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I have a website that's been going for 10 years or so, doesn't get huge traffic but it's fairly consistent. About 5 years ago I put the same content on youtube- instructional how to videos. The website offers slightly better content because there are images to accompany the step by step text below the videos. The text is more or less the same on youtube and my website.

Recently, youtube has started to vastly out-perform my website.  For every page/video on my website, there is a youtube page. They're basically competing against each other. Over the years I have accrued a fair number of links to my website.

My question is, should I redirect my inbound links to the relevant youtube pages and sacrifice my website?

Thanks!

Will

Hi,

I'm getting these weird phantom search results showing up in my analytics account which is skewing  my results. I have a wordpress site, and I do have some custom search results pages, but analytics is telling me these hits are coming from google- which I doubt. The end of the query string (&cat=plus-5-results) is not coming from a link created within my site.

Anyone have any ideas? Failing that, would somebody be kind enough to explain how I can ignore these hits, but retain other, valid search result requests?

Thanks reading!

Will

Screenshot%202019-05-16%20at%2022.32.10.jpg

Oh yeah, right! That's funny, I wonder how that happened. I had a quick peak in Yoast and the various post types and pages were set to no-index. You're a star, thanks a million.

Let's see what happens...

Hi there,

I have for a long time had a bicycle maintenance website at madegood.org. Over the years the film branch of this business has taken off and moved in a slightly different direction, so I thought in March I decided to move madegood.org to madegoobikes.com, and create a new website for my film business at madegood.com. I thought I did a good job of telling google about my change of domain, but my rankings completely died, so about a month I moved madegoodbikes.com back to madegood.org.

So far I haven't seen any sign of a recovery in my rankings, I'm getting almost no visits. I've check all my top pages on OSE and everything seems to be in place.

https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/pages?site=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.madegood.org%2F&no_redirects=0&sort=page_authority&filter=all&page=1

Is it normal to wait over a month for my rankings to recover, or is there anything else I should be doing? Any tips/ideas/advice whatsoever will of huge help!

Okay great, that's very helpful.

What if I wanted to have multiple scripts, say, for points of interest along the route, and had multiple (20+) tags at the bottom of the page? Would this be an ugly way of doing it, or considered totally okay in the eyes of google?

Thanks Federico.

As my script is being called at the bottom of the page, I would assume it doesn't count as 'inline'?

Yes the scripts are only being used once on specific pages.

Hi,

I have a page on my site with a google map embed, and a path drawn on the map. The path is made from a long string of coordinates. For ease I have the co-ordinates placed in a script tag at the foot of the page, amongst my javascript

My question is, will this script tag hurt the seo for the page? I've read that inline js and 'data islands' can be bad, so I've been careful to keep it out of the main body of the page. Thanks, any help appreciated!

Hi,

I'm building a tabbed navigation menu in which lots of sub-menu items are hidden with css until I mouse over a top level item.

Is there any way this could be considered cloaking by google?

Cheers

question posted, I'll let you know what they say!

Thanks Tom,

Yes those tools are very useful, I have used them already. It really was an automated script I was after.

I'll give screaming frog a shout. Their tool is excellent otherwise.

Hi everyone,

I've had my site for a while now and have changed the structure a number of times. I'm confident my 301's work well and am not concerned about dead ends on my site.

My question is, is there a way to find 301 redirect chains? i.e. can I export my link data from webmaster tools and run it through some software that tells me how many steps my 301's are taking to get to the final page?

I don't know for sure that there are long 301 chains in my link structure, but I have a suspicion and it's very hard to check by going through them manually.

Thanks in advance

Will

Hi Michael, thanks for your reply.

Not quite right on both counts actually. I didn't get a message in WMT and my sudden drop in referrals doesn't coincide with an algorithm change. I think this means it's quite likely the problem is not to do with my links? Could be wrong though, I don't really know what I'm talking about.

I think it's an on-page optimisation issue, although if my drop happened suddenly could that still be the case? My html is a bit of a mess- there were some broken links in the footer to my disclaimer etc and had a ton of internal links pointed at 301's plus some unintentional hidden text etc (hence the site rebuild).

I was slowly starting to rank better and better for a whole load of specific keywords, surely all my links didn't take a hit?

Hi All,

I've recently had a google penalty, and have spent a long while working through tying up any loose ends with my site (I'm building a new one, so you'll still see some probs on my current one).

My search referrals do slowly seem to be recovering, but only for variations of terms that are similar to 'bike repair'. Now, my site does primarily offer bike repair advice, so that's a good thing, but I'm not yet ranking for any of my specific keywords. One example is that I used to rank quite high for the term 'schrader valve'.

