Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey All - The above reply was created by me. So sorry - was signed into Mozzer Alliance instead of my own account when I created it.

When you say "exclude your search"...do you mean exclude that soft 404 page specifically from the search bots? Can you take a quick peek at one of the pages in question...? http://www.seadwellers.com/search/page/8/ There are 8 of them....only diff is the number at end of URL...I am afraid I do not understand how/why it exists? Any insight you might have time to give is greatly appreciated...I'm trying to learn. Thank you Martijn

Hi there Actually, if you have ScreamingFrog you can run a crawl and this will tell you what pages these internal link errors live on and what their anchor texts are so you can quickly pinpoint and update them. If this is something you don't feel like you can do (or have time to do), shoot me an email and we can discuss - my email is in my profile. Otherwise, there other companies you can reach out to if it's easier for you! Hope this helps! Chat soon.

heheh well I'd love that 47 not found could be "lots" by the way, where are thos links coming from? What you have to bear in mind is that it's not the same if the 404 is caused by internal or external linking. If internal, then you have to see which page is creating the 404 and fix it If external you have to ask the webmaster for fixing the link and meanwhile have the 301 in place so you can save the value of those links..

Hey! I am not familiar with that app so I can't speak to it. I am willing to bet it's an issue with their crawl, because again, I am not seeing anything on my end other than the issues I listed above in my quick scan. Does Check My Links have anymore documentation to how they crawl 404s? I can't imagine it's any different than other crawlers, but again, not familiar so I can't say either way. Hope this helps! Good luck!

Ok - wasn't willing to let this go until I could definitively track down the issue. I've never come across this before. Rob, you've somehow managed to get a Unicode Escape character entered at the beginning of one of your paragraphs in your "Photography Series Part 1 Picking your Camera" post. This character is invisible to the reader, but because it's considered an invalid XML character, your RSS feed (which is just a specifically formatted XML file) is erroring out, as you noted. To fix this, you're going to have to go back into your WordPress dashboard to edit that post. Scroll to the second paragraph in the Smart Phone section that begins "You can buy a waterproof housing..." Place your cursor at the beginning of the word "buy" and then use your backspace key to delete all the way back to the word "plenty" in the paragraph before. Then hit the Enter key to create the new paragraph, and retype the words you've deleted in that "You can buy..." sentence. Then retype the words into the end of the previous sentence. Then, click Update to save the new version of the post. Believe it or not, that should fix the RSS feed validation problem. Now, the next issue will be that many places where the RSS is used will cache the feed (i.e. store a copy of it) The only way to bust/refresh that cache will be to publish another post, so the cached version gets updated to show the new post and the fix to the old post. If you are adding the RSS feed somewhere it hasn't been used before (e.g. to a newly created sidebar widget) it should be pulling the corrected version of the feed and work as expected. Hope all that makes sense - if not, just holler. Sorry for all the previous confusion as I tried to work out what was actually happening. Paul [Ignore the original suggestion below - the fix required more research] Rob, on your blog post titled Photography Series Part 1, Picking the Right Camera, the first subhead is  "Which Camera is Right for you?  Sea Dwellers Dive Center of Key Largo..." Try removing the extra space after the question mark and before the words Sea Dwellers. [EDITED TO ADD: Also remove the exclamation mark from the alt tag (alt="Dive and shoot!") for the associated photo.] Then you'll have to clear the site's cache if it has one to clear any RSS cache. Lemme know how you get on. Paul

Hi there, Unfortunately, this isn't something that anyone can tell you without at least a few hours of research - Google has a pretty complicated algorithm! I can tell you some more things to take into account, in addition to Bob's list: **Keyword relevance: **For the search queries that you want to rank for, does Sea Dwellers look the most relevant? Do you use the phrase that you want to rank for in your page title, the h1 of the page, and on the page itself? Be careful not to sound like you're writing for robots rather than humans, but using the exact same phrase as you want to rank for definitely helps with rankings. **Inbound link relevance: **Where did you get the links to your site? More links from relevant sites (for example, unsponsored posts about the best company to dive with) are going to help with local queries like "dive Key Largo." **Potential spam / paid links: **If you've paid for links or have spammy links coming to your site, Moz may have an inflated version of your PA or DA metrics, since it isn't as good at recognizing that as Google is (though they're working on it with their spam score). Good luck! If you're feeling especially frustrated about this, I'd recommend hiring an SEO to give you some definite answers. Best, Kristina

Hello! What you will want to do is look at your crawl diagnostics in a campaign to get a better understanding of the errors. The CSV is helpful to hand over to a web developer to address any issues. There is a mix of positive and negative errors you will find in the report. You can use the data viewed in a campaign as a guideline. TRUE values mean the errors for the specific column exist, these are the ones you will pay close attention to. FALSE values mean they do not exist. Most FALSE values will not appear in a campaign so many of the cells in a CSV will show this. Hope this helps!

Hello Tom, You answered a question for me some time ago, and i appreciate it.  I wanted to ask you, I am a very small business, I do my own site, seo, etc.  After being involved with a company that milked me for $...i realized that I can do SEO on my own...I have a great blog, 10,000 followers on Facebook Page, doing ok in basic SEO.  I do believe that this kind of has to be done organically these days, as content & linkbuilding needs to be authentic now? However, I obviously am NOT a professional, I believe my site has some issues and I cannot really deal with them well.  For example, my RSS feed is screwed up...http://www.seadwellers.com/key-largo-diving-blog/ I am getting this error message..."RSS Error: This XML document is invalid, likely due to invalid characters. XML error: not well-formed (invalid token) at line 257, column 32" I have not been able to fix this...and I think I have other on-page SEO isssues that are above me. Do you offer a one-time service that could address these kind of things?   I do not have big budget, but could use a look-over of my page for on-page issues that you could "optimize" for me? Also, what is you opinion on linkbuilding these days?  Is this something you think i can address on my own? Thank you,  Rob Sea Dwellers Dive Center of Key Largo

The answer is easy, just do it when you think such link will provide profitable information to the users

If Google is showing a 404 error when you click on the search result then technically you should also see a 404 error when visit the URL directly through your address bar. Google does a live fetch of your site from the search results so that won't change the 404 you're getting in a few days time. Yes, you can return a 404 header to only the Googlebot, but this has be done intentionally via htaccess, and I doubt you've done that. If you've been using one of the old date or the numeric permalink structure options, then you'll need to redirect your old permalinks to your new ones. You can try a plugin like 'Simple 301 Redirect' and fix the broken URLs that way if you only have a few of them. If you have a lot of them, which may be the case if you've changed your permalink structure, then you need to find a plugin that'll do the job for you. Good Luck

This is correct. You have consolidated both versions of the domain. No need to worry.