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Hi Ankit

It appears as if you have Yoast SEO installed in your main site, but All In One installed in the blog sub-domain. I do recommend Yoast as best plugin.

The trouble is, there are a few ways to handle the pagination of category pages. I don't think you need to actually do it the way Matt has it on his blog (i've never even seen that before, ironically, with the canonical to first page).

The primary concern is to noindex all pages beyond page #1 of category pages, which you have done with the All In One Plugin.

Ultimately, I like Yoast's complete setup though, which when set correctly in the settings, does this;

Category Page One - http://blog.travelindia365.com/category/travel-news/

• Canonical - http://blog.travelindia365.com/category/travel-news/

• robots index (note you're supposed to leave out robots all together if it just says "index" but no harm done if its there)

• rel next - http://blog.travelindia365.com/category/travel-news/page/2

then...

Category Page Two and Beyond - http://blog.travelindia365.com/category/travel-news/page/2

• Canonical - http://blog.travelindia365.com/category/travel-news/page/2

• robots noindex

• rel prev - http://blog.travelindia365.com/category/travel-news/

• rel next - http://blog.travelindia365.com/category/travel-news/page/3

That would be the recommended settings to go for, I've never had any issues with them.

• • • • -

Thanks Chris and Gareth for chiming in too!!

-Dan

Hello

I would consider https and www to be the "correct" version of all pages, and be sure all other versions redirect to that.

So:

• http www - redirects to https www
• http non-www - redirects to https www
• https non-www - redirects to https www

Just also be sure all of your internal links, canonical tags etc match the https www version

Search Console should reflect the changes as soon as the correct version is indexed and re-cached.

Hi

I'd also look at this from the user's point of view. In my personal experience the first option (a subfolder) is the least confusing.

-Dan

Thanks Moosa! Just want to clarify a few points to be sure they don't get mis-understood by other readers:

Duplicate content

• just want to make sure they know, although duplicate content is not the best thing, there is no penalty per se

Cross Domain Canonical

• search engines will in fact crawl both versions. They will just not index the one with the canonical tag pointing to the source page.

When you go to Admin -> Tracking Info -> Tracking code

If Universal has been activated, but the code has NOT been updated, you will see this;

http://screencast.com/t/FJuKuBDI <--click for screenshot.

Hello

Yes - after you do the redirects, Google will gradually start to show everything in one property. It may take a few weeks as they re-crawl everything.

But as far as your rankings, this might help a little bit, but there are a lot of other factors. Without knowing the industry, keywords etc it's really tough to say what else might be holding you back. There is no penalty for this kind of duplicate content.

Hope that helps!

Hi! Looks like Rand beat us to this one, but just a few quick things to add for ya.

I did a quick crawl of the site in Screaming Frog.

Looks like most of the duplicates titles are due to two things;

1. Your tag pages all of the same name. There must be away to set your titles for tag pages to reflect the tag name.
2. Its counting every page twice - one with the slash at the end (ie: /contact-us/) and without (ie: /contact-us)

(note: seems like the same for your descriptions and pages headers - this could be the "duplicate page content error")

So, fix your tag pages and see about why the pages are loading with a slash and without.

The 404s are there, but they look like some sort of squarspace issue with how images are cached or something - not actual pages on the site. Looks like one of your links to wikipedia has a stray character in it causing it to be a broken link.

I would verify/cross check these errors in Google Webmaster Tools and then Rand's suggestion is perfect for the 404s.

Hope between all of that it helps!

-Dan

Hi Garry

The advise I have heard, and follow, is to keep categories more general, and to only have a handful - say 5-10 categories.

But you want to have lots of tags. Tags can be very specific and unique to each individual post.  You can have several tags for one post.  I have a lot of pages that get picked up by tag pages, which tend to also make great long-tail URLs.

So let me give an example.  Website about cars.  Categories might just be: Sports Cars, SUVs, Pick Up Trucks, Station Wagons.  Tags however would be very specific: 2 door honda, fastest sports cars, driving and safety - etc etc etc.

And I've also heard to be sure not to have a tag with the same name as a category.

