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The domain you are using is .com.au - which is by default geo targeted to Australia. It's not possible to change that. Geo targeting is only possible for generic top level domains; check the list here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1347922?hl=en
Edit: The general info on geo targeting in the search consolecan be found here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/62399?hl=en
Hi,
To be very honest - I don't think crawlers are looking at the way you structure your url's. In my opinion these 3 options are equally valid and it depends on your personal preference how you want to organise it. Also think about your reporting needs - it's very easy in Analytics to put filters based on folders (or to use the drill-down reporting)
What is more important is how you make this information accessible for the users - which is completely unrelated to the url.
Like Bryan mentioned - it could be useful to have a support section on your site - regrouping all the support documents for all the products on your site. Again - this could be done regardless of your choice of url's.
To determine the importance of a page crawlers are mainly looking at two things:
The relevance is also determined by factors like appearance of keyword in url, H1,...etc all the basic stuff - but these would again be identical for the 3 scenario's you propose.
Hope this helps,
Dirk
Hi,
How did you notice the drop in rankings - is this info coming from webmaster tools or some external tracking system? I just search for the keyword shutters (google.be/ from Brussels) and your site is still ranked in 3rd position (Dutch) - 1st position FR.
Did you see a significant drop in traffic to these pages in Analytics?
By the way - not sure if shutters is the best word to describe the product you are selling (French version) - the word "volets intérieurs" seems to be a better word.
Probably not related to the current issues - but you might want to check the size of the images on your homepage (and speed optimisation in general: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150922_6W_RT4/1/details/) - also check pagespeed insights from Google.
Please also take into account that with the current organisation of your content you push the FR version 1 level deeper than the NL content.
You also might want to take a look at the internal redirects on your site - you redirect all url's to have the trailing slash which is ok - but you should also update your internal links accordingly.
rgds,
Dirk
A canonical url always applies to a "full page" = content accessible under a specific url so it's not possible to apply the canonical url to only a part of the page.
Duplication of content is not always a reason for "punishment" by Google - check https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66359?hl=en : "unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results" that you will get an action from Google. In most cases - "we (=Google) do a good job of choosing a version of the content to show in our search results".
You could consider to make one main page for each type of product and then list the specifics for each model number on the same page but it could lead to lower traffic.
You could also try to make for each detailed page a piece of "original" content, but in cases like yours I guess this would be virtually impossible.
Don't think everyone would agree on this advice - but given that your pages are currently ranking quite well and they are answering a certain customer need I wouldn't do touch them. The risk you run seems limited.
Dirk
It's not related to the robots.txt - you can easily check that in Webmastertools (Crawl > Robots.txt tester)
First issue is the location of the link - if you put a small link to the blog hidden in the left corner at the bottom of the page Google is not going to attribute a lot of importance to this link.
Most important issue on your blog articles is the canonical - example:
http://www.keukensduitsland.nl/blog/woontrends-2016/ has as canonical url: http://www.keukensduitsland.nl/woontrends-2016/ - however this page will redirect you with javascript to the blog article.
Make the canonical self referencing and do a proper redirect on the other pages (301 rather than js redirect)
Dirk
I don't fully agree with the answer above - having 404's is not a direct cause for demoting. Check https://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.be/2011/05/do-404s-hurt-my-site.html . Another interesting video on expired e-commerce products is here: http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-seo-advice-unavailable-e-commerce-products-186882. Redirecting to the homepage (or any other non related page) is certainly not a good thing - this would be considered a soft 404.
It is however best practice to redirect products that remain in the catalog to the newer versions of the page. Even for those that don't remain in catalog you might consider to redirect them to a closely related new product. You indicate that given the number of products this would be not feasible. Are there no common patterns in the url to redirect these pages in bulk? Is it possible to put the redirect in the page header?
Redirects (properly implemented = going to the corresponding content) are both good for users & Google. If you don't redirect it will take some time before the new products are indexed and replacing the old ones in the ranking - which will almost certainly lead to rank loss: the 404 results will quickly disappear from the results and it will take a lot longer for the new ones to take their positions, it they manage to get back to these positions at all.
