Hi Alexander,

While there are some server-side technical things you can do to force a 404 error for a given URL, the best thing to do is remove the content in question from your server. At the very least this should achieve getting a 404 status code when you attempt to visit the URL that once housed the content. Ideally, if you can configure a custom 404 page that is more user-friendly, that's even better.

Now, depending on how your server is configured, there may be instances when a URL should produce a 404 error, but doesn't. I only bring this scenario up as a possibility because it's something I am currently dealing with on one of the sites I manage.

In any case, you may need to work closely with your server administrator or Web developer to achieve what you need. Most likely, it's just a matter of removing the old content from the server. Hope that helps!

Dana

No.

That's all I have to say about that.

I am being serious.

Dana

There are some excellent companies out there that can provide a broad range of site audits for you. Moz has compiled and excellent list here: http://moz.com/community/recommended

Because they weren't on the list and I have a tremendous amount of respect for the knowledge and experience this company has under one roof I'd also mention Rimm-Kaufman (RKG)

Prices can vary wildly, ranging from free audits to audits that are $10,000 or more, so it's important to consider where your company is and what's needed and take it from there. Here's a great post on site audits from the RKG blog:

Building a Better SEO Site Audit

Hope that's helpful info. Also, if you've got someone savvy on your team, and you have more time than you have money, here's great site audit template (given as part of Annie Cushing's presentation at Search Love Boston in 2012)  that can really go pretty deep and help you construct one on your own:

http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/craziest-internet-marketing-audit-checklist-on-the-interwebz

It includes links to an already formatted GoogleDoc that templates everything you need. Brilliant.

Hi Robert,

In general I would agree with Moosa, however, in this situation I think a drop-down menu is not the best choice. I think I understand why you want customers to be able to choose from the category page. It's most likely that there are a lot of colors to choose from, which means any drop down menu would be extremely long, and the presentation on the category page is quite attractive.

Yes, the individual product pages are duplicate content, so you have a few options. Since your main content and color choices really live on the category page, you could do as Travis suggested and use the category page URL as your canonical URL for all the separate color product pages. In addition to that, if your preference is really that potential customers find the category page first and foremost, and you really aren't that concerned with them finding a page for an individual color, you could add a rel="follow, noindex" attribute to those pages as well, which would keep them out of the SERPs. However, if you are wanting to rank for longer tail search terms containing individual colors, this may not be the way to go. In that case, simply using the canonical should work. Still, those individual product pages may end up in Google's supplemental index with you category page being the favored result.

All that being said, this scenario is extremely common on eCommerce sites. Keep in mind that there is no such thing as a duplicate content "penalty" per se. There may be negative fallout from situations like this, i.e. the wrong page ranking for a certain term, your crawl bandwidth being eaten up by many pages that are similar, etc. But I would make that secondary to the most important thing: What method will make it fastest and easiest for your customers to find exactly what they want? Do that, and then use some of the techniques mentioned to handle the SERPs.

Hope that helps!

Dana

Hi Greg,

I have seen this problem rear its ugly head before and most often it was connected to the use of relative instead of absolute URLs. I notice that you are using relative URLs for images, which is very common. I also notice that there is no self-referencing canonical tag on the page.

First, I would try adding a self-referencing canonical tag to this page if possible. Then, resubmit your sitemap to GWT and wait. GWT isn't very quick, so it could take some time to see if anything changes.

Also, I would experiment with changing one page's image URLs to absolute URLs instead of relative. Again, submit to Google and wait. See if the 404 errors being reported (specifically the ones for the page you updated) go away.

How many 404 errors are there? Is it a small handful or thousands? If it's a relatively small number (in proportion to the number of overall pages on your site), I really wouldn't worry about it at all. 404s aren't bad. Google uses them all the time and they are a natural result for either a URL with a typo or content that has been removed from a site. I would suggest making a custom 404 page though, because the ones served up by default by servers are usually pretty scary and unhelpful to your end users.

Hope that helps a little. These may or may not end up being solutions, but it gives you a place to start. Cheers!

Dana

Hi Alexander,

It looks like you've implemented the canonical tags properly. It can, however, take Google a very, very long time (sometimes years) to remove old content. If you really want the old page/URL out of Google's index, the very best and quickest way to achieve that is to make sure that the old page produces a proper 404 status code then use GWT's Remove URL tool to request Google to remove it from their index. This still isn't immediate, but I've seen URLs removed in as little as a week using this method. Hope that helps!

Dana

Thanks Miriam Agreed on all of the above.

Thanks so much Jane. I believe that URL is blocked from being crawled by our .htaccess file, although that's something I need to verify with IT. I just know from past discussions that it is blocked from crawling and indexing and it isn't in Google's index.

