Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi there,

I have just written an article that is due to be posted on an external blog, the article has potentially 3 links that could link to 3 different pages on my website, is this too much? what do you recommend being the maximum number of links?

Thanks for any help

Hi there,

I am planning to out source my SEO and one company has caught our attention, they propose this:

Article submissions

Directory submimssions

Blog post comments

Social bookmark submissions

Press Release submissions

The above sounds a bit spammy, however the success they have had with such activity with other websites has been fantastic.

Please let me know your thoughts

Hi there,

We have 20 retailers who are about to launch websites and are going to be selling our products on their websites, however with they have no content for these products they are wanting to take our content we have for our product pages on place the content on their websites, is this going to cause an issue for me? We are ranking well for competitive keywords in this niche and do not want to do anything to harm it.

What I would say is the retailers in question of no intention short term anyway of doing anything with SEO.

Thanks for any help

I read this in Dr.Pete's article in seomoz

Know Your Crawl Paths

Finally, an important reminder – the most important canonical signal is usually your internal links. If you use the canonical tag to point to one version of a URL, but then every internal link uses a different version, you’re sending a mixed signal and using the tag as a band-aid. The canonical URL should actually becanonical in practice – use it consistently. If you’re an outside SEO coming into a new site, make sure you understand the crawl paths first, before you go and add a bunch of tags. Don’t create a mess on top of a mess.

Would this cause me an issue using the method I have used?

Also should I use a canonical on the original URL pointing to itself?

Thanks

Hi Matt,

I really do not want to create a 301, as I want to see stats in Analytics for this short URL.

I have actually used a canonical, do you recommend removing this and using disallow in robots.txt?

Thanks.

Hi there,

I have just read this post:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps

What is the purpose of the canonical tag in this instance if you can you block that URL in robots.txt?

Thanks

Hi there,

We are going to be promoting one of our products offline, however I do not want to use the original URL for this product page as it's long for the user to type in, so I thought it would be best practice in using a URL that would be short, easier for the consumer to remember.

My plan:

Replicate the product page and put it on this new short URL, however this would mean I have a duplicate content issue, would It be best practice to use a canonical on the new short URL pointing to the original URL? or use a 301?

Thanks for any help

Hi Derek,

Their backlink profile looks ok. I was just wondering the value of each link on these websites? as they all seem to be on the same IP.

The strange thing is when using the chrome add on 'PageRank Status' the IP addresses are different, I have got to say slightly different, all in the same city.

Kind Regards

Hi there,

I have placed an article on a blog which I am very happy with, the webmaster has came back to me and suggested more blogs which they are relevant to my niche, so all good, however when checking the neighbourhood checker in Majestic SEO, I had entered one of the domains he suggested then Majestic SEO gave me this message:

Note: we recommend checking this IP: 99.45.343.45 (this is because some domains have multiple IPs or this one changed it recently). please note IP is just an example. Once I checked the IP, all the domains he had suggested were all listed under that IP, should I avoid placing anymore articles on these domains? from an SEO perspective.

Kind Regards,

Hi Amod,

I have also experienced this, our developer accidentally placed this "nofollow" tag across the entire website.

1. Yes, just get Google to fetch your pages via webmaster tools.

2. No.

3. No.

4). Rankings will come back as Matt has pointed out, no need to worry.

Yes, it seems that this is the case that it's the .ie website that been crawled more often.

I have recently launched a new section on the .co.uk website which has been crawled by Google and is not currently on the .ie website:

http://www.avogel.co.uk/health/tinnitus/

However even though this copy is all original verified using copyscape, when I copy and paste the first paragraph into Google.co.uk, this webpage above is not the one that appears in Google.co.uk, so maybe there is something else going on?

Thanks

Yes, it looks likely that I will need to use "rel= canonical" tag which is far from ideal.

At the moment we are writing lots of new pages, for example, this page has recently been launched on the .co.uk & .ie websites:

http://www.avogel.co.uk/health/fibromyalgia/

http://www.avogel.ie/health/fibromyalgia/

Again if I copy and paste the first few paragraphs of the text on the .co.uk version or .ie as they are the same into Google.co.uk, its the .ie version that appears, you can check it out for yourself if you wish.

