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Hi Guy's,

I have a question about a website that ranks between SERP 10 - 20 and often drops out of the search results. Looking at authority it should score in atleast in top 10.

Netherlands + Belgium - Dutch language
https://www.vaneyckshutters.com
Keyword: Shutters (in all languages)

Netherlands: SERP 10 - 20 and drops 
Belgium Dutch language: Top 3 position 
Belgium French language: Top 3 position

History:
In the past, the website was live on domain extensions:

• .nl (Dutch)
• .be (Belgium)

Later they switched to

• .com/nl/  (Netherlands + Belgium - Dutch language)
• .com/fr/  (Belgium - French language)

And finally they swtiched to

• .com (Netherlands + Belgium - Dutch language)
• .com/fr/ (Belgium - French language)

*All switched where provided with redirects

In 2016 Q3 a new website was launched provided with https://, there where some issues with redirects but that's mainly fixed now. After launching the new website the positions where terrible. The website didn't score on the keyword: Shutters, and some times not even on there own brandname. After a while it stabilised but still sometimes the website dropped out of the search results. A few weeks ago we made some technical changes and now we see drops again.

Strange things Still we see strange things happening. Mainly the fact that Belgium NL and FR score good, but that could also be because of lower competition. What about the search result:

• site:vaneyckshutters.nl (indexed)
• site:vaneyckshutters.be (indexed)

i came across this article, and looked at:

• vaneyckshutters.nl/robots.txt (present)
• vaneyckshutters.nl/robots.txt (present)

Strange that the meta titel is ignored bij Google:
".com" meta title is the same as the indexed ".nl" and ".be"

At some point a saw a redirect from the old website to the new:
302 permanent redirect (made me think there was some tweaking going on)

I asked a friend if he could provide some SEO advise and gave suggestions: - In the robots.txt is see "disallow:[empy]", is that smart?

• Canonical on home is set to: "/" but redirect without "/"
• x-default in alternate is missing

Advise Does anyone see the issue or has an advise for us? Maybe we are missing the clues and is something going wrong on:

• Server/domain level (redirects)
• Authority level (still some 404's)
• Technical issues (hreflang)
• etc. etc.

Hope someone can help us out!

Thanks a million!

I have a question about the right way to not index pages: With a canonical or follow no-index.

First we have a blog page:

**Blogpage **
URL: /blog/
index follow

Page 2 blog:
URL: /blog?=p2  
index follow
rel="prev" /blog/ 
el="next" ?=p3

Nothing strange here i guess. But we also have other pages with chance on duplicate content:

/SEO-category/
/SEO-category/view-more/

Because i don't want the "view-more" items to be indexed i want to set it on: follow no-index (follow to reach pages). But now the "view-more" also have pagination. What is the best way?

Option 1: 
/SEO-category/view-more/ 
Follow no-index

/SEO-category/view-more?=p2
Follow no-index
rel="prev" /view-more/
el="next" ?=p3

Option 2: /SEO-category/view-more/ 
Canonical: /SEO-category/

/SEO-category/view-more?=p2
rel="prev" /view-more/
el="next" ?=p3

Option 3: Other suggests?

Thanks!

I have a question for the links in a sitemap. Wordpress works with a sitemap that first link to the different kind of pages:

• pagesitemap.xml
• categorysitemap.xml
• productsitemap.xml
• etc. etc.

These links on the first page are clickable. We have a website that also links to the different pages but it's not clickable, just a flat link. Is this an issue?

Hi Guy's,

Whats the best way to set internal links on your website:

1. href=: /page/
2. href=: https://domain.com/page/

Thanks!

This website is doing the same:

eci.nl/engelse-boeken

On the left filters... When you hover over a link it's different from the actual URL when visiting it.

Hi Guy's,

On our webshop we link from our menu to categories were we want to rank on in Google. Because the menu is sitewide i guess Google finds the categories in the menu important and meaby let them score better (onside links)

The problem that i'm facing with is that we make difference in Gender. In the menu we have: Man and Woman. Links from the menu go to: /categorie?gender=1/ and /category?gender=2/. But we don't want to score on gender but on the default URL.

For example:

• Focus keyword = Shoes
• Menu Man link: /shoes?gender=1
• Menu Woman link:  /shoes?gender=2

But we only want to rank on /shoes/. But that URL is not placed in the menu. Every URL with: "?" has a follow noindex.

