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Not quite sure what you meant by all of that, but if I understood correctly:

You have two <title>elements in your code:</p> <p>one on line 4 of the code:</p> <p><span class="webkit-html-tag"><title></span><span>GamesChannal – Video Games Review</span><span class="webkit-html-tag"></title>

One on line 1739 of the code:

<title></span><span>gmaeschannal</span><span class="webkit-html-tag"></title>

this is immediately preceded by another tag on the page.

Basically, your site isn't coded properly, and you should fix it - you should only have one section, and one <title>element - there may be other elements duplicated as well, but this is what I see from a quick check of the code.</p> <p>Mark</p></title>

A great free quick tool for running KW checks is the SEO Book rank checker - it's an extension of Firefox and is pretty easy to get set up and running in no time

This is the SEO solution I've been using on a site and it's been pretty good. Just make sure you have good site developers handling and maintaining the site - if the site goes down or becomes very slow and unresponsive, no SEO plugin is going to help you.

I agree with Tom wholeheartedly

I totally agree with you and have seen the same thing myself.

The other positive aspect of running PPC ads is that it increases your exposure (both search and display), and leads to a rise in branded searches. Branded searches, like direct traffic, often convert pretty nicely, and helps to send more signals to Google that you're a brand and should the lovely treatment they often provide to brands. So I do think there are residual benefits to ppc advertising for SEO.

The Chrome extension Redirect Path (built by Ayima) does see this as a 301 - it's an awesome extension and very helpful, I use it all the time.

Google is definitely seeing this as a 301 redirect - when you run the info: site operator, on the URL, they show you the horizonblue URL - they def understand this -bcbsnj url has been replaced with horizon blue - check it for yourself here

I just checked your robots file, and I see this:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /cars/index

Disallow: /cars/details

Check in webmaster tools what Google is seeing for your robots.txt - this will confirm what you see is what Google is seeing

Can you paste the full text here?

You may also try to build some links into the page, as well as sharing it on social networks, particularly Google+, to get the big G to recrawl and revisit the page and update the meta info it is displaying.

Good luck,

Mark

If the search engines are using it, it's as a spam signal - I'd recommend staying away from it, and usually tell my clients to leave it blank and have them remove keywords tags that are stuffed and could seem to be a spam indicator - see this article on Search Engine Land

In page analytics aren't real time, so give it a day or two and it should be fine

I don't think there's no reason to nofollow this branded link - you built their site, they chose you and have kept that link on there - that's a pretty good signal that they are endorsing your work. If they want it removed, by all means they'll remove it, or ask you to remove it, or replace you with someone else and remove it. So I'd leave it as followed - but definitely go with branded.

You may also want to consider creating a page of clients you've worked with in the past/portfolio type page, and then link to that page instead of the homepage. If you get hit, you can always kill that page and start another internal portfolio page. With the homepage, that's much harder to do.

I'd be very hesitant to add target anchor text in these links - I've seen sites that had built links like Web Design and SEO services by Company X - web design points to the webdev page, seo points to the seo page on the company website. These sites got rocked by Penguin - footer site wide links with keyword rick anchor text pointing to target pages leads to heavily overoptimized backlink profiles that are awesome penguin food. Don't do it! Just use a branded link or a naked anchor link (www.companyx.com) as the link back, otherwise you're just asking for trouble.

You can check out raven tools - they have a lot of these features, and also deal with lots of other channels - they're a very good multipurpose tool - http://raventools.com/ - I've used them in the past - granted they offer fewer services now since they no longer provide rank tracking, but they're very good for link building management, social, reporting, analytics, kw research, and lots of other features.

Google has recently cracked down on tools that provide data scraped from the search engines. They've removed API access because they believe these sites are violating their terms of service by scraping Google data. Since the keyword tool, and other moz tools like the campaign tracker with rank tracking, scrape Google data, Google Adwords has removed API access and so SEOMoz no longer has access to this keyword data.

You can see this thread here for more info about it. I hope they get it back soon, but it's not looking very promising at the moment.

Mark

I think the name should be reflective of the nature of the blog - is this a blog published from the site, which in my mind makes sense to call it blog, or is this something going to be created by and for the community of your audience, in which case it makes sense to call it community.

