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The majority of the configuration needs to happen on the server hosting the main website, Alex. Because essentailly, the visitor isn't even going to be aware of the existence of/URL for the other infrastructure. They're going to go to example.com/blog, and example.com's server configuration is going to deliver them the content from someotherserver.com which hosts the WordPress install.

In addition to the proxy configurations, you may need to deal with cookies, SSL configurations and potentially other server header information that needs to be maintained between the requests passing back and forth between the different servers as well.

This is a pretty common requirement in enterprise configurations though - to keep the software running the blog from potentially interfering with or compromising the security of the main site infrastructure. So like I said - eminently do-able, but not trivial to implement.

Does that answer your question?

Paul

My guess is that if the domain has no backlinks, it probably has no link juice to even pass to the main site.

What kind of traffic is the doorway site getting? Is it mostly direct from type-ins due to being an EMD?

Without seeing the site, my recommendation would be to take down the doorway site altogether and 301-redirect the domain to the appropriate related category on the main site. That would still pass along the traffic, and also some of whatever minor link juice the page had managed to acquire.

Would that make sense?

Paul

Those pages are linked using normal hrefs in the page's code, so there's no reason they couldn't be indexed. The popup effect is being created by a JavaScript onclick event, which, as its name implies, only fires after a visitor has clicked on a link, which wouldn't affect Google.

The site isn't doing itself any favours with its unusual use of a "plus" sign as a word delimiter in it's URLs instead of a hyphen, but that only makes the URLs look strange to a human user and also shouldn't affect the search engines.

Are those pages linked from anywhere else on the site? Because they're on a page that is 4 directories deep, and the page itself has quite a few links, it's entirely possible that the search engine simply isn't crawling deeply enough on the site to get those links.

Getting some external incoming links to those pages might help with indexing, as would linking to them from pages closer to the root of the domain. The FAQ page in particular might be worth earning some extra visibility.

The bigger question is - are they the kinds of pages a user would actually enter a search term for?

Paul

Good point about the Change History - at least that will catch things like new filters.

Understood about the external doc being easier for some clients not used to working in Analytics. When going that route, I at lease try to get them working in a shared document - either in Google Docs or at least a shared doc in a DropBox or something.

That way there are fewer issues with trying to figure out who has the most current version, and it's available to you when you need it - like when you are doing a normal monthly review but want to quickly check what you  think might be an anomaly - without having to make a request for the doc.

P.

The solution to what you want to accomplish requires setting up what is called a reverse proxy, Sharon. It is not an automatic thing to set up and requires a high level of customisation on your server that is not generally available on inexpensive shared hosting.

Paul

I think the question you're asking is more about keyword targeting than about keyword density.

If you think like your own target visitor, when she sits down to look for a dealer who sells the make of car she's interested in, does she type in "Chrysler Jeep Dodge Ram dealer"? Of course not. She's looking for a Chrysler, so she types in Chrysler dealer. Or even more likely: "Chrysler dealer in MyTown. There are many keyword research tools (including the one here at SEOMoz ) that will tell you the other variations of the words your target visitors are likely to use and how much competition there is for those terms.

The other thing to keep in mind is that you don't target keywords to a website  you target them for individual pages. Your "website" doesn't chow up for the term Chrysler dealer, it's a particular page that gets listed.

So to answer your specific question, you have multiple, related keyphrases to target for. So you need to build multiple pages, each one (and a few supporting pages) targeted to one of the phrases you identified.

So while your home page might talk about being a Chrysler Jeep Dodge Ram dealer, you should have another really strong page or section that talks all about why you're the best Chrysler Dealer in MyTown. And another page or section that specifically talks about how you're a Jeep dealer, etc. You are essentially building "mini-home-pages" or what are also know as Landing Pages for each of you main terms

A page has the best chance of ranking well if it's clearly focused on one or two keyphrases and their closely-related variations. Then you use the site architecture (how you set up the page hierarchy and links between pages) to help the search engines understand which are the most important pages and which are the supporting pages.

