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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

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.

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

Although this could help us read the code, I'd say it's pretty low on the priority list as far as where to spend time/energy. The site is WordPress, so unless they recode the theme or get a developer to do it, it's going to have to be compressed code.

There are many tools which can aid the process of evaluating a site's code;

• http://www.browseo.net/
• fetch as Google - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/158587?hl=en
• a header checker like - http://urivalet.com/
• plugins like the MozBar - http://moz.com/tools/seo-toolbar

Hi Chris

For keyword targeting information I would look specifically to these resources;

• http://moz.com/blog/visual-guide-to-keyword-targeting-onpage-optimization
• http://moz.com/blog/keyword-targeting-density-and-cannibalization-whiteboard-friday

Think of a page as having a central topic which is the page's purpose. Then make that page fulfill that purpose as best as possible. So if it's Colorado Barn Construction - what is a person who types that into Google looking for? And give it to them.

Link building - I would go after links that;

• Can also get you referral traffic
• Are on pages that rank for keywords in Google
• Have good engagement, like comments and social shares
• Are relevant (at least loosely) to your industry
• Are not on sites that were obviously built for links (like blogs which accept any writer, blogs that don't focus on just a few niche topics)
• I would stop using exact anchors like "colorado barn construction" to create links (see your question)

I would go after EDU links if they fit the criteria above.

Some link building resources;

• http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies
• http://www.linkbuildingbook.com/link-building-resources.html

A video can definitely help engagement - but add a video if you would add a video and knew nothing about SEO. In other words, add a video because it's the best thing to have on that page and don't worry about the SEO implications.

A great resource on how to rank in general;

• http://moz.com/blog/how-to-rank

Also the periodic table of ranking factors will give you a good overview of all the factors;

• http://searchengineland.com/seotable

Hi

I don't think the percentage has changed at all. It can vary depending on specific circumstances, but as a default this should be largely consistent.

I don't have direct experience with tools to help migrate the content itself (most of my clients have developers do that). You might want to look at this: http://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-move/

It depends what the existing site is built with - if it's on a current CMS I'd google "migrate from [cms name] to wordpress".

Someone with good database skills could probably do it that way.

Hi There

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hi There

What I would do is perhaps refine the process of how you're building the new site. In brief;

1. Build out the new wordpress site exactly how you want it. Don't sweat redirects etc.
2. When it's done being built, then match old pages to new pages to create redirects (do this by crawling the old site and the new site with screaming frog, you'll get your final list of old/new URLs, and just match them up).

This way, you're just focusing on making the new site as perfect as possible - and then do the redirects.

To answer specific questions;

Or is there a way to eliminate the added "/" WP attaches at the end?

There probably is, although I wouldn't sweat it too much. Whatever the new page is you end up, you're just going to redirect the old version to the new one.

And a way to custom add the real-estate-blog folder?

Yes - you can go to Setting->Permalinks and use "custom structure"

Hi

I would definitely do #2 and move to wordpress normally. The link juice loss is minimal. Just make sure you don't end up with chains of redirects, which you can follow my post here on finding and eliminating them;

http://www.evolvingseo.com/2013/10/09/how-to-find-fix-redirect-chains/

Adrian

First step, is to check that the page is indexed - which is it. So then it is a matter of ranking, which is a huge topic of course, so let me point you to some resources that have already covered how to rank;

• http://moz.com/blog/how-to-rank
• http://blog.kissmetrics.com/seo-for-ecommerce-websites/
• http://blog.crazyegg.com/2013/09/12/on-site-ecommerce-seo/
• http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies

In general if your on page grade is an A you may need to continue making the site more popular with links, social media, referral traffic etc. For example the link metrics show a fairly low DA of 35 and online 10 linking root domains.

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!

Hi Wesley

They won't see it as a normal link, but Google will try to probably crawl and process them, it just would take longer to do so. If you really want to prevent Google from crawling a link, use the rel=nofollow attribute like this on the link itself;

sign in

Reference here

That's pretty much what he's saying, because tag archives by design are not really useful pieces of content on their own. They are just lists of blog posts. It seems useful on the surface, but when you think about it, users don't want to search a search engine to then just have to search through another list of articles.

Plus people have tried using tags to rank for keywords a lot in the past, and I have seen far less tag archives ranking in Google over the last few years.

Hey There

Most of the time, I default to recommending to NOT index tag pages. It's what I recommend in these two articles;

• http://www.evolvingseo.com/2012/08/10/clean-sweep-yo-tag-archives-now/
• http://moz.com/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success

BUT, with that said, I make these recommendations because people generally don't know what they're doing, and tag archives turn into a big mess. They can result in lots of thin/unhelpful pages, which do not help much when indexed.

