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That would be desirable, so you do not get any dupe content penality. It is then a question of which way you prefer the juice to flow. If Andrea's page is more targetted and getting the links, then rel canonical links from the blog to those pages may be more benificial.
It shouldn't, but I would always place rel canonical as the first line to ensure that it is indexed first and all references are relative to that. This is a developer preference as it is a good design practice. This works on pages we host and create. You should also inform webmaster tool of any parameters you use and to ignore them,even though you have the rel canonical.
Search engines will read all your parameters unless you tell google with webmaster tools what parameters to ignore. This can cause an issue with the url like domain.com/topic?keyword&somefield then pages that include the keyword and other parameters will share the link juice. So, if you have 10 options of somefield you will get ~1/10 value per page indexed.
So, it is better for you to use rewrites to include your keyword in the url and then mark parameters to not be indexed in Goggle etc.
I am not sure that it helps rankings yet, but it cannot hurt them and it will help at some point in the future. As search engines try harder to understand what sites are about, using contextual markup will help. These changes to HTML and also the schema.org rich snippets will be used in future and will help. SEO is evolutionally as are development practices and it is all about staying ahead of the competition when search engines change the playing field.
I do know following the guidelines here, getting strong relevent links built and ensuring a fast user experience helps rank on sites we built. Does it give us an advantage oer the competition? Maybe, only time will tell.
We are setting up a site at http://www,dreambuilders.com.au which uses all those tags to seperate articles from navigation and the aside. It is still in development but the HTML 5 tags are set up.
Brett
Sure Diane, Thanks. If HTML5 there are specific tags to denote type of content.
<nav>- is the navigation links</nav>
<aside> - is subsiduary content, such as ad content and general information</aside>
This allows for seperation of interests and allows your site to have a logical flow and still provide contextual infromation about the content. If you look at our markup you see content wrapped in these tags.
Hi, I am a developer and hire an external SEO to do the link building but we do the site optimization following guidelines pointed out here and using the Moz Tools for our site www.oznappies.com
We tag to HTML5 where it is clear what an article or main section is and navigation or subsidary links are, as these are defined in the standard. This means we have total control of content meaning that Google will index. I also noticed that Google is including site speed in their beta analytics and so we optimise for performance, using best practices and cdn for js libraries. It is worth running your site through www.gtmetrics.com to see where you have performance issues that will affect rank in the near future, as Google is aiming at 5sec load time for user experience.
We are a new site (3 months old) and have moved from 100+ to page 1 for all our targeted key phrases, including the most competitive ones. We have in-house content authors writing original content every couple of days and posting on relevant forums and blog comments. We are now in the process of taging as schema.org rich snippets to prepare for search engines factoring this in.
We are seeing the same on the Australian Google and we are a start up (3 months old) by we are still climbing in rank, so it has no adverse effect on us.
I would get them in the shopper mindset and transfer it to the street. Ask them, do they go into a retail outlet and ask to see the '82374 in category?' as the shop assistant looks at them with a blank expression, or do they ask for a 'womens rain jacket'. When you bring it back to real life examples, I find customers understand what you are trying to convince them. So, why should it be different on line, if you want any rank benifit from the url it needs to have your key words in it. If you are targetting 'womens rain jacket' and you get a mention in a blog etc a anchor of 'www.company.com/womens/jackets/rain' still includes the keywords where as the cookie cutter url does not. It also makes the site look more professionally created than a DIY cookie cutter version.
Brent makes good points and you will see a inital wave ride in rank but it should bounce back higher. I like to also add Canonical head tags to make the new origin of the site's pages. I would also prepare a new sitemap and submit it, if there are a lot of pages, make the move in groups, with a resubmit after each group. We have had pages bounce back much quicker than 30 days too, some in as little as a week.
I figure brand in the case of a restraunt would be FoodEstablishment->LocalBusiness->Organization that sets your business branding across the site. Your would want to ensure any 404's that might happen go to the home or an informative search page, as a usability feature.
