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Hi Keri,

I am also facing this issue with your links data as most of it is outdated and can you please confirm that link data is up to date as 1 month period is quite long and to analyse our site and competitors we have to be quick on analyzing and observe the results.

Hi Tom, Thank you so much for pointing this out. I was not aware to the fact that quotation can make a such big difference. Thanks Again.

Hi Guys,

Need help in understanding whether having duplicate pages on your site push you down in rankings. Our all product pages getting indexed by Google with different parameters i.e. filters, affiliate id, utm_source etc. and then we have 10-15 duplicate for one product page. I am observing dip in rankings whenever Google starts indexing these duplicate but when I asked this question to John Muller and other Google team they said if you set up canonical then you don't have to worry about having different urls for same page but we are not ranking on Google and if we do then we dropped from page 1 to page 2 or sometimes page 3.

Example - http://goo.gl/G5p3X5

Any suggestions.

Hi Dean,

Thanks for your prompt reply. We are using rel canonical tag from different variants to one URL. Do you think adding all variant in one page and giving option to click on the color image to choose color variant help in rankings?

Hi guys,

Please advice me on something improving my product pages ranking. We are doing well for head terms, categories but not ranking for product pages.

We have issues with product pages which I am think is hard to tackle. For instance we have duplicate products (different colors), duplicate content internally (colors) and from manufacturer websites.

Product pages linked from sub-category i.e. Home > Category > Sub-Category (20 per page) using pagination for next 20 and so on.

Product pages linked internally via widgets that says other Similar products, featured products etc.

Another issue with our product pages is that we are using third party reviews platform and whenever users add reviews to product pages this platform creates an hyperlink to different anchors which is not relevant to product. Example - http://goo.gl/NUG652

Can somebody please give some advice on how to improve rankings for product pages. writing unique content for thousands of pages is not possible. Even our competitor not writing unique content.

Check the cached text version of your page in Google and compare it with that of first 5 results. It might be that through you have it in H1 tag however, during crawl process Google is finding it below the content which it is highlighting for your page. Compare it with top ranking sites and you might have to simply fix the code of the page.

Since, the brand name was Ross & Bute earlier, it might actually take some time before Google can pick the change in brand name especially if the site had a lot of authority and links coming from authority sites with "And". Having said that you can try some of the following to speed up the process:

1. Press Release in Big PR sites talking about the change in name

2. Contacting and getting the anchor changed for already created brand links

3. Getting Yahoo, Business and other directory links updated

4. and wait for Google to pick up the changes

IMO, Anchor text diversification has a lot to do with your niche market and industry. For instances, in your industry if all the sites ranking on top have very targeted anchor text with no major diversification as such then you might want to take that route while if sites in your industry have unrelated (with respect to keywords targeted) anchor text - like brand names, click here, read more then you should work in that direction because you might play but cannot compete in soccer while wearing tennis shoes.

Here is how you get the highlighting done where character is >140

1. Goto new rules in Conditional formatting dropdown

2. Select "use a formula to determine which cell to format"

3. In the edit section under "format value where formula is true" give following:

=len(A1)>140

and then select custom formatting (fill color)

Now simply use format painter option to fill the complete column (all individual cells) with this formatting

*Note I am using Excel 2010

By default the geographic targeting it set as blank (no targeting) with United States option greyed out (unchecked). It might have got set if someone had accidentally clicked the checked button (if they did not do it intentionally) as there is not other way to set it.

AFAIK Google recognizes these change almost immediately however, impact on rankings/gtraffic can take upto 1-2 months.

The script you have added is perfectly fine. Also, there is no harm in adding the canonical especially if have added analytics tracking parameters on the links whether internal or external. This helps in ensuring that all links point to page without parameters.

I am assuming that SEOmoz must be giving NOTICE and not reporting it as an ERROR which is perfectly fine.

You can choose any of the platforms on a self hosted domain.

What you should be focusing on is the quality of content. The content should be unique with your thoughts and inferences/inputs even if it is about a generic topic that can add value to the users. Also, share your posts and participates in discussions on social communities to create a buzz as as as gain authority as an author in the respective niche. This is the only way forward if you want to future proof it from Google's algorithmic changes.

