No Internal Followed Links on My Site?
-
I just ran the Site Explorer on my site (myeyedr.com) and it reported that there are no internal links on www.myeyedr.com or myeyedr.com. However, there were 20 internal followed links on www.myeyedr.com/index.aspx.
I'm guessing this is hurting my SEO. Any suggestions?
-
Thanks for the detailed response. I really appreciate the feedback.
-
I did see your NoFlash content. I'm not certain that all bots see the NoFlash exactly as you expect. For example, since googlebot does try to crawl flash it may not be seeing your noflash content. RogerBot is almost certainly not a good proxy for Googlebot on your site.
I suggest you log in to Google Webmaster Tools: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ (validate your site if you need to)
Under the diagnostics tab, fetch your page as googlebot, then see if your links are being found.
You also do have a canonical problem on your site. http://www.myeyedr.com/index.aspx#/myeyedr-home and http://myeyedr.com/index.aspx#/myeyedr-home (w/ and w/o the www.) are two different pages in google and look like duplicate content. They are both competing with each other for links. I'd suggest you choose one or the other, and create a 301 redirect from the other. At the very least use a rel="canonical" tag on one version. http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=139394
You can also specify only one version be indexed in Google Webmaster tools but it's better to solve it on your site, so it's resolved for all search engines.
The index.aspx page you mentioned is redirecting to the myeyedr-home page.
I would still suggest you rethink your flash home page. It simply doesn't have any content on it to signal Google that your are a relevant site to eye exams for example. Outside of your title tag, the keyword "eye exam" doesn't appear anywhere on the site. You have a bunch of keywords in the Meta Keyword field which isn't used by any search engine but does tell your competitors what you are trying to rank for.
Consider a little more content on your home page, with some good semantic markup H1 tags, etc... Alternatively, just don't try to get traffic to your home page, since it isn't designed to rank well. Instead create more keyword specific landing pages, i.e. make https://www.myeyedr.com/request-form.aspx your most compelling page to get clients to book an appointment and then focus your SEO efforts around getting that page to rank well for "Eye Exam".
I know it feels good to build/own a "cool" site, but if I took you into the usability lab and made you watch your prospects try to use your site, you'd likely be very disappointed. Many users will find your unconventional GUI difficult to navigate. To say nothing of users with special accessibility needs, technical issues with Flash, Javascript, etc.. It's particularly ironic for an eye doctors site to be inaccessible to the vision impaired.
At the very least I'd be watching my Google Analytics very carefully. See what percentage of your traffic has flash disabled and/or javascript disabled. Note your conversion rate and bounce rates of those segments vs. your other traffic.
I also happened to notice that your book appointment form is quite extensive. You didn't ask for any forms usability advice but ask yourself if you NEED all that information before the prospect is allowed to walk in your office? Perhaps you'd book more appointemnts with a much simpler form that feels less overwellming. Then you could hand customers an iPad in your waiting room to fill in all that other info.
Good luck!
-
Consider a design that has flash elements and easily spiderable links. Don't leave anything to chance.
-
crvw,
Thanks for the fast response. We actually have an HTML version of the site, which is automatically displayed if Flash is not enabled. This seems to be working quite well, which is why I'm confused. I would expect the spiders to ignore the Flash and pick up the HTML version when it is crawled.
The other interesting thing is that SiteExplorer sees all the links in www.myeyedr.com/index.aspx but not on www.myeyedr.com which is actually displaying index.aspx. Shouldn't the results be the same?
-
Hi Lance,
I took a quick look at myeyedr.com. The whole page is one large flash asset. That's not a great practice from an SEO perspective (or from a Useability and compatibility perspective).
Google and Bing and making some efforts to find links in Flash, so it's possible that the do see your links, but many search engines won't see any links on your page. As you found out, the SiteExplorer bot (RogerBot) Can't see your flash at all.
Don't forget that almost no mobile devices can see your flash site either. Visually impaired users, etc...
It wouldn't be too difficult to recreate your page with HTML/CSS and it would be a lot more SEO friendly.
