Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey There

Categories can certainly bring traffic, so I typically do index them. (I do recommended noindexing subpages of archives though - page 2 and onward etc).

But if your goal is to target more keywords, these are typically best done with creating new posts or pages around them, if they are unique enough to warrant new content. It's best to keep your categories to a minimum (7-10 maybe top level categories - you can nest more under those if you have to) - but design your categories for best information architecture. Let your posts and pages carry more keywords.

I would not recommend trying anything as an SEO "trick" like using the canonical on pages that are different keywords. The canonical is only for pages that have nearly identical content.

Hope that helps!

-Dan

Christine

Thanks for providing the site name to me via PM - won't reveal the site here, but I see the issue.

The contact link in your footer should always lead to the contact page;

• http://www.yourdomain.com/contact/

However, it is adding the subfolders of whatever directory you are in. If you are on the page

• http://www.yourdomain.com/your-subfolder/

it is linking to;

• http://www.yourdomain.com/your-subfolder/contact/

In which, of course, no contact page exists at that URL.

You need to find where the footer links are being created in your WordPress setup - options are;

• Could be in the theme settings
• Could be in a widget
• Could be "hardcoded" into the footer.php file (although I doubt it)

And see if you can enter the link to the contact page just as an absolute link (not a relative link) explanation on this page

In other words, you want the link in your footer to ALWAYS point at http://www.yourdomain.com/contact/

If this does not fix it, you may need to go into the "editor" and find the footer links in the footer.php file - where you can change the link to reflect the absolute path of the contact page.

If still at a loss, contact the help folks for your WordPress theme, cause this sounds like a theme issue if the mistake isn't on your end, this definitely has nothing to do with Yoast.

Hope that helps!

-Dan

Diane

They are also in the middle of "Mozcon" which is a 3 day very long and intensive conference.

The only time I called customer service, my issue was literally resolved in under 90 seconds from the time I dialed.  I even tweeted about it I was so impressed.  So all positive here.

That makes me think, did you try sending a tweet to @seomoz or any of the employees?

-Dan

1. Google does not use GA data for rankings. They only use data they have access to "outside" of your analytics, such as possibly;

• Click through rate
• bounce rate/time on site
• +1's
• "Block this site" (sometimes it shows up in the SERPs when you return)
• Google Toolbar activity like bookmarking

2. So following from question 1, it would not help for SEO to do this. It might help you however in gaining some more insight as to how logged in users use your site.

3. Its thought sub-domains do not pass much link juice across sub-domains, but for a subdomain to be on a private part of the site, this may not matter quite so much. If you've always done it that way, it may be better to just keep it the same. In these cases I always do what makes the most sense to the user. Eliminate confusion. Have a short but description word for the subdomain.

4. Compete's official documentation is here - and Rand did an interview with them back in 2008 here

Hope that all helps!!

-Dan

Hi Sanjay

There's a lot of issues with this site. I'll list out the worst ones I saw:

• There is a lot of unnatural link building as you can see here in the Open Site Explorer anchor text report - way too many links for "pharma machines manufacturer" and other commercial keywords
• There's tons of keyword stuffing on the site itself. The homepage header does not need to have all those variations of keywords for example. Your title tags are also long lists of keywords. Check out Google's guide for title tags.
• You're linking out to web designers and SEO companies in the footer, also with exact match commercial keywords - it definitely would count as links that are being given to sites in unnatural ways possibly.
• There are issues with the graphics and design which might deter users and give you bad user metrics. The graphics are low quality and show pixels. There is a broken image at the very top of every page. I would clean those up and make it look higher quality.
• Social accounts like Twitter are just stuffed with keywords as well: https://twitter.com/prismpharma - you'll want to clean up social accounts and remove keyword stuffing.

You probably ranked where you did artificially before, because of the spammy links etc. So it may take some time of doing things to right way before you rank well again.

-Dan

Hi!

Just need to clear things up here, sorry I'm a little late to responding!

