Welcome to the Q&A Forum

HI Jubaer,

Last year, Cyrus Shepard did a White Board Friday and touched on this very subject.
REF: https://moz.com/blog/the-rules-of-link-building-whiteboard-friday

Quote: "...

Don't link externally in the footer

A couple of other rules that I see people violate all the time that Google has made painfully clear in the past few months: Don't link externally in the footer. Just don't. I'm not going to go into the reasons. Just don't do that.

Avoid site-wide links

By the same token, except for navigation, avoid site-wide links. This is something that we've known for years. If someone links to you externally, site-wide, in the side bar, that's ripe for Penguin-style links...."

The idea of linking to your site on every page is an old tactic used to generate higher DA / PA for the linked site. There is of course something to be said about a company that is proud of its work and is happy to put their name on it, but in general the idea of harvesting clients link juice in an effort to boost yours is a bit pretentious.

At best you get credit for 1 link on the site, at worst you move the bar towards getting a penalty for spamming.

My advice, if your clients are okay with it, pick a page like "about us" or "contacts" and put a small blurb, site powered By "WordPress" designed by YourDesignSite.com. This would be 2 external links and draw a correlation for scrapers between the CMS, the Keyword Design(ed) and Your site.

Hope this makes sense and helps,

Don

My first thought was exactly what EGOL suggested. However given the decission that they are dead set on rebranding I would suggest the following.

Split the wholesale site off first, leaving the current domain in place for a transitional period. After a pre-dertmined period of time (however long they feel it necessary for wholesale buyers to get used to the new website), then change the retail side to the new brand, and take full advatange of 301 and change of address.

My thoughts hope it helps,

Don

Great Answer Peter!

/thumbs

Don

Hi Neil,

Sounds like you have put some thought into this and want to start off in the right place.

Categories: In your line of thinking you seem to landed on wanting category pages either for organization or for keyword opportunities, which is great. However, without knowing exactly what your categories are, or what type of website you're using, it is hard for us to commit further on this line of thinking.

Dynamic vs Static: Depending again on what type of website you're building or working on and the amount of items you'll ultimately end up with its hard for me to give a recommendation. That said, I do have some general rules I like to follow. If we are talking +100's of properties I would absolutely go dynamic.

Dynamic requires more initial coding to get setup, but once done you end up with a very easy way to add properties with minimal effort.

If you're only listing 20-40'ish properties, you may find that putting the personal touch into each page and going static is a better route.

In the end the dynamic vs static debate comes down to time and reward. If I were selling 10, 50 million dollar properties you could bet your left one, that I would absolutely take my time and do them static. But if I had to list 50, 60k properties and 2 150k's I would spend my time on the back end coding something that allows me to plug and play the stats.. so to speak.

To summarize I used property sales as an example here, but it wasn't quite clear if you were talking about selling properties, or possibly hotel rooms. In any case, using categories is usually a good thing.  In the Dynamic vs static debate it all comes down to time vs reward, which is the best way to use your time given the potential return?

Also don't forget about the Schema when you make your decision. https://schema.org/RealEstateAgent

Hope this helps you,

Don

Hi Zoe,

I just tried to view your Robots.txt file and was unable to access it. So I requested a crawl. The error I got from Moz is "612 : Page banned by error response for robots.txt."

I would suggest you look at the file permissions of your robots.txt file. It should be readable by the public; Apache permissions would be (644). This means it is not available to view or it could be that it is in the wrong directory or non-existent altogether. It should be in your root and accessible via a browser here: http://www.guitarcontrol.com/robots.txt

I would also note that some people feel that listing your sensitive directories in the robots.txt file is a security risk, and perhaps they are right. However, there are other ways to secure a directory and keep them out of the Indexes, and if the information being protected is that important, I would imagine that all security precautions would be taken.

The robots.txt file is important for crawlers so it should always be used and available to be read. If security is the problem here, I would point to some high profile sites that don't seem to have a problem with showing the public their robots.txt file.
https://www.google.com/robots.txt
https://www.facebook.com/robots.txt

I hope this helps,

Don

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| 612 : Page banned by error response for robots.txt. |

Hi Sandi,

I thought Screaming Frog would follow 301 rules and exclude them from the sitemap. To be sure I just ran the domain and it appears to be true. With the free Screaming Frog you can configure things like ignore canonical pages, noindex pages, paginated urls, and PDF's. It also allows you to set the change frequency and priority.