This is obviously just a short introduction to keyword targeting and research, but hopefully it gets you started?

Paul

{Edited to add: To answer your very specific question - Chrysler Jeep Dodge Ram dealer is one keyword. If you want to target Chrysler dealer, you MUST use that exact phrase, not just a long phrase that happens to include the target words somewhere within it. For much less competitive terms, sometimes just having them somewhere on the page (even though not together in a specific phrase) can be enough, but if you're targeting a phrase, you must use that exact phrase at least some of the time.}

Ollie, if I'm understanding your question correctly, the easiest place for you to start is with Google Webmaster Tools. You're looking to discover URLs of pages that used to exist on the sites, but no longer do, yes?

If you click on the Health link in left sidebar, then click Crawl Errors, you get a page showing different kinds of errors the Google crawler has detected. Click on the Not Found error box and you'll get a complete list of all the pages Google is aware of that can no longer be found on your site (i.e. 404s).

You can then download the whole list as a CSV and start cleaning them up from there.

This list will basically include pages that have been linked to at one time or another from other sites on the web, so while not exhaustive, it will show the ones that are most likely to still be getting traffic. For really high-value incoming links, you might even want to contact the linking site and see if you can get them to relink to the correct new page.

Alternatively, if you can access the sites' server logs, they will record all the incoming 404s with their associated URLs as well and you can get a dump from the log files to begin creating your work list. I just find it's usually easier to get access to Webmaster Tools than to get at a clients server log files.

Is that what you're looking for?

Paul

A.J. Kohn just posted last week about how, from his information, the Authorship Project at Google is actually dead. Not that the concept of authorship is going away completely, but that there will be "a change in tactics from Authorship markup to entity extraction as a way to identify experts and a pathway to using Authorship as a ranking signal."
http://moz.com/community/q/trending-bugs-in-moz-analytics

It's a really interesting read, and makes great sense, especially considering the direction Hummingbird has taken toward improving the Knowledge Graph. Given the amount of work still ahead on the entity extraction process, I suspect it will some time (a year?) before we start seeing authorship elements begin impacting rankings. And with the way the SERP pages are going, by then there may not be any actual "ranking" process to speak of.

As far as "ranking of of sites in search engines" with regard to selling sites, etc... Google essentially tries to rank pages, not sites. Obviously a site's other pages benefit from the halo effect of other strong pages and brand recognition, but if we follow their logic on author influence, as long as the "good" author's content remains on the site, it should still rank, regardless of whether or not the author still writes for that site (see current implementation of Authorship and how it references sites and author as a "former contributor").

I suspect the algorithm may be taught how to detect when the newer content on a site isn't as "influential" or trustworthy as the older content, and adjust the "halo effect" accordingly.

Google's got their work cut out for them to implement some sort of "authority ranking" (my term) that takes into account the famous, but doesn't burn the smart but lesser-knowns the way their current focus on big brands burns the often-more-valuable smaller sites.

As Takeshi says - building authority and trust in all the organic ways possible is a beneficial strategy, regardless of the specifics of how authorship plays out.

Good question, and as always in web marketing... interesting times ahead.

Paul

That's the staging URL for GoDaddy-hosted sites, Ryan. It likely means that when the site was being developed under the hosting account's temporary URL, it got indexed by the search engines.

It's also possible there's a domain resolution issue on the hosting server. Are there any other pages showing this problem?

The reason its display is broken is because the CSS and JavaScript on the page will be getting called from the wrong URL, so they can't resolve and format the page content.

Paul

If that site is representative of the rest of the sites, then I'd say you might have a problem. This is going to involve a judgement call on your part, because as you say, Google has no hard and fast recommendations for these situations.

Looking at that site, the "Name" links are do-follow. Yours is one of 965 comments on the page. My guess is the site recently got itself added to someone's "do-follow comment sections to spam" list (yes there really are such lists) as all the crap links are from the last 4 months.

So to Google, this will absolutely look like the crap it is trying to hammer down with Penguin.

