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You'd still want the other pages of the site to show up on Google so it defeats the purpose of just having the homepage show that, either way, it will be complicated if I pushed for that and forced redirects, so I would just make it simple and introduce an unblockable popup that logs IPs for that instead of making that verification page the actual home page. That way, I get to keep my optimized homepage and you can make the most of popups like introducing sharing/signups etc.

For easy niches, Ive made these things rank in the past but it's been a long time since I've worked on a site that still use verifications that way. It might be harder this time, but if it's easy enough, optimizing that page with some more content and targeted meta details should still work like a charm.

Yoast has an ecommerce plugin so use that.

It has a bit more functions specifically for ecommerce sites.

To answer the 2 questions:

Should i noindex the media and also the custom post type archives for product and gift cards and if so why?

• noindex is fine

What about the taxonomies for ecommerce? What's best practise? Noindex?

- noindex is also fine

On the sites I've worked with using that setup, those worked out fine.

• Fix broken internal and external links, like the Yoy-search url. That should solve one area of your 404 problems
• Identify why you have 404's in the first place. Find the root of the problem. Are these dead product pages? Definitely 301 them to the correct URL. If the product isn't there, consider redirecting to the homepage (or asking the linking site to change the URL to a relevant page) or showing a custom 404 page to show their other relevant offers.

Google has stated that it's going to impact a large significant amount of results but it's definitely going to be for mobile only so you should check your traffic sources to see if you get a good chunk of mobile traffic.

Dirk is right so you should look at your pages that have good mobile traffic and push out a temporary solution for that until you get a good mobile end for your website.

Good luck!

ouch that's going to be hard unless the client is really open to talking to you and actually wants to trust you.

They usually are guaranteed something when it comes to "services" like that vs traditional seo where you offer audits, "long term", "outreach" and words that tell them that it's going to **"take time" **

What I would do is just tell them that it is their decision if they want to go with them and you as a friend, would like to ask him to check out these (then name articles about it penguin or penalties)

Ask them if they are willing to change their domain in the future once they get dropped by google.

And if their site gets destroyed by google, then they will have to pay you 4 times the amount to help them recover which isn't always guaranteed.

Worked for me, should work for you.

You mentioned SS is your platform. Then it's probably an image/CDN problem.

The image will be given a page, since it will return a 302, it wont get indexed even if it's on the sitemap.

If you have a lot of images on your site, then a good chunk of page wont show as indexed in webmaster tools

Something like that

Back then, it needed a major panda update to finally see some changes. Personally, I think this is still the safer bet.

As it is refreshing monthly now, I've noticed that it still is a bit tricky to figure out. I've had sites that recover after 3 refreshes. I've seen sites recover after a full year. For what's it worth, I've never experienced a recovery right on the next minor refresh, possibly because it still needs time to fully crawl and reindex the pages.

I've actually gotten google to recognize scenarios like that for pages like that so it's possible.

I've experimented on doing some internal linking (if possible) and get a few links to come in with the $ sign.

Mention the $ sign in the body and eventually, I've gotten it to work.

Sometimes, location does affect that kind of search term though so that's another variable.

ah, no follows... according to Google, it doesnt pass anything but from experiments, it does pass and influence rankings. Some would say other wise.

truthfully, nobody really knows the definite answer to the question you are asking

You disavow it, you dip, then who's fault is it?

You dont disavow it, you dip, then who's fault is it?

Nobody would even really give you a concrete answer to this so people won't reply.

Personally, I would look at your competitors. See the % of spam they have (which is probably a lot since you are in that niche) vs their overall link portfolio then weigh your options if you want to disavow them. Whichever you choose, all the while building strong links. Those spam links are usually just non-anchored links so it does lower the chances of them becoming a problem. If you have time, you might also want to look at competitors that are receiving the same domain links, you might find the root of the problem or see how their sites react to the negative spam.

Yeah, practically every site out there gets those so I would look at the other reasons for the traffic drop.

If it's really bothering you then just domain:askives.com each of those and submit them.

