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The links are treated as separate, so they won't cancel each other out and the link from website A to you will pass link juice. Even if you have a reciprocal link that is dofollow and they have one pointing to you that is dofollow they won't cancel each other out and link juice will be passed.

A few reciprocal links in the right circumstances are fine, it is only when a large proportion of your link profile is reciprocal that you are likely to get a penalty for attempted manipulation of Google's rankings.

Hope this helps...

Hi I personally would host them in a subfolder - especially the PDFs as they are likely to gain links and these links will help strengthen your domain.

However if you have them in a sub-domain they won't have the same benefit from the links as Google essentially treats sub-domains as a separate domain. This will also limit the ranking ability of PDFs as they won't benefit from your domains authority on a sub-domain.

Have a look at this article for a bit more insight into subfolder vs sub-domain

- http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites

I hope this helped..

Hi - yes the SEOMoz crawl report doesn't currently take into account canonical tags and it will report a page as duplicate content even if it has the tag on it. Have a look here for more -

 http://www.seomoz.org/q/canonical-tag-and-duplicate-content-report

There doesn't need to be two physical pages when you are creating a 301 redirect as you are essentially creating a rule which is separate to the physical pages which says page version 2 is at version 1 permanently. Have a look at this guide - http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection

I would redirect your visas/index.asp to visas/ as visas/ is also the address of a directory and so you don't want all directory pages redirecting to /index.asp as a directory will contain multiple pages..

Well a 301 redirect is a permanent redirect so it passes on 90-99% of link juice gained by the page your are redirecting. Therefore it would be better to 301 redirect an old page domain with a healthy link profile as you will pick up benefit from the multiple links gained as opposed to one link from a site of reasonable authority if you were to build a site around that page. The ranking impact from the redirect will be far greater as you are essentially gaining multiple links in one hit once the search engines catch up and recognize the redirects, thus having the greatest impact on ranking in relation to the two methods you mention above. Hope this makes sense...

Hi Keri,

So what are your thoughts on the points raised here? I still think this is very relevant and I still regularly see people giving thanks but awarding no mozpoints, which I believe is down to misunderstanding the system. Is Rand looking at doing a WBF on the community as a whole?

Just a quick question Diane have you created and submitted a Google News Sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools?

http://support.google.com/news/publisher/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=75717&topic=2527688&ctx=topic

You are targeting a term which looks quite competitive in the SERPs, so it is not going to be easy to rank well and will take some time.

Having a quick glance at your page it it clear that it is over-optimised as Sandip points out.

Running a quick on-page report with SEOMoz for the term gastric band hypnotherapyand your page it is clear you are **keyword stuffing with 51****occurrences **of the term on your page. You need to look at making our page more natural as over-optimization is something that has been under scrutiny of late with Google.

I would also look at your link profile for this page - running your page through opensiteexplorer.org it is clear that you have over done the use of anchor text with 7 linking root domain and 271 links containing the specific keyword anchor text - gastric band hypnotherapy.

Essentially you need to look at re-doing your on-page optimization to make it more natural. You also need to look at diversifying your link profile in terms of anchor textas it is clear too targeted at the moment.

I hope this helps Diane.

I think this will help with your question - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/why-wont-google-use-my-meta-description

Hi - I would definitely not place a no follow on the drop down menu. I have a similar issue when a site I work on was redesigned and this caused an increase in the on-page links, however the sites search engine rankings and traffic actually increased after the re-design which incorporated this. The site was doing well before the redesign as well.

For further peace of mind have a look at this previous Q&A -

http://www.seomoz.org/q/should-i-nofollow-the-links-in-the-drop-down-nav-menu

It all depends on how long it takes Google to re-crawl those pages with the no index tag on them.

I would do this along with the steps you have already taken in order to help speed the process up if you are in a hurry

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1663419

No problem George - I thought it would as I know a few people have had this concern, as you can see from the link.

Hi

I wouldn't worry about this being an issue as the SEOMoz crawl doesn't currently take into account rel=canonical tags and will still report duplicate content and titles. This is something they are looking at adding - here is some more information from the SEOMoz staff for peace of mind -

 http://www.seomoz.org/q/canonical-tag-and-duplicate-content-report

Fairytale of New York - The Pogues for me - though Mariah Carey - All I want for Christmas is You! has a certain charm about it haha

Well if it is easy enough for them to change the URL to your new one then I would go down this route, as it will pass 100% of the link juice. However I would still put 301 redirects in place as it will make sure any visits to your old pages will get to the new ones and any links that you can't change will still be able to pass the majority of the link juice that you have already gained.

Hi Zora

Yes I would 301 redirect your old URLs to their new corresponding ones (passing around 90-99% of the link juice from your old domain) and then set change of address in Google Webmaster Tools under configuration for your old domain. You need to be patient as it will take time for Google and other search engines to catch up with this change.

For more information have a look at this blog post which is very useful in your situation - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/achieving-an-seo-friendly-domain-migration-the-infographic

I saw the duplicate and posted in the original as I thought the other might end up being got rid of, but maybe I should have posted in both as you have Chris. Anyway I hope both our answers are of use to Pedro..

I personally would stay away from such directories that require a reciprocal link.

I definitely wouldn't have a page for links, as you want to keep your link profile as natural as possible, whereas a page for links looks spammy and it will be easy for Google to indentify low quality reciprocal links to directories.

I would have a look at what Google says regarding such links schemes -

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356

Hi Adam

Yes you are correct as your query string is changing and so is the page you are directing to.

Hi Adam,

Try this:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^everything-after-the-question-mark$ RewriteRule ^shop-online$ http://www.new.com/new-page? [L,R=301]

so above would be

Options +FollowSymlinks RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^page=shop.product_details&flypage=flypage_images.tpl&product_id=69164&category_id=303$ RewriteRule ^shop-online$ http://www.new.com/new-page? [L,R=301]