Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey Francisco,

First and foremost, you should check why your traffic has dropped.

Check whether it has dropped on a certain search engine or on a certain set of keywords or landing pages, or is it a blanket drop everywhere.

Check whether your other sources of traffic have tanked as well (direct, referral, etc.) to see if you maybe have a website problem (Webmaster Tools can help you diagnose that as well).

Also check some of the Moz reports available. Moz cannot read Google penalties, so your Domain Authority (as well as your traffic) might have dropped due to a sudden removal of a portion of your backlinks.

As a side note, if your subdomain has been penalized due to spammy backlinks, there's a high likelihood your whole domain has been penalized as well.

I also recommend using responsive design via popular frameworks, like Bootstrap or Foundation. You shouldn't have problems using those from an SEO perspective.

Shayann, you should check which are the 2 Other URLs that create this issue, to check if they implement different rel=canonical tags.

Hey francisco,

I'm not sure I understand, what do you mean when you say Google removed the backlinks? Google doesn't have control over websites that link to you (unless they're on Google's property, like the Blogger platform).

If the links (which, by the looks of that Moz report, were either on a big link network that was taken down or they were sitewide links on large websites) are actually gone, then there is no need to disavow them. Disavowing URLs/domains that have no links to you won't have any effect, even if they used to link to you in the past.

Hope this helps, cheers!

Hey Shayann,

What errors related to rel=canonical do you get in your Moz report?

Inside the Crawl Diagnostics Summary, the rel=canonical tag is listed inside the Notices block. That means it's just a count of how many pages have this tag implemented, and doesn't imply there are any errors with it, but simply that the tag is present on your pages.

Hope this helps!

Hey Rich,

WebGnomes have a pretty nice list of website analysis tools: http://www.webgnomes.org/blog/10-seo-analysis-tools/

I test ran most of them, but I still find myself going back to Woorank.

Hope this helps.

A 301 redirect would typically pass the old domain's link metrics to the new domain (and any penalties if they exist). Theoretically you would get a boost to the Dutch website.

However, there are a few things you should be aware of:

1. You won't be able to use the international version of the website again. Also, a 301 means "permanent redirect", so Google will likely deindex the old domain, and would be hard to get it back up if you change your mind later.
2. You should redirect page-to-page instead of redirecting all of the old domain's pages to just the homepage of the new domain. Otherwise the redirect will have a smaller effect.
3. A .nl domain is a ccTLD geo-targeted domain. You won't be able to rank as well for international queries (e.g. english) as you did with the .com gTLD. Consequently, some of the websites linking to you might also remove the links if they notice the website is now in Dutch.

Hope this helps, cheers!

It can harm you only if any of the kw rich domains have been previously penalized by Google, in which case 301 redirecting it will likely pass the penalty.

Otherwise, it's just like using the same tactic to redirect typo or vanity domains. Won't harm you, but it won't help you with ranking either, regardless of the domain name or keywords used.

Cheers!

Hey Dan,

301 redirecting those domains won't really help you SEO-wise unless they have a good backlink profile to begin with. Even then, it's better to build quality content on those sites, get some good backlinks and then link to your main domain (instead of redirecting). That's basically how brands use micro-sites to promote themselves (Wil Reynolds has a nice video on the advantages and disadvantages of using micro-sites).

Just a cautionary thing: Google has lowered the value of keyword rich EMD domains in September last year.

Hope this helps!

Hey Scott,

Using tables for a website layout will not affect your rankings directly (aka Google will not give you a penalty for using tables).

However, since tables should be used to present tabular data and not full website layouts, there are certain disadvantages that you should be aware of, and they're very nicely summed up in this post: http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/6036/why-arent-we-supposed-to-use-table-in-a-design/6037#6037

Hope this helps!

Yes, the canonical tag is a good use for this situation, so that Google can consolidate links/metrics/equity under one URL. Just remember to implement it correctly, like the following example:

I would go towards trying the permalinks option + plugin. It's quite easy to set up and check if it's working right away.

