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Go over Phil's article carefully, especially the comparison bit at the end. There are times when YouTube makes more sense, but mostly it's either big brand awareness stuff, or things people would start by going to YouTube to find, e.g. rock videos, TV show excerpts, some viral content, etc.
Backlinks are going to matter much, much more than number of pages.
Don't use subdomains; they share almost no domain authority with the parent domain. AND, you aren't as likely to get a country-specific boost as if you used a country-specific TLD, Possibly you're just unclear on the difference: if so, here you go: the subdomains are qualifiers to the left of the domain (e.g. www., blog., etc.) and TLDs are the right side of the domain (e.g. .com, .org, .co.uk, etc.).
E.g. use www.toaddiaries.ca instead of ca.toaddiaries.com.
If the content is really similar across the various countries, i.e. it's just translated, you should use rel=canonical (pointing to the country-specific page) and hreflang alternate (in ALL pages, pointing to all of the other versions of the page). See Maile's talk on this here.
Pay close attention to the distinctions between LANGUAGE and COUNTRY, e.g. spanish versions might exist for dozens of countries, and those differences matter.
They're right in that you do NOT want the content to be on a different subdomain--in most cases, Google doesn't share domain authority across subdomains.
You can do a reverse proxy to handle this--see Jeremy's writeup here.
Load-balancing is a fairly generic term. I'm really familiar only with BigIP F5 hardware load balancing and Microsoft's software-based load balancing, but it's possible that some load balancing solutions can handle things like the reverse proxy would.
Update all internal links to point to the new URLs. 301 redirects don't pass 100% of the link juice.
The best option is to create a 301 redirect rule(s) that handle all possible situations. If that's not practical, then just worry about the ones that are linked to by external websites. You can spot these by making the transition to the new URLs, then watching for 404 errors in Webmaster Tools, and looking for pages linked to by external sites.
If you're using IIS, you can actually do some pretty complex logic in your 404 handler and make it return a 301 in certain cases. Check this post I did a while back.
How big is your site? Is the page being A/B tested a pretty strong page (PA, PR)?
Let's say you've got a relatively small site, with a few dozen pages, and the page in question is one of only a couple linked to from the main nav. So it's one of the stronger pages on the site. Blocking it in robots.txt means Google isn't going to continue to distribute link juice from that page to other pages on your site, so all of those other pages get slightly weaker.
In general, robots.txt isn't the place to block Google, as you throw away the outbound link juice from that page that's blocked. Instead, you'd want to do a meta robots noindex,follow on the page itself.
If you've got a big site, and this particular landing page isn't a major portion of the overall site in terms of PA, then you shouldn't have seen an effect like I've described.
Hi Jake,
I'm not familiar with LimeLight, but Phil Nottingham did this great writeup on YouTube vs. hosting on other platforms.
One of the things you need to be concerned about is: will Panda recognize the embedded video as rich content on the page? iFramed solutions might not be....traditionally, Google has NOT treated iframed content as existing on the page (although I've seen a couple of examples with clients' sites where iframed-in content has caused the "wrapping" page to rank for content that's only in the iframed).
I'm a big fan of embedding using Wistia, using their video SEO embed type. It automatically creates not only your video sitemap, but also embeds schema.org/VideoObject markup on the page, so that Google absolutely can tell that there's a video embedded there, and what it's about etc. as well.
Michael
I found no examples, sorry...
I don't understand your comment about rel=canonical. There should be ONLY ONE rel=canonical, and it should reference its own page, EXCEPT in the rare case I outlined above where the content on two different country pages is essentially identical.
I would agree IF the video is something that people would search for, e.g. big branding content, humor, viral content, music or celebrity related.
Otherwise you're just generating traffic for YouTube. Conversions from visitors to your YouTube page for your company to clicks back to your website will run around 1%.
And the YouTube page for your video is likely to outrank your own page that embeds that video.
Phil Nottingham from Distilled is the master of the universe when it comes to video SEO...see his writeup here where he talks about the pros and cons.
Rel=canonical pointing to a different domain is essentially telling Google "here's the original copy of this article".
That's fine if you choose to reprint just the occasional bit of content from somewhere else.
It's also a fine strategy to use in a white-label system, where you might have the same content published across a number of sites, all branded differently.
But you want to use this sparingly. If you've got a site with 1000 pages, and 750 of those pages are rel=canonicalled back to another domain, essentially you're telling Google that most of your website is just republished stuff that somebody else wrote. That's not going to be a good signal for Google of the likely quality of the site in general.
If you're in a situation where you really do need to publish a lot of pages on multiple sites, and all of the sites do need to be found in search for SOME terms, then for those duplicated pages, I'd noindex them on the "copy" sites, so that in the example above, Google would only see and index 250 pages, all of which would be original content.
I'd agree with Monica. Panda's above-the-fold algo is absolutely going to slay your home page. You've got only 1 sentence of content above the fold. Your images in the slider are all clickable (except the Lego image), and besides, they don't seem to be foreground images (except the Lego image)...Panda is likely going to see them as decoration.
Your video is probably not seen as video. I see no schema.org/VideoObject markup, and it doesn't seem to be one of the standard embeds (YouTube, Vimeo, Wistia) that Panda can likely recognize in the HTML.
Everything else on the page is clickable, which (this is my theory only) is likely to cause Panda to see it as navigation....not content.
So....I'd recommend:
I'd also recommend going into Google Webmaster Tools, and doing a Fetch & Render on your home page, to make sure that Google is able to see your page laid out the way you expect.
