Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thank you Andreas,

But is the redirect HTTP Header reading correct or not?

Also, site:seomoz.com is showing a very small number of pages, while my clients old website is all appearing on Google. Every single page.

Issa

Hi,

I personally think you should only allow Google to index tags if you have a big number of posts that use these tags organically, not for keyword stuffing and spammy activities.

In the case you mentioned, I would disallow Search Engines from indexing tag pages. And if you believe that these tags should not be on that website, then you should delete them. Looking at the example URL you sent, its clearly created in the attempt to trick Google.

I would start first with disallowing search engines from indexing them, then I would go head and slowly remove these tags.

If you have posts that are not 100% relevant to the business and are high quality, consider removing those too. This particular page is not doing well really from linking or authority point of view. See the image I attached

I hope this helps.

S0MucPO

Hi there,

You might have experienced this before but for me this is the first.

A client of mine moved from domain A (www.domainA.com) to domain B (www.domainB.com). 301 redirects are all in place for over a year. But the old domain is still showing in Google when you search for "site:domainA.com"

The HTTP Header check shows this result for the URL https://www.domainA.com/company/cookie-policy.aspx

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently => 
Cache-Control => private
Content-Length => 174
Content-Type => text/html; charset=utf-8
Location => https://www.domain_B_.com/legal/cookie-policy
Server => Microsoft-IIS/10.0
X-AspNetMvc-Version => 5.2
X-AspNet-Version => 4.0.30319
X-Powered-By => ASP.NET
Date => Fri, 15 Mar 2019 12:01:33 GMT
Connection => close

Does the redirect look wrong? The change of address request was made on Google Console when the website was moved over a year ago.

Edit: Checked the domainA.com on bing and it seems that its not indexed, and replaced with domainB.com, which is the right. Just Google is indexing the old domain!

Please let me know your thoughts on why this is happening.

Best,

No this is a link not a resource. You dont need to change this.

Yes even if they are external websites they are still not encrypted like your website. I am not talking about links, here, i am talking about resources.

I wouldn't be able to tell you why that tool hasn't worked, I never used it before.

You could PM me your website and i will have a look for you if you prefer.

Issa

Hi Daniel,

I am trying to think with you here, not to give you a solution (sorry for that).

It sounds like your website was hit by Panda, the manual review (or automated) was initiated by creating the new dev site and allowing Google to index it, then deleting the website that Google has preferred to rank higher than your original website. Too many extreme changes that were not planned correctly.

Like with many Panda penalties, Google rarely tells you anything, nor tells you that your website is affected even. I have seen so many companies going down the route of creating a website on a new domain.

However, I'm wondering, if you 301 redirect your old website (which obviously is having big problems ranking-wise) wouldn't you be transferring the reputation alongside the equity? Wouldn't your website have the same bad ranking?

Also, if you are suffering with the current ranking, why would you want to transfer such equity to a freshly created website, with good usability and ticking many more boxes than the previous one on Google search result pages?

If I was you, and creating a website on a new domain, i would simply start from scratch. And make sure that the website is big on usability and unique high quality content. Then I would make sure that there are high quality, high authority websites linking to relevant pages on your new website.

I hope this helps you in anyway.

Best,

Issa

Hi w4rdy,

This error means that you have an "https" page (or pages) that have in the source code elements using non-https URLs. This could be images, css links, or javascripts.

View the source of your page, and look for "http://" then try to change that to use https:// instead.

The reason this is a problem is that your page is promising encrypted secure exchange of data between the server and the users. Having non encrypted elements in your source code invalidates this promise. Even on Chrome there will be a warning users when this happen by changing the colour of the URL protocol.

See attached. I hope this helps

Issa

MpUpq4k

Hi Radi,

I don't see any issues with this as long as every suburb page will have unique and quality content as opposed to duplicate and thin content that is usually caused by creating unnecessary pages just to include additional keywords.

So say you have "Area A" which includes "Suburb A" and "Suburb B".

If Area A has so many listings, on domain.com/area-a/ then you can split that into

Suburb A domain.com/area-a/plastic-plants-subarb-a
Suburb B domain.com/area-a/plastic-plants-subarb-b

Listing should be unique and of high quality on each of these pages, none should be repeated.

I hope this helps

Issa

Hi Tavneer,

Good question, unfortunately Google will not tell you all duplicates. You need to use a tool for that.

My recommendations is to use the CopyScape tool, its has free service for samples, but I do recommend you get the premium which is incredibly cheap. Should buy credits and then do the following:

1. Get a list of all your website's URLs (you can use any method you like. i usually search for site:mydomain.com in Google and export them with SEO Quake plugin/extension on Chrome)
2. Go to bulk check on CopyScape
3. Add all your URLs in there
4. Process the bulk search
5. Wait few seconds and you will have a list of all duplicates on external websites, with average percentage.

I hope this helps.

Issa

Thank you Mike,

It helps to have two experts agreeing with me. And you are absolutely right regarding misusing the canonical tags. I will keep an eye on it for sure.

Best,
Issa

Andy, than you very much for confirming that canonical are better than noindex in this case.

Best,

Issa

Hi there,

We are restructuring a website. The website originally lists jobs that will have duplicate content. We have tried to ask the client not to use duplicates but apparently their industry is not something they can control.

The recommendations I had is to have categories (which will have the idea description for a group of jobs), and the job listing pages.

The job listing pages will then have canonical tags pointing to the category page as the primary URL to be indexed.

Another opinion came from a third party that this can be seen as if we are tricking Google and would get penalised, **Is that even true? **Why would Google penalise for this if thats their recommendations in the first place?

This third party suggested using nofollow on the links to these listings, or even not not index them all together.

What are your thoughts?

Thanks

Issa

Hi David,

This is completely your choice. Your website's SEO and overall ranking wont be affected by block SEMRush for example.

