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Hi,
If your site is crawlable and the on-page optimization is spot-on, link building might be the answer.
First, make sure your content is fantastic. When you look at the other pages in the top 10, can you honestly justify why your page deserves to rank there? Once you get your content to this level, link building becomes a whole lot easier because you have created a linkable asset.
As for link building strategies or plans, I recommend taking a link at these two links.
Hi Dan,
DA is a fantastic metric to compare domain strength and judge their overall backlink profile and ability to rank. However, it is not a good metric to Trend to show domain improvement. Simply put, the metric data set is different with every Linkscape update.
If you go to the Open Site Explorer homepage, you will see that the recent crawl contains 104 billion URLs. That's an amazing number. Their next crawl could theoretically cover 107 billion URLs. You may have hundreds of additional backlinks found in those extra 3 billion pages crawled. Your DA goes up, despite you doing nothing to the website. Most likely, your competitors DA goes up as well.
The next update may only crawl 103 billion URLs. It doesn't crawl 100s of pages with your links. Your DA goes down. So do your competitors.
Simply put, it is a sample size of backlinks. It is great for comparing one domain to another, due to the data being based off of the same sample size. It's great for competitor insights and analysis.
When your DA goes down, that doesn't necessarily mean your site is less authoritative. If you still have links pointing to your website, you don't lose that equity because Moz had a smaller crawl. Remember, DA is a marketing metric, but not a Google ranking factor.
Can you share some details why you want to "move" the store locator to a subdomain? That makes me think it is already operational in a subfolder at the moment. In general, I would recommend not moving content unless there is a very good reason for it.
This type of fluctuation occurs all the time. Google results don't stay static for long.
How do you get back on top?
Make sure your website is the best page on the web for that query. Truly think about how can you make it better for your users, not the search engine? Does it need to be updated regularly? Do visitors to your page show good engagement - can you improve it? Can you get your site to load faster?
Get positive signals pointing to your page. External links being the most important, social signals won't hurt.
Duplicate content is going to be on your website. The key is to keep it out of Google's index. That is why using Google tools is very important. I find that using Google Webmaster Tools (duplicate page titles) and most importantly Google search as the best way to identify these problems.
This article is absolutely fantastic and there is a section titled "Tools for Finding & Diagnosing Duplicate Content" that explains exactly how to use Google and Google Webmaster Tools to find your duplicate content.
Hi Jenni1,
You are right to be concerned. Do not use the canonical tag like you have described above.
I would recommend putting that content on it's own unique page. Then, pull in the content to your product pages via a an ajax request to pull that content into the tabbed area. This would make the content visible for the user but not a part of the page html for the search engines.
Majestic SEO has a historical link index. SEOmoz/Open Site Explorer does not at this time.
No, you do not have to pay for link removals. Document the request, note they asked for payment, and then disavow the site.
http://www.seroundtable.com/google-disavow-link-payment-17387.html
This is a technique I would only consider if your clients site is already highly authoritative (high PR, DA). Essentially, your splitting up one domain into a handful different subdomained websites.
When you have a very strong site and you split it into subdomains, you increase your chance of getting multiple spots in the SERPs. When you split a weak site into subdomains, you water down your authority and it will take extra link building to get each subdomain to rank really well.
Perhaps a better strategy would be to do a bit more keyword research and figure out what keywords to really go after with the current URL structure. Instead of going after something like 'bathroom remodeling' maybe you would be better served going after 'bristol custom bathroom remodeling' or something more specific. Sometimes you have to carve out a niche and get some links before tackling a more difficult keyword.
Technically, it doesn't necessarily matter. However, it matters to you for these two reasons.
Losing link juice: probably negligible but why risk it
I would change the canonical link. It should not be a difficult switch.
Decreasing will not negatively affect your organic traffic.
Here is what I think you should do.
Find those blog posts that get little to no organic traffic. Look for opportunities to combine/merge similar posts into one new, better post - then republish them. When you encounter old posts that you can't imagine having any future value, consider removing them completely.
*edited to correct a typo
Did they pay your directly to place the link on your site? No.
Go right ahead and link to them with a followed link. People link to business partners, suppliers, vendors, etc all of the time. That's as natural as it gets. Your companies are connected offline as well as online. As others had mentioned, I'd still play it safe and link to them with their company name, not some KW rich anchor.
