Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Linda,

In the absence of any penalty or rankings dip, there's likely nothing to worry about as this is pretty common. If nothing else, even though Google reports those links in GWT it's very possible they discount them in every other way that counts.

On the other hand, if you are worried about it there should be no harm in proactively disavowing the domain. Lot's of agency folk that I know make this a regular practice to disavow any suspect links and 99.9% of the time, if done correctly, no harm will come to your site simply by filing a disavow file (unless you disavow links that are actually good, but that's another story)

If I understand correctly, you have incoming affiliate links which don't work on HTTPs due to varnish, so you are redirecting them to HTTPs, where they do work. Let me know if I'm missing anything.

Okay, first of all if you are serving up two versions of your site on any page (HTTP and HTTPS) without 301'ing one to the other, you should absolutely have canonical tags pointing to the HTTP. And without the affiliate tracking parameter.  (Edit: see thoughts below on NOINDEX)

As for 301 vs 302: Technically, to stay within Google's guidelines, affiliate links to your site should be nofollowed. In practice, sometimes they can offer a ranking benefit, but more than often Google discounts them. Regardless, if you abuse them for linking purposes it can come back to bite you in some instances. There's no clear answer, but keep in mind 302s may very well negate some of the link equity from these affiliate links (which may or may not be a good thing)

NOINDEX - My thought process is, if you don't want the HTTPS URLs indexed, and the link equity from the affiliate links isn't a consideration, then it's likely best to NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW the pages. This ensures they will be kept out of Google's index, keep crawl efficiency optimized, and deliver cleaner results. This also means the canonical tag isn't necessary. (and probably unwanted, as it sends conflicting signals with the NOINDEX tag) Keep in mind this strategy effectively kills any incoming link equity from the affiliate links, but does help keep you within Google's good graces.

Although my best guess tends to agree with Martijn, I'm not absolutely sure. I searched Google Webmaster Forums but couldn't find a definite answer. It might be worth posting there to see if a representative from Google could lay the question to rest: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/webmasters

That said, I believe image search impressions are only counting regular image search (not images that appear in regular results) and do not count impressions below the fold that haven't rendered (because that could go on for a very long time and result in 1000s of impressions that never happened.

Sounds like a plan. I'd also make every redirect a 301, just in case. Cheers.

On one hand I'd agree with you that you shouldn't have to rewrite those URLs on your end. On the other hand, it's usually best practice to make sure both versions of a URL (with slash and/or without) resolve to the same page. The reason for this is that:

• Search bots, including Google, will often "explore" variations of URLs for discoverability reasons - they want to make sure they are discovering all of your available content.
• People will link to you with and without trailing slashes. If they link to you with a trailing slash and your page breaks, you could be wasting link equity, to say nothing of the bad user experience of people visiting your site from the referral links
• For one reason or another it's common to append URLs with various parameters (for tracking reasons, campaings, etc) and often these URLs are generated by third party services when pointing at your site.

For all of these reasons, it's pretty common to either force redirect trailing slashes (via a 301) or make sure both versions resolve to the same content, and use a rel=canonical tag to indicate to search engines that these are indeed meant to be the same page.

On the other hand, if this is something not feasible and URLs ending in a slash are indeed different pages, you might want to carefully consider what those pages deliver to both humans and bots because it seems inevitable that both will eventually crawl and stumble upon them.

Perhaps not the answer you were looking for, but I hope it helps.

1. Right, each post is linked to in the author byline at the top of the post. I don't believe the links there carry much weight either, but there are literally 1000s of them throughout the site for each category, and the links are connected to semantically relevant blog posts, as opposed to a topic-agnostic sidebar link.

4. Whoops, I goofed by calling it a "non-html" pull down (typing too fast). Of course it's HTML. I simply meant we moved them from a static sidebar format into a pull-down, non linking sidebar format.

Cheers!

Hi Edmond,

Like Ray pointed out, there could be multiple reasons. If you'd like another set of eyes, feel free to PM me as well.

