Yup either what Mike said or email the webmaster and ask for the link to be removed.
But I mean... does it drive any traffic in?
Welcome to the Q&A Forum
Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.
Yup either what Mike said or email the webmaster and ask for the link to be removed.
But I mean... does it drive any traffic in?
yes. definitely. make a new page, title it the keyword, build the page for that keyword. done and done.
I would definitely tend to agree while worrying that there's somewhat of a gray area here.
Reason being that the page might not be as relevant as the domain. So if the privacy policy page is on hip-hop-records.com's signup page, and there are 100s/1000s of these types of links coming in with presumably all the same anchor text (i.e. "Privacy Policy") then that could be dangerous.
If all of the sites you deal with are legal sites and SMBs then fine. But I feel like many sites can generate privacy policies for any type of business/service/product/etc.
You will not be penalized for not including titles and descriptions, but Google will auto-fill them for you.
Takeshi's advice is sound if all you want is to not have these pages displayed in site links (the links under your domain when you google your domain's name). However, it sounds like what you are asking is to not have the pages displayed at all in SERPs ever. I don't quite understand the reasoning behind this, I must say. For example, if you work for Comcast and somebody googles "Contact Comcast" you should want them to land on your contact page. Same with the registration page, I would think..
That said, if you truly do not want those pages indexed you can disallow them in your robots.txt or add this tag to the header:
Take good notes! Download CSVs from GWT, Take screenshots, document ALL findings. You will need all this should you have to put together a resubmission package for Google.
There's really no way to stop it, unfortunately. I've tried sleuthing a few of these instances in the past and have yet to be successful in getting results. I'd really really like to though (hey if anyone wants to join the fight let me know!)
Good luck, keep us posted.
don't forget image alt and title tags, that might boost your keyword optimization.
Well my first thought is "who's domain is that and why don't you have your own domain name?"
So I'd start there.
That is simply untrue, though. In the quote you provided the SEOmoz stance even says "it does appear to provide some slight value." Yet you then said it does not add value... This post is contradictory at best.
Now what IS debatable is HOW relevant the H1 tag is and exactly how powerful it is in terms of optimization. What I know for certain is that it won't hurt to include your target keywords in your H1 tag and this can be done anywhere on your page, not necessarily at the very top in a title format.
Now of course this doesn't mean overusing the tag by any means. Never would I suggest such a thing. I use one H1 tag per page, period. No exceptions. But I always make sure my primary targeted keyword sits in that tag.
While it may not be the most powerful optimization technique, it is a piece of the puzzle and the SEO world is made up of a billion tiny edits that build one giant glorious page-1-search-ranking.
Voila.
It's because you're gettin' beat. You need to build some links!
You only have 32 linking root domains (according to OSE) and a DA of 26. That's why you're gettin beat, I'd venture to guess.
Time to SEO it up!
Why is your menu on the landing page? Can't you put it on it's own page?
Because yes, this will impact your on-page optimization. Some people have different beliefs in how much weight these things carry, but I personally believe it makes all the difference in the world. I'd put that menu on it's own page.
Well it sounds like you have competition now. Time to start a link building campaign, grow some strong original content via blogs/youtube/social media and get people to organically link to your site. IE - SEO-it-up!
Slightly unrelated - When was the last time your site had a face lift? Not to be critical, but I'd suggest perhaps looking into modernizing the layout a bit better. It looks old and dated and a bit clunky. For a brief moment I thought you were using frames... it's like that. The big banner in the middle at the bottom is full of horribly pixelated images and the layout is worn.. Again, not trying to be mean I'm just saying UX is everything.
Yes most likely. Really depends on the keyword though. For example - I work for a SaaS company. Instead of targeting the term "cloud computing," we target more specific keywords with high search volumes.
While obviously "cloud computing" is searched for more frequently, the fact is that Google isn't putting many commercial sites on page 1 there for good reason: People Googling that term aren't looking for services, they're looking to learn what the term means/is. I'd imagine that this applies to what you're discussing. Most likely Google is keeping enterprise companies off of their just based on the fact that that isn't what the users searching that keyword are looking for.. They're most likely looking for broader knowledge.
