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Also the fact the url of the exe is an .aspx page could be seen as deceitful. I wouldn't do it like that. Since you use dot.net, use a httphandler and match url with file extension. And I would not serve an .exe, zip it and serve a .zip file.
And I strongly support donford advice about a download page for all the good reasons he is referring to.
I recently had to solve the same issue. I don't know if my approach is the best one, but I will describe it.
At the end was just few lines of code, and I could even do it myself (I am far from a PHP coder).
In my case I didn't edit the WP template because I am using a different rendering engine, but that doesn't mean much.
I would not use different WP installation, it makes editing cumbersome.
My understanding is OSE relay on a db which is updated on a monthly basis. Last update was October 29, if you moved after October 29 I guess you will have to wait till November 25 to see any change in OSE.
Moz doesn't pick, just signal the duplicate content. If you add the canonical Moz should understand and un flag it as duplicate.
Don't laugh, but personally my advice is to gain some backlinks to that page if you want to improve ranking.
All the on-page optimization suggestion you can easily find in the page grader tool here on moz.
If you want to rank well for “Brown Engineered Flooring”, you know what you have to do, put it in the url path, put it in the title, in the h1, in the body, don't stuff the page with it and remember the usual recommendation: before the fold is better than under the fold, at beginning of the title is better than in the middle, etc...
I have no idea what CMS you are using but check the server side code generating the link, not just the code sent to the browser.
We recently switched to SSL, and our CMS was already building internal links on pages using the protocol of the http request.
I agree with you.
But let me just add something.
New Delhi to New York is 12.000 km, that's around 120ms of latency. While within India it's probably in the 3 to 15 ms range.
TTFB should be below 500ms to be in a safe zone, that 120ms leaves 380ms for everything else, is definitely doable,
each http request made from the browser is going to be affected by the latency, but for a long list of good reasons the website should be optimized reducing the number of request necessary to render pages,
to improve performance reducing latency a CDN is the thing to use, duplicating content around the world on different physical or virtual machines with the purpose of improving performance, still make sense, but only if your traffic is epic.
Let's say you are collecting backlinks across a variety of pages for foo.com, like: foo.com/clown, foo.com/juggler, foo.com/lion-tamer and so on...
Page Authority will benefit for each of those pages, but what is going to happen to Domain Authority?
Is there any data available? Any educated guess in what's the best strategy to try to get best results for both PA and DA?
I don't know which CMS/framework you use but it's unlikely you can set canonical at template level.
Hashbang is a thing of the past.
Google became pretty good at executing JS as explained by Matt Cutts in one of his video.
But a part from google juggling with JS...
What you need to do is design the server “served” page optimizing it for SEO, loading with server side technology all the data you want to be indexed for, and loading with ajax the data you don't care about being indexed for. Loading doesn't mean display, you load the content on the page with server side technology, and you use client side technology to show and hide according yo users interactions with you UX.
Yes, linking from duplicate content means potentially loosing SEO value.
google could detect those articles as duplicate and do not include some in the index, result the backlink will bring no value to you.
if google do not detect those articles as duplicate you should still ask yourself if it's really what you want to be linked from extremely similar articles. Because that's a signal, the content of the article where the link is placed, google will use to choose the keywords you will be ranked for. Same article content same keywords you are feeding google.
The_Sage answer is excellent in my opinion.
Personally I am a modern user, but the large majority of the visitors to websites I manage are not.
There are few ways of checking what kind of visitors you have using google analytics: https://www.google.it/webhp?q=google+analytics+users+scroll
I think you need an in deep analysis.
There's something definitely very wrong. I can see only 13 keywords, with a backlink profile of more than 500 linking root domains. Your traffic seems to have been in constant decline for a while but in May something happen which sort of killed it completely.
Also looks like you gained around 15/20 thousands links between Oct 9 and 15, that's smelling.
On the 8th of Sep you got 150 root linking domain in one day, wow, that's smelling even more.
To avoid any risk of being penalized you need to be very careful to do not cloak. For example, in my experience if you tweak content serving different version of the page to javascript enabled browser and browser without JS is fine. But if you change something when you detect the http request is coming from googlebot, even if you change just a title, google gets very very angry.
Link building is not affected, do not encourage people to link using hashbang.
I don't remember about canonical, I don't think so, but just check the google docs I linked earlier.
But, as I said earlier, I strongly suggest to do not use hashbang, and redesign the app to use ajax the way I described earlier.
Google takes your meta-title as a mere suggestion, it usually show the proposed meta-title as “the” title in SERP but you have no guarantee.
If google finds your title is too short, over-used, poorly written, stuffed with keywords, or inadequate for the page content / searched query will sometimes create its own title.
