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Category: Intermediate & Advanced SEO

Looking to level up your SEO techniques? Chat through more advanced approaches.


  • You can pull the meta descriptions with Screaming Frog from the Wayback Machine if your site is archived. If you want to do this, let me know and I'll help you with the settings.

    | TheeDigital
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  • Hello Zach, Based on what you are saying, this is an algorithmic warning and is not based on manual action. Since we are still talking algorithms, all you have to do is clean up your link profile - disavow all low-quality links and perhaps build a few higher-level links and over time the ranks should return to their former state. I know this is pretty much the same answer you received to your question on the Webmaster Help Forum, but I think that gentleman has a point. I disagree that you should "ignore" the emails, but a lack of manual oversight probably means that it is a technical issue that can be addressed rather than one you willingly perpetrated. In regards to your link profile, it's possible that the form the links took - for example, blog comments, posts etc. - contributed to the decline in rankings, but would not affect your "rankability". I don't think a Reconsideration Request is necessary as long as you ensure that your profile is clean of all "waste material". Perhaps push a link-building program for better links and see where that puts you. Also, completely unrelated to link-building, but is there a chance that the content might be responsible? Are you sure there is no duplicate content on your URL's? It might be that the current loss in rankings is Panda-related and not Penguin at all - that warning may be over and done.

    | Toddfoster
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  • OK, I think I understand what you are asking now. Canonicals are for identical or near-identical pages. I don't know that those two pages would be considered to be identical, even after you added the arctic listings to the Canada page, especially as the above-the-fold content is different. Keep in mind that the "penalty" for duplicate content is that Google will choose only one page to show, depending on which one it thinks is most relevant. And if you have one page that gets a lot more traffic and engagement, that is likely to be the one Google chooses, anyway. If I were you, I'd probably make sure the description sections at the top of those pages each has a good bit of unique content and maybe I'd change the titles and h1s to make them a little more different from each other (if you can do that) then I'd just leave it at that and see what Google makes of it. If it seems that your higher traffic page starts to lose traffic, you can always add the canonicals then, and resubmit the URL through Fetch as Google in Webmaster Tools.

    | Linda-Vassily
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  • Tom, I do get what you are going for. I also understand what Ray is saying and I do think he has some good points. I would also start by looking at multiple options. The options I see are this: Keep the current domain and expend it like Ray suggested (/mazda=tires/ etc). Start a new domain (carparts.com) and redirecting your current pages to the new domain (carports.com/toyota-parts/) Keep the current domain and create a new domain for your expansion and linking them all together. So you get toyotaparts.com, mazdaparts.com, hondaparts.com etc. Every option has a few pro's and cons speaking for it. The domain you currently own and use also has an age factor in its favor. By redirecting it to a new domain you may pass on the authority but you won't pass on the age of the domain. Though new websites tend to rank well in the beginnen, then start dropping some and then settle down it's still a risk factor. Ever more in a very competitive niche. Maybe the real answer is somewhere in between the options. You could also keep what you have right now, and expend by creating both carparts.com and mazdaparts.com. What you then could do is build something on carparts.com and from there refer to each individual site (toyotaparts.com/mazdaparts.com etc). And you expend by creating new fresh sites and by creating your own high quality new fresh content that's unique and refer it to your other content on the other websites. That way you get a spider web with carports in the center of it and the other sites at the far end, linking it all together to one giant network. Some SEO's might have to say something about this too but I'm just giving you my piece of mind and my thoughts on this subject. Hope this helps you some. Regards Jarno

    | JarnoNijzing
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  • I understand I might be a little late, but I had experienced this issue first hand with a Magento site. Once I added a wildcard exclusion in the robots.txt file my impressions and click improved noticeably.

    | AGMContainerControls
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  • Hi Mike, Welcome to the Moz community and congratulations on your new website. It's great to see you here and doing your due diligence on link building beforehand, it will surely pay off in the long-term. Moz has created a very handy and informative link building guide, especially for those in your position. Have you read through it already? If not, I highly suggest starting there. Moz's link building guide: http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-link-building

    | Ray-pp
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  • Thanks so much everyone. Not only was it all very helpful, it was very fast.  Thanks and have a great day.

