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So the general view on satellite sites is that they're not worth it because of their low authority and the amount of link juice they provide.

However, I have an idea that is slightly different to the standard satellite site model. A client's website is in a particular niche, but a lot of websites that I have identified for potential links are not interested because they are a private commercial company. Many are only interested in linking to charities or simple resource pages. I created a resource section on the website, but many are still unwilling to link to it as it is still part of a commercial website. The website is performing well and is banging on the door of page one for some really competitive keywords. A few more links would make a massive difference.

One idea I have is to create a standalone resource website that links to our client's website. This would be easy to get links from sites that would flat out refuse to link to the main website. This would increase the authority of the resource and result in more link juice to the primary website.

Now I know that the link juice from this website will not be as good as getting links directly to the primary website, but would it still be a good idea? Or would my time be better spent trying to get a handful of links directly to the client's website? Alternatively, I could set up a sub-domain to set up the resource, but I'm not sure that this would be as successful.

Thanks guys.

I'm aware of the negative effect on user experience and I tried to convince them to replace the redirect with a banner, but they refused. If I has some evidence that suggested that having the direct was having an effect on SERPs and therefore the number of potential customers they attract then I might be able to convince them better.

I need a complete report telling them why they should reinstate their website on mobile devices and remove the redirect or they won't listen. Dreadful user experience is a start, but the website is now almost invisible in mobile SERPs which is a serious issue. However, I'm not sure if this would affect the desktop SERPs (although I know that user experience is taken into account).

I would do

User-agent: *
Disallow: /?
Allow: /

But test it first in WMT first to be safe. However, you must be sure that this is the route you want to go down. Robots.txt will prevent all of those pages from being indexed, which means that none of their content will count. Any links to these pages may also be devalued. The result is a potential drop in SERPs.

What is the reason why you don't want them appearing? That way we may find an alternative solution.

There's a few different methods of doing a redirect or a rewrite which might work. What code are you trying to use for the 301?

You can demote sitelinks so that they are less likely to appear but Google displays the pages that it considers to be most relevant to the searcher. Use the Mozbar to have a look at what the PA of the pages displayed are compared to the ones you want to display. You may need to have a look at your internal linking structure to improve the authority of the pages you want to display.

We recently started working on a website and most of the work done so far is resolving onsite technical issues (duplicate content, duplicate titles, broken links, pagespeed, grammar, etc.). Everything done has been positive, but their position in SERPs has actually gone down. I'm having a look to see if anything I have done could have had a negative effect.

However, when visiting their website on a mobile device, it automatically redirects you to iTunes so that you can download their app. My first instinct is that this is a horrendous idea as it would result in a massive bounce rate which would be impossible to track. I have tried convincing them to do it differently, but this is how they want it. However, when googlebot visits the website as a mobile it returns an error. I'm fairly sure that this would have a negative effect on search results but I could do with a second opinion.

I agree with Adam, if the links are natural then there is no need to disavow them.

However, if the links go to pages that no longer exist then it provides a poor user experience that can harm your rankings. Think of it like having dead links on your website. Have you set up 301 redirects for the pages that have become inactive? If not, set them up and make sure to redirect the pages to relevant areas of the website (no all to the homepage). Do this and the links should pass more juice and your website's performance should improve.

Hi John, just be a bit careful asking that on here. A lot of PPC agencies use these pages and will just advertise themselves.

Thanks guys.

I suspected the profiles wouldn't be worth indexing, but it's always worth getting a 2nd opinion. Just annoying as the links are already there on good websites, but not offering any link juice. Nevermind.

Whilst looking for link opportunities, I have noticed that the website has a few profiles from suppliers or accredited organisations. However, a search form is required to access these pages and when I type cache:"webpage.com" the page is showing up as non-indexed.

These are good websites, not spammy directory sites, but is it worth trying to get Google to index the pages? If so, what is the best method to use?

Have a look at the anchor text of those links. If the website is sending 500 links with keyword targeted anchor text then it's going to look spammy as hell to google and your position in search will suffer (as I found with one of my clients). This information should be in GWT as well as open site explorer. If the anchor text is branded or just contains the url then you might be ok.

