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Yup hootsuite isn't the right tool for you there.
You CAN use hootsuite to track hashtags and mentions on both Facebook and Twitter, but you can't track things like follower growth, interaction and other key metrics.
The tools you'd be looking for are things like socialbro, or fanpagekarma - they track this information and do competition comparisons.
In all honesty people worry far too much about the duplicate content rule. Duplicate content is primarily for content sites and only penalized on a large scale.
In your case not only is the about page one that you likely aren't hoping to get ranked, but it's such a small factor that I doubt it will come into play.
Your inbound marketing strategy is likely to be much more than SEO traffic in fact I'd be willing to bed that a good 60%+ of your traffic is direct and/or social. In such a case as long as users are able to find the information they need on the site (and ultimately convert to bookings keeping the end-client happy and cash flowing) then I wouldn't worry about the "About Us" page.
Remember two things:
1. Put the customer experience first and everything else is gravy.
2. A good business (and good marketing) is a bigger picture than just SEO these days. Focus on what traffic origin makes sense for you and make sure they can access the information they need.
Here's what Matt Cutts had to say on the issue:
http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-duplicate-content-wont-hurt-you-unless-it-is-spammy-167459
Your doing everything right in clearing your cookies and making sure you are logged out of your Google account.
To change your search location simply click on the "search tools" button and you should see your city. If you click on that city you'll be able to enter another location and switch between them.
I agree with you that a 301 is better than a single on site link, but 301'ing the entire site at the homepage level will result in all his competitors pages being deindexed and only passing the value of the domain not the internal pages.
While that may have made sense previously he stands not only to get more SEO value from redirecting internal pages to their equivalent on his site but FAR more inbound marketing value as even if people find his competitors site (which will still be indexed) the internal services pages are redirected to his pages.
He isn't trying to redirect he does want both pages.
Also canonical sitewide is problematic unless you add a customized conditional at the PHP level. He has a wordpress site and can't edit the raw HTML of every page so he needs to have a PHP string at the global level which changes based on page variables.
Sometimes there is absolute nonsense when it comes to topics surrounding "the passing of link juice". You need to remember that:
A) Link juice isn't one set thing but rather a quick name given to the overall sphere of influence from an external website
and
B) Link Juice isn't on or off like a switch but rather in varying degrees.
Personally I would 301 any page that ranks for a keyword to your internal page that you wish to rank for that same keyword. One of the most important things for Google is deliverable intent. For example in the mobile search market plenty of websites redirect users on mobile to the mobile version of their site. But if the clicked moz.com/article.html rather than get directed to m.moz.com/article.html they are just redirected to m.moz.com and fail to hit their intent. This causes a devaluation and an increase in bounce rates.
You want people searching for keywords to still find your solutions. So 301ing the entire site to your homepage is a bad idea. However, if you 301 a page that ranks for "LinkedIn SEO" to your page on linkedin SEO you are keeping the value in the same intent and niche and delivering the user to what they want.
While on the main page of your competitor you should leave it up and put a note of the acquisition/merger but still keep the site structure and links to the pages you have 301'd so if a spider or person comes to your competitor site and clicks "services" they are 301'd to your services.
While this is a lot more work it's going to ensure you maintain their old value, increase your value and keep a flow of new customers coming your way from search results. It's well worth it!
I don't want to post the same answer as I did to your previous question but perhaps there was further clarification that you needed, that I missed!
Put a conditional in the header. Since you are using a wordpress platform you can't go in and manually edit each pages canonical anyway. Using the page if function and a variable you would be able to assign each one it's own rel= from a central head file anyway.
In an ideal situation you'd do each page manually but because of your CMS you need to do a work around
If you check out Rand's Intro to SEO slideshare (http://www.slideshare.net/randfish/introduction-to-seo-5003433) slide 46 and 47 talk about URL structure and specifically sub-domains.
As Rob said you do want to sub-folder structures and avoid sub-domains. Hopefully you are old enough to remember when websites like lycos.com were big and people could make their own websites. These were all hosted on subdomains like moz.tripod.lycos.com and because of this structure search engines needed to see subdomains as separate websites. For this reason they have separate grading, change the flow of link juice and can easily count as duplicate content.
Sub-domains are best utilized for information that is distinct enough. Like in the moz example Rands personal blog could theoretically sit at rand.moz.com as its a separate theme, different content, etc it would just loose out on the flow of value.
Once again Rob is right about using 301 redirects to move your subdomains into folders.
Now moving on to the more specific nature of your question "Are fourth level sub-domains any worse than third level sub-domains" I am going to suggest that when asking such a question you've already lost a big chunk of the SEO/inbound marketing battle.
