Questions created by panini
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Why does my 301 show the old urls with new descriptions and titles?
Hi all, We've just rebranded. The 301 appears to have worked well and moved the results and rankings onto the new domain. However a site:olddomain.com search in Google brings up about a hundred pages that have the new titles and descriptions but show the old urls - does anyone have any idea how to make the old domain disappear from the SERPS? Many thanks, Richard
Technical SEO | | panini0 -
Penguin: Recovery from Algorithm
Hi Mozzers, A quick question regarding Google Penguin recovery. A domain I have was hit by Penguin and we got a message in Webmaster Tools. We went to work fixing links we thought were most harmful, documented the evidence and did a reconsideration request. Google's reply was "No manual spam actions found". If reconsideration requests aren't the way to go then of course I will continue to build good natural links. But if I remove more links which I consider to be harmful will I ever know if the penalty is removed? Is there a point at which the algorithm would remove the penalty and inform me? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | panini0 -
Google Analytics Site Search to new sub-domain
Hi Mozzers, I'm setting up Google's Site Search on a website. However this isn't for search terms, this will be for people filling in a form and using the POST action to land on a results page. This is similar to what is outlined at http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1012264 ('<a class="zippy zippy-collapse">Setting Up Site Search for POST-Based Search Engines').</a> However my approach is different as my results appear on a sub-domain of the top level domain. Eg.. user is on www.domain.com/page.php user fills in form submits user gets taken to results.domain.com/results.php The issue is with the suggested code provided by Google as copied below.. Firstly, I don't use query strings on my results page so I would have to create an artificial page which shouldn't be a problem. But what I don't know is how the tracking will work across a sub-domain without the _gaq.push(['_setDomainName', '.domain.com']); code. Can this be added in? Can I also add Custom Variables? Does anyone have experience of using Site Search across a sub-domain perhaps to track quote form values? Many thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | panini0 -
Multiple domains to one payment sub-domain in Google Analytics
Hi Mozzers, I have a series of sites (~25) that are all regional e-commerce sites with the same URL structure eg. www.[region]-product.com as well as a 'master' site (eg www.product.com). I also have a single Adwords PPC account which point to all of the regional sites as well as the master site. As part of the payment/checkout process you only ever get taken to a sub domain of the master site (eg payment.product.com). My question is: Is it wise to use the single PPC Adwords account to set up an Analytics account under which I list all of the regional sites and the master site? Once that's done I'm not entirely sure how I can track sales from a regional site to the payment process of the master site and have sales correctly assigned to the right domain. On the payment process I can only use one site ID tracking code so I'm not even sure I can correctly assign a transaction to a single site if multiple sites use the same payment pages. Example: Visit to region-product.com > Quote form submitted to payment.product.com > Payment completed on payment.product.com > Sale is assigned to which domain? Can anyone who understands what I'm trying to achieve comment on the plausibility of this? Many many thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | panini0 -
Tracking competitors in search engines
Hi Mozzers, I'm using Advanced Web Rankings (AWR) to track my site and a number of competitors in Google - seeing how rankings and brand visibility change from week to week. I didn't set this up from scratch and I'm worrying with all of the recent algorithm changes that I might well be tracking the wrong competitors. Is there a tool or methodology I can use to find the biggest players in the market? I'm in the travel market so there's lots of choice and I track the large sites but want to be sure I'm aware of smaller/mid-sized sites gaining visibility without me tracking them via a platform like AWR. Many thanks!
Competitive Research | | panini0 -
How many pages to 301 Redirect
Hi Mozzers, My site has 11,200 pages indexed in Google and I'm looking to remove some of the lesser content which should probably have been picked up by Panda. However these pages work out to about 1,100 in total and I'm not sure whether to remove these bit by bit or just do it in one fell swoop? Does Google not like a site's indexed pages fluctuating too quickly? Are there any other considerations I should be aware of? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | panini0 -
Infographic Outreach
Hi Mozzers, I'm in the process of finalising a design for an infographic to be hosted on the blog section of our travel website. The topic of the infographic is Olympics based - 150 days to go! - so it should appeal to a fairly broad audience. Aside from targetting some of the official and non-official Olympic sites that might want to link to us or Retweet us I'm trying to think of some ideas that will give our infographic some legs. I do plan to target sites that have previously posted infographics on the same subject as they're more likely to host one again. Watching Tom Critchlow's Outreach for Linkbuilding is giving me some ideas but I still feel I'm missing something considerable that could really benefit. Any outreach ideas I've completely missed? Thanks!
Social Media | | panini0 -
Googlebot crawling partial URLs
Hi guys, I've checked my email this morning and I've got a number of 404 errors over the weekend where Google has tried to crawl some of my existing pages but not found the full URL. Instead of hitting 'domain.com/folder/complete-pagename.php' it's hit 'domain.com/folder/comp'. This is definitely Googlebot/2.1; http://www.google.com/bot.html (66.249.72.53) but I can't find where it would have found only the partial URL. It certainly wasn't on the domain it's crawling and I can't find any links from external sites pointing to us with the incorrect URL. GoogleBot is doing the same thing across a single domain but in different sub-folders. Having checked Webmaster Tools there aren't any hard 404s and the soft ones aren't related and haven't occured since August. I'm really confused as to how this is happening.. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | panini0 -
Rel canonical with index follow on query string URLs
Hi guys, Quick question regarding the rel canonical tag. I have lots of links pointing at me with query strings and previously used some code to determine if query strings were in the URL and if they were then not to index that page. If there weren't query strings then the page would be indexed and followed. I assume I can now use the rel canonical tag on each of these pages so the value goes to the proper URL minus any query string. However do I need to have the rel canonical tag above the index, follow tag on the page? So URL is site.com/page.html?ref=ABC meta robots is "index, follow" Rel canonical is "site.com/page.html" Does the order of the meta robots and canonical tag matter? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | panini0