Many, for pure backlinks check the most comprehensive are ahrefs.com and https://majestic.com
Also my direct experience tell changing the image name greatly improve image ranking in serp.
That's one of those cases where I would use buzzsumo, see what is most shared, and create similar content around those same keywords.
If you are not changing the IP address you don't need to change the DNS, if you change the IP address, in addition to updating the DNS records you also need to properly redirect traffic from old urls to new urls.
With IIS the best option is using url rewrite, which is very flexible but a little tricky to set up if it's the first time you do so: http://www.iis.net/learn/extensions/url-rewrite-module/creating-rewrite-rules-for-the-url-rewrite-module
Url rewrite does operate at web server level, its powerful and does the job, but you may consider doing redirects at application level, depending on the technology you use, php/dotnet/aspx/mvc you have different tools. The advantage of doing it at application level is you can redirect dynamically, in other words use an algo to translate the old urls to the new ones using whatever information is stored in the application cache, database, and so on. While using IIS url rewrite you either statically redirect each old url to a the new url or you use regular expressions or wildcards to dynamically do so. In other words using url rewrite you have a little less flexibility.
What percentage of page content would be duplicate?
I am asking because I remember seeing a video of our spiritual guide Matt Cutts addressing that, and he said at google they do understand content sometimes is quoted, cited, etc... And it all depends on how much text is duplicated when you quote, cite...
But unfortunately he was not saying how much is too much.
That was also my concern but all the four websites are related to the same branch of business I would say.
It's a software house basically, site 1 is just about them as a company. Site 2 and site 3 are about old technologies they do not resell/implement anymore. Site 4 is an online webservice to exchange messages anonymously, they actually never launched it. It's the one more distant from what they are doing and I agree with them it really looks unfinished and not so professional.
So, social these days is hot. But is there anyone who can report some figure about a real, documented, analytically documented, success in using social for e-commerce?
There's a lot of presentations like this one saying it's great, it's a big impact, etc...
But how? And what about figures of sales, or traffic, or something you can measure... Which had a significant spike thanks to a social network attempt?
I am asking because I tried myself to use facebook for e-commerce, and we tried a lot:
After 6 months and around 15k euro spent the result is:
My conclusion is either we are really dumb at using social for e-commerce, or we wasted our time...
Anyone had some experience to share?
I think showing information about the product, making clear the product can no longer be purchased and encouraging the visitor to buy alternatives is the right thing to do.
404 is out of question, it means you are removing it from SERP, why do that? You want to have as much pages in SERP as possible.
Think about those visitors, they got on that page looking specifically for that product. If you redirect/301 them to something else, you do not serve them the information they were looking for, and you may redirect them to content they are not interested into.
The only case where I would do a 301 is if the discontinued product page has tons of backlink and a terrific page authority, in other words an incredible amount of page juice to transfer.
Checking the example you linked, that page has PA 1 and zero backlinks, so there's no advantage in doing a 301.
One final notice, I am not an expert of music supply but I think you can do a much much better job at suggesting alternatives, if I look at that page I can't see any alternative product, I would suggest alternatives prominently on top of the page with a short reference+link where you state the product is no longer available, or something like that.
If you want to track a button click using Google Tag Manager you still have to use analytics api as described in the link I posted earlier.
No I am not aware of any other way of tracking button clicks than using javascript. If the button clicks trigger an url change you can of course track it indirectly, tracking the url change.
GTM also needs you to add analytics api call for tracking transactions: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gajs/gaTrackingEcommerce
Same goes for site speed and few others.
Adding that javascript does of course introduce a potential delay a slow down user experience. Based on my experience the delay is negligible.
If you need to chain a lot of tracking calls I suggest deferring them.
I strongly suggest you to design and plan (carefully) what you really need to track first.
Pages and posts are all content, I never heard of google crawler/algo to make distinction. And I don't think the fact of having a date is a making a page a post. I believe a discussion about posts and pages nature would be like a discussion about the sex of angels.
Depending on the user search query google notoriously give a boost to fresh content in SERP, but that depends on the search query. If you search about soccer results on sunday night, google guess you are interested in the actual results of the day and gives a boost to fresh content. But that's it. As far as I know if you search for plumbing in Chicago it's unlikely fresh content get a boost.
We tried custom audience as well, I should edit the question stressing it's included in the remarketing we did. Thanks for the links I am going to study them now.
No.
You work on the copy. You write a body/content of at least 1000 words with the right keyword density. With a good structure, with some images and maybe even some outbound links to authoritative sources.
You test the results and you update accordingly.
Maybe I am missing something, but form submission is either PPC or organic because the visitor is coming from PPC or Organic. So if you define a goal in analytics for the form submission, triggered either by url match or javascript, you can later check in analytics how many lead were generated through PPC or organic checking the goals per channel/referral/campaign.
