Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Peter,

Don't really understand your question about permalink & url - as far as I know a permalink is just an url which remains permanent. Could you give an example of what you mean?

GWT is checking if pages exist - it's not showing you errors if only a part of the page (like the image is missing) - Screaming Frog is much better to help you with this. If Screaming Frog is detecting the issues, it implies that there are links to these images. When you go to the "Response Code" tab - filter on 4xx errors and click on the image url - you can see in the window below under "inlinks" which pages are linking to this image.

Dirk

It could be that the message is only disappearing tomorrow.

The message from Google however doesn't say that the penalty is revoked but that it has been revoked or adjusted. It's possible that the penalty is now only applied to the specific subdomain rather than the site as a whole. Is it still the original message which is shown under Manual actions?

Would update the terms & conditions anyway - so that you can react quick if you see other actions appearing. Try to scan the subdomains from time to time to make sure that they are not violating the Google guidelines.

Regards,

Dirk

Hi

The syntax you use is wrong:

Example page: https://www.whichledlight.com/bulbs?page=2

The canonical should be

(currently )

Check this reference: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en

The rel next /previous should be:

(currently:

Check this reference: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663744?hl=en

Hope this helps;

Dirk

Hi,

Try to answer your questions point by point:

1. You could add to your terms & conditions that sites created need to follow Google webmasterguidelines - and if they are not followed you can delete the subdomain.

2. Revoke the penalty is only possible by cleaning the site and removing the contested content. It depends on your current terms & conditions if you have the possibility to force the one who is managing this blog to clean the site.

3. Idem as above - if your terms & conditions didn't stipulate that messing with Google guidelines is forbidden, there is not much you can do at this point.

4. Wordpress is hosting the blogs on wordpress.com - the main site is wordpress.org. Weebly has terms & conditions that forbid Spam/SEO sites (probably Wordpress.com has this as well - but it's stated very clearly on the Weebly.com)

Update terms & conditions if necessary - send warning to offending blog users & delete them if necessary.

Hope this helps,

Dirk

If you don't have a mobile version for the French site I would not automatically redirect to the English version.

I would rather offer users the choice - Continue to the French desktopversion or Go to the mobile version (English). For me it's not as much a question of SEO but more about User experience.

Once the FR version of the mobile site is ready you can do the automatic redirect.

rgds,

Dirk

Hi,

To be very honest - I don't know much about Ajax & how it can be crawled. I read an article beginning of March that the Webmaster guidelines on Ajax that you are referencing could well be changing in the near future. Haven't seen an update on Google Webmaster blog - but it might me something to keep in mind.

Screaming Frog can index all the products on the page - so as long as you keep the main category pages accessible via "static" links I don't think you'll run into problems.

Maybe somebody else can add some personal experience.

rgds,

Dirk

Peter,

It depends.

If you don't get a lot of traffic from image search there is no need to do anything special.

If you are receiving a lot of traffic you basically have two options

• redirect the images to the new location (if this is easy to do)

• alternative would be to keep the images in the old location & put them in the new location as well. As you update the sitemap & redirect the url's Google will after a while update the index for image search & get the new location. As long the index is not updated, your 'old' images will still appear in image seach, when people click on the link they will however be redirected to your new page (as the page containing them is redirected). In my experience - the update frequency of the image index is lower than the normal search index.

I applied this strategy on 2 migrations of sites with 90% of search traffic = image & it proofed quite successful.

Hope this helps - let me know if you have additional questions,

rgds,

Dirk

Hi

Not sure what you mean with Google Parameters  - but normally the hreflang should be reciprocal:
(https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en)

• Missing confirmation links: If page A links to page B, page B must link back to page A. If this is not the case for all pages that use hreflang annotations, those annotations may be ignored or not interpreted correctly

In your case page https://www.sitegeek.com/a2hosting?grank=open is linking to https://fr.sitegeek.com/a2hosting - but https://fr.sitegeek.com/a2hosting is not linking back to https://www.sitegeek.com/a2hosting?grank=open but to https://www.sitegeek.com/a2hosting.

