Visits dropping to zero is a bit odd, have you confirmed your analytics code is installed and tracking properly?
Posts made by LynnPatchett
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RE: Changing template and loosing visits should I role back
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RE: Niche Market without impartial authority for links
Keep brainstorming! And show how this process is going to be the engine that moves you up the rankings to the rest of the team.
Think about audience groups. Swing sets for the house (ie individual consumers) ok sure, but how about playchools and similar? How about municipalities for parks and things like that? Brainstorm to expand your potential audience and why they would be interested in your information and products, then you have a number of different avenues in regards content creation, link building outreach and potential sites for cooperation on blogs etc. If your competition is mainly based on news and pr links, think what that could mean if you find even a few strong links that are not in that group!
If possible watch that video I mention above with the whole team, I think it is really relevant to your situation and will help a lot.
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RE: Niche Market without impartial authority for links
Hi,
In regards the links and authority sites, I am sure there are places you can find! Digging through the link profiles of your main competitors might flag up a couple of common sites that link to your type of content. Thinking creatively about who uses your products and in particular different user groups that would be interested in your products should also open up new ideas on potential sites that you could approach, The fact that there are no 'authority sites' beyond competitors in your niche does not mean there are not solid sites with relevant related content that you can approach for guest blog opportunities, links, social mentions etc. Your new tool that you mention could also be a good outreach subject, if you are proud of it then let that pride shine through!
Have a look at this recent mozinar (I really liked the bit on brainstorming for different audience segments, it is great stuff!).
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RE: More Indexed Pages than URLs on site.
Hi David,
Its tough to say without some more digging and information, it certainly looks like you have most of the common problem areas covered from what I can see. I will throw out an idea: I see you have a few 301 redirects in place switching from .html to non html versions. If this was done on a massive scale then possibly you have a google index with both versions of the pages in the index? If so it might not really be a big issue and over the next weeks/months the old .html versions will fall out of the index and your numbers will begin to look more normal again, Just a thought.
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RE: Magento CMS Page Meta Titles?
Hi David,
A couple of things to try (I haven't tested them)
Set up an xml update on the cms page like this:
<reference name="head"><action method="setTitle"><title>Your Module Page Title</title></action></reference>
Depending on the controllers this might change both page and breadcrumb titles (not sure if that is what you are after)
If you don't mind doing a small code change the trick described here: http://inchoo.net/ecommerce/magento/change-any-page-title-in-magento/ should do it. If following that you would actually be doing it backwards, the normal page title would be used in the breadcrumb and the updated page title used in the title tag.
If actually the breadcrumb is not the most important thing for that page you could just remove it, also with an xml update like this:
<remove name="</code">
"breadcrumbs"``/></remove>
Hope one of those helps!
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RE: More Indexed Pages than URLs on site.
Hi David,
Not sure why they started showing up now (some recent changes to the site?) but I suspect your problem is indexed urls that you are trying to block with robots.txt but are finding their way into the index somehow.
If you do a search for: site:nicontrols.com inurl:/manufacturer/ and then click on the show omitted results you will see a whole bunch (31000!) of 'content blocked by robots.txt' notices but the urls are still in the index. If you do a couple more similar searches looking for other likely url paths you will likely find some more.
If you can get a no-index meta tag into these pages I think it will be more effective in keeping them out of the index. If you have in mind some recent changes you have done to the site that might have introduced internal links to these pages then it would be worth looking to see if you can get the links removed or replaced with the 'proper' link format.
Hope that helps!
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RE: SEOMoz directory list - some clarity needed FROM SEOMOZ STAFF
Regardless of the value (or lack of) of a specific link from a specific directory I would agree with you that the seomoz directory list is a bit problematic. Since they are listed it does give the impression (rightly or wrongly) that these directories are 'approved' by seomoz and this might be sending the wrong message to many people. Would be interested in hearing the thoughts of a staff member on this, personally I would be tempted to get rid of the list!
