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Say I'm on Nike and I +1 a soccer shoe page...does the Nike root page rank higher/for more terms for my google+ followers or would just the soccer shoe page?

I have noticed for some pages of the site I am working on that I see the video that is posted on that page ranking a lot higher than the page itself or the page does not rank at all, just the video.

I'm curious to know if these two can technically be competing for rankings and if Google sees that the page does not need to rank because it chooses to put the related video into the SERPs.

Also, has anyone seen any differences in the way videos rank based on where it's hosted (youtube, wistia, etc)?

I would think this is common sense not to but still unsure, is it bad practice to keep videos hosted on multiple sites (currently I am adding videos on a new host, but have not deleted the old ones on Youtube yet)?

We are working on a site with a page that has been ranking on page one of serps for quiet some time. It all the sudden completely lost its ranking for a single term (no major changes to on page made), but still ranks on the 3rd page for a few similar terms. Those terms used to rank a bit higher. Is it possible that some old spammier link building techiniques could have caught up with this site? The page itself is still indexed, has a few terms it is ranking for - but just completely gone from index for primary term.

Rand Fishkin touched on the tiny links that can appear for your search result - not the 6 pack of links that show the structure of your site, but the 2-4 links that show up on one line below your meta description. Any idea how to earn or influence these?

He mentioned them in the "New Opportunities in Google's Search Results" webinar from May 2011 on Slide 19 if that helps.

An example would be if you search "seo guide" in Google search, the SEOmoz link has those mini links below the meta description.

Are they random or can they be influenced?

Is this going to be updated any time soon?

As Alan said, you have a ton of old 404 pages with no one linking to them and they're not being indexed in the SERPs, just let them 404 because that's what Google recommends to get rid of them. If you are getting links and traffic for your 404's pages, you definitely want to make it a priority to 301 redirect them. The grunt work is looking at each URL and determining its value.

Two best responses on this issue that I have found so far.

From the Google Webmaster Central Blog: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/search?q=%22404+week%22

Rand Fishkin himself: http://www.seomoz.orgwww.seomoz.org/blog/are-404-pages-always-bad-for-seo

We switched over from our standard XML sitemap to a sitemap index. Our old sitemap was called sitemap.xml and the new one is sitemapindex.xml.

In Webmaster Tools it still shows the old sitemap.xml as valid. Also when you land on our sitemap.xml it will display the sitemap index, when really the index lives on sitemapindex.xml.

The reason you can see the sitemap on both URLs is because this is set from the sitemap plugin. So the question is, should we change the plugin setting to let the old sitemap.xml 404, or should we allow the new sitemap index to be accessed on both URLs?

Clicking on the little box opens up the homepage of our site, for all the strings with numbers in them.

Obviously they are not all representing the homepage, otherwise they wouldn't all show up as different URLs, right?

When we click on one of our keywords under the keywords section of Google Webmaster Tools it shows our top URLs for that keyword. The problem is that it is giving us some very strange URLs that we have searched high and low to try to find but we don't know where they came from.

Here is a screenshot: http://bit.ly/pl6mB3

Do you know where this type of URL string could have originated and how to fix it?

Thanks for the response!

Yes, we do want to implement the rel=canonical tag but since we are using Magento to build on we are having some issues. One of the issues is that we have the shirts page with sort features:

www.mysite.com/shirts/shoby/size-m

and then the tshirts page:

www.mystie.com/shirts/tshirts/shoby/size-m

So the problem we're running into is trying to figure out how to write a script to implement rel=canonical so that for the first URL, everything after shirts canonicalizes to the /shirts/ URL, and then for the second URL everything after tshirts canonicalizes back to the /shirts/tshirts/ URL without the /shirts/ rel=canonical overriding it.

We are working on an ecommerce site that sorts out the products by color and size but doesn't use the sortby= but uses sortby/. Can we tell Google to ignore the sortby/ parameter in Webmaster Tools even though it is not followed by an = sign?

For example:

www.mysite.com/shirts/tshirts/shopby/size-m

www.mysite.com/shirts/tshirts/shopby/color-black

Can we tell WMT to ignore the 'shopby/' parameter so that only the tshirts page will be indexed? Or does the shopby have to be set up as 'shopby=' ?

Thanks!

Hello,

For functionality purposes, I need to wrap separate blocks of content with a tag. The main question is whether Google will follow this URL, even though it is not a hyperlink on the page, just a URL used for functionality purposes.

We will have 10-20 of these types of span tags with a different URL for each one, and we just want to be sure that Google will not be following these URLs that are not links.

Thanks!

It seems as though you're referring to sitelinks. I'm referring to one link with bullet points, all from the same page.

Ic5LA