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Hi! The Moz tool is not being more specific as to what element is a duplicate? (ie: description, title, H1, etc)?

I ran it through Screaming Frog and it only found a few H1s that are a duplicate, which is not even a big issue really.

Hi

Someone recently showed me Power Mapper Sitesort.  I have not personally used it.  But he ran a full audit right in front of me, and it looks pretty powerful.  Its $150-$500 though.

In general I love SEOmoz's suite of software. For an audit you may want to try their Crawl test

And real nice to have for an audit is Screaming Frog.  Free up to 500 pages, then you have to pay for larger sites.

Depending on the site, I generally use a mix of tools to pull together the info needed, and get it into a mix of excel, word or powerpoint, depending on how its going to be presented.

-Dan

Hi There

What you need to do is;

• Using your SEO plugin (hopefully Yoast SEO plugin) - noindex tag archives.
• Also, noindex subpages of archives

It is normal for tags to be their own page, but it is not desirable to let the search engines index them, thus why we'll add the noindex for tag pages. The search engines can potentially see them as duplicate or thin content. It's OK they exist, just not ok to index them.

Some resources;

My article on Moz about setting up WordPress correctly

Yoast SEO plugin

-Dan

Hello! Actually, often having more results can sometimes increase the CTR to either result

But either way I wouldn't be concerned about CTR in that sense. I would worry again about if users are enjoying your pages once they land on them.

You can, however, still work on improving CTR in general to both pages by making your titles and descriptions better - more clicks = more traffic anyway!

Kevin

I bet if you have Webmaster Tools setup and you run a "fetch as Googlebot" this will get you what you need. You'll have the header response info in there too, but you'll see how Google will view all the source HTML.

-Dan

Hey There

See my other answer. You first have to noindex tag archives. Then you can exclude them from the XML sitemap.

Noindexing tags will not harm SEO. Google has been not returning tag pages in search results very much at all anymore. You really want your articles themselves to rank.

-Dan

Hi Jamie

There could be a number of reasons this is happening. It's tough to say for sure without knowing the site and taking a look (feel free to mention that if you can).

But I would check all the basic accessibility stuff first, ie:

• Make sure you are allowing crawling of the old site and new site (not blocking with robots.txt)
• Be sure your 301s are setup for 1:1 content/page matches - in other words - don't 301 a bunch of old pages to the homepage, because this can confuse google and also it doesn't pass any value anyway (references here and here)
• Check that your canonical tag usage is correct - ie: a canonical if used incorrectly can point the wrong signals at the wrong page)
• Make sure you have the old site/property registered in search console, and see if the indexed page #'s are going down.

ALSO: What you're seeing in SERPs might be based upon old anchor text and links (off-site signals) - you may want to see if you can update old back links from an anchor text standpoint.

But any details you could provide would be helpful!

Hi Scott

I don't think further on-page tweaking for keywords is the best approach to be visible again for "web design akron ohio" as Google already "knows" this is what the site is about, and you will probably not boost ranking there by small tweaks to keywords on-site.

We know Google knows the site is about this by plugging in your domain to the AdWords keyword suggestion tool --> http://screencast.com/t/rZ0E74GVjeY

I think a combination of perhaps these three things;

1. Local SEO
2. Links
3. Social

Local SEO

For local SEO, make sure your local listings, citations, reviews etc are all complete, updated, current etc. Use https://getlisted.org/ or something like Whitespark's local citation finder/builder to help you there.

Links

I find for small/local business you don't need a lot of links, but you might need a few high quality and recent links to help get you back where you need to be. High quality means, editorially chosen/placed within the body of content - linked to probably with brand anchor text and in a good context about your business. This might mean a story in a local news site, or a good mention in a higher authority blog - check this out for some ideas: http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies

You don't have an over-optimized link profile from an anchor text perspective at the moment, so that's good - keep the links as natural as possible.

Social

What I mean here is build the authority / relevance of your business in one or maybe two social networks and make sure to clearly associate your profile with your domain.

In your industry, you'd probably want to get really good with maybe Twitter, Google Plus or even Pinterest (where you can share nice visual/design content) - and make sure you link to/from the profile and your domain. In the case of Google Plus, use rel author and rel publisher.

-Dan

Hi Kate

Likely Causes

• user metrics - Google has thought to have been using things like click through rate, and when users bounce back to the SERP and click on another result - as part of their algorithm. In other words, they have user metrics (kind of like their own analytics) to detect how happy users are with the results in the SERPs - and I have heard that this is a possible cause for "the Google Dance"
• **multiple pages alternate rankings for one keyword **- maybe you have a few pages that are similar in content, and Google has a hard time figuring out which is which - and the ranking page for a particular keyword keeps switching - this would cause dramatically different rankings.
• could be the nature of weekly rank tracking - Moz rank tracking IS accurate for sure - but Google will sometimes move things around slightly. If Moz happens to check the ranking in this small window, where Google has shifted something for just a moment, then it looks like for the entire week you've been in a totally different position.

Suggestions

• evaluate your "search queries" metrics - in webmaster tools they give you metrics like "impressions" and "click through rate" - check them out for the keywords in question that are seeing the Google Dance. You can pull this data from WMT into analytics quite easily. See if you're getting poor metrics for click through rate.

