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I was just sent this site by one of my friends, and it gave me a good chuckle. I thought I would share...

http://seo.ninja/

Is the 302 redirect the only way to get users from one page to the other?

The difference between the 301 and 302 is that the 301 will remove the page from the index over time. The 302 redirect is more of a fork in the road allowing the other page to remain indexed. It should really be your decision, if you want the page to remain indexed then don't use a 301 redirect, keep the 302. If it is irrelevant or if there is duplicate content it might be better to use a 301 redirect.

Tablets are handled slightly differently from Mobile devices. It is not a fair assumption that they will be affected the same as mobile devices.

There is heavy debate on the effects of this update on desktop searches. My theory is that this update cannot exclude desktop search results without there being a mobile index. I believe sites that are responsive will see the greatest benefit of this update.

Mobile Friendly will show on all pages that are mobile friendly, whether it is a desktop search or a mobile search. If you are forcing customers to your desktop version for a better user experience I believe that is the right way to do it. As long as you have a mobile version available and Google can see it I think you will be fine. Have you used the developers Mobile friendly tool yet? It could help answer your questions on a page by page basis. I don't know how tablets will be affected by this update as it is specifically targeted to mobile devices.

Don, sorry to hear you are having a tough time. You are so good at what you do, don't let the man get you down

I started working in SEO as a hobby because I loved to write content. I did it for free for my friends' businesses and then started teaching myself some of the technical stuff. Now I work in house as the online marketing director. I hate being the only one in the company who knows anything about SEO and AdWords. I feel like I am always speaking Chinese to these guys. I have a few consultants, but it isn't the same as having a team of people to bounce ideas off of or double check my strategies. That is kind of why I like the Moz Q&A so much, it is like my team away from home lol.

It is a tough decision, the rebel in me wants to find out if you considered starting your own shop and taking your clients with you because I know you could handle it. And if ever something came up that you couldn't tackle you could find answers online; Moz, Search Engine Land, or any other resource. That is kind of the beauty of SEO, you can find the answers without getting out of your pajamas.

Again, sorry to hear this is weighing you down.Good luck!

The files aren't duplicate. I am familiar with using the XRobots tag. I was really just curious if my theory would work.

Thanks for all your input.

If I am not mistaken, you can upload spreadsheets. If you can export your products from your current platform into a CSV you can manipulate the field names to be able to import them to Magento. I would do a test export from Magento to get the correct field names. If your images are on a CDN or File Server you should be able to add the file name and description to fields on the spreadsheet. I haven't worked with Magento in awhile, so this info might be outdated. Good luck!

If a response was marked as a good answer or staff endorsed, it will show as answered. I think if you go in to edit the question you can change it from answered to unanswered.

In my experience most people will still view and respond to questions if they think they have a helpful answer

Our products have about 4 PDFs a piece, which really inflates our indexed pages. I was wondering if I could add REL=No Index to the PDF's URL? All of the files are on a file server, so they are embedded with links on our product pages. I know I could add a No Follow attribute, but I was wondering if any one knew if the No Index would work the same or if that is even possible. Thanks!

In that case, you really don't need the 301 redirects. The canonical tags should have updated correctly when you made the change in your platform.

It can take months for Google to start deindexing old URLs.

Have you done a search in Google to see what pages they are still indexing? You can type in site:"Your Website" and it will give you the full results of URLs that are indexed. If there are any that shouldn't be, you can fetch and render them in GWT to force Google to crawl the 301 redirect, which should expedite the process. I am sure you submitted a new sitemap once you made all of your changes, but, if you haven't that could also help speed up the process.

Hi,

Go to Admin - Filters - + New Filter - Create New Filter - Name it whatever you would like - Then under filter type select "Exclude" and enter whichever data you have. The IP address usually works best. Then hit save.

Ryan is correct, if you cannot see the text in the source code of a page, then the robots cannot see them either. There are not many widgets or plugins out there that are actually fully integrated.

I think the better way to pass the authority is to set the canonical tags on the page to the www. version of your site. This passes the same amount of link juice and page rank as a 301 redirect. If you were changing the URL completely I would say a 301 redirect would be best practice, but I think the canonical tag is more appropriate here. Do you have the ability to set the preferred version of your URLs in your store settings on your platform?

Alick has some good points, but I would also point out that depending on where you are accessing data in Analytics you might be picking up information for your Bing PPC account as well, assuming you have a Bing PPC account.

Do you have conversion tracking set up in AdWords? Are you tracking calls and clicks as conversions or are you only tracking revenue?

Right now, Google is saying there is not a difference between the two, however, I think most people would say that Responsive is the way to go.

