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There also seem to be url's which are duplicated:

/new-york-city-tickets/elektra-theatre-tickets/50-shades-the-musical-mar-21-2015-1283412.html
/new-york-city-tickets/elektra-theatre-tickets/50-shades-the-musical-mar-25-2015-1283241.html
/new-york-city-tickets/elektra-theatre-tickets/50-shades-the-musical-mar-27-2015-1283246.html

=> 3 different url's - but the content seems to be identical on these pages.

You could try to do a full crawl with Screamingfrog - and check the semi-duplicates on your site (identical H1, metadescription,... and so on)

If I do a site:yoursite.com/minneapolis-tickets in Google I get results - so these pages seem to be in the index, even if this is not shown on the sitemap level in WMT.

I notice you use noindex on a substantial number of pages (for expired events) - maybe it would be better to use the unavailable after meta tag. See also: http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2334932/ecommerce-seo-tips-for-unavailable-products-from-googles-matt-cutts

Update - if your site is identical to your username - the cause is almost certain related to the lack of indexable content on these pages. The event pages, while very userfriendly & valuable for end users, are too light for Google in terms of content. Apart from the title, most of this pages are quite identical (the maps, dates & prices are different) if you look at the source code.

There could be many reasons why this sitemap is not indexed.

Are there any duplicates between the different sitemaps (if there are duplicates, they are not listed as indexed in the 2nd sitemap)

It could also be that the pages are too light in terms of content to get indexed - example - if you only list the event name, date, and place, without additional content it will probably not get indexed.

Are you sure that all the url's in these sitemap can be indexed (not blocked by robots.txt or noindex tag)- you could try a few url's of the sitemap in Fetch like google and see if they are fetched properly.

rgds

Dirk

I think this page is a bit over optimised - the word locksmith appears 62 times on the page. The text seems to be written for Search Engines rather than human beings. I would make the text shorter & more to the point, and don't repeat your keywords too much.

Also watch out for duplicate content - http://24hourlocksmith.com.au/tag/dimple-lock/ ; http://24hourlocksmith.com.au/james-bond-lock-picking-tool/  http://24hourlocksmith.com.au/tag/dimple-key/ seem to be identical.

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

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)

If you recently did a site redesign - you probably deleted old redirect rules as well. Google seems to keep all the url's it has indexed over time stored somewhere - and the moment the old redirects disappear - you'll see these very old url's popping up in webmastertools. I had the same experience after a recent migration, and if you search on this forum, you'll find plenty of other people who have encountered the same thing.

Nothing to worry about - if these errors in WMT are annoying you could put the old redirect rules in place again, or if they are using a seperate folder structure, you could delete these folders via WMT. These errors will disappear over time, even if you don't do anything.

Another option would be to use the 'unavailable after meta tag (as mentioned by Matt Cuts here: http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-seo-advice-unavailable-e-commerce-products-186882). The discussion is about ecommerce site but the same logic applies for expired events. More info on the tag itself can be found here: http://googleblog.blogspot.nl/2007/07/robots-exclusion-protocol-now-with-even.html

Hi,

There is an interesting post on this subject on Moz - with all the different strategies you can follow. You can find it here: http://moz.com/blog/how-should-you-handle-expired-content

Hope this helps,

Dirk

Hi Robert,

Your question seems similar to this one - http://moz.com/community/q/home-page-blog-snippets-duplicate-content-help - there is no duplicate content if you're just using a small part of an article on another page.

Not sure where you would put the noindex - in each case noindex is only possible for pages - not for snippets

rgds,

Dirk

I think that the answer that Richard gave you on your first question is also applicable on this one.

Apart from that, you should see SEO as a long term strategy, if your competitor is ranking well with shady techniques, it's may be good on the short term, but he'll loose on the long term. I saw plenty of my competitors take a dive in rankings after the Panda update in May, while quite a number of our sites gained substantial search traffic (+25%)

If you already got punished for over optimised backlinks, I would certainly not take that road again, and be very careful with any SEO company which would propose this strategy.

rgds,

Dirk

Google Academy http://www.google.com/analytics/learn/index.html would probably be a good starting point. Or just trial/error with some support from online help. It's pretty self-explanatory.

rgds,

Dirk

It depends a bit on the topics you're discussing. For most sites, it's very difficult to get ranked on your homepage apart when people are looking for your brandname. If your site is mainly covering one topic - and all the blog post on your site are giving additional info on that specific topic or closely related topic it might work.

I would only add additional content on the homepage if it's adding value for the users - it's not really something which is needed for Google (example; when I search for "sports car" on google.co.uk - one of the top results is http://www.classicandsportscar.com/ - which has more or less the same setup as you describe = slider +links to other articles - no specific 'homepage' content)

Hi

In my experience there is a certain latency with the links shown in Webmastertools, I has the tendency to continue to show links, even after they have been removed (we used to have a partnership with a large telco - and had 1.5mio links coming from them - when the partnership ended it took several months before they disappeard in WMT). If you are unable to find these links using the tools you mentioned I wouldn't worry about them.

rgds,

Dirk

This seems like a pretty normal set-up, and there should not be any need to use canonicals in this case. Just one thing - although there is no such thing as an ideal number of words for a blog item, if your show 100 words of blog 1 on the home, and blog1 only has 120 words in total - it's probably not the best set-up (not for Google, and not for the users, as they would need to click to get only a little bit of additional information)

Update - I assume that blog1/blog2/etc are blog posts written on your site - if they are external blogs this page has little value

I don't think this would be considered a black hat technique, as most corporations with multiple brands are doing this. Just don't try to over optimise the anchor texts and you'll be just fine.

However, I am a bit puzzled by your remark on self referral. If it's a completely different brand, and you want to measure the traffic separately from your corporate brand, you should use a different Analytics property for that site.

If you want to measure the traffic as if both the corporate & the brand site would be one site, one property is ok, but than you have to adapt your analytics tracking code for cross-domaintracking. If you are using universal analytics - you can find here (https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1034342?hl=en) how you can do that.

rgds,

Dirk

Update - I checked all the url's on the reverse IP- they all point to your site & all of them are giving security warnings that the certificate is not valid. As the owners of the domains are different - it's a stronger indication that the error is at your hosting company.

You could check with your hosting company. When I do a reverse IP lookup - it seems the other site is hosted on the same ip address as your site (http://reverseip.domaintools.com/search/?q=radiokilimanjaro.org.uk). Maybe something got mixed up with the configuration at the hosting side.

Dirk

At least we agree that we disagree

I always take the "efficiency" approach - a technical page like a login page makes no sense as a landing page, and I don't want to have it in the search results. So I put the page on "noindex" and all the links that point to it as "nofollow". Given the fact that Googlebot is not crawling all the pages every visit, I don't want to waste its time on crawling links to pages that don't need to be indexed anyway.

Even if you look at it from a "link juice" perspective, you want the juice to go where your interesting content is, not to pages that don't need to be indexed anyway.