Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi, 
I'll keep this one short and sweet!

We've noticed just recently that a number of competitors are bidding on our company name, clearly with the intention of being listed above our organic result. I'm certain that Google used to allow us to bid on our own company name for a negligible amount but now it looks like we're going to have to chase £1 odd per click to  obtain customers who are actively searching for us.

Can anything be done about this or is it now nature of the beast that we're going to have to have a price war on bidding on our own company name?

Thanks for your help!

Chris

We've made a lot of changes to our website (https://refreshcartridges.co.uk/) over the years, with our website developer putting a heavy emphasis on improving page loading times in general.

One of the those changes has been to base64 encode or in-line the majority of images on our site which has reduced our loading times down to under a second for most of our pages for our visitors which are mainly based in the UK.

My question is whether in-lining the images, thus removing the images filenames for index association results in this technique being a net-good or net-bad for our sites SEO in general, particularly on our frontpage.

Cheers all for your feedback.

Umar, please don't worry, I wouldn't touch links or traffic generated by the likes of Fiverr with a ten foot barge pole! 

Many thanks Dave.

To be honest I'm thinking about disregarding the 55 limit altogether and just keeping the length sensible and popping the important keywords towards the beginning of the title so it doesn't matter too much if / when it gets truncated.

For example, something like the following for a product listing:

'Canon PGI-520BK Compatible Inkjet Cartridge. Buy PGI-520 Ink at Refresh Cartridges.'

This covers the keywords Canon, Inkjet, Ink, Cartridge, Cartridges and the name of the product twice along with the inclusion of 'Buy' and the Company Name.

I don't think it looks hideously spammy but please do feel free to give me a slap if you think I may be about to make a terrible mistake  

Thanks again.

Hi,
I'll keep this really short and sweet... I'm just intrigued more than anything.

With the exception of user testing has anybody ever had a good experience with Fiverr? Obviously I'm not  contemplating SEO services for $5 but I'm just curious as to whether anybody has found any services that were genuinely useful in a day to day capacity?

Many thanks for such a thorough and informative response. Pretty much none of our titles need to extend past 55 characters, it's just a case of whether it would be beneficial to cram some more potential keywords in  
If I can be so cheeky, if you were to rewrite the example given of a competitors title 'Brother DCP-197C Inkjet Cartridges. Cheap Brother DCP-197C Ink' to something more to your pallette what would it be? Obviously I appreciate you more than likely have no experience of our niche, I'm just curious.

Thanks again for taking the time to reply.

Hi,
In order to appease the Moz crawler we recently changed over 10,000 URL's in order to make our Meta Page Title less than 55 characters as it suggested. Unfortunately our rankings dropped dramatically pretty much overnight so I am getting the feeling that perhaps our titles are now just a little too concise and need elaborating on just a touch.

Our competitors that rank well seem to use a small amount of keyword repetition.

For example, whereas we may have:
Brother DCP-197C Inkjet Cartridges

They will have:
Brother DCP-197C Inkjet Cartridges. Cheap Brother DCP-197C Ink.

What are your opinions of the fact that:

a) Their Title is over the 55 character figure that is suggested for displaying correctly in the SERPs.
b) The words Brother and DCP-197C are repeated in the title.

The fact their title appears to be working better is almost enough to sway me but the competitors title just looks a little too spammy for me to make a sitewide change without asking some second opinions first.

Cheers all!

Many thanks for your response.

My pondering was how the amount of money bid affects the ranking on pages such as http://bit.ly/1i4dPec

Looking at the above URL you will see products listed in terms of price and as such what differentiates the guy choosing to pay 1p a click or the guy paying £1 a click in this list?

Hi,
I was wondering if I could ask is perhaps someone could give me some clarification as to how the amount we bid on Google Product Ads reflects the product positioning on Google Shopping?

We have a Google Product Data Feed which is then linked up to our Adwords account so that we can determine a PPC bid amount. In instances like this it doesn't seem to make sense that one person may be paying 10ppc and another 20ppc when the buyers criteria for sorting merchants was purely down to the price.

