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I did the fetch as google and everything looks normal. I also do not have any erros that have anything to do with this page.

It's very strange. It seems to have happen all of a sudden.

Thanks for your message. I've already checked that, and the site was in face de indexed.

I wanted to share this with everyone for two reasons. 1. To try to figure out why this happened, and 2 Let everyone be aware of this so you can check some of your pages if needed.

Someone on Facebook asked me a question that I knew I had answered in this post. I couldn't remember what the url was, so I googled some of the terms I knew was in the page, and the page didn't show up. I did some more searches and found out that the entire page was missing from Google.

This page has a good number of shares, comments, Facebook likes, etc (ie: social signals) and there is certainly no black / gray hat techniques being used on my site. This page received a decent amount of organic traffic as well.

I'm not sure when the page was de-indexed, and wouldn't have even known if I had't tried to search for it via google; which makes me concerned that perhaps other pages are being de-indexed. It also concerns me that I have done something wrong (without knowing) and perhaps other pages on my site are going to be penalized as well.

Does anyone have any idea why this page would be de-indexed? It sure seems like all the signals are there to show Google this page is unique and valuable. Interested to hear some of your thoughts on this.

Thanks

It seems like Google is smart enough to deliver the correct results. I'm sure there is a range depending upon what sort of keywords you are targeting.

But typically there is going to be enough content on your site to allow for Google to understand what the proper categories your site is targeting.

This question would be better answered by sending an email to SEOmoz staff as they would be the ones who could properly and accurately answer it.

I think you continue to do what you have done in the past (assuming you have followed good white hat practices in the past.)

You write good, descriptive, accurate titles that are optimized for the keywords you are targeting on that page, and you write for your readers. It just seems like Google is now going to be smarter at delivering search results to searches. As Rand says often, Google is SMART.  If you focus on creating unique and valuable content that people want to share and link to, Google will continue to find way to deliver that content to those who are searching for it.

I'm curious what you all think about using a 3rd party commenting system (like Disqus) vs the native wordpress commenting system?

I've read so many reviews online it makes my head spin, so I wanted to see if any of you have any experience, or perhaps some trusted case studies.

I was using the native comment system for a while, and then tried out Disqus; which seems to be good, but I'm not sure if people know how to easily get notified of new comments. With the native system there was a check box that said "subscribe," plus I used a plugin to redirect a first time commenter to a welcome page, as well as sent an email to them. I feel like Disqus makes it harder for people to get notified on new comments.

However, I like giving people the ability to log in via different 3rd party channels (facebook/twitter/disqus, etc.) I know there are some 3rd party tools that allow you to do this on the native comment system as well. Any way, I'm just curious if anyone had any experience.

Also I'm assuming the audience makes a big difference. My target readership is mommy's and parents, and not necessarily a 'tech" one; so I want to make the ability to comment very simple and easy for them. That's key.  I'm sort of leaning on moving back over to the Wordpress comment system.

Yes it did.

I want to chime in and say that as a a normal person who wants to learn SEO in order to have content found, and ultimately help people, I find SEOmoz to be extremely useful. Without sounding over dramatic, I can even say it has been life-changing for me, and my "career."

The info you will learn from the White Board Friday's, this q&a, and the rest of the staff of SEOmoz is invaluable. There is so much junk info online about SEO, and I personally enjoy having a "home base" so to speak. SEOmoz is the place where I go to line up other info that I hear about. I can trust that the info that I read/watch here is accurate.  Time is one of our most value assets, so if you value your time, SEOmoz is a great place to come and learn (and build your business/brand/story, etc..)

And on a personal level I have to say that the people here are great. A lot of "seo junk" you find online (free or paid) just seems to be ran by shady people, hard core salesman, and just generally untrustworthy people. But you won't find that here. I could type for days about my personal experience, but I'll save you details, and just say you can trust these guys. They aren't out to get you. They don't try to sell you on stuff. They don't "over-promise." And they aren't into SEO just to make a buck. It's the way the company is led from the top down.

