Category: On-Page / Site Optimization
Explore on-page optimization and its role in a larger SEO strategy.
-
Should old pages that have being 301 redirected but have no/mimimal traffic be deleted?
Nick, Thanks a lot for your advice. I will leave them in place and live with the clutter. Thanks again! Linck
| LinckB0 -
H1 partially hidden like youtube
I suspect it's not a problem for YouTube, and I doubt Google would penalize a site too much for doing so. That said, in general it would be considered best practice to keep your text visible. If you do need to hide text or include it in popups or slideouts for the sake of usability, that's fine too as long as it's not done to excess. In cases like these I think its best to keep an open mind and experiment if necessary, but I wouldn't expect to see a big difference either way.
| Cyrus-Shepard0 -
I have seen zero movement in my Google keyword rankings.
Well I've been using MOZ for three months. I have seen upward and downward ticks on Bing but absolutely no upward or downward movement on Google. I would think that there would be some fluctuation over a three month period. I've have fixed the issues shown on each page. I don't know what to do.
| LindaWolfe0 -
Best place for tutorial videos on e-commerce site
It really depends on the kind of content you have and where that will best serve user intent. Ultimately, the intent on product pages and the intent on help pages is nuanced and slightly different. Is a "tutorial" video going to satisfy the user who lands on a category page, likely looking to potentially make refine a selection and make a purchase? Although I haven't seen your videos, so it's hard to say for sure - I'd guess it's probably not ideal. In such an instance, the user probably wants to know more about the features and benefits of a product/category type, rather than "how to use X". Ideally you should re-edit and reframe the videos you have (or make new videos) to match the specific pages - so having one variation for the category page that fits the user intent there and then one for the help page section which better matches that user intent. My gut is to say that your current videos will work better in the help section, but I say this without knowledge of the site or videos, so please take that recommendation with a pinch of salt. I don't recommend following EGOL's suggestion in this thread, because I think it's a slightly old hat "SEO' mentality that puts the search engine factors above the user experience. Just because you won't get penalised for having the same video across multiple pages doesn't mean it's a great idea. Remember that video is just a media type, like text and image. You (probably) wouldn't think about duplicating blocks of text across multiple pages and for the same reasons, I don't think it's particularly wise to treat video any differently. Make sure you're creating content FOR the pages, rather than creating the content and then trying to work out where it fits afterwards. While it's possible that a video you create is relevant for multiple use-cases, in 99% of circumstances, said video would better serve each use case by at least being slightly re-edited for each page that it lives on. If you think that actually, the video is perfectly relevant for each page in question and doesn't need to be re-edited, then you should probably ask yourself whether you need two pages or whether you can consolidate the content into two pages. It's much better (from both a search engine and user perspective) to have one very strong, rich page targeted at a specific topic, rather than to have multiple thinner pages. I hope that's useful! Phil
| PhilNottingham0 -
On-Site Optimization Issue!
Hi Dina, Federico is correct, Moz Analytics will flag any duplicate content issues it finds on your site. While it is impossible to prevent creating duplicate content altogether on a smaller Wordpress site that contains tag, category, and archive pages, the easiest way to prevent duplicate content issues is to follow Federico's recommendations (not because these pages are not useful to your users, but because they can create duplicate content). I would also make sure that you only include excerpts of your blog posts on the front pay of the blog (vs. the full posts), and take care that pagination does not create duplicate content issues for you as well. While no-indexing paginated pages is not the ideal method for preventing duplicate content issues (in my opinion), it is the easiest for many people. (You can read about alternative ways to handle pagination here.) Finally, it sounds like you are not offering any of the brand's own products and services on the blog. If this is the case, I would make the blog's home page the front page (that is, the home page for the website.) I hope that helps! Thanks, Christy
| Christy-Correll0 -
Canonical Question For Different Languages
Hi Mark, I'm checking old Q&A and see yours is still marked as unanswered. Are you looking for more answers or aren't you satisfied with mine and Tom answers? If it is so, it would be great if we can help you further. If not, it would be great if you could sign the question as answered Ciao Gianluca
| gfiorelli10 -
Technical Question Regarding Responsive Themes
Ashley Chris has got the right idea - what you want to do is check the source code (HTML) of the page as it's loaded in the mobile device. I believe you could also use the user agent switcher in a desktop browser to see how it would render on a variety of mobile devices. Essentially, if you can find the source code for that ad in the HTML, even when loading on a mobile device, the ad is present but hidden. This is where my knowledge drops off a little - as I am not 100% of the mechanism that triggers an ad to count as an impression. It must fire off a javascript code - which in theory will happen if it's present but hidden in the HTML. Hopefully that helps you determine how it's displaying / not displaying. But the other thing is - people are using mobile sites all the time that have ads but are responsive - there must be a standard way for the ad provider to understand this is happening? Maybe talk to them too and see if you'll get a negative mark from it. They may do something to compensate for this.
| evolvingSEO0 -
Does Google penalize a page with the image tag with alt and without src?
An image with no image? That would be just like an HTML error. It would be a mistake to think that doint this would be good for your SEO.
| George.Fanucci0 -
Rel="canonical" link should they be to or from an "SEO friendly" url
Jeff's spot on. Come up with the briefest visitor readable URL that fits the proper understanding of the page identity along with its hierarchical relationship to content above it in that funnel. That's the URL that should be referenced in the canonical tag as well as links pointing to the page. If for some reason months or years later that URL needs to change (because the program name changes for some reason for example), then make that change and implement a 301 redirect to that new URL to pass any previously accumulated link value.
| AlanBleiweiss0 -
How important are image file names
Thanks guys - I really appreciate your quick responses to my silly question:) JJ
| jjtech0 -
How to rank Product pages over its Resource counterpart?
