Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Carlton,

Awesome answers from everyone here!

I just wanted to add that it appears there is only the one 302 redirect that has been incorrectly placed, but of course it is an important one as 302 redirects do not pass link value, so any external site that happens to have linked to your non-www domain will not be adding value to your link profile.

Also, this page http://www.ietravel.com/central-south-america, although appearing to be fine when viewed in the browser, is returning a 500 Error for crawlers (Internal Server Error). You will need to get your tech people to sort this out for you.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Big where it counts

Hi im rubbish,

I would generally agree with Tom on the need to be completely honest with yourself when assessing links.

It is also a good idea to make sure that you have carefully read the finer detail of Google's quality guidelines. Make sure you know what qualifies as a link scheme in Google's eyes. This page provides some specific examples that might be eye opening if you have not read them recently.

If you think that the ongoing issue is caused by the appearance of more links, then there are a couple of things you should do:

1. Make sure that you disavow entire domains as Tom suggested, so that any other links in existence at that domain will also be disavowed.
2. Carefully monitor and identify new links as they appear. If it seems that unnatural links are still accumulating without explanation, highlight the issue in a reconsideration request and make sure that you provide scrupulous detail for the Webspam team to follow up. Be very clear - "these links have not been initiated by us".

Since you're in the UK it might be useful to know there are a couple of Search conferences coming up in the next couple of weeks that include sessions and workshops on link removal and penalty recovery.

BrightonSEO in the South - 11 & 12 April. I believe individual conference tickets are all gone, but there are still places in the Link Removal workshop with Tim Grice (which comes with a full day conference ticket included)

ionSearch in the North (Leeds) - 18 & 19 April. The conference includes both an Expert Panel on Link Removal and workshop sessions. Tim Grice will also be speaking here, as well as Christoph Cemper (owner of the company that develops Link Detox) and myself (rmoov.com).

A final note on starting again with a new domain: This absolutely has to be purely a business decision. With the obvious amount of time, money and effort put into your site's branding to date, even stripping back the entire link profile and "rebooting" your domain is likely to be a better business proposition than having to recreate an entire brand.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi GaB,

I would suggest a completely different solution.

I would not use 301 Redirects for the Phase 1 change. Rather, I would use a Rewrite Rule to serve the file with the new extension. The Rewrite Rule is basically telling the server to serve OURLEX when a request is made for OURL. The nett result of this is that as far as the Search Engine is concerned, nothing changes.

Here is a Code example which will serve the .php when the .aspx is requested:

RewriteEngine on

RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^(.*).aspx$ $1.php [L]

Then, when Phase 2 is complete, I would implement the 301 redirects using a single Rule once again to permanently redirect all OURL's to NURL's. So, the solution I would recommend is the last one on your list.

Option 6 - Something else I think is better:

• Phase 1: Use Rewrite Rule to satisfy all requests for the OURL by serving the OURLEX
• Phase 2: create one rule that will 301 redirect all the OURL to the NURL

It is best to keep in mind that a 301 redirect should only be used when you intend the redirect to be permanent. Also while Google's stated position is that googlebot will follow multiple 301 redirects, it has also said that "daisy chaining" them is not generally a good practice. There are two reasons for this:

1. Google's Matt Cutts has indicated that "at some point we will stop following them if there are a lot of them"
   Should you happen to have other domains that are already 301'd to the site, the daisy chain effect is amplified.
2. As Ryan mentioned, the small amount of link juice that is lost with a 301 Redirect does accumulate over multiple redirects and can have a negative impact.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi again Alan,

I would pretty much have to agree with all that's above. It really must come down to ROI and for someone who is just running a single site, then the decision you're faced with is how much up-front investment you are prepared to make and whether you are prepared to sustain that investment in the long term.

While all of that is obvious, I thought I would share the one thing included in the SEOmoz Pro subscription that I think is potentially the most valuable and perhaps the most under-utilized by Pro members...

1 Free Private Question per Month!!

Yes, I made it bold and underlined it because this is the one feature that could provide you with the professional input that changes your business completely. The pity of it is that many members completely forget about their private question. Maybe this is because they don't realize it actually means you can ask a question and have it answered by a member of the SEOmoz Staff or Associate.

Yes, that means you could actually have the help of someone as awesome as Dr Pete,  John Doherty, Jen Sable-Lopez, Keri Morgret, Casey Henry, Michael King, Gianluca Fiorelli, Dan Shure, Cyrus Shepard and many more...

Even Rand Fishkin?

Yes. Even Rand answers private questions. The fact is, your question will be assigned to a person on the SEOmoz team who has the skills and experience to best help you.

