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That's too bad... unfortunately our business is too large to simply restructure the URLs, and such a project would take quite a long time to complete. Anyways, having the ability to segment site sections with wildcards would have enabled us to hone our campaign setups.
Not a huge ordeal. Now I need to reconsider how we setup our campaigns moving forward.
Thank you Federico.
Basically I would like the Moz crawler to focus on a specific section of our domain. We do not bucket things via folder groups, so the use of wildcards would be applicable to us.
Our URL structure:
Is the example below a valid input to track the above URL structure?
Thanks.
Does anyone know of a good bulk backlink checker? I want to input a list of URL's (1,000's) at a time and check to see if their are any external backlinks.
I looked at the sitemap, and they are including the http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-story-of-seomoz but not the canonical page - http://www.masternewmedia.org/entrepreneurship-the-full-story-of-seomoz-told-by-rand-fishkin/
So based on this example, the page on SEOMoz is still included in the sitemap, regardless if it has a canonical or not.
This seems to make sense, since canonical links are used only as a hint and not an absolute directive.
I also noticed that Google is choosing to index and rank both pages, on Page 1.
SEOMoz is ranking higher on my browser for "the full story of seomoz". A few things going on here.
Why is google choosing to rank SEOMoz higher than Mastermedia.org for this page? There's a canonical setup, but google is choosing not to follow it. (again its a hint not an absolute) this doesn't always work.
I would think Google would be able to filter out the duplicate content easy. In this example, they are clearly not. SEOMoz is ranking #4 and Masternewmedia.org is ranking #5 for query "the full story of seomoz"
I have several sites that have cross domain canonical tags setup on similar pages. I am unsure if these pages that are canonicalized to a different domain should be included in the sitemap. My first thought is no, because I should only include pages in the sitemap that I want indexed.
On the other hand, if I include ALL pages on my site in the sitemap, once Google gets to a page that has a cross domain canonical tag, I'm assuming it will just note that and determine if the canonicalized page is the better version. I have yet to see any errors in GWT about this. I have seen errors where I included a 301 redirect in my sitemap file. I suspect its ok, but to me, it seems that Google would rather not find these URL's in a sitemap, have to crawl them time and time again to determine if they are the best page, even though I'm indicating that this page has a similar page that I'd rather have indexed.
I am looking for a reputable SEO company to help diagnose Panda issues. I am very familiar with SEO and lead an in-house team so I need more than a basic audit.
e.g You need unique content
e.g. You need to create quality content
I am looking for someone with a technical mind to help diagnose. Please reach if you have someone in mind.
A question came up today on how to correctly serve the right status code on pages where no search results are found.
I did a couple searches on some major eccomerce and news sites and they were ALL serving status code 200 for No Search Results Found
http://www.zappos.com/dsfasdgasdgadsg
http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_trksid=p5197.m570.l1313&_nkw=dfjakljgdkslagklasd&_sacat=0
http://www.cnn.com/search/?query=sdgadgdsagas&x=0&y=0&primaryType=mixed&sortBy=date&intl=false
http://www.seomoz.org/pages/search_results?q=sdagasdgasdgasg
I thought I read somewhere were it was recommended to serve a status code 404 on these types of pages. Based on what I found above, all sites were serving a 200, so it appears this may not be the best practice.
Any thoughts?
Thanks for your responses.
@EGOL - I would agree that merging the sites would be ideal given that they share such a large database. Unfortunately, this isn't an option for our company (at this point-in-time). Acquiring new content for our product pages has been tossed around, but would be a HUGE undertaking, so its on the "back burner" for the moment.
@Ben Fox - We came to the conclusion that it was content because it was the only clear "offender" on the list of potential problems. However, the fact that only 3 of our sites got penalized perplexes me as well. It would have made more sense had all of our sites suffered a penalty (luckily only 3 did). One response I got from another forum was: since google removed enough duplicate content (3 sites in our case) it deemed that the others were "original".
We didn't point canonicals to any one site (like 9 going to 1). We only added the rel=canonical to our manufacturer category pages (a small percentage of pages). Since some of our domains sell products that aren't "niche specific" we told these pages to send preference to their proper niche domain (hope that made sense).
For discussion purposes, here is a response I got from another forum:
Why has only one site recovered?I suspect/assume the other sites will bounce back the same way after their own 30 day penalties expire.>Why would only 3 of our sites be affected by this "filter"/Panda if many of them share the same content????? maybe removing the first site allowed the scoring penalty applied to the other sites to shrink in size. as each site was removed, the penalty applied to the others correspondingly shrunk. ?????>Is it a coincidence that it was an exact 30 day "filter"?No. 30 day is a common penalty.Does anyone agree with these? I've heard of the 30 day penalty before. If this is the case, then a warning from Google would be nice.
Hello fellow internet go'ers!
Just as a disclaimer, I have been following a number of discussions, articles, posts, etc. trying to find a solution to this problem, but have yet to get anything conclusive. So I am reaching out to the community for help.
Before I get into the questions I would like to provide some background:
I help a team manage and improve a number of med-large eCommerce websites. Traffic ranges anywhere from 2K - 12K+ (per day) depending on the site. Back in March one of our larger sites was "filtered" from Google's search results. I say "filtered" because we didn't receive any warnings and our domain was/is still listed in the first search position. About 2-3 weeks later another site was "filtered", and then 1-2 weeks after that, a third site.
We have around ten niche sites (in total), about seven of them share an identical code base (about an 80% match). This isn't that uncommon, since we use a CMS platform to manage all of our sites that holds hundreds of thousands of category and product pages. Needless to say, April was definitely a frantic month for us. Many meetings later, we attributed the "filter" to duplicate content that stems from our product data base and written content (shared across all of our sites). We decided we would use rel="canonical" to address the problem. Exactly 30 days from being filtered our first site bounced back (like it was never "filtered"), however, the other two sites remain "under the thumb" of Google.
Now for some questions:
Why would only 3 of our sites be affected by this "filter"/Panda if many of them share the same content?
Is it a coincidence that it was an exact 30 day "filter"?
Why has only one site recovered?
Hello fellow internet go'ers!
Just as a disclaimer, I have been following a number of discussions, articles, posts, etc. trying to find a solution to this problem, but have yet to get anything conclusive. So I am reaching out to the community for help.
Before I get into the questions I would like to provide some background:
I help a team manage and improve a number of med-large eCommerce websites. Traffic ranges anywhere from 2K - 12K+ (per day) depending on the site. Back in March one of our larger sites was "filtered" from Google's search results. I say "filtered" because we didn't receive any warnings and our domain was/is still listed in the first search position. About 2-3 weeks later another site was "filtered", and then 1-2 weeks after that, a third site.
We have around ten niche sites (in total), about seven of them share an identical code base (about an 80% match). This isn't that uncommon, since we use a CMS platform to manage all of our sites that holds hundreds of thousands of category and product pages. Needless to say, April was definitely a frantic month for us. Many meetings later, we attributed the "filter" to duplicate content that stems from our product data base and written content (shared across all of our sites). We decided we would use rel="canonical" to address the problem. Exactly 30 days from being filtered our first site bounced back (like it was never "filtered"), however, the other two sites remain "under the thumb" of Google.
Now for some questions:
Why would only 3 of our sites be affected by this "filter"/Panda if many of them share the same content?
Is it a coincidence that it was an exact 30 day "filter"?
Why has only one site recovered?