I totally agree with Marie. First and foremost, be calm. Don't freak out and start changing a whole bunch of things. Make sure your client knows what's going on. Far better for them to hear it from you than discover it on their own. Make a plan. First, document everything that has recently changed. Hopefully you've done that already. Start with that 301 redirect. You already know it's a problem, whether it's caused this or not.

Has anything else changed? Meta tags, specifically title tags? I have seen a site drop from a #1 branded search position and disappear for up to a day because the title tags were updated. Then it reappeared back in it's original spot. It's possible that your clients site is in a Google dance, but my gut says that's not it. Start with the 301...and while you're at it, check and make sure that the non.www version of the homepage is properly redirecting via 301 as well as any other potential URL versions that also produce the homepage and that may have inbound links.

Good luck and please let us know what happens. Hang in there!

You might try the good folks at http://www.goinflow.com/ - Everett Sizemore in particular. He gave a very good mozinar on eCommerce SEO here: http://moz.com/webinars/ecommerce-seo-fix-and-avoid-common-issues  This is how I became familiar with him.

There are also two guys at http://www.melen.net, Matthew Prepis and Oleg Korneitchouk (Oleg is active here in the Moz forum) who performed a high level audit for us that was top notch. They were striving to win our business and are still in the running. They are excellent.

Either of these two might come in quite a bit lower than a company like RKG, depending on the scope of the project of course.

Hi all,

We have an opening for a Senior SEO Associate. Would love to hire someone in the Moz Community. Here are the details: Sr SEO Associate https://g.co/kgs/Ucwzp7

Cheers,

Dana

Howdie,

Yes, I believe we got this sorted out. Interestingly, it wasn't any of the suggestions made here causing the 301 status code responses. I posted a thread in Google Webmaster Tools Forum regarding the issue and received a response that I am 99.5% sure is the correct answer.

Here is a link to that thread for future readers' reference: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!mydiscussions/webmasters/zOCDAVudxNo

I believe the underlying issue has to do with incorrect handling of a redirect for this domain:  ccisound.com

I am currently pursuing getting it corrected with our IT Director. Once the remedy is in place, I should know right away if it solves the issue I am seeing in the server logs. I'll post back here once I am 100% certain that was the issue.

Thanks all! This has been an interesting one for me!

Arafah, I respectfully disagree with loss of ranking and "link juice" (I hate that term - I prefer "page authority") being a misconception. Matt Cutts himself states that 301-redirects do not pass all the value of the original link. Here's a link to Eric Enge's article/interview with the quote directly from Matt Cutts: http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2010/03/google-confirms-301-redirects-result-in-pagerank-loss.html

Hi Garrett,

It really depends on the nature and use of the image. I'd really take that on a case by case basis. If you created unique images that received a ton of links or social shares, or they provided something important to your end users, than sure, recreating them on the same URLs might be a great idea. You might want to spot check a few in AHrefs, OSE and Google ANalytics to see if they were generating buzz, traffic, links or all three. Choose some likely candidates and find out what you see in those tools and let that guide how you proceed. Cheers,

Dana

Hi,

I agree with EGOL that the "100 links" rule is old information.

To more specifically answer your question, yes, all links in your global navigation, footer and links on category and product pages are all counted as internal links and all (provided you haven't done anything silly like added "no follow" attributes) pass link equity throughout your site. For this reason it's important to be strategic about the architecture of your navigation and internal linking structure. Ideally, your top most important pages should be included, if possible in your navigation and/or footer.

It's not unusual for large eCommerce sites to have significantly more than 100 links on a given page.

For example, Home Depot ranks #2 in Google for the term "flushmount lights" with this page: http://www.homedepot.com/b/Lighting-Ceiling-Fans-Ceiling-Lights-Flushmount-Lights/N-5yc1vZc7nk

As you can see from the attached screenshot, this page has 523 links on it. While clearly exceeding the "100 links" - this page still has no problem ranking very well for a targeted keyword.

For verification that Google dropped the "100 links" rule, check out this Matt Cutts video from November, 2013 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHG6BkmzDEM

EGOL is also right that Moz should update their suggested SEO best practices to reflect more current methodology.

