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Great! (you can ignore my last answer below - I wrote it before I noticed that you solved it already)

Dirk

In the example you give the meta description is too short (70 characters - should be 155 or even longer). If Google thinks your meta description isn't good at describing the content on the page, it will select another part of the content which seems to be more appropriate.

I would try to make the meta description a bit longer & teasing. The text should be both descriptive & teasing for the searcher to click on it. Check here https://moz.com/learn/seo/meta-description

Dirk

@nateknox & @rachel.cachel: This question is more than 1 yr old - apart from the original poster & the people who replied nobody is seeing the questions you ask. If you need help - post a new question in the Q&A

Hi Ronell,

Nice ideas but when you do a post to promote Youmoz you might also consider speeding up the review process a bit. Not really motivating if you submit a post to get the message "We'll review your article as swiftly as we can, but because of the high volume of posts we receive, it could take several weeks for us to get to yours. ".  This is not really in line with your answer to the question of Donna ("Turnaround has more to do with the quality of the post than anything else") - you can't judge the quality of a post before reading it.

Dirk

Length of url & number of folders have some importance (see also http://moz.com/blog/15-seo-best-practices-for-structuring-urls - point 6 & 11) but I don't think they are major ranking factors.

What is important however is the depth of the site (how many clicks needed to reach the content you are integrating) - As you are integrating a old site on in another domain - I would try to make sure that you have sufficient crosslinks between the part you are integrating & the existing content. If you only have 1 link from the home to the "integrated" site, you'll be moving the old content one step deeper in the structure, which might have a considerable impact on your ranking (I was unfortunate enough to experience it on one of my sites)

Hi Justin,

If you want to redirect to home I guess you should just put / as the destination url (as told - not really an expert in Yoast)

I think the rule should look like

Redirect 301 /folder_to_be_removed/ /

Could you give it a try?

rgds

Dirk

There is long article on the dev blog how they determine whether pages are duplicates - check https://moz.com/devblog/near-duplicate-detection/ - it's quite technical stuff - but this is the part which might interest you:

"This leads to one of the questions we get asked a lot: Why do I see duplicate content warnings in the context of Custom Crawl for pages that I see as different. Ultimately, it’s always because of the same reason: because no dechroming is done, there is a small amount of unique content relative to the total content. One of the places where this crops up a lot is web stores, where there’s a large amount of chrome layout, but only a short product description associated with it."

Dechroming : removing things like navigation, footer, ..etc from the page (exact def. to be found in the article)

If you compare both pages - apart from the image & product title there isn't too much difference between them so the crawler sees only a very small % of content which is different and marks them as duplicates.

Dirk

Hi Chris

you can optimize a subdomain-  although it's always better to use the main domain. In your case it depends a bit on the flexibility you have to create unique content  within the provided template.

i assume that the second question is about accessing the same content using a different url - it's not necessarily a problem & can even help from SEO point of view if you are able to define the canonical url on the template site

Situation would then be: template site mysubdomain.bigsite.com - all urls have canonical to mypersonalsite.com -> all the urls of the template site will be indexed on mypersonalsite.com

if you cannot define the canonical url it's duplicate content and should then be avoided.

rgds

Dirk

Hi Ronell

Just to clarify - I don't argue that there is a the link between review time & quality of the post. I am quite happy with the quality of most of the  posts on Youmoz so you are certainly doing a good job.

I am not a native English speaker. If I get a message that it can take weeks before an article is reviewed for me this is equal to "it can take weeks before we read your post". Hence my remark - you can't judge the quality of a post before reading it and so your reply to Donna sounded a bit odd to me.

I understand from your answer that you do a quick review of the new posts every day. Probably it would be better to state this in the initial message (we did a quick review and it's a gem/interesting but will need some rework/needs to be completely rewritten/completely rubbish) rather than stating a generic message that it will take weeks to review.

Reading between the lines - by getting the generic message I understand that my post is simply not good enough at this point and is hidden somewhere at the bottom of the pile

Dirk

Hi

Not sure if the indexing problem is solved now, but I did a few other checks. Most of the tools I used where able to capture the problem url without much issues even from California ip's & simulating Google bot.

I noticed that some of the pages (example http://www.gazetaexpress.com/fun/) are quite empty if you browse them without Javascript active. Navigating through the site with Javascript is extremely slow, and a lot of links don't seem to respond. When trying to go from /fun/ to /sport/ without Javascript - I got a 504 Gateway Time-out

Normally Google is now capable of indexing content by executing the javascript, but it's always better to have a non-javascript fallback that can always be indexed (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.be/2014/05/understanding-web-pages-better.html) - the article states explicitly

• If your web server is unable to handle the volume of crawl requests for resources, it may have a negative impact on our capability to render your pages. If you’d like to ensure that your pages can be rendered by Google, make sure your servers are able to handle crawl requests for resources.