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RE: Duplicate Page Titles & Content
Hi,
All things being equal, if the canonical tags are properly implemented you should see zero.
For ecomm sites, it is pretty easy to get duplicate title and content warnings from similar but not identical product pages which is usually an indication of thin content (no descriptions or one line descriptions that are almost identical).
So first line of enquiry is to confirm the canonicals are really doing what you expect them to be doing and if after the next crawl you still see duplicate issues then download them in a csv and start investigating them to see which pages are being flagged.
Hope that helps!
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RE: 301 redirections done too late - What do you suggest?
Hi Johan,
As Tom says definately make sure your 301s are in place. Especially for a large site you will want to submit a new sitemap to help indexing the new urls and a user friendly 404 page perhaps noting the redesign and linking to the main areas of the new site would be a good idea if you expect to still be getting traffic to old urls that are not covered by 301s for some reason. The basics in other words, but worth a mention.
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RE: Adwords keyword vs exact match kw
Hi Arnout,
Hope I am not missing something obvious, but this data is already in GA if you have properly connected the adwords and analytics accounts.
You can see it in traffic sources -> sources -> search -> paid and then click the "matched search query" in the central column where it says primary dimension. This gives you the exact keywords or phrases that were matched and brought the visitor to your site.
Is that what you are after? If so, no need for extra scripts!
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RE: Magento Duplicate Content Recovery
Hi Jon,
Are you sure the indexing issue was the cause of your drop in rankings? Switching platforms can introduce a raft of potential issues. You have probably covered these but worth keeping in mind things like any content changes that happened at the same time, proper rel canonical tags on the product pages, 301 redirects to account for url changes etc. I would pay particular attention to main keywords and their associated landing pages pre and post platform change to note any major differences which might give you more specific areas to look at.
In regards how long it might take, if you have a big site with lots of products then it could take google a number of weeks to reindex (or deindex) all the pages, so I would suggest being patient before making too many changes on top of each other. You can check the cache date of your main pages in the google serps by clicking on the 'cached' link next to the url which will give you a page with the date of the latest copy google has.
Hope that helps!
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RE: Seo moz has only crawled 2 pages of my site. Ive been notified of a 403 error and need an answer as to why my pages are not being crawled?
Hi Andy,
Not sure why you are seeing a 403 error (I don't see this in the headers), but you seem to have an issue with your rel=canonical tag on your homepage. It is showing a relative link to "/home" which leads you to this page: http://www.inoncology.com/home/ which is actually showing a 200 OK status, but is obviously not!
Digging into the headers a bit more it seems you might have a circular redirect going on before that, I am seeing /home redirect to /content/internet/pm/inoncology/com_EN which seems to redirect back to /home/.
No 403 in all of those, but maybe the combination of wrong rel canonical tag plus the mixed up redirects is causing the moz crawler and screaming frog to choke?
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RE: Is joomla better than wordpress let me know your thoughts
Wordpress and Joomla are both just tools at the end of the day and can both be effective depending on how you are using them. I personally have had negative experiences trying to optimise existing joomla sites (complicated templates, weird plugin functionality, slow load times etc) but I am sure those more experienced with it would say these things can be overcome.
The real questions are why you want to switch systems and how much effort it would require to do so? It looks like you have quite a bit of content in your site, so migrating to wordpress would likely need a bit of technical experience and time to complete. I am sure there are scripts around that will help in that process, but migrating a db from one system to another usually has a few gotcha moments along the way! You would also need to account for any changes in url structures and 301ing the old urls to the new. All in all not a decision to be taken lightly.
If there is not a specific reason you want to switch (ie something you are trying to do in joomla that is proving impossible for some reason) I would think that switching platforms might be more hassle than it is worth. As for one or the other being more customisable and/or secure than the other, I don't think there is really any difference between them, both are fully customisable and are as secure (or not secure) as you make them if following best practices.