Since the buyer has the option to sort their products in price from minimum to maximum the sort order cannot be manipulated by Google based on the amount the merchant was paying. As such, how is determining a cost per click figure relevant when the customer is searching by base price low > high on Google Shopping? Surely I should just set the limit to £0.01 and rely on the customer determining the sort order (which ultimately will lead to a higher conversion rate) than allowing Google to skew the results based on bidding 20-30 times this amount?

I should state that I'm in the UK. I do realise that a high PPC amount will increase our chance of exposure on standard search pages but my question does relate solely to results listed on Google Shopping.

Thanks for your help!

Chris

Hi Bob,

Thanks for your response. My main reason for wanting to keep things below 55 characters is because Moz is currently giving me several thousand warnings for going over this length!

'Google typically displays the first 50-60 characters of a title tag—or as many characters as will fit into a 512-pixel display. If you keep your titles under 55 characters, you can expect at least 95% of your titles to display properly. We recommend that you keep your title to 55 characters or less to ensure that customers see your full title—and to avoid replacement text that may not provide the same incentive to click as a custom-written tag.'

I also wasn't sure as to whether a longer title diluted the effectiveness of each keyword within the title.

Hi all,

Our category Meta Title Tags are a little woeful and so I'm in the process of rewriting them.

Let's say you have a product for sale.... some inkjet cartridges for a Canon BJ10V printer for example. In an effort to keep things concise I was thinking that for this category I should have the meta title set simply as:

'Canon BJ10V Inkjet Cartridges' and perhaps our company name after this text (and a pipe delimiter)

This takes us just under 50 characters which is ideal but doesn't include any real keyword variation and will result in the company name being duplicated at the tail of the title tag on 6,000 odd pages.

A large number of my competitors have title tags along the lines of:

'Canon BJ10V Cheap Inkjet Cartridges for Canon BJ-10V Ink Printers'

I understand the reasoning behind this but does the variation of keywords compensate for the fact that the title looks spammy (to both humans and Search Engines).

What would you do? Keep it clean and concise or stuff the title full of keywords. In the event of the former would you include the company name in each title in the knowledge they would be well under 50 characters without?

Thanks for your help.

Many thanks all. The crawler is currently in the process of creating an image sitemap as we speak. We tweaked the website a little to ensure the ALT text is spot on for the product in question before starting this process.

As mentioned my only reason for asking was to ensure that we weren't providing what would essentially have been redundant information for no reason whatsoever (ie Meta Keywords) but you've convinced me that it is a good idea.

Speak soon and thanks again.

Ah, that's a shame.... Was worth a go.
The thing I hate about Wordpress is that the most unlikely plug-in's or themes can cause unexpected issues. At the same time however it's great that it's so easy to temporarily switch things around without losing any work or vast amounts of time in order to try to pinpoint the cause of the issue.

Sorry I haven't been of any help but, again, goodluck!

Hi there,

Are you able to temporarily disable the 'Who we are' sidebar widget and confirm that the content of the page reappears without scrolling? Troubleshooting could then be targeted specifically towards this widget.

Of course, if my hunch is wrong and it's not the sidebar widget just disable and re-enable widgets one by one until you find the culprit  

Good luck!

We've just installed the server side script 'XML Sitemaps' on our eCommerce site.

The script gives us the option of (easily) creating an image sitemap but I'm debating whether there is any reason for us to do so. We sell printer cartridges and so all the images will be pretty dry (brand name printer cartridge in front of a box being a favourite). I can't see any potential customers to search for an image as a route in to the site and Google appears to be picking up our images on it's own accord so wonder if we'll just be crawling the site and submitting this information for no real reason.

From a quality perspective would Google give us any kind of kudos for providing an Image Sitemap? Would it potentially increase their crawl frequency or, indeed, reduce the load on our servers as they wouldn't have to crawl for all the images themselves?
I can't stress how little of a hardship it will be to create one of these automatically daily but am wondering if, like Meta Keywords, there is any benefit to doing so?

