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If those pages are linked only internally to your website you may not need to put any 301 at all.

301 are useful only, as Federico said, if you want to save part of your external juice. If you have backlinks you want those websites to change those backlinks to the canonical page or if not 301 that page to the new one.

If those pages doesn't have any external backlink pointing to them they shouldn't be ranking at all since they're canonicalized to another one, so you'll just need to avoid internal traffic to them changing your internal structure.

Hi ZUL,

Actually the most reliable one is still the adwords keyword planner, even after it's terrible merging with the traffic estimator.

Also if you already have your main keywords you may find useful http://ubersuggest.org/

OR

If you have clear which are your main competitors you can track their top keywords using http://www.semrush.com/

The issue I'm seeing here is that Google has digested all the info and since pages were canonicalized and 301'd to others then they consolidated the value and dropped them. Even if you fix the canonical google won't be crawling those pages again as they've been dropped.

My theory is that you have the new structure live but not the old URLs, so you may want to ensure Google recrawls those pages and understands the right path.

I would create a Google Webmaster Tools account for the old website and submit an XML sitemap forcing google to re crawl the old URLs. and so to see the newly corrected 301.

If you can't do this, you may try creating a set of HTML pages linking to the old URLs, by letting google crawl and index them (with the index page and all pages linked on the page option) you should be able to have google crawling those pages and so to discover the right path.

I hope this works. Let us know how it goes, happy to dig further

e

Happy to have been of help, please do let us know how the test goes

Hi BJS, normally the most important page of a website is the homepage not just because it is the homepage but because is the most linked page interanlly where all the juice flows, so the pages which are nearest the homepage are supposed to be the most important too. The farest they are from your homepage, so the more hidden they are the least important they are.

Moreover if a page is widely linked internally the more important it should be just because if many products belongs to a category, the most this category is linked through breadcrumbs and the more content it has.

Don't be concerned about having products deep in structure is normal that for the most competitive kw categories are the pages which are focusing on those terms because these are the most useful pages for users to filter and find what they're looking for.

mmmm I'm not sure if I understand the problem correctly.

There is no way you could register a domain with dots in it. So you're suggesting that Google may have an issue if your page title is including dots in crawling the URL? If that's the case no worries.

Aside from my personal experience you can check this page: https://www.bls.gov google doesn't get confused by the U.S. in the title of the page and correctly show it in the SERPs. Note that dots are not usually part of the query, with some very rare circumstances where its presence change the meaning of a word.

Your case is a good example, google will understand that your site is about USA and not about "us", despite you not adding dots.

I hope this helps.

First of all, I'll better forget about tons of links. Sometimes is better to have few but good quality links than a massive amount of crap pointing to one or more pages.

Normally the highest value is hidden where no one can go. If you manage getting in touch on a 1 by 1 basis with good quality sites you may achieve few links but with an high value. To achieve this you'll need really good content. Not only original but with data, research and which may be considered useful to someone (because they'll need to link to it).

This is not scalable in the short end but as time pass by you'll be expanding your list of contacts and achieve a group of quality sites which already knows you and who are happy to share your content.

For this purpose, if they don't want to link to your content, try to ask them to share it on their social profile, there may be someone who likes it and link or retweet it!

About searching for blogs, I use the google tab but you can also consider on find 5 hi valuable sites and then use the related command in g search

if those pages are all in the same directory are in a couple of them you can remove them using the removal from index tool in gwt, in order to make this those pages should return a 404 or being noindexed (which is what you already did).

Hi Yosepgr,

one thing I would like to clarify IMO is that dev needs SEO guidance on how to implement schema. Sometimes people just request schema implementation and then wait for dev to do it. I'm not saying is your case but we, as SEO, should provide technical guidance on how to correctly implement that.

That being said I had a similar case in the past and what I did was creating a sitemap including just the dead URLs. I this way I was forcing google to crawl them and see that they now redirect to the new version.

After doing so, ensure that your redirect is actually a permanent redirect (301). You can check that easily with screaming frog by crawling those URLs in list mode or get the ayima plugin for chrome and visit the URL so you can see what the header response look like. Ensure that the redirect is 301 and with just 1 step (if possible).

It may take a while for google to digest the but you shouldn't be worried about schema as if google is penalizing your site for spammy markup, it will penalize only pages containing that markup which are now dead and removed from the site.

I hope this helps!

e

I think that you need to be wise. You don't have to turn everything down nor everything up. I think that being paid for an editorial post may be good but always be sure that what you're writing is useufl for your visitors.

You don't want that your users think that you've sold your content. I've never been paid to publish content on my sites just because when I found something useful I will write about it and link to it even for free. HOwever if someone's contacting you offering money and you think that it is a good product why not accepting an extra money?

Hi Sandra, don't worry about 404s volume because they won't hurt your rankings.

About your issue I understand that you want to be really clear with your users and don't hurt their experience on the site. So create a custom 404 which changes its content depending of what page is returning it. If it's one of your old product you can return a message or an article of why you decided to remove them and propose some alternatives. For all other errors you can just return a search box or related products to the one you lost.

