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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.

HI Jo I won't redirecting anything. You want the existing url to remain in rankings so:

1. duplicate your pages in legacy directory
2. put a canonical in domain.com/legacy/product page to domain.com/product so you'll be avoiding dupe issues
3. then rollout your new responsive design
4. then if the responsive design is the same content (and it should be the same) you can maintain the canonical or if you want to get rid of legacy pages 301 the legacy url to the existing one.

Hope that makes sense.

I don't know who told you to remove pipes from titles since it has been a while seos normally uses them in titles, since they helps to separate sentences better than a full stop or comma.

Aboutthe order, you want your main keywords at the beginning of the title. I'll add the name of your site just if the two are true:

1. your title is still less than 70 characters long. If you add the name of your company and it's not showing, your just diluting the density of your title without achieving your goal (branding)
2. your company is renown. Having the name of the company helps to enhance ctr if the company is renown, but if you're not so famous, I'll choose to have more dense and focused titles without diluting their value with not useful company names

Hope that helps!

Hey Circa, this may be negative seo from a competitor it may be spammers or fishers and so on, it's difficult to know.

Your drop may depend on that depending on how much those links are part of your whole backlinks portfolio, as generalzod said, if you have a 75% of your links like those one they could have hit you if they're kind of 10% you may  have different issues there, since every site has some porn or spam links pointing to them and google knows that.

If I were you I'll buy a subscription to ahrefs or majestic seo, get all your links, find the crappy ones, and ask for removal. then the ones which remains can be disavowed.

After that wait for a couple of days and submit a reconsideration request to google saying them you've also submitted a link disavow. Explain them what happened in details.

To prevent this in the future you can use ahrefs/majestic new/lost links feature so you can watch which links you're acquiring everyday and if there's something wrong you can ask for removal /disavow them.

Hope that helps!

Hi Bob, I can't see why this could not be white hat, the main issue I see is not on the bots side but on your own.

Having many sites in the same niche may be difficult to manage because you want to differentiate them enough to get the most of them, also it's hard and time/money consuming to build strong brands in a particular niche, branding nowadays is an seo factor too (not directly but it affects).

You're saying you're overlapping keywords, you can do that but consider that you'll have hard time to choose sites where build links for one and not to another, you then need three unique ips, and if you'll achieve results your client will complain due to one site cannibalizing the other, so actually the growth of one would be the loss of another.

Be wise, and try to understand the real needs of your clients and why he wants to build 3 similar sites at once in the same niche.

To enhance your domain authority you'll need them to link to you not the opposite. You may want to earn the links they have or just have them linking to you.

However if they're related and as Jesse said linking to them may enhance the UX, it's always a good idea to link to official and authoritative sites, it makes your website more natural because the nature of the web is a "web" of sites interlinked among them.

Summarizing it won't help your authority directly but it will help you look better to both your users and I think to bots too.

Just to have you even more comfortable 404s doesn't hurt your site

Yes madame. It's called re-messaging ask to your rep in bing for that and they'll help you for sure.

Hi Ben, I think you got really good answers especially the Marie strategy is really a gold piece. However I'm adding my two cents here.

If you want to get rid of bad links you'll need to get more backlinks data not only relying on GWT, the same googlers said that you'll need to rely on more tools because doesn't show the whole data. Try the historical index from majestic SEO tool or the raw export of ahrefs or even here in seo moz you got good tools for that (although I recommend for this majestic historical which is the widest one, sorry mozzers ).

Then get those backlinks through a tool which may help you finding the toxic links which are poisoning your site (dtox tool is really popular this time) and disavow all the toxic and the more suspicious ones.

Be sure to disavow by domain not url because you may be missing other urls not indexed in the same domain which may get you in troubles in the future.

Add many attachments demonstrating your efforts to remove the links because google overstated that you should try to do everything to try remove the link before asking for a disavow

(here) -->"You should still make every effort to clean up unnatural links pointing to your site. Simply disavowing them isn't enough"

Hey Marie that was interesting, I've never attached all the emails I sent to google, I 'm sure that they won't see them all but it's definitely impressive to show how much work you did. HAve you got a better "consideration" from the web spam team making this process? Or it didn't get their attention?

