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Thanks for the feedback. I agree, it seems to be google specific.

Scratch that, webmaster tools is showing manual action. Now the fun part...

I'm a bit baffled by this one and would love if someone in the community could help provide some clarity!

In general, my website (PSG1.com) is indexed and cached correctly. The exception is that the homepage is actually cached as plasticsurgerygroupnewjersey.com, another domain we own.

1. Header checkers all confirm that plasticsurgerygroupnewjersey.com redirects to PSG1.com, not the other way around
2. No canonical is set for that domain.

At one time, I used the Moz toolbar to view attributes and it registered PSG1.com as having a response code of both 200 and 301 to plasticsurgerygroupnewjersey.com. However, I cannot replicate this.

Any idea why the homepage of PSG1.com is not indexed/cached correctly? I appreciate your wisdom!

TJ,

Why send the source info through the form? Are you passing it your CRM or something?

I typically just utilize Google Analytics to track the source. You can set a custom variable with the lead's name into GA if you want to match up leads.The avantage is that you can also track other lead sources like organic, social, etc. in addition to PPC.

Of course, if you're doing really high volume, this isn't real efficient.

-Rick

Could always give it a whirl...

Here's what I'd do.

First, check big stuff like:

• Did your URLs change? Is so, were redirects applied?
• Did your devs accidentally noindex or nofollow entire sections of the site? I've seen this happen a bunch.

If neither of the above, I'd next dig deep with analytics to try to figure out if there is a certain pages, type of pages (product page, articles, blog, etc), etc. that have taken the biggest hit.It may give you more direction. Could also:

• Review Webmaster tools
• Run a site scanner link ScreamingFrog and look for big errors

You could always try blocking new stuff but you never know how long it's gonna take google to come back and honor your changes.

Maybe try some keyword themed around military/army/navy + preparation?

'Bootcamp' fitness stuff is huge right now (especially with crossfit and similar stuff becoming so popular) so it's gonna be challenging.

Really depends on the products you're selling. I do like Rob's answer about keeping the page live and offering an alternative or capturing an interest list. You still want the sale or to create the lead so providing some sort of call to action is key if these are significant.

If the product is never coming back, I'd def redirect to a close match or a parent category.

Can you give away products? Maybe target a few influential bloggers and send them a product sample for review?

As long as you redirect them to a URL with campaign tracking variables "?utm_source=Banner&utm_medium=referral" there shouldn't be an  issue.

Well said, I agree. There's too much uncertainty. I'd be shocked if anyone could guesstimate (at the keyword-level) with any decent level of accuracy. Overall % improvements are a bit easier to ballpark guesstimate.

Yahoo can be ssssllllllooooowwwww.

Part of me wants to say, "If Google can't find the link on it's own, then you don't need the link."

The other part wants to say, "BookmarkingDemon is great for helping Google find your links."

One answer is better when writing a blog post about ethical SEO. The other, a realistic way to get 'garbage' links indexed (even if they still won't be worth much).

Tell your boss that the website's flux capacitor will get overloaded without a good meta description.

Curious if you check your rankings that often? Must drive you crazy!

I really only look at webmaster tool data as search is personalized, localized, etc. Are you looking from the same browser each time (like just refreshing the page)?

Almost everything these days is DB driven! I see no issues and the same optimization rules apply. Yes, google just sees the final rendered version of the page so aside from potentially slower load times, it all looks the same!

Once it's crawl-able, go to town!

I'd almost certainly first try to use it as a micro-site. Would it be big deal to do a quick overhaul (not sure what your business is)? If you can generate leads from it, why risk a fishy redirect? Either way, could always link from the new domain to your existing and pass some of that link love.

Agree with Brandon too that more info is needed but I can't think of much that would convince me to do otherwise without trying this first.

Good luck

Some of these directories take data dumps from DMOZ (http://www.dmoz.org/rdf.html). So I guess it all depends when they grabbed the data last.

Hey Roy,

It's an interesting debate. On one hand, every page can be a landing page so you want to maximize opportunities. On the other, how much is too much. I guess you could put it all over and measure it's usage and make a decision based on that?

Hey Gary,

I partially agree with Cafe. However, I wouldn't remove any redirects for URLs which may have backlinks. Maybe it would be a good idea to figure out if any of the redirects which you are removing are from URLs that have earned links? An Open Site Explorer link export would help you figure out if any of those URLs still have value.

