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What does it take to get your own google+ url? I keep getting turned down saying I need more followers. Is does anyone know of a threshold I have to cross to get one? On my personal 534 people have me in their circles and on my company i have 474 +1's.
Don't translate proper names. Especially things like New York, I would be willing to bet that everyone has heard of that. But I take the stance to not translate proper nouns, it dilutes the word and causes confusion.
Yes, they are using a variable tied to the url so that you can access the site and see the combination that has been selected. This is a html5 only thing. You can read more about it here, http://stackoverflow.com/questions/136458/change-the-url-in-the-browser-without-loading-the-new-page-using-javascript/4222584#4222584
Actually have recommended products on page, or other products in the same category. You could have it pop up a fancy / color/ thickbox when people add to the cart and recommend other products, something like this http://module-presta.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/thumbnail/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/i/m/imgforuserguide_popup_cart_02.jpg
There are all kinds of different things that you can do to cross sell. Look at what amazon does and how they operate, they optimize the product pages. On them they have lots of different product offers.
Honestly in my opinion you are going to have a hard time making the category rank higher than the product. Especially since things like rich data only supports one offer per page. I have no proof, but I would off the hip say that search engine want to put people on a product page, not a category page.
One thing to take into account to is conversion rate, just about every study says you convert more with a product as a landing page vs any other page in a site.
My take on it is this; on pages use Publisher, because it is company content. No one really inquires to who wrote your about page on your site, it is trivial, but it is not trivial what company the about page is about. On blog or opinion posts, I use Author.
Without seeing the site here are my suggestions.
Keep the current url and build the business back up. Send the time and figure out why your site has dropped in the rankings, it could have been any one of dozens of reasons.
Then I would also send out emails to the people that you were slow with or provided bad customer service to. Explain the situation that caused you to be slow, apologize, and give them a coupon. If you have a lot of bad reviews from this period I would enact a plan maybe using rafflecopter or something similar to wipe the reviews away.
Since you have a busy season, I would spend the whole off season trying to get things back in order with the site for when the next busy season comes.
What cms are you using? I have a module that I developed that is free for Prestashop if you are using it. What it does is lets you give your search pages a static name. You have to specifically define terms, so it does not automatically make a landing page for each term. It also lets you do title's, meta descriptions, and keywords for the pages. The way the code works might prove a useful framework for adapting it to what ever platform you are using. The git is at https://github.com/Prestashop-Modules/searchterm there is an explanation of how it works at http://blog.dh42.com/search-pages-landing-pages/
This comes down to personal preference in my opinion. I think honestly it is neither here nor there. The instances that your 404 page could come up in the SERP's is more than likely pretty low and at the same time it really does not offer any useful content. So disallowing it would not really be any loss. One reason why it might be disallowed is that you have an e-commerce site that rotates products. When a product is deleted, the developer has a 301 to the 404 page, then with the robots.txt saying not to index the 404 page, the other page will drop out of search engines. If this is the case I would rethink that strategy. If you notice a lot of sites like amazon and other big sites leave the page in the index even if the product is no longer for sale. The thought is traffic is traffic, the hardest part in the whole equation is getting someone to your site, if the page is ranking, why delete it.
The only time I can think that I would specifically allow it and optimize it is if you have a cool 404 page. Some companies actually spend a bit of time on their pages and it gets them a little pop of viral traffic from social sharing sites like reddit. If you do have one that is funny or unique I would allow it and actually optimize it for a term like "funny 404 page" or something like that.
From experience the absolute best is to use different domains that are targeted to the country. Like site.uk, site.com.au, ect. I have found that besides being expensive, it works really well, just have different content on each domain.
While I am not opposed to the idea, I would make a few considerations. I would make sure that nothing is linked between the two sites. Make sure your ssl certificate is filled out in a different company name with a different address. Buy the domain in another name as well. It could be a fun experiment, but one thing I would highly advise against is using negative SEO. It seems like more and more people are including that in their black hat strategy these days, but just don't do it.
They are not ignored by google, they would be seen as duplicate content if the same content is used on each page. Also one thing you should keep in mind too is that you will be diluting the keywords in the page name by adding more.
I write a blog and at the bottom I have a little bio area, see this screenshot http://screencast.com/t/KG9ghNdRlnO What I am wondering is should I keep this consistent from post to post? Or should I vary them? Is there any benefit in either? Also when I guest post on other peoples blogs should I use the same, or another bio?
If that is the case, then your shopping cart is not "acting right". Https will exist for every page in your site and it shouldn't. What cart are you using? I would redirect everything outside of the payment, cart, and contact pages to non secure. There is a disconnect from what robots files actually do and what people think they do. They are a suggestion, no index means not to add it to the index, but it does not mean don't go on that page. I have spiders on pages that are blocked from them all of the time.
