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Hey Richard,
Yep Andy is correct - however if you are really dying to know you can always detect the orientation yourself using javascript (http://www.williammalone.com/articles/html5-javascript-ios-orientation/) then push it though as a GA custom variable (https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gajs/gaTrackingCustomVariables) until Google start reporting it themselves.
All the best,
Stuart
Hi Marc,
When you say Wordpress blog do you mean you'll be hosting the WP blog on your own server? Or you're using one hosted on wordpress.com (albeit via blog.yoursite.com) ?
If you are hosting it yourself then WP runs on PHP so normally plays pretty nicely with other PHP sites, just install it in a subfolder (so www.yoursite.com/blog/) and you should be good to go (unless you have any re-write rules that could mess with what wordpress is trying to do - just make sure thay they don't touch on the /blog/ sub-directory).
If you are hosting on wordpress.com then why not install WP on your actual site and use the above method?
I won't go into the merits of guest blogging as a link building strategy here 
Best wishes,
Stuart
Hi Mark,
On our site we use responsive design / css media queries to shape the same content to fit on mobiles / tablets / desktop. We initially had the same issue with the menu, but managed to use to clever css to actually use the same menu code, just present it at the top of the page for tablet / mobile, and off to the side (sliding in via a button touch) for mobile. This works pretty well and I certainly haven't noticed any negative effects SEO wise.
Best wishes,
Stuart
Hi Chrisopher,
Sounds like Hreflang could be your friend:
http://moz.com/blog/using-the-correct-hreflang-tag-a-new-generator-tool
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en
Hope that helps!
Stuart
Yep I agree with Dan, unless you really want people to be able to find your lost password page through the search results i'd disallow it as well - actually there is a bunch of stuff you can do to further secure your wp-admin folder should you so choose : http://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/11-vital-tips-and-hacks-to-protect-your-wordpress-admin-area/
Ah ok - do you mean that it's showing up in your report of links in Open Site Explorer? If that is the case it is probably because it is linked to from a few pages on your site, including http://inter-italia.com/en/ (under the account drop down it's linked to as 'Forgot Password?')
It looks like this might be an issue with your Worpress theme as it should really be linking to http://inter-italia.com/wp-login.php?action=lostpassword but rather than http://inter-italia.com/en/wp-login.php?action=lostpassword
Best,
Stuart
Hey Stacey,
In Wordpress the admin area is normally under the wp-admin folder (unless it's been changed), not sure if it's for the same site but the URL http://inter-italia.com/wp-admin/ seems to go to a WP admin page.
Hope that helps!
Stuart
Hi Phil,
Yeah fair point re the publisher tag, but like you say there is a lot of debate about exactly how to implement it, but i'll definitely try and refine it's use if I can.
Cheers for the video advice, i'll keep working on it.
Stu
Hi Phil,
Thanks for your response - and also your awesome talk at BrightonSEO - as far as the authorship markup is concerned we shouldn't have authorship markup on that page but we should have publisher markup, should that really only be on the homepage then? I've read a few different things about it (we put it on all pages as technically we are the publishers of all the pages on the site).
As for the video, i'll try what you suggested, I don't mind the video itself being there it's more the date in 2007 that makes the content look way older than it actually is! But yeah thanks for the advice, i'll keep at it!
Stu
Hey,
We do have a video sitemap, but that video isn't listed in it
Maybe i'll change the code and rename the video, see if that does it and then give the obfuscator a go...
Hey Mozzers,
I'm having a real problem getting some rich snippet data to go away! Normally i'm all for it, but in this case it's giving our department page a video rich snippet and also a really super old date (i'm not sure if this is connected with the video rich snippet, but it showed up at the same time).
The SERP is here: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=pool+table&pws=0&hl=en&num=10
We are 3rd for our page http://www.libertygames.co.uk/store/pool_tables/
I can't find the date Google is using anywhere on the page, in the headers or file dates or anything. I've even removed the video markup and removed the page from the video sitemap, the rich snippet testing tool confirms this : http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.libertygames.co.uk%2Fstore%2Fpool_tables%2F
Does anyone have any ideas why this might be showing up or if there is a way to speed up getting it off there and our old meta description back? I'm pretty sure it's killing our click-throughs.
