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I just did 3 random searches and you were on page #1 for all 3.
"pearl+beads" position 4
"glass+beads" position 9 (wiki is at 7!)
"shambala+beads" position 9
Seeing the usual ebay, amazon big brand domain clusters for these queries so I'd say your doing OK. You might want to consider moving your category descriptions above the fold to improve further rather than below your products on the landing page.
I think you have got the site hierarchy down just fine. However, taking a look at [what I presume to be] your landing page, I think that you could improve your search position by providing more information on the page here.
Start with your company USP's, maybe include a short explainer video? Then work on your written content. Make your page better than your competitors page and you should be rewarded.
I have a site in a very competitive industry with a landing page that ranks within some huge business homepages, and our domain authority is about half of theirs! You just need to keep working on that page.
Dont be tempted to throw too many links at it either. Work on weeding out only the best links from your competitor profiles.
I guess that would be your decision. I have in some instances reported violations, although they were not always heeded. If you wish to report them then here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/paidlinks?pli=1 is the best place to do so.
Taken from: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en
The following are examples of link schemes which can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results:
I agree with Jane.
TBH I'd rather start with a brand new domain without the redirect, however sometimes we have to go with what the client wants, even if we advise against it, ultimately its their decision.
I have warned them that it's still early days and the penalty may still be passed. My suggestion was made to provide another response that didn't involve potentially destroying a second established domain via a redirected penalty.
I've also seen this discussed a lot here on Moz, and have been involved in some of those discussions. You could try redirecting it to a new domain.
I have a new client who came to me suffering an obvious penalty (they weren't ranking for their own brand name), I asked them NOT to redirect the domain as I wanted to carry out some backlink research amongst other tasks to try to understand the problem. However they chose to go with the redirect against my advice - and it worked.
They went in at number 2 and a week later are at number 1. I cant say for sure how long this will hold, I'm concerned if there is a penalty of some kind that they may well disappear again in the next few weeks. But we are not losing anything in the meantime.
We have recently experienced a huge spike in referral traffic from .fr domains (we are in the UK).
They all lead to our 404 page. Its been going on for the last 3 days, and its still happening with about 20 visitors browsing the site from these domains at any one time, staying approx 3-7 seconds and then bouncing.
The top domain appears to be a parked page. We cant see any obvious links or ads coming from any of these .fr domains and they are quite irrelevant to our sites industry anyway, which leads me to believe these may not be real visitors.
Any advice on what may be causing this? And how to stop it?
Needless to say none of these referrals have converted.
Thank you so much Miriam. Its good to know that its something that's already been picked up in the US. I've added my comments to a webmaster forum thread that Linda Buquet started regarding this issue too, hopefully, Google will tweak this sooner rather than later. At least I dont feel so helpless now! Thanks again.
I noticed something this morning, when performing a search on Google UK for "Intensive driving courses southend" the first position is awarded to a driving school that is using exact match keywords instead of brand name on their G+ page to rank for local terms. See this for yourself here: https://www.google.co.uk/#q=intensive+driving+courses+southend
Until then, my site had held position 1 for this term for well over a year.
Every gut instinct I have tells me that this will not work forever and its not something I should implement, however I'm interested to hear if anyone else is using this tactic, and how its working for them?
How can I compete with this "grey hat" tactic?
Thank you Miriam. I appreciate you sharing with me the broad idea of the type of structure that you feel a site should have in this instance (if starting from scratch).
You have pretty much echoed my proposal for a new site structure, built for how Google works nowadays, rather than 2-3 years ago. We are currently reducing the size of the current site, to bring it as close to this type of model as possible. However the site would need a complete redesign to make it viably possible to have this type of structure.
I guess what I've been looking for is some kind of reassurance that we are moving in the right direction! Its a scary prospect reducing such a huge amount of pages down to a compact targeted set. With prospects of losing so much long tail traffic, it can make us a little hesitant.
However the on-site changes we have made so far, seem to be having a positive affect.