If you're publishing articles, behind the scenes info, general information, etc., I would call it a blog. If you're encouraging users to publish and it's more geared towards community participation, I would call it community.

Those are my two cents - good luck!

Mark

Why not write the content normally and use css to style the text to force lowercase - this way it shows up in the engines and to other crawlers as readable and normal text, while it displays in the browser to humans as lowercase? that's what I would do

Mark

See this info here - http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1011811&ctx=cb&src=cb&cbid=-1lv5wpxwzizr&cbrank=1

I'd recommend building a custom report to see full traffic referal info - look at the full url, and not just the domain - I built this custom report for myself and I find it very helpful - it's for an ecommerce site, but you can change the ecommerce info for goal info if that fits better

https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?uid=E0KXNJqvRdS51dg3wkEfwg

Mark

If the site got hit in the search engines (I see a major drop in visibility for the site in Search Metrics June 21 and 28 2012), and the client has now moved to a new domain, why would you 301 the old pages to the new ones - don't you want to start with a clean slate, which is why you started a new site?

If the 301 passes the penalty or not, why take the risk? Why not build your link profile the proper way this time?

I also see a lot of over optimized anchor text in OSE and very little branded or generic - diversify your anchor text and focus on branded, unoptimized, and naked anchor text (www.claims...) in your link building efforts.

If you're worried about visitors to the current domain, why not redirect using a 302 and then eventually let the domain die?

Instead of switching domains, you can also do a link disavow after a thorough review of your links and then do a reconsideration request, and then start the link building again on the current domain, instead of switching to a new hyphenated domain that just looks like a spammier version of the original URL. I would do a thorough back link review and then disavow and reinclusion request instead of the new domain route. You can refer to this article for how to review your links from Search Engine Journal.

That's my two cents - hope it helps

Mark

It's more of a site security issue - not updating your wordpress and plugins leaves you vulnerable to security flaws exploited in old wordpress installs - Google is trying to help you and encourage you to update your wordpress to maintain security and prevent the site from being hacked.

I don't believe it's a rankings issue, but more quality of website and health of the web in general issue that Google is sending out these messages.

You can refer to this blog post on State of Search for more info.

I agree with Moosa, but it may make sense to also look at mozrank for the subdomain - OSE calls it subdomain mozrank, which would look at the strength of the whole subdomain. you can also look at the number of linking root domains and followed linking root domains, compare that to the total numbers for the domain, and determine how much of the overall strength of the domain authority is resultant from the particular subdomain you're looking at. Those are just my theories, but to me it makes sense

Hey Pete, the moz keyword difficulty tool will give you a score on a scale of 1 - 100 how difficult the term is - not many other tools will you give levels of competition for organic search results. However, SEOMoz no longer has search volume data, due to Adwords API issues.

It doesn't look like many companies out there will both be able to scrape Google search results and provide info using the adwords api. So you'll have to pick your poison - do your keyword research right in the adwords interface, or with other tools, and rely on tools like SEOMoz which scrape Google for organic difficulty scores.

Mark

What I'm saying is why not write your code to fire the virtual page view only when a successful registration takes place, or when someone registers via Facebook and Twitter?

That should be something you can capture and then fire only once someone registers, no?

I would recommend trying to create a virtual page view that will be fired whenever someone registers on the site - this way, you don't need to create a success/confirmation page for the form, just have the site fire off a virtual page view, and track this as a goal.

Mark

I usually look at subdomain metrics as reported by OSE to gauge the strength of a particular wordpress or blogspot domain - if it is has legitimate external links, it's definitely something I'll consider.

do you mean semantic markup?

Hiring people to talk about your brand is fine - paying someone to talk about your brand and link to your site with the express purpose of influencing the search engine's algorithms is the problem. If you pay someone to talk about your brand and they nofollow the link that is perfectly fine in the engines' eyes - the link is not meant to influence your ranking - however, paying someone for a link is the problem.

That being said, bloggers are getting smarter and realize they can make money off of this, and are going to try and make money off of guest blogging just like they can make money off of inserting contextual links.

