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Just to follow this up. We're now seeing the mobile usability error reports gradually being removed from pages at approximagely 100 pages / day.
It just seemed to me that the whole validation request process didn't actually appear to do anything and we just had to wait for the site to be recrawled?!
Thanks for your response Daniel. The steps you outlined are exactly what I have done - which is why after requesting validate fix I was surprised that the pages came back with errors still!
I've submitted a validate fix request again so I'll see what happens...
Well the questions you need to answer are the ones that your target audience are asking! You don't get Google Points just for answering questions!
Don't fall into the trap of creating the kind of Frequently Asked Questions page where none of your target audience care about any of the questions! You see this a lot when businesses take a very internal perspective and forget who they're meant to be talking to!
Don't waste your take creating content around questions that nobody is asking!
There's a couple of things to consider here:
1. What are the questions you need to answer on the landing page in order to get visitors to convert or take the next action. (How much does it cost, etc)
2. Then there are broader questions for which you want to try and get a slice of the traffic (eg: where's the best place to hire bikes in alsace etc... )
If you're got access to search console you can look for queries that contain question related words ("how, why, where, when, what etc).
You can also use these in search queries too. For example "inurl:how alsace bike" got me "How long is the Alsace wine route?" and more. Also, do take a look at the pages that appear in the search results for ideas too.
Keep an eye on the related searches displayed in the search results as well.
I have found that it's useful to have a friendly chat with the the business owner/sales people - they can usually (but not always!) give you some insights into the questions that are important to potential customers.
For many topics, the questions that people are are going to be the same as similar topics so taking a look at your direct competitors or site's with similar offerings can help you generate ideas.
If you've got site search set up on the site make sure you're capturing the searches people are doing there, again that can help give you some ideas.
If you've got a chat widget enabled on the site, it's worth seeing if you can get your hands on the transcripts or questions that are being asked there.
You might also consider carrying out a survey, particularly if you've got a good social media following / subscriber list.
Doug.
A site I'm looking at for a client had 100's of pages flagged as having Mobile Usability errors in Search Console.
I found that the theme uses parameters in the URLs of some of theme resources (.js/.css) to identify the version strings.
These were then being blocked by a rule in the robots.txt: "Disallow: /*?"
I've removed this rule, and now when I inspect URLs and test the live versions of the page they are now being reported as mobile friendly.
I then submitted validation requests in Search Console for both of the errors ("Text to small" and "Clickable Elements too close")
My problem now, is that the validation has completed and the pages are still being reported as having the errors.
I've double checked and they're find if I inspect them individually.
Does anyone else have experience clearing these issues in Search Console? Any ideas what's going on here!
Hi Peter,
First point, the headline traffic numbers are a pretty lousy metric. Do you have goals set up?
Over the last few months I've seen the volume of search traffic arriving on my site diminish, but at the same time I've seen the number of conversions stay the same and the average engagement metrics have improved. It appears that yes, we may be getting less traffic, but that the traffic we've lost is less relevant, with weak/poor intent.
In order to get a grip on what's happening on your site I'd recommend that your segment your traffic, drill deeper into the data and try to understand what exactly has changed.
What does the traffic (and engagement) look like across device types? How has this changed compared to before the site update? (And out of interest, what drive the decision to make the site mobile responsive?)
How much of your traffic comes from outside of your service area? Has this changed since you removed your location landing pages? How much of your traffic comes from locations that are not relevant to your business?
I also notice that you once had a whole bunch of geographical landing pages. When were these removed? It also seems that they were redirected to a page that no longer exists.
For your organic search landing pages, which pages have shown the greatest decline? Is it limited to your home page or specific pages on your site? Have those pages changed at all?
If you have Google Webmaster Tools (Search Console) set up you can then look at the pages showing the decrease in traffic, look at the queries that those pages are appearing in the search results. How relevant are these specific queries to your business? Are you tracking any of them? How has your visibility changed since the update?
You mention that there were some pages that changed, and that these were only recently redirected. this could be a problem.Were any of these pages previously responsible for a good proportion of your inbound traffic?
As well as considering changes in inbound links from third part sites and changes to the on-pages content (or pages being removed) have there been any changes to the on-site navigation?
