Welcome to the Q&A Forum
Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.
Actually, in my experience the quickest way is to 301 redirect it to another URL. This is even quicker than disabling the URL and let it return a 404 (which would be my second choice).
Also, keep in mind that only using GWT does not have any impact on Bing!
10 hours shouldn't pose a problem - i've had no worries even with longer downtime. googlebot won't even have tried to access most of your pages in that time, so i'm sure only a fraction of pages was unaccessible for the bot during the downtime (namely those it had on crawl schedule then).
to be sure, you can always check the crawl stats on GWT and see if there is any significant change.
If the links are legit and connect to good sources I wouldn't nofollow them. Personally, I only use nofollow for paid ads (if they don't run via an adserver) and user generated content.
If you have those 25 links on a single page, it might be a bit too much - unless it's a link page or such. If the are spread on your entire domain, it's no problem.
Don't worry too much about the page rank and think about content and topic relation. If the sites you link to are topically closely related to your own content, then it can actually help your own rankings if they are of high quality. For instance, if your site is about rocket science, it makes good sense to link to nasa.gov (it would actually look strange if there is no link to this rocket-related authority). Not that I want to sound like matt cutts, but if these links add value to your users, then they deserve to be followed:)
Well, if Moz is able to find such URLs, these dynamic versions are linked-to from somewhere in your content. This is still not optimal, even if you use rel=canonical. If you can find the source and change these URLs to a non-dynamic version, this will still be better. Otherwise just ignore the warning in the report...
It's still there, but hidden a bit. Enter the first domain in the field and on the left side a navigation will appear including "Compare Link Metrics", where you can compare multiple domains.
It's still available, but I wonder as well why MOZ hid it like that...
i wouldn't use nofollow in that case either. link juice is no longer preserved by using nofollow, so other than sites "not trusted" or links that are "paid for" (as stated by EGOL), i no longer see other reasons to use them. i just can't think of an advantage here.
and if you don't want pages like privacy policy etc. indexed, you'd better go with meta robots "noindex".
just give it a few days of weeks until google recrawls the page. or alternatively. if you dont' want to wait, you can submit the url again via webmaster tools. i think here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url?pli=1&hl=en
but with such a minor fix there's no hurry IMO
That's definitely not SEOMoz's usual customer service. So far, I've always gotten very quick and helpful responses. Mistakes can happen though - reply again to your thread and I'm sure you'll get an answer quickly.
The links are not related to your IP, but to the URL. If images are available on both img.domain and www.domain, then you have a duplication issue. Best practice is to 301 redirect from the old to the new URL to give a clear indication of the unique location they are on.
as old as it may sound... but provide good content to the sites you want links from. one of the most successful strategies in my opinion, is still offering sites custom content according to their needs: offer to write them a specific article about the topic they desire. have the article include a link to a helpful page on your site.
of course, try to get good variation in the domains you chose to get links from. steer clear of spammy sites. and make sure you have a lot of anchor text variation. a LOT! in my experience, overoptimization of anchor text and only using the same kind of blogs for backlinks is what can hurt most.
nocando as far as i know. you might be ranking in G-news US if the content is relevant locally.
When submitting your site go G-News you can chose some local preferences. These will matter (as well as location of servers). If you're not based in the US, you should still be able to rank with relevant articles, though the competition is definitely tougher there than in the UK.
I have similiar issues with Germany and Switzerland (both in German): Lots of German sites can rank in G-News Switzerland. Swiss pages have a harder time to rank in Germany (probably due to harder competition and better-linked sites in Germany) - but they do appear, when relevant.
the bots can easily identify a url shortener, as this performs a normal 301 redirect
Make sure the site is coded in UTF-8, then you can use ü. UTF-8 supports all special characters, incl. chinese, russian etc. and makes life easier with compatibility in general.
Disallow: /archive/ does not work for urls like archive?page=333
I suggest to block it as Christopher described above or like this:
Disallow: /archive?*
I basically agree with Cesar's opinion. But if your brands have a close relation to each other I think it's okay to link to those - from header or footer. Header links will look less spammy since they are well visible for users. If your brands have a legit connection to each other there should be no riks - at least that is my experience with well-established brands that belong to the same company.
But linking from related content always has some benefits compared to sitewide linking - at least for seo. If you want to push cross-selling, linking from a header meta navigation makes sense.
I would not put this in the footer, and definitely not with optimized anchor text. This will raise a red flag for google and does not add additional value to either you or your clients. If you do want to link to projects (which i think makes sense) it's better to have a portfolio page with these links. And as Jonathan suggested, use brand names or logo images to link to these projects.
Yes, probably a good idea to use specific portfolio tags (like "portfolio cats", "portfolio dogs", etc.). That way it doesn't get mixed up with other content (unless you want it to, of course).
Then you could create a portfolio overview page where you link to your sub-topics.
Split the portfolio up into various topics? This seems better for usability as well. Tag the various portfolios by category and make it nice and browseable. Does that make sense?
A good and quick way to get a feel for you competitor's keywords is checking the meta keywords tag. If you're lucky, they're still using it, thereby sort of disclosing what they want to rank for... Other than that, have a look at their page titles, as most optimized sites usually have their main keywords in there.