Brett
I would and do target content on a range of our pages, where I think we can give the viewer more useful information. If you list a sample menu you could use the 'offers' to provide prices and specials. You can use your customer reviews with the 'review' tag. It is also good to establish your brand throughout with the 'organization' tags. I do think this is a longer term strategy as Google is only starting to make use of some of the tags now and does not have a working test tool yet.
So, overall answer is maybe target your brand on each page and pick specific pages with strong useful content that you begin taging, at least until a good test tool allows you to check results.
Since schema.org is the new standard and adopted by Bing, Google and Yahoo, it is the better option. It also has more detail in its schema.
You also have the opportunity to set up A-B comparison experiments to check results. I know those poistion are best for revenue, but you are looking for visitors. It is a matter of having the traffic level, then getting the revenue positions optimised. If the site looks too much like an ad site, then you will not get the tweets and other social markers working for you.
I will fix that, thanks, funny my seo did not pick up on that.
So, here is the confusing bit Ryan:
Keyphrase - Modern Cloth Nappies = meta description
Keyphrase - Reusabe Nappies = img alt
Both searches page 2 on google.com.au
It looks like the page may be dynamically generated, otherwise you would need to update that part of the page each time a new rating is given. There is a lot missing for either RDFa or schema.org rich snippets.
You would need to add the mark-up in the code that created the page, and that is probably best left for the site designer.
I have begun marking up the site for schema.org and Google has now begun indexing those pages with a weird result. Instead of using meta description in search it is using the ALT text from an item marged as ImageProp="image". I was hoping it would display the picture not change my description.
Any ideas?
You site looks great, quite clean and fitting the colour and mood for a dj. There are a couple of things though I notice as a web developer:
Your youtube links are not embeded (from a facebook feed), so someone clicking on them leaves your site - you should have these embeded so they can be played on your page with out leaving it and use links http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eq6gFOXeOFk&rel=0 for the embeded videos. The rel=0 means when someone plays your video they will not see related videos when it ends. Those related videos could be from competitors.
Some of you anchor text text start 'Click here ...' that is really not strong key word use unless you are trying to rank for the keyword 'click here'. If you look at Google adwords you can find other keywords that Google thinks are a close match for the one you are targeting and then see how many people use that keyword. These would be more useful than the click here keywords now.
You are getting 2 404 errors - loader-small.gif and like.gif and most images do not have preset width and heights which means the page continually adjusts size as images are loaded on the first visit.
You may also want to consider HTML5 sectional markup to tell Google where the important content (section,article) is on the page and what is just navigation (nav) or sidebar (aside) content. Not sure if Google gives weight to this yet, but they will at some point.
Hope that help with the usability side of the site.
This is what I would suggest if you wnat to keep all those ads (I have an editor's mockup here to illustrate the idea http://www.dreambuilding.com.au/content/in2town.pdf ). Keep the articles as main focus on the site and use the top of the sidebar for related articles and move the advertising to the bottom of that column.
Think of it this way, if you get 20% of your visitors clicking the ads in your current position but you only 100 vistors/day would it not produce better revenue to get 10% click through and have 1000 visitors a day, by marking the site article centric rather than ad centric?
If you also HTML5 mark that ad content as 'aside' and the main atricle as a 'article' then your may even find Google changes the way it interperates the site design and moves up your ratings.
We have been producing lots of content, being active in forums and getting good links for strong sites in our marketting area and the site has shot from 100+ to 50, 30, 25, 12, 12, 12. There we are stuck at the moment, so I guess we have to do the next round of improvements and get better content out there. Thanks for the advice Egol & Alan
The long list I supplied was to give an indication of what I saw when I visited the site. Since these change regularly, I included what I saw as I found them to be sending the reverse message to the story which showed the wife forgave him yet the ads encouraged flurting etc. It was just a snapshot in time to highlight my point. The righthand column now looks more on topic since your change.
I agree with Steve and Ryan, in that the site is either about the story or about the ads and at the moment it's still about the ads and Google will rank acordingly.