Thanks in advance,
Stuart
Hi Laura,
If I remember correctly (it was a while since I messed around with these things), doesn't wp_title() actually add the <title>tags itself? If so you would just need:</p> <blockquote style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% #f7f7f7; padding-top: 5px; margin-left: 0px; padding-left: 2px; padding-bottom: 5px; white-space: nowrap; overflow-y: auto; font-family: monospace;"> <p><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="<?php bloginfo('html_type'); ?>; charset=<?php bloginfo('charset'); ?>" /></p> <p><?php wp_title(''); ?></p> <p> <?php sg_header_meta(); ?></p> </blockquote> <p>There is more info here : <a href="http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/wp_title">http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/wp_title</a></p> <p>If that doesn't do it, you could always try reversing your changes and use an SEO plugin, like the awesome Yoast Wordpress SEO (<a href="http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-seo/">http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-seo/</a>) which should allow you to change the titles without mucking around with the wordpress code itself.</p> <p>Hope that helps!</p> <p>Stuart</p></title>
Hey Chris,
Doesn't look like you need a reverse proxy to me, reverse proxies are normally for when you want to run say a wordpress blog (which runs on php, apache etc.) with say an ASP based main site - two incompatible technologies which is normally why lazy web developers just put the blog on a sub-domain - its the reverse proxy that fixes this.
But as your blog is in a sub-folder and not a sub-domain there is no need for a reverse proxy (as it looks like your CMS runs on PHP as does wordpress).
I see you are linking into the blog already, you might be able to tie into wordpress a bit more but developing some kind of plugin, or just going straight into the mysql database, to tie in your two 'sites' a bit more.
Hope that helps!
Stuart
No worries, once you have decided which one you are after, follow one of these guides:
http://www.stateofsearch.com/rel-publisher-explaine-marketers/
http://www.vervesearch.com/blog/seo/how-to-implement-the-relauthor-tag-a-step-by-step-guide/
Best,
Stuart
Hi Richard,
If you have a Google+ for business page it sounds like you might be after rel=publisher rather than rel=author, take a look at this quick presentation to see the difference:
http://www.slideshare.net/seosmarty/relpublisher-versus-relauthor
Best,
Stuart
Hi Paul,
Pagination is always a bit of a sticky area!
Firstly I certainly wouldn't do any user agent detection, you don't wanna get busted for cloaking when you aren't even up to anything that naughty.
A nice way i've seen this handled (for wordpress sites although the idea can work on any site) is with the wordpress infinite scroll plugin : http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/infinite-scroll/
That basically leaves the site as it is for non-javascript web browsers (so with page 1, 2 3 etc.) but if you have js enabled (i.e. not a spider bot) it will keep scrolling the page. This functionality could I guess be changed to create a pagination effect.
Tie this is with some rel="prev" and rel="next" markeup (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html) and I think that is certainly one way to fix the problem.
Another way could be using similar markup for a 'View All' page : http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/view-all-in-search-results.html
Hope that helps!
Stuart
Hey
Yeah this can be a bit of a problem, as is the same with relying on any one metric to judge something by.
As great as SEOmoz PA/DA etc. are they are probably more easier to game than say pagerank - this could be by more spammy links being counted, or say if the domain did have a site on, was dropped, then re-registered by someone else with lower quality content or content dragged out of the wayback engine put on it.
Overall I would always look at a blog and think 'if I was interested in this content would this be the kind of site i'd read ?' - if the answer is yes then go for the guest post, if not then maybe move on.
Other metrics such as social (facebook fans, twitter followers, G+1s etc.) can also help give an idea of how genuine the site is, although there are also ways to game these as well.
Hope that helps!
Stuart
Hi Lawrence,
Firstly you are asking this on seomoz.org - who are ranking just fine Although I think that's more because moz started out more for SEO discussions and evolved - still I think it shows that concentrating on quality content and generating quality in-bound links are probably more important than the type of domain you are on.
That said personally given the choice of .org or .info i'd probably go for .org just for the fact I would say that users are generally more 'aware' of .org than .info which could potentially impact your click-through rate in the SERPS.
