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Hi Yanez

Jarno basically explained it. You have a few options though - what is the site created with?

Basically you can either;

• Create the new site in a subfolder with the same URLs - and then move it to the root folder to replace the old site. If ALL URLs stay the same, no redirects are needed.

• OR, you can create the new site with entirely new URLs in the root (minus the index page, which you keep a different name in the meantime) and then when ready, you switch out the index page, which becomes the new homepage - and put in redirects from the old URLs to the new URLs all at once.

But to get into more specifics, it does depend how you are creating the site (HTML, wordpress, drupal?) to give more details.

-Dan

Hi Shaun

Yes in terms of keeping strictly to Google's guidelines, I agree that Yoast should in theory use either prev/next or canonical on subpages, but not both.

I am honestly not certain the settings it could be otherwise, as "subpages of archives" is the only one I know of that handles pagination.

Could there be another plugin or your theme (or custom coding in header.php) causing a conflict? One thing you can do is shut off other plugins one by one to diagnose. You can switch themes or switch to the default header.php file included with WordPress, but I (for obvious reasons) do NOT recommend doing that on a live website. I'm not sure if you have a testing environment.

Are you using a framework like Thesis or Genesis?  Sometimes those can cause unexpected things to happen as well.

-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

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

Robert

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

-Dan

This might not be the entire picture but they could be using YouTube's high authority plus link building to their profile page and/or individual videos. Moz/Majestic etc might not have picked up on everything, but you can see a bunch of EMDs and microsites linking to their YouTube profile page;

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?page=1&site=www.youtube.com%2Fuser%2F1800FIGHTIT&sort=page_authority&filter=&source=external&target=page&group=0

Tom's answer is pretty right on the mark. It could be many things.

For one, I think your link profile in terms of anchor text is pushing over optimization, especially for that one page. I suspect the link sources might be mainly press releases etc (known "link building" methods) but I didn't dig into that a whole ton. I'd really try to get your links a bit more branded for anchors etc.  Check out this for link building ideas - and check out this for some possible trickiness because of your partial match domain.

On site, there may be some basic things to clean up. I ran Screaming Frog - see some long page titles, long descriptions (or missing descriptions) and in general the page titles could be a bit better I think.

For example;

"Cheap PVC Banners & Vinyl Banners Custom made Plastic material"

Could be a bit better for search engines and users. Maybe;

"Premium PVC & Vinyl Banners At Affordable Prices!"

It could be whatever you'd like but I am finding that "un-seo'ing" titles these days and making them more user friendly (while keeping your keyword in there) can help.

Also - are PVC and Vinyl the same thing? If they are different you may be throwing off the semantic relevance there.

-Dan

Hi There

This is definitely strange - does it still happen for you? I could not recreate the issue here. There's no doubt this is odd, but I'd ultimately be concerned if it was a page 1 result in which you were missing the first search around. Doesn't seem like this is affecting any actual visibility though?

How are impressions in WMT? Anything off there?

-Dan

Hi There

This can be common with new sites. Google will test out it's rankings in the beginning to see how users respond etc - and then it may "settle" to a more normal ranking.

These small adjustments to on-page things like H1s (which is not a strong signal) etc are probably going to make very small differences. I would recommend looking at other factors such as back links, domain authority, local citations etc.

You can use the Moz Keyword Difficulty tool to gather lots of metrics around why certain sites rank where they do, and where you stand compared to those that are ranking.

Take a look though these link building strategies as well as GetListed for some help on the links and citations.

Hope that helps!

-Dan

Hi Shaun

Dan here, one of the Moz Associates - we're very sorry for the delay!

I've attached a screenshot of my own personal company site which uses the Yoast Plugin - just want to verify the code as seen here is what I would consider "correct" and best practice for WordPress pagination.

That code has not require any custom coding or anything. So either we need to get the Yoast settings correct, or something else may be interfering with Yoast.

