Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Sheryl,

If those URLs are returning a 404 Error, then you don't need to delete them -- they're already gone :).

The 404 error is simply a response code which says the page could not be found. The likely reason for this is exactly what you said in your question: since you renamed your URLs, you basically deleted the old URL and replaced it with a new one.

In general, there's nothing that you NEED to do, but here are a few suggestions:

• If you link to any of those 404 URLs on your site anywhere, then be sure to change those links to point to the correct, new URLs.

• Were any of these old URLs very popular? Did they get a lot of links and a lot of traffic? Are people still trying to go to them? If so, then you can 301 redirect those URLs to point to the new, correct URLs.

I hope that this helps. If you have any other questions then just let me know.

Phil

The problem is with this line:

meta-refresh: 0;url=http://akaalpet.com/default.aspx

You're basically telling the search engines "I know you came here to check out www.akaalpet.com but I'd rather you head over to http://akaalpet.com/default.aspx"

Because of that, when someone visits www.akaalpet.com you're redirecting them to that other URL right away.

Make sense?

Personally, I would 404 these pages.

But first, I would spend a good amount of time looking for incoming links. Perhaps take a random 100 of your 1,000 pages and do a backlink check on all of them. Is nobody linking to them....and they're not generating traffic....and you don't have a new page to replace it....then just 404 them.

However, if you find out that magically these pages have lots of links, then you'll want to put on your thinking cap. Might it be worth creating a new page to point those links to? Or, are you better off just reaching out to these folks and asking them to link to a different page on your site?

Also, on a semi related note, I wouldn't 404 all 1,000 pages at the same time. Do a few hundred at a time and see if anything happens. If there's no huge rush, it's better to space it out.

I've used this same exact method and it worked great for us.

I'm seeing your images show up in my Google Image search:

http://bit.ly/PKAaaq

Looks like your images are getting indexed.

In fact, even when doing a search for "yard cleaned of wood" I see one of your images:

http://bit.ly/NsNeS0

Perhaps there's no issue after all :).

Hi Nathan,

Despite using a different plugin, I think Dan's advice still applies.

In general I suggest INDEXing the categories. Make these your keyword rich overarching categories.

For archives, I'll general NOINDEX those. They're likely not providing a lot of value to searchers, and could possibly create duplicate content.

For tag archives, I also suggest NOINDEX.

As long as you INDEX your categories, then you can kind of just follow your heart with the rest of them. Luckily, there really isn't a worst case scenario. If you're nervous, then just don't NOINDEX anything and see what happens. If you're happy with the SERPs then keep it as is.

I know it's awfully stressful to make sure you get this all correct at the start, but I promise this won't make or break your SEO. Feel free to experiment to see what works best for you.

This is definitely one of those things where you can talk to 10 different people and get 5 different opinions.

The best detailed resource that I've seen on this was written by Dan Shure. I highly recommend you check out his entire post on the subject: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success

He details step-by-step how he handles each, and gives the reasoning behind his choice.

Hey Rich,

Unfortunately, I only have one suggestion for you.

Throw your supposed 404 URLs into this tool http://www.tomanthony.co.uk/tools/bulk-http-header-compare/

This will allow you to check their response codes in real time to erase all doubt of whether they're 404ing or not.

Hi Rich,

Are you willing to post some of the URLs here so that we can take a look?

Phil

Using bitly to shorten your links works perfectly fine. In fact, that's exactly what I do :). Basically, using bitly just sets up a 301 redirect which passes most of the link juice over to your site.

For a comprehensive (and awesome) look into link shorteners, be sure to read this post from Dan Shure: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/url-shortener-owl-li-indexed-in-google

Open Site Explorer can definitely take some time to register links, so that might be your issue. I'd recommend downloading your latest links from Google Webmaster Tools to see what sort of Twitter links you have.

My hunch is that your your version of Excel has a semicolon set as the "list separator" rather than the comma. With that being the case, when you try to open the file, Excel doesn't quite know where to separate things.

