Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi  gfdd420,

Yes Gaston already mentioned the best tools for backlinks analise.

Using this tactic of redirecting expired domains, i can see this working for healthy and relevant domains for your website.  So if they wouldn´t be domains with legacy spam issues / penalties and their topic is highly connected to the topic of your website i wouldn´t expect Google to penalize this as this is not much different from you buying a competitor and redirecting its website to your own.

Hope this helps

Hi Alex Cox,

I understand why you would want to do this and i have seen instances where this was done (not with the shoping aggregator markup but using the product markup with aggregateratings) and they got the rich snippets in the serps, like you mention. But for how long?

The point though is that your not following the intentions of the schema markups.  These reviews that you would be using on the category would be from people reviewing your products and not the category itself.  Hence you are gaming the system.

I´ve had the urge in the past (had to use some restrain) but refrained from doing it because at the end of the day you are eluding your users and thats not good business in the long run.

Hope my thoughts helped

Hi Jesh Krisna Murthy ,

To answer your questions:

• As your site has lots of content in the different categories it makes a lot of sense to add these to the url structure.  They will help users and crawlers understand how your site is laid out. They will also add relevant keywords to the urls which could benefit your rankings.

• For doing this kind of a change you should analyse the following:

• the work involved in doing this change (how easy is it to change this in your cms? in some cms´s like wordpress this change is pretty easy)

• the work in the additional setup of the 301 redirects you need to send people landing on your old page to the new page and to pass on any link equity of those old pages.

• Work involved in updating your internal links to these pages.

• update and resubmit your sitemaps.

• I would do this change all at once, though it effects many categories,it is only one change. And it could be more of an effort to try and split it up.  If you want to be extra cautious though you could do this by category

• When you have done this change correctly and submitted new sitemap to search engines this shouldn´t take to long for Google to pick up.  I have seen 1-2 weeks and sometimes a bit more. And as you have setup correct 301´s you shouldn´t have to worry about this.

Hope this helps you.

regards

Hi Enertiv,

There are many things you can try like using the form on the page itself (instead of the user having to click on "schedule demo" to get to the page of the form) also there is a small disconnect on the words used,  so better would be to have the text on the action button under the form also using "schedule demo" rather than "submit".

You can use testimonials from authority clients in your niche to aid the credibility of the company / product. And therefore get users to more easily convert.

you also had a chat appearing asking me if i would like to receive a case study (good idea) but it disapeared when i visited another page and i couldn´t get it back to appear. you could keep it sticky and let users close it.

like i said there are many things you can do, but i didnt see any maior critical thing on your page, it´s many times also an issue of trying out several different approaches and AB test them. several companies have great advice on this https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/high-converting-landing-pages or https://unbounce.com/101-landing-page-optimization-tips/ amongst others.

you also say you got a plenty of traffic of the keywords you are targeting, how are you actually monitoring this? Because for some of the main keywords you are targeting on those pages(like building solutions, submetering, building diagnostics, utility submetering)  i couldn´t find Enertiv in the SERP.

Another way to go would be to invest some money in Adwords so you can control better the traffic you get for each keyword and the amount so you can easier test different versions of your page to optimize the conversions.

No eureka moment, but i hope it helps

Hi VTMOZ,

If there is no issues with the domain, as you indicate,  than do a auto redirect 301.

greet

Hi xdunningx,

You can use them and they could have a positive impact on SEO if they are not duplicates of the Category taxonomies. So for instance you have an eCommerce site that sells sports clothes and you have categories for fitness, tenis, golf, soccer etc.. . than you could have tags for leggings, t-shirts, tops, etc...

Many times though they would be subcategories as well so you would have a subcategory page for leggings e.g. sports.com/category/fitness/leggings and a page for the leggings tag e.g. sports.com/tag/leggings.  Both these pages would be competing for search queries related to leggings and therefore have less of an impact (as its not a clear statement of your site to google as to which page should rank) compared to one unique page on your website ranking for that query.

In general i would stay away from tags (woocomerce or others).for ecommerce unless they are very tightly managed and are for terms with sufficient search volumes and relevant for your business, and dont duplicate your categories.

Hope this helps

Hi Pintapin ,

i am understanding you have a website that runs on the .com domain but you also have the .ir domain.  And you want to know what to do with the .ir domain.

So if you are in Iran and your users are likely to look for your domain with the .ir domain, or you actually communicate the .ir domain, you should setup a 301 to the main .com domain. I am assuming here you have been the only owner of the .ir domain so there wouldn´t be any legacy issues.

Not redirect - so park domain, disallow, delete domain - will only benefit the SEO of main domain if you would suspect to have spam problems on the .ir domain.

Hope this helps, (if i didn´t understand the issue correctly let me know)

Hi joelmd,

Yeah that changes the situation and you surely add value.  This needs a very custom solution though, besides the things you already mentioned one ideia could be a series of articles you could publish on your website where you list the top 10 businesses in category xxx in a certain geographical area. you could base this list also on the completeness of their listings and offer the ones that appear on the page a badge for being in the top 10 and ask them to insert it in their website (people and businesses like being part of a top 10) and the badge could have a link to the said article on your website.

Just one of many ideias you could think of.

regards

Great! sometimes google just needs a bit of time.

Hi GemmaApril ,

Very strange situation.  I can see your page appearing though for your business name https://imgur.com/o4oWmqU.  Just not for your keywords (though another page is ranking).  Do you see any organic traffic going to the page in GSC or GA?

