Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Tobias - how are you checking 404s, are you using SEOMoz crawl diagnostics?

If so, export the CSV! Many people dont do this yet there is a plethora of info there.

1. Open the csv, and sort by the "4xx" column so that all of the 'TRUE' cell values are at the top.
2. Delete / Hide / Move all columns except: URL, 4xx, TIME CRAWLED and REFERRER

Now you can see which URLs are 404,'ing, how the crawl found them (where the link is that sent the crawler there) and what time it crawled (in case youve fixed it since.

Its easy and its thorough.

Definitely to reiterate Dana, need more info about the specifics because yes there could be disastrous effects if not done properly.

Besides meta refresh, there are other things to consider. Probably most importantly is the positioning of the home page in search results for the 'product'. If you are ranking top 5 for your product keywords, and the ranking page is your home page, you may find that when you rework your home page to reflect your brand, you lose that positioning.

If you were moving from one landing page to another (i.e. /products to say /products/buy, it would be a bit different because you could 301 the /products page and officially tell Google and other SEs that you are simply moving the page. You cannot, obviously, do this with the root domain (301) or that would defeat the branding purpose.

I would definitely check positioning and revenue for your money keywords first. Also, once you move the product, i would at the very least have a link in the main navigation of the home page that links directly to the product with the appropriate anchor. If you only have one product, or one product set, i would also encourage you to optimized the URL (i.e. instead of /product it could be /

Still need more info to make solid recommendations.

Hi jdcline -

Would probably need a bit more info to provide an answer. Obviously you are aware of the Penguin update last Friday (http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change).

My initial response wants to be that you should create pillar pages where the home page links to 10 or so main categories, and then those pages link to next level pages, instead of linking to all sites from the home page.

Definitely need more info though - does each page, link to every other page (50)?  Are the links to the 50 pages from the home page in the footer? Top navigation?

SEO's are wary and for good reason - it wasn't long ago that 'footer' links was an over-used tactic that was quashed, resulting in the start of the 'blogroll' type links. Like I said, opinions are going to differ wildly for different SEO's on this one. For us, when we work a client, we know and control their link profile so we know that their site(s) are very clean. As such, we feel that having a footer link to our business (just as web design companies do) that we are not at risk.

Like you, we see this everywhere in our competitor link profiles and in fact, we see large variations in local ranking when there are links added or removed from their or our local clients.

So it's going to be your call in the end - opinions will differ, and even I might change my mind within the next few months depending on what happens in the SE Algo world. But for now this is a practice we are actively using.

Hi Mickel -

The answer is both. Keep your html sitemap, and keep the link in the footer as is. Crawlers will look at these but they are generally more for human visits.

Then create your xml sitemap (www.url.com/sitemap.xml) and verify it in Google Webmaster Tools.

Hope this helps!

CMC is correct - thats how I do it for larger sites.

1. delete all columns except the URL column (col A) and the duplicate pages column (now Col B)
2. in cell C2, enter this formula:  =len(b2)  it will calculate the characters in dupe pages cell
3. drag that cell down to last row
4. select all three columns and sort col c by largest to smallest

Obviously this isn't going to give you an exact number of dupe pages since URL text strings can vary in length, but it does give you a pretty good idea of the worst offenders....

Exactly - as a goal presents multiple difficulties. Im not sure if theres a quick answer to that one but Id like to know!

Do you mean tacking Adwords visits that go to another page, and then convert? If you just want to see what your adwords visitors are doing once they hit the landing page, just use Visitor flow and select AD Group in the drop down. It will tell yo where they land, where they go, and where they exit.  Hope this helps..

You can always check by testing in your browser but the best way is to check the header response to make sure the server is sending the proper response (a 301) - your landing pages look good (see below). I use Live HTTP Headers which is a firefox plugin - hers what it tell you:

http://pharmacy777.com.au/our-pharmacies/applecross-village/

GET /our-pharmacies/applecross-village/ HTTP/1.1
Host: pharmacy777.com.au
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0; rv:15.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/15.0.1
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Thu, 04 Oct 2012 03:23:17 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.22 (Ubuntu)
Location: http://www.pharmacy777.com.au/our-pharmacies/applecross-village/

So the redirect is working. The only thing i noticed was that the home page instantly switched to www and didnt even return a 301 so it appears you may have implemented a redirect there outside of htaccess.

If your report is still showing duplicates make sure that its not the trailing slash. Your URLs can be loaded as such:

http://www.pharmacy777.com.au/our-pharmacies/applecross/

http://www.pharmacy777.com.au/our-pharmacies/applecross

The best way to find out if the SEOMoz report is counting these as dupes is to Export the crawl report to CSV (top right of crawl report). Then go all the way to the far right column called 'duplicate pages' and sort it alphabetically. This column will show you all of the duplicate urls for each particular URL row. Lots of times you can find little 'surprises' here - that csv report is priceless!

Update: Reporting can be historic - so you are probably looking at a report from an older crawl.

