Welcome to the Q&A Forum

HI Paul,

I agree 100% with you, in the case you want to check external links. That's why I try to solve my errors on GWT so I can see new external errors showing up.

However in this case I got confused by this sentence:

_ I have been able to find and fix many of them but there are links that are coming from our home page that do not seem to exist._

I thought that he was speaking aboiut links generated inside his homepage. However if the case are external links, I recommend spry advice, but only for few links. If you have many of them you can consider to use GWT API and download all the broken links with their own linking urls. An information which google used to share before but that now is not available in GWT (at least not in mine)

Hi Howard, I think the best thing is to prioritize and contact all the sites in bulk to have those comments removed. If they don't answer disavow those urls, Then write arecon request to google to ask them to remove any penalty they put upon you because you were victim of some kind of negative seo attack. After having your rankings fixed try to understand from where that attack may be arrived although I don't think you'll find anything since the attack wasn't on your site

Sitemap and robots are not required but recommended. However you may find sites which doesn't need them jsut because they're really tiny or which doesn't want to show they blocked pages to competitors.

Sitemap may be the same, you don't want to show to your competitors your site structure or your site is so small that is useless. Also a sitemap may be useful for you to be sure that google is aware of all you urls and that those urls are crawled constantly.

For a classified ads site I'll recommend to use map for categories. You want google to rank those pages because there are the ones rankings for broader keywords and attracting users which may convert. Create one or more sitemap (with an index), based on how many urls you have, (limits for each sitemap are 50k urls per sitemap).

I'll also recommend  you to canonicalize you paginated series to the main page and submit only the first page. In that way google will focus on the first page and consolidating all the value there.

Hi Rajesh I would like to help you but I couldn't understand your issue.

Do you have dupe titles?
Do you have pages which should not retrun 404?
Do you have pages which are redirecting without you making anything to the site to achieve that 301?

I think you're doing it right but:

• you should try to be consistent throughout the site. In your blog for example you dind't appended the rel=tag attribute to the links to your tags (try with the escotilla tag). You may use it everywhere or nowhere imo
• moreover, even if you did that right you won't be safe from any penalty, maybe you're safe with this possibl eissue but this fix won't save you from other possible issues you may have like dupe content, or shallow pages or heavy low quality bad linking (i don't know if it's your case, just listing a couple of them)

Having said that I've never used that kind of tag, I think that google is smart enough to recognize you navigation + categories + tags. If you build your site architecture correctly, this tag may help but you should be ok anyway.

agree with george, I'm seeing in your blog all urls having appended the - codebaby text in the title. Check in your wp configuration of titles, maybe you've installed a plugin which is overriding your initial titles and appending that.

Sincerely I've never used seomoz tools for crawwling my site to find 404s.

I always used screamingfrog/xenu(last one is free), which gives you not only the url where the error is found but also the type of links and its anchor text. In that way it would be easy to quick find the error, because maybe it's a realtive links which is malformed and pointing to a non existing url.

Hi Mike, Sorry for my lastest answer it seems I've overlooked an article from last february which states that the value lost in a redirect is the same you lose in a link (here), so about the value both B and A will give you the same seo value (more or less).

The choice will depend on which page will return the best UX. If you think that the user may find valuable the video they're seeing I'll leave that video there and link to product or service related. If you think that the video is really outdated and you'll better get rid of it, so 301 it to the service/product page.

Hope this helps!

Going one by one:

C) redirect to a general page like the homepage is somewhat a bad idea because it's seen as soft 404, like you don't know where to point that expired ocntent so you're pointing that to your homepage.

B) redirect from those page to your product page (if they're related) always give some added value but you're avaporating some of your links value due to the redirect. Also users are expecting a video and I don't know how much your bounce may raise after doing that. Having an higher bounce is never recommended this panda days.

A) I think this is the best solution. You're still giving to users the page they requested and to enchance their experience your giving a related product they may consider useful. Transcripting the video is also useful to have that content indexed so the value of your video is added even more in those pages. I woudl like to know how much traffic you're receiving to those pages because you can also achieve more sells only by giving to the users something useful to buy.

I agree with Scott and Takeshi, also give credit to people linking to you is a good way to enhance their value and so the one they're passin to you.

Maybe you can consider a dynamic footer with a slideshow of the mentions you receive in external sites, like you see in movie trailers. This will give you a testimonial like added value mentioning your backlinker without even having to link back to them.

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.

I think you should divide among your services. Every category is a service you give.

Than the further step will be to create geotargeted pages for each location you serve. If you got different bases in different places create a local business in google local for each of those, actually google is giving a lot of space to their local business listings so you may find a good opportunity there if you manage to show up among the first 7 results.

HI Alvin, I understand that you're quite paralyzed on external actions. It seems that you have to focus on your onsite activity.

You're in contact with a governamental page so a possibly high authority, you may put into your site something which show this relationship with the governmental entity and achieve some links which everyone dreams about gov and edus.

You may have access to autoritative figures which may release opinions or important news which other people may not know about. So in short create great content focusing on your strengths, your high autohrity.

About what I said you before, can't you promote that website or its contents using your personal profile in social medias? Or is it forbidden to let people that this page exists?

Hope this may be a better help.

Hi Carolina, if you can send to me even on pvm a list of some examples of the url you'll need to redirect I'll try to help you. However if you publish here the URI (so your domain won't be shown) the whole community may try to help you.

whooops

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.

As always in the SEO industry, there's no right answer for any particular case but I think you got a really structured approach to it. It would be great to know the results of your experiment. This could be a really good article in the seomoz community, let me know how it goes!

I've always used GWT as a report on my 404, and since it stops on 1000 404s I always download them for further reference and then mark them as fixed.

404s are a natural response in the whole internet so fixing them is a good thing but waiting for google to remove them from your GWT account amy take long time. If they don0t bother you follow streamline's advice.

First of all congrats on taking a linkfrom dmoz, even with its contras it still remains a good source where to have your link placed.

Second don't worry about it. Google knows how many sites are taking DMOZ data even Google directory is based on it

Hi Eric, I'll try to answer your further question even if I'm not an oracle like Pete

First of all thanks Pete to underline that you need to give google just one response since you can't give them both 301 and 404, I was assuming that and I didn't focus on that part of Eric's answer.

Second. Eric, If your purpose is to give google the ability of recrawl the old content to let them see it has disappeared you want to give them a 404 or a 410 which are respectively not found and permanently not found. Before it was a difference but now they've almost the same value under google's eyes (further reading). In that way google can access your page and see that those contents are now gone.

In the case of 403 the access is denied to anyone both google and humans, so in that case google won't be able to access and recrawl it. If your theory is based (and I think you're in the good way) upon the thing that google needs to recrawl your content and see it ahs really gone, 403 is not the response you should give it.