Did you already set up this keyword in your Adwords campaign? Possibly, this keyword has too little traffic, so it's not possible to target it (it would then indicate "not enough traffi" or something).
But you're right, I don't see any paid ads for tobacco-related searches as you see here: http://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/176038?hl=en
I don't see the problem, OSE returns quite some backlinks (from 10 linking root domains) and you appear for a search of your brand: https://www.google.com/search?aq=f&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=google+authorship+markup#sclient=psy-ab&hl=en&safe=off&source=hp&q=4pmdesign&pbx=1&oq=4pmdesign&aq=f&aqi=g1&aql=&gs_sm=3&gs_upl=1l1l3l138l1l1l0l0l0l0l67l67l1l1l0&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.,cf.osb&fp=78e43915a3d4fbbf&biw=1440&bih=811
What are the specific keywords you lost traffic for?
To answer your question #2: If you don't have a thank you page, you probably want to track clicks on the "send" button and define them as goals. In order to do that, you have to add analytics javascript to the button so it's defined as an event. Then you go to goal setups as described above by Brian and define those events as goals.
As described here: http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/google-analytics-goals-funnels-tips/#Event
Hi Farky
In my opinion yes, this is not optimal SEO.
Firstly, I think that the "trick" is easy for search engines to discover: the image always stays the same, so why does the alt attribute vary? Especially if this automatic replacement appears on every page it's easy to discover.
Secondly, the idea of the alt tag is related to screen readers: a screen reader reads the alt attribute to the visually impaired so that they know that is on that space on the page. So you should best describe what is on the image in the alt attribute, in order to use it correctly (which in your case would be the company name).
Instead, I would try adding images to the site that are actually relevant for your target keyword. That way, when you describe the image in the alt attribute, you will be able to naturally use your keywords.
yup, the site doesn't look too bad. but i have some experience with trying to get gambling sites into G-News and despite of good and frequently updated content we couldn't get into it. I think poker is probably the most difficult segment to get accepted here!
the following thing strike me as possible problems:
as a first quick fix, i guess i would start with point 3 and put less "commercial" links into your news articles. maybe if you start publishing an article per day that might also help.
I'm optimizing a pet supplies site (http://www.qualipet.ch/) and have a question about the best practice for expired product pages.
We have thousands of products and hundreds of our offers just exist for a few months. Currently, when a product is no longer available, the site just returns a 404. Now I'm wondering what a better solution could be:
1. When a product disappears, a 301 redirect is established to the category page it in (i.e. leash would redirect to dog accessories).
2. After a product disappers, a customized 404 page appears, listing similar products (but the server returns a 404)
I prefer solution 1, but am afraid that having hundreds of new redirects each month might look strange. But then again, returning lots of 404s to search engines is also not the best option.
Do you know the best practice for large ecommerce sites where they have hundreds or even thousands of products that appear/disappear on a frequent basis? What should be done with those obsolete URLs?
Google could crawl the dynamic URLs created by your searchbox - but it usually doesn't unless there is a link to such a dynamic url somewhere. Internal searches don't create much problems anymore, but if you want to be sure, you could always block your dynamic search results pages via robots.txt or Google Webmaster Tools (>Site configuration >URL parameters).
So if the URL generated by internal searches is http://www.site.com/search/?searchword=search+query+here, you could add this to robots.txt:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /search/
that doesn't seem necessary: since it's your own blog i assume you don't receive payment for it;)
nofollow won't do much for you in this case. but if you would like to assign more link power to possible text links from the content, you might want to consider redirecting the banner links via javascript. that way, no link juice will be wasted on banners that carry little seo value.
I started loving joomla because now it's really easy to set up. It gives you more possibilities for customization and hosting I think. Also, you have full control over templates. In WP, this is sometimes limited (not sure, wordpress.com and wordress.org makes the difference I think). Now, while Joomla is fully open source, I think you have to pay to be able to fully customize WP (correct me if i'm wrong).
But just looking at the nature of your site I think WP is probably a really good choice and you'll have better performance and less maintenance trouble if you go for dedicated hosting.
Thanks for your thoughts guys.
@Igal@Incapsula: I like your 302 idea! That might acutally make a lot of sense for some products that are short-lived.
@Matthew: Good to know that lots of 301s were not an issue on your sites. Are you talking about thousands of those, though?
Most importantly, I will have to find something that can be automated and doesn't require much extra-work. I will probably go for 301s and remove those after a few months
Remind me to post my learnings here after implementation:)
If the domain is new you're going to have some hard months before you until you can rank for competitive terms. Foremost, I would try finding niches and create unique content for those (i.e. not too competitive products, where you write your own product descriptions).
I assume you are referring to buzzmart.com? What strikes me here is that there seems to be no direct way to_navigate _to your category pages - just the search field. I guess it would help to include categories in the navigation somehow.
Link building is definitely key too and if you can find some ideas how you'll get mentioned as a new alternative to ebay that's pretty good. On the other hand, I would hold my horses concerning directories, forum/coment spam, as I've seen there is something going on there...
