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Hi There

While I'm not entirely familiar with how things work on the SellerDeck end - you can I believe have one WordPress install in the root and have different sections like /blog and /help etc - but put other non-wordpress things in /store or any other folder you want. So long as you don't try to make a page, post, category, tag, etc at /store you should be good to go. FYI two WordPress installs shouldn't affect speed but it may be more of a management and consistency concern, but I don't think you need to do that.

I am not totally sure I get the bonus question In this scenario, the ecommerce platform would serve the homepage? What would WordPress be doing in this situation? Thanks for clarifying and I'll try to help out!

-Dan

Hey Jesse

It gets tricky to say the least. First there's the protocols which are best practice "rules" for any web development - http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html

But then there's Google's sort of own interpretations and treatment of those redirects on top of that. And there's always what Google says vs what they actually might be doing.

Technically a 302 is "found" although everyone uses it for "temporary" and yet a 307 is a temporary. I recall Google saying in their eyes there is no difference.

Yeah I guess you could leave 302s or 307s in forever, and how long is acceptable? I could leave a 302 redirect in place for 20 years and then decide to move it back? Is that what they mean?

As far as what Google does with them there's lots of Google and 3rd party resources about them and like I said we can probably find a few Matt Cutts videos talking about how they treat them - but then there's reality - which brings a lot of variables and moving parts.

So I think the main idea is as cliche as it sounds, all real situations are different. I follow this train of thought;

1. If possible, FIRST choose what to do based upon best web standards and in most cases this should hopefully satisfy SEO.
2. But if you have to do something purely for SEO - basically manipulate a known hole in how these things work vs. how Google supposedly treats them, because that's the only thing that will fix something - then do that. This might be why for example you'd choose a 302 redirect despite knowing it's not really temporary

Hi

I think the only compelling reason to keep it, is if it reflects the real structure of your site. Is there a "category" button or link to click on, which brings you to a page www.example.com/category with content on it?  If not, I would remove it.

I generally think of "category" more as a word for blogs or portfolio sites.  If you DO have a actual page or link for "category" I would consider renaming it "products" or something more e-commerce friendly.

-Dan

Greg

That's right, the best way is to block crawling with robots.txt - makes sense to keep crawling clean and efficient. If you're using Yoast you can edit robots.txt right in there, or you can do via FTP.

This question was being asked a ton a while back so I made this video explaining it: http://youtu.be/2RrcUKaiAc4 (actual answer starts at 1:00)

-Dan

Not 100% sure if it's Penguin per se but it's definitely a link based problem. Look at all of the top anchor text to the site - it's entirely commercial keywords --> http://screencast.com/t/gt4zbWiWNxMc

What I've seen happen in this cases is that you will artificially rank well for some of those keywords for a little while and then a link algo catches up with you and you'll drop to where you should have been (or lower) all along.

Your on-site isn't as poorly over-optimized as other sites I've seen, but it could be toned down a little but removing keyword repetition / stuffing in the titles/URLs/descriptions etc.

You should definitely try to change the anchor text on any of the back links that might be good links, but just too optimized from an anchor standpoint. Use natural non-exact match anchors or branded / domain for the anchor text.

For any links that are just plain old bad/spammy/low quality - try to remove them or disavow them.

Do you mean to say that you do not want these pages indexed at all?  You say "there is no information on these pages and they do not need to be optimized".  If in fact, you don't want them indexed, you would add them to your robots.txt file as such:

Disallow: /filename.html

Disallow: /folder/filname.html

etc.

However, what EGOL and Bryce have suggested would be the most work, but make the most sense overall.  If you can find a way to re-structure the 25 downloads / add content etc to capture the additional traffic that would seem to be the best choice.

Greg

Generally if you're not seeing this in Webmaster Tools or Screaming Frog (have you tried a crawl there yet?) then it's probably not an issue. Crawl it with Screaming Frog, and if you maintain the default settings (honor robots.txt and don't follow nofollows) and set to Googlebot, this will be a pretty accurate representation of what Google is doing. If the pages don't pop up, you should be fine.