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RE: How can i make our social network site rank higher?
Hi,
The meta keyword tag is pretty much useless in terms of ranking, so if these are the keywords you are referring to then I would not expect to see any results.
In terms of improving rankings, in the first instance you will need to give the search engines (and users!) some more information about what your site offers. Having a quick look at your homepage I have no idea what yookos offers that would make me want to register. I would recommend getting some text into the homepage describing who your site is aimed at and why it is different from other social type sites.
Your page title for example is 'Log in with your Username | Yookos', this is not helping the search engines understand what your site is about! The same comment goes for your meta description: 'Yookos is one of the leading and fastest growing social networking sites that provides a safe and engaging environment for users.'. Why is it a leading and fast growing network? Who is the main target audience(s)?
Beyond the homepage, it would help to get some more indexable pages on the site. Some ideas might include users guide or frequently asked questions type pages which will give you some more content that you can use to explain what the site is all about to users that have not already registered and also give the search engines some more information and pages they can use in the serps.
Hope that helps!
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RE: What is the best way to rank well on both Google.co.uk & Google.com?
Hi Paul,
As you already know there are a couple of ways to approach this. Opinions will vary, but with the details you have given I would be tempted to do as you originally thought, keep building links from US based sites. There must be some US based blogs, review sites etc that cover your software field (?), those would be the first place I would look at for getting some more relevant US links.
Keep in mind that not all .com sites are US oriented so even though you say you have more US links than UK, if this is only based on the domain then it might be a bit more complicated than that.
You have not mentioned what your keywords are, but software type keywords might have some pretty different keyword difficulty scores between the US and the UK, which might account for your #1 ranking in the UK and nowhere to be seen in the US. That being said, since you are ranking in both for other keywords that is an indication that ranking in both is at least possible with the setup you currently have.
If you have not done so already, it might be worth putting a news page or a blog post on your site about the expansion into the US market. If you run a blog then I am sure there are some other content ideas you could come up with that detail US specific data for your particular software field which would give you some nice content to use when approaching people for links.
Hope that helps!
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RE: Where to find good SEO freelancers?
Not being silly, but have you tried Google? Searching for seo consultant or seo agency etc together with your location will surely bring up some likely candidates. Linkedin might also be a good place to try the same type of search for some local talent. I agree with svmedia that it is nice to be able to meet them in person, although certainly not absolutely needed.
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RE: For an image which is in the CSS and not the HTML, can you add an alt tag?
Hi Bridget,
There is no alt attribute in css, so no you cannot add it there,
There are a couple of things you can do.
1. Optimizing your image file names will at least give an indication of what the image is about and
2. Rethink your css and the use of background images. Specifically you could get the same effect as you have now without background images using a combination of absolutely and relatively positioned divs. This way you can have the same layout as now but with the image in the html rather than the css and alt tags will be available for them.
Check the link here for some demo code: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8708945/how-to-position-text-over-an-image-in-css
Hope that helps!
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RE: How to check Mozrank and/or Moztrrust in Bulk
Hi,
Yeah I seem to not be able to get past 100 now for some reason. I remember I had some luck with this excel add-on in the past. I think it limits to 1 request every 10 seconds so if you have a big list better to leave it run over night, but it does the job and gets the data into excel so worth a shot!
http://www.businesshut.com/seo/seomoz-mozscape-add-in-for-excel/
You could also check out the seogadget excel for the moz api, I have not managed to give it a good go through, but it should also be able to do the job:
http://seogadget.com/mozscape-api-extension-for-excel/
Hope one of them helps!
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RE: Wordpress Blog Providing SEO to Main Site
Hi Phillip,
Well the short answer is sure the blog can bring benefits to the main site. It opens a number of avenues that your main site might not be able to easily address in terms of content, so more in depth discussions about XXX and posts about related topics that might not fit easily into the content of your main site.
