Hi Margaret. Here's the Guide on rich snippets for products: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/146750 What you'll be interested in making sure price and priceCurrency are correctly used. The snippet "priceCurrency" is, "The currency used to describe the product price, in three-letter ISO format." Cheers!
![RyanPurkey RyanPurkey](/community/q/assets/uploads/profile/1929-profileavatar-1619582383766.png)
Best posts made by RyanPurkey
-
RE: How can I change the currency Google lists my products with in the SERP?
-
RE: How can I make sure Google is crawling a link from an iframe (video)?
This post is fairly extensive in regards to your question and should give you ideas even beyond what you're asking here, http://moz.com/blog/hosting-and-embedding-for-video-seo but if you're looking for the highlight, this is still pretty applicable advice today:
Embed the content with HTML5 and JavaScript or Flash, but not an iframe
Unfortunately, Google are not very good at crawling iframes at the moment; so if you want videos to be indexed, you need to make sure you’re embedding content in an HTML5 player with Flash fallback, or a pure Flash player.
If the video is being embedded on your own site you can also create a transcription for it on the same page and then place the links in according spots. Cheers!
-
RE: Best way to find the best keywords to write Q&A
You can also install site search and look at what people are trying to find once they arrive to your site. Further, if you have profiles that are thoroughly developed you can look at the analytics to see which aspects of that are drawing the most visits for setting content creation goals when it comes to planning what to add to other profiles. Cheers!
-
RE: Does it pay to change link text internally?
Variable link text applies to your internal website pages whether from your own site or externally; however, you'll be best served by giving your most competitive terms and most important pages one relevant link from your home page. On internal pages you can link to those same pages with less competitive and semantically related keywords, but avoid overly linking to one page multiple times per page. It's also useful for the links to be in context of the rest of your site. Halogen Software does a good job of this (http://www.halogensoftware.com/) Note how in their left-hand navigation they use a contextual link and then use a nofolllow for the "Find out more..." link to the same page.
I can't really speak to the worth applied in this effort. That depends on your own ROI. But a carefully crafted site will pay long term dividends down the road, even more so as it gains external links with similar keywords.
-
RE: How to set up international SEO for english speaking countries
Without resources for multiple sites, you'll likely want to create separate folders for the regions, ex. yoursite.com/usa/, yoursite.com/uk/, yoursite.com/au/ and so on. To further guide users you could employ location based redirects to their applicable portion of the site. As far as Wordpress design goes you'll want to clearly label each section and state the the services and products being offered are (US/UK/AU) specific.
-
RE: Safely change canonical URL many times
The central idea of canonical is that it's the source while the iterations are iterations... so I'd avoid moving canonical around. What you're also is describing within your network is a little hard for me to wrap my head around. Why are sites A, B, C, and D different? Are they localized? Are they in different verticals? Are they talking to different channels or interests? If there are differences like these the content should likely be unique enough to address the different market being served by the different site.
If not selecting one as your resource center and handling campaigns as campaign variables seems like the way to go, ergo: Site A/Resources. Link from Site B = Site A/Resources?v=campaign_ids_promotions_timing_etc. Google even has a tool for doing just this: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033867. And why this is helpful here: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033863. Cheers!
-
RE: SEO'd Title Tag for Product Pricing Page with Little to No SV for Product Pricing Related Terminology
Hi Richard. One thing you could do is run a PPC campaign directed at this page using only Company Name branded terms (thus helping with a low CPC) and split test all the different titles you're considering. This way you'll find one that gits your needs as well as one that generates the best CTR based on your tests. Cheers!
-
RE: I'm seeing that open site explorer seems to do a good job analysing backlinks
It sounds like you have the skill set to be effective with Open Site Explorer, spreadsheets, and management via your CMS. The graphs and reports you mention are often handy to agencies reporting to clients that want a simple report. Since you're plugged in to the pulse of your site you don't need the extra fluff. I did recommend Zoho in another post for someone seeking out project management software, but their online docs are top notch as well. Structuring your data and projects to be shared with your internal team and targeting completion date milestones should help with what you want to achieve.
