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I've been looking into creating an app for one of my sites as well. I was wondering about the SEO impact, so I tried exploring a link from iTunes for one of my competitor's apps and encountered the same problem you mentioned.
According to a reply to the post below, OSE can't handle HTTPS / secure URLs.
Does anyone know of any testing / studies with evidence that Google prefers dark text on a light background vs. light text on a dark background?
I have a website that currently has light text on a black background, and really like the way it looks, but am concerned that the style may be hurting SEO.
Moreover, redesigning something inverse with the same quality would be a large project and fairly costly, so I'd like to make sure the benefit will really be worth the cost before moving forward.
Did you get a chance to have your developer look at your code? Here's a snippet -
There's another one right above that I suspect also includes some items that aren't parsing.
<fieldset class="question">
<legend>${question}</legend>
{{each answers}}
<label for="q${$data.id}a${$index}">${text}</label>
{{/each}}
</fieldset>
It's more than likely template code specific to the MonkCMS that isn't getting processed - perhaps there's not a matching variable / object setup in the system.
You will notice that both sections are currently hidden, so maybe you can just do without them altogether?
I'm not familiar with the Monk CMS, but looking at your code, you have some links to:
${pdf} - the %7B and %7D are basically URL encodes for the braces.
My guess is that ${pdf} is supposed to be parsing into a real URL, but it's not happening...
If you want to have total control over what goes into the title on each and every page, as your developer mentioned, that would definitely require some extra custom programming - can't begin to give a ballpark figure without talking more specifics.
If you're okay with something at least semi-standard across the board that would just include having the actual property address in the title, I can't see that taking more than a couple of hours of programming (if that).
Without looking at the actual source, I'm 99% sure that your property details are already being stored in a database. With that said, I imagine they can just duplicate the existing header into a new file (i.e. header2.cfm), insert CFM code into the title tag that pulls the property address, and then replace the header file that is currently included in the rentaldetail.cfm page with the new one.
Should you make any global changes in the header in the future, you will need to update both header files.
There's really probably a variety of ways to handle this, but that's my 2 cents.
For whatever it's worth...
I've worked on several real estate websites myself. They can get rather complicated. There's definitely a great deal of power in developing your own solution, but it can be costly and time-consuming - you can easily spend $20K for something good.
If you see yourself continuing to need other programming adjustments, it may be easier to jump over to one of the more customizable commercial solutions, such as http://www.diversesolutions.com or http://www.realestatewebmasters.com . Please note that I'm not trying to bump your developer out of work - they can certainly assist with either of the above solutions, and will likely be necessary for the first one.
Hope that helps -
I don't see evidence of a popular CMS being utilized on the page you mentioned, but it does use ColdFusion, which is a scripting language, and I would guess is probably communicating with a database that holds the various details for each property listing. I don't think it would be too difficult for your developer to pull the address into the title tag.
I've seen the same thing on some of my sites...
This guy provides a pretty good analysis
http://socialmediatoday.com/georgestevens48/1317336/google-rewriting-page-titles-time-brand
It sounds like it's not so much about colons, but more about moving brands to the front of the title. Only time will tell whether it's a test or a permanent change.
I also want to add that I've seen this for general searches that do not include my company name / brand.
For whatever it's worth, I just wanted to clarify the difference between meta tags and the actual title element.
I've seen a number of cases where people use something like:
or
Please note that Google does not consider the above to be a title element, and will not treat it as so.
You want to make sure your title element looks more like this:
<title>My Page Title</title>
If you look at most of the Facebook comment implementations, they're usually embedded with an iframe.
Technically speaking, that is making the content load from another source (not on your site).
As we're constantly seeing Google evolve with regard to "social signals", however, I suspect embedded Facebook comments may begin to have an impact if they pertain to content that is actually located on your website.
If your ASP code is used primarily for dynamically generating HTML (at or before page load), and the HTML isn't changing, and your URLs are staying the same, I can't see how SEO would be affected or why you'd run into any problems.
If the upgrade includes code modifications that change the way the pages load, however, it could affect SEO depending on how that's handled.
Hi Sean,
Search engines are going to look at the title element that is inside of the head element. Moreover, W3C HTML standard / definition only allows for one title element only.
