Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi

I'm working on this site: www.nobelcom.com and on the logo I have a rel=nofollow. Do you think I should keep it, and is so way, or I should remove the nofollow (why?)

Hi,Do you thing those pages have duplicate content:https://www.nobelcom.com/Afghanistan-phone-cards/from-Romania-235-2.htmlhttps://www.nobelcom.com/Afghanistan-phone-cards-2.htmlhttps://www.nobelcom.com/Afghanistan-Cell-phone-cards-401.htmlhttps://www.nobelcom.com/Afghanistan-Cell-phone-cards/from-Romania-235-401.html.And also how much impact will it have on a panda update?I'm trying to figure out if all the product pages, (that are in the same way as the ones above) are the reson for a Panda Penalty

Hi guys,

I've updated the post with the latest news and switched it to 'discussion'.
Let me know your thoughts.

Cheers,
S.

Thanks for the insight Everett,

That's what I'm afraid of - the 'benefit' at the domain-level.
That's the plan: the affiliates to update their links, but I'm sure the process will not be very fast.

Hi Lynn and thanks for your input,

1. No content, only url changes. Our main focus was to get better results for queries like 'xxx phone cards' and also for spanish queries like 'Mexico tarjetas telefonicas' (before the update the spanish urls contained english words..)

2. We started the link profile cleaning and we're still working on it (removed a big amount of 'bad links', disavowed others)

UPDATE - 19.02.2014:

Hi,

We got another negative answer from Google pointing again to our affiliate links, so the 301 redirect and block was not enough.
I understand the need of contacting all of them and ask for the nofollow, we've started the process, but it will take time, alot of time.

So I'd like to bring to your attention another 2 scenarious I have in mind:

1. Disavow all the affiliate links.
Is it possible to add big amount of domains (>1000) to the disavow doc.? Anyone tryed this?

2. Serve 404 status for urls coming from affiliates that did not add noffolow attribute.
This way we kinda tell G that content is no longer available, but we will end up with few thousand 404 error pages.
The only way to fix all those errors is by 301 redirecting them afterwards (but this way the link juice might 'restart' flowing and the problem might persist).

Any input is welcomed.

Thanks

---

Hi Mozers,

After a reconsideration request regarding our link profile, we got a 'warning' answer about some of our affiliate sites (links coming from our affiliate sites that violate Google's quality guidelines).

What we did (and was the best solution in trying to fix the 'seo mistake' and not to turn off the affiliate channel) was to 301 redirect all those links to a /AFFN/ folder and block this folder from indexing.
We're still waiting for an answer on our last recon. request.

I want to know you opinion about this? Is this a good way to deal with this type of links if they're reported? Changing the affiliate engine and all links on the affiliate sites would be a big time and technical effort, that's why I want to make sure it's truly needed.

Best,
Silviu

Hello,

A while ago (Sep. 19 2013) we had a new url structure upgrade for products pages within our website (with all the needed 301 redirects in place,internal links & sitemaps updates), but our new urls lost the serps of the old ones and with that we experienced a big traffic drop (and since September I can't see any sign of recovery).
Here are just 3 examples of old and coresponding new urls:

http://www.nobelcom.com/phone-cards/calling-Mexico-from-United-States-1-182.html
http://www.nobelcom.com/Mexico-phone-cards-182.html

http://www.nobelcom.com/es/phone-cards/calling-Mexico-from-United-States-1-182.html
http://www.nobelcom.com/es/Mexico-tarjetas-telefonicas-182.html

http://www.nobelcom.com/phone-cards/calling-Angola-Cell-from-Canada-55-407.html
http://www.nobelcom.com/Angola-Cell-phone-cards/from-Canada-55-407.html

We followed every seo/usability rule and have no clue why this happened.

Any ideea?

Cheers,
S.

Thanks Ari!

Thank you for the tip Ari, but our website is not using apache and htaccess, so the rules are written in another language, but I'm sure this is not important.

The http status of the old urls is 301 to the new relative paths /new-url.html
and this is where my problem is:
Should the destination url (the new one) be relative or absolute?

Silviu

Hello everyone,

Recently we've changed the URL structure on our website, and of course we had to 301 redirect the old urls to the coresponding new ones.

The way the technical guys did this is:

"http://www.domain.com/old-url.html" 301 redirect to "/new-url.html"
meaning as a relative redirect path, not an absolute one like this:
"http://www.domain.com/old-url.html" 301 redirect to "http://www.domain.com/new-url.html"

This happened for few thousands urls, and the fact is the organic traffic dropped for those pages after this change. (no other changes were made on these pages and the new urls are as seo friendly as possible, A grade on On-Page Grader).

The question is: does the relative redirect negatively affects seo, or it counts the same as an absolute path redirect?

Thanks,
S.

Thx for the advice. Will do!

Thanks for the input.

I was thinking about removing the folder by blocking the pages from robots txt. In the meantime I can  fix the all the errors and once that's done I'll have everything back up.

My main concern is that if I do that now even more duplicate content will show :). Would it be better if I allow the search engines some time to de-index these pages and come back with the fixed verion afterwards?

Dear Mozers,

Recently I added a new language to one of my sites in a new folder (www.site.com/es/) but for some reasons many links got broken or were simply sending to a  wrong page. This caused a bad indexing and it also showed a lot of duplicate content.

I know how to fix it but my question is this: Is it better to remove the second language folder, fix it and then put it back up after a few months or just fix it now as it is and wait for G to come back and index the new links?