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Some nice feedback there Matthew, Thank you. I certainly think this could be something i should look more into.
There a certain types of this product we dont cover in the article. Simply because we dont sell them. I know this could account for a number of the bounces simply because of the search terms users enter from this page.
How would you reduce the bounce rate for the attracted traffic and expectation of those products you dont sell?
The page in question is
http://www.atp-instrumentation.co.uk/different-types-of-thermometer/
Allow me to add some more context.
The site is going under a content review, as I found many page of thin or poor content when i began. This page will also be updated in-line with new categories and better content that is being injected into those new pages.
When i began in March / April the page wasn't great, but attracted so many visitors I was reluctant to alter it too much. I added the product images, and links into the already existing sub-sections.
The content can be improved upon, but as the average person spend 4-5 minutes reading im fairly sure the content is ok for now.
Hi Mozzers,
I wanted to discuss bounce rates as i am trying to drive my websites down and would appreciate some pointers.
Firstly, the facts.
Ours is an e-commerce website we attract 10000-12000 visitor a month, 8000 of which land on a single page and the other 4000 rest of website.
On a whole the rest of the website has a bounce rate of 48-56% which im fairly comfortable about, but have made small gains with little changes.
The problem is the single page attracting 8000 visitors. The page is an informative article about the various types of a select product and its most common uses. When i started the page had no internal links and was suffering from a 88% bounce rate. I have since inserted products into every sub-section of the post and lots of links to products, category pages etc. This has gone really well and the pages linked from it attracted 1000 more views month 1, and 1500 month 2 with the bounce rate dropping to 76% (small win). However I am still not happy as this is still very high. I would like to work towards dropping it below 60%.
The article attracts traffic from hundreds of longtail keywords around the subject "different types of this product". The average time spent on the page is 4-5 minutes so I know people are reading the article and finding it useful. How else can I look to encourage more click-through?
Im not a robots.txt expert by a long shot, but I found this, which is a little dated, which explained it to me in terms i could understand.
https://sanzon.wordpress.com/2008/04/29/advanced-usage-of-robotstxt-w-querystrings/
there is also a feature in Google Webmaster tools called URL parameters that lets you block URLs with set parameters for all sorts of reason to avoid duplicate content etc. I havn't used it myself but may be work looking into
Thank you, your clarification backed up my theory for most things. The changes I am making also impact design to hopefully increase conversion and userbility at the same time so I think ive got things right.
Cheers for your time.
I would do some things to look at user interaction to see if they can look past "attracting visits"
Maybe an example of a landing page attracting a lot of traffic but suffering from issues such as
Give them stats showing a fairly new article page attracting visitors from a variety of closely related keywords, but put a couple of deliberate minor technical issues on there related to the keywords and see what they say.
Worst case: They miss everything
Mediocre: If they identify the minor technical SEO problems and small improvements
Best Case: They look past the technical SEO and realise that although you have traffic there must be an issue which could well result in a loss of ranking when google identifies users are not finding what they need.
This would give you an indication of if they can look at the bigger picture and use some initiative or if they are a more "follow this formula" type. It also opens up room for discussion.
Its an eCommerce platform the blog side is a feature where introducing separately so no worries on that front. These will only be one copy of these category pages but they are essential to be indexed and they generate our revenue.
Hey Mozzers,
I've recently been doing a content audit on the category and sub-category pages on our site. The old pages had the following "profile"
Above The Fold
Page Heading
Image Links to Categories / Products
Below the Fold
The rest of the Image Links to Categories / Products
600 words+ of content duplicated from articles, sub categories and products
My criticisms of the page were
1. No content (text) above the fold
2. Page content was mostly duplicated content
3. No keyword structure, many pages competed for the same keywords and often unwanted pages outranked the desired page for the keyword.
