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You blog posts should be indexed and followed. It may just be the default so development pages do not get indexed by search engines.
I would recommend using no index tags on the various category, archive, and tags pages that are created when using a WP blog. These pages can lead to a lot of duplicate content problems.
Check out this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsW8E4dOtRY
Summary: If you're not trying to stuff hidden text in there then don't worry about it, it's a normal thing on today's web.
Are you properly tagging your PPC destination URLs? If these URLs are not properly tagged some of the paid traffic coming in may be attributed to organic.
The "Google US" means that they are analyzing the top results on Google to determine the keyword difficulty.
Google does not let people use their AdWords API (where Moz would pull search volume from) if they violate guidelines. One of the guidelines was that you cannot scrape search results (which Moz does to determine Google US difficulty). I believe the keyword search volume was switched to Bing data work around this issue. I do not believe there is a way to have the Google search volume display in the keyword difficulty tool.
Any one feel free to correct me if I got any of that wrong.
I've done a little SERP analysis recently to help figure out how much content I really needed to rank well. What I found was that for the queries I researched sites that were ranking in the top ten either had a low PA/DA and a ton of text (2k + words on the page) or a high PA/DA and a low amount of text (~300 words). Obviously sites that had a high PA/DA and a ton of text crushed it in the SERPs. This all goes back to classic correlation does not equal causation.
There seemed to be a point where a page with low PA/DA could still rank well if you had enough content, and vice versa. I would think if the site you are referring to has minimal text on the page its backlink metrics are pushing it to the top of the SERPs. Also, good UX will improve time on site which may help it surface to the top of the SERPs.
Again, correlation does not equal causation. This is just something I've seen for a sample of keywords I am targeting. I've used this to determine which landing pages on my site have low PA and have worked on adding some relevant text to those pages.
I would add some no index, no follow tags to all of those pages as well just to be safe. I've had Google index some stuff I've had blocked via my robots.txt in the past. Also, make sure if you update your sitemap that you don't accidentally include these test URLs.
I wouldn't intentionally create duplicate content. I would talk with your company and stress the importance of avoiding duplicate content creation.
As for where to host the blog. I would recommend hosting it on your site if possible. Links to the blog posts will benefit the domain it's hosted on. The only way to really benefit your site would be to link to pages on your site from within blog posts; however, that would not be as beneficial as hosting the blog on your company's site and building links directly to your company's domain.
I believe Moz had some issues with their linkscape index sometime over the past few months. The metrics for the last update were put together using a smaller sample size of links, meaning the numbers were down across the board for most sites. The problems were corrected and now the metrics are being calculated using a larger sample size of links, meaning the metrics went back up.
As part of your campaign you can't; however, if you want to run a crawl check out http://pro.moz.com/tools/crawl-test. It won't update your campaign but is a great way to get information from your site.
It's possible that Google just feels that the text you have in your H2 is a more accurate description of your page. Is your meta description too long? I know that Google occasionally ignores the Title Tag and displays the H1 or other text in the SERPs if they feel it is more relevant.
If auto-tagging wasn't turned on, were the campaign URLs manually tagged? Did they have utm parameters on them?
It is most likely a case of not having any campaign tags on the destination URLs.
I'm working on a site where dynamic URL extensions to the homepage were automatically redirecting to the regular homepage URL. Though autotagging was turned on in Adwords, the campaign tags were being lost in the redirects meaning that the paid visits were not being tracked properly in Google Analytics. They were being recorded as organic visits.
Double check that the destination URLs of the PPC campaigns are not redirecting, and that any autotagged URL will not redirect.
You have to copy and paste it, for some reason it looks like it's a relative link.
If your content is significantly different you will be fine. There are a lot of websites using the same basic Word Press themes with minimal customization so I don't see how this would be any different. Though Google is getting more advanced at determining the lay out and make up of a page, I'm not sure that theme and design elements are as distinguishable to them.
I would recommend purchasing Screaming Frog. You can crawl the site and sort the URLs by level. Remove the URLs that are too deep from the crawl and export to XML sitemap. Screaming Frog is definitely worth the price to unlock all of its features and have an unlimited crawl limit.
If you have Pro Plus or Pro Elite you can have branded reports.
You are essentially cloaking a keyword rich H1 tag. I would not do this as it is against Google Webmaster Guidelines.
Sorry for the cliche response, but I would worry more the quality content than the length of the content. Are your users going to feel fulfilled with less than 300 words? Maybe for some topics. I doubt there is a magic number to get links.
If you are churning out blog posts of an "optimal" length but they aren't engaging you probably will not see any benefit.
Long story short: Don't worry about the length. If you are writing just to write, you probably shouldn't expect much in return.
Take a look at the text-only cached version of the page. If you are unsure how to do that follow my crude instructions below.
