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If the main category is Digital Marketing then I would have the URL be /digital-marketing/. I think its important to consider how you plan to use the category in the future and build for that so you don't have a funky structure in the future and/or have to do a bunch redirects to fix it. I understand that's not always possible and things may come up you hadn't considered.
I would have your URL represent your site architecture. If Digital Marketing is a subcategory of Marketing I would have the URL structure represent that by using example.com/marketing/digital/...
If you plan on adding more subcategories at a later date it will save a lot of headaches by just having your URL structure represent your site architecture.
It is true that you will most likely not be penalized for these pages, Google is pretty good at figuring out common canonicalization problems in my opinion and would most likely not penalize you for having duplicate content. I would encourage you to dig a little deeper and see what additional problems these pages could create though.
Consider that Google will waste valuable crawl bandwidth crawling these meaningless pages, rather than focusing on the important content you want them too. If Google is crawling them, you can most likely bet that PageRank is flowing through these pages as well, diluting the link equity of your site.
Are you using Wordpress? There are a lot of great plug ins that can help you manage these pages. You could control how Google crawls these pages with your robots.txt, by placing meta robots tags on the pages using a plug in, or by placing rel=canonical tags on the pages pointing back to the page that is the original source.
If it is showing as direct traffic you would have to filter out specific IP addresses. Direct traffic doesn't have a source to filter out.
I crawled your site and didn't see the 404 errors.
I did notice that your sitemap in your robots.txt 404's so you may want to take a look at that.
Are you seeing these 404s in Webmaster Tools or when crawling the site?
If WMT where does it say the 404 is linked to from? Click on the URL with the 404 error in WMT and select the "Linked from" tab.
Crawl the site with Screaming Frog and your user agent set to Googlebot. See if the same 404 errors are being picked up and if so, you can click on them and select the "In Links" tab to see what page the 404 is being picked up on.
I checked the source code of some of the pages on www.kempruge.com and didn't see any relative links which usually create problems like this. My bet is on a site scraping your site and creating 404 errors when they link back to your site.
You are essentially cloaking a keyword rich H1 tag. I would not do this as it is against Google Webmaster Guidelines.
I misunderstood you before, I thought you meant the old URLs had the anchors.
You are correct, technically the tabs are not unique pages. You would have to redirect each of the previous pages to http://www.teapigs.co.uk/tea/matcha_shop rather than to the anchored URL.
Having content under tabs may limit your ability to rank for a variety of keywords. For example, if previously there was a page ranking for "What is Matcha?", it may now be difficult to rank for this term because there is no longer a unique page dedicated to the topic. You lose the ability to have a unique URL, Title Tag, Meta Description, H1, and so on.
Is the content technically on one page (ww.website.co.uk/product) and just being displays based on the anchor in the URL?
Has Google indexed the anchored URLs? In my experience Google does not index anchored URLs.
I'd love to see an example to see how it is coded; however, if they are just anchored URLs displaying content that is all located on one page, the products page, then the products page would be the only page you can redirect. Technically, anchored URLs are not unique pages.
If the content is being generated with AJAX and your developers are using the hashbang method to serve a unique URL, I don't believe you would see the hash in the URL.
You have to copy and paste it, for some reason it looks like it's a relative link.
If your content is significantly different you will be fine. There are a lot of websites using the same basic Word Press themes with minimal customization so I don't see how this would be any different. Though Google is getting more advanced at determining the lay out and make up of a page, I'm not sure that theme and design elements are as distinguishable to them.
Sorry for the cliche response, but I would worry more the quality content than the length of the content. Are your users going to feel fulfilled with less than 300 words? Maybe for some topics. I doubt there is a magic number to get links.
If you are churning out blog posts of an "optimal" length but they aren't engaging you probably will not see any benefit.
Long story short: Don't worry about the length. If you are writing just to write, you probably shouldn't expect much in return.
I think alt tags are still relevant. It's another way of helping Google identify what a page is about. Are a few alt tags alone going to make or break your rankings? Probably not, but it doesn't hurt to optimize what you can.
What are the domain authorities of the two sites? If that page is on a domain with higher authority, though it has fewer external and internal links, the internal links the page does have may be passing higher amounts of authority.
I would focus on the singular version in title tags and URL, then in the copy of the page use both versions as well as synonyms.
You won't be penalized for it, but why would you need to? I would think about if what ever is appearing above the H1 really needs to be in an H2 tag.
