Welcome to the Q&A Forum
Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.
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 jmico,
You ask what they can do for you, but maybe a better question to start would be what can you do for them.
Business directories are obviously nothing new, and besides them having a bad rep in SEO, why would they need to list with you. What are you offering that is so unique businesses will want to sign up. If you find something truly valuable and unique you can think of ways to get involvement from them. And they will probably be willing to reciprocate the value.
Your whole strategy for SEO could than be based on these benefits and it will be easier to find out what will make sense; followings on social accounts, blog mentions, testemonials, etc....
Just offering a business listing will not get people to do anything in my opinion.
regards
Hi Laura-EMC,
I cant make up from your example what kind of duplicate content this is. You say it is from product pages but the first url looks like the homepage for your blog.
Anyway as a basis you should redirect duplicate content to the right page when the page doens´t need to be available for your users. e.g. you had a page for a product but now you have a better one and you redirect the users to this one.
A canonical should be used when the page needs to be available for your users but you don´t want them in the index. e.g. you have a shoe page for shoe size 41 but you also have a page for shoe size m. As the only difference on the page will be the size the content on them will be almost completely igual. you still want the users to be able to visite the page but not have it in the index.
Hope this helps
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,
On your first question i wouldnt do a redirect i would show a message with a link to your website for users ending up on that domain.
The difference is that with a 301 redirect you are telling Google to pass all the link equity of that page to the page you are redirecting to (the good and the bad) when you implement a link on the page pointing the users to your correct website you can use a nofollow which will result in google not passing any link equity at all.
Hi Najia-ali,
When i look at your onpage optimisation it all looks good. but when i analised the the keyword difficulty for sign boards in Indie ,one of the main keywords i think the site is targeting, you have very strong competition, several sites with domain authority over 80 whilst the site of your client has DA of 6.
The fact that only one backlink to the site is showing in moz isn´t so strange as they don´t have the same size index as Google. The high authority competition you are up against though would suggest you need to work on your link profile and inserting the site in directories will not be enough.
To get link from high authority sites will not be a easy and quick fix and usually takes time to build, i am talking about things like content creation, guest blogging, testemonials, promotion, outreach etc...). A lot has written about this like https://moz.com/blog/the-10-golden-rules-to-attracting-authority-links, https://nichehacks.com/build-niche-backlinks/ or https://neilpatel.com/blog/11-ways-to-get-authority-links-for-your-new-blog/ among many other articles.
Sorry dont think there´s an easy fix for this
Hi Cesare Marchetti,
Thanks for you question. I think there are several things to consider here:
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)
to go back to your initial question and assuming .ie is treated as ccTLD, what GSC seems to validate; in Google´s eyes your site is more relevant for users in Ireland and will therefore not be able to rank equally well as a gTLD globally.
What you can do is change to a gTLD (which i think is the most efficient if you have one website targeting globally). or ccTLD´s for the countries you want to target (ok if you have a lot of recourses)
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 imjonny123,
Yes thanks, hope your doing well too. if you have the same content you have already on the main domain, no issues in using noindex and you will avoid duplicate content issues at the same time.
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.
Hi Alick300,
isn´t .ie a ccTLD though for Ireland or does google treat this one as a gccTLD as seen here https://www.screencast.com/t/5YgjXIriy ?
hi imjonny123,
So what other kind of content would be on the order. subdomain besides the cart?
