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That's a pickle!

Yeah, whatever you choose I might suggest making the changes gradually. Introduce elements one at a time instead of all at once. In this way, you might be able to preserve some of your established link equity and relevancy signals.

Shouldn't cause an issue either way. Moving from http to https is one of those edge cases. But basically, it's a login page so link equity really isn't a factor (most of those links are likely to be ignored or devalued anyway) and it's not really a reciprocal link.

My advice - don't sweat it.

While I can't say for sure, I'd say you're safer off keeping any existing anchors as-is. Changing existing links could have unintended consequences, and you don't know what the effect will be of keeping them the same.

As for your title tags and other site elements, if you are doing a domain migration, it's best to keep as many elements exactly the same as possible - at least during and in the first couple months after the transition. In this case, I'd ask if your visitors will recognize the new brand name, and if it makes sense to keep the old keywords.

I'm going to go against the grain and say this doesn't look like a duplicate content issue to me - at least based on text. There's enough unique content on those pages that you shouldn't be falling into those filters. No one can say for sure - that's simply based on my experience.

That said, there are other signals around these pages that are very similar. Namely things like title tags and anchor text.

Title Tags:

• The Wildlife & Beaches of Kenya - Natural World Safaris
• Ultimate Kenya Wildlife and Beaches Safari - Natural World Safaris
• Wildlife & Beach Family Safari - Natural World Safaris

From a topic perspective, are these differentiated enough? They seem to target very similar topics and keywords. ... and the anchor text to these pages follows similar patterns, mostly internal links from the sidebar.

So long story short, these pages may not be differentiated enough that they may be interpreted as dupe content (or thin content topics, as it were) and there simply aren't enough external signals to keep these pages afloat.

The solution may be to consolidate or group these pages into themes. Make sure you have strong "hub" pages that link everything together (think Trip Advisor)

One other thing of note - I notice the page is JavaScript dependent. Because of this, make sure to perform a "Fetch and Render" in Google Webmaster Tools, and make sure the page displays correctly. If it doesn't, be sure to address any issues.

I can't speak to this specific traffic source, but it's very, very common to see strange bumps in traffic from unusual sources for short periods of time. 100 different reasons this could happen. Strange web configurations that accidentally link to you from every page of thier site, odd redirects, spambots gone bad, etc.

Almost always, it's harmless and you can typically ignore it, although it can play havoc with your reporting.

At the risk of over-simplifying....

• Page Authority of a particular URL is dependent on the quantity/quality of the links pointing to that URL
• Domain Authority is dependent (among other things) upon the quantity/quality of the links pointing to any URL on your domain.

So it's entirely possible that your website is improving it's domain link profile, while the link profile to your key pages hasn't changed much.

One way to address this is to make sure that the URLs that earn new links also link to your key pages, so that link equity is distributed internally throughout your site.

The ethics of the Internet dictate that you

1. crawl politely,
2. obey robots.txt and
3. properly identify yourself

This isn't a new issue. Link networks and sites have blocked crawlers and manipulated Google for years. Fortuneatly, it's only a small fraction of the web. Also, it unlikely links from those networks have much value, so crawl priority would be super low anyway.

Actually, it could be viewed as beneficial when blackhat sites block OSE and aHrefs, because those sites often get penalized by Google, but 3rd party crawlers have no way to know this, so blocking effectively keeps them out of the indexes.

Here's the list in question: http://moz.com/community/recommended#link-building

Let's put it this way: based on my experience with the companies on this list, there are very few I wouldn't recommend as a link building partner.

Obviously, some companies are more specialized than others. Some companies specialize in link building, while others offer it as part of a larger, integrative service.

It's a good bet if the agency has a dedicated service page that describes their link building process in any sort of detail, that it's something they specialize in. Cost is another consideration, and most companies should be upfront with you about this.

Yes, it's a pickle. Here's what we're dealing with:

1. You need a new business name for the second business.
2. Unless you completely change the business name so that it's appropriate for both locations

Now that I think about it, I like option #2. It's more work, but in the long run the branding benefit of having the same name recognized in both cities will likely pay off in some way.

Regardless, let's assume #2 isn't an option. I really want it to be, but let's say a name change is off the table. Then you need 2 business names, and presumably 2 websites.

In this case, duplicate content is likely going to hurt you. Each business should be unique. Because it's essentially Local SEO, you can rely on the quality of the citation building and unique reviews.

In theory, you could get away with it if all your other SEO signals were strong, but you still have the challenge of starting all that work from scratch, and maintaining two sites.

Still, I'd rather you change the business name for both businesses, and run the entire operation from a single site with multiple location listings.

Still relevant: http://moz.com/blog/tactical-seo-how-many-termsphrases-should-i-target-on-a-single-page

My honest opinion is that these terms are so related, you could comfortably target them on a single page. Let the content decide the targeting, not the other way around.

The risk of optimizing too many pages around the same content are many, including:

1. It comes off as spammy
2. A real risk of a Panda penalty
3. Who wants to write 20 near identical pages of web content about London Scaffolding anyway?

