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Slow and Steady is always a good sign. However spikes every once in a while should not be an issue at all. Let's say something from your website goes viral and you get tons of likes and other social activity related to your website for like 3 days and then it dies down. That's the nature of social media. Don't worry about it 
This could be for multiple reasons. If you are looking at raw total links (not unique domains) linking to you, one blogger linking to you with a sitewide link and if that person change his blog's link display from sitewide to homepage only can impact numbers like that. Have you also been monitoring your competitor links ? How have they changed ?
Also, the quality of the sites OSE uses it's in index would improve over time, in which case spam blogs etc might get dropped, thereby causing in reduction in the number of links.
There could be a number of things. See OSE Stats below from their update on 9th Oct, 2014
You said there's outbound link tracking. Check if those links are nofollowed as Ryan suggested. You can also check if if they are something like www.thatsite.com/redirect.php?id=1 and if the redirect.php has a noindex or www.thatsite.com/robots.txt has a disallow or something like that.
If the links are redirects via a tracking, they are not really being counted towards the linked to site's backlinks anyways, so I don't think there are any issues here.
You might want to think about it a a little bit more and see how it all fits in your marketing strategy. The recommendation is definitely to just link to the articles. The question is, where to link it from ?
Also, the question is whether you would want to pass link juice from your website to those pages?
As far as reproducing the content, that's definitely a no-no in my opinion, since you are then signing up to duplicate content issues.
What I'd suggest doing is randomly revising some of those 404's that appear and check whether they should indeed be 404s. Are there any bulk rules / wildcard 301s you can implement to redirect the traffic for 3-6 months ?
These URLs are usually found from external links to your website. When you click on a detail of any of the reported 404s, it tells you what the error details are, whether this link is in the sitemap or where it is linked from. You'd realize in most cases it's linked from somewhere. If it's an internal link, correct it. If it's external, do you think the webmaster might update it if you contact them or is it easier to just set a 301, retaining the SEO value ?
I hope this helps.
Enam, I would not worriota out it. This is a natural link. Think of other social networks like twitter. If you were to tweet your link and 10,000 users retweet it, you have that many links from different pages within twitter.com
this s the nature and structure of the website, don't stress yourself about this. If this was coming from a crappy domain or spammy bloon other it would be something to worry about.
I hope this helps. Have a good weekend.
It's been a while since I tried Moz's crawler. This new "major refresh" looks great Dr Pete and Team Moz. Cheers.
I usually never limit it. I let the content writer decide based on how / what the topic is and I try not to restrict them to a certain word count. Short article or long, it should serve the purpose it's being written for and if it's for the user, which is what it should be, it should cover the article title in the right way and do justice to it.
I hope that helps.
Any kinds of bulk links...I would suggest to stay away from unless you are trying this for a throwaway site if it gets penalized. If you are planning long term, invest in content and more "real" link building which is a lot of hard work.
Also read this question here.
You'd have to add the disallow in robots.txt and then go into the Google Webmaster Console, use the Remove URLs option to get Google to deindex that page.
From Google:
Use **robots.txt **to specify how search engines should crawl your site, or request **removal **of URLs from Google's search results ( have you read our removal requirements? ). Only site owners and users with full permissions can request removals.
This is a code injection kind of spam that you have been hit with. I suggest you go ahead and upgrade your wordpress to the latest version as well as the plugins and themes.
The code injection is either placed within mySQL database in the wp_options table or inside your header files.
Check this article for an exact fix - http://www.mydigitallife.info/wordpress-hack-recover-and-fix-google-and-search-engine-or-no-cookie-traffic-redirected-to-your-needsinfo-anyresultsnet-golden-infonet-and-other-illegal-sites/
Honestly, my advice would be to grab a list of your backlinks using both Google Webmaster Console as well as the OpenSiteExplorer and merge them into a spreadsheet and get rid of all the duplicates.
Next step would be to identify which of those links are spammy and you'd be better of having them removed. This is in my opinion the hardest part depending upon the volume of sites/links.
Then hire somebody to find email addresses of the websites where you want links removed. Finding something on the page and if nothing else, using whois. I would then send an email to each one of those contacts and in a quick short email, tell me the URL where the link is located and your site URL. Tell them to remove the link right away since you have received a Google Warning. I would imagine this taking care of a good portion of those links. I would send another email in a week and then again for a total of 2-4 times to see if you get a response and get the link removed. When nothing else worked, offer then $10 for the link removal and that should gain their attention. If that does not work either, I would suggest you move on.