1. Quick Fix - Create a description template for tag archives

You're getting duplicate errors because your tag archives all have the same meta description. Use an SEO plugin like Yoast SEO for wordpress something for Joomla and create a template for your tag descriptions. This will give each tag archive a unique description and eliminate the duplicate errors.

See screenshot

2. Long Term Fix - Root of The Problem

The real ROOT of the issue, is a combination of maybe a poor theme, no SEO plugin (that I can see) and tag pages being used incorrectly.

• Tags should be completely different than any categories

• And as standard practice I NOINDEX tags. Because there content is so similar to other pages, and it also may not be the best user experience. There may be exceptions to this but its a general rule I follow.

Now, with that said, don't just go deindexing your tag archives.

Tomorrow (May 8th 2012), I have an extensive article going up on the Moz blog about WordPress and duplicate content. I suggest reading that article to get a good understanding of how all the elements work. And perhaps in the long term you can work towards a more robust WordPress setup. But for now, no harm done the way it is.

Hope that helps!

-Dan

Edit - Realized they are using Joomla. The same concepts apply, but with a technical implementation that works with Joomla (which I am not as familiar with).

I think you're having trouble because there's really three criteria to evaluate this on. Link authority, quality and relevance. In your situation you need to find a keyword where the current results are low in at least two of those areas. In other words - right now - you'e not going to win against high link authority and high quality. Let me break down each:

Link Authority - this you already know about. Domain Authority helps assess this. It's basically the ranking power of a site/page based upon backlinks.

Quality - this is how good the current results are at fulfilling the query with quality information. This can only be judged by a human eye - meaning - you have to look at each result as a topic expert and ask yourself - can I do better? Open times I'll see pages with high link authority but the content is low quality. This is still a hole in opportunity. Lack of quality can also be due to the fact it's not written by a true expert. Old content ranking can also be "low quality" as well.

Relevance - something can be high quality and have high domain authority, but just not be a relevance match. In other words - maybe the search is "Dominican Republic Weddings" but the result is about "Dominican Republic Events". This is a slight mismatch and also an opportunity.

Link/keyword tools can give you "link authority" but not many really measure quality or relevance that well - this is where your human eye comes in.

So... you need to find a SERP with a gap in at least two of those. Low DA and low relevance. Low relevance and low quality. You get the idea

I would suggest making a quick spreadsheet and mark each keyword with the volume etc (the usual metrics) but assign a quality and relevance score based upon your judgement.

Now - this isn't magic of course - your content has to be the best and you have to do some promotion etc - but it's definitely the approach I would take for choosing keywords.

Sajio is right on this one. The best thing to do with tags in general is noindex them. Then they won't show up in search results, and the duplicate titles won't even matter

To noindex tags with Yoast, go to "SEO->Tiles & Meta->Taxonomies" and check off the box "noindex" under Tags.

But, as Prestashop said, if you do ever need to edit the robots.txt in the future, Yoast allows you to do this without FTP access. You go to 'edit files'.

Hi

What page type are you getting this on? Categories, tags, posts, pages? Every page?

Did you fill out the description templates under Yoast->Titles?

Its strange Moz does this and not Google. Can you provide your site or a screen shot of the source code (view source on your browser)?

Thanks!

-Dan

Hello!

You can likely just ignore them, as Google is most likely just ignoring them (they are not helping nor hurting).

If you are nervous though, just keep a close on the rankings and search traffic for your site, and specifically the pages the links are pointing to. If you don't see a huge ranking/traffic change the links are for sure not affecting you.

If you really want to be extra careful, you can simply just disavow the domain with the disavow tool. if for some weird reason the links are helping you, you might notice a drop in ranking, which you can just undo by removing the domain from your disavow file.

Hey There

Paul's right, it's going to be impossible to suggest exactly how to do this, since there's several nuanced steps that could be involved.

This is by far the best resource to follow if you're doing it by hand.

There are some plugins and third party sites like Manage WP  (which I used once with success) that can help too.

