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Hi Mozzers

Ive noticed that I have some 302 redirects on my website which have been there for some time . They should really 301's but I am wondering if 302s pass link juice or not as from what I've read they don't so I just wanted to check if anyone knew for sure,

thanks

pete

Thanks Craig,

We are basically a tool hire website but previously as also had a number of mini sites which just specialised in one aspect of what we hired, so for instance, we had a carpet cleaner hire website and a generator hire website as well. This helped to give us a larger SEO footprint and until the start of 2014 was proving very successful. By we got a penalty(due to some links from myguest blog which an seo freelancer did for us ) and this took a few months to clean up and we also then stopped the microsites for saftey as well.

I will check the traffic from the 301 domains and see if I can remove them.

thanks

pete

Dear Mozzers,

I have an issue with my UK Website (short url is - http://goo.gl/dJ7IgD  ) whereby when I type my company name in to google.co.uk search the .com version returns in Search as opposed to the .co.uk and from looking at open site explorer the page rank of the .com is higher than the .co.uk ?. Infact I cant even see the .co.uk homepage version but other pages from my site.

The .com version is also 301'd to the .co.uk.

From looking at Open Site Explorer, I have noticed that we have more links pointing to .com as opposed to .co.uk.   Alot of these are from our own separate microsites which we closed down last year and  I have noticed the IT company who closed them down for some reason 301'd them to the .com version of our site as opposed to the .co.uk but If I look in http://httpstatus.io/  (http status checker tool) to check one of these mircosites it shows - 301 - 302 - 200 status codes which to me looks wrong ?. I am wondering what it should read ... e.g should it just be a 301 to a 200 status code ?.

1. My Website short url is - http://goo.gl/dJ7IgD   and an example of some of 10 microsites we closed down last year which seems to be redirected to .com is http://goo.gl/BkcIjy   and http://goo.gl/kogJ02

2. As these were redirected almost a year ago - it is okay if I now get them redirected to the .co.uk version of my site or what should I do ?

3. They currently redirect to the home page but given that each of the microsites are based on an individual category of my main site , would it be better to 301 them to the relevant category on my site. My only concern is that , may cause to much internal linking and therefore I wont have enough links on my homepage ?

4. How would you suggest I go about building up my .co.uk authority so it ranks betters than the .com- I am guessing this is obviously affecting my rankings and I am losing link juice with all this.

Any advice greatly appreciated .

thanks

Pete

Awesome , Many thanks All !!.

Much Appreciated

Pete

Thanks Dirk for taking a look,

Sorry my fault (typo) , The urls are actually case sensitive so it needs to be done in lower case.

So for example , site.co.uk/cleaning-enquipment-manchester  would 301 back to cleaning-equipment

thanks

pete

Hello Matt,

Many thanks for taking a look at our site.

1. The other sites which are 301'd to our site used to be separate microsites we had . We closed these down last year and just 301'd the links to our homepage.

2. The links from Motorhomes etc are all in our disavow file . We used to hire everything but then just concentrated on tools so the seo agency we used at the time spent alot of time cleaning up our link profile and disavowing whatever we couldnt get removed ourselves

3. The links from leedssearch.co.uk and similar are from citations and these link to our branch pages

We did have doorway pages but we 301'd them back to the main category page (the urls are in lower case)

example - http://www.website.co.uk/cleaning-equipment-manchester  will 301 back to http://www.website.co.uk/cleaning-equipment

How would we rebuild some authority ?.. We did get a manual penalty last year which we recovered from for unnatural links and it took along time to sort out and get it removed. We are naturally quite scared with regards to link building after what the last freelancer did and got us links from a blog network which got penalized.  The seo agency we use to use only provided a few links from poor quality domains and it wasn't worth the money we were paying them every month ?

What would you recommend ?

thanks

pete

Hello Mozzers.

We historically had Location specific landing pages on our eCommerce site.

examples -

site.co.ukj/cleaning-enquipment-london

site.co.ukj/cleaning-enquipment-Manchester

These all had unique content(600 words approx) and ranked in top 10 for many cities. I understand these would have been classed as doorway pages so we got rid of them (301'd back to the category pages) and now our rankings for these terms have tanked.

We also have specific branch pages but we have kept these like many other companies with multiple branches do.

It feels like by doing a good thing and tidying up everything , we are actually making our site worse. Everything else seems to be in place. Loads of new regular content , clean profile , mobile friendly, lots of citations etc etc.

Any idea what could be going on here. Here's a link in our site - http://goo.gl/0yjSd8

thanks

Pete

Hello Mozzers,

We have restructured our site and have done many 301 redirects to our new url structure.

I have seen one of my competitors have done similar but they have kept the old sitemap to assist google I guess with their 301's as well.

At present we only have our new site map active but am I missing a trick by not have the old one there as well to assist google with 301's.

thanks

Pete

Hi Andy,

I have a similar situation with my site so I am interested in what is advised here as I've also thought maybe page sculpting is the answer but I've heard different answers on this subject. In my case , the 100 link rule wont work

From what I've read and heard in google hangouts etc

1. 100 Links per page is out of date now as google can and does read more links than this.
2. The types of links and where they are on the page does affect its importance. I.e Navigation and footer links are treated differently
3. Do you have duplication in the links ? i.e anything that appears both in the footer and the nav or someone else on the page?

I remember John Mueller (Google) recently advised against Page Sculpting as it could more harm than good.

Please share what you find out as this is an interesting topic which will benefit many on there

thanks

Pete

You may want to see the latest google webmaster hangout . John Mueller answers a question about this type of topic. You may also want to see the seo journal article linked to this.

