Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Colin

Any luck with this yet? I'd follow Marie's good advise and first be sure everything is updated. Then try these things to find it;

• Disable each plugin one by one and see if it goes away.
• Can you see the code when you view source or use a tools like browseo.net or shut off CSS? If you can see the location of the injected code you may be able to tell where it was inserted.
• If you can't see it viewing source or with browseo etc - try doing a Google cache: search and view in text only.
• Check your widgets.
• Check your .htaccess file

Once you find it definitely check out this document on securing wordpress.

Let us know how it goes.

-Dan

Just checking in here. How have things been going? Just wanted to add some info;

• did you actually receive a "manual action" from Google? If not, a reconsideration request is not needed, it's an algo not a manual penalty
• Hummingbird will not do this. The "date" of Hummingbird is not really a specific point in time, and it's definitely not the day Google announced it. The Hummingbird algo didn't act like Panda, Penguin or any other penalty.
• Disavowing links can take up to six months to have an effect. This info is straight from John Muller at Google. Google has to actually crawl the websites that are listed in the disavow file before applying the disavow.
• It's not good enough to only disavow. Google wants to see some effort to remove links as well.
• You may not bounce back unfortunately (tough to say without seeing the site). But if you were artificially ranking too high with bad links, now you might be ranking where you should have all along.

Overall the best thing to do is remove and disavow as much as possible and work on moving forward as best possible to acquire new links and make the site better overall.

Hi Mark

Are you all set with this? I'm crawling the site now with Screaming Frog and am not seeing the 404 errors any longer, so perhaps it has been fixed?

-Dan

Hi There

First off, I rarely delete pages. Better and easier to noindex. That way you get them out of the SERPs and reduce the poor user metrics, but people can still find the pages otherwise and you don't have to 301 redirect them etc. You can delete if you feel they are just a bad user experience over all of course - but I noindex as a starting point.

Anyhow, regardless, here's how I access it - first I use a custom report with the following metrics (you can play around with them);

• pageviews
• entrances
• new visits
• avg time on page
• exits
• exit rate
• "page" for the dimension

Thresholds - starting point (I use filters)

• pageviews - I start with over 50
• avg time on page - less than 30 seconds
• exit rate - great than 80%

I like to end up with a list of maybe 50-100 pages that fall within the thresholds. Every site is different. But I try to isolate 50-100 of the worst pages (we're assuming maybe a 2,500+ page site).

You can throw a segment on there if you want to segment just Google Organic traffic - that could in some cases be more accurate.

Hope that helps! Interested to see what other people do.

-Dan

Cary

Your onsite looks cleaner than most I've seen lately. Your link profile does look slightly suspect though. Its heavily weighted towards keyword anchor text. Although perhaps they're all legit sources, lack of brand signals in anchor text could be to blame. There is also very little social sharing of the site.

Also, I did find some suspect links like I mentioned, for example at the bottom of this page: http://www.automobilesbook.com/index.php - also a comment here: http://howtosplitanatom.com/how-to-hack-your-life/how-to-use-firefox/

Did you outsource anything and were perhaps told they didn't do anything spammy?

-Dan

I'm not so sure I'd jump to the conclusion you've been hacked so quickly (as a few other answers have mentioned). You just have bad backlinks pointing at your site, right? No pages have been created ON your website that you did not allow correct?

If so, it does sound like some sort of negative SEO link building. Be hard to tell how/why they were built without a big analysis - but anyhow - you can disavow them. But I would also look deeper into why they have happened to begin with. Could it be a competitor or someone who has decided to make enemies with you?

Hi Christopher

Looks like it was done correctly. There's a few ways you can check. One easy way is the Redirect Path Plugin by Ayima. Shows you the status code right in Chrome. http://screencast.com/t/wBqiYMzJf

You can also use a header checker like URI Valet - as long as you see a 301 code when running it the redirect is correct.

