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Hi Dan

I had missed that reply; cheers for the heads up (my email notification never came through). I'll talk to the devs about implementing to target all bots.

Thanks!

Many thanks for taking the time to respond and sorry for my slow response.

At present we feel that it could be seen as cloaking as we would be introducing specific code just for Google. This would change the render view in Search Console as well between Google / users.

Thanks

Kate

Hi

We have an issue with images on our site not being found or indexed by Google. We have an image sitemap but the images are served on the Sitecore powered site within <divs>which Google can't read. The developers have suggested the below solution:</divs>

Googlebot class="header-banner__image" _src="/~/media/images/accommodation/arctic-canada/arctic-safari-camp/arctic-cafari-camp-david-briggs.ashx"/>_Non Googlebot <noscript class="noscript-image"><br /></span></em><em><span><div role="img"<br /></span></em><em><span>aria-label="Arctic Safari Camp, Arctic Canada"<br /></span></em><em><span>title="Arctic Safari Camp, Arctic Canada"<br /></span></em><em><span>class="header-banner__image"<br /></span></em><em><span>style="background-image: url('/~/media/images/accommodation/arctic-canada/arctic-safari-camp/arctic-cafari-camp-david-briggs.ashx?mw=1024&hash=D65B0DE9B311166B0FB767201DAADA9A4ADA4AC4');"></div><br /></span></em><em><span></noscript>

aria-label="Arctic Safari Camp, Arctic Canada" title="Arctic Safari Camp, Arctic Canada" class="header-banner__image image" data-src="/~/media/images/accommodation/arctic-canada/arctic-safari-camp/arctic-cafari-camp-david-briggs.ashx" data-max-width="1919" data-viewport="0.80" data-aspect="1.78" data-aspect-target="1.00" >

Is this something that could be flagged as potential cloaking though, as we are effectively then showing code looking just for the user agent Googlebot?The devs have said that via their contacts Google has advised them that the original way we set up the site is the most efficient and considered way for the end user. However they have acknowledged the Googlebot software is not sophisticated enough to recognise this. Is the above solution the most suitable?Many thanksKate

A problem has been introduced onto our sitemap whereby previously excluded URLs are no longer being correctly excluded. These are returning a HTTP 400 Bad Request server response, although do correctly redirect to users.

We have around 2300 pages of content, and around 600-800 of these previously excluded URLs,

An example would be http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/destinations/africa-and-the-indian-ocean/botswana/suggested-holidays/botswana-classic-camping-safari/Dates and prices.aspx (the page does correctly redirect to users).

The site is currently being rebuilt and only has a life span of a few months. The cost our current developers have given us for resolving this is quite high with this in mind. I was just wondering:

1. How much of a critical issue would you view this?

2. Would it be sufficient (bearing in mind this is an interim measure) to change these pages so that they had a canonical or a redirect - they would however remain on the sitemap.

Thanks
Kate

I'd take a look at Analytics and compare the periods before and after the drops, looking at landing pages filtered by traffic medium organic. This should show you which pages have seen the biggest loss, which in turn should give you an idea of what keywords have been effected.

If there are just a few pages then run through a technical audit checklist on these pages to make sure no errors have been introduced - for example a page hasn't accidentally been set to "no index" (I've seen it happen).

You could also compare average position of keywords between two periods in WMT to see where the biggest drops are.

doVpwi3

Many thanks for taking the time to reply.

Ryan - I am talking to CMS Source about these options; it's not possible with the current configuration but it looks like we may be able to change this with a bit of development work.

Sean - Thanks, I had considered the canonical, which would at least prevent a duplicate content issue although I think we need to take measures to stop this admin. subdomain being accessible which this won't help with.

Lynn - Thanks, I'll do that as an interim measure.

Thanks
Kate

Hello Moz Community

Hoping somebody can assist.

We have a subdomain, used by our CMS, which is being indexed by Google. 
http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/
https://admin.naturalworldsafaris.com/

The page is the same so we can't add a no-index or no-follow. 
I have both set up as separate properties in webmaster tools

I understand the best method would be to update the robots.txt with a user disallow for the subdomain - but the robots text is only accessible on the main domain. http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/robots.txt Will this work if we add the subdomain exclusion to this file?