To help out, I found this great guide for you that provides a few different ways for you to solve your issue.

http://www.paessler.com/knowledgebase/en/topic/2293-i-have-trouble-opening-csv-files-with-microsoft-excel-is-there-a-quick-way-to-fix-this

I'm only being so direct because you asked for a good ass kicking which makes me think you're great at receiving feedback :). Here are my unfiltered, stream-of-conscious thoughts:

• This site reeks of spam to me. I realize it's not (and it actually has good content), but my first thought was SPAM. As a user, I would've gone back to the search engines after just a few seconds.
• I think it looks like spam because the "Talk to a Local Bankruptcy Attorney" banner looks like an ad and breaks up the headline from the copy. Also, the caption has a typo (which is one of the first things I see) and the copy is riddled with links. Plus, the fact that comments aren't allowed makes me think that maybe an actual person didn't write this.
• What do you want someone to do after reading this? It's not clear to me. Even if this page perfectly answered my question, I don't think I'd click anywhere to go somewhere else on your site.
• To add legitimacy, I suggest adding a picture and bio for the author. Perhaps link to some of his other work?
• What's the point of the "Recent Questions" on the right? It seems to give no value to me as a user, and really contributes to the page looking cluttered and non-genuine.

Alright, I hope this helps!

Rearranging your keywords in the title could definitely make a difference. Here's what SEOmoz has to say about it:

SEOmoz's correlation research has shown that pages which employ the targeted keyword(s) at the front of the title tag benefit greatly in the rankings. There is a direct relationship between proximity to the front of the title element and prominence/rankings as seen by the engines, and the further back in the page title the keyword appears, the worse the correlation with high rankings.

Because of this, if you can do so naturally (aka, without it sounding funny) then it's likely worth testing putting your keywords at the front of your title tag.

This is very interesting.

This might be showing the power of their title tag and URL. They have "adoption agency" in the title tag and "adoption" in the URL. Bethany.org doesn't have either. Still a bit baffling though.

If you're up for a test, try changing your title tag to start off with "adoption agency". Of course, only do this if it's right for your business.

You can get that information from Screaming Frog (hooray for a free tool!) or from SEOmoz (if you happen to be a paid member).

Whoa, that's so cool! Does that mean I can have my automated monthly reports come as csvs?

We wrote freakishly similar responses at the exact same time. High five!

It completely depends on your site and the competition.

For example, if you're trying to complete for "super duper elephant lamp" then you can be on page 1 within a week. Frankly, you could probably have the #1 result in a week.

However, for a keyword like "lamp" you'd have a lot more trouble getting on that first page.

Basically, without looking into your specific niche, there's no way to give an educated answer.

-Phil

PS If anyone reading this happens to go into the "super duper elephant lamp" business then I expect to be paid royalties :).

As far as I know, reports are offered as PDFs and can't be exported as CSV.

However, you can export things such as "Rankings" and link metrics as CSVs.

Hi Ben,

Here are thoughts off the top of my head. Hope they help :).

• Make sure your site is still being crawled/indexed. I know it seems random, but a "noindex, nofollow" tag could have accidentally been added to your site which would cause major problems. Also, there's always the chance that a change happened to your robots.txt file and you're now blocking all engines. After checking those things, be sure to do a Google search for "site:{your website}" to make sure everything is still in the index.
• Do a TON of manual searches. Search for your popular keywords and look at what's happening. Sure, this will give you a very limited view, but often times it's all you need. Did you used to rank #1 and now you're #3? Or, did you used to rank #1 and now you're completely gone? Or, have your rankings not changed at all? Is there a new competitor in the space? A horrible review about you online? Etc. Dig into all of these things with 30 minutes of Google searches.
• Dig deep into your analytics. Is most of your drop in traffic from a few keywords? Did a few specific landing pages just stop getting traffic all of a sudden? Did everyone stop tweeting about you all of a sudden? These are just some ideas, there are a million things you could look into.
• Lastly, check out Google.com/trends. It's always a possibility that the overall search volume for your keywords has declined (but this does seem a bit unlikely).

Alright, I hope this helps Ben. If you have any questions then just let me know.

Phil

I don't think hiding the text the way you have harms their SEO value since the content is still readily available in the HTML of the page.

