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it's more then ok - however you should use the full url not the relative one.

vs

Hope it helps.

Hi,

Should i make an 301 redirect?

** Only if you can actually redirect using 301 to pages that cover the same or have at least some connection with the old page. Otherwise there won't be too much benefit.

If you are not able to 301 redirect them to new specific pages you could 301 redirect those all to a single page that can act as a topic page  - a gateway.

Make the 404 noindex?

** That won't help. if google gets a 404 response code it will treat it as a not found page and it won't index / crawl the page anyway - so google's bot won't see anything on the page anyway including the no index tag.

Cheers.

Hi,

Short answer: yes, you are right, you should be worried. Google is good at spotting those satellite sites and they will either just not consider those links so all your effort with those is for nothing or they might push a manual penalty for unnatural links and/or one of the algo will get this network and push them all down including your main site.

Those links don't count towards your link profile and are for sure not sending any "love" so it will be a good idea to lose those asap. If for some reason those sites or some of them are performing well in search for local terms keep them but add no follow to the links that are pointing back to you to be safe.

As for the duplicate content - I would't worry so much - you won't rank but there is no filter or penalty for duplicate content.

what's the url ?

Hi,

Just wondered whether you think the footer text here on tis page constitues 'keyword stuffing'.

** Yes, that's the definition of  keyword stuffing right there.

I think it does but wondering why they haven't been penalised for it.

** Well .. give google some time  

On a serious note, if the sites performs well on the organic side and you don't rank and get a lot of traffic from the keywords / queries listed in the footer Google won't apply a filter. I've seen several cases with sites that used this approach and didn't rank for the keywords that were stuffed and they did fine.

On the other hand the site looks, form an organic point of view, almost flat line

http://screencast.com/t/2uZTXOSRq

So visibility is very very low .. there is not much to cut from that at this point. More then that even if the site will have organic potential due to that heavy footer it won't rise - so even if you don't have a penalty in place you won't be able to get a real lift off.

Hope it helps.

Hi,

In order to deindex you should use noindex as content=none also means nofollow. You do need to follow now in order to reach all other pages and see the no index tag and remove those from the index.

When you have all of them out of the index you can set the none back on.

This is the main reason "none" as attribute is not very wide in usage as "shooting yourself in the foot" with it it's easy.

On the otehr hand you need to see if google bot is actually reaching those pages:

• see if you don't have any robots.txt restrictions first

• see when google's bot last have a hit on any of the pages - that will give you a good idea and you can do a prediction.

If those pages are in the sup index you can wait for some time for Google bit to revisit.

One last note: build xml sitemaps with all of those pages and submit those via WMT - that will help at 100% to get those in front of the firing squad and also to be able to monitor those better.

Hope it helps.

Have a friend reading the page and ask fast "whats your name" after that.

If he will reply: "Widgets" then you are going over board with the keyword on page

Just kidding - anyway, the friend approach works well - have someone that is not familiar with the site to read the page and if at a first glance it will make sense and it's you are not going over board with how many times you are saying it then it's ok.

A very good guideline that you can use,  that if you manage to de-attached your self from the site, can really help.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.at/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html

Hi,

Depending on your Landing pages - it might be to broad  - you might get a terrible quality score ...If you post an example: keywords, LP, ad copy - I am sure a lot of people here can post some suggestions...

Cheers.

Knowledge  / deep understanding of code (html, css, programming of any kind) is a good to have set of skills in your SEO bag but I don't think is the main  valuable skill a good SEO must poses.

In my opinion the set of skills targeting Conversion Optimization (rules, procedures, UX related, A/b testing) is the most important additional 'skill set' you need to master in order to be able to really provide good SEO advice and run a normal professional SEO campaign. CO (Conversion Optimization) covers a lot of fields but at least knowing the basis will make you a much better SEO.

Hope it helps.

I am doing it but with extra care - you need to dilute the anchor text.

More then 50% of the links won't count but the rest will. You will see rapid increase in ranking but if you don't keep the links flowing the ranking will get down fast since the links are not high quality links.

Whatever people are saying I didn't see any of my sites were I am using this or people complain about any delisting or penalization since its something you can do for your competition so no one will penalize you.

Building manual links is the same so no one can say manual link building is white hat  and bulk link building is black hat.

However if you are doing it for a client you should explain it in detail - and expose the risks (risks that until now are only on paper as I am pretty sure no one got a penalization from google doing bulk link building). if that was true someone can bring down his competitor by doing this.

Hi,

For me it dosen't show on #1 - using google.com from AT and google.at - still from AT.

Even so - give google some time - it will figer it out soon. I've seen several similar results for a day or two and then based on the quality it will remain up or it will go down - it's google dance after all - it needs to push new sites up to see if users will behave and embrace the site or they will bounce - get back into serps.

Hi,

Strictly from a technical SEO perspective it's ok to let the forum in the index and let the bots crawl it - for many reasons (eg: internal links, support pages for some keywords and so on).

Having duplicate Title Tags is not a big issue. The worst negative effect that you can suffer from is for a forum page to rank instead of one of your main landing pages - but that can also be fixed. There are no issues from Google's perspective if you have duplicate Title Tags (again, the only negative effect can be canibalization - you are trying to rank with multiple pages for the same query).

