Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Toby,

thank you for your quick respons. To answer your questions:

• Site structure stated the same -> no changes were made
• The resposiveness was done by recreating the code of the website that was build in Tables and recreated with div's. I've tested the code off course and found no problems with it. It was completely HTML5 validated.
• No not logged in to Google account
• Incognito window of chrome is still untested -> will try that shortly -> thank you for the pointer
• Changes in Google and in Moz.com crawltest
• I know mobile friendliness has to do with mobile searches but since that rest of the site did not change I did not expect any change on desktop (been no. 1 since 5 or 6 years for most of the terms). I would sooner expect a increase do to the cleaner code then a decrease in rankings
• I testen in Google itself on my ipad and iphone and noticed the results there too. All of the competitors are not mobile friendly yet.

Hope this clears up some.

I will PM you a link to the site for your point of view on it.

regards

Jarno

Hello Mozzers,

I got a questions about some rankings. Some of my sites always had no. 1 rankings for most of the competitive terms per niche. I recently made the change to a full responsive design for more mobile friendliness. No all of the sudden I see different competitors that are not mobile friendly outranking me for some of my most important keywords but also I see some link farm sites (like: camping.startpagina.nl) outranking me for some terms.

I was under the impression that Google doesn't like link farm sites? Also I provide a lot of good unique content on my pages and my competitor does no such thing. Still for some terms he outranks me. I understand that it can't be just 1 thing and that there are a lot of factors playing a rol in the big picture but still, you must understand that this is pretty frustrating. I obey the rules of the search engines and see competitors do no such thing and still being outranked by them.

Further details of this matter can be send to you in PM if you need it.

Looking forward for your thoughts on this.

regards

Jarno

Howard,

As far as i know there is not an exact number you are allowed to link to form content. I looked at your page (disney part 1) and the number of links is not to high for the amount of content but I think it's mostly everyone's opinion.

A thing that stood out for me: When I visit your site I see a huge header section with social buttons, site-search, logo, menu and a huge H1. Then I just see a small portion of your content with more adds then content. This could get you hit by Panda/Penguin. Also I see 2 search columns? One on the top right of the page and one in the main section of the site on the right just above the Most popular by Views section. Why?

I would suggest keeping just 1 search bar, making your header a lot narrower (lower) and removing some of the ads on top and placing them further down in the content. That just my 2 cents on this. As for your question about the outbound links: If the links adds value to the page and is logical then you can keep it but keep it all to a minimum.

Jarno

Wayne,

What if you would make a section on your main website for licenses and there each license that you have given to a company gets it's own page. On that page their company information is shown with adress, phonenumbers etc.

They put up a shield or badge, that you have to develop, with a link to their section/license on your site. That way you do the licensing and resolve the issue of duplicate content since the information is gathered on your site. And you get about 50+ incoming links. About the link network I'm not all that concerned. I run a website with over 900 campsites. I guess about 200 of those sites link to our website and we link to their website on their own page. We never had any problems with that method.

Hope you understand what I'm getting at.

regards

Jarno

can you go in even further, showing the Facebook pages/profiles that refer to you? Have you searched for your website, business name, name in Facebook and Twitter? Have you promoted a #Hash to social media or anything?

Maybe start by searching in the Social Media networks to see if anything comes up.

Tom,

I do get what you are going for. I also understand what Ray is saying and I do think he has some good points. I would also start by looking at multiple options. The options I see are this:

1. Keep the current domain and expend it like Ray suggested (/mazda=tires/ etc).
2. Start a new domain (carparts.com) and redirecting your current pages to the new domain (carports.com/toyota-parts/)
3. Keep the current domain and create a new domain for your expansion and linking them all together. So you get toyotaparts.com, mazdaparts.com, hondaparts.com etc.

Every option has a few pro's and cons speaking for it. The domain you currently own and use also has an age factor in its favor. By redirecting it to a new domain you may pass on the authority but you won't pass on the age of the domain. Though new websites tend to rank well in the beginnen, then start dropping some and then settle down it's still a risk factor. Ever more in a very competitive niche.