No offense taken. And that's why I answered the ROI question as I did. If you're selling large scale real estate or heavy equipment one or two sales may be all you need for the year... it's a much different answer than if you're an affiliate for elastic wristbands.
It sounds like you have a solid understanding of the business side of your business, so if you have cost effective solutions to doing what you want to do you should be fine.
-
RE: How to set up international SEO for english speaking countries
Hi Thomas. Yes, inbound links to subfolders tend to help Domain Authority rise better than those going to subdomains. Rand recently did a White Board Friday on this, found here: http://moz.com/blog/subdomains-vs-subfolders-rel-canonical-vs-301-how-to-structure-links-optimally-for-seo-whiteboard-friday. Cheers!
-
RE: Google now automatically adding (NAME).UK.COM to the end of each page title
Hello James. The current titles I'm seeing are pretty short, for example, your title on the resources page is simply, "Resources" As a general guide, consider how your title tags stand completely on their own. "Resources" is so vague that Google is adding information that--net effect--is probably helping your CTR. You can make your title tags more specific and longer and they'll either end in a ellipsis (...) or not have anything appended. Here's the Moz guide on best practices for further reading: http://moz.com/learn/seo/title-tag
-
RE: Content Delivery Network
Paulo, you'll have to test the speed of your site yourself, but you can do so at a place like: http://www.uptrends.com/aspx/free-website-server-network-monitoring-tool.aspx
It will display results from other countries and cities from around the world and help you decide whether or not you need a cdn.
-
RE: Do image links with no alt tags pass link value?
It's not really useless as there is page rank passed through most links on the web to some degree, it's just harder to classify what the image means in a keyword sense. Also, if this is a banner link, there's likely to be a redirect script or discounted link value because you're paying for the placement anyways.
If you do acquire other image links though, having the image be in a table cell with related text nearby helps, having the image and text be part of the link also heps, if the image is in a div or other markup along with related text, that helps too... Basically anything that correlates the image to some text in a common web structure. And of course, alt or title text.
-
RE: Multilingual website - Url problem (sitemap)
From their support page (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en) when you're combining region plus language you'll want to do this:
For example, you may have specific URLs for English speakers in Ireland (en-ie), Canada (en-ca), and Australia (en-au), but want all other English speakers to see your generic English (en) page, and everyone else to see the homepage. In this case you should specify the generic English-language (en) page for searchers in, say, the UK. You can annotate this cluster of pages using a Sitemap file or using HTML link tags like this:
That way you can even have a situation like nl-en or vice versa. I'd use 302s for redirecting based on conditional things like browser settings. Cheers!
-
RE: Double hyphen in URL - bad?
Or make the Keurig sessions min-value:10 every day until this is solved.
-
RE: On-Page Report Card, rel canonical
It's in the code so your developer would have to do it, from Google's Guide:
Can the link be relative or absolute?
The rel="canonical" attribute can be used with relative or absolute links, but we recommend using absolute links to minimize potential confusion or difficulties. If your document specifies a base link, any relative links will be relative to that base link.
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=139394
-
RE: What's the best strategy for reducing the number of links on a blog post?
Your domain strength is pretty high, so on your home page and top pages, those navigational links are going to be fine, but you could nofollow the bulk of them on the individual blog pages.
You already have the tweet and facebook like buttons that are getting use, but you might be able to add some easy to copy & paste code, similar to a badge, to try and boost inbound links (http://www.seomoz.org/dp/badges). Also, since you have so much content you could try getting a Polyvore-like feature added to your site that helps people make a collage from the different wedding details they like. (http://www.polyvore.com/).
I didn't dig too deeply so these are just off-the-cuff examples, but hopefully enough to spark some ideas for you.
-
RE: Do "Sponsored Posts" links get discounted by google?
