Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Many thanks Alex, already on all of the points mentioned above but always nice to get some validation for plans of action... half the time that's more satisfying than coming up with them!

Sorry again I should have been clearer it is not really the meta data I am concerned about at this point more the benefit of on-page content. I think the bigger issue is that for organic search traffic card pages are almost redundant and focus, as Mike says should be on the range pages which should encourage browsing.

Although in additon there is the issue about the card page lacking in enticing content which could reduce the chance of a conversion. Becuase this is a predominently visual subject pehaps I am just worrying about the lack of text as it fundamentally goes against usual SEO rather than benfitting usability.

Apologies, I should have said greetings cards, so this is indeed very helpful, thank you

We are redeveloping a website for a card company who have far too many products to write unique descriptions for each. Even if they could I don't think it would be beneficial to the user. However they do have unique descriptions for each range which is useful for users viewing an individual card.

Which is better practice:

a) Ignore the duplicate content issue and supply the user with info about the range

b) Provide clear enticing links to find out more about the range which will leave the individual card page a little void of content.

Many thanks

Thank you for your response I understand and always try to follow your points so I suppose my questions is actually: Is the duplicate content of the title describing the company/ site detrimental i.e pages from the same site competing for the same search? So if all pages contain the phrase "commercial estate agents" because that is what they are, would it be seen as spammy and would the pages compete against each other?

For one of the core service searches I have three consecutive results for different pages including the homepage. Is this a good or a bad thing?

My point about humming bird is whether further explanation of the page would be more beneficial than explaining the website? For example is

Birmingham Commercial Property Tips | Commercial Estate Agents

Better than

Birmingham Commercial Property Tips | Help find the perfect premises (ignoring length)

This latter solution has better contextual information making each HTML title completely unique but does this weaken the site's ranking for Commercial Estate Agents?

In light of Hummingbird and that HTML titles are the main selling point in SERPs, is my approach to keyword rich HTML titles bad? Where possible I try to include the top key phrase to descripe a page and then a second top keyphrase describing what the company/ site as a whole is or does. For instance an estate agents site could consist of HTML title such as this

Buy Commercial Property in Birmingham| Commercial Estate Agents

Birmingham Commercial Property Tips | Commercial Estate Agents

In order to preserve valuable characters I have also been omitting brand names other than on the home page... is this also poor form?

A client has found another SEO agency promising various things to do with link building. Most of these promises are based upon links from sites with allegedly high page ranks. So my questions:

1. Page rank seems to be fading out am I safe to stay with PA and DA metrics instead?

2. I don't agree with link building tactics and feel that it should more a networking activity to provide USEFUL links to users... am I being too white hat and missing opporunities?

3. The other company have promised long list of links including 100 SEO friendly web directory listings, 200 PR 8 back links from Pinterest (which i thought was no follow) & 10 long lasting and high quality mini web sites (with three pages/posts, video and pictures). Am I right that this all sounds a little spammy or is this really what I should be doing for me clients?

Many thanks, that is what I have been trying to explain to the client but they really are concerned about the penalty even though I can not see any evidence of it.

I am in the process of sorting out the their blog and a useful guide area so this will really help my argument.

A client has recently switched to us for their SEO and is hugely concerned about their previous company's link building efforts.They say that they have recently removed over 300 links but OSE still lists 160 links.So three questions:

1. How long will it take for OSE to recognise if the links have been removed?

2. How great could the effects of this be on the site's rankings?

3. If we continue to struggle with getting the links removed would Google's disavow tool make much of a difference or are there negatives that sould be considered first?

This does indeed seem like an excellent solution that we can use for the featured item on the homepage. Thank you

I do, however, have this pending sense of doom that I am not going to be able to convince the client. I suspect that they want it permanently visible on the homepage if not in the footer.

These links are fundamental to the current site goals will I get penalised if they are added to the footer? If so then it will definitely help persuading the client.

Thanks again for your help

We are redesigning this site http://www.crystalshop.co.uk/ but not reinstating the ecommerce yet so the primary aim of the site is to increase foot traffic in the shops. The list of shops on the RHS of the homepage is really messy  but is useful. I would like to move these to the footer... is this a bad idea?

