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If you cannot create and update an XML sitemap for your site, you should consider creating an HTML sitemap. While you cannot submit an HTML sitemap to search engines, spiders can crawl your HTML sitemap and crawl pages deeper into your site.
Matt Cutts says that if you can only do 1 type of sitemap, do an HTML one, because it helps both users and bots.
Hope this helps.
Mike
Whoa! Those are big PDFs and a lot of products.
If that is the case then I think the only way you could get people to link to your actual webpages vs the PDFs would be to offer them 1) a summary of the PDF 2) frequently asked questions about the product 3) how-tos not covered in the PDFs or something.
As far as the canonical idea, that is not really what that tag is used for according to Google -
"Must the content on a set of pages be similar to the content on the canonical version?
Yes. The rel="canonical" attribute should be used only to specify the preferred version of many pages with identical content (although minor differences, such as sort order, are okay).
For instance, if a site has a set of pages for the same model of dance shoe, each varying only by the color of the shoe pictured, it may make sense to set the page highlighting the most popular color as the canonical version so that Google may be more likely to show that page in search results. However, rel="canonical" would not be appropriate if that same site simply wanted a gel insole page to rank higher than the shoe page."
Mike
Hi David,
This typically happens when your PDFs are full of content people want. I have seen this personally with a previous company I worked with and their spec sheets (it was for a software copy). This is good and bad - good people find your content awesome and are linking to it - bad that your PDFs are ranking vs your pages.
Solution - make your pages better. You could potentially take the content from your PDFs and make a page - this in theory should still compel people to link to you. If your PDFs are massive in size, you could consider condense the contents into a webpage that contains FAQs, a summary of the information, etc.
This isn't a bad problem to have. If you can't beat them, join them - optimize your PDFs for search.
Hope this helps.
Mike
You should have ranking/keyword stats starting to appear after a week, if you are ranking for those keywords.
As far as your DA being 1 within Moz, this is normal, because you created a brand new website, so it has no authority. Now it may have some authority since your September launch; however, Moz can take some time to update its index, "A typical timeline for getting a page/site included in Mozscape is 45-60 days, sometimes less for very important or well-linked-to-pages."
Hope the helps.
Also, if you have any other questions regarding being newer to Moz tools, Moz Help has some great FAQs, videos, and how-tos.
Mike
Again, I personally would suggest the directories listed on GetListed.org. If you haven't gone there yet, here is a list of their suggested directories:
These are all "trusted" and "SEO friendly" in terms of your original question.
Getting listed in these or other directories is not necessarily going to make you rank higher; however, they will hopefully drive some additional traffic to your site.
When you say, "high quality", what are you actually asking? If you are talking about PR and DA or passing link juice or whatever... it is going to depend not only on the directory, but also the page that you are on in that directory - whether Google indexes that page, how many other businesses are on that page linking out (diluting any link juice), etc.
As Nakul stated, you should be listing your business where your customers are. Are your customers going to be searching for you in the Yellow Pages or in a Google/Bing/Yahoo business directory - maybe? Are they going to be searching for you on DirectoryBin or WorldSiteIndex - I guess I'd doubt it.
With the time you are spending researching directories or even getting listed in these directories, you could be spending creating good content that will naturally get linked to and shared on social. My advice - create good, shareable content and engage with whatever "community" your business has. When you have nothing else left to do, then get listed in a few legit business directories.
Mike
Kind of, but only for 24 hours via an iframe: "The reviews response group returns the URL to an iframe that contains customer reviews. You can embed the iframe on any web page to display the response content. Only the iframe URL is returned in the request content." - Product Advertising API
Hope this helps.
Mike
You should try and get your business listed in all of the directories listed on https://getlisted.org/
Hope this helps.
Mike
From those analytics, it almost looks like he started his website in Jan 2013... if that is the case, it can take some time to establish authority and ranking. If your rankings increased, then it makes sense that your traffic would also increase.
For a site that I optimized, we saw some immediate results; however, after 3 months of building up authority, rankings shot up and so did traffic.
