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Additional to what David said, I would still consider leaving the comments option open (until there is no "over-usage").
Also a factor to consider (especially in Barry's case), what kind of comments do people post. Do they have a positive or a negative annotation? Are they on-topic or not?
If you have a community, like Moz has IMO, where I see a lot of good, complementing comments, responses to each of the posts, I'd consider indexing the comments.
What do you think? David, Monica? 
Hi I would go for four Social networking sites:
1. LinkedIn
2. Facebook
3. Twitter
4. Google +
I am not really engaging myself into others, but you can build very valuable relations on these in your area. I hope someone will include other Social networks in the list to.
Try getting back to the basics. Create an audit for the website, for the webpages that you'd like to rank for. Check for accessibility.
For example on one of our projects a simple development error caused our new content to be hidden from search engines (a simple content tab that had an issue with Javascript).
Sometimes getting back to the basics and creating an auditing for our website could highlight issues that stop us from ranking on top 10 spots.
From my experience, if the content is well written and it adds value for users you will only benefit from it.
This way you will have Unique, descriptive text on the product search page and it makes easier to optimize for.
Hope that helped,
Istvan
Hi Victor,
IMO, there are no two identical cheesecakes. 
So I would not consider it as an issue, UNTIL they are not a complete copy-paste to each other.
Let's say that I have a way to cook a Hungarian goulash, and my best friend makes the "same" Hungarian goulash, but he does "personalize" it. We have two recipes, still we have two different recipes.
The way you could make it more "unique" is to let the community comment on these recipes (for ex. have a button like: "give your compliments to this chef!" and give the possibility to the users to give a personal opinion about the specific recipe. This way community members will generate the unique content to each of the recipes. (lets face it, I do not think comments will be copy-pasted to the similar recipes).
This is a personal opinion, I'd love to hear feedback from others.
Gr., Keszi
Hi Bradrussel,
G+, FB or Twitter buttons... With all of them I would point out the page you are on. (It is quite logical if you think about it).
Think about the following scenario: you are a visitor, go to a website, check a product... You want to share it with your friends. You want to share the product, and not the brand (right?!)
I believe that it would attract more targeted visits if you could share the products themselves instead of brand.
I hope this helped,
Istvan
Yes, that is the best solution From Teginder's response I thought he already wrote to you.
Hi Atul,
Do you have a thank you page after subscribing? if so, then you can track it with google analytics.
Set up a goal in GA: Decide one of the three types of goals you want. This can be URL Destination, Time on Site, or Pages/Visit. You will need the URL destination. just enter the Thank You page's URL and it is set up.
That should be the scenario.
I hope that helped,
Istvan
useful video step-by-step: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=no9LuXnmLao
Hi Tamir,
First of all welcome to the Moz community!
I would propose you to take a few hours and watch the following two mozinars:
The advanced Wordpress SEO helped me a lot in understanding how to approach the technical implementations on Wordpress for SEO purposes. It is quite old, but I do not think it is outdated at all.
I hope these help respond your questions.
Gr., Keszi
Well,once again I come up with the same issue: please forget about SEO companies who tell buying thousands of incompetent link in order to rank higher.
Instead I would go on your idea, create something that is really helpful for their possible clients, their visitors. Go try to create some video series, start blogging, be there on social networks and respond to their inquiries.
In long term the results will pay out.
I hope you can convince your clients.
Good luck!
Istvan
Well, you could block Google and Bing from crawling your website (via Robots.txt) and run a Crawl via Moz, that's possible I think.
Istvan
your code should look like something:
[onClick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Downloads', 'PDF', '/salesForms/orderForm1.pdf']);">Download PDF](<span>http://www.example.com/files/map.pdf)
The "MyMap" you see in the code above is a Label.
You can read further on: http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/eventTrackerGuide.html#Labels
From the article which is linked above:
Before you can view event tracking results in your reports, you must set it up on your site following these steps.
Set up tracking on your site. Make sure you have set up tracking for your website. For information on setting this up, see Tracking Sites.
Call the _trackEvent() method in the source code of a page object, widget, or video.
The specification for the _trackEvent() method is:
_trackEvent(category, action, opt_label, opt_value, opt_noninteraction)
category (required)
The name you supply for the group of objects you want to track.
action (required)
A string that is uniquely paired with each category, and commonly used to define the type of user interaction for the web object.
label (optional)
An optional string to provide additional dimensions to the event data.
value (optional)
An integer that you can use to provide numerical data about the user event.
non-interaction (optional)
A boolean that when set to true, indicates that the event hit will not be used in bounce-rate calculation.
