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If the canonical tag is on the page, despite the fact the page loads in either version only the one that you have in your canonical tag will be indexed.
As far the Moz reports these are not updated minute by minute, to see if the canonical tag has fixed the problem in Moz's reports you'll have to wait till they do their next crawl (once a week). You may also use Google's Webmaster and ask for a re-crawl after you made changes.
Hope that helps,
Don
Hi Mohamed,
This is an important issue. By leaving both versions of the pages up, you run the risk of having it indexed twice and possibly suffer from duplicate content penalties.
There are a couple ways to fix it, but the easiest would be add a canonical meta tag to the page that points to the version your site should be using
**for no extension**
or
**with the extension**
The other way would be to modify your .htaccess file in your root directory to forward all traffic to whichever version you are using.
To force removal of the extension you could do this
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^([^.]+)$ $1.html [L,NC,R=301]
To force extension you could do this
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^..html$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.)$ $1.html [L,R=301]
The htaccess should work on most host but if I remember correctly GoDaddy has some special requirements. Check with them if you are using them as a host.
Hope this helps,
Don
Hi Leanne,
On the "Tracked Keywords" tab of Add Manager Keywords, you will see all the keywords you're tracking by scrolling down. There are filters branded / un-branded as well as the ability to add custom labels which help you sort them. If you haven't selected a filter all the keywords should be visible on that page.
Hope it helps,
Don
H Danny,
I have never used it but ScrapeBox has a page scanner that sounds like it would work.
http://www.scrapebox.com/page-scanner
Hope that helps,
Don
HI Rod,
That should have fixed your duplicate content problem.
Hi Trevor,
I started by creating my first campaign. Moz crawls these once a week so the sooner you get this setup the sooner you'll start seeing results.
Next, I started asking questions, my first question, ekks almost 4 years ago! Moz is one of the best places on the internet to get solid educated answers about SEO. Though we may have seen the question before, somebody will usually point you in the right direction or give an updated response.
Sean pointed out some great links. Starting out I liked going to the tool section and just playing around with tools. This gave me a feeling for what each one did and how I could best use them in my role at my company.
Hope it helps and welcome to Moz!
Don
Great answer Dirk and I completely agree.
Hello,
Moz has a Fresh Link Explorer. However, no site including Google will catch them all. Using multiple tools is really the only method I know to find most of them...
Hope it helps,
Don
I agree with Ashley here,
I don't even have anything to add to the response. Well done!
Hi Timothy,
I agree with CleverPHD here, a couple hundred crappy links won't likely hurt a strong brand, and the amount of time it took to get them is not indicative of a spammer. In general 150 links from a true link spammer would be few hours or less.
I will add another thought, up until last year when panda come down it was some what routine for people to still use link directories, and in some case there still are a few industry specific directories that actually make sense.
I would certainly ask your freelancer to look up the Google Panda update and ask him to self evaluate what he has been doing. Hopefully, he will see the light. Here is a decent article over on SearchEngineJournal.com
Hope it helps,
Don
Hi,
They shouldn't hurt the rankings directly. However, the user experience from my point of view would be horrible. No matter how tasteful they are done, they always annoy me. I just finished up writing a SEO article this morning, and I remember vividly advising against this.
Hope it helps,
Don
Hello Rich,
I think giving them a copy of you domain would be a very bad choice. They will likely have the duplicate content problems as I am sure Google would "most likely" recognize you as the source of the content. Since you were around first. Basically, to Google, the site would be relegated to a low quality clone of yours and they would never see respectable SERP results. Ultimately not really helping either of you.
I am of the opinion there is an alternative solution out there, some off the top of my head....
The actual solution I would recommend would require more information from both sides of the situation, The good thing here is you are in the power seat and nothing really can get done with out your say-so. I would recommend caution with giving anybody direct access to your content, if somebody wants it that means you are doing something right.
I hope this input helps you. I have had personal experience with duplicating a retail website for business to business sales. If you would like more thoughts feel free to PM me.
Don
No problem Liam,
You can safely canonical your home page to itself. I've had 2 sites setup that way for a few years now.
Good luck,
Don
HI Liam,
Yes you can fix this with a canonical tag or you can do a blanket fix that redirects all "/" urls to the non-slash version with .htaccess.