If you want to avoid these issues, try creating a relationship with the blogger first, connecting with them on twitter and other social media networks, actually reading their blog and interacting with them. As a representative of the brand, they'll recognize you and you'll have a real relationship and then approach and ask to guest blog post on their site - this should be a very different reaction.

There are also lots of other ways to build links besides guest blogging - it ain't easy, and no one is saying it is, but you should probably diversify your strategy - here is a great post with various tactics and strategies from Jon Cooper - enjoy!

Good luck,

Mark

This should be ok - if you're going to link between the two sites (I've seen lots of site networks interlink between them in the footer) I'd recommend not using keyword rich anchor text in your links between the sites but rather your brand name as the anchor text or the clean url and not use anchor text at all.

I've seen lots of sites/networks get hit due to this overoptimized site wide anchor text in the footer, so link cleanly.

But I don't think you'll have an issue of duplicate content in the regular algorithms.

For Google Local, you may want to consider getting a unique phone number (and address) if you want a separate place listing, but that may not be enough and you may need more unique info - see this blog post from Mike Blumenthal for more info

Good luck,

Mark

Firstly, why add the no follow tag - let the pages be followed - so if you link back to your parent site, some link juice may flow.

Secondly, I agree with Nigel about the canonical tag. In terms of robots, the no index tag is more effective than blocking the site in robots.txt. You can also implement the no index tag via the http status responses in apache using your .htaccess file - see here for more info

This way you can control this site wide from one location and also it won't be as apparent to anyone who looks at the code of the nonbranded site that it shouldn't be indexed.

Mark

Have you outsourced link building / SEO services to anyone? It could be they used a tool or outsourced this work to someone else, and these articles only went live in Oct. and Nov, even though they had technically gone through the pipeline a few months prioer?

It doesn't seem like someone would attack your site in that manner with a few articles on a crappy site - they would use sitewides, thousands of directory submissions, social bookmarks, etc., for much cheaper than having 3 unique articles written and posted with anchor text.

I'm more of the opinion these are remnants of an old link building strategy than of a malicious attack to hurt your site.

Mark

My question to you - why do you want to blog about candles? Is this as a hobby, passion, or is this a method of bringing in customers to ecommerce site. You have to look at your goals for blogging - branding? Customer acquisition? Positioning yourself in the industry as an expert?

If customer acquisition is important to you, I'd recommend building the blog on the site itself, in a folder called /blog - this way, as an expert in your niche, you've positioned yourself in that manner, and people will want to buy from you due to your expertise.

From an SEO perspective, your high quality blog should naturally gain links, and can certainly be promoted through outreach and gather links in that way. This will help your ecommerce site's visibility and reach in the search engines, and will strengthen the domain as a whole. You don't get this if you blog offsite on a different domain - you won't be gaining this link strength for your site, which should be an important consideration.

Mark

Going over 70 characters means your title tags will be truncated by Google. And nowadays, it's not dictated by characters, but the amount of pixels those characters take up - staying under 65 will usually mean you're in the clear.

If you are formulaically creating title tags, and a few of those go over 70, I don't think it's the end of the world. It's not bad - you aren't going to be punished - Google will just truncate the tag and add an ellipsis - worst case scenario, they'll create their own title tag.

That being said, I'd make sure for your target pages (pages you really care about and are aiming for as landing pages in the SERPs), you manually review/write them and make sure they are optimized in terms of keyword inclusion, Call to action, branding, length, etc.

Apparently this is reflective of code change made to the system and not algo updates here - see Dr. Pete's tweet here - https://twitter.com/dr_pete/status/288665186951380994 - stay tuned for his blog post

If you're on Windows, you can locally install xampp on your machine, and then install wordpress locally.

Or you can do what columK suggests and install it on a subdomain on your site. Here is info from wordpress about moving domains - you can also install a plugin to do this - I've used Wordpress Move in the past

Once you've set up the new site, go to the settings section, reading, and then click the checkbox to discourage search engines from reading the testing site - that will modify the robots.txt to block search engines.

Good luck!

Mark

It might be a coding / plugin issue - it looks like you're using some plugins to load code on the site - when you clicked on the search button, what happened - it would take you to a search page, or a search box would open somewhere on the current page?

