Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Darin,

Let me add my 2 cents:

If it makes sense from a usuability standpoint to have the author bio on the page, then by all means leave it there.

What's most important, from a search engine point of view, is that the unique content on the page is the most important.

This means placing the paragraphs about the print description front and center on the page. Since Panda, Google seems to treat page content using more of a Reasonable Surfer model in a similar manner as they handle links. That is, the higher up and more prominent the content, the more likely that weighs into their calculations to what the page is "about."

Matt Cutts has previously said it only takes 2-3 sentences to make a page unique, but personally I think closer to a couple hundred words is a safer number.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

Hi Iris,

Sorry for the frustration. Some of this can be a little hard to grasp at first. And in truth, it may be this isn't the right product for you - especially if you're not finding value.

Regardless, let me go over these issues one at a time.

1. Canonical - This simply means you have a canonical tag on the page. It's not a high priority, or even a medium or low priority issue. It's simply a notice so that you know it's there (in case it's not suppose to be).

In this case it looks like the tag exist as it should, so there's nothing to worry about.

2. http://villasdiani.com/?db

If you click that link you can see the page resolves, and because it's listed in the report it means our crawlers are finding it linked to (probably by a malignant link on your site - or sometimes a bit of javascript)

In this case it does have a proper canoncial tag on it, so all is good. Was the canonical tag added recently? I am surprised that our crawlers would report it as a separate page. But if it was added recently it might make sense.

3. This one's a bit more of a myster. If you look at this page: http://villasdiani.com/category/kenya-news/ The first image in the upper left hand corner has the alt text "Kenya Villa Rentals on the Top in Africa"

The only problem is the report says the link is on the homepage, and not this internal page.

If this was changed in the past month it may explain it, because we are reading the link report (which is updated about once a month) and not the crawl report (which is updated weekly). If you think there is an error in either of these reports we could ask the help team for assistance. They're usually very good at digging into technical problems.

Regardless, your site is looking very healthy.

Hi Ivo,

I've heard second hand (from respected SEOs) that when they switched TLD's it took much longer to recover full rankings traffic - but this was only one case and I'm suspicious to trust it.

Generally, if you follow proper procedure for domain migration, including submitting sitemaps for both your old and new urls and also building new links shortly after the switch, you should see minimal loss in traffic.

SEOgadget has a nice case study they did a short time ago, although I believe they maintained the same TLD.

Changing both the folder structure and the TLD at the same time does complicate things and adds a degree of uncertainty, but it's better to have one 301 redirect instead of making a chain, so perhaps it's best to make the entire change at once.

Hi Iris,

Let me answer this way. Most websites have strange URLs that are generated by extra bits of code, and they are usually both harmless and difficult to hide.

There are methods how you can go about rooting that page out, but they can be fairly complicated, but the simple answer is I wouldn't worry about it. Because of the canonical tag on the page, it's already doing what it should and passing all link equity to the homepage. And Google doesn't have the ?db page in it's index, so it's really nothing to worry about.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

The clue here is when you search for Google's cached version of the page:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.rtl.nl/xl/#/home

...which shows they associate this page with the higher directory (without the hash) or http://www.rtl.nl/xl/

Which is totally consistent with the way Google typically considers hashtags (not hashbangs #!). In other words, Google is ignoring everything after the hash for indexation purposes, but they are displaying it in search results. John Mueller of Google explained this on a very old webmaster forum:

"There are some cases where we're experimenting with showing them in the snippet (as in Colin's example), to help users to find parts of a page quicker."

So I think something like that is happening here. Google displays the URL for certain queries, but really it associates it with the higher level page, and doesn't really index/cache it as it's own separate page.

Hope this makes sense! Thanks for the great question.

I'm probably biased, but I find it hard to beat Domain Authority in the long run.

