Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi BigBlaze,

This is a very common scenario in e-Commerce. For example, microphone and speaker cables come in hundreds of different lengths. Writing Pulitzer-quality content for pages like these is absolutely not necessary in order for pages like these to do well. In addition to that, people shopping for items like these do not expect to land on a page filled with paragraphs of content with flowery hyperbole. They want to find what they need, put it in their cart and checkout.

For this reason, your site isn't as bad as you might think. The fact that your titles are all the same I don't consider to be a problem at all because you have made them unique by including the furnace filter size. Same with the meta descriptions. As long as they are unique and do a good job of describing what's on the page, these aren't really duplicate content either.

If you want to work on unique content creation or go after longer-tailed search, you might consider adding some robust FAQ pages or even a blog.

The bottom line is your site isn't about content so much as it is about selling furnace filters. Even if you spent a lot of time re-working your product descriptions so they were all "unique," they are still going to be substantially similar in Google's eyes (and to users) anyway. I mean, it's really not realistic to wax poetic about furnace filters, although I'm sure someone's tried!

I'd concentrate on making the sizes easy to find and purchase process quick and painless. If you get good conversions and a lower than average bounce rate and good customer reviews, you'll be sitting pretty in the SERPs I think.

Dana

You are welcome Chris. Good luck and let us know when it starts showing the right way around!

I'm not sure that a canonical tag is going to effectively solve the problem. Also, if implemented, it would completely undermine your original homepage. I don't think you are going to want to do that.

Have you analyzed your inbound links and the anchor text associated with it? It's quite probable that you attracted a number of inbound links that contain anchor text specific to your original city and that this is a big contributing factor to the "national" page outranking the "city" page for said "city." While not impossible to address, trying to get the folks who are linking to you to update their links may not be productive either.

The one thing you can control is how you are linking internally and what anchor text is pointing to what page. I think if you send enough signals from your own pages that this new "city" minisite is the right and best location for people searching for information or products pertaining to that city, eventually it will bump up ahead of the other page.

THis could take a good amount of time. Depending on how long the original page had to build up its links and authority, it probably will take at least that long, and maybe quite a big longer to build up the same kind of authority on the new page.

I know this isn't probably the definitive answer you're looking for, but I really do think that this one is a matter of time, effort and patience.

Dana

I appreciate the shoutout Rob. Thanks to you both for reading. I really appreciate that. You are both sp right. Engagement is key. And the best part, you just never know what that relationship you work at building via the comment might lead to, whether it's traffic, links a guest post or just a great friendship...all are very worthwhile in my book.

Dana

Hi Brian,

I would say it depends totally on your business plans and how much you want to/expect to grow. My point being, that going through all the trouble to add the city name to the business name, may end up being a problem when, for example, you end up with 6 different locations in Chicago.

If you know, due to the nature of your business, that there will only ever be one franchise located in each major metropolitan area, then perhaps adding the city name would be okay. However, think about the future long term. If it's possible that you are going to end up with even two locations in one city, then you're going to have a lot of follow up work to do after the fact (sorting out citations in the same city).

I would follow the lead of major franchises like The Olive Garden and stick to your brand name, but carefully optimize each city listing with specific and accurate information.

I hope that helps! (just my two cents)

Dana

Hi Mike,

I am sure you've probably already barked up this tree, but do those pages contain 100% substantially unique content?

Also, have you had an SEO developer review your robots.txt and .htaccess files to make sure there isn't something it there preventing crawlers from having access?

Dana

Hi Jesse,

I agree with Robert here and also EGOL's comment below that your interaction and discussion has led to a fruitful conversation. BBB accreditation is something we have considered many times. Honestly, we've gotten great "acceleration" out of just focusing on our local business listings and citations. Since we haven't even completed the free opportunities there, there's no point (in our minds) of spending money until l we've exhausted all of our free opportunities.

I encourage everyone here to avail themselves of all the opportunities at http://www.getlisted.org and the citation tool at White Spark before biting the bullet with a BBB paid listing.

Cheers!

Dana

Hi Mike,

I am not a developer, but I think the problem is the hashtag in your URL. This is a problem for search engines in that, anything following the "#" is completely ignored by search engines.

