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Yep, it's another "it depends" - if Moz links to Search Engine Land in multiple blog posts over many years (as it has done), this is going to count for more than one vote. Those links also undoubtedly go to different pages on SEL's site (new posts, etc.). But if I write one blog post every other day, linking to my affiliate site in every post, this really won't help the affiliate site at all

Hi Israr,

Since your site is properly targeted to Pakistan in Webmaster Tools, don't worry about having a .com domain as opposed to .com.pk. The WMT configuration does that job perfectly.

I would be tempted to guess that one of a number of things is happening: It could very well be that the US results are being affected by recent updates and those updates haven't rolled out to the rest of the world yet (the US usually sees updates first; in the first Panda roll-out, it took Google a long time to extend the roll-out past the US. I remember being at a search conference in Poland over a month after Panda was released in the US and people kept bugging the Google rep about when it would come to Europe!). In this case, you might be in for a good ranking improvement in Pakistan soon.

It also might be the case that there is more competition for the term you want to rank for in Pakistan than there is in the US. If the query pertains especially to Pakistani audiences (mentions location, is about a product or service only available in Pakistan, etc.) then other competitors might have fared better in providing adequate localised signals, whereas your site might be appealing to a more general audience (as far as the signals it gives Google are concerned).

Is your website hosted in Pakistan? The location of a website's hosting should not be a major factor at all, but it can make a small difference if Google has trouble figuring out what the intended target country is. Your WMT geo-location should have taken care of this though, even if the site is hosted in the US or elsewhere.

Also, do you have a good number of links from other Pakistani websites, whether they be .com.pk domains, sites hosted in Pakistan, and sites with a lot of Pakistani links themselves? Again, not a massive ranking factor, but if most of your links come from the US or other foreign countries, this isn't as good of a location signal as if you have a lot of links from other local websites.

To be honest, I think that the first scenario is more likely and that a movement upwards in the US results is a good sign...

Hi Alex,

When it comes to bad links pointing to your site, definitely remove them as an when you can (i.e. immediately, acknowledging that it will take time to contact every linking webmaster and negotiate the link removal). If you are going to suffer any ill effects in rankings from removing bad links (which does happen if Google was passing PageRank through those links), it's still best to get this done sooner rather than later. What you do not want is bad links that haven't been noticed to suddenly be picked up upon, resulting in a manual penalty.

Hi Jonathan,

I think I understand what you're asking - you're asking if it matters for social signals if a link out from a social media website (be it Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, etc.) goes through a 301 or a 302 redirect, e.g. a bit.ly link goes through one 301 to get to the target page, right?

Unfortunately, I don't know whether a 301 or 302 has any influence over how Google treats links from social media (which are usually also nofollowed, but we're talking purely about social signals here). I can only speculate that if I were Google and I wanted to look at social signals as opposed to SEO ranking signals, I would not take into account whether the redirect was a 301 or a 302.

If I were building my own tool to do this, I'd absolutely use 301s just because they are best practice for SEO, so you're going to get the benefit of the 301 if the link comes from somewhere other than a nofollowed social media site. There would be no reason to penalise a URL shortener or its target URLs for this.

Third vote for using the site and not redirecting it here (pending a re-brand of sorts to suit the fact that it's now owned by your company).

You have the opportunity to take up a lot more real estate in the SERPs than you do now, whereas redirection at worst removes the old site from the results. At best, you might see a small improvement in your rankings, but you're already ranking better than that site to begin with. As EGOL says, PageRank is logarithmic so if you're dealing with what is a weaker website (whether in actual PR or toolbar PR - the latter of which is a fairly outdated metric but still gets used for basic comparison purposes), it may actually be many times weaker than your stronger domain.

At best, using both site might allow you to target different sections of the same audience, appeal to different needs from the audience base (very large clients versus smaller businesses, etc.), and for results where you rank top 10 with both sites, you're about 20% of the results, not 10%

Hi Marcel,

Not sure that this can be put down to Panda: it could be related since Panda deals solely with on-page, but Google works on so many changes at once that it might not be. There is a team dedicated to working on SERP display, optimising click-through from SERPs, etc. so it would be very difficult to say exactly what this relates to. It's definitely been happening (a higher number of people asking in here about why their descriptions and title tags are changing in SERPs) for a few months now.

Hi Damien,

So if I'm reading this correctly, the consultant is saying that due to the size of the site (tens of thousands of pages), and the need to categorise its content, that subdomains are the best choice.

