Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Screenshot added, thanks for the response

Hi all

We configured a standard goal in Analytics that is triggered on an event. I have seen cases where the number of triggered events is larger than the goal completions due to limitations to how many times the same goal can be fulfilled within the same session, BUT in this case we got the opposite problem. We got more Goal Completions than we got events that is supposed to trigger the goal.

Now also added a screenshot of how the goal is configured. As you can see its just configured to use the Category name of the event. Nothing fancy at all.

How can that be possible? Again, more goal completions than events that is suppose to trigger it?

Grateful for any help

Fredrik

AclZDUO

Hi all

We are marketing an e-commerce site and seem to have a weird issue. For some reason the clearly specified meta description is not being used in the SERPs. Had a look in the source but all tags seems to be there.

The site can be found here:
www.bangerhead.se

A sample search in Google that uses the wrong info in the SERP:
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&rlz=1C5CHFA_enSE548SE548&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#safe=off&q=bangerhead

Any ideas to why this is? Grateful for any inputHave a nice day

Fredrik

Hi

I got good news and I got bad news for you:

Good news: your not nuts. The text is visually there.
Bad news: the text is actually not in the original source code since its loaded with AJAX.

An easy way to check this is to do a view source on the page. Dependent on browser the function is in different places but in Google Chrome its under View -> Developer -> View source. When your seeing the source code try to do a search and you see that the word "handbook" is not there.

So what does this mean: 1. It means that the moz tool can not handle this AJAX way of making the page. 2. It could also mean that Google can not index the site.

Good look forward

Fredrik

Hi

In my opinion the logo should not contain H1 or H2 tags, if it does not contain indexable text such as slogan, byline etc.

H1 should be used for the most important heading comparable to how its used in a word document. This should also be your main heading. Also there should be only one H1 on a page.

H1 should be used for the second most important heading comparable to how its used as a subheading in a word document. This should also be your main heading. There could then be multiple H2s on a page since they describe sub content.

You can find more useful information about this and other SEO challenges in the great Moz Guide.

Hope this answers you question.

Have a great day

Fredrik

Forget to mention, this has been discussed before in this thread:
http://moz.com/community/q/visitsweden-indexing-error

Unfortunately those suggestions did not seem to solve the issue.

Hi

Been building and optimising sites for 15 years and this is one of the hardest problems I ever came across. So any help would be very much appreciated. Here we go:

For some mysterious reason this URL http://weekend.visitsweden.com/no/ has been indexed as http://weekend.visitsweden.com even if we tried all we can to correct it. The problem is that since the latter points to the first URL with a 301 it refuses to get any page rank. Also it does not get visible in Google at all.

Just a recap of what we have tried so far:

• Add site to webmaster tools
• Add proper sitemap.xml
• Add 301 redirect to the correct URL

An easy way to locate the problem is to search for the main content of the site. As you can see it returns the wrong URL and the correct URL does not even get listed.

Again, any help is very much appreciated.

Kind regards

Fredrik

Hi

Again thanks for your quick response. Unfortunately we still have the same issue even though we have performed many checks and tests. Any more smart ideas on how this can be corrected?

Regards

Fredrik

Hi again

The weirdest this is that it does not seem to update. When I do a site:weekend.visitsweden.com/no/ the page is still nowhere to be found.

https://www.google.no/?gws_rd=ssl#q=site:weekend.visitsweden.com%2Fno%2F

Any ideas?

Again thanks

Fredrik

Thanks for the great input! Have now tried to do the changes as per your suggestion.

Does it look better now?

Again thanks

Fredrik

Hi all

Just got a new site up about weekend travel for VisitSweden, the official tourism office of Sweden. Everything went just fine except som issues with indexing.

The site can be found here at weekend.visitsweden.com/no/

For some weird reason the "frontpage" of the site does not get indexed. What I have done myself to find the issue:

• Added sitemaps.xml
• Configured and added site to webmaster tools
• Checked 301s so they are not faulty

By doing a simple site:weekend.visitsweden.com/no/ you can see that the frontpage is simple not in the index. Also by doing a cache:weekend.visitsweden.com/no/ I see that Google tries to index the page without the trailing /no/ for some reason.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://weekend.visitsweden.com/no/

Any smart ideas to get this fixed or where to start looking?

All help greatly appreciated

Kind regards

Fredrik

Having the same WHOIS info as contact info on the site would possible be a sign of authenticity i guess? More on topic here:

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-question-do-whois-privacy-services-harm-seo/5874/

Thanks for great input.