I cleaned this up to the following structure
Above The Fold
H1 Page Heading 80-200 Word of Content (Including a link to supporting article)
H2 Page Heading (Expansion or variance of the H1 making sure relevant) 80-200 150 Words of Content
Image Links to Categories / Products
Below the Fold
The rest of the Image Links to Categories / Products
The new pages are now all unique content, targeted towards 1-2 themed keywords. I have a few worries I was hoping you could address.
1. The new pages are only 180-300 words of text, simply because that is all that is needed to describe that category and provide some supporting information. the pages previously contained 600 words. Should I be looking to get more content on these pages?
2. If i do need more content, It wont fit "above the fold" without pushing the products and sub categories below the fold, which isn't ideal. Should I be putting it there anyway or should I insert additional text below the products and below the fold or would this just be a waste.
3. Keyword Structure. I have designed each page to target a selction of keywords, for example.
a) The main widget pages targets all general "widget" terms and provides supporting infromation
b) The sub-category blue widget page targets anything related and terms such as "Navy Widgets" because navy widgets are a type of blue widget etc"
Is this keyword structure over-optimised or exactly what I should be doing. I dont want to spread content to thin by being over selective in my categories
Any other critisms or comment welcome
Richard,
I ran a test and only found 6 or 7 external links like yourself. I think you may be getting slightly confused.
Are you talking about colum AO (External Links) in a moz crawler report download? If so this doesn't refer to external links pointing off your page. It refers to external links pointing into that page.
I think theres an older post somewhere on here about it.
http://moz.com/community/q/ok-crawl-test-link-question-again
Yup found it! Staff confirm my beliefs.
Hope that helps!
Havn't received anything yet
Hi Richard,
Could you provide a URL? Pvt message if you want, so I can take a look have a better idea
Looks like Rich Snippets / structured data are whats doing it on this particular URL. If you right click on the site and click inspect elements you will see bits of code like this
The itemscope & item type tags all have to do with rich snippets / structured data, im no expert as i've not implemented them yet myself, but you can find out more at the following links
https://moz.com/learn/seo/schema-structured-data
https://moz.com/blog/a-visual-guide-to-rich-snippets
https://developers.google.com/structured-data/breadcrumbs In short, they tell the search engines what the data is so it can be displayed in a more appealing way in the search engine.
So your saying in google their URL appears
site.com/cat1/subcat/subsubcat/page
but once clicked the url is
site.com/page
If this is the case, I would guess that they previously had the page at the "site.com/cat1/subcat/subsubcat/page" url and google index'd it there and have since re-directed the URL the site.com/page and google simply hasn't reindexed and updated its listing yet.
Without a URL / example to look at I cant tell if anything more is going on.
Hi Mozzers
Having worked on my companies site for a couple of months now correcting many issues, im now ready to begin looking at a content review, many areas of the site contain duplicate content, the main causes being
1. Category Page Duplications
e.g.
Widget Page Contains ("Blue Widget Extract")
Widget Page Contains ("Red Widget Extract")
Blue Widget Page Contains ("Same Blue Widget Extract")
Red Widget Page Contains ("Same Red Widget Extract")
2. Product Descriptions
Item 1 (Identical to item 2 with the exception of a few words and technical specs)
Item 2
Causing almost all the content on the site to get devalued. Whilst i've cleared all moz errors and warnings im certain this is causing devaluation of most of the website.
I was hoping you could answer these questions so I know what to expect once i have made the changes.
As always, thanks for you time!
Hey Noah,
Your content seems good at first glance, my major issue was that it took me forever to load your site.
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=hiddentriforce.com&tab=desktop
I ran a speed test and there seems plenty of things for you to fix, your mobile friendly which is good but at only 25/100 on mobile and 45/100 on speed, this could be a reason your finding lower class competitors out-ranking you.
My first stop would to be to fix these.
I would be tempted to have a title and a very short description and potentially a thumbnail image or something. Enough so I can tell what roughly what the excursion is before clicking it. Not so much that I remove the need for clicking to find out more and create loads of duplicate content. That's what I would expect as a user.
