I tried putting this URL into Open Site Explorer and OSE cannot access any data for this page. Is anyone else seeing the same problem? I had the same problem when I moved one level up in the structure by following the breadcrumb. OSE couldn't access that category page either. Have you noticed this before?
Posts made by danatanseo
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RE: Ranked well initially, then experienced a significant decrease does anyone know why?
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RE: How can I best optimize only meta descriptions for an ecommerce?
You are most welcome. Yes, you are so right. If you demonstrate your expertise, even if it's just something small, within his budget, you will gain his trust (one hopes). If not, and he tries to take advantage of your expertise (and generosity), then it might be time to move on to a more appreciative client.:-)
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RE: Reciprocal Links NoFollow
I think reciprocal links to related industries can be perfectly natural. In some cases they can even be really helpful to your visitors. A perfect example is Pink Jeep Tours Sedona (I don't do SEO for them), they have a page for Local Area Info where they link to lots of different hotels, area attractions, etc. Almost ever one of those local attractions link right back to Pink Jeep Tours, and they are all followed links going both ways.
This all seems perfectly natural because they are helping their visitors find other fun things to do. In cases like these, I think the reciprocating links are very valuable because they are all closely related (by industry) and helping to increase each other's credibility.
Regarding your question about nofollow/no index. In my opinion, no that wouldn't be considered black hat at all. SEOMoz does it, for example, in Q & A profile pages for all the user's links, until they hit "Journeyman" level, when they remove one "no follow."
I think the no follow/no index is your own personal choice. Just keep in mind that Googlebot may decide to follow the links and/or index the page anyway. Search engines only view those as "suggestions."
Hope that's helpful and good luck.
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RE: How can I best optimize only meta descriptions for an ecommerce?
Hi Sergio. Yes, I think you are on the right track. I would make the keyword research, and any resulting changes to the Meta descriptions, target things specifically by category and then products.
I understand your frustration. Perhaps you can convince him to try one small thing in addition to the meta descriptions (hopefully of your choice), so you can show him a positive impact from something that could have a bigger impact. Just a thought!
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How can we improve our e-commerce site architecture to help best preserve Page Authority?
Today I installed the SEOMoz toolbar for Firefox (very cool, highly recommended). I was comparing our site http://www.ccisolutions.com to this competitor: http://www.uniquesquared.com
For the most part, the deeper I go in our site the more the page authority drops. We have a few exceptions where the page authority of a subcategory page is actually better than the cat. page one level up.
In comparison, when I was looking at http://www.uniquesquared.com I noticed that their page authority stays at "21" on every single category page I visit. Are you seeing what I'm seeing? Is this potentially a problem with the tool bar or, is there something significantly different about their site architecture that allows them to maintain that PA across all category and sub category pages?
Is there something fundamentally wrong with our (http://www.ccisolutions.com) site architecture?
I understand that we have longer URLs, but this is an old store with a lot of SKUs, so we have decided not to remove the /category/ and /product/ from the URLs because the 301 redirects that would result wouldn't pass all of the authority they've built up over the years.
Interested to know viewpoints on the site architecture and how it might be improved. Thanks!
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RE: [eCommerce Issues] Having a tough time writing content for product color variations. Any recommendations?
Hi Paul,
As an e-commerce SEO I feel your pain! I am not sure what platform your store is running on, but is it possible to consolidate all the different colors onto one sweater page and allow customers to select the color via a drop down box (usually referred to as "options" in e-commerce back ends) ? This would in essence create a hub page where you would just have to write great copy once, and include the colors. Now, if you are like most e-commerce sites, every color and ever size has its own SKU. You of course have to add them to your products database, but there should be a way to make it so they don't actually display as product pages. You then associate the SKU with the specific option (i.e. Medium size, color Red) and when a customer selects that options, that specific SKU is what is added to their cart.
Hope that helps!
Dana
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RE: Analytics oddity
It sounds like a bot to me. Whose bot? Hmm...could be any bot that accessed your sitemap.
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RE: Running a contest to increase Facebook Likes
As long as the contest legitimately engages a company's Facebook followers, I can't imagine why it would be a problem. Contests and giveaways are great ways to engage people. The one thing I would be wary of wouldn't so much be Google but Facebook itself. They have recently embarked on a campaign to eliminate "Fake" followers. If your contest produces a lot of fake follows, then you might see your number of likes inflate while people are entering, but then drop down again after the promotion if Facebook determines that alot of those new followers weren't real people with genuine FB accounts.
