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Sandip it sounds like you are providing advice for an affiliate. JB85 is asking about affiliate links because he is a merchant.

JB85 are you going to go through an affiliate network like Commission Junction, Shareasale, Linkshare, Google Affiliate Network.... or are you going to have the links go directly to your site via some internal affiliate management system or script?

If you go through a major network you don't have to worry about it. The links go through the network's URL first and do not pass pagerank.

If you have the links go directly to your site you should not try to get pagerank through them. Add a rel nofollow tag to the text you provide affilaites, and state that the links must be nofollowed in your terms. It may seem like a good idea to use "naked links" but it would be short-term gain and long-term loss for any eCommerce business hoping to generate organic search revenue in the coming years.

Good luck!

Thank you Donna. We have seen a lot of success with the pruning method for outdated content. I'm glad the article has helped you.

I'm sure Jane meant that it would block indexation of the page.

In my opinion you should probably noindex,follow (robots meta tag) the pages and make the internal links just normal links, possibly with a rel= nofollow link attribute, until the user fills out the profile.

I will go look into your other question as well.

PS: The drawback of this solution is that bots will still be spending crawl budget crawling those URLs if you are linking to them internally. [Edited]

Hello ReniaEats,

Googlebot and Google's algorithms are much more sophisticated than those at Moz. If you are sure that the keywords are only used a couple of times on the page, with the exception of templated items like those in the menu, I wouldn't worry too much about it. Just write in a language that you think will be compelling to visitors and don't be too concerned with adjusting keyword density on the page.

With that said, you may also want to look at the code just to make sure there is no hidden text. Just do a CTL+F (Find) search when viewing the source code and type your keywords to see where they show up outside of the navigation/menu.

If you wanted to share the site I'm sure someone could have a look and let you know if there is anything to be concerned about.

I like the idea of sending affiliate links through a redirect on a subdomain because you can kill off all of those links at once by removing the redirects so they don't affect the final destination page should you need to clean up your link profile of page-rank-passing affiliate links. Whereas, if you had those links go straight to the destination page you'd have to ask the affiliates to remove each and every link, and/or use the disavow tool on them. I have heard of people sending those though a URL shortening service instead of a subdomain, which should work just as well since they are 301s.

I'm not sure how much sway keywords in the redirecting URL have, but it isn't a bad idea to keep them contextual as you described above. That just seems to make sense anyway.

Since the affiliate.subdomain URL is going to 301 redirect it won't have a canonical tag. You could put a self-referencing canonical tag on the final destination page if you wanted to.

The number in the URL is fine.

This seems like a good topic for discussion so I will leave it open for you.

PS: My answers assume you know the risks of passing pagerank through affiliate links and are willing to take them.

If you had one page about ice surfing I could understand putting it in the URL. But if you expand this strategy out to all pages on a domain about ice surfing then it is going to get pretty redundant. I'd go with #1.

Yair,

See the infographic on this page regarding rel nofollow tags in links, and when you may want to consider using them. Specifically, see the part about User Generated Content:

http://searchengineland.com/infographic-nofollow-tag-172157

However, Google can decide to crawl whatever they want to crawl, whether it is a nofollowed link, links on a page with a nofollow meta tag, or javascript links. If you really want to keep Google out of those portions of the site you should use the robots.txt disallow statement, as I mentioned in your other thread, or use the X-Robots-Tag as described here.

In the iDevAffilliate control panel you should be able to set the "default incoming traffic" URL and the "alternate incoming traffic" URLs to whatever you want. This would be a good opportunity to set up your affiliate program so ALL affiliate links go through a redirect on another domain or subdomain. For instance, a premium URL shortening service or a redirect script on another domain you own, or even one installed on a subdomain for that site.

This way you can kill off all of those links at once by removing the redirects so they don't affect the final destination page should you need to clean up your link profile. Whereas, if you had those links go straight to the destination page you'd have to ask the affiliates to remove each and every link, and/or use the disavow tool on them. To put it another way...

If spammy affiliate #123 links to www.YourSite.com/Product?affiliate-id=123 you would have to either get them to take the link down or use the Google Webmaster Central "disavow" tool (which is spotty, at best). Multiply this by hundreds or thousands of affiliates and it becomes a royal pain.

However, if spammy affiliate #123  links to http://adsever.yoursite.com/link-id=1 or www.URLShorten.er/asdf, which then redirects to www.YourSite.com/Product then you can simply remove the redirect on your end without ever having to deal with the affiliate, who will then be linking to a 404 page on a different domain, which is of little concern to you.

If you have control over how all of this works I recommend keeping things consistent. So if the taxonomy is "greeting cards > occasions > birthday cards" and the breadcrumb is "greeting cards > occasions > birthday cards" then the URL path should be "/greeting-cards/occasions/birthday-cards/".

This one is debatable, but my personal preference is also to have /product/ in that url path to differentiate product pages from category URLs, blog posts and other types of pages.

As others have stated, we can't really say much with certainty unless we view the site. However, here are my two pennies anyway...

The farther you go down into the directory structure (assuming you have a logical taxonomy and site architecture) the more long-tail and specific the keywords will be. The more long-tail and specific the topic, the less page authority is needed to rank.

With that said, if I was working on a site with millions of pages I'd look into doing a content audit to determine which ones even SHOULD be in the index. Very few sites can scale quality landing pages into the millions.

Hell Joni,

Although Thomas seems to be answering someone else's question here (replied in the wrong window?) Mihai has done a great job of providing you with actionable advice related to your question.

