Welcome to the Q&A Forum
Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.
Great response Nicholas. @AWCthreads, Do you have your city/station in the footer ? How many pages do you have in your site ? Do all of them have City/State targeting in them via Page Titles ? Do all of them get traffic from keywords with Geo data attached ? Does your website have a Regional Dmoz listing ?
Carl It would be best to identify and create a list of those part-time bloggers and find their contact information, twitter, facebook etc and then reach out to them. You could also possibly acquire their wordpress/blogspot subdomains and have the content "move" to your site if it's relevant as well as hire them for future posts. I know wordpress.com hosted subdomains can be redirected to domains for a fee. I am not sure if blogspot has similar ability, guess not.
I know you said "new". But how new is it ? Are you also constantly working on your Link Profile ? I have seen "Monster" Authority sites within thousand's of those search pages ranking with no issues. So yes, as Tyler said, it might make sense to do a disallow via robots.txt as well as a noindex tag. Are you getting decent enough rankings on your category pages ? Again, it all boils down to the authority of the site/domain.
If you look at the cache version of the page, it still shows pagination and only shows the default 12 products to Google on Page 1. Therefore there's no real impact in terms of Direct SEO impact as far as "On-page" SEO ranking factors are concerned. I hope this helps.
Another neutral here. I was actually in the same boat as you. I have used PC for so many years that it was hard to migrate completely. I now have both a Mac and a PC. The Mac is just more stable, as Nathan said, no Blue Screen of Deaths etc.
It sounds like it's been a while since you demoted those pages. I think this sounds more like a bug that it's not happening. You could go to the Google Webmaster Forum and submit a request there or if it's urgent and the following solution is doable, you could try blocking those 3 pages via a noindex tag or via robots.txt and see if they get removed that way. Once the pages have been removed using that technique, you could remove the noindex tags or disallows in robots.txt unless you would prefer to keep it that way and you don't want those 3 pages to show up anywhere...period. I hope that helps.
Do you know if that page is cached or if there's a nocache tag on the page ? I have seen some of those scenarios in the past. In my opinion, that should be the reason.
I think the shirts having variations like:
FUNKTION Mens Short Sleeve Red Golf Shirt
FUNKTION Short Sleeve Black Golf Shirt for Men
Might work. This would give you good rankings in Google Products (Google Shopping) and as far as the listing for your category page is concerned, that's the page that should be ranking for Golf Shirts or Golf Shirts for Men or Men's Golf Shirts.
What do you mean when you say "link on google gets removed."
Do you see drop in rankings ? Where does it rank now and does it disappear from the 1000 results or just gets dropped ? Because the rank/shift could be for a variety of reasons.
It is being picked up from your DMOZ Listing in http://www.dmoz.org/Society/Law/Services/Lawyers_and_Law_Firms/General_Practice/North_America/United_States/Mississippi/
Add a meta tag as following in your HTML code if you don't want that to happen.
<meta name="googlebot" content="noodp">
This will take care of the problem.
I think this becomes a usability issue. If I want to link to XYZ Apartment and I link to www.example.com/category/apartments-apartment1, tomorrow, the content of this page changed and its now referencing ABC Apartment, which is not what I intended to do. So it does not sound like a great idea. Another thing, can you do www.example.com/city-state/apartments-name-of-the-apartment-1 www.example.com/city-state/apartments-name-of-the-apartment-2 www.example.com/city-state/apartments-name-of-the-apartment-3 I hope that helps.
Yes, I would recommend you remove the alias.
Next, I would suggest you redirect the specific pages from the old domain/site of the company you acquired to the pages that make most sense for the user on your site. Like if you took over certain products from that company and merged them into your products (or services), a 301 from the products page to your products page would make sense and so on.
This will pass on the SEO value to the respective pages much better rather then a complete redirect from the entire site to just your homepage.
I suggested this based on the fact that you wrote, the acquired company's domain is ranking better, which demonstrates the presence of some sort of authority in terms of backlinks and trust and aging factor in the SERPS.
Great suggestions from Keri and Holly. I would like to add: On the townstate.com, try to do an Infographic about something. Maybe an interesting chart about the Real Estate Market Trends in the last 1-3 years within your city/state. Some top 10 lists like: Top 10 Reasons Why TownName is a Great City to Live In. Top 10 Jobs in TownName Area Top 10 Cities Where People Move from... You get the idea. I hope that helps.
It would not be a good idea to interlink them for SEO reasons as you mention "creating a link wheel/pyramid". I would ask these questions to myself: 1. Do all the sites have unique content ? 2. Do they have any duplicate/repurposed content at all between theme ? 3. Do uses on one website need to navigate to the other website, since it provides value to the user ? 4. Have you considered nofollow links ? This is a bigger strategy discussion that you have to do to figure out your next steps. If they don't provide too much of a value, how about you aggrgate the content on 1, maybe 2 or 3 combined sites instead of 50 and 301 the rest ? It's really difficult to answer further without knowing more in detail. I hope this atleast invokes some questions and a long term SEO strategy.
I agree, this is not automated but so far, from what we know, looks like a nice and clean option. Thanks.