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You could point a canonical to the original source (in fact that is the way Google prefers it). It's a great solution if it's you who's syndicating the content. However, if you would do that, you would loose any opportunity to get ranked on that content.

Googles view: (source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66359?hl=en).

"Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results. If your site suffers from duplicate content issues, and you don't follow the advice listed above, we do a good job of choosing a version of the content to show in our search results."

The big problem with duplicate content across different domains is that it's up to google to decide which site is going to be displayed. This could be the site which is syndicating the content, but it could also be a site which has the highest authority.

In your case - if possible I would try to enrich the content you syndicate with content from other sources. Examples could be interesting stats on the neighbourhood like avg. age, income, nearby schools, number of house sold & average price...etc or other types of content that might interest potential buyers. This way your content becomes more unique and probably more interesting (and engaging) for your visitors (and for Google)

Hope this helps,

Dirk

There is one link in Open Site Explorer (in the fresh discovered section: https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/just-discovered?site=http%3A%2F%2Fb5footballcup.com&filter=&source=&target=page&page=1&sort=crawled)

It's quite possible that there are more links to your site, and that Moz hasn't discovered them yet. You should know however that no tool will be able to discover all the links to your site. Most of them can find the links from high ranked sites, but the more links you have from smaller & less well known sites, the more difficulty the tools will have to find these links.

There was a similar question a few days ago - you might want to check these answers as well : http://moz.com/community/q/link-building-links-aren-t-showing-on-moz-or-semrush

rgds,

Dirk

Hi,

This is question which is asked quite often on Moz Q&A. Pages that have a big chunk of source code in common are sometimes considered as duplicated - even if the content is quite different. Recently they did a post on the tech blog on how they identify duplicates (it's quite technical stuff - but still interesting to read - https://moz.com/devblog/near-duplicate-detection/)

If only address & image are different but description is identical - the page will probably be considered as a duplicate by the Moz bot. If it's only for 40 of 1500 listings, I wouldn't worry to much about it, especially because you are unable the content anyway.

I would be more worried if other real estate companies would use the same feed and hence provide exactly the same content on their side, not only the 40 you mention but the full listing.

rgds

Dirk

Hi,

You might want to check this article of Google on facetted navigation: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.be/2014/02/faceted-navigation-best-and-5-of-worst.html

In your current set-up - Google isn't indexing pages of type https://modli.co/dresses.html?category=45&price=13%2C71&size=25 as these pages are only accessible using javascript (you can check this by crawling the site by using Screaming Frog or just using site:modli.co in Google) - so adding the rel next/previous will not change a lot for these pages.

If you want to make this pages accessible you will have to

• make this pages accessible using HTML links rather than js
• rewrite the parameters in your url's to make them more understandable for Search engines (https://modli.co/dresses.html?category=42 should become https://modli.co/dresses.html?category=elegant)
• use rel next/previous if pages are spread over multiple pages
• use canonical url's to eliminate parameters irrelevant for search (like size, price,...)
• eliminate potential duplicate content issues: both https://modli.co/dresses.html?category=42 & https://modli.co/dresses/elegant.html are showing elegant dresses

Hope this helps,

Dirk

Hi,

Rand did a Whiteboard Friday on this topic (http://moz.com/blog/subdomains-vs-subfolders-rel-canonical) - and also answered a question quite similar as yours (http://moz.com/community/q/moz-s-official-stance-on-subdomain-vs-subfolder-does-it-need-updating)

=> advice would be not to use subdomains but rather to use subdirectories (which corresponds with the advice Tony gave you)

rgds,

Dirk

Completely agree with Bob. The only exception where you might consider using nofollow on internal links would be on links for sign in, add to shopping cart,... - although they indicate that it's not really necessary.
Quote from webmaster tools on reasons why you could use no follow: (source:https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569?hl=en)

• Crawl prioritization: Search engine robots can't sign in or register as a member on your forum, so there's no reason to invite Googlebot to follow "register here" or "sign in" links. Using nofollow on these links enables Googlebot to crawl other pages you'd prefer to see in Google's index. However, a solid information architecture — intuitive navigation, user- and search-engine-friendly URLs, and so on — is likely to be a far more productive use of resources than focusing on crawl prioritization via nofollowed links.

rgds,

Dirk

The choice in the property between http / https is just to let Google know what the default page of your site is.

