Welcome to the Q&A Forum

What your saying is true, but I have never heard of anyone getting hacked (bar brute forcing password or poor passwords), if they keep upto date with the security fixes.

Some hosts eg dreamhost will auto update installs for you , so you don't have to worry about  updating.

I had a similar issue (not Magento), turns out it was in the sitemap that was submitted to WMTs, did you check there?

check the url in the open site explore too, it might tell you if any urls are linking to it

You would/ should use 301 to fix a 404 error, and direct to the correct content.  404 pages are for when their is no correct content (mistyped url), but ultimately you never want a link to a 404 on your site

its call 404 ERROR for a reason

Yeah standard, "its not our problem" response.

As I said before, if the joomla site shared something like mysql database access then it was most likely not the hosts fault.

I have seen hosts blame opensource cms when actually they were just trying to hide their issues.  Its going to be impossible to know until someone looks properly into it (which hosts will not do, which is fair enough).

1: not sure, but it opens ok.   but if you submit to WMTs it would warn you if there is a problem

2: to my knowledge, its ok to have more than 1 sitemap (seen a few places have 2 with no issue)

http://www.dotnetblogengine.net/page/feature-table.aspx

Google sitemap Yes

so it already generates a sitemap, you just have to find the link

a bit of googling says ther url is www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.axd  (but that was a very old refferance might be different now)

what cms are you using?  most have sitemaps auto generated, or the there is a plugin available.

I'm not an expert (but have some experience) , but if they are truly separated, and the word press sites were up to date but were hacked too, then there is something very wrong.

If each site was on a different domain and were completely separate (separate ftp access, separate mysql database access,  no master/common username and passwords etc)  then that might point to a problem with the hosting side, but to be honest it really hard to know, with our proper investigation.

Since your not technically minded you would be better getting someone with more technical knowledge to review you current setup to see if it was the hosts failing or it was the way you have your sites set up, there is just too many unknowns to get conclusive help from a forum.

Hope that helps

When you say dedicated do you mean a "managed" dedicated server? or are you in charge of server maintenance?

As for joomla I think there are security updates for 1.5 (best check if its still supported, just make sure you have them upto date.  to late now unless you have a backup before the hack then, update straight away and change passwords (there is a  how to recover from a hack guide for this on the joomla site)

If the hacker got into you joomla site and was able to get you database passwords and if that was a master user account that also had access to the wordpress database then I could see how they could have gotten into both.  Of if the word press site is on the same domain  as the hacked joomla site, then again they could get into the wordpress site. Or if you used common usernames or passwords for the different sites.

But the most important with any opensource software is to make sure that your uptodate with security fixes, because as soon as there is a exploit found script kiddies search the web for vulnerable site and have there fun.  I'm know what "cloudlinux with cageFS" is but as your host says it would not have stopped this hack.

Simalar question here:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/competitor-scraped-ecommerce-product-overview

Short answer, e-commerce site copying products descriptions from other sites is common place, and there is little you can do about it, but I believed google will know that its your content as it will most likely be crawled on your site before your competitors have a chance to find, copy, post and then get crawled.

But you mom's blog will get crawled far less frequently than page A as it has less authority, so the chances the your mum read copied and then posted on her blog before the main site was crawled and in time for her site to get crawled would be very unlikely.  Other wise it would be very unfair that "bigger sites" get credit simply just by being bigger.  But I get your point that being found first is the only factor, but I would think it would be a big factor if not the biggest (back links to the original article would be one I would think)

Btw i'm sure you Mom is a very nice person and would never steal a story of another site for her own blog

Note: I have come to this conclusion based on observation and logic (and others posting similar theories), but I don't have any conclusive proof, I wonder if anyone has do any research into it...

At the moment the pages are too similar so are coming up as dups, (they also will most likely compete with each other in the serps too)

My advice would be either make them more different content wise,  or have one page that covers both terms (I would guess they would be long tail terms anyway, so that might be the best option)

using canonical links it telling google they are the same page content wise and which is the "master page" to show in the serps

"p/s: I have just add robots.txt to sandbox and disallow all pages."

That will do it, just have to wait till google picks up on those instructions (might take a while)

a trick to  not get personal results is to add &pws=0  to the end of the search url

eg

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=keyword&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official**&pws=0**

SEOmoz's bot does not take instruction from No-follow, it crawls your whole site, unless you use robots.txt

Also I think its bad practice to No-follow internally,  better to use no index on the page, if you don't want it in the serps.

"diluting your authority by having dofollow links"  I thought it was not possible to link sclupt in this way, I'm I missing something?