This should work in the .htaccess file
RewriteRule ^(.*)/$ /$1 [L,R=301]
Hope it helps,
Don
Hello W. Gilliland,
Sounds like you were a victim of some really crappy SEO sites / people in the past. A very hard lesson to learn no doubt.The one good thing is it has at least starting engaging you in the process. Nobody knows your business better than you, even the most experienced SEO in the world. Being able to speak some of the SEO language will not only help you communicate with them, but also provides the benefit of you knowing what the hell they are doing, or attempting to do.
Okay, onto the questions.
1. Am I still suffering from Penguin? To determine this you'll want to check your Google Webmasters and make sure you have no Manual penalty. Second, you need to evaluate every page's back link profile. The penguin algorithm doesn't apply to just top level pages but every page! Many many question and answer guru's have helped with other questions about this topic, perhaps thumbing through them to see if anything catches your eye.
2. Are you trapped in Panda and how do you know? First know what Panda was, it was an update that targeted low quality sites which were ranking well for keywords. Your site is far from low quality.. I don't think you have to worry about this directly, however in conjunction with the Penguin update which devalued crappy low quality links, it is possible that some of the "so-so" sites that were linking to you, may actually been hit themselves and warrant a link removal.
3. Do you need to remove more links. Possibly, your site is huge and it would take awhile to completely navigate your back-link profile. I enjoy helping, but this question is one that is not easily answered without research.
4. How can you start ranking for more keywords? Content is the key, and a huge obstacle for e-commerce sites. Maintaining tens of thousands of products can be extremely challenging. My advice is usually to focus on big keywords and pour on the content. For example, take a Brand & Category and write some compelling content for that page. I know Magneto is flexible enough to allow for custom pages, perhaps you can pick some of your best selling, or higher profit margin categories and dive in.
To continue on with this thought I will have to be a tad curt about somethings, but please don't take them offensively rather productively. What you have now is what I call a "Field of Dreams" website, that is to say build it and they will come. There is nothing wrong with this, if your goal is only to provide existing customers an avenue to shop from home. However, if the point of the website is bring in new customers and not just a service portal for existing customers then you have to do much more.
Example continued... I pointed out that you could focus on a Brand and Category, lets look at one (Paul Smith Footwear). To be honest I know nothing about Paul Smith, or their footwear, but that's okay for this example. Your page representing a keyword like "Paul Smith Footwear" looks like this.
Title="Footwear" (not okay)
Description="Default Description" (not okay)
Keywords="Magento, Varien, E-commerce" (not okay, tag shouldn't exist at all)
H1="Footwear" (not okay)
Content= nothing really, a search filter with product images
In this example I would recommend getting the SEO basics right, title, description, and populating some content. Because I know this can be a huge undertaking, you don't have to do your whole site at once, pick your top sellers or profit items and have a staff member or yourself write some content for the Brand and Product. Then use that text in conjunction with what you already have there.
Example Revised
Title="Paul Smith Men's Footwear, | Excel Clothing"
Description="Paul Smith men's footwear is handpicked fashionable footwear for all occasions"
Keywords=(this tag would be completely removed from all pages) H1="Paul Smith Men's Footwear"
Content = Use the keyword again, describe the Brand, and how the footwear makes you fell and look, how Excel clothing decides which Paul Smith footwear to stock and sell. Then show me the filter and product images.
In summary, you were hit by some bad SEO practices you'll need to be very proactive about monitoring all your back links. Continue evaluating each link and disavow the bad sites links. Ranking more keywords requires a complete look at the SEO basics and how they are implemented on your site. There is also room for improvement in the content department.
That is my take on the matters and I hope you consider them in the helpful spirit in which they were provided,
Don
Hi Rod,
I will try address the 2 questions I see here.
1. Is an "index stack" bad for your site.
2. How do I optimize my site.
1. Index Stack, okay to be completely honest I have never heard the term before. However, with the link you provided I was able to understand what you mean. In such case you have taken the content of your sub-pages and placed them directly on your home page. Is this bad.. YES!
The reason why this is bad is because it is creating duplicate content. This is bad because the page that should be ranking for X content is now competing with your home page for these rankings. Your home page should be about your business and services, what you do, and how you do it. The sub-pages are your re-enforcement they support the content stated on your homepage.
