Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey Patrick

Okay, tricky one as it's not really clear what the problem is here but it feels like you have created some kind of duplicate content problem when shifting all of your sites over to WPMU.

Some questions:

1. What are the other sites?
2. Were any of the other sites affected?

It's tough to give you a perfect answer without some further analysis but I suspect a few things here.

1. You have created a duplicate site over at: <cite>smartwatch.smartfamily.wpengine.com/top-5-smart-watches-2013/</cite>‎ (on a much more established domain)
2. You have lots of internal duplication on the site

A few things you can do

1. Redirect the smartwatch.smartfamily.wpengine.com site to your main site (seems you have done this)
2. Tidy up the internal duplication (too many categories and tags likely)

It would be interesting to get some insight into all the 301's you have implemented here as well and really I would recommend an audit of the site just to make sure you have no underlying and not immediately obvious problems. There are a some solid tutorials on SEO audits on this very site so if you want to keep it in house at least find a structured audit process and follow it through (you will likely find other optimisations so it will be a worthwhile process).

Long before Panda and Penguin I have seen sites slapped for duplication and lose 90% of traffic. I have seen this with accidental multiple domains and due to aggressively stolen content and other seemingly innocent reasons.

Ultimately, it seems innocent and like some kind of technical gotcha so certainly, I would not give up here.

Some tasks you could perform:

• Set up a moz campaign and review any issues
• Run copyscape and check for duplicate content and resolve
• Do some manual duplicate content queries to spot other domains that may have your content due to misconfiguration in WPEngine
• Claim all domains and tidy them up in webmaster tools
• Wait

Ultimately, just tighten everything up and give it some time and everything should bounce back. Beyond that, maybe consider getting a pro to do a quick audit to check things over for you and advise on the best (quickest) course of action.

Hope that helps
Marcus

Hey Diane

I may be wrong, but I tend to think that you would be better flipping this on it's head and working from the content back to the larger keywords. If we look at lifestyle magazine as a keyword, we see some search traffic, but there is some strong competition. Then, if we look at modifiers like mens lifestyle magazine the numbers are paltry.

You have to consider, do people look for content in this way? That is, do they do a meta search like lifestyle magazine when what they really want is a specific piece of content covering a specific topic.

The way I would see this working is that you create lots of articles and content that is of interest to your target audience and that will bring people in to the site. You then work hard to convert these people to social media channels so you can then push them new content and bring them back to the site.

I certainly think, a broad, category type search is of little relevance here so focus on the other end and the content that is going to bring people in and then make sure they become familiar with the brand.

It really is a pure content driven approach that will win the day here I feel.

Hope that helps
Marcus

Competitions are always good but really, you want to have a rich social presence that is driven by your content strategy.

So, you post great content on your blog - people read you and follow. They may even then tweet it through your social plugins and you may pick up more readers / followers.

You have a strong presence on twitter, post interesting things, interact with other interesting people to build relationships and ultimately pick up more followers like that as well.

Then, you have strategies for getting followers like competitions where  people have to follow you.

Really though, get some good content on the site and tie in twitter very closely with your content strategy and be active on twitter and you will start to build followers.

No silver bullet really, like everything else, the real answer after all the bluster is simply - hard work.

Marcus

Canonical - this way, if you pick up links to the print pages the value from the links will be passed to the full version of the page.

That's my tuppence (2 cents) at least!

Cheers
Marcus

Hey, I have just been reading this which talks about the value of links and whilst it is not exactly relevant, it does talk about how link placement can have an effect on some elements. 
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/10-illustrations-on-search-engines-valuation-of-links

Additionally, the new semantic markup specified at schema.org will have a big effect over time in the way we mark up elements on the page.

There is also the on page stuff as well, images, text and all that jazz, well talked about here:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/10-illustrations-on-search-engines-valuation-of-links

But really, I guess the crux of your question is the word 'creative' and does creative design impact SEO? Well, not directly, I don't think it makes any difference other than it may win more links than the other man if you have a knockout visual showcase.

Strange kind of answer, but some food for thought.

Marcus

Hey,

There is a general consensus that 300 words or 500 characters is enough but I tend to think that is borderline useless advice here. How long should a blog post be? My answer would be long enough to fulfil the promise of the title and short enough to not be boring and overstay it's welcome.

Some great blog posts may be 100 words, some fantastic posts may be 10,000 words. It really depends on what you are talking about and how long it needs to  be to accurately do what it says on the tin.

There is a tendency in search to try and do SEO by numbers. We want 300 words. Well, 300 words does not denote quality. Quality denotes quality. If your main criteria when writing blogs or hiring writers is to hit 300 words then you have already failed. If your main criteria is to provide high quality answers that don't already exist or to do things way better than they are already being done then you are on the right track.

