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I missed one question you asked - as Google is unable to index content which is only available for registered users I might be a good idea to create a preview page - showing part of the content even when not logged-in. This only makes sense however if the content remains interesting enough for visitors even if only part of it is accessible. You risk to get a high bounce rate on these pages, as the content really needs to be very unique and valuable for the users in order to go through the complicated process of registration. Personally, I always get frustrated when landing on these kind of pages, and unless it's a site that also seems useful for future visits, I always go back to the search results and try to find other sites which provide the info without registration.

Normally in cases like your site Google is showing a message that the remaining results are similar to the ones.

Some reasons why Google is not displaying all results:

• You have a lot of semi-duplicate pages like http://www.blackbowchauffeur.com.au/theme-park/aussie-world-to-cedar-creek-from-cedar-creek-to-aussie-world/947583845769996550
• Some of your url's have a backslash / others not - in your internal linking you use both. The backslash version have non-back slash as canonical (not sure if this is always the case)
• You redirect url's with capitals to the non-capital version - but you use the version with capitals in your navigation
• pages like http://www.blackbowchauffeur.com.au/airport-transfer-connection-to-and-from-suburb-starting-with-h/ don't really add value for the index either
• you might also want to check your 404 pages - they look like a 404 - but non existing pages are redirected with 302 to 404 page with http status 200 - example http://www.blackbowchauffeur.com.au/price/lismore-airport-to-highfields-from-highfields-to-lismore-airport/faq -> 302 to http://www.blackbowchauffeur.com.au/404-page-not-found which unlike the page is stating has a http 200 status

Summary - after crawling 1892 url's of your site - my crawler found 1215 redirected url's (quite possible that these count as url in the results when you do site:mysite.com) as you continue to use them in your site's navigation. From the url's that are actually working a lot of them are near duplicates.

Use a tool like screaming frog to clean your internal links - point internal links directly to the final destination. Check if you really need all these detailed pages - they are just adding weight to your site and I am not sure if Google will index them properly + show them in the search results. Also correct the 4xx page - it should show 404 as http status.

Apart from all of the above - the site:mysite.com is not the most reliable way to check which pages are in the index. Check your search console (and the landing page report in Analytics) & combine this info with a log analysis to see which pages Googlebot is actually visiting. You will learn much more about issues with your site than using the site: command.

Dirk

Yes - there are plenty of people experiencing the same thing (just browse through the questions of the last couple of days).

That's exactly the reason why Rand published a post on it in this very q&a and pinned it to the top of the list - check https://moz.com/community/q/da-pa-fluctuations-how-to-interpret-apply-understand-these-ml-based-scores

Dirk

As with all kinds of certifications - it can help convince others (your boss, potential clients,...) of your skills. Doing the tests for the certification also forces you to check if your knowledge is still up-to-date. Apart from that, it's just a piece of paper.

Dirk

I think every SEO struggles with this question from time to time. It's frustrating to see competitors rank high with shady techniques. On the long run, I remain convinced that "clean" SEO and putting your customer/visitor experience first remains the winning strategy. And yes, sometimes Google does confirm it. With the Panda update in May last year I saw a lot of our shady competitors take a plunge in rankings, while our sites increased both rankings & search traffic (in some cases +60% in search traffic). So be patient, Google becomes better and better at fighting spam.

You gave the answer yourself: no continual post and (no) great content.

Put yourself in the position of a potential visitor: why should he/she come to your site. As far as I see, the topics which are covered (hotels, restaurants, real estate,...) are covered in more detail and with more up-to-date info on a multitude of other sites. Your site doesn't add a lot of added value.

There are some technical issues that could be improved, but it doesn't make sense as long as you don't work on the quality of your content.

Redirect these pages with 301 to the corresponding new ones would be the easiest thing to do. It would even be better to try to contact the site owners and update the links, but I have to admit that this could be a enormous work and in some cases you have the risk that the link is removed rather than replaced.

rgds

Dirk

If it's always identical, it doesn't seem to bring a lot of added value.

Sometimes, it's just added by default in the CMS, just in case (sometimes CMS's can generate pages you don't expect to exist). Plenty of sites are doing it (Moz as well).

The best way to know if you would need to add canonical is to check your site with a crawl tool (like Screaming Frog or Xenu's Link Sleuth). If you don't find any duplicate url's, you won't need it. You could also crawl the site of your competitor, and check if the url is always identical to the canonical (Screaming frog has this functionality). Also check your landing pages in Analytics & Webmaster tools to see if you see any abnormal url's.

Having canonical urls (apart for the duplicate content part) has no specific other advantages for SEO (but it doesn't hurt either). If your competitor is outranking you, it's probably not because of the canonical, but for other reasons.

Last, some people add canonicals to avoid scraping - they hope that the scraper will also include the canonical. Personally, I doubt that this is very useful. Somebody who scrapes content will probably also get rid of the canonical & replace it with his own url.

