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I would look at them for the entire backlink profile, but pay more attention to the followed links when it comes to something like anchor text distribution. Here's why:

If I were Google and I were looking at a car insurance website, and I saw that it had 200 followed links with brand mentions, URLs as anchor text, "click here", etc., then that looks fairly good. However, if the site also has 400 links with "cheap car insurance" as anchor text, does that look somewhat like the site has been doing something like comment spamming? Yup, it does. They make up a telling part of the profile and Google would be silly not to take them into consideration, but they should not directly affect site authority in the way followed links do.

Keep in mind that DA scores are a Moz metric and whilst Moz attempts to replicate how Google operates to the best of its ability, it isn't a Google figure so can't be relied upon to show how Google views a site's authority.

If you've been penalised, I'd most certainly start with removing followed links that are poor in quality. I have not heard of a situation where someone has recovered from a penalty after removing nofollowed links (this doesn't mean it hasn't happened). It's the followed links that Google cracks down on if they dislike them, and the followed links that make a large difference to your rankings.

Hi again,

This could be dampening Google's view of the site, but I would be interested to see what the link building and other promotional activity of your competitors looks like. DA might not have caught up with what they're doing yet, but the subtle improvements are enough to make the "playing field" a little tougher for you.

When you're being slowly out-done, I'd definitely recommend making sure the site is absolutely perfect from an on-page point of view. If you suspect you're keyword stuffing at all, resolve that and tidy up any other house keeping issues you come across. I don't think that would be enough to take a site from top 3 rankings to page 2, but it won't help if there are other competitive aspects you are being beaten on.

Forgive me for linking to my own post, but I wrote about competitive link analysis a few years ago and it might be helpful if you're looking at what others are doing as far as links go: http://www.ayima.com/seo-knowledge/competitive-backlink-analysis.html

Hi Kristina,

I would say that while having both terms in the URL is good, there are _so _man more important places for those terms to be used, and so many more important ways in which they can be used to ensure that your site (and the right content) ranks for [marketing success] that you needn't worry about URL structure. The content of those two areas of your site and how they relate to each other are much more important.

you're are going to need some keyword anchor text from followed links - but not an unnatural amount!

Yeah the ratio of what you need is crazily small right now - I've seen sites with some amazingly good rankings in competitive spaces with nearly blanket brand / miscellaneous anchors, but of course the sources from which they obtain these links are largely relevant to their competitive market / keyword. Like Mailchimp - 10,000 unique linking domains linking with "mailchimp" (plus many more variations below); 28 linking with "email marketing" (all from some questionable badges, mind you) / SERPs right now. The commercial terms will pop up naturally from time to time and that's fine, but to be honest, we'd stopped seeking or being happy about deliberate competitive anchor text a while ago.

HI,

It's possible that you are not passing authority effectively to internal pages if so many internal links are 302ing. PR / authority doesn't pass through 302s, so you have a case where authority is being passed to URLs that are not indexed (as per your statement that the 302ed pages aren't indexed), and that authority is going nowhere.

Understand that you can't update the 302s - do you have the ability to update the links that point to those URLs?

This can cause indexing problems and artificially deflated authority for deep pages in a website.

Cheers,

Jane

Hi Nick,

There still could be ways to harness the client base - you have to be careful how you go about doing things like asking for links, and while tactics like this one are now a bit outdated, looking at innovative ways to get links from the client base is still worthwhile. What the client actually does will depend on the resources of the client base and how they can inspire some sort of action from them, but it could still be doable. As with most aspects of SEO however, it's a bit more difficult than it was back in 2008 / 9!

Hi Conrad,

Unfortunately every migration is going to yield different results in terms of how well the redirection goes and how long you have to wait to get your rankings back if they suffer. Thomas' experience is fairly typical (and the resources he cites here are good too). It's impossible to say what will happen - a particularly large site (let's say a big e-commerce site for a high-street retailer) might suffer due to the sheer volume of URLs that need to be moved and picked up by Google; a small website may have an easier time. However, metrics like the age and authority of the moving website may well play into how successful the move is as well. As such, it's really hard to say exactly how a migration will go without seeing the sites (and even then, ranking problems can crop up that were unexpected).

Cheers,

Jane

Hi Daniel,

Whether these links are all okay or should be removed depends on what else the sites link to, and what else they get up to besides linking to you - if they have been picked off for spam tactics (either linking out, inbound links, on-page spam, etc.) then you'd want to avoid having them link to you, even if they are otherwise genuine industry partners. Sadly some legitimate businesses also run less-than-clean websites from time to time. I would ask the agency who provided your link report for an explanation as to why they placed some of these industry partners in a "remove" category - they may have some very good reasons, or they may have mistaken the intent of the links. I would say that even if they are mistaken, both you and the agency need to ask yourselves if there's a chance Google might also mistake these genuine links as manipulative or unnatural. Unfortunately that can happen as well, but if you are filing for reconsideration you can always explain that x, y and z links have arisen due to a mutual respect / partnership that does not carry with it a commercial benefit to either company in direct relation to the link.

