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Hi Adam,

As you stated, patience is a virtue, one we're especially not used to on the web. But it sounds like OSE never had reason to discover your site (no links pointing in that they would follow), so once your link building kicks off, and OSE updates, you should hopefully start to see your metrics rising.

There are tools out there you can use for rank checking, some free ones (like SEO Book's Rank Checker), which go pretty high, but not into the thousands. I'd say the easiest and quickest way you can check your rankings in Google would be to set up Webmaster Tools (if you haven't already) and check your stats in the Search Queries report. This will give you impression data, clicks, and average rankings for various search terms straight from Google. While not perfect, this is probably your easiest and cheapest (it's FREE!) way to check your rankings without doing it by hand.

I'd do exactly what you're saying. Make the pages no index, follow. If they're already indexed, you can remove the page search.php from the engines through webmaster tools.

Let me know how it turns out.

Hi,

There was just a great post on Google Webmaster Central about this very topic - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/04/how-to-move-your-content-to-new.html

Register both domains with webmaster tools, make sure the new domain is crawlable by googlebot, 301 redirect the old pages/site to the new pages/site, and in webmaster tools of the old domain, use the change of address option under site configuration to tell Google that your site has changed domains and is now on the new domain.

Make sure to check out Google's post, as they give some good tips and walk you through the process.

Good luck!

Well, from what everyone is writing about Penguin, it's an algorithmic update. Meaning you need to fix whatever issues are there, wait for the algorithm to process again, and then if you've solved the issues, you should theoretically restore the rankings. That's much easier said than done. You don't know exactly what the issues are, and we don't know when the algo will process again.

I think the timeline you have set is highly unrealistic and you should aim to set expectations with the client that this process can very well take much longer. If this previous SEO company built problematic links, I think you'll have to deal with them. I don't think pointing good links into the site will get rid of the issue with the problematic links and clear you of the algo. I think you're going to have to go through the tedious work of cleaning things up. The good news is that a bunch of people have written about what to look for. Check in WMT tools for sitewide links, check your anchor text pointing into the site. Export your external links from OSE and then upload them to Linkl Detective- http://linkdetective.com/- let it do the hard work for you, classify a lot of the links, and then you need to go through the process of trying to clean things up, doing as much as you can, and then submit a reinclusion request (may help, may not), hoping Google will discard the other links.

Good luck - really try to demonstrate to your client the complexity of the process and extend the timeframe of the project - that's my ultimate recommendation

I'd create an index.html for the directory, and then redirect it somewhere. This way, you're capturing the inbound links and then rescuing some of the inbound juice.

Otherwise, you can also check out this post for more info on other solutions and modifying your htaccess file to prevent the directory view - http://perishablepress.com/better-default-directory-views-with-htaccess/

Instead of looking at keyword density, I'd look at more important metrics and factors in on site optimization.

Use moz's on on page report card http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/on-page-keyword-optimization/new to check your onpage optimization. Also, you can use the toolbar to highlight a certain keyword. I think most people nowadays don't really take keyword density into account, unless it's extremely high and the post is very spammy looking. Go for natural text that will make sense for a reader, a real human being, to read the content. Use your keywords naturally throughout the text, and I think you'll see better results than incorporating a keyword wherever possible to increase keyword density levels.

So you want to create duplicate content on the web?

If you're syndicating content, the reason you're doing it is to provide this content to the readership of these other sites. If someone searches, and discovers this content in the search engines, you want the attribution of that content to come from the original source, you guys. Why would you want some other website to be discovered as a result of content you created and syndicated to them? If you want the credit to go to them, and the engines to bring visitors to their site for content you created, that's why you should write a guest post or column and put it on their site. But if you're syndicating content and want it to show up on other sites, I think it makes sense to actually have the canonical tag pointing to your site, indicating to the search engines that you are the authentic source of that piece of content. The other site's readers will still enjoy the content on that site, you'll just be credited for it in the search engines. To me, this is a win win situation where everyone benefits. The other site benefits because it gets free content to give to their readership, and you get attribution for it in the engines and the additional exposure to the other sites visitors.

I think WMT is sometimes annoying about it, but it makes sense. If you're pointing the whole site to a different site, I guess it makes sense that they want to verify you control the domain, and not just that one specific subdomain.

One other thing I would do is review your backlink profile - if there are some juicy links in there that you want to preserve and not lose some of their strength due to 301 depletion, I'd contact the webmasters and inform them of the change, asking them to update their links to the new URL to make sure you don't encounter any issues in the future.

What you described here is the same content on multiple subdomains. If you add no index, no follow, you'll prevent the other pages from being indexed and from passing link equity. Firstly, even if you would go this route, I wound't add the no follow rule - that just means you're losing any juice that passes to the page from links, not something you necessarily want to do.

In this case, I'd recommend changing your canonical tag - the birmingham subdomain uses the canonical tag on itself, claiming that it should be credited with the content, when in truth, you said you want the credit flowing to the www version of the site. So you need to change your canonical tag on the location based subdomains to point to the www subdomain. So for http://birmingham.styleblueprint.com/food-and-entertaining/recipes/kale-salad-quick-healthy/, the canonical should be  rel="canonical" href="http://www.styleblueprint.com/food-and-entertaining/recipes/kale-salad-quick-healthy/" />

Hope this helps

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.

