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Hi there,
I currently have a number of URLs throughout my site of the form:

https://www.concerthotels.com/venue-hotels/o2-academy-islington-hotels/256133#checkin_4-21-2024&checkout_4-22-2024&rooms_1&guests_2&artistid_15878:256133

This sends the user through to a page showing hotels near the O2 Academy Islington. Once the page loads, my code looks at the parameters specified in the # part of the URL, and uses them to fill in a form, before submitting the form as a POST. This basically reloads the page, but checks the availability of the hotels first, and therefore returns slightly different content to the "canonical" version of this page (which simply lists the hotels before any availability checks done).

Until now, I've marked the page that has had availability checks as noindex,follow. But because the form was submitted with POST parameters, the URL looks exactly like the canonical one.

So the two URLs are identical, but due to POST parameters, the content is slightly different. Does that make sense?

My question is, should both versions of this page be marked as index,follow?

Thanks
Mike

Hi Chris,

thank you very much for your help and suggestions, it is much appreciated.  I'll de-noindex a handful of my biggest artist pages and see if they attract much interest from users.

As for the /venues/ pages, these have been fairly neglected to date, so perhaps I need to really focus my attention on them, as you say, and bring in some cross referencing.

I have also wondered whether allowing companies to create pages dedicated to their events would be a good route to take - it could be done with ease, so perhaps I should investigate further.

Again, thanks very much, and hopefully I can report back with good news at some point.

Best wishes

Mike

Thanks Chris,

appreciate your comments.  Google in indexing a high percentage of the key pages, and does not have any noindex pages indexed.  Pages are loading at a decent speed.   And only indexed pages are in the sitemap.  So perhaps the non-performing pages are not something I should be particularly concerned about, especially they don't necessarily take up much of my time.  I guess if I start to run into issues with overall site speed then perhaps then is is the time to consider whether they should continue to be listed.  So perhaps, you're right, it's more of a business decision, rather than an SEO one.

I have a further question if you don't mind, which is related but I think is an SEO one.  I have a large number of /artist/ pages - these are pages that list which venues a particular artist is performing at, and allows a user to then check hotel availability for the specific venue and date they will be attending.  At the minute the pages are fairly light on content - they just list venues and dates, although I'm planning to start introducing more content in the near future.  An example page can be seen here:

https://www.concerthotels.com/artist/hotels-near-guns-n-roses-events/1227

At the minute, I've noindexed every artist page on the site, because I was worried Google would see them as thin pages.  But I actually think they are potentially very useful to users, and a powerful landing page for quickly taking a user to the correct venue page with the correct dates for the concert.    I also think that not all users will search for "Hotels near Metlife Stadium" - they might instead search for "Hotels for Guns n roses in NJ..." etc etc. so perhaps I can pick up some long tail searches with these additional landing pages.

The question is, should I index these pages?

If the answer to that question is yes..... obviously, artists/bands do a tour and then generally disappear into a recording studio for a year or two - as a result, there will be many /artist/ pages that, for a while, have lots of useful event dates/venues listed, but at the end of the tour, the pages will simply be empty, and no longer useful, at least until the next tour.  Would you recommend that such pages are indexed when there are events, but when no future events are listed, I set them to noindex?

Many thanks

Mike

Hi there,

my website is ConcertHotels.com - a site which helps users find hotels close to concert venues.  I have a hotel listing page for every concert venue on my site - about 12,000 of them I think (and the same for nearby restaurants).

e.g.

https://www.concerthotels.com/venue-hotels/madison-square-garden-hotels/304484

Each of these pages list the nearby hotels to that concert venue.  Users clicking on the individual hotel are brought through to a hotel (product) page e.g.

https://www.concerthotels.com/hotel/the-new-yorker-a-wyndham-hotel/136818

I made a decision years ago to noindex all of the /hotel/ pages since they don't have a huge amount of unique content and aren't the pages I'd like my users to land on .  The primary pages on my site are the /venue-hotels/ listing pages.

I have similar pages for nearby restaurants, so there are approximately 12,000 venue-restaurants pages, again, one listing page for each concert venue.

However, while all of these pages are potentially money-earners, in reality, the vast majority of subsequent hotel bookings have come from a fraction of the 12,000 venues.  I would say 2000 venues are key money earning pages, a further 6000 have generated income of a low level, and 4000 are yet to generate income.

