Hi Andy,

I just checked and yes they were previously index'd and some of them still are.

Hey Mozzers,

I have several pages on my website that are for user search purposes only. They sort some products by range and answer some direct search queries users type into the site. They are basically just product collections that are else ware grouped in different ways.

As such I didn't wants SERPS getting their hands on them so blocked them in robots so I could add then worry free. However, they automatically get pulled into the sitemap by Magento.

This has made Webmaster tools give me a warning that 21 urls in the sitemaps are blocked by robots.

Is this terrible SEO wise?

Should I have opted to NOINDEX these URLS instead? I was concerned about thin content so really didnt want google crawling them.

Hi Andy, thanks for the answer

I think you have understood me.

Basically the article page needs completely re-writing and restructuring into a supporting article rather than what is is now, which just a well ranking page competing with my landing pages. I know this but until I can decide on the best way to utilise the current content which is good, and write replacement content as I want to keep the page I have done a sort of temporary fix.

This temporary fix was to link out to relevant landing pages in an attempt to signal "This is my actual page about this" etc. This has worked well and has boosted my landing pages and has began spreading the traffic were receiving around the site. But is still some cannibalisation going on.

Until i rewrite it, i want to make navigating the article easier to get some movement around the site. By doing what i mention above, however it means creating inpage links that will be linking to headings with the same keywords that link out to other pages in on the site.

You have confirmed the big fix and what I need to do when i can spare the time.

From my understanding from what you say, the inpage anchors will send signals to google and how I was planning on using them whilst adding userbility will be treated like a new page so would have a negative effect on what im trying to do.

I think I will leave it be until I can free up enough time to re-write the article properly.

Thanks again for a good response.

Hey Mozzers,

I have a very long article page that supports several of my sub-category pages. It has sub-headings that link out to the relevant pages. However the article  is very long and to make it easier to find the relevant section I was debating adding inpage anchor links in a bullet list at the top of the page for quick navigation.

PAGE TITLE

• Keyword 1
• Keyword 2 etc

<a name="'Keyword1"></a>

Keyword 1

Content
<a name="'Keyword2"></a>

Keyword 2

Content

Because of the way my predecessor wrote this article, its section headings are the same as the sub-categories they link out to and boost (not ideal but an issue I will address later).

What I wondered is if having the inpage achor would confuse the SERPS because they would be linking with the same keyword.

My worry is that by increasing userbility of the article by doing this I also confuse them SERPS

First I tell them that this section on my page talk about keyword 1. Then from in that article i tell them that a different page entirely is about the same keyword.

Would linking like this confuse SERPS or are inpage anchor links looked upon and dealt with differently?

Hey guys thanks for your replies.

@Dmitri

I wouldn''t say im missing the bigger SEO picture. I'm just having to deal with the current situation in an orderly manner. When I took over the website, the previous SEO's were tracking hundreds of pointless keywords (just because they ranked for them, but we all know a keyword with 0 searches a month is hardly a model to build a business on), all categories and sub categories had no content except products. There were no canonical urls, poor navigation under optimised images etc.

My tasks thus far has been to sort a website out containing hundreds of pointless thin content pages establish new relevant categories and basically start over. But I have to do all this within the a 5 year old template with no real capital to spend. (Welcome to my hell lol)

My first job was to make the site UX & UI more friendly an I implemented drop down nav menu's, categories than make sense from SERPs and a user point of view. I removed colums to widen pages and made products and content easier to view. Cleared out 5 URLS displaying exact copies of our website. Then writing content for all the sub category pages and actually doing the basic technical SEO stuff on them all. I have now started on the products but obviously there are hundreds to work through. As such social media, backlinking, article writing has taken a back seat.

Because of this my keyword aims havn't been to rank top 10, even top 20 in some cases, but to establish a page for each keyword we would want to target, optimised it and get it achieving some form of ranking even if its 20-50th and sort out organised spreadsheets to begin tracking changes and rankings. Once I have managed to optimise the whole site, and remove the last of the very poor content. I will move onto supporting articles and back links and beginning driving ranks up.

In regards to merging the article page - i agree. the traffic isn't helping me, hence the suggestion to remove the page, but the content is good, relevant and unique, so my logic was that removing the page, accepting the loss of traffic but using what has proven exceptional content on the page would remove a competing url, remove pointless traffic targeted at similar keywords, and give a content boost to the main page giving it more chance of ranking for keywords that will convert.

@CleverPHD

The sub-categories are carefully chosen and we have made every effort to write good unique content for them all. I do think you make a good point however on products being in multiple sub-categories could cause low quality issue and maybe we should look to remove some that are showing the least promise to boost those with the most. But as we have been able to rank all these pages as high as 12th without any real back-linking or supporting articles I dont feel this is causing too many issues and can only get stronger when we have the time for backlinking. They are not loosing ranks and are remaining stable.

It is only this 1 parent category that wont rank, even badly as we appreciate its a highly competitive keyword, it shares no common products, has unique content.

You suggestions are exactly how we came up with many of our categories. But I agree that we do need more hubpages targeting wider terms to redirect to our products, at this time whilst im still working through thousands of products its not possible time wise.

