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The best practice would be to add the noindex tag to the search result pages but not the /searchhere page.

Typically speaking, the best robots.txt file is a blank one. The file should only be used as a last resort with respect to blocking content.

I could not agree more with EGOL. Text on a web page should appear as text, not within images. With CSS3 and current design standards, there is rarely a reason to do otherwise.

About the only place on a site where I permit text within an image is within the logo.

I am not aware of even the slightest SEO value from applying a header tag to a graphic.

Thanks for sharing Dana!

I understand Adam. As I shared, I am not sure SEOmoz is willing to publicly disclose details of it's algorithm. The best chance to find out more is likely to follow Megan's advice and open a discussion in the developer forum.

**There are thousands and thousands websites in the past that used hidden attributes/CSS tricks, hidden divs etc. on the page. **

When those "techniques" were used to manipulate search rankings, they violate search engine policies. In the case of Responsive Design, the CSS is being used to provide a better user experience. There is a BIG difference.

The content is fully viewable on a full screen. On a smaller screen, the less important content is not displayed. There is absolutely no intent to manipulative search rankings.

your responses was quite arrogant and I have got impression that you definitely don't need any help but coming here to show how smart you are

It seems you have been offended by my response. That certainly was not my intention. How can I share a different opinion which conflicts with yours in a manner that is not offensive to you? If you can help me understand, I will make an effort in the future.

I originally chose to visit the SEOmoz Q&A to learn about issues and challenges I do not normally face, and also to understand alternative methods of practicing SEO. That is still the case, but I contribute to the community in an effort to help others.

You have a very unique viewpoint. During my literally thousands of responses shared with hundreds or thousands of SEOs and site owners, no one has ever reacted in such a manner.

My sole goal was to ensure the topic was thoroughly and openly discussed. Your response clearly stated Responsive Design was "dangerous", a "trick" and added a "risk". I completely disagree with your assessment and do not wish any SEOs or site owners to not adopt a best practice based on misinformation. My response was presented accordingly.

Best Regards,

Lindsay wrote a great article on the topic which I am sure you will enjoy: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/serious-robotstxt-misuse-high-impact-solutions

Needless to say - it is dangerous!

Do you have any evidence to support that claim? To be candid, it sounds like you are attempting to drive fear due to your unfamiliarity with the practice.

**I would newer use any CSS tricks or whatever programming technique on my business site! **

Responsive Design is not a CSS trick. It is CSS.

Perhaps you should learn about this established and recommended approach to presenting websites. I am not aware of any risks. Please share what those might be.

Responsive Design was talked about in 2009. The implementation of it rose sharply in 2011 and in 2012 it is widely adopted. So much so Google specifically recommends using Responsive Design.

Responsive design is quite new player in this field and as far there is no ranking/penalty etc. case study - do not risk!

Tell that to all the major companies who incorporated Responsive Design and have only seen benefits from doing such. A couple examples:

http://bostonglobe.com/

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/

I understand your concern Andras. The two questions I would focus on with respect to crawl budget:

1. Is all your content being indexed properly?

2. Is your content being indexed in a timely manner?

If the answer to the above two questions is yes, I would not spend any more time thinking about crawl budget. Either way, using the "noindex" meta tag is going to be the best way to handle the issue you originally presented.

On a related note, does the content on your "useful" pages change frequently? If so, ensure you are optimizing your links (both internal and external) to these pages. When you demonstrate these are important pages to your site, Google will crawl the pages more frequently.

You would be redirecting your entire site. Whenever you use a redirect, you are losing some link authority. For a single redirect only a small amount of link juice is lost, but if you ever encounter multiple redirects, the effect is amplified.

It is common to redirect when necessary, but the case you shared is completely unnecessary. Additionally, you are adding an extra term, "v2" to your URLs which is not helpful to users or programmers.

In summary, using the /v2 directory in the manner you suggested is easily corrected. You should fix it.

