Are sliders killing our site?
-
Our website, http://shatterbuggy.com, has what I believe is a systemic issue that stems from the heavy reliance upon the Revolution Slider for Wordpress. I am not an SEO expert and our site has vexed many SEOs in the past.
We get feedback regularly from customers (especially those that are not tech savvy) that express gratitude for the ease of use via following an image to image sequence to get to their respective booking. This was our goal when creating the site. Incidentally, in many cases, the only linking from page to page is within the slider itself (clickable image) and there is little to no content. That said, we seems to stumble in SERPS against seemingly inferior competition. For example, we should be ranked in spot 1, 2, or 3 ish for "iPhone repair Minneapolis" but rather we are stuck near spot 15.
Any thoughts on whether this is a strategy that may be harming us? If so, would simply creating content on these empty (slider only) pages help? Should we create "static links" that connect to the same places as the slider? Also, is our particular use of the slider creating H1 issues?
Thank you all!
B.
-
Moosa, Dirk-
Thank you both.
B.
-
I agree with Moosa - I crawled your site with Screaming Frog, and it had no problem to crawl the links inside the slider.
-
If the slider is crawl-able, i dont think there will be a much advantage of normal static links.
#personalopinion
-
Hi Moosa-
Thank you for the reply. Much appreciated!
Cheers!
B.
-
Hi Dirk-
Thank you for the detailed reply. Very much appreciated. All of your suggestions make a great deal of sense.
Do you have an opinion regarding linking within the slider though? Specifically, do you know if there would be any advantage to creating static links that are the same as the links that the slider images link to? These would be below the slider.
Cheers!
B.
-
Benjamin,
I don’t think the issue is with the slider but there are other issues you should be considering as important. I will quickly go over it.
- 3XX errors. I am not saying 301 redirection is bad but too many 301s can damage your website so try to minimize them where possible.
- Few URLs contain “underscore”. Not really a very good practice. Also there are one or two URLs that contain upper case as well.
- Not saying it’s a ranking factor, but it can affect CTR which again is a ranking factor. You have missing descriptions on different pages of the website
- Images are not properly optimized.
- Page load time can be improved.
- Your DA is not really impressive, so I guess few more links here and there will obviously help!
Just a quick overview! Hope this helps…
-
Hi Benjamin,
Not sure that it's the slider which is causing your issues.
1. Your site has performance issues - especially linked to time to first byte. Check the results from http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150510_ZZ_QZY/ & https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=www.shatterbuggy.com. You might want to read this thread on how you could improve this https://wordpress.org/support/topic/how-to-reduce-time-to-first-byte-on-my-wordpress-site You should consider to combine & minify the css & js files (you have an awful lot of them - 27 each for the homepage) and modify your caching settings (see advice pagespeed insights)
2. You have 366 HTML pages on your site - 121 pages are redirected. You should update your internal links so that the links point directly to the final destination. Example: the homepage links to http://www.shatterbuggy.com/plymouth/ - but this page doesn't exist and is redirected to http://www.shatterbuggy.com/service-areas/plymouth/. Screaming frog can help you to identify which links need to be updated.
3. 128 pages have no meta-description / 38 pages have no H1 title (example http://www.shatterbuggy.com/service-areas/cherry-creek/ipad-repair/)
4. The images you use on site are quite heavy (almost 50% is over 100KB) - some of them extremely heavy (http://www.shatterbuggy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/waiting-in-line.jpeg) - 123 have no alt text
5. Due to the large slider which always is dominating the page - you push the text out of the visible area. Your regional pages are very similar and could almost be considered duplicates. The region specific content is not visible without scrolling. Google prefers important content to be visible - not hidden at the bottom of the page.
6. You might want to check this article on local SEO: https://moz.com/blog/everybody-needs-local-seo - it contains a lot of tips & tricks on how to make your locations more visible for Google.
7. A lot of specific pages have http://www.shatterbuggy.com/repairs/ as canonical - example http://www.shatterbuggy.com/repairs/iphone-repair/gold-iphone-6-issue/ - not sure if for this specific page the /repairs/ page is the best option as canonical - you might want to point to an iphone repair page.
Hope this helps,
Dirk
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
-
Moving site from html to Wordpress site: Should I port all old pages and redirect?
