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Maybe the spacing is off when you posted it here, but blank lines can affect robots.txt files. Try code:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
#End Robots#

Also, check for robot blocking meta tags on the individual pages.

You can test to see if Google can access specific pages through GWT > Health > Blocked URLs (should see your robots.txt file contents int he top text area, enter the urls to test in the 2nd text area, then press "Test" at the bottom - test results will appear at the bottom of the page)

According to mozcast's big ten tracking, the strongest domains seemed to have increased their percentage of page 1 results on 1/8/2013.

I feel like the trend of big brands dominating the smaller sites has been going on for a while now with no changes in sight.

Great question.

I think for powerful sites, you don't need to worry about it. If you are a new site, this could be seen as a reciprocal linking scheme. I'd recommend linking to them with a nofollow to be on the safe side. Once your site is well established, remove the nofollows.

To danatanseo's point, if you visitors would like it, you should definitely do it. But if you are really worried about G's interpretation of the page, you can always noindex the page and/or nofollow the links.

The two shouldn't be interchangeable, both should be in different formats and writing style.

If you do want to repurpose it, as Clare said, make sure that it is unique and would avoid a duplicate content penalty. Most good blogs won't accept it if its a duplicate of a previous press release.

Is there a better method to present tags than the wordpress tag cloud?

Yes, categories. If anything, the current tag cloud is annoying to use (different sizes, ugly text, repetitive tags). Organize them into several categories that describe the topics accurately and cause minimal overlap.

Also want to mention that your navigation dropdown links is causing the majority of the problem (each section has several links under it). Once again, think about consolidating these links if possible.

Video markup should also appear on regular search results.

Are your URLs just not in web search or are you ranking but no video thumbnails are showing?

You can have both markups on a single page, they shouldn't conflict.

The problem with using a software to translate your content is that it will never be perfect. There will be many grammatical and/or vocabulary errors that would decrease the quality of the content. I'm not sure if Google is able to understand content quality in other languages, but a worse user experience usually leads to worse rankings. Ideal situation, you would have those pages manually translated (but I know it will cost a fortune).

In case you decide to auto translate, be sure to use the rel="alternative" hreflang="x" tag in order to tell Google that you have multiple pages with the same content, except in different languages.

I don't think you should worry about a sudden influx of pages. Ideally, you'd drip feed them in to take advantage of the freshness factor, but you shouldn't be penalized for creating a lot of new pages.

As such, I think the link will be followed normally (it would be as if someone added rel="banana" to the link).

1. If you use IIS, urls are parsed case insensitively (i.e. page.aspx = Page.aspx). Unfortunately, crawlers treat them as separate pages and would say they are duplicate pages. Be sure to set up canonicals for the proper url structure.

2. No, it would be handled through IIS and the web.config file

3. Check. site:url.com and see if your pages appear

Cheers,
Oleg

Yes, she is talking about the title tag, not meta description. And I believe she is referring to this - read the full article here

As you can see from the image, the title is cut shorter in the new version.

One thing to keep in mind is that you will probably lose your rankings for that 2-4 week period. So do it ASAP but not during a peak sales period.

Depends. If the people who would use the Facebook pages have different needs depending on the location, it may be better to have a separate page for each location. However, if all the pages would pretty much be the same (you would post the same updates to each and the questions from customers for each store are pretty much the same), I would stick with 1 brand page. Its easier to manage and it is more authoritative than having 12 separate pages.

Check out this post on the subject

Make sure your internal links to the landing pages have the correct, distinct anchors.

You can put anything into your meta description and it won't mess up any NAP inconsistencies. It's used purely as the text to show in SERPs - not related to SEO, link building, local map pack, etc.

Differences in NAP in the actual website content and various business citations could cause issues, but not in the meta description.

Your code should work, add it then test a dynamic url via GWT > Health > Blocked URLs

You can also set custom parameters to either be tracked or not tracked via GWT > Configuration > URL Parameters

1 day to never.

Depends on the number of editors, submissions for the category you submit a link to and quality of the website submitted.

Check out this guide for tips on how to get a DMOZ link.

Sure, but it doesn't mean everyone will see it.

Best course of action is to add "Special Hours" in Google My Business to declare when your business is closed.

You lose some juice with a 301 and there is usually a 2 week period where you drop out of SERPs for that page. However, the rankings usually come back strong after that.

