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No problem.
You can edit the canonical links through Yoast's SEO plugin, just go into the page/post and then navigate to the 'advanced' tab within Yoast - you can then set the custom canonical link.
Regarding your links that point to you with no trailing slash, WP automatically redirects any URLs without a trailing slash to one with one - this will then flow the PageRank into the correct URL, so don't worry.
Hi Will,
A C-block is part of the IP address of a website (xxx.xxx.CCC.xxx), for example, with my blog, the IP address is 173.248.188.141 - the c-block is 188.
Usually, websites that are all hosted on the same server have the same c-block. This is a way that Google can detect link-farms, where loads of sites are set up on the same server and used to link to your website. This is why it is good to have diversity in the amount of linking c-blocks.
Inevitably, you will have some identical c-block links but that's ok (and is completely natural). In terms of the links to your website, you have links from 130 root domains that are made up of 70 unique c-blocks. This ratio is perfectly fine, so don't worry.
Hope this helps.
The canonical tag should be used to redirect Google bots to the original page without affecting actual site users. If your /?page=kontaktine-forma is a duplicate of your homepage then yes, you should have the canonical link pointing to the homepage - if this is the case, you don't necessarily need to do a 301 redirect, unless you dont want your users to visit the page.
In short, you don't need to do both a canonical link AND a 301 redirect, either one should be fine - 301 redirects should be used more for user experience, so bear that in mind.
Hope that helps.
This is definitely the best thing to do. Whenever a page goes to a 404 you should be consider a redirect of some sort. I would take into consideration user experience when you're doing your redirects as a priority.
In general, when I work with e-commerce website, I will 301 redirect old product pages (now 404 pages) through to the main category pages. This provides a good user experience and any links that were pointing to that product page can be flowed into the category page (you'll be surprised how much traffic you lose from not doing this).
This really depends on your CMS, but I have had some experience with this in the past so might be able to help out. Firstly, I would recommend having a good think about going with the solution... lightboxes have become a lot harder to use from a user point of view since the uptake in mobile device usage. If you're using one, make sure that it's responsive.
Take a good look at this article before you do anything - http://www.businessol.com/blog_posts/seo-javascript-lightbox-js-content/. It explains the SEO implications of using lightboxes and also gives some examples of out-the-box solutions that can be used.
I have used the following plugin before that has worked well:
Hope this helps!
Matt
Hi Laura,
If you're looking for the the counter on your social media buttons to update to show the original number of social shares then it's not going to happen, I'm afraid.
When you move domain, all of the social media buttons will reset their counters and show '0' for all of your articles. Having said this, you need to make sure that you set up 301 redirects from all your old pages to the new ones. If you are just doing a straight domain swap (i.e. all the URLs will stay the same except for the domain name) then you can add the following code into your .htaccess file:
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} \olddomain.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
You will need to replace 'olddomain.com' with your old domain name and 'newdomain.com' with your new domain name. A word of warning here is that making changes to your .htaccess file (if you don't really know what your doing) can end badly, so make sure you pass it on to your developers - otherwise, you can use that plugin.
All of the SEO benefits that your previous pages have gained (links, social shares, etc) will be stransfered to the new domain, but your social shares counters won't be updated. I would recommend giving the following article a read before moving to a new domain:
Hope this helps!
Matt
Rich snippets can be fairly tempermental. They don't always show up in the search results and Google have came out and said this (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1093493?hl=en).
I have some snippets that show on my travel blog that have been there for months and then just vanish - it's pretty annoying, but one thing I would check is that they follow Google's Webmaster guidelines (you can see them in the link above).
Hope this helps.
Matt
Hey Kelly,
I've worked with a lot of companies within search engine recovery projects over the past year or so.
I've taken a look at your backlink profile and you do actually have a lot of good links in amongst the spammy sidebar links. My advice would be to start looking at getting some of those low quality links removed. Now, if you don't have a good understanding of how to go about this then my advice would be to stay clear of doing it yourself - get a professional to look at it.
Start with removing the low quality links and then move forward to create some new high quality links to balance out your link profile. I'm not going to go into all the details of 'how to build good links' but what I would say is that this site is by no means 'a lost cause'.
In terms of how the site looks, it seems really good. The only one thing that I would say (and this isn't major, just an observation) is that the site would look a lot less like a template-style site if you had a company logo within the header. I know that you have 'SiteBoss' in text but it seems like that is almost just the default text there, so having a subtle logo might just reinforce the brand a little more. Just to confirm though, this has no effect on things like search rankings, etc - I'm just thinking about user perception.