If you back and read some old posts by the CEO (Rand) you'll find lots of stuff about how we wants to be in business to help people. To do the right thing. To change the way people think about "SEO." And above all he cares about his customers. And I think that counts for something. A big something. I enjoy supporting organizations  I feel generally have in interest in their customers, and you will find that here.

/rambling

I don't use Google analytics to see much more than how many visits I'm getting and what sort of keywords people are using to find our site. I'd like to step up my GA skills a bit. I'm wondring if you guys could give me some advice. I've never really set up any GA goals, or used it to track specific things, but I'd like to. Here are a few things off the top of my head that I would like to track. I'm wondring if these are posable in GA, and if someone could give me some feedback on how to track it / set up goals. Thanks.1

1. I'd like to know how many people click play on a video when they are on a page that has a video.

2. I'd like to know how many people are clicking "like" " google plus, etc.)

3. I'd like to know the path people are taking on our site. For instance, if they click a link from Facebook, and go to a landing page, what page are they visiting next.....

4. How long people are staying on the page

I would really like to break this down further by people that visit a link I posted on Facebook, or twitter, or from the link on my twitter profile page, etc...

Also if there are any other valuable goals / reports that would be useful for a blogger to track I'd appreciate your feedback.

Thanks.

Yes, I have about 60 404's and 403's I'm trying to correct...

Thanks for the feedback by the way.

I'm not sure how you would give the author pages different titles on a Wordpress powered site...

Should I check some of the no index settings within the plugin?

On my reports they show up as duplicate page titiles....

I have some duplicate content issues on my blog I'm trying to fix. I've read lots of different opinions online about the best way to correct it, but they all contradict each other. I was hoping I could ask this community and see what the consensus was.

It looks like my category and page numbers are showing duplicate content. For instance when I run the report I see things like this:

http://noahsdad.com/resources/

http://noahsdad.com/resources/page/2/

http://noahsdad.com/therapy/page/2/

I'm assuming that is just the categories that are being duplicated, since the page numbers only show on the report at the end of a category.

What is the best way to correct this? I don't use tags at all on my blog, using categories instead. I also use the Yoast SEO plug in. I have a check mark in the box that disables tags. However it says, "If you're using categories as your only way of structure on your site, you would probably be better off when you prevent your tags from being indexed."

There is a box that allows you to disable categories also, but the description above makes it seem like I don't want to block both tags and categories.

Any ideas what I should do?

Thanks.

But the question I really have is WHERE did these pages come from? Also the original page has a canonical tag on it. I just don't know how this page was created, and why it has such a high rank since it's a very new page. It's very strange.

What's interesting about this is that if you take out the %, the url exists. That URL is actually on my site. I have no idea how it got there though. Very strange.

The last crawl found a good number of 404's and I can't figure out what's going on.  I don't even recognize these links.  What's really strange is a few of them high a fairly decent page authority. For instance this one has a PA of 55:

http://noahsdad.com/?path=http%3A%2F%2Feurosystems.it%2Fconf_commerciale%2Fimages%2Fdd.gif%3F%3F

There are several more like this one also, it seems most of these new ones have "Feurosystems" in the link...I have no idea what that is.

Just curious what you guys think is going on, why these are 404'ing, and how to fix it.

Thanks.

Edit: I took out the "%" from the links and I get this: http://noahsdad.com/?path=http3A2F2Feurosystems.it2Fconf_commerciale2Fimages2Fdd.gif3F3F

which takes me to a page on my site. I have no idea what's going on, or what that link is. Hoping someone can chime in because this is strange.

Another edit: I just checked out the Google Webmaster's and it looks like these errors are 403's and all started around March 21st. I have no idea what happend on March 21st to start causing all of these errors, but I'd sure like to get it fixed.

