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I would like to discuss how you think Panda is currently affecting the Google index, and if actually the so much discussed "Panda Update" is still an hot topic in the SEO world.

We got the last official manual update back on March 14, and at that time Matt Cutts said that Panda would have been integrated in the regular algorithm.

Fact is: since then I haven't heard about Panda anymore, despite my main e-commerce website as well as many others, is still under a strong Panda penalty. I have worked hard in the past 2 months to cleanup my site, removing thin and duplicate content. But so far I haven't gotten any positive signs from Google.

Can we say that Panda is now officially integrated in the algorithm? Do we have any signs on that? If so, why we can't see any improvements on our sites, well cleaned-up? Thoughts? Speculations?

I am eager to know your thoughts about this very sensitive issue that looks like has been forgotten a little bit in the past few weeks.

Thanks!

Thank you Paul, I have just voted and left a comment! Let's cross our fingers! That tool is great, but can be much improved

Thank you again.

Yes, thank you Paul, that's actually what I didn't know! I think SEOmoz should make that clear somewhere... I spent almost 1 hour trying to find that information around the site!

Thank you again very much.

Hi here,

I was wondering if there is a way to find out the originating page where a broken link is found from the 4xx (Client Error) report. I can't find a way to know that, and without that information is very difficult for me to fix any possible 404 related issues on my website.

Any thoughts are very welcome! Thank you in advance.

Thank you Everett, that makes sense and I will do that indeed!

Thank you again very much for all your help guys.

Best,

Fabrizio

Thank you Nakul, I agree with you and I will do that way! I have my last concern here: may having an high number of incoming nofollow links be a problem? I mean, if I have much more incoming "nofollow" links vs "follow" compared with my competitors, may be that an issue? From the SEOmoz Competitive Link Analysis tool I already see my incoming link profile having much more nofollow links than my competitors... I am still figuring out if that's actually a problem or not!

This last question will close my research here.

Thank you again very much.

Thank you Nakul. May I ask you what are the reasons to use a nofollow? Is that just to avoid any possible penalization? And here is my natural question: by doing that, will I lose any possible link juice coming currently from my affiliates? Or do you think that I am not getting that anyway?

Thank you again!

Yeah, I use iframes and if I want to be sure they are NOT indexed, I Just add a "noindex" tag. You may also want to add a "nofollow" tag to avoid spiders to follow links inside the frame. Using iframes may be a good idea to reduce the number of links on a page (Bruce Clay suggestion).

Thank you for your reply.

The website I am talking about is my main website virtualsheetmusic.com

I have several hundreds of affiliates that have integrated our data feed on their own website, and so we may have thousands of incoming links from each affiliate. We have our in-house affiliate program and despite we can apply a URL shortener as you are suggesting, that would take a long time to have all the affiliates update their own websites. But that's a great idea we could start deploying soon! Would you suggest to use a 301 redirect there too?

Despite that, what about my original follow-nofollow question? In my current situation, what can I tell my affiliates to do: follow or nofollow?

Thanks!

Yes, I agree with ameliavargo, you could make just a single page including both keywords and potentially rank for both phrases. Boat and ferry are really similar, and I am not sure if you can really make two different pages differently relevant enough to rank both well. That could actually fireback.

I would definitively opt for a single optimized page which includes both words.

Hello here,

this question is from a merchant stand point, and here is a typical scenario: this merchant has thousand of affiliate incoming links. Affiliates link to specific product pages with their affiliate ID passed as a parameter as:

http://www.merchantsite.com/products/product_page/?affid=[affiliate_id]

and users get 301 redirected to a clean URL like:

http://www.merchantsite.com/products/product_page/

after that a cookie is stored into the user's browser for tracking purposes.

Now, my question is the following:  is for the merchant more convenient to have its affiliates linking with follow or nofollow links? Is that actually relevant? What are the pros and cons?

Thank you in advance for any insights!

Thank you guys! I really appreciated your help! This clarified a lot for me.

All the best to all of you!

