Hey Noah,

Your content seems good at first glance, my major issue was that it took me forever to load your site.

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=hiddentriforce.com&tab=desktop

I ran a speed test and there seems plenty of things for you to fix, your mobile friendly which is good but at only 25/100 on mobile and 45/100 on speed, this could be a reason your finding lower class competitors out-ranking you.

My first stop would to be to fix these.

I would be tempted to have a title and a very short description and potentially a thumbnail image or something. Enough so I can tell what roughly what the excursion is before clicking it. Not so much that I remove the need for clicking to find out more and create loads of duplicate content. That's what I would expect as a user.

Morning Mozzers,

We have finally come to the point where we can start to focus on making good original content.

We were wondering how you guys come up with ideas for your content. We are currently doing lots of keyword research to gather ideas and subject areas. But we are struggling with 'angles of attack'.

Being an eCommerce site it is easy to do lots of "The 5 best products for this" type of content. But we feel there is limited value in these especially if we want to gain links to our articles in future as valued content.

How do you come up with your ideas for more valuable and linkable content especially in very niche product areas.

Thanks all.

Thanks Toby, Ive emailed off, I expect a reply to be a couple of days away (what it normally take them) Thanks for the help thus far and ill message back when they do!

Hi Mozzers,

I have a couple of questions regarding starting out into social media with an e-commerce website. Most of my experience lies in niche content where a social media following is more natural.

Having completed most of the site audit (at least the planning). Its time to begin planning the next move into writing articles on the blog and heading out into social media to facilitate link building whilst i finish off creating the last of the updated website content.

I have plenty of subjects I can think to write about and many keywords to target with articles on the website. But I could do with some advice linking this into social media.

We have youtube, google+, facebook and twitter accounts but all of them are inactive bar profile information and have almost no following.

We sell technical measurement equipment across a selection of niches.

My plan is as follows so far,

1. Write 5-10 amazing new articles across the selection of products
2. Link to them all on each social media platform to begin populating each with content
3. Populate the website homepage with links to all our social media accounts to encourage following
3b. Include adverts stating discount codes etc can be obtained by following us on social media

a little unsure where to progress from this point, I have no budget available at the moment, but may be able to obtain some if I can achieve some results without.

As always thanks for your time.

Patrick you may know more than me here but to follow up.

I understand that nofollow link wont hurt his site in anyway, and its a great link to confirm that.

However, he would be loosing the "juice" from the high authority main page and all the cateogry pages. Whilst the nofollow links wont hurt him, loosing this surly could?

To my knowledge there isn't

Are there are ways with php to dynamically load in a different meta descriptions? Sure.

The problem is that this wouldn't be reflected in google. Google takes days-> weeks or even months to update a meta-description within its index. So even though you could make the HTML code change on the actual page, it wouldn't change on the search listing nullifying the whole point.

I don't believe an option exists around this, but somebody may know something i dont.

The problem was as you anticipated, after spending a few days chasing the party who actually look after it im pleased to say i checked this morning and all is working as expected.

Thanks very much for your help Toby!

Hi Andrew,

There is no hard and fast rule for this as it all depends how closely related the keywords are, the competition etc.

The 'general' advice given is to target every page toward 1 unique keyword AND unique content. This is because ranking factors are such things as The title text, the heading text and it is very hard to put the keywords in these locations without it being spammy and forced. But these keywords should be different and not too closely related.

You should interlink from every page where appropriate to really tell the SERPS that "This is my page on Smarty Programmer" and "This is my page on Smarty Tuner". Do not be tempted to have the same page with tuner replacing programmer. Actually write different equally good content or you bring yourself a whole new set of problems.

Think of it as a model, if you have 10 keywords you want to focus, have 10 landing pages with each optimised to 1 keyword. Then have additional supporting pages in the form of blogs or information articles that are related and link to your landing pages. Your page and supporting pages will naturally attract any longtail keywords available that are less competitive.

There are ofcourse exceptions to this rule. A page can rank for several highly competative keywords, its just not that common.

That said your page ranks really well for both terms already. 1-4th for both. If Smarty Programmer and Smarty Tuner are not very competitive, you may be able to target them with 1 page by doing something such as

<title>Smarty Programmer - The Number 1 tuner for diesel trucks</title>

Smarty Programmer

Content targeted at Smarty Programmer

Why Pick the Smarty Tuner?

