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Thank you for the suggestion. There weren't any spaces before or after to cause the error. I believe the issue was related to a java update. I was able to run OPG from another machine after installing a Java update. I can't update the java on the machine I was using for testing that night as some of the applications and systems I need to access require a specific version of Java. Since that night I have been able to run OPG without issue.

I agree with you. It was a chest thumper article.  It simply crows about rigging a fix for historic bad practice.  It does not explain what caused the problem and the randon links solution isn't the best way to handle 404 traffic and probably not the best way to repair site structure problems.

If you have permission to use their images, just get images from them, name them accurately, and give them accurate alt-text. Duplicate content has to do with your own content, in general. Since the point of naming images and alt-text is to help Google understand them, it's not a big issue if an image has the same alt-text as another or appears multiple times on the site (especially since they should all be coming from an images directory, no matter where they are on the website). Also, images are much more likely to be naturally reused than text, as licensing photos is a long accepted practice.

The ethics of the Internet dictate that you crawl politely, obey robots.txt and properly identify yourself This isn't a new issue. Link networks and sites have blocked crawlers and manipulated Google for years. Fortuneatly, it's only a small fraction of the web. Also, it unlikely links from those networks have much value, so crawl priority would be super low anyway. Actually, it could be viewed as beneficial when blackhat sites block OSE and aHrefs, because those sites often get penalized by Google, but 3rd party crawlers have no way to know this, so blocking effectively keeps them out of the indexes.

Hi Nicolaj, I am happy I could be of help. by the way, GetFlywheel Can put you in a Singapore data center. the crawl links you can click on the arrow for more information for instance your pointing Google at a non-indexed page with the canonical tag this is just an example of what you can see http://crawl.blueprintmarketing.com/report_grid/page/64074/broken_links/3c831296fb7d673c6e34da4b56b1fe09f95b6ae7 All best, Thomas

I believe your problem is in your robots.txt file. You're attempting a wildcard blocking of the search results pages with this line: Disallow: /listings/search**?*** However, the asterisk ought to precede the question mark. If you want to block all URLs that include a question mark (?), do this: Disallow: /listings/search***?** Try that and see what happens. I've also found Aaron Wall's article on robots.txt to be helpful. Good luck! Also, adding "noindex, nofollow" to the section does not necessarily keep a web page out of Google's index. When you think about it, you realize Google has to crawl the page the see that meta tag in the first place. Robots.txt is much stronger.

They'll be easily visible to a crawler. They'll be extracted based on their HTML/CSS elements, which are additional signals of importance and of website structure. Don't worry about it. If the HTML of the page includes the raw text, a crawler will understand it.

I will check all the landing pages for this, and see if it helps. Thank you for your feedback

Unfortunately, these situations can be very difficult to diagnose without a ton of details. I will say this, though, and I know it's a hard thing for many people to hear. Negative SEO is very rarely effective unless there's already an underlying problem. It may not be a deliberate ("blackhat" SEO) kind of thing, but for a negative SEO attempt to succeed it could mean that: (1) There were issues with your link profile you are unaware of. This could even be a handful of links that violate a specific guideline and that are easy to overlook. Remember, it's about Google's perception of quality, not yours (and their perception wins). (2) There's some technical issue (say a crawl issue or large-scale duplicate content) that's make you more vulnerable. (3) There's a content quality issue on some part of the site that's harming the rest of the site. Dig deep, because it's easy to see some errant 3rd-party links and assume that's the entire problem but in 95%+ of cases, it isn't. If it's really 100% bad links from someone else, disavowing and requesting reconsideration are about your only option, Unfortunately, if it's Penguin, then you have to wait for an update in most cases, and we're many months since the last one. In most cases, though, it's a combination of factors, and you may have control over some of them.

Happy to help, good luck!

URL Readability = Clickability (providing the URL is not too long.) When you see results in SERPS, the readability (reading ease for a human reader) can help your click-thru rates. It helps the reader to understand if they are interested in your content. Also, it helps search engines to know what your page is about. Underscores are not nearly as good. Category names are often automatically hyphenated by most shopping cart systems, no?

Thanks Mck and Dough.

Get the demo version of screaming frog, run a crawl and you'll find nearly everything I mentioned above.

Not sure I understand the question... ...but here is a case study I worked on. The goal was to convince people my client  could handle pretty much everything. You can read other case studies on the home page at www.lingualinx.com

Dont move it at all. Thats a terrible idea Use an updated flag in sitemap/schema

Yea I guess we'll see. Thanks for the input.