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My points show the same kind of discrepancy as yours and Dana's, Jarno. In fact, about a week ago, most of the questions in my My Q&A disappeared altogether. It looks to me like the database got fouled for some reason and the haven't finished fixing it.

The higher number should be the correct one. I'm keeping track of mine and if/when the whole thing settles out, I'll let them know if my count isn't correct.

I'm actually pretty disappointed with how little this kind of information and status updates are communicated. I also see a real lack of consistent updates with the tool outage problems that have been ongoing.

C'mon Moz folks, your commitment  to TAGFEE says you should be doing a much better, more proactive job at this.

Why not have a simple red box at the top of any tools page that is currently experiencing issues announcing the issue and that you're aware of the problem, with a link to a regularly-updated status page. We shouldn't have to go searching through Q&A & blog posts to try to find out why stuff isn't working.

And telling us to send in a help ticket isn't a good idea either as only one person at a time will be getting the answer even though many are also experiencing the problem.

I'd really like to see a response here form the Moz folks too, Dana.

Paul

Webmaster Tools considers the www and non-www versions of your website to be 2 different sites, Chandana. What that error is telling you is that you can't use your xxxxxtours.com account to set the www version until you've proven you're also verified for the Webmaster Tools account for the www version.

So in your Webmaster Tools main page, click the big red button for Create Site and then create a new site for www.xxxtours.com as well. Once you've verified it, you'll be able to set www as the preferred domain in both sites' configuration.

I know it seems strange, but GWT considers each of those to be two totally separate sites, so you have to prove you have authority for both before you can use one to point to the other.

Paul

Yea, the combination of a lot of crawl errors and the reduction in KB downloaded seem to indicate the SEs are having trouble indexing your site. especially if the crawl errors are 404s. The SEs will want to drop those pages from their index thinking they no longer exist, which will cost you the traffic.

What's the major category of crawl errors you're seeing? And do you have your Google Analytics code installed on your 404 page? (if not, you should).

Paul

I agree with Gaston's approach right up to step 4. If you add the no-indexed pages back into a block in the robots.txt file, you'll end up back where you started from. Because Google will still discover the no-indexed URLs elsewhere and the robots,txt block will stop them from discovering the no-index, and the URLs will likely start to get added to the index again.

No-indexed URLs must not be blocked in robots.txt. Those two processes are mutually exclusive.

Unfortunately, Vikash, I'm not aware of any way to correct the duplicate content issues you're having on wordpress.com. It's one of the severe limitations I was referring to that makes me recommend against using wp.com for business sites.

On a regular, self-hosted WordPress site, this kind of issue is very easily addressed using specific SEO plugins designed just for this purpose.

Sorry not to have better news.

Paul

P.S. Re: using the QA forum - when you create a question, there is a check box to tell the system to notify you by email each time someone answers your question. Even if you don't set that, there is also a small email envelope icon (beside the red flag icon)  in the question box once your question has been published. Clicking on that when logged in will also allow you to request email notification of any responses as well.

As Brian says - depends how the JavaScript is written whether Googlebot can parse the link.

Bigger issue though is that the concept you're talking about is exactly the kind of thing that the Penguin Update was designed to devalue/penalize.

Using this method (assuming the links get parsed) is going top create a glaringly unnatural link profile that will likely draw the unwanted attention of the spam team.

Paul

Yea, losing the redirects can definitely cause ranking and SEO problems. This can happen if the contents of the old site's .htaccess file didn't' get updated into the new site, or if using the WordPress Redirection plugin, the plugin somehow got deactivated or its redirects messed up.

Get those crawl errors fixed, then give the SEs some time to recrawl and see if most of the problem goes away.

By the way - nice looking site!

Paul

PS Marking whichever answer you found most helpful will help out other users and gives a bit of a points boost as well

If you consider this question from the search engine's point of view, you'll be able to answer this for yourself, vtmoz.You're essentially asking "can I manipulate incoming links to send authority where I want it to go, even if that means frustrating/deceiving someone who tries to use that link to find what they're looking for?"