That's a somewhat philosophical answer but a better one than any general advice you may get re word or character count. If you want a more specific answer tailored to your situation then look at the blog posts that do well in the niche you are targeting. How long are they? Could some of them benefit from more detail? Could some of them be trimmed a bit to provide a more succinct answer?

The only caveat to this advice would be to avoid going too long and if you have something that is thousands of words long consider making it part of a series and having several posts that make a greater whole. Think of them as chapters of a book or report and that these parts can then more accurately fulfil the promise made by the whole. A great strategy can be to write up a series like this and then to create an overview or summary that links out to the more detailed sub posts and you then target the high level and more detailed keywords within your topic.

Hope that helps!
Marcus

Hey Romaine

The campaign tool is making a general recommendation based on the best practice advice of only having 100 links tops on a page. That is all fine and dandy but the reality is that this has to be thought about in the context of your site and your users.

What this ultimately means is that you are spreading the internal page rank between those 115 pages fairly evenly. Now, if those 115 pages are all of equal importance then great, but if not, if some of them are just blog categories or the like then you are missing an opportunity to promote the most important pages in your internal hierarchy.

To decide what to do try asking yourself these questions:

• What are my most important pages?
• Can I restructure my site so the less important pages are linked to from elsewhere?

What you will probably find is that you can rethink your navigation and lose the side bar or make that a navigation element on a sub page. This focusses the internal page rank on the important pages and still allows you to provide navigation where needed.

It's hard to give a general answer on any of this stuff as there are so many moving parts and it all depends on what is right for your site and your users. This is a good read by the ever readable and reliable Dr. Pete on the subject:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many

Hope that helps and certainly fire over a link and I will take a look and feedback.

In the meanwhile, this is not optimal, but it's not the end of the world either so don't blow a gasket!

Hope that helpsMarcus

Hey

I agree with Michael in that largely, directories are dead. However, the evolution of directories and sites that add value to the listings are alive and kicking. Yelp (not so much in the UK) is one but TripAdvisor is really a a directory of sorts and that provides boatloads of additional value.

In the UK we have several directory types that are alive and well:

• TripAdvisor
• Trade Directories - plumbers, electricians etc
• Care Homes

My father is actually working on a directory at the moment - it is a list of all pubs in the UK that are dog friendly. It will detail everything for dogs, walks in the area etc etc. It will allow for

So in some respects it is the wrong question - Google does not punish wholes categories of sites. Rather they demote sites that have no real value and don't add anything (or that are set up to help other sites rank and for no other reason).

To make this work you have to ideally have a USP and provide a level of value that makes it desirable for folks to look at your site rather than the sites of the businesses in this category and to build up enough traffic so the business owners want to pay to be listed and get a preferential listing etc.

Hope that helps
Marcus

Hey

This can be problematic. I don't think that you should bend totally to the dictum from Google but you should be aware that with only a single address local SEO can be problematic. We have seen a client with two businesses - totally seperate businesses at a single address have both pages shut down by Google due to using the same address. We were able to get Google to reinstate the initial one after some tussling.

Some questions to ask:

1. does the business have a unique physical address?

2. does the business have a unique service area unrelated to the other business?

3. does the business have a unique and ideally local phone number?

The loose and largely hopeless advice from Google's own help pages is as follows:

• Represent your business as it’s consistently represented and recognised in the real world across signage, stationery and other branding.
• Make sure that your address is accurate and precise.
• Choose the fewest number of categories that it takes to describe your overall core business.

You can and we have successfully worked around this but you must ensure:

• Unique name
• Unique address (even if only a suite / office number)
• Unique phone number
• Clearly different categories on Google My Business

Then it just comes down to the basics like citation consistency and ensuring that the two businesses are clearly separate entities and deserve to be treated as such.

My primary thinking here is always anchored in the real world - if these are clearly separate entities then this should be achievable but we have to be mindful of some of the potential pitfalls with Google My Business.

I will also throw in a caveat that it is very hard to give specific advice without knowing the finer details but be aware of the potential issues here and tread very carefully. Ensure you create a clear divide between the two entities wherever possible (website, phone number, address tweaks, categories etc).

Hope that helps
Marcus

Worth a read:

https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en-GB

Hey Steven

Your kidding right? The "usual spin"?

It's hard to know exactly what you are looking for here but if there are any studies about SEO then it's SEOMoz and their partners from within the industry that are doing them.