Thanks so much for your kind words about the site. I'm aware of the duplicate content issue with the page numbers, and am in the process of correcting it.

My main goal right now however is coming up with some good categories, and organizing all existing and future content into them. Did you have any feedback relating to that by chance?

We have a website where we do a daily one minute video about our son who was born with Down syndrome. When I started the site I was going to do a daily video and put all of those in a category called "Noah's Minute." Cute title, but doesn't really tell anyone what it's about. (Oh what I've learned in the last year.) I was going to do no text on those video posts, just the daily one minute video. I wanted it to tell a story, in order, without me adding to it with words.

Then I was going to have some other categories where I wrote information about Down syndrome.  Therapy post, medical posts, best toys, parenting tips/encouragement, etc.

I'm been running this site for almost a year and I now have a much better idea of the type of content I'll be posting, what people are interested in, etc. I now write content for each of the videos, and no longer group them under "Noah's Minute." If you check out some of the posts, you'll see I try to be very intentional with each posts, and try to make each one centered on a specific topic / key words.

I'm now having to go through almost a year of posts that were under "Noah's Minute" and re organize them, however I'm having a problem with coming up with categories for the post. I have some of them under the category of "Therapy" since a lot of our readers are interested in checking out the different posts we do with Noah for his developmental therapy. But the other posts are much more "general" I guess.  For instance a lot of our  posts are just me telling our story and giving general parenting advice / encouragement. But having a category called "Parenting" seems to vague, and also every post I write could be considered "parenting." I'm wondering if someone would mind checking out some of our content, and giving me some advice on how to organize the posts. There is a lot of great info on our site, and many people ask me questions about things that are on the site, but they just didn't know was there. So I want people to find it better.

Also how "detailed" do I have to be in the naming of my categories for SEO purposes? For instance, the category called "Therapy' is great for people who find our site, since it's a given that the category will be dealing with "Down Syndrome Therapy" but do I have to name the category "Down Syndrome Therapy" in order for people to find it via search? If so, that would get old quick to my readers: "Down Syndrome Therapy" "Down Syndrome Toys" Down Syndrome Books" etc....

Anyways, I'm not sure where to go from here. Thoughts, feedback, suggestions?

Nope, no content delivery network. This is crazy.  No idea what's happening.

Nope, no content delivery network. This is crazy.  No idea what's happening.

@Carson,

This is so odd. When I look at the page, I see this. Am I seeing something different than what you are seeing?

http://d.pr/6RpW

What's strange is when I view the source on that page, I don't see it:

http://d.pr/FUmo

Yes, I do. I'm been clearing the cache.

If you guys are both seeing it, I'm really confused. When I look at my source code, I see this:

http://d.pr/GqOi

Nope...

Really? Do you mind clearing your cache and trying again?  When I look I'm seeing just the one (correct) canonical.

Really? Do you mind clearing your cache and trying again?  When I look I'm seeing just the one (correct) canonical.

Thanks Carson,

It looks like I may have figured it out. I checked out the header.php file and noticed this: . So I just deleted it, and it seems to be working fine.

No problem. Thanks!

yelp. When I first found the problem, I figured out the theme and the plug in were both adding a canonical url, so I took out the function in the theme to add the canonical url. Everything was working when you looked at the post the other day and noticed there was only 1 canonical url. But today I was looking at some code, and noticed it was back to 2 on each one.

What do you suggest looking at / check out?

@Peter,

I'm not sure what happened, but for some reason the canonical is missing up again. All of the pages are using my home page as the canonical url again. No idea what is happening. Can you tell what's going on?

@Peter,

I'm not sure what happened, but for some reason the canonical is missing up again. All of the pages are using my home page as the canonical url again. No idea what is happening. Can you tell what's going on?

On our site I use it on each individual page (post). Same with Facebook, stubmle upon, pintrest, etc...

