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Looks like a pretty spammy site. Sometimes a spam site can rank for a time using black hat tactics, but is eventually discovered and taken down. Rankings also can fluctuate naturally for many reasons-- SEOs usually see a "honeymoon period" for new pages, where they rank really highly when they are first published, before dropping in rankings after Google sees how the page performs in the SERPs.
It likely means the page that the link was discovered on is now redirecting to another page. For example, a few of the links in your screenshot are from Google+, which no longer exists (all pages now redirect to a shutdown notice).
Lots of people speculate that website usability impacts search rank, but this hasn't been conclusively been proven. Improving your website experience is great for conversions and something you should definitely work to improve, but if you want to improve search ranking it's still important to focus on content & links.
Interesting. Do you know if Google Analytics is installed properly? Is the code in your header? Are there any javascript errors on your page? Do you have multiple analytics scripts installed?
May be some kind of tracking issue there.
I would go with the canonicals. If there are any links going to these duplicate pages, that will prevent any "link juice evaporation" from links which Google can see but can't crawl due to robots.txt. Best to let Google just crawl the page and see the canonical so that it understands that it is a duplicate page.
Having canonicals on all your pages is good practice anyway, as it can prevent inadvertent duplicate content from things like query parameters.
Crawl budget can be of some concern if you're talking about a massive number of pages, but start by first taking a look at Google Webmaster Tools and seeing how many of your pages are being crawled vs the total number of pages on your site. As long as this ration isn't small, you should be good. You can also get more crawl budget by building up your domain authority by building links.
Not really. Google only shows referrers as (direct) when there is no referral data present, and that's an issue with the referrer, not your tracking system. Referral data can be lost for many reasons:
You may be able to get around this to a certain extent by using URL parameters (utm_source, utm_campaign), but those would only be for links that you have some control over.
That's very frustrating! I've never had a problem with HMA specifically, but that script usually works.
You may want to try searching for things like "break out of frame proxy" or "break out of frame php" to see if anyone out there has come up with a better solution.
Interesting. Google is usually smart about not indexing proxies, but here it looks like it's doing exactly that.
You can try using Javascript to break your site out of any frames when a visiting your site. This will break the user out of the frame if they come via the proxy, and may also help prevent Google from indexing the proxy frame:
What query are you searching for? The website comes up fine for me.
Make sure you have the canonical tag in the header of all your pages. It helps Google tell what is the original source of a page:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394?hl=en
Also, check in webmaster tools to see if your site has a manual penalty, being penalized can cause other sites to show up higher than you in the SERPs for your content.
Do not nofollow your social media profiles.
Adding nofollows to links does not increase your PR, it just eliminates the link juice that would have gone to those pages. Do not nofollow your own links or links to properties you manage. Only nofollow links if they are low quality sites, you have a commercial relationships with them, or they are competitors.
Linking to your social media profiles will also get them ranking higher in the search results for your brandname, which is a good thing if you maintain good social media profiles.
I've worked with a number of ecommerce sites... my recommendation would start by fixing on-page factors first. Just basic stuff like titles, image alts, URLs, semantic markup, etc. Fix it at the template level, so it's taken care of site-wide.
Site architecture is key with a large site, so make sure that your site is laid out properly. Mostly this means making sure your categorization/organization makes sense, making sure all your content is being linked to, and eliminating duplicate content issues.
Once all the on-page stuff has been taken care, I would focus on link building. Building links to an ecommerce site is not easy, but it's doable. Start by taking a look at some of your competitors, to see where they are getting links. As an ecomm site you can also take advantage of things like giveaways and contests to attract links. Leverage your blog to get guest bloggers.
Here's a good list of link building ideas, if you need more:
It likely means the page that the link was discovered on is now redirecting to another page. For example, a few of the links in your screenshot are from Google+, which no longer exists (all pages now redirect to a shutdown notice).
You can start by trying the "site:domain.com" search. This won't show you all the pages which are indexed, but it can help you determine which ones aren't indexed.
Another thing you can do is go into Google Analytics and see which of your pages have not received any organic visits. If a page has not received any clicks at all, there's a good chance it hasn't been indexed yet (or just isn't ranking well).
Finally, you can use the "site:domain.com/page.html" command to figure out whether a specific page is not being indexed. You can also do "site:domain.com/directory" to see whether any pages within a specific directory are being indexed.
Not really. Google only shows referrers as (direct) when there is no referral data present, and that's an issue with the referrer, not your tracking system. Referral data can be lost for many reasons:
You may be able to get around this to a certain extent by using URL parameters (utm_source, utm_campaign), but those would only be for links that you have some control over.
There are a bunch of sites that offer this service such as Alexa, Compete, Google Trends, etc. but none of them are close to accurate. But they can provide very rough ballpark figures as well as relative popularity:
http://moz.com/blog/testing-accuracy-visitor-data-alexa-compete-google-trends-quantcast
Another option, which is more time consuming but potentially more accurate, is to do some research on the site, and identify their top keywords. The Google Keyword Planner can help you with this, just pop in the URL and it will show you the keywords that the site is optimized for.
Then run the keywords through a rank checker and combine that data with estimated click through rates and the search volume for the keywords to estimate how much traffic they are getting. Multiply that number by 10 to account for long tail variations, and that will give you an estimate of their total traffic. Paid tools such as Linkdex can help with this.
Hey Samantha, having text in rollovers should not be an issue unless you are deliberately being spammy or trying to trick Google about what your page is about.
Modern web design incorporates many design elements that are hidden until the user interacts with them, such as: drop down menus, sliders, contextual help, slideshows, etc. Google understands that these are legitimate ways of presenting content to users, and not a blackhat tactic to spam keywords.
There's always the chance that hiding text could inadvertently trip Google's spam filters, but many of the most popular websites incorporate these design features, and the risk should be minimal.
The meta description is the description that is usually displayed in the search results (usually, because Google can change it to whatever they want). It has absolutely zero impact on your SEO rankings. What you want to do with the meta description is make it compelling so that people will click through to your site. Approach it like you approach writing copy for an Adwords ad.
The excerpt (I'm assuming you're using Wordpress) is the snippet of text that appears on category pages and other archive pages on your site. Usually, this is just the first several lines of your post, but you can customize this to be a short summary of the content of the post. The summary approach is better from an SEO perspective since it is unique content, and may be a better experience for your users as well. However, writing a custom excerpt for each and every post can take time & resources, so you'll have to decide for yourself whether it's worth the effort.
The title attribute does not have any SEO value for links (or images, for that matter). Links can influence click behavior for users, which may indirectly affect SEO, but it has no direct impact on rankings.
I would say in general links from within a post/article carry more weight than sidebar links. Sidebar links have been devalued quite a bit by Google, and with Penguin you could even potentially be penalized for a sidebar link on a site with thousands of pages. With that being said, I would not turn down a sidebar link from a high authority site if offered one.
PR can be deceptive because it hasn't been updated in nearly a year. So a site can still be high quality even if the toolbar PR shows a 0. It's always nice to get links from sites that are already ranking for your keyword, but make sure to do a thorough backlink analysis first to make sure they aren't spamming their way to the top. If the #1 result is using black hat tactics, it could take your site down with them when they inevitably get penalized down the line.