This is the Average Position for your Search Impressions.
Example: Locally, you got 500 impressions at average position of 6.0. Nationally, you got 0 impressions at 122. It would report 500 impressions at an average position of 6.0.
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This is the Average Position for your Search Impressions.
Example: Locally, you got 500 impressions at average position of 6.0. Nationally, you got 0 impressions at 122. It would report 500 impressions at an average position of 6.0.
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.
Writing your own unique, compelling meta description is best. Often, large sites resort to using first words of content as the meta description because they cannot scale writing and implementing 100,000+ meta descriptions.
Linkable Asset Idea: Offer Free Printables (Coloring Sheets, Birthday Cards, etc).
You might not be able to easily get someone to link to your product page, but focus on getting more links to your domain for now. Can you put a linkable asset on your category page?
Wordpress is pretty SEO friendly right out of the box. If you install Yoast and implement some of the basic recommended features, you should be relatively good to go. Put your focus on content creation before worrying too much about minor SEO details.
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.
Absolutely not. Spam links still work fantastic for ranking a site (temporarily). Those are links that never get seen or clicked, they pretty much just get crawled. Don't go the spam route, but also don't worry too much about people clicking links. I've gotten a ton of great links that have sent very, very little referral traffic, meaning links on popular posts still don't guarantee getting any/many clicks.
Some of my favorite e-comm resources on duplicate content, customer reviews, etc are on Inflow's blog.
You are not alone. Facebook wants to make money and is essentially another ad network. Yes, there is some organic reach but it is very, very little. Company pages promoting their own content now have to pay to reach their fans. That is just the way it is. The best way to tap into Facebook's "organic reach" is to have content that gets it's own likes and shares.
Hi Pete-
Your set-up here is pretty good.
Ideally, you would want your Canonical Tag to point to your view all page, as that page might be the best experience for users. If your category has too many products in it to display a reasonably sized view all page, consider breaking it up into more niche categories/subcategories.
The canoncial tag on these pages and the rel prev/next is essentially telling Google not to rank those individual pages. There is no need to worry about the H1/H2 pages in those series. Update them only if you think they will provide the user a better experience.
I would avoid hyphens in the domain name if possible. It's easier for people to remember your domain name or type it in after hearing someone say it. Multiple hyphens can begin looking spammy.
The URL length in your example is just fine. Looks good.
If you want to permanently remove URLs from the index, this is the basic process:
Have your developer implement NoIndex, Follow to all pages that have the URL parameter you want removed. For example, if the URL contains categoryFilter= (like above), then add the NoIndex, Follow tag to the of the page. Do this for all URL paramters you want removed from the index.
Make sure Google is allowed to crawl those pages. If they are blocked by robots.txt or told not to crawl them via Google Webmaster Tools, Google will not be able to see the newly implement NoIndex, Follow tag.
Then, give it some time and wait. It may take Google a long time to crawl all of these paramtered URLs again. Fallout of the index might be slow.
Once the URLs are gone, consider blocking the crawling of them via robots.txt or in GWT parameter handling.
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 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.
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:
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.
Paid links are always a gray area. Yahoo Directory and other authoritative directories have always been out there over the years as a recommended spot to get a link, despite costing money.
My recommendation: Go for the link if you think it's a good site and may send some traffic your way.
One or two obviously paid links that all your competitors also have, isn't likely to cause an issue for you. If this is a tactic you are intentionally abusing and have a lot of paid links-- then you are going to be at high risk.
I'm sure others might disagree with my response...
And, yes two your last two questions.
Use the the additional tags to specify the video content. Will allow you to attribute conversions, goals, everything in GA.
Just start using tagged URLs.
You our will find the data under Aquisition->Campaigns.
Be sure to name consistently. YouTube is different than youtube.
IMO, the best solution would be to Tag your URLs with UTM Tags.
With this method, you can link to anywhere on your site and get accurate data in analytics. You can learn more about them here: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033867?hl=en
No, this won't cause problems big problems, assuming your original content makes up a good chunk of the overall page content. Would it be better if you had your own descriptions and photos? Yes.
I know it's hard to scale writing unique descriptions or taking photos for products, so you should focus on a smaller chunk. Find a way to prioritize the products you want to boost. Maybe it's keyword volume, best sellers, high margin, or a combo of each. Write unique descriptions for 20-50 of them. See if it improves organic performance. If you see an ROI, move on to the next batch of products.
You are right on. It can be very, very expensive.
Don't get me wrong, I love Wistia. I'm a Wistia customer myself. I just don't think it's right for every client/video/goal.
Use YouTube. Use YouTube analytics to find out what websites embedded your video. Perform outreach to those websites, asking for a link crediting you as the resource. Make sure the YouTube video is embedded on your website and the actual video description links to your website, to verify proof of ownership.
Hi,
This is completely normal at the moment. Many 301 URLs stay in the index for 6-12 months.
Case in point, google this:
There isn't anything you can do. Verify your 301s are set-up correctly. Move on.
Judging from your original comment, it sounds like you know what you are doing. Just give it some time.
Sometimes, I find that a FAQ or something similar will rank over a more Category based page because despite being less targeted, the FAQ is full of content and the category page is quite thin in comparison.
Here is what I would do:
Disagree 100% with the Wistia mention. Do you know how Expensive it is to pay for bandwidth for a video with 500,000 views on Wistia? To me, the original question sounds like he wants to make money now. Not spend money for some links to his website.
I know Moz is tight with Wistia, but I'm seriously doubting why this was marked a Good Answer.
If you are going for Virality (and you don't want to sell the rights over), use YouTube. Perform outreach to media outlets yourself. Get it on paid StumbleUpon. You can earn a lot of money with the Google ads on top of the video and you can still build backlinks in the process (if that's even a concern of his).