The links inside the tracking code are relative links - so if called on http - they'll send the data in http - if called on https - it's https they use to transfer the data. Your data is tracked in both cases.

You can force Analytics to always send the data over SSL - you find here how you can do that.

Hope this helps,

Dirk

PS The reason why you get the duplicates in Screaming Frog is because by default Screaming Frog is not respecting canonicals - you can change the default behaviour under Configuration > Spider > Advanced > Respect Canonicals. This way Screaming Frog will do the same as Google and show only the canonicalised version (in your case the https)

I guess it's related to the keyword + location. If you do a tooth whitening site:yoursite - the tooth whitening pages appear first - if you repeat the query with the location - the homepage gets the first result. You could try to add the location on the title / metadescription / H1 / url of the detailed pages - to make it more obvious that the page is not only about tooth whitening but about tooth whitening in your city.

Also check what is more popular - you mention teeth whitening as example - the article however talk about tooth whitening - Google knows it's similar - but I would go for the more popular term.

rgds,

Dirk

Summarising (this thread is becoming extremely long):

• redirects seem to be implement as they should
• user engagement seems to be improved after migration

Performance seems to be & has been an issue - with unresponsive scripts & pages which are loading quite slow. Quality of HTML is (was) quite lousy.

I would stick to my original advice - and ask an HTML / CSS guru to have a look at your code, clean it & implement some of the performance improvements that were already mentioned before (to reduce the time to first byte). One thing you could already correct in the code is the location of an embedded javascript - it should be in the body or head - currently one script is outside the HTML tag.

Good luck

Dirk

Small update - if I compare the results of both old & new site - the order of the results seems identical (don't know if the order of the results was different before migration)

Hi,

I did a site:www.greatcleanjokes.com/ and sampled a few of the url's - all of them seem to redirect to the appropriate page on the new site. To be sure - I tested a few of them with web-sniffer.org, and it returned a proper 301 status. The cached version of the results is also showing the version of the new site.

A site:chokeonajoke.com returned slightly more results (probably new content you added) - so on first sight not really an issue

To be honest - I don't think the problem is related to the redirect. You could double check - download the 1000 most popular pages from the old site & crawl these using Screaming Frog to see if the redirects are ok (you can do this in the free version - no need to buy the licence if you use list mode).

Did the number of pageviews/visit decrease or increase after migration. Longer time on page is normally a good sign, could also indicate however that people struggle to find the info they are looking for (which I doubt is the case on your site)

rgds,

Dirk

It's a game of words. In the context of the question - if you would provide the schema tagging only to bots the tagged info could also be listed in the SERP's and the bots get a better understanding of what the page is all about. Final goal is off course to serve the user the best answers when he's searching. On the page itself however the user doesn't see any difference if the page is tagged with schema or not.

Dirk

Hi Alick,

Schema.org is not for users - it is "a collection of schemas that webmasters can use to markup HTML pages in ways recognized by major search providers, and that can also be used for structured data interoperability (e.g. in JSON). Search engines including Bing, Google, Yahoo! and Yandex rely on this markup to improve the display of search results, making it easier for people to find the right Web pages.'

Source: http://schema.org/

rgds,

Dirk

Hi Anirban,

The impact of adding the few lines of extra code of schema.org will be zero on the load time of your pages.

Apart from that, serving different content to bots & human users could be considered cloaking by search engines.

Implementing schema.org on the normal pages should do just fine!

rgds,

Dirk

It depends a bit on what is causing the self-referrals; normally when you check analytics it gives an indication what the source of the problem might be.

You could check this article https://threeventures.com/how-to-fix-self-referrals-in-google-analytics/ or this one (http://gatipoftheday.com/use-the-landing-pages-report-to-isolate-self-referrals/) on how to fix the problem.

