Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks  Kristina, Working fine. Keep up the good work.

Hi mike, we do have webmaster tools set up and I will take a look at Screaming Frog, as it looks like an efficient piece of software. I should have probably been a bit clearer in my query though. Will Screaming Frog tell me which internal links are pointing to 404 pages? The only way I can think of checking this at the moment is to go through every page on the site, checking each of the links to see if they go to the correct pages.

Hi Thomas, If a page doesn't have an equivalent on the other country version then you don't need to specify hreflangs really, you can just specify the one of the page that exist if you want, to keep the consistency, although if you see: the goal of the hreflang is to specify Google which is the "best" URL to show in their results when a search is done and there are many that could be relevant as they target the same queries, but should be targeted to different audiences, since in this case there will be only one, then it's not necessary to do it. Thanks, Aleyda

All the categories are based on what my customers search for in my nav or based on what discovery related keywords they search for. My worry is that this is endless, as there are literally thousands of categories that I could be creating. If you have 5 or more products that are relevant to a keyword, should you not create a category for your customers to find, rather than just a product page, (offering your customers more options)? Thanks,

Hi Anders - totally not your fault; it's ours. We have volume data that's US-centric currently, and don't have data for Norway (or other countries) yet. We're working first on UK, Canada, and Australia, and then will try to get other countries' search volume data, too. Apologies for that - in the meantime, my suggestion is to use AdWords KW Planner data for volume and select the specific country.

Yes, it is an important thing to consider, because Googlers repeatedly told that if the canonicalized page and the canonical are very different, then Google may not take into account the canonicalization.

Hi David, If you're confident enough that there is no duplicate related issues on your website, I wouldn't worry about implementing the canonical tag. You can use the tag on an individual page basis, should you feel that you need to tell Google which is the original page.

Thanks for you answers, I'll definitely be checking out Grepwords. I also want to look into the Adwords API in combination with excel, because these does seem to have an implementation, although I can hardly find any clear information on this. I just want to be able to paste a list of keywords and retrieve the search volumes for my country automatically.

Hi Rohan, Some more details would be nice indeed, but if I'm right you're looking for ways to achieve an increase in CTR for both your organic and paid results. What we sometimes do is analyse what our average CTR is for a certain position and then cross reference that data with other keywords that perform lower to find out what we can do there to get a better CTR for them. By changing either the title, to make it more click worthy or the META description. Hopefully this already gave you some ideas.

If you delete the page, and it had links pointing to it, the server will return a 404 not found page, which makes you lose any authority they had to pass to the main domain or subdomain. Using the 301 redirects at least you take a portion of the authority back to your Website. If your CMS is somehow advanced, it should be easy to hide those "expired pages" from the page list avoiding any confusion. But again, if you redirect the page, lets say about am  inbound marketing conference in Boston to the main domain that does not "serve" any kind of useful content to the user that was actually expecting the page of the Boston conference, that won't help at all. Instead, try to 301 them to something that the user may be interested in, even tho the event he was looking for is no longer available; in this case, it could be a page listing all the upcoming inbound marketing conferences (in/near Boston). By going that route you favor your site by making the pagerank flow to the other page and you also help the user, which is the primary target.

Thank you for this update. I have Tumblr, Blogspot etc. that I use as part of my strategy and it is quite disconcerting this morning to see an individual post on a Tumblr blog with a PA of 94.  It's like looking in your bank and seeing a balance of 100K.

I agree with Eric. Go with Abc Cars, abc Cars, or abc cars (no spaces).

Hi Eric, I think we've got our paths crossed slightly, i was talking about getting get the social follows, followers and posts count for each social profile associated with a domain. eg if you where comparing ford and bmw you would see : ford twitter : 100 followers, 20 following, 5 posts bmw twitter : 200 followers, 100 following, 20 posts ford facebook : 100 likes bmw facebook : 10 likes

Thanks for the link. I'm guessing our solution lies somewhere between #'s 2 and 5 in that post. Appreciate the help

Hi, I think your H1 idea is fine. For the meta descriptions I'd write a new one for each page and make it so that it compels searchers to click your page. That may or may not be the first few words on your page. If the words do not capture interest you may lose a searcher to another search result. The meta description is important for click through. As you identified, just a product name or half a sentence will not serve you well.

I have hundreds of books for sale on one of my websites and the product pages for these books get very few visitors per month.  However, each month we make about 75 sales from these pages (with some visitors buying several different books).  Think of it as 500 pages that each get 5 visitors per month with 3% of the visitors making a purchase.  These sales are really easy to service, just open the shopping cart page, print a label, slip a book or two into a mailer, slap on a label.  The inventory turns over about once a year and takes up very little space. We are not going to delete those pages. These are not thin content pages.  We have a few hundred words of unique content per page plus standard information that includes, author, publisher, date, ISBN, etc.

But if I can find out, how may times, it appears on our site, and compare that to a competitors that will help.

I just did a check and you're right, even though these pages are showing up as errors to the user they are actually showing up as 200 OK, which is causing the duplicate content issue. Thank you!

Hi Joshua Thanks, I see the ranking drop. However, have you lost traffic? I see most positions were on the 2nd page to begin with. I see this quite often, when sites don't rank on page #1, the rankings can drop/jump a lot around pages 2-5. I know it's not fun seeing a "drop" but ultimately I would focus on your traffic as a mindset. I ask if this is a fairly new site, because it's a super competitive niche, and I'm surprised it ranked that well to begin with. If it's a new site, often Google will rank it higher for a little while to see how users react to it, and then it may settle back to a more "normal" ranking. I'd also check your Search Analytics report in Search Console - do you see Impression and Position drops across the board? It's tempting to analyze only a few top keywords, but I'd try to look at things as a whole too.

While I have nothing to add in regards to facebook ad cliks not showing up in Analytics, I do want to add caution that facebook, while produces a lot of clicks, impressions, likes and even website clicks, unless you have such a broad site that you can do the fly paper traffic tactic and lure some of those people in,  I've found facebook's user base widely impulse driven rather than focus driven. For broad niches this works well, for narrow niches it's a risk.