Imagine a beautiful hotel. The outside is adorned in the finest materials of the time, well maintained and awe inspiring. A equally impressive doorway beacons you to come in. As you do, you find yourself in the lobby. Well placed pristine signs detail some of the hotel's offerings, private gym's, hot tubs, saunas, massage, 5 star dinning, dance halls, and judging by the impressive lobby you have no doubt these offerings will be spectacular.
In this example the lobby is your homepage an impressive list of the offerings guest will find inside. What you don't see is a middle-aged fat man sprawled out in the lobby getting a massage. Which is what your index stack is doing.
2. How to optimize (fix it). To fix this you'll want to structure you home page to be about your business, and services. High level overviews of what you offer, with strong brand placement.
The purpose of the homepage is to make it clear what you do, how you do it, why people love it, and in general more about your brand. The purpose of your inner pages is to completely detail the particular service or products, with call to action to convert interest into money.
I would remove the internal page content from the homepage, and focus again more on an overview. Essentially cut out everything between the Hunting & Gathering Club, and the Call to Action "There's a Southern Whitewater Experience for everyone". Beef up the links to the internal pages by making them look more attractive and obvious.
There are other things that may need addressed as well, but I hope this answers your primary question,
Don
HI Matthew,
I referred to this post by Rand about how to structure a title tag many times. Title Tag
It maybe a little difficult to get all you main keywords on your homepage, but you can certainly create content pages that will hopefully pick up the additional keywords.
Hope it helps you too,
Don
Hi ATP,
There are a some post here on the forums, unfortunately with somewhat different points of view about multiple H1's. I have a feeling nobody knows for sure. However if we take Matt Cutts' word on it, you don't have much to worry about for 2-3 H1 tags on a page on Google. I can't say much about the other search engines. Apple.com uses multiple H1 tags.. but then again when has Apple ever followed the norm.
Post 1 (3 years old, okay multiple h1's for html 5)
Post 2 (1 year old, not so great multiple h1's)
Post 3 (1 year old, mixed point of view's staff endorsed)
I know all search engines behave in their own way. With that in mind, it is of course advised you always use you best judgement. If Bing drove 90% of our traffic I would be very leery of pushing the envelope with them, and if I did I would watch the results very closely.
I am not currently developing any HTML 5 site, but I do try to stay up to date on the current SEO trends. Recently a user asked about his site and view points, which I answered in similar fashion here.
Hope that helps you as well,
Don
Hi
I agree with Andy here.
Our manufacturing site used to block "right click", "copy" and "paste" short cuts simply because they were worried about their images or content from being used against them. After I started I put an end to that, mostly because it was absolutely pointless and not user friendly.
The truth is any scraper or person with basic webdesign skills can easily get that content if they want it. The trade off simply is not worth it when you consider we live in a social media world. Who knows how many links they missed because somebody wanted to copy & paste an answer to a question from our site to a forum, blog or other outlet. Instead I started harnessing this ability for links by using the site Tynt.com which helps track this type of copying and tries to drive traffic back to you by adding referral info to the copied text.
Hope this helps,
Don
Hi BT2009,
While ATP's advice is generally the accepted advice there is reason to actually use more then one H1 tag. Most specifically in HTML5 pages which actually uses the H1 tag to break up sections of content within an article tag. This is an important distinction to the old rule. You can read a lot about this new methodology here on Tutsplus.
There are other cases in which one may use more then one H1 tag, like when changing view points for multiple devices. The basic rule of thumb in such case is the purpose of the additional tag for the users benefit? In both of these cases I still would lean more towards minimal use of multiple H1 tags.
Okay so now that we know that lets move on to the question about Bing. First, we all know that Google has way more invested in the search engine software & hardware than any other company including Bing. Bing may still be using the 1 tag rule. This may not actually be a direct penalty but as ATP points out a simple confusion point that the search engine hasn't yet adapted too. Google has flat out said it does not penalize for multiple H1 tags, but I have not seen the same comments from Bing.
Whats more is each search engine will act in its own way to a website redesign, most focus on Google since it drives most people's traffic, but in fact Bing, Ask, Yahoo, Baidu all treat new content, urls, design differently. I have seen cases were a site redesign takes a couple months before traffic gets back to normal and another few weeks before I know for sure if the redesign actually helped.
