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Penguin 2.0 is definitely from webspam and backlinks. I suggest using Google Webmaster Tools as your backlink dataset. They provide links that are more likely to be causing problems. It's extremely unlikely the internal links are hurting you if it is Penguin 2.0.
Hi!
I would be very careful about guessing what caused the drop in traffic to begin with, before you go adding noindexes everywhere.
Try to find a correlation to the drop in traffic. Did rankings drop? CTR? Amount of brand searches? What type of organic traffic dropped, long-tail or head terms? Also, you may want to compare the amount of unique visitors compared to the past and check the amount of new visits compared to the past.
I'd investigate a little more before taking action.
-Dan
Hi Rebecca
What are the crawl errors exactly? From that report screenshot it looks like you have a variety of them, so the fixes will all be different.
Let me know, and in the meantime you might want to check out my article on Moz about setting up WordPress
-Dan
Great answers here by Josh and Alan. I'll touch upon the informational/blog pages and social buttons.
Social share buttons can be great on Informational pages, sure to get people to share your content, but a lot of the benefit is for social proof.
Pat Flynn has a great episode about social proof here. Check it out. Keep in mind social share numbers can work against you if they are low.
Also, I'd add social buttons only for the networks your target audience is most likely to be using.
I recently started checking out the SumoMe suite of tools. I was pretty impressed on first glance - I think there's a lot you can do with heat maps, content analytics and analytics integration which help you measure the results of each piece of informational content.
Hi
Acquiring links requires the marriage (no pun intended) of creating great content AND pro-actively going after links in an ethical way. And actually, it can even be that the need for a link for a certain topic can inspire you to create a particular blog post, for the sake of getting that link.
So yes, a blog is a great place to start, because you're creating fresh content, and hopefully if its good enough people will naturally want to share it.
One tip (I think I was able to find your site). You have a Facebook share button on your blog posts but not a Twitter button. I'd HIGHLY recommend adding one, since getting your site tweeted is crucial to sharing as well.
-Dan
Forgot your second question: Your menu at the top supplies the link to the homepage. Put internal links where it makes sense from a user standpoint, and just use natural looking anchor text, with exact or partial keyword match. But don't go overboard, you don't want it to look spammy.
I agree with David here. Someone made a custom category plugin for WordPress which will do what David is suggesting. I would not block anything, but rather noindex what you don't want in the index, which is typically for me tags, subpages, author and date archives.
-Dan
Hi
Is that a page where the homepage shows up instead of the desired page? I didn't see anything from your domain on the first 1-20 results.
But see the screenshots. That's a highly competitive term. And then check out your client's domain's backlinks and facebook shares. Very sparse. That clearly needs a lot of work. Ryan's right, it does seem you've got your on page SEO down pretty good. I'd take a look at your backlinking and social sharing metrics now, especially building links to those inner pages you want to rank for.
Maybe there's a better example where the homepage shows instead of the menu page? That was the original question you had, yes?
-Dan
Diane
Your page is too saturated with OTHER keywords and topics. It is not targeted enough towards the one topic you are trying to rank for. What the page needs is less of the off-topic content in the main elements (title, url, description, header, bold and internal links) to reveal the main topic you're trying to focus on.
Partially what I mean by "off-topic" is that you have many variations of your targeted phrase on the page: "hypo gastric band" "gastric band hypnosis" "virtual gastric band" are diluting the value of "gastric band hypnotherapy" - and they are all sort of competing for attention.
Whatever keyphrase you are trying to rank for, you want it to match exactly in the title, meta description, url and top header. This achieves a harmony between all of these elements, and then its ok to have variations of them appear naturally elsewhere in the body. But you want to focus those important elements with the exact keyphrase you're going for. This not only helps SEO but usability too.
-Dan
Hi Ricky
Yes I think this would be an easy programming job, or maybe there's a plugin that can do this. I' not sure off the top of my head, but I'll see if any other Moz folks have any suggestions.
Hi
Use the Keyword Difficulty and SERP Analysis tool - run a full report. It will give you all the ranking factor metrics of the top 10 results (plus an 11th site you can add). The major things I always check first are;
Chances are you may need to beat some people in the top 10 in any of these metrics.
-Dan
Thanks for the details. It may not be those links, but if there were even a few others, it could potentially hurt the site. I had a client who had done some spammy link building in 2011ish with another agency and just those few links hurt the site. I would try removing or disavowing anything you can find that's spammy, and not helping, and see if they helps anything.
The types of things to de-optimize on your own site would be more like keyword stuffing in the titles, URLs, headers and internal anchors - not so much blocking pages from being crawled. Blocking crawling it typically only if you want to improve crawl efficiency on really large sites or you just don't want Google to page attention to that content, but it won't fix a Penguin issue if it's on-site.
-Dan
Hi
It appears as if many of the links in your menu are nofollowed at the anchor tag level. That was the first thing I noticed after looking real quick. I don't know that this would have to do with your question, but since its quite important I thought I'd point it out!
To really dig in, I would suggest running a full report with the keyword difficulty tool and have a look at all the metrics. (You can add your URL if not showing in the top 10) That would be a good place to start!
-Dan
Agreed with Gianluca, I reference that article a lot.
This is another article I've found helpful too. He tells you step by step what to do.
And this is an article on the same blog with advanced tips.
I would look at this in a holistic manner. First of all, why would you link? Is this just for backlinking/ranking purposes? Then don't do it.
But are you asking because your friend has actual content you want to share? In THAT case, is the content (topic) relevant to the content on your site? And do you generally only link out to other sites for the sake of sharing the content on them? If so for both, I don't see anything wrong with it. And if it is just to share the content, you can just nofollow it too for added "security".
But if its just to try and get your buddy a link, don't bother.
-Dan
Hi
I think you're asking a question about duplicate content, and Google possibly indexing more than one version of the same page?
To avoid this from happening, add the canonical tag to the head of all your pages;
Each canonical should contain the original URL for each page. This will avoid indexation of the same page multiple times.
Jassy is likely correct, that the engines know how to ignore referral parameters, but you should have a canonical in place in most cases anyway.
-Dan
Ian
I'd completely agree. As I said to Patrick above, I've been deindexing tag archives like mad on my clients sites, with NO negative consequences, if anything the results are very positive. They're thin pages, with not much going on and often the titles get duped.
Check out this post I did which shows how to safely determine if tag archives can be de-indexed and how to do so.
Noindexing tags of course doesn't prevent Google from crawling them. If they're linked to it can still be good for Google discovering your content.
-Dan
Hi Mark
Check out my answer from this previous question. It explains how to use the SERP analysis tool and get data as to why a website ranks where it does.
-Dan
I do not know of such a tool - maybe try SEMRush? They have a lot by way of competitive analysis.
As with any new topic, if you want to learn and DYI that's great! However with anything new you're going to be learning, and make mistakes along the way and progress slowly.
I would read through this resource - its the best overview I've seen.
Is it more important for you to have knowledge and skill in the long run? Then utilize the many resources here and DYI.
Is it more important for you to get the job done right and in a timely manner? Then hire someone.
Last thing to consider, does the idea of it excite you? The definitely try it!! If not, you're likely to wish you had gotten some help...
Good Luck!
-Dan