Welcome to the Q&A Forum

HI Dino,

Yes the links will still show in external link reports if they still exist. Assuming you have GWT access for the domain in question, you can go to the google disavow tool (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main), select the relevant domain and then click 'disavow links'. it will pop up a window where you can also download the last file that was uploaded to the disavow tool. You can then use this list to cross check against the links you are seeing in the reports to make sure nothing was missed.

Wordpress and Joomla are both just tools at the end of the day and can both be effective depending on how you are using them. I personally have had negative experiences trying to optimise existing joomla sites (complicated templates, weird plugin functionality, slow load times etc) but I am sure those more experienced with it would say these things can be overcome.

The real questions are why you want to switch systems and how much effort it would require to do so? It looks like you have quite a bit of content in your site, so migrating to wordpress would likely need a bit of technical experience and time to complete. I am sure there are scripts around that will help in that process, but migrating a db from one system to another usually has a few gotcha moments along the way! You would also need to account for any changes in url structures and 301ing the old urls to the new. All in all not a decision to be taken lightly.

If there is not a specific reason you want to switch (ie something you are trying to do in joomla that is proving impossible for some reason) I would think that switching platforms might be more hassle than it is worth. As for one or the other being more customisable and/or secure than the other, I don't think there is really any difference between them, both are fully customisable and are as secure (or not secure) as you make them if following best practices.

Hi,

If you can do as recommended above and get rid of the page completely then this would be the way to go. Since it is on a national newspaper site and a couple of years old I am guessing this might be tough to do (although worth a shot).

Otherwise you can try to boost your own rankings and grab more real estate by:

1. Making sure all your on page data is branded (page titles, company schema etc).

2. Use verified social channels and link to them from your site (especially google+ but fb, twitter, linkedin, youtube are all good).

3. Get a few more branded links into the site (I assuming you are in 2nd position, it is a bit unusual for a branded search to not return the brand as the first option - you might just need a few more (honest) links).

5. Short term solution: Adwords on your brand's search. You should get a 4 pack of site links + descriptions in it also so should give a fair amount of real estate above the newspaper article and should be inexpensive.

Hi,

At first glance it seems you have a rel canonical issue. All of your blog posts have a rel canonical pointing to: <link <span class="webkit-html-attribute-name">rel="canonical" href="http://www.hilden.co.uk/bed-linen.html" /></link <span>

Probably not what you had in mind!

Hi,

Sometimes FB seems to get a bit stuck on urls, I find running them through the fb url debug tool (https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/) usually seems to unstick them. I plugged that url into the tool, it returns ok, does it post properly now also?

Hi David,

Personally I feel the value is debatable. If you are syndicating your own blog content then you are running the risk of either duplicate content and/or what looks quite a bit like mechanical link building, both of which are low value options.

If you are planning on creating unique content for the other blogs then you need to balance the amount of effort it will need to create something decent with the amount of time you have. I have also found that you can be in danger of competing with yourself, and the last thing you want is your offsite blog competing with your main site/blog. In my experience blogspot etc have proven to be more hassle than they are worth in upkeep and I would prefer to focus on the main blog creating good content and building strong links.

My two cents!

HI,

There was a recent WBF about syndicated content which runs down the various technical ways you can attribute your listings as the original source - check it out here. It would probably also help to make sure your listings are the first ones into the index which can be done by internally linking to the new jobs (obviously), quickly adding them to your sitemap, sharing them through social channels (especially twitter) - all of which should help make sure your content is indexed quickly and ideally before it is replicated on other sites.

If the other sites have stronger authority than yours you would still really want to get one of the 3 options discussed in the video implemented. It sounds like you already have the link back to your site (option 3 in the video) so perhaps the link is not 'clean' ie a straight text link that leads to the exact job on your site and is not no-followed?

It might also depend on what kind of long tail you are looking at ranking for. Individual job ads might not pull a lot of organic traffic by themselves if they are not aggregated by type or location for example - at which point the higher authority domains are likely to show an advantage (just a thought).