I have a few related questions:

• Although there is potential for any of these pages to generate revenue, should I be brutal and simply delete a venue if it hasn't generated revenue within a time period, and just accept that, while it "could" be useful, it hasn't proven to be and isn't worth the link equity.  Or should I noindex these "poorly performing pages"?

• Should all 12,000 pages be listed in my XML sitemap?  Or simply the ones that are generating revenue, or perhaps just the ones that have generated significant revenue in the past and have proved to be most important to my business?

Thanks

Mike

Thanks Martijn,

probably too early to have noticed any of my new links, so that's good news.  Hopefully the next update will show an improvement to my domain and page authority,

Thanks

Mike

Hi,

I think I read somewhere that domain authority and page authority are updated twice a month - is this true?  The reason I ask is because I had a very successful content piece released last month (around 20th May) that received some great links (mainly to a landing page, but also many links to my home page) from highly respected sources such as Time.com, Spin.com, RollingStone.com, DailyMail.co.uk...

However, my domain authority hasn't changed at all, and the page authority for the page is only 47, which I was hoping would be higher for a page that received millions of visitors, 100k+ Facebook likes, and a wealth of sites linking in.

Also, in OpenSiteExplorer, when checking against my home page, it says there are no Just-Discovered links for the last 60 days - again, I'm puzzled, as my home page has been referenced by many leading news sites.

Many thanks

Hi everyone,

I've just been checking my MOZ authority scores, and the page authority of my home page, www.concerthotels.com is 53 (mozRank of 6.16) which seems pretty good to me.  However, the domain authority is only showing as 45.  Is this typical?  There is such a big difference between these two scores - what does that suggest?  Is there anything obvious that I can do to bring the domain authority up to the level of authority that the homepage commands?

Similarly, the UK version of my site has a homepage authority of 41, but the domain authority is only 30.  Looking at numerous other websites, quite often the homepage and domain authority scores are very similar, or the domain authority is slightly higher, so it does look as if this is unusual.

Any comments would be greatly appreciated,

Many thanks

Mike

Hi Michael,

firstly, thanks so much for your very thorough reply - I really appreciate it.

I really think it's fundamental that the Hotels tab remains as the initial tab, simply because it's what the main aim of the user's visit is likely to be - I think that immediately presenting the user with the key information is pretty essential, and will hopefully keep bounce rate and conversion rate at respectable levels.  However, displaying the map by default could be a good move - I think the reason against doing this in the past was that I might not be able to rely on the map being served up immediately, as it could be fetched slowly from Google - I guess that's still something to consider - if the user is greeted with an empty screen (where the map should be), then they are pretty likely to bounce.

Good point about the cloaking function name - not the most sensible idea I've ever had

How important do you think "above the fold" content is?  I mean, would it make sense to somehow include the venue reviews information at the bottom of the page, rather than on the separate tab?  Although this review content wouldn't be above the fold, it would be visible to the user (albeit further down the page).  Do you think that is likely to carry more weight in Google's eyes than having the same content, but not immediately visible to the user (hidden in tabs).

I think this is my main problem - combining my pages together into this new design is great, since it eliminates the likelihood of thin pages.  However, I've now got so much information on each venue that it's difficult to find a clear way to present it, at the same time as satisfying the search engines.  My user's like the Hotels tab at the minute (reflected in a high conversion rate, and low bounce rate), as it's really clear - the relative lack of text makes it pretty clear and easy to use.  However, while user's are liking it, the search engines aren't.

I hate the fact that I might have to sacrifice user friendliness in order to satisfy the needs of the search engines, but I guess that's part of running a business that relies on SEO.

Thanks again,

Mike

Hi everyone,

my site has suffered from a number of organic drops this year, following a redesign, panda, and penguin.  An example of one of my key pages is shown below:

http://www.concerthotels.com/venue-hotels/bridgestone-arena-hotels/326895

Earlier this year, I redesigned my site, so that, for example, 4 pages associated with each Bridgestone Arena (a page with nearby hotels, one for user reviews, one for upcoming events, one for general information) were combined into one "Bridgestone Arena Hotels" page.  The reason I did this is because I felt that many of the pages were very thin.  My new page has tabs for reviews, tickets etc., with the default tab listing nearby hotel information - the primary aim of my website.

