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Both great answers - thank you Sean and Brighton College.

This just confirms my suspicion that it's not a good idea. You know that sickening feeling you get in your stomach when something doesn't feel right? That's the feeling I got when approached from our customer about doing this. I think that gut instinct as Sean alludes to has a lot of truth in SEO.

I agree with both of you on "it's better to have a few good outbound links" and "the more inbound quality links vs outbound, the better."

Thank you!

We are working with a large, global customer that has asked us to link to their website from about 5,000 pages of our website. The links would either point to one page on their website, or they would point to specific pages throughout their website.

Is this a bad thing from an SEO perspective, as in - would either of us be penalized from search engines for doing this?

Would it also help if Joel put a canonical on the new index.php page?

Thanks Jarno,

Good to know from your geographic location. Looking at analytics shows traffic is down about 60% from Google visits originating from the U.S. to our main domain.

The last ia_archiver blocks an archiving website - saw it in Bruce Clay's robots.txt (http://www.bruceclay.com/robots.txt).

But we are looking at cleaning up our robots.txt file so it's nice 'n tidy. There are things in there that can now be removed, so thank you for the reminding tip!

No errors in Google Webmaster. Did receive a message on Nov. 5th saying http://www.ides.com/: Big traffic change for top URL but no reasons listed.

Your html sitemap is best for website visitors, so best practice is to list the most important sections/pages. Google can use your html sitemap page to crawl the rest of your site as long as the structure can be followed.

If you have lots of pages, then it's best to us an xml sitemap to submit through Google Webmaster. Once your xml sitemap is in the root directory of your website, you can also let search engines know its location through your robots.txt file like this:

User-agent: *
Sitemap: http://www.SomeDomain.com/sitemap.xml

If your site changes over time, it's a good idea to create fresh sitemaps - just set reminders for yourself in a calendar.

Here's a puzzler...

Our main domain (www.ides.com) doesn't appear in Google (but does on Bing and other engines). We think this is due to duplicate content which we're fixing.

However our website's subdomains continue to appear prominently in SERPs, even on Google - here are some examples:

• IDES Prospector = prospector.ides.com
• IDES =  support.ides.com
• Cycolac FR15 = catalog.ides.com

Why would Google penalize a main domain and its subdomains?

Another tool to help generate a sitemap and even check broken links is called Xenu (weird logo, but good free product).

Carolina,

I'm with Jarno. As for traffic to domain.com for the past 3 months, you might take a look at www.compete.com - while not perfect, it may give you an idea if the non-www domain was receiving traffic.

Thank you for the article link- just what I was looking for!

Pretty cool, however I noticed that it only appears for "things to do in {insert large city name here}". Small cities don't show ... yet (things to do in laramie wy)

If a page has more than 100 links, rather than splitting up the page into multiple pages, is it ok to use name="robots" content="noindex, follow" />?

The page in question lists links to articles so the page itself isn't that important to appear in serps, but the articles are the helpful content pages:

www.ides.com/articles/processing/injection-molding/

I hope they make the same mistake again - our website finally returned to normal positions in Google SERPs that we were at prior to our 404 error page mistake back in Dec. 2011.

Then yesterday, once again we've gone missing and are baffled at why and what to do... We did notice our site:www.ides.com raised from 21,800 pages yesterday to 124,000 today.

www.ides.com

Our representative at Bruce Clay Inc just replied with the following info, so something's up...

"We’re pretty clueless too. The whole Internet went a little crazy yesterday because of a big shakeup in Google’s results, and there are a few theories as to what exactly happened. From the forums it looked like a lot of sites lost all their rankings."

They are looking into our Google Webmaster Tools and Analytics accounts to see if they can pick up any clues.

Last December we fumbled our 404 error page with a misconfigured server and broken links on the page.

Needless to say, our site dropped into an abyss - for 4 months. Yesterday we appeared again in our regular placement (actually stronger placement). Our site has been around since 09-Jan-1999 and has been a highly regarded site with good link structure and solid content for engineers.

Then today we're gone again. Yesterday morning we had 125,000 pages indexed with Google which grew to 187,000 by late afternoon. Then this morning we're nowhere to be found and only 21,800 pages are now indexed.

We've been working with Bruce Clay Inc through an SEO site audit doing several updates to improve through good seo practices. We haven't made any changes to the site since last Friday, April 13th (maybe the unlucky number has something to do with it....)

Any ideas, insight, suggestions???? Thanks!