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"the plural seems to un-natural to fit in the content, or title"
In that case, I wouldn't use it. I can't speak for Portugese, but in English, in the last 2 or more years I can't remember any cases I've had where Google doesn't recognise the difference between plural and non-plural anyway.
What happens when you search for the keyword in plural? Do non-plural results show up? And vice-versa? Trying that out should help.
There's always a small amount of authority lost through a 301 redirect or canonical, but as long as you set the 301 redirects up correctly I wouldn't worry about it. It should benefit your site in the long-term.
I've overseen a few site migrations where unfriendly URLs (e.g. /product.php?id=1234) were replaced with friendly URLs (e.g. /category/product) and more often than not, immediately after the migration organic traffic and rankings remained consistent or improved. I think there was one where traffic and rankings dropped in the short-term but then recovered to a better level within a month.
If you go ahead with the URL change and 301 redirects, keep a crawl/record of your current website, then when you've completed the redirects, crawl the old URLs to see if they're redirecting as you expect. If they're not, fix them as quickly as you can.
I agree with Tom in terms of the URL structure and breadcrumb trail, though I am a fan of short URLs, so I'd shorten some of the category names when used in your URLs e.g.
/transport/air
instead of
/motors-and-transport/air-transport
Also be aware that
/transport/air
is different to
/transport/air/
It isn't wrong to use question marks in URLs.
However - as Thomas says, short and descriptive URLs describe what is on the page, whereas the query parameters you use currently don't. "Keyword present in the page's URL" was also believed to be an important ranking factor by the participants in Moz's Ranking Factors survey earlier this year: https://moz.com/search-ranking-factors/survey
By mirroring URLs, will each product then exist at 2 URLs? E.g.:
example.com/product.php?id=3624
and
example.com/category/product
If so, you don't want to do that as it creates duplicate content. Using canonical tags to fix the duplication doesn't solve the problem completely.
If you change URLs, you should 301 redirect the old to the new, so
example.com/product.php?id=3624
would 301 redirect to
example.com/category/product
Just in case you aren't aware - a "301" is a permanent redirect, so when using a permanent redirect, even if other websites have linked to example.com/product.php?id=3624 - the browser will automatically redirect to the new URL, passing most of the authority built up from the links you mentioned.
Whether I'd advise you to change the URLs of existing products depends on whether you can implement the redirects. In the short-term you'll lose a slight bit of link authority through the redirect, but in the longer-term, the frendlier URLs should benefit your website.
Also, there's always a risk when making large scale changes to URL structure - you need to make sure customers can still navigate the site without issues, and search engine crawlers understand the changes you've made - 301 redirects are best-practice to ensure this.
Ideally, when URLs are changed, all internal links should be updated.
" Launched in 2003, back then it wasn't such a bad idea to use keywords/tags in the URLs, so I did that." - it's not necessarily a bad idea now - I'd question why you feel the need to change them? Shorter is often better though.
If you do go ahead, 301 would be the best practice. Canonicals pass link juice too but they're not always honoured.
A couple of extra things - make sure to update all of your internal links to the new URLs as millions of 301s could negatively impact the speed of your server. And check a sample of the old URLs just to make sure everything is working as expected.
I would go with responsive. From experience, a separate mobile site might be easier to setup in the short-term but will cause more issues in the long-term (I haven't ever worked on anything like a video editing website, but I would imagine it wouldn't create many other issues).
Have you looked into why no one has purchased from a mobile device? I've seen conversion issues on mobile that don't impact the desktop version of websites - sometimes checkouts that don't work at all on mobile. But as you said, most of the traffic comes from desktop browsers so it could just be that.
Although separate mobile sites will still benefit from Google's mobile update (if they're mobile friendly), Google do recommend responsive over a separate site e.g. here in their starter guide: "Google recommends using RWD over other design patterns." https://developers.google.com/webmasters/mobile-sites/
There's also a useful white paper from Google here: http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en//intl/ALL_uk/think/multiscreen/pdf/multi-screen-consumer-whitepaper_research-studies.pdf
Nicknames are often put in quotation marks so you could just write James "Jim" Jones when introducing the person (title tag and h tag) and maybe the first occurrence of their name in the text. The most important thing is that and content reads naturally - if you wrote James "Jim" Jones whenever you referred to the person in a few paragraphs of text I doubt it would read naturally.