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, actually you won't have any direct seo benefits by linking your G+ page to your website.

What you'll achieve may be +1 made on your site and your g+page will sum togheter and that your g+ page should appear for your brand name searches.

More than that there's no evidence you'll receive any kind of boost YET. However to have such features you'll need a g+ page instead of a profile and follow the instructions here

Hope that helped!

Hi Sarah, you have to be careful with this because you can't limit the user activity on your website if they didn't leave a review, there are so many review website they can go and read for free. You need to offer them something different.

Actually what you want to do is to have the best and accurate reviews. In that way you'll have satisfied users who in the future may consider to participate more in your website (like tripadvisor).

Also you want to be sure that someone leaving a review has really used the service/product. You don't want fake reviews or discussions among users in your website.

Then you can propose base features and some advanced features for highly participating users. Sorry to not leave you any idea on what to do, but I have a clearer idea on what you don't have to do.

You definitely need to understand your website+users and find a way to attract them and "monetize" them. Hope this helps.

Hi Bull, actually I don't recommend you to make a 100% accurate math on how much juice is lost, what you have to maintain clear is that this will make you lose value.

So, if you really need to make those redirects, try to reduce them to only one step, but, for ease of management if you REALLY need to create two steps redirects consider that you'll be losing the same value you'll be losing from one page linking to another and to other one (further reading here).

For page rank (juice) purposes 301 are treathed as links. However what I recommend you is after having put in place the generic redirect rules, identify your best traffic delivering pages and create an ad-hoc 301 for those ones, so you'll be sure those urls will receive least impact in that sense.

You're welcome Geraldine, hope this solves your doubts. If after speaking with the devs you'll still have some doubts, you know where we are and if you don't find us there's an huge great community of professionals here! Cheers!

Hey Bob, if those links are topic-related and aren't delivering you any traffic I agree with Thom in his huge and detailed answer. Swap it to an editorial article to an improtant page of your site would be my pick.

Hi, you can use xenu (which is free) or screaming frog if you have the license. They're both great crawling tools.

Then the most difficult part is the association among all the different urls of each language. If you have any pattern which may help associate those pages you're done.

Example:

EN: www.domain.com/page/node-123
ES: www.domain.com/pagina/nodo-123

etc etc.

In that sense with excel you can easily isolate the id of each page and build the xml with functions, since the XMl is pretty straightforward:

="<url><loc>"&URL&"</loc><xhtml:link < strong="">rel="alternate"** hreflang="de"****    href="""&GERMAN URL&""" />****<xhtml:link< strong=""> rel="alternate"**** hreflang="es"****    href="""&SPANISH URL&""" /></xhtml:link<></xhtml:link <>**</url>"

Hey Gianluca! thanks for your endorsement. From a geolocalization expert like you is even more gratificant

@Geraldine. Gianluca's last advice is a very good option for your .EU TLD, because normally it doesn't make much sense here in europe due to the high difference we have in such a small space.

In that way you can use that version as the default one and localize your offers for each country. Google normally rewards people using their new standards

Hi RefCandy first of all canonical tag is a recommendation to spiders not a rule, so google will probably crawl your page.

Moreover the canonical tag prevents duplication issues not crawling itself there are many sites which uses self referring canonicals so there's no issue on your crawling rate at the beginning. However when google discovers the duplication of that page with the other you've set up it'll end crawling that page with less frequency, so it will give less value to some links in there.

The only rule which prevent links crawl is the nofollow tag in the page .

IP redirect may be tricky since you'll have to maintain that information up to date and be sure that it is working properly. Also there may be users who even staying in a uk ip wants to see the american or eu site, and having the possibility of using the hreflang to set up correctly every site I'll change that strategy to:

• instead of redirecting via IP, I'll consider using that info to show a banner which states, "hey we've seen you're in UK, click here to see the uk version of the site, you'll find many offer based on your country!" (or maybe something shorter than this
• use the hreflang tag to specify to engines which language is optimized for each site, in that way google won't give you duplicate content issues and it will also make the right site ranking depending on the country.

In the short time I'll also give more focus on the .com site because it ahs the widest audience and because it's the most common TLD used for commercial sites. However in the long term you may want to have specialized teams which will make this differences even stronger with an highly focused marketing activity.