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HI Alberto,

Understanding the purpose of the NOFOLLOW tag is what would make your decision. In general you should NOFOLLOW.

Edit for Reference: Google NoFollow Tag

• Untrusted Content (like user generated un-moderated)
• Paid Links Or Paid Advertisements
• Links to Pages That Serve No Search Engine Value (sign up, registration, etc..)

In your case you have "resources" which in theory adds value to the page and the users experience. A single page with resource links is not going to hurt your site at all. Without seeing the exact page I would lean to say it would be fine as follow links. That being said, you want it to be tasteful non-spammy and indeed a boon to the user experience and not just a big list of garbage.

Hope this helps,

Don

Hi Becky,

How did you do the redirects?

Did you generate a new sitemap?

Is there anything that would block crawling the non www version?

Do you still have www links on any of your pages? (typically this isn't an issue because most people use relative linking but figured I'd ask).

A quick note www. and non www are considered two different sites just as http and https are.

Hope to help

Don

Okay so if you have one root domain you can only have one robots.txt file.

The reason I asked for an example is in the case there was something you could put in the robots.txt to differentiate the two.

For example if you have

thisdomain.com and thatdomain.com

However if "thatdomain.com" uses a folder called shop ("thatdomain.com/shop") than you could prefix all your robots.txt file entries with /shop provided that "thisdomain.com" doesn't use the folder shop, Then all the /shop entries would only be applicable to "thatdomain.com". Does this make sense?

Don

Taken and suggestions submitted!

Can you provide me an example of the way the domains look... Specifically where the root pages are.

Domain1.com

forums.domain1.com ?

Additionally, if you are redirecting 303 one of the domains to the other why do you want two different robots.txt files? The one being 303 will always redirect to the other...?

Depending on the structures you can create one robots.txt file that deals with 2 different domains provided there is something unique about the root folders.

Okay so if you're using a 303 then you're saying the content you want for X site is actually located at Y site.Which means you do not have 2 different sub domains. So there is no need for 2 robots.txt files and your developer is correct you can't use 2 robots.txt files. Since one site would be pointing to the other you only have one sub-domain.

However, 303 is in general a poor way to use a redirect and likely should be 301.. but I would have to understand why the 303 is being used to say that with 100% certainty. See a quick article about 303 here..

Hope this answers the question,

Don

What host are you using?

Hi Timothy,

Short answer is content.

Easy to say hard to complete. Here are some strategy's I found helpful in the past.

Customer Reviews (moderated):  these provide additional details that customers appreciate reading before making a buying decision. It also adds long-tail keywords that you may have not thought of along with lots of unique content.

Product Schema / microdata: this gives search engines and shopping listing sites a workable schema to list your products on sources you may not have been aware of.

Research and Self Review: This is one way Amazon gets ahead of its competition to illicit customer reviews. They actually send their top reviewers free products to generate unique review content. (Amazon Vine). Most companies probably can't afford to do this, so is why I recommend self reviews. If you're not a strong writer possibly hire a copy writer to proof-read.

Customer Images (Moderated): Adding customer generated images is an easy way to get additional unique photos and alt text.

Some thoughts, hope it helps,

Don

I tend to agree with digihouse, however this was a recent question posted here at Moz where a Moz associate suggested proactively disavowing the links.

You can check the responses there for some additional guidance.

It doesn't look like there is a general conscience on what to do. So perhaps a compromise makes the most sense. You could document the domain link and page and if it ever starts becoming an issue you are already one step ahead of it.

Hope it helps and good luck,

Don

The shift is happening. I just did a review in Google Anayltics and noticed in 2010 we had 0.5% traffic from mobile devices today it is over 13%. This trend is likely not going to change. Google is trying to be pro-active here.

The subdomain has to be separated from the root in some fashion. I would assume depending on your host that there is a separate folder for the subdomain stuff. Otherwise it would be chaos. Say you installed forums on your forum subdomain and a e-commerce on your shop subdomain... which index.php page would be served?

There has to be some separation, review your file manager and look for the sub-domain folders. Once found you simply put a robots.txt into each of those folders.

Hope this helps,

Don

HI Troller

Outbound links are important. Eric Enge wrote a post for the Moz Blog here

What it comes down to is the way the interwebs where originally envisioned and how page rank is passed between sites. When you speak about a topic and you link to authoritative sites, this provides your USERS more information on the subject and you are doing them a service. As such the algorithms that assign page rank pick up on your link and pass some juice to your link(ee).

