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Hi Pedram,

It looks like 508 compliance is legislation in the US referring only to federal agencies and their information technology properties, so unless you are building for a federal agency, this won't be something you need to worry about.

Looking at your profile, it looks like your company supplies government clients but isn't a federal agency, is this right? (I was looking at this page http://www.learningtree.com/government/.)

If you are building for a federal body, the act refers mainly to accessibility issues and is part of the Rehabilitation Act (not the Americans with Disabilities Act as might be assumed). Sorry to link to Wikipedia, but information on the full act (with links to 508) is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rehabilitation_Act_of_1973

Hope this helps! Perhaps check with an internal person at Learning Tree who knows about compliance issues relating to your government work, but I do not see where contractors to government agencies are included in this. I could be wrong though.

Addressing this point: "maybe the strong pages which do rank well and gain links/social shares are not ranking as well because they are passing link juice through the navigation to other pages."

I assume you meant "don't rank well"... the thing about PageRank is that to the best of our knowledge, it doesn't "leak". Think of PR as coming in two forms: the type a page accumulates and the type it can pass on are not the same thing. You don't drain a page of PageRank by linking out a lot, but you do ensure that linked-to pages receive less of the total available authority if you link out a large number of times. Of course, a page is going to suffer if you link to a million other pages, but this is mostly because it looks spammy and Google assumes the page is not user-friendly. There is nothing un-friendly about your current navigation - I'd personally not change it.

Hope this helps,

Jane

Hi there,

A relatively old post on this from the Moz blog might be of use: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-solve-keyword-cannibalization

Have you done any link building to the primary vinyl banners page? When a range of different pages rank for one query, it can often indicate a problem with the strength of the primary page, with site hierarchy not favouring that page as the canonical source of generic information about the topic.

"Website A which was ranking very well before redirection is now nowhere to be found on Google search.  "

Hi - a question about this statement - did you just redirect ONE page from Website A to Website B, and now A is not ranking at all, and B is not ranking as well as it did for the first week?

Sorry, I was not quite clear on that point and need to be sure before answering the question.

Cheers,

Jane

Hi there,

Google and Yandex operate in very different ways, so comparing rankings between the two is not a very accurate practice. David is correct that point B is much more relevant / likely than point A though. I would try to avoid drawing comparisons between your rankings on both search engines however.

Hi there,

I see you have deleted the malicious pages appearing on your website - they now return 404 server responses. Unfortunately Google still has several of these pages indexed: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=cleanedison.com+%22cialis%22&oq=cleanedison.com+%22cialis%22&aqs=chrome..69i57.1741j0j4&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=91&ie=UTF-8

It should not take long for these URLs to drop out of the index. When these spam links point to 404 pages, they should not damage your domain but if you see negative rankings movements, the disavow tool is a good option. It can also be used pre-emptively if you are particularly concerned about the volume of these pam links coming in.

Hi there,

I see the page indexed when searching for its URL: http://i.imgur.com/dhCnlqK.png

However, there is a huge amount of duplicate content when looking at the leading text on this page: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22We+have+exciting+plans+in+place+for+supporting+our+students+and+are+committed+to+a+high+level%22&oq=%22We+have+exciting+plans+in+place+for+supporting+our+students+and+are+committed+to+a+high+level%22&aqs=chrome..69i57.613j0j9&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=91&ie=UTF-8

As such, Google could well be filtering this page when it comes to more competitive searches, as it sees the same content over and over again. Have you noticed the URL being completely de-indexed and not appearing, even when searching specifically for the URL?

Hi there,

Nope - this shouldn't be an issue, as Marty says, as long as the instances of you linking to this page multiple times are natural and necessary to the content. Avoid using too much optimised anchor text with these links, but Marty is also correct that linking with anchors like this is very common and a good way to point to content within a longer page.

Hi,

Going to agree with Fuel Interactive here - the best practice is to redirect page-by-page if you are combining sites, unless you are set on deleting / consolidating content from the merged sites into one smaller, tidier website. In that case, it's still best practice to redirect to the most appropriate page if one exists, rather than just to the home page.

