Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks the slides are nice but they said the actual videos of the presentations would be available this year.

I went to Mozcon - where are the video presentations located?

Anyone out there have some suggestions for how I can improve my home page and increase my lousy conversion rate?

I've spent years on the content and SEO optimization of my site and very little time on making a home page that sells stuff. Caveat - I don't have the money to go to one of those fancy companies who do a complete makeover and charge in the tens of thousands.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Jean

http://www.northwest-wine.com

I'm trying to clean up my spam incoming links and can't find where to download a complete list. Google Webmaster Tools has a button to download "Sample Links" or "Latest Links" but they don't show them all.

Looking for wisdom from all the gurus out there.

Thanks,

Jean

In November 2010 Google introduced the "standout tag"

http://support.google.com/news/publisher/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=191283

I can't find any articles/blog posts/etc in google after that date, but its use was suggested in a google forum today to help with original content issues.

Has anyone used them?

Does anyone know what's the latest with them? Are they worth trying for SEO? Is there a possible SEO penalty for using them?

Thanks, Jean

So do you think google will take me back and show my site in its organic listings again?  The new pages are nowhere to be found today, even though they were in good positions a few days ago.

The site has been up since 1998, I have fresh content, lots of Facebook activity, regular blog entries, etc etc.

Thanks!

Should I remove the redirected old pages from my site after the redirects are in place?

Google is hating the redirects and we have tanked. I did over 50 redirects this week, consolidating content and making one great page our of 3-10 pages with very little content per page.

But the old pages are still visible to google's bot.

Also, I have not put a rel canonical to itself on the new pages. Is that necessary?

Thanks!

Jean

Thanks so much for your response - and for reminding me to be patient.

I've tried leaving the pages intact with a link to the new url and found that the five or six pages of old vintages all pointing to the new page resulted in hundreds of almost empty pages.

I thought that it was effecting my SEO, having so many pages with almost nothing on them.

I have to put the info about all the older vintages on the current product so the customer can get the full story. So I can't put the info about each past vintage on its one page and then put all of the content on the current page.

Google counts that as duplicate content.

I'm not sure what you mean by "archive them"?

Thanks again,

Jean

Thanks so much for your words of wisdom.

Re the url with 2008 in the title - the "2008" is an unfortunate consequence of the way we named the pages originally. It is the most relevant page and lists the 2010 wine. This is not a page that was incorrectly redirected, the url's name was poorly designed.

Should I rename the pages to leave off the vintage?  Ideally I'd think the url would be something like "shea-wine-cellar-homer-pinot-noir.html and not have the vintage in it at all. But, renaming all of those differently dated pages would require 301's, wouldn't it? That's a lot of 301s - a lot of the pages have the wrong vintage in the url.

Re why google is liking the blog post link that seems less on target versus the wine's own page - this has been happening since 1)I started posting good fresh content on the blog everyday; and 2) especially since the redirects - it's been more in the last few days than ever before.

I'll check, but the 301's were put i place by a very very good IT guy.

Again, thank you so much.

Jean

http://www.northwest-wine.com is the site.

Here's an example of an old page that has not yet been redirected:

http://www.northwest-wine.com/Beaux-Freres-Willamette-Valley-Pinot-noir-2009.html

Here's the new page we'll redirect it to when it is sold out:

http://www.northwest-wine.com/Beaux-Freres-Pinot-noir-WV-2010.html

You can see why we are redirecting - the older page has the same content as the newer one, except the newer one has the additional content for the new vintage. I'm consolidating all of the older vintage tasting notes onto one page with the newer ones.

Is this the info you need? Thanks SO much for the quick response.

Jean

We had several hundred old pages on the site with duplicate content and new pages with fresh info on the same topics.

So I redirected the old pages to the new pages. Next day, plop, we're dumped off google for almost every keyword.

Dang I thought they didn't want duplicate content and old funky pages.

What did I do wrong and what can I do to fix it?

Thanks so much for anyone who can share their expertise.

Jean

http://www.northwest-wine.com

Thanks!

Jean

I forgot to say - this is the SEOMoz crawl.

The latest crawl of my site revealed hundreds of duplicate page content and duplicate page title errors. When I looked it was from a large number of urls with urls appended to them at the end.

For example:

http://www.test-site.com/page1.html/page14.html

or

http://www.test-site.com/page4.html/page12.html/page16.html

some of them go on for a hundred characters.

I am totally stymied, as are the people at my ISP and the person who talked to me on the phone from SEOMoz.

Does anyone know what's going on?

Thanks So much for any help you can offer!

Jean

How about a wiki?

Thanks for the expert help. Generally there are 2 to 8 pages that I am consolidating - for me it's info about different models of a product - we have reviewed them all on different pages but having all of the info on one page with photos and background info is a lot juicier than a dib and a dab on each page - and is more useful for a reader on our site. There are incoming links to most of the pages from other sites so I don't want people to end up on our 404 page. Thus the 301 strategy. Fascinating about the rel canonical. I didnt know. So I need to put a rel canonical to itself on each page that is the main page for a topic. What if there are pages optimized to similar topics? Like manual juicer and highest rated manual juicer? Will a rel canonical for the page optimized for the keyword "manual juicer" and a rel canonical on the page for "highest rated manual juicer" reduce seo juice if the two pages are on the same site? To me when I hear Oracle I think of the database company. Shows how old I am. Ha. Thanks a lot for your time answering my questions.

