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I just had a smack upside the head moment. I had all of the links in the main nav as absolute but my links in the footer were all relative. That was giving me my 404 errors.

Hopefully this will get me back on Google's good side. We dropped in the ranks a little for some of our main keywords.

I recently implemented a blog using WordPress on our website. I didn't use WordPress as the CMS for the rest of our site just the blog portion. So as an example I installed Wordpress in http://www.mysite/blog/" not in the root.

My error report in SEOMoz went from 0 to 22e. The Moz bot  or crawler that SEOMoz uses is reporting a ton of 4xx errors to strang links that shouldn't exist anywhere on the site.

Example:

Good link - http://www.mysite/products.html

Bad link reported by SEOMoz - http://www.mysite/blog/my-first-post/products.html

I've also noticed that my page speed as become much slower as reported by Google.

Does anybody know what could be happening here? I know that typically it's better to install WordPress in the root and use it to control the entire site but I was under the gun to get a blog out.

Thanks

Thanks for the reply Matt!

I think I may have identified another page on our site that could be optimized for the same keyword phrase, so I made changes to the title and h1 tags along with a review of the content.

I also discovered that on the home page both my h1 and h2 tags were the same. Not sure how much that may of contributed to our recent drop but I'm going to test that out to see if it was an issue.

I've been reading a lot about keyword cannibalization and I'm worried that some of my sub pages may be pulling rank from my home page.

If I'm trying to rank my home page for the keyword phrase "blue widget manufacturing" and I have sub pages with the titles "blue manufacturing services", "blue widget enginnering", "medical widget manufacturing" is it possible that those pages could be causing me to commit keyword cannibalization?

I'm looking at a lot of the results for my keyword phrase and they don't seem to have additional pages with similar keyword phrases.

Wondering if I should change my titles so they don't look as optimized.

I'm wondering how Google calculates local search volume in the keywords tool without specifying a city or a region.

Is it just an average of the different regions or states?

I'm using the "All in One SEO" plugin and checked  the option to no follow tags and archives.

I just launched a WordPress blog on our website and SEOMoz is reporting duplicate content on all of our tags. We only have one post so far, so of course each tag is going to be duplicate. Should I no-follow those tags for the time being?

Hey Josh,

Wasting more time on it is what I was going back and forth on this morning when I saw where they placed our site. I'm kind of scratching me head as to why they would completely ignore the category that I had requested. Our company offers both products and services but our core business is our services, so says our home page and supporting content. Not sure why they placed us in a category for our products.

It's a little disappointing but the pages PR is the same.

The listing for my company was buried in a bad category in the Yahoo! Directory that had no Page Authority. I was able to get them to remove the old listing because I couldn't find the account info for the individual that originally created it. I resubmitted and they didn't put my site  in the category that I requested but the Page Authority of the category that I was placed in is 50. Is this OK? Or should I repeal and ask them to move it to the category that I had originally requested which I feel would be more relevant for my company and listing which also has a 50 PA?

Great!

Thanks, I may take you up on that!

-Brandon

I'm using the "All in One SEO" plugin and checked  the option to no follow tags and archives.

EGOL,

Do you have sub pages for all of those keywords? With the page named according to the keywords?

That is the first time I've ever seen a recommendation to put the url in the title tag. I don't think I've seen that anywhere. What advantage does that have over placing a keyword first.

Thank you for the responses!

The reason why I thought it may be effective is because I had seen it done on a few sites. Specifically when a CMS is used to manage the sites content. If you place a h1 tag into your header file it's going to care through every page of the site.

I will definitly be changing that strategy ASAP!

Thanks for the help.

Gyi Tsakalakis

I actually went to management with three sites that ranked on page one of Google for our most important keyword and asked them to verify that the companies were our competition. Management countered me by printing out some pages from a competitor that they knew of but ranked no where near the top of Google. So I think they kind of missed the point of what I was trying to prove. So I've had some difficulty even getting off the ground.

I've been reading a lot about keyword cannibalization and I'm worried that some of my sub pages may be pulling rank from my home page.

If I'm trying to rank my home page for the keyword phrase "blue widget manufacturing" and I have sub pages with the titles "blue manufacturing services", "blue widget enginnering", "medical widget manufacturing" is it possible that those pages could be causing me to commit keyword cannibalization?

I'm looking at a lot of the results for my keyword phrase and they don't seem to have additional pages with similar keyword phrases.

Wondering if I should change my titles so they don't look as optimized.

Thanks for the suggestions! Recently I was trying to convince a friend of mine that he was charging too much to list in his directory. I explained to him that if I stumbled across his directory, looking at his domain rank which was 23, I would pass on his $40 submission cost.