Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Has it shown any data in the past in that section? As if it did, it is probably a glitch and should be fixed in a few hours.

Your "blog" pages are in fact missing a description. For example: http://photographerinc.com/david/ has no description tag. It has the og:description, but that's not the same.

I wasn't able to find a broken link tho.

I'm sorry James, but I don't provide SEO services for the moment.

There a list of recommended SEO companies suggested by Moz: http://moz.com/article/recommended

As for the Metrics, if you go to opensiteexplorer and type the URL of your competitor, you won't get any data, as it is actually a new site and with almost no authority.

I did check the backlinks using ahrefs and they have near 75. My quick guess is, that if they are climbing out of nowhere, received 75 backlinks in a few days, then they are most likely using some king of black hat seo technique. But you shouldn't care, they WILL be removed in a few days (it could take a couple month too. You can report them to Google as a spam report).

Anyway, leaving that site aside, there are issues in your site that you should fix ASAP, or you will never get a decent amount of Search traffic. As I mentioned before, you can't name your pages "HOME". You need to name them properly. Check other Websites for reference... Your title, in the homepage, should read something like: "OC PAtent Lawyer - Entrepreneur and Mid-Size Business Patent Attorney". Plus your description should state what you do, while now, it also says "home".

Send me PM if you need more info. I can probably help you out for free. It is a Wordpress theme, so it shouldn't be so hard to fix.

James,

There's no such thing as "hijacking your authority".

You mistakenly typed twice your own domain, so you are seeing the same results in both columns

PS: There are a few things in your SEO that you have overlooked. Just by accessing your site I noticed the first: Title = "Home". You should really consider hiring an SEO expert to help you with your site.

Do you mind sharing your Website's address?

Hi!

The 1st error is given when you are linking somewhere in your site to a 4XX page. Try following the links in hat error report to see which page is linking to that 4XX. Once you find it, simply remove the link or fix it.

The 2nd, if you are just adding the missing tags, it would take at least a week to reflect in the crawl stats in Moz as Mozbot scrapes your site one a week.

Hope that clears it up

Well, it could take some time, yes. 72 hours isn't that long. However, I'd suggest you verify your site on GWT and then use the Fetch as Googlebot to scrape your page and verify that Google is actually seeing the correct page. Then you can click submit to index and select the option that says something like "this and all linked pages". That should help getting your site re-crawled and re-indexed faster.

Make sure all your possible url versions are correctly redirected via a 301 the the correct version. http://www.site.com - > https://site.com, etc.

Hope that helps!

Christian,

I just checked your site and I wasn't able to find those URLs that are constantly changing as you mention.

If you are referring to the restaurant order presented on the page changes, that's nothing to worry about. You are just sorting the restaurants by the last review, right?

I wouldn't recommend noindexing the review section, in fact, I would recommend you further improve it using schema.org markup to tell Google what those "comments" are. You can even use GWT Data Highlighter to markup your data automatically (although only Google will know the markup if you use that method).

About the duplicate content, there's also nothing to worry about, as in the homepage you present only 1 review while in the restaurant page you show all of them, so the content is different.

You should also use schema.org markup to let crawlers know business locations, details, etc and what you are actually listing.

Hope that helps!

Have you contacted the Google Webmaster Help forums? As that seems to be a glitch in Google.

How many pages are scraped by Mozbot? If the amount that mozbot shows is different, then you should either sit and wait until Google removes those indexed pages or create a conversation on the forums so someone at google can give you a hint of what is going on.

If the tool is listing those URLs with and without the slash I guess you are linking to those pages with and without the ending slash. You should check your site and remove the one that shouldn't be there.

Also, check if the "wrong" version redirects to the "correct" one or at least has the "correct" URL in the canonical tag.

The lastmod should be the date that the page was last modified, however, most sitemap generators don't know when that was so they just use the timestamp and a changefreq daily to tell Google basically that they need to scrape the page everyday. In most cases, that's not the case as the page remains the same for years, but that won't hurt you at all as Google has its own methods to verify if a page has changed and "learn" how often your site/page updates that it needs to re-scrape it.

Hope that helps!

I'm with Peter. As I wrote you Yesterday in the question you posted: http://moz.com/community/q/all-keywords-increasing-rank-except-url-keyword-whats-going-on

There's a massive report on a new update on SERoundtable: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-update-17956.html

Both should happen.