-Dan

Brandon

Just catching up here. You can do as suggested and use .html but I would highly recommend going with the new URL structure and using 301 redirects. Especially if it's a fairly small site (under 100 pages). I've rarely seen this affected rankings one bit.

-Dan

Thanks for the details. It may not be those links, but if there were even a few others, it could potentially hurt the site. I had a client who had done some spammy link building in 2011ish with another agency and just those few links hurt the site. I would try removing or disavowing anything you can find that's spammy, and not helping, and see if they helps anything.

The types of things to de-optimize on your own site would be more like keyword stuffing in the titles, URLs, headers and internal anchors - not so much blocking pages from being crawled. Blocking crawling it typically only if you want to improve crawl efficiency on really large sites or you just don't want Google to page attention to that content, but it won't fix a Penguin issue if it's on-site.

-Dan

Hi David

What you really want to do is _noindex_tag pages. See my guide to setting up WP for SEO. You can nofollow the tag links too, but not totally necessary. Google's pretty good at figuring that stuff out.

-Dan

This should be totally fine. It's pretty common blog/wordpress practice to have excerpts on a category page and then the full article/recipe on that individual page.

Also, just to dispel a myth there is no duplicate content "penalty" - so nothing to fear from that standpoint anyway - just try to make each page have a distinct purpose, which they do. The category page allows users to browse all the recipes in that category and choose which to view. The recipe page allows users to view the whole recipe and use it to hopefully cook something tasty

Hi Ahmet

I don't think the sitemap indexed is an issue. Also I wouldn't block it with robots.txt - cause they won't be able to crawl it!

-Dan

Penguin 2.0 is definitely from webspam and backlinks. I suggest using Google Webmaster Tools as your backlink dataset. They provide links that are more likely to be causing problems. It's extremely unlikely the internal links are hurting you if it is Penguin 2.0.

Lisa

I would honestly switch to the Yoast SEO plugin. It handles the SEO (and robots.txt) a lot better, as well as the XML sitemaps all within that one plugin.

I'd check out my guide for setting up WordPress for SEO on the moz blog.

Most WP robots.txt files will look like this;

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/

And that's it.

You could always just try changing yours to the above setting first, 

before switching to Yoast SEO - I bet that would clear up

the sitemap issues.

Hope that helps!

-Dan
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Hey There!

Sounds like you're doing a lot of things by-the-books and "right" "on paper" but it's really tough to know if you're on the right track for sure without seeing the site or an example of some of the links being build, or content, etc.

I say this because "40 links a month" for example sounds like a nice number, but also sounds suspect because that's a pretty sizable amount of links, which makes me wonder about the quality of them.

What I'd be curious about is - what are the things outside of SEO or SEO tactics/fixes have been done? I'm thinking in regards to social, audience building, brand building, design upgrades, content, adding value etc? Also, what type of site is this and how big is it?

The other thing that's tough to know is how well the technical things were implemented. For example, switching to https among other things can create a lot of redirect chains. I would try to undo redirect chains and only do page->page redirects (instead of having chains of page->page->page->page etc).

And right, it's tough to know if your disavow is helping or hurting without knowing a lot of the specifics.

If it was me, I'd make sure you're focusing enough on others things besides just directly on SEO. That doesn't mean you'd ignore SEO when doing social, content, audience building etc - just that you're taking a more holistic view. I think Google definitely favors recovering sites that prove they are building something people want.

I agree with Rui. If the 301's are in place, this should not be hurting the rankings anymore. WordPress can be a little slower, but you can use something like WP Super Cache to really speed it up.

I think the issue with the site now are things like the design, content, the on-site optimization, and also back links as Rui pointed out. I would refocus back onto making the site as best you can, and definitely don't shy away from using WordPress.

-Dan

In addition to what EGOL suggested, which is right on - you could also check to see which pages are indexed but not receiving traffic (for say the last 3 months). I would do this by crawling the site and comparing an export of your product pages to an export of your organic landing pages from analytics. Any products that Google has indexed, but not ranking or returning in search are good ones to noindex until you make them better.

