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I'm doing some work on an ecommerce site for an electronics distributor and I've been seeing these "Via this intermediate link" notations from GWT under our "Links To Your Site" section.  I understand how and why these notations would normally be displayed, however, these links are mainly coming from our direct competitors.  Fearing that we might be a victim of a negative SEO attack, I looked into the situation and noticed that all of the links are from PDF's (technical data sheets) provided by the manufacturer that both we and our competitors use on our product detail pages.  This still seems odd to me because, we download these pdf's and host them on our own site on our own servers under a completely different name (as I'm assuming our competitors do as well), yet, there still seems to be a connection between our sites through these PDF's.

I've included a screenshot of some examples.  Since we have thousands of SKU's on our site - with technical PDF's for nearly all of them - we're seeing a lot of links from competitors sites.  I'm not sure if this is good or bad, I'm just trying to understand the situation more clearly.

Has anyone had any similar experiences or some information from Google that might explain what I'm seeing here?

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I work in an industry where companies are often being bought up by other larger companies. When this happens, there is often a change in the company name to incorporate the parent company name as well.  My company is a distributor of these products and I'm wondering if there are best practices for marketing both the original brand name and the new brand name for the same product?  We're trying to avoid any duplicate product detail pages, so dynamically generating the same page for two different names is not ideal.

Anyone have any tips?

Thanks!

Hi Patrick,

I'm really glad I found your question/post.  I'm looking at a similar scenario in which there has been a major uptick on 3/11/14 for Direct Traffic (and similarly, a slight drop in Organic).  We also have a phone tracking system that works with Cookies to display a certain telephone number based on the web referral that is reporting a similar anomaly. Many of our customers are a little "old school" and still use Internet Explorer to browse our website (about 50% of the users) and I noticed that, more than any other browser, IE showed the greatest transparency between the spike in Direct and the drop in Organic - all coinciding with a specific date: 3/11/2014 (see below).

It's also interesting to note that Google Webmaster Tools launched their Index Status Tool update on 3/9/14.  I've always been under the impression that Google Analytics tracked both http and https traffic together, but since the update to the GWT tool, is it possible that the traffic was tracked as Direct rather than Organic (it's sad to say, but yes, we just recently noticed that Google had indexed both http and https versions of our website by (our) mistake, so, who knows...).

I also noticed that Microsoft had issued Vulnerability reports for that specific date as well - and one of the main technologies they listed as "effected" was Internet Explorer.  So.... lots of detective work, but I do like the checklist that Paul Thompson had put together for you.  Very helpful indeed!

Please let us know if you have any updates to your organic/direct traffic numbers!

suF6RID

We first rolled out the Homepage link reduction project back in July of 2013.  I was hoping to make it a full year, but it seems as though the higher-ups are ready to move on (seeing as though it's been close to 10 months, I can't really blame them).

However, I should mention that we did see a hefty increase in the overall number of pages in Google's index. It's really too bad that those indexed pages never really converted in to web traffic, but I would say that we have some site clean-up to perform and some page quality issues we should be checking in to as well.

I suppose it's nice to know that when we end up making the proper changes to our site content/quality, we could try and adjust our site architecture again (and this time we'll have some figures to benchmark against).

Thanks again!

Hi David, thanks for getting back to me so quickly!

We're mostly just using JavaScript to exchange the telephone numbers and cookies to keep track.

Essentially, we would use a different telephone number for each directory/broker-site/search engine/etc... that we saw significant traffic from (enough traffic to warrant a unique telephone number).

Thanks for getting back to me, Donna!  I would have thought the same thing as what you mentioned, however, we programmed a bit of a workaround to reduce the links on the homepage, yet, putting one more step between the homepage and the product pages (i.e. if the product pages used to be 3 steps away, but with over 1,000 links on the homepage, we put the product pages 4 steps away and reduced the total number of homepage links to under 300).  The results weren't terribly affective (effective?), but the reduction in the homepage links did not boost traffic at all.  In fact, there was an almost immediate drop (although, not too significant) in traffic across the board.

There's no doubt in my mind that the workaround we implemented was not the cleanest way to roll out the changes, but I would have thought we would see just a slight change in traffic - in the right direction, that is.

Either way, thanks again for getting back to me.  We've decided to rollback the changes that were made so I'll be sure to keep you updated on the trends we see afterwards.

Regards,

Gerry Mendiola

I suppose this is somewhat of a stretch for SEO, but probably still falls under the Search Marketing umbrella. My ecommerce site issues a specific phone number to the user based on the referral path they used to get to the site (i.e. Our print media will have #A printed on it, while users that find the site via Organic Google Search will see #B, and etc... for other referral paths).

Recently, we've seen a fairly significant dip in phone calls via the Organic Google Search telephone number. We've tried troubleshooting the issue and there doesn't appear to be a programming issue and our sales numbers do not reflect the change in call traffic.  However, we have noticed that when visiting our website via encrypted.google.com, our default web number is being displayed, rather than the intended Organic Google Search telephone number.  Do people still use encrypted.google.com?