Should you include more than one title element, whichever will be chosen / indexed by a search engine is anyone's guess. I'm not sure how they handle that.
In regards to the homepage content, it looks like you could use a bit more. I see you have styles defined for an H1 & H2 tags, but no H1 or H2 elements on the page.
Moreover, it looks like you have several lightbox popups. It's good that you have the actual content for each one in the main source for your homepage (vs. being loaded dynamically), but you'd probably benefit from altering the design a bit to make that content / text visible without the popup.
I didn't see any recent test for 2013, but it's been analyzed quite a bit, and the 2 links below expand a bit on what I mentioned.
The conclusion on the first one below is that it won't index content loaded dynamically from a javascript file on another server/domain.
http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/can-google-really-access-content-in-javascript-really
Here's the link that talks about extra programming necessary to make AJAX content crawlable and indexable.
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=174992
Googlebot has become extremely intelligent since its inception, and I'd guess that most members here would probably agree that it's gotten to the point where it can detect virtually any type of content on a page.
For the purposes of analyzing the actual content that it indexes and uses for ranking / SEO, however, I'd venture to guess that the best test would be viewing the page source after the page has loaded.
If you can see the content you're questioning in the actual HTML, then Google will probably index it, and use it considerably for ranking purposes.
On the other hand, if you just see some type of javascript snippet / function where the content would otherwise be located in the page source, Google can probably read it, but won't likely use it heavily when indexing and ranking.
There are special ways to get Google to crawl such content that is loaded through javascript or other types of embeds, but it's been my experience that most embeds are not programmed this way by default.
Can you provide a URL? It would help if we can see the actual page -
I imagine you were looking for the answer posted by EEE3 regarding Google Analytics, but just wanted to mention that term is also common on the more technical side of web development, relating to both Flash & Javascript, and I imagine some other languages.
Moreover, it refers to situations where a program on a site, or in your browser (javascript) is trying to communicate with and access data from another website / domain name.
For instance, if you have a flash program on your website that accesses data (such as photos) from another website, the website hosting the actual data may need to add your website to their crossdomain.xml file.
Just browsing the forum and noticed this thread... Looks like you've changed to WordPress, but I just wanted to post an answer should anyone else need it.
Based on your description, the page title and navigation items are currently being generated from the same field (likely, the default "title" field) in the entry. Moreover, it's certainly not unusual to want them to be different (navigation title generally much shorter).
You'll want to add a new custom field specifically for the navigation title, adjust the template that generates the navigation to use this new field, and continue using the main Title field the way you wanted.
Assuming you're on ExpressionEngine 2.x (released july 2010), you'll add the new field through Admin > Channel Administration > Custom Fields.
To adjust the template that generates the navigation, you'll want to go to Design > Templates > Edit. If you're familiar with HTML, you can open the Index template and drill down to wherever the navigation is likely located at. You'll probably find an "embed" statement that references another template specifically for navigation. Just use whatever name is in the embed statement to find the navigation template, and go back to Design > Templates > Edit to open that template up. From there, you'll want to change the {title} tags to the name of the new navigation title field you created - {my_new_field} .
If you're on 1.x, the process is very similar, but the templates and custom fields are in a slightly different location - let me know if you need additional help.
I don't work for ExpressionEngine, but I do want to mention, for whatever it's worth, that I've used most major CMSs (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal etc.), and stopped when I got to EE. If you're comfortable with HTML, you'll find it's an extremely powerful CMS, especially for SEO.
Should anyone need any help with ExpressionEngine, you can find a list of developers at http://www.director-ee.com, or you can always visit their forums
Hello,
One of my clients received the notorious message from Google about unnatural links late last March.
We've removed several hundred (if not thousands) of links, and resubmitted several times for reconsideration, only to continue with responses that state that we still have unnatural links.
Looking through the "links to your site" in google webmaster tools, there are several hundred sites / pages listed, from which we removed our link over 60 days ago. If you click each link to view the site / page, they contain nothing, viewable or hidden, regarding our website / address.
I was wondering if this (outdated / inaccurate) list is the same as the one their employees use to analyze the current status of bad links, and if so how long it will take to reflect up-to-date information. In other words, even though we've removed the bad links, how long do we need to wait until we can expect a clean resubmission for reconsideration.
Any help / advice would be greatly appreciated -