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If it's Amazon you are concerned with you could probably just leave them as-is. However, you could also run a scan of your site using a tool like Screaming Frog or OSE and look for outbound links going to Amazon.com and other known affiliate sites. This will at least make tracking them down to manually update them easier. You could probably have this done at the database level too, though that is something for which you'll probably want to hire a DBA. The following article has the best idea I could find for your situation, though it still isn't perfect because you could be applying a nofollow meta tag (as opposed to a nofollow link attribute) to pages that have both affiliate links AND editorial links that you want followed. At any rate, I hope this helps: http://www.bradlinder.net/2011/05/how-to-add-nofollow-attribute-to-all.html

I have been using Yoast SEO from the start and it hasn't helped. I already noindex subpages and tags etc. I am talking about individual posts that I am concerned are considered thin content from when I first started the blog. I cleaned up duplicate content found in Google Webmasters as well as crawl errors. My rankings keep getting worse despite a lot of quality back-links and more readers. I keep improving my site and my growth is going well but Google keeps pushing me down and I don't understand why.

Moz has their own list of recommended SEO providers who they vouch for which can be found at: http://moz.com/community/recommended. You can also look for Moz Associates, like Dan Shure of Evolving SEO, who Moz trusts to provide expert advice on the Q&A forum.

And keep an eye out for sweeping generalities--there's not much in SEO that is 100% black or white.

Thanks for this excellent answer. I did a search and my site is the only one that came up in the results. The scraper site is not loading so I guess it is gone. I think I have the rel="canonical" tags on all my pages because I have the Wordpress SEO by yoast plugin. Thanks so much because I really don't have time for letters and lawyers.

That would take forever! Seriously! But I have no programming skills whatsoever.

It is just one of the plugins you can research and possibly find more that will have filters etc. Yoast's SEO plugin has powerful features and you can follow no follow by pages, and you might have some other way of doing no-follow maybe based on categories

Is the comment on each page, or is there a sidebar saying "[You] commented on a post", or something to that effect? If the actual comment is on each page, it's something wrong with the site and it'll disappear when the admin corrects it. If the other option, then it should also show several other commenters - it shows the latest comments and yours will be removed when enough people comment to push you off of that list.

I wouldn't expect you to remember!

Okay, a few points: 1. In addition to using Yoast to noindex archive subpages, you may want to also consider seting it to noindex both tag and category pages. These are found in Yoast under "Titles and Meta > Taxonomies" 2. While the Yoast plugin will put a "Noindex" tag on the page, this doesn't remove it from Google's index right away. Google first has to crawl the page. Using the index removal tool does help. 3. If your site dropped from 320 visits a day to 30, you may have different problems than duplicate title tags and/or content. Not sure what to tell you to look at, but backlinks, penalties or something else may be to blame. If you're interrested, here's a great (free) webinar on Wordpress SEO http://moz.com/webinars/advanced-wordpress-seo

You've been extremely helpful. Thanks!

I am using Yoast. I did the recommended settings. But Google seems to be ignoring the archive settings and indexing past page 1. Can I reboot Yoast or something to try and get it to "take"? I don't use tags or author archives and those are noindexed. My archives show the full article. I would like to do a preview but without a picture it is just way too boring. I should probably figure out how to show a picture preview. I am using Genesis. Suggestions?

Thanks!

Hi Dan, Great answer down, all the best, Thomas

It's from adsense. Here is everything you need to read: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13462795/determine-which-advertisement-made-a-request-to-eyeblaster-addineyev2-html

I am using Wordpress and Genesis and I cannot figure out how to give my header image a keyword. I can't do an H1 on my homepage because it would look terrible. I was thinking about putting it in my sidebar but would that cause problems with my category pages that target other keywords? I have gotten some errors for self-cannibalizing. Thanks for your help!