Hi David,

Great question. Couple of points I'll go over, and realize the answer only applies specifically to Moz. Others may find different optimal solutions.

1. Crawling categories isn't a problem for us. Each blog post is linked to several juice-passing category links within the body of the post. And we have 1000s of posts all linking to individual categories.

2. Our reason for putting categories in a drop down was simply to save space. We could have made the links crawlable using pure CSS/HTML, but we suspected it really wouldn't make a difference.

3. Sidebar links have diminished value. It's doubtful much link equity was flowing through them in the first place (for other architectures it may be beneficial to have completely robot friendly sidebar category links, but in our case they were so redundant they weren't really necessary)

4. Finally, when we moved categories into the sidebar, we noticed no change to rankings/traffic to category pages, so we left it as is. Had this been different, we would have reconsidered our strategy.

Again, this strategy is outside traditional "best practices" but practically speaking, it works just fine for us, but may be different for newer sites, sites without as much link equity, etc, etc.

Hope this helps! Best of luck.

Personally, i try to avoid this approach and focus on quality over quantity.

A single, well written and shared piece of content has the potential to earn many times more links and traffic than 50 purchased or hastily written articles when the quality is in question.

Really, I don't care about how many posts I've written or how many comments I've made (and by directory submissions I hope you mean Local Directories What I do care about is how users engage with those activities, how often my content is shared by authoritative influencers, and how these activities contribute to SEO success.

Sticking to a structure and/or schedule is important, but I would avoid the cookie-cutter approach to SEO. A couple presentations by Rand that may be helpful.

• Why Content Marketing Fails
• Building a Marketing Flywheel

Hope that helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

This is not the definition of cloaking and I wouldn't worry too much about any penalty.

That said, anytime you redirect googlebot to a different experience than users it's a situation you want to be very careful with, and in most situations avoid. Often this is solved by serving different experiences via javascript. Even though Google is pretty darn good at parsing javascript, they will often interpret the default version of a page as if the javascript is turned off.

Regardless, I'd keep an eye on search results, Google Webmaster Tools, cached versions of your site and make ample use of "Fetch and Render" in GWT to ensure Google interprets your site they way you think it should.

Let's put it this way....1. Google expects to see pages like FAQs, About Us, Contact Pages, etc have a high number of internal links.

2. The link equity "leaked" to these pages is usually negligible. Sure, there's a small amount of PageRank, but it's not really considered anything that would influence your on-page optimization.

On the other hand, if the links were in obvious places, and there were a lot of them, I might be tempted to control my link equity as well. It really all depends on where the links are placed and how prominent they are on the page. "How likely is the user to click this link?" is a good question to ask a.k.a. "reasonable surfer"

3. At the same time, Google probably doesn't care too much that you removed those links, either. Very rare that removing links is seen as over-optimization.

4. Google is getting very good at following javascript links. They many not show up in Google Webmaster Tools, but it's likely they are parsing your javascript anyway. (unsure how much link equity, if any, flows through this)

If you're concerned about it, you can simply watch your rankings, traffic, and crawl stats to monitor for problems. If there is, simply revert your actions back to the original, and hopefully everything will be good.

Best of luck with your SEO!

As Max said, from a ranking perspective, Time to First Byte seems to be the most important factor. The same author of that post offered some tips to improving time to first byte: http://moz.com/blog/improving-search-rank-by-optimizing-your-time-to-first-byte

Oftentimes, you simply have a lot of assets to load and it's difficult to cut anything back. In these cases, the order that things load becomes increasingly important for user experience (asynchronous java script, for example).

Regardless, doing everything you can to improve speed and checking with Google Page Speed Insights is usually the best advice. I've never, ever seen a website where improving speed performance didn't help with traffic metrics (wether rankings or engagement) so I believe it's an investment worth making.

These other folks left some fantastic responses, so I'll only add that DA is a relativistic number generated each update. It's best use case is to compare yourself to other sites, so if both you and your competitor dropped a similar amount, that's actually not a bad thing.