-Dan

I agree with David here. Someone made a custom category plugin for WordPress which will do what David is suggesting. I would not block anything, but rather noindex what you don't want in the index, which is typically for me tags, subpages, author and date archives.

-Dan

Hey There

What Barry says is true - you can throw anything in there and it will load, as long as the category is at the end.

But yes, for certain, in your case I would 301 redirect /shirts to /clothes/shirts (and all other categories). Crawl the site with Screaming Frog and keep an eye on 404 errors in Webmaster Tools for anything you might have missed.

I don't think there's any issue in regards to duplicate content.

-Dan

To further enhance how a crawler sees it, or any webpage, you can turn off CSS and browse as Googlebot.

Use the default user agent plug in for Firefox

Use the web developer plug in to turn off CSS

Also, shutting off JavaScript is good too.

-Dan

Hi Anthony

This doesn't sounds like anything super harmful but I'm not too familiar with the inner working of Magento - is there a screenshot you could provide that might help?

Thanks!

-Dan

Hi There

It's definitely hard to say, without intimate knowledge of all aspects of the site - what the benefits will be by moving to WordPress. As a standard answer, I always see it as beneficial to move to WordPress. But the client should understand it's an investment, it's not like they're going to instantly rank better just by moving to WordPress. What it's going to do is put them in a better position (in a lot of ways) to rank better moving forward.

So in general, I'd always say "worth it" to make the move - but it's all in the specifics in the current site and how well things as executed.

It is entirely possible to have minimal link loss through redirects. You just have to;

1. Avoid chains
2. Make the redirects on a page by page level - and the topic needs to match (as Cyrus does a great job explaining here.)

You can fulfill both #1 and #2 no matter what platform you switch to, no matter how old the site is. You can always go back and undo redirect chains using the methods in the post I shared.

I'm not recommending a new design - I'm saying the process of how you go about implementing on the redirects can be a little more straightforward (and thus eliminating potential for chains and link losses). You first build the site in WordPress, without worrying about URL structure, .html slashes and so forth. Then you redirect old pages to the new pages however the URL structure ends up. You can go to past redirects and redirect them directly to the new wordpress URLs.

Hope that all makes sense - summary being - it is worthwhile to switch to WordPress - and any link juice loss is the fault of poor implementation, not the result of the switch itself per se

Hi There

There's two possible ways I can think of you may want to try. Segmenting by landing page or segmenting by keyword/source.

**Landing Page ** - depending on the site, there may be specific pages (like products for ecommerce) that are obviously more purchase based. You can create a segment to show you all traffic that came by way of landing on one of these pages.

Keyword/Source - there are also purchase intent keywords like "buy, for sale, for purchase" etc - you can create a keyword segment which includes all of your purchase intend words - exclude branded terms, "how to" information intent words etc. There may be certain sources that you know are informational - like if you're linked to in a resource etc that's an informational visit - but if your product is in a "top 10 products" list, this referral traffic may be more purchase intent.

So really there's no blanket way to do this. You have to determine what determines the intent of traffic for your site and create segments around those parameters.

Hope that helps!

-Dan

Hey There!

Let me ask - what types of pages are the duplicates showing up for? In many cases, it's just subpages ie: /page/2 etc - and these aren't as problematic.

Let me know the types of pages and I'll see if I can help from there

Thanks!

-Dan

That's exactly right, however don't forget one important detail - the OpenGraph meta tags!  Facebook needs these to send the data about your page back over to Facebook.

You can get more info about the tags here

-Dan

Dan (nice name)

Thanks for the response!  I had assumed there would be a deviation between FB and GA - but is it typical for GA to show practically only 60-70% of the clicks?  It seems like a big difference?

Thanks!

-Dan

This really depends on the specifics of what you need to do. In other words;

• are you moving just blog posts, or are you moving pages too?
• when you say "combine" do you mean put the old blog posts into the new blog section on the new site?
• you're going to maintain the same theme as is currently on SEO Martin?
• how do you want this transition to appear publicly? Just that one day, all of a sudden both sites will be combined? Or are you going to do it in stages?
• what are you going to do with the old domain? redirect the old URLs to the corresponding new content?

