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Boxed navigation is becoming pretty common navigation style these days. Many large corporations such as Rackspace, IBM, and Cisco use this format.
Best practice is to have on average not more than 150 outbound links on the page so try to maintain your on page links around this number.
I would not be too concerned on where you put the content on the site as long as the content can be crawled by the search spider. Blog is the best place on a website to provide good quality content to your users where they can subscribe to RSS and follow your work. It can also increase chances of generating User Generated Content on your website which will ultimately benefit your rankings.
Jared,
I would think more about the user experience and less about the search spider when changing the site / url architecture. If your users are able to find the information they need faster and easier with your new architecture then I would go with that.
Using "services" page does sounds appropriate and you can always use right keywords in the URL while 301 redirecting your older URLs to the new ones.
Not sure if I understand your point correctly. Are you saying you will be dynamically feeding keywords on the pages with tabs?
I would suggest to go for yourwebsite.com/location since it will be better experience for your local visitors and will save an extra click.
Your most recent Google cache is showing the target as Toronto,Ontario confirming your concerns.
The challenge you are facing is similar to sites like Yellowpages.com, superpages.com and any other location targeted sites may face. The way these sites have worked around is by adding relevant static content to the website.
By adding relevant content to your home page your will be able to minimize the location targeting effect. Plus, search spiders already know that you are not limited to the location of IP because they have indexed multiple pages from your website.
I also noticed that your home page outbound link to content ratio is upside down. You have too many links on the homepage and extremely limited content. Additionally, the text blurb on the top is not user friendly and stuffed with too many keywords. You can easily replace this text with user friendly static content such as your website USP.
Analytics coding can get tricky at time and there can be instances where you may see wrong data being reported. I always recommend more than one web analytics platform so you can have data in the instance of failure of your primary analytics tools.
Yes. You can certainly have more than one analytics platform and continue to have correct data. Both Clicky and Google Analytics are owned and developed by separate entities and there should not be any interference in data collection or reporting.
There might be a web page code conflict instead of analytics tag conflict.
Can you post your web address so I can review the codes?
Font size impacts user experience and may impact SEO in certain cases. Providing users multiple font size options to choose from i.e small, medium, large helps user experience. Search spiders do look for usage of bold, italics and H1 tags on a web page. Better user experience generally lead to better SEO.
Can you elaborate on the issues you are facing?
I checked the header for both URLs are they are indeed giving me a 200 ok header code which means this is a page canonicalization issue.
Page canonicalization happens in cases where www or non www, .php or non .php , .asp or non .asp pages exist.
The solution to this is to do a 301 redirect of http;//search-engine-upgrade.com/default.asp to
http;//search-engine-upgrade.com using htaccess file.
Please this line of code in your htaccess file
redirect 301 /default.asp http://search-engine-upgrade.com
or you can the following rewrite code
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /default.asp\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^default.asp$ http://www.search-engine-upgrade.com/ [R=301,L]
Ryan answered this question pretty well and I would like to add few points to it
1. As long as your site architecture is organic and designed for the user you should not be too concerned about page -keyword targeting.
2. Avoid have too many links on the page. Typically, there should not be more than 150 links on a page.
3. Make sure to have equal balance of content and images on the site.
4. Backlinks with good distribution of anchor text.
Password protected content in most cases is not indexed in the search engines. Having all the content behind the signup wall can be a barrier for you to rank for keywords in your niche. However, that does not limits you to rank since modern SEO is not just based on the on page content. There are multiple factors that influence rankings in 2011 such as site accessibility, content, backlinks, social media, online reputation, local seo, LDA, search protocol usage and more.
Rank recently wrote a blog post on the responsibilities of SEO in 2011 and it is worth reading.
What analytics tool are you using?
