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You shouldn't worry about them if they are marked with nofollow.

Nofollowed links will not damage your rankings because, as the Google's support page says, the nofollow attribute "means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links".

Cheers!

Hey, let me take a swing at this.

As I understand, you would like to rank with the www.mysite.com/category/name page, and you can get backlinks to your blog posts instead of your category. Your problem is that www.mysite.com/category/name/specific-blog-post redirects to www.mysite.com/specific-blog-post, and you don't know if that counts as a backlink to your category page.

First of all, you're right, getting backlinks to your category page is usually pretty hard, and your best bet is to get backlinks to the blog posts that are featured in that category. This can be efficient especially if your internal linking is sound, so that on the blog post page you link back to the parent category (and not to many other parts of your website).

Second, there is no problem that www.mysite.com/category/name/specific-blog-post redirects to www.mysite.com/specific-blog-post. That's the way you set up your WordPress permalinks, which isn't bad and is actually fairly common. Google doesn't associate the blog post with a category based on URL, it associates them based on the relationships (internal links) it finds while crawling your site. Getting more backlinks to blog posts in one category will pass some value to the category itself, so naturally your category will also rise in ranking.

Hope this helps, cheers!

Hi Bill,

I'd probably do this using Excel as well. Get the domains in a column, use the Lins API for Excel tool to grab backlink/LRD information for each domain, then use the SEO Tools for Excel plug-in to check the redirect location.

You can also grab backlinks for each of the domain using the API tool, but you might need to do that in a separate sheet.

Hey Greg,

Don't worry about nofollowing links toward your blog. It's your blog, which, while not on the same domain, is still part of your business.

As an example, you can check out www.nbc.com. You'll see that they have a shop in the top menu which links to an outside domain. Also, on the main page, if you check out the footer, they have product previews from their shop, just like you have article previews from your blog. They haven't used nofollow, and you shouldn't bother with it either.

Have a great weekend!

Hey Roy,

I haven't worked with ecommerce sites that also sell on stores such as Amazon, but I've found an interesting answer to a question very similar to yours, here: http://moz.com/community/q/amazon-product-descriptions-and-our-website-s-product-descriptions

As a solution, you could try feeding Amazon/Ebay only a small excerpt of the description, and not linking from your main site to the Amazon/Ebay products.

Cheers

Hey,

These are actually called one-line sitelinks (also known as mini sitelinks), and have been documented on the Google Webmaster Blog here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ro/2009/04/one-line-sitelinks.html

Basically, they're a more condensed (up to 4)  form of the normal sitelinks, and can appear for results other than the first result. Google uses them to show users other pages on that site related to their search term. Like the normal sitelinks, you can't really control when they show up.

Hope this helps, cheers!

"So what I'm taking away is that the Root Domain DA of 95 is meaningless in this case and that I should look at Page and Sub Domain metrics such as Moz Rank, Moz Trust and Linking Domains."

Exactly!

"Assuming the latter metrics are superior to our site can I expect these links to pass "juice" and boost our organic search traffic?"

Links pass "juice" regardless if the site that's linking to you has superior metrics or not. You shouldn't pass on sites just because their metrics are lower than yours (but I understand if you'd want to prioritize those blogs with higher metrics/social impact).

Regarding the visibility and organic SEO efforts, you should aim for blogs with a high number of subscribers/followers first, and worry about the metrics later (plus, these blogs are the ones with the highest metrics most of the time).

I would even rather have a nofollow link from an influential blogger in my niche than a dofollow link from someone who hasn't written in 6 months. Reason is that, beyond the visibility and direct traffic, the first link might also generate more links in the long run from the blogger's followers and community, which would boost your organic SEO even more than in the other case.

Hope this makes sense, and have a great weekend!

Hey,

I wouldn't worry about this. Your page has enough unique content so Google won't consider the snippets as being duplicate content. In addition, you interlinked the blog and the website, so Google is likely to see the relationship between the two and consider them as part of the same entity.

The only disadvantage you might have from not hosting the blog on the same domain is that a link to the blog won't provide the same link equity to the website. Other than that, I wouldn't change anything.

Hope this helps, good luck with your business!