It's hard to say what to do without knowing the size of your site's backlink profile, but here is my best shot given the information you've provided. If you are currently ranking #2, I would not get rid of any backlinks at the moment, unless they are 100% against Google's TOS (paid, hidden, etc). However, I would also be really focused on acquiring more relevant and natural links to make sure your overall backlink profile looks solid and should survive future algorithms/inspections.
As your backlink profile gets stronger, consider removing poor backlinks gradually for increased SERP stability.
Don't worry about Moztrust. It's just a metric, and not one used by Google.
I would advise against it.
I would stick them all in subfolders of the www version of the site. www.web.com/texas
If the domain is has an extremely high authority (80+), I would consider it due to potential to dominate the SERPs by getting the www.web version and state.web version both to rank high.
A few questions need to be answered. Primarily:
If these products are coming back in stock, this is a big problem and you need to have your team work to find a solution to have these pages maintain a 200. You could be losing your spot in the rankings every time you run out of inventory, missing out on a lot of traffic and cross-selling opportunities.
If the products are gone and not coming back, this isn't a big problem, as it is something every e-comm deals with. Having a plan to handle this is important though.
Some basic options include:
Just because your competitors are not doing it, doesn't mean you can't. In fact, you might consider it a great opportunity to stand out. You might want to consider creating some content you think will be link-worthy.
It's not as easy as just creating the content and getting links. You have to find the right spots to promote it as well.
I don't think there will be an ASAP solution to this. I think you simply need to continue to build a brand (authoritative website, social profiles, strong online presence) and increase the search volume for your brand. As more people begin to search for Zotey and click the "Search instead for zotey" it will go away.
As others have mentioned, simply commenting on a blog post does not directly help SEO and if done for the sole purpose of dropping a link it is basically worthless spam.
Leaving a thoughtful, intelligent comment that furthers the conversation started in a post can be a great way to build a connection with the author. If you do this regularly on a site, your chances of securing a future link to your content can be significantly increased.
You could handle this similar to how you'd handle any sort of seasonal/yearly content.
Ideally, I'd try to have this set-up.
domain.com/top-10-list is your main piece of content. This is the page that currently ranks well. I would update that URL with your new, updated content. The content that was originally on that list, I would put on a new URL like domain.com/top-10-list/2011 or whatever year the original article was created. Then, on the primary page, I would link to all previous/archive lists. You could update the page every year to keep it fresh.
This would keep all rankings/authority focused on your original URL. If your original URL doesn't work with this plan, for instance if it was domain.com/2011-top-10-list, I would consider 301ing that to a newly created page that is focused on being an evergreen list.
If set up correctly, using the canonical tag as described above will usually keep the actual PDF out of the index. Using NoIndex is a guaranteed method to keep it out of the index.
Hi Brad,
I'd actually take the opposite position of Alan. I would distribute the press release first and then post it to your site a bit later. I see press releases ability to build external links as one of their biggest values. If there is a concern for duplication, I'd rather have the external postings of the release 'count' in the eyes of google as opposed to the internal.
I wouldn't worry too much about it either way though. Press releases are posted and reposted all over the web, and that's just the way it goes.
Your press release should be linking to important content on your site. It's unlikely that the brief content on the PR would be a significant source of organic traffic for your own site, opposed to the content the release is actually writing about and linking to.
The only time I would do it the other way around, would be if I was creating a PR for a company that is popular and newsworthy no matter what. If SEOmoz had a press release, it would make sense to post it on their own site first because people within the industry are going to find it and link to it, therefore creating many more external links to their actual domain.
Long story short, in my opinion, new/small website should submit first. Big/popular website should post on their own site first.
You really shouldn't worry about this. GWT or Moz Tools, etc try their best to alert you to possible duplicate content, often times based on pages having duplicate title tags. Not everything listed in those sections is necessarily a problem.
When it comes to the paginated pages above, you may still want to consider implementing something like NoIndex, Follow on those pages.
I would Recommend implementing NoIndex, Follow on your Paginated/Archive pages of your blog.
YourSite.com/blog/page=2 isn't a valuable landing page for Google. You don't need to let them index it.
Typically, if you want to use the Canonical Tag for pagination, you would have it point to a View All style page, such as friendly-url.html&view=all.
If you have too many products/pages in the pagination series, you might want to consider removing the canonical tag and implementing rel=prev/next. You can get more info here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html
Those discrepancies would not concern me, but there are some differences between all the things you list:
Total indexed: 2,360 Search Console - this is likely a reasonably accurate list of the number of pages you have indexed in Google. You could use a tool like URL Profiler to check index status of specific URLs.
