Questions created by NoahsDad
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Can someone please take a peek at this?
I used to rank really high for the phrase "characteristics of down syndrome" for this post: https://noahsdad.com/physical-characteristics/ but not I've lost almost all traffic to the post. Even if you search for "characteristics of down syndrome Noah's Dad" the post doesn't seem to come up. I have no idea what is going on. If someone has a few minutes to take a look it would be very helpful. Also, I have lost almost all organic traffic to my site. I used to get close to 100,000 visits a month from organic traffic and now I'm getting 3k or so. So almost all of it is gone. I'm hoping whatever is going on with this post can be figured out so I can address and fix all of the other pages as well. Thanks so much for your time.
Keyword Research | | NoahsDad1 -
Lost almost all organic traffic. Need some help.
Hi Mozers. I blog about our son with Down syndrome (https://noahsdad.com) and you may remember me from this case study here on Moz. https://moz.com/blog/seventeen-ways-to-improve-your-blog-case-study I was getting close to 100,000k a month in organic traffic to our blog, then it slowly started to decline to the point where I am not only getting 3k in organic traffic a month. So basically I lost all of my traffic. I honestly have no idea what is going on or why this happened. I know everyone is busy but would anyone be up for taking a peak into my GA and search console and seeing if you can figure out what may have changed and why my traffic dropped off so much. Our website helps a lot of people so you'd be doing some good and it may even be a good case study post! Thanks so much!
Content Development | | NoahsDad0 -
How would you structure this content?
We have a site where we write about our son who was born with Down syndrome. I had a question regarding some content I'm trying to create and structure and hoping you guys can point me in the right direction. One of the things we are often asked by new parents is what toys we suggest for people to buy for their child with Down syndrome, or as gifts for a friend who has a child with Down syndrome. So I'd like to write some posts that suggest great toys for each year of a kids life (and continue that as Noah grows.) However, there are some variations of key words that I would like to rank for as well and it gets a little messy, which is where I need the help. For example for each year I could have a post titled: Top Ten (I could also change out top ten for Best, etc..)Toys For A One Year Old with Down Syndr Top Ten Christmas Gift Ideas For A One Year Old With Down Syndrome Top Ten Birthday Gift Ideas For a One Year Old With D.S. Top Ten Learning Toys For A One Year Old With D.S. Top Ten Toys Under 25 Dollars For A One Year Old with DS Top Ten Developmental Toys for a One Year Old With DS Top Ten Fisher Price Toys for a child with ds Best Light Up Toys For a one year old with ds best muscial toys for a one year old with ds I could also think of other variations as well. Also I can make each of these with the various ages. 2 year old, 3 year old, etc... So I'm not sure what the best way to go is. I could easily have a ton of content that is all virtually the same (birthday gifts / christmas gifts..although I could suggest different toys) so I'd have a ton of different toys pages trying to rank for one term each that is good for google searchers but probably not so great for folks coming to my site as I would have toy pages scattered all over the site. I also don't know how landing pages would fit in to all of this. Would I want a "Down Syndrome Toy Guide" landing page, or "Down Syndrome Gift Guide" ... or both...or something else, and then link all of those other pages on that page? I have a few pages on my site now that I wrote before I started to think about all the different combinations I wanted to rank for: http://noahsdad.com/gift-ideas-down-syndrome/ and http://noahsdad.com/best-fisher-price-learning-toys/ I'm open to any feedback you guys may have on this. I'd also like to do some posts on "Down Syndrome Books" and hope to use the same info that you guys give me and apply to books. (Therapy books, touch and feel books, resource books, new parents books, etc..) Hoping some folks chime in as your help would really be appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NoahsDad0 -
How import are breadcrumbs SEO wise on a wordpress blog?
I was recently told I should take the breadcrumbs off of our site, for if no other reason than that it would look much nicer, and I tend to agree. I was curious how much seo weight breadcrumbs add to a site, and if I would take a big hit if I removed them... Thanks!
Web Design | | NoahsDad0 -
Is there a way to view Facebook book stats for last 30 days instead of a week?
I'm trying to Facebook stats (engagement, exposure, etc) for the last 30 days instead of the last week...when I look at Facebook admin stats I'm only seeing the last week. Does anyone know if there is a tool (or a way to do it within Facebook) to see the stats for a 30 day time slot instead of just a week? Thanks!