You could try to add a canonical url to https://www.sitegeek.com/a2hosting?grank=open pointing to https://www.sitegeek.com/a2hosting and combine the canonical with the hreflang. Normally this should be possible according to Google - but I couldn't find an example of an implementation.

Try the canonical & test it here: http://flang.dejanseo.com.au/

Hope this helps,

Dirk

Ravi,

The goals of an image sitemap is to find the images that are published on your site - the images you list in the sitemap are not the ones you use on the site. Example: Image used on site: http://www.urbandazzle.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/800x800/c7ea75a76d63a5bd57bd6d87127c28c4/b/1/b17211.jpg

Image listed in sitemap: http://www.urbandazzle.com/media/catalog/product/b/1/b17211.jpg

Quoting Google:

"To give Google information about images on your site, you'll need to add image-specific tags to a sitemap. You can use a separate sitemap to list images, or you can add image information to an existing sitemap. Use the method works for you! " (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/178636?hl=en)

You have asked the same question two months ago - and the answer remains the same (http://moz.com/community/q/why-my-image-are-not-indexed-even-though-i-have-created-image-sitemap)

rgds,

Dirk

Hi,

It's probably better to contact Moz Support directly - https://moz.com/help/contact 
Don't panic - Moz is quite customer oriented. I am sure they'll find a solution.

rgds,

Dirk

Hi,

In the Search Analytics report could you put the filter on "Pages" rather than "Keywords" - and check if there are pages listed that seem suspicious to you?

Did you try "spammy keyword" site:yoursite.com in Google?

Recently there where quite some questions about wordpress sites that had been hacked - mainly caused by this vulnerability:

https://blog.sucuri.net/2014/09/slider-revolution-plugin-critical-vulnerability-being-exploited.html

or this one https://blog.sucuri.net/2014/12/revslider-vulnerability-leads-to-massive-wordpress-soaksoak-compromise.html

I guess that sucuri would normally detect this - but maybe you could doublecheck that you're not using these kind of slider on your site.

rgds,

Dirk

Hi,

For situations like this, God invented hreflang... Basically with hreflang you tell search engines that duplicates of the content exist that target other countries/languages. The exact definition can be found here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

There is a great article on hreflang here on Moz (and more important) a tool that you can use to generate them): https://moz.com/blog/using-the-correct-hreflang-tag-a-new-generator-tool - once implemented you can test it here: http://flang.dejanseo.com.au/

Hreflang needs to be implemented on all the pages on your site which have equivalents on the other sites.

It's not necessary to change the content or the images.

Hope this helps,

Dirk

Hi,

The example I quoted in my reply about Paul's pizza (it's not exactly the same - but quit close)

For the newspaper: if it's just an ad random links (e.g. in the footer) it doesn't look really natural. If the newspaper is featuring an article about a legal issue and it's quoting your law firm in the article, than the link would be quite natural.

For the retirement homes: Google is quite aware that if you're in a retirement home you have entered the last phase of your life; so it's not really unnatural for a retirement home to feature some articles on your final "bucket list" - which could include content on how to make a will. If on these articles they quote your law firm, or if the content is entirely written by your law firm, it would be quite logical to mention the original source (or even better - put a canonical url pointing to your site).

Basically - natural links are quite easy to detect. Just ask yourself: if no link building for SEO purposes existed, would the publisher include this link? If he would, it's almost certain that it's a good link. If he wouldn't, it's not really a good one.

rgds,

Dirk

Tom,

Image search is a bit different - if you are dependant on image search & the names and/or location of the images is changing during migration you have to very careful. (as I am a bit lazy, I just repeat the answer I posted here)

In my experience, the image index is updated much slower than the normal index, and while google is quite fast to index the redirected urls it seems to need  much more time for the images. On a previous migration we had the situation where the image thumbnails where still visible in the search results , but as soon you did preview the image the image didn't load as it had moved from it's original location. The problem with image search is that when this happened the position of the image remained in the results but the site behind it changed (at that point we also discovered that an huge number of sites who had stolen our original images).

