Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Looks like it caught up with them: http://searchengineland.com/confirmed-google-venture-backed-thumbtack-hit-with-manual-action-for-unnatural-links-222664

Thanks for the update, Rand, and good luck on getting Mozscape V2 up and running ASAP. I'm sure I'm not alone in wanting to see Moz emerge as the leader in this industry, bringing the tools up to par with the amazing community assets that you guys provide.

Looking forward to seeing the mustache disappear!

-Yair

Thanks for the reassuring response, Alick.

Based on what you're saying (and that post from Niel Patel) it's a waste of time to even fill out Google form (these sites are not outranking us). Agree?

Our site has lots of unique content and photos and it is constantly being scraped and posted on other websites. Most of these are no-name sites that pop up and exist for adwords revenue.

Aside from the fact that we don't want our content being copied, this is an SEO nightmare because they often link back to us from pages that are stuffed with keywords and have very low domain authority (it's a form of negative SEO).

My question is:

Does anyone have experience with fighting this phenonmenon?

What have you done that is effective?

Does anyone have experience with a service such as http://www.dmca.com/ProtectionPro.aspx ? Does it work/is it worth it?

Any input is appreciated!

Since Moz is trying to predict how Google ranks your site, and Google claims to take the disavow file into account, I'd like to suggest that Moz allow webmasters to upload their disavow file. I imagine this data would be useful to Moz in determining Domain Authority (they may even think of other ways to use it and might even help come to a conclusion on the great debate) and it gives a chance for sites to improve their Moz DA when they are bombarded by spammy links.

I'd love to hear the community's thoughts on this idea, as well as the what Wizards of Moz have to say.

Thanks Matt.

In the meantime I found out that if we go to https we will lose a lotf our ad revenue (we rely heavily on Adsense) so we're going to hold off for now.

We're migrating our site to https and I have the following question:

We have some old url's that we are 301ing to new ones. If we switch over to https then we will be forced to do a double-redirect for these url's. Will this have a negative SEO impact? If so, is there anything that we can do about it?

Thanks - but are SURE that adding the schema will make the box appear? (that was my original question)

Thanks - it's no problem.

I don't know what you're talking about. We have not added the code yet (we're doing it next week).

Thank Ricardo, but I'm not sure you're understanding my issue. In your screen shot there is NO search box in the results for Hometalk.

Thanks for the response.

You're seeing a search box in the results?

Can you show me a screenshot?

Here's what I'm seeing:

http://imgur.com/oEjGX54

and here's what I'd like to see:

http://imgur.com/3U3injH

For some reason, a search for our company name (“hometalk”) does not produce the search box in the results (even though we do have sitelinks).

We are adding schema markup as outlined here, but we're not sure about:

Will adding the code make the search bar appear (or at least increase the chances), or is it only going to change the functionality of the search box (to on-site search) for results that are already showing a search bar?

Thanks so much!

This is exactly what I wanted to know.

Thanks for the quick and thorough response, Sajeet.

I just need a little clarification:

In the example you gave: www.mysite.com/main-page?medium=abc this page will be canonicaled to www.mysite.com/main-page. Are you saying that in such a case I will lose some link juice but not when the query string has utm parameters? If this is what you mean, how do you know that Google treats different query strings differently?

It is well known that when page A canonicals to page B, some link juice is lost (similar to a 301). So imagine I have the following pages:

Page A: www.mysite.com/main-page which has the tag: <link rel="canonical" href="http: www.mysite.com="" main-page"=""></link rel="canonical" href="http:>

Page B: www.mysite.com/main-page/sub-page which is a variation of Page A, so it has a tag

I know that links to page B will lose some of their SEO value, as if I was 301ing from page B to page A.

Question:

What about this link: www.mysite.com/main-page?utm_medium=moz&utm_source=qa&utm_campaign=forum

Will it also lose link juice since the query string is being stripped by the canonical tag? In terms of SEO, is this like a redirect?

I have a few basic questions about mobile SEO. I'd appreciate if any of you fabulous Mozzers can enlighten me.

Our site has a parallel mobile site with the same urls, using an m. domain for mobile and www. for desktop. On mobile pages, we have a rel="canonical" tag pointing to the matching desktop URL and on desktop pages we have a rel="alternate" tag pointing to the matching mobile URL. When someone visits a www. page using a mobile device, we 301 them to the mobile version.

Questions:

1. Do I want my mobile pages to be indexed by Google? From Tom's (very helpful) answers here, it seems that I only want Google indexing the full site pages and if the mobile pages are indexed it's actually a duplicate content issue. This is really confusing to me since Google knows that it's not duplicate content based on the canonical tag. But - he makes a good point - what is the value of having the mobile page indexed if the same page on desktop is indexed (I know that Google is indexing both because I see them in search results. When I search on mobile Google serves the mobile page and when I search on desktop Google serves me the desktop page.)? Are these pages competing with each other? Currently, we are doing everything we can do ensure that our mobile pages are crawled (deeply) and indexed, but now I'm not sure what the value of this is? Please share your knowledge.

2. Is a mobile page's ranking affected by social shares of the desktop version of the same page? Currently, when someone uses the share buttons on our mobile site, we share the desktop url (www. - not m.). The reason we do this is that we are afraid that if people are sharing our content with 2 different url's (m.mysite.com/some_post and www.mysite.com/some_post) the share count will not be aggregated for both url's. What I'm wondering is: will this have a negative effect on mobile SEO, since it will seem to Google that our mobile pages have no shares, or is this not a problem, since the desktop pages have a rel="alternate" tag pointing to mobile pages, so Google gives the same ranking to the mobile page as the desktop page (which IS being shared)?

Thanks so much Andy!

We have 1 sitemap for our desktop site, mobile site, and images. This works for Google, but I'm not sure if it's supported by Bing or if they require separate sitemaps.

Anyone know?

We have a mobile site that uses angular js, so we are using Pushstate and adding the   tag to each page so Google receives an HTML snapshot.

My question is if Bing supports this meta tag and will fetch the correct version of the page?