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http://searchengineland.com/download-the-latest-google-search-quality-rating-guidelines-97391
Google has been on a conquest taking them down online but I would really like to take a look at it if you have a copy!
[moderator note - please use the PM system and exchange email addresses there. We've removed emails from this thread before it gets indexed and exposed to the world]
You can add Meta descriptions in wordpress 2 different ways. If you have a small site and want to simply add a generic description all you need to do is open up header.php in your themes directory and add the following code:
This will pull the site description that can be set in the "general settings" in the WP admin section. If you are looking to generate dynamic meta info then this is best done with a plugin (although it is not very hard to simply pull the excerpt or any post meta and have that display). That would look something like:
If you want to go the plugin route I would second the All in one SEO and SEO plugin by Yoast. Additionally Premium Dev offers an SEO plugin that is pretty sweet but you have to pay to get access to all their plugins so you are probably better off with the free ones.
No problem Dan.
There is definitely no harm in ticking off the errors as "fixed" and then seeing which ones return. If they return I'm betting 1 of 2 things. 1.) That you still have a live link somewhere on the new site pointing to the page. The easiest way to test this is click on one of the pages in WMT and hit the "linked from" button. That shows you where google is getting sent to the page from. The second option is that the pages have an "external" link pointing too them. If that's the case you want to be double sure to redirect it so you get the link credit!
I'm not 100% positive on why MOZ is not showing the errors as quickly, but MOZ does a "deep" crawl of the web and then does a lot of computing. WMT is literally just crawling your site, and spitting out anything it finds to your account. A much easier job for WMT, hence it is pretty quick to report site errors too you. The errors in your MOZ account will most likely update when MOZ pushes their next mozscape index update (this will also be useful for you because MOZ will have better data about "external" links than WMT)
From the error you sent me it looks like you are going through a move of a site from .aspx to .php or .html. When you change languages like this you can end up with a lot of gnarly 404 pages, especially from search pages that have variables in the URL. If you have a large amount of these errors, so many that you feel you are getting a temporary "penalty" for too many site errors you can write a quick snippet of code in the .httpdconf file on your apache server to fix these old useless pages. (if your not on an apache server this can still be achieved, the code would just be different.)
make sure to put this snippet below all of your other individual page redirects
#redirect all old dead .aspx pages to the new homepage
RedirectMatch 301 /(.*).aspx /
You should still make your best effort to redirect each old page to its corresponding "new" page. However at a certain point if you have thousands to redirect, and many are just pages with with search parameters in the URL... there comes a point where you want to just hit all the remaining pages in 1 fell swoop.
I'm not certain on how long it would take the 301 to fully "pass" page rank in Google's eyes. I think it is safe to assume that once the old page no longer has a 404 link, and it is not showing up any longer in Google searches then the PR has been passed. MOZ page authority should reflect it once MOZ pics up the change, but MOZ authority is just very "similar" to PR. Its not an exact science, MOZ should pic up the change easily though, it will just take them a little longer time.
Hi Tanveer-
I think you will find your experience posting in Q&A very positive and I suspect Moz does things the way they do to possibly foster some of that community involvement. I've found that almost any question I had related to Moz I could reach out to the community and get great answers (usually with responses in 10-15 mins on a question). The community at Moz is very large, very active, and very helpful.
We just went through this exact process with a website. We agonized over whether to do the move since the .html pages were ranking and converting well. In the end the client wanted it so we decided to make the switch, this is what we did:
1.) Took all well ranking .html pages and 301 to their new version in apache .htaccess file, example code
Redirect 301 domain-name/old-page.html domain-name/new-page/
2.) Installed the SEO plugin by Yoast and made sure to tune all title/meta info for each page
3.) Made the change and stayed patient. We saw a traffic drop for 9 days following the move. Then on the 10th day we got close to pre-move levels, and 2 full weeks later we were back at pre-move levels with improved average site time, bounce rate and conversions.
