Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks for letting me know that I'm not the only one seeing this.  In Analytics, I've got a nice upward line of traffic, so as you said, I'm not too worried about it.  Maybe someone else will have more knowledge about the graph itself.

Changing the content to show a bot something different than regular user is always considered black hat and is frowned upon.

That being said, if you're trying to create different messages based on where the user came from, you may want to consider something like a bright box to provide direction and interaction to the visitor.  Some general text in the page like that could be dynamic without being considered deceitful to Google.

I would have to recommend not trying to show Google something completely different than what users see in any regard.

So I was thrilled when Webmaster tools released the little graph telling you how many pages are indexed.  However, I noticed with one of my sites, that it was actually going down over the past year.  I've only been doing the SEO on the site for a few months, so it wasn't anything I did.

The chart is attached to this post.

Now here's the funny part.  I haven't really noticed anything out of the ordinary for keyword ranking dropping off.   I also tested my most recent page that I put up.  3 days after I posted it, I could find it in a Google search.  Shouldn't this mean that's it's indexed?  I can also find any other page I've posted in the last few months.

Another oddity is that I submitted a sitemap a while ago when the site was only 22 pages.  The sitemap index count says 20 of those pages are indexed.

The chart only says that there are 3 indexed pages right now.  However, I can clearly find dozens of pages in Google searches.  Is there something I'm missing?  Is my chart for this website broken?  Should I report this to Google?  Has anyone had a similar issue?

decreaseIndex.png

Also keep in mind that SEO is not an exact science.  There are methods that should produce results, but there are no guarantees that the company can rank your for the keywords you want at the price you're willing to pay.  Theoretically, given the budget, any company can rank for any keyword they want, but you probably aren't going to be happy with the price tag.  They're a company too, so the more work it's going to take them to rank you, the more it's going to cost.

Sounds like that keyword is just very specific and there won't be much competition for it.

PA and DA are just 1 of the many ranking factors for SERPS.  DA not as much.  Consider a blog you set up at wordpress.com.  Your DA is 100 because it's a wordpress.com domain, but your page authority will still be 0. Will that DA help you out eventually?  Sure, but to start, it's not going to make you rank that much higher.  Perhaps that's why your expert writes it off as important.

If you're stuck on doing this, I would recommend using a backend programming language like .Net or PHP to detect the Google Bot and generate a completely different page.  That being said, it's highly black hat, and I wouldn't recommend doing anything close to it.  Google doesn't like being fooled and has stated it penalizes for sites that try to display different content to the bot and users who browse the site normally.

The canonical tags are definitely applicable to this situation once Google goes everything again and sorts it all out with the new tags.

I would say it's worth the effort to give your main site a boost.  IMO the more content you can get on your own site that's relevant, the more Google has to base it's evaluation off you.  If your blog has alot of fresh content, that'll keep Google coming back for more!

Just to follow up on this.  the meta tag for this is

I think you may be thinking of the updates that says links in footers are bad now?  Correct me if I'm wrong.  I believe the intent of that is that site wide links in footers of other peoples sites that link to yours are devalued.  This means that you won't be getting link juice from every page on their website like you would expect.

Links in your own footer should be for the benefit of your visitors first, and I think that's what you've done with your links.  If you're trying to mold your PageRank in a specific way, try breadcrumbs or internal linking from the content of the page.

Thanks for the lead to myblogguest.

Your plan sounds good too.  I'll second the no spun articles concept.  There's such little benefit to them.

Start with On-Page optimization - IE get your keywords into your content.  Then I would just start reading SEO blogs until you have enough understanding of what's going on to branch out from there.

Thanks for the knowem.com link.  I have to use it more, but it looks like a promising organizational tool.

Just because you have WordPress running your blog, doesn't mean WordPress has access to edit the files of the main eCommerce site.  You can install a standalone WordPress blog in examples.com/blog and have regular HTML files serving example.com

You can also takes steps to secure your WordPress installation on top of this.

