Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi there,

As a general rule, you almost always want to "follow" internal links - this includes links between internal pages. To do otherwise could hurt your SEO.

Links do a lot of things. They create a path for search robots to crawl your site. They send off relevancy and popularity signals to ranking algorithms.

Is there any particular reason you thought of "nofollowing" your internal links?

About the only time you want to add nofollow to internal links is when doing so prevents search robots from going down the wrong path, such as so-called spider traps, or sometimes as a layer of protection to keep robots from crawling certain pages (not the best method to use)

Regardless, making sure your internal links are followed has many, many benefits. This is one of my favorite blog posts of all time - although a little dated, it applies to internal links as well as external: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/10-illustrations-on-search-engines-valuation-of-links

Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

That's a really good idea. To be honest, I'm not familiar with any such extension. Would love it if someone built one!

Hi Steve,

Thanks for the question, but I think I'm missing something. What features are you referring to? Both the External and Campaign based On-Page tool grade:

• 4 Critical Factors
• 7 High Importance Factors
• 9 Moderate Factors
• 11 Low Importance Factors
• 5 Optional Factors

I thought they were exactly the same, but I'm only a casual user of this tool, so I honestly might be missing some features here. Please let me know!

Hi Ken,

I'd actually worry less about the number of links on the page and try to address the duplicate content/title tag issues.

In reality, it's very common and sometimes necessary for websites, especially eCommerce websites, to have more than 100/links per page.  See this post from Dr. Pete.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many

Hi Ben,

It's now 2 days after your original question, and it looks like your back in the SERPs, at least from what I can tell. Hopefully you've made a full recovery.

It's difficult to understand exactly what damage was done by your dev in Webmaster Tools, but it's reasonable to assume that whatever it was caused the error.

One thing I did notice is that both the https and http version of your site resolve.

http://www.freestylextreme.com/ &
https://www.freestylextreme.com/

Ideally, one would redirect to the other, or at a minimum have a rel canonical tag in place so that only one version is crawled.

I'd go ahead a put your robots.txt file back in place, and check yourself with Google webmaster tools to make sure everything is okay.

Best of luck!

Hi Alex,

To answer your question directly, Google's PageRank algorithm raises at an logarithmic scale thought to be somewhere between 4 and 7. Which if my non-mathematical brain understands correctly, ad PageRank of 4 is approximately 4-7 times more powerful than a PR3, which is 4-7 times more powerful than a PR2, etc.

Interesting Fact: MozRank uses a similar logarithmic scale.

But SEO5 has a very valid point. In the old days, it was enough to go after links on high PageRank pages. Today, it plays a much smaller role of importance, and sometimes doesn't matter at all.

Instead of PageRank, a few of the top things you want to look for in a potential link aquisition are:

• The Authority of the Website/Page (Domain/Page Authority)
• The Trustworthiness of the Website/Page (Trust Authority)
• Any penalties? Is it in a good neighborhood?
• The content and theme of the linking Website/Page
• Anchor Text
• Potential Position of the link
• Text surrounding link
• Other links on the page
• Title tag of the page
• Does it rank for the keyword you want to rank for?

There are several other factors, but these cover several of the major ones.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

There's a couple of things that can add concrete SEO benefit when adding video to your site:

**1. Video Schema: **This can tell search engines what the video is about and add a ton of relevant information. https://developers.google.com/webmasters/videosearch/schema

2. Video Sitemaps: You can additionally provide some of the schema information here. But at this this can help get your videos indexed https://developers.google.com/webmasters/videosearch/sitemaps

3. Transcriptions: You can see how we do this on Moz with our Whiteboard Friday series. Basically it combines the best of both Video and blog post formats.

So the benefit is 2-fold. When implemented properly, a video can add contextually relevant information for SEO purposes (although "simply adding a video" likely isn't enough. And secondly, the increased user engagement, if/when successful, can add an important boost.

Hope that answers your question. Best of luck with your SEO!

Hi Andrew

First of all, these links are common spambot links and there is nothing to worry about. Whew!

Both your PRO campaign and Open Site Explorer get their link data from the same place - the Linkscape Index. In fact, I found the "viagra" link in OSE. You can see it in this report here: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?page=1&site=blogs.dalealcock.com.au&sort=page_authority&filter=&source=external&target=domain&group=0 - Scroll about 1/2 down.

(Please note - although both the PRO campaigns and OSE use the same Linkscape index, the two platforms update on slightly different schedules. So it is possible to see links in one and not the other.)

