Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi-

I'm not sure if they are actually having a negative effect if they no longer exist. However, to be sure you can log into your Google Search Console an use the disavow links tool. Marie offers a good overview of the tool, with some great cautionary remarks on this post https://moz.com/blog/guide-to-googles-disavow-tool

Good luck

Ken

Hi-

That's a pretty general question and the answer is certainly more complicated than a yes or no. Here are some things to consider.

You need to look at why  you aren't you ranking for those keywords? Have the pages been indexed and are they showing up in the serps at all? If not, that's possibly a different problem. If they are showing up and they are competitive keywords it may be that you need to do more work to rank them higher.

As for changing keywords, that may be of little help depending on the answers to the first part. Certainly there are keywords that are easier to rank for, but only if you're doing the right things to get them ranked. The Keyword Explorer tool at Moz (https://moz.com/explorer) is a great place to start if you want to assess different keywords.

Good Luck

Ken

Hi-

I wouldn't being to guess the % needed, but I can tell you one way that we try to get around the issue with similar products. We added a "short description" section with bullet points to highlight all the questions people might ask about the product and in there we are very specific about color, shape, flavor etc. When we have similar products (say different flavored gummi bears) we list both basic facts about the product that are all the same (i.e. size, how many per bag) as well as listing the other attributes that are unique to that product (i.e. banana flavored, yellow colored) and that seems to be enough to keep us from a duplicate content penalty. It's also nice because it cuts down customer questions.

Just a thought

Ken

And I thought it was just me! Well at least I feel a bit better now! Ken

Hi-

I am thinking that maybe it's the list that appears on  your dashboard when you click search then scroll down a bit and there you will find "keyword opportunities"

Ken

It may not be an issue, but be sure to keep checking Webmaster tools and if needed you might have to disavow those links.

Good Luck

Thanks for the tips. I have reported the images and we will see what happens!

Ken

Hi all-

We recently had some pictures show up on our local profile that are not our store. When you click on them they have links to someone's blog as well. Can someone tell me how these got here and more importantly how to get rid of them. We've looked everywhere but can't find them to get rid of.

Thanks for any help!

Ken

Hi-

Have there been any updates to this? We have been using  cloudlfare for probably a year and all of a sudden I am getting the 804 errors on our SSL.

Any help would be appreciated.

Ken

Hi

If you have an alert set up for your site and Google is sending you messages about your ndw product it simply means that Google  has found the page, which is a good thing. What is your concern?

Ken

HI-

I think you are correct in that you need to do a 301 redirect from the old site to the new one. If the pages are the same between the two domains I believe something like the following in your htaccess would work:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

I am not an htaccess expert, so try before you buy!Good luckKen

That is exactly the problem we had. Cloudflare helped with that as well as blocking  the ips with our old webhost.

Also, make sure that you disavow the links from those domains in webmaster tools as well.

Good luck

Ken

Hi-

We had a similar situation which got even worse when someone initiated a DDOS attack on our site from out of the country. Since then we have used cloudflare.com and things have been a lot better.

Good Luck

Ken

Thanks for a great explanation,I agree with Jordan that checking competitors trends was a great addition. We saw a small drop is DA and I was at first concerned,but then noticed we did fine relative to our competitors. Thanks Kyle

Hi-

If the page content is the same is the url structure is the same, I don't suspect you'll see too much, if any, damage. You might even do better because you went responsive.  Just be careful to make sure of things like placement of the title tag, etc, and your stylings (H1, etc) are similar to where they were before.

Good Luck

Ken

Thanks,

I think that's it, Now time to go study with Dr. Pete.

Ken

Hi all-

Lately on Google I've seen a few results where there is something stuck between the ads and the organic listings that I can only describe as as mini knowledge graph of sorts. (picture attached).

Can anyone point me to more information on this and how Google may be choosing these.

Thanks

Ken

blue-candy.jpg

Hi-

It seems to me as long as there is other content on the page, you should be fine. If this is, for example a product, it's quite normal to have the product name as the url and to have the name as the image name (and alt tag). You would still have a bunch of content on the page (product description, etc) in addition to that so it wouldn't be considered spammy

Ken

Hi-

Not sure how much content vs ecommerce you have on your Wordpress site but my 2 suggestions would be as follows:

1. For your Wordpress content get yourself the Fishpig wordpress-magento integration plugin. This will allow you to put your blog inside your Magento store and still have the old layout for content.

2. For redirecting the products you might look at Magentos built in redirect options. You can find it under Catalog --> URL Rewrite Management.  I believe I have even seen an extension that will let you mass upload those, but not sure about that.

Good Luck

Ken

Same here. we called and someone helped us fix it right away.