Personally, I'd try to eradicate the problem at the root. Make sure your CMS does not generate any URLs in upper case letters at all, and you'll have the best solution for this problem!
Yes, you're on the right track. Duplication bad. If you already spend resources for blogging, make sure the blog is part of the website you want users to purchase your products and services.
If management really cannot be conviced to stop this duplication craziness, at least get them to implement rel=canonical pointing to the company blog on your own domain to minimize duplication impact.
Hi Heather
I think those 2 options are not exclusive. First focus on your top 40 keywords as you suggested. In a next step, by all means target further keywords. The point is that you'll probably have to create extra content so you won't be able to expand to 280 keywords in one go. But try to integrate those in your content planning to prioritize content that promises lots of search traffic.
Basically I don't see a reason to remove old news articles from a site, as it makes sense to still have an archive present. The only reason I could think of to remove them is if they are duplicate versions of texts that have originally been published somewhere else. Or if the quality is really crap...
This is strange indeed. I suggest to follow James' advice above and check via Webmaster Tools if there are accessibility issues for Googlebot.
Another reason for this problem could be that this page is not linked to anywhere. Do you have a link pointing to this article on a page of your site that is being crawled by googlebot? Is it present in a sitemap?
actually, when putting the closing itemprop div to the end, the testing tool returns the correct values.
Personally, I don't like using such keywords in sitewide page titles. I mostly stick to just adding the brand name at the end of titles. In terms of ranking, it doesn't help to have "dog boutique" on several pages, as only one will be ranking for this term. IMO your site looks quite okay, i.e. the home page will be ranking for your targeted term.
I think your other page titles look good too - if you added "Moondoggie Dog Boutique" on all page titles, those might lose some relevance for the specific keywords you want to target there.
In short, adding "Moondoggie" at the end of your titles seems a good choice.
Oh yes true, now I see it. You linked to it 21 times, so actually this now looks like you linked too much!
But like you've said, I think relevance is key. Try to add a little bit of content to the CPU page. A quick unique description of it or so. See if that helps. I guess you might have to test a few different approaches to see which ones work. This is actually a really interesting case.
The domain authority doesn't count for much here, as anyone can set up a blog on a blogspot subdomain. Seems to me the best way to check the value of those backlinks is looking at the blogs that link to you: Are they well-written, up-to date and authoritative? Are they topically connected to your own site? Then they probably count for something. Also, have a look at the backlinks of those blogs - if those are valuable, the blogs' links are probably good for you too.
Hmm, this is strange indeed. Google should follow the links on the home page and index the available subpages. 2 months should be plenty of time too. Maybe try these two things:
Allow: /
```Even though the current robots looks in order, this specifically tells search engines to index all except the /wp-pages you excluded.
This might speed it up. BTW, the site is correctly indexed in Bing.
That amount is probably a bit too much. I guess you want to bundle your efforts more into top-hierarchy overview pages. Keep in mind that users hardly will perform specific searches for something like "log house wood beam 400x400mm"...
Usually it's a better choice to have one landing page for the product and let users customize via dropdown (to chose 400mm, 600mm, etc.). This will reduce your amount of pages and probably leads to a better user experience too.
What works pretty good for me usually is linking from the page that does (but should not) rank to the page that should (but does not) rank, using the anchor text you want to rank for.
In this case this means linking from the comparison page to the CPU page with the anchor text including "fx8350".
You definitely want to have a company account that is independent of users, as they might come and go. I don't think setting up personal authorships makes sense unless you publish a lot of authoritative content. IMO this is more relevant if you are news publishers or frequent bloggers. Otherwise I think a corporate account does the job.
hmm, is there a source for the 15% statement? I never found anything clear about it, but here matt cutts seems to say that the pagerank dilution is a myth: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Filv4pP-1nw
Hej Johan!
Ah okay, then the answer is easier: If your visitors won't be able to see those sites, Google must not access them either.
I also suggest not to list them in an XML-Sitemap since only pages with value for users should be listed there. As you asked above, IMO these 3600 low quality pages would not have a positive impact - they might even hurt you.
Focus on pushing those sites for search engines that are of value to users.
Cheers,
Phil
In my experience, many so called SEO's don't have much experience and obviously rely on the wrong sources. They live in a lala-land, thinking they're the only ones who figured out how to trick the game and will "rank #1". Funny enough, they never even state what keyword they would like to rank #1 for... So that shows a clear misunderstanding of how people even search for and find stuff on the web.
I guess it has to do with a lack of training and maybe also the quick development of how things go on the web: Marketing standards from 1970 might still apply, while SEO from 2002 does not... And some people stand still and refuse to learn. Good for us! We can outrank them:-)
Hi Alec
Depending on what your website is about, I usually find it best to get links from partners and cooperators. Is someone distributing or using your product? Try to get them to state this on their site! Anyone you regularly cooperate with? Make sure they will say so on their site.
Careful not to overdo it with the link. Take it easy, create links step by step and don't get too many at once...
Hmm, this might actually be a non-issue. I used http://tools.seobook.com/server-header-checker/, but if I check it with Firebug it correctly returns a 404...