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It's a long term process, keep working and the results will come. Just remember how painful this was and use that to strengthen the resolve of using good SEO practices so you don't have to go through this again!

I wouldn't say definitely, but yes most probably it is still pulling the existing cache.

301 redirects are the way to go.

It won't hurt to import the content if it is of value to the clients, the reality is you will 301 redirect each page-by-page so it would make sense to have the content from prior.

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.

Panda is often a sitewide penalty, Penguin is usually isolated e.g. specific keywords, pages etc.

Take a look at this article, should give you some better insight into the updates and how they can affect your site/in what capacity they affect sites.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-difference-between-penguin-and-an-unnatural-links-penalty-and-some-info-on-panda-too

Hi JD,

First things first, the site is dancing around in the SERPs so you may be ranking well and it is trying to gain traction, or you may not be ranking well at all and you are getting inflated spikes.

Secondly use the Google Adwords keyword tool to search the exact search traffic for the terms you are optimising and let me know what they are. Be sure not to tick "broad" or "phrase" as these will give far larger figures, just make sure only "exact" is ticked. You could optimise as well as you like, but if there is no traffic for the search terms, then that is why you aren't getting any traffic.

When you are searching for your rankings, use a different browser, maybe IE and ensure you aren't signed in to any Google account and your browsing history is cleared so you aren't getting any bias towards your own website.

Get back to me on the above and we can go from there.

I'm not sure I'm 100% clear on your desired outcome based on the question. It stands to reason that if you are using the canonical on www.example.com/blue-pants-123. then you would also make any 301 redirects from old sites to that directly also as it is the one you appear to be trying to rank, why else otherwise would you have the canonical tag for it?

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!

Another add on to Egol's post is the split of SEO resources. If you don't have the time to build the necessary online properties to rank both it may be an argument for focusing your efforts on one stronger site then splitting resources and having two "also-rans".

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.

Hi Tim,

The /about may work I didn't see any of those, the 20 or so that I saw with /posts were all not working.

Not sure if it's from the Moz or Google side but it looked as though it was an error in the way Moz created the link if it had /posts on the end.

Probably less important for the Spammy link, but there would be a decent chance you have other links pointing to the same broken pages which would be worthy of the 301 redirect. I'm a pretty big fan of not Disavow'ing unless absolutely necessary, it's a tad overused in my opinion.

Hi Nathan,

Search on Open Site explorer the page and see if you can find where it is being linked from. Then you can go and update it and also 301 redirect the page to your homepage as an additional safety net for any links missed.

Hope this helps!

After checking out my own SEOmoz profile I noticed that many others also have the same problem of a broken Google+ link.

The problem is if you (as I did) cut and posted the end section of your Google+ profile and included the /posts portion.

I previously had my SEOmoz Google+ page linking to: https://plus.google.com/u/0/103404543700653398620/posts

This shows as a broken link, everyone should check their profile and ensure they only copy paste this pasrt of their Google+ profile page: 103404543700653398620. Then your profile will be correctly listed in the SEOmoz section of your member profile i.e. https://plus.google.com/103404543700653398620

I saw lots of profiles with this problem and assume moste did as I did and just copy/pasted the back section and forgot to test it.

If you could let me know if it was an issue for some of you that would be awesome, I  hope this helps out!

Here is a decent thread on this question regarding link juice from canonical links:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/do-canonical-tags-pass-all-of-the-link-juice-onto-the-url-they-point-to

Here is the response from SEOmoz staff member Dr. Peter J. Meyers:

"I have to disagree about link juice. In many cases, canonical tags will work much like 301-redirects, and do seem to pass link-juice. I've even seen experiments where people used canonical tags to move an entire domain. I wouldn't recommend it (except in rare cases), but it seemed to work.

I am concerned, though, that you're linking internally to one version, but then using canonical to point to another version. I find that's a bad idea - while it sometimes works, you're sending a mixed signal, and it can cause problems for your SEO efforts. I personally think that a truly canonical URL should be used consistently across the site, including in internal links. Internal links are one of your strongest canonicalization cues.

Unfortunately, it's hard to say if link-juice is being passed, given the mixed signal. I'm afraid there's no great way to measure it, at least on the level of the individual link. I should add that Google also isn't a big fan of setting a canonical to page 1 of search results. They'd generally rather you canonical to a "View All" or use rel=prev/next. Canonical isn't always a good bet for pagination these days."

Hope this helps out!

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

There is no point diluting your authority by having dofollow links to the subdomain if it isn't going to rank, so by all means "nofollow" the links.

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.

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.