A note about rewriting pages in general: I've rewritten old pages and seen improvements in SERPs. The risk would lie in how big of a content change occurs - if you have a page about dogs and rewrite for cats, you won't be rankings as well for dog terms. The benefit of rewriting over creating a new page is that it already has ranking power and can rank more easily for new terms.

Since #2 is the one that is getting shared/linked to frequently now (and I'm assuming a better domain name), I would slowly redirect the pages from #1 to #2. Try it for a few pages and see what kind of results you get. Just give G 2 weeks to update your rankings.

Cheers,
Oleg

Follow & Connect

You shouldn't worry about it. Honestly doesn't even seem like you have a lot of links on those pages.

In fact, I'm pretty sure you get that message on the your blog because you link to each post 6 times (title, image, read about text, read more, comment count x2). Sitemap will naturally have many links.

The "too many links" would only really affect your rankings if you have a lot of irrelevant external links or you link to every page on your site from every page. Either of these would siphon you link authority away from the pages you want to rank.

Having many links on just two pages on your site is no big deal and nothing to worry about.

Yandex is pretty much only used in Russia, Kazakhstan and some Eastern European countries. If you don't have customers in those areas, I wouldn't worry about Yandex.

They could have set those up just in case people make typos when trying to reach the www. version. I would set up 301's from all of them to either the www. version or non-www version (check to see which is a better backlink profile).

Your options are pretty limited. If over-blog won't work with you to set up 301 redirects, you may need to take down the content, upload it to its new destination, and replace the old pages with blurbs + links to the new articles.

You cannot put a rel=canonical tag anywhere but the header. So if you can't edit that, you're out of luck =/

Nope, that's exactly what you should do.

301 redirect would probably force a loop/redirect error. You should use .htaccess/IIS to auto-magically redirect/rewrite all /index.html pages to the root folder. In addition, I would set up canonical's on the page as well with the definitive page url.

Just fix the link(s) that are causing the problem by adding a / to the start of the url. Then rerun screaming frog and you should be golden.

If you are still having problems, share the URL and I can take a quick look.

I like your suggestion with the overlay when a visitor is using IE8. Couple that with an additional stylesheet with fixes to make the site usable (if not responsive) to reduce visitor drop off (because you can bet that many people won't download a new browser and just leave the site)

The www. vs non-www is causing the issue. You should 301 redirect your site's pages to the www. version since it has a higher authority.

You can use the following .htaccess code to accomplish this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

• Check if domain is indexed
• Check the anchor profile of the domain - too spammy means it would affect your current site's anchor profile and possibly penalize it
• View the site via archive.org and make sure it was good site. Spam/porn/hacked sites will probably do more harm than good.

Also, the best 301 strategy would be to link individual pages to specific new pages on your site. I would focus on the pages that have external backlinks and do a catch-all redirect to the homepage for the remainder.

So ideally you would do page to page redirects which would be on the .htaccess level. Meaning sitea.com/topicx redirects to siteb.com/similartopicx

If you don't have that ability/don't want to do that, use the DNS 301 and point it all to siteb.com. I would also first verify both websites in GWT and tell Google the website is moving locations.

Shot in the dark but maybe a sitewide link was removed? e.g. you posted a comment on a blog, it appeared in the sidebar under "recent comments", moz picked them up, your comment is no longer recent, lose all the sitewide backlinks, see that drop.

If you've exported your backlinks previously when you had a lot, compare the current links to the old list and see where they differ.

Looked over it briefly, looks fine. Point more internal links to that page though.. currently only have them from all "fundraising supplies" categories/products. Add to blog, link from text in other categories, special offers, etc.

Long as the site loads fine in all browsers (and loads fine for googlebot - check GWT fetch & render) then it shouldn't really affect SEO.

Its just good practice to use divs and stylesheets over tables. Tables have their uses but for an entire site layout, there are better solutions.

I would not noindex the quizzes, especially if they are getting links and shares. If you add a paragraph or two about what the quiz is and how to interpret results (or average results, other info about the quiz), that should be enough content for search engines to determine the page relevance (in combination with the links/shares it's getting).

Another way to add more content is to encourage users to share/comment on their results.

Advantage to doing it via HTML: picked up by all search engines, not just Google.

Don't think there is an advantage over doing it through GWT.. except that it might be easier to use for the less technically inclined.

