Welcome to the Q&A Forum

You can create a template for the titles and metadescriptions of the tags also in Yoast - go to the section of titles, and then in the taxonomies section, you can create a template for titles and meta descriptions. Scroll down to the bottom of the page - you'll see what you can dynamically insert in your template text.

If you're finding these tags are missing meta descriptions, that means they are pages that don't have meta descriptions. This points to a larger issue - do you want each page being created by Wordpress for each tag you use to be indexed by the search engines? Are these high quality pages you'd want a user to land on? Do they provide value? If not, you don't want them to be indexed. You can use a Wordpress plugin to control indexation of these tag pages - Yoast's SEO plugin, http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/, besides for being awesome, will control this for you. Install and then go the indexation section, and from there, you can control what is indexed and set the tags to not be indexed.

You can do lots of other stuff with the plugin, and I definitely recommend installing it either way.

Hope this helps and let me know if you have any issues with it.

One thing I would add is see if you can get the sites taking the content to implement a cross domain canonical tag. Meaning, have them point to your original page of the content in the canonical tag. This will indicate to the search engines that they are attributing the content to you. This should serve as the clearest signal to the engines who to attribute the content to - it's great that there is attribution in the text itself, but the best method of giving the correct attribution would be with the canonical tag.

Hope this helps

Something is going on with your robots.txt - when trying to visit the file, it automatically prompts me to download the file and doesn't actually display it. Was it always like this or is this a recent change?

I would recommend making sure your robots.txt file is crawlable and readable by the search engines before looking to see if there any other issues on the site.

Some of what you're doing sounds ok, but I'd definitely stay away from the article spinners and the article directories. In short, don't pollute the web with crappy content that no human would ever read - Google is catching on more and  more and punishing those who do.

For link building ideas and tactics, Jon Cooper recently put together an awesome post of tactics - http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies - be sure to check that out.

Also, I'd focus on making onsite improvements - make sure your titles and meta are written well, aren't keyword stuffed. That your internal linking is solid and your pages are crawlable and configured properly. Try to improve on things like site speed, and markup your data using schema.

Bottom line is - try to create awesome pieces of content for your sites, and build relationships with others to market them and spread publicity.

Hope this helps

Mark

Try this - of course take what you need from it - source is here - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6059920/removing-index-html-from-url-and-adding-www-with-one-single-301-redirect Options +FollowSymlinks -MultiViews RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www. [NC] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(./)index.html$ [NC] RewriteRule . http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}%1 [R=301,NE,L] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www. [NC] RewriteRule . http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [NE,R=301,L] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(./)index.html$ [NC] RewriteRule . %1 [R=301,NE,L]

could it not be working because you used rewriteengine twice?

Hi,

As you noted, the noindex meta tag is present on the page. This tells the search engines to completely remove it from their index. You want this to tag to be on pages you want removed/excluded from the search engines, certainly not on your homepage if you care about your PR.

As you can see here, your site is no longer cached in Google - http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=cache%3Awww.pokeronlineitalia.com. Your blog, on the other hand, which has the meta robots tag of "index,follow", is still in the cache of Google - http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=cache%3Awww.pokeronlineitalia.com%2Fblog

If you want search engine traffic, you need to remove this tag immediately and wait for Google to come and crawl the site. You may want to build some links into the site and/or share it over various social networks like Google+ and Twitter to speed up the indexation process.

This is most probably why the page has no PR - it's not indexed in Google.

Hi Daniel,

I was a bit confused by this - index.html on your site returns a 404 error. I changed the url to index.htm and then it returns the correct information as a 200.

Basically, I'm not saying to delete the page index.htm - that is in fact your default page and what the server will show as your homepage. Nakul and I have just been saying to configure the server to strip out the index.htm from the URL and just show twinbytes.ca. Since your site is in fact on an Apache server, you should be able to use the htaccess info that Nakul gave you. But be careful when changing an htaccess file - you can really mess up your site if you don't do it properly. Be sure to make a backup of the file before making any changes or additions to it.

Even though your file is index.htm, the line in Nakul's code should have you covered due to the regular expression.

Mark

Hi Christoph,

In today's world, I'd be very hesitant to outsource my link building to company that will guarantee a top page 1 ranking for  a moderately difficult keyword. There are so many other factors to take into consideration.

I'd also stay away from a performance based model - this may encourage the link builder/SEO to try various methods to get quick results. If you suddenly shoot up in the rankings with the usage of dodgy tactics, I wouldn't be surprised if your site took an even bigger drop a short time later. Google is really cracking down on webspam and problematic tactics, and I think you need to be a bit patient and let things go naturally.

Currently, I'd advocate guest blogging and other forms of organic link building.

Is the site currently ranking for the term? What is the backlink status of the domain? If you pay a link builder to optimize for one term, and neglect your branded anchor text and the backlink profile of the rest of the site, you can run into serious issues with the search engines that will be harder to resolve and will take more time and money than you had originally intended to invest.

Hope this helps - just to clarify, I'm all for link building and organic growth in rankings. I just think you need to take a larger approach looking at your whole site, its onpage optimization and its backlink profile.

Sounds like you've got your bases covered.

