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No, I don't think letting nature take its course is the answer, but there might be another approach.

You could, as Hutch42 suggests, inventory existing URLs and then gather some additional information, meaning inbound (landing page) traffic and links.

• If a page has inbound traffic it usually means the page is ranking well, bookmarked, linked to or shared. No inbound traffic means people come to the page after having already landed elsewhere on the site.
• If a page has incoming links, that's helping build your domain authority.

Group pages according to the ones that are getting a significant amount in inbound traffic or have inbound links. Redirect those. Don't bother with the others.

Google analytics will tell you which pages have landing page traffic. Use a couple of different link tools to assess which ones have valuable inbound links including Google Webmaster Tools. (Every tool is going to give you a different answer. You want as good an inventory as you can muster.)

How much is "enough" inbound traffic and/or links? That'll be a judgment call on your part. So really you'll need to weigh the amount of effort to do this analysis versus the amount of effort to build the redirects and go from there.

That's my two cents.

And the data aggregators of course, as they feed so many other local local repositories. That's the benefit of using Moz Local. It will guide you through the submission process and feed data aggregators. Then, as Jim Rudnick mentions, Whitespark is an excellent resource for finding (and acquiring) other highly relevant and worthwhile citation sources.

If you don't want to use moz local, you can use their educational materials to arrive at the same place.

It might make sense to ask for an objective 2nd pair of eyes on your Wordpress configuration. It's sounding like it might be a setup problem. Do you have someone you can ask to do that?

If anything changed between the 15th and today, it'll help ensure it gets updated. But that's all.

Can you see if it's cached? Try cutting and pasting the entire URL into the search window, minus the http://. If it's indexed, it should show up in search results. Not the address bar, the search window.

You maybe haven't gotten any responses yet because the page you reference - http://manvanlondon.co.uk/category/clients/removals/man-and-van-wandsworth - comes up as a blank page with the words "write error" in the upper left-hand corner. It's hard to diagnose without being able to see.

I get the same error if I try to view http://manvanlondon.co.uk/category/. Are those legitimate pages? I can't navigate to it via your site structure. I can get to http://manvanlondon.co.uk/category/removals/ but not http://manvanlondon.co.uk/category/**clients**/removals/.

Hi Dan,

You might find this Q&A helpful. It offers suggestions for what to do when an unexpected page is ranking for your targeted keyword phrase. I think most, if not all, suggestions apply in your case as well. Good luck!

I agree with Ray-pp. It can take some time - weeks to months - for Google to catch up with the changes made to the site. Sounds like something else might be going on causing you to have so many extra pages indexed. Can you explain the cause of having ~5,000 extra pages indexed? When did they first start to appear? Are you sure you've configured your wordpress implementation to minimize unnecessary duplicates?

There are some pretty good resources right here on Moz Christopher:

• http://moz.com/blog/topic-modeling-semantic-connectivity-whiteboard-friday (whiteboard Friday)
• http://moz.com/blog/semantic-seo-questions (blog)
• http://moz.com/webinars/semantic-seo-for-the-people (webinar)
• http://www.slideshare.net/MatthewBrownPDX/strings-to-things-the-move-to-semantic-seo-mozcon-2013 (Mozcon slide presentation)

Messichessi, it's a good question. I suspect the sources of those incoming links to your site - the sites linking TO you - might not have been part of the 35%. It could also be that Moz only shows you a sampling of the incoming links it has inventoried, much like Google does.

As you can see from Sean's explanation above, Moz doesn't inventory every link, and the process they use is different from Google (and any other link reporting tool, for that matter).

Hi Messichessi,

That question has been asked before. The short answer is about once a month and you can view updates here.

It's always best to search Q&A before posting. You can often find your answer quickly that way. Of course there may be times when you need additional clarification or the answer might need updating, but it's a good place to start.

I'd start by taking a look at your link profile. I did a quick check with Moz and Majestic SEO and noticed a couple of things:

1. You have very few incoming links (0 recorded on Moz, 84 on Majestic).
2. None of the Majestic inventoried links have any citation or trust flow, meaning they're considered very low quality.
3. The majority of the Majestic inventoried links are tagged as having been deleted.