Let me know if you have any questions - I'd be happy to take a quick look at your data if it would help.
Doug.
On the topic of whether to put all your blog content under a /blog folder or not. I'd normally recommend it just so that you can easily segment the blog section of your site in Analytics. If you don't it's tough to see how your blog is performing separately from the main site and it's not always obvious what is a blog post and what is a service/resource/support page. Visitors who enter the site via blog posts usually have less commercial intent.
Thanks Kane - I've managed to make the case for a real-simple "download preview pdf" link so at least I feel comfortable that they won't lose too much of this "hidden" traffic.
It would still be nice to understand how <embed> is handled and whether any link-equity passes though the embed. Tight deadlines on projects don't mean you have time to experiment.
One site that I'm working on has previously had a great deal of success from the pdf preview content on the site. The pdf previews are quite substantial and rank for many many long-tail terms that drive a reasonable amount of traffic back to the site to purchase the full version of the product.
As part of a site redesign, the way the pdf previews are embedded/presented on the page is changing slightly:
The proposed modal pop-up on the new site the code looks like thie:
<object data="my-pdf-preview.pdf" type="application/pdf" style="width:100%; min-height:600px; max-height:100%;max-height:100%;"><embed src="my-pdf-preview.pdf" type="application/pdf"></object>
Where as the old code looked like this:
<object data="mt-pdf-previewpreview.pdf#view=FitH,50&scrollbar=1&toolbar=0&statusbar=0&messages=0&navpanes=0" <br="">type='application/pdf'
width='100%'
height='600'>It appears your Web browser is not configured to display PDF files.
No worries, you can download the PDF file here.</object>
Note: how previously the code contained a plain, standard link to the pdf document.
My worry is that without this link, search engines won't a) be able to discover/crawl the pdf content or b) pass any link-equity to these pdfs.
Does anyone have any experience/recommendations about this? I'd like to have some information before I request that they add a plain link to the pdf previews back onto the on-page content.
You definitely have a nofollow link on your profile page. It may take a while for it to show up in Open Site Explorer. (Ahrefs is showing a followed link from Moz to your site.) I wouldn't worry about it.
There's another trap that I've seen people fall into, and that is not looking at the pages you're competing with in the search results.
If you look at the SERPS for your target term, are their any insights there?
Hi,
On the keyword ranking page in your campaign there's a button on the right hand side, just above the graph that you can use to send yourself an email with all the historic ranking data in .csv format.
It includes ranking data for you and any competitors that you've set up on all of the search engines you set up in your campaign.
For some of my campaigns, this goes back years!
Was there other historic search data you were trying to get?
What's the purpose of the home page? Is it purely navigational? Does it have any unique content on it?
Hard to assess whether there's a real problem or not and what that problem might be without taking a look at the site.
I don't think it matters, but without knowing more about your site it's hard to say for certain.
See this article: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-site-command-ranking-12858.html
What's more important is that you have the right page getting visibility for the right keywords/topics so that you provide the best user experience and increase your chances of converting those visitors into customers/followers.
What page is coming up first? Can you make any guesses as to why?
What I have use the site: search for is to look at the top 10 pages and assess how well these reflect the products/services/topics for which the site wants to be associated with.
Hi Garrett,
I agree with you that using one authoritative domain is generally preferable than although there are valid reasons to create campaign specific micro-sites.
What makes the them think that a new site, with our any establish authority is going to perform better than the current site?
I think that as the new site has already been built the best thing to do is to collect some data and see how well it is currently performing (even if it's not as optimised as it could be). Is it out-performing your authoritative site? Can you get access to analytics/webmaster tools data for the two domains?
Can you establish why the authoritative site struggled to get any visibility for the main service? What are the strengths/weaknesses of their site compared to their competitors?
Sometimes, the pursuit of a "glory keyword" is a fools errand. Just because you can't rank for the high commercial intent keyword doesn't mean you can create content targeted at potential customers earlier in their awareness.
Can you provide resource content, or blog posts that enable your client to get in front of the conversation and build a relationship before people are ready to make a commitment and click that "contact-us or buy now" button?
Without knowing the sites concerned it's difficult to provide any specific insights.
I first question that springs to my mind is why you want to create a separate site for a specific type of case?
