Website tables

[starplus]

Hi guys , my website www.starpluservices.com  on google first page for the past 2 years and we were page rank 4, 2 months ago we changed all page titles and Keewords after that the page rank droped to 1 and we are not anymore in page 1 in google, we have done all this changes to target another keyword Office Cleaning London, now after 2 months I had 3 quotes for SEO , and 2 SEO companies told me that I need a new website because my one was done with tables and the other company told me that if I still on first page with some keywords andon the 2 page with cleaning companies to dont make a new website just update my one!!

Could anyone let me know what should I do?

Regards

Sergio

[starplus]

this week we back to first page with keyword cleaning companies www.starplusservices.com

Thanks to all of you for the repplies

[Thommas]

Hi Sergio

Page titles are a very important ranking factor and changing them will affect your ranking. You say that the new keyword you are trying to rank for is Office Cleaning London, do you have inbound links containing that anchor? I don't know what was the keyword you were ranking for the past 2 years but I assume you had a fair share of backlinks with anchor containing that keyword. There is more to consider, is the new keyword bringing you more or less traffic, is it converting better?

[AlanMosley]

The canonical domain name,

You can get to your page using

www.domain.com

domain.com

www.domain.com/index.html

domain.com/index.html

you need to decide www or not www, then you need to get a 301 to that domain, you need to also 301 redirect from index.html to that domain.

then you need to make sure you dont have any links in your website pointing to the wrong version.

especialy not /index.html.

[starplus]

Hi Allan,

2 things 50$ !!! which 2 things?

Many thanks

[AlanMosley]

To fix the 2 things i suggest should cost about 50$

[KeriMorgret]

[moderator hat on]

Let's keep this thread related to the original question posted. We make it real easy to create a new question and mark it as a discussion, and that's the more appropriate place for a level-headed discussion about some of these details that don't concern the OP as much as it does the people answering the questions.

Thanks!

[moderator hat off]

[starplus]

the cheapest quote that I have to do this amendements is £350 so is nearlly the same as the new website, and they give a nother option wich is do my site in wordpress for £400 or a cms system for £250.

What should I do!!!

[AlanMosley]

I had a look at a few, and they are template sites, and seeing that you are talking Pounds, not dollars, its not that cheap.
i found this error in all of them

The page with URL "http://www.magsmusic.com/" can also be accessed by using URL "http://www.magsmusic.com/index.html".

This split your ranking as SE see this as 2 seperate pages, but also because the internal links link back to the index,htm, the link juice does not make it back to yourr home page. Its the same problem you have.

If you go ahead, you want to make sure all internal links to your home page point to domain.com, and not domain.com/index.htm

but they do look ok.

I would fix the site you have, i would fix the canonical domain with a 301 redirect and change internasl links to point ot it. that alone will help heaps.

[starplus]

Hi Alan,

this is the websites that this guy has done £399

http://www.nmwebdesign.co.uk/Websites-WP.html

Any good?

[AlanMosley]

no i agree, I would not dissmiss the whole platform because it has problems.

There is a trade off for using a CMS, there are advanatages and disadvanatges

I also dont say that search engines wont crawl a wordpress site, but its what it finds when it crawls. You want to make sure it crawls to its optimum.

no you cant rank higer then #1, but may rank higher for other variations of the terms, long tails and the sort.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

If you can tell me how I can rank better than 1st, then I am all ears

Crawlability is a big thing, but clearly Google has no problems in crawling my site at all - or millions of other Wordpress sites.

Don't get me wrong, if I see things that are a big problem, then I fix them and had I missed this one on my site? yup! And thank you for pointing that out to me.

However, please don't dismiss an entire platform because of small issues. Mine was a mistake on my own site - most of my time is spent on other peoples so I tend to rush mine and fit it in when required.

[AlanMosley]

Yes it does make a difference, of cause it does, You may rank, well, but you would rank better if you fixed them.

all you need to do is fix the link and you have saved the link juice, i cant see why you woud  not do that. In IE press F12, then the networking tab and you can see all the 301s as you navagate.

buy the way, Matt Cutts said that the most common mistake is bad crawability, he said it was the most important, then content then marketing. He also said that redirects leak link juice,

Its not a theroy, its not a rumour, its cold hard fact, and easy to fix.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Far too much talk about link juice. Google themselves say we want content. They have no problems crawling millions of Wordpress sites and if it were a really big problem, why would I rank first for phrases that run into a contention ratio of hundreds of millions? Why would loads of other Wordpress users?

I think what you have here is just a hatred of Wordpress because you see this as a major problem, when it clearly isn't.

OK so Bing found 700+ redirects. And? Is it making any difference to my ranking? Nope. In fact, I rank much higher in Wordpress for these phrases than I did with my HTML based site. If I was doing badly then yes, it could be an issue - but I'm not. Says to me that Google don't care as much as other factors.

