Yes, you will, but it's going to prove far less of a headache than working with what you've got.

if you stick to the same design, import the same data, and keep the URL's the same; You won't hardly lose any page weight and authority.

Looking at the URL structure at http://www.nextgenrestoration.com/, the URL's can be kept the same with the right permalink structure.

If you're referring to the /blog content regarding everything having to be 301 redirected, then there will be a few simple processes available to make the migration smooth but seeing as this will be Wordpress to Wordpress database, you may as well export the old /blog and reimport the blog data before working on the new fresh install of Wordpress.

Hi Todd,

If the blog contained valuable content but was instructed to 301 redirect to a new location, then you are correct, the crawl would not go as far as crawling the content and subsequently indexing/caching or analysing value therefore any weight the actual content possesses will not transfer via the redirect however domain/page/URL authority / link juice / PageRank and other link metrics will, not 100% of this, but most of it.

301 redirecting is not designed to directly improve rank although other benefits of 301 redirecting can lead to this. Such as usability, traffic, relevancy.

Where are your questions? I'll take a look and see if I can help.

Was the homepage one of the pages that included the noindex meta tag?

Even if it was, pages will not all be crawled at the same time or in a particular order. The homepage may have already been crawled before the change was made on your site, your homepage may not have even be crawled at all today if it was visited yesterday for example.

Crawling results can vary hugely based on a number of factors.

The scenario you describe...

"I started eight blogs on a different host with keyword rich domain names to get some links to the shop. Today I don't update them, but they have a lot of links to our shop and the blogs have something like DA 20 and PA 30-40. There are lots of links between the blogs as well."

...is likely to match much of the criteria Google are using to hit sites with Panda / Penguin updates, to be honest, unless the blog content is of high unique content and not 'over optimised', I would not make any efforts to associate yourself with the network of blogs as it will likely do more harm than good over the forthcoming 12 months.

Really, you need to be assessing the overall value of each blog and whether similar content on your current webshop is a good match for the content on each of the blogs. If you're just contemplating 301 redirecting to improve ranking of keywords, then it's unlikely that this will be the result.

Sounds like a bit of a mess, if it were me, I would just do a fresh install of Wordpress, build a Wordpress theme improving their existing design, add the blog at the /blog location and have the whole website all using the same Wordpress install. Then 301 redirect any old URL's to new URL destinations.

Alternatively, just move the /blog content to a temp directory, then add /blog from the root instance of the Wordpress installation and then reimport the blog content from the MySQL database of the first instance (original /blog) of Wordpress.

Yes because that is what caused them to take notice of the meta noindex and drop your pages from their search results.

Best of luck with it, feel free to send me a PM if your pages haven't reappeared in Google's search engine over the next few days.

Hi Gary,

If the pages dropped from Google's index that quickly, then chances are, they will be back again almost as quick. If your website has an XML sitemap, you could try pinging this to the search engines to alert them to revisit your site as soon as possible again.

It's bad luck that the meta tag was inserted and this caused immediate negative effects, but it will be recoverable, and likely your pages should re-enter the index at the same positions as they were prior to today.

The key is to just bring Google's bot back to your website as soon as possible to recrawl, publishing a blog post could do this, creating a backlink from a high traffic site (a forum is a good example for this) are some methods of encouraging this.

Hope that helps.

How can Google Webmaster Tools be reporting duplicate title issues for pages that can only be accessed if you are logged in? If pages of your website require authentication then they are inaccessible to search engines so subsequently, cannot be reported on.

Unless I have misunderstood?

Potentially an issue with 3dCart's canonical URL feature?

I think there is potentially a bigger issue with your site / URL structure causing this maybe. Have you recently changed whether your website makes use of www / non www in the URL's? Instances of both versions are indexed in Google currently - did you enter the canonical URL in 3dCart with the www or without. And if you use Google Webmaster Tools, is this set to display URL's with or without the www?

There is currently a www redirect from non www to www however, so one would presume www is preferred - so just ensure any settings in 3dCart's admin panel that include your domain, are inserted with the www included.

Maybe on this page.

Hope this helps initially.

If you are using a content management system, these additional meta tags can often be controlled within your administration panel.

If the meta tag is hard coded into your website header, this will appearing on every page of your website and will subsequently result in you not having any pages indexed in search engines.

As Ben points out, the noindex directive instructs search engine robots not to index that particular page. It would recommended to address this issue as quickly as possible, especially if you have a high traffic website that is getting crawled frequently.

Based on the URL's you provided above, it's more than just a duplicate page title issue as the contents on the page are almost identical too.

Normally, 'default.asp' is used as a true path to the homepage, similar to how 'index.php' works. If this is the case, you need to 301 redirect (Apache) or IIS redirect (ASP) default.asp to the homepage (/).