In webmaster tools in site configuration you can set prefered domain (if you have .co.uk and .com for the same site) and you can set the prefered local for the .com site and set locale to united kingdom. Since you will be keeping the US site and adding a new one for the uk, the .co.uk domain is automatically set to the uk and is not changable.
So, but choosing a .co.uk domain name Google does that setting for you. You should also set locale in your tage of the pages. That should make it clear to search engines that the site is designed to show to uk visitors.
It is work having standardised endings via a url rewrite or 301 redirect. If both exist Google will flag it as duplicate content, which you will see in 'html suggestions' in webmaster tools. Since it is classed as duplicate (as if different case - upper/lower) the link juice will be split between the variartions.
On thing that stands out is the 12 ads (below) that send the opposite message to the story. If you want to have articles that stand out and get return visitors, you need to have less of the ad revenue look to the site. I know the idea of having return visitors on the site is to attract adsense revenue but it has to be much more subtle to get a following.
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I really hope it is part of their plan as the do keep pushing 'improve the user experience'. How do you compete against a 10 year old site, moz DR 57? Even when it has been idle for two year it still holds position 3.
The keyphrase we are tragetting heavely still only gets us to #12 and there 1 stale and 1 dead on page 1 - doh!
I have even tried to buy the dead domain, but even the email for the owner is dead.
That was a good catch Alan and Ryan, I just looked at the Alt and Title and did not even notice the example used them in an anchor. Doh! I would only ever use them in images. Since I develop on the Microsoft platfrom using it anywhere other than img flags a syntax error.
With the recent focus on Google to reduce rank of farms and low value sites, I am interested to get SEO view on if you think Google will start devaluing stale sites. I do find it a bit frustrating that in the top 5 for my main key phrase, there is one site that has NO content just an error and another blog that has not updated content in 2 years.
How can blogs that do not blog be considered high enough value by Google to rank in the top 5?
How can sites that just return 404 or 500 for ALL their pages be even considered a site let alone rank 2nd.
I am interested so see others experiences and thoughts on 'user experience' clean ups by Google and why these types of sites get missed?
Egol you may have some insight on this: When I did a site analysis on www.onemedical.md it 301 -> www.onemedical.com -> 302 -> www.onemedical.com/sf/doctors if it detects the cookie that says I pre-selected sf on the last visit.
How would you suggest they do instead of the 302 to pass juice to the desired page sf or ny?
This is the section where the social networks are :
<ul class="aff-social"><li class="aff-twit"><a title="Follow Us On Twitter" target="_blank" href="http://twitter.com/growyourcareer">Follow Me On Twittera>li><li class="aff-fb"><a title="Find Us On Facebook" target="_blank" href="http://www.facebook.com/realestatecareers">Find me on Facebooka>li>ul>Your would addbefore the and add a class aff-plusone to the CSS stylesheet 'style.css'.But it depends on how these pages are served, as to whether you can edit this page directly or it is coming from a virtual page in a database which is most likely for a wordpress site. If in doubt, ask the designer where you can edit the site content.
Quite the opposite, these are very desirable if used for their intended purpose.
The Alt tag is for accessability handling, so it helps people with visual disabilities to understand the content of a picture.
The Title tag is used to provide tooltip information to the user when they hover over the image.
Both these enhance the user experience as thus are looked on favourably by Google.
BUT, it's an important but - seo's in the past would stuff these tags with useless spammy content. e.g. You have a automotive business so the alt tag:
'car gmh fast cars sports cars red cars porsche' that is bad.
'Our new sporty red porsche makes an easy ride through the windy roads of Denmark' - good
The title tag could say 'Porsche 911 2005 touring the roads of Denmark'
It's all about adding value to the site for the user not manipulating the search engines. So, use alt tag to describe the item in detail and the title to provide extra details. Do not have the same text in both as they have different purposes.
Hope that sheads enough light on the subject.
Shane, it tends to be the sites that manipulate the rankings (black hat) know all those tricks and if all it took was a seal from an SSL company, they would have a different one on each page. It would be surprising that the seal actually gives you page rank, it most likely does the opposite since an outbound link only passes juice to the destination and all those seals link directly to the ssl provider.