Would you mind describing, perhaps with a diagram, how this setup is a problem for passing authority internally? I am thinking it breaks the flow kind of like this:

Page 1 of Series -----> passing authority to page 2 --------> authority stops dead in its tracks due to non-unique URL

Instead of looking like this:

Page 1 of Series -----> passing authority to page 2 --------> page 2 passes authority back to home page, page 1 and page 3 of the Series....and so on

Would that be a somewhat accurate description? Thanks so much for responding. It is greatly appreciated!

I would try posting on LinkedIn and possibly also on Inbound.org. As an advanced SEO, those are the two places I look at first when browsing for new opportunities. Hope that helps! 
Dana

Awesome Reed. Thanks for the hat-tip on Twitter too. I appreciate that. Cheers!

Hi Carl,

I don't blame you for being confused. Since none of us knows what Google is actually rewarding as an "authoritative mention," whether that be a followed link, no followed link or a brand name mention, my answer can only be based on conjecture and experience. Hopefully there are some fellow Moz folk out there with some data to support what I am about to say.

I think that if we can track brand mentions, so can Google. Consequently, while it might not be the case right now, very soon it may not matter at all if a brand mention has a link or not. As for sites that are adding the "nofollow" attribute to your citation links...I'd probably be thankful that they care enough about the integrity of their content and their sites to take the time and discipline required to do this. In a way, they are protecting you too.

While Google has brought down the hammer on guest blogging, I think they are smart enough to know that inviting a high-authority and knowledgeable expert to write a post for their blog is and has been very normal practice in journalism since journalism began. While they would most likely never come out and say it (because doing so would divulge too much info about their algorithm), but I firmly believe that a "nofollow" link from certain sites are more valuable than a followed link from others. Along those same lines, I think a brand mention without a link from certain places, my be much stronger than a followed link from other sites. While I'm sure it's a complex equation, Google is certainly capable of writing an algorithm that could take all of these factors into consideration and assign a value to that brand mention or link, regardless of whether it is linked, followed or nofollowed.

That being said, when we produce content, sure, if I see a brand mention that isn't linked, I most likely will contact the editor of the publication and ask if they would consider adding one. I think the key for us is, we don't produce content purely for the purpose of getting links. We produce content based on our company expertise and actual work/projects we've completed. Sometimes it's something we write and sometimes it's someone else writing about what a great job we did. As long as it's quality and relevant to our audience, I don't really worry about the other stuff, to be quite honest.

I am very interested to know what others have to say on the subject.

Thank you Jane.

To answer your first question, no, we don't plan on continuing using the current method, however, I am concerned that whatever we decide to change is implemented properly.

To answer the second question, yes, all of our unique product pages return 200 OK status codes. I think the scenario your described is a very plausible scenario and it makes perfect sense to me. Especially you describe something else that I have seen happen, which I didn't even mention in my question. This is, the swapping out of ranking pages. I have seen this many times when one page might rank for a particular term for a while, then drop, and another page will take it's place and may do a lot better or a lot worse, and then in a few months time they will flip flop again.

One thing you didn't speak to was the fact that we have "no crawl, noindex" set up on this URL that is home to all of our paginated series pages. I am wondering what kind of havoc that could be wreaking on our internal linking and authority flow throughout the site? I am thinking it can't possibly be a good thing, no matter how you slice it.

Thank you very much for the link to the Pagination for SEO post. It contained a most excellent flow chart for pagination that I think every SEO should blow up, print out and post on a wall somewhere where developers and IT can see it. I am sharing a small version here:

LbNGood

Hi Reed,

I agree with the first part of Marty's answer above, but I disagree with both Marty and Arie regarding what the proper canonical tag should be for the pages in your paginated series. It just so happens that I was studying this very subject last week and Adam Audette released an excellent post on the subject on the RKG blog.

According to Adam, the canonical tags on the pages in your series should be self-referencing. If they aren't, you run the risk of Googlebot thinking that all the content (products, items...if it's an eCommerce site) is just the same as the content on page one of the series, which of course, it isn't.

Here's a link to his most excellent blog post on the subject, which also contains some links to other talks and posts he has given regarding pagination. Pagination is one of his main authority areas:

http://www.rimmkaufman.com/blog/video-avoid-pagination-gotchas/03042014/

Hope this helps!

Dana

You are very welcome. I do think that separating the suites and adding the extra phone number (particularly for their Google+ pages) will really be all that needs to be done. Good luck!