As for "not worrying about it until penalized" - just read through the miserable (and often futile) experiences all over the Q&A section here of site owners who have spent a year trying to dig out from under a Penguin penalty. And as for these links helping you at the moment - not bloody likely. Crappy internal pages with a PA of 1 and 965 links sure aren't passing you any ranking value.

So... how to decide what to do?

• How strong is the rest of your backlink profile and what percentage are these crappy backlinks?
• What's your link velocity for quality links compared these crap ones? (i.e. how frequently do you earn quality links compared to how often these new crap links are showing up?)
• how many of the crap links are actually do-follow?

If your own backlink profile is overwhelmingly strong, there may well be less to worry about, especially if the majority of the crap links are no-follow.The problem of course is that there are also plenty of reports of people running into issues after using the disavow tool too. So that's where the judgement call comes in.

If it were my site and I depended on it for income, the crap links were coming quickly and many were do-follow, I would collect the crap links as they come in, and once every 6 or 8 weeks, or when the links really start to mount up, I'd submit a disavow request. I'd also keep excellent records of the crap links and the quality links I'd been earning so I could respond quickly to a manual penalty should one come up.

Like I say - judgement call. Interested to know what others would do.

Paul

Sorry, one additional - since you mentioned using Open Site Explorer...

Go to the Top Pages tab in OSE and filter the results to include only incoming links. One of the columns in that report is HTTP Status. It will tell you if the linked page's status is 404. Again, just download the full CSV, sort the resulting spreadsheet by the Status column and you'll be able to generate a list of URLs that no longer have pages associated with them to start fixing.

Paul

Agree with Tom re getting it done with 301 redirects. The other thing to be very careful about though is that the newly acquired websites don't have major quality issues, especially spammy, manipulative backlink profiles. If the infringing sites were using inappropriate SEO methods and were coming under algorithmic pressure/penalties as a result, those issues will also be passed to your "real" site.

Paul

As far as the search engines are concerned, thmedicalcallcenter.com and www.thmedicalcallcenter.com are two separate sites that will compete against each other and dilute each others' authority and ranking unless one is 301-redirected to the other.

As SEO5 indicates, it's best to assess which version already has the most incoming links and use that version as the primary, redirecting the other one to it.

This is best done using a 301 redirect written into your site's .htaccess file. In addition, there is spot in Google Webmaster Tools (GWT or WMT) where you can also hint to Google which version of the site you want to be the primary.

It's not enough to only use the hint in GWT as that only applies to Google, it will do nothing to correct the problem in the other search engines.

Paul

The additional massive complexity, expense, upkeep and risk of trying to run a separate server just for bots is nowhere near worth it, in my opinion. (Don't forget, you'd also have to build a system to replicate the content between each server every time content/code is added or edited. That replication process could well use more resources than the bots do!)

I'd say you'd be much better off using all those resources towards a more robust primary server and let it do it's job.

In addition, as Lesley says, you can tune GoogleBot, and can actually schedule Bing's crawl times in their Webmaster Tools. Though for me, I'd want the search engine bots to get in and index my site just as soon as they were willing.

Lastly, it's only a few minutes' work to source a ready-made blacklist of "bad bots" useragents that you can quickly insert into your htaccess file to completely block a significant number of the most wasteful and unnecessary bots. You will want to update such a blacklist every few months as the worst offenders regularly change useragents to avoid just such blacklisting.

Does that make sense as an alternative?

Paul

As long as nothing's changed in terms of site structure/URLs and auxiliary files, changing servers shouldn't have any effect on SEO, Jodi.

First thing to make certain is that your auxiliary files (.htaccess, Robots.txt, and xml sitemap) are the same as on the old site. I've seen many instances where new default versions were applied on the new server, causing problems. Make sure your xml sitemap is in place, is complete and is updating correctly.

If your old .htaccess file had customized redirects in it, those may not have been transferred to the new server. (This would have been a manual process - needing to be done by whoever performed the migration.)