Thanks Andy, i will try this on Tuesday after the bank holiday and see if i can get it working. Either way you have provided a workable solution for me so thanks very much!
Hmmm slight hic-cup
I just noticed the pages ending
.html
such as category and product pages are now also being given a /
Would you advise just swapping and using the remove / rule or is there an edit to this code so it only happens to page that dont end in .html
Thanks Andy, it worked a charm and testing doesn't seem to show any errors elseware.
I used the 'enfore a trailing slash' version included in the same article you provided which was
RewriteCond%{REQUEST_FILENAME}!-f
RewriteRule^(.*[^/])$ /$1/[L,R=301]
For anybody else thats interested.
Hi guys, this type of question has been asked a few times before but I couldn't find something that told me what i need so apologies if its a tad repetitive.
I use Magento, and have several pages using its CMS. However, it produces 2 URLS for each page with a simple /.
For example,
website.com/hire
website.com/hire/
I know google treats this as 2 separate pages, which would be the better solution.
1. Write a URL re-write for every CMS page
RewriteRule ^hire$ http://www.website.com/hire/ [R=301,L] (Is this right?)
2. Write a general rewrite rule to always add the /
No idea where to begin with this
3. Add a Canonical tag to the page which i think is possible in magento by adding this to the Custom Design Layout XML option in the page CMS.
<action method="addLinkRel"></action> <rel>canonical</rel> <href>http://www.website.com/hire/</href>
This would make the /hire/ page self-reference and the /hire page reference the /hire/ page I think. Which one of these solutions is the best and any pointers with the coding would be grand.
Has there been any changes to website traffic or more specifically organic traffic over this same period?
Hi John,
We are in the process of doing a similar thing, we had 15 articles all pdf's with one in-particular attracting 5k viewers a month to the website (65-80% of our website traffic each month). Our problem was that the PDF didn't encourage them to interact with the rest of the site, and was a nightmare to update.
After discussion and seeking advice here on the moz forum we decided the best solution was to launch a blog (in process), update all the old pdf articles and release them all as a blog post, then re-direct the old pdf's to the relevant blog post then finally attach the new updated pdf as a downloadable link via a no-follow link so we don't get duplicate content and our customers can still take away the content. So far we only did it on 1 article as a test whilst we get the blog set-up correctly, and about 1/5 of 5000 viewers each month now view additional pages across our site instead of just the pdf.
If you do it correctly and get the same success with your pdf's that are attracting traffic you may find you can seek the boosts in traffic your blog is after.
SIDE NOTE: However, if your blog has 300+ articles and your not getting traffic, i would suggest moving traffic from other parts of the site to your blog in this manner isnt the answer you seek and instead you need to look at addressing the problem directly by looking at marketing strategies for your content aswel as reviewing the content in these articles to see if there may be a reason its not attracting visitors or ranking to gain traffic.
Cheers Dirk,
I will look to implement this fix, as always you've been great!
The first option question is fairly simply and is doable with a little bit of javascript / jquery and either the data attribute or css classes.
http://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_global_data.asp <--- For info on the data tag
Say you had your page, you tag each entry with relevant HTML data attributes (I would stick with 1 page listing all of your hotels for example and allow them to be filtered)
Cruise1/Hotels/
Hotel 1 (data-food="included") (data-price="19.99") (data-rating="5")
Hotel 2 (data-food="notincluded") (data-price="9.99") (data-rating="3")
Hotel 3 (data-food="included") (data-price="4.99") (data-rating="2")
Then a little bit of javascript code activates on a button or drop down menu etc, so when "Food Included" button is clicked make all hotels where data-food="notincluded" vanish. You just repeat the process for every variable your after and can make it as complex or simple as you like. I wouldn't recommend doing it yourself unless you know how but your developer most likely will, its fairly basic javascript. This method means that all of the information is loaded initially for google to crawl and any filtering happens in the users browser so doesn't hide any information from google bots.