Maybe the real answer is somewhere in between the options. You could also keep what you have right now, and expend by creating both carparts.com and mazdaparts.com. What you then could do is build something on carparts.com and from there refer to each individual site (toyotaparts.com/mazdaparts.com etc). And you expend by creating new fresh sites and by creating your own high quality new fresh content that's unique and refer it to your other content on the other websites. That way you get a spider web with carports in the center of it and the other sites at the far end, linking it all together to one giant network. Some SEO's might have to say something about this too but I'm just giving you my piece of mind and my thoughts on this subject.

Hope this helps you some.

Regards

Jarno

Hi there,

read your question with great interest. This kinda thing is what I face during some projects to. The first problem is that you are the fourth company working on their site. Every SEO has his/hers own methodology. In other words, things you might not consider to do, might be considered or done by someone else. Then again, the basics should all be the same.

The fact they've had some bad SEO done in the past can hurt a site. I would disavow those links, wait for maybe a month or 2 and check regularly if the links have been dropped. And then look at what the rankings will do. But don't focus on rankings alone. For instance, what is the bounce rate at this point? If the incoming traffic is unrelated to the subject through directory links or bad links you might see a high bounce ratio or low views per visitor. That is also I factor I would look at after disavowing some links. In stead of disavowing everything at once (which you could do) maybe it's wiser to disavow 25% first, then another 25%, another 25% and then the last 25% of links. And keep measuring the effect.

As for using singular or plural domain names is always tricky. It also kinda depends on the language your focussing on. In the Netherlands we have some terms that the plural is completely something else as the singular version. Sometimes it's just a "s" on the end other times the entire word becomes something different.

I would work a bit more on the old domain, making sure the on page SEO is completely up to date and correct, making sure you disavow some/all of the links, creating new unique content, acquire new links through your new content and keep a focus on the future. That way you might also get this old domain to work. Besides the age of the domain could also be a factor (several tools take this into account).

If you do switch to another domain, I agree with Ray. Make sure you also host it on another IP adres and make sure you don't get any reference from the old to the new domain because then the bad link juice might just flow through to the new domain.

Hope my point of view helps

Regards

Jarno

Lubov,

I do feel you improved your titles here. Using the Engineered Brown Wood as the start of your title seems logical to me. The Cipressa in the old title, what does that  refer to? A particular type of wood or product name you use?

Using London in the Title might tell your users where you are but they don't tell them who you are. Danny Dover's book suggest you use | Companyname/sitename at the end of the title. I implemented this for several websites and the results seem to work great. However, when you do that and implement it throughout your site you don't mention London. But you do refer to it in the footer. Why not implement your entire contact details in the footer of the page? Then you can leave london out of your title tag and you have it in your page footer. That is what I would do.

Hope this helps you some.

regards

Jarno

Ivor,

i think i counted correctly:

1. above the content main section
2. right next to your own ad (which Google also counts as Ad)
3. Mid content in between the audi's (the page i looked)
4. at the bottom of the left side bar.

So you actually have 5 ad blocks on your site. Then again, the first ad block should not be that high on the page. Delete the above the content one, and the bottom left sidebar one and add some content before using the block next to your own ads. That might work for you. But at this moment you are violating Google's policy on using ads (IMHO)

I would defiantly add more content, more text less ads. Maybe 1 or 2 ad blocks on at least a 1000 words ? I never measured a ratio that works. Maybe a good idea to do that sometime.

As for the errors, can you give a few examples of the pages that are duplicate, I will look into it a bit further.

Regards

Jarno

Ivor,

what I would do is make sure you update your sitemap.xml daily and also have Google scan it every day (add it by hand in your webmaster tools or use another tactic). That way you are constantly telling Google where all the pages are. Besides that I would recommend having the right structure for pages that no longer exist so they give a correct 404's and make your pages canonicalized for content (but only if you indeed have unique content). 34000 pages are hard to inspect for problems but you would have to start somewhere.

I also noted that you have a lot of adsense blocks and other ads blocks on the pages. Google Adsenses insist that you use no more then 3 ad blocks on 1 page. If I look at your page I see at least 4 blocks. So I would drastically dial this number down and keep them as low as possible on the page. You now have one above the main content (http://www.mercadonline.es/ads/coches/9909). I would never do this. Start with content (maybe 3 or 4 paragraphs before you introduce you first ad block. I work with adsense a lot and I know the policy of Google on this. This might be why you got hit by the penalties. Panda and Penguin both look at the quality of a page and the ration between ads and content.