And thank you for giving me some ideas about content creation for each town. I really like this as an idea to move forward after the changes are complete, which will hopefully be by the new year!
Thank you. That thought process did occur to me at the time of adding the robots txt, however that was back in March and the impressions drop has happened this week.
I have updated the robots.txt to show the new disallow command rather than "/search".
I also just installed my last back-up which was just before i added Google comments.
Thanks for your help!
Thanks for this. I knew i needed to stop search being crawled for duplicate content and the disallow "/search" operator seemed to be the way a few others had done it. I will update that line to show the new query instead, presuming this is relevant for blogger blogs?
That line of text is from the fourth post down "Sales Stats Confirm the UK Still Loves Cars", its truncating the posts to show "read more". However the source code, for some reason, shows all of the post.
Could there be something missing from here? I did delete the code that shows number of comments per post as i integrated Google comments late last week and the numbers didnt add up.
We recently redesigned a site which had strong rankings and learnt a valuable lesson about defining URL parameters using webmaster tools.
Basically, the new site used filters and this caused a whole load of duplicate content, causing the site to drop from postion 1-3 for every core keyword to approx position 8-10.
I didn't even know that tool existed until i asked on Moz and its been a lifesaver.
My Google blogger blog is about 10 months old. In that time i have worked really hard with adding unique content, building relationships with other bloggers in the same niche, and done some inbound marketing.
2 weeks ago I updated the template to something cleaner, with a little more "wordpress" feel to it. This means i've messed about with the code a lot in these weeks, adding social buttons etc.
The problem is that from some point late last week thurs/fri my pages started disappearing from Googles index. I have checked webmaster tools and have no manual actions. My link profile is pretty clean as its a new site, and i have manually checked every piece of content published for plagiarism etc.
So what is going on? Did i break my blog? Or is something else amiss? Impressions are down 96% comparing Nov 1-5th to previous 5 days.
site is here: http://bit.ly/174beVm
Thanks for any help in advance.
Hi Miriam,
Thanks for jumping in.
The business model is service-based. So when i refer to "46 products" they are actually 46 different types of service available.
The customer will typically book and pay online, through the website, and they are then served at their location which is most often either their home or place of work. They actually have far more than the 25 actual locations, much closer to 120 I believe. However, I only began their SEO in February, AFTER they were hit by Panda. So building up their local listings is taking time, as the duplicate content issue seems far more urgent. Trying to strike a balance, and fix this all slowly over time to lay a solid foundation for inbound marketing, as its being diluted by the poor site structure.
Does this help? Am I doing the right things here?
You scared me then Chris!
"It sounds like you're saying that your one ecommerce company has 25 Google local business listings--and growing?! It's very possible that could come back and haunt you unless you in the form of merging or penalization."
Why? The business has a physical location in every town, so why should they not have a page for every location? This is what we were advised to do?
"If there was no other competition, you would almost certainly rank for your keywords along with the town name"
I have used this tactic before, for another nationwide business, but on a smaller scale and it worked. Ie; they ranked (middle of page 1) but for non competitive keywords and the page has strong backlinks. With this site, the competition is stronger and the pages will not have a strong backlink profile at first.
My biggest worry, is to cut all the existing pages and lose the 80% long tail the site currently pulls in. But what other way is there to tackle so much duplicate content?
I have a large ecommerce website which is structured very much for SEO as it existed a few years ago. With a landing page for every product/town nationwide (its a lot of pages).
Then along came Panda...
I began shrinking the site in Feb last year in an effort to tackle duplicate content. We had initially used a template only changing product/town name.
My first change was to reduce the amount of pages in half by merging the top two categories, as they are semantically similar enough to not need their own pages. This worked a treat, traffic didn't drop at all and the remaining pages are bringing in the desired search terms for both these products.
Next I have rewritten the content for every product to ensure they are now as individual as possible.