However, with that being said, from the perspective of a new visitor to your site, it seems a bit strange to have to click a "read more" link to read more of the welcome section. Doesn't seem very welcoming :).

1. If it were my site, then I would remove the bottom content. It's formatted in such a way that as a visitor of your site, I would never read it. It looks like legal text, or text that is just there for SEO. If it is there just for SEO, then I think you're better off targeting those keywords on different pages. For example, target "fairy costumes" on a fairy costumes page...rather than your homepage.

2. From my experience, internal anchor links don't correlate well with search rankings. For that reason, I think you should use the anchor text that is best for your user. If that also happens to help your SEO then great. If not, then I wouldn't worry about it.

3. The footer links serve no SEO value if you already link to those pages. If you link to the same page multiple times, then Google will generally just use your first anchor text.

Hi Boo,

First of all, congrats on getting that number one ranking!

Now, onto your question...

I would suggest creating another page targeted specifically to large and giant horse buggies. I'm sure that you could create a targeted and awesome page for these keywords that would really benefit folks looking for larger buggies.

My guess is that if you try to target these phrases on your homepage that you'll just be doing too much. It won't look great to users, it will be hard to send enough signals to the search engines (that's a lot of keywords to use), and that's a lot of different anchor text to get for one page.

To use a more modern example, if I had a site selling cars, then I would target the keyword "cars" with one page (I haven't actually done the research) and would target the keyword "suv" with another since folks doing those searches are looking for two very different things.

Hope this helps!

Phil

It's a little bit more tricky now, but definitely still possible. Here's how I do it:

1. Go to the bottom right of your screen and change the number of rows that Google Analytics will show. It doesn't matter what you change it to, but so we're on the same page, let's change it to 50.
2. Look in the URL for where it says "table.rowCount%3D50" and change the 50 to 50000.
3. You're done!

It will probably take a while to load, but you'll get all of your keywords in one easy to export place.

I know it seems like I'm just answering your questions with even more questions, but I promise I'll eventually be helpful :).

Do you have Google Analytics set up on your site? If so, I'd suggest digging in to find out exactly where you're losing this traffic. Did a specific keyword drop off? A certain type of keyword? A certain landing page? A certain section of your site? etc.

If you're willing to share the URL of your site then some of us here might be able to help. It's hard to analyze and offer suggestions without seeing the site since there are so many different things that it could be.

Hey Dan,

Here's the answer from Adam at SEOmoz on 3/19/2012.

"Supporting https is definitely in the plans, but it's a big project (following some other big projects) for the Linkscape team. Our current plan is to address this in during the last quarter of this year. I apologize for the wait."

3NQ66

Best of luck Gary! You're on the right track!

It all comes down to the number of links pointing to the sites, as well as the quality (and relevancy) of the sites linking to you all.

After a quick look, your site has a domain authority of 29 with link from 85 domains.

The competitors that rank ahead of you have a domain authority of at least 50 and have hundreds or thousands of sites pointing to them.

On page factors are becoming less and less important. To see a recent study, check out this article: http://www.theopenalgorithm.com/correlation-data/on-page-factors/

I suggest you create some awesome content that people will love, and then use that to do some link building. It will probably be a long process, but also a very rewarding one. All things considered, I think you should feel very good about where you rank now. Keep on keepin' on and move up those SERPs!

Thanks for providing some more detail Holly. I definitely think it's applicable to leave here and I'm happy to help.

Some people like to prevent search engines from crawling category pages out of a fear of duplicate content. For example, say you have a post that's at this URL:

site.com/blog/chocolate-milk-is-great.html

and it's also the only post in the category "milk" with this url:

site.com/blog/category/milk

then search engines see the same exact content (your blog post) on two different URLs. Since duplicate content is a big no-no, many people choose to prevent the engines from crawling category pages. Although, in my experience, it's really up to you. Do you feel like your category pages will provide value to users? Would you like them to show up in search results? If so, then make sure you let Google crawl them.

If you DON'T want category pages to be indexed by Google, then I think there's a better choice than using robots.txt. Your best bet is applying the noindex, follow tag to these pages. This tag tells the engines NOT to index this page, but to follow all of the links on it. This is better than robots.txt because robots.txt won't always prevent your site from showing up in search results (that's another long story), but the noindex tag will.

