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Not really sure, but as I was trying to diagnose it, the site broke on me. Only after I sent my crawl tool to it.
So I am wondering if your server sees incoming spiders crawling, then blocks them. That would explain why both SEOmoz and my crawl tool came back with funny errors.
At first glance, I didn't see any issues. Not really sure.
You should be alright with a new site, just make sure you don't lose your architecture. If you are going to have a completely new architecture, then you need to make sure you are 301 redirecting everything correctly. You may see a little dip, but if done well, you will be fine.
I believe you are probably doing this alright. Just as long as you aren't out soliciting 100's of blogs asking for a link and a review.
I wouldn't worry too much about those. Just focus on keeping your site natural.
I would see about adding some secure logos via Verisign or McAfee.
And do you have any well know brand names you could display as clients?
I'm not sure that is the rule. I would continue with the product reviews, just make sure that the people who are doing the reviews, that their sites are relevant.
In November of 2011 Google announced that it would start encrypting search sessions of anyone signed in to Google.com. In practice, this means that Google stopped passing the organic keywords that referred traffic to websites whenever users are logged in Google and conducting searches.
Basically anyone logged into Google and does a search, the keyword is now "not provided".
http://searchengineland.com/encrypted-search-terms-hit-google-analytics-99685
The rel=canonical is based on the actual url structure. So whatever your url structure is (your navigation), then the rel=canonical tag should match.
Not possible. Google's not going to index something that is not accessible to everyone.
A great tool to help you get started would be Google's Page Speed Online Tool : https://developers.google.com/pagespeed/ This will help identify any technical seo issues.
I would also suggest being a little more social.
I believe this file is the base template for all the others. So if you put it on the main one, it should be on the others. That is why I suggested to add it and then view the code of the others to verify it is there as well.
I believe all you have to do is put this tag
On the main login page (should be the same url) and it will cover all variations.
If you aren't sure, go ahead and add it then view the source code of the pages above to see if they all have the same rel=canonical tag.
Then I believe the links will only show for the old site, and not the new one.
So if you had 400 links to https://goopping.atscheckout.com/goopping/
doesn't mean that you automatically have 400 links to http://www.goopping.com
Are the links going to the new site or the old site?
Are they actual not found pages? If not then I wouldn't 404 them, and I have never tried to 404 parameters.
Also, I would make sure you setup a rel=canonical tag. This will also help with the duplicates.
Instead of trying to 404 those, I would suggest utilizing GWT (Google Webmaster Tools) and use their "URL Parameters". This will allow you to tell Google not to index all of them.
Log into GWT, under "Site configuration" select "URL paremters".
yes, the urls being blocked are includes from your Wordpress program.
Well there is a robots.txt file. You can view it here: http://containerforsale.co.uk/robots.txt
What warnings are you getting in your sitemap submission area? It appears to look alright: http://containerforsale.co.uk/sitemap.xml But I tried to validate it and got a 504 Gateway Time-out error. http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/index.php?op=validate-xml-sitemap&go=1&sitemapurl=http%3A%2F%2Fcontainerforsale.co.uk%2Fsitemap.xml&submit=Validate
I assume you are getting no data reads via Open Site Explorer correct? This just means that OSE hasn't crawled or found your site. I wouldn't panic, since there are so many sites out there, OSE only crawls a small portion.
I would wait until the end of this month until the next OSE Linkscape index update comes out. You may find that they now have info on your site. (if not, start link building so OSE can find you)
Google and SEOmoz both crawl the web differently and don't crawl everything. And Google should be crawling a lot more then SEOmoz. So with that said, you will see differences in their indexes.
A few similar answered questions:
http://www.seomoz.org/q/different-information-on-seomoz-and-gwt
http://www.seomoz.org/q/open-site-explorer-vs-google-webmaster-tools
Canonicals are fine, but you should always canonical the correct or main url. (The one being used in the navigation)
Doesn't appear to be blocked, so maybe it has something to do with your /wp-includes/ directory.
Change the robots.txt file to this:
User-agent *
Disallow:
David,
Log into GWT, and under "Site configuration", select "Settings". There you will see that you can select your Preferred domain. (www or non www)
From Google: If you specify your preferred domain as http://www.example.com and we find a link to http://example.com, we'll consider both links the same. Learn more about setting a preferred domain.
I agree with Phil. The site isn't being redirected to the new one. Most likely what they setup is a rewrite instead of a redirect.
