Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi All,

My eCommerce site got hit badly with the Panda 4.0 update so we have been doing some site auditing and analysis identifying issues which need addressing.

We have thin/duplicate issues which I am quite sure was part of the reason we were affected by this even though we use rel=next and rel=prev along with having a separate view all page although we don't concanical tag to this page as I dont' think users would benefit from seeing to many items on one page.

This led me to look at our Code to Content Ratio. We have now managed to increase it from 9% to approx  18-22% on popular pages by getting rid of unnecessary code etc.

My question is , is there an ideal percentage the code to content ratio should be ?.. and what should I be aiming for ?

Also any other Panda 4.0 advice would also be appreciated

thanks

Sarah

Hello Khem,

These are actual fully operated business locations .

Yes our landing pages already show the NAP.  My query was, do I also create a link to the corresponding google places from each location landing page and visa versa ?

thanks

Sarah

Hello All,

I have an Ecommerce website with a number of different depots which customers can pick products up from. I have created a Google Places listing for each of my depots.

1. My website has a unique page for each of my Locations. Should I have a link from the individual website location pages to the corresponding Google Places Page ?..  Currently I only have a link from the Google Places page back to the website Location Page ?

2. Should the images I  have in my google Places listings contain the relevant Location name in the image file names ?

3. Is there any useful pointers for SEO tuning for google places or articles anyone could recommend ?..

thanks

Sarah

Hi All,

We have an ecommerce Website with multiple locations for our stores and we currently display separate location specific pages for the different categories and sub categories. This has helped us previously to rank well for local search in each of the areas we have a store but over the last few months since humingbird, our local rankings on some things have dip a little .

We want to implement a branch locator of some description to improve the user experience.

From looking at other websites with branch locators, they tend to a separate button/page with which you can search for a branch etc. However, they don't have location specific pages.

1. My query is should I do it so if  a user comes in on a specific category location page and follows it through to product page , then to have a tab on the product page displaying the local branch from which he can come in. My thinking here is that , is that it would help confirm my local citations and help improve local rankings. Or Should the local branch be displayed on the local category pages instead or as well ?.

2. If a user comes in from the homepage or not on a specific location page, then the branch locator will allow them to search for a specific branch.

3. Should I also put in a branch locator as a separate page or can It be in more places.

I don't want to damage anything which may have an effect on rankings due to citations and NAP on the location specific pages.

Any advice or good examples to look at would be greatly appreciated

thanks

Sarah.

Hi ,

We are currently in the process of re-developing out commerce website and I wondering should we use a CDN (content delivery nertwork) for our product images.

My category pages are currently showing approx 21 product images per page and the page speed is okay but can be better but the page size is rather large ... anything between 600kb - 1 Meg. We do optimise the images already in photoshop. We also do things like minify etc to get the pages to load as fast as possible but I think the only thing left is using a CDN but I have heard mixed reports about using this.?

We are also doing a mobile responsive version of the site to but I know that speed will be king with google and how it reflects on rankings.

Whilst I can see a CDN will improve image page load speed etc, I guess there a negative SEO impact as well as images will be stored in the cloud ?.. as opposed on to on my site/database.

Does anyone know how best to implement a CDN without impacting on SEO or know of any good SEO /implementation articles on this ?... Maybe do Ieave some images on my category pages so I can still do the alt image tags etc/ and have the remaining images on the CDN.?

Many Thanks

Sarah

Hi Peter,

Many thanks for your thoughts and taking the time to answer. Yes I have been trying to add richer content on my most popular local pages although it can be quite difficult when you have 90 odd locations , so I've done the top 25-40 depending on the category and I will remove some of the lesser popular locations for now to decrease duplicate/thin content ratio.

I agree , that the citations would be the way forward. I have started doing these as well for at least 20 locations although some don't have a link back to my local page but I believe that google is really looking for the NAP as a way of local verification as opposed to a link.

Good point regarding the .com and co.uk. These mainly go to my home page but I am looking ay my competitors,their ratio is better than mine so I will try to improve this also.

Thanks for the Miriam Ellis Article - I will study this in details. First impressions , it does look very good and has some great pointers.

One again Many thanks

Sarah

Hi All,

I have an UK tool hire eccomerce muliti location website with different locations pages for each category. My stratedgy has been to specialise on local search for each location as oppose to try and compete with highly competitive keywords on a national level.