In my experience, IP based content is problematic for several reasons. I would suggest redirecting to pages designed for each language. A few examples:

es.domain.com

domain.com.es

domain.com/es

Depending on a variety of factors, one of the above solutions is likely the optimal one for your situation.

Is using /v2/ a good practice?

No. The subfolder would be used during testing. Once the redesign is complete, the /v2 would typically be removed and the redesigned site would replace the old site.

Hi Andras,

The first thing to know is a general rule....the best robots.txt file is a blank one. There is almost always a better method of managing a situation without using robots.txt. There are numerous reasons, one of which is search engines do not always see the robots.txt file.

Regarding the noindex meta tag, that is the proper solution. I understand your concern over crawl budget, but I suggest in this instance, your concerns are not warranted. It is a waste of crawl budget to have search engines spend extra time due to slow servers, bad code, thin content, etc. If you have pages which should not be indexed, adding the noindex tag is likely the best solution.

Without being familiar with your site, it is not possible to offer a definitive answer, but generally speaking this response should be accurate. Keep in mind many sites have millions of pages, and Google has the ability to crawl the entire site each month.

Let's say your main site focus on Ford cars. On the main site you have content related to Mustangs, Pickups, Vans, etc.

If you have a microsite focused on Mustangs, redirect each page from the microsite to the same (or similar) page on the main site. If the page does not exist on the main site, move the content from the microsite to the main site.

Dana and Kevin's responses are great and deserve a thumbs up. I would add a few key site which have not been mentioned. I would place these primary information sites above any secondary sources:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/

http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/

http://www.youtube.com/user/GoogleWebmasterHelp

http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/default.aspx

http://mattcutts.com/blog/

Before looking to other sources, my advice is go to the official source of information.

If you decide you need more analysis, SEOmoz is (obviously) my preferred suggestion. I would suggest the above sources combined with SEOmoz is enough to keep a person busy for a year.

When you do view other sources, including SEOmoz, keep in mind there are great posters on bad sites, and bad posters on good sites. The difference is, the good sites will (eventually) correct any bad information. I prefer SEOmoz because they do an exceptional job of correcting misinformation. Even so, it may take a week for the error to be caught. With such a large, active community it is a huge amount of work to review every post made on the site.

Responsive design is specifically mentioned as Google's preferred method for presenting mobile websites.

how Google will treat hiding content with the smaller screens

Google understands the code very well. As long as you implement the code in a reasonable manner, you should not have any concerns about a Google penalty.

Will this effect our rankings in a negative way?

Not if implemented correctly

https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/

Our links were from an SEO company who always vowed their methods were totally adhering to google, but that was before penguin.

I have heard this exact statement countless times. I hate to be harsh on my own industry but things are quite bad for clients. They do not know who to trust, with good reason.

• many "SEO agencies" have little to no SEO knowledge. They skipped everything and built links, which worked too well in the past and now many site owners are paying the price.

• many of these same agencies outsourced 100% of their work to other countries were the work was performed in the lowest quality manner, despite assurances to the contrary

• many sites offer the appearance to be US or UK companies, but a quick inspection shows the veil is very thin and these are actually companies from India or other countries who pay for a virtual office or a single small office in order to funnel business.

Companies and site owners need to know how to navigate the shark infested waters of SEO and work with quality service providers.

Regarding your Penguin issue, based on the information provided your efforts are not even close to what is required to resolve the issue.

1. A comprehensive backlink report is necessary to capture all known links to your site. I use data from Bing, Google, OSE, Majestic and AHREFS. Once combined, this report is the most comprehensive list in the industry. There is no single source, nor any two sources, which can be used to properly capture all the links to your site.

2. The links need to be properly identified. Most site owners and even SEOs struggle in this regard. It cannot be done by any automated tool as there are far too many errors.

3. A comprehensive Webmaster Outreach Campaign needs to be conducted, and it needs to be successful. On a bad campaign the success rate should be about 25%. On a good one, the success rate exceeds 50%. There are numerous factors involved.