Hope this helps you some.

Regards

Jarno

I think you have the best possible answer above.

Good Luck.

Next to Martijns question for some more link information could you also provide some more insight in analytics with best scored pages / bounces rates / time on site / CTR / etc.

I just opened the site on my iMac but it doesn't look all that great. Could be other users experience the same and leave your site with a high bounce rate which in turn could hurt your ranking ability. So maybe the offsite SEO is okay but maybe the on page could be improved?

Considered that?

Gal,

could you perhaps provide some more information? URL, referring Social Media users / pages, etc.

Otherwise we wouldn't know where to look.

Regards

Jarno

I agree with Dave.

When the page redirects from a page to a 404 it's another redirect however the url mentioned does not exist so there should not be any links to it within your site. If a competitor is linking to a non existing page it's referred to external and as long as it stays like that then you should be just fine. The problem starts when you start linking to a non existing page.

So keep it clean and implement the change I would say.

Thank you both for your responses and my apologies that I haven't been able to respond sooner.

I will start by looking into it a bit more before making any significant changes however maybe 2015 is a nice year for a complete site redesign. Thank you for you thoughts.

Regards

Jarno

Mozzers,

As the title of this question describes I'm am wondering how important it is that your code has to be up to date for SEO and UX use. One of my sites was build in 2007 and updates in 2010 (new images / color) but my code hasn't changed that much over te years so the site still uses tables for lay-out purposes in stead of divs. Now how important is it to update this and how much risk will this have to my current rankings? For most of my main keywords I rank number 1 in Google (NL). I can't afford to lose those rankings but if an outdated code will get me into trouble I might have to update this anyway and then rather do it sooner then later.

Any suggestions on this subject?

regards

Jarno

Very nice trick, great catch. You will jump out in the SERPS using this. Maybe the next smart thing or the next trick?

If the site is under 500 pages use the one suggested here, copy the HTML code and use it in a page. That's what I would do.

If the site is over 500 pages I would indeed look for extension, module, widget for your CMS.

Hi,

If I get what you are asking then you will be facing duplicate content issues unless you use a canonical tag stating where you get the reviews from. So for instance if you have product A on websites Z, Y and X (hopefully every site has it's own unique content for the product or you'll be facing duplicate content issues right away).

If you get reviews on Z you want to use them on X and Y
If your get reviews on X you want to use them on Z and Y
etc.

I think you can use canonical tags pointing in the direction you get  the information from but I am not sure it will do the trick. Maybe there is a widget of plugin for the site that gets the reviews from a review site and shows them on the other sites? That might be a lot better and a lot less complicated. Or just keep the reviews at each site. But that is just stating the obvious.

Jarno

Rodney,

I believe you have the use the $ symbol for following the content and using the ^ symbol I always start off by using the base URL. You could try:

RewriteEngine on
Options MultiViews FollowSymLinks
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} .
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.example.com [NC]
RewriteRule (.) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^news(.) http://www.example.com/blog$1 [R=301,L]

I think this should do the trick.

regards

Jarno

Hi there,

i would defiantly do it. Both rename the files and give good alts just like suggested above. But there is another very good reason to do so. Since 2007 when I started with some of my websites I always used logical names for images and descriptive alt tags and this turned out to send me quite a lot of traffic actually. Don't think of 100,000 visitors per year but using analytics I've seen years with about 7500 to 15000 visitors per year through image search by Google.

Also, these people also opted in for our newsletter, viewed a lot of pages etc. etc. So yes. I would use logical names and alt tags and invest the time in it.

Regards

Jarno

First of all I must Agree with Moosa.

I also ran some experiments like this and by the use of hyphens (for instance separating 2 words with a hyphen in de domainname). Even though my better backlink profile, my higher DA/PA and my better content (more actual, newer, more words, less links in the text) The website still keeps outranking me. But for clients of mine I've been running similar test which in turn show that it is very possible to outrank websites without hyphens, stopwords or The in the URL.

