Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hmm.

Will you have a folder for your blog? Something like http://www.domain.ext/blog/<topic-or-category>/articles/<article-name>? I think I found your site (wednet) and it looks like you already have a blog and a few other important pages in the root directory.  </article-name></topic-or-category>

I would NOT park the articles themselves in the root domain. While you want a flat(ish) architecture, you don't want it to be completely level; you want your most important "money" pages in the root directory. If you have 15-20 categories and 3-15 articles per category, you'd have between 45 and 300 posts in the root directory and that's too flat.

If it were me, I'd go with http://www.domain.ext/blog/<article-name>. (Notice I removed "/<topic-or-category>/articles" from the example you provided.) You can use Wordpress to set up topic-or-category pages e.g. http://www.domain.ext/blog/<topic-or-category>/<article-name>, but these should be noindexed. They're there only to make it quick and easy for your audience to find what they're looking for. </article-name></topic-or-category></topic-or-category></article-name>

At some point you may want to start indexing your category pages. There has been lots of discussion about that on this Q&A. It's a personal choice and it can result in increased traffic and conversions BUT you should make an effort to customize category pages so they are absolutely unique before you decide to do that.

Hi there Wendy,

Wordpress allows you to specify a default permalink structure that will allow you to avoid inclusion of "/year/month/title".

In the left-hand menu select Settings > Permalinks. Choose the last option (custom) and append "/blog/%postname%/" after your domain name.

Hi Joe,

Not sure how you detected this problem. Was it on Moz Open Site Explorer? If that's the case, then Gaston has provided an answer. Especially if those 900 links were coming from very few sources, it's credible that Moz may not have picked them up in the last build of its backlink index.

If you detected it using another tool, or even with Moz, I'd use a few other sources to confirm whether you have a problem or not. Take a look at Search Console, MajesticSEO, and/or aHrefs. They will show you how many links you have. The last two will show you patterns of acquisition and loss. Most sites gain and lose links over time. You'd want to look for an abrupt change in pattern.

If that doesn't answer your question, let us know and we can pursue other possibilities.

geanmitch,

You have two problems:

(1) Your home page (https://www.jasperartisanjewelry.com) is canonicalized to http://jasperartisanjewelry.com/home. Change the canonical tag so the home page points to itself. In other words, your home page canonical tag should read as rel="canonical" href="https://www.jasperartisanjewelry.com"/>.

(2) http://jasperartisanjewelry.com/home redirects to https://www.jasperartisanjewelry.com/home which turns a 404 (page not found error). Create a new 301 redirect that points (A) http://jasperartisanjewelry.com/home to (D) https://www.jasperartisanjewelry.com/. Do NOT point (A) http://jasperartisanjewelry.com/home to (B) http://www.jasperartisanjewelry.com/home and then to (C) http://www.jasperartisanjewelry.com/ and then to (D) https://www.jasperartisanjewelry.com/. Go directly from (A) to (D). Get rid of any intermediary redirects.

That should take care of it.

Hi Tom3_15,

Should I create a new view in analytics? No. There's no need and you want to easily compare before and after.

Should I also create a new https property in Google search console and set it as the preferred domain? Yes

If so, should I keep the old sitemap for my http_ property while updating the sitemap to https only for the https property?  _Keep the old sitemap for your http property. Add the new sitemap (with https URLs) to the new (https) property.

Thirdly, should I create a new property as well as new sitemaps in Bing webmaster? Yes

Finally, after doing a crawl on our http_ domain which has a 301 to https, the crawl stopped after the redirect, is this a result of using a free crawling tool or will bots not be able to crawl my site after this redirect? _I don't know why your crawl stopped after the redirect. I use screaming frog and it continues to crawl after the 301 so it might, as you suggest, be a function or shortcoming of the particular tool you're using. BOTs should be able to continue to crawl your site after the redirect. Google certainly can.

Agree totally with Matt-Antonino.

This Moz post, by Dan Shure, was the one I found most helpful when trying to figure out how to index (or not index) pages and posts. http://moz.com/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success

The post speaks specifically to Wordpress, but concepts are transferable to any implementation.

Fraid not, but I did find this article from October 2013 helpful. (I have no relationship with the site owners. Just found the site when I was looking into options myself.) It compares the reach and benefits of different alternatives.

