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Thanks Istvan,

What are the solutions you're thinking of if you were to go against best practice?

Hi guys,

Now I have always been against this, and opted to noindex internal search results pages to stop the waste of link juice, dupe content, and crawl loops... however, I'm in a discussion with somebody who feels there may be a solution, and that the pages could actually be optimized to rank (for different keywords to the landing pages of course).

Anybody come across such a thing before?

My only solution would be still to noindex and then build static pages with the most popular search results in but that won't suffice in this case.

Any recommendations would be much appreciated

Thanks,

Steve

This will always be the case... there are different sources, and different interpretations of what constitutes errors. I wouldn't go thinking that just because GWT is Google that means it's the most efficient though, Google have a lot of other business to be thinking about and are unlikely to be too concerned if everything isn't perfect in their free GWT product, so I doubt it would take priority over other services of theirs. Where-as Moz of course is more focused in that particular area. I would just combine the two and iron out as much as you can from each... you'll never get them to match up though.

We had a site-wide (I know) in the footer of a huge site which seemed to propel us to P1 of G for a competitive term. Of course I accept that there's more to it than just that but of late I have been wondering how much of the things we stopped seeing value in, still actually hold more value than we think.

There are two camps on this, those who say to have a separate site and those who say use the same site... the former are wrong, the latter are right.

That's exactly what I'm saying, just have one really well designed and coded site that works perfectly on every platform. Why double your link building/acquiring workload by doing it any other way?!

Cool

I hope it keeps heading in that direction then... and now you know all about link juice too

But not before you've posted a link to their site first.

But then it's merely a reciprocal link, and 9 times out of 10 will be less in value. I'd rather get the link through another hook, though I agree something must be in it for them too.

Make sure when you are placing links first make up good anchor texts with your keywords in it.

Or not, a tonne of incoming links with exact match keywords might raise a few flags. Natural links tend to have brand names, web addresses, etc... in them, and generic things like "click here".

I'm not saying it's not a relevance signal but it's certainly a lot less of one than it was. By all means get a few exact matches, partial and phrase matches but I'd mostly go for the relevance through the site/page content and the fact that it's relevant, trusted sites/pages that are linking in... and not so much concern with the anchor text.

If you use automatic submission you're faced with a problem. Duplicate content. If you want to get around the duplicate content problem then you're faced with another problem, you have to use article spinning. Both of which are not good. Aside from that, the majority of the sites the auto software's submit to won't end up giving you any links and your article will still read with visibile, non-working html code in it, of the ones that do give you a link it will be either nofollow, or pass zero of anything to you because it's spammed to hell with millions of articles for being one of the few article sites that allow follow links.

Now, there might be a few sites that pass juice, but that will be because of quality levels in what they publish. So submitting to them would have to be manual only, as there's no way any auto software would get your article into a site like that.

I would certainly think it will help what you've done already but looking at the site again, I'm swayed to suggest that some of the links come out of the body as well... I can't say for sure that I'm correct but intuitively I just have a sense that Google wouldn't be too keen. It's almost like there's more linked content in there than there is non-linked content. So to an extent, it's not even about the link juice in this case but Google's view on page quality. Hopefully somebody else will chime in here as I'm far from sure.

Aside from that, I'd still look at other possible factors too.

Have you used the crawl error report tool on here? If not, certainly check that out: Crawl Tool

Google can do better than 100 links per page now, but it's not about the crawling that I'm referring to, it's the spread of equity.

Your homepage has x amount of equity, which it passes through to other pages via links. Due to the sheer number of pages linked to, that x amount is only able to pass y amount to page a, where-as if there were less links then page a would get z amount of equity.

Look at this:

Old Moz Image

Disregard the stuff on that page about NoFollow helping to retain linkjuice though, that turned out not to work that way and you still lose that link juice anyway even if it is nofollow.

Hehe, I think you might be preaching to the choir there a little

".... I am betting all of my money on links being rapidly depreciating assets."

That terrifies me, I'm not kidding I lose sleep over thinking about that regularly.

I think you're right about too many on-page links, I'd address that first for sure... spreading that link juice way too thinly

And yeah it's a little shy on links & link diversity, etc... and of what it has got, there's no deeplinks.

I used to use half of them before I started spending more time on here and edging away from that stuff a year or two back, and honestly they did used to work but they really don't anymore. You have to spin content if you want anything out of them, LinkVine was the best of the bunch but their effect went down and down. I have friends that are still a little darkside lol, My understanding is that they're of even less worth now, once Panda hit... well, from what they say you might as well just go out and comment spam for all the good it'll do you.