However with 46 products and each of those generating a product/area page we still have a heap of duplicate content. Now i want to reduce the town pages, I have already started writing content for my most important areas, again, to make these pages as individual as possible.
The problem i have is that nobody can write enough unique content to target every town in the UK via an individual page (times by 46 products), so i want to reduce these too.
QUESTION: If I have a single page for "croydon", will mentioning other local surrounding areas on this page, such as Mitcham, be enough to rank this page for both towns?
I have approx 25 Google local place/map listings and grwoing, and am working from these areas outwards. I want to bring the site right down to about 150 main area pages to tackle all the duplicate content, but obviously don't want to lose my traffic for so many areas at once.
Any examples of big sites that have reduced in size since Panda would be great.
I have a headache... Thanks community.
Thank you both Lesley & Jim!
This tool is exactly what we needed! Fingers crossed now we have resolved the issues we had with all that duplicate content.
How long has the parameter tool been available?? I never even knew it existed!
We have an ecommerce website with 700 pages. Due to the implementation of filters, we are seeing upto 11,000 pages being indexed where the filter tag is apphended to the URL. This is causing duplicate content issues across the site.
We tried adding "nofollow" to all the filters, we have also tried adding canonical tags, which it seems are being ignored. So how can we fix this?
We are now toying with 2 other ideas to fix this issue;
adding "no index" to all filtered pages
making the filters uncrawble using javascript
Has anyone else encountered this issue? If so what did you do to combat this and was it successful?
Thanks Alan.I Take it by this you mean we should only 301 redirect pages with valuable links and forget the rest?
The pages dont have any links worth worrying about as its the "weaker" half of the site. We're more concerned over the site restructure and the affecting the general health of the site by losing so many pages at once.
We have a site that is suffering a duplicate content problem. To help resolve this we intend to reduce the amount of landing pages within the site. There are a HUGE amount of pages.
We have identified the potential to reduce the pages by half at first by combing the top level directories, as we believe they are semantically similar enough that they no longer warrant being seperated.
For instance: Mobile Phones & Mobile Tablets (Its not mobile devices).
We want to remove this directory path and 301 these pages to the others, then rewrite the content to include both phones and tablets on the same landing page.
Question: Would a massive amount of 301's (over 100,000) cause any harm to the general health of the website? Would it affect the authority? We are also considering just severing them from the site, leaving them indexed but not crawlable from the site, to try and maintain a smooth transition. We dont want traffic to tank.
Has anyone performed anything similar? Id be interested to hear all opinions. Thanks!
Yes Miriam, that is exactly what i meant, thank you for clarifying and many thanks for your response, it echo's my own gut feelings towards "clouding" the authority of the focus target pages, which are of course obviously where we have the bricks and motar buildings.I really like your idea of adding a CTA to those other "nearby town" pages that funnels users and hopefully a little more "authority" towards those areas. A great suggestion.
Duplicate content was a major issue, But we've been working on making these pages as unique and relevant as possible to each individual area by adding relevevant copy about the business and industry in that area. It's been a long slog, as this site was (i believe) hit quite badly with Panda last october, but we're doing everything recommended to improve its user experience.
Thanks again for your advice Miriam, much appreciated.
We havent used Meta keywords for a couple of years but I read an interesting article yesterday that suggested using this field to list semantic keywords and synonyms that you couldnt fit naturally into the body content. Havent tried it yet, just thought it was an interesting concept.
We are seeing this every day for lots of searches in the UK. I did some reading up on "domain clustering" and found that Google recently reverted its algo regarding how many results it displays for a particular search term. It used to be no more than four, then it changed to 7, which is an older practice. Compare this with competition from Amazon, Ebay, the .com and .nz results for transactional searches, and the bias towards brands and most small businesses in the UK dont stand a chance of competing in organic search anymore. I for one know of several small businesses that are down 70% because of this, dropping from position 1-3 to position 8-12. Hence the PPC conspiracy theory. "Google did it on purpose to push us all into using PPC".