Hi Alex,

As I read your question my mind was already turning. I haven't dealt with exactly the same situation, but I have run into a situation where the same company has different divisions that each have separate addresses and phone numbers, but only one business name. It's a different, yet similar problem in reverse in a way. Consequently, I have also struggled with the whole business citation problem and inconsistencies with NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) information.

That being said, I think your idea of splitting the addresses by adding Suite # and having one of the dentists get a uniqur phone number is probably the best solution under the circumstances. This might be hard to explain to the business owners, but I'd just present a case to them on how important it is to have all of those online citations line up with absolutely matching NAP information.

Do these dentists share the same Website? If so, this could be a problem too, and it might be worth convincing one or the other to get their own domain, but it sounds like they already have separate sites (since they have different brand names). If they were sharing the same site that would add a whole additional element that hopefully isn't a factor here.

Hope that help! Cheers,

Dana

This question is prompted by something Adam Audette said in this excellent presentation:

http://www.rimmkaufman.com/blog/top-5-seo-conundrums/08062012/

First, I will lay out the issues:

1. All of our paginated pages have the same URL. To view this in action, go here: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/audio-technica , scroll down to the bottom of the page and click "Next" - look at the URL. The URL is: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/IAFDispatcher, and for every page after it, the same URL.

2. All of the paginated pages with non-unique URLs have canonical tags referencing the first page of the paginated series.

3.  http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/IAFDispatcher has been instructed to be neither crawled nor indexed by Google.

Now, on to what Adam said in his presentation: At about minute 24 Adam begins talking about pagination. At about 27:48 in the video, he is discussing the first of three ways to properly deal with pagination issues. He says [I am somewhat paraphrasing]: "Pages 2-N should have self-referencing canonical tags - Pages 2-N should all have their own unique URLs, titles and meta descriptions...The key is, with this is you want deeper pages to get crawled and all the products on there to get crawled too. The problem that we see a lot is, say you have ten pages, each one using rel canonical pointing back to page 1, and when that happens, the products or items on those deep pages don't get get crawled...because the rel canonical tag is sort of like a 301 and basically says 'Okay, this page is actually that page.' All the items and products on this deeper page don't get the love."

Before I get to my question, I'll just throw out there that we are planning to fix the pagination issue by opting for the "View All" method, which Adam suggests as the second of three options in this video, so that fix is coming.

My question is this: It seems based on what Adam said (and our current abysmal state for pagination) that the products on our paginated pages aren't being crawled or indexed. However, our products are all indexed in Google. Is this because we are submitting a sitemap? Even so, are we missing out on internal linking (authority flow) and Google love because Googlebot is finding way more products in our sitemap that what it is seeing on the site? (or missing out in other ways?)

We experience a lot of volatility in our rankings where we rank extremely well for a set of products for a long time, and then disappear. Then something else will rank well for a while, and disappear. I am wondering if this issue is a major contributing factor.

Oh, and did I mention that our sort feature sorts the products and imposes that new order for all subsequent visitors? it works like this: If I go to that same Audio-Technica page, and sort the 125+ resulting products by price, they will sort by price...but not just for me, for anyone who subsequently visits that page...until someone else re-sorts it some other way. So if we merchandise the order to be XYZ, and a visitor comes and sorts it ZYX and then googlebot crawls, google would potentially see entirely different products on the first page of the series than the default order marketing intended to be presented there....sigh.

Additional thoughts, comments, sympathy cards and flowers most welcome. Thanks all!

Anthony, thanks so much for chiming in. My gut instinct is to agree with you. I think I'm going to sit on this one and think about it for a little bit. It will also give me some time to formulate the best approach if I do decide to ask him to change the links to "nofollow."

I really like this Idea. I think diplomatically approaching it is key. We do have one person at our company who is good friends with this particular blogger. I need to use him as my emissary, but it will be a hard sell. Within the first month of me coming on board here he introduced himself to me this way: "Hi, my name is xxxxxx and I don't give a crap about SEO."...so I will have an uphill battle there, LOL. Ah well, 50% of SEO is diplomacy isn't it?

Thanks for responding. I appreciate it very much.

Hi Keith,

This it totally fine. Using class within the

is very common. The ID isn't a problem. Googlebot still understands that this is an

. I think as time goes forward, some of these technical SEO elements will become less important. Search engines are going to understand, particularly as HTML5 becomes more widely adopted, that <h>tags are used as much to define stylistic elements as structural elements. Hope that helps!

Dana</h>

Hi Edward,

This is a very common problem in eCommerce. Although I don't have experience with Yoast's Woo Commerce, I imagine that there are several possibilities on how to deal with this issue.

Depending on how you handle your inventory there are a few options.

