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Hi Miriam

The other aspect of this that got me thinking when I saw the update was around multiple sites for the same business. I have seen this in several niches where the same business has 2 or 3 different websites ranking on page 1 for their main term. Each of these sites has unique content etc however they are all linked via the same address. I have been waiting for Google to resolve this issue as it is technically a doorway page unique just more sophisticated. It wouldn't be hard for them to devalue a site if they see it ranking well and it is the same business as another site ranking.

I wonder if they will deal with this issue in this update.

Hi Eric

It sounds like Google will only affect websites only on Google's mobile listings. So rankings on the desktop version of Google should be unaffected. They are doing this purely from a user experience perspective and are devaluing sites that aren't mobile ready for users on a mobile device,.

From the research I have done I would say they are worth it. The external links in Wikipedia are nofollow however I have seen reason to believe that Google still counts links from Wikipedia. This test is a few years old now so it may have changed but this is what I found.

I built a new site on a new domain for a client that was a local restaurant. Once the site was live it gathered a couple of links all very small in terms of pagerank value. The site sat at PR0 for over a year.

Some time after that the site was listed on the villages Wikipedia page as an external link (of course no followed). The wikipedia page itself was a PR3. After the next PR toolbar update my clients site received a PR2 update.

From that I knew fully well that there was no other links pointing to the site that would have affected this. Since that day I have always assumed that Google pushed value to sites linked from Wikipedia followed or no followed. But as I say, this test is about 4-5 years years old now.

Hope this helps.

Hi Nevil

Google does support cross domain canonical tags as they announced here: here http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.htm

However I am not sure this is the best strategy for you. When you use a canonical tag you are basically telling Google not to index that page but the one in the canonical tag instead. If Google listens to this it means your job pages will not be indexed in Google.

The better strategy for this would be similar to Indeed's where you take a snippet of the job, add your own unique content to the page and then have the call to action button link to the original job itself. This should give that page the best chance to rank.

Indeed is a tough example to use. They are pretty much number 1 for every job related term with a site that is extremely thin. I believe Google has listed this site similar to Wikipedia where it is a credible source for jobs and they give it additional weight. How fair Google is being here has been a long debate of mine

I hope this helps

I have had a very quick look at your link profile and it seems there are 2 major issues.

1. You anchor text profile is over optimised for commercial terms, this looks unnatural to Google and is usually what algorithmic updates such as Google Penguin look for to reduce a sites rankings.

2. A lot of your links seem to be forum profiles, this is an old and quite spammy way of building links to a site. These types of links used to work to gain rankings but with recent advancements and updates in Google these can actually harm your site.

I would recommend to look at all the links pointing to your site, look closely at what links are unnatural and attempt to get them removed. As well as this I would recommend submitting these unnatural links to the Google Disavow Tool in your Webmaster Tools account.

Hi Alex

Looking at your link profile the anchor texts of your links look over optimised. I would almost certainly say these are causing issues with your site and could be a reason why your site isn't ranking for those key terms.

Before looking at investing time and money into changing the architecture of the site. I would look into analysing all links pointing to your site and see if you can get some of the unnatural links removed. Then give Google time to notice the change.

I hope this helps.

Adam

AS Alberto says you are pretty much correct in your implementation however I just want to check a couple of things.

If you are looking to get authorship set up you do not really need to set up rel=publisher so lets leave that part for a moment. If you want the homepage to have authorship simply put rel=author on the homepage linking to the correct Google Plus account. I assume you have done this part.

The next part is to go to the Google Plus account and make sure that on your profile you have added your eCommerce site in the "Contribute to" section. This creates the link and will start the authorship markup and it should appear in SERPs.

If you want to double check that authorship is working correctly then use the Google Structured Data testing tool here and enter your sites URL. This will let you know.

Hope this helps.

HI Jean-Francois

I would try to keep you sitemap as clean as possible. But could you export all the data into a CSV and clean up the pages using a formula. If you got a full list of your URLs in column A in Excel. Then used the following formula

=LEFT(A1,Find("ref=",A1)-1)

Put this formula into cell B1 and drag the formula down all the rows. This should strip out all of the parameters you do not want. Then simply remove the duplicates and you have your list of URLs to create a clean sitemap.

Let me know if this helps.

Hi, I would say the best way to answer this is to look at a general news site such as the BBC here in the UK. They have a huge domain the covers hundreds of topics. There is no way this site will have an overall relevance on the domain yet the links it provides will still provide a huge benefit. With this in mind, in your situation I wouldn't worry to much about the relevance of the domain. It is more around the relevance of the topic of the content itself.

In your case, I am assuming that the link you are referring to will be the author bio link at the bottom of the page. In this case I wouldn't concern yourself too much on the strength of this link. Ultimately it will be fairly low as in context links tend to get the most benefit if we are talking pure SEO here. By all means I think you should continue writing on the blog as it is in your field of expertise but make sure you are doing it to build your own personal brand and not  just for the sake of the link.

