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Hi Bob,

I use Screaming Frog for this. If you don't already have it, it's $99 very well spent. Once your site is crawled it's very easy to pull the 404s into an Excel spreadsheet and deal with them from there.

Hope that helps!

Dana

I understand why blog comments might be "nofollow" - because it preserves the page authority of the post. However, I don't understand why one would want to "noindex" blog comments. It seems to me that all that UGC, if indexed, would just make the page it resides on far more valuable.

Is my view of that skewed? Am I missing something? Thanks! (and sorry to answer your question with a question)

If it were me I would nofollow the comments but index the content of the comments.

I agree with Matt. 2013 is going to be all about 4 things (IMHO):

• Google+ and authorship
• Optimizing for the Knowledge Graph
• Structured data
• Mobile

And we'll all be peddling as fast as we can to get on top of these when, without a doubt, something completely new will come along that we haven't imagined yet ....That's what makes SEO endlessly fascinating!

Have you loaded the sitemap into Google Webmaster Tools? That's a good starting point because Google will tell you where most of the problems are and give you suggestions on how to fix them. One of the most common things I have seen is having characters in the Product names or descriptions that XML doesn't like, i.e. HTML.

I personally prefer using [exact match] instead of "phrase match." The difference is that with exact match a search for [extra large widgets] would return an ad for [extra large widgets] but not for "extra large widgets on sale." Conversely, if your campaign (and I'm making the assumption we are talking about paid ads) was set to be triggered for "extra large widgets" as a phrase match, your ads would be triggered for both "extra large widgets" and "extra large widgets on sale" plus many other variations, like "widgets extra large" or even "widgets white extra large"  I use exact match because it gives me tighter control over my ad spend. However, this is with a keywords set with which I am intimiately familiar. If I was launching new campaigns for things I didn't know as well, I'd definitely use some phrase matches until I started to see what's really working and what isn't.

Hope that helps a little!

Dana

I think perhaps the intention was that they didn't want these pages to be indexed. This makes sense for certain things/links from a homepage, like "My Shopping Cart." But honestly it looks like a lame attempt at Pagerank sculpting, which Google has been wise to for many years. The two "nofollow" links that concern me the most are the "Site Map" link and the link to their blog. Why in God's good name wouldn't you want a bot to follow links leading to your sitemap and blog. That's nonsensical.

Regarding the other "nofollow" attributes, those aren't necessary either. Get rid of them all. Matt Cutts has said on several occasions that he sees no practical reason why any Web site would want to "nofollow" any internal page. Here's a video where he says that:   http://youtu.be/86GHCVRReJs

So, bottom line, "If it's a link within your site to another page within your site, I would leave the 'nofollow' off."

There you have it. I hope that helps!

Dana

There isn't a way to do this in Moz Pro Tools, but I believe there is a way to do this in some of the upgraded (paid) subscriptions for SEMRush. I think even there, there is a limit to how far you can go back.

If you changed any of your URLs when you went through your site redesign, you may just need to audit old links, new links and your 301 redirects to make sure all of them are functioning as expected.

Ultimately, the rankings that you had are really less important than what your traffic is telling you. It could be that you inadvertently took down some highly linked and highly visited pages, and, regardless of rankings, that's hurting you now. One thing you can do is backtrack in Google Analytics and look to see if you had specific pages that were producing a lot of traffic before that aren't now. That will help you zone in on the problem and fix it.

I recommend Matt, Oleg and the guys/gals at http://melen.net/  Matt and Oleg are pro members here as well. (http://www.seomoz.org/users/profile/357534)  Hope that helps!

Hi Antonio,

Great question and great example. Yes, Google can see "amdridlive" as "Madrid live." Consequently, I think your URL in option 2 is the way to go for all of the additional reasons you suggest: shorter URL, avoids repeating the word Madrid. So far you have really good instincts. Hope that helps!

Dana

This is really a case by case thing I think. Clearly, "cars.com" is a great domain name to rank for the word "car." But who wants to rank for the word "car?" Certainly not someone who's selling cars. If you're selling cars you might want to rank for longer rail terms containing the singular "car" -  like "buy a new car." But let Wikipedia rank for the plain old word "car" because it's not going to bring you well-qualified traffic.

The second example you give "online datings" is just not what any person fluent in English would type in a search bar. In this example, I'd say definitely don't go for the plural.

You should be able to see the difference in search volume between the singular and the plural in Google's Keyword Tool. That should tell you a lot. For example, look at the search volume difference between "communion supplies" and "communion supply" - there's a big difference.

