Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Carl,

Its hard to say for sure, but those links look to me like the kind of stuff you get with the 200 dollars for 500 back links type services. Keep in mind that any link explorer application is not showing you links that were created today, just links that were first discovered by that application today, so the links could be days, weeks or even months old depending on how often the pages of the site are crawled by the app. As a general rule lower value sites with fewer incoming links are crawled less often, and those look mainly like low value article sites. Also keep in mind that if you had a company doing this kind of work for you at one point, these links are often automated to a degree and could be coming online weeks/months after the initial order was placed.

In view of all that, I would think that chef link might just be a mistake from the same service, somehow your link got attached to a different site/project or something like that. If your link profile is full of those kind of links yes you will probably be having trouble ranking and maybe disavowing as Michael suggests is a good idea (don't expect quick gains though...).

Hi Carl,

Those are all low value links,  the first two are full of links that are using optimised link text for anchors so an obvious target for devaluation and/or penalties. The third link doesn't look like a directory as such, but still very low value with so many links on one page. If you are talking about disavowing the links, I would say this depends on your overall link profile. One or two of these kinds of links probably isnt going to hurt you, I certainly would not be looking to acquire them now though.

Hi Matt,

It can take some time to index new sites. Submitting a sitemap to GWT, building a couple of links and sharing it a bit on social channels will usually help speed up the process. I am not very familiar with google sites, but if you can re-enable the google hosted site then maybe it is an idea to announce there that the site is now hosted elsewhere and link to it. You could reduce the content on the google site pages to just an abstract/intro on each page and link to the full content which is now on the new site which should take care of duplicate content issues and also show a clear connection between the two of them (for both incoming users and search engines).

HI Benoit,

I see the site indexed (https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ablubridge.com) and only a few of those are the ww2 version so it looks like the 301s are ok and the site is being indexed properly. As to why you are not showing up for brand searches, it is likely  because you are a very new site and the brand name blubridge also is associated with a microphone of some sort that is bringing other relevant results into the serps. If you search for 'blubridge construction software' you appear. As you start getting some links to your site you should start moving up for branded searches.

Hi Jason

I wouldnt think the duplicate content is the issue, especially assuming the main keyphrase you are after had the homepage ranking for it (which doesnt have the dup issue) right? Moz is not showing you anywhere near as many links to the domain as ahrefs is, I would look at GWT also and have a good look through all your backlinks, at first glance there seems to be a chunk of obvious spam/seo type links in your profile that might be a more likely cause of the trouble. If you are not getting any more of those and have a marketing plan in place then it might just be a matter of keep doing what you are doing and you will start ranking again. But you will want to make sure you know where those dodgy links came from and that you are not going to be getting many more.

Hi Jason,

Might be the server setup change is a red herring, such a drastic change so quickly sounds odd. Have you checked the dates against known google updates? NOV 14 comes to mind given the time frame you mentioned. A look at ahrefs shows some swings in linking domains in the last 2-3 months and a chunk of them look a somewhat iffy...

Hi Rebecca,

If you are after the basic moz numbers like domain authority etc then there are a couple of excel tools you can use to pull this data with the moz api. Check out this discussion for a rundown. Hope it helps!

Hi Robert,

There are a couple of things to think about. You mention media plugins, but the url you mention just looks like a theme image path. So if we start from theme images, I have got to love the roots wordpress starter theme. It has a series of htaccess rules that basically show all your template images sitting in /media and all your uploaded images sitting in /assets. It does the same thing for css and js files etc, so does a pretty good job of hiding the fact you are using wordpress (at least in terms of url paths). It can be a bit tricky to get used to, but once set up it is pretty good. I don't really think it makes a great difference in ranking for much, but I like the clean urls!

Hi,

If the only reason for changing the canonicals now is to try to help your SEO then I would not jump in and change all 700 right away. Canonicals are used to indicate the preferred version of a page for google to index, they do not actually remove duplicate content pages  (see Dr Pete's detailed explanation here). Magento's default canonical structure is usually set to have product urls with no category in them to avoid the dup content issue which you get when the product is in multiple cats/sub cats at the same time. If this is not an issue for you and all products are only in one category, or you are happy for them to be indexed in a specific category then you could change the canonicals, but I would not think it would make a huge difference in rankings so would look at it more from a user's point of view. Does having the category in the url for any specific product make sense or help to define the product more? If yes then consider changing the canonical, but I would try it on a small subset of products first and monitor things for a while before changing them all.

Hope it helps!

Hi,

If I understand right, I don't think internal links are your problem (or at least not the root of your problem).

