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Kimberly
You're welcome. To clarify, there is no duplicate content penalty for this. It just means Google can't crawl your site as efficiently and also might not pass link value (page authority) to all the pages as strongly as they might otherwise.
This article is pretty advanced, but explains the idea of crawl optimization really well.
Hi Kimberly
I don't think Google did anything to purposely hurt the site. The AdWords and Organic search depts are really huge in themselves, and I don't think there is much cross-conversation there. What sort of quality scores are you getting from AdWords for your pages? Are they good?
Bounce rate is a weird metric. A lower bounce rate could be bad too, because users are maybe not easily finding what they want on the landing page and are forced to click around.
Definitely play with the ads. Keep specific notes about what you change and when. And keep in mind, it may take some time (weeks) to reflect in any ranking change.
You should also make a proper 404 page in the template/design of your site - it's just the default server message. These sort of things help show Google you are a responsible site owner 
Internally, you should also avoid linking to 301 redirects. Link straight to your final URL. For example you link to http://www.homespellingwords.com/About (capitol A) but it redirects to http://www.homespellingwords.com/about (lowercase a). This hurts crawl efficiency and reduces how link authority flows through the site. This happens a LOT on your site, so update all your links
Hi Joost
Dan here (I wrote that Setting Up WordPress article )
Without seeing your site, it's tough to be 100% sure, but here's what I would make sure you're doing:
The key with how "deep" you index categories may depend on:
I find it's good to hit that sweet spot where you don't get a ridiculous amount of pages indexed, but are deep enough in the categories with search volume to not miss out on any traffic.
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 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"
Great! That's definitely a bit more specific.
If you look at your anchor text for the back links in Open Site Explorer, you'll see a lot of "commercial" keywords which is very unnatural --> http://screencast.com/t/CeMDxdug - I'm going to guess from that evidence, that your rankings for "balar" keywords was artificially high to begin with, and now Google has dropped the site back down to where it should have been all along. The site itself looks pretty nice - not very spammy, and the design and content is pretty good.
Here are some great resources for acquiring links that are more natural and are more of a win-win-win for the business, users and Google:
Here's some custom strategy for you. For businesses like this, you're serving a LOT of different industries. I find it effective to dive into one specific industry you serve (like urban watse: http://www.sinobaler.com/application/urban-waste-baling-press/) - this could be a REALLY fascinating topic to do some high quality content about!! I'm sure it's a hot topic, and people are very passionate about it. Invest some resources into a well researched piece of content about this topic and get it in front of people who care about the topic. They won't be the people who necessarily buy something, but they will share and link to it like crazy. I am thinking of people who care about natural, the environment, green living etc.
Then apply that to all the other sectors begin served: agriculture, food, clothing, etc etc - so you don't have to always write about the products, you can write about the industries.
Ethan
It sounds like the issue has been resolved. I'm not too familiar with domain add-ons but if you have any more trouble let us know and I'll be sure another Moz Associate takes a look.
-Dan (Moz Associate)
Hi Sally
I would start by checking out some of the great resources out there answering a lot of these questions and more:
I would recommend getting your question more specific. Those questions are as broad as you can get in SEO. More specific questions might be:
Hope that helps you keep going in the right direction!
-Dan
When you say "the original blog content would be shortened with a link to the full blog" can you explain that a little bit more? You mean an article like this http://myadvocates.com/blog/fda-issues-warning-about-so-called-brain-supplement-prevagen would be only partial and it would link to the full version somewhere else? And the destination new content is what would contain more FDA products?
Also, it is likely you are getting most of your traffic from only a handful of posts. I would do an 80/20 analysis of your blog content (how I show step by step here) or just eyeball your analytics. To mitigate most of your risk you could leave the top 5-10 posts for traffic the same.
As Cyrus points out here you should be careful with how much you change the contents of the page. Google is good at understanding semantics, which means they are more likely to decide not to pass value through redirects because of changes if those changes are too different than the original content. They also understand document structure, so if you're changing from a full post to another format you should be careful with that too.
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.