The last reason I would discourage you from buying a plural version of a niche you are interested would be if the existing company has made a brand out of the singular version. For example, Peet's coffee has the domain Coffee.com  - Some blogger has bought the domain Coffees.com...and it's totally lame...If you aren't careful with things like this you could get accused of cybersquatting or worse, trademark infringement. It's one of those situations where just because you "can" doesn't mean you "should."

Without knowing more details that's about as much as I can say. I hope it's somewhat helpful!

Hi Thomas,

I am always learning too and am very interested by your question. Are you based in the UK but hosted in the US? Or are you based and hosted in the US? The reason I ask, is that if you are based in the US, I presume that your target market is US. If you are based in the UK I presume your target market is UK-Europe. If the latter is true, have you considered changing to UK hosting? Although I don't know the whole story, it seems from looking at your site that you are indeed UK based.

I am thinking that you are having a bit of trouble ranking for a more British term because you are USA hosted. I do think the location of your host is a factor in ranking for certain terms. The problem is, I can't point to any proof to support that opinion. I am interested to hear what others have to say about this.

Thanks Thomas!

Dana

Chris,

Great job on the site. I love it! OnTwitter and FB do you follow every celebrity chef who loves cheese? I bet there are some bloggers out there that would blog for cheese {I am one of them]. My guess is an inbound link from a celebrity chef or food and wine authority site would be pretty valuable. Ask them if they'd consider linking to you if you sent them some free cheese!

Have you considered adding product reviews? I am pretty sure your E-cart integrates with PowerReviews. We have been using them on a little niche site we launched back in January and I have been very impressed with them. It's only 30 USD/month. If you upgrade to the next level you can actually submit your star ratings to Google so they appear alongside your product listing. Might be something to consider?

Great job on the site,

Dana

I have experience with applying for the google Trusted Stores classification. You are not going to be able to achieve through eBay transactions. You are only going to be able to achieve it through your own storefront with your own brand.

That being said, would you do better in the SERPS with a Godle Trusted Stored icon? Yes as long as you are only looking at Paid Search Results. If You aren't bidding in Goole Adwords, then  no, absolutely not, no boost.

The other thing to consider about Google Trusted Stores is their minimum transaction levels. If you don't have at least 200 transactions in a month, you won't qualify for the program.

Depending on your sales volume, I'd recommend looking elsewhere to get a "boost" in the SERPs.

Great question. Yes, it would be much better to put the text on the page via the CMS with CSS to achieve the same look as you have right now. The reason is that a SE spider cannot crawl text that is embedded in an image. All the spider will "see" is that it is an image containing whatever is described by your "alt" attributes. If you want search engines to be able to "read" that content, I would recommend going the route of making it actual text styled in conjunction with the image you want via CSS as you propose.

Hope that helps!

Dana

Search volume can be incredibly volatile from one region to another. I would imagine that "outage notification" as a term could be incredibly volatile, because it's really pretty vague. If there was a major earthquake, I would think that colume for that term would soar...or any natural disaster really. On the  other hand, if things had been relatively quiet and  there hand't been any major seismic or weather events, then that might mean something else.  but that all depends on where you are, and where you are trying to sell.

If search volume in a remote area of Pakistan increases by 5,000 percent, and it's only temporary because of a weird event.....is that something you can build a business on here in the States? Of course not

There are many factors to consider. Search volume is one tiny piece of the puzzle.

Thomas, I've been doing a little research trying to support my hypothesis that the location of your hosting company can effect your SERP results and I found this:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday

This is probably a great starting point.

This is a great question. There is a lot of confusion about rel=author. It is my understanding that for e-commerce, if the "brand" is speaking, that rel=publisher is what would be most appropriate, not rel=author. I have the same scenario on our newly revived e-commerce blog. There are times when we will want to list someone specifically as rel=author, i.e. if they are an expert on a particular subject, but most of the time we will want to post as rel=publisher. This is done by creating a brand page in Google Plus as opposed to an author page. Still, Google+ has the problem that a brand page must be attached to a Google profile, which must be an individual person, not a company. I would be very interested to hear others address this whole issue.

Dana

I liked the way you worded your question the first time better   Although, it's probably more specific now. lol...Sorry just had to let you know I enjoyed it.

Hii bluekite,

You need to make that read more link in your blog a "do follow." This is only going to bolster your internal linking structure, which is a VERY good thing. In your case especially this is perfectly relevant and helpful to your readers. I hope that helps!

Dana

You're welcome Dan! I just noticed there is also a post in YouMoz on the subject:

http://moz.com/ugc/the-new-adwords-keyword-planner-your-keyword-research-process