The title tags in this example are unique and are fine.
The bigger concern would be if those pages all have unique, valuable and not-thin content as opposed to being created for ranking a variety of keywords.
I would not recommend changing URL structure unless you have a very good reason to do so. Worrying about kw density on a decently readable, nice URL should not be reason to recommend a total URL rewrite.
You are spot on.
RewriteRule ^subdirectory/(.*)$ /anotherdirectory/$1 [R=301,NC,L]
Taken from: http://coolestguidesontheplanet.com/redirecting-a-web-folder-directory-to-another-in-htaccess/
When you say "link profiles" it leads me to believe that you are using Open Site Explorer or some other SEO Tool. No SEO tool can crawl every page on the web, which is why the link may not show up on some client's backlink reports.
See if it is reported in Google Webmaster Tools or if the page is indexed by Google. If the page is indexed, you know Google is aware of the link.
If you think you would get more discussion using Facebook's Commenting platform, go for it. Be sure to have the comments pulled in via API and rendered on the page, so you keep your SEO benefits. Read more on this page: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/comments
You can probably find a Wordpress plugin that takes care of this for you.
Yes, you should do what you described. You don't need to "delete" the content on the old page before moving it to the new one. Create the new page, redirect the old one.
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.
You should be able to get this accomplished by creating a recipe on https://ifttt.com/
Create a RSS to Twitter recipe and it should work out just fine.
I've seen this debated numerous times as to whether or not a penalty will pass. Personally, I wouldn't risk a good clean site with another website's troubles. I mean, why risk a "totally clean" website?
A better route may be to simply contact the website owners of the good links your penalized website has and ask them to point them towards the same content you've put on your clean site.
Consider creating a page on your site for both terms. Weddings are a big deal for people and ultimately, they are going to book a venue that they love and relate to. If you have a great venue, you shouldn't be afraid to list a few other venues (perhaps not your primary competitors) that are good alternatives. Perhaps you could even make a referral arrangement with them and earn some income from people who book their venues from your page.
It's a great chance for you to highlight what is special about your venue and deliver value to the searchers of either term.
Parameter handling in Google Webmaster Tools won't get a URL out of the index if it is already indexed.
You need to use the NoIndex robots meta tag in the of your page. Once you add this tag, be sure you are allowing Google to crawl the page. Make sure it is Not blocked via robots.txt or with Parameter handling.
Once the pages have left the index, you can block them from being crawled.
This is a very normal thing for Google to display a different Page Title for the home page of a website. If you do a search for a head term like "Vitamins" you sill see the page titles for a few of the listings automatically get switched to "Company Name: Rest of Title"
Simply put, you can set a Page Title but Google does not always honor it if they think they can pull in a more relevant title.
As others have mentioned, it sounds like these links have little potential value. You could always drop a few comment URLs, tweets, G+ posts to those pages to help them get indexed, but they would still pass very little authority and I can't say it would be worth the effort.
Perhaps you could contact those same Suppliers and offer to give them a testimonial or find some other way to get your company linked on a more prominent page of their website. Think about what you can offer of value for their website.
As Kevin said, HTML is a better format for the web.
Perhaps you can offer this as a downloadable PDF on a lead generation page? You can certainly use this asset in more than one way.
Hi Ruben,
Here is my take:
#1 - In general, these domains are immune to spammy links. I've seen numerous pages on Facebook, YouTube videos, LinkedIn Pages rank for highly competitive terms from a massive, 100% backlink profile. The main reason people do this is because it is no risk to their own site. These pages are another clear example that Google doesn't have a great ability to "ignore or devalue" spam links, instead using the threat of penalty to scare website owners away from performing this linking techniques on their own site.
#2 - I'd say this would not cause a problem for your website linked from the social profile (usually a nofollow link), but I wouldn't recommend doing it either. Even if you have a highly ranked Facebook page for a good term, I'd bet the amount of traffic you funnel through there from the search engines to a conversion page is minimal. Could it cause a problem down the road or during a manual review? Perhaps.
Moz page grader is just a tool that makes recommendations on "best practices." You can ignore it's recommendations for things you think are fine for your users or not obvious red flags (missing title tag for example). I see no problem listing the full, official product names for each product. If that's what they are called, that's what they are called.
Also, I like when e-commerce sites show 20-30 products per page, as I find it showcases a good product mix and also isn't too much of a drag on overall site load time.
One thing I would strongly recommend if you have a bunch of nearly identical products is SKU grouping. People might search for "4 gig" or "8 gig" USBs, but perhaps they don't search for red, black, blue, etc. Consider putting all similar brand "4 gig" USBs on the same product page, then allow users to select the color. This could possibly have a major impact on the number of products in your product categories. I also think it's better for both the users and the search engines.
I've definitely found that Google seems to take more liberties giving you the title tag of your choosing when your title tag is too long. I also like the pixel width guidelines over the character recommendations. Your title tag is currently 589 pixels wide, vs the recommended 466 maximum.
Fun tool to test it out with: http://www.webshoptimizer.com/page-title-pixel-meter/
Of course, you could change it and create a nice short title tag, and Google may still choose to show something else.
Hi Kathleen,
Removing pages can be a scary thing, but if those pages don't garner much traffic in the first place and you 301 redirect any with external links pointing at them to the most relevant page on your new site, you'll be fine. Quite often removing low quality pages (not sure if you think yours fit this description) can actually lead to a nice improvement in organic traffic.
This is a complicated question that I can't give a simple answer for, as every site is set-up differently and has it's own challenges. You will likely use a variety of the techniques mentioned in my last paragraph above. Good luck.