So i was thinking to make a link in the menu, on man and woman: /shoes/, but on mouse down (program it that way) ?=gender. Is this cloaking for Google?

What we also could do is make a canonical to the /shoes/ page. But i don't know if we get intern linking value on ?gender pages that have a canonical.

Hope it makes senses Advises are also welcome, such as: Place al the default URL's in the footer.

Hi Guy's,

For our webshop we're considering a new URL structure because longtail keywords to rank so well. Now we have

/category (main focus keywords)
/product/the-product345897345123/  (nice to rank on, not that much volume)

We have over 500 categories and every one of them is placed after our domain. Because i think it's better to work with a good structure and managed a way to make categories and sub-categories. The 500 categories may be the case why not every one of them is ranking so well, so that was also the choice of thinking about a new structure.

So the new URL structure will be:

/category (main focus keywords)
/category/subcat/ (also main focus keywords)

Everything will be redirect (301, good way), so i think there won't be to much problems.

I'm thinking about what to do with the /product/ URL. Because now it will be on the same level as the subcategories, and i'm affraid that when it's on that level, Google will give the same value to both of them.

My options that i'm considering are:

**Old way **
/product/the-product-345897345123/

.html (seen this on big webshops)
/product/the-product-345897345123.html/

Level deeper SKU /product/the-product/345897345123/

What would you suggest?

The new structure would be

• 20 categories
• 500+ sub's devided under main categories
• 5000+ products

Thanks!

Hi guy's,

I came across webshops that put images, CSS and Javascript on different websites or subdomains. Does this boost SEO results? On our Wordpress webshop all the sourcescodes are placed after our own domainname:

www.ourdomainname.com/wp-includes/js/jquery/jquery.js?ver=1.11.3'
www.ourdomainname.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/example.jpg

Examples of other website:

Website 1:
https://www.zalando.nl/heren-home/

Sourcecode:
https://secure-i3.ztat.net//camp/03/d5/1a0168ac81f2ffb010803d108221.jpg
https://secure-media.ztat.net/media/cms/adproduct/ad-product.min.css?_=1447764579000

Website 2:
https://www.bol.com/nl/index.html

Sourcecode:
https://s.s-bol.com/nl/static/css/main/webselfservice.1358897755.css
//s.s-bol.com/nl/upload/images/logos/bol-logo-500500.jpg

Website 3: 
http://www.wehkamp.nl/

Sourcecode:
https://static.wehkamp.nl/assets/styles/themes/wehkamp.color.min.css?v=f47bf1
http://assets.wehkamp.com/i/wehkamp/350-450-layer-SDD-wk51-v3.jpg

Hi Guy's

We have a website with a total of 133 incoming links. It's a https:// webshop and when i checked our incoming links i noticed that:

http:// has 23 refferring domains
https:// has 110 refferring domains

Is it better to ask if the link could be replaced in https:// ? There is a 301 redirect to the seruce website, on all www / non-www and non-https url's

Thanks!

Hi Russ,

Did you read the question? We can't find out where the links are coming from....

You could exclude sertain IP ranges in the .htaccess but that will never block all US traffic.

Big question is, why would you want to block them? Are they not the target audience you try to reach? What about Canadian people living in the US?

I've uploaded some data of one of our new customers. They used to have only 6 backlinks. Within 1 day, the backlinkcount raised to about 50. All from spammy directories form China, Ukrain, Brazil, etc.

So I'm talking about a real spam problem, not the typical spammy links in Analytics, copy of content or just a few % of all links referring to the website.

An example of a linking domain: http://dokuo30.kuronowish.com/cgi-bin/oekaki/up.cgi

I tend to think it has something to do with 404 page's being indexed.

O3Fn4Dh uafkU5z

Yep, the links are there. It's not the typical Analytics spam

We all get 'some' spam but I'm talking about loads of links. Ahrefs tells us that only 8% of the links is from Holland. It's a Dutch website and most of the links come from Ukrain, China and Russia.

Hi Guys,

I have a case which seems to occur more often for our customers. The websites of our customers seem to receive tons of backlinks from websites all over the world (China, Russia, Ukrain, etc).

It’s spam we never asked for, we didn’t buy any dodgy linkbuilding packages or anything.

Do any of you guys have experience with this matter? We try to disavow the links but it takes too much time and we will never manage to disavow 100% of all links.

Examples are www.keukensduitsland.nl and www.m2beveiliging.nl

Hope anyone has experience and maybe even solutions for this matter.

Thanks!

