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We rank really well for a brand in Bing (#2 behind manufacturer, and it's a competitive name) but are in about 15th place in Google. Any suggestions on what could be hurting us in Google are welcome!

But if I can find out, how may times, it appears on our site, and compare that to a competitors that will help.

Thanks Clayton, yes exactly. A Word Count (and location) of one particular keyword. I don't believe I'm 'stuffing' on any one given page, but we seem to be being penalized on this one keyword so I'm wondering we're considered to be 'stuffing' across the domain. It's just a popular product line for us, so between categories, products, accessories etc. it appears a lot.

What is the best way to search across my entire sub domain for a keyword? Any good tools out there?

This is likely just a lag issue. I have found GWT's to be very, very slow at reflecting changes such as links that were there and are not anymore. There may have been a link there the last time that page was crawled and GWT just hasn't crawled since the link was removed.

Only us, and the other websites which are ranking well for the same brand are competitors with us across many other brands, product types etc. where we are very competitive against those sites, and are ranked higher on most of the other key words/phrases.

Overall our SEO efforts have worked well, slow and steady increases in rankings across the board for all products and categories, EXCEPT for one particular brand name. Key words and phrases for that brand consistently under perform all other key words and phrases. Strategies etc. are the same, and we have not received any notifications about 'manual action' but I'm convinced there is something affecting our ranking on that brand. This has been going on for approximately two years, prior to that we ranked very well for this brand.

What sorts of tests can I run to try and find the problem?

For several of our keywords we have two listings on page 1 of the SERP's, both pages on the same domain. It's the "top"
 level category and than sub category within that top level category. Ideally, we could condense and have just the one result, at a higher position in the SERP. I thought Google would eventually do this for us as I've seen in the past, but it's been a few years now and still hasn't happened. Any suggestions?

I've been using the Google tool and going page by page, everything seems great. But I'd really like something that will crawl the entire subdomain and give me a report. Any suggestions?

We have a domain which was optimized for a specific keyword. It does very well for that keyword, but seems like it has in turn caused our primary domain to be penalized (back to page 3) for that same keyword (We think they've figured out the connection).

The optimized domain (only one page) has links on it to our primary domain, so I don't want to delete it as that's where our traffic currently comes from. But if I deleted it and 301'ed it to the primary domain is there a downside?

Alternatively I could disavow it, but if the search engines know it's the same owner will they hold that against all domains?

Or, alternatively again. Should I turn it into a more substantial website? Which could in turn remove it's "spamminess".

Any suggestions are welcomed!

There is a website that OSE has identified with a spam score of 5, it back links to me with a very specific key word. How important is it to have them remove those links?

Also, how important is the "historical" link profile? When I check my current link profile, it's still not great. But not nearly as bad the historical profile shows (I don't think). Thanks again!

Doh. We still rank well with most of our keywords, I'm wondering if we're on borrowed time then. Do you think we would be better off removing any incoming links from domains within our "link network"?

I've come to the conclusion Google is definitely penalizing me for the keword "sensaphone" and I cannot figure out why. I've checked back links etc. and I don't see anything that would raise a flag. We rate very well in Bing etc. for the same keyword, but in Google SERP's will be on the 3rd or later page. Our domain is - www.absoluteautomation.com - any ideas?

Awesome, thanks Ryan. How would I add "private, max-age=600" as code? Is there I can line I can put in the tags to show every image on that page should have that cache rule?

I've been getting mixed reviews on this and I'm trying to figure out whether this is something I should be concerned with. We have a higher than recommended amount of code, relative to "content" but not by a crazy amount.

Thanks!

Thanks Ryan,

They are URL's that we would like to have indexed, so any visitor could find them. They don't change often, but if a SKU for example changes, the cart automatically changes the URL to match the new SKU, but does not generate a 301. I'll look into this, thanks for the tip.

Ocassionally the URL for a product on our website will change. The shopping cart does NOT automatically create a 301 for the old URL to the new one. So in WMT the old URL's will appear as Not Found errors (even though all links in the cart automatically update, so there are no broken links within the cart).

These issues always sort themselves out with some time, but still disconcerting. Is this a major issue? Thanks!