Depending on your platform, I would consider re-writing all of your URLs to omit that hashtag completely. Search engines (and humans!) can respond in unpredictable ways to anything other than alpha-neumeric characters. Then I would implement 301 redirects if necessary (depending on how old the site is and how many inbound links there are to each page).

I don't think that sitemap submission is even going to help right now because of the hashtag issue, but I'd love to hear from a developer on this for verification.

I hope this helps!

Dana

Hi Tim,

Most likely this isn't built-in to what we've got as we are on a very archaic, custom-coded site. Still, here's a URL just in case you might have any insights:

http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/product/cad-gxl2200

Let me know what you think (other than the site was coded when dinosaurs still roamed the earth)

Dana

Thanks so much. This rings a bell now. I think I read this or something like it because something told me it was possible. I just don't code enough to keep up with some of these things! Thanks much!

I will premise this question by saying I am not a developer, so please forgive my ignorance on this one.

Is there a way to achieve an expandable/collapsible

without relying on javascript?

Thanks all!

Dana

I think the best source I've come across about truly 'demystifying" structured data is Richard Baxter. He did a really great Mozinar a few months ago that had some great information and "how-to's" with real-life examples: http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/microformats-real-life-use-cases

He also wrote a great blog post: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/schemaorg-a-new-approach-to-structured-data-for-seo

and I think there's an even more recent blog post from Richard on the subject that I can't seem to find at the moment. Perhaps someone here can point us in the right direction?

I would paraphrase some of what Richard has to say, but I'm still mystified and struggling with how to markup my site content properly, so I'd better let Richard do the talking

Dana

You are very welcome. It's a great tool. Well worth the license fee. Enjoy!

Have you tried Screaming Frog? If not, you might start there. I believe there is a function that allows you to pull all anchor text into Excel. This would allow you to figure out how many co-occurences you have of certain phrases. Once you have that, it might be easier to work the other way and then track down the URLs where that anchor text is located.

You may have tried this already but just thought I'd suggest it.

Dana

Hi Gina,

We too are also using All in One SEO for our corporate blog which is located here: http;//www.ccisolutions.com/blog

Within WordPress, in combination with this Plug-in, you are allowed to select authorship of each blog post. As long as you have set up your users/writers with all the information needed to populate Structured Data (aka Rich Snipppets) information, this info should be communicated to Google with each post.

I don't think there are any FAQ's or guidelines telling you this, or even how to do this, but I have realized that as we publish our blog posts, Google is recognizing our Structured data as defined by who we select as the author of specific posts.

I hope this doesn't sound ridiculously vague. I can elaborate with some real world examples via private message if you like.

Dana

Takeshi is right, but I'll chime in that the whole purpose of SEO is to increase traffic to one's website. It follows that if your targeted blog comments produce an increase in traffic, then they have boosted your SEO program.

The link Takeshi sent is a fantastic reference. I highly recommend it also.  It is one of my favorite blog posts of all time and I refer to it often. He is right that there are probably some quicker "wins" in terms of tactics (in comparison to blog commenting) on that list.

Cheers!

Dana

I think blog commenting can still certainly be effective for SEO when it's done right. I think you're on the right track. I read your first comment and I have a suggestion that hopefully will make your comments more authentic, and hopefully then, get them read and noticed a little bit more.

If I were you I would completely disclose who you are and that you are in the business of selling furnace filters. Do this above and beyond just putting it in your link. Be authentic and conversational. The beginning of your comment started out good, because I felt like I was getting some good information and advice. But the end (particularly when you asked me to Google a specific term), struck me as a pitch, and that was a bit of a turn off.

Can commenting work? Yes. Just remember to be real, write conversationally (no marketing-speak) and above all, give more than you get.

Good luck Jean, I hope this helps!

Dana

You are very welcome.

I don't think it really matters. Yes, you could definitely get the browser to match the SERP by populating the <title>Keyword 1 | Keyword 2 | Company Name</title>

Hope that's helpful Tommy,

Dana

It's possible that Google has chose to display the content of your meta description as the title, instead of the actual page title. What is Google showing under the title in the search result? Is it just selecting a snippet of content from the page?

