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I recently removed about 600 'thin' pages from my site which are now showing as 404 errors in WMT as expected. As I understand it I should just let these pages 404 and eventually they'll be dropped from the index. There are no inbound links pointing at them so I don't need to 301 them. They keep appearing in WMT as 404's though so should I just 'mark as fixed' until they stop appearing? Is there any other action I need to take?

Following uploading a disavow file do you need to submit a reconsideration request or just wait for a refresh?

Yes this box is checked and it gives me the options then. Should it not be checked?

I am getting a 404 error.

Does having a post in too many categories have a negative effect on SEO? I have some posts in around 15 categories on my site.

Thanks guys for your advice. Am I best to no follow individual links or do it in the meta tag? If I no follow all links on a page will it stop internal link flow around my site. I have some pointers to relevant pages on my site in the bod of the text.

I have recently moved my wordpress blog from a subdomain into a directory e.g. www.mysite.com/blog/ and installed yeast SEO however when I go to the site map as directed in the pluign panel www.mysite.com/blog/sitemap_index.xml its not there are I get a 404 error?

Any help much appreciated.

Hi Guys,

Simple question. Should I nofollow affiliate links on my site. Will it help SEO at all?

Thanks. It's a new blog and has no links pointing to it so would it be okay just to move it?

I have moved my wordpress blog from a subdomain to a subdirectory /blog/ on my site. What is the best way to setup a redirect from the subdomain to the new /blog/ directory?

Or should I just delete the subdomain blog and wait for google to index it on /blog/. I need to do one or the other so as not to run into duplicate content issues.

Yea I found a folder and in it was not just the towns from that county but folders for each county which were also up a folder level (where they should be). I don't use PPC for the Top 10 site listed in my profile. I use it for the site I've had the issue with here (a separate site not listed in my my profile). It's a white label site but I'm struggling to make the PPC profitable to be honest. Any tips appreciated!

I do use PPC but no index my PPC pages.

Thanks Robert. I've just found out to my horror whilst browsing files on my server that within one off my subdirectory folders was an entire copy of my site meaning every single page was duplicated! I'm not a pro web designer/SEO and looks like I've made an expensive mistake!

I definitely need to remove the folder I've found which duplicated the entire site but do you think I should also remove the county/town pages as a precaution or leave them and hope it was the error I've just found that was causing the problem?

Thanks for your reply. I don't have the time to write significantly different content for these pages and I don't think the amount of traffic available for these long tail keywords warrants it. (I was just after an easy win which clear doesn't exist!) If I remove these pages perhaps it will give a boost to my main pages as any penalty should be removed by the algorithm? Would you agree? I could probably make up the 10% loss in traffic I'd get by removing the pages by at the same time receiving a traffic boost to my main pages due to any penalty being removed.

Should I 301 all the pages if I remove them? If so where to as I understand redirecting to the home page is not the best thing to do? There are very few links pointing to these pages so should I just let them 404? Won't they eventually be removed from the index?

Hi,

No the text is identical for each town within a county so 'Lincolnshire' and all the towns within it have the same text (except for the town name) but another county such as 'Suffolk' will have completely different text (however the towns within Suffolk all share the same text as the parent county).

The site is structured like:

/lincolnshire/

/lincolnshire/lincoln

/lincolnshire/grimsby

etc....

These pages account for less than 10% of my traffic but I think could be causing me more harm than good.

I have a site that has most of it's traffic from reasonably competitive keywords each with their own landing page. In order to gain more traffic I also created landing pages for counties in the UK and then towns within each county. Each county has around 12 towns landing pages within the county. This has meant I've added around 200 extra pages to my site in order to try and generate more traffic from long tail keywords.

I think this may have caused an issue in that it's impossible for me to create unique content for each town/country and therefore I took a 'shortcut' buy creating unique content for each county and used the same content for the towns within it meaning I have lots of pages with the same content just slightly different page titles with a variation on town name. I've duplicated this over about 15 counties meaning I have around 200 pages with only about 15 actual unique pages within them.

I think this may actually be harming my site. These pages have been indexed for about a year an I noticed about 6 months ago a drop in traffic by about 50%. Having looked at my analytics this town and county pages actually only account for about 10% of traffic.

My question is should I remove these pages and by doing so should I expect an increase in traffic again?

The following types of links are appearing in my webmaster tools crawl errors report under 'other'. I've noticed they are in my sitemaps ( I run wordpress and use a plugin called Google XML sitemaps). How do I get rid of this error?

http://www.musicliveuk.com/bands/postname%/

what settings should I select in there to make it work?

I've just logged into webmaster tools and have over 100 404 errors. I'm running wordpress and I recently added child pages to 2 of my categories like so.

www.mydomain.com/category1/lincolnshire

www.mydomain.com/category1/cambridgeshire  etc...

The 404 errors though are for pages or categories I've never created though. I have over 20 root categories but decided to test adding child pages to only two of them. The 404 errors are for www.mydomain.com/category5/cambridgeshire .... It seem that gogle has tried to crawl these pages that don't exist. Can anyone explain what's going on?

When I click 'linked from' in webmaster tools it's showing links from pages on my site that don't exist also.

I have set up wordpress categories but the permalinks are showing as www.mydomain.com/?cat=12 as opposed to the category name. The child categories though work fine and show as www.mydomain.com/category/chidcatgegory

I've obviously got my permalink settings wrong somewhere. How do I fix this?