View the reports. Once event tracking has been set up and working on your site for a day, go to the Content section of the reports and view Event Tracking.
onClick="
Hi there,
IMO the two pages are near duplicates and I have seen pages that have been indexed in such cases (on one of our own projects). Then we have taken in consideration the canonical, and issue was solved. This is why I have recommended it, but I am opened to other solutions also.
Gr., Keszi
Just like Egol said, it is all about engaging your audience:
1. You can create the content that is good for SEO, but will it drive traffic?
2. Is you audience more opened to video or articles? Or maybe webinars, infographics, etc. etc.
First of all, I would check for what my audience is looking for, what is that really makes them take action and then try to work out with the budget part and plan the creations strategy.
Gr.,
Istvan
Hi Levalencia,
I would recommend you two very good White-Board-Fridays by Rand Fiskin:
These videos will answer your question regarding link metrics.
I hope that helped,
Istvan
The code goes into the link which points to the download page (just as you have thought )
And the /salesForms/orderForm1 was a copy-paste from the article I have linked
Gr.,
Istvan
Hi Mark,
The guys have mentioned quite good answers above, so I am not going to elaborate on that.
I just wanted to jump in with a tool for the algorithm diagnosis: http://www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguin-tool/
It helped me a lot to see which update has hit one of the sites I have been working on.
I hope it will help you as much, as did with me.
Gr., Keszi
Very good reply Matt! I will have to bookmark that 101 too
Instead I would invest in resolving the issue
www.intelligentinvestor.com.au/Portfolios/Income/ is not http://www.intelligentinvestor.com.au/login/?requestedPage=%2Fportfolios%2Fincome%2F
The first one has content, the second doesn't. While you are not logged in you are redirected to the second one. (Depends on cookies I think). If they have "smart" enough they have submitted their www.intelligentinvestor.com.au/Portfolios/Income/ to Google index, so Google can see it
Oh, I know the feeling! I'd say, try to make an audit for the site, then make a priority list and take it step-by-step.
Let me know, if you need help.
Exactly my idea! and you have everything in one spot. I hope it will work out for you!
Cheers!
I would terminate with them. (even I would use those 6 weeks to have them clean up the stuff they have done).
Hi Net66,
As I read through your question my first impression was... No Waaaaay!
I wouldn't advice to mix things up. Just simple create a new brand for the US market. The reasons are the following:
1. When re-targeting an established website you can hurt your rankings in both UK and US results.
2. a .co.uk is a ccTLD which wont be very useful for a US targeting
3. for a better on-site optimization you will have to rewrite content to better fit the US English readers level (and there are major differences between US and UK English) - What happens to their established visitors?
4. if you reach to retarget somehow the .co.uk website, they will see a fall in the sales (because they will probably loose some ranks in the .co.uk and gain some new ones in the .com)
Ok. Now if you buy a new brand name for the US market:
1. You can develop from first stage an optimized website (information architecture, content, links, etc.)
2. You can have a brand name that is more catchy for US market.
3. They can run two different websites in the same time effectively. Until the US website comes up, they will have enough sales from UK markets.
I hope that helped,
Istvan
Hi James,
www and non-www are already 2 paths, www.example.com/ and www.example.com are another two. You can play with the idea
Also, you can focus more the link juice.
For ex. let's have Fritzy and Googgly, two visitors who would like to link you product page.
Fritzy will link to www.example.com/product/ -> with anchor text "product" (cool, eh'? 
We wish all of our links would look like this)
Then comes Googgly and links to the same product with the URL http://example.com/product/
Now you will have duplicate content linked separately and you wasted the link juice.
Just add a canonical to example.com/product/ which point the link juice to www.example.com/product/ -> you will transfer aprox 85% of link juice gained on example.com/product/ + it will not be duplicate content.
I hope I didn't mass up here something
Another thing that you could do is just to 301 non-www to www or vice versa.
Gr., Istvan
Carlos, I will take a look and send you a PM.
In general there is no quick way for SEO (if you want to play it safe), especially if we are talking about a competitive market.
Hi danarchism,
This is what we have on a quite big website:
1. Main site is geo-targeted for a specific country
2. sub-folders of the site are geo-targeted for other countries
3. On each Page in the header we have the HREFLANG to the other 9 languages we use on the site.
Still when we talk about SERP impressions we have many times overlays (Such as the Geo-Targeted content to the Netherlands will appear in the Google.be or Geo-Targeted content to Germany appears in Google.At).