You should design your coming soon page in a way that allows visitors to visit the AU version meanwhile. Perhaps even adding a newsletter sign up form...

If you are already getting links, then Google is already aware of your site. They were probably not indexing the AU version as you were forcing them to go the US, which is an "under construction" page.

Google prioritizes results that they consider more valuable.

Imagine someone looking for a private equity firm database, they WON'T type private equity firms, as those who enter that are either looking for the meaning of "private equity firms" or news about "private equity firms".

Google might have ranked you on top for some time, but after the release of hummingbird, everything changed, now Google tries to "understand" what you are thinking, what you are looking for and present the best possible results, not only based on the query itself, but also taking into account search history, habits, etc.

You should also consider that your Website, compared to the others shown for that specific query, has a very low domain and page authority. Plus it lacks of any kind of social signals.

Oh well, as you mentioned "rebrand" I guessed you were able to also merge the two, by using one site to cover all, like most manufacturers do (apple, samsung, sony, etc).

Anyway, in this case, I would suggest you build different content for both sites. In the manufacturer site, you can have technical specifications, let's say it builds computers, then in the manufacturer page you list technical aspects of the chips, motherboards, manufacturing process, etc. While in the sales front you "SELL" the end product, show how it works, you can probably add videos of the product in action, etc.

By following that process you will end up with "similar" pages, but sites that actually read totally different; and you won't need to nofollow or noindex anything...

Why a different brand name? Couldn't just the manufacturer offer the products for sale on its site?

I can understand it if the retail store sells not only from one manufacturer, but if all the products are from the same manufacturer then why don't just use 1 site? That should be simpler to maintain, market, etc.

If your main concern is page load time, then I'd suggest you look into the @media query for higher resolutions. In fact, if you use sprites, you can recognize via CSS the display and serve different sprites (or images) based on the display resolution.

Take a look at the RetinaJS project here: http://retinajs.com/

Hope that helps!

Yes, subdomains linking to your main domain do flow link juice. However, having the exact same content could be an issue unless you noindex it, which will result in no juice being passed to the root domain.

I would take a different approach tho, as you said, it could take far more coding, but the results would be much better. Make the root domain accept canadians a free customers (don't know how you are going to pull this, ips, sources, etc), but this approach will get the link juice directly in your root domain instead of passing it through the subdomain and probably getting a penalty for duplicate content.

Also, take into consideration that if Canadians get the service for free just from accessing from Canada, other users from other countries may just use a VPN (like HMA) to access the site and look like Canadian visitors...

Hope that helps!

Subfolders ARE the best approach

As to your options, I would go with A, but if a visitor goes to say the Canadian version: domain.com/ca even though he previously accessed domain.com and was redirected to the AU version as it was the first time and a cookie was created/session var to store that, I wouldn't redirect him/her.

Let me put this differently.

AU visitor accesses domain.com, you redirect to domain.com/au (and you don't create any cookie, as the user actually didn't select a specific location).

Visitor accesses again, redirected to the AU version, but chooses to change the Country to CA, then he/she is redirected to domain.com/ca (a cookie/session var is now created as the user actually chose another option).

Visitor accesses again domain.com (he has the cookie/session var), he is redirected to the CA version regardless he is in Australia.

Visitor accesses again, but this time he types domain.com/au instead of the naked domain. He has the cookie, but I wouldn't redirect him... as I figure he typed the AU version because he WANTED the AU version.

That's what I would do. However, you can choose to redirect him anyway to the CA version as he has a cookie/sessio var stored. That's up to you.

Then on the 302, what I meant is that every redirection you make in this case should return a 302 status code, not a 301, as the 301s can be stored by the browser and then the user will be "forced" to the redirection. EX: he is in the AU page, chooses to go to CA, you create a 301 (instead of a 302) then next time he accesses the AU version he is redirected BY THE BROWSER to the CA version.

Hope that clears it up.

Agree with Mike.

However, I'd like to add that in the last few years, as .com are almost impossible to get, people started to use ccTLDs for sites not targeted to a specific Country, and Google (and I am guessing other engines too), had to "learn" to recognize these sites in order to rank them for other Countries as well.

Well known examples: bit.ly, last.fm, etc.