Hey Ramesh,

After a quick look in Open Site Explorer, your site seem to have a very unnatural link profile (lots of black hat including a lot of comment spam) and was probably caught in the latest Penguin update.

Your only solution going forward is to remove/disavow those links and do SEO the right way. Be sure to also check Webmaster Tools for any manual penalty warnings. The whole process will likely take you quite a few months.

Hope this helps, good luck!

Hey Wilkerson,

Since these bloggers are hosted on blogspot/wordpress, you can't use the Moz DA metric to screen for quality blogs like you would a normal website.

Instead, try using the subdomain mozRank, mozTrust and Linking Root Domains (you can see them in the Mozbar popup under the Subdomain column). Check the image attached to see where these are.

Even better than using the above metrics, check how popular the blog is (this includes blog comments, twitter followers, etc)! Try to think more in terms of visibility and direct traffic and less in terms of how much will the actual link help you in the search results.

Hope this helps, cheers!

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Hey Tim,

You can still access it here: http://pro.moz.com/tools/crawl-test

Don't really know if they plan to remove it or they just forgot to include a link into the new version.

Hope this helps!

Hey Harris,

Moz currently offers API access to their Mozscape (formerly known as Linkscape), which is what Open Site Explorer uses, and the Followerwonk Social Authority, used for measuring Twitter engagement. As per their documentation, using their Mozscape API will only allow you to get access to these resources:

• URL metrics
• Link metrics
• Anchor text metrics
• Top pages
• Metadata

As such, there's no Rank API available right now.

Hope this helps, cheers!

Hey Jeremy,

You could opt to continue paginating comments, and use a rel="canonical" tag to ensure Google doesn't see comment pagination as duplicate content.

If i remember correctly, the Wordpress SEO by Yoast plugin should automatically take care of this, but you can also implement it manually via this code in the section of your template:

Source: http://www.shoutmeloud.com/wordpress-duplicate-content-problems-fixes.html

Hope this helps

Hey Jean,

You shouldn't worry about that. There are people who had domains parked for years before starting to build content.

Write quality content, promote it, and Google will take notice regardless of when you launched your blog.

Cheers

Hey Jessica,

Due to the way your CMS works, the segment between the /p/ and the /19635 part is irrelevant to getting the right data from the database in order to display the correct product. In fact, you can write anything there and the URL will still work.

For example: http://www.patriotoutfitters.com/p/random-string/19635

It's probably quite difficult to hack your CMS in order for this not to happen, or change it to another CMS completely. The easy solution (might still require some small modifications or perhaps a plug-in) is using a rel="canonical" tag to always specify the right URL that you want for that specific page. This way the search engine won't read the separate URLs as duplicate content.

There's also the alternative of using the meta refresh tag (instead of the rel="canonical") to do a 301 redirect, since you will probably not be able to do it with .htaccess. I wouldn't use it though, especially since the users aren't affected by the different URLs, and you're only interested in informing the search engines.

Hope this helps!

No problem! Basically Google will recrawl the old URLs and should find the 301 itself. Your issue should resolve all by itself, just give it a few weeks. When it finds the redirect, it should remove the old URL from the index.

Hey Kyle,

I think that your problem is that you have the same (duplicate) category meta description for all categories, so Google discards it as being irrelevant. Your product meta descriptions on the other hand are unique, so they show up fine.

The solution would be to create unique descriptions for each category and subcategory.

Hope this helps, cheers!

Hey Christian,

The issue here might be that Google still has a cache of the old URL before the 301 redirect. In that case, you'll just need to wait until the Google data centers refresh the data.

Also, instead of using a server header tool, you could use the Webmaster Tools "Fetch as Google" option on the old URL, and click on the "Success" link to check how Googlebot retrieves the page (to make sure Googlebot sees the 301 header as well).

Cheers!

Could you tell us where exactly do you see an External Links column in the Crawl section?

I'm looking at the Crawl Diagnostics page and can't seem to find that.

Thanks Tom! However, I'm not interested in the URL structure, as I got that figured down. I'm mainly curious on what's a good practice for designing the blog category page when you have subcategories, and all the posts belong to the subcategories themselves.