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You will be just fine if you remove your feed.

With the death of Google Reader and the lack of Feedburner support, I wouldn't be surprised if Google got rid of Feedburner down the road.

Hi Vjay,

That section is powered by the brand's Google+ company page. I don't think there is an official way to achieve this, but I think this is what it takes.

• Set-up a Google+ page for your company, fill it out entirely (full Company name), including nice pictures. Update it regularly.
• Be sure the page is linked to your brand's website and vice versa.
• Be sure your company sends strong brand signals to Google (people actually search for your brand)

Essentially, you need to figure out the primary causes of duplicate content and then pick a way to handle it. A great spot to find your duplicate content is in Google Webmaster Tools under the HTML Improvements section. Look at the section titled "Duplicate Title Tags" and this will show you a spot where you very well may have duplicate content.

The primary ways to take care of it will be:

• NoIndexing
• Canonicalizing
• Parameter Handling in Google Webmaster Tools

Choosing which technique you use will likely be a result of what you are technically able to implement, based on each unique challenge from the different causes of duplicate content. You likely won't be able to kill all of the duplicate content at once. I suggest handling it in chunks. For example, first tackle the Items Shown problem you reference in your question. As you mentioned, you could canonicalize it. Basically, whenever the URL reflects your Item Parameter, you could canonicalize it back to the representative URL.

ie: yoursite.com/category-results&items=15   --> would canonicalize to yoursite.com/category-results

Once you have the Number of Item pages out of the index, focus on the next biggest cause of duplicate content.

Hi Dana,

While technically a paid link and against TOS... I wouldn't recommend changing it or worrying about it. And I'm a pretty conservative SEO. Every backlink profile has some bad links. Old bookmarking sites, comments on random sites, scraper sites, whatever the cause may be. If this link has been there for years without problem, don't worry about changing it.

Now, if you had 10-50 similar paid links, I would recommend actively changing them to nofollow as it would look like you were trying to be manipulative to the rankings and would be a good preventative measure.

I agree with EGOL's advice.

Another thing to consider is, do you interact with other influencers in your niche? If you post a good piece on content on your site, are there influential people in mind who might reasonably tweet it and help you attract additional shares and links? If not, perhaps you should share the article on a more popular site and use it to start building some relationships which will result in future links coming your way. Start building a relationship with everyone who comments on your post or tweets the link.

Focus more on your users and this: "or at some point, you just don't care about keywords and write whatever relevant to your site"

You will begin to get traffic for keywords that are important to your users and company that keyword tools had little to no volume listed for.

I would have absolutely no concerns over changing your content, as long as you are confident you are changing it for the better.

I would definitely recommend implementing NoIndex, Follow on Archive pages. On a blog, you want your Actual Posts and potentially even your post categories to rank. There is little chance page 3 for category/author has any value to the search engines so you should simply tell them to crawl the page but not index it.

You most definitely can canonicalize the https pages to their respective http pages. I have done this on websites and had great results in keeping one version of the site in the index.

As always, make sure your sitemaps accurately reflect your canonical URLs.

I think link building can become a priority after these other important factors are in place.

Easily Crawlable

Good architecture and UX

Nice design

Great content

Acceptable conversion rate

You are sort of in an odd situation. You could tell Google that the "p" parameter is for pagination and they would better understand that. However, the canonical tag usage sort of tells Google that all of your paginated pages are actually duplicates of the first page.

A quick glance at your site and I can see you are still ranking for a large variety of keywords, but as you mentioned it's mostly pages 3-10. There doesn't appear to be any glaring issues with your basic wordpress setup. I'm not sure why you dropped so much around that specific date, but if it was me I would try to increase your number of external links. Even though you are targeting low competition keywords, for whatever reason since November you just don't seem to have the authority to push your posts up to the top page. I see 22 total linking domains to your site. Every single link you acquire makes a huge improvement over your existing backlink profile.

I would absolutely delete them. Take note of the products that have any external links or organic traffic and consider redirecting them.

Hi Kathleen,

Removing pages can be a scary thing, but if those pages don't garner much traffic in the first place and you 301 redirect any with external links pointing at them to the most relevant page on your new site, you'll be fine. Quite often removing low quality pages (not sure if you think yours fit this description) can actually lead to a nice improvement in organic traffic.

Save your money and your time. Put them both towards creating something of value on your website. Pay a designer to improve your best piece of content. Pay a writer to create a new piece of content. Do it yourself with your free time.

Sadly, sometimes Directories can still work. However, it is not a safe, long-term tactic and you can get more value by putting your resources somewhere else.

SEOmoz has a list of directories that you can consider. http://www.seomoz.org/directories

Go after every link you think you can acquire that is relevant (topic overlap) and not spammy in any way. Plenty of great small sites out there that have DAs below 30.

Hi,

Without looking at the site, it can be a bit difficult to see if you have things set-up correctly.

You mention WordPress. Have you considered using an Authorship Plugin? I know there are many out there and I assume most work just fine.

I believe you can even set-up single person authorship through Yoast's SEO plug-in.

You could use Screaming Frog to do something like this. Go to Configuration-> Custom and add the word or phrase you are looking for. Screaming Frog will collect URLs that have that word in the site HTML.

You should be able to get this accomplished by creating a recipe on https://ifttt.com/

Create a RSS to Twitter recipe and it should work out just fine.

Removing backlinks, especially ones with money anchor text, will most definitely cause your rankings to decrease. I can only assume you did this because you viewed the links as spammy or something that could eventually cause you future ranking problems at an algorithmic or manual level. If that is the case, you probably made the right decision if you are hoping this site will rank for the long-term.

Instead of restoring those links, try to find a way to create a few new ones that you feel are safe for the long-term.