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Hi Matt,

Well I quickly ran it through Xenu (don't have the paid version of screaming frog) and one thing that sticks out immediately is your training registration pages like http://www.cbmtraining.co.za/register.aspx?c_id=1269 and http://www.cbmtraining.co.za/register.aspx?d_id=2249 for example.

There are quite a few of these pages and they all have the same title. You could put the actual name of the specific event in the title tag and that will help. It would also be good to put a bigger description of some sort in the page for each event, otherwise the registration form data looks pretty much like duplicate content even if you have a couple of lines unique for each event on each page now. You have a couple of other duplicate page titles floating around, but sorting out that issue with the registration pages will cut down the numbers a lot and let you focus more clearly on the others.

Hi Tim,

Did you ever get to the bottom of the issue mentioned in this question? It is almost certainly the same problem.

Have a look at this page and try either turning of the sh404SEF anti flooding feature or else boosting the max number of requests allowed. http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?p=1368937

The anti flooding part of this component is basically blocking requests for pages if it thinks someone is trying to do a dos attack on your site. The current setup seems to be too sensitive and is bloocking screaming frog after the first few requests, quite possibly blocking the google bots, maybe blocking the moz crawler also, so certainly something you should address.

Hi,

It can happen for a number of reasons, in my experience usually due to either unintentional blocking of the page from crawling or from being a JavaScript heavy/only site which doesn't allow content to be easily read by the moz crawler. Check out this dev blog post for a rundown on most issues and solutions. Hope it helps!

Hi Melissa,

It is actually pretty common for wp based sites to spin out repeated 404 errors (or at least have the potential to do this). It could be a theme issue, a plugin issue or a setup issue or a combination of all 3 depending on the site.

First thing to do is figure out where the link is coming from. Download your moz error report in csv and filter by 404's. On the left you will have the 404 page and on the far right you will have the referring page. Go to the referring page and view the source and try to find that link. Keep an eye out for relative links from deep structure pages also (so you have page /category/page/5 and the link is a relative href="/" or href="/6" which can have the effect of spawning repeated 404s like /category/page/5/6 etc etc).

Once you have found the link, you should be able to identify the template part which is producing them and then act accordingly to either edit the template or adjust the settings/plugin so that they stop. If you can give us a real example of a 404 and its linking page we should be able to give you more specific info.

Hi,

Yes it is ok and secure. Adding users with these restrictions basically gives them read access rights to the relevant accounts but they cannot change settings, add/delete users or generally cause any unforeseen trouble!

Hi Matthew,

I think you will find that those urls are included in your sitemap.xml and that is why they are being crawled. They are also being indexed by google - you can search for the name of the verification files and they show up in the results. Remove them from the sitemap and you should be ok!

Hi Dan

The hreflang will tell google that different pages are targeted to different languages/regions, but it will not help solve your existing dupe content problems as you describe them. So for these you should use the canonical tag.

Hreflang and canonical tags can be used together but can cause issues if you are not careful. Main thing to be sure of is that you keep any canonical tags within the same lang/region pages. You do not want to be having a US page with a canonical tag pointing to a UK page in other words.

Having multiple UK pages with a canonical pointing to the main UK page and the main UK page having an hreflang tag to its US counterpart is ok (as is having a self referencing canonical tag on the main UK and US pages if needed). Google mentions here that this is an acceptable way to handle canonicalisation issues in an international setup.

What you would also want to avoid is having hreflang tags on your dupe content pages in the UK version. Where would they go? to the US version of the duplicate content? To the main canonical version of the US content? That could get messy pretty quickly. So the trick is to consolidate your UK pages with rel canonical and then properly markup your final regional variations with hreflang.

Hope that makes sense!

Hi Anoop,

For your question regarding the benefit, site wide links especially on the same host (or a handful of hosts) all pointing to you are not going to give you much benefit and could potentially bring penalties. Be especially careful about stuffing keywords into those links. Your best bet if you want to keep the reference to you as a designer is to put the links only on the hompage or alternatively on a site credits type page and keep them to branded links only (ie the name of your company).