Bear in mind also that exact match domains aren't what they used to be and you may well be better off creating a brand for your site on a .nl / .com then building the site up from there - with no risk of any kind of exact match domain penalty or anything else in fact in the future!
Best
Stuart
Hey,
Just a quick thought, is the page in question indexed in DMOZ? I haven't seen it on any of my pages in a while but it could be that Google is using the title from there rather than your title - if so the noodp meta tag could get rid of it. Probably not the issue but you never know.
All the best,
Stuart
Hey,
It's not showing up on my Firefox, which makes me think it could be one of your Firefox addons which is doing it. Try disabling your plugins through entering
about:plugins
As the URL, then try reloading the page.
All the best,
Stuart
Hey,
This WBF might be of some use:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-sitewide-reciprocal-and-directory-links
The one thing I would add is to make sure the anchor text is pretty natural, i.e. your brand term.
I have also seen it suggested to have one 'partners' page then sitewide link to this page and only have the one external link on this page.
All the best
All I can imagine is that either they bank with barclays and put a fair bit of business their way and have gotten their business manager to speak to the web team, or perhaps someone on the web staff could be taking a few back-handers for links, has been known to happen before.
Hey Peter,
Are you talking about setting up a goal in GA or simply tracking which links have been clicked? If it's the later then you can setup some javascript so when the link is clicked then you call
_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', trackWhat, clickLocation, clickTitle]);
Which will create an event in GA which you can track, alternatively if you are looking for a GA goal you could try adding a virtual pageview to the link activated by javascript again:
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview', '/example.php']);
Just make sure you have that page set up as a goal in your GA setup.
Hope that helps!
Stuart
Yeah we managed to get it to pick up the products for us, normally seemed to take a day or so after the crawl to reflect the change in the serps, although that was going from not showing it to showing it so not sure about the other way around.
But yeah 'items' and 'products' seem to be the words which trigger it, although there may be more...
Best,
Stuart
Hey,
I checked out your site in the UK serps and could see the Google product count snippet, which is different from the meta description (which also seems to be ok).
I'm no expert with Magento but as I mentioned you may be able to hack the Magento code a little bit to say 'Book 1 - 20 of xxxxxx' instead of 'Item 1 - 20 of xxxxxx' which might stop whatever text matching algorithm Google is using - i'd probably search the Magento forums for ways to do this - although it's not guaranteed to work i'd say it's worth a shot.
I'm not aware of any meta tag or anything else which would tell Google not to display this snippet i'm afraid (although I may be wrong).
Best,
Stuart
Hi Ben,
The only experience i've had with this is actually trying to get google to show this little snippet, what I found was that they seemed to just pick this up from the page, when the page had text similar to 'item 1 of x' or 'product 1 of x' - item / product seemed to be the words that google were looking for - only a guess but maybe try something like 'Book 1 - 10 of 22484' on the page and see what google makes of that?
All the best,
Stuart
Hey,
I was working with a site recently who's host suffered a number of issues over a few days, enough to receive a few warnings in GWT - and yes there was a hit to the rankings in the short term. However once their host got their game together the rankings did creep back up, although it took around a month of normal up-time for the ranking to largely recover.
As Greg says i'd definitely ensure you're on a good host, server downtime should be the last thing you need to be worrying about!
All the best,
Stuart
Hi Will,
In that case it doesn't really sound like you can stick with the original domain, so as Prasad suggested I would go with the 301 and the Google WMT Change of Address.
To avoid getting too many WMT errors you might also want to spider your existing site with something like screaming frog to ensure you catch all the existing URLs and point them to the right place on the new site.
You could also potentially contact people who have linked to your existing domain and ask them to change the link to your new domain.
All the best,
Stuart
Hi Will,
I guess my first question would be is why are you moving to a new domain? If at all possible if you are ranking on your existing domain I would try and keep your site on there, even if you are moving to a completely new CMS and server there are ways to ensure your URL structure maps over so each URL can be replaced 1-for-1 with a new page on the new site - if this is what you are doing?