Hope this helps,

rgds,

Dirk

Difficult to confirm without having the actual site. Looks like analytics spam on first sight.

You can find some useful info on how to block this in this article: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-stop-spam-bots-from-ruining-your-analytics-referral-data

rgds,

Dirk

If performance decreased dramatically between the old & the new site it can have a very strong impact on search results. You're in a competitive area, and most of the jokes published on your site also exist on other sites, so the content is not really unique. It's difficult to say post-launch if it is the only reason why your site dropped. I assume you redirected all the old pages to the new one & did a change of domain in WMT?

Did you see changes in google analytics (like increased bounce rate, lower time on page, ...) the moment you changed the site?

Page speed improved - but Time to first byte is still quite high. You might want to check out this article on how to optimise your WP site: http://www.webpagetest.org/forums/showthread.php?tid=13520

rgds,

Dirk

I guess that most of these people just heard that SEO is all about link building. As the price is extremely low, most of these customers will probably reason they don't have much to loose and a lot to gain if they try the offer. They are probably completely unaware of things like Penguin & manual penalties.

An easy road to success is what a lot of people are looking for, the same reason why crash diets & get rich schemes are very popular, even if they seem to good to be true...

rgds,

Dirk

I have very good experiences with physically inviting people (who have the same profile as your target audience) to the office & ask them to visit the site to do some basic tasks on the website (like search for a product, buy a product,...etc). Observe what they do in order to complete the task (even better to film it). We had 10 people doing this - and already after the 3rd or 4th person we noticed some fundamental flaws in our redesign (For the test, it's best that people who where involved in the redesign are not present during testing - they can only observe from a distance in order to avoid interference with the test persons).

rgds,

Dirk

Hi,

There seem to be some technical issues with your site:

• site speed - even though the webpagetest result is not that bad - every page I visited on your site seemed to load very slow (http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150423_8J_1E1E/). Screaming Frog indicate that 30% of your pages needs more than 3 sec's to load (and Screaming Frog is normally very soft in judging site speed)

• Google insights for speed: again the score is not great but not really bad either - but if you see the number of blocking .js & .css files it's a bit terrifying (https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fchokeonajoke.com%2Fjokes%2Fbest-jokes%2Fgood-jokes%2F&tab=mobile)

• most pages call a css file that doesn't exist: http://chokeonajoke.com/wp-content/plugins/all-sub-categories/catstyle.css?ver=4.1.2

• on some pages example http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/best-jokes/good-jokes/ (same for /jokes/death-humor) I was unable to load them in Chrome - in Firefox I got the message: non-responsive script: Script: http://chokeonajoke.com/wp-con…/jquery-2.1.3.min.js?ver=2.1.3:2. Checking w3c validator indicates line 1627, Column 8: Stray start tag script. (http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fchokeonajoke.com%2Fjokes%2Fdeath-humor%2F&charset=(detect+automatically)&doctype=Inline&group=0)

• 6% of your content is >10 clicks from the homepage

If I were you I'd hire a good css/html/js programmer & ask him to clean your code. For a rather simple site you seem to use an awful lot of javascript. Cleaning the code & working on performance will probably solve most of the problems. It can take sometime however before you regain your initial search traffic.

rgds,

Dirk

Just one small thing - I googled the phrases in the offers you mentioned. Your question which was posted 45 minutes ago on Moz is already outranking all the offers promoting these services. Guess these powerful links, link wheels & backlink pyramids aren't as powerful as advertised...

If it's sounds to good to be true, it's probably not true...

Honestly - stay away from these kind of offers. You'll probably end up with thousands of low quality links to your site which could temporarily boost your site, but before you know it you'll be hit by a Google Penguin penalty. Buying links is and remains a violation of Google webmaster guidelines.
Quote:

"Any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site's ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. This includes any behavior that manipulates links to your site or outgoing links from your site."