But it isn't just a juice leak, it actually helps your site become associated with more authoritative sites. It is natural for web developers and industries to link to similar sites when those sites provide more information than themselves. The idea is for it to be natural, I wouldn't recommend a strategy that links to authoritive sites on every page or even most pages. Rather consider yourself as a reader when do you appreciate a link to a more authoritative site? That is where your outbound FOLLOW links should be.

Hope this helps,

Don

If you're not switching domain names, just host then the situation is much better because now you have control.

When you switch host you're going to get a new DNS (Domain Name Server) it will likely take a few days for this to propagate through the internet. So expect some initially slow traffic days.

Once the DNS has changed to your new site you have control, so you will want to put the 301's on the new site for any of the old pages that don't have url's to their new equivalent. Just like if you were making new pages on the site. Even if they don't have any inbound links you should still 301 any decent ranking URL's to the new ones you make, since they are likely indexed or bookmarked by search engines and users.

Hope this helps,

Don

HI Richard,

I think you may have stumbled into a bit of a messy situation here. If you do not have access to the old site, how can you 301 redirect to the new site? The 301 redirects are put into the .htaccess file of the old site. Think of it like a "We Moved Sign" you would place on a retail store. You pull into the parking lot and see a sign that says. "hey we moved, we are now located at...". If you're not allowed to use the parking lot, you have no where to put this sign.

You need to make sure your client is allowed to, or at least the company hosting the site is willing to allow you to put in the redirects. To answer your question you need to specifically put in a the .htaccess file on the OLD site to the new site.

You do not have to be concerned with matching URL's only that you format the .htacess file correctly. An example would be (again this must be on the old site server).

• redirect 301 oldpage.html http://www.NewSite.com/newpage.html
• redirect 301 oldfolder/somepage.html http://www.YourNewSite.com/newfold/newpage.html

If you choose to keep the same file structure you can do a blanket 301 redirect using mod rewrite (it must be enabled on the old server). Like this.

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^OldDomain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.NewDomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

You can read more about redirects here at Moz.

If you do not have the ability to put an htaccess file or the clients hosting provider is un-willing to help (they may for a charge) then you're in a bad situation with no great solutions. The only thing I can think of is having the clients old host create a page that say this site has moved and provide a link to the new site. Our company did this many many years ago http://www.columbiaindustrial.com/ when they changed their name and host (before my time). Then you need to recommend how long you would recommend the client pays for this new page to be live... I'd say at least 3-6 months.

Hope this helps

Don

Amazon actually gives products to their top reviewers. Via Amazon Vine. Trick is un-biased good reviews gets you good stuff! Moz actually gives rewards too, but its actually for helping others. You could say a review kinda...helps others ya?

Here here!

I don't even type on trains and I still loose some post.

Good suggestion.

It takes all kinds :).  I think to me maybe a learned response any time I click a link and see a redirect unless I implicitly trust the site I'm alt+f4'ing right away. I don't want popups, I don't want redirects I want to go where I say to go, even if where I said to go is empty. At least I got there and now can make a conscience choice what to do next.

Maybe just preference.

Cyrus Shepard covers removal of a site from Google in a blog post

http://moz.com/blog/we-deindexed-followerwonk

Hopefully this answers your question.

Don

Hi Leonie

I am not completely against 301's for these situations but from a user experience level I don't like when I got to X url and end up at Y url. I understand the reason from an SEO perspective but I don't like it from a user perspective. I take this into account when I make my decisions for my personal sites as well as my company's.

For e-commerce sites I prefer one of two methods. For products that "may" one day return I prefer to leave the page up, disable checkout / add to cart features and provide users similar buying choices along with an out of stock "email me when available again" option.

For products that will likely never be available again I still prefer to leave the page up, provide alternatives for them to buy, and then canonical the URL to parent. The second option works in two ways. First you don't miss the traffic from others linking to you, second you give the page's credit back to the parent category while reducing the no longer available page's chance of being a SERP result and up the parent's. Eventually the page will fall off the SERPs. Once a year you can do a sweep to see if any of the no longer available pages are getting any views if not then just remove them.

Both options provides users a better experience then "O you want to go here, O, I say you go here!" that 301's induce. I am not saying there is no place for 301's, in this sort of case I think the alternatives maybe a tad better, though maybe a little harder to implement.

Yep, seems Google treats the meta description tag as mere suggestion then anything else.

Very normal.