Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hello Everyone, I recently removed some pages and made a custom 404 page by putting "ErrorDocument 404 http://www.site.com/404.htm" in the htaccess file but WMT now reports soft 404 errors, how do I do this properly? Thanks

Hi, I have recently installed wordpress and started a blog but now loads of duplicate pages are cropping up for tags and authors and dates etc. How do I do the canonical thing in wordpress? Thanks Ian

Hello all, I have a site and I want to set a preferred domain but when I do it says I need to verify my site but it gives me no ideas how to do that. I know that normally you have to do it when you set the account up but I had an analytics account for this domain first then just logged on with those details and I was in with no verification process. Cheers

Hi, Where can I get a reliable list of the top 1000 keywords searched for over the last few months or 2012 or whatever? Thanks

This is a bit of a rant, to be fair, but I'd appreiciate peoples opinions all the same... If you search google in the US for long hairstyles at around position 4 and 5 there are a couple of pinterest pages that are just doorway pages for the sites they link (or mostly link) to. The first one http://pinterest.com/hairstylesweekl/long-hairstyles-for-women-2012-2013-long-hairstyle/ is said to have 6k pinterest followers, I can't fathom why a doorway page to such a low pagerank site would get that many but it doesn't look like they've bought them. And the second one http://pinterest.com/hairstylesvane/long-prom-hairstyles/ is so blatent. 20 or so pictures all from the same site. Google seems intent on penalising "wrong doers" while everyone else gets caught in the crossfire and yet someone throws a pinterest doorway page together in 1/2 an hour and it gets near the top for a relatively large search term. Panda/penguin etc were sold to us as a fix for low quality and spam but instead it seems to have given a free meal ticket to people like this and yet established sites get kicked in the teeth by arbitrary penalties and negative seo.

Hello, I want to ditch about 1000 pages of a 2000+ page site. I believe the 301 redirect thing is the way to go but my expertise is limited. Is there a way to do a blanket redirect ie if a user or search engine looks for a page thats not there it all gets redirected to the index page or do I have to do each one manually? Thanks Ian

Hello, My sites are showing odd "links to your site" data in WMT. Its not showing any links to the homepages and reduced links for other pages. Anyone else seeing this? Penguin refresh maybe?

Hello, In Googles Web master tools under "content keywords" 2 of my major keywords are missing. My site used to rank well for the keyphrase "short hairstyles" but gets very little traffic from google at all now, about 1% of what it did before april 2012. Someone did a negative seo number on us by pointing 10k+ spammy links to us from message boards, this and the timing of the traffic loss leads me to suspectthe penguin update. I am removing them as best I can but no increase in traffic has resulted so I'm looking for any and all issues and the missing keywords seems to be an oddity. The missing keywords include "short" which is pretty fundemental. The word is in the domain and plenty of times in the content. Any ideas?

Hello, In google WMT my site has the following message. <form class="form" action="/webmasters/tools/settings-ac?hl=en&siteUrl=http://www.prom-hairstyles.org/&siteUrl=http://www.prom-hairstyles.org/&hl=en" method="POST">Your site has been assigned special crawl rate settings. You will not be able to change the crawl rate.Why would this be?A bit of backgound - this site was hammered by Penguin or maybe panda but seems to be dragging itself back up (maybe) but has dropped from several thousand visitors/day to 100 or so.Cheers,Ian</form>

Hello, The pro dashboard crawler bot thing that you get here reports the mydomain.com and mydomain.com/index.htm as duplicate pages. Is this a problem? If so how do I fix it? Thanks Ian

Hi, I seem to be making progress in recovering from penguin/panda. (maybe) However I get vastly different results if I search google in different ways for example if I specify the geographic location as US (I am in the UK) for prom hairstyles ie http://www.google.com/search?q=prom+hairstyles&gl=us (which I believe gives the SERPs for the US or at least it used to) my site (prom-hairstyles.org) comes in at number two or sometimes on the second page. But if I just search google.com it comes in at 450 or so. My question is do you get the same and why such a big difference? Thanks, Ian

In GWT it gives an option to do the following but which is best? and why? If you specify your preferred domain as http://www.example.com and we find a link to http://example.com, we'll consider both links the same. | <label for="no_assoc">Don't set a preferred domain</label> |
| <label for="use_www">Display URLs as ** www.example.com**</label> |
| <label for="use_nowww">Display URLs as example**.com **</label> |