My understanding is that all no follow does is not pass authority and does not help retain authority ( basicly it just throws it out the window the authority it would have passed to that link)

The e-commerance system we have has a geo tagged hompage system so you can set up different homepages based on the user country IP.  But I want to test what the default homepage is, if the system can not get the user IP, does anyone know of a way to do this?

Also does googles bot, not give an IP for this, or is it always an American IP (even if your site is set to a different country)?

Thanks

Don't forget Moz's bot only crawls 10,000 pages, while Google can/will crawl more.

But to be sure manually check some of the dups that GWTs are flagging.

If google crawled and picked up the text on your site before your competitor  then you get the "credit" for it,  which logicly they should have since you had the text first, only problem if your competitor is a bigger site DA wise and they are crawled more often.

But e-commerce site copying text from other site has been happening for a long time, they are just not doing themselves any favours

edit: missed eyepaq post, but yeah, what he said

I don't know about yoast, but if wordpress and magento have their own site maps, they both can be added to sitemaps under webmaster tools.

You can also check the sitemap that yoast makes, to see if it has both wordpress and magento links in the xml file (pick 2 random urls and seach).

I would just make sure that the xml is being updated when you add new pages to your site.

My understanding is that google will " pick up"  the story/text from the original place when it crawls it (bigger sites get crawled more often), so it gets the credit.  In that case the only problem is when a big site copies a story from a smaller site before google has crawled it.

But your worrying that all theses back links will look spammy.  Story syndication or data scrapping is so common and been happening for so long, it would have been a big problem by now, but its not (not to my knowledge).  I think google can easily spot a syndicated or scrapped story from a legit source and knows not to mark the backlink it as spammy, but I don't think you would get much juice from the syndicated links (especially if they are junk site).

I know of sites were they do the same as you (get picked up by big news sites), and it all gravy baby

I got eight 404 errors with the Seomoz crawl, but the report does not says where the 404 page is linked from (like it does for dup content), or I'm I missing something?

Thanks

So you think these would hide these links from goggle's bot, but will be usable for the end user?

I know the "no follow" link sculpting does not work, and I'm sure google would be switched on to tricks to hide links to sculpt.  If the trick does work, its the type of thing google does not want you to do, so I wouldn't do it incase I get punished by google down the line.  (maybe I missunderstand what your trying to do).

I'm not familiar with that type of link, so I don't know if it would work on a technical level.

yes, use the robots file to deindex, once your ready to launch remove the disallow, and the next time google crawls your site you should get indexed.

you must have been linked from somewhere for google to find you, so it means google will find you quicker once you ready to launch ( you already have a backlink)

export as a csv file

"However i have double checked that where is no external link to the webmail pages from any other source"

the link might be so obscure that seomoz has not picked it up and google bot has.  Note in WMT there is "latest back links" but there is a few weeks delay on them, so the link might be recent.

I'm 99% sure there has to be a link from somewhere, or there is no way google can find that page.

I have added the No-index as well in  my robot.txt file on my site but yet no change.

It will not take effect until the next time google crawls your site, I think it took a week or so before my test site was removed (i did no robot.txt file too)

you have no results at all?  as perfect007 said its updated once a week, so it normally says "in progress"

But if you still get no results by tomorrow, then report to the seomoz staff,  along time ago I had a crawl problem where it was only crawling about 500 pages of my site, when we had 10,000+ pages.   There was a technical problem with the crawl with my site which they fixed very quickly

there must be a link from somewhere for google to pick it up,  I had a test site on a sub domain that got picked up to my surprise. The reason, the site had pinterest button on the product pages, and the developer had tested it to see if it worked, and later removed it, but someone (or something) repinned it and then a backlink to my test site was born

Point is there are millions of ways to get a back-link accidentally .

Best way not to list is either added it to you robots.txt file or add No-index to the webmail page

Yeah I did that after posting the question I started test like that, but its not coming up and searching the url does not show the page, but other normal pages ("lower" pages) are showing (that don't have this problem), so it seems that it is de-indexed those pages.

its weird that webmaster tools say ""We didn't detect any issues with non-indexable content on your site.", when there are.

Getting this sorted one way or another is my top priority

I don't think its much of a penalty if you in 2nd place!  If your were being penalised it would be alot worse than that (think 20- 50 places).

