revium

Thanks for the ‘hacked’ resources. I will check them out.

Thanks for responding. I figured out the problem but had not posted a follow up post yet. It appears that the footer file had been hacked. Not sure how it was done though since WordPress and all the plugins were up to date. It is fixed and working properly now.

If you are now using a new domain (switching from wordpress.com to taskylonea.com) you will need to verify again with webmaster tools.

If comments are useful for users and unique content and not spam and are included in the code rather than inserted via javascript than they can be helpful for SEO. But if you do not remove the spam comments then it can definitely make your pages appear to be low quality.

If you have a redirect from an old page to a new page, I would wait to delete the old one until you know for sure that the new one has been indexed.

Once the redirect is in place you should be ok to delete the old one, but I would keep the old one in place until the new one is indexed, in case you have to revert back to them particularly if you are having issues with indexing the new pages.

Is the text on the page somewhere? Google will sometimes change the title displayed in the search results if they feel it is a better/more accurate title.

https://www.seroundtable.com/archives/023139.html

Your links to those small organizations should not have any affect on your rankings unless for some reason they are labeled as spammy or low quality sites. Even then that alone should not cause a big drop.

Do you happen to have the SEO Smart Links plugin installed? There has been some discussion that it can negatively affect your website.

https://seobraintrust.com/seo-smart-links-penalty/

If the post is listed under 2 separate categories, are there 2 different URLs for the article? My experience has been that the actual article URL is the same regardless of how many categories it is listed in.

I guess it might depend on the URL structure chosen.

Once Google recrawls a page and sees that the content has changed they should adjust their index accordingly. It is hard to say how it will change things, but if the content only appears on your site then you should have a good chance of ranking above the others.

Nothing seems out of the ordinary with your crawl stats. One thing I look at with them is if the amount of pages drops per day while the time spent downloading a page increases then it can be a sign of the site running slow which could cause the search engines to not crawl as often or as many pages, but that does not seem to be an issue with your site.

I think posting the full text of your reviews on the various message boards could definitely be an issue though. Even though you have the canonical tag on your site, there is no canonical tag on the forums pointing to your site to give you credit as the original source so it is very possible that the search engines are crediting them with the content which is why you are seeing your rankings drop.

The search engines are constantly working to improve their logic to identify which sites are the original source of content and unfortunately they do not always get it correct which sounds like it is the case with your content if those forums are out ranking your site.

Personally, I would just post a snippet of the review on the forums and then link back to your article page for the rest of the text. It may seem less useful to a reader of the forums, but it should protect your content better and help the search engines to identify your site as the original source.

I would doubt the affiliate links would be the cause of the drop in rankings/traffic because you have lots of unique content on the page besides the links. If the affiliate links were the only thing on the page then it would be more likely they could be the cause.

If you look under the crawl stats in Webmaster Central do you see a drop in the crawl activity to your site recently from Google?

I do not see anything blatant on the site at first glance which could be causing it.

By any chance have you obtained any unnatural links (paid, spammy, etc.)?

One thing to to take a look at is many WordPress sites display new blog posts on the front page and then have them fall off as newer ones are published. This sometimes has the effect of having the new articles rank well while they are linked from the homepage, but when they are no longer linked from the homepage they do not rank well any longer.

This can be due to the fact that there is more link juice flowing from the homepage because most links point to a site’s homepage and are not deep links to an article. To counter this you want to get deep links going directly to the article and make sure you are interlinking your newer articles with your old ones.

I have not looked at your link profile or interlinking structure, so this may not be the case, but it is something I have seen happen with WordPress sites in the past.

The search engines ignore anything after the ‘#’ sign, so you are fine.
https://www.seroundtable.com/archives/003229.html

The search engines determine which sites to rank based on the keyword entered, but most likely the the keywords a site shows up for exist on the site.

If you are not happy with the keywords your site is ranking for then switch out those words on your site with different words. Also continue to write new content for your site adding new keywords your want to rank for, and as you do this your site will have more keywords that your site could potentially rank for.