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Hi Andy,

Thanks for the response.

I was thinking we could noindex,nofollow, but how would we do this without figuring out every single URL it affects? There are obviously hundreds (thousands?) of combinations, and going through this manually will be a huge investment of time.

Cheers,

Lewis

Hi,

I'm dealing with an ecommerce client who sells furniture. Each category landing page has a menu on the left hand side that allows you filter by colour, material, brand etc.

Take the www.example/double-beds page, as an example: if you select 'Wood' from the 'Material' filter, the URL changes to www.example/Category/Browse?PageNumber=&ViewAs=&ObjectEntityKey=1916&PageSize=15&SortBy=&filterOptions=47&filterOptions=47 and all the wooden double beds are displayed.

As this new URL contains some of the same products/content as www.example.com/double-beds, where do we stand from an SEO/duplicate content point of view? Are we at risk of a duplicate content slap?

Cheers,

Lewis

Hi Andy,

I would always just add to the disavow file. But what I'd like to know is how will disavowing nofollow links affect a site? Google is already ignoring them...

Thanks for the quick reply, Andy.

As disavowing is the process of telling Google to ignore links from certain domains, would this have any effect on nofollow links that are apparently already being ignored by them?

Hello,

One of our clients - a cleaning business - has a heck of a lot of spammy nofollow links pointing to their site.

The majority of the links are from comments or 'pingbacks', most with the anchor text 'cheap nfl jerseys' or 'cyber monday ugg boots'.

After researching the subject of spammy nofollow links, it seems there is a lot of uncertainty regarding the negative affect these could have on your SEO efforts.

So I guess my question to the community is: if your site was suddenly hit by a plethora of spammy nofollow links, what would you do and why?

Cheers,

Lewis

Hi Tom,

I guess if you used a /blog sub-folder, any links to individual posts will pass juice down to the main /blog landing page. If you go for the /blog-name URL, juice will be spread across the whole domain.

Hi Tom,

I've always used /blog/blog-name as the URL structure for any blog. I feel this makes it clear to Google that these posts belong to a blog and are not a stand-alone, separate page on your site. However, I'm not sure it would have a massive SEO effect if you kept the /blog-name structure.

Cheers,

Lewis

Hi,

Yes, it will be a pain for your writers, but that's what they're paid for. For example, if you had four t-shirts, all different colours, it wouldn't be too difficult to write unique content for each. I wouldn't use the same content and just change the colour, this may cause you problems.

Hi there,

You need to figure out if colour variations are competing with each other in the SERPs. If not, the best option would be to allow customers to choose a colour via a hover-over or drop-down menu that's built into the page's interface. If you choose this method, the URL will not change and there's no need to canonicalise or worry about duplicate content.

If, however, potential customers are searching for a specific colour of the product via Google, you may want to create separate pages for all variations and write unique content for each. It can be a pain for your writers, but needs must!

I hope this helps.

Lewis

Thanks for the quick response, Patrick. Why, if this robots.txt file is incorrect, does it yield no errors on other sites we use this on?

Cheers,

Lewis

Good afternoon Mozzers!

I've got a weird problem with one of the sites I'm dealing with. For some reason, one of the developers changed the robots.txt file to disavow every site on the page - not a wise move!

To rectify this, we uploaded the new robots.txt file to the domain's root as per Webmaster Tool's instructions. The live file is: User-agent: * (http://www.savistobathrooms.co.uk/robots.txt)

I've submitted the new file in Webmaster Tools and it's pulling it through correctly in the editor. However, Webmaster Tools is not happy with it, for some reason. I've attached an image of the error.

Does anyone have any ideas? I'm managing another site with the exact same robots.txt file and there are no issues.

Cheers,

Lewis

FNcK2YQ

Not entirely related, but your site isn't mobile-friendly. So from next Tuesday, you may start seeing a drop in traffic if this is not addressed.

According to Open Site Explorer, you only have one external link going to your site.

Here's a step-by-step guide on how to use the disavow tool if you do have some dodgy links - http://moz.com/blog/guide-to-googles-disavow-tool

Hope this helps.

Lewis

What's your site? Come 21st April, as long as it's mobile-friendly you won't be penalised.

Hi Massimiliano,

I'm too too sure why the development guys are having issues. I think it may be due to the already being rewritten from blog.domain.co.uk to domain.co.uk/blog - but I'll double check.

Hi,

We're currently using a third party blog platform (Blog Engine) on our site and we have a trailing slash issue. I can add as many trailing slashes as I want to the blog's homepage URL, but they don't redirect and our dev guys say this cannot be done with Blog Engine.

We're in the process of building our own blog but, in the meantime, I just wanted to know if this will cause an issue? Individual blog posts with trailing slashes are redirected, it's just the homepage where it can't be done.

I haven't noticed any traffic going to a blog URL with trailing slashes, and I don't believe any URLs with trailing slashes are being indexed, so should this be OK?

Cheers,

Lewis

Hi Keszi,

Thanks for the clarification on canonicals.

Lewis

Hi there,

You'll want to 301 all of the old URLs to the new ones in order to transfer any authority the pages have built up. Canonicalling will not pass any link juice, so I wouldn't do this.

Cheers,

Lewis

Hello,

There was a good post on YouMoz the other day: The Power Of Basic Technical SEO.

Hello,

We created a good infographic for a client of ours and a large tech site (DA 86) picked up and ran a story on it. We didn't contact this company asking them to feature it, they have just picked it up through other shares around the Web.

I understand that, at the end of the day, it's their prerogative whether to "nofollow" their links or not, but surely they should be giving our client some credit as they have clearly deemed the graphic newsworthy and felt that it would appeal to their readership.

I've emailed said tech site, but to no avail. Does anyone have any advice on this? Or is it just a case of they can do what the heck they want? I know that our client will still benefit from the additional referral traffic, but a follow link would have been nicer!

Cheers,

Lewis