Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Dan

From my experience of Magento is a dog for development with a minefield of conflicts to negotiate for small changes, making progress slow and costly. It is also quite server hungry whereas Shopify is hosted by them and another headache removed. I like the concept of properly vetted plugins, centralised updates etc. From what I can see it is a platform that just works, that allows you to get on with looking after your customers rather than a IT department.

We have been looking at moving our ecommerce store www.pretavoir.co.uk from Magento to Shopify Plus. However, as we rank quite well at present we are interested in hearing experience others may have had making this change and also any advice that you may have... Also, any general comments on Shopify appreciated..

Hi

Thanks. We do canonicalise sizes though not colours as the colour can be an important search term..

Donna, Thanks for your reply. In this case each of these goggles in each colour is a separate sku and landing page.  (Also apologies to use google and goggle in same sentence

Thanks for responses so far. I have been thinking further on this question and a further question has presented itself;

Consider the example where you sell ski goggles. Company SkiEyes produces a gents goggle called ExEyes in three colours, black, blue and red. It has been a best seller for years with plenty of sales, traffic and links (one for each colour). Now the blue has been discontinued whilst the red will be out of stock for 2 weeks. In the case of a customer making a google search 'SkiEyes ExEyes' the ideal scenario would be that google ranks in stock black colour at top, then out of stock red and further down the discontinued.. Any thoughts on how this could be achieved?

Alick

Thanks for link to moz article which is excellent. I like the suggestion of a custom 404 page for certain cases. Also as 404 pages lose link juice they suggest best option is to leave products on site though with suggested alternatives;

One of the more important aspects to my question was regarding SEO, ie will keeping discontinued products be superior to a 404 and the answer is within the article you link to... Also I am coming to the opinion that the best customer experience is to keep the product on site (however at bottom of list of products in their category) with suggestions for alternative choices. This way the customer doesn't hit a dead end and we keep any traffic and/or link juice ..

Donna

Thanks for the Matt Cutts video which I had been unaware of. I would consider our site to be more in the medium category. We are unable to predict an expiry date as our products don't have such a date i.e. some will continue for years and others will sell poorly and be discontinued after a few months. Also I am not in complete agreement that a 404 page is no more frustrating than a page which shows the original product albeit with a discontinued note. At least in the latter scenario the customer has an image and details of the original product to work from. Even better if we make suggestions of similar products...

In the case of an eCommerce store with a large catalogue of branded goods the inventory is constantly being adjusted as products become discontinued. Each year most fashion brands have 2 or 3 launches. At this same time they will delete some (not all) of previous years collections. Once we have sold through the remaining inventory of last season's products the question is how to proceed?

a) delete products to avoid customers landing on page, then only to be disappointed when product is no longer available to purchase..

b) keep products however mark as discontinued / no longer available and show a link to a similar product if applicable..

I am coming around to the opinion that b) provides a better user experience. However will this growing catalogue of old products (pushed to bottom of category page) help keep content of site full and have SEO advantages? If this is the case then that helps confirm b) as best choice??

Interesting question you pose.

Do you have permission from your boss to look at adwords account? If so then I would think that you should have access.. Agencies wont want you accessing account and making changes however as you mention its very useful to be able to see which keywords are gaining best ctr so that you can repeat in your SEO efforts. Forgive me for being cynical however their refusal to allow you access could hide a number of issues eg the change history will reveal how much work they are doing (or not). Even worse they could be spending your firms budget direct ads to other sites. If they wont allow you access you need to get some very good reasons indeed. Otherwise time for a new agency imho.

Danny,

I am not clear on relationship between these three or four domains? Is swedish-distributor.co.uk a fourth?

Julie thanks for your reply with which I agree mostly.  However there may be a opportunity to use good names if the passage of time and removal or dropping of all links has 'sanitized' the url.. question is how to have this confirmed...

I am involved in setting up a new business which as of yet is to decide on a brand name.. As the availability of domain name in local tld (and ideally .com) is of so much importance, the brand naming process is inextricably linked to this. Therefore, upon finding a suggested name was available to register (without premium) there was a degree of satisfaction. However on looking at archive.org it was discovered that the .co.uk had been a sex/marital aid store back in 2004 and more recently in 2014 a travel blog / affiliate. Q is; Is the past history of what is a site with possible black hat links a reason to avoid registration? Or, does time cure all? And, is there a way in which domain health can be reliably confirmed? Thanks in advance for your input..

I must admit that I have not kept up to date with SEO best practice and changes over the last few years not since digesting Danny Dover's bible and using his advice to optimise and rank two of our sites. I have a third site which doesn't rank so well. Would you be interested in using it as a case study that you can dissect and make you input on this forum. The site is www.glassesnow.co.uk   I look forward to your thoughts...