I could see a point for using tags in this very specific intentional way. But you'd have to do it perfect;

• You can not over tag things.
• You need to make the tag archives look great
• They need to provide extra value above and beyond the post itself
• And you may want to to add customizations to them (like this plugin does for categories)

You have to recognize the other better options you are forgoing by using tags;

• You could create a page or post focused on the keyword
• You could create a category around that keyword
• You could manually assemble a page/post which is a resource that pulls all your posts together, much like a tag would do automatically, but this would be a unique piece of content hand curated.

I would generally stick with <a>links if you want to ensure web crawlers can crawl the links. Its possible they may be able to process <select>and crawl through to those pages, but I'd suspect it may be slower and less reliable than a normal anchor link.</select></a>

Hey There

I've not used Squarespace but this looks like your answer here: http://help.squarespace.com/guides/how-do-i-create-url-shortcuts-or-mappings

I think they are calling them "shortcuts" or "mappings" and not "redirects" but looks like it achieves what you need. As others have said the global catch all isn't very ideal, you should definitely individually redirect old pages.

Hope that helps!

Hi Mike

That is odd for sure. I could see this being tricky to diagnose over a Q&A so I'll suggest some more things and ultimately you might want to try to see if someone can help.

These are just guesses / possibilities;

1. Do you have any caching plugins etc? Try disabling those
2. Try disabling / enabling Yoast. Your settings should remain.
3. Try one by one disabling other plugins and seeing if it changes.
4. Are you using a theme that could conflicting? Check your theme settings.
5. You may want to try Yoast support directly - he typically will claim it's not his plugin causing an issue (and 99% of the time it isn't) - so might be tough to get help, but that would be the ultimate source I think of a solution.

Beyond getting hands on with it, that's what I could offer as some other guesses. It does sound like something possibly simple. I would keep exploring all options! If you do find the cause feel free to write back and let us know.

Hi Mike

Yep it's clearer, thanks You had noindexed/nofollowed a lot of low quality pages, since improved them and want to return them to index/follow.

Just to check, do you have this option when editing each individual post in the Yoast box?

--> http://screencast.com/t/epjFCpGl8hT

Or do you mean you are selecting nofollow and it keeps switching back? Is Yoast and WordPress updated to the latest version?

Also, you are seeing "nofollow" in the HTML source? I know this is probably what you mean, just confirming to not miss a detail.

-Dan

Hey There

Just seeing if you still need help with this? Just to clarify, having a "nofollow" meta tag on the post does not prevent it from being indexed, that would be a "nopindex" tag - perhaps we're using the two terms interchangeably here?

To get the posts indexed again, you want three things to be true;

1. There is no "noindex" present in the html meta tags
2. There is nothing blocking the content in robots.txt
3. You are linking to the posts from the block so they are crawled.

If those three things are all true, Google does need to crawl the page again to then reindex it. Thomas is correct in that you can "fetch as Googlebot" in webmaster tools to speed up this process and you can then submit that page, or even the whole site to the index.

Let us know if you still need help!

-Dan

Hey There

Unfortunately I have seen the same issues as Chris and Anthony describe - and that is it's never clear how updated the data is in WMT.

In theory I believe Google needs to crawl the page(s) the backlinks were on, see they are no longer there, and propagate that to your WMT account. I do know that for the disavow tool, Google has said it can take them up to 6 months to process all the sites in your file. So who know, perhaps it's an equally long time range for removing links and seeing them disappear from the link report.

Anyhow - I do have a small tip. For any link cleanup we have done, we keep a very detailed spreadsheet of all the links and a status on action and result. So when you pull new link reports from any tool (WMT, Moz, Majestic etc) you can compare that to your spreadsheet and eliminate duplicates or links you have already dealt with.

Also, one fast way to check several hundred links at once is to put the links in a .txt file, and upload to Screaming Frog in 'list' more - and crawl all of them with a filter looking for your domain name. This will tell you a) what linking pages don't even exist anymore (404) and b) if you still have a link on them.

If you want something even more robust at managing links, perhaps look into BuzzStream - http://www.buzzstream.com/ - I haven't used it myself (yet, but may do so soon) and I hear it's good to keep track of links.

-Dan

Hope that helps!

Hi Jason

Glad you are liking the community so far! I would recommend starting with this post I did for Moz to help answer exactly these questions about WordPress and SEO: http://moz.com/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success

When you're starting out and have just a few tags (6 isn't much) it's not a huge deal, but for some sites as they grow it turns into 300+ tags without planning on it - then it's a little more of an issue. Not something that would cause a penalty per se, but just not great for the site to have those extra pages indexed and existing because they don't generally add any value (they are often similar to the posts themselves).

I would use maybe 3-4 tags tops for any blog post. They are little detailed words to describe the content. Additionally, tags only have a utility if used as navigation in the site somehow: either a list of popular tags in the sidebar or sometimes you can click on the tags for each post at the bottom of the post.