Here are a few that just jump to mind:

1. http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

The ranking factors article takes so much into consideration. A panel of 130 or so experts and correlation-based analysis from the vast amount of data gathered through the link scape index and other means.

2. http://www.davidmihm.com/local-search-ranking-factors.shtml

This is an article looking at the myriad local search ranking factors. Again it uses a panel and a whole bunch of data to best give an overview of local search ranking factors.

3. http://www.distilled.net/blog/

If you want more general data and mathematical analysis of search then the guys at distilled publish some great information.

4. SEOMoz Tools

You want data? Then the tools here will give you that. Granted, it's not perfect and it won't SEO your site for you but it will give you some metrics to work with.

5. www.seobook.com

The blog at SEO book pulls no punches and is often a great place to go for some cutting analysis of what is right and wrong in search.

But, psst, come here, wan't to know the real secret?

Hard work - that's it, plain and simple. SEO is a closed box. The engines don't publish their algorithms and even if they did give us a comprehensive overview of everything covering all areas of search it would likely be out of date before we have finished reading it.

I kind of feel your pain, you want exact answers, specific things that you can do to succeed but SEO just does not work like that. There are way to many variables and for every industry, every site, every country, every city things can be a little different.

If you want to 'examine seo' then you need to do it from your perspective. If you want analysis it has to be done within the context of whatever you are trying to achieve. There are plenty of great SEO's on this board and if you want some help understanding what you can do to rank better then post some more details and I am sure you will get some help, I will certainly take a look.

I hope that helps a little, even if it was not exactly what you may have been looking for.

Marcus

I guess the big question is whether facebook is a relevant platform for marketing this business. If your customers and prospects are not there, and the business has little to share in terms of interesting, shareable content, then... maybe you are barking up the wrong tree?

The simple answer is... forever, unless you have some pressing reason to remove them. Certainly, I would keep them there till I knew there was no indexation of these other links and no requests for them for a say, 12 month period.

If you have external links pointing to any of these old pages, then again, that is another argument for keeping them in place.

Just leave them there, comment them as legacy in redirection script and forget about them and focus on something else.

Hope this helps.  
Marcus

Hmm, sounds like you have your own little network of sites so any interlinking of them purely for SEO purposes is going to be problematic. The guidelines page on link schemes has recently been updated and makes for a good read and specially, this point seems relevant:

From - Link Schemes: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356

"The following are examples of link schemes which can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results:

• Buying or selling links that pass PageRank. This includes exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links; exchanging goods or services for links; or sending someone a “free” product in exchange for them writing about it and including a link
• Excessive link exchanging ("Link to me and I'll link to you")
• Linking to web spammers or unrelated sites with the intent to manipulate PageRank
• Building partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking
• Using automated programs or services to create links to your site"

It is hard to comment with certainty without seeing the sites but seeing as these are all EMD's there is always the possibility that these are essentially doorway pages that exist purely to capture search traffic and direct them to another site. Again, this is not advisable and to again quote the specific Google guidelines:

From - Doorway Pages: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2721311

"Doorway pages are typically large sets of poor-quality pages where each page is optimized for a specific keyword or phrase. In many cases, doorway pages are written to rank for a particular phrase and then funnel users to a single destination. Whether deployed across many domains or established within one domain, doorway pages tend to frustrate users."

"Having multiple domain names targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page"

The bolding in all cases is mine and I have not seen your sites but it's time to be honest and ask yourself if these sites exist purely for these reasons and then further debate the value of them going forward as a potential negative equity.

To go back to your original point, if you are looking to nofollow the links then I would not worry about any slow or steady approach, just make the changes to be within the guidelines as quickly and painlessly as possible.

As ever, without examples, only general guidelines can be given but all too often these kind of EMD sites exist to rank for a specific term and if you are linking back to other sites then they likely are problematic in a variety of ways.

Hope that helps.

Marcus

Don't 301 it, that is not going to help and you are affectively just passing those bad links along to the new domain. I hate to say it, but you are looking for an easy option and there is not one, you just need to clean up that link profile as much as possible and illustrate the blood, sweat and tears you have gone through to do so.

Okay, quick look at three pages that have dropped from Bing.

If I take a chunk of text from the homepage and google it in double quotes I often find 50 or more pages with the same content. Not a good start but at least your page comes up first indicating that you are at least the owner / originator of the content.

If we do the same in Bing, I am finding your pages, but only after several others with the same content AND bing ranks other sites above your site indicating a problem.

What to do? Well, it depends. How did this content get onto all these other sites? Has it been pinched from your site? If so, you need a content audit and to find any other sites using your content and to ask them to take it down.

