Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I found YSlow helped me effectively optimize the loads speed there is so much that you can do to help you with this. Hows the optimization going? My tools of choice were firebug and yslow - I also installed pagespeed from Google Webmaster Tools when doing this work.

Hi Brett - when I have been optimizing the loading of one of my wordpress sites I have found YSlow is effective. Have you used it?

Cheers Oleg, I have just seen the duplicate content issue overlooked so often, so I thought it was important to put this point across and give a useful link to a more in depth look at the solution.

Goolge won't have anything against Magneto as it is a very widely used platform and there would have been a lot more people asking this sort of question if Google suddenly decided it didn't like it. I would have a look at all your sites link profiles and see if there are any clues there? I would also look at your sites architecture/structure and see if you have a duplicate content issue which can be common on e-commerce sites. For a more in depth insight you will need to share your sites with the community.

If you haven't already I would run your sites through http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ for clues

Yes it could affect your current rankings if you don't make sure that you have redirected your http:// versions to your new https:// versions of the page using a 301 redirect as it can create a duplicate content issue. Here is a more in depth look at this in a recent and very well answered Q&A - http://www.seomoz.org/q/duplicate-content-and-http-and-https

Hope this helps!

Hi Graeme,

I have had an issue in the last couple of weeks where a campaign that was tagged to display in Google Analytics wasn't showing anywhere near the amount of traffic I was recording at the other end. My problem was fixed by changing to the latest GA tracking code and placing it in the header as prescribed. I though I would just check to make sure you are using the latest code on your blog?

Yes - if you have a 301 redirect in place from your old URL to the new then around 90-99% of the link juice will be passed from the old links pointing at your old domain. Obviously anchor text that is your old domain isn't ideal in terms of targeting a specific keyword for ranking (though post penguin you don't want to over do keyword rich anchor text anyway) but the juice will still be passed in terms of link juice that will help your new sites domain authority and the page authority of the pages that it is being redirected to..

Hi KLLC

Do you mean that pages are showing up as duplicate content in the SEOMoz crawl report but you have canonical tags in place? If so don't worry as SEOMoz doesn't recognise canonical tags yet and so still reports the pages as duplicate content even though you may have tagged them correctly to help search engines.

Take a look here for more info and scroll down for some SEOMoz staff responses for added help - http://www.seomoz.org/q/canonical-tag-and-duplicate-content-report

Hope this helps

No problem Rob - domain age won't be passed through a 301 redirect

However in relation to the age of a domain and how it impacts your ranking have a look at this interesting Q&A from a couple of months ago -

http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-does-your-urls-age-affect-your-ranking

I think you will be fine if you create a 301 redirect from the old domain and make sure you take the time to build a decent natural looking link profile and have optimised the site for the visitor and not the search engines. Taking into account all the on-page factors without going overboard....

Well what I would say is that when you do a 301 redirect from one domain to another you will lose some of the link juice that has been gained (a 301 passes around 90-99% of juice), so there is chance that when you do this you may see a difference in your SEO rankings. However if done correctly the impact is likely to be minimal and there are plenty of us that have done this successfully and it has worked out for the better. Remember as you said the website is poorly optimised and you are going to be pointing to a new site that has been optimised sensibly and will contain more content, so long term you are on to a winner and you should see improvements in search rankings and traffic generated by your site. Also remember online marketing and SEO is about the long term goals, as well as quick fixes and low hanging fruit that can be picked up, so explain this to the accounting firm and explain how your strategy will cause minimum impact and in the long run it will work to their businesses advantage.

Hope this helps - remember when you do your 301 redirect and tell Google in Google Webmaster Tools that your site has moved it does take time for the search engines to catch up...

branded keywords are those that include your brand and none branded are the generic terms which will take more work and are likely to drive a lot of traffic from generic searches people put in if they don't know your brand. So for instance if I was searching for beer instead of Budweiser beer then ranking highly and gaining traffic from the none branded search would be useful to know as a segment and it would give you a guide as to how your search engine rankings are going.

Hi Thomas - dont worry - the SEOMoz crawl doesn't actually take into account your canonical tags at the moment but it is something they are looking into, so I wouldn't worry you are not the first to report this...

Have a look at this for peace of mind

http://www.seomoz.org/q/canonical-tag-and-duplicate-content-report

The article is still applicable today and here is more info on your topic from a Q&A earlier this year - http://www.seomoz.org/q/duplicate-content-and-http-and-https

You will notice the top endorsed answer (endorsed by DR Pete) uses this method and points to this article

You will also notice a 301 redirect is recommended solution as I mentioned above though they do it the other way around. I would do it to the secure version as that is the one I would imagine you want to be the page that is used as it is secure. Search engines can index both protocols so doing it either way won't harm you...

