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If you 301 redirect the old category page that had the bad backlinks, you will be indirectly pointing those bad backlinks from the old category page to the new one.

If it shows as 404 in webmaster tools and you are no longer using that page, that means it is displaying the correct error. It should eventually be removed from Google's index if it is still in there or you could remove it from Google's index in WMT if you wanted to.

Hope this helps.

Mike

Me too

I just asked the Moz team this earlier this week.

They are working on functionality similar to this where you can add multiple users to one account; however, they have no ETA on when this will be available.

Mike

Thanks for your responses.

To help clarify things, when I say these videos are "outdate" I mean that some of them are 10+ years old... so old in fact that we do not even have GA tracking on these pages, because that was not a thought we had 10+ years ago.

Long story short, (I had a great response, but my browser refreshed and I lost EVERYTHING, so I am taking a second stab at this) as I see it after reading your responses and thinking through things further, I have two options:

A) instead of transcripts (too much time and/or money to get these written and the videos are so old that it probably doesn't make sense to get this done) I could include a small paragraph with a link to the up-to-date product page.

B) redirect to the up-to-date product page.

I want to pass as much link juice as I can from these old video pages to my product page and do not know which method would be preferred as I could include some anchor text if I choose option A (I understand that internal anchor text does not make a huge difference, but I was unable to find anything that said if there is a preference to a page having one link pointing to another page or a straight-up redirect).

Thanks for any advice you can give.

Mike

We have 60 demo movie pages on our site. We no longer link to these movie pages internally, because they are outdated; however, a lot of our partner companies are still linking to these pages.

Some of these pages will have 10-15 linking root domains and a page authority of 30+... so pretty decent authority.

These pages only include a movie on the pages, no links. I am trying to pass some of the link juice from these pages to other pages on our site.

I am wondering if I should:

A)Include transcripts on these pages, then link back to our current product page or solution pages?

B)Set up redirects from these pages to a product or solution page?

C)Set up a redirect to our homepage?

Any advice?

Thanks,

Mike

I understand that you don't want them to have a different experience; however, you should want them to have a unique experience.

If you are just doing it for Google, I would read the link I included in my original post, which states, "...in some cases, content is deliberately duplicated across domains in an attempt
to manipulate search engine rankings or win more traffic. Deceptive practices like this can result in a poor user experience, when a visitor sees substantially the same content repeated within a set of search results." and "In the rare cases in which Google perceives that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we'll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. As a result, the ranking of the site may suffer, or the site might be removed
entirely from the Google index, in which case it will no longer appear in search results."

Here is an example - SAP provides business software solutions globally. They have MANY versions of their website. Look at the subtle difference between content, images, etc. SAP-US and SAP-UK. They have the same type of pages on both sites, but the content and positioning is slightly different.

I understand that you are saying your visitors want the same end result whether that is a product or service from your company. You may just want to try having a landing page specific to the UK? You could design it like your homepage and then have it link to content throughout the rest of your site (the same stuff you are linking to for US based customers). You would then want to add domain.com/uk to all of the UK based business directories and such. Maybe create a Facebook page that is for that UK based domain?

Hope this helps. It is a good idea to target other areas... I am just saying that if you start duplicating your content, you could run into trouble with Google rather quickly.

Good luck.

Mike

I guess it depends on the extent of changes you make when you say you would modify it for dialect changes.

Google refers to duplicate content as, "Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably
similar."

So, if you are changing a handful of words/phrases and just changes the location from X to Y, that probably wouldn't be very unique. You want to keep in mind that not only do you want to create unique content for search engines, but you want your users to see unique content as well. For instance, if a visitor was on your site and they were looking at your office locations and read your US page, then your UK page and they were almost identical, that would provide for a poor user experience.

I would suggest that you rewrite them to be as unique as you can. Can you get by with just changing the dialect and location on those pages? - maybe; however from a user standpoint that would not be good form.

Hope this helps.

Mike

If you are redirecting all of the pages from Site A to Site B, Site A really no longer exists from a content point of view. You are simply passing on some of the authority from Site A to Site B, which will increase the authority of Site B.