Keep in mind you can use utm_source, utm_campaing, etc... In the links originating the leads, if you control them.
Check my answer to a similar question: http://moz.com/community/q/angular-seo
I am a big advocate of Angularjs, it's a great framework and I use it in every project. I always put SEO on top of my priority list when starting a new project and I never use hashbangs.
In my opinion hashbangs are fundamentally wrong, an old hack born when pushstate was not available.
The only case where Hashbangs make sense is for old complex application/javascript website developed without thinking about SEO, when you evaluate to modernize the app is too complex and not worth it.
You can happily use angularjs and benefit from its routing api without messing around with hashbangs.
I did some testing with Facebook ads and resulting Facebook likes on target pages. And something is wrong!
Just after creating the ad, before the ad was approved, I could get many likes on the target page without even seeing any traffic on server logs or google analytics.
I documented my tests here. I repeated the tests 6 times, every time I could get tens of likes on the target page within seconds and without any approval of the ad.
These pages have little traffic and there's no way these likes could have been natural!
Everyone I reported was able to reproduce it, try yourself.
A little update. I found others reporting un-expected Likes pouring...
But at least they were "running" the ad, so externals to Facebook could have seen it and decided to Like it to later offer "liking" service as reported from this fellow.
But in my case the ad was not approved... So... Who can see it beside me and Facebook?
I have a competitor using a technique I don't understand. But which seems to work.
Basically in the homepage has a
<noscript>area with a bunch of internal links to pages like:</p> <ul> <li><a href="foo.com/keyword1">keyword1</a></li> <li><a href="foo.com/keyword2">keyword2</a></li> <li><a href="foo.com/keyword3">keyword3</a></li> </ul> <p>Inside these pages there's an iframe with the site homepage url as source, within the iframe tag there's some text (less than 100 words) with some emphasis on the keyword and a link back to the home using keyword as anchor text.</p> <p>All the pages are in the sitemap and indexed, and when you open one you are shown that page (no 301 redirect).</p> <p>Technically those are not doorway pages, because there's no 301.</p> <p>The website has a much weaker backlink profile than others, but does rank pretty well with better positions for those keywords, for many is the TOP 1 (with the url of the homepage, not the iframed pages).</p> <p>And I don't understand why. I understand the usage of the iframe to have the same content as the home page, but without being detect as duplicate content.</p> <p>And I can guess google crawler does crawl the <noscript> links follow them and.... And since the page is basically empty should not do much. The url of the page with the iframe includes the keyword, but doesn't sounds like such a powerful signal to be sent back the homepage thanks to that link contained within the iframe tags.</p> <p><strong>Does anyone have any idea why it works?</strong></p></noscript>
You need coding, when the visitor land on the entry page of your site take the utm_source or utm_campaign from the url and log where he is coming from, in a cookie, session variable, etc... Then pass it through on form submission. You can use header, footer or any wordpress piece of code used in every page.
You can't keep the query string through the visitor path unless you code too, and it's more complex, and I don't believe you can find a wordpress plugin doing that. For sure is not something you can do with a standard wordpress installation.
What keywords are driving traffic to each page?
If semantically they share the same traffic, and if after merging the content and skimming the fat you don't loose too much, I would merge them and 301 one url into the other.
If each page is having traffic from different keywords you have the option of just do nothing and leave them the way they are.
Imagine being a visitors of those pages. Would they better serve your need for information split or merged?
Tracking ROI is not an issue. Branding without ROI is an issue.
Cutomer service for me is no marketing, you plugin any CRM software into your FB account and you have an additional channel to stay in touch with your customers and that's ok.
So we have one thing called branding, take the brand you think is more appropriate for FB branding, Coca Cola, Burberry, Tesla, whatever you want. And write down a formula which calculate the ROI of your branding investement on FB for that brand. I would love to see that figure.
What does it mean when GWT abruptly jump from 15k to 30k pages crawled per day?
I am used to see spikes, like 10k average and a couple of time per month 50k pages crawled.
But in this case 10 days ago moved from 15k to 30k per day and it's staying there. I know it's a good sign, the crawler is crawling more pages per day, so it's picking up changes more often, but I have no idea of why is doing it, what good signals usually drive google crawler to choose to increase the number of pages crawled per day?
Anyone knows?
You can use either one or another, cookie is persistent through different visits (and last as long as you decide it to last), while the session variable last only for the current user session. Depends on the attribution window you want to use.
If I was you I would check keywords using semrush.com but seems you did a nice job already analyzing them.
I actually agree with what Monica said, theoretically is better to have two pages on serp for CTR.