I hope this helped,
Istvan
Hi there,
If there is a Thank you page after the event, then you should go for a goal.
If you want to track an event, then there are event tracking codes.
You can find a very good article regarding this issue over Google. It will describe, how to implement and what you can achieve with event tracking (they also give you a lot of alternatives).
I hope that helped,
Istvan
Hi Ravi,
It is not free, but worth the money($40/month), I think: https://www.distilled.net/u/
There you have a lot of modules which you can learn and test your knowledge.
Keszi
Hey Jesper,
The decision of URL structure can be affected by multiple stuff, that your Content Management System supports or not.
I prefer the 3rd version (the one without category in the link) to avoid duplicate content coming from different URL patterns to the same page (now I know you could place canonical links, but what happens when you have 50000 products and at least 10000 categories and child categories?).
If you do not have too many categories and subcategories, and you are able to insert canonical links into your system, then I would go for URL structure with category name included (it is more descriptive).
Just an example for your case:
A. Website with a lot of categories and subcategories
www.example.com/panasonic/lumix/lumix-FZ200.html
www.example.com/digital-cameras/panasonic/lumx-FZ200.html
www.example/product/luxim-FZ200.html
and so on...
Could leave to duplicate content if you cannot point out which version of the URL is the "Real" version.
B. Website would have the same product under the same categories, but then the product URL would look like:
www.example/luxim-FZ200.html
I hope that helps you take a decision.
Gr.,
Istvan
Hey Martijn,
Thank you for the help.
Since I am not an "expert in the field" I wanted to have my back from you guys.
Thanks again.
Istvan
Hi,
Try out your page with Flang tool. Maybe it will give a better insight what you are missing out.
We cannot do more without a link that we can inspect
BTW: common mistake, do you have a self reference? It is needed in order to hreflang to work well.
Keszi
Hi James,
If you will have the on both of the pages it should do the trick.
Or another possible solution would be to create a 301 redirect for www.home.com/index.html -> www.home.com/
Beware if you use both redirect and canonical have the same link there.
I have seen infinite loops created with canonical and 301 created for search engines. Canonical was pointing to the "/" version and the redirect was with the non - "/".
I hope this helps.
greetings,
Istvan
Hi!
There was an article about this on Moz main blog: http://moz.com/blog/cross-domain-subdomain-tracking-in-google-analytics
Maybe it will be helpful for you.
Gr., Keszi
What I would try out, is including a self reference also.
So next to your hreflang there would appear a new hreflang, such as:
When we have implemented hreflang, we have also used a self reference, and I do not have any issues there.
I hope that helps.
Keszi
Oh, I understand... Well, I wouldn't. Instead try to figure out why your website isn't ranking that well, try to get yourself an SEO to do list and check both on-site and off-site, are you giving enough juice to contribute to the quality of the site? Where are your "weak" spots, how could you resolve those, etc.
If I would in your situation, I would approach first my site, am I really doing everything to rank or not? Then I would check competitors (but just in order to see which are their strong points, their weaknesses), use their strong points on your website, make it even better and try to avoid the same mistakes that they are doing.
I hope this helped,
Istvan
Hi Chuck,
I have seen something similar on one of my previous projects, where outsider domains have been redirected to the project itself. So spammycrap.tld/UbaOZ had a redirect to ourproject.tld/UbaOZ/ this way it was appearing in our Search Console error list.
I discovered it by going through all the backlinks from AHrefs and Majestic. If this is also your case, unfortunately, you cannot do much about it, especially if you do not have any control over those domains. What I did, I created a list of these URLs, and redirected them to a page on our project, which had a 410 status code.
Hopefully, this approach helps you.
István
That Kumar guy is funny. We also had to deal with him in the past. He asks for a certain amount of money /links removed.
We have tried talking to him first, in order to remove the urls. But in the end his websites ended up in our disavow file. (and his response was: I do not care)
Keszi
Hi Joanne,
When taking such a decision I always read through again and again the article from Google: https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=83105
Ideally it would be good to contact each webmaster and ask them to change the url from the .com to the .co.uk, but realistic that is almost impossible.
What I would do is download through OpenSiteExplorer all the incoming links, check in general which are the most important for me and at least contact those webmasters and tell them about the change of address.
I hope it helps.
Istvan
Sorry, I've forgot to detail that case:) Thanks for pointing it out.