Any help would be appreciated. I am porting an old legacy .html site, which has about 500,000 visitors/month and over 10,000 pages to a new custom Wordpress site with a responsive design (long overdue, of course) that has been written and only needs a few finishing touches, and which includes many database features to generate new pages that did not previously exist. My questions are: Should I bother to port over older pages that are "thin" and have no incoming links, such that reworking them would take time away from the need to port quickly? I will be restructuring the legacy URLs to be lean and clean, so 301 redirects will be necessary. I know that there will be link juice loss, but how long does it usually take for the redirects to "take hold?" I will be moving to https at the same time to avoid yet another porting issue. Many thanks for any advice and opinions as I embark on this massive data entry project.
Technical SEO | | gheh20130 -
Site Crawling with Firewall Plugin
Just wondering if anyone has any experience with the WordPress Simple Firewall plugin. I have a client who is concerned about security as they've had issues in that realm in the past and they've since installed this plugin: https://wordpress.org/support/view/plugin-reviews/wp-simple-firewall?filter=4 Problem is, even with a proper robots file and appropriate settings within the firewall, I still cannot crawl the site with site crawler tools. Google seems to be accessing the site fine, but I still wonder if it is in anyway potentially hindering search spiders.
Technical SEO | | BrandishJay0 -
Robots.txt & Mobile Site
Background - Our mobile site is on the same domain as our main site. We use a folder approach for our mobile site abc.com/m/home.html We are re-directing traffic to our mobile site vie device detection and re-direction exists for a handful of pages of our site ie most of our pages do not redirect the user to a mobile equivalent page. Issue – Our mobile pages are being indexed in desktop Google searches Input Required – How should we modify our robots.txt so that the desktop google index does not index our mobile pages/urls User-agent: Googlebot-Mobile Disallow: /m User-agent: `YahooSeeker/M1A1-R2D2` Disallow: /m User-agent: `MSNBOT_Mobile` Disallow: /m Many thanks
Technical SEO | | CeeC-Blogger0 -
One large site or a few microsites?
Hi, I have a client who runs a professional expo company and wants to redo his website. Right now he has one website that has the following sections: expo company info, wedding show info, electrical wire show info, fishing show info. My question is, when I rebuild the site would it be better to do one site or four microsites?
Technical SEO | | JohnWeb120 -
Duplicate Content on 2 Sites - Advice
We have one client who has an established eCommerce Site and has created another site which has the exact same content which is about to be launched. We want both sites to be indexed but not be penalised for duplicate content. The sites have different domains The sites have the same host We want the current site to be priority, so the new site would not be ranking higher in SERPs. Any advice on setting up canonical, author tags, alternate link tag etc Thanks Rich
Technical SEO | | SEOLeaders0 -
Is it possible to build a new site and replace it
Hi i have a site that i want to re build because it has moved away from what i wanted it to do and deleted a lot of the site and due to this has caused a lot of errors. My site is built in the old joomla and i want to build a brand new site in the new version. My site in2town.co.uk which is a lifestyle magazine runs very slowly and what i want to do because it has a lot of problems under the google webmaster control panel, is to rebuild the site and turn it back into the site it should be instead of trying to make it into so many different things. The problem i have is, i have thousands and thousands of great links going to the site and i am worried about losing these links. It would take me about a day to turn it into the site it should be and improve it. My hosting company have said that i can put it under a sub domain the new site and then when i have built it, they can then move it under the correct name. But what i am worried about is, the site is very slow at the moment, and i am worried that by doing this that it would not solve the problem of making it faster even though i have a dedicated server. I want the site to be brand new with no errors and i am worried by doing this that the site will run slowly because i am still working off the old script. I have tried migrating the older version into the new joomla but it could not be done and caused problems so this could be my only other option. Any advice would be great
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Site Hosting Question
We are UK based web designers who have recently been asked to build a website for an Australian Charity. Normally we would host the website in the UK with our current hosting company, but as this is an Australian website with an .au domain I was wondering if it would be better to host it in Australia. If it is better to host it in Australia, I would appreciate if someone could give me the name of a reasonably priced hosting company. Thanks Fraser
Technical SEO | | fraserhannah0 -
Site problem
I moved a site earlier on in the year to a better server www.keyrs.co.uk, my main keywords being equity release - equity release calculator and equity release schemes. Since this happened the ranking have gone down and the schemes and calculator terms and have hit positions 7-8 when they were 2-3. basically my question is open to all, i am looking to see what the problem is with these pages as it is driving me nuts. All tools on SEO moz show the pages are doing well, however i must be missing something. Mike
Technical SEO | | TomBarker820