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Community outreach could help... find some bulletin boards/forums/etc. where your presence would make sense and start becoming a resource to others. The more helpful you are the more likely people will trust your brand and consider you over your competitors (Just don't be on the forums with intent to constantly try to sell or push your product because that can just be spammy, unhelpful and hurt you in the long run).

More, unique and relevant content on a consistent basis will help with potentially getting more links, shares, comments, etc. The more opportunities you give people, the more chances you have. Just make sure you're not spinning crap for the sake of having something new. Every bit of content should be as fresh and original as possible.

If the "Subscribe" box is for RSS notifications, why not just have an RSS icon leading them to the feedburner page where they can subscribe? Personally I think that would be better than having a generic subscribe box just about the flashy newsletter signup. I'd figure a lot of people wouldn't understand what the difference was when first looking at your page and either mistakenly subscribe when they meant to get the Newsletter or overlook the subscribe box completely.

I didn't mean to sound harsh or critical... so please don't take it that way. I've been in the situation of destroying my own stuff thanks to bad advice and bad links before... so I know how hard it can be.

In your case, I don't think the 301 is necessary. Like Dana said, it could just be fluctuations and over the coming weeks, months, etc. that article could wind up getting more link love and ranking better again.

Great, original content will garner new links to your site & articles. Work on creating new content and keeping things fresh so you're a resource to your customers, fans, industry, etc. and the good vibes will flow (hopefully). Anything vaguely unnatural with link building nowadays has the potential to turn around and bite you. So when you have a great article that is doing well and drawing in the readers and the rankings start to slip... give it some time, see if its just natural fluctuations, do some testing, etc. so you can do even better with the next one.

Yes, pointing from a subset to a superset of information is one of the main reasons for the canonical. So Google would not view it as improper. Just remember... Canonicals are a suggestion NOT a directive. Google will choose whether to listen to you or not.

My suggestion: Write new, great, original content... get new, great, natural links. Don't do shoddy linkbuilding that will hurt future great posts.

As Takeshi said, there really is no benefit of doing that with respects to SEO. But some people are desperate, ill-informed and willing to try anything.

The WMT error reporting issue has been driving me crazy. At first it was stuck on the 23rd but it did move forward to the 25th for me eventually... but that doesn't exactly help me at all. Hopefully they'll figure it out and fix it soon.

This sounds like an ambiguous area. Your FAQ is your FAQ and should stand on its own. Now, technically speaking, if the article is what you want ranking for your FAQ you could consider a canonical tag telling Google that your FAQ is a subset of the Article's superset.

You could also, instead of including the 300 word FAQ copy/pasted into the article, link to the FAQ from the article where relevant and/or only include a sentence or two from the FAQ that is pertinent to the article.

If any of them are in Customer Service or deal with Clients and their questions, get them talking about those things that are a constant... do their new clients always bring up the same questions, the same concerns, etc. to the point where it feels like they're reading a script when they answer. Get them to realize that by writing about these common questions and concerns from their standpoint as an expert they can help to alleviate common problems in their field/industry... thus making their lives easier.

I don't see Google caring about fake facebook fans as it does nothing for people or their sites. 5000 fake facebook fans will make you look bigger than you are but those 5000 aren't necessarily liking and sharing your content, they won't broaden you shared stories unless what you want is more bots liking your page, and it'll increase the costs of your promoted posts without any ROI since you'd be promoting to fake people anyway.

Facebook has been known to occasionally hit pages doing this and remove fake accounts used to inflate page fans.

Have you done anything in the way of linking, social outreach, engagement with sites/forums/bloggers in the industry, etc?

Page 16 and Page 17 are not necessarily duplicates of each other but since each page is showing the entirety of the articles, instead of a snippet/preview/etc, every article would be a duplicate of the exact content showing on those pages.

So, I'd definitely agree with NoIndex on those pages.

CleverPhD pretty much hit the nail on the head with a much more concise version of what I was trying to say. +1 internets for you good sir or madam.