I'm worried that all the great unique user review information that I'm collecting is not being given the weighting it deserves, because it is content that is not immediately visible when the user lands on the page - only click the Reviews tab makes the content visible.

The hidden content is definitely being picked up by Google e.g. searching for a portion of the review content in Google such as "We were here for the Aerosmith concert. The workers were so friendly and helpful - great experience!" serves up the Bridgestone Arena page in the results.

But do you think Google still sees the page as being pretty thin in content, because much of the unique content is initially hidden?

I am considering introducing a little featured reviews section to the visible content, that just includes a couple of the latest venue reviews, with a link to open the reviews tab.  But if I have some review content here, and the same reviews in a hidden section of the same page, is Google likely to treat this as spammy?

Thanks for your help and advice,

Mike

My site experienced a 60-70% drop in google organic traffic too, late on Friday 11th October/early Saturday 12th October, and hasn't recovered at all yet.  Is this when you experienced a drop too?  There doesn't seem to be any online chatter from anyone else experiencing a similar drop.  I had thought I'd managed to avoid any ranking drop following the latest Penguin/Hummingbird, but it looks like a delayed reaction!

Hi everyone,

my website experienced a 30% drop in organic traffic following the Penguin 2.0 update in May.  This was the first significant drop that the site has experienced since 2007, and I was initially concerned that the new website design I released in March was partly to blame.  On further investigation, many spammy sites were found to be linking to my website, and I immediately contacted the sites, asked for the removal of the sites, before submitting a disavow file to Google.  At the same time, I've had some great content written for my website over the last few months, which has attracted over 100 backlinks from some great websites, as well as lots of social media interaction.  So, while I realise my site still needs a lot of work, I do believe I'm trying my best to do things in the correct manner.

However, on August 11th, I received a message in Google WMTs :

Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site

I studied the table of internal links in WMTs and found that Google has been crawling many URLs throughout my site that I didn't necessarily intend it to find i.e. lots of URLs with filtering and sorting parameters added.  As a result, many of my pages are showing in WMTs as having over 300,000 internal links!!

I immediately tried to rectify this issue, updating the parameters section in WMTs to tell Google to ignore many of the URLs it comes across that have these filtering parameters attached.  In addition, since my access logs were showing that Googlebot was frequently crawling all the URLs with parameters, I also added some Disallow entries to robots.txt to tell Google and the other spiders to ignore many of these URLs.  So, I now feel that if Google crawls my site, it will not get bogged down in hundreds of thousands of identical pages and just see those URLs that are important to my business.

However, two days later, on August 13th, my site experienced a further huge drop, so its now dropped by about 60-70% of what I would expect at this time of the year! (there is no sign of any manual webspam actions)

My question is - do you think the solutions I've put in place over the last week could be to blame for the sudden drop, or do you think I'm taking the correct approach, and that the recent drop is probably due to Google getting bogged down in the crawling process.  I'm not aware of any subsequent Penguin updates in recent days, so I'm guessing that this issue is somehow due to the internal structure of my new design.  I don't know whether to roll back my recent changes or just sit tight and hope that it sorts itself out over the next few weeks when Google has more time to do a full crawl and observe the changes I've made.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.  My website is ConcertHotels.com.

Many thanks

Mike

Hi Mat,

thanks for your reply.  I'll definitely change the link, but I agree that it would be harsh if it was the sole reason for the 30% drop in organic traffic.

There are definitely some directories linking to ConcertHotels.com - at one stage I used the SEOmoz list of directories and got my website listed on some of the recommendations from the list.  But my strategy for the last two years has been to approach venue's own websites and ask if they'd be interested in linking to our nearby hotels page, as a useful resource for their visitors.  This strategy has worked quite well for me, and to me it sounds like a very natural, sensible link building strategy.  I'll certainly work through my list of backlinks, but I would hope that the majority of them are from very relevant websites (due to the strategy I adopted).  I guess there could be a percentage that I have not had any control over however, and I guess I should disavow these?

As for the directories, should I now be disavowing directory links?  I didn't think that the percentage of directory links to my site would be that high -I used the directory link strategy in the past to simply enhance the number of links to my homepage - the strategy I described above is one which achieve links to specific pages throughout my website, not my homepage, so I felt the need to grow the number of homepage links.