If these variations of essentially the same page are not handled, they are seen by search engines as duplicate pages. Please learn how to implement the above here.

As long as you're sure that no organic search traffic is coming in via ranked search results pages from your site, it would be of no harm just to prevent search engines from indexing those pages as per the robots.txt directive I mentioned above - then just focus all your attention on the other pages of your site.

With regards to the unique content, always try and find the time to produce unique content on the category pages, these were the ones you mentioned you wanted to rank. Normally this is feasible providing you haven't got over 1,000 categories.

Feel free to PM me over a link to your ecommerce website if you would like me to take a look at any of the situation in greater detail.

We currently have a browser session on a local server used for serving search results without any of the cr*p that Google like to push. This gives a completely clean and accurate search results page in any brand of search engine (Google, Yahoo, Bing etc) and type of search engine (web, image, maps etc).

This is mainly controlled via the use of query parameters in the URL string. No results are ever clicked on within the session as to not influence rankings. There is no web history, no personalisation, no geo-targeted within the results.

I hate everything Google have done to make search results more 'personalised' or 'targeted'. And that's not just because I work in the SEO industry either.

Granted, stripping back your search experience to the raw criteria as we have done shouldn't be this difficult and I would certainly be a solid user of Vanoogle but what we've done works for us and ensures we don't see skewed results (when we require).

How I would handle this would depend upon the performance of the ecommerce website and which entrance paths via the website convert higher.

You could easily instruct search engines not to index the search results page by adding the following in your robots.txt:-

Disallow: /search.php?search=*

But is there a real likelihood of duplicate matching content with your actual category pages? It's unlikely in all honesty - but depending on your website content and product range, I suppose possible.

If many visits to your website arrive via indexed search result pages, I would be inclined to leave them indexed however and implement measures to ensure that they won't be flagged as duplicate content.

Ways to handle this depend on your ecommerce provider and it's capabilities sometimes but more often that not, is just a case of ensuring there is plenty of unique content on your category pages (as there should be) and there is no chance of other pages of your website hindering their ranking potential then.

There are number of ways of potentially handling this depending on what kind of website you have, what platform it uses and how you want to serve your business both on desktop and mobile devices.

Typically though, the correct procedure would be to implement user-agent detection on your website so that when Googlebot (desktop search) and Googlebot-Mobile (supports both feature phone and smartphone now) both visit your website, you can serve different pages/stylesheets based on their browsing capabilities.

For pages on your mobile sub domain, use canonical links pointing to the regular versions of your content which will instruct search engines that those versions are the originals but with user-agent detection in place, both web and mobile versions of your content can safely perform in the same index and Google will rank your mobile content better for mobile device users.

Read further on this:-

7 Real Mobile Duplicate Content SEO Issues

SEO Considerations For Google Mobile Search In 2012

5 Tips For Optimal Mobile Site Indexing

Mobile SERPs & Usability

Excellent article covering everything that should be taken into consideration when launching a replacement website / website migration. Definitely recommended for the member asking the original question to work through each points contained within the article.

Great resource Keri.

There is literally tons of factors to consider. Primarily, how much will the website be changing, one would only presume considerate research has been carried out and the changes are for the better (both from a usability and optimisation perspective).

Some questions to ask...

1. Will the URL's / URL structure change at all or will all URL paths be kept intact?
2. Will the actual content on each page be changing at all?
3. Is any content being removed or added?

These three questions will pose the biggest ranking changes...

All three should be addressed for the better which should then see a positive climb in rankings (if anything at all). If any URL's are changed, as Erik points out, 301 redirecting these is essential, however this won't pass 100% weight through to the new destinations so it's possible the authority leakage on these alone could cause a drop in rankings (temporary of otherwise).

Hope that helps for now.

The allow directives need to come before the disallow directives for the same directory/file paths. (I have never personally tested this although it makes logical sense to instruct a robot to access one particular path within a directory structure before it sees that it is blocked from crawling that directory).

For example:-

Allow: /profiles

Disallow: /s2/profiles/me

Allow: /s2/profiles

Allow: /s2/photos

Allow: /s2/static

Disallow: /s2

As per how Google have formatted their robots.txt.

Woopra has been our preferred analytics solution for the past 18 months or so now. We were utilising real time analytics long before GA introduced it and we've been relatively happy with their platform and features.

Others worth checking out include:-

http://getclicky.com/

http://www.crazyegg.com/

http://haveamint.com/

A small amount of weight / authority will be lost when changing the URL's and 301 redirecting to the new locations. It's only fractionable but could be the difference between 3 or 4 positions in the search results within your niche.

It's possible there could be an issue with the 3rd party plugin you used, they may have overlooked something critical in this process.

When did you notice the drop in rankings / traffic? Is it possible it could also be due to Panda/Penguin preparation/updates also?

