Welcome to the Q&A Forum
Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.
Yes, Jared, this is a great answer. I understand completed. It looks like we are ok then with Google Custom Search as it is. Thanks so much for your thoughtful answer. Now, if we can only get our paginated category pages sorted out, we'll be on the right track! 
Hi Gerd,
Yes, this is a separate issue we are also struggling with on the site. I believe Travis' YouMoz post from yesterday made a pretty good case for using multiple paginated URLs, and he even illustrated how to accomplish this with sorting parameters like "color" and "price"
You raise a very good point about duplicate titles and descriptions potentially being a problem in this scenario.
Does anyone have any ideas about how to handle that? Could the backend be programmed to dynamically create unique titles and descriiptions based on some rules for naming conventions? (assuming you have access to that level of the code of course)
Really interested to know some points of view on this!
Dana
I understand exactly what you are saying Jared. However, here's the problem, the canonical tag is exactly the same....for every single subsequent page in a series across the entire site.
No matter what is searched. The canonical tag remains:
Wouldn't that mean that all search results pages, regardless of search term, are viewed as the same page?
I have heard this discussed before come to think of it. In this case, wouldn't it be proper to block all dynamic search results pages from being crawled or indexed by Google via the htaccess file or robots.txt file?
I know that the number of 301-redirects can sometimes raise concerns about site speed. However, 1,000 is really not that many. Large e-commerce sites can have 10,000 301s, or even more. Depending on how the 301 files is handled even this large number can be handled in ways that have very little impact on site speed or page load times.
I think the number in your vase is nothing to worry about.
I do think that deleting and 301 redirects is the best way to go for anything that's remotely relevant. For those that aren't, create a custom 404 page and let them 404. Eventually they will drop out of the index. If they don't, you could still file a remove URL request in Google Webmaster Tools.
Hope this helps and good luck!
This was a brilliant post.
I have a question about Pagination on sites that are opting to use Google Custom Search. Here is an example of a search results page from one of the sites I work on:
http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/search-return?q=countryman
I notice in the source code of sequential pages that the rel="next" and rel="prev" tags are not used. I also noticed that the URL does not change when clicking on the numbers for the subsequent pages of the search results.
Also, the canonical tag of every subsequent page looks like this:
Are you thinking what I'm thinking? All of our Google Custom Search pages have the same canonical tag....Something's telling me this just can't be good.
Questions:
1. Is this creating a duplicate content issue?
2. If we need to include rel="prev" and rel="next" on Google Custom Search pages as well as make the canonical tag accurate, what is the best way to implement this?
Given that searchers type in such a huge range of search terms, it seems that the canonical tags would have to be somehow dynamically generated.
Or, (best case scenario!) am I completely over-thinking this and it just doesn't matter on dynamically driven search results pages?
Thanks in advance for any comments, help, etc.
I always like to begin my responses to questions pertaining to prediciting what Google might do with the caveat that I can't predict anything Google might do.
That being said, I think you are fine and don't need to do anything. Industry relationships like this are normal, common, widespread and accepted. For example, there was a trade publication that picked up info on hundreds of our products earlier this year and put links to them all over the place. It was an official industry magazine. It was a great thing, and we didn't even have to pay for it. Eventually, they moved on and picked up someone else, so the links gradually dropped off.
The same kind of thing can happen, say, for example, if some news about your business makes the front page of Huffington Post. Suddenly, you are going to get thousands of links because there might be a headline link to your website from every page of the Huffington Post. Then, gradually they will drop off.
Don't worry about this scenario. That's my advice. These are the kinds of relationships you want. Going around cleaning up like this is not really going to effect Google at all and it's going to cost you a lot of time you could spend building new links.
I'd suggest starting a business Twitter account. There's no time like the present right? You might find that interaction on Twitter is better or at least different. Being in both can be very good for your brand too. That's what I would suggest.