Disclaimer: No one, including myself can predict what Google will or won't do. (sorry, I aways feel the need to put that in when answering a question about "predicting" what Google might or might not penalize).
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RE: Recovering from the Penguin update finally w00t!
Wow, thanks for sharing. I hope this is a serious object lesson for people who are trying the same things. What kind of baffles me is that you'd forgotten that you'd purchased and set up a bunch of different Web sites. I don't know, call me crazy , but that's kinda like publishing a book and saying "Really? That's mine> I had no idea!"
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RE: Is it possible to lose rank because my site's IP changed?
Okay, just heard back from 3DCart. The old IP and new IP are both USA. That being the case, I don't think that had anything to do with my ranking drop. Hopefully it's just a natural fluctuation.
Thanks Adam!
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RE: YOUTUBE BEST PRACTICE for SEO
Have you created a YouTube channel for your group of videos? I'd definitely suggest that. Here's a great video from the folks over at REELSEO, http://www.reelseo.com/build-brand-youtube-channel/ They are awesome with their advice about video SEO. Also check out blog posts on Video SEO by Paddy Moogan and Phil Nottingham (I think if you Google their names with "video SEO" you'll find them right away). Hope that helps!
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RE: Has SEOMoz considered making it possible to follow a specific Q & A thread via Twitter and/or Email?
Hah! I knew there was one. Just couldn't find it. Thanks Adam (as my father would say "It's a good thing it wasn't a snake!....)
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RE: Is it possible to lose rank because my site's IP changed?
Thanks Adam. I know the EMD isn't an issue for us, and this site is extremely young (January of this year) and has never used any link schemes, link buying or any questionable SEO, so I'm not worried about Panda either. Just concerned that we held on to that #2 spot for a solid 6 months and then dropped.
I have heard that IP change most often doesn't effect SEO, unless the IP change moved to a different country. Since I am at the mercy of 3DCart, it's possible the country did change. I am trying to find out from them right now.
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Is it possible to lose rank because my site's IP changed?
I manage a site on the 3dCart e-commerce platform. I recently updated the SSL certificate. Today, when I tried to log-in via FTP, I couldn't connect. The reason I couldn't connect was because my IP had changed.
Last week the site experienced almost across the board rankings drops on lmost every important keyword. Not gigantic drops, a lot just lost 2-4 postiions, but that's a lot when you were #2 and you drop to #4 or # 6.
Initially I thought it was because I was attempting to markup my product pages using structured data following guidelines from schema.org. I am not a coder so it was a real struggle, especially trying to navigate 3dCart's listing templates.
I thought the rankings drops were Google slapping me for bad code, but now I wonder....could I really have dropped down because of that IP address change?
Does anyone have a take on this? Thanks!
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RE: Non-home page ranking higher, very odd
I feel your pain! Although, sometimes cleaning up an outdated site can be the most rewarding because there is so much upward potential. Good luck!
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Has SEOMoz considered making it possible to follow a specific Q & A thread via Twitter and/or Email?
I think it would be great if there was a way to follow a particular Q & A thread without having to post a comment. There are so many great topics and discussions in here and sometimes I lose track of some that I'd like to continue following as people post, without having to post in the thread myself.
Have you guys (Mozzers) ever considered adding a "Follow this thread on Twitter" or "Follow this thread by email" function?
Or is there already a way to do this (without posting), that I just haven't found?
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RE: Non-home page ranking higher, very odd
I notice that when I navigate to an interior page, then want to go back to the Home page, that the little hyper-link in the upper left inside the home page logo actually took me to this URL:
http://www.thematstore.com/index.htm
instead of http://www.thematstore.com
I loaded them both into OSE: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/comparisons?site=www.thematstore.com&comparisons%5B0%5D=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thematstore.com%2Findex.htm&=Compare
You can see that the /index.html version of your homepage has the lion's share of internal followed links. This might be something you want to correct so all those internal pages are actually linking back to http://www.thematstore.com
I agree with Irving's suggestion to get rid of those footer links to other search engines.
I disagree with Irving's statement that keyword tags "can only hurt" you. I don't think they are hurting you. But he is correct in that you don't really need them. It does help your competitors discover what keywords you're going after.