It can be a real pain to go through a consolidation / redirection process like this, so only do this if it's really necessary and will likely cause a big uplift in either performance or your ability to manage each area of the business.

Dave is right that IIS can do a URL by URL redirect for you, or you can do this in your .htaccess file if you are using an Apache server as opposed to a Microsoft IIS server.

Hi there,

Are you using the rel="alternative" tag (also referred to as the href lang tag) on the site? This tag will do the following: if your page for "FCR Media Lietuva, UAB" is available in English, Lithuanian and Russian, for example, but all of these pages are meant for the Lithuanian market each page will contain a different tag. They will look something like this:

That is, the hreflang part of the tag says "This content is in English but it's meant for Lithuania." The second says "this content is in Lithuanian and is meant for Lithuania". The third is in Russian but is meant for Lithuania, etc. You can include as many country / language pairings as you like. This is a really handy tag for both countries where multiple languages are used, and for languages that are spoken in multiple countries.

You can also end up with a situation where you have a set of tags like this:

That is saying: "these two pages are the same, but one is in Czech and is meant for the Czech Republic; the other is in Lithuanian and is meant for Lithuania. But the content is actually the same, just directly translated."

This tag is not intended specifically for this problem, but for duplicate content as a whole, where that content has been duplicated for the sake of providing content to people in different countries. As a result, I believe it would be a good tool to incorporate here due to the small amount of duplication as a result of title tags.

Hi Bastian,

Did the answer provided in the linked-to thread help here? Anything more you need help with?

Best,

Jane

Hi Bryan,

From a generic point of view, not having seen the other sites (the guys above have some great points about the example site given), there are a number of reasons a site's home page might rank instead of its product pages / speciality pages. The most common is that a site is not very strong, but the strongest page on the site (inevitably the home page, bar extreme circumstances like a very popular blog) is just strong enough, and its content is just relevant enough, for Google to want to rank it. This is very common for new websites - Google figures, "this site is great, better rank it for x, y and z queries", but the internal pages don't yet have the authority to rank on their own.

Link development and good linking throughout the site can help this situation change, although there are some established sites that still suffer from it. You'll see this happen for even some competitive queries - at my former agency, we once had a client who ranked well for [car insurance] in one particular country, but it was always the home page, not the car insurance page, that ranked. Changing that balance was a timely process of building authority into the site's deeper pages.

You can also have a situation where a site is accidentally targeting competitive terms with two or more pages, called keyword cannibalisation. This old post is still relevant in regards to how to deal with this.

Hi Jeff,

This is truly bizarre. The news that there is no drop in Webmaster Tools is very good though - you'd see something similar there if there was truly a traffic drop as opposed to a tracking problem.

I see you are using different GA accounts for each site - have you contacted the host? When I have seen tracking problems in the past that did not match up to actual traffic, it was because the JS code to trigger the analytics visit was being delayed or stopped by something else running on the site. For example, a custom analytics package my former agency built for one of our clients was not being triggered upon page load for two reasons. One, a heavy Conversion Rate Optimisation JS package was loading further up the page and taking an extremely long time, and two - most visitors clicked quickly to a target page, before the CRO JS and our JS could load properly.

Hi there,

Just to round this question off, you could canonicalise the query-string URL searching for black iPhones to the iPhone 5s listings page and keep an individual phone's lising at /123456 separate, yes. It's best to keep the canonical tag for truly duplicated or near-duplicated pages, so you would not want to canonicalise an individual product page to a listings page or similar.

Hi,

Federico is right - there is no good evidence that a large number of tweets directly influences the rankings of a page... it is a good signal, but it is not nearly as directly correlated to rankings as links are.

Definitely not saying that Twitter campaigns are useless: I assume with some confidence that Google analyses content's popularity and spread on Twitter and will have a good grasp on what constitutes real Twitter popularity and what is manipulated or done entirely by spam accounts. This could be used as a signal to indicate a page's current popularity, and on-going success would indicate a good resource. This isn't well studied or proven yet though, so keep that in mind when looking at social metrics from an SEO point of view.

Hi there,

Is there any way you might be able to show us an example of this? Could be easier to spot if there is a problem.

