Recently revamped site structure - now not even ranking for brand name, but lots of content - what happened? (Yup, the site has been crawled a few times since) Any ideas? Did I make a classic mistake? Any advise appreciated :)
-
I've completely disappeared off Google - what happened? Even my brand name keyword does not bring up my website - I feel lost, confused and baffled on what my next steps should be. ANY advice would be welcome, since there's no going back to the way the site was set up.
-
Well I'd say that the nonindex issue Gareth pointed out, and the major markability error I discovered are your two biggest concerns initially. But yeah, once the dust settles, the other issues I point out are all a concern. Unique content that's specific to each page is quite important to long term SEO success.
-
Wow Alan - I'm surprised at how quickly you were able to find so many issues -- HUGE thank you!!!! Egad I had no idea about this stuff - especially the videos - I wrongly assumed that because the videos are stored on the backend in a single location, that having them placed in multiple areas was fine. I cannot thank you enough for pointing these errors out -- I really appreciate your expert advice!
-
Once you fix the noindex, here's some other stuff. It's a "quick hit - what stands out" kind of an audit to see if there are any really obvious red flags.
1. Odd Links
Looking at the source of your POS Nightclub and Bar page I found some odd things going on related to links. Specific examples:
A) You've got a link off to the right side of the page just under the main navigation bar (under the "News" link). This link is titled "News" and it rotates different links to different news items. One of them goes to a site called Spoke.com and the rest go to other DInerware.com pages.
Each of these links has a link "title" attribute that appears to contain the intro text of whatever it's pointed to. The problem here is it's significantly filling content at the source level that's totally irrelevant to the page. If this is happening on the entire site,there's a lot of topical dilution.
While this issue itself shouldn't be a problem big enough to be concerned with, I do believe its harming your sites quality from a topical perspective. And since this is stuff only search engines see, or is only seen when hovering over whatever individual article is viewed in the rotator, it's not good to have so much content there. Not good at all.
Also, the Spoke directory isn't exactly a high quality directory. So linking there isn't helping your site's perceived trust aspects.
2. Apparent mass repetition of video content
Am I correct in that you've got some videos posted to multiple pages of the site? Causing serious duplicate content problems? Many pages seem to have almost no unique text while having several videos. If these are then shown on more than one page, not only do you lose out from a lack of HTML text based content (a significant factor), but you get hammered by the duplication.
3. Links to PDFs
I see links to PDFs in the right column of the Product Training page, and none of them have the php code at the end of them. Yet within the page itself, PDFs have it http://www.dinerware.com/pdf/DinerwareCFGManual.pdf?phpMyAdmin=6e28a551fa44f2aa65e57201d6164da9
What's that about?
4. Markup Language Fail - The biggest problem
When I run your site through the W3C Markup Validation check, it fails and can not process. This alone means you've got a site coding problem that's most likely causing serious problems with search engines.
Go to http://validator.w3.org and enter in http://www.dinerware.com/pos-product/training/
I doubt the complete breakdown that I got when submitting that URL is temporary - and if you see it too, that's a critical issue.
-
No problem!
-
HOLY SMOKES!!! Gareth - thank you so SO SO much! I'm not a back-end web person, but will get the right folks on it asap - wonder how that mistake could have been made -- I'm grateful to you!
-
Hi Jeanie, I just had a quick look at your site and noticed you have noindex, nofollow on all of the pages I checked. You may want to adjust this as you're telling the search engines not to index these pages. Take a look at your source code and you'll spot it quite easily.
-
http://www.dinerware.com - Thanks, Alan
-
Jeanie - what's your site? Can't offer help without knowing that.
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
-
Why is Coyscape showing content duplication error even after implementing 301 redirect ?
We are maintaining the corporate website of one of our prestigious clients "FineTech Toolings" (http://www.finetechtoolings.in). Recently I had raised a question regarding "2 websites running paralley in 2 diferent domains, i.e. 1 organisation having 2 different websites on 2 different domains". Recently my domain changed from http://www.finetechtoolings.co.in to http://www.finetechtoolings.in via 301 redirect, but still I am facing content duplication issue as per Copyscape. Hence I am having a small doubt regarding the same. Please note the following question very carefully and provide me the exact problem and the solution for the same: Even though I have implemented 301 redirect (http://www.finetechtoolings.co.in is redirected to http://www.finetechtoolings.in), which is completely ok as per the SEO rules, why is copyscape still showing that duplicate content exists in the former website? I think I am clear enough with my question.