If I'm not making sense at all then please just let me know :).

Lastly, from what I can see on your site and blog, it doesn't look like the category pages for your blog are actually in your robots.txt file. Have someone do a double check.

To check this myself, I just did a google search for this URL:

http://blog.squarespace.com/blog/?category=Roadmap

And it showed up in Google right away. Looks like something isn't going according to plan. Don't worry though, that happens all of the time and it should be an easy fix.

The nofollow attribute and robots.txt file serve different purposes.

Nofollow Attribute

This attribute is used to tell search engines, "Don't follow this link", or even "Don't follow any links on this page." It doesn't prevent pages from being indexed, just prevents the search engines from following that link from that particular page.

Robots.txt

This file contains a list of pages that the search engine should not access and should not index.

To read more about robots.txt check out this page: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/01/controlling-how-search-engines-access.html

For more on Nofollow, check out this page: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=96569

Hope this helps!

More action is definitely required :).

There currently is no redirect set up. When I visit http://accuposretail.com/ I receive a status of 200. If there was a redirect then I'd be able to see either a 301 or 302 redirect.

This is definitely a BIG duplicate content issue that you'll want to jump on fast. Have them 301 redirect the old domain to the new.

Best of luck!

Unfortunately, I don't think it's as simple as qualifying folks by their years of experience. There will be some brilliant SEOs with only one year of experience, and some awful SEOs with 10 years of experience. The same goes for just about every industry.

I'd recommend having someone do this job on a contract basis. For example, have them send you a keyword research report for $500. Then, if you love the report, you might look into signing them up for an hourly contract to keep doing your SEO going forward, or set them up with a monthly retainer. This way if you find someone great you can have them do more work for you, and if you find a "stinker" then you're only out a few hundred bucks.

In my opinion, the best possible thing to do is download the data from Open Site Explorer, and then use LinkDetective.com to analyze it. All of this is completely free and breaks down the links of your competitors into different types. For example, you'll be able to see if your competitor has a ton of guest posting links, comment links, directory links, etc. Once you have this information, then you can easily copy the strategy of your competitors, or (better yet) improve upon it!

Here's a link to a video that will walk you through the entire process: Video Link

Hi Rich,

Why have two different sites with the exact same content? If I could understand a bit more about the reasoning and the specifics then I should be able to provide a half decent answer :).

Phil

Hi Nick,

Welcome to the SEOmoz community! It's great to have you :).

I'll give you the short answer, followed by a much longer (and probably more helpful) version.

Short answer: Follow your heart.

Long answer: All things being equal (which will never actually be the case) Google has no preference toward .com or .me. So, that means you ought to take some time to think about the people visiting your site, and the people linking to your site.

Which version is going to have more credibility, be easier to remember, AND be easier to link to? I'm pretty sure the answer to all three of these is the .com domain, although, like I said earlier, follow your heart.

Regardless of what you choose, I suggest securing both domains, and 301 redirecting one to the other.

Hope this helps!

Phil

Oh wow. When you said "non-existent" I didn't know you meant literally. That's crazy. Sorry I couldn't be more help.

Well, I have good news and bad news.

The bad news is that I can't be TOO much help. The good news is that you're not alone.

Just last week I wrote a post on the SEOmoz blog about this exact issue. You can check it out here.

If you can figure out exactly why it happened then definitely let me know and I'll give you a big high five.

You could also share it on Google+. I plus oned a site of mine yesterday, and today it's indexred. It doesn't have any other links pointing to it.

Although needs is definitely a strong word, I'd say that this is something that you ought to fix, especially since it will be so easy.

Based on your description of the issue, it sounds like the quick fix is to add the noindex tag to the thank you and contact page:

However, this assumes that the contact and thank you pages shouldn't show up in the SERPs. I figure that's a safe assumption because I don't know when I'd ever like to see those pages.

The risk of keeping all that duplicate content around is that one day Google might penalize you for it and reduce all of your rankings. Is this likely? Who knows. But I'd rather not take the chance.