If you happen to have links point to these old product pages - you will loose these as well if they go to a 404.
In case that redirects is indeed not a valid option - make sure that you have a custom 404 pages so that user can easily find what their looking for. It might reduce the damage a bit.
If it was my site - I would try to find a solution to implement 301's.
Dirk
To update - even worse: on the blog itself you are linking to the canonical version - not to the /blog/ version. So it would be impossible for Google to index /blog/ type of content.
If you do woontrends 2016 site:www.keukensduitsland.nl you will notice that the canonical version is properly indexed (even with the strange js redirect.
Dirk
The site did exist before - check https://web.archive.org/web/20141117163048/http://www.(your domain)/ - so quite possible it had a manual action (if the type of content was as low quality then as it is now) erasing it from the index.
On first sight there seems nothing obvious that is wrong with your site (I crawled the site with Screaming Frog and it looks ok). Site:meko.lv gives 85 results which looks ok (even a bit too much if you look at page 5 & onward)
The only strange thing is your robots.txt - User-agent: googlebot Disallow: /*? - I imagine you added this line to block pages like this https://meko.lv/index.php?option=com_ajax&format=json which are still in the index. Did you try to do a fetch like google on your sitemap to be sure that this rule isn't blocking the bot from reading the contents? (especially because your sitemap has a particular url http://meko.lv/index.php?option=com_osmap&view=xml&tmpl=component&id=1 with a question mark inside. You might want to rename this to a more standard meko.lv/sitemap.xml
Hope this helps,
Dirk
The best way to deal with this is using canonical url's. Choose one of the 2 pages are "main" page - use a canonical on the second page to point to the "main" version.
Example: yourdomain.com/category1/article.htm => main page
yourdomain.com/category2/article.htm -> in the head section of this article put:
This way Google will know it only has to index yourdomain.com/category1/article.htm.
To learn more about canonicals:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en
https://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization
Dirk
You are redirecting Google bot to a 500 page. Check http://serverfault.com/questions/238664/block-bots-with-iis-7-5-and-8-0 - this page list a number of ways on how to block bots to access an IIS server. Then check your own configuration. My guess would be that you implemented one of these rules by accident.
Update: you don't block Bing - but you block Yahoo as well.
Dirk
It's not a big issue. Just mark as fixed - if they 404 & no links exist them they will disappear from the reporting (every site has 404 errors). Even if you don't do anything it's not a problem;
Dirk
I agree with Ryan that it's more the engagement which is important than the pageviews.
If you have client side filtering & ordering - you could use event tracking in Analytics to get better idea of what visitors are actually doing on your page. Each time a user changes the view, you track an event in Analytics. When you have a high bounce rate on your site, this will also give you a better idea of the actual time spent on a page (remember that there is no measurement of visit duration when a user visits only 1 page and no events are tracked - see also: http://cutroni.com/blog/2012/02/29/understanding-google-analytics-time-calculations/).
Hi,
The best way to find the source of the redirect loops is to perform a crawl with Screaming Frog - the moment you see these endless url's appearing - you stop the crawl - click on the url - right mouse button "Crawl Path Report" => this will lead you all the way back to the url where the error starts.
In your case, it could be sufficient to check the source of registration page and look for relative links containing /register-login - probably it's one small link hidden somewhere which is causing the problem. The crawl would be good to check if other loops exist.
The best way to avoid redirect loops is to use absolute rather than relative url's in your code - which makes it (almost) impossible to get these loops. Normally this should be something you can configure in your CMS.
If it's a login page - I would not put a canonical - it has no value for search engines (and for users who would land on this page), so I would put a noindex on these pages and nofollow on the links that point to this page.
rgds
Dirk
You gave the answer yourself: no continual post and (no) great content.
