Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey Thomas - thanks for jumping in! Just to clarify;

• Yoast will allow you to noindex categories - I'm sure that's what you meant. You can delete categories in the default WP setup.
• And I think you mean "noindex all subpages of archives"

Carlo

That is actually very standard WordPress behavior and should happen. Its redirecting the non-slash to the slash version. Either way, Matt Cutts has said inconsistent slashes will not really harm you, but its still good practice to have it redirect. From what I can tell, you don't need to change anything!

Hope that helps

-Dan

Hey There

You want to look for this;

You can just do a cntrl-f (to search text in the source) and type in "noindex" and it should be present on the Tag archives.

-Dan

Hi Angela

First off - where are you seeing the jump in 404's - Moz Tools? Google Webmaster Tools? Screaming Frog SEO Spider? Somewhere else?

When I visit that link which points here it does not 404, it returns a 200 - which leads me to think the tool you are getting this from is wrong.

You can also use a "Header Checker" like this: http://urivalet.com/?http://www.turnerpr.com/blog/wp-login.php?redirect_to=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.turnerpr.com%2Fblog%2F2013%2F10%2Fdays-markus-freitag%2F#Report - and you can see it also returns a 200.

Now, let's assume though the page is returning a 404 and you want to fix it. The link is due to your blog setup, and the site is requesting all users log in before they comment. For example if you go all the way to the bottom on this post: http://www.turnerpr.com/blog/2013/10/days-markus-freitag/ - under Post a Reply, you will see the link.

You can shut off this feature (which is normal to do) by going to Settings->Discussion-> and uncheck "users must be registered and logged in to comment".

Hope that helps!

-Dan

Hello... Yes, this is very possible and commonly done.

You want to install WordPress into a subdirectory of the existing site. This acts like an install of WordPress within the subfolder you choose and doesn't touch or change the rest of the site. Normally when people do this, they try to find a theme they can modify to have a similar design to the existing site. Or you can have a custom theme designed, but a lot of smaller businesses don't do that because its more expensive.

But regardless of the design, to get a WordPress install working you just install in a subdirectory. So if the dentist's site is www.greatdentist.com just make an actual folder on the server at www.greatdentist.com/blog and install WordPress in the /blog folder.

Hope that helps!!

-Dan

Hi There

1. For the flash file NoReflectLight.swf - I would do a removal request in WMT and maintain the blocking in robots.txt of /plugins/

2. When you do a URL removal in WMT the files need to either be blocked in robots.txt or have a noindex on them or 404. Doesn't that sort of link redirect to your affiliate product? In other words, if I were to try to visit /go/affiliate-product/ it would redirect to www.affiliateproductwebsite.com ?Or does /go/affiliate-product/ load it's on page on your site?

3. I would maintain the robots.txt bloking on /plugins/ - if no other files from there are indexed, they will not be in the future.

-Dan

Hi There

Jesse is right, a 302 doesn't pass PageRank, but it make pass other signals (such as understanding of content, associated penalties - these are just my guesses by the way). Is this something where you are concerned of passing bad link signals? Or other undesired signals?

Also, technically a 302 is for "temporary" redirects, but people do misuse this temporary bit all the time and leave them more or less permanently

-Dan

Hi Mike

In general, I will always "noindex subpages of archives" which is a setting you can check off with the Yoast SEO Plugin. Anything with a /page/2/ or /page/3/ etc is a "subpage" and checking off that setting in Yoast will noindex them, which is the best thing to do.

You can see the WordPress SEO post I did on Moz for more WP stuff.

-Dan

Hey Fabio

Regarding #2 I'd give it a little bit more time. 301's take a little longer to drop out, so maybe check back in a week or two Technically the URL removal will mainly work if the content now 404's, is noindexed or blocked in robots.txt but with a redirdect you can do none of those, so you just have to wait for them to pick up on the redirects.

-Dan

Hey Jesse

It gets tricky to say the least. First there's the protocols which are best practice "rules" for any web development - http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html

But then there's Google's sort of own interpretations and treatment of those redirects on top of that. And there's always what Google says vs what they actually might be doing.

Technically a 302 is "found" although everyone uses it for "temporary" and yet a 307 is a temporary. I recall Google saying in their eyes there is no difference.

Yeah I guess you could leave 302s or 307s in forever, and how long is acceptable? I could leave a 302 redirect in place for 20 years and then decide to move it back? Is that what they mean?

As far as what Google does with them there's lots of Google and 3rd party resources about them and like I said we can probably find a few Matt Cutts videos talking about how they treat them - but then there's reality - which brings a lot of variables and moving parts.