Also, check webmaster tools for "crawl stats" - on average, is Google crawling an abnormal amount of pages compared to the "normal" site size?

If it is a problem, you can always block them with robots.txt

-Dan

I forgot to mention WordPress has a really good forum where there may be someone who can help you more directly http://wordpress.org/support/

Hi Landon

I had a client with a similar situation. Here's what I feel is the best goal;

Calendar pages (weeks/months/days etc) - don't crawl, don't index

Specific event pages - crawl and index

Most likely the calendar URLs have not been indexed, but you can check with some site: searches. Assuming the have not been indexed, the best solution was to block crawling to certain URLs with robots.txt - calendars can go off into infinity, and you don't want to send the crawlers off into a black hole as it's not good for crawl budget, or for directing them to your actual content.

Hi

First check to see if the pages are indexed in Google by doing site:www.mydomain.com as a search.  If they are not, you have nothing to worry about (as long as you block them in robots.txt soon)  Your developer should be able to edit your robots.txt file extremely easily.  Its just a file that sits in the root directory of the website.

If the 25 pages are indexed though, it could have a negative impact to have 25 duplicate title tags.  As to how much impact, that may depend on how large the site is, how deep into the site they are, etc.

-Dan

Hi John

First thing - have any other metrics changed? Traffic via Google search? Rankings (do you track these independently of WMT)?

Do know that the disavow can take 6+ months to fully process and have an effect back in the SERPs. I do see some suspect links. With Google being so aggressive lately, I could see only a few bad links hurting the site;

• http://wiis.tu-graz.ac.at/people/tom.html "jazz online server"
• http://enn2.com/nitelife.htm "internet cafe index"
• http://public.homeagain.com/faq.html "found pets"

The more I look in OSE there's definitely a lot of link issues. I know they may be old, but it's possible some could have come back to haunt the site.

I would be extra certain you've disavowed all the bad links. Greenlane SEO has two great posts on the process they use;

• www.greenlaneseo.com/blog/2014/01/step-by-step-disavow-process/
• http://www.greenlaneseo.com/blog/2014/04/how-to-uncover-those-harder-to-find-links/

The site design LOOKS great - terrific actually. So it's almost easy to assume everything is technically OK on-site, yet there are definitely some issues there.

For example there are almost 800 pages indexed - which seems like a lot for this site (I could be wrong). There are lost of really long titles and descriptions etc. So as Andy suggests, I'd take a good look at cleaning up anything on-site as well. It may not have caused a penalty, but anything to help Google re-processes the site will help

Found it (thank you Screaming Frog custom filters)

It's on this page - http://www.kempruge.com/bankruptcy-common-reasons/

-Dan

I am not aware of a plugin that does this thing exactly. You may want to look into general shortcode plugins that have a whole variety of shortcodes and maybe within them you will find something that does what you are looking for - I wouls start with these;

http://codecanyon.net/item/intense-shortcodes-wordpress-plugin/5600492

http://wordpress.org/plugins/shortcodes-ultimate/

Hi Benj

I would wait until they update the page cache - that usually brings the most significant ranking change due to on-page changes.  They may crawl the page, but updating the cache is what you want to look for - you can of course click on "cached" in the search result or do a cache search - cache:www.mydomain.com/mypage.html

There's no telling how long it will take, but it sounds like your site is well trafficked, you can see the cache update in just a few days.

You can try changing one thing at a time - but usually the only two things I personally see that make a big difference is title tag and url.  The other thing to keep in mind, is how the whole page works together - title->url->description->heading->content->images - can sometimes have a bigger impact when you bring all of those elements into harmony.

-Dan

Hi There

To answer your first question about URL structure, I would see slides 12-15 in this Mozinar I did: http://www.slideshare.net/evolvingseo/hands-onwpseodanshure (you can also watch the whole Mozinar here).

In short - if your site is mainly a blog, it's ok to do site.com/blog-post but if your site is a blog within a site you probably want to do site.com/blog/post-name

You will want to 301 redirect the old URLs to the new one. I think it's worth it.