Is this a signal of anything in particular? Or can I not read anything specific into this?

Thanks!

Thanks for all your advice!

Thanks Kane,

I did as you said and the one strange thing that sticks out is that engagement seems to be up by a significant amount- both page views and time spent on site. Everything else is down though, every referral source. Perhaps it could have been an engagement issue, as in, people were not spending long enough on my site?

The thing that looks odd to me is that 'disclaimer' is number 4- what's going on there!? Surely that's an internal link that's somehow being read as an external one?

Thanks, that's made it crystal clear!

Not sure why the hidden navigation is there but I'm sure I can get to the bottom of it.

Did you use a tool to flag these hidden elements up, or did you just look at the page source?

Thanks again, I'm very grateful you took the time to look at this

Hi there BlastAM,

These are the Anchor Links from from webmaster tools, which I'm fairly sure are external(?).

i'm not sure i quite follow what you mean when you say I have 'some links in the code that aren't on the page'.

could you also explain what you mean by that last comment too. Sorry if I'm asking a stupid question!

i'm rebuilding the site from scratch at the mo', so all your technical suggestions are very useful.

Thanks so much!

Thanks Chris.

Is that a general concensus?

Hello!

I'm doing a systematic review of my site after getting a bit of a  heavy punishment from google last month. I think things are going in the right direction, but wanted some advice on anchor text. Here is a link to the top 200 terms as exported from WMT;

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AkGVm349qCtIdHYzR01EVDhBOHFIekJZS0FVbG9RN1E#gid=0

Can someone give me some advice on whether anything looks suspicious or not? or is it not that simple? My site is madegood.org.

Thanks so much in advance. I've had some fantastic help on here already, but really any advice is appreciated.

Cheers

Hi there,

A little more info would be useful. How is your site structured? Do you use a CMS?

I use Yoast's SEO plugin for wordpress which is excellent. You can define which categories or post types you want to be in your sitemap and which you want to be left out.

Maybe if you are more specific with your question someone can help with a more specific answer

I've had a similar problem and posted a question about it here;

http://www.seomoz.org/q/identifying-why-my-site-has-a-penalty

A friendly member of the community has given me loads of advice, I'd suggest you follow the tips he's given me.

Oh okay! That makes sense. Found a few issues with my php rules that automatically write links on a few of my contents pages.

I've learned some valuable tips here, such a fantastic help. I'm going to get the new site up in a week or two and we'll see if things change.

I'll keep you updated!

Thanks for the table of links. I'll see to it.

I'll work on the code on the new version of the site, seems pointless to do it now.

I've installed the plugin. How do I change the status code of a page? I don't really understand how it can be anything but 200, as if i'm viewing it it's obviously there! I thought 301's pushed the user to the 200 version of the page and only existed temporarily in the browser? Obviously I'm wrong, perhaps you could explain it for me?

Cheers for the screaming frog tool, looks great.

Just checked the 418's and they do seem to be already re-directed with 301's, or are actually in place. What would be the protocol here?

Got your message, thank you. What tool did you completed the crawl with? I'm sort of disappointed this stuff didn't come up in my seomoz weekly scans.

A few questions;

• How do i know where the 301's are being sent from? So in a this chain of events...

Link on a page on my site > routed via a 301 > landing on the desired page

... how do I find the first step in the process? the table you sent me seems to point out only the middle step.

• Yes the 'about us'  and 'contact us' pages are weak. I'm building a new version of the site as we speak and will take care of it then. In the mean time, if i no-index them is that as good as getting rid of them?

I will now sort the 404's and 418's. Without wanting to sound like a broken record; thanks again! Do let me know if there is anything I can do in return once we've got to the bottom of this.

Will

Wow, thanks for all this. It's late now in the UK so I'll check it out tomorrow.

Cheers

p.s. Where are my 418's coming from!?!

Thanks devknob,

In answer to your questions;

• it is across all organic traffic and all keywords to my entire site

• the content on my site is fairly squeaky clean. I've been using the seomoz pro-tool to keep it in check. I use yoast seo for wordpress to handle my canonicals and employ no dodgy js hiding techniques. I did not remove content.

• I haven't been buying links. I do have 20,000+ sitewide links coming from bikingbis.com and 12,000 sitewide links coming from citycyclingedinburgh.info/bbpress/. The ones from bikingbis have been removed and have requested removal of the other. Anchor text is varied and is mainly branded keywords

My question is though, if it's a bad backlink problem, wouldn't it coincide with a panda or penguin update?

