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Hi all,

I recently took over SEO efforts for a large e-commerce site (I would prefer not to disclose). About a month ago, I began to notice a significant drop in traffic from Bing and uncovered in Bing Webmaster Tools that three different versions of the sitemap were submitted and Bing was crawling all three. I removed the two out of date sitemaps and re-submitted the up to date version. Since then, I have yet to see Bing traffic rebound and the amount of pages indexed by Bing is still dropping daily. During this time there has been no issue with traffic from Google.

Currently I have 1.3 million pages indexed by Google while Bing has dropped to 715K (it was at 755K last week and was on par with Google several months ago). I know that no major changes have been made to the site in the past year so I can't point to anything other than the sitemap issue to explain this. If this is indeed the only issue, how long should I expect to wait for Bing to re-index the pages? In the interim I have been manually submitting important pages that aren't currently in the index.

Any insights or suggestions would be very much appreciated!

Thanks Rand. I suspected so.

It was a very intriguing experiment you conducted. My take away... there are no more short cuts without getting into trouble with Google... just smart and hard work, keeping your plate clean.

Thanks for your response!

Back in April of 2014, Rand performed an experiment to determine if Google clicks-throughs made a difference on rankings. He Tweeted and asked people to search on a specific term, and then click on a specific listing, to determine if the immediate clicks made a difference. Within 2.5 hours, his search listing went from #10 position to #1 position.

My question is this: If this experiment still works today, could you right click, copy link address of the SERP listing from Google's page and put it in a Facebook or Twitter post, and receive the same results? Or would this be gaming the system?

Here is an example of the link:  https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=10&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwiaqZD9-cXLAhUKyWMKHfFID70QFghYMAk&url=http%3A%2F%2Fbuzzy4shots.com%2Ffocus-pain-relief%2F&usg=AFQjCNElHaso_vXP4rWQdsaX1JdP8IItMQ&sig2=Sg9r6zSbW0pZQtb4ZbzJqg&bvm=bv.117218890,d.cGc

Not exactly. When it comes to different countries, like the example domains you listed above. (.com and .ca) Google allows for mirrored or duplicate sites by country.

When it comes to multiple sites in the same country, Google will give value to the first use of the content, then no value to the 2nd use. In the example you gave of San Diego and Atlanta, it is important to create unique content, citations and backlinks that are localized to that site's location.

I have a client that has two separate appliance companies in the same area and two separate websites. I've used some of the same general content on both, but have content that is unique to both, along with unique links, and they both rank really well.

Yes, if they are different businesses, they should be treated differently.

Not a bad looking site. Google does allow for duplicate content across multi-regional sites. And sometimes a new site will get an initial boost then drop back down. Also, if there is not a lot of localized website competition, Google will rank them as the most relevant for this category in Hawaii.

Thanks guys. That was what I thought. But, it is always good to get some conformation.

Is it still a good practice to use "div's" to place content at the top of the HTML code, if your content is at the bottom of the web page?

Correct, Thomas. We are not looking to restructure the site at this time but we are looking for a program that will crawl 300,000 plus pages and let us know which internal pages are duplicated.

We are looking for an internal duplicate content checker that is capable of crawling a site that has over 300,000 pages. We have looked over Moz's duplicate content tool and it seems like it is somewhat limited in how deep it crawls. Are there any suggestions on the best "internal" duplicate content checker that crawls deep in a site?

Does anyone know how deep the crawl diagnostics will crawl when searching for dup content? Will it crawl the entire site, or will it only crawl "x" amount of pages?

Thanks!

Thank you, Cyrus. Your response is very much appreciated.

Since I posted this question, our reports have been showing the links are starting to drop off. I will update this thread if something happens.

Somehow we ended up getting hundreds-of-thousands of links coming from our .au (Australia site) to our .com (America site). We believe that something happened during a change that turned a handful of our example.com.au navigational and footer links into back links pointing to example.com and sub-domains of the American version.