We have a large website that targets the whole UK. It has landing pages for every town in the UK. For the towns that this particular business has a bricks and mortar hq, we have set up a local/places page.
We then added the corresponding places adress to the appropriate town page on the website. This is just a handful compared to the 3,000,000 towns our site aims to rank for.
Question: Would it help or hinder our SEO efforts to add the local addresses to other town pages in close proximity to the original?
For instance say we have a places address for croydon in London. Would it hurt to add this address to pages that target towns near croydon, such as Mitcham.
All opinions greatly appreciated. Cheers!
Hi Scott,
My intial thoughts were over-optimisation penalty, its just on the second level pages, which are main category pages. The category+Town pages are ranking just fine. We removed two sets of footer links and made the navigation more user friendly with tabbed navigation instead. We fixed the breadcrumb as it wasnt clickable, so the second level pages had barely any internal links. We rewrote content for all pages applying semantics liberally. We added other content to the pages and improved the social signals overall to the domain. We finally did a 301 redirect on the second level pages to new URL's hoping to lose any penalty....but still nothing. Not even ranking in the top 500 for core keyword yet add a stemmed keyword as a prefix and BAM there we are at position 5. Im running out of ideas.
I'd also be interested to hear peoples thoughts on 301 redirects internally.
My website is structured like this:
Home > Categories > Categories+Town
The homepage and the Categories+Town page all rank for intended keywords, yet the "over-optimised" category pages do not rank at all, they are still indexed, just not ranking for the core keywords.
Will creating new URL's and 301 redirecting the old pages internally pass on any penalty that may be in place, algorithmic or otherwise?
Thanks Oliver. That first article is the kind of advice i was looking for!Funnily enough, i did have the slideshare idea, and think that will be a great secondary strategy to get the most from the content and a way to market the original content.
George, this is what my gut instinct is telling me to do. It makes sense and if it works we can turn it into a series. If i choose to do this, do you feel we should provide an embed code like we would with an infographic? If so, any idea what would be the best practice for the backlink?
EGOL, yeah...I kinda got a bit over excited about the idea. But now i have a list of comic sites that publish im feeling inspired to try this again in a more serious manner. And ive learned a valuable lesson.
Cheers everyone!
We have been creating written content for a client over the last year with great success. Locating websites across the internet to publish our articles was not difficult, just a little time consuming.
Now we have decided to take this a step further by creating a comic strip for the same client. The only problem is, we are having great difficulty finding a site that would be suitable for publishing this content.
Its not an infographic, or slideshow, or video and its not a written article.
The usual search operators are no good as this is our first attempt and REAL comic geeks are so serious about the art im scared we'd be pulled apart.
Does anyone know of any resources which would publish this type of visual content?
Thanks for your help!
Hayley
Heres the scenario...
We recently took on a new client who's previous seo company had partaken in some dodgy link building tactics.
They appear to have done some blog comment spam, very poorly.
The situation we are now in is this:
We have a site with an internal page deemed more important than the homepage (the homepage has 60 linking root domains and the internal page 879). It looks as though the previous seo company submitted a disavow request, theres a message in webmaster tools from a few weeks back saying it had been received, but no further correspondence.
I have doubts as to whether this disavow request was done correctly... Plus im not sure that Google has issued the site a warning yet as they are ranking position one for the keyword on the internal page.
Our clients want us to handle this in the correct manner, whether it be to simply ignore it and wait for Google to send a warning about the links, remove the offending internal page and leave a 404, or try to disavow the links that google doesnt know about yet from 800+ websites.
Suggestions for the best practice for dealing with this situation?
Any advice is much appreciated,
Thanks, Hayley.
We have a website that has a whole heap of internal links. After re-structuring the footer links to the main categories we are now looking at the best way to display the internal links from each category (approx 20-50 links from each).
At present they are simply listed on the corresponding category page, however this doesnt look great so we want to display them in a way that is user friendly and also seo friendly.
