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

Thanks Miriam Agreed on all of the above.

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

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>

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

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 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!

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

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:-)

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!