I would say that there are far bigger websites using categories within subfolders, notably big retailers, e.g.

http://www.marksandspencer.com/c/beauty, http://www.marksandspencer.com/c/food-and-wine, http://www.marksandspencer.com/c/mands-bank

http://www.waitrose.com/home/inspiration.html, http://www.waitrose.com/home/wine.html, http://www.waitrose.com/content/waitrose/en/home/tv/highlights.html (<-- the last one being a crappy version, but a subdomain nonetheless)

and so do websites that deal with providing content for very different audiences:

http://www.ncaa.com/schools/tampa, http://www.ncaa.com/championships/lacrosse-men/d1/tickets, http://www.ncaa.com/news/swimming-men/article/2014-03-29/golden-bears-and-coach-david-durden-earn-third-national-title, http://www.ncaa.com/stats/football/fbs

Has the consultant provided examples of other websites doing this that would take on the same structure?

There are hundreds of examples of websites whose structure / categories are properly understood despite existing in subdirectories, so I'm still sceptical that this is a necessity.

This is not to say that a subdomain approach wouldn't work and is definitively bad or anything, I'm just not really convinced that the reasoning is strong enough to move content away from the root domain.

I disagree about user experience - from a user's perspective, the only difference between subfolders and subdomains is the URL they can see in the address bar. The rest is aesthetic. You can do or not do everything you'd do with the design of a website using subdirectories that you'd do with a website(s) employing subdomains. For example, just because content sits on www.icy-veins.com/wow/, its navigation wouldn't have to link to www.icy-veins.com/hearthstone/ or mention the other brand in any way if you don't want to. You can still have separate conversion funnels, newsletter sign-ups, advertising pages, etc.

Hey Joost,

That's a tough one because it probably should be subjective and depend on other factors about the linking site, the site it links to and how it links. If the BBC were to link to me twice, once to a new product page on my website and once to my home page, I'm not going to be concerned that the link is only worth the first link in the HTML code, and freak out if that's not to the page I'm interested in. Same thing goes for a lesser site to the BBC, but that would be a highly authoritative example.

That said, if you're counting links from c-classes or IPs, which is a very common way to assess backlinks, that page on the BBC is going to count as one "vote".

If I see a sidebar linking out twice to the same domain, I'm not going to be all that comfortable claiming that both those links are going to be any more useful than one would have been.

I don't believe Google would be simplistic enough to treat two links from one URL on bbc.co.uk to two different pages on one website the same way as it would treat two links on a blogspot blog to two pages on another website, if that makes sense.

Hi Christopher,

The set-up you have at the moment is actually fine for SEO - http://www.fdmgroup.com/ resolves the website. http://fdmgroup.com/ employs a 301 redirect to take users and search engines to http://www.fdmgroup.com/: http://i.imgur.com/et4AKYV.png

This is correct, http://fdmgroup.com/ would be seen as a separate "version" of the home page if it was allowed to load without sending everyone on to the "www" version via the 301 redirect. Furthermore, every page within the http://fdmgroup.com/ "version" of the website would be duplicated from the "www" version of each page.

If you want to change to use http://fdmgroup.com/ instead, using that both on advertising and having that be the version of the website that resolves for both users and search engines, you will need to reverse that 301 redirect. This will mean that when people try to visit http://**www.**fdmgroup.com/, they are redirected to http://fdmgroup.com/. This is a simple process.

However, it is inadvisable to go through redirection like this unless you really, really have to. When you redirect a URL with a 301 redirect, a large portion of the URL's authority is passed on to the new URL. Not all of the authority is passed though. As a result, your rankings and traffic can take a little hit for a short while. This is not usually a big problem, and usually resolves itself quickly but it is best avoided unless the redirection really has to take place.

I am tempted to say that "it looks cleaner" is not the best reason to go through this change when your current set-up is totally fine and correct for SEO purposes.

That said, you absolutely could reference fdmgroup.com in offline advertising for stylistic purposes. When people type that URL in, they'll be redirected to the www version just as they are now. This is pretty common because of the stylistic benefits of not including www in TV / print advertising.

Hi Alfredo,

Some interesting discussion here. Coming back to the root of the question, Matt's response of "Google has a lot of experience in returning relevant web pages, regardless of the top-level domain (TLD)" is very important. It cancels out a lot of the question about the new TLDs.