Hi Shawn,

In theory it's possible, but it's pretty difficult and can take an awful lot of optimisation.  As well as who else is bidding, Google take into account your quality score.  You'll need to optimise your quality score a lot by having very relevant keywords, ads, and landing pages and segment everything down into a lot of ad groups to have any chance.  Then you'll need to achieve a high CTR, have low competition and constantly optimise everything (taking out low performing keywords, adjusting ad copy etc).

It can be a long road, but in theory you can get there - by following the above though you will in theory continually drive your costs down, so whilst you may never get to $0.01 you may get closer than you are now!

Hope that helps

Hi Jeroen

I would look more into making sure the URLs are kept fairly short and friendly. I wouldn't expect a huge SEO impact from this, I would look more into the question "does including the brand name in the URL improve usability for my visitors?". Maybe you have several "ProductA" all by different brands? If this is the case then yes I would include the brand name in the URL.

If you are selling only BrandX products on your store and nothing else then I would not bother putting in the brand name as you are already including the brand in your main site URL. Having it twice could make the URL look at bit keyword stuffed.

Hope this helps.

Adam

Hi there,

We may be able to help - we're www.datify.co.uk, a UK based agency.

Be great to chat more on this.

Thanks,

Hi George

It looks like most of it has been covered here but I thought I would mention a fairly simple way to do this sort of site migration. Firstly I would assume the all title tags, meta descriptions and h1 tags will be the identical to the site transitions. Understandably the URL structure may change slightly.

The number one thing is to make sure that that redirect strategy for the entire site is done correctly. This may mean crawling the entire old site using Screaming Frog to then map out exactly what URL will be redirected to what in the new site. Then your developers can structure this into redirects on the site. Depending on how many pages there are this may need tweaking to make sure there are not too many rules created to redirect the site.

In terms of making sure that each page is setup correctly from an on page point of view, this would be a very large task to accomplish. I am just typing out loud now but you could do the following:

• In Google Analytics export the top 100 (or larger depending traffic coming into your site).
• Export the rankings data that these pages are bringing traffic for organically (this will be difficult now not provided is the majority of organic keyword data but you may have historic data in GA that could help with this).
• Using the highest converting keyword for each page, use a tool such as the Moz onpage grader to fully check the page for any on page issues and an overall grade. You can then run the Moz on page checker on the new dev site and see if the grade is the same. If it is not then make the recommended changes to meet the checklist.

This is by no means an automated system but at least it is running each page using the highest converting keyword on the traffic bringing in the most traffic. This is the best way I can see this happening, it still isn't fully accurate as it is only checking the highest converting keywords but with the page potentially bringing in traffic from so many keywords it is very difficult to automate this fully.

But really the best thing to make sure is:

• The redirect strategy is bulletproof to ensure all backlinks are redirected to the new site.
• The title, meta and content is copied across so it is blatant to Google that the redirect is in the correct place.

I hope this help.

This will eventually stop the pages being indexed yes. It may take several days in some cases but they will go.

Were these subdomains duplicates of your main domain? If so you could try 301 redirecting them as this could speed the process up.

You could start by optimising the homepage for those terms and track the rankings from there.

Focus on optimising the title tag to include those keywords, looking at the content of the homepage I would say that is fine for now.

From this see what movements in rankings you get. If you still get very little movement you will have to look into starting a campaign to attract some links to your site to further help movement. For this it may be worth contacting a professional to assist on how to go about this.

Let me know how you get on.

Hi Elihn

You could block this page from search engines so that they no longer index the page. There are 2 main ways of doing this:

1. You can block the page using a meta tag.

2. You can block the page using the robots.txt file in the root of your website.

Let me know if any of this helps.

Most cases like these are catered for on an adhoc basis, usually done by a dev team that will migrate the entire database into the new site.

There could well be a market for a porting tool that provides a checklist type system for a large scale site migration. I have seen site migrations go wrong. A lot of revenue can be lost through the plummet of organic traffic from a failed migration.

If you re concerned about that then I would look at ranking the deeper page at something that is longer tail and lower competition. This should then allow your homepage to rank. Best thing is to test and measure the results.

Hi Elihn

Yes it would stop that particular URL ranking and you would lose the traffic. Apologies, I assumed from your post that the organic data from that URL was causing issues and you did not want it indexed. I thought there may be a URL parameter you could block that URL and leave the original URL you want to rank in Google's index.

If you like you can PM me the URL and I can have a closer look.

Adam

Just to confirm what my findings discovered, it showed that Wikipedia does (or at least did then) actually provide value from an SEO sense. The external links are indeed nofollow however Google could be wavering the nofollow status of those links because of the fact it is "Wikipedia".