The easiest way would be to put the robots.txt in the root of your subdomain & block access for search engines

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

If you subdomain & the main domain are sharing the same root - this option is not possible. In that case, rather than working with robots.txt I would add a canonical on each page pointing to the main domain, or block all pages in the header (if this is technically possible)

You could also check these similar questions: http://moz.com/community/q/block-an-entire-subdomain-with-robots-txt and http://moz.com/community/q/blocking-subdomain-from-google-crawl-and-index - but the answers given are the same as the options above.

Apart from the technical question, qiven the fact that only the labels are translated, these pages make little sense for human users. It would probably make more sense to link to the normal (English) version of the blog (and put (en Anglais) next to the link.

rgds,

Dirk

These are normal 404 errors - the :443 after the url just indicates that it's using the https port (you can add the 443 after each of your https urls - they redirect to the normal ones); Don't know why wordpress is adding the :443

Check your site if you have internal links to these 404 pages (try Screaming Frog or another crawltool. These pages seem to have existed in the past: check this example http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_M5jZnMoFmcJ:https://www.compleetverkleed.nl/hoed-al-capone-panter-8713647758068-2/+&cd=2&hl=nl&ct=clnk&gl=nl

If no internal / external links to these pages exist - this problem should disappear after a while.

rgds,

Dirk

Do you get al lot of traffic from image search? If not, I don't think it really matters, there are thousands of site who are using the same setup as you.

if you get a lot of traffic from image search you need to be careful. Never moved from main domain to sub domain, but did a recent migration of a site where 80% of traffic came from image search. All the images were moved to a new folder.

In my experience, the image index is updated much slower than the normal index, and while google is quite fast to index the redirected urls it seems to need  much more time for the images. On a previous migration we had the situation where the image thumbnails where still visible, but as soon you did preview the image the image didn't load as it had moved from it's original location. The problem with image search is that when this happened the position of the image remained in the results the site behind it changed (at that point we also discovered that an huge number  of sites had stolen our original images).

To avoid this we now migrated the images to the new location and updated the links in the html, but we also kept the same images in the old location until we had the impression that they were no longer indexed.

this strategy seemed to work as unlike the first migration our results from image search were unaffected.

hope this helps

Dirk

There was an update of the Moz index yesterday - so it's not really abnormal that there are some fluctuations. If you want to read more about that - check this post from Rand https://moz.com/community/q/da-pa-fluctuations-how-to-interpret-apply-understand-these-ml-based-scores which explains quite well what's happening.

Dirk

Hi George,

The reason why these pages are identified as real is that they are real; try these url's in web-sniffer.net and you'll see that they generate a 200 status code. They are certainly not redirected.

They originate on the page http://www.immigroup.com/news/top-8-canadian-immigration-law-schools - you put double quotes around the links to the universities hence the strange url's. Apart from the fact that it's generating duplicate content (all these pages are identical apart from the url), it's not really dramatic & easy to fix.

Personally, I would be more worried about the H1 titles which are identical on most of the pages, the meta descriptions which are missing, the mixing of languages (english, portuguese?), the heavy images (>100K). Your internal linking could be improved as well, sometimes you link to the non-www version, sometimes to a https version, which are then redirected to the www version.

Try crawling your site with a tool like Screaming Frog - it's a quick audit of your site's vital parameters, and shows you what & where you can improve your site (it's also the way I found these problems on your site)

rgds

Dirk

As a rule of thumb - if the links add value for the visitor of your site, make it a "Follow" link.

If it is a commercial link, or a link to a site with low quality, it needs to be nofollow. Check also https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569?hl=en

rgds,

Dirk

Hi Rajiv,

If you post the same content on both FR & EN version:

• if both are written in English (or mainly written in English) - best option would be to have a canonical pointing to the EN version
  Example: https://fr.sitegeek.com/category/shared-hosting - most of the content is in English - so in this case I would point a canonical to the EN version

• if the FR version is in French - you can use the HREF lang tag - you can use this tool to generate them, check here for common mistakes and doublecheck the final result here.

