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That's a good point about keeping the page indexed if it's being 301 redirected. There are approximately 900 properties listed with maybe 50-100 leaving the site each month. Would it be best to give a 410 HTTP response code? There won't be a lot of direct traffic to these pages, the main issue is with how Google sees the page. Users will search for it while it's listed but we're not talking about a large amount of traffic.
I have a client site that displays properties from the MLS. Once these properties sell they're removed from the MLS and they stop showing up on her site. This would result in a 404 error, but right now any property that's not being found is being 301 redirected back to the property page. I see how this makes sense for a user, but Google is saying there's an increase in Soft 404 errors and I've read that this could negatively affect organic traffic.
Should I keep the redirect for removed properties or should I have it serve a 404 with a message that the house you're looking for may have sold and link to the property page? Is it better to have Soft 404 errors or 404 errors?
Amazing answer. Thank you! We're doing much of this, but you've given me even more ideas.
I have my main Google Places / Google+ Local page in Detroit where I've had it for probably 5 years and have 10 5-star reviews. It shows up pretty well in the local listings. I recently moved to Sioux Falls, South Dakota and while I'm still doing business in Detroit and have an office location, my main location is now Sioux Falls. I've started a new Google+ page here, but it's not doing very well and I don't have many reviews. Which of the following should I do?
1. Create New Page and Leave the Old page where it is
Create a new page for Sioux falls and leave the old page in Detroit. It will take some time to build up the new location profile.
2. Change the Address of the Old Page (Detroit) to my new address in Sioux Falls
Could I change the address of the old page (Detroit) to my new address in Sioux Falls, then create a new page for Detroit? This would hopefully have my page with all of the reviews, which has been around for awhile, in my new main location and I could create a new page for Detroit.
Does anyone have any experience with this? What do you think would be the best approach?
Do you have competing title tags, headings, and content between this sub-page and the home page? If they are the same or similar, something on the home page makes it more appealing to rank than your home page. It could be better quality content that is more relevant to the keyword than the home page or it could signify issues with your home page as Philip alluded to.
Limited content or mixed content on the home page could be an issue or it may be technical. Is the home page not loading correctly or loading very slowly? Also, is your home page not ranking for they keyword or is the sub-page just higher in ranking? Does your home page rank for other keywords?
Yes, I think it's a must for them now as their current site is almost unusable on a phone. The main issue with the mobile site and Google's stance are the faulty redirects. I believe everything redirects to the mobile home page right now. It may not be a huge deal right now because they have limited content but it's something we'll have to address.
The mobile site currently can be indexed by Google as well, which is an issue.
I have a restaurant client that we're setting up with SinglePlatform.com to distribute their menu and make sure all of the restaurant sites have updated information for their business. As part of SinglePlatform's service, they offer a mobile site. Normally we would just create a mobile site and make sure that it's optimized but this client isn't ready to invest in a customized mobile site yet. The mobile site we can get with SinglePlatform is very simple. Call, Menu, Address, View Full Website, Photos, General Info.
I know this would make it much easier for mobile users to find information and contact them but it's not mobile best practices. Whatever main page they land on would redirect them to the home page of the mobile site (i.e. not a 1 to 1). We also won't have any Google Analytics information for this site.
The question comes down to usability or SEO? I'm leaning toward the mobile site for now and sell them on a customized solution later. I guess I'm just looking for some verification or any insight.
I have a client that has multiple apartment complexes in different states and metro areas. They get good traffic and pretty good conversions but the site needs a lot of updating, including the architecture, to implement SEO standards. Right now they rank for " <brand_name>apartments" on every place but not " <city_name>apartments".</city_name></brand_name>
There current architecture displays their URLs like:
I know it is said to never change the URL structure but what about this site? I see this URL structure being bad for SEO, bad for users, and basically forces us to keep the current architecture.
They don't have many links built to their community pages so will creating a new URL structure and doing 301 redirects to the new URLs drastically drop rankings?
Is this something that we should bite the bullet on now for future rankings, traffic, and a better architecture?
Alright, sounds like I should keep the URL structure. My reason in thinking about removing it was that I don't really want to have the menu structure of:
Services
I want Web Design, SEO, and Internet Marketing to be main menu items to draw attention to them. Maybe I'll leave the services page but only link to it from the footer. I guess that provides flexibility for the future if I add services.
My site currently ranks #1 or #2 for 2 separate pages on web design & SEO for my geographic location. The URLs are currently mysite.com/services/web-design/ and mysite.com/services/seo/
I'm redesigning my site and I'm taking out the "Services" page as I'm focusing on web design and SEO and lumping everything else into my "Internet Marketing" page. Because my pages for web design and SEO rank so well, should I keep the URL structure even though I don't have a "Services" page or should I just remove services and 301 redirect so I have mysite.com/web-design/ and mysite.com/seo/.
I know doing a 301 redirect could hurt me in the short term but I'm wondering if I should just bite the bullet now and change it in favor of a better URL structure.
What do you think?
I think you may have hit on some key points here that kind of work into my initial thoughts:
I believe that if you have these two key attributes for your site, having your categories and tags indexed would be very useful. In myself and the clients that I work with, I feel like the categories have plenty of high quality content but the tags are hit or miss.
From hearing the discussions of others and my own experience, I feel like having the categories indexed and the tags noindex would work out well but I think it's worth a shot to index my tags and see what happens. I'm sure Google and SEOmoz will let me know if I have some big dupliate content issues and I can easily monitor the traffic to these pages.
The interesting statistic for the tag pages will be the bounce rate...
It depends on what you're using the site for. If you're wondering about straight SEO results for .net or .com, there likely won't be a difference as they're both main TLDs. If the site is used for mainly one time visitors or is strictly online, you should be fine with a .net. If people are mainly getting to your site by searching or possibly bookmarking your site, it won't matter between the two.
On the other hand if you have an offline business, I would definitely go with a .com. 9 times out of 10 if you give someone a business card with MyCoolDomain.net, they will type in MyCoolDomain.com. It's just habit. Try it with friends and tell them to go to YourSite.net while standing over their shoulder. I bet even then you get most people going to YourSite.com. If it's off-line, you want people to remember the main domain and not have to worry whether the TLD is .com or .net. They just automatically guess as .com.
The Wordpress SEO plugin by Yoast doesn't no index both by default and I would give him more authority on SEO than the all in one SEO pack. Maybe it's a "depends on the situation"?
I guess it sounds like noindex, follow tag pages there is a consensus but I'm surprised at everyone saying noindex, follow on the category pages. With providing a category description and only displaying an excerpt from the posts, I feel like you have a good page that should be indexed.
I guess that brings up a good question on the measure of duplicate content. Is seomoz pro crawler a good enough measure of duplicate content or is Google super sensitive?
For anyone that's interested in results, I've taken my blog that had everything nonindex, follow (categories and tags) and set categories to index, follow and tags to noindex, follow. I've seen about a 20% increase in traffic (not all due to this), my category pages are indexed and cached, and they're being used as entrance pages in some cases. Note that I did add good descriptions for these and I'm displaying them on the category page.
I also took another blog that had everything index, follow and changed it to the same that I just described. They have seen a reduction in their bounce rate and an increase in traffic.
On the same subject, I've also changed my paginated pages (archive pages 2+) to noindex, follow. They pretty much look the same as page 1 and they're pretty low quality landing pages. I've just added it but I noticed many recommendations to do it, Yoast.com does, and I see it on other big sites.