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The reputation and integrity of the major players would be at stake here. If they changed their user agent identification (to spoof Googlebot or Bing or whatever) that could be detected, and they would be castigated. The crawler IP address and its user agent ID would be out of sync...
This seems to be very common... home pages should outrank deeper pages, yes?. Are there any external backlinks (from relevant, authoritative sites) to your deep-content landing pages? Perhaps all your credibility resides on your home page. Have you done any off-page SEO for the landing pages?
Just one factor out of many, but if something as insignificant as the bounce-rate for that URL for your specific search term being higher than another URLs bounce rate... is an example of how dynamic the SERPs can be.
If I click on yours, and go immediately back to Google SERP page, and then click on another URL... and this happens thousands of times could that impact your SERP position next month?
Was there a change in your bounce rate during the period?
SEO does not exist in isolation. Your actions and your competitors actions are concurrent. Perhaps a competitor has improved their (on-page and/or off-page) SEO more than you did in the same time-frame? Don't assume that negative SEO is the only effect. There are many things happening simultaneously and in many places.
Did their backlink profile change? Did their content change? Did yours? Were there any algorithm changes? There could be many, many factors to consider in detail when trying to understand reasons for any ranking changes, positive and negative.
URL Readability = Clickability (providing the URL is not too long.)
When you see results in SERPS, the readability (reading ease for a human reader) can help your click-thru rates. It helps the reader to understand if they are interested in your content. Also, it helps search engines to know what your page is about. Underscores are not nearly as good. Category names are often automatically hyphenated by most shopping cart systems, no?
Hi John and others. It's been over a year John, did you get listed yet? As noted above, some categories may not have editors who are active, and some editors reject listings for any reason, accepting only the best, most important, and most relevant ones. Some categories are almost impossible, even if your site is relevant and has quality content.
Were you successful in getting a DMOZ listing for your site?
It seems that Shopify (shopping cart platform) does this automatically?
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Have you inspected the backlink profile for your page vs. the top ranking competitors? What are you seeing as far as relevance, quality and quantity of inbound links?
If you are looking for directories, this is a good resource:
http://info.vilesilencer.com/niche
Where there is good page rank and relevance, a few directory links may not hurt, use with caution.
If you have many inbound links or landing page traffic for the old page URLs, will you be redirecting those old URLs to your new URLs?
Voted +1 for Ricky's response, good suggestions. Have you looked http://www.blogengage.com/ for ideas? Depending on your market specifics, you may need to design more tailored strategies and tactics.
Have you looked at Ahrefs, MajesticSeo, AuthorityLabs? It may depend on your specific keywords, whether or not you will find historical data with any given tool. Also, your historic ranking (average SERP ranking) can be available in Google Webmaster Tools / Google Analytics.
I'll just leave this here.
https://twitter.com/SEOmessiah/status/425417000186150913
What is the value to you? Exposure? Traffic? Links?
Duplicate content has little value in the eyes of Google.
And this:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/demystifying-duplicate-content-penalty.html
If a directory has good page rank, there may be some value there, but that needs to be tested and proven.
If there is a good directory of directories, this is it:
Demonstrate competence by responding directly to the concerns of the odesk request with relevant and well-grounded SEO practices, guidelines, and plans. Give some examples of similar work you've done from your portfolio.
A house built on sand? Low quality pages will not attract natural links. Without good content, there's no there, there.
Build a quality site with good content, and useful design, relevant to your prospects and clients needs, before you do anything else. Deliver value first.
Even with fewer links, a site with higher quality content can often outrank a site that has more links, and will also be more link-worthy.
Hi Adam, More good points. As you wrote:
How to efficiently and iteratively check and re-check this work with SEO-Migration-QA Tools? ... For a list of a few hundred URLs .. old ..vs.. new? (Without a labor-intensive process.)
Surely, this is a common problem and has already been faced, and solved, by many.
If a such a Porting-QA tool does not yet exist, there must be a good market for one?
Jared has added some good points. Have you looked at your competitors? Understanding how and why their sites outrank your site? Have you prioritized your entire list of potential keywords and search queries?
Hi Ryan, and thanks, again! You do raise good points on Quantitative vs. Qualitative factors.
Yes, the human component is important, but Googlebot+Algo is a mechanical device, and given the list of top 100 URLs and top 200 keywords, prioritized, it should be possible to inspect each page, old .vs. new, using an SEO-QA tool, mechanically. If the porting team invented random garbage for HTML Titles, Meta Descriptions, etc. then the new SERPs would be devastating to the business as soon as the test site goes live.
The new site may LOOK better to the naked eye than the old one, but Google will not treat the new site very kindly in the SERPs. There is always room for improvement but when a site already has had lots of SEO work done, and the porting team omits that from the new site, a disaster looms.
Checking a prioritized list of ON-Page SEO ranking factors for a prioritized list of 100 URLs and prioritized list of 200 keywords should be a fairly mechanical task. A QA tool could do it in a few minutes, while a human may take a few weeks.
**The SEO-QA-Tool could indicate a prioritized list of major SEO gaps and problems to be fixed before going live, for a HUMAN to review and take well-considered action on. **
_Update/Edit :: SEO is never really DONE, there is always room for improvement and things are always changing... even the SEO Ranking Factors. There are currently accepted authoritative opinions that have been published here, and in other places, for SEO Ranking Factors and generally accepted SEO standards. The difference between $4 per hour and $100 per hour SEO work is the quality of the SEO tools being used, and how well those SEO standards are understood, and even the experts often disagree. _
Ref: http://moz.com/search-ranking-factors and http://moz.com/blog/ranking-factors-2013 and http://moz.com/blog/future-of-search-ranking-factors and http://searchengineland.com/seotable
_Update/Edit-2: The key point here being, the SEO features of the OLD site have not been migrated to the NEW site, so the porting team has more work to do. How to QA that work without a huge labor expense? Some basic SEO-Migration-QA tools are needed, based on a sound SEO methodology such as: _http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2115729/10-Steps-to-a-Successful-SEO-Migration-Strategy
Hi Ryan, Thanks for taking time to reply. You have some good points, but for the purely MECHANICAL factors such as HTML Title, Meta Description, IMG file names and HTML alt tags, and listing all the internal (and external) links with anchor text — side-by-side, old .vs. new — an automated On-Page SEO QA tool — would surely be very useful to assist anyone porting a website. I am surprised not to find one online as yet.
It's a kind of in-vitro A/B testing. Without such a QA procedure, going live with a test site could be disastrous, if the old site ranks well, the new site may rank very poorly.
We do have a list mapping old-url to new-url, prioritized. We have a list of keywords, prioritized.
Surely there is a niche market for some kind of automated Porting-QA reporting tool?
In a perfect world, there would be an SEO tool to predict the impact of porting before going live. Look before you leap.
It could be the difference in your on-page optimization. Have you checked competiton vs. your pages with the http://moz.com/researchtools/on-page-grader yet?
When you are porting a website, there are several key considerations.
Do you have access to Google Analytics? Google Webmaster Tools? Historical data?
Besides Google SERPs, your traffic may be coming from many different sources. How many are REFERRED from other sites, via external links? How many are DIRECT traffic from old visitors who saved the URL as a favorite, or e-mailed the old URL to a friend?
That is why you need to know your top landing pages, and make sure to handle redirecting old URLs to new URLs.
Since you are changing the URLs, is there any way to redirect each of you OLD URLs to their corresponding new URL? Unless you can do that, your porting will be one step forward, two steps back. Until Google ranks all your new pages (URLs) it will be hit-or-miss. Google may take days, weeks, or months to rank and settle your new URLs into the SERPs.
I use GSERP.com as well as AuthorityLabs, GWT and GA, along with several other tools to track keyword performance :: day-to-day and month-to-month :: for several sites and many dozens of keywords.
It is very common to see individual search queries vary up and down, DAY-TO-DAY, by a lot in the SERPs. Sometimes they will settle down at a steady SERP ranking, sometimes not. There are so many variables —— What is Google doing today with fine-tuning of adjustments in the algo? What are your competitors doing? What are users clicking on today?
Rather than look at noise in your results day-by-day, the trends month-to-month are far more interesting and useful, IMHO.
UPDATE/EDIT ::
It's just my own speculation, but I think Google has built-in a "hunting" feature where the SERP position is tested, up and down, by quite a lot — before it settles on a stable place . . .
Are users clicking on your SERP result, and staying in your website, or are they immediately bouncing back to Google search to look for something better? If you could answer that, you may find reasons for the downward trends in your SERPs.
What, specifically, are you measuring? What tools are you using?
Hey Mozzers, Are there any good Migration-SEO-QA Tools out there?
Given a prioritized list of URLs and prioritized list of Keywords, is there a tool that can compare basic SEO factors, old URL vs. new URL, and identify all the specific gaps that need to be fixed?
Here is a basic SEO-QA acceptance checklist, for porting any website.
. . . Until the porting work is completed we cannot accept the new website.
Givens:
1. A list of the Top 100 URLs from the old site, prioritized by conversion rates, landing page traffic, and inbound links.
2. A list of the planned 404 - mapped URLs, old to new site, from the porting team.
3. A list of the current Top 200 Keywords, prioritized.
4. A good amount of SEO work has already been done, by several professionals, for the current (old) site.
**How to evaluate if the new site will be acceptable to Google? Check ON-PAGE SEO Factors... **
**. . . that is, the NEW site must be AS GOOD AS (or better than) the current (old) site,
in the eyes of Google, to preserve the On-Page SEO work already done. **
Criteria:
Potential porting defects:
Notes:
_Any Migration-QA Tools?_Given a prioritized list of URLs and prioritized list of Keywords, is there a tool that can compare basic On-Page SEO factors, old URL vs. new URL, and identify most of the specific gaps that need to be fixed before going live with the new site?