I know you are probably thinking "no way! I only get 1 out of 100 site owners to respond". The problem I see is most site owners chose the easy way out when they built manipulative links, and they similarly choose the easy way out when attempting to remove them. That is why forums are full of site owners sharing "I have turned in 10 Reconsideration Requests and all of them were declined".

You need to eliminate a "significant" number of links before using the Disavow Tool. My recommendation is to seek out a quality SEO provider with experience in resolving Penguin issues. If you cannot afford the cost of cleaning up the manipulative links, you can also change domains. The cost of losing all your good links and changing domains is very high in the long term, but in the short term the expenses are quite minimal.

will teach me to reply after drinking some of 'Scotland's Best'

Serves you right for not sharing with us!

For the doorway sites, 301'ing them to the main site is perfectly fine and desired. Be sure to 301 the entire site if they have more then one page. Also be sure to set the redirect to the appropriate page rather then simply dumping users on your home page.

For your subdomains, as long as you are redirecting users to similar content on your main site, you should be absolutely fine. If the content does not exist on your main site, move the page from the subdomain to the main site. You should not experience any significant traffic loss. The future advantages of consolidation outweigh any minor loss which may occur.

if i removed these sub-domains i would loose 40%-50% of my overall traffic which is around 6,000+  a day

If you 301 redirect your subdomain to the main domain properly, you should not lose traffic. You specifically mentioned having subdomain pages that were nearly identical to the pages on the main domain. Redirect each subdomain page to the equivalent page on the main domain.

If you are concerned about traffic loss, try with just one domain first. Wait 30 days so you can fully see the results of the change, then proceed from that point.

Regarding the Doorway pages, they will likely continue to work until you are caught, at which time you will be penalized. You may not even realized your are penalized at first, then when you discover the issue, you may not be clear on whether the issue is the Doorway page, the subdomain issue, or one of the 50 algorithm changes Google makes each month. It is up to you as to what type of site owner you wish to be: white hat or black hat.

Hi James,

I am pleased to hear no manual actions have been taken on your site. You are correct in stating you should not submit any further Reconsideration Requests.

As I look back to your original Q&A, you stated you were impacted by a manual penalty on October 5th. What led you to make that statement?

If your site suffered a ranking drop, you can analyze your analytic data to determine exactly when that drop occurred, and what segment(s) were impacted. Did the drop only impact Google organic? If so, that would indicate an algorithm issue. If the drop impacted other traffic sources, it may be a downturn for your business or industry. In summary, a traffic drop analysis is needed.

If you know your site acquired spammy links (i.e. you hired link builders or "SEOs") then you may be impacted by Penguin. If you have low quality content, which includes thin and duplicate content, then you may have a Panda issue. There are other numerous other algorithm changes besides those two. There could be a new issue on your site as well. It's time to dive in to your analytics to gain all the data possible surrounding this drop in traffic.

Hi Vegit,

I reviewed the link you shared. You were provided with excellent advice from Ruth who clearly and repeatedly shared your issue is not in any way related to a Google sandbox, yet you are still bringing up the topic. It seems you do not believe her. I would suggest you consider Ruth as a qualified source of SEO information and trust the advice.

Regarding the advise Thomas shared with you, I hate to disagree with another mozzer but it is absolutely incorrect. I just read it for the first time and am surprised to see it has not been corrected by others, although I did notice someone provided a thumbs down to one of the responses.

Your exact question is asked and answered by Matt Cutts here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnfM_szmDh0

As Ruth shared, the behavior you described...ranking well for a term then disappearing...is typical of a penalty. Despite your assurances of having quality links, I strongly suspect Google feels otherwise. You mentioned having 15 links and half of them using the same term. You also mentioned having multiple directory links.

To clearly answer your question, Is age of a  domain a ranking factor ? No, it is not a ranking factor.

The best guess I have is domain registrars, who earn money from registrations, wish you to believe such and propagated the myth.