The answer might not be as simple considering so many bugs keep appearing in the Google Places.

I will suggest that you should use the merge listing options (assuming that you are verified owner for both the listing) of Google Places that appears when you hit the "Report a Problem" from the footer of the listing page. Just give details along with the link of other listing say Option B from Option A's "Report a problem". This way you can even preserve the review that you have on Option A.

Go through following steps assuming that you want Option B

1. Update address of Option A

2. Get both listing verified

3. Report a problem on option A listing - select Merge listing and follow steps

4. Wait for about 3-4 weeks for it to take effect.

If you want your page to be search engine friendly you have only two options:

1. Change 302 redirect to 301 redirect and pointing it to the correct page.

2. If 301 is not possible then remove the 302 redirect and just keep canonical tag pointing to the correct page

Though it is not guaranteed that the correct page will start to rank but I think following changes might work. Add a link to the respective page you want to rank from the Home page of the site with the desired Anchor Text. Note that this link should not be in the footer but at a prominent position on the Home so it transfers most relevance as per Search Engines.

Try to get some natural links for the respective page without worrying about the anchor text. Make sure that the page you are trying to rank has optimized titles and other page elements with respect to keyword.

In your Google webmaster account add and verify both the domain http://example.com and http://www.example.com

Suppose you want to set www version as preferred method then in the Configuration >> Settings of both the domains under webmaster tool set www version as preferred

Also, you can add the canonical tag under the head section of each page as follows:

<link rel=<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a> href="[http://www.example.com/actual-page-name-comes-here.html](view-source:http://www.snapdeal.com/deals-delhi)"/>  

I believe that redirect for a single site should not be the cause for de-indexing. It had to be due to some other reason(s) like addition of noindexed in robots.txt, spammy link building done in the past or thin/duplicate content.

You should check if Google has send any messages in your webmaster tool account either recently or in the past. Also, you should check if someone might have accidentally added remove URL (domain in this case) request in your webmaster account.

Technically you can delete the old files if the redirect is in place correctly.

However, do test it out after you delete the pages to ensure that everything is fine. You can use Google WMT's 'Fetch as Googlebot' to know the exact response Google gets.

The above rel canonical on the page is perfectly fine. They should not be reason for your ranking drop and can be left untouched. However, make sure that all pages have canonical set as respective page URLs.

These are generally added give a directive to search engines about the one version of URL to be indexed. Reasons for the same can be numerously like reducing duplicate content on the site (especially ecommercce site) to ensuring the link value passes to main URL where people link to your pages using utm parameters.

You can read more about canonical tags here: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394

To answer your specific question, a lot of times Google displays algo created title tags if it believes that the one supplied by the webmaster is not good enough or does not contain the query term being searched for.

If Google is changing the title tag even when the search term is present in the title you have mentioned on the page then you might consider changing it and making it more meaningful. Having said that, there is no guarantee that Google will pick and display your changed title even if it matches the search term and is grammatically correct and good to read.

With Google coming down heavily on spam sites with first Panda and now Penguin, I will not suggest to have the repetition of the keyword twice on the main domain name as you never know this type of spam might be the next in line on Google's list.

My suggestion would be to try and work your way in becoming a brand for the niche you want to target as that will be the future and all other scheme to fool the engines will eventually die.

If you hide the address in Google Places account, Google will remove all instances from public view whether in Google Place page. It will only show this address to you when logged-in

Unfortunately there is nothing you can do to speed-up the process especially when Google Places is having some real troubles in managing data these days.

Facebook

Twitter

Google Plus and Pinterest

If you are ranking at 2nd/3rd position and sites above you do not have rich snippet it  does makes sense to include them ASAP as it attracts eyeballs and clicks.

In short, Rich Snippet definitely help in improving CTR which is a part of ranking signal.

Getting links from directories like Yohoo and BOTW are not considered paid links by Google due to their authority and also because the amount they charge is towards editorial fee and they still reserve the right to reject any spam site.