There's always the possibility that Moz can get featured in the section of the frontpage results, like how google is doing it with other blogs. But I dont think it will for news, specifically.

If your site is qualified to be included then it'll definitely give you some help with SEO.

Hi!

I would look at the source of the traffic first (they have to be coming from somewhere) or IF the site has injected codes.

I've seen this happen before. Injected codes (invisible or not) then they spam you with links and traffic from different countries. Some country specific traffic gets more visibility hence more traffic from there.

I hope it's not but it's better to be safe and check if you were hacked.

I wont point at the competitor yet as that's a very minimal thing in terms of SEO. It just messes up your stats though.

it depends on the niche and the specific keyword. It's actually pretty normal on many niches. Some are monitored more closely by Google. Some get away with it for the next 3-6 (sometimes more) months

Those tactics still work, with just a few tweaks this time around and not just 1 anchor blasts. Plus there are a lot of non-mainstream tactics being applied today so it is harder to find out. You can see them with majestic, and your other link checkers, but most of the best SEO's, you won't see their links at all.

My take, I'll just go ahead and start doing other things to improve it's current rankings. I could assign someone to go over links if another team member is available.

If I see improvements, within the next month, then that's a good sign already that you should continue and not worry about the dead links.

It takes google a long time to actually forget about those links pointing to your site. So if they are dead AND then you didnt notice any increases or drops in analytics, then they are pretty much ineffective so they shouldnt be a major obstacle. I think someone coined a term for it, ghost links or something. LOL.

There was an update 3 days ago. It's not reported but it looks like a big one. Maybe that's it?

I dont think it was Penguin, as my sites that little links but great onpage SEO and branding got some huge increases.

Im still checking the others to identify the common thing.

In your case, it's sounds weird that you will drop even for bing and yahoo AND social. So that's probably not because of google.

• Check webmaster tools - impressions, how much has changed?
• Crawl your site - check problems
• Did you move to https?
• What else, besides link removal, did you do?
• Maybe check your htaccess/robots/were you hacked? Injected by an invisible code? Check Google cache
• Check analytics code are you using the universal code? Or whatever stat tracker you are using, be sure that it's compatible.

Go for exact match domains, web 2.0 blogs and profiles, and social profiles. Make them legitimate and link to them (or interlink them)

Some should get traction and push the article down. It sucks, but people like that exist in this world, but karma is a b*tch and they will pay for it

Keri just nailed it.

You will actually hear a lot of crap in places like that. Actually, ive been to events where speakers just talk crap. Stuff they don't even test, just "heard" or made up.

I would give them what they want, and inform them of the possible outcomes

More often than not (with proper redirects in place) the new page will rank on the same spot after a while.

It's a win win for them. They get what they want, they have 1 domain to worry about plus they have built a lot of links to the separate domains.

It's like the traditional ecommerce strategy: build separate product specific sites -> after building enough traffic -> 301 to category page of main domain. We all know it's harder to get natural links to category/product pages so that's what I would do.

gazzerman1's suggestion would be my next play if that doesn't get approved.

What's the exact day of the drop? Normally, I wouldn't really be concerned with a drop in webmaster tool impressions especially after a bump up, but since you mentioned you lost traffic on Bing, yahoo and social, it does raise some flags.

IF that happened around the final 3 days of the month, then you were affected by the update I mentioned which nobody seems to be talking about....

Anyway, did you check crawl errors on GWT? Did you crawl the site separately ? Did you see any problems with the index/noindex/etc?

As for injected codes, the easy way is to load pages (that you lost traffic on) in google. Check the saved cache. If you got some injected codes, they'll show up there.

There's really not much we can do but assume things. I do hope you could find the reason for the problem.

I would suggest keyword research and planning out how you want them to flow. You will also need to look at your permalinks since you are using wordpress as you might prefer to show the category in the URL

Easiest path would be to just let the post name be the permalink, excluding categories in the url, then you just move them to their respective categories.

Take your time and carefully plan everything out first, you will also need to fix the old URLs to point to the new ones so don't forget that.