Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Have you checked your traffic and ranks? This could just be an issue with index reporting. If traffic and ranks are stable then no need to worry.

If however traffic has declined, there is certainly an issue, check:

• have you received a penalty
• use site: command to see what URLs are actually showing Google index
• fetch and render to see how Google see's your pages
• run a crawl of your site using Screaming Frog or other such tool
• is there issue's with 404 / 500 or No response pages
• has dev deployed anyting like moving to https without applying 301 redirects

I think first is to determine, if this is an actual issue or not. Then if it is, run some serious analysis to determine cause and apply a fix.

Many thanks,

Hi,

If you're paying to have a presence on a website and not doing it to pass PageRank, that's fine. You must, however, request that the website owner places a 'nofollow' attribute on the link to ensure no PageRank is passed. Google have a page here on how to do this and what it means.

If the link doesn't have a 'nofollow' attribute, you will be violating Google's guidelines and that is very much a dangerous tactic.

Here is some further reading so you can put your mind at ease:
Google's page on Link schemes
A reminder about selling links that pass PageRank Why do paid links violate Google's guidelines while other ads don't? (Video)

Hi,

Yes - you absolutely should do this. As you said, 301 redirects would be the way to go as these pass almost all of the link juice to the page you redirect to. If there's not an easy way to add redirects using your CMS, you can use your .htaccess file but this is very powerful and can cause server issues. If you're unsure, ask your developers or better still, send them a list of old pages and where they should be redirected to implement them for you.

Hi Ram,

Yes, you absolutely should redirect all of your HTTP pages and other resources to the HTTPs version to prevent the situation you describe happening. It's likely Google will see duplicates of each of your pages which will cause ranking issues.

There's a great check-list at the bottom of this blog post by Cyrus Shepard which will take you through everything you need to do.

Hi,

Although it seems slightly strange, I can't see any significant SEO issues which it might cause. Have you asked the client why they want to do this? As I'm sure you know, usually one page should focus on one topic and therefore require one link from a main navigation.

Something worth considering would be the internal anchor text which Google will take in to consideration for the linked-to page. If you have 2 or more links on one page linking to the same page, Google will use the first instance of the link as the anchor text. This is something you may want to have a think about.

Hi David,

To be honest, I'm quite surprised that you used to rank strongly for that search term. I've only looked at your on-page SEO and, although your homepage gets an A grade on Moz's On-Page Grader, there's quite a lot you can do to improve things.

Firstly, do you really want your homepage to rank for this term? Unless there's a very good reason, I usually only want the homepage to rank for branded terms (in your case, searches for Unique Magazines). I would recommend creating a new page to target 'Magazine Subscriptions' using something like http://www.uniquemagazines.co.uk/magazine-subscriptions/ as the URL. You can then optimise this page much more freely.

Currently your homepage doesn't include the targeted keyword at the start of the title tag, it only uses the term in an H3 tag (not exact match) rather than an H1 tag and there is very little text on the page for Google to understand the topic of the page. Creating a new page should give you the flexibility to improve all of these things. You can also build internal links to the new page using 'Magazine Subscriptions' as the anchor text.

Hi there,

I strongly suspect this is an issue with the way your theme is configured. Yoast is a fantastic plugin but it's not very forgiving with poorly configured themes. This is what I think is happening - within SEO > Titles and Metas, you probably have the 'Noindex subpages of archives' option ticked. Try unticking this option, save the changes, refresh your homepage, look at your source code and my guess is that the 'noindex' attribute will be gone.

Could you let us know how you get on?

Hi Carlos,

I couldn't agree with Keri more. Using these kinds of outdated practices will result in two things - a short-term increase in rankings, followed by a penalty from Google (possibly with a complete removal from their search result pages).

Google is really smart (and getting smarter) at finding this kind of activity and it is a clear breach of their guidelines. If you do a Google search for 'Google ScrapeBox Penalty' there are lots and lots of articles about sites which have been hit. Also try searching for 'Google blog network penalty' and read some of the thousands of articles.

Quite simply, you're risking your site (or worse, your clients' sites) with a Google penalty. It's not if but when you get hit. Would you feel comfortable explaining to your client/boss that their site no longer appears even when someone searches for the brand name? I definitely wouldn't!

I'd strongly urge you to reconsider and take a look at more ethical methods of doing SEO. Yes, it will take longer, yes, it will be frustrating at times but it will also be so much more rewarding that you're actually making the internet a better place and no just filling it with junk and spam.

Good luck Carlos!

Hi Li,

Matt gave you some good answers there but I thought I'd expand on them a little.

There are a couple of well-known programmes you can use to crawl your website in a similar way to Google. One is called Screaming Frog and the other is Xenu Link Sleuth. The free version of Screaming Frog only crawls up to 500 pages of a website (your site has many more pages than this) but the pro version crawls an unlimited amount. It costs £99/year and is definitely worth it if you'll be working on your SEO. Use one of these programmes to crawl your website and find the broken links. You can also pull this data from your Moz report but this may not be as up-to-date. All of these tools will show you where your broken pages are and which pages on your website are linking to them. You can them use your CMS (or HTML code) to go to the linking page and update the link to point to a working page or remove it completely if the content has disappeared. Once fixed, you will have no broken internal links on your website.

The other factor to consider is external websites which point to broken pages on your website. As you don't have control over these links, you will need to redirect the broken pages to other, working pages on your website. There are a couple of good ways to find external websites linking to broken pages on your site. The first is in Google Webmaster Tools (go to Crawl > Crawl Errors) and you'll see a list of broken pages on your site. The second is using Moz's Open Site Explorer (go to Top Pages and change the HTTP Page Status to 4xx). Here is the link to the report of your site (there are 22 pages). Again, this will show all pages on your site which are broken. You can export both of these as CSVs so you can work with them in Excel.