In general, you want to avoid going through 301 redirects if you don't have to. You should be able to maintain your rankings / authority from one URL to another when it is redirected properly but there are no guarantees. It's best to avoid doing it at all unless it's really necessary.

Hi there,

To reiterate some things that have been said here:

You want to remove / move away from Blogspot and Wordpress blogs that are hosted on .blogspot.com / .wordpress.com. Very few people would ever recommend using Blogspot even for a self-hosted blog - Wordpress is very much superior. Using a Blogspot domain does not give you a boost in Google's rankings, so do not worry about losing out because of that.

You also want to remove the duplicate content problem - as is linked to above, Google dislikes duplicate content and will filter out one "version" of the identical content. A query like this one shows that Google has indexed the content on your blogspot blog - if you click to see additional results in that results page, you will see that the way the blogspot blog is set up is absolutely terrible when it comes to duplicate content as well. Google has found 101 versions of the same sentence. The content appears to be drawn into the URL dynamically - the actual text of the post is not visible in the source code of the page, but the entire blog appears to be readable from any blog post URL - all you have to do is scroll up and down.

You really need to remove this blogspot blog and work solely on your own site, but if this blog is currently bringing you traffic, then this is going to be tough. Blogspot does not have a native method for 301 redirecting an old blog to a new location. There are a range of options for redirecting visitors at a page level, but I am relatively sure that there is no server-level redirect option yet.

Hi Stacey,

EGOL is right - this is an outdated technique (buying exact or partial match domains). Several sites will rank for a lot of keywords with partial / exact match domains, but they are almost universally ranking for other reasons, not solely because of their domain names. Google has worked hard to eliminate the effectiveness of this domaining technique due to how much low-quality content ranked well as a result of this being effective years ago.

Have you looked into any possible penalties? 49th is low for an otherwise well-established company, assuming that the site's on-page optimisation is good.

Hi Kevin,

It's inconclusive how careful you have to be when starting afresh after an irreparable spam penalty - also, while I understand that the client needs to see results, I have anecdotal evidence of horrific backlink spam being resolved and penalties being lifted - my former agency worked on a site last year with a backlink profile full of thousands of bad links. Literally thousands had to be removed or disavowed. It took about six or seven months to fix, unfortunately, but the penalty was lifted earlier this year after the biggest link take-down project I have ever seen.

However, if you simply cannot fix this, I would go with the .com. Penalties certainly regularly pass through redirects, and I would not be confident that other forms of redirection like 302s and meta refreshes wouldn't count in this case too. Even without a redirect, what Mary says about penalties following brands is feasible since it's not going to be a secret to Google that this is the same business on a new domain name.

One thing is certainly true: starting with the new domain is the only way to go if the client cannot commit to a lengthy take-down process. Have another look at whether you have exhausted the disavowal process though... there might be more to get out of that route before you ditch the domain completely. Disavowal is meant to help in situations like this, but it's also true that the team there can be very difficult to get a positive response out of, even when you have done your best to remove the links and are demonstrating that you can't do more.

Cheers,

Jane

Hi Errol,

Yep, these links all come from the same c-block.

As Mary says, it's likely that Google is well aware that these sites are related. I disagree that that would automatically put you at high risk for a penalty, given that interlinking owned / managed websites is common practice, even amongst people who are not doing so for SEO purposes. Unless the network of sites appeared very manipulative, it is likely that the links would be discounted and no benefit passed between them rather than you being slapped with a bad penalty... however, nofollowing the links between each site and your hub site is the best practice when it is done to any extent / large scale, just in case this was viewed as manipulative. Since I do not know how many links / sites we're talking about here, I would certainly say that nofollowing these links would be the safe thing to do.

Even if you were being super-sneaky with the hosting of these sites, disguising Whois information, making changes to your template, etc., Google is incredibly good at figuring out which sites are related to each other. They've been good at this for a long time, so it's always best to assume that they'll know about professional networks like yours and follow best practice with linking.

Hope this helps!