As for the second question. I think your worrying about something that doesnt need to be worried about. In my opinion it doesn't matter if it makes logical sense so long as it makes user sense. If i was using your website and i saw Mediterranean cruises or Italy and greece. I would presume Italy meant just italy, Greece meant just Greece and Mediterranean meant numerous locations across the Mediterranean. I would do it exactly how you have done.
If it were my site I was building from scratch I would have the following layout.
Home Page
Port A
Hotels
Hotels 1
Hotels 2 (site.com/porta/hotels/hotelname)
Excursions
Excursion 1
Excursion 2 (site.com/porta/excursions/excursionname)
Port B
Port C
Obviously Port B & C would mimic port A. This way each hotel, each excursion and each port would each have a unique page crafted and target towards keywords each with a unique title and page content.
Then I would address the cruises themselves I would have a landing page for each cruise like you do now, this page would have a unique title and content (all your descriptions etc that remain constant.)
Then a page for each for each category under each of those as below, again this would have a consistant title (Cruise 1 Itinerary) etc
Then importantly, I would have the content on these pages dynamic and changeable rather than creating a new page. So if i had 2 dates for cruise 1 (2nd and 17th for example) instead of having
which would create 2 pages with the title (Cruise 1 Itinerary) I would have
dropdown menu containing all dates
div containing timeable
div containing list of ports
As standard these page would have the closest cruise information so there was always content. Then have a database containing all the information on a set cruise. If 2nd is selected from the drop down menu. The (div timeable) is updated to the new values and (div ports) is updated to a list of ports. These links can then go towards the static page created that remains constant.
Edit:
This should stop duplicate pages and titles and keep the very user friendly format you have now.
Thanks for the reply patrick,
As a follow up, how would I go about re-directing these sites? Their content changes whenever I update the main site so i presume they are linked somehow. I have access to the root folder on the main site and cannot find any reference to them there.
If they are being hosted else-ware how is the content being updated immediatly
Hi Marston,
This is still rather confusing, but I think im on the right line of thinking. Let me know if this is correct.
Lets take 2 cruises both to the same location on different dates, my search parameters return
Cruise1 June to USA
Cruise2 July to USA
Is your problem (simplified) that
website.com/cruise1/shore-excursions/ & website.com/cruise2/shore-excursions/
would be exactly that same as each other and when you compound this into many cruises with many variables you get many pages with many duplicated titles and content?
Hi Brad,
Im not an "expert" but do a fair bit if developing in my spare time. My understanding is that this shouldn't affect you from an SEO stand point. Its only the databases and administration files behind the scenes that are ran from the same place, and if set up correctly google bots dont crawl these anyway. Each site is still technically self contained and a website in its own right. You are not trying to anything naughty like linking between the sites to boost rankings etc and are treating them as separate entities. Also I believe the "store" system in magento is designed with exactly what you are doing in mind.
In terms of servers, lots of websites bar the absolutely huge ones out there are hosted on shared servers anyway, you just simply don't see it and the bots know its not an important factor (unless in extreme cases where dodgy stuff is happening i believe). The personal sites I develop are technically sub domains and I still get them ranking completely independently and treated as separate entities.
Please dont take just my opinion as the answer, wait for someone with a little more experience, I dont want to just spam the obvious but it might also be worth a post on the Magento help forums as the community there may be able to offer some magento SEO expertise that this forum cant.
Hello Again,
Looking for a little help to help me understand what exactly is going on here.
Ive taken over maintenance of a website and have so far fixed a lot of issues. ahrefs has shown me that a second version of my companies website exists that exists at a second url. This second website is linked to the actual company website like I haven't seen before.
www(dot)#(dot)co(dot)uk is the main company website. But a second accessible version exists and is accessible at www(dot)#(dot)co(dot)uk
The instruments version is a direct copy and all of the links point directly to my main site. Any changes I make on the main version are automatically applied to the other version. It shows up as a SPAM back link on moz as all of the link points to my website etc
Ideally in my mind, the instruments version homepage should simply re-direct to the main homepage to solve this "duplicate content and spammy backlink" issue however, the instruments version is the same suffix that all our company emails work with.
