Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Many Thanks Egol,

Some good ideas here which I will look to replicate

thanks

Peter

Ah , I see. Many thanks Linda

Pete

Hello All,

On our eCommerce site some products have additional information which we currently show via a PDF link next to the product.

I am thinking, is it more beneficial from an SEO point of view , If I was to put this additional pdf information to a webpage and have a link going from the product to this .

From what I read, google cannot read contents of pdfs so if I was to have this as webpage via a link , then the product page would get more keywords and strength around it which would help improve it's seo etc.

Just wondered if this is the best way forward or not ?

thanks

Peter

Hi All,

I have a number of branches as we have separate branch pages and separate google local listings for these. I have been trying to keep them in consistent for citation purposes but google keeps trying to tweak the address in the local listings.

Sometimes for example , google is trying to remove the premises number from the Road e.g  78 Doncaster Road is the actual branch address but google local business wants it as Doncaster Road,

I also see Google is wanting to sometimes remove the locality name etc?..

Also If the local listing has a county ( in America - you would have State) , google is sometimes wanting to remove this add United Kingdom in Country instead ?.

Is this a problem and how to deal with it as I think this is obviously impacting my local rankings?.

If i approve all these changes then do I need update all my citations and page addresses all the time ?

Or can I just leave the suggested "Update" or overwrite googles suggestion with what I had originally.

Does anyone else have this problem ?

thanks

pete

Hi Monica,

The pages do have the same information and topic as the reason I use Pagination is that I have too many products in the same category to show on one page,so its there to tell Google that Page 2 ,3,4 etc is an extension of Page 1 along with my View All page

The only differences I can put in the H1 , H2 tag would really be synonymys or alternative keyword phrases. On page content would be same though, as I can't really write about the same set of products many different ways for the 2nd, 3rd , 4th pages etc.

Would that be okay ?

thanks

Pete

Hi All,

I use pagination (Rel=Prev , Rel=Next) and a canconical tag on my paginated pages and also on my View All page to point to my root page (Page 1).

My thoughts are am I missing a trick by having the same H1 and H2 tag on each of my paginated pages ?

Should I having different ones on say Page 2, 3,4 and view all , to give the Collective Page better SEO .

Just wondered what peoples thoughts here were ?.

thanks

Pete

Hi Monica,

Many thanks . OK cool

Will do

Pete

Many thanks Ryan , Much appreciated

Pete

Many thanks Phillip

Pete

Hello All,

On my ecommerce landing pages, I currently have links to my products as H3 Tags.

I also have useful guides displayed on the page with links useful articles we have written (they currently go to my news section). I am wondering if I should put those article links as additional H3 tags as well for added seo benefit  or do I have to many tags as it is ?.

A link to my Landing Page I am talking about is - http://goo.gl/h838RW

Screenshot of my h1-h6 tags - http://imgur.com/hLtX0n7

I enclose screenshot my guides and also of my H1-H6 tags.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

thanks

Peter

Hello all,

I have 2 301 redirects on my some of my landing pages and wondering if this will cause me serious issues.

I first did 301 directs across the whole website as we redid our url structure a couple of months ago.

We also has location specific landing pages on our categories but due to thin/duplicate content , we have got rid of these by doing 301's back to the main category pages. We do have physical branches at these locations but given that we didnt get much traffic for those specific categories at those locations and the fact that we cannot write thousands of pages of unique content content , we did 301's.

Is this going to cause me issues. I would have thought that 301's drop out of serps ? so is this is an issue than it would only be a temporary one ?.. Or should I have 404'd the location category pages instead.

Any advice greatly appreciated.

thanks

Peter

Many thanks All

Pete

Hello All,

We are looking at our internal links and most of them say "More" or "View All"

The "more" anchor Text links - are usually positioned on the Body Content as we only display a portion of the content and then the user clicks more to see all the content ? - Should we be changing the "More" Text to something more keyword /phrase friendly i.e " more information about carpet cleaning" or "more information on Tool hire"  or would that be deemed as spammy ?

thanks

Peter

Hi All,

Screaming frog has identified that we have a few H2 tags on our pages , although we only have 1 H1 tag. We have numerous H3,H4's etc.