Once the WordPress site is up and live, you'll want to crawl it to look for broken links. The biggest thing is making sure all the old URLs redirect to the new ones.

Hope that helps!

-Dan

Build trust with content that people actually use. This might mean its good enough to;

• bookmark to refer to later

• email to a friend or collegue

• refer back to later yourself

• get shared on social naturally

• get linked to natually

Content that does this is

• helpful (new info or old info just more detailed or done better than anyone, or put in a new way)

• entertaining - gets people to laugh, cry, feel inspired

• teaches something

• shares something personal

• innovative.

I always refer to this to jump start my brain with ideas.

-Dan

Hi There

I'll just go through some of the biggest things I see in a few areas of the site;

Off Site / Backlinks

• anchor text - you've got too much commercial anchor and not enough branded or non-commercial. see the open site explorer report here. Any anchors that you have control over I would change them to your brand name or domain name. I'm referring to the anchors that say "oakland boudoir photography" etc
• disavowing - as others have recommended, if you do have old back links that are of low quality, it won't hurt to disavow them. what you really should do though is use webmaster tools list of back links. I find the Open Site Explorer backlinks to be great for a lot of things, but when it comes to finding and disavowing all of your damaging old links, you really have to go with Google's list. There's going to be a lot more in there.

Local SEO

• check ExpressUpdateUSA - ExpressUpdateUSA is a data provider to dozens of listing services. If your info is not correct with them, that's why you may wrong addresses pop back up again. Make sure all your info is correct with them.
• use GetListed.org and Whitespark Local Citation Finder or Citation Builder. These services are going to help you find, claim and optimize more local listings than you could ever dream of. Is this the highest quality thing to be doing? Not always, especially as you get past the big ones (Google+, Yelp etc) but can't hurt.
• claim GPS listings. add your business to Nokia Maps , NAVTEQ, tele atlas
• I agree, reviews are huge. This search has a bunch of great articles for ideas in how to get them.

On Site SEO

• link to your homepage with your brand name as anchor text. right now, your name is the anchor text for all links back to homepage. put the homepage link on your brand name and possibly logo for good UX
• if you're especially trying to rank for local queries, you need your city in the title tag(s). Don't stuff all kinds of cities in there. Just put "Oakland, CA". Unfortunately since you're not located in SF, it's not going to help much to put SF in the title tag to rank for SF
• If you want to rank for SF, I would suggest having a specific page with content about San Francisco. Testimonials of clients there, case studies of work there etc etc. I would also suggest getting people from San Fran to write reviews for you on Yelp, Google etc etc
• your site loads at non-www (bayareaboudoir.com) - this should redirect to www version.
• not a huge issue, but /index.html should redirect to the main homepage.
• In general, meta descriptions could be a little longer (not over 156). Make them like natural sentences, rather than lists of keywords.

-Dan

Hi Vladmir

Perhaps I can help a little...

1. It depends on the type of duplicate content. Three scenarios;

-- two pages that are exactly, or almost exactly, alike. this means titles, on-page content etc. with those, you really should 301 redirect one to the other OR noindex one of them. then submit a URL removal request in WMT

-- pages that only have duplicate title tags and/or meta descriptions. assuming the on-page content is different and its just the title tags that are duplicate, change the title tags so they are unique. or, if the pages don't belong in the index (like paginated pages) noindex them.

-- lastly, you can have the same page_but it appears duplicate because of parameters like /search.php?search=apples - the page is 'search.php' but the parameters make it look different each time. This is the most appropriate time to just add a canonical._

2. In WMT, first submit a URL to 'crawl as Googlebot' - then after that crawl you will have an option to submit the URL to Google. This should get them to see the change sooner. Even if you didn't do this, any normal page should get re-cached in less than a month

3. Assuming we're just talking about on-page changes, this is also when they re-cache the page. That's when you should see the biggest change.

Hope that helps out!

-Dan

Noted, we really appreciate Thomas' participation!