As to why all of them are not showing up in your reports, seomoz and other tools can only ever index a subset of all the links/pages on the web. I would think that the sites that are not showing up maybe have small link profiles (few external links from other sites) and as such are just not getting crawled that often because references to them from other sites are not found that often. Over time if their link profiles get stronger then you will likely start to see more of them appear in the reports.

Hope that helps!

Hi,

You could try fetching the page (homepage I guess unless these pages were all part of a sub section of the site) in webmaster tools which should help speed the process, see this page for details. And of course if not already done make sure you have a valid sitemap in GWT which has all the relevant urls in it. A bit of patience and they should come back.

A million pages linking in is a whole lot! I would be very careful if those are mainly site wides, it is asking for trouble.

As for the seomoz tool, I too sometimes wish it would show a link it is not, but patience is a virtue. If the site is decently linked, the seomoz bot will likely get to it at some point.

Try looking at it another way though. If a link is continuously NOT showing in the seomoz report it is a pretty strong indication in many instances that the link/page has a really low benefit. Really low in this case would mean pretty much non existent. So in that respect I find the seomoz link reports useful for focusing much more on quality than quantity if you see what I mean.

HI,

It looks like your 'request info' button is spinning out endless urls, try going to any page and then clicking 'request info' a couple of times. You will see these urls being created. It is probably a relatively simple mistake in the code for the button, your developer should be able to fix it.

Hi Peter,

For some information on the process check out a couple of articles like: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-ultimate-guide-to-advanced-guest-blogging http://www.searchenginejournal.com/the-ultimate-guest-bloggers-guide-for-2013/57457/

and also some wise words of warning here:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-guest-bloggers-are-sleepwalking-their-way-into-penalties

That second link above also some some follow on links for some of the more popular blogger linkup sites like myguestblog.com and bloggerlinkup.com. I can't say I have ever actually published a post with these services, but worth checking out to see what is there and generally how the process on those sites work.

In regards what categories are suitable, you are going to need to brainstorm and think outside of the box a bit, there are no independent removals bloggers that I know of :). I have also seen quite a few really spammy removals posts, seems to be an industry that is/was attracting this kind of link building. If you want to stay away from that you will need to think laterally and go for niches that can somehow be related to yours.

A couple of ideas might be DIY or home renovation blogs, entrepreneur/small business blogs maybe even an automotive type blog (you have vans right?).
So with any of those, once you found a likely blog, see what kind of content they use and try to find an angle for content of a post that is directed to their audience but relevant to you. Many times you might not even be mentioning your removals service, you might be talking about the process you used to build your business or about some cool modifications you have made to your vans.

And as the others say, don't pay for the post or the link!

My two cents!

HI Neil,

The joomla installation will in effect be 'deactivated' when you switch the htaccess rules over to serving the root from the wp install (you will also be replacing index.php in the root folder if memory serves).  Google will not have a problem with this BUT the old joomla content will not be available anymore (to users or bots). You will be recreating the old content on the new wp install also right?

You will need to make sure your 301s are setup properly from the old joomla urls to the new wp urls and you will need to wait until after the switch to the wp site to verify these are working properly so a bit of preplanning and verification afterwards will be needed there. Other than that all the usual best practices for switching to a new site are all still of importance, check out this guide for a good rundown. Hope it helps!

Hi Bob,

The value of any link depends on many factors including technical moz type page/domain ratings but also social and community/readership type metrics. Those first links you show above at first glance look ok although a bit dry and maybe built more for guest blogging than anything else. Not trying to slag them off on a quick look but I would want to dig a bit deeper before I would say those are quality links.

That being said, the second list is really low quality. So, to answer your question, that second group is such low quality that they were probably discounted already and not offering any value to linked sites. In this respect, 1 quality link would be more valuable than 1000 of those, so there is your answer

My two cents.