You are not keeping Site A's rankings. You are telling Google, "I don't use Site A anymore, but the content on Site B is the equivalent... you should use that instead." If you were ranking #5 for a keyword using Site A, you will not automatically rank #5 for Site B when you have the redirect in place.

If you were to completely remove the content from Site A, Google would not care, because you have redirects that immediately redirect users and spiders from Site A to the Site B equivalent.

Does that answer your question?

Mike

Hi Alex,

From a functional standpoint, absolute and relative paths should lead users and spiders to the same page.

There are some pros to using one over the other though:

Relative

-faster to code

-if you switch domains, you won't have to deal with redoing internal links

-your page should be faster, because you have less code for browsers and Google to sift through

Absolute

-leaves little confusion for browsers and spiders, because it is using the EXACT path

-if your site gets scrapped, the links would still point back to your site

-Google Webmaster Tools recommends absolute paths, "Where possible, use absolute rather than relative links. (For instance, when linking to another page in your site, link to www.example.com/mypage.html rather than simply mypage.html)."

Hope this helps.

Mike

One of the biggest things is competitiveness of the keyword.

For instance. The company I work for does accounting software. That means that we are up against HUGE names like QuickBooks, SAP, Microsoft, Epicor, SAGE, etc.

When this is the case, you may need to either break things up into niche category pages or subdomains and/or target long-tail keywords.

Also, if this is a new site or a new page, it can take time for Google to index it and rank it up higher in the SERPs.

Be proud you got an A! Now just fine tune things to get where you need to be in the SERPs.

Hope this helps.

Mike

Hi Rasmus,

I think the SEO best practice or normal practice is to target one keyword per page. I think the reasoning behind it is you can tailor the title, url, content, backlinks, etc. to that particular keyword instead of splitting it up between multiple.

That being said, I think it all comes down to the competitiveness of your keywords. If they are very competitive, you are better off doing multiple pages; however, if they are not completive or more "long-tail" types of keywords, you could definitely attempt to have them on a single page.

If this does not help in answering your question, I would simply recommend trying it. See if you can get the results you want using one page... but if you can't attain those results, switch it up and try the two page approach.

Hope this helps.

Mike

This has been a much debated topic over the last few weeks.

According to Google Webmaster Tools regarding the disavow tool, "This is an advanced feature and should only be used with caution. If used incorrectly, this feature can potentially harm your site’s performance in Google’s search results. We recommend that you disavow backlinks only if you believe you have a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site, and if you are confident that the links are causing issues for you. In most cases, Google can assess which links to trust without additional guidance, so most normal or typical sites will not need to use this tool."

So as you can see, most sites shouldn't need this tool. If you have thousands of spammy links coming from one source, with keyword heavy anchor text, that could look bad to Google; however, you are more or less averaging 1 link for 200 different domains. As long as that anchor text is unique (even if it doesn't completely make sense) you "should" be fine.

This article from Search Engine Land, 6 Things To Think About Before Disavowing Links, states "If you haven’t actually been penalized and you start disavowing your links, you’re essentially outing yourself to Google that you manipulated the system. Make sure that you equivocally know you were penalized and it’s not just some random fluctuation in rankings, a sitemap or indexing problem, or an accidentally no-indexed page."

You say, "Contacting these sites to have these links removed would be a very long process..." Google actually recommends you contact the site owners first and make an attempt at doing everything in your power to request your links get removed prior to using the disavow tool if you choose to do so.

Long story short. With that few links coming from that many unique domains, AND the fact that you haven't received a warning from Google... I would be tempted to just leave things and evaluate the keywords you were previously ranking for. If you see that it has been a straight up nose dive in rankings, there may be some concern, but fluctuation in rankings (at least for me) is relatively normal. In the course of a week, I can be high on page 2 or on page 5 (I have extremely competitive keywords) - I have come to expect this type of fluctuation, because I always rise to the top eventually.

Hope this helps.

Good luck.

Mike

No. Google will not index your page differently; however, it can potentially slow your pages down, because you will have additional code.

Here is what Google has to say on the matter, "Where possible, use absolute rather than relative links. (For instance, when linking to another page in your site, link to www.example.com/mypage.html rather than simply mypage.html)."