I would like to know more quantified data as to why this seems to be so. Jim, do you have any articles, statistics or data to prove your statement? Now asking for myself. I am asking so that I can prove it to other people when I make the same claim....and they will definitely ask

Thanks!

Dana

I am curious to know what tools you are using to check your PageRank. Google very rarely updates PageRank. I think at most it's maybe 3 times a year. In my own experience it's been less often than that. So, the reason I ask is that PageRank is not usually changing as much as in the example you provided because Google simply doesn't update it that often.

There may be people here who know better than me how often this is done and how often it's been updated in the last year, like Dr. Pete Meyers.

I would check these things out before jumping to any conclusions about your new site's PageRank.

Cheers,

Dana

Hi Rachel,

I thought this was a great question. I do SEO for a niche site that runs into this all of the time. The site sells religious products. Ss you might imagine, there are Catholic church products, Protestant church products and non-denominational church products and everything in between. Each of these may have a completely different name for exactly the same item. For example, a mainline Protestant church will call a communion wafer a "wafer" while the Catholic church often refers to them as "hosts." In America we refer to the part of a church service where people break bread together and share wine or juice, Communion, but it's also referred to as the Eucharist in Catholica, Episcopal and Lutheran churches.

You can see this opens up a huge number of possibilities. Some searched more than other. I think it's a matter of having such intimate knowledge of your customers and product lines that you know exactly when to use which variations of the keywords. In certain situations they make perfect sense, but use the wrong combination of keywords with the wrong product, and you might succeed in getting search but could end up severely alienating your potential customers once they get to your site.

Great question!

Dana

This is an excellent illustration Marisa. Very good description, and I totally agree on the modified broad match.

Good catch Marisa. Yes, you are correct.

You are very welcome Christopher. I hope it was helpful.

Yes, you are right on both counts. I think there will come a time when Google will display the brand icon in place of an image for pages that are marked up with rel=publisher. I can see that pulling through for the sites I manage when I plug them into the Rich Snippet testing tool. Google, however, is not yet displaying those images.

Good luck! It sounds like you've got a good idea of what pages should use what type of authorship.

Dana

Hi Christopher,

Yes, this is a perfect example of what I was talking about. Matt Cutts at no point in this video says that PR has no value. In fact, he says exactly the opposite. He says:

"There are a lot of SEOs and people in search who look at the PageRank toolbar, but there are a ton of regular users as well. You would be really surprised at how many just regular people have the Google toolbar and use PageRank as a way to figure out ihow reputable something is....We get into our tunnel vision and think no one else uses the PageRank toolbar, but the fact is a lot of people do."

He goes on to say that Chrome doesn't have a PageRank toolbar and IE10 won't allow toolbars or add-ins of any kind. He talks about how, if IE10 catches on, the PageRank toolbar might not be used by as many people.

He then reiterates: "A lot of people do use it. I believe we will continue to support those people while they use the Google toolbar...but it looks like the writing's on the wall that with IE 10 the Google Toolbar won't be allowed any more on IE 10 in Windows, so we'll see how things develop in the future."

So you see, his video is about the Google Toolbar. He never even addresses PageRank, aside from the fact that it is something in the Google Toolbar. He certainly acknowledges that people use it and that Google continues to support it.  In no way did he ever say or even imply that PageRank wasn't a valid way to determine the trustworthiness of a site. In fact, he said just the opposite.

What are your thoughts?

Dana

Hi Bob,

I'm going to take your questions one by one:

1. (1) Do charity websites or company websites with link pages ( about5-10 other links) or links / logo's on the front page offer value even on unrelated sites?  - YES, definitely. This is a great way to get .edu links. find out what universities are selling sponsorships for their websites, or contribute enough to make a good scholarship fund and then ask to have your company logo and link on every page of the site. THere is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Several e-commerce sites have done a good job of doing this.

2. What happens if 80% of the link building I am doing comes from blogs? - FABULOUS - I don't see any problem with this unless you are out there planting blog comments that are spam.

