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My first thoughts are, I would not suggest posting to a.blogspot.com or .wordpress. You want any links that your content builds to be directed to your website, so it's important that you put your best content on your website and not on something else.
The sites you are checking may not be in the index for OSE, Majestic, or Ahrefs. These tools don't have the resources to crawl every site and page on the internet, but they are growing all the time. Don't let it not showing in OSE stop you from going after a good link.
I would map the analytics data to the major algorithm changes and look for spikes, check out http://panguintool.barracuda-digital.co.uk/ If it's a manual penalty you will see it in webmaster tools, but for algorithmic you kind of have to guess if you are hit or what not and to what degree you were penalized.
You site doesn't really follow on-site best practices. For instance, you have a large amount of links on each page, few images are using alt text, the titles look keyword stuffed and most are far longer than they should be (some are 6x longer than they should be,) your sorting system is causing duplicate content issues which looks like the solution for was to noindex and canonical the pages, which should never both be done. I'm also not seeing any real product descriptions other than what are likely manufacturer specs.
I would stop worrying so much about your competitor and get your own site in order.
Pedram,
No worries. By packaging, the process in which we are sending content out their to get viewed.
For example: A picture can be optimized for a variety of social networks including Flickr, Google+, Facebook, and Twitter, which is great, but you need to plan how you are going to send it out there for people to see. Is it going to be an album as part of an event or is it just going to be a simple picture upload, because it's something funny that your audience will enjoy. Twitter you can't create albums, so simply taking pictures "live" during an event is great but then you can upload a 100 photos later on to Facebook/G+ as part of an album. You can even on Facebook create that album as part of a historical event and add it to your timeline.
The overall point is that each social network is different so just because you have one piece of content, doesn't mean that you can't use it in different ways.
I hope that explanation helps out.
Cheers,
Richard.
While you're link building, I would also check out your local directories and make sure that your address/link/phone number is updated on all of them. You can check out GetListed.org... an SEOMoz bought company to see if your information is accurate everywhere.
I would start by cleaning up the on page. There is a lot wrong from ridiculously long title tags, no H1 tag, and missing alt and title tags on the images. A lot of the subheadings you use could be h2s as well. Also, don't forget to use internal links in the blogs back to other pages.
I would also make sure the articles you are writing align in content with what people are searching for.
Use the subfolder. The problem with subdomains is that they can be treated as a separate website and if that happens then the strength/signals do not pass to the rest of the website.
Best for SEO is with a subdirectory. Subdomains can be treated as separate websites.
Yes, it overwrites. Always download the old list and make changes before uploading again.
You're pretty much doing what you can. Continue to disavow and continue to build high quality links. The stronger your link profile, the less likely you are to receive a penalty.
You might try pinging the site out or just building a link to the site.
Read everything, believe half of it, test everything twice whether you believe it or not.
It sounds like you are looking for a link manipulation guide. Don't buy social media links on fiverr. You also should not worry about link velocity if the links are natural.
More information on the business would help, but in general go ahead and claim profiles on social media and web 2.0 sites as this will help establish your brand. If you have a physical address, make sure you get your Google+ business profile and submit to the major data aggregators and other NAP sites. Look at the backlink profiles of your competitors or do a bit of searching to find sites in your niche where you can acquire links. Submit a press release about the launch, maybe do a few interviews if the site is something people would be interested in.
John Mueller actually very recently addressed this as well on the blog: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2015/07/googles-handling-of-new-top-level.html
Basically, all TLDs are treated the same.
Google came out earlier this year and said that they would change some meta titles and improve them as they see fit.
This post from Yoast.com, might help you out: http://yoast.com/google-page-title/
Did a search for site:thinkstrategy.com prescription, check out the meta descriptions. Look at the cached version of the page, links and everything are there. Looks like whatever is infecting you is showing users one thing and crawlers another.
Just a few ideas:
I hope that helps!
Pedram,
We've never heard of someone getting caned for duplicate content, for sharing things on multiple social networks. If you do have one piece of content, that you are sharing to multiple networks what you are going to want to do is repackage that content. You can deliver content in different ways in social networks so play around with that.
As per your "followed" vs. "no-followed", the majority of social networks these days are "no-followed", I would suggest starting with where the audience of your niche is. Find out the demographics of your product and then find what social networks they use.
Hope that helps!
Took a quick look and the first thought is that you have no unique content on the pages, so they are likely being hidden by Google because they are duplicate content. This causes your main page to show instead, and not rank as well as the artist page, which is more targeted to the search term.
I know that a lot of these links are no-followed, however one thing that we always stress with all of our clients if they are going to be on any network from Manta to Facebook, is that they have a clean and accurate profile and actively update them at least once a week. This show's not just Manta that we're using it for value but it shows users that we're actually on the social network and not just a spammer trying to get links.
Remember the one core thing to Google is they like fresh content and they like content that is not spammy, so the goal should always be to look as if "human" as possible. We believe that social profiles that are updated regularly do factor into the algorithm and increase the positioning of that social account, thus giving more value to it's links. Again, no scientific research has been done...but it's a general belief that we have.
As long as the search engine can read all the text, I see no issues. Modern designers put text in multiple tabs or partially hidden until expanded all the time these to create a better user experience. It is generally only hidden from the user using css and is fully visible in the code.
It's right in your code, it does exist.
rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Transport Jobs » Submit Comments Feed" href="http://jobs-transport.co.uk/submit/feed/" />
You may have comments hidden/disabled for the page but the feed for the comments is still there.
Jess,
There's a lot that you can do. Please review this post from David Mihm(the local search God): http://moz.com/blog/local-search-ranking-factors-2013
Some suggestions right off the bat.
