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Hi there,

Sorry, can you clarify - are you saying that your client supposedly has links on pages like http://www.sammorganhomes.com/wp-fav/backup/supplement/semitruckleasing.html, but that those pages redirect to the spam site?

Hi there,

This is horribly frustrating, but the difference is that they're Facebook and YouTube and the rest of us aren't.

That's the short version. The big boys and girls get away with a lot more than normal folk Also, a widget from a huge brand is going to make less of an overall dent in the make-up of the site's backlink profile than it is for a brand that is not enormous.

The longer version is that this method of link acquisition was spammed pretty badly a few years ago. Moz's former CTO Matt Inman (better known as the Oatmeal comic writer) wrote a post about doing this six years ago. He achieved very good results very quickly using widgets / badges. The post is here: http://moz.com/blog/widgetbait-gone-wild

As you can see in the post, Matt's method of gaining links was blindingly effective. He's a good comic writer and a smart guy who knew how to tap into a lot of people's egos and interest for links. This was also in 2008, so long before everyone had seen the Buzzfeed-style "which city should you live in?" quizzes go around Facebook. However, he abused the method (as he readily admits) and he got caught.

Anything that has been abused like this is on Google's radar and they don't like it. Less interesting versions of this sort of link dev include newsletter sign-up forms with "email marketing managed by X" links and similar. It seems very unfair and disingenuous on Google's part that smaller businesses are penalised or at least not helped by these kinds of links, but it's certainly true that a smaller business (and by this, I mean "smaller than Facebook") gaining hundreds or thousands of links in two weeks is a far bigger shift in backlink profile than Facebook gaining hundreds of thousands of links constantly from all sources, including widgets.

Hosting these pages as subfolders instead of subdomains should be fine, and is the "traditional" way of presenting new content with the highest likelihood that the content will inherit authority from its parent domain from an SEO point of view. They should rank just as well as if they were on subdomains or separate domains.

Separate installations and themes should not make a difference; Google will be absolutely clear in its understanding that these sub-brands are related to the main brand and to each other, so assuming you are fine with this, different design and CMS installations will not make a difference.

Hi there,

The first question, as the others have stated, is whether the content has been duplicated. If so, that's a problem no matter where the websites are located.

However, if you have two totally different websites from a content point of view on the same topic, hosting them together should not be a big problem. The only issue would be Google's understanding that the two resources were owned by the same entity, and therefore ranking them together might not constitute the most diverse user experience for people searching on the topic. Google reads registration information as well, and also understands that some servers / hosting services host hundreds of thousands of websites so some topic cross-over is natural without the sites being owned by the same person or company. If you had two sites selling pet food on the same dedicated server for the sole purpose of having two sites rank for the same pet food queries, I'm not 100% sure Google would ignore their hosting though.

The ideas above are all great. I would add that local addresses for branches / outlets are great if you have them. Being able to supply local addresses definitely indicates that you are not solely located in one town.

Hi there,

This is an incredibly broad question that you'd really need to hire a freelance consultant or agency to work on for an extended period for best results The issue of how and where to promote a new website is pretty much a cornerstone of online marketing.

As far as link development goes, I would start with the link building category here on the Moz blog. There is link development and promotion content on there dating back almost ten years (clearly the older stuff might be quite outdated now).

"If I wanted to change my home page URL, (currently along the lines of "http://example.com/home") would it be a good idea to change it to "http://example.com/dallas-auto-repair"?"

I have to say no to this particular example. Realistically, your home page probably shouldn't sit on an internal URL like this anyway; is there a reason why the home page is not sitting on the root?

If you were to follow this exact example, it sounds like your home page targets "Dallas auto repair", but that there is an internal page targeting "Dallas auto services" as well, which sounds like a good recipe for having internal pages compete against each other for the same type of rankings.

We advise caution when implementing redirects: if there is no good reason besides "this would get a keyword into the URL", it's usually not a great idea. If you need to change the URL for a number of reasons, putting keywords in the new URL is a good idea. Say you have long, complicated dynamic URLs that a CMS has created: you'd be best to make these static URLs for a number of reasons. However, if you have a URL like www.example.com/auto-repair-services, I would definitely not 301 redirect that to www.example.com/dallas-auto-repair-services just to get the word "Dallas" in there, for example.

301 redirects sometimes don't seem to transfer the exact authority / rankings from one URL to another, so unless there is a very good reason to go through redirects, I would not do it.

As Matt Cutts says in the video Prestashop links to, a short period of downtime should not hurt at all. Google understands that short outages happen fairly regularly. If you know that the site is going to be down for longer, try to serve a 503 server status, indicating that the site is "unavailable" rather than "not found" (404) or "gone" (410).