We run Magento and we're in the process of redesigning our site. We want the site to have separate storefronts for different countries, however we won't have the site language translated initially. We're thinking we'll use the Magento multi-store feature and have sites like /fr, /de  /en-us, /en-au, etc.

Is the best practice to use hreflang and for the non-english stores which haven't yet been translated? For example set them as, for French users:

Essentially saying, the page is aimed at French people, but is in English.

The separate storefronts will have things like currency and tax localised to each country and will gradually be getting translated, especially the more generic stuff like "Add to Cart", "Checkout" etc.

Or, should it be targeted at French language and country, despite not all being translated into French?

Or is there a better way to do this?

Have you had a look at this blog post?

<a>http://moz.com/ugc/the-beginners-guide-to-keyword-research-using-free-tools</a>

Also I would suggest you mine your adwords account for keywords which actually convert and bring you revenue.If you don't have an adwords account then it will be worth creating one if only just for the purpose of keyword research. You may find that keywords of medium competiveness and relatively easy to rank for  are higher converting than keywords of high competitiveness as by their very nature lots of companies are competing for a slice of that pie.

Highland, Thank you for the response.

We are using memcached locally as it seems to give best results, having tried a combination of APC and memcached.

Would moving our database to a different server speed up the time to first byte(ttfp) as currently we sit with very little load on cpu? What would be the benefit?

Where you mention 'a cloud based solution' are you referring to using Cloudflare to sit in front of our server to act as a cdn and cache, or to move to a  complete cloud based solution? I assume it is their Business package you refer to which gives the ddos and other protection.

Looking at Googles pagespeed tools, out ttfp seems to be the hold-up. which then just leaves the off site code (Snapenage, Comodo, etc) bringing up the last elements.

Thanks for this response.

We had been looking at Cloudflare and also at rearranging our server somewhat. Will let you know.

We are using Magento on Nginxwth caching enabled with memcache

Thanks for your reply.

This page is a better example of our problem

http://www.pretavoir.co.uk/sunglasses/ray-ban-sunglasses.html

Yes had looked at GT Metrix though not paid much attention to YSlow. Will take a look now.

However it may be of more interest to look at the speed of this page rather than homepage;

http://www.pretavoir.co.uk/sunglasses/ray-ban-sunglasses.html

We have noticed that our site is much slower than many of our competitors and expect that this is affecting our organic ranking.

We are on dedicated UK Fast server with

[20/08/2013 16:44:35] Tony Jackson: Operating System: CentOS 6 64-bit
CPU: 1x Intel Xeon E5-2620 @ 2.0GHz
Memory: 8x 8GB DDR3 RDIMM
Hard Drive: 4x 128GB SSD RAID10
[20/08/2013 16:46:28] Tony Jackson: Nginx, percona, tomcat/solr, Magento CE, cat: 25200 products

I could really do with your thoughts on this page for example

http://www.pretavoir.co.uk/sunglasses/ray-ban-sunglasses.html

Both helpful replies thanks. Further investigation led me to this Magento Bug:

http://www.magentocommerce.com/bug-tracking/issue/?issue=13662

(Need to have a magneto account to see the bug report).

Seems there's a spearate underlying issue which we need to fix first - the rewrite table grows exponentially every time we index Magento and creates a new URL for every configurable product. i.e. a product that has one or more associated products that will have the same name - used for displaying different sizes and colours. This means that Google is picking up a new page for each configurable product each time it indexes: different URL, same content, same product sku - a technical SEO nightmare!

Having moved a site across to Magento, obviously re-directs were a large part of that, ensuring all the old products and categories linked up correctly with the new site structure.

However, we came up against an issue where we needed to add, delete, then re-add products. This, coupled with a misunderstanding of the csv upload processing, meant that although the old urls redirected, some of the new Magento urls changed and then didn't redirect:

For Example:

mysite/product

would get deleted re-added and become:

mysite/product-1324

We now know what we did wrong to ensure it doesn't continue to happen if we weret o delete and re-add a product, but Google contains all these old URLs in its index which has caused people to search for products on Google, click through, then land on the 404 page - far from ideal.

We kind of assumed, with continual updating of sitemaps and time, that Google would realise and update the URL accordingly. But this hasn't happened - we are still getting plenty of 404 errors on certain product searches (These aren't appearing in SEOmoz, there are no links to the old URL on the site, only Google, as the index contains the old URL).

Aside from going through and finding the products affected (no easy task), and setting up redirects for each one, is there any way we can tell Google 'These URLs are no longer a thing, forget them and move on, let's make a fresh start and Happy New Year'?

Drat cant watch Fabios video. Is it part of a Moz bundle?

Dana

Its all coming back to me. My SEO brain is a bit rusty unlike my alter ego who sometimes posts here..

