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URGENT:   I checked the text on a few of your product pages, then searched for a snippet of your product description in quotes.  Your descriptions are posted on other sites.   And that text on your site for some products is verbatim identical to the product descriptions displayed on amazon.co.uk.   That is deadly.    Google is filtering several other websites where this same text appears verbatim.  I see amazon with verbatim and four filtered results here.  So, I would be sure that the text on my site is unique.   If you are spreading it to amazon, rewrite what is on your site.  If other people are stealing your text, that's a harder problem to solve. ============================= If this was my site, I would do the following with the category page.  I am not saying that everyone is going to agree with me, but this is where I would bet my money and time. -- Include two to three sentences, in proper language, about each of the products.  Give the visitor enough information so he/she can decide to click.  Don't give me a whiff and make me click to taste it.  People who buy tea are the kind of people who don't mind reading by hate clicking into fifteen pages just to get some idea about the product. -- Personally, I would ditch the hover-over effect and get that text onto the page.  You NEVER know how search engines are going to treat it.  You never know how devices are going to treat it, or how old men like me, who enjoy their tea are going to react when it doesn't seem to work when I click on it.  Also, I believe in getting all of my info out for the visitor.  Don't make the visitor click to another page unless he is really interested. -- I would show the rating on the page.  Ratings  are like bling.  Flaunt them.

Nikola, are you using wordpress ? What is the URL? Web therapist, Chenzo

301 redirects are called permanent, but that's not really the case. They are permanent only as long as they are in place. If you want to see this, do everything as Andy said and then remove the redirect. You'll notice your traffic drop and when you put the redirects back the traffic will recover. Go ahead and do this every year and you'll see that each time it drops. We've dealt with drops that happened from domains that haven't been active in over 5 years, so as EGOL alluded to, keep them forever.

Its funny, I always have the right direction when working for my clients but when it comes to your own websites and seo optimizations it always helps to get a second pair of eyes. We are all bias to our own work. I couldn't agree more

If it is a drop in organic desktop traffic, then that won't be caused by the mobile change (as Andy said). Out of curiosity, what are your percentages of organic traffic by device? Does mobile account for a sizable amount of your organic traffic? I'm wondering if mobile is being mis-reported as desktop? While I'm doubtful that mobile usability issues would cause a drop in desktop traffic (assuming it is legitimately desktop traffic not being mis-reported), one easy way to test this would be to take a page that get lots of organic traffic that has mobile usability issues reported, fix those mobile usability issues. This ranking factor is real time and page by page (see Search Engine Land), so you should see some results quickly if that is the factor. Another question for you - what exactly did you change about your product descriptions? Meta description, on-page text, both? Are those the pages that lost traffic? Maybe try reverting back and see what impact that has. I'm guessing you don't want to share your domain here, but feel free to connect with me privately with the website URL and I'd be happy to take a look at your domain more specifically to see if I can spot anything else that might be causing this issue.

Thanks Patrick. I will take a look at these links.

Thank you Ethan, Yes I will recommend a 301 redirect to the I.T. guys, but I do think that my I.T. guys wont like me much Please can I ask - why would I need to create more content to canonicalise it if I already have two url's? Would I not just add code to both pages? If the page 1 url exists and temp redirects it to the page 2 url, would I not just add code to both pages? Or if I add code to the page 1 url, would it be exactly the same to the other variations? Please teach me this as I will need to explain it to the I.T. dept as this was there recommendations. I think I will most definitely need tech help moving forward! Thanks a lot for your time!

Hi, I tested the code mentioned above: RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteRule ^(.*)index.(html|php)$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L] It works well for index.php, but not for XX-index.php. The site where I tested this code is bilingual, so there is also a GR-index.php file and the above code redirects it to the root domain as well. Also, another problem is that the code above causes the redirection of index.php inside any directory. For example, http://domain.com/directory/index.php is redirected to http://domain.com/directory/ How can I avoid this and keep only a "basic" redirection of http://domain.com/index.php to http://domain.com? Yannis