Since you are so close to page one, I would do just those things and see if your ranking improves. If it does. Proceed cautiously with Irving's suggestions "c" and "d." I'm not saying they aren't good suggestions, but that if you do everything all at once, and your ranking sinks, you won't have any idea what had the negative impact. I would be especially cautious in removing that page and "de-optimizing" things.
Out of recent personal experience, I decided to "de-optimize" a page that had SEO copy in small text way at the bottom of an e-commerce page. I was #2 in Google and hoped that by de-optimizing I could move up to #1. Guess what? I took out my keyword-stuffed copy, and boom, dropped to #4.
This is why I say proceed with caution. Do one thing at a time and evaluate the results before moving on and changing something else.
Hope this helps!
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RE: Non-home page ranking higher, very odd
Hi Joe,
I am curious to know about how this could happen too.
Is your client in the USA? I just searched "chair mats" and outside of the major brands like Staples, Amazon and Sam's Club, there were only a couple of others listed, and the listing was for their home page. I didn't see any listings on page 1 that went to a subdirectory or resource page. This might be a silly question, but are you private browsing?
Dana
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RE: E-commerce SEO when products are shared between sites
One great way to make sure that the content on your identical product pages is unique is to collect separate customer reviews for each site. This will give you UGC that also gives you unique content. Of course, it takes time to collect the reviews, so the more unique you can make the existing content, the better off you'll be. Good luck!
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RE: Adding another Question Topic
I think adding a Webmaster Issues question category is a great idea polarking.
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RE: Are you an in-house SEO or an Agency/freelancer SEO ?
I am in-house
Level of happiness - 9.0 out of 10
Desire to experience the agency side of life: 7.0 out of 10
What would it take to get me to move from one to the other? - $30K above my current salary (which isn't really that high)
Anyone, anyone, Bueller?
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RE: Multiple domains vs single domain vs subdomains ?
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.
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RE: Updating Youtube Videos
Yes, we have a similar situation for our YouTube channels. In our case, some of the old videos are even for obsolete products. We leave them all, even when we do an updated video on the same product. That total view count for your YouTube channel overall can go a long way towards bulding credibility in a new viewers mind.
Hope that helps a little. Just my two cents
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RE: What would your Seo tactic's be for this
Great comments and well-said Ade. I just had an "Aha!" moment. You said:
"Make your website something that offers real benefit to your site visitors."
I am an in-house SEO for an audio/video equipment and installation retailer. We spend a lot of time and effort making sure we have great service and great products. We spend hours and hours talking about our value proposition....
We talk and talk and talk about how our products can benefit customers....
What we've never yet discussed is "What can our Website do for our visitors? What kind of experience is it giving to visitos? What reason are we giving visitors to stay on our site and stay engaged?"
Sure, great people and great products are crucial, but people go to Norstrom's not just for great products, but for the experience of shopping in their stores. Aha!
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RE: How to remove Google + logo?
Oh my it's no bother. I am glad you found the solution. Cheers!
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RE: How much copy should there be on an e-commerce category page?
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.
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RE: Help fixing the traffic drop that started on 4 September 2012.
I appreciate you hanging in there and glad Rand jumped in to assist. Thanks also for not being offended at my observations. I think it's super cool that you are a "gadget news" site. I signed up to follow your blog Please keep us posted on how this goes. I hope the suggestions you receive here help you to recover from the traffic drop.
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RE: Different Title Tag and Page Headline
I think there could potentially be great advantages to having a different title tag from the page headline. The title tag gives you the opportunity to boil that headline down to its most important parts.
The title tag should avoid stop words. Think about the title tag as if you were a librarian. I don't know how old you are, but remember in the old days when you had to ue a card catalog to search for things? You never used words like "for, and, the, at, with" etc. Those took up space on the cards and made things harder to find.
Here's a hypothetical example. The "reader friendly" title of the first Harry Potter Book was:
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
Do you know how most people search for that book? (Library or Online, doesn't matter) - right, they search "Harry Potter - Book 1"
Okay, so the best title for the page would be "Harry Potter Book 1"
You did a good job at eliminating stop words from your title. However, also be cognizant of the character limitations in Google for displaying titles. You are good with 53 characters. I'd say 59-65 absolute max. Otherwise, you risk being truncated in ways you don't want/
A word of caution. That "%" sign at the end of your title could pose a problem for some engines. It might be better to spell out "percent."
