Hey Cyrus,
Thank you very much for the detailed response!
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Hey Cyrus,
Thank you very much for the detailed response!
As an aside: please feel free to extend any other SEO suggestions you may have my way! I am doing my best to learn the SEO trade... and ANY advice is appreciated.
SEOmoz Community!
I have a relatively complicated SEO issue that has me pretty stumped...
First and foremost, I'd appreciate any suggestions that you all may have. I'll be the first to admit that I am not an SEO expert (though I am trying to be). Most of my expertise is with PPC. But that's beside the point.
Now, the issues I am having:
A lot of our SEO efforts thus-far have done good for Federal Auto Loan... and we are seeing positive impacts from them. However, we recently did a server transfer (may or may not be related)... and since that time a significant number of INTERNAL duplicate content pages have appeared through the SEOmoz crawler. The number is around 20+ for both Federal Auto Loan and Federal Mortgage Services (see attachments).
I've tried to include as much as I can via the attachments. What you will see is all of the content pages (articles) with dupe. content issues along with a screen capture of the articles being listed as duplicate for the pages:
Car Financing How It Works
A Home Loan is Possible with Bad Credit
(Please let me know if you could use more examples)
At first I assumed it was simply an issue with SEOmoz... however, I am now worried it is impacting my sites (I wasn't originally because Federal Auto Loan has great quality scores and is climbing in organic presence daily). That being said, we recently launched Federal Mortgage Services for PPC... and my quality scores are relatively poor. In fact, we are not even ranking (scratch that, not even showing that we have content) for "mortgage refinance" even though we have content (unique, good, and original content) specifically around "mortgage refinance" keywords.
All things considered, Federal Mortgage Services should be tighter in the SEO department than Federal Auto Loan... but it is clearly not!
I could really use some significant help here...
http://www.federalautoloan.com/Default.aspx and http://www.federalmortgageservices.com/Default.aspx are both the designated home pages. And I have rel=canonical tags stating such.
However, my sites can also be reached via the following:
http://www.federalautoloan.com
http://www.federalautoloan.com/default.aspx
http://www.federalmortgageservices.com
http://www.federalmortgageservics.com/default.aspx
Should I incorporate code that "redirects" traffic as well? Or is it fine with just the relevancy tags?
I apologize for such a long post, but I wanted to include as much as possible up-front. If you have any further questions... I'll be happy to include more details.
Thank you all in advance for the help! I greatly appreciate it!
Thank you all for the responses so far.
Based off the responses thus far, it seems as though the site doesn't have any Google-related issues (I hope).
However, I am still concerned that specific article names do not show up. For example, when I type "count the costs before you get an auto loan" into the Google search bar... our article doesn't show up. At least not for a substantial number of pages.
I'm deeply worried that this is an issue related to our permanent redirect... as none of our other sites have this problem (sites that haven't been around for as long... counting the time before the redirect). The original URL was GetGreatAutoLoans.com if that helps at all.
Thanks!
Great!
Thank you very much Nux! Really appreciate the help.
Hey Kyle,
I guess my problem is that I am trying to "compare" SEO and SEM a little too closely at the moment. Right now our content, etc. is doing great for our SEM strategy... So obviously I'm wanting to see the same for Organic.
Everything I've read so far speaks to really focusing on quality/original content that are keyword specific. I assume I can't go wrong by building an extensive database of articles for specific (and long-tail) keywords.
Thanks for the Tool link! Glad you liked the site. We put a lot of effort into each of our sites.
Thanks for the response Kyle!
Hey Nux!
Great idea, thank you! Transitioning from FederalAutoLoan.com to Federal Auto Loan makes perfect sense.
http://www.federalautoloan.com
Both of these links point to http://www.federalautoloan.com. As far as I know, this is a pretty standard tactic for users that don't use www. when typing in a URL.
As for the /Default.aspx... I'll check into it. Our IT is using it for some reason. I'll have to get back to you on that.
Thank you very much for the response!
Hey Zsolt,
Thanks for the response!
I'll get on the H1 tag issue right away.
As for the code issue... is that really a significant problem? It's how my in-house IT department has coded all of our websites... and frankly, they are pretty good at what they do. Unless it is causing us major issues with Organic Search, I'm inclined to leave it as is. Let me know.
I have done a bunch of keyword research as of late - and read a lot about the importance of long-tail keywords - so this is good advice... and currently in progress. Obviously over-night results aren't to be expected. Is there a specific way I should be developing content for these keywords?
I'm working on our linking strategy as well. And will definitely avoid purchasing links.
Thanks Zsolt!
Hey guys,
I am in need of a little help!
I am currently an aspiring SEO (trying to absorb as much information as I can and implement changes to help my site organically)... Most of my experience revolves around SEM.
That being said, I have a problem. My site is doing well through paid search... great quality scores, etc. However, the content on my site (and even my site as a whole) does not "appear" to rank well in Organic.
To explain further... My site is federalautoloan.com... and when I type in exact article names (or even federal auto loan) into Google, nothing shows up. And yes, my content is all original/unique content. I've even recently added a unique Calculator to my site.
site:federalautoloan.com in the search bar shows results for all of my pages... but it just seems as though Google does not like my site for some reason. At least in Organic. The odd thing is, none of my other sites have this problem.
Do you guys have any advice?
The only thing I can think of is that somehow my 301 redirect was performed improperly. Yes, I had a permanent redirect performed on my site about 4 months back. The URL we were using prior just wasn't performing as well in Paid Search. But seeing as how that is the preferred method by Google... I'm really at a loss...
Again, my site is FederalAutoLoan.com.
Any help would be GREATLY appreciated. Even generic SEO advice would be appreciated.
Edit: Two other things to note... I have plugged my site into the SEOmoz Pro tool... the tool is not showing any issues for my site. I am also making use of Google Webmaster Tools and the only error that shows up for my site is a Soft 404 for one of my pmcs... Not sure why it is even pulling one of my pmcs... but as far as I can tell, there really shouldn't be any problems.
Note on the 404 for anyone who might give a response on that issue... http://www.seoconsultants.com/tools/headers returns a 200 OK response.
Edit2: Question presented below.
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