3. I have links that are clearly spam - GET RID OF THEM (I'm sorry, Did I shout????)

4. The "key" here is genuine....c'mon, your next door neighboor  kcan tell if that page is keyword stuffed or not. If you read a page and think to yourself "Gee, hmm, I wonder if that's keyword stuffed..." - It probably us. Rewrite it.

I hope this helps a little!

Dana

There are times when rel=publisher is more approrpiate than rel=author, a product page on an e-commerce site for example. Will a site be penalized for establishing authorship on every page? Absolutely not. In fact, I think that is what Google is intending for people to do.

The problem right now is there is such mass confusion over rel=author and rel=publisher andhow to use them properly, that right now, you see lots of sites that should be using rel=publisher using rel=author instead. Because Google has done such a poor job of articulating how and where to implement these things, I can't imagine them penalizing sites for using one when they should be using the other. Although, I suppose strange things have happened.

I do think that the intention with authorship and also structured data markup is that Webmaster implement all the appropriate tags and markup on every page of their site.

Hope that's helpful!

Dana

I think characterizing what Matt Cutts said about PageRank as meaning that PageRank no longer means anything is a mistake. In his blog post from August 2012, (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/why-did-my-pagerank-go-down/) Cutts clearly spends an entire email explaining to a Newspaper why their PageRank might have gone down. If PageRank no longer meant anything, he would have said that in his response to them. But he didn't. Instead, he spent the entire email discussing several issues that Google saw with the site that were in violation of the terms of service. As a result, the PageRank dropped 50%.

I think Cutts' comments regarding PageRank in no way undermine the fact that PageRank still is an indicator of a site's authority and value. I think what he's trying to get people (including SEOs) to understand, is that attempting to manipulate PageRank, via sculpting, selling links that pass PR or buying links that pas PR are bad things to do and could hurt your site, possible even getting it removed from Google's index.

I still pay attention to PR as I am managing SEO, but it isn't the be all end all, nor do I do anything to try to articfically manipulate PR on the sites I manage.

I also use all of the other resources you mentioned. One I use that isn't on your list is http://ahrefs.com, and for domain authority I specifically use OSE.

I hope this is a helpful viewpoint. I do think there are a lot of misconstrued notions about things Matt Cutts has to say, with people often over-interpreting or reading things into his comments. Mostly, I think he means exactly what he says, no more, no less.

Cheers!

Dana

Without seeing the root domain metrics, I'd say domain 1 and my advice would be to pursue some relationships with other people in the same industry (or interested in things related to what's in the page content) and see if some high quality links could be earned.

If the site is a business (i.e. selling products, gathering leads, or anything of that nature), the first thing I would do would be to check to make sure all of the business citations available were filled out with complete information and claimed. http://getlisted.org/ is a great place to evaluate where you are at and what steps you need to take to complete your online business proflles. Most of them are completel free for basic listings, with many enhanced options available too.

Good luck!

Hi all,

I got and answer to this question from the great folks at Wistia themselves. Yes, it is possible! They were kind enough to allow me to post how to do it in my blog. The instructions and sample code  for how to do this can be found here:

http://www.danatanseo.com/2013/02/how-to-make-video-transcripts-in-wistia.html

Enjoy!

There are definitely more directories, in addition to Yahoo, that are still very worthwhile. I think the key is...balance. If the only links your site has are from directories, then they aren't going to be as valued. if you have a good balance of inbound links from directories of other sites, then you're okay.

Here's my "fast and dirty" list of things to check before you decide to get listed in a directory:

1. How old is the directory? Older is better
2. What's the PageRank of the Directory? Higher is better, above 3 is better, below that forget about it.
3. What is the cache date of the directory? (more than 2 weeks, forget about it)
4. Does the directory have a "free" inclusion option? Great! That's a good thing.
5. How many inbound links does the directory have (use OSE), more is better
6. What's the Alexa rank of the directory? Lower is better
7. What country is the directory based in? Some are better than others. I'll let you make that call

I recently updated an excellent list of 100 reputable Web Directories just a few days ago. You can view it here: http://www.danatanseo.com/2012/03/high-pagerank-web-directory-listings.html!

I hope this helps!

