Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks for all your help guys, much appreciated.

I have an established website that ranks well in Google. However, I have just noticed that no xml sitemap has been registered in Google webmaster tools, so the likelihood is that it hasn't been registered with the other search engines. However, there is an html sitemap listed on the website.

Seeing as the website is already ranking well, do I still need to generate and submit an XML sitemap? Could there be any detriment to current rankings in doing so?

Thanks David, appreciate your advice.

One of the sites that I work on has a high turnover of products as it sells cutting-edge technology products that quickly become outdated. For each product it is important to build a strong link profile as the competition is very high. I am therefore reluctant to remove pages once products have been discontinued (typically after 6-12 months). However, I do not want discontinued products to appear alongside the latest products as this will hinder the customer experience.

Is it worth me finding a way to archive the old products, so as to maintain the links that have been built up?

Yes, thank you.

I have the Yoast plugin installed but must have missed the option when settings up.

I have been trying to research adding ping services to the default list in wordpress, which only includes http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

A lot of the articles that I have come across seem to be quite old, can anyone tell me if this is still relevant and if so, which services do you find to be worthwhile using?

Thanks

Thanks Keri.

I did think perhaps it was something to do with that because the views starting coming in immediately after the exclusive content went up. I checked the homepage and couldn't see my blog there anywhere though, even when logged out of wordpress.

The strange thing is that while it shows my total views have had a massive increase, individual views have not gone up, so it's as if the extra views have not actually come to the blog, not even the homepage. If my blog was featured on the wordpress homepage, do you think each impression could be counted as a view? Perhaps that would explain all the extra views without extra traffic.

The influx of views has dropped off again now, the wordpress.com referrals ran for 7 days in total, peaking on the 3rd day and then gradually declining. All in all a nice problem to have provided that it's not a malicious attack!

Yes that's correct, on wordpress.com rather than wordpress.org and on the wordpress servers.

I'm glad at this stage that it is on wordpress.com instead of self-hosted as the traffic levels probably would have taken it down by now otherwise.

Just seems strange that the referrals are being shown to come from wordpress.com itself.

It's the wordpress analytics I'm using so I can't drill down into anything more specific unfortunately.

I can't filter out my own location but traffic has jumped from 3-4k views per day to 18k views, then 72k view and looks like today's views will even eclipse the 72k from yesterday.

No the site isn't monetized so no increase in ad revenue - it's a wordpress.com install.

The referring link just shows up as wordpress.com, but when I click through I can't see a link to my blog on the wordpress homepage.

Do you think it could be bots or a malicious attack? Surely if it was bots it would at least show up as views of the homepage?

My Wordpress traffic has hit an all time high over the last few days - in the last 48 hours I've had as many views as the last two months combined.

This huge spike in traffic has coincided with a great piece of exclusive content that went up, but I wouldn't expect the traffic to be nearly as high as this.

The strange thing is that all the extra traffic seems to be referred from Wordpress.com, however, I cannot drill down to a more specific URL. Also, the referrals do not seem to translate into page views of the homepage, nor a particular article.

Can anyone offer any insight into this situation?

Thanks

Thanks for the feedback guys, will give your suggestions a try.

Hi,

I've just run an SEOMOZ Pro scan for the first time and it is picking up duplicate content errors from the RSS feed. For some reason it seems to be picking up two feeds, for example:

http://blog.clove.co.uk/2009/05/13/htc-touch-diamond2-review/feed/

http://blog.clove.co.uk/2009/05/19/htc-touch-diamond2-review-2/feed/

Does anyone know why this is happening and how I can resolve this?

Thanks

Thanks for the reply, sorry it's taken me a while to respond.

I've used a variety of PR sites for the best part of a year now so it seems strange that barely any of them are being picked up.

Hi,

Over the last year I have used a range of different PR sites to post news articles that link back to various pages on my site. However, barely any show up as link backs on Open Site Explorer, neither follow nor nofollow links.

Can anyone explain why this is and whether or not the dofollow links count towards SEO if they are not picked up by OSE?