For many answers about tags etc you can see my post about WordPress SEO here but in general;

• categories - index
• tags - noindex
• author archives - noindex for single author blog, index for multi-author with customized author pages
• dated archives - noindex
• subpages of archives - noindex

You're not noindexing to avoid duplicate content, you're noindexing to avoid too many pages being indexed that don't need to be, and probably won't rank anyway

Hey There

I answered similar questions here;

http://moz.com/community/q/wordpress-redirect-login-401s

http://moz.com/community/q/wordpress-4xx-errors-from-comment-re-direct

But essentially Stuart has the right idea too. In the drop down it's linking to somewhere where users can go if they forgot their password.

If you don't want this crawled (which I recommend) by Moz, Google, Bing etc add this to your robots.txt file;

Disallow: /wp-login.php?action=lostpassword

So that goes under what's in there now.

Hey There

Yes that looks like the right format for 301. Make sure you're putting that below the default wordpress stuff.

If you want to redirect a bunch of pages all to one page you just do it like this;

Redirect 301 /photos-1/ http://www.orchardsinn.com/new-page/

Redirect 301 /photos-2/ http://www.orchardsinn.com/new-page/

Redirect 301 /photos-3/ http://www.orchardsinn.com/new-page/

etc...

I like:

Pushchairs, Strollers & Buggies - Prams | Baby Huddle

I know it seems insignifigant, but I like it with that EXACT formatting (the hypen etc).  Remember, you want this to be user friendly in the SERPs and on the page itself.  And not just SEO friendly.  So the format is:

keyword, keyword - category | Brand

Also, you then might want to make your url and H1 match the keyword portion of the title tag, for good overall on page optimization.

-Dan

I just wanted to point out a few issues I saw right away;

• Internal linking might be playing a roll. The site is not linking to these hacks pages right from the homepage, it is down a second level via the "download hacks" link. Yet the forum is being linked to universally across the main navigation.

• In fact the forum comes on top for most internal links --> http://screencast.com/t/MYjf3dNzZGE

• Bear in mind Google will treat privacy pages and sitemap internal links differently, because they know these are standard pages linked to universally, so you don't need to go removing links to those - but you should think about overall site architecture in relation to your content pages.

• The top YouTube video won't play - it says: "This Video has Been Removed as a Violation of YouTube's policy against spam, scams, and commercially deceptive content". That can't be good for the pages quality score.

• All comments below are unanswered. This is your opportunity to engage with visitors, show some extra and helpful content etc - I would respond to some of the commenting.

• I see 225,000 pages indexed on the entire root domain. Is there really this many pages with actual content that people are looking at and using on a regular basis? Maybe it's a good idea to do a content audit on the site and remove or consolidate low quality and/or extra pages.

• I am not familiar with this industry and type of site - but Google seems to be trying to rank forum pages for other domains as well - and only a few "landing pages" - as these landing pages just try to get the visitor to register, only only after they register can they get access to the content. Google is reluctant to rank pages in which the user can not easily complete the desired action on that page. Maybe this industry is out of that norm?

• Make sure you are not blocking CSS and JS from being crawled in robots.txt - http://www.ilikecheats.com/robots.txt - there's a lot of stuff in your file there, and Google now prefers to crawl these files, so I would check you're not blocking that. Use the new fetch and render tool in webmaster tools.

• You've got an infinite crawl loop happening --> http://screencast.com/t/hNekO6fx3A - I found this with screaming frog SEO spider. Something you'll definitely want to resolve.

• Lots of pages link internally via 301 redirects, which can also hurt crawl efficiency

• Did you intend to make this page a "post" and not a "page"? http://www.ilikecheats.com/01/rust-cheats-hacks-aimbot/ - see my video about the differences - either way you should be updating this page, and fixing issues as they arise to make sure users are happily finding what they need on it.

Is doesn't seem like there is any one silver bullet thing to fix, but it seems like Google might be having trouble figuring out which page to rank for certain queries - so perhaps the architecture, keyword targeting etc is not clear enough.

I also suspect the forum may be more trusted and authoritative due to user metrics. It's likely users are visiting the forum more often, staying longer and engaging due to the nature of the forum. But you can certainly help Google out by clarifying the site structure and page targeting a bit better.