Now that is from a technical perspective and you should decide if you will leave it "open" or not based on two major factors: the technical aspect but probably more important the content aspect.

Is the content within the forum good ? High quality ?

There is an important set of questions (23 to be exact) that you will need to review with the forum:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.at/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html

If at the end if most of the answers are ok - then you should open the forum for the bots - if not, I would keep it  under robots.txt.

If you have a lot of content and it's at least decent content you can leverage it and gain a lot - after all is UGC and that is gold (if it's not spammy.)

Hope it helps as a short direction.

Cheers.

Everyone is now doing article marketing (guest posting etc) so for sure at some point in the near future those type of links will be a no-no like forum signature that back in 2004-2005 were the hot subject of everyone in SEO - publicly that is - not as a dark tactique.

So if it's easy to post it there then go for it - but if this link will requaire a lot of "resources" then you should think about it.

More then that you won't get a PR 7 link there. You will get a PR 0 in the beginning. Your page could get some weight in time but for sure it won't get to PR 7.

Domain authority however matters so there is a plus there. You should however consider first the page that holds the link as far as power not the domain. (the domain as an additional factor but for sure not as a primary factor).

my 2c.

Your site is still in the index, ranking for several terms - so no heavy penalization in place.

You do have a lot of SEO related issues on the site that can and will harm you in the future but it doesn't look it's that heavy to go from x to 0.

Did you check if with the new redesign has all things in place ?

The team that did the redesign didn't place / implemented the Google Analytic code in the new design.

I don't see it in your source code in any of the pages I've checked.

It must look something link this in the head section of the source code.

var _gaq = _gaq || [];
  _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-xxxxxxxx-1']);
  _gaq.push(['_setDomainName', '.yoursite.com']);
  _gaq.push(['_setAllowLinker', true]);
  _gaq.push(['_setAllowAnchor', true]);  

  _gaq.push(['_setCustomVar', 5,'User-Type','free', 2]);

      _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);
  _gaq.push(['_trackPageLoadTime']);  

**Ask your developers to put the code back on ever page and **

**everything will go back.**

**Redesign can cause some issues so is the 301 redirect but in **

**this case it's not the issue !**

Hope it helps.

Normally for this type of flow you won't get any value for that link.

That is because that iframe is in fact a page that is displayed within another page and use for this purpose alone - to link to you that is. That page doesn't have any authority because no one is linking to it - not even the site that part of - this page won't be in any navigation, sitemap or any other linked source - so it will have almost no value. Maybe a little value as part of an authority site but I doubt it will cont.

Just to underline the above - you will have a link from an obscure page, a satellite that for the user will look like is part of an important page but for Google and friends (since they see beyond the smoke screen) this page won't pass any link juice.

This is the reason why for link building one of the most important requests is : the link shouldn't be within an iframe or using a javascript.

My personal opinion is to move away from this concept as it can eat up a lot of resources with only a small to none amount of benefits.

Hope it helps as an outside advice.

Hi,

1. Are we correct to assume that it was the stage site that caused the unnatural links warning?

** I don't think this is the case. However - if you post the url someone here can have a look.

2. Do you think that it was the stage site that caused the drop in traffic? After doing a link audit I can't find any large amount of horrendously bad links coming to the site.

** It can be the case - but if the test site will be removed and that was the case for the drop then you should get back on track very fast.

3. Now that the stage site has been taken down, how do we get it out of Google's indexes? Will it be taken out over time or do we need to do something on our end for it to be delisted?

** Verify the stage site in Google Web master Tools and then use site removal tool there and you will get the site out in one single move. (if tjis is really what you want).

4. Once it's delisted the links coming from it should go away, in the meantime however, should we disavow all of the links from the stage site? Do we need to file a reconsideration request or should we just be patient and let them go away naturally?

** You can disovow but is better to remove them - see #3.

You should send a reconsideration request after you remove the stage site and explain. If you will get a response that you are still in violation of the guidelines and they still see un natural links that means the stage site was not the reason

5. Do you think that our rankings will ever recover?

** Hard to tell without seeing the domain name. If the stage site was the issue and you solve it (remove it) then yes - although I doubt that - at least based on the information available so far.

Hope it helps.

Cheers.

I would say: shorter and with at least the main keyword din the title tag. Plus the keyword should be as close as possible to the beginning of the Title (as long as it sounds natural).

Cheers.

We work with load balancing a lot using multiple IPs - there are no issues SEO wise however you must be certain that those IPs, in the past, didn't got associated with spam or are on any black lists from previous users as in this case you can get a red flag for bad neighborhood.

In my personal experience this is the only down side - if this is ok - there is no reason for concern - only good things can happen.

Hope it helps.

Looks like google dosen't really like this one: http://screencast.com/t/1nwsdABxQv

So I would't put any hopes to get some love from any links from there ...

However for sure you will get some love phone calls from a lot of companies trying to push services and products

Don't redirect or remove - even if "outdated" the content still can provide some value. Just add a note on top of it and / or add a feature so someone can signup to get a notification when things will happen again or a reminder.

Cheers.