Another quick note (but this wouldn't prevent you from being indexed) is your tag pages are indexed. I'd change those to noindex to minimize duplicate content.

You can, if you narrow your objectives, specialize and try to rank organically.

If you're trying to rank for "big city" + "short, popular and highly competitive keyword phrase" then you won't be able to outrank local search results. At least not for the short term.

The recommended approach is to carve a geographic or specialty niche for yourself, produce excellent, compelling content, and build some popularity and authority. Once that's done, you can consider expanding and going after some of the more popular and general terms like "toronto dentist".

See what Matt Cutts has to say on the matter here - www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XHAhn8HCzs.

A popular (and free!) tool (for up to 10 questions I believe) is SurveyMonkey. I have created a Pinterest board with some pretty helpful conversion optimization resources on it if you're interested.

Hi Ram.Babu,

You seem to have a fair bit of duplication on indexed pages of the site, particularly in the area of title tags for author, paginated and forum pages. It would help consolidate your existing SEO equity into more important parts of your site if you noindexed those.

Have you profiled the links of your top ranking competitors to see what local and valuable links they have that you miht be able to acquire? I'd start there if I were you. Have you checked for penalties in Webmaster tools?

If it were me, I'd keep looking.

Nothing wrong, from a SEO perspective, with going with .gy or .co. I just think you'd be explaining "it's not a .com" and spelling the extension for years. It's less memorable. You'll get a lot of questions. You'll frustrate people with fat fingers.

How about "thepbguys.com". It's a funky (in a positive way) name for a funky (in a positive way) site and also still available.

This is a great post to help with site architecture. Published in 2011 and still relevant today.

Site architecture determines, in part, how your link equity is distributed across the site. Right now you have it spread too thin because the vast majority of indexed pages sit in the root directory. I think you'd be better off grouping pages by related topics, much like you have in your left-hand margin, by author and topic. Read the post and see what you think.

Another thing I though of is when I search for a quote, I tend to type in whatever I can remember of it. For example, if I search for "never give up", brainyquote is the 2nd result I see. They have that specific text in their title tag. I don't see quotery anywhere in my search results. It doesn't have quote text in title tags.

Now in this instance, you could say it's because the actual quote is "never give in" (in vs up), but you could use that common misconception as an opportunity to add more text to the page and increase your chances of ranking.

Another example is a search for "nasty, brutish and short". You guys don't show up anywhere although I do see you have that quote in your inventory.

Hi Jason,

I have a couple of suggestions.

1. The site is slow. That will bump up your bounce rates and impact your rankings. You should try speeding it up.
2. You have a ton of redirects going on. I did a partial scan of your site and found roughly 20% of the html files found were redirected. For example http://www.quotery.com/rick-warren redirects to http://www.quotery.com/rick-warren/. If it were me, I'd check to see if I had an incoming traffic or links to these pages and if not, I'd delete them and get rid of the redirect. It'll help speed your site.
3. You also have a lot of duplication. For example http://www.quotery.com/william-shakespeare/page/15/, http://www.quotery.com/william-shakespeare/page/16/, http://www.quotery.com/william-shakespeare/page/17/, http://www.quotery.com/william-shakespeare/page/18/, http://www.quotery.com/william-shakespeare/page/19/, http://www.quotery.com/william-shakespeare/page/20/, and http://www.quotery.com/william-shakespeare/page/21/ are all competing to rank for "william shakespeare quotes". I see you've canonicalized them so they point to themselves, but that isn't helping. You should be pointing the pages to http://www.quotery.com/william-shakespeare/ or using rel = next / prev.
4. Your title tags all contain your brand name. That's unnecessary. Yes I see Brainy Quotes does the same thing, but that doesn't mean you should too.
5. Your search is funky. I searched for "h jackson brown" and found 0 results. I searched for "h. jackson brown" (notice the dot after the h) and found two.
6. Your site architecture is very flat. That's spreading your SEO equity too thin. I'd group content differently.
7. You have a lot of "thin" content, less than 400 words per page. I'd be looking for ways to beef that up.

Those are just a few things I noticed. You should probably get an independent audit of the site and supporting processes and use it to identify risks and opportunities, and then set priorities for next steps.

If you want to share a set of urls I'd be happy to take a look at it in case anything else jumps out.