Moz Pro | | NoahsDad0 -
Need some feedback on organize media
I work at a large church and we have an unique problem we're trying to solve. We have a lot of media on our site. We have messages from every Sunday, plus mid-week services, and other events all on our website. We have the messages organized into series, but would like to somehow organize these messages into topics as well, or some other way to organize them better. We have over 5000 pieces of media! Here's a link to our current media page....does anyone have any experience working with this much content, and how we can do better? By the way, SEO / organic traffic is secondary to helping users on our site find content better. We are also in the process of changing over our site search to google search to help give users better search results. But our end game is to help user find our content better. Thanks for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NoahsDad0 -
Question about Google Keyword "match type."
When using google keyword tool what type of match type do you find most helpful? broad, exact match, phrase? I know they all have their own benefits, but if you just want to test out which term gets more searches I'm not sure what the difference is between the exact match and phrase. Thanks!
Keyword Research | | NoahsDad0 -
Best way to duplicate a wordpress site for staging purposes?
I want to make some changes to my Wordpress site, and want to somehow set up a live staging area. Does anyone know of a good way to do this? I want all of the same content there I just want to be able to make changes to it and try it all out before going live. Any thoughts on this? Also I want to be sure the staging site doesn't get indexed since it will be a complete duplicate of my existing site. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NoahsDad0 -
Thoughts on how to make this page better
I wrote a post that's doing really well in search and want to take it up a notch. It's about ipad cases for kids. I'm wondering if anyone has any suggestions on how I can step the page up a bit. Maybe add sub headings for the various iPads? Something else? When I wrote this post the new batch of ipad's weren't out so I'm thinking I should add subheadings for the various ipads. Any other ideas? Thanks.
Affiliate Marketing | | NoahsDad0 -
Is there a way to track who clicks on these links?
At the bottom of my single page posts, I have some related posts. I'd like to set up some sort of GA tracking that lets me know how many people are actually clicking on those links. Anyone know if there is a way to do this? Thanks!
Conversion Rate Optimization | | NoahsDad0 -
Looking for a nice way to add an amazon affiliate store to my site
We are often asked what our favorite toys, books, resources, etc, are and I want to make a page(s) with our top resources that is a nice clean amazon affiliate store. Are there are good resources anyone knows of to do this? (I'm using a wordpress blog by the way....perhaps there is a plug in?) Thanks.
Affiliate Marketing | | NoahsDad0 -
Best image size for FB Timeline updates?
Does anyone know the best size for images that are uploaded to FB timeline? For instance if I make a meme, the worlds seem to always get cut off when they show up on people's timelines, or view them for their phone. Any thoughts on this? At first I thought square worked best (and looks like it does if you visit the actual page) but for people viewing on their phones or their own timeline (maybe?) it looks like they are seeing a 4:3 image. Is the image size that people see not universal? Thanks!
Branding | | NoahsDad0 -
Is there a way to do this sort of keyword research?
I'd like to be able to do some keyword research as follows: Let's say I have two (or maybe more) separate keyword phrases I want to rank, is there a way to find out what combination and/or additional keyword phrases/descriptors are searched for the most? For example, let's say I want to rank well for the following terms. "Green widgets" and "boxes" Is there a tool I can use that will give me ideas/suggestions on how to use those two keywords the best way? Especially showing me long tell keyword suggestions I may not even know about. The tool may show me things people search for like "best boxes for your green widgets" gets more serach results than "best boxes for my green widgets." (Helping me figure out which combo of words in a long tail phrase is better. Or it may tell me a suggestion I didn't think about like "how to build boxes for your green widgets," or "how to put your green widgets into boxes," or "where to find boxes for your green widgets" or other combinations of things people search for using those two phrases? This may be possable using google keyword tools, but if it is, I'm not sure how to do it. Looking forward for any feedback. Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | NoahsDad0 -
Need help setting up a Google analytics goal.
I'm just now getting my feet wet with the goals in GA. I'm trying to figure out how many visitors to a certain page, click on a certain link (which takes them no a certain page on my site.) What's the best way to go about this? Thanks.
Reporting & Analytics | | NoahsDad0 -
Advice on using google analytics and webmaster tools....for noobs?