I do have some duplicate/ thin content issues on these location pages but I've been actively writting additional unique content on these pages to address this issue which also making sure my title tags, h1 , h2 tags etc are unique for each location along with having individual google local + pages etc etc. I have never previously been affected by any duplicate contents issues and always ranked first page (mainly top 5) for most of my local keywords).

However, when google humingbird update came out , I suffered approx 25% drop in traffic and rankings. rom what I read , local search sites have suffered somewhat in this update and I did a link detox report to try and asterain toxic links etc. I found a few which I disavowled but I have had no manul penalty message in my GWT so I can only assume I was affected by an google algorithmic penalty.

From looking at opensite explorer , I can see my link ratio for my .co.uk site shows

43% .com

37% .co.uk

I am wondering if it could be this which has been the cause of my local rankings to fail ?.

Has anyone else suffered the same as I am at my witts end as to what are the likely factors which could have caused such a drop ?

Any tips, greatly appreciated. Happy to give my sites url if anyone would like to take a look ?

thanks

Sarah.

Hi All,

I have set up different Google Business Places listings for each of my locations for my business. I want each location to rank for their retrospective keywords.

So from an SEO point of view to help these rank..

When choosing Keywords/Categories for my listing , should I use my main keyword + my location

example - I have a carpet cleaner hire depot in London and I want to rank for London  so should my keyword be just carpet cleaner hire or Carpet Cleaner Hire London. My other depot is say in the location of Watford so should that listing have keywords that contain Watford in them ?.

Also - Should the description contain my localised keywords ?

I have looked around and cant' find much on this topic

Any pointers would be greatly appreciated

thanks

Sarah

I have approx. 1500 products which can be hired from 80
locations so what I have done it first split the products up into approximately 20
categories and then 8 to 10 subcategories per category and then have 80 location pages for each Category and sub category.

Each location page also have a Google Business Local listing
as well.

So , yes there is some degree of duplication as I have 20
categories x 80 cities and then least 8 Sub Categories per category x 80 cities

I have written unique content for the more popular cities on the category and sub category landing pages etc but as you can see, it would take me
years to write complete unique content everywhere… My site is currently 50K plus pages.

I can’t see any other way of doing it ?

Hello Guru's,

I have a Hire Website whereby you can rent products online.

I have created different Location pages for these which are in essence the same pages  page but with different location specific urls, title tags  , on page content etc etc. This helps me to rank for local search.

These location pages also display 20 products per page.

My question is  Should I make the ALT IMAGE TEXT location specific for each of the 20 products  . Example -  Steam Cleaner Rental in "location" or should I only amend a few of the Atl Image Texts to be location specific.

I don't want to come accross as spammy in google eyes but I also don't want to be seen as having duplicate content , images etc etc

What do you think ?

thanks

Sarah.

Dear All,

My website (a rental website where you can hire anything online) currently has approx 1/3 of it's traffic from mobile devices , ipads, iphones, blackberry , HTC etc etc.  The bounce rate is slightly higher for these at 47% but we have not optimised our site to be mobile friendly as yet.

This is something I want to do. Do we just make it fit well into a 320 pixel screen or should we do new wire frames etc and essentially make a cut down website just for mobile. One of the things I know we will do is to make it pick up someones location and retrieve results nearest to them but is there any other do's and don'ts when going down the mobile route ?. I seem to find conflicting infomation when researching this , one example is about using a different url for mobile , one site says it gets you more traffic whilst another says don't use a different url.

Also does anyone know of any good tips or sites where I can get some useful info about making the site Mobile Friendly >?

thanks

Sarah.

Hi,

If you click on Notices, it will give take me to All 10,018 of them.

You cannot click on the "Change" 255 Number next to the main notices to only see the ones that occured in the past week ?.

Notices

10,018

• Change

  255

  • When I expport this data, I get a list of All urls crawled (14,855) and there is no column to filter on to show the recent 255.* thanks* Sarah

Hi Thomas,

Our website is 60K pages approx, I know it only crawled approx 14.5K of the site but I would have hoped that the New Notices It has found would be witihn those pages and displayed at the top as being the latest issues found ?

