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Gotcha, i already disavowed their entire domain do you think it would be more effective disavowing each URL that they have listed in GWT?

Thanks for the response Andy!

Yes we have seen a decent amount of links get removed, close to 600. However none from this blog network that was the largest culprit. It was just driving me crazy that we got them removed but Google is still showing them there if i do a query of site:blog.com + "brand name"

I just wish there was a way to make Google recrawl that blog indepth rather than waiting, which on that point, what happened to Google cached pages?

I have a new client who has been fighting to get past an unnatural links penalty. One of the biggest reasons behind it was that they paid to get a followed link/ad on a blog network, well this ad ended up being a site wide link which ended up giving them thousands of back links within a few days.

After getting the owner of the blog network to remove the link i manually spot checked a handful of pages and used screaming frog to crawl looking for a link referencing their site. From what i can tell they are all gone. However they are still in Google Webmaster Tools as well as Google's index and it has been a couple months since they have been removed.

Does anyone have any advice on getting them removed from Google's entities even though they are already off of the website?

Thank you in advance,
Kyle

I agree... essentially if they would like to rank they would have to work on the content (both targeting and freshness), building additional links, and increasing social mentions and presence.

Good point on the title tag, definitely want to make them read more organically and natural. Perhaps instead something like: Disaster Restoration Experts > Serving Ohio and Indiana.

Noah it looks like you are heading down the right track:

• Your site is indexed in Google/Yahoo (24 pages which seems like all pages)
• You have a great diversity in your anchor text
• Your domain authority is low but if it is a new site it should not be surprising
• All of your content is in search engine crawlable content types, including the navigation
• You have a properly formatted robots and XML sitemap

My suggestion is find a way to keep your content fresh moving forward. Perhaps like a blog or articles section on your website where you can begin targeting longer tailed content themes. Also, keep working on your outreach especially on social. Perhaps offer a social referral bonus for customers who refer a friend on a social network?

Keep up the good work!

• Kyle

What you will want to do is set a custom filter under configuration to look for your specific Google Analytics account profile number and set it as "does not contain". Once you have that custom filter set, run the crawl pointing at your site. Once it is fully complete check out the custom tab and any pages missing your tracking code will be listed.

Also, keep in mind, in order to use this functionality you have to have the paid version of the tool.

Good Luck!

• Kyle

Ben, just to make sure i understand your question. Are you asking if there is a way to make sure that Google Analytics tracking is working/installed correctly OR if Google Analytics tracking is accurate?

If it is the installation side a few steps you can take to double check are:

• Use a crawler like Screaming Frog to check and see what pages do not have the script on it.
• Build a test page on your site with the code and measure to see how accurate the visits and unique visits are.

If it is the accurate side a few steps you can take are:

• Installing another tracking software like Get Clicky to have an extra set of data to compare.
• Ask your developer/system admin to pull your server logs to compare entries

Hope this helps!

• Kyle

Thanks for the input Cyrus!

If your interested, here is what ended up happening:
It turned out that my colleague, the person who was pressuring me to find the research,  had read some hubspot powerpoints that talked about the size of your website and how much inbound traffic you can receive, rather than the size of your website being a ranking factor. So this was my response back:

It sounds like we are both trying to answer a slightly different question. I was looking for “Does a site’s size determine its ability to rank in search engines". You were looking for “Does a site’s size effect the amount of traffic it receives”

While they both seem very similar they are quite different. In regards to a site’s size being a ranking factor I would disagree. A site’s ability to rank for a given term is based on its external linking factors, social mentions and on-page targeting. This is why even smaller websites and companies can be competitive for individual keyword terms. However I would completely agree that a site’s size does give you a better opportunity to gain more overall traffic because there is more content to be indexed in search engines and shared across social networks, blogs, directories, etc..

In the end they decided to take the suggestion and combine the product and demo pages to help increase their page's authority and in turn its ranking position.

