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Hi Elias,

I have seen a similar issue a few months ago at an ex employer. In their case 301 redirects have been ignored!

So basically what happened:

1. They had an older link structure which they have redirected to the new url versions (this happened around 2009-2010)
2. After a "silence" period in affiliate marketing they have reactivated their affiliate programs and heavily invested in it.
3. Because of no. 2. they have gained a lot of incoming links with the old links

Now what we believe went wrong is that Google could interpret this as an "accidental" 301 redirect because of the high number new incoming links to the old version.

As far as I know, when they resolved their affiliate links everything went back to normal.

It might be that your situation is a similar one to theirs.

I hope it helps,

Istvan

Hi Ryan,

At the end of this page you will find several ways to block Roger bot from indexing pages: http://moz.com/help/pro/rogerbot-crawler

I hope it helps,

Istvan

I am really sorry for the bad experience with them. I only had good ones until now

Try to tweet Aaron when you have an issue (psss, you can find his twitter account on this page: http://moz.com/about/team/aaron)

Hi Teginder,

I think the solution would be for you to write to the beloved Help team of Moz.com. They will probably give an answer to you faster, than community members in Q&A.

I wish you luck!

Greetings,

Istvan

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:

Exactly my idea! and you have everything in one spot. I hope it will work out for you!

Cheers!

Hi David,

For me it worked with Business account.

I have created an email for this purpose, went to an incognito page (Chrome) and made a page for my client. Then opened up the business account with the created email address.

I prefer to have a Business account for every Page that we administrate.

I hope it works for you also.

Greetings,

Istvan

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

There is no SEO software can help you determine if you have implemented correctly the canonical links(which page you are targeting with optimization). What they can do is to notice you about the fact that you have a canonical link present on that specific page. Which data you can export and analyze. Unfortunately this means a lot of manual work for you or your team.

Just think about the fact that you might Point a Canonical link from Page A -> Page A and from Page B-> Page B (because you have a script that will point a canonical to itself). Eventually these two pages are the same, it will be quite confusing to a search engine, right?

Or Page A -> Page B, Page B-> Page C and so on... that's also something that you would like to avoid.

Another case Page A -> Page B, Page B -> Page A.

With exporting the data that SEOmoz gives you and analyzing it in Excel (or a similar program), you will have the chance to avoid these problems.

I hope it helped and cleared the picture a little-bit

Istvan

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

Hey Turkey

Well I have just read a good case study, which amazed me: http://mattjanaway.co.uk/link-bait-mrcake-case-study/

I do not know about the exact number of links they have got, but the quality was really good:  The Guardian, Fox News, Huffington Post,Metro.

I hope you like it

Istvan

Hey,

I've seen nobody answered your question, so here it comes

What you see regarding canonicals are notifications(and not errors). There is not system which could tell if the canonical link is pointing to the right one or not(which url is the one that you chose to target), what it can do is to point it out to you. Then you can export the list of URLs and check if you have applied them good or not.

Unfortunately this means a lot of manual work, but it can help a lot.

Just think about the fact that you might Point a Canonical link from Page A -> Page A and from Page B-> Page B (because you have a script that will point a canonical to itself). Eventually these two pages are the same, it will be quite confusing to a search engine, right?

Or Page A -> Page B, Page B-> Page C and so on... that's also something that you would like to avoid.

Another case Page A -> Page B, Page B -> Page A.

With exporting the data that SEOmoz gives you and analyzing it in Excel (or a similar program), you will have the chance to avoid these problems.

I hope it helped and cleared the picture a little-bit

Istvan

SEOmoz, or any other tool on the web, won't be available to tell you if the canonical URLs are set up correctly or not. Instead they can give you a notification that the specific page has a canonical URL.

An advice in your case, do not use automatic canonical generation for ecommerce websites, because you might end up with two different urls with the same content having the canonical urls pointing to themselves.

Page A will tell Search Engines that Page A is the original version of the page, while Page B will tell Search Engines that Page B is the original version. If you would be the Search Engine, would you be confused?

I usually use the notifications that I get from SEOmoz to check and try to avoid situations as described above.

I hope it helped,

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 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

In my belief, working on quality, expecting to have link on sites that are really big fish in the industry, eventually will pay out.

Yes, there are still a high number of websites which rank well with those links, but time will come when they will regret that.

So don't worry about your principles just keep up the good work.

Greetings,

Istvan

Hi again,

I use the SEO plugin for Wordpress by Yoast.

The problem with qTranslate is that in the backend you have 1 post, with 1 Title where you will have EnglishTitleGermanTitle but somehow it doesn't do the job well.

Istvan

Hi Reggie,

Matt Cutts talks about this topic in one of his videos: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/keywords-meta-tag-in-web-search/

I hope that helped,

Istvan

Yes, that would be a signal. But the idea I have mentioned in my previous answer was to "host" different languages on different ccTLDs.

English version  - .com or .co.uk (if you are targeting the UK)

French version - .fr

Spanish version - .es

We had 9 languages back that at that company and for each language we had different subfolders: /en/; /fr/; /it/ and so on... which gave us the possibility to geo-target each subfolder from Google Webmaster Tools, but we have seen our competitors next to us(and even before us) in most of the cases with their ccTLD version.

"Having different ccTLD's for each language but keeping the same site would result in duplicate content am I right?"

If you plan to keep the current versions + have new ccTLD versions then yes, you have a duplicate there. What you could do, if you migrate to ccTLD version is the create 301 redirects from the old URL to the new.

Istvan

Hi Lenia,

With qTranslate my biggest issue was the URL system for each page, which was the same indifferent by language (and since our clients website hosts 3 languages it was kind of odd to have a non-describing URL system).

Another back stab from qTranslate was that each post "hosted" every language version, but WPML gave me the possibility to work with every language on as a different post -> Different Title, Different URL, Different Meta tags.

This is why I have chosen to use WPML (although you have to buy it, but it does worth it).

I hope this helped,

Istvan