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HI,

Put your site though screaming frog and it shows you are linking to that page in a couple of places with a lower case s 'scanning-services', I would think that is the issue that the crawl is flagging. Screaming frog mentions 3 instances of the lower case link so perhaps the sitemap was one and a couple of others hidden away in the page texts somewhere? Find and correct those capitalization mismatches and you should be good!

Hi,

I am pretty sure moz only flags duplicate content on your own site and you should be able to find out what page it is referring to by downloading the csv of your crawl data, filter for duplicate content = true in the relevant column and then look on the far right hand side, the 'duplicate page content 2' column should give you the other page that is flagging this.

Hi,

If you go into your crawl report and drill down to the 404 report you will see a column showing what page is linking to the missing page. Based on this you can remove the bad link and fix your 404 problem. Be sure to also verify the missing page is not still listed in any sitemaps you have. Hope it helps!

Hi Hitesh,

There is no technical problem in using both hreflang and canonical tags on the same page. As you mention in most instances the canonical will be self referencing and this setup is ok and causes no confusion for the spiders. It is also possible to cross reference languages in the canonical tag (for example canonical the en-gb to the en-in page or vice versa). This can get a bit tricky if you are not aware of the behavior which this can cause (check the answer to this question where David explains it in detail). But for addressing url variables using self referencing canonical tags within an hreflang setup, you are fine.

HI,

Magento can have a bit of a steep learning curve so unless you want the developer learning on the job I would say you will want to see either a solid portfolio of sites already developed in Magento and/or Magento certification. There are quite a few individual Magento certified developers out there now, so it is worth looking to see if there are some in your area.

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,

Its easy to tie correlation to causation but you need to be sure and the addition of a new site section should not usually cause a traffic drop for existing pages. If there really is no cannibalization / duplicate content then first thing is to verify there were no other technical issues caused at the same time (moz crawls should show new issues cropping up). If nothing technical is apparent then I would look at what pages lost traffic and extrapolate from that (and your rankings) what keywords seem to have lost traction. If nothing else changed content wise over that time then have a look at what sites gained positions for these keywords (maybe some competitors upped their game) and also look at known google algo updates (maybe you got caught in one of them).

Hi Joel,

If the domains are separate and the multi site and mapping is all set up correctly (it can be a bit tricky) then google will see the sites as different domains and as far as that goes will treat them all as regular websites. No reason for a negative impact at a technical level there. As to if there are indicators that these sites are related, yes there are as you mention shared ips and c blocks and if the front end code is substantially the same then this is identifiable also, but they will still be treated as separate domains. As long as your content for each domain is strong and unique you shouldn't have a problem.

Hi,

Tough to say with any certainty but a couple of things come to mind:

1. Was it just the url changes or did you change content as well? The old urls look more 'optimised' (such as it is) for queries like 'calling xxx from yyy', the new ones look more like 'xxx phone cards' so if content changed along these lines at the same time this might be an area to look at.

2. That being said, a quick look at your backlink profile shows a high number of 'phone/calling card' exact match links and there was a google update around the 5th of October which might have got you, especially if you changed your urls just before that to include 'phone card xxx' in the url.

As long as the 301s were working properly there is no real reason for you to lose traffic just because of the url change. If your traffic dropped in early October, I think the update might be the more likely cause.

Hi Lily,

You can find this information in your moz crawl reports. If you export the report and look for the column 'Blocked by meta-robots' this should give you a list of the pages that have this tag (they will be flagged true in this column). You can also use the screaming frog tool which should give you this information in the meta and canonical tab.

Hi David,

That looks like a tricky issue you have there. Your dates don't immediately look like matching with well known updates, but to be honest a lot of stuff was going on in the last 3-4 months of 2013 so it is easy to get confused!

You say that you traditionally ranked well for 'daily bible verse' related searches. I am not familiar with what phrases these might be, but have your rankings actually dropped on your 'main' keywords or have they remained pretty steady but you still see the traffic drop?

I would look into trying to identify better where the traffic was lost and that might help identify why. So you could look at things like landing pages and compare between the month of lost traffic with the month before. Once you have your list of landing pages that lost significant traffic you could look at any keyword data still available for those pages to try to get an idea of what kind of queries (and intent) were bring traffic to those pages and then go and have a look at what kind of serps those type of queries return now. Have some big sites (wikipedia or similar) moved into top positions? Are knowledge graph boxes answering the question without the user needing to click through to your site?

Understanding what content lost traffic (and/or tracked keywords lost rankings) should give you a better idea of what happened and be able to guide you in planning your next steps.

Hope that helps!

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,

Generally I find it is very difficult to do SEO for foreign languages if you do not have a native/bilingual speaker on your team. Sure you can get a professional translation done which may be proper in its language use, but if the terms you are targetting are even somewhat competitive then your chances of ranking are slim. To compete you would need all the normal signals associated with good rankings (inbound iinks, social signals etc) in your chosen language and this is really pretty much impossible without a native speaker and someone who is familiar with the language, country, customs etc in question (I wont even get into the issue of getting incoming leads in foreign languages that you cannot support or getting a user to the site in one language and then insisting on communicating in a different language... not ideal!).

For keyword research the google keyword planner is probably still your first point of call for any language, but if you do not speak the language... what kind of insight are you going to get??

Just my two cents, but for me if you don't speak the language and seriously want to target a foreign language... find a native speaker to help!

Hi Matt,

It looks like you have no index headers being sent out on your site. if you have the web developers toolbar installed on firefox and view the response headers on your homepage you will see:

X-Robots-Tag: noindex, nofollow, nosnippet

So this is like a noindex, no follow meta tag and is basically blocking the search engines from spidering and indexing your site. If you find out where those headers are getting set and get rid of them you should see your site getting indexed pretty quickly.

Hi Kandice,

It is as you say, campaigns with the asterisk are tracking all sub domains not just the www. I think this is only in the old campaign layout, I don't see it in the new moz analytics.

Hi,

No direct experience but from a technical point of view the authority passed through the 301 would not be lost as such, just not of any use in ranking the new page since it is noindex. Once you allow it to be indexed it will start to appear in the search results and any extra push given by the 301 should be as expected. That being said, it might be an idea to noindex, follow the pages in question so any authority added can flow through your no indexed pages to your indexed pages. In that respect it is the nofollow rather than the noindex which is causing authority from the 301 to be wasted/lost.

Use chrome so cant say I will miss the firefox one much, especially if more awesomeness added! (sorry guys!).

You say you have submitted lots over the last couple of days, keep in mind that every time you upload a file it replaces all the previous ones. So you need to be adding to your one main disavow file, not uploading multiple different files. That being said, if possible I would do the grunt work beforehand and try not to upload a lot of files over a short period of time.

Hi Gregory,

It can be a real pain, and the short answer is it depends on the doctype you are declaring and the browser version you are viewing it in. Check this page for some more details (seems odd to be referencing wikipedia here, but it is a pretty good overview).

Putting this code into your head will force IE to use the highest mode available (not quirks mode in other words):

Hope it helps!

Hi,

Since you are planning on adding other articles to each tag I don't think canonical is the best way to go since they are not (or are not going to be) true duplicate content. The main problem is the use of tags which usually produce pages with content which is available elsewhere on the site and as such do not have anything really unique about them (except for the tag). No-indexing is one solution, check out these discussions for more details and some related links.

http://moz.com/community/q/dupe-content-canonicalize-the-wordpress-tag-or-noindex http://moz.com/community/q/noindex-tags-in-wordpress