Just some remarks:

• partially translated pages offer little value for users - so it's best to fully translate them or only refer to the EN version

• I have a strong impression that the EN version was machine translated to the FR version. (ex. French sites never use 'Maison' to link to the Homepage - they use Acceuil). Be aware that Google is perfectly capable to detect auto-translated pages and they consider it to be bad practice (check this video of Matt Cutts - starts at 1:50). So you might want to invest in proper translation or proofreading by a native French speaker.

rgds

Dirk

Hi,

To be very honest - I don't think crawlers are looking at the way you structure your url's. In my opinion these 3 options are equally valid and it depends on your personal preference how you want to organise it. Also think about your reporting needs - it's very easy in Analytics to put filters based on folders (or to use the drill-down reporting)

What is more important is how you make this information accessible for the users - which is completely unrelated to the url.
Like Bryan mentioned - it could be useful to have a support section on your site - regrouping all the support documents for all the products on your site. Again - this could be done regardless of your choice of url's.

To determine the importance of a page crawlers are mainly looking at two things:

• how many links does this page get (both internal and external)
• how many clicks do I need to get from the homepage to this particular page

The relevance is also determined by factors like appearance of keyword in url, H1,...etc all the basic stuff - but these would again be identical for the 3 scenario's you propose.

Hope this helps,

Dirk

We have a site which generates 90% of it's traffic via image search. On this site we use both Alt & Title tag - and they are identical (and quite similar to the name of the image). Under the current circumstances (it could indeed be considered as keyword stuffing), not sure if I still would go for identical alt/title for this site. Traffic continues to grow, and even increased after Panda update last year, so (until now) we experience no negative impact.

Normally the alt should describe the image, the title should more or less contain the same content but more focussed on call to action - see also: http://blog.raventools.com/alt-title-text-optimized-images/

In your case, as your choices are limited, I would still go for identical alt/title - but take care that you keep the content to the point & don't exaggerate with the use of keywords. If you don't want to take any risk - stick with the Alt & drop the Title.

rgds,

Dirk

Hamid - the fluctuation is not necessarily coming from something you did wrong. The main takeaway from Rand's article is to consider the PA/DA as a relative measure - to see how you score compared to your competitors (see quote below). It tries to predict how well your site is doing in the search results - but (as all tools on the market) it will never be perfect.

"My strongest suggestion if you ever have the concern/question "Why did my PA/DA drop?!" is to always compare against a set of competing sites/pages. If most of your competitors fell as well, it's more likely related to relative scaling or crawl biasing issues, not to anything you've done. Remember that DA/PA are relative metrics, not absolute! That means you can be improving links and rankings and STILL see a falling DA score, but, due to how DA is scaled, the score in aggregate may be better predictive of Google's rankings."

The reason is quite simple - if you look at your source and search for H1 - you'll see that you have multiple H1 - the first is

1, than # 2, than # 3, than the final one is the real H1. Keep only the real H1 & remove the others and the issue is solved.

rgds,

Dirk

If it's sounds to good to be true, it's probably not true...

Honestly - stay away from these kind of offers. You'll probably end up with thousands of low quality links to your site which could temporarily boost your site, but before you know it you'll be hit by a Google Penguin penalty. Buying links is and remains a violation of Google webmaster guidelines.
Quote:

"Any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site's ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. This includes any behavior that manipulates links to your site or outgoing links from your site."

Source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356

rgds,

Dirk

I have migrated several sites - including changes of urls (and even domains). If done well (meaning that all pages are properly redirected from the old to the new url) there should not a be an issue. In 80% of the migrations, you couldn't even notice that there had been a migration if you looked at the search engine traffic. In the 20% where traffic was lost, it wasn't related to link juice but to other issues:

- if you change the look & feel of your pages this can have an impact on your visitors (both positive and negative - check bounce rate, time on page, avg. pages/visit) - if it's negative you can quite easily loose positions in search (resulting in lower search traffic). If your pages stay exactly the same - this shouldn't be an issue.

• Same goes with performance - if the performance of the new platform is worse than the old one - it could again have a negative impact on your users, and as a result on your position in the SERP's.

• if you change your site structure - take care of you site depth. Sometimes changing you site can push important content deeper or cause less internal links to these pages, again having a negative impact on the site's performance in the SERP's.

Nobody will be able to give you a definitive answer on your question, but as far as I know, link juice doesn't get lost with 301's, but a lot of other factors can have a severe impact.

If you loose traffic, recovery can take a long time (up to 6 months) provided you find the root cause of the problem (and it won't be the link juice). If you don't - that traffic is gone.

Hope this helps,

Dirk

Hi,

How did you notice the drop in rankings - is this info coming from webmaster tools or some external tracking system? I just search for the keyword shutters (google.be/ from Brussels) and your site is still ranked in 3rd position (Dutch) - 1st position FR.