Yes it does

Have a look here

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/solving-duplicate-content-issues-with-http-and-https

I would 301 redirect the http:// version to the https:// version to take care of any link issues.

The SeoMoz crawl doesn't actually take into account your canonical tags at the moment but it is something they are looking into, so I wouldn't worry you are not the first to report this...

Have a look at this for peace of mind

http://www.seomoz.org/q/canonical-tag-and-duplicate-content-report

I agree with goodlegaladvice if you have time to rewrite the content this would be the best scenario as you are likely to pick up search visitors.

If you don't have the time you could consider cross domain canonicalization crediting the original clearly to the search engines - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/cross-domain-canonical-the-new-301-whiteboard-friday

No problem Antonio,

Your question in regard earning potential - you are looking an impression model from what you have said - so that all depends on the amount of pageviews you get as this sort of advertising measures CPM cost per thousand impressions.

It also depends on what ad network you choose or whether you are going to try and sell your ad space yourself. CPM Ad Networks have different requirements to sign up with them and they all pay differently.

http://www.earningguys.com/advertisement/15-best-cost-per-impression-cpm-ads-networks/

This article gives some well known CPM Ad Networks that you might want to look into or possibly contact to get an idea about what your site could earn. If you could get an average CPM rate that they pay then you could easily estimate your sites potential income.

What is the engagement like on your site?

That is why for peace of mind I would go for a 301 redirect which will pass the majority of link juice in terms of SEO and it will eliminate the old page pointing straight at the new one and telling search engines that your old page has permanently moved to the new URL.

Once search engines catch up they will only index your new page URL and Title which you have optimised eliminating the old unfriendly ones but passing any link juice they have gained at the same time.

Does this make sense?

If you have used a canonical tag to point to the best version of your page then there shouldn't be an issue in terms of SEO and search engines as you are actually telling the search engine that you have two pages that contain the same information and you would like them to take the one mentioned in the canonical tag as the original. You are actually practising good optimisation and that is the whole reason the canonical tag was introduced to help optimise website structure for search engines.

A quick question - when you create this new page that will have a different URL and Title are you going to be keeping the rest of the content the same? If so I would personally use a 301 redirect to the new URL and make sure that you have changed any internal links such as navigation to the new URL and not the old one. When I have had a situation such as this that is what I have done and it has worked well. It is important when changing your site structure and URLs that you make sure your navigation reflects your new URLs and not the old redirected ones, so you don't give mixed messages to the search engines.

I agree with Andy, just update your content.

I would look at going for one long page if I were you, that way you are not in danger of competing with yourself to rank for keywords. From my own experience I have seen users prefer one long article. I have also found that as one article is more content rich so it has generated more long tail traffic, partly due to the page becoming stronger, as all links that it has gained point at one page rather than being spread between two -  making them stronger in the eyes of the search engines (higher Page Authority for one page article).

Also I have seen where multi-page articles have been put into practice and the second part of the article has been the one that has ranked the highest, not ideal in my opinion.

Here is a recent Q&A that will give you more input as to whether to split your page or not - http://www.seomoz.org/q/determining-when-to-break-a-page-into-multiple-pages

Place a 301 redirect on each of those domains pointing at your new abcelectroniccigarettes.co.uk.

Thanks for sharing activitysuper - Irving beat you to it http://www.seomoz.org/q/google-launches-their-disallow-tool

There is some interesting discussions around this from Ryan Kent that is worth a read

Unfortunately I think there are only two options redo all your content or go through your old content updating the hard coded links and then upload this with filezilla to your new domain - which would be quicker than redoing everything.

To increase linking root domains you need to develop a link building strategy. Basically great content + exposure will help you gain these links. There are lots of ways that you can develop content that people will want to link to and there are lots of link building strategies. I would suggest searching on here for link building and have a look at both blog posts and Q&A for some ideas and an in depth insight.

Once you have started gaining more links you will increase your domain authority automatically.

To give specific link building ideas I and I am sure the rest of the community would need to have some more information on your site and what niche you target.

Well if you are going to target specific European countries I would look at creating content specific to them and targeting them. I would in this case consider setting up subfolders on your new .com domain such as /uk, /de, etc and putting the specific country contents in them. You don't need individual country code domains for each.

If you setup your new site on the new domain yes you could copy all your webpages via ftp from your old domain to your new domain, however you would need to look at your navigation and internal links because if any of these are hard coded to your old domain such as abcecigs,com/aboutus.html then you will need to change it to your new domain.

When you have a 301 redirect in place you should go into Google Webmaster Tools on your old domain and tell it that this website has moved and select your new address.