I think the only thing that could hinder that thought is if the responsive design couldn't produce enough functionality or visual appeal to have a good user experience. Some stores just have too many product options to really make a responsive design work, so they use a mobile version of the site. Google likes uniformity, which I why most people prefer the responsive design.

You could use a canonical tag to tell google which page is the desired page. Unless the other page also had targeted key terms on it. Then I would avoid the canonical tag and try to find a better way to optimize the other page for key terms not so closely related.

A little selfishly, I am glad that there wasn't too much notice given. No one else in my industry has a mobile friendly site, so this will be huge for my company. Shame on me, lol.

Any further news on a mobile index? Realistically, how can this update not affect search results if there is no mobile index in place? I would be curious to see the results in m.domains and /mobile folders vs responsive design. Previously, Google said there would be no ranking difference, that the mobile experience was the most important part of this update, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the responsive designs may do slightly better than the other mobile versions of sites.

You will want to do the 301 redirect. That is the best way to address a domain name change. You would use a canonical tag if you were keeping both sites live, which isn't best practice. The canonical tag is not necessary when you use the 301 redirect. You will use the canonical tag to set the correct version of your URL, for example, if your set version is abcde.com and not www.abcde.com you will add a canonical tag to the page for abcde.com.

Several years ago when I first started in SEO, I bought domains that were relatively close to my competition's domains, it was a competitive tactic that is quite out dated. However, I never suffered any legal ramifications. My sites were not always live, they were just bought to prevent my competition from buying them.

That being said, I do not believe that they are trying to take the domain away from you for any other reason than it is their brand name and they want control of it, or they want it to disappear. You do not have to give them control of the site, I wouldn't personally. I would hate to have someone running my site, no thank you.

Having a brand is becoming extremely important for SEO. You are probably ranking so well because your domain includes an established brand. I would buy a domain that reflects the name of your business, your brand, and redirect the twpstains.com to that domain. You will see the most benefit from this approach. You will be able to maintain most of your SEO juice and be able to recover faster than if they take control of the domain and decide to do something else with it, like redirect it to their site, or redirect their site to twpstains.com. It wouldn't be in their best interest to have both sites running at the same time.

If you have to change your domain name then you will most likely suffer rankings loss. You will redirect the old domain to the new domain, which will temporarily help, but you will basically have to work on the new URLs to get them to rank.

What they are asking for seems strange. Do they sell direct as well?

I think that is the big unknown at this point. All we know so far is what Google has said “This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results.”

The first part references it’s affect on mobile searches and then goes on to state “AND will have a significant impact on our search results”

Google doesn't have a separate index for mobile so that leads me to lean toward thinking that it will affect all searches desktop and mobile, however that is not to say that Google could simply filter mobile searches and have this only affect mobile. They are working on a mobile index however, so who is to say that won't be launched at the same time as this new update.

The fact that they have released so much information ahead of time means the update is probably going to be a huge one. In my opinion, unless the mobile index is launched at the same time, then there is no way this change won't affect desktop rankings.

I do link hygiene once a month. I usually have to update my disavow file when I do that. Our site is old and keeping up with all of the links is not an easy task. Link hygiene, in my opinion, needs to be done monthly. If you are or aren't building links you can pick them up around the internet not even trying. That is why I monitor my profile so closely. Usually the links that just appear out of nowhere are links that I don't want or are bad for my site.

There is a software, but for your site it would be about $650 a month. It is really helpful. It updates the disavow file and forces a crawl immediately. To me, it is worth the money. You will have to have the time to manage it, which takes a few hours monthly.

I guess I was a little confused about which page was the targeted page. When you are looking in the SERPs are you searching while you are signed into anything? That can skew your results quite a bit. I would advise that you try to look while you are not logged into anything, and I find I get more accurate results in Internet explorer. Clear your browsing history and cache before you search also. That will help give you cleaner results.

The reason that is ranking in my opinion is because the exact keyword is in the URL.

_The keyword is sage 200 price and the ranked URL is showing page http://www.eurekaaddons.co.uk/products/sales-order-plus-for-sage-200/. _**However, this optimized page does not have the exact keyword in the URL. **

You can delete the page that is not optimized, but you should double check the page that you want to rank for and see where else you can make changes to better optimize for your term.

I would definitely add it to both as Google sees these as two different sites.

To add to what Alick said, make sure your clicks are valuable. dynamyt100 is correct that your on page content might not be exactly what the searchers are looking for.

You QS is determined by three things, ad relevancy as it relates to your keywords, expected click through rate, and on page relevancy.

