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Hi Jeff, I had the same issue with a client last year. In a nut shell a soft 404 error is when the page looks like a regular 404 error web page but the http response header returns 200 OK. So search engines think that the page is okay (a regular webpage) but there is no content on that page etc. Your webteam will need to identify how they are producing the soft 404 error pages (with 200OK header responses) and change that set-up in the CMS. Or, if these are old pages that are no longer required and are no longer driving traffic then archive/delete them. Good luck, Davinia

Thanks Keri, I missed that one

Thank you. That thought process did occur to me at the time of adding the robots txt, however that was back in March and the impressions drop has happened this week. I have updated the robots.txt to show the new disallow command rather than "/search". I also just installed my last back-up which was just before i added Google comments. Thanks for your help!

Dave, I think you're on the right track with the KPI you have listed. We have been making a shift towards removing all keyword data provided by Google Analytics (thanks (not provided)!) and focusing more on landing pages. We still monitor keyword rankings but we try to tie our efforts into the landing pages reports when discussing progress with our clients. As in: "We are targeting X Keyword on Y Landing Page. X keyword's ranking has improved while organic visits to Y landing page have increased". Now it is difficult to get that granular for every keyword/landing page combination, however providing a couple of examples will help show the impact of your efforts and hopefully calm down a client who's seeking #1 rankings for every keyword as soon as they sign a contract! Hope this helps and good luck!

I agree with EGOL. I think that a new design should improve User experience on the site and all related metrics. In this case we're speaking about the same list EGOL says, from bounce rate to conversion rate and from time on site to internal navigation. This should be tested using an A/B platform or whatever ensures you're not changing from one day to another without knowing the effect of the new design. This requires good tools and time (optimizely may be one). A new design may also improve SEO rankings and in my opinion this means, all changes made in development of the site: SPEED: improving CSS and javascripts, using of sprites and the things which may help you speeding up your site (google loves that!) URL REDESIGN: if URLs are completely messed up it could be good to review them and write more user friendly URLs. BEWARE! this may cause your rankings to dance a bit, due to 301s and changes effects. 301s can be set up in a wrong way and even if set up correctly may lose some value of the old page, so if you really NEED to update your URLs structure be sure of the benefits of that. If you're not sure DON'T CHANGE THEM. EXPERIENCE: It's a really great opportunity to make the most of mobile increasing traffic and build a responsive UI, compelling with experiences throughout all the devices. All of the above can be an additional value but consider design as an effect mainly focused on improving user experience.on the site rather than googlebot. Try to improve user experience metrics and to not HURT SEO this by maintaining the code as it is, improving it but not changing it, without changes on site contet, without changingn meta data and URL (if you don't have a clear plan on how to take advantage of that change), hope this helps!

Eoin, If you have you Google analytics synced to your Moz Analytics, you can go to Search | Keyword Rankings and then click on the Opportunities tab ( in the old moz pro its: Overview | manage keywords | find new keywords ) and get a list of keywords that people found you site for in the past 30 days.  It doesn't give you your rankings for any of those terms unless you add them to your keyword list but it does give you some other good info about the term.  Remember though, this keyword data is getting less and less as Google basically not providing it in their google analytics any longer.

Hi Jeanette! If you just added your GA profile into your campaign, it will take up to 24 hours for daily traffic to appear and a week to show weekly data (default) If you go into Search > Traffic from Search and toggle the timeframe to daily you will see data appear. Hope this helps!

I do find this a little clunky compared to other available tools sadly. I have had it for 12 months and never really use it.

I need to play with it, but it does look interesting after spending some time in it yesterday.  There does seem to be data missing from one campaign though. Like I said before, my biggest problem are similar or light colours, when i first visit analytics I can't see some of the colours, although they are better on an Apple screen than they are on a PC. A how to guide on the right side of the screen would be good.  Nice big bright button that I can't miss.  I bet there is a how to guide and I've missed it

Hi Mark, I'm checking old Q&A and see yours is still marked as unanswered. Are you looking for more answers or aren't you satisfied with mine and Tom answers? If it is so, it would be great if we can help you further. If not, it would be great if you could sign the question as answered Ciao Gianluca

Thanks for the reply, Tom. The statement you make about the rankings not magically appearing is great to hear. Have been trying to explain this to the client for a while so always good to see someone else agreeing with me. For now will continue the strategy of trying to clear up the links as best we can and looking at keywords which were not being spammed to death before and trying to rank for those.

Sorry.  I'm not familiar enough with Wordpress.com's options.

I selected the plugin called Redirection mostly because it has been downloaded 1.4M times.  My thinking is that popular plugins tend to get more testing and tend to be more compatible with other themes and plugins.  It works fine for me. Best, Christopher

Thank you so much for the responses

Hi, No I don't think it indicates a problem. Your sitemap.gz is just the gzipped version of your sitemaps and it's a good sign that they link back to all your pages.

Hi , I am sorry for the late response. For some reason I did not get any notifications for your message. Please check my private message to you.

nick I have had similar problems with "experts" in this field. Everything's expensive and is most probably not going to work out the way the expected. So far I have had more help in moz than any seo company has provided.  I just keep reading and it's starting to get better. It's no fun being screwed over repeatedly but it seems to be a right passage as a webmaster.

Only public posts are indexed by Google in terms of Facebook and other social networks. To track what Google has indexed perform the following search: "site:facebook.com/username" it should reveal the posts that have been indexed or that Google is aware of. Hope this helps

Hello George, Thank you for fast answer! I read that article and there is some issue with that. if you can see at it, i'd really appreciate it. So the problem is that if i do it directly from Tumblr, it will also block it from Tumblr users. Here is the note right below that option "Allow this blog to appear in search results": "This applies to searches on Tumblr as well as external search engines, like Google or Yahoo." Also, if i do it from GWT, i'm very concerned to remove URLs with my subdomain because i afraid it will remove all my domain. For example, my domain is abc.com and the Tumblr blog is setup on tumblr.abc.com. So i afraid if i remove tumblr.abc.com from index, it will also remove my abc.com. Please let me know what you think. Thank you!