So you've got a big performance issue if you put all 20 images in img src= notation, as the browser is going to try to download those, of course. What I've done with my travel website with big hotel images (I'll have as many as 75 or more sometimes) is specify the 1st image in img src= notation, then use Javascript to update the src attribute on click or timer. The downside of this: good luck getting Google to index the other 19 images, even if you put them in an image sitemap.  In my experience, Google didn't want to index anything it couldn't verify was really on the page. You can use @media queries to point at different images for different resolutions, but only if they're background images....which most likely means they won't be indexed, and they won't be seen as content by Panda. What I've ended up doing is a bit of a hack; I use client-side Javascript to detect the screen resolution, then I can select different sized images based on that.  I use Joe Lencioni's SLIR library to take any large image and automatically create and cache the various smaller sizes I need.

Hi Dino, How often does Google crawl your site? Google may not have found some of those inner pages. You can ask Google to recrawl any section of your site by using Fetch as Google, which gives you the option to "Submit to index". You can ask Googlebot Mobile to be the one doing the fetching, and I assume if you "Submit to index" after that, it'll get Googlebot Mobile to crawl the page again. But, it isn't clear. I would also double check that you have an XML sitemap which includes all of the URLs you'd like to rank. And, if this is at all possible, try adding links to the pages that still show "Try Anyway" to your homepage, even if it's temporary. Google crawls your homepage more often than any other page on your site, and is more likely to see those pages if they're directly linked off of there. Good luck! Kristina

Yes, making the links nofollow should be implemented. BUT... I will say that outgoing links are not generally a bad thing, unless that's all there is to the site. If all you're doing is publishing affiliate links without any content then I wouldn't expect to give up your day job any time soon to retire to the Bahamas... Affiliate sites that do well, do well because the people running them provide decent content and add value. Just my twopenneth... I am not suggesting that this is your plan, just that that may be the reason you've heard that outgoing links are 'bad' for SEO. In fact, Google is more likely to recrawl more often if the site is both easy to crawl and is not a dead-end (in other words a site with no links would probably not be crawled very frequently), so it could be argued that outgoing links are a good thing. Personally, I would use magento over wordpress - it's more secure and less likely to get hacked. I hope this makes sense! Good luck with your venture.

Thanks for the responses.  Yes, we are worried about too much interlinking and that being seen as manipulative. I do think we're leaning towards a completely separate domain.  I'll just have to be careful with the links.

your redirects has to be in your server if not it'd be hard to manage that by yourself. What you ahve to be sure is how those redirects have been done. If they're on a dedicated HTACCESS, then it would be fine as, like you said, you'll ba mainitainig hte exact same  URL structure, but if they're maintained by a WP plulgin or JS, be sure to not ovverwrite it, or if you want to get rid of it, export your rules and rewrite them on your htaccess.

Hi, I certainly wouldn't put the text into an image if you can help it, the more good on page content the better! The H1 tag describes what the pages is about, if the slider isn't 100% relevant, then being above the H1 is fine. If it is relevant, then you can always have the H1 above in the code, and then style it in CSS to be below the slider. Kind Regards Jimmy

We are looking into an MVC plugin for our umbraco site. I believe there can be custom elements, such as the sign-up process. Would you say it's better to host it on a sub-domain? I'm thinking this is the way forward. What are your thoughts? Within our niche there are three very popular forums, none of which seem to have severe spam issues. I expect they are well moderated (and I've said this is a necessity). Ours will have someone looking after it (moderating) as well as people dedicated to answering specific questions. Thanks for your advice! It's greatly received.

Thanks for the quick reply Martijn, I will 301 these back to the homepage. Just strange that Google is reporting these when they do not exist anywhere on the site.

Hi there Testimonials are great - they help build trust in your brand and work from a user standpoint, and can also help bring in search traffic by mentioning specific development, design, or industry elements in their critique. You can also use these testimonials to develop case study or white paper content to showcase more benefits of using your business or your competition. Hope this helps - good luck!

Hi there Take a look at Hotjar and VWO, they have different surveys and poll opportunities for you to explore. Good luck!

How much value would these links actually give if they were followed? Just curious as they would be in the footer and would also lack relevancy as presumably websites would be getting designed for many many different companies in different industries.