Dana

There are definitely more directories, in addition to Yahoo, that are still very worthwhile. I think the key is...balance. If the only links your site has are from directories, then they aren't going to be as valued. if you have a good balance of inbound links from directories of other sites, then you're okay.

Here's my "fast and dirty" list of things to check before you decide to get listed in a directory:

1. How old is the directory? Older is better
2. What's the PageRank of the Directory? Higher is better, above 3 is better, below that forget about it.
3. What is the cache date of the directory? (more than 2 weeks, forget about it)
4. Does the directory have a "free" inclusion option? Great! That's a good thing.
5. How many inbound links does the directory have (use OSE), more is better
6. What's the Alexa rank of the directory? Lower is better
7. What country is the directory based in? Some are better than others. I'll let you make that call

I recently updated an excellent list of 100 reputable Web Directories just a few days ago. You can view it here: http://www.danatanseo.com/2012/03/high-pagerank-web-directory-listings.html!

I hope this helps!

Dana

I agree with Anthony. I managed 6 Volusion stores for one company for several years. It's a decent platform, but don't rely on them for your technical SEO advice. Some of their tech reps are very green.

I personally prefer using [exact match] instead of "phrase match." The difference is that with exact match a search for [extra large widgets] would return an ad for [extra large widgets] but not for "extra large widgets on sale." Conversely, if your campaign (and I'm making the assumption we are talking about paid ads) was set to be triggered for "extra large widgets" as a phrase match, your ads would be triggered for both "extra large widgets" and "extra large widgets on sale" plus many other variations, like "widgets extra large" or even "widgets white extra large"  I use exact match because it gives me tighter control over my ad spend. However, this is with a keywords set with which I am intimiately familiar. If I was launching new campaigns for things I didn't know as well, I'd definitely use some phrase matches until I started to see what's really working and what isn't.

Hope that helps a little!

Dana

We are considering using Wistia as a more SEO-friendly video solution. In our preliminary tests, we like what we see with the exception of one thing. There is no way for video users to toggle the interactive transcripts on and off. From an aesthetic viewpoint, our team finds the scrolling text extremely visually distracting. For usability and SEO purposes, we know that having the transcript there is important.

Unfortunately in the embed codes, you are limited to either including the interactive transcript, or leaving it out. There is no mechanism to allow users to view it if they want to, but leave it off if they don.t

Has anyone here created a workaround for this problem or found another solution, like Wistia, that has a more aethetically pleasing and user-friendly presentation of trascripts/captions?

Thanks!

Dana

Expandable and collapible DIV's are just fine for SEO. They do a great job of accomplishing great design without compromsing content for SEO. Yes, Google can crawl that content just fine. Here's a link to a great webinar that specifically addresses some great Pro-Tips regarding how best to use these: http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/designing-for-seo

Hope that helps!

Dana

Yes, you have a good take on it JML. I too would love to hear what others have to say about this.

Have you thought about putting a "View All" option (link) on your listings pages? This could make it possible for both users and Google bot to access all of the listings without having to deal with the latency inherent with paginated pages. (Googe's own research has shown that users prefer scrolling through lots of content instead of having to move from one page to another....just a thought).

Yes, you can get Google to crawl your site starting from an interior page  using "Fetch as Googlebot" which is available as an item in the left hand navigation menu is Google Webmaster tools. After entering the URL of the page click on "Submit to Index" and then a box will open that gives the choice of submitting just that URL or submitting the URL plus all linking pages. Choose that second option. You can only do this a limited number of times a month so be judicious about which ones you submit this way.

As far as cache date, convention wisdom is that the more recent your cache date, the better. What this means is that Google is actually crawling your site more often. A cache date of 3 weeks or more happens when Google has come to your site or page many times but rarely finds any new content. WHen that's the case, google bot visits less frequently. Because Google values fresh content, it's better to have a newer cache date and to have google bot visiting more frequently.

I would be a little bit concerned that you have 15K pages and only 4.5K indexed. That ratio seems low to me. This might be an indication that google bot is having trouble crawling your entire site. Also, how new is your site? Is it a few months old or a few years old? Google bot crawls new sites more frequently, simply because they are new content. Over time, depending on how often your content is edited, updated or new content is posted, the crawl schedule will change.

