Welcome to the Q&A Forum
Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.
When I create Title tag I usually target one or maximum two keywords that are available on the page. If you have 3 major services why not create dedicated page for each service and target one keyword per page.
This way you will be able to create title tags more specifically instead of general titles and title will relate to the content of the page accordingly.
In my opinion, title tags that are more targeted to the page works well.
Hope this helps!
Eric, If I would be at the place of your consultant, I would have suggest you Wordpress (not drupel though). I don’t think there is a problem with blogger platform but things are really difficult in blogger platform whereas in Wordpress things are really easy.
Let’s say you need to set customer Meta description for a blog post in blogger (not saying it’s impossible) but as compare to this in WP all you need is a Yoast plugin and even a person without acode knowledge will do that.
Another reason I will suggest you is that I have seen very few blogger blogs ranking well in search engines as compare to WP. And another important reason why I will suggest that while back Matt Cutt recommends WP over blogger.
I am sure any SEO with a development background can give you indepth reasons for this.
Hope this helps.
If you have two different domain contact exact same things (products, descriptions, contact and more), there is no other way other than the possibilities mentioned by Dmitrii.
Even the canonical version will only allow Google to index one domain and remove other one from the index so from the SERP point of view you will only have one domain instead of two.
Hope this helps!
If I would be at his place, I would have created more social profile or may be a new page on my website targeting the keyword and get some links to the page so that when someone search for a keyword they find social profiles and other pages instead of that PDF.
MY advice is to create About.me page, Linkedin Profile, Twitter Profile, Website Page (targeting the specific keyword) and more. As social profiles have higher DA they are more likely to rank better as compare to that PDF.
When more social profile and website pages will rank better as compare to the PDF< the PDF will moved to the 2<sup>nd</sup> page of Google and more and more people might not be able to see that.
Hope this helps!
CleverPhD, you nailed it in detail.
Personally I think you have to give it some more time. If you have added news pages of unique content, just make sure that the quality of content is good.
Also see if the keywords are mapped correctly. It is also important to add some internal linking as this will help new pages get crawled in Google and internal link will give a link juice to new pages.
If I would be at your place I would have boost new pages on social media and add some links to the new pages as well.
I think you should be doing the above mentioned activities and give it some time to see how Google is reacting to that.
Hope this helps!
Abbas I love your site and links that are pointing to your site are decent (atleast most of them) there are quite a few links that contain a red flag but you can always remove or update a disavow file in Google to tell Google that you are not looking for a juice from certain websites.
If the traffic is stagnant from the last few months my advice is to see what is missing by auditing your few blogs posts from the past few months and compare it with old post that help you increase traffic. Also try and look in to different traffic channels and see what traffic is actually causing the problem. Is it the organic traffic, social media or others!
If the traffic is stale from organic channel, my advice is to look in to your keyword research and write blogs by targeting keywords accordingly. On blogs, it’s important to target quite a few long tail keywords as this will give you a small bump but it’s easier to rank as compare to head tail keywords.
Another important thing is internal linking, make sure you are properly internal linking blogs each other. This will not only decrease your bounce rate but it will also help you get good rankings in search engines.
As far as the bounce rate is concern, usually on blogs the bounce rate are high but you can use multiple techniques to reduce it. Try to keep good call to actions at the middle or the end of the blogs posts that help people continue their journey on the blog.
I may be wrong here but from what I see most of your blogposts are reviews, I would advise you to create multiple types of content that will engage users with the content. BuzzFeed Content is the great example here.
Also, make a blog calendar and decide how many blog posts you are going to publish on the website and what time they will go live. With proper social media promotional plan! Search Engine Journal update multiple blog posts in a day so tracking their strategy would be a good idea here.
Try > Learn > Repeat! As you are a blog, it’s important to try different ideas, learn from them and implement the learning again.
There must be more areas you should consider but above is a general idea that I can quality thinks of!
Hope this helps!
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!
Here are few of the options I would have considered, if I would be at your place.
- If the page done not contain too many quality links, why not design a custom 404 page and take tell user that the unit is sold but they can contact the website to enquire more about other available units.
