Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks Marcus.  Today I learnt that I think best in the shower.....

Somtimes it just helps to get the question out there for others to comment - Your responses obviously got me thinking!

Thanks for all for your input!

Hi, I never heard of anyone getting a very clear response to a reconsideration request.  The first response is their standard one when no manual penalty exists.  I don't quite understand how you could have got a clear response as to what was wrong if the problem was algorithmic - that sounds very odd.  What did the second message actually say?

I think you would also need to setup your G+ account to show you contribute to that blog.  I remember from setting this up a while ago that it is a two way thing (to prevent content being attributed to an author without their permission).  You will need to add the blogs URL to your G+ account as well for authorship to work.

Hi, I did not see any major changes around this date.  Was it across different URLs as well as keywords or was it a single URL?

Are your blog and your shop on the same domain?

I think it comes down to whether you have the resources to keep both sites at the top of their games.  Having two sites is pretty much twice the work of having one (see, I'm a maths genuis me!) if they are both to rank well.  You "should" be able to grab a larger slice of the top ranking spots with two sites but it is hard work.

After a long hot shower, I just thought this one up, how about.....

1.)  I give each affiliate/trade user a URL with an affiliate ID on the URL, i.e. ?ID=123 (say) which points at my websites homepage

2.)  If a user lands on my site with a URL containing an affiliate ID, the homepage is served up to the user with links that take the user to pages onto the affiliate subdomain site (the homepage that gets served up will be slightly different to the standard homepage).  If the user navigates anywhere from this page they end up surfing the subdomain pages (all of which will be NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW).

3.)  The "homepage" that gets displayed to the user is always INDEX,FOLLOW and has a rel=canonical tag for the homepage itself.

I "think" that this way my main domain gets the benefit of the links and the users always get the version of the site they are looking for without any extra "spammy" landing pages.  Any one see any problems with this?

Yeah, it's in situations like this that I find it a bit beguiling to be told to build for humans.  If Google were as smart as humans, then I would agree but until then it seems to be a case of "build for both".  Where do we draw the line between building for Google's computer like flaws and building to manipulate rankings........

Is that really right?  If that was the case presumably Google needs an index of NOINDEX pages or am I way off?

I "site A" gets a link from a NOINDEX page then Google must have some sort of record of that page's "WORTH" (for want of a better word) to attribute some value to "site A".  That page's "WORTH" being derived from those pages that link to it.

That suggests to me (and my poor befuddled brain) that NOINDEX means it is indexed it just doesnt show in search results?

Thanks for your response.  I don't think I can realistically go down the route of rewriting the entire site (the products change every year so it would not be a one-off cost by any means) - I would not get a return on that investment/time.  I suppose, if I thought I might then why bother making it an affiliate site?

I agree with "a bit risky or just wouldn't work" - that's why I am asking because I didn't much like my own ideas!

Thanks again.

This aspect has been exercising my brain recently.  It bothers me slightly that Google seems to treat "content" as synonymous with "text".  This create real problems for many e-commerce sites where people are not visiting to read......they want to "see" and then buy.

One of my websites sells printed greetings cards.  The actual board, size etc of cards is pretty uniform across our range so the cards really only differ by how they look.  Images are therefore hugely important and tell the user pretty much everything they need to know about the card.  They are the number one important aspect for that product.  Therefore to create the best user experience the images need to be number one priority.  However if I want Google to love my page and return it for queries relating to that card then I need to provide a textual description.  Ideally prominently on the page (since the Page Layout Algo etc).  But I know humans don't need that explanation because everything they need to know is contained in the image information.  So I am then forced to write a description not for my users but for Google.  I know we are supposed to build sites for people not engines but I can't see any other way of having Google love my page except to write something pretty much exclusively for Google.

Sorry for the slightly "ranting" nature of this but it does bother me.  Not only do I have to write descriptions for Google (unique for each card) but now I need to make them more prominent in the misguided belief that humans want them!

Gary

Hi

I could use some advice on a site architecture decision.  I am developing something akin to an affiliate scheme for my business.  However it is not quite as simple as an affliate setup because the products sold through "affiliates" will be slightly different, as a result I intend to run the site from a subdomain of my main domain.

I am intending to NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW the subdomained site because it will contain huge amounts of duplication from my main site (it is really a subset of the main site with some slightly different functionality in places).  I don't really want or need this subdomain site indexed, hence my decision to NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW it.

However given I will, hopefully, be having lots of people link into the subdomain I am hoping to come up with some sort of arrangement that will mean that my main domain derives some sort of benefit from the linking.  They are, after all, votes for my business so they feel like "good links".  I am assuming here that a direct link into my NOFOLLOW,NOINDEX subdomain is going to provide ZERO benefit to my main domain.  Happy to be corrected!

The best I can come up with is to have a "landing page" on my main domain which links into parts of my main domain and then provides a link through to the subdomain site.  However this feels like a bad experience from the user's point of view (i.e. land on a page and then have to click to get to the real action) and feels a bit spammy, i.e. I don't really have a good reason for this page other than linking!

Equally I could NOINDEX,FOLLOW the homepage of the affiliate site and link back to the main domain from there.  However this also feels a bit spammy and would be far less beneficial, I guess, because the subdomain homepage would have many more outgoing links than I envisaged for my "landing page" idea above.  Also, it also looks a bit spammy (i.e. why follow the homepage and nofollow everything else?)!

The trouble, I guess, is that whatever I do feels a bit spammy.  I suppose this is because IT IS spammy!    Has anyone got any good ideas how I could setup an arrangement like I described above and derive benefit to my main domain without it looking (or being) spammy?  I just hate to think of all of those links being wasted (in an SEO sense).

Thanks

Gary

Wow - now I feel like my idea has been blessed by a god (Lead SEO at SEOMoz).....feeling quite chuffed actually!

I can see it in the index???? site command shows around 61k URLS?

I have the same concern with some of my landing pages.  I know this is an old thread now but does anyone have any more up to date experience of this.

The question I am needing to know the answer to is how do they determine what is an ad?  Or I suppose do they care, or are they just looking at how far away from the top left of the display in the actual content?  Has anyone done any experiments on this sort of thing in situations where the "stuff" at the top of the page is not ads but images/video/flash etc?

I wasn't aware the Google didn't like a modified "published date" perhaps someone with more knowledge on that than me can help?  Sorry, I believe in "knowing your limits" and I have no personal experience with that being a problem (I am not saying it is not, just that I don't know!).

I'm not sure if this sort of duplication is going to be a long term effect.  I think this is some sort of temporary problem arising from the Penguin update.  I raised it as an odd result in another post (see link) and I think (maybe that should be hope rather than think) it will get resolved over time:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/anyone-else-seeing-increased-duplication-of-domains-since-penguin

I don't think this sort of duplication makes for a good set of results.

Gary

How about you maintain a single "page", i.e. a consistent URL for the "current year", so a slug of something like

-my-event-event-name (no dates or anything like that in the slug) then each year

1.)  Put the new/revised content on that URL.  Include the year in title, content, description etc.

2.)  Create a new post and copy the last year's content to that one including the historic date and link to it (if you want) so a URL a bit like -my-event-event-name-2011

That way, you always have the latest content on a consistent URL.  You can then maintain all the links you accrue over time to a single URL, just update content each year and store all of the past posts on "newly created" URLS each year.  No matter whether they rank or not, presumably....

Gary

If you ask anyone outside of the the SEO world what Google+ is and they have rarely even heard of it.  In fact I did a quick poll of my customers to see if anyone was using it and got a nil response (not typical from other things I have asked).  No-one has even heard of it, FaceBook has won hands-down.  It just has all the momentum already!