Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Paul,

Bing is much less confused, and we'll sit tight - but many thanks for the change of address tool suggestion - we had missed that!

Best,

Richard

Hi Mike,

Ok, that's pretty much what we thought but thanks for confirming your thoughts.

Best,

Richard

Hi all,

We've just rebranded.  The 301 appears to have worked well and moved the results and rankings onto the new domain.  However a site:olddomain.com search in Google brings up about a hundred pages that have the new titles and descriptions but show the old urls - does anyone have any idea how to make the old domain disappear from the SERPS?

Many thanks,

Richard

Hi Richard and Marie,

Thanks for the replies so far. We did the first generic warning asking for a reconsideration request then the second message saying "..for this specific incident we are taking very targeted action on the unnatural links instead of your site as a whole".

In this instance did our drop in rankings result purely from some of inbound links being excluded from then? Are these links of no worry or consequence to us as Google have essentially disavowed them from being of any value? That's certainly the conclusion I'm getting.

We did stop link building in light of these messages and that has no doubt let other sites take over and improve their rankings while ours stagnated a bit.

Hi Mozzers,

A quick question regarding Google Penguin recovery. A domain I have was hit by Penguin and we got a message in Webmaster Tools. We went to work fixing links we thought were most harmful, documented the evidence and did a reconsideration request.

Google's reply was "No manual spam actions found".

If reconsideration requests aren't the way to go then of course I will continue to build good natural links. But if I remove more links which I consider to be harmful will I ever know if the penalty is removed? Is there a point at which the algorithm would remove the penalty and inform me?

Thanks!

Thanks for the answers so far guys!

It appears they do indeed link out to other companies in the same industry and the tend to just have a link plus the Meta Title and tag each website under particular products. We'll ignore these from our backlink clean up efforts.

I've exported a list of 1000 domains from GWT that link to our site and ordered by PageRank (a la Richard Baxter's advice) and can see 37 domains with no PR. Of these, some are indexed as anywhere between 20k pages to over 1 million pages yet their sites are down. I appreciate it takes time for Google to completely remove a site from its index but I'm finding it hard to identify which bad quality links to go after.

Thanks.

Thanks for the help guys. I have been 301'ing to a seperate domain rather than somewhere else on the same site. I'll speed up the removal of the old content, thanks Ben!

RewriteRule ^folder/(.*)$ http://www.newurl.com [R=permanent,L]

The above works for me.

Hi Mozzers,

My site has 11,200 pages indexed in Google and I'm looking to remove some of the lesser content which should probably have been picked up by Panda. However these pages work out to about 1,100 in total and I'm not sure whether to remove these bit by bit or just do it in one fell swoop?

Does Google not like a site's indexed pages fluctuating too quickly? Are there any other considerations I should be aware of?

Thanks!

Hi Mozzers,

I'm in the process of finalising a design for an infographic to be hosted on the blog section of our travel website. The topic of the infographic is Olympics based - 150 days to go! - so it should appeal to a fairly broad audience.

Aside from targetting some of the official and non-official Olympic sites that might want to link to us or Retweet us I'm trying to think of some ideas that will give our infographic some legs. I do plan to target sites that have previously posted infographics on the same subject as they're more likely to host one again.

Watching Tom Critchlow's Outreach for Linkbuilding is giving me some ideas but I still feel I'm missing something considerable that could really benefit.

Any outreach ideas I've completely missed?

Thanks!

@vitalscom - it's at least good to know someone else has experienced this!

Due to the volume I don't consider doing 301s a permanent solution. Fortunately there is a noindex on our 404 page so Google et al shouldn't take these errors into consideration.

Hi guys,

I've checked my email this morning and I've got a number of 404 errors over the weekend where Google has tried to crawl some of my existing pages but not found the full URL.

Instead of hitting 'domain.com/folder/complete-pagename.php' it's hit 'domain.com/folder/comp'.

This is definitely Googlebot/2.1; http://www.google.com/bot.html (66.249.72.53) but I can't find where it would have found only the partial URL. It certainly wasn't on the domain it's crawling and I can't find any links from external sites pointing to us with the incorrect URL. GoogleBot is doing the same thing across a single domain but in different sub-folders.

Having checked Webmaster Tools there aren't any hard 404s and the soft ones aren't related and haven't occured since August. I'm really confused as to how this is happening..

Thanks!

Thanks for the responses guys.

@oznappies: I'll have the canonical line at the top for best practices and so it's visible.

@Ryan - My CMS has the option to noindex/nofollow too as there are some pages we don't want indexed. Thanks for the heads up about the WMT/Bing method though.

Hi guys,

Quick question regarding the rel canonical tag.

I have lots of links pointing at me with query strings and previously used some code to determine if query strings were in the URL and if they were then not to index that page. If there weren't query strings then the page would be indexed and followed.

I assume I can now use the rel canonical tag on each of these pages so the value goes to the proper URL minus any query string. However do I need to have the rel canonical tag above the index, follow tag on the page?

So URL is site.com/page.html?ref=ABC

meta robots is "index, follow"

Rel canonical is "site.com/page.html"

Does the order of the meta robots and canonical tag matter?

Thanks in advance!