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I went to the main site and it is a page set up with just the domain name, looks like there is no real website with links.  Looks suspicious for sure. Thanks for helping! I will investigate this further.

I have been trying to clean up any 404 errors. We keep getting the following:

URL

/include/vdimgck.php            referring domain http://www.856d.c@m/plus/feedback.php

rendered domain unclickable by adding the "@" since I do not know if it is safe.

I just turned off the trackbacks and pings in the blog since I saw it was producing duplicate content and from what I read it is not worth keeping those with Wordpress.

is vdimgck.php anything some here instantly recognizes ?

It tops all our 404 errors, seems like a lot of requests.

Thanks!

Hi,

Back in 2009 I decided to update an older site from .htm  and  .shtml to .php. In order to minimize the impact I would go in every month and do a 301 redirect on the .shtml page to the new .php page. So I have many that range from 2009 through 2010.

I had left the old 301's because I felt they would only be used if needed but I would think I should clean up my .htaccess by removing the old 301 redirects if they are not needed.

How long should you keep this type of 301 redirect?

Thanks!

As of today 42 views of this question and no comments. I would have to guess that some looked at the site a little and did not see anything. The reason I even posted this question is because I saw someone else post a similar question and there were a lot of quick comments stating that the person's website had obvious spam techniques on the home page.

Still hoping some experts at least throw in a comment.

Thanks!

Force7

On March 23rd our site fell 47% in one day. www.TranslationSoftware4u.com  but we still held quite a few #1 to #7 rankings on Google and thought it would just recover.

Our top keyword "translation software" was #4 , now we are #19

Over the next week I waited to see if it recovered. We have been online 10+ years and always stayed with white hat.  I admit to learning as I go over the years but always felt content was king so I focused on information. I really do not see my site as using spam techniques but maybe I am missing something on the way I have it.

March 23rd, major drop -47%

On April 2nd  I started with SEO MOZ and the Research tools showed we had duplicate content warning. This was from a blog we were trying to start that only had 7 posts but it had about 20 tags per post. I did not realize that tags actually created that post under that tag. I went in and deleted the tags again being stupid and not realizing it was then making that come up 404. The blog was so small we do not get hits on it anyway so hoping it just clears itself up. ( still get duplicate warning on our directory due to using "php Link Directory", but it's due to how it reuses the title tag and description, 2 instances per category page"). Still trying to fix the php directory issue. Seems many others are running it and did not have a drop.

April 24th, we dropped another -10%

It keeps falling -70% now.

I have gone through the site and tried to clean up any warnings like duplicate title tags, meta descriptions.

With regards to links I put up a small web directory with some reciprocal linking. Our product translates languages but software is not the same as a human so we often set clients up with human translators, the directory is a nice place to help our customers find a translator or see online tools that can help. The links were not excessive, there were maybe 100 links. After the fall I went in and found some translators had gone out of business so I deleted those, I am down to 65 links now, about 45 are exchanges.

I have submitted to some online directories manually, but looking back through the links there is not really anything that makes me concerned. The link back to my site was really the most neglected SEO thing I did. Again concentrating on content. I did find a few links that I was not happy about but I did not put those links so had no control.

I have been working on cleaning up my title tags, and making sure the content just reads better.  I have been hoping that my site would just start recovering but it keeps sliding.

Has anyone seen recovery from the updates. Should I see anything yet? I cannot seem to get Google to return to the site and reindex.  Am I doing somethign spammy on my site and I do not realize it?

Thanks for any advice in advance!

So if I understand correctly, I should have..

<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.mydomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mydomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]</ifmodule>

on the .htaccess and then also add

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /.index.html\ HTTP/ RewriteRule ^(.)index.html$ /$1 [R=301,L]

AND

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^.mydomain.com$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(.+)/$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]

The internal linking structure of the site is as follows:  main navigation is usually absolute, http://www.domain.com/page.php     but throughout the site if I link a keyword i use the "/folder/page.php

When I do a "site" command on Google I see the

www.TranslationSoftware4u.com/   as the only one I saw listed

Our hits are down 70% so I am paranoid about making a mistake during the process of trying to find out how to recover from the latest update.

Appreciate the time you are taking to help answer this Matthew!

Thanks,

Force7

Hi,

It looks like Seomoz (and Screaming Frog) is showing my home page as duplicate content.

http://www.mydomain.com         Page Authority 61     Linking root Domain 321

http://www.mydomain.com/         Page Authority 61     Linking root Domain 321

[Screaming Frog shows duplicate as]
www.mydomain.com/
www.mydomain.com/index.html}

Years ago I hired someone to write the code for a rewrite for non www to be 301 redirected to www version. I was surprised at finding out that I still have a problem.