Julie Joyce at Search Engine Land recently did a writeup of the various competing domain metrics, including Domain Authority:

http://searchengineland.com/down-with-toolbar-pagerank-and-up-with-what-175886

A couple of things I should note:

• It's common for DA to fluctuate normally with each index
• The recent government shutdown included 1000s of subdomains across the Web, which had a ripple effect across many Moz metrics, including MozTrust, which feeds into Domain Authority
• DA is a relative metric, so when you see your DA rise or fall, you'll often see similar results in your competition. This makes DA ideal for a competitive metric.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

I'm hesitant to give a definite answer on this. Short answer: Yes, Google should understand these are RSS generated links and typically ignore them. But I've also heard grumblings from webmasters who swear this isn't true.

A better question might be: why 100's of sitewide links? And why are they included in the RSS? The RSS typically includes an article body without much additional navigation. If you address these issues, consolidating your links and cleaning your feed, I'd say you likely have little to worry about from scrapers.

The Open Site Explorer indexed is completely refreshed every few weeks, and currently consists of 105 billion links. While that's quite a large data set and mostly comparable with other indexes in the space, it's still only a fraction of the links on the web and only a portion of the links Google undoubtedly knows about.

The way OSE finds links is that it prioritizes pages with lots of inbound links and links it found during previous crawls. Because BBB pages are often found deep-deep-deep under layers of navigation and usually don't have a lot of external links pointing to them, they aren't easy pages for crawlers to find on a regular basis. BBB has an especially difficult site architecture, and sadly this issue comes up a lot with that particular site

We're working on including more historical data in the index, so that even if we didn't crawl the link in the past two weeks, we'll still include it if we are reasonably confident it still exist. This will help alleviate some of these concerns.

The good news (or bad depending on how you look at it) is that while OSE doesn't show every link, it tends to show the majority of the most valuable links.

Regardless, thanks for the feedback and best of luck with your SEO.

I do need to give recognition to David's answer below. For while most of the time you don't need to worry about RSS links, I've heard of webmasters who've been stung by this. It seems likely to hit lower authority sites harder.

If it is a concern, at least you have the power to do something about it.

1. Always place a rel canonical on every page, with an absolute URL (full path) This way if the scrapers take the whole page, the canonical link pointing to yourself might stay in tact.

2. If you suspect over-optimization filters you can de-optimize your anchor text, or add greater variety.

3. In extreme cases you can file a DMCA takedown request of your copywrited content, but at volume this solution doesn't scale, and is a messy business regardless.\

Regardless, these are for the minority of cases. Most of the time you shouldn't have to worry about it.

Hi Amelia,

Great question. It doesn't mean your site is spammy, it simply sounds like your link profile likely looks like a lot of sites we see that do happen to be spammy.

My guess is that in order to rank better, you may want to work on increasing your visibility by attracting more external links to your site. Does that sound reasonable? (Additionally, this would eliminate most of the spam flags)

It's a big task, but a few resources that may help:

• https://moz.com/blog/category/link-building
• https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-link-building
• http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies

Hope that helps!

Whew! Big thread.

Sometimes, when you can't find all the broken links to a page, it's easier simply to 301 redirect the page to a destination of your choice. This helps preserve link equity, even for those broken links you can't find on large sites. (and external links, as well)

Not sure if this would help in your situation, but I hope you're getting things sorted out!

Howdy,

Unfortunate, it's really hard to asses why you may have experienced a drop without a deep-dive look into your site, links, and history. But there are some basic steps you can take to help diagnose the problem.

1. Check Google Webmaster Tools for any messages, HTML suggestions, crawling errors or other indications of problems. Sounds like you might already be doing this.

2. Check the date of your drop against known algorythm updates. The Google Algo History is a good place to start.

3. Do a complete site audit. Here's a good template for one: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-perform-the-worlds-greatest-seo-audit

4. Completely crawl your site using a tool like Moz or Screaming Frog, looking for common errors.

5. Check your backlink profile for dodgy links. Paddy Moogan wrote a good guide on how to do this: http://www.stateofsearch.com/step-by-step-guide-finding-low-quality-links/

The key here is to try to identify any problems that you can fix. Sometimes Google simply changes the way they rank sites and devalues your link profile, your content, or something else that's hard to control. But once you identify the problem, it's much easier to fix.

