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You can try a caching plugin like W3 total Cache - http://wordpress.org/plugins/w3-total-cache/

It minifies CSS, and does a lot more to speed up your site - just read all of the instructions first - it can be pretty powerful

Good luck,

Mark

When you filter links by followed and 301, that shows you the "juice passing" links - it's just another way of saying links that should count in the search engines to pass strength from another website to yours

Sure - you have urls that are being blocked by robots - you have this line in your robots.txt -

Disallow: /questions/search

It is thus preventing urls from within that folder, questions, which start with the word search from being crawled. What are you trying to accomplish with this block? If it's the folder search, within questions, it should be /questions/search/.

And the other warning is telling you these pages take a long time to load - check your server or these individual pages and see why that is taking so long.

Hi Marc,

You've written out a very detailed question, and I think you are in the right direction with the disavow. You already stated how you have spent a significant amount of time on your link cleanup procedure, and have documented a lot of the work you have done and the outreach you've done to try and clean up your backlink profile created by your previous SEO. I would submit this to Google in your reconsideration request after doing the disavow - it can't hurt to submit the reconsideration request. But keep in mind, if you got hit by an algo penalty like Penguin and not manual action, the webspam team won't be able to remove the penalty. Only if the webspam team applied a manual penalty to your site or part of it will the reconsideration request help.

In terms of the disavow, as shared by the webspam team (Matt Cutts, Joh Mueller), take a machete to your problematic backlinks - http://www.seroundtable.com/google-disavow-machete-16844.html. If you find domains that have problematic links on them, instead of trying to disavow each page with probleatic links, use the domain: operator and disavow the whole domain/subdomain. Don't be precise and surgical, but use a machete on those problematic domains and links. Once this has happened, I'd see what happens with the rankings.

In terms of Google carrying over the penalty to your new .com domain due to brand association, I wouldn't worry about this. If you were in fact hit by an algorithmic penalty based on links, if the links remain pointing to the old domain, and you don't give the search engines indications that they should replace the old domain with the new one (301 redirects, change of URL via webmaster tools), there should be no reason the engines would pass over the links and the penalty to the new domain. I don't believe the algorithmic link penalty is based on your brand, but rather on the specific site and that site's backlink profile. So if you do start from scratch and don't 301 redirect to the new domain, you are in effect starting from scratch. You many not rank in the beginning, but that's not because the link penalty transferred over, but your site may not have enough link equity on its own to rank.

Either way, good luck with whichever path you choose - I personally hope the disavow helps you and you can salvage your current site, so you don't have to put all of the hard work and effort you put into your old site in the trash.

Good luck,

Mark

You can also check out blogger link up (an email list sent three times a week) with opportunities for guest posts, and also check out Zemanta

Blocking the pages via robots.txt prevents the spiders from reaching those pages. It doesn't remove those pages from the index if they are already there, it just prevents the bots from getting to them.

If you want these pages removed from your index, and not to impact the size of your index in the search engines, ideally you remove them with the noindex tag.

You can check the cached version of that page to see what they have in the cache - is it a recent version of the page or something pretty old, and they haven't reindexed that page in a while.

Either way, I think these notices are more recommendations and helpful tidbits they think will assist webmasters than crucial information that will influence rankings. So if the message isn't relevant anymore, I would ignore it and move on building a great website for your visitors!

Following up on what Mark wrote, buzzstream has a great generator tool for creating these queries - http://tools.buzzstream.com/link-building-query-generator

It's very helpful

Hi Cal,

URLs are in my experience a very small part of the ranking algorithm.  Data from Moz's recent Ranking Factors Correlation Study seems to back this up - see https://moz.com/search-ranking-factors/correlations.  As such, I wouldn't worry too much about the URL structure when making decisions like this.

That said, I'd tend to lean towards the "Default" option you provided because you said you were writing blog posts, so /blog/ should show users what to expect from this page a bit better than the "Alternative" option.  If I'm a user, and I see the URL http://chocchip.com.au/services/website-design/medical-clinics, I expect to see a services page, not a blog post.