I think what you gentlemen have highlighted is that I am probably focusing on obtaining some form of ranking to early, I should continue my effort across the whole site and improve it as a whole b and organising it into a manageable state before worrying about obtaining mediocre rankings that will come naturally when ive completed the mountain of work ahead of me.

Hey Mozzers,

I was looking for a little guidance and advice regarding a couple of pages on my website. I have used 'shoes' for this example.

I have the current structure

Parent Category - Shoes

Sub Categories - Blue Shoes
Hard Shoes
Soft Shoes
Big Shoes etc

Supporting Article - Different Types of Shoe and Their Uses

There are about 12 subcategories in total - each one links back to the Parent Category with the keyword "Shoes". Every sub category has gone from ranking 50+ to 10-30th for its main keyword which is a good start and as I release supporting articles im sure each one will climb. I am happy with this.

The Article ranks no1 for about 20 longtails terms around "different shoes". This page attracts around 60% of my websites traffic but we know this traffic will not convert as most are people and children looking for information only for educational purposes and are not looking to buy. Many are also looking for a type of product we dont sell.

My issue is ranking for the primary category "Shoes" keyword. When i first made the changes we went from ranking nowhere to around 28th on the parent category page targeted at "Shoes". Whilst not fantastic this was good as gave us something to work off. However a few weeks later, the article page ranked 40th for this term and the main page dropped off the scale. Then another week some of the sub category pages ranked for it. And now none of my pages rank in the top 50 for it.

I am fairly sure this is due to some cannibalisation - simply because of various pages ranking for it at different times.
I also think that additional content added by products on the sub category pages is giving them more content and making them rank better.

The Page Itself
The Shoes page itself contains 400 good unique words, with the keyword mentioned 8 times including headings. There is an image at the top of the page with its title and alt text targeted towards the keyword.

The 12 sub categories are linked to on the left navigation bar, and then again below the 400 words of content via a picture and text link. This added the keyword to the page another 18 or so times in the form of links to longtail subcaterogies. This could introduce a spam problem i guess but its in the form of nav bars or navigation tables and i understood this to be a necessary evil on eCommerce websites.

There are no actual products linked from this page. - a problem?

With all the basic SEO covered. All sub pages linking back to the parent category, the only solution I can think of is to add more content by

1. Adding all shoes products to the shoe page as it currently only links out the the sub categories
2. Merging the "Different Type of Shoe and Their Uses" article into the shoe page to make a super page and make the article pages less like to produce cannibalistic problems.

However, by doing solution 2, I remove a page bringing in a lot of traffic. The traffic it brings in however is of very little use and inflates the bounce rate and lowers the conversion rate of my whole site by significant figures. It also distorts other useful reports to track my other progress.

I hope i have explained well enough, thanks for sticking with me this far, i havn't posted links due to a reluctance by the company so hopefully my example will suffice.

As always thanks for any input.

Hi Andrew,

There is no hard and fast rule for this as it all depends how closely related the keywords are, the competition etc.

The 'general' advice given is to target every page toward 1 unique keyword AND unique content. This is because ranking factors are such things as The title text, the heading text and it is very hard to put the keywords in these locations without it being spammy and forced. But these keywords should be different and not too closely related.

You should interlink from every page where appropriate to really tell the SERPS that "This is my page on Smarty Programmer" and "This is my page on Smarty Tuner". Do not be tempted to have the same page with tuner replacing programmer. Actually write different equally good content or you bring yourself a whole new set of problems.

Think of it as a model, if you have 10 keywords you want to focus, have 10 landing pages with each optimised to 1 keyword. Then have additional supporting pages in the form of blogs or information articles that are related and link to your landing pages. Your page and supporting pages will naturally attract any longtail keywords available that are less competitive.

There are ofcourse exceptions to this rule. A page can rank for several highly competative keywords, its just not that common.

That said your page ranks really well for both terms already. 1-4th for both. If Smarty Programmer and Smarty Tuner are not very competitive, you may be able to target them with 1 page by doing something such as

<title>Smarty Programmer - The Number 1 tuner for diesel trucks</title>

Smarty Programmer

Content targeted at Smarty Programmer

Why Pick the Smarty Tuner?

Content targeted at Smarty Tuner

Ensure both keywords have at least 1 image with alt and title text targeting them. This example is a bit to cut and dry but demonstrates the idea.

This should allow you to rank for both phrases on the same page. BUT there needs to be enough content supporting each phrase, and a suitable amount of competition. If the competition if too fierce you can just shoot yourself in the foot and not rank for either phrase.

If I was you I would run a couple of tests. Get Smarty Tuner inserted a couple of times within the text. Google is clever and it may associate the words enough to begin ranking you for both without sacrificing your current ranking for smarty programmer. Slowly introduce more content targeting smarty tuner such as an image with its alt text and title text, the a few smaller headings etc and some more text and I recon you can quite easily have the same page targeting both and holding no1.

Cracking response Don, can say honestly say i've learnt something today.

I have done work with HTML5 and heard of this concept but never gave it any attention as every major SEO site always talks about a single H1 being best due to the variation in different SERPS, the rise in bing traffic etc etc.

Would you say you have had good results, across multiple SERPS, with multiple H1's implimented with HTML5? Or in google only?