Sean

It's not really necessary to use canonical url's. If you are sure that every piece of content on your site is available on a unique url you don't need to implement them.

It doesn't hurt having them either. Using canonical url's (if implemented properly) can help to avoid duplicate content issues. Like Patrick mentioned, having canonicals doesn't imply that no duplicate content issues exist (I've seen sites where the canonical url is always equal to the url - which renders them completely useless)

Crawl tools like Screaming Frog are the best option to check if you need canonicals, and if you have them, to check if they are properly implemented.

rgds,

Dirk

Your SEO is right - even if they are updated, it can take a while before they disappear in Webmaster Tools. Google is not really best in class to update these warnings. I did a quick crawl of your site with Screaming Frog, and I couldn't find Duplicate Page Titles or Meta descriptions. 20 pages don't have a metadescription (/tag/ pages)

For a site of 89 HTML pages, the tool had to crawl a lot of resources though - you could consider to put a 'nofollow' tag on the reply links in your comments (the url's of type http://www.bluetea.com.au/sydney-kitchen-companies-a-buyers-guiAde/?replytocom=383 are not indexed, but the links to these pages are followed which ads no value, and is just wasting google bot's time)

Some of the examples you give are extremely light on content (http://www.bluetea.com.au/portfolio/potts-point-kitchen/, http://www.bluetea.com.au/cleaning-products-and-our-health/toxic-cleaners/  http://www.bluetea.com.au/colour-consultant/fushia-door/ , you could consider to add some text to these pages, and at least add a alt tag to the images you show.

While visually very attractive, 27 images are above 100k - check if you can compress them (think about your poor mobile visitors). Page speed seems to be quite good, noticed however your use a lot of javascript (23% of bytes transferred is javascript) - a bit strange as your site doesn't seem to be that complex.

Also check your external links, 4 of them lead to pages that do not exist anymore.(http://www.cosmit.it/tool/home.php?s=0,2,67,71,78, http://www.sampfordixl.com.au/neff/t44t97.html, http://www.kitchenwaresuperstore.com.au/, http://www.forbo-flooring.com.au/)

rgds,

Dirk

Hi,

Nothing is wrong. The non-ASCII url is translated to ASCII - the non-sense symbols you see are the translated symbols (you could test that yourself here:http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_urlencode.asp.

As Moz works with the "translated" version - it will not find the original version - but it will find the ASCII version. Google is perfectly able to handle these "international url's"

That said, Moz is not really best in class for foreign languages with a lot of symbols and accents - these foreign characters render the page grade report virually useless (see also this quesion: http://moz.com/community/q/foreign-language-character-sets-in-page-grade-reports

rgds,

Dirk

I doubt that it's Sandbox - if you look at the common signals for Sandbox (http://moz.com/blog/googles-sandbox-still-exists-exemplified-by-gradercom) your site would not be found for any keyword, not even your brand name, and have normal rankings in Bing.

I did a few very specific searches with phrases from your site both on Bing & Google:
"Everything that you are looking to achieve with your home addition or renovation project" => both have the same result (=your site)

Search for brand name - rank 1 in Bing - rank 3 google - so doesn't look like a typical Sandbox situation.

Rgds,

Dirk

PS Noticed that the speed of your site improved dramatically - so hopefully you will see you site start to rank soon

Hi,

Can't find the link on the page you give as an example - but on other pages you have in the source a link of type

<a <span="" class="html-attribute-name">href</a><a <span="" class="html-attribute-name">="{link}"></a><a <span="" class="html-attribute-name">href="http://www.....dk/video-virtuelt-cockpit-i-ny-audi-a4/"</a>

<a <span="" class="html-attribute-name">Sourcepage: www......dk/bilmaerker/chevrolet/page/2/

In the browser the {link} is encoded as %7Blink%7D

Hope this helps,

Dirk</a>

Hi Ravi,

Did you use the robots.txt tester in Webmastertools - your robots.txt mentions to block /catalogsearch - if you want to block the entire directory I think you have to use

Disallow: /catalogsearch/

On top of that /catalogsearch is only blocked for Googlebot-image - not for the "normal" Googlebot - if you want to have it blocked for all bots you have to move it to the beginning of the file. Idem for /admin => should be /admin/ and in the beginning of your robots.txt file

rgds,

Dirk

To remove the trailing slash - check http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21417263/htaccess-add-remove-trailing-slash-from-url & try one of the answers proposed there. Than add the 2 lines from the 2nd example in my first answer.

Dirk

Matt Cuts said literally about this that if this is your main concern, you should probably take one step back and see if there are not some more important issues to resolve regarding your SEO strategy like page speed, usability issues, ...etc. Full video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AsLWIuNNMU&t=11

According to an (old) study on Moz (http://moz.com/blog/results-of-google-experimentation-only-the-first-anchor-text-counts) - apparently only the first link is counted (in terms of anchor text). Matt Cuts mentioned this in the video as well, but wasn't sure if this was still the case today (last time he checked was 20009).