The question you are framing is "I know it isn't good - but is it any worse?" Well even if it's not any worse you already know that it's not great and you should be taking structural steps to build on a sites accessibility, user functionality and it's SEO. If you find yourself asking "Is X any worse?" "How bad is Y?" "Can I get away with Z?" then you should immediately stop pursuing that idea and try and find a different method.
In this case that method is sub-folders and a 301 migration, but remember the framing of your questions and your over all directional strategy need to change to really drive home your campaigns!
Since you are using wordpress you won't have individual pages in your FTP. The only way you could edit something into the individual pages would be each posts edit page on the CMS. However, I don't know if doing that would work since its technically beneath the head.
And yes the canonical redirect can be done in the general header, although personally I would load it as a php IF criteria. In other words you add it to the general header but tell it only to load that if i t is on one of these /en pages. That way you don't have the canonical applied to other pages you actually want, or the main page that it is directing too as that would cause an odd loop for the spiders that I doubt they would respond positively too.
Here you can find a quick sample of working with the PHP if page criteria: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7997016/if-this-page-show-this-else-show-this
Good luck!
The others are right Google analytics can not hurt your SEO; however, what it can do is provide some pretty effective reporting on factors than can hurt/improve your SEO.
More and more SEO is becoming about user experience, things like CTR, Bounce Rate and Time on Site matter as crucial factors in your quality and authority scores in Googles eyes.
Google Analytics will allow you to identify areas of user experience weakness, improve them and increase your ranking in the long term. While many people will tell you it doesn't matter if you have GA it infact can make a huge, and positive difference.
There certainly should be much of an impact in your ranking. However there are a couple things worth considering in this matter:
-Location value: If you are a working on a campaign that is focused on a specific international region then having an IP from that country can be beneficial in the eyes of some search engines in regards to local searches
-Link Value: You'll also want to make sure that you aren't switching to a shared IP which hosts websites that are linking to you already - while in all honesty something that would be extremely rare, if it were the case it would likely lead to the devaluation of those links
-IP History: It's also important to know that you aren't moving to a digital neighborhood that's known in the search engines eyes for housing spam. Think about it like sharing your identity, you wouldn't want someone under your name giving talks about illicit topics. Look up your neighbors with a reverse IP lookup tool such as yougetsignal.com before making the jump.
All in all you likely won't see a big impact from switching your IP address - you just want to do a little due diligence to insure that your new digital home is one that's squeaky clean before moving in!
Cheers,
Adam
If you have a lot of duplicate content (or overlapping content) on the same server it may not be a penalty but Google simply lowering the value of the properties due to a lack of uniqueness.
Make sure as you rid of old domains you are 301 redirecting back to the main site and continue to simplify your site and consolidate it into single landing pages. Also make sure none of these old sites are inter-linking in any method other than a 301 redirect as that would have a negative impact on your SEO.
In a way I wouldn't worry too much - it's kind of what you want a push in the right direction long term. If you are going to have secondary websites they need to be unique enough (by the nature of intent) to actually warrant their on place in the search engines. If you are really just having a slightly different spin to the same intent and content each time then Google is going to continue to lower the value of the sites across the board.
I've had the same thing happen to me with old clients that started back in the day that owning multiple domains made sense, a lot of them dropped off and the clients freaked. We streamlined the content into unique and hyper targeted landing pages and 301'd the old domains - within a few weeks not only were we back up and running but we were simply crushing our competition. We shot up in SEO across the board, our traffic was up almost 30% and our users were converting at a higher rate due to ease of use.
Think about it from the user perspective and you'll always win, streamline it, make it easy, make it accessible and the rankings WILL come. (Well worth reading Cyrus' post about that mantra: http://moz.com/blog/seo-satisfaction)
The disavow tool should not be your first result and it isn't a magic fix all button.
Before using the disavow tool you are expected to try and reach out to webmasters and make manual link removal requests to try and remove as many negative links as possible before using the disavow tool. After all you can't expect Google to just batch dump all the data it sees for your site otherwise their penalties would be worthless.
After that disavow the links, be honest and open in why the links are there and what caused them. If you are lying about it it will be pretty obvious and your disavow likely won't get granted; and if you have been doing something shady that wasn't yet caught it will be when your site is reviewed.
All in all if you have a clean white-hat campaign and have come under some link spam flack then using the disavow tool will be helpful. It's helped a few of my clients survive competitive negative SEO - however, sometimes this simply isn't enough. It won't fix everything, it won't remove all your links and it won't help against any manual penalties.
