Category: Intermediate & Advanced SEO
Looking to level up your SEO techniques? Chat through more advanced approaches.
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Disavowing 100k Affiliate Links
Hi there. Do you see any negative results so far? Any hints at it? How spammy are those links (anchor text, DA/PA of linking pages etc)? Did/do you have manual actions taken by GWT/search console? How is your MOZ OSE spam score? What I would recommend, if you have a suspicion that disavowing those links would help, is to disavow small part of them, let's say 100-200 and see the effects on your rankings, DA/PA and other metrics. Hope this helps.
| DmitriiK0 -
Affiliate Links Dilemma
Thank you Everett, I think what you wrote makes sense and I'll see what to do. I'll analyze again all my affiliate links and assess the risk of getting rid of those links. If I see I could risk losing rankings in some way, I'll consider to disable the stronger affiliates last. Thank you again.
| fablau0 -
SEO RANKING ISSUE | Category Page Trumping Homepage
The best thing I would do Jonathan, is take a look at this Whiteboard Friday from Rand, because it should answer a lot of questions that you have. It is specifically about what to do when the wrong pages rank. From what you are telling me, it sounds like the category page might be a doorway page, but clearly Google isn't seeing it as such. Would I advise pointing it with a canonical tag? Probably not, but I would work on making your homepage much better. Look to add not only amazing content, but do some keyword research and add in synonyms / LSI / similar keywords to help Google better understand what the page is about. -Andy
| Andy.Drinkwater0 -
Pagination do you still need unique titles?
Hi Jay, I agree that probably it won't really matter if you have implemented the rel next/prev tags. But still I would always make sure that the pages will just have the actual page number added to it so they will be unique. In most cases this is a very easy fix for developers or in some CMS' you can do it yourself. That's why I wouldn't take the risk and make them unique. Martijn.
| Martijn_Scheijbeler0 -
Same brand but different domains and TLDs, What could be affect on SEO?
The XML sitemap is the faster way.
| BlueprintMarketing0 -
Why the sudden increase in soft 404s?
They have stopped, with no changes to the site. I have no idea why. Thank you for the offer though.
| EcommerceSite0 -
Is the eCommerce site Shopify SEO friendly?
Let's export Shopify to OpenCart. OpenCart is designed in a way that all of its pages can be indexed and identified in search engines. So by providing the identification information through Meta Title, Meta Description and Meta keywords, you are making it easier for search engines to get your store data. OpenCart allows the use of search engine optimized URLs for product, category, manufacturer and information pages. SEO keywords are defined per product, category, manufacturer and information page, stored in a database table (url_alias), looked up at each page request, and translated into an internal URL. Here is some SEO tips for optimize OpenCart site: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/11-seo-tips-boost-your-opencart-online-store-sourabh-nagori
| Nayotanguyen0 -
Base href + relative link href for canonical link
Hi there. I would say it's not the best way to do it like that. I'm not entirely sure how google would react to this. There are couple way to check it. Basically, google bots are very similar to any other bot, so, you can use, let's say, a facebook debugger, or check your MOZ tools, see what they say. If those tools are saying there are errors, then google most likely will say the same. Hope this helps.
| DmitriiK0 -
Changing Canonical Tags on Indexed Pages that are Ranking Well
Okay, makes sense. I am changing it to www. Thanks!
| QuickToImpress0 -
YouTube Ads - Disable?
Hi Becky! You should be able to find the answer on here: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/132596?hl=en Let me know if you have any trouble with that, thanks!
| BlueCorona0 -
Does Navigation Bar have an effect on the link juice and the number of internal links?
Hi onurcan-ikiz! Moz has a great blog post that discusses how many links is too many. I would check that out for advice—while there isn't an exact number of links you should not exceed, many people suggest having fewer than 100 links per page. If you main navigation as a lot of links I would be worried about the link juice. When your website receives a backlink from another website, hopefully with a high domain authority (YAY!), the link juice is being spread out to ALL the pages being linked from the page they are linking to. This means if www.cnn.com (who has a domain authority of 96) links to your company's homepage, they would be spreading some of their authority to you through "link juice". But instead of retaining majority of that juice/authority on the homepage (thus increasing the authority on that page), you are going to be spreading fewer and fewer amounts of that authority through all 100+ pages linked from the main navigation. Check out this link juice diagram to get a visual representation of what I am talking about. Hope this helps!
| BlueCorona0 -
Is this organic search sketchiness worth unwinding?