I would redirect the https version to http. Then I would make sure that there is a cannonical tag in place, next I would go over my site map and make sure that there isn't an link to the https page in there. After that you should be set, I wouldn't put it in the robots.txt though.
Oh, it works nice. What platform are you using it with?
The social aspect is that it gives users the ability to post their reviews to their facebook or twitter accounts. I am pretty sure they just added rich snippets a bit ago as well.
I will shoot of an email in a few and ask Omer about the sending back dated emails. I know that was something they were working on and they were also working on using unique coupon codes as well. Because coupons are great to send that way.
I do. I have found it works really well actually. I beta tested the version out for Prestashop actually. The guy behind it, Omer is a great guy I have had a little contact with him. The only thing that worries me about the plugin is, what do they do with the information.
Other than that, it works flawlessly.
I am sure people will think this is sketchy, but I have used it and it seems to work.
http://www.papablogger.org/2013/05/get-more-Google-plus-followers.html
I would host on both. It seems to be what SEO Moz does, so I am sure that is the best strategy.
It will affect the time it takes to get your site indexed. What is the purpose for only sitemapping one category?
The viral lift sometimes, it really depends on the company and what the prize is. The company I do it for has a unique product that has a pretty big following. So people organically review it as good and write blog posts about it.
We have never promoted any with money per se. One thing I have found that works really really well is blogging. If there is a blogger in the market that has a lot of followers and they can be paid or given free product to make a blog post about the giveaway (along with a fb post and a tweet). Then that can work out well. We saw one balloon from 500 people entered to 3k people entered in one day because of that.
I don't tend to recommend paid ads, I like the subversive paid blog post, where people do not realize it is "sponsored". I feel people tend to believe it more and have found it works out better.
Rafflecopter is awesome for this.I have a client that does it regularly. What we do is add an option (one of the make your own entry options) that says something like "If you already own this product post a review for an entry" and other one we do is "Write a blog or forum post about the product for an entry"
I would say doing that we normally get 100 or so positive reviews on various sites and 30 or so blog posts / forum posts. We typically get about 1k people entering total. One thing we have been doing to further target is to post suggested review or forum sites to post on. I think it is borderline spammy, but I feel like it is on the safe side of the line.
Disavow the links in Google, then send a DCMA take down request to both the host and to the site owner. If you can link to the internet archives showing how old your material is. If that fails, hire a lawyer in the jurisdiction of where the host is and have them send a letter. Also it might be helpful to have it pointed out in the letter that they are in the same jurisdiction too.
There are actually a lot. One thing it depends on is the price range. One that I have had clients use before is regus and using their virtual office packages. http://www.regus.com/products/virtual-offices/virtual-office-bundles.aspx
In my opinion and dealings they have. One thing I have noticed they do not frown so hard upon is redirecting the same word, different extension to the same site. Like site.com, site.co.uk, site.com.au Google is on to the tricks that your client is using, if the domains are not getting many direct accesses, then the 301 redirect will end up dying after a couple of weeks or a couple of months and be useless.
Its a spammy and costly suggestion, but I know how clients that are set in their ways are. I would recommend to them to maybe set up variations of the same site at the different addresses. Different images, different content, different everything. Maybe have the same logo, but have the contact forms feeding into the same email address.
I think more than likely you have been put into a tough situation by a not so good seo company that the client had before.
I have used http://piwik.org/ to pretty good success as far as self hosted analytics, the good thing is with a little coding you can change the way anything works. Plus there are a lot of pretty cool free plugins too.
What platform do you use? It is a little more difficult than just embedding it on to a page, you also have to pass the variable of the product(s) that were ordered.
Why are you not using the same domain name? I think you are going to have ranking problems and customer trust issues by changing the domain name.
On the other hand since you own the domain, I would run a tool like screaming frog on it to spider it. Then when you move the hosting, write 301 redirects from all of the old products and pages to the new corresponding one.
But if there is any chance that you can keep the 5 year old domain and it is not penalized, I would. Domain trust is an important factor.
Google is a different case being run through the validator. I actually read an article on why google's site do not validate. The reason is that they send so much traffic, it actually saves them a good amount of money not closing tags that do not matter. Things like adding a self closing / to an img tag and the sorts.
While I do not think that validation is a ranking factor, I wouldn't totally dismiss it. It make code easier to maintain, and it has actually gotten me jobs before. Clients have actually ran my site through a validator before and hired me.
Plus funny little things work out too, someone tested my site on nibbler and it came back as one of the top 25 sites. I get a few hundred hits a day from it. I will take traffic any where I can get it.
I could be wrong in this, but I have always thought of no index as meaning "don't display". I have never actually tested it, but I would be willing to be that google crawls and rates your site even with a no index tag. The only difference being it is not displayed in the serp.