Would it not be better to have this as a page/section on your current site? This would mean that this new content would benefit from the authority of your current site and you'll avoid the duplicate content problems as you can just refer to the canonical version.
What's the problem you're trying to address by creating the separate site? And what do you want that site to achieve?
If you go ahead, then Issa's suggestion of using a canonical tag tell Google that the bio page on the new site is a copy of the bio on the old site is a good one.
I've got a client in a similar situation. They have a .com domain but they only offer services in Australia.
The good news is they rank just fine for the search terms that are relevant to their business (these are primarily queries with local intent).
In Webmaster Tools, you'll want to tell Google that your site is targeted to an AU audience. There's an option to set this under "Search Traffic" -> "International Targeting". Click the "Country" tab and then you can choose to target users in a particular country.
We also made sure that it was very clear from the content on the site that the business was based in Australia paying particular attention to local search optimisation (See: http://moz.com/learn/local ) - getting local business listings in reputable, authoritative directories etc.
It's best to think of it from a visitors point of view - what are the on-page signals you need to provide to give them confidence that they are dealing with an Australian site. (Local address, Australian phone number, mentions of relevant places / people / events, associations/badges/certifications from relevant Australian bodies etc...)
Hope this helps - Good Luck!
Doug.
It might be a better user experience to create a specific landing page for these services at either the old URL or using a 301 redirect from the old service page to the landing page. The page doesn't have these visible in the menu and explain to visitors that the service is no longer being offered by present the partner site as an alternative.
That way the redirect doesn't come as a surprise, it provides some value to your visitors (who'll be able to find someone offering the service) and give you partner site a link.
Would your client be happy to referrer real life leads to the partner/friends site?
My first suspicion was that it might be something to do with the content delivery network. I notice that the URL of the images is: "creativecalendars.nocompany1412096296.netdna-cdn.com/"
Looking at the http header on the cdn hosted images I can see that this is being correctly canonicalised to the local image.
What's the URL of the image sitemap? Can you share it so we can take a look?
I take it there are no errors being reported in Webmaster Tools for this image sitemap (Crawl -> Sitemaps).?
The ALT tags on your images appear to be very short/generic or missing. The image file names aren't too descriptive either. You might want to take a look at how you can improve these.
Isn't this more to do with the fact that the pages that Moz chooses to grade aren't necessarily the ones that you're optimising, but the ones that you're ranking for in the search results? If your home page is the only page with any authority, you can find it ranking for lots of your main keyword terms.
If the wrong page is ranking you might want to take a look at your site architecture/internal links and the language being used on the page - but be careful, the page ranking might not be a perfect match for the keyword - but it's a whole lot better than having no pages ranking at all!
Got to say I'm totally with Moosa on this one. Your link profile is a significant weakness.
I would start by looking at your business relationships/partnerships etc and see if you can get branded links from other sites related to your niche. There's little other content on your site that will learn more general/broader links. (There's no blog/resource/faq pages etc.)
Even though the link may be using branded anchor text, they are still coming from topically relevant sites.
Moz will crawl the site every week so you'll need to wait a few days for that to happen.
In the meantime you could try using the Moz Crawl tool to do a manual crawl. Depending on the size of your site this can take a few days so you might find it's just worth waiting for the weekly crawl. You can find the crawl tool here:
https://moz.com/researchtools/crawl-test
If you site isn't included in Google's index because it was inaccessible due to the robots,txt, then you'll want to go into Google Webmaster Tools and use the Crawl -> Fetch as Googlebot to kickstart Google crawling/indexing your site.
How big is the site in question? How many pages are there to de-index?
What does Google Webmaster Tools tell you about the old domain? Does it show pages being removed from the index over time?
If you do a site:{old domain} query, can you see that the number of results being returned is gradually decreasing?
How have you implemented the redirects?
Have you submitted a change of address request in Webmaster Tools?
On the new website, have you submitted a sitemap fom the old website as well as the new one?
What does the backlink profile on the old domain look like? Can you start to get authoritative links to the old site updated? What about any embedded internal links in your content - have they also been updated?
More guidance from Google here:
The position your page ranks at isn't fixed. It can depend on a lot of factors such as personalisation and geographical location of the searcher (local and international), search history and of course any changes during the time period.