In Google Analytics you can use onclick function with pagetrackview to track all the link clicks (internal and external)
onclick="pageTracker._trackPageview('/yourfile.pdf')
You can add this line to the GA code and track one URL as well i.e onclick="pageTracker._trackPageview('/URL.html');
Omniture onclick syntax is as follows using s.prop (property / traffic variables)
<li onclick="geturl('http: www.yourwebsite.com'');onclick="s=s_gi('nameofyouromniturereportsuite');s.prop1='Name" of="" hte="" file="" for="" reporting';s.tl(this,'o','name="" the="" reporting')"="">Anchor Text of the file</li onclick="geturl('http:>
Coremetrics has event conversion metrics that can be used to track downloads and link clicks
cmCreateConversionEventTag ("Event ID","Action Type","Event Category ID","Points");
Event id = Name of the file
Action type = 1 for event initiation and 2 for event completion
Event category id = Name of the group / page
Points = lead scoring points
Directory submissions are a total waste of time. Personally, I would not use any software solutions that offer mass directory / article / comment submissions because these fall under grey area and search engines don't value these anymore like they use to years ago.
Local directory submission to websites like angielist, superpages, citysearch, yelp is certainly useful for local rankings.
Local ranking factors has a lot in common to regular search ranking factors including quality and quantity of links, content LDA score, and several other metrics.
However, there are lot of other metrics that Google generally looks at to rank a site locally.
local place page with correct information ( address, correct category, phone # , map icon)
Profiles on local directories ( superpages, citysearch.com, angielists ..)
Local citations (links from local directories and sites like chamber of commerce, BBB, local small business groups)
reviews (Google and other local websites like Yelp, citysearch, judysbook)
Here is a link to a website that provides extensive research work on local ranking factors.
Here is another links to awesome SMX Seattle 2011 breakaway session on local ranking factors.
Search engines are placing more importance to usability than ever before and longer URLs are usually not considered user friendly. The popularity of URL shortening service is another proof that having shorter url is better.
The idea is to maintain the right balance between keyword usage in the URL and the length of URL.
Paid directories are not beneficial the way it used to be long time ago. Any paid links is a serious no no even though the case that directory services provides is that they don't charge for links but for resource required for manual inclusion.
There are some exceptions to high quality directory such as Yahoo. One should always ask the question if this directory provides a benefit to the user and if the answer is no then a backlink from this site is worthless for both traffic and seo.
Best practice is to add new content and create new title and meta for these pages instead of changing title for the same page constantly.
Changing title too many times in short span can confuse the search spider as title is the first piece of content crawled by spiders. By changing the title too many times you may cause the search spider to think that there is something unnatural about the website.
Cache tags are associated with caching of the page for faster downloads .
instructs the browser to download the information from the local cache instead of getting information from the network server allowing decreased load time.
The exact opposite is where the browser will not use the local cache and download the information from the server.
As a best practice, cache should be controlled through HTTP headers ("Expires", "Cache-Control: max-age" and "Last-Modified") instead of using Meta.
The other option is to use .htaccess code for caching of images and other content to speed up load time.
There are several ways to measure the success of the content and these can be divided into two categories - quality and quantity metrics
Quantity metrics
visitor engagement metrics (time spent on page, bounce rate, page view per visit)
conversion metrics (orders / conversion driven by the content)
social metrics (facebook likes/shares, tweets and other share metrics)
Rank of keywords driving organic traffic to the page
Quality metrics
quality of comments
quality of social shares
Feedback received from users
LDA score (although LDA is a quantity metric it fits the quality criteria because the LDA algorithm essentially is a mathematical indication of how relevant the content is to a keyword)
Best
Sameer
Traditional online directories are losing its value in the eyes of search engines and a good example is DMOZ. Even though DMOZ was one of the most popular directory before 2009 (it still has some value) it is not the best link source.
Local search prominence has allowed local directories to become stronger than a regular web link directory.
The question a user should ask before investing in directory link building is
are users going to appreciate the availability of this directory? Is this going to provide benefits to the end user?
Is this a vertical directory within high authority website or is this just a collection of links?
Is the directory locally targeted (think yellowpages.com , cityguide.com) (applies to local ranking)
If the answer to these questions is no then clearly this is not a good source for getting links.
I did a quick search for Facade and Façade and Google is able to understand the difference and display the correct results and it didn't asked me to correct the word. Google's language detection technology is pretty good. If you use Google translation then there might be some instances where you may not get 1x1 translation of the sentence but it is better than other tools available.