_ *** Edit: Any comments on the SEO criteria, tools, or methods will be appreciated!_
An image with no image? That would be just like an HTML error. It would be a mistake to think that doint this would be good for your SEO.
Here is a technique that may work for you.
In Google Analytics, you can go to:
Acquisition...
Keywords...
Organic... (Or paid)
Sort by highest bounce rate.
You may see a lot of one-offs that may not be very relevant, so it's useful to add some filtering.
So, set some advanced filters, such as:
Site usage... Bounce rate... greater than 50
Site usage... Visits... greater than 5.
Which may filter out some of the noise.
Sort by bounce rate to see the highest bounce rate keywords.
Remember that more than half will be not provided, probably, but this will give you a sampling of keywords with the highest bounce rate.
Also, perhaps the bounce rate is high because they found what they wanted to know on that page very quickly. Sometimes a satisfied visitor bounces.
Here is a correction :: Posting on Google+ is not the same as Google+1's.
Google +1's Amazing Correlation with Higher Search Rankings - Moz
http://moz.com/blog/google-plus-correlations
by Cyrus Shepard - in 11,464 Google+ circles
Aug 20, 2013 - Many publishers have added Google+ authorship information to their websites in order for author photos to appear in Google search results. . . . _(Edit: This should say "posting on Google+" instead of Google +1s. It's clear that Google doesn't use the raw number of +1s directly in its search algorithm, but Google+ posts have SEO benefits unlike other social platforms.) _— August 20th, 2013 - Posted by Cyrus Shepard
Ricky,
One question.. All things being equal (and they never are) are you certain that the ONLY change that Google sees is the WWW change?
There are so many ranking factors that can be involved when creating a new site to replace an old site, such as keywords in the context of each page, keywords in Title tag, Meta description, text-on-page, IMG tags, etc...
Was this a direct port of the old content of each page, Titles, Descriptions, etc? Page-for-page?
What about the IP address of the web host, and whatever Google thinks about that neighborhood.
There are so many factors to consider that could explain a change in SERP ranking. Rankings can fluctuate up or down, day-to-day, depending on hundreds of factors, including whatever the competition may be doing...
Thanks for the vote, but if you have something to say, why not add it? Is my interpretation of the ranking factors wrong?
Interesting... one of my clients has the opposite problem. Bounce rate is over 50% yet average pages per visit is over 4 and average time per page is over 3 minutes. Peter's suggestion seems to be a very good one. Check individual pages to see who needs fixing the most. Put more oil on the squeaky wheels.
Note that **http://moz.com/search-ranking-factors **shows:
URL Starts with 'www' 0.03
Indicates that SEO experts have determined thru testing, search engines may slightly prefer the WWW to be canonical, if I am interpreting that correctly.
So, you may want to make the WWW version the canonical one.
Use a 301 to redirect the non-WWW to the WWW version, for the entire site.
Use Google Webmaster tools to set the WWW as the preferred domain.
Also, your # of Google +1's may need help. Have you compared your backlink profile with that of your competitors lately?
GA allows many sites per "Account" and many "Accounts" per Gmail login. So in GA, I created a few dozen Accounts and put up to 50 clients into each Account. Most clients have one or two websites, some have more, so I put the larger clients into separate Accounts (UA-nnnnn-xx where nnnnn is the Account and -xx is the website property.)
In Google Analytics I am monitoring over 500 sites for various clients. ALL of that is under one Gmail login for admin, and you can assign access privileges to each web property uniquely, so each client can look over their results privately via their own Google login.
Hi Adnan,
If I understand your question, you have a page for each specific product, yes? So, you may want THAT page to rank better than most of your OTHER pages, for a specific search query relevant to the name of that product?
This is a very common issue for any shopping cart system. So, any good shopping cart CMS would be SEO friendly enough to ensure the product name is used prominently in the page title tag, and in an H1 or H2 heading tag, IMG alt tag, etc... Then, it's up to you to have a high-quality and relevant product description (page text) that uses good SEO for your important and related keywords and interesting content. That is what's important for on-page SEO.
I am not yet sure how hummingbird would affect this, just use the basic SEO good practices for on-page content, and you should do well.
The question then becomes, have you prioritized your keywords, including long-tail, for each product and it's own webpage? Have you optimized your content accordingly?
Hope that helps.
1% response rate is much lower than I would have expected from public libraries. Have your respondents given you any feedback?
A more personal approach may have much better results. You could have your local staff ask a parent to visit the library and speak to someone in authority, starting with the reference desk, who are usually very helpful. Ask the parent to get the name of a person who has authority to add this type of content to the library's website, and approach them directly. That may even be the library reference desk staff. Give the parent a briefing and something to deliver to the library staff.
The library may be more responsive to a library patron, a local parent, who would recommend your services.
In my own experience, good category names are very, very important. Have you prioritized your top 10 or 20 keyword search phrases? Those should be worked into your top level categories. I have recently seen reasonable benefits from redesigning categories and subcategories, and of course 301 redirecting popular old ones to the new ones diligently.