Yes, those kinds of links can be a problem IF you do not use a rel canonical tag. However, it is not uncommon for websites to use tracking parameters in the URL. This is fine as long as you use a rel canonical tag and/or tell Google and Bing to ignore those parameters. Most likely Google already knows to ignore them anyway. Please read these articles and let us know if you still need help with this...

Article by Dr. Pete on Rel Canonical Tags http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions

Setting up campaign tracking URLs If you use Google Analytics: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033867?hl=en

About Rel Canonical Tag Support by Google:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394?hl=en

About URL Parameters: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1235687?hl=en

Q: The example I gave earlier "www.domain.com/greeting-cards/occasions/birthday-cards/" would this be considered keyword stuffing if I am targetting the keyword "birthday cards"?

A: Absolutely not. If you saw a real keyword stuffed URL you'd probably laugh out loud at the fact that people are still writing URLs like www.bluewidgets.com/widgets/blue-widgets/best-blue-widgets/top_blue_widget.html . Your example is just a clear URL representation of the structure of your site.

Q: Keeping in mind this taxonomy would it be better for my URLs to follow this pattern instead? www.domain.com/greeting-cards, www.domain.com/occasions, www.domain.com/birthday-cards?

A: That depends. Are birthday cards a form of greeting cards? Are occasions just a way to categorize greeting cards by occasion? If so, they should probably go under the /greeting-cards/ directory.

Q?: All of our product pages have URLs formatted as follows /product/product-name.

A: Good. I'd keep them like that. You don't need category folders in the product URL.

Hello Rachel,

I had a look at each of these and probably wouldn't recommend MSemantic based on the user reviews. Google Rich Snippets for Magento only had 2 reviews, which is too little for my taste.

If you want to go with an extension I would start with either of these two, one of which you've already mentioned:

http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/rich-snippets-suite.html

http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/seo-rich-snippets-google-bing-yahoo-schema-org.html

You could also take the DIY approach:

http://www.creare.co.uk/magento-product-schema

http://gotgroove.com/ecommerce-blog/developers-toolbox-adding-rich-snippets-to-magento-products-with-schema-org-tags/

Hello Vasso,

Are you planning to run this affiliate program yourself, or are you looking into affiliate networks like Linkshare, Share-a-Sale, Commission Junction... ? If you're using a network they will do the tracking. You can track yourself too just to make sure they're being honest, but the two numbers will almost never match up due to cookie lengths, returns, attribution models, etc...

If you want to track affiliate sales on your own you can do this through Google Analytics. Each affiliate will have their own tracking code, which will be put into the URL. This could cause some duplicate content problems if you do not make use of the rel canonical tag, or at least instruct Google and Bing, via webmaster tool consoles, to ignore your affiliate ID parameter.

Assuming you have ecommerce conversion tracking set up properly in Google Analytics already, it shouldn't be that difficult to find out how many conversions, how much revenue, etc... resulted from visitors who arrive at any given affiliate ID URL.

Here are a couple of resources to help out:
Integrating Google Analytics with Affiliate Tracking Software

How to Track Affiliate Sales in Google Analytics

Hello Hijabgem,

You should NOT have more than one Rel = "Canonical" tag per page. However, as is the case with the page below, if the tag is the same URL in both instances on the page it probably isn't going to cause any problems:

| rel="canonical" href="https://www.hijabgem.com/maxi-shirt-dress.html" /> |
|   | rel="stylesheet" href="//maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/font-awesome/4.2.0/css/font-awesome.min.css" /> |
|   | rel="canonical" href="https://www.hijabgem.com/maxi-shirt-dress.html" /> |

Hello Gil,

With regard to user-generated profile pages, I typically recommend to clients that they noindex,follow these until they reach a minimum threshold of completeness (e.g. 75% complete) to avoid filling the index with thin "stub" pages, or those created by spam profiles.

If these are local business type pages, as in the White Pages example, the more "supporting content" you customize those pages with the better. For example, a local business listing page could link to similar businesses in the area, provide star ratings, allow visitors to leave reviews/comments, share demographics data for the area, include links to the business' social profiles, embedded videos (commercials, etc...) for the business and many other things.

I realize these pages might be getting traffic at the moment, but as Google updates the machine learning algo to incorporate feedback from the quality raters, who are now being asked to look at supporting content, your client may find their traffic to those pages (and indeed the site as a whole) slowly declining over the next year or two.

That's about as far as I can take it without seeing the pages. Good luck and I hope we've been of some assistance!

Did this work for you Rajiv?

Event Tracking is definitely what you're looking for. You can learn more about it here:

https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gajs/eventTrackerGuide

BDCSEO,

That really depends on if those URLs are still getting traffic and/or have any backlinks. I would do a complete export of all of the backlinks to that domain and look for any going into those pages. That should tell you if you need to redirect any of them.

We recommend to such clients that they apply the robots noindex,follow meta tag on the duplicated pages until they get rewritten. We aim for 20% of all products on the site to be completely unique in content, and indexable. The other 80% can be rewritten gradually over time and released back into the index as they are rewritten.

So to answer you question: Yes, I think your plan is perfectly acceptable, and is what I would do myself if I were in the same situation.

Hello Rebecca,

Screaming Frog is capable of a lot when set up properly. Mike King has a great post about running it on Amazon Web Services (AWS) so it could fit your cloud solution request. Have you checked out Seer's guide to doing almost anything with Screaming Frog? Do you have "Check External Links" checked? Also "Always Follow Redirects" should be checked. And you can set the "Max Redirects to Follow" to whatever you like.

If that doesn't work, have you tried Deep Crawl?