Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thank you Miranda!

Will definitely do. This site was using ExpressionEngine as the CMS and it needed some serious in house cleaning done. Especially with 404 redirects and meta tags. My main errors with Google and SEOMoz were the duplicate descriptions, urls and meta data. Wordpress probably wouldn't have had these errors, but since the site was custom built there were some minor, but major misplaced and forgotten lines of code in the .htaccess and header files.

I'll update here if I start to see serp movement.

Thanks EGOL! There have been some improvements to keywords, but nothing that jumps out at me right now. Just the sort of typical fluctuation. Hopefully, I'll start to see some larger jumps soon..

Hello Mozzers,

I just logged into my account and after what has felt like a few months of on site work I finally see ZERO errors across the board for my main campaign with SEO Moz!

I just wanted to share that with everyone because at one point above the errors were in the 5,000 range. It was causing penalties and weight in serps, but now thanks to SEO Moz and the help that I have received in the Q&A section, I have corrected all the errors!

So, thank you to SEOMOZ and the pro community very very much!!!

As a discussion though, how are the errors with most other users? Are you typically always seeing no errors, a few errors or a lot of errors for your campaigns?

Thanks!

Jesse

Personally I would just do the "wildcard" redirect.

I think doing it with a landing page wouldn't be the most user friendly method of redirecting.

I definitely would.

Major companies do that all the time, not only with various domain extensions, but also with mis-spelled domains.

Quick example:

gooogle.com redirects to google.com

Hello,

I recently discovered that half of the pages on my site, about 3,500 were not being indexed or were indexing very very slow and with a heavy weight on them. I discovered the problem in the "HTML Suggestions" within Google's Webmaster Tools.

An example of my main issue. All 3 of these URL were showing 200 Status OK in Google.

www.getrightmusic.com/mixtape/post/ludacris_1_21_gigawatts_back_to_the_first_time

www.getrightmusic.com/mixtape/post/ludacris_1_21_gigawatts_back_to_the_first_time/

www.getrightmusic.com/mixtape/ludacris_1_21_gigawatts_back_to_the_first_time

I added some code to the .htaccess in order to remove the trailing slashes across the board.

I also properly set up my 404 redirects, which were not properly set up by my developer (when the site "relaunched" 6 months ago )

I then added the Canonical link rel tags on the site posts/entries.

I'm hoping I followed all the correct steps in fixing the issue and now, I guess, I just have to wait until the penalty gets lifted? I'm also not %100 certain that I have been penalized. I'm just assuming based on the SERP ceiling I feel and the super slow or lack of indexing my content.

Any insight, help or comments would be super helpful.

Thank you.

Jesse

It seems like Google likes the newer Schema.org markup. But, they still crawl the Open Graph I believe. The OG tags do help Facebook categorize shared links though. Personally, I'm switching my OG tags and implementing the Schema markup. If Google likes that better for their rich snippets, I'm going to make the change. Here's a Google link about it http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1211158 Paragraph from Google "Facebook Open Graph serves its purpose well, but it doesn't provide the detailed information search engines need to improve the user experience. A single web page may have many components, and it may talk about more than one thing. Even if you mark up your content for Facebook Open Graph, schema.org provides an additional way to provide more detail about particular entities on the page." - Google

Hi, I suggest feed burner. I've never read anything but I feel like it helps get your links indexed quickly since Google runs it. You can also submit your RSS to various RSS pingers. Also get your RSS set up on your Facebook pages, linkedin profile or other social media sites that have the option to pull in RSS. Good luck.

Typically, I'd offer an exchange on my blogroll. But, I've gotten links on blogrolls from giving the webmaster a free seo report on their site and how to improve. Also, I've gotten links just by sending an email and informing the webmaster about my site and how having a link back would benefit their users.

Hi, Recently I've been noticing that getting some solid blogroll links with your targeted keyword as your anchor text gives some really nice results... Guest blogging and having targeted keywords in your article as your anchor will most certainly help also. But this blogroll's have done wonders for me Good luck! Jesse

Thanks Ryan for the fast response. The URL that I was thinking of is http://www.datpiff.com/mixtapes-search.php?criteria=keyword: j cole For the keyword J Cole Mixtapes, this page ranks well, around #4. I don't think it's designed though. It seems to be the sites search results page. Thanks.

Yes to Yoast as well. I used the All-In-One SEO for a while, plus some others, but Yoast seems to be much more powerful.

Hello, I can't seem to find an answer anywhere. I was wondering how a websites search query keyword string url can rank above other page results that have stronger backlinks. The domain is usually strong, but that url with the .php?search=keyword just seems like it doesn't fit in. How does Google index those search string pages? Is it based off of traffic alone to that url? Because those urls typically don't have backlinks, right? Has anyone tried to rank their websites search query urls ever? I'm just a little curious about it. Thanks everyone. Jesse

Thank you guys! It's definitely personalized results. It's still such a weak domain though to show to me so highly ranked in Google. I guess that's an exact match domain type of thing though. Sometimes I wish my site had my main keyword in it

Thank you all though for your quick responses. Sorry if it was an obvious answer.