Jane

Hi there,

Just to round off this thread, I would say that Robert is right - often low rankings aren't about what you are doing "wrong" but are about what your competitors have done right that you have not considered. If your SEO practices are out of date (I am guessing here, but things like seeking links from directories, focusing on the minutiae of markup rather than robust site structure and quality, unique content, pushing out small daily "blog" updates that are repetitive rather than writing two or three longer, quality pieces per week, etc.) then your rankings will suffer if your competitors are more up to date.

If you are still seeking links from third party sites with solely "optimised" anchor text (e.g. links saying "Car insurance" pointing to the car insurance page) you can end up with a penalty or poorer rankings as a result, usually at the hands of the Penguin algorithm or a manual action (although if you are still ranking 8th, you do not have a penalty.

Hi there,

Just checking in to see if you looked through the things Kevin mentioned and if you are still experiencing the indexation problem after the HTTPS switch?

Cheers,

Jane

Hi Jason,

If you use the unique ccTLDs and the href lang / rel="alternative" tag, this duplication will be fine. The tag was brought out in late 2011 and tells Google: "just because this content is the same on an Australian site, a British site and an American site, this is okay - it has been done on purpose." You can also use it to point to direct translations, e.g. "this Spanish content is the same as this English content over here, but one is meant for the UK and one for Argentina." Lastly, you can also use this tag as mark up to say "This is French content meant for Canada, and this English content over here is also meant for Canada".

More information about the tag is available here and here.

Cheers,

Jane

Hi there,

I'd echo the points above regarding on and off page, especially off page: a poorly optimised site from an on-page perspective can gain rankings based on its great backlink profile. A perfect website with perfectly optimised pages will not rank if it does have links.

Have you engaged in any link development during the fours months? Along with looking at the points Erwan raised, I would look at the backlink profiles of your competitors in the area and decide on a 12 month goal for how many links you need and from which types of sites. Have a look at the link development category on the Moz blog for years worth of good ideas as well.

Hi Christoph,

It's certainly true that there's a lot of room for improvement, even given the page you're working with right now. As Martijn notes, this image includes text that could be incorporated as HTML - whether you use image replacement, HTML 5, etc., a basic like this means that Google understands nothing about what the image is about / says.

In general, creating a page with more "text" on it (or, more specifically, a page set up in a way that makes it easier for Google to understand all of its content) is beneficial. It may not make a marked, noticeable difference to traffic straight away, but the site / page has the likelihood to rank for more terms if you include all its terms as readable text.

I would agree that the titles aren't particularly spammy, but also that you could re-word them slightly to make them more conversational (even a re-write for little reason can force a re-index of the tag itself which can help). This said, there really isn't anything untoward about what you've written already - the title tags take a common format and most sites do not have an issue with this.

Are you using the all-in-one SEO plug in, if you are running Wordpress?

Hi Siggi,

There are certainly a lot of instances of "agent" being used on the page which you may be best to cut down on, e.g. using the product name in the roll-over - there are 345 instances of "agent" on that page alone. Don't worry about the Moz grader tool and the apostrophe - Google can understand this, even if Moz has trouble with it.

So for example, on the text over the image for the "Vyztužený saénový korzet Penelope", perhaps use that text only, rather than including "L'Agent by Agent Provocateur" as well, etc.

Hi Jeff,

This sounds like a problem with the GA installation rather than actual traffic if you are not seeing this in the log file analyser for all these sites. Sounds really basic but have you checked that the GA code is included properly across the sites, especially the pages that have gone from 400 daily visits to 0?

If you're also running ranking reports and not seeing a drop in rankings, then the issue is almost certain to be reporting rather than actual traffic.

Do you see a drop in impressions / clicks in Webmaster Tools too?

Hi Robert,

Weird, you are right - the canonical tag appears on the majority of pages, but not on a select few, like https://www.bestfitbybrazil.com/Articles.asp?ID=282, which is indexed with its https URL. Is there something different you can see about this URL structure or where it sits in the site that might cause this? Could be worth pointing this one out to the Volusion team too. It appears that no URL with the Articles.asp?ID= structure has a canonical tag.

