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I'm looking over a friends website, which used to have great natural ranking for some big keywords. Those ranking & CTR's have dropped a lot, so the next thing I checked into was top selling Brand & Category pages.

Its seems like every year or so a New Page was constructed for each brand... Many of which have high quality and natural inbound links.  However, the pages no longer have products and simply look outdated.  I'm trying to figure out if they should place redirects on all the old pages to a new URL which is more seo friendly.

Example Links :

http://www.xyz.com/nike2004.html , http://www.xyz.com/nike-spring2006.html , http://www.xyz.com/2011-nike-shoes.html  - (have quality inbound links, bad content) ....

Basically would it be advantageous to place redirects on all of these example pages to a new one that will be more permanent... http://www.xyz.com/nike-shoes.html  I'm also looking at about 15 brands and maybe 100+ old/outdated urls, so I wasn't sure if I should do this & to what extent.  Considering many of the brand pages do rank, but not as well as they should...

Any input would help, thanks

Sending you a PM

Good plan actually, I appreciate it.  I dev'd my own sitemap script but agree xml-sitemaps works great.  I suggest that to friends & clients needing an easy solution.

Giving the analytics... I did't want to update roughly 400 pages.  However, you handed me my resolution... I'll wrap the old pages with my up to date header/footer & just make some banners that direct traffic to the updated website.

Note: Making a basketball/shoe analogy...  Just assume I'm selling Nike Shoes & traffic lands on my 1995,1996,1997 etc Charles Barkley pages.  I don't sell shoes, and my query reports & analytics show people arent searching for Barkley but because of the age and trust of my page, engines still point them there.

Anyway, I appreciate it a lot.  Over complicated things this time !

So basically, my website is very old... 1995 Old.  Extremely old content still shows up when people search for things that are outdated by 10-15+ years , I decided not to drop redirects on some of the irrelevant pages.  People still hit the pages, but bounce...

I have about 400 pages that I don't want to delete or redirect.  Many of them have old backlinks and hold some value but do interfere with my new relevant content.

If I dropped these pages into a sitemap, set the priority to zero would that possibly help?  No redirects, content is still valid for people looking for it, but maybe these old pages don't show up above my new content?

Currently the old stuff is excluded from all sitemaps.. I don't want to make one and have it make the problem worse. Any advise is appreciated.

Thx

I help manage a family website, that has about 10,000 products... It was top ranked since 1996, then got smacked by Penguin and recovered but its still receiving only a fraction of the natural traffic it used to get.

Something we have never used... Is a sitemap.  I'm curious if anyone knows reliable software that will generate a sitemap?  My cart is custom built, website uses html pages across the board.

Dynamic content and parameters are set up properly, onsite seo is in the excellent range.  The only thing that I haven't been utilizing is a sitemap.  Because the cart was hand built, it would a huge convenience to use a lightweight program thats compatible with any website, has parameter settings, exclusions and anything else useful to negate any duplicate content.

I have a few highly dynamic pages as well...  If anyone knows a product or a possible solution, it would be much appreciated.  Working it up myself would be very time consuming.

Thx

Its been a couple days now, and a bunch of the useful open site explorer features are still down... Is this something that you are working, were the features taken down or is it just being neglected?  Prior to posting this, I tested on multiple browsers... Windows 7,8 & a Mac

Specifically, the criteria below prompts "oops something went wrong"

Inbound Links Tab : Drop downs for, "Show Links", "From Pages", "To This Page"

Top Pages Tab : Broken

Please Advise

Cool, I sort of thought that would be the case.  I was just concerned because I didnt have dedicated time to develop my niche site, so even thought its been online for 8 years... The penguin penalty was rather severe, and took a full year of cleaning just to be re included.  Meaning I want no association between the two site.

That being said, I can't see how natural social sharing for a few weeks could be damaging to my primary website but I just wanted to check to see if anyone had experience with this specifically.  By that I mean, how social metrics and sharing may impact a website...