Hey there - I'm going to weigh in and just concur basically with Paul. Also just like to add a link to the wordpress resource post I did on Moz which breaks down a lot of the distinctions between tags and categories. Hope that helps too.

Link

Hi Stuart

There could be many nuances to every situation (essentially, what type of sites they are and what type of content it is), but in general I'd go with what's most user-friendly - what will reduce any confusion, and send old traffic to the new home of the acquired company. A subdomain is fine if you want to clearly show to users a distinction between the acquiring vs acquired site.

Definitely do your 301 redirects. I would highly recommend reading up on Cyrus' article here about 301 redirects. In general, the content should be basically the same from the old page to the new page being redirected to. I would try to migrate the site "as is" as much as possible to eliminate other factors/changes that could affect things. You can update things later, but this was it makes it easier to analyze if any rankings are lost. In other words, be systematic and keep track of when/what you change.

Hey There Buon Giorno from 15ish F in Massachusetts

Thomas has a lot of good stuff in there - I'll just give a consolidated answer to reiterate.

WordPress will do all of that for you. I assume the designer is going to create a custom theme for you? This means they'll do custom HTML and CSS. First off, make sure to verify they are going to do this all as a child theme. Developers will usually do a child theme off of a standard parent theme like TwentyThirteen etc. A child theme will give you seperation between what the designer codes, and what came in the parent theme. This way you can edit the child theme without breaking the parent theme.

As Thomas said you do have full control of all of your code. But how the designer builds it will affect things. There's one of two things you can do here;

1. ask the designer to show you a similar example wp site they've recently developed. You, or have an SEO, look it over for the requirements and HTML markup.
2. you, or have an SEO, look over the site they build for you before it launches to check the code.

But really, there's nothing inherent about WP that you have to look out for, much of the issues come up when people make bad themes or bad custom designs.

Definitely use Yoast SEO!

-Dan

Hey There

I would probably focus on "bigger things" - for example

Unless these pages are all super unique/add value aside from just having different town names, it's not the best practice to have thin/overlapping content;

• http://stalbansdentist.com.au/dentist-st-albans
• http://stalbansdentist.com.au/dentist-burnside
• http://stalbansdentist.com.au/dentist-cairnlea
• ...etc

Also, when crawling the site I found example placeholder content like;

• http://stalbansdentist.com.au/a-monk-walks-his-path/
• http://stalbansdentist.com.au/a-stylish-stud/
• http://stalbansdentist.com.au/hip-young-woman/
• ...etc

You may want to delete those

Onto the questions;

• I'm not sure what Moz is seeing wrong with the canonical, it looks good.
• This one seems fine to me as well.
• There are 2 H1's currently - see this --> http://screencast.com/t/qRBG5jbW3EYx

Also, the titles are a little long / keyword stuffed;

Dentist Cairnlea, Dental Care, Braces Fillings, Orthodontist Dentistry | Family Dental Care

Maybe make that something like;

Dental Care in Cairnlea - Family Dental Care

Hey There - glad you're enjoying the forums!

So if the tabbed "child" pages can not be crawled and indexed individually you have nothing to worry about. Are they indexed? Can you get cache for them by typing cache:www.yoursite.com/page-name ?

You can test crawling by using Screaming Frog. If the tabbed child pages do not show up when you crawl the site, you probably don't need to do anything.

If they ARE crawlable, then yes I would noindex them.

Hi There

So were you getting 404's on your posts themselves? Or 404 errors on weird/extraneous pages? I should mention that 404 errors on extraneous pages will not hurt your search rankings. But it is an issue that should be worked on.

The report has a LOT of different headings, which in particular would you like definitions on?

-Dan

Hi Mike

Yep it's clearer, thanks You had noindexed/nofollowed a lot of low quality pages, since improved them and want to return them to index/follow.

Just to check, do you have this option when editing each individual post in the Yoast box?

--> http://screencast.com/t/epjFCpGl8hT

Or do you mean you are selecting nofollow and it keeps switching back? Is Yoast and WordPress updated to the latest version?