Go to your Facebook and Twitter accounts and log out. Then, log in to either Twitter or Facebook under your business. Twitter works best for this because you might have your business Facebook page attached to your personal Facebook account. Log in to Twitter with the business Twitter account. Then return to Klout. Make sure you are doing all of this in the same browser. This should work. Let me know. Cheers!
Yes, your pages are crawled once a week. Consequently if you make a fix, it could take until the next crawl for it to show as fixed. Also, there may be times when not all of your pages are crawled. You can see the number of pages crawled in your Dashboard. Hope this helps! Be patient. I'm sure if it's fixed SEOMoz will recognize it.
Yes, this can definitely be done. Here's an example of one of the business accounts I set up for a client: http://klout.com/#/Communion_Cups . Just use the business Facebook or Twitter account on the sign up page and you'll be on your way. Hope that helps!
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
I just did this today. It was on a 3dcart store, so this may be over simplistic, but hopefully it gets you closer to implementing what you want (your will have to replace the URLs with your own of course):Immediately after your page tagshttp://www.yourdomainname.com/product-image-url.jpg"/> Then you will need to install the Facebook "Like" button javascript on your product pages. You can get detailed instruction on how to get and install this code by going to Facebook Developers area hereI am not a developer and it is pretty straightforward. You are able to define the size,, style etc. of your Like button on that page.Good luck. I hope this helps!
While I certainly don't want to pretend to be able to predict anything Google might do, to me, the fact that you are thinking about this as being a potential problem should be enough to make you consider some options. Depending on how many pages you have, it may not be that difficult to get really truly original content produced for those other pages.
Will Google choose not to index you? I have no idea.
My guess is that you get indexed, but may not rank very high if the content is substantially similar on all of those pages. You might get stuck in the proverbial "sandbox." (ranked so low that no one can find you).
My gut says, if you have to ask "is this duplicate content?" It probably is, so make it unique.
Great authors. I haven't read it but have wanted it for a while. Trust me, mistakes by developers can totally derail any SEO you want to do. I am an in house SEO and I spend about 80% of my time trying to fix technical errors that were made by developers who never took any SEO into consideration when building the site.
If they get to know a lot about SEO it will make your work more effective, quicker and make it possible for you to contribute more to the bottom line..
Thanks Dr. Pete! An you know what? You are absolutely right. Google has interpreted the canonical just that way and it's been in our GWT reports forever and no one could figure out where they were coming from.
Thank you, thank you, thank you (in my Gomer Pyle voice, of course!)
Wow, it's amazing how fixing one thing can sometimes take you down a whole nother road and fix something else at the same time. I just can't thank both you and George enough.
Kudos to George on a great answer.
Yes. Option #3. If it expired in the last year, it may just be in limbo. I'd find out, but don't sound overly interested. if the call forwards to some "attorney" selling domain names for ridiculous prices, forget it and go with option #1. I think if the content was great your hypotheses that people would be less likely to link may prove untrue. Good luck and I want to know what happens.
The 2nd edition was done in 2008. Have you read it? I have. A lot of the fundamentals there are completely sound, and they stay away from a lot of the garbage tactics that SEOs have done over the last few years.
Interested to know your take on it. Always interested in different points of view.
Ehren, don't just trust my word for it. Read the reviews on Amazon.
My own copy is also dog-eared from constant flipping back through and referring to things.
If they weren't developers I wouldn't make this recommendation, but there's a great book on SEO and Search Engine Marketing produced by the smart folks over at IBM. I highly recommend it because it gets down to the nitty gritty technical stuff really well. And, it was written by developers
P.S. I am not an Amazon affiliate. This is not an affiliate link
http://www.amazon.com/Search-Engine-Marketing-Inc-Companys/dp/0131852922
Sorry that was a link to the old edition. Here is the newer one:
There is a listing of recommended and very well-vetted companies and services located here: http://www.seomoz.org/article/recommended
It's pretty hard to get on this list, so I'm sure anyone who is listed there would do an excellent job. They aren't all Inbound, but I'm sure a few of them would probably be a perfect match. Hope this is helpful!