Screaming Frog found 428 url's and the sitemap has about 100'ish urls. Which is still in the range of easily being manually reviewed.

Here is a link to the sitemap I generated for your site: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5yObTBvN3iVWFJZczJWTUlZU0U/view?usp=sharing

Here is a link to Screaming Frog official site: http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/

When doing SEO it always best to have a full toolbox!

I hope this helps,

Don

I read the topic the other way around. Wasn't in touch with the proposed Moz update date.

Mozcast shows relatively mild changes the past couple days.

Hi Silviu,

You can "Demote" links from appearing in the Sitelinks.

Here is a ref link on google.

Here is a quick answer.

Login to Google Webmasters
Select Domain
Navigate to Search Appearance -> Sitelinks
Enter the URL for the page that shouldn't appear and click the "Demote" button.

*Note Google will only follow this rule for 90 days so you'll have to check it every 3 months to insure everything is working the way you want.

Hope this helps,

Don

Hi,

Something is generating those links, and that is what I would want to fix. It sounds like a module or add-on is incorrectly coded, or installed improperly. As p=1_1 is usually a form of pagination and / or sort order.

You could of course easily fix it by putting a canonical tag on the root page to itself or work out a mod rewrite rule, but that isn't actually fixing the problem. As soon as you add another category you may have to revisit the fix again.

Here is an example of using mod re-write on Stack Overflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14666140/htaccess-rewriting-php-pagination

I hope that helps,

Don

Hi Satish,

Then my first response is appropriate. Google will use whatever "title / Description" it feels is best, again I recommend you watch the YouTube video from Matt Cutts (former Google SEO guy) about why that is.

In your particular case it could be the Doctor Deepu Chandru is driving more traffic to the site then your focused keywords, so as long as people keep engaging with Google's suggestion they will keep using it. Or perhaps you have made changes and not allowed Google enough time to re-index the site.

My suggestion remove the H1 tags from the docotor's names you are using multiple h1 tags there, this could be a bit of confusion for Google, change them to H2 tags. Then under your Logo write in H1 the Page title "Liposuction Surgery and Laser Hair Removal". This will tell Google the most important thing on this page is those specific keywords. Give it 1-3 weeks to get re-crawled and Google to get its indexes changed and you should see the difference.

Hope this helps,

Don

Okay it is possible that I misunderstood the question.

Where specifically are you seeing that Google is not indexing your title and description?

Google Webmaster or Search Results ?

Thanks,

Don

Hi Malika,

Blocking image directories or images themselves in robots.txt only prevents the image from being added to "image" search results. You will still get the full benefit of the alt text on the page, the image just won't appear in the image results.

How this actually works is the crawler will crawl the site and index all the text and weight (h1, h2, alt etc..) then when the crawler moves to add the image to the search cache it finds it can't access it due to robots.txt and simply ignores it and goes on.This leaves your original text as what is indexed as a search result, and nothing for image results.

If you are using Apache you may want to not use robots.txt as the method of blocking images. I would recommend using the .htaccess file with a code like this...

<filesmatch ".(bmp|gif|jpg|png|tif)$"="">Header set X-Robots-Tag "noindex"</filesmatch>

This is a blanket declaration and would prevent indexing of any images with the noted extensions on your site. This is particularly useful if you have multiple image directories. Further more if there are a few images you want indexed you could pick a particular extension like .jpeg for example (note jpeg not jpg), then just convert those few images and know they will be indexed as they are not in the exclusion list.

Another benefit of handling it this way is if you already have images that are indexed, using the noindex tag will get them out out of the image directory much faster than blocking them. The reason is you are giving Google a new directive which is "noindex", otherwise they will just treat them as inaccessible and move on, leaving any cached version to appear in the directory for some time.

Hope that makes sense and helps,

Don

Hi Satish,

Google will treat your title and description as suggestions. The reason they do this is because they want to provide the best possible description to their users. In such case they may generate their own description based off words, alt text, your description or combinations of all three.

This is nothing new, Google does this to everybody. You can view a video by Matt Cutts on this exact situation here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3HX_8BAhB4

Hope this helps,

Don

HI Li,

I think I answered this in your other question.

