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Yes, redirections are 100% necessary. I agree whole heartedly.

Surely you can block them once the contract has been ended? I don't know how the law works where you are, but in the UK if you sever a contract you are no longer bound by it. But then again, I'm not a lawyer!!! LOL I'd be earning twice as much if I was!!! I'd look into this or get your legal team (assuming you have one) to look into it for after the contract has ended.

If they're scraping, could you put a canonical tag on your pages to self canonicalise? Only just thought of this!!! Might help, if you've not already done it.

What a pig awful situation to be in. I feel for you.

The previous poster has some great suggestions which I would follow.

May I also suggest that you start a PPC campaign of your own to 'pick up the slack' as you put it? Assuming the budget previously allocated to this vendor would cover it? If the vendor was using PPC as the revenue driver to these horrible UX pages, imagine how much better the conversion would be from one of your 'good' pages?

If you've never used Adowrds before, then I would look at the adwords education center for a bit (sorry I can't remember what it's called). A good site I used to use when first starting out learning Adwords is PPC Hero - they had some good tips a few years ago, and I have no reason to believe they've gone downhill! I think (and hope I don't inadvertently offend anyone here, but it's my experience) that if you can do SEO then running PPC (though time consuming) should be easy enough for you to get your head around.

I don't know if this is a stupid suggestion or not as I'm not very technical (I rely on brilliant developers in my team) but could the vendor's dodgy pages be disallowed by your robots file? Could you also remove them from the index via webmaster tools (especially if the pages are just PPC landing pages and not built for organic search, which I understand is the case from your post)? Like I say, this may be a stupid suggestion... Please go easy on me if it is!!!

Good luck - and remember, 'what doesn't kill us, makes us stronger'. I bet you're a much better SEO now than you were a year and a half ago!

Sounds good, please count me in.

I am an inhouse online marketing executive. I work for a UK commercial mortgage brokerage offering BTL and commercial mortgages as well as bridging loans.

Thanks!

Sounds good, but the page isn't in the index...

John - I would redirect, but the I'm a belt and braces kind of person.

Jimmy, this is why I am leaning towards a sub-domain. Though the previous posters seem to have very valid points about why a subfolder may be better for us...

As for making it easier for the devs, that wasn't exactly what I meant... They've said they need to know which way we want to go in order to put together a plan. I think it will impact how they set certain things (I don't understand) up so will make a difference to the time scales etc - which is what our boss is asking for!

The forum will be a place for UK landlords to discuss their businesses.

We sell landlord mortgages. So I think this is pretty close. We also provide advice articles.

I want to carve a bit of a niche for us in terms of subject though, and try and veer towards finance for landlords as much as possible.

Hi Tom,

Thank you for your quick response!

I was leaning towards the sub-domain rather than sub-folder simply because I'm anticipating that we will at some point get hit by spam. This is inevitable I think, and I'm putting a plan in place to try and limit it as much as possible, but I am pretty sure it'll happen - it always does! The forum will be moderated by a human as well. I was thinking that if some bad links got posted in the forum they would be less likely to affect the main domain. This may be daft. Please say if it is!!!

Hi,

We're setting up a forum for our users (our target audience responds extremely well to forums).

I was wondering if it should be set up on a sub-domain or not. I'm leaning towards sub-domain, but our devs say this will impact how they approach it so I'd like to give them an answer asap so we can proceed with planning it!

Thanks,

Amelia

We are looking into an MVC plugin for our umbraco site. I believe there can be custom elements, such as the sign-up process.

Would you say it's better to host it on a sub-domain? I'm thinking this is the way forward. What are your thoughts?

Within our niche there are three very popular forums, none of which seem to have severe spam issues. I expect they are well moderated (and I've said this is a necessity). Ours will have someone looking after it (moderating) as well as people dedicated to answering specific questions.

Thanks for your advice! It's greatly received.

We're looking into creating a forum for our visitors.

I've identified that our target market is very active on online forums, and that this is the best way of encouraging user participation amongst our audience (I know forums as such are a bit old-fashioned, but so is our audience!)

I have never set a forum up before... I was wondering if there was anything your collective brains could come up with in terms of a 'wish list' the forum should have... For example, I want to limit spam (LOL, I know, losing battle) - what measures would you put in place to do this? I was thinking that users would have to create a login to participate, and that they would only be allowed to post links after a certain number of posts - is there anything else I've missed?

We will be looking to promote the forum via email marketing to our customers, and will set up logins for them each, and invite them to join individually. There are about 10,000 people we could invite in this way (list is growing every day, so it could very well be a lot more by the time we launch!)

What else would you suggest? I was thinking of display advertising (maybe via adwords remarketing), and obviously we'll be looking to list organically (but I don't think this can happen instantly, I kind of feel it's a chicken/egg thing - we need the participation before we get ranked, but to get participation we probably need to be ranked!)

I was also wondering if we should set it up on a subdomain or not? I'm in two minds about which is best for us!

Anyway, any input from you would be enormously beneficial.

Thank you!

I think it depends on where the website is - in the UK, it is a requirement to make sure that disabled people have the same or as similar as possible experience online as anyone else. Alt tags make it easier for the blind (amongst other groups of people) to understand the context of a website - a picture tells a thousand words and all that!

I personally think its worth doing (though there are some missing on my site for various reasons) as even if you don't believe any of your visitors are using screen readers I bet some of them actually are.

In the late 90s/early 00s the well known British supermarket, Tesco redeveloped their website to be accessible (not just Alt tags), and saw a staggering increase in sales and conversions as a result. I can't remember the exact figure but it was pretty impressive.

So I guess I'm saying there are other reasons besides SEO and legal to implement accessibility features into your site - fundamental business reasons! Making more money. (though of course the cost must be weighed up against the benefit just like anything else).

Pesky spammers ruining things for the rest of us! Thanks for answering

Shame they're removing them. I think they're cute... Makes the link stand out!!!

Hi,

Does anyone know how Search Engine Land did this?

(See image - it's a panda in the title tag link in the SERPs)

Thanks,

Amelia

us2MMnM.jpg

I'm not sure this would help the other radio stations and as others have suggested will damage you. I would fight the proposal as much as possible. It won't benefit either party.

I appreciate though that you may be tasked with making the best of a bad situation. Patrick has come up with some great suggestions.

Good luck whatever you end up doing

But it's the date that makes them different! As in if I was specifically looking for info on 2013 I wouldn't WANT the 2014 page to be served and vice versa.

I would leave them both indexed - assuming the data is entirely different in each.

I get the same thing. Nobody on here seems to know the answer (I asked a similar question in the last week or so) - if the pages are there when you do a manual search then I wouldn't sweat it. I have taken the view that it's not worth worrying about!

Good luck Amelia

Then why redirect at all? Why not just update the page with the new content / layout (whatever) and keep a record of when you changed it. If you keep the old layout / content you can always switch back if the test proves the old worked better than the new...

Hi David,

I was going to say the same as Patrick. A/B test.

We use Google analytics experiments and it has never affected our rankings.

Good luck

Amelia