Hi,

It i probably google deciding to rewrite the titles for you, Yoast himself makes a mention of it here: http://yoast.com/google-page-title/ In short, not much you can do about it.

HI Benoit,

If the site is very new and has no incoming links yet I would think that google is still trying to decide what it is all about and how best to present the data in the serps and that is why you are seeing the contact data in there (also the type of search you are doing - an exact match for the domain - could be influencing the type of data returned). Give it a bit of time and the description should change around and settle.

The date is mentioned in your source code (view source and search for 'vcard' and you will see a hidden div with author and date info in it). So google is likely thinking your site is a blog and adding date info to the serps. Getting this hidden code completely out of the template should help getting the date out of the description.

Hi Brandon,

Its probably that robots meta noindex tag you have in there!

HI,

bmw -intitle:bmw

Should work (if you ignore the google rewritten titles in the serps).

HI,

On the face of it this certainly looks like a penguin related drop, the time fame matches even if the drop is less steep than some have seen. It is worth looking at your organic traffic segmented by landing page, maybe your homepage took an immediate hit and some inner pages pages held their rankings a bit longer (or vice versa). If the site is quite new then it is also possible that you are seeing normal variations that often come with new sites (which may explain the slower drop off, the penguin update hit your main keyword(s) and the longer tail stuff slowly declined as google eventually decided where your pages should be placed in the serps). It is of course always worth thinking about if any other changes in the code or content happened at the same time which might have had an effect of rankings.

If you have been building a lot of links through directories and especially if those have been somewhat keyword heavy then a penguin hit seems likely (even though no manual penalty notice). I would hold off on building any more directory links and start looking at evening out your profile with some more natural type links (these will depend a bit on your industry).

Is all that new traffic organic? Is your sale/conversion rate increasing at the same rate?

If the answer to either of those questions is yes then you should be moving cautiously. If the main aim is to make the site mobile friendly then do that first and monitor traffic/rankings for a couple of weeks. After that depending on what you see try implementing the other changes you have planned in order and give a week or two in between each change to monitor how things are going.

Changing urls, titles, metas, internal linking and content all at the same time on a site with that much traffic (and I am assuming at least some profit).... is crazy. If rankings/traffic plummet, which change caused it? Where do you even start diagnosing with that many changes at once? Nightmare!

Hi,

I have seen the same thing in a number of Magento shops I track, but while Magento can be a bit of a pain (those url variables oh man!) I think this is most likely due to thin product content and how the SEOmoz report decides on what is duplicate content.

The modal window content is repeated across all or most pages as you say, and since that content is the vast majority of the page's content, then the report is saying these pages look all the same. The product details are very small texts in comparison to all the generic shipping etc content you have in each page.

I see in my reports the duplicate page report numbers bouncing around all the time as the report decides one week that these 5 pages look the same and the next week a different 5 pages look the same!

I don't know the specifics of how exactly the report decides which pages to flag as duplicate or why it bounces around, but I think the main issue is that if the report is seeing the content as duplicate, then there is a good chance the search engines might as well. It is at least an indication that something is amiss.

How to fix it? Well I would suggest 2 things:

1. Add more product details to pad out the product specific texts on product pages and

2. Move the modal content window data into separate pages and then either link to them from the footer as you do now, but leading to their own page or else load the separate page data into the window using ajax or similar.

Both solutions require a bit of work, I would think the second would have the most immediate benefit in terms of the SEOmoz reports.

Hope that makes sense!

Hi

This should do it, you place the robots.txt in the root directory of your site.

User-agent: * Disallow: /product-category/

You can check out some more examples here: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/robotstxt

As for the multiple urls linking to the same pages, you will just need to check all possible variants and make sure you have them covered in the robots.txt file.

Google webmaster tools has a page where you can use to check if the robots.txt file is doing what you expect it to do (under Health -> Blocked Urls).

It might be easier to block the pages with a meta tag as described in the link above if you are running a plugin allowing this, that should take care of all the different url structures also.

Hope that helps!

Hi,

I think this will do what you are after: http://pro.moz.com/tools/crawl-test, limited to 3000 pages but should give an idea if the fix is working as you expect.