Once you've cleaned up as much as you can, and ensure you are employing white-hat SEO methods and have your facts in order give it a whirl and hope for the best. That's how the disavow tool plays out.
Hey Mker,
Here are a few things to consider:
You are in a sector that is hit pretty hard with an authority domain (Zazzle), you have to remember that the closer to the authority source a link is the more value it holds. Perhaps even opening up a Zazzle shop with an external link, or trying to get some craft blogs to write about your service could be some very valuable routes.
Integrate the product schema (http://schema.org/Product) not only will it help your SEO rankings but it's sure to boost your CTR and conversion rates simply because of the additional visual stimuli
Do some detailed keyword analysis, perhaps they keywords you are fighting for simply aren't the right fit for you. Try finding a number of easier ones that have smaller traffic but by grabbing a few of them you could equal the traffic of a more challenging word
Consider further segmenting your products so that you can have pages that target specific keywords - just like too many cooks spoil the stew, too many keywords spoil the SEO. If it makes sense to split your products and optimize your pages give it a whirl
SEO isn't the only strategy, consider inbound marketing some PPC ads or a Facebook fan page running a promotion make work wonders at the holiday season. Believe it or not even if you were ranking first organically some users would still only ever click the ads, and users that are ad shoppers are far higher when it comes to converting.
Off-site is going to be key in such a competitive industry, but far to many people make the mistake of trying to go for big high-quality links and as many as they can muster. Remember Google sees everything and hates SEO their main goal is to find sites that naturally and organically gain authority across the internet. When considering such things you may want to look at what seems reasonable for your industry. Appearing on popular mum blogs, craft blogs and holiday blogs or forums would be your best bet. If suddenly you had a ton of wikipedia links it would likely seem a little sketchy!
Watch out for any SEO now a days who doesn't talk about inbound marketing and buyer personas. SEO as a tactic is a dying breed, SEO is now a part of a much larger strategy - and the key reason why SEOmoz is now Moz. People who talk to they are blue in the face about building you links and optimizing your on page are likely to hurt you in the long run. Take the time to invest in someone who is going to give you a holistic and complete approach to inbound marketing. When the user is happy, Google is happy and ranks are high!
Last but not least use a tool like ahrefs and scan for sketchy links, maybe despite all your hard work something is dragging you down. Try and contact those webmasters of any spammy links you may have to get them removed, and if worst comes to worst try the Google disavow tool
Oh and PS don't forget a site map, eCommerce and a beautiful sitemap with product schema markup is sure to be a great hit!
When ever we talk site structure I love to refer to Rand's Intro SEO slideshare (http://www.slideshare.net/randfish/introduction-to-seo-5003433) slides 46 & 47 in this case if I remember correctly.
The basic mantra to remember is that when it comes to URL's - keep it simple.
Google loves simple, clean and meaningful URLs and dropping the .aspx extension should actually serve as a plus long term. While Google may initially rank the old page depending on its indexing and crawls just make sure that the .aspx pages are re-directing with 301 redirects (not 302) and eventually they should swap out entirely.
In all the years I've worked in SEO I've only ever seen sites improve their ranking by cleaning their URL's like this. Just make sure to 301 and you're all set!
Hi Megahn,
You don't have a small task in front of you so I am going to break down a number of steps and suggestions that will hopefully guide you through this process.
1. Consider your CPC and Positioning - While you didn't mention it, there is the possibility that due to the economic regions you are targeting that your ads are either more costly or simply more competitive (via QualityScore) compare your average position of the ads in these countries with ads in other countries. This may be where a lot of your discrepancy comes from. If your ads are at a lower position consider doing what you can to improve your QualityScore.
2. Consider linguistic differences - One of the more challenging concepts for many PPC campaign coordinators to grasp is the HUGE impact of linguistic changes in your ad copy. Things that preform well in one region may not perform as well in another simply due to cultural bias, or linguistic nuance. Use the Google Keyword Tool Keyword Planner (https://adwords.google.com/ko/KeywordPlanner/Home?__c=9069233028&__u=4674907968&__o=kt) and target each of your regions individually, run a number of searches (and search suggestions) on those geographic locations to see the difference between how users search for your service in those countries as opposed to the ones you are performing well in. Consider modifying your ad copy to match this.
3. Service Discovery - Another thing to remember is that in each part of the world people discover services differently. While in some places people Google search for a plumber, others may still just instinctively use the yellow pages. Check to see the differences in the amount of search traffic you have between the countries you are performing well in and the western countries where you aren't. Consider in regards to your service if another strategy may be worth while.