Depending on who they are, Google might even recognise them as the same person whatever version of the name is used.
I'm interested if it's just me that gets frustrated by this?
I've just Ctrl + clicked a few links to open them in separate tabs and then realised that none of them had opened. I know it's been like this for a while.
It's a usability issue as it goes against expected norms, and now I have to right-click and then click "Open in new tab" on each link, which is more time-consuming and frustrating.
More and more websites seem to be losing their Ctrl + click on links ability (JavaScript often breaks it). I don't know if there's a Mac equivalent...
Anyway, I hope that doesn't seem like I'm too angry. It just frustrates me a little and I hope it gets fixed. 
Edit - I've just realised these are getting blocked by Chrome's pop-up blocker - but why? It's only an issue on a small number of websites.
Even if you search on google.com? Have you tried other countries like google.fr? If google.com is redirecting to the Netherlands' version visiting www.google.com/ncr should stop it.
This works on any localised version of Google (at least those I've tried!). So you can go to google.de and enter Berlin as the location, google.co.uk and enter London etc.
For Facebook your answer is here: https://www.facebook.com/help/131671940241729
The last two points seemed a bit drastic:
The US is a much bigger market than the Netherlands so it's more difficult to rank for anything. Your issue could just be that.
You seem to have covered most things but you haven't mentioned the rel hreflang tag: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en
Is your server hosted in the Netherlands? I'm thinking out loud, but it shouldn't matter if everything else is set up correctly. How about a US-based phone number? Every signal you can send should help. Are there any customer reviews on the Google page?
The anchor text in a link is just one of many ranking factors so keywords often rank at number 1 if they contain no backlinks with the same anchor text. Also, anchor text isn't as important a ranking factor as it once was as it was abused, and it doesn't have to be exact match keywords either e.g. "orange men's shoe" could help "orange shoe" to rank and "red automobile" could help "red car" to rank.
Wikipedia pages do so many other things well - in depth content and internal linking being just two. And the site has huge authority of course.
Does he benefit from the images ranking so highly? I haven't seen many studies where image clicks result in good traffic, especially in terms of revenue if it's an e-commerce site.
It seems a strange way of doing things. Are you saying the images don't match the text content of the page? The context an image is placed in can help it rank, so it seems strange that these images are ranking based on their historical context. Google reads CSS so should see that the images are hidden. Unless you're blocking Google from seeing the CSS which is now against Google's Webmaster Guidelines: https://plus.google.com/+PierreFar/posts/TLeHSDRwjhB
If you're not blocking Google from the CSS, all other things being equal, then 301 redirects of the page and images could be enough, though I wouldn't be surprised if the rankings drop as from the information you've given (and assuming they're relatively competitive keywords) I'm surprised the rankings have remained for so long! The best way to preserve the image rankings would be to have the images on a page with relevant content.
I would keep them followed - they are your websites, and genuine links so why not? Lots of websites do this naturally without a problem.
If any of the sites are duplicates where the only differences are regional you should make sure everything is set up to Google's liking. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/video-expanding-your-site-to-more.html
You could remove any keywords from the anchor text if you're worried e.g. instead of
Noiselevelmeter.com | Sound Level Meters for the US & Canada just keep the URL as the link:
Noiselevelmeter.com - Sound Level Meters for the US & Canada
Or alternatively link to the other websites from your homepage only.
A website adds subfolders to a category URL for each filter that's selected. In a crawl of the website some of these URLs reach over 400 characters. For example, if I select shoe size 5, 5.5 and 6, white and blue colour, price $70-$100, heel and platform styles, the URL will be as follows:
There is a canonical that points to www.example.com/shoes/womens/ so it isn't a duplicate content issue.
But these URLs still get crawled. How would you handle this? It's not a great system so I'm tempted to tell them to start over with best practice recommendations, but maybe I should just tell them to block the "/filters/" folder from crawlers? For some products however, filtered content would be worth having in search indexes (e.g. colour).
You can get some idea of organic image traffic if you use Google Analytics:
Acquisition > All Referrals > click on google and look at /imgres. If you want to see where the traffic is going to (to get an idea of which images) click /imgres and on the Secondary dimension dropdown go to Behaviour > Landing Page.
