Welcome to the Q&A Forum

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

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

Hi Edward,

I currently have the same situation where "half" of our site is html 5 and the other is still using div's and such. The html 5 tag's have been slowly being added to the site for about 3 months now and we have seen no negative impact because each version of the code is still considered valid. The only thing you may want to look out for is making sure that your site renders properly in older browsers.

-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 Kyle,

The menu is straight HTML atm, so that is causing a problem with the links per page. 300-500 links on most pages. I am working on getting this recoded to work as an AJAX call to only load the parts of the menu the user wants to see.

Thanks for your help!

Hi James, No there are all do-follow tags. The pages themselves have several hundred links as well.

Yeah external links aren't the problem there is over 1 million external links pointing to the domain level.

The home page PageRank is 5 but every single internal page is PR 0.

Things I know I need to address each page has 300 links (Menu problem).

Each article has 2-3 duplicates caused from the CMS working on this now.

Has anyone else had this problem before? What things should I look out for to fix this issue. All internal linking is follow there is no page rank sculpting happening on the pages.