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Yeah good point about the "block site" option.

So I think I've got a good strategy going but wanted to get others feedback on it...

I've been link building on a lot of blogs via reviews and giveaways. Frequently, these blogs give my posts limited exposure on the Home Page because the posts quickly get buried by new posts and eventually pushed off the home page to the "older posts" pages.

Sometimes, reviews never even touche the home page because they live one level down on a "reviews" page which typically has 0 inbound links and low page authority.

In these cases, I will use OSE to find the blog post with the strongest back link profile and request a link on that page instead. Typically, these posts are 2-3 years old so the bloggers are usually happy to give an old page some action.

I'm a bit concerned though..Since these pages are frequently old, their content has not changed for years. Essentially, the pages have gone stale. Am I getting any benefit from these links? They typically have the 2nd best Page Authority on the Domain, but I'm wondering if the lack of fresh content kills all the value.

Yes, I've read that people have had problems with it hurting your page load speed

Yes I understand it would be much harder to get the target keywords from high PR sites, but assuming that I could, i guess my question is if anyone believes that Google penalizes for unnatural Pagerank-Anchor Text distributions. In a purely organic link environment, some keyword text would most likely be found on both high PR and low PR sites, not only one or the other.

Ahh yes, link building. Thank you for your input. Obviously i will not get a definitive answer on this, but it's great to hear people weigh in on the assessed risks.

Thank You!

Hey SEO Mozosphere -

Working on a link buying strategy. I know it is wise to target not only anchor text links but also branded text links to keep your anchor text distribution looking natural. However, do you think it would be too risky to ask for branded text links only from low PR sites and focus the more valuable keyword anchor text links on high PR sites?

Google's keywords tool usually does a decent job of suggesting other phrases and terms. You are using the keywords tool, right? If would try words like "apartments, condos, houses, etc.." I have found similar issues with local terms using the keywords tool (no traffic). You can also get some help by playing with  the auto-complete on Google's search bar but it's more vague..also try looking at page source of your competition to see what they are optimizing for, especially in the meta keywords field.

Hey Ben,

Great advice, I think you are dead on. Big help thank you!

-Zack

Hey Ben thanks for your feedback.

We did change the extensions somewhat recently..We didn’t use .html, but we did use .jsp before a site redesign in October.  So for instance, our item page URLs used to be:

www.uncommongoods.com/item/item.jsp?itemId=13271

and are now:

www.uncommongoods.com/product/pee-pee-teepees

We never had an extension on the homepage; for category pages (non-product pages), we made the switch around June 2010, and for the product pages and all other pages we made the switch in October 2010.

What would you suggest we do as a solution to get our page rank back?

Hello SEO brethren -

I've got a mystery I'm trying to solve. I work in house SEO at http://www.uncommongoods.com/

Our home page is a Pagerank 5. All of our sub-pages are Pagerank 0. Even this one below which has 276 links from 57 domains:

http://www.uncommongoods.com/product/recycled-wine-bottle-platters

Any clue what is going on here? Is a PR 0 typical for a page with this many links / linking domains?

Thanks!

-Zack

i agree

I would focus on diversifying your linkbuilding. Vary the landing pages, anchor text, and PR of the sites u are requesting links from.

try deleting the  subpage content. It might be too keyword stuffed and u might have got penalized. I'd get in touch w Google via Webmaster tools

Agreed. That's what we do at my company with old products

If you're a tourist business and the tourists know it as 144 I would stick with that. However, you may be able to get further insight off adwords keyword tool or traffic estimator. You can try some searches and see what the traffic looks like to try to gauge which search pulls more traffic.

well your HP is still indexed...is there a particular keyword you are concerned about ? I know many people have been seeing some weird rankings these last few weeks. It seems that Google has been doing some algorithm tests..

Hi Guillaume,

Your comments about Javascript on the client side make complete sense to me now and I will examine our Resin config w/ my IT team. Thanks for explaining. Also, as per Beneeb's advice above, I'm going to try making some changes to robots.txt.

From a bigger picture perspective though, do you think this 404 Error is even that big of a deal? Are we likely to be penalized for this in terms of Page Rank, Domain Authority, etc..??

Thanks for your help!

-Zack

Hi Beneeb,

That tool is awesome! It definitely helps, thanks! I'm going to show that report to my IT guys today. I think your guess is a very good one. Hopefully I can persuade them to make the changes and we'll see if it resolves the error.

Best Regards,

-Zack

Hi Beeneeb,

Thank you for your insight. I think this makes sense as I see there is some redundancy in robots.txt as it is now. I'm curious however, why do you think that changing robots.txt will resolve the 404 error?

Best Regards,

-Zack