Here is the code on my htaccess page.

<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.mydomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mydomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]</ifmodule>

Was this code not properly written ?

One more question, we were hit hard by Panda and Penguin, would something like this be that much of a factor.

Thanks in advance,

Force7

I had to come back and thank you for the great suggestion on the Screaming Frog software tool, this is exactly what I was looking for plus some additional tools that are invaluable.

Won't I loose page authority for the existing pages, even with a 301? There are not that many pages but really concerned about loosing some of his rankings.  He has a lot of backlinks so they will always link to the old content.

This would be like 301 redirecting the whole site?

Hi,

I come from the old html days of Frontpage and then moved to Dreamweaver. I first worked with Wordpress at version 2.7 and was not all that impressed, but then recently I worked in the new version and was extremely impressed. So my knowledge of Wordpress is VERY limited and plan to build future sites with it.

I need to know the best way to solve an issue for a customer.

The client is http://www.nextgenrestoration.com/

Site was built years ago with Frontpage. The popularity of Blogs was hot so someone told them that if they add new content it would be better to use a blog, so they added a blog.

So you have the following:

www.nextgenrestoration.com   (main site)

then they installed wordpress in a folder (blog)  www.nextgenrestoration.com/blog

Original person that built the site quit.  New person took over and said the main site needed to changed to Wordpress because they did not have Frontpage and all they knew was Wordpress.  Main site was converted to Wordpress. They wanted to keep the original design so they did not use a stock template, they just built it with their design. I guess from looking at the Editor, they manually went in and put the design in to match.

Now.. this last month, the person that had changed
the site to Wordpress quit.   So I got involved because the new person they hired  could not add content to the main website. If you add a page, it does not show up, you have to manually go in the php and add the link to the category. The new person knows how to use Wordpress but she knows nothing about PHP so is lost when it comes to manually adding content to the site.

Here was my Thoughts.

The main site needs to be rebuilt in a stock template so it automatically creates new pages, blog posts. I have to make sure that if we change the
main website that we could keep all the same links and page names. The girl
that built the site, if you hover over the links that she put it under ‘florida’,
that must be a category. But we would need to keep the same page names. I know
we could do a 301 redirect but this guy cannot lose traffic. He is already down
in hits after the last Panda update.

My thought was, rebuild the main site in a stock template so
someone can actually add content easily to the site. Also build a new blog
section so it all matches. (personally the existing design looks old and dated and needs updating)

If you look at the site now. The blog looks totally
different and it is not helping if a customer comes to the blog but cannot see
the navigation for the whole site.  My thought was to just leave the old blog, it has a LOT of backlinks. But just add a new blog to the main site and all new content goes there.  The old blog would stay just make sure we did build in some call to action so it sends them to the main site.

Also, we found we cannot create a Blog on the
wordpress we have installed in the main directory. I am guessing because it
wants to name it /blog?

I  want to be sure we give this client the best advice on what to do without
hurting his existing seo and traffic.

As you can tell, I am not qualified to really give the best advice since I am so new to Wordpress. This is a small company that really needs some help.

Thanks in advance for your time!

Force7

I have taken a major hit from the latest update. Site has been online for 10 years, white hat SEO all the way but I do have some legacy pages were I would duplicate title or the description on a new page.

Things are just unorganized currently and trying to find the best approach to organizing what I already have as well as track new content.

I would like to have a tool that would basically extract a list of my current pages, the title tags and the description in an Excel file.  Not sure how the pros organinze the SEO on a site but my biright idea is that I can have a large excel file with the pages listed  so I can detect duplicate info.

Site only has about 300 pages. Just regular php pages, no CMS.

Thanks in advance!

Thanks, I will check out Linkedin.

The post is at

http://www.translationsoftware4u.com/blog/tag/brand-monitoring/

I semi understand the canonical, I am guessing that you create a post then specify the Url of the main post. I was not sure technically what it does to the other links/posts like the one above.

I only have 7 posts so far but came up with about 180 duplicate pages. When I first added to tags to the posts I was thinking the more the better. Obviously that was wrong. So now I am going back and really just wiping out the tags. I am not even sure tags are that helpful other than categorizing the content and maybe I should rely on categories themselves to do that. Open to suggestions on proper tagging.

THanks,

Force7

Hi,

I just signed up with SEOMOZ and found some major duplicate content issues with Wordpress. I have installed Yoast SEO plug in but honestly am a little lost on how Wordpress handles it all and need guidance.

I would love to hire someone to do some desktop share / Skype sessions to teach me the proper way to set this up but did not see if there was any place on SEOMOZ where employers and providers can connect.

I am interested in more than just this one issue, looking for a freelancer ongoing to work on our site for SEO.

Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance

Force7