Are sliders killing our site?
-
Our website, http://shatterbuggy.com, has what I believe is a systemic issue that stems from the heavy reliance upon the Revolution Slider for Wordpress. I am not an SEO expert and our site has vexed many SEOs in the past.
We get feedback regularly from customers (especially those that are not tech savvy) that express gratitude for the ease of use via following an image to image sequence to get to their respective booking. This was our goal when creating the site. Incidentally, in many cases, the only linking from page to page is within the slider itself (clickable image) and there is little to no content. That said, we seems to stumble in SERPS against seemingly inferior competition. For example, we should be ranked in spot 1, 2, or 3 ish for "iPhone repair Minneapolis" but rather we are stuck near spot 15.
Any thoughts on whether this is a strategy that may be harming us? If so, would simply creating content on these empty (slider only) pages help? Should we create "static links" that connect to the same places as the slider? Also, is our particular use of the slider creating H1 issues?
Thank you all!
B.
-
Moosa, Dirk-
Thank you both.
B.
-
I agree with Moosa - I crawled your site with Screaming Frog, and it had no problem to crawl the links inside the slider.
-
If the slider is crawl-able, i dont think there will be a much advantage of normal static links.
#personalopinion
-
Hi Moosa-
Thank you for the reply. Much appreciated!
Cheers!
B.
-
Hi Dirk-
Thank you for the detailed reply. Very much appreciated. All of your suggestions make a great deal of sense.
Do you have an opinion regarding linking within the slider though? Specifically, do you know if there would be any advantage to creating static links that are the same as the links that the slider images link to? These would be below the slider.
Cheers!
B.
-
Benjamin,
I don’t think the issue is with the slider but there are other issues you should be considering as important. I will quickly go over it.
- 3XX errors. I am not saying 301 redirection is bad but too many 301s can damage your website so try to minimize them where possible.
- Few URLs contain “underscore”. Not really a very good practice. Also there are one or two URLs that contain upper case as well.
- Not saying it’s a ranking factor, but it can affect CTR which again is a ranking factor. You have missing descriptions on different pages of the website
- Images are not properly optimized.
- Page load time can be improved.
- Your DA is not really impressive, so I guess few more links here and there will obviously help!
Just a quick overview! Hope this helps…
-
Hi Benjamin,
Not sure that it's the slider which is causing your issues.
1. Your site has performance issues - especially linked to time to first byte. Check the results from http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150510_ZZ_QZY/ & https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=www.shatterbuggy.com. You might want to read this thread on how you could improve this https://wordpress.org/support/topic/how-to-reduce-time-to-first-byte-on-my-wordpress-site You should consider to combine & minify the css & js files (you have an awful lot of them - 27 each for the homepage) and modify your caching settings (see advice pagespeed insights)
2. You have 366 HTML pages on your site - 121 pages are redirected. You should update your internal links so that the links point directly to the final destination. Example: the homepage links to http://www.shatterbuggy.com/plymouth/ - but this page doesn't exist and is redirected to http://www.shatterbuggy.com/service-areas/plymouth/. Screaming frog can help you to identify which links need to be updated.
3. 128 pages have no meta-description / 38 pages have no H1 title (example http://www.shatterbuggy.com/service-areas/cherry-creek/ipad-repair/)
4. The images you use on site are quite heavy (almost 50% is over 100KB) - some of them extremely heavy (http://www.shatterbuggy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/waiting-in-line.jpeg) - 123 have no alt text
5. Due to the large slider which always is dominating the page - you push the text out of the visible area. Your regional pages are very similar and could almost be considered duplicates. The region specific content is not visible without scrolling. Google prefers important content to be visible - not hidden at the bottom of the page.
6. You might want to check this article on local SEO: https://moz.com/blog/everybody-needs-local-seo - it contains a lot of tips & tricks on how to make your locations more visible for Google.
7. A lot of specific pages have http://www.shatterbuggy.com/repairs/ as canonical - example http://www.shatterbuggy.com/repairs/iphone-repair/gold-iphone-6-issue/ - not sure if for this specific page the /repairs/ page is the best option as canonical - you might want to point to an iphone repair page.
Hope this helps,
Dirk
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
-
Site address change: new site isn't showing up in Google, old site is gone.
We just transitioned mccacompanies.com to confluentstrategies.com. The problem is that when I search for the old name, the old website doesn't come up anymore to redirect people to the new site. On the local card, Google has even taken off the website altogether. (I'm currently still trying to gain access to manage the business listing) When I search for confluent strategies, the website doesn't come up at all. But if I use the site: operator, it is in the index. Basically, my client has effectively disappeared off the face of the Google. (In doing other name changes, this has never happened to me before) What can I do?
Technical SEO | | MichaelGregory0 -
How to Switch My Site to HTTPS in GWT?
I recently bought an SSL certificate and moved my site over to HTTPS. Now how do I make the change in Google Webmaster Tools?
Technical SEO | | sbrault740 -
Site Redesign: 302 Query
Hi there, We'll be redesigning our website www.example.com and as such want to 302 users from www.example.com and all other pages to a new URL www.example.com/landingpage while we go through the redesign. The new landing page will have copy and a sign up form on it and once the redesign is completed, we plan on removing the 302 and sending all traffic back to the original url www.example.com. I'd just like to check that a 302 is the most relevant option here? Obviously, once redesign is completed we'll 301 any old URLs to their new locations once completed.
Technical SEO | | Hemblem0 -
Site not loading on Firefox
Hello guys, I can't get my website to be loaded on Firefox, why's that?
Technical SEO | | PremioOscar0 -
Cross links between sites
hi, We have several ecommerce sites and we cross linked 3 of them by mistake. We realize that the sites were linked through WMT, We have shut down 2 of the sites about 2 months ago, but WMT still shows the links coming from those 2 sites. how do we make sure that google will see the sites are shut down. Is there a better of way resolving this issue. We are no longer using those sites, so do not need them to be active. whats the best solution to show google that the links are no longer there. Crawler shows that it was able to crawl the site 45 days after it is shut down. thanks nick
Technical SEO | | orion680 -
Site Map Problems or Are They?
According to webmaster tools my Sitemap contains urls which are blocked by robots.txt Our site map is generically generated and encompasses all web pages, whether I have excluded them using the robots.txt file As far as I am aware this has never been an issue until recently. Is this hurting my rankings and how do I fix it? Secondly, webmaster tools says there is over 5,000 error/warnings on my site map. But site map is only 1,400 or so pages submitted. How do I see what is going on?
Technical SEO | | Professor0 -
What do I do with an old site when a new one is built?
I have a customer that has a PR 4 website with over 3000 pages of content. He decided to build a brand new website with a new domain and it now has a PR of 2. Our question is, what do we do with the old site? Do we migrate all the content over to the new site and do redirects on all the pages? Do we keep the old site up and put links over to the new site? He was just planning on shutting it down but that seemed like a complete waste of PR and SEO. What is his best course of action? Thanks for your replies.
Technical SEO | | smartlinksolutions0 -
Should this site start again on a new domain
Hi We have not done SEO on this site they have used another company who looks like they outsourced and the links have been built by a third party all blog networks and this company have said they cannot get the links removed. Google flagged artificial links on this web site in February and in April it lost over 10000 visitors in a month and its just free falled ever since. The categories have been recreated and no redirects created due to the amount of backlinks from the blog sites to the original category pages but the site is not recovering its down to 1500 visitors a month and used to get 14000 a month. So should my customer ditch the domain and move this site to fresh domain? http://www.kids-beds-online.com Any answers would really be appreciated. thanks Tracy
Technical SEO | | dashesndots0