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Hi Greg,

Forgot to say thanks! We ended up taking your advice and we've made sure each page uses rel alternate correctly. Took a bit of development time, but I'm sure it's worth it in the end.

Cheers,
James

In our case we don't usually stock the reseller, we rely on a number of wholesalers to distribute our products. This is why we need the leverage, because the normal methods aren't available to us.

I'm also not convinced by the assumption that we're really aiming to suck linkjuice and get clickthroughs. Firstly, we would have pointed it to a more important page, and secondly we would have pointed it to a page that converted into sales for us. And thirdly, if the reseller even suspected that we tried to that, they would stop selling our products. That's just not something we would risk doing. The combined sales of our resellers easily beats our own sales.

Despite that, if you think that our resellers are going lose ranking because they've put up sitewide links, then that's worrying and that's something we need to address.

Yes, in hindsight we probably should have made the link nofollow.

Would putting nofollow and noindex on the FAQ itself make a difference? That should make it obvious to Google that we don't want any of the link juice.

Thanks,
James

Great, thanks for the info. I always thought Google was really hot on compliance, but good to know there is a bit of leeway.

Hi Guys,

In the last week our website saw a drop on some of our biggest and best converting keywords and we think it might be down to us rolling out a “Trusted Retailer” badge scheme.

We sell our products directly to consumers via our website, but we also sell our products to other online resellers. We think badges are a good to show the consumer that we trust a site.

On the 17th September we sent out badges to about 39 of our best retailers, two of whom have already put them on their sites.

Instead of sending them a flat jpeg, we sent them HTML files containing code that pulled in the image from our servers. We wanted to host the image to make sure that we always had some leverage. So if a company stopped selling our products, or the quality of their site went down, we could just remove the badge.

Whilst at it, we stuck a link in there pointing to an FAQ on our website all about trusted retailers and what people need to look out for. We chose the anchor text “(brand name) Trusted Retailer”, because that seemed to be the most relevant.

The code looks like this:

(our brand) Trusted Retailer

You might notice that there is a div just before the link. This is there to stop the user from clicking on the top 65% of the badge (because this contains the shop name and ID number), and we also used a negative text-indent to move the anchor text out of the way. But right underneath this is our Logo, so it’s almost a hidden link, but you can still click it.

So far the badge has been put in on two sites, one of which isn’t so great and maybe looks a tiny bit spammy. (They sell mostly through ebay as opposed to on their main site). Also, these sites seem to have put it on most of their pages!

So my questions are;

• Is this seen as black or grey hat?
• Is it the fact we put in anchor text with our brand?
• Or is it the fact the url is transparent in the coding?
• Or is it the fact the sites are using sitewide links?
• In any case would Google react so quickly as to penalise us in two days?
• If this is the issue, do you think there’s anything we can do to stop getting penalised? (Other than having to e-mail 39 retailers back and getting them to take the badges down).

Thoughts much appreciated – we do our SEO in-house and are still learning every day…

Thank you

James

Our website uses a custom built CMS, but uses a fairly standard WYSIWYG text editor.

I've looked at some of the code it produces, and it's not pretty. My gut feeling tells me that this extra bloat is bad for SEO.

Am I right in thinking that Google doesn't look kindly upon badly formatted and bloated HTML?

Thanks,
James

Hi everyone,

I'm just setting up a series international websites and need to use rel="alternate" to make sure Google indexes the right thing and doesn't hit us with duplicate content.

The problem is that rel="alternate" is page specific, and our international websites aren't exact copies of the main UK website. We've taken out the ecommerce module and a few blog categories because they aren't relevant.

Can I just blanket implement rel="alternate" and let it sometimes point to a 404 on the alternate websites? Or is Google going to find that a bit weird?

Thanks,
James