Latest Questions
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Change Brand Spelling after 8 years
To be honest - if it is only putting one letter in capitals most of your customers/visitors will hardly notice. If this is the only change - it will not make a difference in terms of usability. Google changed it logo recently and there was a big buzz about it. When I asked at home - nobody had even noticed the change (4 frequent Google users). Dirk
Branding / Brand Awareness | | DirkC0 -
Usability: Using Letters in Phone Numbers
Like Miriam mentioned - use the real number on citation sources and major offsite areas. The only ways I would suggest using a vanity number on your site is through javascript swapping (think CallRail phone tracking), or by using it in an image with the alt text being the real (non-vanity) number. I would A/B test with the javascript method on your site. That solution would use a find & replace function depending on the click source (organic, direct, ppc, social, forum, etc), and swap in the tracking number/Vanity number. Test that for a while and compare phone call volumes. I think if you are a local business that would hurt NAP consistency, so that would need to be monitored pretty closely as well to make sure that vanity number doesn't cause damage.
Local Strategy | | Eric_Rohrback0 -
Cannot re-activate PPC after GWT violation has been removed.
I've been through something like this once, and, unfortunately, even with substantive ad spend, it took a lot of time and effort to get an AdWords rep involved. You have a couple of choices: (1) Complain very loudly, including Twitter and Google Webmaster Forums. Yes, it's not the ideal solution, but it works more often than it should. (2) Contact anyone you can at AdWords and try to get rep time. I'll tell you what we did - I'm not saying you should do it, but desperate times, etc. We went to a Google Analytics meet-up and got a few cards from Googlers. Then, we emailed all of them. Since they were out of town (for the meet-up), we got their vacation auto-responders, so we emailed all of their bosses. This continued until some VP got so annoyed he demanded someone assign us a rep to shut us up. Look, I'm not proud of it, but that client got their ban lifted.
Paid Search Marketing | | Dr-Pete0 -
URL Structure's Effect on SEO
The way you structure the url has no impact on SEO performance (unless the url becomes very long & unreadable). The depth of a site has an impact (how many clicks do I need from the homepage to get to a page) but this is completely unrelated to the folder structure. A good article on why it's good to have a certain structure in your url can be found here: http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/structured-urls/ As changing URL's always carries a risk & doesn't bring SEO benefit I wouldn't change them just for the sake of changing them. Dirk
Web Design | | DirkC0 -
URL Structure's Effect on SEO
Hi J.P., Page depth refers to the number of clicks it takes a user (or search engine) to get to a page from the home page. And yes, this can negatively impact SEO, as well as usability, if it takes too many clicks for users and search engines to get to a page. (Search engines may use up their crawl budget, while users may simply leave your site and go to one that is easier to find what the are looking for.) However, the number of clicks it takes to navigate to a page doesn't necessarily mirror the URL structure. So, in the example you give, the existing URL makes sense - http://www.domain.com/procedures/breasts/augmentation. It is readable, includes keywords, does not use special characters, avoid stop words, and isn't too long. If you were going to change the URL structure, I would go with http://www.domain.com/procedures/breastaugmentation over http://www.domain.com/breastaugmentation, unless the only procedure your client does is breast augmentation. But, seeing as there is not a compelling reason to change the URL structure, I would leave it as-is. Even if you perfectly plan and execute all 301-redirects and update every link, you are creating a lot of work for yourself (as well as anyone who links to you, as best practice would be to ask them to update the new link). Furthermore, 301-redirects are known to pass slightly less value over time. Of immediate concern, you should expect fluctuations in the site's performance in the SERPs when making any sitewide change such as this. For more information on best practices for URL structure, I recommend checking out this post by Rand Fishkin: <a>https://moz.com/blog/15-seo-best-practices-for-structuring-urls</a>. I hope that helps! Christy
Web Design | | Christy-Correll0 -
Making a site mobile friendly
Hi, I can't see any reason why Google would object to this. Mobile and desktop sites are often very different and have different elements showing - in fact, I can't think of many where they are identical in terms of showing everything. My own site hides elements from Google via mobile (option via the theme) and I make good use of this as you don't want a huge page on mobile - it's about quick conversions and getting the point across on a much smaller screen. -Andy
Technical SEO Issues | | Andy.Drinkwater0 -
Facebook widget and blocked images
Hey Michael I wouldn't be concerned, Google stated recently that blocked 3rd party images should not be an issue.
Technical SEO Issues | | evolvingSEO0 -
Duplicate content
Using Noindex is a solution to prevent any problems, but what about linking to your original (law) source? The page could be indexed and as long as you have enough good quality content on your website you should not have any trouble i think. CleverPHD makes a good point about writing some text of your own!
Technical SEO Issues | | Stramark1 -
What is best practice for fixing urls that have duplicate content, non-static and other issues?
you could introduce breadcrumbs. It will make the URL nicer in the search results of google without changing the URL!
Technical SEO Issues | | Stramark0 -
Sitemap Contains Blocked Resources
Thanks for the latest responses guys I have researched it into the grave and it the way Magento generates the sitemap makes it impossible for me to exclude these URLS. I will just unblock them from robots, and make them all noindex. This seems to solve all problems, i will then block them when im 100% sure they are unindexed. Thanks Again chaps. Big help as always.
Technical SEO Issues | | ATP0 -
How I can saw Handling Price for Google Shopping Feed
Hi, That is not possible in Google shopping because Google stated very clearly that products price in feed and price on website should be equal otherwise account could get suspended. Once I were showing products price on website excluding VAT and in XML feed inclusive VAT price were showing. Google send me a suspension warning email about that so you have to show the same price in feed and on website including VAT and other charges. Thanks
Paid Search Marketing | | Alick3000 -
Domain dominance
Lisa It is a personal decision. There is no right or wrong answer. Big companies - sometimes buy them and do not use them in any shape nor form, but keep from competitors. Smaller companies usually don't as it is a costs issue. My experience is most competitors do not understand their own digital channel let alone, snapping up similar names of competitors...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ClaytonJ0 -
Question regarding very unique SERP -
Yeah, this one's a bit tricky. These are snippets Google is creating from on-page search results. To the best of my knowledge, this particular style of snippet is not based on any particular markup. Google is extracting it from source-code structure (like tables and CSS elements). If you don't have these and want them, all I can really suggest is clean HTML/CSS. Why and how they do this, exactly, is still a bit of a mystery. If you have these and don't want them, you're kind of out of luck. The only options are blocking snippets completely or trying to essentially make your source code so awful Google stops doing it, and the side effects of that are a lot worse than an undesired snippet format, IMO.
Search Engine Trends | | Dr-Pete0 -
Is there a tool that will find a string from the source code from a list of URLs?
Cheers Dirk Didn't know Screaming Frog could do that. Works perfectly! Screaming Frog is just the gift that keeps on giving
Behavior & Demographics | | richdan0