Low budget just means you have to put the time in yourself.  Good content takes time to create, and if you can't outsource it, then you're stuck with doing it on your lunch breaks

Ouch.  All the thumbs down aren't really necessary.  Margaret is just sharing what seems to be working for her.  If it works for your niche, then go for it.

24 hours isn't out of the ordinary.  I've had a site with a blog that took close to 3 days to complete a full crawl.  You could use the report card page if you're looking for an update regarding those changes for a specific page or two.

If the comments above haven't swayed you from looking at density, SEO Quake has a plugin for Firefox that will analyze all the words on your page and give you density for each word and each phrase.  It may bring to light some phrases you weren't meaning to target, or show you a word you have much too high a density of by mistake.

I second the time frame issue.  1 month won't be enough time and your work will just benefit the next person this client gets to work on it, while you'll be left with an upset client because of bad expectations.

I don't believe the actual tag pages are the issue here.  It's the fact that the same page can be accessed by 3 different url's because of the tags it's under.  Canonical links will take care of this.

The 301 will give you the credit you're looking for.  You can't really control how people link to you unless you're actually creating the link, so you just have to bear with it.  Be sure to emphasize the non-www address when you're trying to get links so you get the full value of the link.  The issue with non-www is that allot of people are accustomed to typing in a www and may ignore any suggestion you provide.

If the non-plural version has potential, then it's obviously relevant to your site, so I don't see any reason why not to target it.

Reciprocal links don't hold as much power as 1 way links from their site to yours, so Moosa's suggestions are a better route.  If you find blogs in your niche, you could also build your reputation through commenting on these blogs.  It could provide traffic through readers realizing you are another good resource on the topic.

It is a do-follow link, and the page has good PR.  That's a nice link to have in the portfolio.  Not only for the juice, but because you may also get good traffic from it.

SEOquake has a free keyword density, and SEO analysis add on for Firefox you could try.  Their tool has a well rounded approach that's easy to understand.

I'm not sure I fully understand why you need a spoof.  If you put the 301 rewrite condition in the .htaccess file, Apache will read that before doing anything else with the page, is doesn't matter if the extension will execute on Linux because it is redirected before anything happens with the actual file.

Yes I would do both.  If your goal is to standardize to either www or non-www, then redirect to one or the other.  This will assure new backlinks go to the desired version.  The canoicalization should standardize the link power on Google's end.

Did your changes coincide with anything else?  Like a push in backlink generation?

If the links are pointed at your own sites, there's no reason not to let the juice flow to your own pages.

Building links on highly relevant sites would be a good idea if you're willing to put in the time to make a useful post.  If the forum allows do-follow links, that will help you a little.  As part of a balanced link building strategy, they could be beneficial.

Any site that sells you thousands of links will be using an automated tool.  This is considered very spammy because the links have no value, they'll be on trashy sites, and on sites that there will be thousands of other links on as well.  The value a service would provide you wouldn't be worth the money.

Adding Canonical links certainly wouldn't hurt.  I don't think it'll help you though.  It may see them as duplicates because there is so much of the page that is the same.  Is it possible for you to throw in a paragraph description about the scholarship for each one?  There isn't much for a robot to compare when 80% of the page is the same and just a few fields are changed.

Did you remove any actual content, or change the url of the page, or use rel='canonical' links?

Chances are they aren't separate pages.  canonical tags are what you want to use.  They essentially combine different ways of getting to your pages into 1 indexable page.  So

www.example.com

example.com

example.com/index.html

all point to the same page, but if you put in the section, no matter how the crawler got there, it should consider the page www.example.com, which means you wont have the competing pages issue.

As stated, the titles have to be exactly the same.  1 character different and they're not duplicate.  Although 70 characters is what Google displays in the searches, they index more than that.  You can make your title 140 characters long to make it unique, it just will cut off in the search.

If you don't mind paying for a tool, scrapebox will do that for you.  You import a list of url's then it can check PA or DA and you can export the results.

Scrapebox apparently has the capability to find contact details off a page, but I've never tested it.

Referrals are a header.  It doesn't matter if GA is on the site.

