Did you leave the old sitemaps (xml and html) up until Google got all your new pages indexed?

My understanding (could be wrong) is that leaving the old sitemaps provides a simple way for Google to keep seeing that "oldpage.html" is redirected to "newpage.html".

The more often Google sees the redirect, the faster they index properly. And an easy way to make sure they keep seeing the change is to leave your old sitemaps up for awhile.

Hi Martijn,

I checked my FIrefox, and not seeing any plugins or addons that would cause that issue.

It is strange that it is only that one page. None of my other similar pages do that...

Did it happen on your computer? Any other ideas?

Greg

Hi Julie,

The domain authority on the pages all look good. But what matters more to the SEO impact is how related the linking page/site is to the site that they are linking to.

You did not say what the target site was. But if the target site is for a musician or artist, then the spotify or creativemarket links would be more valuable than the moz link.

Hope this helps,

We have a https site and have been checking our 301 re-directs from the old http pages.

All seem fine except one...and it is ONLY weird in Firefox (it works OK on Chrome and IE). The http version of that one URL is redirecting to the correct https URL, but with ?ref=wookmark being appended to the end. Why?

On the Firefox browser only...

http://www.easydigging.com/broadfork(dot)html

301 redirects to

https://www.easydigging.com/broadfork(dot)html?ref=wookmark

From the research I did Wookmark seems to be a JQuery feature, but we do not use it (as far as I know). And even if we do, it probably should not pop up when doing a 301 redirect. I did try clearing my cache a few times, with no change in the problem.

Any help is appreciated

Anybody else have ideas or suggestions about this question?

Happy New Year!

Greg

Hi John,

Sure thing! They are mostly images we made for a Yard Drainage Guide we wrote years ago that used to be very popular.

Here is image #1 - https://www.easydigging.com/sitebuilder/images/drainage_33-600x388.jpg

And here is image #3 - https://www.easydigging.com/sitebuilder/images/drainage_22-600x386.jpg   *MOZ is showing a Link Status of 403 (forbidden) for this and many other images. But not sure why since the images are easily viewed and appear in the drainage guide.

Attached is the screenshot of the "Links>TopPages" screen from Moz Pro.

moz-image-urls.jpg

Looking at my "Links > Top Pages" report shows the top fifteen being image URLs (jpg files). Weird or normal?

Clicking the "View Links" icon for a few of the image URL's shows that the best links in the list have DA in the 30's and 40's, and some PA in the 20's. But the linking sites have names that SOUND pretty crappy (from sites with names that sound weird or spammy)

QUESTION 1: Do links to image URLs...   A) help the overall SEO of the site's HTML pages,   B) only help the specific page the image appears on,  C) or are they of no value to the regular pages?

QUESTION 2: What to do with the obsolete images? (images still hosted on our site, but do not appear on any pages)  If I remove the images, the links will be lost. Which is good if the links are hurting us, but it would be bad for our SEO if the links are helping (unless we 301 the obsolete images to current ones)

Thanks!

Hi Ian Watson. We have 2 questions (hopefully you are still monitoring this thread)

1. In the case of an old-page.html that is 301 redirected to current-page.html, will Link Explorer automatically assign inbound links going to old-page.html to the current-page.html ?

2. What is the purpose of showing "Internal, followed links" and "Internal, nofollowed links" on the COMPARE LINK PROFILES PAGE?  What good does it do to know or compare those counts?

Thank you!

Thanks Roman. I am good with doing redirects, and it is not many pages, so making coding mistakes that cause chaos is not really the issue (though it is always good to avoid).

My question is really about using some of the "link juice" being directed to useless outdated images to improve the ranking of some deep but related pages on our site.

There are probably dozens of reasons, not that they are good reasons   For my ecommerce sites it is because we want to keep the viewers (potential customers) focused on the product pages (where they can buy stuff)

The blog pages BRING a few people to the site, and that's good. But for the people who are already on the home or product pages, we don't need to show them that there is a blog available, we just want to keep them focused on shopping.