You could try some DMCA takedown requests but often, if this is an old site and you have been wildscale plundered I have found rewriting the content is often easier on your site.

As an example, I have a client I have worked with for 10 years or more. We set them up and they have been pretty much ruling the roost in their little niche for years and were the first site to really set up doing what they do we believe.

Well, long before panda or penguin they suddenly dropped out of search and I had a panicked phone call. A bit of digging found literally hundreds of sites all over the world that had copied content, also, some pretty much out and copies of the website (with not all links replaced as well so still pointing to some pages on the source site).

We tried to contact all these folks but in the end just used it as an excuse to freshen up the content and do a rewrite and it bounced back.

Now, not saying you don't have other problems, it was the quickest of quick looks but certainly, this is the direction I would go in.

Hope that helps!
Marcus

Hey Greg, this sounds like an algorithmic penalty. It could be to do with the site itself or more likely it could be to do with external aspects that are / were beyond your control.

Google has replied and told you to check your content so this certainly needs some investigation for starters.

1. External Duplication

I did a quick copyscape search for the homepage and it came back with 26 other sites with the same or similar content (mostly craigslist sub domains).

I did another copyscape search for one product page and it came back with 80 results of sites with the same or similar content.

You have external duplication issues.

2. Link Profile

There is no link profile to speak of so that is not the problem - 16 links from 6 sites. Nothing of any quality.

---

So, without getting all CSI on this, you have a site with no links and a whole bucket load of content duplication on other sites. Whether they are cutting and pasting this content and dropping it on other sites or they are taking it from other places, you need to A) sort this out & B) educate them going forward.

Get the duplication sorted, get a few decent links, add a bit of unique content (try moving the blog onto the main domain instead of on the blog. sub domain) and you will bounce back for these long tail searches at least.

Seriously though, I have seen this a bunch of times. I have even seen older static sites have their content so pillaged and scraped that they got penalised but it was easy fixed by just making the content unique and leave the old duplicated stuff to the haters and scrapers. You probably can't control all these external sites as easy as you can edit the site itself so get onto that quick smart and tell your client to stop dropping this content on every single website imaginable.

As google hinted - look at your content.

Hope this helps! Shout if I can help!

P.S. Oh, and the URLs are horrible, something a little shorter and less obviously dynamic would be better for users.

Hey, that is a great big question posed in a very succinct way.

As ever, there are a lot of moving parts and it depends on every keyword in every niche regarding how tough it will be to rank.

Main elements to consider are:

• Structured Address (NAP) + Consistency of Address
• Structured Citations - total number, quality
• Unstructured Citations - total number, location, relevance of citation site / page
• Optimisation of Google+ Local page (images, updates, video, completeness)
• On Page SEO for site
• Local Links & Citations
• Site Popularity (Search & possibly social)
• Reviews on Google+ Local and other popular citation sites

I wish it were just that simple though and any approach has to consider the industry and existing competition. We tend to review the competition, try to understand their strengths and weaknesses and use that to formulate a customised plan for each local / small business client.

Review the competition, find out who is where they are and how. Understand the strengths and weaknesses of the competition. Do the basics really, really well - citations, on page, Google+ Local page. Then, look at local links, general site popularity. Create  review strategy and try to encourage (without cheating) mentions of your keywords  and targeted location in the reviews.

Don't be tempted to cheat. Don't just buy 100 crappy citations. Do things properly, craft each mention, work on getting good reviews. Do real company shizzle #RCS. Consider each citation a possible advertisement. Love your customers, ask them to love you back.

I will stop here as this is starting to sound like Baz Luhrmann song:

"sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes you’re behind…the race is long, and in the end, it’s only with yourself."

You really have to avoid an SEO by numbers mentality though as it is easy to fall into that trap here and whilst you may see some initial flourish you won't win the race with that approach and returns will rapidly diminish and you may see a bell curve with an improvement and then a drop around low quality tactics.

One last thing, consider co occurrence, it is a hot topic but think about mentioning your keywords where you mention your brand, URL, NAP or elements of. If I was creating a citation or unstructured citation on a site then I would look at mentioning my brand, phone number, location and possibly URL - something like:"

"At Bowler Hat we concentrate on technical SEO Audits and small business SEO for companies in Birmingham. You can call us anytime for help on 0121 314 2001 or visit our site at www.BowlerHat.co.uk.".

The highlighting is mine to better illustrate the important aspects of that sentence and how it can be done cleanly and naturally without the need for crappy writing etc.

