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Hey again! I see now - thanks for clearing that up. Depending on your organic traffic to those /tag/widget-a pages and user engagement from search on those pages (which I highly doubt you have much), I would leave them as they are, but "noindex,follow" them. Reason being, those tags can help users if they are looking for something specific, rather than being redirected to the cornerstone page, and having to look through the articles listed to find what they want. This can create a confusing user experience. Keep it easy for them. The reason you should "noindex,follow" them, they aren't useful to search engines but you still want the equity moving through the site to follow links on those pages so that equity can continue to move. Either way, I doubt search engines are giving weight to those tag pages as opposed to your cornerstone page. Hopefully this helps! Let me know if you have any other questions or comments!

I've had problems and emailed them to ask what the devil is going on - they replied saying that they would compensate me for the time the service is down for. That was last week. I logged in this morning and my rankings were tracked successfully, so I emailed them to ask what compensation I will be getting... So far I haven't had a response, but they gave me a discount last year when a similar thing happened so I have every expectation of them fulfilling their promises.

Kristina has good questions. You need to isolate the problem metrics as best as possible. In GA you can parse out influence of click bids vs. CTR having the effect on RPM/eCPM. If it's a CTR issue that is responsible for 100% of your ad revenue drop and eCPM drop, ie. the click bids went unchanged, then you need to look at Mobile vs. Table vs. Desktop changes in CTR over the period in question.  You might want to take a look at CTR changes based on source/medium as well and drill into anything that seems significant. Some of the adsense metrics in GA are a bit suspect. I like checking earnings per click against adsense revenue / adsense ads clicked. We noticed a big drop in mobile ad CTR cutting our ad revenue in half, disproportionately affecting iPhones and it was due to the change to HTTPS having an effect on who our advertisers were indirectly affecting ad relevance/quality. Desktop CTR actually went up but the overall decline hid the problem from the client.

Understood.  I read EGOL for months before I really grokked what he was saying about how to optimize a site for search engines. Best, Christopher

Typically updates are not confirmed for a few days after the event but Google is always making minor tweak to the algorithm... As well as Mozcast I find the Panguin Tool (<cite>www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguin-tool/</cite>‎) really useful as this allows you to overlay Google updates with your organic traffic to align any dramatic changes... Steve

Try turning personalized search off, using an URL like this: https://www.google.com/search?q=keywords+to+find&gl=us&pws=0 At least for me, what I see there matches what Moz shows, although those are the results shown to a person in god knows what location with personalized search off, they match Mozs'. Hope that helps.

If the link is not an href and is javascript there is no need to add the rel nofollow attribute. However, if it is an href link, or an href tag is contained within the javascript on the page it is best to add a rel="nofollow" attribution within the href tag. I wouldn't rely on putting it within the div to work.

Such as video  (maybe a comparison of the pros and cons/features/styles/uses/quality of a variety of different collars), audio (interviews with retailers/veterinarians about what which ones they recommend/or sell the most) press release (maybe on a recall/particular new style/your investment in technology for 3D printing of dog collars)--that kind of thing.

Hi Patrick It is a little tricky to say for sure without the context of the site. However, the one link you've cited, those are typically not an issue. I'm pretty confident Google sees that as a "junk" site, scraping links, repurposed content etc that's not "real". I would worry about links that were done to clearly attempt to over-optimize - either through being paid, anchor text, sitewide links on low-ish quality sites, links within content that is not at all relevant. Conversely, you can be proactive by trying to build links that look as natural as possible - domain/brand/propword anchor text. In fact I think Cyrus' video pretty astutely describes what to look out for. You really have to discern if links were done maliciously (if you did not build them) and those would be the ones to use disavow. Hope that helps! -Dan

Excellent ... thanks for your suggestion.  I had been placing a link in the new article back to the old and all of my old articles outrank the new.  Should I remove the links to the old articles one I have placed links from the old to the new?

Hey Patrick Glad it helped. Ask any more questions here and I will get an email and pop by if I can help. Cheers Marcus