Put yourself in the position of a potential visitor: why should he/she come to your site. As far as I see, the topics which are covered (hotels, restaurants, real estate,...) are covered in more detail and with more up-to-date info on a multitude of other sites. Your site doesn't add a lot of added value.
There are some technical issues that could be improved, but it doesn't make sense as long as you don't work on the quality of your content.
As with all kinds of certifications - it can help convince others (your boss, potential clients,...) of your skills. Doing the tests for the certification also forces you to check if your knowledge is still up-to-date. Apart from that, it's just a piece of paper.
Dirk
Click on your profile picture (right upper corner) - Select Billing&Subscription - then Billing Information -> your invoices are listed here.
Dave,
While checking your site, it seems that the tracking code is not always loaded - so probably it's more a technical glitch after the maintenance. Not clear what is causing it - when you install the tag assistant plugin you will see yourself. Seems to happen on first visit.
When it's not loaded your source (homepage) looks like this:
Dirk
I agree with you that positioning is more about the content than having an exact match url. However, as Ryan indicates, buying the domain is low cost, so I would buy it anyway, if only to redirect it to the main domain.
This could potentially save you a lot of trouble if your boss (or higher) would type in the exact match domain only to see that it would go to one of your competitors. They usually don't know much about SEO, and for some reason a lot of them are convinced that having the exact match domain is the preferred tactic to secure a number one position...
I missed one question you asked - as Google is unable to index content which is only available for registered users I might be a good idea to create a preview page - showing part of the content even when not logged-in. This only makes sense however if the content remains interesting enough for visitors even if only part of it is accessible. You risk to get a high bounce rate on these pages, as the content really needs to be very unique and valuable for the users in order to go through the complicated process of registration. Personally, I always get frustrated when landing on these kind of pages, and unless it's a site that also seems useful for future visits, I always go back to the search results and try to find other sites which provide the info without registration.
Agree with Daniel - according to John Mueller from Google the location of the server is (almost) irrelevant - it's mainly the performance and the user experience that counts. Quote :'For search, specifically for geotargeting, the server's location plays a very small role, in many cases it's irrelevant'.
I guess it used to be a more important signal but currently is no longer the case - check this article on Webmaster support: "Server location (through the IP address of the server). The server location is often physically near your users and can be a signal about your site’s intended audience. Some websites use distributed content delivery networks (CDNs) or are hosted in a country with better webserver infrastructure, so it is not a definitive signal."
Google is quite capable of determining based on your content (address, etc) which audience you are targeting so go ahead and move your server to California.
rgds,
Dirk
Hi,
It's probably better to contact Moz Support directly - https://moz.com/help/contact
Don't panic - Moz is quite customer oriented. I am sure they'll find a solution.
rgds,
Dirk
I agree with Ray. However, I tried to crawl both your old url & new one always got a "Connection refused" error in Screaming Frog (even when reducing crawlspeed & increasing default response timeout). . Maybe this is completely unrelated, however never had this on other sites before. Did you try to fetch the new pages in Webmastertools?
Your robots.txt is quite long - you're sure that all pages that need to be indexed can be indexed?
(completely unrelated to the indexing problems - I used webpagetest.org to see if your site was accessible by other automated tools - it worked, but also revealed that your pages are extremely heavy to load)
Dirk
Could you check these "problem" url's with a tool like web-sniffer.net of http://tools.seobook.com/server-header-checker/ to be sure that the pages are really returning the correct status. I encountered similar problems with 404 before - while visually the correct page was rendered - the header returned a 404 status. You could also try "Fetch like google" in Webmaster tools.
Would be helpful to have an actual url - if you don't want to disclose the site - you could send it via private message.
rgds,
Dirk
Yes - there are plenty of people experiencing the same thing (just browse through the questions of the last couple of days).