Pinterest! Growing like crazy and I've finally found a spot for the hundreds of images that didn't make sense to put in a photo album that no one would see. You'll get hundreds of repins and followers and I'd suspect it's going to help SEO more and more. Connect it to your FB and twitter and g+ accounts for maximum cross social networking.

Cleaning up the website by consolidating pages - each with a little bit of useful info -  into one definitive page that is really useful and full of good content.

Doing 301's from the many old pages to the one new really good one. Didn't want to do rel canonicals because I don't want the old pages around, I want to get rid of them.

Will google see the 301s and go nuts or see that there is one definitive, really good page with no duplicate content? The change is very good from a user perspective.

Also, On-Page Report Cards on SEOMoz suggests that you put a rel canonical on a page to itself to tell google that this page is the definitive page. What do you think?

Thanks so much for anyone who has time to answer - so many gurus - this is a great forum. - jean

Hi Dunamis -

I just don't know, and I don't want to blame my competitor. But the 250,000 crappy links from sites with home pages loaded with hundreds of  links and pictures of Lady gaga happened almost to the day of our rankings tanking. And no google update has ever effected us nearly as much. And my other site that shares hundreds of links back and forth to this one on a similar topic was virtually uneffected.  (It does not have the treash links.)

I fully take responsibility for the possibility that I need to improve the site for google, but I still wonder about the huge number of bad neighborhood links going into the site.And the coincidental dump in rankings.

Oh, I didn't  mention, the links appear and reappear. One day they are not there, then they are back a few days later.

Thanks so much for any suggestions.

This happened to me and it has been a nightmare. Our google rankings have tanked, the quality scores on our pages in adwords have tanked, and our several dozen top three organic links from the very best keywords for our market have dumped below our competitor.

Coincidentally, our main competitor has taken over the top positions that we used to hold. And he recently hired a firm to get him "guaranteed top positions on your keywords." And his incoming links have increased, mostly from places that you pay to get links from, but still, after ten years of no links in, he's gotten more than we have (real links, not the 250,000+ spam links. I can't help but wonder if this is a new method of trashing the top ranking sites. And I don't have a clue how to stop it.

I haven't contacted google, thinking that it happened around the time of Panda and we needed to make changes, but it's getting worse and worse. Now google is showing "block all results from this site" option when our results are shown.

If anyone has managed to recover from this mess, I'd love to hear about it. We've been online since 1997, still get over 5000 unique visits a day, and have lots and lots of great original content. I've never used black hat methods, never even used Adwords as we've had such good organic rankings.

I have about 500 products with multiple urls for the same product, but different versions. I sell wine and have a different page for each vintage. I've decided that is not the best way to go, and want to point the older vintage pages to the latest version page, and make that the only page for the  product as time goes on.

Do I have to put a link in the text from each older page to the newer, or can I use a 301 to redirect them to the new page? I don't want google to think I'm pulling something funny.

We had an SEO guru at our etailing meeting yesterday and he said the problem is DUPLICATE pages, not the number. He told a woman with 4000 pages not to worry about nofollows unless there were duplications.

Just a thought, but I'd make sure there aren't any incoming links to those pages. I don't know if google would see them on a nofollow page. And we know how much we love incoming links1

I could go widget crazy with my website, there are so many cool buttons and linking this and likes and etc.

There's one that is used a lot, called "Addthis" that adds a series of small icons to share a page via facebook, twitter, etc. The javascript looks innocent enough, but there's a link, and who knows what google makes of it.

Then there are the dozen or so Facebook widgets - are they safe to use without negative SEO consequences?

Does anyone know of any other pitfalls with using the numerous addons offered free to enhance your site?

Thanks for any wisdom out there!

Jean

Thank you very much. You've been very generous with your knowledge. It is most appreciated. Now it's time to get on to the coding!

Jean

I sell wine from Oregon, so I'm thinking of dividing the wineries up into regions/AVAs, one AVA on each page.

I'm afraid people might have a hard time finding the winery they are looking for, so maybe I should supplement the regional pages with a "search" page listing all the wineries with links, maybe putting a no follow on that page, figuring that I don't care if that page is spidered.

Good ideas or not so good?

I know how to do a css menu that looks the same as my javascript pulldown, but aren't I going to run into the same problem with too many links on the page?

Thanks so much you are very helpful.

I've had the same pull down menus on my site since 1998! I guess it's time to try something new.

I have a javascript dropdown menu on every page of my site. It lists all the wineries I write about and sell. About 300 links.  I've been told that google doesn't like so many links on a page, but that it doesn't spider javascrpt. Then I hear that it does.

Am I being penalized by all the links? Or does the spider really not see them?

I don't want to give up my javascript menus, unless I have to. Should I put a no follow on each link inside the code?

And on the other hand, am I losing google juice by not letting it see all the pages on my site that I link to in the javascript menu?

Thanks in advance for your help!

I'm removing old products (wines)  from my site, and I've been using 301 redirects for each product page back to the winery page. My question is, am I using best practice? I want people who search for these now nonexistent products to go to the winery page where they will see what is now available. But does google approve?

I've also tried leaving the product's page intact but saying that it is no longer available and putting a link in the text that points to the winery page.

Which is better, in the eyes of the god google?

Thanks!