In order to improve ad relevancy, make sure you are using your keywords in your ad. If your keyword is blue widget, but your ad says buy widgets now, blue widgets will have a low QS. This also plays into your expected click through rate. If your ad relevance is below average, then your expected CTR will also be low.

On page relevancy is probably the most important factor. You shouldn't advertise blue widgets and land people on a page for red gadgets. This will dramatically effect your bounce rate.

Adding negatives will help improve your expected CTR also. If you have really broad terms then you could be picking up bad clicks.

If you want to see where you need to improve your key terms, go into your keywords and click the bubble above the keyword status and it will tell you what is below average, above average and average. That should tell you where you need to start.

Sometimes pages rank for a keyword that we are targeting because the page is seen as relevant. For example, my keyword is 22kw generator. I have 2 models that rank for this term, plus a page that just happens to mention the 22kw generators.

The best thing to do is to make sure that the page you are targeting the keyword on is correctly optimized and add a few internal links to the page from other high traffic pages on your site. Adding a couple reputable links to the page would also help. If you are tracking the keyword here in moz, go to Search - On Page Optimization - Manage Page Grades and remove the page you don't want attached to the keyword. Also, if you export that table into a CSV file, you can sort it by kw and see if the term is ranking on more than one page.

I wonder if it is because you have it set to display only a rating of 5, and not the true review aggregate. I think if you still have star ratings showing then that should be fine.

Can you click on the red bubble with the ! to see what the error is?

I agree with Laura, Big Commerce, OpenCart, OSCommerce, these would all be great solutions. I think Big Commerce is the best hosted platform on the market right now. OpenCart and OSCommerce are not hosted solutions, and they are both open source so you would have to have some coding experience to get them set up.

It is really important to have diversity in your link profile. However, if you have 2-3 links from one domain, it isn't terrible. Now if you have 100 links from one domain, that could be seen as spammy. I am not sure if there is a way to break these down by percentage of value, like you are referring to as Google has started to change the way it values back links. The second link on the same domain would be more valuable if it were on a different domain.

If the PDF is available in other places, then it could be considered duplicate content. If you want to prevent that then no index the PDF. Unless the PDF is something you want to rank for.

If you redirect site b to site a now, you will be passing along the negative effects of the penalties. Site a no longer exists in the search world if your redirect is that old. The best thing to do would be to fix the penalties, disavow bad links and submit a reconsideration request. Redirecting site b to site a would mean starting all over, and you would still have to deal with the penalties or site a won't rank at all. I suppose you could just kill site b, and make site a live again. You would still be starting over with site a, either way.

I just moved my site from Volusion to Big Commerce and made all of the changes you listed above.

Somethings I noticed is that it took us a little longer to regain organic traffic than if we had not made any additional changes aside from moving platforms and changing URL structure. It wasn't a huge difference, only about 2 weeks.

Once the changes had been implemented, the site was fully indexed and all of the 404 errors were fixed we surpassed our previous organic traffic by 25% and moved our keywords up significantly. I also noticed that I had far less duplicate html errors in GWT while the old site was deindexing and the new site was becoming indexed.

I would make the changes up front. If these changes are better in the long run, why not get them done when it is convenient? Just make sure to add all of the versions of your site to GWT and set the preferred version to the https.

In my experience, leaving the products up with links to the category page or a similar item has worked the best for me. A lot of people still search for items that were discontinued 2-4 years ago, so removing the pages didn't work well for us.  There is a meta tag you can use to tell Google the product is discontinued, but most of my customers really like being able to go to the old products and find similar models. I am in the generator industry, so years down the road someone could be searching for their model looking for a manual or something which is another big reason we keep the old products up.

We also carry small parts, When those items are discontinued we redirect to category page with a message that says the product you are looking for is no longer available, please see these other suggestions or call us.

If something is just out of stock, we leave the product alone and update the availability.

If you have more than on canonical on a page, Google will ignore them all. Pick the page that will be the canonical and add the same tag to the subsequent pages with duplicate content.

www.site.com = canonical

the canonical tag on all subsequent pages will be link link rel='canonical' href='www.site.com'

Wherever you have duplicate content you should try to minimize the effects, usually with canonical tags.

I would shy away from your strategy only because showing viewers one thing and bots another is frowned upon. What's wrong with PPC visitors landing on your SEO pages?

Moz has the On Page Grader. You can also use the "analyze page issues" function inside your campaign. Go to Search in the left nav menu, click on crawl diagnostics, and then a drop down will appear that says "analyze page issues". You can type in a URL there and get some more information. I use both of these tools and find them to be extremely helpful in catching anything I might miss.

I agree with Richard, based on your explanation, this is the proper way to do the 301 redirects. Your plan will work just fine.