There's a lot of shades of gray to this question. The more spam-like versions most likely would be discounted, while guest posts on strong websites would still drive link value. For example, if I wrote an article or story that was picked up by the mainstream news and placed on a site like ESPN, USA Today, NYT, etc. the link in the story would be valuable.
If the site that picked up my article or story was a paid repository of low quality content then the link would likely count for much less or could possibly be considered spam if the website was considered a bad neighborhood in regards to linking.
-
RE: Awesome Ecommerce category pages
Hello. Depending on your CMS, shopping cart, or web site design software you can often find sites that are well-designed and ranking well, as one example: https://wordpress.org/showcase/tag/ecommerce/ (for Wordpress). you'll be able to find similar pages for Magento, Shopify, and others. Cheers!
-
RE: Are (ultra) flat site structures better for SEO?
I haven't seen URL structures as a deal breaker when it comes to ranking, other than when it's full of session IDs, variable strings, and is a massively large URL. Mostly I consider using folder names for tracking purposes and try to keep them short for the most part. That way I can plug in a few to analytics and have a pretty good idea of that area of the site's performance. SEOmoz wrote a great article on this type of analysis at: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/a-powerful-analytics-tip-every-website-should-employ
You could accomplish the same thing with URL naming convention, but a folder would give you a quick way to organize and allow you to use shorter URL names. Back to the SEOmoz example, their folder names are extremely short, and sacrifice keyword targeting for the sake of length. As EGOL says, links are going to matter more than the word(s) in your folder name.
-
RE: What's the best strategy for reducing the number of links on a blog post?
Hi Tait. I went through one of the blog posts with 20+ comments and saw that most of the links via user names are pretty wedding relevant--wedding photographers, profiles back to your own site, some broken links--plus they're already nofollowed already. It'd be a good idea to apply nofollow to the individual comment links as well below the user name.
If you have the SEOmoz toolbar you can turn on "Show Nofollows" here and see all the different links the 'moz is disregarding. All the "Browse Category" links at left are nofollowed, the section tags, and the function links (Add Image or Video URLs...) I think you could take a similar tack with your blog and apply any incoming link juice to a few select links that are the focus of that blog post. That way you're leaving the option open for people to be social via your blog and provide links for people to click, but the technical focus is around your target keywords.
To get more insight on where you could apply nofollows, just leave the "Show Nofollows" highlighter on in the tool bar and surf the web for a bit: competitors, blogs that would likely be in a competitive niche, etc. You should be able to get a pretty good idea fairly quickly from that exercise.
Last, coming up with hooks for people to link back in to individual blog posts would be handy as any juice coming in would then be redistributed to your most targeted links.
-
RE: Parasite Hosting
Hi Prunarevic. Can you clarify your question? I'm a bit confused about what you're asking. Typical parasite hosting is accomplished by hacking into a website or finding an openly editable portion of a website and adding content that redirects to your target page. It's not advisable, and if you break laws while hacking into someone's website it could be far more trouble than it'd ever be worth.
-
RE: Does alt tag optimization benefit search rankings (not image search) at all?
Alt tagging is good for the visually impaired, so it's partly a best practice for that reason. I'd treat readability issues the same: avoid keyword stuffing, make the alt tag something informational. If it brings about some SEO benefit because of that, great. Two birds.
-
RE: On-Page Report Card, rel canonical
Trying making the absolute URL, i.e. "http://www.mysite.com/category/9-Irons" as your href instead of "/category/9-Irons" in the rel="canonical" link tag.
-
RE: Building a link building team
Great expansion on the line of thinking from Steve here. Thumbs up. @Drew T, questions like these are the things you'll want to consider and map out for someone(s) that you task with building links. Ultimately some of the best relationships you'll cultivate online will come from more than just getting a link, but actually connecting with other people that are in your niche.
-
RE: Upper to Lower Case and Endless Redirects
Which ones are in your sitemap, uppercase or lowercase? Have you double checked any and all internal links on your site to make sure everything is lowercase? Are there other sites out there pointing to uppercase? Are you 100% certain of a complete purge?