Citations often boggle people but they are just directory listings really - a little more on that here:
http://www.bowlerhat.co.uk/blog/types-of-citations-for-seo/

Remember that citations are abused by folks in the medical world to artificially inflate the worth of a medical paper or report so as soon as you factor money into it and add the dirty SEO word then citation abuse can and will be rampant and google knows about this and is on the lookout for it. So... play nice!

Back to the original question - where to learn?

Well, here for starters, search the blog then:

• http://www.localseoguide.com/
• http://www.davidmihm.com/blog/
• https://getlisted.org/ - will get you on the right track.

Some good tools:

• https://www.whitespark.ca/local-citation-finder/
• http://www.brightlocal.com/

Hope that helps! 
Marcus

Hey Alex

Is it possible to get a link so we can review in more detail? Without a link, I can give you some general feedback and I am sure we can try to flesh this out a bit further.

If you had tons of duplicate content and had a traffic drop in Feb then Panda is a likely candidate but if you have removed the duplication and built a new site then that should have resolved those issues.

There is nothing to say you have not picked up another penalty though or have some other problem and Penguin is the next likely candidate to review. So, check your analytics and see if there were further traffic organic traffic drops from Google on  April 24 and/or May 25.

If so, then you likely have external issues (links) that may be effecting your chance to rank.

Action Points

1. Set up a new campaign for the site in the SEOMoz tools and be fastidious in resolving any reported errors

2.  Review the traffic losses in Google analytics and compare against the dates of known algorithm changes here

3. Review any messages and or problems in Google Webmaster Tools

4. Once you have identified any Panda / Penguin problems or any other issues then attempt to resolve them. There are several good guides online and I have a few simplified ones over at my site or check out the posts on Penguin and Panda over at Distilled.

Summary

Ultimately, it is really hard without a link to give a specific review but it sounds like some kind of penalty or devaluation to drop from page 1 to page 6. Likewise, the fact you still rank in Yahoo & Bing would indicate that the site is being penalised. It could be a manual penalty or one of the algorithmic penalties. If you have resolved the duplication issues (check against copyscape and the moz tools) and have no manual penalty (check in webmaster tools for messages) then the likely candidate is external issues so a spammy or manipulative link profile.

Hope this helps and feel free to fire over a link so we can give some feedback specific to your site.

Marcus

References

1. Simple Google Penguin Audit 

2. Google Panda Problems and Solutions

3. Detailed Penguin Audit 

Hey Atul

There is a really good cheat sheet here:

http://www.addedbytes.com/cheat-sheets/mod_rewrite-cheat-sheet/

It shows you the most common things you will need to do and is certainly worth printing off and super glueing to the wall next to your desk.

So, looking at the sheet (and you really have  to learn this stuff rather than luck it through else you will end up going around the bend when something does not work as you want it to) a basic rewrite works as follows:

RewriteRule ^page.html$ new_page.html [R=301,NC,L]

So, to make this work for you

RewriteRule ^page.html$ new_page.html [R=301,NC,L]

But, that is, assuming I understood your question and you are actually looking to redirect A to B and not to just create a nicer URL by masking the /abc/ as /abc.html in which case this is the basics for creating a pretty URL

RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z0-9-]+)/?$ categories.php?name=$1 [L]

• that is for a more dynamic page with a querystring but the theory is the same.

Maybe if  you provided an exact example I can give you one example to build on?

Hope it helps!

Marcus

Hey Stephen

You have every right to be concerned here and duplicate content is a big problem but don't take my word for it:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66359
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1235687

Lets try and forget any SEO mumbo jumbo and just think about this in common sense terms:

• 50 pages with 6500 duplicates means there are 130 versions of each page - which one should Google return in search?
• If Google is crawling your page and has 6500 pages to crawl how are they supposed to know which page is the right one?

I am guessing there are not actually 6500 versions of your pages so in all likelihood, this is some kind of URL based duplication with the page being returned on several URLs (or 130 URLs). What is more worrying is that if the Moz crawler found these pages they are all obviously crawlable so the internal link structure and information architecture is all out of whack.

Without examples it is tough to give advice but you have various options

1. Tidy up the URLs - remove any unnecessary URL parameters (this can be done in webmaster tools if your development company are unhelpful (as they certainly seem unknowledgeable and happy to hand out duff advice).
2. Implement a canonical URL
3. Improve the internal link structure so you only link to one version of each page (ideally combined with a canonical)

Ultimately we want just the 50 pages, a canonical URL, consistent internal linking and any confusing parameters dealt with in webmaster tools.

This kind of problem should be easily resolved and happy to give specific feedback if you wanted to post a link showing some examples.

Another good read:
http://moz.com/blog/fat-pandas-and-thin-content

Hope that helps!
Marcus