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Hi there! Have you had the chance to read through our Beginner's Guide to SEO? It might clarify some of these things for you.

Knowing only what I do, I would think that yes, if they're proliferating what are effectively duplicates of their main corporate site, they'd end up with issues surrounding duplicate content.

I'd suggest reading up on the effects of duplicate content here: https://moz.com/learn/seo/duplicate-content. That page is pretty focused on duplicate content on a single domain, but it'll still give you an idea. With so much cross-domain duplicate content you'd face similar issues, though I wonder if some spam flags would be raised, too (I'm honestly not sure).

Of course, it's possible that all those duplicate domains canonical back to the original, or some other fix. But in general I'd expect there to be trouble.

Alright, a fix has been deployed. Again, please let us know in this thread if this issue keeps coming up.

Hi kirupa!

It's quite possible that spamming the keyword isn't what's helping them rank. Have you looked into their backlink profile?

Just to add, there's more info on the release here: https://moz.com/community/q/our-new-index-is-live-and-things-are-looking-great-for-the-new-year

Hi Jon,

I'm afraid I'm not presently aware of a tool that does exactly that, but you may have some luck with Fresh Web Explorer and the Brand & Mentions section of Moz Analytics. Both track unlinked mentions of your brand.

There was also a Whiteboard Friday late last month on link reclamation.

Apologies if you've seen all that before.

Good luck!

Matt

You've pretty much nailed why we use them at Moz. We have a custom bit.ly domain (mz.cm), they look nice on social media, and they hide the UTM parameters we use.

Based on the fact that we don't currently offer any promotions (aside from our 30-day free trial) I'm going to have to join Eric in calling this and similar offers illegitimate and encouraging you to buy your subscriptions through these companies directly.

I've also just sent that site to our Legal team, so their offer may not be available much longer, anyway—thanks for the heads-up! I'll be locking this thread to further comments, as well.

I have to say, GTAMP, I agree with all the above advice. As Jared notes, this isn't something that's going to wreck your traffic on its own. However, David is spot-on that it's certainly worth fixing if the cost isn't too high.

I recommend this all the time—so it's possible there are folks here who are getting tired of hearing about it—but the Moz Keyword Difficulty tool might be able to get you some insight. It can give you a pretty good idea of what factors are leading to the top 10 sites for any given keyword ranking where they are, which can help you zero in on exactly what you'll need to focus on.

Cyrus Shepard gives a really good overview of how it works in this video.

Andreas is right—the subdomain will be considered a new site by the search engines, so you won't get any SEO benefit from the existing domain. I'm not aware of any benefit you'd have a a totally new domain over a new subdomain, either, but Andreas may be able to give more information on that.

I agree with everyone here (thanks, guys!), and I want to add that DA and PA are both most useful when benchmarking against competitors, not as an absolute value.

Take this scenario—a high-authority industry site links to a large number of other sites in the same industry, and they all benefit from its authority. But if for whatever reason that site goes down or loses authority, all sites it links to could be affected. That could conceivably bring down the DA of a major portion of the vertical.

None of those sites did anything wrong, and since they're each others' main SERP competitors, their rankings may not change at all. But they'll now all have lower DA.

Does that help at all?

Hi Richard! Would you be able to share the URL of your site/affected pages? This is a tough one without seeing the page source.

It's really hard to say, and it's definitely not unheard of for rankings to vary wildly between search engines. It's possible that you lost some ranking power when you nofollowed those links, or that Google is just trying to figure out where to rank you now that your link profile has changed. It's also possible that it's completely unrelated.

Honestly, that's why I recommend the Full SERP Report—it might help you work out what it is that's letting the sites ranking above you pull ahead.

Hi MobileDay! Did these answers help?

Hi there! While there's technically nothing wrong with redirection 404s to the home page, you might want to consider pointing them toward a 404 page, instead. Otherwise, visitors won't know why the link they clicked took them to the home page rather than to the page they expected, which isn't a great experience.

Just a thought, though.

I agree with Eric. No one source is going to give you a full picture of your link profile. Generally, OSE is best for measuring the overall strength of a full link profile, as many low-authority sites aren't indexed.

Also, keep in mind that there are a _lot _ of reasons that DA can go down, many of which have nothing at all to do with your specific link profile. That's why we recommend using it to benchmark against competitors rather than as an absolute score. Rand goes into more detail about that here:

DA/PA Fluctuations: How to Interpret, Apply, & Understand These ML-Based Scores

Hi Akshay!

Do you know whether Google has indexed your site since you added that canonicals? If you're not sure, you may want to resubmit your sitemap in Webmaster Tools and see if that gets them started.

For what it's worth, our advice for this is generally to noindex the tag pages, as they're generally not pages that need to rank.

Noindexing the tag pages will likely work. You could also try using robots.txt to block crawlers from accessing pages that have URL parameters unique to those tag pages, but you'll want to make sure it won't affect your site's crawlability before you do that.