Lots of people try to make tags to rank in search engines but I have found this to be a bad strategy. In general, I recommend people to noindex tags as shown in the article. With the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress you should also "noindex subpages of archives".

Categories - I would create 5-7 categories that you will file all blog posts into - and only use those and don't let categories grow (don't keep adding new categories). You can customize your category pages with this plugin: http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-custom-category-pages/ - and indexing them is fine.

Good luck!

-Dan

Hi Marcus

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

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

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

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

Just wanted to add my two cents and make sure you're all set. Pretty sure everyone here nailed it. The brand name is a little ambiguous and there are other things our there that could legitimately rank for that. It is a little curious how Google is not ranking it for the brand yet Binghoo is.

One quick example, the Twitter account still links to their old domain - https://twitter.com/fsstudiodev - fix a whole bunch of little things like that and in aggregate they should add up to more clear brand signals.

One thing I'll mention which no one else did ----> Rel Publisher - this connects the G+ page to the website and is probably THE most powerful brand signal you can easily send in Google's eyes. I would do that as high priority.

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.

As long as you 410 (delete) the old pages, they are no longer indexed and will not cause a duplicate content issue.

You can safely move to a new domain, move the content over (upgrade it a little) and there should be no duplicate content issues. The duplicate content issues were designed for things like just scraping content from news feeds and posting them on your own site, and not having any unique or original. Or selling products as a reseller and not doing anything to the manufacturers text etc.

If you move the site to a new domain - I would just 410 the pages on the old site and not do any redirects. You were probably only ranking for a short period of time because of the unnatural back links. If you redirect them you will pass the negative link values over to the new site (those that were not fixed or disavowed anyway) and there is probably not much for good link metrics to warrant a redirect. You will lose any traffic from people who are trying to visit the old site, so maybe you can put up a message on the old site's homepage that it has moved to a new domain, but not link to it.

OK so what I would do there is;

1. Add meta noindex tags to the child pages.

2. Wait for them to drop out of the index (check for them every week or so with site: searches or cache:)

3. When they get noindexed, then add rel = nofollow to the links within the HTML that points to those child pages so they stop getting crawled in the future. You can leave the noindex in place if you want.

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...

Hi Anthony

Kurt's answer was pretty dead on (thanks Kurt!).

Just want to add some more detail about the disavow specifically. We've been told by John Muller in some of his Google Hangouts (he works on the webmaster tools team) that the disavow can take up to 6 months to fully take effect. This is because Google has to have crawled all the domains/pages in the disavow file, based upon their own crawl schedule (having nothing to do with when you submit the file). As they crawl the disavowed URLs, they then add a nofollow basically on those links.

Sounds like you're doing the right things! I would also think about being sure to try to get traffic from other places in the meantime, even paid. I have heard John also suggest that you can start testing page quality with PPC traffic. I also believe evidence of other traffic sources, especially social, will help any site recover much more quickly.

Hey There - glad you're enjoying the forums!

So if the tabbed "child" pages can not be crawled and indexed individually you have nothing to worry about. Are they indexed? Can you get cache for them by typing cache:www.yoursite.com/page-name ?

You can test crawling by using Screaming Frog. If the tabbed child pages do not show up when you crawl the site, you probably don't need to do anything.

If they ARE crawlable, then yes I would noindex them.

Hmmm this could be tricky once it's starts becoming unclear what redirects were done where etc. I'd take a clean slate approach - note that to do this you have to have the OLD URLs somewhere - either in analytics, an old crawl, archive.org, webmaster tools etc;

1. Gather up ALL old URLs from the sources listed above (old crawls, analytics, webmaster tools etc)
2. Prepare any 301 redirects you need. I recommend using the .htaccess file. It's much easier to keep track of and have it all in once place.
3. Disable the redirect plugin
4. Remove any redirects from .htaccess
5. Test the site to make sure they are all gone
6. Put your new redirects all back into the .htaccess file

Now in theory you should have redirects ONLY in the .htaccess file. Test the site by crawling it. Test some of the old URLs and make sure they redirect.cYou can also put your old back links into Screaming Frog in list mode and check them.

I find the redirect plugin is OK but it's best to shut off any automatic creation of redirects.

Unfortunately I don't know enough of the specific intricacies of how each plugin performs for speed. But you pretty much named all the top plugins I can think of.

What I am suggesting is, to choose your favorite plugin and then use caching and maybe even a CDN to help with pagespeed.

Webpagetest shows you are using neither right now: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140108_9E_b84581251c692e8e31f098c5f3ad5917/ - and it shows that images are not compressed either.

So in other words, make everything else about the site as fast as possible.