If you assign specific part numbers to all the different "versions" (i.e. lengths, colors, flavors, sizes, etc), which I think is probably most often the case, I would look in Woo Commerce to see if there is a way to set up a "Parent Child" relationship between a master product page and all the various versions of a product that might be available. Usually this results in creating a "Parent" part number where the master page "lives" and then all the separate version become children of that page. When someone makes their selection, the system pulls the specific part number corresponding with their selection and puts it in their cart. Technically, the children products still have "pages," but if you use a canonical tag on the parent page, leave it off the individual children "pages" and also hide those pages from being crawled and indexed, you will have solved your problem. There are a number of ways to keep those "child" product pages from being crawled and indexed, either via robots.txt or "no crawl, noindex."

The other choice, which is also probably available in Woo Commerce, is to set up a product page (again, you would have to create an Item ID or Part number for it that won't necessarily be a real product in your inventory). Then, create options for all the different versions of the items that are then presented to visitors via a drop down menu, radio buttons, etc. Again, you can usually correspond these product "options" to specific part numbers in your database. The difference is really presentation. When you use a drop-down menu selector, your visitor will only be able to select one part number for their shopping cart at a time. They would have to revisit the page and re-select different options if they wanted the same item, for example, in different lengths. The Parent/Child solution is nice is you want to allow your visitors to order 5 10-foot cables and 6 20-foot cables all on the same page at the same time.

Every platform is a little different. I have used these solutions in both Volusion, 3Dcart and seen them in Magento. It can take some back and forth to get things laid out and functioning the way you want, but from an SEO viewpoint the work is worth it because the "hub" pages that you in effect end up creating have a lot more value to searchers than having to visit nearly identical pages for cables that are exactly the same, but differ only in lengths.

Long answer I know. But I really hope it helps!

Dana

We have a well-known blogger in our industry with whom we've had a long-standing relationship. We've had inbound links from his blog for many, many years. Today I noticed that we are running a banner ad listed on all pages of his blog under a heading that says "Sponsors."

He has dedicated an entire page of his site giving full disclosure of all advertising. However, all of the links on his site pointing to us are passing link equity. To my knowledge they've been this way ever since they were first established years ago.

I am fairly certain this fellow, with whom we have an excellent relationship, neither knows nor cares what a "nofollow" attribute is. I am afraid that if I contact him with a request that he add "nofollow" attributes to all of our links that it will damage our relationship by creating friction. To someone who knows nothing and cares nothing about SEO, asking them to put a "nofollow" on a link could either seem like a technical request they don't know how to handle, or something even potentially "shady" on our part.

My question is this: Considering how long these links have been there, is this even worth worrying about? Should I just forget about it and move on to bigger fish, or, is this a potentially serious enough violation of Google Webmaster guidelines that we should pursue getting those links "nofollow" attributes added?

I should add that we haven't received any "unnatural" link notifications from Google, ever, and haven't ever engaged in any questionable link-building tactics.

Thanks so much Gianluca for this thoughtful and valuable advice.

Yes, page load speed is definitely something that's been a concern. This is why we went back to 24 products displayed per page instead of 50 a few months ago. However, since then we've made some significant improvements in page load times and we think we can probably go up to 100 products per page and still be fairly fast. We will have to test.

On the up side, we only have 7 categories with more than 100 products, and only 24 with more than 50. The biggest problem we have effecting speed isn't so much the images. It's the fact that the website does real-time pricing calls on every product to ou business back end every time the page loads. This may be a sticking point.

I have also thought about the canonical tag problem. Of course, it's a problem now too, but if the "View All" page just ends up getting that generic URL and no proper canonical tag...then we really are back to square one.

The possibility of no-indexing all of the categories that are related to paginated series is something that crossed my mind yesterday, so it's interesting that you mentioned that. While it would solve certain issues, wouldn't this be a problem in terms of having valuable content in Google? Granted, some of our category pages are purely there for navigation purposes, in which case, I suppose there's no harm in no-indexing them. However, with the roll-out of Hummingbird I began looking at our category pages as valuable opportunities for "topics" pages that could act as a hub for visitors searching for products or information around specific uses or brands.

Wouldn't there be a significant risk in losing valuable market share for key terms by removing so many category pages from Google's index?

If I am understanding your last suggestion you are saying to have the page default to "View All" and noindex everything else...You are right, not a great scenario, but you are also right in that this may be the only solution given management's steadfast stance on not wanting to pay to fix it.

Lot's to think about, but your comment has been extremely helpful. Thanks again!

Thanks so much EGOL. I always love your candor.