Hi Ruben,

Thanks for writing in. I'm unfamiliar with Bluehost's HTTPs service, but I assume they are taking care of top level issues. You'll still want to go through the checklist to make sure everything is valid and you follow SEO best practices.In short:

• Check your links
• Check your assets (images, CSS, javascript)
• Canonical tags
• Register with Google Webmaster Tools
• Update your sitemaps and robots.txt files

This covers the important stuff. As you noted, a few more tips here: http://moz.com/blog/seo-tips-https-ssl

Hi there,

Google tends to consider text in the main content areas more than text in supplemental areas (like the sidebar) and text in certain areas (i.e. the meta keywords tag, title element on images/links) may be ignored entirely. On the other hand, keyword stuffing in any area could lead to problems.

Keep in mind that keyword density isn't a ranking factors. Never has been, never will be. Google tends to look at your page more holistically (or at least they try to) so taking this approach usually requires a bit more natural approach than inserting keywords at strategic locations.

Not to promote my own post, but I highly recommend reading about these advanced SEO concepts for on-page optimization: http://moz.com/blog/7-advanced-seo-concepts These help explain how Google may judge your page beyond keyword usage and placement.

Finally, you typically won't get in trouble for duplicate content if you stuff keywords, but you could easily suffer other algorithmic penalties. The best advice is to write naturally, make sure your content clearly communicates your main ideas, your content is focused around your primary keyword topics, and you provide a user experience that makes people want more.

My opinion is that the URLs are less important than the actual content on the page, including title tags, headlines, body text, etc.

Unfortunately, there's no way to manually determine when you've crossed the line of "near-duplicate" content, so it's best to make each content experience serve a unique experience targeted towards a specific purpose.

This is a tough question to answer because each page should serve a unique and important purpose for your visitor, and these examples seem like they are trying to cover the same topic using different keywords.

While this approach is somewhat common, when your variations don't "vary" too much, it becomes fodder for Google's Panda algorithm, which penalizes sites with content that repeat the same topic over and over again with minor variations.

On the other hand, if your pages really do serve a unique purpose, then the situation you described is perfectly acceptable. I suspect Google considers "New York City" and "Manhattan" as two distinct, but closely related entities. It's tough to know in advance how different pages optimized for these terms will interplay with each other, but you may have to do some experimenting to find out.

Keep us updated on your progress. Best of luck!

It's very common for an internal page to be more popular than the homepage, and there is no known penalty or discrimination in such a case.

Hi there,

I'm sorry to hear your rankings took a hit. That's a major drag. Major ranking changes can be caused by 100s of different things, so it's important to look at as many elements as you can, and it may take a long time to do a thorough investigation. Even then, it's not unusual for some webmasters to never know why their rankings changed.

The first 3 questions you want to investigate:

• Have you been hit by a penalty?
• Have you been hit by an algorithmic update? (as Pixel by Pixel pointed out)
• Any major crawling issues? You can check Moz or Google Webmaster Tools

If the answer turns up negative, you might consider a full site audit. Keep in mind, you may not have done anything "wrong." Algorithms change, and you might simply need to change your tactics to keep pace.

I agree with Trung. Keep in mind that any tool, including Moz's, take a one-size-fits-all approach. The tool is meant to warn you when your page doesn't follow best practices - but if there's a perfectly legitimate reason for the words to be there, don't sweat it. If the keywords make sense, by all means leave them in there.

You don't always have to follow best practices.

On the other hand, if you fear the page isn't ranking well because of over-optimization, there are other places you can controll use of keywords, such as the

• title tag,
• the alt attribute in photos,
• headers,
• the URL and
• incoming anchor text.

Often, for over-optimized pages, toning down the keywords in these areas can make a difference.

The one thing I would caution against is placing any text you want to hide in an iFrame, as Google is getting good at associating those with the page content.

Hope that helps! Best of luck with your SEO.