We are lucky on this occasion as the manufacturer site has great B2C descriptions which sell the product well. Also, none of our main competitors are taking the descriptions indeed nor have they taken time to write their own.

Thanks for your answer. I'm off to watch those videos

We are doing some inventory improvements eg new photographs from various angles, etc. We are also writing descriptions for each product.. As one of our suppliers has perfect desriptions on their site what is the theory on how duplicate content will affect our ranking for these products if we copy and paste? Also if we change the descriptions, just how different do they need to be? Thanks

I'm working on a page that has links from some decent pages pointing to it, but a lot of them are low-value blog comments. So I'm pretty sure that its Page Authority is higher than it should be, compared to where it's ranking.

Does SEO moz take the type of link into account?

i.e. if it's a footer link, blog comment, or forum signature link; this should carry less weight than a link in the content of the page itself, as it does with Google.

Why would SeoMoz not wish to appear on Page 1 of serps as such a position a) would bring new subscribers and b) demonstrate they are not summed up by the idiom; Those who can,do; those who can't, teach

In the past I have met a number of SEO companies who make a play on the 'we're not about our results, we're about your results' Ahem, perhaps you can't match the SEO skills of your competitors?

Anyway back to the topic, I am interested in your understanding of how ranking importance is distributed,that each keyword in a title tag is given its share along the lines of; If  the title is one word like "SEO" then that word is given 100 points. If the title is "Search Engine Optimization" then each term would be given about 33 points. As many have suggested the earlier the keyword appears in the tag, the more importance it received and therefore the share for this title might be 45,35,20?

Lets look at an example of a title tag for a eCommerce site

Toshiba 3D LCD TVs | Free Delivery | TH32TT | TH42TT | Tellys.com

As free delivery often help conversions (though of course title tags are not often read by humans) there is worthwhile search volume. Also the two most popular model numbers also receive search volume. (please ignore that this may cause competition with product pages and assume that this is a one page site and/or there will be no duplication or internal conflict). In this case just how much negative effect are these extra keywords inficting? Would it be better to strip back to Toshiba 3D LCD TVS   ???

Thanks

Hi

Thanks for your input. Screaming Frog looks like a very interesting tool. I will give it a go.

Thanks Erik. Your input is appreciated

As we use osCommerce I believe there are some technical issues with getting text onto category page ie Adidas Sunglasses page.

Thanks for your reply.

As regards internal links, is there any merit the the theory that link juice can be passed through exact match anchor text more powerfully eg rather than chanel in left hand nav bar there could be anchor text chanel sunglasses somewhere on home page?

I totally agree with your recommendation re meta descriptions. Is there a method by which you can increase likelihood that your chosen text will appear in serps snippet rather than some other text off your landing page?

I have been working on an eCommerce site; www.pretavoir.co.uk over the past year. Improvements in SERPs have been good with many top three positions. However, there are other important keywords of similar difficulty which refuse to behave in a similar way.... The site is PR4 and has a homepage PA 52. The homepage includes links to internal brand pages eg Prada, Gucci etc. Q Would it be worthwhile creating footer anchor text with eaxct text eg Prada sunglasses, Gucci Sunglasses?? Thanks

Without actually going to each product page and looking at the number next to the 'Like' button, is there any way of finding a list of all your pages and the number of Facebook likes on each?

Keep the page up, but 301 redirect it to the page a customer is going to find most useful. That page may be the equivalent deal for the new season, or a page listing the current new-season deals for that destination. That way, any sites who had linked to old offers will pass their link juice to the new offer.

This way, most of the link juice is preserved and the customer is less likely to bounce.

We were having a discussion on title tags and optimising multiple pages for the same term. We rank well for the phrase 'chanel glasses' which points to our Chanel brand page. The Chanel brand page is optimised for this term, and has the phrase 'Chanel glasses' at the front of its title tag.

Previously, the title tag on our home page had the words 'Chanel glasses' at the start in an attempt to rank twice for the term (as one of our competitors has managed). This never worked (though at the time, our DA/PA was lower than it is now). For this reason I switched the title tag on the homepage to try and rank for 'designer glasses'.

My belief is, given we already rank highly for the term on a more relevant landing page, trying to rank for it again on the home page is not the best use of a title tag on our highest PA page. We may as well use it for something more generic like 'designer glasses' (though this term does not convert nearly as well, nor does it currently rank as well for us as we've not been attempting to get 'designer glasses' as anchor text. Plus it's more competitive. Another generic term maybe be preferable).

My colleague's view is we should attempt to do what our competitor has done and try and rank twice on page one for this term. I like the idea of dominating the top  results, but I feel that since attempting to get double-listed hasn't worked for us so far, we should use the homepage for optimising for a different term ( ideally something that we don't already rank for elsewhere on the site).