When you think of it that way, the answer's pretty apparent. And in fact, Google has stated that when you try this, they just consider it a "soft 404" ( so a "not found" even though the resulting page might return a 200 found status code) and remove any authority value the link might have had.

So yes, the major risk is that you'll be throwing away the value of those incoming links, both for authority and for the actual visitor traffic that will be misled and likely bounce as a result.

The vastly better solution is to redirect those links to point where they belong, then use internal links from those strong pages to other related pages on the site to transfer the ranking authority around to other related pages. You should also make sure there is a strong call to action on the highly-linked pages so that you can lead new visitors to take other beneficial actions on the site.

Make sense?

Paul

There may be a member here who knows the answer, Shinya, but you're more likely to get a direct, correct answer to a specific service question like that if you use the email form on the help page http://www.seomoz.org/help. They'll likely get back to you quite quickly tomorrow morning.

(My suspicion is yes, the trial will give you the same Pro rate limits - the Pro Trial offers all the functionality of a regular subscription. But like I say - reliable answer will come direct from the SEOMoz folks)

Paul

You do this the same way as any other 301 redirect, Jean. You put the 301 redirect rules in the htaccess file of the filtrationmontreal.com site pointing to the new URLs on furnacefilterscanada.com.

Paul

Maurizio's got it.

It's never a good idea to rely on the search engines "figuring out" confusing/contradictory signals from your website, vtmoz. While they claim they can do it in some cases, in reality, they very frequently get it wrong. (Though I've never seen any indication from Google that it makes any effort to find any connecting ownership signals between dupe sites when deciding whether to index a dupe. That would be way outside the scope of the crawler.)

So yes, it's entirely possible that wholly duplicate website is causing ranking and authority issues. Assuming what you mean by a site for "testing new optimisations" is a development website for testing new code before deploying to the live site, you'll need to get the dev site placed behind a password-protected login, or at the very least, have no-index meta tags added to every page. Once those are in place, you can use Google Search Console to request removal of the site from the index to hopefully speed things up. It's possible that when you had the dupe site before, it didn't get fully indexed, but this time it did, which would be why you're seeing more problems now. And having a dupe site in the index can definitely cause problems with the original site, as well as the dupe.

There's no guarantee removing the dupe site from the index will immediately resolve all the problems you are having, but leaving the dupe site in place in the index is just too big a risk. You'll still have to look deeper into what else may be causing or exacerbating the ranking issues.

Paul

Agree with Martijn - this is almost always caused by a link not properly including the http(s):// at the beginning..

Since it's occurring an all blog posts, it's likely a link in the navigation/sidebar/footer or other templated area of the pages.

You'll need to look in the pages' source code to find it.

[UPDATE] Yup, it's an incorrectly formatted link on line 100 of the page - part of your header menu.

• class="hs-menu-item hs-menu-depth-1 hs-item-has-children"><a <span="" class="html-attribute-name" data-mce-mark="1">href</a><a <span="" class="html-attribute-name" data-mce-mark="1">="</a>www.messinastaffing.com">Staffing Divisions

  You can see the href is missing the _http.

  Paul_

WordPress has this error-correction functionality built-in, Luke.

If you user a server header checking tool on that non-existent URL, you'll see that WP is automatically using a 301-redirect to push the user to the correct address each time - so no duplicate content or split authority problems at all.

Paul

The only way I can see accomplishing this is if you have a fully complete sitemap generated by your own website's system (ie not created by a third-party tool which simply follow links to map your site)

Once you have the full sitemap, you'll also need to do a crawl using something like Screaming Frog to capture all the pages it can find using the "follow link" method.

Now you should have a list of ALL the pages on the site (the first sitemap) and a second list of all the pages that can be found through internal linking. Load both into a spreadsheet and eliminate all the duplicate URLs. What you'll be left with "should" be the pages that aren't connected by any links - ie the orphaned pages.