This will save potential leads and still allow them to convert in to paying customers for the company
- Another option if there are quality links available is to 301redirect it to other similar units available on the website. This way the redirected page will get more link juice and they tend to get better rankings in search engine from the targeted keyphrases.
This way you will get audience to land on the new unites and possibly convert in to leads.
- 301 to Home page. In my opinion this is the bad idea as people are searching for particular unit and sending them to the home page will confuse them and they might bounce instead of converting in to leads.
Bad UX which leads to lower conversion rate!
Hope this helps!
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!
I think you get me wrong, you are talking probably talking about chain redirects as in from a to b and than b to c and may be d. For this Matt himself said in one of his Webmaster videos that Google might not crawl the link after 2 or may be 3 stages.
I am more concern about redirects in total because redirect increase the page load time and page load time is a factor in Google rankings which make me think again before go ahead and set 1000+ redirection (for example)!
But thanks for your reply!
I know Google says there is no limit to it but I have seen on many websites that too many 301 redirects can be a problem and might negatively affect your rankings in SERPs.
I wanted to know especially from people who worked on large ecommerce site. How do they manage internal redirect from one URL to other and how many according to you are too many. I mean if you get a website that contain 300 plus 301 redirections within the website, how will you deal with that?
Please let me know if the question is not clear.
I agree with Russ! If you have a 404 page see if you have exact page on your new website (or atleast nearer to exact) if yes, redirect! If you are in to ecommerce industry and you really don’t think that 404 page have any other alternate, in that case try redirecting it to 404 pages!
Make sure the page is customized, provide value to users and allow them to continue their journey on the website.
Hope this helps!
If query string is the only choice you have in order to identify location then why not using canonical on the page. This will tell Google what the preferred version of the page is and so Google will only index the preferred version and avoid all other form of the URLs.
This way you will be able to use query string and avoid duplicate content at the same time.
Hope this helps!
Hello David,
In my experience, Meta keywords have no negative impact on rankings and neither positive. I certainly agree with EGOL that if you are smart, title tags are good for you understand what the page is targeting any ways…
I personally don’t think there is something they know and we don’t but yeah as you said they are banks, they care less about what other people extract from their data as they are number one (or they easily can outrank their competitors) because of huge budgets and talented big teams.
They may be using wrong keywords in their Meta keywords to misguide people who believe too much on meta keywords of competitors. (possibilities)
I think in the world of today, using or not using Meta keyword has no huge benefits… just a thought!
Hope this helps!
If the sellxgadget.com is your domain and all of your keywords contain sellxgadget in the keyword with “v1” or “v2” or “v3” in it then as per my understanding, the best approach would be to go with the first option.
That is: sellxgadget.com/v1
Here are few of the reason why I will go with the first option:
- The overall size of the URL will be small and it’s important for the URLs to be not too long. The URL is covering all your keywords and yet small in size.
- It didn’t seem spammy to me! The keywords are in the URL but not over optimized.
Hope this helps!
As far as my understanding goes about SEO the way you are targeting the keywords on your pages is not the correct approach. My advice is to list down all the keywords head and long tail keywords and then map the keywords on different part of the website accordingly.
I usually target one to two keywords per page and then set the page content accordingly. Once done you will have a clear idea if what pages to target against which page when building quality links back to your website.
It is best to hire a SEO Consultant that can help you with these issues and help you get better visibility in search engine form the keywords that you ideally want to target. If you go with this approach you might not be able to outrank your competitors.
Hope this helps!
As far as my understanding goes, if you have one physical location you can only include one business so if you offer gyms and children nursery, you probably have to choose your primary business and include it accordingly or go for any other physical location.
But, I still recommend you asking from a person who usually works in the local SEO industry.
Hope this helps!
I agree! In case of noindex, nofollow tag you are telling Google not to count it!
I agree with Russ here and there are two important reasons for this
Hope this helps!
You said you remove the index.php from the robots.txt. I just wanted to when did that happened? Because after removal, it usually took some time to get back in index (crawler need to recrawl the website accordingly).
My advice is to resubmit your robots.txt and updated sitemap.xml to Webmaster console and wait for the next crawl and this should be fixed.
Hope this helps!
