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I would noindex tags, but leave categories indexed. You can check my post for full details on setting up Yoast: http://moz.com/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success - I'll answer the sitemap question separately.

Brian

As far as which to remove, that's just up to him to decide. Unless I saw how the site was put together with plug-ins etc he should be able to determine which one is best to use.  Its whichever is easier for him really.  From an SEO standpoint you just need to choose one, it doesn't matter which.

Hope that clarifies!

-Dan

Hi Brad

ATP has the right idea indeed. I don't foresee there being any issues with this at all. You're biggest two risks with any migration (back or front end) are broken links and downtime. If you're not changing any URLs, then you don't need to do redirects. Just obviously minimize any downtime as much as possible and you should be fine!

Hello!

You should check the actual status code of your custom 404 page - does it actually return a 404 Not Found?

You can check in a variety of places:

• https://urivalet.com/
• https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/googlebot-fetch

Or install the Redirect Path plugin and it will show the status code in your browser.

If you do not have any tags or categories, you should exclude them from Yoast's XML sitemap. To do this;

1. Go to SEO -> XML Sitemaps
2. Check off Tags and Categories to exclude them from the sitemap.

If this doesn't fix it, let us know - I can try to help further.

-Dan

Hi!

Thanks, I'm viewing the source code now and it appears correct.

I would definitely update Yoast. Its great now, but the old version was known to break certain things.

Then let us know if you're all set.

Thanks!

Hmmm ... I think the more important question here is - would it be possible to not have URLs changing like that? I'm not 100% sure I follow the reason why it's set up like that?

Alternatively, could the URL change with ?parameters instead? That way you could set a canonical to point to the main URL and the parameters could achieve the changes you need.

I'm pretty sure the back links I brought up are most of the cause of it.

Hi There

In general you probably don't need to do that. Here's how I would normally deal with indexation in WordPress (assuming you're using WordPress);

• Categories - index
• Tags - noindex
• Date archives - noindex
• Author (single author blogs) - noindex
• Author (multi-author) - index
• Subpages - noindex

Basically all these settings are shown in my post here on setting up WordPress: http://moz.com/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success

Yoast is the best plugin to do all this with!

Hi Paolo

I think your best bet is to name the image file as accurately as you can, without intentionally trying to keyword stuff it. Name it something useful as if a person should get an idea of what the image is just by reading the name. And don't make it too long.

I'm not a complete image SEO expert - but here's some resources you should check out first;

• http://www.seosmarty.com/image-seo/
• http://www.seomoz.org/blog/image-seo-basics-whiteboard-friday

Renaming every photo is not over-optimization if it makes it easier for the user. Like I said, just don't keyword stuff the name

Hope this helps!

-Dan

1. Keyword research - [celebrity name + fashion] or [celebrity name + clothes] in adwords tool (set to exact match).  See screenshot.

2. Choose what phrase to optimize for to help guide content.  Try to create content with a viral / social media hook to it. Obviously include the photos, but also maybe you could crowdsource comments on the pictures from your twitter followers or email list first.  Try to find people that have a good social following.  Give them a 'sneak peak' at the photo, gather their comments.  Or, find a fashion critic to give it a glowing review/write guest commentary.

3. Make sure the article is on-page optimized for the chosen keyword

4. Then when you release the article, the people you collected comments from will share it in their social networks, helping to get it indexed and noticed right away giving it a social boost.

5. Build a few links to the page...

The search volumes are relatively long-tail it seems for this sort of thing, but if you find the right phrase, it could be highly transactional.  Someone searching for "brad pitt fashion" may in fact be highly interested in purchasing something that he has in fact worn.  The trick is in finding the right keywords.  Don't just throw up an article and see what happens. A little bit of planning to it up front could be a huge win.

Good luck!!

-Dan

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I'd publish this is a page. Full explanation here! --> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RrcUKaiAc4

I would honestly write your titles mainly for humans. Personally I feel;

Post Name - Site Name

to be the best format.

-Dan

Hi Colin

Do you mean something like Slimbox? http://www.digitalia.be/software/slimbox2 - I wasn't sure if you intended to have all 16 photos visible at once in the box, or if you meant the user with go through them one by one?

-Dan

I see what you're getting at. This wasn't a "normal" redirect old page to new page situation. The page being redirected to existed all along, and then they decided to 301 pages to it that were not related topically or by page type. The page with redirects pointed at it dropped in ranking.