Thanks again for your help and advice

Mike

Hi,

my website experienced a 30% drop in organic traffic following the Penguin 2.0 update, and after years of designing my website with SEO in mind, generating unique content for users, and only focusing on relevant websites in my link building strategy, I'm a bit disheartened by the drop in traffic.

Having rolled out a new design of my website at the start of April, I suspect that I've accidentally messed up the structure of the website, making my site difficult to crawl, or making Google think that my site is spammy.  Looking at Google Webmaster Tools, the number 1 anchor text in the site is "remove all filters" - which is clearly not what I want!  The "remove all filters" link on my website appears when my hotels page loads with filters or sorting or availability dates in place - I included that link to make it easy for users to view the complete hotel listing again.  An example of this link is towards the top right hand side of this page:

http://www.concerthotels.com/venue-hotels/agganis-arena-hotels/300382?star=2

With over 6000 venues on my website, this link has the potential to appear thousands of times, and while the anchor text is always "remove all filters", the destination URL will be different depending on the venue the user is looking at.  I'm guessing that to Google, this looks VERY spammy indeed!?

I tried to make the filtering/sorting/availability less visible to Google's crawl when I designed the site, through the use of forms, jquery and javascript etc., but it does look like the crawl is managing to access these pages and find the "remove all filters" link.  What is the best approach to take when a standard "clear all..." type link is required on a listing page, without making the link appear spammy to Google - it's a link which is only in place to benefit the user - not to cause trouble!

My final question to you guys is - do you think this one sloppy piece of work could be enough to cause my site to drop significantly following the Penguin 2.0 update, or is it likely to be a bigger problem than this?  And if it is probably due to this piece of work, is it likely that solving the problem could result in a prompt rise back up the rankings, or is there going to be a black mark against my website going forward and slow down recovery?

Any advice/suggestions will be greatly appreciated,

Thanks

Mike

Hi Cyrus,

thanks for spending so much time looking through my site and comparing my new design with the old one - I really appreciate it.  The feedback you've provided is great - I'm really happy that you like the new look and feel, and the points you've raised have certainly got me thinking.

1. I do agree, it is a little top heavy, and on the venue page the hotels are hidden beneath the fold, so you might be right that I notice a drop in conversion.  I'll launch the site to a small number of visitors and collect some stats.  It might not be a major issue, since the vast majority of users to the website actually land on the hotel listings page (as opposed to the general venue information page) - but I guess we'll find out

2. Mmmm, good point - I guess the only page I'm removing that Google might have thought contained high quality ranking signals would be my old venue reviews pages - they contain a lot of unique, customer reviews of the concert venue.  So there is potential for weird things to happen - I'll monitor it closely.

I hadn't thought of how the website would look, or work, if Javascript/cookies were disabled, so thank you for highlighting this - I'll certainly look into this.

3. You definitely raise a worrying point here - I hadn't thought of it from a duplicate content view - I simply thought that it would be nice to show the user a sample of hotels from the general venue page, before prompting them to view the entire list.  I don't know how I can change this - I guess reducing the number of hotels might help?  That way, I'd be reducing the amount of duplicate content.

4. Good point, I'll read the article and put the changes in place.

5. Ah, I hadn't thought of that - I was just going to put a sitemap of the new URLs up - how long would I need to include the "old" URLs in the sitemap for?

Thanks again for all your advice!

Best wishes

Mike

Hi SEOmoz team,

for the last few months I've been working on a new design for my website, the old, live design can be viewed at http://www.concerthotels.com - it is primarily focused on helping users find hotels close to concert venues throughout North America.  The old structure was built in such a way that each concert venue had a number of different pages associated with it (all connected via tabs) - a page with information about the venue, a page with nearby hotels to the venue, a page of upcoming events, a page of venue reviews.  An example of these pages can be seen at:

http://www.concerthotels.com/venue/madison-square-garden/304484

http://www.concerthotels.com/venue-hotels/madison-square-garden-hotels/304484

http://www.concerthotels.com/venue-events/madison-square-garden-events/304484

http://www.concerthotels.com/venue-reviews/madison-square-garden-reviews/304484

The /venue-hotels/ pages are the most important pages on my website - and there is one of these pages for each concert venue - they are the landing pages for about 90% of the traffic on the website.

I decided that having four pages for each venue was probably a poor design, since many of the pages ended up having little or no useful, unique content.

