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Great advice, Keri! I've updated the question. Thanks!

Hi David, Sounds like you're on the right track there which is great, though it's often better to fix the problem rather than mask it with de-indexing. Even something like giving people an opportunity to write a bio about themselves could be a great way to get some unique content on these otherwise-empty pages as a quick example. I have seen a correlation between bounce rate and rankings. This doesn't necessarily mean causation of course but whether it's because of that bounce rate or the reason__s people are bouncing less, the ranking result is going to be the same Moz also covered this topic back in August too.

Even though you don't have any geo-targeted sections, there are other indications on your site that let them know you are targeting Ireland and Google might be optimizing for that. With that said, how are you checking these rankings? Do these keywords send you large amounts of traffic? Check Search Console. Are you having an issue getting UK traffic (North Ireland)? Are you worried about UK traffic due to North Ireland? I am worried that what you are seeing is due to your own search history and settings and/or Google seeing the same search a few times and testing out different results. There might also be different competition in the Northern Ireland market. There is a ton that could explain this, but alas, as with most things SEO, it's hard to pinpoint.

I would guess its related to your issue "www and the non-www versions of their websites are both in play" meaning that MOZ is crawling them both as separate sites and you will have different links going to the www version than you will the non-www version, which will give you different spam scores. It would be good to compare the link data that MOZ gives you between the two URLS, downloading the CSV of both and having them side by side in one spreadsheet might be easier, this should give you an indication of what links are causing the spam score to be higher. I would also suggest loading both www and non-www versions of your website into Google webmaster tools if you haven't done so already.

Thanks for helping Malika! To clarify for other readers, blocking in robots.txt after the pages have been indexed will actually prevent them from being removed from the index with a meta noindex tag, since Google won't be able to crawl the pages to see the noindex tag. If staging URLs have been indexed already (and assuming they still need to exist), here's the steps I would take: Add meta noindex tags to every staging URLs If urgent, also do a URL removal request in Webmaster Tools (but this is usually not needed) Wait until the staging URLs are noindexed - you can check periodically by doing site: searches in Google. Only after they are noindexed, block Search Engines from crawling them with the robots.txt file.

Yes

Not surprising JonOS. If you've done a good enough job with the on-page, that's usually what's remaining.

Thanks Peter...Greatly appreciate your help! Much appreciated!! Have a great holiday.

From an seo perspective the domain is regionfanilyholidays.co.UK so thought category page would be /hotel/ etc

Hi Zoe, I just tried to view your Robots.txt file and was unable to access it. So I requested a crawl. The error I got from Moz is "612 : Page banned by error response for robots.txt." I would suggest you look at the file permissions of your robots.txt file. It should be readable by the public; Apache permissions would be (644). This means it is not available to view or it could be that it is in the wrong directory or non-existent altogether. It should be in your root and accessible via a browser here: http://www.guitarcontrol.com/robots.txt I would also note that some people feel that listing your sensitive directories in the robots.txt file is a security risk, and perhaps they are right. However, there are other ways to secure a directory and keep them out of the Indexes, and if the information being protected is that important, I would imagine that all security precautions would be taken. The robots.txt file is important for crawlers so it should always be used and available to be read. If security is the problem here, I would point to some high profile sites that don't seem to have a problem with showing the public their robots.txt file. https://www.google.com/robots.txt https://www.facebook.com/robots.txt I hope this helps, Don <colgroup><col width="907"></colgroup> | 612 : Page banned by error response for robots.txt. |

Hi Sandi, I thought Screaming Frog would follow 301 rules and exclude them from the sitemap. To be sure I just ran the domain and it appears to be true. With the free Screaming Frog you can configure things like ignore canonical pages, noindex pages, paginated urls, and PDF's. It also allows you to set the change frequency and priority. Screaming Frog found 428 url's and the sitemap has about 100'ish urls. Which is still in the range of easily being manually reviewed. Here is a link to the sitemap I generated for your site: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5yObTBvN3iVWFJZczJWTUlZU0U/view?usp=sharing Here is a link to Screaming Frog official site: http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/ When doing SEO it always best to have a full toolbox! I hope this helps, Don

This is something we've always done to some extent and we've been putting more of a focus on in the last few months, along with general UX. A part of our sales process these days is about gathering information on the structure of a company, their brand and "voice" and what it is they're looking to achieve from the business ideally. With that information, we can make sure our content and overall UX is on point with the rest of the company so it fits nicely. Our aim is to either integrate with or act as their marketing department and have everything look like a single, congruent package. The last thing we want is for client websites to feel awkwardly out of place with the rest of the user experience.

That's correct. In your HTML you have code as: [_this is the search icon and as it's created it fool some bots that there is file javascript(0) in current folder. So if i'm here: http://www.jasonfox.me/infographics/page/9/ then bot add file this as relative and full path became: http://www.jasonfox.me/infographics/page/9/javascript(0) and this is how 404 is make. Correct way is to replace "javascript(0);" with "javascript:void(0)" or with "#". Only this patch in WordPress theme (look around header.php) will stop 404s._](javascript(0);)

Agreed! If the copy is same it would be duplicate. It might be worth looking at the URLs - versions with and without trailing slashes, www and non-www, different protocols serving the same copy. They all look same and one to the human eyes but search engines consider them as duplicate. Maybe more details on the URLs would help us answer your query better.

I saw this and thought it might be related: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-fluctuations-continue-likely-not-penguin-21489.html

Hi Floriane! Could you send your question to help@moz.com so that we can take a look at your campaign and see why this might be happening? Thanks! Kevin Help Team