WHOIS is a good way to find their contact information and if this is not working find them on social media like facebook or twitter as most websites usually respond to that. If this isn’t working, I don’t think you are left with much option and you probably have to give the bad news to your client.
Another thing you can do is to see where they are fetching their data from if they are fetching data from big data aggregators you can fix the information there and it will get update accordingly.
Hope this helps!
Ideally just by changing the title tags the index should not be dropped but if this is something you have noticed, you can always update your sitemap.xml and resubmit it to Google and in the next crawl it should be indexed again.
Hope this helps!
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!
I am a little confused, normal ecommerce websites usually work as domain.com/category/subcategory/products and as your URL structure contains product/category I believe this is not a common scenario.
Here are my general recommendations.
Hope this helps!
I personally think this is a problem from the CMS end, if you are using CMS like Zencart or Joomla, this usually happens. Also, there is a possibility that some internal linking within the website is using this kind of URL by mistake and that is why crawlers are picking this up.
Check both possibilities and I hope one of them should resolve your problem.
Hope this helps!
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!
The straight answer to this is NO! You cannot look in to analytics data and see who are visiting these pages and where are they coming from but yes you can always look in to their back link profile and see which websites are linking to those pages and guess accordingly.
Just a thought!
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!
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!
I will use the basics here!
You have 2 website, website "A" is a total SPAM and website "B" is decent and showing some positive moments.
When you shut down your first website, make sure all of its content is out of the Google index and all the links are now linking to either 404 page or some other pages other than the content itself.
Also, make sure that the content is not used elsewhere.
If this is done, you can reuse the content slowly on your B website and run stuff accordingly and I am sure there shouldn’t be any problem with that!
Personal Opinion, my idea is to build the newer version of the content (may be by adding more facts, data and figures to it) and reuse it on the website so that it not only pleases search engine but the real audience accordingly.
Just a thought!
EGOL sir, you probably nailed it!
Whenever creating titles and descriptions you have to think about two areas
Id I would be at your place, I would list down all the important keywords in one document and then map the keywords on different pages of the website accordingly. Once done and I know what keywords I should be placing on each URL/page, I will move accordingly.
Once I have keywords mapped, next thing is to divide the pages as per the priorities. Important, Less Important and rest of the pages
Start with important pages, than move towards less important pages and then the pages that are on the website but not your priority at all.
As EGOL said, dedicate some time in your day may be half hour everyday (if you have another person to do the job in that case its different) and get the job done. This way it will be more efficient and closer to what your audience is looking for
Hope this helps!
1. I absolutely agree with you!
2. Obviously i am not an expert but I tried to explain this point to him as per my knowledge and experience but i guess he want some "expert" to explain this to him.
3. Thank you for pointing this out as the tone was pretty much rude (to be atleast).
Not sure what exactly is a satisfactory answer to him 
but as far as results in Google.com they are not always as per the guidelines. Type in “SEO Services” and you will find companies who are ranking on basis of blog comment spam.
But they are much better than what I use to see previous year!
I think Google is working hard to make their SERP results pure but they are 100% pure and as per the guidelines is not something I will agree with.
It’s a process and it will take time #iguess
I am in Pakistan and that is why I do check websites in rankings from time to time and I have to say that there are many niches and areas where Google still allow spammy websites especially when it comes to Google.com.pk (maybe because Google give less important in our area).
The best idea is to report this URL to Google to bring this to their attention and may be in the next Google penguin update, this got hit.
In my opinion, there is not much you cannot do other than reporting it to Google.
Hope this helps!
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!
I have seen website lost their rankings and traffic when they change their hosting server where the files are located where as I never heard if someone change their DNS (domain name stays the same) has lost any rankings at all.
This is my assumption but again I would suggest you to talk to the hosting company and discuss this issue with them and they might be able to give you a better insight of what they are up to!
Hope this helps!
Before I start, why your website is using “_blank” even on internal links? This does not make any sense to me and I was literally pissed after three clicks.
Anyways, if you are interested in increasing the indexed pages here are the few things you could do:
Also, make sure that the 301 redirections from http tp https versions are correct and working and xml sitemap is updated.
If you do that I am sure that Google will not only index your pages but will also rank better from the desired key phrases.