It was the same in our case. Could do nothing more, then just disavow him.
Unfortunately there are people who fall in his trap, and pay for the removal.
His websites are not indexed in Google. Therefore I hope Google doesn't count any links/anchor from his sites.
Hi Godad,
If it was me I would go for the canonical version.
if you want to go with the no-index, then do not forget to use no-index, follow (so you do not miss the "link juice" those pages might get).
I hope it helped,
Istvan
Hi Kevin,
You should write an email to the Help team, they will surely resolve your issue.
You can email them at: help@moz.com
Gr., Keszi
Hi,
Could you point out the website or what platform you are using? maybe it would be easier to help.
When everything else fails, I do the XML sitemaps manually (Notepad++ and Excel). But Screaming Frog also is helpful.
Keszi
Hi Lincoln,
First of all, I would try to investigate what happened, why you have dropped out of top 5 to position ~#45. If you take a look at the Moz's Google Algo update page: http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change and you compare it with your Google Analytics/Google Webmasters Tools data, do you see any specific update that might have hurt your rankings?
If you want to be quick with this, there is a great tool Panguin.
Before I would jump into troubleshooting the other questions, I would try to figure out what went wrong in the first place. Sometimes resolving old issues on the site can help the success of future efforts. So it might be worth a try.
I hope it has helped, Gr. Keszi
Hi Jeepster,
I saw this question wasn't answered yet, so here I come with one:
What I would do in your case, is to check when the rankings or the traffic dropped.
Since, like you said, you have a child to look after, it means that you might not have a ranking history... well, if you have Moz PRO, then you could go to: Campaigns -> Ranking tab -> Change the "full rankings report to PDF" into "Entire keyword ranking history to csv" export it, and then look after the Keyword, Date, Traffic and Google Ranking columns.
If you are not a PRO member or you do not have a campaign set up for this particular website, you could analyze your traffic from Google Analytics and check aprox. on which date did your organic traffic drop.
After you have this, you could check the Google Algorithm Change history of Moz.com. Compare the dates and try to figure out what update has taken you down.
Regarding 17 Server Errors/575 soft 404s/17 Not Founds/Access Denied 1/Others 4:
I really hope it works out for you!
Cheers,
Istvan
Hey,
Can you point out an example URL? (if you don't want to disclose the website URL in here, you can do it via a personal message). This way we can debug an exact URL and not just a theory.
Regarding blocking via robots.txt: it is never a good idea to block a search engine from URLs you want to deindex. This way the Google crawlers won't grab and process the data, and you will have your URLs in the search index.
Just check: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6062608?hl=en
"While Google won't crawl or index the content blocked by robots.txt, we might still find and index a disallowed URL if it is linked from other places on the web. As a result, the URL address and, potentially, other publicly available information such as anchor text in links to the page can still appear in Google search results."
In case of 301 redirects (make sure you are not using 302), if the crawler can access the page, you should have the old URL removed from the index.
Hi Lincoln,
I'd be cautious using tools that automatically generate a list for disavowing links. Instead take a day or two and go over it manually, filter out those which do look spammy. (You can use Opensiteexplorer to export your backlinks.)
Here you have a very good article from Modestos Siotos, on how to conduct a link audit.
Gr., Keszi
Hi David,
I was checking your source and it says:
Is it possible that missing a space in code doesn't stop Google indexing it? (I think that's causing your issue)
Here's a documentation how to implement it correctly directly from Google
Hope it helps,
Istvan
Later edit: btw: it should be something like this:
Hi James,
Regarding the robots.txt syntax:
Disallow: /jobs/? which basically blocks every single URL that contains /jobs/**? **
For example: domain.com**/jobs/?**sort-by=... will be blocked
If you want to disallow query parameters from URL, the correct implementation would be Disallow: /jobs/*? or even specify which query parameter you want to block. For example Disallow: /jobs/*?page=
My question to you, if these jobs are linked from any other page and/or sitemap? Or only from the listing page, which has it's pagination, sorting, etc. is blocked by robots.txt? If they are not linked, it could be a simple case of orphan pages, where basically the crawler cannot access the job posting pages, because there is no actual link to it. I know it is an old rule, but it is still true: Crawl > Index > Rank.
BTW. I don't know why you would block your pagination. There are other optimal implementations.
And there is always the scenario, that was already described by Matt. But I believe in that case you would have at least some of the pages indexed even if they are not going to get ranked well.
Also, make sure other technical implementations are not stopping your job posting pages from being indexed.