Hey,

Those are several very good ideas.

We are going to develop a little plug in which allows our content to pull products out of our catalogue. For example, 'Epson Stylus DX4450: Printer Basics' would display cartridges for the DX4450 alongside. Hopefully this will result in an element of cross selling and decrease our bounce rate.

Since around 70% of the traffic is outside of the UK and a lot of these people (by the very fact they're researching these articles) have broken printers I can't see our clickthrough increasing dramatically but every little helps.

Most our products are a little too run of the mill in order to provide interesting and impartial reviews for. A review of one of our cartridges would be incredibly self serving!

I certainly agree that cross selling is something that we have to concentrate on over the coming days. Thanks again for your help.

Chris

Hey, thanks for getting back in contact.

Yeah, we were contemplating doing that. It does seem to be further diluting the emphasis on people making a purchase however which was our real concern - If someone does a search for a DX4050 printer then it seems relevant to just yield a list of products rather than loads of additional content that is unrelated to their purchase.

I guess pretty much anything we do is going to potentially detract from the user experience in the name of giving the possibility of people linking to us. Making something that is truly relevant and natural while at the same time adding to the user experience and attracting the possibility of external links would appear to be the challenge!

Hi,

Our eCommerce site currently includes a blog section known as Igloo which we have filled with unique and helpful content that is useful to a fair few people, not just customers of ours. It currently attracts a large number of visitors (more than the actual eCommerce side of the site in actual fact) organically who aren't currently customers of ours.

Very few of these turn in to paying clients so it's not really a money spinner but it has worked quite well from a linkbait perspective / traffic generation perspective and undoubtedly a few of these people do end up making a purchase on the actual shopping end of our site.

We're look at ways to encourage these people finding help on this free resource to take a look at our homepage and hopefully make an order but in the meantime I am worried that there may be a few downsides to us creating this content:

• Google may see us more as a help site than a shopping site. Since selling products is where we make our money this could ultimately be a bad thing.
• Our bounce rate is REALLY high (I'm talking around 94%) on the help site versus around 20% on the eCommerce site. I guess people land on the article they want, read it and then disappear. Would this bounce rate skew our entire site stats and ultimately result in decreased performance in the SERPS.

I would appreciate your opinions and, in the event you do feel it may be hurting us overall perhaps some suggestions on how to mitigate the effects?

Many thanks!

Hey all,

I'm in need of some serious inspiration and I'm hoping one of you generous people can help.

We're looking to do a spot of link building for an eCommerce site which I would describe (without putting it down too much) as 'boring'. This isn't our fault per se as the site sells printer cartridges and there's only a certain amount of excitement such a product can create.

As a result natural linkbuilding is quite tricky, especially when it comes to creating links to anything other than our homepage. For the past couple of years we have focused on creating good content and indeed have a thriving database of hundreds of helpful articles and videos on the site. These are generating decent traffic (and rank #1 for many different help related search terms) but the problem with these articles is that they don’t convert in to sales at all well. I’m also conscious that it will ultimately end in us developing a link profile which would classify us as a printer repair resource rather than cartridge sales website.

I have read numerous guides on Moz but they all tend to focus on products which are a little sexier than those that we sell. Getting someone to share and link to a truly unique product would be incredibly easy compared with asking someone to engage, share and link to the latest Epson cartridge.

I started writing articles on some decent quality business blogs however the links given don’t look particularly natural and the link would always be to our homepage.

We have the staff and the time but we built a whole host of rubbish links back before Penguin and I want to ensure that we are going to head in the right direction before embarking on something new. If you had a site which was really dull how would you devise a link building strategy that was relevant and, most importantly, natural?

Thanks for your help.

Chris

Hi All

Many thanks for your responses.

I love the idea of the website http://theuserismymom.com/ and will probably give it a go for the sake of $100 but am conscious that this wouldn't give a varied spectrum of reviews from a wide demographic.

I guess a combination of user testing with people that we know physically in the office and usertesting.com is the way forward.