Good luck!
Seriously. It will honestly be incredibly beneficial and may in itself get your rankings improved.
When I joined my current company they were hesitant to change their website for the same reasons. I rebuilt the site and launched it a few months ago and we have seen drastic improvements in ranking and conversion ever since.
Go for it! My money says you'll see a marked improvement.
Well then, if I'm understanding you correctly, you shouldn't need these specific pages indexed anyway. Instead you should be promoting/doing SEO for the pages that lead you to the listing portal. So the duplicate titles or titles shouldn't matter or be a question..
?
This is incredibly interesting because I wanted to come here this morning and talk about pretty much this exact topic. So I'm going to try and piggyback on your thread so as not to have 2 separate threads about the same thing but please tell me to leave if it seems more like a hijack.
As I said I am facing the exact same situation. A bit more detail:
We have a primary targeted keyword, let's call it "main keyword" that is a service. This particular page had a ton of black hat work done for it in the past. So there were thousands of poison links pointing to the page "main-keyword.html" and what I did was after spending as much time as I could manually removing links, I finally gave up and changed the URL so that these links would 404. So now the page's URL is "main-keyword-services.html"
This seemed to work great at first. We hit page 2 of the SERPs about 10 days later and all of those poison links were no longer listed in GWT. That felt really good. But then the carousel kept a-swingin' and the main-keyword-services.html page dropped way out of the SERPs.
Now this is where it gets interesting: We also have a page on our blog featuring an infographic dedicated to these services. That URL is "main-keyword-infographic.html"
This page is ranking on page 2 of the SERPs and that's with very little link-building efforts. Of course these two pages are connected internally, so it'd be nice if both would rank. (I built this through EGOL's advice way back of trying to get multiple pages to rank for one keyword as my competitors were doing.) But right now I really don't want the infographic page to beat out the main services page.
All I can think to do is continue my link building efforts, and that's what I would have come here to tell you mr. bigbadwolf. However I feel like there's something I'm missing.
So I'm dying to see any input from the rest of the community. Sorry my post wasn't very helpful to you, TC, but perhaps together we will find what we're looking for. Unfortunately (or heck, maybe fortunately) I'm pretty sure all it means is we need to kick-up our SEM efforts.
It's frustrating for me because our competitors are outranking us with nothing but black hat tactics. Links from hip hop forums, fake tumblr and weebly accounts and stupid hair-removal blogs. It's a link service they are purchasing and they have been for some time, and it works for all of them. I refuse to stoop to that level but I can feel my boss getting close to saying "no, it works for them we're going back to buying links." I mean they've been ranking for like 8 months with these tactics. WTH!?
Okay thanks all
start with redirecting your non-www to the www version. get a 301 in place asap. i looked at this, saw it, and stopped checking. this is the first thing to do but i'm sure there are plenty more...
edit: although you do have a canonical tag so that's good. still it will help to do as i suggest as canonical does not guide incoming links only keeps you from getting panda penalties and guides Google to index the proper version of the duplicated content.
Well this is going to be tricky because Google will always want to rank sites that are most relevant to what it thinks users are searching for. I'd have to bet that 99.9% of searches done for "convert media" are looking to... convert some sort of media.
That means you're going to have to try and trick Google which is always dangerous. However you can probably do this while staying within Guidelines.
For example, I'm looking at your backlink profile and specifically at your anchor text hierarchy. Typically a domain's anchor text should be varied between the domain itself, the brand itself, images and variations of the former. Your anchor text profile does not have any links built with "Convert Media" as the anchor text. This is definitely a big part of why it isn't ranking for said keyword.
I see the words "ben stein" as the number two most linked to anchor text... What the what?! Ben Stein? As in, win Ben Stein's Money?? Also I see "contextin" as having the most links so I'm assuming you recently changed your domain and brand.
Anyway, I think the best thing you can do is change those (you should also get rid of any spam links you may have..) to your actual brand and domain and continue building more organic links.
Good luck!
Oh yes absolutely I hadn't caught that. That will certainly help you rank better but you should be sure that this is the branding you want. Branding may be the single most important aspect of your company, so lock it down and roll with it.
Good luck!