Please first try going to: Yoast SEO->Titles/Meta and select "Noindex subpages of archives". This to my knowledge is the only setting that needs to be made to handle pagination correctly.

Let us know if that works - and again, apologies for the delay. Sometimes we have quite a backlog and don't pick up right away if the community has not appropriately answered a question.

Thanks!

-Dan

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Hi Daniel

Yep - as Mat says there's no official solution to this. Do you mean deindexed by Google (without you wanting them to be) or deindexed by you on purpose?

I suppose you could also;

• crawl your whole site
• depending how big the site is, do a site: search in Google.
• use the SERPs redux bookmarklet - get all indexed URLs in a column in a spreadsheet
• compare your crawl vs. the list indexed and whichever was not present in the SERPs could have been deindexed
• this method is faulty as it assumes all crawled URLs were indexed in the first place - but could get you part of the way there.

-Dan

Hey Thomas - thanks for jumping in! Just to clarify;

• Yoast will allow you to noindex categories - I'm sure that's what you meant. You can delete categories in the default WP setup.
• And I think you mean "noindex all subpages of archives"

Hi There

Not 100% sure I am interpreting the question correctly, but let's give this a shot Few things to do;

• make sure to first install Yoast like Thomas suggestions
• noindex subpages of archives
• keep categories indexed, that's fine.
• you can choose to remove /category/ from the URL but I recommend leaving it there.
• Yoast should automatically add proper canonical on each page automatically. as long as you don't do anything else to effect this, it should be all set by default.
• be sure to noindex tags, these are not needed in the index.

Some further resources for you;

• http://moz.com/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success
• http://moz.com/webinars/hands-on-answers-to-the-most-asked-wordpress-qestions
• http://wordpress.tv/2013/08/13/justin-briggs-seo-in-wordpress/

Hope that helps!

-Dan

Thanks for helping out! I have a feeling she meant "ranking" as in position in SERPs, not "PageRank" - caught myself making that semantic error a few times

Hi Samantha

99% certain you can do this with Advanced Web Ranking - it's a hefty application with a LOT of features, so it's not cheap, but you could just do the 30 day trial.

I also just checked my campaign in Authority Labs (which is my favorite straight ranking tracker tool) and looks like they go beyond position 100.

Lastly, I think Aaron Wall's plugin goes up to position 200 as well.

-Dan

Hi

You can use the URL removal, which should work fine, but I think this issue was you were blocking crawling in robots.txt for /?id=13 http://thewilddeckcompany.co.uk/robots.txt and www http://www.thewilddeckcompany.co.uk/robots.txt

If the crawler is blocked it can not see the redirect, so you would want to remove the /?id=13 from robots.txt and let Google crawl it to see the redirect, and that URL will drop out over time.

Something unrelated I just noticed - you should have a better 404 template http://thewilddeckcompany.co.uk/kjhf - one that uses your site's template/design and provides something a little more useful.

-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 Catherine!

At this stage I think your best bet is to reach out to someone who can assist you directly, as it's a little tricky to work out the troubleshooting in the Q&A. You could contact Geoff (from Distilled) who is the person who developed the plugin http://geoffkenyon.com/ or I'm not sure if you know of any developers who could help with the technical stuff? Moz has a really good list of recommended companies as well! http://moz.com/community/recommended

-Dan

I would read through this documentation: https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/3141229?hl=en - but as far as I can tell in there, it's average monthly search volume.

This additional page (https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/3022575) offers the following explanation;

• Average monthly searches ("Avg. monthly searches"): The average number of times people have searched for the exact keyword based on the location and Search Network targeting that you've selected. We average the number of searches for the term over a 12-month period.

-Dan

Colin

Gotcha - I am not sure of anything off hand that does this, but have asked any other Associates if they know of something.

-Dan

Catherine

When you say customize, what sort of things would you like to do with it?

-Dan

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

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

Hi There! What CMS or platform are you using?

-Dan

Hi Anne

I would make sure the page is in fact accessible via the crawler.