So I think the main idea is as cliche as it sounds, all real situations are different. I follow this train of thought;

1. If possible, FIRST choose what to do based upon best web standards and in most cases this should hopefully satisfy SEO.
2. But if you have to do something purely for SEO - basically manipulate a known hole in how these things work vs. how Google supposedly treats them, because that's the only thing that will fix something - then do that. This might be why for example you'd choose a 302 redirect despite knowing it's not really temporary

I'm pretty certain standard crawls in campaigns are once a week.

Hi There

You should ensure the content either;

• has meta noindex tags
• or is blocked with robots.txt
• or 404's or 410's (is missing)

And then use the URL removal tool again and see if that works.

Not 100% sure if it's Penguin per se but it's definitely a link based problem. Look at all of the top anchor text to the site - it's entirely commercial keywords --> http://screencast.com/t/gt4zbWiWNxMc

What I've seen happen in this cases is that you will artificially rank well for some of those keywords for a little while and then a link algo catches up with you and you'll drop to where you should have been (or lower) all along.

Your on-site isn't as poorly over-optimized as other sites I've seen, but it could be toned down a little but removing keyword repetition / stuffing in the titles/URLs/descriptions etc.

You should definitely try to change the anchor text on any of the back links that might be good links, but just too optimized from an anchor standpoint. Use natural non-exact match anchors or branded / domain for the anchor text.

For any links that are just plain old bad/spammy/low quality - try to remove them or disavow them.

Hi There

Just checking... are you all set with this? I know that with Thesis it can be tricky, and it might depend on the specific theme you're using within thesis.

Hey Aron

Just wanted to chime in on the wordpress bit. EGOL nailed the core answer though. But for the noindex, yes you can just noindex any pages you want to and this isn't going to cause any issues. Noindexed pages do not count towards Panda or low user metrics in the algo, so it's a great way to let the content exist but not have it cause trouble in the SERPs.

-Dan

Hi Landon

I had a client with a similar situation. Here's what I feel is the best goal;

Calendar pages (weeks/months/days etc) - don't crawl, don't index

Specific event pages - crawl and index

Most likely the calendar URLs have not been indexed, but you can check with some site: searches. Assuming the have not been indexed, the best solution was to block crawling to certain URLs with robots.txt - calendars can go off into infinity, and you don't want to send the crawlers off into a black hole as it's not good for crawl budget, or for directing them to your actual content.

Hey There!

Just making sure you're all set with this? Some additional resources that might help (courtesy of Rand);

• Perfecting On Page Optimization - please keep in mind this resource is getting quite old. But it shows the classic SEO process of targeting a keyword. If the keyword you are trying to out beat your competitor with is at all competitive you'll really want a dedicated page for it. That post will show the traditional method for targeting a page.
• This flow chart (from this post) - shows a method for deciding if you need a separate page to target a keyword.

I use those are good starting point guides when in your situation.

-Dan

Hey There

Bradley's answer is great. I just want to add, you really should only worry about the suggestions here - http://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ - in regards to Google and speed / UX factors that would affect ranking.

You should also check for mobile errors in Webmaster Tools.

I am not aware of a plugin that does this thing exactly. You may want to look into general shortcode plugins that have a whole variety of shortcodes and maybe within them you will find something that does what you are looking for - I wouls start with these;

http://codecanyon.net/item/intense-shortcodes-wordpress-plugin/5600492

http://wordpress.org/plugins/shortcodes-ultimate/

Hi There

When you upgraded the site did the URL change or did it stay the same? I noticed you also have a lot of your staging site indexed (probably unintentionally) but I would suggest getting that noindexed.

I do see they all redirect to the homepage of your site, but this might not be the best thing to do, since there is not a great topic relevancy going from deep pages redirecting to the homepage. I would just add meta robots noindex tags to them and not redirect them.

I think I answered my question, as I see the archive.org version of the page from a few months ago - the URL is the same but just with capital letters. This is sending through a 301 redirect, but I doubt enough is lost with that.

Unfortunately your back links seem to have an unnatural amount of commercial anchor text, especially for the page in question. So I am willing to bet perhaps when you upgraded the site, it may have "stirred the pot" a little and Google looked a little closer at the site.

I think the "final straw" may have to do with the fact the new site has a sitewide anchor text link "gastric band hypnotherapy" in the main menu, whereas the old site did not. Google takes the overoptimized back links, adds it up with the new overoptimized internal links and that could have triggered something.

Another question - did your rankings drop sitewide? Just for this page?

-Dan