Hi Jason,

At first glance I would say a big part would be the number of external links and the domain authority. The first site has some links from quite a few major news sources in regards an incident where a woman's breast implant got 'blown out'(!!). Bbc, la times, cbs, nbc, huffington post, wow!

Now, i'm not suggesting you try to organise a similar event , but man, those links are pretty powerful and even though the event could be considered a negative one from one side of the equation those links are probably giving a good overall authority boost to the site.

Hi there,

It looks like you have a technical problem which is probably the root of the issue. On the vast majority of your pages (including the homepage) you have a meta robots noindex tag which is telling google not to index your content! You can see here that there are very few pages indexed. Unless there is some specific reason for this setup then you should go into the yoast settings and/or the general wordpress settings and remove this instruction. For yoast check here for the various places to check, for wordpress generally you go to Settings -> Reading and make sure the 'search engine visibility' checkbox is NOT ticked. Hope it helps! If you get that sorted out I would think you will see a pick up in results pretty quickly.

Hey Dan,

Its a bit confusing and has been for a while! See: https://moz.com/community/q/uk-and-gb-when-selecting-targeted-engines-in-campaign-management. Results should be the same between them anyway but Moz is saying that GB is the mistake and is due to be phased out.

Not really a great plan if you ask me.

Why don't you put the blog on your own domain, share the links through social channels and start building your followers and your domain authority? I would concentrate on quality over quantity, one good post a week is easily going to beat 5 spun out posts.

Your plan as it stands is too mechanical, easy for google to spot and really a whole bunch of links from the same, obviously networked sites like squidoo, tumblr etc how much value is that really going to drive? Not much I wouldn't think!

Hi,

This happens quite often if redirects are not implemented with adwords in mind. You can either ask your developers to tweak the redirect code so that url parameters are passed on during the redirect or alternatively change the relevant adwords urls to go directly to the redirected url which will bypass the redirect completely and should preserve the gclid parameters. Depends a bit on how temporary or permanent the redirect is (you say you are using a 302 temporary redirect currently but this would normally be a 301 if the change is permanent).

Hi David,

A couple of things to try (I haven't tested them)

Set up an xml update on the cms page like this:

<reference name="head"><action method="setTitle"><title>Your Module Page Title</title></action></reference>

Depending on the controllers this might change both page and breadcrumb titles (not sure if that is what you are after)

If you don't mind doing a small code change the trick described here: http://inchoo.net/ecommerce/magento/change-any-page-title-in-magento/ should do it. If following that you would actually be doing it backwards, the normal page title would be used in the breadcrumb and the updated page title used in the title tag.

If actually the breadcrumb is not the most important thing for that page you could just remove it, also with an xml update like this: <remove name="</code">"breadcrumbs"``/></remove>

Hope one of those helps!

Hi Paul,

As you already know there are a couple of ways to approach this. Opinions will vary, but with the details you have given I would be tempted to do as you originally thought, keep building links from US based sites. There must be some US based blogs, review sites etc that cover your software field (?), those would be the first place I would look at for getting some more relevant US links.

Keep in mind that not all .com sites are US oriented so even though you say you have more US links than UK, if this is only based on the domain then it might be a bit more complicated than that.

You have not mentioned what your keywords are, but software type keywords might have some pretty different keyword difficulty scores between the US and the UK, which might account for your #1 ranking in the UK and nowhere to be seen in the US. That being said, since you are ranking in both for other keywords that is an indication that ranking in both is at least possible with the setup you currently have.

If you have not done so already, it might be worth putting a news page or a blog post on your site about the expansion into the US market. If you run a blog then I am sure there are some other content ideas you could come up with that detail US specific data for your particular software field which would give you some nice content to use when approaching people for links.

Hope that helps!

Hi,

The new(ish) business.facebook.com is pretty much the MCC equivalent. It can be a bit difficult to figure out in the beginning but it is a lot better than the situation you describe! Check out the official faq page here.