Thank you, that was what I thought.

On my site "example.com" I have set up the following in the header:

The problem is that the tags are universal across the site, so every page has these tags, leading obviously to no return tag errors. I.e. the page www.example.ca/testing.html still has the tags:

Not tags with "testing.html" in them. How bad is this? Does it matter?

Hi Ryan,

Thanks! Unfortunately with our cart platform it is very difficult to add snippets, if there any meta information we could add to the header to accomplish the same thing?

This site - http://www.niagarafaucets.com/KRAUS-KBU10-p/kbu10.htm - is using the same platform as us, and has accomplished this. But I cannot not figure out how, I don't them reference currency or use "CAD" anywhere in their code to show currency.

I.e. This product - http://www.absoluteautomation.ca/fgd400-sensaphone400-p/fgd400.htm - shows up as USD in the SERP. (In the US it just won't show a currency, if Canada it will show USD on the SERP).

My pricing is all in CAD, how can I tell Google this? (It knows pricing is CAD in my Google Product Listings/Merchant Center).

Thanks!

Hi I did, this URL - https://www.google.ca/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#safe=off&q=absoluteautomation.ca%2C fgd400 - hows what I mean.

Because I'm Canada and browsing it shows US in the SERP listings

Hi, I'm having a problem with Google SERP results showing my currency as USD, when it should be CAD. An example of a page with this problem is - http://www.absoluteautomation.ca/fgd400-sensaphone400-p/fgd400.htm - can anyone see where Google is getting USD from on there? I don't see it anywhere in the coding. Thanks in advance!

I believe I've properly targeted, and told Google that our website absoluteautomation.com is aimed at US residents, while the .ca domain targets Canadian. However our .com domain routinely appears above our .ca when searching in Canada (actually on a physical computer in Canada) on google.ca. I'm hoping I can fix this both to improve Canadian search results, and I'm assuming that whatever is making .com appear so well in Canada is hurting it on the US side.

Any ideas?

Awesome thanks Linda, any thoughts than as to why WMT is listing these pages as being considered "duplicates"?

Hey everyone,

We've got an issue where our current shopping cart provider (Volusion) allows us to use canonical and rel="alternate" links, however the canonical links are forced on our Desktop as well as mobile pages. When they should only be on the mobile pages. You can view what I mean at the below two pages:

http://www.absoluteautomation.ca/fgd400-sensaphone400-p/fgd400.htm

https://www.absoluteautomation.ca/mobile/Product.aspx?ProductCode=FGD400

Does anyone have any ideas in terms of working around this?

Hey everyone,

For the URL - http://www.absoluteautomation.ca/dakota-alert-dcpa-p/dkdcpa2500.htm - I have the following tags in the header:

rel="canonical" href="http://www.absoluteautomation.ca/dakota-alert-dcpa-p/dkdcpa2500.htm" />

rel="alternate" media="only screen and (max-width: 640px)" href="http://www.absoluteautomation.ca/mobile/Product.aspx?id=37564" />

Yes Google WMT is reading these as duplicate pages with duplicate titles, meta descriptions etc.

How can I fix this? Thanks!

Hi, we've recently changed shopping cart platforms. In doing so a lot of our URL's changed, but I 301'ed all of the significant landing pages (as determined by G Analytics) prior to the switch.

However, WMT is warning me about this spike in server errors now with all the pages that no longer exist. However they are only crawling them because they used to exist/are linked from pages that used to exist. and no longer actually exist.

Is this something I should worry about? Or let it run its course?

Thanks Irving. When you say stuffing the blog and knowledgebase tags. Do you mean stuffing on specific blog or knowledgebase article pages? Thanks!

Hi Oleg, yes it's - http://www.absoluteautomation.com/sensaphone-400-fgd0400/ - with the keyphrase being "Sensaphone 400"

For example, having a link on many pages (so dozens of links in total) using a product name, all pointing to that product page. Could Google see that as "spammy" and penalize that product page in the SERP's?

Note: My product page has been penalized for the search term "Product Name" and there are no external links pointing that page using the product name as a term. This is new with the latest Panda Updates.