It means it won't be accessible on https://admin.naturalworldsafaris.com/robots.txt (where we can't create a file). Therefore won't be seen within that specific webmaster tools property.

I've also asked the developer to add a password protection to the subdomain but this does not look possible.

What approach would you recommend?

Hi

I was hoping to get some thoughts and opinions on our blog. It is part of our main site (not on a subdomain) but performs very badly, pulling in very little organic traffic (only accounting for 0.6% of our organic traffic).

Every page of the blog is listed in our sitemap, and using Screaming Frog I've done spot checks of several pages to see if they are indexed, which they have been. Looking at Google's text cache, all the content is visible.

Pages are often well shared on social media (for example): http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/blog/2014/10/antarctica-photography-safari-2014-updates.aspx

I'm aware that we do need more links coming into the blog but I still feel that it should be performing better than it is.

Any suggestions would be appreciated!

Hi both

Thank you.

Linda - It's people arriving at the Canada page who want to see all Canada, not the other way round. People select Canada as a destination but  are also interested in our Arctic Canada trips.

The Canada page itself doesn't rank well or act as a landing page portal, however it is important in terms of site structure as people check that destination to see if we do trips there once they reach the site. People equally come onto the site looking for a trip to the Arctic as a destination so we do need both within the site in terms of the user journey.

The canonical tag would be my preference - if there is enough unique content on both pages do you think it matters if the holidays list is the same - this could be an alternative although we won't escape a percentage of duplication?

Hello

Just trying look at how best to deal with this duplicated content.

On our Canada holidays page we have a number of holidays listed (PAGE A)
http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/destinations/north-america/canada/suggested-holidays.aspx

We also have a more specific Arctic Canada holidays page with different listings (PAGE B)
http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/destinations/arctic-and-antarctica/arctic-canada/suggested-holidays.aspx

Of the two, the Arctic Canada page (PAGE B) receives a far higher number of visitors from organic search.

From a user perspective, people expect to see all holidays in Canada (PAGE A), including the Arctic based ones. We can tag these to appear on both, however it will mean that the PAGE B content will be duplicated on PAGE A.

Would it be the best idea to set up a canonical link tag to stop this duplicate content causing an issue. Alternatively would it be best to no index PAGE A?

Interested to see others thoughts. I've used this (Jan 2011 so quite old) article for reference in case anyone else enters this topic in search of information on a similar thing:

Duplicate Content: Block, Redirect or Canonical - SEO Tips

Have a read of this: Google: Your Content In Tabs & Click To Expand May Not Be Indexed Or Ranked

I'd have a look at the source code and see if the content is readable. Also copy and past snippets of the "hidden" text into Google to see if it is being indexed.

Hi Monica and thank you.

Our site is cached pretty regularly, last done 10 Dec 2014 03:29:11 GMT. The decrease in rankings ties into the subsequent loss of traffic. Our rankings are fluctuating a lot though.

Some of our reviews are a few years old, do you think that this would put off current users or do you think the value of the date tag to Google is the higher priority in this instance?

Since the disavow we have built in a number of new, good quality links but I will look at the link neighborhoods to see if anything stands out.

Thanks again for everyone adding their thoughts.

The traffic decline seems to have come about since Thursday 4th December. We did well out of the Penguin 3.0 update, having previously been negatively affected (link clean up and disavow put in place earlier this year). Our ranking on important terms have dropped below their pre-Penguin 3.0 uplift now though.

Our keywords have continued to drop again today with several showing a loss of 7-10 places (on top of previous drops).

I did test the expanding panels and found that Google did seem to be indexing the content okay. I have tried making one of the reviews panels permanently expanded to see if it makes a difference though but still worry it just makes the page look very spammy as the keyword is the same as the item being reviewed, so is repeated numerous times on the page.

Any further thoughts?

Thanks,
Kate

Sorry I forgot to add, we have seen some decrease in CTR but this corresponds to the decrease in ranking so I would expect the CTR to be lower at #20 than #12 for example?

Hi all

Thank you for your responses, I appreciate you taking the time to look at our website.