We are currently fixing this, but we are wondering if this could potentially be problematic in terms of a penguin penalty due to an unnatural linking campaign or back link scheme. Could this error create major problems for us in the near future if we have corrected the issue? Your thoughts are welcome!

Thanks!

HashtagHustler;

Thanks for taking the time to respond. This change is a tough one. If you've every worked for a company with in-house SEO, it is a balancing act to accommodate what Upper Management wants, and still maintain best practices, rankings and traffic.

I feel the best option is what you suggested, that of leaving the store there and addition to the home page, but upper management is not buying that option, so I'm trying to find the best way to do this without too much damage. I feel the home page will take a hit in rankings, I just want to minimize the damage as much as possible. My task is to make sure that the linking networks are carried over, move over the content and images, and then 301 the store page to the new home page.

I will probably set up a roll back plan, if the rankings tank.

As for the forum. We have a very successful forum on a sub-domain, that does very well for us. We also have an active blog.

Thanks for your input.

We are looking at doing a major change with our website. Upper management is wanting to have our home page be our store page, instead of just a landing page. So basically we would be eliminating our current home page, and replacing it with our store page. This is a very large site and our current home page gets a lot of traffic. Issues to deal with will be ranking of the current page content; Internal links to both pages; external links (backlinks) pointing to the two pages, and of course, a potential drop in rankings and traffic.

Any ideas on how to best do this? Or not do it at all. 301 redirect?

Thanks,

Brad

I would go with subfolders versus subdomains. With subfolders you draw upon the strength of your whole website. With subdomains, each subdomain has to stand on its own. (Internal page linking, backlinking and content) By keeping everything tied to your root domain, you have greater value. I've learned this by experience with our own older strategies of using subdomains. Building up a bigger site with more pages is better.

Each subfolder, with its own localized topic, will rank just fine as a page, because it is supported by your larger site.

My reporting is back to normal. Much have been a glitch on Google's side.

Yes, my reporting is back to normal. Looks like a problem on Google's side. They have not commented on it, though.

Mine dropped today. We do have a large eCommerce site with 1,000's of products. But, I'm also seeing on sites that don't have products.

Just noticed a large drop in Webmaster tools of our structured data graphs. Both "items" and "items with errors" dropped. It is across the board on all our sites. Even checked some of the sites that I do consulting work for, and they dropped.

My assumption is that this is another Google glitch, similar to what we saw last year, and in March of this year, where is corrected itself.

Anyone else seeing anything on their end?

My suggestion would be to stay with one site, and set up pages or categories within your site to address different audiences. Building more than one site will require you to do backlinking and social channel strategies for each one. Build the mother ship and point everything there. Good examples to follow are Amazon, Walmart (Who has recently jumped into the rankings over the last few years).

I have a lot of local website clients. I use the Wordpress platform exclusively for these websites and have had phenomenal success with rankings for these sites. One particular client's site was no where to be found on Google 2 years ago. They now dominate the top three positions on Google's 1st page on over 100 relevant keywords. (These are strong head terms and not just long tail terms)

So I'm a strong supporter of Wordpress. Of course you have to work on optimizing your pages, but Wordpress makes it so easy and quick to make changes.

Email me here:  bstone81@comcast.net and I can discuss how we can help you.

Here's the instructions:

Ask Google to crawl a page or site:

1. On the Webmaster Tools Home page, click the site you want.
2. On the Dashboard, under Crawl, click Fetch as Google.
3. In the text box, type the path to the page you want to check.
4. In the dropdown list, select Web. (You can select another type of page, but currently we only accept submissions for our Web Search index.)
5. Click Fetch. Google will fetch the URL you requested. It may take up to 10 or 15 minutes for Fetch status to be updated.
6. Once you see a Fetch status of "Successful", click Submit to Index, and then click one of the following:
   • To submit the individual URL to Google's index, selectURL and click Submit. You can submit up to 500 URLs a week in this way.
   • To submit the URL and all pages linked from it, click URL and all linked pages. You can submit up to 10 of these requests a month.