I'm sure you'll see lots of examples that go against this format, but it seems pretty intuitive and has worked for me thus far.

-Dan

You should definitely "noindex tags (that is what Matt was talking about to some extent).

I would also "noindex subpages of archives" in your Yoast settings as well.

Webmaster Tools and Google might not always react right away to certain site changes, which might be why you are seeing a delay.

Hi

Great responses Matt and Ben, thanks!!  Only things I could add are;

Webmaster Tools

• Check google webmaster tools every few days for the first 2-3 weeks.
• You may turn up some 404s or other types of errors that should be corrected.
• And keep your eyes out for any other warnings

Analytics

• You're going to spike your traffic (potentially, hopefully) in analytics big time, or at least skew the data
• Use filters and advanced segments to separate blog traffic so you can still analyze things even after a potential spike in blog search traffic.
• At minimum make an annotation of the date you made it indexable.

Dates

• Regarding the dates, I did come across this recently - I have not tested, so please take it with a grain of salt - removing dates from the SERPs - I would only recommend trying it if the content was not "time sensitive" (like a cooking recipe).

Hope all this helps!

-Dan

Hi Corey

Don pretty much nailed this answer. I'll make sure to answer your specific questions:

• You're not negatively affecting your ability to show in search by noindexing tags. They almost never rank or get traffic since they are just pages of thin content. Noindexing them does not affect your other pages.

• No other repercussions - unless you have a random tag archive getting traffic. Check your analytics, and if so, you can individually leave specific tags indexed with the Yoast plugin. I wrote a post all about this a while back: http://www.evolvingseo.com/2012/08/10/clean-sweep-yo-tag-archives-now/

• You would have to figure out how to have unique title tags on each page - which is honestly more effort than is worth it. The Moz tool is showing an 'error' of duplicate content but the issue is just more that tag pages don't have much value and can just be noindexed and then ignored.

Hi Ben

Highland's response is definitely a good "poor man's" way, and there's nothing wrong with it at all.

WordPress now offers site redirects through the wordpress store - I believe it's like $12 a year.

There is also this domain mapping trick, which seems like it would still work, but they do say its a little complicated.

-Dan

Hi

EGOL's answer makes sense.

I'd like to add also - you don't necessarily need to write the posts just before the time of publishing them.  You could have several posts scheduled to publish at certain dates, as long as they were not time sensitive.

Also, you could take what would have been one post and break it into two parts, if there is enough content and it makes sense.

You can also take guest posts, which obviously eliminates the need for you to write them - good networking too.  And maybe you'd discover video or screencasts are a comfortable medium.  You may be able to generate a 3-5 minute video and get it posted in far less time than a written post.

You could also record audio of yourself or an interview with someone in the industry and get it transcribed for some fast quality content.

-Dan

Hi There

I'm not an advanced analytics expert (maybe medium level ) but let me try to help out.

1.Enhanced eCommerce vs Event Tracking

Enhanced eCommerce helps you measure how users interact with your products, shopping cart etc - so you can see in depth information around adding items, viewing items, cart abandoning, purchase completions. You can slice and dice this at a product level. This is only for sites where you can purchase products on the site.

Event Tracking is like a blank canvas to track any sort of user behavior you want (within some limitations) - but you might track a button click, interaction with a video (play, pause, etc), or PDF downloads, or scrolling behavior.

Importantly, you can turn and event into a goal where you could track sign-up form completions (via the click of the 'submit' button) as a goal and tie that back to your standard analytics data.

Event tracking can be done on any website - even if you don't sell products.

2. In short: no. You may still need event tracking.

If you enable enhanced eCommerce, this will give you the capabilities described above (measuring product and shopping cart interactions) - see this for more info https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6014841?hl=en ...BUT your option to use event tracking is your choice based upon what you might want to measure. If you want to measure clicks on your email list signup button you need event tracking. If you want to trigger an event with scrolling behavior (see this for an example http://cutroni.com/blog/2014/02/12/advanced-content-tracking-with-universal-analytics/)

Hope that helps!