I'm glad that the general consensus is that the user reviews are good content, all the review content should be accessible to Google bot and isn't hidden at source level, it's just behind an expanding panel to stop the page becoming too long. We'll look at rewording the first paragraph to make sure it is very specific to the reviews on that page and won't appear as review spam.

The reviews are all genuine - it is a concern that that may appear otherwise; we may have to look again at whether to include dates. The reviews we receive are generally really positive, which from a company perspective is great, but I can understand why users may be skeptical.

If the fluctuating keyword rankings for these pages aren't connected to the new reviews then I'm not sure what else could be causing it - Penguin 3.0 related updates?

Hello

Hopefully can get a few opinions on this.

We've added some user reviews to our website for key products. We added these approximately 3-4 weeks ago. In the last week we've seen keyword rankings drop on the pages they've been added to.

For example see: http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/wildlife/primates.aspx

This page ranked well for both gorilla safari and gorilla safaris but both terms have dropped considerably (12 to 20 checking Google UK on the Moz rank checker). Due to the formatting required for the Rich Snippets (and we have the user review stars in the SERPS) the term "Gorilla safari" is perhaps becoming a bit spammy on the page.

Another example would be "Borneo holidays" (up and down in the SERPS between 12-18) on this page: http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/destinations/far-east/borneo.aspx

Do you feel that these fluctuations in keyword ranking could be to do with this?

Thanks

Hi Cyrus,

Thanks for taking the time to answer.

It seems that there is no firm answer on this one - interesting to see you felt there wasn't necessarily an issue of duplicated content but that grouping these pages into themes with a hub page would be of benefit (assuming I've understood your suggestions).

The issue is that in some ways the pages and content is similar, so the trips are focused on the beaches and wildlife of Kenya - a lot of the difference is in the accommodation and level of luxury, which is dealt with in the on page copy. I think we will have to revisit how we handle page titles.

We only fairly recently changed those pages to ensure that all content in the individual tabs is visible to search engines (previously they were only able to crawl the content in the overview tabs, the content of other tabs was effectively hidden). I have checked this in Google Webmaster Tools and it all displays fine / all the tabbed content is found within the html.

Many thanks
Kate

Thanks for the replies Andy and Amelia

We cover around 30 destinations and each one has a suggested-holidays page and then maybe 5-15 individual itineraries. Using the copy from any of those itinerary pages will show multiple results in Google as the opening text is being pulled into several other areas on the site.

However, individually a lot of these itinerary pages and overview suggested-holiday main pages rank reasonably well and account for quite a lot of traffic to the site. We can't no-index or use canonicalisation really as each page does have unique content and is different - there is just quite a bit of cross over. At the same time we saw a significant drop with Panda 4.0 and see smaller drops every month with each subsequent update.

Has anyone got any suggestions on how else we can handle this content?

Thanks
Kate

Hi

I'm an in-house SEO and we've recently seen Panda related traffic loss along with some of our main keywords slipping down the SERPs.

Looking for possible Panda related issues I was wondering if the following could be seen as duplicate content. We've got some very similar holidays (travel company) on our website. While they are different I'm concerned it may be seen as creating content that is too similar:

http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/destinations/africa-and-the-indian-ocean/kenya/suggested-holidays/the-wildlife-and-beaches-of-kenya.aspx

http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/destinations/africa-and-the-indian-ocean/kenya/suggested-holidays/ultimate-kenya-wildlife-and-beaches.aspx

http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/destinations/africa-and-the-indian-ocean/kenya/suggested-holidays/wildlife-and-beach-family-safari.aspx

They do all have unique text but as you can see from the titles, they are very similar (note from an SEO point of view the tabbed content is all within the same page at source level).

At the top level of the holiday pages we have a filtered search:
http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/destinations/africa-and-the-indian-ocean/kenya/suggested-holidays.aspx

These pages have a unique introduction but the content snippets being pulled into the boxes is drawn from each of the individual holiday pages.

I'm just concerned that these could be introducing some duplicating issues. Any thoughts?

Thanks Pixel by Pixel. We don't operate on a local basis which is why we've not done anything with Google local before.

I'll look into the images, thanks for picking up on that; I think a lot of it is to do with how the site was built, it uses a lot of images for all the styling. While the site is large it holds a lot of good, unique content and on the surface I think we do meet all the requirements that Google recommends for content depth and quality.

