Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Pinterest! Growing like crazy and I've finally found a spot for the hundreds of images that didn't make sense to put in a photo album that no one would see. You'll get hundreds of repins and followers and I'd suspect it's going to help SEO more and more. Connect it to your FB and twitter and g+ accounts for maximum cross social networking.

Cleaning up the website by consolidating pages - each with a little bit of useful info -  into one definitive page that is really useful and full of good content.

Doing 301's from the many old pages to the one new really good one. Didn't want to do rel canonicals because I don't want the old pages around, I want to get rid of them.

Will google see the 301s and go nuts or see that there is one definitive, really good page with no duplicate content? The change is very good from a user perspective.

Also, On-Page Report Cards on SEOMoz suggests that you put a rel canonical on a page to itself to tell google that this page is the definitive page. What do you think?

Thanks so much for anyone who has time to answer - so many gurus - this is a great forum. - jean

Hi Dunamis -

I just don't know, and I don't want to blame my competitor. But the 250,000 crappy links from sites with home pages loaded with hundreds of  links and pictures of Lady gaga happened almost to the day of our rankings tanking. And no google update has ever effected us nearly as much. And my other site that shares hundreds of links back and forth to this one on a similar topic was virtually uneffected.  (It does not have the treash links.)

I fully take responsibility for the possibility that I need to improve the site for google, but I still wonder about the huge number of bad neighborhood links going into the site.And the coincidental dump in rankings.

Oh, I didn't  mention, the links appear and reappear. One day they are not there, then they are back a few days later.

Thanks so much for any suggestions.

This happened to me and it has been a nightmare. Our google rankings have tanked, the quality scores on our pages in adwords have tanked, and our several dozen top three organic links from the very best keywords for our market have dumped below our competitor.

Coincidentally, our main competitor has taken over the top positions that we used to hold. And he recently hired a firm to get him "guaranteed top positions on your keywords." And his incoming links have increased, mostly from places that you pay to get links from, but still, after ten years of no links in, he's gotten more than we have (real links, not the 250,000+ spam links. I can't help but wonder if this is a new method of trashing the top ranking sites. And I don't have a clue how to stop it.

I haven't contacted google, thinking that it happened around the time of Panda and we needed to make changes, but it's getting worse and worse. Now google is showing "block all results from this site" option when our results are shown.

If anyone has managed to recover from this mess, I'd love to hear about it. We've been online since 1997, still get over 5000 unique visits a day, and have lots and lots of great original content. I've never used black hat methods, never even used Adwords as we've had such good organic rankings.

I have about 500 products with multiple urls for the same product, but different versions. I sell wine and have a different page for each vintage. I've decided that is not the best way to go, and want to point the older vintage pages to the latest version page, and make that the only page for the  product as time goes on.

Do I have to put a link in the text from each older page to the newer, or can I use a 301 to redirect them to the new page? I don't want google to think I'm pulling something funny.

We had an SEO guru at our etailing meeting yesterday and he said the problem is DUPLICATE pages, not the number. He told a woman with 4000 pages not to worry about nofollows unless there were duplications.

Just a thought, but I'd make sure there aren't any incoming links to those pages. I don't know if google would see them on a nofollow page. And we know how much we love incoming links1

My main competitor has recently jumped above my site in google's organic listings. After consulting with an SEO guru who spent quite a bit of time looking at his site and mine, he says that in his opinion it turns out that the big difference is the increase in his number of incoming links. He's gone from 5 to over 50 in a month.

There are very few incoming links that relate to what we do, or are from sites that might be expected to link to him. There are a lot of directory links.

He bought a listing in yahoo directory, but the big change is a bunch of links coming in from various sites through mamma.com - it looks like it is part of a company called "affinity" - and they are selling an "extensive network of premium publisher partners". In other words, incoming links from a bunch of search and marketing sites.

If he wasn't succeeding, I wouldn't bother to ask, but since it appears that these links are giving him sufficient juice to get above me our competitive the organic keyword (after over ten years and no improvement to his site's content) I have to explore it a bit.

Has anyone heard of this mamma.com/affinity company? They offer to give you "an expert" to help with your personal campaign, but they also want your credit card and a commitment to $25 before you get to the "good" pages. Somehow they don't seem to be attracting google's attention. Should I be exploring this further and considering signing up?

I know the general rule is to avoid this kind of thing but he's having some real success.

Thanks!

Jean

I could go widget crazy with my website, there are so many cool buttons and linking this and likes and etc.

There's one that is used a lot, called "Addthis" that adds a series of small icons to share a page via facebook, twitter, etc. The javascript looks innocent enough, but there's a link, and who knows what google makes of it.

Then there are the dozen or so Facebook widgets - are they safe to use without negative SEO consequences?

Does anyone know of any other pitfalls with using the numerous addons offered free to enhance your site?

Thanks for any wisdom out there!

Jean

I have over 250,000 links into my site that I did not ask for, did not buy, and frankly, do not want. Some are from pages covered with links, some are from what look like "normal" websites.

I'm afraid these crazy links are going to destroy my credibility with google. My site has been up since 1997, and I've never had anything like this happen before. If I follow your argument correctly, you are saying that I should be blacklisted?

But I did nothing NOTHING to get these links in. There are links from about sixty sites into my site - links I asked for and from high quality sites. The rest are all just there, I had nothing to do with it.

Any expertise you could offer would be deeply appreciated. I wake up having nightmares about these links.

Thank you very much. You've been very generous with your knowledge. It is most appreciated. Now it's time to get on to the coding!

Jean

I sell wine from Oregon, so I'm thinking of dividing the wineries up into regions/AVAs, one AVA on each page.

I'm afraid people might have a hard time finding the winery they are looking for, so maybe I should supplement the regional pages with a "search" page listing all the wineries with links, maybe putting a no follow on that page, figuring that I don't care if that page is spidered.

Good ideas or not so good?

I know how to do a css menu that looks the same as my javascript pulldown, but aren't I going to run into the same problem with too many links on the page?

Thanks so much you are very helpful.

I've had the same pull down menus on my site since 1998! I guess it's time to try something new.

I have a javascript dropdown menu on every page of my site. It lists all the wineries I write about and sell. About 300 links.  I've been told that google doesn't like so many links on a page, but that it doesn't spider javascrpt. Then I hear that it does.

Am I being penalized by all the links? Or does the spider really not see them?

I don't want to give up my javascript menus, unless I have to. Should I put a no follow on each link inside the code?

And on the other hand, am I losing google juice by not letting it see all the pages on my site that I link to in the javascript menu?

Thanks in advance for your help!

I'm removing old products (wines)  from my site, and I've been using 301 redirects for each product page back to the winery page. My question is, am I using best practice? I want people who search for these now nonexistent products to go to the winery page where they will see what is now available. But does google approve?

I've also tried leaving the product's page intact but saying that it is no longer available and putting a link in the text that points to the winery page.

Which is better, in the eyes of the god google?

Thanks!