"...If your goal is to get rid of bad links, you can use the Open Site Explorer to see a sites "Spam Score". Any domain with a rating of 7+ is probably a good candidate."

REF: https://moz.com/community/q/does-google-flag-bad-back-links

Good luck,

Don

Hi Li,

Moz will show you the linking page with their Open Site Explorer.

If you are looking at your whole domain, just enter the homepage url and set the filter "target" to "this root domain".

It will then show you the site.page linking to you plus the page its linking too. You can also download a CSV file to help you quickly sort.

If your goal is to get rid of bad links, you can use the Open Site Explorer to see a sites "Spam Score". Any domain with a rating of 7+ is probably a good candidate.

I do agree with Josh, in that removing bad links is not a high priority unless you know you have used bad SEO tactics to spam your site.

Hope this helps,

Don

Hi Veebs,

The original page referenced is 404 (gone).

I scanned 250 of your pages using Siteliner.com and Screaming Frog. I didn't see any more /self/self/self type links. Do you have another page that is showing the same issue?

Thanks,

Don

Hi Nik,

I do wish you the best of luck. I think the reason you get #1 results for "adding city name" is your website likely uses the city name in the description, making it a new keyword "outdoor mirrors Perth" for example. That keyword itself generates different results then the broad keyword "outdoor mirrors" and again since Google treats intent differently based on location, you get different results. Furthermore since your business is located in Sydney, Google can easily draw a high correlation between outdoor mirrors and Sydney for anybody in that area.

Good luck once again,

Don

Hi there,

Really depends on how it is implemented. A simple share button is so common I think it would be hard to find anybody who thinks it is intrusive. If it is jazzed up and runs as a floating screen, a lay-over, or pop-up taunting a user to click it.. then ya that is mild to very intrusive depending who you ask.

Personally, I have no issues with share buttons they are mostly white noise to me, I generally ignore them without thinking. Now if a site chooses to float its share buttons in my face, or throws me a pop-up every time I take a certain action, I will get annoyed and likely leave the site.

There is no doubt there is benefits that helps your site by using share buttons, I think like all other things they must be used tastefully and with the user's experience in mind. Your first goal is to give the user the best experience possible, if that is good enough the user will find the button on their own.

As for alternatives.. well every social media site has their own sharing tools, you could use the most used ones and add that code directly. Some have much better metrics then others, Addthis just gives you a very nice portal to see all the stats side by side. If you are using floats, layovers, or popups with Addthis, perhaps you try using a simple button instead and see how the engagement goes after the change.

My thoughts,

Don

Hi Nik,

The answer to the question is very simple, the fix maybe not so much.

Q: Does anybody know why we don't rank well without the city added to the keyword?
A: Google returns what they fill is the most relevant results for any search. In such case using the keyword in the city of Perth for example, the site is not the most relevant.

Okay maybe that is a bit crass, but what is actually going on may help take the sting out of it. Understand Google's goal is to give searchers the very best result for any search term. To do this they have to understand not only what each search term means but also try and interpret the searchers intent. So in your example when a person in Perth searches for Outdoor Mirrors Google may choose to show local results, national results, images, or combinations thereof.

It's quite clear there are differences in what type of results you'll see, for example in the US (Dayton, Ohio) Google thinks I want to view images of mirrors (2nd result images), followed by Pinrest results rank 3, and 4. The number 1 result is shows me outdoor wall art, but offers no outdoor mirrors whatsoever. Further research shows that term "outdoor mirror" has a bit of a negative connotation here as I'm seeing results about dead birds and other wildlife.

Culturally Australia maybe a bit different which Google may interpret the intent of the term "Outdoor Mirrors" as being somebody wanting to buy them locally. In which case they would show localized results.

I hope that helps you understand what is going on there...

So onto the fix.. how do you get your site to rank in these cities? First, you need to understand what Google thinks people want to see when they type in the keyword in those areas. Analyze the results, are they showing local retailers, local showrooms, just images? Once you understand what Google thinks people are looking for with that term, you can then develop content to become more relevant then the competition.

For example, if they are showing local retailers. You could write content that highlights delivery cost, time in transit, and local area installations for each city.

I hope this helps,

Don