Hey Dylan

Either of those are possibilities for Google finding and indexing a page like that. There could be many ways that happened - I've seen them spider "links" in a drop down depending on how it's implemented.

One thing you can do to check how, is looked at the text-only cache of the page (type cache:www.domain.com/page-name in your browser and click text only) - and look to see if the drop down items actually appear and clickable links. You can also try crawling the site with Screaming Frog and set the user-agent to GoogleBot and see if they got picked up.

If the filter is just for example re-sorting the list of items in a category, there is probably not a need to have this crawled or indexed, because it's just the same content in a different order.

If you do want to remove them from the index, you will want to add a meta noindex tag to the HTML, wait for them to drop out of the index, and then block crawling with robots.txt or nofollow the links that might be generated.

Hope that helps!

EDIT - I'd also check to be sure they are not showing up in your XML sitemap.

Hi There - I have heard great things about Schema Creator by Raven! Yoast handles just publisher and author but nothing else. There is also the Google Plus Authorship plugin for Authorship specifically.

Hi

It depends.  Are you going to have an individual page just for "pushchairs" "strollers" etc?  If NO, then use keywords first.  If YES, and these are going to be lower level pages, then put "Category" first on the category page, and put each keyword first on the corresponding sub-page.

You can see that some of this gets into how the site all fits together, so thinking about it a little more holistically is important.  What the flow of page to page is like for the user, and what makes sense from an architecture standpoint.

-Dan

Hi There

Generally those types of 404's won't be too harmful - they sound like they may have been somewhat artificial WordPress pages.

What I would do is get your list now from Analytics or Webmaster Tools - this way you will capture URLs that actually got traffic or Impression in Google and redirect those.

So run a landing pages report, and an top pages report in webmaster tools - maybe for the last 6 months. Create a text file of all the URLs, and run them in list mode through Screaming Frog. Redirect any that 404.

If you were to go back in time, what I would have done with Screaming Frog is - let it crawl everything - you have to allow it to "follow redirects" and "ignore robots.txt" etc - I know Google is not supposed to crawl anything in robots.txt - but basically you'd be letting Screaming Frog get to everything, that way you don't miss any URLs.

Hey There

Just wanted to confirm that as far as we know there is no bias towards having WordPress and thus needing to post content more. Google is pretty platform-agnostic when it comes to how they rank sites.

Dan who? Sorry for the delay here, was on vacation. But let me see if I can help.

This is a very intriguing. I think the best way to confirm/deny if this is an actual issue, is by going to Webmaster Tools -> Google Index -> Content Keywords - webmaster tools will be registered of course for just www and in theory should not take into account any of the subdomains. So if a subdomain is adversely affecting the main domain, those erroneous Keywords would show up probably in WMT.

Another way to check would be the related: search operator which when I run on Strutta's root domain, I get sites that make sense - other social media, facebook and contest sites. A straight branded search for "strutta" looks pretty strong too, everything is relevant.

Lastly you could look in "impressions" under webmaster tools for the www site - if you are "ranking" www pages for those extraneous keywords with random pages that could be a signal of something weird.

But I do think this is probably more a question of how the AdWords tool works - which to be honest I am not exactly sure, but probably a big combination of domain content, page content, anchor text from links etc.

Hope that helps!

Yes, that's making sense now.

Just don't forget the hyphen

I just want to add for record, one thing that was really interesting. That is this page: http://www.lifeionizers.com/blog/health-more/benefits-alkaline-water-hair-loss

Was cached in Google but not indexed - which is odd. And to me a sign that Google is not crawling and processing the blog correctly. I've attached screenshots since they may very well index the page shortly.

Cache - http://screencast.com/t/cZcGbIHb

Site: search not indexed - http://screencast.com/t/IJQbyMhd

Hi There

It's a little tricky to diagnose without seeing the full context. But in general I'd say if the code is serving no purpose that you can tell - it doesn't show to the user ever (check all devices / screen sizes, all page types etc etc)... if it never displays for the user for any purpose, you can remove the code. I don't think the code is very bad though, in the grand scheme of things. I've seen far worse blatant links placed within themes and designs. This one doesn't seem malicious, although I'm not entire sure what it's for out of context.