GWT is Google Webmaster Tools

You will first need to remove the 301 redirect to site b, then add a redirect from b to a. If you don't remove the first redirect you will create a redirect loop and neither page will be visible.

How long has site b been up? I would say that making a change now is going to be confusing. If this change was done recently, within the last 3 months, you need more time to determine the benefits of site b. There is no overnight result, but the change was made initially for a reason right?

Depending on how long the 301 redirects have been in place, you could have trouble getting site a to rank again. The 301 redirects would have removed Site As URLs from the index, meaning you would be starting over, again. Aside from that, it will probably be very confusing for returning customers. They have already seen a change once, now they are going to have to make another adjustment. Those things would be my first two concerns.

I think that they help more for conversions and click through rate personally. It could help with your brand recognition, which can have a positive effect on your SEO. I use them more for CTR than SEO. Which I guess the CTR is important to SEO as well. So in a round a bout way, call to actions can help your SEO.

Did you also move to HTTPS? It looks like your canonical tags are set to the https version of your site. Have you added that site to GWT?

There is something in your CSS/HTML file that is taking forever to load. I would look for bad JS. The page spins for about 45 seconds before it actually loads.

In GWT, go to Crawl > Sitemaps > and look at your submitted sitemap. Make sure it sees all of the pages. You should also be able to see if pages are being indexed. It looks like you have about 565,000 pages indexed for www.jmac.com. You still have 360,000 pages indexed for www.jmacsupply.com. So, I would infer that the old site is still being deindexed and until that is finalized you might be having issues with duplicate content. Two weeks is a little premature to freak out in my opinion. This can take 4-6 weeks to finalize. There is always a period of time after a migration where traffic kind of plummets. If after 4 weeks you are still having issues, I would try fetching some pages as Google and seeing what happens.

Google's mobile bot tends to crawl pages faster than the desktop bot. That would explain why your mobile page is ranking in engines for specific product searches. If I just Google the name of your company, your mobile site is a few pages deep.

Some things to check would be that your 301 redirects have been implemented accurately, make sure you have set the preferred domain in GWT, add both the www version and non www version of the site as well as the https and non https version of your site, and make sure that your canonical tags are set correctly. If the https is your preferred version, whenever someone types in jmac.com they should land on the https version, and that is not happening.

Is it impossible to write unique content for these pages? Even a small amount of unique content on top of the exact same copy would be beneficial.

I agree. You will need to add the https version of your site to GWT. Google sees these URLs as two different URLs, so you will want to add the HTTPS version of your site.

If you can keep the majority of the URLs the same, that is beneficial. What you want to make sure of, is that on any page that the URL does change (You will probably have a few) make sure you redirect them.

For example if your URL is abc.com/blue-widgets.php and it changes to abc.com/blue-widgets.htm, you will have to redirect the .php to the .htm. If that part of the URL structure doesn't change, and you change nothing else, then you should be ok.

So your footer links, top nav bar, are only visible in code? But can you see them on the page?

To elaborate on my answer, I feel that schema markups for links in the footer, sidebar and top nav are irrelevant and not worth exhausting the effort. What benefit does the markup have to the user? The markups should highlight the most important parts of your site for the benefit of the searcher, not the search engine. Therefore my answer is really that same, put yourself in the shoes of the searcher. Is there something in those links worth highlighting that could possibly increase your CTR? My guess is that there probably isn't. Without seeing your site, I couldn't really assume otherwise.

The benefit is not to the engine as these markups are for user experience alone. Highlighting the data won't help you rank better if it is irrelevant to the searcher.

That is tough to say. I think there is more likely the sites themselves can be punished for having poor quality content, but, that being said Penguin is becoming ever more advanced and you can be penalized for being in a bad neighborhood. So far that refers specifically to link profiles, but I don't put it passed Google to start including content in that evaluation as well. My rule of thumb is always go with your gut, because your instinct is usually spot on. If you get bad vibes then do whatever you can to make sure you are satisfied with the end result.

Yes, you are not incorrect. As I said, this is not necessarily bad, but it isn't necessarily good. The tactic isn't bad, but the implementation is bad. If you can rewrite the content, that would be my recommendation. Before you disavow, ask the webmaster of the other sites to remove the links if you feel that is what you want to do.

If the current company you are working with published these articles, you should remind them of Hummingbird, Panda and Penguin. I am not saying these links are best practice, but there are alternatives to disavowing them. Without knowing what the rest of your link profile is I cannot say that removing them would be my first jump. I would first try to fix the content and anchor text, second I would ask whichever webmaster has links you can't salvage to remove them, and my last resort would be to disavow them.