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Google changes title tags when a page is relevant for a query but the title doesn't appear to be relevant enough or, in some cases, is too long. There is nothing you can do about it except to possibly re-write your title to be more concise and user-friendly, and then hope that Google decides not to change it in other search queries.

But i've found that Google changing titles can be more beneficial than harmful. i.e. You rank better or look better in SERPs for related terms that you had not originally planned on. You can't stop all instances of Google changing your title, nor can you be certain of knowing all the search terms in which they have decided to alter the appearance of your title.

This is not an uncommon problem. Take a look at this Moz Help page for the most common answers to your problem: Why Isn't My Site Being Crawled? You're Not Crawling All My Pages!

In personal searches I almost always go all the way to page 3 just to see what's there. I regularly find that odd gem which is more than perfect for what I intended even though it was not perfect for what I had typed.

Sure, from what I know the EMDs hit were spammy but the thing is... why work on three sites & create partial duplicate copy in the hopes that them being EMDs would give you a boost when you could create great non-duplicate copy for one site and have it rank based on putting quality work & effort into it? Odds are you'll have better luck that way than you would linking between your own EMDs like that.

And if the plan is to 301 redirect the two EMDs to the primary then you'd really need a strong link profile on the two EMDs to have them help enough once redirected. Instead you could spend the time working on the primary site instead of spreading your effort across three sites.

Ah... its a search results page. Generally speaking, best practices for internal search results pages is to disallow them in robots.txt as Google usually considers is disfavorable to have search results appear in search results. What I'd really worry about here is that it could accidentally be viewed as cloaking since you're serving Google something completely different than you're serving human visitors. (Though a manual reviewer should see that you aren't doing it with malicious intent)

Does this only happen on search results pages?

Personally I don't think the NoIndex, NoFollow solution is the best because they'll be harming or killing any link equity that was going to the site through that page instead of consolidating it. The best solution would be to come up with the means of adding that 301 as soon as you can so they stop hurting themselves needlessly.

Could they possibly leave the page up and just add some form of "Product Discontinued" type of message on the page to direct people to the most pertinent category page and other listing/product as needed? That way they don't shoot themselves in the foot while they wait on the ability to easily 301 and then once they can they just need to 301 the pages with the "Discontinued" message to one of the relevant pages listed.

Have you checked the HTTP header status code shown to users and are you sure that its not just a custom 404 page? Could you give a specific URL as an example?

If the page doesn't exist and only offers a small amount of info like that then making it a 200 across the site when Googlebot sees it would cause Google to view it likely as duplicate thin content or a Soft 404. So a real 404, if it is in fact a 404, is the correct thing to do.

The SEO benefits of Tags tends to be negligible. Mainly they work together to help the user experience by tying together similar articles and increasing a visitor's time of site and pages viewed by offering them similar content that may draw their attention. The biggest problems with Tags (especially on Wordpress) is if you don't set them to NoIndex and have artciles to show Full instead of a Snippet on the archive page. When this happens you create a duplicate version on every Tag archive attached to the post, the Author archive, the category archive and the homepage. And a one-off tag with no other posts associated with it becomes useless because it creates more duplicate content without effectively tying your article to any other similar posts.

I almost always tell people with Wordpress blogs to switch posts to showing snippets on homepage and archives to lessen duplication, NoIndex archives, and (where possible) clean up & remove useless one-off tags that you don't think you'd use again and plan new content to add to the one-off tags you would use again.

In that case, I agree with EGOL. Just drop them all.

I suppose the most important question is What will be replacing them?

You don't necessarily want 30k 404 pages appearing overnight like that and causing issues for visitors. Personally I'd say you should go through all the pages to determine what the most relevant alternative page is and then 301 redirect the old pages to the new ones. That'll be a lot of work for 30,000 pages but it would probably be the best way to save from inadvertently losing traffic, backlinks and positive link equity.

Okay, so no 301s.... well then, assuming all of those duplicate sites have been live for a while and crawled by the spiders, you might be better served with canonical tags.

Exact Match Domains took a hit recently in Google so trying to capitalize on something like that won't necessarily help you. Instead of splitting your work over 3 sites hoping to make one rank better, you'd be better served by targeting your efforts on the main site and giving it the best, most relevant content you can while building its link equity.

Take a look at the Moz Help Page Why Isn’t My Site Being Crawled? You're Not Crawling All My Pages!

It lists the most common reasons for your issue.

Yeah... if you're using the Wordpress platform hosted through Wordpress instead of through an independent hosting solution then you can't add plugins so you're a bit stuck on that as far as my knowledge goes.

A plugin like Yoast will give you the ability to set your archives to NoIndex, Follow which should alleviate your issues.

