Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Jackie,

What I'd advise you to do, is to create a Screaming Frog Crawl so you can compare the two crawl data. If both show missing meta descriptions on the same pages, then there might be something on your side.

It is always good to double-check the information you are provided. So you are sure that the issue isn't a bug.

Gr., Keszi

P.S. I made a quick crawl with Screaming Frog on the first domain: sundancevacationsblog.com and found quite a big number of Missing Meta Titles.

Hi Sam,

If the pages that you are talking have been blocked by robots.txt I do not think they would be in any way beneficial. In our case (because of a development made back in 2009 - which still wasn't corrected) we have pages that are noindex, follow. And I have seen that some anchor texts used for internal linking still bring value to the landing pages.

I hope this helped, Keszi

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

Hey,

You would probably want to go to: http://advertise.bingads.microsoft.com/en-us/home then sign in, not sign up (if you already have a bing ads account)

Gr., Keszi

Not yet, but planning it for a future website. I found this after I have made some research reading that article on the Moz blog

It seems it had some effect on us.

Hi Vic,

How about this plugin? https://wordpress.org/plugins/timeline-express/screenshots/

Gr., Keszi

Hey!

Actually Rand made a very nice Whiteboard Friday about this topic: http://moz.com/blog/subdomains-vs-subfolders-rel-canonical-vs-301-how-to-structure-links-optimally-for-seo-whiteboard-friday

I personally prefer to use subfolders, had good experience with it.

Gr., Keszi

Like I have mentioned it above, Majestic has it. You can compare the backlinks of two website/webpages.

But you can also download all the backlinks and with some excel work, you can compare the lists.

Hi Dev,

When it comes to checking links and anchor text usage, I usually prefer Majestic over Moz (do not get me wrong, Moz does a great work, but I am used to Majestic for these kind of tasks).

Keszi

Hi there,

Basically you are saying that you'd like to host every language on different domains. That shouldn't be an issue. If the text is translated, you could even create a sitemap for language targeting and submit it. This way Google will know that Page A is a translated version to english of Page B.

You can read more about the HREFLANG here: http://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag

There is also a tool for generating the correct sitemaps, which will make your job easy. You can check it here: http://www.themediaflow.com/tool_hreflang.php

I hope it helped, Keszi

There was a Google Webmaster Central office-hours hangouts where John Mueller was talking about this.

The idea was, that you should let googlebot crawl the old pages also, so they can pick up the redirects.

Regarding my previous answer: Might be an idea to include the new page to the sitemap, without removing the old ones. (so they can crawl the old versions and pick up the 301 redirects).

Hey,

When we had made to merge pages, we have been waiting for a few days after the new page went live, before updating the xlm sitemaps. It is always better to give time to Google to recrawl the old versions.Gr. Keszi

Hi Michael,

I am not quite sure, but I have a gut feeling telling me it has something to do with your canonical tags. When did you implement those? (cannot run a crawl now, but I will surely check it out in the evening).

Gr., Keszi

Hi Alec,

IMO a good link is one that not only provides "link juice", but can provide referral traffic as well. Therefore when someone asks me where to start with link building, then I always try to guide them towards the concept of:

• Who is you target audience?
• What do they read?
• Do you have the linkable assets on your website, where you can provide them with unique value?

These are the prerequisites of a link building process. Only after you have answered these (and mainly to yourself), you can start thinking of how to connect your target audience with your assets.

Do not forget, that quality always wins against quantity. Do not try to create many links, with low value.

Also before you start building links, read as much as possible about Google updates.

Gr., Keszi

Hi Alec,

There are various tools that you can use, but when it comes to the real "deal" I usually go for Screaming Frog + Excel. Back, when I had a Moz Pro account, I remember their crawls provided quite a good data to start with.

This is how I usually do it (doesn't mean that there are no good tools for SEO).

The most important IMO is to collect data, as much data as possible. Understand it. Prioritize it. Then take action accordingly. (I think Moz Pro is a perfect tool that can help).

I hope it has helped.

