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Hello Everyone,

I recently removed some pages and made a custom 404 page by putting "ErrorDocument 404 http://www.site.com/404.htm" in the htaccess file but WMT now reports soft 404 errors, how do I do this properly?

Thanks

Hi, Thanks for that. How do I get it?

Hi,

I have recently installed wordpress and started a blog but now loads of duplicate pages are cropping up for tags and authors and dates etc.

How do I do the canonical thing in wordpress?

Thanks

Ian

Thank you all that seemed to have worked.

Cheers,

Ian

Hi Chad,

The problem is I can't verify anything atm.

Hi Kyle,

Under manage site there is only

Add or remove usersGoogle Analytics property<a class="gwt-Anchor">Delete site</a>I've tried linking wmt to analytics but nothing changes

Hello all,

I have a site and I want to set a preferred domain but when I do it says I need to verify my site but it gives me no ideas how to do that.

I know that normally you have to do it when you set the account up but I had an analytics account for this domain first then just logged on with those details and I was in with no verification process.

Cheers

Thanks for your help

Hello Branagan,

Thanks for that.

They seem to give a top 10, I was looking for a longer list. (The first link is dead btw.)

Many years ago someone somewhere produced a list of the top1000 keywords. I found one for 2012 but it didn't look very accurate.

I tried searching for top 500 with more success.

Ian

Hi,

Where can I get a reliable list of the top 1000 keywords searched for over the last few months or 2012 or whatever?

Thanks

This is a bit of a rant, to be fair, but I'd appreiciate peoples opinions all the same...

If you search google in the US for long hairstyles at around position 4 and 5 there are a couple of pinterest pages that are just doorway pages for the sites they link (or mostly link) to.

The first one http://pinterest.com/hairstylesweekl/long-hairstyles-for-women-2012-2013-long-hairstyle/ is said to have 6k pinterest followers, I can't fathom why a doorway page to such a low pagerank site would get that many but it doesn't look like they've bought them.

And the second one http://pinterest.com/hairstylesvane/long-prom-hairstyles/ is so blatent. 20 or so pictures all from the same site.

Google seems intent on penalising "wrong doers" while everyone else gets caught in the crossfire and yet someone throws a pinterest doorway page together in 1/2 an hour and it gets near the top for a relatively large search term.

Panda/penguin etc were sold to us as a fix for low quality and spam but instead it seems to have given a free meal ticket to people like this and yet established sites get kicked in the teeth by arbitrary penalties and negative seo.

ok thanks

Hello Andy,

Thanks for that.

I have most of it in a directory so just so I know I've got it right... in the htaccess file I put a line:

RewriteEngine on RewriteBase / RewriteRule ^gallery/(.*) http://www.example.com/ [R=301,L]

Where /gallery is the directory to be moved, will send everything from the directory (including stuff in subdirectories) to the index page? I do have a corresponding new gallery but the file names are different.

Cheers

Hello,

I want to ditch about 1000 pages of a 2000+ page site. I believe the 301 redirect thing is the way to go but my expertise is limited. Is there a way to do a blanket redirect ie if a user or search engine looks for a page thats not there it all gets redirected to the index page or do I have to do each one manually?

Thanks

Ian

Hello,

My sites are showing odd "links to your site" data in WMT. Its not showing any links to the homepages and reduced links for other pages. Anyone else seeing this?

Penguin refresh maybe?

OK thanks for that,

Some of these things are already in motion.

I'm still hoping someone can throw some light on the missing keyword thing as I believe it may be significant.

I think thats covered by paragraph 2 and expanded on in paragraph 3.

Hello,

In Googles Web master tools under "content keywords" 2 of my major keywords are missing.

My site used to rank well for the keyphrase "short hairstyles" but gets very little traffic from google at all now, about 1% of what it did before april 2012.

Someone did a negative seo number on us by pointing 10k+ spammy links to us from message boards, this and the timing of the traffic loss leads me to suspectthe penguin update. I am removing them as best I can but no increase in traffic has resulted so I'm looking for any and all issues and the missing keywords seems to be an oddity.

The missing keywords include "short" which is pretty fundemental. The word is in the domain and plenty of times in the content.

Any ideas?

OK thanks.

Ian