Yes, I believe this is probably the best solution. Regarding the passing of rank, etc, nothing will really change from how it is now, except that one page will clearly be defined as the original content. This may help boost the page authority of the page with the canonical tag. Whatever authority that original content page has should pass to other pages the same as it is now.
Agreed. I think if we can change the Storefront to storefront without having to employ any kinds of redirects it would be great. Otherwise, the site is so old, that it may not matter.
Along those lines, we recently had the opportunity to remove /Storefront from the URL string. We chose not to because the site is 10 years old and didn't want to risk losing any page or domain authority by having a whole bunch of 301 redirects.
Certainly interested to know your take from the viewpoint of someone who knows code. Thanks George!
Thanks so very much George for your thorough answer. This is exactly what I needed know, and it makes it possible for me to explain it to the CEO. It appears we have a confusing mixture of absolute and relative URLs, that need to be sorted out. I think sticking with the absolutes will makes it much easier.
While we have this on the home page:
This is an example of a category page canonical tag:
Would I be correct is saying that there is a problem here because the actual URL of the page is
http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/wireless-microphones
So if we are going to use the relative URL in our canonical tag, it should be:
Is that correct?
Thanks George. Can you help me with what this means on a large site "
If your document specifies a base link, any relative links
will be relative to that base link." ? Does "document" refer to the entire site, or a single Web page? Thanks!
I believe the proper syntax is like this [taken from the SEOMoz homepage]:
However,
one of the sites I am working on has all of their canonical tags set up like this:
I should clarify, not all of their canonicals are identical to this one, they simply use this naming convention, which appears to be relative URLs instead of absolute.
Doesn't the entire URL need to be in the tag? If that is correct, can you also provide me with an explanation that I can give to management please? They hate it when I say "Because I said so!" LOL
Thanks Mike. Understood. I think your anchor text is fine. Have you considered adding the word "Find" or "Shop" or "Buy" to it? Like this:
Shop German Shepherd Figurines from MyDomain.com
I'd make the whole string one big hyperlink. You are clearly signaling to the user where they are going and what they can do there. I don't think there's anything spammy about that.
Then, I would link directly to the German Shepherd Figurines page.
I hope that's helpful!
Matthew, you are very welcome. I think putting those two ideas together would come across nicely. Best of luck to you!
I admire your pro-active ideas and ambition greatly. As someone who fields SEO sales calls every day, I'd just toss out a word of caution.
Most businesses have spent a lot of time getting very good at what they do. They understand their vendors, their products, their customers, their bottom line. There's no way a gung-ho SEO can look at a site for 30 minutes and pretend to waltz in as if they know the first thing about the business, its goals or its customers. I've had SEO's pitch me keyword lists that were completely wrong for the business because they had no idea who the customers really were (and most likely they didn't care).
I get so tired of people calling me and saying "Hey I took a look at your Web site and did you know you don't have any [insert select SEO term here] ?" The last one, just two weeks ago said "Hey, did you know you are missing all of your meta keywords tags on your Web page?." I should have hung up, but I played stupid and strung him along just to see how green he really was, poor chap! lol
I don't like it when people call me and say they've been looking at my Web site source code. It's almost like they've been lifting up my skirt to see what color my underwear is!
IMHO it's bad manners to offer an opinion unless asked for it. To me, the best approach is to give them a compelling reason to ask you for help. That way, they've invited you into their "space." Show some genuine interest in their business. 30 minutes of prep time just isn't going to do it, and they can see right through that.
The only SEOs who've ever gotten my attention were the ones who offered to fix something small for free just to show me that they were competent and could produce results. To me, that's the best hook in the world.
While I have found SEOMoz tools to be invaluable for tracking results and providing reports to my CEO, I don't rely solely on SEOMoz for everything I need to optimize the sites I manage. Google Analytics data, reports and tracking are a crucial part of the whole picture.