4. Conversion Opportunity - The countries you are discussing are a little more challenging to convert. They expect a more professional looking website, detailed contact information and a well laid out service guide and pricing information before buying. If you are seeing traffic but it isn't converting the same it may be worth while reaching out to individuals in these regions and working through some site useability testing.
When going through these steps the problem should become clearer to you - if you still don't know what to do about the problem once identified (or once you have more data but aren't sure what the problem is) I encourage you to reply to this thread and I'll continue to do what I can to help walk you through this process.
Since you are using wordpress you won't have individual pages in your FTP. The only way you could edit something into the individual pages would be each posts edit page on the CMS. However, I don't know if doing that would work since its technically beneath the head.
And yes the canonical redirect can be done in the general header, although personally I would load it as a php IF criteria. In other words you add it to the general header but tell it only to load that if i t is on one of these /en pages. That way you don't have the canonical applied to other pages you actually want, or the main page that it is directing too as that would cause an odd loop for the spiders that I doubt they would respond positively too.
Here you can find a quick sample of working with the PHP if page criteria: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7997016/if-this-page-show-this-else-show-this
Good luck!
If you check out Rand's Intro to SEO slideshare (http://www.slideshare.net/randfish/introduction-to-seo-5003433) slide 46 and 47 talk about URL structure and specifically sub-domains.
As Rob said you do want to sub-folder structures and avoid sub-domains. Hopefully you are old enough to remember when websites like lycos.com were big and people could make their own websites. These were all hosted on subdomains like moz.tripod.lycos.com and because of this structure search engines needed to see subdomains as separate websites. For this reason they have separate grading, change the flow of link juice and can easily count as duplicate content.
Sub-domains are best utilized for information that is distinct enough. Like in the moz example Rands personal blog could theoretically sit at rand.moz.com as its a separate theme, different content, etc it would just loose out on the flow of value.
Once again Rob is right about using 301 redirects to move your subdomains into folders.
Now moving on to the more specific nature of your question "Are fourth level sub-domains any worse than third level sub-domains" I am going to suggest that when asking such a question you've already lost a big chunk of the SEO/inbound marketing battle.
The question you are framing is "I know it isn't good - but is it any worse?" Well even if it's not any worse you already know that it's not great and you should be taking structural steps to build on a sites accessibility, user functionality and it's SEO. If you find yourself asking "Is X any worse?" "How bad is Y?" "Can I get away with Z?" then you should immediately stop pursuing that idea and try and find a different method.
In this case that method is sub-folders and a 301 migration, but remember the framing of your questions and your over all directional strategy need to change to really drive home your campaigns!
I'm sure you've heard the saying "If you build it they will come" - it's a famous movie quote (I want to say Field of Dreams, but I can't quite remember off the top of my head), but more importantly it's a great mantra to build off of for SEO.
When you are trying too hard to improve your rankings you are going to fail. The most important thing you can do to improve your SEO is improve your site for your users. Google will identify your poor grammar stuffing time and time again - and let me tell you that's going to hurt you in the long run.
If you are a golf store in leeds then make sure you have an address in your footer including your city name, make sure your business is listed (and verified) on Google Places (<cite>www.google.com/local/add/</cite>) and if you have a trusted and notable business listing directory in your area like YellowPages make sure your business is listed with their digital directory. (Do NOT ever take the time to list on directories that aren't big notable companies it will actually have a negative impact)
Next it may be worthwhile implementing the Local Business schema markup (found here: http://schema.org/LocalBusiness) or schema events as they geotag as well (http://schema.org/Event)
Other than that keep your content organic, focus on your visitors needs, don't try and stuff in keywords and hit percents it all looks unnatural. Focus on getting your users the website they want to see and your CTR, Time on Site, and Bounce metrics should alter in a positive fashion lending themselves to a bit of an SEO boost anyway.
To stray away from the SEO and get a little inbound it's worth while to set up a Facebook profile with website and address information for your business as well, not only driving traffic but giving you more locational and social authority.
If you've already reached out to them asking them to remove these and had no luck, and you've seen a negative impact on your site it may be time to use the Google disavow tool.
However I wouldn't actually take the time to do this unless it is negatively impacting your site. Google understands that you don't control the links that go to your site, and as part of sites organic growth and sharing pattern you will certainly see occasional spammy links. If they weren't links you created, and they really were spammier blogs simply picking up your copy then I doubt you have anything to worry about.
Obviously if this is a botched blackhat SEO campaign it will be noticeable in the anchors, property times and property relations and that will hurt you long term, but if you were also picked up by some legitimate good quality blogs I wouldn't fret too much about the spammy links.