Are SERPS activly distinguishing different page sections with HTML5 yet or is there still the danger of H1 dilution with over use?

The article is nearly 2 years old, is there any more recent discussion on the subject (google searches lead me to the same article).

P.S: Apologies i guess im high-jacking the thread, so if don responds I will leave it there so the original poster can get the answers he wants.

Short answer: No its never too late.

People rescue lost links in this way all the time. The old pages may not have been de-indexed yet especially if there are being linked to from another website.

Ideal solution: Locate all the links pointing to old pages and get them updated to point to the new page. Put the 301 in place anyway to save any you miss.

Nearly ideal solution: Slap a 301 redirect on it - BUT make sure that the 301 is to a direct replacement / relevant page.

There is no negative implications for doing the 301's this late... (as long as the pages are relevant). But not doing them... well as you have seen... rankings will suffer.

Ive seen links that are months to years old get rescued this way, so get them redirects on!

Hey there,

A very important point to make is that you should have 1 and only 1 h1 tag per page. This is of vital importance on one of the most crucical SEO ranking factors. If your design has changed this I would address it immediately.

When you do a redesign like this and your rankings drop you should ask yourself 2 questions

1. Has google, bing or any other SERP changed their algorithm and could it have affected me? - if no...
2. What have I changed ?

If the SERP's havn't updated their algorithms then you have changed something for the negative. Look at your pages from before and now, what has changed? Make a list and cross them off 1 by 1 as you eliminate them. If you only had one h1 before and now you have multiple then this is your starting point.

Without seeing the site, the best advice I can give is to give your new design the SEO checklist.

https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/basics-of-search-engine-friendly-design-and-development contains all the basics. It may sound simple but go through and check them off 1 by 1 making sure your design takes these in mind or improves on what you had before.

My gut feeling is that something has changed (such as more than 1 h1 tag) that bing has noticed and dropped you for it. Google may not have dropped yet but could do should you not address it.

Edit: I forgot

If it is only your competitive keywords that have dropped rankings it could well be something simple like too many H1 tags.  Before those pages were screaming

IM ABOUT THIS

now they are saying

im about this

and this

Really good article that Andy, really enjoyed the read.

Thank you for your valuable input as always!

Hi Andy thanks for the response,

Your presumptions are correct in some cases

Sometimes i have a category

Category: Awesome Widgets
Product: Blue Awesome Widget
Product: Awesome widget with stuff

However, Although there has been some cannibalism here, the category page (being linked from the homepage) and some internal linking always sorts it out and gains much more authority and ranking, removing the issue.

However, in this instance, where I am having the problem, all 3 are products with equal importance.
Blue Widget = the basic model, no thrills
Splash proof blue widget & Blue widget with alarm are more expensive completely different models with additional features

The keyword they're targeting doesn't have the traffic to be worth making its own category, 70% of those ranking above us are distributors selling our products using a duplicated copy of our descriptions etc (A practice i've stopped since arriving).

Because all 3 are so different (yet similiar enough to cause as issue) i dont feel canonicalising them although solving the issue feels like a cheap fix that has the unwanted side effect of stopping the product pages ranking for their own natural longtails.

I feel your second option is more appropriate. But am a little unsure to what extent to implement it.

My Current Plan
Each product currently has around 150 word bullet pointed description.

• Write 200-250+ words description, talk about the other models as upgrades and include links to "blue widget with alarm" etc (250 words is about right without waffling or creating a wall of text for these products)
• Restructure the 150 words of bullet point into a features and benefits box

This gives each page 400+ words of unique content once you include description, tech spec and features.

Questions Should I link every instance of "Blue Widget" to the blue widget product page or just once from each relevant page?

Say i write 3 blog posts to link to my blue widgets page - should these be closely related enough to have "blue widget" in the title or maybe just talk about more general widget stuff and link it in. I dont want to just create another page that can join the cannibalistic party.

Hey Mozzers,

I think i know the answer to this one but i just wanted to check my thinking if you wouldnt mind.

I have an ecommerce website with lots of very similar products, for example

Blue widget
Waterproof blue widget
Blue widget with Alarm

One of the pages is ranking top 10 for "blue widget", however the other intermittently swap with it, knocking that page out and itself into the top 10. Then a few weeks later it swaps back again. This seems like a clear case of keyword canablisation to me. And i am wondering on the best solution.

301: Obviously not an answer as i need all 3 products visible
Canonical to one of the pages: Doesn't seem correct either, the products are similiar but not the same, all 3 could rank for different longtails etc

I was suffering from something similiar on my closely related category pages and I combated that by interlinking them all with the relevant keywords to point to the relevant pages.

Should i do the same for these products such as... 
From 'Blue Widget' product link to "Blue widget with alarm" and "Waterproof Blue Widget"
From Waterproof blue widget and blue widget with alarm link to "Blue Widget"     (using the anchor text in the "").

This should tell serps that all pages are about blue widget but the main one is the "blue widgets" page. Correct?

As a follow up. Is this one of the reason ecommerce sights have related products options?

Hi Pete,

Andy nails most things so ill just talk about the "how different part".

Google is very good at identifying the structure of a sentence and determining its meaning. To simplify things I always look at it like this

"It is warm" is the same as "It is hot"

changing text like this and hoping its unique is asking for trouble. Instead try to write as if you are a different personality appealing to a different type of person within the context of the site.