But if I look at serp for those keywords and I open the two pages I feel a bad taste in my mouth, I have the feeling I have been cheated because the meta title before to click and the content after the click seems too similar (I didn't read through all the content I confess), but I may be biased since I know what you are trying to do, a regular visitor my feel different.
Nevertheless I think the theoretical benefit of having two pages in serp could be balanced by the ranking benefit of merging the two pages; iif a big jump was possible (http://moz.com/ugc/click-through-rates-in-google-serps-for-different-types-of-queries). Which seems highly unlikely, but you can test it.
To merge or not to merge?
I changed my mind, I would not merge. I would start to slightly change one of the pages, both meta-title and content, to remove that bad taste in my. And monitor ranking variation after each change.
Facebook shares/likes, Google +1, Tweet counts, etc... All will stay the same, all social signals do follow 301 properly... As long as you keep the same (old) url in the social plugins. If you trade the old url with the new one you will have split count.
As for google algo, it's not open source yet, so no one knows what it is doing with these social signs exactly. Since google is pretty good at managing redirects my guess is they know what it means for social signs too.
I am not sure I understand what you mean, that website has a total of 35k pages submitted through sitemap to GWT, of which only 8k are indexed. The total number of pages indexed have always been slowly increasing through time, it moved from 6k to 8k in the last couple of months, slowly with no spikes.
That's not the total number of pages served by the site, since dynamics search results page amount to around 150k total pages, we do not submit all of them in the sitemap on purpose, and GWT shows 70k pages as the total number of indexed pages.
I analyzed Google crawler activity through server logs in the past, it does pick a set of (apparently) random pages every night and does crawl them. I actually never analyzed what percentage of those pages are in the sitemap or not.
Internal link structure was built on purpose to try to favor ranking of pages we considered more important.
The point is we didn't change anything in the website structure recently. User generated content have been lowering duplicate pages count, slowly, through time, without any recent spike. We have a PR campaign which is increasing backlinks with an average rate of around 3 links per week, and we didn't have any high DA backlinks appearing in the last few weeks.
So I am wondering what made google crawler start crawling much more pages per day.
Check your tracking code. Never seen that happen to me.
Given you are after page juice only, as far as I know after the third link from a certain domain, no matter it's DA, the incremental page juice transferred is negligible. Only exception in my experience is when 1) the additional links are deep-links, 2) content targeting heterogeneous keywords and 3) you work on to get exceptional PA for that linking page.
But, in the first place, why did you choose to NOINDEX, FOLLOW those product pages?
If you have a preferred product page among those different variants seen as duplicate why don't you just use canonical to point there?
What do you think is the benefit of noindexing? Theoretically leaving them there with the duplicate content and a canonical you are wasting some google bot crawling budget, but unless you need google to crawl your pages with a high frequency (because your content is frequently updated) I wouldn't care much.
Personally I see de-indexing as the last resort.
Anything make sense if it make sense.
The only rule is what make sense from a duplicate content perspective. And you are not limited to rules based on category tree sub levels.
Just think about the content of each category (or family/group of categories) and what make sense to have in google index. What should go in google index is the target of the canonicalization, what doesn't matter to have in the index (because duplicate, because of ridiculous potential traffic, etc...) should have the meta canonical tag pointing to the canonical url. That's all.
Check webserver log files, or log visits (ip address, user agent, __utma, __utmz, possibly browser fingerprint, etc...)
Analyzing those you can easily find out if the traffic is from scraping bot or humans.
In addition to what Robert just said. If you add a 301 now to format url properly, and later add a second 301 to move to HTTPS, you will add redirect to redirect losing that little bit of page juice twice.
Hi Dino,
yes since I originally posted this question I discovered a couple of things.
First, google loves this schema http://schema.org/Product but stubbornly refuse to show star rating set for http://schema.org/Organization, my competitors where using Product schema on their home pages and landing pages with no relation to any product on the page and getting the stars, so I did the same, and the stars appeared.
So use http://schema.org/Product
Second, google refuse to show star rating for SERP where the search query is for generic common terms keywords, it's showing star rating for branded keywords, and for additional keywords but I have not been able to identify a path/rule, I only realized for branded keywords it show star rating, for common terms it does not.
So if you add star rating http://schema.org/Product markup in a page which is ranking for "Ford Focus" they will appear, but if you put the markup in a page which is ranking for "nice looking cars" google won't show any star.
Hope this helps.
How do you find out what are the emotional triggers of your audience?
Is there a prevalent methodology?
I am familiar with, and I practice persona building, and logic deduction of what may trigger and what may represent a barrier for that persona.
But sometimes it's hard, for certain products which have no sex appeal it's hard to figure out. Let's say you are in the business of selling heaters/boilers online, it's tough to find any emotional factor in boiler product/vendor selection.
A well defined methodology would help, I just don't find any.