Welcome to the Q&A Forum

@JustDucky We recently migrated to a data center and the average loading time dropped from ~4 seconds to ~0.9. I to noticed only 1-2% drop in bounce rate. It seems only that many people were turned off by the loading times. Then again 1-2% can be anything.

@John O'Haver I would invest the time simply because ~3.4 is the average value. This means that sometimes it goes up to 10 or even more. Take a look at your analytics account and see the performance per country. Also, I've been benchmarking analytics with remote monitoring solutions and I find a discrepancy of about 30% (probably due to limited sample date from analytics). I don't want to advertise any available solutions, but trying one won't hurt. You may find your times to be better (I hope).

One thing I see and might be the reason is that you have

rel="canonical" href="http://appetise.com/"

but domain redirects to

http://www.appetise.com/.

So you have set the canonical version to appetise.com and then a 301 redirect to www.appetise.com. What I suggest is you do is alter the canonical link element to:

rel="canonical" href="http://www.appetise.com/"

I have some pretty strong links from relevant sources linking to the homepage of a site I deal with.

The links are usually from a PR3-5 pages and display specific result about the linking site. Sometimes they come from badges. We offer several services, so sometimes the page is about one service and next time about the other. Currently all of my pages link to the homepage. Would it not be better to link to the specific product page related to the page I have? Also I can do a canonical to the service pages?

Which would be best?

IA few years back I noticed that Google Webmaster Tools returns 404s from regular text containing a URL, but no anchor tag. I came accross this again today. Is it worthwhile to create those URLs and 301 redirect them to proper pages.

Hi Derek,

I deal with a site which has a lot of low quality links. The owner decided it is a good idea at some point and got a bunch of links despite their quality. What I notice is that this works while the site is still small. Correct me if I'm wrong on this one. Not all sites are treated the same way and it definitely depends on the local Google version we are using. You will be surprised what still works on Google.bg. Things that would never get a site off the ground on google.com or google.co.uk.

Regards,

Svet

I've been working with the canonical tag for many issues since Feb 2009. I haven't tried this particular situation. It will most likely not rank document X on website B like it would on website A without canonical.

Since canonical translates to "i'm a copy of an existing page", then I guess that it would perform as if it was the documenton website B.

It is a whole different story if document X has been linked to from good pages on website A. If it ranks possition 1, then it is likely it is linked. This way you should be able to transfer some link juice. It is considered to pass on less than 301 redirect, which on its part is not passing the whole thing.

I look forward to some testing. I will try to see if I can do the experiment myself. This sounds like a good way to build links. That is if you can place the canonical link element on website A.

Including but not limited to "pages which are hosted on web servers located in Australia". While hosting is an important factor Google are aware that a lot of the times webmasters might get better deals and service from host in different geographical areas. Let me put it this way. If I have a site hosted in the US, but my site is in german, my backlinks are from german sites, the local address on the site is in Germany and I have a german phone number, it si likely Google will take the hint that I'm more relevant to people in Germany.

IMOHO, under "Pages from Australia" Google brings back sites firmly associated with the australian market.

I will have to disagree. While this helps for a page/website to be associated with the market it is not always the case. The for example http://www.outback-australia-travel-secrets.com/ - showing under Pafes from Australia. It is not a .com.au and it is hosted in Canada.

Hi Diane,

3 things come to me. Before goind to the points below it is good to know where your statistics are souced from. More importantly - how you receive your traffic.

1. Lower possitions on google due to:
   • sudden drop in rakings because of a competitor is performing better
   • google penalty (your platform is 1.5 and there are a couple of versions after it. With Joomla I will always check for security risks. You should be able to check is that is the case on google webmaster tools.
2. Probably a reffering site ceased sending traffic
3. There is some seasonal effect. Many people take their holidays in August. It depends on where your traffic is comming from.

I hope that helps!

Svet

One thing I see and might be the reason is that you have

rel="canonical" href="http://appetise.com/"

but domain redirects to

http://www.appetise.com/.

So you have set the canonical version to appetise.com and then a 301 redirect to www.appetise.com. What I suggest is you do is alter the canonical link element to:

rel="canonical" href="http://www.appetise.com/"

With 302 redirects, Google first sees the old URL and then moves one to the new one. The bot will always first go the the old page, since 302 means temporary redirect. If you, by any chance, decide to go back to the old URL, Google needs to be kept in the loop and that is why it always checks the old page for the redirect.