Gr., Keszi

Hi Michele,

First of all, I would try to include it in sitemap. Than I'd do the following:

1. For all the cars that you have sold, I'd try to implement a noindex, follow (and keep the page alive for the following few days, giving time to Google to crawl these URLs again).
2. Every day a sitemap should be generated, then pinged (check Google's "best practices for sitemaps" article: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ro/2014/10/best-practices-for-xml-sitemaps-rssatom.html and the ping protocol: http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html#submit_ping)

That's my personal approach. But might be that others come up with better ideas.

I hope it helped.

Gr., Keszi

Hi,

I'd go for redirect all the pages. Even if doesn't have 1 link (external), but until it is not an orphan page, it still got some value from internal linking.

That is my personal opinion.

Gr., Keszi

Egol, you are right! Just love how you present your idea!

I was more into how to interpret the data from Moz (or any other tools in general).

Hi Andy,

It is important to know that Moz crawl gives you an error/notification about a specific issue, to highlight that one or more elements could influence your search rankings. All tools can do, is to highlight information for you.

The way they highlight an issue (high importance, low importance, etc.) is based on the big data they are able to analyze, and how they have experienced how these data correlates with the rankings from their data.

On the other hand having your competition having the same issue, might be a signal that it is a point on your website where you could do better than your competition.

This is how I interpret their data.

I hope this was helpful.

Gr., Keszi

Hi William,

Did you try out Ontolo meanwhile?

Gr., Keszi

After some research made, I have found the following code, which could be implemented in the theme's functions.php:

function rel_next_prev(){global $paged;if( get_previous_posts_link()){?>
}if( get_next_posts_link()){?>
}}
add_action('wp_head','rel_next_prev');?>

Try it out, and let me know when it is live. We can then check if it works well or not.

Gr. Keszi

If the admin subdomain is used for any testing purposes, then I wouldn't redirect it. If there is no specific use for it, you could do a 301.

If it is used for testing purposes, then you could:

• block the crawlers
• noindex the pages (as Ryan mentioned it above)
• use canonical to the www. version

I hope it was helpful.

Gr., Keszi

Like Linda mentioned it, I would also keep it under one domain. What you could do is to present the cons and pros of each version, maybe you can convince your client

Basically the two websites from content point of view are going to be similar in any way?

Hi,

I'd completely deny access for robots to the subdomain. For this I would create a robots.txt for the subdomain (place it in the folder of the subdomain) which would state the following:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

This way your content from the subdomain won't be crawled by search engines -> no content duplication issue for search engines.

Gr., Keszi

This is true.- In case of duplicate content.

But until now we didn't talk about same content on the secondary website. This is why I have asked him to give us a little bit more information.

Hi,

I do not really understand the question. Is the secondary site on a separate domain or are you implementing it on the same domain?

Could you give a little more information? So we can give an easier answer

Gr., Keszi

Each search engine has it's own search algorithm. In some cases things are similar, but I do not think they can be correlated.

Hi David,

Isn't it possible that your website has been effected by another Google algorithmic update, while the manual penalty?

Gr., Keszi

Ivan, correct that homepage is a "static page", which has a custom template in your theme directory.

That template has a loop which is going to show your latest articles on the homepage. That's part of the file you need to edit.

Gr., Keszi

So the question really is, what kind of page template does the homepage use in order to pull in the data. We would need to modify that in order to put in the pagination.

P.S. Sorry for the late reply.

I am not 100% sure. For that I would need to have a look at the php code.

For sure, now it is not implemented.

Usually Wordpress SEO by Yoast implements this automatically when we are talking about category/tag/date/etc. archive pages.

In case of the homepage, I do not know personally where to implement it - I'd need to see the code for it.

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

I believe what you are missing is the pagination markup link rel="prev"/rel="next". This is why all the paginated content is indexed, although you have a canonical link set up.

Gr., Keszi

I do not believe that having the same text in h1 and title tag could cause any issues. For example we can see a lot of Wordpress websites rank where the title wasn't rewritten. There in most of the cases H1 and Title tag are exactly the same. (or differ only in a | Brand in the title)

That's a personal opinion.

Gr., Keszi

I personally do not see anything wrong with the code.

