Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Ok, thanks.  I'll check into it some more.  I didn't renew the yahoo directory so we'll see how long it stays up.

Thanks, just curious where they would be on my sitemap if they aren't on the site itself?

The links that google is 'crawling' simply don't exist.  So there's nothing to 301.  That's what I'm confused about.

Thanks again.

Aaron

Hi,

Google Webmaster tools sent me a few messages recently about the jump in the number of 'not found' errors.

From 0 to 290 errors, ouch.

I know what it's from but I think Google is seeing things.  We developed another page/subdomain we're working on with links back to the root domain.

Basically a complete list of articles page that lists each article and links back to the root domain.

Not sure what Google is crawling but the links that would result in a 'not found' error aren't there.

Will these disappear over time?

Thanks for the help!

Just curious if paying for a business.com link is still relevant at all.

I cancelled my yahoo paid directory listing after researching on here.  Can put the $300 to better use elsewhere.

Just curious if business.com is now not the best use of money either.

Thanks!

Aaron

Just curious what people think.  The SEOMOZ trust on my site has gone up, all while Google is dropping us in rankings for lots of keywords.

Just curious if this can happen to anyone or once you are 100% 'trusted' you're good.

We went from 120,000 page views down to about 50,000.   All while doubling content, improving the design(at least from a user perspective), and getting more natural links.

Seems counter intuitive to Google's mantra of ranking quality.

I would guess 'authority' sites never get hit by these updates right?  So when you make it you've made it.(at least from a dropping like a rock perspective, obviously you have to keep working).

I'm guessing we just need a bunch more quality links but would hate to work on building links, quality content, trust etc for it to be something so finicky long term.

Thanks Roberto,

I'll check into those, was planning on just using excel.  Those tools may be well worth it though.

Thanks Willny, was planning on just trying to get links to the homepage and let the Webmaster put whatever anchor text they wanted.

Is that a bad idea?  Or should I specify what anchor text I want?  I figured 'natural' was not suggesting anything.

Great, much thanks for the help!

That's always the question right?:) In my opinion the site has very high quality data.

-If they would link to Wikipedia about an article on Neurosurgery then they should link to our interview with a neurosurgeon.  www.jobshadow.com/interview-with-a-neurosurgeon

-It's real information from real people doing the jobs, i.e not a journalist's rendition.

-It should be of benefit to their readers.  If I was reading their site and followed a link on to mine I would say 'hey man, thanks for linking to that.  That was cool, I'll come back to your site more if you keep linking to great info like that'.

Obviously I'm biased though:).

Is that enough?  Or do I need a lot more?

Hey, great thoughts.  Much appreciated!

I could do a survey around job satisfaction pretty easy.  Have tons of data there. Was looking into that.

What did you mean by the 'ego bait angle' and top 10 lists?  Sounds interesting.

Also, could you elaborate on the inspring people with online presence/profiles.  Those seem pretty intriguing/possible.

Thanks!

Getting ready to do some link building.

I've got several lists of competitors' links, including a bunch of sites with broken links that would be a great fit to link to us.

I've got a capable VA to get started work on reaching out to people.

Just curious if this is the right game plan, seems a little simple:

For this round of link building I'm thinking all the links would point to my root domain.

-Find quality sites/links to go after

-Find an email to the owner/webmaster

-Have the VA send them a value proposition email(i.e. why it's good fit for all)...or tell them about broken links etc.

-Follow up myself when a response is generated.

-Hope/verify they link to us.

Thanks for the help with the newbie questions.

Question, been thinking of some link bait infographic ideas for my site www.jobshadow.com

I've got a couple in the careers/job niche but the one I think would be best is completely unrelated.

I study free market economics a lot and want to debunk the whole 'deflation' debate that is on the news these days.

The overall gist would be to do so with a history of Apple products showing why falling prices aren't anything to be afraid of.

Given that it's econ/techie related(even non econ people would find this graphic neat I think) and not specific to the 'career hunting' and job searching my site is I'm curious what people suggest.

Give it a shot and release on our blog anyway?  Or trade it to someone else in a more relative niche(assuming the graphic gets built, I know ideas are relatively cheap:).

Ok cool, yeah I think it's mainly comment pages.  Which no following them is standard on Wordpress.

The blocking of the robots notice threw me a little off though.  Obviously you'd want your comments to show up in the search engines as well.

Thanks both of ya'll for the help!

Hi,

I've got a bunch of notices saying almost 1200 pages are no-followed and blocked by robots.

They appear to be comments and other random pages.  Not the actual domain and static content pages.

Still seems a little odd.  The site is www.jobshadow.com.  Any idea why I'd have all these notices?

Thanks!

Double good answer if I could.  Thanks!

A couple more quick wet behind the ears question.

Is nesting a native function of wordpress?  Is it when you create a new category inside of another category in the post options.  I'm pretty sure that's how it works.

