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I am merging a niche site, tshirts.com to another site mainsite.com.

I am using an htaccess file on a linux server, and the homepage of the niche site is being directed to the corresponding category page on the main site (i.e nichesite.com to mainsite.com/niche.html). Everything else is also a page to page redirect.

I have something like this in the htaccess file:

Redirect 301 http://tshirts.com/ http://www.mainsite.com/tshirts.html
Redirect 301 http://tshirts.com/blue.html  http://www.lampclick.com/blue-t-shirts.html
Redirect 301 http://tshirts.com/white.html http://www.mainsite.com/white-t-shirts.html
Redirect 301 http://tshirts.com/black-tshirts.html http://www.mainsite.com/bk-t-shirts.html

When I check 301 for lets say http://tshirts.com/blue.html, I get:

http://tshirts.com/blue.html -** 301 Moved Permanently**

http://www.mainsite.com/tshirts.htmlblue.html -** 302 Found**

http:www.mainsite.com/

How do I fix this? Why is everything being appended to minsite/tshirts.html?

I appreciate your help.

When a filter is selected, a # is added right after the .html. You're saying that this page won't even be indexed?

I am going to be merging two sites. One is a niche site, and it is being merged with the main site.

I am going to be doing 301 redirects to the main site. My question is, what is the best way of redirecting section/category pages in order to maximize SEO benefits. I will be redirecting product to product pages. The questions only concerns sections/categories.

Option 1:

Direct each section/category to the most closely matched category on the main site. For example, vintage-t-shirts would go to vintage-t-shirt on main site.

Option 2:

Point as many section/category pages to larger category on main site with selected filters. We have filtered navigation on our site. So if you wanted to see vintage t-shirts, you could go to the vintage t-shirt category, OR you could go to t-shirts and select "vintage" under style filter. In the example above, the vintage-t-shirt section from the niche site would point to t-shirts page with vintage filter selected (something like t-shirts/#/?_=1&filter.style=vintage).

With option 2, I would be pointing more links to a main category page on the main site.

• I would likely have that page rank higher, because more links are pointing to it.

• I may have a better overall user experience, because if the customer decides to browse another style of t-shirt, they can simply unselect the filter and make other selections.

Questions:

• Which of these options is better as far as: (1) SEO, (2) User experience

• If I go with option 2, the drawback is that the page titles will all be the same (i.e vintage-t-shirts pointing to the page with filter selected would have "t-shirts" as page title instead of a more targeted page with page title "vintage t-shirts." I believe a workaround would be to pull filter values from the URL and append them to the page title. That way page title for URL t-shirts/#/?=1&filter.style=vintage_ would be something like "vintage, t-shirts." Is this the appropriate way to deal with it?

Any thoughts, suggestions, shared experiences would be appreciated.

I have a client with a domain that has "sex" in the domain name. For example, electronicsexpo.com.

The domain ranks for a few keywords related to the services offered. It is an old domain that has been online for over 10 years. It ranks well for local keywords. No real SEO effort has been made on this domain, so it is rather a clean slate.

I am going to be doing SEO on this site. Will the fact that the word "sex" exists in the name have any sort of negative consequence. There is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING adult related or pornographic on this site.

I would think that search engines are sophisticated enough to differentiate, but would potential customers with things like parental filters be blocked from viewing content?

Is this hurtful in anyway? If so, would I be better off changing domain names?

TIA

I posted a question about this a while ago, but still haven't pulled the trigger.

I have a main site (bobsclothing.com). I also have a EM niche site (i.e shirtsmall.com).

It would be more efficient for me to merge these site, because:

• I would have to manage content, promos, etc. on a single site. In other words, I can focus efforts on 1 site. If I am writing content, I don't have to split the work.

• I don't have to worry about duplicate content. Right now, if I enter a product URL into copyscape, the other sites is returned for many products.

What makes me apprehensive are:

• The niche site actually ranks for more keywords than the main site, although it has lower revenue. Slightly lower PA, and DA.

• Niche site ranks top 20 for a profitable keyword that has about 1300 exact match searches. If you include the longer tail versions of the keyword it would be more.

If I merge these sites, and do proper 301s (product to product, category to category) how likely is it that main site will still rank for that keyword?

Am I likely to end up with a site that has stronger DA?

Am I better off keeping the niche site and just focusing content efforts on the few keywords that it can rank well for?

I appreciate any advice. If someone has done this, please share your experience.

TIA

Hi There,

The drop in traffic was for desktop organic.We do have a mobile site.