Maybe you should try that test, change it drastically then go and fetch it from Google Webmasters Tools. Let's see what happens.

I'd test it with one page, then fetch it from Google webmasters tools.

If the test works, then it could be applied to all of the problematic pages.

Hi Fernando,

It should not have any issues from SEO point of view.

We are using the same technique at a client's website (to distinguish easily a hungarian and a romanian version which are not the same at all - so a multilanguage implementation wouldn't have been benefitial), and both version are working fine.

So I would not worry too much about it.

Gr., Keszi

I was thinking the same also. But then I have seen the line in Carla's question: "The funny thing is that Google is picking up the correct Meta Description." (and I thought those have been changed at the same time).

Google is known for the fact that likes to rewrite titles and meta descriptions, if they believe it fits more to the user.

There are a few articles which you could read:

• from Yoast: https://yoast.com/google-page-title/ <- he is writing about this issue itself
• from Moz: http://moz.com/learn/seo/title-tag

I hope it will help.

Gr., Keszi

Hi Christian,

Every single tool has it's own index and indexing procedure. Some have a better link discovery than others. This specifically doesn't mean that a tool in general is better than the other one.

Before paying for any tool, I believe you should make a research for what are you going to use that specific tool.

It might be, that ahrefs, majestic have better link discovery, but Moz is better on the on-site issue discovery... and it helps you resolve that issue quite fast.

If you would like to know more about how OSE link discovery works, you can read more about it in Moz's help hub: http://moz.com/help/guides/research-tools/open-site-explorer (check the FAQ also).

I hope this clears up some questions you had.

Gr., Keszi

Hi Geraldine,

So, meanwhile just jumped in what would be most cost efficient implementation for the HREFLANG on your website.

Give the following article to your developer: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2620865?hl=en

Basically he will create a sitemap for each of the websites, which will indicate what is the alternate version of every single page in other languages.

You will then submit this sitemap to EACH of the Google Webmaster Tools accounts for the websites (.fr, .de, .com, etc.)

This should be the fastest and most cost efficient in your case.

Reminder: Remove the Hreflang link from current versions. It is the best to indicate alternate via only once channel.

Gr., Keszi

Could you write me Private Message with your email address? I need to ask a few questions to your developer in order to search for a good implementation.

Hi Geraldine,

I checked it quickly but I do not see the implementation done.

Regarding of how you could do it fast, what Content Management System are you using?

Gr., Keszi

Hi David,

There is a really good mozinar about Advanced Wordpress SEO: http://moz.com/webinars/advanced-wordpress-seo

I know it is from 2013, and it might not look fresh, but I remember listening it and getting a lot of good tips on how to handle your wordpress website. (Also tags, archive pages, etc.)

It is less than one hour, and it does worth watching it.

I hope it will help you identify and resolve these issues on your website.

Good luck! Keszi

Hi!

Like Jamie has mentioned it, you have a HREFLANG issue on the site.

Try implementing for each of the domains the following code:

<- default for international
                  <- default for US
              <- default for Aus
                             <- default for italian language!
                             <- default for french language
                          <- default for german language!

I would implement it like this.

The difference is compared to Jamie's implementation idea, is that I wouldn't put the .com version as the x-default.

All of the hreflang markups have to appear on each of the pages! For example:

Read through the articles Jamie provided, they will be a huge help to kick-start the implementation.

Gr., Keszi

I was thinking how to answer this, but it is so simple: Yes and Yes for both of the questions

Let me know if you need further assistance.

Hi Ariel,

I have found something on Stackoverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7780859/htaccess-rewrite-to-force-trailing-slash-at-the-end

Maybe you want to check it out, if it works for you.

Gr., Keszi

Hi Dave,

Personally I would put a noindex, follow on all three of these pages.

The question to you would be the following: Do you think, that if someone would land on your website to one of these pages, would it deliver value for them?

The single item, that in my belief should be analyzed is the search pages. I'd check from Google Analytics if there is any organic traffic to these pages, compare it with the current pages that are on my site. And IF I find any new queries which I do not cover with my current pages/categories, I would create one for them.

I hope it helped. Gr., Keszi