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I have seen a few different results where they did show a local result, such as when searching for something like "web design in city"
It seems like the word "in" makes a difference of when local listings pop up, as compared to doing a search like "web design city". Did MOZ ever do a study on this? I'd like to see results if so.
Make sure they are set to index in your robots.txt file.
I would have all URLs go to the secure version. It makes more sense to have one version indexed.
If there was a purpose for the Secure Socket Layer to begin with I would assume you would only want people to access that version.
Just wanted to add that he may want to process the 301's, even after setting the plugin correctly, as Google may have already indexed a lot of the non-SEF and author pages. On the new canoncial pages, it's probably a good idea to also check "no-archive" so the search engine only shows the most recent result.
David, for you to reference:
Best of luck with your edits!
Due to the optimization and content done around your keywords, and the fact that you already have a keyword driven domian, I wouldn't worry about it.
Google will show the name of the business with the URL, and have the URL link as "website". Same with mobile LBL. It will show call, directions, and website (might not be in that exact order)
People get too caught up on having the businesses real name in their domain. You already have a site, you have a domain based around exactly where you what to rank at, and what you want to rank for, and you have domain age with your purchased domain.
"My issue is that the real busniess name is HEMA DESIGN CENTER, so i dont know if we should change the name in the chamber of commerce to CABiNETS BAY AREA or list the business as HEMA DESIGN CENTER, with this website www.cabinetsbayarea.com."
^^^ This question refers to what you should do for your citation sites, correct? The business name is "HEMA DESIGN CENTER" so use that. You will still have links going to the proper domain, and still be getting people to the site. The only reason I would not set it up under the business name, and use the keyword driven name is if you plan on building another site for the business name (under a branded domain).
Here is the kicker. Whatever you do, keep it consistant. Use the same tactics that you use on your site, and same information across the web. You dont want to lose credibilty with the search engines. Pick one strategy and run with it.
My opinion? Stick with the keyword driven domain. When used properly, these carry a ton of weight. People are not going to search for a local company by name, they are going to search by service and location. For example: "cabinet installation bay area" would be a real-world search query for your site. Mirror the same approach as your site when setting up citations, minor company name, major keyword focus. If you keep it clean and not spammy, I think you will be good to go.
As with most graders, they are only there to point you in the right direction, or to bring to light any areas of improvement. If you want additional resources, try some of these. We handpicked these to help people with SEO, and a lot of them link to articles on MOZ. http://www.webdesignandcompany.com/seo-resources
Since you are going to have a /marketing page above the success page, is there a plan to link out to many areas of marketing content within your site? mening are you setting it up this way to have marketing be a top level page, that has many categories? If so, then yes, use this structure.
Form another user: "The thing I'd worry about is "marketing/success" implies marketing has greater importance than success, in the root scheme of things." I agree with this, in that the SE will view "marketing" as a higher priority directory than "success"
For that individual page, I would use the url domain.com/marketing-success, as the keywords will appear often in the content that same way. Search engines will treat the hyphen as a space, rather than a separate directory. It is possible to have the page rank high using the other format, but I forsee the hypenated version working out better for you.
Looks like you have a few pages that may be the same. If you use a CMS (content management system) like Joomla or Wordpress, chances are that users and search engines may be accessing multiple versions of the same page. What is the URL in question? I'll take a look.
Also, this might help. Google
Titles are critical to giving users a quick insight into the content of a result and why it’s relevant to their query. It's often the primary piece of information used to decide which result to click on, so it's important to use high-quality titles on your web pages.