Hello,

I have four outbound links from my site home page taking users to join us on our social Network pages (Twitter, FB, YT and Google+).

if you look at my site home page, you can find those 4 links as 4 large buttons on the right column of the page:

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/

Here is my question: do you think it is better for me to add the rel="nofollow" directive to those 4 links or allow Google to follow? From a PR prospective, I am sure that would be better to apply the nofollow tag, but I would like Google to understand that we have a presence on those 4 social channels and to make clearly a correlation between our official website and our official social channels (and then to let Google understand that our social channels are legitimate and related to us), but I am afraid the nofollow directive could prevent that. What's the best move in this case? What do you suggest to do?

Maybe the nofollow is irrelevant to allow Google to correlate our website to our legitimate social channels, but I am not sure about that.

Any suggestions are very welcome.

Thank you in advance!

Thank you Peter, I got your ticket reply.

That makes perfect sense, and as Dr. Peter pointed out on a different thread:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/why-seomoz-bot-consider-these-as-duplicate-pages

I was discussing this issue further, I was confused by your report.

Thank you again for your help and I hope you will improve your report interface to avoid such confusion related issues in the future.

Best,

Fabrizio

Thank you, that was what I thought, but I needed someone else opinion to be sure that I wouldn't get penalized because of that.

Thanks for the link also!

I appreciated your help.

Fabrizio

Hello,
I have question. We have hundreds of affiliates that have implemented our datafeed on their websites, and to avoid duplicate content issues we are requiring them to put a canonical tag on their own product pages pointing to our own original product page.

So, for example, if an affiliate has a page about our Product 101, they will have to add a canonical tag pointing to the corresponding product page on our own website:

www.ourwebsite.com/products/product101

Now, since many of our product pages have defined a "noindex" tag (due to Panda issues), may that be a problem? In other words: what kind of problems could cause having our  affiliates defining a canonical tag on their own product pages pointing to the original product page on our website which have a "noindex" met tag defined? Maybe it is a stupid question we shouldn't worry about, but any thoughts about this scenario are very welcome!

Thank you in advance.

Thank you so much! I really appreciated your reply which clarified everything for me.

I will follow your advice!

All the best,

Yes! Got it! You are absolutely right, I read the report in the wrong order! Here is how the reports listed the duplicate pages:

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/PatrickCollectionFlPf.html?tab=mp3

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/PatrickCollectionFlPf.html?tab=pdf

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/PatrickCollectionVcPf.html?tab=mp3

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/PatrickCollectionVcPf.html?tab=pdf

So, I thought the first couple above was a duplicate, and the second couple the second duplicate, instead here are the right coupled duplicate pages:

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/PatrickCollectionFlPf.html?tab=mp3

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/PatrickCollectionVcPf.html?tab=mp3

and the second couple:

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/PatrickCollectionFlPf.html?tab=pdf

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/PatrickCollectionVcPf.html?tab=pdf

So, I agree that the SEOmoz duplicate report should be improved graphically to avoid such a kind of confusion.

And that kind of duplicate issue is actually something that I might need to fix on my part... but with the fact that both duplicate pages belong to two different items and have two different canonical definitions may possibly solve the problem by itself... or not? I guess this is one of those rare cases where SEs can actually get confused!

What would you suggest to do with this kind of cross-similar product pages? Those are legitimate pages belonging to two different items that have the same kind of content (i.e. same included music pieces) but written for different instruments! And here is, in fact, another thread where I am discussing about how to handle these kind of similar products found often in the music industry, where the same piece of music can be written for several different instruments causing nearly-duplicate pages:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/canonical-tag-how-to-deal-with-product-variations-in-the-music-industry

Any further thoughts are very welcome.

Thank you again Dr. Meyers!

Yes that's correct and sorry for the confusion: looks like Firefox Firebug doesn't detect 301 redirects properly. I have tested your old site redirect with:

http://www.internetofficer.com/seo-tool/redirect-check/

and looks good! Now I will think about your drop of traffic...

Peter, I have added a new editorial review on the page:

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/Moonlight.html

Also, by looking again to your suggested http://www.origenmusic.com/free-piano-music.html, that page is quite different from ours and it is not dedicated solely to that specific title (Moonlight Sonata). So, I don't think the possible "duplicate "issue may be the real problem (not for that specific URL at least).

Any more thoughts? Someone else? Pretty desperate to understand what happened on those pages to drop so much in rankings!