How you create the redirects depends on your site. If you use a CMS, there may be an easy way to implement them. If not, you may need a developer to help you out.

Let us know how you get on.

Hi Kraismir,

While you're correct about the prev/next tags, it's extremely unlikely that anyone will want to use page 2 as an entry point to your website. Also, there is no content on page 2 which differentiates itself from page 2 - the title tags and meta descriptions are also the same. This is a very common issue with paginated pages and there are many examples of sites using the technique I described above. Take a look at the source code of page 2 of Yoast.com or page 3 of Laughing Squid and you'll see the same implementation.

Hi Ben,

Sponsoring events is a great link building tactic. As the link will come as a side-effect of the sponsorship rather than from direct payment, Google will not penalise you for this. Imagine the reverse - companies would be far less likely to sponsor events, support charities etc if Google were to start penalising them.

Here are a few posts you can look to for reassurance:
http://moz.com/blog/5-link-building-tactics-to-improve-your-local-rankings
http://www.wordtracker.com/blog/33-seo-experts-share-their-most-effective-link-building-strategies
http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2064922/131-legitimate-link-building-strategies

Hi,

Just to let you know it's quite easy to find the domain of the site in question from the screenshot you provided

I think as you've created a new sitemap and submitted it to Google and removed all the pages so they return 404s, you should be fine. The page will just drop out of the index in time. You might also want to add the address of your XML sitemap to your robots.txt file as it's not there at present.

I crawled the site using Screaming Frog and couldn't see any dodgy looking pages remaining. You could create removal requests of the pages in Webmaster Tools if you'd like to take an extra step. Do this under Google Index > Remove URLs. To prevent this happening again, make sure you keep your WordPress installation and all plugins up to date.

I think that would be a great solution with a really clear incentive for the shopper to convert. On the Moz post I linked to, Stephanie wrote about using cookies to implement a message after a redirect under the 'Dynamically-Generated Messages' sub header. Unfortunately it's well beyond my coding skills but I'm sure a developer could help you out.

Howdy,

As you suggested, there are a few approaches you can take here. There's a really thorough article/discussion on Econsultancy on exactly this topic as well as a Moz blog on the same topic. I'd have a read of those and decide which approach is really best for you.

If you decide to go down the redirect route, there's no need for a developer to be involved. There are loads of plugins for WordPress you can use to create your own redirects but this one would probably suit your needs.

Hi Kraismir,

There are definitely a few things you can do here. Firstly, I notice you're not using any canonical tags on your category pages. This will definitely help you out. Canonicalisation can be a tricky concept to grasp but there's a Moz article on it here. Grab yourself a coffee and have a read!

Secondly, I notice that the rel="prev" markup on page 2 of your London category is pointing to a different URL than the main page. The main page is http://toppages.co.uk/city/london/ but the prev markup is pointing to http://toppages.co.uk/city/london/page:1 - this will cause you duplication issues.

Finally, there is no need for any page other than the main page to appear in the rankings. You currently have 1,917 pages in the London category which are all competing with each other. The best way to get around this is to tell the search engines not to index any of the paginated pages, but still crawl the links on the pages to the individual listings. This can be done using the meta robots tags with the attribute 'noindex, follow'.

These are the three things I would recommend you do:

1. Add a rel="canonical" tag to all of the category pages. These should all point to themselves. For example, placing the following in the of the main category page will help you <link rel="canonical" href="http: toppages.co.uk="" city="" london="" "="">Page 2 should have the following  <link rel="canonical" href="http: toppages.co.uk="" city="" london="" page:2"="">and so on.</link rel="canonical" href="http:></link rel="canonical" href="http:>
2. Fix the prev markup on page 2 of the category to the following
3. Add the following to all paginated pages but not the main category page

That will definitely help you but let us know how you get on.

You have some good answers from Ryan and Hutch there. Press releases should be used as part of a larger overall strategy and not be the only thing you're doing to build links and/or drive traffic.

As Hutch said, by all means, if you have something useful to say, why not do a press release? If you're just doing it for the sake of it, you'd need to consider what the benefit is.

Ryan said it better than I could but definitely steer clear of spun press releases as this all this will do will give a short cut to getting yourself a penalty.

I'd look to invest in a more complete content strategy if you haven't already. If you're still looking for more traffic and have the budget, have you considered using a content distribution network such as Outbrain or Taboola? This can be a great way to get more eyeballs on your content and also build links. Here's a great post on using content distribution networks written after a test carried out by Seer Interactive. Rand also did a Whiteboard Friday a few weeks back on how paid media can have SEO benefits. This is something I've done in the past with really good results.

Hi Riccardo,

There are couple of errors with your code there. Firstly, the noindex attribute is used at a page level, not link level. If you want to noindex a page you should use the meta robots tag on the page itself. There is more information on the meta robots tag here. The nofollow attribute however, can be used at link level. You're essentially telling the search engines not to crawl this link.

Secondly, the attribute isn't wrapped around any text so it's wasted code having it there. If you want your anchor text, 'Kumar' to be in italics, you should close the tag after the word. Also, replacing the tag with an tag (short for emphasis) is considered good practice.

____Finally, try not to use spaces in your anchor text. Modifying your code in this way will give you this:

If you want the anchor text to be in italics:
Kumar

If you do not want the anchor text to be in italics:
Kumar

If you're interested in learning more about HTML (it's really easy!) W3C Schools is a good place to start.

Happy coding!____

You'll definitely need to add a link to the source anyway but even so, I'd carefully check the terms and conditions of the sites you mentioned to see whether they allow this.

If you're adding a timeline, I presume it won't be updated very often so I'd really urge you to create your own content rather than take it from another source. It sounds like a very risky strategy to me.