Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks for the help.

By the way, who is the happy panda?

I'm using Yoast's Wordpress SEO plugin on my wordpress site which allows you to quickly set up nofollow / no index on specific taxonomies. I wanted to see what you guys thought was the best practice in setting up my various taxonomies.

Would you noidex, but follow all of these, none of these, or just some of these:

Categories, tags, media, author archives ( (My blog is mainly a single author blog (me) but my wife does sometimes write posts. So I didn't know how this effected everything. Also I could simply make the blog a single user blog and just have her posts be guest posts, but I'd rather leave her as a user.), and  date archives.

The example I read on line only no-index's the date archives. Just curious what you guys thought.

Thanks.

I totally agree.

I did the fetch as google and everything looks normal. I also do not have any erros that have anything to do with this page.

It's very strange. It seems to have happen all of a sudden.

Thanks for your message. I've already checked that, and the site was in face de indexed.

I wanted to share this with everyone for two reasons. 1. To try to figure out why this happened, and 2 Let everyone be aware of this so you can check some of your pages if needed.

Someone on Facebook asked me a question that I knew I had answered in this post. I couldn't remember what the url was, so I googled some of the terms I knew was in the page, and the page didn't show up. I did some more searches and found out that the entire page was missing from Google.

This page has a good number of shares, comments, Facebook likes, etc (ie: social signals) and there is certainly no black / gray hat techniques being used on my site. This page received a decent amount of organic traffic as well.

I'm not sure when the page was de-indexed, and wouldn't have even known if I had't tried to search for it via google; which makes me concerned that perhaps other pages are being de-indexed. It also concerns me that I have done something wrong (without knowing) and perhaps other pages on my site are going to be penalized as well.

Does anyone have any idea why this page would be de-indexed? It sure seems like all the signals are there to show Google this page is unique and valuable. Interested to hear some of your thoughts on this.

Thanks

It seems like Google is smart enough to deliver the correct results. I'm sure there is a range depending upon what sort of keywords you are targeting.

But typically there is going to be enough content on your site to allow for Google to understand what the proper categories your site is targeting.

This question would be better answered by sending an email to SEOmoz staff as they would be the ones who could properly and accurately answer it.

I think you continue to do what you have done in the past (assuming you have followed good white hat practices in the past.)

You write good, descriptive, accurate titles that are optimized for the keywords you are targeting on that page, and you write for your readers. It just seems like Google is now going to be smarter at delivering search results to searches. As Rand says often, Google is SMART.  If you focus on creating unique and valuable content that people want to share and link to, Google will continue to find way to deliver that content to those who are searching for it.

I'm curious what you all think about using a 3rd party commenting system (like Disqus) vs the native wordpress commenting system?

I've read so many reviews online it makes my head spin, so I wanted to see if any of you have any experience, or perhaps some trusted case studies.

I was using the native comment system for a while, and then tried out Disqus; which seems to be good, but I'm not sure if people know how to easily get notified of new comments. With the native system there was a check box that said "subscribe," plus I used a plugin to redirect a first time commenter to a welcome page, as well as sent an email to them. I feel like Disqus makes it harder for people to get notified on new comments.

However, I like giving people the ability to log in via different 3rd party channels (facebook/twitter/disqus, etc.) I know there are some 3rd party tools that allow you to do this on the native comment system as well. Any way, I'm just curious if anyone had any experience.

Also I'm assuming the audience makes a big difference. My target readership is mommy's and parents, and not necessarily a 'tech" one; so I want to make the ability to comment very simple and easy for them. That's key.  I'm sort of leaning on moving back over to the Wordpress comment system.

Yes it did.

I want to chime in and say that as a a normal person who wants to learn SEO in order to have content found, and ultimately help people, I find SEOmoz to be extremely useful. Without sounding over dramatic, I can even say it has been life-changing for me, and my "career."

The info you will learn from the White Board Friday's, this q&a, and the rest of the staff of SEOmoz is invaluable. There is so much junk info online about SEO, and I personally enjoy having a "home base" so to speak. SEOmoz is the place where I go to line up other info that I hear about. I can trust that the info that I read/watch here is accurate.  Time is one of our most value assets, so if you value your time, SEOmoz is a great place to come and learn (and build your business/brand/story, etc..)