This article compares the costs, pros and cons of most of the options mentioned above. It's ws published just this month, so it it's current.

Lastly, someone on Moz asked in October last year " if anyone had experience or recommendations between either Taboola or Outbrain (or a better service I haven't heard of yet)". Here are the responses.

That should help!

Hi Diana.

First, I agree with EGOL that you absolutely have to be able to show value.

Second, given where you're at on the learning curve and your own admission about being challenged by technical SEO, I  think it might be premature for you to be thinking about branching out on your own.

If I were you, I'd be looking for a position in a highly regarded existing SEO company. Figure out what you're good at NOW, and offer up those services. Be open and honest about your desire to learn and to eventually branch off on your own. Also set a realistic time frame during which you'll dedicate yourself to your new company and give them your all. Hunker down, do a good job, and learn as much as you can about technical SEO AS WELL AS how to run a small business. At the end of your allotted time frame, re-evaluate. You may be surprised at what you discover.

So Rand, does the engineering collective know what needs to be done or do you need a technical architect to offer an assessment of the situation and recommendations? I don't have that skill set, but perhaps there's someone in your vast audience that does and would be willing to help out.

Hi.

https://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/discover/v8r4/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.discovery.es.ad.doc/monitoring/iiysawhttp.htm says it's an error that occurred when the crawler attempted to connect to your Web server. It says a slow site or network might be the cause of the problem.

Your robots.txt is set correctly and your site is accessible (I just tried), perhaps your best bet is to wait and see if the problem recurs.

I also ran a scan of your site using screaming frog and got close to 2,000 internal server errors (response code 500) primarily from pages in this directory - http://mississaugakids.com/mississauga-events-calendar/. The pages are loading very slowly. That might be contributing to your problem.

Maybe start there and then circle back to see if the 612 error is recurring? I'm not very technical, but perhaps they're somehow related?

Johnnyroc,

Take a look at the answer to the question asked immediately after yours - "is there a tool that I can use to scrape and see [competitor's] meta tags". The answers provided will also help you learn more about what your competitors are doing.

Can Moz weigh in on this please? There is a lot of really  good discussion on this particular topic across multiple threads but no clear direction. What does Moz recommend and why? The why is important and here's why.

If I have a client with an established blog that uses the blog.domain versus domain/blog structure, should I be recommending they migrate to a different structure?

Sorry. It's a best practice and has been for a while. Extra work, but adds clarity for visitors and search engines alike.

Yes, I see the same results.

If you're expecting to see more and wondering why not, that's a topic that frequently comes up in this forum. Here's one good explanation from member Charles Mazzie - https://moz.com/community/q/inbound-links-how-accurate-or-up-to-date-is-open-site-explorer. There are others you can find by searching Q&A.

Hi lnevo,

I had a similar situation last year and am not aware of a faster way to get pages deindexed. You're feeding WMT an  updated sitemap right?

It took 8 months for the excess pages to get dropped off my client's site. I'll be listening to hear if anyone knows a faster way.

And even then, you have to be careful because Google lies by omission. Rand explains in this Moz Blog post dated February 14, 2012.

Can you expand on your question a bit more? I don't understand.

I concur wholeheartedly with every point Robert has made.

Bottom line, and you know this - you said you did - Moz is only one piece of the puzzle. As Robert said, it's in its early days, but I like it. For $49 it doesn't promise the world. It says it'll update 10 of the most important recipients and aggregators of local data with our your most important local data. It does that. And it provides a wealth of educational material to accompany it.

I recommend you take Robert up on his offer or continue down the path of self-optimization making sure you fill in remaining blanks. I have a post on how to do local SEO if you want to start there. It won't answer all your questions, nor will it result in as good an outcome as you'll get from hiring a pro like Robert, but it might help.

Donna

Putting a range around the DAs where fluctuations will be most felt (10-40), helps and makes sense, but I also saw 3-15 point differences in DA this update at the higher end of the scale.

Here is a helpful discussion on the same topic that took place in June 2011 and is still relevant.

http://moz.com/community/q/how-long-is-it-safe-to-use-a-302-redirect

If it doesn't answer your question, just elaborate further below.