If you are, then they should eventually stop crawling the uppercase. Still, having them crawl the upper case and receive a 301 redirect doesn't involve much bandwidth.
-
RE: How do I 301 url's with numbers in them?
Here's a solution that might work in your case, but like Steven said, hard to tell without an example: http://www.webmasterworld.com/apache/3957440.htm
-
RE: Keywords ranking on Homepage but are not mentioned.
Hi David,
Semantically related keywords are part of it, as is search intent, inbound links, semantic network relations, and general Google mojo. The logic behind it is that having the exact words on a page isn't as importnat is being a highly relevant match for the searcher's topic and intent. With the data available to Google they're pretty readily able to infer those connections.
Rand covers this in-depth during a recent Whiteboard Friday http://moz.com/blog/topic-modeling-semantic-connectivity-whiteboard-friday
-
RE: Building a link building team
Concur. Looks like a link farm and your link isn't surrounded by content so much as it's surrounded by a ton of other links. Definitely look for another solution.
-
RE: Duplicate Content Pages - A Few Queries..
I think the nav menu works well from a UX perspective so complete removal might be a little drastic. You could look into using the term 'cruise' a bit less within the menu as you get, "Africa Cruise, Alaska Cruise, Baltic Cruise... and so on," but I'd also check these changes against Google performance instead of just the Moz tool alone. If they aren't performing whatsoever and duplicate content looks to be an issue it could warrant a change.
-
RE: The impact of homepage link compared to site-wide backlinks
From a hypothetical point of view there are a lot of variables that go into this question: size of site, PA, DA, text of link, mix of links, contextual nature of the links, and so on; basically, you have a spectrum of answers depending on all the variables, where in one case a link from the home page would be massively stronger than links from all sub pages, or the inverse, where universal links would dominate one link from the home page.
-
RE: Understanding hreflang
There's actually even more scenarios to it than just that, but thankfully there's a great Moz post on this from April 2014: http://moz.com/blog/hreflang-behaviour-insights that covers your questions, and more.
To your specifics, yes a user can set a specific language and Google will try to serve results weighted to their language settings, regardless of location (the German user in the UK per your example). They can also serve German results to anyone in Germany by default (location based).
Again, the blog post breaks it all down very well. Go take a look and you should be able to parse what you need for your exact situation. Cheers!
-
RE: Links from any country?
If you're already at 90% UK traffic I'd look into diversifying and go after easy fits like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and South Africa. Is the site on a UK domain with UK hosting? If so, that will be more of a location signal than links and the major factor in UK boost. Stronger links--from anywhere--will apply to the strength of your site globally, plus the UK. I'd start going after those.
-
RE: Multilingual Sitemaps
Kate Morris wrote a nice post on how to break up sitemaps for large sites a few years ago, but it still holds true today: http://moz.com/blog/multiple-xml-sitemaps-increased-indexation-and-traffic, so following the advice there should help on your first question.
Your 301 redirect to English should probably be a 302 and based on browser language settings. Is it possible for anyone to get to a file or folder at www.example.com/whatever...?
Third, see the blog mentioned above. She gets into the details of how to create an Index format for your soon to be many sitemaps. Cheers!
-
RE: IIS Server Load for 500 Page Level 301 Redirects
Very minimal. A 301 redirect is delivered via an HTTP status code which is the first thing to get crawled on a page. there won't be any other server load other than sending it along it's way to it's new location.
Edit: To put this in other words, it's not going to be any worse than your IIS server having to deliver an additional 500 plus HTTP status code 200.
-
RE: Finacial pages markup
Hi Guy. The Corporation schema is probably best suited to markup for publicly traded companies: http://www.schema.org/Corporation as it has the following uses...
tickerSymbol: The exchange traded instrument associated with a Corporation object. The tickerSymbol is expressed as an exchange and an instrument name separated by a space character. For the exchange component of the tickerSymbol attribute, we reccommend using the controlled vocaulary of Market Identifier Codes (MIC) specified in ISO15022.
duns: The Dun & Bradstreet DUNS number for identifying an organization or business person.
legalName: The official name of the organization, e.g. the registered company name.