So my new design attempts to bring a lot of the venue information together into fewer pages.  My new website redesign is temporarily situated at: (not currently launched to the public)

http://www.concerthotels.com/frontend

The equivalent pages for Madison Square Garden are now:

http://www.concerthotels.com/frontend/venue/madison-square-garden/304484

(the page above contains venue information, events and reviews)

and

http://www.concerthotels.com/frontend/venue-hotels/madison-square-garden-hotels/304484

I would really appreciate any feedback from you guys, based on what you think of the new site design compared to the old design from an SEO point of view.  Of course, any feedback on site speed, easy of use etc compared to the old design would also be greatly appreciated.

My main fear is that when I launch the new design (the new URLs will be identical to the old ones), Google will take a dislike to it - I currently receive a large percentage of my traffic through Google organic search, so I don't want to launch a design that might damage that traffic.  My gut instinct tells me that Google should prefer the new design - vastly reduced number of pages, each page now contains more  unique content, and it's very much designed for users, so I'm hoping bounce rate, conversion etc will improve too.  But my gut has been wrong in the past!

But I'd love to hear your thoughts, and thanks in advance for any feedback,

Cheers

Mike

Hi there,

I'm currently redesigning my website, and one particular pages lists hotels in New York.  Some functionality I'm thinking of adding in is to let the user find hotels close to specific concert venues in New York.  My current thinking is to provide the following select element on the page - selecting any one of the options will automatically redirect to my page for that concert venue.  The purpose of this isn't to affect the organic traffic - I'm simply introducing this as a tool to help customers find the right hotel, but I certainly don't want it to have an adverse effect on my organic traffic.  I'd love to know your thoughts on this.  I must add that in certain cities, such as New York, there could be up to 450 different options in this select element.

|

<select onchange="location=options[selectedIndex].value;">  <option value="">Show convenient hotels for:</option>    <option value="http://url1..">1492 New York</option>    <option value="http://url2..">Abrons Arts Center</option>   <option value="http://url3..">Ace of Clubs New York</option>   <option value="http://url4..">Affairs Afloat</option>   <option value="http://url5..">Affirmation Arts New York</option>   <option value="http://url6..">Al Hirschfeld Theatre</option>   <option value="http://url7..">Alice Tully Hall</option> .. .. ..</select>

Many thanks

Mike

|

Hi,

I'm currently redesigning my website, and in many places, I've now decided to make links a little bit more obvious for the user, using tags within a <a>tag in order to make the entire block of text clickable.  I was just wondering if this could have a negative impact in the search engines.  My gut feeling is no, since I'm actually improving usability, but I guess it could have an impact on how Google looks at the anchor text?  An example of the HTML is as follows: </a>

<a></a>

<a></a>

[Cristal Night Club Hotels

<address>1045 5th Street
Miami Beach, FL33139</address>

6.4 miles from Miami Dade County Auditorium](http://localhost:8080/frontend/venue-hotels/cristal-night-club-hotels/301022 "Hotels near Cristal Night Club")

Thanks for your thoughts and comments,

Best wishes

Mike

mmm, I'm not sure I fully agree with you - in certain circumstances thats the case, but if duplicate content is only shown on pages that are not indexed then that shoudn't really have any influence on the results at all, should it?  In my case, the duplicate content would only be there to enhance the user's experience, not to try to get an unfair advantage in SERPs.

Hi Cocarcea,

mmm so are you saying that Google will penalise my entire website just because it finds duplicate content on non indexed pages?  I would have thought thats a bit harsh, since I'm making sure that the pages I allow in the index have good quality, unique content, while the duplicate content is only left in other pages to aid the user.  I'm not keen on using rel=nofollow - the pages contain plenty of links to internal pages on my site, and I want to encourage Google to find those pages.

Thanks

Mike

Hi,

I currently have a lot of hotel listings pages with little or no content, as I'm scared that if I place duplicate hotel descriptions on the pages then Google will stop ranking the page.  I've found that having descriptions of some kind do help conversion significantly, so I'm considering generating unique hotel descriptions on each main page (page 1 in each set of listings) - these are the pages that Google indexes.  On subsequent pages (page 2, page 3 etc.) I'm thinking about resorting to displaying the duplicate affiliate content hotel descriptions - these pages can be crawled but are set to noindex.  My  question is, do you think this is likely to have an effect on my website in the rankings, and as a result push my primary pages (that contain 100% unique content) down in SERPs.

Thanks

Mike