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Dan,

Just a thought for natural incoming links:

As a user (taking my SEO glasses off for a moment), if I did like the site - and know nothing of the importance of links, aka.. the everyday users, I would probably link to domain.com and not subdomain.domain.com - unless I came directly off a blog article...

That may be what the company wants: for users to link to the training application (not really sure)?  It seems as if they have the www. redirecting to subdomain (so all www.domain.com links would actually hit the subdomain) but everything else would steer clear of the domain.

Hope this helps,

Eli

Agree with Chris.

Niccord, you could easily take Steve's How to Perform the World's Greatest SEO Audit and turn it into a checklist / rubric for analysis.

Eli

Lewis,

Transferring content becomes more complex when an entire site changes the domain name or when you move content from one domain to another. Due to abuse by Spammers, search engines are suspicious of lots of 301s from one domain to another. 301s between domains may require more time to be properly spidered and counted.

One thought: if your last sight was penalized, do you not just want to disavow links / clean up your link profile and content, and then ask for reconsideration by Google?

If you do continue to move to a new domain, and you 301 redirect the old domain to your new one (without disavowing / cleaning link profile) you may end up bringing down your new site. Plus, making the content new and fresh (like you mentioned) couldn't hurt.

Eli

What it is NOT:

• No Link was broken. I have used Moz, Screaming Frog, Excel, etc - there are not broken links.
• We have not added spammy links.
• We kept the same amount of links and content on the homepage - with an exception of 1 or 2.
• All the pages remained canonical. Our blog uses rel=prev rel=next, and each page is canonicalized to itself.
• We do not index duplicated content. Our tags are content="noindex,follow"
• We are using the Genesis Framework (we were not before.)
• Load time is quicker - we now have a dedicated server.
• Webmaster tools has not reported any crawl report problems.

What we did that should have improved our rankings and traffic:

• Implemented schema.org
• Responsive design
• Our bounce rate is down - Average visit length is up.

Any ideas?

Jake,

I completely agree with Peter. We used to buy keyword domains all the time - and it worked well - until about 6 months ago. We own counseling practices, so we bought many [city]+counseling.com domains for really cheap.

A year ago, those ranked on Google in top 5 spots within 2 months of purchasing and building out the site. Now, you cannot find those keyword domains anywhere, unless, like Peter said, they already had domain authority. The domains we had been working on for years are still fine, but starting with a new keyword domain now is like starting with just an ordinary domain.

Eli

Iris,

You may be keyword stuffing... I haven't read through your entire site, but do be careful. One of the best sayings someone ever taught me was: "When you are doing SEO for keywords, be good at it - don't be great". It's strange, but it makes sense. Don't over do it.

Instead, consider exploring other avenues such as link building. I've noticed you only have 8 unique domains pointing to your site. The resort / hotel industry is very difficult to compete in, so consider building a better link profile.

Besides the keywords, there could be other reasons you are not ranking.

Eli

Thanks Sorina,

I took your advice. Ill keep you posted on what happens. I ended up noindexing the tags, and should help the dupe content. I really love how you put it: "Does this page contain any unique content, content that can't be found anywhere else on the website."

Leaving the initial question just a bit, but staying within taxonomies, Sorina, what do you do about categories? Do you normally noindex them since they also do not contain unique content?

Maximillian,

Thanks for the response. In fact, I just read that article. I enjoyed Harrison's analysis. I also made sure my pagination plugin was updated with rel=next and rel=prev are on the pages.

Mozzers,

Here we go. I've read multiple posts for years on taxonomy dupe content. In fact, I've read 10 articles tonight on taxonomies and categories.

A little background: I am using Wordpress SEO with the Yoast plugin.

**Here is the scenario: We have 560 tags - some make sense - some do not. **

What do I do?

• Do I not worry about it?

• Matt Cutts said twice that I should not stress about it, because in the worse non-spammy case, Google may just ignore the duplicate content. Matt said in the video, “I wouldn’t stress about this unless the content that you have duplicated is spammy or keyword stuffing.” (Found Via Search Engine Land - http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-duplicate-content-wont-hurt-you-unless-it-is-spammy-167459).

• Do I NoIndex,Follow the Tags?

• Yoast and a Moz post both say I should NoIndex and Follow the Tags. From the post: "Tag, author, and date archives will all look too similar to other content. So it does not make sense to have them indexed." BUT! **The tags have been indexed for YEARS! And both articles go onto say **"if your blog has already existed for some time, and you've been indexing tags all along for example, you shouldn't just go deindexing them" (http://moz.com/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success).

• So do I deindex tags that have been indexed for years? I checked the analytics, and in the past month, tags have brought in less than 1% of traffic, but they are bringing in traffic.

• Do I canonicalize the tags?

• Canonicalize the URL from "http://domain.com/blog/tag/addiction/" to "http://domain.com/blog/" ? And if I canonicalize, would you canonicalize to the /blog or to the base /tag?

Thanks for any and all help. I just want to clarify this issue. One of the reasons is because I received a Moz Report with a TON of dupe content warning from the tags and categories.