Did you actually rewrite the URL's using mod_rewrite in .htaccess or change the permalink structure in Wordpress?

If the new URL structure was implemented correctly, did you test the 301 redirects to ensure they were actually redirecting to the correct destinations?

Have you analysed the traffic in analytics to establish what URL's are seeing the drop in traffic? If the old URL's were indexed in Google with authority, the change to your URL structure would have caused a dip in organic rankings and subsequently traffic...

I'm not entirely sure I follow the situation but certainly yes, if your website was only launched a week ago, it's highly unlikely it's ranking for anything and the authority of the domain is likely to be much weaker than others that are more established on the web.

What type of query are you analysing a ranking for? Is it a query on your brand / company name? Are the retail stores part of your company too or outlets that resell your products? Links are just one of many factors and quality of links far outweighs quantity of links so there is plenty else to consider if you want to outrank these other two websites. Without more information on this, it's difficult to point you in the right direction however.

No, it won't be of that much use no. Homepage PageRank ought not to be focused on too much, I've seen domains with homepage PR that are just complete garbage anyhow.

Again, the same with 'dofollow' links, there's far more 'weightier' metrics to be attracted to than whether a link is followed or not.

At the end of the day, it's just yet another business directory probably serving little purpose...

Is anyone going to use it? Probably not.

Will you get any traffic via the link? Probably not.

Will you see a return on the cost? Probably not.

In my view, definitely not worth looking into. Ask yourself this, what would make this website a good link prospect - if all you come up with homepage PR4 and dofollow. Then you're going about it all wrong.

Check out this. Hopefully should help.

Hey Kathy,

Sorry I meant is the single site that you had 4000 backlinks from still indexed at all (if you're saying the owner had to take it down)...

Thanks

You're welcome.

Ad positioning and strategy really is dependant on your intentions. Personally, I won't even stop to read content on a blog that inserts ads within the body. I perhaps would think one Adsense block at either the top or the bottom of the article body would be deemed bearable but anymore than that, you run the risk of getting flagged at Google for low quality / poor ad to content ratio potentially.

It's unlikely that whether a page contains multiple

tags or just one, the effect of that page's performance on this metric alone will be minimal. H1 tags won't have a massive amount of affect and is just one of many hundreds of factors. Whilst with HTML5, multiple

tags is possible, why would you want to anyway? Header tags should be for structuring content in a hierarchy and typically, you would rarely want to have two topics competing for main precedence on the same page.

In the sense that a report is alerting that there are too many links on a page though is going to be because it is warning of authority leakage more than anything else though.

Granted, the insertion of 'just' in my previous statement probably misleads...

I agree though that if you were to link every page to every page, it would just cause a royal headache to crawlers - why one would do that though is beyond me.

It's unlikely to purely be a result of this one incident though. Are there any pages of this domain still indexed in the search engines? If not now, then if this was the cause, I would be expecting your rankings to be reinstated... Otherwise, there is likely issues elsewhere too.

Sorry Pete, that was a typo where I meant to say 'internal linkage is classed differently as external linkage' (I've amended my reply).

Depends on the tool you are using but duplicate page title would have to be an exact match on the page title I would expect...

Where are you seeing this error appear?

And no, it's unlikely that if all your page titles are being appended with your company name that this would flag duplicate page titles.

If your website is dynamic, it is likely that your page titles are being rewritten but something is delaying the time it takes to rewrite them so any bot/crawler is just detecting them as duplicates... Possibly.

It took over four months for authorship markup to work for our blog. It seems Google are rolling our rich snippet inclusion into the search results very gradually, and their could even be a domain queue based on authority - either way, I doubt the utilisation of the Google+ network will do you any harm at all whilst you're waiting.

Firstly, the first thing to do is try to keep all advertising below the fold (that means below the visible section of your page when you first land on your website).

If you're already offering advertising in the side menu and header, is there really a need for Adsense within the content body as well... twice? If you wanted to utilise both an independent ad network as well as Adsense, I would extend your onpage content, ensure the non advertising content is of a much larger ratio than your ads.

Typically, ads are seen a mile off and won't be clicked on that much these days, you may find that switching to image ads rather than text ads within Adsense delivers a higher clickthrough from your visitors - at least these aren't as obvious as the Adsense text ads.

Subtlety is the key here, play around with colours, layouts and formats until you find an approach that works best with your website content and your target audience. Never try and trick your readers either (by disguising ads).

There is no right or wrong way when it comes to website advertising but don't expect it to generate a large revenue stream overnight, you need to keep content extremely on topic and relevant to maximise the relevancy of displayed ads from the ad network(s).

What makes you think you have too many on page links? Internal linkage is classed differently as external linkage, linking just dilutes the authority from the page (amongst other crawlability and usability factors), but if it's internal linkage, at least the authority is kept on your domain.