Ian

I'd completely agree. As I said to Patrick above, I've been deindexing tag archives like mad on my clients sites, with NO negative consequences, if anything the results are very positive. They're thin pages, with not much going on and often the titles get duped.

Check out this post I did which shows how to safely determine if tag archives can be de-indexed and how to do so.

Noindexing tags of course doesn't prevent Google from crawling them. If they're linked to it can still be good for Google discovering your content.

-Dan

Hey Ryan

Just finally getting to this, thanks for reaching out on Twitter and asking for my input. It seems like everyone here has already helped you out, and I do agree

Only thing I'd add, is remember 301 redirects are not only for engines but for the users so always be sure they make sense from a UX point of view.

And also, be sure this doesn't create a chain of redirects. If 301s were already in place on the site you're redirecting from, always try to redirect from the original source, like this;

DO THIS:

www.one.com/original-page.html ----> www.two.com/real-page/

www.one.com/new-same-as-original/ ----> www.two.com/real-page/

NOT THIS:

www.one.com/original-page.html ---> www.one.com/new-same-as-original/ ----> www.two.com/real-page/

Communicate this to IT as best as you can, as its been said by Cutts to avoid chains of 301s if possible.

Hope this all helps, let us know!

-Dan

HI

I would not worry about PR too much.  Check your traffic, rankings and other key metrics over the next week or so.  If they hold steady, I wouldn't worry about it.  Just keep doing everything with the best practices possible.

A 10 second look at your site and nothing "panda-like" jumps out at me.

-Dan

Hi There

The screenshot doesn't seem to be working - but pretty sure this is how it works:

• to see "with change" at all, the first date in the time period can't be more than 32 days ago (for example, today March 27th if I set start date Feb 24th or earlier, I won't get "with change")

• it compares based upon your time range.

• if I have Feb 27th - March 27th selected - it compares that to Feb 26th - Jan 26th (the prior 30 days).

• if I have March 20th - March 27th selected - it compares it to March 12 - March 19th (the prior 7 days).

Hopefully that makes sense? Pretty sure that's how they are calculating it.

Hi John

I've checked this out a few times today, and tossed it around with a few other Moz people.

When I crawled the site earlier today with Screaming Frog, I got all the 500 errors you describe on the "normal" pages.

Now when I crawl the site I only get the "weird" pages with the unusual URLs.

We don't think this has to do with either Yoast of W3 Total Cache causing any of it. As far as what caused 500's on the "normal" pages, its hard to tell now. They loaded fine in my browser when I checked earlier.

But I strongly suspect maybe something going wrong in .htaccess for those stranger URLs.

Not sure why those URLs exist like that in the first place - they should all be "clean" whenever possible with the question marks etc in them. That'd be the first place I'd get straightened out. Check permalink settings or maybe a theme setting? Or did someone do something custom to the .htaccess file?

Get your URLs operating correctly. Then if the 500s still exist, you know its a different matter but at least you've narrowed it down and correct the URLs.

Hope this helps!

-Dan

I would look at this in a holistic manner. First of all, why would you link? Is this just for backlinking/ranking purposes?  Then don't do it.

But are you asking because your friend has actual content you want to share? In THAT case, is the content (topic) relevant to the content on your site?  And do you generally only link out to other sites for the sake of sharing the content on them?  If so for both, I don't see anything wrong with it.  And if it is just to share the content, you can just nofollow it too for added "security".

But if its just to try and get your buddy a link, don't bother.

-Dan

Not bad at all! Unless there is a very similar site in your industry of a competitor and risk being accused of "copying".

-Dan

It is still known to help, but to a generally small degree.  You can see all the ranking factors in the latest study here.

Hi There - Moz Associate here - we're finding someone to help you with this.

-Dan

Thanks for mentioning that video - here's the link to it

I'd say you probably don't have anything to worry about. The links are most likely not counted by Google (like they're not even there).

DO check webmaster tools for any "unnatural link" warnings though.

-Dan

Its not bad at all, I would just recommend using free themes available only within WordPress. Maybe someone else knows of a trusted source of free themes. And yes, you can use the free plugins just the same.