I suspect the redirects through off the topical understand of what the commercial page was "about".

It's a fascinating SEO test - but hopefully not something anyone would do for real. Rules of thumb:

• Try to get your URLs right from the very beginning
• Try not not change them unless you have to after the fact
• Definitely don't redirect from one page to another unless the content is an exact match (or really close) and don't redirect across page types (commercial to informational, vice versa etc)

Few rules about sitemaps;

• You should only include in them pages you also want crawled and indexed

• They should not contain URLs with 404s or blocked by robots.txt

My guess is there are too many URLs in the sitemaps, since I'd guess the website is not over 2 million actual "real" pages,

Also, I randomly clicked on a URL in one of the sitemaps and it 404'd;

http://www.eumom.ie/forums/topic/oakhill-school-leopardstown-/

This is probably causing a lot of the errors you see. It's honestly not a 5 minute fix - but if it were my site, I would be using the Yoast SEO plugin and using the sitemap feature within Yoast. It makes it very easy to include / exclude certain pages and updated automatically etc.

I think there must be a way to tell your plugin what to include / exclude from the sitemap but I don't have as much experience with it.

But generally - only include pages you want crawled and indexed. Don't include pages that 404.

Anthony

There's a few ways to do this, and it does depend a little on the specifics of how the site is set up but the best (and easiest) may be to use the URL parameter settings in Webmaster Tools.

You're going to log into webmaster tools, go to configuration->URL Parameters - set it to NOT index things beyond the ? (this may be numbers 2 and beyond or it may be everything)

How is this set up though? Does the calendar "start" and "end" somewhere or is it going off infinitely in either direction?

The robots.txt file won't keep the page out of the index.

If you can let us know some more specifics that would be great!

-Dan

Hi There - I too am shooting in the dark here a little without having the exact page, but I understand you not being able to share it.

One, is do you have any back links built to the facebook page?

Two, is are you reciprocally linking to/from the website and facebook profile? Are the links on the website crawlable etc?

Are you using the facebook open graph tags on your website?

Do you have a Google Plus Business profile setup - and from that profile, linking out to your company website as well as the facebook profile? Same for YouTube?

Lastly, did you set up a clean URL for the facebook page with the brand name?

-Dan

However, you should allow Google to crawl your JavaScript and CSS (which is now blocked). Here's some background info on that:

• https://moz.com/blog/why-all-seos-should-unblock-js-css
• http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/10/updating-our-technical-webmaster.html

Hi There

As mentioned above - it would be optimal to see an example - or if you can't share the site, just a generic example. It may be that wordpress is adding feed URLs where they don't need to be, so we'd need to take a good look.

Hi Shulman

Definitely get familiar with the WordPress SEO guide I put together for Moz. It will cover all the basics including good settings for a starting point on any WordPress blogs.

To answer your question specifically;

First make sure you're using Yoast SEO

Then, it sounds like you need to "noindex subpages" - these are pages where the URL is /page/2/ /page/3/ etc. You make this setting in Yoast.

Secondly, set up title and description templates, also in Yoast. This is why some descriptions are empty. If you set up a template it will fill them automatically.

Hope this helps!

-Dan

Hello

I don't think any of those factors with the information provided could have had such an impact on the site. Especially not some simple title tag adjustments. It's possible that would happen over time as Google processes the new user signals, but probably not so quickly.

What type of keyword was it? What industry is the eCommerce site in?

Not sure if this came on your radar, but there was an unconfirmed Google update a few weeks ago:

• https://www.seroundtable.com/google-update-no-21225.html
• http://www.hmtweb.com/marketing-blog/unconfirmed-google-algorithm-updates-2015/

If the changes you see match about November 19th, I'd check out Glenn's suggestions at the bottom of that second article. The site could have been caught in a content quality update.

Thanks for the info via direct message. As far as I know, those /feed/ URLs should not return 404's. I checked my site for example;

http://www.evolvingseo.com/2014/08/15/hiring-evolver-number-one/feed/ - and that returns a 200 OK.

I am not sure why WordPress would be doing this to be honest. Do you have a developer working with you? Or if it's a Theme you could contact the theme vendor about it.

You likely have two because of the theme you're using. Noindex both tag sections.

Hello

There could be a lot of issues. It's possible the way you're handling URLs can be a factor.

What specific keywords are you seeing rankings down for? And what was the exact date?