It also can open up networking/community type opportunities with other related blogs (for example) which can result in positive social mentions and/or links, and those links into the blog will help with boosting the overall domain rank of the whole site.
And of course you can use it to target various key phrases etc that might be difficult to get into the main site and then link back to relevant pages in the main site which complement what you are discussing in the blog.
So, yes definitely can benefit the whole domain in a number of ways and having it at /blog/ is a very common practice that should work just fine!
Hope that helps!
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RE: Warning error from SEOMOZ crawler
Hi Juan,
Well for the specific url you mention something appears to be wrong.
Firstly, the url you refer to http://www.tarifakitesurfcamp.com/alojamiento does not exist (shows the 404 page) so the moz crawler is correctly telling you that it is redirecting there.
Secondly the redirect from the first page is indeed a 302 and not a 301, I check using http://www.internetofficer.com/seo-tool/redirect-check/ and it shows a 302 redirect, so again the crawler is giving you correct information.
What to do? First of all make sure the pages you want to redirect to exist and you have the correct urls for them and then have a look at your htaccess file and make sure there are no errors and test to make sure it is doing what you expect it to be doing.
I think for 301 redirects the first url need to be without the domain name like so:
redirect 301 /tks-camp/alojamiento/ http://www.tarifakitesurfcamp.com/alojamiento
Thats what I use anyway and seems to work.
Hope that helps!
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RE: How to check Mozrank and/or Moztrrust in Bulk
Hi,
So if you have a list of urls in the A column and the A1 field has a title 'urls' or similar then you select the B1 field and in the formula box (fx) up top you can put something like
=getLinkscape(A2:A92)
Which will pull the data for the urls listed from the fields A2 - A92.
I have found that you have to have a multiple of 10 so you don't get a timeout error, I think the script bunches the urls into groups of 10 and it seems to have an issue if there is an odd number. So if you have 99 urls, add another one to make a round multiple of 10!
You can see some more tips here: http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/updated-tool-seomoz-api-data-for-google-docs
Hope that helps! Its a really useful tool.
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RE: Google Analytics - Not provided info
Hi,
You are exactly right, not provided is shown for users entering the site through organic searches when they are logged into a google account at the same time. 17% is not too bad, I have some sites where it is above 50%!
There are a couple of ways to approach this. The most common is to remove the not provided data from your searches and then look at the percentages of your main keywords/phrases in what remains. All things being equal, your not provided data will likely contain roughly the same percentages of these keywords also.
You can also look at your cpc data if you have it, since google has decided to show all matched queries for paid data. This can be another source of information in regards percentages of keywords used to land on the site which can then be applied to your not provided numbers.
Hope that helps!
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RE: How "Assisted Conversion value" is calculated on Google Analytics?
Hi Diego,
Check out this page where there is a rundown on the numbers:
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1191204?hl=en -
RE: How to check Mozrank and/or Moztrrust in Bulk
In Google Docs you can do this using the (awesome) Seer Interactive Toolbox, check it out here:
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RE: Help, a certain directory is not being indexed
Hi Trent,
Having a quick look I saw that you have relative urls in your canonical tag and this could be problematic. I think it would be worth making those urls absolute to avoid any confusion on Google's part in determining what page or page version should be indexed.
Cannot say for sure if this is the problem, but worth looking into.
Hope that helps!
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RE: Blogs, blogspot, tumblr etc
Hi David,
Personally I feel the value is debatable. If you are syndicating your own blog content then you are running the risk of either duplicate content and/or what looks quite a bit like mechanical link building, both of which are low value options.
If you are planning on creating unique content for the other blogs then you need to balance the amount of effort it will need to create something decent with the amount of time you have. I have also found that you can be in danger of competing with yourself, and the last thing you want is your offsite blog competing with your main site/blog. In my experience blogspot etc have proven to be more hassle than they are worth in upkeep and I would prefer to focus on the main blog creating good content and building strong links.