Without more specific information like the website or pages in question I can only give you some general questions to look into... Have you checked on the specific pages that the crawls says are the duplicates? Since you're on Wordpress then it is very possibly caused by the Category archives, Tag archives, and Author archives still being Index, Follow and duplicating all of your posts. Also, do you have your blog set to show the full post or previews on the homepage and archive pages?

It possibly just hasn't been long enough for the spiders to re-crawl everything yet. Have you done a fetch request in Webmaster Tools for the page and/or site to see if you can jumpstart things a little? Its also possible that the spiders haven't found a path to it yet. Do you have enough (or any) pages linking into that second page that isn't being indexed yet?

Using tools from SEOBook, I'm seeing 228 internal links on your homepage to your category pages and articles. They appear to be legitimate links so I wouldn't worry that there are too many though you should double-check that you don't have too many duplicate links unless they are necessary.

As for http://www.in2town.co.uk/Health Magazine, that's just an improperly encoded space though it would seem given your URL structure that it should be a dash - not a space. Once again, check Open Site Explorer and that should help you find what is linking to it.

That odd URL is the link in the image on the right side of your site for "lose weight today with gastric band hypnotherapy".

I used Open Site Explorer to find what pages were linking in and they all mention "(img alt) gastric" which made it easier to pinpoint where on the pages the link was coming from.

That sounds like the textbook definition of a Relevant Link. Client makes mechanical parts, sells to mining & construction industry, links to/from mining & construction industry... not sure what would make that irrelevant. Google won't penalize you for those.

If your title is concise and within the 10-70 characters limit (though width of letters can throw that off a bit) then you'll more likely appear with your correct title instead of an altered one. In some cases though, if Google considers your page relevant to a query but doesn't think your title is relevant then they will alter it. This may seem like an issue but can in fact allow you to appear for search terms that you didn't think you were relevant for but are. I've seen this happen on pages for one of the ecommerce sites I work on. When i search for one of our core terms I see the correct title and then a search for a synonym to our core term returns our site in the SERPs with an altered title. In this case its fine because the title wasn't originally optimized to the synonym but Google sees it as relevant, changes it, and allows us to rank well for the term. As far as I know though, there is no way to send Google a notice that they shouldn't alter your title in the SERPs. Google somehow reserves the rights to change how they list your site if it improves the search experience of its users.

A one-to-one redirect is usually best but as long as where you redirect to is the most relevant alternative then you are fine. If the original page that is now 404'd was receiving essentially no traffic and wasn't ranking then you can likely let the 404 stick and it will drop from the index (assuming it was there already). If one new page is relevant for 2, 3, 4+ older pages and there's nowhere more relevant to redirect them to, then it is perfectly fine to 301 all of those to the same place. What you don't want to do is blindly decide to bulk redirect everything one level up or to your homepage without doing your research first. You want to make sure that the new URL you're pointing to will serve your customers/visitors as best as it can.

And as Simon said in his response, Cyrus' post on redirects is a great resource for answers on what you should, or shouldn't, be doing.

Beat me to the punch as I was writing up my response. Thumbs up to you for a good answer that was similar to mine.

Depends on the way in which they misspelled things. If they got your domain name correct but messed something up after the slash (i.e. mysite.com/TyposHappne) then you will likely see a notice in Google Webmaster Tools of a 404'd page. At which point you could either ask the webmaster at the other site to fix the link or you could 301 the 404's page to the correct URL. If the incorrect link spells your domain name wrong... well then there's really no easy way to find it. You could potentially run a crawl test on a website that you know does link to you on other pages to see if the test brings up notices of broken links and then check if those broken links were meant for your site. Beyond that I don't believe you can do anything except hope the site administrator or their SEO runs their own tests to check for broken links and then fixes them accordingly.

Rel Canonical is not quite the right thing for this sort of issue.

If you're worried about the 404s sitting around too long and losing traffic for the moment, you can 302 everything to a landing page, category page, or homepage while you work on setting everything else up. You have two choices at this point.... 1) recreate all of the old pages and old URLs then remove the 302s, or 2) Add new products and new URLs, then as Dana said you'll need to map out all your new product URLs and old URLs to determine what old URL should be 301 redirected where. Then set up your necessary 301s and test that they all work.

The pages in question don't have any Meta Robots Tags on them. So once the Disallow in Robots.txt is gone and you do a fetch request in Webmaster Tools, the page should get crawled and indexed fine. If you don't have a Meta Robots Tag, the spiders consider it Index,Follow. Personally I prefer to include the index, follow tag anyway even if it isn't 100% necessary.