Also, I think links could be a big factor here. There are many with exact match anchors (calling cards, phone cards etc) according to open site explorer. Some of them I checked, and they look like they are on spammy sites (like this for example thenewyorkads .com)

Have you done a link disavow and/or cleanup?

Carlo

That is actually very standard WordPress behavior and should happen. Its redirecting the non-slash to the slash version. Either way, Matt Cutts has said inconsistent slashes will not really harm you, but its still good practice to have it redirect. From what I can tell, you don't need to change anything!

Hope that helps

-Dan

Hi Luke

Matt has the right idea. If the pages are going to "exist", you should block search engines from crawling them with the robots.txt file.

I would get your dev to help, but basically you'd find the folder or path in which you want to crawler to stop at. Maybe it's /month/ or something and you'd block that in robots.txt.

Ian covers this in his recent article about "Spider Traps". And you can also read about robots.txt on Moz or on Google.

The root of your issue is that there are links that are coded incorrectly

--> http://screencast.com/t/ndeKw3PL

which is resulting in infinite crawling of pages that do not really exist, and thus the same duplicate/long title tags.

For example this page is a good URL: http://northstarpad.com/category/business-portrait-metro-detroit/

But as shown in my screenshot the "Pet Photography" image links to: http://northstarpad.com/category/business-portrait-metro-detroit/pet-photography// which is a bad URL and NOT http://northstarpad.com/pet-photography/ which is where it should link.

Essentially your links should be "absolute" URLs (which show the full file path) not "relative"

--> http://screencast.com/t/koL5QX9B

You'll need to pass this to a web dev who knows how to edit your WordPress theme files.

Hello... Yes, this is very possible and commonly done.

You want to install WordPress into a subdirectory of the existing site. This acts like an install of WordPress within the subfolder you choose and doesn't touch or change the rest of the site. Normally when people do this, they try to find a theme they can modify to have a similar design to the existing site. Or you can have a custom theme designed, but a lot of smaller businesses don't do that because its more expensive.

But regardless of the design, to get a WordPress install working you just install in a subdirectory. So if the dentist's site is www.greatdentist.com just make an actual folder on the server at www.greatdentist.com/blog and install WordPress in the /blog folder.

Hope that helps!!

-Dan

I just wanted to clarify that the SEO plugin has nothing to do with this, and also turning all in one on/off will probably not fix anything.

Either you may have the free version of Screaming Frog which limits to 500 URLs, or you may need to adjust crawl settings - my crawl definitely was heading towards the 57k

Hi Mike

In general, I will always "noindex subpages of archives" which is a setting you can check off with the Yoast SEO Plugin. Anything with a /page/2/ or /page/3/ etc is a "subpage" and checking off that setting in Yoast will noindex them, which is the best thing to do.

You can see the WordPress SEO post I did on Moz for more WP stuff.

-Dan

Hi - right, I should have answered your specific situation too

When the user selects a facet - does this change the URL too? Meaning, it's supposed to be a totally different page?

I can point you towards the best places online to find wordpress developers;

• https://clarity.fm/browse/technology/wordpress
• https://www.odesk.com/o/profiles/browse/skill/wordpress/
• http://premium.wpmudev.org/blog/find-wordpress-developer-designer/

Try those!

I'm pretty certain standard crawls in campaigns are once a week.

Hi - right, then if the URL changes for the user, you'll want to probably use the PushState method (linked above) to convey this to Google. They likely can't see the URL change by default.

You can check by trying to crawl the site with Screaming Frog SEO Spider with the user agent set to Googlebot. Then go to "outlinks" for the page with the facet links, and see if they are listed.

Hope that helps some more! Let me know if you need further direction.

-Dan

By block, I assume you mean not index them?

If you're using Yoast, all you need to do is select "noindex subpages of archives" under the Titles & Meta menu.

So if simply not indexing is the desired result, that's the easiest bet - and then you will not index all other subpages such as /category/page/2/ etc

Hi There

Just checking... are you all set with this? I know that with Thesis it can be tricky, and it might depend on the specific theme you're using within thesis.

Hey Andy

To answer your questions:

1. So if you're 301'ing the page, it's not really a 404 page, it's a 301 So yes, you can remove the 301 redirect, making it a true 404 page (check that it returns a 404 code using fetch as google or a tool like urivalet.com).

2. If they are in the sitemap, this won't prevent Google from removing them from the index, but it will throw an error. And not that many people care about Bing, but Bing is apparently super picky about having XML sitemaps perfect.