And on a personal level I have to say that the people here are great. A lot of "seo junk" you find online (free or paid) just seems to be ran by shady people, hard core salesman, and just generally untrustworthy people. But you won't find that here. I could type for days about my personal experience, but I'll save you details, and just say you can trust these guys. They aren't out to get you. They don't try to sell you on stuff. They don't "over-promise." And they aren't into SEO just to make a buck. It's the way the company is led from the top down.

If you back and read some old posts by the CEO (Rand) you'll find lots of stuff about how we wants to be in business to help people. To do the right thing. To change the way people think about "SEO." And above all he cares about his customers. And I think that counts for something. A big something. I enjoy supporting organizations  I feel generally have in interest in their customers, and you will find that here.

/rambling

I don't use Google analytics to see much more than how many visits I'm getting and what sort of keywords people are using to find our site. I'd like to step up my GA skills a bit. I'm wondring if you guys could give me some advice. I've never really set up any GA goals, or used it to track specific things, but I'd like to. Here are a few things off the top of my head that I would like to track. I'm wondring if these are posable in GA, and if someone could give me some feedback on how to track it / set up goals. Thanks.1

1. I'd like to know how many people click play on a video when they are on a page that has a video.

2. I'd like to know how many people are clicking "like" " google plus, etc.)

3. I'd like to know the path people are taking on our site. For instance, if they click a link from Facebook, and go to a landing page, what page are they visiting next.....

4. How long people are staying on the page

I would really like to break this down further by people that visit a link I posted on Facebook, or twitter, or from the link on my twitter profile page, etc...

Also if there are any other valuable goals / reports that would be useful for a blogger to track I'd appreciate your feedback.

Thanks.

Yes, I have about 60 404's and 403's I'm trying to correct...

Thanks for the feedback by the way.

I'm not sure how you would give the author pages different titles on a Wordpress powered site...

Should I check some of the no index settings within the plugin?

On my reports they show up as duplicate page titiles....

I have some duplicate content issues on my blog I'm trying to fix. I've read lots of different opinions online about the best way to correct it, but they all contradict each other. I was hoping I could ask this community and see what the consensus was.

It looks like my category and page numbers are showing duplicate content. For instance when I run the report I see things like this:

http://noahsdad.com/resources/

http://noahsdad.com/resources/page/2/

http://noahsdad.com/therapy/page/2/

I'm assuming that is just the categories that are being duplicated, since the page numbers only show on the report at the end of a category.

What is the best way to correct this? I don't use tags at all on my blog, using categories instead. I also use the Yoast SEO plug in. I have a check mark in the box that disables tags. However it says, "If you're using categories as your only way of structure on your site, you would probably be better off when you prevent your tags from being indexed."

There is a box that allows you to disable categories also, but the description above makes it seem like I don't want to block both tags and categories.

Any ideas what I should do?

Thanks.

But the question I really have is WHERE did these pages come from? Also the original page has a canonical tag on it. I just don't know how this page was created, and why it has such a high rank since it's a very new page. It's very strange.

What's interesting about this is that if you take out the %, the url exists. That URL is actually on my site. I have no idea how it got there though. Very strange.

The last crawl found a good number of 404's and I can't figure out what's going on.  I don't even recognize these links.  What's really strange is a few of them high a fairly decent page authority. For instance this one has a PA of 55:

http://noahsdad.com/?path=http%3A%2F%2Feurosystems.it%2Fconf_commerciale%2Fimages%2Fdd.gif%3F%3F

There are several more like this one also, it seems most of these new ones have "Feurosystems" in the link...I have no idea what that is.

Just curious what you guys think is going on, why these are 404'ing, and how to fix it.

Thanks.

Edit: I took out the "%" from the links and I get this: http://noahsdad.com/?path=http3A2F2Feurosystems.it2Fconf_commerciale2Fimages2Fdd.gif3F3F

which takes me to a page on my site. I have no idea what's going on, or what that link is. Hoping someone can chime in because this is strange.

Another edit: I just checked out the Google Webmaster's and it looks like these errors are 403's and all started around March 21st. I have no idea what happend on March 21st to start causing all of these errors, but I'd sure like to get it fixed.