To many on page links with ABC search
-
My client site http://www.tshirtsubway.com has a ABC quick find selector on the homepage of the site and throughout the site and as a result is is showing an error of to many links on the SEO moz error crawls reports.
I wanted some advice on improving this and perhaps looking for an alternative also looking at the current setup and asking is this wrong.
-
Hi Garry,
I did not perform a full site analysis. You inquired about the rankings for the keyword "T shirts" so I only compared the pages which ranked for that term.
-
"Since you mentioned the content specifically, neither site is great, but the streetshirts site is significantly better then the tshirtsubway site."
How on earth have you come to this conclusion the streetshirts site has no content on shop pages ?
-
I can't speak for EGOL. Perhaps you can ask him directly. The challenge I find is a large percentage of people keep everything confidential.
Most of my work in the past has been either for other SEO companies or for private companies involved with a penalty or other specific work where I am immediately presented with a NDA. Unfortunately those circumstances prevent me from sharing my work. I have the impression EGOL is in a similar circumstance in that he isn't freely able to share.
What I can suggest regarding content is after it is created, every article should ideally be reviewed by 4 people:
-
An English teacher (or whichever language is appropriate) to check for grammatical and spelling errors along with overall presentation and reading level.
-
A marketing professional to ensure the message is clear and will connect with users
-
An expert from the field which the article covers. A doctor, lawyer, accountant, etc. Check for accuracy, qualified quotes, etc.
-
A SEO to check for all other relevant factors such as URL, header tags, title, linking, etc.
Usually there are not 4 separate people involved to perform those functions in which case I recommend at least two people: the SEO and an expert. The SEO can use tools for English checking, and then can focus the other factors.
You can also ask others to review the final article. When I refer to "others" I mean people who would otherwise read the article. It is helpful to have a small group of people (bloggers, etc) who read advanced copies. They can offer valuable feedback and also help promote the article. At worst, grab anyone you can...a receptionist, a student, etc....to review the article and share honest feedback.
Some of the SEOmoz articles from Dr. Pete, Cyrus, Rand and others are good examples.
-
-
had a lot of problems in this project with a guy that runs the site who thinks he knows SEO. As a result its all over the place with ridiculous titles .
Thanks for all that its what I already know but nice to hear it echoed by another seo.
One question I had to EGOL is he always mentions good content being king and so on...
Does he have any examples of his own work. (dont just point out wikipedia :-))
-
Hi Garry,
I mentioned personalization because I was unsure if the ranking information was generated by you or from the client. I didn't mean to offend you.
It is still ranking well for music T shirts in the top 5 if its that bad then why ?
Using AdWords keyword data for the UK:
T Shirts 16,600,000 global monthly searches
Music T Shirts 201,000 global monthly searches
Music T Shirts UK 1,300 global monthly searches
"T shirts" has 80x more traffic then "Music T Shirts" and clearly is a much more competitive term. For "T shirts" you are competing against Wikipedia and many major retailers which simply do not compete at all for "Music T Shirts". Additionally, the site's "Music T Shirt" page is better optimized. Google helped out by changing the page title to "Music T Shirt" which is a perfect match.
The site has numerous issues and the page titles and H1 tags I would suggest are in serious need of attention. They not only target multiple terms, but they cannibalize the same terms.The page which ranks for "Music T Shirts" has a title of "Music T-shirt, T-shirts and Tee Shirts at T Shirt Subway" while the home page has a title of "T Shirts | Music T Shirts | Buy Online at T Shirt Subway".
-
It certainly wasn't due to personalization sorry mate but been in the business 10 plus years .
I hear what your saying but investment from the client etc have to be considered
It is still ranking well for music T shirts in the top 5 if its that bad then why ?
-
When I compare the two sites, they are really night and day from a SEO perspective. The streetshirts.co.uk site does have opportunities for improvement, but it is a completely different class as a site then your client's website. A few examples:
-
The streetshirts site has a Verisign EV SSL certificate. It's basically the best SSL certificate from the world's most recognized provider. The tshirtsubway.com site not only lacks a SSL certificate, it seems to fraudulently claim to have a Versign certificate. I was not able to find any evidence of the site having the Verisign SSL certificate it claims to possess.