What about the ownership info? I heard that its a plus if contact details and info match that of the website. Any ideas on that?

Fredrik

Hi

How important is it to configure your domain info in the same way as the contact info of your website? I heard having a long expiry date on the domain and having proper contact info helps create domain trust?

Any tips on this? Info on how to set this up in an optimal way?

Thanks in advance

Fredrik

We are actually using events as the basis for the goals. But we use the calcuations for conversions and conversion value as basis for many reports so its important that this value is correct. True, we can count the events, that is actually what we do now, manually in excel.

Have you by any chance seen any articles or outher sources with info about it being possible?

There are quite a few articles stating the opposite. Like this one:

• Each conversion goal can only be triggered once per user session.  It makes sense, since you don’t want one person to skew your conversion data by reaching a single goal multiple times in a visit.  If you need to know the exact count, then use event tracking.

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/a-beginners-guide-to-conversion-goals-in-google-analytics/42558/

Thanks for the great input and giving us a chance of hope

Fredrik

Hi folks

I read from various sources that if you setup goals in Google Analytics each of these goals can only be fulfilled once per visit. Also some sources suggesting that only one goal from each goal group can be fulfilled per visit.

On our site we have a goal for external links since this provides value to partners. Some users do open an external link in a new tab, then come back to the main site. Any further goal completions would then not get tracked. Since we apply a result based payment model for our work this means we are literally loosing money.

Anyone has official info from Google on this? Can it be configured? How long is a visit?

Thanks a million and have a great day.

Fredrik

Hi guys

Great suggestions and great comments. Think I got the most sorted out now.

BUT, got one major issue left:

As you can see here: http://www.citcop.se/varmepumpar-luft-luft the links to the actual product is not the same as the canonical URL for it?

Now the links on this page are like:

http://www.citcop.se/varmepumpar-luft-luft/panasonic-nordic-ce9nke-5-0kw

When they really should be(this is also the canonical url):

http://www.citcop.se/panasonic-nordic-ce9nke-5-0kw

I have setup magento to use a flat catalog structure but seems like the links in menus etc are still pointing to a URL using the complete path with category and all.

Any ideas how to get all links to a product to be the same?

Thanks

F

Hi all

We got some serious issues with duplicate content on a Magento site that we are marketing.

For example:

http://www.citcop.se/varmepumpar-luft-luft/panasonic/panasonic-nordic-ce9nke-5-0kw

http://www.citcop.se/panasonic/panasonic-nordic-ce9nke-5-0kw

http://www.citcop.se/panasonic-nordic-ce9nke-5-0kw

All of the above seem to work just fine as it is now but since they are excatly the same product they should ofcourse do a 301 redirect to the main page.

Any ideas on how to sort this out in Magnto without having to resort to manual work in .htaccess?

Have a great day

Fredrik

Hi all

I guess we all know what happend to Raven, loosing its AdWords API and being forced into removing SERP tracking. If not, see more here:

http://raventools.com/blog/scraped-data-serp-tracker/

What is SEOMOZ stand on this? Will you continue to provide SERP tracking?

Kind regards

Fredrik

Hi

Hard to tell if those links could be bad for you without seeing them.

I would suggest:

Sign up for webmaster tools, they now offer warnings for unnatural links.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/googles-unnatural-links-warnings

IF you get warnings in webmastertools then you could consider using the new Disawow tool.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/googles-disavow-tool-take-a-deep-breath

Hope this helps

Fredrik

Hi

I fully agree with you, there is no need to put a "fake" H1 instead of the logo. Just add the logo, and if you want you can add the company name in both the filename and the alt text of that image.

H1 is for marking the most important heading of the page. Think of it as you would structure the headings in a school paper. H1 would then represent a very important section. But after all the headings are for the user to understand, not the bots indexing the site.

So all in all, I think you already knew the answer to this one

Fredrik

Thanks

Learned the hard way when it was all too late

Fredrik

Hi

Having keywords in the domain name can help you rank for this, not as much as it used to help but still some.

You should also think about how relevant the domain is for the users, does it connect to the overall scope of the site?

If you are to use SSL on your domain some companies might refuse u a certificate if you are using brandnames in the domain. Sounds far fetched but happend to me a few times.

Hope this could help you out?

Kind regards

Fredrik

Hi Handcrafter

I often get this questions from my clients when they want to start a blog. As I see it there are 3 alternatives.