That's exactly the reason why Rand published a post on it in this very q&a and pinned it to the top of the list - check https://moz.com/community/q/da-pa-fluctuations-how-to-interpret-apply-understand-these-ml-based-scores
Dirk
Location of your server isn't really important - check https://www.seroundtable.com/seo-geo-location-server-google-17468.html: "For search, specifically for geotargeting, the server's location plays a very small role, in many cases it's irrelevant. If you use a ccTLD or a gTLD together with Webmaster Tools, then we'll mainly use the geotargeting from there, regardless of where your server is located. You definitely don't need to host your website in any specific geographic location -- use what works best for you, and give us that information via a ccTLD or Webmaster Tools."
Similar message here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en:
Specifically on CDN's - John Mu indicated
"At any rate, while moving to a CDN may result in small temporary fluctuations, making your site faster will frequently help your site much more. Some studies have shown that the faster your site is, the longer visitors will stay, and that's generally a good thing :-). As I mentioned above, if you're seeing significant changes in ranking, then I'd look for the issues elsewhere" (https://www.seroundtable.com/google-cdn-13117.html)
Dirk
Hi,
It's quite simple - just go to https://moz.com/subscriptions/cancel
(you can also go via the navigation - click on your avatar (upper right corner - select "Billing & Subscription") - on the next page click "Cancel" on your current plan)
rgds
Dirk
Hi,
I wouldn't worry too much about redirecting it to the normal site. It has lousy content at the moment, but the moment you take ownership, you'll redirect it to your site with quality content. Anyhow, Google will see that the ownership has changed as the DNS records are changing, there will be a new owner in webmastertools, the content is changing etc.
As it is a typosquatter, he will probably not have put the effort to build (cheap & spammy) links to this domain, and will not have done many efforts regarding SEO - so probably from an SEO perspective this is probably a quite clean site.
You could put the domain a few months in quarantaine to be sure- putting a static html page like 'did you want to visit mydomain.com - click here', activate webmastertools, check the linkprofile, see if any warnings from Google are coming.
If everything looks ok after a few months, you just activate the redirect
rgds,
Dirk
Update: noticed to late that the robots.txt is blocking googlebot - so Google officially isn't aware that the site is linking to low quality site - so would not have too many doubts on redirecting
It would be better to indicate the "nofollow" on the level of the link rather than on page level (as it will only impact the paid rather than all the links) but if this is not possible, the tag you want to use is ok.
rgds,
Dirk
I think every SEO struggles with this question from time to time. It's frustrating to see competitors rank high with shady techniques. On the long run, I remain convinced that "clean" SEO and putting your customer/visitor experience first remains the winning strategy. And yes, sometimes Google does confirm it. With the Panda update in May last year I saw a lot of our shady competitors take a plunge in rankings, while our sites increased both rankings & search traffic (in some cases +60% in search traffic). So be patient, Google becomes better and better at fighting spam.
Hi
You can check the implementation in Webmastertools https://developers.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/ - or in a tool like https://webmaster.yandex.com/microtest.xml
I checked a branch page - for Yandex some of the fields are not correct (url / local address / local phone missing) - but most of it seems ok. For Google everything was ok.
You could check the other pages as well using these tools.
Dirk
Hi,
Not sure if this is what you want - but if you go to the Keyword rankings there is a link (next to "tracked keyword overview") with title "Ranking History csv" - click on the link and and you will receive an email with the download link with the historical data.
Hope this helps,
Dirk
Both measures are not really reliable to know how many pages are actually in the index.
Googles definition on 'Total Indexed': Shows the total URLs available to appear in search results, along with other URLs Google might discover by other means. This number changes over time as you add and remove pages. The number of indexed URLs is almost always significantly smaller than the number of crawled URLs, because Total indexed excludes URLs identified as duplicatesor non-canonical, as less useful, or that contain a meta noindex tag. (source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2642366)
=> basically this number contains all the pages Google has been crawling since the launch of your site, and is quite useless as absolute figure, it's the evolution over time which is more important
site:domain.com will show you pages that are eligible to show in the search results, but is not a really reliable measure either - it's quite possible that more pages are indexed. On very big sites you will see this number change when you go to page 2,3,...Etc It is a good check to see if your site is indexed or not.