Thanks for your help.

Hello

We're soon going to be embarking on a fairly major site overhaul and while this isn't a particularly SEO related question, I’m keen to integrate user feedback quite heavily in this process and would appreciate your opinion as how best to collect this feedback.

These are the kind of questions that I would like to pose:

1. Is it clear when you visit the site, what it is that they do?
2. What is your first thought about the site when you visit it?
3. On the homepage, where is your eye drawn to immediately?
4. When wishing to purchase a product, would this product page draw you into the sale?
5. Do you get a general feeling of trustworthiness on the site?
6. Using the series of drop downs on the homepage, please choose any product and follow the process through to the checkout. Did you feel that this was engaging throughout?

Rather than yes/no answers I’d like the user to spend a good 5-10 minutes giving their detailed opinions so that we can gain some genuine inspiration on how best to improve the site.

What would be the best method of collecting this data? I was thinking perhaps Amazon Mechanical Turk but the thrust of the work offered there seems to be so diverse that I’m not sure we’d get people in tune with offering the kind of detailed answers that I’d be hoping for.

Thanks for your help.

Yeah, the author in particular looks as spammy as a well known Monty Python sketch.

Thanks for your help.

Cheers Andy, would you also remove all of these?

author" content="<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Ink Cartridges, Inkjet Cartridge, Printer Cartridge, Toner Cartridges Refresh Cartridges</a>" />
expires" content="<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank">0</a>" />
robots" content="<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank">noodp,index,follow</a>" />
Language" content="<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank">English</a>" />
Cache-Control" content="<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Public</a>" />
verify-v1" content="<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank">sJXqAAWP6ar/LTEOMyUgG6nqothxk62tJTid+ryBJxo=</a>" />

Hey,

I know this has been discussed to death but look back through previous postings there doesn't seem to be a consensus on the exact Meta tags that an eCommerce site should include, specifically whether to remove the keyword tag or not since it is believed that Yahoo potentially still makes use of it.

Currently our homepage has the following Meta Tags:

<title>Buy Printer Cartridges | Ink and Toner Cartridge for Inkjet and Laser Printers</title>

Description" content="<a class="attribute-value">Visit Refresh Cartridges for great prices on ink cartridges, toner cartridges, ink, printers and accessories.</a>" />

Keywords" content="<a class="attribute-value">ink cartridges, cheap cartridges, inkjet cartridges, inkjet ink cartridges, ink cartridge, printer ink cartridges, laser cartridges, toner, laser printers</a>" />

Content-Type" content="<a class="attribute-value">text/html; charset=iso-8859-1</a>"/>

author" content="<a class="attribute-value">Ink Cartridges, Inkjet Cartridge, Printer Cartridge, Toner Cartridges Refresh Cartridges</a>" />

expires" content="<a class="attribute-value">0</a>" />

robots" content="<a class="attribute-value">noodp,index,follow</a>" />

Language" content="<a class="attribute-value">English</a>" />

Cache-Control" content="<a class="attribute-value">Public</a>" />

verify-v1" content="<a class="attribute-value">sJXqAAWP6ar/LTEOMyUgG6nqothxk62tJTid+ryBJxo=</a>" />

viewport" content="<a class="attribute-value">width=1024</a>" />

This is too messy but before I do something drastic that I'll possibly regret please can you confirm that, in your opinion, I am best to remove everything with the exception of this:

<title>Buy Printer Cartridges | Ink and Toner Cartridge for Inkjet and Laser Printers</title>

Description" content="<a class="attribute-value">Visit Refresh Cartridges for great prices on ink cartridges, toner cartridges, ink, printers and accessories.</a>" />

Content-Type" content="<a class="attribute-value">text/html; charset=iso-8859-1</a>"/>
viewport" content="<a class="attribute-value">width=1024</a>" />

I realise there is a verify-v1 tag in there but this can be done through a file on our server so while cleaning up that might as well go. Would there be an argument for keeping any of the other tags or are they all pretty much redundant now?