1. First check the page its self in something like URI Valet and make sure it's responding with a 200 OK code. Use Googlebot as the user agent.

2. You can also "fetch as Googlebot" in Webmaster Tools and from there submit the URL. So do the fetch and assuming it returns your 200 code you can then re-submit to the index.

3. You can also try crawling the site with Screaming Frog SEO Spider (with Googlebot as the user agent) and see if those pages come up in the crawl.

Lastly, I am curious how you know the "indexed date" of the page? I know if the page is cached you can see cache date, but not sure where indexed date would be. And sometimes Google may just not re-cache or update the index of a page for a while if it has a lower PageRank and/or the content is not new and fresh - it will not see a reason to update the cache.

Also, have these URLs ever been cached?

-Dan

Let us know how it goes!

Hi Catherine

Really sorry to hear there's still trouble with it I see what you mean, the custom posttypes have their own categories apart from the normal blog categories? Can you scrap the custom posttypes and create the categories as normal?

-Dan

Hi Catherine

Thanks for the additional details and site name (being able to see the site helps). Unfortunately as a Moz Associate we are not able to accept account information - but I think I can help you anyway with what you provided.

Is all you are trying to do is have a "customized category archive"? For example, "Coverage" is a category with blog posts in it, and you want to customize that page so it's unique and has additional info?

For example, this page is a category, but it is customized and you see the list of posts below: http://sugarrae.com/reviews/

If so, all you need is this fairly new plugin WordPress Custom Categories. I think that may get you what you need without any custom coding etc. Let us know!

-Dan

Catherine

Hi! I'd like to offer some suggestions, but second the request for a little more info or screenshots etc? By index page, do you mean an archive page listing all of the posts in each category?

Thanks!

-Dan

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

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

Maybe 35 of them?

You can just leave those 35 indexed then.

I would just really like to get rid of most of them. It's so cluttered! Tags make up for nearly 60% of my site. That's no good.

Bear in mind you can delete from being visible in site navigation (remove tag clouds, tags from footers, tags at bottoms of posts) but the tag archives will still actually exist. So you can remove the links on-site without actually deleting the pages.

Like you siad in your posts, tag archives can be thin and Google is not down with that. I want to merge the tags with that Yoast Term Optmizer tool but it isn't available anymore I'm worried about doing redirects because that is a lot of redirects!

If you remove tags from on-page links and noindex the ones that aren't bringing traffic that should solve things. 35 redirects for the rest that are bringing traffic is not too many

I also have a question on categories. I currently have three categories each with 12 subcategories. The subcategories are city names. (I work for a bar that has 12 locations). Is that bad form? Would you set it up differently? And if I have a category named nightlife and a subcategory under it named Baltimore, should i check them both for a Baltimore nightlife post or just the Baltimore part?

I would think about how often you'll post in each category. What you don't want is a category with only a post or two sitting in it for months or years. If you think, after a year, each category and sub category will have say 7-10+ posts in it, than it should be fine. It's all about having each category archive be full of content and unique!

Hey Spencer

While I'm not truly sure how this will respond, I bet if you use the structured data tester it will give you an answer. In my research as well, I don't think it's a good idea to use display:none (resource) - but my feeling is if you do this correctly, the breadcrumbs will show in the SERPs.

-Dan

Hey There

The post suggests keeping specific tags that are receiving traffic indexed. You can do this on a tag by tag basis with Yoast. The post also does not recommend deleting tags, just noindexing them.

I would suggest keeping tags that are bringing the most traffic indexed, while just noindexing the rest. Do not delete them. Out of your 1,000+ tags - how many are responsible for the 700+ visits?

There's also the option to 301 redirect tags to the most relevant post or category. But again, I would only do this with tags that aren't bringing substantial traffic.

-Dan

Hey There

First question, which I have to get out of the way - are these coming from Bing/Yahoo etc? Use this advanced segment to show Google search traffic only just to double check.