I was wondering if anyone could suggest any resources on how to use GA and webmaster tools? I just sort of look and see my stats, etc...but I'd like to learn how to find my low hanging fruit, and try to help it rank better. I don't really use those tools as well as I should. I know there various spreadsheet's you can use, etc, but I haven't found a good (and easy to understand) resource that helps you learn how to use those tools together well. Thanks
Competitive Research | | NoahsDad0 -
Does capliazations in url effect ranking?
I've read the info about how Twitter's bad seo effects ability to rank well for our twitter profile in some cases. I've been unsuccessful at getting my twitter profile to rank higher than it does, even though all metrics on OSE seem to indicate that it should. I've been linking to the non !#, non https, and non www, version of my profile, however it still is ranking as high as I'd like. I noticed today that the link URL has each letter of my name capitalized. I'm almost certain when I link to it I write out the name in all lower case. I was curious if you think this has any effect on it ranking? I'm wondering what the best steps would be moving forward. I could start linking to the url showing up in google (with upper case letters in the url) or I could go into my twitter profile and change my name to all lowercase and see if that changes the url in google, thus fixing all of the other backlinks to the profile. (At least I think it would.) What's everyone's thoughts on this? Thanks! [IMG]]([IMG]http://i.imgur.com/vGIbf.jpg[/IMG]) vGIbf.jpg vGIbf.jpg
Social Media | | NoahsDad0 -
Thoughts on my site structure? (And a quick thank you!)
I've learned a lot through this site (and the community built around it) about everything SEO related. It's been extremely helpful in helping us help others to learn that all people (even those with a "disability") deserve respect and integrity. (Wow, that's a lot of helps!) So I wanted to give a quick thanks to everyone on this site who has helped, supported, and encouraged us. We really appreciate it. One thing I've been trying to do on my site is look at my categories and over all site structure. I've pruned a lot of things from the menu bar; pruned away and tightened up the categories, and even rearranged the navigation of the site. As you can see, I have several drop down categories up top. I wanted to see if I could get some feedback on how what I'm doing looks thus far, specifically as it relates to my categories / menus / navigation. Although any feedback you'd like to provide would be more than appreciated. One thing I'm curious about (and not sure how to tackle it) is regarding the top most item in the main menus. For instance you'll see I have a top level category called "Down Syndrome Resources" which takes them to all of the posts in that category. Under that, there is a drop down menus that gives them other categories, and even some pages that fall under the topic of Down syndrome resources. I'm not sure if people would know the top most item is a link, or just look at the ones below it. (If that makes sense.) (On a side note I have therapy as a category as well as parenting, the truth is those could all be sub-categories I guess since everything on my site pretty much could fall under "down syndrome resources." Maybe this is a huge FAIL I made when setting up my categories.) I'm also not sure if I should use some sub-categories as well. For instance I have a main category for Therapy. Under that I have posts about speech therapy, physical therapy, and occupational therapy. Right now they are all grouped into therapy. Do you think I should use sub-categories on those 3 terms, leave as is, or perhaps another option? Another question I have is regarding landing pages. It seems like I need to have a landing page for my top "key words." For example therapy. Now if you visit my /therapy you get the category index page, not a "landing page." Same would go for the sub-categories if I were to create them. So I'm not sure if I should make a new post or page naming it something else (maybe "Down syndrome therapy" another named "Down-syndrome-physical-therapy" etc) or something else. (Although therapy isn't really the keyword I want to rank for, I'm thinking more along the lines of children therapy, pediatric therapy, therapy for children with Down syndrome, etc. So maybe I need to rename my categories? I was going for shorter names, so I very well may have done this incorrectly.) All of these questions are things I'm not to sure about, so I'd appreciate any feedback or advice you can give me. And since I'm learning, I could be doing things wrong that I don't even know to ask. So feel free to tell me what you see that's wrong, you won't hurt my feelings. I promise. 🙂 Thanks in advance.
Web Design | | NoahsDad0 -
How do you deal with comment spam: wordpress?