For a great insight into international seo strategy take a look at this article - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday

Well if you are mainly targeting the UK I would setup a 301 redirect from abcecigs.com to abcelectroniccigarettes.co.uk and I would also setup up a redirect from the abcelectroniccigarettes.com to the .co.uk.

However you could consider building your new site on abcelectroniccigarettes.com and putting the different countries that you are targeting in subfolders such as abcelectroniccigarettes.com/uk and putting a 301 redirect from abcelectroniccigarettes.co.uk to abcelectroniccigarettes.com/uk. You would also want to 301 redirect abcecigs.com to abcelectroniccigarettes.com. This all depends on the fact of whether you want to target international customers properly? If not I would go with something like my first suggestion.

Remember a 301 redirect passes the majority of your link juice from your old domain to the new one it is redirected to as it is a permanent redirect.

Just to be clear that when you decide which version you want to be your main url structure you need to make sure that all your internal should point at the preferred format.

So if you are putting preference on the trailing slash as in your 301 redirect is from none trailing slash to trailing slash then your internal link structure should match.

I would look at going down the canonical route - have a look at canonicalization guide from SEOMoz here - http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/canonicalization

I would add a canonical tag pointing at your preferred format url and I would also do a 301 redirect between the two. Using both won't cause issues and obviously your link juice will keep flowing.

It specifically talks about trailing slashes and redirecting from none trailing to trailing towards the end of the article.

Have you got your old domain setup in Google Webmaster Tools, if so have you had a look at links there and do they still show? I have to be honest when I have created 301 redirects I have never gone back checking what links still point to the old domain as I plan on keeping the domain and redirect in place permanently anyway.

You might want to try running your redirected old URL through http://www.majesticseo.com to see what sort of insight this gives you in relation to backlinks...

I have just done that with majesticseo and I can all the links pointing to the redirected URL so this should solve your problem

Well when I was in the same situation as you and had loads of pages that were part of an archive that were all indexed in Google - numerous with low PR - I used a 301 redirect on all of them to tell search engines of their new home. I did this in 2009 and they are all still indexed and bringing traffic into the site today - I am leaving the redirects there forever.

If I was in your situation and it makes sense to put a 301 redirect on a page as it still exists just under a new URL then I would do it. 301 redirects don't cause issues with search engines when they are used properly to move a whole site from one location to another - content relocation this is their purpose.

Hope this helps Gary and answers your question..

Hmm no backlinks but a high PR. I would be interested to see an opensite explorer review of that page. However if you have a page which is of high authority then it would be sensible to use a 301 redirect on that, as you want search engines and visitors to know that the information on this valuable page is still available just at its new location. I hope this makes sense.

You should keep it forever because once you turn off the old url the links that point to it won't resolve to your new URLs and so you will loose the link juice that is flowing through them. Remember a 301 is permanent so I would keep it in place if I were you.

Haha I wondered if you would read the article and notice that - I think your evidence above my prove that button colours really can make a difference. I have found the same to be honest. I also found changing the colour of a call to action resulted in a significant increase in click-throughs from my landing pages.

Some times I think things are just common sense and in a lot of cases I have found that the more you can spell something out for visitors the more they complete your desired actions. You can't argue with metrics and split testing in my opinion.

CRO is one of the most important things that I do in relation to digital marketing in my opinion because as we all know even the smallest change on a landing page can influence the success or conversion of visitors. It's all well and good having a site that has thousands of visits a day, but if none of those convert then you are potentially loosing out significantly.

Just changing the focus of a page using heat maps and a & b testing has lead to a significant increase in revenue generated.

When I read this article a couple of years ago I changed my focus to include an even more intensive push on CRO so I thought I would link to it for those that never saw it - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-definitive-howto-for-conversion-rate-optimization

I agree - if you have setup your country specific subfolder properly with geo-targeting setup in webmaster tools then the duplicate content won't be an issue.

As long as Google can clearly assign a folder to a specific country when it crawls your site then you won't need to worry about adding another redirect or canonical link in my experience.

BUT it was clear from Chris' links that he was aiming for something like this, hence why I asked the question.

Chris if you are unsure what the best options for your international SEO are then I think this whiteboard friday is a good read for you - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday

We must have been writing our responses at the same time - great minds eh Carlos. I agree with you about the fact that you could just redirect subdomain.site.com/uk/page/ -> to www.site.com/page/.

I guess Chris is doing this as a way to target specific countries?

Daisy chaining 301 redirects will pass link juice but each time a 301 redirect happens you will loose a proportion of your link juice which is not ideal as you want to keep as much of your original link value as possible. I would go down the route of using a 301 redirect and then a canonical as the second part of your redirect is essentially showing your preferred page with duplicate content so would make most sense in my opinion.