Stuart
Hi Grace,
It looks to me like the way your rel=next / prev has been implemented in the wrong way - what it looks like it is telling the search engines is that each of your category pages is actually part of a paginated series of pages, this isn't what it is designed for. What it should be is:
Homepage - http://gracessweetlife.com/
Should have a rel="next" on the link for Page 2 - so:
Page 2 - http://gracessweetlife.com/page/2/
Should have a rel="prev" for the link to the previous page (in this case the homepage - so:
and a rel="next" for the link to the next page:
And so on...
Hope that helps!
Stuart
Hi Grace,
No worries, the update to the toolbar pagerank might not be exactly tomorrow so keep an eye on the blogs to see when people start to report it.
The Yoast plugin is definitely really good for SEO, but as I mentioned before don't break your blog to get it, although that said a competent wordpress developer should be able to handle it with no problems.
Good luck with SEO, the best thing to do is keep asking more questions! SEOMoz has some great content. If you are new maybe try one of the welcome webinars to see how to get the most out of it : http://www.seomoz.org/dp/welcome-webinars
Best wishes,
Stuart
Hi Grace,
Firstly - it does look like you have the rel=canonical on your paginated pages but not the rel = next / prev as far as I can see. Rel=canonical is one way of dealing with paginated pages, however I have personally seen better results using rel = next / prev - so if you can get this set up that would be good, but don't break your site trying to do it. I'm afraid i'm no wordpress expert so I can't advise about moving between SEO plugins.
I would say though that rel = next / prev is more appropriate for paginated pages, as rel = canonical is saying the pages are largely the same content, which with paginated results they are generally not.
As far as having PR / DA / PA on the paginated pages that's not really an issue, a number of sites i've worked on with paginated pages show this and it's totally normal.
All in all I wouldn't worry too much about it - as Google say on that page " Paginated content exists throughout the web and we’ll continue to strive to give searchers the best result, regardless of the page’s rel=”next”/rel=”prev” HTML markup—or lack thereof." - they have to deal with paginated wordpress blogs all the time.
With regard to none of your posts getting an page rank since the change how long ago was this? If you are referring to toolbar pagerank then this is only updated every few months or so - see http://www.seroundtable.com/pagerank-update-may12-15097.html - the more important thing to check is to see if the posts are (a) in the index (which it looks like they are - http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fgracessweetlife.com&pws=0&hl=en&num=10#q=site:gracessweetlife.com&hl=en&tbo=1&pws=0&prmd=imvns&source=lnt&tbs=qdr:m&sa=X&ei=R8wXUIPLA8a20QWor4GwCw&ved=0CCgQpwUoBA&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=ddc48e83889475dd&biw=1680&bih=833) and (b) are getting any traffic from search engines in your analytics page ?
Hope that helps!
Stuart
Hi Grace,
Looking at the source code of your site it doesn't look like the rel=next / prev is on there, you do have a class="next" on one of your paginated links, but this isn't the same. There's more information on rel=next / prev and ways to deal with pagination on this google blog post:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html
Like I said Yoast's wordpress plugin is very good for dealing with all these issues, so if you have a developer who setup the site, i'd speak to them about getting this installed.
Hope that helps!
Stuart
Hey Grace,
For paginated content there are also the rel="next" and rel="prev" tags to let the search engines know that the paginated pages are just that, paginated. Yoast's Wordpress SEO plugin takes care of this as well as being generally awesome : http://yoast.com/rel-next-prev-paginated-archives/
Hope that helps!
Stuart
Hi Miriam,
Thanks for the tips, i'll tkae on board what you've said and speak to the client and see if she has any input on the matter, if she genuinely can't I think i'll start off with one page targeting a few locations and try and build out more as time goes on, but hopefully she will have done something worthwhile locally (or maybe I can make her!).
Many thanks,
Stuart
Thanks for the tips, google local is next on the list of attack, but for a number of the keywords it seems that old-school organic listings are still at the top (for the time being) so she is very interested in trying to get up there - and yes we don't want to attract people looking for the wrong kind of massage
Hi There,
I'm helping a friend of a friend with her business website, which is basically providing health services within a local radius of her home, so we are hoping to get her ranking for phrases such as "massage Battersea" "massage Clapham" etc. (where Battersea & Clapham are two places in London).
As i'm a bit new to local work like this my question is what is the best way to do this?