My site is 10 years old, and has always ranked well for the variety of garden tools it sells.  Looking at our Moz Pro > Links > Top Pages report I see that many of the "pages" are actually image URLs. And many of those are images we do not even use anymore (though they are still hosted).

Question: As a way of gaining some link juice to deeper pages, what about 301 redirecting some of those old images over to appropriate pages? (example: redirecting old-weeding-hoe.jpg to the page garden-hoes.html)

Would it be worthwhile? Would it be safe?

Thanks for any and all input!

Thanks everybody!

It looks I need to "sort of" consider them in my analysis

Thanks iStorm. I just looked at the Factors article and see NoFollowed in there as part of the grand total number of links.

What I still want to hear more about is if they should be included when looking at things like a site's Anchor Text distribution....

Some SEO articles say we can completely ignore NoFollow links. Other articles say they still matter - but then are very vague on what they count for or against. So which is it really?

I do realize that they can provide traffic, and for that they are worthwhile. But it is SEO I am asking about...

The SEO purpose I am most concerned with is the Link Profile. Separating the Follows from the NoFollows often gives really different anchor text distributions.

If they don't matter, why do MOZ and other SEO Analysis programs still include them in their standard reports? (I can see some benefit to having them as part of the in-depth reports)

So what's your thoughts? Can we 100% ignore the NoFollows for our SEO analysis?

Hi Carl. No warnings in WMT.

And since the vast majority of the links are NOFOLLOW, they shouldn't count towards any algorithmic penalty either. (that's the common opinion at least)

This question is about one of my ecommerce sites (www.BestDryingRack.com) which is ranking really well for one of it's money words, and not at all for the other.

See the attached screenshot for a quick overview of the riddle we are facing....

Looking at the "Anchor Text" tab in my MOZ Campaign or in Open Site Explorer would lead you to think that I have WAY too many links with my #1 money phrase. (clothes drying rack, or laundry drying rack, as they are synonyms). And since my product page doesn't rank at all for that keyword, that's what I thought too. (My home page does show up on page 3 or 4 when Googling clothes drying rack)

On the other hand, my #2 money phrase (umbrella clothesline, or outdoor umbrella clothesline) has it's product page ranking quite well in the middle of the first page of Google results.

Digging deeper into the links spreadsheet from Open Site Explorer shows that most of the links are NOFOLLOW (which means they don't really count, right?)

As the screenshot shows, here is the breakdown of links that count:

FOLLOW links with Brand and URL anchor text totals 17

FOLLOW links with #1 money phrase anchor text totals 10, with only 1 to proper product page

FOLLOW links with #2 money phrase anchor text totals 3, with all 3 to proper product page

So the riddle is... Can we improve the ranking of the #1 money phrase by just getting a small number of matching anchor text links to the proper page? (making it like #2's situation)

Or do we also need to get rid of some of the 9 links with the #1 anchor text that are pointing to the home page? (since the home is outranking the proper product page for this phrase)

BDR-anchors-040614.jpg

I have a couple of new product videos for my ecommerce site. I am wondering if it benefits my marketing more to put the videos on Youtube, or on some video hosting service like Wistia or Vimeo?

The benefits of putting them on Youtube seem to be ease of embedding, the ability to get a link back from the Youtube page, and having them appear in Youtube searches. (I hear that Youtube is now one of the most used search engines)

I'm really not sure what the benefits of using a hosting service are. But I do remember reading articles saying it was better than using Youtube for some reason....

Help?

Since most customers will be typing on a phone, I suggest not using the "a".

But if a really cool phone number is part of the marketing plan, maybe you could use it as part of the URL. Something like Taxi1515.co.uk or BirminghamTaxi1515.co.uk  -  doing something like that would let you get a good URL for just the minimal cost of a registration...

  Hi Egol  ...so does that mean "no results"  ...or does it mean you can't share?

Neither of my sites has a robots.txt file. I guess I have never been bothered by any particular bot enough to exclude it.

