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Category: On-Page / Site Optimization

Explore on-page optimization and its role in a larger SEO strategy.


  • Videos? If beer does not work try "free popcorn"!

    | EGOL
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  • Your sitemap.xml can't be used to solve this issue, Larry. The sitemap is only used to tell the search engines which pages exist on the site, not what to do if many of those pages share similar content. In your case, likely the best approach is to use the rel=canonical tag to inform the search engines that you aware that the different formats of the audiobooks share similar descriptions, and to pick one format to be the primary page. Once you've determined the primary page, the other formats' pages would use the canonical tag in their headers to point to the primary page. This essentially tells the search engines "these other pages are useful to the user, so I don't want to hide them, but they are really variations of the primary page, so assign all their value to the primary page, please". This process is only a suggestion to the search engines, but it is usually heeded. The only real alternative would be to combine all the different format pages into one page with a description of the book, then listing the other formats and their prices. Kinda doubt your eCommerce system would allow this "out of the box". (You would then 301-redirect all the other format pages to the new main page.) As for the fact that the book descriptions are the same as the publisher's and all the other sites - the only way around this is to write your own custom descriptions. There are many reasons the other sites could be ranking well even with those duplicate descriptions, ranging from better overall site authority, to having been online longer, to having better, more powerful incoming links. It's a tough spot to be in, but you could start by rewriting the descriptions for, say,  the top 25 books (according to your Analytics and your own instincts for which ones are the most valuable sales) and see if that results in an improvement to rankings and conversions. One other way to beat the duplicate content in this case would be to get customers to leave reviews which are included on each page. These reviews would be different from other sites, making the overall content look different to the search engines. But this is also a lot of work to get to scale up as your customers must be encouraged to come back to your site at a later date to leave the review. Hope that helps; Paul

    | ThompsonPaul
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  • Will this not de-prioritise the page that Jon wants to rank though, as it is 3 clicks off the root in the breadcrumb rather than directly off the root? Thanks James

    | jamesjackson
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  • I'm going to thumb you up because I think you deserve a Tshirt!

    | littlesthobo
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  • This topic is deleted!

    | Bucky
    0

  • Jacob, They are exactly right how do you think distilled.net can rank for video SEO far better than any exact match domain because they do RCS and like you've been told you must fight for what you want in SEO and in the world's not with violence with your mind you know. I think you should listen to both of the people posted below or above me. They are very much correct it has everything to do with our element here site is to that keyword not your exact match domain. There's absolutely no reason if you can create better content for your chosen keywords that you should not rank higher than somebody who has content less worthy of the higher ranking. Google is a $40 billion a year monster that can decipher rather not you have actually done things correctly and created something valuable for their reader count on that when you're writing and doing all the hard work and what these well-respected gentleman have said. Sincerely, Thomas

    | BlueprintMarketing
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  • None of those dates coincide with Panda or Penguin.  And yes, a Panda or Penguin related drop would happen immediately coinciding with that day.  However, sometimes there can be a drop that gradually follows a Penguin or Panda day if sites that are linking to you have been affected.  I'm guessing this is not the case for you though. It's really hard to say what to work on because you still don't know the cause for your traffic drop.  At this point it really would be just a guess.  It's never wrong to work on making unique product descriptions so that may be a place to start, but again without knowing the cause, there's no way of saying for sure that that is going to help.

    | MarieHaynes
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  • Thank you for your advice and the link to the great article!

    | nyc-seo
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  • Hello Tommy This is the type of site I'm talking about. It's full of good content, ranks highly and looks professional. http://www.seomark.co.uk/how-many-backlinks/ But the pages that have what look like subheadings are just CSS classes. Many of the pages don't have any sub headings at all. The person who made the site obviously knows what he's doing, I wondered if he knew something I don't.

    | PhilipGledhill
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  • I have been researching this further. If I want to change this on our large Website, I'm going to need major evidence that it's better and that it won't slow down our pages. In this article, Andy King makes the case for relative URLs. But he also says: "Using the base element and mod_rewrite can alleviate the need for absolute URLs, and save additional space." Is this a true and accurate statement?

    | danatanseo
    1

  • yup. try it again be selecting "exact match" in the left hand side of the Google keyword tool and you'll see something more like 60 or so instead of 301k sorry to say. I haven't looked it up but i can tell you almost no one is searching for that. anyway what is for sale in AZ, you are real estate so "real estate" might be your main target not "for sale" but you'll have a hard time getting an EMD for realestate location domain names, so you might want to go with branding + keyword. IE  shadyacresrealestate.com

    | irvingw
    0

  • Tommy, Thank you for the input! I really appreciate it. Best, Erin

    | HiddenPeak
    0

  • Hello Again Erin, 301s are used for 2 purposes.  One way is to tell or direct bots to crawl the other page and it will send linkjuices to the new page.  The second way is to redirect visitors to a new page.  If you are bulk redirecting all pages to the home page, it is kind of a waste.  Visitors want to visit a specific page but then you redirect them to the home page?  They will be frustated since it is not what they are looking for and may leave your page.  Bad user experience.  Furthermore, sending link juices to the home page might also be a waste. The best practice will be redirecting specific pages to a new specific page.  For example, Page A on old domain is about bikes, you want to redirect it to Page A on the new domain about bikes.  One, it will transfer all the old linkjuice on bikes to the new one and visitors are redirected to a page where they want. The canonical tag is for bots to know that you want one version to be crawled over the ones.  301 is kind of for visitors as well and redirecing linkjucies.  Depending on whether you want your visitors to visit only one version, then you might want to use the 301.  Furthermore, if different versions of your page is getting backlinks, maybe use 301 to send the linkjuice back to the canonical page. Hope this helps.

    | TommyTan
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  • Few Links, i have redirect to the other post ! but still it has shown as warning and same 404 error

    | Esaky
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  • Billy can you please describe the process of Geo META TAGS.The reasin why I added wordpress is that I want to know any easy method like plugin or other thing to make these things working. I see rarely very few sites considering these things?

    | csfarnsworth
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  • For figuring out the reports, be sure to go to the help hub that Mike mentioned at http://www.seomoz.org/help. We have a lot of details there about what each of the notices and warnings mean. Do feel free to come here and ask questions. Welcome to SEOmoz!

    | KeriMorgret
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