Looking For Industry Feedback
-
Hi All,
I'm new to SEOmoz, I'm head of marketing for Coastdale Parks. I would like some feedback on the companies websites. I have designed all five websites and I am self-taught I really like the tools on this site and after a day I feel I am more in-tune with my SEO and what I have to do to increase our online presence.
I know how advanced you all our but I have to ask this question;
'On google it give you the preference of having a www. or non www and to create a 301 redirect. I chose the non www. however when I did this I have seen a drop in visitors at first I thought it might be due to the weather being really cold and therefore customers were looking to fly out of Britain, not looking on our websites'. This might be a freak change in customer behaviour, or me changing and not placing the 301 properly'.
-
I am no htaccess expert, but I think you want to change it to:
Redirect 301 / http://whitbypark.co.uk/
Give that a whirl.
Mike
-
Thank you very much Mike, I have repeatedly tried to set the 301 redirect for my sites using code;
Permanent URL redirect - generated by www.rapidtables.com Redirect 301 / whitbypark.co.uk
but this has not worked - could you please suggest a good code to use. Thank you very much for your time.
Chris
-
You are correct in saying your 301 is not working properly. You will want to get your traffic and link juice associated with your preferred domain as soon as possible.
If you use OpenSiteExplorer, you will see that your non-www version has fewer links than the www version. With this set up, you are essentially splitting your authority between two sites instead of one. According to Google, "Once you tell us your preferred domain name, we use that information for all future crawls of your site and indexing refreshes. For instance, if you specify your preferred domain as http://www.example.com and we find a link to your site that is formatted as http://example.com, we follow that link as http://www.example.com instead. In addition, we'll take your preference into account when displaying the URLs. If you don't specify a preferred domain, we may treat the www and non-www versions of the domain as separate references to separate pages."
Once you get your 301s in place and Google recrawls and reindexes your website, I would think that you would see your number of visitors return to its normal volume.
Hope this helps.
Mike
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
-
How does Google look at strings added to a URL
For example: http://localhost:3000/en-US/app/a-knsmtrhqrqs/personal where knsmtrhqrqs is a string Can Google tell this is a string and what's their policy? Will it hurt rankings? Thank you.
Web Design | | RoxBrock0 -
Does my font look good in this?
Apologies for the title, but a serious point here.... We (like a lot of people) spend time on almost mechanical on-page optimisation. However, we are finally moving our thinking to our visitors and what works for them - not the search engines. I know, about time. With that in mind we have de-cluttered our content pages and increased font sizes - focussing on usability more. This is an example of a tweaked page - http://www.compactlaw.co.uk/free-legal-information/employment-law/exceptions-for-unfair-dismissal.html This is an un-tweaked page - http://www.compactlaw.co.uk/agency-agreement.html Which do you prefer to read/look at??
Web Design | | dexm100 -
Feedback on a banner design
I was hoping to get some feedback from you guys regarding some banner redesign we are working on for our website. We are currently using the blue one, but we werent happy with the logo we had of the hat and hands shaking. So once we started working on a new logo, that logo doesnt match at all with the current design so we were messing around with the banner and came up with these ideas. Id appreciate some feedback good or bad 🙂 edit: sorry guess [img] doesnt work in here Current Banner http://i403.photobucket.com/albums/pp120/jimrawr/banner_zpse92b853f.jpg New 1 http://i403.photobucket.com/albums/pp120/jimrawr/21-03-banner_zpsfc224501.jpg New 2 http://i403.photobucket.com/albums/pp120/jimrawr/19-03-banner_zps17c3f2f1.jpg New 3 http://i403.photobucket.com/albums/pp120/jimrawr/20-03-banner_zps966bb780.jpg
Web Design | | DemiGR0 -
I am looking to improve my on page seo, can you provide any recommendations or suggestions for how?
I am relatively new to the world of SEO and recently built a new site. I have read as many books as I can to help increase my skill set rapidly, and have attempted to implement the best of what I have learned but I know many of you have been in this arena for a while and I would be extremely appreciative of any suggestions you can offer with regard to on page. Thanks in advance. http://luxuryhomehunt.com - home page http://luxuryhomehunt.com/homes-for-sale/orlando.html - city level http://luxuryhomehunt.com/homes-for-sale/orlando/bay-hill.html - community level
Web Design | | Jdubin0 -
Rephrasing my question: I have no search traffic -- I would love some feedback
I just posted a question: http://www.seomoz.org/q/am-i-on-the-right-track-still-not-seeing-results-in-rank-traffic-etc An it already has 63 views and one response, but I think I may have phrased the question wrong. I would love a little feedback on my site - I have zero search traffic -- none. I find that odd. I am not sure if it "just takes time" and I need to be patient, or if I am doing something really obviously wrong. I have been really amazed by what I have read so far in this community, and have learned a ton. In my previous question, I listed all the things I am doing -- and I think I have the basics down pat. Should I not have at least 1 visitor per day? Any feedback would be appreciated. Thank you so much!!
Web Design | | WendyKKelly0 -
What is a really great bounce rate for a product or service site? What does Good look like?