You can add filters in Webmaster tools to just look at one country. (I've got one keyword that I'm ranking an average position of 4 in the UK and an average position of 16 in the US for example. The US market is a lot more competitive.).
If you click on the keyword in Webmaster Tools, you'll see the ranking page and a bit more of a breakdown of the positions you appeared at.
All this makes it difficult/impossible to use ranking position as a metric when you're trying to report the success of your campaign to your client.
But really, rankings shouldn't really matter to them - more organic traffic that's converting (more $$$!) is better.
There's lots of good usability info available, but the main problems are:
Contrast isn't just a problem caused by the colour of the text (but avoid the gray on gray text!) it's also caused by the weight of the font. The vogue for thin fonts also reduces contrast and readability. To compensate the text needs to be larger.
Not everyone has the eyes of a teenager! If you can - test your designs on someone(or more than one person) who represents your target audience.
You'll also want to consider the devices/resolution that your audience will be using. (kids with smartphones vs retired people with older desktops and low resolution displays.
Also keep line length in mind - especially with responsive design.
Here's a couple of Jakob Neilsen articles on fonts, (there's lots of other guidance out there though)
From Serif vs. Sans-Serif Fonts for HD Screens
Hope this helps.
Same here - I contacted support and they said "This is a known issue, and we are working on revamping that page entirely - you should see something new there pretty soon! :)".
There's this Mozinar from Dana Lookadoo that'll give you a good insight into the steps involved when supporting a website redesign project. The worksheets are pretty awesome too:
Stress-free Website Redesign for Search and Social
Website Redesign Planning Template
Preparation is key (which might not be the most helpful advice at this stage!)
The disavow tool isn't going to "fix" these 404s.
404's aren't always a bad thing. The warnings in GWT are just there to make you aware that there's potentially a problem with your site. It doesn't mean there IS a problem.
Is there content on your site that visitors clicking on these links should be arriving at? In which case you want to implement 301 redirects so that your visitors arrive on the most appropriate pate.
If there's nothing relevant on the site any more - a 404 error is perfectly acceptable.
Of course, you want to make sure that your 404 page gives the visitors the best chance/incentive to dig into the content on your site. Adding a nice obvious search box and/or links to most popular content may be a good idea. If you're getting lots of visitors from a particular site that you can maybe tailor your 404 message depending on the referrer.
The drawback here is that links pointing at 404 error pages won't pass link-equity. If there is value in the links, and you're happy that they're going to be seen a natural/authentic as far as google is concerned then you can always 301 redirect these.
Where you really should pay attention is where you have internal links on your site that are reporting 404s. These are under your control and you really don't want to give you visitors a poor experience with lots of broken links on your site.
Oh and it'seems important not to panic. We've seen updates get reversed and updates that get scaled back when their impact is just far too drastic.
I'very been watching one site that got hit for about 30 days before search traffic was restored only got the site to get hit again a month later.
Hi Robert.
Sounds like you're having plenty of fun!
From my experience, there is only one thing that you can really do to establish if the changes are algorithmic or not and that is to benchmark your clients sites against their competitors.
If you know how very similar sites are being affected by an algorithm update you can always tell if it's just you or all the similar sites in your niche.
It's not enough to pick a few random sites in that are ranking in serous for your main target terms. You need to dig a little deeper than that.
Who are your clients real competitor. Consider their target audience (demographics as well as geographical locaton). What about the size of the business and their suspected online budget. What about the approach they'be taken on their site, blogging frequency etc?
You'll want to monitor the performance of sites/businesses that are very similar, somewhat similar and dissimilar but related.
It can be reassuring to a client to be told that even though there'should been a massive shake up in the serps - they are still out raking their competitors.
Another thing to consider is how an algorithm update might change the search terms that people use to find your clients.
If the serps are now being dominated by large players, does this mean there is a knock on effect as searchers start using more specific keywords to find the little guys/in dependants?
Or don't they give a stuff and are just happy to go with whoever appears at the top of the search results.
My tips:
Don't just rely on rank trackers - make sure you take screen shots or capture the serps so you can determine the winners and loses following an update. You can then use this info to find out where the top 10 sites are ranking following an update. (Hard to do if you'be not tracked who they are)
Keep an eye on webmaster tools and track the impressions as well as clicks. Impressions may show the impact of an algorithm change more obviously than rank tracking or looking at your organic search numbers.
