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Is this a new website or an old site? You could have been hit by algorithmic issues that Google has rolled out but don't play any influence in Bing, like Panda or Penguin. You could also be blocking Google from crawling your site in your robots.txt. I'd definitely sign up for  webmaster tools in Google if you haven't already and see if there are any issues they are reporting there.

In short, with no information about your site, it's hard to give you a good answer, but I'd look at some of the points I mentioned and see if any are relevant.

If you don't know the anchor text, but know the site is linking to you, you can also use a site crawler like screaming frog (the paid version), and in their custom section, you can give it your domain - when it crawls the site and finds the page with your domain in the code, it'll put that page in the custom crawl section. But this isn't super efficient if you need to crawl a large site to find a link - the Google method mentioned here is good when you know the anchor text and it's a specific one that won't show up on each page. If it's one that shows up across the site, the Google method won't work.

This is strange - I'd try fetch as googlebot from within webmaster tools - I checked it with screaming frog through a crawl from the homepage, and it's accessible to the bots, and your canonical and meta index tags all look good.

For that, you can try pinging pubsubhubbub and letting them know the content is yours - https://code.google.com/p/pubsubhubbub/

I'm sure you can find wordpress plugins to do this for you, like this one

Good luck!

Mark

A great tool for checking your traffic against google updates is panguin tool - it's a great resource for seeing your google traffic and any drops you may have had and how they're related to panda, penguin, and other algo updates.

Also, check in webmaster tools your latest links - see if more spammy links are coming in recently and if this correlates in any way with your drop - if so, disavow these links and do another reconsideration request.

Do you know if it was specific keywords that were bringing a lot of traffic that you've dropped for or it's more across the board? That will help in figuring out the problem.

Mark

The trailing slash at the end of the URL is causing the 404 error - remove the trailing slash and it works fine - you should configure your server to just remove the trailing slash when someone enters it instead of 404

Your site seems to be in decent shape, based on the screaming frog crawl i ran

• You've got 2 internal 404 errors due to erroneous links you placed in the code probably
• your dupe titles don't look like they're a problem - canonical and no index tags seem to have sorted the issue
• page with a missing title is .php?Action=sitemap - doesn't seem to be the end of the world

The spider follows robots.txt

All in all, I wouldn't worry bout the warnings.

Mark

Zack, what's your site? I can run it through Screaming Frog and take a look at the sources for the 404 errors, and export the data for you, so you'll be able to go in and fix the links.

Raven had the same thing happen to them - http://raventools.com/blog/update-google-adwords-availability-in-raven/ - for all of what they claim, taking away access to Adwords keyword data sucks - this is right up there with not provided, and is going to cause a major backlash in the industry

Thanks Marie - I agree with you 100% on using multiple tools and resources. I'd pull the data from as many sources as possible (OSE, Webmaster Tools, Ahrefs, Majestic), and then combine it all in one master spreadsheet, deduplicate, and then analyze.

Make sure you're looking at the right metrics, first off. External links to the domain is different from external links to a particular page.

More importantly, external links is the total number of external links pointing to the page. This has nothing to do with the number of domains linking to your page. A site could have a sitewide link to your competitor in their footer, and with it being a big site, that one domain could have something like 500, 1000, or even 10,000 links pointing to your competitor. So while OSE will say that the competitor has 10,000 links from one domain, that's 10,000 external links, but only 1 domain linking to this page. That's why you'll have a discrepancy between numbers of external links and domains linking - they measure two different things.

Is this site live yet? Can SEOMoz access it? That might be a problem. Also, if you want to see the top results for the keyword and the competitive nature of the SERP, I highly recommend the keyword difficulty tool - it rocks! http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/keyword-difficulty

I'm a bit confused what you mean here by indexing your keywords- to track rankings for your new site, you configure a campaign and then tell the tool which keywords you want to track. The tool will then track in the search engines you choose your rankings for the keyword. If your site is https, this shouldn't make a difference. It will matter if you're ranking in the search engines for https - but if your site is ranking in the search engines, this shouldn't impact your seomoz rank tracking.

For Open Site Explorer, they will track the links and anchor text pointing to your site. If the target page is https instead of http, this also shouldn't make a difference.

In short, others will correct me if i'm wrong, but seomoz should work if your site is https.

Moosa, I don't think you're right.

If you have a bingo site, and you geotarget it to the UK, it makes sense that your site shouldn't show up very highly in US based results, because online bingo for money is allowed in the UK whereas in the US it's not. That's part of the reason they have the geotargeting tool - to focus your site on the country where it's relevant and not on other countries it isn't relevant.

