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Hi Gina,

Which report are you seeing the 404 in? If it is in a moz report but not in the csv download that is a bit odd. Are you sure it is not in there? I usually select all in the excel and then do the ctrl-shift-windows-L together (great trick can't remember what it is called) which gives you filter dropdown arrows on all the column headers. If you go to the 4xx column and click that column's arrow you can quickly see if there is a 404 true hiding in there somewhere. If not, maybe a mail to support is in order since the page should be in there.

Hi Morris,

A soft 404 is basically exactly what you have with your current setup, it is a page not found that is returning a 200 header response (or any other header that doesnt match the intent of the page which is actually a 404 page not found). It is problematic for a number of reasons, mainly that google can and will index and crawl the page and that it makes it pretty difficult to use tools to identify your real 404 issues when the headers are not declaring that the page is in fact a 404 not found!

So yes, you need to get rid of that 200 response header and replace it with a proper 404 header. Luckily this is usually a pretty easy fix for developers, details of which depend a bit on how your system is setup but it shouldn't be difficult.

Hope that helps!

Hi Oliver,

I'm sure it must be driving you mad!

I don't have any great ideas on what to do about it, but my gut says that it is algorithmic (for whatever that is worth) so I am not sure google would look at it as an error. A quick thought before (hopefully) one of the algorithm aces chimes in...

Is this trend more pronounced in books (for example) or specific product categories? I did a search for priceminister and then clicked on a couple of suggested searches (priceminister iphone4 and that kind of thing) and you were all over the place and amazon was not to be seen. I am just wondering if the specifics of a book title or something else like that is triggering this kind of serp result.

Wish I could be more help, it is an interesting case.

Hi Oliver,

Interesting and frustrating indeed.

I don't think it is a bug, but my thoughts would be that it is some sort of association as you suspect between the two sites in Google's eyes. I didn't look a lot but your site does seem quite similar to amazon in terms of product offerings and I am wondering if in all the data available on click throughs etc that google has maybe a significant percentage of searchers end up at both sites quite often and therefore the link has been made. I would think perhaps the two brands are also mentioned quite a lot together and even linked to together quite often? Its not I guess that unreasonable if that is the case that google would choose to show these results, and amazon is amazon with the associated domain authority etc that goes along with it so might often get pushed to the top.

In regards the search queries you mention, do you think people do a lot of searches for the name of a book + the brand priceminister? It does not seem that intuitive that they would, although I might be wrong! If the searches are not happening that often, and since amazon is ranking highly anyway for the titles of many books, then maybe the book title phrases are simply out weighing the added brand keyword if you see what I mean. The google plus example is indeed a bit odd, but that being said if you search for 'priceminister google+' which I seem to recall is the 'official' way to search for g+ pages then you are front and center.

Not that much help in terms of what to do about it, maybe someone else will have a good idea!

Hi Gina,

If the link is showing up in the moz reports you should be able to find it by going to the report page and downloading the report as a csv (top right). If you filter by 4xx client errors and then scroll along all the way to the right in the csv file the referring url is shown in the last column.

Check out this recent video, it is full of great ideas and can be applied to most any industry with a bit of brainstorming and creativity: http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/link-smarter-not-harder

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!

Just thinking out loud here but linkedin would be an obvious choice for the more b2b market contacts. Twitter to connect with journalists and industry news type contacts. Perhaps youtube or similar if you are thinking about how to or demonstration videos and such which might be a way to target individual consumers.

Hi Jim,

What a car!

I don't think there is much point in making unique title tags for each of the images, if the layout stays the same you will still have duplicate content issues even if you change the titles.

What you really want to do is consolidate the content onto one page, and there are 2 ways that should hopefully be pretty painless to do, depending on your CMS:

1. Change your slideshow code so that the images are loaded without changing the url of the page.

2. Use the rel canonical tag so that all the /media/ urls have a rel canonical tag pointing back to the original Chevrolet-Bel-Air/24481/ page.

Either of those solutions should work in terms of avoiding duplicate content issues, I would be inclined to go with the first one myself if feasible.

Hope that helps!

Hi Rose,

Indeed some hosting companies will throw up these ready cpc templates as soon as a domain expires and/or a hosting account goes into arrears. Bad form if you ask me, but it happens.

Hi Ian,

The value of directory links has been debated here quite a lot recently, the value (or lack of) depends quite a bit on the directory and/or the niche your site is in.

As for the pr value, it depends largely on the kind of site architecture the directory uses. Some directories have a kind of silo nav structure where as you say main and second level pages get most of the link juice and individual pages end up with almost nothing. Others have a flatter structure where internal pages manage to get a bit more.

All things being equal from a technical point of view you would likely be getting better value if your link ends up on a page with some pagerank rather than a page with none. That being said, if the directory is not in a niche directly related to your site, or perhaps a large well known general directory the value of the link is debatable and I personally wouldn't bother to pay for one. The directory you specifically mention has the strap line 'seo friendly web directory'... any directory with the word seo in it for me is a bin and forget (thats just my opinion of course).

