Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Patrick,

Your first link is going to your custom 404 as well, but I get what you are describing, so yes, if it were me I would make sure that the pages are noindexed (using the noindex meta tag, which is the most reliable method) by default when they are created. When you decide that a page is to remain on the site permanently you can then remove the noindex tag and make it visible.

Your custom 404 has everything you need to make sure there is a good chance the visitor will click through to another page in your site, so you are doing all you can to make sure that those people following a broken link don't bounce right back to the search engine.

I would say your logic is correct in that the only way to further improve the odds is to reduce the potential for broken links before they happen.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Derek,

I think kjay, Harald & Will have all pretty much covered removal (or correction) of links that are being called from within the pages on your site and using 301 redirects to capture traffic from external links.

I would also make sure that you have a well designed custom 404 page set up for your site so that any link that isn't covered by the work you have done on the above will still provide an opportunity for the visitor to get to the content they are looking for.

You should make sure that your custom 404 page contains some well written text that invites the visitor to explore the site to find other content that will help them and a menu that will allow them to click through to other parts of your site.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Nikos,

A simple 301 redirect should not cause your rankings to evaporate. The 301 Redirect is just signalling to search engines that they should de-index the old domain and replace the link in their index with the new one. It generally doesn't happen in less than a day either

It seems perhaps there is a problem with the way that the redirect has been implemented, or some other completely unrelated issue that has caused a coincidental loss of rankings.

Can you post a link to your site so that we can take a look at what is happening? If you would rather not post the link publicly, you can go to your profile and send me a private message. There are really too many possibilities to guess without taking a look at the site.

Sha

Hi Jayesh,

A full crawl usually takes 1 week to update, but if you want to get a quick start on your campaign you can use the Crawl Test Tool to get started. You can also use this to run a crawl of sites that are not included in your campaigns.

PRO members can schedule crawls with the Crawl Test Tool for 2 subdomains every 24 hours. You'll get up to 3,000 pages crawled per subdomain. When these crawls are finished, your reports are sent to your PRO email address.

If the crawls in your Pro campaigns haven't updated after 7 days then you should contact the Help Team by emailing help [at] seomoz.org and ask them to check on the campaign for you.

Hope that helps,

Sha

oops,

Thanks for the pickup

Hi Proforums,

Since your problems have coincided with the change to Drupal, the most important thing is to ensure that the person you engage has a very good grasp of the specific SEO issues and challenges presented by the CMS.

One hint for you - if you search SEOmoz (site search, not Q&A) for Drupal, you will find member profiles for at least one member who specializes in SEO for Drupal sites

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 John,

Excellent response here from Ryan as always, so not much more for me to say except that there are some other excellent resources here at SEOmoz which can help you to focus on the broad range of things that might be influencing your site visibility in the Search Engines.

Essentially, as Ryan indicated, it is about taking a "future proofing" approach to your site. If you haven't already found the Pro Webinars section of the site, there is an excellent Webinar from Doctor Pete on Future Proofing Your SEO: 2012 Edition. One extra thing to note here is that all SEOmoz Pro Webinars uploaded include the presenter's Powerpoint Slide Deck. Since SEOmoz presenters make a point of including links to useful resources etc in their decks, this is a huge extra help, so don't forget to grab it.

Also, one of my favorite tools for seeing exactly what is contributing to the top 10 Rankings in a niche is the Keyword Difficulty SERP Analysis Tool where you can run Advanced Reports to see how each of the Top 10 Ranked sites for a particular keyword term are doing against a whole range of key metrics. The bonus is that even if your site isn't in the Top 10, you can enter the URL to have it included in the comparison 8D.

Rand also provided a great post that explains how to use the tool: The Best Kept Secret in the SEOmoz Toolset.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Link-who?

Glad to see you weren't too badly affected by that less than impressive attempt at content development...actually a fairly solid example of how much the writer could obviously benefit by spending some time learning from the hundreds of posts in the Daily SEO Blog and YouMoz - all of which is absolutely FREE!

Even better, maybe they should also consider some of the excellent material on offer at Inbound.org

Not sure that I would do them the service of providing a link from SEOmoz ...maybe just type the URL and let people copy/paste if they are interested?

Sha

Big where it counts

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 threebiz,

First, welcome to the community! Look forward to seeing you around in the future

Since there is a small loss of "link juice" when you apply a 301 redirect, you should pay attention to which domain you choose to redirect and which you keep as the primary domain.

Your choice may be influenced by suitability for branding, but if there is no real branding advantage in using one or the other, then I would make sure that I redirect the site with the lesser Domain Authority to the one with the greater.

You can use Open Site Explorer to check Domain Authority (DA) for both domains. You can learn more about DA under Metrics, Link Counts and Data Points.

If for example, you have Site A with a DA of 30 and Site B with a DA of 20, then I would redirect Site B to Site A, since this allows you to maintain the full domain strength of the site with the greater prospect of ranking.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi again,

I think the line of code below will create the 301 Redirect that you need:

RewriteRule ^/dir$ / [R=301,L]

Let me know if you come across any more problems with it.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi kat2,

Hmmm...clearly, I should have slept before answering this , as I completely overlooked the fact that your second URL is actually a directory, so please ignore the first part of my original response (now removed), which would only work if you have a specific file to edit.