Hey all, So, I've noticed a site ranking on the first page in Google for a keyword that I have been targeting for years. The keyword is "mixtapes" and pretty competitive. The site, http://www.newyorkmixtapes.com is ranking around #4 in Google. It seemed odd to me so I looked into the site using some of the tools here. Open Explorer showed that they have minimal links. The actual site is pretty spammy also. Does anyone have any idea how this site ranked so high so fast? Is it ranking because I am located in New York? Does Google still put lots of weight on exact match domains? It's just been bothering me because it's a keyword that I put a lot of work into and then the site rolls around an ranks well for it with barely any backlinks. I just wanted to put it out there and see if I'm missing something obvious. Thanks everyone!

Thanks Chris! I did get the NSM Better Meta plugin installed and I really like it. So, I have a new sitemap with Google created. I love Wordpress as well, I just felt that all of my competitors were using it and I needed to stand out from everyone else Plus I wanted complete control over where and how my content is presented . It has been trickier even with good designers and developers, but I'm hoping in the end it will pay off. I was just pretty surprised at how fast Google broke up with me. I guess it's time for me to go back and wine and dine again for some G Love. Next time this situation occurs I will focus more on 301'ing each url before the switch. Thanks for the reply Chris!

Thanks for the response Ryan!

• My content is identical to the content that was on the WP site. I used a plugin to export my Wordpress posts to the EE site.

• I was using the Joast SEO plugin while on WP. I have a similar SEO plugin installed now with EE though for the meta data.

• My URL structure did change from the Wordpress site.

I think I do have all url's redirecting to the homepage. Should I have set it up differently? My top 80 urls redirect to their respective posts on the new EE site.

Do I have to go in and redirect all of my old urls to their individual corresponding new EE urls?

Should I just wait it out and hope Google gives me some love back?

Thanks for the help Ryan!

Thanks Daniel.

I've added the Google+ to all of my new posts hoping to help get indexed. I would have loved to stick with Wordpress, but I'm not a fan of using plugins and then worrying about them breaking when Wordpress updates and keeping on track of all that.

I chose my top 80 urls to 301 because I had over 3000 posts from my previous site. I just didn't have the time or resources to individually 301 them each.

I also haven't gotten my RSS set up yet. I'm hoping once I do (next week), I'll get that back into Feedburner, which I think should help get indexed faster again. Right?

Thanks for the quick reply Daniel!

Jesse

Hello,

Thank you for taking a look at my issue.

My site: http://www.getrightmusic.com

A month ago, I switched from Wordpress to ExpressionEngine. The reason being I wanted a more powerful membership functionality with media uploading. After I switched, my traffic basically dropped in half. I was averaging around 4-6,000 unique visitors per day and now I am at about 2,000 per day.

I resubmitted a new sitemap to Google webmasters. I also set up 301 redirects on my top 80 urls that were ranking well and driving traffic in Google.

Not only did Google kick me off of my top spots in the SERP's, but I no longer get indexed as quickly as I used to. With the old Wordpress site I would get url's indexed within minutes. Now they aren't even getting indexed really at all.

Is this a normal occurrence when switching site designs and systems?

Do you think Google will just take a little time before they give me back some respect?

Is there anything I should be doing to get back to ranking and getting indexed faster?

Thanks for any help or any insight you may have.

Jesse

It does replace the Google XML Sitemap Generator, which is nice to have just one plugin that handles that.

I haven't found it to be size and load time heavy on my site though. It does have a lot of options, but I've found that once you se it up properly for what you need it to do, you can let it be.

The original reason that I switched to Yoast, was that the All-In-One plugin was doing strange things with my categories, which I wanted to represent strongly in search. Specifically my getrightmusic.com/category/mixtapes/

Hope that helps. If you switch to Yoast and need any help setting it up, feel free to ask.

I switched to Yoast's SEO plugin a few months ago from the "All In One" plugin and I'm very happy with the results that I've had with it. I felt like the All In One was sort of dated compared to Yoast's, maybe they have updated it in the last couple months, but I'm still sticking with Yoast.

Thanks! I assumed that was the situation, but I was just curious. Hopefully I'll see the link strength a little faster than normal Thanks for the quick response.

I'm just a little curious about this and thought I would make use of the new Q&A system. This is my first open question.

I recently acquired some blogroll links on 3 fairly popular and well trafficked sites, some with more authority and pages than mine (Get Right Music).

I was wondering if anyone is familiar with the time frame in which I should start to see that affect my rankings in Google. Also, the time frame when I should start to see those domain links appear in Open Site Explorer.

I'm just curious. Thanks everyone.

Jesse