Google writes here - Geotargeting settings. You can use the geotargeting tool in Webmaster Tools to indicate to Google that your site is targeted at a specific country. Do this only if your site has a gTLD (generic top-level domain name). However, don’t use this tool if your site targets more than a single country. For example, it would make sense to set a target of Canada for a site about restaurants in Montreal; but it would not make sense to set the same target for a site that targets French speakers in France, Canada, and Mali.

Here's more info:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=62399

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=182192

No - you haven't blocked visitors from other countries - you've just given an indicator to Google that your site is relevant for visitors from a particular country.

If you have a site geared towards people living in the UK, you tell Google that this site is relevant for people in the UK. This will tell them the site should show up in UK searches or about a particular topic relating to the UK, but for a similar query in the US, the site is not relevant. You haven't blocked users from other countries so much as you've told the search engine this site should be shown for users from this country.

If you're targeted a language based demographic, like Arabic speakers, you wouldn't use the geotargeting tool, because you want arabic speakers from multiple countries. That's how the tool works.

Hope this helps and let me know if you have any other questions.

Firstly, I'd set up rank tracking so you don't have to worry about this on a daily basis. Use the SEOMoz campaign tracker, which will track your rankings on a weekly basis. You can also sign up for a free account at Authority Labs, Rank Ranger, or many other rank tracking tools out there.

Google may be trying to determine where your site should be ranked. They could be testing CTR rates on the various serps, and based on that determine how it should be ranked. Also, they could be having some crawl issues of your site, or some temporary link building or other signals that would be causing fluctuations. It could just also be a rather volatile SERP with a lot of movement.

Without knowing what the keyword is and the competitiveness of the SERP, it's hard to give you a 100% answer, but hopefully my questions will help steer you in the right direction of what to look at.

A great way to get data straight from the search engines about other related and longer tail keywords is to use their suggested search features. A few tools to do this in a quicker and easier manner -

http://ubersuggest.org/
http://soovle.com/

Hope this helps,

Mark

The aggregate columns you are showing are monthly averages. You can also show the column for monthly search volume - once you've turned on this setting, when you export it, the csv will include the searches per month - this is helpful for understanding seasonal keyword trends

Using the Screaming Frog SEO Spider (free version to download will crawl 500 URLs, paid version [99 GBP for a yearly license] will crawl as much as you want), you can see all of the inlinks to a particular page. So run a crawl of the site, you should find those pages with Screaming Frog, and then you can view the inlinks to those pages. Visit the inlinks, and check the code for the links to the page you're looking for - this will quickly show you where the links are to the pages you're trying to hide.

Also, have you checked the sitemap - the CMS might create links to these pages in the sitemap.

good luck and let me know if you need any more help with this.

Mark

hmm, pretty strange - you can always test it by putting the code on, and then viewing it in real time - you should see visits happening, especially if you open the site in a different browser.

You can send through an example and I'll be happy to take a look.

You should keep your meta descriptions short, at most 155-160 characters. I usually write my meta descriptions in Excel - use the formula len() in the field next to where you're typing to automatically calculate the length of the meta description you are writing. Include your target keywords, and USPs (unique selling points) of your page that will entice a user to click on the result. Remember - the meta description can be your free spot of advertising in the search results if they choose to use it. So use keywords, include USPs, and include a call to action as well, encouraging the searcher to click on the result.

Remember, social media networks like Facebook also use the meta description, so write with more than one audience in mind.

And of course, refer to this awesome resource from the moz for info about meta descriptions - http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/meta-description

export it o excel, then use seo tools for excel to check broken pages, etc.

See this post here - https://seogadget.co.uk/check-your-xml-sitemap-errors/

You can also run it through screaming frog, but with excel it's free

Let me know how it goes

Mark

When you say both sites show up in results, but for different queries, are you referring to the actual duplicate content pages/articles, or the homepage and other target pages. These pages/sites may be ranking for these different terms due to strength of the site/page and backlink profiles.

In terms of canonical tags, if one site is going to be doing a cross domain canonical to the other site, I don't see how this could help the site that is doing the cross domain canonical. The site receiving the canonical tag and being credited as the source of the original content, I could see this helping them and helping the page of content to rank higher, but I don't see why this would help the site linking out with the cross domain canonical.

My suggestion - the site producing the content should get the credit, cross domain canonicals should be used to associate the credit for the content with the site producing the content, and you should also include a piece of text in the content piece that says this originally appeared on xyz website, or something along those lines. I'd provide as many signals to the engines as possible as to where to attribute this content.

your comment about visualizing internal linking in charts reminded me of this post and the posts that are linked within - maybe this will help a bit

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/one-more-great-way-to-use-fusion-tables-for-seo

It pulls title tags, meta descriptions, meta keywords if they're on the page, H1, H2, etc - very useful and it seems like it'll do a lot of what you're looking for - definitely worth the 99 pounds fro the year!