If you're finding these tags are missing meta descriptions, that means they are pages that don't have meta descriptions. This points to a larger issue - do you want each page being created by Wordpress for each tag you use to be indexed by the search engines? Are these high quality pages you'd want a user to land on? Do they provide value? If not, you don't want them to be indexed. You can use a Wordpress plugin to control indexation of these tag pages - Yoast's SEO plugin, http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/, besides for being awesome, will control this for you. Install and then go the indexation section, and from there, you can control what is indexed and set the tags to not be indexed.

You can do lots of other stuff with the plugin, and I definitely recommend installing it either way.

Hope this helps and let me know if you have any issues with it.

One thing I would add is see if you can get the sites taking the content to implement a cross domain canonical tag. Meaning, have them point to your original page of the content in the canonical tag. This will indicate to the search engines that they are attributing the content to you. This should serve as the clearest signal to the engines who to attribute the content to - it's great that there is attribution in the text itself, but the best method of giving the correct attribution would be with the canonical tag.

Hope this helps

Something is going on with your robots.txt - when trying to visit the file, it automatically prompts me to download the file and doesn't actually display it. Was it always like this or is this a recent change?

I would recommend making sure your robots.txt file is crawlable and readable by the search engines before looking to see if there any other issues on the site.

Some of what you're doing sounds ok, but I'd definitely stay away from the article spinners and the article directories. In short, don't pollute the web with crappy content that no human would ever read - Google is catching on more and  more and punishing those who do.

For link building ideas and tactics, Jon Cooper recently put together an awesome post of tactics - http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies - be sure to check that out.

Also, I'd focus on making onsite improvements - make sure your titles and meta are written well, aren't keyword stuffed. That your internal linking is solid and your pages are crawlable and configured properly. Try to improve on things like site speed, and markup your data using schema.

Bottom line is - try to create awesome pieces of content for your sites, and build relationships with others to market them and spread publicity.

Hope this helps

Mark

Try this - of course take what you need from it - source is here - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6059920/removing-index-html-from-url-and-adding-www-with-one-single-301-redirect Options +FollowSymlinks -MultiViews RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www. [NC] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(./)index.html$ [NC] RewriteRule . http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}%1 [R=301,NE,L] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www. [NC] RewriteRule . http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [NE,R=301,L] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(./)index.html$ [NC] RewriteRule . %1 [R=301,NE,L]

could it not be working because you used rewriteengine twice?

Hi,

As you noted, the noindex meta tag is present on the page. This tells the search engines to completely remove it from their index. You want this to tag to be on pages you want removed/excluded from the search engines, certainly not on your homepage if you care about your PR.

As you can see here, your site is no longer cached in Google - http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=cache%3Awww.pokeronlineitalia.com. Your blog, on the other hand, which has the meta robots tag of "index,follow", is still in the cache of Google - http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=cache%3Awww.pokeronlineitalia.com%2Fblog

If you want search engine traffic, you need to remove this tag immediately and wait for Google to come and crawl the site. You may want to build some links into the site and/or share it over various social networks like Google+ and Twitter to speed up the indexation process.

This is most probably why the page has no PR - it's not indexed in Google.

Hi Daniel,

I was a bit confused by this - index.html on your site returns a 404 error. I changed the url to index.htm and then it returns the correct information as a 200.

Basically, I'm not saying to delete the page index.htm - that is in fact your default page and what the server will show as your homepage. Nakul and I have just been saying to configure the server to strip out the index.htm from the URL and just show twinbytes.ca. Since your site is in fact on an Apache server, you should be able to use the htaccess info that Nakul gave you. But be careful when changing an htaccess file - you can really mess up your site if you don't do it properly. Be sure to make a backup of the file before making any changes or additions to it.

Even though your file is index.htm, the line in Nakul's code should have you covered due to the regular expression.

Mark

Hi Christoph,

In today's world, I'd be very hesitant to outsource my link building to company that will guarantee a top page 1 ranking for  a moderately difficult keyword. There are so many other factors to take into consideration.

I'd also stay away from a performance based model - this may encourage the link builder/SEO to try various methods to get quick results. If you suddenly shoot up in the rankings with the usage of dodgy tactics, I wouldn't be surprised if your site took an even bigger drop a short time later. Google is really cracking down on webspam and problematic tactics, and I think you need to be a bit patient and let things go naturally.

Currently, I'd advocate guest blogging and other forms of organic link building.

Is the site currently ranking for the term? What is the backlink status of the domain? If you pay a link builder to optimize for one term, and neglect your branded anchor text and the backlink profile of the rest of the site, you can run into serious issues with the search engines that will be harder to resolve and will take more time and money than you had originally intended to invest.

Hope this helps - just to clarify, I'm all for link building and organic growth in rankings. I just think you need to take a larger approach looking at your whole site, its onpage optimization and its backlink profile.

Sounds like you've got your bases covered.

One suggestion - make sure you don't block the old URL's with your robots.txt file - you need to make sure the robots can reach the old pages, then follow the 301's to update their index.

I'd also use your favorite backlink profile to check external links - I'd contact the really juicy sites linking to you and inform them of the change, asking them to correct the link to the proper page, for server loads and users. This way, you won't be losing any juice through the redirects. Also make sure you're not losing juice by having external links go to 404 pages - would be a good time to recover all lost juice.

While you may drop in rankings temporarily, things should sort themselves out in a bit.