My two cents!
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RE: Remove html file extension and 301 redirects
Hi,
htaccess can be a pain and I will admit I usually manage what I am after with a bit of trial and error. Try the following, and if you have problems concentrate on the lines:
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} .html
RewriteRule ^(.*).html$ /$1 [R=301,L]I have added a redirect for index.html to root, and from non www to www and removed the last .html from the last list of _ to - redirects. Give it a shot, and keep that backup handy just in case. If no go, maybe one of the htaccess experts around can step in and have a look, I am not 100% sure what some of those other rules are doing to be honest!
<ifmodule pagespeed_module="">ModPagespeed on
ModPagespeedEnableFilters extend_cache,combine_css, collapse_whitespace,move_css_to_head, remove_comments</ifmodule><ifmodule mod_headers.c="">Header set Connection keep-alive</ifmodule>
AddCharset UTF-8 .html
<filesmatch ".(js|css|html|htm|php|xml|swf|flv|ashx)$"="">
#SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
#</filesmatch><ifmodule mod_expires.c="">ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 1 years"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 1 years"
ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 1 years"
ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access plus 1 years"
ExpiresByType image/jpg "access plus 1 years"
ExpiresByType text/css "access 1 years"
ExpiresByType text/x-javascript "access 1 years"
ExpiresByType application/javascript "access 1 years"
ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access 1 years"</ifmodule><files 403.shtml="">order allow,deny allow from all</files>
# mod_rewrite On only needed once
RewriteEngine On301 permanent redirect old underscore.html to new dash urls
redirect 301 /PRODUCTS http://www.timports.co.uk/kiln-dried-logs
redirect 301 /kindling_firewood.html http://www.timports.co.uk/kindling-firewood
redirect 301 /about_us.html http://www.timports.co.uk/about-us
redirect 301 /log_delivery.html http://www.timports.co.uk/log-delivery
redirect 301 /oak_boards_delivery.html http://www.timports.co.uk/oak-boards-delivery
redirect 301 /un_edged_oak_boards.html http://www.timports.co.uk/un-edged-oak-boards
redirect 301 /wholesale_logs.html http://www.timports.co.uk/wholesale-logs
redirect 301 /privacy_policy.html http://www.timports.co.uk/privacy-policy
redirect 301 /payment_failed.html http://www.timports.co.uk/payment-failed
redirect 301 /payment_info.html http://www.timports.co.uk/payment-info301 permanent redirect index.html to folder
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /([^/]+/)index.html?\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^(([^/]+/))index.html?$ http://www.timports.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]301 permanent redirect non-www to www
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^(www.timports.co.uk)?$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.timports.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]301 permanent redirect all .html to non .html
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} .html
RewriteRule ^(.*).html$ /$1 [R=301,L] -
RE: Remove html file extension and 301 redirects
Hi,
I think you will only need this bit:
#301 from example.com/page.html to example.com/page
RewriteCond%{THE_REQUEST}^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /..html\ HTTP/
RewriteRule^(.).html$ /$1 [R=301,L]And you would replace this bit below with the above:
Rewrite valid requests on .html files RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.html -f
RewriteRule ^ %{REQUEST_URI}.html?rw=1 [L,QSA]
#Return 404 on direct requests against .html files
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} .html$
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !rw=1 [NC]
RewriteRule ^ - [R=404]But leave the at the end of that section.
htaccess files can be a bit picky, so be sure to keep a backup so you can quickly undo something if it is not working!
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RE: Remove html file extension and 301 redirects
Hi,
Indeed there seems to be an issue with your redirects since the .html versions are still available on your site. Two things to check in the first instance:
1. The redirect line for the .html to non .html versions:
Rewrite valid requests on .html files RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.html -f
RewriteRule ^ %{REQUEST_URI}.html?rw=1 [L,QSA]
I am not sure if this will work the way you want it. First of all a # at the beginning of this line means it is a comment and not processed so you seem to have the RewriteCond part of the statement as a comment (maybe this is just the forum formatting it wrong, but good to check).