Also, you are seeing "nofollow" in the HTML source? I know this is probably what you mean, just confirming to not miss a detail.

-Dan

I think trust (or lack of trust signals) is a huge factor here.

• For example, the only contact information is a contact form: http://www.freesharewaredepot.com/contact.asp - no phone number, email address, or physical address. This is something heavily mentioned in Google's Quality Raters Guidelines. I've actually happened upon it here: http://www.freesharewaredepot.com/about.asp - but users might want more easily accessible ways to contact you.
• The site also does not show any indicate of who is behind the site - no people's names, and barely pictures etc. This is bad for trust too.
• In general, as a normal user, I have no way of knowing I can trust the editor reviews, or other information - was it actually all created by an expert? is a question that pops into my head.
• Bill's right too - the site is very duplicative of other sites out there in the space, such as - http://www.tucows.com/downloads

The issues above I've addressed only have to to with Panda. Few more thoughts.

• The other thing that strikes me is the imbalance of links to social shares. I don't think Google uses social shares as a direct ranking signal, but I could see them looking for weird differences in numbers as one flag. In other words - the site needs to be promoted and liked holistically - through links, social shares, mentions, etc.
• The site also gets zero brand searches - by this, I mean no one is going to Google and typing "free shareware depot" - which signals to Google, maybe people don't think the site is all that important or memorable. This is why some branding and differentiation is so important.

-Dan

It appears they already have multiple pages (teen gifts for example).

So I was going to say, run them all through the on-page optimization tool, and the SERP analysis tool (run a full report), get all the ranking factors of Gifts.com and then improve their own for each page.

Thoughts on that?

-Dan

Hi Joost

Dan here (I wrote that Setting Up WordPress article )

Without seeing your site, it's tough to be 100% sure, but here's what I would make sure you're doing:

• Noindex subpages of archives
• Index categories
• Noindex tags
• Set up title templates for categories so maybe they say "Browse Category Name - Sitename" (something call to action like for eCommerce)

The key with how "deep" you index categories may depend on:

• search volume
• how many extra pages per level that causes to get indexed etc
• where it starts competing with actual products that could rank instead

I find it's good to hit that sweet spot where you don't get a ridiculous amount of pages indexed, but are deep enough in the categories with search volume to not miss out on any traffic.

Hi Robert

Some others have given some great ideas. Wanted to chime in and ask if you can give any more info? It's tough to say what's going on in such a general context. Anything would help - industry, a URL, keywords.

Also, as Andy suggested - do you have other sources of data to back this up? I would suggest actually looking in Search Console (Webmaster Tools) for your query and landing page data and see if you can tell how much it's happening one way or the other. You can filter by country, device and time period to segment things even more.

Let us know if you can provide more info or find any more data!

Hi Joshua

I don't think this will cause a search engine conflict, but I'll pass this to a Moz product person to see if they can answer re: Moz On-Page Grader

-Dan (Moz Associate)

Hello!

I would suspect the homepage drop was unrelated to the login page changes. As Michael says, it was probably just a coincidence!

Just want to echo Patrick's answer. He's pretty much got the right idea. Most rankings not on page #1 will jump all around. I would only be really concerned if it dropped from page #1, down to page 4-5 etc. Also, I would also agree that you don't need to focus too much on rankings week to week - and in addition - I wouldn't focus on rankings for a single keyword too much.

To see if you have some sort of site-wide issue, I would check your Impressions in Google Console Search Analytics. See if your Impressions have dropped in the same timeframe.

I would also look to queries where you already rank page #1 - and be sure those are optimized for CTR with titles and descriptions, and then see if you can find out if users are happy with those pages - maybe with goal tracking or some sort of measurement to see if they are converting etc.