Having said that, due to recent changes in the way Google uses incoming links in determining ranking these links might have no to little effect in rankings. They still might get some direct traffic.

Even if no change in the URL structure is done, small changes in content can upset (even improve) the rankings as the keyword placement, density and proximity do change with even slight change/addition in content.

Also, with addition of more pages and changing template you will be altering the internal linking of the site which again will effect the rankings. You will also need to make sure that the crawl pattern should not change with these changes which means if content is closer to start of body tag and then comes the internal links you might want to maintain similar flow in new design.

Even if you do everything perfectly, do set expectation that it might take upto 2-3 months to get back to where you  are currently as there are always some fluctuations after site design changes time of which can vary.

Depending upon the domain authority you can have sitelinks for multiple internal pages. We have extended sitelinks for many of our brand terms where one of the category page ranks on top along with 6 sub-categories pages as sitelinks.

With proper SEO strategy, you can have sitelinks for your client's different location specific pages.

As per Google, depending upon the user-agent you should display the website. So, for Googlebot-mobile only mobile site remains visible and for Googlebot (desktop) only desktop site is shown. Google preaches adding a 301 redirect to mobile version depending upon user-agent detection. Find complete article here:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/02/making-websites-mobile-friendly.html

This change should solve your current issues with the rankings

If all these pages are under a directory structure than you have the option to remove a complete directory in URL removal option. See if that is feasible in your case.

Google is really giving troubles in identifying 301 these days and persists showing old URL's. Here is a suggestion that you can work with:

First make sure that you have 301 redirect all old pages to respective new URLs.

Do a quick check using the Fetch as Googlebot to see the response code of old URLs OR see the cache of old URL's which should show corresponding new URL and its data.

If all is well technically, I recommend that use the remove for Google Index feature of Webmaster tool and remove one of the old URL's that is currently ranking. Monitor the change over a couple of weeks to see if new URL start to appear in rankings or for fluctuations in traffic (for old and new URL from your analytics report)

If this approach works, then repeat it for other URL's.

What is the exact issue you are encountering? The title description of the site you mentioned are getting displayed properly in Google Search.

"Fetch as Googlebot" will give you the source code of the page and whatever is displayed gets crawled by Google though you need to ensure that the syntax are correct.

"Fetch as GooleBot" gives you the details that Google will fetch from your source code (no ajax code will appear for instance)  along with server response code.

If you want to see how your page will show in SERP's preview you need to use the tool "Instant Previews" under Labs section of the Google webmaster tool.

It will not create duplicate content issues if the 301 redirects are placed technically correctly (so whenever a request from mobile device or googlebot-mobile comes it should redirect to mobile site only). Here is a link to Google blog that talks about most commonly asked queries related to mobile sites: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/02/making-websites-mobile-friendly.html

Hope this helps

Any of the above variations can be used for mobile site.

Though if you see that most of the big sites use m.sitename.com including Google so might want to use that one instead.

As long as you can accurately detect the mobile device and 301 redirect to the mobile version of the site you do not have to worry about the duplicate content. Here is the link to Google blogs which talks about basic problems and solutions for the same while making a mobile website: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/02/making-websites-mobile-friendly.html

1. Go to "Traffic Data" Tab.

2. Click on edit link present along the text : For Google Analytics Profile domainname

3. Click button "Set GA account and profile"

This will prompt you to make the change.

Hope this helps.

The link posted is not working...

Though the error that you have pointed may occur because in the source code you might have given the href url starting with www and NOT http://

We have a fairly large site which does a cookie-based 302 redirect to the the specific city page if someone types in the Home page URL. Though if the cookie is not available (first time user) it goes to the Homepage and asks user to select the city as our services are city specific. Everything is working fine with this setup.

Though our tech team now wants to display the contents of city page on homepage URL itself if the cookie is available without 302 redirecting to new URL. Though no-cookie available scenario remains unchanged.

Technically, I think this change should work fine without any ranking issues as still the first time users see the actual homepage as does Googlebot.

Please confirm possible issues in rankings with this change from your experiences as based upon city present in the cookie homepage will display different content.