Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Agree with Jan.  These are, in essence, paid links and Google has been very vocal about the fact that paid links should not pass page rank.

If these are banner ads with a campaign tag, Google may be aware that they are ads.  To be safe, why not ensure that links from affiliates are 'nofollow'.

Lisa

I would ask a different question, "Why am I writing an article just for SEO?"  Search engines have cautioned against thin content written specifically for "SEO" purposes, and years ago created Panda to penalize this type of content expressly.

The better question is, what is my existing content missing?  How can I focus on content marketing? That is how do I optimize the pages I already have to be more visible, engaging and share-worthy. And, how can I market and syndicate my content in a non-spammy way?

Not knowing your website, it would be hard to determine what's missing or what could be improved.

Elizabeth, think of internal links as walking a visitor to content you'd like them to read, or that you think they might find valuable as relevant to the content they're already on.

Links not only help the user experience, but they tell every audience which pieces of content you find valuable and relevant.

The anchor text you use should be intuitive and helpful for the reader.  Sometimes that means using the exact title of the page you'll be going to.  Other times it means developing the anchor text as if you are the reader i.e. why would I leave the page to visit this link?  Is it more helpful than the page I'm on?  Is it supportive research to support my story?

If you're an ecommerce site, it is helpful to link to related products within that category or collection or other products someone might need.

If you think of every page as a standalone page that someone entered from search, how would they know to get to related products?

I hope this helps!

Lisa

Thanks for your candor, EGOL.  Was just looking for some insight on where I might look outside of the obvious markers I'd already evaluated.

These forums have been been extremely helpful in the past when folks have encountered similar issues before mine.

Have a great day!

Thanks, Tom. I'm quite puzzled because I don't see anything that would indicate why organic search pages per visit have dropped 7%.

404s and server errors are fairly stable.  We did see a spike last Monday from spam that we have since fixed, so not sure if that would translate to organic.

Our organic traffic was growing in the teens week over week, and in the past few weeks, we are down by 2% or flat.  I know this is kind of a micro look, but I try to stay on top of things as much as possible.

And now the pages per visit are down two weeks in a row.  We're a news media site, so I'm trying to see if I can see a pattern, but can't seem to find one.

Thanks for your input.

If any other ideas pop into your head about pages per visit or ideas on stabilizing traffic, I'd be grateful.

Thanks,

Lisa

Irving-

404 pages seem to be stable as do referring sites, and no navigation updates.  I'm not sure about the GA tagging.  I did not implement the tagging, so I wouldn't know where to look to find out.

Any guidance would be much appreciated.

Thanks,

Lisa

Week over week our pages per visit continue to drop.  Any ideas on where to look to diagnose?

Igal-

Related question.  We just moved to a CDN for our images.  Our site is www.mnn.com and our CDN is http://images.mnn.com/.  The only thing we’re allowing Google to crawl are the images,  so we shouldn’t have any duplicate content issues.

However, what I AM seeing is several thousand warnings in Google Webmaster Tools for our video sitemap.  Our video sitemap contains about 618 videos, but we have 2,472 errors citing “Sitemap contains urls which are blocked by robots.txt” which I believe is related to the video icons in search.

When I look for a video in Google, I still see our icons related.  I can’t seem to figure this one out.

Any thoughts?

Lisa

Ryan -

Related question.  Our IT team moved to a CDN, and said that they 'noindexed' our Image URLs on our site.

Since there aren't technically dupe content issues with images, should we allow Google to index images in both our old sitemap AND the new CDN??

Thanks Keri. Cue, the song, "Wind beneath my wings."  Thanks for helping me avoid self-flagellation

Cheers.

I've received no messages from Google about 'iffy' links whatsoever, and the links they're reporting in Webmaster Toosl have declined by 10 MILLION since October.

We did go through a CMS upgrade in December which I believe had some impact, and then I set a preferred domain at the end of last month, but we were bleeding links before then.

Any idea what could have happened?  We don't engage in any link building schemes whatsoever, and like I mentioned, I've received no messages at all from Google regarding a penalty.

I've looked everywhere, because I suspected the same thing.  There is nothing on the page, in the comments or in the code that would create this situation virtually across the board.

It wouldn't be that big of a deal, but it's happening with tons of content.

Unfortunately, with a news media website, we have to have time stamps, but even if we didn't, I would have no clue how Google is assigning the dates that they are.

We're a news media site with content that has been live for a few years. All of a sudden, Google is showing our content (even though no one has touched the file) with a date stamp of '3 days ago'. Even for content that is years old.

I checked the date it was last cached, and it doesn't even match.  The URLs were last cached on January 16, but the date stamp says '3 days ago.'

From where does Google pull the date stamp?  Any ideas?

Thanks, y'all!  I figured it out!  Yay!  You guys are the best Who knew.  I expect things to be SOOOO difficult with Google, this one was way to simple.

Cheers!

Aggie

I'm in the process of trying to set a preferred domain in webmaster tools -- to set our www version as preferred vs. the non www. version.  IT is already redirecting non-www to www, but I get this message when trying to change settings "Part of the process of setting a preferred domain is to verify that you own http://mnn.com/. Please verify http://mnn.com/."

While we own the domain, I am not sure how we can have Google access a file at [http://mnn.com/[some_file](http://mnn.com/[some_file) when we are forwarding all requests for non-www to our www site.  
Note: The apache rewrite predates me and I'm not sure how / why we have two domains set up, but I'm trying to fix the preferred domain now.Am I able to verify the non version once the redirect is in place.Any ideas??? Help???Thanks!Lisa

BTW, I already posted my issue in the google news publisher forum to no avail.

It quite literally coincided with the rollout of the new CMS. We averaged 2K visits a day from Google News and now we get nothing.

I would definitely start by removing the canonical tag.  Essentially, you're telling Google that your page is not the preferred version of the page, and that the preferred version doesn't exist.

Depends on whether or not you have wordpress.com or wordpress.org.  Wordpress.com doesn't support plugins.

I think we all know by now that buying links never bodes well.  It's not sustainable and if Google catches on it could hurt worse than being patient.

Definitely submit a sitemap, and work on your long term social media strategy.