Have you been tracking your visitor engagement and looking at bounce rate, time on page, depth of site visits, etc? There may be an issue there.
I also use SEMRush, Google Webmaster Tools, Ahrefs, Rank Checker, and the SEOQuake Toolbar to help me look at many different things.
Every site is different. E-commerce sites will have specific problems that blog sites don't have, and vice versa.
I think SEOMoz tools are exceptional, but I think even Mozzers would agree that they are not meant as a stand alone, all-in-one, never need anything else kind of tool. It works best when used in combination with the other great tools that are out there.
Hope that's helpful!
In the context of this question and conversation, what about using rel=publisher for the brand voice and rel=author for specific individuals?
Katie, what happens if someone who has built up great Author Rank via their personal account leaves the company. It seems the company would lose out in that scenario. Very curious to know everyone's take. From personal experience I can tell you that connecting one's personal Google account to a specific brand can make for a big mess when someone moves to another company.
What is the context of the link and where will it appear? Is it on an internal page or an external page? If it's external, is this in a blog post, a comment on a blog post, a business listing or a directory, or something else? Is there a lot of surrounding text? If so are there other keyword links, or none?
This is a great question that shows something I am sure we are all spending a lot more time thinking about post-Penguin and Panda!
I have seen this happen before. Yes, wait a few days before panicking. It takes time when something changes for the index to update. It could be a few hours or a few days. If you don't reappear in a week, then it might be worth investigating further. I wouldn't make any more significant changes right now. Wait it out first.
This is a great question. I just read a blog post by Tom Critchlow about how Distilled uses Google+ for all internal communications and that they had to deal with the same issue. Here's a link to the post http://tomcritchlow.com/private-google-plus-engagement
I would set up AuthorRank on the blog from the business account, have everyone use their personal accounts for internal communications and just make sure that everyone's circles are set up accordingly. In other words, you want blog readers circling the business account circle for the blog, not necessarily individual's circles.
I'd love to hear what other people think because I think there is mass confusion over this specific issue.
I have seen the same scenario in many of the e-commerce sites I have managed too. I never saw any adverse effects as far as SEO went. I think it depends on what the perceived purpose of those links is. If you are really just helping your visitors find additional content or products that are relevant to what they are looking for, I think you should be okay.
In this particular case, I don't think it's a problem.
However, I am always willing to admit that I could be wrong and am very interested to hear what others might have to say. There might be some folks here who've had completely different experiences.
I'm not a fan of stop words in titles. How about
Nightlife Forum | UK Clubbing Guide | Talk Nightlife
What do you think? I basically just got rid of the "and, for, the" - But it remains very readable.
I too have seen this kind of change make a big difference, but sometimes it;s short term and the page sinks back down to where it was before. I think a new page title makes Google bot temporarily "curious" and it thinks "Oh I've found a new page!" Remember, bots aren't as smart as humans, so it takes them a while to catch on.
It's great that your page moved up. Watch it for a month and see what happens. If it retains its position, then maybe it's a good tactic to try on other pages
It could be that the change you made was a better "title" for the actual page. Finding better, more accurate, concise and descriptive titles that really hone in on what your page is about is always a good thing.
Hope that helps!
Hi EGOL. You make some good points. But, wouldn't you agree that testing is the only way to know for sure? I think making big changes to pages and structure based only on a hypothesis is not the best way to proceed. While long pages might impress visitors to some kinds of sites, they could be a huge turn-off to visitors on other kinds of sites. If you have an assumption that one way would be better than another, then the best thing to do is to test that assumption and find out if what you believe is really true or not.
If you are pleasing the search engines at the expense of your audience, what have you gained? You might end up getting more traffic, but what if they bail because the page isn't what they were hoping to find or it's too much for them to digest?
Can you tell I'm on my testing soap box? LOL, OK, I'll come down now.