That's why I agree with Moosa. Keep running the experiment in stages and maybe even use your information to write a YouMoz post about it. Could be a very interesting read.

Jarno

Personally I would go with number 3, purely based on a feeling. Number 2 just feels and look wrong.

I think with number 3 you've got it all logically arranged. State / City dealer. Very logical.

Just my 2 cents.

Regards

Jarno

if it truly is only in the breadcrumbs trail then I don't think it would hurt your rankings. But nevertheless if this really are your breadcrumbs then I think you could keep it this way. Why would you remove it?

regards

Jarno

Hi there,

I looked at your site, looks good. I also ran your site through I tool I recently discovered (it might be an old tool but still).

http://nibbler.silktide.com/en_US/reports/www.clickdesk.com

It gives you a report about your site looking at coding, social media accounts and reach, localization features etc. It might not be the best software or not a bible of internet marketing but it does give you quite a interesting view on things. I recently solved a lot of problems with different websites which helped me rank better but internet marketing is not an exact science as you just might know.

Hope it helps some

Regards

Jarno

I understand all the websites get traffic and rankings for different keywords. Although, you are stating that some of the services and products provided are no longer active and since that is the case (as stated above a service that never launched) then I would look at the point of keeping the content alive as it will not convert any new clients since that service is not provided. How would you get a return on investment for all the merge work.

Like sureshchowdary said above, making a list of all the pages and doing a 1-1 redirect is a lot of work (believe me I know -> in february 2014 I did the same thing for a client redirecting the entire site to new location (+/- 1000 pages)).

So If I were you I would look at the effort needed to perform all the work, make an estimate in what the investment would be and what would be the return on the work. It might just be wise to decide to add some content to the oldest site and redirect all the links but leave the rest of the content.

Just my 2 cents and for your consideration

Jarno

Dear Pete,

i just checked your website with nibbler: http://nibbler.silktide.com/en_US/reports/www.bestathire.co.uk

Perhaps there are some things here which you can use to your advantage. Indeed it is possible that you were hit by one of the updates. This could be because of your backlink profile (maybe) or for some other reason which unfortunately may not be clear. All I can say at this moment is to keep doing good things and rankings might return in the same fashion as they disappeared (I've had that happen once or twice).

Good luck.

Regards

Jarno

Sarita,

this is why there is the possibility of canonical tags. More info about canonicalization: learn through moz.com

When you have written the item and share it through any kind of software or partner I would suggest publishing the original first with a canonical tag to your own site, then sending it to the rest and asking them to include the same canonical tag. That way you should be doing fine.

Regards

Jarno

Hi there Spackly,

I'm guessing what you are getting at is using tabs (like specifications to products in webshops that are only shown when clicked on), right?

If that is the case you could show a picture with some info per person with a link to more info (the tab) that expends the information about the person. If you do this using HTML and CSS (or PHP with CSS) you could have it made like so that when you visit the source of the page you get then entire code including all the full bio's but when you visit the site in a browser like a normal visitor you would only see 31 small bios with 31 tabs for more information.

This is something you see in a lot of shops at the moment and I must admit that it works like a charm.

Hope this helps you some.

Regards
Jarno

Graftene,

you are absolutely right that it would just loop, however there are several reason you can still apply the tag.

1. If someone find the need to copy your entire site / code they will also copy your canonical which may not be deleted by them.

2. If there are instances of the some content on the net you at least tell the search engines that the original version of the text is on your website.

The second reason in my opinion is the most important. Why? Because if you do some content marketing and you share your information or your texts with the web it can very well be that you would want to use your own text, in that case, the search engine at least knows where the original is.

Hope this helps some

Regards

Jarno

Hi,

Are you sure you submitted the right site map format / files? We've had in in the past that are sitemap was broken up into multiple files and we had to send sitemap-index.xml, sitemap-1.xml ... sitemap-16.xml. Have you checked it again and again?

regards

Jarno

I agree with paints here. The domain you have been using for so long you should exploit in such a case.

My opinion on the two would definitely go to kawasakirobotics.com but imho I would also choose to exploit the other domain option. Think about the effort you have to put into it to get the same kind of result and values for a brand new domain.

