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1. I have a few sites on Godaddy and haven't seen anything unusual occurring for soft 404s.

2. It depends on the cause - are they a large percentage of the total indexed pages? By the sound of it they're only 2 or 3 from a total of how many?

The solution is usually to check why your pages aren't returning a proper 404 error code if they don't exist, or whether there is an issue with them being redirected somewhere.

Hi,

Ideally, you want everything that's important as high up the menu structure as possible without making it too unusable for actual customers.

If it's 3 levels deep, then it's starting to get to the stage where I'd either look to move the category up if it's an important one, or possible merge it with something else that's relevant to be able to get it higher in the menu structure. Ultimately it's about managing your crawl budget and if you're burying something 3+ levels down, it's less likely to be regularly crawled unless it's incredibly popular from external links etc.

Flatter, shallower navigation and menus are always best as long as they're still usable...

I can't recommend an SEO specific project management tool, but I have used a range of the different ones out there to manage marketing, including SEO.

In terms of tools, the best solutions I've found have either been to merge several tools together - in my case, I use Slack as a communication tool which then pulls in updates and info from Trello, Asana and a couple of others. It's a bit of a pain to co-ordinate, but having Slack as the central hub helps to keep everything together, and most team members are able to see what they need fairly quickly and easily.

The all-in-one solution I've preferred has been Liquid Planner, which has a huge amount of stuff for both workflow and team management etc. It works really well for larger teams, and offers the flexibility for freelance and client access in addition to internal management, combining tasks, timekeeping, payments etc.

There's no exact rule as far as I'm aware, but generally 75-80% unique is a commonly quoted threshold.

The actually amount of duplicate content on a page won't affect how Google handle a canonical tag - either the tag is there or not, just the same as a redirect etc.

There's pretty much no-one at Google who would know every element of the ranking system, so it seems unlikely a third party would successfully replicate it all beyond what is already available via the common SEO tools.

If they really had managed to completely replicate everything to the point it worked perfectly, why wouldn't they just set up their own websites to rank highly and make money without having to do client work?

They may well have built their own internal SEO tool, which could do something similar to the Moz On Page Grader, for example.

But considering how important external SEO factors remain to be, and the fact they'd have a much more limited data set than Moz or other tools, it seems like it would be a bit pointless unless they planned to pivot to selling their own SEO tool.

So either the client ends up being saddled with a company using a tool with very little data. Or they end up being saddled with a company aiming to ditch clients and sell an SEO tool instead in the future...

Hi,

Could it be the Most Engaging Posts report, which is in your Moz Campaign menu under Social?

Is it something like 'non /' to 'trailing /' to 'https' by any chance?

It's not a major issue as far as I'm aware - I've had it on a few sites where I wasn't able to implement changes to the redirects, and it didn't stop the sites from ranking as well as would be expected.

But it's also solvable - just implement the redirect rules for http non / to https, and http trailing / to https rather than in a chain.

Hi,

It's not about 'using 404 pages'. It's about removing the occurence of a 404 page when a product isn't available...

So the answer is yes. It's fine to redirect what was a product page to the main relevant category page if that product is no longer available and you don't plan on restocking in the future.

In fact it's recommended if you want to preserve a large percentage of the link equity the original page has built up, and hopefully provide a good user experience by allowing customers to find alternative products.

The only issue is if you have thousands of products being discontinued, then the amount of 301s can affect the speed of your website. But I've managed redirects for websites with 100s of thousands of products, and 10s of thousands of error pages without any issue.

I'd echo Yossi in saying that it may be worth creating a custom 404 Error Page which helps your users if they encounter it, and also improves your branding - with most eCommerce sites with large inventories, it's inevitable error pages will crop up despite your best efforts.

And I'd echo Nitin in saying that if you might get the product back again, you're better leaving the pages on the site and allowing customers to register their interest when it reappears...

Basically what Patrick said.

Also it's worth saying that it's pretty easy to move a blog from WordPress.com to .org it you wanted to do it without a developer - having done it quite a bit, I think my record is about 30 minutes to have the new blog up and running (the only complication is if you have particular design functionality, but if you're on wordpress.com, that's unlikely)....

Plus it'd speed up the loading time for your blog which is taking a while to load right now...

It could be an intermittent slow server or one that's dropping out occasionally. There are various services which allow you to monitor uptime (e.g. Pingdom etc).

Hotlinking is definitely a bad idea - it can often lead to the original site changing the images to prank anyone known to be using them for example. Or if the original site goes offline, it'll take out your site as well.

