Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hello!

Although 404's will eventually stop being crawled by Google, having too many at once can negatively affect your rankings. The  most important thing is that you do not want to be linking to these 404s anywhere from within your site. If so, you want to definitely remove those links.

If I have one or two 404s in my crawl errors, I typically will just leave them be and wait for them to be dropped out of being indexed. Some other solutions I've utilized are:

1. Make an engaging 404 page so that when users find the page they will be encouraged to stay on the website. Having a search box or some of the most popular links on the page is a good place to start

2. 301 redirect the pages to relevant pages that do exist. This will help your link juice flow and will make for a good user experience since they are reaching a relevant page.

Hope that helps!

I hear your frustration...been there, done that, bought the t-shirt

It's important to come to terms with the idea that PA/DA isn't everything when it comes to ranking. I've worked on sites where the design and conversion strategy is terrible and people were not hanging on the site too long. These sites with higher bounce rates won't rank as well. Another factor I've seen is the continuous updating and adding content (such as in a blog) helps push rankings upward. One of my sites consistently ranks higher than our competitors with higher PA/DA and I'm certain it's these factors that's doing it.

There's probably a more techy nerdy answer out there, but this is just based on my experience. If sites aren't ranking well for me, I usually suggest a site redesign and redevelopment. Doing an overhaul and clean up can go a long way.

Good luck!

Hello!

The description that is being generated is dependent on the search query. When the page is the most relevant to the search, you get the title and meta you have set. When you search the "careers," you get the relevant title and meta for that search. So even though the results is bringing a person to the same page, Google is giving the most relevant excerpt for the search query. You can only have one meta description per page so there isn't a way around this.

I don't think this is much to worry about though…it looks good in the SERPs. The title for the "SQL Sentry Careers" shows up as "Career - SQL Sentry" with relevant meta data underneath.

Hope that helps!

Hey David

Once you publish a page/post in WordPress and submit a sitemap, you are stuck with those pages. I've experienced this problem a lot as I use WordPress often. Once you trash a page there and delete it permanently, it's not stored anywhere in the WordPress CMS. They are just reading as 404s since they existed and now no longer exist.

As stated above, just make sure you are not linking to your trashed page anywhere in your site.

I've done a couple things with 404 Pages on my WordPress sites:

1. Make an awesome 404 page so that people will stay on the site if they found your 404 page on accident. Google will eventually stop crawling 404s so this is a good temporary way to engage users.

2. 301 Redirect the 404s to relevant pages. This helps keep your link juice and also helps with the user experience (since they are reaching a relevant page)

Hope that helps!

Hey Colin!

I looked at the pages and, I think, not only is the content thin but it may also show as duplicate content. My company creates and provides SEO services for a lot of eCommerce stores and we see this common issue. We typically make products such as these a single product with a way to choose different specs. That way you have the content all on one page and limits the duplicate and thin content that often comes along with an eCommerce store.

If that is not an option, I would recommend reworking the content on these pages. I don't recommend canonical due to the URL structure. Noindex will be a way to avoid the duplicate/thin content, but that also means they are not indexed by search engines and limits their possibility of showing up.

Hope that helps!

Hello

While there are good reasons to validate your code, it does not directly affect your rankings. Matt Cutts talks about this in a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPBACTS-tyg

Validation does give insight into your development needs and will help you to improve user experience. However broken code won't take away from good content and that is primarily what search engines are looking for.

When you are at the campaign dashboard, click "Search" on the left...then under that click "Crawl Diagnostics"

All that info will be there.

Indeed! I'd be more concerned as a developer that there are glitches even if it won't affect SEO. Bad business

I ran into something similar. Apparently the mention doesn't even have to be in link form. Just a plain text mention of the brand/domain will show up as a mention.

As stated by Alan, I'd disavow them if it seems shady.

Hey Ross!

Those pages are not "different" when it comes to search engines. Or maybe I should say, not different enough. The content is extremely thin and only switching out a word or two will absolutely make them come up as duplicate content. I would strongly suggest optimizing the page content and meta descriptions to be unique.

