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Thanks Doug for your response. It really cleared up the questions I had about that date Google shows next to the search results.

I was not able to find official details about it, all I was able to find was different referencing as the indexing date of a page.

But I knoew here in the MOZ community there are people who really know things, that's why I asked.

So that date is just Google's estimation of the publishing date, not the date Google indexed the content!

Thanks again for taking the time to answer me!

Thank you for your response Devanur Rafi, but the "good" site doesn't have problems getting indexed. 
Actually all posts on the "good" site are indexed the very same day they are published.

My question was more about the indexing date shown in Google search results

How come, for a post from the "bad" site, Google is displaying an indexing date previous to the actual date the post was published on that site?!

And how come this date is exactly the same as the date Google says it indexed the post from the "good" site?

I am consulting someone for a problem related to copied content. Both sites in question are WordPress (self hosted) sites. The "good" site publishes a post. The "bad" site copies the post (without even removing all internal links to the "good" site) a few days after.

On both websites it is obvious the publishing date of the posts, and it is clear that the "bad" site publishes the posts days later. The content thief doesn't even bother to fake the publishing date.

The owner of the "good" site wants to have all the proofs needed before acting against the content thief. So I suggested him to also check in Google the dates the various pages were indexed using Search Tools -> Custom Range in order to have the indexing date displayed next to the search results.

For all of the copied pages the indexing dates also prove the "bad" site published the content days after the "good" site, but there are 2 exceptions for the very 2 first posts copied.

First post:
On the "good" website it was published on 30 January 2013
On the "bad" website it was published on 26 February 2013
In Google search both show up indexed on 30 January 2013!

Second post:
On the "good" website it was published on 20 March 2013
On the "bad" website it was published on 10 May 2013
In Google search both show up indexed on 20 March 2013!

Is it possible to be an error in the date shown in Google search results?

I also asked for help on Google Webmaster forums but there the discussion shifted to "who copied the content" and "file a DMCA complain". So I want to be sure my question is better understood here.
It is not about who published the content first or how to take down the copied content, I am just asking if anybody else noticed this strange thing with Google indexing dates.

How is it possible for Google search results to display an indexing date previous to the date the article copy was published and exactly the same date that the original article was published and indexed?

Your construction is not correct because the second parameter in your redirect, the url you are redirecting to, needs to be the full url, like this: http://www.yourdomain.com/public-affairs-job-archive.php

If you need to redirect any URLs matching a phrase you can use RedirectMatch -it performs a regular expression redirect.

In your case the redirect will look like this:

RedirectMatch 301 /archive_details.php?id=(.*) http://www.yourdomain.com/public-affairs-job-archive.php

In these blog posts you can link to your homepage using the anchor texts that include the targeted keywords. This is known as internal linking and is also one of the many ranking factors.

With the help of a designer. The slides in the example you pointed are images. You need someone creative with decedent skills in a graphics editing program like Photoshop and after the images are made you use any slideshow creation software to transform them into a presentation.

What do you mean by "dynamic pages"? Are these archive pages, post index pages or something similar?
I use a Yoast WordPress SEO plugin to generate sitemaps and with it I am able to include anything I want in the sitemap, including such pages.

Do you have separate pages for the services?

If you do I would optimize like this: 
abcwidgets.com/industries/durable-goods - for "durable goods" (industry name)
abcwidgets.com/industries/durable-goods/service1 - for "service1" (service)

But if you don't think optimizing for industry name is worth, then yes, I would optimize for primary service + industry name. The order depends. I decide that based on keyword research. Most of the times it is best with this exact order, "primary service industry name"

Rel canonical is used to avoid duplicate content issues, on pages that display the same content under different URLs.

In your case the use of rel canonical is not appropriate.

Best practice, if you want all content to be assigned to the main URL, is to actually put all content on this page. You should get rid of these product/main-page/specs, product/main-page/resources, etc pages and post all the content on product/main-page using divs.