So....

1. If the dev site has not been indexed yet, you can block crawlers via robots.txt
2. If the dev site is already indexed and you want it removed, add meta NOINDEX tag to all pages allow the site to be crawled via robots.txt (reason: you want google to crawl and noticed the noindex tag on the pages so that they remove it from search results. if the site is indexed and you block crawler via robots.txt, google will keep the pages indexed but won't crawl them again). Once deindexed, you can block via robots.txt again

As long as its blocked (and you build that into your process), having the dev site on the same domain shouldn't be an issue. We have our own dev domain + server that autoblocks all pages from being indexed.

Once you have all the 301 redirects set up, create a sitemap with all of the old urls and submit that. Google will crawl them and see that they are now 301 redirects and process the data faster. then delete the sitemap.

You should also have a canonical tag on the article pages with the new/current link that should be indexed.

"knowing that our inbound link rarely link to the actual articles" --> not sure I follow.

In general, your rankings should bounce back once google picks up on all of the fixes.

Index status, Pagerank, DA, Moz Trust, Social Engagement, Alexa, etc. There are tons of possible variables but the standard for a "good" site would vary by industry. Honestly, you are better off manually looking through all of the links and determining whether a site is 1) indexed in google 2) not filled with spam 3) related to your website (that goes for directories and low DA sites as well)

Rule of thumb: if you think it might be a bad link, it probably is.

Hmm, not that I'm aware of. If anything, Google used to scrape Yelp reviews. Where are you seeing that this is the case?

shouldn't hurt your rankings, only help. might see a temporary dip as google updates its index.

make sure the www. is the more authoritative version of your site by check PA/DA on opensiteexplorer

Don't think anyone would have a straight answer but my best guess is no. It would affect the value of a link if you choose to point from competitor --> main site (link is devalued) but I don't think it would affect rankings.

You need to set up rel="alternative" hreflang="x" tags to let google know that you have two sites, with very similar content, that target different countries.

1. Link to it
2. Add it to sitemap
3. Compress it and make it load faster

My guess is that the file size is too large. Why not turn it into an HTML page? Or several pages?

To go along with that, when did you set up the redirects? It can take 2-3 weeks for rankings to bounce back to where they once were.

In addition, you changed the site design/structure which could also affect rankings. Perhaps a paragraph of text used to be near the top of the page which helped you rank well but in the new design, it is positioned lower so gets less relevance score.

Or maybe the new layout has more repeating elements (dupe text) or more links per page (decreasing authority per link). There are lots of things that could potentially explain the slight decrease.

I would give it a couple weeks to see how the rankings bounce back and re-evaluate then.

You should create separate events for each event you have (even if the location is the same)

from https://schema.org/Event --> "Repeated events may be structured as separate Event objects."

So if you don't want those links crawled, add rel="nofollow" to the <a>tag. Noindexing the pages will still allow crawlers to follow the links (but won't index what they find). </a>

<a>All of the articles should have canonicals set up to index the file version of each page.

RE: using random post plugins... why random and not related posts? Related posts would have readers more like to click through to another article and improves the overall relevance of the page for SEO. I'd look into a plugin that links directly to a random or relevant post instead of going through an intermediary link.</a>

You should use the hreflang tag to tell google that each of these sites are the same pages but should be presented to users in different locations.

So you would have en-uk, en-us, en-au, etc.

If you implement those tags, you should be fine, If not, google will pick up on it as duplicate content.

Look into plugins that set up canonicals for Magento and that should fix any dupe content issue.

My guess is that it is generating session variables for all visitors from some tracking addon.

1. Yes, use 301 instead of 302. 301 would pass any authority (i.e. any backlinks) that the vanity URL gains to the actual page whereas a 302 doesn't.

2. Add a canonical URL to www.clientdomain.com/xyzpage so that search engines only index 1 version of the page

That should do it!

2-sided coin.

If you make it a single page, you will probably rank better for "This Is Our Youth" keywords overall.

However, if there is significant keyword traffic volume for "This Is Our Youth Videos" and "This Is Our Youth Cast", you might get better ranking by developing each of these pages out further (more content).

As they stand now, I recommend moving all the content onto one single page and make the tabbed navigation just scroll down to the appropriate part of the page.

My guess is the apostrophe (') in the meta description that is causing the issue. Check out your other pages that don't have the meta description indexed.