Hi jgodwin,
I think the default search engine on Safari would still be Google Search so you would be all right there. And as ios and android cover more than 99% of world wide operating systems (https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/16/14634656/android-ios-market-share-blackberry-2016) that would leave under 1% not covered. For the few Microsoft phones out there, in this 1%, you can off course optimize for bing https://ignitevisibility.com/how-is-bing-seo-different-than-google-seo/
Good luck, hope this helps
Well it would aid in relevance which could impact on rankings. But the degree of impact depends on a lot of other factors http://searchengineland.com/seotable
Hi poliedric,
I seem to remember a situation when it was loading by ajax, could that be your case? that could explain you not finding it in the source code and GSC still showing you the tag. Info on extentions for finding ajax content https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7830864/jquery-load-data-not-showing-up-in-page-source
I´m not a coder though so could be other reasons
Hope this helps
hi vtmoz,
I can see all this keywords of being there own topic, sure they use the same main keyword / topic "seo" but they are not the same. A page about "seo history" and "seo strategies" can have substancial different content and cater to a different search intent. If you have good content for all these keywords its a sound strategy to create multiple landing pages for them.
The url reflecting the Page title is a good practice and so is maintaining your URl´s as short as possible.
In your case you have another option that would keep your url reflecting the page title and at the same time keeping it short (though i wouldn´t worry to much about 80 char more on this https://moz.com/community/q/maximum-length-of-the-url-for-seo-75-115 and https://moz.com/blog/should-i-change-my-urls-for-seo
https://www.tumbleandhide.com/newton-leather-wallets-card-holders
But if you want to choose between your two options i would go for the first https://www.tumbleandhide.com/collections/newton-leather-wallets-card-holders as the latter doesn´t include some important keywords.
I have read those same countless articles but can´t think of any study on it, neither any respectable person in the industry elaborating on it. We pay attention to maintaining consistency in the NAP´s (don´t sell it as a service though) just as good business practice and always had the idea it would be good for SEO as well. Now i am not so sure if there is any impact there.
When i see people mentioning ".. even the slightest variations...will hinder a search engine´s confidence" my hairs standup as i have seen over time that many NAP´s from clients have natural variations, sometimes parts of the address are abbreviated, order of words changed, a small insignificant part of the address omitted, phone numbers with international codes and without, with extensions and without, Names with Ltd and without. Doesn´t make any sense to me that these would already hinder the search engines´s confidence as they are natural (google always claims to like natural).
Very interested to see if someone will come up with a credible source for this
Hi Mrsem,
I imagine the address type isn´t a factor for local pack rankings because either one goes to local relevance and i cant see how one would be more relevant over the other. Say i am looking for a hairdresser, google shows a local pack with hairdressers in the area they identified i am searching from why would a business that "service customers only at their location" be more locally relevant than "service customers at my business location And customers location".just a different kind of service. No statistical data to back this up though. Will be interesting to hear other opinions on this.
Hi Alex,
I would say if you maintain the exact same url structure e.g.:
before:
after:
You will be good with the search engines, independent in which server folder the new site is (current or new).
Hope this helps
Hi Brian Nash,
Don´t think this funcionality exist. Can you explain why you would like to nofollow instead of disavow?
Hi Advertisingtech,
I´m not so sure today about this technique (though i have used it much in the past) and i do think they could compete. As usually is the case the main keyword for the homepage is more general and more competetive i still think authority strength could be the issue, and increasing relevance wouldn´t solve this. Since it is called search engine optimisation though,nothing keeping you from implementing your idea and see the results.
Let me know if it worked out
Hi Seoanalytics,
Is there a correlation or causation between the search popularity of a keyword an the difficulty to rank? I would think the primal reason for dificulty in ranking is a high comercial value of the Keyword that could be because a lot of people search it or because it has high values + margins. So not just the popularity of the search term is key and a keyword could be highly popular but have no comercial value.
e.g. for "tying shoes" (i know not very exciting example) i find 6.600 monthly searches in US and moz ranking diifficulty 50. and for "ty slippers" 390 monthly searches moz ranking difficulty 65, whereas you would excpect the other way around if there was causation.
so i would say there is correlation but no causability. Just my 50 cents
Ok, curious to see some other people opinions. This goes back to intent and is a i see it at the core of SEO and an exercise i like to apply with every keyword analyse.
Hi Advertisingtech,
So first of all is the new site not ranking for any of the main keywords or is the problem that other pages are ranking for them but not the homepage.
in the first case this could be due to a number of reasons but with a new site authority (inbound links) could be a maior issue.