Interesting question. I don't think Google has every penalized anyone for passing Pagerank to themselves. Technically all paid links should be nofollowed according to Google's policy. Practically speaking, in your case, it's more of a grey area although I seriously can't anticipate too many negative consequences.

Hi Wendy,

Since it sounds like you were hit by Panda first, that's where I would start. I can't be sure that it's a factor, but I found a lot of "thin" pages on your site like:

• http://www.myoptimind.com/megaworld-corporation-uptown-bonifacio-website/
• http://www.myoptimind.com/why-custom-web-design-is-important/

You might benefit from going through your site and adding value to pages like this, or going through your analytics to see what pages don't recieve many visits and/or have low engagement, and address these pages first.

If you're using WordPress, you might also consider cleaning up your tag pages such as this one: http://www.myoptimind.com/tag/e-commerce-tips/

As far as backlinks, I did find a number of low quality directory and comment-style links pointing to your site. Have you received any messages from Google Webmaster Tools or filed a reconsideration request?

Additional resources: http://moz.com/webinars/advanced-wordpress-seo

I get suspicious anytime I hear about exact match press release links. In my experience they can do little to help you, and everything to hurt.

Whenever I submit a press release I always use url links (example.com) or generic anchors, never a "money" term. This is because Google views press releases as non-editorial, and tends to devalue most links they see coming from these sources.

If that exact match link that you embedded in your press release is widely distributed across multiple sites and distribution platforms, then you're in even deeper.

There's been some talk by Google of late that the newer class of penalties and algorythmic filters can act more at the page level (whereas before they tended to be applied broadly to the entire domain.) This means if you're trying to clean things up, you can start by addressing the one page with the over-optimized links and working your way out from there.

I'd start by trying to remove the links, then possibly using the disavow if you aren't successful. Finally, if the page doesn't have a very strong backlink profile you can simply remove it and serve a 404 or 410 status code, and then remove it from the index using the Remove URL tool in Google Webmaster Tools.

Not sure if this relates to what is happening on your site or not - it's pure speculation on my part. Regardless, I hope it helps in some small way.

Cheers,

Cyrus

Google just updated thier link scheme document:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en

Links with optimized anchor text in articles or press releases distributed on other sites. For example:
There are many wedding rings on the market. If you want to have a wedding, you will have to pick the best ring. You will also need to buy flowers and a wedding dress.

Unfortunately I don't think there's much value to be gained. These services are pretty tight about protecting user privacy. And, this is a totally horrible observation to make, I've found that the majority of people "spying" on me really don't know what they are doing. There are exceptions of course, but I find it's better to look ahead than over my shoulder

Ahhhh! Yes, there are ways to do this. A couple of options....

1. If you are code proficient, our API is probably a good bet. http://moz.com/products/apiHere's some info about getting started: https://moz.com/products/api/keys

2. A less technical solution is to use a 3rd party integration. A good one is Richard Baxter's SEOgadget for Excell, You'll still need an API key which you can easily obtain from above, but it puts everything in a spreadsheet format where you can gather all kinds of link metrics.

3 Mozcheck.com This is what I suspect you are really looking for
Hope this helps!

I tend to agree with James in terms of bounce rate. Google tries to segment the most relevant result by country, so a low bouncerate outside your target market hopefully wouldn't hurt you much.

That said, you can specify a target country in Google Webmaster Tools. Instructions are here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/62399?hl=en

Using this setting doesn't ensure your website wont appear in foreign results, but it does give a "hint" to Google that the content isn't targeted for that region.

Hope this helps!

Cyrus

Shouldn't be a problem except when the following issues arise:

1. Duplicate content - easy to do when you're dealing with clients in the same niche. This actually has nothing to do with being on the same server, but I thought I'd mention it
2. Unnatural interlinking between these sites.

In a normal world, there's probably no reason for these clients to link to each other. If you are doing a lot of linking between them in order to influence rankings, THAT could raise a red flag to Google. More than likely, they simply won't count the links. Worse case scenario you get a manual penalty.

On the other hand, it's completely normal to host sites on the same server, even with a common Google Analytics account. If you're not building a link network and have unique content, you shouldn't have much to worry about.