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I highly recommend putting a 301 redirect in place for any links like the one you mentioned above. Google wants the ensure that users have a great experience when in your website, and if there's even a slight chance that their visit could be interrupted by a broken link, you could be dinger. To stay safe, I recommend redirects.

Yes, absolutely. If the subdomain (e.g. xyz.domain.com) was migrated, using appropriate permanent redirects, to a subdirectory (e.g. domain.com/xyz) then this would support the overall site in terms of visibility and reputation on Google

Hi there If you're guest blog posting to give your audience relevant and topical content, then guest blog posts will not be an issue. Just again make sure that it's not a tactic strictly to gain or influence link signals. Danny Sullivan actually wrote a great post on the issue back in 2014 which you can reference here. Just make sure that you and your partners are on the same page that your guest blog posts should be topically relevant and provide real solutions. Make sure links reference data points or solutions sourced for your posts. If you keep on the path of "is this information or link necessary?", then all should be well. Let me know if you have any questions! Good luck! Patrick

I certainly think it would hurt you in your link building activity. Many websites will state that they don't support content related to alcohol, tobacco or gambling. Unless it is a huge money maker for you, I would purge that content.

Hi Oleg, Thanks for the response. Unfortunately our child theme has no header and footer files. And it is not located in the parent theme's header or footer files as far as I can tell. Is there any other solution for this?

VTCRM, Good luck! -- Jewel

It could end up outranking the homepage depending on how many links you have pointing to the page in question and how well optimized your homepage is for the keyword. Rather than focusing on ranking this page because of the URL though, I would focus on ranking the page that provides the best user experience. If the homepage is too broad to provide a good UX then maybe a separate landing page does make sense. If you're trying to outrank the homepage, the two things you have the most immediate control over are: decreasing the amount of times you use the keyword in prominent places on the homepage increasing the amount of internal links pointing to this other landing page Best, Daniel

Hi Andre, Our sub-domains has the activity like forums where lot of users are participating. It's hard to control it with broken links, external links and some spammy content. So we are interested to move the "optimised" sub-domains to sub folders and leave the others. And if the page title repeats in pages of sub-domain, is that bad  and dilutes the website transparency? For all our website pages we have give "topic name | brand & keyword" and same for sub-domain pages like "topic name | brand & keyword". Is this hurting us? Having keyword along with brand name across the sub-domain pages hurt rankings? Thanks

Screaming Frog can do that—here is more information about it. But maybe you just want to start with the Google Search Console report—you can find out more here. And yes, if you have a lot of internal links pointing to a page on your site, you are telling Google that you think it is an important page.

It seems you didn't get my question. There will be no duplicate content in pages. All I am discussing is about how to optimise sub-domains pages with "keyword" and "brand" at page titles. Generally we have given "brand & keyword" in all pages of website. Can we do same for pages of sub-domains? Is so many pages added with "brand & keyword" helps or kills in ranking?

Google left us in "confusion world" and making money. First, does anybody guess what is good or bad link as per Google? No. May be very less SEO experts; that too after using expensive tools. Google agreed that they "try hard" to stop the negative SEO affect; but cannot guarantee you that no links hurt. So it implies that Google algorithm is never going to be accurate even they update with Penguin or Peacock. That too it'll be more less accurate coming to websites like us with thousands of backlinks where hundreds and thousands of new clueless backlinks add every month making it hard finding the culprits. Wikipedia page is sure a strong hit. Wikipedia page is not a feasibility every company but only for which holds some genuine reputation can get a page and backlink. So, even it's a nofollow technically, Google gives a weight to it. One of our sub-domain is hitting with backlinks from same domain for last few months...all added up to 5k links...mostly from comments. Do we need to worry about this hitting our domain and website rankings?

Hi, Yes! They're still important, in itself they won't give you any ranking boost as it will only increase the easiness for the search engines to crawl your pages. So they will find all your pages on your site more easily. If you're already using WordPress you can easily set up your plugins to provide you with sitemaps, don't forget to add them in a line to your robots.txt and definitely make sure you submit them in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Martijn.

Thanks for the answer & confirmation. What if we get back links from different social channels like tumblr, digg, stumbleupon, etc.... Back links from these social discussion forums hurt?

But as per the current SEO buzz,  internal nofollow leads of waste of link juice and we cannot preserve it. Moreover some suggests not to use nofollow internally.

Hi there, There isn't a definitive answer regarding the number of links that you should add. The way I'd suggest thinking about this is what would make sense for users - do they need to have links on every single page? Does it make sense for them to be able to click to different subdomains from anywhere or could you list them all on your homepage or another page? It's pretty common practice to cross link between subdomains that are related to each other, but you do want to be careful not to do it if it doesn't make sense i.e. if you're doing it just for SEO benefit, it's worth considering if it's the right thing to do. It's also worth avoiding a focus on keyword driven anchor text, because that could definitely be seen as manipulative if you overdo it. I hope that helps! Paddy

As part of the normal backlink profile you would absolutely expect to see some nofollow links (In many cases, you can expect to see more nofollow than follow (Moz's inbound links have a ratio of something close to 40% follow to 60% nofollow). Of course, if you only have a few inbound links there's every chance that 100% of them could be passing equity. However, as your site grows, you'd definitely expect to see that percentage drop off. Being honest, I can only see this ratio being something to concern yourself with if you are trying to make your backlink profile "look natural", rather than allowing to develop naturally. Often, the kind of places that allow you to "get" dofollow links (i.e. paid links/directories etc.) are of lower quality and Google will have a pretty good understanding what they're up to and simply discount the links, which could see you investing a lot of effort and gaining nothing of any worth at the end. So, in summary, there is no optimal ratio of follow/nofollow links, only good links (natural/relevant) and bad links (paid/spammy). Concentrate your efforts on building great contents, satisfying your visitors (by giving them what they want) and building relationships within your vertical and you'll gain far more from fewer links. It may seem counter-intuitive, especially if you see your competitors gaming the system, but their success will likely be short-lived. I know that the "build great content" and "putting the user first" messages can seem a little trite, but you hear it a lot because it's true. Good luck with your project!

You should remove it if possible. No reason to link to a dead link (poor ux, waste crawler time) or call a non-existent resource (slow site down). However, I don't think it will make any noticeable effect on your rankings.

All this ^ and that ^^

Why would porn site links have to be bad links? Of course, if a porn link goes to a kitchen website, there is a problem there. The idea behind this, at least for me, is that when you spot links that you analyze and determine that are bad links, whatever the reason, those links should be disavowed. Under your own criteria there will be good links that Google might consider bad links and vice-versa. My advise is to do not leave all that work just to Google. No one better than you to take care (when you know exactly what you are doing) of your site. Keep in mind that all of these are my opinions and what i I'd do in this certain position. Best luck. GR