Whatever the case, you'll probably need some arrangement of these;

• exporting posts
• importing posts
• merge/combine multiple blogs
• moving wordpress

If you want to leave some more specifics, myself or someone else could chime in with more info.

I also wouldn't rule out developing the whole thing on a dev server first.

-Dan

Hey There. Yes, I generally utilize mainly custom reports and segments for clients, as everyone goals and markets are different. Essentially, just creating the reports won't bring any "results" but our analysis and utilization of the data - takeaways and next step actions are what bring the results

But segmentation is totally essential to analytics: the words of Avinash say it much better than me ---> http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/web-analytics-segments-three-category-recommendations/

-Dan

Hi Pauline

I'd agree with Takeshi - likely not a big deal at all. As long as the links are not spam (people trying to link to their products or services) you should be totally fine and don't even think you need to do anything else.

Moz will report those things, but in some outlying situations like that, they are not a concern.

-Dan

Topsy

Followerwonk

Social Mention

MentionMapp

Twtrland

AnalyzeWords

Klout

Crowdbooster

(props to Mike King for spotting a bunch of those)

Hey There

OK, this should be pretty straightforward then;

1. Create a new section for the new blog where the old content will go (basically a page that's a blog "homepage").

2. Export all the old content from the old blog using WordPress' export function.

3. Have your redirects ready to go - some people like using just the .htaccess file, some prefer the redirection plugin. Either way, you'll want to maintain ownership of course of the old domain name. Individually redirect every piece of content to it's new home.

4. Import the posts to the new blog.

5. Put the redirects in place. Obviously check everything really well.

I wouldn't use the move domain tool in WMT since you're not doing a direct 1:1 move.

Hope that helps!

-Dan

Hi Marcus

I'm going to just go through a bunch of items in no particular order;

• Internal links in footer - the anchor "private dental practice in york" linking to the homepage is a little over-optimized.  As is linking to the marketing and web design companies with exact commercial anchors.
• The actual brand name is a little unclear. Is it "fresh Smiles" or "FreshSmile" or "fresh dental" or "fresh dental smile clinic"? It's super important to have this clear to make a strong brand presence. "Fresh dental smile" and "fresh smiles" don't return a normal "branded" search result with 8 or 10 sitelinks. See this screenshot for an example. This has to be 100% clear on-site and off-site, especially in local listings.
• The homepage title tag for example is a bit overdone. It should be the main keyword / service and the brand name. Also, "cosmetic dentist" appears in almost every page title tag. You want to avoid repetition, have the titles describe the page well, while fitting in the main keyword for that page. Follow Google's guidelines on titles.
• For back links, there's definitely some over optimization going on - see Open Site Explorer's anchor text report - and the use of anchors like "dentists in york" "dentist york" etc is a bit excessive. Get those anchors changed to brand names if possible. Believe it or not, there's just too many links in general, and many of them are keyword links. What I mean is - you're not ever naturally going to see 100's of back links for a dentist. Google knows this. So it sends a red flag to have too many low quality over optimized links. I would stress obtaining a few links but of super high quality.
• Social Media - the facebook feed for example is just a blast of "push" marketing - teeth services, photos and so forth. Very minimal activity in general. They should pick maybe one social network that aligns with where their customers are and use it as a communication medium - a place where patients can leave messages, the office can post fun and engaging things. See Social Media Examinar for plenty of social ideas - I recommend possibly using either Pinterest or Instagram as well. Twitter doesn't make much sense for a dentist. I am mentioning social media because in my opinion it helps SEO.
• Rel Publisher - even if they're not posting activity on Google Plus (same as the Google places page now) use Rel Publisher to connect their website to their G+ page. Check that its set up correctly with the rich snippet tester
• Site speed seems poor - here's a test result from webpagetest - note that many of the images (like this one) are taking almost 1 second each to load. You definitely want to try to get those to say 50-75k with some compression etc. Site speed is a small ranking factor as well as UX factor for visitors.
• The site has a lot of pages indexed for a dentist web site - over 1,000 as you can see here. What I would do is see if they are all getting traffic (check in analytics) - and HIGHLY consider killing off pages like this: http://www.freshsmiles.co.uk/teeth-straightening-in-york/ which are is a blog post format, designed to just target a keyword and even the image is broken now. There are a LOT of pages like that indexed. Here's another: http://www.freshsmiles.co.uk/we-also-offer-patients-facial-rejuvenation-treatments/ - this will all seem like thin content for sure, and affect rankings.

