Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Perfect! Thanks for your help Kristen

Thanks for the tip. I've never spotted that before!

I've tried to find the answer to this question myself, but I've found differing opinions. The conclusion I've come to is that Stackoverflow allows follow links when the user that posts the link has sufficient reputation or if the link receives user validation.

Has anyone else here used Stackoverflow.com that knows the answer to this question?

Thanks for answering my question Dirk! I found the deeper follow up conversation interesting as well.

Could someone help me with a 'what if ' scenario please?

What happens if I publish a piece of content on an external website, but then later decide to also put this content on my website. I want my website to rank first for this content, even though the original location for the content was the external website.

Would it be okay for me to put a rel=canonical tag on the external website's content pointing to the copy on my website? Or would this be seen as manipulative?

Thank you both - and sorry for not replying earlier. It sounds like we have some work to do

A lot of pages on our website are currently indexed on both their http:// and https:// URLs. I realise that this is a duplicate content problem, but how major an issue is this in practice?

Also, am I right in saying that the best solution would be to use rel canonical tags to highlight the https pages as the canonical versions?

Thanks for your reply Monica. The blog is a landing page where the separate blog posts were listed, which is what I think you are suggesting so I'll go ahead and recommend that we do the re-directs to the corresponding page.

Thank you all for your replies - it's helped to get my thinking right

I’ve come across numerous blogs recently that suggest that SEOs should NOT do bulk re-directs to a category page. This has come as something of a surprise (doh!!) and I feel like I should already know this. It does seem like there is lots disagreement here so I thought that I’d ask what people’s opinions were to make sure that I get my thinking straight. I've read all the main Moz blog posts on this topic and, although really useful, they've left me none the wiser around a few specific questions.

Here’s some more detail about the situation. We’re currently consolidating a lot of content into a main blog, which will be the focal point of new blogs posts that are created. This is different to the past, where we tended to create separate blogs for different products on separate domains. I’m currently considering how we move content across from one the older blogs to this new blog (which will soon sit on a subfolder of our main domain).

I have three (!) questions:

1)      Could you confirm that doing bulk re-directs a category page is bad? I already know that doing them all to the homepage is an error.

2)      Should I re-direct the home page of the old blog on a separate domain to the relevant category page on the new site? The category page is related, but does not cover the EXACT topic. The category page covers our replacement product offering. It I shouldn't do this, where should I re-direct the old blog domain to?

3)      I’ve recommended that we set up 301 redirects on a one-to-one basis, redirecting each piece of content to its new location on the old site. What about content that has been earmarked for removal and for which there is no obvious alternative? My previous recommendation has been to re-direct these pages to the most relevant category page on the new blog. Would it be better to let this 404 or, as an alternative, create a custom 404 for the users on the new blog highlighting the new content that we offer?

Any help would be appreciated

Thanks for your thoughts Linda - much appreciated

This is quite a broad question I’m afraid – any help would be appreciated.

I’m trying to find the best way of optimising our new training pages. These events are aimed at teaching our customers how to use our software to do different tasks. Inevitably, the themes and naming of these training workshops overlap with some of our products. A close example would be, to make up a product, ‘Keyword Ranker’ and ‘Keyword Ranker Training’.

Someone has raised the concern that the training pages might start outranking the pages for our main tool, particularly as the training will be heavily promoted via social media. Also, the on-page content talks about similar topics. They’ve suggested that we use rel=canonical tags pointing from the each training page to the related product page to prevent this from happening.

I myself don’t think this is a good idea as this is not what the rel=canonical tags are designed for. I think that they might prevent the events pages ranking for any query at all, which is not what we want. Also, I believe that the training pages and the products are different enough that Google will work out which to rank for relevant queries. Has anyone else had an experience of doing this? Are there any approaches that people would recommend? Or is this something that we shouldn’t be worried about?

A few other thoughts that I’ve had:

• Using schema.org event markup to emphasise what the events pages are about.

• Making sure to remove old events once they have expired. I thought it best to let these 404 as I’ve read that 301s to a category page than cause Google to penalise content.

• Putting internal links from the product pages to the relevant training workshop pages.

• Using the meta unavailable tag on events pages, so that when the event has happened then it will be removed from Google’s index.

Yes I do, I mean a review where the writer can make up their own minds about the product. It sounds from both your answers that it is best to be careful in these circumstances and make sure that everything it up front.

Thank both for your help!

When a company pays for an impartial review from a website, should these links be no-followed? I am confident that paid positive reviews are seen as a manipulation of search, but is paying for an impartial review okay?

Thanks for the help Ryan

I think the title sums up the question, but does a new subdomain get any ranking benefits from being on a pre-existing high authority domain. Or does the new subdomain have to fend for itself in the SERPs?

Excellent - thanks for your responses guys, that's a great help!

Some people in the company I work for have suggested that we buy a keyword rich domain that matches a new product line that we're planning to release.

I've advised that this in itself is not a good idea, as we'll need to produce high quality content for that site rather than just having it exist for ranking purposes. We already have a section on our main site focussed on this product line, so I don't think having the keyword match domain would really add anything unless we worked out what we'd use this site for.

That said, I was wondering whether it might be worth buying the exact match domain anyway, in order to prevent a competitor from using it?

Thanks for the clarification Don - much appreciated

Thanks for your response Donford and for the link.

The question I am asking is slightly different (I think!). If you were setting up a completely new website, would that website rank better on it's own separate domain.

For example, if I setup a website called www.widgets.com would Google prefer that to widgets.maindomain.co.uk? Or is there no difference at all?

I guess what I'm trying to find out is whether there is any difference at all between setting up a new website on a subdomain or domain, or whether Google treats these as the same.

I realise that often it is better put content in a subfolder rather than a subdomain, but I have another question that I cannot seem to find the answer to.

Is there any ranking benefit to having a site on a .co.uk or .com domain rather than on a subdomain? I'm guessing that the subdomain might benefit from other content on the domain it's hosted on, but are subdomains weighted down in any way in the search results?