To avoid this we now migrated the images to the new location and updated the links in the html, but we also kept the same images in the old location until we had the impression that they were no longer indexed.

This strategy seemed to work as unlike the first migration our results from image search were unaffected.

Apart from that, you will have off course have to update the image sitemap as well (if you currently have one)

If you have additional questions, don't hesitate to ask them (I migrated 3 sites over the last year which had 90% of the traffic coming from image search)

rgds

Dirk

With Penguin in mind, a link like this doesn't look real natural to me. Even if you don't pay for it, it still looks like paid link.

It would be different if this pizza place would have a blog, where they would discuss about their legal troubles with their neighbours, and they would mention what a terrific job your lawyer has done to defend them.

I refer again to the beginner's guide (sorry for that). Link techniques that used to be good and are considered bad practice now are

• Blog comments that are not moderated
• Press releases with optimized anchor text
• Article directories
• Guest post signatures
• Advertorials
• Embeddable widgets
• Infographic embeds
• User profile pages
• Guestbooks
• Forum signatures
• Directories that are not moderated

Source: https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-link-building/types-of-links

You also might want to check https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en - one of the (negative) examples is quite close to what you would like to do

• Forum comments with optimized links in the post or signature, for example:
  _Thanks, that’s great info!
  • Paul
    paul’s pizza san diego pizza best pizza san diego_

My advice would be - don't do it.

rgds

Dirk

I am a big fan of Screaming frog myself. Apart from the real basic stuff (checking H1, titles,...etc) it's also useful to check if all your pages contain your analytics tag and to check the size of the images on the site (these things Moz can't do).

It's also extremely useful when you're changing the url structure to check if all the redirects are properly implemented.

Sometimes you get loops in your site, especially if you use relative rather than absolute links on your site - Screaming Frog has an extremely helpful feature: just click on the url  and select "crawl path report" - which generates an xls which shows the page where the problem originates

It's also very convenient that you can configure the spider to ignore robots.txt / nofollow / noindex when you are test a site in a pre-production environment. Idem for the possibility to use regex to filter some of the url's while crawling (especially useful for big sites if the they aren't using canonicals or noindex where they should use it)

rgds,

Dirk

Unless you're selling pizza's yourself, these links are not going to help you much

This strategy is not really going to work - most sites make links on testimonials and comments nofollow (just to avoid that other webmasters are just going to post comments to create links). Not that nofollow links are necessarily a bad thing (check https://moz.com/blog/the-hidden-power-of-nofollow-links) - but these kind of nofollow links normally add no value.

You might want to check this link https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-link-building and all the resources you can find here: https://moz.com/blog/category/link-building

A lot of reading & studying to do - it might be a relief for you that even experts sometimes get it completely wrong http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-failures

Good luck,

Dirk

Hi,

If you would have asked this question before April 21st I would have said to publish the responsive pages the moment they were ready, even if the remaining pages are having a different design.

At this point, it seems that the impact of Mobilegeddon is quite limited, so if you can finish the complete site in a couple of weeks, I would rather go for the better user experience and present the full site with the new design.

If in the next days the mobile update would have serious impact on search results, you can always decide to publish the pages which are already responsive.

Keep an eye on this post - https://moz.com/blog/day-after-mobilegeddon - if the update really starts having an big impact, you'll read it there. (or follow Moz / Searchengineland / Searchenginewatch / ... on twitter & you'll be to first to know)

rgds,

Dirk

Linda,

I hope there is no misunderstanding, I fully agreed with your first answer. I also like the solution with the canonical - however not possible to implement this if the content has already been put off-line.

rgds,

Dirk

Hi,

You can only have duplicate content if the same content is published on different sites. As far as I understand from your question, site one doesn't sell product range A anymore, so these products are no longer published on site one. So there can't be a duplicate content issue if you publish the same content on site two.

I like the suggestion of Linda to put 301 from the old pages on site 1 to the new pages on site 2 as it will reinforce the position of the new pages.

rgds,

Dirk