So yes I would just 404 them without the redirects.

Hi There

Just checking, any luck with this? Can you clarify what you mean by "sites"? Those both look like sub-folders? Can you explain a little more in context how they fit into whatever domain you're on?

Hey There!

Just making sure you're all set with this? Some additional resources that might help (courtesy of Rand);

• Perfecting On Page Optimization - please keep in mind this resource is getting quite old. But it shows the classic SEO process of targeting a keyword. If the keyword you are trying to out beat your competitor with is at all competitive you'll really want a dedicated page for it. That post will show the traditional method for targeting a page.
• This flow chart (from this post) - shows a method for deciding if you need a separate page to target a keyword.

I use those are good starting point guides when in your situation.

-Dan

Hey There

I just did a reverse image search on two of your images and they are present in Google Image search

• http://screencast.com/t/QWKhqQfIH0Z8 - this one is indexed.
• This one is indexed and both versions are from Eyeem

But one issue, is that when I click 'view image' (what normally would open the image file in a new tab - instead it triggers a download box for me --> http://screencast.com/t/7LyLRRJ4CTb6 - perhaps this is because you are preventing people from doing so and just copying the images for free. But I was actually able to download the image for free straight from Google (the download worked).

Which leads me to another question... if the images are not free, maybe it makes sense to not index them? Or maybe index a watermarked version or small thumbnail?

Most likely, but I would double check with your developer - since I might be unaware of anything out of the ordinary!

Hi There

When you upgraded the site did the URL change or did it stay the same? I noticed you also have a lot of your staging site indexed (probably unintentionally) but I would suggest getting that noindexed.

I do see they all redirect to the homepage of your site, but this might not be the best thing to do, since there is not a great topic relevancy going from deep pages redirecting to the homepage. I would just add meta robots noindex tags to them and not redirect them.

I think I answered my question, as I see the archive.org version of the page from a few months ago - the URL is the same but just with capital letters. This is sending through a 301 redirect, but I doubt enough is lost with that.

Unfortunately your back links seem to have an unnatural amount of commercial anchor text, especially for the page in question. So I am willing to bet perhaps when you upgraded the site, it may have "stirred the pot" a little and Google looked a little closer at the site.

I think the "final straw" may have to do with the fact the new site has a sitewide anchor text link "gastric band hypnotherapy" in the main menu, whereas the old site did not. Google takes the overoptimized back links, adds it up with the new overoptimized internal links and that could have triggered something.

Another question - did your rankings drop sitewide? Just for this page?

-Dan

Hi There

There does not appear to be any accessibility issues. I can crawl and access the images just fine with my crawler.

My guess is that since the images are duplicate, and they also exist on other websites, Google may be avoiding indexing them since they already are indexed and they are technically not being linked to with a normal tag.

Is this causing a particular issue for the site? Or is it just a pesky technical bug?

My initial thought is "ads above the fold". It's hard to tell in Archive.org's archive of your old design, but it looks like ad space increased a lot on the new site? You have the block on the left which kind of interferes with the content, as well as the banner ad on the right which is pretty large (but doesn't distract from the content much).

Plus these ads are not just on the homepage, they are on the inner content pages as well.

They way Matt Cutts explained "ads above the fold" - it's not so much you need to cut down the pixel size of ads, but make sure not ALL your pages have too many ads - so only make a %% of pages on your site have ads, and some not.

I would play with how ads are appearing on the site to begin with.

Your issue does not sound like a migration error, because that is usually immediate. This sounds like something Google takes a little longer to process (page layout / design, user metrics, ads etc).

Hi Ruben

I fall along the lines of the other suggestions. Your homepage should get the most links, but the link value will pass through to the inner pages. Definitely optimize (on-site) the homepage for the brand as well as (in my opinion) the most broad keyword - like "Florida Attorneys" - not that you would rank for that per se (or obsess about ranking for it), but it's just good architecture telling Google the topic/category of the entire site, as well as telling the user an all encompassing phrase of what the company is.

Now, the title tag is currently wayyy too long, as I'm sure you know. Something like "Kemp & Ruge Law Group - Florida Attorneys" would work just fine.

-Dan

You can do a "site:" search directly in Google like this and I currently see this --> http://screencast.com/t/ZVqq5iumQ - you can probably do a site: search on the whole domain, a subfolder or a specific page etc.