I know anytime I get a re tweet or share from a large outlet, I see substantial traffic, and sometimes ranking increases... However have never seen, talked about or noticed the impact of a share from a website like my niche site.  Which has a pristine service record, strong social following but yeah was kicked for a reason.

thx

So basically, I have two websites.  One being my Primary website and another which is very Niche/Seasonal.   Now the Niche website received a penalty, and was later re-included however google traffic has been extremely limited since being reindexed. (bing never had a problem, still top ranked)

I don't directly link back and forth between the two websites because its not worth hurting my primary websites ranking.  I'm sure google knows I own both anyway, as they are on the same webmaster tools but the Niche site was kicked for spammy link building & its been an endless process removing them all.

Anyway, with that being my concern.  Would it be acceptable to cross share facebook posts, retweet and do things like that on occasion?  My primary reason for asking is because the Niche website has a very large social following, so I would like to share post/tweets from my Primary site when its relevant and vice versa.

Appreciate any suggestions/comments.  Thanks!

Yeah, I have all of that in place.  I found 1 external link from an https , and 1 on my blog that was just an error one of my employees made.  2 Links total, at least thats what I found.  Robots blocking everything you mentioned.  My header uses absolute paths.

I do agree with you on one thing, once kicked, the little things that may not have mattered over the past 15 years all the sudden pop up as problems... At the same time I have heard the complete opposite, people are kicked and then they are right back where they used to be a few weeks after being included.

Competitive sabotage is positively happening, unless a random person who happens to live in the same city my competitor is located just went awol and decided they wanted to spam my offsite forums, attempt to hack the website multiple times, and add me to a spam link rink.

Anyway a webmaster says he has changed the canonical on their end to http , although it hasnt changed yet.  I'm sure this could take a few days or longer to take place.  Hopefully that is the fix, we'll see though and thanks for the advise!

Hmm, see no major changes have been made to the cart.  The website has ranked for 15 years, so the https thing just popped up after the penalty/ re inclusion.

I'm wondering, since the canonical tag was added fairly recently.  Do you think I should just fetch the homepage and submit again?  Or even add a new page, and fetch/crawl/submit that?

Just to get a fresh crawl?  Crawl stats show about 2250 on average daily, so I was expecting this https thing to be gone by now... Regardless of why they chose it to index over my normal link.

thx for the input

My only concern with doing a redirect is this.  The shopping cart is https: , so if you start the checkout process you will enter https:

If person decides to continue shopping... They will stay in the https, but since the checkout page is restricted to bots, essentially https doesnt exist and shouldnt show on any searches.

The sitemaps is clean, and a canonical is in place...

I have been having some issues with a competitor, is it possible they submitted  https://www.mysite.com/ version of my website knowing that google will prefer this version?

thx for the advise

Basically, I have no inbound likes going to https://www.mysite.com , but google is indexing the Homepage only as https://www.mysite.com

In June, I was re included to the google index after receiving a penalty... Most of my site links recovered fairly well.  However my homepage did not recover for its top keywords.

Today I notice that when I search for my site, its displayed as https://

Robots.txt blocks all content going to any secure page.  Leaving me sort of clueless what I need to do to fix this.  Not only does it pose a problem for some users who click, but I think its causing the homepage to have an indexing problem.

Any ideas?  Redirect the google bot only?  Will a canonical tag fix this?

Thx

Gotcha on the canonical - that makes sense.

but in terms of the page/structure.  essentially, loading 100 products on one page does not look good in my opinion.  So use pages so i can display 20-25 products

http://www.xyz.com/brand.html?page=1 , would show the first 20 , http://www.xyz.com/brand.html?page=2 would show the next 20 ... and so on.

depending on the brand... there would be anywhere from 2-8 pages , therefore 2-8 duplicate titles/descriptions and possibly leading to indexing problems.

all of the text content and h1 is only shown on http://www.xyz.com/brand.html , and excluded from anything like http://www.xyz.com/brand.html?page=2   ... this is why i am looking for a way to sort of prioritize the main page for indexing purposes.