Is there any SEO advantage to having one anyways?

Back in August of 2013 Google created a form that allowed people to submit small websites that "should be ranking better in Google".

There is more info about it in this article http://www.seroundtable.com/google-small-site-survey-17295.html

Has anybody used it? Any experiences or results you can share?

*private message if you do not want to share publicly...

You do not need to change your domain name. Just add BC and Canada to the title tags, description, and a few more places in the page text.

When I first went to your site I thought it was about Langley, VA (where the CIA is)

You should add "BC" and "Canada" to your title, description, and page text. Maybe Google is just confused about what city your site is about?

Also your first h1 tag is really messed up. It's a handful of links, images, and text. I think it should just be the important text. After that you have more h1 tags, and for some reason they are capitalized as H1. You should only have one h1 that is just text.

You also have a whole bunch of H2's (capitalized) that are just vague section names. One or two h2's that directly relate to your site's purpose would be much better.

All your html code should really be lower case letters (I think).

Have you done all the "local SEO" stuff to tell Google that your site is only about Langley BC?

To prevent overlapping your page URL's focus it may better to do the following for dog training and whistle training:

www.mysite.com/dog-training/

www.mysite.com/whistle-training/

That also keeps the words the page focuses on as close as possible to the front of the URL.

Hi Rob. I'm guessing your site is not responsive?

So is the navigation issue related to what is clicked to go from page to page? If the buttons are just too tiny, you may be able to enlarge them using CSS for handheld devices like the iphone. If it is because of dropdowns that require a mouse click to operate correctly, then you may have to replace them with different type of dropdowns.

Or if a site rework is planned, then going responsive fixes these "small device" issues. I use Twitter Bootstrap for responsive and love it.

If it is just one thread on a forum that was flooded with bad links, you could delete that thread. Make sure that any traffic to the associated URL's get a true 404 response.

My understanding is that doing so shows that you did not want those incoming links and that you are not gaining any advantage from them. If you do another Reconsideration Request, you should probably tell them that the targeted page was deleted.

Hi Mark,

I asked a similar question here and on a few other SEO forums a few weeks ago. Here is what I learned...

PPC (Bing Ads and Google Adwords) is very easy to fix. Just go into the settings for your campaigns and only target the countries you want your ads to show in. Later if you find that your results are poor in certain cities or states or provinces, you can even exclude them. Targeting your ads this way works very well and is very easy to do.

Limiting Organic results is not worth the effort. Though you can add a huge list of excluded IP's to your htaccess, you then slow down your site because of the computing effort needed to check each new visitor. What is worth the effort, is to go into Google Webmaster Tools and declare your targeted country or region. What I was told by a number of different responders was that doing so means that Google will not count poor site performance outside your targeted country against you.

For example, my US targeted site has a generic Bounce Rate of 60%. When I dig deeper I find that traffic from countries like Phillipines and India have a bounce rate pushing 80%, but that traffic from the US has a bounce rate of only about 45%. Since I have declared the US as my targeted country, Google is supposedly not counting poor performance from other countries against my site. I have set up "Segments" in my Google Analytics to only show US visitors, and that really helps get a realistic uncontaminated overview of how my true customers are interacting with the site.

Hi Wesley,

I am using Constant Contact for rating requests. I have had good luck breaking the customer history up into 1 month chunks, and also including the customer's first names in the file of contact info I upload. That way the past customers get a semi-personalized email that starts like this...

Hello Mike,

Please tell us how happy you are with the tools you purchased back in July 2013.........

My guess is that I will reach some point as I go farther into the past where the number of good reviews I get becomes minimal, and then we will stop at that point.

We do use Shopper Approved to collect and publish the ratings. I know there are divided opinions over if it is better to collect them on your own site or use a service. I like using a service because: 1) it is easy, and 2) I get Stars to show in my PPC ads.