The other thing I see about this URL by just having a play around is that just changing the query string at the end to 283 as opposed to 282 is bring up the same page: http://www.bestfitbybrazil.com/Articles.asp?ID=283

Unrelated to the initial issue but a lot of the site's content is also duplicated on http://bestfitbybrazil.blogspot.co.uk/, a Google plus page and Tumblr e.g. https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22Bia+Brazil+Leggings+LE2854+are+sophisticated+and+versitile+sexy+leggings.+They+fit+like+a+glove%2C+shaping+and+enhancing+your+figure.%22&oq=%22Bia+Brazil+Leggings+LE2854+are+sophisticated+and+versitile+sexy+leggings.+They+fit+like+a+glove%2C+shaping+and+enhancing+your+figure.%22&aqs=chrome..69i57.1069j0j9&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=91&ie=UTF-8#filter=0&q=%22Bia+Brazil+Leggings+LE2854+are+sophisticated+and+versitile+sexy+leggings.+They+fit+like+a+glove%2C+shaping+and+enhancing+your+figure.%22&safe=off

Hi Robert,

Disallowing these in robots.txt is the correct thing to do here - this takes away any potential Google problem regarding the login pages. Google MIGHT still index them (but it's not - see here) because blocking via robots.txt says "don't crawl this" rather than "don't index this URL". Subtle difference, but you do sometimes see URLs that are blocked in robots.txt showing up in the index as JUST a URL (no title tag or meta description, since Google was not allowed to crawl the page). An example from your own site is the affiliate sign up page, which is blocked but indexed (see screenshot here).

Moz obeys robots.txt but it's showing these errors, likely because it has seen the links to those redirecting pages somewhere. But Google should not be a problem.

Regarding the HTTPS issue Travis pointed out, check out this search. This shows that you have pages with HTTPS URLs indexed - the top result for me is this page.

You need to implement the canonical tag to point to the preferred version of each URL (HTTP or HTTPS), or implement 301 redirects from one to the other, so URLs like this one are not indexed as they are now.

Cheers,

Jane

Hi Robert,

Just to reiterate what was said here - the issue here will be that the home page is much stronger than the internal pages, hence why it's ranking better. This is quite a common problem. I wouldn't worry about the page grader for now, because once you get the right pages ranking, the page grader will show the correct grade for the pages.

Working on the internal linking to those pages, off-page optimisation, those page's content, etc. is certainly going to help. Strengthening the homepage won't hurt either, as long as those internal pages are linked to well from the home page. You can consider linking to them with optimised anchor text, as long as this appears natural and makes sense for a user. For example, if you were working with an insurance site and the home page is ranking for [car insurance] instead of www.site.com/car-insurance/, link to the car insurance page from the home page with the anchor text "car insurance". You'll know instinctively if this is appropriate for the pages / keywords you're dealing with here. You may well have already done this, but thought it best to reiterate just in case!

Cheers,

Jane

Hi Bob,

There are a few others, the main one being Wordtracker (which comes with very good reviews). Wordtracker has a good reputation, but it's worth noting that some smaller tools do not have access to a large dataset to pull their numbers from, so you're not necessarily getting a true picture. Although Google's numbers are almost certainly a bit wonky (deliberately), at least you are getting them from the source and can have confidence in comparing volume. By that, I mean that if the tool says 10,000 people per month in the US search for [hypnosis] and 2,000 search for [hynotherapy] (these are totally made up numbers), then you can be somewhat confident that [hynotherapy] is 1/5th as popular as [hypnosis], even though you can't rely on the 10,000 / 2,000 figures.

Cheers,

Jane

Hi Ash,

It's generally advised that you either target a keyword with the home page or with an internal page and not both, so depending on which resource you choose as the one you want ranking, I would target that page and that page alone. This is an old post but it illustrates the point well.

Hi there,

There's definitely no magic number for conversion rates, unfortunately - some businesses consider 2% amazingly high. For others, anything less than 20% would be a failure depending on what the desired action is. It depends entirely on the page and campaign.

I would start here to figure out both what your current problems are and what sort of improvement you can consider to be "good" - it's very difficult to compare your CR to anyone else's but your own. That post works with that assumption - that it's only your own data that can be used to decide on what constitutes improvement or what success looks like.

