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Be patient Sam, you don't want to do too much too soon raising more flags with Google. As long as you're getting good citations for your places listing, it should be a matter of time before you regain your position. Since you did have the top positions in the past i'm assuming you followed all the best practices to optimize your places listing.
Good Question Luis,
Suggested Process below:
Here is a link to a useful post to get you started
Here's the link to the Google guide for Ajax URL indexing. Hope this helps.
Tudor, google did do 2 updates in Oct, the Penguin # 3 and the Page Layout # 2 , details here
The errors on your WMT might have something to do with it as you mentioned 2 million of them . That is definitely a very high number and might have raised flags with Google. Try cleaning out the 404's, redirecting any of the old url's to the new ones and then resubmit your sitemap.
Edward, yep i'd delete those listings and start afresh hiding the address.
More info on this excellent post Do not rely on the Google review process, very unreliable.
Diane,
It's loading up fast for me as well. The gtmetrix report now gives it a "B" grade with a page load time of 1.51 seconds which is pretty good.
I would only use the no follow tag when i want to protect some information posted on the site from getting accessed by everyone. This includes any confidential internal info posted on the site or info that's behind a login. If you do not utilize the no follow attribute properly you can end up doing more harm than good. No harm in getting some additional pages indexed by Google as long as they don't compromise any data.
yes as long as they are links from credible sources and not bad neighborhoods.
this part refers to the same content being on the site but being translated in different languages, then you dont need to worry about the content being marked as duplicate. Hope this helps.
My suggestion would be to be proactive as opposed to being reactive and avoid experiencing a rank drop. Ideally optimize one keyword per page on the site. Since the site has not been penalized yet, you can start off with your link building campaign as it does take time for the sites to approve your link and make it live on their site.
My suggestion would be to review the quality of the content on the site. If the site does host good quality content, then i would recommend submitting your articles on them. If they look spammy and dont really have meaningful content posted that the visitors can benefit from, i'd stay away from it.
Using the canonical element can help you fix this. More info in this article
Hi James,
The loss of ranking could be attributed to various factors:
If you do have a co.uk domain then the changing of hosting from the US to UK could have impacted the rankings.
Here's a link to a discussion on Cloud fare's impact on SEO.
This article might be helpful. Link
If the domain that you acquire has backlinks associated with it, then the 301 would help with SEO . After a while, those backlinks will be associated with your main domain and you can derive SEO benefit associated with it. If the domain has no backlinks then there isn't any SEO advantage to it. You can benefit from any direct traffic that domain gets because once you 301 it to your niche site, any direct traffic associated with that domain will now go to your nice site.
In my opinion, i don't think you will derive a lot of SEO benefit from hosting the yahoo answers. You are better off building your own Q&A database . It is definitely more work and time consuming however there can be a lot of benefit in investing time and resources in this.
There is an old post referring to Q&A as a strategy that you can access here.
Yes definitely, Google's over optimization penalty seems to be impacting a lot of sites. Your best bet would be to reduce the over optimization on the pages , hopefully when Google indexes the new changes, you will regain your rankings.
seems to be working fine. I tested a few sites and it gave a correct response.
- the tool seems to work , did some tests and it is returning accurate responses
- Not used screaming frog, previewed the demo, it looks like good tool and the features mention the redirect check
- this might take a bit of time but eventually yes, the url that was 301 redirected should not appear in the search results
- wait for a while before you run crawl reports as it might take some time for Google to register the 301 that you have setup.
In this instance your best bet is link building. As Ryan mentions in his response put a lot of focus on beating your competitors with targeted and high quality links with the keywords in the anchor text. Do keyword research on synonyms that are very close to your core keywords. Build a keyword list with those related keywords and do both the on page and off page optimization with those keywords. If your industry is competitive, you're better off focusing on related keywords.
Eric, try focusing on one location at a time in your title tag . At present you are trying to target 3 states ( MN, IA, WI) on the home page title tag. Build backlinks for the MN key phrase from quality sites. Be very careful with the over optimization penalty while you work with the on page factors.
Kyle, a 404 page pops up if a visitors tries to access a URL on your site , however the server is unable to find that page on your site. A 301 redirect on the other hand is a technique to forward a particular URL permanently to another page.
Based on what i read in your question, you should have the 301 redirects set to your home page and not the 404 page. If you set them to a 404 page with your home page link on it then the visitor has to take an extra step to reach your home page and try to find the info they are looking for.
yes and from a content perspective , it looks sensible and goes with the flow.
that's a great list Dana :). thanks for sharing.
Not sure of any Google courses for conversion optimization, however i would recommend the courses run by Market Motive. The faculty there is top notch and the conversion module is really good.
I'd do any of the below :
Good post on this topic here
Good question Carlo . If i had to handle that for the client, i would classify the links as "related content" or "related posts" which is a common practice with blogs and news oriented sites. The "incoming search queries" classification can be misleading and a direct suggestion that it is aimed at the search engine bots as opposed to the visitors.