Like someone mentioned, I want people to be directed back to a specific post. I did put a Facebook like box on our home page which allows people to like our facebook page directly from our home page (which has been very effective) and I thought about adding a "like" button for our home page, but it would be sort of confusing I think to people. There would basically be two different like buttons....

I may experiment with having a place in the footer to like our main page: site wide. I'll have to see how it goes.

Same here. Thanks.

Hope you are doing well.

Yes, I caught it. And it did pick up the canonical to the home page...I lost rank on a ton of key words. I'm hoping it gets fixed in the next index.

Thanks for the reply, but in this case I don't think that would apply.

What's happening is the them is putting 2 canonical urls into each post. The url of the current page, and the home page. So google is getting confused. Trying to fix it now.

Today I noticed I was dropping (pretty big jump) for some keywords, so I checked out the source of a page, and noticed that my source code has two canonical urls. One to the home page, and one to the /page-title.

I just changed themes recently, and the dropped happened after I changed themes.

Is this what's causing me to drop in rank for certain terms? You can view the source here:

http://noahsdad.com/physical-characteristics/

Thanks Casey!

@casey, thanks for your reply, I can go into the header and delete the info, but there's something in the them (a function?) that is getting the into. I'm assuming I delete some info from perhaps funtions.php?

thanks for your help by the way.

@casey, thanks for your reply, I can go into the header and delete the info, but there's something in the them (a function?) that is getting the into. I'm assuming I delete some info from perhaps funtions.php?

thanks for your help by the way.

I have a random question form someone who is a developer.  I"m not sure if this is the right place to post this question, but figured it was worth a shot.

I have the Yoast SEO plug in installed, and it this plug in is duplicating some of the functions of my theme and as a result I have some duplicate html and meta data in my source code.

From what I can tell it looks like both my theme and and the YOAST plug in are duplicating meta description,  canonical url, and maybe a few other things that I can't really understand.

I was wondering if anyone knew of what the best way to fix something like this, and if these issues are having any negative effects on my site / SEO?

Thanks so much.

You got it. It was strange. It went form almost none to a ton! ha,ha.

Hope you are doing well.

The site LIfehacker.com does this all the time. They will quote 2-3 sentences from the article, talk about why people should go check out the full article, and than link to it. I don't see anything wrong with that, especially if what you say about the article is unique and valuable.

Thanks, but I'm not sure what you mean by "upgrading my Wordpress." I have the newest version, and I also use the Yoast SEO plugin.

My main readership is moms, so they are very active on pintrest. They repin a lot of my content, and spend time looking at other pages on the site once there.  However, they know what they are getting before they come to the site.

Like the others have said, it really just depends on what sort of audience your site has.  For me, it's been good (I actually want to step up my boards, and make them a bit more organized...) but may not be for you.  Also remember it's invite only at this point, so even though there are a lot of people on it, not every one is. So you'll have to decide if it's worth your time at this point.

I'd be interested in this also. My site has a lot of images (but even worse, a lot of videos). I'm trying to speed up my site, and I was also looking at the CDN. I have been using Site5 shared hosting and I have been very happy with it. (I get a lot more traffic that 500 a day, and it works great.) They also have a VPS that is priced very fair, but to be honest the shared hosting has been incredible. Not to mention their customer service has been outstanding.

I am interested to hear peoples opinion on CDN's though.

Something interesting happened on the last update for my site on SEOmoz pro tools.

For the last month or so the errors on my site were very low, then on the last update I had a huge spike in errors, warnings, and notices.  I'm not sure if somehow I made a change to my site (without knowing it) and I caused all of these errors, or if it just took a few months to find all the errors on my site?

My duplicate page content went from 0 to 45, my duplicate page titles went from 0 to 105, my 4xx (client error) went from 0 to 4, and my title missing or empty went from 0 to 3.

On the warnings sections my missing meta description tag went form a hand full to 444.  (most of these looking to be archive pages.)