There is no harm in having both setup. It's up to you, you can leave http, delete it, register it again later - etc.

I think this is a definitive as it gets.

Also, its not too surprising they weren't caught stuffing keywords, I've seen that go unnoticed before.  What I do see getting penalized more is trying to list the same business in multiple locations, duplicate listings, that sort of thing.

Thanks Kevin!

Also, you can crawl the old site with Screaming Frog SEO Spider to check old URLs. Here's how to do that.

1. Before switching to the new site, crawl the site with Screaming Frog.
2. Save your crawl
3. After switching to the new site, crawl the old URLs in list mode in Screaming Frog.
4. If they all 301 redirect then you're good. If any of them 404 then redirects are not working or not in place and you need to fix them.

Alternatively you can also grab your old URLs from Google Analytics or Webmaster Tools if you forget to crawl the old site. But I like crawling because it picks up everything.

Hi There

In my experience, so long as you redirect any URL changes correctly you shouldn't see a drop in rankings. A good coder should be able to clean up a template, as well as take measuers to help with load time. Definitely use a caching plugin like WP Super Cache. I think WordPress is a great way to go for a quick solution. A premium theme is only about $50 - go with one that is from a developer that a) has really good star ratings and b) and this is important - seems to provide good support.

It probably doesn't matter much if you have a sitemap submitted for http, although you can delete it if you want.

is it the SAME sitemap as for the https site? And are your metrics coming in the same?

There is no advantage other than if you need to look at any data specific to http.

Hi Adrian

In regards to the other tags, I take it back, it was Chrome's view source code coloring, made tags look broken at quick glance. Sorry!

As far as the canonical, I was just curious why there are two URLs for that page to begin with? Is it that you need the '1850' in the URL to provide the GET call to the database?

It appears as if all your category level pages operate this way?  You should be able to get a singular, clean URL and make your category call without the need for duplicate pages at all.

If this is not the case, you may want to 301 Redirect the '1850' page to the other page. There doesn't seem to be a need for both pages to be accessible by users.

Hope that helps!

-Dan

Hi Robert

Without seeing the site, just going by the question, this is honestly not something I'd worry about. "Duplicate content" is really only an issue if you are stealing/scraping content from other people and copying it onto your site in aggregate. Having the same text appear on one page and then another, if it's your own unique text is OK. Of course in context those pages need to be uniquely valuable for users. The homepage needs to fulfill a purpose, and the inner pages need to fulfill different purposes.

Oh by the way, here's a post I wrote for Moz on setting up wordpress for SEO: http://moz.com/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success

This is probably not cloaking as long as it's not malicious. Engines are going to have a non-js view by default for the most part, so that is the version they will see anyway. You can check Google text-only cache of the page to see how they are seeing it.

In theory a change from tables to divs should not affect anything if its simply a layout/styling change. But if you inadvertently changed something else, thats where you might run into trouble.  I would just double check everything else is as before; indexation, URLs, internal anchor text, titles, descriptions etc.

Three things I would do;

1. You have it on a test server now?  Crawl the live site and new site with Screaming Frog or Xenu Link sleuth and see if both crawls return the same thing for titles, descriptions, headers etc.

2. View both the new and old site with CSS/Java turned off and set user-agent to Google Bot (there's a plug in for firefox to do this) and see if you can see all the content.

3. Finally, you can run the broken link checker plug in for Chrome on the new site, and make sure all your links work.

After launch of the new site, I would immediately also check webmaster tools for any errors.

-Dan

Hi Adrian

I think there's a mixture of things going on here. I'll just spell out the top ones I see after a quick look:

• On the old domain, URLs returning a 404 code need to also LOOK like 404 pages, right now they just look like the homepage: http://www.perfectprofiles.eu.com/kjhgjkhg

• On the current domain the alt text on the logo is "dental implants luton - logo" - just make that the company name "perfect profiles".

• In fact there's only one plain text of "perfect profiles" on the entire homepage, which is in the footer.