I just don't know how I can go about getting these urls as when I export the list , the csv file is very big and not that easy to read through.

thanks

Hi,

When Seomoz crawled my site, my notices increased by 255. How can I only these affected urls ?

thanks

Sarah

My eCommerce website is seeing some rankings flucuate daily from say rank 20 to rank 130 whilst some other keywords ago up and down by as much as 40 places.

I have been putting up alot of new unique content and can see in GWT that google has been crawling my site more but given that I was affected by the google panda updates which saw a 40% drop in traffic I'm only just to recover some of it.,

i have also been trying to get rid of any poor links and our linking building is only concentrating on high quality posts and links.

I am wondering if this is the post panda update - "google dance" or is google having issues trying to work where to rank my site and possibly punish me?

thanks

Sarah.

Hi,

We have a couple of pages which have been damaged due to an SEO person we hired creating a stupid amount of bookmarks and generally poor links.

I've tried to get the links removed where I can but on most of these blogging sites there is no contact webmaster etc so I am struggling. Panda update as also affected traffic by about 35%.

My question is , should I consider creating new urls for the "damaged " pages and then doing 301 redirects to them from the damaged page to the new page. Then start to build up good links to the new page whilst google should de-index the old pages over a couple of months ?.

Just at my witts end how to get rid of these blogging rubbish etc etc.

Thanks

Sarah.

You could always try Copyscape which will show you if you put in both urls.

Dear All,

I have been looking at GWT Crawl Stats and wondering how should I be interrupting the crawl stats chart.

AllI I see is 3 charts telling me a high , low and average for the below but I am wondering is there anything I really need to be looking for ?.

Pages crawled per day

Kilobytes downloaded per day

Time spent downloading a page (in milliseconds)

thanks

Sarah

Hi Russ,

Our traffic had gone down a little bit earlier in June but ....

We first got an message on 22nd June - in GWT - Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site.

Then on 26th June , 80% of our rankings for our keywords fell off a cliff. We don't know if it was the refresh from the panda update or if it was the google bot problem.

We have never had this message beforebut noticed we had some dodgy urls being produced from our site. We don't know how long this has been going on for but wasnt sure if either the googlebot changed it's way of working or we just so happenned for the Panda refresh to happen a couple of days after the message.

I would have thought that our rankings would have suffered on 11th June if it was the Panda that done it.

In the meantime, we have put 301 redirects on the dodgy urls

thanks

Sarah.

Hi ,

We have an eCommerce site and currently we have a problem with duplicate content.

We created Location specific landing pages for our product categories which initially did very well until the recent Google Panda update caused a big drop in ranking and traffic.

example

http://xxx.co.uk/rent/lawn-mower/London/100

http://.xxx.co.uk/rent/lawn-mower/Manchester/100

Much of the content on these location pages is the same or very similar apart from different H1 tag, title tag  and in some cases slight variations on the on page content but given that these items can be hired from 200 locations it would take years to have unique content for every location for each category...

We did this originally in April as we can't compete nationally but we found it was easier to compete locally ,hence the creation of the location pages and it did do well for us until now.

My question is , since  the last Google Panda  update, our traffic has dropped 40% , and rankings have gone through the floor and we are stuck with this mess

Should we get rid off (301 ) all of the location specific pages for each of the categories ot just keep say 10 locations per cities as the most popular ones and either do No follow no index the other locations or 301's or what would people recommend ?

The only examples I can see on the internet that others do with multiple locations is to have a store finder type thing... but you cant' rank for the individual product /category doing it that way...

If anyone has any advice or good examples of sites I could see that employ a good location url specific method, please let me know.

thanks

Sarah

Hi all,

My Site rankings took a battering in the past week , From what I have read,  I know that google have updated their algorithm and supposedly it only affects less than 1% of queries but I was very surprised to have fallen in that list...

Just wondered, am i the only site to have been hammered  this past week ? or is it more of a case that maybe the new algorithm  means I need to be more savvy with our SEO.

Just posting a quick general consensus question ...

thanks

Sarah

Hi All,

Quick question ,  Are we correct in thinking that for any given URL it's not possible to do a 301 redirect AND a canonical tag?

thanks

Sarah

Ahhh,  I see what you mean now. Yes, good idea .

Will get that implement to.

Yes, everything is duplicated.It's all the same apart from the url which seems to be bringing in to different locations instead of one.