About 2,920 results Google search "site:example.com" - site: search is less accurate and will likely return a different number each time you do it, even if it's just moments apart.
Sitemap: 1,229 URLs: these are URLs you added to a sitemap because they are priority pages you want to make sure Google has indexed and hopefully ranked. You control this number.
Screaming Frog Spider: 1,352 URLs - Screaming Frog is going to start on your homepage and crawl the site attempting to discover as many URLs as possible. If you are not linking to a page, SF won't be able to crawl it. Google on the other hand may have old pages, old URL structures or pages that were linked from an external website in their index and they won't forget them.
A really important question is: how many pages do you have that you want to be indexed? Is Google's index bloated with pages that you want to keep out? Figure these things out, and then try to adjust your sitemaps, noindex, robots.txt as needed.
The Moz recommended list is great, but a bit on the high end side of project scope for many Small to Med sized businesses. Another resource for you to check out is Credo. There are some good agencies and consultants listed there as well as some info on the types of work they specialize in and the rates of the projects they take on.
Yes. This is very important to fix. Each page on your site should have it's own unique page title that accurately describes the content of the page and contains a keyword.
Right now, every page on your site has the same title. Your title looks alright for your homepage. My one suggestion would be to try putting the company name at the end.
**Northern Ireland Landscape & Documentary Wedding Photographer - Martin Spence Photography**
Individual Pages on your site should have unique titles. Perhaps something closer to this:
Not only do these titles more accurately describe each page, but they also cast a much wider net on keywords giving you more visibility in the search engines.
Good luck updating your site. You'll find plenty of articles about 'writing title tags' if you look around.
Derek- This isn't the easy answer, but what you need to do in this instance is test. Run a simple A/B test.
I think you are fine. All of the URLs above seem to point to single focused pages, based around an immigration issue related to South Africa.
The way you have it now probably isn't the slickest looking for branding, but I don't think you'll be seen as spam and I try prefer to leave the URLs the same unless change is absolutely necessary.
Nathan- There is no right answer for this. All I can do is repeat the usual advice. It's quality, not quantity. Vary your anchor text.
Attempt to build some links that also benefit users. Instead of commenting, contact the niche blogs and ask if you can write a guest post. This will result in a followed link that adds value to the web instead of a nofollowed link buried in the comment section. Also, this will result in your product/brand being the focus of the site's readers.
Best of luck.
A reverse proxy can be an alternative for sites that are unable to put their blog in a subfolder. If you currently have a blog in a subdomain, you can use a reverse proxy to essentially put it in a subfolder. From my understanding, using a reverse proxy can have some drawbacks though, such as performance/speed issues.
Subdomain vs Subfolder
Subfolder is the preferred method for sites that don't already have a ton of authority. All links pointing at the blog will strengthen the entire domain.
Subdomain can be a useful technique for strong sites that can support essentially starting a new site. This can allow you to grab additional spots in the SERPs.
From my experience, the change of address functionality had little effect during migrations. I would not worry about it too much, as long as you have properly working 301s.
I would optimize for on-page quality (great writing) and not worry about optimizing for an awkward keyword phrase, even if there is search volume.
Say you put 'Solar Panels for Home' as a bold headline somewhere on your page. Maybe you go up a ranking spot or two, perhaps gather a bit more traffic. Are those new visitors or the previous regular visitors going to convert after reading something like that?
Google is getting pretty smart. Write about the topic (solar panels for homes) in a natural way and you'll be just fine.
If you really want to try and force something in there, you could try something like this:
"Solar panels, for home use, are becoming increasingly more affordable...."
You are on the right path and realize you have a problem.
My #1 suggestion would be to fix this at a programming/development level to prevent this from happening. Canonical tags can be used to help/fix the problem, but they are more of a suggestion to the search engines as opposed to a 100% perfect fix.
If you can't eliminate the problem, have no fear using the canonical tags. Each category, subcategory and product should have their own canonical URL and the duplicates can canonicalize back to them.
Hi Dennis-
SEOmoz's Competitive Link Finder tool will do this for you.
The canonical tag is unnecessary if you don't have problems with URL variations (tracking parameters, session ids, etc). Don't just think about external links though, if your own CMS or internal linking structure links to the same pages in different ways, the canonical tag can be a patch while you work on a development fix.