In WMT, I see 365 errors under mobile usability (viewport, font size, elements too close). We have over 100K pages.

The traffic we get is for long-tail keywords. Most of which we are not tracking because the volume for each keyword would be so low. It seems too much of a coincidence that all of our competitors would move up at once for the same terms, causing a drop in our traffic.

The last actions we took as far as link building was about 4 months ago:

• It was removing some links with exact match anchor text via outreach

• Added a couple of links via broken link building method

We also added some product descriptions.

Other than that we haven't really done much on the site. The traffic drop was around the same time the mobile algo update rolled out.

Thanks for your help.

Hi There,

The drop in traffic was for desktop organic.

We have never had a manual penalty. The last actions we took as far as link building was about 4 months ago:

• It was removing some links with exact match anchor text via outreach

• Uploaded a disavow file with a number of links

• Added a couple of links via broken link building method

We also added some product descriptions.

Other than that we haven't really done much on the site. The traffic drop was around the same time the mobile algo update rolled out.

Thanks for your help.

I have noticed a significant drop in rankings since late April. It is about a 30% drop in organic from Google.

This is despite the fact that we launched a mobile site before the update. What gives?

Any thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated.

The Moz crawl diagnostic is showing that I have some duplicate content issues on my site. For the most part, these are variations of the same product that are listed individually (i.e size/color).

What would be the best way to deal with this? Choose one variation of the product and add a canonical tag?

Thanks

No manual action. I have seen some fluctuation in rankings, and I am trying to figure out if it is Penguin related.

Thanks for the help.

If a site has been effected by Penguin, and the main issue is over-optimized anchor text. Would the disavow file take care of this?

If there is a no-follow added to the link when Google next crawls the site, wouldn't you still have the optimized anchor text in your profile?

Thanks for the response.

I have used the canonical tag on both sites to deal with www/non-www issues. Both sites have a single URL for each product.

The duplicate product page issue is with the content on the body of the product page. Both the same on both sites. So I have:

www.mainsite.com/product123.html and www.nichesite.com/product123.html

I checked the page title of some products in Google with quotes, only 1 product page shows up, either from the main site or the niche site. So it seems that Google is already deciding with each product page which site to show.

If people are linking to your site, it would seem natural that the vast majority of those links would point to the homepage, product page, or a article/content page.

Let's say you have 100 links pointing to your site, and 40 of them are pointing to category pages. Would this seem unnatural?

Does Google or other search engines have a way of determining this as a factor in ascertaining whether the links are natural or not?

Is there a rule of thumb when it comes to the pages that are linked to on your site?

I have a main site, and a niche site that has products for a particular category. For example, Clothing.com is the main site, formalclothing.com is the niche site.

The niche site has about 70K product pages that have the same content (except for navigation links which are similar, but not dupliated).

I have been considering shutting down the niche site, and doing a 301 to the category of the main site. Here are some more details:

1. The niche sites ranks fairly well on Yahoo and Bing. Much better than the main site for keywords relevant to that category.

2. The niche site was hit with Penguin, but doesn't seem to have been effected much by Panda.

3. When I analyze a product page on the main site using copyscape, 1-2 pages of the niche site do show, but NOT that exact product page on the niche site.

Questions:

• Given the information above, how can I gauge the impact the duplicate content is having if any?

• Is it a bad idea to do a canonical tag on the product pages of the niche site, citing the main site as the original source?

• Any other considerations aside from duplicate content or Penguin issue when deciding to 301?

• Would you 301 if this was your site?

Thanks in advance.

No, never got a clear answer. Still not sure what the problem is.

I had a downward slide in Google organic traffic at the beginning of April (around 8-10th). It doesn't coincide with any of the algo updates, and I can't figure out what the cause it.

Has anyone else experienced such a drop?

Any suggestions as to finding the source/cause?

TIA

I have a niche site that was hit by penguin. I was never hit with a manual penalty, but it is obvious the algo update hit the site. I have submitted a disavow file, but it doesn't seem to have made an impact. The site does have good rankings on Yahoo and Bing.

Should I close this site and 301 to the category page on my main site (i.e tshirts.com forwarded to mainsite.com/tshirts.html)?

The main site had a drop after penguin, but is now receiving more traffic than pre-Penguin. The impact is mainly keyword specific (i.e keywords that appeared in anchor text dropped).

Appreciate thoughts.

I understand there is a subjective, human factor when deciding to link to/from a site.

Nonetheless, what are the lowest Moz or Majestic metrics that are acceptable when building links. At what point do you say this site doesn't have the profile I would want?

