Welcome to the Q&A Forum
Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.
Apparently, Google is indexing your main domain http://sportiqe.com with over 7,000 pages already indexed (https://www.google.com/search?q=site:sportiqe.com). Perhaps you are also seeing the previous version as you set the custom domain recently?
Looking at your site, everything looks ok, canonicals are well set, etc.
Hi!
The 1st error is given when you are linking somewhere in your site to a 4XX page. Try following the links in hat error report to see which page is linking to that 4XX. Once you find it, simply remove the link or fix it.
The 2nd, if you are just adding the missing tags, it would take at least a week to reflect in the crawl stats in Moz as Mozbot scrapes your site one a week.
Hope that clears it up 
It's the same thing! Both result in a 301 redirect...
The only difference is probably a little faster at the registrar level (unnoticeable), and the need of a server for the htaccess option. Besides that, there are no SEO benefits on any.
I've never seen Google (or other engines) pay any attention to HTML comments. In fact, I've seen strong evidence that they are completely ignored. It only makes sense. People stick all kinds of things in comments for a wide variety of purposes. I can't imagine why a search engine would do anything else. And as far as Panda is concerned, Panda is aimed at the user's experience and since HTML comments are invisible to users, there's no reason they should have any effect.
How about a rewrite rule?
To redirect products, you can use something like this:
OSCommerce URL: http://www.domain.com/your-product-name-p-123.html
Magento url (assuming product names are the same when importing the products): http://www.domain.com/your-product-name.html
.htaccess:
RewriteRule ^(.*)-p-(.*)\.html$ $1.html [L]
However, I would actually use a redirect, you loose some link juice, but it's minimum (with something like this):
RewriteRule ^(.*)-p-(.*)\.html$ $1.html [R=301,L]
Hope that helps!
By the way Hugh, if you think the broken link reported by Moz isn't actually there, then you can contact them about a possible glitch here: help@moz.com
If the images are being indexed just fine, even though they are "four folders deep", why would you change that? It would be like trying to fix something that is working perfectly, you may end up with something you didn't expect... (reindexing all images could remove them from the index for a while... it won't do any harm, but as you said, they are just fine where they are now).
Hope that helps!
2 ways to do it with different effects:
Robots.txt in each subdomain. This will entirely block any search engine to even access those pages, so they won't know what they have inside.
User-Agent:*
Disallow: /
noindex tags in those pages. This method allows crawlers to read the page and maybe index (if you set a "follow") the pages to which you link to.or "nofollow" if you don't want the linked pages to be indexed either.
Hope that helps!
Yes, it does. Google penalizes links that pass pagerank and are built unnaturally, like those ones you mention. You should have the IT company set ALL those links to nofollow, that will accomplish both the company goals, avoid/remove a penalty while still providing the municipality site a way to go to the IT site.
Hope that helped.
PS: check if the IT company received a manual penalty under WMT to verify, and if they did, fix the issue adding a nofollow to ALL the links and then file a reconsideration request.
EDIT: most likely, if those are the only links you have, you received a penalty, as a devaluation happens when you actually have no control on the links, but in this case, the IT company placed the links on purpose.
Hey Dan,
If I understood correctly, you should use both. Canonical tags are used tell search engines that the content is located on the canonical content, while hreflang points which version should be served to each visitor depending on the user's location/language.
If you Yoast, then they already handle the canonical tags and there's nothing you need to do. For the hreflang, if you have at the moment only 1 version served to all visitors, then those shouldn't be used. However, if you have 2 versions quite similar, like en-US and en-GB then you will need to choose the one that's default, let's say the US version and have the following on each version:
en-US:
en-GB:
This applies if the en-US and en-GB versions are NOT exactly the same. If the language changes (that's why you create a specific version to each country) you need a canonical in each version pointing to itself.
If the en-US and en-GB have the same contents, then the canonical should point to the en-US version (but there's no need to have the en-GB version really, which makes it useless / expendable).
As you mention that at the moment you do not have any extra langs/regions, then you could leave the tags empty or better remove them.
There's a plugin for wordpress that handles hreflang tags (paid) hreflang Manager
Hope that helps!
Agree with Jeff.
I noticed, however, that using some king of markup to let Google know your "most accessed" and important locations increase the chance of getting those pages in the sitelinks, ie: HTML5 tags like
<nav>.</nav>
You can use robots to disallow google from even crawling those pages, while the meta noindex still allows the crawling but prevents the indexing of those pages.
If you have any sensitive data that you don't want Google to read, then go ahead and use the robots directives you wrote above. However, if you just want them deindexed I'll suggest to go with the meta noindex, as it will allow other pages (linked) to be indexed but leave that particular page out.
