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Thank you EGOL and Chris Menke for taking the time to look at the site and giving me your thoughtful responses. It's much appreciated.

I realize it's an uphill battle with this site and that the site author is competing with herself in many instances, but I'm wondering why when I look at Google Webmaster Tools (GWMT), she's not even showing up for many search queries. I know GWMT only shows us a sampling, but surely she's eligible to rank for more than just the 3 queries it's showing me now after more than a year in operation. That's why I think I'm missing something.

I can't figure out why this site (www.liveathomeseniors.com) is eligible for so few search queries on Google Webmaster Tools. I know there is a lot of work to be done, but this is my biggest puzzle right now. What am I not seeing? 379 pages are indexed and yet the site is has only been deemed eligible to rank for 3 queries over the past 3 months. Is it all the repetition in the way the content has been structured?

I'd appreciate people's thoughts on this. I can't see the forest for the trees.

Donna

I also reference the Moz guide that @Chris mentions above. That and (less frequently) this one - b-s.ee/149L8Cv. A how-to from stateofdigital.com for mobile websites.

I followed @Eli's suggestion and Googled "seo audit filetype:pdf". It's a great template.

That's exactly the problem, the redirects are disbursed randomly throughout the site. Although, and the job's still running, it now appears as though there's almost a 1-2-1 correlation between pages and redirects on the site.

I also heard from Dan Sharp via Twitter. He said "You can't, as we'd have to crawl a URL to see the status code You can right click and remove after though!"

Thanks again Michael. Your thoroughness and follow through is appreciated.

Thank you Michael.

You're right. I was on a 64 bit machine running a 32 bit verson of java. I updated it and the scan has been running for more than 24 hours now without hanging. So thank you.

If anyone else knows of a way to exclude files using status codes I'd still like to learn about it. So far the scan is showing me 20,000 redirected files which I'd just as soon not inventory.

I'm having a similar difficulty on my own site - the words "Philadelphia SEO Company" are being appended to end of every post, not pages, posts only.

• I've ticked "force rewrite titles" on the Yoast General tab.
• I'm using "%%title%% " in the title template for both pages and posts on the Post Types tab.
• I have not touched the header.php file.

Any ideas?

I have a very large ecommerce site I'm trying to spider using screaming frog. Problem is I keep hanging even though I have turned off the high memory safeguard under configuration.

The site has approximately 190,000 pages according to the results of a Google site: command.

• The site architecture is almost completely flat. Limiting the search by depth is a possiblity, but it will take quite a bit of manual labor as there are literally hundreds of directories one level below the root.
• There are many, many duplicate pages. I've been able to exclude some of them from being crawled using the exclude configuration parameters.
• There are thousands of redirects. I haven't been able to exclude those from the spider b/c they don't have a distinguishing character string in their URLs.

Does anyone know how to exclude files using status codes? I know that would help.

If it helps, the site is kodylighting.com.

Thanks in advance for any guidance you can provide.

Thank you Keri. Such a speedy response!

And NOW it makes sense. So happy to have that resolved.

I know this is an old thread, but it might be exactly what I need.

A client site has seen a dramatic drop in bounce rates. They were making changes to the site layout around the time bounce rates suddenly dropped. I can see that they have Google Analytics installed twice on all pages. Could that be the problem?

If yes, why would having analytics installed twice cause the bounce rate to drop dramatically. Are the other site metrics reliable?

Any help would be much appreciated!

Thank you both. I appreciate the feedback!

I'm curious to know if Moz concurs with your BOTW assessment James Shaw. They've assigned it a domain authority of 81.

For local SEO, it's good to get directory listings / citations. It serves to validate your business is where you say it is.

I agree with all of the above and just want to add that those local links can make a big difference to a small business in a non-competitive market. Now if you're a SEO company trying to rank for SEO in Seattle, forget it. But if you're a in a niche market in a small community, it can make a real difference.