Some URL were lost during the drop of server, what should i do? Create again? Delete on GWT?

What exactly do you mean by this? That the rankings were lost or the files were deleted? If the files were deleted but you want those pages back, re-create the files and upload them again to the same location they lived in before, i.e. re-creating the same URLs. If you mean that some URLs lost their rankings but that the files / URLs still exist, you will need to wait a little while to see if their rankings come back. I expect that they will: a 12 hour downtime should not hurt you permanently.

Brand new pages can fluctuate in rankings for a while before they seem to "settle", yes, but for some queries, results are different day in, day out. There is no set time period for a new page to "find its place". Google seems to sometimes test whether new resources "deserve" good rankings: the page may seem high-quality - if Google ranks it well for a short period, does the page attract traffic? Does that traffic stay on the site? Do people bounce back to the SERP and choose another resource? Does the page attract links? Social media attention?

A page may drop down in rankings for a time, rising again as its attracts more links. There is really no good rule to go by, besides understanding that a brand new page with good rankings may not have great rankings forever, and that SEO work is still required to keep its rankings high.

I think an overall better solution would be to work on developing a strong enough website that the site is given sitelinks, indicating a stronger brand that has extra real estate space at the top of the SERP. With subdomains, you might be able to rank second or third as well and I've definitely seen this happen (although can't replicate it right now). However, Google usually tries to show relatively diverse results, even for company names. You might have trouble ranking content on the same domain, even presented as subdomains, in both top positions. It's more common for Google to pick a social profile, a separate company resource and perhaps a review site for the top results, rather than listing link after link from the same root domain.

The canonicalisation option would probably work, although I too wonder how necessary it is to create two totally separate websites. Unless it's really vital that the branding be very different, I would look at developing different areas on the same root domain so that you do not have to put 301 redirects in place, work on the link development for a new domain, etc. Canonicalisation is certainly a viable option though.

Hi Tiffany,

There is a difference between all of these URLs, as far as Google is concerned. If a URL has any one characters different to another, Google considers it to be different. This is true even if the pages each URL loads are exactly the same.

For all of these URLs, you should choose one that you consider to be the "proper" URL. Call this the "canonical" URL - the correct version. There is no gold standard for which versions you should choose, besides for one, which I'll get into later: https://www.abc.com/ is realistically not better or worse than http://abc.com/.

However, you might have a good reason why the entire site should be on HTTPS URLs, i.e. on secured as opposed to unsecured URLs.

Some people choose to not use the "version" of their site that loads with "www" - again, there is no benefit or detriment either way.

For the abc.com/blog/ example, the general rule is that **if more content site beneath the /blog/ subfolder, the URL should have a trailing slash. **If "/blog is just a page with nothing housed beneath it (i.e. there are no pages like www.abc.com/blog/2014/post.html), then you can leave the trailing slash off if you like.

No matter which versions you choose, all alternative versions should be 301 redirected to the canonical version (the one you chose as your preference). If you choose http://www.abc.com/ and someone types in https://abc.com/, they should be 301 redirected to http://www.abc.com/.

The other option is to place the canonical tag on each "alternative" version, pointing to the canonical URL of that page. This means that https://abc.com/, etc. load, but the canonical tag tells Google that the primary version is not on this URL, but on the one you specify in the tag. This is quite easy to do: each URL will be pulling its content from the same file (that is, there are not usually two files for the home page, one populating www.abc.com and one populating http://abc.com - it is the same file being displayed on different URLs). As such, that one file needs to have the canonical tag indicating your desired canonical URL. Each page requires its own canonical tag, indicating the desired URL.

301 redirection to the canonical URLs is the traditional way of getting this done.

Cheers,

Jane

Then you'd want to avoid the canonical, but it's unlikely that the page will rank well if you have copied it from a reliable resource like a government website. Google tends to try and filter copies like this, although sometimes you see the same thing ranking over and over again on different sites because those duplicated resources are legitimately the only relevant results for a user's query. When Google does filter duplicate results, it will try to pick the most authoritative resource to rank, discarding the rest. In a case like this, it'll pick the government website 99.9% of the time and discard copies.

If you really want that page to rank, you'd also want to avoid linking to the original source as well, as linking was a good way of specifying the source before canonicalisation. I wouldn't say that it's a good idea, though - there's no point adding duplicate content that lacks canonicalisation to your website when you don't need to, even if the content is a good resource.

The link might be enough but I am not sure what a Googler would say to the question. They might advise you to add a canonical tag due to the entire page being a duplicate. Using the canonical certainly can't hurt your site at all, besides the fact that that page won't rank (which isn't an issue). The rest of the site remains totally unaffected.

