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This is correct but the result I see at my end is of local maps and this is because someone (or they themselves) has registered in local maps with the title “computer software enterprises inc” so this make sense for me to be on the first page.
Hope this helps!
I will agree with John and in addition to that if it is possible for you to add no index to blog’s category pages it will better!
Ok, so here is a thing why do you want to switch from http to https version? If this is because of the fact that it helps Google rankings, I would suggest not go for it as it only give you a small benefit (if any).
If your website is small and there are only few pages then going for 301 redirection is a good idea just 301 redirect your pages so that link juice transfers to the preferred version.
If your website is big and you think that rel canonical is the only solution, my idea is to go with http version as moving https without redirection will hurt your rankings to a good extent.
Again, this is pretty much depends upon what your end goal is… so decide what you want to achieve at the end of the day and act accordingly.
Hope this helps!
The links are not build by you... you are sure that the link of link that is pointing back from certain URL is a bad link and you have tried everything to remove those links but failed... now the only option you have left is to use a disavow tool so go for it!
It is important not to use disavow tool when you didn't tried removing the bad links manually but if you did attempt and failed then you should go with option left with you that is using a Disavow tool!
Honestly speaking, it was some other website, I would have encouraged you to set a do-follow tag but as they are social media plguins, there is no problem with that!
I personally think, anything follow or no-follow both should work fine and it should any affect your SERP positions.
Just a Thought!
There was a time when I used to face this problem on regular basis as I had lots of clients all from the eCommerce sites.
This usually happens when your internal linking strategy is not satisfactory. The idea is to reconsider your internal linking strategy and fix the problems and you will see categories will started rank for their key phrases.
Hope this helps!
Let’s go basic for a while!
If two website have the similar content, Google is going to consider both website as duplicate content. If I would be at your place, I would have created separate content for both websites so that Google consider as unique content.
If they contain two different locations, most probably you would have different physical locations as well, why not include your physical locations on the website and add business listings in Google local. Once you do that, chances are you will start ranking for the right kind of audience.
Hope this helps!
I am not sure but i guess It is simply notifying you that you are doing this.. it sis not necessarily bad! similar to... lets say for some reason you are using 302 redirection instead of 301 so in that case SEOmoz will add 302 redirection under notice tab so that you know what you are doing and if this is not something you like just switch things accordingly!
for exact reasons i guess you should email to help@seomoz.org
I am not a developer so any developer with a SEO background can tell you better but in general page load speed is important both from user point of view as well as search engine rankings and as far as W3C validation is concern, there are quite a few errors that you can ignore in order to stick with your page load speed.
Hope this helps!
If you compare 404pages with 301redirections I believe 301 is a better option and here is why!
When a visitor of your website reach to a page that is no more present on your website, they will find the 404 page which may leads the visitor to bounce from the website as usually 404 pages hurt user experience.
The idea is to 301 them to appropriate pages so that they never see any broken page on the website and can easily perform the desired actions while continuing their journey on the website.
This will also help increasing the time on site which will impact positively on your site nad rankings in search engines.
I looked in your back link profile and not many SPAM links are available on the website and SEMRush data tells that the website is ranking for around 1.6k keywords (in AU) which was 490 keywords back in 2013. I understand that you rank for 2k plus keywords back in good days but it seems like you are improving and your strategies are working for you.
In my opinion all you need is to accelerate your efforts and keep working and you will see better rankings in the near future.
In order to tell Google that you are actually working on betterment why not changing your content from time to time on your website (different parts of the website) and get some media links back to your website.
I think it should work.
Hope this helps!
If the domains have a good back link profile then it is always good to 301 redirect the KW Rich domains to the main domain but in my personal experience with one of the BIG website is that too many domains 301 redirecting to the main domain can hurt your rankings.. especially when they have a poor or no link profile.
Loved every word of it and yes content is playing the backbone these days when it comes to ethical SEO. Ideally, Google should consider content as an important ranking factor because this is one thing that users will read and based on it a user will make their buying decisions.
I mean obviously if you are in a competitive niche, just content might not help you win the game but saying that minus content just with titles, meta descriptions, page speed and other ranking factors you can rank well, might be true few years back but defiantly not today!
In the Modern day SEO its safe today that Content is the Trump Card!
Common case! In my personal experience there is no need of changing or removing pages from the sub domain!
Remember Google is picking up your review page because Google is finding it more relevant but what if the most relevant page according to Google link to another page that you want to rank?
I think you should link from your review page to the home page plus get some more good links that should target your home page and wait for the next crawl!
Probably this issue will be resolved!
Your question is kind of confusing to me but if you are asking about having all internal links on the home page. This is fine. I take a quick look of your website and from the indexing point of view it looks just fine to me!