Perhaps a few years ago when SEO was different to now, this might have been a big problems, but as any decent SEO knows, the rules have changes.

[AlanMosley]

For that price i suggest you will get a out of the box website, I would prpoably stick to the one you have.

On this about you analysis

taging as no-follow, unless you are linking to a spam site, it is of no use.

no following links, mean the linked page will get no link juice, but it want save you any, all links use link juice whether they are no-follow or not. The difference is with no follow it evaperates.
so unless the linked site is of bad reputation and you do not want to look like your promoting spam then dont use a no-follow.

If tyou are a local business try and get some links from local directories, they are about the only cheap link that still has value.

Fix the problems you have found.

But here is aa big one you can do to bost your link juice

you have interal links pointing to http://www.starplusservices.com/index.html

This means that your link juice is not making it back to your home page http://www.starplusservices.com/

This alone may make the difference
Goog luck

[starplus]

Many thanks guys , I have an offer from a London Based Company they will do a new website for £399 and they have done a lot of them . So should I just update my one and create a blog or do a new one? We still on google page one for commercial cleaning companies london, commercial cleaning services london, I'm just a bit afraid of loosing all this idf I do  new page.www,starplusservices.com

I have listed below my findings analysis of www.starplusservices.com

•          meta descriptions are quite short and can be expanded on a
bit further for more keyword density

•          home links to index.html page (should go to true homepage
that is found in search ie www.starplusservices.com not
http://www.starplusservices.com/index.html)

•          non-www. -> www. 301 can be implemented

•          no html sitemap page

•          no xml sitemap file

•          no Google webmasters (from what I can check)

•          homepage has external links to accreditation sites - tag as
nofollow

•          site has links to facebook, twitter and youtube every page

• tag as nofollow

•          no keyword-targeted internal linking

•          menu links both top and footer have no titles on the links

•          services page - left menu is made of images, need to have
alt tags on them

•          images - some images do not have alt tags (example
http://www.starplusservices.com/carpet-pictures.html), and some have the image
filename as the alt tag (see for example
http://www.starplusservices.com/washroom.html)

•          no optimised h1 on any page

•          no optimised h2 any page

all this was the report from a UK SEI Company!!!

[AlanMosley]

No its not the end of the discussion, dont take yourself too seriously

Its keeping a site from ranking higher, no matter what the rank at the moment. i dont think un-necessary redirects is a small problem, we try very hard to get a good link, but why would you try so hard to get a quality link and then let it leak as it flows though your site.

Remeber, it leaks not once, but many times as it flows though the site. i believe SEOMoz put the leak at about 10%, i have reason to believe it is 15%, but what ever it is, it is multiplied many times as the link juice flows though your site.

When you have 772 of them , thats a problem.

My point is fact, if you want to prented otherwise thats not my buiness, i really dont care if the leaks are fixed, but fact it is.

but the point is, WordPress is not good for crawlability, wordpress users dont like to here it but a crawl of any woprdpress site shows it to be true.

[Francisco_Meza]

In Sergio's case, he only has a few pages (less than 20?). All he needs a an HTML site built in Dreamweaver and that the end of this discussion.

If not dreamweaver, then I would say WP.

Alan, don't get me wrong here.... I'm not saying that leaking link juice is not important. But I don't think Sergio needs to be concerned about it nor iNetSeo. If the loss of link juice is BIG, then hell yes; fix it. If it's small, then I wouldn't sweat the details. I have all kinds of errors on my sites, but trying to fix small errors isn't keeping me from ranking #1 - #3 for many of my top keywords. Feel free to run a Bing Report on my site if you want. I rank way stronger in yahoo and bing than in Google.

[AlanMosley]

It is a problem its leaking link juice,

you say that redirects are there for a reason, yes they are, they are in case there is a external link to the old url when you rewrite to a friendly url, you dont want exteral links to both, you would then a have a duplicate content problem. So the answere is to use a 301 redirect to the new from the old url. that is all correct.

But then you should not link to the old url with internal links and then redirecet to then ew url, because you leak link juice.

This s a common problem with Wordpress.

It is a problem, if you do not want to fix them, then dont. but itys still a link juice leak.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Whilst it seems that you are just wanting to prove a point and win an argument, I am afraid you wont get that satisfaction from me.

Redirects are there for a reason in many cases and Wordpress sites generally do very well in Google - how else woud I get the rankings I do?

Some things that Wordpress does it does - accepted. If it was a problem, I would have spotted and changed it a long time ago. It isn't so I haven't.

End of as far as I am concerned.