Hi Catherine,

Yes, it will make your competitors cost per click higher. Mainly because in this case you will get the highest quality score. Bidding on your own brandname gives (most of the time) a 10 out of 10. Competitors will get a very low Quality score (not relevant) and have to bid more to rank higher.

Hi Guy's,

I was wondering if it matters if your hosting servers is set on a different country than where you're website is targeting (.de (germany) website and the server is in france)

Thanks!

Thanks for the answer!

Hi guys,

I was wondering if there is a difference in SEO performance between a page which ends with .html or just with a slash.

For example:

• www.domain.com/test/ - www.domain.com/test.html

Which one is better? And is there a difference between productpages and productcategory pages. Because we see mostly productpages ending with .html and category pages ending with a slash.

Take a look at some big dutch companies like:

http://www.coolblue.nl/
http://www.bol.com/
https://www.zalando.nl/ (product page)

There are doing this with a reason.... i guess....

Thanks.

Thanks alot!

Also, don't just look to the spam score but check what the score was based on.

Example: A real good and populair site without contact information will get a spam score.

Use Open Site Explorer as an indicator but just check those sites manualy. It would be a pitty if you deleted realy good backlinks only beacause OSE says it has a spam score.

It depends. Analyse the links for yourself. Why do they get a high spam score and are they really spammy links?

Some links with a high spam score can still give you a great value. But in most cases I would choose to get rid of them.

How is your site ranking at the moment? Removing spammy links could have a positive effect but could also have a negative effect. Keep this in mind when your site currently scores high in the rankings.

Hi Nitin,

The URL is www.keukensduitsland.nl (/blog). The link to the blog page is in the bottom left corner called "Keukennieuws".

Hi Guys,

I'm currently asked to work on a website. I noticed that the blog posts won't get indexed in Google. www.domain.com/blog does get indexed but the blogposts itself won't. They have been online for over 2 months now.

I found this in the robots.txt file:

Allow: /
Disallow: /kitchenhandle/
Disallow: /blog/comments/
Disallow: /blog/author/
Disallow: /blog/homepage/feed/

I'm guessing that the last line causes this issue. Does anyone have an idea if this is the case and why they would include this in the robots.txt?

Cheers!

Thanks for the answers No outgoing links for the site

Hi Guy's,

We have a website with no outgoing links (only Facebook). Is this a good way to score better in the SERPS? Or is it better to have some outgoing "relevant" links for a natural linkjuice?

Thanks!

Top thanks The only strange thing was that when i optimize my HTML code the Text/HTML ratio decreased :S

Hi Guy's,

In Wordpress we've got the plugin "WP Rocket". It's possible to optimize CSS, JS, HTML and Google Fonts.

If i optimize (minify) CSS and JS the website will load faster and the pagespeed will be reduced. So i guess that's always better for SEO results en SERPS...

But what will happen if i optimize my HTML code? It will be much shorter but less organized. Will this also affect SEO results and rankings? I'm awear that less code will increase my text ratio, but don't know if Google will punish the website for having a code that's not very good organized.

Thanks!

On our webshop we've added some URL-parameters. We've set URL's like min_price, filter_cat, filter_color etc. on "don't Crawl" in our Google Search console. We see that some parameters have 100.000+ URL's and some have 10.000+

Is it better to add these parameters in the robots.txt file? And if that's better, how can we write it down so the URL's will not be crawled.

Our robotos.txt files shows now:

# Added by SEO Ultimate's Link Mask Generator module
User-agent: *
Disallow: /go/
# End Link Mask Generator output

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/

@ Andy Drinkwater We will investigate the points you mentioned...

@ Arnout Hellemans We are going to check Webmaster console 

@ Dirk Ceuppens We noticed the drop because we make use of serpfox.com, a daily SERP checker. Thanks for the advice and we will investigate this also.

For now i'm going to check all the points and give an update asap.

Thanks!

New update at:

https://moz.com/community/q/index-problems-part-2

Hi Guy's

A few weeks ago i posted a question: 
https://moz.com/community/q/index-problems

After some good advice, we changed a few things:

• www.domain.com <<< NL version
• www.domain.com/fr/ <<<< French version

(domain.com/nl/ 301 redirect to domain.com).

So the SERPS for keyword ‘shutters’ went from #32 to #8...... for 2 day's.... and gone.... and not comming back anymore....

Did we missed something?

Help is much appreciated, thanks

Yes, that could me possible.