Sorry to be the barer of bad news.
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
-
PDF best practices: to get them indexed or not? Do they pass SEO value to the site?
All PDFs have landing pages, and the pages are already indexed. If we allow the PDFs to get indexed, then they'd be downloadable directly from google's results page and we would not get GA events. The PDFs info would somewhat overlap with the landing pages info. Also, if we ever need to move content, we'd now have to redirects the links to the PDFs. What are best practices in this area? To index or not? What do you / your clients do and why? Would a PDF indexed by google and downloaded directly via a link in the SER page pass SEO juice to the domain? What if it's on a subdomain, like when hosted by Pardot? (www1.example.com)
Reporting & Analytics | | hlwebdev1 -
Differences in site search revenue in GA
I just put in a piece of software to replace a really bad built in site search engine on my 3dcart website. Now I am trying to measure the change, but I am having some issues. When I check the ecom data in the conversions section of GA with the built in segment Performed Site Search, I get promising results. Approximately 5% revenue increase over LY. But if we jump to behavior, site search, usage, and then check the visits with site search, I get a decrease by 4%. And the actual revenue is off, by like double (150k compared to 80k) Anyone have any idea why I am getting these results? The site search function is set up. Tracking is enabled, query parameter is keyword and search url is /search.asp?keyword=
Reporting & Analytics | | ShockoeCommerce0 -
Google Web Master Tools show that my site has been crawled, but search results show old title tags, ect.
Does the index report reflect what will be displayed on Google results? Google seems to be indexing my site every Sunday...
Reporting & Analytics | | 928shopper0 -
404 errors more than 1.8 lacs, Duplicate Content, Duplicate title, missing meta description increasing as site is based on regular ticket selling (CRM), kindly help
Sites error increasing i.e. 404 errors more than 1.8 lacs, Duplicate Content, Duplicate title, missing meta description increasing day by day as site is based on regular ticket selling (CRM), We have checked with webmasters for 404's, but it is not easy to delete 1.8 lac entries. How to resolve this issue for future. kindly help and suggest the solution.
Reporting & Analytics | | 1akal0 -
How do you handle a "too many inbound links" notice on your crawl diagnostics report?
How do you handle a "too many inbound links" notice on your crawl diagnostics report? The url's identified come from our blog....is it reading all the blog post URL's and giving me a notice? Is this ok to leave all the links? Or would anyone recommend no follow tags on all of our blog posts?
Reporting & Analytics | | cschwartzel0 -
Where do I find Google Analytics link tracking for outbound links?
We implemented this script in source, where would I find the outbound link tracking; in Events?
Reporting & Analytics | | KnutDSvendsen0 -
Linking domain dropped followed by significant decrease in Domain Authority
A relatively high ranking site disappeared from the linking root domains of a client site, and the site dropped significantly in domain rank, authority, and trust. Oddly enough, traffic is almost double the previous week, and search results for keywords remain strong. I checked OSE and the linking domain is not listed. There are also several other linking root domains that have never shown in the domain analysis, but we'll leave those for a later topic. I visited the linking root domain that disappeared from the analysis and found everything to be in order. The site is a major local forum with a relatively high domain authority. All links are still there, and there hasn't been any change to the site as far as links are treated according to the owner. The only thing that has changed since the last site analysis is an event campaign ran with unpaid ads posted throughout the forum. The site being analyzed is a catering company that is cooperating with the forum owner and local bar to host a local celebratory event. Of course I'll wait for the next indexing to see if things change, but what could be going on here? This is more of an SEOmoz question, as we're talking over 10 point deduction in domain authority, although search results are still strong.
Reporting & Analytics | | kwoolf0 -
High percentage of nofollow links
Hi, I've just created my first campaign and noticed that on the competitive analysis our website is having a lot of nofollow links: more than 50% I did some research on the web to learn more about nofollow links, but I don't understand why this percentage is so big especially compared to the other websites in the analysis (less than 10%)? Anyone any ideas? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | poupette0