You can check some other solutions for redirecting .html to non .html here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5730092/how-to-remove-html-from-url2. At the bottom of the file you have a bunch of 301 redirects like this:
redirect 301 /kindling_firewood.html http://www.timports.co.uk/kindling-firewood.html
Which are working as expected redirecting underscored urls to urls with dashes. But they are also redirecting to the .html version which means you will be getting into double redirects which is pointless in your case. Once you have the non .html redirects working as expected you should adjust these 301s to go to the non .html version like so:
redirect 301 /kindling_firewood.html http://www.timports.co.uk/kindling-firewood
Hope that helps!
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RE: I have few similar job forms that were created for different positions. SEOMoz says, its "duplicate pages". So how do I resolve it? I want my jobs to be searchable in Search Engines.
Hi Michelle,
Those pages are indeed all exactly the same except for the job title and have very little content.
Writing a job description for each placement would help with the duplicate content issue, things like what kind of experience is required for the position, what responsibilities for each job are, what it is like to work for the company etc.
You could also check out relevant microdata here http://schema.org/JobPosting which even if you cannot implement will give you a good idea of what kind of data you could include in the job descriptions.
Hope that helps!
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RE: Will google regards www.example.com and www.example.com?331457 as the duplicate content?
Hi Jonny,
As the others have said rel=canonical is the way to go, and as you describe is the way to implement. Just put the rel=canonical tag in the head of your index page (or whichever page is in question) and all the urls with your affiliate ids in them will see the same head and rel=canonical tag and you should be good to go!
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RE: SEO issues with Magento
Hi Daniel,
Since I was looking I put the site through Screaming Frog (http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/) and there are a bunch of 404 errors being shown.
I think it must be the relative links you have in your footer. Weird thing is on chrome they work ok, but in firefox they return a page not found! Not sure if this is related in any way to your rankings drop, but even if just for user experience worth having a look and maybe even hard coding those footer links.
You can see an example if you go to http://www.scojo.com/mens-reading-glasses.html in firefox and then click on any of the left hand footer links to the other categories.
Good luck!
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RE: SEO issues with Magento
Hi Daniel,
For the images, if you download your sitemap here: http://www.scojo.com/sitemap/sitemap.xml and then search it for image:imageyou will find them. The first one for example lists this url: http://www.scojo.com/catalog/product/image/size/0x0/c/o/court_1133.jpg.jpg</image:image>
Which is a 404 (not pointing to a 404 page, just returning a 404 not found).
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RE: SEO issues with Magento
Hi Daniel,
Maybe something else changed in the weeks prior to this that had an effect, like a template or layout change? Is it just you or have other sites fluctuated in the serps also? You have probably gone through this process, but worth mentioning since the robots.txt itself doesn't look very suspicious.
As for the image indexation, I think I have your culprit. In your existing sitemap http://www.scojo.com/sitemap/sitemap.xml there are 582 image urls and they seem to be all going to a 404 page.
Hope that helps!
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RE: SEO issues with Magento
Hi Daniel,
At first glance I'm not sure a robots.txt issue would be responsible for the rankings drop you describe. What pages are still blocked that you dont want blocked? Maybe something else is going on in regards the rankings?
For issue 2, have you submitted an image sitemap.xml? If so what is the address? I see plenty of your images in google image search, so some of them at least are being indexed.
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RE: Influence on CTR for high traffic keyword in url and redirect
As David says a lot depends on the niche/keyword/competition scene, but if I may play the devils advocate:
I am not sure how valid that ctr data is with all the ongoing layout changes google has been trying out. Good ctr data seems nearly impossible to find but this report http://www.slingshotseo.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Google-vs-Bing-CTR-Study-2012.pdf makes for an interesting read, and the numbers are substantially lower.