If it's as simple as redirecting using the same slugs (hence one global redirect rule) then I would redirect the images. If it's complicated then I might not bother, depending on whether image search leads to many visits and conversions to your site or not. Usually image traffic doesn't convert well. If you're migrating to a new domain and keeping the same folder structure it should be as easy as doing one global redirect?
Rather than redirecting I'd most likely take the opportunity to make the filenames of images more friendly than ce7aeffb1e5bdfc8d4288885c52de8e3.jpg by using short descriptive filenames.
Wikipedia editors often delete pages about individuals or businesses if they deem that the individual or business isn't notable enough to have their own page. So in most cases probably not a good idea.
I agree with EGOL.
Another problem with Wikipedia is that you don't have control over the content - anyone can edit a page.
Maybe one day your company will become well-known enough for someone to independently create a Wikipedia page about the company. At that point Wikipedia might be less likely to outrank your own site!
Can you show the beginning of the article after 30 days is up? Similar to what New Scientist do: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22229720.600-memory-implants-chips-to-fix-broken-brains.html
Thanks for your response. I can't upload a picture due to client confidentiality.
Plenty of websites that do well don't have much written content on their homepage (and categories) - firebox.com is one example, and that has less text content than the example I'm referring to. Google has recrawled the page and is still showing the same meta description so I may suggest adding some content to try and encourage Google to use that if it doesn't want to use the meta description.
twitter.com is recognisable enough, but keeping the www. makes a URL more recognisable, especially if you're using a domain extension that people aren't familiar with e.g. one of the new gTLDs:
example.photo
or
www.example.photo
Some CMSs and forums automatically linkup text when it has the www. prefix, so you might be slightly more likely to get clickable links if you keep the prefix.
Advantages to not having it - shorter URLs, and programming-wise it's unnecessary.
Often it's down to personal preference - do you prefer the prefix or not? If you'll have subdomains it might look nicer if you keep the www. prefix for your main site.
To avoid duplicate content issues make sure you 301 redirect your non-preferred domain to the preferred, or canonical to your preferred domain if 301s are not possible. You can also set your preferred domain in Google: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/44231?hl=en
I've just bought a new .uk domain and haven't decided whether to www. or not yet!
Where possible it's best to group your URLs with pattern matching. If you're only changing the domain name and no other aspect of the URLs you should be able to handle all redirects with one line of code. This is linked in the guide I posted: www.webconfs.com/how-to-redirect-a-webpage.php - scroll down for htaccess (but double check that's the correct formatting for page-to-page redirects).
For one e-commerce website, in place of the proper meta description, Google is showing a 318-character-long mix of snippets from the homepage content for the domain search (e.g. [example.com]). A brand search returns the correct meta description - as do the keywords the homepage ranks for.
I know Google changes the meta description if it doesn't think it's relevant, but this one (there is only one) is and has (as far as we know) shown until now, and I've never seen such a mix of text in the SERP, and so many characters - it's picking up random text from bits of anchor text e.g. "privacy policy", title attributes from links, labels from radio buttons and more.
The home page W3C validates apart from a couple of basic things like missing alt text. The only things that might be related that don't are some custom meta name tags added by the CMS - but I wouldn't think this would make any difference to whether a meta description is displayed properly or not?
I've recommended we wait until tomorrow to see if Google fixes this on recrawl, but does anyone have any ideas if it doesn't? The homepage doesn't feature much standalone text, so I was thinking if we add a few extra words it might encourage Google to pick from that if it doesn't want to use the meta description. The text would have to be useful for users and fit in with the design of course, which could be awkward...
For when you launch the new website, Google have a change of address tool:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/83106?hl=en
As mentioned, 301 redirecting the exact old page to the exact same new page is the most important step. Plan ahead and map out your 301 redirects. You want to be sure of what's happening when the domain is transferred to give your rankings and traffic the best chance of remaining intact (or even increasing, which I've seen with some website redesigns).
I think you can change your Twitter handle more than once. If you have a good existing following I'd recommend updating your existing profile to the new handle, and (if possible) re-registering the old Twitter handle at another account - linking in the bio to your new Twitter account. That'll make sure you retain some of the link authority your current Twitter profile has built up and ensure people can still find you through any old links. I think custom Facebook URLs can be changed once.