Tanveer,

what I meant was using the Social Media meta data tags in your page. Before we used the meta data tags Google didn't use our given Title and Description. After we entered it in the Meta Data tags for Facebook and Twitter (We used the same title for SM and our page, as did we do with the description) and all of the suddon Google used our Title and description.

Hope you understand what I meant now.

Regards

Jarno

What Keri is pointing out is quite a good one actually. This was one of the reasons why some pages wouldn't rank. We entered a title and description still nothing. Finally at page 9 or 10 I think it was we found the page. With a completely other title and description. We then used the Social Media integration with titles and descriptions -> Google suddenly changed them too and we started ranking pos. 1 and 2 with some pages.

As for the time laps: A good test (like Rand did with his last WBF video) takes up at least 3 months maybe more. Some changes will take like forever to take effect, others you might notice earlier. Don't give up to soon.

Keyword tag isn't needed anymore indeed like pixel and silver stated.

hope this helps some

Regards
Jarno

Dear Louis,

I totally get what you are getting at and I don't know if it has been proven positive but I do know this:

If google knows what websites you own, and if those websites link to each other, then Google (i think) will make the assumption that the link is not acquired naturally.

Same thing with analytics accounts. I use 1 analytics account to manage all client websites and another for my own websites. Google knows then what websites you own and I wouldn't be surprised if the devaluate websites that link to each other and are owned by the same person(s).

I never came across any proof of this what so ever but logical thinking came to this conclusion. Hope you understand what I am getting at with my answer.

I also register domain names for clients but I always put their information into the Whois for Ownership and administrative contact and my own information for technical contact (since it is also my server). I know for a fact that Google uses IP addresses to determine uniqueness of a site so if they do understand that then i can imagine that they understand the whois information and Google analytics client information.

Hope this helps

Regards
Jarno

I agree with Paints, Homepage is very very very slow.

I also don't think the title of the homepage is that appealing, so I would definitely rewrite that one.

As for the Dash problem. I have several websites all with dashes all without ranking problems. One of those websites currently drives like 100.000 visites each month so the dash is definitely not the problem.

Then some other point for your site that might be useful to you:

• I think you should kill the widget on the left side that appears halfway of the page and substitute that one with a normal share widget on the bottom of your homepage or not at all.
• Have you optimized the size of the images? Some take like forever to load or don;t focus that well.
• The titles for the sub pages are a bit stiff and short (Everest Base Camp Trek). Personally I like the way Danny Dover described in his book, Search Engine Optimization Secrets, so I would make it more like: Everest Base Camp Trek | Green Lotus Trekking (off course you should take in consideration the length of the title).
• The images slider/gallery doesn't work properly in my browser (safari), once I click an image it doesn't work at all.

I think these are your main problems. If you could speed up everything (page load speed on the Tibet Tours page is 5.976 seconds) and optimize your titles, images and the rest of the site, you could make sure that the dashes in the url don't have any negative effect at all.

Hope this helps some. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me for them. 
Regards
Jarno Nijzing

you should check out this weeks WBF:
http://moz.com/blog/panda-optimization-whiteboard-friday
It's also about the above the fold content.

Regards
Jarno

Very clear explanation by Devanur.

I always look at PA for my clients and when we broaden the scope I take DA in that picture together with MR/MT for the domain and subdomain.

Since a couple of months I started using a sheet based on the OpenSiteExplorer.org competitive analyses. That explains a lot but also lets my costumers see that there website is changing (improving) which is also quite important off course.

So mainly focus on the PA, then DA (with or without MR/MT) depending on the scope of the project.

Regards
Jarno

Dear Gerry,

How much of a difference it makes i'm not actually sure about but what I do know:

Some of my projects were started on a country domain (.nl). They ranked well, got some nice traffic etc. But on those terms where the competition was fierce it could not beet the competition. Then we build 2 of those projects on .com domain names (which actually is for the USA) and we started to see differences in rankings for the more fierce terms.

So domain extentions do matter. If i were you and I couldn't get the exact domain you wanted maybe you could get a different version of that domain name (eg. with -'s in the url or with an extra word in it perhaps?)