Beyond that, what you are suggesting sounds a bit like playing with fire! You are making 8 grand a month now on 3rd? Surely it would less time consuming to further strengthen that site than to build another one from scratch? How long did it take for you to get to 3rd?
And 301'ing a near exact match domain to an exact match domain in today's landscape.... well that just sounds a bit risky!
I think David hits it on the head with: "The other way is to make a few extra bucks and invest in them in tissues".
Just my two cents.
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RE: Sitewide links causing problem
Hi Bob,
The first thing I looked for when visiting your site was a big "what is nlp" button, I really had no idea! Maybe google is thinking (or has started thinking) a bit like this for the search term nlp also? With the potential for local results etc mixed in it seems to me that the term could be a bit volitile in terms of rankings and your experience possibly hints at that.
I see the sitelinks you mention if I search for nplcalifornia with no space, but am not well aquainted with these expanded sitelinks and their finer points, maybe someone else?
I would still be wary of messing too much with those site wide links!
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RE: Sitewide links causing problem
I don't think changing the link text on those two sites is going to help much to be honest. If anything I would be tempted to try and reduce the amount of sitewide links, there seem to be a few.
A couple of things come to mind.
1. Why should you be ranking for NLP? I am searching from Europe and the first page has some heavy hitters (wikipedia, stanford U), some local(ish) results and a few nlp.something type sites that I guess might be your online competitors?
The term NLP is a bit ambiguous, It could be Neuro-Linguistic Programming, it could be Natural Language Programming (the Standford link) or it could be the NLP Theatre down the road. So if google is going to return results based on what it thinks the user intent is then you have a mix of local and 'what is NLP' type results which seems pretty reasonable.
So with that in mind, I'm not sure your site has enough 'What is NLP' type content to justify ranking on the first page and maybe that is something to consider in terms of adding content.
2. Sitelinks seem to come and go depending on the search term and who knows what else so I wouldn't worry too much if you are not seeing them right now. The good news is that searching for "NLP California" from where I am you are number one, sitelinks and all!
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RE: How do I gain full SEO value from individual property pages?
Yes I think microdata would help a lot in this case, and once you have a template setup it really takes no time at all to implement!
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RE: How to provide product information without duplicate content?
Hi James,
That will probably do it. If you want to avoid having to fiddle with the paging code etc check out something like (grabbed the first link I saw) http://www.jquery4u.com/function-demos/ajax/
Loading content with ajax/jquery is pretty straightforward
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RE: How do I gain full SEO value from individual property pages?
I will have a stab at it
I am a bit confused over your main problem since you say that individual properties have great unique content and are good for sharing, but then that they have similar descriptions and you would prefer for them not to be emphasized in google.
If I understand right, this seems to be mainly an architecture type issue since you want to put emphasis on location + type of accommodation so that users are landing on the 'category' page such as it is and can then drill down.
If so, I don't think you have any problems if the category/url structure is right so something like
Florida/Miami/Condos gives a pretty good indication of the way you are intending visitors to discover your content. You will want to make sure that each page in that trail has some unique content beyond a simple list of properties. The individual property pages could then be optimized more for the name of the rental than its location (although obviously location would also be included).I would think that schema markup might be your friend here. Have a look at http://schema.org/LodgingBusiness and particularly the location details and see how you can apply this to the individual pages.You could then replicate the locality information through your url/folder structure.
Using breadcrumbs (and structured markup with them) would also help emphasize this to both users and search engines... and maybe you will get some of those lovely breadcrumb links in your serps!
Hope that makes sense!
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RE: How to provide product information without duplicate content?
As Andy says you could pull the information into a popup/lightbox/div using javascript and source it all from the same url, so should do the trick.
Just thinking out loud now, but it might be worth testing putting the generic texts back into some of the product pages and seeing what happens. 250 word unique texts for each product might be enough to make the moz crawler (and the search engines) see enough value and difference on each page for it not to be an issue anymore. You could test in a single category for example and cross check against analytics and ranking data to see what happens.
