Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Great. It really sounds like they should keep the sub-categories

Hi There

Just checking, any luck with this? Can you clarify what you mean by "sites"? Those both look like sub-folders? Can you explain a little more in context how they fit into whatever domain you're on?

I'd look at this in a holistic manner.  If your site looks great, functions great, has good information, promotes trust among visitors, has good on page optimization, etc this is likely not of concern.  The search engines know that an e-commerce site is going to have many add to cart buttons on a page and on a site.  I'm sure they take this into consideration when judging an e-commerce site. As long as you're not doing anything sneaky with the buttons like hiding text behind them or anything, I'm sure your fine.

Of course, an example of your site, screenshot or link, is always most helpful when determining these things

-Dan

Hi Luke

Matt has the right idea. If the pages are going to "exist", you should block search engines from crawling them with the robots.txt file.

I would get your dev to help, but basically you'd find the folder or path in which you want to crawler to stop at. Maybe it's /month/ or something and you'd block that in robots.txt.

Ian covers this in his recent article about "Spider Traps". And you can also read about robots.txt on Moz or on Google.

Most likely, but I would double check with your developer - since I might be unaware of anything out of the ordinary!

Hi Andrea!

Funny, you just tweeted to me today and then I was assigned to help you out with this question

Anyway, just want to make sure I understand exactly how things are setup to see if your question has been answered.

Is this correct?

• You used www.wordpress.org (not .com) and installed a WP blog on a domain hosted with Go Daddy? In other words, you installed the WP files etc into your Go Daddy hosting account?

• And you want that blog to map to like blog.yourdomain.com ?

Let me know, thanks!

-Dan

Hi - right, I should have answered your specific situation too

When the user selects a facet - does this change the URL too? Meaning, it's supposed to be a totally different page?

My initial thought is "ads above the fold". It's hard to tell in Archive.org's archive of your old design, but it looks like ad space increased a lot on the new site? You have the block on the left which kind of interferes with the content, as well as the banner ad on the right which is pretty large (but doesn't distract from the content much).

Plus these ads are not just on the homepage, they are on the inner content pages as well.

They way Matt Cutts explained "ads above the fold" - it's not so much you need to cut down the pixel size of ads, but make sure not ALL your pages have too many ads - so only make a %% of pages on your site have ads, and some not.

I would play with how ads are appearing on the site to begin with.

Your issue does not sound like a migration error, because that is usually immediate. This sounds like something Google takes a little longer to process (page layout / design, user metrics, ads etc).

Hi!

Little late to the party here - thanks Geoff for helping out!!

While certainly creating excerpts on for the tag pages would be great - I'd suggest doing a crawl of your own site with something like Screaming Frog SEO Spider

I just did a crawl, and see a bunch of issues needing attention:

• Just about all of your meta descriptions are exactly the same
• Your H1s are all the same
• Bunch of duplicate titles (because for example, all the author archive subpages are being given the same title)
• I don't see any meta robots or canonical tags in use at all, which would be good to help control what pages you want indexed or counted for value.
• You have tons of meta keywords, mostly all duplicates, and the meta keywords tag should not be used anymore.

You've got some additional issues to work out besides just the tags thing.

Check webmaster tools to confirm this as well, Google webmaster tools will show you everything you need to fix!

-Dan

Hi - right, then if the URL changes for the user, you'll want to probably use the PushState method (linked above) to convey this to Google. They likely can't see the URL change by default.

You can check by trying to crawl the site with Screaming Frog SEO Spider with the user agent set to Googlebot. Then go to "outlinks" for the page with the facet links, and see if they are listed.

Hope that helps some more! Let me know if you need further direction.

-Dan

Hi Kimberly

I don't think Google did anything to purposely hurt the site. The AdWords and Organic search depts are really huge in themselves, and I don't think there is much cross-conversation there. What sort of quality scores are you getting from AdWords for your pages? Are they good?

Bounce rate is a weird metric. A lower bounce rate could be bad too, because users are maybe not easily finding what they want on the landing page and are forced to click around.

Definitely play with the ads. Keep specific notes about what you change and when. And keep in mind, it may take some time (weeks) to reflect in any ranking change.

You should also make a proper 404 page in the template/design of your site - it's just the default server message. These sort of things help show Google you are a responsible site owner

Internally, you should also avoid linking to 301 redirects. Link straight to your final URL. For example you link to http://www.homespellingwords.com/About (capitol A) but it redirects to http://www.homespellingwords.com/about (lowercase a). This hurts crawl efficiency and reduces how link authority flows through the site. This happens a LOT on your site, so update all your links

Hi Anthony

There's two separate things here, so I'll attack each one individually - and give you some insight to the thought process.

• First - there's the issue of IF you should move them to WP
• Second - if you should, the question is how?

Should You Move To** WordPress**

It's unquestionable that for design, practicality, and long term benefits - you should move them to WordPress. The issue it really all about the ranking. So the questions then become - WHY is the site ranking now, and could you preserve that ranking with a migration.

I would look at things in the following ways.

• First - determine what keywords we're talking about. Is it just head terms? Is it just the exact match of the domain? I'd make a list.
• Then - try to determine why the sites are ranking for the given keywords. The Keyword Difficulty tool is great for that.
• Basically - what we really need to rule out, is if Google sites pass any authority that regular sites do not? I don't see that this is the case.

My inclination would be the say that you can safely migrate - so long as it's done correctly .. see next.