There may also be some other issues we didn't discuss here, however since you mentioned the multiple H1 tags is was obviously a concern of yours so I hope we addressed that adequately for you.
Don
Hi Kashif,
Following this structure should get it done.
RewriteRule ^subdirectory/(.*)$ /anotherdirectory/$1 [R=301,NC,L]
For your example it would be like
RewriteRule ^FolderA/FolderB/(.*)$ /FolderA/FolderC/FolderB/$1 [R=301,NC,L]
For less then 100 redirects it "may" also be prudent to do them individually. I say this because it makes it very obvious what is going on if you ever need to edit it again. I would use Excel or OpenOffice to create a spreadsheet then just concatenate the cells together, following this example;
Redirect 301 /path/to-old-url https://www.mydomain.com/path/to-new-url
Ref site: http://coolestguidesontheplanet.com/redirecting-a-web-folder-directory-to-another-in-htaccess/
Hope this helps,
Don
Hi Noob,
I can imagine how frustrating that could be. What you have is a site that offers a service, and that service itself will generate a ton of links. So the question is how do you attract both buyers and sellers (listers and lookers) right?
In cases like this it may not be the best to focus mainly on building backlinks, rather focus your efforts on other marketing avenues. This could be email marketing, community type engagement (Local Area Websites, Industry Specific Websites, Charities), print (Newspapers, Magazines), Radio, Online Advertisement (Facebook, Twitters, Google, Yahoo).
Without knowing exactly what type of classifieds you plan on running I can't be very specific. However, I will say the "classified" type website is nothing new and as I'm sure you're aware you're up against some pretty big names (Craigslist, Ebay, Angieslist, LocalAreaNewspaper/classifieds.com) Which means if you're going to fight in this arena you should be doing something they aren't doing, or whatever they are doing better.
This type of website is one that is very good at generating its own links as many "sellers" will post links to their items on Facebook, Reddit, Instagram, Twitter and so on. You could take advantage of this to get a main link to your domain by offering new posters a quick code grab which includes a link to the specific product they just posted along with a link to the site itself.
Of course if you're talking personals that is a different animal in where you approach people but the theories are still the same.
The things you can do in either case is to focus on making sure the site is as easy as possible to use for both listers and lookers. They both should have a great experience. Make sure they are completely informed about fees and how the service works. Along with that offer lots of back end features that allow both sides to ease of use, in the areas of tracking and searching.
In all cases how these sites stay around by being relative. Ebay is still around because people still buy stuff from there, despite the ridiculous fees and issues sellers have dealt with over the many years. If eBay were to lose sellers that would have a direct impact on lookers and vice versa. Keep both sides happy, you need them both.
Hope this helps in some way,
Don
HI Travis
Yes, you can use your .htaccess file to fix this. (This file should be located in your home directory)
A simple example would be
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^YourDomain.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.YourDomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
What this does is looks for any request for non-www urls, if found it 301 redirects it to the www version of the page.
Hope this helps,
Don
Hello,
This is a very common challenge in Ecommerce.
You have a couple options to consider.
1. Keep the existing format but add more unique content to each based on the type. For example on the Powerpoint template you could add at least a paragraph on PowerPoint and how this template works inside the program, a video of you downloading it, opening it, and modifying it with some test data.
2. As you pointed out, one page with 3 different download options.. you can even use this option to up-sell a bundle which includes all 3.
As it is now Google is going to pick one of those pages and index it and basically ignore the others as duplicate content. You may actually have further issues throughout the site due to the shear volume of similar content on each page (the bulk of the page's content is exactly the same baring the item's description). You may need to evaluate how you present all the other info on this page (how it works, what others are saying, whats in this template, whats included etc..) all this is leading to many pages with a lot of the exact same content. If other of your pages are displaying all this info as well, the one paragraph description may not be enough to make the page unique to a search engine.
You can review your site on Siteliner here.
Again this is a big challenge for most Ecommerce sites, especially those with a lot of products. However, for smaller sites with less products it is important to focus on each one of these products and write unique, compelling, informative content that sets you apart from the larger sites.