Here are a few tips for managing your titles:
<title></code> tag</strong>. If you’ve got a large site and are concerned you may have forgotten a title somewhere, the <a href="https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/answer.py?answer=80407">HTML suggestions</a> page in Webmaster Tools lists missing or potentially problematic <code><title></code> tags on your site.</li> </ul> </ul> <ul> <ul> <li>Page titles should be <strong>descriptive and concise</strong>. Avoid vague descriptors like <code>"Home"</code> for your home page, or <code>"Profile"</code>for a specific person's profile. Also avoid unnecessarily long or verbose titles, which are likely to get truncated when they show up in the search results.</li> </ul> </ul> <ul> <ul> <li>Avoid <strong>keyword stuffing</strong>. It's sometimes helpful to have a few descriptive terms in the title, but there’s no reason to have the same words or phrases appear multiple times. A title like <code>"Foobar, foo bar, foobars, foo bars"</code> doesn't help the user, and this kind of <a href="https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/answer.py?answer=66358">keyword stuffing</a> can make your results look spammy to Google and to users.</li> </ul> </ul> <p> </p> <ul> <ul> <li>Avoid <strong>repeated or boilerplate titles</strong>. It’s important to have distinct, descriptive titles for each page on your site. Titling every page on a commerce site "Cheap products for sale", for example, makes it impossible for users to distinguish one page differs another. Long titles that vary by only a single piece of information ("boilerplate" titles) are also bad; for example, a standardized title like <code>"<band name> - See videos, lyrics, posters, albums, reviews and concerts"</code> contains a lot of uninformative text. One solution is to dynamically update the title to better reflect the actual content of the page: for example, include the words "video", "lyrics", etc., only if that particular page contains video or lyrics. Another option is to just use <code>"<band name>"</code> as a concise title and use the meta description (see below) to describe your site's content. The <a href="https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/answer.py?answer=80407">HTML suggestions</a> page in Webmaster Tools lists any duplicate titles Google detected on your pages.</li> </ul> </ul> <ul> <ul> <li><strong>Brand your titles</strong>, but concisely. The title of your site’s home page is a reasonable place to include some additional information about your site—for instance, <code>"ExampleSocialSite, a place for people to meet and mingle."</code> But displaying that text in the title of every single page on your site hurts readability and will look particularly repetitive if several pages from your site are returned for the same query. In this case, consider including just your site name at the beginning or end of each page title, separated from the rest of the title with a delimiter such as a hyphen, colon, or pipe, like this: <pre><title>ExampleSocialSite: Sign up for a new account.</title>*` Be careful about disallowing search engines from crawling your pages. Using the robots.txt protocol on your site can stop Google from crawling your pages, but it may not always prevent them from being indexed. For example, Google may index your page if we discover it by following a link from someone else's site. To display it in search results, Google will need to display a title of some kind and because we won't have access to any of your page content, we will rely on off-page content such as anchor text from other sites. (To truly block a URL from being indexed, you can use meta tags.)
If we’ve detected that a particular result has one of the above issues with its title, we may try to generate an improved title from anchors, on-page text, or other sources. However, sometimes even pages with well-formulated, concise, descriptive titles will end up with different titles in our search results to better indicate their relevance to the query. There’s a simple reason for this: the title tag as specified by a webmaster is limited to being static, fixed regardless of the query. Once we know the user’s query, we can often find alternative text from a page that better explains why that result is relevant. Using this alternative text as a title helps the user, and it also can help your site. Users are scanning for their query terms or other signs of relevance in the results, and a title that is tailored for the query can increase the chances that they will click through.`**
If all the rest of the items match up, it could. If your are going to target a higher ranking based on exact match and keyword match techniques, one thing that will help tremendously is consistancy. Don't make it harder for Google to figure out who you are, what you do, and where you do it
I would do a competitive link analysis to see where he is actually getting the links to his site, and how they are positioned in the linking platform. Manual link building can be extremely tedious, but it is ultimately a very powerful tool in getting Google to notice your site. Linking out to relevant sources and topics can help, as Google does not like to see sites that do not provide a larger resource to a user. We wrote an article on how to do a competitive link analysis. Might help you getting started.
For the reporting of F vs B, what tools are you using to analyze the date? Moz? If you are using the MOZ page grader, pay attention to what page you are actually grading, and for what keywords. The reports are helpful in pointing out errors, but can give a false positive in the event they are analyzing multiple pages for the same keywords.
A few things:
1. Are there any links pointing at the page(s) you want to rank, rather than the root domain?
2. How many links are indexed? Do a site search to view this: (site:www.yourdomain.com, and also site:yourdomain.com to check for non-www versions)
3. Have you submitted the main URLs in webmaster tools using the "fetch as Google" option
4. Run the site in SEO-browser to see how the pages render out. Your seo efforts might look good on-page, but render out strange in the eyes of the search engines. (h3's before h1's, etc)
5. Check analytics for referring URL's, and set up an account in moz to check backlinks of you, and your competition.
Should be a good start 
Most people use these pages for tracking only, and set them to no-index so Google doesnt pick them up. I'm guessing you have tracking set up to analyze the traffic and attachement rate for that article? A hashtag is genearally used to point to an anchor point on that page. You currently have two URLs with the same content.