Believe me, when I went home last night to ponder solutions to this problem, everything you mentioned crossed my mind. It was a thoroughly frustrating conversation to have. It simply amazes me that Google can tell the world very clearly all the things that will help their sites do better in the SERPs, yet people continue to ignore all of that advice, do what they want (or whatever is "easy" or cheap), and then whine about why their sites aren't doing well.

Making the commitment to hire an in-house SEO without equipping them with good tools and refusing to take their advice is like hiring an astronaut, handing them a box of toothpicks and some gunpowder and saying you expect them to land on the moon.

Thanks so much Andy. Agreed on all points. I think I have convinced the powers that be that at the very least we should add a "View All" option. This would give both end-users and Google a useful means to access all of the products in a category at once, without having to resort to pagination if they didn't want to. It is something we can add fairly easily and at little to no cost. Since only 8 of our category pages have more than 100 products, and none go higher than 200, this seems like a very reasonable compromise, at least for now.

I very much appreciate you taking the time to respond It was a frustrating day and a frustrating conversation to have to have.

Hi fellow Mozzers.

I am in need of assistance. Pagination is and has been broken on the Website for which I do SEO in-house...and it's been broken for years.

Here is an example:  http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/audio-technica

This category has 122 products, broken down to display 24 at a time across paginated results. However, you will notice that once you enter pagination, all of the URLs become this: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/IAFDispatcher

Even if you hit "Previous" or "Next" or your browser back button, the URL stays: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/IAFDispatcher

I have tried to explain to stakeholders that this is a lost opportunity. That if a user or Google were to find that a particular paginated result contained a unique combination of products that might be more relevant to a searcher's search than the main page in the series, Google couldn't send the searcher to that page because it didn't have a unique URL. In addition, this non-unique URL most likely is bottle-necking the flow of page authority internally because it isn't unique. This is not to mention that 38% of our traffic in Google Analytics is being reported as coming from this page...a problem because this page could be one of several hundred on the site and we have no idea which one a visitor was actually looking at.

How do I articulate the magnitude of this problem for SEO? Is there a way I can easily put it in dollars and cents for a business person who really thinks SEOs are a bunch of snake oil salesmen in the first place?

Does anyone have any before and after case studies or quantifiable data that they would be willing to share with me (even privately) that can help me articulate better how important it is to address this problem. Even more, what can we hope to get out of fixing it? More traffic, more revenue, higher conversions?

Can anyone help me go to the mat with a solid argument as to why pagination should be addressed?

I read your post at Mstoic Hemant and noticed your comment about Firefox 10. Since I couldn't get Dust-Me Spider to work in my current version of Firefox I tried downloading and installing the older version 10 as you suggested. When I did so, I received the message that the Dust-Me Spider was not compatible with this version of Firefox and it was disabled.

We are considering purchasing the paid version of Unused CSS (http://unused-css.com/pricing) - Do you have any experience using the upgraded version? Does it deliver what it promises?

Thanks!

Hi Hemant,

I tried using Dust-Me in Firefox, but for some reason it won't work on this sitemap:  http://www.ccisolutions.com/rssfeeds/CCISolutions.xml

Could it be that this sitemap is too large? I even tried setting up a local folder to store the data, but everytime I try the spider I get the message "The sitemap has no links."

I am using Firefox 27.0.1

Thanks so much Bill and Brian. This is exactly what I was thinking. I did the same thing Bill suggested initially and took a snippet from one of the reviews and did a verbatim search and got nothing. What I thought this told me was that yes, the page was indexed, but not the content. The fact that the cached version renders the content from the javascript only shows that the script was executed, not necessarily that any of the content it contains was actually indexed.

From an SEO standpoint I think this is valuable content that the dealer would very much want indexed. While the service providing the javascript might be very convenient, and the majority of end users might be able to consume the content, the fact that it's not searchable, to me, means it's an opportunity lost.

Thanks again everyone.

Hah! Thanks Andy. Must not have had enough coffee this morning. I didn't even think of looking at the cache...so obvious, lol!  Thanks so much. You are spot on.

Hi all,

I've read the posts in Google about Ajax and javascript (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/174992?hl=en) and also this post: http://moz.com/ugc/can-google-really-access-content-in-javascript-really.

I am trying to evaluate if the content on this page, http://www.vwarcher.com/CustomerReviews, is crawlable by Googlebot? It appears not to be. I perused the sitemap and don't see any ugly Ajax URLs included as Google suggests doing. Also, the page is definitely indexed, but appears the content is only indexed via its original source (Yahoo!, Citysearch, Google+, etc.).

I understand why they are using this dynamic content, because it looks nice to an end-user and requires little to no maintenance. But, is it providing them any SEO benefit? It appears to me that it would be far better to take these reviews and simply build them into HTML.

Thoughts?