I am wondering, is it good SEO to have only 1 H2 tag like with H1 tag or can you have more ?

thanks

Peter

Dear All,

We have an xml and image site map but we currently don't have a separate GEO Site Map / map files for our branches.

I am wondering if such a thing exists and if so , if this something that we should be doing to help our branches rank locally on google maps etc. We have google local listings for our branches and we already do schema.org for our branches.

Any thoughts on this would be appreciated.

thanks

Peter

Hello Ryan,

Many thanks for taking the time to answer this. I will give that go .

Peter

Hello All,

I have an eCommerce site and have implemented the use rel="prev"  and rel="next" for Page Pagination. However, we also have a View All which shows all the products but we currently don't  have a canonical tag pointing to this as I don't believe showing the user a page with shed loads of products on it is actually a good user experience so we havent done anything with this page.

I have a sample url from one of our categories which may help - http://goo.gl/9LPDOZ

This is obviously causing me duplication issues as well .

Also , the main category pages has historically been the pages which ranks better as opposed to Page 2, Page 3 etc etc.

I am wondering what I should do about the View All Page and has anyone else had this same issue and how did they deal with it. Do we just get rid of the View All even though Google says it prefers you to have it ?

I also want to concentrate my link juice on the main category pages as opposed being diluted between all my paginated pages ? - Does anyone have any tips on how to best do this and have you seen any ranking improvement from this ?

Any ideas greatly appreciated.

thanks

Peter

Hello Monica,

Many thanks for your response.

We currently don't have any user generated content on these pages. It is something we are looking at doing but being a tool rental business , reviews is something, I have found that the industry (my competitors etc) have previously stayed aways from. Thoughts, being that most people who give a review with regards to this, would tend to give a negative review as opposed to saying the carpet cleaner they rented was ace !..

We are currently spending alot of money on the location content writting, it's just with over 100 categories and so many locations, the cost of doing this for everything would be way beyond our budgets. We have like you said, picked our most  valuable locations depending on category (where we rent more of a certain product) and have written unique content for these pages.

If we Rel Canonical Tag the remaining location pages with the duplicate content, is this not going to cause problems as the main location varies category to category and these duplicate location pages still have their own NAP etc etc so , in effect I am pointing one branch page to another branch page at a different location which gets more rentals ?.. Would the location pages with the duplicate content still get affected by panda ?...

There's nothing really on the web I can find about this specific problem but I am sure , there must be loads of multiple location business who have done similar to us.

I will take a read and research on your suggestion and probably try it out for a few of them to see what happens in the rankings.

Many thanks

Pete

Hello All,

I have a eCommerce site and we operate out of mulitple locations. We currently have individual location pages for these locations against each of our many categories. However on the flip slide , this create alot of duplicate content.

All of our location pages whether unique or duplicated have a unique title Tag, H1, H2 tag , NAP and they all bring in the City Name . The content on the duplicated content also brings in the City name as well.

We have been going through our categories and writing unique content for our most popular locations to help rank on local search.

Currently I've been setting up 301 redirects for the locations in the categories with the duplicated content pointing back to the category page.

I am wondering whether the increase in number of 301's will do more harm than having many duplicate location pages ?..

I am sure my site is affected by the panda algorithm penalty(on the duplicated content issues) as a couple of years ago , this didn't matter and we ranked top 3 for pretty much for every location but now we are ranking between 8 - 20th depending on keyword.

An Alternative I thought,  may be to instead of 301 those locations pages with duplicate content, is to put No Follow tags on them instead ?...

What do you think ?.

It's not economically viable to write unique content for every location on every category and these would not only take years but would cost us far to much money. Our Site is currently approx 10,000 pages

Any thoughts on this greatly appreciated ?

thanks

Pete

I would also like to see it available in the UK as well as I don't think we have anything similar here which does this.

Peter

Many thanks for your help Laura.

That's what I was thinking so will do as you suggest.

thanks

Peter

Many thanks All

Peter

I am basically wondering , If these duplicate content pages are affecting my local rankings for pages that I do have unique content for or not ?

Yes , I understand that changing the NAP won't create a unique content page.

What I was getting at , is say for example. I have 30 location specific pages for a given category each with their own specific location friendly url.