Where you installed the blog shouldn't matter as any content in the blog will be structured under the directory you installed it in.  I've run a few blogs out of sub directories with no issue.

If you're comparing your page speed from pre-blog to post-blog, chances are they'll be slower because of the nature of the blog.  Every widget/plugin slows down your loading time, as may a poorly designed theme.  Add the fact that you're using a database to serve your content, it slows down more, especially if you're on a shared hosting platform that has other sites doing the same thing.

As for your 404 error.  Is products.html a page that's outside of the blog directory?  If so, you have to hardcode the http://www.mysite.com in the href or the blog will auto append it's base directory on it.

Guest Posts should be unique content, so you may not get a huge response if you're site will provide little value to the writer of the content.  That being said, I agree with Anthony that the benefits are there for you.  If you get a really great writer that creates a viral piece of content, it will be associated with your site, and you'll get all the links for it.

I have to say that a well posted comment with some meaning has driven traffic to my personal blog.  Every once and a while I'll see a strange referrer and it's due to a random blog comment I posted.  Has it made a huge impact?  Not really.  Could it be outsourced?  Probably, if done by a professional that will take the time to make the comment meaningful.  You won't find a cheap way to outsource a true comment though.

It's known that when you 301 a page, you loose some of the power it once had.  That being said, if you're basically 301'ing your whole site, Google will have to reevaluate everything.

For your category pages, add the robots tag and Google will not index them.

if you're using wordpress, here's a quick snippet.

if (is_category()) {

//Allow indexation of category URLs

echo ‘’. “\n”; } elseif (is_404() || is_search() || is_author() || is_archive()) {

//Do not allow indexation and crawling of 404, search, author and archived pages

echo ‘’. “\n”; } else {

//For other URLs, not mentioned above such as post URLs, Page URLs - allow indexation and crawling.

echo ‘’. “\n”; } ?>

Can you check to make sure those pages are still indexed by Google?  If the pages that were indexed are no longer indexed, then your canonical links have interfered with the ranking.

SEOmoz alone can not help your site, but it can give you an idea of what you may need to do to increase your visitors from an SEO standpoint.  If you have 3 years of content, you probably are just lacking on the promotion side of things.

I found this post online.  Do any of these bullets apply to you?

This is one of the most frequent questions we're asked these days. We always begin by explaining in which cases phone verification is impossible:

• if you have already used 3 times the same phone number for verification
• if you are trying to change your listing's phone number
• if you have no direct line, i.e. the call has to pass by answer machine or extension

If your situation is none of these, keep reading.

Read more: http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/workarounds-for-google-places-verification.html#ixzz1qXMXMzty

I saw a site that was redesigned and then became incredibly slow.  Their issue was that there were a number of widgets that loaded a bunch of different Javascript and css files.  There was also an issue where the site wouldn't load until all the images (and there were many dozen) on the page loaded.  I use Chrome's developer tools to see all the elements that are loaded on the page. It's very useful in determining what's taking the most time to load.

I've had a number of my reports hang up like that.  I got all but 1 to work if you delete the report and query it up again.  I only had 1 stubborn one that would never finish...

I'll keep working on it.  When i get something that will give you all 10,000 pages, I'll send you a private message.

Thank you for the vote of enthusiasm Jennifer!

Oh yes,  I realize the call only gets it for that specific domain.  The thing you could could do is download a full list of the URL's in your domain, and paste them into the textbox.  Then put that into Excel and run a sum on the count column.  Sorry if that didn't make sense.  If I get my site crawler operational, I may be able to implement a way to just put in the top domain and have it find all the other pages and tally them for you.  But as of now, the list is the best I can do.

for instance.

"http://www.apple.com/",13476

"http://www.apple.com/mac/",257

"http://www.apple.com/ipod/",134

The export tool from OSE should have all your pages listed.  Given it's not a huge domain, the tool should be able to handle it.

Let me know how you make out, if not, I'll have time tomorrow night or maybe Sunday to improve the functionality.

You're right.  It's not quite.  But it did give me the metric I was looking to see if was fixed.  Thanks!