Site: 1 Mr technical writes the content for this site. Your all about the technical features, why they outshine the other specifications and why thats good.

Site 2: Mr indulgent writes for this site, he is less concerned with the technical and is all about actually using the product. He talks about the ease of use and how great if feels to use etc.

Site 3: Mr in the middle, he has a descent amount of respect for the technical elements and mentions them, and has a more speculative approach of explaining why this would be good.

These three personalities all talk very differently, use a different pool of words, create these persona's and be them as you write. This will give you the base difference to make identical information very different.

To combat similar products, my approach has been to not try to distinguish them too much but to engage with the similar products and talk about them. For example product A is the same as product B except product B has a special paint on it that makes it look good so it costs more. So product A is all about value, its the cheapest in the range so great value for money, affordable but with all the necessary perks. Product B is luxurious, not only does it have everything product A has but looks dang good and is a real head turner.

This approach allows you include all the important content needed to get the word count up and make it a good page but present in a way that is very different.

I agree with Andy,

I use it as a guidance tool on any website i build. It serves a purpose, to check things are understood how they should be by a predetermined standard. But like any other automated tool it compares to set requirements that cannot always be met and cannot identify and ok these exceptions.

As long as you understand the error its pointing out and why its pointing it out, and know that despite this the code is rendering correctly and all outcomes are working as expected then there is no problem.

From an SEO stand point, aslong as google see's your site how you want it too i think it is a very very minor factor. Hell all of google returns errors of some variety.

Hi,

I don't want to insult you with to basic of an explanation so please tell me if this isn't what you mean and im over simplifying it.

Find a link on your website,

right click it and click on inspect element, this will bring up a developer panel at the bottom of your browser (its different for each browser, but there are all similar.) It will have the code that makes the link highlighted amongst the rest of the code that makes up the page.

For instance the "The Mission" link in your footer has this code
The mission

<a  ="" link="" tag<br="">href="">  = the URL parameter where the link should follow</a>  = closing the tag where the link stops

Best SEO practice is
The mission

You should then take this 1 step further for best SEO and include a title parameter for the link which would look like this 
The mission

Edit: Can't spell

cheers rob, i will wait a week or 2 before rolling it site wide so i have to evidence of no effect to back me up incase it does go wrong and go from there.

thanks for your time

thanks for the reply rob.

if i had a page with 1000 words would it be too much to hide 800 in a similar way as this and only have 200 showing? or is it fine for the same reasons you have listed? can i go too far with it?

Hi Mozzers, This question has been asked a few times over the years, but opinion seems to have changed drastically and i wanted to get an updated opinion from sources i trust.

On my category pages I have content above products. The content can push the product too far down, and if placed below is never viewed. To battle this I wanted to implement a "Read More" button so i could keep a couple hundred words there and expand it to the rest of the content if the user wanted. If not the products would remain near the top of the screen for better conversion.

I have implemented this on this page to test if it affects my keyword rankings before i go site wide. But also wanted an opinion if this practice is ok. The example page with it implemented can be found here.

The content im hiding isn't huge here but on other pages could be more. Is there a set ratio of text i should aim to keep / hide?

Any pitfalls i should watch out for?

I know google crawls the hidden content as its in the source code but should i be wary of a penalty is too much is hidden?

Hi Mozzers,

I have a couple of questions regarding starting out into social media with an e-commerce website. Most of my experience lies in niche content where a social media following is more natural.

Having completed most of the site audit (at least the planning). Its time to begin planning the next move into writing articles on the blog and heading out into social media to facilitate link building whilst i finish off creating the last of the updated website content.

I have plenty of subjects I can think to write about and many keywords to target with articles on the website. But I could do with some advice linking this into social media.

We have youtube, google+, facebook and twitter accounts but all of them are inactive bar profile information and have almost no following.

We sell technical measurement equipment across a selection of niches.

My plan is as follows so far,

1. Write 5-10 amazing new articles across the selection of products
2. Link to them all on each social media platform to begin populating each with content
3. Populate the website homepage with links to all our social media accounts to encourage following
3b. Include adverts stating discount codes etc can be obtained by following us on social media

a little unsure where to progress from this point, I have no budget available at the moment, but may be able to obtain some if I can achieve some results without.

As always thanks for your time.

I think dirk covered it and i was way off Ignore this response

Moz does a crawl weekly in which all your data gets pulled over and your keyword ranks checked etc

Expect your first full report 1 week from when you created your campaign. Some of the data will filter in over the first week. Give it 7 days and your should have a full set of info to work with.

Depending on your moz membership you should have access to tools like the moz crawl test and OSE in which you can start doing things...

https://moz.com/researchtools/crawl-test

you could run this if your wanting something to do whilst information populates. It will give you a nice report you can begin working from (just without the fancy moz interface).

Depending on your level of understanding however the report can be a little daunting - another good place to start is the moz beginner guides

https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo

plenty on here mose websites can get stuck into without seeing their first report.

Hope thats of some use

Hi Prime,
On the presumption that your onsite SEO is complete and your content is indeed excellent I would do the following.

