Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Danne,

I remember reading a post about this from Barry Schwartz on seroundtable.com: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-panda-ser-hurt-comments-19652.html

Read it through, it quite describes the effect of user generated content (specially comments).

This is one specific case, I am sure that it is not a general rule for this.

Gr., Keszi

I personally do not see anything wrong with the code.

Maybe you should try that test, change it drastically then go and fetch it from Google Webmasters Tools. Let's see what happens.

Hi Lincoln,

I'd be cautious using tools that automatically generate a list for disavowing links. Instead take a day or two and go over it manually, filter out those which do look spammy. (You can use Opensiteexplorer to export your backlinks.)

Here you have a very good article from Modestos Siotos, on how to conduct a link audit.

Gr., Keszi

Hi Niners,

I wouldn't use subdomains for international website. Instead I'd use subfolders. Subdomains can be considered as totally separate websites, while using subfolders you "gather" the link juice in a more efficient way. But that is a personal opinion.

Regarding your question:

• I'd create a profile in Google Webmasters Tools for each of the subdomains/subfolders
• Do not forget the international targeting for each of the profiles
• I would submit to each of these profiles it's own language based sitemap
• if you are talking about an international website, I'd consider using Hreflang markup.

I hope this has helped.

Gr., Keszi

Additional to what David said, I would still consider leaving the comments option open (until there is no "over-usage").

Also a factor to consider (especially in Barry's case), what kind of comments do people post. Do they have a positive or a negative annotation? Are they on-topic or not?

If you have a community, like Moz has IMO, where I see a lot of good, complementing comments, responses to each of the posts, I'd consider indexing the comments.

What do you think? David, Monica?

Not yet, but planning it for a future website. I found this after I have made some research reading that article on the Moz blog

It seems it had some effect on us.

Sorry, I've forgot to detail that case:) Thanks for pointing it out.

Hi Ariel,

I have found something on Stackoverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7780859/htaccess-rewrite-to-force-trailing-slash-at-the-end

Maybe you want to check it out, if it works for you.

Gr., Keszi

Hi Victor,

IMO, there are no two identical cheesecakes. So I would not consider it as an issue, UNTIL they are not a complete copy-paste to each other.

Let's say that I have a way to cook a Hungarian goulash, and my best friend makes the "same" Hungarian goulash, but he does "personalize" it. We have two recipes, still we have two different recipes.

The way you could make it more "unique" is to let the community comment on these recipes (for ex. have a button like: "give your compliments to this chef!" and give the possibility to the users to give a personal opinion about the specific recipe. This way community members will generate the unique content to each of the recipes. (lets face it, I do not think comments will be copy-pasted to the similar recipes).

This is a personal opinion, I'd love to hear feedback from others.

Gr., Keszi

Try getting back to the basics. Create an audit for the website, for the webpages that you'd like to rank for. Check for accessibility.

For example on one of our projects a simple development error caused our new content to be hidden from search engines (a simple content tab that had an issue with Javascript).

Sometimes getting back to the basics and creating an auditing for our website could highlight issues that stop us from ranking on top 10 spots.

Totally agree. Many clients aspect to gain a lot of links without contributing with content that is really good enough to gain links to.

And if you ask for a better content, then they will just announce that your job is to get links and not to change the content they have (that happened a few times with me, and I really didn't enjoy that).

Hi Fernando,

It should not have any issues from SEO point of view.

We are using the same technique at a client's website (to distinguish easily a hungarian and a romanian version which are not the same at all - so a multilanguage implementation wouldn't have been benefitial), and both version are working fine.

So I would not worry too much about it.

Gr., Keszi

Hi Andy,

If it was me, I'd try to get rid of these links. They might have any metrics showing high DA, PA, CitationFlow, TrustFlow, or any other (depending on what tool that you use). Until they are in no way related to the target URL, they just raise the balance of spammy link in your link profile.

Let's go back and check why do we have a Penguin update at all?

If we go back in time, many link builders (not all of them), have been hunting for links, regardless the source relevancy&quality. Google had to take action and fight the web spam, that we have created (from one hand with link building).

This is my personal opinion, but I hope it does help you convince your "board" to think in quality vs quantity. Try to remind them, that just because a domain has high metrics, it is not a quality site.

I hope this was helpful, good luck!

Gr., Keszi

Alan, I agree with you on this one.

But if there is no followed link to the pages then it kind of stops the search engines to reach these pages.

But we'll see as soon as we have any testing done on this issue.

Hi Alessio,

Regarding gaining a lot of links (from agencies or from softwares) I am always getting back to the same idea:

Do you think the software or the link builder (which is payed 4$ for 100 links.... and no kidding I have heard even rougher payments in that industry) does respond on the following questions?

1. Does that link provide information, +value for the reader?
2. Is that link complementary to the content where it is placed?
3. Does the visitor, who reaches our site find what he was looking for through that link?
4. Is that link valuable for robots?

I believe that we, as online marketers we should focus for the idea of gaining more trust from both visitors(HUMANS) and Search engines(ROBOTS).

Now gaining a lot of low quality links will not harm Humans (at least not directly) but may harm robots reputation. I think you should ask yourself: Do I really want that?

I hope that helped,

Istvan

If the admin subdomain is used for any testing purposes, then I wouldn't redirect it. If there is no specific use for it, you could do a 301.

If it is used for testing purposes, then you could:

• block the crawlers
• noindex the pages (as Ryan mentioned it above)
• use canonical to the www. version

I hope it was helpful.

Gr., Keszi

Egol, you are right! Just love how you present your idea!

I was more into how to interpret the data from Moz (or any other tools in general).

Hi Levalencia,

I would recommend you two very good White-Board-Fridays by Rand Fiskin:

• http://www.seomoz.org/blog/which-...
• http://www.seomoz.org/blog/which-...

These videos will answer your question regarding link metrics.

I hope that helped,

Istvan

Hi CP,

The fact is, that I wouldn't republish those articles that were already published to article directories. There are a lot of content scrappers which use these article directories. and you don't want to publish articles that have been copied many-many times.

This is only my opinion. Start building up new content, Query Deserves Freshness will just love it

Good luck!

Istvan

Hi Michael,

I am not quite sure, but I have a gut feeling telling me it has something to do with your canonical tags. When did you implement those? (cannot run a crawl now, but I will surely check it out in the evening).

Gr., Keszi