I actually wrote a site migration guide last week, there should be a few points in there you'll find useful: insideonline.co.uk/website-migration-guide/
Oh yes - I'm sorry about that. So the duplicate content issue still applies, and now I've tested your website - it is quite slow but not as bad as the example I gave. I'd still recommend improving the speed.
Do you link to the website you're scraping the content from? Do you have permission to publish it?
I'm assuming at this stage you don't have any messages from Google in WMT about penalties. Can you pinpoint any onsite changes you made before the traffic drop?
Considering the duplicate content on your site I'm surprised you ranked so well and saw the traffic increases you did - so with your absence of links perhaps the website is at it's natural position at the moment. I have no experience of real estate websites or the Swedish market and competition within it though.
You could consider adding some unique content to the homepage and other location pages - something useful for users. If I was moving to a new city I'd want to know about the different neighbourhoods and which area suited me - which areas are quiet, near to parks? Which have good (public) transport links, might be noisy, have amenities nearby? These could be expanded into really useful standalone location guides, with pictures, maps and more info added.
I'd need to know more about the purpose of the website to make an informed decision, but Google does like websites that are updated regularly so my inkling would be to add it over time, especially if new content is something that is likely to attract returning users?
Footer links are not usually an issue unless you're using them for keyword spamming e.g. you have a load for different locations: "buy house london", "buy house manchester", "buy house liverpool" etc. You won't get a penalty for having over 100 links on a page so that's unlikely to be the issue either.
I've had a quick look at your website and there are two major issues I picked up on:
While I was browsing this happened to me twice "Just nu har vi tekniska problem".
I'd recommend http://www.linkdetox.com/ from Link Research Tools. It pulls in backlink data from 20+ sources to which you can add your own data, and it categorises links based on a risk rating.
I'm in the UK too - they're based in Austria (I think) and the support is always pretty quick to respond (usually within a couple of hours).
I haven't used Link Risk so can't compare, but a colleague tells me it doesn't pick up as much data (and is more expensive).
Edit - to add to Marie's comment, I agree that links should always be reviewed manually whatever tool is used!
To add to this, Google have a good primer: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35291?hl=en
There is some good info e.g. "No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google".
Does anyone have recommendations for any particular site searches for large e-commerce sites based on Magento?
Some (hopeful) requirements:
It'd be really useful to see examples and know if there are any particular issues to be aware of.
Thanks.
Do you still need the old domain? If not you should make the new website reside at www. or non-www.
Imagine telling people your URL "it's at www2.example.com" - most people don't know anything other than www. so it could cause confusion.
Also, if you have the same content residing at the www. and non-www. versions of your website, the two versions will be conisdered duplicate content so you should make sure only one exists.
That is interesting - perhaps just a coding issue as the other links are all nofollow.
The link should still pass juice - Google counts the anchor text of the first occurrence of a particular link on a page (often called "first link priority") but as far as we know ignores the anchor text of repeated links - so that's probably what you're referring to. Subsequent followed links will still pass juice.
My moz profile link does show in my Google WMT account.
Cheers - and thanks for the update too.
Is anyone aware of any e-commerce stores that have any sort of conversion rate from image search? Have any particular changes they've made resulted in an increase or decrease in sales?
Another reason for having separate phone numbers is to make sure there's no confusion when people search for your phone number.
Both very useful answers - thanks.
Images are compressed and resized to fit into an article, but each image in the article links to the original file - which in some cases is around 5Mb. The large versions of the images are indexed in Google.
Does this decrease the website's crawl budget due to the time spent downloading the large files?
Does link equity disappear through the image links?
Either way I don't think it's a very good user experience if people click on the article images to see the large images - there's no reason for the images to be so large.
Any other thoughts?
Thanks.
If [hats in chicago] clicks are converting into sales you should be careful about playing with this in case you lose the ranking altogether. Saying that, individual product pages usually convert better than anything else so it may be best to concentrate on those instead of category pages. To rank a category page that lists the hats you have available there are a number of things you can do if you haven't already:
This isn't usually a big problem, especially if you use rel="next" and rel="prev".
If you wanted to remove the duplicate content warning in Webmaster Tools you could add the page number at the start of each title tag from page 2 onwards. I like having the page number in the title tag as a signal to website visitors.