There's really only one way to find out if one page structure/design is better than another and that's to split test your ideas. Optimizely.com is a great resource that has a one month free trial.
That being said, I personally don't think there's anything wrong with the page with the steps listed linking out to each step. Visitors generally will keep following a trail as long as they feel they are on the right track. I would be concerned that adding more content to the page might distract visitors from proceeding through the funnel, which is ultimately what you want them to do, yes?
Again, you won't really know that for sure unless you test one way versus the other. If you do test, look at your bounce rates in addition to funnel conversion rates. If one version has an excessively high bounce rate, this could be bad for SEO and would be something to consider when making any changes.
I can give you all kinds of personal opinion, but that's not really going to help you. I think you need to test test test. Hope that helps!
Dana
You are definitely headed down the right path. I know from experience with 3DCart that they have just started offering SEO services. I would advise to steer clear of them. If you've had any experience with their customer service, it's, well, marginal.
I attended their kick-off webinar for their SEO services and they were still talking about populating meta keywords tags. I posted a question asking them when they were going to make it possible to do SEO on their .asp pages [which you currently cannot access at all] and they did not respond. There are similar built-in problems with SEO for their blog.
I would advise hiring an SEO that specializes in E-commerce who has had a lot of experience with 3DCart. I'll still take a look at the site on Monday. There may be a lot of things you can do yourself without the expense of hiring someone.
Excellent comments Ryan. I believe part of the challenge here will be working within the confines of 3DCart. I had the same problems with Volusion. These E-Commerce solutions are not necessarily coded with SEO in mind at all. I liked the way Volusion's back end was organized much better than 3DCart's. In 3DCart everything is broken into pieces and not organized very well. Trying to put in javascript for certain additional features can be difficult or impossible because one cannot access the right parts of certain pages (i.e. one cannot directly access the whole code of a product page to place snippets in the ). I've also had several times where javascripts from PowerReviws, Bizrate and AddShopper broke the shopping cart altogether.
If I'd had a choice I would have built my newest e-commerce site in Volusion. However,, Volusion does not have sophistacted enough taxation capabilities and the company had nexus in California, Washington and Idaho. We were forced to choose 3DCart because it was the least expensive option that integrated with Avalara, a 3rd party tax calculation service.
Hi Great Fence,
I am only speaking from experience. I am not saying there will definitely be a dip. I am saying that anyone who is replatforming, particularly if they are re-writing URLs, they need to be prepared for a dip Perhaps it has to do with changing servers where your site is located (if I was Google, that would be a significant part of the equation).
There are no guarantees for sites one way or the other.
As a SEO who specializes in e-commerce I just want to make people aware that re-platforming might now solve all of your SEO woes overnight. You have to be patient.
Great Fence...if that 3-month dip led to double the traffic and conversions that you had before you re-platformed then it would all be worth it wouldn't it?
Some platforms are definitely better than others, but you need to be prepared to sacrifice a little and wait out the dip. If you've researched your choice well enough and made it taking into consideration your overall business goals, you should be fine.
I know that's not 100% reassuring, but if your business model is solid and your [products are good, you should be okay.
Dana
Hi Angela,
What are you seeing in your Google Webmaster Tools reports? 3dcart does have some unique SEO problems, but nothing that should be affecting you to this extent.
For example, you can't SEO 3DCArt's .asp pages nor can you properly SEO any blog posts.
However, I have a niche site on 3DCart that is doing quite well.
Your site is adorable and clearly unique.
I would be happy to take a look at it if you are willing to grant me view rights to your 3dcart backend I can tell you how to do that if you'd like, No charge. I just really like your site and would love to see you get back to where you were.
Please feel free to private message me or drop me an email at dtan@ccisolutions.com
First of all, I'd like to say, your sight is completely adorable!
Okay, that being said, I have a lot of experience in E-commerce. What platform were you on and what platform did you change to? Were there any changes is the URLs of your site? Did you do 301-redirects? Do you know for sure those 301-redirects were done properly?