These links are spambot Trackback links. You can read about trackback spam here. It's an old tactic that still works once in awhile, but it looks like you didn't link back to him (either manually or through automation) so you should be just fine. There are literally millions of these links around the Internet, Google typically ignores them, and they are usually nothing worth messing with.

Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

This question is full of mystery. If you "nofollow" an outbound link, Google won't count it, and this is the safe thing to do for untrusted links 99% of the time.

But why would you not want Google to "see" the link? There is a technique called "masking" or "cloaking" in which you redirect the link through a blocked directory (via robots.txt), then use php or another method to send the link on it's merry way.

This is often done with affiliate links. Do a Google search for how to mask (or cloak) affiliate links and you should find several techniques to do what you're looking for.

Hi Wianno,

As mentioned, Penguin seemed to hit over-optimized and spammy link profiles, so this would be a great place to look.

Dr. Pete wrote a great post about it last week which is well worth looking into:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/penguins-pandas-and-panic-at-the-zoo

That said, if you have a duplicate content problem, it's well worth addressing even if you haven't seen a ranking drop because of it. No guarantees, but simply fixing duplicate content problems often has the effect of causing a traffic rise.

In the end, it may be easier to deal with dupe content that over-optimized anchor text, but take a look at both if you can.

Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

Sounds like a smart tactic - and I'd continue to do it - but you most likely want to diversify your link profile.

Keep in mind that multiple links from the same domain typically don't help as much as links from multiple domains. But if the forum posting are generating you traffic and connections, I don't see much harm in continuing to post.

For instance, I have like a jillion links from SEOmoz, but I still continue to post here, and wouldn't stop for the world.

The Google link; command is notoriously inaccurate, to the point of being worthless. Rand wrote a piece on it a couple years back.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-link-command-busting-the-myths

Unfortunately, as for manually checking for backlinks, your options are limited.

The good news is that OSE is getting much quicker at indexing new links. Other good ways of discovering links include checking your referring sites in Google Analytics. I could be wrong, but I believe this is the principal behind Linkstat.com

Moz is releasing a new update to Blogscape soon that should solve some of these problems. Majestic SEO sometimes has good backlink information.

I've endorsed Ryan's answer but just a quick note about PageRank.

We encourage folks not to use PageRank as an indicator of ranking strenght, as "PageRank has a relatively low correlation to how well things actually rank." - Rand Fishkin

PageRank is good for a couple of things, such as a raw indication of link popularity, or as Ryan mentioned to determine a penalty.

PageRank data is historically inaccurate, Google doesn't update it regularly enough to be useful and finally Google has asked us politely not to scrape PageRank data, and SEOmoz honors that request. So those are a few of the reasons we don't include it in the MozBar (SEO Toolbar) and other places.

Rand discusses the subject in depth in this WBF

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-is-googles-pagerank-good-for-whiteboard-friday

Without having much direct knowledge of Volusion, Ben appears to be correct. Since the links are being generated by the "leave a review" links, you don't really want these followed anyway.

Where you are thinking of adding the "NOINDEX, FOLLOW" or canonical tags?

Both Shane and Nakul gave some good advice, so I'll just add my 2 cents.

As your domain is new, this could have serious implications for your site and it's ability to rank. I can't say for certain it would hurt, but it sure would make it a likely candidate for an algorithmic penalty.

302s sound better than 301s to me, but even that many 302's redirecting to such a young site should throw up spam warnings galore at the Googleplex.

Additionally, adding the extra layer of his site...

typindomain.com ---> hisredirectsite.com ---->mysite.com

...might actually complicate things instead of making them better.

In the end, I think there might be easier ways to gain the same amount of traffic in a long-lasting, low risk way.

Howdy Daniel,

Some good information here, let me add my own 2 cents;

1. Mozscape and Open Site Explorer are updated about every 4 weeks. The metrics are entirely link-based, so downtime of your server won't effect the numbers.

Because we use a new index every few weeks, there's a natural fluctuation in the number of links we find. There are literally billions and billions of links on the web we have to crawl every month, calculate metrics for each one, and then package them into an index that makes sense.

Sometimes links will disappear or re-appear in the index. This is natural and usually minor, although a large jump or decrease in your Domain Authority can be scary - it doesn't mean your traffic or rankings will change. Mozscape may have trouble finding links on pages without a lot of links pointing to them, or links hidden under layers of navigation. For more, see this document:

http://www.seomoz.org/help/open-site-explorer-faq

2. Usually Google won't penalize you if your site is down, but if it's down regularly or for an extended period, this could have negative consequences. If you feel your site has suffered because of this, I might suggest submitting a fresh sitemap, or try the "crawl as googlebot" feature as soon as your back up and running. May not do much, but it's worth a shot.