There are a few reasons behind this thought process: 1) crawlers cannot get confused when crawling your pages, because the complete path is available 2) should your site content be scrapped, the links would point back to your own page 3) if you have poor site structure, this can increase errors (for instance if you switch to HTTPS for a signin page and you continue to use relative pathing for navigation, you could then have links to the HTTPS version of your website and the HTTP version).

Also, just for reference, when you are looking at using relative or absolute for canonical pages, Google states, "rel="canonical" can be used with relative or absolute links, but we
recommend using absolute links to minimize potential confusion or difficulties."

Hope this answers your question.

Mike

I pick up what you are putting down... thanks for the clarification Frank.

Here is how I think things would play out...

If you are creating /super-awesome-best-thing-ever as a new page that does not exist yet on your site, it will have very little rank. It if you redirect site.com to site.com/super-awesome-best-thing-ever you will have a partial drop in page rank due to the 301 redirect. Just because you are redirecting your homepage to the /super-awesome-bet-thing-ever does not mean it will get the full power of your old homepage, site.com. You would also need to change all of your internal links to point to site.com/super-awesome-best-thing-ever instead of site.com, because you'd lose some of your link juice flow if you also used the redirect internally.

And if you use a 301 redirect, you are telling Google that this change is permanent - inferring that you are no longer going to use your domain of site.com. Does that mean Google would remove the URL site.com from the index... I don't know.

I do know that SEOmoz places keyword usage in the URL under the "moderately important" section of its on page analysis - that said, I wouldn't go to trouble of this. I think you are better off optimizing your homepage for the keyword or creating a /super-awesome-best-thing-ever landing page.

Hope this helps.

Mike

Did you submit an xml sitemap using Google Webmaster Tools?

This alerts Google that your site has changed drastically and that they should crawl it and index the new content.

You should also submit a sitemap to any other search engine you want to rank in. Yes the search engines "should" find your site eventually; however, this gives them a heads-up.

Hope this helps.

Mike

That is very odd that it is ranking that high.

Using OpenSiteExplorer, it shows that rockymountainpatiofurniture.com only as 5 internal links. The other 2 links are blog comments.

I looked and on Google, RMPF has almost 3000 indexed pages and after a 48% scan using Screaming Frog, the homepage has over 5406 internal inlinks.

I can only assume we are not seeing all of the information related to this site. It appears to be pretty established and have a decent number of internal pages with unique content.

That probably doesn't help much... but it does give you a little bit more information.

Mike

It looks like it is pulling some localized results for that. I am in Minneapolis, MN and do not see rockymountainfurniture.com in the first 50 results; however, when I change my location to Atlanta, GA (I looked at the location in your profile), I do see them on page one.

Mike

According to Google's, Ways to correct my local business listing to correct your business name, "If your business name isn't showing up correctly, edit the listing in your Google Places account. Verifying your listing allows you to personalize your business’s Place Page with custom fields, photos & videos, posts, and more."

Depending on whether you have already verified the listing saying you are the business owner or if you just edited it for a local business the instructions may vary slightly.

Hope this helps.

Mike

I personally think this may confuse users. For instance, if they click on your company logo from another page and are directed to www.site.com/super-awesome-best-thing-ever stead of www.site.com... that might appear kind of strange to them.

Why don't you either:

• optimize your homepage for super-awesome-best-thing-ever

• create a landing page for super-awesome-best-thing-ever

If you are trying really hard to rank for super-awesome-best-thing-ever, I would try the above 2 options first. If you still aren't getting the results you want, then maybe try the homepage redirect; however, I think that is somewhat odd functionality for the user.

In most cases, the super-awesome-best-thing-ever is going to be more specific. For instance, if bestbuy.com redirected to bestbuy.com/electronics-retailer that would confuse me... A LOT.

Have you tried other options first?

Mike

Research Tools > Keyword Analysis

They do show different information than AdWords; however, the SEOmoz one is pretty cool, because it analyzes your completion as well.

You may need to run the "Full Report" to get the information you are looking for; however, the basic summary is also very helpful when researching keywords.

Mike