Basically, HELP lol. I have no understanding of how this is set up, and the best way in which to deal and if it could affect anything such as company emails.
With it being over a week since your email was sent I don't think the two events are related, the pattern we see from our emails see an initial spike and a much smaller spike the Monday of the following week due to out of offices etc.
If your certain its direct traffic then I would be investigating further with analytics. The spike is at a time you normally experience spikes, is this coincidence or a pattern?
In our marketing department we try to paint a picture of our direct traffic users.
Which page are they landing on, what are they doing, where is the user located, are the visits resulting in more bookings/services being orders. Then consider external factors which may cause people to go looking more.
For example, one company I work with here in the UK see a jump in direct traffic correlating with the end of the financial year and tax refunds.
As SMG said, Behaviour and Acquisition tabs are your friend. Sorry its not more of an "answer" but direct traffic can be vague.
Hi Bob,
Don't upgrade just because somebody says you need to, consider the variables and then decide if its the right choice for you. Yes its good to be up to date with the latest HTML5 and responsive designs etc but you have to way up cost vs reward.
We faced a similar debate this month after "mobilegeddon", and had to consider the change to a responsive site. After a bunch of calculations we concluded that it would take 7 years on average to earn back the costs of upgrading our website and it would simply not be worth it as our site is performing well in every other aspect.
If your site is still valid HTML, ranking well for its keywords, user friendly, looks modern and up to date then the only consideration really is the "mobile friendly" test which Lesley has detailed. In which case, its just working out if the realistic mobile gains are worth the outlay.
Disclaimer: Im sure some people will totally disagree and argue that a mobile friendly site is an absolute must. Whilst I cannot argue that this is certainly the future I believe each site must be taken individually on its own purpose & merits.
Harry, Could you provide a little more info/clarify a few things?
You stated that your direct traffic on the spike day followed the same overall pattern as a normal day etc... but you haven't clarified if the spike was all direct traffic.
Was this spike definitely direct traffic?
Also I think its beneficial for us to know (so we can look at factors that might influence direct traffic)
What Industry / Type of website is it?
Why are Mondays normally big traffic days?
From my understanding it is a disadvantage Adam,
Although a 301 passes link juice it only passes a percentage of it, a little is lost along the way. Also redirects increase the amount of time needed for a page to load after the click as it has to walk down a longer path to reach its destination. Im sure I read somewhere (cant find the source sorry) that too many redirects and redirect "chains" can negatively impact your ranking but it likes redirects that genuinely offer replacement relevant content.
If it were me I would at the very least
Redirect: /this-is-it/ -> /how-nice/ removing a step in that path
Keep: /yep-yep/ -> /how-nice/
Then change all links on your website point to /this-is-it/ and /yep-yep/ to /how-nice/
If possible get any backlinks changed to the new url also.
Hello Again,
I have taken over managing a website for about 2 months and have fixed a whole heap of problems. Im now turning my attention to the URL rewrites as there are ALOT of them. I have fixed the most problematic offenders that were blocking products and all sorts of mischief but I now want to clean them up.
The website is on Magento, and there are 240 custom URL rewrites.
Question 1: Am i correct that I should edit the links on my website so that they link directly to the new page instead of utilising the re-direct for best SEO results.
Question 2: If my website doesn't utilise the URL rewrite (fixed in question 1) its only purpose is to transfer link juice from any external link the page had before. If this page didnt have any external inbound links then I can delete the URL rewrite as it serves no purpose.
Question 3: If Q1 and Q2 are correct, what is the quickest way to check the inbound links to a page quickly so I can make a quick decision on if i should remove the re-write.
Many Thanks in advance!