I am looking to clean up the backlink profile of a site. Also, I would like to set a criteria for building links in the future.

I appreciate your thoughts on metrics when it comes to link building.

I am looking to hire a content writer for our sites. Anyone familiar with a service where the manage the content on your site?

Basically, come up with topics & content ideas, then writing the content.

Please give me an idea of the pricing if possible.

Greatly appreciate any help.

I have a few pages that have dropped in rankings recently. I suspect it is because of the ratio of the anchor text. For example, you have 20 links pointing to page site.com/mens-jeans.html, and 15 have the anchor text "mens jeans".

If I am looking to dilute the exact match anchor text, will the internal links count?

Thanks

I am looking at the links to my site from GWT. I see a bunch of random sites I've never heard of. I never made an effort to get links from these sites.

Sites like

| http://www.xlx.pl |

Also found one porn site!

Should I just ignore these or disavow them?

Have you used the disavow tool before?

If so, how many links and what was your experience?

Have you used the disavow tool before?

If so, how many links and what was your experience?

I have some links pointing to categories from article directories, web directories, and a few blogs. We are talking about 20-30 links in total. They are less than 5% of the links to my site (counting unique domains).

I either haven't been able to make contact with webmasters, or they are asking money to remove the links.

If I simply rename the URL (for example changing mysite.com/t-shirt.html to mysite.com/tshirts.html), will that resolve any penguin issues?

The link will forward to the homepage since that page no longer exists.

I really want to avoid using the disavow tool if possible.

I appreciate the feedback. If you have actually done this, please share your experience.

I have had a niche store since 2008. It has a higher conversion rate than my main site, and does fairly well.

The site template is an exact copy of my main site, and all the product URLs are the same. The only difference is, it only has items from a certain category.

My questions is, are niche store still a good idea?

Will I be better of doing a page to page 301 to my main site, and just focus on a single site?

Am I better of as far as SEO with one main site?

If anyone has experience with this, I would like to hear about your experience. Any thoughts are appreciated.

Over the past week, I have noticed a drop in conversions. By drop, I mean NONE at all. The traffic to the site seems steady from different sources, so I don't think we've been hit with a penalty.

I have looked through the site, and there are no problems with the functionality.

Is it possible that you lose conversions because of the type of keywords that are driving traffic?

In other words, the impressions and queries remain steady, but you are not getting traffic that converts (if that makes any sense).

Thanks in advance for thoughts and advice.

Thanks Takeshi!

Any thoughts on the drops in rankings, given all the other metrics?

Over the past few days I have noticed some apparent major changes. Before I explain, let me say this:

Checking my analytics and WMT:

• There is an increase in traffic (even via google organic)

• There is no drop in impressions or clicks

• There is no drop in indexed pages in GWT

Having said that;

• When I check my indexed pages using site:www.mywebsite.com, I see only 30 results as opposed to the 120K that I was seeing before (it was steadily climbing). The indexed pages have increase 3 fold in the past year, because of the increase in pages, updates, and products on the site.

• I see a sudden drop in rankings for major keywords that had been steadily rising. For example, I had some major keywords that were on page 7-8, not they are on page 20+ or not at all. Also, the page that used to show in the rankings has changed.

I have only done white-hat guest blogging in the past year for link building, on a small scale (maybe 20-30 links in a year).

They only other change recently, is that we are:

• Posting products on Houzz and Pinterest daily

• adding our site to all local directories (white pages, Yelp, citysearch, etc.)

My site got hit by Penguin more than a year ago, but we have done everything right since, and our traffic via organic results has more than doubled since the Penguin release.

What the hell is going on? Should I be concerned?

I am talking about a personal Facebook page. Is there a way to know who has viewed your profile? Any analytics available for persona FB pages?

I know FB does not allow Javascript or GA tracking, but I have read there are ways around it.

Thanks for the help.

This is somewhat off-topic, but this seems like a good place to ask.

Has anyone used a script/code/3rd party service that allows you to track who has viewed your profile?

We have been doing link prospecting and link building in-house, and I just wanted to get a sense of the process from others doing SEO. Here are the simple questions to the survey:

To get things started, I have highlighted my answers in bold letters.

1. How advanced do you consider yourself in link building:

a) Beginner

b) Okay, but learning

c) Expert

2. How many hours do you spend a week engaging in link building related tasks (i.e prospecting, reaching out to prospects, generating follow-up lists, etc)

a) 5 hours or less

b) 5-10 hours

c) more than 10 hours

3. How many quality links can you generate a month?

Around 6-8 (they are decent, not the highest quality- mostly blog posts)

4. Do you rely on SEO tools or do you believe in advanced search queries and DIY techniques?

Both, I am trying to get more familiar with the advanced queries.