Simple, effective and easy to use navigation is critical to website usability and will have an affect on performance in search engines. In your example, I wouldn't expect any negative ranking affects to occur as a result of the style of navigation menu your website utilises. If that is deemed most useful for your customers, then that's the best approach.

Use a tool such as SEOmoz' Crawl Test or Xenu's Link Sleuth to determine any crawling issues. There are a number of free online tools for this too.

Hi Peter,

In addition to topic (sometimes), what I mean is the nature of the content can affect the costs - for example: press releases, blog posts, landing page / sales copy, website info pages etc.

For a 1,000 word article, we would likely charge around £75 mark.

Thanks

That doesn't even make any sense...?

Obviously there is a line between creating mediocre copy yourself and hiring an experienced professional writer that understands human reading behaviour, website usability, targeting different mindsets and implementing the necessary to maximise the potential of said content being found.

Specifically requested was "the best quality".

It's relatively simple to check if content that has been created for you has been copied from elsewhere online (which is what I presume you mean by "duplicate").

What type of content is it? This could essentially affect the costs.

We provide copywriting / content creation services and for high quality copy, hourly rate would be about £25 or quote can be provided on scale of project. There are hundreds of low end, low quality article writing services of course that are from as little as $5 per 1000 words but as with everything, you get what you pay for...

I appreciate that doesn't directly answer your question but as a provider, though it might be useful to chime in.

What are we looking at? I can see Adsense ads on your website so how are they not displaying as you're expecting?

Personally, I would say your website contains too many ads too. This will likely affect your rankings in search engines but also lower the value of your pages plus deter visitors.

Almost any domain's link profile I look at contains a collection of backlinks such as these, I've noticed many in our site's link profile before - they come and go though and mostly these are just auto generated via various scrapers, bots and other automated systems to try and manipulate engines and/or mass produce content at other domains.

How many link's are we talking here, if they account for a good 25% - 30% of your overall link profile, then I would agree there is a chance that a drop in rankings could be related to these since the Penguin update. If its only a few links, then I wouldn't say these would be having much of an affect on your rankings.

The drop in rankings could be due to any number of reasons so it's not practical to start exploring these without first establishing exactly what has been done on your website in the past week (or even few days depending on how frequently your domain gets crawled) and diving into your web analytics to establish any unusual onsite behaviour or changes to metrics in the lead up to today.

Could well be the affects of an algorithm update. Could be something entirely different.

Does it rank for anything worthwhile?

Does it have any legitimate / valueable links pointing to it?

If the answer is no to both of those questions, just delete the page and recreate it at a new URL and request a removal of the old URL from Google's index (and obviously don't 301 redirect it).

Another recommendation for this would be Xenu's Link Sleuth too.

It's a free application that will crawl your entire domain and report titles, metadata, broken links, header response codes amongst a load of other relevant metrics and will allow you to sort by any data along with display a report too.

Many websites have incorporated the necessary development that allows query parameters from their internal website search to be indexed by search engines - with the view of essentially driving more traffic - however untargeted it is likely to be - it also builds many thousands more indexed pages from their domain in the search engines.

A common way of doing this is by monitoring incoming search term referral traffic and then adding a widget on page to contain these search queries linking to the same search query processed via their internal search, hence how so many of these pages can be indexed for a particular domain.

It's very common with torrent / file sharing websites.

You unfortunately can't control what methods another website is using but it sounds like there is more to it in the sense of what they have done if they are outranking for a completely unrelated term to their domain yet have identified that your domain is authoritative for this same terms.

Without knowing the specifics, it's hard to elaborate further on this... Happy to look if you wanted PM domain/keyword.

Any tools that are worth their weight in gold will be those that typically balance out the elements of optimising a page and reflect this in the grade it offers. Such as SEOmoz for example, their tools aren't going to advise to optimise everything as much as possible to the extent it is over-done, if this looks the case, then the grade is highly unlikely to be an A.

I think the term over-optimisation is largely misperceived. Delivering a well structured, compliant and semantically coded, unique website which provides original content, caters for its intended audience and takes into consideration usability measured via onsite behavior is naturally going to perform well anyhow. There are hundreds of factors granted, but generally only need to be addressed once (such as templating, internal linkage structure, URL formatting and content hierarchy) (with the website elements that is) - after this, as long as content is researched, offers value and is what people want to see, then the grade of any given page will be pretty good whilst not 'over-optimised'.

Any cheap and basic web based tool that basically just gives a grade based on title, metadata, keyword frequency, blog, social profiles is close to useless (take Hubspots free website grader for example) anyhow and wouldn't contain a formula to distinguish between whether (for example) a page has more than 500 words on a page or whether the same keyword appears 450 times within that same 500 words.

If you can rely on any set of tools online that are in touch with the latest algorithm updates from Google then SEOmoz is the safest bet.