Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Andy

No, it is a Webstore site.  We have no access to code or to the site folders, so we cannot do anything at all with the current .co.uk site at all, but repoint it and then 301 the pages we had.

There are few ways to do this and I would like to ask other Mozzers if they have found the best way.

We have a site .co.uk and are moving it back to .com.  However we do not have any access to the site folders for .co.uk.  (We have to move it anyway as our provider is withdrawing their service).

We have built our URL 301 redirect file and it is ready to go, but how to impliment it?

We can repoint .co.uk to another site, and then redirect all traffic for each URL but this is quite messy, or just forget trying to 301 each page and just rediect the whole site.
the .com has more authority already, but we ready do not want to frustrate visitors who are using a link to reach a product, only to find they hit our homepage and not the product.

Your thoughts would be very welcome or other ideas

Bruce

Domain Authority is not really something you can control.  It is a view taken by Moz, Google etc using various algorithms.   So now you cannot influence the rank easily.

I would recommend stepping way way back and take a broad view of your site and look at some of the key Domain ranking factors that Google (might, as we can guess but they don't tell) use.

Dropping a factor of 9 is large, so something must have changed in the bigger picture.

Bear in mind that just because the numbers have gone down, does not mean that your site has had a penalty or other such disaster, it could well be that your Pond just became a Sea for some reasons, which you need to take a view on in your broad overview of your industry.

Please let us know how you get on as this would be very interesting to all Mozers I am sure

Bruce

This might be an aside to the main issue, but this is a search phrase.  Do your customers or webusers, actually search for this phrase?

I haven't drilled into this any more, but would be very interested to know which bit of the keyword they would be searching for.

Phrases are really hard to get a good score on in my experience

Bruce

I would look to see if the happy medium could be in the way "Calls to Action" are used within the pages of the site.

This way by introducing "signals" it indicates to the end user, that they can see the quality, experience the company and also enquire or buy.

I imagine what you really want is an advertorial style site with Showcasing projects, products, call to action at the end or sprinkled amoungst the narrative.

Hope this is food for thought

Bruce

Thanks for the clarification Mark.

So distilling down the motivation of the client, they ultimately are looking for sales?

If this is the case then everything needs draw the customer to the basic motivations to enquire further. This would suggest a cleint based presentation.

If sales are not the motivation, then the site surely must be a vanity site to show how good they are at what they do.  In which case showcasing to the industry their expertise is the important ellement.

I could be wrong, but I think that the client wants a sales introduction site, not a vanity site???

Bruce

(edit typo)

Looks to me that some mighty tinkering has been going on, on a regular basis to get these ups and downs and vast swings.

If you can refer back your change logs to see where what and when has reflected in the traffic flow.

Also look at your Adwords account too.  When a key word that drives traffic but no sales is eventually culled this can be the result.  Low traffic, but very good quality traffic remains

Please let us know more info,

Bruce

Really interesting post

What is the client wanting out of the Blog? The answer will help determine the content.

PR or Sales?

Bruce

It is a really tough one to deal with, although Google does recognise ecommerce data for products and recognises that duplication of product titles and descriptions happen and does not from what I understand have a major issue, although you will be competing with the others for the key word and phrasematches with your own site. (edit expand explaination)

Depending how your own site is structured, product popularity etc will give an indication of how well you will rank for your own site versus the big boys.

My view is that whilst you should use your own site to reflect your brand identity, expand the Brand / Category pages with fresh new text to add authority to your site, and look at all the channels collectively and do not worry if your own site is appears to underperform compared to the rest.  This is normal as the volumes of traffic and exposure will drive sales.

Hope that is useful

Bruce

Just seen the update to this question.

If you have a high value, high margin product, yes you might be able to afford a AU$20 cost per conversion, but if you are only making AU$15 on a sale, then this makes no sense at all.

Hope this keeps the little grey cells working.

Bruce.

Everything points to the first flush of youth.  New site, lots of new content and google loves this.  Now time as started to balance as your rightly say, to settle the site to where it naturally sits as a new kid on the block, but not that new.