New domain

We typically recommend this option when the blog might loose credibility by being on the main company domain. You also might want to have a different style and tone on the blog. Say a bank wants to start a personal finance blog for teens. The language and tone used here might not reflect the values and tonality used on the main bank website. There could also be a value in this due to the possibility of linking in a smart way between the two domains.

Good: Freedom in the way you communicate, links between the two domains
Bad: Takes long time to get pagerank and domainrank, confusing message to the user

Subfolder

Using a subfolder is the direct opposite to using a separate domain. Its integrated with the site and will be perceived by the users as part of the site. In my opinion style and language should, at least partly, match that of the main website. Search engines will most likely also see the blog as part of the site. Dependent on the domainrank of the main site it might be easier to get a good pagerank for the blog in a short amount of time.

Good: Integrated to the site, one channel, easier to rank on
Bad: har to use different tonality. Can be tricky to use different CMS or publishing tool.

Subdomain

Using a subdomain can be seen as a mix of the both above. It allows for a different technical setup and a somewhat different style and tone. If you have a strong main domain you will have an easier time to rank compared to a completely new domain.

Good: can use different technical setup, somewhat easier to rank on
Bad: Not as integrated as a subfolder, not as free as a new domain

Normally we advise our client to use a subfolder due to the SEO benefits. But only when:

1. Their technical environment can handle it
2. The blog does not use credibility by living inside the main site
3. Style and tonality is somewhat the same
4. The main domain has an already established domainrank

You mention security concerns as your main reason against using a subfolder.

Maybe you can elaborate on this a bit?

Have a great day

Fredrik

PS you can find a bit further info here:

http://www.michielgaasterland.com/blogging/integrating-your-blog-with-your-main-website-choose-subdomain-or-subdirectory/

Hard to say without knowing the domain or the keyword.

Fredrik

Actually, one aspect that we forgot to mention was that the real link value is not from the press release. The real value is if any of the online blogs or newspapers picks up the story and runs it, hopefully with a link.

http://www.prweb.com/ is said to reach many "real" writers. Have not used it myself though.

If you use it, please share your experiences.

Fredrik

I think its hard to say exactly what is the ONE best site for this. It also depends on what kind of products you have.

One of the biggest problems is that your press release lives for a very short time on for example a frontpage. Then where does it go? Does it have a dedicated URL?

We have been using www.mynewsdesk.com, there you get your profile page and that has time to collect some pagrank. You can see the below example of one of our clients:

http://www.mynewsdesk.com/se/pressroom/lmg

If you have a look at that in OpenSiteExplorer you can se that the pagerank is atleast decent.

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mynewsdesk.com%2Fse%2Fpressroom%2Flmg

Hi Claudio

Some PR sites are great and some not so great. You have to check the domain and pagerank of the page where your release will be posted. Will it also rotate and be shown on frontpage? How long? Also make sure you have proper links back to your landingpage and make sure they are not put as nofollow.

You can use www.opensiteexplorer.org to investigate the pageranks etc

Here is also a list of free PR sites:

1. Free-Press-Release.com
2. PRLog.org
3. ClickPress.com
4. NewswireToday.com
5. Express-Press-Release.net
6. Free-Press-Release-Center.info
7. TheOpenPress.com
8. PressMethod.com
9. PressBox.co.uk
10. BusinessServicesuk

Good luck

Fredrik

I dont think the problem is the https vs http here.

Maybe you could share one of the erros with me?

Fredrik

HI Chris

We have been using CDN networds to achieve this for many years and have not seen any issues with duplicate content. As I understand it, one piece of content should only exists at one URL. So if the same URL is served from a number of different IPs there should be no issues with duplicate content.

To make absolutely sure you can keep an eye on warnings in Google Webmaster tools and implement canonical tags.

Hope this helped to shed some light on this issue.

Have a great day

Fredrik

Glad we could help

Fredrik

PS Dont forget to mark as answered

Hi Peter

When you say you got the message  'Duplicate Page Content', is this from Google Webmaster Tools?

You mention an old page? Is that still active under different domain?

To avoid the duplicate content error you need to make sure that there is only ONE url for each piece of content. There are many ways of achieving this and here I only suggest a few:

Canonical tags

Try to use Canonical tags where ever you can. This can be implemented on both versions. The orgininal version should have tags pointing to itself. More info on excatly how to do this here:

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/canonicalization

Remove old site from index

Make sure the old system is no longer indexed. Do this using either robots.txt or add a no index no follow metatag.