Thanks again

Will

Hi,

My site has been hit with a google penalty of some sort, but it doesn't coincide with a penguin or panda update. I have attached a graph of my visits that demonstrates this.

I have been working on my SEO since the latter part of last year and have been seeing good results, then all of a sudden my search referrals dropped by 70%.

Can anyone advise on what it could be?

Thanks!

Will

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Hello All,

A few weeks ago I posted in the Q and A believing I had received a google penalty due to a sudden and considerable drop in referrals...

http://www.seomoz.org/q/google-penalty-8

... so I dug right to the bottom of my site and did a complete review of all my links. After clearing all the potentially problematic links, I wrote a very descriptive reconsideration request to google. 10 days or so later I received a 'no manual spam action found' response, which I guess is a good thing but now begs the question- what has gone wrong!?

Over the past 4 or 5 months I've been doing some heavy work on the SEO of my site, www.madegood.org. This has all been white hat stuff (as far as I'm aware), and have been using my seomoz pro account to monitor progress. I've done lots of reading on the subject so think I'm up to scratch on most general good advice, in terms of link building and site structure. I've always tried to create very high quality content and have been building some great links from very authoritative sites including The Guardian newspaper and Sheffield University. My pro dashboard is telling me that my link analysis history is improving, despite my keyword performance declining.

Is there anyone that can do a deep review of my site? I'm happy to share my analytics/webmaster tools etc info with you if that is helpful? I'm totally lost here and am becoming disheartened with all the hard work I've been putting into the SEO for my site.

Thanks so much in advance, any help is gratefully received. Of course I can provide more info should you need it.

Will

Hey thanks!

Although, what am I looking for with regards to dodgy backlinks? What are the tell tale signs?

I'd be happy to go through my backlinks in WMT and check each one, but not entirely sure what I'm looking for. I know all the theory behind good backlinks, but it all seems a bit wooly when it come to bad links, is there an easy way to spot sure fire offenders. Then when I find one, what can I do about it?

Cheers

Will

Will do!

Thanks Cyrus, that's a very comprehensive answer!

I basically uploaded the copy on to new pages on my site, and manually put a 301 every page of  the old site to the page on my site that has the same copy.... If that makes sense!?

I'm only concerned because I've suddenly (over the last couple of days) seen a hit in my google search referrals by about 70%. This migration happened months ago but I'm trying look under every stone.

I'll do as you suggested and see how I get on. Thanks again.

Will

Hello All,

I've recently acquired somebody else's blog and have redirected every post to the relevant page of my website (madegood.org). The content is the same as on the original site, and I have used 301 redirects. The original blog didn't have a particularly high page rank

I'm slightly worried that there are now thousands of links coming from one domain, which itself doesn't have much authority. Is there a way that I can tell google that I've acquired the blog, as opposed to just having lots of links from one domain.

Thanks

Will

Nice one Chris. I'll keep an eye on things.

You've been very helpful!

Hi Chris,

Thanks for your response. I never did get a particular large number from a specific keyword, it seems to be across the board. My branded keywords don't seem to be sending any traffic any more ('madegood', 'madegood bikes' etc) but I suppose that could be a coincidence.

My inbound links have been increasing, including some really good ones from guardian.co.uk (x6) and inhabitat.com (x1). Webmaster Tools tells me I have 39,862 from 262 domains, and this has been increasing steadily too.

I know this sounds odd, but the drop coincides directly with enabling webmaster tools data within my analytics account. Could this be related!?

Is it possible that google might be just trying things out and it could return to normal, or do I really need to fix this?

Thanks again

Will

Hi, I've seen a steady improvement in my google search referrals since optimising my site and keeping an eye on SEO over the last few months.

I'm only getting relatively small numbers of referrals, around 120-130 a day, but this has steadily increased from about 40 before Christmas. It's been a fairly consistent increase until 4 days ago when suddenly my referral numbers were cut in half.

I'd be surprised if google was penalising me since I'm such a small site, but are there any obvious signs I should look out for?

Oh, and my site is www.madegood.org should that be of help.

Thanks!

Will

As far as i'm aware google doesn't have a maximum amount of 301's for a website, or, it won't penalise you for having too many. Make sure you keep an up to date sitemap submitted to google. I use Yoast SEO for that

Broken Link Checker is a good plugin to manage broken links from within your site. You can manage them all from a dashboard within wordpress so you don't have to visit each page individually.

Hope that helps.

All In One SEO Pack is another good free plugin that allows you to directly edit the meta description tag on each page