It can be done in a many ways. With Bootstrap it could be done these ways:

Long detailed Title with many words

Short Title with few words

or

Long detailed Title with many words
     Short Title with few words

Or if you are coding it yourself, then create similar class names and in your CSS file define at what screen widths they are declared   visibilty:visible; or  visibility:hidden;    - This is not cloaking, there is always a version of the text visible to the user.

Hi Rafael,

In a responsive design you can definitely change any font size you want for different device widths, even h1 text.

You just give the h1 a class, or put it in a div with a unique class. Then in the CSS file you can use media queries to change anything like this...   font-size:12px; line-height:16px; color:red;

I do it often to put my h1, h2, h3 tags anywhere I want on the page and make them any size or style I want without messing up the look of the page.

Are you converting a site to responsive, or just trying to hack a few things on a fixed with site?

If you are really making the page responsive, then I suggest using one of the pre-designed responsive site systems. I use Twitter Bootstrap. It's free and very easy to learn, even for a non-programmer. With Bootstrap your problem would be solved either by using a single title and changing the font-size for different device widths, or by presenting different versions of the title on different device widths. Like this...

Brand New Xbox One 500 GB Black Console

Xbox One 500 GB Black Console

In Bootstrap the class "hidden-desktop" actually means it is only visible on devices that are NOT desktops - which are tablets and phones. They tell you which screen width ranges are considered to be which device type. You can go to my site on a PC and pull the screen width across from wide to narrow to see how a Bootstrap site reacts to varying screen widths.

If you are just trying to hack a few repairs, you will need to do it in the CSS file with "media queries". Not too hard, but takes a little learning and experimentation to figure out. Your page HTML will need to have a "class" or "id" added to any element you want to adjust with the CSS.

I think that some grouping is good. It's likely to make the Hummingbird happy, and it minimizes duplicate content issues.

But the keywords in the group need to synonyms, or nearly so.

I recently combined two separate pages that used to be focused on "clothes drying rack" and on "laundry drying rack". To the customer, these words were interchangeable.  Afterwards the new combined page read better to the visitor and it made the site navigation more logical. Still waiting to see what it does for the ranking...

But I wouldn't combine "soccer ball" and "volley ball" - even though they look the same and kids may use them interchangeably. People interested in one are not interested in the other...

I only took a quick look at a few pages, but it appears a little thin. There's not much content on each page.

Also I couldn't tell what the purpose or the focus was. Is it meant to be a resource where people for reviews of language-learning programs? If so, there is not much depth to the reviews so they are unlikely to rank well. Or is it meant to be a record of one person's quest to learn lots of languages? If so, I wouldn't expect much organic traffic because few would search for such a topic to read about.

Suggestions: If the focus is reviews - get some more in-depth content there. Leave the blog pages day-to-day musings.  Also do add meta-descriptions to the blog pages.

How long ago did you do this?

Google is often pretty slow to change things. Sometimes it takes weeks for a simple change like a page title to start appearing in the results...

Hi Ian,

There is a way around it, but first an opinion on duplicate content. I think that duplicate content issues are really about duplication across websites, not duplication within websites. Store ABC is expected to have a fair amount of text that repeats across it's own pages. The problem arises when both Store ABC and Store LMN and Store TUV all have the same bits of content (like product descriptions).

But anyways, if you really do not want to have your lists of consumables repeated on multiple pages, just turn the lists into images....

Then on the Machine A page display the image of the list and give it a file name and alt tag like "Machine A Consumables" and "Consumables for Machine A".

And on the Machine B page display a COPY of the image of the list and give it a NEW file name and alt tag like "Machine B Consumables" and "Consumables for Machine B".  Etc, etc...

For the visitor, there is no difference between reading the words from text or an image. (unless they have sight issues and are using a screen reader)

Does this solve the problem?