Hi Mike,

Thanks for the response, the old structure was pretty flexible it's just "/productname.aspx " or really whatever keywords we wanted, but ending in .aspx.

The new structure is not as flexible, it is - "/productname-p/keyword.htm" and categories are "/categoryname/categoryIDnumber.htm"

So I don't think there's going to be anyway to automate this and we're looking at a few hundred products and a few dozen categories. Is there a downside to having that many 301 redirects?

This applies to our product and category pages. What is the best way to limit the impact of this?

I.e. I switch shopping carts and every page has the same path/name but now ends in .php instead of .htm.

Our E-Commerce company has an abundance of surplus items, refurbished items etc. from returns. It isn't worth spending any time making the product listings, but it would be nice to sell them from our site. I'm worried that in creating these almost "empty" product listings Google will view these pages all as duplicate pages, or pages without unique content because they will really just be an empty, standardized page on the cart with limited text. Even though in reality for customers looking for deals they are very useful pages to get deals, any tips on how to do this?

(We can't justify creating unique pages because most of the offers are "one offs" where once we sell one product we are done with that listing.)

Using some rules to block all pages which start with "copy-of" on my website because people have a bad habit of duplicating new product listings to create our refurbished, surplus etc. listings for those products. To avoid Google seeing these as duplicate pages I've blocked them in the robot file, but of course they are still automatically generated in our sitemap. How bad is this?

We've dropped rankings across the board in Google, not severely but 1 and 2 spot drops and yet increased in rankings in Bing and Yahoo on the same keywords (basically all of them). Is this the sign of a new bad incoming link?

The dilemma here of course is that the stores will be very similar in content, with the domains only being different in that the store targeting the US will be a .com domain and the Canadian store is a .ca domain.

We currently own a .com domain name, but the .ca is already taken. We're looking at setting up a Canadian ecommerce store, how important is it to have the store on a .ca domain as opposed to a .com? We can always set it up on the .com and attempt to optimize to Canada but in the long run are we shooting ourselves in the foot? Thanks!

We are in a position to purchase a domain, made of relevant keywords to our company with a current page ranking of 4 for their home page. However in looking at their analytics and other information they do not do well on significant keywords and have very low site traffic. In fact they do very, very poorly.

With their high page ranking would it be relatively easy to conduct a successful SEO campaign on the domain if we were to take it over as our own and attempt to climb in the SERP's? I know Page Rank doesn't mean everything when it comes to your ranking, but 4 is relatively high in our field, so I don't really understand why they do so poorly when it comes to their actual rankings on key words.

Hi, thanks for your response! Another issue we had was that when we switched carts we were actually able to condense our site, merge some pages which were related together into single pages. So we 301'ed the extra pages into the new condensed page which had the information from all of the current pages in it. Any chance that could have hurt our SERP's?

Our shopping cart automatically generates the URL for each product using keywords from the product titles, because of this EVERY TIME we change titles etc. the URL changes and a 301 is automatically generated. On a site with only about 550 pages in our sitemap and for indexing we have about 550 301 redirects. Does anyone know how google handles this? This seems like a terrible ratio of 301's to indexed pages. But I don't know if Google cares about this or not.

Does anyone know if there are any  advantages or disadvantages to going with the extended vs normal SSL seals in terms of SEO work?

Do you know of a better way for a company to do this? The content essentially has to be identical, but at the same time the shipping policies, pricing etc. has to be different because one is only for Canadian residents and one is only for American.

The problem is they are the same company, selling the same products. Just the different Canadian and American pricing, slightly different information etc. So the sites are very similar. I'm worried that one (or both) are being penalized for this. Is there anyway I can tell Google they are the same company so it is ok that they are nearly identical? For example I wouldn't care if the .ca domain never appeared in Google.com and would never care if the .com Domain never appeared in google.ca.

Or is there a better way to handle this?

We have two sites, both English language. One is a .ca and the other is a .com, I am worried that they are hurting one another in the search results. I'd like to obviously direct google.ca towards the .ca domain and .com towards the .com domain and let Google know they are connected sites, non-competing.

Hi Oleg,

Thanks for the advice. Both of our sites are in the English language though, we'd really just like Google to know they are the same company and not competing sites. How can we do that?