As you can see, a lot to work on! I don't think any one thing is going to fix the site, it's going to have to be a bunch of improvements.

EDITED TO ADD: I would just kill the tag archives. Remove them from navigation and delete them. Check to see if a few might be getting traffic (using my method here) and 301 redirect the few that might be and just remove the rest. I was trying to crawl the site, and it's already queued up to over 1,500 pages - most of them tag archives.

Raviv

Just to make sure we're not assuming incorrectly, temporarily shut off the Yoast SEO plugin. This should be fine to do for just a few minutes. Do you still get the 403 errors? If so, then it is not the Yoast plugin but some other issue.

Also, do you get this error while logged out of WordPress? Trying doing it on your site in incognito mode in Chrome without logging in.

Let us know what happens with both of those tests!

-Dan

My belief is that forums are great! This Q&A is a great example - I remember hearing that moz's traffic increased quite substantially after adding it.

I think the trick to a forum is getting the right platform. And getting some seed members is important, as well as moderators.

If anyone has good platform to recommend from an SEO standpoint, that'd be great, I don't have any direct experience in that regard.

-Dan

Hi There

You might want to give Screaming Frog a shot for creating XML sitemaps. Here's a post which talks about how. Basically, since you can customize the crawl, this will allow you to exclude the parameters etc. I'd give that a shot.

-Dan

This is a pretty broad question, so hard to tell exactly what's going without more information.  Things I'd investigate first:

• Go to your Google Webmaster Tools account (assuming you have it installed on the site) and check number of impressions and CTR.  Has the site not been showing up in as many searches overall as compared to the past?

• Go to Google Insight and see if there has been a decrease in search volume overall for your keywords to correlates to the drop in traffic.

• Go a little deeper into the analytics, and see if you can pinpoint specifically where search traffic decreased.  Did it decrease across all keywords?  Can you segment out certain keywords and isolate ones which dropped where others did not?

• Also, check analytics for a drop in search traffic on all engines or just google, just bing, just yahoo etc.

Overall, at least the way you described the scenario, it seems when diagnosing an issue like this you really need more information.  And specifically, you need more information that correlates to the drop in traffic, ie other changes that occur parallel in time to the drop in traffic.

• Also, how are you tracking rankings?  You'll want to verify its accuracy perhaps by getting rankings from another source just to be sure.

Ha! I'm trying to quit. _Again. _

Funny enough - look what I just found: http://www.bobwp.com/wordpress-floating-social-bar-plugin/

Hey There

This is an odd one for sure, and a really crowded space with a ton of EMDs and PMDs so a lot of noise. But I have a few hunches just after looking around a bit.

1. Their site is visually blazingly fast compared to chillisauce.

2. Their site is one of the few I could find, where the entire domain is hyper-focused on "stag in edinburgh" - and has the benefit of the homepage being the page to rank or match topically for those types of keywords. Whereas chillisause and some others are broader focused in what the site is about - and so architecturally, or linking, perhaps not as easy for Google to rank/credit those types of pages within the site, in this case, and as Doug pointed out perhaps their on-site is not so strong.

3. User metrics could be playing a role - CTR in serps etc. They actually stand out as being the least spammy of most other results, and have a shorter domain name (less spammy looking).

But yeah, there's plenty of anomalies - all exact match anchors for linking, less links, a borderline spammy/keyword-stuffed website. Has this site done well for a really long time?