I see his point of view - if we were ranking nowhere for the search term then, yes we should concentrate on getting one page to rank, not two. But since we already rank well for the term, perhaps his strategy is preferable?

Just for clarity, the title tags are not duplicate, but the idea was to share many of the same keywords between the two title tags.

What are your thoughts SEOmoz?

Since you guys are understandably struggling with crawling and processing the sheer number of URLs and links, I came up with this idea:

In a similar way to how SETI@Home (is that still a thing? Google says yes: http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/) works, could SEOmoz use distributed computing amongst SEO moz users to help with the data processing? Would people be happy to offer up their idle processor time and (optionally) internet connections to get more accurate, broader data?

Are there enough users of the data to make distributed computing worthwhile?

Perhaps those who crunched the most data each month could receive moz points or a free month of Pro.

I have submitted this as a suggestion here:
http://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/20458998-crowd-source-linkscape-data-processing-and-crawling-in-a-similar-way-to-seti-home

I have noticed some interesting changes in how google are returning searches for specific branded products. In this case 'tom ford glasses' position 12 result has three product extensions (see image) This is similar to the product extensions which occasionally occur on adwords. Have you seen this happen and if so any ideas how it all works?

TR3nz

How much time and effort can you spend in obtaining a link from DMoz. I was of the opinion that its just a submit and waiting game?

We currently sell our products to Australia customers via Google Adwords marketing and are keen to achieve good organic serps. What steps do you recommend taking? Are any of you working down under and interested in helping on this project?

Thanks

Sorry double post please delete

I think what he's saying is, ranking for 'website design' is going to be really, really tough - it's a highly competitive term. You'll need a DA of MUCH higher than 30 to be ranking for that term. Which means building links from more authoritative websites.  I noticed that some of your best (i.e. highest domain authority) links  were forum/blog comments which probably aren't passing much link juice. I would look to get guest blog posts on higher domain authority sites that can link back to you. And remember that all important anchor text - a lot of your links have the anchor text 'Kieran Daly' rather than 'website design'. Not forgetting the value of writing great linkable content, of course

Im thinking of brand names in particular eg CHANEL, GUCCI etc are all caps brand names, however most title tags only cap the first letter. As to attracting the right kind of people? There is no 'wrong' type of people if they purchase your product?

Got it; linkfromdomain:

Forgive me if I've lost my way here though Im interested in links out from a site rather than back links. Im sure there is a bing tool? Im interested in finding out where a site links to and the number of sites it links to and therefore just how much this might weaken a link if you were to attain one on that page. For example if you find a blog which is very relevant to your business and you can see a link passing good relevant juice. If you can then see which sites that blog links out to then you can write 'You link to ..... and we're similar to them so perhaps we can have a link too? Also a number of sites they link out to might help you decide whether the site would pass as much link juice as on a superrficial review looking at just PA/DA and/or OSE?

I am interested in how the number of outbound links from a page linking to me might affect how much link juice is passed to me? As regards variables youre quite right I just wanted to keep that out of the calculation.

As regards 'opportunity' perhaps its more appropriate to see this Q as to help decide which site you should put your efforts into getting a link from. If a great site with PA/DA of 70/80 has 50 obls on the page youre likely to gain a link would you be better going after a  link on a site of PA/DA of 35/40 with only 10 obls on the page?

Agreed, though in the event that you are position 4 or 5 it might be worth testing? as many of the general public are less sensitive to CAPS than more web savvy folk. Otherwise, you're not aware of any negative effect in terms of google ranking factors

Following on from earlier Q, what do you all use to count links out from a page. I believe there is a bing tool which does this, though rather than a list of sites a simple number would be ideal?

I am interested in your thoughts on the effect of number of outbound links (obls) on link juice passed? ie If a page linking to you has a high number of obls, how do you compute the effect of these obls and relative negative effect on linkjuice.

In the event that there are three sites on which you have been offered the opportunity of a link

Site A  PA 30 DA50      Obls on page 10

Site B  PA 40 DA50      Obls on page 15

Site C  PA 50 DA50      Obls on page 20

How would you appraise each of these prospective page links (ignoring anchor text, relevancy, etc which will be constant)

Is there a rule of thumb on how to compare the linkjuice passed from a site relative to its PA and the number of obls? Is it as simple as page with 10 obls passes 10x juice of page with 100 obls?

It often the case that a page of serps will show up very similar title tags eg  Cheap Widgets | Widgetsrus.com format, written partly for humans and partly for SEO.. Although against Googles best practice and indeed a violation of their adwords policy would using in CAPS in title tags reduce ranking (whilst increasing visibility and CTR)?

Meta Descriptions provide google with the text snippet shown in organic results therefore important.

Meta Keywords are no longer a ranking factor and in fact can be a disadvantage as they can give you competitors easy access to your keyword list therefore not only unimportant but a bad idea.