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Hi Gavo,

You put up robot.txt instead of robots.txt.

http://kaya3976.com.au/robots.txt indeed disallows all pages.

Thanks Everett, I appreciate it!

Hi Travis,

Thanks for your reply.

As I just wrote to Everett, I can't share too many details for confidentiality reasons. My site is somewhat similar to WhitePages, where http://www.whitepages.com/ind/p-001 has a Moz Page Authority of 45, but http://www.whitepages.com/ind/p-150 has a Moz PA of 1. We have similar PA distribution among our index pages, but our organic search traffic is just as high when linked to from the PA 1 pages and when linked to from the PA 45 pages. So I don't know if my client should spend time fixing the problem.

Thanks

Thanks. I can't share too many details for confidentiality reasons. I realize that makes it hard / impossible to diagnose correctly, and I'm sorry about that.

These are person pages. The site's link structure naturally gives more link power to the people with the most connections. We could NoIndex (or mask links to) pages that don't have much information but I think such a system would probably be complex and may backfire.

So there's not the kind of taxonomy / directory / long-tail keyword structure that you would expect from a large product directory (for example).

Let's pretend we're discussing WhitePages.com where http://www.whitepages.com/ind/p-001 has a Moz Page Authority of 45, but http://www.whitepages.com/ind/p-150 has a Moz PA of 1. I can fix the problem and get the back pages to have higher PA, but I can't recommend that my client spend resources to fix this since the pages at the back of the index get just as much organic search traffic as the pages at the top.

Thanks

Thanks. Sorry I wasn't clear, when I say the traffic is pretty evenly distributed among the pages, I'm referring specifically to organic traffic. I'm wondering if the relatively even distribution of organic traffic is proof that better balancing the link flow won't increase traffic.

I'm working with a site that has millions of pages. The link flow through index pages is atrocious, such that for the letter A (for example) the index page A/1.html has a page authority of 25 and the next pages drop until A/70.html (the last index page listing pages that start with A) has a page authority of just 1. However, the pages linked to from the low page authority index pages (that is, the pages whose second letter is at the end of the alphabet) get just as much traffic as the pages linked to from A/1.html (the pages whose second letter is A or B). The site gets a lot of traffic and has a lot of pages, so this is not just a statistical biip. The evidence is overwhelming that the pages from the low authority index pages are getting just as much traffic as those getting traffic from the high authority index pages. Why is this? Should I "fix" the bad link flow problem if traffic patterns indicate there's no problem? Is this hurting me in some other way? Thanks

Great answer, thanks!

For weeks, Yahoo consistently contributed just over 80% of what I got from Bing. Suddenly for the last two weeks the Yahoo and Bing graphs diverged, with Yahoo traffic dropping to 50% of Bing's. Any ideas? Did Yahoo make any deals with companies to give them better ranking? Have they suddenly started adding more ads above the fold? Any thoughts? Thanks

I added a Google custom search box to my pages, that's doing an advanced Google search. A lot of people are using it. So users are coming to my site from a Google search, and then often performing another Google search on my site. Should I be worried that Google may interpret the resultant user behavior as a bounce or pogo-stick? Or will the fact that the second search occurred on my site, using custom search, and with advanced parameters signal to Google that this is not a dissatisfied user returning to Google? Thanks

If all of the pages are very valuable and serve the user you should be OK. But if Google finds too many people clicked a search result to your page, and then quickly bounced back to Google and clicked a different result from the search listings, they'll trust your site less and lower your rankings across the board.

The problem isn't too many pages, it's too many pages that aren't satisfying enough of Google's users.

In February 2011 Google launched "Panda" whose main intent was to find sites that were creating many low quality pages. Since then, the "content farm" strategy of quickly creating many pages has generally been backfiring.

Instead focus on pages that will satisfy Google's users, and preferably also attract social shares and links.

If all of the pages are very valuable and serve the user you should be OK. But if Google finds too many people clicked a search result to your page, and then quickly bounced back to Google and clicked a different result from the search listings, they'll trust your site less and lower your rankings across the board.

The problem isn't too many pages, it's too many pages that aren't satisfying enough of Google's users.

In February 2011 Google launched "Panda" whose main intent was to find sites that were creating many low quality pages. Since then, the "content farm" strategy of quickly creating many pages has generally been backfiring.

Instead focus on pages that will satisfy Google's users, and preferably also attract social shares and links.

Hi Gavo,

You put up robot.txt instead of robots.txt.

http://kaya3976.com.au/robots.txt indeed disallows all pages.