This could be the reason for the strange errors when trying to fetch like Google.

Hope this helps,

Dirk

Hi,

If you still find errors in WMT I would do a full site crawl with screaming frog to be sure that no errors remain.
Apart from that, I fear you will have to be patient & hope for the best. One of our sites was hacked (2times in a 3 month period) - we lost about 30% of search traffic, and it took us about 3 months to recover (we fully recovered, but we were in a pretty specific niche, with a lot of long tail searches and not that much competition)

rgds,

Dirk

Hi Justin

Google doesn't seem to be figuring out (even with the correct hreflang in place) which site should be shown for each country.

If you look at the cached versions of your .com.au & .com versions it always the .co.nz version which is cached - this is probably also the reason why the meta description is wrong (it's always coming from the .co.nz version) and why the % of url's indexed for each sitemap (for the .com & .com.au version) is so low.

Try to rigorously eliminate all cross-references in your site - to make it more obvious for Google that these are 3 different sites:

• in the footer - the links in the second column are pointing to the .co.nz version (latest articles) - change these links to relative ones

• on all sites there are elements you load from the .com domain (see latest blog entries - the images are loaded from the .com domain for all tld's

As long as you send these confusing signals to Google - Google will mix up the different versions of your site.

rgds,

Dirk

this is the way I understood it - if you can add the canonical url to each page it is ok. If you can't add the canonical you shouldn't mask the url as you will be creating duplicate content as each page is accessible on 2 urls, the subdomain and your personal domain

To quote Google: Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar.

Having one image on two different posts - even when alt & title are identical will hardly qualify as duplicate content. A lot of sites (even well known publishers) are reusing the same images on their pages - if you're talking about stock photos - these are used on millions of sites. You won't be able to rank them for Image Search - but they won't hurt you either.

Dirk

Strange case - you do rank for the full title (Formosan Odyssey: Taiwan, Past and Present - position 3) - and number 1 for the first phrase of your description. Google works in mysterious ways...

Two remarks on the page - the image of the cover is incredibly heavy (https://camphorpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Formosan-Odyssey-cover.jpg) - you might to optimise that & there is an issue with the review markup (check https://developers.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/  - reviewed item is missing)

However - the heavy covers equally apply to the other pages on your site, and I imagine the review markup problem as well so it's not an explanation of why this specific page doesn't rank for the book title.

rgds,

Dirk

Hi

If the template is marked as responsive it should pass the mobile friendly test. Main issue with these templates is that they are very often stuffed with a lot of features that you're not going to use (resulting in heavy css / js files). This could have a negative impact on the load time of your page. That said, I guess most people just buy Wordpress themes rather than develop themselves.

rgds,

Dirk

Hi Justin

Probably the easiest way to eliminate these cross references is to ask your programmer to put all links as relative links rather than as absolute links. Relative links have the disadvantage that they can generate endless loops if something is wrong with the HTML - but this is something you can easily check with Screaming Frog.

If you check the .com version - example https://www.zenory.com/blog/tag/love/ -it's calling zenory.co.nz for plenty of links (just check the source & search for .co.nz) - both the http & the https version

You can check all these pages by hand - but I guess your programmer must be able to do this in an automated way.

It is also the case the other way round- on the .co.nz version - you'll find references in the source to the .com version

In screaming frog - the links with "NZ" are the only ones which should stay absolute - as they point to the other version

Hope this clarifies

Dirk

Hi Margaret,

You should read this review on the Moz spam tool written by Marie Haynes, who is quite knowledgeable on link removal & spammy links. Basically, the tool can be useful, when used in combination with other tools and with manually reviewing the links themselves. So don't take decisions only based on the score of the tool - Ryan made some valuable points on how to determine if a link is spammy. You should also read this post by Marie on how to identify unnatural links.

Based on these elements, you can make a decision whether or not to disavow these links.

rgds,

Dirk

Marcel

with this setup Google considers your mobile site as the mobile view of your desktop site so in terms of authority it should not have an impact on authority. Most sites we have in this setup have same rankings for mobile & desktop searches.

rgds

Dirk

Hi,

You could put a 301 redirect of the old image folder to the new location. The easiest alternative is to keep the images in both places for a while, until Google has indexed the new location (which can take a few weeks/months). Normally, if all the internal links have been updated, there should be no links to old location, so these images will disappear from the index and replaced by the ones in the new location. Once they are indexed on their new location, you can delete them in the old location

rgds,

Dirk