Is this a signal that the .ie webpage is getting all the credit for being the source? Even though it should not be an issue as I am using hreflang tags and everything is setup correctly in webmaster tools geographically for both domains.

A plan could be delaying the new pages/content on the .ie website until Google has crawled the .co.uk version of those new pages/content, however doing this will have the same affect on the irish website as it's having on the .co.uk website at the moment.

Thanks

Hi David,

I had freshened up the menopause & related pages after the launch of the .ie website and them copied this content over to the relevant pages on the .ie website.

The new written content was published on the .co.uk website and the .ie website about 10 days after the .ie website went live and around 10 days before all these pages dropped:

/health/menopause/

/health/menopause/symptoms

/health/menopause/hot-flushes

/health/menopause/night-sweats/

It just seems from the above the .ie website is the issue?

Thanks

Hi there,

It's just not practical to re-write all the .ie pages, there is literally hundreds of pages, most of which contain 500 - 700 words.

It looks like canonical could be my only option, however it's just something I do not want to do, as the .ie website is ranking well for a number of keywords in Google.ie

What I would say is that not one .ie webpage is out ranking any .co.uk webpage in Google.co.uk for any keyword, it's just when I copy and paste the first few paragraphs from a .co.uk webpage into Google.co.uk it's the .ie webpage that is appearing, surely this is telling me that something is just not quite right?

Hi David,

Thanks for your quick response.

I was thinking about using the canonical tag on the .ie website, however would this not have an affect on the rankings for the .ie website on Google.ie?

I have just noticed on the .ie website that the robots.txt file has this:

**Allow: / **

http://www.avogel.co.uk/sitemap.xml

I'm not sure what negative affect this would have if any, would it be best practice to take this out? I think what has happened here is that the developer has copied across the whole .co.uk website over .ie without actually changing the robots.txt file.

Thanks

Hi there,

We have a .co.uk website which was ranking well for a number of highly competitive keywords, however in February 2012 those rankings for those keywords suddenly dropped off Google all together and have never came back.

A few possibilties to why this has happened:

1. We launched a .ie website which has exactly the same content, could this be the reason for the drop? I have put in all the necessary steps in making sure Google ranks these geographically correct by using hreflang and making sure everything is setup properly in webmaster tools.

Why I think it could be this:

If I copy and paste the first few paragraphs of text from the pages in the .co.uk website that were ranked highly in Google.co.uk it's the .ie version that appears not the .co.uk version.

Here is the webpages in question:

http://www.avogel.co.uk/health/menopause/

http://www.avogel.ie/health/menopause/

Forgot to mention, the reason we have these two websites is due to different currency and legalities.

Hope someone can help me out with this.

Hi EGOL,

I am having the same issue also, these websites are not out ranking me for a particular keyword, however if I copy and paste the first few paragraphs of text into Google on one of my product pages lots of other websites are above my listing that has copied my content, even though my page has higher authority and PR.

Should I be worrying about this?

Kind Regards

Hi Stephen, The URL's in question are:

UK version:

http://www.avogel.co.uk/health/menopause/

Irish version:

http://www.avogel.ie/health/menopause/

Any help would be appreciated.

Kind Regards

Hi Adam,

Thanks for your reply.

I suppose what I could do is mention to them that if they are taking content from our website, they must have at the bottom of each page 'Text supplied by Company Name' the company name supplies a keyword that we target.

I have actually just noticed that there are many retailers out there who are copying our content from our product pages without me knowing, I noticed this by copying a pasting the first paragraph of a number of my product pages, however what is strange that these websites come above my product pages, is this something to worry about? is Google giving me full credit for these pages?

Kind Regards

Hi Mat,

Thanks for your reply.

Yes, there is a lot of work that goes into the content for product pages, blog posts etc.

I think most of the content that they want is for our products they are going to be selling on their website, so they are in need of content for these pages, but not really sure on how to handle this best (SEO benefit)

I had recently stumbled upon retailer websites who have copied our content without actually asking us, however some of those websites have kept the anchor text, we are getting some benefit, right?

Kind Regards