Down in the notices I have over 2000 that are blocked by meta robots, meta-robots nofollow, and Rel canonical. I didn't have any where near this many prior to the last update of my site.

I just wanted to see what I need to do to clean this up, and figure out if I did something to cause all the errors.  I'm assuming the red errors are the first things I need to clean up.

Any help you guys can provide would be greatly appreciated. Also if you'd like me to post any additional information, please let me know and I'd be glad to.

I'd like to see if the community could offer some feedback on how to 'step up' the comments on our blog.  I've been looking over various options, and of course you can find as many pros as you can cons for each of these.

In addition to our website, we have a very active, and engaged Facebook page, so my first thought is to install Facebook comments on our blog.  However I believe you loose the SEO benefit form the comments (I'm not sure how much SEO benefit you get form the comments anyways if the post content is optimized), people can't comment unless they have, and want to use, their Facebook account (although I've seen some work arounds that allow people to use either or), people don't get notified when there is a reply to their comment, I don't 'own' any of the comments, Facebook does...so if I ever decide to change comment systems, I loose all the comments, and I loose the ability to send a 'welcome email' to first time commenters (which has been very effective for newsletter sign ups.)  Facebook sends a large number of traffic to my site, and since there are so many people on our Facebook page, I feel this may be a good option.  One other concern I have by allowing people to use either Facebook comments or Wordpress comments is the use of my top commenter plug in.  This plug in has been very useful in increasing our blog comment engagement.  We are even going to be rewarding our top commenter each month. I'm assuming if you use Facebook comments by itself, or the combo Facebook / wordpress solution I've found online, I wouldn't be able to use a top commenter plugin, since this is pulling the data from Wordpress, correct?

One thing I don't understand is I've seen a plug in (I think it's Facebook simple connect) that allows comments to 'sync' between those comments that appear on the blog, and those that appear on wordpress. I'm not sure how this works.  Does Facebook recognize a certain url being posted on the Facebook page, and associates that with the same url on the blog, and simply syncs the two? In other words can people comment on the blog (via Facebook comment) and comment on the Facebook page, and simply continue to conversation from either location? This would be a pretty neat feature, but I'm not sure if that's how it works. Also, if I use Facebook comments solely, does anyone know what happens to all of the previous comments left on the blog? Do they all go away? In other words, does it make it seem like I have zero comments on any posts? This wouldn't be good.

I know a lot of people use and like the Disqus comment system, but I've read lots of horror stories about loosing comments, blogs being slowed down tremendously, etc.  I like how disquis allows you to 'like' someones post. I feel like this would help increase community engagement, but not sure how much. (We already get a fair number of comments as it, I'm just trying to make the experience better.)  I'd like for people to be able to post pictures / images in the comments, and I think disqus allows for there (though there may be plug ins that allow this on the native wordpress comments.)

Finally I'm wondering if there are some good comment plug ins that would allow me to stay using wordpress native comments, but step up the comments. For instance, using pictures in comments, being abel to rank comments (sort of like the thumbs up / down here on SEOmoz) and any other cool plug ins that help promote engagement.

I hope you guys can offer some insight as to the best direction to go with the comments.

Thanks in advance!

I am looking to add a static page to my site to allow people to add their site to a 'master directory".

I'd like to make this as SEO friendly as possible.  Here's it what I would really like to be able to do.

1. Someone visits the page and can either browse the blog directory on that page, or

2. Fill out a short from that has their blog name, url, short description of their blog, their state, country, and maybe the option to upload an image as well. This way people can search by the state / country to find people near by.

3. I'd like the links to be no-follow.

4. I'm not sure if there is an easy way to do this (I think I've seen some plug in's that may be able to do it.)

5.  I'm also not sure if there is anything  I'm missing here that could make this better. What I don't want is just a long list of links like everyone has on their side bar. I'd like to make it better, more user friendly, more seo friendly, and more helpful than that.

Any creative input on how I might do this is appreciated.

Thanks.