As a best practice when you move content or change domains it is advisable to have 2 site maps - #1. Few days before the migration and #2. immediately after the migration. This will allow Google to understand that your content has moved.
Additionally, making sure you notify Google by using "change of address" tool in Google web master tools.
If your site is a high authority site then large percentage of your new pages will get indexed pretty quickly (24-48 hours) and it may take upto 30 days to see full indexation.
One more step is to start building links to the new site. New links can also boost the indexation for the new site.
Looks like you are having dynamic page canonicalization i.e duplicate pages are generated dynamically.
You can set the rel=canonical tags to solve the duplicate content issue.
As Daniel mentioned below it is still not clear on how these pages are being generated and linked.
What you are essentially talking about is creating offsite gateway pages. Gateway pages are definitely considered spam when done for the sole purpose of link building and ranking. Squidoo is not a bad site and we have many pages (lens) on squidoo and the pages have unique content. It is a good place to market your content and build personal authority.
If your squidoo lens is high authority and have ton of links to it then a link from that particular page to your website will carry some link juice. However, the goal should be to create good quality lens to help users.
It is also important to note that Google latest panda update has impacted the traffic and ranking of content farms and low quality content sites like hub pages, ehow, ezine article. It is quiet possible that squidoo has lost traffic as well because there are tons of lens that are low quality and were build for the sole purpose of link building.
Best
Sameer
Hey James,
Not sure exactly how your site is organized but it seems like you should be able to resolve the issue using 301 direction instead of rel canonicals.
Sameer
I am seeing the same issue. This appears to be a bug with the search segment. I just added a question about this in the GA discussion forum. Hopefully we should be able to resolve this.
Not exactly sure if this is what you are talking about.
rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish"/>
AND
rel="canonical"/>
is the same.
We recently (Feb 2011) completed a major domain migration project where we moved Rackspacecloud.com to Rackspace.com/cloud. Both domains are high authority websites and moving over thousands of pages was a challenge in itself. What we learnt from the process was that authority of the domain matters a lot during domain migrations.
If you follow all the steps in the migration process to the T then chances are you will regain the ranks/juice pretty quickly (domain with higher authority regain faster).
During our migration we were able to transfer atleast 30% ranking to the new domain in about 72 hours. The new domain is now ranking for more than 80% of the keywords that the old domain ranked for. We also found that the new domain is also ranking for some of the top keywords that we were not ranking with the original domain because of the combination of massive link juice, proper redirections and new links.
It took 3 weeks for major search engines to index 90% of the new pages on the Rackspace.com/cloud site and during this transition we continued to receive SEO traffic through the old index pages. (some of the sub domains on the original website are not migrated yet)
The most important steps in the process are
proper 1x1 301 redirection
Web master tools update (change of address)
sitemap updates
request your top backlinked websites to change the TLD
drive new links to the new site more aggressively
As far as the usability goes, short URLs are beneficial but I really don't see major difference between smallbusinessdoer.com and smallbizdoer.com.
As a general rule, a content is considered duplicate if it matches 60% or more to the original content. Seems like in your case you have a 75-80% match which could result in duplicate content issue.
Canonicalization is a good idea and will prevent you from facing penalties / other issues.
Google will automatically detect the origin of the keyword request based on the IP and will localize the result. The new local SERP is blended result which is a combination of local places, local directories, national / global listings, news , videos and other media.
The first step is to find out if a keyword search for "appliance repair" results in a locally influenced search results. If you are seeing the Google places listing for this keyword then move on to the next step which is optimizing your on and off page elements for the target keywords.
I looked at your Google place page and noticed that 100% of your website reviews are Google reviews. If you look at a recently conducted study by SEOMoz there is a bigger correlation between high local search ranking and reviews from third party review sites than Google place review. I suggest you should ask for reviews on other sites like yelp.com, citysearch.com, judysbook and similar.
Diversity of review is also important as much as the volume of the reviews.
Not sure if I understand the question correctly. Are you looking for a solution to concatenate keywords or you are looking for a long tail builder?
I don't think he will need the rel canonical as long as the proper redirect code is in place.
