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The objection is that those links pass more authority/PR. Therefore the hesitation to remove them is that SEO pages will lose authority. I know this isn't true, but am having a hard time getting others to come to the light side.

Of course, no problem! Maybe a comparison of before and after MozBar PA for a couple of the top performing SEO pages? Not sure if that's the best KPI for this test, but it's a rather difficult thing to measure...just throwing out some ideas on how I intend to measure when I'm able to run a similar test.

Thanks for your feedback.

I've done the research to prove that people don't use them, but still unable to convince my opponents of the lack of true SEO value in terms of authority, PR, page discovery, etc.

Thanks for your feedback.

I totally agree with all 3 of your points, especially the comment regarding better ways to tackle internal linking.

Thanks for your feedback.

Glad to hear I'm not the only one dealing with this debate! Would you mind sharing any data you collect on your test once you have enough to be conclusive?

We have an internal debate going on right now about the use of a link list of SEO pages in the footer.

My stance is that they serve no purpose to people (heatmaps consistently show near zero activity), therefore they shouldn't be used. I believe that if something on a website is user-facing, then it should also beneficial to a user - not solely there for bots. There are much better ways to get bots to those pages, and for those people who didn't enter through an SEO page, internal linking where appropriate will be much more effective at getting them there.

However, I have some opposition to this theory and wanted to get some community feedback on the topic.

Anyone have thoughts, experience, or data to share on this subject?

For future reference, if you've got the Moz bar installed in your browser, all you need to do is click the pencil/marker icon and select the "Nofollowed (pink)" option. All nofollow links on that page will be highlighted.

Awesome, you should see those dupe errors go away on your next crawl report!

It looks like you chose the non-www route, in that case, you'll want to update those canonical tags to point to the same.

It's good to have those canonicals, but they don't quite function the same way as the non-www redirect. Check out this article, you should have something in your htaccess file that actually redirects those, so non-www always redirects (or vice versa if you choose).

To use Moz as an example of how this should function, watch the URL bar when you click this link: http://www.moz.com/.

Hi,

Generally speaking, any link that takes users off of your site should open in a new tab. If you send them away in the same tab, they're probably not coming back to your site. Especially with social media, they're likely to get distracted with something else and forget about what they were doing in the first place.

Nice, a fellow tarheel!

On both of those sites, I'm able to view both www and non-www versions. I do think configuration of the sites isn't setup properly. Also, in running a site:heritageprinting.com search in Google yields both www and non-www versions of pages.

That's strange, I don't know of anyway to manually remove that from the report. You could setup a new campaign with just the www version, but that's not optimal because then you'd lose your historical data.

Is this for the Heritage Printing website?

Hi,

Moz is actually doing part of what it was designed to do, notify you of duplicate content issues, which has pretty serious ramifications. One version should always redirect to the other version. It doesn't matter whether you choose www or non-www, both versions of a webpage should not render.

By having both www and non-www versions accessible, you're having search engines crawl and index twice as many pages as necessary. You're certainly hindering the effectiveness of your SEO efforts but having this duplicate content issue.

I don't know what CMS you're using, so I can't recommend how to setup those redirects, but a simple "www redirects with CMS XYZ" should get you there.

Hi Will,

It'd be impossible to find a solution to the problem without having the domain. If you want to message me the URL, I can take a quick look for ya.

A lack of either of those files shouldn't create any crawl issues. Setting up those files won't fix your problem, but you should add them both anyway.

That's good to know, it'd be a shame to lose all that historical data due to a secure migration.

Hi,

I've never seen any evidence of title-casing being more attention-grabbing or of Google overwriting them because of it. If you're concerned with Google replacing your meta descriptions, use a NOODP tag and your problem is solved.

Regarding ALL CAPS, Google has never been a fan of this technique to improve CTR, you can even see this in their ad copy rules for Adwords. I'd steer clear of ALL CAPS in SERP-visible meta data.

Hi,

On this new page, you mostly talk about the other 2 types of oak beams, so there's really not enough differentiation in this content. At this point, you're kind of working up hill against yourself.

The better way to tackle this would have been to generate content for your broadest keyword first, show Google that your site is about oak beams. Then write content for specific types.

Recommendations from my other comments still stand.

Regarding your thought about ranking the US website in both US and UK, and directing UK visitors to a UK version will work, however you won't be able to do that with redirects or a different version of the post. Doing that would change the URL, which would affect which page gets indexed. It's possible to change content of a page based on location without changing the URL, which is what you'd have to do in order to keep indexing in line.

I do still think that your best bet is to use the UK domain and treat it as its own entity just as you're doing with the other countries.

No problem! I'm not too familiar with secure migrations in WP, but I bet there is some kind of plugin for that.