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Hi Andy,
First of all Google would still find the pages since your site most likely links to them? ( And if not how would users find these otherwise? )
After looking at your example page what if you made a unique description for each artist / performer and then have a list of events that is always changing under them that way you have some type of unique content that would be helpful.
-Brent
You can use SEMRush there data updates once a month so currently it's 2 weeks old. It also shows the previous months rank in ( )'s next to the "current" rank.
I'd suggest getting the Yoast SEO plugin and going to settings -> indextation -> and setting they tags to noindex.
Other then that I wouldn't worry about the 404 errors if the pages were of no value anyways. Also doing a mass 301 of these pages may be even worse then 404 errors in the long run.
This may be obvious but you haven't mentioned it. Did you try to claim the listings? Or are they already verified and claimed by somebody else?
Judging from the various things mentioned in your question the "company" you hired is nothing more then a spammer. If their entire "SEO campaign" is to deliver xx directory links a month then fire them right now.
On the other hand if they're submitting your sites to highly relevant directories that would make sense to a user looking for your company PLUS doing other forms of link building then yes keep them (this doesn't sound like the case)
To answer your page authority question - the page authority is showing up as "1" because OpenSiteExplorer needs time to find these need links and evaluate them accordingly you should see their true page authority by the end of the month.
-Brent
Hi Jason,
Yes i'd swap back to the .com, also try and keep the link structure the same as your old site or you will lose all your current search engine traffic.
-Brent
Interesting, not sure. Did you ever check out the theme?
-Brent
Your best bet if possible would be to put the blog as part of your clients site. This will allow all the backlinks acquired from their awesome content to help the authority of their overall site.
As far as any strategie for blogger in general there isn't really anything special that needs to be done that you wouldn't do on Wordpress.
Hi Jason,
What was your reasoning for swapping to .net? It sounds like you need to keep your aged domain and 301 all your newly purchased domains over to it.
-Brent
Hey Kyle,
I see you set the question as answered. What did it end up being?
-Brent
Judging from the various things mentioned in your question the "company" you hired is nothing more then a spammer. If their entire "SEO campaign" is to deliver xx directory links a month then fire them right now.
On the other hand if they're submitting your sites to highly relevant directories that would make sense to a user looking for your company PLUS doing other forms of link building then yes keep them (this doesn't sound like the case)
To answer your page authority question - the page authority is showing up as "1" because OpenSiteExplorer needs time to find these need links and evaluate them accordingly you should see their true page authority by the end of the month.
-Brent
One of the things mentioned at SMX this week was the new "alternate" "hreflang" tag.
Put this tag at the top of your US site:
rel=”alternate” hreflang=”en-GB” href=”http://www.example.co.uk/” />
rel=”alternate” hreflang=”en-US” href=”http://www.example.com/” />
This will tell the engines that yes you have two "duplicate pages" but this is the correct language for each.
More on alt hreflang here: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077
I would imaging that Google will rely on profile authority (how many people "like", "tweet" and "plus one") things they share. The new Page Rank of social profiles almost. Then will come the paid mentions (just like paid links) and all that garbage.
Hi Jason,
What was your reasoning for swapping to .net? It sounds like you need to keep your aged domain and 301 all your newly purchased domains over to it.
-Brent
Hi Kyle,
Did they build the Wordpress template themselves? The pingback is a little suspicious, download the plugin called TAC and see if it brings up any hidden code. I had a similar problem where I was working on a site that was using a free theme and had a 302 in the header which made the site struggle in rankings. As soon as I figured out that it was in fact the free theme causing the issue I got it removed and traffic 10x'ed (not much as they were getting like 5 visitors a day) in roughly a week.
It's hard to help without seeing the site but let me know what TAC reports and if it's clean we'll dig deeper.
-Brent
Your best bet if possible would be to put the blog as part of your clients site. This will allow all the backlinks acquired from their awesome content to help the authority of their overall site.
As far as any strategie for blogger in general there isn't really anything special that needs to be done that you wouldn't do on Wordpress.
Hi Jason,
Yes i'd swap back to the .com, also try and keep the link structure the same as your old site or you will lose all your current search engine traffic.
-Brent