If pages are ranking but just not your homepage that you should thoroughly analyse your onpage content and see why google thinks these pages are a better match and amend the content accordingly.
Your strategy for url´s structure is correct and follow best practices as you said, this wouldn´t be the issue. You could use sa part of the url the main keyword. e.g:
a real estate classified website: category url for family homes in palm springs --> xxxx.com/real-estate/family-homes/palm-springs
Hi SEO analytics,
I would like to find companies offering bike tours, Blogs about bike tours, some posts about bike tours i can do in my vicinity, Up and comming bike tours events in my area, maybe a how to prepare and tips for bike tours.
What do you expect?
Hi MarketingGH,
Yes you are right, wasn´t aware of this list (learning everyday). It is in fact a ccTLD but google treats it as a gTLD.
So just to clarify you would have a:
xxxx.co targeting the US (and setting up this geotargeting in your GSC)
xxxx.co.uk targeting the Uk (and no need to setup geotargeting in GSC since it already a ccTLD)
If this is the case you wouldn´t have any duplicate content issues. If i misunderstood could you clarify.
Hi Neil,
I think complementing your local seo business for your clients with adwords makes a lot of sense. Since both have there strengths and weaknesses you can maximize the results for you clients while gaining a lot of insights.
Google Adwords express is mainly for small business owners that don´t have the time neither the knowledge to use Google Adwords. You have a lot less control in the former, especially the lack of control over the keywords, and most is automated. This doesn´t give you enough control to effectively manage these campaigns for your clients and add value for them. More info on how to start with adwords for smb you could find here https://www.pickaweb.co.uk/blog/complete-guide-to-google-adwords-for-local-business/
If you should have them all in one account or each one have there own depends on various factors, like:
Hope this helps and good luck
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 Aua,
Since speed is a ranking factor for Google anything influencing this speed negatively would theoretically be bad for SEO. I don´t know how many are "too many" but if you are talking about several dozens that shouldn´t really impact that much. It isn´t good practice though to leave not completed unpublished posts in your site, and usually not necessary, to keep a clean database it would be better to finish them off site on an editor and insert them in your site when they are done.
Hope this helps
.co is a ccTLD (https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db) and assigned to Columbia
.com is a gTLD (https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db)
The article you mention starts by saying "If your site has a generic top-level domain, such as .com or .org, and doesn´t mention .co
Hi MarketingGH,
with ccTLD (country code Top Level Domain) there is no problem with duplicate content in the same languages through these domains and when setting a country target for gTLD´s this wouldn´t be an issue either.
As far as i know though .co is a ccTLD for Columbia and not a gTLD so you should register the .com domain (unless this is what you meant than thats correct).
Hope this helps
Hi Vtmoz,
Couldn´t agree more with you, they are a pain in the ... specially when they have sound and i have no idea where the vid is. As Google rolled out there mobile interstitials penalty at the beginning of this year and this is also a usability issue, who knows...
Apparantly John Mueller from Google also said he didnt like them and asked if they should penalize.
Would surely be a game changer.
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 Flaske,
Igor´s Answer about analysing the serps is excellente advice. It will give you insight about how Google is already thinking about these queries and which pages are the best answer for them.
Curious though is your suggestion is: Azores Canyoning - São Jorge Canyoning | Brand Name but your page tiltle on the website says: Canyoning Azores - Canyoning São Jorge | Brand Name . I think the latter makes more sense as this is what most people are looking for (250 monthly searches vs 50 for the other way around). Also these are quite competitive as i see tripadvisor appearing several times on first page.
I am from Portugal so next time i will visit the açores will defenitely have to do some canyoning
boa sorte
I agree with Gaston´s view. What is stopping you though from changing the nofollow tag to follow and maintain the canonical and noindex? That way you wouldn´t have duplicate content issues (either on the main domain, folder or subdomain) and still pass link equity.