10 location pages will have totally unique content on them with minimum 500 words of goodcontent.

20 Remaining location pages, will have the same content apart from the NAP and the main keyword phrases bought in. I know this doesn't make the content unique.

I therefore have 33% unique content, 66% duplicate content against this category for the 30 locations.  Given that I am probably getting some form of duplicate penalty , would it be better for me to 301 my pages with duplicate content back to the main category page , therefore the category will only show 10 locations ALL with unique content ?.. or can I get away with say only doing 301's on say 10 location pages, so I end up with 10 locations of unique content , 10 locations of duplicate (but with unique nap) and the last 10 locations 301 to main cateory page , therefore the ratio is 50% unique content for the category.

I am wondering if I should be getting rid of all of the pages with duplicate content in there or whether I can get away with a small percentage..And whether this is affecting my rankings on my pages which I do have unique content written for?

thanks

Peter

Hi ,

When I look at my google analytics for my UK Website, I can see alot of visits come from outside the UK , i.e Brazil and USA. Both of which give me almost 100% bounce rates from people visiting from there.

I am wondering, if google looks at bounce rates with regards to ranking factors and should I therefore block access to my site from visitors outside the UK ?... Would this help increase my rankings ?

Given that we only serve uk customers, I cant see any benefit of allowing non uk customers the ability to see the site .

what does people think ?

thanks

pete

Hello All,

I have an Ecommerce Site specializing in Hire and we have individual location pages on each of our categories for each of our depots. All these pages show the NAP of the specific branch

Given the size of our website (10K approx pages) , it's physically impossible for us to write unique content for each location against each category so what we are doing is writing unique content for our top 10 locations in a category for example , and the remaining 20 odd locations against the same category has the same content but it will bring in the location name and the individual NAP of that branch so in effect I think this thin content.

My question is , I am quite sure I we are getting some form of algorithmic penalty with regards the thin/duplicate content.  Using the example above , should we 301 redirect the 20 odd locations with the thin content , or should be say only 301 redirect 10 of them , so we in effect end up with a more 50/50 split on a category with regards to unique content on pages verses thin content for the same category. Alternatively, should we can 301 all the thin content pages so we only have 10 locations against the category and therefore 100% unique content.

I am trying to work out which would help most with regards to local rankings for my location pages.

Also , does anyone know if a thin/duplicate content penalty is site wide or can it just affect specific parts of a website.

Any advice greatly appreciated

thanks

Pete

Hello All,

We want to split up our Sitemap , currently it's almost 10K pages in one xml sitemap but we want to make it in smaller chunks splitting it by category or location or both. Ideally into 100 per sitemap is what I read is the best number to help improve indexation and seo ranking. Any thoughts on this ?

Does anyone know or any good tools out there which can assist us in doing this ?

Also  another question I have is that should we put all of our products (1250) in one site map or should this also be split up in to say products for category etc etc ?

thanks

Pete

Many thanks both

I previously had locations in these places but now we don't hence the 404's.

thanks

Peter

Hi All,

We have been streaming our site and got rid of thousands of pages for redundant locations (Basically these used to be virtual locations where we didn't have a depot although we did deliver there and most of them was duplicate/thin content etc ). Most of them have little if any link value and I didn't want to 301 all of them as we already have quite a few 301's already

We currently display a 404 page but I want to improve on this. Current 404 page is -  http://goo.gl/rFRNMt

I can get my developer to change it, so it will still be a 404 page but the user will see the relevant category page instead ?

So it will look like this -  http://goo.gl/Rc8YP8   . We could also use Java script to show the location name etc...

Would be be okay ? or would google see this as cheating.

basically I want to lower our bounce rates from these pages but still be attractive enough for the user to continue in the site and not go away.  If this is not a good idea, then any recommendations on improving our current 404 would be greatly appreciated.

thanks

Pete

Many Thanks Jeff

Much Appreciated.

Pete

Hi All,

I recently relaunched a new design on my tool hire eCommerce website and now display my products in grid form on my category landing pages as opposed to just a list view which we previously had on the old design.

My bounce rates are alot higher than they use to be and my gut instinct is telling me maybe this is wrong . I want to do some a/b testing using a list view.