If I were you I would leave the no index tag out and just get things squared away after launch. In my opinion what will happen is when google keeps crawling it, they will see that the content has changed. Which will help you more in the long run than a no index tag. You might rank low at first, but through the SEO changes your ranking should go up. In my mind it is better to rank low at first then not to rank.
Correct, here is an example, this is a search how it is normally generated, http://admedonline.com/index.php?controller=search&controller=search&orderby=position&orderway=desc&search_query=tape
It uses no meta tags really and has an ugly url that is not great for indexing. Plus I disallow the search in the robots.
Here is one of the searches that I rewrote, I have cheesy meta tags just to test it, but it has a better url.
I would love to know what this whole new section of the internet is. Any clues on it?
See my strategy is not to provide poor results, but more targeted results. How I normally use it is like this, say you have a site selling laptops. You would put them into categories like amd, intel, then screen size, maybe processor speed and ram. But what happens when someone searches "red laptop" or "beats by dre laptop" having a search page come up with all of the appropriate laptops is not a bad thing. I don't recommend people over categorizing, so I see this is a way around it.
The easiest thing i can think of is to write a script that works with your dispatcher to create a site map. The format I would use is add the page and all of the "product images" on the page to the map and move to the next. At the same time I would use an auto increment variable to keep track of how many lines you have written. When you get around 50k, write out the name of the next site map file that the program will create and have them chained together this way.
Are you using a custom platform or an off the shelf e-commerce package? Most off the shelf packages actually have a module that can create a site map and a lot have it where you can cron it too.
I don't recommend Magento, because I am a Prestashop person. But at the same time, one feature of Magento (and Prestashop) is that you can manage two separate shops at two domains from the same back office. If it were me, I would run both. The puzzle site is more targeted to puzzles, the toy site is more targeted to toys. Each has their own place in the market and can stand alone. It actually will give you a good ground to test the sites against each other.
Your host has your server configured wrong. I have no clue how google found out that the port was open, but it should not be taking requests, and especially serving html pages from that port. I would contact the host and have them close the port. If they won't you can use a htaccess to rewrite the port to your main domain.
On another note, are you on a mac server? That is the apple update port.
I fall into the category of creating good content and links will come. Not to say that I don't out reach, I do both. I write a blog on an e-commerce package, and when I have a post that mentions another company I send them an email asking for a facebook post or retweet.
I think people try to churn out "good content" too often and it doesn't work. On my blog I get about 1k uniques a day. Which for my niche, I would estimate I am in the top 80%. I write a new article about every 2 weeks or so, they are technical articles. But at the same time, they are generally good articles. A few months back I had an article retweeted by hosting company, picked up by hn, and posted on reddit. It got 50k unique views in just a couple of days. Good content gets passed around, bad content gets skimmed and forgotten about.
Why can't you just use a large vps account with whm / cpanel and give each an account. As for the different servers, just use different ip addresses an no one will ever know. I would look into a set up by either webhostingbuzz.com they have a couple data centers in the US and Europe or OVH if you know how to manage a server.
Please don't be offended by this.
Honestly looking at the site I see no effort put into onsite SEO.
It honestly looks like a spammy site to me. You have a lot of text included after the copyright, which I am assuming you are using for ranking. Which in my mind amounts to no more than just putting a big list of keywords at the end of the page.
I am a firm believer in onsite first and off site next. You have a lot of on site work to do.
I have mentioned before about rewriting search URLs to look like landing pages, in e-commerce sites. Is this going to be a bad practice to use on a wide scale?
I took the time to make a module for the platform I develop on which is going to make it easier to do. Normally a search would look something like shop.com/search_controller?search_term=searchword and the search pages are disallowed in the robots.txt file.
But the module I made lets you configure them to be like site.com/searchword or what ever you want it to be. It also lets you configure the meta title and the meta description of the page too. Here is a screenshot of the options.
http://screencast.com/t/PwhBfSia5k
The module also appends the urls to the site map of the site too. Will this get people a penalty by google? Or will it get their pages indexed? I have done similar on a small scale of like 5 words per site, I am wondering how it will be seen on a large scale.
One that no one has mentioned is Olark. It is a website chat program. You can use pigeon to communicate with people, but it ups up an an alert every time someone lands on the site. It tells the user agent and a bit of information about them. Plus you can initiate a chat with them if you want to.
You should look into the module by Presto-Changeo, duplicate url redirect. It fixes this issue.
I am a moderator at Prestashop's forums and I can say that I saw a few posts about your same issue yesterday. I am thinking that Google is having an issue with some of the analytics accounts. I wouldn't worry about it too much unless it persists til Monday.
No problem, you can click answered so if people search the topic they can see it is answered.
I really wouldn't worry about it if I were you. You are choosing to set up an e-commerce site on the most hacked platform in the world.
Hey, I googled it and found it. This is it http://wordpress.org/plugins/seo-ultimate/ Look down at the permalink tweaker, that is what I was talking about.
