Hello Dirk & Mike

Many thanks for you advice and feedback.

Alot of my categories and landing pages are all within 2 clicks from home so that's a relief that google isn't counting the number of / in the url.

Most of my users don't come through home page as my brand is not well known etc  , I rank for my category landing pages so these are pages I really need to push hence my thoughts on reducing the number of categories on home page to only popular categories as a few of them we have never made any sales from so to push more link juice to the ones we do should help those rankings there otherwise I'm wasting potential link juice to products etc we never sell..

Many thanks for taking the time to explain.

Pete

Hi Dirk,

Many thanks for your assistance and advice. The homepage does look quite busy with alot going on, thats why I thought it would be better to have the homepaqe more about branding etc and less about the trying to get every category etc on there etc on there as we are small business, so building trust /brand etc is vital as we can't compete with the majors who seem to have an instant advantage with higher da etc ..  Most users come in on a category landing page as oppose to home to so I think that would improve user experience and make the whole thing alot less cluttered. Then I would have the room to improve other aspects such as my diy news etc.

Am I correct in assuming though by having less links , If I was to tone the homepage down , would improve the concentration of link juice to the child pages.

Also another thing I've noticed is that my level 2 categories do not sit directly underneath my level 1 categories from a URL point of view. We were wondering if this would confuse google even though we have everything in mini sitemaps etc.

Many Thanks

Pete

Hello Mozzers,

I was looking at my homepage and subsequent category landing pages on my on my eCommerce site and wondered whether I have to many internal links which could in effect be diluting link juice to much of the pages I need it to flow.

1. My homepage has 266 links of which 114 (43%) are duplicate links which seems a bit to much to me. One of my major competitors who is a national company has just launched a new site design and they are only showing popular categories on their home page although all categories are accessible from the menu navigation. They only have 123 links on their home page. I am wondering whether If I was to not show every category on my homepage as some of them we don't really have any sales from and only concerntrate on popular ones there like my competitors , then the link juice flowing downwards in the site would be concerntated as I would have less links for them to flow ?... Is that basically how it works ?

2. Is there any negatives with regards to duplicate links on either home or category landing page. We are showing both the categories as visual boxes to select and they are also as selectable links on the left of a page ? Just wondered how duplicate links would be treated?

Any thoughts greatly appreciated

thanks

Pete

Hi All,

We are a UK Company with Uk customers only and use CloudFlare CND. Our Site is hosted by a UK company with servers here but from looking online and checking where my site is hosted etc etc , some sites are telling me the name of our UK Hosted company and other sites are telling me my site is hosted in San Fran (USA) , where I presume the Cloudflare is based.

I know Cloudflare has a couple of servers in the UK it uses but given all my customers are UK based ,I don't want this is affect rankings etc , as I thought it was a ranking benefit to be hosted in the country you are based.

Is there any issue with this and should I change or is google clever enough to know so i shouldn't worry.

thanks

Pet

Hi,

Just a quick query regarding the "talk about Google will not longer index click to expand content". We use this method all over our newly designed eCommerce site and since our penalty removal , rankings have not improved as much as I had hoped so I was wondering if you had experienced a decrease in rankings on pages that use this ?

I will probably try and experiment a some pages on my site with the click to expand removed and all content showing but it does make the pages less attractive. Also I am not sure how long I would need keep the experiment going for to see a change or not in rankings?

thanks

Peter

Many thanks Patrick,

I will take a look at the article etc.  These pages are gone and wont' be coming back , so It looks like a 410 would be fine.

Many thanks

Pete

Hi All,

We have approx 6,000 - 404 pages. These are for categories etc we don't do anymore and there is not near replacement etc so basically no reason or benefit to have them at all.

I can see in GWT , these are still being crawled/found and therefore taking up crawler bandwidth.

Our SEO agency said we should 410 these pages?.. I am wondering what the difference is and how google treats them differently ?.

Do anyone know When should you 410 pages instead of 404 ?

thanks

Pete