I have akismet installed on my Wordpress blog, and it does a great job of filtering the spam comments, but for some reason my site (and server) gets slammed by the amount of spam comments akismet blocks. If I check my spam folder there will be over 100 spam comments in an hour. (which in turn puts a load on my server.) Does anyone have any thoughts on how to put a stop to this? (Or at least slow it down?) I know I could use a captcha, but I really don't want to put any barriers on people commenting and I don't even like using those captcha's myself. Thoughts? By the way, does anyone know how spam like this works? This has been going on for sometime now. Are spammers just using automated software to do this?
Web Design | | NoahsDad0 -
Anyone have any experience with freelance graphic designer sites?
I'm wanting to get a few things designed for our site, and I was curious if anyone has any experience using any of the companies online where you can hire graphic designers. It looks like a lot of these companies use people over seas, and although some of them are talented, I don't think their styles are the same as I'm used to here. (Hope that doesn't sound bad...I'm not meaning it like that.) Does anyone have any suggestions for a good company to use online? Thanks.
Branding | | NoahsDad1 -
Thoughts on using a CDN?
I'm trying to decide if I should use a CDN to speed up my site. I've never used one before, but I do know that there are a lot of images on my site and I think that could help a great deal. Are they hard to set up? Are there any down sides? And are the pricey? Also I'm not sure even sure if it would make a difference for me, but I want to work on getting my site faster. Thanks.
Web Design | | NoahsDad1 -
VPS Suggestions?
Few questions: 1. When do you know if you have out grown shared hosting? 2. Who do you suggest for shared hosting for a med sized blog? (At least I think I'd define our stie as. Any ideas what sort of traffic qualifies as small-traffic / med-traffic blog? ) 🙂
Web Design | | NoahsDad0 -
Any developers (php/wordpress) out there? Quick question.
This question is directly related to SEO, but I wanted to see if there was any wordpress / php pro's out there who wouldn't mind helping me with a few quick things. The biggest one is I'm trying to move this facebook like button from where it is to the line of sharers above it. The sharers are being put in by the digg digg plug in, and the facebook button is being put in by the facebook plug in. You can see it on my site, or on this plug in. Thanks! gEOa
Social Media | | NoahsDad0 -
Should I 301 images to parent post?
I'm using Yoast's wordpress seo plug in and a few months ago I enabled the feature that redirects all images to the parent post. This month I noticed a huge drop in my organic search results for images. I just did a crawl of my site and it looks like every image does indeed have a 301 redirect on it. I'm curious what the though is on this. Should I unselect that option? I was under the impression it wouldn't make a difference with traffic and actually thought it would help since it brought people to the post instead of just the image page for that picture. Thoughts?
Search Behavior | | NoahsDad0 -
Thoughts on how to speed up my site? (Other site ideas.)
I was wondering if someone had a few minutes to talk a look at our site and see how to speed it up. I've ran some of the speed tests and I get different results, so I'm not sure if my site would be considered "slow" or not. Also if there any other things that jump out at you (usability, side bar, things I should change / add / take away to make a users experience better, etc.) please let me know. Any feedback is good feedback to me. 🙂 I'm using WP Super Cache as well. Thanks!
Web Design | | NoahsDad1 -
Should I put my "brand" in every one of my posts / pages?
I've heard different thoughts on this and wanted to see what you the seomoz group thought. I have been leaving my "brand" out of my titles so I could create longer titles (without my "brand" taking up precious space.) I've also read that adding your brand can take away from the words you want to optimize for in the title / post. I've read other places that you want your brand in every page title to "strengthen" your brand. Long story short, I'm trying to figure out if I should add my brand to the my page / post titiles, or leave them as is. Feel free to check out my site and current title template if you'd like. Thanks!
Branding | | NoahsDad0 -
Best practice for someone wanting to repost / translate some of your blog posts?
I've been contacted by several sites (a few in other countries) who would like to repost some of our articles on their site. A few of these are in other countries and they would like to translate them in their language. (we have a site about raising a child with Down syndrome so they are wanting to use our info to help people...not "beat us" in rankings, or anything like that.) I didn't know what the best practice on this was. I don't want to get dinged for duplicate content or have someone rank higher than me for my own article, etc. Just curious what the best way to go about this was. I'm also assuming the articles that are translated wouldn't be an issue at all since the content will be in another language. Is this right? Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | NoahsDad0 -
Would this be considered "thin content?"