Hope this helps,
Don
Webmasters love of sub-domains... shake fist!
I agree with Michael here.
I will add that is also important to know if you have the ability to maintain a blog. If you're in a low value market then the effort maybe wasted. Making a industry leading blog, and maintaining it at levels above the competition may be challenging; depending on who you are up against.
Alternatively, simply achieving top ranking pages for these low volume keywords maybe adequate. Again as Michael points out it is all relative to the market you are in. A low volume keyword that drives a $100,000 sale may be worth extra effort to achieve, while a $1.00 sale wouldn't.
Hope it helps and good luck
HI Edward,
I'm not sure the "best way" but I can share 3 ways I know of.
Competitor Research
Check your competitors see if they actively participate or simply get links from domains which are forums. Usually a doing a search on their backlink profiles for "blog", "forum" will identify these quickly.
Search Engine Search
I sometimes find relative forums simply buying going to Google typing a broad keyword + forums. At this point I have to evaluate the forum to see if it worth trying to engage with.
Industry Engagement
If you are actively engaged daily in the industry talk you will pick up on what people are posting. For example following industry leader's Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Instagram profiles will lead you directly to some post and the places they are referencing.
Once you have at least one location worth engaging with, you can also watch those places daily as many times people will re-post information from a similar site / forum. Take for example here.. we oft see info from SearchEngineLand.
Hope this helps,
Don
HI Dino,
I don't see any issues. It is okay to use multiple H1 tags for reasons such as this. Google has confirmed multiple H1 tags are okay.
My example above was probably more alarming to you then I could have realized. My effort was to point out a simple case of how to use css for multiple device types. In your case having different text is for the benefit of the user which is exactly as it should be.
Good job,
Don
HI Dino,
Before I said to much I had to look at Visual Composer. Spent about 10 minutes there and didn't really see how the code turns out. Perhaps if you like to post a link to the webpage or just message me if you don't want it public. I'll be happy to review the source and offer a thumbs up or any suggestions I can.
Good luck,
Don
Hi Dino,
Is your code something (basic) like this.
Then you use a switch to determine which view to show?
If so, the correct way would be to use the switch to select which CSS to load instead. Thus you can use the same class but it will show up different based off of the users view.
Here is a nice article about switching CSS based on views.
Hope that helps,
Don
HI Stacy,
Dayton Ohio here!
I know the amount of information about SEO can be overwhelming; some of it which still ranks well is outdated...FRUSTRATING!
Any advice I can give will be tailored by my past experience, as I would assume most of everybody else’s will be as well.
To start with there are basically 4 things I will touch on.
1.) Your website.
Are you building it by hand?
Or are you using a CMS (Content Management System); WordPress, Blogroll, Joomla...?
This is an important decision to make. Each pre-built CMS system has some perks and disadvantages. Most are simple to get published but maybe more popular targets for hackers simply due to the platform's popularity. Even with decent web designer skills they can present a challenge to get past the learning curve to do any personal customization.
If you are building your own site, you may have a lot of work ahead of you in non SEO related categories. Depending on your design and coding skills this may not be a huge hurdle.
Either option is valid. But you'll want to fully familiarize yourself with the platform you choose and its SEO's effectiveness.
2.) Know the basics (Moz Guide To The Basics)
When building a site, or choosing a platform you'll want a firm understanding of these concepts. If choosing a platform these will allow you to adequately evaluate each one. If building your own site you can easily write the content with the basics in mind.
3.) Mobile Friendly is a must for new sites
The amount of people using tablets, and mobile devices is only going to go up each year. If you are starting a new site ensure your content is mobile friendly. Established websites may get a little leeway due to the amount of authority they have built up in the years before you, but starting out better than them is important. This year Google starting differentiating mobile search results based on their mobile friendliness.
Read:
9 This You need To Know About Google's Mobile Friendly Update
Basic Mobile Optimization
Responsive Web Design
4.) Content is Key
Having the best content for your industry is key to top search results. You may be able to take a good content approach at first to target long-tail, niche market keywords, but your end goal should be the best content. This is one of the most important aspects not oft talked about in SEO. You can have a great page with all the right SEO practices and never see page one search results. This is because you when you're on the internet you are competing with everybody in your industry. First page results = money for just about every industry!
