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Absolutely no harm at all.  Do you have an index sitemap that you list all the sub-sitemaps from? If not you should do that as well just for sanity of sitemap management.

Totally agreed, Daniel! I'd also say it's our job to set expectations and be clear about when something is a test vs when something will more than likely work. Consulting is all about setting expectations!

Hi Rhys! Yes, that should be fine as long as you do a one-to-one redirect from /page/ to /page2/.

Out of curiosity, why change the URL and not update the content and styles on the current page? You'd save any link equity, keep your URLs consistent, and probably stand a better chance of ranking longterm.

Hi Ennovation -

To directly answer your question, if you nofollow the link back, they will not receive any credit for your link. If they have a followed link to you, then you do receive credit. Simple as that. People doing link exchanges are usually quite wise to this, though, and when they find that you nofollowed the link to them, they will often remove the link that is pointing to your site.

I also have to tell you that I don't recommend link exchanges. I suspect that pages that exist just for link exchanges, or sites offering them, are quite discounted in Google. Plus, it ends up looking quite spammy, even if the sites you are exchanging links with are in your niche.

Since you are already thinking about building and keeping relationships with people, why not take it a step further beyond a link exchange, and instead do a guest post for them? If they want to do one for you as well, I think that's totally fine.

Good luck.

Hi ian, for those of us interested can you share the issues that are causing this update to be rolled back? Also, I like many saw the update and have to explain things to clients and bosses, so it would Ben rest to get a post on the main blog about what’s changing and why things are fluctuating more than usual.

Hey Techboy -

Assuming your site validates fine using the Rich Snippets tool,  as you said, unfortunately I don't think there is much you can do. I heard Stefan Weitz from Bing talk about it, and he said that it's a slow rollout because they want to get it right, and they are also wanting to see how people use it. Also, the search engines are giving priority to brands and well-known people (especially with rel=author markup), so the little guys are having a harder and harder time getting the semantic markup to show in the SERPs.

He even went so far as to say that we should mark up our sites now, so that when Schema is rolled out more we'll be ahead of the curve (and he insinuated that it will affect rankings positively as well).

Sorry I can't provide an actionable answer, but right now with the semantic markup it can be a bit of a waiting game.

Rodrigo -

Good question. The syntax does in fact matter, though not necessarily for SEO rankings. It matters because if you screw up your robots.txt, you can inadvertently disallow your whole site (I did it last week. Not pretty. Blog post forthcoming).

To get to your question, it is usually best to put the "Sitemap: " line at the bottom of the robots.txt, but it is not required to have it there, so far as I know.

You do not need the Allow: / parameter, because if you leave it out, Google assumes that you want everything indexed except what is put in the "Disallow: " lines.

In your case, you are disallowing "http://www.site.com/form.htm" and everything in your cgnet_directory folder. If you want everything in these folders hidden from crawlers...you have done exactly what you need to do.

I'm still learning about this, so I'm open to any correction the rest of the community has.

I totally agree that placing a link in-context does not make it a good link. I could also show many examples of links in-context that are obviously manipulative. So we have to go what I've been saying for a long time - is the link adding value to the article? Is it placed at the time of publishing? Is it there just for the link, or does it provide value to someone who would click through?

Studies have been showing time and time again that readers are much more likely to click on something like [click here] or [this article] instead of an exact anchor. Exact anchors are basically only done by SEOs.

So we should think carefully about when'where we put these links too. I think the argument and studies done on partial-match anchor text being valuable bolsters the argument to link whole sentences instead of just the keywords you want to rank for. You may also get more referral traffic if you do this.

Got it, thanks so much Ian!

Hey Trevor -

A couple of things here. First, I would never recommend that someone use obfuscated Javascript on links in order to make it so that the crawlers cannot see them.

Also, I think the "too many links on a page" guideline is not one to follow too strictly. It's not an "error" in the Moz Pro Campaigns because it is a guideline. Depending on your site, you can have many more than 100 links on a page and be fine. Or, you can use other ways (iframes, nav behind Javascript) to have these links available to the crawlers.

Just remember (as I am sure you do) that these links will not pass any link juice and you will need to use other ways to get your pages indexed and to have a good crawler-friendly architecture.

Just my two cents. I don't think you'd be cloaking, but it's starting to get a bit iffy. I'd steer clear.

Hey Andrew -

From what I'm seeing in the OSE index and in my browser, you moved the content over to your new domain but did not forward your old domain. I know you said that you had a lot of links to your homepage on www.myclient.co.uk, and since you did not 301 this page and older pages, you've lost all your links.

Can you explain why you did not 301 your old domain?

Hey Alan -

Great question here. I honestly do not know if that htaccess trick will work. I've heard it postulated that it will, but have not seen anything conclusive on it! Unfortunately reinclusion requests take some time. If you think that you have been targeted unfairly, I'd recommend making as much noise publicly as possible. Get in front of Google and plead your case.