Regardless of the value (or lack of) of a specific link from a specific directory I would agree with you that the seomoz directory list is a bit problematic. Since they are listed it does give the impression (rightly or wrongly) that these directories are 'approved' by seomoz and this might be sending the wrong message to many people. Would be interested in hearing the thoughts of a staff member on this, personally I would be tempted to get rid of the list!

Hi Bridget,

There is no alt attribute in css, so no you cannot add it there,

There are a couple of things you can do.

1. Optimizing your image file names will at least give an indication of what the image is about and

2. Rethink your css and the use of background images. Specifically you could get the same effect as you have now without background images using a combination of absolutely and relatively positioned divs. This way you can have the same layout as now but with the image in the html rather than the css and alt tags will be available for them.

Check the link here for some demo code: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8708945/how-to-position-text-over-an-image-in-css

Hope that helps!

Hi,

I believe the limit on local listings per account is 100, not 10 (see here), so you will be ok for a while yet. Since you are not eligible for bulk upload/verification the only option at the moment is to input your local listings individually as usual and verify them individually also. You can then add new locations as they become available and once you are over the 10 locations limit you can initiate the bulk verification request following the instructions here.  There is no disadvantage in this process, you don't 'lose' anything starting out with less than 10 locations and then moving above that number and bulk verifying so nothing to worry about!

Hi,

Well you have started on the right track with moz and the other tools! Personally I would take a step back from the link building and get a good grounding in the basics first. The moz beginner guide is a great place to start.

In regards your link profile, the moz metrics can be a bit deceptive if you have done a lot of link building in comparison to your competitors, the authority numbers can be somewhat inflated even though the links are not high value (and indeed are even hurting you). Your link profile to me looks problematic, especially the non www which has quite a few linking texts which seem completely unrelated to your site (check the anchors cloud in the ahrefs links above). Is this the reason for your ranking problems? Maybe and there is a good chance you will need to try to get rid of some of those links if possible. Might be worth asking whoever built these links if it is possible to unwind some of them, but this is a whole different conversation and worth a separate qa question where someone with more experience in getting rid of bad links might jump in with more specific advice.

What I can certainly say now is I would stop the link building you are currently doing as it looks problematic and there is no point in making it even worse. Then go through the moz guide, get a good grounding in the basics and in the first instance concentrate on building links from relevant sources from your offline world. What I mean is incorporate your real world contacts and actions with your site, register your business/site with relevant local business directories or local photography groups for example. Be a normal business with normal business activities in other words and incorporate these when relevant to a link here or there. There is no 'acceptable' rate of link building, but honestly for a local wedding photography site a 'natural' rate could be only a link or two a week! 40 a day is simply asking for a penalty, why would a site like this be getting so many links if not to try and game the search engines?

Hope that helps!

HI Tom

If they are two very different websites then why would it matter if they are on the same c block or not?

Personally I would not get too worried about trying to hide the connection from google, it is a losing game in most cases. That being said, most of the content you mention seems to be relevant to the ecom site, I would be tempted to host it on the same domain. Use the blog site to add relevant reviews and content and to help boost the overall domain authority of the main site. Just because the blog is hosted on the ecom site doesn't mean the reviews cannot be unbiased!

My two cents!

Hi Anoop,

For your question regarding the benefit, site wide links especially on the same host (or a handful of hosts) all pointing to you are not going to give you much benefit and could potentially bring penalties. Be especially careful about stuffing keywords into those links. Your best bet if you want to keep the reference to you as a designer is to put the links only on the hompage or alternatively on a site credits type page and keep them to branded links only (ie the name of your company).

As to why all of them are not showing up in your reports, seomoz and other tools can only ever index a subset of all the links/pages on the web. I would think that the sites that are not showing up maybe have small link profiles (few external links from other sites) and as such are just not getting crawled that often because references to them from other sites are not found that often. Over time if their link profiles get stronger then you will likely start to see more of them appear in the reports.

Hope that helps!

Hi George,

Doesn't look like an article submission site to me, looks like a domain that expired a few years ago but had a decent backlink profile and has now been picked up by someone to sell links or pad out their own link profile(s). The newspaper articles look like they are from feeds and the only links I can see that are not to big US newspapers are the three little links down in the footer. The site itself only appears to have about 10 pages in total.