Hope this helps!
Matt
Hi Daniel,
My advice here would be to learn the basics through online resources. Subscribe to things like DistilledU, which is a great online resource and can take you through all of the basic steps in barely any time at all. Make sure that you follow all the major blogs and are always dedicating some time to reading up on SEO related stuff.
The next stage can then be looking for a mentor. Personally, I would suggest reaching out to well-known industry SEOs to see if they would be interested in doing it; you will often find that having a mentor that is currently working within the industry will give you the most value.
I personally do this kind of thing and have had most of the people that I mentor simply get in touch with me after reading some of my content. The way I charge is through an hourly rate for my time, hence why I suggested learning a lot of the basics through online resources (because it will be a lot more cost effective). Alongside this, you need to decide on what it is you want to get from the mentor - do you want to get an overall view of SEO or would you like to focus on a specific area? for example, link building, technical SEO, local SEO, etc.
If you want some more info on how I can help then drop me a private message through Moz, or just email me (my email is visible in my profile). Bare in mind that I'm based in the UK though 
Hope this helps!
Matt
Hi Lauren,
What I would say is that it looks like you're doing everything right with your redirects - redirecting dynamic URLs through to keyword relevant URLs will work much better for SEO.
Regarding the on-page links... if you have a lot of on-page links, it means that each of the links passes a smaller proportion of PageRank around the website. This is particularly important for your internal links. For example, if you have 10 links on a webpage, each of the page you link to will be passed 1/10th of the PageRank value. This can be really important on your homepage to try and pass as much of the PageRank to your key pages of your website. If you instead had 100 links on the page, you would only be passing 1/100th of the PageRank to each page.
Having minimal links on a page is important, as long as it doesn't interfere with user experience. I would say a health number is between 20-40.
Hope this helps.
Hi Georg,
I have had the same problem. It is because of the latest update by Google around 'over-optimisation'.
Don't worry though, all is not lost! There are a few things that you need to change:
Make sure that your webpage titles are not over-optimised (i.e. 'Free Shoes, New Shoes, Sports Shoes - Shoe Company'). Make sure that they read properly and don't look spammy. Try not to repeat any of the keywords more than once, if at all.
Check that all of the links on the page are not suspicious. For example, having loads of anchor text linking to the same page.
See what your keyword density is on your webpage and see if you have maybe be keyword stuffing (Google is being a lot harsher and stricter on this now).
Go through your img alt attributes and check they are all relevant and not just blatanet attempts to fit in long-tail keywords.
Once you have done this, resubmit the pages to the Google index and hopefully, after a few weeks, you should start regaining some ground. Unfortunately its a bit of a waiting game now, but make sure you do everything you can to show to Google that you are not over-optimising and you should be OK.
Also, take a look at Rand's recent whiteboard Friday which goes over this.
Good luck!
Matt.
Hi Mark,
I hope you're well.
Basically, the canonical tag is used to let Google know which URL it should refer to as the original source of the page content. So, if you had the following URLs that all go to the homepage:
www.domain.com/
www.domain.com/index.php
www.domain.com/home/
Then Google could crawl each of these pages and identify them as three different pages all with the same content. This could say to them that there is duplicate content on the site (which is not good). Usually with the homepage Google is intelligent enough to understand that there is just one page and the /index.php for example isn't a duplicate.
The problem that you do face, especially on the site that you are optimising, is with the different pages that have information on the lettings, etc (i.e. your product pages). For example, if you look at the following URL on your website:
http://www.daft.ie/searchshortterm.daft?id=23606
This is when you go through to the short-term searches and then I find the '176 Rathgar Road' apartment. Due to the dynamically generated URL (search.shortterm.daft?id=23606) I can gather that there would be several ways to get to this page with a different URL. My first suggestion would be to set up Search Engine Friendly URLs, for example, instead of having 'http://www.daft.ie/searchshortterm.daft?id=23606', it would be:
http://www.daft.ie/short-term/dublin/176-rathgar-road-apartment/
This way you could clearly optimise the page on Google search and have the canonical link to the page as:
href="http://www.daft.ie/short-term/dublin/176-rathgar-road-apartment.html" rel="canonical" />
This would improve the SEO performance on the website and avoid duplicate content issues.
I hope this helps, but if you need any more info then just let me know.
Matt.
Hi John,
Here is a list that I have given to a client before to show what we would do in terms of some SEO:
In terms of what you need to do, I would first start with the on-page work, which would consist of (not exclusively):
These are just a few things but will hopefully get you on your way.