-
The streetshirts site accepts Paypal and GoogleCheckout. The tshirtssubway.com advertises acceptance of those payment options, but either the store is not properly configured or these claims are fraudulent.
-
The streetshirts site has active social engagement. There are over 100k facebook likes and about 1k Google +1s on the home page. The tshirtsubway.com site does not use any social engagement at all, except a single Google+ widget on the home page in a sidebar below the fold where it is unlikely to be seen and has 0 clicks.
-
The streetshirts site PA/DA is 65/58 vs the tshirtsubway 53/43. While both sites appear to have some manipulative links, the tshirtsubway site appears significantly worse. The majority of the anchor text is either "t shirts" or "music t shirts".
-
The streetshirts site uses mostly valid html code (2 errors). The tshirtsubway.com home page has 68 errors.
-
Since you mentioned the content specifically, neither site is great, but the streetshirts site is significantly better then the tshirtsubway site.
-
The streetshirts site manages it's PR flow much better with a total of 51 links on the home page whereas the tshirtsubway site has about triple that amount.
If I were to use an analogy, I would say it's like comparing a McDonald's hamburger (tshirtsubway) to a Whopper w/Cheese. The Whopper isn't a fantastic burger, but next to a regular McDonald's hamburger it's clearly the better choice. They are simply not in the same class.
The last point is you mentioned the traffic drop. There are simply far too many issues with the site to discuss the ranking drop. The home page should never have appeared in the top 20 results in my opinion so it's hard for me to discuss the "drop" from that perspective. My first guess would be the site never really appeared that high but was shown there due to personalization.
Good luck.
-
-
Yeah Ryan Google.co.uk thats right.
-
Garry, can I ask you to share which search engine you are using? I used Google.com for my research because it was a .com site and nothing was otherwise stated. The result you are sharing is from the UK so I am now guessing you are using google.co.uk.
-
Sorry Ryan but I disagree with your reply. The site is ranking highly for Music T Shirts and was 2nd page for T Shirts for months.
something has happened recently but I hear what your saying regarding the site being stuffed with links.
I am worried the site might have been penalized in some way.
For T shirts this site is no 1 - http://www.streetshirts.co.uk/
your telling me it has lots of great content ??
-
Do you have any ideas on the problem with the site ranking for 1 word.
While T Shirts is clearly a focus for the site, it is also an ultra competitive keyword. While the site has a respectable PA of 53 for the home page, there is only one result in the top 20 sites with a PA that low and it belongs to Zappos (PA 47) but that site has a much higher DA (93 vs 43).
The overall quality of the home page is not great. There are no trust symbols and the page seems to be written for search engines more then for people. The page seems stuffed with keywords and links.
The title is focusing multiple keywords which is also a concern.
In my opinion the site's home page should not appear on the 2nd page of SERPs so I can't speak as to why it may have appeared there in the past. There could have been changes made to the site, the page or it's links. I think the site can do well in SERPs but it definitely requires SEO attention.
-
Thanks Ryan I will pass all these suggestions on. Do you have any ideas on the problem with the site ranking for 1 word.
It was 2nd page for the keyword "T shirts" but it has now totally disappeared. Its really strange ?
Asking the client if they have been adjusting pages but never had this happen before.
-
Hi Garry,
An A-Z link panel is fine if it is well presented and used by visitors. I suggest examining your Google Analytics to see if the panel is really used.
I would recommend combining some letters. The letter "T" offers 6 shirts, but U only has 1, V only has 1, and W, X, Y & Z have zero. It is wasteful to flow PR to pages that have no content. Perhaps you can present one button for U-Z.