ALSO - webmaster tools will give you their average position (ranking!) straight from Google. look at what THEY have for your average position for those keywords - maybe you're jumping there too.

• look at how many landings pages there are for one keyword - using webmaster tools or analytics data, see if one keyword is resulting in many landing pages. If so, try to focus just one page on the topic for each keyword.
• **supplement weekly rankings **- run SEO Book's rank checker (free plugin) a few other times during the week and see what you come up. As mention above, look at webmaster tools average position data (rankings!) and compare data.

Hope this helps!

-Dan

Thanks for the follow up! There was also some indexing issues going on with google last week (pages were taking hours to get indexed, even using the fetch and render tool) so maybe this was somehow related. Glad it's resolved for now!

Hi Edward

The tag you're seeing is the facebook open graph description. This is only for facebook and not the same as a regular meta description for search engines.

I would suggest installing the Yoast SEO for WordPress plugin, which will add meta descriptions to your site for you.

Some WordPress SEO basics here in my article.

-Dan

Hello!

For product URLs I would go with the "flat" structure and just do shop.com/product-name (Option 2)

I second Lynn's answer. You need to find where the link is coming from to begin with. Could also use Screaming Frog SEO Spider or Webmaster Tools - they will all get you the same thing. Find out where the bad URLs are linked from, and then you can narrow down the source of bad code or whatever it may be.

-Dan

The big issue I see here is that you don't actually have a page targeting JUST "fascinators" - it would be something like https://www.prettycool.co.uk/fascinators.html - kind of like you have all wedding accessories - https://www.prettycool.co.uk/wedding-accessories.html

The reason is, the homepage is not the best page to rank for just fascinators since you sell other things, it's not the best relevance match.

So create a page for All Fascinators

Here's what to do;

1. Crawl the site with Screaming Frog (you can do up to 500 URLs with the free version).
2. Look for the suspect pages in your crawl list.
3. Click once on the page in the list
4. Below, click "To Links" - and this box will show you the page(s) linking to the bad 404 page.
5. View the "From" page (which links to the bad page) in your browser.
6. Look at the source code for that page - do a "find" and paste in the bad page's URL. This will show you where it's linking from.
7. Fix the spot in your theme or template where it is linking to pages that do not exist.

You generally don't need to take any action on these types of links (you don't need to remove or disavow). Google can see they are just scraped duplicates or a real article and ignore them.

But let's say they were harmful bad links (maybe paid links or irrelevant placed sneakily by you - ie: a link to iphones from a page about dogs), then when you remove links it's always a good stop-gap to also disavow. Because Google might not immediately crawl the URLs with bad links right away, but the disavow they will in theory pick up on more quickly.

1. If you check the source code of your blog posts, there must be some sort of link to the feeds - possibly even in the header. I'm not 100% on how the Moz crawler operates (if it only spiders <a>anchor links or if it spiders referenced links in the header - pretty sure the latter) - but either way that's how they're finding it, through some sort of link on the page.</a>

<a>You could try running a crawl with Screaming Frog SEO Spider and see if it also picks up the feed URLs and Screaming Frog will show you where it found the links as well.

2. Good question. Your theme may be displaying links to these things somewhere - the best way to find out is to crawl with Screaming Frog and it will show you which pages link to your feed  and trackback URLs. Then if you don't need them, you can go into the editor and remove them from the code.

3. I agree with Thomas here, I would not block them with robots.txt - rather I would see if you can fix them at the source and remove the links if they are not needed.

-Dan</a>

While what Matt and CleverPHD (Hi Paul!) have said is correct - here's your specific issue:

Your categories are loading with "ugly" permalinks like this: http://site.labellaflorachildrensboutique.com/blog/?cat=175 (that loads fine)

But you are linking to them from the bottom of posts with the "clean" URLs --> http://screencast.com/t/RIOtqVCrs

The fix is that Catgory URLs need to load with "clean" URLs and the ugly one should redirect to the clean one.

Possible fixes:

• Try updating wordpress (I see you're on a slightly older version)
• See if you .htaccess file has been modified (ask a developer or your hosting for help with this perhaps)

Found another linking issue:

This link to Facebook in your left sidebar --> http://screencast.com/t/EqltiBpM it's just coded incorrectly. It adds the current page URL so you get a link like this http://site.labellaflorachildrensboutique.com/blog/category/unique-baby-girl-gifts/www.facebook.com/LaBellaFloraChildrensBoutique instead of your Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/LaBellaFloraChildrensBoutique

You can fix that Facebook link probably in Appearance->Widgets.

That one issue is causes about 200 of your broken URLs

Hey there

Dirk pretty much hit upon the issue, which I'll reiterate with a visual. If you enter any gibberish /blog URL (like this: http://primepay.com/blog/jglkjglkjg) in the browser it returns a 200 OK which, but it should return a 404 code --> http://screencast.com/t/cStpPB5zE

Otherwise pages that are really broken will look to crawlers like they are supposed to exist.

Hello

I would consider https and www to be the "correct" version of all pages, and be sure all other versions redirect to that.

So:

• http www - redirects to https www
• http non-www - redirects to https www
• https non-www - redirects to https www

Just also be sure all of your internal links, canonical tags etc match the https www version

Search Console should reflect the changes as soon as the correct version is indexed and re-cached.