As Ryan points out contacting Verisign directly will give you some insight, they are a company built on reputation and would not say it adds Google rank when it does not. You have to consider what their product is 'trust' and if they give you false information that hurts their marketting when you discover that is not the case. They would tell you what I said in my first reply, that their seal brings customer conversions, which is ultimately what you are after.
Generally ecommerce sites exclude their ssl pages via robots.txt or nofollows so the question does not get raised. If the content on those pages is secure but not authenticated then the value is limited as it is public and open to exploit. As a developer, I have attended many seminars on this topic alone.
The rank gain you get is secondary (from more tweets, blog links etc because people trust your site and like it) rather than a direct corelation.
Read the paper (relevant section below) from the link:
If I use SSL on my pages, will we be PageRank'd higher then non-ssl pages? So far, there is NO conclusive proof that a SSL site will get higher Google/MSN/Yahoo search rank listing compared to the same site which is unencrypted. In fact there seems to be no positive or negative result if you have your pages encrypted or not. This is because the quality of the data on the site is not validated by SSL, only that the certificate is independently verified. The most important factor in Google's PageRank for example is the amount of high quality sites linking back to your site. The idea being that if a site like Digg or CNN link to your site then your page rank will increase because their page rank is high. This is completely independent of whether your page is encrypted or not.
I do tend to watch my main keyword as it teaters between 10-12 as page 1 tends to create large spikes in traffic for us, but I'm not an SEO, just a developer keen to keep a site on page 1. The rest of the keyword, I just watch the summary.
Googles view is:
301 when you can and canonical when you do not have direct server access to do a 301. But, I would and do, have both to ensure both case and endings are correct for the landing page. i.e. someone might tweet http://www.funderstanding.com/V2/Coaster instead of the lowercase version and google will report dupe content if it is not dealt with.
<link href="http://www.funderstanding.com/content" rel="canonical"> is the only one that does not pint to the old site from those you mentioned. With links from that page it may find enough of the old site to produce the dupes.
You can fix it and then request a crawl
Thanks all, I hoped it would be fine and I will proceed with your advice.
The fact that the site you are talking about is selling link will mean they will probably be hit by the next round of Panda updates, so save your money and hire a marketting person to create you some great content that people will want to tweet about or post links to.
If you look at the data from the last round of updates, sites droped rank upto 90% so your DA60 could become a DR6 and no value anyway.
Look at your top competitors and what they are doing right and do it better have a look at the current whiteboard Friday video from Rand to see how it is all changing.
By the way we are PR0 but have 8 keyphrases top 3 and 16 on page 1 which equates to a huge continual growth in traffic. We took the hard route and contribute to the industry blogs etc.
It can help your click through conversion rate if it is on the checkout page near the 'pay' button as it can build user confidence. I agree that a lot of users do not know all the safety measures developers put into a site, but if you give them a warm and fuzzy feeling when they are about to purchase and a place to check your security or privacy policy, then they are more likely to complete the sale.
I would doubt it adds rank but with Google's emphasis on usability it may be a factor on legitimising your site, especially if you have an EV SSL as the process is more rigerous to be validated.
If you have relevant links from other countries they would help your rank but with the recent Panda updates from Google, if they are spammy sites, webfarms or paid links they will hurt your rankings. We participate on blogs and provide articles internationally that are on topic which help boost our rank, we even send products to reviewers overseas for evaluation.
This one was discussed recently in another post but the bottom line is resources. There is a reaserch Tool 'Rank Tracker' that you can use daily, but 300+ keyword for each of SeoMoz's customers every day automatically would mean they would need more resources and add costs which they would have to pass on to us. Most people would probably net check daily anyway. Even Google analytics are a few days behind in their reporting.
Are the canonicals in the old site pointing to the new site? The new site one looks fine, I cannot see any links to the olds site to check.
standarised endings \ - Ok
https: rejected - OK
url match canonical and sitemap - Ok
It seems very odd.