I really hope this is helpful!
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RE: How to remove Google + logo?
Call me crazy, but if I were you I'd leave it there. You have some +1's that are giving you some cool credibility. Just a thought?
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RE: Pubcon in Las Vegas
I am a little new to the whole trade show/convention scene. Because I am in-house my current company is very selective about which ones they will send me to. Fortunately, they sent me to Mozcon 2012 and I just loved it and took back so much knowledge and information to the Web team.
Is Pubcon worth attending for an in-house SEO like me? Or would our convention dollars be better spent at SMX West?
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RE: Implementation of Rich Text Snippets on a e-commerce site
I am struggling with all of this myself. One thing I actually did right was implement the image tag to display our brand logo for the home page and category page. Yes this works. Take a look at our home page or one of our Category pages in the testing tool:
http://www.celebratecommunion.com/prefilled-communion-cups.html
Of course, Google isn't doing anything with this information yet, so it (our logo) doesn't yet appear in SERPs.
Unfortunately, it's pulling the brand logo instead of the product thumbnail image on our product pages. If you figure out how to achieve that, let me know!
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RE: Removing old versions of a page.
I think that's a personal choice more than anything else. If he really feels that those old pages are detracting visitors from the content he really wants them to be seeing, then perhaps 301 redirects would be fine. But, since the content is unique and his site is ranking very well, I see no harm in leaving them as is. Personally, I'd take them case by case, research how many inbound links they have, how much traffic they get (if any) and make a judgement call. It may be that you get rid of some, keep some and 301 redirect some depending on what the page is. Sorry that's not more definitive, but it's likely no one here knows his content better than the two of you. I'd just say it doesn't have to be all of one thing, whether it's leave them alone or redirect them.
Hope that helps!
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RE: URL is starting to appear capitalized in Google Search Results. How come?
Hi Margaret,
I took a look and yes, found multiple listings on page 2, all still lower case. Again I attached a screen shot. Are you private browsing to see the results? [I did}
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RE: URL is starting to appear capitalized in Google Search Results. How come?
Interesting. When I do a search in Google (using IE), I am not seeing any captitalization in the URL. I attached a screen shot so you could see what I saw.
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RE: REL prev/next on pages with additional sort parameters
Hi Peter,
Do you have a "View All" page option? If so, you could just use a canonical tag on the "view all" version of the page, without doing anything further.Here are some helpful resources (the video from Google is very good):
http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/mitigating-mixed-signals-effectively-consolidating-paginated-urls
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1663744
Hope this helps!
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RE: Meta missing description tag ??
Hi Angelita,
This just means that the Web page in question in the report is missing a Meta description tag. Here's a link to an article in Google Webmaster Tools that explains all about these tags: http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/www.google.com/en/us/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf
Go to Page 6 in the guide for a good explanation of how to best use and implement Meta description tags.
I hope this helps!
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RE: How to set Home page for the best effect
Personally, I vote for / - (I think you meant a forward slash, no?) - When I visit a Web site home page, from a user perspective, I have an expectation that I will see this as the URL: http://www.HomePage.com or, http://HomePage.com - If I see anything else, it makes me wonder..."Am I in the right place? Do I really want to be here?" That's not the kind of wondering you want your visitors to have.
Even if another choice was better for SEO, that question mark over your user's head that appears when they see something like http://www.HomePage/BigLongKeyword, could be enough to make them bounce right back to Google. At that point all that SEO becomes useless.
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RE: 100% sudden drop in traffic
Gerd, for all of us less technical folks out here, can you explain why this was effecting the number of pages Clinton had indexed in Google SERPS?
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RE: 100% sudden drop in traffic
Trust this suggestion, Clinton. Gerd is really smart and probably way more technically smart than me.
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RE: Do you have to have a Google+ profile page for a person before you can build a Google+ brand page?
I still haven't received a truly complete, detailed answer to this question. I would really like to hear from Google. Anyone have additional info?
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RE: Help fixing the traffic drop that started on 4 September 2012.
I would try getting rid of the tag cloud and see what happens. maybe it has no impact, maybe it solves the problem, at least you'll be able to eliminate it as the culprit.
