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Thank you Everett! That makes sense. I appreciated your help!

I'll let you know if I'll have any more questions about all this, but I think for now I'll have to work to cleanup my back link profile first... thank you again.

Hello everyone,

Maybe it is a stupid question, but I ask to the experts... What's the best way to noindex pages but still keep backlinks equity from those noindexed pages?

For example, let's say I have many pages that look similar to a "main" page which I solely want to appear on Google, so I want to noindex all pages with the exception of that "main" page... but, what if I also want to transfer any possible link equity present on the noindexed pages to the main page?

The only solution I have thought is to add a canonical tag pointing to the main page on those noindexed pages... but will that work or cause wreak havoc in some way?

Thank you Donna for your reply, but that's exactly why I posted my concerns here: How do I know if a page or a set of pages are "causing" me to not rank? That's the purpose of this discussion... how do I actually know that any action of that kind, by "nuking" pages, will be causing me more benefit than damage?

A couple of years ago, I thought to be under a Panda penalty, and I started to remove from the index many of our product pages that I thought were not bringing us traffic or had low user engagement... well,  the only result we had was a steady decline of traffic because of the removed pages, that's all. I put all pages back after 6 months because we would have died miserably. After 6 months I concluded that we were NOT under a Panda penalty. IN fact, I put back all pages, traffic got back and we started to rank better than before (fortunate event??)

Also, if I we are under a Panda or similar penalty, why do we still rank well for some keywords? And, back again to square one: Why should we think to be under a Panda penalization if our content is actually less thin, less duplicate, and better handled with canonicals, noindex tages, etc, in order to cope with any possible Panda penalty than our well-ranked competitors??!

Thank you Kristen for your kind reply.

Yes, of course, I have considered that a thousand times. Do you really think that could cause so much trouble to make most of our rankings slip over the 10th or 20th page of the SERPS? Those pages you have mentioned on our website, are actually blocked by robots.txt, with the exception of the first page of course. My concern is about those first pages that should be able to rank anyway... unless you tell me that the contextual weight of the "subsequent" pages could play a role to "boost" the first page in some way if Google can spider and index them... but then, I'd be concerned with "too much similar or thin content" because by doing what our competitors are doing, I'd create thousands of additional pages with inside pretty much the same content (lists) organized in different ways... you see what I mean? Of course it seems to work for our competitor, but hence the contradiction and absurdity I was talking about above with the Panda algorithm: shouldn't all those thousands of extra and similar pages be bamboo for Panda?

I hope to have not confused you... I am just trying to find the elephant here that is causing the problem...

Thank you for your help!

This is a very good answer, thank you Kristen. The more I look at the "site structure" of my competitor compared to ours, the more I realize we need to work on that.

I have also started to think about the so called "siloing technique" Bruce Clay introduced a few years ago, and it looks like 8notes.com has done a very good job to follow that kind of concept, whereas we are probably "spreading" too much of our juice around thousands of different pages and categories... what are your thoughts on that?

Just a thought about the fact I have put those pages to be no indexed in the robots.txt file: If you look at those pages, you see they are generated dynamically from our internal search engine. And as you can see, you can filter results by clicking the filters on the left side of the page... which is a great thing for users, but can be problematic for search engines. Right? So.. that's why I decided to simply no-robot those pages, to avoid any possible indexing and crawling issues. So... how would you suggest tackling that problem? My first idea would be to create "static pages" for those dynamic pages linked from the category pages, and then block via no-robot the links of the filters on the left side... do you have any different ideas?

Thank you again for your help! Super-appreciated!

Thank you very much Julie, I really appreciated your words. I have wondered so many times what Google think of "quality", and why before us there are always very low quality websites distributing the exact same music for free (often copyrighted music, which is illegal) and most of those sites are full of ads. Is that quality?

We could open a new discussion thread on the "What is quality to Google?" topic, I think it'd be very popular!

Thank you again.

Hello everyone,

I am working to create sub-category pages on our website virtualsheetmusic.com, and I'd like to have your thoughts on using a combination of images and text as anchor text in order to maximize keyword relevancy.

Here is an example (I'll keep it simple):

Let's take our violin sheet music main category page located at /violin/, which includes the following sub-categories:

• Christmas

• Classical

• Traditional

So, the idea is to list the above sub-categories as links on the main violin sheet music page, and if we had to use simple text links, that would be something like:

Christmas
Classical
Traditional

Now, since what we really would like to target are keywords like:

"christmas violin sheet music"

"classical violin sheet music"

"traditional violin sheet music"

I would be tempted to make the above links as follows:

Christmas violin sheet music
Classical violin sheet music
Traditional violin sheet music

But I am sure that would be too much overwhelming for the users, even if the best CSS design were applied to it. So, my idea would be to combine images with text, in a way to put those long-tail keywords inside the image ALT tag, so to have links like these:

Christmas
Classical
Traditional

That would allow a much easier way to work the UI , and at the same time keep relevancy for each link. I have seen some of our competitors doing that and they have top-notch results on the SEs.

My questions are:

1. Do you see any negative effect of doing this kind of links from the SEO standpoint?

2. Would you suggest any better way to accomplish what I am trying to do?

I am eager to know your thoughts about this. Thank you in advance to anyone!

Thank you Rob for your extensive reply.

I see what you mean, and I am aware of that. This "link technique" suggestion is part of a bigger plan I am working on where the goal is to create a more "siloed" structure to increase topical relevancy as I have discussed on this other thread of mine:

https://moz.com/community/q/panda-rankings-and-other-non-sense-issues

And even though that's a minor thing, everything adds up. For example, we have recently moved from http to https and that's also is a minor thing, but adds up with all other improvements we are working on.

As for your suggestion:

"I would consider is replacing the example music videos from your specific instruments pages to your home page so visitors know what kind of quality they are getting if they subscribe."

I don't exactly understand what you mean, are you talking about our own produced Music Expert videos or the YouTube videos inside our product pages submitted by the users?

Thank you again

Thank you Samuel for your reply as well.

Yes, what you describe is exactly what I also learned: no need to be too much "redundant" about keywords, but SEs will understand from the surrounding context... well, fact is some of our competitors are doing what I am suggesting here and they are dominating the 1st spot on Google for most of the keywords we are competing with. They also have a more clear "siloed" category-sub-category structure than us, which suggests this technique combined with the siloing technique help a great deal (also, note that for most category pages we compete with, we have much more external links than them! Hence my though that a more clear, siloed structure could help)

And of course, anything we do is with the user in mind: ALT text is always meant for users first, but I don't see harm in being a little bit redundant on that if it could help with SEO as well, don't you?

Thank you again very much, and please, any additional idea you may have is very welcome!

Any more thoughts on this?