Welcome to the Q&A Forum

yeah and most worrying is people are claiming to be affected by Negative SEO - which if true is a whole new SEO strategy to worry about. Protecting yourself as well as trying to improve

John Mueller from Google has just confirmed:

Google has just confirmed that mobile friendliness is now a ranking factor for people on smartphones. The date it goes live is 24th April 2015.

There is a great presentation on the hangout - which will be available later to watch and once its available I will update with a link - but I would make sure your checking webmaster tools for any alerts / messages if you care about smartphone users.

What do people recommend, regarding responsive vs mobile site vs dynamic serving.

Is your site ready? What are you planning on doing since the update has been announced.

first of all I am glad I am not the only person who thinks about this before sleep (its when I come up with my crazy ideas and thoughts) - tip, have a notebook next to you otherwise you might forget by the morning.

I've never seen any direct correlation between this and I would guess it would be very hard to prove either way, but I would tend to agree.

Google wants to rank sites which are more popular and answer their users experience, so if a lot of people are searching for 'x' and search term. I.e. 'bbc televisions' and someone else did a search for televisions, I wouldn't be surprised to see bbc ranking higher as a lot of people had suddenly been searching for the site. The only caveat I would add would be, that if your site has a poor user experience and a lot of people search brand name an query and bounce, you would probably rank lower.

I have never seen any evidence for this, however its not a silly question / thought.

Hi

I think it was at BrightonSEO where PI DataMetrics were talking about similar pages on a website can cause rankings to drop for your main page. This has got me thinking.

if we have a category about jumpers so: example.com/jumpers but then our blog has a category about jumpers, where we write all about jumpers etc which creates a category page example.com/blog/category/jumpers, so these blog category pages have no index put on them to stop them ranking in Google?

Thanks in Advance for any tips.

Andy

Isn't the main question: Why do you have duplicate pages, are these essentials - the easiest option would be to remove them. But in terms of whats the best option, here is a great article from Moz: http://moz.com/learn/seo/robotstxt

I would read that and decide based on your websites and situation the option best suits you.

In my opinion I would suggest:

Hi

I still only have version 8 so I can't test it, but my GA is showing data for version 9 with sales.

I have also checked that these aren't Paypal orders.

Once I get version 9 I will test, but our visitors are currently able to checkout.

Thanks

Andy

Hi

Free samples are a bit of a grey area, and in my opinion it depends on who is sending out the product and what they really want from it.

We send out quite a few products to be reviewed and we actually want them reviewing to find out what people think of them and to drive sales (if it gets a positive review). I like a link and only for the reason its easier for the customer to purchase the item, but whether that link is follow / no follow / affiliate - i don't really care. Its all about the review to build awareness of the fact we sell the products and sometimes to show the diversity of the products we sell, especially new categories.

Where it becomes and issue is when the person sending out the reviews start demanding followed links to certain parts of the sites, thee don't look natural and the only reason they are sending out the products are for SEO benefit.

Regarding your disclaimer, as someone who has sent out products I wouldn't have a problem with you putting that on there, and there was something earlier this month about vlogging now having to make it clear when they have been given free products to review.

I guess SEO isn't as White Hat and Black Hat as some claim, as this to me would be 'Grey Hat'. Plus review sites need to get there products from somewhere to review and these sites do add a lot of value to customers in the decision process of buying so I couldn't ever see Google penalising sites for either accepting review samples or sending them out - whether or not in the future the might a  'review follow' as well as 'follow and no follow' I don't know. This could be one way for the search engines to see that while the links haven't technically been paid for but are not 100% natural.

Great article here for aditonal reading on this: moz.com/community/q/soliciting-product-reviews-with-free-samples 

Thanks

Andy

Edit your existing ones change to:

Redirect 301 /article1.htm http://mysite.net/article1/
Redirect 301 /article2.htm http://mysite.net/article2/
Redirect 301 /article3.htm http://mysite.net/article3/

but also add in:

Redirect 301 /wordpress/article1/ http://mysite.net/article1/
Redirect 301 /wordpress/article2/ http://mysite.net/article2/
Redirect 301 /wordpress/article3/ http://mysite.net/article3/

There is a plugin in wordpress for 301 redirects and it tells you how many times the urls have been hit, if say after 6 months nothing has hit the old urls and there are no links pointing to them, feel free to delete.