Hi Scratch_MM,

Yes optimising for pdf´s still matters and follow some specific optimization rules, You can find a great post about this on SEJ https://www.searchenginejournal.com/pdf-seo-best-practices/59975/.

In relation to competing with the parent page, the pdf is just another page and as such eligble for ranking dependent on the content.  If the pdf contains the same content as the parent page than it would be better to use a canonical to the parent page.  Otherwise its will compete as much as normal pages would do, based on there content.

Hope this helps

Hi Camilo,

thanks for the clarification.  As this content wil not be available anymore on the "old" pages it will only exist on the newly created blog pages there will be no duplicate content issues.  These newly created blog pages with the content removed from "old" pages will start from scratch for ranking. and the "old" pages could loose some ranking because you reduced the onpage ranking.

This is not per se bad as it is part of your strategy to improve on conversions (which should be the most important kpi anyway).

You could help these new blog pages a bit by linking to them from the "old" page.

Hi Jenna,

In relation to the client searching their Business name, that shouldn´t be a big issue (unless they have chosen highly competitive generic words for their business name like "low interest loans") as EGOL mentioned they should rank fairly fast for this.

For adwords you can show them this http://www.tbkcreative.com/why-you-shouldnt-google-your-own-ads/ .  Many times though the clients will still continue to search anyway.  One of my clients only stopped after i showed him in his account that the keyword he was constantly searching had a ctr of 4% where all others in the account were more close to 20% and that it was the only one with a Quality score 3 points lower than the rest.  After this i showed him the results of him having stopped searching and he hasn´t restarted.  In this case though we were talking about 15-20 searches a day minimum.  Sporadich searches shouldn´t impact that much.

You need to also setup a regular reporting where you can show the results and this should be part of the inicial agreement.  Here you can show either data from analytics, GSC, Adwords, Moz etc... that will assure them there are actual results from your work. And be very clear from the start about what they can expect.

Hi VTmoz,

Although it sounds there is no big risk involved to do the redirect when there are no backlinks and no traffic, it might be better to err on the safe side and simply setup an information page on the domain with a link to your main domain. So that way when people accidentally enter the taken over domain they can easily navigate to your correct site, and you don´t risk any legacy issues with the taken over domain.

If you do decide to redirect you could additionally check in the GSC for manual penalties, check spam score on Moz and citation flow / trus flow on Majestic and view archive.org to check for any spam content in the past (though all these are unlikely when you have not found backlinks or traffic).

Anyway good you got the domain that was infringing on your trademark!

hi  Luke Rowlands,

You can use another name (although i can´t come up with a reason why a client wouldn´t want that format in the url).  You should however than

Link to it in your robots.txt or submit the sitemap directly to the search engines

Hi Chuck,

Yes i have seen this before.  I understand this manufacturer is also your supplier so they would also be cutting out a middle man (more clients would purchase from them directly) and leaving them with higher margins whilst at the same time reducing there cpc´s.

If you remove all competition but one from a keyword auction it would lower cpc (how much depends on the minimum cpc for that keyword) but it has nothing to do with "low search volume" which is a result of a keyword having very small amount of searches (this is influenced directly only by the buyers and not by the sellers).

Google will handle this by reducing the cpc that was increased because of competitor bidding auctions.

Its not a pleasant situation and in my case there was nothing to do about it (or it must be a generic product for which you could find another manufacturer, which i think is not an option in your case)

Hi  AdvimateLtd,

Yes you need to do 301´s to pass link equity to the new url´s .  You can use a tool like this one here to facilitate the work https://donatstudios.com/RewriteRule_Generator

Hope this helps.

I Agree with James,  for the 404 pages you could also configure Google Search Console to find them (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6001104?hl=en.)

Hi  Cesare Marchetti,

Thanks for you question.  I think there are several things to consider here:

1. are you the only one appearing on adwords for these keywords or are there other competitors as well.  If latter is the case you would simply be loosing potential business to your competitors as 20 - 30% of the users click on adwords (these are the ones left over after the 70% - 80% that never click on ads) for commercial terms.
2. Different people with different intent, devices, place etc.. will click on different results so i would like to dominate the serp as much as possible so i can cater to those, and adwords would just be one of those results.  This way i think i can maximize the results and return.
3. But these are mostly empirical assumptions to really test this objectively is almost impossible as there are many factores influencing results.  like you said seasonality, competitores, positions you have in the serp based on device, location, time etc... You could stop adverting adwords for one month for one of the keywords, compare how results were for this keyword compared the other keywords (and compare that to how they would compare in previous months), ajust for seasonality based on historic monthly results. But there can still be other factors incluencing the results.

Hope this helps and give you some perspectives on the issue, althouhg i don´t think this is completely what you were looking for (and if somebody does know a way to test this i would be very interested)

Hi Alex Cox,

I understand why you would want to do this and i have seen instances where this was done (not with the shoping aggregator markup but using the product markup with aggregateratings) and they got the rich snippets in the serps, like you mention. But for how long?

The point though is that your not following the intentions of the schema markups.  These reviews that you would be using on the category would be from people reviewing your products and not the category itself.  Hence you are gaming the system.

I´ve had the urge in the past (had to use some restrain) but refrained from doing it because at the end of the day you are eluding your users and thats not good business in the long run.

Hope my thoughts helped