Your Robots.txt (which can be found at http://www2.learningtree.com/robots.txt) does in fact have Disallow: /htfu/ which would be blocking http://www2.learningtree.com**/htfu/**uswd44/reston/it-and-management-training from being crawled. While your old page is also technically blocked, it has been around longer and would already have been cached so will still appear in the SERPs.... the bots just won't be able to see changes made to it because they can't crawl it.

You need to fix the disallow so the bots can crawl your site correctly and you should 301 your old page to the new one.

Pro has 5, Pro Plus has 12, and Pro Elite has 30 campaigns. Only active campaigns count towards that cap, not ones that have been archived.

Its like how a Square is a Square but also Rhombus and a Rectangle. Long tail keywords can be any and all of those definitions depending on the moment, your goals and your needs.

In most cases I wouldn't consider a Low Traffic term a "Long Tail Keyword" simply because it has low traffic. But I would argue that Long Tail Keywords are likely to have lower traffic than their short tail counterparts. People are more likely to search using shorter terms and phrases but sometimes a 4+ word combination can be popular. But I would argue that a Long Tail Keyword/term/phrase is likely to be 3, 4, 5+ words long. Can those words be all extremely product specific? Sure. Do they need to be? No. Are they more specific than a one or two word short tail phrase? Yes.

One word with low traffic is probably just a bad keyword to be using. A 4 word phrase with high traffic could just be a popular long tail search. In some cases it will depend on your industry. Some phrases can have multiple meanings. Just because a 4 word phrase has good traffic doesn't mean you need to use it if the first 3 pages in the SERPs are all sites devoted to a completely different concept that happens to have the same phrasing.

I agree with Dana on the Custom 404 for classifieds. A 301 could confuse people and increase bounce rate since you're not serving them what they thought they were getting. Whereas a 404 makes perfect sense given the transitory nature of a classified ad. Just make sure to let people know the product/ad/listing is no longer available and give them helpful links.

This is definitely NOT the best thing to do. Bulk redirects to the homepage will wind up killing a large chunk of the relevancy signals, link equity and traffic since you're not serving the most relevant alternative to your users. They should be redirected to their most relevant live counterpart. And using a plugin that redirects ALL 404s isn't good either since sometimes a 404 is useful. For example, how will you know if a link is broken if it can't 404? In this case, if you just renamed the categories... redirect the old URL to the renamed category it belongs to.

Take a look at Cyrus' blog post from the 18th How to Completely Ruin (or Save) Your Website with Redirects.

Its also important to note that practically all blogging platforms NoFollow the links in the comments.

1. If you have older content and you create newer relevant content that you want people to see instead of the older content, you likely want a 301 redirect. In this way, all (mostly all) of the link equity is passed to the newer content which will eventually rank in place of the older content.

2. If you have duplicate pages like those caused by a parameter where site.com/page1 is the same as site.com/page1?this=x then you should canonicalize the page and its parameters to site.com/page1. In this way, the search engines understand that page1 is the real version of the content and thanks to the canonical will eventually take the place of the parametered versions that had been appearing in the SERPs.

Appendix to 1... down the road, those older pages that were redirect may wind up with no more links pointing to them from anywhere and no traffic going to them. At this point you may consider just 404ing the older page if you'd like to clean up older, less useful redirects.

Appendix to 2... A Canonical is a suggestion, not a directive. This means that the search engines do not have to follow it if they feel it is not entirely relevant.

Sorry... I just had to jump in on this since the other members of the Roberts Tribe of Moz have chimed in. I agree completely with their assessment.

Ha, okay... you got me there. I just figured the "official" google stance would be important to state. If someone really wanted to they could nicely ask for reviews and just happen to also slide a few something or other the way of the reviewer. Though i personally would not endorse that. But yes, he could invite reviewers, give them an "industry rate" on rooms, happen to state that reviews of both a positive or negative stance are greatly appreciated as it allows the hotel to work on improving weakness and help evaluate what the current strengths are, etc. etc. Its all in how you word it and present it.

Normally i fix soft 404 issues by redirecting or adding content to the page. So if you can't redirect then you could try adding some unique content to those pages. Basically its like they're saying the content is soooo thin or non-existent that the page looks like it 404s despite serving a 200 status.

As per the Google Places reviews guidelines (link

Conflict of interest: Reviews are only valuable when they are honest and unbiased. For instance, as a business owner or employee you should not review your own business or current place of work. Don’t offer money or product to others to write reviews for your business or write negative reviews about a competitor. We also discourage specialized review stations or kiosks set up at your place of business for the sole purpose of soliciting reviews. As a reviewer, you should not accept money or product from a business to write a review about them. Additionally, don’t feel compelled to review a certain way just because an employee of that business asked you to do so. Finally, don’t post reviews on behalf of others or misrepresent your identity or affiliation with the place you are reviewing.