I hope this helps. You could get somebody on odesk.com or a similar site to get all the labor intensive work done.
I agree with Andrea's comments. I'd also like to highlight the answer from within the question.
"My main competitor has a lot more pages".
Great content, strengthens your entire website. Attracts more social media activity, more shares, more time spent on site etc etc. So If I were you, I'd see what I can do to provide useful content. Find the gaps. Look at your analytics, see what keywords people are using to come to your website. Do you update your content ? Is there an opportunity there ? If you can, see what people are looking for in your site-search.
I hope this helps.
Santosh
From an indexing issue, it's not a problem. It's just a warning...as JH and Marisa said.
However, I'd look into the usability. Do people use the links to set the appointments ? Does it hurt the "conversion" rate if you were to have the option of Book online, with available time slots visible, just not hyperlinked and then when they get to the following page, a drop down with the available time-slots ?
If it's doable and makes sense, maybe A/B test it.
There's no other way for the links to be on the page but not be visible to the bots
I just responded to this exact question. Here's my answer and a link to that question:
Honestly, my advice would be to grab a list of your backlinks using both Google Webmaster Console as well as the OpenSiteExplorer and merge them into a spreadsheet and get rid of all the duplicates.
Next step would be to identify which of those links are spammy and you'd be better of having them removed. This is in my opinion the hardest part depending upon the volume of sites/links.
Then hire somebody to find email addresses of the websites where you want links removed. Finding something on the page and if nothing else, using whois. I would then send an email to each one of those contacts and in a quick short email, tell me the URL where the link is located and your site URL. Tell them to remove the link right away since you have received a Google Warning. I would imagine this taking care of a good portion of those links. I would send another email in a week and then again for a total of 2-4 times to see if you get a response and get the link removed. When nothing else worked, offer then $10 for the link removal and that should gain their attention. If that does not work either, I would suggest you move on.
I hope this helps. You could get somebody on odesk.com or a similar site to get all the labor intensive work done.
There are 2 aspects to removing these pages (I am presuming these URLs are already indexed in Google).
First, you need to get these removed, so that they do not exist. Either a 404 or a Canonical to itself.
If it's a canonical, as Google recrawls these pages, they will drop the duplicates from their Index. If they are 404, then also they will drop or you can request remove via Google Webmaster Console.
I can's say specifically without looking at the actual example.
I hope this helps.
How much other unique content is there on the page (if any) ? Judging by your question, it does not sound like there's a much bigger piece of content that's unique to this page only. So if you have 1-2 paragraphs of sales pitch which is duplicate or similar to the sales pitch or promotional copy on other pages, it's okay if the ratio of the duplicate snippet is small. If however it's a big proportion, then it's thin content and the site may drop off in the SERPS. I would recommend doing a complete SEO Audit, see what you are doing, how you are ranking, what the competition is doing and how they are ranking and create an SEO roadmap to follow. I hope this helps.
Technically, yes you could do it. However, here are some things to keep in mind:
1. In most cases, you will see that the domain expired, went to redemption, got deleted and then nobody else has bought it...yet. In these cases, usually the power of the domain is lost to a great extent, although not 100%. It's tricky.
2. Consider #1, since all the value is not lost, you could do this, but then are you planning to do this for 1-2 domains or 100-200 domains ? Where do you draw the line. Because technically, the question then becomes of 301'ing that old/expired/reregistered domain to your website. If you do it 1-2 times, it might be okay, but then if this becomes your primary link building technique or a big (un-natural) percentage of your backlinks, it will be nothing but trouble. I hope this helps.
Marie
I just found this Chrome Extension, which does have a copyscape aspect in it. So you can click a button and it can check the entire page, not just a small snippet of text or phrase.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/meta-seo-inspector/ibkclpciafdglkjkcibmohobjkcfkaef
I hope this helps.
There could be a variety of factors that could influence your rankings and a drop of just 1 keyword is not enough to guage the magnitude of the problem. Did you rankings drop for other keywords as well ? Are you noticing both an upward and downward move in the rankings or just downward ? If downward only, I would suggest you check all your On-page SEO as well as Off-page and do a complete SEO Audit.
Again, don't use a drop in 1 keyword's ranking as a decision maker for other actions.