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Most likely is a Moz error. As far as I know, Roger (Moz crawler) automatically adjusts the speed depending on the site performance, I guess watching for the response times, as they crawled sites too fast, they could be either bring down your server or have their IPs blocked as a security measure. It does that automatically. However, sometimes our Websites can become slow and therefore instead of a 200 status code (success load) it gets a 404 as the server isn't responding.

Are you behind a shared server? Were you able to see Roger crawling your site? There are some free services that allows you to make some stress tests to see if your server is responding well, even under pressure.

This shouldn't have anything to do with the fact that the pages are not showing in Google, but, if you are having server issues with regular downtimes, Google may remove pages that they consider gone from your site. Google already said that a couple of 404 errors isn't enough to remove a page from their index, however, a 404 over 3 - 5 days might.

Have you verified your site on GWT? They do show crawling errors, and if they are also getting 404s they should appear there.

Hope that helps!

Just published an article on SEJ about Schema.org markup and its role in future google updates: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/schema-org-eight-tips-incorporate-rich-snippets-conform-google-hummingbird/75435/

As peter pointed out, it will depend on the CMS you are using, nowadays there are plugins for almost everything.

Didn't know about Market Wired.

PRWeb (Vocus) customer support SUCKS! So if they are similar services, definitely go with Market Wired...

G,

It wouldn't do any difference to serve the sitemap over HTTP or HTTPS. As for the http and https pages within the same sitemap, it isn't a problem either.

The only reason I can find for creating multiple sitemaps is for HTML pages, images or videos that do require separate sitemaps.

Does you site uses PHP? If yes, I suggest you test xml-sitemaps.com and it will create the full sitemap for you. If you have a dynamic site, then I suggest getting their commercial version. I've been using it for over 7 years I think and I always get a copy for each site I create. And they offer lots of extras in case you need them (news sitemaps, etc).

Your problem is this piece of code:

That should be inside the body of the page instead of the head.

Hey G!

You can serve your sitemap in both versions, that won't be any problem and won't trigger the duplicate content issue. So you are safe both ways.

As for the second question: Yes, you should, unless you don't want your pages indexed (any HTTP or HTTPS). I think I saw your site before, and if I remember correctly you had your homepage and login script under SSL, right? Then you should definitely include your homepage in the sitemap but you can leave the login script file out as you don't need that indexed nor google will index it either.

Once you have your sitemap ready, consider including a path in the robots file, like this:

User-agent: *
Sitemap: http://[your website address here]/sitemap.xml

Hope that helps!

None of the ways you decide to display the images will affect Google AdSense, unless you serve a page with a hundred ads and the image there, or if you did some kind of trick to "force" users to click on the ads.

That said, you need to think for the users, put yourself in your visitors' mind. What would be easier? faster? prettier? If you ask me I would definitely go with the lightbox to display image galleries.

It won't hurt you in front of Google eyes either, they are smart enough to interpret lightboxes just fine.

Nope, it isn't too good to be true. Page caching is one of the smartest ways to increase speed.

How it works depends on the plugin, but usually it avoids making queries to DB, and processing by saving a copy of a page for a certain amount of time, so when the next person asks for it, the site will serve the saved version instead of generating it all over again.

EDIT: even on highly dynamic sites pages do not constantly change, for example, go to CNN now and go again in 1 hour, you will probably see the exact same thing but the latest news changed (most likely), but the rest of the page could be easily cached for 1 hour and avoid the re-generation so all those users accessing within that hour could be served with the cached copy instead of generating it thousands of more times (one for each visitor).

Have you tried looking at the headers response you get when accessing those pages? Try with http://web-sniffer.net/ to verify that your site is actually responding with a 301.

Anyway, I think Mozbot AKA Roger, scrapes sites once a week, so if you made the changes only 4 days ago, I would hold for a few more days.

How about using the robots file to disallow those pages? However, if you have a 301 and in the new page a noindex it should work (but who knows, they are still showing the old URLs after a year).

Did to try using the "Fetch as Googlebot"? in WMT? if not, go ahead and then hit the "submit to index" that usually speeds up big changes in sites.

Hope that helps.

If you are using the appropriate rel="alternate" hreflang="x" you shouldn't have any problem. For more info you can read here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

Most likely, as the pages are the same, they won't show up at the same time, Google will serve the one that they consider appropriate for the user, hence the use of hreflang, to guide Google to know which version they should serve to each user.

Hey Christy,

I did follow those steps a week ago I think when I opened a question about the same issue, that didn't solved it. However, since Yesterday (I think it was my latest login), I wasn't requested to login again, so seems fixed in this area. OSE is still asking me to login every time, unlike before that ig I was logged in in Moz I was logged in in OSE too.

Thanks!

What do they have? 10,000 pages of uninteresting content? a robots tag noindex,follow will do to leave them our of engines. But to decide you really need to know what those pages have. 10,000 isn't a few, and if there's value content worth sharing, a page could get a link, that if you disallow it through the robots, won't even flow pagerank.

It all comes down to what are those pages for...?

Well, 20 are a lot, those sites are probably safe, but the main corporate site might be flagged as "selling link" although it isn't.

I just had my manual penalty revoked, and in the process they pointed a link from federicoeinhorn.com to my business site (the link was in the about page saying I was the CEO of *** and a link there). Google pointed that specific link as one of the examples of the infringing links, therefore I would suggest you do a nofollow to all those external links in the nav.

Hmm.. usually it is advised to nofollow those kind of links. However, as your main corporate site links always to the same places (how many external sites?) there shouldn't be any problem, still it wouldn't hurt to nofollow them to avoid any penalty.

Sorry, I do not provide SEO services/consulting. If you are looking for a SEO, you can search in the recommended companies section: http://moz.com/article/recommended

I only contribute here as a hobby and a way to learn more every day

Having a link in the image linking to it's own file does not help your image to get indexed faster or added to a sitemap, at least not that I know of.

In my blog, I don't have the images linking to their file and they are indexed just fine, plus added to the image sitemap that is being generated by "xml-sitemaps" automated script.

Having the image file redirecting to the page having the post is actually serving users with different content that what Google may see, hence the penalty of the image mismatch. If Google offers a link the the image, it should load the image. That's why they also offer link to the page or clicking the image links to the page where the image is. You can read more on the "Image Mismatch" penalty here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/3394137

The "page" you see only the image is the image file itself, there's no page there, just the file.

Wordpress does that by default but you can simply change that default to other options they offer and it is "saved" as the default, like no link, link to another page, etc.

The only benefit of having the link to the image file is that usually images are scaled to fit into posts, and therefore someone may want to see the image in its full size, hence the link to the image file. There are also other ways to deal with that like lightboxes to display images.

You could redirect the image to the page where the image is, but that requires some coding (detecting from where your image is being requested, etc.). Doing that may also carry a penalty from Google (recently announced) called "Image mismatch".

There's no "best practice" here, the best is what you consider best for each image. Take the image scaling example I mentioned, say you post an infographic, perhaps the image is much larger than the size you have available, so it makes sense linking to the image file, so the user can see the infographic in its full size.

Hope that helps!

PRWeb is the best one i my opinion. But almost all Press Release sites have gone nofollow (within their site and distribution network), so you won't get any link juice from them, if that is what you were looking.

However, that doesn't mean you can't get some links organically by others sharing the news, etc.

Hope that helps.

If you are using GWT, AdWords or AdSense they can work alongside Analytics to provide more accurate data.