It is tough to say exactly what is causing that... looks like you must have done something good : )
Mike
Hi Rich,
Physically having the H2 above the H1 is fine. Like Schwaab and Chris say, you won't be penalized for it - it is more a matter of logical hierarchy on your page.
I am guessing you are doing this because you don't have access to the CSS or do not want to modify the stylesheet and you like the look/design of a page with the H2 above the H1 - this is fine, just not best practice necessarily.
Typically your page should be structured like:
etc... implementing
You don't "need" to have an
Hope this helps.
Mike
Hi Mark,
I disagree with a lot of the points in that article. Sliders/Carousels can be done well. In many cases, I don't think brands are trying to rank for their homepage for anything other than their brand name - therefore, this strategy is serving its purpose.
IBM uses this strategy and is successful. SAP uses this strategy and is successful. And even Apple uses this strategy and is successful (I think I might have just blown a few minds with this bomb).
To your questions:
I think showing a representative sample of the logos for the companies you help is fine. Whether it is just 5 and they click a link to go to the dedicated page OR if you use a mini slider/carousel to show the wide range of companies on the homepage.
You could consider using a slider of sorts that would have a high profile company logo and a quote from someone at that company that is saying how awesome your services are... if you could get like 5 or so quotes/testimonials like that... that would be pretty awesome - in my opinion.
When done correctly, any of the text you use should be able to be indexed by crawlers, so no FLASH and no crazy difficult javascript.
If you think this is a differentiator and will help people select you as their service provider, then this is a great idea. If you are just looking to make you site look cool, you could just have a page accessible from your navigation that would like to a comprehensive list of company logos.
Hope this helps.
Mike
Hi David,
This typically happens when your PDFs are full of content people want. I have seen this personally with a previous company I worked with and their spec sheets (it was for a software copy). This is good and bad - good people find your content awesome and are linking to it - bad that your PDFs are ranking vs your pages.
Solution - make your pages better. You could potentially take the content from your PDFs and make a page - this in theory should still compel people to link to you. If your PDFs are massive in size, you could consider condense the contents into a webpage that contains FAQs, a summary of the information, etc.
This isn't a bad problem to have. If you can't beat them, join them - optimize your PDFs for search.
Hope this helps.
Mike
Yes. That is considered duplicate content. You common URLs you should check for include:
I might have missed a few more, but those are the ones I usually look for.
You can review this Google Webmaster Tools article on how to fix duplicate content issues by using 301 redirects, selecting a preferred domain in GWT, using the canonical tag, and more.
Typically, not in all cases, you have an http and https issue because you have a secure page on your website that uses relative links instead of absolute. So when you go from http to signin on an https, from that page all links point to https page versions instead of the http which the visitor came in on.
Hope this helps.
Mike
You should try and get your business listed in all of the directories listed on https://getlisted.org/
Hope this helps.
Mike
From those analytics, it almost looks like he started his website in Jan 2013... if that is the case, it can take some time to establish authority and ranking. If your rankings increased, then it makes sense that your traffic would also increase.
For a site that I optimized, we saw some immediate results; however, after 3 months of building up authority, rankings shot up and so did traffic.
It is tough to say exactly what is causing that... looks like you must have done something good : )
Mike
Kind of, but only for 24 hours via an iframe: "The reviews response group returns the URL to an iframe that contains customer reviews. You can embed the iframe on any web page to display the response content. Only the iframe URL is returned in the request content." - Product Advertising API
Hope this helps.
Mike
Hi Dana,
It looks like some of the *.cat links are still being used through your site.
For instance, /StoreFront/B8I.cat is actually 301-ing to /StoreFront/category/B8I.cat and /StoreFront/B8I.cat (with anchor text "headphones or earbuds") is being used on the /StoreFront/category/controlling-the-low-end-on-your-stage page.
The /StoreFront/category/controlling-the-low-end-on-your-stage page is at level 7 in your site and is linking to /StoreFront/B8I.cat, making it at level 8, which then 301s to /StoreFront/category/B8I.cat, keeping it still on level 8 because of the 301, and finally redirecting with a 301 to StoreFront/category/headphones (which is a level 1, because it is accessible from the homepage (level 0) navigation).