Hi there,

Sorry this question has gone without more responses. I wanted to follow up.

I agree with William that this is more of a usability / conversion question than SEO. In general, this is not an SEO issue although I would lean towards keeping pages' structures the same, with the same markup. I do not know if Google operates in a way in which it develops expectations of a page based on other pages' content / structure, but it could do, and in that case you'd want to keep things standard.

From a usability point of view, keeping things standard can mean you can create expectations in your users, and you can also effectively test conversion improvements and A/B or multivariate test pages. This can be extremely profitable from a sales perspective.

Hi there,

May i also then ask why should we do "Regular download / checking of your own site's backlinks"

By this, I mean conducting a regular download from Open Site Explorer of your links and checking to see if they have increased or decreased in number, what the quality is like and which type of links you'd like to get more of. You can also download your links from your Google Webmaster Tools account, but it is good to have more than one source of backlink data because different services usually show a slightly different picture due to their crawling capabilities, etc. Other services that do this include Ahrefs and MajesticSEO.

I would say that if you are going to renew, definitely use a few hours of SEO time a week to get familiar with the toolset and what it can do for you. $99 a month can go a long way if you take advantage of what's on offer, but I agree that it is a waste if you don't use it. The good thing about learning to use the tools yourself is that you can save hundreds of thousands of dollars on consulting if you can do a lot of this yourself. Understanding the tools and what they tell you also means that you will be better able to pick good external consultants in the future if you get to the stage where you can employ / contract someone to do SEO for you.

Hope this helps!

Cheers,

Jane

Hi there,

Realistically, the tag should be used for duplicates, yes. How "duplicated" a page is, is subjective: a page with 50% of the same content as another page is probably going to count as duplicated as far as Google goes... where that line of duplication acceptability goes isn't something any of us really know.

For pages where the content is totally different besides the header and footer, you technically shouldn't use canonicalisation. However, experiments have shown that Google honours the tag, even if the pages aren't duplicates. Dr. Pete did an experiment when the tag came out (admittedly a few years ago) where he showed that you could radically reduce the number of pages Google had indexed for a site by canonicalising everything to the home page. I personally had a client do this by accident a couple of years ago, and sure enough, their number of indexed pages dropped very quickly, along with all the rankings those pages had. As an ecommerce site that was ranking for clothing terms, this was very very bad. It took about six weeks to get those rankings back again after we fixed the tags, and the tags were fixed within about five days (should have been quicker but our urgent request went into a dev queue).

So the answer would be that Google seems to honour the tag no matter the content of the pages, but I am pretty sure that if you asked a Googler, they'd tell you that it should only be used for dupes or near-dupes.

Hi Ruben,

There are no negatives to streaming content like this (G+, Facebook or Twitter) that we are aware of, although it isn't likely that these will be seen as "constantly updated content", especially due to how some of these feeds are coded. Often, they use iframes or similar that don't actually show Google's bots what is in the streamed box: Google just sees that there is a Twitter widget or similar on the site. For other types of streaming, Google can read and index the content but will still absolutely understand that it comes from a third party. That said, good social interaction is a good sign (although not a confirmed "ranking factor") and thus can be considered a positive.

Hi Alan,

I replied to you about this on another thread, but I wanted to reiterate:

My SEO firm claims that Google looks at link profile only when there is a Penguin update and that these only occur once or twice a year.

This is not correct. Google only looks at removing or handing out Penguin penalties during a Penguin update (1, 2 or 3 times per year is the norm), but regular sites with regular link development can improve at all times. Link building might take a month or so to really show progress, but Google crawls and updates its indices almost constantly. It's simply not true that you will only see ranking improvements once or twice a year.

Similarly, you can lose rankings if you lose links that were counting, outside of a Penguin update.

Regarding DA and PA - yes, you can rank well with any combination of these. They are not indicators of how well you will rank, but a gauge of what your site's authority is relative to every other site Moz analyses, based upon backlinks. DA and PA are configured in a way that is meant to best represent how Moz believes Google values backlink profiles, but clearly Moz doesn't have access to Google's actual algorithm or measures of which links Google counts / discounts / values / doesn't value.

Also, "can I rank well" depends on what query you want to rank for. You will easily outrank a far higher authority website if your site is much more relevant to the query (although it's annoying to see high authority websites pop into SERPs for queries that they're not particularly relevant for, and it does happen from time to time).

If you have relatively low authority and you're trying to rank against similar websites with DA / PA scores in the 70s or so, your job is likely to be a lot harder. That said, it can still be done with focus on the specific niches you're interested in and work on improving the number and quality of links pointing to the site.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Jane

Hi there,

Is this still happening, or does it seem to have been taken care of?

Cheers,

Jane