Hope this helps!
I agree with Adam, the reason why I would recommend adding full URLs in the internal links is because if some other blog reshare (if not steal) your content and put it up on their own blog, the links (if not full URLs) will be broken.
Adding full URLs will allow new audience to reach out to you without a problem.
Hope this helps!
Here is my take on this!
In my personal opinion all TLDs are similar in the eye of Google it’s just that people tend to consider .edu, .gov and .org links more authoritative and link to it naturally as compare to .com and .net domains and which is why special TLDs tend to win the race but this is not always the case.
My advice is to see if the org domain has a good and clean link profile and if they are getting a link from quality sources, then go for it and if not the idea is to pass it like any other non-quality domain you pass.
In my opinion, saying that Google give importance to some domains as compare to others is nothing but a myth.
Hope this helps!
In my opinion, there should be no problem with you publish multiple articles on the same date but technically it is impossible to do justice to all the content pieces when published on the same date. If I would be at your place, I prefer to go with the calendar. I would prefer to create the calendar based on the team members I have.
If I will have two to three members in my outreaching and content promotion team, I would prefer not to publish more than two articles per day.
Once the content piece will be launched I will ask my team members to start the promotion activities which include outreach to like-minded people, social bookmarking, link outreach and more.
This will also depends upon the website popularity, if you have a website like Search Engine Journal where people do expect more than 2 to 3 articles a day I will go ahead and follow the trend but if not then I will start a slow and move accordingly based on how much traffic I am receiving on each content piece.
The best idea is to see how popular you are within the community, what your readers are expecting and act accordingly.
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!
Daniel, I guess there is no straight answer to it and I totally agree with you when it comes to SEO audits, now it’s not limited to titles and meta tags only. One has to focus on UX and UI of the website, their bounce rate on the website, content creation, blog and much more.
If you personally ask me I love Alan Bleiweiss when it comes to SEO audits of the website and I highly recommend you checking this post out http://alanbleiweiss.com/professional-seo-audits/seo-audit-checklist/
It covers all the important points that one should cover when auditing the website.
Hope this helps!
adding the nav in to separate div and hid it accordingly... this is simple any developer will be able to do that!
But again, my recommendation is not to try this at all!!
In my opinion, quality content has nothing to do with keyword density in it. If the content is quality, users will stick on the page and you will get more time on site by users and shares on social media accordingly.
As far as the rankings are concern, I know it’s important but keyword density is not the only thing that Google took in to consideration when ranking a website. My advice is to do the deeper analysis of the website and see why the rankings have dropped?
- Is it because the content that dropped its ranking were really bad?
- Is your bounce rate high on those pages?
- How many shares and link you get on pages that are ranking well as compare to the pages that dropped recently
- How powerful is your internal linking
Also, create few more content and see how they are acting after the update, and make a decision based on the data you have collected.
My advice is to keep your users as your first priority because if they like it, they will share it and the conversion rate (important at the end of the day) will improve.
Hope this helps!
How is she hiding this is an easy part but if I would be at her place I won’t do that and this is because Google don’t like displaying different page to user and a different version to search engine bot. To me this is kind of gray hat.
If she is ranking at the moment she might not rank for a longer period of time and you will see a drop soon (may be in the next update).
I will highly recommend displaying the same version of the page to users as well as to search engine bots this way you become more transparent and you will see Google will lift up your rankings…soon!
Let’s wait and hope the Google to do justice a little sooner J.
Hope this helps!
I think Patrick pretty much nailed it. My best advice is not to make changes on the website without testing them use tools like optimizely or Unbounce.
If you have a budget, my advice is to get recommendations from any CRO expert.
Hope this helps…
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!
Saying that these domains are more or less useless will be wrong in my opinion. If I would be at your place I would have gone for the micro sites idea with creative content that can help the people of that particular city or the people who want to travel to that city.
If you are up for it, make sure that the content do not get duplicated. I agree that some of the gallery pictures might be the same but your creativity in text content should make it as unique and powerful for readers as possible.
What you should not do is a massive redirect as this will not help you in any way but too many redirections might cause a negative fluctuations in rankings.
Hope this helps!