Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thank you guys! This was just what I needed. Extra thumbs up for your article Amelia!

Hi there! Thanks for reaching out! My name is Erin, and I'm on the Moz Help Team. I appologize for any confusion here. I downloaded your crawl CSV for kmtstore.com, and everything looked fine. From what I can tell Google has 296 pages indexed for your site, and we crawled 241. Our crawler starts with your home page and uses recursive crawling to find pages on your site through the links we find. Thus, your homepage is the only seed we use to crawl your site. We know that Google uses multiple seeds, so it could be possible Google is indexing more pages that way. Since we use recursive crawling, if these product pages aren't linked to your homepage, our crawler won't be able to pick them up. I hope this helps, and if you have any other questions, please reach out to us at help@moz.com! We'll be able to take this conversation offline and answer any other questions for you from there! Cheers! Erin

Pardon my delayed response here, but wanted to thank you all for your input. I was pretty confused about the issue at the time, and your advice/info proved to be very helpful.

Things like this can be a little tricky to dissect anyway. Most important thing is that you're doing things right, it's just accounting for Google's ability to crawl.

You wrote "until the subscription comes up for renewal" - Is it charges automatically, or it gives me a chance to decide before hand?

Thank you - very helpful

A manual action is normally on links coming in not going out so you should be safe if you've cleaned your link profile etc.

Removing the page should more than likely be a basic task. However knowing if what they have done was worthwhile would require a well-practiced eye. I don't want to discourage you, but it sounds like you may not be that well-versed with off-page. So, for the low low cost of reading this; I can give you a few things to watch out for. I'm sure some others will jump in, and I would be grateful for that as well. I probably won't remember to mention everything, and I may learn something. All of that is the real reason I come back to Q&A, aside from the fact that I want to solve problems. I blame my dad. Nevertheless, here's what to look out for: A lot of exact match anchors (your target keywords) Low quality directories (You will know them if you can search adult, pharma and casino keywords in their search function.) Paid stuffs (A dead giveaway is an 'Ad' that actually passes juice - not nofollow or otherwise 'neutered'.) Unrelated links (This means you, due to the reciprocals. You aren't related to a thatcher in New Zealand... or at least most likely not.) All of the above are examples of things that may get your site penalized, depending on the circumstances. Now if the agency was doing a lot of low quality directory listings, there's actually something pretty new you should be aware of. A lot of low quality directories are blocking popular crawlers. So maybe a lot of links aren't gone, just your favorite crawlers have been blocked. Get all your standard link datas: GWT, BWT, Majestic, Ahrefs, etc. - filter duplicates and commence crawling. That's where Screaming Frog also comes in handy. You can spoof a popular user agent, thus you will not be blocked. So you will have a better idea of the actual links that exist, or don't exist, to your site. This is what you have to do, brochacho. Chin up.

What are the pros and cons for referencing all page versions in sitemap and for include just general (English/Desktop) version in sitemap? Let me clarify, you want to know the pros and cons of putting all page versions in sitemaps, or just doing the english/desktop and letting Google figure it out. List All Content in Sitemaps Pros If the sitemaps are set up in a logical fashion, this makes for an easy way to see indexation issues. You can use hreflang in the sitemaps rather than on the page. This reduces page code and ups page speed, albeit slightly. You are guaranteed that search engine will find all of the content. Cons Lots of sitemaps to make and maintain. Sitemap just main content (desktop/english) Pros Easier to maintain. Search engines are much better today at finding most versions of content. Cons Run the risk of content not being indexed correctly. Some content might not be found and indexed. You could not easily verify indexation. If any onsite code was removed that told Google where to go, then the possibility of indexation issues increase. Hope that helps answer your question!

Just for my own organization. I know that in all the Google examples, the x-default tag is at the bottom. Overall, I don't believe it makes a difference.

Hi I noticed a dip in traffic after my last relaunch as well but it got back to normal within 2 weeks. I can recommend doing a search in google with site:yoursite.tld to check which sites are listed. Make a Excel Sheet from that and check if you have done all the 301 properly.

Well, it sounds like it may not be worth the brain damage to make the change.  Is that what I'm hearing? If that's the case, I'm good with that!

"As far as Social is concern, I would advise you to go one page for each state and cover all stores that comes under that particular state" Actually if they create a Google+ Local page for each store - which they should in order to rank in local... then that page will also automatically be a G+ Business page with social features as well. They could opt to not use all the store pages for social and just have a brand Social page - but just letting you know all locations with a G+ L page will also be social pages. To set up for 200 locations you want to use the bulk datafeed, now called "Google My Business Locations":  https://support.google.com/business/answer/6002002?hl=en

Devon, If relevance between two subdomains is low, the value of links pointing from one of them to another will be low, as well--even though they share the same root domain. If they're as different as you say, it's probably best to tough it out on a new domain. Nonetheless, it shouldn't be inconceivable that you could come up with some overlapping concept between something on the two sites about which you could write. Such an article/page of content/blurb added to the old domain and linking to the new domain could give the new site a little boost in visibility/traffic/awareness.

I would not recommend changing URL structure unless you have a very good reason to do so. Worrying about kw density on a decently readable, nice URL should not be reason to recommend a total URL rewrite.

How long have the items been showing an error? Webmaster tools seems to be a little slow some times. I made a small mistake in my markup that caused me to have errors. It is now been fixed but it has just slowly been declining for 3 weeks and still has quite a ways to go.

Been through the disavow on my site- While missing out on a few possible links, sucks.....are they high enough quality to warrant the possible negative consequences of lost revenue from the penalty coming back? Personally speaking unless that's a link from the Wall Street Journal or CNN, I wouldn't be poking the sleeping bear, it's just not worth it.