This is not a simple CSS editing issue. The entire documentation for Google Custom Search, including how to style the search results can be found here: https://developers.google.com/custom-search/docs/js/cselement-devguide

You are welcome!

Two websites with the same content is not web spam... I don't think this approach will work.
Maybe the content is not really the same - what we see as "the content" may not be the same for Google. Maybe the older website ranks because it has authority and the newer one, even if it has the same products and descriptions maybe it has a lot of client reviews that makes Google not consider it duplicate since the reviews add value and original content...

Since on both these pages the canonical URL is set to http://www.laddersfree.co.uk/ chances are that the pages are not seen as duplicate content. But the rel="canonical" is just a suggestion not a directive for bots, so there is a chance they may ignore it.  To play safe, since this is a matter you can easily solve, you shouldn't rely only on the rel="canonical".

You don't need to 404 the .index.php page, you need to make a 301 redirect from it to http://www.laddersfree.co.uk. This way most of the link juice from .index.php will be passed to http://www.laddersfree.co.uk.

In order to do that, you can add to the .htaccess file located in the root folder of your website the following lines of code:

RewriteEngine on
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.php
RewriteRule ^(.)index.php$ http://www.laddersfree.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]

Since only your organic traffic dropped and the reported time frame corresponds to some Google algorithm updates an explanation for this may be that your website lost some rankings for keywords that were bringing you good amount of traffic.
After changes to Google algorithm settled you probably regain the rankings.
I repeat, this is my presumptions in case only your organic traffic dropped.

If all your traffic dropped it may be because you have some website downtime...

Or it may be that your traffic didn't drop, just your tracking tool had difficulties (maybe someone  in your team accidentally uninstalled tracking code from some of the pages)

Also, at the bottom of the page "Crawl Diagnosis" there is a button "Download CSV" - in that file there is the complete crawl report. Download it and use filtering in Excel or Google Docs and you will be able to identify all the issues on your website.

As I said, you can add reference to your sitemaps in the robots.txt file:

At the end of the file http://www.thesalebox.com/robots.txt add the following lines:

sitemap: http://www.thesalebox.com/AppliancesHomeEntertainment.xml
sitemap: http://www.thesalebox.com/Hardware.xml

I doubt that using different anchor texts for the same image will have a negative impact on SEO.
After all, a picture is worth 1000 words and since we can't put all 1000 in the alt attribute at the same time, we can put them in smaller groups

Not to forget, that technically even if your image source is the same, what you display can be totally different via CSS so Google can't blame you for using different anchor texts.

Here is a quote from Google's Webmasters Help:

In some cases, the image URL may not be on the same domain as your main site. This is fine, as long as both domains are verified in Webmaster Tools. If, for example, you use a content delivery network (CDN) to host your images, make sure that the hosting site is verified in Webmaster Tools OR that you submit your Sitemap using robots.txt. In addition, make sure that your robots.txt file doesn’t disallow the crawling of any content you want indexed.

Source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/178636

According to the above, now that you have also verified the subdomain where you are hosting your images you should be fine.

You don't have to submit the sitemap to the GWT account of the subdomain where you host your images, but you may add reference to your sitemaps in the robots.txt located in the root folder of your website, by adding something like this to the robots.txt file:

sitemap: http://www.thesalebox.com/AppliancesHomeEntertainment.xml
sitemap: http://www.thesalebox.com/Hardware.xml

I sometimes put noindex on category pages too, because I have the manual excerpts also present on the blog index pages (the pages that list all blog posts in chronological order).

But is really a decision I make based on the type of website. There are websites where category pages present much interest then the chronological post listing. On these I don't use noindex, but I also do something to prevent duplicate content - I add some static text to the category pages so that they don't contain only the post excerpts.

Yes, if your images are on a CDN server you must add to GWT that subdomain too  in order to be able to see if the images are indexed by Google or not.

