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Hi Jan,

I would imagine the Pinterest links are all "nofollow" and not passing authority, also the link from Polyvore is also "nofollow".

The reality is there pages have more authority, the title is the same and at present that is why you are being outranked.

I guess the most important question is; "does it matter very much?" - I haven't searched the keyword tool for an estimation on search traffic, but I'd hazard a guess it is slim to nil. The fact that they outrank you due to SEO factors is unimportant if there is no organic traffic. You outrank them on the social factors, hence the larger following and that is where the traffic is, so if I could pick more Pinterest traffic or more Google traffic for this instance, I know where I'd be putting my money.

Hope this is of some assistance.

Hi Shawn,

It is most likely going to be one of two things:

1. The On-Page optimisation for the Category pages is not direct enough to rank for all product pages and therefore you would need to re-focus the on page optimization and messaging to the products you are directly aiming to rank for.
2. You have built backlinks or internal links to the product pages so they hold more authority (you can check the PR and PA/DA of your pages vs. category pages for an idea)

Possible solutions are:

1. Re-optimise the category pages to be relevant for the products you want to rank
2. Build more powerful backlinks and authority to the category pages
3. Make category pages canonical page for product pages (probably not the ideal solution but just a thought).

I guess the real question is why wouldn't you want clients seeing the exact product they are trying to search for? If they are searching XL Blue Widgets and you would prefer they go to the Widgets page, then it doesn't make too much sense?

Hope this offers some insight.

Hi Adam,

There are a lot more factors than simply going and disavowing all of these. You really need to determine what you are thinking when you say "these are all crappy links". You can use metrics such as DA/PA/PR/MR/MT and have conditional formatting set for the excel columns. You can export all back links from Google WMT, Ahrefs, OSE and even then you won't have all of your backlinks. Then use the Moz Toolbar to go and test the parameters you have set and paste them into the respective URL fields on the excel.

The process is manual, but the process of disavowing should be, it would have been automated crappy SEO that got you into this, so unfortunately automated crappy SEO, won't get you out of it. Time and effort is required or you will end up disavowing all of the value with the rubbish and you may as well just start from scratch.

Hope this helps!

Redirect is the best option for you I believe, you will pass the majority of link juice if anybody has backlinked to the https version.

You will need to contact the host where your server is in order to get this implemented. Alternatively you can just resubmit your http site for index in Google via GWT and see how that goes.

Hi,

We have experienced similar and in my experience if the 7 locals slot in between say 3 and 4, these effectively become 3-{4,5,6,7,8,9,10}-11 so the natural rank 4 is really 11th.

The reason I say this is I have noticed results moving up out of the local listings, into the top few and then back down into the local. This has been across several companies in the past 6 months, mind you just for one industry.

In my experience the only additional pages which you can rank in addition to having a local listing, is a sub-page. Although we have seen a local listing and also organic homepage listing ranking as high as middle of the second page.

I hope this has been of some assistance, just my observations from our listings.

Hi John,

You might have numerous pages displaying 404 errors if they are broken links. 301 redirect them all to the right page, then run the report again and see if it is displaying and information on meta descriptions missing.

As long as you outweigh them with great natural links then you will be fine. These spammy links are part and parcel of building great sites. It is when they are viewed in isolation or as a large proportion of a site's backlink profile that it is clear they were built for the purpose of ranking.

I think his hugs are "nofollow" so they aren't worth much anymore

Not especially for link authority as they will be "nofollow" attributed links. I would recommend doing it from a social link traffic perspective as any specific SEO benefit would be negligible, traffic is traffic though

Hi Heather,

Rand had an article on just this topic for a Whiteboard Friday, well worth a read:

http://moz.com/blog/how-to-move-rankings-up-on-older-existing-content-whiteboard-friday

Improve your backlink quality and anchor text diversity. If you have access to some of the links, go back through and modify some of your anchor texts.

Hi Paul,

Moz can run campaigns on multiple subdomains or sites, you get up to 5 separate campaigns for $99/mt, then up to 12 for $199/mth.

Each campaign will allow you to track the relevant pages within each for rankings via rank tracker i.e. if a sub-page ranks it will tell you that.

Hope this helps out!

I'd recommend making at least some of your posts sticky to the homepage on the topic you are trying to rank as without some consistency you will be constantly changing the picture Google has of your website content wise.

Other options would be to add an additional section below the top slider with text, in my profile you will see how we have stuck our front post to the homepage as we previously had blog snippets from new posts and it was making our rankings far more volatile.

We use LinkedIn predominantly in the B2B space and find it is a great way to engage i industry discussions and also personal and company branding. For B2B social marketing my personal vote is LinkedIn #1!

Try as best you can to do a 301 redirect page for page i.e. map out the structure and relevant page and then redirect it to the relevant page on your new site. That way you have the best chance of passing on the relevant juice and hopefully rankings for each page.

Just a link on the homepage will give you a far less juice through and little of the backlinking power to the old site that you are trying to harness for the new sites' rankings.

Hope this helps!

Hi Ron,

Not a silly question at all mate!

It appears there aren't any "nofollow" attribute links on members profile pages, I had a look at this one as an example: http://www.instructables.com/member/JonnyBGood/. I'm not sure if that is for all member profiles though.

I only had a little chance to look at articles and couldn't see any links so can't comment on if they are "nofollow" or not. I would recommend downloading a "nofollow" toolbar extension on either Chrome or Firefox, that way when ever you view any site all nofollow links have a red dotted-line show up around them so you can instantly see the dofollow and nofollow links. It is helpful not just from a link building perspective, but also to see how authority can be directed around pages.

Hope this helps!

None of the link databases you use will have the quantity of links that webmaster tools has. You can use multiple sources to try and build the best possible picture of yours or competitors link profiles.

I don't believe they are going to hurt you, it is more of a warning that if you are trying to have these indexed that at the moment they can't be accessed. When you don't want them to be indexed i.e. in this case, I don't believe you are suffering because of it.

Hi Ron,

I have a pdf explaining, I will PM you, which should answer all those questions:

• Your link isn't hyperlinked - hence not a link, just text
• The link I have shown is a "nofollow"
• Link to member profile page is dofollow

Hope this helps out mate!

Hi Branden,

I don't know the best way to quantify lead value from those directories as we don't have any links with them. In terms of SEO value though I would recommend comparing them with this directory, bit of a hidden gem in my opinion for the price:

http://www.web-designers-directory.org/

Hope this is of some assistance.