If you are doing this at the the DNS level (i.e. CNAME) you actually want an A Record to point all the domain names to the one IP Address. You would then need to do a ReWrite to handle the 301 redirects. You would also need to ensure you verify all the domains in Google Webmaster Tools and set the prefered domain to www.mainsite.com (note you we need to use settings -> prefered domain in site configuration). I would also add a canonical meta tag to the head of each page.
Since you have the .au is you site Australia wide or international. If it is Australia wide you should have the .com.au as the main web address.
On a site I am working on we provide a landing page summary (say top 10 information snippets) and provide a link 'see more' to take viewers to a page with all the snippets.
Now those first 10 snippets will be repeated in the full list.
Is this going to be a duplicate content problem? If so, any suggestions.
Reading all the information buzzing around on Google and social markers, I would think that fewer bog entries and tweets from better sources or related sources would be better in the long run. One thing Google seems to be doing at the moment is biasing keyword searches to social metrics, if you are logged in and your network is active on the topic. We have been able to move keywords rapidly up in rank by contributing to blogs and doing guest articles in our targeted market.
With the last couple of rollouts by google to reduce rank of low quality sites, relevance of content and links is becoming more important. Rand has a slideshow that illustrates how search engines have evolved.
I noticed a lot of Adsense in prominant places on your pages, even a big banner from on-line dating. Is the site doing well with AdSense? If so, you visitors may read a little of what you offer then click through to the next site. I know if I see a site covered in ads, I am more likely to return to google and check the next option. The ads Google Adsense is applying are also quiet out of context. e.g. Imagine a big burly bikie visits your site to read about motorcycles, does he see an ad for Harley Davidson, no he is presented with ones on 'trying to conceive', how does adsense make that connection?
Also people love to see active fresh content and the dates on your entries as I click each of the top links show 2009 or 2010 articles. There is also significant time span between articles inside the one topic. As Egol says have allok at high retention sites and see what you are doing different.
If you cover such a broad range of topics, users may just be interested in the specific one they came to see.
I would also suggest to move 'recent comments' and 'recent searches' higher toward the top of the column and login further down. If you want people to click through to other article on your site then make sure they are prominent. I also see 'leave a comment' but do not see any comments just ads.
To lower bounce rate you need to
There is my quick usability study.
To quote W3C draft specification on HTML5
Attributes are placed inside the start tag, and consist of a name and a value, separated by an "=" character. The attribute value can remain unquoted if it doesn't contain spaces or any of " ' ``` = < or >. Otherwise, it has to be quoted using either single or double quotes. The value, along with the "=" character, can be omitted altogether if the value is the empty string.
The accepted convention is " but according to the standard both are supported.
P.S. Is a version of your site live, if so I would maybe like to blog about it as it is related to what we are doing in baby toddler items (looking at your avatar).
With Google's continuing focus on usability and user experience coming into their ranking algorithems more and more you would expect they would give less weight to product-feature1-feature2-feature3.com than product.com. The fact they are gearing up to show performance in analytics data suggest that usability in gaining in importance as is social significance. How many people do you think with use up most of their tweet with your url?
I agree with the above and ensureing unique anchor text and Egol where multiple pages where you can dominate several positions in search is great. We have a main keyword that we target on several pages and use anchor text that includes that word but also targets longer tail variations. e.g. word, phrase with word, elaberate on word.
The image name is different as it is late loaded by a javascript async call to fetch the image. Images are not considered as cloaking and async loads are a common practice. Since the load only seems to load an image and not text content Google would be unlikely to penalise you. But, all that javascript (19 modules) and the 36sec pageload time could cause you a performance penelty as Google introduces this new metric (they are trialing in their beta).
I would suggest you run the site through gtmetrix.com to sort out the performance issues.
Glad it is working correctly now.
If you talk to the developer, they may be able to preload the google stack for your analytics pluging to use. The problem is that the ga.js is getting accessed twice. They should have picked that up the during the development, if they had access to your webserver. I would lean on them to fix this issue. It should be a 10min fix for a js programmer.
I think is is the second link your we really after looking at your question again.