My question is , previously in our list views we  just showed the images and pricing and had on page content on the bottom of the page. The user would click on the product image and they would then we taken to the product page which has the product description , t&c, etc etc..

1. If I was to do this in my a/b testing but change it so we also displayed the product descriptions as well on the category landing pages . Is there a special way to do this as in effect, we would have duplicate content as the product descriptions are also on the product page?. Does anyone have any thoughts on this as to whether its a No No from an SEO point of view ?...

Heres a short url link to one of my category pages - http://goo.gl/QJv5gw

Historically we use to rank well for the category landing pages and not for the product pages.Our Rankings are down , bounce rates are higher so I am trying to sort both. We have good content on pages etc.

Any advice greatly appreciated as always

thanks

Pete

Many thanks to everyone for their comments and help on this. I will def. take all on board and will have a read of your blog post as well Andy.

I did see lots of 500, 522 errors in GWT but that could be related to my CDN (Cloudflare) so will investigate that as well.

hopefully things will sort itself out.

Many thanks

Pete

Hi ,

We used do wedding hire aswell but we disavow those links we could not get removed and tidied up our link profile where we could. We have a few directory listings which we have kept but they are for citation purposes.

Thanks

pete

Hi All,

I've just checked my rankings and everything on my eCommerce Site has pretty much tanked really badly since my new URL structure and site redesign was put in a place 2 weeks ago.

My url structure was originally long and had underscores but we have now made it clean, shorter and use hyphens. We also have location specific pages and we have incorporated these into the new url structure.Basically it now pretty much follows the breadcrumb trail on our website.

We were originally a general online hire site but now we have become niche and only concentrating on one types of products, so we got rid of all the other categories/products and pages we do not deal with anymore.

Our Rankings issue , was only bought to light in the most recent MOZ Ranking report so it's looking site google hates our new store.

Someone mentioned the other day, that Google may have been doing a Panda/Penguin refresh last weekend, but  I am surprised to have dropped like 20 to 50 places for most of my keywords.

We have set up the 301 redirects, We have also made the site alot smaller and set up a few thousand 404's to get rid of a lot of redundant pages . We have cut down massively on the thin/duplicate content and have lots of good new content on there. We did new sitemaps , set up schema.org. , increase text to code ratio . Setup our H1-H5 tags on all our pages. made site mobile responsive.. Basically , we are trying to do everything right.

Is there anything glaringly obvious , I should be checking ?.

I attach a Short url link if anyone wants to have a quick glance- http://goo.gl/7mmEx

i.e Could it be a problem with the new urls or anything else that I should be looking at ?.. I.e how can I check to make sure the link juice is being passed on to the new url ?

Or is all this expected when doing such changes ?

Any advice greatly appreciated ..

Pete

Many thanks LindaLV

Pete

Hi All,

We implement most things on our Website that is recommended and most recently we did Schema.org. However, one area which we haven't done is fix our W3 Validation Errors.

My developer thinks they are not so as such and it's more about ticking the boxes but does anymore have any experience whereby fixing all these did actually have an SEO /Ranking Benefit ?..

Most of our URL'S are indexed and google recrawls regularly so I am not sure as to it's importance.

Also we have a mobile responsive version so I wasn't sure if it more important because of this.

From what I read, I can't see to any benefit from fixing it all but just wanted some other opinions?

thanks

Pete

Hi ,

Sorry, Do you mean using Fetch or something else ?.. We have almost 10K pages so how can I re-crawl the site in Webmasters  ?..

We have submitted new maps and I can see from the stats that Google Did crawl the site last on Friday 14th .

thanks

Pete

Hi All,

We changed out url structure on our website to both reduce both the size of our category url structure (reduce the number of layers '/ ' )  and also to replace the underscores we originally had to hyphens... We did this during a new site design. Anyway we relaunched it a week ago.

We did the 301 redirects from old to new , new site maps etc, and the latest moz ranking report is showing most of them dropping 5 to 10 positions  i.e from 3rd to 10th etc...

Is this something to be expected , and then it should recover or should this be telling me alarm bells.

I would have expected not such a negative shift in all my rankings ?..

Anyone thoughts of this would be greatly appreciated...

thanks

Pete

.

Hi Both,

many thanks for you help.