The problem is that your homepage is set up so that it is mainly all one page in Google's eyes. Any of those links to different areas at the bottom of the page reload the same page with the map moved and showing the area. If you put your site through screaming frog you will see the same thing, only 5 pages are crawlable. I see you have a sitemap with different property urls, are those all getting indexed if you look in GWT? If the site is new, it might take some time to get indexed, but I think you will need to make it easier for the crawler to get to your pages beyond the sitemap. Reworking your area links so that they are also available on separate urls and giving some links to the properties outside of the maps api and your sitemap are probably the best place to start.

Hope it 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 Micheal,

When you say you started noticing it again, this is through webmaster tools or through your own monitoring? I ask because having a look at the site I can see no technical reason why those truncated urls would be getting indexed again at first glance. Maybe it is just a matter of waiting a bit more for the last of them to get removed? If all of a sudden they have started creeping up again, it suggests some variable in the mix has changed  again, but I cannot see anything that stands out.

Hi,

It is a known issue with the on page grader (I get the same with Greek characters and there are reports on quite a few other non latin character sets also).  Might be worth adding the issue to the list here, I don't see it specifically mentioned.

Not much help I know. The only thing I can suggest is using the grader report as a guide to make sure you you are not missing any of the major on page factors. To be honest I have never found these reports to be that useful other than as a quick check that I am not overlooking something obvious...

HI,

I think you are going to have problems as you describe it (if I understood it correctly). 301s and canonicals are not the same thing, the 301 is actually taking you to the second page, the canonical is suggesting which page you want to be considered the main page to index. In your case you are declaring pageB in the sitemp, 301ing that to pageA and then recommending pageB be considered the main page (which is 301ing back to pageA again). The results of that is difficult to predict to say the least. I would think the most likely result is your pageA results being indexed, but only after making life difficult for googlebot et al by running them through this loop.

Is there no chance of fixing the cms so that the pageB urls can be displayed properly without a 301?

Hi Iris,

You can check the page source of the page you are looking at (right click and view source) and if the title tag near the top has the name of the site at the end then yes obviously it is being put in there by some setting and you can follow what Free Range has said below. I looked at a couple of your pages and did not see this, so it looks at first glance that your setup is ok and that the site name is being put in by google.

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.

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 Laurie,

8 hours per month is going to limit your options a lot! Personally I think it is virtually impossible to do a proper job in that small amount of time, so perhaps client education on the benefits of what you are proposing is in order first? If you can bump it up to 16 hours a month that would give you the option of doing 4 hours a week which will allow you time to plan things better and to reflect on the previous week's actions and possible results. 8 hours a month all on one day is like month 1: analysis, month 2 - content, month 3 - more content, month 4 - more content, a few links maybe... with that kind of timescale both you and your clients are likely to get discouraged long before real results start appearing!

That being said I would definitely look at making sure the content is decent (and optimised) before actively looking for linking opportunities. This will usually involve content creation in addition to on page optimisation (so another 8 hours...or more!). Be realistic about the keywords you are trying to target and go after longer tail and/or local combinations. Only then would I really start looking at links, but be careful! Deep links to these kind of small scale sites to me usually means seo directories and pr releases and they are not going to do you much good. Concentrate on easy wins in term of local business directories, potential links from cooperating businesses and the like.

Hope it helps!

I think you are getting confused by the wordpress default site functionality. The admin bar you see in your site is only visible when you are logged in as an administrator. Normal visitors to the site do not see this bar or code. You can disable this feature even for admin users by going to Users in the left hand admin menu, editing the user and deselecting 'show toolbar when viewing site'. So, it is not code being injected into your site in the way you think, it is just admin functionality you are seeing when you are logged in!

There is no need to worry in other words!

Hi,

Everything Sharia says is correct in terms of being sure you know what you are dealing with. Assuming that your drop in rankings/traffic is related to the reported penguin update last weekend and again assuming that the bad job your seo firm did was related to building loads of crappy links to your site then I would suggest taking a deep breath and start looking for more information on penguin/penguin recovery. There is lots of info on this on the qa and the blogs, for example:
http://moz.com/blog/the-difference-between-penguin-and-an-unnatural-links-penalty-and-some-info-on-panda-too
http://moz.com/ugc/what-a-penguin-recovery-looks-like

A short answer to your question is that there seem to be mixed thoughts on using 301s to try and 'get out' of a penguin related drop in rankings. Personally I think the balance of opinion points towards 301s being either a very short term tactic or else just passing the problem on to the new page/domain. So I would not jump into the 301 to a new domain route without thinking things through (a lot!). A couple more relevant posts:
http://moz.com/blog/save-your-website-with-redirects
http://moz.com/blog/google-disavow-tool