Then - really focus on "local SEO", here's some resources:

• https://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors
• http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/
• http://www.evolvingseo.com/2016/03/29/005-local-seo-phil-rozek/ (disclaimer: that is my Podcast)
• https://moz.com/blog/category/local-seo
• http://blumenthals.com/blog/

Hi Andrew

Here a few things to check or rule out:

• Are those pages accessible to be crawled (not blocked with robots.txt etc)

• Are they also internally linked? (ie;s crawl with Screaming Frog, starting at the homepage and see if they turn up)

• Is the page actually indexed (search the URL in Google) but just not showing up in Search Console?

• How long are you waiting before resubmitting - also does it literally get half way down the list, or do you mean 50% are not indexed?

Overall, I would just submit the sitemap and you don't need to keep resubmitting. I would rather do some crosschecks to make sure the URL is accessible (crawlable) and even maybe indexed already, just not showing in the report. Usually, there's some other issue with the URL besides a sitemap issue - and like you mentioned, I'm not sure how long you're waiting, but it can indeed take weeks for them to show up.

Hello!

Welcome to the world of SEO, and Moz

Before making any big changes, I would do a few things:

• Keep an eye on your daily rankings for the top keywords to that page. Quite often these sort of rankings changes are normal to a certain degree. I would give it some time and keep an eye on the flux to get a sense for how much they are moving around.
• To piggyback on that, definitely be sure to track / watch rankings and metrics for many keywords, not just the top volume keyword.
• Also - did you see a NET loss in organic traffic to the page also? Sometimes, because of all the long tail keywords, despite losing ranking for a top keyword, you may not lose much traffic.
• Track competitors rankings too! You'll probably also see their rankings shifting around a lot - and this is a great way to tell if the ranking changes are just 'normal' for your space.

As you can see, a lot of good SEO is about having clear data that paints the whole picture

Now to your question specifically, I highly doubt that would trigger a keyword stuffing issue. Google is pretty good at mapping out the contents of the page. They likely know this is user generated content, and don't count keywords in there the same way they do you 'main' content.

I would dig around for common accessibility or technical issues - like mobile friendliness, do a fetch and render in Search Console (and make sure the images etc are accessible) etc.

But in short, unless you see a very clear drop in rankings, traffic across many pages and many keywords it's likely 'business as usual' with normal algo fluxuations 

Robert

Ha, thanks! I honestly can't take much credit - a few folks in the more grey/black hat realms have been talking about exploiting YouTube's authority and Google's preference to YT for a while. Glen from ViperChill has talked about it a lot: http://www.viperchill.com/new-seo/ - great post, I'd highly recommend anyone check it out!

-Dan

Hi Matt

I'm afraid this might have to be something custom. I hunted around and couldn't find anything that does this by default. You might want to check WPMU's plugins or Code Canyon. Sorry we can't find anything pre-made - but good luck!

-Dan

Your other option is to use meta robots tag like this;

Its a one step process instead of two.

Full documentation on URL removal from index here and on the robots meta tag here

I do not think that's a simple yes or no.  It depends if the search triggers a 7-pack or blended result.  I would read this article on local ranking factors, its considered one of the best sources of info right now on the topic.

-Dan

Tim

The essential pages to redirect are;

• Ones that have backlinks pointing to them (check in opensite explorer, majestic seo, google webmaster tools, and analytics for referring sites
• Carry ranking value for specific keywords that are valuable to you
• Have ever been a landing page (look at your landing page report in analytics for the past 6-12 months) - although it seems like you've got this figured out. Is it a fairly small site?  (Under 50 pages or something?)

Depending on how your site is built there are several options for doing the redirects in an efficient way.  Assuming it's a custom site and you've got a good clean URL structure, I might try something like;

1. Spider both sites with Screaming Frog
2. Export the URLs into Excel
3. Do some sort of lookup function to match the corresponding URLs from the old site to the new site
4. Use that to construct the text for the .htaccess file.

If the site is so small, you might not need something intense like that.  Cut and paste will do just fine  If some other setup, I'd need to know more to suggest a different way to create your redirects.

After you do everything, check webmaster tools for the next few weeks for any 404s that might pop up.