301 IMHO are not the way to go, if an url is gone it has not being redirected anywhere, so a 301 will result in a bad UX 99% of the time.

yes just create one you can call 301-sitemap.xml and submit it to google webmaster tools. This is a separate one from your full sitemap as when you ll get those pages removed from google seeps you can just delete it without affecting your normal sitemap.

I know that this may be off topic but I would like to spend two more words on this

Just wondering how google would know the difference.

Try to move your focus away on humanizing Google. Google doesn't mind if you've REALLY paid or not for a content, don't think that if someone stops you in the street and ask you for a link for 5$ google may be aware of that, because it doesn't and I think that it also doesn't care about the REAL truth.

Google only cares about what IT thinks. Even if your link is natural and free, if it comes from a link network which sold links but in your case not, then you've paid that link too. Google is a private entity, which plays on its own rules, not bad nor good but just its own rules

Bear in mind that Google is not human, it's not under the human law of being truth when evaluating links, condemning the paid ones after demonstrating that they've been paid showing an invoice as a proof.

So when you analyze your backlinks (or trying to achieve new ones), try to understand if those links may be paid or not under google eyes not yours.

About being paid for a review you can create good content even being paid, just say to the one who's paying you that you will be writing a review but not publishing their content. You'll use their services and then write a review, so you're compelling and writing soemthing really useful for both users and google.

There's not always a clear science around that but usually a penalized site never gets back to its prior shine, or at least it will take you a lot of time, that's why is it somewhat better to have a slower growth than risk anyway a penalty.

Regarding your examples, I see that pvc banners query returns a lot of otpimized results on that query. I don't know which link you may have removed but looking at backlinks pointing to http://www.discountbannerprinting.co.uk/banners/vinyl-pvc-banners.html
 in OSE I see that:

• one third of your referrals are spammy domains
• you are using quite alot of keyword rich anchors which are actually a good signal for link schemes to google

try to be as natural and possible and consider that you'll need to work more to get google trust than some other clean websites.

I would normally say yes, but it really depends on how good your forum is. Sometimes people like to do reputation marketing and if the site is authoritative you want to show for your name's queries that you are part of an important website with lots of contributions. But if your profile pages are not that relevant or nice or provide any interest to your users, I don't see why you'd like to let google index and serve them

Hi loopyal, sorry for my bad english maybe I got you confused.

I'm exactly saying what you state above, even if someone pays you in the street, google may know it's been a paid link, but not because they got a radar on all of us but just because you've replicated a process which get your content recognizedas a paid link.

You're doing great on studying about who're you're linking because bad neighbours which are linking you may create or not issues but surely if you're linking to a low quality site this will give you problems.

About the site you're speaking, what I recommend is to create a valuable post for your users. If that site is in your nihce and you think they may give a valuable service to your users why not writing about them? And if you get paid is better. But beware I'm not encouraging on having content from them and publish it, but evaluate their product, ask for free accesses, make a REAL review. In that sense this review will be helpful focusing on your users and their interests. They're your "clients" and you have to always think about them, sorry if I got misunderstood I'm not saying it's easy, but just that sometimes we complicate the picture asking on how google can recognize a paid link, because they don't; they just recognize the apparel of that link which is following the same structure of paid ones, so even if it's not paid you may be penalized too.

In short. If the site writing you is a good site, with a good product, offers you to use their product, write a content about them and link to them if you find their product useful, I don't think it would be a bad thing linking to them. Just try to have the possibility of writing about their service in the most free way.

In SEO there's no perfect answer since the environment always changes.

I think that you should bet on one site and build there the whole value. Give to your authors a page where they can build their profile and link them to their g+ page (if they don't have it recommend them to build one) in that way you'll achieve extra exposure in serps with the tiny image of the author.

Then for the book try to rank both for their name a ISBN code which is more long tail always useful. You may also try to boost the traffic to those pages using some tiny adwords budget, so more authors may join your community and enlarge the authority of your site.

try visiting the site now, It seems Godaddyhas fixed the issue

Hi Nikhil, it's normal that you're worried about this kind of things, that's one of the consequences panda got into this market. It's good that you worry about it, there two different approaches to this: try to trick it or understand it and add some real value to that content. This issue is not only in your niche. Think about books, films and lyrics of songs. You can't change them, howeveryou can add something to make that content more useful for google to le t you rank for it.

I'm not a lawyer but I'll try to make an example. The first result will be the official result then you may write an article which takes that law and then add some bullet points of the main aspects of that law, then the related laws, adding bolds, commentaries and things like this. You won't be first but you'll start building your brand as the site giving real value added to that laws, something that some people may think you're valuable and google too.

Don't worry about duplication in this case, as I said before, lyrics sites got a lot of that content and they're not duplicates, try to open your page to more keywords than only the text of that specific law.

I hope that would be useful.

HI Josh I think that you won't run inmore problems than the normal issues of a domain migration.

Considering you have your social media set up withthe old domain would make sense for the users to have everything under that site, that makes  a lot less confusio for users lanidng in your site.