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Internal redirecting link?

As in, the backlink is followed but goes through a redirect to get to your page?

A 301 will still pass all link juice, minus a few drips in the process, to your website. But if the link goes to a redirect link, then the link juice will be from whatever authority that URL has rather than the URL of the page with your link.

e.g.

Profile > Redirect Link > Your page

So any link juice from the 301 will be from that middleman there (which might be of lower quality), rather than directly from the profile. It will also take a few crawls for Google to recognise your page as being the destination that should be "credited".

If it's a 302, then it won't pass any link juice.

Sorry, I don't know if I'm the only one but I found this really confusing to follow and visualise. I understand if not, but is it possible to share the link so we can have a look?

Multiple H2s is fine and whether there may be an issue or not depends on how similar they are and how many exactly. Obviously 50 duplicate H2s will potentially be seen as spammy. As for the invisible text, is this hidden to users with something like display:none so is still readable by crawlers? If so, Google doesn't approve of hiding content or making content inaccessible to users with the intention of manipulating rankings. It may be seen as you deliberately attempting to get your keywords in for SEO, without it being of value to the user. With the perspective that if it it had value to the user, then it wouldn't be hidden. So it must only be there to game the search engines.

Hi Marie. Thanks for your response.

I'm a bit hesitant to share the examples for my client's privacy. I hope you understand. I do not work on these websites' SEO, I was only asked to look into it to see if I can spot anything that could be causing this. I do, however, work for a larger website that owns both the websites, so that's why I've been asked.

The two businesses share the same address. I was thinking that this may be a factor, but neither site has a Google My Business listing or much in the way of offsite citations. No DMOZ listings.

There are no external canonicals in place, and no mention of the others' URL on the respective sites. Double checked

No duplicate content as both sites sell different products with no overlap, so no duplicate product listings or content. The two sites are not even competing in SERPs for any similar keywords.

I've recently been shown some SERP results where Google is appending a different website's brand name to the end of the SERP title. It's actually rewriting the brand's name to that of the other website. (This is obviously not ideal.) Why would this be?

The other website doesn't even stock the same product, so there shouldn't be any confusion there. But even if it did, many websites stock the same products. Just confusing...

Seems you're on the right track, but I wouldn't pay too close attention to the PA and instead focus on culling the pages that offer no value to the user. The pages that are perhaps duplicate content, or can be merged with another page to create a stronger, more relevant page. Reducing or pruning the number of thin pages to maximise the value and quality of the pages you keep will help with the overall health of your website.

If you only look at PA, then you may end up getting rid of a potentially valuable page that simply didn't have the opportunity to perform well before.

As Martijn said, tagging multiple categories to a post can help with crawling due to more internal linking. Fortunately, if your URL is just sitename.com/post-title, then you can change/add existing categories and it won't make a difference as the URL won't change, so you won't have to redirect anything. If you're renaming categories, changing the category URLs, you may still want to redirect the old category URLs to the new category URLs to preserve the category pages' authority though.

If the site structure is more like sitename.com/category/post-title, that's when it may become an issue and you will want to redirect the old URL to the new URL. If you use Wordpress, I believe it will automatically redirect the old URL to the new URL if you do change the category. (Definitely test this to make sure it works with your version/plugins.) There are also plugins to help you tag multiple categories to a post but, setting a preference for the permalink category.

Have you looked at your competitors' link profiles or domain/page authority? If your site is brand spankin' new, no matter how well optimised onsite it is in comparison to your competitors, it might be difficult to rank at first if you're competing again high profile websites with above average domain authority.

Google will still crawl and follow links on a page that has the tag "noindex" so long as it doesn't have the tag "nofollow".

"nofollow" will tell Google not to pass any page authority / link juice. But if the page is just noindex'd, then Google will still pass link juice.

With the site search, are you including "site:" in the search query before the URL, like in my example? You shouldn't be getting this thread in a site search if you're doing it right.

If the pages are indexed, then you just need to get them ranking in a better position. In which case, you should form an SEO strategy.

For sites that are no longer indexed, try fetching and rendering the URL in Google's Search Console to see if there's any issue. You can also request Google submit the URL to index through this tool.

If you haven't already, it would also be beneficial for you to submit your sitemap through Google's Search Console to improve Google's crawling of your site. It might just be that Google is having a hard time crawling your site, and that's why you're dropping links.