As Oleg said, I would be sure to add a canonical link for that page.
Lots of questions! Whew ok... here I go
Question 1: If we change the .net website to a .com address, will 301 redirects safeguard our SEO real estate?
Most all your page rank and weight should be trasferred through the 301. If you are leaving most everything else the same, it will also be very simple to redirect, as you can do a mass redirect in htaccess if the URL structure stays the same. If not, you will have to redirect all the pages manually. Yes, its very time consuming, but its the safest way to ensure all your pages go to the right place.
Question 2: we own the .com extension and have been using it for some back office stuff. It was purchased because it was advised that the .net did not carry much credibility in the US, is this correct?
Meh, if the site is set up well, and validated through multiple places then there will not be much of a difference. With a .net domain, it’s still possible to achieve high rankings on search engines, but you just have to make sure that you put in the extra effort into your branding methods so that clients and prospects are aware that your website ends with .net and not .com. Most people will type in .com by default without even thinking about it.
Question 3: If we change the .net to the .com which is hosted in the US, will we wipe our search rankings on Google for the UK and non-US locations? I saw this post and wondered:
http://moz.com/community/q/uk-rankings-disappeared-after-us-website-launch
If the transfer and redirects are done thouroughly and to the most complete that it can be, then most likely no. I'm a bit curious as to why you do not have a .uk for your domain extension, particulary if you target the UK. Also, it looks like the guy who posted that had two duplicate sites, trying to rank for multiple countries. Duplicate=bad news for seo. If you launch 2 website that are the same, Google will most likely index the newer one, and the old one will get replaced. This actuall happened to me at an old company I used to work at. We had 2 sites, for 2 different areas. One launched, and then someone took th eother site live without changing out content for the new area. Old site got knocked down, new site got pulled up.
Question 4: is hosting the regional site best done on a local domain (we own a bunch) or does that not really matter?
Local like how? Please elaborate what your intentions are and focus area would be. (what domain for what area)
Question 5: If we use a WP plug in and just use subfolders for translating and localising content (US, Germany, Australia), what is the best way of serving that content for local PR?
Why not just use Googles own translator, rather than a plugin?
http://support.jimdo.com/tutorials/apps-and-plugins/how-to-add-google-translate-to-your-website/
Sent! Check your email and let me know if this helps. I included the PDF of the article and the full size image if you would like to print it out. Sorry about you not being able to view the live article. Please do not repost the article on any other webpage, as it is a copywritten document.
To be clear, what type of cart system does the site use? VirtueMart? Magento?
I agree with the posts above, in that sometimes it doesn't hurt, but at the same time, you aren't doing the product pages any favors. Two ways to look at this would be:
1. Having the URL structure set up like you example will still get the pages indexed, if they are included in a sitemap, and submitted correctly, furthermore if the content on those pages is a good match.
2. Having the pages set up that way will limit the ranking potential of those pages, by having a long URL, without relevant keywords in place. Let me explain:
In your example:
www.example.com/women/denim-jeans/py/c/109/np/108/p/3834.html
You have the opportunity to potentially rank for "womens denim jeans" using that url. This somewhat limits the ranking potential of the items, as they are all tied into one specific category, that being "womens denim jeans". Lets look at another example:
www.example.com/women/denim-jeans/faded-wash/indigo-dye-item-details3834.html
In the above URL, you are much more specific in the style and type of jean it is, and a user will know (and a search engine) what the page is specifically about. Style, color, keyword, category, etc. Since you most likely have a large catalog of product types, why limit your item details to a bunch of unnecessary numbers and slashes?
I would also look at a way of using product markup to make the items stand out further in search results. Google likes to see "the complete package". Using clean specific URL's and schema product markup tells a much clearer pricture than /py/c/109/np/108/p/3834.html. Depending on the CMS used, there may be a component or plugin that takes care of the product markup for you, from the item description and details.
Hope this helps!