I would definitely not class this as one of the statements he makes in order to spin a line for Google either - this should be taken as their stance, in my view.

So with that said, the question is largely down to EMDs.

Google targeted low quality EMDs a couple of years ago: http://searchengineland.com/low-quality-exact-match-domains-are-googles-next-target-134889. Low quality is the key point here; this doesn't really address whether a high quality site called SciFiBooks.company (or .com) has inherently more chance of ranking for [scifi books] than a very similar website (in terms of backlinks and content quality) with a different name. Debate about that is ongoing, as you can see here.

Hi Damien,

There are cases where subdomains are very necessary or inevitable, usually because of technical limitations (and even then, they can usually be worked around via practices like reverse proxy). When you see subdomains in the wild and aren't sure why they're being used, they will often just be legacies - old set-ups that no one wants to change because it would require redirecting old URLs, which is inadvisable if those URLs don't need to be redirected and if they rank well.

In this case, I'd be really interested to know why the SEO was adamant that the new structure should use subdomains and not subdirectories. Google is much better at working with new subdomains now than it was in years past, but if there is no good reason to use them, subdirectories are still the safer option for SEO purposes, and the content housed on subdirectories should automatically inherit authority from the parent domain. New subdomains seem to be far less likely to inherit this authority, as other responders have said above.

Find out exactly why the SEO wanted subdomains - if their reasoning isn't solid, you may want to place this content in subdirectories and place 301 redirects from the subdomains to the subdirectories. If you are going to do these redirects, doing them sooner rather than later is advisable as redirection usually comes with a short period of lower rankings / traffic.

On that note, redirection does usually result with that short period of traffic loss, but that should happen quite quickly and be fixing itself in 2+ weeks, not getting worse.

Hi Joost,

I don't have hard data on this at all; this is a what-I-know plus gut feeling answer.

Gary is right - multiple links from one page to another target should be treated more like one link to the target domain, but this might not be a uniform rule. In effect, two links from one page whether those links be site-wide or individual shouldn't have much more or less effect on the target website than just one.

That said, if Google felt that site-wide link or text blocks were being used manipulatively, there is no reason why they would not discount the value of those links altogether. It's interesting that you may have seen a correlation between multiple links from site-wide areas and poorer performance. It would also be interesting to see the data - you could put together a good blog post about it with enough data, for sure.

Exactly as Anirban says. We're seeing a lot of directory SEO questions lately, and it's worrying. Both the exact anchor text and the fact that directory links are more often than not junk is why you should remove them.

If they were directories that were HIGHLY relevant to your business and frequented by people looking for your type of services, they might be fine. For instance, if you found a directory listing gardeners, plumbers, electricians and builders in Los Angeles and you happen to be a gardener in Los Angeles, there is some sense here.

However, the vast majority of directory submissions we see are made-for-SEO and should be removed ASAP.

Yep, I would guess that your Panda issue was far more likely to have been the URLs than the menu - that's pretty standard Panda fare so that's great that you've sorted that out.

I am leaning towards really doubting that the menu is hurting you at all, but of course experimenting with removing non-essential menu items is possible. It's hard to draw real conclusions from the results you see after you modify something like a menu because other factors will influence rankings during that time, e.g. you gain or lose links, Google changes its treatment of unrelated metrics, your competitors gain or lose links, etc.

Absolutely - the authority the receive from being tied to the strong root domain and from the internal links they receive from the website allows pages to rank with no third party inbound backlinks.

A lot of retail queries bring up pages ranking with only internal links - a query for [yellow dresses] in Google.co.uk has Debenhams ranking second. The site has no inbound links from other websites.

You will see this over and over again - a competitor ranking lower for that query may take on a link development project to increase their page on yellow dresses' authority over the Debenhams page, and from experience I can tell you that that can be very profitable! However, in an environment where no SEO has taken place on these pages, the pages from the strongest domain will often rank very well with no deliberate effort.

I'm assuming these internal keyword links are a lot more effective if they're only competing against 100 links instead of 400+

In theory, kind of - one link out of 100 that uses the anchor text "natural skin care" will receive a higher percentage of the available passable PageRank than one link out of 400 using the same anchor text. The link from a page with just 99 other links should not be seen as any more relevant for the phrase "natural skin care" than the link from the 400-link page though. But it should receive more of a boost for that keyphrase than if it had to share the passable authority with three times the number of targets.