Ken

Hi-

As a small business owner and the in house SEO guy, I wrestle with the same question all the time. My best advice would be do the things that will get the biggest bang quickly first. For example, work on your page titles. they are an easy fix that can have big effects. I would also look at the structure of your pages, for example are you using H1 tags for your product names on the product pages and are all your images tagged.

Once you've done the "easy stuff" I would just start tackling some of the other items you mentioned one at a time. Page speed is probably a good one to go after, if your site really needs it. That has obvious benefits in terms of visitors. Content such as product descriptions are a slow battle. Things like that require time to make the changes so what I do is allocate some time each day to making them. I track my changes in a spreadsheet and check my rankings here at Moz on a regular basis to see what is/isn't working. A good suggestion might be to look for someone who can write well (an intern) and have them help you with that part.

Even though it's really important, I would wait until you finished some of the other things before starting a link building campaign. You want to make sure you are "link worthy". When you think you are ready, I would create some interesting underwear content and see what that turns up.

Hope this helped!

Ken

Hi

Maybe young should look into some of the woocommerce inventory plugins. I did a quick search and came up with several.

Good luck

Ken

Hi-

Hi-

In addition to what microdesign suggested, here are two more.

1. You have no meta description. This is the text that Google will use as a description on the results page (not really for ranking, but important nonetheless). This is true for both pages listed. For the home page there should be something about the site and for the product page, at the very least a short description. You can use what you have for the og tags now.

2. You might consider flipping the order of things on your page titles for product. As it is you have "product name - what it does". That's fine if you want to rank for the product name, but if noone knows your product yet, you might want to flip it so you rank higher for "Natural Colon Cleanser" rather than the product name (unless of course the product name is well known - I jut don't know it)

Ken

Hi Max -

I beleive Everett is correct. The Facebook reviews are not marked up with rich snippet code for google, rather they have FB markup. In addition, the review data you have for the site in the footer is marked up as a product.  It also probably doesn't help that the reviews are buried down at the bottom of the footer.

As an FYi, we recent;y switched over to a reviews service (Yotpo.com) and  that has worked well for us.

Ken

Hi-

Here are a coupe of quick thought for you:

1. I don't actually see the ratings on your home page. I can see that they are in the code but I didn't see them appearing on the page. The only reviews I see are the FB reviews.

2. I read somewhere that Google will sometimes not show the rich snippet data if they think you are light on content. I will find the reference and post it when I do, but that could be a problem for you as well.

Good Luck

Ken

Hi-

I am personally not aware of any "two way" affiliate programs, but for setting up an affiliate program for your site (pay people for referrals), Ray had some good suggestions for places to start.

I would add the following two thoughts:

1. Depending on your ecommerce platform, you might be able to find low cost affilaite plugins. For example, I know that Magento has several available. The downside to something like this is that you need to build a network of affiliates yourself. If you go with one of the affiliate networks you have an army for affiliates that can choose to list your products.

2. Try to make sure that whatever affiliate program you use has a way to mark a customer as coming to your site first (a cookie on your site). When we set up an affiliate program  what would happen is that someone would go through the order order process then when they got to checkout they jump off the site for a minute to go find a coupon. When they returned they would have the affiliate ID of the coupon site, so that site would earn a commission even though they were really not the referrer.

That's my 2¢ !

Good Luck

Ken

Hi-

Can't speak to that company but I can tell you that we recently began using another product/store review service (Yotpo.com) and it seems to be doing us some good. People are pretty eager to say nice things about us when we make it easy!

Good Luck,

Ken

Hi-

I'm not sure how much meta-descriptions really matter for duplicate content purposes, I believe they are mostly used for  display in the SERPS. Either way, sounds like they will be somewhat unique and if the page content is unique I don't think you would have an issue.

Good Luck

Ken

Hi-

Look into the built-in Magento redirects (catalog -->URL Rewrite Management). They tend to work much faster than putting all those redirects into an htaccess file (I learned that from experience)

Ken

I would agree with Bruce  in that unless this is a "must have tomorrow" industry, it might be best to leave everything as is and add something that tells your customers that you're down for a few days. Why not throw up a banner on every product page that says something like "we're moving to serve you better - so orders may be delayed for a few days more than normal". We did something similar when we moved and most customers understood.

Good Luck

Ken

Hi-

I would tend to agree with Bruce that you want to keep it on the same domain, otherwise you are starting from scratch for SEO on the new domain.

Good Luck

Ken

Hi David-

We had a similar situation recently where we had a dev site and forgot to no-index it and actually started to appear in the SERPS. After a bit of puzzling it LOOKS like Google found (or at least indexed)  the pages as a function of us being logged into our Google accounts when viewing them. We did not do extensive testing on this, its mostly anecdotal but ti did look like it was true. Maybe we'll do the experiment one day to be sure!

Ken

Hi-

I am relatively new to Magento, so my advice may be limited, but have you tried checking the Magento URL rewrites? Magento creates its own rewrites which you can fund under Catalog/URL Rewrite Management. You can look there for the "bad" URLS and take them out/redirect them.

