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Will do. Thank you very much, Sam!

Hi there,

Our website is www.mormonhub.com. We have many other websites that we own as well. For some reason, our website has tens of thousands of Site Crawl Issues. We have tried looking into what's causing the problem, but can't figure it out. We do use Wordpress for our website. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

wFL8I

Thank you much. Reading your answer is giving me kind of a "duh" moment. I think if I were looking at this situation from the outside it would be a different story. I definitely am over thinking this. Thanks again!

Thanks for the great answers. We created the example link I gave above, along with many others that are similar, so they are not natural and they are pointing to other sites also owned by us.

I asked this exact same question on the google product forums and got pretty different answers. This is one answer that the others were agreeing with:

" It really seems like you're over complicating things to me.

1 - if the link doesn't add any value to users, why is it on your website? 2 - nofollow links that are unnatural. Since they are sites owned by the same org, I'd nofollow. If you nofollow, then you're fine. I'd stop focusing too much on exact match/ratios and just keep it logical. Is this link natural? (if not nofollow, but that doesn't make it a BAD link) and is this useful for my visitors (if not, don't add it!). "She mentions she would nofollow the links that do have value but are owned by us.Any thoughts on this response?

Hi all, I am wondering what peoples thoughts are on using rel="nofollow" for a link on a page like this http://askgramps.org/9203/a-bushel-of-wheat-great-value-than-bushel-of-goldThe anchor text is "Brigham Young" and the page it's pointing to's title is Brigham Young and it goes into more detail on who he is. So it is exact match. And as we know if this page has too much exact match anchor text it is likely to be considered "over-optimized". I guess one of my questions is how much is too much exact match or partial match anchor text? I have heard ratios tossed around like for every 10 links; 7 of them should not be targeted at all while 3 out of the 10 would be okay. I know it's all about being natural and creating value but using exact match or partial match anchors can definitely create value as they are almost always highly relevant. One reason that prompted my question is I have heard that this is something Penguin 3.0 is really going look at.On the example URL I gave I want to keep that particular link as is because I think it does add value to the user experience but then I used rel="nofollow" so it doesn't pass PageRank. Anyone see a problem with doing this and/or have a different idea? An important detail is that both sites are owned by the same organization. Thanks

Update on this issue........

I ended up restoring a few of the links I removed but none of the truly crappy ones. It seems though I was just needing to be a little patient. This latest algo update shot be back up to 8th after I had dropped to 30th (after removing a ton of links). So it seems those links were still passing pagerank even though they were total garbage and didn't offer any value whatsoever. I think this is evidence that Google's quality standard when it comes to links definitely went up. Which I guess goes without saying but it's good to have proof. I also hadn't done anything else to the site for the last couple months other than remove those links so there shouldn't have been any other variables at play.

Thank you very much. That is just what I was looking for.

The site does have and has had ranking issues since the first Penguin and has really had problems the last few months. And other than some minor things low quality links are really the only problem with the site.

Does anyone else have insight on this?

Right so if the pages no longer exist they need to be gotten rid of right? Most of these won't be removed by the webmasters and so they'll need to be disavowed right?

These pages were UGC and are essentially spam, and entirely irrelevant to anything on the site itself. So 301 redirects would not be wise or useful I don't think.

It hasn't received a manual action no. But that doesn't mean algorthimically the site isn't being affected.

So you're saying to not worry at all about these links?

They offer nothing in terms of value. If going to live pages they would be considered very spammy and completely irrelevant. But since these pages don't even exist you're saying it's unnecessary to bother with them at all?

I'm seeing the crawlability issue in WMT itself. The strange thing is that I know some pages have been indexed, we get most of our traffic organically from Google. But WMT shows zero pages indexed, zero traffic from search etc. The site has been verified as well.

The site is in Wordpress and I've been using a plugin called all in one schema.org rich snippets and schema creator by raven tools.

• As you can see it creates quite the eye sore especially if you were to start marking up a lot of stuff. Here is an example:

http://historyofmormonism.com/2014/03/26/hawns-mill-massacre-1838-resulted-30-mormon-casualties/

• Schema creator by raven tools lets you add markup right into the body of the page like you will see about a paragraph down. I "marked up" the person Alex Baugh just for an example. You will notice the container it creates right inside the article.

• If you scroll down to the bottom you'll notice a larger summary box, this is created by the other plugin; all in one schema.org rich snippets that marks up and creates a summary of the overall webpage.

• If you look at the support forums for this plugin here: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/all-the-info-i-fill-goes-directly-into-my-post?replies=5#post-4030332

• One of the authors of the plugin mentions that this box is necessary and includes a link to Google Webmaster forums backing it up, the 4th question down here:

https://sites.google.com/site/webmasterhelpforum/en/faq-rich-snippets#display

• I also thought that maybe it was only this one plugin; all in one schema.org rich snippets but this other plugin from Raven Tools does the same thing. These two plugins are also two of the most popular schema microdata plugins on Wordpress.

