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k9byron

I have filled out the listings template provided by Moz Local for creating listings. I uploaded a week or so ago and when I went to check listings today, none were created. So I tried to upload the CSV file again, and it is giving me an error saying "Make sure you are uploading a CSV (Comma Delimited) file and that you include the column titles. If you are using Microsoft Excel, please export your spreadsheet as a CSV file first.". I have saved it as a CSV in both Excel and Google sheets, but neither file seems to be recognized by Moz Local as a CSV. Is this happening because of the previously uploaded file, or did it never get uploaded in the first place and I just missed the error message the first time around? Anyone else having problems uploading their CSV and found a way to get it accepted? Is there any other way to create a CSV from an excel file other than Excel or Google Sheets? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

k9byron

Hello Mozzers,

I have an on-page SEO question regarding URL structure. A few months back we hired a full-time SEO person who is working on-page right now and she really wants us to completely re-due our URL restructure from a flat to pyramid style (example below).

Current URL structure / page title is:

Dog training Collars - K9electronics.com
http://www.k9electronics.com/dog-training-collars/

Small Dog training Collars - K9electronics.com
http://www.k9electronics.com/small-dog-training-collars/

Einstein ET-300TS Mini Dog Training Collar - K9electronics.com
http://www.k9electronics.com/einstein-et-300ts-mini-remote-dog-trainer.html

Suggested URL structure / page title change:

Quality Dog Training Collars - Lowest Price Guarantee - K9electronics
http://www.k9electronics.com/dog-training-collars/

Dog Training Collars - Small Dog - K9electronics.com
http://www.k9electronics.com/dog-training-collars/small-dog/

Einstein ET-300TS Mini - Dog Training Collars - K9electronics.com
http://www.k9electronics.com/dog-training-collars/small-dog/einstein-et-300ts-mini

I guess you could say we are the poster-boys for Google penalties and have received just about every penalty in the book. Panda, penguin algo penalties and a partial manual action for unnatural links. Several months ago we removed 1000's of in-bound links and had our manual action lifted a few months back and are now hovering around the top / mid 2nd page for all our big terms ...we used to be top 3 for everything.

As we were removing bad links, we also completely redesigned the site and removed lots of categories and products and 95% of all our old, low quality content and replaced it with new, high quality content. The site was really slooooow, so we optimized it and moved it to a big dedicated server and tripled page load time. Added rich snippets, Google authorship, increased our FB and other social presences and much more ...

I had also considered this URL structure change during the redesign because I had heard and read that it was good to do, but it required redirecting practically all our URL's which I know can hurt the site even more so then it already has been ...

Our SEO says that as it sits now, our pages are competing with each other and really seems to think this is going to improve our rankings a lot ...after several weeks. My question is, at this stage in the game, is it really going to help a lot and give us more benefit compared to the 301 redirect link juice loss? Any comments and/or suggestions are very much appreciated!

k9byron

Excellent! Thanks guys! That was really stressing me out trying to figure out the best thing to do with those pages ...404 it is

k9byron

As of May 21st 2013 (Penguin 2.0 update) we hit a triple-header and I think we can now officially dubbed the "KING OF GOOGLE PANALTIES"!

-July 2012 - recieved 2 "Unatural Links" email

-April 2012 - 20% traffic hit

-May 21st 2013 - 35% traffic hit

We have/had lots of very low quality links using the same anchor text as well as about 150 very low quality articles and almost 100 categories w/several hundred products that recieved little to no traffic.

We have spent the last several weeks cleaning up our link profile and were highly successful in getting most of them removed and have kept detailed reports for our Reconsideration Request for the manual "Unatural Links" penalty. We have also went a step further and have completely redesigned the site that is now much faster/better on-page seo with new, high quality articles and are removing all the low quality articles, categories and products but we are unclear what to do with these.

Which brings me to my question. Should we redirect these pages back to the home page or just let them go to 404 error? I have been doing lots of reading on this subject but there doesnt seem to be any good answers. From what I read, neither are good choices and I cannot decide between the lesser of the 2 evil's ..so any help with this would be greatly apreciated!

Note:
-These category and product pages have absolutly no inbound links (link benefit) and in my opinion are only sucking off link juice and generating little to no revenue. There are also no similar categories or products that these could be redirected to. For example, redirecting dog toys to the dog bed category just sounds like it would increase our bounce rate.

-Again, the articles also have no link benefit and only a small handful of the articles actually generate any traffic to speak of (several thousand visitors per year) and the rest generate less than 1000 visitors per year. All have high bounce rates and low conversions.

It would be nice to keep them live as I think some are okay and could be rewritten/re-purpose over time but maybe in light of our Panda penalty it might be better to just to save them offline, let them go to 404 errors and rewritten/re-purpose them another time?

-We did create a very nice 404 page with category navigation and huge search bar so I am leaning more toward this option.
..
Thank in Advance!

k9byron

We did receive a message from google about inorganic links. Also, our page speed right now has to do with us changing hosts. We know about those issues, and about our on site SEO problems. Like I said in my post, MY task is to try to make sure that I remove any links that may be hurting us, fix any broken ones and make sure that our link profile is as natural as can be. There are other people tasked with the issues you are talking about, I am just trying to get a handle on what I need to do.

k9byron

Ok here goes.

Over the past 2 years our traffic and rankings have slowly declined, most importantly, for keywords that we ranked #1 and #2 at for years. With the new Penguin updates this year, we never saw a huge drop but a constant slow loss. My boss has tasked me with cleaning up our bad links and reshaping our link profile so that it is cleaner and more natural. I currently have access to Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools, SEOMoz, and Link Builder.