Well, if it were one of my clients sites… I wouldn't do that. While I understand your logic with a noindex, I wouldn't want to create a situation where the pages would not be about to be found at all in search engines. Although it will drop your duplicate content numbers here on Moz, it's only a temporary fix. I guess a good question to explore is how long you will need to keep them as a noindex versus how long it would take to fix the content issues.

I'm still not entirely sure about how your site is structured but I'll give it a shot…

Firstly, the noindex tag is only for pages. It tells the crawl to not index an entire page and stops it from ranking. That tag is meant for the section of the page. Nofollow tags are found within the link and are meant to stop the transfer of page authority…so you are essentially telling the crawler bots that the links are external and/or not totally relevant/trustworthy. Nofollow shouldn't be used really on internal links within your site pages because you want to spread the page rank and authority and receive the SEO benefits of that.

It's probably telling you there is a problem because you are essentially stopping the flow of link juice within your site and from sharing page rank and authority with other trustworthy/relevant sites.

So why have you made them nofollow in the first place? Maybe you can assess why and where to use the nofollow so that it is beneficial. I guess it's not necessarily a "problem" …but you are not receiving any possible benefits from limiting your nofollow links.

Hope that helps!

Exactly…. Google is the first one that comes to mind!

Hi Pete

H tags are used to show hierarchy so I would suggest changing your first H2 tag at the top of the page to an H1. After that, you can break up your content  with H2s, 3s, etc. Google will look for a H1 tag to see what the page content is about so it is important to have the keyword you are targeting within that.

Clearly organizing your design with heading tags hierarchy will make it more user friendly and will also help search engines better understand your content. Think about it like you are looking at a newspaper… the H1 gives you the title, H2 will be the supportive subtitles, and so forth

Hope that helps!

Hey there

Since you are using a CMS just about everything will show up as a page…especially if you are using WordPress. I would suggest disallowing the indexing of these pages. Even if you were able to get meta description tags in there, they wouldn't do anything for your SEO since they are just one image on a page.

If you are using WordPress, there is a setting in the backend that stops the indexing of media pages. That will stop this problem you are having.

Hope that helps!

Ahh ok I see now.

Even though you have a nofollow on your link in the navigation from your url to your wiki, the pages will still be indexed! Even if the links are not being followed by search engines they are still being indexed by them-just want to make that clear. Also, it's important to note that even if Google reads a nofollow tag they still have an option to follow it anyway. Because of the open source platform you are using, I'm not sure if there's a way to stop the crawl from indexing the link between your url and your wiki. That might take some fancy foot work. That would be the only way to get the nofollow percentage removed…but you really don't want your wiki pages to not be indexed anyway.

Moz is reflecting what the crawl bots see…such as Google. You can't tell it to not show you certain things unless you alter your code, .htaccss, or robots files to change the way the site is being crawled.

As I stated earlier…having a lot of nofollows doesn't necessarily hurt your SEO, but it will not bring you the benefits of followed links that pass link juice and page rank.

I understand it's hard to see the real issues to address when you are flooded with this other stuff, but I'm not sure you have many other options unless you want to remove the nofollows.

Just curious…why do you use so many nofollows anyway? Or is it automatically generated by wiki?

Ahhh the lightbulb just went off! Thanks a bunch

I see your issue with that…

I'd suggest moving the H1 title and the section it titles up, at the very least. Maybe under that slider? It's not good practice to bury your H1 at the bottom of your page.

Hey Jeremy

I think the problem is that your Google+ page needs to be a business page and it also needs the address of the business added there.

You can make a business page here: http://www.google.com/business/

Google will have to verify that you are at that address and then it will take some time to update after that, so if you re-upload the CSV and it's still telling you that, it might just take some time for everything to show that it is in order.

Hope that helps!

Hello Mozers!

Anyone out there have any experience using the Google data highlighter tool in WMT?  I'm just curious if it is something I should be utilizing or should just try to get the same results using microdata markup. I'm not a fan of "tools" per se...I'd rather get my hands dirty.

Just looking for any thoughts or experiences in using it.