If the content is generated before the page is served to users and search engines they will see it like any other page. Check out the source code of the page, if the content is in there you are fine.
I would look into installing a module called Global Redirect. It should take care of this problem for you. I used to work exclusively in Drupal and made sure this was installed on every site.
https://drupal.org/project/globalredirect
http://developerkarma.com/2008/04/22/step-step-guide-installing-drupal-module-global-redirect.html
If you have Pro Plus or Pro Elite you can have branded reports.
I guess it all depends on the relative importance of the keywords and landing pages. If the pages that were hit are important landing pages that drive conversions it should be something that is addressed. If the pages are being penalized, on-page optimization probably won't help too much; however, building quality back links could have some benefit.
It's possible that rankings have decreased on certain pages because the links that were helping the pages rank are no longer valued, rather than the pages receiving direct ranking penalties. If this is the case than building some quality links to replace the ones that are no longer valued may help the pages rank well again.
What worries me the most is when you say the company is going to switch to "white hat only for a few months" (not exactly sure how you meant it, so forgive me if I read into it wrong). Things are never going to improve if white hat tactics are only a temporary strategy. Google is only going to get better at picking up shady tactics.
https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2454010?hl=en
"Quality Score is an estimate of how relevant your ads, keywords, and landing page are to a person seeing your ad. Having a high Quality Score means that our systems think your ad, keyword, and landing page are all relevant and useful to someone looking at your ad."
Nope, but the click thru rate of the ads will affect the page's quality score and may help with future ad performance.
Adding the following lines to the bottom of your robots.txt should do it:
Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap/uk/sitemap.xml
Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap/de/sitemap.xml
If you wanted to update the file names to be different it wouldn't hurt, but I don't think you would have any problems with how they are currently set up. If you have submitted them to WMT and they are being picked up ok I think you are fine.
Take a look at the text-only cached version of the page. If you are unsure how to do that follow my crude instructions below.
What I do to test if Googlebot can view the content of my homepage:
Do a Google search for 'site:example.com' and find your homepage. Next to the green URL in the SERP listing for your homepage there is a green arrow. Click that and select 'cached'. Then, when viewing the cached version of the homepage, click 'Text-only version' in the bottom right corner of the grey bar that appears at the top of the browser.
If the content you are questioning shows up, there is a good chance Google has obviously been able to crawl and index it. If the content is not there, there is a good chance they can't. If the content is in a hidden div it will likely still not show up in the text-only cache.
I've found this as a good source in the past, not sure if you have already checked it out:
http://www.internetmarketingninjas.com/blog/search-engine-optimization/301-redirects/
High Domain Authority. Quality back links. Good user engagement.
So did commercial.vigilantinc.com/wine-refrigerators.php have a 301 redirect to vigilantinc.com/commercial/wine-refrigerators.php; or did you just have one redirect from commercial.vigilantinc.com to vigilantinc.com/commerical thinking it would also redirect all the subfolders?
If the latter is the case you need to put a 301 redirect on every subfolder of the subdomain, or place a site wide redirect on the subdomain.
Were the redirects tested and working? I'm confused why Moz would not be picking up the redirects. Do you have any specific examples of the pages that Moz was reporting as duplicate content?
Is it possible you just redirected the root of the subdomain, rather than every page on the subdomain?
I think it's something that should definitely be addressed. The massive amounts of broken links, and subsequent loss of link equity, could have a more negative impact on your site than the Moz errors that were being picked up.
If auto-tagging wasn't turned on, were the campaign URLs manually tagged? Did they have utm parameters on them?
It is most likely a case of not having any campaign tags on the destination URLs.
I'm working on a site where dynamic URL extensions to the homepage were automatically redirecting to the regular homepage URL. Though autotagging was turned on in Adwords, the campaign tags were being lost in the redirects meaning that the paid visits were not being tracked properly in Google Analytics. They were being recorded as organic visits.
Double check that the destination URLs of the PPC campaigns are not redirecting, and that any autotagged URL will not redirect.
Do a site:examplesite.com to see if Google is able to identify individual sections of content on the site. If not, you need to create pages to have something to work with.
With only one landing page you can really only target a couple keywords. I think you should definitely focus on building out landing pages for the content, rather than having it all display at one URL. Without landing pages you really can't target a variety of keywords.
Thanks for the response!
