Thanks.

This is what I figured, but I realized that I've never tried it before and I wanted to be 100% sure before potentially noindex'ing my homepage

If I've got a page that is being called in an iframe, on my homepage, and I don't want that called page to be indexed.... so I put a noindex tag on the called page (but not on the homepage) what might that mean for the homepage?  Nothing?  Will Google, Bing, Yahoo, or anyone else, potentially see that as a noindex tag on my homepage?

I've never seen this before so I don't have much to say, but if I ran into this I would think to check for double implementation of the analytics code.  Give the source code a look-see and CTRL + F for the UA code.  See if it's there twice.

Yeah, I know I can do that in Google+ Local... and I know that some other websites also support this.  What I want to know is how Moz Local handles this with its '1-click' auto-syndication feature.

Just listing the address and hoping people will call 99% of the time isn't really an option.  I don't want to list the guy's home address as the business address if it's going to be public.

I'm wondering how Moz Local will handle a business that doesn't want to publicly display an address.  A handyman, landscaper, or locksmith might want to do something like this.  Is it easily handled or do you have to manually try to "work around" to hide the address on sites that let you?

Thanks!

Hey Robert!

There are a few tools you can use to get a good idea of when an external link was created.

1. opensiteexplorer.org (a Moz tool) will give you a "date discovered" date.
2. ahrefs.com will give you a "first seen" date.
3. majesticseo.com will give you a "first indexed" date.
4. Google Webmaster Tools will give you a "first discovered" date when you export "recent links."

Between those 4, you should be able to find the link you want.  Webmaster Tools is free but will be limited.  The others show you some data for free, but require a monthly subscription for all the details.

On the /media-coverage/ page, the header says "Media Coverages Archives" -- I imagine there's a way to edit this headline?  I checked archives.php with the theme but it doesn't look like it's pulling from there.  If you aren't sure, I can see if the plugin creator can help out!

I am trying to add "Media Coverage" as a custom post type, and it asks for singular and plural... well, singular is the same as plural ('Media Coverages' sounds ridiculous), but it's telling me that they MUST be different from each other.  Ever run into this problem and find a way around it?

I had a feeling that post types might be my solution... I've been putting off learning about them for too long.  Today is my day!

I'll look into that and let you know if I end up with any follow-up questions

I'm curious what some of your thoughts are on the best way to handle the separation of blog posts, from press releases stories, from media coverage.  With 1 WordPress installation, we're obviously utilizing the Posts for these types of content.

It seems obvious to put press releases into a "press release" category and media coverage into a "media coverage" category.... but then what about blog posts?  We could put blog posts into a "blog" category, but I hate that.  And what about actual blog categories?  I tried making sub-categories for the blog category which seemed like it was going to work, until the breadcrumbs looked all crazy.

• Example: Homepage > Blog > Blog > Sub-Category
• Homepage = http://www.example.com
• First 'Blog' = http://www.example.com/blog
• Second 'Blog' = http://www.example.com/category/blog
• Sub-Category = http://www.example.com/category/blog/sub-category

This just doesn't seem very clean and I feel like there has to be a better solution to this.  What about post types?  I've never really worked with them.  Is that the solution to my woes?

All suggestions are welcome!

EDIT: I should add that we would like the URL to contain /blog/ for blog posts /media-coverage/ for media coverage, and /press-releases/ for press releases.  For blog posts, we don't want the sub-category to be in the URL.

Hey Robert!

There are a few tools you can use to get a good idea of when an external link was created.

1. opensiteexplorer.org (a Moz tool) will give you a "date discovered" date.
2. ahrefs.com will give you a "first seen" date.
3. majesticseo.com will give you a "first indexed" date.
4. Google Webmaster Tools will give you a "first discovered" date when you export "recent links."

Between those 4, you should be able to find the link you want.  Webmaster Tools is free but will be limited.  The others show you some data for free, but require a monthly subscription for all the details.

I would steer clear of removing 250 blog posts from the other web properties.  They may be driving traffic to those websites.

The client is requesting 250 particular blog posts to be rewritten.  This isn't the best content strategy in the world, but that's what you're being asked to do, so the BEST way to handle it is to completely rewrite every post so they are 100% unique.