What-ever you do, do not tweak, if Moz page rank scores are good for your keywords etc, as this will end up with you being totally confused about the stats you are starting to see.

Make sure each main page scores well for your keywords and build good content and update regularly to your main category pages.  Products pages are static, so use your entry pages to add fresh content.  Improve each page where you can.

Penguin is cannot penalise sites without spammy links, so this is not the problem if you don't have any.

Remember Google is about quality end user content, fresh and unique.

Hope this helps on the journey.  Look forwar to many more questions in due course I am sure.

Bruce

Appears to me, that you are beating yourself up about milk that hasn't yet been spilt ( to mix my metaphors) (edit, brain thinking faster than fingers type)

Interestingly, another thread was debating about "if you can't beat them, join them" with reference to slighly grey SEO. Penguin goes to show that only bright white outshines the rest.

Please wait a few days or so to see how things settle, worrying about what if will not make a drop of difference to what is real.

301 redirects are 100% fine, but should match as close as possible to the original content pages. but no "Check out our new website", whilst you cannot state this on a 301 redirect, only via anchor text, will not be acceptable in good SEO terms as this is spammy to say the least.

From what you have written and not written, I think you really need to spend some quality time reading and studying SEO and how all aspects work before embarking on your next steps.

Hope this might be somewhat useful

Bruce

Disavow is common practise, when all attempts have failed to get rid of unwanted links or you are uncertain about the origins.  This is a short video by Matt Cutts Head of the Google Spam team who explains Googles postions

http://youtu.be/eFJZXpnsRsc

Hope this is useful

Bruce

Panda has just rolled out, so give it a few days to settle down and then review the keywords.

Once you have seen stability, then start to look deeper as required

Bruce

17th October we have seen dramatic increase in Google Crawl activity, not as strong as the last update, about half the pages were crawled this time than that of the last main update.

Bruce

edit typo

Our GWT Crawl goes wild when it reaches the UK, so nothing yet.

Looking forward to seeing the impact.

All this very hard work that we all put in makes us look forward to Penguin dropping by to those who ride on the crest of others work!

Have a great weekend all

Bruce

The SEO was right with the 301 with the knowledge that 301 will not pass 100% rank authority as the original URL. The 301 will drop between 1 and 10%.

Sounds a bit complicated the next bit so to save this complication. Have the info on both sites, but put Canonical tags on the pages with the duplicate data.  This is the preference from Googles perspective.  this tells google that this is duplicate content.  If you intend remove the data from these original locations then rel canonical etc will not be needed.

Google does not want duplicate data, therefore you should for good practice use the canonical or delete the other data from sites

Hope that is of use

Bruce

I would doubt that this is a test, but this is driven by other metrics.

Positions rises and fall initially and then settle, so this could be the result of your hard work.  If this was me and I was unsure as to why this has happened, I would also stop any further tweaks until I have seen how static these positions become, otherwise you will not be able to see what environmental changes have effected any future change.

Keywords can be very volatile for many reasons, seasonality, competition, trend etc.  So it is worth doing more research on what theses results mean and find out as much as you can as what factors have influenced this positive change and be able to explain what has happened.

Positions change like the weather so nothing is permenant in site ranks, so work will still nee dto be done to maintain the positions, but knowing what why and how is key to this future maintenance

Bruce

Good post Patrick

Your right, Google is not here to make us popular, that is our job.  Google has to protect its own postion as No1 search engine, by delivering top quality content first time to the user.

I remember a not that many few years ago starting to get really hacked off with generic search queries delivering porn, meds, directories, warez sites and other useless returns, hit a link and have pop ups galore to try and close before the next one popped open.  What a vastly different experience Google searches are now, of course with Browsers getting better too.  The flip side is that we have to work harder to make our own sites visible to the rank highly.

One other thing we noticed a week ago, was that another competitor who was the bain of our lives, has delisted the brand we were competing with them for.  That said, most who where on the scene a few years ago have also disapeared too.

Without doubt, penguin, panda etc will level again the playing field as Google has to remain the browser of choice for Google to remain at the top position.