All that being said, I'm a fan of having it on every page.
Essentially it sounds like you simply want to eliminate a /blog/ directory and instead use a keyword rich category slug as a directory for each article. That URL structure is just fine. You will still be able to filter your analytics by category performance and the URL is easy to understand as a user.
No, there are not.
My recommendation: Use these as guidelines but don't obsess over the grade. Get to a A or B level, then switch your attention to usability, conversion and overall awesomeness of the page.
Hi Samuel-
There are a lot of benefits to allowing guest posting on your site. The key is to have a high standard for contributors. Doing so will result in great content on your site. Some benefits as follows:
• Great content made for your site. This will likely result in some organic traffic, social sharing and some links pointed at your great content. The great content on your site will help your site be recognized as a thought leader in your niche. Best of all, you didn't have to spend much time working on it.
• The guest author will likely promote their post on your site by linking to it, tweeting it and sharing it on other social profiles. This will expose their fans to your site and work. Increasing your brand's presence.
• The guest author will owe you a solid and very likely allow you to guest post on their site. This will allow you to promote a selected piece of content/keyword from your site.
There is nothing wrong with reciprocal linking if it is done in a way that is beneficial to both sites. The only problem with reciprocal linking is that it is often abused in a spammy way that is nothing more then a link exchange attempting to manipulate page rank. If you are doing a reciprocal exchange only for the link, you should probably avoid it.
You will be just fine if you remove your feed.
With the death of Google Reader and the lack of Feedburner support, I wouldn't be surprised if Google got rid of Feedburner down the road.
You won't really be able to see how much of it is direct. If someone clicks an external link pointing at the old site or types the URL in the address bar, they both would go through the same redirect process.
If you wanted to get some general tracking on people hitting old URLs, you could have your redirects go to the new site with utm parameters on the end of the URL.
Something like: old-domain.com -> new-domain.com?utm_source=old-domain&utm_medium=redirect
Essentially, you need to figure out the primary causes of duplicate content and then pick a way to handle it. A great spot to find your duplicate content is in Google Webmaster Tools under the HTML Improvements section. Look at the section titled "Duplicate Title Tags" and this will show you a spot where you very well may have duplicate content.
The primary ways to take care of it will be:
Choosing which technique you use will likely be a result of what you are technically able to implement, based on each unique challenge from the different causes of duplicate content. You likely won't be able to kill all of the duplicate content at once. I suggest handling it in chunks. For example, first tackle the Items Shown problem you reference in your question. As you mentioned, you could canonicalize it. Basically, whenever the URL reflects your Item Parameter, you could canonicalize it back to the representative URL.
ie: yoursite.com/category-results&items=15 --> would canonicalize to yoursite.com/category-results
Once you have the Number of Item pages out of the index, focus on the next biggest cause of duplicate content.
Hi Dana,
While technically a paid link and against TOS... I wouldn't recommend changing it or worrying about it. And I'm a pretty conservative SEO. Every backlink profile has some bad links. Old bookmarking sites, comments on random sites, scraper sites, whatever the cause may be. If this link has been there for years without problem, don't worry about changing it.
Now, if you had 10-50 similar paid links, I would recommend actively changing them to nofollow as it would look like you were trying to be manipulative to the rankings and would be a good preventative measure.
I agree with EGOL's advice.
Another thing to consider is, do you interact with other influencers in your niche? If you post a good piece on content on your site, are there influential people in mind who might reasonably tweet it and help you attract additional shares and links? If not, perhaps you should share the article on a more popular site and use it to start building some relationships which will result in future links coming your way. Start building a relationship with everyone who comments on your post or tweets the link.
Focus more on your users and this: "or at some point, you just don't care about keywords and write whatever relevant to your site"
You will begin to get traffic for keywords that are important to your users and company that keyword tools had little to no volume listed for.
I would definitely recommend implementing NoIndex, Follow on Archive pages. On a blog, you want your Actual Posts and potentially even your post categories to rank. There is little chance page 3 for category/author has any value to the search engines so you should simply tell them to crawl the page but not index it.
You most definitely can canonicalize the https pages to their respective http pages. I have done this on websites and had great results in keeping one version of the site in the index.
As always, make sure your sitemaps accurately reflect your canonical URLs.
I think link building can become a priority after these other important factors are in place.
Easily Crawlable
Good architecture and UX
Nice design
Great content
Acceptable conversion rate