If you were to remove the blog posts from the other websites and simply post them on the new website, you're running the risk of taking traffic away from the already established websites.

"Would google pick up on the fact that these blogs are already appearing elsewhere on the web and thereby penalise the new site for posting material that is already indexed by Google?" -- Yes, you run the risk of being penalized by Panda with such a large amount of duplicate content.  Google wants to rank websites that provide value to visitors.  If a website is entirely made up of content that already exists on another website, you're providing no added value to visitors.  Again, you could remove the content from the other websites and 301 redirect to the new one.... but you're taking a lot of value away from those websites if you do that.

First thing that comes to mind is maybe the site had a lot of site-wide links before.  If it had 5,000 or 10,000 links coming from 1 single domain and that website went down, that would be a huge loss of referring pages in a short amount of time.  Maybe they were in web directories and asked to be removed?  While simultaneously attempting to build some high quality backlinks from more referring pages?

It's all speculation of course, but plausible.

Where are you seeing the trailing slash?  If I go to threewaystoharems.com in my browser, there is no trailing slash.  I do see a trailing slash if I do a Google search for "site:threewaystoharems.com" but that is normal.  Every website will show that trailing slash.

I think you might be obsessing over a non-issue  Let me know if i am misunderstanding.

Ah!  I misunderstood the bit about reverse proxying.  In that case... to be perfectly honest, I'm not sure.

When you setup a reverse proxy, what happens to the sub-domain?  Does it go away or does it still exist live?  If it remains live, you'd end up with a duplicate content issue.

EDIT >> I found this at the source you linked to (which answers my question) -->

"The next thing you can do is add a robots.txt file to the sub-domain that stops robots from indexing it. As Reverse Proxying keeps the requested URL the /blog/ URLs will use the robots.txt from the main domain rather than the sub-domain.

The final (and most extreme) thing you can do is to register Google Webmaster Tools for the sub-domain and remove it from the index. If you are doing this, you need to do it in conjunction with robots.txt."

The Google Disavow tool doesn't work like that.  It won't actually remove links from any pages.  It is basically just a signal to Google that you want those links to be nofollowed.  Ahrefs would have no clue if something has been disavowed or not.

Canonical will pass link juice almost exactly like 301s will, so there's no harm in going that route.  Matt Cutts explains that in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zW5UL3lzBOA

You sound like you're good to go.  You've got duplicate content worked out, and you've got a plan to retain link juice (canonical).

If you don't make them VERY unique from the originals, the new site won't perform very well.  If the new site consists of nothing but 250 blog posts that were already discovered on other websites, you won't get good results.  Simply keyword optimizing the posts won't be enough.  They should be entirely re-written to avoid potential problems with Panda.

I'm not sure what you mean by this -- Would the articles need to be completely taken by all current publishers?

I wouldn't recommend hiding the date because you don't want users to know that the content is old.  What about when you publish something fresh and someone lands on the page but they can't find a date?  They won't know how up to date that information is.  I think a lot of people look for dates on blog posts, and rightfully so.  They want to see that they're getting good information.  You're right, if something is 2+ years old they might look for something more up to date.  But you can update old blog posts and re-date them.  Add something new to it, make some changes, and update the date.

Imagine an SEO strategy blog that didn't date the posts.  You would be doing your visitors a complete disservice by hiding the date.  You might have a post all about article directory submissions and they won't see that it's from 2008.  That's not enhancing user experience, and people won't be happy with you.

Old content won't always be a bad thing.  Read #4, "Burstiness," on this blog post: http://www.seobythesea.com/2014/03/incomplete-google-ranking-signals-1/

It's really interesting and a great read about how older content will sometimes receive the boost in rankings over fresh content.

EDIT: I'd like to add that it's completely okay to hide the date in some circumstances.  You might have some sort of evergreen content that truly will stand the test of time and info may not ever, or rarely, change on the topic.  For instance, if you were writing a blog post about how to improve your basketball shot.  Who cares if the post is from 2006?  In that case, hiding the date isn't going to reduce the overall user experience.

Here's the Google documentation on multilingual and multi-regional websites: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en

You will also want to read up on hreflang here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

I would personally go with example.com/mx