Technical SEO | | KDKini0 -
Removed .html - Now Get Duplicate Content
Hi there, I run a wordpress website and have removed the .html from my links. Moz has done a crawl and now a bunch of duplicated are coming up. Is there anything I need to do in perhaps my htaccess to help it along? Google appears to still be indexing the .html versions of my links
Technical SEO | | MrPenguin0 -
My site is not being regularly crawled?
My site used to be crawled regularly, but not anymore. My pages aren't showing up in the index months after they've been up. I've added them to the sitemap and everything. I now have to submit them through webmaster tools to get them to index. And then they don't really rank? Before you go spouting off the standard SEO resolutions... Yes, I checked for crawl errors on Google Webmaster and no, there aren't any issues No, the pages are not noindex. These pages are index,follow No, the pages are not canonical No, the robots.txt does not block any of these pages No, there is nothing funky going on in my .htaccess. The pages load fine No, I don't have any URL parameters set What else would be interfereing? Here is one of the URLs that wasn't crawled for over a month: http://www.howlatthemoon.com/locations/location-st-louis
Technical SEO | | howlusa0 -
Fixing up poorly performing eCommerce SIte with content? First things first..
I had a small site that was performing well enough for me for 6 years--nice source of extra family income. It was a very out of date platform (1990's) and I moved it to Big Commerce in December. Since then visits and sales have just plummeted. It has died and I am sad. I want to remain positive. It's a viable niche product line, I have tons of quality inventory, my site platform is current. I am a good writer and am willing to add content if it will help. From what I can determine apart from technical issues I may not know about I think I suffer from THIN CONTENT. I want to pretend I'm opening a new business and start over in today's environment. I have had bad experiences with two SEO consultants (one ripped me off financially, the other gave me advice that hurt me) so I have no choice but to educate myself. I got started in ecommerce back in 1998 with the help of many wonderful kind people on forums so I'm turning to this resource once again. What would you do first if you were me especially to get some revenue flowing asap? I need help. I need to know if there is hope or if I should liquidate at the nearest swap meet 😉 Thanks! decorativedishes.net
Technical SEO | | ddktt1 -
What might make Bing.bot find a URL that looks like this on our site?
I have been doing something Richard Baxter recently suggested and reviewing our server logs. I have found an oddity that hopefully some of you smart Mozzers can help me figure out. Here is the line from the server log (there are many more like this): 157.55.32.166 - - [04/Mar/2013:08:00:59 -0800] "GET /StoreFront/category/www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/shure-se-earphones HTTP/1.1" 200 94133 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)" "-" See how the www.ccisolutions.com appears after /StoreFront/category/ ? We used to see weird URLs reported in GWT that looked like this, but ever since we fixed our canonical tags to be absolute instead of relative URLs, they no longer appeared in our Webmaster Tools reports. However, it seems there is still a problem. Where/how could Bingbot be seeing URLs configured this way? Could it be a server issue, or is it most likely a data problem? Thanks in advance! Dana P.S. Could this be resulting from our massive use of relative URLs all over the site?
Technical SEO | | danatanseo0 -
Is adding reviews to your site using schema structured data markup considered duplicating content?
A client of mine whats to add reviews from other sites such as Judys Book and Yahoo to their site. (Yes the actual content of what was posted in the review. They are proud of what their clients are saying). I am not sure if using schema mark up and including the review body on the clients web site was safe or would it be considered duplicate content? Is there a "good practice" for this? Any assistance or suggestions are welcomed. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | mgordon0 -
Duplicate Content - Mobile Site
We think that a mobile version of our site is causing a duplicate content issue; what's the best way to stop the mobile version being indexed. Basically the site forwards mobile users to "/mobile" which is just a mobile optimised version of the original site. Is it best to block the /mobile folder from being crawled?
Technical SEO | | nsmith7870 -
Can we use our existing site content on new site?
We added 1000s of pages unique content on our site and soon after google release penguin and we loose our ranking for major keywords and after months of efforts we decided to start a new site. If we use all the existing site content on new domain does google going to penalized the site for duplicate content or it will be treated as unique? Thanks
Technical SEO | | mozfreak0