Thoughts??
Here is the code. Please add this to your .htaccess file. This will remove both index.php and www/non www canonicalization.
RewriteEngine onRewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.co.uk [NC] RewriteRule (.*) http://www.domain.co.uk/$1 [L,R=301]
RewriteEngine OnRewriteBase /RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index.php\ HTTP/RewriteRule ^index.php$ http://www.domain.co.uk/ [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
You can get past the duplicate content issue by adding rel canonical tag to your original website. Typically, duplicate content issue arises if the content is more than 40-45% similar to the original content.
You can also block the spider access to the duplicate pages on the micro site by using meta robots tags.
I have seen similar services and I don't think they can do anything but help the backlink page get indexed in search engines by using social media updates or submitting the page to digg.com through a authority digg account. You can also tweet your back link page using a spam free social account but don't overdo this as this will be considered a grey hat. If the content is interesting or has virality potential then it could go viral automatically.
Here are few things you can do to optimize your existing back links -
1. Followup with all your back link source and request to update the backlink to your actual pages instead of 301 version of the page.
2. Request your backlink provider to update the anchor text on some of your links.
3. Build organic backlinks to the page your link is hosted on. The argument to this technique could be why not build new links to your own website instead of building links for others but since we are talking about optimizing your existing links this could help as well.
4. See if you can get the webmaster to move your link close to relevant content. i.e. moving a blog roll link to a relevant blog post.
5. Find our all the backlinks linking to a 404 page on your site and either 301 that page to a relevant page on your website or request webmaster to update the links.
I would certainly rate this strategy as grey if not black and avoid it. This is one of the area in search marketing where lot of sites tend to get away with but may soon face consequences. SEO / Link building companies mainly located overseas rely on this technique heavily.
It is definitely painful and unfair when a competitor with spam links ranks well for highly competitive keywords set while a professional SEO spends months working hard playing the clean game. However, the reward from white hat is unmatched.
One last thing that I would like to point out is links from website hosted on the same IP blocks are less valuable links from different IP blocks. This is same as the domain diversity concept.
I have not seen negative impact due to H1 tag as much as I have seen positive. H1 tag optimization used to be popular optimization technique few years ago until lately it has been downgraded in priority by search engines. The top ranking factors are -
domain authority
link quality and quantity
social signals
title tag keyword usage
Anchor text from backlinks
http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors
Note- Keyword is title is way more important that keyword is H1 tag.
SEOMOZ spiders have a crawl schedule. It is possible that the spiders have not crawled your entire website. I had a customer site that took 2 week to start reporting errors on the campaign dashboard.
You can also install Google web master tools to double check and run Xenu link sleught.
Yes. It is possible to have site free from error as long as you don't have any dup content, title, 4xx, 5xx or robot issues being reported on the Moz campaign dashboard.
Key word in the url is important but it is not the only factor that will decide the rank for your target keyword. You can use golf-club or club but here are few other things that should be inline in order to rank for golf-club.
1. Authority of your domain.
2. Quality and quantity of the incoming links to your main domain and the target page
3. Relevance of the on page content on the golf club page. ( LDA score)
4. Title tag
6. Anchor text of the backlinks to the target page.
and several others.
Since you already have the word golf in your domain adding the keyword again in the url will not make a signficant difference as long as you target the page content for golf clubs. The key is it have original content and organic backlinks.
I include the following clause in a legally binding contract for both web design and seo to make sure the client understands and agrees to it. (Please contact your legal advisor/ attorney for the exact clause. I am not a legal advisor and the suggestions presented here are for information purpose only)
--- SEO company is not responsible for changes made to the website by other parties that adversely affect the search engine rankings of the Client’s website.
--- SEO company is not responsible for the Client overwriting SEO work on the Client’s site or requesting webmaster / designer or developer to make changes to the Client's site.
As far as partial SEO goes, you may include another clause in your contract that clarifies that the client will not be able to get any significant results from a partial or selective SEO.
However, you could enhance your portfolio by adding a partial SEO module and offer this as value add with design at no cost. You can use this to sell the benefits of complete SEO and additional services such as link building.
