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Dear Alexander, You should provide access to Google WMT to take a look at the source of your 404, also provide access to your CMS if the issue is cause by your system and even provide access to your hosting server to work on your HTACCES file to 301 or 410 pages according needs. You can email me at webmaster @ freesharewaredepot . com (Im the SEO of this directory) Hope it helps

I would forward that old domain to the new one at the DNS level (no domain mapping) as a 301 redirect. Then you should be able to safely shut down that old blog, since you said "duplicated" content. But if the old blog URL structure is different than the new main site, and you have a significant number of links to that old Wordpress site, you might want to set up server side redirects to preserve any link juice coming from those inbound links.

"there is no penalty for have duplicates of your own content" Alan, I must respectfully disagree with this statement. Perhaps google will not penalize you directly, but it is easy to self-canabalize key terms if one has many facets that only differ slightly. I have seen this on a site where they don't rank on the first page, but they have 3-4 pages on the second page or SERPs. This is the exact issue that I am trying to resolve. Evan ps. sorry I hit the wrong button, but you got a good answer out of it

Yes, i did notice the missing "descriptive" title and description tag on the pages with incorrect grammar. I already send a note to the developer that he should change that. It seams that there is to little text to work with for Google.

Jonathan First off, I would ignore the competitors to some degree. It's going to lead you in circles. It's not so simple that links relate directly to rankings. There are a ton of factors as to why competitors can be ranking better. I'd focus purely on cleaning up your site as best as possible. You also do seem to have an issue with anchor text in your link profile - a lot the top anchors are commercial keywords ""hoisery online uk" "tights" etc. These need to be changed or cleaned up. This is going to give you a flag as being over-optimized. I don't think number of internal linking pages would create a penalty. How's your non-google traffic as a percentage? If it's anything less than 30% of overall traffic (and organic Google is 70% or more) I'd work on getting traffic from other sources - this will all feed back into your SEO.

Hi Alan, It was the Panda algorithm that updated this week, not Penguin.  Panda is about on page quality and not about links.  (We don't know for sure if links play any part in Panda, but my guess is that they don't.) "So are you saying that despite the new Penguin update, Google will not review our disavow file and that the  only action to take is to ping the links from the low quality domains in order to expedite Google's review of our site?" The disavow file starts working as soon as you file it.  It's complicated though.  If the Penguin algorithm has decided that your site is untrustworthy in regards to links, then Google will still continue to suppress your rankings until Penguin refreshes again. Regarding pinging links to make them get disavowed, that's still up for debate.  The idea is that you get Google to visit the link so that it can recrawl it and apply your disavow. Jim Boykin of Internet Marketing Ninjas asked John Mueller about whether it was possible to use the Google submit url to ping urls to get them recrawled (see video here at about 1hr 4min: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0FC1K25Z3w&feature=c4-overview&list=UUthrUiuJUtFSXBUp48D8bAA).  John said it wouldn't work.  But who knows, perhaps building links to those pages might work. EDIT: That type of thing - building links to bad urls to get them to be recrawled is not something I would recommend that you do.  It's something I might experiment with myself at some point but it's not something I'd recommend the average Penguin hit site does.

As Dinesh suggested, the Adwords Keyword Planner is a great tool.  You can also use Google Suggest and related searches at the bottom (Ubersuggest or Scrapebox for more results,) then there's Soovle which pulls from many sources, and Google Trends also has related terms.

Linking internally with optimised anchor text should be fine, but be careful not to overdo this in the same manner that you would not overdo inbound links with optimised anchors. In the last day, I've read a couple of theories about over-done internal anchor text being a common factor in sites that have recently lost rankings, but do NOT take that as gospel or even particularly important yet, as this was acknowledged by the person who said it as a very preliminary theory that they had not run proper analysis on yet. Just something to keep an eye on - I am sure the person will publish this theory if they establish that it has more merit! The image re-usage should be fine, although it's best to use entirely unique content in both text and imagery.

Hi there, David has covered some important points already. I wanted to point out that the URL you supplied here (www.thesandiegocriminallawyer.com/theft-crimes.html) 301 redirects to http://www.thesandiegocriminallawyer.com/san-diego-theft-crimes-attorney.html. Are you using the resolving URL to do any link building (although you say the number of inbound links to the crime pages are very low)? If there was an older version of some of these pages and you've gone through recent redirects when moving to Wordpress, those new pages / URLs may have a hard time ranking initially.