~thx

I'm trying to figure something out, as I just finished my "new look" to an old website.  It uses a custom built shopping cart, and the system worked pretty well until about a year when ranking went down.  My primary traffic used to come from top level Brand pages.  Each brand gets sorted by the shopping cart and a Parameter extension is added... So customers can click Page 1 , Page 2 , Page 3 etc.

So for example : http://www.xyz.com/brand.html , http://www.xyz.com/brand.html?page=1 , http://www.xyz.com/brand.html?page=2 and so on... The page= is dynamic, therefore the page title, meta's, etc are the same, however the products displayed are different.

I don't want to exclude the parameter page= completely, as the products are different on each page and obviously I would want the products to be indexed.  However, at the same time my concern is that have these parameters might be causing some confusion an hence why I noticed a drop in google rankings.

I also want to note - with my market, its not needed to break these pages up to target more specific keywords.

Maybe using something like this would be the appropriate measure?

Yeah because of the age of my website, there was just news that was picked up YEARS ago... a lot are hi-pr links, i just want to make sure I do the right thing with em because as it stands right now any traffic gained from these now is 75%+ bounce rate.  Good anchor text for most, 301 is what I was thinking about first... then i thought, maybe just wrap the pages in my new header and hope the searches dont remove or derank these random pages.

Again - We are talking about 50 pages, which bring in about 4k clicks a month... Albeit not huge, just didnt know what to do with them.

One more Idea - I make a new different header that used a "nofollow" on all links for all my category & brand pages, then use it to wrap these old pages... The idea would be to preserve the "old content" , and hopefully keep the pages ranked #1 for their respective low volume searches...

Would that even work?

This questing is regarding an ecommerce website that I hand wrote(html) in 1997.  One of the first click and buy websites, with cart/admin system that I also developed.

After all this time, the Old plain HTML look just doesnt cut it.  I just updated to XHTML w/ a very modern look, and believe the structured data will index better.  All products and current category pages will have the identical vrls taken from the old version.  I decided to go with the switch after manual penalty, which has since been removed... I figured now is the time to update.

My big question is that over the years, a lot of my backlinks came from products/news that are either no longer relevant or just not available.  The pages do exist, but can only be found from the Outbound Link Source.

For SEO purposes, I have thought a few things I can do but can't decide which one is the best choice.  Any Insight or suggestions would be Awesome!

1. Redirect the old link to the most relevant page in my current catalog.

2. Add my new header/footer to old page(this will add a navigation bar w/ brands/cats/etc)

3. Simply add a nice new image to the top of these pages linking home & update any broken/irrelevant links.  I was also considering adding just the very top 2 inches of my header(logo,search box, phone, address)

*note, some of these pages do receive some traffic.  Nothing huge, but consider the 50+ pages, it ads up.

I wasnt able to find any good answers on this.  I have two separate ecommerce websites, one with a top level blog.  (www.xyz.com/blog) and different website with a subdomain blog (blog.xyz.com)***note on the subdomain blog, although it links to our website.  You cannot directly shop from it.  Until i can make some sort of scraper, its what I have to work with.

For quite some time now I have been copying the blog posts and re-creating them on facebook as a Note.  Using the same anchor text/links on facebook as my blog post.

Part of the issue is that I want the facebook pages to have some content and not just links.  Both get 2-3 updates per week, 1 of those being a blog re-post.

Does anyone know if google or bing considers this duplicate content?  Should I simply link directly to the blog everytime, as a best practice?

Any insight on this would be great.  Thanks!

Is google to blame?  I feel like something of this magnitude requires legal action but havent found anything online about what I can do legally, whether I should collaborate and if simply bringing all this to google's attention is enough.

Thanks