Welcome to the Q&A Forum

What's your bounce rate like? Is it high? If so, maybe you do need to make some changes. How about time on page/site? I'm believing more and more that google uses user engagement metrics to help rank sites. I don't know if this is part of Panda or not though. As others have said, I wouldn't change anything until the dust has settled. Implementing a few tables here and there is not a difficult task (I wouldn't have thought) and maybe is just what you need to make the content you have more readable. I would have thought a table is just the tool to display bank holidays! Though, of course, now that the second May bank holiday has passed us, there aren't many left (BOOOOO). Good luck, and make sure you wait for the dust to settle before you do anything. Amelia

Thanks for all that. Really valuable information. I have gone to Parameter handing and there were 54 parameters listed. In total, generating over 20 million unnecessary URLs. I nearly died when I saw it. We have 6,000 genuine pages and 20 million shitty ones that don't need to be indexed. Thankfully, I'm upgrading next week and I have turned the feature off on the current site, the new one won't have that feature. Phew. I have changed the settings for these parameters that were already listed in Webmaster tools, and now I wait for the biggest re-index in history LOL! I have submitted a sitemap now and as I rewrite page titles & meta descriptions, I'm using the Fetch as Google tool to ask for resubmission. It's been a really valuable lesson, and I'm just thankful that I wasn't hit worse than I was. Now, it's a waiting game. Of my 6,000 URLs' on the site map submitted a couple of days ago, around 1/3 of them have been indexed. When I first uploaded it, only 126 of them were.

There's no direct evidence that over-doing your internal commercial linking (i.e. linking with your primary keyword internally in a site) causes problems, but it certainly doesn't look professional to continually link to your car insurance page with the anchor text "car insurance". There has been some speculation that internal linking like this can cause issues, but I haven't seen it tested or proven yet in the way that having too many inbound links like this has been tested / confirmed. I would certainly not overdo this sort of linking despite there being no solid evidence that I am aware of, partially because of the unprofessional vibe it gives a page (related to everything David has mentioned above) and partially because I am sure it sends sub-optimal signals to Google regardless of whether it is considered a ranking factor.

There are a couple of thoughts that I have regarding this question and the reference you made to Neil's post, so I will try to organize my thoughts here for you: First, unless you are the food network... recognize that you probably don't have the DA or authority that the food network has. In his post, the Food Network did not attempt to rank both of those posts for the term "cooking". Google has gained an understanding of both of those pages with a relation to the term "cooking". Some of that would have been through on-site SEO, but a large portion of that would have been through links, social signals, DA, PA, etc... It isn't simply about optimizing 2 pages for the term "cooking". If you attempt to optimize two or more pages for the exact same keyword around the same keyword, you run the risk of self-canibalization. Read/watch more here: http://moz.com/blog/keyword-targeting-density-and-cannibalization-whiteboard-friday What I would suggest is that either your website, or a category should represent the broad keyword/phrase/theme, and then let it's subcategories target other variations of that theme and how others may search it. For example, lets say I wanted to create a campaign around Rubics Cubes (I'm on a mission to solve one right now), perhaps I could create supporting pages that target supporting themes such as "how to solve a rubics cube", and "where to buy a rubics cube", or "Amazing rubics cube videos"...etc. The point is that you become a resource for Rubics Cubes, not just a page that ranks for that term. Be the end all be all for people looking for rubics cubes, and have your site hierarchically organized to help point all of those rubics cube related resources point to the main rubics cube page. Now, back to neil's point, if you created a fascinating resource for rubics cubes that developed shares, links, and buzz, it is very possible that you could gain 2 listings on the first page of google, but they have to be amazing. Hope this helps ! (I'm going to solve my rubics cube)

Hello Julian, If you follow my advice above you should be fine.

There's no one-sized-fits-all answer to this, I'm afraid. Any large-scale change to a site carries risk, and could even look like over-optimization. Even if it's a great, high-quality change, Google may re-evaluate the site, and you could easily see short-term ranking fluctuations. Long-term, you very well might improve, but there is definitely short-term risk. As Kevin said, my recent post explains the new width guidelines - it's not as simple as one number. I also don't think that falling outside of these guidelines is the kiss of death. It could impact CTR and I wouldn't make a habit of it, but some titles are just naturally longer than others. It really depends on what the before and after look like, how big your site is, how authoritative your site is, and a lot of things that are hard to dig into on a Public Q&A. Personally, I'd say test it - pick the pages where the change has the most value and the current titles are long and try changing a group of them. See how it goes. Doing it in phases and measuring can help you get a better handle on things and even help you tweak the changes as you see what works and what doesn't.

I have seen this as well, and have experience with both SEO plugins mentioned in this thread. Yoast is very good, as is All in one seo pack. Not many people are aware of the different rules of robots for a page. The page title switching is controlled by Google, as mentioned above. The effects can be mitigated by adding a special meta tag on that page, which is ODP = no. ODP (stand for open directory project) will allow Google to switch around the titles to better suit the users search query. Another tag you should add is archive = no. Below is a complete example: name="robots" content="index,follow,noarchive,snippet,noodp" /> This states to the search engine, index this page, follow all links, do not show archived pages, (old, cached) allow snippets and markup, and do not customize displayed titles from open directory project. Want proof? http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-supports-meta-noodp-tag/ "In some circumstances, Google uses descriptions from the Open Directory Project as the title and snippet for a web result; this tag lets you opt out of the ODP title and description." I have used this on my site, and on clients sites with great success. If you add this tag, it will take a while to reindex, but give it a try and see if they display the real page title after you submit and wait a bit. This should help you out quite a bit.

