Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Wordpress and Joomla are both just tools at the end of the day and can both be effective depending on how you are using them. I personally have had negative experiences trying to optimise existing joomla sites (complicated templates, weird plugin functionality, slow load times etc) but I am sure those more experienced with it would say these things can be overcome.

The real questions are why you want to switch systems and how much effort it would require to do so? It looks like you have quite a bit of content in your site, so migrating to wordpress would likely need a bit of technical experience and time to complete. I am sure there are scripts around that will help in that process, but migrating a db from one system to another usually has a few gotcha moments along the way! You would also need to account for any changes in url structures and 301ing the old urls to the new. All in all not a decision to be taken lightly.

If there is not a specific reason you want to switch (ie something you are trying to do in joomla that is proving impossible for some reason) I would think that switching platforms might be more hassle than it is worth. As for one or the other being more customisable and/or secure than the other, I don't think there is really any difference between them, both are fully customisable and are as secure (or not secure) as you make them if following best practices.

Im pretty sure I did....

'wp-admin-bar-wpseo-kwdensity'  and 'class="ab-item"' indicate that this is code related with the wordpress admin bar. If you are logged into wordpress as an admin you will see this bar (black bar at the top of the page) when you view the site also. Did you try deselecting the  'show toolbar when viewing site' I mentioned above? When you do that do you still see the 'injected' code? I suspect not.....

Yoast and his seo plugin are both very welll known and respected, it doesn't just inject code into a site so that is why I say I think you are misinterpreting what you are seeing.

As for the a class="seomoz-highlight seomoz-highlight-nofollow", as Leslie says this is because you have the moz toolbar installed in your browser and have chosen to highlight no follow links in the options. Deselect this option and you will not see this code anymore. If you like, look at the google cache of any of your pages.... they will have neither of the code snippets you are worried about in them.

HI Dino,

Yes the links will still show in external link reports if they still exist. Assuming you have GWT access for the domain in question, you can go to the google disavow tool (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main), select the relevant domain and then click 'disavow links'. it will pop up a window where you can also download the last file that was uploaded to the disavow tool. You can then use this list to cross check against the links you are seeing in the reports to make sure nothing was missed.

Hi,

If you can do as recommended above and get rid of the page completely then this would be the way to go. Since it is on a national newspaper site and a couple of years old I am guessing this might be tough to do (although worth a shot).

Otherwise you can try to boost your own rankings and grab more real estate by:

1. Making sure all your on page data is branded (page titles, company schema etc).

2. Use verified social channels and link to them from your site (especially google+ but fb, twitter, linkedin, youtube are all good).

3. Get a few more branded links into the site (I assuming you are in 2nd position, it is a bit unusual for a branded search to not return the brand as the first option - you might just need a few more (honest) links).

5. Short term solution: Adwords on your brand's search. You should get a 4 pack of site links + descriptions in it also so should give a fair amount of real estate above the newspaper article and should be inexpensive.

Hi,

At first glance it seems you have a rel canonical issue. All of your blog posts have a rel canonical pointing to: <link <span class="webkit-html-attribute-name">rel="canonical" href="http://www.hilden.co.uk/bed-linen.html" /></link <span>

Probably not what you had in mind!

Hi David,

Personally I feel the value is debatable. If you are syndicating your own blog content then you are running the risk of either duplicate content and/or what looks quite a bit like mechanical link building, both of which are low value options.

If you are planning on creating unique content for the other blogs then you need to balance the amount of effort it will need to create something decent with the amount of time you have. I have also found that you can be in danger of competing with yourself, and the last thing you want is your offsite blog competing with your main site/blog. In my experience blogspot etc have proven to be more hassle than they are worth in upkeep and I would prefer to focus on the main blog creating good content and building strong links.

My two cents!

Hi,

I think this will do what you are after: http://pro.moz.com/tools/crawl-test, limited to 3000 pages but should give an idea if the fix is working as you expect.

HI Benoit,

If the site is very new and has no incoming links yet I would think that google is still trying to decide what it is all about and how best to present the data in the serps and that is why you are seeing the contact data in there (also the type of search you are doing - an exact match for the domain - could be influencing the type of data returned). Give it a bit of time and the description should change around and settle.

The date is mentioned in your source code (view source and search for 'vcard' and you will see a hidden div with author and date info in it). So google is likely thinking your site is a blog and adding date info to the serps. Getting this hidden code completely out of the template should help getting the date out of the description.

HI,

There was a recent WBF about syndicated content which runs down the various technical ways you can attribute your listings as the original source - check it out here. It would probably also help to make sure your listings are the first ones into the index which can be done by internally linking to the new jobs (obviously), quickly adding them to your sitemap, sharing them through social channels (especially twitter) - all of which should help make sure your content is indexed quickly and ideally before it is replicated on other sites.

