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If the association has explicitly requested a link back, I think it would damage the trust between the client and the association to make that link a no-followed one. Yes, the value of a one way link is greater than that of a reciprocal one in most situations, but in this case the trust of the association (which already links to you!) should be worth more than the 2 milligrams of extra link juice you might earn by no-following the link.

Discounted? Maybe. Penalized? Not sure.

Google will have a hard time reading the intention of these links. How can they be sure these links were placed by the competitors of Anton rather than Anton himself?

This is called 'pagerank sculpting'. It was used in the past to make sure the links that didn't have nofollow received a larger amount of link juice (as the link juice that was passed by a page was split by the number of links back then).

There was a 'recent' change in the way internal nofollow links are treated, that renders this practice pretty much useless nowadays. Read more about it here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-consolidation-the-new-pagerank-sculpting

Getting a web page to display your content as TRUE utf-8 requires everything to be set at the utf-8 encoding. 'Everything' includes: your database, your database tables, your database fields, your connection from php to your database, you header as set by php, your header as set by html, your content itself etc.

The following resources were extremely helpful to me when I was switching to utf-8 (which is by far the better encoding over ISO):

http://www.phpwact.org/php/i18n/utf-8

http://www.phpwact.org/php/i18n/utf-8/mysql

Bonus tip: make sure your content and files are saved as utf-8 without BOM (Byte Order Mark), this will save you lots of trouble later!

I think they do, as I can't find any 'nofollow' on their links. However, unless if you have a really popular (and well linked to Tumblr blog), I don't think the value will be large.

I don't think this is (in most cases) related to penalties.

My best guess would be exactly keyword optimization (somebody optimizing his page for 'book' rather than 'books' will most likely rank higher for 'book' than he ranks for 'books) and incoming anchor text.

Research by SEOmoz has shown there is little to no value in having optimized anchor text for your home page:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/testing-the-value-of-anchor-text-optimized-internal-links

Noindexed pages are pages that you want your link juices flowing through, but not have them rank as individual entries in the search engines.

• I think your legal pages should rank as individual pages. If I wanted to find your privacy policy and searched for 'privacy policy company name', I'd expect to find an entry where I can click and find your privacy policy

• Your search results page (the internal ones) are great candidates for a noindex attribute. If a search engine robot happens to stumble upon one (via a link from somebody else for example), you'd want the spider to start crawling pages from there and spreading link juice over your site. However, under most circumstances you don't want this result page to rank on itself in the search engines, as it usually offers thin value to your visitors

• Blog archive and category pages are useful pages to visitors and I personally wouldn't noindex these

Bonus: your paginated results ('page 2+ in a result set that has multiple pages') are great candidates for noindex. It'll keep the juices running, without having all these pretty much meaningless (and highly dynamic) pages in the search index.

Hey tgraham,

Personally I don't see any objections to sending the traffic from the new url to a subfolder on the old domain. Since this page will probably be more relevant to your redirected visitors than your home page, your visitors will have a better user experience this way as well.

Kind regards,
Theo

PS: I presume you're aware of the fact that this way of utilizing the new domain will keep it from ranking in the search engines? By using a 301 redirect only the old domain will rank, not the new one.

I don't think there'll be a trustworthy tell-tale to know what directories are still passing link juice and which aren't. You might want to try looking at the 'Domain mozTrust (DmT)' as reported by the SEOmoz toolbar. The higher this value the greater the change directories are still passing value.

I got the same question during a presentation I was giving recently and have to admit I didn't knew the answer on the spot either. Some thinking and discussing with others has given me a pretty clear picture on this though, which I will now try to pass on to you.

I don't think code order matters that much anymore. A couple years ago, when Google was crawling only a portion of a large webpage (mostly due to hardware restrictions), you'd better make sure your valuable text or links were placed in the first part of your webpage, otherwise it wouldn't get crawled at all! With Google crawling large webpage in total (if I recall some quote from Matt Cutts correctly he stated that they now index webpages over several MBs in size, as long as they contain enough valuable information).

