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:

• http://domain.com
• https://domain.com
• http://www.domain.com
• https://www.domain.com
• http://domain.com/index.(extension)
• https://domain.com/index.(extension)
• http://www.domain.com/index.(extension)
• https://www.domain.com/index.(extension)
• http://domain.com/default.(extension)
• https://domain.com/default.(extension)
• http://www.domain.com/default.(extension)
• https://www.domain.com/default.(extension)

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:

1. 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.

2. 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