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Nope, doesn't need to be fixed. There's nothing wrong with this practice, especially for a Wordpress site (imo).
The notices that moz tools are giving you are just that - to make you aware that those canonical tags exist. They aren't warnings or errors, just notices to draw your attention to canonicals in case you ever wanted to look into them or ensure they were correct.
I think what Marie is saying is that there is a disparity here somewhere. You say you have thousands of natural links, yet you only are showing 125 referring domains... Same thing on OSE *only 79 referring listed there but that's normal for ahrefs to have a more complete vision. Still not a ton of links.. I'm wondering if you would see improvement just by building some great content and gaining new relevant links..
oh believe me, I understand completely. But I googled london magician and you were number 2. That's pretty friggin' good!
One of my sites lost a number one ranking we held for our primary keyword. I'm just happy we are at number 2. I know it could have been worse. Like Chris said, probably not a penalty. Could just be the way the algorithm worked your competitor bested you. Build away and feel proud of the fact that you are operating under Google's Webmaster Guidelines. (most likely...)
You dropped just 2 positions?? Consider yourself lucky and go build some organic, natural links!
YES I am wondering this too. I'd kind of like to see him do it without natural links (or somebody) to test this theory. I hope it's true. It would just mean that we can focus entirely on proper content and link building and forget about poison links altogether!
Since Penguin 2.0 is an overhaul though (right?) it should technically overwrite whatever damage was done from 1.0... by theory? So my next question would be, OP - Did you see any changes at all last night? even bumped up or down a couple spots for targeted keywords?
No problem.. I'm sure you can get a ton of help around here this community is awesome. I'm going to write a rushed response because I'm hurrying to wrap up for a 4 day weekend (woot woot!) so ---
Start by getting a list of all referring domains. Use multiple tools. Open Site Explorer, ahrefs.com, Google Webmaster Tools. Check all you can and get this list. Maybe into Excel. (there are some great articles on parsing this data and how to setup excel sheets to help determine Domain Authority and Page Rank value, but I'm not able to grab links at the moment check around these forums and seomoz blogs..)
What you'll be looking for is low DA and irrelevant domains. If you have a bunch of links coming from autism-savior.com/forums/ it probably is spam. Some of them will jump right out at you. If these links don't look like they would help somebody to learn more then they are poison... etc.
I'm assuming somebody along the way used a link building service. Something like $75 for 1,000 links, etc... If so maybe you can contact the company that did this and ask for a full report with logins/passwords. I did this with some success. Removed about 1/5th of paid links once... Wasn't great but at least got me closer.
These are just a few ideas. Hope they helped. Keep asking questions, maybe start another thread (since this one is marked answered it might get less clicks.)
No problem. Sorry to hear about it, but like I said: You can recover! Don't despair and keep us posted on your efforts. Your story could help many I'm sure!
And here's why you were penalized via the Penguin update right here: http://gyazo.com/8b4c324ddc8b83d5be4f746b42dfa550.png
Get to removing the bad links.. Keep good ones, but build a more diverse anchor text. This is not a manual penalty for you it is recoverable. Build natural links and remove the unnatural.
You got Penguined my friend. In case you've somehow missed it, the 2.0 update rolled out last night, at the exact same time your SERP dropped. Not a coincidence, I'm afraid.
Yeah I didn't mean it was simple to recover, but simple to discover rather. I'm well aware of the difficulties, believe me.
I'm trying to learn more about this 2.0 Penguin action. The only way to do so is research. Can you please supply us with your domain? We may be able to help further that way anyhow..
To research your link profile, first you need a tool such as Open Site Explorer or ahrefs.
From there, it's simple.
links that don't exist or links to pages that don't exist?
..heck, either way i'd ignore them and focus on phase 2 of your plan. Disavow seems to be a bit overused in my opinion. It's more of a last-ditch effort for penalty recovery IMHO.
and if it's 404 errors you're trying to fix: Google will eventually stop following those after they 404 long enough. Don't even worry about it. (unless they're links you want, then put a relevant redirect in place.)
Hope this was helpful.
From my experience with this latest update (not even 24 hours old, mind you) it seems to be more of the latter than the former. I'm seeing sites that had a mix of good/poison links sit around the same placement while sites with nothing but spam links dropped off the face of the earth.
Again though, this is early and one teeny tiny little example out of the billions of pages out there.
Will probably be awhile before we know anything concrete but my guess would be the same strategies of 1.0 apply toward 2.0. I'd imagine they just widened the umbrella, so to speak.
We'll see! I've got a close eye on a few sites I'm curious to see what will happen to...
Any notices or warnings in GWMT?
edit: nevermind, I've been under a rock for a few hours.
You could change it without informing Google and just see what happens.
Personally I wouldn't do anything until you've actually seen a decrease in traffic and ranking placement. I received an unnatural link notice in GWMT back in March for one of my sites and have yet to see anything happen to it. There was black hat SEO work done on that site in the past (not by me, of course) so I wouldn't be surprised if all the sudden it took a hit but to this day I've seen nothing but improvement in my target keywords for that site.
I feel like if I had responded to Google and submitted my site for reconsideration I would have seen bigger penalties. So I created a re-inclusion package and waited... two months later I see no problems so I'm still waiting.
Absolutely! But only if it's
a.) not too long
b.) relevant to the page's content
c.) attractive to the target audience
i.e. don't make it long and spammy; keep it short and sweet because remember that this is what your potential visitor will be clicking on to visit your site. IT MUST ENTICE THE VIEWER!
Hope that helps.
You should link to the most relevant page. Forget about A or B or which one you want where. When you are building links you should make sure that they are being built in a place where people will actually want to click them. They should offer relevant information, data, or resources to further assist any potential users of the page you are linking from. The rest of that is irrelevant.
Link the page that fits.
just looked at the other site you say is working... it has a much simpler robots file and no delay. just sayin' //
That's one of the bigger robots files I've seen in awhile..
You sure that crawl delay isn't messing things up? Not sure but that'd be my first guess.
