Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey Steve,

Yes there are possibilities for optimizing the dynamic pages, but I am on the same side with you, I would simply noindex the search result pages and focus my energy on other possibilities on the site.

Gr.,

Istvan

Hi Dusty,

It would be better to set up 301 redirects, instead of 302.

Check the article of Dr. Pete here. It really describes the status codes.

I hope it helps,

Istvan

Hi Jeff,

I have imagined your situation and reminded me of a past client of mine, who asked me to do the same. But I will tell you the same thing as I have told him back then: Why to focus doorway pages instead of good landing pages on your main domain?

Think about the main difference between Doorway pages and Landing pages as the following:

• Doorway pages are made for spamming the index of Search Engines, creating pages to rank for a specific keyword/keyword phrase but afterwards you are fooling the visitor, because they will need to go further in order to reach the goal of their visits. The doorway pages will have a negative User Experience!
• Landing pages are created in order to focus a product/service of yours and while the visitor enter the page, they will reach the goal of their visits. The landing pages will have a positive User Experience!

There are two very good articles related for this two expressions, maybe take a few minutes and read them through:

1. Landing Pages
2. Doorway Pages

Instead of the Doorway Pages (Domains) I would advice you to try focusing the main domain for quality landing pages with quality content.

I hope that helped,

Istvan

Hi Joanne,

When taking such a decision I always read through again and again the article from Google: https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=83105

Ideally it would be good to contact each webmaster and ask them to change the url from the .com to the .co.uk, but realistic that is almost impossible.

What I would do is download through OpenSiteExplorer all the incoming links, check in general which are the most important for me and at least contact those webmasters and tell them about the change of address.

I hope it helps.

Istvan

Hi Steve,

Sorry for responding so late.

So whenever we have a situation as having many dynamic pages optimized, I always get back to the idea of Faceted Navigation. This way you will give the Search Engines one path to crawl to each products (but be aware that you will need to invest time and energy to have a well planned, structured navigation path).

What's the positive behind Faceted navigation:

• it will resolve the duplicate page flag on your products (giving search engines only one good specified path to crawl)
• it will raise the user experience as the visitors will have the chance to easily get to the desired product fast

The negatives:

• Are there any? - Ok, seriously speaking, you will need to sit down and think a lot of which path you choose, how to resolve it to be efficient, the web dev team will work a few days/weeks (depending on their other tasks, importance of their tasks, etc.)

What it will bring to your site (relative to what you have now): currently you have noindex on the "category" (basically a search page with a filter on it, right?) page. With faceted navigation this current structure will be completed with an "tree" structure to your final products on the specified path (that you have chosen).

I hope this is clear and helped!

Gr.

Istvan

Hi Sebastian,

I personally prefer Yoast over Google XML sitemap plugin, because for me Yoast's Wordpress SEO plugin does the job for both SEO and sitemap generation. I prefer to reduce the number of plugins I use on wordpress.

This is a personal choice, maybe you will hear other opinions also.

Cheers,

Istvan

"Now I just have to figure out a way to tell my boss I told him so without actually using those words." I feel your pain!

Hi Godad,

If it was me I would go for the canonical version.

if you want to go with the no-index, then do not forget to use no-index, follow (so you do not miss the "link juice" those pages might get).

I hope it helped,

Istvan

Hi David,

I would avoid having more then 50 links on a page in total because of two factors:

1.) It confuses the the client (just think as you would walk in a park and you get to an intersection where you have 100 ways to go, which path would you choose?)

2.) if we look at the pagerank formula (as we know it since the beginnings) think about how much would you divide the "link juice" (ex. you have a chocolate and you want to split it to a lot of people).

I hope this helped you make a decision.

Gr.,

Istvan

Hi Kevin,

This is a question that I get all the time. In my opinion, having outbound links to non-competitive, but still related and authority websites is good.

For ex. if we are talking about a travel website, it does not harm to include a link towards the city destination's wiki page, or links towards museums or other "things to be seen" in the area.

Always, when you think of placing an outbound link on your website, I advice to think on the visitor's intent, and help them discover possibilities, which make your product even more interesting in their "eyes".

But once again, this is my personal opinion.

I hope it has helped. Gr., Keszi

'Neatza Andrei,

First of all, try to monitor new backlinks for the website, where are they coming from, what type of links are coming in to your website. Are all of these links low quality?

I'd use Majestic for this problem (they identify new links way faster than Moz), so you can export raw data, analyize and create a disavow file for the low quality links.