Hope that helps.

-Dan

You can add markup to videos in your website even hosted on YouTube. Here are a few resources;

• http://www.sistrix.com/video-rich-snippets/
• http://www.searchenginejournal.com/time-come-actually-create-video-rich-snippet/90953/
• http://www.branded3.com/blogs/how-to-add-rich-snippets-for-video-seo/

The problem as you mentioned, is the fact YouTube will most likely outrank you depending on the specifics of the query. You may try making the videos "unlisted" (that is people can only find the YouTube URL with a direct link) but still embed. I don't have direct experience with this though.

Ultimately, to rank a video on your site with rich snippets etc you may want to self host with a platform like Wistia.

Also, whichever platform you use, don't forget to create a video sitemap. This is a great resource on Distilled about video sitemaps: https://www.distilled.net/blog/video/creating-video-sitemaps-for-each-video-hosting-platform/

Afshin

To my knowledge, outbound links do not cancel inbound links. They will flow PR if they're followed (which takes PR away from internal links, but this is not of worry. Look at all the best sites on the net, they ALL use outbound links!)

Its best to think of this based upon the engines and users.

Engines - there has actually been a very slight positive correlation shown between rankings and outbound links. Also, link out to sites that are similar in content to yours. Don't sell links of course, and don't go WAY overboard with outbounds.

Users - Link externally for users. Add outbound links based upon user value. Its that simple. And think about the "karma" too... if its a blogger who you genuinely like, you're building a relationship with them, and these relationships can provide great value in the future.

-Dan

Hi Patrick

Welcome! Thanks for the question. Everyone else pretty much got you in the right track here. The structure is good. Avoid too much redundancies and avoid too many folders (depth).

I'd like to add that I too feel very strongly about NOT indexing tag archives. If a blog is set up how it WordPress intended, you'd have about 5-8 categories, and an infinite amount of tags. You index the categories, as they act as the main buckets of content, but you don't index tags - because you could end up with 500 tags, and have half of them with only one post in them. Then they look an awful lot like a duplicate of the post. Not to mention tag archives are pretty thin, and Google is returning them much less in the SERPs now.

I had a client with 9,000 (yes... NINE THOUSAND) tags indexed. I zapped em all out of the index and his traffic actually went UP. Not entirely sure if it was due to the tags being removed, but it sure as heck didn't hurt traffic.

Feel free to check out my SEO for WordPress post on Moz as I think it covers a lot of the things you may have questions about.

-Dan

Edit: Ohhh I meant to add... noindex your subpages too.

Thanks for the responses John and 'walrus'

The only two sites I trust to buy themes from are;

• WooThemes
• Themeforest

You're right, pro perks discounts are here - and woothemes are included.

Then be sure you read my post on WordPress, and look under the "Themes" section for the best way to set up themes once installed. I've never seen a perfect one for SEO. They're all a little wonky.

Basically I say;

"DO use themes for design elements;

• Colors
• Fonts,
• Page layout
• Headers
• Footers
• Basic social media button stuff

Do NOT use themes for SEO stuff, such as

• Indexation
• Analytics codes
• Titles and descriptions
• RSS feeds
• Menu structure (ideally this is done with WordPress Custom Menus)

Let the Yost SEO plugin handle this stuff! Shut off / do not use these types of SEO functions within the themes."

Hope this helps!

-Dan

Hi Gary

You should have your 301s ready, as you'll want to implement them as soon as the site changes.

A quick way to get all the URLs (new or old) is to spider the site with Screaming Frog or Zenu  - get the URLs in a spreadsheet, and that way you have your list of old/new URLs.  Depending how well you know excel you can get them matched up and ready to go quite easily with very minimal typing.

Then check webmaster tools right away when you may the switch to catch any 404s.  Also, re-spider the site to look for the same.

-Dan

That advice looks pretty sound Jeremy, thank you!