Hi Erik,

I believe you can use the Google Analytics URL Builder to accomplish what you want/need to do. Here's a link to Raven's version: http://gaconfig.com/google-analytics-url-builder/  or here's one straight from the source: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033867?hl=en

Here is a fabulous Whiteboard Friday presented by Rachel Gerson from SEER Interactive that explains why you want to tag your campaigns and how to do it: http://moz.com/blog/why-google-analytics-tagging-matters-whiteboard-friday

Hope that helps!

Hi all,

So far I have found this one: http://unused-css.com/   It looks like it identifies unused, but perhaps not duplicates? It also has a 5,000 page limit and our site is 8,000+ pages....so we really need something that can handle a site larger than their limit.

I do have Screaming Frog. Is there a way to use Screaming Frog to locate unused and duplicate CSS?

Any recommendations and/or tips would be great. I am also aware of the Firefix extensions, but to my knowledge they will only do one page at a time?

Thanks!

Greetings, I am going to weigh in here, not because I am any kind of Yoda at all, but purely from a common sense point of view. I hope that's okay.

I would deduce that if anyone was able to know when a domain was released and how soon it sold thereafter it would have to be the domain registrar. So, let's say, hypothetically, that some domain registrar decides they are going to start publishing a list of domains that were released for sale and then sold immediately. Then let's say Google gets a feed of that list and just automatically, via the algorithm, discounts every single one of those domains down to PR 0, and strips them of all potential link authority value...

I'm sure you can see dozens of problems with that scenario. Here are just a few:

1. No one can really evaluate the new owner's identity or purpose without knowing who the new owner is. If registrars disclosed that information, I can't even imagine the number of privacy issues that would arise.

2. The assumption would be being made that the new owner is not the same, related to the old company. I'm sure there are plenty of cases where this happens.

3. Google would be making the assumption that the selling of the domain to a new domain owner was to end the business. Again, there are probably many many instances when this is not the case.

It seems to me that Google, nor any other search engine, can reasonably deduce the motives of a new domain owner. I mean, there are some smart folks at Google, but I don't think clairvoyance has entered the algorithm yet. Consequently, it probably seems more reasonable to let expired domains retain some of their value with the belief that most business owners are only going to buy domains relevant to their business and that end users will cast their "votes" for how well these new owners use the real estate by exhibiting either engagement or bouncing and viewing another site. Eventually, the algorithm will more or less accurately sift through the results and serve up results that visitors find engaging.

Sure, maybe it works for a year, two years, hell, even three years. So maybe this approach is viable, for now for a website or a page that just seeks short term benefits. But, if what you are building is a business that you want to last, a brand that you want to matter to people 20, 50, 100 years from now? Then I think there are far better uses of your time, effort and resources.

Thank you all so very very much. Matt, I am going to drop you a PM as you suggested. Paul, wow...thank you for sharing your insights here. I am sure this is extremely helpful information not just for me, but for many other folks here who've observed some of the same things on their sites. Yes, I agree that the conversion issue could very well be a mobile optimization problem and not a Safari problem as we have spent very little to no time optimizing our mobile site. Given the traffic levels coming in via that channel, it's probably time to get crackin'!

You guys are awesome!

Hi David,

I understand your concerns about guest blogging, however, I think you can share your article with other sites, i.e. "syndication," if you just take care of some details. First and foremost, make sure it's a site that's relevant to you or your potential audience. It sounds like it is, so you're probably good to go there. Second, make sure you have a canonical tag in place on your original content. This may or may not matter in terms of how Google attributes the content if the site you post to is a higher authority site than yours, but that's okay because what you're after is the audience and traffic, not the link or link equity. Lastly, to assuage your concerns about any potential penalty from being associated with something that says "guest blog" on it, ask that you get attribution, but that any links back to your site are given the rel="nofollow" attribute. This is something really out of your control, but you can at least attempt to cover that base.

Above all, no matter what, make sure you get full attribution and that you or whomever wrote it is listed as the author.

We have syndicated many of our articles to blogs and online magazines who appeal to our audience. Sometimes the content gets attributed to the blog even if it appeared on our site first if the blog is a high-authority site. Sometimes we even end up getting followed links back simply because the blog editor doesn't know how to do "nofollow." Like you, we don't do it all over the place, but instead are very selective and only offer specific pieces to specific places. If you think about it, a huge amount of news content online is syndicated. Syndication has always been an accepted way of sharing content. As long as it's done for the purposes of providing interesting information to a particular audience instead of for the sake of a link, I think you're perfectly fine doing so.

Hope that helps!

