Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Geraldine,

So, meanwhile just jumped in what would be most cost efficient implementation for the HREFLANG on your website.

Give the following article to your developer: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2620865?hl=en

Basically he will create a sitemap for each of the websites, which will indicate what is the alternate version of every single page in other languages.

You will then submit this sitemap to EACH of the Google Webmaster Tools accounts for the websites (.fr, .de, .com, etc.)

This should be the fastest and most cost efficient in your case.

Reminder: Remove the Hreflang link from current versions. It is the best to indicate alternate via only once channel.

Gr., Keszi

Hi James,

First of all you need to categorize these 404 pages, some may come from website sections that were deleted in the past, and haven't been addressed. Other 404 URLs could appear through domain redirects to your website. (unfortunately, these are harder to find, process and resolve).

For the first category (when sections have been deleted, moved, etc) you will have to ask yourself which is the correct way to resolve the issue? 301 redirect to most relevant URLs? Or just 410 and let search engines know that your page are deleted, and URLs should be removed from index. Please don't start redirecting every single 404 URL to your homepage, or any irrelevant page, or you will be creating soft 404s.

Regarding the /insertgibberishurlhere type of URLs, you should check what kind of domains are redirected to your domains (I have seen domains that had this kind of 404 not found errors via massive domain redirects to a project). First of all, if this is the case, you need to ask yourself, what are you redirecting to your website. If the domains are not in your hand, you could also redirect all of these to a 410 status code url on your website.

Oh, and the obvious version: crawl your website with tools as Screaming Frog, and make sure you are not creating the 404 URLs yourself. (almost forget about this version)

Let me know, if you have further questions.

Hi Daniel,

Having a friendly/readable url structure will surely help you in several ways.

You can read more about it here:

• http://moz.com/learn/seo/url
• http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/basics-of-search-engine-friendly-design-and-development

In the second article check the "Url construction guidelines" part.

But before you start implementation on such a development, try to check how you could avoid an url structure redesign failure. (Such as forgetting about 301 redirects from the old structure to the new one).

I hope it helped. Gr. Keszi

One good advice: don't let the frustration make you take decisions

Work hard and you will benefit from it and over rank them.

Good luck!

Istvan

Hi Luke,

I would implement a canonical in any situation where there can be parameters in the url. This way telling any search engine to only consider one (the original) version of that page.

Gr., Keszi

As Alick300 has mentioned, Pagerank is a metric that we do not use anymore.

I would advise you to check the metrics that Moz is using: PA, DA, mR, DmR, and in case you are a Pro member, you could also check mT and DmT:

1. PA: Page authority: http://moz.com/learn/seo/page-authority
2. DA: Domain authority: http://moz.com/learn/seo/domain-authority
3. mR&DmR: mozRank and domain mozRank: http://moz.com/learn/seo/mozrank
4. mT&DmT: mozTrust and domain level mozTrust: http://moz.com/learn/seo/moztrust
5. spam score: http://moz.com/blog/spam-score-mozs-new-metric-to-measure-penalization-risk

Be aware that these are only metrics and in some cases increasing these metrics doesn't necessarily mean that you will rank better: Correlation <> Causation (check the article I have linked into the spam score, by Rand).

Also you could check the whiteboard Friday: http://moz.com/blog/understanding-and-applying-mozs-spam-score-metric-whiteboard-friday

I hope this will be helpful to you.

Keszi

Hi there!

First of all, I believe that you shouldn't use both canonical and rel=prev/next. The two techniques do not work together well: "In cases of paginated content, we recommend either a rel=canonical from component pages to a single-page version of the article, or to use rel=”prev” and rel=”next” pagination markup." (quoted from http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html"

Basically you have more possibilities:

• Do not set up canonical or rel="prev/next", but use noindex, follow meta robots tag for pages 2+ (kind of old school, but still works as a charm)
• Implement Rel="Prev/Next" but without a canonical! the two elements do not work together (as mentioned above)

I think the best method for you would be to have a rel="prev/next" and have the canonical removed.

I hope this helps, Keszi

Hi OMT

I would suggest Google Analytics + SEOmoz.'s rank tracker. Perfect combination for me.

I hope that's good for you too.

Cheers!

Hi Peter,

Regarding agencies that are only working with link building I have terrible experience. I prefer to do link building with in-house people. This was it is a way easier to check what they are doing and how they acquire the links.

The problem with link building agencies is that they usually don't work on the quantity vs. quality . And although quantity is important, but quality is 1000x more important for me.

There are several SEO agencies that will tell you they will get x number of PRX links. The question is: how will those links affect your visitors? I am always trying to gain links that are win-win situations for both me and the "potential link partner", answering questions such as:

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 have left robots for the last position since I believe we should add less value to this and give more importance to visitors.