In fact, in the results you should see your old URL with the new content indexed. Is that the case? I'm also not quite sure if 302 will pass PageRank. I would say - switch to 301.

I've worked for a website with 100+ internal links on most of its pages. In 4 years, the bot never got confused.

At one point it looked ridiculous. After the owners refused to remove the footer links and other duplicate ones I went ahead with nofollow attribute on the links I consider to have close to no value for users and search engines.

We impelemnted nofollow by marking all internal links with a unique ID. E.g if a link to the live chat form the footer of the site got ID #4112 on the home page, it had the same ID through the rest of the pages. I then got all the ID I want to have the attribute and gave them back to the developers. This approach had one great advantage - it minimized the chance of human error to only me restricting the wrong link. Nothing was lost in translation.

I'm wondering what would be the best approach for further expanding the online presence of the business I work for. Let me start off with the resources at my disposal.

We own visafirst.com and run the business for 7 years. All that time we had the domain online. There was a penalty back in 2005, I think (for hidden text). I've been dealing with the domain since 2007.

In the last few years we got translations in French, German, Italian, some pages in Japanese, and recently we got it translated in Spanish. The translations don't hold all the products the English version has. We translate only products which we can offer to the targeted audience. So far, I use language folders /en/, /fr/, /de/ etc. I have the settings in Google's Webmaster Tools set to the most appropriate country (the one we want to attract customers from). We own a lot of local domains .co.uk, .ie, .fr .de, .es, .jp, etc. Currently we either use them for small projects, like AdWords (to improve CTR) or have them point to the .com version with canonical.

I like nothing more than the idea of having the local domains appear in local search results, without that inflicting damage on the .com version. If I decide to go with the local domains and redirect (probably I will use canonical to avoid the redirect mess) the existing portions of the site to their relevant local domain - visafirst.com/fr/ to point to visafirst.fr etc., I'm afraid that I would take too much away from the domain in terms of content and backlinks.

So, I'm faced with the following question - Should I risk it with the local domains where we have physical presence, or should I continue using the flagship domain.

Also, would local domains improve the CTR a lot? I will test that with AdWords in the days to come, however it would be nice to know if someone has faced this before.

Thank You,

Svet Stefanov

First I will start with the most annoying and obvious answer - try to get as many backlinks as possible, most of them from sites which are firmly associated with the UK market.

You can also try providing the UK content under a subdomain, or even better - a /folder on your site. Then you will be able to associate it with the relevant market on Google Webmaster Tools. If you go with a subdomain, that might be better if you submit your site in local listings. This post by Rand Fishkin on ranking in Google Local if found useful for ideas about local listings.

Regards,

Svet

With a couple of hundred pages it does not seem realistic of me to suggest this. If you have a product which you are eager to push up, then get links for it. Get links for your home page and security bond section. It is feasible and it will have possitive effect down the road.

I work with a site with 15000 pages with similar content, close to the approach of suretegrity.com. The main part of the content is the same, but with a variable. I actually use 4+ variables. Most of my english pages are still in the index little of the have any page rank at all, but they rank. I got no rank for them in 2 years time, so I wouldn't hold my breath for PR on those if I were you :).

Yes, I can't say I saw dramatic changes in the rankings after I got the internal links beneath the "esoteric" 100.

The first thing I would do is login to my webmaster tools account and submit a reconsideration request. https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration?pli=1 this goes a long way with Google. Just explain everything as it happened and confirm that the problem got fixed.

I hope that helps!

Hi Diane,

3 things come to me. Before goind to the points below it is good to know where your statistics are souced from. More importantly - how you receive your traffic.

1. Lower possitions on google due to:
   • sudden drop in rakings because of a competitor is performing better
   • google penalty (your platform is 1.5 and there are a couple of versions after it. With Joomla I will always check for security risks. You should be able to check is that is the case on google webmaster tools.
2. Probably a reffering site ceased sending traffic
3. There is some seasonal effect. Many people take their holidays in August. It depends on where your traffic is comming from.

I hope that helps!

Svet

Whatever you do don't memorize the content in your efforts to alter it in each variatio. Leave your desk/laptop and have a cup of coffee/tea. Write down the content in your own words. That doen't always work for me, but I am able to get good variations when it does. Another thing I rarely do, but find amusing is I getting a cup of coffee and going where my colleagues go for a smoke. While eavesdropping on their conversation, I try to replace the subject of their discussion with the subject the page I'm stuck on. It is often bizarre but I get a few good expressions and synonyms.