I would think google would be just not give any credit for the dodgy link, so removing it would make no difference

that's my understanding of it anyway

When you  say "set my preferred domain to www" do you mean via webmaster tools?  if so google does not have control over your site, so of course there will be no forced redirect.

www.yourdomain.com is different from yourdomain.com, so you can pr can be split (if your backlinks are a mix of both).

should you do a force redirect for www, via htaccess?  yes, why? its good practice and easy to do.  also it will fix it for bing and other search engines

without knowing more about your situation, short answer is yes

background info: we have an established  closed  E-commerce system which the company has been using for years.  I have only just started and reviewing the system, I don't have direct access to the code, but can request changes, but it could take months before the changes are in effect (or done at all), and we won't can't change to a new E-commerce system for the short to mid term.

While reviewing the site (with help of seomoz crawl diagnostics) I noticed that some of the existing "landing pages" have in the code:

<meta name="<a class="attribute-value">robots</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">INDEX,FOLLOW</a>" />
then a few lines later 

<meta name="<a class="attribute-value">robots</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW</a>" />

Which the crawl diagnostics flagged up, but in the webmaster tools says
"We didn't detect any issues with non-indexable content on your site."

so the question is which instructions does google follow? the first or 2nd?

note: clearly this is need fixed, but I have a big list of changes for the system so I need to know how important this is

tthanks

i was just thinking, you might be able to put a robots file in the subfolder telling seomoz bot not to crawl that folder, not sure if that's possible.  But make sure you only target seomozs bot only (don't want to tell google not to crawl it).

but that would stop the subfolder being crawled completely, which I don't think you want

google has to see the backlink first, so you can check if the page that the backlink is on has been crawled yet by checking if it has been cached by google or has been cached since the link has been added.

I'm guessing you mean the seomoz, bot crawling your site?  If so why do you want to crawl them separately, because google won't, they are on the same domain.

to answer your question, I don't think it can be done

so in short seo wise not worth it, only worth it if there is real traffic.

its had no traffic in 4 years, so not worth it

thanks

I would do it, but other might think its a bad idea

I  was reviewing the 404 report in webmaster tools, when I found a 404 back link from a 10 year old forum topic on a very high DA site.  It seems the poster did a direct hotlink to a pdf that was on our site a very long time ago, but is now gone so you get a standard "can not be found" page on our site.

Is it now worth redirecting the url to an appropriate landing page, considering the age of the post/ link and the sites DA, or is it not worth it because of the age of the link, its a forum, and we are still getting some juice  from it anyway despite it being a 404, and won't get much more out of it.

Just want to know it good practice if I find many such links (very old links to now 404 pages)

Thanks

"Nofollows cannot be used for link sculpting anymore, and just result in link juice evaporation."

This was what I thought too, just wanted to confirm, thanks

Then as Tom said, this would help you branding with google and also helps make you backlink profile look more natural, as you would expect big brands to get mentions a lot more than links.  I think you will get a hidden boost from this, but I understand nothing beats the instant gratification of a back link

Did they mention you companies name or website , just didn't link to it or did not reference you at all?

I'm not sure, but if your website name (not link, or anything, just the brand) is written on a high profile site you will get a something (little) from it as in google seeing/knowing your brand name, but I could be wrong about that.

edit: Tom beat me to the post

"Do we believe today that nofollows really drain SEO equity from a website?"

I think so, but I don't think its 100% drop from a no follow (not that anyone said it was)

About a year or 2  ago (on a different site), they had a mega menu which had no-follow on less import categories (trying to link sculpt), This was changed so that they no followed links were just removed completely, and I believe this did have an effect on ranking on the pages that were not cut.

But I agree sometimes its necessary (easier?) to no-follow some links, and if its only a few there is very little damage, but I'm talking about every product page so collectively, possibl,y a lot of juice lost.  I can't think of a good reason to do that, unless it was a lazy way to eliminate dup content or the product pages competing with the category pages as landing pages.

I started a new job running  a companies E-commerce site.  I have been going thought the site, backlinks etc to see what the current status is.

I have noticed that they have "no followed some categorises on the (huge) mega  menu, but also they have no followed every product form categories.

Now personally I would have no follows on the login/register/checkout page, and maybe some external links, but my understanding  has always been  that by using no follow on internal links you just throwing away google juice.

I'm thinking was someone at some stage trying to do some misguided link sculpting with no follow, or I'm I missing something

Note:  the company does not have brands per say for the product pages and so are not landing pages (the categories are landing pages)

just want to check, does it says that "caribbean-peach" is dupped with "lipstick-plum-red" pages?

if so that's because they are very similar which can trigger a dup warning. Canonical can not fit that as they are different pages.

maybe a cropped screen shot would make it clearer