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RE: How do i block an entire category/directory with robots.txt?
Hi
This should do it, you place the robots.txt in the root directory of your site.
User-agent: * Disallow: /product-category/
You can check out some more examples here: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/robotstxt
As for the multiple urls linking to the same pages, you will just need to check all possible variants and make sure you have them covered in the robots.txt file.
Google webmaster tools has a page where you can use to check if the robots.txt file is doing what you expect it to do (under Health -> Blocked Urls).
It might be easier to block the pages with a meta tag as described in the link above if you are running a plugin allowing this, that should take care of all the different url structures also.
Hope that helps!
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RE: List of Google recognised abbreviations?
Indeed that is another question.
I suppose it might if you use it as a second instance of describing 'x with y' in a page's text although the word 'with' is so generic in many instances that I'm not sure it would make a huge difference... I could be wrong though!
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RE: Indexing Issue
Hi Faye,
As Martijn said there is an issue with your main menu, if you turn off javascript in firefox and visit the site... no menu at all!
You can see the result in your sitemap.xml also, only 2 urls are created in it, the homepage and the dentists page which you have a link to in the body text.
Try redoing your menu in css, it should fix the problem. Have a look here:
http://www.cssnewbie.com/easy-css-dropdown-menus/I just grabbed this example, if you search for css dropdown menus you will find many more.
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RE: Does Having 3 Websites On Magento Affect Domain Authority?
Hi Matt,
You will want to be careful of duplicate content issues since all product and static blocks etc will be sourced from the same database. But this is something you can edit on a store view by store view basis so as long as you make sure the content is suitable then really from an SEO point of view it is like you have 3 different sites.
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RE: Does Having 3 Websites On Magento Affect Domain Authority?
It shouldn't effect domain authority.
The multi domain setup in Magento is usually done through the use of virtual hosts on the server side in combination with different base urls for each of the main store views.
Search engines would still see the 3 domains as 3 separate domains and links pointing to the individual domains would still be pointing to separate domains.... so I don't think there would be a problem in regards domain authority.
You have probably seen it already, but here is the official Magento description of the setup procedure: http://www.magentocommerce.com/knowledge-base/entry/tutorial-multi-site-multi-domain-setup
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RE: List of Google recognised abbreviations?
That could be an interesting list!
No idea if one exists or not (could be a whole phd of what/why google recognises certain abbreviations in there!), but a quick unscientific test searching for 'fish w/ rice' and 'fish w rice' (I guess I am hungry), shows the serps returned highlighting the word 'with' as well as the words 'fish' and 'rice'.
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RE: Duplicate content in SEOMOZ report
Hi,
I have seen the same thing in a number of Magento shops I track, but while Magento can be a bit of a pain (those url variables oh man!) I think this is most likely due to thin product content and how the SEOmoz report decides on what is duplicate content.
The modal window content is repeated across all or most pages as you say, and since that content is the vast majority of the page's content, then the report is saying these pages look all the same. The product details are very small texts in comparison to all the generic shipping etc content you have in each page.
I see in my reports the duplicate page report numbers bouncing around all the time as the report decides one week that these 5 pages look the same and the next week a different 5 pages look the same!
I don't know the specifics of how exactly the report decides which pages to flag as duplicate or why it bounces around, but I think the main issue is that if the report is seeing the content as duplicate, then there is a good chance the search engines might as well. It is at least an indication that something is amiss.
How to fix it? Well I would suggest 2 things:
1. Add more product details to pad out the product specific texts on product pages and
2. Move the modal content window data into separate pages and then either link to them from the footer as you do now, but leading to their own page or else load the separate page data into the window using ajax or similar.
Both solutions require a bit of work, I would think the second would have the most immediate benefit in terms of the SEOmoz reports.
Hope that makes sense!