For our insurance clients we always recommend geo targeted approach unless they have very deep pockets. We also recommend a short and a long term strategy. The short term strategy being PPC advertising, identifying the core search terms that are converting and getting traction for the client using the "search terms report" in adwords. Once we identify the best keywords, we utilize them in our keyword selection strategy for the SEO campaign and go after optimizing those keywords using SEO best practices.
Just looking at these pages, you might be over optimizing them for your targeted keywords. I can see that the targeted keywords that have been used extensively all over the pages.
Clean the pages up with new title tags, header tags, image tags and internal links. Also check your backlink profile for the site and use the disavow tool to highlight any bad links.
to be on the safe side, find a hosting provider in Africa. If you type in "franchise" in the google.co.za search engine, the majority of the first page listings are the .co.za extension, so even if the local hosting makes a small difference might as well take advantage of that.
My recommendations below:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/creative-link-building-for-ecommerce-sites
http://www.slideshare.net/richardbaxterseo/linkbuilding-for-ecommerce-sites-smx-munich-2012 ( excellent presentation )
http://searchengineland.com/make-yourself-findable-in-the-global-graph-of-commerce-135082
http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2207735/How-to-Make-Your-Ecommerce-Site-Link-Worthy
I would also base it on the site content. Does the site content (product listing) warrant an extra sub directory to be created. For example if you are selling cars, then you can have a directory for Honda and then another subdirectory for the specific make with the keyword Honda in it.
In your case since the site only has 6 pages, it would not make sense to create the subdirectories.
yep try crowdbooster , they give you a summary of your own activity in terms of busiest days of the week as well as that of the followers and the ones that you are following.
Bryan, you might have created an infinite loop that might be causing the issue you are describing. More on the issue HERE
for sure, all the best
Pick the one that has more inbound links associated with it and already has high pages in the index. Make sure you set the preferences in WMT to either the www. or the non www version.
Do some keyword analysis. Drill down in the analytics reports and review the keyword data to see any trends. Also take a look at where the traffic is coming from (Geo target). We had a similar situation where the direct traffic spiked for a client and it was because the development team was based in that location and they were accessing the site a lot. If that is the case you can filter that traffic using the IP's.
Seen a little spike in traffic since the first week of Nov however that can also be attributed to seasonality. We deal with a lot of online stores and charity/ donation portals and this is one busiest times of the year for them. The rankings don't seem to have been impacted that much.
Simon,
Stick with relevancy. If it reads well on a page then you're ok however if you are using the keyword 30-40 times chances are that it does appear to be spammy for those keywords. I'd recommend rewriting the content so the main key phrase is used 2-3 times depending of course on the length of the content. Be careful with the on site optimization as well as alt tags and internal links . Dont over use them.
Changing the domain name to a keyword rich domain has a lot of pros and cons associated with it. I've listed some below:
Pros
Downside
As you can see , there are more disadvantages on changing up the domain . I would not change it up for a keyword rich domain. As opposed to that, try and get the generic domain ranked for that keyword by following all the best practices for SEO ( strong on site, off site, PR )
Google pulls sitelinks in an automated manner based on what they feel is important for your site and would help the user access your site better. According to Google:
"There are best practices you can follow, however, to improve the quality of your sitelinks. For example, for your site's internal links, make sure you use anchor text and alt text that's informative, compact, and avoids repetition."
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=47334
Another good post below:
I dont think Google will have any issues crawling the links as long as they are logical and meant for a better visitor experience. I looked at the site and it does seem that they are appropriate for the page so i dont forsee any challenges with that.
Here is another post referencing the same issue:
http://www.seomoz.org/q/opinions-please-on-duplicate-page-titles-too-many-on-page-links-warnings
Chitra, it might have been a combination of the over optimization penalty as well as questionable link building practices. I would suggest refreshing the on site SEO and reducing the keyword density of the main key phrase on the targeted pages. Review the links that have been built for the site and use the disavow tool to report any bad links. Check WMT for any messages from Google.
You can try some of the social media analytics tools below that will give you an insight on the brands you are following:
followerwonk
crowdbooster
sproutsocial
as long as they are not targeting one particular keyword, you should be ok
Dino,
a good post in this link describing a checklist to follow. Please read the comments on this post as well , helpful info.
http://www.authorsure.com/514/how-long-will-it-take-for-my-facelogo-to-show-up-in-the-search-results
In one of our our client scenarios, it took 2 months before Google started showing the image.
Not necessarily, if the internal links are correctly in place to guide visitors in the right direction , then you're ok having them on the internal pages. You mentioned only 1 internal link for the inner pages , which should be ok. The issue would be if you overdid it and had lots of keyword rich internal links created to link to other pages.
You might also want to review this post below from SEOMOZ