Any suggestions and examples appreciated.
Thanks in advance.
Thank you Linda. Common sense told me that was the case but the way this data is displayed within WMT is confusing.
Looking at some Google Webmaster tools data and im a bit stumped. Can anyone tell me if the "not selected" pages should be taken from the "total indexed pages" or are they a seperate entity?
The way the data is displayed on the graph leads you to believe they should be taken from the total indexed pages, yet Googles own description of "not selected" pages says that these pages are not indexed. Confused.
Dont want to say which directory im looking at just now because
im worried this will turn into a discussion about directory
submissions whereas i just need an answer to this question.
The code in the html looks something like this:
<link href="[http://www.example.com/weddings](view-source:http://www.whatisseolinkbuilding.com/shopping/weddings)" rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>"/>
Its entered into the head of each page within that section
referencing the first page as canonical.
I wouldnt recommend Guest Blog It to anyone personally.
My articles are often stolen and the links removed. Upon contacting admin ive received no response. I even trolled their fb page hoping to get an answer, but so far.....zip.
There are some great resources here:
http://bloggerspassion.com/list-of-100-plus-blogs-that-allows-guest-blogging/
You can also try searching:
The above suggestions taken from this post:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-ultimate-guide-to-advanced-guest-blogging
Good luck.
If a business directory is using the rel=canonical tag on the first page of results for each section, is there any value from having a link on page 2 or 3 of these sections?
Fantastic. Thank you very much. Interestingly this website is hosted on a different platform to our others, so I wonder whether this has something to do with the config. We'll set up 301s for w. and ww. as a short term fix and look at the config going forward.
Many thanks again.
First of all, thanks very much for taking the time to have a look for us and offer your opinions Marcus, much appreciated.
We are certainly going to be experimenting with the canonical tag in this way moving forward. We've never experienced problems with user interaction within the site since Google decided to start ranking the "show all" version of the pages instead so we've never really worried too much about it until now.
The worst hit was another non-competitive term "clic clac sofa bed" - we grew it steadily from 10th position back in feb and this was 3rd last week (!) and is no longer ranking at all! The page that was ranking is: http://www.franceshunt.co.uk/live/sofa-beds/
When this campaign began back in the old days of yore we were still using free directorys for optimisation of deep pages. Ive read alot about these being slowly de-indexed by Google so was wondering if this was having an adverse impact on some of the "weaker" pages. As you can see though there has been no off-site optmisation towards this page its a pretty new term (only added to campaign in feb) so im discounting that theory - for now!
Thanks Marcus!
Our site is http://www.franceshunt.co.uk/
We have asked a couple of questions before on Moz as to how best to solve the pagination issues within our site.
Google seems to prefer to rank the "show all" version of the targeted landing pages.
So whilst we are optimising http://www.franceshunt.co.uk/dine/extending-dining-tables/
Google prefers to rank http://www.franceshunt.co.uk/dine/extending-dining-tables/?p=all
Which hasn't caused us any problems before, yet now im wondering if this could be part of the issue too. Please let us know what you think!
We were ranking third before the update for this term.
Surely brand exposure and social signals are related to their number one positioning, but whats with the second result?
This is the same landing page yet through a different navigational path. This is what im questioning here?
Within the last week we have had a handful of our rankings drop dramatically down the SERPS. About 15% but this an estimate and has not been fully investigated yet.
Whilst looking into possible scenarios that could be causing this i wanted to check what the SERPS looked like for the terms that we are still holding position on.
Typing "extending dining tables" into Google UK today i was amazed at what i found...
Ranking in position 1 and 2 is a massive UK furniture store.
But isnt that the same landing page being returned for both positions??
It appears to be a navigation problem within the site category tags causing duplicate content. However they have been rewarded with the top two positons subsequently pushing our website onto page two.
I find it so frustrating that we listen to Googles best practices when it comes to pagination issues yet this is how our hard work is rewarded!
Anyone else have any thoughts about this?