Here's the google help doc on trackpageview: http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55529. Or you could use event tracking: http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/eventTrackerGuide.html.

Neither will necessarily work better. In the old days, news and blogs all seemed to use dates. Problem is that dates don't really add any value so why not just keep it keyword rich with category and article name? If you're going to submit the site as a Google News Source, you may want to read http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=68323.

I don't believe that there are any "accredited" courses.

Agree, keep the .html

I second that idea. Guaranteed re-tweet on that video.

Cheap wine?

Per Google's recommendations, I'd change the links to the new website.

Wp e-Comm is "okay" out of the box, but is missing stuff. Just make sure you install  the Yoast Wordpress SEO plugin and that will fix the rest and give you specific control over the category/product page titles, meta, etc. It's a great plugin to use in combination with WP eCom.

One cautionary note: If the products are going to live in multiple categories (which a lot of times they do in eCom), I'd go with /product/product-detail. Avoid duplicate pages and having to canonical and get into that whole mess.

You're not going to lose a lot (or probably anything) by not having the category names in the product urls. Just my opinion though...

Magento has some great options for that if you're going in that direction.

There's probably a number of ways to do it, some more manual than others.

Get a developer to export a list of product numbers (if they are unique) and urls from the DB of the old and new CMS. Use excel and match em up (vlookup is a good function for that), create the htaccess redirects (=CONCATENATE is a good function for that) and whaaalaaa.

If programming resources are short, you may need to use a scraper (ie. mozenda) to get the info. Or, just pick the most valuable revenue entreating pages (export from Google Analytics if you have that setup) and manually write redirects. Not recommended but better than nothing!

Err, so many options, lol. And definitely switch to Magento. It rocks!

Hola,

We've moved a number of sites for similar political reasons. It's always frustrating as an SEO!

We almost always have seen some drop-off for obvious reasons. Sometimes that drop-off has been less 5%, other times closer to 30% depending on the precautions that business owners were willing to take. Sounds like you're going to do redirects and do the webmaster tools request. 2 tips:

• Plan to hold on to the .net domain for a long time and keep the redirects in place. Our worst results were situations where for some reason, the business owner would not (refused to/could not/whatever reason) hold on to the old domain name.
• Try to find a feasible/scalble way to get your top-linkers to move to the new domain. In a perfect world, you'd get most your inbound links updated. This can take some time but seems to help minimize the impact and be better in the long-run. This is an absolute waste of times in some cases (way too inefficient) but if you have or can establish solid relationships, get those links updated!

Best of luck. It's not an ideal situation but usually isn't the end of the world if you're in it for the long haul (unless your in a crazy competitive market)!

For volume, I stopped using wordtracker because I thought it made more sense to get the data straight from the source, so-to-speak. I use google to get that estimate. Google doesn't really show keywords without decent volume so that may not be the best tool for long tail. We typically only do keyword research to identify 'themes', as opposed to specific long tail.

For competition, there are many other tools to guesstimate. I personally just use google search operators (intitle: and intext:). It's not perfect or precise but I think you could poke holes in the methodologies of any other tool as well. My goal is to get a rough comparison between keywords.

Hope that helps!

http://www.internetofficer.com/seo-tool/redirect-check/ and http://www.seomastering.com/url-redirect-checker.php both say 'not search friendly'.

Kind of weird, some other tools are showing a 301. Even more weird, when i visit the url, it looks masked and i see http://www.bookbyte.com/productv3.aspx?isbn=9780321676672 (note the "productv3.aspx") which is different from what any of the tools bring back. I'm not a dev so i cant help much more. Something weird going on and i assume that's what google is seeing too.

best of luck!

Hi Thomas,

I'm seeing a 302 redirect on http://www.bookbyte.com/product.aspx?isbn=032167667X.

Maybe try this: http://www.webtoolhub.com/tn561352-url-redirection-checker.aspx

Ahh, I better understand your initial comment. Your concern makes complete sense.

I'd still go with the form technique and apply it to title tags as well (see EGOL's comment). It will help you better target longer tail which may be your best bet anyway (unless you're already a link powerhouse and can compete for the more general search phrases).

I wouldn't go an hide/canonical/disallow anything until i knew G was having a problem with it. But that's just me.