My no1 tip on getting your site index'd would simply to be to simply fetch as google and submit the main page. Set up your analytics and then focus on your local SEO. Do all your local listings, and basically everything moz recommends about local SEO. This should be plenty for you to be index'd.

Then I would stop thinking about "Link Building" in the traditional sense.

Don't fall into the trap of thinking
links = ranks = clicks = visitors

instead try to think of it as
publicity = visitors = natural links = ranks = more visitors

Take some of your excellent content and begin marketing it. Get social media happy, g twitter, facebook, google+ and every other platform you can think of active. Social media activity is a good ranking factor, use it. Get active on niche forums, other niche websites and begin spreading your brand. By this I don't mean spamming forums with links to your website I mean offering excellent advice and relevant links where appropriate. Ensure profiles are complete with links to your website so when you have helped someone and they check you out they find their way back. If you have a marketing budget get some PPC to begin driving traffic, and look at other forms of advertising. If your content really is excellent odd links will begin to sprout up.

This achieves 2 things. It spreads your brand and builds relationships and reputations within your niche.

I would do this from anywhere from 2 to 6 months. Asking for links as a new website even if your content is top notch is hard and has a very low success rate. Asking for a link from a website you have spent 2-6 months supporting and having a presence on is a lot easier. Especially if you can design a piece of content you know that site needs. Is a certain question being asked a lot on a website? Make something providing the answer then approach them with the content.

Alternatively make the first move. Found another website that cracking in your niche but not directly competitive? Review them, award them, and tell them about it. Websites like to brag when they receive a 5* award or review and will often link back to it.

Don't act to receive a link, act to advertise your brand.

I apologise if this isn't a direct answer to "how to link build". But i wanted to stress the difficulty of link building, even more so for new sites. I would rather spend 6 months of time on social media, building relationships and working myself into a position into the niche to ask for a high authority link with some success rather than spend 6 months of NO responses from link requests.

Hi John, sorry ive been on leave so not checked back on the  forums.

Glad it looks like its working for you. I dont think the comments do anything except signify where word press has begun writing to the .htaccess (i dont run wordpress so can't be sure). Normally comments do nothing but signify something useful to the user.

I can try to breakdown the code a little for you, but my htaccess isn't fantastic so its by no means complete.

Firstline:  RewriteCond%{REQUEST_FILENAME}!-d

RewriteCond% = This says use this condition if....
{REQUEST_FILENAME}!-d =  ... is NOT a directory

RewriteRule^(.*)/$ /$1 [L,R=301]
I believe this bit takes a snapshot of the url upto the final / then rewrites it to that snapshot.

The combination of these must mean it doesn't affect your wordpress admin directory. I know this code can break if your install is within a directory (as is discussed in the stackover flow link) but they have provided a solution for that in that topic. I would say test if on your live website to make complete sure it will work as this may be slightly different to your local install. Have a back-up ready just incase it doesn't.

Make sure you check every url including

Homepage
Pages
Posts
Category Pages
Sub Category Pages
Post Pages
Any images or files

To make sure it is working as expected on all of them.

Hi John,

I asked something similar myself something myself but im on the Magento platform. This should matter as the solution wasn't platform specific. It just involved editing htaccess file. If your up for editing your .htacccess file then it could be of some use. The topic URL is below and it contains multiple solutions for editing and removing the / and the debugging process we went through along the way. (Courtesy of Andy and Dirk) Hopefully its of some use to you

https://moz.com/community/q/cms-pages-multiple-urls

SUMMARY:
If you know how to edit your .htaccess and your ready to dive straight in this code should do it.

RewriteCond%{REQUEST_FILENAME}!-d
RewriteRule^(.*)/$ /$1 [L,R=301]

If you want the page with explanations and walk-through please see the original topic as editing your htaccess  badly can cause all sorts of errors.

Edit: I realised i was probably a tiny bit lazy and should of probably included this link which is the original link i got sent from stackoverflow with instructions on how to to edit your .htaccess file.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21417263/htaccess-add-remove-trailing-slash-from-url

Dirks answer later in the post offer guidance on applying it to certain parameters which should prove helpful if your still having loop problems with the admin page.

Sorry the wording made this seems unclear

The /products/ section isn't a product. It is a parent category called Products,

Our set-up is  domain.com/cateogry/sub-cat/sub-cat/

but the main category is called "products".

It is this main parent category im thinking of removing and moving all other category 1 step up the hierarchy.

Hi,

I am a little unsure exactly what is being asked here.

"www.example.co.uk/www.example.co.uk"  certainly is not the URL of your homepage, it doesn't follow basic url structure.

Could you provide a screenshot to the screens that are making you think this URL is being tracked? Im guessing its just some confusion and its actually tracking "www.example.co.uk" and the /www.example.co.uk bit is just the way in which it is displaying it to you for some reason. Hard to know without knowing where you seeing it.

Hello again Mozzers,

I am debating what could be a fairly drastic change to the company website and I would appreciate your thoughts.

The URL structure is currently as follows

Product Pages
www.url.co.uk/product.html

Category Pages
www.url.co.uk/products/category/subcategory.html

I am debating removing the /products/ section as i feel it doesn't really add much and lengthens the url with a pointless word. This does mean however redirecting about 50-60 pages on the website, is this worth it? Would it do more damage than good? Am i just being a bit OCD and it wont really have an impact?