Source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356

rgds,

Dirk

Hi,

Not really a great coder myself, but I am building a smaller site as kind of hobby project, trying to incorporate all the best practices of RWD. My first approach as my skills in CSS & HTML were quite limited was to buy a template on Themeforest. I noticed very soon however, that modifying these templates is quite difficult to do, and it's even harder to understand exactly what each element in the css is used for (there was no documentation inside the css)

When I ran some checks with external tools, I noticed that for all the templates only 30% of the css was actually used. Load times were pretty mediocre, mainly because the huge number of external javascripts used for all the fancy stuff on the page. Maybe I bought the wrong template, but my general impression is that these templates are developed based on frameworks which are already quite bloated (Bootstrap, Foundation) - and then they add a lot of additional jquery plugins for things like sliders, responsive menus, ...etc.

If you just need a temporary fix - you could try one of these templates - they are cheap & functional, even if they do not fit your needs for 100%. For the final version, it's probably better/cheaper to find a great designer/coder to build your code from scratch rather (or based on a very light css framework) than to clean the code in the template.

rgds,

Dirk

There was a similar question a few days ago (http://moz.com/community/q/can-i-move-google-tracking-from-one-account-to-another)- and unfortunately the answer is no.

I repeat the answer from google:

• You cannot migrate historical data from one account to another. Thus, if you set up an account for a web property and then later want to move tracking to a separate account, you cannot currently migrate the data from the old account to the new account.

Source: https://developers.google.com/analytics/resources/concepts/gaConceptsAccounts

You could download most of the data to xls - and start tracking on a second account as you already did.

If the account was opened on the clients name - you try contacting somebody at Google to recover the account. If the account is from the SEO firm, it will probably difficult to recover it.

There could be some interesting info in this post - http://moz.com/community/q/is-there-a-way-to-find-out-who-the-admin-of-a-google-analytics-account-is - it's a bit a different case, but maybe the info can help you to somehow regain control over the account (update: this link from this question could be of interest: https://www.en.adwords-community.com/t5/Tracking-Reporting/How-to-gain-access-to-your-Analytics-account-Property/m-p/436348)

rgds,

Dirk

According to Google webmaster guidelines - a sitemap for users still has some value:
Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map has an extremely large number of links, you may want to break the site map into multiple pages. (source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en)

I agree with Patrick that now most people don't bother to consult sitemaps  - if they need to consult it to find their way on your site you probably have a UX problem.
For SEO purposes - it still can have some advantages:

• it can ensure that your site becomes flatter (content is less clicks away from the homepage)
• Google wants that "Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link." .A HTML sitemap can help with that as well - especially if you have a highly dynamic site where a lot of content is only accessible by (product) search

Sites like Linkedin.com still use these HTML indexes (although they are not called sitemaps but member lists) - as you can check when you visit the site in "Incognito" mode in your browser.

rgds,

Dirk

Read this, it's obvious

If you are selling to B2C customers in the UK you have to include the VAT in the price your list - it's a legal obligation (this is the case all over Europe)

Quote: Any <abbr title="Value Added Tax">VAT</abbr> due is already included in the price of something you buy in a shop. No tax is added when you pay.

Source; https://www.gov.uk/tax-on-shopping

rgds

Dirk

Hi Eva,

The setup you describe is quite a standard approach in countries with multiple languages - and should work just fine, even without the hreflang attributes. Check this article from https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en. I live in Belgium - as we have 3 languages most sites have this configuration. On first visit -the user is offered a choice of preferred language, which is stored in a cookie. On subsequent visits - based on his previous choice the user is than redirected to the chosen language version

Adding the hreflang can help, but can also introduce new problems  - you can check here how to avoid them -http://moz.com/blog/hreflang-behaviour-insights

Hope this helps,

Dirk

One of the sites we acquired syndicated content to other parties (when we bought them last year, we changed the policy, so all syndicated content now has a canonical url pointing to the original article). Some of these sites were better positioned for our content, but apart from that, we didn't see any penalties for doing this. If these small business owners don't need to rank for the content and they get if for free, it should be easy to ask for them to put the canonical. In our case, discussion with these sites was sometimes difficult as we were paid for providing the content.

Dirk

I don't think you get penalised for syndicating content like this (it would be too easy - you just take the most interesting pieces of content from your competitor, post it on some anonymous domains and wait for his ranking to drop).