I agree with the two methods that both you and Gaston have pointed out. The downside to reversing those links is that the domain authority could drop a bit—which could impact their rankings on the SERPs. If this happens, the client might think you are doing something wrong and causing their rankings to rank when, in theory, you were trying to help get rid of any sketchy links. In my opinion, I’d keep them. They’ll make your work perform better. Disavowing them could yield worse results than what their former SEO provided. If that happens, you're playing defense and blaming. Hope this helps!
| BlueCorona0 -
SEO penalty for changing domains by simply switching DNS on Wordpress and adding 301s server-side?
Hi David, Not having a CMS on the old site will not cause you any issues. The main thing you need is the 301 redirects to the new domain. You should also make sure that the redirects from the old domain are redirecting to the corresponding page on the new domain. IE. You shouldn't be redirecting all pages from the old domain to the homepage on the new domain. You might see some decreases in organic traffic for a week or two after the change, but it should pick up to its previous levels once search engines have properly crawled and indexed everything again. Cheers, David
| davebuts0 -
Will Amazon outrank our Online Store?
Hi Frank, It looks like you are the manufacturer of the products you sell. Going on Amazon could expose your products to new customers that otherwise would not find you. I guess the question is are your competitors on Amazon? If you're happy with sales as they are, you can choose to stay away, but if you are looking to expand, it might be worth a try. Their fees are significant and they are always coming up with ways to get in your pocket. Also managing them will add hours to your week. If you do decide to do it there are a few options. Vendor Central and Seller Central. There is a great group on LinkedIn named "Amazon Vendor Central (AVC)" you should look at. You can learn a lot there about negotiating your deal with Amazon before you jump. Also the pros and cons of VC and SC. Good Luck!
| Chris6610 -
What would cause these ⠃︲蝞韤諫䴴SPপ� emblems in my urls?
They are encoded URLs. For example, Google will turn all " into %22 and all spaces in the URL to %20. You can learn more about them here http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_urlencode.asp . And here is a useful tool for encoding and decoding URLs: http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/dencoder/ . What you need to do is have the developer "escape out" or "rewrite" all non-alphanumeric characters in the URL. You'll also have to 301 redirect the old URLs to these new, search-engine friendly ones without the characters that get automatically encoded, like parentheses, commas, tildas and plus signs.
| Everett0 -
SEO - Ecommerce Small Business Quick Wins
Thanks very much for the advice, spot on as always
| BeckyKey0 -
Bing Ranking Factors
Thank you for the information. I appreciate breaking it down in a simple way.
| Kdruckenbrod0 -
Title Tags & Keyword Order
I've been hearing this question more and more often as of late. Here's the basic information on Title Tag construction, as provided by Moz: https://moz.com/learn/seo/title-tag Moz suggests: Primary Keyword - Secondary Keyword | Brand Name. Moz also mentions that since Google only displays the first 50 or so characters of your title tag, it's imperative to get your keyword in those first 50 characters so users are able to see them in the search results when the title tag is displayed. In fact, if you scroll down on the page, you'll see that Moz specifically suggests placing important keywords close to the front of the title tag, citing: "According to Moz's testing and experience, the closer to the start of the title tag a keyword is, the more helpful it will be for ranking—and the more likely a user will be to click them in search results." I hope this is helpful!
| BlueCorona0 -
Geo-Targeted Sub-Domains & Duplicate Content/Canonical
Great question! Based on the situation you've described, your best bet is to direct all of the geotargeted pages to canonical to the version on that sub-domain. So, for the example you provided, . I would not rely on geo-targeting to have the right links show in the right search locations!
| BlueCorona0 -
Is the image property really required for Google's breadcrumbs structured data type?
I agree that it doesn't make a lot of sense for Google to require the image itemprop - it's not the only example of Google requiring an itemprop that doesn't really make sense (for example, OperatingSystem is required for the WebApplication property, which doesn't make sense since it's...you know...a web application). For what it's worth, even though the documentation says it's required, BreadcrumbList code that doesn't include the image attribute validates just fine in the Structured Data Testing Tool, and pages without the image itemprop in place are still getting breadcrumb snippets in the SERPs. So it may not be as "required" as Google says it is.
| RuthBurrReedy0