Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Frank,

First, let me answer your question to Alan.

The main advantage of NOINDEX, FOLLOW is that robots can still crawl these pages and pass any link juice that flows through them. So any links pointing to these pages, whether from your own site or external sources, can return back to your site through the links on these pages. Make sense?

If the search engines are excluded from crawling, then they can't discover any links on these pages that flows back to your site.

Also, it seems that you would want to keep these pages out of Google's index, as they are completely unrelated to your site (unless you wrapped them in branding and re-purposed the content as a sort of portfolio)

Sometimes you can get an over-optimization penalty for too many exact match anchor text links pointing back to your site, so watch the anchor text on the reciprocal links and try to vary them as much as possible.

Hi Ben,

Sorry for the late response - hope the question is still relevant to you.

Short answer - yes, this could cause a problem, depending on how many 404's you are creating. The first thing you want to do is check with Google Webmaster Tools. Look at your Crawl Error report and see if Google is also reporting these URLs as 404'ing - my suspicion is that they are.

Is it just one URL that is 404'ing, or several? If it's only one, that you realistically don't have much to worry about, but it's always best practices to fix it.

Solutions:

1. Remove the 404. Let the page load in it's own browser window if need be. If you want to keep the page out of search results, there are better ways to do it.

2. Add a meta robots "NOINDEX" tag to the popup page. This will keep it out of the index.

3. After the page is gone from the index, add a nofollow to the link, or block the directory using robots.txt.

Regardless, there are quite a few ways to tackle this. Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

Hi Gavin,

Just to clarify, SEOmoz flags your content as duplicate if finds 95% HTML similarity. You can use an online tool to compare pages yourself. I like this one:

http://www.webconfs.com/similar-page-checker.php

Google obviously uses a more sophisticated method than Moz, but it's still a good warning because pages without much unique content - even if they aren't true duplicates - often have a difficult time ranking for their targeted keywords.

Hi Matthew,

My advice on the matter has changed a lot over the past year. These days, it's still okay to build directory links, but I suggest doing it only with directories related to your niche.

General directories, in my mind, are best to stay away from altogether.

For example, if you run a nursing home site, you could probably find a dozen high quality directories of nursing homes and assisted living facilities. These would be great!

The general rule of thumb is if you build directory links, make sure you build "normal" high quality links along with them at an equal pace. Try to build one naturally given editorial link for each directory link you build.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO!

Hi Waqid,

Yes, if you create a mobile site that is accessible, search engines may discover and crawl it. There is a lot of debate surrounding this, but if they discover duplicate content, you might be dinged in the rankings.

This is a problem with 10,000 solutions.The best practice today, and one that search engines are leaning towards, is a SINGLE URL approach, in which you use CSS style sheets and HTML5 to get your content to display correctly across all browsers, both desktop and mobile.

In reality, this is often more difficult than is practical, so workarounds are required. At a minimum, if you do build separate pages for mobile, make sure they contain the rel=canonical tag pointing to the original URL of your main site. That way, if a search engine discovers these pages, they won't penalize you for duplicate content and will be able to give proper attribution.

Bryson Meunier has a blog on the subject of mobile SEO that's pretty insightful. You can find it here.

http://www.brysonmeunier.com/

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

Yes, most of the 500 will be worthless junk, and can actually hurt you.

In general, the easier it is to score a directory link, the less value it becomes. It's a completely inverse relationship.

Great suggestion EGOL!

There are generally two reasons folks see different rankings than what is reported in SEOmoz

1. Personalization and localization. SEOmoz takes great pain to remove the influence of both localization and personalization from it's rankings, but these all to easily slip into our browsers and Google's default settings when checking rankings. Make sure you check your rankings with personalization turned off (or in some sort of incognito mode) and set your location to the country wide setting (United States)

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-personalized-search

2. Universal Results - This has to do with the way rank is counted when influenced by things like sitelinks, video results, image results, blended local rankings and so on. The list of variables is long, but a full explanation can be found here:

https://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/20933146-universal-rankings

That's a great question. I'll see if I can shed some light on the issue for you.

If I understand your question correctly,  you're wondering why Twitter doesn't show up as a backlink to your homepage, http://www.idyllic-software.com/, in Open Site Explorer or any of the other SEOmoz tools. Is that correct?

(I'm referencing this report here: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/domains?page=1&site=www.idyllic-software.com%2F&sort=domain_authority&target=domain)

It does seem strange, because OSE has indexed your twitter account. We can verify that here: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=twitter.com%2Fidyllicsoftware

With a Page Authority of 48, that usually would be high enough for Linkscape to index the link to your site on your Twitter page. Unfortunately, Linkscape isn't foolproof, and sometimes it does miss links, especially if there aren't a lot of inbound pages to the linking page in question. (sorry if this seems like a circular argument)

My suspicion is because Linkscape has only indexed three inbound links to your Twitter page, there isn't enough Authority present to follow the links found there. The only solution is to build more, high quality links to your Twitter page to ensure the links get indexed.