I've considered creating a page for each of these terms, however it's hard to work out how they could have unique content as a massage in Clapham is very much the same as one in Battersea, and I don't want to fill the pages with useless information about where Battersea & Clapham are because i'm sure people searching those phrases already know that!
The only other thing I can think of would be to just mention the areas on a generic massage page and hope that ranks with a bit of "massage battersea" etc. inbound anchor text.
If someone who has experience in this could offer any advice that would be great.
Many thanks,
Stuart
Hi Erica, Thanks for your response, totally makes sense. We do have transcripts of the videos but we used these on separate FAQ pages which sit along side the videos (there are about 7 or so on that page with a JavaScript drop down to change between them) which receive some traffic but nothing like our main money page, would you recommend moving those transcripts to this page ? Many thanks, Stuart
Hi there,
We were ranking no. 1 for one of our key terms for a long time, however a competitor of ours by the looks of it purchased a load of private blog network links and managed to shift above us.
The page we rank for on that term has a video with the markup to trigger a video box rich snippet (which i've noticed never seems to be given on position 1 but can be for 2 and below) - so that is now what our entry in the SERPs is.
Since then we have actually dropped down to 3rd, with the web page now being in 2nd not having any new links / content in a very long time.
Therefore I was wondering if anyone had any ideas about whether the video box could actually reduce CTR which could have resulted in us dropping down to 3rd ? The meta description text seems to be reduced to 100 characters with the vid box, so we're not getting our full message across where the others in the results are.
My natural assumption would be that the video box would gain a higher CTR, but i'm thinking this may not be the case for us. Does anyone know of any data relating to the video box in the SERPS ?
Many thanks,
Stuart
Hi everyone,
The background to my question is that one of the companies I work for has just produced a load of videos answering many of the common questions about their products, for the ecommerce part of their site. I've got these videos transcribed which I want to use as the backbone to some of the main pages on the site (some of which are already ranking reasonably well).
I was thinking of putting this content on their department page (so for example their departments would be kitesurfing, land kites, toy kites etc.) above links to their sections (e.g. kite surf kites, kite surf boards etc.). Do you think this would be a good place to put a large amount of text ? (the text will be in a scrollable div) - i.e. could it get in the way of the links which are currently passing juice deeper in to the site ?
Alternatives are to put the videos under the links to the sections (which would place them below the fold), or to place each video on its own page and simply link to these pages from the departments page (although it is the department page we wish to rank).
Another alternative is to put links to the sections both before and after the new content.
Hope that all makes sense! Thanks in advance
Hi thanks for the input, my only concern with doing this would be increasing load times, I think its a case of one optimisation tactic vs. another. Perhaps something like only loading the product images of the products below the fold would help the loading time issue but this then creates issues of its own!
Hi there,
Whilst checking out the SERPS, as you do, I noticed that where our category page appears, google now seems to be counting the number of products (what it calls items) on the product page and displaying this in the 1st part of the description (see image attached).
My problem is we employ pagination, so that our category page will have 15 items on it, then there are paginated results for the rest, with either ?page=2 or page-2/ etc. appended to the URL. Although this is only a minor issue, I was just wondering if there was a way to change the number of products displayed on that page to be the entire number of products in that category, is there a microformat markup or something that can over-ride what google has detected ?
Furthermore is this system of pagination effective ? I have considered using javascript pagination, such that all products would be loaded on to the one page but hidden until 'paginated', but I was worried about having hidden elements on the page, and also the impact of load times. Although I think this may solve the problem and display the true number of products in a section!
Any help much appreciated,
Stuart
Thanks for the advice, that article looks great will have a good read of it over the weekend. I think it might just be down to a case of trying various things on a few different pages and see which works best.
I agree authority is key here, however we found having a clear site navigation near the top of the page, as well as including breadcrumbs on deeper pages helped give google the clues about which pages to show when you are deemed worthy!
Thanks for the response, I should have mentioned "Liberty Games" is our brand term so is at the and after the | of every page on the site.
I did read that it was a good idea to try and target the singular and the plural term in the title tage, so for example 'Pool Tables, buy a pool table online at Liberty Games' - although i'm not sure if this would appear too stuffed as when you search for the singular google already highlights the plural so it clearly knows the link. That said we don't rank as well on the singular so any boost would help.
