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Yeah it is definitely a debate in the world of SEO. I tend to lean toward AJ John's opinion. http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/is-click-through-rate-a-ranking-signal

First off, meta descriptions don't affect your ranking in the SERPs. They DO however contribute to CTR (i.e if you see what you are searching for in the meta description, you are more inclined to click it).

There could be a few things contributing to the other sites ranking higher than you.

1. Site Age: Even if you have more links pointing to your site and a higher DA, site age could be contributing to your lower ranking.

2. Click Through Rate: The click through rate on the site above your site could be higher. You might even have a higher bounce rate.

I would also make sure you are effectively using internal linking on the pages that aren't ranking as well as you'd like.

If you Google the keyword "used iPhone 5," the URL ranking #1 in the SERP is the following: http://buy.gazelle.com/buy-used-iphone-5/

This page has zero content on it and a button on it that takes you to a category page with the iPhone 5 pre selected. My question is **how does this page outrank the sites products pages? **I ran a backlink analysis and don't see any links pointing to that URL.

Also, **how does this site deal with its duplicate content issues? **If you look at the following URLs, you'll see a bunch of duplicate content in the "Key Features" section below the fold.

http://buy.gazelle.com/buy/used/iphone-5-16gb-at-t

http://buy.gazelle.com/buy/used/iphone-5-16gb-sprint

If you think about it, this site will have different product pages for each variations of cellphone carrier and cellphone storage capacity. So for an iPhone 5, they will have 15 pages!

Any insight into this would be much appreciated!

Give this a read. What you are seeing isn't something unheard of. http://www.shoutmeloud.com/effect-of-showing-date-stamp-on-blog-traffic-case-study.html

Best practice is to write titles for your audience keeping keywords in mind, but not obsessing over length. Although only the first 512 pixels (50-70 words) of the title tag will show, some believe longer titles are better for SEO purposes because they allow you to fit in more keywords. The first 512 pixels should be catchy with your keyword to help CTR, but anything after that doesn't show can still help in terms of SEO. Do not worry about changing the titles of those 5000 pages. It could even end up hurting your rankings in the SERPs.

Yeah the Mozscape index on June 22nd is most likely why your DA dropped. It wasn't a Google algorithm change so it shouldn't affect your rankings.

Google has gotten much smarter when it comes to differentiating between similar keywords. It really depends what the page is about. Best practice is to try to target a unique keyword phrase for each page, but it's totally fine if part of that keyword phrase is used on other pages on your site. If the pages are pretty much the same, you might want to combine the pages, or using a 301 redirect/rel canonical to tell Google what page is the most important.

Looks good to me. Those pages shouldn't be competing in the SERPs.

Hi Lauren,

This is true in the case of keyword cannibalism. For example, lets say you have a page you are trying to rank for the keyword "Auto Insurance," but you also have two other pages that target the same keyword. These pages will end up competing (cannibalizing) against each other. To combat this issue, you can use a canonical URLs. This will let Google know what page is the most important. Here is a guide on MOZ for how to go about using them.

https://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization

However, if the pages are targeting different keywords, you have nothing to worry about.

Hope that helps!

Hi Rosemary,

I know ALL CAPS have been known to hurt CTR. If I am searching google and I see a title tag or meta description with phrases in all caps like CHEAP, BUY HERE, etc., I tend to lean toward the opinion of thinking the content is spammy and click on something that looks a bit more professional.

Also, take a look at Googles product search editorial guidelines here. https://support.google.com/manufacturers/answer/6124110?hl=en

In it they state, "Avoid any repeated and unnecessary use of punctuation, capitalization or symbols. Don't use exclamation points in your product titles. The use of symbols, numbers, and letters should adhere to the true meaning of the symbol."

I would err on the side of caution purely because CAPS can hurt CTR. I don't think there is a consensus on whether or not CAPS can help/hurt your ranking in the SERPs (there has been evidence that suggests both) from an SEO perspective.

Hope that helps!

Hi Lauren,

This is true in the case of keyword cannibalism. For example, lets say you have a page you are trying to rank for the keyword "Auto Insurance," but you also have two other pages that target the same keyword. These pages will end up competing (cannibalizing) against each other. To combat this issue, you can use a canonical URLs. This will let Google know what page is the most important. Here is a guide on MOZ for how to go about using them.

https://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization

However, if the pages are targeting different keywords, you have nothing to worry about.

Hope that helps!