You'll definitely have to do some manual cleanup in this process to deal with things like page URLs that include dynamic variables etc, but it should give a strong starting point. I'm not aware of any tool capable of doing this for you automatically.

Does this approach make sense?

Paul

In addition to Vahe's suggestion, it's possible the terms being used refer to what is also frequently referred to as "the long tail" of search.

Tier 1 or "head" terms are search terms with both extremely high search volume and very high competition Tier 2 or "body" terms have lower search volume and competition, and tier 3 or "long tail" terms are those which are so specific they are searched much less frequently, but also there are considerably fewer sites competing for their traffic.

Example:
tier 1 head term - "SEO"
tier 2 body term - "ecommerce SEO specialist"
tier 3 long tail term - "SEO specialist for WordPress in Seattle"

Note it's not just the # of words in the term that determine it's tier, though usually longer terms will be located farther down. It's more the search volume and amount of competition that determines the classification.

There's lots of info on the long tail of search here at SEOMoz and the web in general if you want to get a deeper understanding of it's value.

Paul

Further to Patrick's point, remember that a page passes its authority to other pages by dividing up the page's "power" (ranking authority, or your term Pagerank) and distributing it relatively evenly through all the outgoing links on the page. So if you have a bunch of links to external sites, you're sending a significant amount of that "power" to other sites instead of distributing to your own pages.

The web is built on the effectiveness of hyperlinking, so this isn't an argument to never link out from your site, but having a number of not-very-useful external links on every page dissipating your own page power unnecessarily isn't a good strategy. (And no, no-following those links doesn't change the fact they send your page authority away instead of keeping it for the other links.)

Hope that helps clarify?

Paul

Hmmm... you should be seeing the URL change in the browser's address bar after the redirect pushes to the corrected URL, Luke. I certainly do in my installs that I confirmed it with.

At any rate, if this answered your question fully, would be a good idea to mark the question as "Answered" to help other users. I'd also love a mark as "Good Answer if you found it valuable.

And yea, absolutely - something new to learn every day. That's what I love about this business I only remember seeing this correction functionality mentioned once in passing in some documentation, but I couldn't find it by search even though i knew what I was looking for. So no wonder you couldn't scrounge it up.

Paul

The only possible way I can think of is if the other person's site has an xml sitemap that is accurate, complete, and was generated by the website's system itself. (As is often created by plugins on WordPress sites, for example)

You could then pull the URLs from the xml into the spreadsheet as indicated above, add the URLs from the "follow link" crawl and continue from there. If a site has an xml sitemap it's usually located at www.website.com/sitemap.xml. Alternately, it's location may be specified in the site's robots.txt file.

The only way this can be done accurately is if you can get a list of all URLs natively created by the website itself. Any third-party tool/search engine is only going to be able to find pages by following links. And the very definition of the pages you're looking for is that they've never been linked. Hence the challenge.

Paul

You'll absolutely want to get the blog moved to the subdirectory. Tell your developers they must use 301 redirects to point the traffic from the old subdomain pages to the new location. As long as the blog's site structure and URLs remain the same, that will be a pretty straightforward redirect to write.

Once they've done the redirect, test by going to a bunch of the old page addresses and making sure you end on the new pages.

Also use a header-checking tool on the new pages to confirm that it's actually showing that 301 redirect was used (not a 302, for example)

The sooner you do this the better, so that new incoming links will be pointing directly to the new location instead of being redirectd through the old location.

if you want best bang for the buck, check for the strongest links that currently point to the old site and see if you can get their webmasters to update them to point to the new URLs. Even pages that are redirected don't pass 100% of their authority through the 301 to the new page, and there is evidence to indicate that the 301s pass less authority as they age.

All good reasons to get the move done as soon as practical.

Good luck!

Paul

P.S. If your blog has a name that people may begin to recognize & remember  (ie that is different from the site name) strongly consider naming the folder /the-blog-name instead of just /blog. Every bit of distinctiveness helps!