Make sure you keep a fantastically good record of every change that happens to the site and make sure your client understands the need for a robust change control process.
When trying to determine if it's an algorithm change or just a cockpit ... I'd be more likely to put my money on "cockup".
I've got a couple of clients who have an international market for their products or services. Both of these clients have a .co.uk domain.
For one site the US market is the major audience, the other it's european countries.
At the moment, neither of these clients have translated page or content targeted to a specific country. There are no plans at this stage to create such content.
Google considers the .co.uk to be targeted to the United Kingdom. The assumption is that by changing this to .com it will increase their international reach.
For both the domains, referral and direct traffic is much more diverse than organic (which as you'd expect is heavily UK weighted - but there is some international organic traffic)
Does anyone have any experience making such a change? How did the change affect your international reach/visibility?
Does anyone have any metrics that they'd like to share that could be used to make a case to clients?
(Note, I'm not interested in how you'd go about handling the domain change - I'm happy/confident about doing this.)
I think you're possibly trying to solve a problem that you don't have!
As long as you've got a good information architecture and submitting a dynamically updated sitemap then I don't think you need to worry about this. If you're got a blog, then sharing those on Google+ can be a good way to get them quickly indexed.
Don't worry. I'm not saying that in your case it'll be a "spider trap". Where I have seen it cause problems was on a site search result page that included a "related searches" and a bunch of technical issues.
Are your search results appearing in Google's index?
If you have a valid reason for allowing spiders to crawl this content then yes. you'll want to just noindex them. Personally I would challenge why you want to do this - is there a bigger problem trying to get search engines to discover new content on your site?
Using the noindex directive will (should) prevent search engines from including the content in their search results - which is good but it still means that the search engines are crawling this content. I've seen one (unlikely) instance where trying to crawl search pages created a bit of a spider trap[, wasting "crawl budget".
So the simplest approach is usually to use the robots.txt to disallow access to the search pages.
If you've got search results in the index already, then you'll want to think about continuing to let Google crawl the pages for a while and using the noindex to help get them de-indexed.
Once this has been done, then you can disallow the site search results in your robots.txt.
Another thing to consider is how the search spiders are finding your search results in the first place...
Good advice. When there's a potentially large impact (organic makes up such a large percentage of your traffic) you really do need to tread carefully.
I've seen more than one site that rolled out sweeping changes in, shall we say an overly enthusiastic manner, and accidentally remove themselves from search completely!
I would recommend doing some research and identifying the real low hanging fruit. What queries/topics/categories is there the greatest search opportunity. If you're already doing well for particular terms then there's not much scope for improvement and the impact of getting things wrong is worse.
Can you look at particular pages that are performing badly. Look for landing pages for organic search traffic that have poor engagement metrics. This can identify poorly targeted keywords, or missing/poor content, miss-understood search intent etc.
The performance of your snippet on the search result pages can be pretty variable and affected by a whole host of things.
The first big problem is advertising. If your ranking #1 on a SERP that has a high volume of ads then they will be diminishing the visibility of your site.
The ads you're competing with have a big advantage over your organic SERP. It's much easier for the advertiser to put specific language in their ad to entice searchers to click through. Matching the users intent and adding compelling benefits / reasons why they should visit their site. (eg: Prices you can't beat, free estimates, fitted in 1 day etc...)
Your snippet describes your business but it doesn't tell me "what's in it for me?" if I click though on the link. Your first words are "Custom Fabricator" which causes me some friction - This sounds like you might be b2b. Do you sell stuff direct to customers?
EGOL has some great advice about sharpening up your snippet.
You've got some reviews and testimonial - What is it that really matters to your customers? Sometimes it's not always what you think it is, or described in the language you'd use (as you're in the trade).
Another question is how much traffic is there for this search term and how "SEO" aware are your competitors. I've noticed that for some competitive terms the real search volume isn't as high as you think it is. I've come to the conclusion that certain terms can be inflated due to the amount of rank tracking going on!
How are your other keywords performing? Are you getting better results from keywords like "granite counter installation St Louis" for instance? Can you compare the CTR between keywords with a similar intent?