-Dan

If you use wordpress redirect and transfer (above in my answer) you should avoid any duplicate content issues.

Hi Tafser - thanks for helping out! Just want to point out, looks like they have a mobile site at a mobile subdomain which passes the test: http://m.prismpharmamachinery.com/

Dan (Moz associate)

There's a deeper issue going on - the pages with trackbacks aren't actually accessible from your site's menu the way it is now - these pages:

• http://redlandsorthodontics.com/orthodontics/children/child_braces-2/
• http://redlandsorthodontics.com/testimonials/redlands_braces_for_children/

All the pages with the trackbaks are being linked to (accidentally) from images.

Try to follow this chain

• This image -> http://redlandsorthodontics.com/wp-content/uploads/redlands_braces_for_children.jpg
• on this page -> http://redlandsorthodontics.com/testimonials/
• links to -> http://redlandsorthodontics.com/?attachment_id=362
• which redirects to -> http://redlandsorthodontics.com/testimonials/redlands_braces_for_children/
• which has the trackback -> http://redlandsorthodontics.com/about-us-2/meet-the-staff/redlands-orthodontics/trackback/ on it which has the 302 redirect.

You need to:

• Remove the links from the images. Go to media->select an image->edit->and select "link to NONE"

That should straighten it out.

-Dan

"Agents" Thanks very much for the answer and appreciate the help...

I think in the case of this site, since it is a very simple blog, swapping the tags and categories won't completely break the site or the SEO.

But for the sake of preventing any misunderstanding in general, categories and tags are fundamentally quite different. Many people do swap their use, and get away with doing so because the sites are simple.

First, refer to the "Categories vs. Tags" section in my post on the Moz blog

To reiterate the basic differences here:

Categories

• Can have a hierarchy (be nested as parents and children)
• Are used best as a "menu" - like if the entire website is a blog, the categories are designed to fit into your main menus - this is built right into the wordpress functionality. This menu can be the main menu at the top, or in the sidebar
• A category archive can be the homepage
• 5-8 categories (the main buckets of topics on your blog) is best. If you want more, you can nest them
• Categories always existed, from the beginning of wordpress
• When used in this proper fashion, the category archives should be indexed by engines.

Tags

• Tags have NO hierarchy (they can't be nested)
• They are not to be used in the menu of a site - the main menu or sidebar menu. You see them a lot as a "tag cloud" in the sidebar or at the bottom of posts. They work better as this type of navigation, if users want to find articles similar in a much more specific way.
• A tag archive can NOT be the homepage
• You can use as many tags as you want, but they should not be the same as categories. They should be more detailed than categories.
• Tags didn't always exist from the beginning of wordpress, they were added after.
• When used in this best practice way, I always advice to NOT index tags (at least at first). Tag pages will be thin, almost duplicate and of little use to the searcher. MUCH better landing on a category archive or better yet a post its self.

-Dan

Hi John

Some themes have that functionality, so check there first.

If not, I think this custom post plugin should do it.

This one is a simple post template, but don't think it does more than one.

Hope that does it

-Dan

Hi Jason

Glad you are liking the community so far! I would recommend starting with this post I did for Moz to help answer exactly these questions about WordPress and SEO: http://moz.com/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success

When you're starting out and have just a few tags (6 isn't much) it's not a huge deal, but for some sites as they grow it turns into 300+ tags without planning on it - then it's a little more of an issue. Not something that would cause a penalty per se, but just not great for the site to have those extra pages indexed and existing because they don't generally add any value (they are often similar to the posts themselves).

I would use maybe 3-4 tags tops for any blog post. They are little detailed words to describe the content. Additionally, tags only have a utility if used as navigation in the site somehow: either a list of popular tags in the sidebar or sometimes you can click on the tags for each post at the bottom of the post.

Lots of people try to make tags to rank in search engines but I have found this to be a bad strategy. In general, I recommend people to noindex tags as shown in the article. With the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress you should also "noindex subpages of archives".