I am really curious about a result I have never seen before. Our bounce rate went down a lot on a new site. So, what is good??? Recently, we took on a project with a company that offers a product they install for consumers and who had been in business for 15 plus years. The company is successful, has good customer base of those who have been made very happy, etc. It is not a repeat sale type of product, etc. One and done. Their site when we began talking was roughly a year old and was not well constructed but not terrible. Most of the issues were around I frames, use of older coding, poor SEO, etc. There was not really a way to "redesign" and we built a new site. This became a true collaboration in a B2B environment as the owner pushed us like crazy. Not the bad kind of push, the one that makes you say to your team, "Let's find a way!" The result, IMO, was a gorgeous site. But, as you know, those are a dime a dozen. But, to get to the point, when we took over the account they had a bounce rate of around 45%. I did not see this as either good or bad, but a fact and for this industry probably not bad at all. In all honesty, I was not looking at that as a first metric I wanted to move, but it was obviously at or near the top for all the reasons we know. So, this site is a local business, not an everyday product and gets about 2500 to 3000 uniques per month. If we compare to May of 2011/2012: 2011 2012 Total Visitors 1852 3,298 Uniques 1609 2,740 Pageviews 5,634 23,203 Pages/visit 3.04 7.04 Avg Duration 2.05 3.20 Yes, I am leaving off what we are getting, yes, I am leaving off the site. Please don't hate me. I am really wanting to see what others see with site changes and bounce rates first and will disclose. So, what's a great bounce rate? How do you know?
Web Design | | RobertFisher0 -
Looking for a Static Blog Roll (Directory) plug in / tool
I am looking to add a static page to my site to allow people to add their site to a 'master directory". I'd like to make this as SEO friendly as possible. Here's it what I would really like to be able to do. 1. Someone visits the page and can either browse the blog directory on that page, or 2. Fill out a short from that has their blog name, url, short description of their blog, their state, country, and maybe the option to upload an image as well. This way people can search by the state / country to find people near by. 3. I'd like the links to be no-follow. 4. I'm not sure if there is an easy way to do this (I think I've seen some plug in's that may be able to do it.) 5. I'm also not sure if there is anything I'm missing here that could make this better. What I don't want is just a long list of links like everyone has on their side bar. I'd like to make it better, more user friendly, more seo friendly, and more helpful than that. Any creative input on how I might do this is appreciated. Thanks. 🙂
Web Design | | NoahsDad0 -
?3dCart, Magento, Volusion, Zen Cart? Looking for recommendations based on my situation.
I have done a ton of research trying to figure this out but still need help and clarification. My strength is marketing and not the technical aspects of ecommerce cms etc. I am ignorant in this area and don't mind if you explain to me like a 5 year old. I am ready to take my marketing knowledge and creativity to ecommerce but this one aspect is stopping me. I really want to understand this and would be appreciative of the option to do a skype instant message session where I would pay you for your time to ask for clarification. I will explain my situation so you can better understand where I am coming from and can recommend something appropriately. My ecommerce stores run between my own and my clients range from motorcycle, supplement and fitness equipment stores. None of the stores are very large with the biggest one having about 150 products. Mainly I am looking for a mix between an economical solution combined with being easy to use and great for search engine visibility. I have a lot of questions here and appreciate in advance anyone reading all of this and helping. Am I correct in my understanding that I basically have 3 options when doing ecommerce. One is I can go to a company like 3d cart or volusion and they can provide the merchant account, ssl cert, the cart and free and paid templates ready to go? Two is getting free cart software such as Magento or OScommerce etc. The third option is paid cart software like zen cart or others. Is that my main options? Let's say I was to use 3d cart. What kind of cart platform will I be using then? One they created? Or do they use a (free/paid) solution like I talked about in question 1? Is the main advantage of using a company like 3dcart and volusion the fact that they integrate many things into one? With Magento would I need a developer to customize my theme to integrate all those things? Are there some major disadvantages to using companies like 3d cart? How does the process and advantages work when using a solution like Magento or OScommerce. So for example I decide to use the Magento free platform. Am I then able to hire a designer to create a site from scratch that will work with the Magento platform? Or I could also go to template monster and purchase a theme already made and have it customized by someone? Also what about paid cart software like zen cart etc? Why would I use that over the others? Would I also then hire a designer to create a site that works with zen cart or purchase a template made then customize? Are you able to create almost ANY structure and design for a site no matter what its cart platform is? For example, although I would make a few changes to this site I think it's very close to a great site from a design/conversion standpoint. http://www.spiderofficechairs.com/ . Lets say for example I was using any one of the options I have so far mentioned. Would I be able to just tell a designer/developer that I have magento,3dcart, zencart etc and tell him I would like that type of layout for example? How would I know how certain cart platforms are coded? Does that even make sense? For example I have created and ranked many sites and tested quite a bit also. I have always noticed that very clean basic static html sites have almost always ranked better and faster for me. Do these platforms come built a certain way such as html or (I don't even know what the names of other options are). Or does it not come as anything and when I have the site built I determine how I want it built? Also if you have any suggested reading for me I would be appreciative. Thank you for the help. Jake
Web Design | | PEnterprises0