Phillip could be right on the money, I've seen lots of traffic from image search. I'd check to see if you're ranking there. And Brian has a good point too about it possibly being local, or some other form of personalization.

The best thing you can do is use segments and filters to isolate any other factors - ie: mobile vs desktop, location, etc. I very rarely see an actual error in GA so I would keep digging!

-Dan

Hi There

You could generate one for the whole site, but this will be a pain because you'll have to update it very often. What I would recommend is;

• Let Yoast generate one for the blog area. This will sit under site.com/blog/sitemap_index.xml
• Create one for the static part of the site - you can use a sitemap generator (google search). Just don't include the blog in it.

Then you can submit each separate to Webmaster Tools. This way Yoast will update the blgo sitemap automatically, you'll just have to update the static one on your own.

-Dan

Hi There

To noindex pages there are a few methods;

• use a meta noindex without robots.txt - I think that is why some may not be removed. The robots.txt block crawling so they can not see the noindex.

• use a 301 redirect - this will eventually kill off the old pages, but it can definitely take a while.

• canonical it to another page. and as Chris says, don't block the page or add extra directives. If you canonical the page (correctly), I find it usually drops out of the index fairly quickly after being crawled.

• use the URL removal tool in webmaster tools + robots.txt or 404. So if you 404 a page or block it with robots.txt you can then go into webmaster tools and do a URL removal. This is NOT recommended though in most normal cases, as Google prefers this be for "emergencies".

The only method that removes pages within a day or two guaranteed is the URL removal tool.

I would also examine your site since it is new, for something that is causing additional pages to be generated and indexed. I see this a lot with ecommerce sites where they have lots of pagination, facets, sorting, etc and those can generate lots of other pages which get indexed.

Again, as Chris says, you want to be careful to not mix signals. Hope this all helps!

-Dan

Hi There

I'm an associate here at Moz, and have asked the other associates if they might know the answer, as this one's a little outside of my experience. Please follow up and let us know if you don't hear from anyone.

Thanks!

-Dan

Fortunately I predicted this question a year and nineteen days ago: http://www.evolvingseo.com/2012/08/10/clean-sweep-yo-tag-archives-now/

No seriously, you just want to run that analysis to make sure you're not killing a random tag or two with some traffic or links. In which case you can selectively delete and/or noindex.

-Dan

Hi Diana

This may have been implied, but is it not an option to change your internal linking? It's obviously best to have all your internal links point to the exact locations you want without 301 redirects. So absolute URLs are recommended in this case pointing to final pages.

I think this article may help you: http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/5-easy-steps-to-fix-secure-page-https-duplicate-content/ - I'd follow the steps there, it's pretty solid!

-Dan

Greg

Awesome! Glad the mozinar is a valuable resource! Gotta love grumpy cat memes

-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

Hi David

I would recommend cross checking this with Screaming Frog and/or Webmaster Tools. It's only a concern really if the web spiders and users are experiencing these 404's. I have seen it happen where Moz's crawler may hit 404's that Google and/or users do not.

If you get the errors in Screaming Frog or Webmaster Tools as well - here's what you need to do to fix them.

1. Go to the source page of one of the broken links.
2. View the HTML source.
3. Do a control-F and search for the broken link (have it copied to your clipboard)
4. Determine where in the code it's coming from.
5. Then you can probably debug it from there.

Let us know if that gets you there.

Thanks!

-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

Hi Courtney

It should be under Yoast->Edit Files -- see this screenshot. If it's not there, are you using some sort of special host for WordPress? You're using WordPress.ORG (not .com)?

I agree that its good for you to learn, but .htaccess is something that can take down your site with one misplaced character, so I would be careful if you're going to edit it. Have a friend you can call on who might know how to fix it if something goes awry. Also, you should have FTP access readily available, in case it does break, that's how you're going to get in and fix it.

Certainly not discouraging you from learning it - just be careful and have FTP access in case you need it!

-Dan