That's the bad news. The good news is that the links are obviously there, Google can see them, and if Twitter links count for anything, then you are getting full credit, regardless if they show up in Linkscape or not. Oftentimes you'll see edge cases like this where a link appears in one index but not another. Moz is working on doubling the size of the current index, so there's a good chance you'll see your links in an upcoming update.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

Hi Jeremy,

You're in luck, because a guy named Mark Collier just did a study on the matter. He found that exact match .net domains had a much lower correlation to higher rankings.

.net exact match = 0.08 Correlation
.com exact match = 0.18 Correlation

The full study can be found here: http://www.theopenalgorithm.com/correlation-data/domain-name-seo/

In the latest SEOmoz study, the correlation for exact match .com domains was .22 and previously .38, which indicate that the power of overall power of exact match domains in general is diminishing.

http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#metrics

It's worth reading both of these studies in whole. It's also worth noting that there are likely several reasons for .net exact match to rank lower. #1 being that .net domains tend to be spammier, less established domains.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

In general, reciprocal links are fine if there is a good reason for them to be there. Sometimes they help, sometimes they do nothing.

But get too many off-topic reciprocal links and you will risk a penalty.

Rand did a great video awhile back that discussed this topic: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-sitewide-reciprocal-and-directory-links

So, a couple reciprocal links on your site probably wont hurt you, but I'd be extra careful about soliciting these types of links from others. In the end, it's more rewarding and less risky to gain links the hard way.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

Sounds dangerous!

Usually, these types of links may be found on high authority pages, but the placement is spammy, such as deep in the footer with 100 other links, or an out-of-context sidebar link.

Do the pages have PageRank? I only ask because a page may display both PA and DA, but if it's been de-indexed by Google then it most likely will be stripped of PageRank.

The other problem is relevance. The links may be of little value to you if they don't come from on-topic pages.

In short, I would advise you stay away from this.

But, to answer your question, you would need a ton of links to move your Domain Authority from 62 to 78. That's because both PA and DA are scaled algorithmically, meaning a ten point jump could be 100 times more difficult to achieve. At the upper ranges, the difference between scores becomes much more pronounced, so that it's much more difficult to rise from a 60 to 70, than it is to go from a 10 to a 20.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

With a quick glance at both blogs, it looks like you're doing just fine.

Both have a distinct look and feel (the Boy Scout blog is by far the more attractive - but that's just my opinion)

You might get a higher click-through rate if you were to move the Boy Scout Blog to it's own keyword rich (and shorter) domain, but the hassle and potential downsides of moving it means it probably isn't worth the hassle.

Regardless, if you've been doing it for awhile and it's working for you, I wouldn't change a thing.

Hi Denis,

Welcome to SEOmoz! Glad to have you on board. There's is a lot to learn, and it's a very much go-at-your-own-pace kind of learning (with a lot of Google searches thrown in with a few years of trial and error) but that's why we're here.

1. Yes, you have a duplicate content issue with your homepage. Probably the easiest way to fix this is with a canonical tag (or secondly, a 301 redirect)

You can learn more about these here:

• http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps
• http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-block-redirect-or-canonical
• http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world

2. On-page reports. Yep, your intuition is correct - you need to click through the blue link to see the report. After this, you'll see a rich report with all sorts of specifics.

Here's a tutorial and video on the on-page report. https://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/20878127-on-page-analysis-for-campaigns

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO!

The notices in the SEOmoz PRO platform are just that - notices. They are neither good nor bad in themselves, but we want you to be aware of them in case the issues are not supposed to be there.

In the case of comments such as yours, there are very legitimate reasons why you wouldn't want these crawled or indexed, depending on your situation (duplicate content issues, link to spam, etc) If you are aware why the issues are appearing, and comfortable with your reasoning, it's perfectly fine to have notices in your account.

In my view, it's not a big problem to have these sites on the same server, as long as each site has unique content, and there isn't a huge amount of inter-linking between the sites. (in which case, 30 sites would sound a lot like a link network to me, which would risk all of your sites being de-indexed)

What is potentially a problem is making sure each site is truly unique. This means having unique content (including navigation and in some cases, unique templates - although some would argue this is a bit extreme) You say that the sites employ the same link building methods - does this mean they all have links from the exact same sources? Again, you could be stumbling into link network territory again... or Google may choose to place less value on those links.

It's a murky area, and you'll have to use your own analytics and judgement to tease the answers out of Google. I'd say your not in trouble just because of the shared IP, but my suspicion tells me your in a dangerous neighborhood.

Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

This is such a nuanced question that depends on so many different factors, I fear I can't give you a complete answer. But I can tell you some of the questions I'm asking in my head.

-What happened to the old para-sailing pages on Site B? Do they redirect to the salespage/homepage? Does the site still rank for and receive traffic for para-saling? What did those old pages rank for?

-Are you trying to rank the new site for para-sailing queries? If so, it might seem appropriate to redirect the old para-sailing pages to the next most relevant landing page. This is what Google would prefer, anyway.

-Do you take up 2 SERP positions now?

That's off the top of my head. Would probably have some more questions if I saw the site and knew more about the particular queries.