Pete

Hi ,

I have it as well. Cannot log in.

Pete

Hi All,

We upgraded our framework , relaunched our site with new url structures etc and re did our site map to Google last week. However, it's now come to light that the rel=next, rel=Prev tags we had in place on many of our pages are missing.

We are putting them back in now but my worry is , as they were previously missing when we submitted the , will I have duplicate content issues or will it resolve itself , as Google re-crawls the site over time ?..

Any advice would be greatly appreciated?

thanks

Pete

Hi All,

We have just redone a site wide url migration (from old url structure to new url structure) and set up our 301's etc but have this one issue whereby I don't know if' it's a problem of not.

We have 1 url - www.Domain.co.uk**/**  which has been set up to 301 redirect back to www.domain.co.uk

However, when I check the server response code, it comes back as 200.

So although it appears to visually 301 redirect  if I put the url in the tool bar, the status code says different.

Could this be seen as a potential duplicate home page potentially and if so , any idea how I could get around it if we can't solve the root cause of it. This is on a cake php framework,

thanks

PEte

Many thanks All. I will take your advice on board

thsnks

pete

Hi All,

I am just evaluating my title tags, H1,H2's etc and wondered in light of the google algorithm  changes over the last 12 months , we should look at more diversity as opposed to things possibly looking over optimized...

Originally (18 months ago) my Title tags considered of 2/3 keyword phrases , then I reduced this to my keyword phrase | Brand Name  but a majority of my H1's and H2's had the same keyword phrases. Historically this has served us very well and rankings for good but over the last 12 months, we were hit by panda, hummingbird etc...and which we are trying to recover from and from what I have read, the rules have changed with regards to good seo./ over optimized SEO.  We have been writting unique content , making more of our links branded etc to sort things out from that perspective but on the page stuff is just as important so I would like to get this right.

1. I am now thinking , that I may be getting penalized if my H1 and title's , H2 are the same ? and that they should be obviously related but different.

2. H2's again , need to be related but not the same as either of the above.

Is that how things should be these days ? from what I have read about this, most of the articles are not that recent so I don't what to do what is now redundant advice

Any advice greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Pete

Oh, I see. I didn't realise it was  a different bot for mobile. I've added the content to the mobile version now.

Many thanks Monica

PEte

Thanks Monica

Pete

Many thanks Gazzerman1 .

Pete

Hi All,

We updated our website with a new url structure. Apart from the root domain , everyother page is showing up in opensite explorer with a page rank 1.  Although we only went live with this yesterday, I would have thought that the 301's etc from the old urls would be coming through and the PR would show ?..

I am not familiar what to expect or what alarms bells I need to watch out for when doing this type of thing although I would probably expect a small drop in traffic ?..I don;t know what the norm is though so Any advice greatly appreciated?

thanks

PEte

Hello All,

I am just in the process of updating all my google business locations for each of my depots. I have been uploading photos but I am wondering if the file names of the photo's need to be unique for every location ?

I know I need to describe the picture in the filename so it's good use of keywords but I am wondering if google will see it as spaming if I upload the same product pictures etc to ever google business location ?

thanks

Pete

Hello Monica,

Thanks for your response. My concern was the mobile version is responsive so google only reads from htlm file and the CSS Style sheet will control what is displayed to the user. For the mobile, the on page content is not displayed as we went for more of a user experience , fast and efficient as opposed to making it content heavy etc..

I was thinking from a rankings point of view, whether it would affect mobile results if we didn't show this content, even though google will only read the main htlm file which shows the content.. I don't think it's deceptive as google will know its mobile responsive and I have seen other sites not display the content but I was wondering if I was missing a trick here.

thanks

Pete

Hello All,

We are soon to launch our new redesigned website along with a mobile responsive version but i  have noticed we currently don't include the on page Content we have on the mobile version which we have on the desktop version to help with rankings etc.

I am not sure how google does mobile research with regards to rankings. We have designed our responsive version to be as user friendly as possible at the expense of having to much clutter/content but I am wondering now , if we will rank on mobile if all our on page content isn't present.

Just wondered if we should include it at the bottom of the pages with say a "Read more"  extension to help avoid clutter?

Any advice greatly appreciated

thanks

Pete