The homepage of the blog. All of the blog posts were news stories about products, promotional stories, added to Adwords Ads, banner ads, and a big link in the navigation that says "Buy advertising"...all sent signals to me as a visitor that this site was about profiting from advertising.
Again, please don't be offended. I am one user, and I am only offering one user's opinion. I could be a sole instance, so take what I say with a grain of salt.
The best way I have ever found to keep track of historical rankings for keywords is SEOMoz Pro. You can get a free membership for 30 days.
If you had a good idea of what your rankings were before for specific keywords, put them into simple text list and load them into SEOBook's RankChecker Firefox extension and see where you are at now compared to where you used to be. Just beware that if you load in more than 50 words at one time to Rank Checker it will probably crash, so do them in groups if you have to.
I certainly hope this helps in some way. I understand how disconcertin huge drops in traffic can be.
Good luck!
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RE: 100% sudden drop in traffic
The problem isn't the analytics code. The problem is the number of pages indexed in Google. I can say that, definitely.
[Updated] Many thanks to Gerd for his correct analysis of the problem. I stand corrected! I was looking at the wrong URL in site: I looked at site:http://www.clintonpower.com.au which only shows three results. Without the "www" yes shows 156 indexed pages.
I very much appreciate Gerd's expertise!
My apologies, Clinton for perhaps leading you to look at the wrong thing.
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RE: 100% sudden drop in traffic
That was actually my first thought, so I went to site:http://www.clintonpower.com.au
According to the results I can see, there are only three results listed. I am assuming your site has way more than three pages?
One of the three results is a link that leads to this page:
User-agent: * Disallow: /wp-admin/ Disallow: /wp-includes/ Sitemap: http://clintonpower.com.au/sitemap.xml.gz
Hope we can all help you piece this together!
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RE: Help fixing the traffic drop that started on 4 September 2012.
Have you tried getting rid of your Tag Cloud?
My initial thought as a first-time user is that your site is a collection of advertisements. Please, don't be offended. I know that's not probably what you are intending, it was just my impression.
Try taking out the tag cloud and see if there is any positive result.
Have you been tracking your rankings for important keywords? Have these changed recently?
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RE: 100% sudden drop in traffic
Yes, for starters uncheck all the boxes. Although I am unfamiliar with this specific platform, it sounds like a setting gone awry. The worst problems are often from the simplest mistakes.
After you uncheck all the boxes, spend a week monitoring your GWT reports. You'll know very quickly where there might be pages you don't want crawled or indexed, like dynamic search results pages on am e-commerce site.
It's great that you have a developer for help.
You might repost another Q & A question here regarding robots.txt for the specific platform you are using. You might very well find some specific help on which boxes to select and which boxes to leave unchecked.
I feel for you! I had a site disappear many many years ago because my host was in another company and sold his hosting company. I lost my entire business, so I really do understand that horrible feeling! I really hope something I've given you here helps. Cheers!
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RE: 100% sudden drop in traffic
You are very welcome. Have someone look at your robots.txt file. It looks possible to me that you are disallowing your entire sitemap. If that's not it, my guess is it was a recent back end change. Can you uninstall Premise, undo anything else you've done in the last 10 days or so. Resubmit your sitemap and see if that fixes it. Then, one by one reinstall, or redo the changes you made, but wait a couple of days between each change.
I think something you have done is telling Google bot that you don't want your pages indexed.
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RE: 100% sudden drop in traffic
Hi Clinton,
I'm not a super-technical SEO, but it looks like maybe you have something going on in your htaccess file or robots.tct file that is telling google not to include any pages from your site.
Have you changed anything in the backend settings recently?
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RE: How does using a CMS (i.e. Wordpress/Drupal) affect backlinks and SEO?
Ditto to that Jared. Great explanation. And now I'm hungry.
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RE: Just read Travis Loncar's YouMoz post and I have a question about Pagination
Considering that the larger of the two sites I work on is on a platform from 1996, I might actually be living "back in the day!" lol - Thanks again Jared!
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RE: If you have multiple schema types on a page, which Rich Snippet will display in Google?
I have just voyaged into the world of schema and microdata recently. It is my understanding that Google could choose to display as few as none and as many as all of your rich snippets, depending on how relevant they are to any given search.
Interested to know what others will have to say!
Dana