Also, the bottom part of the page which offers text has many duplicate links. Once again, I recommend reviewing analytics data first, but if users are not clicking those links I would remove all the duplicates.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
"Avoid Too Many Internal Links" when you have a mega menu
Using the on-page grader and whilst further investigating internal linking, I'm concerned that as the ecommerce website has a very link heavy mega menu the rule of 100 may be impeding on the contextual links we're creating. Clearly we don't want to no-follow our entire menu. Should we consider no-indexing the third-level- for example short sleeve shirts here... Clothing > Shirts > Short Sleeve Shirts What about other pages we're don't care to index anyway such as the 'login page' the 'cart' the search button? Any thoughts appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ant-Scarborough0 -
Scary bug in search console: All our pages reported as being blocked by robots.txt after https migration
We just migrated to https and created 2 days ago a new property in search console for the https domain. Webmaster Tools account for the https domain now shows for every page in our sitemap the warning: "Sitemap contains urls which are blocked by robots.txt."Also in the dashboard of the search console it shows a red triangle with warning that our root domain would be blocked by robots.txt. 1) When I test the URLs in search console robots.txt test tool all looks fine.2) When I fetch as google and render the page it renders and indexes without problem (would not if it was really blocked in robots.txt)3) We temporarily completely emptied the robots.txt, submitted it in search console and uploaded sitemap again and same warnings even though no robots.txt was online4) We run screaming frog crawl on whole website and it indicates that there is no page blocked by robots.txt5) We carefully revised the whole robots.txt and it does not contain any row that blocks relevant content on our site or our root domain. (same robots.txt was online for last decade in http version without problem)6) In big webmaster tools I could upload the sitemap and so far no error reported.7) we resubmitted sitemaps and same issue8) I see our root domain already with https in google SERPThe site is https://www.languagecourse.netSince the site has significant traffic, if google would really interpret for any reason that our site is blocked by robots we will be in serious trouble.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
This is really scary, so even if it is just a bug in search console and does not affect crawling of the site, it would be great if someone from google could have a look into the reason for this since for a site owner this really can increase cortisol to unhealthy levels.Anybody ever experienced the same problem?Anybody has an idea where we could report/post this issue?0 -
Search Results Pages Blocked in Robots.txt?
Hi I am reviewing our robots.txt file. I wondered if search results pages should be blocked from crawling? We currently have this in the file /searchterm* Is it a good thing for SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Tens of thousands of links to less than 10 pages from 1 domain
I was looking at 'Links to your site' in Google Search Console and noticed our website has around 60 thousand followed links to 8 pages from a single domain. This is happening because we run an ad on the referring domain (a blog) and the ad is in the sidebar along with other ecommerce stores in the same niche. As a result, our ad, and most of our competitor's ads, have links showing up across this blog's entire site. Are this many links, and the type of links, a problem for SEO? I'm wondering if it would be wise to discontinue this advertising. While we get a very modest amount of traffic as a result of the ad, it doesn't convert very well, and I'm wondering if there might be any SEO benefit to not having all of these inbound links from a single domain coming in. Thanks! J
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vcj0 -
Google Search Analytics How to Get Search Keywords for a Page?
How do I get the keywords coming into a page on the new Google Webmaster Tools Search Analytics? Used to be there in the old version. You would just view your most popular urls and when you expanded the urls you would see the terms driving the traffic. How do I see the most popular keyword queries for a given page in the new tool? Alternatively can I still use the old tool somehow?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | K-WINTER0 -
Do I need to use rel="canonical" on pages with no external links?
I know having rel="canonical" for each page on my website is not a bad practice... but how necessary is it for pages that don't have any external links pointing to them? I have my own opinions on this, to be fair - but I'd love to get a consensus before I start trying to customize which URLs have/don't have it included. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Netrepid0 -
SEO on page content links help
I run a website at the bottom we have scroller box which the old SEO guy used to contain all of the crap content so we can rank for keywords not on the page and put all of the links in to spread the link juice into the other inner category pages (some of these pages are only listed on our innerpages otherwise). We are trying to remove this content and add decent content above the fold with relevant long tail keywords in (it is currently decent but could do with expanding if we are removing this large chunk of text in theSEO box and some long tail keywords will be missing if we just remove it) we can add a couple of links into this new content but will struggle to list the category pages not on the left hand navigation. If we were to list all of the pages in the left hand nav would we dilute the power going to the main pages currently or would we be in the same position we are now? For example at the minute I would say the power is mainly going to the left hand nav links and then a small amount of power to the links in the SEO content if we put these into the nav will it not dilute the power to the main pages. Thank you for your time and hopefully your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Is my "term & conditions"-"privacy policy" and "About Us" pages stealing link juice?
should i make them no follow? or is this a bogus method?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEObleu.com0