And a few others.
It may be a question of using some Extension markup to better indicate the nuances of stock quotes. For example, maxPrice and minPrice could conceivably be used for High and Low price quote values, while price/open could reflect Opening price quote, and price/close the close. With those you'd have the structure of an OHLC bar.
-
RE: Should I disavow spammy links that are showing in Open Site Explorer but not showing in Google Webmaster Tools?
You're welcome Sara. I'm leaning towards no penalty associated currently, but you'll want to use your judgment. Things like percentage of spam to reputable links, whether or not the client is showing up for branded searches, number of pages listed via the 'site:' search, and so on. If they don't appear to be penalized and are competing about where to be expected then these links likely aren't affecting them.
GWT doesn't guarantee showing all backlinks, so yes, it is a possibility that you won't find them there. You can use other backlink checking tools like Majestic and Ahrefs to compile an even larger list, while a site like https://www.rmoov.com/ can help with speeding up the cleaning process.
Finally, it'd probably be instructive for you to run several sites through OSE and see how much spam is common place so that you can start to get a feel for it. Much is from content scrapers that are linking unintentionally, things of that nature. Google knows to ignore them for the most part.
-
RE: Multilingual Sitemaps
Per Google's recommendations here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2620865?hl=en, yes you want to have pages correctly tagged with their alternate language translations. Per the blog I cited earlier, you'll want to organize the sitemaps to break out the 200.000 pages in a structure that's more refined than just 'all', specifically in ways that will help you find if there are problems creeping up in one section or another. Good luck!
-
RE: WordPress Pretty Permalinks vs Site Speed
I agree with Alan. Wordpress has been turned into a full blown CMS platform and is capable of handling well over 400 pages. A quick walk through some of the sites in the Wordpress Showcase (http://wordpress.org/showcase/) will reveal several sites that are well of 400/800 in page size. And if you make the pages static there are going to be even fewer server calls. Speed at that level will really be determined by server speeds, network bandwidth, connectivity, and up times. Typically a slow site can be solved by a new host not a new CMS.
-
RE: WordPress Archives
Hi Donald. Are you talking about the pages that group the older blog posts or just older blog posts themselves? If the latter keeping the links in them as standard is fine. If you're having crawl issues with your site you may consider funneling link strength down specific sections of your site. A little clarification might help with a better answer. Cheers!
-
RE: Links from other country same language
A diversity of links is a good thing actually, and one of the positives in search ranking factors. Often these types of links will fall under, "# Unique cblocks Linking to the Page" or "# of Unique IPs Linking to the Page" as they're from locations different than Switzerland / Zurich. See: http://moz.com/search-ranking-factors.
Have you been monitoring your user behavior via Analytics? Do you get a higher bounce rate of traffic when the visitor's browser is set to German? Those could be possible problems that you might want to address via translations of your page(s). Cheers!
-
RE: Content Aggregation Site: How much content per aggregated piece is too much?
There are several examples of sites that do this which you can reference: Verge, Metafilter, HuffPo, BoingBoing, etc. but as far as allowable text goes, you'll want to look up fair use rules for wherever you're located, but here's the US and Wikipedia discussion of them.
http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_useTypically, you'll want to write some surrounding editorial content (unique) and of course link back to your source. If what you're doing is purely link based, popurls.com or alltop could be good examples. Cheers!
-
RE: Canonical for stupid _GET parameters or not? [deep technical details]
First, I'd look for a way to shorten the URL via the API. There are a TON of blank variables in that URL so I'm guessing the API has everything turned on, even though you're not pulling results for all those variables. If you can, get it to return data on only the things being searched for.
Next, if the API is just too unmanageable, I'd look into building static pages that pull search results into them via an iFrame. That way you could control all the URLs and content for several hundred popular searches, have nice clean URLs, but still have the dynamic search results as a portion of the page.
