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SEO benefit? Nah, nothing.
But redirecting the .com and .co.uk sites is probably better for the customer. I'm speaking as someone who used to hate when typing in twitter.co.uk sent me to a crappy MFA page (but somehow never remembered that I wanted the .com).
If you've already got the domains what else are you going to do with them?
I've only got a small amount of experience with this tool set and from that I've made the decision to avoid it.
A lot of the sales copy makes me not want to buy it as well - it seems like it would have been great circa 2004 but if you tried to get me to buy it now I'd probably say something rude.
Is it going to take longer to clean the site up than to start a new one?
If so, I'd bite the bullet and start a new one.
I'm assuming that the term you're targeting is "fotograf i odense".
I'd recommend running your homepage through the SEOMoz on page optimization tool.
You're showing up within the top 100 which is a good start. If you can build some links to the site you should quickly rise up to the top 50.
Although I should warn you that until you get to page 1 (and maybe page 2) you won't really see a large increase in organic traffic.
Defintely point the variations on your domain at your site. So point mysite.nl at mysite.com. Why point the none branded ones at your site? Do they have link equity that you want? Or did you buy them in case they became useful?
Personal opinion. - likes per photograph is far, far better for UX.
If you're worried about this then ask the site to do a larger content update on their page rather than just changing a link. Get them to add an editorial note that says when the update happened and why.
A lot of "keyword sponsorship" services only change phrases into links and don't actually update the content. Plus if ti comes down to a manual review you've almost got proof that it's not just some crappy links you've paid for.
Is the second keyword less related to the overall theme of your site?
If your site is selling "chocolate mousse" and the second keyword is "anaphalctic shock" then I wouldn't be surprised if you were struggling to rank. That's an extreme example but you get the point?
You should use a 301 redirect on all pages on your old site to point them to the pages on the new site. This is the best option.
If this isn't possible, or if it is too time consuming, then I would recommend looking at your analytics and making sure that you 301 any page that has been an entry page from Google within the past 6 months. That way you're only spending time on pages that are actually driving traffic.
If you do this then you will also want to make sure that you 301 all pages that have external links pointing at them.
In answer to question 1 Google don't officially recommend so I wouldn't. (and I doubt anyone with evidence that there is added benefit from it would share the evidence.)
If you export to .CSV and put it into Excel the referring page (referrer) for the 404 error can be seen in column AM.
That should be enough to fix it although if it's a dynamic site it can end up being more complex than that.
If it's just the title tag on the pages then you might as well try swapping out one or two and testing your changes.
If those titles affect the URL of the page or of any other pages then you'll need to consider these changes. Changing URLs is the same as creating a totally new page so obviously this is a bad thing.
If it is literally just a title tag change...I'd try it, you can always roll it back after a week.
I don't think this is possible but would love to hear to the contrary.
Hi Laura.
Well the obvious thing is to push for organizational change and get the whole company on board with SEO and moving in the same direction. That's the best solution as if you're all working together you can pool resources and work cohesively.
But you probably already know that.
To make the most out of your current situation I'd start by doing some onpage analysis - checking your pages are targeted at the right terms and that everything is set up correctly.
If possible I'd push to improve your page types - making sure that your product pages are as good as they can be and packed full of information. That way you might be able to do some linkbuilding to your pages based on the quality of the content.
If not possible then you've got to figure out how to linkbuild to your pages in their current format.
And that's pretty much it - do as much optimization as you can but if your company really wants to move the needle on SEO then you'll be wanting to work on a sitewide level.
Hope that helps.
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I wouldn't be overly concerned.
For some terms, especially product codes and the detail pages of your site there are probably only going to be three pages where that term appears. The product page itself, the page within the navigation that links to that page (normally a list), and the sitemap.
Your sitemap is probably heavily linked to across the site so it does kind of make sense that it would appear as one of the top URLs for a term.
The reason I wouldn't be overly concerned is that I would IMAGINE (and I could be totally wrong) that the top Pages list is generated by a very simple algorithm that doesn't reflect how the organic search algorithm sees your site.