Best practice is to write titles for your audience keeping keywords in mind, but not obsessing over length. Although only the first 512 pixels (50-70 words) of the title tag will show, some believe longer titles are better for SEO purposes because they allow you to fit in more keywords. The first 512 pixels should be catchy with your keyword to help CTR, but anything after that doesn't show can still help in terms of SEO. Do not worry about changing the titles of those 5000 pages. It could even end up hurting your rankings in the SERPs.

Oh I see, my apologies. Generally, you do not want two different pages attempting to rank for the same keyword because of keyword cannibalism (i.e. your pages will be competing with each other in the SERPs). I would change the search page to "Searching for LED Spotlights" or some other keyword specific to that page. I would assume the category page would convert leads better so changing the anchor text (led spotlights) on the "Searching for LED Spotlights" might help assuming you want the category page to rank higher in the SERPs.

Hi,

This is a pretty big debate in the world of SEO. Here is a thread that should have all the information you are looking for. https://moz.com/community/q/the-great-subdomain-vs-subfolder-debate-what-is-the-best-answer

In my opinion, if you run an E-Commerce site or a site that is hard to build links to, I would stay away from a subdomain.

For example, product pages on E-Commerce sites are especially difficult to build links to. If you look at the product page link profile on sites like Amazon, you will find almost no links pointing to those pages. The reason they usually rank #1 in the SERPs is because of their DA. This is where blogs come into play. If you have a sound content marketing strategy that is bringing in links to your blog posts, these posts will pass link juice to your root domain and improve your overall rankings.

If you are using site.com/blog rather than blog.site.com it might help your SEO by passing more link juice and improving your root domain, but it certainly won't hurt it. There is a possibility it might help if you switch, so I would opt for that.

Hope that helps!

As long as you are sure the posts on your blog are no longer on your site, you should be fine posting the same content again and not have to worry about duplicate content.

Hi Rosemary,

I know ALL CAPS have been known to hurt CTR. If I am searching google and I see a title tag or meta description with phrases in all caps like CHEAP, BUY HERE, etc., I tend to lean toward the opinion of thinking the content is spammy and click on something that looks a bit more professional.

Also, take a look at Googles product search editorial guidelines here. https://support.google.com/manufacturers/answer/6124110?hl=en

In it they state, "Avoid any repeated and unnecessary use of punctuation, capitalization or symbols. Don't use exclamation points in your product titles. The use of symbols, numbers, and letters should adhere to the true meaning of the symbol."

I would err on the side of caution purely because CAPS can hurt CTR. I don't think there is a consensus on whether or not CAPS can help/hurt your ranking in the SERPs (there has been evidence that suggests both) from an SEO perspective.

Hope that helps!

You should be fine having one product under a category. To avoid duplicate content, you should use canonical URLs. Since you are using WordPress, you can use Yoast to accomplish this. If you haven't used canonical URLs before check out this guide. https://yoast.com/rel-canonical/

Hope that helps!

Google has gotten much smarter when it comes to differentiating between similar keywords. It really depends what the page is about. Best practice is to try to target a unique keyword phrase for each page, but it's totally fine if part of that keyword phrase is used on other pages on your site. If the pages are pretty much the same, you might want to combine the pages, or using a 301 redirect/rel canonical to tell Google what page is the most important.

Hello! Sounds like you've got a pretty big project ahead of you. First question, why do they want you to remove title tags, descriptions, etc? I wouldn't remove them, I would do some keyword research and target local keywords specific to your geographic area. For example, 2016 Honda Civic Orange County.

What pages are showing up as duplicate? Are they specific vehicle pages? How are they duplicate? There are better options than rel canonical in many cases. Read this article and it should provide some insight. https://moz.com/blog/complete-guide-to-rel-canonical-how-to-and-why-not

Sometimes there is no way to avoid duplicate content, especially on a dealership site. Check out DriveTime's website, they do a good job on their SEO. If you filter for a specific make and model and look at the vehicle descriptions, you will find duplicate content. Compare two cars with the same make and model, but that are different colors and you will see what I mean. This type of duplicate content usually won't hurt your SEO, especially on a dealership site where your pages are constantly changing as you receive and sell vehicles.

You can always tell Google not to index specific portions of your page if you have duplicate content that provide no SEO benefit like disclaimers, warnings, etc. https://perishablepress.com/tell-google-to-not-index-certain-parts-of-your-page/

Also, check out this video by Google Webmasters. The speaker makes it pretty clear that you won't be penalized for duplicate content unless it is spammy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxWo4ttPgAc

If you can be a bit more specific with the duplicate content issues, I'll see what I can do to help.

Good luck!