Run the domain through seo-browser. If it shows up there, you are good to go. The only problem I think you would have is if you used javascript or flash, as either of those are more difficult for the bot to read. (flash being pretty much impossible)
To me, the more important question would be: how can you structure your navigation to get a user to spend more time on the site? We have set up sites where only the top level menu item is available, then you have to select a side menu item. By not allowing a user to instantly select the page they want, you can increase on site time, while not hurting the user experience (since they will be directed into a page with info related directly to what they clicked on)
You can see this this in action on our site here: http://www.webdesignandcompany.com/ (for example)
Another big company that uses this style of menu is distilled marketing.
Hope this helps answer your original question, and provide some additional insight.
No problem! We like to think that we know St Louis fairly well, as we are one of the few companies to rank for St Louis SEO company, St Louis internet marketing, and St Louis web design companies all on page one, sometimes more than once
I hope that this information helps you with your local efforts, and gets you showing up. If you are already on page 2, chances are you are just missing a smaller piece of the puzzle. Page two is a sign that you already have a lot of the right elements in place, and something needs to be added or adjusted to bump you up a page. If we ever get a client in St Louis that offers the same local services as you do, we will be sure to see you on the battlefield! Lol
In the past 2 months we have been seeing a large amount of movement in our ranking reports in Moz Pro.
Here is what is going on: We run reports for around 15 different clients using Moz. We also track around an average of 100-150 different keywords for each client (some more, some less). What I have seen lately is that we have a week where the sites do great, next week a large shift down. The week after a large shift up. The next week a large shift down. Rinse, repeat.
It makes it very hard to spot the trouble areas on a page or keyword when there doesn't really seem to be a consistent way of knowing what the trends are. It appears to be random, and the next week they seem to recover, along with some that do not. We will see some keywords drop 30 places, only to regain the majority of that drop the following week.
Some of the sites have received content updates while others have remained largely untouched. It is very confusing to see this pattern, and I have tracked it for about 2 months. Is anyone seeing a similar pattern in their reports? Could this be related to the rollout of Google's RankBrain, the new AI learning tech from Google? Most of the keywords are tracked are not long tail, and are basic local business/service type of keywords. Plumber in St Louis, etc etc
Write for the user, not for ranking. If the users like, and share, and spend time navigating through your content, search engines will take notice.
Easiest way? Look at what is one the site, look at what the competition is writing, and how they rank. Look back at yours and compare.
"Is every post you write on your site is SERPs worthy?"
This is only something you and your traffic can answer. Reading through what you have, does it address all aspects of the point you are trying to make, or give all information on a topic you are trying to cover? What is it that makes people like or share what you have written?
"You need a content development plan."
If they are truly gone, then a 410 would be the best option for you. Since they are indexed even if there are no links pointing at them, people can still find them besed upon what they are searching for. You never know when your link will show up, because you dont know how long google is going to take to get rid of the links.
http://www.checkupdown.com/status/E410.html
"The 410 error is primarily intended to assist the task of Web maintenance by notifying the client system that the resource is intentionally unavailable and that the Web server wants remote links to the URL to be removed. Such an event is common for URLs which are effectively dead i.e. were deliberately time-limited or simply orphaned. The Web server has complete discretion as to how long it provides the 410 error before switching to another error such as 404"
We did this for a client that needed old defunct pages removed. Once you set the pages to return a 410, and use Google url removal tool, you should see them dropping off really quick. (all of ours were gone within a month) Having that many pages return a 404 may be hurting the experience of your users as when they see a 404, they go right for the back button.
Having worked with multiple companies in St Louis for rankings, it can be difficult.
I agree with Jeff that people search for things adjacent to their exact neighborhood, as metro St Louis is a very small portion of the "city". There are also people that search for items using the STL, Saint Louis, and St Louis (St Louis being the local lingo and the most popular)
Before you begin modifying anything, I would manually go and check that your keyword reporting tool is working correctly (AWR, MOZ, or whatever you use). Go to Google and see that your suspicions are correct. If they are, then proceed to do the following. Also double check in Bing and Yahoo to see if there are any trends. Chances are if you suck at ranking across all search providers for St Louis, you need more local authority.
1. Manually track what keywords and phrases that rank low. Look at competitor keyword phrases and SEO for signs of what Google is giving the authority status to, and then look for why.
2. Look at the backlinks of those sites. Having worked with a lot of local companies, most high ranking sites are pretty good about doing their citation site and local optimization. Being a larger focused company, you will have to think of ways to get your St Louis-specific content to become "more valued" and authoritative than the local sites that offer the same services. For example: If a local provider has a 100 backlinks from local St Louis citations, all stating that he does "KEYWORD in St Louis" you are going to have to prove that your St Louis content deserves that spot.