I hope that helps.
darodar.com is a typical spam referral that shows up in most accounts. Other common ones are 7makemoneyonline, semalt, and buttons-for-websites. There are a few options for filtering them that we wrote about here: http://www.theedesign.com/blog/2015/blocking-spam-referral-traffic-google-analytics
The best option is typically Filters in Google Analytics, but we've run into accounts that don't have proper permissions to use the filters.
For the contact form, you should look into a honeypot field instead of captcha. Captcha can be easily broken by most bots and lowers the conversion rates of users. A honeypot field is a field that is hidden from users with css, but bots will see the field and fill it out. When they do, the form will not be submitted to you.
While Moz has many great tools with lots of features and benefits, I am not aware of anything from them to check for external duplicate content. You may try http://www.copyscape.com/ or copy and pasting sections of text within quotes to search Google for duplicates, or this tool can help as well http://smallseotools.com/plagiarism-checker/
Do you have any examples of this Andy? I was under the impression that backlinks are exactly what gave you pagerank. I would assume those with higher PR you saw just had links that whatever indexing agent like OSE did not see, but Google did, and the ones with loads of backlinks were simply low quality or there were lots of links on the particular page.
Chain redirects just mean that a page redirects once, and then redirects again to something else.
An example might be a site that was originally in html, then php, and now has no file extension.
If the redirects were left in order each time a site was upgraded, you might go from page.html to page.php to page.
The easiest way to clean them up is to make sure all redirects go to the current version of the page.
The title tag is the meta tag that appears on the tab in a browser. http://moz.com/learn/seo/title-tag
You are confusing this with the url. http://moz.com/learn/seo/url
Moz has their own crawler and their own index. Roger (the name of the crawler) can't feasibly crawl the entire web at the scale that Google can. It's nothing to worry about, likely Google sees the links and Roger will eventually.
If you want to see if the link is indexed, just search it in Google. You can also see incoming links in Google Webmaster Tools. If it's in there, Google sees it.
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/76329?hl=en
Use dashes. Underscores don't specify any specific function whereas dashes are specifically word separators.
It would help if you post a link to the page Google sees. You can do a search on Google with the site: operator to find out of the link is indexed. Basically, you need to figure out if the link exists and then figure out what is causing it.
AirnWater,
I doubt you will be penalized. You have to remember that the majority of Facebook is still closed off to Google and it's Spiders, so how would it be able to penalize your fanpage? Facebook is still far away from ever letting Google completely crawl it, so it won't be able to see your individual posts.
To answer your other question about the contest overall, I would ask what is your mission statement for the contest and what are you doing? If a client simply asked you to gain fans to their Facebook page, I see no problem in doing this, but if you're trying to drive sales this is completely different. I will like a Soap page for free soap, but that doesn't mean that their content will be attractive to me. I simply wanted the free soap. You have me for free soap and not for the engagement, you have to be careful here now because fans might expect free things from you all the time.
If you still want to continue a contest to increase your fan count though, I don't see why you couldn't hold one every two months. That's enough time to increase your fan count, while not being a complete saleout.
To get engagement, your money might be better suited elsewhere, in this case(maybe PPC). I would also work on more fill in the blank posts on Facebook or like posts, to increase edgerank.
Could be that you used the same or mostly similar content on the city pages so Google isn't showing them. It also could be that your main product page is the one where all the links are pointing and none on the city pages, and probably in the menu or even the footer of this product page you have the city name pages linked as well and Google is simply weighting all the factors and determining the stronger page that may only show the city name once is more relevant than the city page which would be better optimized.
As Miriam said, check if people search for the county. In the particular area where TheeDesign is located (Raleigh, NC) we are referred to as the Triangle (Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill) but almost no one searches this way. The county is Wake County, but few people search by the county name either (more in some industries than others,) and typically the city is the highest search terms. So you have to debate whether the extra effort and planning is worth the extra visitors or not.
Ask yourself, who is your audience? Are they on G+? If so writing stuff on G+ might be a good idea, however if your audience is not there I would suggest leaving it on your blog.
In general as well, I agree with EGOL by leaving it on your own website you are leaving the opportunity for the post to be shared not just on G+, but on FB, Twitter, and now even Pinterest. Only on very special circumstances, would I suggest writing a full-length post on G+.
I agree with everyone else, that wordpress has a great CMS(content management system) and is fairly easy to operate for people who want a website but are afraid of it being too technical.
Benefits of wordpress include:
Even Moz's grader doesn't take all factors into account, but the biggest issue you are likely missing are links, could be external or internal or both. Make sure you have a few different keyword variations linking to the page, check the backlink profiles of a few of the top pages to make sure but I bet they have some anchor text links coming in that you are likely missing, giving them more relevance in the eyes of google.
301 redirects are called permanent, but that's not really the case. They are permanent only as long as they are in place. If you want to see this, do everything as Andy said and then remove the redirect. You'll notice your traffic drop and when you put the redirects back the traffic will recover. Go ahead and do this every year and you'll see that each time it drops. We've dealt with drops that happened from domains that haven't been active in over 5 years, so as EGOL alluded to, keep them forever.
Why not both? Some cases one method is preferred over another, or in fact necessary. As with non html documents such as pdf, you may have to use the robots.txt to keep it from being indexed or header tags as well. I'll also give you another option, and that is to password protect a directory.
I would use one website, because it would be easier to market one website instead of 50 websites. Could you imagine managing 50 FB pages and having all of them be original content? I don't think sooo...
Having one website means that you can direct all of your efforts to it instead of spreading yourself too thin.
Quick fix = do the redirects.
Best practice = do the redirects and try to get the inbound links changed as well.
It is best if you can get the links changed, but always be sure to do redirects as well as there may be other links that you are not aware of.