But this is one personal opinion, this is how I try to "make the web a better place".

I hope that helped,

Istvan

Hi Hiroaki,

When you have problems like this, maybe it would be advised to contact the Help Team and let them know what system you are using. Maybe they will be able to rebuild the "bug" and resolve the issue faster.

You can contact the help team at help@seomoz.org

Gr.,

Istvan

Hi Remko,

First of all I would check for the domains that I want to buy and redirect for relevancy and their backlink profile.

The example you gave:

Fietstassen.eu - > Loodgieter.nl for me it was a little strange. (Correct me, if I am wrong, but Fietstassen is bicycle bags? and Loodgieter is repair/handy man?).

I did not check in details what kind of link profile Fietstassen has, but if my dutch isn't cheating on me, I might have a feeling that it has collected non-relevant links to your target website.

As for your first example: Glaspunt.nl -> Glas.nl if I get it right, these two seem to be in the same industry, so buying glaspunt.nl could be an idea.

As in general:

If you buy a domain, just to redirect and gather their link juice:

1. look for relevancy first.
2. check that domains backlink profile (just to be safe. if it only has a spammy link profile, I do not know if it would be a good idea to point it towards your project)
3. if the domain that you are buying would be more relevant to a category of your website, I'd redirect it towards there instead of homepage.

I hope this helped.

Gr., Keszi

Hi Emerald,

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

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/which-link-metrics-should-i-use-part-1-of-2-whiteboard-friday

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/which-link-metrics-should-i-use-part-2-of-2-whiteboard-friday

In these two Rand talks about a few tricks and tips how to use the link metrics.

I believe if you watched these videos you will gain the answer to your question.

I hope that helped,

Istvan

Hi Donnie,

I believe that this is depending in what niche you are. Because your friend might be right in his niche, but there are businesses who drive converting organic traffic.

To be more precise, just check a few website's conversion rate from organic and paid entries. What you will see is that depending on the niche (geo-location, targeted genders, targeted age groups, etc.) websites will have very different statistics.

It is kind of rough to state that PPC visits are converting better in general.

This is my opinion.

I hope I have opened another "door"

Istvan

P.S. Hopefully I didn't misunderstand the question

Hi Jeff,

First of all, as previously mentioned in another question of yours I would recommend redirecting from non-www to www or vice-versa. And after that using only one version of the URL to link to your website.

Now related to this question: I wouldn't bother myself with PR.

If working with directory listings I would go to the most popular ones from my business niche. For example here on SEOmoz we have a list of web directories which were recommended by mozzers: http://www.seomoz.org/directories

I would recommend you to read through the short text on that page, it will give you on overview where to submit your listing.

Greetings,

Istvan

Hi Emmanuel,

If you want to have a quick crawl then maybe it would be smart to use: http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/crawl-test

I am not aware of starting a new crawl faster with the campaign which you already set up.

Gr.,

Istvan

Hi there,

Basically you are saying that you'd like to host every language on different domains. That shouldn't be an issue. If the text is translated, you could even create a sitemap for language targeting and submit it. This way Google will know that Page A is a translated version to english of Page B.

You can read more about the HREFLANG here: http://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag

There is also a tool for generating the correct sitemaps, which will make your job easy. You can check it here: http://www.themediaflow.com/tool_hreflang.php

I hope it helped, Keszi

Hi Cody,

image alt tags serve as anchor text if you use images as links.

I hope that answered your question.

Gr.,

Istvan

Hi TBiz,

The fact with these website is the following: they have a lot of sitewide links (link that appear on more then one page of the linking website). For ex, footer links (such as "created by" or "designed by", etc.), advertising which appears on each page, etc.

Although it can drive a big number of inbound links, I would still go and ask the question of quantity vs. quality? Which one is better for a website? (If it would be me, I would choose quality).

I hope that helped,

Istvan

Hi Christian,

Every single tool has it's own index and indexing procedure. Some have a better link discovery than others. This specifically doesn't mean that a tool in general is better than the other one.

Before paying for any tool, I believe you should make a research for what are you going to use that specific tool.

It might be, that ahrefs, majestic have better link discovery, but Moz is better on the on-site issue discovery... and it helps you resolve that issue quite fast.

If you would like to know more about how OSE link discovery works, you can read more about it in Moz's help hub: http://moz.com/help/guides/research-tools/open-site-explorer (check the FAQ also).

I hope this clears up some questions you had.

Gr., Keszi

Matt, thanks for the credits!

double thumbs up on your statement regarding link building: "remember that link building is always about quality, not quantity."

Gr.,

Istvan