Hi Dana,

Thomas makes good points in regards nginx and lightspeed, but since making changes to server setup can sometimes be a big pain it is worth verifying if the page loads times have really been affected as you think.

The pagespeed insights numbers can be a bit deceiving in that they are telling you how many 'best practice' checkboxes you have ticked while not actually telling you how fast your pages are loading. You could have a pagespeed value of only 50 for example, but pages loading in 1.5 seconds (fast in other words). First thing to do if you havent already is to check the page speed times in analytics (content -> site speed) and see what numbers they are giving you and if they have gone up at all since you installed the apache modules. I cannot think of any technical reason for those modules to negatively affect page speed times, but it is worth checking. Also worth checking page load times through a tool that mimics higher server loads. I have used http://loadimpact.com/ which seems pretty good.

Once you have determined your real page load times you can then assess if there is a problem and the best way to approach it (which can depend a lot on what the root cause of the slow times is).

A million pages linking in is a whole lot! I would be very careful if those are mainly site wides, it is asking for trouble.

As for the seomoz tool, I too sometimes wish it would show a link it is not, but patience is a virtue. If the site is decently linked, the seomoz bot will likely get to it at some point.

Try looking at it another way though. If a link is continuously NOT showing in the seomoz report it is a pretty strong indication in many instances that the link/page has a really low benefit. Really low in this case would mean pretty much non existent. So in that respect I find the seomoz link reports useful for focusing much more on quality than quantity if you see what I mean.

Hi Tim,

Did you ever get to the bottom of the issue mentioned in this question? It is almost certainly the same problem.

Have a look at this page and try either turning of the sh404SEF anti flooding feature or else boosting the max number of requests allowed. http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?p=1368937

The anti flooding part of this component is basically blocking requests for pages if it thinks someone is trying to do a dos attack on your site. The current setup seems to be too sensitive and is bloocking screaming frog after the first few requests, quite possibly blocking the google bots, maybe blocking the moz crawler also, so certainly something you should address.

Hi Peter,

For some information on the process check out a couple of articles like: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-ultimate-guide-to-advanced-guest-blogging http://www.searchenginejournal.com/the-ultimate-guest-bloggers-guide-for-2013/57457/

and also some wise words of warning here:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-guest-bloggers-are-sleepwalking-their-way-into-penalties

That second link above also some some follow on links for some of the more popular blogger linkup sites like myguestblog.com and bloggerlinkup.com. I can't say I have ever actually published a post with these services, but worth checking out to see what is there and generally how the process on those sites work.

In regards what categories are suitable, you are going to need to brainstorm and think outside of the box a bit, there are no independent removals bloggers that I know of :). I have also seen quite a few really spammy removals posts, seems to be an industry that is/was attracting this kind of link building. If you want to stay away from that you will need to think laterally and go for niches that can somehow be related to yours.

A couple of ideas might be DIY or home renovation blogs, entrepreneur/small business blogs maybe even an automotive type blog (you have vans right?).
So with any of those, once you found a likely blog, see what kind of content they use and try to find an angle for content of a post that is directed to their audience but relevant to you. Many times you might not even be mentioning your removals service, you might be talking about the process you used to build your business or about some cool modifications you have made to your vans.

And as the others say, don't pay for the post or the link!

My two cents!

Hi,

Yes it is ok and secure. Adding users with these restrictions basically gives them read access rights to the relevant accounts but they cannot change settings, add/delete users or generally cause any unforeseen trouble!

Hi Jesse,

If you change the url even a bit and let the old one 404 then you will accomplish what you want in terms of cutting the bad incoming links, so if all of them are poison as you say, then this is probably a logical option. You could also consider a 410 response which might remove the page from the index faster and is considered more permanent (gone forever).

In terms of the incoming traffic I would keep two things in mind.

1. Firstly it would be nice to identify where that direct traffic is coming from as much as possible. Check out this article for a couple of ideas on what traffic might be hiding behind those numbers and apply to your situation as relevant. If you have a couple of days/weeks to be patient you can manually tag some of the likely sources to see what data that gives you.