Hi all! Okay, here's the scoop. 33% of our site visitors use Safari. 18% of our visitors are on either an iPad or iPhone. According to Google Analytics, our average page load time for visitors using Safari is 411% higher than our site average of 3.8 second. So yes, average page load time pages loading in Safari is over 20 seconds...totally unacceptable, especially considering the large percentage of traffic using it.

While I understand that there are some parameters beyond our control, it is in our own best interest to try to optimize our site for Safari. We've got to do better than 20 seconds. As you might have guessed, it's also killing conversation rates on visits from that browser. While every other browser posted double-digit improvements in conversion rates over the last several months, the conversion rate for Safari visitors is down 36%...translating into 10's of thousands in lost revenue.

Question for anyone out there gifted in Web design and particular Web Dev....Do you think that it's possible/reasonable to attempt to "fix" our current site, which sits on an ancient platform with ancient code, or is this just not realistic? Would a complete redesign/replatform be the more realistic (and financially sound) way to go?

Any insights, experiences and recommendations would be greatly appreciated. If you're someone interested in spec'-ing out the project and giving us a cost estimate please private message me. Thanks so much!

Hi Thomas,

My apologies for the extremely long time it took me to respond. Once Fall hit we got very busy! Thanks so much for the info on hosting and CDN, this is very, very helpful. We have just gone through several months where we experienced a significant amount of downtime, so I am hoping that if I kick and scream enough and show these folks how downtime impacts their revenue, they will finally make a change. Things move very, very slowly in small businesses, so I will have to be patient, but hopefully we can get there. Your suggestions have been pure gold and I really, really appreciate you taking the time to share your expertise.

Dana

I agree with Arjen and Keri for the most part. However, I have seen the same phenomenon you are describing. While I would definitely take a long hard look at the quality of the content and probably even the technical SEO aspects of your pages, if all other things are equal it's very likely your competitors will still outrank you based on the age of their domains. If they have been established and in business for significantly longer than you, with an online presence for significantly longer than you, it's going to be an uphill climb to outrank them. Hope that helps!

I agree with Takeshi. One thing that no one has mentioned here is GetListed.org  (which Moz purchased in 2012 or 2013). Although their evaluation tool can be a bit wonky, it is helpful in identifying which directories your business may or may not be in, and there is an interface that helps you submit your listings manually which is completely free. If you have more time than money, this can be a good alternative to services like Yext. Hope that helps. Cheers!

Dana

I agree completely with Simon. We too have attempted to syndicate content and had the sites we submitted to then outrank us with our own content. The fact is, if you submit your content to a site that has higher authority than you, chances are they will rank for the content, not you, even if you have canonical tags and authorship in place and even if you publish the content on your site first. We've seen this happen not just with content like articles, we've seen it happen with products (i.e. if we have the same products for sale on our site, Amazon and eBay, Amazon and eBay will outrank us for those same products), and we've certainly seen it with videos. Post the same video on your site and YouTube and YouTube will rank for the video, not your site.

This isn't to say nothing should ever leave your site or get posted externally. If your business or someone at your business wins an award or does something positively newsworthy, reaching out to a reporter or blog editor with a story is a great way to raise the brand awareness you seek and obtain valuable referral traffic from the exposure.

The scenario at my company is almost identical to yours. The other difficulty I face (and I'm sure you and Simon have seen this too as in-house SEOs) is one of vanity. Stakeholders can get very caught up in the number of views their videos are getting on YouTube, or the number of eyeballs an article will get if it's syndicated versus just placed on their own site. Convincing them that being the sole location of that original content is sometimes a hard sell. I think the best way to do that is to produce a couple of pieces of great content and convince them not to distribute those around, then track how well that content gets positioned in the SERPs. If you can show them some real examples of the strategy being successful on a small scale, they'll be more apt to allow you to continue down that path. Hope that's helpful!

Hi Mike,

Many thanks ro both you and Dr. Pete. I apologize for leaving both of your answers hanging here for so long. Both explanations made perfect sense and I totally get it now. Now it's just a matter of fixing some of those issues. I've know since coming on board here as an in-house SEO that we had some pretty significant site architecture problems. This is just another one to add to my "to-fix" list Many thanks to you both I really appreciate your responses!

Dana

Thanks so much Dr. Pete this is very helpful. My apologies to both you and Mike for taking so long to circle back and mark this as answered. You both have done an excellent job of explaining what I am seeing. It makes perfect sense, even though it does point to some site architecture/internal linking problems we need to fix. But that's exactly why I asked the question:-)

Hi Brad,

Great question and I'm glad you asked it because I am planning out which conferences I'll be attending this year and trying to decide where to spend the money, just like you

Here's my personal experience and also what I've heard from asking and talking to lots and lots of people:

Mozcon, to me, is an absolute must. It's also great for me because I live in Olympia, so, no need for a plane ticket.