Hi Colin,

For sure Disavow the bad domains that are linking to you (whole domains, not just pages). If you are comfortable working with your htaccess file you can follow the guidelines in this article to get those bad domains to automatically prune links to your site (assuming they are automated sites) by 404'ing incoming visits from those bad domains. This tricks the site's bots into assuming your site is gone and so they delete the links to your site. Works for some spa,,y sites, but not all.   http://www.boxaid.com/word/simple-alternative-google-disavow-tool/

The sad truth though is that for awhile the bad links were probably boosting your ranking, and there removal (by Disavow, by Google's algorythm, and maybe by 404ing domains) will cause your rank to fall. You will have to build good links to replace the seething mass of bad ones...

Hi Chris,

I have a couple of small ecommerce sites and ran into the same problem with MOZ Recommended list. They are wonderful intelligent folks - but way too pricey for small businesses.

What I did was search the Forum for questions that sounded like they matched the problems I was experiencing. Then started a list of who answered them in a way that sounded intelligent, that I could understand, and that were polite. You can then check the profile of the MOZ members who answer questions in a way you like. Some will run small SEO firms, or work for small firms. Then put together a Request For Quote (RFQ) and send copies to 3 or 4 of your favorites.

It really does not take that long. Just an evening searching and reading the Forum, then an afternoon to write the RFQ.

After that I did have a hard time choosing just one - I wanted to work with them all but the budget did not allow ;-(

Good luck!

My experience has been Yes, for some things...

Doing it for internal page links should make your SEO better by eliminating the chance the search engines will misunderstand those links. And if a page of yours gets scraped, the internal links on that page will at least count towards your site

Doing it for IMPORTANT images will insure that the search engines can correctly index those images. Also it makes it possible for social media like Pinterest to use those images, and for others like Facebook to display an image from your page when that page is Shared.

I usually don't bother with absolute URLs for things like CSS files. Or for images which do not need to be indexed or shared, like buttons and icons and such.

This is a real-life problem on my ecommerce store for the drying rack we manufacture: Some people call it a Clothes Drying Rack, while others call it a Laundry Drying Rack, but it's really the same thing. Search volume is higher for the clothes version, so give it the most attention.

I currently have 2 separate pages with the On-Page optimization focused on each name (URL, Title, h1, img alts, etc)  Here the two drying rack pages: clothes focused page and laundry focused page

But the ranking of both pages is terrible. The fairly generic homepage shows up instead of the individual pages in Google searches for the clothes drying rack and for laundry drying rack. But I can get the individual page to appear in a long-tail search like this: round wooden clothes drying rack

So my thought is maybe I should just combine both of these pages into one page that will hopefully be more powerful. We would have to set up the On-Page optimization to cover both "clothes & laundry drying rack" but that seems possible.

Please share your thoughts. Is this a good idea or a bad idea? Is there another solution?

Thanks for your help!

Greg

Sorry, no good answer on how to effectively explain that "it takes time" (I run multiple stores myself and am not a big fan of hearing that either)

But I do have a question. Are you using PPC in the meantime to drive some sales? Also you could be doing PPC combined with CRO to get their conversions improved while you all are waiting for time to pass and organic ranking to rise. You can learn a lot from PPC about what people really search for and what message motivates them.

Gotten a few emails recently about their latest promotion. Just wondering if anybody here uses that system (program, method,??) and can share their experiences?

If it is a landing page ONLY for PPC, and regular organic searchers should not be going there, then you could just noindex that page. I think that will make it's bounce and other stats not count towards the rest of the site...

Good morning Chris! I went and looked in IE. There it is not a single line, but it is a solid block of code that is not really readable by humans. It needs spaces in the code.

Do a "View Source" at my site EasyDigging.com, or even here on this Moz page, to see how code should be displayed for humans to easily read it (and look for problems and give suggestions)

Wordpress is easy to create with, but has it's own special challenges for SEO. Are you using any of the SEO plug-ins for Wordpress, like Yoast?

Hi Daniel. I struggle with the same issue on one of my ecommerce websites, while my other site doesn't have that problem (the subpages always appear ahead of the home). I don't know why.  Hopefully one of the smart Moz Members will have some ideas...