5. What tools if any do you find useful?

Myblogguest, advanced search queries, majestic SEO, ontolo query generator

6. What is the most useful method for getting inbound links from authority sites (i.e .edu, .org, etc.)?

I have had no success pitching content to these sites as of yet.

Thanks

Why don't you just come up with another scheme to make money!

This one seems to have run its course. Be happy with the money you made and move on.

I submitted my  site to DMOZ 5 years ago. It has yet to be approved.

Is there any use in trying to submit to this site. I have an established e-commerce site that has thousands of pages indexed.

Anyone have any useful info?

Directory submissions are a form of link building that may have worked before. Even before the Penguin update, directory submissions weren't helping much. You should try to get listed on the following directories:

DMOZ (if that ever happens!)

Yahoo paid (build trust)

• joeant, BOTW

If there are relevant directories to your business, I would look at getting listed there as well. More to get your name out there for people that are interested in you services.

Other than that, I wouldn't waste much time adding my domain to directories. They are not worthwhile links.

If this was helpful, I would appreciate a thumbs up or a good answer

I am sure those reasons are part of the answer.

When ran the site through OSE, I saw 18 inbound links. That is fewer links than other sites ranking in the top 10. So, I thought maybe the site has a high domain authority. That was not the case either.

I think I figured out the reason (in addition to what you listed):

• They have a lot of unique content on their pages. Even product pages.

• When I run a backlink analysis on Majestic, the number of links are much higher.

Mystery solved!

That's what I thought too. But he clearly says:

"PS: We have not built any links or engaged in content marketing activities for the aforementioned themes. We are ranking well; [sorely] on the basis of the work we have done on-page!"

You're saying content alone can work if you have a few hundred existing links and build no more links?

I was expecting you!

Thanks for the input

I read this blog post:

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/let-onpage-optimization-change-your-life

The author claims they have increased the visitors 50 fold doing on-page seo ONLY. So they just added content, and optimized the site structure.

Anyone have seen similar results?

Not outreach whatsoever, just adding content to site. Technically, this should be true, article directories has tons of visitors and they were giving out links.

As the Penguin update continues to change the way sites do SEO, many have moved towards guest posting as a "white hat" means of getting links from legitimate related sites. Now, admittedly, the content that is being posted via guest blogging seems to be much higher than the crap that was being posted on article directories and such. You also don't get the duplicate content like you did with the spun articles and mass submissions. But, guest blogging is becoming as ubiquitous as the paid blog links (i.e payperpost, etc.). I for one, have used guest posting, although I am not 100% sold on the results.

It seems that with the increase of guest blog networks, these links are becoming as easy to get as the article directory links. Doesn't that lessen the SEO value of the links?

And here the question that is always pestering: If you have quality content, why would you ever place it on someone else's site?

This is the meat of the discussion:

Shouldn't guest blogging be limited to unique opportunities (i.e a VERY established guest blogger in your niche)? Or is it okay to post content on as many related legitimate blogs as you can?

Thoughts...ideas....

I saw a question posted by someone a while back asking how a certain (in their opinion crappy) site was ranking in the top then.

It happened that there were some good reasons for that site ranking.

Well.... I have stumbled on a site that seems to be ranking for (almost) no reason at all:

• relatively low DA/PA

• very few inbound links (none seem to be that special)

• thin content

The only thing I can think of, is that the site has the keyword in the domain name. But looking at the search results, there are other domains with exact match keyword in URL and somewhat stronger metrics that don't rank.

ALL their backlinks are blogroll links. Not looking good!

I have an opportunity to place a guest blog on a site. The site has the following metrics:

• DA/PA: 24/36

• Inbound links: 3K+ from 16 root domains

Here is what makes me uneasy:

• The number of links from the same domain, suggesting sitewide or footer links

• When I look at the backlinks, there are links from sites like http://best-american-law-firms.info/, or http://www.luvbuds.info/. They sare blogroll links that are likely paid for.

Would you get a link from this blog?

Getting .edu links seems to be the Holy Grail for many SEOs and link builder. I understand how difficult it can be to get a link from a .edu domain that happens to cover topics in your industry.

What I am wondering is, has there been any studies/tests to determine if .edu links are more powerful that a link from a trusted/relavant .com?

All things being equal (DA, PA, etc.), is the .edu better?

What if the .com has slightly better metrics, is the .edu still better for SEO?

I haven't been able to find any expert blog posts about the added value.