Google has been extremely authoritarian over the last few months about links, and there's a possibility that they'd say a partnership link wasn't "natural" because it had commercial intent. Sometimes it's damn hard to figure out exactly what they mean by "natural". It's incredibly frustrating.

However, backing up again to where you're at right now, I would say that you need an explanation and thorough analysis of why genuine links have been flagged. You never know, the agency might have found something that's actually going to save your next reconsideration request.

Hi Ryan,

It's going to be hard to do this without creating duplicates - if they aren't commissioning re-writes of descriptions but just pulling from the database, identical content like this is far from ideal.

One school of thought is that there really isn't any such thing as a "duplicate content penalty" unless you have some huge, gratuitous problem that results in a Panda issue. Google simply chooses the version of the content it favours and drops the other. The local site would still be much more relevant for a query like "fridge sale san antonio".

An example of a big retailer that has a similar(ish) site at the moment is Marks & Spencer Outlet here in the UK (outlet.marksandspencer.com). M&S is probably the most recognisable high street brand in the UK, to give you a perspective on size.

Looking at what they're doing, they're listing pages like this: http://outlet.marksandspencer.com/Limited-Edition-Jacquard-Textured-T69-1604J-S/dp/B00IIP7GY2?field_availability=-1&field_browse=1698309031&id=Limited+Edition+Jacquard+Textured+T69-1604J-S&ie=UTF8&refinementHistory=subjectbin%2Csize_name%2Ccolor_map%2Cbrandtextbin%2Cprice&searchNodeID=1698309031&searchPage=1&searchRank=-product_site_launch_date&searchSize=12

This is the same product as this: http://www.marksandspencer.com/jacquard-textured-coat-with-wool/p/p60056127. I love it that the "outlet" version is more expensive... anyway...

The product details, which are all included in the HTML of the main site, are not included in the Outlet page. The Outlet URL is indexed (what queries it ranks for / could potentially rank for are unknown) - but I would be keen to hypothesise / experiment with the idea that if that product was on a page about it only being available at M&S Moorgate, and looking for coats at M&S Moorgate was as popular a query as [fridge sale location], the Outlet page would rank.

You will never get an SEO to say that you should "copy and paste" descriptions across domains or within them, but essentially the pages have to provide a service / information that makes them worth ranking for relevant queries.

Hi Dana,

I'm inclined to think that this is a problem with how the tools process links to and from PDFs rather than the passing of PageRank through PDFs itself as well, although I am not sure. I would certainly not say no to a link to or from a great PDF if that was the only option, although I have also actively encouraged clients to re-publish their quality content housed in PDF format as HTML and redirect the PDF file to the new source. We're just a lot more sure about how authority passes through HTML files.

Hi,

The guys here have already left some great comments. It's hard to guess why / where the links are coming from without seeing them, but I agree with William that five per week seems low for an automated bot. Those things usually do thousands, unless it's being run by someone who doesn't want you to notice the activity. Either way, a person is probably behind the activity at its root - do you have any idea who might want to maliciously hurt your website?

There is a possibility that the activity is not being carried out in order to directly hurt you, but that your site is part of someone's larger negative SEO attack against someone else. Some negative SEO attacks will target a business (let's say Nordstrom's, for purpose of example). They'll point thousands of links to http://shop.nordstrom.com/ from some terrible pages, but will sometimes mix in links to other sites to muddy the waters a bit. Are there any other sites linked to from the same pages as yours? Any trends you can spot?

Moz and OSE sometimes miss the real underbelly of the internet - the stuff that's available if you know where to look for it (and Google usually knows where to look for it) but for the purposes of regular marketing / SEO, is fairly irrelevant. My former agency built its own backlink analysis tool and did the same thing. We could do deep crawls to find this crap if we needed to (and so can Moz) but it's thankfully rare that situations like this come along that require such a deep look at links. Moz, Majestic, Ahrefs, etc. will show you links from the part of the internet that they believe counts. Frustrating when things like this happen, but if you are finding these in WMT then you should have sufficient information to go through with a disavowal and / or reconsideration request.

Hi there,

Ryan is correct - high numbers of subfolders like this aren't ideal. That takes into account real and virtual subfolders (i.e. "subfolders" that have no content on them but are generated by a CMS versus subfolders that contain landing pages).

Ideally, these would be rewritten to www.example.com/women/denim/product1.html, etc. You will need to check with the developers why the CMS creates these subfolders and what can be done about it.

Google is much better at indexing / ranking URLs like this than it was a few years ago, and it's not exactly a deathblow if you're told that this can't be changed. It's still not ideal though, so check whether it can be simplified.

Hi,

The drop could be unrelated to your disallowing the account pages (but perhaps check if the CMS allows random query strings, and look into whether it could have created any upon user action, etc. just in case). It's pretty common to see fluctuations in the number of indexed pages, especially with numbers of pages in the thousands or higher. Have you noticed a decrease in traffic from search that you can match with deindexation of pages that were previously bringing in visitors?