Hi Dan,

Is the site running wordpress? If so it sounds like maybe a badly coded template which is showing links somewhere in the code to the attachments (if you click on the image in its normal page does it take you to the duplicate url you mention?). It would be best to find out where the linking is happening and correct it so the links are removed if at all possible. The Yoast plugin also has a setting where you can redirect attachment ids to their related post (its in the permalinks settings of the yoast plugin) - that might help solve the problem.

Hi,

Are you sure these old urls are not being linked from somewhere (probably internally)? Maybe the sitemap.xml was forgotten and is pointing to all the old urls still? I think that for 404's to show in GWT there needs to be a link to them from somewhere, so in the first instance in GWT go to the 404s and have a look at where they are linked from (you can do this with moz reports also). If it is an internal page like a sitemap, or some forgotten menu/footer feature or similar that is still linking to old pages then yes you certainly want to clear this up! If this is the case, once you have fixed the internal linking issues you should have significantly reduced list of 404s and can then concentrate on these on a more case by case basis (assuming they are being triggered by external links).

Hope that helps!

Kalimera from sunny silicone Athens!

One or the other of virtual page views and/or event tracking in google analytics will do the job.

The form is in its own separate page, just loaded into a jquery window so you could just track page views of the form as normal by putting analytics code in it. If the page returned is the same then you should be able to set up the goal tracking/funnel as normal.

If you want to get more data (like which pdf they are trying to download) then you can trigger a virtual page view inside the analytics code of the form page instead of the default page view and include a reference to the pdf in it. You could also try event tracking on the button clicks, but I dont think you can set up funnels with events (only final goals). There are ways around that, but probably easier to go the virtual page route if you want easy funnel visualisation.

Check a bit of further reading:
Page views vs Events Virtual page views (can be triggered by buttons or by page load).
Using events as goals

Hope it helps!

Hi Jesse,

If you change the url even a bit and let the old one 404 then you will accomplish what you want in terms of cutting the bad incoming links, so if all of them are poison as you say, then this is probably a logical option. You could also consider a 410 response which might remove the page from the index faster and is considered more permanent (gone forever).

In terms of the incoming traffic I would keep two things in mind.

1. Firstly it would be nice to identify where that direct traffic is coming from as much as possible. Check out this article for a couple of ideas on what traffic might be hiding behind those numbers and apply to your situation as relevant. If you have a couple of days/weeks to be patient you can manually tag some of the likely sources to see what data that gives you.

2. If possible consider making a custom 404/410 page for this instance giving real users a link to the new page. Not 100% sure on the technicalities of how google will assess a link to the new page from the now old page which is returning a 4xx status. You could meta tag the 404 noindex, follow or even noindex, nofollow I suppose to further enforce the disconnect between the old and the new while still keeping the link available for human visitors.

Hope that helps.

Hi Paul,

As you already know there are a couple of ways to approach this. Opinions will vary, but with the details you have given I would be tempted to do as you originally thought, keep building links from US based sites. There must be some US based blogs, review sites etc that cover your software field (?), those would be the first place I would look at for getting some more relevant US links.

Keep in mind that not all .com sites are US oriented so even though you say you have more US links than UK, if this is only based on the domain then it might be a bit more complicated than that.

You have not mentioned what your keywords are, but software type keywords might have some pretty different keyword difficulty scores between the US and the UK, which might account for your #1 ranking in the UK and nowhere to be seen in the US. That being said, since you are ranking in both for other keywords that is an indication that ranking in both is at least possible with the setup you currently have.

If you have not done so already, it might be worth putting a news page or a blog post on your site about the expansion into the US market. If you run a blog then I am sure there are some other content ideas you could come up with that detail US specific data for your particular software field which would give you some nice content to use when approaching people for links.

Hope that helps!

Hi,

I believe the limit on local listings per account is 100, not 10 (see here), so you will be ok for a while yet. Since you are not eligible for bulk upload/verification the only option at the moment is to input your local listings individually as usual and verify them individually also. You can then add new locations as they become available and once you are over the 10 locations limit you can initiate the bulk verification request following the instructions here.  There is no disadvantage in this process, you don't 'lose' anything starting out with less than 10 locations and then moving above that number and bulk verifying so nothing to worry about!