As for the 404... Google will not penalize you for having a page that isn't there. Too many 404s can be bad for user experience but in this case the pages you'd be 404ing are causing much more trouble.

Large amounts of spammy looking exact match keywords creating an unnatural link profile will do that nowadays. Have you received any unnatural link warnings because of them or seen anything that appears to be an algorithmic penalty?

How bad are the links? Sure exact match can hurt now but would it be better to attempt gaining some more natural links to the page. Have you attempted to get any bad links pointing at it removed?

Does the page really provide no value? Does it get any qualified traffic which then disseminates to the rest of your site? Or is the page DOA?

Personally I'd say NoIndex it for now, see if there's better content you could add, work on removing links and getting better ones, and see if that helps. You wouldn't want to 301 bad links to another place on your site because it doesn't fix anything... it just deflects the issue for a while.

Oh god, I couldn't agree more with you. Infinite Scroll pages/sites just look and feel awful to me from a user standpoint and they detract from sites from an SEO standpoint.

Like Kevin said... just because you sell blue widgets right now doesn't mean your site has to be blue-widgets.com or cheap-blue-widgets.com. But if you had a page specifically on blue widgets, it can help (to an extent) to have the url along the lines of example.com/blue-widget-info.php. Your homepage is your brand. If you work on natural linking, bookmarking and outreach which ties your brand to your most important keywords then the link equity will help you rank for those terms.

I've actually wondered this too because my SEOmoz report shows 404s that Google Webmaster Tools does not and I'd like to know how mozbot found it while googlebot didn't.

If the pages have traffic, rankings, etc. then its better to have a relevant one to one redirect instead of letting them 404. Its always better to 301 redirect directly to the relevant page instead of having a chain of redirects to redirects. Having 75 new redirects won't slow down googlebot. It can handle quite a lot.

Google Autocomplete is determined by a number of factors such as how popular certain word combinations are, their search volume, trends, etc.

http://support.google.com/websearch/answer/106230?hl=en

http://searchengineland.com/how-google-instant-autocomplete-suggestions-work-62592

Social bookmarking sites can be crawled and indexed by the Search Engines whereas most social media platforms likes Facebook and Twitter are not usually indexed and links are nofollowed. Starting a blog and regularly adding original content will help your site. Linking should be as natural as possible. Don't buy into any of those linking packages out there as they are likely to get you algorithmically penalized.

Social Bookmarking does still work but not as well as it may have in the past. It can still be a viable way to get traffic to your site but not necessarily always the most qualified traffic. Personally I'd say to stay away from any social bookmarking tools that will automate things for you because that will be a bit of a red flag if you're too spammy with adding your links. A more natural approach to getting your pages added to social bookmarking sites is the better way to go. Just don't expect it to magically increase you rankings, conversions, etc.

Assuming I fully understand your question, here's an example as an explanation: If Page A has 2,000 words and Page B has 500 but the bulk of Page B's content appears in Page A, then Page B is a subset of Page A's superset and should have a canonical tag pointing to Page A.

That can depend on the theme of your Wordpress site. Can you post a link to your site so we can take a look?

If you're 301 redirecting everything to proper, relevant alternative pages on the other site then there's no reason to canonicalize the page.

The Rel="Canonical" notice has nothing to do with changing your title tags... likely just a coincidence. Its not really an error either. All the SEOMoz crawler is doing is notifying you that the page has a canonical tag on it. Though I don't see a canonical tag on the link you posted above so I don't know why that page would have been listed unless it had one once and has since been removed.

It's usually suggested that Tag archives and Category archives be set to NoIndex which will help in alleviating this issue.

Would you mind posting a URL so people could take a look at the pages in question?

I'd assume GWT is returning a Soft 404 for those pages. Have you considered writing content for the page to express the need to log in for users to reach whatever important content is available via an account? That way Google sees that it is a real page and not so empty as to make them think it has 404'd. Or if there is no reason for Google to be indexing this page in the first place you could mark it NoIndex.

