Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey All, Was just looking through some google pages on best practices for meta descriptions and came across this little tidbit. "Include clearly tagged facts in the description. The meta description doesn't just have to be in sentence format; it's also a great place to include structured data about the page. For example, news or blog postings can list the author, date of publication, or byline information. This can give potential visitors very relevant information that might not be displayed in the snippet otherwise. Similarly, product pages might have the key bits of information—price, age, manufacturer—scattered throughout a page. A good meta description can bring all this data together. For example, the following meta description provides detailed information about a book. " This is the first time I have seen suggested use of structured data in meta descriptions.  Does this totally replace a regular meta description or will it work in conjunction with the regular meta description? If I provide both structured data and text, will the SERP display text and the structured data the way it was previously displayed? Or will the 150 -160 character limit take precedence and just cut off all info after that?

Got a quick sitemap question. We have a clients site built in opencart and are getting ready to submit the sitmap. The default sitemap setting generates urls right off of the root. For example site.com/product. These urls are also accessible through the site itself. We prefer to give the site some depth and have structured the products so the urls are site.com/category/product. All of the product pages have canonicals including the category so we should not have to worry about duplicate content on the /product page vs the /category/product page. My question is both types of product pages are included in the sitemap at the moment. Since we don't want google to index the /product urls should we leave them off of the sitemap even though they are readily accessible from the frontend(though not linked)? Or just leave them and let the canonical tag be used in directing google as to which urls to index. Thanks in advance.

Hey Everyone, We are getting ready to engage a client for some potential marketing/SEO so in preparing for this have ran the site through OpenSiteExplorer. The site is relatively new and there are only two links under the inbound links section. They are relevant and add value, no issues there. Here is where it get strange. When I look under the 'Just Discovered' section there are many (hundreds) new links going back about a month. Virtually all of them have the anchor text 'Louis Vuitton outlet'. Now the client swears he has not engaged anyone for black hat SEO, so wondering who could possibly be creating these links. They do sell some Louis Vuitton items on the site, so I'm wondering if it is possible that some spam bot has picked up the site and began to spam the web with links to the clients site. So far today, 50 or so new links have been created with said anchor text and the clients root URL all on very poor quality, some foreign blog sites. Would like to find out why this is happening and put a stop to it for obvious reasons. Has anyone experienced something similar? Could this be a bot? Or maybe someone with an axe to grind against the client? Anyone could be doing this on their own, but just seems strange for it to be happening to a new site that does not even rank highly at the moment. Any advice or info is greatly appreciated, thanks in advance.

Hello All, Just started to work on a new clients site that has been hit with multiple google penalties. I was looking at their backlink profile and noticed they have numerous links from what seem to be very low quality directory websites. My question is, when building citations and looking for directories to submit to, what makes one directory more credible then another one? If most of them are just publishing links and business information, why does google consider one credible and the other spammy? Clearly with some it's easy to tell if they are credible or not, but with some it is not as easy. Should you only really be submitting to the best of the best or are some lower lever ones ok too? Have read a few things on this topic, but most is older and just want to hear what people have to say on this today. Thanks.

Hey Everybody, Have a client that recently came to us asking for SEO help. Did some initial analysis on their current SEO status and most everything looked pretty good. On-page work was pretty good, nothing really lacking there other then missing alt tags for all images. Their linking profile looked good too. Lots of good links from quality sources, all relevant. Client has done some good press releases. They could probably use a bit more focus in their content as it is somewhat general and not keyword focused. Initially it didn't look like they needed any help with their SEO, so was a bit curious as to why they contacted us. Today we get their google analytics information and immediately noticed that they have had a 85-90 percent drop in organic traffic from all major search engines that started about two weeks ago. If all their SEO looks to be done properly, any ideas what would account for the massive drop in traffic? The only thing that looks like may have happened is that they may have dropped a couple spots from position #1 to position 2-3 for some of their highest traffic terms.  Even if that is the case, I would not expect such a high drop off in terms of organic traffic. Just curious as to what anyone else can attribute the huge drop in traffic to or what else may help identify the issue. It's almost as if analytics was turned off or removed from the site, but that is not the case.

I've been trying to block out a few URLs using robots.txt, but I can't seem to get the specific one I'm trying to block. Here is an example. I'm trying to block something.com/cats but not block something.com/cats-and-dogs It seems if it setup my robots.txt as so.. Disallow: /cats It's blocking both urls. When I crawl the site with screaming flog, that Disallow is causing both urls to be blocked.  How can I set up my robots.txt to specifically block /cats? I thought it was by doing it the way I was, but that doesn't seem to solve it. Any help is much appreciated, thanks in advance.

Hi,
We have a client who has engaged us recently for some SEO work and most of their website looks pretty good seo-wise already. Many of their site pages rank at the top or middle of page two for their targeted keywords. In many cases they are not using the targeted keyword in the URL and most pages could use some additional on-page clean up. My question is, is it worth it to re-write the URLs to include the targeted keyword and then do 301 redirects to send the old pages to the new ones in order to improve the ranking? Or should we just do the minor on page work in hopes that this will be enough to improve the rankings and push them on to the first page. Thanks.