Obviously, your private question needs to fit within the subject categories available here in Q&A and you should be careful not to waste it on something you could as easily get answered here in regular Q&A. With that in mind, I would consider the potential value of such a benefit to your business and think carefully before giving it up.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Greg,

That is an impossible question to answer I am afraid

OSE results are an indicator of how your site stands according to the metrics that influence PageRank.

Your actual rankings may be influenced by any number of things which are known only to Google:

• Algorithmic filter effects such as Penguin, Panda, Exact Match Domain etc;

• Manual Actions (penalties) applied for any number of issues, from link spamming to cloaking or even abusing rich snippets markup. Check Slides 6 and 7 of this deck for breaches of the quality guidelines that will lead to a manual action ;

• Disavowed links (any links that you have disavowed and are disregarded by Google remain live links which inform the OSE results because Moz is not privy to the list);

If your rankings have tanked recently, I would be using OSE to see if there are any obvious issues with anchor text ratios, links originating from places that are undesirable, changes in authority of sites linking to yours etc, rather than trying to correlate the numbers with your results.

Sha

Hi Matt,

I would agree 100% with Ryan's comments on robots.txt.

In addition to this, it is a notoriously unreliable method for blocking...if the crawler happens to come to your site via an external link to any page other than the home page it will not see robots.txt.

Sha.

Hi Pol360,

Excellent answer from Anthony and big thumbs up!

If you are looking for a tool that will let you know when you have new links, you might want to take a look at Linkstant, a cool tool put together by Tom Critchlow & Rob Ousbey from SEO consulting company Distilled.

You won't get all of the Moz metrics available in Open Site Explorer once the Index is updated, but in the meantime you will at least know instantly when new links are created

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi,Just a little confused by the question - you mention the fact that there are "no manual webspam actions found", but also say that your site has been under a penalty and released again.

Do you mean that you have had manual actions in the past that were resolved, or are you simply meaning that you have seen three different traffic drops which you refer to as a "penalty"

Sha

Hi Manuel,

This blog post Web Design Company Fail #1 will give you an idea of some of the things to watch out for when redesigning sites.

One trap with Wordpress sites is inadvertently using a template that has built-in SEO problems, so do some good research on the template you select to make sure that there are no known issues identified.

The other thing is to make sure that you plan right from the start to eliminate the standard duplicate content problems generated by default in Wordpress. Using a good SEO plugin for Wordpress is a good idea for this reason. I find that Yoast SEO for Wordpress is very helpful.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Ennovation,

This is a known issue that does happen occasionally with campaigns. I have had the same problem with a client site that turned out to be an "edge case".

Whenever you have something happening in your Pro campaign that does not look right, you should contact the Help Team direct. You can use the Support tab on the left of the screen while in your campaign, or send an email to help at seomoz.org.

Make sure that you let the Help Team know the campaign that is affected (campaign number in the URL, or domain name) and the problem you are having. They will be able to take a look at it for you and let you know when the issue is resolved.

In my case, there was a little engineering magic and the next crawl yielded the correct number of pages

Hope that helps,

Sha

OK, so if there is "no manual spam action" in place, then you are dealing with either an algorithmic issue (which would include the affects of having any of the recently devalued link networks included in your backlink profile), or a direct technical SEO problem.

First and easiest to identify is an unintentional Technical SEO SNAFU:

1. Have you changed anything recently that might coincide with the time when you see that drop in traffic?
2. are there any issues highlighted in your Google or Bing Webmaster Tools accounts (crawl issues, changes in blocked or no-indexed URLs etc)?

When it comes to figuring out whether you have been affected by recently devalued link networks or other algorithmic issues , I left some ideas in a comment here http://moz.com/community/users/211679 earlier today which might be helpful. There are also some tools available which help to see if changes can be tied to algorithmic updates like the Panguin tool.

Hope that will give you a start on identifying the issue(s) and then you will be able to see your way clear to fixing them.

Sha

Hi Gajendra,

The Pro App identifies two types of duplicate Errors (the red button in your Crawl Diagnostics Summary). These are Duplicate Page Content **(**a significant amount of content on the page has been identified as duplicate) and Duplicate Page Title (page title only has been identified as duplicate).

Duplicate Page Title errors are most often an internal issue, where many pages in the site have been given the same page title.

Duplicate Page Content errors can be either an internal and/or external issue. It may be that identical pages within the site are visible via multiple URL's, AND/OR the content on pages may be a duplicate of content on other websites. This happens a lot with sites that use product descriptions, content feeds etc from other sites.

To identify the actual URLs where duplicated content has been detected, click the Red error button in the Diagnostics Summary and you will see a list of pages where the error has been identified. In the second column, you will see a blue link which tells you how many duplicates there are for that particular item. When you click the link you will see a full list of URLs which are duplicates.

