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Hi everyone,

There are a few pages on our website that aren't being indexed right now on Google and I'm not quite sure why. A little background:

We are an IT training and management training company and we have locations/classrooms around the US. To better our search rankings and overall visibility, we made some changes to the on page content, URL structure, etc. Let's take our Washington DC location for example. The old address was:

http://www2.learningtree.com/htfu/location.aspx?id=uswd44

And the new one is:

http://www2.learningtree.com/htfu/uswd44/reston/it-and-management-training

All of the SEO changes aren't live yet, so just bear with me. My question really regards why the first URL is still being indexed and crawled and showing fine in the search results and the second one (which we want to show) is not. Changes have been live for around a month now - plenty of time to at least be indexed.

In fact, we don't want the first URL to be showing anymore, we'd like the second URL type to be showing across the board. Also, when I type into Google site:http://www2.learningtree.com/htfu/uswd44/reston/it-and-management-training I'm getting a message that Google can't read the page because of the robots.txt file. But, we have no robots.txt file. I've been told by our web guys that the two pages are exactly the same. I was also told that we've put in an order to have all those old links 301 redirected to the new ones. But still, I'm perplexed as to why these pages are not being indexed or crawled - even manually submitted it into Webmaster tools.

So, why is Google still recognizing the old URLs and why are they still showing in the index/search results?

And, why is Google saying "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt"

Thanks in advance!

• Pedram

Dana,

Thanks so much for your reply.

Yes, it did drop out of place recently. Just this week I believe it dropped. Also, it hit page one just 2-3 weeks ago, then boom gone.

Across the board, our rankings for other relevant keywords are pretty solid (I say relevant because management does want to monitor our rankings for super broad keywords that have low chance of ranking). I haven't seen any major drops in traffic or ranking as I've been monitoring. Over the past few months, in fact, I've seen natural search traffic increase as the ranking for the term I'm asking about actually went up in ranks

In regards to the conversion question - that's a great way to look at it. In fact I did that and noticed that conversion using that keyword actually increased 4 fold this past month. We went from conversions beginning with that keyword in January from about 1-2% of total non-branded conversions (that we can track i.e. no "not provided" conversions), to about 9% of total non-branded conversions in the month of May. So clearly it holds some weight

That article does provide some useful insight. Upon brief scan, it's certainly useful. I'm bookmarking and reading in detail later! Thanks

Anyone else have any input/suggestions? Dana if you have anything else to add, please do!

Hi Mozzers,

I am in charge of everything Web Optimization for the company I work for. I keep active track of our SEO/SEM practices, especially our keyword rankings. Prior to my arrival at the company, in January of this year, we had a consultant handling the SEO work and though they did a decent job on maintaining our rankings for a hefty set of keywords, they were unable to get a particular competitive keyword ranking. This is odd because other derivations of that keyword which are equally competitive are all still ranking on page one. Also, full disclosure, they were not engaging in any questionable linking. In fact, they didn't do much of any link building whatsoever. I also haven't been engaging in any questionable content creation or spammy linking. We put out content regularly as we are a publicly traded company - nothing spammy at all.

Anyway, one thing I tried since February was engaging in a social media sharing campaign among friends and coworkers to share the respective page and keyword on their Facebook and Google+ pages. To my surprise, this tactic worked just like natural search usually does - slowly and through the months I saw the keyword rank from completely invisible, to page 6, to page 3, to page 2, and finally onto position 6 page one as of just last week.

Today, unfortunately, the keyword is invisible again :(. I am perplexed. It's tough to build links for our company as we are in the public and everything we do has to be approved by someone higher up. I also checked our webmaster tools and haven't seen any notifications that can give me clue as to what's going on. I am aware that there was a Penguin update recently and there are monthly Panda updates, but I'm skeptical as to whether or not those updates would be correlated to this because, at initial glance, our traffic and rankings for other keywords and pages don't seem to be affected.

Suggestions? Advice? Answers?

Thanks!

I doubt it. The titles aren't hidden at all. It looks good as you said, but it's not purposefully hidden at all.

As you said, there are many reasons as to why you're seeing dropped listings. You're targeting competitive keywords. Perhaps you should try to run a link audit on different websites on page 1 for your targeted terms and see what's going on with your competitors. Maybe they have a better (or worse) linking strategy or social share strategy than you?