The main problem is that you loose control over which site is ranking for the content. Suppose one of the dentists in your case would be quite famous, because he's appearing quite a lot on television, or he treats famous stars and blogs about it on his site. By doing so, his site is quite popular, and get's a lot links from well known sites. In that case, it would be possible that his site is outranking the original site for this article.

For this reason, canonical url's were "invented" - so you can continue to syndicate content, without running the risk that this syndicated content is going to outrank the original site.

rgds,

Dirk

If the external links to these pages are ok in terms of quality, and you don't have a similar page on the new site, I would redirect these pages to the homepage. It would be a bit of a waste to loose good links to your site.

For the ones that have no (quality) incoming links - you could put a 404 (or in your case probably better a 410 - The requested resource is no longer available at the server and no forwarding address is known. This condition is expected to be considered permanent) - see also this video of Matt Cutts on this topic. As Patrick indicates - a custom version is more user friendly compared to a standard one.

rgds,

Dirk

It will not affect the normal search - most sites use stockphoto's, and you see the same pictures appearing on hundreds of sites. 
For image search, these new sites will compete with the existing site. If you're current site looks like iStockphoto or similar, these new sites will probably outrank the existing one as the textual context of the images will be much richer than the standard tags you find on a typical stock photo site. This is not necessarily a bad thing, if you manage to get your potential customers to the main site to buy the images.

You could also consider to integrate the new content as a blog on the main domain. It's better to reinforce an existing domain with new interesting content, rather than to start different new smaller domains and this way you won't have any traffic cannibalisation.

Hope this helps,

Dirk

Hi Donna,

Didn't forget your question - however the first reply I got was a bit too generic (Drupal can do everything that Yoast does, and even better, but sometimes several modules are required).

Would it be possible to indicate for which Yoast functions you would need a solution - so I can be a bit more specific in when asking info from them.

Rgds,

Dirk

Hi,

If you look at the API pages it puts April 30th as date of next update (http://moz.com/products/api/updates)

rgds,

Dirk

Yep - you'll have to upload the file to the server first.

Bob's suggestion to generate the sitemap via the Yoast plugin is an excellent idea.

rgds

Dirk

Hi Justin,

Are the url's going to change when you update the design? If they are not changing you can already update now.

It's not really abnormal to have only a certain % of the sitemap indexed - it could be that Google judges that a certain number of pages is too light in content to be indexed. 55% of url's indexed seems rather low.

Sitemap errors - check the url's that are listed as errors. If I am not mistaken, you use an external tool to generate the sitemaps. It could be that this tools puts all the internal links in the the sitemap; regardless of their status (200, 301, 404) - normally only url's with status 200 should be put in the sitemap. Check the configuration of the tool you use & see if you can only add url's with status 200. Alternatively, you can check the internal linking on your site & make sure that no links exist to 404 pages (Screaming Frog is the tool to use - it can also generate the sitemap).

For the wrong sitemap- as your sites are exact duplicates, probably hosted on the same server, it could be that the .co.nz sitemap overwrites the .com sitemap , as they have the same name. You could rename your sitemap like sitemap_au.xml, sitemap_us.xml & sitemap_nz.xml. This way, if you add a new sitemap for .nz it will not overwrite the .com version. You submit these to Google & you delete the old ones (both on the server & in Google WMT).

Hope this helps.

Dirk

PS. If your design is also changing the url's - don't forget to put redirects in place that lead the old to the new url's.

Hi John,

As far as I can see - using both the debugger & Analytics extension - I don't see anything wrong with the tags. The only reasonable explanation for the drop of the bounce rate seems to be the events triggered by the enhanced eCommerce tracking. I googled it & there seem to be more cases where implementing the eCommerce tracking had an impact on bouncerate. So, if you don't want the bounce rate to change you will have to make all the events triggered by the advanced e-commerce module non interactive. Not sure how you can do it with the tag manager (I am not using it myself).

rgds,

Dirk

Marcel,

When you contact the site owners - a good guideline on 'how to clean' can be found here: https://codex.wordpress.org/FAQ_My_site_was_hacked (specifically for Wordpress) - more in general: http://www.google.com/webmasters/hacked/ - it could be that the hackers gained access by a security issue with the slider (http://wptavern.com/critical-security-vulnerability-found-in-wordpress-slider-revolution-plugin-immediate-update-advised) so they should certainly check that Wordpress & it's plugins are up-to-date.