If you examine the waterfall view for example, there is a file taking over 1.3 seconds to load --> http://screencast.com/t/UooUNXsuiZ

Here's one of the best posts I've ever seen on speeding up wordpress - http://www.wphub.com/tutorials/speeding-up-wordpress-website/

To add to Bradley's answer, which would be my choice plugin, after it's installed you can test it with webpagetest.org or Google PageSpeed Insights - and basically see if any of it's elements are causing a slow load time, and you can use things like caching or a cdn to work against any slowness the feature might add.

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.

In my experience this is going to wildly vary. I've seen things all over the map. There's a lot of variables like if there's any custom design involved, who is going to handle the redirects etc with more attention to detail. So unfortunately I do not know of any standard cost per page etc.

I would honestly choose the company based upon prior work record - get some references and/or example work. I do find that many times the more expensive option is the "cheapest" in the long run cause they'll do it right the first time, but vet that by talking to some past customers.

Hey There

Bradley's answer is great. I just want to add, you really should only worry about the suggestions here - http://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ - in regards to Google and speed / UX factors that would affect ranking.

You should also check for mobile errors in Webmaster Tools.

Hey there

So Chris is right, this isn't always the meta description showing, but often snippets of text based upon what the searcher typed. But Google is getting the text from somewhere on the partner's website.

One thing you should do is check Google's text only cache - type cache:www.domain.com/url-name (adding cache: in front will give you Google's cache - and then click "text-only" in the top right. Search for the text in question there. It's possible either the content is "hidden" somehow but crawled, or maybe it used to be there, and it's still in Google's cache even thought the current page is different.

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

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

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

Hi Joni

I was also going to recommend setting up events/goals as Chris mentioned. The goal gets tracked as a metric, so you can view metrics for any traffic source. You would basically do it in one of two ways;

• either have an event trigger when the "submit" button on the form is clicked

• or use the "thank you" or "confirmation" landing page URL and set the event as a URL destination.

Then, once you have an event, you can turn any event into a Goal.

While it is true you can get this data for Organic Search traffic in one bucket, unfortunately due to "not provided" you won't be able to get accurate data by keyword.

-Dan

Cool, you bet - thanks for following up and letting us know it worked out

Hey Erick

Did the old URLs/Pages get new URLs? If they are clean from a link perspective on the old site they all need to be individually redirected to the matching new pages. Also, check to be sure all the new pages/content is indexed and cached with some site searches etc. It might be a matter of getting that to happen completely first as well.

-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 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 Jonathan

Although Google's guidelines don't explicitly mention "discounts" I do feel this would be considered a paid or manipulated link as the company is offering a monetary benefit in exchange for a link.

Google's Guidelines state that any link that is paid must be disclosed in a machine readable format and nofollowed

-Dan

1. For increasing Domain Authority, as mentioned in my other answer this is about gaining just a few really good quality links from highly trafficked and trusted sources. This can be done more proactively through maybe outreach or trying to get a story about you done somewhere, or land an interview etc. Or it can be done more passively through exceptional content, or an exceptional brand and you will gain links as a result.

2. Outbound links don't really carry weight in the sense of authority being given to your site the way an inbound link does. Having outbound links on your site may help to a small degree with perhaps your trustworthiness in Google's eyes though.

3. That is correct.

Hi Scott

I don't think further on-page tweaking for keywords is the best approach to be visible again for "web design akron ohio" as Google already "knows" this is what the site is about, and you will probably not boost ranking there by small tweaks to keywords on-site.

We know Google knows the site is about this by plugging in your domain to the AdWords keyword suggestion tool --> http://screencast.com/t/rZ0E74GVjeY

I think a combination of perhaps these three things;

1. Local SEO
2. Links
3. Social

Local SEO

For local SEO, make sure your local listings, citations, reviews etc are all complete, updated, current etc. Use https://getlisted.org/ or something like Whitespark's local citation finder/builder to help you there.

Links

I find for small/local business you don't need a lot of links, but you might need a few high quality and recent links to help get you back where you need to be. High quality means, editorially chosen/placed within the body of content - linked to probably with brand anchor text and in a good context about your business. This might mean a story in a local news site, or a good mention in a higher authority blog - check this out for some ideas: http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies

You don't have an over-optimized link profile from an anchor text perspective at the moment, so that's good - keep the links as natural as possible.

Social

What I mean here is build the authority / relevance of your business in one or maybe two social networks and make sure to clearly associate your profile with your domain.

In your industry, you'd probably want to get really good with maybe Twitter, Google Plus or even Pinterest (where you can share nice visual/design content) - and make sure you link to/from the profile and your domain. In the case of Google Plus, use rel author and rel publisher.

-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.

Hey Aron

Just wanted to chime in on the wordpress bit. EGOL nailed the core answer though. But for the noindex, yes you can just noindex any pages you want to and this isn't going to cause any issues. Noindexed pages do not count towards Panda or low user metrics in the algo, so it's a great way to let the content exist but not have it cause trouble in the SERPs.

-Dan