At least go into the "Crawl" section in Webmaster Tools, and do a "Fetch as Google" of your domain and all pages. This will ask Google to reindex your whole site. You can also see your page the way Google sees it.

He needs to start with the obvious first. Take a look at Webmaster Tools to make sure Google is indexing his pages. Do a Fetch on some pages to see what Google sees. Next move would be to have a full, in depth site audit done to review all the elements of the site. Screaming Frog is a good tool for that. Then he needs to go back and explore his links again. Adding some new, relevant links will help.

I recall Matt Cutts, in one of his videos (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z07IfCtYbLw), addressing product descriptions (Scraped from the manufacturer) with E-Commerce sites, especially those sites that are selling products that a hundred, or even a thousand other retailers are selling. He said that you would be ahead of your competition if you took the time to rewrite those descriptions, so they are original and not duplicate content . It is not necessary to refresh or rewrite them every couple of months. Just having a unique description that no one else has for that product will put you ahead of everyone else selling that product.

It would be a good idea to try and get your customers to write reviews on your products and post them on your product pages. This is unique, original content that is fresh. Amazon is a good example of doing this.

The fact that you have all new URL's, even though you have 301'd all your old URL's, it will take Google time to crawl, index and rank those new URL's. It is like a whole new website, and is not currently in Google's database.

You might try going into Google Webmaster Tools, under the Crawl section, and then Fetch as Google. When it is Fetched, click on the Submit to index button, and then click the box "URL and all linked pages". It may speed up the process of Google re-indexing, but is no guarantee.

I have had to do this on numerous sites where I wanted to change to different URL structures.

Thank Takeshi. Yes, I was aware of the no-follow policy with Pinterest. Just saw it as odd that Google is picking up a greater percentage of Pinterest links than before. I'm not seeing that same characteristic across any other links.

I've been using Pinterest for a couple of years now. It has been great in promoting our brand and generating referral traffic.

My question is this. I've noticed in Webmaster Tools, in the "Links to your site" section, that my links from Pinterest has really shot up.It's gone from 3,500 links, 6 months ago, to over 23,000 recently.

Those of you using Pinterest, have you seen a similar increase? Just wondering if Google is recognizing more of the links, even though they are "no-follow" links.

Sure. First off, you've been asked by the linking company to do so, so you want to accommodate their request, and secondly, it will do you no harm.

Google is getting pretty good at sniffing out webmasters trying to game the system. Just naturally put your keywords in places that make sense and try not to overdo it, and you should be fine.

It is going to be spamming your URL's with keywords that are not serving a subfolder purpose. I would focus on naturally putting your keywords into your product name in the title tag, URL and H1 tag.

Might be a little spammy in your title tag with "Las Vegas"

With my company, which has several major domain sites and a mother-ship root domain, we've had this ongoing discuss of moving all our subdomains to subfolders. Our concern is the pain of the transition in losing valuable traffic until the subfolders gain value and traffic. So we have the following subdomains:

boatcovers.iboats.com

boatpropellers.iboats.com

biminitops.iboats.com

forums.iboats.com

And all our other products are listed under iboats.com. Is there a painless way of making the switch to move our subdomains into subfolders and not get killed on traffic?

Looks like Google fixed the issue. All my sites impressions are back up.

We are considering adding expires header to our site. If we add this meta tag to expire for a certain date, but we do not make any changes to the site after it expires, can you be penalized for this?

I'm finally starting to see people talking about this issue on other forums. One poster indicated that it is a Google glitch and that they are aware of it and working on a fix. This happens from time to time. If you may recall, over a year ago Links to Site in GWT dropped overnight. That too was a Google reporting error.

Always good to know it is them and not us.  Now back to work, with less worry.  

