1st Campaign - Advice please.
-
We have just run our first campaign for our site and have found over 5,335 errors!
It would appear that the majority of which are where the crawl has duplicated the product page with the "write a review - Tell a friend page"...hence a large number of errors.
In addition we also have over 5,000 302 warnings for the following URL:
URL: http://www.collarandcuff.co.uk/index.php?_a=login&redir=/index.php?_a=viewCat&catId=105
Please bear in mind we are fairly new to this type of data....so go easy on us.
In short, will these errors have a significant bearing on our rankings etc and if so how do we rectify?
Many thanks.
Tony
-
Hi Tony,
If the "Sign In" form is an element included on the page that you set to rel=canonical, the other instances of the sign in form should be neutralized (in terms of triggering duplicate content errors).
Usually, something as small as a sign in form doesn't constitute enough content to trigger the "duplicate" warning. The SE's algo has to account for certain elements that are useful on each page (for example, navigation bars). They are more concerned with people scraping large amounts of written content from other sites or just recycling large portions of their own site for SEO purposes.
-
Josh,
It appears that the errors may relate to the "Sign In" section of the page which for the record is available on every page of the site hence the number of errors. Would that have a bearing on the results and more importantly would that reduce the link juice?
-
Josh.
Thanks so much.
We use Cubecart v4...basic and i simple i know but it works for us.
Trust that helps.
Tony
-
Hi Tony,
Welcome to the world of SEO
I just spoke to someone who had a similar issue (duplicates due to user reviews). There is a relatively clean solution for this and it comes with a fancy name, "Canonicalization". Here is a great step by step for setting a page to rel="canonical".
Basically, you want to tell Google that there is one "source" page for all the duplicates.
Example:
You have a page for blue widgets. Users can review the blue widget, but each new review becomes a new page (problem). If you label the original product page as canonical, your duplicates will be ignored, and the Google bot will be much happier with your site
It's hard for me to tell how much the duplicate content is impacting your ranking right now, but after you use rel=canonical, you should see some major improvements within a couple weeks.
As for the 302 redirects...you want to fix this immediately! Here is the step by step for 301's.
There are some shortcuts to changing 301 redirects depending on your platform...do you happen to know what your development team is using? Changing 5,000 of these would be a little cumbersome to do by hand
Keep up the good work!
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
-
Content question please help
Would content behind a drop down on this site Https://www.homeleisuredirect.com/pool_tables/english_pool_tables/ you have to click the - more about English pool tables text under the video Work just as well for SEO as content on the page like this site http://www.pooltablesonline.co.uk/uk-slate-bed-pool-tables.asp
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Find the Needle UK Link Quality Advice
Moz, We are a UK manufacturer and we historically have a link from the site http://www.findtheneedle.co.uk/ which is sort of a UK manufacturer database/directory I understand directory type links are not what we need nowadays in SEO but i feel with this one being quite well targeted towards UK manufacturing businesses it may be worth keeping the link, From my research we receive little quality referral traffic from this site, Moz OSE doesn't seem to be able to see the link at all, Majestic Says: <colgroup><col width="115"> <col width="122"></colgroup>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Antony_Towle
| TrustFlow | CitationFlow |
| 28 | 35 | Any Advice on this ? Thanks James Any Advice ?0 -
[Need advice!] A particular question about a subdomain to subfolder switch
Hello Moz Community! I really was hoping to get your help on a issue that is bothering me for a while now. I know there is a lot of about this topic but I couldn’t find a good answer for my particular question. We are running several web applications that are similar but are also different from each other. Right now, each one has its own subdomain (which was mainly due to technical reasons). Like this: webapp1.rootdomain.com, webapp2.rootdomain.com etc. Our root domain currently points with 301 to webapp1.rootdomain.com. Now, we are thinking about making two changes: changing to a subfolder level like this: rootdomain.com/webapp1 , rootdomain.com/webapp2 etc. Changing our rootdomain to a landing page (lisitng all the apps) and take out the 301 to webapp1 We want to do these changes mainly for SEO reasons. I know that the advantages are not so clear between subdomain/subfolder but we think it could be the right way to go to push the root domain and profit more from juice passing to the different apps. The problem is that we had a bad experience when we first switched from our first wep app (rootdomain.com) to an subdomain (webapp1.rootdomain.com) to set them equal with the other apps. Our traffic dropped a lot and it took us 6 weeks to get back on the same level as before. Maybe it was the 301 not passing all juice or maybe it was the switch to the subdomain. We are not sure. So, I guess my question is do you think it is the right thing to do for web apps to go with subfolders to pass more juice from root to subfolders? Will it bring again huge drops in traffic once we make that change? Is it worth taking that risk or initial drop because it will pay off in the future? Thanks a lot in advance! Your answers would help me a lot.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ummaterial0 -
Google is squashing my rankings, insight please?