Dan,
If you have an English page that is also available on Turkish (same content but rewritten/translated) then an hreflang tag is recommended, not mandatory, but recommended. Although as you said you are already writing in Turkish and geotargeting in GWT, there are other engines too, that regardless their market share, shouldn't be overlooked.
HOWEVER, if you have a page in English not matching a Turkish page, then you don't need the hreflang in that page. The tag is only used when the same content is available on other language/location to tell engines which version they should serve.
What you mention about using x-default and removing the canonical is nonsense. Those are 2 different things and one would not interfere with the other. The plugin I recommended does not mess with Yoast, leaving the canonicals as they should be and adding the hrefland tags as specifies. Check this example on my site English and Spanish using both Yoast and the hreflang Manager plugin:
Check the source code, both have their canonicals and hreflang tags just fine. We chose to use the English version as the default, as you can see in the x-default.
The hreflang tags should be used only when the content is the same (but targeted to a different audience). Of course of the translation from one language to the other some lines must be rewritten to make sense.
In my example, I used two very similar (if not the same langs), however there are things that change, but those are minimal (take as an example a car "hood", in England a "bonnet"). As those are such minimal changes, I don't think a specific version for GB is needed if you are already serving a US version (that's up to you). In that case (1 english version to all english speakers), you only specify the language, instead of the Language and Region:
<link rel="<a class="attribute-value">alternate</a>" href="http://www.example.com" hreflang="<a class="attribute-value">en</a>"/>
Now, just to make sure we have an example that DOES apply a different GEO in en-US and en-GB, could be a page that explains what are car repair centers, plus below it shows a list of repair centers. In these scenario, the content is the same, but the list of repair centers change, you would like to display those in GB to your GB audience (still, from my point of view, useless, but was just an example).
Hope that clears it up
Why would you create an image tag if there's no image to put? If the reason is just to put some words, then yes, that's stuffing, and you could be penalized.
Nope, that post is completely wrong my friend. Besides being from 2011 or even earlier, the writer probably misunderstood to how Google handles external/internal links in WMT.
What is confirmed is that www.domain.com and other.domain.com ARE different domains and a penalty to other.domain.com DOES NOT affect www.domain.com. Otherwise, all blogspot, wordpress.com and others should be penalized by now.
If the event has already passed, and as you say there's no longer any value on those pages, you can just delete them. Or a good option would be to 301 them to a page that explains why the page is no longer available and offer the user other related pages that he could might be interested in.
Hope that helps.
Some pagerank is diluted over a 301 redirect. The same as if you had one link to HenryJewelers.com from Henry.com.
It will certainly be better to use the actual domain. But not going the other way around? Is HenryJewelers.com an established website with lots of value? are all the links pointing to Henry.com? why not going with Henry.com as the main address, it clearly makes more sense user-wise.
Most likely using the rel="alternate" hreflang="x" tag, where X is not only the language but also the location. You should have something like this:
1st line tells the default page.
2nd line tells that visitors with french browsers in France should get that page.
3rd line tells that users with french browsers should get that other page.
Think the best way to apply that and you need to do it for each page that has different versions. Those lines are just for the homepage.
PS: That won't guarantee that Google will show the specific page you want, nothing can, but it will help Google understand the structure and serve the best page to the user.
Hope that helps!
If you delete the page, and it had links pointing to it, the server will return a 404 not found page, which makes you lose any authority they had to pass to the main domain or subdomain.
Using the 301 redirects at least you take a portion of the authority back to your Website. If your CMS is somehow advanced, it should be easy to hide those "expired pages" from the page list avoiding any confusion.
But again, if you redirect the page, lets say about am inbound marketing conference in Boston to the main domain that does not "serve" any kind of useful content to the user that was actually expecting the page of the Boston conference, that won't help at all. Instead, try to 301 them to something that the user may be interested in, even tho the event he was looking for is no longer available; in this case, it could be a page listing all the upcoming inbound marketing conferences (in/near Boston). By going that route you favor your site by making the pagerank flow to the other page and you also help the user, which is the primary target.
None of the ways you decide to display the images will affect Google AdSense, unless you serve a page with a hundred ads and the image there, or if you did some kind of trick to "force" users to click on the ads.
That said, you need to think for the users, put yourself in your visitors' mind. What would be easier? faster? prettier? If you ask me I would definitely go with the lightbox to display image galleries.
It won't hurt you in front of Google eyes either, they are smart enough to interpret lightboxes just fine.
If an author contributes on more than one site, then on G+ you should link to each author page on each site (within the same G+ profile). Each site should have the author page linking to his/her g+ profile. The authorship verification needs a "reciprocal" link to verify "ownership".
Have you tried OSE to find links pointing to the new URL and the old one?