Sorry to provide a non-answer, but I'd go as far as to say that it's hard to even compare your CR with others in your industry - with different brands and landing pages, everyone's data is unique to them.

Hi Viresh,

The 301 redirect option is perfect, and so is using the canonical tag to point one "version" of the site to the other if you would rather do that - instructions for doing that are here. Just make sure, as you would with the redirect, the the canonical tag points on a page-by-page basis. That is, xyz.com/page31.html has a canonical tag on it pointing to www.xyz.com/page31.html, not to www.xyz.com/.

Cheers,

Jane

Property sites use a range of techniques to handle this - I have seen 404s, 410 Gone responses, 302 redirects and 200 OK responses showing a largely blank page (definitely not recommended) whilst browsing a little this morning.

Others leave the listing live but show that it's no longer on the market, e.g. http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-to-rent/property-29033160.html

It doesn't sound like you can use this last option, although it would allow you to recycle URLs for properties like rentals that often come back on the market.

If you must go with a 404, try to make it useful as Dave says. Can you customise the 404 page, perhaps pulling in information dynamically based upon the listing that was deleted?

Hi Joanna,

That's really interesting. I do not know the answer to whether rankings with thumbnails are treated differently upon a user clicking, but I agree with Anthony that you might be turning visitors off for some queries. It's certainly worth testing if we can confirm that the traffic is not being misappropriated in analytics.

I oversaw a campaign a year or so ago that placed thumbnails on rather transactional pages for a retailer and we did not see traffic decrease dramatically, but the thumbnails only showed up intermittently. I would certainly agree with attempting to keep thumbnails for pages where a visual guide like a video makes sense, given the results you've seen.

Hi,

You shouldn't have to do anything in WMT as there isn't an option for preferred URLs between HTTPS and HTTP (whilst there is an option to say if you prefer http://site.com/ or http://www.site.com/). Google should pick up and acknowledge the 301s if you choose to do this, ranking only your HTTPS URLs.

It used to be the case that this wasn't recommended for SEO, but Google has come a long way with dealing with secure URLs. Just a quick search for inurl:https will show you how many sites are indexed with SSL URLs. Some have done it properly; some have not.

Hi Felicity,

Unfortunately this won't be something Google would consider grounds for reducing Ebay's ranking for this keyword / these items (duplication of images, including both theft and legitimate re-purposing) is absolutely rampant online so duplicate images aren't easy to police and in most cases, it doesn't make sense to do so. Have you tried reporting the listings to Ebay Australia? Have a look here - http://ocsnext.ebay.com.au/ocs/sr?search=1&query=1732&popularTool=true&st=0&popularToolName=Report%20an%20item

Especially if the items are knock-offs or not really what they purport to be, Ebay might take some action on the listings or sellers. I would think that is your best bet.

Cheers,

Jane

To add to what Cyrus has said, Google will "choose" a version of content it finds duplicated to favour, so has clearly chosen the local. subdomain. The main website would likely fall back into favour if you were to consolidate the subdomain and redirect it to the main site, but I would definitely find out if the third party agency who developed the subdomain has done some promotion of the subdomain that you aren't aware of.

There is no real problem using subdomains or subfolders for specific local rankings / campaigns. I wouldn't say you are gaming or abusing it here - you have a dupe content problem that needs fixing though.

If you were to use subfolders, the duplicate content problem would remain as long as there are multiple versions of the same content, but if you were to consolidate the main site and subdomain's strength, then any subfolders you added to the one remaining site (assuming all content was unique) should inherit authority.

You should be fine if his version of the content has disappeared before yours goes live. It's fairly normal for content to appear in more than once place over the course of time, so you won't fall into a filter or penalty situation with this, as long as his content has been deindexed. Best to check that it is no longer cached before yours goes live, but it should not take long for Google to drop it.