If you don't bother with any links I posted here, please at least watch Rand Fishkin's Whiteboard Friday on Good Unique Content Needs To Die
To answer your question about picking keywords, while this is an important process and though long tail keywords may not bring a lot of traffic they will bring in the right traffic if all is done correctly you can start ranking for broader keywords, even without trying!
In summary, know the basics, and understand why mobile optimization is important, this will help you choose your design platform and finally remember writing the best content is one of the most important things you can do.
I really hope this helps,
Don
Thanks for sharing.
This is an interesting case for me. On one hand by writing technical no keyword content he likely drew a lot of technical links to the site due to depth. Links from high authoritative sites like Colleges and Government sites.
On the other hand it may have limited appeal to the general population due to the technical nitty gritty, where they just want to know if "X" firm handle said type of cases and what kind of cost is associated with it. But I could also see how more important high profile clients may find the technical stuff more important as cost is less of an issue.
All and all this was a good read.
Thank you,
Don
An engineer at work told me about this. Its like Amazon Echo with kung fu grip.
Hello Ben,
That is a very good question. I don't think I've seen this type of issue here before but I would imagine others have at some point been in the same boat. The inherit problem as you likely know, is the word Free.
I cannot offer you an absolute solution, but I can provide some ideas that I hope will lead you to an informed solution. I think you have made a good decision to try and combat the email filters from auto marking you as spam. Now the question is how do you market the actual brand without the negatives associated with our problem word? My thought would be to consider a parent company for internet re-branding purposes. I don't suggest abandoning what is likely a long cherished company brand, simply rolling it into another corporation / llc / company for the sole purpose of internet marketing.
The first step you have taken is changing your domain name; this probably has saved your emails from going directly into the customers spam folders more times than we can count. The next step would be re-branding your online presence. This is not to say you abandon your original company brand, rather you forgo using it exclusively when doing online marketing and everything that encompasses. Like websites, social media, AdWords etc. I would point to probably the most high profile case on these forums is SEOMoz becoming Moz, and why that happened. Here the reasons maybe slightly different, but the reason why you re-brand isn't set in stone.
Thinking this through, I would first start by picking an online brand name. You probably have more insight as to what that could be, than I. The next would be to do the research, how do we re-brand ourselves. Again Moz has been through this and has gone that extra step detailing some of good and bad of re-branding. If you decide this strategy may work for your situation, I would like to point out to avenues I see as viable.
1. You re-brand under new name. But keep your old brand name alive on a sub page. (I.e. newbrand.com/living-free-travel)
Benefits:
2. You re-brand under new name with a simple reference to the old brand.
You inform your clientele of the change and how it can positively affect your services to come. For example a well written article detailing why you are changing brand names can give you exposure. See my first link to Rand Fishkin's "SeoMoz becoming Moz" post above. This would be trying to get the best out of a bad situation. It really is not your fault your brand has come under unwanted scrutiny but you would be showing that the company is adaptive and responsive to the changing market place.
That is what I had running through my brain; I hope it helps you and anybody that comes across this in the future.
And as always I hope to hear from others to get you even more help,
Don
Hi Nancy
Does this subdomain "new" actually exist on the kbc.de domain? If so I can't access it from the US. I would imagine that Rogerbot (Moz's crawler) is having the same problem.
Hope this helps,
Don
Hello,
To answer the question, the footer links are likely not serving any purpose on your homepage. Based on a couple factors, one you stated most traffic is coming on the landing pages, and second links that are in the footer and pages with over 100+ links pass little link authority to each of the corresponding pages.
There really is only one legitimate reason to keep more then 100+ links on any given page. That would be user experience. But as you say people aren't actually arriving on your homepage, and even if so they could easily get to a location page from your top navigation. I would say, remove them.
Bryan touched on the FB issue.. so I will touch on one that I would personally turn me off (since we are talking about user experiences). That is the "Trust Tags" in your footer. They are not links, they are simply images. Had I stumbled upon the site and noticed that, I would have simply left without investigating it further. It is as if you are trying to trick me into saying yes we are GeoTrust, Authorize.net. ExoticCarRental verified, but we aren't able to prove it. All those logos should be links to third party verifications.