As always, thanks for the input

Morning Mozzers,

Currently our website has 2 navigation bars.

The top Navigation is the typical **Home - Products - Services - Contact - About **type thing

The side navigation contains a link to top level categories, if a category is selected it shows the child categories
Eg.

Socks
Shoes
Boots

Cateogry level (Socks)

Blue Socks
Red Socks
Green Socks

The top navigation has drop-down menus built in whilst the side nav does not.

Would it be worthwhile to edit the nav bars so that the top nav bar contains the categories with the child categories displaying in dropdown list when clicked.

Top Nav
Home - Socks - Shoes - Boots when hovering over socks you would see

Socks
Blue Socks
Red Socks
Green Socks

My reasons for the change I could remove the thin content "Products page"

It would add a link to the categories and sub categories from every page on the website as it would be in the top navigation bar i think this would help with ranking for some of the sub-category pages that struggle.

It would allow me to remove the left nav bar on the homepage, moving more content above the fold and give the website a more modern feel.

What do you think? Is would this be a positive or negative change?

Hi Mike,

Somebody might jump in and correct me here but I think bing referral / organic are one and the same. The difference being that one is when it is search logged in via https so the terms are hidden and the other when search normally and it can provide a query. Refferal is increasing as they become more google like an increase the https.

This doesn't show up for google because analytics is a google product so they classify it all as organic not referral.

Edit: I cant spell

Cheers Everett.

You have definitely reset my thinking, id started to make it over complex for myself.

The content for the resolution / category pages will create a lot of duplicate issues due to the unavoidable similarities, i will take a combination of solutions provided here and try to consolidate resolution and capacity into broader categories that can be written about as you suggest with less overlap. I will look to no-index smaller categories that would be thin and cause issues but remain essential.

I will also stick to my plan and consolidate the "types of widget" onto the main widget page. This will move them a step up the hierarchy and allow me a wider scope of content on the main parent page.

All product urls are  homepage.co.uk/product.html by default so shouldnt cause issue in multiple urls. I have also implimented automatic canonical tags on all cateogry and products to combat any accidental duplications.

Im at the difficult point where developing filters etc are not a great option due to the age of our CMS. Before I can secure a greater budget I need to show results.

This rules out (for now) any mass changing of nav bars which are sadly a bit static. This means doing it via pure and fairly basic page structure at the moment. Hence my difficulty sorting out a normally fairly easy problem.

Hello again Mozzers,

We have a category, lets call it widgets. Within widgets are about a hundred or so products. For usability my predecessor made the following layout

Widgets Main Cateogry  - Links off homepage - (no content just links to the 3 sub-categories)
- Widgets by Resolution
---- About 20 subcategories 
eg. 0.1 Resolution widgets
      0.2 resolution widgets
- Widgets by Capacity
---- About 20 subcategories
eg. 1 capacity widgets
     2 capacity widgets
- Widgets by Type
---- About 12 subcategories

This was a major improvement from a userbility perspective as it made a very complex product range navigatable by the major features or basic type. However, as you can imaging we now have 60+ very similiar pages all displaying very similiar products a nightmare for SEO. It also isnt ideal for user navigation as it take too many clicks to get to the products.

I propose the following fix, and i wanted your opinion.

Widget Main Category - Link from homepage (Consolidated with Widgets by Type)
-300 Words of content
-Links to the 12 Sub-type Catoregies (These are pages i can fill with content + products. This would give me a more ordinary structure of which I can focus each page to a keyword)

The tricky part comes with incorporating the capacity and resolution options.

1 Browse Capacity Page
(20 sub categories all the same except capacity quantity & products)
1 Browse by Resolution Page
(20 sub categories all the same except resolution value & products)

The owner want them, I was going to link from the main widgets page to each of these to give the customer the option. What I can't decide is how to deal with them from an SEO point of view. Should they be no-followed? canonicaled? Can there be any advantage to having so many pages covering slightly different variations or as i suspect it is dangerous to the overall health of the site.

To complicate things further, Canonical tags may not be an option due to an old magento version running that doesnt support them. Is there an alternative way around?

As always many thanks.

P.S. The 301 directs would add a time aspect that in my opinion would make me think twice. But if you dont mind re-directing the 150 pages go for it.

Either way dont worry. It should be fine.

Hi John,

Let me firstly say that this isn't as much as a problem as you think (at least in my opinion).

"So, we have 150+ posts equally sharing the hompage authority - detracting from their ability to rank for their core services pages."

This is simply not true as far as I am aware. Your homepage will only pass authority to the pages it links too. Just because they appear to be under the homepage directory doesn't really mean anything. Each page is treated as an individual and will only gain authority from those pages that link to it..

Now technically, yes from a good SEO point of view your blog posts should be /blog/subjectpost.html as it is both informative to the user and search engines by telling them this is part of your blog and is about whatever subject.

BUT... /blog/ doesn't tell people anything about the content of the post itself. Say the category is widgets, then   /widgets/widgetkeywordpost.html is beneficial because it tells everyone visiting the page that this post is about widgets.

