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
-
Please Help! Crawl & Site Errors - Will This Impact My SEO?
Hello Moz, I need urgent help. I remove a tonne of product pages and put everything into one product page to deal with duplicate content. I thought this was a good thing to do until I got an email from Google saying: "Googlebot identified a significant increase in the number of URLs on ****.com that return a 404 (not found) error. " I checked it out and found the problem: 4 Soft 404's
Technical SEO | | crocman
41 Not Found's What do I need to do to fix this? Is it a problem or should I just ignore? I removed all the pages on WordPress but I need to do it somehow manually through Google? I have worked so hard on my SERP's that this will destroy me if I'm penalised. Please can someone advise?0 -
Changing site URL structure
Hey everybody, I'm looking for a bit of advice. A few weeks ago Google sent me an email saying all pages with any text input on them need to switch to https for those pages. This is no problem, I was slowly switching the site to https anyway using a 301 redirect. However, my site also has a language subfolder in the url, mysite.com/en/ mysite.com/ru/ etc. Due to poor work on my part the translations of the site haven't been updated in a long time and lots of the pages are in english even on the russian version etc. So I'm thinking of just removing this url structure and just having mysite.com My plan is to 301 all requests to https and remove the language subfolder in the url at the same time. So far the https switching hasn't changed my rankings. Am I more at risk of losing my rankings by doing this? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Ruhol0 -
If I want clean up my URLs and take the "www.site.com/page.html" and make it "www.site.com/page" do I need a redirect?
If I want clean up my URLs and take the "www.site.com/page.html" and make it "www.site.com/page" do I need a redirect? If this scenario requires a 301 redirect no matter what, I might as well update the URL to be a little more keyword rich for the page while I'm at it. However, since these pages are ranking well I'd rather not lose any authority in the process and keep the URL just stripped of the ".html" (if that's possible). Thanks for you help! [edited for formatting]
Technical SEO | | Booj0 -
Pages with a short life time... example Flash Sales Ecommerce Sites?
Hello everyone, I am managing an ecommerce website and I am not sure what policy I need to make for a lot of the product pages.The Product pages, example Givency Bag, go live on a specific date and go down in a few days... like Groupon. Please shed some light in this dark tunnel.
Technical SEO | | MTalhaImtiaz
Thanks and regards,0 -
I have an eCommerce store with a lot of 301 redirects. Would that hurt my rankings?
I use BigCommerce, and they have a system where all the URLs are dynamically generated from the name of each product. So if I named a product "widget x y z" the url would be /widget-x-y-z/, and if I changed that to "blue widget x y z", it would change to /blue-widget-x-y-z/ and automatically redirect the old one to the new one. As a result, in 6 months, because of a lot of tweaking and experimenting, I've ended up with a hefty list of 400 redirects. Some of them are very old, and some are recent. So my question is in two parts: a) does having all of these redirects hurt my rankings? b) if so, would deleting them help?
Technical SEO | | shabbirun0 -
Brand New Site Penalized?
I recently launched 2 completely separate and unrelated websites at the same time. Both are new domains and hosting accounts. neither have any links. One is ranking for a branded search and the other is not. The interesting thing is that I tested both sites on the back end of my server before launch. The site that is not ranking for branded search IS ranking still on the back end of my site for the branded search. I have removed all content and 301 redirected the testing urls back to my portfolio page. Could this be do to Google indexing one but not the other. Does it have anything to do with testing on my server first and my DA being higher than current new sites? Or is it something completely different I'm missing completely. Is this a Penalty?
Technical SEO | | CDUBP0 -
Will training videos available on the "members only" section of a site contribute to the sites ranking?
Hello, I got asked a question recently as to whether training videos on the deeper pages of a website (that you can only access if you are a member and log in) will help with the sites ranking. On the SEOMoz software these deeper pages have been crawled as far as I can tell with errors reported on pages from the "members only" section of the site, leading me to believe the members only pages and their content will contribute to the sites overall ranking profile. I have suggested uploading the informational videos on the main pages of the site for now, making them accessible to all visitors and putting them in a more obvious place to encourage more sharing and views, however I've also said I would check it out with some experts so any information will be greatly appreciated! Many thanks 🙂 Charlotte
Technical SEO | | CharlotteWaller0 -
How hard is it to rank above a site that has 300 back links from dex?
I am new to SEO and have started my keyword research. One keyword I would like to rank for has a competing site with over 400 back links, 300 of which are from dex. How hard would it be to outrank links coming from dex?
Technical SEO | | marker-3115280