If this is, is it a bit of a gamble to move it to the bottom of the homepage rather than higher up as it is? We are already featuring a link to the shop finder page but I want to get the locations in as prominent place as possible but it's quite a long list!

For the specific client I had in mind, although the enquiries have doubled in the past year they still only get less than 70 a month which I don't think warrants the weeding. 100+ and I completely agree. The phone number is the most prominent, as the only method of contact featured in the page header.

This is a usability question more than SEO but I thought this community would be the one to ask.

Are completed conversion rates generally higher for contact forms or email enquiries?

I try to encourage our clients to have short contact forms where possible to ensure the first contact (ask questions later).

Personally an email seems like a giant daunting and potentially irrelevant enquiry that could get lost in the plethora of spam emails flying around. Also half the time I start the email and then give up.

Many thanks! I have tried with custom segments in the past but got confused and gave up. In doing this it has helped me clarify how I evaluate the data.

My keyword ranking have dropped and it is the perfect incentive to give them a kick up the behind to right some new content! I will also talk to them about a link building budget as currently their investment is far too low for a site of this size.

Thanks again for your help very much appreciated.

I do a lot of work for a large estate agency based almost solely in London. They get a considerable amount of traffc and all other stats, on the whole, are always positive. The only thing that is decreasing regularly is the percentage of new traffic.

My understanding of user behaviour for this market is that no one in their right mind would make an enquiry or arrange a booking without a) looking at the property at least twice themeselves (once to before the enquiry and once before a viewing) and b) more than likely show a partner. Plus the site is well laid out and useful so I believe users are favouring our site over the comparison sites.

So  questions:

1. Should I be panicing

2. What is the most efficent way of increasing new visits?

Things to note:

The HTML titles throughout the site are a bit of a mess - key word rich but too long and inconsistent. Could this be a contributing factor to the CTR?

Also in the past month we appeared in over 4k different queries but our non branded impressions are down 22%. Could more concise, less keyword stuffed HTML titles help this? Do I need to look at the page titles to ensure that they contain the exact phrases that are in decline?

Any help will be greatly appreciated!

It really is bizarre, the number of unique keywords or queries is as follows:

Google Webmaster Queries (in webmaster) - 77

Google Webmaster Queries resulting in clicks (in analytics) - 18 (406 in total)

Keyword clicks to the site (in analytics) - 125

There must be something I'm missing!

I understand about the Google log in but, unless I have misunderstood your response, this also applies to the keywords that have driven traffic to the site.

Why are so many more keywords showing in my analytics than queries that resulted in click? Is this not the same data? Is this where I am going wrong?

Can anyone clarify why my list of queries from google webmaster tools varies so much from the keywords that have resulted in clicks?

I have a site that, according to Google analytics, has had clicks from 125 key phrases where as in webmaster tools (via analytics) allegedly only 17 queries have resulted in clicks. Is it becuase GA can't handle less than 5 clicks from the webmaster data or is it something else I am missing?

The site I am researching for has very little traffic from other search engines.

Thanks for your help. A lot of the pages that are showing up with these errors relate to search results or to the submission of a contact form so it's not about attracting traffic more making sure nothing detracts from the site as a whole.

How much notice should be paid to the warnings on the SEO Moz crawl reports? We manage a fairly large property site and a lot of the errors on the crawl reports relate to automated responses. As a matter of priority which of the list below will have negative affects with the search engines?

Temporary RedirectToo Many On-Page LinksOverly-Dynamic URLTitle Element Too Long (> 70 Characters)Title Missing or EmptyDuplicate Page ContentDuplicate Page TitleMissing Meta Description Tag

Thank you to both of you. Especially, Corey, the bit about how this research will help with understanding google. I can not justify the time researching this for what I estimate will only be a few hundred additional hits.

Sorry Bing but I love Google as much as it loves me (well my client's site at least). Thanks again

I have a site that is currently ranking 6th for a certain key phrase. But when i search on Bing it is on page 4. The result on google is for the homepage and the bing result is a search result.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

I am not logged into to google when searching but we do use adwords.

Thanks Russ - that's a good idea. Bit of a pain from a tech perspective as it turns out, but definitely they way we'll tackle the issue post launch.