-Dan

Hi

Great question! Stumped me a little, but I found this article.  Safe to say it seems as if google ignores the apostrophe (and other characters including hyphen etc) so in effect "men's fashion" and "men s fashion" is the same thing.

-Dan

Hey There

I see this question is a bit old ... are you still have these issues? If so, when you say "going down" do you mean according to the numbers showing in Webmaster Tools?

I do know that quite often there can be a delay in the data in Webmaster Tools (especially the indexation report which you may be referring to).

I don't think there's any harm in updating the dates to reflect the most recent version of the page, so long as they are accurate.

Let me know if that helps or if you're all set.

-Dan

Hi Christopher

I am honestly not an expert at this type of plugin specifically - but have plenty of experience searching for plugins. If I were researching (which I just have for a bit) I would try this one first;

http://wordpress.org/plugins/oa-social-login/

I tend to look for recency of updating, quantity of downloads, and depth of documentation (which hints at how good the support is). Doesn't seem like we're going to find the the perfect solution here from a review standpoint, but based upon other factors I would comfortably try the one above.

Also wanted to make sure you saw this article on Smashing Magazine - there's some good info in there, in the comments as well.

-Dan

Hey There

I would use a robots meta noindex on them (except for the top page of course) and use rel = prev/next to show they are paginated.

I would prefer to do that than use WMT. Also, WMT crawl settings will stop the crawling, but not remove them from the index. Plus, WMT will only handle Google, not other engines like Bing etc. Not that Bing matters, but always better to have a universal solution.

-Dan

I saw the AdWords help tab had a email address and phone number. I bet if you or someone payone for AdWords contacted (and asked like you're a paying AdWords customer) you could get an answer.

You could also submit a question in the Google Webmaster Help forum, or their Google Plus Group - or join a hangout they hold every Friday.

-Dan

Diane

Your page is too saturated with OTHER keywords and topics.  It is not targeted enough towards the one topic you are trying to rank for.  What the page needs is less of the off-topic content in the main elements (title, url, description, header, bold and internal links) to reveal the main topic you're trying to focus on.

Partially what I mean by "off-topic" is that you have many variations of your targeted phrase on the page: "hypo gastric band" "gastric band hypnosis" "virtual gastric band" are diluting the value of "gastric band hypnotherapy" - and they are all sort of competing for attention.

Whatever keyphrase you are trying to rank for, you want it to match exactly in the title, meta description, url and top header. This achieves a harmony between all of these elements, and then its ok to have variations of them appear naturally elsewhere in the body. But you want to focus those important elements with the exact keyphrase you're going for.  This not only helps SEO but usability too.

-Dan

Greg

I agree with you in 95% of cases, and talked about that in my WordPress Moizinar (slides 13-15). Also see screenshot of what I like for URL structure on your basic WordPress setup (that is a site with a blog in it - typical company/agency site for example).

The only case where I like putting the blog posts right at the root level are if the site is literally only a blog, with like an about page as the only "page" and that's it. In that case I think this works fine.

-Dan

"...slowly going downwards over the year"

This sounds like possibly user metric related, which are important ranking factors no tool is able to give us. It's possible, users have showed preference to other pages ranking for that query over time. Metrics could be;

• click through rate from SERPs
• bouncing back to SERPs ("pogo-sticking")
• time on page
• repeat visits to the page
• direct visits the page
• completed actions on that page
• ...etc

Essentially, users might be telling Google they don't like the page based upon their behavior. Some suggestions;

• Watch Rand's video about how to improve Pogo Sticking
• Check out these articles on improving CTR in the SERPs (most the top ranked resources there are good)
• Set up goal tracking to get a conversion rate
• Try Justin Cutroni's scroll tracking to see how users are interacting with the content
• Try a heatmap program like http://www.crazyegg.com/

Without being able to see your page, it's tough to give custom recommendations, but I would also recommend making sure you have the best design of any site in your niche for your audience.