If you are "over-optimizing" the page just to "get the lead" then I'd suggest using a noindex tag to avoid that page from being indexed, as most likely, if those are landing pages specifically designed for users coming form online advertising, they don't offer any added value to your main site.
Are you using the hreflang correctly? it contains both the language and location. If, for example, you french version is being served with the hreflang="fr" that means that users with a French browser should see that page, but not that users in France should see that page.
If you are running an German browser, searching in France, you will probably get the German version first, as the hreflang="de" it's doing it's job. If you'd like to have the french version even for German browsers, you will probably need to add an hreflang="de-FR" and point to the french version.
Even adding all the hreflang tags you may need, Google will ultimately serve what they think is better to the user. There's no way to "force" them, hreflang is just a "guidance"
Hi,
Hope that helps!
Hey Alberto,
If those 44 posts are set to "private" how is Moz finding them? Somewhere in your blog you are linking to them. Find those links and take them down.
Then you should consider 2 things:
Hope that helps!
Maximilian is right. Apparently that's the issue. Moz also respects the noindex, nofollow (I believe) and that's the reason they aren't crawling those pages either.
Moz does it for you if you have a PRO+ account
Anyway, the thing here is that archive, tag and author pages (pagination) do not provide ANY value to the user or Google itself, therefore it should be better no noindex while leaving the follow tag to let the pagerank flow to the pages that DO matter: POSTS.
Did you verify your site with GWT?
If yes, go to "Search Traffic" > "Manual Actions" and see if there's something there.
Penalties could occur for several reasons, manipulative backlinks, stuffing, full spam, etc. Check there and see if you have any.
If not, then it could be Hummingbird or Panda affecting your site.
I am guessing here, but Moz crawler does not respect your robots.txt file. Instead, if you want pages not to be crawled, try using the meta robots noindex for a change and see what happens.
Christian,
I just checked your site and I wasn't able to find those URLs that are constantly changing as you mention.
If you are referring to the restaurant order presented on the page changes, that's nothing to worry about. You are just sorting the restaurants by the last review, right?
I wouldn't recommend noindexing the review section, in fact, I would recommend you further improve it using schema.org markup to tell Google what those "comments" are. You can even use GWT Data Highlighter to markup your data automatically (although only Google will know the markup if you use that method).
About the duplicate content, there's also nothing to worry about, as in the homepage you present only 1 review while in the restaurant page you show all of them, so the content is different.
You should also use schema.org markup to let crawlers know business locations, details, etc and what you are actually listing.
Hope that helps!
Catherine,
If you have a blog you should be using structured data. But in any case that couldn't be the reason of the drop.
I am guessing competitors using some shady techniques to outrank you and others or perhaps lack of content. I do see only 18 pages were indexed. Having a blog and posting regularly can help you. For example posting experiences from your customers? or any extra info you can provide on the locations you offer skiing (I don't know). Do a little research and see what's missing in other pages and get your hands on it.
In any case, if the site outranking you are spammy, you can always report them to Google, they don't pay too much attention, however, you could then throw a thread in the Google Webmaster Help forums (if you didn't do any backhat link building, which apparently you didn't.
Once you start creating good content, over time you will earn links which ultimately and combined will give you an edge over your competitors. That just needs time, time and more time.
Hope that helps!
Open Site Explorer only indexes a portion of the Web. If your links are showing up in Webmaster tools that's ok and there's nothing to worry about. Eventually, OSE will start showing your Links.
Yes, those "pop-ups" are crawled. Search engines are already smart enough to interpret lightboxes just fine, which is the name of that kind of "pop-ups".
I will surely do it. It's not all about SEO, but building relationships. You may not get a link from them directly, but you could indirectly!
There's when guest blogging becomes a spam technique, when you only do it for the link. Change your mind, watch it from another perspective!
Example: I once wrote for a small SEO blog, it had almost no value, then when I applied for a much bigger site, and showed them my work, it was a "Can you please write for us?".
Try turning personalized search off, using an URL like this: https://www.google.com/search?q=keywords+to+find&gl=us&pws=0
At least for me, what I see there matches what Moz shows, although those are the results shown to a person in god knows what location with personalized search off, they match Mozs'.
Hope that helps.
No, it shouldn't mess with the snippet. Snippets aren't created from the content of the XML feed, but from the video markup in the site. The sitemap only allows Google to easily identify the videos in your site.
As for the robots.txt question, there's no need to specify the video sitemap location, you can if you want, but that won't give you any "boost". Regardless if the videos are youtube hosted or not.
Hey G,
I took a quick look at your Website and link profile.
There's no much I can suggest other than continue working on your site. The on page grader is just another metric, but you can't take that and expect higher rankings.
Google say they consider over 200 metrics to rank Websites, not only links, but also content, navigation, user interface, etc.