3. Look at avenues within the local area where you can distribute content and get people linking back. Easiest and fastest way? Most likely a few Press Releases from one of the larger companies with a wide distribution network that can hyper-focus your content to St Louis. Look for openings or opportunities from The St Louis Business Journal, St Louis Post Dispatch, Local Channel 5, STLtoday.com and any other major news outlets. All of these sites have very high page ranks, and domain authority. Link these releases back to your local St Louis content in various ways and formats, but "St Louis" will most likely be your best bet since most locals type it that way.
4. "My question may be more related to on-page optimization. We rank pretty well when adding the various keyword modifiers at the end of the regular keyword" The on page optimization will have to cover the St Louis area (unless you use those pages to rank in multiple areas under the main keyword phrase), for all of the reasons mentioned above. I know that you are trying to use the local setting within Google, but that is only so accurate as your physical IP is going to be from a different place. Might be worth it to set up a few localized pages on your site to see if it makes a difference in your placement.
5. You also may be seeing this change as a part of the algorithm updates, that do more to separate local and nationwide search. Seems like they are going away from using the IP and location information as one of the most important factors, as users search queries often include the location if they are looking for local. People's search habits change, and Google responds.
Hope any of this helps, and best of luck!
I agree. Get rid of all the links that do not offer any benefit. Remove external links that don't point to good, relevant info. Disavow inbound links from any banned or questionable sources. Even if the links pointing at you are no follow, the links can still get visited. Remember, it's up to Google to respect the no follow rule. In some cases they may ignore it, if they think it's a relevant link.
I understand your want to get the subpages ranking, but let's focus on the positive first.
If your homepage listing is already ranking high repeatedly for different searches, do everything you can to get that listing to stand out. Ratings, reviews, schema mark up, authorship, all of it.
Secondly, what does your internal ranking structure and URLs look like? Do your subpages depict only one type of crime, and does the homepage link to them, other than just in the menu? Does the destination URL match the type of search query being performed?
What about your backlinks? If all of them only point to the homepage, then Google is going to think that is the best resource for users.
Optimizing and managing 500 different domains is not only impossible under a normal workload, but also will make each site harder to rank.
Like William stated, you are splitting any link juice over 500 different sites. I would focus your efforts on a few domains that produce excellent results, and either let them expire or park them all on top of one domain.
Personally, I think true directory or public information outlets are the best.
I would look at the service or product you provide, and try to understand where people would go to look for that item. If it is a service, where do people go to find out information about that service? Are there any leading authorities that you could become a member of, or post content to?
If it is a product, how do people look for it? Where do people go to look for it? Do people review it? Is your focus local or national?
When looking for opportunities, you have to be creative. I understand you are looking to increase your ranking, but you also want to have links that people will USE, not just to sit on some directory in a hope of being a ranking factor. If you are deadset on getting just links, use the MOZ backlink analyzer to see who your competitors have linking back to them.
Sometimes its about what you cant see. Backlinks, and other sources may exist that factor into a higher ranking.
Register Camper1.com, to let your customers know you are the best!!!
No but seriously, think about what is going to stand out for branding, and help you in the long run. If you are local, perhaps a keyword driven domain mixed with your company name would work out better? Something like:
COMPANYNAMECampervanrental.com (BigJoescampervanrental.com)
or
LOCATIONvanrental.com (stlouiscampervanrental.com)
I dont think the numbers hurt you in any way, but I cant see how it would be doing you any favors either. If you decided to do the ones you mentioned, (camper2hire or campers4u) I could see it being useful from a branding standpoint.
"What is the most common problem to be solved when optimizing web sites?"
Poorly optimized content and layout.
We often run across pages that have zero header tags, content without keywords, bad URL structures that do not include keywords, etc.
Are you wanting to know for your own website, or for a client? If it is one your personal site, why not post a link so we can see if there is any existing on page issues? I'm assuming you are asking due to having difficulty ranking?
We have been seeing some strange things happen in Google local after the most recent update. We used to show up in the maps all the time and have made no major edits or changes to the profile.
