Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks Logan, appreciate the prompt response.

Hey Everyone,

Here is the situation : Currently, a website's sub domain is being redirected to the main website home page. We're having issues getting the sub domain pages indexed. Just want to confirm that it is because of the redirect on the sub domain URL. Should we kill the sub domain redirect and set it up as it's own page? Will that solve the indexing issue for the sub domain pages.

More explanation below:

subdomain.domain.com currently redirects to domain.com

We're having issues indexing pages belonging to the sub domain ( subdomain.url.com/page1 or subdomain.url.com/page2)

Appreciate your input in advance.

Cheers,

What is the best process to track conversions/visits in Google Analytics when running an email campaign that links to both a sub-domain and then the main domain?

To elaborate further, we have an email marketing campaign that directs users to a subdomain (e.g. promos.website.com) within the subdomain we include our products. Once a user clicks on the promos, they are taken to our main website (e.g website.product1.com).

What is the best process to track conversions from this email campaign that leads users to the sub-domain first, then to the main site (where the conversions take place)?

We have URL tagging in the Email Campaign - but not able to see the true conversions show up in Analytics on the main site.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers!

Wondering if anyone has experienced 0 data in their Google Search Console (Search Analytics) and found possible solutions to retrieve data?

We have a few clients who, prior to the update to Google Search Console, were getting data regularly in terms of the Search Queries report, but ever since the update to Google Search Console, they are no longer receiving data.

As an FYI, both the www and non-www versions of the website are verified in Search Console and the XML Sitemaps and Robots.txt files are clean, tested and working fine.

Any insights or experience of sites showing 0 data in Search Analytics?

Any possible solutions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

We've noticed recently on an E-Commerce website that we manage that PayPal has recently shown a large increase in Referral Traffic on the website.

Is anyone having an experience with this and how can we block it? It seems like its counting the traffic that leave to PayPal to complete a purchase and then return to the site as increased traffic.

The increase started to occur around April 29, 2015 and I'm wondering if this has anything to do with any recent updates made by PayPal?

Any insight or other experiences would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

You can refer to the link below for info:

Documentation for Medical/Health types.

SEO BOOK - Bloggers Guide to SEO (Highly recommend reading this)

All the best.

2nd Vote for Screaming Frog. Tried a lot of tools to pull info on all the URL's and this tool is by far the best one for the job.

Thanks for your opinion Andrew. Wondering how much of an impact it makes if you dont utilize the "blog" in the URL structure and add in the Title directly (www.domain.com/title) especially when going after competitive keywords.Logically it would make more sense to have a structure like this (www.domain.com/blog/category/title)

Good point Patrick.

Sites are adopting different URL structures for posting blogs (examples below).

Quicksprout ( www.domain.com/dateposted/blogposttitle)

Moz (www.domain.com/blog/blogposttitle)

SEO Book (www.domain.com/blogposttitle)

What do you recommend?

Would love the group's opinion on the Forbes.com welcome page

(http://www.forbes.com/fdc/welcome_mjx.shtml) redirects to the actual home page after 20 seconds.

• SEO implications for this tactic?
• Does it impact the home page rankings? (Positive/Negative)

Any input is appreciated.

Hi Mozzers,

Would appreciate your input on a tool (free or paid) that provides accurate information on the volume of traffic (paid and organic) that a site is getting every month. It would be nice if the tool can also provide data on the pages with most traffic (and number) page wise for a website?

Cheers,

SEO5..

Thank you! I'll test it out!

Hi,

I am looking to run an On-Site audit for a website and I'm wondering if there are any tools available online that take the existing Meta Tags on ALL pages of a website and downloads them to a .CSV or .XLS.

Would need Meta Title and Meta Description for all pages at the very least.

Any suggestions are appreciated - looking for Free or Paid options.

Thanks.

Hi Ben,

What's your motivation to advertise the same branded keywords for both the sites at the same time? If you want to do some A/B testing and seeing which site converts better for the same keywords, you can run site A for one month and site B for the next and see which one converted better.

Cheers,

SEO5..

Hi Asif,

I suggest you look at this plugin below:

Pubble

Not sure if it supports LAMP sites.

Cheers,

SEO5..