Hi Clint I'm in agreement with your line of thinking. Other than building links to the product page itself, you may want to change the way the page looks in order to give it that boost. As you will have seen - in this and other industries - Google is a fan of ranking informational content. Subsequently, your resource page, which is more likely to have said content, will often rank higher. The solution would be to add more of this type of content - unique versions of course - to your product page for Google to crawl. Additionally, you may want to withold or remove that kind of content from the resource page if you really don't want it to rank. The trade-off comes with user experience - by demoting or even removing this resource page, will it come at a serious detriment to users on your site finding what they want? If there's a hint of this answer being "yes", then I wouldn't do it. User experience is paramount. Instead, you may want to add my call to action/sales imagery and/or copy to the resource page to drive conversions. Hope this helps.
| TomRayner0 -
Help required to get the right landing page ranking
Go with Serpbook or rankchecker...I was furious to receive a report from Moz today telling me that around 50 keywords went from Rank 1 to rank nowhere. after they brought me back from my heart attack incident (sarcasm) I decided to check SErobooks and a free tool called rankchecker and my keywords were fine and where they should be ranking wise. I do not trust Moz on rankings at all tbh
| artdivision0 -
Matt Cutts or No Action Is Required
Google tends to downplay the existence of negative SEO, because: (1) frankly, it makes them look bad, and (2) people tend to over-estimate how common it is (we all like to blame the competition). In most cases, if Google thinks a link is malicious and being created by a third-party to harm you, they'll just devalue it. The problem is that Google is far from perfect at detecting who created a link. If they had that down, they'd be a lot better at dealing with spam. So, I wouldn't trust them to simply figure it out. If a link or linking domain is clearly bad, and especially if you've suffered a penalty, be proactive. The very fact that Google is warning you in Webmaster Tools suggests that they haven't simply devalued these links. They think that the links are suspect.
| Dr-Pete0 -
Communities Served on Page for SEO
I personally would go with your option 2 (Create a page that says areas served... then each page would have a non-duplicated and original content for that area.) Building out those landing pages for your urgent care facility on your current site makes synergistic sense (since the businesses are very closely related, same industry etc.) and allows allows you to leverage the current link profile of your existing domain. If it is truly and independent business run completely separate from your existing practice, it may be a good idea to creat a site. Hope that helps!
| RickyShockley0 -
What are "stop" words in Title Tags?
Courtney, I agree with Bradley. You and your client shouldn't worry about it too much. Write the Title to be the best for your searcher to help provide the best explanation for what that specific page consists of. This will also be to Google's liking, especially with the Hummingbird update to show relevance and human readability. Avoiding stop words can be considered an older SEO tactic, much like placing your brand name at the end of the Title. We now see Google taking the brand names, if placed at the end of the Title, and moving them to the beginning of the Title at their discretion. Also, educate your client on other SEO focused articles and checklists rather than GoDaddy. GoDaddy's SEO content and advice is sub-par at best compared to the plethora of content out there for SEO best practices for proper optimization. Hope this was helpful! - Patrick
| WhiteboardCreations0 -
ECommerce Filtering Affect on SEO
Andie - We work on a lot of eCommerce sites with similar left-hand navigation filters. I think that the thing to keep in mind is that these pages are often like search results pages, and require a human to choose options to create those URLs. As a result, they shouldn't be pages that a typical crawl bot would find. That said, each eCommerce system acts differently, and it's possible that permanent links are created that are added to a site map. Or, it's possible that Google's bots are starting to check boxes on eCommerce filters to better mimic human behavior. After all, Google has created self-driving cars. The data driven approach: I would check to see if any of these pages are showing up in Google Webmaster tools to see if it is, indeed, an issue, before trying to go crazy about duplicate content. Hope this helps, -- Jeff
| customerparadigm.com0 -
In counting words for a "long article," do comments count in the word count?
It feels like you're paying to much attention to the grains of sand and not enough attention to the beach. Think at scale--do you really want to be editing everyone's comments for ever and ever? How would your audience think about that? If you're audience is prone to misspelings and grammer errors (and whose isn't) so be it. One comment is worth a few errors and google's not going to ding you for that. Instead, think about how you can get more people who are going to make those errors to your site. Don't knock your audience if they're engaging with your content.
| Chris.Menke0 -
Category Advice
Okay, again, think with the mindset there is no stupid question when reading this next one When you say "reviews and videos" would live in their own categories....do you mean, subordinate to apps or, equal to apps with the name "app-reviews" "app-videos" If you have not figured out by now, categories are really confusing to me! thank you Mike
| crazymikesapps10 -
Would it be inappropriate use of authorship mark-up for a directory profile?
No that would be against G+ TOS. You would need to use the rel=publisher tag instead and link to the business G+ page.
| CustomButtonCo.com0 -
New Pages - Stable Rankings
In two of the sites I work with out of 3, we had stable ranking when we added new pages. For whatever reason after a couple of months, they started shifting up and down. Once, we built some links to them the rankings remained.
| JacobEdward0