Thanks again,

Tom

I have a really tricky decision to make concerning one of our clients. Their site to date was developed by someone else.

They have a successful eCommerce website, and the strength of their Search Engine performance lies in their product category pages. In their case, a product category is an audience niche: their gender and age.

In this hypothetical example my client sells lawnmowers:

http://www.example.com/lawnmowers/men/age-34

http://www.example.com/lawnmowers/men/age-33

http://www.example.com/lawnmowers/women/age-25

http://www.example.com/lawnmowers/women/age-3

For all searches pertaining to lawnmowers, the gender of the buyer and their age (for which there are a lot for the 'real' store), these results come up number one for every combination they have a page for.

The issue is the specific product pages, which take the form of the following:

http://www.example.com/lawnmowers/men/age-34/fancy-blue-lawnmower

This same product, with the same content (save a reference to the gender and age on the page) can also be found at a few other gender / age combinations the product is targeted at. For instance:

http://www.example.com/lawnmowers/women/age-34/fancy-blue-lawnmower

http://www.example.com/lawnmowers/men/age-33/fancy-blue-lawnmower

http://www.example.com/lawnmowers/women/age-32/fancy-blue-lawnmower

So, duplicate content. As they are currently doing so well I am agonising over this - I dislike viewing the same content on multiple URLs, and though it wasn't a malicious effort on the previous developers part, think it a little dangerous in terms of SEO.

On the other hand, if I change it I'll reduce the website size, and severely reduce the number of pages that are contextually relevant to the gender/age category pages. In short, I don't want to sabotage the performance of the category pages, by cutting off all their on-site relevant content.

My options as I see them are:

• Stick with the duplicate content model, but add some unique content to each gender/age page. This will differentiate the product category page content a little.
• Move products to single distinct URLs. Whilst this could boost individual product SEO performance, this isn't an objective, and it carries the risks I perceive above.

What are your thoughts?

Many thanks,

Tom

We have some clients who have raised concerns over how this new update will affect them. They are an Estate Agents who regularly update their property portfolio, blogs and news section etc.

Can you advise how they may or may not be directly affected?

Thank you.

Thank you so much for your reply.

Our clients are providers of serviced apartments so they want to use their social media sites to advertise available apartments etc as well as to interact with their followers etc. This is something we can easily do however, i'm just unsure as to how much time to we should be putting aside for this and how to come up with a plan of action. Does that make sense?!

Sorry if this sounds vague, I'm relatively new to SEO and I find discussing these topics with more knowledgeable people than myself helps me to understand how to go forward.

Thank you!

If so,how?

Sorry if this sounds like a really vague question but our client has asked us to take control of their Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn account and Im just trying to research the best practice for this?

Any advise would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you so much, that clears everything up for me!

Thank you for your help! I'm relatively new to this. Am I right in thinking that because the links are being sent in an email confirmation delivered from the website, that it's not as simple as a nofollow?

Hi Guys,

I'm after some advise please.

We have a client who offers self catering accommodation to let on his website. We are looking at ways to increase links to his site and one idea we had was to possibly affiliate ourselves with local companies within the areas of the specific accommodation.

Our client is looking to partner with local business's in each area of said accommodation (probably two of each kind) and then send the details of these business' with whatever special deals they will offer customers on every confirmation that goes out to the clients.  Obviously, in return, these business' will then link to Room-B.

What I'm trying to find out is if linking to partners via an email delivered from thewebsite is safe in terms of link juice: it's important that Google doesn't index any outbound links to partners from us at all.

Any advise would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks

We are currently working on a project which involves 3 separate .com domains in relation to a UK company selling/renting residential, commercial and investment properties within the UK.

We are now working on producing a .hk site for the overseas customers.

Can anyone advise what the best practice is for a .hk domain and where best to start? Should the domain be hosted in that geographical location for example?

We are relatively new to this so any advise would be greatly appreciated.

We are looking into amending a website we are working on to try and combine 2 or 3 current pages onto one page.

This site is similar to an estate agents site and currently has images, map, floor plan sub pages etc.

Can anyone tell me, if we were to combine these pages and include the above details on one page, how that would affect the current search engine rankings?