Hi There
The screenshot doesn't seem to be working - but pretty sure this is how it works:
to see "with change" at all, the first date in the time period can't be more than 32 days ago (for example, today March 27th if I set start date Feb 24th or earlier, I won't get "with change")
it compares based upon your time range.
if I have Feb 27th - March 27th selected - it compares that to Feb 26th - Jan 26th (the prior 30 days).
if I have March 20th - March 27th selected - it compares it to March 12 - March 19th (the prior 7 days).
Hopefully that makes sense? Pretty sure that's how they are calculating it.
Hi Anukul
As far as I am aware, it is not possible to fetch and render via an API - however you can double-check the documentation here: https://developers.google.com/webmaster-tools/
It sounds like what you really need to work on perhaps is Crawl Optimization. If Google thinks the site is important enough, they will crawl it fast enough to catch all of the changes.
AJ Kohn wrote and excellent post on it here which I highly encourage you check out. Here are a few other resources on getting Google to crawl your site faster:
Hope those help!
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.
Hi Neil
Has this been now resolved? I've tried crawling the site a whole bunch of ways and am not turning up any 404s at all. It's also possible the errors in webmaster tools were old. Did you try "marking as fixed" and see if they come back?
Hi Monica
Basically you need to edit/update your links in the footer for blog categories. Depending on your setup there'd be a few ways to do this. Some guesses:
So that's it - you just need to know where to update your footer links. It might be something you would want to ask a dev or someone experienced with wordpress to help you with.
Hi
As Ryan said, if it's the only option it's OK to do. It won't hurt your SEO abilities.
Thanks ... many paths to the same result
Thanks Kevin!
Also, you can crawl the old site with Screaming Frog SEO Spider to check old URLs. Here's how to do that.
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.
How big is the site? If it's say, under a few hundred pages then you can just leave the structured URLs, and I usually prefer this for good UX and architecture. If the site is much bigger, it might be a little more complex and the specifics could affect things a little.
I think drilldown should be available if you just click 'facebook.com' etc - no?
My second thought is perhaps someone has scraped your GA code and has it on another site? Are you using Google tag manager or do you have the GA code right in the source code of your website? Can you check http://spyonweb.com/ to see if any other websites have your GA code on them?
Let us know if you see anything!
Most likely, but I would double check with your developer - since I might be unaware of anything out of the ordinary!
Great - the info helps. To be honest, this isn't a huge issue if left alone, or if you do the redirect. But if you're worried about users landing on the wrong page, you can 301 redirect to the homepage and that should be just fine.
If you can't delete them, you should probably 301 redirect them to the most similar page, or just the homepage. You can redirect them in the .htaccess file or use a redirection plugin: https://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/
Hi Kevin
Looks like you have some great answers here. I'll just add my 2 cents as well:
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?
Awesome! Thanks for the update.
No problem
What you would want to do is learn a little about site architecture, and how different pages will target different thing. Think of a sire like Zappos:
So your homepage should target the broadest concept / keywords. Then you might have category pages targeting things slightly more specific. Then your posts would target informational searches of very specific things people are looking for.
Hi There
We were just saying the type of content being created seemed like a very good fit for sharing on social media.
I'd say if it's your goal to be practicing SEO - that process and SEO work should start way before writing a new blog post and entering a focus keyword. You would want to begin everything with keyword research. This helps you determine what to create content about to rank for things.
You may also want to learn a little about how different pages should rank for different things - and your homepage should target your main over arching topic. This will be usually the broadest, most highly searched term.
There's some great resources on keyword research:
http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/keyword-research
Hi There
To step back a second, not all blog posts or pieces of content need a focus keyword. It depends on the goals of your content, and how you are trying to get it traffic. It looks like a lot of your content may be best suited to get traffic from social media etc. That's great, and in that case just write your article and don't worry about the focus keyword too much because it may rank for stuff by happenstance, but your main traffic sources won't be SEO.
That said, sometimes you may create content because you specifically see an opportunity to maybe rank for something where there is a "gap" in existing content in Google's search results. For example, you may notice a lack of great results for something like "pembroke welsh vs cardigan corgi" - and as a goal, you may set out to create the best piece of content on that topic to rank for it, and SEO is your primary goal. In that case, you'd enter "pembroke welsh vs cardigan corgi" into Yoast, and it will tell you how well your article is optimized for that based upon simple best practices.
