Hey
I am not really a windows guy but I am sure you can do this in .Net so it can be done at the application level. Also, I am sure you can do this in IIS but you maybe have less flexibility.
What are you trying to achieve?
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Hey
I am not really a windows guy but I am sure you can do this in .Net so it can be done at the application level. Also, I am sure you can do this in IIS but you maybe have less flexibility.
What are you trying to achieve?
Hey Mike
I have a site, it lost about 80% of traffic on the 7th of February. I have seen that there was some talk of results changing in the UK on the 7th but this one site has been hammered.
It's annoying really as the major competitor is almost a perfect case for how to cheat. The business provides several services all from one site as does the one I manage. But, they also have the URLs for each of these services and use them as single pages designed to throw the user to the main site (duh - doorway pages) but... the thing is, it works for them, has worked for years and years and on this last update, it seems to be getting better.
Really annoying and likewise, I have not had any good feedback as to what the problem may be from other SEO folks I know.
So, good folks of SEOMoz - any ideas on this one? It may help me figure out what has gone wrong with my fathers site as well which is http://www.vinyltodigital.co.uk
Marcus
You do get small variations in how the server wants the htaccess but give it a go and see if it works.
If you are happy it is working in the browser then there is a free bit of software called webbug that will let you see the HTTP headers to ensure you are getting the 301 permanent redirect returned.
Hope it helps.
Add a canonical URL of www.mysite.com to the homepage (/ & /index.php) & 301 redirect www.mysite.com/index.php to www.mysite.com
That covers both bases and will see the content indexed on the correct page before too long.
Cheers
Marcus
So, what you are trying to do is put a value on a link? Almost like calculating ROI on PPC traffic? I am not really sure how you would go about that. So many different metrics and how can you truly know the value of one link unless you add one at a time and assess.
You can try to guess at this but sometimes, the metrics, even the moz-metrics don't add up in that way and links that you think will make a big difference don't do the job.
Couple that with the fact that it's a constantly moving target and it's more difficult still.
I am still not sure that I 100% understand what you are trying to do here :S
Hey Todd
I saw some pretty major impact on one site on the 7th of Feb, it seems that a fair few other UK people did as well, I don't think it is a penalty, just an algo change of some sort but still trying to get my head around it.
Can you post the URL and keywords? Happy to take a look.
Cheers
Marcus
Hey Will
If your current product page has variations but only varies based on the reviews it is showing then there is not really anything unique (bar the reviews) on these pages and the main content (product details) is the same.
Maybe something like what Amazon does:
1. Main Product page with some reviews or snippets
2. Reviews page (dynamic) which the primary content is the reviews
Then, the different review pages can rank on their own merit and all that user generated content does not go to waste.
You could use a static URL for your product page and a dynamic URL for your reviews page so it would be something like this:
/category/product-name.html
/category/product-name/reviews/?page=1
/category/product-name/reviews/?page=2
/category/product-name/reviews/?page=3
etc
Check out these amazon links:
product:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Girl-Dragon-Tattoo-Millennium-Trilogy/dp/1847242537
The amazon links are a bit crazy, but it is a sound concept overall.
Hope it helps!
Marcus
Hey Anne
There was a discussion about this a while back:
http://www.seomoz.org/qa/view/29063/multilanguage-multicountry-strategy
The general consensus was that there is no perfect way from an SEO perspective at the moment to run a multi language site and that a single domain per country is a better way to go forwards.
If you are going to tackle this you will need to set up new sites for all but the primary language and then 301 redirect the additional language pages on the existing site to the new site. If it's joomla and everything is in a /dir and the new site maintains the same page names this should be easy enough with some mod rewrite wizadry in your htaccess and you should be able to write a single rewrite rule for each language to the new site.
Maybe some canonical URLs on the new sites if easy to implement as well to make sure there is no confusion about who is the owner of the content but the 301's should take care of that with time.
You can then effectively target each language / territory with one site and monitor each site as a seperate campaign.
Hope it helps.
Marcus
Hey, can you drop in the phrases and related pages? Hard to comment on the above without a little more info.
Open Office Draw is free and has a series of flow chart icons but it's a manual job and takes a bit of getting used to (price is right though). Anything like this falls apart for larger sites though as you would be there all week.
Would love to know if there is a firm favourite amongst people as it's certainly helpful to visualise interlinking and structure.
Variety is key and we tend to use the following as a starter:
It's different for each job, usually requires assistance from the client to do social stuff (forums, blogs etc) and always, always, always take a good bit of time and needs a structured approach.
Half the time, if the links easy to get, it aint worth having! So, think not in volume, but in quality. Get 10 links a week and you have 500 by the time the year is out and you are in a much better position.
Cheers
Marcus
Hey, mobile is getting larger and I know that half of my web browsing (at least) is done on my smartphone and with android bringing smartphone features to the wider market then, it's just a matter of time before the world has the web in their pocket.