I share a lot of images via twitter and over the last year I've used several different tools to do this; mainly twitpic, and now instagram. Last year I wanted to try to find a way to host those images on my site so I could get the viewers of the picture back to my site instead a 3rd party (twitpic, etc.) I found a few plugins that worked "sort of" well, and so I used that for a while. (I have since stopped doing that in favor of using instagram.) But my question is do all of these image posts hurt my site you think? I had all of these images under a category called "twitter" but have since moved them to an uncategorized category until I figure out what I want to do with them. I wanted to see if anyone could chime in and give me some advice. Since the posts are just images with no content (other than the image) and the title isn't really "optimized" for anything do these posts do me more harm than good. Do I delete them all? Leave them as is? Or do something else? Also in hindsight I'm assuming this was a bad idea since the bounce rate for people clicking on a link just to see an image was probably very high, and may have caused the opposite result of what I was looking for. If I knew than what I know now I would have tracked the bounce rate of those links, how many people who viewed one of those images actually went to another page on the site, etc. But hindsight's 20/20. 🙂
Technical SEO | | NoahsDad0 -
Any idea why this is reporting a 404 in MozTools?
I did away with a vague category and 301 redirected the category url to the home page. However the link is reporting as a 404 in Moz Tools when it scans my site. Here's the link, and as you can see it redirects to the home page. Just curious if I did something wrong. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | NoahsDad0 -
Facebook code being duplicated? (Any developers mind taking a peek?)
I'm using a few different plug ins to give me various Facebook functions on my site. I'm curious there are any developers out there would could take a look at my source code and see if it looks there is some code being duplicated that's slowing down my site. Thanks so much!
Web Design | | NoahsDad0 -
Need help with image resizing (re: slow site)
I'm trying to figure out why I'm having speed issues with my site, and using google speed test to help me knock out some of the issues. One of issues deals with image resizing. I have a responsive design and so even though on the home page the normal width is 580 of the blog area, the full post can go up to 1170. So I size all of my images to 1170 wide and let CSS resize them depending on the size of the browser. (The images on the most recent post are a little bigger than this because I was testing something.) I was wondering what the best practice was in regard to what I'm trying to do. Also feel free to check out my site and let me know of any other feedback / advice you have. Thanks !:)
Web Design | | NoahsDad0 -
Need some advice on changing website around.
I want to make some changes to my personal website and need a little help. I originally hired someone to create this site for me several years ago. Most of the site (including the home page) is html, but the blog part (/blog) is wordpress. The main site hasn't been updated in a few years (although the blog has been updated more often.) I'm not really targeting any keywords on my site (other than just my name) so I'm not really concerned about loosing any rank or anything. I"m just curious what the best route to go should be. Would you suggest keeping the site's format "as is" so to speak? (make the front page a landing page so to speak that links to my various sites, a little bio, etc; keep an about page, contact, /blog, etc...? ) Or should I go the more traditional route and make the blog the front page? Another route is to someone keep the most recent (1,2,or 3) posts on the home page (landing page) and sort of make it a landing page / recent post page. It's sort of like that now, only the main page just links to the most recent post instead of actually adding the post, if that makes sense. There maybe some themes out there that would work well, so feel free to suggest one if you know one that would work. I think the Aboutme.com pages look pretty nice and will let you use a custom domain, but I'm not sure. (And it's not a complete theme, so not sure that's the best option.) Thanks!
Web Design | | NoahsDad0 -
Should I remove the ?replytocom variables in wordpress?
I'm using Yoast's wordpress plugin and there is an option to remove the replytocom variables. I'm curious what everyone's thoughts were on that, and if I should do it. Here's the site if you need to see it. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NoahsDad0 -
What to do when you want the category page and landing page to be the same thing?
I'm working on structuring some of my content better and I have a dilemma. I'm using wordpress and I have a main category called "Therapy." Under therapy I want to have a few sub categories such as "physical therapy" "speech therapy" "occupational therapy" to separate the content. The url would end up being mysite/speech-therapy. However, those are also phrases I want to create a landing page for. So I'd like to have a page like mysite.com/speech-therapy that I could optimize and help people looking for those terms find some of the most helpful content on our site for those certain words. I know I can't have 2 urls that are the same, but I'm hoping someone can give me some feedback on the best way to about this. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | NoahsDad0 -
Few questions regarding wordpress and indexing/no follow.