Although your URLs are very much over optimized it will not take more than a second for one to realize that you are pushing SEO here. I think this is not really a very good idea so my advice is to optimize your URLs and make it SEO friendly instead of inserting your keywords in to it.
If you are asking something different, I would love if you can elaborate your question a bit more.
Hope this helps!
In my personal opinion internal links have more to do with site architecture and if they are user friendly! Try to focus on producing better user experience on your site and keep that in mind that links should not be too many that it comes under the section of over optimization.
You number shows that you have too many pages on your website. Just see if the user experience is not shitty then you are good to go!
This is pretty much complicated so let me summarize what you are up to and then will move towards my suggestion.
You have 2 domains at the moment, one targets US and the other target AU market. Now you are planning a global launch on a third domain where most probably you are going to redirect your existing pages.
The global domain is not with you so you want to go with a temporary strategy and that is to create a sub folder. US sub folder on AU website and AU sub-folder on a US website.
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WOW, saying that this strategy is ideal for one or not will be difficult as there are lot of things missing which includes brand reputation, market share, audience trust on the brand and more.
I mean if you can wait for few months than going for a new domain is a better idea than going for a temporary strategy as this will be a very quick change for audience, first in November and another change in January.
Try to give the amount of time to audience in which they can adjust. Again, if the audience’s trust level with the brand is good and they can accept this kind of quick change then I don’t see a problem.
I am assuming that on sub folders you will link to another website instead of creating a new content on a sub folder. I believe create separate content on a sub folder is not a good idea as SEO issues and ranking will take months and within few months you have to move to another strategy.
I don’t see a problem with moving to a new domain but you have to keep in mind that when shifting two different website to a 3<sup>rd</sup> domain you will see lot of ranking fluctuation so if you have a good migration plan but no back up plan then you should consider having one right now or else you will see a big loss from the organic traffic.
Again, there are lot of points that can be discussed but this is what I think it is having the limited knowledge about the domains and business.
Hope this helps!
Highly suggest the idea by Dan... Yoast SEO is the great plugin!
That’s great that you can get a link from Gov website but the link will be in the footer and this means every page of the website will be linking back to you as normally websites share the same footer across the website.
Google like natural links and when you will use a key phrase to link back to your client’s website (especially in the footer) this will hurt you as Google can easily guess that the link has been created to manipulate SERP results.
My opinion, if you are linking from footer is to get link on brand name instead of a keyword this way you will get the link juice. I am not saying you will be able to achieve your goal but still you will increase the website authority which will help you in different ways.
You also said that you don’t have lot of unique content for each page. There is no shortcut or pass here you have to create unique content for pages in order to increase your chances to rank for different county related keyphrases.
Honestly, this strategy in my opinion is not good and Google can easily guess what you are doing and reward you accordingly.
I think the better idea is to get a link with a brand name to increase authority, create unique content for county pages. Get some quality links from different industry related websites and you will rank better in SERPs from the targeted key phrases.
Just a thought!
I agree with Peter, I have worked with a company who had several different products that are huge so they used the similar structure. I think in order to give better user experience they should have some text on home page (instead of image only) but i think from the technical SEO perspective there is no big problem with this!
wow Matt, this was new to me to be honest.
Completely agree with Fede, the 301 process will redirect the juice to the new URL but this process always loose small amount of link juice. If you think adding the new URL will help you better than losing a bit of a link juice is fine!
As far as the penguin is concern, it doesn’t matter what pages/websites you are linking out to what really matters is what kind of websites are linking back to you. If they are spammy and shady websites probably the chances are you will get hit by penguin but if the links are from decent and relevant websites you are safe.
As far as the best practice you are talking about, think about your customers and readers if they are fine with it, there is no technical issue with all on one page with linking out to PDF and manufacturers.
Hope this helps!
There are literally tons of factors that are involved when Google ranks a site so this can be anything other than just links and quality of content. There are other factors like on-page optimization, site architecture, how you have been discussed on other websites, social media and much more…
I give a quick look to your website and here are the following things I witnessed in a one go!
I believe there are two different websites were you are using the similar content, I just checked one page and Google says the content that is available on the website is more or less similar to the content available on this URL: http://www.hvhtek.com/associates/surfopt/surfopt.html
I believe this page also represents your company but technically they are two different domains containing duplicate content.
The idea is to have a unique and quality content on the website and this can help you improve your organic visibility.
In my honest opinion, links are playing their part too!
Open Site explorer said you are getting 182 links from the 10 root domains, probably you should increase the links from the root domains and if you are using tactics like blog commenting or forum posting to get links then consider avoiding it as this will hurt your rankings instead of building it.
Many of the links are no follow (probably coming from blog comments). It is important to have links from diversified areas and not all should be no followed or do followed.
Keeping the link profile as natural as possible is a way to go and outrank your competitors from the desired key phrases.