You can use screaming frog to crawl the site, and it will show you the internal links and anchor text to each page across the site as well. Though this post from Branko is a bit old,it's still a great resource on using Screaming Frog to check for internal linking issues - http://www.seo-scientist.com/seo-spider-review-xenu-on-seo-steroids.html

Screaming Frog has a paid version, but the free version will you crawl up to 500 URLs, so that might be sufficient for ya.

Hope this helps and good luck.

Mark

Sounds very interesting and like a great opportunity for you.

What I don't get - why build a strategy for a site that you're going to eventually 301? Why not register the candidate's name, build up the content and the brand of the candidate over there, and then eventually just launch a site redesign/more formal look on the site once the candidacy is announced. Why the need to 301 to a new site? You don't want to lose some of your hard earned equity in 301s.

I also think in terms of social, be authentic, and let the candidate tweet about issues facing the community, etc. I think an authentic social media campaign will be more successful than a political censored one even before the candidate announces that they're running.

I agree with what William wrote, it's just not super easy. In addition to building out the great content, you have to market it. You have to get the word out - you have to do the outreach. It's not enough to build awesome content, you have to share it, via social networks, email, outreach, word of mouth, contacts you may have, the press, etc. You can build the best blog pieces out there, but if no one hears about it, it ain't gonna do you much good.

Adria wrote a great post here on SEOMoz the other day - I'd check it out - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/why-link-building-strategies-fail

You'll have to do this in Google docs and not in Excel, but try this solution:

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/updated-tool-seomoz-api-data-for-google-docs

No problem. Let me know how it goes.

Why are you launching the .ca site - to target Canada, right? So then it pays to get any advantage you can to rank in Canada, and so whatever advantage the Canadian hosting will have, isn't it worth it to go after that?

HI Joel,

I'm looking at a blog post now on the site - http://activerain.com/blogsview/3275081/the-true-cost-of-collecting- - it's links are followed - you can use the mozbar to check/highlight followed and nofollow links. The links on this page are certainly followed and passing link equity.

That being said, blog here for the exposure to the readership and potential clientele, in addition to the brand exposure. Don't just do it for SEO purposes, but contribute value to the community - your returns will be greater in the long run with this mentality!

Mark

Hi,

It will very clear to Google the two sites are related, simply from the URLs and similar content alone. With eyeforweb.com being hosted in the US, and you may want to boost your Canadian rankings by hosting the site in Canada.

I'd certainly recommend, depending on the overlapping content between the two sites, that you implement the rel alternate tag as well - http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077 - it can be a bit tricky, but it's worth it.

Hope this helps,

Mark

This sounds like a plan. Give it a shot and test the results

You should check your rel canonical in the header of your html, and see where it's pointing to. Sounds like it's pointing to a different page. You can check this with the mozbar - analze the page, and go to the page attributes section - it'll show you the rel canonical tag for the page.

Send an example of the page if you want us to look at it and see if we can give you more specifics.

Ideally you should remove one and 301 redirect it to the other. If you need to keep both pages on your site, then definitely use the canonical tag.

As an aside, I'd also configure your server to fix your URLs and remove the capital letters - configure your htaccess file on your apache server to automatically redirect capital letters to lowercase, thereby avoiding further canonical issues. See here for more info - http://www.stateofsearch.com/three-htaccess-tips-for-seo/

Hi Marisa,

It sounds like you're advocating for all of us members to get organized and create the largest link network the world has ever seen (mwahahaha). While there is some logic to it, I really think this is exactly the type of stuff that Google is going after. In the end, what it would come down to is the user. By your linking from your site to the coat hanger site, are you benefiting your user? Is the link in context and does it make sense? If someone was genuinely interested in reading your article, would following your link help them? If so, by all means do it. I don't think Google will penalize people for naturally linking to friends, business partners, associates, local businesses, etc. But what happens when this becomes organized, and your DIY furniture blog starts linking to forex sites and cheap online prescriptions? While that is clearly an exaggeration, I see it as only a matter of time before things would deteriorate. While you should by all means be building relationships and establishing connections and then leveraging those connections for all purposes, including link equity, you need to keep your user in mind in the end and be focused on them.

That being said, I'm all for contextual outbound links to relevant sites - let's all spread the link love a bit more!

Hi Adam,

As you stated, patience is a virtue, one we're especially not used to on the web. But it sounds like OSE never had reason to discover your site (no links pointing in that they would follow), so once your link building kicks off, and OSE updates, you should hopefully start to see your metrics rising.

There are tools out there you can use for rank checking, some free ones (like SEO Book's Rank Checker), which go pretty high, but not into the thousands. I'd say the easiest and quickest way you can check your rankings in Google would be to set up Webmaster Tools (if you haven't already) and check your stats in the Search Queries report. This will give you impression data, clicks, and average rankings for various search terms straight from Google. While not perfect, this is probably your easiest and cheapest (it's FREE!) way to check your rankings without doing it by hand.