Have you done a keyword density check on your site? Try to keep keyword density to around 1-3% (that's what's worked for us in the past).

Of course there are also the fundamentals: make sure you have keywords in all the right places (which it seems that you do - maybe consider putting keywords in the URL).

Hope this helps.

Thanks Kenyon (Carlton? LOL)

This has been helpful!

Thank you, Richard. That actually does help out a lot.

Very helpful, Richard. Thanks for sharing.

Could you further elaborate what you mean by "packaging"?

Hi All,

What's your opinion on sharing the same content across your social media outlets. We are targeting only slightly different markets across each social media outlet. I find it hard to develop content for each outlet 3-5 times a week. There really is so much to share. At the same time, I wouldn't want to get canned for any duplicate content or anything like that.

Along those lines, can anyone provide some advice on which social media outlets are "followed" vs. "not-followed," both in terms of links and overall indexing?

Thanks!

Wordpress certainly isn't the only way. This is a pretty broad question. Can you elaborate a bit more as to why you're asking?

Many people build custom sites and their SEO presence is just fine. Wordpress is also great. Many different platforms offer different items, so I guess it all depends on what you want out of a website.

Lynda.com actually has a great course about 6 hours long. It doesn't cover some of the new updates, BUT, it's a great fundamentals course with some advanced techniques.

You can find the course on Adwords here:

http://www.lynda.com/Google-AdWords-tutorials/Essential-Training/73287-2.html

Thank you!

Along these lines, we do a lot of internal linking from our blogs to other content on our website. Can this serve to hurt us in anyway?

Thank you both!

Hey There,

That's a pretty decent budget in my opinion. I know that some vendors can charge anywhere from 500 - 5K month depending on how robust a campaign you have.

When looking for a vendor I'd suggest to take a good look into:

(1) Reputation - How many clients do you they have and how long have they been around? What type of results have they seen?

(2) Processes - How do they go about analyzing your PPC efforts. Will it align with how you envision your campaigns to operate?

(3) Relationship - Can you depend on them with unlimited consultative services. What I mean by this is, are they going to be available answer the majority of your questions, or will they file you in order of importance in comparison to their other clients

(4) Knowledge - Make sure they know their stuff! You'd be surprised how many Internet Marketing/Web Development companies advertise PPC services just because they know it's hot and do not have too much experience. Not that this is a bad thing per se (of course we all gotta start somewhere!), but, depending on your goals and budget, make sure you are truly getting what you paid for.

One vendor that I've had some pretty positive experience with is a company called Web Mechanix. I did some work with them at my old employer and they were pretty on point. Check them out at www.webmechanix.com

Good luck!

Hi Fellow Mozzers,

Just started off here on seomoz.org and am super happy to have joined the community! I've recently started a new job as web optimization manager for an education company. There is a lot to do and one of my first tasks is to figure a better strategy for our current blog.

I've convinced our management to move our blog from topic.domain.com to domain.com/blog. My research has shown that this is a better strategy so that our blog can receive the DA of our root domain, get more people to click through our site, and even receive more natural searches (PLEASE, someone correct me if I'm wrong on this).

Anyway, our blog is currently hosted as a Wordpress blog and we're wondering if it's more worthwhile to build a blog platform ourselves or continue using Wordpress. I am not a technical guy and don't know the backend stuff to make it happen, but my concern is primarily for the optimum search capacity. Also, our bloggers frequently put links to different portions of our website - does this hold any negative  SEO value in terms of too much internal linking? I personally wouldn't assume so, but then again I could be wrong. Finally, we also track our main website using Google Analytics- currently, the only tracking we have installed on our blogs is the default provided by Wordpress (yes yes I know, but that's why i'm here -- to fix these weaknesses). I'm assuming we will be able to better track using GA when the switch is made.

So, I guess my questions are:

(1) Is my research correct in that it's better to have our blog hosted as domain.com/blog over topic.domain.com

(2) Are there any best practices in making this switch and/or any negative implications with continuing to use Wordpress or should we build our own platform (we have the internal resources to do so, but would prefer to take the easiest and best route in terms of SEO and community building).

(3) Will it still be just as easy to track using GA.

Thank you!!

Pedram