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Thanks - i'll give them a call first thing Monday!

What do I tell her to alleviate her fear that she's not ranking for a ton of keywords and that this other guy is creating crap content? Keep these in mind.... **1) It is important to stay focused.   ** If client hired you to focus on valuable keywords such as (A) and (B) then they call you because they are not ranking for (F) and (G), which are not valuable keywords, then you need to revisit the original plan withe client (chase valuable keywords).   They need to know that putting work into (F) and (G) are less likely to move their income needed and going after them in addition would not be as valuable as putting MORE work into (A) and (B). 2) Promising rankings vs Promising a work agenda Clients need to know that when you quote them a price that you will do specific work for them.  The results of that work might produce certain rankings, however, you have no control over what work competitors are putting in or will start putting in after they realize that you are on the attack  --  then the work that you "thought" would produce certain results will not achieve them because competitors have raised the bar.  Every time you raise your clients income or rankings that was done at the expense of a competitor and some of them will respond vigorously. So I would always go into any project with educating the client that the work you do might be offset or more than offset by work done by the competition.   The client is paying you to compete, the client is not paying you to assume all competitive risks that are in their industry.   That should fall fully on them - not on you. If a webmaster in my niche decides he wants to overtake me and hires an SEO to add more fuel to his fire the result might be a decrease in rankings for HIM.  Why?  He needs to be adding fuel at the same rate as me just to keep up and faster than me if he expects to get ahead. 3) Chase rankings or chase keyword reach? At my office two people work all day, every day, trying to increase the keyword reach of the website.  (KW reach = getting great content, best-on-the-web or close to it, out there for more and more keywords)   We might "watch" rankings, but we don't "work on rankings".   Working on keyword reach is a guaranteed success almost every time because you pickup new traffic for new keywords.  And as you get more and more great, best-on-the-web, content out there your site starts earning a bigger and bigger fan base and more and more sharing.  The result of that generally, over time, results in an increase in rankings. So, we are running a factory for quality content.  Instead of working on rankings we are putting everything into "reach".  And that is where I am betting all of my money. (This will work for you if you are working in a niche with great keyword breadth... but if you are working where keyword breadth is really narrow you can run through the reach in a couple of years.  But some industries can keep two people busy for decades.)

Took a quick look at the page, and nothing majorly technical jumped out at me as preventing or hindering page rankings. I always suggest making sure your site's set up in Moz Analytics and looking at the crawl diagnostics, which show a lot of common technical problems. (If you haven't already, of course.) I did notice that on your example, the title tag is too long and Google truncates it. For e-commerce, the big separator between leaders is content. The more you can create unique content about your products -- start with the most important ones -- the better off you will be. Make sure you have unique product descriptions. People love video. And people also love solutions or knowledge about how to use the product and what it will solve for them. You do a great job at listing the specs and features, but what's the value add? A quick look at the competition in the SERPs shows that your competitors, they aren't doing a good at this, and it would set you apart. Additionally, I also noticed that your site in general has a pretty low domain authority, and the product page in question doesn't have any backlinks. These will definitely affect your rankings. Before jumping on building links, I highly suggest reading our beginner's guide to link building, which will walk you through the pros, cons, and best practices to build links as you don't want to get into trouble with Google over links.

In understand about dev time and trying to get things put into the priority list - its a real challenge in todays business especially for those in SEO as these days onsite factors help in ranking, its no longer all about links But I agree about images that would be good, if and when you ever do move to a new platform and want some people to test the it, let me know I am always willing to help out where possible.

I truly assumed it is based on more than just links. You do have tools such as SEMRush, Searchmetrics, SimilarWeb that show traffic analysis (which is not accurate but can show trends or directions). If a site loses 90% of its traffic then obviously its domain authority is far from being intact

Steve, Thank you for sharing this.

Hutch42 - That was my thought as well, so I really appreciate you confirming my thoughts!

You're welcome. Great insights as usual. And this just further emphasizes the importance of content as well as how it relates to organic rankings. If a company has no interest in using words written well, search doesn't have much interest in it.

Both Ryan and Linda have great answers for your specific issue. As a new customer, I highly suggest signing up for our webinars that walk you through how to use the tools and real life examples with them.

Thanks Ryan, They are URL's that we would like to have indexed, so any visitor could find them. They don't change often, but if a SKU for example changes, the cart automatically changes the URL to match the new SKU, but does not generate a 301. I'll look into this, thanks for the tip.

Sure. Use a VPN to place your IP in the country you want to test, create a new browser instance with the language set to the target countries language (or language within that country you want to test), and then search the location specific version of Google, i.e. google.co.uk instead of google.com. While not all inclusive of what users will be seeing from within that country, that should give you at least a more informative snapshot. Cheers!

As Ryan mentioned, OSE is updated on a schedule. Our next update is scheduled for March 11th. We try to update it -- barring any technical difficulties -- at least once a month.