John Mueller has also stated a number of times that there is no duplicate penalty as such but my interpretation of that is that you wont rank as well as the original source. Many affiliate sites suffer from this kind of thing as they are share the same product descriptions etc.

Pete

Hello Paul ,

Many thanks for your assistance and comprehensive answer to solve this.

You raise some very valid points and something I hadn't picked up on - the fact that currently my internal structure is referencing urls which are not the same as what the canonical tag is set for. Asyou say, this is not a good thing..

Once again, thanks for your help to solve this. My developer is on the case now.

thanks

Pete

Hi Mozzers,

I have a query regarding canonical tags on my eCommerce site..

Basically on my category pages whereby I have more than 1 page, I currently use next/prev rel and also have a canonical tag pointing to the View all version of that page. This is believe is correct.(see example - http://goo.gl/2gz6LV

However, from looking at the view source on my other pages,  I have noticed I have canonical tags on all my category pages which are only a single page and these canonicaltag are pointing to a different url.

I enclose an example . Please advise

Category page - http://goo.gl/Pk4zYl

This is where the canonical tag points to  - http://goo.gl/EwKv26

Another example

Category Page - http://goo.gl/4gWTdD

This is where the canonical tag for that page points to http://goo.gl/qm4HV7

Should I either make sure that categories that are only 1 page , don't have a canonical tag at all ? or do I have a canonical tag on say every page on my website for safety pointing to the main url for that page. The later, I imagine would be a belt and braces approach but I don't want to screw up anything if it's not advised?

Please help/

Kind regards

Pete

Hello,

Well these pages are onsite but I've been told they can also be classed as doorway pages or at best, spammy..

So for example - you can see below I have a main "cleaning Equipment category" and I also have cleaning equipment category pages for different locations , so these would serve carpet cleaners in London , carpet cleaners in Brighton , carpet cleaners in manchester and so on.

www.site.co.uk/cleaning-equipment/carpet-cleaners
www.site.co.uk/cleaning-equipment-london/carpet-cleaners
www.site.co.uk/cleaning-equipment-brighton/carpet-cleaners
www.site.co.uk/cleaning-equipment-manchester/carpet-cleaners
www.site.co.uk/cleaning-equipment-liverpool/carpet-cleaners

All the location pages have unique content , title tags , h1 tags etc but I've been told they look spammy and they are in effect doorway pages as I trying to get a local search footprint in different cities. .

what I want to change it to , is just have the www.site.co.uk/cleaning-equipment/carpet-cleaners page and either 301 the location pages or follow no index them.

thanks

Pete

Hi Mozzers,

I have what is classed as doorway pages on my website. These have historically been location specific landing pages for some of our categories but from speaking to a number of different webmasters , then general consensus is that they are not in google guidelines so I will be getting punished by having them.

My options are :

1. I can 301 the pages back to their original category pages . This will conserve some link juice to pass back to the respective category page.

2. I can set these as Follow No index. Not sure what will happen here with regards to link value etc.

What would be best ?... Some of the pages do currently rank "fairly well" for some of the locations so I am getting traffic from them but I also know I will be getting a algorithmic penalty for having them so how best I clean these up ?.

Also , by cleaning up the site structure , would I see any benefit here ? or will I have to wait for a new panda update/ refresh ? I thought the panda refresh won't use a new dataset

thanks

Pete

Hi ,

Sorry for the late response, been away for a few days. Yes,. it does help alot.

Many thanks for your help

PEte

Hi ,

We are an online Tool hire affiliate . The company we are partnered with has physical depots which we currently use this as our own and have branch pages for these locations.

I have also seen other partners do the same which they rank very well for.

thanks

Pete

Hello Mozzers,

I am wondering how do you rank for categories locally where when you operate from multiple branches.

Currently our eCommerce website has location pages for every category but I know that this is now classed as doorway pages and spammy so I am in the process of sorting out our site structure.

I understand that the general format for having sites with multiple branches is to have a branch page per physical location and that's about it. Is there any more to this ?

However, What confuses me though, is that if you offer all these services in all these branches, how are you going to rank for them locally if you don't have a specific page for each of them in that location?

So for example -

We rent Carpet cleaners , floor sanders, generators in each of our different branches.

My site currently has a carpet cleaner hire <location>url , floor sander hire <location>url and a generator hire <location>url.  Every branch has a url for each of my categories.</location></location></location>

So if I was to get rid of all of my location category pages. How am I going to rank for these renting these products in different cities where our branches does without having specific location pages for them ?

Is it just a case that google knows that because I have branch pages at locations x, y, x , then my carpet cleaner , floor sander and generator category pages will rank locally in those locations providing I have decent citations etc etc etc

thanks
Pete

Many thanks , I didn't think it looked like something google would approve of. Will stay clear of that idea then.

thanks

Pete

Hi Mozzers,

One of my competitors uses a trick whereby they have a number of different sitemaps containing location specific urls for their most popular categories on their eCommerce store.

It's quite obvious that they are trying to rank for keyword <location>and from what I am see,  you cant to any of these pages from their website navigation or search , so it's like these pages are separated from the main site in terms of accessing them but you can access the main website pages/navigation the other way round (i.e if you select one of the pages from finding it in serps) </location>

1. I know that google doesn't really like anything you can't access from the main website but would you class this as blackhat ? / cheating etc ...  They do tend to rank quite well for these  alot of the pages and it hasn't seem to have affected pages on their main website in terms of rankings. I am just wondering , if it's worth us doing similar as google hasn't penalised them by the looks of things..

thanks

Pete

Cool, Many thanks Andy

I will check out Buzzsumo to

thanks again

Pete