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I'm currently building a site which currently has an archive of blog posts by month/year but from a design perspective would rather not have these on the new website.
Is the correct practice to 301 these to the main blog index page? Allow them to 404? Or actually to keep them after all.
Many thanks in advance
I'm building an eCommerce website which has an advanced filter on the left hand side of the category pages.
It allows users to tick boxes for colours, sizes, materials, and so on. When they've made their choices they submit (this will likely be an AJAX thing in a future release, but isn't at time of writing).
The new filtered page has a new URL, which is made up of the IDs of the filter's they've ticked - it's a bit like /department/2/17-7-4/10/
My concern is that the filtered pages are, on the most part, going to be the same as the parent. Which may lead to duplicate content.
My other concern is that these two URLs would lead to the exact same page (although the system would never generate the 'wrong' URL)
But I can't think of a way of canonicalising that automatically.
Tricky.
So the meat of the question is this: should I worry about this causing issues with the SEO - or can I have trust in Google to work it out?
It sounds like the /2001/ portion of the URL to select an option, but the remainder of the page is identical. Is that correct?
In that instance, you're correct that the canonical link should be www.example.com/ProductGroup/example/
How you do that is more of a technical problem, and would depend on the software your site is powered by.
For this to make sense, it's worth noting that MSN search is now Bing. Bing also powers Yahoo search.
I wonder if where Bing's engine isn't as good as Google they are showing your results when your page doesn't actually answer the user's question. If the page is contextually 'no good' they wont stay for long, hence the bounce rate.
Just a guess, though!
Hi there,
Before I get into the SEO bit, as a user I hate this kind of thing! It always feels like 5 clicks when I really ought to just press 1. Maybe that'll influence the decision - but if not, on to the SEO...
I think as long as you have good alt text Google should be able to find your image links just fine. But make sure you also...
Definately go the HTML route over Flash.
Cheers
If you're a pro member - you could use the Keyword Difficulty Tool: http://pro.moz.com/tools/keyword-difficulty
Why are you planning on adding so many pages? What's the benefit for a user?
Directories are pretty frowned upon generally.
They'll be seen as a single page because they share the same URL.
Hi Robert,
You need to be careful to comply with Google's tracking rules which basically define that you aren't allowed to track with personal information.
7. Privacy. You will not (and will not allow any third party to) use the Service to track, collect or upload any data that personally identifies an individual (such as a name, email address or billing information), or other data which can be reasonably linked to such information by Google. You will have and abide by an appropriate Privacy Policy and will comply with all applicable laws and regulations relating to the collection of information from Visitors. You must post a Privacy Policy and that Privacy Policy must provide notice of Your use of cookies that are used to collect traffic data, and You must not circumvent any privacy features (e.g., an opt-out) that are part of the Service.
If you're happy to have a general overview of what search terms lead to the most conversions you could implement an Analytics Event(https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gajs/eventTrackerGuide) which is fired off once an email is sent and then set this up in conversion tracking in Analytics.
So not quite what you're after, but would comply with the ToS.
I'd probably put this down to a lack of local competition to show him how it's done!
Hi Juan Miguel Callejas Romero,
It looks to me as though those two websites are identical. I would definitely settle on one of those domains and then set a 301 from the 'discontinued' domain to the new one.
If you have a market outside of spain, I'd probably advise you go with the .com. If I'm in the UK and see an .es domain I'm unlikely to click on it. Conversely, if you're exclusively in Spain and as a Spanish resident I see .es in a sea of .com's I'd likely click on that.
In summary: select the TLD which you think will have the best click-through rate (analytics may shine a light on this) and then 301 the other to that domain.
Google does index PDF files quite well, and from my experience Powerpoint does a good job of generating PDFS. I don't expect you'll see any problems here.
But how about this... if you uploaded your powerpoint to a service like SlideShare you will probably provide a better experience to many users, you can have an additional social elements and gain one or two decent links from SlideShare. Worth some thought?
Hi Demetrios,
It's difficult to say exactly how it'll affect your DA or PA - like PageRank there's a considerable number of factors and contexts that build that ranking.
Domain Authority is in part built up from your MozTrust score. The MozTrust is roughly calculated by measuring how many sites sit between your website and a trusted website. Educational and Government websites tend to be considered trusted websites, so if they link to you directly the MozTrust there is very high indeed.
Be aware though, you shouldn't build your site's success on the back of one or two trusted links. You need diversity and as many trusted relevant sites as possible to "back your credentials up" to Google and other search engines.
I know that's vague, but I hope it helps. Learn about how MozTrust works.
Hi Manutx,
First Click Free looks relatively simple to implement. Essentially all you need to do is allow crawlers with the user agent of "Googlebot" or referrers from Google results to go directly to the article instead of a sign-up form, just as it would do with a logged in member.
I can't find any pre-built Wordpress plugins that handle First Click Free for you, but this piece of PHP may be useful if you could integrate it within your single.php template:- http://www.ryancramer.com/journal/entries/first_click_php/
Good question. In your situation I've seen lots of people set up an "Outlet" store on eBay.
I think you're right about the duplicate content risk, it would pose an issue. You might want to consider noindex'ing those empty products but that would mean they wouldn't be discoverable on Google itself.
Alternatively perhaps if it's a refurbished item you could add a canonical link to the main product's page, and on that main product page link to the empty page so that people can discover it that way.
Absolutely! You can do a blanket "301 any page with .html at the end to the same page without it" rule with .htaccess to save you time and energy once you've done your renaming process.
This neat little bit of code (found at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5730092/how-to-remove-html-from-url) should do the trick nicely.
<code>RewriteEngineOnRewriteCond%{REQUEST_FILENAME}!-f RewriteCond%{REQUEST_FILENAME}!-d RewriteRule^(.*)\.html$ /$1 [L,R=301]</code>
It may be a bit of miscommunication on their part Thomas.
While there is likely to be development work for these country specific sites, you shouldn't have to get a new site built for each country, that's most likely insane!
What they're probably suggesting is to launch country sites at yourcompany.com/de/ but then registering domain names such as yourdomain.de which would just redirect to that - not for SEO use but just to protect your brand and for those who try to access it from those domains.
Sure can! Well.. the country in which people search in, but that's probably a good indication.
Should all be good. To just see organic searches, do the same but with "Traffic Sources > Search > Organic" instead.
Hey Omid,
I've taken a good look through various websites built with Adobe Muse. These were ones featured in "Site of the Day" on the Adobe website, and so I imagine are considered the best of the best.
I'm not impressed by the quality of the code. Perhaps the most worrying thing for me is that things that are clearly semantically headers are being rendered in
tags.
Additionally there doesn't seem to be any alt text applied to any images on sites I've found running Muse.
They also seem to rely on a large number of HTTP requests and many resource seem to be poorly compressed.
Without knowing too much about the tool, everything I mentioned could be down to individual designers - but the trend is there.
I wouldn't rank their markup too highly, and there's some pretty unoptimised elements on those sites. I think that if your site does well on SERPs with those sites it's probably in spite of your markup.