More on robots.txt here:

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/robotst.xt

301 redirects

Try to use 301 redirects pointing any old page to the new page. You can also use this to point non www pages to always use www or the other way around. If you have old pages on a different system make sure these are not online. If they are still active on different domain, make sure to make 301 redirects to the new page.

More on this here:

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection

You can find more info on how to avoid this error on this post:

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/duplicate-content

Good luck and hope these tips can help you get started.

Fredrik

Hi Chandana

There are a few major things to consider when updating the site:

**Keep same URLs **

Maybe the single most important factor is to not change allready ranking URLs. I do understand that changing the look of the site might require this, but you should at least do your absolute best not to change them. Also if you have a mutlilevel structure such as www.example.com/category/page be very careful changing the category since that will mean you also change all subpages.

I would check pagerank and incoming traffic from search for each of the pages, then make a note on what pages are most important. You can use www.opensiteexplorer.org and Google Analytics for this.

301 redirects

If you have to change your URL structure then make sure you do proper 301 redirects to the new URLs. This will not prevent you from loosing ranking on the page but will help you recover faster.

On-page SEO

Make sure your new site is optimized as far as possible for on-page SEO. Before you move, test the old page, then make sure the new page is atleast as good. Maybe also a good idea to look at headings and try to follow the same structure. Use the quite excellent tool from SEOMoz for this. You should find it here: http://www.seomoz.org/tools

Internal Link structure

This is not all that easy but try to look at how your internal link structure looks at the old site and move this to the new site. What footer links you got? What keywords you use in the links? What menus you use? If your new site is going for a dropdown menu this typically adds a massive amount of links to your site. This might be important.

Be careful

When making new sites its easy to get too busy designing and building the new site. Just play it cool and make sure not to make any mistakes such as leaving a no index tag or forgetting to remove a default robots.txt. Take an extra day to go through it all.

Spot mistakes as quick as you can

Make sure to use Google Webmastertools and Analytics to spot any problems and correct them as fast as you can.

Hope these simple tips helps you get going with your move.

Good luck and hope your new site turns out well.

Fredrik

Hi Carl

To answer your question I would need to have a look at the site. If the content hidden behind the read more button is in the HTML and then hidden until Read more is clicked its probably gonna get indexed. To be sure you can hide it in the CSS instead of in the HTML. If the text is added from inside the javascript and injected into the DOM its probably not going to get indexed.

You can also use this free tool to see the page as Google sees it:

http://www.seobrowser.com/ (Use the simple version its free)

Your second questions concerning if you would be penalised for it depends on just what is behind that Read more button? If its information that is valid to the user and a natural part of the site you should have no problem.

Hope this helps you on the way'

Have a great day

Fredrik

Hi David

How long have you had the robots.txt file? Preventeing Google from indexing the page would not automatically remove it if its already indexed. That would take some time.

You could try using the removal tool:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals

If its urgent you could check the header and do a 301 redirect if the user comes from Google. But I think it should sort itself out within not too long.

Fredrik

Hi Ron

As Paul stated there are many ways of doing sliders. Most of the new sliders out there do work with JavaScript but often used already loaded dom elements for the slides. That means that the actual content is in the HTML and the JavaScript is used to animate or style them. This content would then be indexed just as a normal div would.

You can also use http://www.seobrowser.com/, (simple option is free) to see the page as Google would see it. If you then can read your content it should be possible to index it.

One thing to think of is that sliders, as the name implies, often contains more than one slide. If the slider has a heading in it it might be a good thing to make the first heading H1 and secondary sliders H2. This way you can place your most important content in the first slide.

Not sure if you use Jquery but if you do http://jquerytools.org/ offer great power and flexibility. Please note that I am NOT connected to them or work for them. We have just used their scripts on variious of our projects.

I had a quick look at your example and unfortunetely that would have a very hard time getting indexed since content is in the javascript. I would consider putting all content in the HTML and then just hide and show sections using Jquery instead.

Have a great day and good luck

Fredrik

Hi again Lary

May I ask for the domain of your competitor?

Fredrik

Hi Alex

site:www.dobermandeen.co.uk seems to list all pages now? Seems like problem taken care of?

Fredrik

Hi

Your boss is right, building links is a very important task. But, as you hint at yourself, its all about doing it the correct way. So asking the community before getting started was a smart move.

I have had many clients that could not resist the temptation of buying low quality links. A few months later they are all paying the price of this by being penalised by Google. So before we get started, stay clear of buying low quality or any links for that matter.