A last option, if possible, would be to setup URL rewrites to change the popular searches into normal sounding pages, but that could be difficult and cause things to break if the API changes suddenly or throws more random variables into the mix.
-
RE: On Site Errors
Looking at that first example here's the meta description code:
So the Meta Description for that page is "nofollow7" plus Google is being told not to index that page. Is that supposed to be the case? If yes, you could remove the URL in GWT. If no, you'll want to get that cleaned up.
The in head css also isn't a best practice. Have you ran these through Google's Page Speed tool and other markup validators?
P.S. Meta Tags that Google Understands: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/79812
-
RE: Directories
Hi Ben. Ideally you'll want to get your links from a source that could also provide referral traffic as well, so if it's a directory that looks useful to several local businesses or specific topics, great! Same goes for a blogger that seems to be getting comments and some level of interaction on their site, excellent! In addition you'll probably find new ways of networking that older sites didn't do well early on and could target those. Working on developing the PR side of the business will go a long ways too as you'll be building relationships with people that make content on the web. Look into researching sites in other areas or other types of food service, maybe places that are highly competitive, to get an even broader idea of tactics.
What's hard to tell in just looking at the numbers is how many of those old links that seem somewhat spammy have been discounted anyways a while ago. Cheers!
-
RE: Meta-description not used at all times
Hi Fredrik. Google will pull description text from snippets throughout the page as per their documentation here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35624?rd=1. While it's a best practice to write titles and meta descriptions, that Google will use them is no guaranteed. Here' s the part pertaining to your situation:
The description attribute within the tag is a good way to provide a concise, human-readable summary of each page’s content. Google will sometimes use the meta description of a page in search results snippets, if we think it gives users a more accurate description than would be possible purely from the on-page content. Accurate meta descriptions can help improve your clickthrough; here are some guidelines for properly using the meta description.
Cheers!
-
RE: Canonical for stupid _GET parameters or not? [deep technical details]
Also, here's a blog post from SEOmoz discussing the idea of Google, internal search results pages, and thin content: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/fat-pandas-and-thin-content
"Google has often taken a dim view of internal search results (sometimes called “search within search”, although that term has also been applied to Google’s direct internal search boxes). Essentially, they don’t want people to jump from their search results to yours – they want search users to reach specific, actionable information.
While Google certainly has their own self-interest in mind in some of these cases, it’s true that internal search can create tons of near duplicates, once you tie in filters, sorts, and pagination. It’s also arguable that these pages create a poor search experience for Google users.
The Solution
This can be a tricky situation. On the one hand, if you have clear conceptual duplicates, like search sorts, you should consider blocking or NOINDEXing them. Having the ascending and descending version of a search page in the Google index is almost always low value.
Likewise, filters and tags can often create low-value paths to near duplicates.
Search pagination is a difficult issue and beyond the scope of this post, although I’m often in favor of NOINDEXing pages 2+ of search results. They tend to convert poorly and often look like duplicates." -
RE: Advice for grouping short content briefs?
Hi Allison. I think your new format is fine as your older format seems to be similar length when you consider the amount that gets cut-off by the membership login. Here's how the combined page looks in Google's cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:BLtwig_9MFsJ:www.chemengonline.com/november-chementator-briefs-5/&hl=en&gl=mx&strip=1
With separate briefs you'll be able to title and describe each one more accurately. Whether that impacts your business model is larger question. Cheers!
-
RE: Are "Redirect 303 & Iframe" types of backlinks?
Mostly no on iFrames, or not in a reliable way. Redirect 303 is more uncommon, but similar to a 302. Either one is not the way to permanently send old content to new. Google has a guide on redirection here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93633, and iFrames here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/34445. Cheers!
-
RE: Large sites linking to us in their menu
This doesn't look like a manipulative or paid link on your part, but is in the correct section on a relevant domain and in proximity to other forums on the same topic. It should be fine.
Are you trying to deal with a manual action in your GWT account?