If you do a site search for the URL (just search in Google: "_site:http://www.thefader.com/2017/01/09/lil-wayne-best-rapper-alive-rap-millennial-grows-up-essay_" - without quotation marks), you can see if it's indexed in Google.

The first URL you gave was indexed for me. But the second one doesn't appear to be.

I'm seeing that URL as being indexed in Google. Do you have any other examples?

Pinterest links weren't always nofollow, and the links that were created at that time remain to be followed even now. Doesn't really answer your question, but thought it would be worth sharing since description links only went nofollow about 4 years ago.

Unfortunately, editing the followed links results in the link no longer being followed. Tried that. If the image gets repinned, the repin won't be followed either.

This isn't an issue, and most sites don't provide clickable links to their sitemap/s.

I would recommend adding your sitemap URLs to Google's Search Console though, to help Google crawl your site more efficiently.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/183669?hl=en

How similar is the content/subject of the page? For example, if the page used to be about Cats and the URL was website.com/cats, then if you needed to replace it to be about Dogs then obviously you'll have to change the URL to website.com/dogs. Even a 301 redirect from /cats to /dogs doesn't really make much sense, as they're both completely different subjects. You'd be better off 301ing the old /cats to the homepage instead.

However, if the two subjects are similar or related at all, ideally you don't want to change the URL at all. You can change all the content on the page and replace everything if you need to, but the best solution would be to keep the existing URL. Especially if the page has value in terms of page authority/traffic/backlinks. For example, if the page isn't about Cats anymore but specifically Cats' Accessories. You have to ask yourself whether /cats still makes sense in context, and you can optimise everything else on the page for "cats accessories".

Otherwise, go ahead and 301 that bad boy.

Edit: I should note that the decision you make on this will heavily depend on the subjects of the two pages and your existing URL and site structure. Without seeing your site and having some idea on the replacement page, it's hard to give specific advice. Hopefully this response is helpful in that it will give you something to think about though.

Yeah, I mean with big news sites you can see that their articles get indexed by Google almost immediately after it's published. As you said, depends on the prominence of the site, as well as how deep the page is within the site structure. On ecommerce sites, sometimes you can see that product pages that are really deep within the site structure and buried amongst thousands upon thousands of other products won't have been crawled in like 2 months.

You can always check pages in Google search to see when the page was last cached or, if you're using Chrome, by appending "cache:" before the URL in the address bar (e.g. cache:www.moz.com). Gives you the date and time of Google's last cache of the page. Could always monitor that every day on another site for up to a week, and see how many times Google crawls it in a week to get an idea of frequency.

You're more likely to get advice if you created your own question than hijacking someone else's, since it's a completely different question. Good luck!

Depends on the frequency at which Google crawls the site. If the improvements are all on-site then you wait until Google next crawls the site, and you should see your rankings improve, or you can request a URL fetch and submit to index via Google Search Console to prompt Google to crawl your site asap. Then you can see the position changes that very day - sometimes within minutes, sometimes within hours.

If the improvements made were off-site then the same applies, except that you can't request Google's Fetch URL tool. You just have to wait until those sites get crawled, and see what happens. Depending on how frequently Google crawls that site, it could take hours, days, weeks or even months.

Congratz on the publicity! Those are some great links!

Unfortunately though, Google may be ignoring them because they contain the tag rel="nofollow" which basically tells Google (and other search engines) not to follow it. The Daily Mail one definitely does, so I would check the others too. Many big publishers will nofollow external links, as they can't "vouch" for what they're linking to and don't want to risk the association.

Though the mention of your site, even with a nofollow link, isn't without benefit to your website! The Daily Mail one alone has a page authority of 51 and a domain authority of 94, so being linked to from there is impressive. It puts your website in a "good neighbourhood", so to speak. But just not as SEO-effective as it would have been if it were followed.

If the link doesn't contain the rel="nofollow" tag then it doesn't matter if the link was added after Google first indexed it. If Google crawls the page again, after the link was added, it would count it.

Could be anything really... Maybe the page which is supposed to rank for that query (but was previously ranking poorly in comparison) is over-optimised, so Google prefers the new page created. Google will also be crawling the supplementary content on the page, such as the modules and menus you mentioned, though this should have less weight than the main content itself.

But as Ricky said, without knowing the page and keyword, it's hard to say. There might be something really obvious.

I was having this before the weekend. Every new page I visit, Mozbar would give me a captcha. As much as I enjoy picking out all the bicycle photos from the grid, it's not so fun when it pops up for every new page....