As far as I see it, here are your options for the spammy links -

• If it's a KEYWORD-SPECIFIC penalty to that page, 404 the page to disavow the links and build a new page on your domain targeting that term. Build good links to this.

• If it's a sitewide drop in traffic, then you need to remove as many of the links as possible. There are tools out there to help with this, but generally you need to find low-PA/DA, exact anchors. These are going to be the ones that are hurting you most. Also look for sitewides with exact anchors that can be seen as manipulative.

• Google wants to see "good faith" in getting links removed. So document all sites that you contact, the sites that get back to you, the links you get removed, and the links you know about that you have not been able to get removed, including reasons for why (ie 4 emails sent, no reply, cannot find an email on WhoIs, etc). You have to be completely transparent.

One tip for you is to share all of these links in a Google Doc, which you link to from the reinclusion request. Then, shorten the link within the reinclusion using a bit.ly link so that you can see if/when they look at the links.

Good luck man. I know how hard it is to wait on hearing back, having gone through it a few times myself.

John

Hey John -

Thanks for coming here and asking your question. From my looks at your site as well, I don't see anything glaring that would keep that page from ranking.

Unfortunately, sometimes Google picks a random page to rank (on small sites like yours this is often the strongest on the site, which is the homepage) and seems unwilling to want to change that ranking page. A few thoughts for you on how to get the correct page ranking:

• Rewrite your content on this page. It is stuffed with keywords (your main keyword appears 10 times, "Jekyll Island" appears 30) and doesn't read naturally. You're writing for 2007-era search crawlers, not 2017-era users.
• Your site is way over-optimized. When I look at your About or Portfolio pages, why are these optimized for specific [wedding photographer] keywords? This doesn't make any sense for users.
• Build links to the page you want to rank. Get some local citations (from Better Business Bureaus, wedding venues, etc) to this page and I bet you'll pop in your rankings.
• Mention different venues where you have shot weddings in that area. This will help give semantic relevance to your page.

Hope that helps.

Hey Rox -

Great question here. I'm going to try to give an answer, but I'm also going to put in a few questions to help clarify things.

First, I doubt that the subdomain is pulling down the www. if the subdomain has a lot of bad links to it. This is assuming it's example.domain.com and not the www.domain.com in itself (www is techincally a subdomain).

If you want to move the content from the subdomain, why not move it to the main domain and not 301 the old URLs? Instead, add the new URLs to the XML sitemap and link to them internally. Then, put either a 404 or 410 status code on the old pages so that they drop out of the index and the links are not affecting your site anymore.

If you do want to move the content to another site, but you think you have either an algorithmic or manual penalty, do not 301 the old URLs to the new domain. Instead, go about building up that site like you would any new site.

I hope this helps.

John

Did you consolidate many domains into the .com, or just move the domain over completely from .co.uk to .com? In which countries have your rankings dropped? I am guessing UK.

The backlinks you have are not on great websites. Have you tried to get listed in places like the UK's version of the Better Business Bureau? Put in some work doing some guest posting and I bet your rankings will go up.

My guess is that if your rankings have dropped mostly in the UK, that it's the loss of the .co.uk ccTLD, which is definitely not an insurmountable hurdle, just might take a bit more work.

If the links are exact anchors (which I assume they are if you were doing link exchanges) and are in the footer, I would get them removed. I have not heard of anyone linkbuilding their way out of Penguin; only by removing bad links have people recovere. So yes, I would remove these links if they are this way.

Branded links are usually fine, unless they are something like what WPMU dealt with and they were too close to exact anchors.

Penguin seems to mean that there are specific links that Google does not like. Go look at the posts that have been written for the different types they don't like, and look through your backlink profile to find the money terms where you might have too many exact anchors.

Good luck.

Hi there, I'd recommend looking into using Scripted for this if you're not a strong writer. You can get awesome content for quite cheap.

Gotcha. Would you mind DMing me the URL so I can have a look? Also, a list of any URLs that might be redirected into the site.

This is a great question, and from some posts I've seen it seems that plugins like SEO Smart Links have caused issues with Penguin: http://www.itechcode.com/2012/05/19/vital-seo-tips-after-penguin-algorithm-update/

So I would say yes. Be careful using things like SEO Smart Links or KB Linker, as they can cause you to unnaturally link certain words all the time, in a way that is not good for user experience either.

It's harder when you are talking navigation, etc, but I posit (and I have no proof of this) that menus and such are not as at-risk to be hit with Penguin as overdone in context links.

As we always say, what would users expect to see? Give them that.

Hope this helps

Hi there! Does your site have subfolders or subdirectories targeted at your specific countries and their languages? Because the best and right way to do it is with a subfolder like site.com/ch/en/ targeted with HREFLANG for ch-en.

Some links I found that might help - https://www.brightedge.com/blog/seo-for-multiregional-websites/ and http://www.amazeemetrics.com/en/blog/seo-tutorial-geo-targeting-with-hreflang-tag

Hope that helps!