The first thing I would say to this is since penguin link profiles are under more scrutiny than ever and as such you really want to have a natural link profile. Realistically is it natural to have only inbound links? - no a natural link profile will have links flowing in both directions and as such some will be reciprocal. However you need to make sure that if you are doing a reciprocal link with a website then you linking back would add value to your visitors. If you are going to reciprocal link I would work to this principle and keep them to a minimal and then you should be ok. I do personally have two sites that I work on that are linking to each other and this hasn't caused any negative impact on my rankings as they both rank well, but the link makes sense and I haven't created sites just to link to each other.

If you are thinking of going down the route of offering links to other sites if they link to you purley to boost the flow of link juice and increase links to your site then I would stay away from this practice, as there are penguins swimming in those waters!!

My mistake - I thought that was the code that enbphotos wanted to add to the .htaccess, however if that is the code it is pretty obvious that the rewrite engine is engaged Alan haha cheers. My apologies for misreading the response.

Other than that I agree with what Alan says...

what is the small bit or rewrite code that is already in there? Does it already engage the RewriteEngine? If so you don't need that line twice but you can just add your other code below the existing and it should work.

A lot of hosting environments that are on shared servers for instance allow you to put redirects etc in place through interfaces and then create the .htaccess for you...

This is a common issue with sites in relation to duplicate content - I would look at setting up a 301 (permanent) redirect from none www version of your page to the www version.

Have a look at the SeoMoz guide to redirection here - http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection

Hope this helps

Robert gives you a very good answer; a page with low ranking is ideal for being improved through optimizing the on-page factors and gaining links to your pages. If you have a blog linking to these pages is a very good idea to bring them to visitors attention again.

Just to reinforce this point - Thankfully page ranking doesn't carry over otherwise there would be a lot of us in this industry struggling!

In relation to internal linking I would look at where these pages sit in your site architecture in terms of links to them - are they prominently linked to in your navigation or are they buried deep in your site. If they are buried deep would you be able to include them closer to the top of the site navigation (in terms of including them higher up the navigation levels, such as only taking one click to get to your low ranking pages from the homepage) with approrpriate keyword anchor text linking to them? Depending on your site this is not always appropriate but it is a concept worth considering as it will make a difference in my experience.

Well I would not go down the route of sub-domains if you were bringing all your sites under one for SEO purposes. I personally would consider putting each of the sites in a sub-folder on your corporate site and then 301 each domain to that folder. You need to remember that sub-domains are often viewed by Google as separate domains, which means any links pointing to the sub-domains pass little benefit onto the root domain (in this case the corporate site). This in my opinion defeats the object of raising the domain authority!!

Well look at you link building strategy so as to improve your DA and PA. How does your currently compare to stringsdirect.co.uk?

I think by not writing unique meta descriptions you are missing an opportunity to help your pages convert better in the SERPs. A good well written meta description can improve your sites click-through rate in the search engines. I have tested out different ones in the past and if you get it right you will see a noticeable improvement in my experience.

Have a quick look at the SeoMoz best practice guide for some more general info -

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/meta-description

I must have done the OSE with www. for both thanks. I have done a none personalised search and I am seeing stringbusters.com as 1 and stringsdirect.co.uk as 2.

Well I would create two pages if you think that you can produce good quality unique content in relation to each product term on an individual page. As you have two audiences you could target each for input such as reviews to help make each page unique.

The advantage for each is that you can clearly target the individual term in relations to page title, header, content, url name. Then if you look at ideas to build links to both you will succeed.

Hi Robert

You are not wrong - I wasn't logged into Google and I had the location set to United Kingdom then did a search on guitar strings which brought up the site I mentioned above as number 1.

Now I probably made the mistake of presuming that Dan saw the same results as me owing to the fact he is based in the UK too.

Dan needs to specify the site which he intends - I actually intended to only leave the link to OSE and not to a specific website so that he could take a look and give us some feedback on this. Then due to the positive reply I took it that we were seeing the same results and he was wondering how this could happen.

I am now confused as I don't get the same results as you when using OSE for the two websites mentioned in your screenshot.

I must be going mad - stringdirect.co.uk actually has a PA of 47 from what I am seeing and the DA 36 which is higher than stringbusters.com DA 31 Pa 42, so this wouldn't explain the difference with what I am seeing.

What are your thoughts?

Well they would appear to have several of their own sites on their own domains linking to each other and there link profile contains a lot of text to anchor strings. I think the fact that the website has a reasonable link profile and all the internal navigation has anchor text containing guitar, strings or both pointing at a page with the URL guitar strings will have a strong influence on the ranking.