I am making an assumption here, so if anyone else knows that relevancy in internal anchor text goes up along with the division of passable PageRank, please chime in!

Google doesn't have the same reverence for anchor text that it had a few years ago, but most of its efforts in not relying so much on anchor text have been focused on inbound links from other websites, rather than internal links.

Hi Joanne,

The "fewer than 100 links" quote is a little bit outdated in terms of what Google can actually handle. This article from late last year makes clear that the limit is long gone. The guideline is an okay benchmark when it comes to ensuring that you aren't overloading a page with useless or irrelevant content and links, but it's definitely not a requirement for crawling / indexing / ranking success anymore.

Your drop-down looks pretty standard to me. Some sites choose to present menus like this using JavaScript to call lower-level URLs (e.g. Hair, Face & Body + Natural Skin Care might be links in the HTML but then a JS call is required to bring up Certified Organic Skin Care, Cleansers, etc. - Google and other search engines do not traditionally execute JavaScript and thus won't see the links) but this is an increasingly unnecessary tactic, and could be detrimental if those URLs are not linked to in a crawlable manner elsewhere within the website.

Having a lot of links on a page has one "detriment" - a page does not "leak" PageRank / authority if it links out a lot, but it does mean that less PageRank passes through each link if there are hundreds of links, as opposed to 50 or 100 links. The total amount of PR that can be passed on is divided amongst more links. Again, it's important that links to all your pages be crawled so that those pages are indexed and receive authority, so I don't think you have to worry about this.

Further example: http://www.marksandspencer.com/ uses a JS-powered navigation, http://www.debenhams.com/ does not.

Hi there,

I would also seek a second opinion - there are many HTML issues that aren't troublesome enough to bother Google, and the claim that "the quality of coding makes it more difficult for Google to index the site and this may be detrimental to ranking" depends heavily on what those coding "issues" actually are. I'd rather see a list of what they say is detrimental than do a full code audit here - I'd be super curious as to what those issues supposedly are.

That list can be used as a starting point to get the second opinion of other development and SEO companies - I would certainly run the list by SEOs as well as coders, as each group knows more about their chosen field than the other. You'll get a good idea about a) what has been done sloppily and b) how Google might treat that sloppiness.

Agreed that going back to the original coders, especially for diagnosis, isn't the best idea, but if you have proof that something they did is sub-par, you might mention it to them. As DJ123 says above, don't expect a high receptive response if you do, of course!

It could be a legitimate point or it could be a way to charge for services - I'd get some full independent quotes. Perhaps even pay someone a small amount for a audit that does not come with it the chance of further work for that person. That is, the auditor has no financial incentive to find something wrong with the site.

Results are certainly displayed differently for different locations if the query is location-dependent (searching for [hospitals] from Rochester, NY in google.com will get you a very different result from doing the same thing in google.com in Sacramento).

You can change your perceived location in search settings, whether you are logged in or not: http://i.imgur.com/6xgLXAL.png

http://i.imgur.com/e9tuuua.png

Changing my location from its default (based on my IP, which Google actually gets wrong - it thinks I am an hour further south than I actually am) to a location in the north of England changes my results for such a query to reflect where I've said I am: http://i.imgur.com/GqNTKRG.png

I know there's a way to do this in an automated manner if you're building a rank checking tool (my former agency did this), but I'm afraid I don't know how to do this off the top of my head, so you're stuck with the manual option here.

I will assign this question to the Help Team as they will have more information about the IP location Moz's rank tracker crawls from.

Again, not sure what your queries are but they very much could be influenced by geo-location if they are at all dependent on a user's location.

It can do - as others have said, there is a lot you can get away with with brilliant results if you manage to go undetected, and the linking pages' metrics are good enough to fool search engines about their quality. Spam still ranks - "churn and burn" link development (where you cycle through throw-away domains, ranking one for a short period for a highly-profitable keyword, putting a new site in its place when it is penalised / banned) still legitimately works too, but is obviously not most people's idea of a great long-term business plan if they have any desire to build a brand or use their online brands offline. But if you rank top-three for [buy cialis] for two weeks with a domain you spend $9 on and link development you can spin easily for new sites, you will come away with a healthy profit.

Not saying this is what your competitor is doing, and engaging in outright spam is a bad idea if you don't plan to ditch domain after domain, but it can absolutely still work if quick rankings are all you care about.