Hi Alan,

Handling a Google penalty is a delicate issue as there are a lot of factors that need to be considered to assess the penalty on the site accurately. It is not a black and white issue where there is one right answer and doing that will fix the issues and lift the penalty. The whole process includes an in depth analysis of the site including the on page and off page factors. I would really suggest you to consider hiring an expert on this subject and have them do a thorough evaluation and provide recommendations. I've included links to some resources below that you might find helpful.

Recover from a Panda Penalty - QuickSprout

SEW Article

Cheers,

SEO5..

I would suggest brushing up your knowledge on link building before starting on this activity. Some useful links below for your reference.

Growing Popularity and Links - Moz

Link Building Resources - Point Blank SEO

Hope this helps,

Cheers,

SEO5..

I would also suggest looking into a tool like Hootsuite that allows you to post content on multiple social media properties using one interface and has strong analytics built in. You might also find the below links helpful.

Social Media Automation Tools

Beginners Guide to Social Media - MOZ

Cheers,

SEO5..

I would agree. Delete option is not necessary.

ah , my bad. I would think that any attempt of that sort would constitute a copyright /image licensing infringement.

Haven't figured that one out either :). Apparantly Roger Mozbot  does not like questions being deleted , only edited:)

Yes that does seem to be the case with some of the experiments we are running. Would be cool if the real time report in GA can be extended to Google experiments as well.

Hi Pete,

Links to 2 articles below that reference A/B testing and their impact on SEO. The use of canonical tags is a recommended practice for the URL's being tested:

Impact of A/B testing on SEO

Website Testing - Google Search

Cheers,

SEO5..

Let's look at one of the pages ranking higher than yours:

http://resources.woodlands-junior.kent.sch.uk/customs/bankholidays.html

This site has a DA of 74 as compared to yours with a DA of 18. I would look at the on page and the off page optimization efforts for all the non .gov sites as they are the best ones you have a chance of beating in the rankings.

Hope this helps.

i do see the page being indexed by Google. Query string below:

https://www.google.ca/search?num=100&site=&source=hp&q=http%3A%2F%2Fid.gamesinasia.com%2Freview-smartphone-xiaomi-mi3%2F&oq=http%3A%2F%2Fid.gamesinasia.com%2Freview-smartphone-xiaomi-mi3%2F&gs_l=hp.3...3304.3304.0.4212.3.3.0.0.0.0.674.930.1j1j5-1.3.0....0...1c..51.hp..3.0.0.0.gRuEaPCdFOg

Cheers,

SEO5..

This list below might be helpful for you:

Social Media Conferences in Europe

Cheers,

SEO5..

This list might be helpful for you:

Turkish Search Engines

Social Networking in Turkey

Cheers,

SEO5..

P.S. Visited Istanbul earlier this year, beautiful place with so much history.

I'm doing a search from Toronto and the .ca site comes up above the .com site for the branded terms. When did you create the .ca version? If it was done recently, it might take a bit of time for Google to rank the .ca pages for the related terms.

Cheers,

SEO5..

Just for the benefit of this discussion, Google now is allowing for automatic verification if the site has a verified GWT account.

Details below:

** Instant verification**

You may be instantly verified to manage your business if you’ve already verified your business’s website with Google Webmaster Tools.

Make sure you’re signed in to Google My Business with the same account you used to verify your site with Webmaster Tools. Note that some business categories may not be eligible for instant verification.

Once you’ve verified, you may see a banner asking you to review your information and make any final changes.

Click Done editing when you’re certain everything is up to date.

Note that you won’t be able to update the business’s name until the verification process is complete.

Google + Verification

I see Bank Holidays also dropping to the 9th spot. Lots of .gov sites are ranking in the top 5. Same for the 2014 keywords.

IMO , while Google does not penalize sites for using stock photographs on multipe domains, it's advisable to follow best practices for image optimization when adding them to your site for the most benefit. Some best practices and Matt Cutt's video link on the same issue below:

Matt Cutts on Stock Images

Image Optimization : Best Practices ( Important points highlighted below)

To help us index your images, make sure that:

• we can crawl both the HTML page the image is embedded in, and the image itself;
• the image is in one of our supported formats: BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, WebP or SVG.

Additionally, we recommend:

• that the image filename is related to the image’s content;
• that the alt attribute of the image describes the image in a human-friendly way;
• and finally, it also helps if the HTML page’s textual contents as well as the text near the image are related to the image.

