Please suggest! Overstuffed URLs - to change, or not to change?
-
Hello guys,
We are in doubts about changing URLs on our http://www.fiberscope.net/ store
The site was hit by Google in January and has dropped from top 3 to top 20 for most of its keywords.
Now we're working on some redesign, including removing of over optimized content from it.
It looks like our categories and content pages URLs are overstuffed with keywords. Here is a dilemma. Should we rewrite them and set up 301 redirect or just leave as is?
I look trough the seomoz Q&A and find out that a lot of guys got in troubles after redirecting
PLEASE, Suggest!
-
sure!
-
keep us posted on how this works out for you
-
Thanks for ideas, Jesse
-
just glanced at your backlink profile... you've lost something like 10,000 links over the last week or so. if those were all poison links, that's fantastic for you!
NOW you need to start building quality links or you'll never regain your rankings.
so get out there and do some link building. That's my best advice to you. apart from a redesign and better optimized content.
img alt tags are a problem as Dennis suggested. a quick peek shows one alt tag that says "search" and another that reads "McAfee SECURE sites help keep you safe from identity theft, credit card fraud, spyware, spam, viruses and online scams"
These are both perfectly wrong examples and should be fixed.
Also, clean up that HTML it's gonna be difficult to manage in such a cluster like that. (my own personal gripe.. you may work differently than I)
-
Thanks Dennis,
And you got it right - we received a message from Google with a warning about "silly" links
We have enough links from very trusted, industry related sources but paid junk damage it
We've stopped buying links, but what can we do with existing ones we bought? I think we have to wait 2-3 months and resubmit to Google?
-
I suggest making sure if that is really your problem.
Fix the minor details, alt tags, remove your meta keywords, fix your sitemap
Dropping to Top 20 doesn't really look like a penalty, more like there are other pages that are better than you.
Take a look at your webmaster tools first for problems and fix those.
Check your keyword average rankings in there and look at your impressions on when you dropped
I also suggest looking your links...its a mix of Russian and sape links
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
-
Changing URL to a subdomain?
Hi there, I had a website www.footballshirtcollective.com that has been live since July. It contains both content and eCommerce. I am now separating out the content so that; 1. The master domain is www.footballshirtcollective.com (content) pointing to a new site 2. Subdomain is store.footballshirtcollective.com (ecommerce) - pointing to the existing site. What do you advise I can do to minimise the impact on my search? Many thanks Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mjmaxwell0 -
301 forwarding old urls to new urls - when should you update sitemap?
Hello Mozzers, If you are amending your urls - 301ing to new URLs - when in the process should you update your sitemap to reflect the new urls? I have heard some suggest you should submit a new sitemap alongside old sitemap to support indexing of new URLs, but I've no idea whether that advice is valid or not. Thanks in advance, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Are these URLs too Keyword-packed?
Hi guys, Here is the URL: http://www.consumerbase.com/mailing-lists/dog-stores-mailing-list.html The target keywords are "Dog stores mailing list" and "Dog stores mailing lists" Does having "mailing-list" and "mailing-lists" in my URL hurt me?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W0 -
Please help me with your advice
Hi all, Couple years ago I started to build my business based on EMD domain. The intention was to create the source with the rich unique content. After a year of hard work the site achieved top 10 in Google and started to generate good amount of leads. Then Google announced the EMD Update and site lost the 90% of traffic (after Pandas updates our SERP was steady ) “ a new filter that tries to ensure that low-quality sites don’t rise high in Google’s search results simply because they have search terms in their domain names. ” But I don’t consider my site low-quality site, every page, every post is 100% unique and has been created only to share the knowledge with others… The site has EXCELLENT content from industry point of view.... Since the “ EMD Update “ I read hundreds , hundreds of different articles and opinions related to EMD update and finally I am confused and lost. What should I do… • Kill the site and start new one
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Webdeal
• Get more links, but what type of links and how I should get them
• Keep hoping and pray....
• Or do something else Please help me with your advice0 -
Dynamically change anchor text and URLs remotely
Hey i'm looking to create a widget in javascript which i dynamically change the urls and anchor text which link the widget back to my site remotely (via php) once it spreads. I have heard peopled doing this before, but i can't seem to find a example. Does anyone know of any examples/widgets or anything which can do this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | monster990 -
Request a 3rd party to change the URL to your site or 302 redirect it?
Hi, My new site design for small hope went live about 3 months ago and I changed the URL structure. I'm kind of new to the SEO game, but I've done quite a bit of research, successfully implemented all the 301s I need and tested them and everything is working fine. But I'm having a little trouble with this propagating through Google et al. Most of the advice is to sit tight and wait but I want to be a little more proactive. So even though the 301s are in place, can I ALSO send emails to our partners and request link changes? Would Google find this suspicious behaviour and penalise us? Thanks, Adam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NaescentAdam0 -
Is it OK to have a site that has some URLs with hyphens and other, older, legacy URLs that use underscores?
I'm working with a VERY large site that has recently been redesigned/recategorized. They kept only about 20% of the URLs from the legacy site, the URLs that had revenue tied to them, and these URLs use underscores. Whereas the new URLs created for the site use hyphens. I don't think that this would be an issue for Google, as long as the pages are of quality, but I wanted to get everyone's opinion on this. Will it hurt me to have two different sets of URLs, those with using hyphens and those using underscores?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Business.com0 -
Expiring URL seo
a buddy of mine is running a niche job board and is having issues with expiring URLs. we ruled it out cuz a 301 is meant to be used when the content has moved to another page, or the page was replaced. We were thinking that we'd be just stacking duplicate content on old urls that would never be 'replaced'. Rather they have been removed and will never come back. So 410 is appropriate but maybe we overlooked something. any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | malachiii0