Last year I attended Jessica Bowman's In-House SEO Exchange in Santa Monica. It was a very different event, specifically for in-house SEOs, very small, but VERY worthwhile. If she offers it, I will do it again.

I have heard that PubCon, while probably of value from a networking standpoint, is not the best conference to go and get great takeaways and learn a lot. Basically, I've heard it's a wild party. In all fairness, I've never been. Don't get me wrong, I love a wild party, but given what I've heard I don't feel right asking my company to pay to send me to that one. Maybe if I paid for it myself I'd consider going.

I've heard that SMX West is good, but that SMX advanced is better, particularly if your intending on learning a lot by attending. That's the kind of thing I'm really lookng for, so, for me, SMX Advanced is probably going to become a must for me this year and probably future years.

The one conference last year I didn't attend and that I really regretted missing was InBound 2013. I was following the blog posts and Tweets coming out live from the event and if the atmosphere they conveyed was anything close to what was actually happening, I want to be there next year, really bad.

For me now, the question is: If I absolutely HAVE to chose one (in addition to MozCon and the InHouse SEO Exchange)....would it be SMX Advanced or InBound 2014? Personally, I am leaning towards InBound, but I think SMX Advanced will be an easier sell to my company because it's in Seattle and they won't have to pay to fly me across the country.

What are the conferences you are gravitating towards?

Hi Bob,

I'd highly recommend building out your profile on LinkedIn (if you haven't already) and then maybe even opting for the upgraded membership for a month or two. Lots and lots of SEO jobs there. Speaking from experience, the jobs posted on LinkedIn are far more "real" than jobs you'll find other places (like TheLadders).

If there's a company you're particularly interested in, call them directly. I cold called the company that I currently work for, they hadn't even advertised for an SEO, and guess what? They created a position for me Nifty huh?

One final suggestion, you're getting into a realm where working for an hourly wage is not really the best approach, IMHO (feel free to disagree). But, I think that if you are looking for a steady SEO job working for the same company or agency, you need to come up with your expected salary and benefits. Keep those close to your vest and don't put them on your resume. The right company will make the right offer Best of luck to you!

Dana

Hi. A mystery indeed! Have you recently upgraded or changed Web platforms or changed or upgraded what you are using for your site navigation?

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

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

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

Yep, agreed on both points  Sometimes I think it's easy for us old-timers to forget that there are a lot of folks just starting out who might not have know the difference.

Hey guys, interesting thread about an old tactic.  Fresh Fire Media, I feel your pain. I was an in-house SEO for a very similar business owner who laid me off so they could dump all their marketing money into domain spamming and fake blog networks. So frustrating, but sometimes all you can do is shake your head and move on. They'll learn the hard way.

Just a note for newbies reading this thread, and this might be screamingly obvious to you web devs out there, but when people say "bold" they don't really mean the tag. This tag is deprecated and has been for many years. They mean the tag. They both visually do the same thing, but to my knowledge the tag is completely ignored by search engines, while the tag can still be a signal to a bot that the content it contains is of some particular importance to the content of the page.

Hope that helps!

Hi Jonathon, Excellent question! I expect you'll get two or three opinions on this. Here's mine, but keep in mind, depending on your goals, it may or may not be the right thing for you.

Don't be a link hog.

What do I mean by that?

I mean, don't be so tight with your concern about leaking link juice (God I hate that term!) out of your pages by linking to another site. Instead, think about it this way:

Is linking to this other resource or site helpful to my readers/site visitors? Does the fact that you are linking to a valuable resource enhance the value of your content/page and end up making you even more authoritative than you would have seemed without it?

If the answer to that is "yes!" Than, by all means, link to that other page or resource and be polite and respectful and for heaven's sake make it a "followed" link.

On the other hand, are you linking to the other page simply as a conversational, maybe even a one-off mention, like a link to a manufacturer from an eCommerce site? or worse, is someone paying you for a link back to them? Or perhaps it's a link contained in a comment on one of your posts.....Sure, go ahead and link if you want to, but use the rel="nofollow" attribute for those types of links.

It's certainly a judgement call, but I try to look at things this way, if I thought highly enough of a resource to mention it or include it for my visitors/readers, then I probably should link with a followed link. Just my two cents! Hope that helps

Dana

It can take Google a long long long time to remove old pages from its index. I'd highly recommend manually submitting the relevant URLs via Google Webmaster Tools' URL removal tool and do them a bit at a time. We have done this quite successfully. Otherwise, I think you're doing the right things. Hope that helps!