That said, the number of pages in the index is not a very important figure, it's rather the ranking of your site for your main keywords which is important, as it is the main driver of your traffic.
Hi,
If it's just a new template and all the other factors remain the same - you should have no (negative) impact. If you switch to a mobile template, don't forget to also test the speed of your pages & the size of your images - it's nice that the site is responsive but if you have a lot of very heavy images, and the sites loads slow on mobiles, the gain will be minimal.
The traffic drop related to site migrations is very often related to changing the structure, generating a lot of 404's when not all the pages are redirected. Google seems to be cautious when suddenly there is a spike of 404's and reduces the traffic for a while. Once everything is back to normal, traffic (normally) returns.
rgds,
Dirk
Redirect these pages with 301 to the corresponding new ones would be the easiest thing to do. It would even be better to try to contact the site owners and update the links, but I have to admit that this could be a enormous work and in some cases you have the risk that the link is removed rather than replaced.
rgds
Dirk
I guess you are referencing the geo targeting in the Search Console - there is no geo targeting in Analytics.
If you have a country specific TLD like .co.uk your site is automatically targeted to the uk market. Geo targeting is only possible for 'neutral' TLD's like .com,.net,.org,...etc. If you site is targeted to one specific country it's very difficult to rank for keywords outside the geographic area. On a .co.uk domain it's virtually impossible to create a section that targets Australian customers.
In that case - you would need to buy a .au domain or a generic domain. If you want to target multiple countries and buying different local tld's is not possible - you can buy a generic one (.com) - and target parts of the site to a specific country like
mydomain.com/uk => target uk
mydomain.com/au => target au ... etc
Don't know what you mean with "canonicalising new url's with relevant keywords" - for international content you shouldn't use canonical url's to point to your main content - rather use href lang tags to make it obvious to search engines which part of the site is targeted to which audience.
Some useful resources:
International SEO checklist (Moz) Hreflang attributes (Google)
International SEO (Moz)
Country Targeting (Google)
Geo-Targeting Your Pages for Specific Audiences (Bing)
Hi Fraser,
I doubt that it is the dummy content which is causing the troubles. You use the x-robots-tag to put noindex/nofollow on all your pages. Probably this a setting in the config of your Wordpress site. More info on the tag can be found here: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/control-crawl-index/docs/robots_meta_tag?hl=en
Apart from that :
rgds,
DIrk
Hi,
You still have some duplicates - for each page the https & http version exists - I would choose the https version & redirect the non-https version to this one.
There are a lot of pages which have no H1or an H1 that doesn't really add value. Title idem - not always covering the content:
Example: http://www.mercadonline.es/anuncios-sevilla -
Title: Resultados de la búsqueda - MercadOnline.es
H1: missing
Apart from this - I guess your target audience is looking for quite specific info (like BMW for sale Sevilla) - as far as I can see you don't really have optimised pages for these queries. A potential landing page for this query would be: http://www.mercadonline.es/ads/motos-motocicletas/12162 - but Title, H1, Metadescription are not adapted
Title: Motos, motocicletas - 12162 - MercadOnline.es
Meta description: En Mercadonline.es encontrará diariamente una amplia gama de motos y motocicletas - 12162
H1: Vehículos
=> try to adapt these to make it more specific to the corresponding search query.
Hope this helps;
rgds,
Dirk
Hi,
Can't find the link on the page you give as an example - but on other pages you have in the source a link of type
<a <span="" class="html-attribute-name">href</a><a <span="" class="html-attribute-name">="{link}"></a><a <span="" class="html-attribute-name">href="http://www.....dk/video-virtuelt-cockpit-i-ny-audi-a4/"</a>
<a <span="" class="html-attribute-name">Sourcepage: www......dk/bilmaerker/chevrolet/page/2/
In the browser the {link} is encoded as %7Blink%7D
Hope this helps,
Dirk</a>
Not really an expert in robots.txt - but you could always try to simulate Rogerbot using a tool like Screaming Frog (the tool is free if you crawl less than 500 pages).