With Google advancing their detection of the 'visual location' where text and links are placed on a webpage (see #5 on http://www.seomoz.org/blog/10-illustrations-on-search-engines-valuation-of-links), source code ordering will most likely have dropped in value as well. Using CSS styling, we can now order our source code pretty much at will anyway, which has changed it from a valid signal to a 'SEO trick' (just like adding a suffix to the URL has, see http://www.finishjoomla.com/blog/5/does-adding-a-suffix-to-my-urls-affect-my-seo/).

By 'viewing' (and perhaps manually categorizing or using machine learning http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_learning) webpages Google will notice patterns in webpage source code. For example: 'that div containing a large amount of links, usually placed in an ul-li, often containing links to 'home' and 'contact' will most likely be your menu. Just like 'that div containing more text than any other div, often starting with a H1 or H2 tag, containing the most images and ending with a call-to-action' link will most likely be your page content area. Thus, Google doesn't 'know' whether a certain part of your source code is your menu, your sidebar or your page content, it deducts it by looking at common patterns.

(lol, my answer is more than three times as long as your short question!)

To me this sounds like a clear-cut case of a need for the canonical tag.

Why not use the 301 redirect? Even though the content strictly hasn't move but has 'expired', I'd use the 301 redirect to take both visitors and links from the old expired page to another page that 'catches' them. Good for both the user experience (perhaps you might place some links to jobs related to the one that we were redirected from on the new page?) and for your link juice.

See this topic for more information: http://www.seomoz.org/q/what-do-you-do-about-links-to-constantly-moving-pages

As long as these links are editorial given and are coming from good domains, I think there should be a lot of benefit in them. Of course links from related domains are better (if only for referral traffic), but I personally don't think they'll be devalued or be seen as manipulative.

Perhaps HTML5 tags are used as one of the signals in determining which piece of source code is what. Seeing how easily one could manipulate these tags, I don't think it'll be a strong signal though. Of course it can be a good guidance for future web developers to identify pieces of source code!

Google is able to read CSS files (for example to determine if a link is hidden), but I don't think it will parse these files and apply them to the webpage to determine the visual layout of it. I think it would require a great amount of processing power (and time) to actually render a webpage, rather than sort out the pieces based on the source code like I described in my answer above.

Glad I could help!

"What you describe is ok, no policies are violated."

I strongly disagree on this one. What he describes sounds an awful lot like Google's description of a 'doorway page', which are explicitly against Google Webmaster Guidelines:

"Doorway pages are typically large sets of poor-quality pages where each page is optimized for a specific keyword or phrase. In many cases, doorway pages are written to rank for a particular phrase and then funnel users to a single destination." (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66355)

In light of the above I would advice against the practice your describing. Instead I would optimize (sections) of the main site for such keywords or set up independent (complete and value adding) domains for these keywords you'd like to rank for.

The (in)famous Google Panda update (thousands of posts on Google about this) struck international websites on the 24th of February, right in the same month where you reported the problems started. Perhaps the drop is traffic is a result of this update and not of the backlinks?

Regarding those links: I think a single website that links to you (be it with millions of links) probably won't be the cause of this drop. Unless, these backlinks were put in place close to (before) the date where the traffic started dropping. Have you tried contacting the website that has those links up and request them to remove your site from their system?

I think the link from randomsite.com (PR6 homepage) is more valuable than a link from evenmorerandom.com.

Because there toolbar PageRanks are updated at an almost random basis, it is quite possible that randomsite.com inner pages actually have a decent PageRank internally at Google, that is simply not showing up in the toolbar yet. While the same holds true for evenmorerandom.com, there is a slim chance that this page has gone from PR/ to PR6.

Comparing the MozRank of these inner pages (which is updated far more frequently) would be far more useful in this situation.

I agree with Aran, as long as you use the display:none in a legitimate way, Google is unlikely to penaltize you for it. Even if they got as far as manually reviewing your website, they would see you've intended no foul with the display:none.

Assuming the website we're talking about is the same as in your email address, I find the meta robots tag

For the page https:// webshop . acsi . eu / en / checkout / onepage / (spaced to prevent indexation of this post).

Are you sure the right meta tags are in place?