1)What is the best program or process for identifying bad backlinks? What exactly am I looking for? Too many links from one domain? Links from Low PR or low “Trust URL” sites? I have gotten conflicting information reading about all this on the net, with some saying that too many good links(high PR) can be unnatural without some lower level PR links, so I just want to make sure that I am not asking for links to be removed that we need to create or maintain our link profile.

2)What is the best program or process for viewing our link profile and what exactly am I looking for? What constitutes a healthy link profile after the new google algorithm updates? What is the best way to change it?

3)Where do I start with this task? Remove spammy links first or figure out or profile first and then go after bad links?

4)We have some backlinks that are to our old .aspx that we moved to our new platform 2 years ago, there are quite a few (1000+). Some of these pages were redirected and some the redirects were broken at some point. Is there any residual juice in these backlinks still? Should we fix the broken redirects, or does it do nothing? My boss says the redirects wont do anything now that google no longer indexes the old pages but other people have said differently. Whats the deal should we still fix the redirects even though the pages are no longer indexed?

I really appreciate any advice as basically if we cant get our site and sales turned around, my job is at stake.

Our site is www.k9electronics.com if you want to take a look. We just moved hosts so there are some redirect issues and other things going on we know about.

k9byron

For whatever reason, X-cart creates duplicates of our categories and articles so that we have URLs like this

www.k9electronics.com/dog-training-collars
www.k9electronics.com/dog-training-collars/

or

http://www.k9electronics.com/articles/anti-bark-collar
http://www.k9electronics.com/articles/anti-bark-collar/

now our SEO guy says that we dont have to redirect these because google is "smart enough" to know they are the same, and that we should "leave it as-is". However, everything I have read online says that google sees this as dupe content and that we should redirect to one or the other / or no /, depending on which most of our internal links already point to, which is with a slash. What should we do? Redirect or leave it as is? Thanks!

k9byron

Hello People,

I have been searching for a service to help us with our link building and have been talking to a company that uses the 3-Way link exchange method and my question is: Does it work well?

Below I pasted an email from this company explaining their method. Thanks in advance to everyone!

===============================

Our success rate is about 80%. For one way links, we use 3 way link exchange method for making links. Suppose your site is A. My website is B. My friends website is C and friend's client's site is D. I will add a link on B linking to D and my friend will add a link on C linking to A. This is the procedure we use for making links.

We check the quality of the website before putting link on it. The site will be completely relevant, no spam links will present there and the page will be minimum of PR1.

================================

k9byron

Hey Mozzers,

I would first like to thank everyone in advance for replying to my question

Actually, my question is 2-part: Hosting & Domains

1) We are currently researching product-related domains and would like to build-out review style mini-sites on WordPress that link back to our main site product pages. We're using X-Cart platform and X-Cart offers a WordPress module. My Dev. recommends installing a main WordPress mini-site template on my server and replicating this template under different domains/unique content, obviously ;-).

-My questions is; For backlink purposes, would it be better to host these WordPress pages in a different location/server?

2) Domains (which domain extensions are the best): I have read mixed reviews on this subject ...

a) Do dashes (i,e. brand-model.com) have an impact as well??

I read a post regarding this; http://www.commonsensemarketing.net/do-domain-name-extensions-matter/ - and the general feeling was that .com and .net ranked higher, faster but that .info wasn't a bad runner up. I was a bit excited to hear that .info wasn't a bad choice as they are actually "available" and cheap as well (under 3 bucks) until a comment was posted about a "Market Samurai" study. They reported testing 4 domain names (below) with the same article, date & time post .

1. domainname.com
2. domainname.org
3. domainname.net
4. domain-name.com

-My question is: Can anyone give any advise on which domain extensions work better/rank higher faster? com / .net / .org / .info / ect?

Also, is it better to have more product related keywords in the domain? Example, one of my products is the "Dogtra 280ncp Platinum". WordStream exact match tells me that "dogtra 280ncp" gets 210 searches per month and that "dogtra 280ncp platinum" gets another 91 searches per month. I'm guessing that its better to buy www.Dogtra280ncpPlatinum.com instead of www.Dogtra280ncp.com as we would pick up the searches for the "platinum" term as well?

Question Summary:

Is it better to host these mini-sites on another server than my main site?
Which domain extensions work better?
Is it better to use as many product related keywords in the domain as possible and maybe even throw modifiers in there as well such as "buy" or "review"?

Thanks Again!
Byron-

k9byron

hello again!

1st i want to thank robert, istvan and everyone else for the great answers to my last question. i guess i should have been a bit more specific with the questionas i am still a bit unclear about a couple of things.

i forgot to mention that we actually moved the site several months back and redirected all the "category" pages, but, i wasnt aware that the "product" pages were never redirecte! so my next questions are:

at this point is it even worth redirecting those old product pages?
if so, should we use the IP address as shown below or the domain as shown below ...i am guessing at the IP address.

http://72.3.181.97/catalog/CanineCushionDogCouchBeds.aspx
http://www.k9electronics.com/catalog/CanineCushionDogCouchBeds.aspx

also, our old site was never deleted from the server. our ranking / sales dropped off by about 50% when the new site went live so im guessing this can be directly contributed to the products not being redirected / duplicate content from the 2 sites?

im also guessing i need to find a new developer ..can i get a vote on that?

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| http://72.3.181.97/catalog/CanineCushionDogCouchBeds.aspx |

k9byron