Is this site replacing an old one? What's that structure like and is anything working there?

Hey Leigh,

First off, I'd say that your #2 concern would be a great problem to have! I'd rather own 2 of the top listings than just 1!

In scenarios where product-level optimization is not feasible/efficient/etc, I'd try to get as many data points on each product as possible and do 'form optimization'. I see that your initial descriptions are going to be similar. You should enhance them a bit using product attribute info. It takes a bit of programming but worth it in the long run!

Do you have other product attributes which can be worked into each product page template?

Maybe stuff like:

• Size availability (2,3,4,etc.)
• Color/style options (white, gold, pink, etc.)
• Seasonal availability (winter, spring, year-round, etc.)
• Parent category names (wedding ring, anniversary necklace, etc.)
• Material (gold, sterling, etc)
• Fulfillment time [1 week, immediately, etc.)
• Weight

In this case, you can enhance your descriptions with that data. For example, your product page template would look like:

The [Insert Ring Name] is a [Insert material] [Insert parent category name] available in a variety of sizes including [insert size options, comma separated]. The [insert product name] is available [insert availability attribute] and usually ships [insert fulfillment time].

Would yield something like this on a specific product page:

The 14k yellow gold ring is a yellow gold wedding ring available in a variety of sizes including 1,2.3 and 4. The 14k yellow gold is available year round and usually ships in 1-week.

We're still seeing form optimization work pretty well as long as:

• The content is pretty useful and not just a bunch of keywords and attributes stuffed onto each page (aka, provide value, especially to the customer!)
• You have at least a few different data points for each product which can be utilized to hide the appearance of 'form optimization'

O yeah, not sure of your sales volume but push the h*ll out of getting customers to write reviews and make sure the reviews appear in a SE friendly way on the product pages themselves for added uniqueness.

See where I'm going with this? Hope this helps and good luck!

We're not seeing it anywhere...

I'd 301 it. I haven't tested it but it makes the most logical sense.

Honestly, I take everything from the dahsboard as a suggestion. Just cause the dashboard says something is a 'warning' or 'error', doesn't mean that the same logic isn't driving traffic, sales, leads, etc. Look at the suggestions, but make sure you're not shooting yourself in the foot by 'fixing' something.

I guess the value is that you have an unbiased set of eyes (even if they are artificial!) keeping a watch on your site, especially when you implement changes which may send crawlers for a loop.

Just my take on it. We don't really use it much but when we do, we have found issues that we otherwise would not have.

Try TripAdvisor (http://www.tripadvisor.com/WidgetEmbed). Their hotel widgets have been hugely successful (and evil!).

Wordpress

Wordpress

A canned answer like "300 words" may be misleading. Why not transcribe the whole video (unless it's really long)?

I think it could be argued differently but, if the products are identical, I'd pick one of the categories and try to keep the SE's out of the other. Probably be best to pick the category that will apply to most 'prospects'. Could use canonical, disallow in robots, etc.

You can't apply tiered pricing via your CMS and display wholesale pricebreaks? Then you could just link to the same product page (URL) from each different category.

Can you determine whether this is happening to any other pages right now?

Whenever we see this type of thing, we look at the development schedule to see which dev changes have recently been implemented. As everyone else has noted, I don't see anything out of place either but sometimes it's easier to look at specific recent dev changes.

Has the page been crawled since last cache? If not, maybe it would be a good idea to 'help' google crawl it a little more quickly to see if things get resolved.

NoIndex 90% of a site? Interested to hear why that makes sense in any situation. Maybe only implement have of those noindex tags at first to see if you get the desired result.

As for the title, meta and content, all at once is fine. Hopefully your new stuff is better than the old! Best of luck!

Can't hurt, although I think it would look more 'natural' to get a link from just one page (even if footer), ideally a hiuh-level page.

Thanks for the reply. I sort of figured that it would take some time, especially with us being a new website. Just didn't want to sit back and wait if there was something we could be doing.

thx.

We've recently (in the past 6 months) implemented rich snippets into one of our websites, which lists events around the USA. We've run our code through Google's testing tools and all looks good. When we search for terms which we compete for, many of our competitors display the event sub-links in the SERPs but we still do not.

Does anyone have any experience with rich snippets with regards to whether site reputation or  (we're a new website) others factors will impact if/when google will display our rich snippets in search results?

Thanks!