An older question also adresses the same topic (http://moz.com/community/q/is-there-a-seo-penalty-for-multi-links-on-same-page-going-to-same-destination-page) - answers seem to agree that there is no SEO penalty.

So to answer your question - I wouldn't really have big concerns about having multiple links to the same page. Must say that based on the description you give, I worry a bit about the usability of this menu.

rgds,

Dirk

Several elements here:

1. Migrating from subdomain to main domain - Moz "official" line is that this should be beneficial (check Rand's WBF on this https://moz.com/blog/subdomains-vs-subfolders-rel-canonical-vs-301-how-to-structure-links-optimally-for-seo-whiteboard-friday)

2. If you change your url's - 301's are still your best option. It's possible that it's not transferring all link equity - but it's still the best option you get. Watch out for redirect chains however. You might find this post interesting - also check the comments below: https://moz.com/blog/accidental-seo-tests-how-301-redirects-are-likely-impacting-your-brand. From personal experience - I have migrated several big sites to new platforms - completely changing the url structure and in most case you couldn't even notice the smallest glitch in Google Analytics. So it's not a given thing that your rankings/traffic will drop after redirects.

3. You mention that you also are doing a re-design - improving both design and content. This is the big unknown. Question is always if your carefully designed new pages are going to please your visitors. In the migrations cases where we had a drop of traffic this was very often related to the redesign - lower pageviews/visit, higher bounce rate - lower time on site. Few days after migration - traffic dropped (and it took indeed a few months to regain the original traffic/rankings)

4. Incoming links. I agree with Dmitrii: in an ideal world you should reach out to all the webmasters and they would kindly update the old links to the new ones. Realty is that some of them heard some SEO stories that outgoing links to other sites could get you punished by Google - and that it's always better to put non follow links or remove all the links to commercial parties. I fear that the risk of losing links here is bigger that gain.

Hope this helps.

Dirk

Hi,

You're site is not the only one - there seem quite a bit sites which redirect to these fake e-shops. Most likely the cause of this problem is a vulnerability issue with the slider on your site - check these links: http://wptavern.com/100000-wordpress-sites-compromised-using-the-slider-revolution-security-vulnerability & http://wptavern.com/critical-security-vulnerability-found-in-wordpress-slider-revolution-plugin-immediate-update-advised

I noticed you already installed sitelock which is a good thing. You should however also block access to pages like yourdomain/wp-content/themes/maya/inc/admin_scripts/ .  Also check that Wordpress is up-to-date (as well as the other plugins you are using), change all your passwords on the server (also change your email passwords). If needed, get professional assistance to help you out of this mess, especially if you're not technically skilled.

It's quite important that you now delete all the external content on your site. Don't postpone this - the brand owner could file a spam report, or even take legal actions (one of the url's your site is redirecting to seems to be a phishing site of canada-goose.com - http://www.jackenoutletde.org/login.html

This case is quite similar to this one http://moz.com/community/q/chinese-site-ranking-for-our-brand-name-possible-hack - but the roles are different - this question is from a site owner which didn't rank for it's own brand name because of hacking issues (which would be Canada Goose in your case)

rgds,

Dirk

PS you'll find a Belgian IP address in your sitelock logs - that's me, not the hacker

Hi,

If you read this article (https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/search-results-in-search-results/) - the official guideline is "Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages **that don’t add much value for users coming from search engines". **(added the bold)

The question is: what is a search result page.  if you're selling LCD tv's - the page which is showing only Panasonic tv's could be considered a search result from a query on the site, but it could also be considered as a page which offers value for users searching for a Panasonic LCD tv. Idem if you look for 'jobs in Montreal' - one of the first results is http://ca.indeed.com/jobs-in-Montréal,-QC - which is the same result that you would get if you would search Montreal on http://ca.indeed.com/

If these sites didn't index these "search results pages" they would almost never show up in the SERP's. I think the important part is "adding value for the users".

On dynamic search pages (or facetted navigation) Google even made best practices (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.nl/2014/02/faceted-navigation-best-and-5-of-worst.html) - even though you could consider all these kind of pages as search results.

Hope this clarifies,

Dirk

Great reply from Tom. The other way to see it (more from philosophical nature) - by definition the 'world wide web' is

'The World Wide Web (www, W3) is an information system of interlinked hypertext documents that are accessed via the Internet and built on top of the Domain Name System'. (Wikipedia)

If you site only has only incoming links, and no outgoing links - it's like a dead end street (or and end-node) and would be a bit in contradiction of what the www is (was) all about. It would also seem that you are convinced that your site has all the possible answers / solutions for a certain topic and that you are convinced that no other site could be of interest for your visitors.

No hard facts or figures to support this theory, just my gut feeling.  If you have a number of good external references that have added value content for your visitors I would certainly link to them.

rgds,

Dirk