These are the quick analysis, I believe digging the website in detail might help you caught more areas where your attention is needed. There can be multiple factors that are playing their part and as a whole you are not been able to rank above your competitors and win organic traffic!
Hope this helps!
Malika, If I would be at your place, I would have made the list of all the URLs that I need on the website and implement canonicals on it accordingly. This will help me stay away from duplicate content within the website, if there is any.
Now the URLs that are redirecting, If they do not have backlinks pointing to them and no traffic is on those URLs, I would have created a custom 404 page and redirect all of those URLs to a custom 404 page so that IF the user comes in he simply understand that the page is no more available and engaging custom 404 page have the power to retain customers and move them to other parts of the website.
This will kill too many redirections on the website and overall site’s speed would have increased.
Hope this helps!
I don’t see any negative SEO effect with what you have explained here but just to tell you what I have encountered with my client’s website in the past!
When working with .htaccess file try to use it carefully because this can even lead to a big disaster if something gone wrong! (Just sharing my experience).
Also, plan the redirections prior to the switch because without it you might see a big drop in traffic obviously shifting URL will hit you a bit in rankings and traffic but that will be mostly temporary.
Hope this helps!!
Google number consider sub domain as part of the domain so this shouldn’t be a problem for Google plus just verify your author for the blog and it will work fine.
I don’t see any problem with that!!
As far as the dropdown menus are crawl-able and Google can see what content is available in those menus I don’t think there is an issue.
The only reason why I will go for first option is because, it will work great on mobile and other devices. With old style menu, there will be UX issue on mobile specially.
Just a thought!
Mike, my advice is to 301 all pages from old domain to the new domain and make sure there is no problem with in (usually this shift causes problem which result in bad ranking fluctuations). If everything goes fine… give it a week or two to get things in order!
You will see your old domain will be out of index and new one will started ranking accordingly…
Will it rank no. 1?
Not sure but 301ing the URLs always cause a loss in link juice so I it always depends upon the competition you are chasing!! I believe you also should do some content marketing or awareness program to let your audience know about the new domain… if that will get you some quick links, you might regain your rankings in search engines.
Hope this helps!
Dana, I have been through this situation and it was very easy for me to make then no follow the paid links that are pointing back to my client’s website.
Obviously Paid Links are against the Google terms and you know you cannot take that easy so you have to go with adding no follow attribute.
When I was facing this issue, I tried to setup a physical meeting (may be a dinner and a coffee) and then slowly tell him how Google is reacting these days and how business should take care of small details that ideally they shouldn’t. Plot the problem and let him know the solution… If he is not technical enough just offer him your technical services for free and if he/she is really in a good connection with you, he probably will say yes to it (keep your services free)!
And you are done!
Not sure about CCL but good web hosting defiantly impact the SERP rankings. The problem with bad web hosting is the downtime and if Google crawl your website in the downtime, you probably will witness a dip in rankings.
Hope this helps!
My quick advice here is to install GWT and Bing Webmaster tool to see where is the problem with regards to crawling and indexing. Mostly when the website’s overall structure is not SEO friendly, indexing becomes a problem for search engines.
Technically 301 redirection means that you are shifting users as well as search engines to the new version of the URL so technically there is no need of including the new version of URL in the webmaster tools but I believe including them will not hurt either.
Hope this helps!
The Now URLs are the one you probably want ideally so it should be before to now!!
My advice would be to include a fresh sitemap and upload it Google Webmaster tool. Not sure about time but I will second Donna, this will take time for the pages to get out of the Google Index.
There is one hack that I used for one page on my website but not sure if it will work for 1000+ pages.
I actually removed a page on my website using Google’s temporary removal request. It kicked the page out of the index for 90 days and in the mean time I added the link in the robots.txt file so it gone quickly and never returned back in the Google listing.
Hope this helps.
The shortest and simple answer to that is forget website B and stick to website A combining or 301ing both website will hurt the reputation of website A as well.
Hope this helps!
Ok, if I would be at your place, I will choose one of these solutions.
- 301 the URL to appropriate live URLs so that when traffic lands, it go to relevant page or a custom 404 page that tell user the page is not available (and give links to other parts of the website). This is a good idea to retain visitor to the website even when the page is dead.
- If you really want to remove the URLs from Google, in webmaster tool there is a remove URL section, use that and it will remove from the index for 90 days and as the header status of those URL is already 404 they will not come back again. Ever!
Hope this helps!
404 hurt rankings? In my personal experience, too many 404 on the page does!
It is very important redirect all the alternate versions of your home page to be permanently redirect to the preferred version of the home page. Search Engines ideally consider unique URLs to be a separate page on the website and if two different URLs contain the same content that will be considered as duplicate content which actually can hurt your SERP rankings.