It really depends on the website ownership and also the purpose. I know you were using examples, but if the second site is a specific stock image site, for example, they may consciously want to promote that site for images...

Sounds like it - Reddit commonly puts people in a hidden sandbox if they've been spamming.

Only you know whether you've constantly spammed your blog or been more sensible and also shared other content, commented and built up a decent profile.

But basically there's no real solution, other than using Reddit as intended rather than spamming until the situation might improve. "You can try and contact the admins to get your ban revoked. It's extremely rare for the admins to reply and/or unban banned users though".

If your username is banned, you can check here: http://amishadowbanned.org/

But otherwise it's time for a new account and IP address and not messing it up this time.

I've been in a similar situation, and I'm definitely still learning when it comes to code and development. I found the best way was to separate out the technical areas, and focus on one at a time.

In addition, it's worth seeking out actual courses rather than trying to pick it all up from free online articles. Either that, or find someone that knows their stuff in each specific area, and would be kind enough to help guide you when you need it. I've definitely found that some in-depth book and course learning, and helpful mentors, has been the quickest way to level up when needed...

Hi - it's nothing to worry about, as Thomas said.

All it means is that anyone going to nappyvalley.net is correctly redirected to the www. version. That's right, as you always want to pick one version of the url as the canonical version, and redirect the others to it.

And when you set up in Moz, you tried to track the non-www. version which is being redirected. Just select the www. version and it'll all work fine.

Seems strange that the duplicate url is being created - without knowing if you've used the Twitter embed option or a plugin, it's a bit difficult to figure out the issue. You're probably better off solving it by fixing the duplication issue, rather than hiding it with a redirect, as you'll end up with a large number of redirects in place if it continues...

If you did just want to redirect everything, then the easiest would be to add a redirect via .htaccess for anything /www.twitter.com to redirect to the proper blog post title.

Honestly, I'd question having the Twitter feed on your blog? If it's just your own posts appearing, then it's not going to offer any value over having a follow button - it's only if it's aggregating multiple sources that it's worthwhile...

Yep. There's certainly nothing to stop them from ranking, and if you're already doing well with product pages, then it's an indication your category pages should also do reasonably well.

Obviously you'll want to optimise for at the category level (e.g. Ladies Leather Jackets, rather than a specific jacket name or type), and there may be more competition. But obviously by going for broader terms, there's the opportunity to attract a lot more traffic.

In general when I work with eCommerce sites, I always tend to work from individual products up where possible, so as far as I'm concerned you're doing it in the right order...

So you want to rank at the top of search results and get people to pay for your products, but you can't invest the time to write some decent content for 20 pages?

You don't get penalised for duplicate content - what happens is that all except one result will be filtered out generally. Or you'll be seen as low quality and won't rank for any... You can canonicalise all the pages to 1 main page which will have a better chance of ranking, and that will tell Google that you know it's duplicate content. But you'll only ever have that canonical example ranking - if that's better than investing in either creating unique content yourself or outsourcing it to someone that can, then that's the route to go.

So the issue is that you have sub-pages which contain a lot of the same information about cushioning, Gore-Tex etc?

If the content is reasonably unique, then it's a case of optimising each sub page for 'trainer model name cushioning' or 'trainer model name Gore-Tex' as appropriate.

Alternatively, you could create one high level glossary page for all the terms used for all the trainers, and then canonicalise each sub page to that one - then you won't risk the duplicate content filter, and provide a useful resource for people who might be looking for Gore Tex Trainers, rather than Nike Model One With Gore-Tex Trainers...

You'd be fine with one mention of Women, otherwise you risk keyword stuff in your page title.

Plus even if it ranks, it'll look terrible in search results.

Was it a manual or automated penalty?

If it's automatic, it can take a long while before things return to 'normal'. Obviously if you've disavowed lots of links, then you'll have lost any value they were originally offering, so to get back to the same ranking positions, you'll need to build a lot of new, clean, ethical links with a decent value.

Throwing your url into Open Site Explorer immediately throws up some links I'd want to investigate and potential remove for starters. If you've already been penalised, still having any dodgy links in place will continue to cause issues.

The other thing is that traffic to the keywords etc may have changed over time. It's worth considering whether there are other trends (e.g. a downturn in the housing market), which might mean even ranking number 1 for a term won't bring in as much traffic as it did pre-penalty, simply because not as many people are looking for it...