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thanks! very helpful!

Matt Cutts stated in 2009 that if Google finds more that one link to the same page, that it counts only the first link, and ignores all other links. This info is several years old now, but we have not yet found information about this changing. You can hear it direct from Matt Cutts at http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-one-page-two-links-page-counted-first-link-192718\.  Having multiple internal links to the same web page on your website will not hurt your website, and there is no need or reason to craft the link as a no-follow. Many webmaster have good reasons to have multiple links to the same web page, and Google certainly would not punish a website for this.

Thanks! That is exactly what I wanted

I'm with Eric on this, it seems highly unlikely that only loading a block of content is causing a load on your pages. I would start with teaching your developers what the best purposes are for SEO so that they can come up with better alternatives for these kinds of situations. That might pay off best in the end.

Anyone who can answer this question is going to be a very rich person! At this point, IMO, trying to do "white hat link building" in a super competitive niche where people do not tend to link naturally is going to be extremely hard.  You're right...links still count.  But the sites that are killing it in this type of niche are not the ones who are gaining links naturally but the ones that are still able to find ways to trick Google.  I think that there are some areas where it is extremely difficult to rank using just white hat methods. I don't have an answer for you unfortunately.

yes, that is the super simple explanation my mind was blanking on. thanks!

Thanks! I had a RU content person on my team ask on a Yandex specific forum and that is the answer she got.

Hi Sara, Following up on this one - has there been a real drop in rankings that you have verified?

Hi Sara, If you are keen to get more traffic through the news stories and the main blog link, it's definitely a mistake to move it, just from a usability perspective... I agree with Andy that stats like you're seeing for these links in Analytics suggest that you can make an improvement to the page to increase the click through rate if. The effect of a link being above or below the fold is probably negligible when it comes to PageRank passed (with the exception of footer links, which appear to be devalued).

No, you can't migrate the video. in terms of embedding - an iframe is super lightweight. Just embed a YouTube iframe and you should be fine.

I'm pretty sure it was February, when Yandex announced that they will no longer be using links as an SEO ranking factor. This was expected to hit March this year sometime - I am guessing this will be what has happened. -Andy

Thanks for all the input and advice! We are a gaming site that publishes industry news 2-3 times a week, but that is not our main source of income

Thanks for the help!

Hi Sara, The tool Tom suggested sounds good, although I haven't used it personally. A couple things I do to check mobile site response time: Google Pagespeed Insights is really good and provides recommendations for how to improve page speed. If you're using a Chrome browser, you can also use the right-click 'Inspect element' feature to view the load timeline. In 'Settings' (the cog in the lower right corner) choose 'Overrides' > 'User Agent' and select a mobile user agent. (NB: you can skip this step for a separate mobile site with a URL different to the desktop site if you're able to access the actual mobile site via a desktop) Exit the 'Settings' overlay and choose the 'Network' tab. There is a 'Timeline' column which shows the time each element of the site took to load. Hope that helps!

No, as long as none of the links are broken, I don't see how this would have a negative effect on SEO. If the user experience doesn't change, it generally won't affect rankings (minus markup data).

In Australia I recommend ilisys.com.au - they are owned by Uberglobal. They have a dealer hosting package. We host our clients domains and websites under this package its quite well priced - we have about 100 domain and its costs $200 per month. They have all the usual features, CMS support, regular backups, automatic restore on request. Alternatively I can host you under our package. Good luck with the other countries

Thanks for the help, but upon looking into the issue further we've decided to host the sites locally.

I agree with CleverPhD. Keywords in URLs are extremely helpful both in terms of generating traffic and tracking your reporting in Analytics.

That's what I'm doing and isn't working... But thanks!