Hope it helps,
Don
Hi Verve
It maybe possible to use "mod_rewrite" depending on how the URL structure was.
If each of these items were parameter based have a look at mod_rewrite cheat sheet and see if you can match an expression or condition for the various products that are moving.
Hope it helps,
Don
HI Luke,
Having dealt with unique but thin content in the past, there are a couple things that come to mind.
First we would start by understanding the goal of this tool. Yes, some people make handy tools for themselves or friends or just to see if they can do it (I made a site that tracks the heat/frequency of Ohio Keno numbers), but usually the purpose is to generate brand recognition or customers; ultimately meaning money.
Once we know the goal of the page we can now move onto how we can use SEO best practice to achieve this goal.
I see two viable options here. The first would be to focus the page on a broad term like "energy comparisons" and possibly throw in the areas that are serviced for localization purposes. To do this you would build the page based on this broad term detail the tool, the use, add videos, help files, pdfs, reports and then rel=canonical the generated URLs back to the main page.
The second option would be to go aggressive and not only target the main page for the broad terms and areas but also target the long tail address's for energy comparisons.
Examples:
To do this you would have to add more dynamic elements to the code that returns results. That maybe difficult or it maybe extremely easy if the database has more information.
I could easily in-vision this tool returning X rate vs. Y vs. Z company rates, but also returning neighbor's rates 122 White Elk Lane, 123 White Elk Lane, Average Block Rates, Average Community Rates, and compare them to the entered address, adding charts, rate trends, and maps will all be a boon to make the content for 120 White Elk Lane's page be unique. This method removes the thin content and adds tremendous value to anybody looking at buying or selling a home.. just imagine how many real estate companies would link to this page to help sell their listings!
In short you can take one of two approaches, target the broad keywords on the main tool page and canonical the generated urls back to the main page, or add in some dynamic but very helpful content to make the urls unique. You could also start by using the first approach while building the code for the second approach, once finished just remove the canonicals and let the pages rank.
My thoughts and I really hope this helps,
Don
Need to follow up on myself here.
I also noticed that you use the keyword "Pashmina" in almost every single one of your page titles. Along with "cashmere" they are very likely making your site a victim of keyword cannibalization.
Small list of titles:
Hope it helps just had to add this info..
Laura's answer is great spot on about the age and link building advice.
I will also emphasis a point she made about your statement that you said you're not doing any link building until you page is ranking.
You don't wait for a page to rank to start link building, you start link building to get a page to rank.
Other questions about is it over optimized: Moz's Page grader shows a couple issues.
One other suggestion I have that is not in the page grader, and I have seen this a lot lately, is the way this template is putting the main text way below the header and image elements. You want your unique text to be above these elements showing it is important not tucked away under a ton of images and links. It would be much better to get your internal category images and links section off the main page all together (you already have them in the navigation).
Hope this helps,
Don
Glad to see this coming online. Just watched day one, and look forward to my daily fix with coffee.
Hello Akshay,
I looked at this particular page and variations of them and do correctly see the rel="canonical" tag.
You should note that the Google HTML improvements will only change after they rescan your site. It is not immediate, and depending on Google's crawl schedule. Meaning they crawl some sites minute by minute while others may not get crawled but once a week or longer. If you have fixed the problems Google recommends, on the next update you should see the results.
A few other things you may want to look at while you're in there.
Title Tag (Too Long)
Meta Description (Too Long)
Keywords Meta Tag (useless)
Title Tag: 72/70 Easy fix remove the "space" at the beginning and replace the "space-space" with a comma.
Improved fix: Rewrite the title tag. "pressure" and "cleaner" is used 3 times in the title (See Rand's post back in 2008 for an example)
Description Tag: 248/150Fix: Re-write the meta description tag see Moz's Description tag lesson.
Keywords Meta Tag. This tag is useless, no search engine you want sending you visitors actually pays attention to it. It also tells your competitors exactly what keywords you're targeting.
Hope this answers your question and beyond,
Don
This is a VERY old way of indicating a link to the "homepage" which is usually index.html /.php /.asp .
The term "Home" was very prevalent in the late 90's early 2000's. This gave rise to companies with home in their name like homestead.com (webhost / design). Many companies and people still see the word home and relate it to root. However the top 10 websites in the world do not use the term except Yahoo.com. Though you may find many "house" icons still about.