Hi Claire - we need the url of your site to check the headers on the 301 redirect!

Definitely a good way to fix this is via htaccess like you are suggesting you did. When I get a new client its in the campaign startup list and it works well. Make sure there arent any other issues like the infamous trailing slash causing duplication. If you provide the URL a quick check can be made.

Ive never got used to using allow although I know many people do. I simply use:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Sitemap: http://www.aa-rental.com/

Where user agent * means all crawlers;

Where disallow: /cgi-bin/ means i dont want them crawling that folder (put in any folder name there) but they can crawl anywhere else...

Sitemap: points to my XML sitemap

Don't look for a question mark, go to the site's profile and look for an email - it will tell you that Google has found unnatural links. Keep in mind that sometimes these emails come 4 or 5 days after the [penalty has been applied.You may have to wait a few days (unless this happened some time ago).

If it's Penguin you wont get a notification. Others may disagree but the Penguin recoveries Ive performed were almost exclusively due to a higher than "natural" appearance of keyword anchor text links in the link profile. If you check your backlinks in OSE, and find that you have a high percentage of links that all use your money kw, then yo will need to have those backlinks diversified.

This is an age old question (kind of). Your answer lies lies in weighing the pros and cons of redirection and consolidation. The questions you need to ask are:

1. Are there inbound links targeting any of the 'old' pages in question. To find out, use OSE.

2. Are the "old" pages that are still in the index, ranking for anything of value? Use Analytics CONTENT > LANDING PAGES to check and make sure "old" pages aren't getting visits.

If 1. is yes, then you should look at the value of those links - if there are some really good ones (old, from pages with high domain authority, etc) then I would consider making a request to those webmasters that the link be changed to the new page URL. This is a courtesy most webmasters will acknowledge since it saves them having a dead link on their website.  If the answer is no, and there are no inbound links proceed to #2!

If 2. is yes, then you should definitely make sure that all inbound links have been changed to the new page before redirecting. However, in addition to redirecting, also make sure that the page you are redirecting to is similar in nature. If the ranking page has a lot of good content, then make sure the new page does as well, etc. I

Sry guys - must have posted while others were writing. Even if you didn't get the original email - if Google is saying you have unnatural links, then you need to deal with that problem. Submitting recon makes no difference if you dont get rid of the bad links

You will almost certainly need to take action by linkmining your website, identifying 'unnatural' links or links from blatantly bad neighborhoods, submit requests for removal from the webmasters, and so on. Document all of your work and then add that information in with your reconsideration request. If you do not put the work in you will not get a positive response.

Hi Scott -

Eyepaq has it right in that you need to understand if you are under a manual penalty or an algorithmic penalty to know exactly what course of action to take.

Manual Penalty - You'll get an email in WMT if you are under penalty, This will be due to bad links. You will need to clean up your links, and then open that email and click on the 'reconsideration request' link.

Algorithmic - You'll usually see a sudden drop in positioning, in some cases it will affect a string of your best keyword variations while other low lying fruit as it were still rank well. For this penalty, check anchor text % first, then go through the other penguin stuff (you can find tons of info in the SEOMoz blog). There is a form online you can use if you "feel your website was unfairly demoted" but I am no longer sure of its efficacy.

Position 46 > 50 or vice versa. This really means nothing at all so don't take it as an indicator. Google is always messing around so 4 positions out of 50 is insignificant. For example, your site used to be top 10, but when it moved to 50, about 40 websites moved "up" a spot. Consistent movement from week to week is a better indicator.

Honestly, at first glance most SEO's would probably say this is a bad idea, particularly with Penguin - the problem is, it seems to work.  I know as an SEO when i do competitive analysis, some of our competitors have thousands of links that read:

SEO by

And they certainly rank for their respective terms. Opinions may differ with some SEO professionals here, but I would argue that unless you have seen a significant decline in positioning for the anchored text, I wouldn't be concerned about it and would venture to say that it's probably a positive strategy. The best part about links like these (we do this as well) is that for the most part, the links are usually very clean.

Hope that helps.

Hi Ilya, I replied to another recent question so Im pretty sure I know you're dilemma

From what we are seeing, averaging thresholds where your kw anchor is less than 20%, and then using Brand & URL, as well as others "click here" to fill in the rest. Brand is good I still wouldn't exceed a threshold of 30% on any one keyword. So for example, a company called Sparkling Flooring, we would use Sparkling Flooring no more than 30%, www.sparklinkflooring.com around 30% (but you can go higher with URLs, we just choose not to), and no more than 20% on 'hardwood flooring', etc.

Combined with excellent unique copy, a good information section like a blog or installation tips section, and other good Optimization techniques, and youre golden.

Official SEOMoz complaint: I never did receive my hug from Roger. Just saying...

Update: Hug received via Twitter!

The user content links are the ones that are putting you 'over the threshold' - just as would be the case if those were products on an ecomm site - in my opinion I would completely disregard that warning for the paginated pages.