Now when we search for our services, we show up high in the organic results, and not at all in maps (local listings). We have our profile setup as a service area since we do meet with people and provide services at their location, but also have checked the option that we also serve people at our address.
I am wondering if the recent update favors actual storefronts when people are searching for services. Any ideas? Technically all the actual work is provided at our location, and the service we provide at the service area locations is based upon consultations. If we switched it to an actual storefront listing could that possibly help? Our profile is fairly strong, and has reviews, long history of posts, etc.
What gives Google?
if you agreed to pay him for services, I would satisfy that payment and then break all ties.
Sounds like this person is very vindictive. I think you are wise to get out now. To answer your question, yes there are ways to hurt a sites ranking. We only practice white hat seo at our company, but we have been approached by other seo companies to do some pretty questionable things. (We used to be an outsourcing destination for SEO) Some of the things we have seen include:
1. Using proxy servers to overwhelm a websites bandwidth,causing the server to crash
2. Setting up false citation sites with a similar or exact business name and creating false bad reviews
3. Buying up paid links from banned sites, and pointing them at the domain
and many more..
Its generally best practice to not hire the people that claim to be white hat (or otherwise) seo experts. No one person is an expert at seo, we are all using what we know to be best practices. If someone promises or guarantees you anything, run away.
I agree with William on keeping an eye on your webmaster tools reports, and also change ALL your passwords. FTP, cpanel, hosting, CMS, Email, etc.
If you need any assistance, pm me. I'd be glad to help. I hate it when people get taken advantage of like this, by people that don't know what they are doing.
Please provide an exact example of what you are trying to do, or planning to do. That will allow you to get much better advice.
While the tagging system is nice, it can be a killer for seo. Tag pages generally have thin content, and a lot of links i.e. bad for Googel guidelines. If you want to help your users, and still use the tagging system, set the tagging pages to "no-index"
As to the categories URL's I would add them. Think of your site like a book, and your categories like the chapters. Setting your site up with categories also allows you to potentially have another focus keyword in your URL, and helps users navigate your site easier
Google has been messing up a lot lately.
First, the new Google Business manager is HORRIBLE. (sorry, had to get that out of the way first). Google Plus and Local used to be so easy to manage and use, but now you have to go through more page to do the same things. Just my personal opinion.
We have also been noticing reviews disappearing from local listings, and when we call them and ask what's up, they (Google) say it is a technical issue with Google Business and that the reviews "may" return once the bug is worked out. We have a lawyer-client that has worked extremely hard to get over 90(!) legitimate 5-star reviews, only to see them cut that back down to 60. Then, after we called and complained, 3 days later they were back.
As long as the url is accessible, it doesnt matter. You can redirect from a subfolder, or using root domain.
One thing to remember, make sure you redirect both www, and non-www versions. Are you using cpanel? It makes this a super easy process. If not, let me know, and I can supply you with some htaccess rules to get you started.
*Keep in mind, all link juice is not always transferred. Generally most will be passed through, but I just wanted to make you aware.
In the great Google infrastructure, I'm sure that Google knows what IP address your site is hosted on, and all the ones tied to it. In one of the past MOZ blog posts you can see a number of factors Google looks at to see what you control. We used dedicated IP's for each client, just in case anything ever happened to one account, it would not affect the others. They are close in IP address range, since they are on the same block, but none are on the same number. This isn't an attempt to gain SEO rank, as much as it is to protect the client.
Locally, I have reason to believe its a different story. For example, we are located in St Louis, and use a local server center located in downtown St Louis. After changing our site from hostgator under a shared IP, (Provo, Utah) to a local server center, we saw an drastic (in internet time) improvement in site load time, responsiveness, and believe it or not, a ranking boost....true story, no joke. It wasn't a large boost, but we moved up 2 spots on our main keyword on page one, and 1-2 in other places. We didn't make any other changes to the site, other than adding a few blog posts, and this was not around any major algorithm shift or update. We have seen this pattern repeat with other clients as well.
My guess is that Google liked the decreased load times, the local server location (as it matched the city on our site, somehow verifying our location further), and the fact that the site was on a dedicated IP address. If we had just changed the site's IP address by itself, I do not think we would have seen any impact or result change.
"there is really no SEO benefit of having a unique IP for each of your sites unless you're attempting to pass link juice between each, which falls into the greyhat category."