Many thanks!

Chris

Hi Gregory,

That's a nice idea, I think I'll give that a go.

I think all I want at this point is for someone to take a couple of hours every month to take a look, see what work we've done, provide some fresh ideas, point us in the right direction and then leave us alone for another month while we work on the points given along with integrating our own ideas.

Thanks again 

Hi Keri,

Thanks for your response; I did think about contacting a couple of them even though I didn't think that we would be a great match together just to see if anything came up.

Then I figured if these guys are used to earning $500 an hour then it didn't seem fair to take up their time in this way if I knew we probably wouldn't end up working together!

Hey,
I love the resources available to me through Moz.com and although I've found it's possible to make a half decent attempt at improving our site using these tools. I have however got to the point where it would be nice to have a second opinion as my view on our site and what can be achieved is no doubt somewhat stale.

Obviously asking the community through Q&A is a start and I have benefited greatly in the past from your advice but I wouldn't expect anybody to give our site more than a two minute glance for free. As such I'm hoping to locate someone that I can pay to talk things over with just to get some fresh ideas and perhaps a list of tasks that my staff and I can continue to undertake over the coming months.

I appreciate that Moz has a list of recommended SEO companies however these all seem to be targeted towards larger brands and I can imagine a relationship with one of these companies being less personal than I would like. Asides from going through lists of users and checking out their profiles individually, is there a resource that lists the smaller independent on Moz.com and if so where can I find it?

Alternatively are their any external resources that might help me to find someone that would be a good match?
Thanks for your help.

Chris

Many thanks for your response. The 301's were implemented around April 2012 - There were a couple of  URL's which were missed however and this would probably explain the cached versions that you've picked up on.

I've just checked two dozen URL's at random and have only picked up on three pages that are cached and these are the first three results on the first page. The remaining pages don't seem to have cached versions available which would insinuate that Google hasn't been able to crawl them for some time.

I've just set up Google Webmaster Tools to ignore the dispmode variable so thanks for the heads up on this feature which I've completely glazed over in the past. On the assumption that the 301's were set up correctly would you imagine that configuring WMT do disallow crawling of these pages would speed up the removal process?

I'll keep this one short and sweet  

Many moons ago we used to have several different methods of sorting our products and this change in sort order was achieved by having ?dispmode=list or ?dispmode=grid after the product URL. Best part of a year ago we decided to scrap this feature and 301'd all the ?dispmode URL's back to the base URL.

The funny thing is that Google don't seem to have dropped a single one of the old URL's from their index and a search for site:www.refreshcartridges.co.uk dispmode returns almost 8,000 results.

This isn't a massive problem but I'd have expected in the past year they'd have picked up on a couple of the 301's and would have started removing the old results. I'd hate to think we were getting any kind of penalisation for duplicate pages.

I know the answer to this question is going to be 'just be patient, the old results will disappear' but just to ensure we're not missing anything stupid. I'd really appreciate it if someone could check out www.refreshcartridges.co.uk/brother-c-223.html?dispmode=list to confirm there's nothing more we could be doing to get these old results removed from the index.

Many thanks

It's not an issue at all - Don't get me wrong I'm not in a hurry to get the low quality stuff back again!  

Hey,
Over the last six months or so we've been going through our backlink profile and cleaning up links from poor quality sources. Week by week there have been small changes in our Google Webmaster Tools 'links to your site' section to reflect this.

I logged on this morning however and there has been a dramatic shift in the information displayed. Pretty much every bad link has been removed from the list including sites I know for a fact are still linking to us as they didn't communicate at all to our removal requests.

Additionally, rather than showing the top 1000 links to our site as it used to, WMT is only showing 73 linking domains. The remaining 73 domains are good natural links from high quality sources.

I'm guessing Google are just in the middle of an update and that the remaining linking domains (including the bad ones) will reappear shortly. This isn’t a request for advice or help but I’m just curious as to whether anybody else is seeing anything similar?

Thank-you so much for your response, Oleg.