What I do to test if Googlebot can view the content of my homepage:
Do a Google search for 'site:example.com' and find your homepage. Next to the green URL in the SERP listing for your homepage there is a green arrow. Click that and select 'cached'. Then, when viewing the cached version of the homepage, click 'Text-only version' in the bottom right corner of the grey bar that appears at the top of the browser.
If the content you are questioning shows up, there is a good chance Google has obviously been able to crawl and index it. If the content is not there, there is a good chance they can't. If the content is in a hidden div it will likely still not show up in the text-only cache.
I've been invited to the Moz Analytics Beta; however, I am not seeing any data for any of my campaigns. Do I have to do something specific to enable the beta, or does it take a while for information to appear?
I would focus on the singular version in title tags and URL, then in the copy of the page use both versions as well as synonyms.
Adding the following lines to the bottom of your robots.txt should do it:
Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap/uk/sitemap.xml
Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap/de/sitemap.xml
If you wanted to update the file names to be different it wouldn't hurt, but I don't think you would have any problems with how they are currently set up. If you have submitted them to WMT and they are being picked up ok I think you are fine.
Thanks for the response!
I do see that message, which is kind of what confused me. I saw the "We've already migrated at least one of your existing campaigns over from PRO" part and assumed I should be seeing some data. I have used up all of my campaign slots currently so I can't create a new one. I just received access to the beta yesterday so I will give it a little more time to update.
Nope, but the click thru rate of the ads will affect the page's quality score and may help with future ad performance.
I've found this as a good source in the past, not sure if you have already checked it out:
http://www.internetmarketingninjas.com/blog/search-engine-optimization/301-redirects/
It is true that you will most likely not be penalized for these pages, Google is pretty good at figuring out common canonicalization problems in my opinion and would most likely not penalize you for having duplicate content. I would encourage you to dig a little deeper and see what additional problems these pages could create though.
Consider that Google will waste valuable crawl bandwidth crawling these meaningless pages, rather than focusing on the important content you want them too. If Google is crawling them, you can most likely bet that PageRank is flowing through these pages as well, diluting the link equity of your site.
Are you using Wordpress? There are a lot of great plug ins that can help you manage these pages. You could control how Google crawls these pages with your robots.txt, by placing meta robots tags on the pages using a plug in, or by placing rel=canonical tags on the pages pointing back to the page that is the original source.
What are the domain authorities of the two sites? If that page is on a domain with higher authority, though it has fewer external and internal links, the internal links the page does have may be passing higher amounts of authority.
I guess it all depends on the relative importance of the keywords and landing pages. If the pages that were hit are important landing pages that drive conversions it should be something that is addressed. If the pages are being penalized, on-page optimization probably won't help too much; however, building quality back links could have some benefit.
It's possible that rankings have decreased on certain pages because the links that were helping the pages rank are no longer valued, rather than the pages receiving direct ranking penalties. If this is the case than building some quality links to replace the ones that are no longer valued may help the pages rank well again.
What worries me the most is when you say the company is going to switch to "white hat only for a few months" (not exactly sure how you meant it, so forgive me if I read into it wrong). Things are never going to improve if white hat tactics are only a temporary strategy. Google is only going to get better at picking up shady tactics.
I would look into installing a module called Global Redirect. It should take care of this problem for you. I used to work exclusively in Drupal and made sure this was installed on every site.
https://drupal.org/project/globalredirect
http://developerkarma.com/2008/04/22/step-step-guide-installing-drupal-module-global-redirect.html
I misunderstood you before, I thought you meant the old URLs had the anchors.
You are correct, technically the tabs are not unique pages. You would have to redirect each of the previous pages to http://www.teapigs.co.uk/tea/matcha_shop rather than to the anchored URL.
Having content under tabs may limit your ability to rank for a variety of keywords. For example, if previously there was a page ranking for "What is Matcha?", it may now be difficult to rank for this term because there is no longer a unique page dedicated to the topic. You lose the ability to have a unique URL, Title Tag, Meta Description, H1, and so on.
Are you seeing these 404s in Webmaster Tools or when crawling the site?
If WMT where does it say the 404 is linked to from? Click on the URL with the 404 error in WMT and select the "Linked from" tab.
Crawl the site with Screaming Frog and your user agent set to Googlebot. See if the same 404 errors are being picked up and if so, you can click on them and select the "In Links" tab to see what page the 404 is being picked up on.
I checked the source code of some of the pages on www.kempruge.com and didn't see any relative links which usually create problems like this. My bet is on a site scraping your site and creating 404 errors when they link back to your site.
I crawled your site and didn't see the 404 errors.
I did notice that your sitemap in your robots.txt 404's so you may want to take a look at that.
If the main category is Digital Marketing then I would have the URL be /digital-marketing/. I think its important to consider how you plan to use the category in the future and build for that so you don't have a funky structure in the future and/or have to do a bunch redirects to fix it. I understand that's not always possible and things may come up you hadn't considered.