Excellent that you're using WordPress. That's a good start You can get rid of the categories section by using This fantastic plug-in then clicking the do not show categories http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/ Another tool that his help me a lot to get other pages to write very well is Scribe content by copy blogger here's some info http://www.copyblogger.com/scribe-4/ http://scribecontent.com/ If you're able to use HTML5 please do it. The schema will improve your rankings dramatically and the size of your page will shrink dramatically. I would also highly recommend using manage WordPress hosting WP engine, ZippyKid, web synthesis and Pagely. a managed word press host is all going to help you immensely with word press problems that most hosts will simply tell you I'm sorry your servers up these guys will actually solve the problem for you it is well worth the small extra fee. The backups, security and site speed would be almost impossible to replicate on other systems for the small price that you pay with these systems. Here's an honest review from a friend of mine who is using a VPS and had a very fast server in place however now uses manage WordPress hosting http://www.gregreindel.com/wordpress-hosting-zippykid-giving-it-a-try/ Advanced WordPress SEO and duplicate content Once you’ve done all the basic stuff, you’ll find that the rest of the problems amount to one simple thing: duplicate content. Loads of it in fact. Out of the box, WordPress comes with a few different types of taxonomy: date based category based tag based Next to that, it seems to think you actually need to be able to click on from page to page starting at the frontpage, way back to the first post you ever did. Last but not least, each author has his own archive too, under /author/<author-name>/</author-name>, resulting in completely duplicate content on single author blogs. In essence that means that, worst case scenario, a post is available on 5 pages _outside_of the single page where it should be available. We’re going to get rid of all those duplicate content pools, by still allowing them to be spidered, but not indexed, and fixing the pagination issues that come with these things. 3.1Noindex, follow archive pages and disable some archives Using the WordPress SEO plugin, make sure to prevent indexing (or even existence) of archive pages that do not apply for your site. You do this under SEO → Titles & Metas, where you’ll find the following options on the “Other” tab: [image: Titles-Metas.png] The settings above are the settings for my site. As you can see, I’ve completely disabled the date based archives, as I don’t use those. Any date based link will redirect to my homepage because of this setting. I’ve left the author archives untouched, but I have checked a checkbox on the General tab, which makes the subpages of those archives be noindex, follow by default. So you’ll never land on page 2 of an archive on my site from the search engines: [image: noindex-subpages.png] On smaller sites it might make sense to noindex either the category or the tag structure, but in my experience noindexing those on yoast.com does little to no change at all. There is one type of archive that is noindex,follow by default as well in the WordPress SEO plugin: the search result pages. This is a best practice from Google for which a setting is left out as you should just have that anyway. A lot has changed in how Google handles paginated archives recently when they introduced their support for rel="next" and rel="prev" links. I’ve written an article about that: rel="next" and rel="prev" for paginated archives, which is a bit too technical to fully list here, but suffice to say my WordPress SEO plugin takes care of _all_the needed changes automatically. 3.2Disable unnecessary archives If your blog is a one author blog, or you don’t think you need author archives, use WordPress SEO to disable the author archives. Also, if you don’t think you need a date based archive: disable it as I have. Even if you’re not using these archives in your template, someone might link to them and thus break your WordPress SEO… 3.3Pagination Thirdly, you’ll want to make sure that if a bot goes to a category page, it can reach all underlying pages without any trouble. Otherwise, if you have a lot of posts in a category, a bot might have to go back 10 pages before being able to find the link to one of your awesome earlier posts… There’s an easy fix, in fact, there are several plugins that deal with this. My favorite one by far is WP-PageNavi, maintained by Scribu, one of the best WordPress developer around. If you have the Genesis Theme like we do here on Yoast.com, you can just enable numeric navigation under Theme Settings → Content Archives. 3.4Nofollowing unnecessary links Another easy step to increase your WordPress SEO is to stop linking to your login and registration pages from each and every page on your blog. The same goes for your RSS feeds, your subscribe by e-mail link, etc. WordPress SEO automatically nofollows all your login and registration links, but you really shouldn’t have a login link in your template in most cases. 3.5Canonical In february 2009, the major search engines introduced the rel="canonical" element. This is another utility to help fight duplicate content. WordPress has built-in support for canonical link elements on single posts and pages, but it has some slight bugs in that. It doesn’t output canonical links on any other page. With my WordPress SEO plugin activated, you automatically get canonical link elements for every page type in WordPress. 4A site structure for high rankings Blogs are spidered so easily due to their structure of categories, tags etc.: all articles are well linked, and usually the markup is nice and clean. However, all this comes at a price: your ranking strength is diluted. They’re diluted by one simple thing: comments. 4.1Pages instead of posts You’ve probably noticed by now, or you’re seeing now, that this WordPress SEO post is actually… not a post. It’s a page. Why? Well for several reasons. First of all, this article needed to be a “daughter”-page of my WordPress page, to be in the correct place on this blog. Secondly, to rank for the term [WordPress SEO], this article has to have the right keyword density. And that’s where things go wrong. Comments destroy your carefully constructed keyword density. That’s why I decided to make my most important articles into pages. That way, you can easily update them and do a new post about what you’ve changed. 4.2New wine in an old bottle If a post on your blog becomes incredibly popular and starts to rank for a nice keyword, like mine did for WordPress SEO, you could do the following: create a new page with updated and improved content change the slug of the old post to post-name-original publish the new page under the old post’s URL, or redirect the old post’s URL to the new URL send an e-mail to everyone who linked to your old post that you’ve updated and improved on your old post wait for the links to come in, again; rank even higher for your desired term as you’ve now got: more control over the keyword density even more links pointing at the article the ability to keep updating the article as you see fit to improve on it’s content and ranking Some among you will say: I could have 301 redirected the old post to the new one with the same effect. True. Except: you’d lose the comments on the old post, which is in my opinion a sign of disrespect to people who took the time to comment, and 301 redirects take quite a bit of time sometimes. Of course you should treat this technique with care, and not abuse it to rank other products, but I think it can be done in everyone’s benefit. For instance this article: if you came here through a social media site like Sphinn, expecting an article about WordPress SEO, that’s exactly what you got! 4.3Linking to related posts One way of getting search engines to get to your older content a bit easier, thus increasing your WordPress SEO capabilites a LOT, is by using a related posts plugin. These plugins search through your posts database to find posts with the same subject, and add links to these posts. There are quite a few related posts plugins but I tend to stick with the Yet Another Related Posts Plugin or custom code in my own theme. A very good alternative isMicrokid’s related post plugin, which lets you manually pick related posts. This might cost a bit more time before you hit publish but might very well be worth your while. There are also a lot of plugins that will automatically link certain keywords to certain posts. I do not like this at all as I find it to look very spammy. http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/www.google.com/en/us/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf I hope this is all talk to you sincerely, Thomas

OK I see. Well I am using the Wordpress SEO plugin by Yoast and he says the plugin takes care of this problem so I don't know why this is happening. I am using the Genesis Theme.

Without poking around your blog, I can't really offer much more advice.

I'd be interested for more details on this, if you have any, as this is what I have been doing.  I can't tell if it has done harm but then I can't tell if I'd have done better if I hadn't done it.