The thing is, you don't know what a good CTR for that particular SERP is. You don't know what you competitors (in ads, organic and local) are getting so it's difficult for you to say if you're earning your fair share.
Hi Dana,
When you click on the checkout button - what's the mechanism for taking people to the https:// site. Is it just that the checkout link uses https:// in it's link? Is there some javascript wizardry you're particularly concerned about?
Even though googlebot follows this one link to the https version of the cart, it will still have all the other links on the previous page queued up to follow (non-https) so I don't think this will stop the crawl at that point. It would be a nightmare if googlebot stopped crawling hte entire site everytime it went down a rabbit hole!
That's not to say that you wouldn't want to consider no-following your checkout button. I'm sure neither you, nor google want to the innards of the cart pages to be indexed? There's probably other pages you'd rather Googlebot spent it's time finding right?
My take on the Google blog about understanding Javascript is that the aim is to try and do a better job discovering content that might be hidden by Javascript/Ajax. It's a problem for google when the raw html that they're crawling doesn't accurately reflect the content that is displayed in front of a real visitor.
Well the good news is, after all that, the development server is now safely behind authentication and the level of traffic to the site has returned to previous levels for the last three weeks. Fingers crossed it won't be going anywhere.
It has been a wake-up call for the client though and it's started some useful discussions. Every cloud...
Thanks for the support!
Ad then, just as I say that - I see the following article:
Google's Update From Last Week Reversing Itself?
Sigh
Tracking rankings on this site is pretty impossible. Keywords/queries sending traffic are completely dependant on that day/week/months news stories. (I've come in late to this one - the client isn't tracking any specific keywords.)
Traffic appears to have suddenly reverted to "normal". Yesterday's traffic was right back to where we'd expect it to be and today is looking pretty good too. I'm looking to see if there's a similar correlation with SERP volatility (which I'd guess you'd expect if there was an algorithm update at play...)
I still feel as if I'd put my money on the large volume of links moving around.
Hi Jane,
As is all to frequent - it's a bit like hitting a moving target...
I don't believe there have been any other changes to the site, but I can't confirm that with anything approaching absolute confidence.
The one thing to be aware of is that links to this site are generated automatically based on the way news articles are tagged on "sister sites". This means that there's a considerable ebb and flow of links pointing to the site.
The development site that was pointing all these links additional links to the target site has now been placed behind some authentication (this happened a week or so ago). Even though some of the links from this site had be rediscovered before that was done - there was no sign of any upswing.
Nothing that I'm aware of has changed, but over the weekend/today we're now seeing a significant improvement in organic traffic (it's too early to talk about a recovery though.) GWT is also started showing a lift in the impressions too. We'll need to see what happens over the next couple of days.
I don't think that the disappearance of the links happened on exactly the same day as the site lost it's traffic. All I can tell is that ahrefs reported the -17k links on the same day. I've not been able to establish when exactly the links were removed. (Important lesson for the web developer here - make sure you keep a decent change-log!)
Following David's tip off, I did a bit of digging around any updates that may have affected things.
Mozcast showed a couple of days of activity on the 17/18th and Rank Ranger had an indication of an update at the same time. Serpmetrics etc also had similar indications.
Unfortunately I've not managed to get any info on the kind of sites/pages that were affected or what features they might have had in common so it's hard to say whether we're looking at the impact of a update on google's side or whether it's the links/local changes that are the cause. (Or some combo of the two!)
The good news is that it's been a wake-up call to the client. They now realise that the site in question has some significant weaknesses that need to be addressed and can't/shouldn't just rely on these "unnatural" links from their sister sites!
"Keep calm, don't panic and don't over-react!"
Hi David, do you have any details? If this is the case it would be nice to compare sites and see what the common factors might be.
I don't think it's affected any anchor ratios. The is a huge level of diversification in the anchor texts used. 17k out of 900k isn't a large proportion.
The interlinking from sister sites has been in place for a long long time - it's not something that's been added recently.
I've dropped you a PM.
I've been asked to look at a site that has lost 70/80% if their search traffic.
This happened suddenly around the 17th April. Traffic dropped off over a couple of days and then flat-lined over the next couple of weeks.
The screenshot attached, shows the impressions/clicks reported in GWT.