    | jeremyskillings
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  • BI - business intelligence is an important tactical advantage if you can establish what a competitor is doing SEO strategy wise that is.. So if you wish to tell the world exactly what SEO keywords you're targeting then sure go ahead.... It's a "not-too-smart" idea in my SEO world tho...

    | JVRudnick
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  • They are different things for used for different reasons. By using the robots to block any page behind a log in you will not have to worry about them trying to access that information at all. You should also have canonical tags pointing to themselves on all pages especially product pages and landing pages.

    | Hutch42
    0

  • Thanks Dana! I have gone through screaming Frog what a great tool! Has mad life a lot easier and more structured for me Thank you again!

    | edward-may
    0

  • awesome thanks so much great info!

    | edward-may
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  • Hi Jason! Popping back by this thread after digging deeper into this issue, which is a controversial one. At the time I wrote the above Moz Blog post you read, Google had never made any public differentiation between testimonial and reviews. Now, with John Mu's comment, we are hearing something brand new about this, and there is debate about how to interpret this. For example, what John is citing appears to be the fact that Google views testimonials as filtered sentiment (controlled by the business owner) vs. the unfiltered sentiment of 3rd party reviews. So, a question is, if you published unfiltered testimonials on your website, would Google be okay with them being marked up in Schema? I can't answer that question, but there is a really good discussion of this going on at Linda Buquet's Local Search Forum. Especially check out David Deering's thoughtful comments: http://www.localsearchforum.com/google-local/26385-say-what-google-says-dont-add-review-markup-your-customer-reviews.html It's going to be up to each Local SEO how they want to interpret this. As for me, I agree with David's take on this at this point and we'll see where the chips fall with this in future.

    | MiriamEllis
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  • No, I believe we no longer see 'people' photos in the SERPs. The microdata is still recommended, but it's recommended so that Google can understand the full semantic implications of the content on your website, not to display the photo in the SERPs. John M. on Google Authorship: https://plus.google.com/+JohnMueller/posts/HZf3KDP1Dm8

    | Ray-pp
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  • There are many times where I would take something similar to Scott's tact. I agree as well, he mentioned some good general practices. But this site has been in the wild for a bit and you just acquired it. This means there's a good bit of homework to do before overhauling the entire permalink structure, for what I suspect is a considerable number of pages/posts. Knowing nothing else, the safest opinion I can render is to keep the structure as is for existing pages/posts (current traffic/link/revenue considerations) - and consider a custom post type and custom permalink workaround ('Sperimenting! Woooo!) for fun and profit(?). Your developer, or the WP development community, may have a better solution. Though I generally tend to disagree with doing things simply because the competition is doing the same. If nothing else, the mentality tends to bleed over into everything. Just think of all the wasted time/opportunities. Some differentiation can be a good thing. But if the custom permalink URLs tend to out-perform the slightly-lesser-than-pretty URLs over time, you can do a cost/benefit of total URL permalink change. (Rewrites... rewrites as far as the eye can see... buzzlightyear.jpg) But yeah, you'll probably have to confront the previous posts/pages permalinks at some time. I'm just saying confront the issue with some primary data, with the aid of secondary data.

    | Travis_Bailey
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  • In the post/page, scroll to the Yoast settings box, click on the advanced tab and there should be a "Canonical URL" field near the bottom

    | OlegKorneitchouk
    0

  • I experienced a similar issue recently with a client. A few 904 errors seemed to coincide with a notice in the client's 3d cart CMS that they were short on bandwidth. We also saw a VERY significant drop in rankings across the board. We upgraded the hosting plan and the 904 errors went away temporarily, and a very modest improvement in rankings followed, but not a return to normal. It's now about 2-3 months after we first saw the 904 errors and I've just noticed another one that has come up.

    | stevefidelity
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  • Probably not important but there is a wild card A record (*.greatwesternflooring.com) https://who.is/dns/greatwesternflooring.com, if you visit http://greatwesternflooring.com you get a 301 redirect to http://www.greatwesternflooring.com/ I would try have a CNAME for www. and maybe set a rel="canonical" for the domain

    | Xtend-Life
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  • Ill look again. Thanks so much for the help

    | Atomicx
    0