Only thing I'd add, is you may want to consider showing excerpts of each article on the category page. This will bring in some more content (which is perhaps why those pages aren't bringing you traffic).

Also, you can check out my recent post on WordPress SEO, in case you missed it - might help illustrate some things even more.

I do think your categories could be condensed, and I do in general noindex tag archives (as Jeremy suggests) as a default starting point.

-Dan

Hi

Few things I saw right off the bat:

• Doing a site: search in Google (site:ignitehats.co.uk) I see LOTS of duplicate meta descriptions, and LOTS of pages that look like empty search results getting indexed.  (like this one)
• Google has 6,000+ pages in the index for the site, but screaming frog only found 700!!

The other answer about backlinks might have merit to it, but none of that's going to help until you get these technical issues fixed.

I would honestly proceed this way;

1. Get a complete site audit done by a professional

2. Make the technical changes needed

3. Fill out then content some more. The site overall is very "thin". Not much text, especially important pages that should carry authority like the home page and category pages.

4. Wait for Google to re-crawl

5. The use this tool to answer the question "why does a site rank where it does?"  Make sure to run the full report.

6. Then work on backlinks.

-Dan

ALSO - your site is loading with AND without the www and /index.html does not redirect.  All possible variations of the homepage should redirect to only one.

-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.

• I think 15 is pretty good.
• You might want to consider nesting categories (this is one difference that separates them from tags).
• NOTE: If you're eliminating categories from the website to trim down, make sure to 301 redirect them to relevant pages so you don't en up with 404s.

-Also, in regards to tags.  Should those be treated more like subcategories? But use tags.

• Generally not thought of as subcategories, because tags (unlike categories) have no hierarchy or relationship. I'd use the nesting suggestion from above if you want to make subcategories.
• Tags are like a label you just slap on a piece of content.
• Tags should NOT ever be the same as a category that already exists.

**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). **

• Right, tags do have a bit more value if they are used on more than one article. But I wouldn't worry about that too much. As long as you're noindexing them for search engines, a typical tag cloud will usually highlight the most used tags to the reader, which is better for UX. Just label your articles with maybe 3-7 more detailed key words as your tags, noindex them, and you should be good!

I would have set up 301s in .htaccess.

However, I think you may just be citing a correlation not causation.  You have some WAY bigger issues:

1. The homepage can be arrived at by:

• paysubsonline.com
• www.paysubsonline.com
• paysubsonline.com/index.aspx <--returns a 404
• www.paysubsonline.com/index.php <-- loads a "coming soon" page, completely different than homepage, though which you can get to - https://paysubsonline.com/howitworks.php and others etc...
• www.paysubsonline.com/index.html <---returns a 404

Redirect all possible variations on the homepage to one singular version and fix that old site that's showing up.

2. Your sitemap has all URLs that look outdated (.htm extension and have "www" while the internal links in your site do not have "www") <--update your XML sitemap and resubmit to webmaster tools

3. You have not robots.txt file.

4. You have no canonical tag - which would be the last possible line of defense against all the duplicate content.

I'd start with those things, hope that helps.

-Dan

Hi There...

Definitely check out the SEO for WordPress post I did for Moz. I wrote it for those very types of questions.

However, to answer a little more specifically in your case, I would;

Index

• Categories
• Pages
• Posts

Noindex

• Author
• Dates
• Media
• Tags
• Search results

Follow

• Everything

Disable

• Nothing (in your case, you have two authors, so make the pages accessible, just not indexed)

NOTE: This is assuming (as Saijo says) you have the structure set up correctly. Usually this means;

• 5-8 Categories
• As many tags as you want
• Categories are more general (the 5-8 topics covering the whole blog)
• Tags are more specific fine tunings of categories
• Categories and Tags are all different from one another

Hope this helps!

-Dan

You definitely need to use a canonical tag to handle tracking URLs. If you're on WordPress I highly recommend using Yoast's SEO Plugin - not only for canonicals, but everything.

You can also handle tracking URLs within Google Webmaster Tools.

-Dan