I think you may want to check your plugins - was something disabled? Does it need to be updated? Was it updated and no longer compatible with the wordpress you're running? That might be the direction to go in.

Mark

It should be fine - your site is built in wordpress, and you can just change your wordpress setting to show as www. instead of without the www - make sure your site is configured to 301 redirect to the www version, and you should be fine as far as the search engines are concerned.

In this case, use the canonical to point to the default version of the page, without the default.aspx - make sure all pages use the same canonical tag.

More importantly, you have a major redirect loop going on here on your home page - this is definitely not configured properly  - look at the attached image - you have 3 redirects going  here, both 302 and 301 - you really should clean up this path and have the site resolve normally in a browser- the tool I'm using is the ayima redirection tool for chrome, but the mozbar in chrome and firefox will also show you the redirects - go to page analysis, an then the second tab, page attributes, will show you the redirect path your browser took.

You should have either http://www.aviation-sms.com or http://aviation-sms.com resolve a 200 status code, and ideally, the other one should 301 redirect to the correct version. If not, then use the canonical tag to point to the primary version on all other versions of the URL.

Hope this helps-

Mark

PISfd.png

Think of it this way - if you're a user, and you want to find out info about this page, what is the best page for you to land on? If it's a specific keyword relevant to a deep page full of content, then you'd want Google to target your inner page. If it's a general term, maybe your best page is the home page.

Take one example - electronic cigarettes.

If someone searches electronic cigarettes, then that's the head term, and pretty generic - there's lots of relevant subtopics - so you'd think the main page should be your home page. But if someone searches electronic cigarettes quit smoking, an inner page relevant to the uses and scientific proof / lack thereof about using ecigs to quit smoking would be more relevant.

Bottom line - Keep the user in mind when doing keyword targeting, and think what the best page for you to display the keyword would be.

Thomas, I agree that the forum is a great product -but it is pretty slow

I'm with you Chris - the forum has been slow of late - but the wait is well worth it

I would build links in to the site through outreach and content production on the site - does your client have business partnerships they can leverage for links? You need to develop equity into the site.

Position your client as an innovator, leader, something to set them apart from the competition, and then go out and promote them. Establish relationships with bloggers and influencers and have them write about your client as well.

Lots to do to promote the site, but in today's day and age, you still need links to rank your content, especially in a competitive niche like electronic cigarettes.

Good luck,

Mark

Following up on what Mark wrote, buzzstream has a great generator tool for creating these queries - http://tools.buzzstream.com/link-building-query-generator

It's very helpful

You can also check out blogger link up (an email list sent three times a week) with opportunities for guest posts, and also check out Zemanta

Hey Steve,

A good place to look for SEO / inbound marketing jobs is the inbound.org job board - good luck in your search!

Mark

They've understood the navigation of the site, and are now showing each path of the nav as a link to that individual page/category - this is good - you're basically getting mini site links on each serp listing, which should help to send traffic to these category pages. The display looks good, and has the potential of sending visitors to multiple pages on your site, so I don't see a problem here - do you?

should be

When you filter links by followed and 301, that shows you the "juice passing" links - it's just another way of saying links that should count in the search engines to pass strength from another website to yours

Make sure you check out Dr. Pete's post on the blog here - it's not just you experiencing it

As the other people already responded, there is a lot of fluctuation in the SERPs on a regular basis.

A few things come to mind

1. Google could be trying out different landing pages for the term - it may be your homepage was blocked and so they showed an inner page, but much further down.
2. This fluctuation seems to be happening every few months, where the site gets downgraded temporarily and then recovers - see the attached image
3. Have you been having site connectivity issues - any messages in webmaster tools?

Hope this helps,

Mark

3Ulbs.png

I agree with what Andrea wrote above - just one additional point - blocking a file via robots.txt doesn't prevent the search engine from not indexing the page. It just prevents the search engine from crawling the page and seeing the content on the page. The page may very well still show up in the index - you'll just see a snippet that your robots.txt file is preventing google from crawling the site and caching it and providing a snippet or preview. If you have canonical tags put in place properly, remove the block on the parameters in your robots.txt and let the engines do things the right way and not have to worry about this question.