For example:
- http://www.example.com/xyz - http://www.example.com.xyz.html
these two URLs are different in the eye of Google and if it displays the same content that will be considered as duplicate content. In order to stay away from this problem you should set 301 redirects to all alternate versions of your home page.
Hope this helps!
George, I guess you forgot to include the URL of the website you are trying to optimize and what keywords you ideally want to rank for but here are some general things you should be looking in your website.
(If Local) Your website should be included in all major map submission websites like Google Maps, Yahoo local and Bing Maps plus you should also include your business listings to yellow pages and data aggregator’s websites with the similar NAPs.
If you are a local business and want to rank for local keywords, than this guide can help you in the longer run: http://www.setalks.com/local-seo-answered/
Also if you are targeting other general terms, do let me know and I will reply to that accordingly.
Hope this helps!
Never shift a website from one country to another country by myself but let me tell you what theory tells us.
- Map Changing
If you website was associated to any business registered in Google Maps and other yellow pages than you carefully need to remove all listings and re-register it on another country. These will defiantly going to hurt your rankings on specific country where you were ranking before.
The problem is results for every country are different from others so if the rankings didn’t really changed (most probably it will fluctuate for local keywords) the rankings that you had in US will not be the same in AU.
What you should be doing.
And you will see your rankings will start appearing in google.com.au
Hope this helps!
Ok, this is how I look at the situation.
So you have two URLs and the question is either to redirect301 or use canonical? In my opinion 301 is a better solution and this is because it will not only redirect people to the preferred version but the link value as well.
Whereas, with canonicals only search engines will know what is the preferred page but it will not transfer the link value which can help you with organic rankings.
Hope this helps!
I don’t think there is a way to move the dates but if the problem is still there it should be appearing in the issues section. If not that most probably means the problem has been resolved.
Hope this helps!
I believe when you are talking about 1 to 5 million URLs it is going to take time no matter what tool you use but if you ask me screaming frog is a better tool and if you have a paid version of it you still can crawl websites with few million URLs in it.
Xenu is not a bad choice either but it’s kind of confusing and there is a possibility that it can broke.
Hope this helps!
I think I have to agree with Patrick. Whenever you have soft 404s on your website the best way to deal with them is to think about users and then about search engines.
Again as Patrick said, if the products are gone forever, redirect the pages to most relevant product and pass the link juice to other pages as well so that right kind of product started to get ranked. If the product are temporarily unavailable my advice is to show the product details, images with a tag about out of stock and a popup may be that guide to other parts of the website.
Whatever you use, think about your users and if they are comfortable, just go with it and I am sure search engine will follow you accordingly as at the end of the day what search engine want is the happy user.
Will soft 404 hurt? In my opinion few soft 404s on the website should not hurt but again as you said it might grow in thousands, in that case this is can be a problem and can affect your SERP rankings.
Hope this helps!
I am not sure If I get your question correctly but as per the best of my understanding if you are making a switch from http to https it’s not important to upload the disavow file of https as well and this is because 301 redirection will also take search engine bot to https versions and take the same actions accordingly.
But, to be on the safe side if you include https versions in the disavow file, it will only help! J
Let me know if it makes sense to you!
I will agree with EGOL! In my opinion Google does not discriminate EMDs but according to the latest Moz’s ranking survey it is believed that Google still favor EMD’s to an extent. If you are losing rankings with EMD there can be other issues which can be over optimization, under optimization, low quality links pointing back to the website and more.
Hope this helps!
EGOL nailed it!
Probably the best use you are thinking of the domain would be to start another website and get it rank for similar kind of keywords which means you will have two domains giving you traffic and conversions. In my opinion, it is better to work hard on one domain and make it an above avg. domain instead of continuing two avg. domains.
The other use you might have thought is to redirect keyword friendly domain to relevant pages. If the domains are new and they don’t have a decent link profile, they probably will not help anyways. What if you build a decent link profile for my new domain? Good idea but the better idea is to spend that same time on your current website and build some quality links for that website and make it an above avg. one.
Just a thought!
I believe you really need someone who can do the site audit and tells you what areas of the website need more improvement. I run a screaming frog on your website and I can say that the migration was pretty much done right.
Obviously when you migrate and 301 pages from only to new domain, not all the juice pass to the new domain so loss of link juice can be one of the reason why you lost rankings for any of the key phrases.
You said you were ranking on 9 and 10 and recently moved to 8 and while I was checking your ranking on SEMRush.com it says “7” so seems like you are on your way back to your old position.
Here are the few things I would suggestion you should do.
Hope this helps.
If the target is to get the URLs out of the search engine index than there are the few solutions can work for you:
Also in order to quickly remove them from the index you can update robots.txt file and then go to GWC and use remove URL feature.
Just a thought!