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Hi Chris
Thanks for the reply.
I think i confused myself with terms. Meant added a noindex to the header of the pages in the relevant tags. We removed the urls from WMT which usually drops them all from the engine in a matter of hours but have read that sometimes this can expire so we put the noindex tag in place incase the WMT did happen to expire and the pages started to get indexed again.
Regards
Carl
Sorry, it appeared I could only upload 1 image in the first post so here is the second image.
Hi all
Wondering if i could pick the brains of those wise than myself... my client has an https website with tons of pages indexed and all ranking well, however somehow they managed to also set their server up so that non https versions of the pages were getting indexed and thus we had the same page indexed twice in the engine but on slightly different urls (it uses a cms so all the internal links are relative too). The non https is mainly used as a dev testing environment.
Upon seeing this we did a google remove request in WMT, and added noindex in the robots and that saw the index pages drop over night. See image 1. However, the site still appears to getting return for a couple of 100 searches a day! The main site gets about 25,000 impressions so it's way down but i'm puzzled as to how a site which has been blocked can appear for that many searches and if we are still liable for duplicate content issues.
Any thoughts are most welcome. Sorry, I am unable to share the site name i'm afraid. Client is very strict on this.
Thanks,
Carl
DeanAndrews, Fuel_Interactive
Many thanks for the reply. Yes, I have the GA and Adwords linked so set up the link. Slightly scared to notice 20% of the keywords were bouncing at 100%. Eeek!
Time to find me some new keywords I think!
Thanks again.
Carl
Hi all
Wondering if anyone could give me a nudge in the right direction with this please.
When running an adwords campaign is there a way in which one can track the bounce rate on the landing page per keyword sending paid traffic? I've had a play about in adwords and GA and couldn't find the right option.
The site I am sending traffic to is not a ecommerce site so cannot set up conversion tracking so we are going to monitor the bounce rates of different keywords and drop the ones which are bouncing much higher than others as it seems better to invest the budget in those words which are keeping people on the page for longer.
Many thanks
Carl
Hi, did you get any warnings in WMT about the site? I've had clients who have received a penalty (not our doing!!) for over optimised baclinks. They could still rank for other keywords but the keywords which they had been promoting too much were down on page 4 or 5.
Carl.
Dana, Jane,
Thanks for the useful replies, I guess the main to take from this is to be natural. Get some citations with links, get some without links. When guest posting, where it's now done, is now being accredited to the Google Plus author account, with a mention of the brand 'written by Jeff (G Author link) from x.com (maybe a link, maybe not. If a link, nofollwed). I think the G+ mark will help too with giving credit to the end site for the author's work.
I can see the day when all backlinks will be no followed and brand mentions are what causes a site to rank high or low. Although, that takes us into a potentially dangerous area...if google are using mentions of your brand over the web to decide that you are a popular site and should rank higher, what if Google can judge the tone of the mentions. If a brand has lots of mentions on forums and article saying they are a scam (for example) would Google then decide that they are not trustworthy and shouldn't be ranking...
Hi, could any fellow users lend me their experience please, I feel I may have confused myself!!
Cut a long story short, one of the seo techniques I (like many here) employ is guest authority for sites. This is done through a manual process on quality sites. However, many sites are panicking now about Google and are nofollowing the author link back to my site. While the guest blogging wasn't done exclusively for links, a backlink is always nice.
This got me onto the topic of co citation. From what I understand, it is essentially google rewarding you but without giving you back link credit. This is no the area where I have confused myself...am i right in thinking that if my brand is talked about in content on a quality site about Internet Security, then google can see the mention of my brand and will still award me some benefit from. To gain said benefit from the content is it enough that my brand is mentioned, for example 'Brand X published a paper about keeping kids safe online in 2013' or would the brand x thing need to be an active link to my site (no follow).
Does this make sense? I did warn that i have managed to confuse myself hehe
Many thanks for firstly talking the time to work out what on earth I have written and for any feedback offered.