I don't think you would get away with this for very long, or that it would benefit you in any way. Google would see that you host or control these sites through your analytics account, or IP range. If you wanted to pull it off, and have separate analytics accounts, dedicated IP's etc, I doubt the result would be worth the time.
I love these types of questions
It always gives me a chance to support one of my favorite tools, SEO-browser. This tool allows you to see what a search sees when they come to your site. What you see is not always accurate. Here is a quick crawl of your page in question:
You can see that your H1 shows up high in the content, and that the image slider is not pushing your site further down other than visually. I don't think that the "above the fold" is as important as other areas of the algo. I have seen hundreds of sites do amazingly well with very large or fullscreen image sliders, and H1's after the scroll. As long as you are covering your main keywords in your content, H tags, meta and page titles effectively, I think you will be fine.
If you are going to do some edits on your site, bookmark that tool. It helps to see when sidebar headers or template headers are rendering out as h1, h2, or h3's.
Sounds good to me. We are more focused on keyword rankings, traffic trends over time, etc than brand mentions. If you are branded correctly you will come up when a search is done for your name.
The one thing I would change is the amount of keywords per account. Each level of moz pro gives you a different amount of keywords and a certain amount of accounts. For our account, I would like to have more accounts as long as we fall under the keyword amount. For example we could have 20 accounts that share the same keyword amount. Most of our clients only care about 20-40 keywords, but we are limited by the amount of accounts we can have. Seems counter-productive to have it set up this way.
Where are you getting the data from for the search volume difference?
Secondly, what are you using to look at your rankings for both terms? Manual searches do not always give you the whole picture of what is ranking or not ranking.
Before you restructure the whole site, set up a few test pages that focus on the non-plural version of your keyword. Monitor the ranking closely. If you see a large influx in traffic, then slowly implement change across your site, although I would not place all your eggs in one basket. Use some of the keyword idea tools available to look at broad match keywords related to photobook(s), and build out your content to cover additional areas. (if you have not already)
Could you upload a picture of the meta result you are seeing?
In CMS-based sites, I have seen the bot pick up content from wherever it can, especially if it is not specified in the description, or title.
As to the homepage text issue, I would try to add in any content you can. I don't think this will "fix" your meta issue, but it will help you in other ways. It sounds like you are avoiding adding text to not disrupt the design, which if you are a big brand identity, doesn't affect you as much as if you are a small - medium sized business. You have to have content. Have to. Even if its just a paragraph explaining who you are, where you are located, and what you do.
I always preach to use your heading tags like you would when writing an article in Microsoft Word, and use 1 H1 tag per page.
Words that explain the information you are trying to cover, and your "mission statement". Include higher amounts of keywords within first paragraph while not stuffing. Should also contain some sort of conversion statement or button
Words that include keywords and viewpoint.
Include high points of what has been covered
CMS sites often render out header tags like mad, causing you to have multiple H1 tags on a page. To check to see if yours is doing this, use SEO Browser. IMO, you can have more than one H2, as you may have multiple high level topics to cover on one page. Keep in mind, you can always use CSS to make
text render as a heading tag, so your page doesn't look goofy. For example:
If your h1 css looks like:
.h1 {
font-size: 28px;
line-height: 29px;
font-weight: bold;
}
then set up a div class:
.largeptext {
font-size: 28px;
line-height: 29px;
font-weight: bold;
}
and they will look the same, but not render an additional h1 tag per page. Use this for your sidebar and page styling areas that also render h tags.
Its cool, we're still bros lol. I understand what you mean, I was just giving him an example of what to look for, or how to optimize for his search audience. Honestly the best way would be to run an Adwords campaign for a month, and look at the Dimentions>search terms to see how people are searching for his products. Could also use the keyword planner, but I have found that to be...lacking in some areas.
I agree in that one of the most important areas to look into would be the backlink profile, as it seems that he is losing authority to his competition.
Completely agree. the easiest way to tell what a page truly renders is to use http://seo-browser.com/.
The method you mentioned does NOT hide content, unless it is set up that way in code on purpose, or in the template.
"My customer hired an "SEO Expert" who is telling them that this content is invisible to search engines."
Everyone is a self-proclaimed expert. I've been doing this 12 years, and still don't know everything, lol. I'm really happy you decided to post, and didn't go along with the herd.
