SEO impact classifieds website

[ivordg]

Hi, I'm part of an organization running a classifieds platform in Spain. (Mercadonline.es) We are hit by Google penalties since a few weeks, possibly caused by numerous errors we are experiencing. Most frequent errors are 404's and duplicate content (titles tags etc) since the nature of our website is dynamic. Many ads change daily, are added or removed, causing Googlebots (and others) to flag us and not being able to see our more unique content.  Until what part of our platform should we be indexed? Since we have +34,000 pages indexed (mostly due to internal filter pages) I would need a systematic solution for us to display relevant and unique content, with enough usage of keywords that can bring us back up - we are actually ranked <50 on google for most of our main keywords. It is costing us precious time and money since we can only aquire our visitors (adwords etc) and not being to attract any organically.

I can go in more detail with someone who can give me a bit more direction.

Your answer is much appreciated!

Ivor

[JarnoNijzing]

Ivor,

what I would do is make sure you update your sitemap.xml daily and also have Google scan it every day (add it by hand in your webmaster tools or use another tactic). That way you are constantly telling Google where all the pages are. Besides that I would recommend having the right structure for pages that no longer exist so they give a correct 404's and make your pages canonicalized for content (but only if you indeed have unique content). 34000 pages are hard to inspect for problems but you would have to start somewhere.

I also noted that you have a lot of adsense blocks and other ads blocks on the pages. Google Adsenses insist that you use no more then 3 ad blocks on 1 page. If I look at your page I see at least 4 blocks. So I would drastically dial this number down and keep them as low as possible on the page. You now have one above the main content (http://www.mercadonline.es/ads/coches/9909). I would never do this. Start with content (maybe 3 or 4 paragraphs before you introduce you first ad block. I work with adsense a lot and I know the policy of Google on this. This might be why you got hit by the penalties. Panda and Penguin both look at the quality of a page and the ration between ads and content.

Hope this helps you some.

Regards

Jarno

[ivordg]

Hi Jarno,

Thanks for your swift response. I will look into it asap and revert possibly with comments and other questions.

Kind regards,

Ivor

[ivordg]

Hi Jarno,

We don't have more than 3 blocks per page, since we always follow Google Adsense guidelines. Perhaps you counted wrongly since there is one block that is our own ad space (anuncio top). And every time we receive warnings of this nature we would adjust immediately. But perhaps we would need to add more text/content instead of only links and ads, in order to respect the ratio?

I think the big problem is also our duplicate content. (see screenshot) and I would have to see how we can canonicalize this...

b2C0in1

[JarnoNijzing]

Ivor,

i think i counted correctly:

1. above the content main section
2. right next to your own ad (which Google also counts as Ad)
3. Mid content in between the audi's (the page i looked)
4. at the bottom of the left side bar.

So you actually have 5 ad blocks on your site. Then again, the first ad block should not be that high on the page. Delete the above the content one, and the bottom left sidebar one and add some content before using the block next to your own ads. That might work for you. But at this moment you are violating Google's policy on using ads (IMHO)

I would defiantly add more content, more text less ads. Maybe 1 or 2 ad blocks on at least a 1000 words ? I never measured a ratio that works. Maybe a good idea to do that sometime.

As for the errors, can you give a few examples of the pages that are duplicate, I will look into it a bit further.

Regards

Jarno

[ivordg]

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