Categories - I would create 5-7 categories that you will file all blog posts into - and only use those and don't let categories grow (don't keep adding new categories). You can customize your category pages with this plugin: http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-custom-category-pages/ - and indexing them is fine.

Good luck!

-Dan

Hi

I actually think WordPress now does the redirects and fixes internal links now when you update the permalink. Try just updating it and see if they get fixed. (Although it may not catch internal links you've added within posts etc, just in the main menu).

If WordPress doesn't do this, just change the URL, change all internal links as needed and also use a 301 redirect.

A fast way to look for bad internal links is with Screaming Frog SEO Spider.

Hope that helps!

-Dan

Just to add one other bit that might be helpful... you can use Browseo to get a quick and easy "SEO View" of most any site. SEO View for that theme

Its basically seen by Google as just one giant page, and not all the content is even there in the source code.

-Dan

Hi Martin

Adam's pretty much got it - rel next/prev would take care of it (that's what Yoast's SEO plugin for WordPress does).

Only other option might be to noindex page 2, 3, 4 etc with a robots noindex meta tag. This would have only the first page indexed. Its another common solution.

As far as how to do this in Drupal, I'm not experienced with that platform, so not sure - but those are the two best solutions you'd want to use.

-Dan

Hi

I had the same issue with a client (except he had FOUR duplicate listings - yikes!)

Anyway, are these are duplicate listings, where there should only be one listing? OR, do they have two locations and thus two listings are needed?

If its a duplicate, YES delete one.  I'm not sure where the trouble is with that (maybe if its under review you can't make changes?  Someone else know about this?)  I caught my clients when they were "pending review".  If you are signed into their places account, you should be about to delete by either completely deleting the listing, or disassociating with the account.   I would completely delete it if its a straight duplicate.

Can you say what you have done to try and delete the listing?

As for the older companies, you might be able to put in a request to Google places by going straight to that places listing and suggesting a correction.  Or can you receive mail at the old address?  You could claim the listing, get it in an account, and then delete it.  Just don't claim it with the same Google account as the other listings.

-Dan

Hi Tommy

You can do as Aran suggests - a redirect would be fine for feeds you don't want being crawled.

But more importantly, you may want to consider not indexing subpages (like this one: http://www.mediaanalys.se/blogg/page/2/) - you can make this setting in Yoast.

Let us know!

-Dan

Hi Anthony

I would not do that As schwabb said, it's hiding text and that's going to raise a flag. Instead, I would first understand the original intent of how/why H1 tags work: http://www.seobythesea.com/2012/01/heading-elements-and-the-folly-of-seo-expert-ranking-lists/ - they should be the main "heading" or on-page title of a document, as Bill explains very well in that post.

Looking at the homepage, the part that says "Esthetic Dentistry - Your Reliable Los Angeles Dentists" would be the best H1 tag - it is the main heading of the content for that page. The same follows for the other pages, for example: http://www.estheticdentistry.net/cerec-dentistry-in-la/ - the H1 would be "Get CERC Dentistry from...."

-Dan

As far as I know Google is more lenient with sitemap errors, but I would still recommend looking into it. The first step would be to be sure your sitemap is up to date to begin with - and has all the URLs you want (and not any you don't want). The main thing is none of them should 404 and then beyond that, yes, they should return 200's.

Unless you're dealing with a gigantic site which might be hard to maintain, in theory there shouldn't be errors in sitemaps if you have the correct URLs in there.

Even better, if you're running WordPress the Yoast SEO plugin will generate an XML sitemap for you and it update automatically.

Hope that helps!

-Dan

Hi Joel

Pages or Posts do not affect search rankings, but as Mark very well points out they differ in functionality.

• PAGES are for static (not tied to a date) content. Pages are like what you'd get on a regular 'ol website.
• POSTS are for dated content, like an ongoing blog or new items. Posts are what you'd typically think of as a blog.

This article I did on WordPress for the Moz blog might help you further.

-Dan

Jay

I would be very careful with this.  I had a friend who was temporarily removed from Places for doing a similar thing.