*we are almost 2 months into the move now and traffic is higher than ever.
Dan-
It sounds like you have already spot checked a few of the pages and they are still returning errors. In my experience WMT is very quick to re-crawl pages you have marked as fixed to see if they truly are fixed. For example if you mark 100 pages as fixed, then 24 hours later 95 of the pages come back, its always been the case for me that the 95 pages still had an issue and were not "fixed".
I would pull up the error report in WMT again, spot check a few of the examples and see if the pages still error out. If they do I would export that list from WMT, send it to your Dev and ask him to fix all redirection errors.
The wordpress hacking was almost surely due to having outdated version of WP, or having a vulnerable plugin installed. There are a few helpful plugins you can use to secure your WP site, plugins like (http://wordpress.org/plugins/better-wp-security/).
also a couple things to note, you should also take basic measures to project the site by changing the default table prefixes of your DB from _wp, create a new admin user and delete the default "admin" accoun & limit access to your wp-admin section in your .htaccess file.... these security plugins will give you a whole checklist of items to "secure".
To help figure out what is causing the 404 errors do the following in webmaster tools:
-login to your websites profile, then on the left hand side navigation hit crawl > crawl errors > not found. Under not found review the list of URL's for clues (you can also click on an individual link to see where the 404 page was linked from). Depending on how large your site is, if the 747 not found URL's is a large percentage of your total page count, you could be experiencing a temporary rankings drop that will disappear one you fix your error pages. If you could add a link to a few of the 404 error pages we could help you figure out what is wrong with your site code or server setup.
Dan-
Yep you are right on, if you added the above type code below all of the specific page redirects then that would "catch" all the remaining URL's with random parameters in the URL and redirect them to the home page. And its very similar code for the windows server, I'm confident your Dev should know this, if for some reason they don't I can message you the code snippets you would need for the windows server.
Also Everett Sizemore brought up a great point below. If you are redirecting all 404 pages to this 1 custom "404 landing page" that is incorrect. That is called a "soft 404" error. These will actually show up in your WMT account as well as under a section called "soft 404's".
Dana your thought was right on. Also you don't even really need to worry about changing anything on the "old" page per se. You could just open up the .htaccess file on your server and redirect the old page to the new. For example:
/olddirectory/oldfile.html http://example.com/newdirectory/newfile.html
Did the language of your website change, meaning did you move from .aspx to .php or .html? If so we have experienced a similar situation where thousands of old pages were indexed by Google, once the site was moved to a new language we were penalized until we redirected all of the old pages.
First, I doubt there would be any chance of you getting any sort of penalty due to the fact that explosives were mentioned. If this were the case fireworks manufacturers would be out of luck as far as SEO goes!
Second, I have actually pulled something like this off in the past, but with a newspaper article. I would start off by contacting the author of the piece, seeing as how he/she is the one who is familiar and even might have a relationship with you company. They also often link to their contact forum or even put their email address on the page. If that doesn't work, I would say the webmaster is a solid backup plan. An editor at the publication should also be able to do it but I would say he/she is less likely to than the first two options. To increase your odds in your email, you might even want to include the hyperlink code you wish inserted to make it easier (also more likely) for them to add it.
Goodluck!
That XML sitemap you linked too is formatted in an odd way. I noticed the site you are generating the xml sitemap for is based in wordpress. There is a really solid sitemap plugin you could use to generate your XML and submit to google instead of the current plugin you are using: http://wordpress.org/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/
I've used that plugnin numerous times and submitted sitemaps to google with no errors. Hopefully that helps you out.
Personally I would just setup the 301 correctly and not worry about logging the change in WMT. However If you click into your site, hit the gear icon in the upper right hand side of the page, then hit "change site address" you can specifiy a new address. You could also setup the https domain as a new site in WMT and delete the old WMT account, but again if it was me I would just leave things as is and let google pick up the change through your 301