I do see that message, which is kind of what confused me. I saw the "We've already migrated at least one of your existing campaigns over from PRO" part and assumed I should be seeing some data. I have used up all of my campaign slots currently so I can't create a new one. I just received access to the beta yesterday so I will give it a little more time to update.
I believe Moz had some issues with their linkscape index sometime over the past few months. The metrics for the last update were put together using a smaller sample size of links, meaning the numbers were down across the board for most sites. The problems were corrected and now the metrics are being calculated using a larger sample size of links, meaning the metrics went back up.
I've been invited to the Moz Analytics Beta; however, I am not seeing any data for any of my campaigns. Do I have to do something specific to enable the beta, or does it take a while for information to appear?
There may be a plug in to place rel=canonical tags on the page. Sometimes, when the plug in field is left blank, a self referencing rel=canonical tag is placed on the page. I wouldn't worry about it too much, it shouldn't harm your site.
From: http://moz.com/blog/dispelling-a-persistent-rel-canonical-myth
"Looking through Google's blog post on the subject, this isn't explicitly stated. However, you can see that even the example website, Wikia, employs this practice on the page Google points out. You can also see Googler Maile Ohyeanswering a comment on this:
@Wade: Yes, it's absolutely okay to have a self-referential rel="canonical". It won't harm the system and additionally, by including a self-reference you better ensure that your mirrors have a rel=”canonical” to you."
In WMT click on the URL that is 404'd and then select "linked to from". It will show you where Google is picking up the 404 error.
Are these 404 pages being linked to from an external site? Sometimes the 404s that appear in WMT are from links pointing to your domain from an external site, often one that has scraped your site.
It's possible that Google just feels that the text you have in your H2 is a more accurate description of your page. Is your meta description too long? I know that Google occasionally ignores the Title Tag and displays the H1 or other text in the SERPs if they feel it is more relevant.
The "Google US" means that they are analyzing the top results on Google to determine the keyword difficulty.
Google does not let people use their AdWords API (where Moz would pull search volume from) if they violate guidelines. One of the guidelines was that you cannot scrape search results (which Moz does to determine Google US difficulty). I believe the keyword search volume was switched to Bing data work around this issue. I do not believe there is a way to have the Google search volume display in the keyword difficulty tool.
Any one feel free to correct me if I got any of that wrong.
Are you properly tagging your PPC destination URLs? If these URLs are not properly tagged some of the paid traffic coming in may be attributed to organic.
Is there a Duck Duck Go research tool?
I'm curious, what search data has been lost?
I would create a custom 404 page that gives users options of similar products or product categories.
I would recommend purchasing Screaming Frog. You can crawl the site and sort the URLs by level. Remove the URLs that are too deep from the crawl and export to XML sitemap. Screaming Frog is definitely worth the price to unlock all of its features and have an unlimited crawl limit.
I've done a little SERP analysis recently to help figure out how much content I really needed to rank well. What I found was that for the queries I researched sites that were ranking in the top ten either had a low PA/DA and a ton of text (2k + words on the page) or a high PA/DA and a low amount of text (~300 words). Obviously sites that had a high PA/DA and a ton of text crushed it in the SERPs. This all goes back to classic correlation does not equal causation.
There seemed to be a point where a page with low PA/DA could still rank well if you had enough content, and vice versa. I would think if the site you are referring to has minimal text on the page its backlink metrics are pushing it to the top of the SERPs. Also, good UX will improve time on site which may help it surface to the top of the SERPs.
Again, correlation does not equal causation. This is just something I've seen for a sample of keywords I am targeting. I've used this to determine which landing pages on my site have low PA and have worked on adding some relevant text to those pages.
You blog posts should be indexed and followed. It may just be the default so development pages do not get indexed by search engines.
I would recommend using no index tags on the various category, archive, and tags pages that are created when using a WP blog. These pages can lead to a lot of duplicate content problems.
As part of your campaign you can't; however, if you want to run a crawl check out http://pro.moz.com/tools/crawl-test. It won't update your campaign but is a great way to get information from your site.
Check out this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsW8E4dOtRY
Summary: If you're not trying to stuff hidden text in there then don't worry about it, it's a normal thing on today's web.
It means there is a meta tag on the page that is blocking the page. Look in the head section of the page for a tag. Remove this and you should be good to go. Check your WordPress settings, sometimes these tags are automatically assigned to pages as a default. You could also download a SEO plug in to help manage the meta robots tags.