Gr., Keszi

Hi Jeepster,

I saw this question wasn't answered yet, so here I come with one:

What I would do in your case, is to check when the rankings or the traffic dropped.

Since, like you said, you have a child to look after, it means that you might not have a ranking history... well, if you have Moz PRO, then you could go to: Campaigns -> Ranking tab -> Change the "full rankings report to PDF" into "Entire keyword ranking history to csv" export it, and then look after the Keyword, Date, Traffic and Google Ranking columns.

If you are not a PRO member or you do not have a campaign set up for this particular website, you could analyze your traffic from Google Analytics and check aprox. on which date did your organic traffic drop.

After you have this, you could check the Google Algorithm Change history of Moz.com. Compare the dates and try to figure out what update has taken you down.

Regarding 17 Server Errors/575 soft 404s/17 Not Founds/Access Denied 1/Others 4:

• try to export the data of errors and check them manually (sorry, I can't give you tools for this, the best is, to look it up manually)
• yes, these errors could lead to problems in ranking (a while ago, a quite big website of a previous employer dropped in rankings. after resolving these issues, we got back)
• cleaning up your GWT in order to be clear it will help you

I really hope it works out for you!

Cheers,

Istvan

Hi Niners52,

I personally do not know DakWak, so I went and checked it out. But first impression: Machine Translation is never good. "The quality of machine translation is around 60-70%" This is what they have said in their live chat.

I personally work for a company where we target 9 different languages, and I know how frustrating it can be, when you do not have the correct translation for a specific text. But I would strongly advise you NOT to use machine translation.

Somewhere in the past (2011-2012?) we have used some machine translation on a website and it was strongly hurting our user experience.

Since then even if it goes slower and the costs are higher, but we go for human translations.

I hope this was helpful.

Gr., Keszi

Google is known for the fact that likes to rewrite titles and meta descriptions, if they believe it fits more to the user.

There are a few articles which you could read:

• from Yoast: https://yoast.com/google-page-title/ <- he is writing about this issue itself
• from Moz: http://moz.com/learn/seo/title-tag

I hope it will help.

Gr., Keszi

Oh, sorry. My eyes run over the site: search. You have only blocked the emailer. My bad

Hi David,

I was checking your source and it says:

Is it possible that missing a space in code doesn't stop Google indexing it? (I think that's causing your issue)

Here's a documentation how to implement it correctly directly from Google

Hope it helps,

Istvan

Later edit: btw: it should be something like this:

Hi Jacob,

As I was reading through your question, the first thing that jumped in: HREFLANG markup.

Then I jumped over your URL and I see the following:

<link rel="<a class="attribute-value">alternate</a>" href="http://www.flowtracksurf.be" hreflang="<a class="attribute-value">nl-be</a>" /> (on Belgium version)

<link rel="<a class="attribute-value">alternate</a>" href="http://www.flowtracksurf.nl" hreflang="<a class="attribute-value">nl-nl</a>" /> (on Netherlands version)

You are not using cross annotation. That might cause an issue for you.

There is a nice article about Hreflang implementations from Dave Sottimano: http://moz.com/blog/hreflang-behaviour-insights

Read it trough, I think with correct implementation of Hreflang, you should be able to resolve this issue.

I hope it was helpful.
Gr., Keszi

I'd test it with one page, then fetch it from Google webmasters tools.

If the test works, then it could be applied to all of the problematic pages.

Hi Lincoln,

First of all, I would try to investigate what happened, why you have dropped out of top 5 to position ~#45. If you take a look at the Moz's Google Algo update page: http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change and you compare it with your Google Analytics/Google Webmasters Tools data, do you see any specific update that might have hurt your rankings?

If you want to be quick with this, there is a great tool Panguin.

Before I would jump into troubleshooting the other questions, I would try to figure out what went wrong in the first place. Sometimes resolving old issues on the site can help the success of future efforts. So it might be worth a try.

I hope it has helped, Gr. Keszi

Hi,

Quite interesting what you developer says There is no such thing in Wordpress as Impossible, but let's say if there is no other way to handle it, you could download the Yoast plugin (wordpress seo) and set those pages to noindex, follow and from robots.txt disallow access to the two pages.

Still I would check what is causing the "auto-generated" pages. If it is a bought theme, go ask the original developer. I'm quite sure that there will be an easy way to fix it. (drop me a private message and we can check it out together)

Gr., Keszi

Later Edit: Hint: Maybe you (or your developer) should check into the custom post types.