Thanks

Andy

Hi Ryan is correct, it can be done by looking at the server logs, it's a bit tricky to set up so just checked your devs have done this before.

also and this is important do you want to show different data to organic visitors from Google or all Organic visitors from all search engines.

Hi

The best way I have found is to look in your server logs, its the only true place to find out what Google is doing on your site.

Download the logs and look at all the 404 errors - quite simple and depending on size of your logs can take you around 5 minutes worth a work - the longer time period you can analyse in your logs the better.

Thanks

Andy

I am assuming you are not changing the domain name so you don't need to worry about any links pointing to the home page as this page will be live.

And for any pages you don't want but have links pointing to them, then yes 301, nope you don't need to recreate the urls, just add the 301 to servers.

Unfortunately if you are changing some of the site urls, you are going to lose some rankings in the short term but I am sure the new site is much better written for the search engines that you improve - but you will lose some short term rankings

Have you made some changes on your website, like adding noindex to the certain sections of your site or have you removed an internal link to a section meaning Google can't access that section. I would investigate firstly what changes have been made on the site.

Might also be worth checking your server logs to see which pages google are crawling - this might also help find out which pages they aren't indexing.

Reason why you might be seeing more pages when you do a site search is because it might take a few days to disappear from search.

Hi

Mozbar as mentioned above is the best tool. Its simple and easy to use.

But the source code is always the best.

Thanks

Andy

Million dollar question - firstly does your site deserve to rank. Do you actually answer the query or is it a 50 word answer and your just hoping Google will rank you. You need to be writing 10x content (https://moz.com/blog/how-to-create-10x-content-whiteboard-friday)

Assuming you have a decent answer, the next question is. How often is Google crawling your website (the only way to find out is to look in your server logs). It could be that Google hasn't even crawled the page yet, if it hasn't crawled the page its not going to rank.

Finally assuming you wrote a great article and Google has read it, how authoritative are you in this niche. If you website is all about cars and suddenly you write an article about pens because its low competitive and you want the traffic, Google is smart enough know to understand you have probably written the article for SEO traffic and probably won't rank you high.

So basically we are unsure and will have to wait until 21st April to find out.

Thanks for everyones input, been very useful and informative

Your current redirects are fine and the best way is if its live to test it. Even thought I knew I had done it right recently when i went to https, I still do several random checks. They all came back as working - but no harm in testing.

Your point 2 is doable and as I am not on my laptop I don't have the code to hand. I will update in a few hours when back in the office for you, but your point 1 is correct.

Hi

Gary illyes from Google confirmed today at BrightonSEO that its just mobile that will be affected - tablet rankings WILL not be affected.

He also confirmed this wont in the April 21st update it wont affect Google Business listings.

Thought I would let you all know.

Thanks

Andy

Ok, are any of the pages ranking. If not I would look if Google can easily find these new urls from your nav / internal links.

Also I would recommend checking your server logs, if Google can't / haven't crawled the pages they can't index them.

Final point, if these pages are completely off topic and the rest of the site is about toothbrushes and you add pages about cars, Google might be unsure about these new pages and how authoritative you are in the niche especially if these fall into the YMYL categories. If its the last issue you would probably need to work on link building into this section of the site from authority sites within the niche.

Hi

This is to spark a debate, rather than an answer which has a specific answer.

While Google may claim that being on the certified programme doesn't increase your ranking, but part of their algorithm looks into whether a website is trustworthy.

To get accepted onto the certified shops you have to prove your a trust worthy reliable business that constantly gets audited. So surely this must be directly / indirectly be a ranking factor?

Just thought I would throw it out there for a debate.

Yes this is a bad idea, you want the blog on the main domain.

You could put a wordpress blog within a folder on your server and just use one instance of wordpress for the blog away from the main site.

It does require a bit of set up, but it would be much better than having a blog on a different url (does require keeping it up to date etc, users having two logins. One of the main site and one for the blog) - it's not an ideal solution but much better than having the blog on a separate domain.