SEO impact classifieds website
-
Hi, I'm part of an organization running a classifieds platform in Spain. (Mercadonline.es) We are hit by Google penalties since a few weeks, possibly caused by numerous errors we are experiencing. Most frequent errors are 404's and duplicate content (titles tags etc) since the nature of our website is dynamic. Many ads change daily, are added or removed, causing Googlebots (and others) to flag us and not being able to see our more unique content. Until what part of our platform should we be indexed? Since we have +34,000 pages indexed (mostly due to internal filter pages) I would need a systematic solution for us to display relevant and unique content, with enough usage of keywords that can bring us back up - we are actually ranked <50 on google for most of our main keywords. It is costing us precious time and money since we can only aquire our visitors (adwords etc) and not being to attract any organically.
I can go in more detail with someone who can give me a bit more direction.
Your answer is much appreciated!
Ivor
-
Ivor,
i think i counted correctly:
- above the content main section
- right next to your own ad (which Google also counts as Ad)
- Mid content in between the audi's (the page i looked)
- at the bottom of the left side bar.
So you actually have 5 ad blocks on your site. Then again, the first ad block should not be that high on the page. Delete the above the content one, and the bottom left sidebar one and add some content before using the block next to your own ads. That might work for you. But at this moment you are violating Google's policy on using ads (IMHO)
I would defiantly add more content, more text less ads. Maybe 1 or 2 ad blocks on at least a 1000 words ? I never measured a ratio that works. Maybe a good idea to do that sometime.
As for the errors, can you give a few examples of the pages that are duplicate, I will look into it a bit further.
Regards
Jarno
-
Hi Jarno,
We don't have more than 3 blocks per page, since we always follow Google Adsense guidelines. Perhaps you counted wrongly since there is one block that is our own ad space (anuncio top). And every time we receive warnings of this nature we would adjust immediately. But perhaps we would need to add more text/content instead of only links and ads, in order to respect the ratio?
I think the big problem is also our duplicate content. (see screenshot) and I would have to see how we can canonicalize this...
-
Hi Jarno,
Thanks for your swift response. I will look into it asap and revert possibly with comments and other questions.
Kind regards,
Ivor
-
Ivor,
what I would do is make sure you update your sitemap.xml daily and also have Google scan it every day (add it by hand in your webmaster tools or use another tactic). That way you are constantly telling Google where all the pages are. Besides that I would recommend having the right structure for pages that no longer exist so they give a correct 404's and make your pages canonicalized for content (but only if you indeed have unique content). 34000 pages are hard to inspect for problems but you would have to start somewhere.
I also noted that you have a lot of adsense blocks and other ads blocks on the pages. Google Adsenses insist that you use no more then 3 ad blocks on 1 page. If I look at your page I see at least 4 blocks. So I would drastically dial this number down and keep them as low as possible on the page. You now have one above the main content (http://www.mercadonline.es/ads/coches/9909). I would never do this. Start with content (maybe 3 or 4 paragraphs before you introduce you first ad block. I work with adsense a lot and I know the policy of Google on this. This might be why you got hit by the penalties. Panda and Penguin both look at the quality of a page and the ration between ads and content.
Hope this helps you some.
Regards
Jarno
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
-
Impact of Non SEO Subdomains
My company has several subdomains whose specific purpose is to act as a landing page/site for our paid search and/or email program. One of the things I've noticed on these subdomains is that they are not being excluded from the SEObots. Could the lack of proper SEO techniques on these subdomains impact our main www subdomain? What is the proper configuration we should use to make sure these sites are not considered for SEO?