Tell the tech team that the url of the old site should never be visible.
And you can use tools like this to verify that it is actually redirecting. (you should see a 301 redirect)
Not really sure what works for everyone else, but I'm always a sucker for "Click here for Free Beer". It gets me all the time.
You must have recently setup your www and non www canonicalization right? This may be the reason, since both of the pages have no OSE (Open Site Explorer) info for the non www version, but do have equal metrics for the www version.
If this is the case make sure you work with GWT and take care of this.
I would see if they could restructure their site so that the 2nd link was the actual link. (without type2). I don't see why they would have those parameters as the main category.
You really want the link architecture to flow with what your Canonical tags are saying.
It will be great to see if anyone has any stats on this. I did recently read a good article similar to this on Hubspot, "How to Write Call-to-Action Copy That Gets Visitors Clicking"
I know it isn't exactly the answer you are looking for, but I feel they have some good points and suggestions.
copy whatever you have in your robots.txt file here and we will tell you the issue.
SEOmoz has a great article about Robots.txt files here: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/robotstxt
the wordpress just has a setting under general settings for www or non www.
The internal crawl report from SEOmoz is based on your internal links, not external inbound links. So if there are any errors, it is in your site.
At a quick glance, I see that you have setup the 301 to www, but if you click into the blog (news), then you aren't at the www anymore. http://cafecartel.com/ccsnews/ - (if wordpress, then it's just a simple settings change.)
Run a crawl test on it (http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/crawl-test) and keep on plugging away and fixing every issue until there are no more.
And make sure you use rel=canonical tags. This will help out with the duplicate content as well. http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/canonicalization
If it is automatically generated, then you should bring this up to your Dev team and have them investigate. One of the biggest issues I see is auto generating sitemaps daily.
Good Luck
If you have ftp access to the site, you should be able to download the xml sitemap and edit it in a text editor program.
Since you have several bad links, I would probably delete them all and create a new one based on your current website. (And if it is a large site, you can have multiple xml sitemaps to keep everything organized and better for you to monitor and track)
There are some great tools out there that will automatically create your sitemaps for you.
I must not be understanding your question, since my answer would be fix your XML Sitemap? Google Webmaster Tools has a tool that allows you to validate your sitemap.
I agree with both Nakul and Matthew, but I would really try to focus on less generic terms and laser target the additional terms.
Automobile, 4 Cylinder, Made in Germany are too generic.
I would do something more like this:
Part Number - Automobile Part Description | Your Brand
98654 - 2006-08 Audi A4 Steering Wheel Airbag, Black | AudiParts, Inc.
If you really want to dig deep into your links, Tom Anthony wrote a great post and offers a great tool. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-profile-tool-to-discover-linking-activity
We use it for every client to analyze and get a better understanding of their links on a monthly basis.
Using OSE http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/, you can view each of your page metrics. (Page Authority, and links)
You may have optimized the pages for certain keywords, but there are many more metrics that determine which pages will rank better in serps. And usually your strongest page will always be your home page.
You need to setup your site Canonicalization so that you don't have the duplicates. SEOmoz has a great article here: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/canonicalization
Since you are hosted on an Apache server, you will need to modify your .htaccess file in your root directory to take care of these.
Make sure you also setup the www or non www preference in GWT. (Google Webmaster Tools)
MozPoints - http://www.seomoz.org/dp/mozpoints
The best way is to get involved.
I think you have the key components covered with the 301, but I would also make sure that you have no internal redirects and that you update your XML Sitemaps and get them submitted at the same time. Once you make the change, and run internal crawls of the site (and no errors), then you should utilize GWT and up your crawl speed and Fetch as Googlebot to start resubmitting the new content.
There's the SEOmoz SEO Beginners Guide: http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo
or the SEO Cheatsheet: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-web-developers-seo-cheat-sheet
I believe you can just add this to your robots.txt file and you will be alright.
Disallow: ?p=contactus
Email is really the only way to deliver to them. RSS will work, but they need to know how to receive RSS feeds in their email program. I would investigate Social, Twitter, Facebook.
Bruce Clay has some reasonably priced tools ($29.95 per month). http://www.bruceclay.com/seo/tools.htm
Just make sure that after you install the template, that you take a look at the code and make sure everything is fine for SEO. Remember that you can always modify the code to make it work for you.