(Edit forgot Bruce )

There is another thread currently running here about PPC.

What is interersting is that some Mozzers are reporting sites are getting only 10% organic traffic.

We are all in the same search for the elixir of SEO. We too are baffled by two competitors getting high ranks, but as we mentioned on another post, we also know we sell more than they do for the competing brand.

So it is not always true that those who appear to be winning actually are.

Bruce

Hi Cole

Yes, we use content page specifc URLs for any links we feel appropriate.  Directories are not a highly thought of any more as a good SEO practice, as this became repositories for links links etc.  This adds no real value to the user of potential user of a directory.

If the directory is something like Yel, we would want only parts of our site to link to their category heading where we are listed under.  So we would not want our generic home page linking to a specific heading in Yel, as this is not useful to the end user, who would click the link and then have to start to search for what they really wanted.

Specific links at this level are liked by Google, because the link is 100% relevent to the user

Hope this helps

Bruce

Hi

This is a really interesting article by Matt Cutts

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569?hl=en

I think this will help you to clarify your concerns on syntax etc

Bruce

Could it be that the domain WM has not set their site preferences in GWT and therefore Google are crawling alternative version?

w w w . mountview . org and mountview . org need to have their preferences set equaly in GWT for Both domain versions or Google with see them as two different sites.

Bruce

Hi Kiwi man

Before you do any adjustments, download and cut and slice the adwords report data for this shopping campaign, analyse it and re-analyse it.

Check the campaign setup and see where your current money is going with your downloaded stats.

"Shopping" is hugely competive and you need to distil your target and also your products very very carefuly before spending more.  Look out for high click throughs with no conversions or high bounce rates.

Hope this helps

Bruce

Hi Sam

They are updated on the 8th day after the campaigns where created and then on the subsequent 8th day, this allows for a full weeks data to be measured.  You should expect to see your update shortly

Moz emails you when all the updates have been run with a summary report once complete.

Bruce

Hi Wattlebristol

Really interesting post and one that gets us all frazzled.

Web Design Bristol.  Really interesting search phrase.  I cannot think when I would have put this phrase into a search engine looking for Website Designers. I note you only have one match for this phrase on you homepage.

Can we recommend that you do some deeper research into what real customers are actually searching for when looking for a company to create our website.

When too close to the coal face, we cannot see the wood for the trees, to mix metaphors.

Who would really in reality would search for this phrase.  Step way way back and put yourselves in the shoes of a real business looking to help building a webste...If we where looking for a company to BUILD our website, this is perhaps not the first words to trip of our tongues. A few might be....

Website companies, Website building companies, Ecommerce Websites, we need a new website, companies who build websites etc

I think we also had the same problem a while ago with a really annoying competitor, who outranked us on one keyword, but having had some feedback from their main supplier, we realised that in fact we outperformed them on gross sales.

Not perhaps the ideal answer, but one we think is worth responding with

Bruce

If there is any chanse that both sites will be live & crawlable at the same time, remember to put canonicals in the headers of the old site pages, so Google knows it is duplicated data.

Bruce

Hi Carl

No problem.  Quick tip, try and make the 301s match as close as possible from the old page content to the new page content.  If it is not quite 100% it will still pass the reduced juice to the new page, but if it is way off then any juice will be lost.

Bruce

First off, are the blog and the main site on the same domain?  If they are then they are almost internal links and this should be classed as such

If the links go to totally different domains, then this will be reciprocal linking, which is not liked by Google, but also recognised as required, but will cost some authority.  What is a big no no is back and forward irrelevent links.

What is OK.  but will cost some authorityParent company A has three brands with 4 sites.  The parent site, links to the brand site via "our other brands" page only and this is reciprocal from the brand site, from their "Our Other Brands" page linking back. 
This is logical from Google and the customers point of view

What is not OK and will definately cost in authority and unatural links penalties

Parent Company links to all the pages in all the brands pages and they do the same back and to each other.  Links are sporadic and all over the place.

This will also work with topics and also other content.

Hope this is of use

Bruce

You can have as many 301s as required, no problem at all.  Google will not mind at all.