If you are not using a separate mobile template or service, just allow the URL's that display on the desktop results to index for your mobile version. (display only) The look of the mobile version might not be the best in the world, but you dont want to create a problem where there is none by trying to get your site ranking higher on mobile searches using a custom URL
Having a separate URL structure for the mobile version can be tricky. If done improperly this will cause Google to index both results, and display both in desktop searches aka duplicte content across two separate URL's.
:insert animated gif from sandlot movie FOR-evv-err:
Seriously, it can take a while for the pages to get removed. One week is not going to see the bot recrawl all those pages, most likely 1-2 months. I would resubmit the entire site using fetch as google, and resubmit all linking URLs. Go through your top level menus and resubmit them as well.
And I know the links are not followed. I'm not trying to get exposure, it's just easier to let you see the video and the bullet points we touch on then type it all here from my mobile. Let me know if this helps! If you need more, I also can get our main PPC manager to chime in and help.
Once its all fixed, you should see start seeing changes in about a month or so. There really isnt any specific timeline, and all you can do is get the errors fixed, and resubmit the sitemap and use the "fetch as google" option in Google WMT. Sometime changes can happen in a week, all depends what your crawl frequency is set to. In your sitemap, do you have it set to daily, weekly, or monthly?
"If you think hiring a professional is expensive, wait until you hire an amateur" :like: Quoted just because it's funny, and true.
Anyway, there are a number of companies able to do what you seek, ours being one of them .
The costs involved in optimizing a site, and long term success generally comes down to a labor vs budget standoff. What does the site need in terms of technical and content implementation, what is the desired outcome, what elements already exist vs those that need to be created/developed, etc. When beginning an SEO audit, we look at the factors in order of importance, to stay within a clients allocated budget. For example: If a client wants to begin a social media marketing campaign, but the site needs a lot of techical SEO help, we will approach that first before marketing something that is broken and just "doing what is requested of us". By being completely transparent, we help clients understand the elements at work that determine their current ranking position.
I agree that charging someone $3000-5000+ a month is very expensive. While we have clients in that price range, not everyone needs that level of dominance in search engine results for everything under the sun. I would be willing to help you in your seo needs. PM me here on MOZ, and lets go over what your goals are. That will allow us to better gauge what your monthly costs will be, and help us understand your goals for the site/forum. If you would like, I can also give you a list of trusted companies we work with, if you choose not to use us for services. Either way, we want to help.
"we have specified the parameters on these URLs as representative URL in Google Webmaster - URL parameters."
How long ago was this done? Since there are so many URL's, it may take a while for them to recrawl and index the representative URL's per your request.
Agreed. if you do not use the proper formatting when adding the text, you could wind up with strange characters showing up when Google/Search engines index those descriptions. We have used them many times in the past, without any issues.
I understand that the client may not want that, but it may need to be explained that redirects are probably a good idea.
I have a few questions:
1. Do the old domains have links pointing at them, or any type of domain authority, domain age, etc? Might be worth it to park the domains on top of your new one, and do a redirect so Google doesn't index them both.
2. Why does the client not want the old domains pointed to the new one? If you still own the old domain, you can install the 410 code on the page, and request that it gets removed from Google in webmaster tools.
A brief update on what a 410 is:
"The Web server (running the Web site) thinks that the URL requested by the client (e.g. your Web browser or our CheckUpDown robot) is no longer available from that system. This is not a 'never heard of it' response, but a 'does not live here any more' response."
"The 410 error is primarily intended to assist the task of Web maintenance by notifying the client system that the resource is intentionally unavailable and that the Web server wants remote links to the URL to be removed. Such an event is common for URLs which are effectively dead i.e. were deliberately time-limited or simply orphaned. The Web server has complete discretion as to how long it provides the 410 error before switching to another error such as 404. "
We had to use this on pages that kept showing up for a local contractor. Once they were submitted to Google, we saw them removed within a week.
"When to use a 410 gone – error code?
If you intend to remove a page or file from your website and you very deliberately want visitors and search engines to know that it is really gone, you should use the 410 gone – error code. If you do not, and rather just delete the page or file, the visitors to your site will get a 404 – not found error which means that the URL you requested has nothing there. This should really ONLY be used if you are sure your intention is to tell the world this file is no longer here and to tell the search engines to take it out of their index."
You can read more here: 410 explained