If I was required to suggest you changes these a few a would start:
As for the 301, it is perfectly implemented. Your robots file has nothing in it and does not need to. You can probably add (and remove everything else in the file):
User-Agent: *
Allow: /
But it wouldn't help much or even anything.
It will require a much more in-depth research, you may want to hire a professional SEO to look at your site and competitors'. I based my quick review only on your site, I don't know who your competitors are or what keywords you are targeting.
Hope that helps, a bit at least
OSE doesn't report the "likes", "tweets" or "+1s" that you may get on your pages or accounts. If you make a post on Facebook or have a page with millions of likes, it doesn't matter at all for the OSE report.
What matters is actually the amount of likes your URL received, the same applies for g+ and twitter. To increase that, you should place the Like, Tweet and G+ button on your homepage, or change the "href" of whatever buttons your have in your site.
This like button:
will return 19 likes (which are the likes that URL received). Almost the same amount OSE reports
This one:
will return 73 (same happens here: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.discountqueens.com%2Famazon-ultimate-shrinky-dinks-jewelry-designer-1495%2F).
Hope that helps!
Sitemaps from xml-sitemaps are completely reliable. Google does not index all pages of your site and it also doesn't show the exact amount of indexed pages, that way the prevent users from using shady tactics to fool the system.
In my case, with about 4K pages submitted to Google via sitemap, about 3.5K are indexed (that's what it says in WT) but when performing a site:example.com search it shows about 5k results. So as you can see, those numbers that Google show are not exact, those are just estimates. If you submit 200 pages via the sitemap and google indexes only 10, then there's a problem.
As per your traffic change, you should look on another possible reasons, ans it could also take some time to reindex all your pages.
Having a link in the image linking to it's own file does not help your image to get indexed faster or added to a sitemap, at least not that I know of.
In my blog, I don't have the images linking to their file and they are indexed just fine, plus added to the image sitemap that is being generated by "xml-sitemaps" automated script.
Having the image file redirecting to the page having the post is actually serving users with different content that what Google may see, hence the penalty of the image mismatch. If Google offers a link the the image, it should load the image. That's why they also offer link to the page or clicking the image links to the page where the image is. You can read more on the "Image Mismatch" penalty here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/3394137
I feel the same way! Even though I am forced to access Analytics by default, I then hit the "Back to Pro" not only because I am used to it, but also I find it easier to read. I really don't want to spend 10 minutes loading for pages and graphs, and the PRO version gives me just that, the info I need instantly.
Based on what you said, you built a private link network, which is strongly forbidden by Google and even if you didn't get caught, you may in the future with that strategy.
If I were you, I would took down all those blogs and move only the good posts to the main one, if you fill your main blog with "crappy" or thin content, you could get that site penalized.
Move only those articles that are worth moving and then take out all those blogs, with no 301s or canonical, just kill them. If you use canonical, they still have links to your main website (link network - forbidden), if you setup 301, then you get hundreds of unnatural links, which again, results in a private link network. and I advise against both.
Hope that helps!
What do they have? 10,000 pages of uninteresting content? a robots tag noindex,follow will do to leave them our of engines. But to decide you really need to know what those pages have. 10,000 isn't a few, and if there's value content worth sharing, a page could get a link, that if you disallow it through the robots, won't even flow pagerank.
It all comes down to what are those pages for...?
It would be a good experiment, but are you willing to lose Fan page likes (regular readers) against URL likes (one timers).
I just made a search to see if there was any info on a test but couldn't find anything (no one tested that yet, apparently) but practically the same answer to your question: http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/16810/best-practices-for-facebook-website-like-vs-page-like
Usually forums are so spammed with links that they are really worthless. Those links will likely help the users but not your SEO.
How about using the robots file to disallow those pages? However, if you have a 301 and in the new page a noindex it should work (but who knows, they are still showing the old URLs after a year).
Did to try using the "Fetch as Googlebot"? in WMT? if not, go ahead and then hit the "submit to index" that usually speeds up big changes in sites.
Hope that helps.
How about myblogguest? You decide where to publish your article from the offers you receive from blog owners... You only need to pay for a membership, or as a blogger, you can publish others' articles without any paid membership.
Before accepting an offer, check they blog offering, their reputation, their previous posts, etc. Just don't take ANY offer, look for the good ones.
You can also do some outreach for yourself. If you are writing the content, simply contacting the blog owners asking to post your article (include the article, as many receive hundreds of "shallow" requests) should work. At least I am writing for high quality blogs, such as SEJ, SearchEnginePeople, etc, just by contacting them with my articles ready to publish. You can later establish a relationship that could led to faster publishing, or even skipping the review process.
Hope that helps!