You can also pop into Google Webmaster Tools and make sure it's not showing any unexpected crawling errors or increased 404s. Also check that the crawl rate seems to be about the same as it was before the move.

Did you see the traffic drop exactly at the time of the server move? Or did happen gradually over a couple of weeks? Or did you see it drop quickly, but not right at the move date? I ask because it's necessary to try to eliminate the possibility that something else affected traffic at the same time as the move, but not move-related.

There have been quite a few major algorithm updates in the last couple of months that could also be culprits.

Use your analytics to see if organic traffic from Google and Bing have both dropped at the same time and about the same rate. This could tell you whether one SE's algorithm change was hitting, or whether both SEs suffered equally as a result of a possible structural problem after the server move.

Let us know what you find & good luck!

Paul

You absolutely do not want to use the remove URL tool in Search Console!!

Since those old subdomain pages have been ranking and earning traffic and authority in the SERPs, it would be a huge mistake to just throw that all away.

Instead, you must use 301-redirects to point those old page URLs to the new page you've created on the main site that you now wish to earn that traffic. The authority and ranking power of the old pages will transfer to the new ones. It's like being told you can choose to start the race from the starting line, or you can be given a 25-yard head start with a tailwind.

Take the head start - redirect the old pages. A side effect of the 301 redirects is that after a period of time, the search engines will stop indexing the old pages, so they'll drop out of the SERPs eventually.

Hope that helps?

Paul

There's really no way to avoid the existence of the two different addresses, THMCC - they're a byproduct of the way of the way web servers and domain names work. They both exists as soon as a website is created. And visitors tend to use them interchangeably.

They aren't "actually" two different sites, they are just two different addresses that refer to the same pages, causing the search engines to see them as duplicate content. Kind of like how your house's location can be described by the lot number on the city plan, or by the postal address. Same house - different ways of showing where it's located.

If the 301 redirect is done correctly, the search engines will understand that everything should be considered to be at the one primary address and they'll pass along the other version's authority to the primary version automatically. And therefore no second version to compete with.

You can easily tell if the redirect is working properly. Let's assume you decide for example that the www.thmedicalcallcenter.com version is the primary and redirect the non-www version to it. When you type in the non-www address into the browser's address bar and hit enter, you should actually see the URL in the address bar change to the www version of the address.

And yea, you absolutely must have both addresses taken care of. You have no way of controlling whether someone types in the address with or without the www. and you want either one to get forwarded on to the primary address.

Does that all makes sense?

Paul

There's no technical limitation to the length of heading tags (h1, h2 etc) as they're not displayed anywhere other than on the content page. (Unlike the meta-title attribute, for example, that gets truncated on the Search Results page if it's too long.)

Make it just long enough and no longer

What I mean by that is - write it as a heading that clearly communicates the nature of the page it's introducing, but don't waste words. The more words in the header, the less your targeted words will stand out - both to search engines and to users. So cut down on stop words (the, and, if, because etc) and try to get your primary words close to the beginning of the heading if possible.

But as Stefan says - make sure it makes the visitor want to keep reading - otherwise your SEO efforts have been wasted.

If you're looking at the Campaign Overview page, you'll notice that the words Duplicate Page Content next to the bar graph are a link. Clicking there will take you to a full page about your duplicate content issues.

One of the columns in that report is Other URLs. if you click on the numeral that represents the number of other dupe pages found, it will show you a list of the other pages that share that dupe content.

Is that what you were looking for?

Paul

iSJJZ

The semantic purpose of a header tag is to mark a collection of words as a header introducing a section of descriptive content. If what you have instead is a series of headers with no content in between, you're defeating the purpose. There's no "reason" to mark those list elements as headers. If you're using

because it's an easy way to create the styling for those terms, you should get out of that habit.

There's no major damage done by having headers follow each other, but there's no real benefit either. And for what tiny value those headers bring for helping search engine crawlers better understand your page content, you've thrown that away.

In other words - don't do it.

Hope that helps?

Paul