Another trick is to type cache:sikin120.net into chrome. If you receive a 404 error then it means the website is not indexed by google and should be avoided.

If you build enough links from quality websites then it might not matter. if you are worried about the impact on your website then don't be afraid to request the link to be removed and use the disavow tool if this does not work. If it is a low quality website then it will probably have little effect on your rankings if the links are removed.

For the most part, Google can crawl any links on the page, but I think I could do with a little bit more information about what pages are being linked to and how the links are being generated.

If you are using javascript or even (shudder!) Flash to generate the links then search engines will struggle to see them.

If it's in html then it should be fine, but you need to be careful of duplicate content. If a single page can be called up by multiple dynamically generated URLs then it can harm search ranking if rel=canonical tags have not been used.

Thanks Tim, Google has been able to access the pages fine, as the all the pages are showing as indexed in WMT. I just think its odd as after 3 months, the site should have been crawled by moz (as with all other websites I've worked on). There is nothing wrong with the linking structure as all the pages are in the nav bar in simple html. As I said, when I took over the website, they messed up big time with the rel canonical tags all pointing to the homepage. After reading this article by moz (http://moz.com/blog/catastrophic-canonicalization), I'm a little bit worried. What is the correct procedure for fixing incorrect rel canonicals? I thought it was simply a case of removing them, but I might be wrong. Thanks again

I took over a website a few months ago which is not performing well at all for chosen keywords. When I first inspected it, I found a rel canonical tag pointing to the homepage on every page. This was quickly deleted and all the pages were fetched in webmaster tools.

3 months later and the website is still performing badly. When I use the mozbar, it shows that all of the sub-pages have a pa of 1. It is only a small site and all of the pages are linked to on the navbar in a simple way. The links are not made using javascript and all the pages are on the sitemap which is submitted to wmt. I have checked that all of the changes that have been made have been indexed as well.

Could it be possible that google still sees the canonical tag even though its not there? I can't think of any other reason why the pages have no pa or why it is so far behind the competitors despite having better content and links.

Also, the site is appropriate for adults, but I found (among the mess left for me) a meta ratings tag set to "general". This has now been deleted, could it negatively affect rankings?

Thanks for replying. As it happens, I checked wmt this morning and found that all of the old pages had been deindexed on their own (with the exception of 2 that had not been 301'd - they've been sorted now) and there are now no duplicate title warnings. The site is also looking better in SERPs.

You are right, I just needed to wait a few weeks and show some patience. Its quite easy to get impatient when justifying our cost to a client.

Thanks again.

I recently changed the URLs on a website to make them tidier and easier to follow. I put 301s in place to direct all the previous page names to the new ones. However, I didn't read moz's guide which says I should leave the old sitemap online for a few weeks afterwards. As I result, webmaster tools is showing duplicate page titles (which means duplicate pages) for the old versions of the pages I have renamed. Since the old versions are no longer on the sitemap, google can no longer access them to find the 301s I have put in place.

Is this a problem that will fix itself over time or is there a way to quicken up the process? I could use webmaster tools to remove these old urls, but I'm not sure if this is recommended. Alternatively, I could try and recreate the old sitemap, but this would take a lot of time.

Make sure you have google webmaster tools installed. On your dashboard, it will tell you if there are any crawl errors, click here to see where they are. Click on each link and it will give you the location of the URL and which pages are linking to it.

A quick solution would be to create 301 redirects for each page in your htaccess. However, it may be better in the long term to find all the pages linking to the missing pages and re-write them.

Due to the management software used for a lot of our websites, the URLs for specific pages appears as:

brand.com/page/pagename/number

I want to add slug URLs so that they appear as:

brand.com/pagename

First of all, do you think this is an effective use of my time and will it significantly benefit SEO in the long run. Secondly, these pages have developed a decent PA over time and I don't want to lose that. Will adding 301s for all the renamed pages be enough to not have a negative effect?