Good luck!

Dirk

Hi,

Do you get a lot of traffic coming through image search? Most of the images you use on the site seem to be stock images, so normally the % of image search traffic shouldn't be that big.

If you receive limited or no search traffic from image search, you don't really have to do anything special. There 404 errors in WMT will disappear after a while & the new images will get indexed. Normally the 404's will have no impact on search traffic.

If all CDN's contain all the images, you could always redirect the original image folder to one of the cdn's - but it not strictly necessary.

rgds

Dirk

Hi Marcel,

I have the impression that soft-solutions.nl already discovered that they have been hacked & have cleaned their site in the mean time.

It's possible that the hacker only copied 1/2 pages - it's however more likely that they copied the full site but that the other pages haven't been indexed yet. Idem for copyscape - if the hack only occurred recently, these tools (and Google) haven't been able to pickup all pages yet.

When I search for 'iphone 6 hoesje' I get the planchemag.com site. As all these pages are duplicates, it's Google who's deciding which page it's going to show. Google decided that in some cases the hacked version is the preferred one, for other queries people will still get to your site. It probably depends on the anchors the hackers used to the hacked site. The volume of iphone 6 is probably higher than iphone 5 queries, so they will probably have used anchors containing 'iphone 6' to point to the site.

Dirk

Hi Marcel,

If I do a site:www.wearemash.com there seem to be only 2 pages from your site indexed at the moment - possible that the other ones haven't been picked-up by Google yet. Quite ironical that the domain wearemash.com belongs to a web design company.

rgds,

Dirk

Hi Marcel,

Don't think that it will change a lot. If the hack is done in the same way as the other cases (which seems to be the case), they copied your entire site into the site which has been hacked. They present this version to Google (cloaking - as you can see in the cached version) - but "normal" visitors are redirected to a different e-commerce site. To make sure the hacked site is positioned well, they point hundreds of links from other hacked sites to the cloned version of your site. So whatever you change on your site, will not impact the cloned version, which will keep it's position, until Google takes action.

It's a quite a simple trick, and to be very honest, I am surprised that Google is not capable to detect it.

rgds,

Dirk

Hi,

You could put a 301 redirect of the old image folder to the new location. The easiest alternative is to keep the images in both places for a while, until Google has indexed the new location (which can take a few weeks/months). Normally, if all the internal links have been updated, there should be no links to old location, so these images will disappear from the index and replaced by the ones in the new location. Once they are indexed on their new location, you can delete them in the old location

rgds,

Dirk

Hi

If the template is marked as responsive it should pass the mobile friendly test. Main issue with these templates is that they are very often stuffed with a lot of features that you're not going to use (resulting in heavy css / js files). This could have a negative impact on the load time of your page. That said, I guess most people just buy Wordpress themes rather than develop themselves.

rgds,

Dirk

Hi Marcel,

It seems to be a plague recently- there where similar cases on Moz the last two weeks: http://moz.com/community/q/chinese-site-ranking-for-our-brand-name-possible-hack (similar situation as you) - a site being hacked http://moz.com/community/q/getting-different-search-queries-in-google-webmaster. It seems the hackers are exploiting a vulnerability in the slider used on these Wordpress site.

Apart from filing spam reports there is not much more you can do. You could inform the site owners that their site has been hacked & ask them to clean it, but I fear that these hackers are capable to switch sites quite fast.

Good luck,

Dirk

Hi Justin,

Next Tuesday is the 21/4 - the day the Mobile Friendly update is launched. You can find more info about it here: http://moz.com/community/q/google-s-mobile-update-what-we-know-so-far-updated-3-25

rgds,

Dirk