You will lose some authority of between 1 to 10% via the redirected to...pages, but this is to be expected.  DA reflects the site and PA the page, so if you need to change the domain, then you will drop a bit, but will with good SEO bring this back up reasonable quickly.

WMT only specifies which version of the site you prefer, so Google knows that www.example.com and example.com are the same site. if you don't make a specification Google will not make the association and will class both as separate domains.

Bruce

Hi Cole

I am not sure why you would want to totally delete the disavow file, but its your call of course.

If you have deleted it yes recrawl to get Google back up to date with the changes quickly rather than wait for the regular crawl.

PS great to see you have sorted this, what was the problem?

Bruce

Unless Google has issued a warning penalty, they either know about the site and ignore it anyway or have not found these links.

Therefore yes build better content to drive traffic, but I wouldn't worry too much about the problem now you have done the disavow.

Hope that helps

Bruce

Hi Cole

Check you listings on Google Plus is complete and includes full business address, with building, street and zip code, make sure your site does too.

Investigate anything that looks odd and reach out to Google.

easy to re-invow.  Just remove the site from the text file and resubmit it.  The text file should contain all the disavow links and is like a master for Google to reference.  Add/remove to this list as required.  I doubt that this is the cause, more like something is not fully joined up for Google, like address etc.

Hope that helps

Bruce

h1 tags are useful, but are not needed by Google, as they will crawl the page to see the content.  However if you have h2 h3 etc tags, but don't have an h1 then crawls will not read any tag at all, as they must be present, completed and sequential.

Hope that helps

Bruce

In our opinion,

Distil all the keywords to a handful, Your budget will be swallowed whole if your not careful, pick the best and just stick to to those.  Set your initial budget high for a week and then drop it way down, once you start to see which words work best. Make sure your adverts are linked to the right page and use keyword destination URLs.  Check the quality score for the keyword.  If it's a low score, revisit. Final thought, don't tweak daily unless you can see a problem that is costing money.  Leave the campaign alone for 7 days and then revisit.

Bruce

HI Thomas

If the redirects look dodgy get rid of them.  Redirects feel spammy unless they are 100% legitimate and can be justified as logical to the end user.  We have all got caught in searches in the past where you click a clink and then get a cascade of redirects going on.  Google want clear transparency for entry to a site.

Bruce

Analyse why traffice is not going to the main page. A few things to look at:

Do a page rank check on Moz on each page using the keyword, and follow the guidelines and make adjustments.

See if the actual pages are getting the same keyword as a trigger, you might find it is actually another word that is ranking higher.

Hope that helps

Bruce

Hi Tom

It might also be worth checking if the clients e-commerce platforms will allow you to add tags into the head.  Some ERP website or cloud based sites don't so worth checking from the get go

Bruce

Matt Cutts covers this in some detail on a Webinar.  If you can fix it, do so, but it would appear that Google do try and make allowances for e-commerce sites where content is duplicated across size colour matrix, being the product description is often duplicated without any other option.

Check Youtube for Matts webinar

Bruce

Hi Pascale

If the content is visible to the "not signed in end user" then it is visible to google. If it is not, it is not visible to Google.

I might have this wrong, but it would appear that you have a pinterest style site and that you want further content only be visible when the user is logged in? This then would be a site settings and not crawl issue.  This is a trgger on the website server to require the guest to log in after XYZ.  The whole site is opened to crawl but you set these parameters for the guest user in your sites back office

I think it is a case of either or, not both

Bruce

edit typo

If the content is for Logged in Users, why would you want it crawled?

Google crawls sites open to the public, therefore if the site is behind a login, then google will not crawl it. If google crawls it, then the content will show up in search results, hence making the login process redundant.

If you want to offer subscription content, then this is a marketing issue, not a crawl issue. You will need to have open content available that the viewing will perhaps then make a call whether to subscribe to your site or not.

Remember login is a cloaking devise, designed to stop unwanted visitors viewing the content, hence why google will view this in the same way.

Hope that helps

Bruce

No it only transports approx 90-99% of the power.  You lose some in the redirect.