Hi All,
I came back from work today from a week off to find my site has gone from 681 external inbound links to 202. With this my domain authority, moz trust and moz rank have all also taken a slip. Compounding this, I am seeing a slip most of my keywords rankings. If i try to use the open site explorer to explore my links and see what going on i get the message
It looks like we haven't discovered link data for this site or URL.
If i check the just discovered links like it suggests I get
It looks like there's no Just-Discovered Links data for this URL yet.
I know these features worked before the index as i used them. Is this all attributable to the moz index issues that have been noted or could something have happened to my site?
Since i started 2 months ago I have made many changes including...
All these changes should be for the better but the latest readings have me a little worried.
Thanks.
Only issue with this is that it makes people wanting the access to PDF unable to do so.
Hi everybody,
My Website is ranking well for several keywords and long-tail keywords. However, all these visits are going directly to some .PDF guides that exist on our products and information on industry sectors the company is based around.
I feel the PDF's are bad simply because they dont offer easy interaction with the rest of the website. I am considering making each PDF into a webpage but am not 100% sure of the pro's and cons of doing so. I will still need to the PDF's accessible for user to download but don't want my new webpages to get tagged as duplicate content.
Is it possible to,
1 - change the PDF's so they send any link authority to the new webpage
2 - make google aware that I want the webpage not the PDF to be the "ranking" page
What is the likely hood of destroying my rank for these keywords on the PDF by making these changes and then not being able to rank the webpage for the same keywords? It would be pointless if I just lost all the traffic lol.
The problem was as you anticipated, after spending a few days chasing the party who actually look after it im pleased to say i checked this morning and all is working as expected.
Thanks very much for your help Toby!
Thanks Toby, Ive emailed off, I expect a reply to be a couple of days away (what it normally take them) Thanks for the help thus far and ill message back when they do!
I dont have access to the DNS, my access is limited to the Magento CMS, and ftp access to the root folder.
I guess its a case of popping an email off to the guys who built the site and control the web space and getting them to address the issue?
I added the line and it did indeed break the website, got internal service error etc
So it seems the file is working
Thanks Toby, here is the entire HTACCESS file with your fix implemented. Doesn't seem to have worked if i go to
http://atp-instrumentation.co.uk with no www it still fails to load
Edited out to shorten convo
Thanks Highland,
How do I go about changing this? I believe its to do with the .htacess file.
The website was developed in Magento via an external company who monitor it. Looking in the root folder I can see the htaccess file but it contains a lot lines of code and rewrites that I dont fully understand.
These lines are the one I think could be relevant so far.
############################################
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^companyname.co.uk [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.companyname.co.uk/$1 [L,R=301]
Then there is lots of category pages etc that are 301 redirected
Follow by
RewriteRule ^home http://www.companyname.co.uk/ [R=301,L]
Then some more redirects for pages
I know this is specific but is this editable a different way in Magento? Thanks for any help offered i know this is getting more technical
I have just taken over admin of my company website and I have been confronted with crawl error 902 on the existing campaign that has been running for years in Moz. This seems like an intermittent problem. I have searched and tried to go over many of the other solutions and non of them seem to help.
The campaign is currently set-up with the url http://companywebsite.co.uk when I tried to do a Moz manual crawl using this URL I got an error message. I changed the link to crawl to http://www.companywebsite.co.uk and the crawl went off without a hitch and im currently waiting on the results. From testing I now know that if i go to the non-www version of my companies website then nothing happens it never loads. But if I go to the www version then it loads right away.
I know for SEO you only want 1 of these URLS so you dont have duplicate content. But i thought the non-www should redirect to the www version. Not just be completely missing.
I tried to set-up a new campaign with the defaults URL being the www version but Moz automatically changed it to the non-www version. It seems a cannot set up a new campaign with it automatically crawling the www version.
Does it sound like im out the right path to finding this cause? Or can somebody else offer up a solution?
Many thanks,
Ben
.