When I investigated I found:
I did discover that ahrefs.com showed that a large number of links were reported lost on the 17th April. (17k links from 1 domain). These links reappeared around the 26th/27th April. But traffic shows no sign of any recovery.
The links in question were from a single development server (that shouldn't have been indexed in the first place, but that's another matter.)
Is it possible that these links were, maybe artificially, boosting the authority of the affected site? Has the sudden fluctuation in such a large number of links caused the site to trip an algorithmic penalty (penguin?)
Without going into too much detail as I'm bound by client confidentiality - The affected site is really a large database and the links pointing to it are generated by a half dozen or so article based sister sites based on how the articles are tagged. The links point to dynamically generated content based on the url.
The site does provide a useful/valuable service/purpose - it's not trying to "game the system" in order to rank. That doesn't mean to say that it hasn't been performing better in search than it should have been.
This means that the affected site has ~900,000 links pointing to is that are the names of different "entities".
Any thoughts/insights would be appreciated. I've expresses a pessimistic outlook to the client, but as you can imaging they are confused and concerned.
Thanks Matt, Andy,
Looking at how they've had automated link building done to every page on their domain it does look like it's automated link building gone wrong.
You don't normally see so many boring product pages getting as many links as they have!
It wouldn't surprise me if were trying to supply the sitemap.xml or rss feed as a list of target URLs to build links to and ended up building links directly to these.
During some competitive research recently I discovered one of my clients competitors sites had an interesting backlink profile.
Looking at the top-pages report in Open Site Explorer the home page was the #1 page (as you'd expect) with 2.5k links from about 500 linking root domains
The second page was the sitemap.xml (~1.5k links, 400 linking root domains) and the third was their /feed page (again, ~1.5k links, 350 linking root domains).
Links to these two pages aren't something that would happen naturally (particularly the sitemap.xml).
There's a whole load of evidence for nasty low quality link building such as over-optimised keyword rich anchor text, comment spam, and even some blog/article based link networks.
It's a pretty nasty niche with lots of cut-throat affiliate marketing.
My guess here is that someone may have made a mistake using an automated link building too, but I'd be interested in what you might think? Have you seen this before?
(Sorry, I can't reveal the domains in question as I'm bound by an NDA.)
Here's a video from Matt Cutts on the topic. He says that subdomains and subdirectories are "roughly equivalent".
SEE: Should I structure my site using subdomains or subdirectories? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MswMYk05tk
"Roughly equivalent" is a big woolly, but what matters more is how you use these subdomains (or subdirectories)
If you're talking about a blog, then what really matters is the value of the content that you create on your blog and how you interlink your blog content with the rest of your site - both in your main navigation and and relevant on-page links.
If your blog articles earn links and social shares then you want to make sure that your linking on to your relevant "money pages" on your site to pass authority and relevance to the target pages.
The main thing you want to do is give your readers, the ones that are interested and engaged, somewhere to go to find out more about your products and services. A nice juicy compelling call to action or a useful next step...
Where subdomains can be useful is where you want part of your site to be hosted on a particular third-party tool. Sub directories are a lot easier to set up and maintain.
SEMRush has a whole load of keyword data on the domain you mentioned. For merchantcircle.com, it's got (at the time of checking) the ranking poisition for 424,216 keywords and the url of the ranking page.
(Unfortunately it doesn't have the page that you mentioned.)
Looking at the page, there really isn't all that much content, so determining a keyword that the page might plausibly be raning for is pretty easy. A quick look at the <title>and the <h1> does give you a pretty big clue that "Spokane Painting Pros" is the likely target keyword.</p> <p>The Moz Rank Tracker does report that for "Spokane Painting Pros", the specific page mentioned, is ranking at #9, although it can't tell me if the site is getting any organic traffic for that keyword. (Google Webmaster Tools might have some more information on the keyword including impressions and click-throughs)</p></title>
Hiya. The "critical" in the screen shot is used to indicate the importance of the on-page factor. It's not a judgement of your optimisation for that factor. (You've got a green tick next to the items so you're ok.)
In the screenshot, the only factor that requires attention is the "Broad Usage in Page Title". which is rated as an "easy fix" and doesn't have the green tick next to it.
Hope that helps clear up any confusion?