I know this is only a partial answer to your question. But hopefully it provides a little insight.

Dana

Thanks very much Christopher. This is an excellent explanation. What do you think of Charlie and EGOL's suggestions regarding making sure that there are links embedded in these PDFs pointing either back to the product page or even to the home page?

In your opinion, is this something worth doing? If so, why?

Hi Don,

Thanks so much for responding and while the answers I have received so far did give me some direction, you are right, one of the fundamental questions I still have is how does a bot behave when it finds an orphaned page like one of these? Does it just revert back to the sitemap and move one? Does it automatically go back to the last non-dead end page and move on from there? What does it do?

Thanks for chiming in. I'd love it if someone more familiar with how a bot actually crawls links like this on a page would jump in with an answer.

Dana

Thanks Charlie. I think this is a good suggestion. I work 9-6 too, and just so happen to be the in-house SEO strategist, so this stuff is what I'm there to do. I don't mind the mundane aspects of SEO because the payoff is usually pretty rewarding! Now I know what I'm doing on Monday (on top of a dozen other things!)

Thanks again!

Many thanks to both you and EGOL for excellent answers!

Thanks EGOL. Yes, many of these .pdfs could be and are referenced by other sites. Given that there's no link from the .pdf back to our site, we really are missing out on a huge opportunity. I thought this might be the case as I pondered the whole concept of "dangling links" that was discussed in a SEOMoz blog post this week.

I agree about the last point regarding opening in a new window being more of a usability issue than a problem for SEO. I agree with you completely that opening in the same window is way better for the end user.

Can a bot navigate via a back button?

Thanks very much to both you and Charlie for your excellent answers!

lol, thank heaven's they aren't spammy. However, they aren't particularly helfpul either. You see, about 3,000 of them are old .pdf versions of print advertising campaigns, going back as far as 2005. They contain obsolete pricing, products, etc. Unfortunately, instead of archiving them off the server, they've been continuously archived in a sub-directory of our main website.

Nearly all of it is indexed. It seems to me the best thing to do for these is to include a statement that the content is an old advertisement and include a llnk to our current "special offers" page.

What do you think of that as a strategy for at least giving engines and humans a means to navigate to someplace current on the site?

Thank you Charlie. In our case, our .pdfs contain no links in them at all. There is nothing for a bot (or a human) that will navigate them out of the .pdf....not even the back button.

Considering that, and EGOL's response below, would the best course of action be to include, at the very least, an active link back to our homepage from all of our .pdf files?

We have as many as 6,000 .pdfs.

Thanks,

Dana

Thanks EGOL,

Yes, I understand well that .pdf documents can be indexed. That's not my concern. My concern is that a bot that navigates to one of our many .pdf tech specs documents, which, incidentally, contains no outbound links to anything, would then become trapped and not be able to continue crawling the site. This is particularly true because we have them set up to open in a new window. In the example above, sure, there's a text reference back to the site "www.kingdom.com" - but it isn't a link in the .pdf. There are no links, in any of our .pdfs.

So, what is the best way to deal with this? Go back and rework our .pdfs so they at least contain a link back to the homepage? In addition toAs well as configure the hyperlinks so they open in the same window instead of a new one?

We have a large number of product pages that contain links to a .pdf of the technical specs for that product. These are all set up to open in a new window when the end user clicks.

If these pages are being crawled, and a bot follows the link for the .pdf, is there any way for that bot to continue to crawl the site, or does it get stuck on that dangling page because it doesn't contain any links back to the site (it's a .pdf) and the "back" button doesn't work because the page opened in a new window?

If this situation effectively stops the bot in its tracks and it can't crawl any further, what's the best way to fix this?

1. Add a rel="nofollow" attribute

2. Don't open the link in a new window so the back button remains finctional

3. Both 1 and 2

or

4. Create specs on the page instead of relying on a .pdf

Here's an example page: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/product/mackie-cfx12-mkii-compact-mixer  - The technical spec .pdf is located under the "Downloads" tab [the content is all on one page in the source code - the tabs are just a design element]

Thoughts and suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Dana