If the other sites have stronger authority than yours you would still really want to get one of the 3 options discussed in the video implemented. It sounds like you already have the link back to your site (option 3 in the video) so perhaps the link is not 'clean' ie a straight text link that leads to the exact job on your site and is not no-followed?

It might also depend on what kind of long tail you are looking at ranking for. Individual job ads might not pull a lot of organic traffic by themselves if they are not aggregated by type or location for example - at which point the higher authority domains are likely to show an advantage (just a thought).

Hi,

Sometimes FB seems to get a bit stuck on urls, I find running them through the fb url debug tool (https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/) usually seems to unstick them. I plugged that url into the tool, it returns ok, does it post properly now also?

Hi there,

It looks like you have a technical problem which is probably the root of the issue. On the vast majority of your pages (including the homepage) you have a meta robots noindex tag which is telling google not to index your content! You can see here that there are very few pages indexed. Unless there is some specific reason for this setup then you should go into the yoast settings and/or the general wordpress settings and remove this instruction. For yoast check here for the various places to check, for wordpress generally you go to Settings -> Reading and make sure the 'search engine visibility' checkbox is NOT ticked. Hope it helps! If you get that sorted out I would think you will see a pick up in results pretty quickly.

HI,

bmw -intitle:bmw

Should work (if you ignore the google rewritten titles in the serps).

Hi,

It i probably google deciding to rewrite the titles for you, Yoast himself makes a mention of it here: http://yoast.com/google-page-title/ In short, not much you can do about it.

Is all that new traffic organic? Is your sale/conversion rate increasing at the same rate?

If the answer to either of those questions is yes then you should be moving cautiously. If the main aim is to make the site mobile friendly then do that first and monitor traffic/rankings for a couple of weeks. After that depending on what you see try implementing the other changes you have planned in order and give a week or two in between each change to monitor how things are going.

Changing urls, titles, metas, internal linking and content all at the same time on a site with that much traffic (and I am assuming at least some profit).... is crazy. If rankings/traffic plummet, which change caused it? Where do you even start diagnosing with that many changes at once? Nightmare!

Hi

This should do it, you place the robots.txt in the root directory of your site.

User-agent: * Disallow: /product-category/

You can check out some more examples here: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/robotstxt

As for the multiple urls linking to the same pages, you will just need to check all possible variants and make sure you have them covered in the robots.txt file.

Google webmaster tools has a page where you can use to check if the robots.txt file is doing what you expect it to do (under Health -> Blocked Urls).

It might be easier to block the pages with a meta tag as described in the link above if you are running a plugin allowing this, that should take care of all the different url structures also.

Hope that helps!

Hi Jason,

At first glance I would say a big part would be the number of external links and the domain authority. The first site has some links from quite a few major news sources in regards an incident where a woman's breast implant got 'blown out'(!!). Bbc, la times, cbs, nbc, huffington post, wow!

Now, i'm not suggesting you try to organise a similar event , but man, those links are pretty powerful and even though the event could be considered a negative one from one side of the equation those links are probably giving a good overall authority boost to the site.

Hi Brandon,

Its probably that robots meta noindex tag you have in there!

Hi,

I have seen the same thing in a number of Magento shops I track, but while Magento can be a bit of a pain (those url variables oh man!) I think this is most likely due to thin product content and how the SEOmoz report decides on what is duplicate content.

The modal window content is repeated across all or most pages as you say, and since that content is the vast majority of the page's content, then the report is saying these pages look all the same. The product details are very small texts in comparison to all the generic shipping etc content you have in each page.

I see in my reports the duplicate page report numbers bouncing around all the time as the report decides one week that these 5 pages look the same and the next week a different 5 pages look the same!

I don't know the specifics of how exactly the report decides which pages to flag as duplicate or why it bounces around, but I think the main issue is that if the report is seeing the content as duplicate, then there is a good chance the search engines might as well. It is at least an indication that something is amiss.

How to fix it? Well I would suggest 2 things:

1. Add more product details to pad out the product specific texts on product pages and

2. Move the modal content window data into separate pages and then either link to them from the footer as you do now, but leading to their own page or else load the separate page data into the window using ajax or similar.

Both solutions require a bit of work, I would think the second would have the most immediate benefit in terms of the SEOmoz reports.

Hope that makes sense!

Not really a great plan if you ask me.

Why don't you put the blog on your own domain, share the links through social channels and start building your followers and your domain authority? I would concentrate on quality over quantity, one good post a week is easily going to beat 5 spun out posts.

Your plan as it stands is too mechanical, easy for google to spot and really a whole bunch of links from the same, obviously networked sites like squidoo, tumblr etc how much value is that really going to drive? Not much I wouldn't think!

Hey Dan,

Its a bit confusing and has been for a while! See: https://moz.com/community/q/uk-and-gb-when-selecting-targeted-engines-in-campaign-management. Results should be the same between them anyway but Moz is saying that GB is the mistake and is due to be phased out.