Hello, The utility on this site that crawls your site and highlights what it sees as potential problems reported an issue with /~username access seeing it as duplicate content i.e. mydomain.com/file.htm is the same as mydomain.com~/username/file.htm so I went to my server hosts and they disabled it using mod_userdir but GWT now gives loads of 404 errors. Have I gone about this the wrong way or was it not really a problem in the first place or have I fixed something that wasn't broken and made things worse? Thanks, Ian

Hello, One of my sites has a strange link profile; it has 40000 in bound links but 30000 of them are from the site http://ourlipsaresealed.skynetblogs.be/ with the anchor text "haarstijl (2)" which is dutch for hairstyles. I haven't paid for or even asked for these links and I don't think its negative seo. I think they just set up a template with hundreds of links they thought were useful to their visitors and produce several pages a day. So the question is do I use the new google disavowel tool? I've held off so far because A. they link to a competitor who haven't been anywhere near as affected as we have although they seem to have been affected to an extent by a drop for some reason and they have a much better link profile overall than mine. and B. in the video Matt cutts goes on over and over that this tool is for people that have done some dodgy link building in the past but I haven't. Thanks, Ian

Hello, My site is being checked for errors by the PRO dashboard thing you get here and some odd duplicate content errors have appeared. Every page has a duplicate because you can see the page and the page/~username so... www.short-hairstyles.com is the same as www.short-hairstyles.com/~wwwshor I don't know if this is a problem or how the crawler found this (i'm sure I have never linked to it). But I'd like to know how to prevent it in case it is a problem if anyone knows please? Ian

I run about 10 sites and most of them seemed to fall foul of the penguin update and even though I have never sought inorganic links I have been frantically searching for a link based answer since April. However since asking a question here I have been pointed in another direction by one of your contributors. It seems At least 6 of my sites have duplicate content issues. If you search Google for "We have selected nearly 200 pictures of short haircuts and hair styles in 16 galleries" which is the first bit of text from the site short-hairstyles.com about 30000 results appear. I don't know where they're from nor why anyone would want to do this. I presume its automated since there is so much of it. I have decided to redo the content. So I guess (hope) at some point in the future the duplicate nature will be flushed from Google's index? But how do I prevent it happening again? It's impractical to redo the content every month or so. For example if you search for "This facility is written in Flash® to use it you need to have Flash® installed." from another of my sites that I coincidently uploaded a new page to a couple of days ago, only the duplicate content shows up not my original site. So whoever is doing this is finding new stuff on my site and getting it indexed on google before even google sees it on my site! Thanks, Ian

Hello everyone, I run about 10 sites and pretty much every single one got hit by Penguin (the traffic plummeted on 24th April). I have never done reciprocal links (except 1 domain upto 2005 or so), I have never bought links, I have never spammed message boards or anything like that (except 1 different domain got hit by negative SEO by someone else) and I have never employed anyone to do any of the above. The way I have created sites for the last 10 years is to try to make them useful and let the links build naturally which more or less worked until April this year. I've been tearing my hair out ever since. The only thing you can say about all of them (apart from that I own them but I've been careful with whois etc) is that the link profile is 100% natural apart from the 2 provisos above. Since April I've hired people but I'm down $20K but not any better in the rankings. A few of the sites are: short-hairstyles.com was number 1 for short hairstyles and short haircuts for years then Penguin came and its dropped off for both. It had 10000 or so spammy message board links posted by someone as negative seo I have got some removed but google webmaster tools still reports them as there. There are tentative signs of recovery (maybe) but no traffic increase. 1001-hairstyles.com has been there or there abouts for 10 years for the keyword hairstyles and hair styles until April. A site ourlipsaresealed.skyblogs.be has 30000 links to it (there are only 40000 total) with the anchor text haarstijls which is dutch for hairstyles, I don't think its malicious just they set a template and do a new page every day and they also link in the same way to a competitor who wasn't affected. An seo firm have been working on this one for a few months, the traffic increased 50% a couple of weeks ago but bombed the day after to worse than before. Prom-hairstyles.org when the same way as above in April. The only back link oddity is a site polyvore.com links to it about 400 times (out of 1000 or so total) they are using our pictures to sell their prom dresses (with out permission) but mostly deep link. Most of the other sites went in a similar way but have no obvious backlink anomalies. Do I use the link disavowel tool? I am a bit wary of it because if you watch matt cutts video he keeps reiterating that the tool is for people who have used dodgy link practises in the past and want to do a clean up but that isn't me so am I owning up to something I haven't done by using it? Are the search results as strange in everybody's niche? In mine there is some real dross as well as loads of pinterest and other user generated stuff. Sorry to go on for so long and thanks for getting this far. Ian