Bruce

I vote Old:

If you start with a new domain, then you will have to build all the rankings basicaly from scratch, give or take a few possible redirects etc.  Providing the penalty has gone then you should be fine on this.  Google doesn't from what we know keep a token penalty on the site because of a past problem,  once the main penalty has been lifted its lifted

A new site can take quite a while to settle in and therefore you could expect many months of patience waiting for the site to get to the level of the old one.

Bruce.

This is always the challenge for buying multiple domain variations.  Matt Cutts mentioned this on one of his webnars.

As long as the 301 redirects are working and also rel canonicals are in place and href lang tags where appropriate then Google will know which site is the primary site and that they are related. But you may in my opinion loose some quality as this will be shared between the different .com sites.

Google would really prefer that you focus your energies on building "One" strong site and develop links to that site. I am not sure why you would want loads of .coms active though.  I can understand brand protections, so buy the domain but leave them dormant.

If it were (edit typo) me, I would only 301 local domains to the .com site and not .com to .com.  This for me is confusing for the end user.  301 redirect for "www.brandservicename.ca" or www.brandservicename.de" with the right heading href etc. but not  www.brand-service-name.com to www.brandservicename.com.

Other Mozers' opinions will be useful too

Bruce

Without know what kind of site you have it is hard to gauge.

Ecommerce Keyword ranking swing wildy as these are often used in conjuction with Adwords and bidding. So whilst you might have a great keyword, if this is a seasonal or on trend product then the competition changes dramatically.

If you have a blog or a company site, not in ecommerce, check what is happening in the industry and see if your keyword has gone on trend.  For example: Blue LED.  a few days ago this was not the hotest topic around, but since the Noble Prize has just been awarded, this phrase will be more volatile, but will drop back once the excitement drops.

So in essence for the above, if you keyword was rankng well, it might be that you where in a niche area and ranked well even with other SEO issues present.  Once competition hots up, others might well outrank you.

If you can give us some more info about your site, that would be a great starting point

Bruce

It depends on how often the keyword is used elsewhere.  The recommended level of all keywords relating to a page is 15, nicely placed amongst the URL, Meta description, h1, and text etc.  As long as it is balanced.

The URL is the first indication of the page content relevance to a searched for keyword, and then the others all build up a great picture of the page.  However, URL is not everything.  Quality content is the most important element of a page as Google will look at the page too to make a decision (edit typo fix) "in conjunction" with the URL.

Keyword stuffing is when you have far to many instances.  The best way to tackle this is with a thesaurus and a good keywork tool to find great variations of the Keyword that are also used.

Bruce

HI William

Are you taking about your site promoting your Ecommerce services, or the actual E-commerce sites you are developing?

Thanks

Bruce

Hi Demi

Is the blog on a sub-domain of the main site or a separate domain.

If it is on a sub domain, then this counts as fresh content.  if it is not you might want to think about moving the Blog to a sub domain.

Can you let us know

Bruce.

No expert, but I suspect that Google is on this one already.  In Googles world i guess, they want you make your Golden Ticket, not some-one else from the past. Google crawls your site and will decide in the fulness of time how good the site is and will rank accordingly.

My major concern would be building a castle on sand.  The sand is the high ranking domain, and unless you can convert this sand to concrete fast, then it will slowly blow away with the wind.

Bruce

In essence I would agree with you.

Domain forwarding is a redirect, but it is not going at add value if it is new and also it is not really the right way to use domain forwarding.  There are many more experts on this subject than me, but domain forwarding from my understanding is meant to direct a domain name to a hosting service, a regional territorial domain i.e .co.uk to a com or to forward domain variations to a parent site.

These should then be used with href lang and also rel canonical in the page headers where appropraite

I think Google would really prefer that you build good links and unique content around the  "keywords social skills" and rich content in your original site, creating a page with the URL including xyz.com/socialskills, rather than Domain Forwarding.  New traffic and links built up over time to the main site will be worth the time and effort.

Hope this is useful and I am sure others will qualify some of my points ref Domains if I am slightly off the mark.

Bruce