Let me know if you need any further help
Matt.
Hi Daniel,
My advice here would be to learn the basics through online resources. Subscribe to things like DistilledU, which is a great online resource and can take you through all of the basic steps in barely any time at all. Make sure that you follow all the major blogs and are always dedicating some time to reading up on SEO related stuff.
The next stage can then be looking for a mentor. Personally, I would suggest reaching out to well-known industry SEOs to see if they would be interested in doing it; you will often find that having a mentor that is currently working within the industry will give you the most value.
I personally do this kind of thing and have had most of the people that I mentor simply get in touch with me after reading some of my content. The way I charge is through an hourly rate for my time, hence why I suggested learning a lot of the basics through online resources (because it will be a lot more cost effective). Alongside this, you need to decide on what it is you want to get from the mentor - do you want to get an overall view of SEO or would you like to focus on a specific area? for example, link building, technical SEO, local SEO, etc.
If you want some more info on how I can help then drop me a private message through Moz, or just email me (my email is visible in my profile). Bare in mind that I'm based in the UK though
Hope this helps!
Matt
Hi Martin,
I wouldn't hold too much importance towards Dmoz as part of your link building because, with any directory, there are loads of outbound links on the site, which means less link juice.
I would suspect that the reason why your link is not showing on open site explorer could be that Dmoz takes a little while to upload the link onto their website so it may show up in a couple of weeks.
My advice would now be to try having a look into some other directories that are focused around the specific industry that your website operates in. You can easily find these by doing searches in Google like:
'yourindustry' + inurl:directory intitle:add
Replace 'yourindustry' with a keyword related to your site and this should show you a few quick wins that you can submit to. Just remember that directory submission is only a very small part of your link building, but it still helps.
Matt.
Hi Laura,
If you're looking for the the counter on your social media buttons to update to show the original number of social shares then it's not going to happen, I'm afraid.
When you move domain, all of the social media buttons will reset their counters and show '0' for all of your articles. Having said this, you need to make sure that you set up 301 redirects from all your old pages to the new ones. If you are just doing a straight domain swap (i.e. all the URLs will stay the same except for the domain name) then you can add the following code into your .htaccess file:
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} \olddomain.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
You will need to replace 'olddomain.com' with your old domain name and 'newdomain.com' with your new domain name. A word of warning here is that making changes to your .htaccess file (if you don't really know what your doing) can end badly, so make sure you pass it on to your developers - otherwise, you can use that plugin.
All of the SEO benefits that your previous pages have gained (links, social shares, etc) will be stransfered to the new domain, but your social shares counters won't be updated. I would recommend giving the following article a read before moving to a new domain:
Hope this helps!
Matt
Hi Tony,
It's important that you don't focus too heavily on having a link profile that is completely dominated by exact match anchor text. Realistically, one of your most used anchors should be branded text - which looks most natural (however, this isn't the case for every website). My advice would be to ensure that all of your landing pages are well optimised for the keywords and then the next stage can be including some local citations and co-occurance links.
Getting local citations from plumbing-related sites will allow the search engines to establish your site as relevant to those related keywords (it doesn't need to be exact-match). Also, if you are having some article links done then you could look at wrapping keywords around your anchor text link, for example - on my blog I try get links that are like this:
Matthew Barby is an SEO specialist based in Birmingham, UK. He enjoys ...
In the above sentence, my name would be the only hyperlink but Google/Bing/Yahoo are intellegent enough to relate the surrounding text with me so that I can start ranking for the links of Birmingham SEO Specialist (get it?). Try looking into this and it will diversify your link profile nicely
Matt
Hi Craig,
SEOmoz has a great list of free & paid directories that you can get backlinks from:
http://www.seomoz.org/directories
Also, you can use this great list:
http://www.avangate.com/company/resources/article/blog-directories.htm
Hi Craig,
I would definitely recommend this method.
It is much better to have a wide spread of keywords within your website, because if two pages use the same keyword then they will be competing with one another for ranking, and this is not what you want.
Optimise the titles and the content around one or two major keywords; for example, 'Web Development Edinburgh' (it doesn't hurt to add Edinburgh here as you will also be optimising for Web Development as a short tail keyword anyway.
Hope this helps.
Matt.
Hi Niners52,
Personally, I like to use webconfs search engine spider tools (http://www.webconfs.com/search-engine-spider-simulator.php) but there are loads out there that you can use and it is your own preference really.
Also, I use ScreamingFrog to do similar tasks.
Matt.
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