Just my two cents - feel free to message me if you need any more help

Mark

In addition to what Becki said (all correct), I feel like it's important to note 2 other things:

1. Even websites that are appropriately redirected, lose some link equity in the process.  See Matt Cutts' video here which says that roughly 10-15% of PageRank is lost through redirects and outgoing links.

2. With regard to the blog problems, I'm wondering if perhaps the blog being down for 4-5 weeks had something to do with it.  If there were historically some links pointing to the blog that were boosting the site, those pages 404ing would effectively remove the links from the link graph.

Still, it seems there's some sort of penalty here because you mentioned them not even ranking for the brand name anymore.  I've never seen that unless there was a penalty.  Have you checked Google Webmaster Tools' manual action viewer?

Think of it this way - if you're a user, and you want to find out info about this page, what is the best page for you to land on? If it's a specific keyword relevant to a deep page full of content, then you'd want Google to target your inner page. If it's a general term, maybe your best page is the home page.

Take one example - electronic cigarettes.

If someone searches electronic cigarettes, then that's the head term, and pretty generic - there's lots of relevant subtopics - so you'd think the main page should be your home page. But if someone searches electronic cigarettes quit smoking, an inner page relevant to the uses and scientific proof / lack thereof about using ecigs to quit smoking would be more relevant.

Bottom line - Keep the user in mind when doing keyword targeting, and think what the best page for you to display the keyword would be.

You can create a template for the titles and metadescriptions of the tags also in Yoast - go to the section of titles, and then in the taxonomies section, you can create a template for titles and meta descriptions. Scroll down to the bottom of the page - you'll see what you can dynamically insert in your template text.

I agree with everything besides for the authorship markup bit.  Authorship markup is not being tracked by Google anymore - see http://searchengineland.com/goodbye-google-authorship-201975.

That said, the larger point about being the first content to go up is a good one.  If we can all figure out where the original is from, assume that Google can too.

I usually look at subdomain metrics as reported by OSE to gauge the strength of a particular wordpress or blogspot domain - if it is has legitimate external links, it's definitely something I'll consider.

google can read your site - they may be reading the content and changing your titles that they are displaying - instead of showing your title tag, they are showing one that they believe to be more relevant.

In Webmaster Tools, you can fetch the page as Googlebot and see what they can see - if you want me to help you via your webmaster tools account, contact me in private message and we can take it from there. But you should be able to do this on your own and see what Google can see - once you know what they can see, you can diagnose if they can actually crawl your page, or if they are rewriting the tags for other reasons.

But your 301 redirect you put in place looks ok to me.

I'd try SEMRush - http://www.semrush.com - although they only offer some of the data for free, I'd check it out - sounds like it can help you and would serve as a good comparison to Ahrefs.

Regarding B), one thing to consider is whether redirects will help or hurt your site.  Even websites that are appropriately redirected lose some link equity in the process.  See Matt Cutts' video here which says that roughly 10-15% of PageRank is lost through redirects and outgoing links.  Therefore, if the site has existed using the format domain.com/post-name for a long time and attracted links to those URLs, then the small benefit you get from adding the keyword to the URL may be outweighed by the natural loss of link equity.

For C), an introductory blurb could help, but make it good quality content, not just for keywords.  Especially since this text will push down the actual blog posts, it needs to be worthwhile for people to read or it could increase bounce rate.

One tool you can use for this is scrapebox - it's got lots of uses, but you can definitely check external links with it - see here - http://www.scrapebox.com/internal-and-external-link-extractor

You can also use the screaming frog spider to crawl a site and then see all of the external links on the site

Scrapebox is a paid tool and screaming frog has both a free (limited) and paid version

Mark

I tend to think something bad must be happening here since it's been almost two months.  If it's just re-indexing, it should have been over long ago.

For widgets, you can try using Widget Logic in Wordpress to control when the widget appears - while it requires php knowledge, you can set widgets with it to only show on certain pages/sections of the site, and you can also set widgets to show only when people come from a certain source - see here for more info - http://wordpress.org/plugins/widget-logic/other_notes/

It's a pretty powerful plugin and should prob do what you need it to - good luck!

Mark