I like that idea but I'd consider alternatives to Facebook and 302 temporary redirect the article. When the traffic decreases I'd want to remove the redirect so all of those links and shares benefit my own website, and not another website.
When you say the guidelines provided by webmaster tools, do you mean these? https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192
Have you used hreflang?
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en http://moz.com/blog/using-the-correct-hreflang-tag-a-new-generator-tool
Send every signal you can to tell the search engines where your content is targeted to. That can include regional office addresses and phone numbers on pages.
I've overseen a few websites that duplicated the occasional article between themselves. I always recommended exactly as EGOL said, and it worked fine. The duplicate article on Site B had a canonical link to the original on Site A, and the "Originally published here" link was added at the bottom of the duplicated version of the article.
If the page is relevant to the audiences on both websites I don't foresee any major problems. The only issue I'd see is if you overdid this and started to copy a high percentage of pages. The search engines don't always get it right - they can choose to ignore a canonical and sometimes a duplicate on a higher authority website might outrank the original on a lower authority website, but this has never happened to me.
You made complete sense. Is there no way of updating the old blog to your site design?
A few questions you could ask yourself to figure out if it's worth moving to the subfolder and leaving the subdomain where it is:
Does the old blog get much traffic?
Does it have many links and shares?
How old is it and how many posts are there?
Despite that, if you do move to /blog the best case scenario is still to 301 redirect old posts to a new unique URL for each post if you can.
From what you say I'd also think the new design will look more professional and therefore, potentially lead to more sales.
Google now class a subdomain as pretty much the same website as the main domain: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MswMYk05tk - so backlinks to the existing blog subdomain will also benefit the overall domain.
I didn't know this until last year either - it'd be useful if Google updated their help pages!
If I was you josh330, I'd only move to www.example.com/blog if the cost and hassle isn't much for you. Although a subdomain and subfolder are considered roughly equivalent to Google, I'm not sure how other search engines see it.
Here's a link I couldn't find earlier - it's outdated now but might still be of some help: http://www.mytrafficdropped.com/
Finding the reason
Are you able to identify an exact date that traffic dropped in your Google Analytics account? Is it only organic traffic that had a big fall-off? If you can identify a date, does it match any algorithm updates here moz.com/google-algorithm-change ?
What to do
If your website was demoted due to an update of Google's Panda algorithm, you'll need to make sure your content is unique and high quality, amongst other things. There's a guide here: http://www.ventureharbour.com/panda-recovery-a-guide-to-recovering-googles-panda-update/
If it was demoted due to certain links (possible Penguin-related), there's a guide to spotting low quality links here (Step 3): http://moz.com/blog/ultimate-guide-to-google-penalty-removal
You could also take a look at Google's Quality Guidelines (there is some duplication with the above links) to see if your website complies with them: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en%233 ?
If you 301 redirect everything correctly to its new URL you should be okay.
Which article was it?
I wonder if a Google Panda penalty has removed your pages. A lot of your content is showing as duplicates across other websites: example 1, example 2
Looking at your links, Penguin could have had an impact too. You have lots of "low-quality" links from pages like this: http://www.zobyhost.com/crear-nueva-cuenta.php - some of which are also responsible for your duplicated content.
However, there was no Penguin update reported in June 2013 - the closest is May 22nd: http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change
Are the product descriptions in the catalogue unique to the catalogue? If they're unique it'll be more beneficial than if they're not, which could cause duplicate content issues.
Would presenting the content in a different way be useful to the client's customers?
Adam - remember that PageRank was only updated every few months (these days, even less) - can you be sure if those earlier links were already taken into account before the Wikipedia link was added? Also, maybe followed links came from websites that scrape or otherwise use Wikipedia's content?
I agree that Wikipedia links can be valuable though. It's an edited resource, and it's likely your content will be linked from a page that's relevant to your content, which helps. I've seen decent levels of engaged traffic from Wikipedia links.
If all you do on Wikipedia is add your own links though - you could end up getting banned from it. Rather than just adding links you should be adding value to the page content as a whole - pieces of your research could be really helpful to readers of the Wikipedia page and lead to more traffic to your website. It will also look less suspicious if you add other trusted links and make good contributions to edits on a number of pages. Wikipedia doesn't like biased content either.