So if it were me, I'd target a single page around these keywords, then create supplemental content that answers questions folks might have and also search for. Pages such as:

• Scaffolding costs / price of scaffolding
• Scaffolding towers
• Scaffolding jobs, scaffolding supplies
• FAQ about scaffolding
• UK Scaffolding regulations
• Mobile scaffolding

I'd try to make each piece of content the best I could make it, and I'd naturally link back to my money when it made sense. When done right, this method will grab more long-tail traffic, and help your main content page to rank with contextual links from topically relevant pages.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

Haven't heard of penalties with no messages or emails (I'd double check the email settings and spam folders just to be certain).

Definitely seems like an odd situation and a less-than-ideal user situation.

As for the age of the penalty, Google has only been notifying users of "partial" pentalties for a year or so, and each penalty has an expiration date. (the expiration date isn't revealed to the website owner, only Google knows this)

There is a chance if you pose this question on the Google Webmaster Forum, an actual Googler may be able to answer directly.

Fetch as Google is a good tool to use to index pages that have recently changed, or in certain special circumstances, but it's not intended to be the primary way to get your site in Google's index.

A foundation of good content, proper site architecture, and a healthy dose of external links is the best course to proper indexation.

This is a common problem > product pages ranking instead of landing pages (or category pages). There's no silver bullet, but a few tips I can give you.

1. Make sure the landing/category pages is optimized with lots of unique content. A category page that simply links to products is going to have a hard time ranking post Panda. This means unique text, photos and external links.

2. Make sure your product pages all link back to the category/landing pages with proper anchor text. Breadcrumbs at a minimum.

3. Link your category pages to other category pages

4. Optimize your product pages for the most unique thing about them. Instead of "Brand B shoes red size 11" optimize them for "red shoes, size 11, brand B"

Keep going in this direction and you get the idea. Cheers!

There's no right answer to this, but here's my take.

The links seem perfectly fine, and natural, to me. They don't contain overly-optimized anchor text. In fact, most link to you with URL anchors, which are generally considered safe.

Even if the links had more precise anchor text, it's usually not a problem unless there is a pattern of unnatural links. If you haven't already, I highly suggest reading this post from Rand:

Dear Google, Links from YouMoz Don't Violate Your Quality Guidelines

Including the first comment, from Marie Haynes, where she pretty successfully defines an "unnatural" link:

• -Intent to manipulate the Google search results
• -Whether it is part of a large pattern of similar links

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

Thanks for you comment. I understand your frustration, especially if you found the marketing message to be confusing. As Keri mentioned, your comments have been shared with the team.

The differences between the size of link indexes has been covered extensively in other places, so I won't rehash it here. One thing I should point out: 24 links only represents the number of links to this specific page/URL. Open Site Explorer shows a total of 156 links pointing to the root domain bannodesignglasgow.com

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/comparisons?page=1&site=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bagnodesignglasgow.com

I've added a screenshot below. This represents about 15% of the links listed for your site in GWT, which is on the low end in our experience. Typically it's pretty common for OSE to report between 20-40% of links found in GWT. The good news is OSE tends to index the links that "count" and are more likely to influence rankings. And as Keri mentioned, no index will be able to capture all of the links Google sees. We are working to greatly expand the size of our index, and we should be able to ship some progress on this in the next few months.

Regardless, thanks again.

XSiNPC8

I don't think you're looking at a penalty situation, if that's what you are asking. Seems perfectly legitimate.

The more interesting question to me is how Google will "weigh" the hidden content in it's algorithm. I suspect that anything that is hidden by javascript (or another method) will hold less weight than text in plain sight. You could try Google's new "Fetch and Render" tool in Webmaster Tools to see how Google views the page. Anything that doesn't display might not get as much consideration as plain text.

Of course, this is a lot of speculation. We don't really know for sure how Google treats text like this, but it's a pretty common situation.

With meta descriptions, if often dealer's choice. If you don't provide a meta description, Google's search snippet will pull the relevant text from your page that matches the user's query, which sometimes may help click-through rate.

On the other hand, a well crafted meta description can also help attract the right kind of clicks.

In this case, however, I fear it was just plain oversight. We update this page a lot, and I believe the meta description simply got lost in one of the many development cycles. So thanks for the heads up!

Ha! Hard to believe this old thread is still alive. This was one of the first questions asked when we first launched the public Q&A.

We have actually kicked around the idea several times, but nothing has come to fruition. Good to know there is still interest. So, no progress, but we will keep the idea alive.

Hi There!

We moved "too many links" under "Site Information" so it no longer counts as an error. We still include it in your report just for your personal knowledge, but in most cases there is nothing you need to worry about.

Too many links can dilute link authority and may not present the best user (or robot) experience, but at least today search engines can generally crawl all of those.

Dr. Pete wrote a good post on the subject awhile back: http://moz.com/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many

Best of luck with your SEO!

Hi, thanks for writing in. I tried the tool this morning using Google Australia and it worked on my end. Are you still having problems?

Moz did experience a DDOS attack over the weekend that might have effect some services. If you are still having trouble, feel free to shoot an email to help@moz.com which will open a support ticket, and the team will look into it ASAP.

Thanks!