You can enter a custom user agent. Rogerbot seems to be rogerbot/1.0 (http://moz.com/help/pro/what-is-rogerbot-, rogerbot-crawler+shiny@moz.com) and try crawling the pages on your site. In default mode, the tool will only crawl pages that are allowed by the robots.txt. If the tool crawls your pages, then something is wrong with the robots.txt - if not, than you should contact Moz staff to check with them.
If you recently did a site redesign - you probably deleted old redirect rules as well. Google seems to keep all the url's it has indexed over time stored somewhere - and the moment the old redirects disappear - you'll see these very old url's popping up in webmastertools. I had the same experience after a recent migration, and if you search on this forum, you'll find plenty of other people who have encountered the same thing.
Nothing to worry about - if these errors in WMT are annoying you could put the old redirect rules in place again, or if they are using a seperate folder structure, you could delete these folders via WMT. These errors will disappear over time, even if you don't do anything.
I noticed you're Belgian, you could also check what other sites are doing like Markplaats, 2ehands,.... in terms of site structure and on-page optimisation. Crawling them with a tool like Screaming Frog will certainly give you some inspiration. I don't know the Spanish sites for personal ads, but check them as well. If you use Semrush you can check for which keywords they rank, how their landing pages look like and how they are optimised.
Hi,
Nothing is wrong. The non-ASCII url is translated to ASCII - the non-sense symbols you see are the translated symbols (you could test that yourself here:http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_urlencode.asp.
As Moz works with the "translated" version - it will not find the original version - but it will find the ASCII version. Google is perfectly able to handle these "international url's"
That said, Moz is not really best in class for foreign languages with a lot of symbols and accents - these foreign characters render the page grade report virually useless (see also this quesion: http://moz.com/community/q/foreign-language-character-sets-in-page-grade-reports
rgds,
Dirk
Hi Jamie,
The link in your profile looks ok (it's not a "nofollow") - I guess that the issue is more related to the data delays of Moz OSE.
rgds
Dirk
I think this page is a bit over optimised - the word locksmith appears 62 times on the page. The text seems to be written for Search Engines rather than human beings. I would make the text shorter & more to the point, and don't repeat your keywords too much.
Also watch out for duplicate content - http://24hourlocksmith.com.au/tag/dimple-lock/ ; http://24hourlocksmith.com.au/james-bond-lock-picking-tool/ http://24hourlocksmith.com.au/tag/dimple-key/ seem to be identical.
Hi Luke,
To me, it doesn't seem really abnormal that a university would have tons of links going to associated companies, alumni companies,.. etc. I think the basic question is - do these links look "natural" when you check them, or are they rather commercial. If they make sense on the page, or add value, I would leave them. If not, make them nofollow.
rgds,
Dirk
Sean
It's not really necessary to use canonical url's. If you are sure that every piece of content on your site is available on a unique url you don't need to implement them.
It doesn't hurt having them either. Using canonical url's (if implemented properly) can help to avoid duplicate content issues. Like Patrick mentioned, having canonicals doesn't imply that no duplicate content issues exist (I've seen sites where the canonical url is always equal to the url - which renders them completely useless)
Crawl tools like Screaming Frog are the best option to check if you need canonicals, and if you have them, to check if they are properly implemented.
rgds,
Dirk
You can't force Moz to crawl all backlinks or submit backlinks. While the Moz bot is crawling a huge number of sites/pages (check this page for the stats). Even when these figures are impressive - it's still only a fraction of the total web and what Googlebot is crawling/indexing. So it's quite possible that some backlinks were not (yet) discovered by Moz. Check also the FAQ on how the backlinks are discovered.There just was an update - so you'll have to check again after Nov. 15th.
As each supplier is using a different method to crawl the web - it's a good idea to check multiple resources to get your backlink profile (raven tools, afhref,...)
Dirk