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Thumbs up to Tom. I'd only add that Analytics will tell you much in terms of priorities. From there you can see what percentage of your traffic was/is mobile to begin with and how mobile effects the conversion cycle. Often times the same users begin their research on mobile devices but then move to Desktop or Tablet to purchase. The basic idea being, you can get a solid estimate on your own cost/benefit by running through Analytics. Cheers!
That's a weird result. I suspect it's due to SEJ's use of .comment-author tags on the comments getting cross-referenced with rel=author that's attributed to Jayson Demers. If it was left as just .comment or .usercomment it might be cleaned up.
References:
This could also be due to intent based on what you're searches were; however, Google has given Google properties preferential treatment in the past as well. See: http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change "Dewey — April 2008 A large-scale shuffle seemed to occur at the end of March and into early April, but the specifics were unclear. Some suspected Google was pushing its own internal properties, including Google Books, but the evidence of that was limited." Cheers!
If you're saying that organically it's ranking well you'll see a dip from the redirection process. If you like the site and don't want the risks associated in redirecting, you should probably avoid redirecting it.
Hi David. The benefits associated with 301 redirection come from either relocating your site, combining sites, cleaning up 404 pages, aligning page names within your site architecture, things of that nature. If you have links or visits to those third level pages and want to house all pages on your root domain instead of third levels, then 301 redirection would be the way to go. Cheers!
There was a nice discussion here on tags: http://moz.com/community/q/wordpress-tag-pages-noindex that still applies. In general they tend to eliminate duplicate content issues when noindexed.
Hi Mollie. Regarding Moz Local, the $84 charge is per location per year. If you've already created paid accounts with the sites where the branches are currently mentioned your cost will only be in hours by doing it yourself.
Regarding some of your location settings, there was a recent discussion here: http://moz.com/community/q/client-says-no-local-phone-number-all-locations-no-directing-to-centralized-call-center about the policy (Google's) around using a call center number versus branch specific numbers.
Listings in general need to be as specific possible in order for people to interact with locations. When you're talking abut mobile users, not having listings that are individualized would likely result in poor map listings and poor walk-in-mobile traffic. You'll likely want to do a cost-benefit analysis of whether or not having your branches listed individually and ranking well would bring in more than $252 / year. Cheers!
Hi Ram. If Jon's fix above doesn't work, you might want to post the link(s) you're testing with Screaming Frog so that people here can see what's going on and give you specific recommendations. It sounds like there's a 302 in place on the http version of your site, but people will need details to see where exactly. Cheers!
Hi Rebecca. Do you have a 301 redirect in place to set your preferred domain? i.e. If someone goes to http:// are they redirected to the www, vice versa, or do both work? If both work you could get crawling on both versions. Ideally you'll pick your preferred setup, add the 301, and also set that same preference within GWT and Bing.
Hi Aman.
While the content is OK and different, you'll be competing against yourself with all of these pages being separate. I'd combine them. Cheers!
Hi Aaron. From the help page:
Q: How do I show or hide the MozBar?
A: Either clicking the button in the top right or using the keyboard shortcut (Cmd + Option + Control + M on OSX, Shift + Ctrl + Alt + M on Windows).
It looks like now the SERP feature is an on / off view by clicking the icon in your browser. (Or using the keyboard shortcuts)
Ah. Regarding #3: If you have a disallow in the robots.txt the search engines won't pick up the noindex. Ensure the noindex code is in place on the applicable pages, remove the disallow, and the pages should be removed after they're crawled. getting that relationship straightened out might help with some of the other things as well. Cheers!
Right. It's kind of a combination of categories you want to rank for and ones that are populated and active enough to rank. Brand C Shirts would be fine, but Brand C Short Sleeve shirts could be too diluted. You're on the right track.
Also, there are some instances where the Moz tool just doesn't align with what you would not consider duplicate content and in those cases feel free to ignore it, especially if those pages are ranking well and performing well in terms of conversion / funnel. Cheers!
Without nuking the blog, the Google method is page by page, last caveat though is that they could reappear, "If you think that a sitelink URL is inappropriate or incorrect, you can demote it. Demoting a URL for a sitelink tells Google that you don't consider this URL a good sitelink candidate for a specific page on your site. Google doesn't guarantee that demoted URLs will never appear as a sitelink, but we do consider a demotion a strong hint that we'll try to honor when generating sitelinks."
Is the blog supposed to be behind a paywall or private to members? If it's not supposed to be publicly visible you should consider noindexing it in addition to securing it via login. Cheers!
So you have individually been banned? You're probably out of luck there.
Hi Joost. The reasoning behind noindexing category and tag pages is because they have a high tendency to show up as duplicate content--as you've just experienced. People like to keep them as part of their site due to user friendliness but often these pages on their own are a reshuffling of content and can be highly repetitive from a search engine perspective. Ideally you keep your top level categories that are unique within the index and noindex the rest. Feel free to keep links within your site as followed. Cheers!
Couldn't tell ya. If you have an existing relationship with an account rep there I'd work directly with them on both points. Personally the linking of a banned site to a clean account sounds very high risk.
There's a take on this at Quora here: http://www.quora.com/How-do-you-track-Facebook-Connect-signup-goals-in-Google-Analytics where the attribute is getting applied via a query string. In his example "redirect_to root_url(:new_facebook_user => resource.new_facebook_user)" 'resource' would be replaced with 'adwords' or whichever attribute you'd like. Cheers!
Hi Gavo. Sitelinks are generally an amalgamation of your most visited pages, high search intent pages, and UX considerations. As such you can often control them by modifying your overall navigation and site structure. It might seem like a lot of work, but getting more people to visit the pages you want as sitelinks really doubles your efforts when those pages also become sitelinks.
As for the timeline, Google says, "Once you've demoted or undemoted a sitelink, it can take some time for search results to reflect your changes." Nice and precise! ;^) It will take eventually though, and not in months, but maybe days. Their resource is here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/47334 Cheers!