Hope this helps

Regards
Jarno

Dear LGW,

personally I've had a website that got some media coverage and even book coverage by someone. I didn't try to change the keywords used but wanted to see how they would link to me. This happened about a year of 4 ago and since then the branded searches my the company name have risen enormously.

So the best way is to get mentioned in my opinion. If press states also come online and they announce you by your company name with/without website address, then you should definitely see some change in branded search queries or lots more visitors to the page found on that term.

Hope this helps you some.

Regards
Jarno

Perhaps you could try focussing on the exclamation mark (!).

That you use the HTACCESS file to rewrite the url with the exclamation mark to the url without?

Something like:

RewriteRule ^!(.*) http://www.site.com/locations/$1 [R=301,L]

The exact syntaxis for this statement should come close to this one. I'm not sure that this will work but it might work.

Regards
Jarno

I agree with David,

I would also use a 301 redirect to a new page. You'll catch all the traffic going to the old page that way and also if Google visits it will follow that path. You could then even notice that Google changed the site link for you. It has happened on several occasions.

Regards
Jarno

Did you use a redirect on the page itself or did you use a 301/302 redirect using htaccess?

Mozzers,

I got a question for all of you. Recently (about 3 months ago) I launched a renewed website for a costumer of mine. Since then rankings have been improving and some decreasing a little but overall it went quite allright.

_Still, we now have some issues with some new pages and I really don't know what to do any more. _

The Case:
For starters lets say the company sells vacuum cleaners. We now make pages for specific product ranges e.g. Miele Diamond vacuum cleaners which in turn tells something about this product range and has links to different pages of that series, for instance the Miele Black Diamond Silent Vacuum Cleaner.

Why did we do this? We already ranked for specific product pages but also wanted to rank for more general terms and thus product ranges.

What happened? We now rank perfectly well for the product pages itself but for some reason the Miele Diamond Vacuum Cleaners page doesn't rank at all or not as it should.

Why is this strange? Because we applied the exact same tactic for some other product ranges on the same website and it worked like a charm (part of the reason why we started to do this for all product-ranges).

I could really use some help here. If you want I can message you the pagelink in PM but I won't post it here for several reasons.

The Vacuum Cleaners in this example or not the real products though but used as an exemplar. I really do hope to hear from you with some advice or request for more information.

Regards
Jarno

Yanez,

redirecting means that you tell visitors and search engines that visit the old page where the new page is located and you present that one to them. Keeping the new page on the exact same address as the old page means that you're inconsistent in building sites. No 2 pages can be named exactly the same.

I would advice you to rename the newer version of the page and redirect the old version to the newer version.

This should solve your problems.

Regards

Jarno

hi there,

it's actually very simple. You have multiple <title>elements in your code. Fix that issue and your site should pass the W3C.</p> <p>Take a close look at your head and if you have the ability rearrange your data. The cleaner your coding is the easier it is to read.</p> <p>regards</p> <p>Jarno</p></title>

Chris,

is the disallow meta update is too complicated for you to add due to software issues etc. then I feel that your current method is the right way to go. Normally you would be absolutely right for the simple reason that page level overrules the robots.txt. But if a software update overrules the rules places in your code then you have to manually add it after each and every update and i'm not sure you want to do that.

regards

Jarno

Dear Philip,

You may also want to check out the SEO Cheat Sheet by Danny Dover:
http://moz.com/blog/the-web-developers-seo-cheat-sheet-2013-edition

The hreflang could also be used with or without geo targeting but would you want to target people in The netherlands for the NL lang? Then I would use it.

It all depends on your means to and end for what is best to be used

Regards

Jarno

Sharon,

if i'm not mistaken this is what you are trying to do:

http://www.riafinancial.com/locations/us/home.aspx is normally in English (or American to some ;-)) and with the language selection the us part of the url changes to FR for France and CH for Chinese .. etc.

I think you will find your answer in Danny Dovers cheat sheet:
http://moz.com/blog/the-web-developers-seo-cheat-sheet-2013-edition

you can indeed target selected languages and countries with the href lang and using the double parameter (hreflang="fr-FR"). Hope this helps  you and solves your problem.

Regards

Jarno