Content targeted at Smarty Tuner

Ensure both keywords have at least 1 image with alt and title text targeting them. This example is a bit to cut and dry but demonstrates the idea.

This should allow you to rank for both phrases on the same page. BUT there needs to be enough content supporting each phrase, and a suitable amount of competition. If the competition if too fierce you can just shoot yourself in the foot and not rank for either phrase.

If I was you I would run a couple of tests. Get Smarty Tuner inserted a couple of times within the text. Google is clever and it may associate the words enough to begin ranking you for both without sacrificing your current ranking for smarty programmer. Slowly introduce more content targeting smarty tuner such as an image with its alt text and title text, the a few smaller headings etc and some more text and I recon you can quite easily have the same page targeting both and holding no1.

Sorry i should have been more clear. This php solution is not a solution, at least in any practical sense.

Basically you would have for example

Descriptions Stored in variables
Meta Description UK
Meta Description USA

The page HTML would be

but the user is already on the website... they have already passed any point the meta-description would have been displayed to them.

The problem with this is that Google displays the meta-description that it has indexed from is most recent crawl. When google crawls your page is loads your page as if it were a user from wherever the bot is located, so wouldn't be able to see the other meta-descriptions for other counties and so couldn't display them if it wanted to.

Even if it crawled your site for various places around the globe, it would just be constantly tyring to update. It can change but each time it does is takes a period of time to be reflected on google. Once its changed the old one isn't stored, its just replaced. Its kinda a 1 description per page rule.

The only solution i could think off is a different landing page for each country (which you have) but there isn't a way to have a dynamic meta description on your main .com (as far as i know) sorry

Hello Again,

I have taken over managing a website for about 2 months and have fixed a whole heap of problems. Im now turning my attention to the URL rewrites as there are ALOT of them. I have fixed the most problematic offenders that were blocking products and all sorts of mischief but I now want to clean them up.

The website is on Magento, and there are 240 custom URL rewrites.

Question 1: Am i correct that I should edit the links on my website so that they link directly to the new page instead of utilising the re-direct for best SEO results.

Question 2: If my website doesn't utilise the URL rewrite (fixed in question 1) its only purpose is to transfer link juice from any external link the page had before. If this page didnt have any external inbound links then I can delete the URL rewrite as it serves no purpose.

Question 3: If Q1 and Q2 are correct, what is the quickest way to check the inbound links to a page quickly so I can make a quick decision on if i should remove the re-write.

Many Thanks in advance!

Harry, Could you provide a little more info/clarify a few things?

You stated that your direct traffic on the spike day followed the same overall pattern as a normal day etc... but you haven't clarified if the spike was all direct traffic.

Was this spike definitely direct traffic?

Also I think its beneficial for us to know (so we can look at factors that might influence direct traffic)
What Industry / Type of website is it?
Why  are Mondays normally big traffic days?

Cheers Everett.

You have definitely reset my thinking, id started to make it over complex for myself.

The content for the resolution / category pages will create a lot of duplicate issues due to the unavoidable similarities, i will take a combination of solutions provided here and try to consolidate resolution and capacity into broader categories that can be written about as you suggest with less overlap. I will look to no-index smaller categories that would be thin and cause issues but remain essential.

I will also stick to my plan and consolidate the "types of widget" onto the main widget page. This will move them a step up the hierarchy and allow me a wider scope of content on the main parent page.

All product urls are  homepage.co.uk/product.html by default so shouldnt cause issue in multiple urls. I have also implimented automatic canonical tags on all cateogry and products to combat any accidental duplications.

From my understanding it is a disadvantage Adam,

Although a 301 passes link juice it only passes a percentage of it, a little is lost along the way. Also redirects increase the amount of time needed for a page to load after the click as it has to walk down a longer path to reach its destination. Im sure I read somewhere (cant find the source sorry) that too many redirects and redirect "chains" can negatively impact your ranking but it likes redirects that genuinely offer replacement relevant content.

If it were me I would at the very least

Redirect: /this-is-it/  -> /how-nice/    removing a step in that path
Keep: /yep-yep/ -> /how-nice/

Then change all links on your website point to /this-is-it/ and /yep-yep/ to /how-nice/
If possible get any backlinks changed to the new url also.

With it being over a week since your email was sent I don't think the two events are related, the pattern we see from our emails see an initial spike and a much smaller spike the Monday of the following week due to out of offices etc.

