Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I can only answer from past experience, but I typically see major changes every 30 days or so.

-Dan

Hi

How are you checking rankings?

I see a few on-site issues;

• there are no canonical tags
• a site: search returns the homepage 2nd in the result.  product categories are not high in the results for the site: search - just seems a little odd to me.
• the meta robots should read "index, follow" not "all" for pages you want indexed and followed

The first thing to do is check Google Webmaster Tools. This is the best source of problems with the site.  Correct every possible thing in there first.

Before thinking its something malicious I would

1. verify the ranking numbers you're getting (try different sources like rank checker from seobook)
2. review and correct all errors in GWT

Hope it helps!

-Dan

Hi

You can use the Plugin for Chrome - hopefully that's what you were looking for!

-Dan

Great answer - "bingahoo" - love that.

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

Tim

The essential pages to redirect are;

• Ones that have backlinks pointing to them (check in opensite explorer, majestic seo, google webmaster tools, and analytics for referring sites
• Carry ranking value for specific keywords that are valuable to you
• Have ever been a landing page (look at your landing page report in analytics for the past 6-12 months) - although it seems like you've got this figured out. Is it a fairly small site?  (Under 50 pages or something?)

Depending on how your site is built there are several options for doing the redirects in an efficient way.  Assuming it's a custom site and you've got a good clean URL structure, I might try something like;

1. Spider both sites with Screaming Frog
2. Export the URLs into Excel
3. Do some sort of lookup function to match the corresponding URLs from the old site to the new site
4. Use that to construct the text for the .htaccess file.

If the site is so small, you might not need something intense like that.  Cut and paste will do just fine  If some other setup, I'd need to know more to suggest a different way to create your redirects.

After you do everything, check webmaster tools for the next few weeks for any 404s that might pop up.

Hope that helps.

-Dan

Brian

As far as which to remove, that's just up to him to decide. Unless I saw how the site was put together with plug-ins etc he should be able to determine which one is best to use.  Its whichever is easier for him really.  From an SEO standpoint you just need to choose one, it doesn't matter which.

Hope that clarifies!

-Dan

Hi

Few things I saw right off the bat:

• Doing a site: search in Google (site:ignitehats.co.uk) I see LOTS of duplicate meta descriptions, and LOTS of pages that look like empty search results getting indexed.  (like this one)
• Google has 6,000+ pages in the index for the site, but screaming frog only found 700!!

The other answer about backlinks might have merit to it, but none of that's going to help until you get these technical issues fixed.

I would honestly proceed this way;

1. Get a complete site audit done by a professional

2. Make the technical changes needed

3. Fill out then content some more. The site overall is very "thin". Not much text, especially important pages that should carry authority like the home page and category pages.

4. Wait for Google to re-crawl

5. The use this tool to answer the question "why does a site rank where it does?"  Make sure to run the full report.

6. Then work on backlinks.

-Dan

ALSO - your site is loading with AND without the www and /index.html does not redirect.  All possible variations of the homepage should redirect to only one.

Hi

I'd also look at this from the user's point of view. In my personal experience the first option (a subfolder) is the least confusing.

-Dan

Hi

To my knowledge, you don't stop it from crawling through the button (like a nofollowed link), rather you block the robot at the page it ends up on after clicking submit.

Say the user hits submit and it takes them to mydomain.com/confirm.html  On that page you'll want to add;

....if you want it to NOT index the page but follow the links on it.

or

...if you want it to NOT index and NOT follow the links on that page.

Its advised that its better to do this with the meta tag than in robots.txt.

Hopefully I've understood the question correctly!

-Dan

Hi

The Open Site Explorer while exhaustive does not have all the links on the web, plus it won't have the most recent links.

You could also try www.majesticseo.com.

You could use a variety of advanced operators to find some more links;

• -site:www.mydomain.com "mydomain.com"
• -site:www.mydomain.com inanchor:"my site name"

That might catch some more of them.  You can try adjusting the time range to get recent ones.

-Dan

Hi

It looks like your have two canonicals on all of your pages. They are being generated by two conflicting sources in your WordPress setup.  One looks like its coming from the wooCommerce and the other perhaps from the default WordPress settings.

So the bigger issue is to have your developer decide on which source is best to take the canonical from. This will depend perhaps on if one works better than the other.

Hope that helps!

-Dan

"Use your Google Analytics to determine which links are not used. If you offer links which are not used, it is a waste and adjustments should be made. An unused link should generally either modified so it is more visible or removed."

• now THAT'S some killer advise right there!  I'm always weary of things like 'only 100 links on a page'.  Every situation is so unique, it will really hurt you to try and stick blindly to a 'rule' like that without thinking for yourself.

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

An alternative for removing them from search results, besides a 301, is meta robots - noindex.  You would do this if you do not want them passing any link value to 301d pages, which it doesn't sound like you would want them to.

-Dan

Good call Ryan.  I simply did a site: search for that page and it came up in the index.  I also searched for a portion of random text from that page and it still came up.  Could it be indexed but because its an orphaned page it doesn't rank for the term its optimized for, because it doesn't get any linkjuice / domain authority flow?

Nice catch again!

-Dan

Hi Gary

You should have your 301s ready, as you'll want to implement them as soon as the site changes.

A quick way to get all the URLs (new or old) is to spider the site with Screaming Frog or Zenu  - get the URLs in a spreadsheet, and that way you have your list of old/new URLs.  Depending how well you know excel you can get them matched up and ready to go quite easily with very minimal typing.

Then check webmaster tools right away when you may the switch to catch any 404s.  Also, re-spider the site to look for the same.

-Dan

Hi

Honestly, I don't think you should worry much about pagerank.  I'd be more concerned if your traffic or rankings dropped.  Check out this whiteboard Friday on pagerank.  There are many more important things to worry about!

-Dan

PS - In about a 5 second analysis of your backlinks, I'd say you might want to focus on improving that. Not sure if someone has been helping you with linkbuilding or anything, but your backlink profile is severely unnatural.  WAY too many exact match anchor text links from irrelevant sites.

Your other option is to use meta robots tag like this;

Its a one step process instead of two.

Full documentation on URL removal from index here and on the robots meta tag here

Hi

That seems like it should work just fine to me.  Just follow these guidelines.

• does it appear useful to the viewer, does it make it easier to consume the content?
• or does it appear unnatural and spammy?
• also, I am not a fan of blanket rules like "don't ever use multiple h2 tags under your h1" (unless they are clearly stated in Google's quality guidelines or somewhere like that).  You have to look at every situation for what it is, and as long as you are not trying to be manipulative and it makes sense as determined by the content than do it!
• As far as I am aware, the only header tag that is recommended to not repeat on a page is the H1.

-Dan