I'd do exactly what you're saying. Make the pages no index, follow. If they're already indexed, you can remove the page search.php from the engines through webmaster tools.

Let me know how it turns out.

Hi,

There was just a great post on Google Webmaster Central about this very topic - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/04/how-to-move-your-content-to-new.html

Register both domains with webmaster tools, make sure the new domain is crawlable by googlebot, 301 redirect the old pages/site to the new pages/site, and in webmaster tools of the old domain, use the change of address option under site configuration to tell Google that your site has changed domains and is now on the new domain.

Make sure to check out Google's post, as they give some good tips and walk you through the process.

Good luck!

Well, from what everyone is writing about Penguin, it's an algorithmic update. Meaning you need to fix whatever issues are there, wait for the algorithm to process again, and then if you've solved the issues, you should theoretically restore the rankings. That's much easier said than done. You don't know exactly what the issues are, and we don't know when the algo will process again.

I think the timeline you have set is highly unrealistic and you should aim to set expectations with the client that this process can very well take much longer. If this previous SEO company built problematic links, I think you'll have to deal with them. I don't think pointing good links into the site will get rid of the issue with the problematic links and clear you of the algo. I think you're going to have to go through the tedious work of cleaning things up. The good news is that a bunch of people have written about what to look for. Check in WMT tools for sitewide links, check your anchor text pointing into the site. Export your external links from OSE and then upload them to Linkl Detective- http://linkdetective.com/- let it do the hard work for you, classify a lot of the links, and then you need to go through the process of trying to clean things up, doing as much as you can, and then submit a reinclusion request (may help, may not), hoping Google will discard the other links.

Good luck - really try to demonstrate to your client the complexity of the process and extend the timeframe of the project - that's my ultimate recommendation

I'd create an index.html for the directory, and then redirect it somewhere. This way, you're capturing the inbound links and then rescuing some of the inbound juice.

Otherwise, you can also check out this post for more info on other solutions and modifying your htaccess file to prevent the directory view - http://perishablepress.com/better-default-directory-views-with-htaccess/

Instead of looking at keyword density, I'd look at more important metrics and factors in on site optimization.

Use moz's on on page report card http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/on-page-keyword-optimization/new to check your onpage optimization. Also, you can use the toolbar to highlight a certain keyword. I think most people nowadays don't really take keyword density into account, unless it's extremely high and the post is very spammy looking. Go for natural text that will make sense for a reader, a real human being, to read the content. Use your keywords naturally throughout the text, and I think you'll see better results than incorporating a keyword wherever possible to increase keyword density levels.

So you want to create duplicate content on the web?

If you're syndicating content, the reason you're doing it is to provide this content to the readership of these other sites. If someone searches, and discovers this content in the search engines, you want the attribution of that content to come from the original source, you guys. Why would you want some other website to be discovered as a result of content you created and syndicated to them? If you want the credit to go to them, and the engines to bring visitors to their site for content you created, that's why you should write a guest post or column and put it on their site. But if you're syndicating content and want it to show up on other sites, I think it makes sense to actually have the canonical tag pointing to your site, indicating to the search engines that you are the authentic source of that piece of content. The other site's readers will still enjoy the content on that site, you'll just be credited for it in the search engines. To me, this is a win win situation where everyone benefits. The other site benefits because it gets free content to give to their readership, and you get attribution for it in the engines and the additional exposure to the other sites visitors.

I think WMT is sometimes annoying about it, but it makes sense. If you're pointing the whole site to a different site, I guess it makes sense that they want to verify you control the domain, and not just that one specific subdomain.

One other thing I would do is review your backlink profile - if there are some juicy links in there that you want to preserve and not lose some of their strength due to 301 depletion, I'd contact the webmasters and inform them of the change, asking them to update their links to the new URL to make sure you don't encounter any issues in the future.

What you described here is the same content on multiple subdomains. If you add no index, no follow, you'll prevent the other pages from being indexed and from passing link equity. Firstly, even if you would go this route, I wound't add the no follow rule - that just means you're losing any juice that passes to the page from links, not something you necessarily want to do.

In this case, I'd recommend changing your canonical tag - the birmingham subdomain uses the canonical tag on itself, claiming that it should be credited with the content, when in truth, you said you want the credit flowing to the www version of the site. So you need to change your canonical tag on the location based subdomains to point to the www subdomain. So for http://birmingham.styleblueprint.com/food-and-entertaining/recipes/kale-salad-quick-healthy/, the canonical should be  rel="canonical" href="http://www.styleblueprint.com/food-and-entertaining/recipes/kale-salad-quick-healthy/" />

Hope this helps