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Hi Guys, I am working on the SEO strategy of an adult e-commerce website and I don't understand how small competitors/websites with a poor domain authority, links profile and on-page optimisation are outranking us across the top high search volume search terms. We have already fixed several issues with the site including canonical tags, duplicate content, links profile, etc... I would be interested to get someone expert's opinion as we have been working on this over the last 12 months and haven't seen improvements. My email is "damien@bangonline.com.au". Thanks in advance!

Hi Ruth,

If we currently have rel=canonical tags on our pages but will be implementing rel=”next” and rel=”prev”, should we remove the existing rel=canonical tags?

Thanks for your help

Freddy

Hi guys and gals,

I have a really tricky client who I just can't seem to gain consistency with in their SERP results.

The keywords are competitive but what the main issue I have is the big page jumps that happen pretty much on a weekly basis. We go up and down 40 positions and this behaviour has been going on for nearly 6 months.
I felt it would resolve itself in time but it has not.

The website is a large ecommerce website. Their link profile is OK in regards to several high quality newspaper publication links, majority brand related anchor texts and the link building we have engaged in has all been very good i.e. content relevant / high quality places.

See below for some potential causes I think could be the reason:

• The on page SEO is good however the way their ecommerce website is setup they have formed a substantial amount of duplicate title tags. So in my opinion this is a potential cause.

• The previous web developer set-up 301 redirects all to their home page for any 404 errors. I know best practice is to go to the most relevant pages, however could this be a potential issue?

• We had some server connectivity issues show up in webmasters tools but that was for 1 day about 4 months ago. Since then no issues.

• they have quite a few 'blocked URLs' in their robots.txt file, e.g. Disallow: /login, Disallow: /checkout/ but to me these seem normal and not a big issue.

• We have seen a decrease over the last 12 months in Webmasters Tools of 'total indexed web pages' from 5000 to 2000 which is quite an odd statistic.

Summary

So all in all I am a tad stumped. We have some duplicate content issues in title tags, perhaps not following best practice in the 301 redirects but other than that I dont see any major on page issues, unless I am missing something in the seriousness of what I have listed.
Finally we have also do a bit of a cull of poor quality links, requesting links to be removed and also submitting a 'disavow' of some really bad links. We do not have a manual penalty though.

Thoughts, feedback or comments VERY welcome.

Thanks Marcus! Appreciate the feedback!!

Yes it was an unatural links penalty that we solved by using the links disavow tool and reconsideration requests. I would say that we saw improvement on some keywords quite instantly but others lets say 1 month after wards.

There has now been about 4 months since we had it lifted and generally speaking we have seen improvements apart from this one keywords (which the client is heavily focused on).

Thoughts?

Thanks for your replies guys, I will look into the book EGOL suggested.

The competition is not doing a huge amount from what I can see in terms of effective link building. Like I say it is competitive but not hugely competitive. Much of what they are doing is quite standard link building.
From what we are doing:
Nothing automated at all. Like I say the client had a penalty and we removed it, and the last thing we want to do is get them another one.

We are focused on several different link building tactics such as gaining links from their industry suppliers, getting links for companies that stock their products - both highly relevant for the industry.

Guest blogging is something that we are doing a little of each month but focusing the anchor text around their brand and keeping the content nice and relevant.

We have looked at gain some high authority directory links such as Yahoo BOTW etc to gain some more established links for the profile.

On-page we have been adhering to all the best practices in regards to content, title tags, blog content etc http://moz.com/search-ranking-factors

The client isn't doing huge amounts on social media, but they are doing some - so I would say that is the weakness.

We are monitoring 30 keywords and the majority are behaving inline with common expectations and also improving gradually. It is this one keyword that I know the previous SEO really abused the anchor text for which is the main issue.

Hi all,

We have a very odd occurrence with a client of ours. It should be noted that they had a penalty recently removed about 2 months ago after much work from our company.

Recently they started appearing back on Page 1 Google for a semi competitive keyword term. We were very happy with this and so was the client. The the ranking improved with our work to position 5, which was excellent.

Unfortunately what has been happening is they have been dropping out of the rankings completely for this semi competitive keyword for a few days and then reappearing in the same position. The client is checking daily and has noticed.

I thought this is just a 'hangover' from the Google penalty and perhaps a one off occurrence, but it has happened about 3 or 4 times now and seems to be happening every couple of weeks. Can anyone shed some light on this behavior?

I have checked Webmasters Tools and everything is fine.

Thanks

Jon

Hi Moz Community

I have a client with 4 x active Google Place listings in different locations all within in the same state of Australia (Western Australia) and all with the business name 'Crawford Realty' as per Google place guidelines.

When searching for 'Crawford Realty' Google returns listings for real estate agents near a town called Crawford in a state called Queensland which is across the other side of the country.

See screenshot: http://screencast.com/t/43p6LdtW

Does anyone know why my Western Australian business listings wouldn't be showing when searching in Western Australia  and why the listings for a town in Queensland, across the other side of the country would be showing.

Thanks in advance,

Freddy

HI Everyone,

Thanks you for your responses everyone, sorry for my late reply.

Please see the search with the keyword 'westrac' via google.com.au. The results are in this screenshot http://screencast.com/t/rgUpDppIx15B. This is the smaller branch showing.

You can see the  locations here: http://bit.ly/18J6eYa

HQ location is location B (hidden under C and D) and location A is the smaller branch.

We have tested the keyword 'westrac' from location B and also from another location near map marker F, approx 25 mins drive away.

We have suspended the google place listing for location A, the smaller branch some time ago and added a new listing for the same location without a website url to try and overcome the problem but I think the original listing for the branch is still showing as the url is present.

Hope this helps and thank you again for everyone's help!

Freddy

Hi Moz experts! I have a client with Google Place listings for multiple branch locations and for some reason the fully SEO optimized Head Office listing is being beaten by an un-optimized branch listing.

The HQ listing gets a tonne of traffic where as the ranking and unoptimized branch location doesn't and is the main listing when searching through Google.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

Hi guys / girls,

We have a few clients in some very competitive areas that are struggling to gain the top spots. We have been building some good quality links, relevant directories, quality citations, guest posting from good quality websites, broad anchor texts profiles, really strong social signals, competitor back links lookup etc.

The issue is that nearly all the websites that are out ranking us have really bad links profiles, lots of spammy links, abusing anchor texts etc

So what can you do in this situation. The obvious path is to think, right well lets match them for cr*p links and get some results. However I am more than aware that Googles Algorithm eventually will pick up on this... well at least you hope so.

Its just very frustrating when you're getting your ass kicked by poor link building techniques and you're doing good work.

I am sure other people have come across this, and I was just wondering if there are any bits of advice of how to move past this? Or is it simply a case of keep doing good work and eventually we will get rewarded?

Thanks!

Hi Moz experts! I have a client with Google Place listings for multiple branch locations and for some reason the fully SEO optimized Head Office listing is being beaten by an un-optimized branch listing.

The HQ listing gets a tonne of traffic where as the ranking and unoptimized branch location doesn't and is the main listing when searching through Google.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks