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Hi Andy,

I have to options. First the easiest. Canonical the pages to the main page. Pretty simple but possibly not the best.

The second solution would be to make the descriptions & titles dynamic as well. For example (I don't have all the info) so bare with me.

Base Description:A selection of the best Silversea cruise deals taking in over 800 destinations across all 7 continents.

On Category Selection:
$category Silversea Cruise Deals $silversea_deal_1

Which would give you these 4 initial descriptions:

• Recommended Silversea Cruise Deals
• Cruise Price Silversea Cruise Deals
• Sail Date Silversea Cruise Deals
• Best Value Silversea Cruise Deals

Then you define the deals..
$silversea_deal_1 = 4 Day 3 Night Key West To Bahama's $499

Now you append the variable to the description:

• Recommended Silversea Cruise Deals 4 Day 3 Night Key West To Bahama's $499
• Cruise Price Silversea Cruise Deals 4 Day 3 Night Key West To Bahama's $499
• Sail Date Silversea Cruise Deals 4 Day 3 Night Key West To Bahama's $499
• Best Value Silversea Cruise Deals 4 Day 3 Night Key West To Bahama's $499

That is how I typically handle multiple pages that need to rank SEO'wise but have dynamic content. You just find a pattern that you can use and plug in the variables, just like any of the content but you do it inside the SEO part.

Hope that makes sense and helps,

Don

Hi Dan,

If these pages have no SEO value then you can just stop them from being crawled, thus preventing any duplicate content penalties. If you see some backlinks (SEO value) to any of these then I would use Canonical.

robots.txt

User-agent:: *

Disallow: /*attachment_id

Hope it helps,

Don

Hi Mayank,

Use the fetch tool listed above to see what URL's are being blocked. If any, it maybe it is just taking Google some time to get things indexed for you.

Hi

If I understand them correctly....

DNS change would be the location for site x is now at this IP. (IP Location Change)

IIS change would be server y is now server x. (Hardware Location Change)

In which case an IIS change would likely be preferred as you don't have to wait for the new DNS update to propagate.

Hope that helps,

Don

Then 404 is the correct way to handle it.

You should also be sure that you clean up any internal links to these pages after they are gone. Search engines can understand other sites linking to pages that are no longer available but they do frown on your own site sending users to missing pages.

Yes I agree that it is a contended issue. I would think most industries this would be of little concern but as Matt points out in his video there are some industries that maybe more prone to this.

As you may know getting random links from sub-par sites is fairly common. I would of course be pro-active about checking my backlinks but not start worrying until I saw a large spike. If you do see this, you will likely have time to get your disavow done before anything happens.

HI Don,

This is a regular concern I have seen here on Moz. Really we want to understand the purpose of Disavow, which is to remove penalties that were brought on by Link Spamming that many companies did to boost their rankings. Sometimes their selves, sometimes by hiring bad SEO companies. Either way the idea is a last resort for those who had fallen in a pit.

Early on people worried that Google's algorithm change could in fact bring a new type of SEO (Negative SEO) that is where a company is paid to use the same old spam tactics but instead of targeting the hiring company they target their competitors in hopes to inflict a penalty on them. Google was well aware of this possibility and tried their best to prevent that from happening. You should see Matt Cutts video about this topic on youtube here.

There are some crappy sites out there that regularly create links to good sites for whatever reason. This is actually normal, and should not be much of a concern unless it becomes apparent that you are being targeted by a Negative SEO campaign. If so, then yes use the disavow tool. If you already have a very strong back link profile the impact of a few random bad links should have no impact.

I hope this helps,

Don

Glad I could help

Best wishes,

Don

I think the answer is basically the same.

The answer is they will be treated differently. You won't see a direct benefit from latching on to the main domain.

In some cases it does make sense to use sub-domains for example, forums.domain.com. This gives the user both keywords forums & domain name (an indirect benefit). It makes it easier to manage content in a CMS by having the forums on a sub-domain. Heck Google does this for many of its products as does Amazon. In most cases these are services offered by the main domain. For example: Google->Ad-Words, Google->Translate, Amazon->Seller Centeral etc..