My first move is always to identify a few competitors and see what kind of links they are getting. Chances are that if they can get links this way so can you. For this http://www.opensiteexplorer.org is a great tool. To get an instant overview what links your competitors have use these settings:

Show: followed and 301s
Links from: only external
To: pages on this root domain

This would now give you a good list of links to your competitor. Sort the list by page authority and start investigating their most valuable links.

Further ideas to how to get links could be:

• Write for other blogs, and become a regular contributor
• Create stunning content that people want to link to
• Interview someone influential

For more useful information on to proceed with links please see these resources:

http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/eight-link-building-tips-whiteboard-friday

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-noob-guide-to-link-building

Hope this is enough to get started.

Good luck and may the linkbuilding force be with you

Fredrik

Hi all

It seems Google has stepped up the "hunt" for overly SEOed websites.

What about having backlinks from SEOMOZ, would that signal to Google that you are involved in SEO and therefor it might hurt your site?

Anyone?

Thanks in advance

Fredrik Ardmar

I have excatly the same problem. Had it for a few days.

Just tried it 5 min ago, same result.

Its a great tool so would love to have it fixed

Thanks

Fredrik

Hi folks

A quick question in regards to setting up Google Analytics for a website with multiple languages on multiple domains.

The domains that needs to be tracked are:

• www.example.com -> English
• www.example.se -> Swedish
• www.example.dk -> Danish

To my best knowledge this can be acheived in Google Analytids using 3 different setups:

• Different accounts
• Different properties
• Profiles

What would you guys consider the best approach?
Pros and cons?

Have a great day

Fredrik

Hi Chaits

I generally agree with Kevin about the user experience. Its always more important to please your users than Google.

Having said that, we did experience a quite significant increase in rankings when "moving" a menu. In our case the menu was a "modern" style dropdownmenu with additional texts to describe each menu item. So when creating a landing page for the keyword "Malmo" texts about the other pages was actually located above the actual text about the keyword "Malmo".

You can see an example here:

http://www.meresverige.dk/rejser/malmo

What we did to solve the problem, and to also make a better user experience, was to load only the first level in the menu at loadtime, then fill in the actual dropdown with a simple AJAX call. This way the actual keyword content comes higher up on the page, and the landing page is not "poluted" with other keywords and texts from the menu.

Over and out

Fredrik

Not sure why it gets downloaded. Should be a perfectly normal .txt file.

I doubled checked in Google Webmaster tool and from the it says the robots.txt file can be read.

Any idea how to remove the download?

Using SiteExplorer we managed to find a large number of weird polish sites ranking to our site.

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/domains.html?page=6&scope=domain_to_page&site=www.meresverige.dk&sort=domain_authority&target=page

Actually most of them does not on purpose link to our site. They seem to be scraping content from wikipedia articles and our link happens to be in the article about Sweden.

A typical links looks like this

http://www.xn--wiey-katalog-mlc97b.kepno.pl/kalmarunionen.php?title=Sverige

Today we took a HUGE drop in rankings and I had some suggestions that these polish links might have something to do with it.

Any ideas how to solve this?

Anyone seen anything similar before?

Thanks in advance and have a great day

Fredrik

My site can be found at:

http://www.meresverige.dk/

We have all read about the dangers of over optimizing our sites. Specially in regards to the latest google update.

Every time we created a new landing-page we typically made sure that the page get an A-grade using the SEOmoz On-Page Optimization tool.

Does this mean its not a good idea to do this?

Maybe aim for a less perfect score?

Hope to hear from you

Fredrik

Darn, those links has not been built with my companies knowledge. Two quick questions:

1. Is there any way to remove them from Googles index in such away that even if they link to us they do not affect us?

2. If Google has lost trust in the domain due to these weird backlinks or any other factor, should I not be able to see that in a dropping pagerank or page authority?

Thanks for the good input

As of today we got huge drops in SERP across all our pages. We can see a drop between 10 to 80% on most of our pages on this domain:

http://www.meresverige.dk

Some background info:

• Never bought any links
• Yes, did optimize the site, but only in fair way, using SEO moz On-Page Optimization. Most pages get an A-grade
• No cloaking, all pages do look exactly same to visitors and Google

Any input on what this could be?

We are hugely grateful for any input that might lead us in the correct direction

Have a nice day

Fredrik

Yes, its google.dk that we are targeting.

Links always helps and for sure we are working on that. Its just that this particular page is ranking so far beyond the others are they don't really have more links pointing to them.