So I'd suggest not offering free visits in exchange for trying to get reviews (positive or negative).

Links from those social sites are often either not crawlable or nofollowed... but what they do actually do is add to your social proof and add new avenues for people to find & share your content. We use Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest regularly for our ecommerce sites and share links to our pages where relevant. Pinterest has actually lead to a wonderful uptick in referral traffic on our site and our photos are regularly shared on people's design boards. This traffic tends to spend less time on site and view fewer pages... but even if only a handful convert then its still people we wouldn't have had if we never tried. Facebook doesn't send us as much traffic but is almost turning into an added level of Customer Service and allows us an easy means of conversing with potential customers. We also share other related pages' content, comment on other pages, and attempt to make ourselves a useful resources for people. Seems that nowadays if you have a business then its almost expected you will have an associated Facebook page. Twitter on the other hand has turned into a stream of pointlessness in my opinion but its likely the nature of our sites that make people less likely to interact and strike up a conversation. More work can be done there as we've seen people who have built great fan and customer bases through their twitter accounts.

All of these things though make us look more available, more professional, lead to more sharing of our content which in turn leads to more people who learn about us which in turn leads to new customers and more sales.

Sounds like you need to set up 301 redirects from your old URLs to the the new relevant ones.

The fact of the matter is that no one fully knows the 250+ signals in the google algorithm or how the 500+ changes a year to the algo affects things. If the press release links are passing any link equity and you decide to disavow them, you're only hurting yourself. Any amount of positive link equity is better than purposely choosing to get nothing from it. If your site, your traffic, your rankings, and other metrics haven't been hurt by the press releases then why disavow them?

Wholeheartedly agree on that one. You don't hear that often enough and from enough people. May not be as quick as typing a few things into AdWords and hoping for good results but we've found some great terms just by listening to people.

Links in press releases like that don't carry as much weight as they used to (allegedly). In some cases, sites will slap a nofollow on them anyway. Disavowing them could potentially hurt you more than leaving them alone. So unless those 50 sites are extremely spammy sites, I wouldn't worry. Have you seen any big hits to your traffic and/or rankings since the article was syndicated?

Write for people, not for search engines. If it sounds unnatural then it is. There's no magic number for keyword density.

Most like to make sure their core term for the page is up front in the title, used in the H1, and used in the meta description. As far as in the content of the page itself, just make it sound good. Good content is better for you than potentially stuffing a keyword to hope to rank. Also, Google (likely) uses Latent Semantic Indexing or at least understands semantically related words... so you can mix it up a bit with related terms and synonyms without fear they won't understand.

Google is the Eye of Sauron so don't worry about having to tip them off to your Pinterest page... they can see the interconnection and traffic. If you have Google Analytics set up for your site, you should be able to see all that lovely traffic coming from Pinterest in Traffic Sources > Sources > Referrals.

Same here. Causes my outlook to stop responding for a bit every time I try to open/look at one of those response emails.

In the case of the wordpress trackback issue... its basically self-referential. Because their is a link to your blog post on your blog, wordpress creates a trackback to notify you their is a link to your blog post on a blog. Normally the reason for this is to notify you of when someone else on a blog posts a link to your site or posts on one of their posts. I.E. a Pingback or a trackback. 302s may not pass link equity but the trackback won't pass as much as the link that the trackback is notifying you of in the first place.

So ultimately, don't worry about the trackback 302s if you can't change the wp-trackback.php file. Its an easy fix if you can access the file but otherwise the seo benefit in this particular case is neglible.

Your old blog URLs 302ing is an issue though. Have you double-checked with the SEOBook tool that your URLs are redirecting improperly or is it just the trackbacks that you're being warned about?

Not sure how I wound up slapping a .ORG onto your URL like that... could've sworn I was copy/pasting everything correctly. Either way, that tool will help you double-check you have the correct HTTP status codes showing for your URLs.

As for the not being able to change that trackback file, don't worry about them then. They won't hurt you by 302ing.

Using the SeoBook server header tool (link), timelinkblogs.wordpress.org is showing that it 302 redirects to Wordpress.org instead of your new site. Do you have any other URLs we can check to see if they're redirecting properly?

As for Trackbacks showing as 302s, that often arises from using the Disqus commenting system. Take a look in your wp-trackback.php file for the line wp_redirect(get_permalink(``$tb_id``)); and change it to wp_redirect(get_permalink(``$tb_id``),301); in order to make all those trackback 302s into 301s.