Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Christy,Thanks so much for your answer. It works perfectly for me and exactly what I was looking for. Your help was much appreciated.

I'm looking to set up a custom ranking report, but I just want the report to show up keywords that I have attached a certain label to. I've attached a custom label to a number of my keywords. Ideally I would like a report which just showed me the performance of these keywords.

Does anybody know of a way to do this? Thanks in advance.

Thanks Chris,

I removed the sidebar links which were on every page so that may have looked spammy, but have left the ones on my homepage as you say - those are only 1 link, and they're genuinely about me and what I do.

Wondering what people's thoughts are on whether to keep WordPress sidebar links?

For example I write a personal blog and usually write about tech related things, but have a sidebar link with keyword anchor text pointing to my clothing based website - completely unrelated to the content on my blog. As it's a sidebar link, it shows up for every page on the site (easily thousands due to all posts having a page, tags, categories etc).

Are those valuable links to keep? There's an argument that all links are good links. Should I change them to have anchor text of the brand name rather than the keyword?

Thanks for the comprehensive reply.

We actually used to work like that under our company name. One of the main reasons for splitting at the time to separate sites was that Google stopped allowing different display URLs for AdWords - we would advertise buyahipflask.com but redirect to macdonald-sporrans.com. We got significantly better click-through rates for the individually branded domains.

We also felt that it was easier to develop good relevant content and social strategies around individual niches, rather than a single brand. IE I feel it would be hard to make our single site which might have 10,000 products on it, rank well for 'quaichs' which is only about 200 of those products.

However, I fully agree with your points about our current setup. Perhaps my ideal would be to have single sites with better names/brands!?

Thanks for the reply - interesting opinion.

I'm aware that our 'brands' are also URLs and contain keywords so perhaps changing the blogs from having keyword only anchor text to having brand name anchor text is better.

Ultimately, I'm happy to do whatever will be better. As we have control of the links it's very easy to remove them quickly. I thought about doing that and then recalled someone saying 'all links are good links' so wondered whether it wouldn't be worth the effort.

At least a good starting point is - from looking at our link profile - do you think those links from the blogs are the ones that we should be concerned about?

Sure thing, probably should've done that in the first instance!

Sites are: buyakilt.com buyahipflask.com buyatankard.com buyaquaich.com

Blogs are: fer.gy callum-macdonald.com

Hey guys,

Suffering a horrible rankings drop after penguin 2.0. We have 4 popular sites and have seen a steady decline in rankings and traffic after 22nd May.

I've looked into it a little bit and am wondering if WordPress blog sidebar links might be hurting us. Specifically my brother and I both have sidebar links on our personal blogs which are getting indexed on every page, and I'm wondering if it's distorting our link profiles.

Specifically, I read something about links coming from sites which aren't relevant to your niche and overly optimised anchor text. Both sites have very simple single keyword anchor texts on the links.

We're pretty white hat in terms of SEO, we've never done that much link building, and when we do, it's usually with worthwhile directories or with sites we have relationships with. Therefore we don't have that many links.

Any ideas on how best to investigate this?

Thanks.

Hi there,

I run an ecommerce store and we've recently started changing the way we handle pagination links and canonical links.

We run Magento, so each category eg /shoes has a number of parameters and pages depending on the number of products in the category.

For example /shoes?mode=grid will display products in grid view, /shoes?mode=grid&p=2 is page 2 in grid mode.

Previously, all URL variations per category were canonicalised to /shoes.

Now, we've been advised to paginate the base URLs with page number only. So /shoes has a pagination next link to /shoes?p=2, page 2 has a prev link to /shoes and a next link to /shoes?p=3.

When any other parameter is introduced (such as mode=grid) we canonicalise that back to the main category URL of /shoes and put a noindex meta tag on the page.

However, SEOMoz is picking up duplicate title warnings for urls like /shoes?p=2 and /shoes?mode=grid&p=2 despite the latter being canonicalised and having a noindex tag. Presumably search engines will look at the canonical and the noindex tag so this shouldn't be an issue.

Is that correct, or should I be concerned by these errors?

Thanks.