Let me know how it goes either way

Excellent insight Dana, I actually thought about that when I first read the article.

Here's my take: 301 redirect does actually pass full PR. What I think Matt Cutts was referring to w(hen comparing a 301 dissipating PR as much as a link) is actually linking to an URL through a 301.

As an example, siteA.com -> siteB.com would have the same effect as siteA.com -> bit.ly -> siteB.com, as in, the link from siteA would dissipate the same amount of PR whether it's through a 301 or not. Otherwise, there would be little sense comparing a 301 to a link, since they have completely different uses (it's not like you would move your site from one domain to another using links).

Again, this is just my take, which seems most logical to me (otherwise no one would use link shortening services ever again).

The .html plugin is not a redirect plugin, it's just using the permalink structure with .html at the end to also work on pages.

However, using permalinks does require .htaccess (it's how WP works), so I'm not sure how you're going to work around that.

Best of luck!

Hey Chris,

You can still maintain .html extension in WP. For posts, you only need to add that inside the permalink settings panel. For pages, you can simply use this plugin: http://www.introsites.co.uk/wordpress/html-on-pages-plugin.html

If you decide that you do want to use 301s to change the links and don't have access to .htaccess, you can use this plugin to manage redirects: http://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/

The redirect-leaks-link-juice issue has been settled: http://www.seroundtable.com/redirects-links-pagerank-16419.html

Hope this helps!

Hey pikka,

You can actually use both rel=next/prev and rel=canonical on the same webpage, but you have to be careful on how you use them.

If you don't have a view-all page, then DO NOT use rel=canonical on the review-pX page to point to the main product page. That's like saying "This page has identical content as the other one, so please disregard this one and use the other instead". It's somewhat of a 301 redirect, which would DEINDEX your review-pX pages.

However, using rel=next/prev is perfectly fine, and it's actually the recommended method when there's no view-all page. You can still use rel=canonical but only to point to the current review page (so basically you would use this just to filter out session IDs or any other parameters that lead to duplicate content).

So, in your case, you should use them like this (let's say we're on page 3):

<-- current page, "clean" url
<-- previous page, can contain parameters
<-- next page, can contain parameters

Do NOT use this:

Hope this helps, here's the Google support page on this issue and Maile Ohye's excellent video explaing it.

PS: Almost forgot, regarding your avatar:

1104.jpg

Hey Tim,

There have been quite a few signals that, outside blogging and similar platforms that offer websites as subdomains, Google generally treats a subdomain and its parent domain as the same entity. This has been actually reinforced last year when they changed how Google treats subdomains inside Webmaster Tools.

I'll also quote Rand Fishkin on an answer he gave on subdomains vs subfolders last year:

"Thus, having a single subdomain (even just domainname.tld with no subdomain extension) with all of your content is absolutely ideal from an SEO perspective. It's also more usable and brandable, too IMO."

Regarding your domain-per-city idea, going on what Rand said, it would make even less sense from an SEO perspective.

To answer your question, linking back from the subdomain to main site will likely not help you with any rankings.

Hope this helps!

It is, but then again, that is what you're trying to do, whether it's through JS or the nofollow attribute.

Matt Cutts recommends letting PageRank flow freely around the website, and only nofollow links that don't make sense for the search engine to crawl, like a login page or the shopping cart. I would go with that since, as Eric Enge points out, they probably filter stuff like navigation and footer links anyway.

I actually have an issue with that as well (I'm also using Excel 2010), been meaning to contact Richard Baxter to ask him about it, but I keep forgetting to do that.

I use the normal function, without "_toFit", and just select the cells beforehand and use CSE (ctrl+shift+enter).

Hey Waqid,

You could create a javascript menu, just be careful that Google can access certain javascript.

Alternatively, you could just nofollow the new links so they don't dilute the other links present on the page.

Or, you could just leave it like that. Google does know how to separate elements present on every page (like navigation) to the actual content of the page, like the product information.

Hope this helps, cheers!