Last year with penguin, our rankings took a hit. We have worked hard, tirelessly, to recover. Last june we had no social media. We had an old website. We completely updated our website to responsive design, over 500k pages. We post daily fresh content, we expanded into social media. We now have 100k followers on Facebook. We are seeing thousands of Google + in the last few months, and not by hiring a single SEO consultant, and we use no ad-words or any paid advertising (except for adsense, limited on our site). We got thousands of Google +1's simply by sharing content in different circles and they liked us the old fashioned way. And yet our rankings have actually decreased. Just Saturday night, suddenly rankings that were on page 2 of Google dropped to page 5. Rankings on page 5 dropped to page 13, over night. Mind you, last year (prior to the penguin update), those page 2 and page 5 rankings were in the top 3 spots on page one. So its been quite a fall. We are doing something wrong, and I don't know what it is. The overnight rankings drop did not correspond with anything we did whatsoever. They just literally dropped abruptly. here is our site: (redacted for privacy, thanks for answering my question!) here is a sample of a fallen ranking. Friday, for example, we ranked on page one of google in this search:(redacted)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marshill
and now we are on page 3. I am open to ideas, suggestions. I want to raise our D/A and have worked hard over the last year to do so, but it doesn't seem to be working too well. Do i have bad inbound links? Is our site not a quality enough user experience? Outside advice is well received. Thank you to anyone who can lend their insight. 🙂0 -
Traffic down 60% - about to cry, please help
Hiya guys and girls, I've just spent 6 months, a lot of blood sweat and tears, and money developing www.happier.co.uk. In the last weeks the site started to make a trickle of money, still loss making but showing green shoots. But then on Friday the traffic dropped due to my rankings on google.co.uk dropping. Visits: Thur 25th april = 1950 Fri 26th april = 1284 Sat 27th april = 906 So it looks like Ive been hit with some sort of penalty. I did get a warning on the 20th april about an increase in the number of 404 errors, currently showing 77. I've now remove the links to those 404 pages, ive left the 404 pages as is, as was suggested here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-fix-crawl-errors-in-google-webmaster-tools. Could that be the reason? We have spent a lot of time on site design and content. We think the site is good, but I agree it has a long way to go but without income that is hard, so we have been struggling through. Any ideas on the reason/s for the penalty? Big thanks, Julian.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | julianhearn0 -
I am SEO amameur and have bee adding links slowly to site. I cannot seem to increase my domain authority from 20 however, Anyone any advice please????
I updated meta tags on website 2/3 months ago and saw a significant improvements in rankings for keyowrds, however since then I have been dropping back down. I am wondering if this is because of low domain authoriyty. it is currentyly 20. www.babskibay.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | babski0 -
Geo-Domain Centralization - Helps or Hurts a Long-Term Campaign?
I have a client with nearly 100 geo-specific domains (example: serviceincity.com). The content is mostly duplicate, however they weren't affected by Panda or Penguin, and most of the domains have a PR2-PR4. Doesn't mean they won't eventually (I know). My strategy is to centralize all the city domains and 301 them to their main website (example: brandname.com/locations/city/). However, their IBL profile shows at least 50% of their IBLs coming from the geo-specific domains, which makes centralizing quite a scary thing for short-term ranking. Having these domains is obviously not scalable from a social media or video SEO perspective, and we all know that in the long-term brand rules and domaining drools. Before I suggest they that they 301 these domains, I thought I'd get feedback from the community. Will all that 301 redirecting give more weight to the primary domain's visibility and sustain the ranking at a page-level, or will it send a flag to Google that the site might have been using it's own network of websites to game results? (which wasn't the case, the owner was just hyper with dominating in each city). Thanks in advance for your feedback.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stevewiideman0 -
I need some blogging advice please!
My name is Matthew and I am a new PRO member and founder of my own Internet marketing company in KS. So far I love the interaction and tools and functionality of seomoz. I am a true student of seo and love the subject. My dilemma is I know a blog is an important piece of any good seo campaign but I know very little about HOW to blog well......this is my new site and blog page. I only have a couple articles so far but many more planned. http://sawwebmarketing.com/seo-blog/ When I read an article that would be particuarly beneficial for my visitors can i post or share that on MY blog (giving the author the credit of course) without google thinking its duplicate content? is there anything specific I need to do with my blog for google to "see" the new, fresh content that is being added to the site? I have seen "tagged" items at the bottom of some blogs. Is this important? Some blogs will have a word or string of 2-3 words that are a link to a specific website. Does this help me or just them or just people reading the blog? **All I know is articles I write need to be relevant to my site and interesting and ORIGINAL and of benefit to my site visitors. ** Any advice that would help insure my blog articles get me all the juice they can would be GREATLY appreciated! Thank you in advance! Matthew ps - my site only went live a couple days ago so I am still working on a few onpage items but ANY feedback about the site itself would be spectacular! Have a GREAT weekend!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mrupp440