Welcome to the Q&A Forum

1. Are they passing bad link juice?
Yes, if you 301 redirected a website/page you bring over both the good and the bad link equity with it.

2. does Google consider links to a sub-domain being passed through a 301 to be bad links to our primary domain?
Refer to question 1

3. The best approach to having these links removed?
Have you received a unnatural links warning in GWT yet? If not you maybe safe with waiting it out. If you are trying to cut it off before that happens i would start with running a LinkDetox report (only $50 and totally worth it). They will define the toxic links, from there i would disavow them.

Hope this helps!

• Kyle

I asked this same question a little while back and got some great responses:

http://moz.com/community/q/shared-hosting-bad-for-seo-exp-godaddy

Hope this helps!

• Kyle

First i would check to see if the update you made to the pages have been recognized by Google. You can do this simply by doing a "site:www.domain.com" search, then view the cached page. If you find that it has not been recognized, you can always resubmit a new xml sitemap to your webmaster tools. In the past i have seen this help speed up the process.

How long ago did you make these updates?

The drop in organic traffic for your partner's sites is directly related to the canonical links. Before i can give advice on how to solve the problem i first need to know, what is the reason for the duplicate content?

Quick question, can Googlebot (or other search engines) follow meta refresh tags? Does it work anything like a 301 in terms of passing value to the new page?

Recently i have found that the data in the trifecta report is becoming less complete. For the last few sites i found that the report returned about half of the metrics it was looking for.

For instance, it mentioned that one of the domains did not have a dmoz or wikipedia link/page even though they had both? Also, it rarely returns the Yahoo Site Explorer metrics even though when clicking to see the source the data is there?

Are you guys planning on phasing out this tool, if not it seems like some work needs to be done on cleaning it up.

Thanks!

I have a client that picked up a bunch of keyword rich domain names and he wants to point them to his current corporate site as domain aliases.

Could this in anyway negatively or positively effect his SEO? or ranking?

Thanks  - Kyle Chandler

In my experiences with on page optimizations never choose more than 1-2 keywords to target on a page. You should have one short tail and one long tail keyword at most. For instance, your homepage should be targeted to "Boston Cosmetic Dentist," after that you shouldn't have it focused on any other pages for risk of keyword cannibalization. Then for your teeth whitening page. Have your short tail keyword be "Teeth Whitening" and your long tail be "Boston Teeth Whitening."

It is important to cater your website to the user not the search engine. Simply adding dentist three times in your title and h1 tag will do no more for you thank listing it once in your title and h1.

Good luck!

Since you didn't receive any penalties this may be tied to an algorithm change, however that is something pretty tough to prove. If you can check their analytics and see if the drop was inline with any updates listed here http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change. Above and beyond that here are some more specific answers to some of your questions:

What would be my best recourse to fix the Spam link problem? I would first define what parts of your link profile is related to spam. A great tool to use for this is called LinkDetox and it is only $40 per site that is totally worth it. From there i would suggest disavowing any sites that are flagged as toxic.

**Also in today's Google,  what is considered a spam link? **
Some red flags would be any website that is not indexed in Google, has a domain moztrust below 2, and if the content is not focused/randomly generated.

Should I just link to his business name, or to a Keyword like Edmonton Real Estate Agent?
Make it as natural as possible. If you are linking back to a portion of the website about home loan questions, use that as anchor text. Or if it is the contact page perhaps use "contact edmonton real estate". Now-a-days you want to keep the end user in mind almost more so than the search engines.

Is there anything I can do about the expired link pages?
Actually this is a good thing - if it was a spam link and it has expired all the hard work has been done for you in the removal

Hope this helps - Kyle

There are many possible reasons. Try resubmitting a new xml sitemap to Google Webmaster tools and that should speed up the process.

SInce i can remember the SEOMoz toolbar didn't display Google's PageRank, just DA and PA. However, as far as i know Google is still using this. If you are a pro member then you have access to the historic page rank tracker:

http://www.seomoz.org/toolbox/pagerank

You would probably need more information than just looking at the client side. The only way that could work out is if the file extensions were .aspx or .php or something like that.

Essentially what i was getting to, is you would set the redirect differently depending on what type of hosting you are using. If it was microsoft base you would set it in IIS, while if it was linux based you would added it to your root .htacess file.

Hope that helped!

First check to see if the site has been reindexed in Google's cache (this link can be found in the site preview box in the SERPs, it actually gives you the last crawl date). This will tell you if your updates have been reviewed by Google. If they still haven't, then its a waiting game. Rasmus does bring up a valid point with resubmitting an XML sitemap, i have seen that speed up the process as well.

Good Luck - Kyle

Do Google penalties EVER pass through a 301?

Yes. 301 redirects make sure end users, search bots and link equity are passed to the new page. It is true though that not all link equity is passed with a 301, however good or bad it is passed. I have found this out with my own testing with clients as well as a few post i found on SEO round table and Google groups.

Does anyone have any clue why my links shot up so quickly and then dropped?

Where you tracking your external links use OSE? If so they crawl a different amount of domains and URLs each time they update their index so chances are you are looking at different data sets each time.

It took a look at the page (machu picchu travel), agreed that your on-page is looking good and your domain authority is pretty solid as well to rank at that difficulty. However you only seem to have a total of 6 links going to this page, all internal links.

Continue working on building those internal links with the descriptive anchor text but more importantly try and get some external links to these pages. As you begin to get more external links you will build up your page's authority and in turn a higher rank.

I noticed that you had a few links form your blog, are those pages ranking at all?

I agree the campaign tool is great... However there is a week long lag to get results. Sometimes you need it in a matter of minutes and the rank tracker tool did that perfectly, until now.

Is there any chance the lag time could be changed for ranking results?

I definitely agree going down to one domain is a good plan and janmi is correct. You will want to make sure you redirect your specific language site to the relevant directory. In regards to increasing your rankings, focus on your on-page optimizations for each language. I am currently going through this myself and got some great feedback a couple weeks ago:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/international-seo-3

In regards to tracking your success, use your analytics to track the increase of traffic per language with an advanced segment of non-paid search.

Good luck!

Shaun - Also, keep in mind over-optimization. There where over 50+ Google algorithm updates in March alone & a handful of them where related to spammy on-page content and freshness. So if you have a lot of keyword stuffing or haven't added new content in a while, this could play a role in the drop.

Which leads me to the question, did you see a drop across all organic or just Google?

Hope this helps, cheers!

Kyle Chandler

Well i took a look at your site's link metrics using majestic seo and it looks like you have some pretty limited link metric's for your site currently. Chances are you aren't seeing an error with OSE or Google's PageRank, you just simply don't have enough back links yet. (No worries though, there is always room for improvement!)

Remember it takes OSE around 2-3 months at times to notice new links if they see it at all. I would suggest using someone like majestic or google's webmaster tools to measure the amount of links as you start off.

As for how to build your links, here is a great place to start: http://www.seomoz.org/pages/search_results?q=link+building

Good luck - Kyle

That would be a great start. There was a recent WBF that gave some great ideas to build links with email marketing campaigns that is definitely worth a read:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/using-emails-to-build-links-whiteboard-friday

Also, try and get some links from your high authority pages across your domain pointing to these. That will definitely help pass some link juice along.

Good luck - Kyle