The dip in the phone traffic began in February and had continued to drop through April.  Has anyone seen anything similar or possibly dealt with a similar issue that you can offer some insight on?  Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

There's a lot of debate out there as far as too many internal links or too many levels of a website.  I've seen the videos from Rand and I've read a lot of the posts here on Moz, but I just want to know where everyone stands on this.  Anyone have experience with architecture while working on a large E-commerce site? We're talking Millions of pages and over 1,000 links off the homepage alone.

Anyways, I don't want to get too specific.  I mostly just want to hear about experiences of the community.

Thanks!

Thanks for getting back to me, Oleg.  I think I understand what you're saying, but my question is still: Why would Google ignore the rel=canonical and serve up search results for the QueryString version of the URL? Analytics is showing that the hits to this URL are from an Organic origin.

Not sure what to make of it.

My Google Analytics is reporting organic traffic for URL's with a QueryString attached, even though there's a Canonical tag that points to the preferred (non-QueryStringed) version.

Would the best way to handle this be the GWT URL Parameters Tool?  I'm fairly unfamiliar with the tool, but after some research, it looks like this might be the best way to go.  Does anyone have any good/bad advice for using the tool?

Thanks!

You're right, Martijn.  Just noticed this in the tracking code this morning:

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My site has just recently (or maybe not so recently...) had a great deal of https URL's indexed (I was really only able to find this out thanks to the recent update to the GWT Index Status). It appears that Googlebot picked up an ssl somewhere (I already know where) on my site and then proceeded to crawl and index pages with https rather than http.  Since I understand the issue, it should be an easy fix.

My question is, does Google Analytics support (track) both http AND https for one site, or would I need to set up two different tracking codes for http and https?  I figured that I might as well grab some data from the https pages that are indexed before I try and remove them. I've done a little research on using Groupings/Groups but I figured I would reach out to the MOZ community to see if anyone else has worked with a similar issue.

Thanks!

Hi Anthony!

These are all great responses to your question.  It's funny that just yesterday I was researching this very topic for my own company and came across this post which shed some light on the subject as well.  It'll also be interesting to see how things shape up with the new SERP redesign by Google.

Keep us updated!

Thanks,

Gerry

Thanks for the response Paddy,

I posted a similar question about OSE not too long ago and received a similar response (about looking at the mozscape update). I suppose that my only issue is that I'm really not seeing the new links generate in the established section, even after an update.  I've been doing a lot of work in reaching out and developing new links from good sources, but I want to make sure I can see the results/data from all of the link building.

Thanks again!  Cheers!

What is the difference between a "Just Discovered" link and an "Established" link in OSE? How long does it generally take for a just discovered link to migrate in to the established link section?  Are there other parameters that need to be met before a link can be referred to as established?

Sorry for all the questions in one post, but I've had the same "just discovered" links in OSE for quite some time and have yet to see them migrate over to the "established" link section.  I was hoping that when these links become established that it would help improve my site DA.  Can  anyone shed any light on this issue or have any other comments?

Thanks MOZ!

Thanks Joel!  I've bookmarked the Mozscape API Update page.  That helps a lot.

Cheers!

Hello Moz,

I was wondering if anyone knows how Moz goes about updating their OSE data?  I've been doing some link building that past couple of weeks, and I notice that the number of "just discovered" links will update every time I gain a new link, however, the "Linking domains" number doesn't (or maybe, rarely) update.  I've checked through the "Linking domains" list to see if the link is there, but none of the links I've just recently obtained have shown up under that metric.

Does anyone have any insight on this or is anyone experiencing the same issue?  Thanks for reading!

Thanks for the feedback, Federico!  That actually helps a lot and also helps confirm what our programmer has just done (which is changed all the canonical tags to the uppercase URL).  I guess now we'll play the waiting game and see if Google reduces the number or duplicates after it's next crawl.

Thanks again!

Hi MOZ, I was hoping that someone could help shed some light on an issue I'm having with URL structure and the canonical tag.

The company I work for is a distributor of electrical products and our E-commerce site is structured so that our URL's (specifically, our product detail page URL's) include a portion (the part #) that is all uppercase (e.g: buy/OEL-Worldwide-Industries/AFW-PG-10-10).

The issue is that we have just recently included a canonical tag in all of our product detail pages and the programmer that worked on this project has every canonical tag in lowercase instead of uppercase.  Now, in GWT, I'm seeing over 20,000-25,000 "duplicate title tags" or "duplicate descriptions".

Is this an issue?  Could this issue be resolved by simply changing the canonical tag to reflect the uppercase URL's?  I'm not too well versed in canonical tags and would love a little insight.

Thanks!

Hi DogiDs,

Any update on whether or not Reziew or Reevoo performed to your standards?  We are currently seeking out a review system for our website, as well, and I found this post by searching for info on Reziew.  We're also in talks with a company called Pluck from Demand Media.  Their system seems very robust, but a little higher on the price point than what we were hoping for.  Reziew is priced quite modestly, which makes it a definite contender, but there's always that fear of the product being "cheap" for that same reason.

Please let me know which you decided to go with.  Thanks!