Always keep this in mind ... If you follow the rules and do things the right way, as they should be done you will be better off in the long run. As Google tightens up its rules and makes changes ... each time they roll out an update YOUR website should improve in rankings. If you want to skip the hard work, take the easy route, buy your way in or resort to jumping the line with black hat tactics ... then please don't act surprised when these updates hurt your rankings or get you banned all together. Remember the old saying, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is !  Adding a bunch of likes from people who are not your raving fans can actually do more harm then good. Lets take an example of 2 websites looking to grow their social media. 1. Client #1 decides to take the high road and put the time in every day or a few days a week to engage on social media. Posting content, liking other pages, getting followers and organically doing the right thing to attract true fans of their work or products. After 1 year this company has only 500 followers. But these are real followers who love the brand, like and share the posts and buy from the company. The social media accounts have a high engagement rate from the fans. This sends great signals to search engines to improve rankings. 2. Client #2 decides to take the easy road and pays some social media promo companies to get them 5000 fans after 1 year. These are not raving fans, they are most likely fakes and made up accounts not going to engage with your posts or comments. These people were encouraged to like your page for other reasons then true love of your brand or products. These social media accounts will def. have a very low or no  engagement rate from the so called fans. This low engagement with so many fans will be seen as a poor signal and possible hurt and def. not help rankings. At the end of the year the account with 10 times less fans, but real fans will have more engagement metrics and make more profits than the business with all the fake fans. The business with the made up fans will have engagement metrics that are very poor in comparison.  If search engines put a ranking signal on social media engagement ( which we think they do more than we realize ) The company with a large fan base and no engagement will be worse off than the company with less fans and more engagement. Take your time and do it the right way, you and your clients will be better off in the long run. Always take the high road - the road less traveled leads to a richer reward in life ! In all aspects of your life and work, including search engines ! Hope that helps, Joe

Yes but when you "no follow" link juice that would have been passed to that page is loss (and not diverted to other pages), in turn that means that any pages that is linked to from the login page does not get any juice passed to it.  And when you think something like a login page is linked from every page that's a lot of link juice to throw away (collectively). I understand your point about the crawling, but unless you have lots of new content (or updating content)  I would take the boost from the maximising link flow though the site. I have removed "no follow" from internal link (like login) before and have seen general boost in rankings site wide before ( not scientific proof granted)

Start using the DFP ad server and target the ads geographically. When someone in your service area lands on the page, do not show the ads or show a house ad. When someone outside of your service area arrives, then show them the ads.  Adsense will target by contextual relevance, geographic area, behavior, remarketing, etc to give those people valuable ads. Sell that ad space by geographic area to people in your industry who serve other areas.

Jasmine,Man do I wish you were right about this. Unfortunately, no dice. Our website doesn't request personal information outside of the "Contact Us" form and a form for requesting an appointment, but even then we're not talking about any medical information at all.  I've been turned down multiple times for all remarketing campaigns. I would love to hear from anyone who has had success with this recently.

Hi Ali, So, Google's guideline on this is that the business name should be exactly what it is in the real world (https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en_). Businesses should not be adding modifiers to their name for the sake of search. If the business is now considering going through a formal/legal re-branding process, then this would be mean marketing-wide, including the website, all citations and other web references, the way the phone is answered, print materials, radio and TV advertising. You'll need to pick one name and use it everywhere. This will need to be the legal name or DBA. Yes, it could be of some degree of help if the legal business name included the city in it, but whether this advantage would be great enough to warrant the major task of a formal re-brand will be a big decision for the company to make.

Thanks for your input Hutch. Both incidents you described have occured already. I'm on top of it but my developer seems lost.

just an update, its seems others have had this issue too.  We have been able to change the 302 to a 301 (magento defaults to 302 by default, this can be changed under configuration, web, url options).  I think the redirect something to do with the "Redirect to CMS-page if Cookies are Disabled", even though its set to "no" its seems its redirecting to the canonical instead. Ultimately I think the solution is under the "Use Categories Path for Product URLs"  which is set to "yes" by default, this make the product urls the same at the canonical (which what google is indexing anyway)

I assume these are pretty deep in the site structure, so I don't think those "links" being reported are very powerful or important. Some people claim that, since PageRank is recursive, you don't want to cut off paths, but when the paths are deep I've rarely seen any evidence to support this. A big, bloated index full of thin content, especially content available on other sites, is a much bigger danger. I would not recommend using both a NOINDEX and a rel=canonical on these pages. It's a mixed signal, and that can cause Google to ignore one or both signals (and at their choosing, not yours). I think NOINDEX is fine here. I've built structures like this for things like event websites (where we index the main event but NOINDEX all of the cities/dates, because they change so often) and have never seen any major issues. Actually, in one notable case, even before Panda came along, the site's rankings improved measurably.