Hi all,

I help run a website for a history-themed podcast and we just moved it to its second domain in 7 years. We've had very good SEO up until last week, and I'm wondering if I screwed up the way I redirected the domains. It's like this:

1. Originally the site was hosted at "first.com", and it acquired inbound links. However, we then started to host the site on blogger, so we...

2. Redirected the site to "second.blogspot.com". (Thus, 1 --> 2) It stayed here for about 7 years and got lots of traffic. Two weeks ago we moved it off of blogger and into Wordpress, so we 301 redirected everything to...

3. third.com. (Thus, 1 --> 2 --> 3) The redirects worked, and when we Google individual posts, we are now seeing them in Google's index at the new URL.

My question: What about the 1--> 2 redirect? There are still lots of links pointing to "first.com". Last week I went into my GoDaddy settings and changed the first redirect, so that first.com now points to third.com. (Thus 1 --> 3, and 2-->3) I was correct in doing that, right?

The drop in Google traffic I've seen this past week makes me think that maybe I screwed something up. Should we have kept 1 --> 2 --> 3? (Again, now we have 1-->3 and 2-->3)

Thanks for any insights on this!

Tom

Thanks for the great answer, Ray. We have been adding a note at the bottom of the post that it's been updated. I think we'll take your advice and give it a bigger call out at the top.

Hi everyone,

We're going through some of our old posts in our WordPress blog and updating them, adding new information, new links, and photos. My question: If we update the posts significantly, should we also update the "published" date to today?

If we only correct some typos or a dead link, we don't touch the date. However, if we've done some real work on the post, we'd like to update the published date in order to bring it to the top of our blog feed and draw new attention to the post. However, I'm a little nervous that this could be seen by Google as spammy, as it's not technically a new post and the URL already exists in Google's index of our site.

Here's an example of a post that was published several years ago and then updated a few week's ago with new information (and a new date stamp): http://www.eurocheapo.com/blog/barcelona-tip-five-cheap-eats-under-e6.html

Any thoughts on this?

Thanks,

Tom

Hi everyone,

I run a travel website that has about 30 pre-search city landing pages. In a  redesign last year we added large "hero" images to the top of the page, and put our h1 headlines on top of them in white. The result is attractive, but I'm wondering if Google could be reading this page as "white text on white page", which is an obvious no-no, especially if it could seem that we're trying to hide text.

Here's an example: http://www.eurocheapo.com/paris/

H1: Expert reviews of cheap hotels in Paris

I should add that our SERPs for these city pages has dropped (for "Cheap hotels in X"), but it could obviously be related to other issues.

Any advice would be appreciated. Many thanks!

Tom

Thanks, Jesse and Brian.

I'll keep digging into GWMT and OSE tomorrow.

We discovered some issues with "rel=canonical" tags today (namely, we didn't have them on our hotel pages and Google had indexed multiple versions of these hotel review pages).

Do you think that a duplicate content penalty on these pages could be playing into this? (Probably not, right, because Google is showing all the links to the page -- it's OSE that's not showing them).

Thanks for your help. I owe you a beer!

Thanks Brian.

It's odd, because this page isn't new. It's nearly 12 years old.

I'm seeing the same thing (no inbound links) across almost all of our hotel reviews -- we have about 1,000 of them on the site, and they're mostly 5+ years old and very well indexed.

I was assuming that there was either some problem with this crawl or that I had something wrong with my code.

I run the site http://www.eurocheapo.com and am finding that many inbound links are not showing up in OSE and on the toolbar. For example, check out this hotel review:

http://www.eurocheapo.com/paris/hotel/hotel-esmeralda.html

In OSE it shows only 2 links (from 1 domain), which is crazy. It has dozens of inbound links from many different domains (links:http://www.eurocheapo.com/paris/hotel/hotel-esmeralda.html).

I notice this all over my site. Pages that we link between are also showing no internal links -- which is easy to disprove.

Was there a problem with this crawl? Or is the problem in our code?

Many thanks for your help,

Tom