Ah... Googlebot can't see those changes on the page from when you click the different offers so each page looks almost exactly the same and like thin content. In which case I'd suggest something along the lines of adding more written content to pages like http://www.ofertasdeemail.com.br/desconto/submarino/ so they look different than page like http://www.ofertasdeemail.com.br/desconto/submarino/so-o-cartao-submarino-indica-as-melhores-ofertas-para-voce-10733.html and then adding a canonical tag to show that the offers are a subset of http://www.ofertasdeemail.com.br/desconto/submarino/

They only problem with this solution is that the individual offers won't really rank for anything in the SERPs and will likely be replaced by the primary page in the index (assuming Google follows your canonical signal). So that may not be a perfectly solution for your needs but it could alleviate problems associated with duplicate & thin content.

First, determine if those duplicate content pages need to exist or if your users would be better served by another page. If that page doesn't need to exist then you may want to consider a 301 redirect to the better page. If a page is an exact replica of another page then you need to ask yourself "Why do we have it?" If its only a duplicate because of thin content then you might want to consider adding more, relevant content to the individual pages to better differentiate them.

If the duplicate page needs to stay for whatever reason then you can consider adding a canonical tag pointing to the primary page. Some cases in which canonicals have worked best on the sites I work on have been relating to parameters. E.G. example.com/product and example.com/product?model=4 are basically the same page but they each serve a purpose. In this case, example/com/product?model=4 is a subset of the one without a parameter and was given a canonical tag pointing to the primary page.

Canonical tags are a signal, not a directive though... which means that the search engines may choose to listen to it or ignore it as they see fit.

I apologize if any of that seems confusing. Here's a link to the SeoMoz guide on canonicals: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/canonicalization and a blog post on the subject: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps

Have you looked into Mobile Responsive Themes for the WordPress site? That may be a better fit than a plugin.

It relies highly on all of the other pages which show up for the specific query, how well optimized they are, their relevancy compared to your page(s) and their continued efforts to rank for that query. I.E. Results May Vary.

From the Alexa website:

Alexa Traffic Ranks are based on the traffic data provided by users in Alexa’s global toolbar panel over a rolling 3 month period. A site’s ranking is based on a combined measure of Reach and Pageviews. Reach is determined by the number of unique Alexa users who visit a site on a given day. Pageviews are the total number of Alexa user URL requests for a site. However, multiple requests for the same URL on the same day by the same user are counted as a single Pageview. The site with the highest combination of users (Reach) and Pageviews is ranked #1.

So, If you want a better Alexa ranking then you need to increase qualified traffic to your website and entice people to view more pages.

There is no magic number of times that a keyword should be included in meta tags or copy. Their placement just needs to look and sound natural.

Your title tag on the homepage looks far less spammy now than it had before. Your meta-description is still a bit long so it'll wind up truncated in search results but it sounds much more natural than it did before.

Newer Google algorithms have come out, been tweaked and been refreshed repeatedly that almost exclusively target thin and spammy content. Something that may have worked in prior years won't work anymore. Perhaps you were hit with an algorithmic penalty during a refresh.

Can't believe I didn't think to post that link... ::facepalm::
That would've made sense for me to do earlier in explaining what some of the issues were on the site.

No, I can't give you new titles and descriptions for your pages. Do you have an in-house SEO and/or a copy writer on staff?

What hosting solution are you using? The free solution offered by Wordpress doesn't give you access to plugins or altering the html.

Every page title should be under 70 characters and unique from each other. The one on your homepage looks really bad... CSCS | CSCS Card | CSCS Test | Apply for CSCS Card | Apply for CSCS Test ... It's too long, overuses your target terms, and isn't exactly descriptive of the page. Your meta description on your homepage is similarly bad... Call 0207 199 9800 for Apply CSCS, CSCS Card, CSCS Test through Construction Helpline. Take the CSCS test, earn your CSCS card easily with Construction Helpline, Apply for your CSCS Card online. There is no good reason to say "CSCS" six times like that, its should be less than 160 character long (yours is 194) and should be relevant to the page. And your meta keywords tag is a red flag that you're trying to game the search engines to rank for CSCS cards... CSCS, Construction Skills, CSCS Cards, CSCS Card, CSCS test, CSCS tests, CSCS certificate, CSCS Health and Safety test, health and safety test, construction helpline London ... which will likely all lead to you being penalized in some fashion by Google.