If I understood correctly you changed all your urls from ending with .html to ending with /

Please confirm you previously had the following urls:
http://www.domain.com/somepage.html

and now you have:
http://www.domain.com/somepage.html

If the above is correct the code I use to do the redirects is:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule (.+).html$ /$1/ [L,R]

When deciding to index/noindex a page I always ask myself: "does this page contains any unique content, content that can't be found anywhere else on the website?"
For tags pages the answer is always NO. On a WordPress site Tag pages contain either automatic excerpts and this content is also available on the actual posts pages or in category pages, either manual excerpts and this content is also available in the category pages. So I decide to noindex tags.

In your case, where the tags pages bring less then 1% search traffic I would noindex them without worrying.

Hi,

I noticed your images are all hosted on a subdomain, http://pics.thesalebox.com. Did you added this subdomain to Google Webmaster Tools?

I don't see any use of Google Analytics Goals in Moz Analytics. From what I see Moz Analytics gets from the linked Google Analytics account only data about traffic from search engines.

I use WpLeadMagnet on some websites and I report: no negative effect on SEO.

To answer Matt Goulart question: the content blocker functionality is based on divs, similar to prettyPhoto, ligntbox plugins, so it doesn't have a negative effect on SEO.

If by "Site Wide Content Analysis" you are referring to internal duplicate content issues, number of words per page, page size, internal linking, broken links check then you may find this tool useful: www.siteliner.com. It was developed by the creators of copyscape.com. There is a free version that scans up to 500 pages from your website. For larger website you will have to go with a paid account.

The rel="canonical" was introduced to avoid duplicate content issues. It has nothing to do with links, internal or external.
 You use rel="canonical" to tell search engines which version of a page you prefer to be indexed.

If you prefer to tell nothing, or if there is no way a page may get indexed with a different URL then you don't need to use rel="canonical".

You are saying that your page has no external links pointing to it - but how can you control that? I may find your page, like it and link to it! This is how backlinks are supposed to work.

As you probably know each url can we written in different ways and still point to the same content. What if you prefer your page to be indexed as http://www.yourdomain.com/yourpage and I instead link to http://www.yourdomain.com/yourpage/ (note the ending /)? In these cases using rel="canonical" may help not losing any link juice.

I hope this helps.

Hi Chiaryn,

Everything is OK now, both data from Analytics and Facebook/twitters now show up.

Thank you!

That's right Dan, you will still need access to GWT.

Your unjustified enthusiasm for being included in a directory with such a poor design make me think that maybe you created this directory yourself and are just trying to promote it here... because I find it had to believe that Amazon, Google, Paypal payed money to be included there.

But I hope that is not the case and my answer to your question is: my small company chooses to list its contact details on the website and other places where it can be easily found by our clients, not by telemarketers like EGOL correctly pointed out.

If you link an Analytics Account to GWT, some data from Google Webmaster Tool will be available in Google Analytics for all users of that Google Analytics profile, but they can't access the website's Google Webmaster Tools account from Analytics.

So just some data is shared, not access to GWT.

I am getting this message: "We are collecting your traffic data now! You should see your traffic metrics here within the next 24 to 48 hours." for more then 3 days now and I'm starting to worry...

Is this showing only to me or is a delay on all MOZ accounts?

Sorry but I don't fully understand the issues you have.

Can you please give more details or give some examples?

Probably you will not like my answer and you will give me the thumb down but:

Your main concern should be your visitors. You are displaying on your website content that, as you personally say, "at times" is dangerous to your visitors. Studies show the percentage of internet users that don't have any antivirus software or use outdated/expired software is somewhere around 50-60%. You should care more about your visitors and stop putting them in danger.

I don't know what content you are iframing on your website, but you should find a more trusted source that doesn't get infected at all.

If they are WordPress experts like you say, they shouldn't stop at only installing Wordpress SEO by Yoast plugin - there are security plugins, backup plugins, analytics plugins, cache plugins, social involvement plugins that are on the "essential plugins list"  of every WordPress expert and when they care about their work they will add them without doubt.

Also, installing some premium Themes require more work then simply uploading the files to the server and hitting the "Activate" button.