Yeah, I'd say you need to wait and see now, since you've added a different type of link (text, absolute link rather than a relative one as is used in the logo). The home page links using the logo are fairly buried in the body of the HTML but that really shouldn't make a difference to whether WMT picks them up, unless I am missing something.

I believe its MibuKotaro

Jane, I've seen the meta refresh reported on this page: http://www.fdmgroup.com/fdm-group-speaks-out-against-the-revelation-that-one-in-four-graduates-fail-to-find-work/ I've since removed the email address on this page. Is meta refresh still an issue? Thanks.

If there is a need to write these from a customer's point of view, no matter how they are going to find the content, then the posts should be written. You don't need to cultivate everything on your site for search - there should be a reason behind why you create and publish content, however, and EGOL is right that a content plan is an important start if you feel that you're writing / publishing "in the dark" with no structure. Short updates might be very useful for your current readership, or for historical purposes, so that future readers can go back and research what constituted a "record price" in 2014. They may never arrive at that content through a search engine, but it's useful to them and they find it regardless.

EGOL and Samuel raise some very good points here. I feel like you're also somewhat at risk of looking like you're trying to deceive the audience if you're deliberately divorcing the community from the brand site and image, but using it to drive the community to commercial action. I am not sure how subtle they are planning on making that connection, but subtlety in that manner rarely works: it's a lot more "honest" and appreciated to cultivate a community and openly market a product, as Moz has done. Using the Moz example, this site did not start out as a tool / analytics provider, so the community actually came first. When I was a full time employee, we were largely an SEO consultancy. The blog was a labour of love as far as Rand and the staff were concerned. In 2007 when we first introduced Premium (now Pro) accounts, we clearly used the community (which was pretty substantial, even back then) to market the service. To all but a very few negative folks, this went down fine. If Rand had started a separate company and website hosting and selling SEO tools and subscriptions, and had dropped hints and posts every now and again here to promote it, it would not have been met with nearly as much favour. The SEO points about two sites being twice as hard to maintain, market and rank than one also apply, but I would question whether a smaller brand can build a totally separate community that is a) big enough, and b) independent enough not to annoy users if they figure out the commercial intent behind it. If there's one thing that's slightly worse than no community, it's an empty one.

As others have said above, combating scrapers is a big reason, but you're relying on lazy scrapers not removing the tags. Another reason is to prevent rogue content management systems from attaching unnecessary query strings to URLs, creating pages that can end up loading infinite times under different URLs. A canonical tag in the source file would mean that any number of duplicate pages point back to the original. The same reason goes for sites that have issues with redirecting www / non-www URLs to the correct version, or who deal with the same problem regarding secure / insecure URLs. In all these cases, the canonical tag is a bandaid, not a cure - it would be better to fix the underlying problem of the rogue CMS, incorrect redirection, etc. but the canonical tag (self-referencing) is there if you need it. Google doesn't seem to have an issue with it, but if you're at all concerned about the other engines, use with care.

Thanks Paul I had a look at the page, but as I can see it uses headers to identify the response, but the actions are rewrite or redirect. There is a custom response you can use, for a definitive answer I would ask on iis.net http://forums.iis.net/ Or you could place each pdf in its own folder and place the header on the folder

Hi Matt, In general, my advice would be to achieve permanent 301 redirects at as granular a page/folder level as possible (prioritized by the current number of linking root domains - Open Site Explorer's Top Pages report is a great tool for this). Where the rebranding & migration is concerned, I would strongly recommend reading through two resources here at Moz:   Ruth Burr's overview of Moz's own fairly recent move (from SEOmoz.org to Moz.com) and Aleyda Solis's handy "Achieving an SEO-Friendly Domain Migration" infographic Between both, I think you'll have your bases covered. Best, Mike

Thanks, Jane! I really appreciate it. If the now noindexed category pages have already been indexed, do you think I should request removal from the index as well? Best... Mike

Hi Alexander, Google says that one website is better than two, and I almost never recommend that any local business publish more than one website, because of the risk this puts them at for NAP inconsistency, duplicate and merged listings as well as often creating thin/duplicate content risks. Google's opinion, as voiced by John Mueller, can be found here: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/rOb2jIctBLQ/discussion So, honestly, my advice is to go with just one site, Alexander.

You are wasting a chance to get more text in your website, alt tags aren't worth much but all the same it a chance to get a keyword or relevant text in your site. It may also be a bad signal to a search engine and they may no longer trust your alt tags when deciding what the image is about