Did you see a significant drop in traffic to these pages in Analytics?

By the way - not sure if shutters is the best word to describe the product you are selling (French version) - the word "volets intérieurs" seems to be a better word.

Probably not related to the current issues - but you might want to check the size of the images on your homepage (and speed optimisation in general: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150922_6W_RT4/1/details/) - also check pagespeed insights from Google.

Please also take into account that with the current organisation of your content you push the FR version 1 level deeper than the NL content.

You also might want to take a look at the internal redirects on your site - you redirect all url's to have the trailing slash which is ok - but you should also update your internal links accordingly.

rgds,

Dirk

Agree with Thomas -  based on the number you give , your site doesn't seem that big. Blocking 3500 images will not change a lot, and it will rather have a negative impact (think about image search).

You might want to check this post on crawl optimisation before taking a decision like that.

Hope this helps,

DIrk

Not sure what you want to achieve with these lines - but both url's are still accessible.

If you want to redirect www to non-www use this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.(.)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.)$ http://%1/$1 [R=301,L]

(http://stackoverflow.com/questions/234723/generic-htaccess-redirect-www-to-non-www)

Other way round:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]

(http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12050590/redirect-non-www-to-www-in-htaccess)

Dirk

The resources mentioned  by Patrick are all good ones - I am even going to add one: http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/structured-urls/ . You don't even have to read it :

• structured url's help semantics  - the folder like structure helps search engines understand how the site is structured
• it's easier to check which pages are indexed as you can do a site:mysite.com/folder/
• reporting is way easier with a structured url

Apart from that, and probably most important argument: a site depth is measured on how many clicks you need to get to a page and how pages are cross-linked - Google is not counting the number of "/" in your url's to determine if your site is flat or not.

rgds

Dirk

I doubt that Google is seeing using a CDN as cheating - it is one of the factors which helps increasing the speed of the site and increase user experience. It would be an ideal world if you could get a 100% score on Pagespeed Insights and all A scores on webpagetest.org - but you have to start somewhere, and adding a CDN is normally one of the easier things to do. So it's certainly not cheating - rather taking a step in the good direction.

Apart from that, Google is offering a CDN itself (https://cloud.google.com/dns/docs).

rgds,

Dirk

On first sight there seems nothing obvious that is wrong with your site (I crawled the site with Screaming Frog and it looks ok). Site:meko.lv gives 85 results which looks ok (even a bit too much if you look at page 5 & onward)

The only strange thing is your robots.txt - User-agent: googlebot Disallow: /*? - I imagine you added this line to block pages like this https://meko.lv/index.php?option=com_ajax&format=json which are still in the index. Did you try to do a fetch like google on your sitemap to be sure that this rule isn't blocking the bot from reading the contents? (especially because your sitemap has a particular url http://meko.lv/index.php?option=com_osmap&view=xml&tmpl=component&id=1 with a question mark inside. You might want to  rename this to a more standard meko.lv/sitemap.xml

Hope this helps,

Dirk

You shouldn't use campaign tracking to check internal links - you have to use event tracking. Check http://cutroni.com/blog/2010/03/30/tracking-internal-campaigns-with-google-analytics/ . Apart from the reporting issue - it's also generating a huge number of url's that need to be crawled by Google bot and is just wasting it's time (most of these tagged url have a correct canonical version). You mention these tags are old - but they are still present on a lost of pages.
For cases like this it's better to check with a local tool like Screaming Frog which gives you a much better view which pages are generating these links.

The other issue you have is probably related to a few pages that have a bad formatted (relative) url in a link - the way your site is configured it's just rendering a page on your site - so the bots are then crawling your site over and over again, each time encountering the same bad relative link - and each time adding the bad formatting to the url. It's an endless loop - best way to avoid this is to use absolute internal links rather than relative links. Not sure if it's the only one - but one of the pages with this error is :http://primepay.com/blog/7-ways-find-right-payroll-service-your-company  - it contains a link to

[Your payroll service is no different.]([Link to - http://www.primepay.com/en/payrollservices/] "Your payroll service is no different.")

This page should generate a 404 but is generating a 200 and the loop starts here.

Again - with screaming frog you can for each of these bad url's you can generate a crawl path report which shows you exactly on which page the error is generated.

Hope this helps,

Dirk