2. If possible consider making a custom 404/410 page for this instance giving real users a link to the new page. Not 100% sure on the technicalities of how google will assess a link to the new page from the now old page which is returning a 4xx status. You could meta tag the 404 noindex, follow or even noindex, nofollow I suppose to further enforce the disconnect between the old and the new while still keeping the link available for human visitors.

Hope that helps.

Hi Dan

The hreflang will tell google that different pages are targeted to different languages/regions, but it will not help solve your existing dupe content problems as you describe them. So for these you should use the canonical tag.

Hreflang and canonical tags can be used together but can cause issues if you are not careful. Main thing to be sure of is that you keep any canonical tags within the same lang/region pages. You do not want to be having a US page with a canonical tag pointing to a UK page in other words.

Having multiple UK pages with a canonical pointing to the main UK page and the main UK page having an hreflang tag to its US counterpart is ok (as is having a self referencing canonical tag on the main UK and US pages if needed). Google mentions here that this is an acceptable way to handle canonicalisation issues in an international setup.

What you would also want to avoid is having hreflang tags on your dupe content pages in the UK version. Where would they go? to the US version of the duplicate content? To the main canonical version of the US content? That could get messy pretty quickly. So the trick is to consolidate your UK pages with rel canonical and then properly markup your final regional variations with hreflang.

Hope that makes sense!

Hi Bob,

The value of any link depends on many factors including technical moz type page/domain ratings but also social and community/readership type metrics. Those first links you show above at first glance look ok although a bit dry and maybe built more for guest blogging than anything else. Not trying to slag them off on a quick look but I would want to dig a bit deeper before I would say those are quality links.

That being said, the second list is really low quality. So, to answer your question, that second group is such low quality that they were probably discounted already and not offering any value to linked sites. In this respect, 1 quality link would be more valuable than 1000 of those, so there is your answer

My two cents.

Hi,

You could try fetching the page (homepage I guess unless these pages were all part of a sub section of the site) in webmaster tools which should help speed the process, see this page for details. And of course if not already done make sure you have a valid sitemap in GWT which has all the relevant urls in it. A bit of patience and they should come back.

Hi,

Are you sure these old urls are not being linked from somewhere (probably internally)? Maybe the sitemap.xml was forgotten and is pointing to all the old urls still? I think that for 404's to show in GWT there needs to be a link to them from somewhere, so in the first instance in GWT go to the 404s and have a look at where they are linked from (you can do this with moz reports also). If it is an internal page like a sitemap, or some forgotten menu/footer feature or similar that is still linking to old pages then yes you certainly want to clear this up! If this is the case, once you have fixed the internal linking issues you should have significantly reduced list of 404s and can then concentrate on these on a more case by case basis (assuming they are being triggered by external links).

Hope that helps!

HI,

It looks like your 'request info' button is spinning out endless urls, try going to any page and then clicking 'request info' a couple of times. You will see these urls being created. It is probably a relatively simple mistake in the code for the button, your developer should be able to fix it.

Hi Matt,

The user agent is called rogerbot, you can see a reference to it here (towards the bottom of the page).

HI Neil,

The joomla installation will in effect be 'deactivated' when you switch the htaccess rules over to serving the root from the wp install (you will also be replacing index.php in the root folder if memory serves).  Google will not have a problem with this BUT the old joomla content will not be available anymore (to users or bots). You will be recreating the old content on the new wp install also right?

You will need to make sure your 301s are setup properly from the old joomla urls to the new wp urls and you will need to wait until after the switch to the wp site to verify these are working properly so a bit of preplanning and verification afterwards will be needed there. Other than that all the usual best practices for switching to a new site are all still of importance, check out this guide for a good rundown. Hope it helps!

Hi,

If you go into your crawl report and drill down to the 404 report you will see a column showing what page is linking to the missing page. Based on this you can remove the bad link and fix your 404 problem. Be sure to also verify the missing page is not still listed in any sitemaps you have. Hope it helps!