One suggestion - make sure you don't block the old URL's with your robots.txt file - you need to make sure the robots can reach the old pages, then follow the 301's to update their index.

I'd also use your favorite backlink profile to check external links - I'd contact the really juicy sites linking to you and inform them of the change, asking them to correct the link to the proper page, for server loads and users. This way, you won't be losing any juice through the redirects. Also make sure you're not losing juice by having external links go to 404 pages - would be a good time to recover all lost juice.

While you may drop in rankings temporarily, things should sort themselves out in a bit.

Nakul didn't specify, but the code he gave you is if your site is running on an apache server. Make sure to work with your developers to deal with these issues, and don't try changing your htaccess file on your own - you make major problems for your site very easily.

Ideally, it's best not to have the index.html showing up as well - could be a problem of duplicate content. So I would recommend correcting your internal links to point to www.website.com without the index.html. Generally, you should set up the server so that it strips out the index.html and 301 redirects to the clean domain. However, if you need to keep the index.html live and can't redirect it, at the very least I'd make sure to use a canonical tag on the page pointing to the clean version of the page, www.website.com.

Let me know if you need me to elaborate further.

Mark

Hi Nakul,

I agree that broad match can help you with keyword discovery, but the Adwords tool will also give you other suggestions when you search just with exact match. And It's important to know what you're looking at - with excel downloads, people sometimes get a bit mixed up at the source and nature of the data.

For KW discovery, there are lots of other great resources -  I'd start with the engines themselves, with the related searches, with tools that mash up that data, like soovle or ubersuggest, and then branch out from there.

Hi James,

Your question makes complete sense :). This is why we often talk about using ppc data to test search volumes. If you're interested in checking the search volume for the term, depending on the type of query matching you're running on the keywords, you can check the impressions of the term in AdWords and get a better picture of the search volume for the query. If you're running exact match on the query, you'll get a much reliable picture of search volume by looking at impressions for the term. The metrics you mentioned give you a picture of the value of the term, and impressions will give you the search volume.

I'd also check out webmaster tools, both Google and Bing, for other search volume numbers. Bing's new tool was built specifically for KW research for organic search.

Hope this helps,

Mark

Whenever I do KW research, I also use exact match. For SEO purposes, you're trying to gauge search volumes for specific terms. (Of course, these numbers are way off in the AdWords tool, and certainly can't be trusted as precise numbers.) You want to know how many times people searched for buy batman comics in a month. When looking at the data for this term, or any term, broad match numbers will be drastically higher than exact match, because they'll include search volume for many other terms and not just the one term you are looking for.

Remember, it's important to always have in the back of your mind not to trust the numbers. And don't think you'll get 1000 visits a month for a term if you rank #1 and that's the search volume. According to the latest CTR studies (most recent one was published by Slingshot SEO and there was a post about it here on the Moz blog as well as their own detailed writeup), the top organic spot gets 18.2% of search volume.

You can also check out Bing's new Keyword research tool, built specifically in their webmaster tools suite to provide you with information about organic searches. Granted that Bing's user base is much smaller, it can still be a good additional resource to have in your KW research arsenal.

I'd also build the links to point to an inner page. If you run into an algorithmic issue with them, you can always 404 the page, lose the problematic links, and then hopefully you can solve some of the algorithmic issues.

For a site ranking on page 1 in Google Shopping Results for multiple products, they're thinking of changing their store name to rebrand themselves and their website. They currently have items appearing on page 1 from their stores on ebay, Amazon, buy.com, sears, etc. Does anybody know if changing their brand name on these stores will impact their results on Google Shopping?

Thanks,

Mark

Google has a program called first click free - basically, you need to allow google bot, along with users, to view the first full article they land on. So if you have multiple page articles, you need to give them access to the entire article. After that though, the rest of the content can be behind a paywall.

You can read more about it here - http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=74536

And here are the technical guidelines for implementation - http://support.google.com/news/publisher/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=40543

Hope this helps,

Mark

After removing the plugin, you should configure a 301 redirect sitewide to strip out the .html and redirect to the version without the file extension. This way, both internal and external links won't lead to error pages, and you won't lose any link juice.

You'll also want to make sure your canonical tags are configured to link to the non .html version of each page, if they're hand coded.

Hi David,

When did the drop in rankings take place? After the blog network deindexation? After the latest Panda release? After Penguin?

From the way you've phrased your question, it sounds like you know the answer already. You have a lot of spammy content, lots of problematic links, and want to do things, as you phrased it, for a bit more longevity.

It sounds to me it'll be more cost efficient to start from scratch, do it properly this time, building with long term goals and strategy regarding site design, content creation, and link building, than to clean up everything and work from there.

Hope this helps,

Mark

A few tips

• sitemap.xml - I'd create a sitemap - there are lots of free tools out there to do this for you
• server configuration - you should fix your Apache server's htaccess file to deal with the urls - you're showing capitals and lowercase letters in the URLs - you want to get rid of the capital letters and only use lowercase ones
• empty pages that can't be good for your site - here's one example- http://contractors.earthsaverequipment.com/index.php/Illinois/ - you don't actually have any contractors in illinois, so why have a blank page on the site? This isn't the only case of this

This is just a few of the issues I picked up on. Hope it helps