Sounds solid. Thanks, Dirk!

Hi Dirk,

Thanks for the message. You may be right. Thing is, GWT's discovery of this large number of now blocked pages (previously indexed) seems to have coincided with a big drop in search overall.

I guess the part that I wonder about it is, if these now blocked pages as 403s are no problem and Google will just figure it out, why does it bother to list them in errors... just in case you didn't know, but that it doesn't in fact care one way or the other search-wise and it won't affect your other pages? Just wondering. Thanks... Darcy

Google WMT recently found and called out a large number of old unpublished pages as access denied errors. The pages are tagged "noindex, follow."  These old pages are in Google's index.

At this point, would it better to 301 all these pages or submit an index removal request or what? Thanks... Darcy

Great question. Unless and until site B develops it's own new link profile and/or gets site A's pages 301'd to site B, in most moderately competitive searches, site B won't produce search-wise like site A (assuming site A produces).

I would therefor, if at all possible in your particular situation, set search expectations accordingly low and/or move as quickly as possible to 301ing the old pages to their new versions. Canonical tags to tell Google that site B is the one true copy of the content will of course not substitute for a good link profile plus old pages 301'd. It will be content without authority.

Maybe you can't ever get rid of site A as your question implies, in which case realize site B will not perform as well search-wise and set expectations accordingly.

Either way, get a list of all the external/incoming links to site A and work to get them updated to site B. This may be a lot of slow pick and shovel work, depending on what's in place already.

If you can anticipate after some reasonable amount of time 301ing old pages to new pages, skip Robert's 2 & 3 as you'd want Google still crawling the old urls to discover the eventual 301s.

Best of luck!

In addition to the on page optimization suggestions above...

I work in an online forum with 70,000+ members and have found that it still requires me to think of new discussions and posts in terms of "what search is this discussion a good response for?" Without relevance to a search opportunity (keyword research), it won't perform to it's potential. Of course, with user-generated content, not all of it fits with an opportunity. So, I try not to think of it as an orphanage where I have to get each discussion adopted/search productive.

I've also had to be careful with submitted articles, which are often duplicate content first published somewhere else. There are ways of dealing with this that still allows for good content to be posted, even if it is duplicate. Of course, if not dealt with already, it can be a huge drag on your site.

Finally, I would pay some attention to site architecture. If one's own site does not link to important pages (thus, seeing them as important and passing the link love), why would Google think they're important? So, some internal linking strategy is necessary.

Good luck!

I don't know this to be a fact, but I would not be surprised that if you could hide specific content on a page from Google, it would not be the best trust signal and could have it's own downside.

Feel free to inmail me your url and I'll look at it more closely.

Best... Mike

Hi,

Alexa has, for purposes of fictional number illustration, let's say one out of 10,000 web users using their toolbar. They then take that data and multiply it by 10,000 and say that represents web traffic in total. With that, they rank sites by estimated total.

They may have some other secret sauce, but that is basically it. So, if you have the tool bar and visit your site as much as you probably do while doing all that work, then it affects your Alexa rank.

It's kind of like why folks filter out your own office's web traffic from one's own Google Analytics data in order to get a clearer picture of pure traffic.

I hope that helps. Best... Mike

It sounds like real progress after less than a year - congrats!

Alexa Rank is an approximation of site traffic rank based mostly on visits to your site by those with the Alexa toolbar. I've compared sites with very similar traffic and found very different rankings. Just out of curiosity, why do you care what your Alexa Rank is? As the site owner, you know what the actual traffic is vs their very approx ranking.

Google PageRank is another infrequently updated calculation that doesn't mean much, especially with so many other benchmarks available.

Best of luck! .... Mike

If those comparisons are your main competitors and if they consistently/clearly outrank you, then I don't think the problem is in the numbers OSE shows. It could be alot of other things, including but not limted to internal linking, or CTR in SERPs (title tags) or user signals like bounce rate, or duplicate content or depth of content or site speed or downtime or a combination of those things and others.

On what you show in those comparisons and what you say about the quality of the back links etc, I would choose your link profile over theirs.

Consider making a spreadsheet of pages/terms where you are clearly beaten by these sites. Then, list across the top all of the different ranking factors you can think of. Then, fill in the info for your pages and your competitors and look for patterns.  That's what I would do.

I hope that helps a little. Best... Mike

That is frustrating. At the same time, it sounds like you're doing alot of right things.

Here are a few questions for you:

How long has it been at D/A 15?

What's your home page authority and how does that compare to these competitors?

How are the actual search results going in terms of, for instance, traffic to your site?

Just a note that Moz's tools, as good as they are, are not synonymous with how Google sees it.

Best... Mike

Yes, WMT API doesn't have it. The site site:xxxx.com search is where are got one of the two too high numbers. Thanks... Mike

Hi Marijn,

Thanks for the suggestions. 2.5 years of G/A organic landing pages is 10,000 urls.... 1/2 as many as the site map and 1/3rd as many as Google says indexed. On scraping google, do you know of a tool for that?

Thanks... Mike