Also, I think it's somewhat helpful letting people search by 'Jobs involving travel', 'Outdoor Jobs', etc.  Are those good examples of tags?  Or does that fall into something else?  They probably aren't category worthy, and definitely sub-category.

But I think it's still helpful navigation for a career seeker who doesn't know where to start(and thus how I ended up with 60+ categories:).

Thanks again for the help!

Dan,

Thanks for the help as well.  I've checked out your article, great stuff there thanks.  I really like the excerpt idea too b/c with no following and no indexing the tags there's not much traffic to gain from that.

-As far as categories.   With a site like mine would 15 ish categories be too many?  Especially given that we've got some pretty random career interviews on the site.

-Also, in regards to tags.  Should those be treated more like subcategories? But use tags.  Because if I got so defined as to put tags like obstetrics, Gynecology, etc on the interview I have with an OB/GYN then they would just link right back to the same interview.  i.e. not provide any value to the reader.

The only way tags like that would provide value was if I have numerous interviews under the same tag right?(in some cases there are more than one interview of each career, different people with the same job etc).

Anyway, starting to wrap my mind around all this.  Thanks for the help!

Aaron

Ok, great.  Thanks for the advice.  Will get to work on those changes, make perfect sense to me.

About the speed stuff, where are you testing from?  I just ran the pingdom report and it loaded in under 2 seconds.

I just upgraded my hosting, before that it was slow at about 9 seconds.  We've got it cached to the gills, pretty static content, so it shouldn't take too long.

Thanks Jeremy.  A couple follow up thoughts.

-Do you think it'd best just to have one category per career/job?  Or several?

-Also, will adding tags to these interviews cause duplicate content?  And should the tags be different from the words in the Title tags?

Thanks again for the help!

Just looking for some advice on this topic.  I know it's much debated but it seems the consensus is that having some broad categories and more defined tags is optimal.

The issue with my site is that it is very broad in nature.  We're profiling and interviewing all types of careers.  The site is www.jobshadow.com for reference.

Up until now I haven't used Wordpress Tags at all.  I've just been using categories(i.e. 9-5 type jobs, salaried jobs, hourly jobs, jobs in medicine, etc).

I've probably got way too many categories.  They are being counted as links on every post page which pushes me way overboard on links per page.

-Just curious if anyone has any thoughts on best practices for my site.

-Also, none of the categories themselves are really pulling in any SEO traffic so switching those wouldn't be a big deal.  Just looking for the best way to help users browse the site and the growing number of content.

And rom what I hear Tags can pull in some random/long tail traffic pretty easily if done right.

Look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Thanks for the help!

Thanks, and yes people don't always make it that far down.  I'm definitely going to add the terms of service and privacy policy on the bottom.  Good points.  Thanks again

Thanks Andrew, good stuff.  Glad to know it's not of the spammy variety.  The last update almost made it sound like any footer was a bad footer.  Working on internal links now.

Just curious what people think of my footer.  I think it provides some value.

Not that many people click on it but it doesn't look that bad in my opinion.

Curious what others think.  If getting rid of it would help SEO I'd look into it.  I outsource all my coding though so don't want to spend money tweaking what doesn't need to be done.

www.jobshadow.com

Thanks for the help!

Just curious if anyone knew of some good ones out there.  Looking to try a couple out.  Thanks!

Thanks, looked that over.  Not sure if that's what happened or not.  Pretty wild though, like a roller coaster right now.

Just curious if anyone noticed a drop in traffic last friday.

I got hammered with about a 20% drop overall.  Didn't know if there was an update or what.

Thanks in advance!

Awesome, thanks.  I implemented several new plugins and a new design, and then immediately the errors started happening.

I'll see if my developer who made all the changes can do some research to figure it out.  Thanks again for the help!

Awesome, thanks!   So for someone who doesn't code PHP should I just point a developer to that article and see if they can figure out how to fix it?

I don't have a clue where to look to fix those errors unfortunately.  Willing to learn but outside of the current skill set.

Also, do you think these errors would affect SEO?  I guess I'll find out when I fix them, just curious what your opinion is.  Thanks!

Hi guys, new here.  Did a little search here and didn't see anything exactly like it.  My bad if it's been discussed.

I've read most of the FAQ's and haven't seen this exact problem addressed.My site is **http://tinyurl.com/89aury5**I recently installed a new design and since then have been having lots of 404 errors.You can see the screenshot here http://awesomescreenshot.com/0b92z1615There has been a perfect correlation between loss in traffic and the rise in errors as well.  **Most of the errors I have are /function.opendir after what would be a normal URL.  **Most of these appear on the 2nd and 3rd page of the crawl report which you can't see on the screenshot.Anyway, I don't have any broken links on the site(that I can find), and certainly not any of these that google is crawling.  I've read it might be a PHP error but no one seems to be able to find it.  Pretty bizarre.Looking for any help.   Thanks!