WordPress install alone is a 5 sec job as we all know, but a robust installation of needed plugins and theme settings can take longer.

Even so, 40 hours looks a little too much in my opinion. You should ask for details.

The Moz data is not erroneous.
But Moz can't know if your rel canonical setting are OK or not, because these settings depend on your own website particularities.

You shouldn't ignore these notices, what you should do is check them, and when the rel canonical URL doesn't match the actual URL of the page verify that the setting is correct, that you don't want the actual URL to rank but instead you want the canonical URL to rank because the actual page is duplicate content of the canonical page.

Link building is not only about branded and generic anchor texts, of course you should try to get some links with keyword rich anchor text. There are a lot of useful resources on the MOZ blog about this, here is a recent one: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-build-links-to-your-blog-a-case-study

Also you should make sure you have good on-page optimization for each of the pages on your website, after doing good keyword research.

Play around with Open Site Explorer's Advanced Reports - you can get exactly what you want with some filters.

Hi Martijn, 
This sitemap doesn't contain images at all

I can't put the URL here in plain text, please see attached image.

sitemap-issue-moz.png

Hi Jason and thank you for your answer. 
The sitemap was just rebuilt a week ago, with the same idea in mind, maybe this will fix the problem. But it didn't...

Hi,
I have a problem with a client's website. I searched many related questions here about the same problem but couldn't figure out a solution.

Their website is in 2 languages and they submitted 2 sitemaps to Webmaster Tools. One got 100% indexed. From the second one, from over 800 URLs only 32 are indexed.

I checked the following hypothesis why the second sitemap may not get indexed:

• sitemap is wrongly formatted - False
• sitemap contains URLs that don't return 200 status - False, there are no URLs that return 404, 301 or 302 status codes
• sitemap contains URLs that are blocked by robots.txt - False
• internal duplicate content problems - False
• issues with meta canonical tags - False

For clarification, URLs from the sitemap that is not indexed completely also don't show up in Google index.

Can someone tell me what can I also check to fix this issue?

I'm not sure if this is really what you need, but you can try with siteliner.com (free service from Copyscape). Their reports show page averages - size in Kb and number of words - and also details for each of the pages checked.

Unfortunately this service is limited to 500 pages per site and I found no way to export reports.
But if no one comes up with a better suggestion maybe this can help.

As I previously said, since this content is not on your website I don't think it will cause you problems. But since I assume you are using this strategy to get backlinks, I don't think is really effective. I repeat: You may get some boost for a week or two when these links are indexed, but later, when they are flagged as coming from pages with duplicate content they will be worthless.

For websites that have their content not publicly available there is a solution from Google to index it, is called "First Click Free" and consists on providing to the visitors that arrived to your site via Google search the entire piece of content ranked in the search  results for free.

In Google Support they explain it better and in more detail, so you should read this: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=74536 and also the technical requirements.

Google shows the translate option because on your page you probably have several words that are in English.

A simple way to check if your homepage is also considered in German is to use the advanced search options in Google, select the in German language and do a site:-query for your site.

Since you are saying the internal pages of your website don't show this problem - think of this: do you have backlinks to your home from websites in English and not to your internal pages?

Irving,

I personally saw this happen on a website - it was hacked, but no malware was placed on it. So the browser message  "this website may harm your computer" was not showing up, and no massage was displayed in WMT under Malware.

These are some blackhat SEO hacks, where they alter the content of a website and place links to porn/gambling without the intention to get the website flagged for malware. The hackers just want to get good links to their shallow websites, not to knock these websites out of Google.

From what I saw Google makes efforts in identifying sneaky domain redirection techniques, so I believe when you do a legit one like you described above there are no risks.

As for domain redirects/301 redirects - these aren't different redirect types, just different way of saying it. What a consider a "domain redirect" must be a 301 redirect in order to pass link juice. If you have doubts about how these work, contact your hosting provider to make sure what they call "domain redirect" is actually a 301 http responce status code that the server sends out for that domain.