I'm using Yoast's Wordpress SEO plugin on my wordpress site which allows you to quickly set up nofollow / no index on specific taxonomies. I wanted to see what you guys thought was the best practice in setting up my various taxonomies. Would you noidex, but follow all of these, none of these, or just some of these: Categories, tags, media, author archives ( (My blog is mainly a single author blog (me) but my wife does sometimes write posts. So I didn't know how this effected everything. Also I could simply make the blog a single user blog and just have her posts be guest posts, but I'd rather leave her as a user.), and date archives. The example I read on line only no-index's the date archives. Just curious what you guys thought. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NoahsDad0 -
Trying to figure out why one of my popular pages was de-indexed from Google.
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
Algorithm Updates | | NoahsDad0 -
3rd party commenting systems vs native?
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.
Web Design | | NoahsDad0 -
Need help setting up google analytics goals / tracking
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.
Web Design | | NoahsDad0 -
Need help with some duplicate content.
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.
Algorithm Updates | | NoahsDad0 -
Can't figure out what's going on with these strange 403's
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. 🙂
Web Design | | NoahsDad0 -
Need some advice on choosing categories.
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?
Web Design | | NoahsDad0 -
Is this causing me to drop in rank?
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/
Web Design | | NoahsDad0 -
Question for a developer out there...
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.
Web Design | | NoahsDad0 -
Lots of site errors after last crawl....
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.
Moz Pro | | NoahsDad0 -
Disqus Vs. Wordpress Vs Facebook VS Comment Plug Ins
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!
Social Media | | NoahsDad0 -
Looking for a Static Blog Roll (Directory) plug in / tool
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. 🙂
Web Design | | NoahsDad0 -
Domain Suggestion Tool?
Does anyone know of a good domain suggestion tool? I've tried some of them, but wasn't happy with the results. I'd basically like to put in some key words, and get some suggetions. Thanks.
Keyword Research | | NoahsDad0 -
What's the best way to include a pdf in your post?
I have some posts where I'd like to include a downloadable pdf....what is the best way seo wise to do this? I was thinking of just putting the file on my server and than just including a link to download it, but I'm thinking there's probably a better way. Any thoughts?
Content Development | | NoahsDad0 -
Best practices to add Facebook comments to wordpress blog?
Our website (noahsdad.com) has a very large and active Facebook group (http://facebook.com/noahsdadcom). Often there are more comments on the Facebook posting of a link, than on the blog post itself. I try to get people go and leave comments on the blog, but they don't get it. So I'd like to try to find a way to get Facebook comments to transfer to our site. I"m not sure the best way to do this....either via a plug in, or via these instructions https://developers.facebook.com/attachment/Comments_Best_Practices_FINAL.pdf/ I'd just like to get it going..and not mess up the comment's I have now. (Also not everyone has Facebook, so I'd like them to still be able to comment the 'old' way (name/email). Hoping someone can help point me in the right direction with this. Thanks.
Social Media | | NoahsDad0 -
NEED HELP ASAP: SERVER ISSUE
Hey guys, Some of you may be aware of our story. We have a website about or son who was born with Down syndrome. Two days a go a post I wrote went sort of viral, and I woke up this morning to an email from my host saying they had to take my site down as an emergency because of the amount of resources it is using. So now my site is down (noahsdad.com.) ...any ideas how to proceeded? I really need to get my site back online asap. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | NoahsDad0 -
How do these people have so many external back links?
A few of the sites that I 'compete' with have blogger accounts...and according to the research I've done they have over 500 million external, followed, links! These are mom blogs....and they aren't trying to do any SEO. I've noticed that if you are using blogger (as opposed to wordpress) and adding embed youtube videos to your blog you can set it to auto populate to youtube and also get a link in return. From what I can gather this just happens with blogger accounts since bloggers...and youtube...and google are all related. Does that have something to do with the crazy amount of followed external links they are getting? They also have a domain authority of 96 (which is because blogger is a trusted domain.... Is the sub-domain a better number to look at since their blog is a sub domain on blogger? Also, does anyone know who to get the same sort of exposure in youtube as blogger blogs get...or if it's even possible? Thanks.
Algorithm Updates | | NoahsDad0