Will keep looking through to see if there is another issue we can spot though!

Hello

I work as an in-house SEO (previously worked for an agency) for the website naturalworldsafaris.com. After a strong start to the year we were seeing really good growth but since Panda 4.0 was released we have been steadily declining.

Our site has, I believe, good, unique content and is largely free of technical issues. I'm struggling to identify what exactly is the issue for the drop. We've had several key terms drop from the top half of page 1 to page 2 of the SERPS, such as the term "Borneo Holiday" (on a Google UK search). I don't believe we have any duplicate content issues.

We've had a few external SEO specialists take a look and none have come up with anything new. Site speed has been flagged as a concern but when compared to our competitors in the SERPS we are consistently one of the faster sites so while we are looking to improve this, I don't feel it can be the only issue.

Any suggestions as to what else we should be investigating next would be much appreciated.

Thanks everyone. I thought that was the case but it's always good to get a second opinion!

Hi

I manage the SEO in house for the site http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/

A new add on to our services has been launched in the form of an online store allowing us to sell, for example, expedition clothing that is relevant to the trips we offer. The store is managed elsewhere and sits on a subdomain of the company who are providing this service for us.

There are sitewide links throughout this site back to our homepage: http://naturalworld.newheadings.com/index.php

I'm just a bit concerned about these links from an SEO perspective and was wondering if we should request these are set up as no follow. Would appreciate any thoughts on this.

Thanks!

Thanks Doug, that's really helpful. Good to see that phrase has bounced back up as well.

We've been looking at our backlinks as we are aware there are a lot of bad, irrelevant directory sites that we are clearing up. Historically the old sites were in a pattern of steadily declining organic traffic, from the end of 2012. This has transferred to the new site (keywords slipping a few places, less long tail traffic). We think this may be due to a poor backlink profile.

We will also look into doing some outreach to the linking domains on the old site and see if we can get these moved over to the new site rather than just relying on the redirects.

Thanks again!

Hi Doug

The reason for the sudden increase in August was because we consolidated several product websites under our one, main domain. The content on the old sites was transferred to the main website and all the pages were redirected. This was done working in partnership with a fairly large SEO company to ensure that everything was handled correctly.

We've not been doing any link-building/acquisition since, other than working with some selected travel journalists and photographers. However historically it does look like there has been some bad link building done on the old sites. The traffic on these old sites had been dropping overtime. With the backlink profiles of these sites pointing to the main content, could they be passing on old penalties?

Organic traffic as a whole is up month on month, but down year on year. Most of our tracked keyword terms have seen slight increases recently, it was just this one in particular which has plummeted.

Thanks for the advice! Would you recommend that the backlink profile is the primary issue to look at for now?

Hi Robert and Travis

Thanks for your responses.

We've not changed anything in the last 90 days, other than fixing a few issues with a duplicate subdomain. When I looked in Majestic I'm only seeing 9 external backlinks to that page. Open Site Explorer shows 35 inbound links from 4 domains. This hasn't changed recently as far as I'm aware.

Thanks for pointing out the issue with the duplicate domains, I thought this had been fixed but we will get back onto this. It isn't a new issue though so I don't see why this term would suddenly drop so dramatically. We've (fortunately) not had the same issues on other top traffic driving keywords/pages.

We are picking up some bad links in our backlink profile that may be contributing to a gradually declining SEO visability. We are cleaning these up but I'm still not sure that it would account for a sudden drop on a key term like this.

Any further insights are most welcome!

Hi

For our site we previously ranked well for the term "botswana safari holidays" on the page: http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/destinations/africa-and-the-indian-ocean/botswana.aspx

We've suddenly seen a dramatic drop for this term, currently ranked #43 on Google UK.

There are no penalty notices in Webmaster tools and the only edits to the page recently have been to include the term "Botswana safari holidays" in the page title and the on-page h2 (previously Botswana safaris and holidays).

Any suggestions why we have seen a large decrease for this term? We expect to see some fluctuation but this one seems a bit dramatic. We've not lost any backlinks to the page that we know of.

Thanks for the help.