Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Great suggestion we'll try that thanks Vic.

Hi,Would love to hear different experiences and thoughts on this one.

We have a site that is plagued with 404's in the Webmaster Tools. A significant number of them have never existed, for instance affiliates have linked to them with the wrong URL or scraper sites have linked to them with a truncated version of the URL and an ellipsis eg;

/my-nonexistent...

What's the best way to handle these?

If we do nothing and mark as fixed, they reappear in the broken links report.

If we 301 redirect and mark as fixed they reappear.

We tried 410 (gone forever) and marking as fixed; they re-appeared.

We have a lot of legacy broken links and we would really like to clean up our WMT broken link profile - does anyone know of a way we can make these links to non extistent pages disappear once and for all?

Many thanks in advance!

Go to Google images and search for your favourite celebrity and then modify your search by clicking on the "Search Tools" and select the labelled for reuse and if your celeb is famous enough you should see a few you can use.

Yup my images send me traffic from Google images on most of my sites and attractive images attract hotlinks as well. At the moment people are hosting their images on a different domain (cdn) and are still being credited with the images but I haven't tried to do that myself ie I don't know if they've set some "ownership" somewhere and somehow.

Hi Elf925,

I love the site and especially the top menu - it's really easy to navigate and filter products etc.

I think the web confs tool is broken because you have a large naviational overhead (header, sidebar and footer) that is the same on each page and maybe 20 or so words that are different out of some 2,000 plus words.

Search engines should be able to sort out the content from the boilerplate and Google has a patent on it here;

http://www.google.com/patents/US8543572

When I do a search for a unique string from your page eg Silver Pendants Plain Pendants HP-JB5331/16458 you are #1 in Google.

When I do a slightly more generic search in Google for Silver Pendants Plain Pendants HP-JB5331/16458 you are at #1 so I think Google is doing quite a good job of analysing the meat of your content.

Have you suddenly lost rankings/traffic or are you struggling to compete for the generics?

Some useful ideas there - thanks!

We're in a games market and we have a link on every page to our download. The link is an aspx but there is no downloadpage as such - clicking on the link triggers an executable download that is just less than one meg.

We've been looking at the top results in our very competitive market and the top 8 don't seem to have a download.

Coincidence or a real factor?

HI Everyone,

We have clients for whom we are going to work with in different countries but sometimes with the same  language.

For example we might have a client in a competitive niche working in Germany, Austria and Switzerland (Swiss German) ie we're going to potentially rewrite our website three times in German,

We're thinking of using Google's href lang tags and use pretty much the same content - is this a safe option, has anyone actually tries this successfully or otherwise?

All answers appreciated.

Cheers,

Mel.

Great, that could be it, thanks so much for the response,

Hi There

I have a question regarding Google generating its own page titles for some of the pages on my website. I know that Google sometimes takes your H1 tag and uses it as a page title, however, can anyone tell me how I can stop this from happening?

Is there a meta tag I can use, for example like the NOODP tag? Or do I have to change my page title?

Thanks

Sadie

HI Everyone,

We have clients for whom we are going to work with in different countries but sometimes with the same  language.

For example we might have a client in a competitive niche working in Germany, Austria and Switzerland (Swiss German) ie we're going to potentially rewrite our website three times in German,

We're thinking of using Google's href lang tags and use pretty much the same content - is this a safe option, has anyone actually tries this successfully or otherwise?

All answers appreciated.

Cheers,

Mel.

Hi Elf925,

I love the site and especially the top menu - it's really easy to navigate and filter products etc.

I think the web confs tool is broken because you have a large naviational overhead (header, sidebar and footer) that is the same on each page and maybe 20 or so words that are different out of some 2,000 plus words.

Search engines should be able to sort out the content from the boilerplate and Google has a patent on it here;

http://www.google.com/patents/US8543572

When I do a search for a unique string from your page eg Silver Pendants Plain Pendants HP-JB5331/16458 you are #1 in Google.

When I do a slightly more generic search in Google for Silver Pendants Plain Pendants HP-JB5331/16458 you are at #1 so I think Google is doing quite a good job of analysing the meat of your content.

Have you suddenly lost rankings/traffic or are you struggling to compete for the generics?

Go to Google images and search for your favourite celebrity and then modify your search by clicking on the "Search Tools" and select the labelled for reuse and if your celeb is famous enough you should see a few you can use.