Hope that's helpful!

Dana

BVeoZ

I agree 100% with MagicDude. After watching Everett Sizemore's E-commerce webinar I tried an experiment. We had a huge block of SEO copy on our home page. We were #2 in Google for our most important keyword.

I removed the copy and put it into the blog instead.

We dropped to #4 in Google.

I took the copy back out of the blog and returned it to the home page. Hopefully, we will recover the two spots we lost when I removed it.

I know people are saying this doesn't work. Maybe it's the quality of the writing that's the problem. We go to great lengths to make sure that any copy we include for SEO purposes reads well and is of some use to visitors.

As is often the case, I think it depends on your specific business and products. I have seen the niche site idea work extremely well, and not work at all. Something to really take into account when considering the multi-site option is: Do you have the resources to develop manage and market multiple sites?

I am an in-house SEO for a company that just launched a micro-brand. They could have opted to put these new products on their existing Web site, but the products and customers were going to be vastly different than the core customer persona of the main site, although they are all church ministry related.

Our main site is very large and I have advised that it would be better to separate out the three subsections of the site because, again, the customers of each leg of the business are completely different. We are in a highly competitive category too, so this makes it extremely hard to rank for important keywords because our messaging is trying to address three different businesses with one Website.

If you have the resources to handle multiple sites, and you're in a competitive space, I'd say go for the niche sites. But beware of Exact Match Domains. Google is crackin' down!

Hope this perspective helps a bit.

Hi Steve,

This is a great question. I think it depends entirely on how much search volume there is surrounding the other variants for "refurbished" parts. If there's a reasonable amount, I'd recommend giving them their own URLs. I know this is harder because if they are substantively similar, producing unique content could be more difficult. I believe you can use schema.org markup to indicate "condition" [http://schema.org/OfferItemCondition] - This would help search engines understand that these items are unique from each other in important ways.

As long as it was clear to both humans and search engines that these power tools are uniquely different from each other in some way, I'd opt for the separate URLs and optimize them for long-tail terms.

If the only difference were color, say a power tool came in red or black, then maybe I would consider making these attributes that didn't necessarily influence the URL. Again there would be the caveat of search volume. If there was significant search volume for different colors, than having separate URLs and schema markup for each would be the way to go.

This is a similar type of question eCommerce site merchandisers (and SEOs!) ask themselves when strategizing how to handle faceted navigation. What combinations of facets warrant their own URLs and which ones do not? I would let search demand guide your answer.

Hi All! What constitutes a normal crawl rate for daily bingbot server requests for large sites? Are any of you noticing spikes in Bingbot crawl activity?

I did find a "mildly" useful thread at Black Hat World containing this quote: "The reason BingBot seems to be terrorizing your site is because of your site's architecture; it has to be misaligned. If you are like most people, you paid no attention to setting up your website to avoid this glitch. In the article referenced by Oxonbeef, the author's issue was that he was engaging in dynamic linking, which pretty much put the BingBot in a constant loop.

You may have the same type or similar issue particularly if you set up a WP blog without setting the parameters for noindex from the get go."

However, my gut instinct says this isn't it and that it's more likely that someone or something is spoofing bingbot.

I'd love to hear what you guys think!

Dana

Hi again Bob,

Take a look at this thread on how to remove query strings from static parameters...I believe your answer is there.

https://wordpress.org/support/topic/how-to-remove-query-strings-from-static-resources

Dana

P.S. Why is this a problem for SEO? A couple of reasons:

1. It's highly likely your content will get shared without the query parameter AND with the query parameter. This will effectively split your link equity between two versions of the same page.

2.Google Search Console is very bad at understanding that the page without the query string is the same as it is with the query string...you'll likely get a lot of duplicate content notifications.

3. From an end-user standpoint, it's just plain ugly....and end user experience matters to SEO right? - I understand that's somewhat facetious....but it's your business right? You want it to look a good, solid, high-quality, professional site. Ugly query parameters scream "I hired my 21 year old nephew to b build me a WordPress site."