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Sorry guys, I wasn't enough clear with my first question above, it was actually too generic.

To cut to the chase, I am talking about our main website:

www.virtualsheetmusic.com (IP 66.29.153.48)

and our affiliate website which is:

affiliates.virtualsheetmusic.com (IP 66.29.153.50)

They have 2 different IPs, but they are on the same server and same network, of course their are on the same IP block.

And I'd like to know to what extent the activity/status of one site can affect the other, but from what you are asking, I guess they could affect each other to some extent. I mean, Google could understand that they are part of the same "network" and then associate them anyway... right?

Thank you Joshua for your additional reply and insights, may I ask you what are your two mentioned specific word phrases you wrote above about? Just curious, because those could be "brand" related keywords like "Virtual Sheet Music" or "Classical Sheet Music Downloads" which are both our own trademarks, therefore they should be considered as "natural"... you know what I mean.

As for our affiliate links, yes, those are the URLs I am concerned about. I was thinking to 302 redirect those instead than 301, but I am afraid also to lose a big deal of juice from them by doing that, even though I am aware that Google could have already discounted those links at some extent, but I am not sure how much, and I don't want to risk losing that little juice that could help us with rankings if not really needed. So, my choice would be to leave things how they are, and, yes, as you are suggesting, start building more "link-baits" to have more natural links, but as you know, that takes time...

I am eager to know your thoughts about my points above. Thank you!

Thank you Vijay for your extensive answer, but as I wrote above, each sub-domain has its own separate IP address. So... if each sub-domain has its own IP address, are they treated as two completely different websites?

Yes, I just watched that video 2 days ago, brilliant! Thank you Thomas, I am much less concerned now.

Appreciated!

Thank you for your answer Joshua, in my case I am talking about affiliates links that use often similar anchor texts that look like ads.

To give you a real example, my website is virtualsheetmusic.com, and pretty often affiliates link to us with, randomly, the following kind anchor text:

"download sheet music at Virtual Sheet Music"

"classical sheet music downloads"

"find violin sheet music on Virtual Sheet Music"

And so on... from what you describe, I shouldn't worry about it, first of all because of the percentage of this kind of anchor texts, second because they are varied anyway (they are not all the same), but of course Google is able to spot a pattern there and understand that they are not natural. Also, most of our affiliates have used our ready to use, copy & paste links, therefore many of them are exactly the same kind of links, but still, just around 16% of our overall inbound links.

I am just worried that Google could see that as a "link scheme" of some sort, and possibly penalize me... your final thoughts?

Hello everyone,

Here I am with a question about Penguin. I am asking to all Penguin experts on these forums to help me understand if there is a "safe" threshold of unnatural links under which we can have peace of mind. I really have no idea about that, I am not an expert on Penguin nor an expert of unnatural back link profiles.

I have a website with about 84% natural links and 16% affiliate/commercial links. Should I be concerned about possibly being penalized by an upcoming Penguin update? So far, I have never been hit by any previous Penguin released, but... just in case, you experts, do you know what's the "threshold" of unnatural links that shouldn't be exceeded? Or, in your experience, what's the classic threshold over which Google can penalize a website for unnatural back link profile?

Thank you in advance to anyone helping me on this research!

Hello everyone,

I have a basic question for which I couldn't find a definitive answer for.

Let's say I have my main website with URL:

www.mywebsite.com

And I have a related affiliates website with URL:

affiliates.mywebsite.com

Which includes completely different content from the main website. Also, both domains have two different IP addresses.

Are those considered two completely separate domains by Google? Can bad links pointing to affiliates.mywebsite.com affect www.mywebsite.com in any way?

Thanks in advance for any answer to my inquiry!

Thank you Oleg for confirming. I think a lot of people should be aware of this as well!

Thank you again.

Hello everyone.

I was reading this article on semrush.com, published the last year, and I'd like to know your thoughts about it:

https://www.semrush.com/blog/does-google-crawl-relnofollow-at-all/

Is that really the case? I thought that Google crawls and "follows" nofollowed tagged links even though doesn't pass any PR to the destination link. If instead Google really doesn't crawl internal links tagged as "nofollow", can that really help with crawl budget?

Fantastic, thank you Paul! Those links are very useful, and I might have already read those when I setup those canonicals (I jut forgot after a few years to have worked on that!)

I'll check them out carefully again

Appreciated your help and prompt reply

All the best,

Fabrizio

Thank you Paul, so, what I have been doing so far is correct, right? Here it is again, please, confirm so I can close this thread:

On page 1:

On page 2:

On page 3:

And so on, until the last page is reached:

Is this the correct way to do it then?

Thank you for your reply, but I am sorry Logan,  I am confused, you said:

Regarding your recent question about links, a self-referring canonical on those pages will handle that.

So, if I had to follow what you said above, I should add the following canonicals on these pages:

Page 1:

http://www.mysite.com/category/

Page 2:

http://www.mysite.com/category/?cp=2

Page 3:

http://www.mysite.com/category/?cp=3

But then you said that I don't have to put any canonicals except for the first page... so, I am confused... sorry!

Fact is, all pages may have extra parameters that could cause duplicates, therefore, how can I tackle that without adding a canonical on each page pointing to the "clean" URL without extra parameters? I hope you understand what I mean...

Thank you Logan.

So, even if I am on page 4, the canonical must points always to the root? I think I read somewhere that it should point to the page URL without the extra parameters like this:

http://www.mysite.com/category/?cp=4

Am I wrong?

I am sorry, but I haven't received an answer to my last inquiry above, I can't close this thread.

I am sorry, but I haven't received an affirmative answer to my last inquiry above...

Another question: what about links on those pages that can take the crawl to possible duplicate because of parameters added to the URL like:

http://www.mysite.com/category/?cp=4&orderby=title

http://www.mysite.com/category/?cp=4&orderby=title&view=list

etc.? That's probably why we added the canonical I talked about above.... your thoughts?

Sorry, it is my understanding I have to leave the canonical just on the first page, is that correct?

Thank you again.

HI!

I haven't seen any change today on my sites, but we suspect Google is playing with some sort of content-quality algorithm since the last June, so it could still going on. Have a look at this article:

http://www.gsqi.com/marketing-blog/june-2016-google-algorithm-update/

I almost forgot: about Internal Links, please, have a look at this discussion I am having here below:

https://moz.com/community/q/rankings-drop-and-google-search-console-internal-links-panel-correlation

I'd love to know your thoughts about it. Thank you again!

Thank you Everett, I understand, I started this thread thinking that just one page of my "category pages" had a rank drop, and that was the "violin sheet music" optimized page. Hence the confusion, my fault. Then, after further research, I discovered that all instrumental category pages dropped in a similar way, therefore I begun to see the problem no more "keyword relate" but "quality related"... here we go

In any case, yes, thank you for the tip, I'll check my internal links. I know that we have overoptimized those a big deal in the past years, and we may want to "de-overoptimize" them a little bit.

And yes, as I am discussing on the thread below, I have currently "noindexed" all those pages while we are working on a redesign of them:

https://moz.com/community/q/can-adding-noindex-help-with-quality-penalizations

Hopefully that'll make most of the trick.

Thank you again very much, I appreciated your help!