I have read through both guides and, on the basis that we have a dedicated server with TONS of unused bandwidth / CPU resources / Disk Space I think it might be an idea to self-host... Even if nothing else it would be nice not to have YouTube harassing our customers with adverts / related videos!

That having been said it would be nice to have the self-help guides on both our site and YouTube.  This would mean that we could potentially gain visitors via our Youtube channel but that people who were already on the site would see our self hosting version and so would be less likely to leave after watching the video.

Would you anticipate any duplication issues if we were to post our content on both our own site and YouTube?

Hi,
We're about to start integrating video content on our eCommerece site in order to bolster the quantity and diversity of useful content that each page presents a potential customer.  We’re talking product reviews, information relating to the differences between different products and company information.  From an SEO perspective it has been suggested that Google will like this however I have a question regarding the actual method of integration.

Usually I would just insert some embed code linking to the correct video on our YouTube channel however I’m really conscious that a search engine will just see the embed code, notice the page loads slightly slower and not really gain anything useful from the video file.

I’m assuming that this isn’t the case but I have several questions:

-          Would you host on YouTube and simply insert the embed code in to the page.  Would any alternative site (or even self-hosted) be preferable?

-          Should I be padding out either side of the embed code with a description of the video and an annotation on OUR site?

-          Does Google actually look at the link and ascertain the relevance of the video file to the actual page?   If it does this does it gain anything useful that could help on-page SEO?

These are probably all pretty basic questions for which I do apologise but I want to make sure that before spending a sizable amount of time on this that we start off with a correct integration!

Many thanks

Lovely, thanks again buddy - Very much appreciated   

That's cool.  It did seem odd including my brand since we are a small company however the advice given in the private question was specifically to include the brand name.  Unless there are any advances I'm going to change the title now as per Irving's advice to:

Buy Printer Cartridges | Ink and Toner Cartridge for Inkjet and Laser Printers

Thanks again for your help guys.

Many thanks Irving; that's spot on.

One question, would you suggest leaving off our brand name entirely?

Thanks again.

Many thanks Tom.  With regards to the Brand Term would you suggest my company name or some brands that we stock - I'm guessing the former but I'm thinking if this gets included on more than a couple of pages I could suffer duplication issues.

In my mind this seems unspammy and unlikely to conflict with other page titles such as 'Toner Cartridges' and 'Inkjet Cartridges'.  I would also plan to leave the company name off of any other titles.

Low Cost Printer Cartridges | Refresh Cartridges

It does seem very untargeted however.

Hi Everett,

Many thanks for getting in contact.  I did actually ask this as a private question and got quite a good response and thought it might be a good idea to share it in case anybody else has this issue.  A screenshot is included as a link.

| | Nov 30, 2012Jasmine AyePaid Search Marketer at Distilled

Hey Chris,

In this instance it appears that Google is grouping all vendors by ink-type. Specifically here: http://www.google.co.uk/products/... There are several vendors listed. ColcUSA seems to have the price advertised at £5.

I don't know how your name came up that way, and I'm not able to replicate the issue. When I even searched "Refresh Cartridges Ink" I couldn't get that to reappear.  When I did, ColcUSA did appear as the vendor on the right side.

But the prices being advertised are not yours and Google is just suggesting the cheapest price that the ink retails for. Does this happen every time you search?

<a class="image-button add-response-button"> </a> |

<a name="post-134030"></a>

| | Dec 2, 2012 | EditChris HolgateDirector at Refresh eCommerce Ltd

Hi Jasmine,

Hmmmmm.... perhaps this search is regionalised somewhat; the issue doesn't affect our main site but we have three stores and the incorrect product data appears for the Google Local searches.  I should have posted a screenshot really in the first instance I suppose so here's one now  

http://imgur.com/1FFkx

It's definitely stating the products are from us and if you click through it does indeed link to the correct page on our website but the prices are completely different.

We do have a Google Product feed but this does convey the correct pricing which then does appear when going a Google Product Search rather than a Google Local Search.

I hope I'm making sense but in all honesty, I've confused myself somewhat!