We tend to use Wordpress for most of our sites and if possible when we develop for clients. It is pretty SEO friendly out of the box and can easily be tweaked further if needs be. For mobile there are (free) plugins that allow you to serve a unique, simplified version of your site to mobile users and it takes about 5 minutes to download and install it.
For mobile device (apple/android/ipad etc) you can use WPTouch - it has a free version that does the job and then a pro version that provides even more features. It has a load of AJAX and HTML5 goodness and is easily customised by non technical sorts through the control panel.
For those who are willing to dig into the code, it provides the same sort of foundation as a good theme and you can easily do more to brand it up and serve a spinky mobile version of your site with maybe a days worth of development. There are a bunch of others as well, onswipe is great for iPad so take a look around see what works best for you.
WPTouch Pro is the best one I have seen but there are similar plugins for Joomla, Drupal, Expression Engine etc so again, take a look and see what you can find.
Working on a bespoke site? Well, you could always take one of these solutions as a starting point, pick it apart and learn from it. Saves reinventing the wheel and some of these solutions are quite mature and robust now so again, there are options.
Hope it helps & give me a shout if any questions, I have been through the mill with this so happy to help.
Marcus
Hey
Having a quick look, the current way you are doing things seems pretty sensible to me from a user perspective as you have separate landing pages for each section of information along with smaller pages, less links per page etc.
You say the drop off is post panda so is the structure of your site the problem? Did you have loads of poor quality links to these pages that have suddenly lost traction or could it be that some of the pages are mainly featuring content from ebay (hot auctions etc).
When you said you have made some ground getting traffic back, what have you been doing to improve things so far?
Not tons of help, sorry but I am not sure if it's the structure of the pages that is the problem here.
Marcus
Hey, I don't really get what you are trying to do here. Is this to provide a tiered flat rate price per link for your clients? If so, I am not sure you can really work it like that across the board.
Sorry, not much help there.
Marcus
Hey, the pro term target tool will give you a page grade for a keyword and is a good way to learn about optimising a page for a given term. It's not a perfect science, but it will point you in the right direction.
Hey,
A site I used to manage picked up a penalty, quite innocently as it was and we got it removed, and a few weeks later it got it back again. Basically, they had some subdomains for testing client sites, removed them in teh hosting control panel and it ended up with the domains pointing at their site and they had several URLs all indexed for their content.
We 301'd all the domains and wrote a reconsideration request and that did the job. Then, somehow, we had missed one and it got penalised again, repeated the process and it was okay again.
As it happens I have another site that seems to have picked up a penalty on the 7th of Feb yet there is really nothing wrong with it as far as I can see and to make matters worse, the competition is pretty much breaking google guidelines left right and centre (mostly doorway pages).
I'll show you mine if you show me yours?
Marcus
Hmm, it's a tricky one but surely, if you use rel canonical back to your main product page you are losing the benefit of all of those additional reviews.
Just spitballing here but would it not be better to have the main product page with the first five or so reviews on and then create unique, paginated pages for the product reviews with a summary of the product details (so the reviews were the primary content).
So, we would have
product-name.html
product-name-reviews-page1.html
product-name-reviews-page2.html
This way, you get lots of nice long tail potential from the additional review pages that summarise the product, show the unique reviews and make it VERY easy to link back to the main product page to buy?
Seems a shame to have loads of great user generated reviews and then stop yourself ranking for them. Just make the purpose of the page clear as reviews of and the path to the main page very clear so user A with concern X can have his fears allayed and click through to buy.
Had a few glasses of wine, so hope, that makes sense.
Hey, that's exactly my approach and it always forms part of a larger picture but good quality articles can help get traffic to and rank a new site so it factors in still for me. Cheers! Marcus
Much of the work I do tends to be on a lot of small to medium sized company websites, the kind of businesses that do not have thousands of pounds to spend or the budgets to create reems of quality content.
That said, neither do the competition so one approach that has worked well in the past has been article marketing.
The approach would usually be to develop some relevant content for the site itself, even if that is just a range of service type landing pages or answers to relevant customer problems and then build links from the article marketing sites (primarily ezinearticles.com).
An average approach would be to write articles that are relevant to the individual services, for instance, problems that can be solved by the service and then to link these articles back to the service pages with the desired keywords in the anchor text.
Another approach has been to develop an article with the client that solves a common customer problem for their own site and then to write a few summarised versions of the article for the article marketing sites. Again, with the intention of gathering traffic, giving a basic answer and linking back to the main article with the main keywords we wish to rank this page for.
For smaller sites serving a fairly tight geographic area this approach, combined with submission to some quality directories (local and niche) has been a strong combo historically.
I know there is a lot of junk on the article marketing sites and there could be negative affects from posting loads of pointless articles but using them properly, to broaden the net, provide answers (albeit summarised) and generate links - is this still a valid approach post the Google Farmers update?
It may be interesting to see how the article sites like ezine have to tighten up the editorial process now and if the content becomes better across the board, it may possibly strengthen this approach over time.
Do any of you still use article marketing as part of your SEO campaigns? If so, what are your strategies and where do you use?
Would love to hear your thoughts folks.
Marcus