In answer to question 1 - yeah. Happens all the time. They're spammy sites that are scraping the serps to get some relevant content. There is nothing that you can do about it and personally I wouldn't worry about them too much.
In a word?
No.
Or at least so little that the answer is basically no.
Hi Karen,
8 months is a long time when you're in the throes of Google. Your problem might not revolve entirely around your navigation.
However in answer to your question - are they the right subpages?
Personally I'd do a card sorting exercise to determine which sub categories your users are expecting to see. You can normally back this data up with some keyword research to see which sub category type terms are generating a lot of search volumes.
For example if you've got a page called "English Literature 1800-1850" and more people are searching for "Romanticism period in English literature" then maybe you've got the wrong subpage.
It is a bit of work, especially joining up the keyword research with the card sorting but at least you'll know that you've got the right sub categories.
Hope that helps at least a little.
+1 to notifying Google through Webmaster Tools.
However this may not solve your traffic problem so I'd probably get to work doing a little social outreach/linkbuilding as well if I were you.
Then real benefit of contributing to an industry forum is that it allows you to build authority within that industry and to connect with other webmasters. You can then leverage the relationships with those other webmasters at a later date.
The actual benefit of having a signature link is negligible.
Because you are an Australian company with an Australian domain and hosting in Australia you will find it harder to rank on Google.com - especially for competitive keywords.
To be honest after looking at your site I don't think you're quite at your fighting weight for competing on tough keywords in a foreign search engine.
If you really want to rank in the US you might want to conduct an onsite audit to check for issues (example-home link in top nav links to /index) and also invest some time into link building.
Hope that helps.
Obvious one first - it could be an error in how you've implemented the canonical tag.
Or Google may have decided that it trusts/likes the duplicate page more than the original. As with anything if Google think you're wrong then they'll override your decision and do as they please.
I doubt that very strongly.
Your breadcrumb displaying in this manner is a bug or loophole in the way Google displays snippets. It's not going to affect rankings.
It's easy enough to do in Excel.
Star by creating a superlist in column A. This should be a list of all sites that have sent traffic to you over a given time frame.
Then in column B run a vLookup to find the number of referring visitors for the last month. In order to do this you will have to have the referring visitors data downloaded and stored.
Then I'd go on to do a similar thing for the previous month's data in column C.
If it's on your own blog then link to any content that is relevant within the body of the article but you don't always have to link back to the main site.
You're probably going to be linking to the main body of your site in the top nav anyway aren't you?
You can learn a lot.
But what you'll learn is probably a lot different from what you'll hear on SEOMoz.
I wouldn't want to say that one is right and one is wrong but right now I wouldn't pay for access to Warrior Forums.
I'd say do your best to get the links removed/fixed at the other end but other than that just leave it.
So long as you're returning a proper 404 you're doing the right thing (on paper).
Totally agree with Stefan on this point.
Although, why are you so keen to keep the original URL? Already built a lot of links to it? Is it a homepage?
Do you mean the different types of vertical search options that Google has - Google scholar, Google images, Google video etc? there's a decent list here.
Or do you mean the different ways that Google modifies universal search? 1 box, map, SPYW etc? I've not seen such a list and I think that's a great infographic idea.
Since sometime around 2009 Google will replace your URL in the SERP with a breadcrumb if they feel it adds a better user experience.
In itself this isn't an issue.
That it takes you to the wrong is odd but I've noticed it happens to a couple of you other pages as well. At a guess I would say that if you complete the breadcrumb so that the last section points to the URL that is being displayed (see this page for more detail) it will solve your problem.
Hope that helps.
I'd go for a separate page for CityA and CityB.
You'll probably want to promote the CityB page on other sites that are relevant to CityB - local directories etc.
Which updates did you have in mind?
Have you checked that the rank checker is using the same version of Google as you - Google.co.uk instead of Google.com for example.
Regarding pagination - urls look fine and you should use rel=prev/rel=next instead of the no-index tag.
Regarding sorting - Google have a handy little sheet about this which you may or may not have seen that covers this kind of issue
I was afraid that this might be the case.