The newer generation just generally knows that clicking the logo will take you back to the root, Back in the early days of the web people needed to understand what each link meant, there weren't many standards but "home" caught on quickly and is still used a lot today. In addition to this many host still use the term "home" to indicate the users public_html folder where their pages are served from. It maybe that somebody who worked at the company found "/home" very comfortable looking due to these reasons.
I agree though having it in the url is pretty silly nowadays. I would suggest they just 301 it back too root -> site.com
Hope this helps,
Don
Cloaking no. What you would be doing is trying to help Google understand the images.
I feel this would be similar to detecting a language or IP and serving an image with text correctly translated. The purpose isn't malice in fact quite the opposite.
I have been leery of CDN's for any other purpose then delivering script for exactly the reason your client is in. When you think about it you can have 2 to 200 urls delivering the same images. Every time a bot crawls the site it sees X image is from a new location. How is the crawler suppose to understand what is actually there?
Anyway my thoughts, hope it helps.
Don
Hi Kenneth,
I am sure somebody maybe to do a full analysis but just quickly stopping by the page here are a few things I picked up on right away.
Using Siteliner I did a quick scan for you.. here are the results they are reporting:
Hope it helps you in the right direction,
Don
That is very interesting William, I personally loved Yelp's idea hated the execution. They are now borderline black mailers IMO. I hope others will respond so we can see some actual data.
Nice post Miriam!
HI Ashley,
It has been awhile since I have seen this question. Figured I'd jump in on this one.
In the early years of crawlers it was a pretty good rule of thumb to limit internal linking to 100 links, mostly because the crawler's didn't have the resources to crawl a ton of links. A lot has changed since this rule was introduced. Spiders have gotten smarter and are able to handle way more data than what they could back in the day.
But the spiders ability to deal with content should not be the only reason you evaluate how many links you should put on a page. The rule of a 100is still a good rule when you start thinking about things like how link juice is passed and what you "Really" want the search engines to know about. Dr. Pete wrote a blog post here on Moz about this, you can read here.
Once you get to the 100 link range the search engines don't really place much value on any of your links. Conversely if you limit your linking to 25 or so, the search engine is able to correlate X page to Y content very highly.
To address the question how can you limit the amount of links Google Or Moz sees, well the best way is to reduce the way your pages are internally linked. If you have a super large navigation in your header or footer it may make sense to change the way the navigation is built. But, if you REALLY feel that having all those links in the navigation is helpful to your viewers then you can use things like Ajax calls to load links on hover or click. Most crawlers won't be able to load action scripts but they are getting smarter.
In summary the rule of 100 is really an old rule but still important just not in the way it was originally introduced. Today you probably can expect most cralwers to do 150-300 links before giving up. If you have a high page and domain authority you may find just ignoring the warning is the best course of action. However, if you're still working to get those rankings up it may likely be worth the time to create a better navigation that logically points to the most important section from each page.
I hope this helps,
Don
Yes, you need to work with Moz support to get the issue fixed.
So what you will get out of a multi-account domain hosting is all domains hosted on the same host one being the primary the rest would be add-ons. . The rep may over sold the SEO benefits in this case. However, he does have a point IMO. Lets say you have the following multi-domains on the same host plan
Flower-City.co.au (Primary)
Rose-City.co.au (Add On)
Tulip-City.co.au (Add On)
All these domains are hosted on the same server with the same name server that resolves the actual path. If Flower-City.co.au gets hit with a penalty for whatever reason the add-on domains may also suffer because technically they are on the same server, thus creating an association to a penalized domain. Additional issues like flower-city.co.au being marked as a spammer may cause the other sub-domains to be flagged as spam even if they never sent an email, simply because they are on the same server. This could actually work in the other direction as well, rose-city.co.au you get the penalty thus affecting the other domains it is associated with.
If you everything is done correctly on each domain, and no penalties are ever occurred than I can't see any reason why each domain wouldn't be able to rank and benefit from proper SEO individually.
My thoughts,
Hope it helps.
I just ran a crawl and did not see any 804's
You can view the results here:
You may want to contact Moz directly to see if one of the Moz staff can help you further.