I only have general clues on how to get the product pages to rank above the home page, like: 1) get some links pointing to the product pages. 2) get more descriptive text content on the product pages. 3) Have great meta titles and descriptions on the product pages. 4) Include social media functions (such as Like, Tweet, and G+) available on the product pages.

I have set Priorities in my XML sitemap to declare the main product pages as being higher that average priority, and the homepage as being lower than average. From what I read it doesn't appear that Google uses these Priority declarations very much or at all, but it's easy to do and does not appear to hurt anything. You can read a little more about Priority at the bottom of this page: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/183668?hl=en

Good luck!

It would help everybody help you with SEO questions if we could read your site code easily. Right now the code is compressed into one long continuous line of code. That saves a little file space, but makes it almost impossible for humans to read.

If you go to most webpages, right click in a blank area, and select "View Source" you will get a screen showing the code  displayed as one item per line, with hundreds of lines. This lets humans easily look for things that are important for SEO. Your webmaster likely has the code this way already on their own computer, but has been making and uploading a compressed version to webhost. Ask him to upload the uncompressed version of important pages.

Other than that, you should hire the service of someone skilled in doing LOCAL SEO - that does not mean some guy who lives in the same area you do. It's a special sort of SEO procedure that is quite different from those of us with a national or worldwide customer base.

You can probably do quite well by spending a reasonable amount with Google Adwords (PPC ads) if you set your ads to display only in the regions you serve.

Also do you have Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics set up for your site? Those will be valuable.

I use GreenGeeks.com for both my sites. Very happy with them. I can call anytime and talk to a person who will answer my questions or fix my problems. No run-arounds, no extra charges.

May be totally wrong here, but it is a quick test...

Switch the order of your redirects. First list all the old specific page to new specific page rules. Then last in the list put this rule - Redirect 301 / http://newdomain.co.uk/ (which you currently have first). That may let most of the specific pages do their thing before that general rule sends whatever is left to the homepage.

The way you code your htaccess is a bit different from what I do. Mine has a lot more code for each rule, and some qualifiers like L and NE...

Let us know if it works?

Thanks Bill. The big drop actually happened back in mid 2012, with partial recovery since then. We do make little text tweaks to the pages fairly often. We do some social media outreach each week.

Still need to know why the clothes drying rack page does so poorly in comparison to the other pages....

I have an ecommerce site for the clothes drying racks my family business makes, and it sells a few other laundry items also. It's about 5 years old. We used to rank on the first page for basic phrases like "clothes drying rack" and "umbrella clothesline".

About 1.5 years ago we fell hard in the rankings. Since then "umbrella clothesline" has moved back to the first page, but "clothes drying rack" is stuck on the 3rd page and always with the result being the generic homepage instead of the good sub-page (which used to rank on the first page) that really shows-n-tells about our drying rack.

Here are the three pages I am talking about. Home page = http://www.bestdryingrack.com/   Drying rack page = http://www.bestdryingrack.com/clothes-drying-rack-main.html  and umbrella clothesline page = http://www.bestdryingrack.com/umbrella-clotheslines.html

Any ideas on how to get the drying rack page to start ranking well again? (hopefully better than the generic homepage ranks)

A little technical background: the Moz campaign on this site says that the home page has a PA = 42 with 190 LRD's and 344 external links. Both the umbrella clothesline page and the clothes drying rack page have almost equal statistics of PA = 35 with 20 LRD's and 23 external links.

My anchor text distribution is maybe unbalanced. The drying rack page has 15 external links with the anchor of "Clothes Drying Rack". But the umbrella clothesline page has 14 external links with the anchor of "outdoor umbrella clothesline" and it ranks on the first page for that search.

I can't figure out how to get OSE to tell me anchor text stats for just the homepage and not the whole site since www.bestdryingrack.com/index.html 301's to the plain www.bestdryingrack.com  (if you know how, please share)

What's wrong with my poor neglected clothes drying rack page? The only way I can get it to show up on the first page is to do a real specific search like "round wooden clothes drying rack"

Your help could save a faltering family business. Thank you!