The only drawback I can think of is that you wont be able to use this tool for your own domain research, which can be helpful if you're looking for ranking stats, or click share from search engines. I would hate to not be able to research my client's websites regularly, as this is the kind of intelligence I use to a) understand Google's and Users behaviour to find my website. b) discover technical and SEO issues with my websites.

So although you can go a head and do it, I would say you should always be ready to unblock them when needed. Unfortunately SEM Rush does not update their database so regularly, so you wouldn't be able to predict when you should unblock their robot for information.

I hope I could help

Issa

Hi usDragons,

Having too many crawl errors is not healthy. Usually a few number of pages are deleted every now and then, but having hundreds or thousands of 404s means something is wrong with the website, and from your description it's obvious that something is wrong. In fact, redirecting unnatural/thin content pages to your website can harm it, as its in a way links that send traffic (through 301 redirects) to your website, so you need to disavow these.

Because you have no control over the website, you should treat it as an external site that is spamming you. So don't think of it as a site that you own but have no access to.

The disavow tool requires you to create a .TXT file that have an explanation of why you disavow each group of domains/links. So you should explain that these are bad links that send you traffic, and you tried to "request" deleting these links and you got no help from whoever controls it, which i guess is true in your case.

Try to explain everything in your comments (in the .TXT file) (See attached)

Good luck and I hope I could help in anyway.

link-disavow-file-example-1024x288.jpg

Hi,

You should find your answer in this link: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs/enhanced-ecommerce#overview

But essentially you will have to use something like:

ga('ec:addImpression',{            // Provide product details in an impressionFieldObject.
  'id':'P12345',                   // Product ID (string).
  'name':'Android Warhol T-Shirt',// Product name (string).
**'category':'Apparel/T-Shirts',   // Product category (string).**
  'brand':'Google',                // Product brand (string).
  'variant':'Black',               // Product variant (string).
  'list':'Search Results',         // Product list (string).
  'position':1,                    // Product position (number).
  'dimension1':'Member'            // Custom dimension (string).});

But you need to specify the Field Object in the top line. Read the link I sent you and should be all self explanatory.

I hope this helps

Issa

Hi there,

Seems to me that you should follow the standard process when you have unnatural links. You should:

1. Compile a list of links and domains.
2. Contact Webmasters of these domains, requesting removal of links (include the pages where these links are added in your email)
3. Save all your sent and received emails to/from Webmasters
4. Ones that don't reply to you, email them one more time a couple of weeks later
5. Create a disavow file for domains that you couldn't get links removed from, state the reason and dates of emails.
6. Submit the disavow file to the disavow tools

I know its not straight froward nor fast, but thats how you maintain the public link profile of any website since the Penguin Updates started.

I hope it helps

Hi everybody,

I have a client that used to rank very well in 2014. They launched an updated URL structure early January 2015, and since they rank very low on most of the keywords (except the brand keywords).

I started working with them early this year, tried to understand what happened, but they have no access to their old website and I cant really compare.

I tried the started optimisation methods but nothing seems to work.

I have a feeling they have been penalised by Google, probably a Panda penalty, but their Webmaster tools account does not show any penalties under manual actions.

Do people impose penalties that are not added to Webmaster tools? If so, is there away I can find out what penalties and what is wrong exactly so we can start fixing it?

The website is for a recruitment agency and they have around 400 jobs listed on it. I would love to share the link to the website but I don't believe the client will be happy with that.

Thank you in advance.

Great thank you.

Will have a read.

Still though, with the situation above, is it OK for this industry to have such duplicate content and what to do about it if its not.

Thanks

Hi everyone,

It seems that Panda 4.2 has hit some industries more than others. I just started working on a website, that has no manual action, but the organic traffic has dropped massively in the last few months. Their external linking profile seems to be fine, but I suspect usability issues, especially the duplication may be the reason.

The website is a recruitment website in a specific industry only. However, they posts jobs for their clients, that can be very similar, and in the same time they can have 20 jobs with the same title and very similar job descriptions. The website currently have over 200 pages with potential duplicate content.

Additionally, these jobs get posted on job portals, with the same content (Happens automatically through a feed).

The questions here are:

1. How bad would this be for the website usability, and would it be the reason the traffic went down?
2. Is this the affect of Panda 4.2 that is still rolling
3. What can be done to resolve these issues?

Thank you in advance.

Ah OK.

You will then need to lookup "even tracking". Basically ad an event on each one of the ads links you have on your website. (Surely you use templates and you can do this automatically)

What this does is create an event record (under Behavior tab on Analytics) every time someone clicked on that link. If you label that even correctly, you can then click on that even, and add a secondary dimension to see where did i t come from.

OR

If you're looking at the source (Facebook for example) you can select a goal on the same report that is setup with the event information. This will give you the number of visits from that source, and the number of events (clicks on the ad)

I hope this helps

A bit confused here, Do you mean ad to your website or clicks on ads within your website?

If its the first (example: you want to know the ratio of people who clicked on Facebook ads to your website TO people who clicked to your website from Facebook organically) then this is pretty easy:

1. Add UTM tags to all your ads destination URLs (search UTM builder or URL builder on Google)
2. Make sure the source (in the UTMs) is the same as the organic/normal traffic.
3. Give the medium a unique name (for example, "advertising")

This way you can go to your Analytics, and click on (for example) facebook source. It will then list for you all the mediums of facebook, in this case: facebook / referral & facebook / advertising.

I hope this helps

Hi,

Duplicate content has always been bad. With all the recent Google updates, this has been enforced even more. So the impact is bad, I cant tell you how bad as this would depend on so many factors.

However, the solution or you is canonical tags, have you ever considered these to help robots identify primary pages?

Best of luck