Thanks, Michael.
have put in the disavow so hopefully that's fine. One would hope that Google could tell that a furniture site wouldn't intentionally spam for jewellery related terms!
Hi all
Bit of a strange one....doing a backlink analysis for my client's website (a handmade oak furniture supplier) and noticed there are about 13,000 spam backlinks to the domain from dozens of websites for keywords related to replica watches. Odd! Obviously neither us nor them have made these backlinks.
Would a disavow be enough action to take in this case? I would rather the client not see a penalty in WMT for spam backlinks for this. Not sure how, or why, we have acquired this links. I can only think someone has been trying to do a spot of negative seo against the site
Thanks
Carl
Thanks will check out the post. To be very honest the affiliate sites were very iffy in quality. They had little in the way of unique content and were more a working test of Matt Cutts' notion that if you put lots of differently sourced duplicate content on one page then the page won't be treated as unique. It appears I was wrong!
I'm not fussed about these sites, they made a bit of money but their main purpose was to test the content theory as we are considering adding a few affiliate type products into our proper magento site. I think it's safe to say that the working hypothesis that lots of different bits of duplicate content = one unique page is very much disproved, hehe.
Lesson for next time...if trying to get a site banned by google (which was pretty much the aim of the test). do it on a different server to the proper websites.
Time to buy a new ip for the magento stores just to be safe
quick update on my most recent reply. Have worked out the reason for the affiliate site drops. Google seems to have taken a dislike to them. Just received the rather direct WMT message of
'Google has detected that some of your pages may be using techniques that are outside our Webmaster Guidelines.
As a result of your site having pure spam, Google has applied a manual spam action to xxxx/. There may be other actions on your site or parts of your site.'
While this is annoying, the affiliate sites were neither here nor there. I did foolishly host them on the same server and IP as my proper magento stores so have to hope they haven't penalised the IP
Hi, thanks for the reply.
If anything the traffic is worse today. I have a few other sites on the server which contain a mixture of duplicate content (affiliate data feeds) and unique articles, in addition to my 'proper' sites of pure 100% unique content. The affiliate stuff makes a few easy pennies on the side. These sites too lost a lot of traffic. Oddly several of the sites now do not even appear in Google for a site: search, yet no message is in webmaster tools so the puzzlement continues.
After running a few tests on the domains which are still indexed i see pages listed when i do a site: but when i search for the page title it is not there.
I have noticed that i seem to have a 1gb php error file (eeek) and that is going up at a fair rate so will see if that is anything to do with it, the bots may be scared off by the error messages - not reported in WMT though.
Ive hundreds of thousands of these...
[25-Mar-2014 17:06:24 UTC] PHP Warning: Module 'PDO' already loaded in Unknown on line 0
Hi
Any eCommerce experts out there, please? I run a magento store and am looking to improve the performance of my category pages in the listings, to aid this I have created category descriptions - a hundred or so words about what, for example, a Maxi Dress is, an example can be seen here http:// yochic.co.uk/dress-267864/ maxi.html (I have broken the link as not sure on the linking policy of the forum).
I have noticed, however, that this category description is appearing all on sub pages of the section, so it is on page 1,2,3,4 etc. Is this likely to lead to me receiving a penalty for internal duplicate content?
The store uses rel="next" in all the category pages, so shouldn't that help limit any problems caused by the duplication of the page descriptions? I notice that when I search for a sub page, 2, 3, 4 etc in Google using the url of page two http://yochic.co.uk/dress-267864/maxi.html?p=2 it returns the first page, so am i right in thinking with the tags that Google sees all the sub pages as being page one.
In which case, doesn't that limit my ability to rank for the products listed on pages 2+? Long story short, the site cannot rank it's product pages because the vast majority of the product descriptions are 100% duplicate because the site is an affiliate fashion store.
Many thanks
Carl
Paul,
Thanks for the quick reply. No, no errors in WMT. There is a little duplicate content on the product page - the description is the same as that supplied by the manufacturer, and thus, used by many other sites. However, while there is 100 word or so which is the same, there is at least 500 - 700 words which are unique to the site so hopefully that would rule out a duplicate content thing.