There will be a simple setting somewhere in ur CMS where it will decide where the post should be created. So changing this to /blog/ wont be too hard. If it were me, I would change it but only because OCD. I dont think you would be experience anything negative because of this.

Brilliant, thanks andy much appreciated. Valuable feedback as always

Thanks for the feedback Andy,

Its always nice to here a a fairly straight forward "that doesn't sound natural" it lets us know we need to review it.

What makes it "less of an issue" if the words are within the menu structure? Is there some info you could provide that backs this up?

I will look to reduce the keyword usage in light of what you have said

As another follow up question, the text uses the singular version 7 times and the plural 10. Would these be seen as the same word in the context of keyword stuffing?

Hey Mozzers,

Im undertaking a content audit and its going very well, we have written some better content for the first set of pages, it still needs some improvement but we have a good base and starting point from which we can make an SEO log and work on it over time. For the content I used the following formula for how many times to include a keyword

Word Count / Length of Keyword. (eg. 600 words / 3 word keyword = 200). Then 1-4% of this (2-8 times).

This has worked well for me in the past and has been a good base guide. I have ran the pages through Moz optimiser and every single page hit an A for keyword page optimisation. However many of the pages failed on keyword stuffing, which obviously has high priority.

My dilemma is that, moz counts 15 as the cut off for keyword stuffing with the written text we have done really well with using it a set number of times. But these pages are product category pages. The keyword in the extreme of cases is listed 7-9 times in the side nav menu. 7-9 times in the product category listings.

Take for example *** it is optimised for thermometers (i know it a tough single word keyword, and we have fairly modest aims with it, im using it here for example purposes). The word is used a good number of times within the article but is sent through the roof with the links to the sub categories. This page for example mentions the keyword 30 times.

Can anybody suggest any ways to improve on this? Is how we display the categories in the nav bar and in the page excessive?

As always many thanks!

Hi Stramark,

This is an interesting debate that I have tried to test myself to some extent and found some mixed results.

A site I took over had category pages linked off the home page in 3 locations, the main nav bar, in the content, and in the footer. The anchor text was different in all 3. I made relatively minor changes but the main one was to make the anchor text the same and remove the footer links. (Basically avoiding any threat of being tagged for spammy links with different keywords)

3 Out of the 8 or so categories saw visible improvements with the removal and standardisation of the anchor text. Very few other changes were made to these pages or the site.

This change leads me to believe that not only can more than 1 link have an impact, but different anchor text on the multiple links also can, multiple links are not simply ignored. However, The big debate i guess is whether that is a good or bad impact, since cleaning them up and removing them helped my pages.

Andy's suggestion seems perfect to me!

This is kind of an extreme example of what 302's were meant to do. Your content will remain exactly where it needs to be for reference purposes and the eventual 301 redirects when your new website goes live. Meanwhile the bravo site with your duplicated content will no longer be duplicated and no link juice or rankings are going anywhere. (In theory)

Minimal work as if the site is an exact copy it will take only a couple of lines to redirect the whole site.

Hi again Ravi,

This and your previous questions have all been rather vague. It feels that you are after more of an SEO consultation than specific help with a problem.

The people on this forum are amongst the most helpful out there and always willing to offer solutions. But in return, it is expected that posters do the basic research, and read the "free information" provided. I believe you have been pointed to the "beginner" SEO articles by moz several times in your previous posts. Join this with your moz reports and all the free tools supplied by google and you have many changes  you could begin to implement to improve your SEO. If you gave them a thorough read through you should be able to identify a multitude of sins that we would be more than happy to help with.

Even if you provided us with a list of changes you have made so far, so that we could tell you where to look next it would allow us to provide you with an answer that could be built up on and demonstrate the efforts and pattern of thought you are currently on.

Your current question asks alot of us...you do not provide us with any issue or information that makes you think something isn't right. All SEO fixes are done for a reason, you need to understand the reason before implementing a fix.  Your question expects us to go to your website, access speed etc, review your source code applying our knowledge, then make a list and tell you how to change it. These are things we have spent weeks, months, years building knowledge over and we simply cannot relay it in a single message. Let alone begin explaining how to fix it all.

My advice would be to do some more research using the many resources you have been provided. Then come with a direct question such as "I have learnt speed is important to my website, what can i do to improve my websites speed". This will allow us to give you some more specific resources and direct advice that you can fix, then approach us with another question.

Sorry if this sounded blunt, I just want to convey the importance of helping us help you.

Patrick you may know more than me here but to follow up.

I understand that nofollow link wont hurt his site in anyway, and its a great link to confirm that.

However, he would be loosing the "juice" from the high authority main page and all the cateogry pages. Whilst the nofollow links wont hurt him, loosing this surly could?

This isn't as simple as just looking at your backlink profile and wanting only high PR links.

There is a diminishing returns effect on anything over 2-3 links from a single website. Google recognises they are all from the same root domain and acts accordingly. I do believe in a penguin update many web hosting companies were affected as many had link profiles with this due to "created by" footer links. However, links like this from a single website shouldnt be enough to arrouse suspicion on their own, it  your website isn't spammy and the website linking to you isnt spammy then dont worry too much.

Ideally yes, you would normally aim for only a couple of links from the highest PR pages on their website but there is a big BUT!