• And the current domain is not the company name (?) which is why it might not be ranking as well for "perfect profiles" which is kind of a vague name to begin with.

• Also, why not just redirect the old domain homepage to the new? I think that would be considered the best user experience since there's not really any useful content on the old domain - Google's cache shows no content really since the page is an image

• The old homepage has a few good links as well

• There's also three Google Plus pages and only one has a verified link to the website - it looks like there are two physical locations and one corporate? You can have three pages, but just really beef them up with as much info as possible.

• Make sure the corporate G+ page is in fact verified and then Customize your knowledge graph listing

• Consider having separate pages for each location only if you fill them with helpful unique info on each, like office pictures, staff names/pictures, hours, directions, etc.

I think it's a mix of a) Google not being 100% on the brand/company name - and then b) doing more local optimization for each location.

That's right it depends on goals. If it's a single service / single product website targeting only one main keyword/topic, one page might be OK. I would definitely check out the article linked to!

Thanks Devanur

Just wanted to clarify that the new recommended length for titles is roughly 55 characters, or more accurately 512 pixels. Screaming Frog SEO Spider will now measure pixel width.

Hi

That seems like it should work just fine to me.  Just follow these guidelines.

• does it appear useful to the viewer, does it make it easier to consume the content?
• or does it appear unnatural and spammy?
• also, I am not a fan of blanket rules like "don't ever use multiple h2 tags under your h1" (unless they are clearly stated in Google's quality guidelines or somewhere like that).  You have to look at every situation for what it is, and as long as you are not trying to be manipulative and it makes sense as determined by the content than do it!
• As far as I am aware, the only header tag that is recommended to not repeat on a page is the H1.

-Dan

Hi Adrian

It's always tricky! It's a longterm solution. Things will need to get sorted out by Google and the dust needs to settle.

You can really ensure this happens faster by taking all appropriate measures - like redirects, notifying webmaster tools, updating internal/external links where possible (social, local listing, etc).

The fact that rankings were lost, means you have less to lose right now - so it might be a good time to take a step back and "do it right"

There's a way to create jump links in the link dialogue box, does this work for you?

https://en.support.wordpress.com/splitting-content/page-jumps/

I also found this plugin:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/better-anchor-links/

It might help to search "anchor links" as that's what some people call them too.

Christopher

Is this a WordPress site? If so, are you using an SEO plugins? Sometimes the code in the header.php file still causes WordPress to spit out more than one title tag. Let us know what setup you have.

-Dan

"Use your Google Analytics to determine which links are not used. If you offer links which are not used, it is a waste and adjustments should be made. An unused link should generally either modified so it is more visible or removed."

• now THAT'S some killer advise right there!  I'm always weary of things like 'only 100 links on a page'.  Every situation is so unique, it will really hurt you to try and stick blindly to a 'rule' like that without thinking for yourself.

I think it's important to understand the options and the results they will cause:

• You could "noindex" the for sale page - it will still live on your site, it's just that no one will find it in Google.
• You can rel = canonical "for sale" -> "for rent" but technically you're not supposed to because the content is different. If it worked, it would basically achieve the same thing as the noindex anyway. It's supposed to pass value like a redirect, but I doubt it would since the content is different.

I think the hidden dilemma is in the fact you're trying to capture both "for sale" and "for rent" traffic - what are the keywords driving traffic to the far sale or for rent page? Maybe it's really a matter of getting both pages to rank for their respective keywords/intents and making it cleat to the user front and center on each page they can in fact both buy or rent. So the "for rent" page would clearly state "hey, did you know you can buy this too?"

I don't know how popular the keywords are too - this would help determine the overall strategy - knowing how big the market is, how competitive, the search volume - and what a typical user expects in the industry.

Hi There

Doing a little research, I understand s.w.org is for emojis. This can be disabled if you don't want to use emjois:

• https://wordpress.org/support/topic/disable-dns-prefetch-of-sworg/

It seems like the Google Fonts one is nothing to worry about:

• https://generatepress.com/forums/topic/dns-prefetch-fonts-googleapis-com/