Odd url Generated(notice it has 2 locations in it)

http://www.bestathire.co.uk/rent/Vacuum_cleaners/Walsall/250/Alfreton

Correct location specific urls -

http://www.bestathire.co.uk/rent/Vacuum_cleaners/Walsall/250

http://www.bestathire.co.uk/rent/Vacuum_cleaners/Alfreton/250

thanks

Sarah.

Thanks Ruth for the very comprehensive answer. Greatly Appreciated !.

Just to clarify your suggestion about the Rel=Canonical tag. Put it on the preferred pages . When the duplicate odd urls get generated, they Wont have a canonical tag so google will know there are not the original page ?.. Is that correct.

Sorry I just got a bit confused as you said the duplicate pages will have a concanical tag as well ?

As for the existing pages, they are very recent so wouldn't assume they would have any  pr to warrent a 301 as opposed to a 404 but guess either would be ok.

Also adding the Meta name no index tag as you suggested to sounds very wise so will get that done to.

We also can't find how these urls were created and then indexed so just hoping a debug file we just created may shed some light.

Will keep you posted....

Many thanks

Sarah

Yes we submitted mini site maps to webmaster originally a couple of months back as our site is 60K pages so we broke is down to categories it etc.

We have not submitted a new map since finding this problem.

We are in the process of using the sitemap generator to generator new site map to see if it picks up anything usual.

Are u suggesting to resubmit ?

thanks

Sarah

Hi,

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Basically, our rankings and traffic etc have been dropping massively recently google sent us a message stating " Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site".

This first highligted us to the problem that for some reason our eCommerce site has recently generated loads (potentially thousands) of rubbish urls hencing giving us duplication everywhere which google is obviously penalizing us with in the terms of rankings dropping etc etc.

Our developer is trying to find the route cause of this but my concern is, How do we get rid of all these bogus urls ?. If we use GWT to remove urls it's going to take years.

We have just amended our Robot txt file to exclude them going forward but they have already been indexed so I need to know do we put a redirect 301 on them and also a HTTP Code 404 to tell google they don't exist ? Do we also put a No Index on the pages or what .

what is the best solution .?

A couple of example of our problems are here :

In Google type -

site:bestathire.co.uk inurl:"br"

You will see 107 results. This is one of many lot we need to get rid of.

Also -

site:bestathire.co.uk intitle:"All items from this hire company"

Shows 25,300 indexed pages we need to get rid of

Another thing to help tidy this mess up going forward is to improve on our pagination work. Our Site uses Rel=Next and Rel=Prev but no concanical.

As a belt and braces approach, should we also put concanical tags on our category pages whereby there are more than 1 page. I was thinking of doing it on the Page 1 of our most important pages or the View all or both ?. Whats' the general consenus ?

Any advice on both points greatly appreciated?

thanks

Sarah.

Many thanks , you have been most helpful.

Yes, I see your point. I think we will have a look at implementing this on a couple of categories where we can monitor traffic and rankings . Then if it looks good, then will roll it out to the rest of the site.

Thank you.

Sarah

Hi ,

We have an eCommerce Site and from looking at a competitor , they seem to be rank better than us even though our everything about our site is better . We hire the same products (are affiliated the same company) so the product list is the same. Both our category pages score A grade in Seomoz reports.

So This is what I can deduce from the competitors category page I am trying to compete against.

On the cement Mixer hire category page

1. The competitor has put the Main Keyword "Cement mixer hire" in all the Title Attributes on their H2 and H3 tags as well as it being the main H1 tag. They have 5 product links in h3 tags all with the same title attribute (cement mixer hire) These links go through to product page.

Am I missing a trick here ?..... I would have though using the title attribute so much for main keyword would be a bit spammy ?.

I have copied them with the point 1 but I have not done mine h3 as yet.

Just wondering that the SEO guru's thought ?.

thanks

Sarah

That;s great thank you. Some great tips here.

Hi,

Many thanks for this.  I guess you could be right, some of the lnks did looks a bit spammy.

Guess, I need to also fill out and send them the form to see what google says.

Am I correct in asuming the only way to remove the spammy links would be to write to the forum moderators etc asking for them to be removed.

Many thanks

Sarah

Hi,

I recently hired a link builder (who works for a digital marketing agency and wanted to earn some extra cash ) to do some link building for me on keyword Carpet Cleaner Hire

Basically , May my ranking for this work has moved from 29 up to 13 , then down to 500 + and now up to 67 ?.