If your certain its direct traffic then I would be investigating further with analytics. The spike is at a time you normally experience spikes, is this coincidence or a pattern?

In our marketing department we try to paint a picture of our direct traffic users.

Which page are they landing on, what are they doing, where is the user located, are the visits resulting in more bookings/services being orders. Then consider external factors which may cause people to go looking more.

For example, one company I work with here in the UK see a jump in direct traffic correlating with the end of the financial year and tax refunds.

As SMG said, Behaviour and Acquisition tabs are your friend. Sorry its not more of an "answer" but direct traffic can be vague.

Hey moz,

Im currently converting my site to mobile as its an older template based on tables it will make a lot of CSS redundant. I cant delete as i go incase a page uses it im unaware of so need to clean it up when its done.

Is there a tool that crawls my entire website and highlights the unused CSS in the files? Ive found a few paying tools that claim to do so but am reluctant to just spend money on something without a recommendation.

Cheers!

So your saying in google their URL appears
site.com/cat1/subcat/subsubcat/page

but once clicked the url is
site.com/page

If this is the case, I would guess that they previously had the page at the "site.com/cat1/subcat/subsubcat/page" url and google index'd it there and have since re-directed the URL the site.com/page and google simply hasn't reindexed and updated its listing yet.

Without a URL / example to look at I cant tell if anything more is going on.

Hi John,

We are in the process of doing a similar thing, we had 15 articles all pdf's with one in-particular attracting 5k viewers a month to the website (65-80% of our website traffic each month). Our problem was that the PDF didn't encourage them to interact with the rest of the site, and was a nightmare to update.

After discussion and seeking advice here on the moz forum we decided the best solution was to launch a blog (in process), update all the old pdf articles and release them all as a blog post, then re-direct the old pdf's to the relevant blog post then finally attach the new updated pdf as a downloadable link via a no-follow link so we don't get duplicate content and our customers can still take away the content. So far we only did it on 1 article as a test whilst we get the blog set-up correctly, and about 1/5 of 5000 viewers each month now view additional pages across our site instead of just the pdf.

If you do it correctly and get the same success with your pdf's that are attracting traffic you may find you can seek the boosts in traffic your blog is after.

SIDE NOTE: However, if your blog has 300+ articles and your not getting traffic, i would suggest moving traffic from other parts of the site to your blog in this manner isnt the answer you seek and instead you need to look at addressing the problem directly by looking at marketing strategies for your content aswel as reviewing the content in these articles to see if there may be a reason its not attracting visitors or ranking to gain traffic.

Hi Thomas,

Firstly, the canonical does the same job as the 301 (for all intensive purposes) without the physical redirect. So in theory only the canonical should be being indexed and all the link juice should be being passed.

The fact that both are indexed suggests that the canonical isn't behaving as intended

• I would check for common cannonical errors to begin with
• If this isn't the case, i would suggest that the 123456 version has too many links maybe internally and externally and that google is ignoring the canonical because it has too much authority.

An issue with using canonical like this is that people who use the search are not sent to the main canonical url. This gives people the opportunity to copy and link to the wrong version of the url, which isn't a practice you want.

A possible solution would be to find all backlinks and get them changed to the main canonical version internally and externally, this could be a lot of work.

The 301 redirect is better in my opinion because it achieves the following

• Customer always see a useful URL and the main canonical URL
• Because of this, links will only likely be built the the url you want
• Google will de-index the 123456 version because it becomes inaccessible

However, unless you can automate this procedure, it can take too much time to create all those 301's for every product.

Personally i use the following guidlines as i find it keeps things clean and tidy
301 any url that isn't domain.com/main-product-url.html
keep the canonical on domain.com/main-product-url.html  so that any version created from filtering or unexpected cms pages dont create duplicate content.

Looks like Rich Snippets / structured data are whats doing it on this particular URL. If you right click on the site and click inspect elements you will see bits of code like this

• Sports

The itemscope & item type tags all have to do with rich snippets / structured data, im no expert as i've not implemented them yet myself, but you can find out more at the following links

https://moz.com/learn/seo/schema-structured-data
https://moz.com/blog/a-visual-guide-to-rich-snippets
https://developers.google.com/structured-data/breadcrumbs In short, they tell the search engines what the data is so it can be displayed in a more appealing way in the search engine.