Now to mod rewrite. I'm getting a sense that something else might be in play here, as your question suggests you have already tried to create a redirect and had problems.

A couple of questions we need answered in order to get this answer right for you:

• Is your site built on a CMS such as Joomla? Some CMS use their own redirect rules to rewrite URL's and these will overwrite the rules you write in .htaccess

• Are you using a 301 Redirect rule, or just URL rewriting?

  • To create a 301 Redirect, your rewrite rule must end with [R=301] or [R=301,L] if it is the last.

If you can answer these questions we will be better able to help sort the problem for you.

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

Hi Jeff,

First of all, you are probably already aware of this, but Yahoo search is now powered by Bing, so any change that affects one will also affect the other.

So, there are a few things I would look at if I were you.

1. Duane Forrester from Bing has made it clear that Bing may use the meta keywords tag to identify sites that are attempting to gain rankings by spamming. Danny Sullivan wrote an article on this at Search Engine Land a while ago - The Meta Keywords Tag Lives At Bing And Why Only Spammers Should Use It.

   On checking your source code I see that the meta keywords tag has been fairly heavily keyword stuffed on all pages, so this will not be winning any Brownie points from Bing. If you want to use the tag, then you should limit it to just a few relevant terms (that are actually included in the page text).

2. I have recently seen evidence with sites I am working on that good, basic optimization improvements, paying attention to fundamentals like keyword placement in Titles and improving the usefulness and readability of page content has brought across the board ranking improvements in Yahoo & Bing. Whatever you do with your content, make sure that the language is natural and not keyword stuffed.

   If you are wanting to get a good handle on your on-page optimization, you can use the On-page Keyword Analysis Tool to check your pages. You have access to the same tool from within your Pro campaigns, but in there you need to have already added the keyword you want to check into your campaign keyword list. With the version I have linked to (which you can access through Research Tools in your Pro Dashboard), you can check any URL for any keyword.

3. I also noticed that you have multiple instances of instructions in the head of your pages due to having used  different SEO plugins to edit the site. Bing's crawlers have a reputation for being quite sensitive to errors and code issues, so this is something that I would also clean up if I were you.

You can also find useful information on optimization in the Beginner's Guide to SEO and this video on the SEOmoz Ranking Factors 2011 Pro Webinar. There is also lots of great information amongst the Whiteboard Friday videos and posts in both the Daily SEO Blog and YouMoz.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi applesofgold,

Some good advice here. I would agree with EGOL that the best approach is to find people who are already open to guest bloggers.

The easiest and most productive way of doing this is to use a service whose aim is to provide connections between those producing content or leads and those who need them.

Some of these are mentioned in Mike Scanlin's blog post How To Get The Equivalent Of $100K In PPC Ads For Free  (and the comments). Those mentioned in the post include Blogger Link Up, My Blog Guest and Haro. I also like Source Bottle and find it really convenient that calls for articles and sources are easily accessible via their Twitter feed.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi sanchez1960

Ryan is absolutely correct.

There are many more ways for Google to recognize the relationship between sites - especially given that the aim is for Googlebot to crawl every page you want accessible on each site. The classic tie between sites is the use of commonly named css files.

I get a sense that your question comes from a concern that the footer links may bring some negative effect upon your site. This is unlikely if you are simply placing a single link in the page footer. Spamming hundreds of links with exact match anchor text in the footer might be a different matter!

As Ryan explained, the reality is that the links just won't provide extra "juice" for your domain.

Funnily enough, we web designers were placing footer links long before the world at large ever heard the terms "SEO" or "link juice". Obviously the reason is that they allow site visitors who are impressed by our work to find out more about us and perhaps engage us to work for them

In my view, this is still a good idea and there is absolutely nothing wrong with it. In fact, I would rather a click to our site from a prospective customer who already loves our work than a click from a vaguely interested "SERP browser" any day.

If Google is smart enough to recognize the links between sites, it is also smart enough to know that linking back to a web designer's site makes good marketing sense. After all, it was not us who decided to make links the basic currency of web rankings

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Dave,

I believe there would be two answers to your question

1.  If Googlebot finds the page via the external link, then YES:

• the link will pass PageRank
• Googlebot will crawl
• both the page and the domain will get juice, because Googlebot hasn't seen the robots.txt

2.  If Googlebot comes to the site via the root (assuming that it obeys the command to block), then NO:

• None of the above would happen because the page would never be seen by Googlebot, so the incoming link would never be seen.

If, on the other hand, Googlebot comes to the page via the root and ignores the command to block, then it should be reasonable to assume that means the page would be crawled & links attributed as though there were no robots.txt, but that is only an assumption, so I guess your question would remain open.

Don't suppose that helped much

Sha

Hey Cyrus!

Nice to bump into you in Q&A

I have to say I actually agree with Adam's view specifically in ensuring that pages have nice relevant page Titles that speak to the user. Even though I may not want a page indexed by a search engine, if users can see it then I should use everything at my disposal to offer good information & encourage conversion. Identifying pages with missing or duplicate information is part of this.

The "ignore" feature will just give me the best of both worlds!

Sha