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

You shouldn't receive any penalties if you are redirecting relevant domains that are associated to your brand. If you are worried that they are not relevant or could be tied to spam you may be better to 302 redirect those specific ones but it all depends on the domains and how you acquired them.

I don't believe it is a Penguin issue, especially if your LinkDetox (love this tool!) came back clean.

Instead it sounds like you have a MAJOR duplicate content issue. If you have a couple hundred masked domains pointing at content all over your website then to Google it looks like you are publishing the same information across multiple websites which is against their search quality terms.

Without knowing the reasoning to mask so many domains my first suggestion would be to 301 redirect all of them to the location that they are currently masked keeping just one core domain that they all resolve to. After that i would create a brand new XML sitemap and upload it to your GWT to notify Google of all the changes you made.

Hope this helps!

• Kyle

Hey Justin, it is a pretty long and specific process. However there is close to 50 different blogs and articles published on MOZ alone for it. I'd start here:

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Amoz.com%2Fblog%2F+%2B+unnatural+link+removal

Hope this helps!

• Kyle

Great point on the unnatural anchor text, that would definitely have a greater effect in regards to top 50 rank. After clearing up your link profile the content portion will get you the rest of the way.

You can take this analysis with a grain of salt since it only entailed around 5 minutes of my time but i think it has to do with the percent of unique content to ads on your page. I clicked through around a few articles in the formula one section and all of them had close to 6-7 paid advertisements (mostly above the fold) and only a few sentences of copy.

Then taking it to the next level the page load time was relatively slow but it seemed almost all to do with the advertisements slowing the load time (using fiddler to inspect). My advice, either limit down the amount of advertising you are running on actual article pages OR write more and higher quality content.

Best of luck!

• Kyle

Thanks for all the feedback guys!

It still just sounds more like a correlation rather than causation. The idea that often larger sites are doing the right activities to get higher ranks (branding, cross channel marketing, RCS, etc.) rather than the fact that they just have a large site.

I really wish that there was some more definitive research out there other than just gut feelings.

• Kyle

The Scenario:
Currently one of my clients has 7-8 products that they sell on their website. For each product they have two different pages one with the product info and one with a video demo. So the pages began to split their authority as they began receiving new links. Since only one of the two pages for each product rank i suggested that we combine the two and redirect the video page to the product page to increases it's authority and rank.

The Clients Response:
After explaining my reasoning and next steps the client mentioned that he thought a site's size was a ranking factor. I had never heard of this before so i told them i would do some research to prove my point, after a little digging around i am now even more confused.

• http://www.seroundtable.com/google-size-ranking-17044.html
• http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4591155.htm

The Question:
Does a websites size/amount of content indexed in Google actually effect your sites ability to rank?

I look forward to everyones feedback, thanks

• Kyle

Good point on the a/b testing, perhaps i move forward with that first to help build some data to support my case. I agree to the end user pop-ups are terrible but i am still intrigued if any data supports it is terrible for SEO?

Well if you know that the frame is already indexed you can do a site search of the frame and see what it looks like as well as the last cached date. The query would look something like this:

site:example.com/iframe-page.html

This will give you the page that Google has indexed. If you are going have the pages not be indexed i really so no SEO value into adding a hyperlink pointing to the frame itself (why build its authority if it is not in the SERPS?). So i would really just take into account the end users experience. If they can already see the framed content, why have a link that just shows it again?

If you are able to share some URLs i might be able to give some more specific answers, thanks!

• Kyle

Since you have control over it you have a few options to help give the best experience for end users. The first update would be adding the following META tag to your iframe  section:

This will allow search engines to crawl the page, follow the links and pass authority BUT keep from indexing them in the search engines. From there if each page is only being framed in on one page you could also include a canonical tag to pass the authority to the higher level page that would be better for end users. However, if it is framed into multiple different pages that approach probably wouldn't not work.

Let me know if that makes sense or if i miss understood your question, thanks!

• Kyle