Sitewide footer links are bad. I'd go with relevant text links in copy and/or put the important links on the blog's homepage in a sidebar. Categories and tags are a good thing if done correctly. They only help in SEO in the sense that they show a relationship and relevancy between multiple posts. When done well, this can help with user experience, increase visitor time on site, and reduce bounces. Categories and Tags are almost always marked NoIndex because of the duplicate content they create. A couple relevant tags per post is a good thing. One (maybe two) relevant category per post.

Based off of what I can see... your page titles look spammy and keyword stuffed, your meta descriptions tend to be too long and are spammy, and meta keywords are not used by Google anymore (and yours are spammy and stuffed).

I'd suggest looking over all of your pages and trying to follow best practices for naming conventions and content.

Thanks guys! My coder is going to look over all of the best possible ways we could implement this and then we're going to see about doing a little testing on one of our galleries. Thanks again.

Having a similar problem with a new site that was created by copying an old site in its entirety. Went through the trouble of cleaning everything up, having pages that were no longer relevant removed, fixed the sitemaps, etc. and now months later WMT showed me a spike of 404s for the old pages with the referrers as the XML sitemap and sitemap page... but they are definitely not be linked from there. I'm assuming there was some sort of hiccup with Google using an older, cached version of the sitemap to find these links.

I wound up just clearing the errors out of WMT and waiting to see if it will recrawl the error pages again. If Google continues to crawl them even though they aren't being linked to, then our next course of action was going to be 301ing them all just in case.

No known negatives associated with doing that? If not then we might give it a test run on one of the galleries.

There was no negative impact after the Pin It button was added and effectively doubled the number of on-page links.

As for the Ajax loading idea, that was actually another one of the ideas that my coder had but I wasn't sure of what the effect would be on Googlebot indexing and following images. Though all the newer photos do get added to the top which would be visible if we implemented that.

One of the sites I work for has some massive on-page link problems. We've been trying to come up with workarounds to lower the amount of links without making drastic changes to the page design and trying to stay within SEO best practices. We had originally considered the NoFollow route a few months back but that's not viable. We changed around some image and text links so they were wrapped together as one link instead of being two links to the same place. We're currently running tests on some pages to see how else to handle the issue.

What has me stumped now though is that the damned Pinterest Pin Button counts as an external link and we've added it to every image in our galleries. Originally we found that having a single Pin It button on a page was pulling incorrect images and not listing every possible image on the page... so to make sure that a visitor can pin the exact picture they want, we added the button to everything. We've been seeing a huge uptick in Pinterest traffic so we're definitely happy with that and don't want to get rid of the button. But if we have 300 pictures (which are all links) on a page with Pin It buttons (yet more links) we then have 600+ links on the page. Here's an example page: http://www.fauxpanels.com/portfolio-regency.php

When talking with one of my coders, he suggested some form of javascript might be capable of making the button into an event instead of a link and that could be a way to keep the Pin It button while lowering on-page links. I'm honestly not sure how that would work, whether Google would still count it as a link, or whether that is some form of blackhat cloaking technique we should be wary of.

Do any of you have experience with similar issues/tactics that you could help me with here? Thanks.

TL;DR Too many on page links. Coder suggests javascript "alchemy" to turn lead into gold button links into events. Would this lower links? Or is it bad? Form of Cloaking?

The music item pages that are creating the mostly empty pages with sidebars are the ones that sound like they should be NoIndexed. Since they're essentially empty pages they would be duplicates of each other, thin content, and a canonical would be ignored because they aren't technically a duplicate of the homepage or a subset of the homepage's superset.