Technical SEO | | APFM0 -
E-commerce website
Hi, I have to do a SEO optimization on a huge e-commerce website, but i don´t know if i have to focus in Schema or meta tags ( page title, meta description) which of them is more important? how can I optimize the website? Thanks
Technical SEO | | AbacoDigital1 -
Website SEO Product Pages - Condense Product Pages
We are managing a website that has seen consistently dropping rankings over the last 2 years (http://www.independence-bunting.com/). Our long term strategy has been purely content-based and is of high quality, but isn’t seeing the desired results. It is an ecommerce site that has a lot of pages, most of which are category or product pages. Many of the product pages have duplicate or thin content, which we currently see as one of the primary reasons for the ranking drops.The website has many individual products which have the same fabric and size options, but have different designs. So it is difficult to write valuable content that differs between several products that have similar designs. Right now each of the different designs has its own product page. We have a dilemma, because our options are:A.Combine similar designs of the product into one product page where the customer must choose a design, a fabric, and a size before checking out. This way we can have valuable content and don’t have to duplicate that content on other pages or try to find more to say about something that there really isn’t anything else to say about. However, this process will remove between 50% and 70% of the pages on the website. We know number of indexed pages is important to search engines and if they suddenly see that half of our pages are gone, we may cause more negative effects despite the fact that we are in fact aiming to provide more value to the user, rather than less.B.Leave the product pages alone and try to write more valuable content for each product page, which will be difficult because there really isn’t that much more to say, or more valuable ways to say it. This is the “safe” option as it means that our negative potential impact is reduced but we won’t necessarily see much positive trending either. C.Test solution A on a small percentage of the product categories to see any impact over the next several months before making sitewide updates to the product pages if we see positive impact, or revert to the old way if we see negative impact.Any sound advice would be of incredible value at this point, as the work we are doing isn’t having the desired effects and we are seeing consistent dropping rankings at this point.Any information would be greatly appreciated. Thank you,
Technical SEO | | Ed-iOVA0 -
Website is not indexed in Google
Hi Guys, I have a problem with a website from a customer. His website is not indexed in Google (except for the homepage). I could not find anything that can possibly be the cause. I already checked the robots.txt, sitemap, and plugins on the website. In the HTML code i also couldn't find anything which makes indexing harder than usual. This is the website i am talking about: http://www.xxxx.nl/ (Dutch) The only thing that i am guessing now is the Google sandbox, but even that is quite unlikely. I hope you guys discover something i could not find! Thanks in advance 🙂
Technical SEO | | B.Great0 -
301 redirects and seo..
I bought a domain and it has nice traffic. It only has about 5 main pages in php When i got the site i switched to html because php was overkill. I did the 301 and google deleted the php files and replaced with html version when i check site:domain.com It has been about 7 days. I DID NOT use 301 for each of the 5 pages to go php to html instead is used this code RewriteEngine On
Technical SEO | | samerk
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mydomain.com
RewriteRule (.) http://www.mydomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
RedirectMatch 301 (.).php$ http://www.mydomain.com$1.html So basically if you load php it will load the html version. dog.php > dog.html Is this OKAY? or should it be done differently.... worried! Thanks !0 -
Does running 2 domains from the same website harm my seo efforts?
Hi I run a website which has 2 domains running from it. One domain has a .co.uk extension and shows products aimed at the UK market. The other domain is a .com which shows products aimed at the US market. As both domains run from the same website, the content is mostly identical APART from the product listings as they change depending upon whether you're in the UK or US. My reason for doing is this mainly for paid search purposes as I can have a more accurate domain depending upon which country I target. Both sites are set to encourage the bots to index it, and in google WMT each domain is targeted to its specific country. So, my questions are, Is this set-up possibly damaging my SEO efforts for either or both websites? If so, would setting one domain to no-index, improve SEO efforts for the other? Thanks in advance for any replies! Cheers Joe
Technical SEO | | joeprice0 -
Seo template for new website
I am revamping my website (www.UltimateBasicTraining.com). It's going to be major and I am concerned about the potential traffic loss since over 60% of my overall traffic comes from organic search results in the military basic training area. Are there any good SEO website templates I can start from? I see a lot out there but would prefer the advice of professionals. Thanks
Technical SEO | | TheVolkinator0 -
Best SEO strategy for a site that has been down
Because of hosting problems we're trying to work out, our domain was down all weekend, and we have lost all of our rankings. Doe anyone have any experience with this kind of thing in terms of how long it takes to figure out where you stand once you have the site back up? what the best SEO strategy is for immediately addressing this problem? Besides just plugging away at getting links like normal, is there anything specific we should do right away when the site goes back up? Resubmit a site map, etc? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | OneClickVentures0