3. Sitelinks - I don't have a definite answer about this, but Google seems to show sitelinks based on user intent, the popularity of your pages, navigation structure, and overall authority. Although Google offers a tool to remove sitelinks, it's pretty hard to influence exactly what they choose to show and when.

Hope this information helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

Well thought out question. A lot of tech related (including SEO) sites seemed to be hit by Panda, but this may be because these types of sites tent to over-optimize.

I wouldn't be too worried about your SEOmoz profile link. The links that Matt Cutts talked about were off-topic links. So an SEO link from one SEO site to another is completely natural, and in fact should help you. (Now, if we could only get that link to be an in-body text link surrounded by lots of relevant text, instead of that damned sidebar link....

You earned that SEOmoz link. Enjoy it with pride!

Hi Ilse,

If you are a PRO member, there's a super simple way to do this within the campaign platform.

1. Start a new campaign, and at the very beginning you'll see a screen like this:

<fieldset class="setup">

Which parts of your domain would you like to track for this campaign?

<label for="campaign_campaign_type_subdomain"> Subdomain</label>

Track one subdomain.

Examples: www.seomoz.org, guides.seomoz.org, pro.seomoz.org

<label for="campaign_campaign_type_rootdomain"> Root Domain</label>

Track at root domain level. Track all the different subdomains within this root domain.

Example: The root domain seomoz.org has www.seomoz.org, guides.seomoz.org, and pro.seomoz.org all as subdomains within the root domain. If we discover pages on any of the subdomains during our crawl, they'll be included in the data we display.

<label for="campaign_campaign_type_subfolder"> Subfolder</label>

Track a specific subfolder. Note that the subfolder path must resolve or we will not be able to crawl the content of that folder.

Examples: www.seomoz.org/tools, guides.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-search-engine-optimization

</fieldset>

2. Make sure to pick subfolder, the last choice. Then enter the specific folder path for your campaign, like www. domain.com/za

This will track rankings for this specific subfolder only. Easy as pie!

Hi Martin,

Great question. There is always a risk when you move a URL. And if the URL in question is already ranking well for your keyword, you may consider the phrase "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."

There have been studies over the years that show that a 301 transfers about 80% of it's link equity to the new URL. Anecdotal evidence suggest this number may be slightly higher when using the canonical tag for the same purpose.

Sounds like you'd really rather have your category page rank instead of the tag page. If this is the case I'd make sure the category page contains truly unique content (and not just a listing of product excerpts). I'd also make sure all my top products linked back to the category page in a prominent fashion. So at the top of my high-ranking tag page, I might insert a keyword rich link pointing to the category landing page.

Of course, if you are already ranking well, you might also consider doing nothing. In this case ask yourself what's best for the customer? Especially the ones landing on the tag page. How can you help them find what they are looking for?

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

Hi Force7

Unfortunately, it looks like Google threw a little bit of everything at you, so untangling the mess may be a little tricky.

Thanks for including the exact dates of the traffic drops. From these we can clearly see you were hit with two different penalties.

March 23 - Panda
April 24 - Penguin

http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change

Panda - This is a tricky one to pin down, but you may be going in the right direction by fixing the duplicate content. I don't quiet understand what you mean by the "php Link Directory" but if you can get it fixed, I highly encourage you to do so.

Recently however, we've seen instances of Panda targeting link profiles, and if you've been double hit by penguin as well, that's probably a good place to look.

Looking at your backlink profile, it's obvious there's a lot of low-quality directory and article type links in your profile.

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links.html?no_redirect=1&page=1&site=www.translationsoftware4u.com%2F

This could easily explain both penalties, and when we look at your site's distribution of anchor text terms, there is large proportion of optimized terms

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/anchors?page=1&site=www.translationsoftware4u.com%2F&sort=domains_linking_page&source=term&target=domain

Which helps explain the Panda penalty. Have you received any messages in Google Webmaster Tools?

So what can you do? Unfortunately, cleaning up a large link profile is hard work, and so is rebuilding it with clean, high quality links. I highly recommend reading Dr. Pete's article on the subject.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/penguins-pandas-and-panic-at-the-zoo

No easy answers. It's okay to have a few spammy backlinks in your profile, but you want to look at the entire balance of your links, and make sure you're earning the majority of your links in a natural looking manner from high quality sites.

Regardless, hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!