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Questions created by BCutrer
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Does referral exclusions remove the ecommerce value from Google Analytics?
Quick question on Referral exclusions. We have a client that just rebuilt their Magento website, referral data from Paypal was never an issue, the site properly attributed to source. New web devs finished the site and all purchases through Google Analytics from PayPal Is now showing as referral traffic. Doing research on the issue the suggestion was to create a referral exclusion in GA from PayPal. My question on that, will the ecommerce value default to the previous referral or will it delete the e-commerce value completely from what is gathered?
Reporting & Analytics | | BCutrer0 -
Flat architecture or deep folders?
We have an e-commerce client that is launching a new site. In setting up for it they decided that they want to change their navigation on the site and url structure. So everything being even, the new site will have appropriate 301 and it's built on Magento so the product pages are all structured as website.com/product-A but the category pages will now be deeper than before. So before it was website.com/product-category/product-sub-category will now be website.com/more generic category/product-category/new-subcategory/product-category. Hope that makes sense. I'm not as worried about the 301's or specific products but I'm worried the category pages dropping a folder level will hurt page authority. Any thoughts, am I being overly nervous?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BCutrer0 -
I need thoughts on how to chase a suspected Hosting Issue with Simple Helix and 524 errors, also some site speed data mixed in...
So the back story on this project is we've been working as PPC and SEO managers with an ecoomerce site (Magento Enterprise based) that crashed in April. After the issue they fired their developer and switched hosting to Simple Helix at the recommendation of the new developer. Since the change we have seen a plummeting ecommerce conversion rate especially on weekends. Every time something seems really bad, the Developer gives us a "nothing on our end causing it." So doing more research we found site speed in GA was reporting crazy numbers of 25+ seconds for page loads, when we asked Simple Helix gave us answers back that it was "Baidu spiders" crawling the site causing the slowdown. I knew that wasn't the issue. In all of this the developer keeps reporting back to the site owner that there is no way it is hosting. So the developer finally admitted the site could be slowing down from a Dos attack or some other form of probing. So they installed Cloudflare. Since then the site has been very fast, and we haven't seen turbulence in the GA site speed data. What we have seen though is the appearance of 524 and 522 errors in Search Console. Does anyone have experience with Cloudflare that seeing those types of errors are common in usage? Is there any other thought what might be causing that and what that means from the servers, because the developer reports back that Simple Helix has had no issues during this time. This has been a super frustrating project and we've tried a lot different tests, but there is really abnormal conversion data as I said especially during peak times on the weekend. Any ideas of what to chase would be appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BCutrer0 -
When you can't see the cache in search, is it about to be deindexed?
Here is my issue and I've asked a related question on this one. Here is the back story. Site owner had a web designer build a duplicate copy of their site on their own domain in a sub folder without noindexing. The original site tanked, the webdesigner site started outranking for the branded keywords. Then the site owner moved to a new designer who rebuilt the site. That web designer decided to build a dev site using the dotted quad version of the site. It was isolated but then he accidentally requested one image file from the dotted quad to the official site. So Google again indexed a mirror duplicate site (the second time in 7 months). Between that and the site having a number of low word count pages it has suffered and looked like it got hit again with Panda. So the developer 301 the version to the correct version. I was rechecking it this morning and the dotted quad version is still indexed, but it no longer lets me look at the cache version. Out of experience, is this just Google getting ready to drop it from the index?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BCutrer0 -
Is there a downside of an image coming from the site's dotted quad and can it be seen as a duplicate?
Ok the question doesn't fully explain the issue. I just want some opinions on this. Here is the backstory. I have a client with a domain that has been around for a while and was doing well but with no backlinks. (Fairly low competition). For some reason they created mirrors of their site on different urls. Then their web designer built them a test site that was a copy of their site on the web designer's url and didn't bother to noindex it. Client's site dived, the web designer's site started ranking for their keywords. So we helped clean that up, and they hired a brand new web designer and redesigned the site. For some reason the dotted quad version of the site started showing up as a referer in GA. So one image on the site comes from that and not the site's url. So I ran a copyscape and site search and discovered the dotted quad version like 69.64.153.116 (not the actual address) was also being indexed by the search engine. To us this seems like a cut and dry duplicate content issue, but I'm having trouble finding much written on the subject. I raised the issue with the dev, and he reluctantly 301 the site to the official url. The second part of this is the web designer still has that one image on the site coming from the numerical version of the site and not the written url. Any thoughts if that has any negative SEO impact? My thought it isn't ideal, but it just looks like an external referral for pulling that one image. I'd love any thoughts or experience on a situation like this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BCutrer0 -
Is there a tool to see all redirects?
I'm thinking this is a silly question, but I've never had to deal with it I thought I'd ask. Ok is there a tool out there that will show all the redirects to a domain. I'm working on a project that I keep stumbling on urls that redirect to the site I'm studying. They don't show up in Open Site or ahrefs as linking domains, but they keep popping up on me. Any thoughts?
Technical SEO | | BCutrer0 -
Is Google not Penalizing aggressively anymore for on page manipulation?
I wanted to throw this out where we have been seeing so much emphasis on Google cracking down on bad linking, have they let up enforcement on manipulative on-page tactics that have faded in current years? I've been seeing hidden text popping up again and ranking. Here is an example. Google "landscaping Portsmouth NH" and find the #1 result. Now find "Portsmouth" on the page. So what I find interesting, the site has a clean backilnk profile, but that's a pretty blatant manipulation hiding those keywords. What I find interesting is I filled out a report on it a year ago. (I'm not a big "fill out spam report" guy, I was curious if Google would take action). A year later it is still #1 for the competitive keyword. So I'm curious if others have seemed similar trends like font-size:0px, or text color as the background popping back up and ranking. I would love other's thoughts on it.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BCutrer0 -
Instagram # not working
Ok I have a client with a branded hashtag that is only working part of the time on Instagram. Client posts don't show up when the hashtag is searched and only partial people in their community have their posts saved. We would like to find more fans of the brand who are already using Hashtags. I looked through all their help info but couldn't find a place to report it. Any thoughts?
Social Media | | BCutrer0 -
Raven Reporting Alternative
Does anyone know of a tool that has similar capacity to Raven's Reports? I'm doing some white labeling of reports for another Agency that is used to sending their clients a monthly Raven report that is basicly pulling out all the Google Analytic Data of top referrers, keywords, landing pages ect and putting them into a nice format. I've used the Moz reporting and at times just combined it with a pdf of the actual GA equivalent. That's always seemed a bit clunky but I don't want to have to take on a Raven subscription just for that. Anyone have any good alternatives or know if when the new dashboard launches if it will also up its game when it comes to the generated reports?
Moz Pro | | BCutrer0 -
I need Black Hat Examples
So I need a little help. I'm guest lecturing this week for a local college class on web design. We are going to be talking about Black Hat design for a little bit and things to avoid. I'd like to share some examples in the wild of old school tactics, keyword stuffing, cloaking, hidden text. Anyone have any good examples? If you don't want to share them publicly feel free to sent me a private message. I would like to give the students some interesting examples so they can visualize it. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BCutrer0 -
Do you Feel Street View for inside a local business is a ranking factor for the local algorithm?
I'm working in a market where the Google Trusted photographer is rolling out. The question came up if providing this data would boost your rankings in the local map pack. I've been asking a few fellow SEO peeps but I thought I would throw it out here for your opinion.
Algorithm Updates | | BCutrer0 -
What SEO topics would you cover if teaching a College webdesign class?
Later this month I am guest teaching a class on best SEO practices for web designers at a local College. I wanted to see what topics others would include if you were doing an overview.
Industry News | | BCutrer1