It seems to me, the way things are going with Places, is it should follow the logic:

1. "I have a business with a physical location" ----> 2. "I should be sure its listed on Places"

You should read through the guidelines for Google Places to know what you're getting into, and if you do try this, use two different Google accounts maybe?  If one listing gets banned, all of them do under that same account, as far as I understand.

I'd ultimately try to find more creative ways to appear in the desired searches though.

-Dan

This one's a little mysterious for sure!

Your theme seems to be allowing a number added after the URL - like any of these actually load the page (without a 404)

• http://www.ministryofsearch.net/services/1/
• http://www.ministryofsearch.net/jobs/100000/
• http://www.ministryofsearch.net/about/873918/

BUT - words don't work;

http://www.ministryofsearch.net/about/dog/ <---gets a 404 page, that's what should happen with the numbers.

Somehow your theme is allowing these numbers to be added. Some thoughts;

• Check your permalink settings. Could be a simple surface level fix like that
• If you're comfortable with .htaccess see if there's any setting in there that would allow these pages to load (you can view .htaccess right within Yoast->Files)
• Comb through your plugins and see if any are allowing this setting
• Worst case, you may need to take this back to whomever developed your theme.

The end result, is you don't want pages to be able to load with those numbers at the end like that. Anything besides the exact URL (or tracking parameters) should return a 404.

Hope that helps you get in the right direction!

-Dan

Hey There

For the most part, it is not a good idea to just use tags as a way to try and gain search traffic from them. They are possibly beneficial to users internal to your site. Users may read an article and want to read other similar articles, so having a few tags at the bottom of the post can be useful. Putting tags in your sidebar for navigation is rarely useful, but if done in a somewhat user friendly way it could work. I generally avoid "tag clouds" or having dozens of tag links in one spot.

In terms of the tag archives themselves (like mysite.com/blog/tag/tag-name/), tag archives rarely look different than posts themselves or other archives. Unless you have a giant site, with so many posts, and tags actually add a beneficial way to scroll through archives on a very specific topic, categories do this fine enough.

And for indexation - if it's a new site or a site that has NOT ever indexed tags I would advise to not index them moving forward either. Unless in a rare .5% of cases this is done in an extremely intentional and strategic way, not for SEO but for users and site architecture. (Think of a site like Smashing Magazine or Search Engine Land with LOTS of content, that's a rare edge case where using tags for navigation and architecture might make sense.)

If you HAVE indexed tags already I wrote an article on how to safely evaluate and noindex them.

In general, I would avoid tagging a post with more than 4-5 tags. Tags should always be different from categories (like more specific things).

-Dan

Hi Alan

I think a little more info would help.

Are listings going to be replaced and updated (and the page address stays the same) or are new listings going to be added (ie: new pages will be added)?

Basically, if the page URL stays the same, ie domain.com/neighborhood/listing/ and you're simply updating content - then Pages are the best way. And you would just use nesting etc to get the structure set up.

If the URLs change, and new ones keep getting added, then you may want to use Posts.

My guide to WordPress on Moz explains a lot of this stuff in detail.

And I did a little tutorial video on posts vs pages

This is a little unique case scenerio, so if you can give a little more info (or an example!) that would be helpful!

-Dan

Leigh

Just making sure you're all set. As far as I know, this will not raise a flag in terms of authorship.

What Williams is talking about is the "author archive" and if you're using an SEO plugin (I recommend Yoast) you'll want to noindex author archives and I even disable them for a single author blog. They end up looking like a duplicate of the main blog page if its a single author blog.

-Dan

Hi

One of the biggest issues I see, is **your proximity to the town center.  **That is, you are almost 5 miles from the marker for the town centroid for Swansea vs many of the competitors being right in the center of town.

Although a US article, try some of the things in this post on local SEO and the this post on advanced local SEO by the same author (I highly recommend Ted's blog in general, great stuff).

You'll need to counteract your longer distance from the center of town with getting as many reviews as you can, citations among other local listings and definitely try the things in those posts above!

-Dan

EDIT: Meant to attached screenshot of your distance to the town center.

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