As a follow up, sorry I know it makes it hard to help but I cannot give out the site name im afraid, I just did a site: search in Google and found all my pages listed (not been banned, that's a start!) however, copying the full title from one of the pages and pasting it into google using " " returns no results. If i try without " " it returns 10 results - none duplicate,s just sites happening to match a brand name in my title - however none of the ten are my page.
So, the page is discoverable via a site: search but not via a keyword search. Very odd. If it were a +x penalty then surely I would still appear just at the bottom of the listings?
Hi all
Wondering if anyone knows how much poor server performance is needed to affect your Google rankings. A few sites of mine were performing fine until about 11am today, since then the site traffic is down about 99% (eeek) at the same time the server was playing up with a server load about 40 - it's 12core, 64ram. I was having database issues at the time too.
Surely Google doesn't work that fast in demoting sites for poor performance does it? If not need I need to ponder other reasons why i have no traffic anymore.
Thanks,
Carl
Same here, i received the weekly email about new rankings but the dashboard shows 20th Feb as the last update.
Thanks for taking the time to look at the site.
Not sure why the code is coming in the wrong place it is using a magento seo plugin so will need to chase them up on that. Just searched a random selection of pages and the code seems to be in the header section on all of those, so it seems there are some pages not playing nicely.
I would like to index the product pages but there are over 250,000 items pulled from the merchants and no chance of writing that much unique content so I feel safest to noindex them all. The main traffic strategy will be to use content which will promote items, such as fashion advice pieces etc.
In the example you give, that seems to be a problem with the categories, will check that out, thanks for pointing it out.
Wondering if anyone could offer some tips here please. I cannot share the site name so will try and be as detailed as possible.
My client had their site on a .com domain and have decided to move to a co.uk domain. The new site has been put on the uk domain with more or less the same structure, save for pages which have been removed or merged.
I am now setting up 301 redirects to tell the engines about the moved site, however this is giving me no end of grief. I can get domain.com to redirect to domain.co.uk no problems, however, if I try and redirect any of the inner pages to their new locations they all end up on the .co.uk home not where they should be. Given the homepage isn't designed to rank for all the terms.
The htaccess I am using is below, I cannot see anything wrong with it, can anyone else?
Redirect 301 / http://newdomain.co.uk/
Redirect 301 /villa_rental.php http://newdomain.co.uk/villa_rental.html
Redirect 301 /new_home.php http://newdomain.co.uk/new_home.html
Redirect 301 /http://newdomain.com/villas.php http://newdomain.co.uk/villastyles.html
Redirect 301 /developments.php http://newdomain.co.uk/developments.html
Redirect 301 /solana_hills.php http://newdomain.co.uk/solana_hills.html
Redirect 301 /middle_east.php http://newdomain.co.uk/middle_east.html
Redirect 301 /denia.php http://newdomain.co.uk/denia.html
Redirect 301 /faq.php http://newdomain.co.uk/faq.html
I have tried both relative and full paths for the old site but doesn't make any difference. Does it matter the old site is php and the new html?
many thanks
hi, yes, maybe should have added that to start with. The site is yochic. co. uk - it is still being worked on so bear that in mind with random products in the wrong places or wonky looking menus.
The category pages are set to be indexed so no problem there, the product pages are the ones which contain the most duplicate content so have been blocked, but a number are still going in the listing.
Hi all
Wondering if anyone could offer a pointer on a problem i am having please. I am developing an affiliate store and to prevent problems with duplicate content I have added name="robots" content="NOINDEX,FOLLOW" /> to all the product pages to avoid google penalties.
However, Google appears to be indexing product pages. When I do a site: search I see a few hundred product pages in the engine. This is odd as the site has always had noindex on these pages. Even viewing the cache of the indexed page shows the noindex meta tag to be in place.
I'm at a loss as to why these pages are being indexed and could do with removing them asap to stop any penalties on the site.
Many thanks for any help.