I moved a very large site (5,000 SKUs) from self-hosting to Volusion in 2008. We had good traffic up to that point and then, for the first 3 months after we re-platformed everything tanked. But what happened next was quite remarkable. Our traffic skyrocketed and our conversion rate did the same.
Sites replatforming have to prepare themselves for a major "dip." But what happens after the dip could be really worth it. I know it's scary, but it could be that you are experiencing the "dip."
I am interested to know what e-commerce platform you were on and what you are on now. They allhave their own SEO challenges. I have a lot of experience with Volusion and 3Dcart and some experience with Magento. I'll be interested to know where you were and where you are now. Cheers!
Dana
Hi Luke,
I think your idea is a good one. Another possibility would be "Birmingham Club Scene" or "Birmingham Night Clubs Talk" or anything that's a synonym for what you want. Change it up a little bit and make it fun.
Hey, I just browsed around your site. It' fun! I think you are doing a killer job. Aside from using more variety in your on-site language, stay the course man. I envy you having a site with UGC! (User Generated Content0.
I understand your confusion. Here's how I would look at it. It seems clear you want your main authority home page to be : http://www.talknightlife.co.uk
Make your canonical on all pages in question point to that URL: http://www.talknightlife.co.uk
Then, 301 redirect http://www.talknightlife.co.uk/forum.php to http://www.talknightlife.co.uk
I'm not a technical SEO guru so I am interested to know if anyone else has different advice. But this seem to make common sense to me.
I don't think the problem is the name os the locations. I think the problem is the over use of the term "nightlife." There are lots of synonyms for that, like "Night clubs" "night life" "night spot" "club" "tavern" etc. I really think the problem is with the over use of that word "nightlife"
I'd say one thing that could be causing this is domain age. Is the competitor's site significantly older and more well-established? Another factor could be your engagement. What's your bounce rate? This is definitely part of Google's algorithm. Are people finding what they want? Do you have on-site search? If so, are you getting a lot of searches with "zero" results? One last thing could be the number of years you've registered your domain. If you've registered yours for 2 and your competitor has registered their's for 10, that could be a factor.
One last thing. Where is your site hosted? Are you on a shared server? What is the reputation of the other sites sharing that server? If your competitor is on a dedicated server and you are on a shared server with other sites with questionable or low reputations, that could be dragging your site down.
I know that's a lot of factors, but each one could make a significant difference. Hope that helps a bit!
Dana
I once had a site hit by this hack too. It's maddening. Submitting a reinclusion request isn't necessary because your site hasn't been de-indexed. You are correct that the problem pages seem to be 404s now, which is good. You have a couple of options. You can either just wait it out and those 404 pages should eventually drop out of Google's index. This takes patience, but those 404s aren't really hurting you from an SEO standpoint. However, they aren't good from a a visitor standpoint. I understand that. The other option, which also requires some time and patience, is to submit the offending 404 pages via GWT's removal too. It's a bit of a pain because you have to do them one at a time. However, because you have succeeded in getting them to 404, you shouldn't have any trouble getting them removed from Google's index.
The removal request page can be found on GWT by navigating to "Optimization" and then click on "remove URLs" - The interface will keep track of which URLs you've submitted for removal and whether or not your attempt was successful.
Good luck and I hope this helps!
Dana
It's very important if you plan on doing any advertising at all, whether it's Google Adwords, Facebook or anywhere else. Aside from the fact that shorter domain names are just easier for your visitors to remember, many advertising networks have character limitations on display URLs. For example, Google Adwords has a 35 character limit for display URLs. You can have a longer URL, but it will be truncated in the ad, which isn't really what any advertiser wants to happen.
I'd say 35 characters or less for your domain name, counting characters like this:
Don't count the "http://www." part in your character count because you can omit that from a display URL in an ad and people will still understand it and be able to navigate to your site.