• This person has a similar question about the raven tools plugin

https://github.com/raventools/schema-creator/issues/104Thanks for your replies, I really appreciate it.

I did a link analysis on this site mormonwiki.com. And many of the pages shown to be linked to were pages like these http://www.mormonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Planning_a_trip_to_Rome_By_using_Movie_theatre_-_Your_five_Fun_Shows2052752

There happens to be thousands of them and these pages actually no longer exist but the links to them obviously still do. I am planning to proceed by disavowing these links to the pages that don't exist. Does anyone see any reason to not do this, or that doing this would be unnecessary?

Another issue is that Google is not really crawling this site, in WMT they are reporting to have not crawled a single URL on the site. Does anyone think the above issue would have something to do with this? And/or would you have any insight on how to remedy it?

I have a question about the "container" that's created whenever microdata markup is applied. What is the purpose of this? I know Google says it helps them understand your content etc. but it creates a really bad eyesore wherever microdata markup is used. Basically a box with all the markup details right there in the body. Has anyone else experienced this? Is this why microdata markup has been so slow to be adopted by webmasters? I understand "hiding" the box in your CSS is not a good idea either. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks

I've done this to several of our other sites and haven't seen a ranking increase or decrease. They have all continued to have roughly the same amount of organic traffic. So I'm assuming these links were really doing nothing from an SEO standpoint and probably a ticking time bomb ready to go off when the next major algo update rolls out.

I may have just gotten a little overzealous when removing them on this particular site. It was for a pretty significant keyword so I'm tempted to maybe restore at least some of them and see what it does.

I meant links to the homepage of a site from other sites that we happen to own.

So  I removed some links to a particular homepage for one of the sites we own, this page had A LOT of links pointing to it using exact match anchors. And for the most part the links were coming from low quality pages/content. After removing a good chunk of them I noticed are rankings went down from around 8-9th two weeks ago to 21 as of today. Has anyone else had a problem like this before?

I'm thinking about restoring some of these links now to see if I can recover some of that. Any thoughts on doing this?

Thanks

Generally speaking if I am just moving a couple of articles from one site to another I need to 301 redirect those old URL's to the new ones right? And even if a webpage doesn't have any links pointing to it, it is best practice to employ 301 redirects correct? After a while, after Google etc. has crawled the new location of the content you can then delete the old URL, is that right? And if other sites are linking to the old location they should be notified of the new location but even if a page has links pointing to it, is it best practice to delete that page after Google has crawled the new and you've notified the webmaster?

I've think I've got this right, I just want some clarification on this issue. Thanks.

Thanks Paul, I'm more curious about how and why these links are created.

That feed url link is coming from my own site but I'm not sure how it was created and/or how to delete them. Any ideas?

Weird, I can't figure it out either which is why I'm here

I'm using Open Site Explorer for the backlink report.

Okay thanks, what about a feed url like this one? http://ldsimages.com/category/uncategorized/feed. Open site explorer is showing it as linking to this site; mormonbeliefs.org, with [No Anchor Text]. How is that link being generated?

Is this an RSS feed link? How was this page generated?

http://blog.moregoodfoundation.org/category/technology/feed

What causes it to show up as a backlink in open site explorer? And how would you go about removing these links? Lots of questions there

Thank you.

I am using cross domain rel=canonical to a page that is very similar to mine. I feel the page adds value to my site so I want users to go to it, but I ultimately want them to go to the page I'm canonicalizing to. So I am linking to that page as well. Anyone foresee any issues with doing this? And/or have other suggestions? Thanks.

We do have permission.

Does anyone else have anymore insight into this?

It's the full book.

Okay, makes sense, thank you. But what if it is just some other random site that has also published the books content (there are many that have published parts of this book) and none are the owner. Who do you canonicalize to, do you just pick one at random? That wouldn't seem to accomplish what Google is after by using the rel=canonical tag.

It is a book we don't own, either. Would you need to somehow find the original and rel=canonical it? Or is this just all around bad to do? Thanks.

I manage a wordpress based site that is needing to under go a site architecture overhaul. the site is christ.org and one of the problems is it has 89 pages but really only 4 are navigatable (not a word apparently).

The site also has over 400 posts so categories and parent pages are both definitely needed. One option is I convert a lot of the pages into posts, but would that happen to break any links pointing to those pages turned posts? Or another option is to keep the pages and posts and create a bunch of subpages, then I would most likely end up with similarly named categories and top level pages. I would guess the name of the category needs to be unique from page titles right? And not just unique but very much differentiated than any page title (not posts but page titles).

Maybe what I need to do is convert the pages that are not really unique into posts and put them in the category it fits with. And then keep those that are unique as top level pages.

The architecture needs some serious work I think Any help would be greatly appreciated.