But it also could be possible that a product will be in stock later, and then it will redirect to the homepage of category. So then we have to find a way to drop the redirect automaticly

Hi Guy's,

On a Wordpress website we have a SEO Ultimate plugin running. Every day i get lot's of 404 errors of products that doesn't exist anymore (but are indexed, site: .... ).

In the beginning we had lot's of testproduct that are not coming back in the shop. So i was wondering if there is a way to automaticly redirect product when there are out of stock, or not comming back anymore... So my 404's can be fixed.

Thanks!

Thanks!

Hi Guys,

i'm considering to prevent Google to crawl all the images on a webshop (3,432), because a the amount of pages that have to me crawled. Will this affect any search results?

Thanks!

Thanks Andy, Great!

We have a webshop with products provided with a content blok below the category/products page. Some products have an infinite scroll option because of the amount of product.

Will infinite scroll affect ranking when there is an text below?

Thanks!

No it happens on multiple desktops. Are you searching in Dutch Google?

Hi Guy's

I have a question about Google asking me to translate the page when i search on brandname. It's in the Dutch Google and the searchquery is: "rotomshop"

I can find why Google wants to translate the page because all our settings are Dutch.

Does anyone have a suggestion?

Thanks!

Thanks fot the answers. Beacause it's a linkpage i get the spamscore from:

Thin Content
A subset of pages within this subdomain have little content.

Large Number of External Links
A subset of pages within this subdomain has a large number of external links.

Anchor Text Heavy Page
There's a high ratio of anchor text compared to content text.

External Links in Navigation
There's a large number of external links within sidebars and footers.

No Contact Info
None of the pages crawled contain an email address or links to a social profile.

So i was guessing the only way to get it a little bit lower is to add some no-follows.

Hi Guys,

I've got a linkpage at it has quite a high spamscore on opensiteexpolorer. The high spamscore is so high because of lots of outgoing links. The link site has do-follow links to relevant pages.

My question is: Will my spamscore descrease when i set some links on no follow?

Thanks!

Thanks! Good to know

Will adding tooltip text to al my links improve my rankings? I read some article, but it's a hell of a job to add tooltip text to al my links. i was wondering if it's worth the time:

A tooltip text appears if the mouse hovers over the image or a link and is provided by using the TITLE attribute. A description of the image or the link then appears in the tooltip in a small yellow box (Internet Explorer). The TITLE text (tooltip text) gives a short description of a link or image. The difference between an ALT text and the TITLE text is that the ALT text is a short description that replaces the image if the image does not load.

The number of links (internal and external) and images must be equal to the number of tooltips for every page. The number of TITLE text can be higher because ALT text can also be used for other HTML elements. Add Title texts to links or images for those which do not have them yet.

Thanks!

Thanks! First i'm going to optimize my channel for our brand.

Anyone?

We have a website full of introduction video's that are viewable in youtube on the website. Is that good for my SEO rankings? Or should i consider placing my video direct on the website without using youtube?

Thanks!

Hi Gianluca,
Thanks for your response and thoughts. We have had a 301 redirect from the domain to the /nl/ but that is where the problem began. We had multiple situations.

Original situation: .com redirecting (301) to /nl/ => no indexation for /nl/

Solution 1: Delete 301 redirect and add canonical tag to /nl/ and add href lang tags

The ranking has been better when implementing solution 1, but /nl/ has still not been indexed. But the pages after /nl/ are indexed. Strange isn’t it? We see the same trend at store.apple.com redirecting to store.apple.com/us/ but /us/ has not been indexed. Our possible solution #2 was to setup NL content on .com and FR content on /fr/. But I’am afraid that I will lose positions in Belgium (now ranking #3).

“The website http://www.vaneyckshutters.com/nl/ does not show in the index of Google (site:vaneyckshutters.com/nl/). This must be the homepage in the Netherlands. Previously, the page www.vaneyckshutters.com was redirected to /nl/. This page is accessible now with a canonical tag to http://www.vaneyckshutters.com/nl/ in the hope to let /nl/ be indexed. When we look at the SERPS for keyword ‘shutters’, the page http://www.vaneyckshutters.com/ is shown in Google.nl on #32 and in Belgium #3.

Problem & question: Why is it that /nl/ has not been indexed properly and why is it that we rank with http://www.vaneyckshutters.com on ‘shutters’ instead the/nl/ page?”

We have an affiliate webshop and all our outgoing links a automatically set on "nofollow", so outging affiliate links don't effect SEO rankings.