Q: Should I really submit an Image Sitemap? What are the benefits?
A: Yes! Image Sitemaps help us learn about your new images and may also help us learn what the images are about.

Q: We sometimes see the original source of an image ranked lower than other sources; why is this?
A: Keep in mind that we use the textual content of a page when determining the context of an image. For example, if the original source is a page from an image gallery that has very little text, it can happen that a page with more textual context is chosen to be shown in search. If you feel you've identified very bad search results for a particular query, feel free to use the feedback link below the search results or to share your example in our Webmaster Help Forum.

Here's another useful article:

Image Publishing Guidelines

Cheers,

SEO5..

Thanks Robert, appreciate your input.

Hi All,

What is the accepted % for visitors that conduct a store locator search online actually visiting that particular store for the nutrition industry? (For example if 50 people used the store locator search on the website , we can confidently say that 25 of them actually went to that store)

Any input or reference to studies/white papers on this topic would be appreciated.

Cheers,

SEO5..

We recently implemented this code for the site www.drhoffman.com . Feel free to compare the codes with yours and troubleshoot the issue.

yes you can, although i doubt the number will be significantly high.

Made a note to send you my next statistic related question directly , well done.

Hi Jeff,

I tried to visualize your question but failed !!!! ... it would really help if you provide an example:)

Cheers,

We use If By Phone quite extensively and have always had a positive experience with them.

Hi Dan,

If you click on the "other" icon. (it is a clickable link), it breaks down the source of the tarffic that has been classified in that category.

I was just taking a look at one of the reports for our clients and it shows that the traffic classified as "other" came form Google, Bing and one of our internal domains. You can also look at the geographic source for the traffic to give you more ideas on where the traffic might have originated from.

Cheers,

Hi Bob,

Here's a link to a great app marketing strategy post . Hope it helps:

Ultimate App Marketing Guide

52 ways to promote your app

Cheers,

Hi Mark,

One of the verticals we work with is the legal industry (lots of lawyer related sites). In our experience, we have gotten good results with both structures, sites with pages just one level down from the home page and others that have pages 2 or 3 levels down. In both instances the pages in question were ranking quite well and a lot of times at the top of the search results. In Matt Cutt's own words:

I would recommend the first-order things to pay attention to are 1) making great content that will attract links in the first place, and 2) choosing a site architecture that makes your site usable/crawlable for humans and search engines alike.

Some resources mentioned below:

Content Syndication

101 on Content Syndication

More Strategies (i'd be careful with the article directories suggestion in this post)

Hi Taysir,

In our opinion, the change in primary and secondary navigation (combining it) should not impact your overall SEO efforts as the content is still there, (you still have the secondary navigation terms merged under one nav)

If you have really good local ranks for the franchisee pages, then i would suggest rolling out this change in phases. Start by changing the territories that don't have as much activity in terms of search volume. Make the change and observe the rankings over the next 30-60 days. If there is no noticeable impact , then you can make the change across the board. Better to be safe than sorry

Cheers,

Hi Dan,

Were you able to sort this out?

Successful implementation of the code requires 3 elements:

1. Modification of the tracking code

2. Updating your privacy Policy

3. Enable Demographics reports in the Analytics interface

Tracking code instructions below:

To implement Display Advertising features for Classic Google Analytics, replace the bold text in this example:

with the bold text in the example below:

You can also generate an updated basic code snippet that includes the change by going to Admin > property > Tracking Info, and turning on the Display Advertiser Support option.

Full info on this process in the link below:

Enable Demographic Targeting in Analytics

Hi Jeff,

Dug up some info for you in the links below.

Chinese Web Design Patterns

Smashing Magazine Article

Chinese E-Commerce Sites

All the best.

Hi Robert,

Since noone responded , thought we'd chime in. Your assumption would make sense in this case based on all things being equal (Ceteris paribus) haven't used that since University:) . If source A and B are giving you accurate data when it comes to phone calls, we can assume that source C is also the same when it comes to the calls. The only accurate way to test this would be to initiate some sort of call tracking ( even if it is only for 30 days) on that referring source and confirm it for sure (then revert back to the usual #)

Hope this helps.

Try not just focusing on the exact keyword but also closely related keywords. If the article is well written and picks up good social traction , you might end up ranking for different closely related keywords, not just the main keyword.