Hi Ash,

I haven't, but the code for the menu is definitely appearing twice in the source, once under

id="Mmenu" class="show-on-phones SpeedyDropDown"> class="MenuCenter"><a <span="" class="webkit-html-attribute-name">class</a><a <span="" class="webkit-html-attribute-name">="toggleMenu" href="</a>#">Menu <nav <span="" class="webkit-html-attribute-name">class="main-navigation"> nav

id

dnn_MENU2

and once under

<navclass="mega-navigation"><divid="dnn_menu1">I would say that the home page could be a good target for those two keywords, especially given you are prioritising it in key areas like the home page title tag. You have a bit of a keyword cannibalisation issue here right now because you have the internal funeral planning page and the home page essentially targeting the same set of keywords.</divid="dnn_menu1"></navclass="mega-navigation"> </nav>

Hi Ash,

This can make sense on occasion, but we'd want to look at the specific example to know if this was the right move. Google would prefer to direct users to the most relevant page, which in a high number of circumstances is the internal page rather than the home page.

You can often see internal pages rank well for keywords where they have very few inbound links from third parties, due to the strength of the site as a whole and the site's good internal linking. For instance, there are only 12 unique domains linking to Very's swimsuit page (http://www.very.co.uk/women/swimwear-beachwear/swimsuits/e/b/1769.end), but the page ranks page 1 in the UK for [swimsuits]. Only Debenhams itself links to http://www.debenhams.com/women/swimwear-beachwear/swimsuits, which ranks one place better than Very for the same query.

Hi Karen,

Breaking away from the hypothesis about the penalty here for a second, but I am wondering if the HTTPS / HTTP issue is part of the problem here.

Would you be able to PM me the website in question if you are not comfortable sharing it publicly here? I am not a Moz staff member (I used to be, 2006 - 09) but I help out with Q&A as an associate.

Cheers,

Jane

Hi there,

Have you been able to remove the old urchin code and is analytics showing the traffic to the new domain now?

Cheers,

Jane

Agreed with Andy that this is about what you want to achieve with the content. I would be making this choice based upon what type of marketing you plan on carrying out with the graph. In some cases, something more simple like a jpeg is going to work better. In others, you're going to want to invest in the interactive HTML5 option.

I know this is a vague answer, but it really does come down to what will be appropriate.

I would look more for a site that has a squeaky-clean profile of its own (both in terms of its inbound and outbound links), has an appropriate page to link to you from and (for extra credit) is perhaps marginally related to your business (also in tech, for instance), rather than go on its numbers and try to shoe-horn a link in there, if that makes sense.

I feel the basic marketing principle behind expecting an entire student body to be interested in the happenings throughout the entire university is flawed - the math majors aren't interested in who the visiting poet to the English department is this week (if this is the type of information that is shared). If they are modelling what engagement should look like off the percentage of fans who like / share a post compared to something like the university athletics page, they are going to be disappointed.

The faculties sharing the generic status with everyone's weekly happenings seems similar to having an important page two clicks from the home page instead of one: why would I want to search through 20 faculties' updates to see what's on in the psych department when, as a fan of the psych department, the psych department could have posted their schedule themselves? I understand the idea behind having all the departments contribute, but it seems to misunderstand the audience and how they want to consume information. Facebook posts rely on the browsing attention span of the audience, which isn't long!

Facebook's algorithm will rank poorly-shared content in quite a low location on the newsfeed if people have their newsfeeds sorted by Top Stories, which is the default. It's hard to say exactly how their algos work (although a lot of study has gone into this in a similar way to how people have studied Google), but a page with 195k fans whose posts routinely receive 20 likes will not be assigned great metrics on the back of that.

My alma mater has fairly decent engagement (40k likes; a couple to a few hundred likes on popular posts, but as low as 15 on less popular stuff). Every post gets just a few shares and a little more comments, but keep in mind that a comment or a like will make a public post show up on that person's timeline as well, so it's similar to a share in terms of visibility (I am not 100% sure about how the placement of a post changes on others' newsfeeds depending on whether their friend has liked, commented or shared, however). What my alma mater is doing, however, is posting university-generic stuff, not news about specific departments unless it's catchy or particularly interesting (the PhD. in squirrel psychology did well because it's a) cute and b) odd; interestingly they did not link to the relevant faculty and I can't find a press release or course page, which seems like a big oversight, even for new news!).

I would contend that a federal model (if you like) of marketing with a bit more power given to the faculties would work - things of interest to the faculties are dealt with on their pages whilst the central university page deals with generic interest.