Do you get much referral traffic from these links? If so does this traffic come from the category pages of their site or the news pages? Don't shoot a your own referral traffic in the foot by trying to optimise your back-link profile.

If you have good traffic being driven from this collection of pages.... leave them be and focus on getting more good quality links elseware.

If they dont provide any traffic then look at the rest of your link profile, if this is an isolated case and eveything else meets good SEO standard and isnt spammy. I wouldnt personally worry about it until google gave me a reason to.

EDIT: My terrible english lol

Hi Patrick,

No, turns out I had been thorough and changed all the link in the sitemaps and on every page previously pointing to it. Having screaming froged it and follows the path through the rewrites etc it turns out What was causing the problem was the inbuilt layered navigation in Magento.

Each CMS created page produces a navigational path to the current page just above the content in this case

Home > Page1 > Sub Page  etc  each of these is a link to the hierarchy so the user can easily navigate.

The page in question (and only this page) seems to have a special rule set up for it (must have been back in development) where the navigation becomes Home > Page1 > Page1 > Subpage where the first 'Page1' is linked to via     website.co.uk/Page1    instead of    website.co.uk/page1/   like the rest of the website.

I have found a temporary way around it for now, having located the link until i can address the source code causing the issue

Managed it with screaming frog, I was just being a little thick and and not taking into account some other rewrites I had that were hiding these links :).

Sorry to waste your time! But thanks anyway

Hi Mozzers,

This may be a bit of a n00b question and i feel i should know the answer but alas, here i am asking.

I have a page  www.website.co.uk/page/ and im getting a duplicate page report of www.website.co.uk/Page/

i know this is because somewhere on my website a link will exists using the capitalised version. I have tried everything i can think of to find it but with no luck, any little tricks?

I could always rewrite the urls to lowercase, but I have downloadable software etc also on the website that i dont want to take the capitals out of. So the best solution seems to be finding the link and remove it.

Most link checkers I use treat the capitalised and non capitalised as the same thing so really arent  helping lol.

Hi Edward,

You are a little confused about what this means i think so let me try to explain.

Each link can be assigned an attribute called rel="nofollow", the person who owns the link has control of this attribute so you can control if the links on your website are nofollow, but you have no control of the link people point to your website.

Generally speaking you want your link profile to contain both and it demonstrates a healthy link profile.

How does Google handle nofollowed links?

In general, we don't follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web. However, the target pages may still appear in our index if other sites link to them without using nofollow, or if the URLs are submitted to Google in a Sitemap. Also, it's important to note that other search engines may handle nofollow in slightly different ways.

Using nofollow them on your own website

The use of nofollow links on your own website to your own pages stops google crawling and indexing certain pages on your website. For example is you had a "Login" or "Checkout" page. Many people choose to nofollow it to stop google crawling and indexing it. This stop a page with normally fairly poor content due to its nature being indexed on your site.

It is also used to prevent duplicate content, if you know a page is a duplicate of another but it is needed, rather than use canocial tags etc some people choose to nofollow them.

Im summary You can't nofollow links that point to your website from external sites (unless you contact the person sending the link and they agree to do so). Your best defence against spammy links is to monitor your link profile and when a link pops up you dont link follow the normal channels to remove it,

nofollow on your own website should only be used to stop google crawling and indexing certain links and passing link juice as and when you need it. It Google still has a bot that crawls through nofollows. But in general it will recognise your wishes.

Sorry i should have been more clear. This php solution is not a solution, at least in any practical sense.

Basically you would have for example

Descriptions Stored in variables
Meta Description UK
Meta Description USA

The page HTML would be

but the user is already on the website... they have already passed any point the meta-description would have been displayed to them.

The problem with this is that Google displays the meta-description that it has indexed from is most recent crawl. When google crawls your page is loads your page as if it were a user from wherever the bot is located, so wouldn't be able to see the other meta-descriptions for other counties and so couldn't display them if it wanted to.

Even if it crawled your site for various places around the globe, it would just be constantly tyring to update. It can change but each time it does is takes a period of time to be reflected on google. Once its changed the old one isn't stored, its just replaced. Its kinda a 1 description per page rule.

The only solution i could think off is a different landing page for each country (which you have) but there isn't a way to have a dynamic meta description on your main .com (as far as i know) sorry

To my knowledge there isn't

Are there are ways with php to dynamically load in a different meta descriptions? Sure.

The problem is that this wouldn't be reflected in google. Google takes days-> weeks or even months to update a meta-description within its index. So even though you could make the HTML code change on the actual page, it wouldn't change on the search listing nullifying the whole point.

I don't believe an option exists around this, but somebody may know something i dont.

Andy sums it up perfectly.

It is very easy to make any "SEO checker" give you top grades for a page. Likewise it is very easy to manipulate individual metrics to be higher. For instance, I could write 2000 words of useless content on wedding DJ's in perth, insert a few keywords in the right places, make sure my taggings is correct and i have the right number of tags and title text etc... Moz gives me an A for optimisation... but my content is crap.

If you have ticked all the boxes for on page optimisation (if you have more than 1 h1 tag  like a previous poster said then you need to look at this at start with the basic step) then its time to look into what andy suggests, the quality of your content, your website trust and hunt down that reason.