Separate the language markup issue from the pagination issue, and treat each of the paginated pages just like any other page on the site.
You should have an hreflang statement for EVERY language page you support for each page in the pagination sequence, including the current page. So, for example, if we're looking at Italian page 17 of your Purple Widgets category, it should have an hreflang for the Italian page 17, as well as for the English page 17, French page 17, etc.
Rel=next and rel=previous should refer to the page from the same language as the page you're in, i.e. on Italian page 17, rel=prev should point to Italian page 16, and rel=next should point to Italian page 18.
I'm presuming, of course, that the content in the paginated pages is roughly equivalent, i.e. if it's a set of pages of purple widgets that you sort them the same way on the Italian version as the French, etc. But really, if you didn't....I'd still probably do it the same way.
Don't forget to set the rel=canonicals as well. Unless you're looking at two pages with the same language and content but targeting different countries (e.g. Portugal and Brazil, with no pricing info on the pages...in that case, you might rel=canonical both the Portuguese and Brazilian pages to one of those), each page will rel=canonical to itself.
But...this won't affect his ranking in Google, Bing or Yahoo. It might make his site look a little better to a potential acquirer, or someone he's trying to sell ads to.
Google PR will NOT be affected by these tactics. And Google PR, as we see it in the toolbar etc., was last updated about a year ago, and Google has no plans to update it going forwards.
Those PR numbers in your examples are from last December...which tells me they're the PR values from the prior owner's site.
But the real PageRank that's actually part of the algorithm won't be affected either--they don't look at Alexa ranking.
I don't think there is any tactic happening. They simply are building lots of mini websites for their clients and messed up on no following affiliate links. it appears that they have not done any of the basic SEO audit work on their system. Nothing deliberate here IMHO.
So if I understand you correctly, your client who's penalized is www.starmandstravel.com, and you're seeing in their GWT backlinks list a ton of links from content.onlineagency.com/index.aspx?site=6599 and one or both of the other parameters are varying, right?
So then your question is: where are the onlineagency pages linked from?
ABSOLUTELY do NOT 301 anything from the old site to the new site...or you risk transferring the penalty!
I'm not sure what Google will do if you disallow via robots.txt AND 301. Most likely, this is safe, Google will remove the old site from the index and ignore the 301s. But I think there's some risk here that Google will read the pages anyway, see the 301s, and perhaps transfer the penalty.
Deleting the domain in webmaster tools will have no effect, other than to prevent you from seeing what Google thinks about the old domain :-/. Google will continue to index the old domain, follow redirected links, see duplicate content, etc.
2 years back....that's going to be right in the middle of a lot of Google algo changes, both Panda and Penguin. It might be just a coincidence that your traffic drop was around when the hacking happened.
Have you done a backlink analysis? It could be that the hackers also planted a ton of crappy links in the hopes of short-term getting your site to rank well for whatever they're trying to inject into your site and sell.
Sounds like you're doing the right thing with the URLs though. To do a double-check on the duplicate content side, you could run Screaming Frog against it, and check for duplicate page titles and meta descriptions. If your pages are getting spit out with multiple URLs, you'll see them all show up with duplicates.
Bonjour! (I lived in Montreal for 6 years :-).
I do a lot of penalty recovery work, and you're in the same situation as a number of my clients: algorithmic penalty (probably), and you've disavowed links, but....no Penguin update for a year.
The next Penguin data update is mostly likely very soon, from mutterings from Matt at SMX Advanced. It's been almost a year since the last one. Your disavows won't take effect until there IS a data update.
I would wait for the data update, and see if you recover on rankings for the 3 terms you had in your footer links from client sites. If you do, then great, continue on...
If not, then I'd be inclined to start a new domain, and move your content from your old site (and blog) to the new site, WITHOUT 301 redirecting. Keep the old site running, but 301 redirect all of the pages to the home page....you want Google to successfully fetch all of those blog pages with the great content, but find it's permanently moved to your home page, where that content no longer exists. This way your new site's content will not be seen as duplicate by Google (if you just 404 the pages, Google will presume the content is still as it was before it 404'd....FOR MONTHS).
It's worth going through all of the backlinks for the old site, seeing which ones are from healthy sites, and manually asking those webmasters if they'd kindly update their links to point to your new site.
What it really comes down to is this: how deep does each of the link-reporting tools crawl? In my experience (lately, from doing a lot of penalty recovery work for clients), I'm seeing GWT crawl a fair bit deeper than most of the other tools out there, so their number is going to be higher.
There's a lot of pages out there that really aren't content pages: things like reply-to URLs, media-only pages in WordPress, standalone blog comment pages, etc.
When it comes to link juice, these kinds of pages have really almost nothing to give to a page they link to, so for the most part, whether you ignore the bottom 1% or bottom 10% of links to your site, you're not missing anything that matters. The exception to this would be a penalty situation, e.g. where there's a bunch of blog comment spam on really, really weak sites....Google is going to want to see that stuff cleaned up, even though it's not really contributing anything of significance to PageRank.
You're on the right track. Force it all to https, and keep the rel=canonical pointing to https versions.
Check out this thread of questions to Google's John Mueller on this topic:
Make sure you test very thoroughly before launching the https-only version: you'll run into issues with things like images, CSS, Jscript referenced via http instead of relative or protocol-free referencing. Same goes for your internal links: you don't want to throw away a ton of link juice (even if only 5% at a time) because of 301 redirects from http to https that you could have fixed :-).