Best
Sameer
I would not worry about the page rank as long as the page has incoming links from other high authoirty sites. Run the opensitexplorer reports on the page and look at the quality and quanity of the incoming links.
Run opensiteexplorer on the entire domain and look at the top pages report to see if the page in question is one of the top 10 pages on the website.
You may also want to make sure the domain itself has good spam free incoming links or atleast the percentage of profile / spam link to highly quality natural link is low.
Google will automatically pickup the reviews from other sites but you can increase the speed of sync by making sure your profile is an exact match on the review sites. It is highly recommended that you take over the ownership of your profile on each of the top local review sites and optimize your business information. We have tested this technique and it worked well.
Here are the details of the test.
Sample -
Business A - New Google Place account and exact matching Judysbook.com + Citysearch account (exact headline, address, and tel#).
Business B - New Google Place account and Judysbook.com + Citysearch account with a different headline but same phone number and address.
Business C - New Google place account and JJudysbook.com + Citysearch account account with different phone # but same address and headline.
Business D - New Google place account and Judysbook.com + Citysearch account account with different address but same headline and phone #.
Submit each Judysbook.com + Citysearch account landing page to Twitter and digg manually one time only after reviews have been added. (Spam free Twitter account with 2000+ followers and clean Digg account with 50+ followers and regular diggs)
Outcome
Google picked up the reviews from Judysbook.com for A and Citysearch account for B.
Note - Google only picked up 1 or 2 reviews for both A and B from the review site so there could be some special algorithm in place for selecting the reviews based on quality.
I will be writing a blog post on my blog on this study soon.
Hope this helps.
Sameer
The best way to target local market is to have subfolders for local areas. I would not say that having a locally targeted subdomain is bad it is just that sub domain will not benefit the authority of the main domain too much. Building content on the sub folder will not only help you rank for local keywords but it will relatively easier to rank since one of the top 5 ranking factors is the authority of the domain.
If you are trying to target a country then it is best to have a country specific TLD. i.e www.google.in (india), googe.com.mx (for mexico) and then target the city within the country using a sub folder. www.google.in/mumbai
Best
Sameer
I have not tested the "syndication-source" or "original-source" tags personally but I have seen a very good case of credit syndication being used at http://www.privatecloud.com
Almost 95% of the content on this website is duplicate word for word of the original article located on the third party websites. I have been tracking this site for almost 6 months now and have seen several instances of duplicate pages (with credit to original article) indexed and ranking on Google SERPs.
Using this example I would agree that your technique should work fine.
Hey Andrés,
As a general rule, content is considered duplicate only if it is more than 35-40% copy of the original. If the person wants to copy your website word for word then here are the few ways you can avoid duplicate content penalty
2. Reduce duplication - Ask the person to modify the content and rewrite in their own words. DupeCop is a good tool that will allow you to compare two content pieces and measure the duplication percentage. (Don't use respun content always rewrite in your own words.)
3. NoIndex Meta Robot tags - If they are not willing to change the page content then you can ask them to prevent those pages getting spidered by adding a noindex meta tags.
Best
Sameer
Yes. Translated content will not be considered a penalty as long as long as you launch the site on a domain with proper local TLD and add locally targeted content then you should be ok. Additionally, you may want to consider hosting the website with a local hosting provider.
This should also apply to an English language content modified for UK audience since UK English is technically considered different than the US. We have multiple English language international websites hosted on local TLDs that rank locally for the respective keywords.
Google has become much smarter in terms of detecting the geo local elements and it should serve the appropriate site on the SERP without causing duplicate content issues.
Sean,
Is there a blog or forum or any form of UGC system in place? The title issue can be resolved by adding a forum/blog since all the titles for each new page will now be the QA text or blog titles with unique content.
I don't think excessive usage of full name + text in title is a good practice because it does not look natural. Google is smart enough to show pages on the website as long as the domain name or the site content shows a match or correlation to the celebrity name.
You could also create new pages related to the industry, lifestyle, hobbies, favorites, and many other aspect of celebrities life and each could have titles with or without his/her name depending on the keyword you are trying to target.
Thanks
Sameer