Can Moz weigh in on this please? There is a lot of really  good discussion on this particular topic across multiple threads but no clear direction. What does Moz recommend and why? The why is important and here's why.

If I have a client with an established blog that uses the blog.domain versus domain/blog structure, should I be recommending they migrate to a different structure?

Yes, it will look like stuffing.

Google looks at the entire URL. You're best to go with the first option, using short but descriptive language to name your poster files.

That said, if you're renaming files you need to keep in mind any existing links or bookmarks. You don't want to create a poor user experience or lose any existing link equity.

Hi mcardenal.

Given you're a newbie you might just need to walk yourself thru the site and make sure all your title and description tags are unique.

Your site is not huge. I would start with a screaming frog crawl of your site. The basic software is free. It's an extremely easy way to crawl your site and quickly and easily find duplicate tags.

If you're looking for a more indepth answer to your question, keep reading.

A standard Wordpress installation isn't SEO friendly. But you're in luck! Back in February there was an advanced SEO webinar hosted by SEOMoz and lead by Nick Herinckx. Nick explains what you need to do maximize your findability.

Here's the link to the webinar - http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/advanced-wordpress-seo. It runs about an hour and a half including Q&A, but it's well worth your time to watch it.

You have unnecessary repetition in your tagline as well. "Conquer student student debt!" You might want to fix that at the same time.

There's another possibility too Ronald.

You could have more than one page eligible to rank for "Barista Classes Los Angeles":

• One that achieved a low ranking on Google and scored a "F" on the on-page optimization reports.
• Another that ranks #1 on Google and scored higher than a "F".

Here's something else you will find helpful.

This blog post, published earlier today (4/22/13) by Phil Rosen at LocalVisibilitySystem, identifies all the well known local directories on which you can create a business listing without having to disclose your address. Places like Angie's List and the Bing business portal.

Just the usual.

Good content.

Good promotion.

Best practice is to optimize one topic per page. If your site is designed so that it's entire content resides on one page, that will be hard to do.

Probably not what you want to hear, but I recommend changing the design so you have more than one page on the site. You're not going to make much headway, in my opinion, with a single page, single topic website. That is unless your goal is to rank well for a highly non-competitive term in an obscure location.

How is your own site doing wrt inbound links from external sources Jesus? Do you have many? Are they coming from quality domains? Related domains?

I share your frustration and see this type of thing all the time. It seems you have to go above and beyond in order to neutralize the advantage keyword incorporating domains have.

I would do as Dan has suggested and go after some very high authority links within your industry. That's the fastest way to level the playing field in my opinion.

Hi Eric.

Just to be clear, is the attribution a must have or will the canonical tag suffice? If it's necessary, is there specific wording to be used?

Donna

My client is publishing their own articles simultaneously on three sites, sites which they own. What can and should they be doing to ensure the get maximum exposure without penalty?

I just want to point out that I have noticed a tendency for many SEO bloggers to use the Genesis theme. Not sure why. Maybe someone else has insight they can share.

Sansonj,

Did you ever figure this out?

I was wondering if the changes you introduced made the keyword density too intense in the headers.

I clicked on your link, but got a 404.

Thank you Miriam.  I was hoping you'd pipe in.

I've been approached by the company to use their tool. It has functionality beyond just populating local data sources which I'm not concerned with. I just want to know how it ranks in terms of local directory coverage. They claim 85% of the local directories will be populated.

Google does measure social activity so your question is a good one.

I personally prefer shares versus likes.  I'm going to quote Mari Smith, as she best explains the difference between the two.  "Note the Facebook Like Button now functions (almost) the same as the Facebook Share Button. The big difference is there isn’t an obvious place to write your own narrative before posting to Facebook, plus you cannot select the thumbnail. Clicking the Facebook Like Button automatically pushes the full story into your personal Profile stream. So, you may wish to add the Facebook Share Button with Counter to your registration page instead."

So from a SEO perspective they're equivalent. From a useability and conversion perspective, I would think share would be better.