As someone who used to work at a company on the Recommended list (and who was in charge of the Contact form) - we did get leads. They were about 80% appropriate for the business model, although a lot were too small or wanting short-term projects (my agency generally took on corporate-level accounts for long periods of time). I would say that this sort of linking is different to just linking to clients, e.g. if we then went on to link to an insurance company that came to us through a Moz Recommended referral. But if your SEO company partners with a PPC agency or design firm, provides some services to the other and sends out a relevant link, that seems a little more relevant.

On the other hand, I hate these discussions about what we're "allowed" to link to

Hi Stephen,

That's part of the syntax used to transfer a site URL-by-URL - what the entire snippet of code means is that a browser or search engine will come across www.oldblog.com/post123.html and immediately be taken to blog.newdomaincom/post123.html. If you are not using the same URLs on the new blog, you won't need to or be able to use this particular function in your .htaccess file.

You say that "the new blog has a different wordpress theme & categories than the old blog" which makes me think you'll need to redirect category URLs separately at least (I must have missed that line when I read the question at first; apologies).

Once you've redirected everything, you will need to keep the old domain. If you let it lapse or sell it, the redirects will no longer work unfortunately.

Hi Tihomir,

Are you planning to give the remaining category a facelift too?

It would be best to include all three categories under the same subdomain (e.g. the "www." subdomain) and place them in folders, e.g. www.domain.dk/category1, www.domain.dk/category2 and www.domain.dk/category3. www2 isn't technically damaging but it's bad from a usability point of view. It's incredibly unlikely to be remembered, for one, and even more likely to be mistyped as www.

Hi there,

I would say that, taking William's point into account, canonicals might work in order to remove any possibility that Google would see the new site as copying the old one. That said, I can't guarantee that they could not either manually or automatically (manually would be much easier) note that the two sites are owned by the same person and that the domain change is a measure taken to avoid a penalty. The truly safest thing to do is to re-write the content and start afresh. The next safest is to remove the content from the old site, force a re-crawl / wait for Google to update its cache of the old site excluding the content, and then re-publish on the new site.

Canonicals will make this process quicker, but I don't believe it can be guaranteed that they won't result in Google making a stronger connection between the two sites, which might not go well. Again, this is only if there are enough similarities for Google to understand that this is not a scraper / scrapee situation but a situation where one entity owns both sites.

I'm sorry not to give a definitive answer.

Hi there,

While looking at metrics like this is important, you're approaching modern link development in a slightly misguided, old-fashioned way. This is the way we used to link about link dev three or four years ago.

For one, there is little use finding an older article (anything published more than a few days or weeks ago) and trying to get a link on it. This was a very popular, effective tactic up until about 2010. However, figuring out if a link was included as an original citation or added after the fact is incredibly easy. Thus, it's easy to discount links-added-later, and you can be fairly sure that Google is suspicious of these links given how popular this link development tactic was pre-2010.

If a site has good Moz metics (DA, etc.) and no or very low toolbar PR, this can be an indication that Google finds something wrong with the site... but toolbar PR is a relatively outdated metric now, so take its figures fairly lightly. If you can potentially get a link from a site, look at all of these metrics and then look at both the backlink profile of the potential linking site and which other sites it links out to. Does it look like it sells links to unrelated, spammy websites / industries? Don't go for a link with them. Do they advertise a text-link service where anyone can buy a link on their site? Definitely stay away.

If you come across a less-popular site in your niche with original, quality content, don't turn a link down on that site because it has low metrics.

"2. If a site is a PR2 DA 30/ PA 32 with 14 root domains, 250 total links.... Would a link like this give me any benefit or should I skip links like this? Why?"

To answer this, you're going to need to look further than these metrics. Those numbers are good enough that if the site is otherwise a good match for yours, the link could be worthwhile.

Hey Flo,

Good news! This went up literally yesterday: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-link-unlimited-18468.html

See the longer discussion here: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/alde4GNOWp0/discussion

This is the first time a Googler has confirmed the lack of a limit on the crawling of internal links

I would stay away from botw.org to be honest - your time and money are better invested elsewhere than with traditional directories, even well-known ones. Google is well aware of how entries are made into directories like this and are perfectly capable of disregarding the authority that would otherwise be passed here. Suffice to say, I am not a fan of using directories for SEO purposes anymore at all.

Similar can go for the BBB but if you are comfortable that you are also doing this for visibility purposes, then the sole purpose is not SEO.

Other partnerships and associations can send good authority to your site, but be aware that if you are "paying for a link", Google may also be aware that the paid link opportunity exists and disregard / penalise it accordingly. What I mean to say is that any link you can easily find the payment terms for, Google can easily find the payment terms as well. Google would say that paid links should all be nofollowed (in which case, no problem, not no SEO benefit either). Again, this isn't my personal view on what an ideal web looks like, it's what Google regards as "how you should link."