Good Luck

Ken

Hi Brant-

Since it looks like they really didn't "copy" the site as much as mirror it (all the content is coming from your site directly), maybe you can ask your host to look into blocking their ip somehow from accessing the content.

Ken

Hi-

Just to clarify, it sounds like you built a separate mobile version of your site, as in m.xxx.com. If that's the case it may take a while to get as much organic traffic as Google sees it as a new site.

Just an idea..

Ken

Hi,

Shot in the dark here but is is possible your old site was hacked and someone was hosting some pages there without your knowledge?  You might not have seen them in WMT because they had little traffic then but now that they're 404s they are front and center.

FYI, my thought process is based on something similar that happened to me. About a year ago in my WMT I found 1000s of links from other sites. It turns out that people had made copies of the layout and graphics of my site and were putting in random text and putting them on in directories on other sites without the owners knowing. I wound up emailing dozens of site owners and had them removed - they had no idea they were there.

Just a thought.

Ken

Hi Ricky-

I don't think it's THAT surprising. The 41 fans are probably real fans so a few of them may have taken a second to hit a button and give them a rating.

I felt the same was as you at first when we had almost 2000 ratings with just under 22,000 fans. Especially since most of my competitors had less reviews and more fans. Other people have suggested to me that the difference is that our fans are "real fans", as in we earned them and that a few of my competitors have "bought fans", which are unlikely to offer any real value and rating.

Good Luck

Ken

Hi-

If the reviewer leaves a comment about the review, you can see it in the reviews section of their facebook page. I have attached a sample from our facebook page to give you to see.

Ken

jlXT0ni

Hi,

We just went through a similar platform change and found that for the most part  the 301s did the heavy lifting. We are still finding pages that we missed, but we got a large majority and I'm happy to say that our traffic/rankings are doing well (getting better everyday).

We did't re-verify we just left the verification code on the site and Google seemed to catch on.

Good luck on the move!

Ken

Hi-

I can tell you from personal experience that Karl is giving you  good advice.We had a manual penalty imposed on us a little over a year ago and I found the best way to get rid if the links causing it was by contacting the site owners and asking. After repeated attempts, the ones that just would not disapper, i disavowed and in the end got rid of the manual penalty.

Good luck and happy (link) hunting!

Ken

I had heard this recently as well and saw the post you reference. Not sure if it was there when you saw the post, but there is a comment from someone who claims to have spoken with a Google rep and confirmed that is is only in Australie for now.

Ken

Thanks Phil,

That's kind of what I was thinking.
Ken

Thanks for the info. I checked with my ISP and it turns out that they automatically blocked Rogerbot because of excessive requests  (this happened Jan 15). Is there a way to crawl dely between requests longer or was that maybe a one time fluke?

Thanks

Ken

HI-

I am trying to grade some specific pages for keywords with the on page grader but it keeps telling me "Sorry, but that URL is inaccessible. "

I can reach them via the browser and they are not https. Any thoughts?

Here is a sample:

www.bulkcandystore.com/kosher-candy

Any help is appreciated.

Ken

EGOL has some great title suggestions.

I would add authorship and rich snippets as well. We have seen increased CTR with those. The rich snippets have been really good because they show the product ratings from our reviews.That really makes the listing stand out in the results.

Ken

Hi all-

i have a video that talks about a particular type of product and have it set up on every page in that category. I am in the process of updating our video sitemap and want to know if I should list all the occurrences in the sitemap or just one? I had asked a similar question earlier about placement, but here I am specifically interested in the sitemap.

Thanks!

Ken

I agree with the other responses.

If it makes you feel any better, think of all the victims of Penguin and Panda. On top for a while, then "blamo" out of site. When Google catches up, out they go but if you keep doing the right things, in you stay.

HI all-

I recently finished our first product video, about a candy called Sixlets. It's meant to be an educational video (as compared to linkbait) but of course I would love to get to seo benefit out of it. I am planning on putting the video on the individual product pages for each color sixlet to make sure people get the information they need. I am also planning on putting it on a page I will create that will house all of our videos.

When I put together the video sitemap (via Wistia), I was really thinking of only including the video page, not the product pages, as as not to appear to be spammy. Does this make sense or am I going about this all wrong. Just want to make sure, as I am new to video.

Thanks,

Ken

My experience is similar to Dennis described, it may take another request.

When I got the letter, I went and contacted some of the hosts that had the unnatural links to our site and got some taken off. I sent in my reconsideration request and was denied as you were.

I got a few more removed and tried again, this time very explicitly telling Google that I had tried to get the remaining ones removed (with examples) but they were beyond my control and that I had disavowed them That time it worked and the manual penalty was removed.

Hope this helps.

Ken