Rob, thanks for your input.

Previous to posting my question, I checked traffic, visits, indexing and rankings. Everything looked normal. I did some checking of some sites I have hosted somewhere else (Not the same as my main sites), and the impressions look normal.

I'm suspecting that there might be an issue with the hosting location, or Google just has a glitch with our impressions reporting for this particular login. Bottom line my traffic and rankings are okay, so I'll wait and see if Google corrects the problem.

Thanks for your input!

I'm seeing a drop in impressions across all my websites that are hosted at a certain location. Just wanted to make sure that it is not some reporting issue that others are seeing.

Rob:

If you haven't done this yet, research the keywords for your business. Make sure you use these keywords in a natural way on the pages of your website. For each page, put your main keyword in the title tag, url and H1 tag. Depending on the website platform you are using, you should be able to do this fairly easy. Make sure that you have keyword specific alt tags on all your images. Get your website listed with all the online local listing directories, especially Google places. Set up Facebook, Twitter, Google plus and Tumblr pages. Work with industry related websites to mention (citations) your business and website.

Keep in mind that all your content on your web pages and social channels need to be engaging and natural. With the launch of hummingbird, it appears that Google is looking more for themed and topic-based web pages, so give the users what you think they are looking for.

There are a couple of things you can do that will help your product pages rank better over your pdf pages. You can do a canonical from the pdf to the product page it is referencing, giving your product page the ranking value. You can incorporate your pdf into text (html) on your product page, giving your product page additional, relevant content, thus boasting ranking.

Dave:

Thanks again. I just watched Rand's whiteboard Friday on this, and it gave me some additional ideas on some old sites that we have, to utilize the value of those pages by canonicalizing those pages to our main website.

I usually watch a lot of Rand's whiteboards, but must have missed this one.

Thanks!

Craig:

Thanks for your input. We are trying to determine how best to maintain the traffic and value on our outside engine site, but still give our boaters on the main page the info they are looking for without clicking away to another (manufacturer) page. Having duplicate pages makes sense to us, but making sure that Google gives the manufacturer page the value. So a canonical seems logical for what we are trying to accomplish. We have hundred's of thousands of pages on our main site, so we are not concerned of losing value there. However, we do want to keep and build the value of our manufacturer pages. That is where we want our traffic to go when they are looking for that manufacturer-specific product.

Thanks again for your input!

Thank you for your reply. I'll check Rand's video. I'm assuming it is one of his white board Friday discussions? In the meantime I did find Google's take on it. It was on their Webmaster Central Blog: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html

Thanks again for responding!

We are a boating site and have our main site with all it's products. We have an engine section within our main site. But we also have an outside domain, specific to a certain manufacturer of engines. So we want our customers to still find the engine information for this manufacturer within our main site, as well as find the manufacturer targeted engine site in the SERPS.

My question is this: Can I canonical those pages within our main site to pages on the outside domain? Or does are canonicals to be used only within the same domain?

Thanks,

That's why you are not sweating the Penguin update... you think and breath like your father.

I'm not particularly concerned. I'm banking that as Penguin 2.0 takes down my competitors spammy links, I will climb in rank. I do have competitors that have some really bad neighborhood links. So I'm counting on the update to reward us.

As for your Mom... are you the result of your Mom's one night stand?  

I'm waiting, probing and analyzing and haven't seen any signs of a Penguin change. I am seeing some of my head terms bounce around the last couple of days. Mostly bouncing up and then back down again. I'm not sure if these are signs of an algo change starting, and working through Google's servers.

Has anyone seen anything yet?

Thanks Takeshi.

I am using Open Site Explorer, and notice a drop there too, but realized different results with the addition or exclusion of "www".

I have used the other tools you mentioned. I just wanted to make sure that Google wasn't trying to mask or restrict our access to seeing website's backlinks. That could really hurt our abilities to build backlinks.

Thanks for your input.