---

Actually, I just want to say that if you run around trying to correct every little issue (and this is a little issue), then you spend no time in doing what actually matters, and that is creating content that Google wants to see.

I guess this is why I do well

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Whilst it seems that you are just wanting to prove a point and win an argument, I am afraid you wont get that satisfaction from me.

Redirects are there for a reason in many cases and Wordpress sites generally do very well in Google - how else would I get the rankings I do?

Some things that Wordpress does it does - accepted. If it was a problem, I would have spotted and changed it a long time ago. It isn't so I haven't.

End of as far as I am concerned.

[AlanMosley]

I never said you had that many pages, but you have that many violations.

The link to "http://www.inetseo.co.uk/seo-services/" has resulted in HTTP redirection to "http://www.inetseo.co.uk/seo-services".

The link to "http://www.inetseo.co.uk/?p=965" has resulted in HTTP redirection to "http://www.inetseo.co.uk/citations-mentions-and-social-seo".

this is just 2 examples. while its ok to have a 301 redirect to a friendly url, you should not have internal links pointing to the old url, it should point to the new url and save the link juice leak.

It leaks on google and bing.

Trying to say that the tool is wrong and bing is wrong doesnt change anything. If I was hireing a SEO, its not what i would want to hear.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

I think the tool is not able to fully understand what is going on with the site - as I said, I have nothing like that number of pages on the site - the tool is trying its best to interpret what it doesn't understand.

Let's face it - it's Bing you are talking about here...

[AlanMosley]

These are the things that Bing says are a problem, you may not think there are a problem but bing does.

For example, each un-necessary redirect is leaking link juice, is that not a problem?

[Andy.Drinkwater]

And I have absolutely no problems with Google finding any of the pages at all - never had.

A very small issue. As long as Google can find the pages in a structured manner, that is all that matters.

Oh, and I think you fill find that the Bing toolkit is also looking at replies to blog posts. I have nothing like that number of pages on my site. I prefer not to use automated tools to try and build a good site with easy to find content.

Andy

[AlanMosley]

I just did a crawl of your site.

Un-necessary redirects 772

Invalid markup 112

large amount of inline css 89

Canonical issues 83

Multiplue H1 14

Canonical to premanly moved url 10

All up i found 1,641 violations. These were found with the Bing Toolkit, it is the exact same violations that bing finds.

but believe it or not, thats not many for a wordpress site.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Have to disagree with the crawlability of a Wordpress site. I have absolutely no problems with mine at all - a lot is down to the theme. Get a good theme and you are laughing.

Crawling through a site should be no problem anyway if you get some link phrases into the body text.

Andy

[AlanMosley]

I agree with that, its depends on the dev, but i have never seen perfect crawlability on a wordpress site. Those that have come close have had programming knowalage and have stepped outside the CMS to fix things.

[evolvingSEO]

I think we're agreeing about this, yes?

Thus my last sentence: A switch to wordpress (and I recommend Yoast's SEO for wordpress plugin) would fix all of this - but it has to be done right, by someone who knows what they're doing technically.

I agree that any platform is only as good as the person who builds it/works with it. Just think that assuming the dev is good, WordPress is generally the way to go for a site his size.

[AlanMosley]

As for tables. They have no affect on SEO, but they do have a affect on page speed, but very little, a table does not reder untill it is all read.

Matt Cutts has said in one of his videos that they crawl both and their is no difference to ranking.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fL_GZwoC2uQ

Dan is correct about your canonical domain problems but I have to disagree with using Wordpress, CMS makes thing easier to update , but do nothing for crawability. Having said that you can get a bespoke web site but stil have the same crawlability problems, as there are not many developers out there that understand the importance of crawability.

See what matt cutts says about crawlability

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6xxcQdAHbI

[evolvingSEO]

Sergio

Let me answer the tables question first - a CSS layout does provide cleaner code, thus can help SEO a bit. But the main concern is not so much about tables, its that I imagine you're NOT on a CMS (content management system) like WordPress.  A CMS would make it easier to update your content, add additional pages or content like a blog etc. That's why I would vote for a new site, built in WordPress.

Ok, onto the page rank issue. First, do know that page rank is nice to know, but don't obsess about it. Focus more on rankings->traffic->conversions.

Anyhow, I think its a 1 now because you're website can load any of the following ways;

• starplusservices.com
• starplusservices.com/index.html
• www.starplusseervices.com
• www.starplusservices.com/index.html

This was probably not the case before, but now all of your incoming links are being diluted across multiple ways of accessing your homepage. Whatever version of your website used to load by default, all versions of the homepage should redirect back to that.

You also don't need the keywords meta tag anymore.

A switch to wordpress (and I recommend Yoast's SEO for wordpress plugin) would fix all of this - but it has to be done right, by someone who knows what they're doing technically.

-Dan