How To Migrate To WordPress

I should preface and say that I have no experience with Google Sites. But let's assume the following things are possible.

1. Build your new WordPress site - obviously on a test server of some sort.
2. Make the new WordPress site have the same content as the current site (same text, titles, etc). We want as little variables and moving parts. Scrape the existing site if you have to with Screaming Frog to grab a lot of that.
3. You can change URLs if you want to - but prepare the 301 redirects ahead of time.
4. "Flip the switch" - I assume you're on your own hosting? You can just basically switch out Google Sites with WordPress.
5. Immediately activate the 301 redirects (if any).
6. Immediately crawl the site looking for 404s
7. Monitor webmaster tools for 404s.
8. After a few weeks, you can probably start improving text etc etc.

Obviously without a deeper look I can't guarantee this as full proof. But I believe you should be fine - the main thing is just those 301s.

Also - couldn't hurt to just try this on one site first!

-Dan

Hey Andy

To answer your questions:

1. So if you're 301'ing the page, it's not really a 404 page, it's a 301 So yes, you can remove the 301 redirect, making it a true 404 page (check that it returns a 404 code using fetch as google or a tool like urivalet.com).

2. If they are in the sitemap, this won't prevent Google from removing them from the index, but it will throw an error. And not that many people care about Bing, but Bing is apparently super picky about having XML sitemaps perfect.

So yes I would just 404 them without the redirects.

Hi There

One thing to check - do you have the exact version of domain registered in webmaster tools? So www or non-www and http or httpS? This has to be exact, webmaster tools considers them all different sites and you can get limited data if the wrong one is registered.

That would be the biggest cause of discrepancy. If this is not the case, there are many times Webmaster Tools data can lag behind, or be different than the index. I would go with what you see in actual Google searches though as the "final answer".

Hey There

Sounds like you are all set - just want to add that the type of page you're referring to: page/2 etc is "subpages" and you'll also want to look into noindexing those as well, in addition to "tags" and "categories". That should also fix the errors you're seeing in the Moz report.

-Dan

Hey There

I just did a reverse image search on two of your images and they are present in Google Image search

• http://screencast.com/t/QWKhqQfIH0Z8 - this one is indexed.
• This one is indexed and both versions are from Eyeem

But one issue, is that when I click 'view image' (what normally would open the image file in a new tab - instead it triggers a download box for me --> http://screencast.com/t/7LyLRRJ4CTb6 - perhaps this is because you are preventing people from doing so and just copying the images for free. But I was actually able to download the image for free straight from Google (the download worked).

Which leads me to another question... if the images are not free, maybe it makes sense to not index them? Or maybe index a watermarked version or small thumbnail?

Hi Dirk

My opinion somewhat varies. They have been requesting webmasters unblock css, js and images for some time now so they can evaluate the layout and design with their algo. Most of the elements I mentioned can be done algorithmically. The poor font color, the lact of padding / margins, the lack of social buttons, poor text readability because of no line breaks.

I'm wary of user engagement metrics, especially as being reported 3rd hand.

Side-note - as we all know, they do have a "mobile-friendly" UX test, which evaluates basically the same types of things for mobile - there's no reason they can't for desktop but just haven't told us.

I would suggest going to Analytics, segmenting by organic search traffic, and seeing if anyone has landed on those pages from search results in the last 2-3 months. If Google is not returning them in search results, and they are not bringing traffic, Google usually favors cleaning pages out of the index that don't need to be there.

If you don't want to noindex them, you can add "Page 2" etc to the title tags to eliminate the duplicate title errors in the crawl report.

-Dan

Hi There

There does not appear to be any accessibility issues. I can crawl and access the images just fine with my crawler.

My guess is that since the images are duplicate, and they also exist on other websites, Google may be avoiding indexing them since they already are indexed and they are technically not being linked to with a normal tag.

Is this causing a particular issue for the site? Or is it just a pesky technical bug?

I agree 100% with Hutch and Patrick. Your best bet is to dive into whatever analytics data you have for the content. I would probably follow a rough procedure like:

• Identify content no one is looking at, is not ranking, is old/poor - start there and you can probably trim out the lowest quality stuff - remove completlely or just noindex to be more conservative
• Then find the other extreme - think 80/20 - find the obvious highest achievers and those are the ones you'd most want to maybe move over or maintain in some way. If any high achievers are getting traffic despite being old/poor - that won't last - so update them.
• The hardest to figure out is the mediocre performing stuff (moderate visits, moderate search visibility). I would probably put all the moderate content in a spreadsheet. Categorize it by topic. Figure out what can stand alone, or be consolidated. Basically you want to arrive at a situation where every piece of content you keep is, if not recent, at least still quality (quality as defined by: unique, well executed, good design, good UX, helpful or entertaining).

The content audit process mentioned by Patrick is a great way to do this analysis with data, but you can also just use some traffic and basic segmenting in analytics as an easier method.

You could also try some tools like URL Profiler, which cake make such an audit process a little easier.

That's just decided if you should keep it - when it comes to migrating I guess it depends on your ultimate vision for the company / branding.

I wouldn't try any tricky things like putting a canonical to say your site is the original source. Google probably knows this is not true, and a canonical is just a "suggestion" so there's no guarantee they will honor it. I would be more in favor of migrating it to your site, removing from the old with a 301 redirect to your site and maybe just a note on your site saying "this article originally appeared in ...." and be really transparent with the user.