Many thanks

|

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| | Dec 3, 2012Jasmine AyePaid Search Marketer at Distilled

UGH!!! i just typed this answer and the internet ate it! grrr....

http://imgur.com/dTDzz This is an alternate way to view the information. The list view that you're showing me has cut this information down incorrectly and inserted avg star reviews per product, most local store, and cheapest price.

I'm afraid the only way to get this changed is to call AdWords and complain. Now that Google Shopping & AdWords have been blurred together they might be able to help, or register your complaint differently.

There's not really a way to change it because the information you put together is correct, but Google's formula for presenting this information is a mashup of all the data they have available to them.

I'm not even capable of clicking on any of these listings (in list or tile format) that will allow me to click through directly to your site. I get a list of retailers with correct prices.

Does this make any sense? I know it doesn't help the fact that your store is being shown with an incorrect price, but it's definitely not your fault.

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<a name="post-134850"></a>

| | Dec 5, 2012 | EditChris HolgateDirector at Refresh eCommerce Ltd

Ahhhhhhhhhh.... I see, so the price given is the lowest price available on the Internet, not the actual price that we're selling the items at.  This is really, REALLY unclear in list view mode.

I guess that's good news however; I was worried that we'd set something up incorrectly and that Google would come down on us like a ton of bricks in a couple of weeks time.

Thanks for your help, it's very much appreciated.

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| | Dec 5, 2012Jasmine AyePaid Search Marketer at Distilled

Yay! Glad I could help! I'll mark this as resolved, but this question should still be open to discussion. If you have any problems in the future please feel free to pick it back up!

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<a name="post-134888"></a>

| | Dec 5, 2012 | EditChris HolgateDirector at Refresh eCommerce Ltd

Many thanks Jasmine!

|

Hi,

We recently asked for some pointers to use on our site bit.ly/4Cogch as one of our SEOmoz private questions.  One of the points that was picked up was that the title of the homepage looked quite spammy:

Ink Cartridges | Toner Cartridges | Cheap Cartridges | Inkjet Ink | Laser Toner

I completely see this however I've checked out our competition and no one seems to be doing things any better and the SEOmoz On Page SEO tool seems to like it so I'm not sure what changes to make.

Does anybody have any inspiration that I could possibly use?  It was suggested that Google is quite brand focused and so I should integrate the company name but how else would you change things, bearing in mind the ink and toner market that we're focusing on?

Thanks for your help!

Chris

It's cool.  Sorry, the point I was making is that irrespective of what you search for the page that is returned is http://www.refreshcartridges.co.uk/advanced_search_result.php (with nothing after the .php) and as such the search results page couldn't spurn multiple pages which could be indexed by Google.

Sorry, I'm not sure what happened to that bit.ly address - The actual address of the website is www.refreshcartridges.co.uk.

Ah, I see what you mean about the search results now however this hopefully shouldn't be an issue as for security (our web guy said something about injections) the URL that is returned irrespective of what is searched for is http://www.refreshcartridges.co.uk/advanced_search_result.php

Thanks again!

Many thanks for your input on this.  I have actually looked at this through the HTML improvements section of GWMT however I am showing only a few dozen duplicated titles / descriptions and this is simply due to the product categories being almost identical (for example HP Deskjet 500 and HP Deskjet 500+)

Many thanks for your response.  Our site is an eCommerce site that doesn't employ tags as such and our categories are all accounted for in the 15,000 page figure.

We did have this at the beginning of the year when we used a ?dispmode=grid and ?dispmode=list to change the way our results were displayed.  This has been rectified however by us completely removing the option and any instances of dispmode present in the URL force a 301 to the correct master page.  There are still a few hundred instances of this dispmode being present in the Google index but 99% of them have fallen out now.

I have checked and double checked and we don't seem to have any issues like this at present.

I'm not certain if this is the case as our search engine requires physical input in order to yield a result.  I don't know if it helps but the URL is http://bit.ly/4Cogchww if you fancy taking a look