There are a number of things which can cause duplicate content errors on a site - many are due to the way the site is structured or functions. To really understand what is happening and how to deal with it, you should read Dr Pete Meyers' landmark post Duplicate Content in a Post-Panda World.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi lucidsoftech,

The following is from the Crawl Diagnostics section of the SEOmoz Help Hub and might help identify the issue:

Why didn’t you crawl all my pages? I only got a one page crawl. Looks like you missed a bunch!
If you suspect you didn’t get a full crawl, or Rogerbot missed some of your pages, there could be several reasons why this happens.

• We only crawl a maximum of 400 links per page. If several pages of your site all have the same 400 links on each page, we may not discover all the pages on your site. Try optimizing your navigation to reduce the number of links.
• Does your navigation rely on JavaScript? Can visitors navigate your site with JavaScript disabled? SEOmoz doesn’t crawl JavaScript, so make sure your links work in all browsing environments.
• Does your site consist of multiple subdomains? Crawls are restricted to the subdomain you set your campaign up on. This means that in general, we don't crawl multiple subdomains. You can solve this by specifying a “Root Domain” crawl in the setup process. (This requires starting a new campaign.)

I have also run across a couple of single page crawl issues in the past which related to secured pages and an edge case. This was identified and sorted out very quickly by the SEOmoz Help Team.

If the suggestions above don't identify the issue for you, then best to go to the Help Hub and click the Contact Our Help Team button to get in touch with them direct.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi there,

Unfortunately products that go out of stock are one of the biggest frustrations for ecommerce site managers. Where products are sourced from another company you can be very much at the mercy of the way that they manage their inventory. This means you need to decide which method of dealing with expired products will work best for you.

From what you have described it sounds like the product was marked temporary out of stock by the supplier, then more recently changed to "Do Not Reorder" status. So, the product has permanently expired and will not be restocked at any time in the future.

Your best option in this situation is a 301 redirect, which will pass link value from the page to whichever page you decide to redirect to. This is where you need to make decisions.

You have essentially 3 choices when choosing an appropriate page to set your redirect target.

1. If you have a product in your inventory that is very similar, you could redirect to that as the product may be of interest to people who were looking for the original product.
2. If you do not have a similar product, then you can redirect to the higher level category page for that item.
   For example, redirect to http://www.vistastores.com/lighting
3. Finally, since you have an internal search mechanism, you could choose to redirect to a search for a relevant term.
   For example, redirect to search ?q=lighting

The aim is to always send the visitor to the most relevant or helpful page to improve the chance of them converting.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Serge,

The reason your redirect is creating a 302 is that it is an unspecified Redirect.

Any redirect that is unspecified will by default be seen as a 302 (Temporary)

To create a 301, you need to specify like this

[R=301,L]

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Jesse,

Basically, the only significant search volume is for the shorter two word term "minneapolis massage", so there is no benefit in going for the longer term (which also has a negative correlation for rankings).

So, since Ryan advised that the .net version of minneapolismassage is available, if you are wanting an exact match domain that might be a better option.

Since the return you are wanting is quite modest, then the traffic afforded by that term and the little extra you might attract from other terms should work for you if you can get some reasonable rankings.

I would suggest that you put some good effort into local search optimization if you decide to go with that domain.

Hope that is clearer,

Sha

Hi Will,

The advice already given here is solid.

In addition to that, a little personal experience I will share.

I had a client who accepted the offer you have received when the service first came out a couple of years or so ago. They told me that they saw a significant loss of indexed pages and traffic to their site within a short time.

I cannot say that what happened to their site was a direct result of using the service as I was not in control of the site at that time. However, I do know that once they decided they wanted to remove the service it took me almost 8 months to get the company to do so!

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Daniel,

I have to say I really don't agree with the idea of deleting 301's after a period of time. The only place where there is a time frame involved in the 301 scenario is at the Search engines.

Links can come from any number of other sources including links from other sites, browser bookmarks, links passed in emails, pdf documents, embedded in Youtube videos ...to name just a few.

If the 301's were originally placed to fix the problem of broken links, why would I want to "unfix" them?

Even for large sites with a lot of 301's there are ways to manage processing load etc and if you have found a solution that is acceptable for a period of time, the same solution should be acceptable over the longer term.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Terrie,

Don't feel bad about asking the question at all - this is a tough topic to get your head around!

In fact, rather than butcher an explanation and confuse you more, I would recommend you read this excellent post from Rand How to Solve Keyword Cannibalization. The post is from 2007, but still the best and simplest explanation of how to fix the problem that I have seen so far. I would suggest you read the comments as well - Rand has dropped a whole lot more excellent information in his answers.

The key to seeing the difference here is not just about the keywords, but the anchor text and which pages the links are pointed to.

Once you follow the structure illustrated in Rand's post, it should become much easier to understand, and also much easier to spot the problem when you look at the pages on your site.

Hope that helps,

Sha