Does that make sense?
It did in my brain... just let me know if it does on paper : )
Hope this helps.
Mike
Hi Margarita,
I have encountered similar issues when you need to enter a password or where the site might require cookies.
Here is what Screaming Frog has to say on the topic:
"13) Why Won’t The SEO Spider Start? Top ↑
This is nearly always due to an out of date version of Java. If you are running the PC version, please make sure you have the latest version of Java. If you are running the Mac version, please make sure you have the most up to date version of the OS which will update Java. Please uninstall, then reinstall the spider and try again.
14) Why Won’t The SEO Spider Crawl My Website? Top ↑
This could be for a number of reasons. Before contacting us, please check your robots.txt to see if the website is blocking the SEO spider. Please also ensure the website is html (the SEO spider does not crawl framesets), that it can be crawled without JavaScript or requiring cookies. Please also check for the ‘nofollow’ attribute if certain links are not being crawled. There is an option in the configuration to crawl ‘nofollow’ links."
Also, SEER has a great article about how you can use Screaming Frog 55 different ways - just some good info.
Hope this helps.
Mike
Hi Mark,
I disagree with a lot of the points in that article. Sliders/Carousels can be done well. In many cases, I don't think brands are trying to rank for their homepage for anything other than their brand name - therefore, this strategy is serving its purpose.
IBM uses this strategy and is successful. SAP uses this strategy and is successful. And even Apple uses this strategy and is successful (I think I might have just blown a few minds with this bomb).
To your questions:
I think showing a representative sample of the logos for the companies you help is fine. Whether it is just 5 and they click a link to go to the dedicated page OR if you use a mini slider/carousel to show the wide range of companies on the homepage.
You could consider using a slider of sorts that would have a high profile company logo and a quote from someone at that company that is saying how awesome your services are... if you could get like 5 or so quotes/testimonials like that... that would be pretty awesome - in my opinion.
When done correctly, any of the text you use should be able to be indexed by crawlers, so no FLASH and no crazy difficult javascript.
If you think this is a differentiator and will help people select you as their service provider, then this is a great idea. If you are just looking to make you site look cool, you could just have a page accessible from your navigation that would like to a comprehensive list of company logos.
Hope this helps.
Mike
Hi Alexander,
If not a lot of people are linking to them AND if the page has an expiration date of sorts, you'd probably want to 410 the page.
404 and 410 both tell Google that the page no longer exists; however, the 410 (GONE) is more specific than the 404 (NOT FOUND).
The 410 "should" naturally get the page out of Google's index faster as well.
Or, if it is an ongoing thing, you could consider changing your URL to /group-course and then just constantly change the content on that particular page, letting the URL accumulate inbound links and drive traffic... I don't know exactly how you are using the page, but just an option.
Hope this helps.
Mike
Again, I personally would suggest the directories listed on GetListed.org. If you haven't gone there yet, here is a list of their suggested directories:
These are all "trusted" and "SEO friendly" in terms of your original question.
Getting listed in these or other directories is not necessarily going to make you rank higher; however, they will hopefully drive some additional traffic to your site.
When you say, "high quality", what are you actually asking? If you are talking about PR and DA or passing link juice or whatever... it is going to depend not only on the directory, but also the page that you are on in that directory - whether Google indexes that page, how many other businesses are on that page linking out (diluting any link juice), etc.
As Nakul stated, you should be listing your business where your customers are. Are your customers going to be searching for you in the Yellow Pages or in a Google/Bing/Yahoo business directory - maybe? Are they going to be searching for you on DirectoryBin or WorldSiteIndex - I guess I'd doubt it.
With the time you are spending researching directories or even getting listed in these directories, you could be spending creating good content that will naturally get linked to and shared on social. My advice - create good, shareable content and engage with whatever "community" your business has. When you have nothing else left to do, then get listed in a few legit business directories.
Mike