How do I request a review of my Adsense Account? who do I contact?

We've done this before and usually, we get dips for some keywords, most will stay the same. We prepare ourselves mentally each time we have to do this LOL. As long as the redirects/content are in-place and you provide a better user experience without affecting load speed, then we are confident enough to just go on and do it. The rewards for the "risk" is always greater.

Yeah that is what I figured. Definitely makes sense to go with the safe choice. Thanks,

Hey Karen, yeah I checked with the developer who laughed at the "line of code" but said yeah its something we could look into doing. Although I may not need to now as Panda 4.0 seems to have done the site a massive favour this morning

Thanks Mark, I have already (sort of) done that but have yet to establish any results - it might be worth looking into a bit more thoroughly! Andy

I agree with EGOL's answer - right on. I was trained in theory in my early days that you should NEVER have two pages targeting the same keyword, similar to Ryan's first answer about Google getting "confused" about both pages and ranking neither. I've now seen in practice over the years that this isn't true and that double listings from the 1&2 or even 2-4 positions are very possible, especially for "chunky middle" and long-tail terms. Similar to how Rand and many others have been saying over the years, you do want to create the perfectly optimized page for your main keywords, fully of great content, rich media, focused CTA's, etc. But there is also a natural use of certain keywords throughout your site that occurs. There are similar but not exact pages that just happen to target the same keywords - and these often create the double listings. So following the advice from others above, what I've seen work well for double listings is to choose a primary keyword for each of your main pages, but don't worry about overlapping certain keywords among your pages - this happens naturally and you can get double listings as a result.

Thanks Anthony! This is the best way to handle it. If you are using Yoast SEO, go to SEO->Titles & Meta - and check off "noindex subpages of archives".

In 29 I'm seeing it under customize and there's a "Title Bar" button in the bottom left corner.

Hi there, Unfortunately the site seems to be down right now, so I can't have a look (I'm getting a 500 unavailable error), but I would say that while copy is important to give Google an idea about the page's topic, copy for copy's sake is not necessary. In other words, as long as the page says enough to get the message across about what it's meant to convey, you don't need to add another 200 words for no reason. That said, each page should contain a good paragraph or so of unique text in most cases. I don't love putting minimums on the number of words that should be used, but keep in mind that text presented as images, etc. should use a technique like CSS image replacement in order to show that text in a search engine readable format, i.e. HTML. I would not be confident that this has caused your 30% drop in traffic unless the pages are now extremely void of unique content and could be seem as "duplicates" or near-dupes of each other as a result, or simply as not very useful. On the other hand, if there are SEO errors with the site already, a big drop in content will certainly not help. Get that 500 error checked out!

I'm glad if it's helpful! Happy reading!

Ah, I see what you mean Alan and I'm inclined to agree. With the JS you mentioned, there's no risk of a user (or crawler) being taken away from the page itself, so no link would be passed and "diluted", as it were.  Thanks for posting this!

Hi, Couldn't see categories in my brief look but to answer your other question - If I index both category and tags, should I use canonical URL tag to pass referring to main category. As I want more my categories in SERP results ranking higher? use the canonical tag if the content is the same (duplicated) I recommend using it on the folder closest to the main level. What the tag will do is tell Google "this content is the same - here is the original" and all juice will be fed to the URL you pointed to in the tag. Using the tag won't get more categories in the results as I just mentioned they are not indexed as they are "duplicates" It does however give you a stronger structure to a degree but only if you've got duplicate content due to e.g categories. Just to help you out a big more here is an example of a great way to use the tag: two URLS with the same content www.example.com/author www.example.com/genre/author you would put a tag on www.example.com/genre/author pointing towards www.example.com/author (however you can do it the other way around depending on how you feel) More info here- https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en Good luck!

if I understand you correctly, this sounds like an issue I am facing and this is what I am experiencing and maybe that can be of help. My site is real estate related.  Page 1 title tag: "City Homes for Sale" (page I want to rank for)  Page 2 title tag: "City Home Picture Gallery" (lots of original pictures and videos I want G to index in order to increase the amount of unique content from my site G is indexing, but I don't care much for - more a page for users to see beautiful pictures) Unfortunately, when users search for "city homes for sale" on search engines, often this Page 2 type will show (I have a lot of Page 2 types for various neighborhoods). I guess because Page 2 has more unique content it ranks well, also because it uses words "City" and "home" in title tag. I have now taken the word "Home" out of title tag and I look forward to see if it helps. Not just in terms of dropping ranking for Page 2 (which would be great), but more importantly will search engines be able to get the point that Page 1 is the relevant page. I am interlinking from Page 2 to Page 1 in a logical way with appropriate keywords. It should be crystal clear, but our supposed super smart / advanced search engines do not seem to get it. Conclusion: As a smaller / less authoritative website, I would definitely be very careful with keyword selection in title tag, as my site has proven that it can work against you. Large powerful websites can get away with more of this I believe and search engines seem to understand them much better. Therefore, I find with SEO advice it is so important to consider if the perspective is in comparison to similar authority websites.