Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Howdy!

In the midst of communicating with Google because of a robots.txt issue, we had a bit of a backfire of sorts and received a notice of unnatural links.  It's not a horror story or anything.  It's seems more like, "Hey, before we address your other issues, here is something you should clean up" although I don't dare put words in Google's mouth.

A few years ago we hired an SEO company which shall remain nameless who did some anchor text blog posts for us which at the time, we had no idea was an issue.

There aren't an enormous number of these links hanging around, but checking our anchor text, in OSE, we saw that there are around 50 or so.  We decided to use removeem.com as an easy way to request removal of these links.

However, on first run, removeem returned a large number of anchor text links beyond just these obvious ones that are actually natural links from users, fans or those that sell their goods on our website.  Examples of these anchor text links would be:

"DEMO"

or

"Find My Products Here"

or

"Home Page"

http://www.mysite.com/goodstuff/foryoutubuy/html

We are a media selling site and we do have a lot of download sites that attempt to "share" content and link back to us via a DEMO link, etc.  While these aren't the greatest sites in the world, they are nevertheless natural links.  Heck, they are pirating our goods, shouldn't we at least garner the link juice from them?!!?

So, questions:  Should we remove all of these links as removem.com suggests or only remove the ones that are unnatural and clarify with google that these other links are natural?

Thanks for your help!

Craig

Yes, our affiliate system does allow for this if we want it to.  We could pre-review for future affiliates, but the damage is already done in these current cases.  We are talking 2-3 websites here that have probably thousands of pages of our products.

One of the sites is even using the .org version of our domain, but that one actually advertises our competitors products....  uh... yeah....  Not sure how we will deal with this trademark violation with a Chinese website yet, or if there is anything we can do, but it is a pretty serious issue.

The options I see are:

1.  Based on our sign-up terms, we could suspend these affiliate accounts because they violate the terms by providing more harm than good.

2.  These sites do list DMCA notices, so we could actually contact them under the DMCA and tell them to remove our content.

3.  Do nothing, but try to get our pages to rank higher than these pages and consider it just another link to our site.

Thanks for the responses!

Craig

We have a longstanding site that sells media files with a large number of digital products.

We offer a referral program with rewards for those that tell others about us.

In the last year, we have seen some sites popping up primarily in China that appear to be spammy looking advertisement based copies of our own site with product pages that link back to our actual products using a referral link/code.  (no-follow links.)

These sites started popping out more when we noticed that some of their pages were outranking our own actual product pages.

Any thoughts on this?  Our affiliate policy states that the affiliate program is meant to help and not harm our site.  In one sense this is traffic to our site which is supposed to be a good thing, but if these pages are ranking above our own, that is not what we are wanting.  I would bet these pages might get clicked on and due to the spammy nature of these sites, the user bounces and never actually gets to our website.

How would you handle something like this?

Thanks!!

Craig

Roger that Phil,

I figured as much, but didn't realize it could take that long.  Since updating our sitemaps, it says that they have already crawled and indexed about 200,000 regular pages.

Hopefully the videos will kick in as well.

Thanks!

Craig

Last question Phil.  While webmaster tools is saying what it is saying, I am definitely seeing our old video records disappearing from Google. so this drop from 70,000 to 28,000 doesn't just seem to be a webmaster tools thing, but does appear to be showing itself in Google as well.

A search that was showing several video results a week ago, now shows none.

Should I be concerned or will the new ones come back in their place you think?

Is it just a waiting game at this point?  I know that's the case with regular sitemaps, but those reference the same pages.  I am a little concerned since Google is seeing these as all new videos.  So, if Google sees them as all new and sends them to the back of the line, I think I would rather have the other flv ones back.

Thanks!

C

Thanks Phil!

Yeah, I am definitely learning how un-reliable WMT is and trusting it less and less...

Thanks for the input.  Very much appreciated!

Craig

Hmm.  Ever heard of putting in 2 different URLs for the same video?  i.e.

<video:content_loc>House_Cat_Mauling_Postal_Worker.flvvideo:content_loc>

<video:content_loc>House_Cat_Mauling_Postal_Worker.mp4video:content_loc>

Thanks for the answer!

Craig

Hi all!

We noticed some issues with our sitemap and so we went through and optimized it to re-submit it.  At the same time, it seemed prudent to optimize our video sitemap, however we probably should have thought through that more as  we are seeing the numbers of indexed videos going down.

Why and what we changed:

We recently moved from flash/flv video to Html5 videos with webm and mp4.  So it seemed prudent to change our sitemap which was using the old flv videos.

At the same time updating our videos with more SEO friendly titles seemed prudent.

So far our indexed videos from the video sitemap have gone from 70,000 to 28,000, so:

A.  How much does a video sitemap depend on the URL of the web page versus the title and the video itself?

I am assuming that Google sees a new file extension and title and assumes that it is a completely new video and that might be why they are de-indexing the old ones?

I suppose we could go back and put the old sitemap to the old flv videos back up, but maybe we should just tough out the change and wait for the new videos to be indexed.

Thanks!!

Craig

Hi, per this thread: http://www.seomoz.org/q/800-000-pages-blocked-by-robots We had a huge number of pages blocked by robots.txt by some dynamic file that must have integrated with our CMS somehow. In just a few weeks hundreds of thousands of pages were "blocked." This number is now going down, but instead of by the hundreds of thousands, it is going down by the hundreds and very sloooooowwwwllly. So, we really need to speed up this process. We have our sitemap we will re-submit, but I have a few questions related to it: Previously the sitemap had the <lastmod>tag set to the original date of the page. So, all of these pages have been changed since then. Any harm in doing a mass change of the <lastmod>field? It would be an accurate reflection, but I don't want it to be caught by some spam catcher. The easy thing to do would be to just set that date to now, but then they would all have the same date. Any other tips on how to get these pages "unblocked" faster? Thanks! Craig</lastmod></lastmod>