So in other words - focus keyword is great when you know your target keyword ahead of time and are writing an article based off of that. If you're just writing an article for non-SEO purposes, maybe you'd refine a target keyword after the fact, but it's not a huge concern.
Choosing your focus keyword also has to do with just knowing good keyword research in general. There's two main factors to think about. Search volume and competition.
The trick of course is to try to find the highest volume but lowest difficulty, and that's a great beginning point for choosing focus keywords.
I would definitely check out the list on Clarity: https://clarity.fm/browse/technology/wordpress - and for developers it's often best to look in your own network - so I'd ask friends / colleagues for referrals, or you can search your LinkedIn connections as well.
Great! So glad it's helped so far, please keep us updated
Hi - I wouldn't focus too much on that - I would take the suggestions made in my first answer and start with those! You really don't want to block crawling of categories!
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 - this was an interesting one! But I think I have found some of the issues.
Those are just some of the immediate things I saw. I'd start there.
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
I'm not an advanced analytics expert (maybe medium level ) but let me try to help out.
1.Enhanced eCommerce vs Event Tracking
Enhanced eCommerce helps you measure how users interact with your products, shopping cart etc - so you can see in depth information around adding items, viewing items, cart abandoning, purchase completions. You can slice and dice this at a product level. This is only for sites where you can purchase products on the site.
Event Tracking is like a blank canvas to track any sort of user behavior you want (within some limitations) - but you might track a button click, interaction with a video (play, pause, etc), or PDF downloads, or scrolling behavior.
Importantly, you can turn and event into a goal where you could track sign-up form completions (via the click of the 'submit' button) as a goal and tie that back to your standard analytics data.
Event tracking can be done on any website - even if you don't sell products.
2. In short: no. You may still need event tracking.
If you enable enhanced eCommerce, this will give you the capabilities described above (measuring product and shopping cart interactions) - see this for more info https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6014841?hl=en ...BUT your option to use event tracking is your choice based upon what you might want to measure. If you want to measure clicks on your email list signup button you need event tracking. If you want to trigger an event with scrolling behavior (see this for an example http://cutroni.com/blog/2014/02/12/advanced-content-tracking-with-universal-analytics/)
Hope that helps!
Hi Jeremy
To my knowledge this is not possible with wordpress.com - this is a little old but states such is the case: http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/is-it-possible-to-embed-canonical-url-in-my-posts-and-pages
adamxj2 posted a good link below from Google, which gives some other steps you can take to help mitigate common issues a canonical tag is meant to address. I find that very often people use canonicals as a band aid anyway, instead of a deeper fix - so there is likely another way to achieve what you need to.
Thanks for chiming in! Although that Google resources does give some ways to mitigating issues that a canonical tag tries to help with, it's not really a way to literally add a canonical meta tag - which is what the OP is likely looking to do (although I do recommend to the OP to be sure you've done the other things as the Google article states.) Just wanted to clarify that
-Dan (Moz Associate)
Yes that is correct. And yes you already have "noindex subpages of archives".
Yes I have a very extensive article on Moz here: http://moz.com/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success
I did I Mozinar here about wordpress: http://moz.com/webinars/hands-on-answers-to-the-most-asked-wordpress-qestions
I have a comparison of Yoast vs All In One here: http://www.evolvingseo.com/2014/02/14/all-in-one-vs-yoast-seo-test-drive/
You should definitely "noindex tags (that is what Matt was talking about to some extent).
I would also "noindex subpages of archives" in your Yoast settings as well.
Webmaster Tools and Google might not always react right away to certain site changes, which might be why you are seeing a delay.
Look near the code and see if there is indication if it was added by a plugin - or see if you can find "
Hi Dan
Check your source code and do a Cntrl=F search for "hentry" and see if you can spot the code and any indication of if it's a plugin or where it's from. It would either be a plugin or coded into one of your theme's files (like post.php or header.php etc)
I think the data highlighter is for less code savvy folks - I have never used it, but I would give it a try as an alternative. Before you go tagging stuff, I would determine if/what on your site actually needs to be tagged too
Hi Dan
This is another type of markup that is ending up on the page - maybe it's another plugin or it's coded into the theme? It's telling you for the 'hentry' the author and updated fields are missing. Unless we know how the hentry card is getting there to begin with, it's hard to say what needs to be done.