However if they are completely different items or services I would just use a different domain completely. I would point to my work for an example. I work for a custom rubber manufacturer who's primary focus is working on new product development and manufacturing for OEM's . But some of the products on our website were generating a lot of interest and phone calls from smaller opportunities. Instead of ignoring this option and potential revenue we built a distribution site (On a different domain) to handle these smaller opportunities. Had we done this on a sub-domain we could have confused larger OEM clients by thinking we are a retailer or middle man, when in fact we are a manufacturer.

I hope that clears things up, really evaluate the reason for the sub-domain if it is a sub-product / service by the main domain and there is no clear conflict for making it a sub-domain then okay, otherwise and in most cases it will likely make more sense to use a different domain completely.

This is my thoughts I hope it helps,

Don

Hi Sunit,

Stephanie Chang wrote a nice blog post about how to handle this situation here on Moz.

She points out there is no right way to do this. I however really like the option to leave the page and content on the site but mark the product page as out of stock, or unavailable right now. I used to run my own e-commerce store and I had many items that were purchased from overseas. At times I could not get an accurate re-stock time from my suppliers due to language and international challenges. My solution was to create and out of stock (email me when available again) notice. I found when those products did come back in stock, that started selling again quickly do to the emails that went out.

The other thing Search Engines don't particularly like content that comes and goes so that may be why you noticed a hit in some pages.

Hope that helps,

Don

As html both are correct, the /> is a standard close tag, however browsers and crawlers do not require the "/"  to know the tag is closed.

In XML you would close the with a standard close tag .

That should answer the technical question.

I also want to mention something about what you wrote. "I want to use it on pages that rankes together with the frontpage in Google, but i only want the frontpage to rank alone and to have the link juice from the other 2 sites direct-ed to the frontpage.."

You should understand the purpose of Canonical tags is really used to keep pages from competing with each other. A good example is if you have a page with info but you also want to give users a printer friendly version (you don't want those pages competing).

If you have two pages with stronger content then your home page for "Keyword X" you could be doing yourself a dis-service by trying to rank a weaker page.

Hello,

A subdomain is treated as its own domain and will rank separately from the main domain. There are a couple of reason I can think of to use a sub-domain but by in large it is more productive to use the main domain.

Matt Cutts (Google) talked about this several years ago here is a link for you: https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/subdomains-and-subdirectories/

The notable thing in Matt Cutts blog post is how they treat domains and sub-domains separately. This is actually important for sites that host others content. Think blog domains for example.

Yep,

This code inside your .htaccess file should fix that.

``RewriteEngine On 
RewriteBase /` RewriteRule ^(.*)index\.(html|php)$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]`

Hope it helps,
Don

HI Andrei,

You received a lot of good responses the first time you asked the question, http://moz.com/community/q/link-building-still-effective

Do you feel that it was not adequately answered? Is there something more specific we can help with?

There is no magic wand for building backlinks. Some times the hard way and the right way are the same way.

Good luck,

Don

Wow that sure does make things tricky. I like Monica's suggestion that you contact them directly. They  maybe more receptive to doing an addendum to the article. Some web-masters are a tad jiggy about removing content or adding noindex tags when content is performing on their site well.

Best of luck, and since this is a unique question I gave you a thumbs up on the original question.

Yes, this is another option.

Great response Egol.

I'm always impressed with people who can think outside the box. Our company was recently purchased by a much larger corporation and instead of trying to roll us together they recognized that separately with their additional resources we are more valuable.

Yep our updates are usually available by Tuesday, but didn't get our second campaign until today. As noted by Alick and Ryan there is a notice on the pro panel. Image below.

Hope it helps,

Don

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Hello Heather,

If the article is completely irrelevant then the best thing to do would remove the content from the site which would prompt a 404 error. In time the article will stop ranking as it no longer exist.

However, it may make more sense to capitalize on its success if at all possible. One possible way is to 301 redirect the page to a different page explaining the change of direction from what was previously stated in the article. This way you still get the initial traffic, and maybe convert those viewers to the new business model.

My thoughts, hope it helps,

Don

Good question,

I personally lean towards browser language selection and allow the option for manual change. Most major sites do it this way.

I changed my FF browser to DE (German) and noticed many sites will serve my content in German. If it were IP based I wouldn't have noticed many changes. Also with the amount of people who speak multiple languages, deployed overseas, or using proxies, IP based really isn't the best solution.

My vote browser based with manual option hope it helps,

Don