Hi Rose,

As Stefan says it is a parked domain (a domain which is either for sale or just not being used right now). The links in it are cpc ads which are likely sourced from adwords (and maybe elsewhere also). If you click through to say 'yoga retreats in costa rica' and then do a google search for the same phrase, you will see most of the same ads on both pages.

So basically, it is neither a real site nor a spam site, it is a parked domain showing ads. In that respect, you would have to set up an adwords account with the relevant key phrases and targeted to search partner networks to try to get a link on it, and as far as I know these links would never show up as backlinks in your site's profile. So apart from the (low in my experience) possibility of conversions from users finding your site through the parked domain, the value of the link is pretty much zero, but there is no danger of getting a penalty from having your site show up in the list since they are in all likelihood sourced from google's own adwords system.

Visits dropping to zero is a bit odd, have you confirmed your analytics code is installed and tracking properly?

Keep brainstorming! And show how this process is going to be the engine that moves you up the rankings to the rest of the team.

Think about audience groups. Swing sets for the house (ie individual consumers) ok sure, but how about playchools and similar? How about municipalities for parks and things like that? Brainstorm to expand your potential audience and why they would be interested in your information and products, then you have a number of different avenues in regards content creation, link building outreach and potential sites for cooperation on blogs etc. If your competition is mainly based on news and pr links, think what that could mean if you find even a few strong links that are not in that group!

If possible watch that video I mention above with the whole team, I think it is really relevant to your situation and will help a lot.

Hi,

In regards the links and authority sites, I am sure there are places you can find! Digging through the link profiles of your main competitors might flag up a couple of common sites that link to your type of content. Thinking creatively about who uses your products and in particular different user groups that would be interested in your products should also open up new ideas on potential sites that you could approach, The fact that there are no 'authority sites' beyond competitors in your niche does not mean there are not solid sites with relevant related content that you can approach for guest blog opportunities, links, social mentions etc. Your new tool that you mention could also be a good outreach subject, if you are proud of it then let that pride shine through!

Have a look at this recent mozinar (I really liked the bit on brainstorming for different audience segments, it is great stuff!).

http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/link-smarter-not-harder

Hi,

25 domains is quite a lot and the short answer is that if they have essentially the same content in the same language then you are likely to have a duplicate content issue of some sort.

I think the best way to approach it starts from the top. You need to identify your main keywords by language/country, see what kind of traffic these keywords are (or could be) bringing to your sites and weigh this information against the amount of resources needed to properly build and support all these different domains in their own language.

Once you have decided on an operational level which domains/languages should be your primary focus then the technical way to implement in terms of avoiding duplicate content issues and declaring to the search engines which tld/version is aimed at which target audience is pretty straight forward.

This recent mozinar runs through a lot of these issues:

http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/foreign-language-seo

And all of the posts in the international issues category are relevant and worth a read:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/international-issues

Hope that helps!

Hi Nikita,

The danger is real enough, you will find many references to penalties and dropped rankings in this forum!

As for limited budget but lots of time, there are a lot of creative things you can do with that combination. It is always good to go through the basics and then dig into the ideas on the seomoz blogs and forums (like here for example). You will find many ways to apply what you read and learn to your own specific site/niches and start moving up the serps!

Hi David,

Its tough to say without some more digging and information, it certainly looks like you have most of the common problem areas covered from what I can see. I will throw out an idea: I see you have a few 301 redirects in place switching from .html to non html versions. If this was done on a massive scale then possibly you have a google index with both versions of the pages in the index? If so it might not really be a big issue and over the next weeks/months the old .html versions will fall out of the index and your numbers will begin to look more normal again, Just a thought.

Hi David,

A couple of things to try (I haven't tested them)

Set up an xml update on the cms page like this:

<reference name="head"><action method="setTitle"><title>Your Module Page Title</title></action></reference>

Depending on the controllers this might change both page and breadcrumb titles (not sure if that is what you are after)

If you don't mind doing a small code change the trick described here: http://inchoo.net/ecommerce/magento/change-any-page-title-in-magento/ should do it. If following that you would actually be doing it backwards, the normal page title would be used in the breadcrumb and the updated page title used in the title tag.

If actually the breadcrumb is not the most important thing for that page you could just remove it, also with an xml update like this: <remove name="</code">"breadcrumbs"``/></remove>

Hope one of those helps!

Hi David,

Not sure why they started showing up now (some recent changes to the site?) but I suspect your problem is indexed urls that you are trying to block with robots.txt but are finding their way into the index somehow.

If you do a search for: site:nicontrols.com inurl:/manufacturer/ and then click on the show omitted results you will see a whole bunch (31000!) of 'content blocked by robots.txt' notices but the urls are still in the index. If you do a couple more similar searches looking for other likely url paths you  will likely find some more.

If you can get a no-index meta tag into these pages I think it will be more effective in keeping them out of the index. If you have in mind some recent changes you have done to the site that might have introduced internal links to these pages then it would be worth looking to see if you can get the links removed or replaced with the 'proper' link format.

Hope that helps!