Thanks for the help.
1. They cheat using automated methods of link building.
2. It's a loophole in Google's algorithm.
3. If it's as bad as you say then I would imagine they will be penalized for it however you can always give them a little help by filing a spam report
I keep getting the "Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site" message in the GWMT for one of the sites that I manage.
The error is as below-
Googlebot encountered problems while crawling your site.
Googlebot encountered extremely large numbers of links on your site. This may indicate a problem with your site's URL structure. Googlebot may unnecessarily be crawling a large number of distinct URLs that point to identical or similar content, or crawling parts of your site that are not intended to be crawled by Googlebot. As a result Googlebot may consume much more bandwidth than necessary, or may be unable to completely index all of the content on your site.
I understand the nature of the message - the site uses a faceted navigation and is genuinely generating a lot of duplicate pages. However in order to stop this from becoming an issue we do the following;
But we still get the error and a lot of the example pages that Google suggests are affected by the issue are actually pages with the no-index tag.
So my question is how do I address this problem?
I'm thinking that as it's a crawling issue the solution might involve the no-follow meta tag.
any suggestions appreciated.
First off I'd check that it's not an issue with your rank tracking software.
Beyond that I have seen some crazy fluctuations on Bing and Yahoo but I haven't dug into them yet - I'm based in the UK so Google's got a 90%+ market share.
Welcome to Q+A,
The avg positions in webmaster tools aren't very reliable. They look at data from all searches and can be influenced by personalization and localization. This means that your "true" position (position with personalization turned off) can be very different from your average position which is an aggregate of all of the data.
I tend to see that my average ranking is lower than my "true" ranking so if I were you I would just check that I'm removing personalization from the search. You can either open up a private browsing session (anonymous browsing if you're using Chrome) or add &pws=0 onto the end of an existing URL query string. In the example below I've highlighted where you would add this in.
This is a tough one.
The keyword difficulty tool can give an indication of where you need to improve in order to move up the rankings but at the same time there are other things that you might need to consider like one page optimization.
You also have to remember that SEOMoz's data does not necessarily reflect how Google views the same data. For example SEOMoz might be saying that you have 30 unique linking root domains however Google might discount 29 of them as having been previously identified as being in a link network. So you see, you have no way of knowing whether the data you see is the data that counts.
Nope.
A 301 is something you have to actively implement.
You can change your title tags without it causing any technical issues UNLESS your CMS automatically rewrites URLs based on the title of the page. If this is is the case then you'll need to find a way to disable this in order to change your title tags.
I agree with Ryan.
No. It's not going to hurt you.
Unless there are other factors limiting you I would probably bring all of the variables onto a single page and treat size as a variable similar to the way you treat colours.
So you don't currently have separate pages for Burgundy and Caribbean Blue covers so why not do the same for size? You would want to adjust the copy to indicate that the product is available in different sizes and obviously this would require reworking the page but if you're going to create a parent page anyway then you might as well.
Hope that helps.
There isn't currently an option to filter reports by date. If you want to sue OSE data for that sort of thing then you need to keep a record of your competitor's current links on a monthly basis. So if you download it now and then again after the next update you can compare the two.
Glad to hear it's all working for you.
Do you think the directories had a noticeable impact. I've discontinued by BOTW subscription because I didn't see the value in it anymore but would be interested in hearing your experience.
It's more of a copy issue as you mentioned. So long as the content on the pages is unique you shouldn't have a problem.
There is an argument that linking out might increase your rankings by a tiny bit.
So long as it's a decent, none malware hosting, none spammy site it won't have an adverse effect.
With regard to follow/no-follow - if you trust the site and think it's passing a benefit to users then why put the no-follow on it?
I've got a couple of recommendations.
First off you can demote a site link in Google Webmaster Tools. You can find the option in configuration/sitelinks. Although Google is obviously assuming that the pages with current site links are important somehow so it might be a good time to recheck your site architecture.
Secondly you should probably remove the no-follow attribute from internal links on your homepage. They won't be having a beneficial effect and could negatively impact how search engines view certain pages on your site.
Hope that helps.