One site I manage has a lot of low quality content. We are in the process of improving the overall site content but we have "turned off" a large portion of our content by setting 2/3 of the posts to draft. Has anyone done this before or had experience with doing something similar?

This quote from Bruce Clay comes to mind:

“Where a lot of people don’t understand content factoring to this is having 100 great pages and 100 terrible pages—they average, when the quality being viewed is your website,” he explained. “So, it isn’t enough to have 100 great pages if you still have 100 terrible ones, and if you add another 100 great pages, you still have the 100 terrible ones dragging down your average. In some cases we have found that it’s much better, to improve your ranking, to actually remove or rewrite the terrible ones than add more good ones.”

What are your thoughts? Thanks

I manage the seo for a bunch of different websites. We currently have a problem with links from low quality sources.... way too many of them and then way too much exact match anchor text.

We have a lot of sites that we basically linked together (blog network) and we are in the process of correcting this. We know we have a lot of links we need to remove and/or anchor text we need to rewrite. My question is how do I know which ones to remove and/or edit. I know that having some links from low quality sources isn't bad, or links from some other sites you own, or having some exact match anchor text. I know this isn't all bad, and some of it is expected but we have a LOT of this going on.

So basically I need to make decisions on each and every link as to whether we want to keep it, edit the anchor text, nofollow it, or delete it. I'm just not sure of what the best action is that should to be taken for each link. Any help would be really appreciated.

http://jesus.christ.org/

If you browse around on there you will see what I'm talking about with the low quality links, or if you run it through open site explorer you will really see what I mean

Thank you, I hope to get some responses soon.

Is it still giving you problems? Does anyone else have this problem?

On a site that I'm working on there is a series of posts with the same beginning to their titles. All of the titles start with Christ's Church ("Mormons"):

And then about the first four paragraphs of all these posts is exactly the same, it is just explaining this series of posts. I'll link to a couple of examples so you know what I'm talking about. I know there are several other problems with these posts/site but I am specifically curious about the partial duplicate title and the first few paragraphs being duplicate.

http://www.mormonchurch.com/3259/christs-church-mormons-helping-out-a-friend

http://www.mormonchurch.com/2969/christs-church-mormon-happiness-is-found-only-through-christ

There are about 30 posts similar to these. Thank you, I look forward to your responses.

Okay thanks, I'll discuss this with others at my organization.  I think we will combine the video and audio posts into one and then rel=canonical the patheos blog posts to the original website.

Any other ideas or suggestions?

This has been great feedback thank you!

Yes definitely. We are talking about dozens podcasts so far...

this is the video version of this podcast from the blog:

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/ibelievepodcast/2013/08/what-happens-to-those-who-die-without-knowing-christ-video/

and this links back to the video and transcript post on the website

this is the audio version of this podcast from the blog:

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/ibelievepodcast/2013/08/what-happens-to-those-who-die-without-knowing-christ-audio/

and this links back to the video and transcript post on the website also.

video and transcript version of this podcast on the website:

http://ibelievepodcast.com/1452/die-without-knowing-christ-video-transcript

audio version of this podcast on the website:

http://ibelievepodcast.com/1455/die-without-knowing-christ-audio

as you can see there a total of four posts for each podcast.

The website is the original source and the more important entity, so the goal is to bring people there. The blog that we manage is on a larger site called patheos.com, a religious website.

I'm not 100% sure if it's creating a "duplicate" content problem but I am feeling like there might be a uniqueness problem.

Both pages (the website and blog) exist in order to help promote the podcast with the blog posts linking back to their respective full transcript posts on the website.

So I'm thinking the other issue might be that the content on the blog if not duplicate, then is considered "thin". It is wordpress based and the content it includes is made up of posts, and there is one for each of the video and audio versions of the cast. The video version includes the video and and then a few short paragraphs talking about the topic at hand being discussed in the podcast. And the audio version is just one paragraph or so about the topic along with the audio. Technically unique from the video, but obviously short, and is generally targeting the same thing.

The website is also wordpress based and has a post for each of the video and audio versions of the cast as well. The video post just has the video and then the verbatim transcript, like Moz's whiteboard fridays! And then the audio version includes a short paragraph or so on the topic, again technically different or unique from the video transcript and also different from the other audio post on the blog but also "thin". Sorry if this is confusing...

Thanks so much for your responses so far, I greatly appreciate it!

I have a site that is mostly just podcasts with transcripts, and it has both audio and video versions of the podcasts. I also have a blog that I contribute to that links back to the video/transcript page of these podcasts. So this blog I contribute to has the exact same content (the podcast; both audio and video but no transcript) and then an audio and video version of this podcast. Each post of the podcast has different content on it that is technically unique but I'm not sure it's unique enough.

So my question is, should I canonicalize the posts on this blog back to the original video/transcript page of the podcast and then combine the video with the audio posts.

Thanks!