It's been all over the place and I am worried that maybe google thinks its unnatural or to many links etc.

I looked at some of the work this chap did and there was a log of bookmarks done , apparently to increase social awareness and some articles on random forums I never heard of but the articles didn't look to good and in my eyes were a little spammy..

I don't have any messages in WMT saying I have been penalised or anything but I am naturally worried that this chap may have caused damaged and that I was manually penalised.

I have since asked him to stop immediately..

1. does this sound normal for the ranking to be all over the place in this manner when link building ?

2. How can I tell if I have been manually penalized in any way ?

3. What;s the general consensus ?.

4. Should I contact google or leave it and see what happens ?

5. Other keywords seems to be okay though.

Any advice much appreciated.

thanks

Sarah.

Hi Peter,

Many thanks for your answer. Very comprehensive and much appreciated There's certainly some good suggestions here.

Just quickly you mention about putting a NOINDEX FOLLOW on every page from 2 or 3 onwards.I take it , that's because later pages don't rank to well ?.

Is that the suggestion so the idea behind it that the link juice is being diluted to much. By Keeping only the first 2 pages say indexed etc, I would stand a better chance of ranking higher.

I will pass your suggestions on to my developer and see what we can come up from it.  Will monitor and report back , hopefully with a sorted solutioin.

Once again , many thanks for sound advice.

Sarah.

Hi ,

In Answer to your point on to Question 2 , Currently the maximum number of pages we have is 4 pages plus a View All for a few of our products but most products are split on 2 pages plus a view all.

For the largest product example we have 83 products broken down as Page 1 to 4 has 20 products , page5 has 3 and View all - 83 products. rel Prev and rel Next are on the pages and View all has Nothing on it  (Is that okay).  The title tags are duplicated on the numerous pages , so I was going to add in page 2, 3, 4 etc to sort that.

I was going to increase the number of products per page to 30 , which would in effect put me down to 3 pages plus View all  but more importantly , I thought I would also get stronger link value and less dilution hence better SEO .

The  pages don't rank partially well at all well but on google speed test, I think we score 85/100 anyway , so from a speed point of view, it should'nt be a problem. Was just worried, that big changes like this could have a dramatic effect .

The url incase your interested is http://www.bestathire.co.uk/rent/Scaffold_towers/266

Many thanks

Very much appreciated.

Sarah.

Hi ,

Many Thanks for your reply,

We do have pagination and sorts like listing products a-z , z-a , price low to high and high to low etc which all generate different urls but we have put in the robot.txt file for google not to spider them. See below .

Also from looking at WMT is says it has blocked886,996 url's in the past 90 days. Our site has approx 54,000 indexed pages.

Disallow: */sort_by:Product.price%20ASC
Disallow: */sort_by:Product.price%20DESC
Disallow: */sort_by:Product.title%20ASC
Disallow: */sort_by:Product.title%20DESC
Disallow: */sort_by:Product.distance%20ASC
Disallow: */sort_by:Product.distance%20DESC
Disallow: */stealth:on

Are you suggesting we do the Canonical the sorts aas well for saftey incase we have missed anything ?

Sarah

We have an eCommerce site with multiple products being displayed on a number of pages.

We use rel="next" and rel="prev" and have a display ALL which I understand Google should automatically be able to find.

1. Should we also being using a Canonical tag as well to tell google to give authority to the first page or the All Pages. Or was the use of the next and prev rel tags that we currently do adequate.

2. We currently display 20 products per page, we were thinking of increasing this to make fewer pages but they would be better as this which would make some later product pages redundant . If we add 301 redirects on the redundant pages, does anyone know of the sort of impact this might cause to traffic and seo ?.

General thoughts if anyone has similar problems welcome

We have an eCommerce site with multiple products being displayed on a number of pages.

We use rel="next" and rel="prev" and have a display ALL which I understand Google should automatically be able to find.

1. Should we also being using a Canonical tag as well to tell google to give authority to the first page or the All Pages. Or was the use of the next and prev rel tags that we currently do adequate.

2. We currently display 20 products per page, we were thinking of increasing this to make fewer pages but they would be better as this which would make some later product pages redundant . If we add 301 redirects on the redundant pages, does anyone know of the sort of impact this might cause to traffic and seo ?.

General thoughts if anyone has similar problems welcome