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Hi Pete,

Andy nails most things so ill just talk about the "how different part".

Google is very good at identifying the structure of a sentence and determining its meaning. To simplify things I always look at it like this

"It is warm" is the same as "It is hot"

changing text like this and hoping its unique is asking for trouble. Instead try to write as if you are a different personality appealing to a different type of person within the context of the site.

Site: 1 Mr technical writes the content for this site. Your all about the technical features, why they outshine the other specifications and why thats good.

Site 2: Mr indulgent writes for this site, he is less concerned with the technical and is all about actually using the product. He talks about the ease of use and how great if feels to use etc.

Site 3: Mr in the middle, he has a descent amount of respect for the technical elements and mentions them, and has a more speculative approach of explaining why this would be good.

These three personalities all talk very differently, use a different pool of words, create these persona's and be them as you write. This will give you the base difference to make identical information very different.

To combat similar products, my approach has been to not try to distinguish them too much but to engage with the similar products and talk about them. For example product A is the same as product B except product B has a special paint on it that makes it look good so it costs more. So product A is all about value, its the cheapest in the range so great value for money, affordable but with all the necessary perks. Product B is luxurious, not only does it have everything product A has but looks dang good and is a real head turner.

This approach allows you include all the important content needed to get the word count up and make it a good page but present in a way that is very different.

I agree with Andy,

I use it as a guidance tool on any website i build. It serves a purpose, to check things are understood how they should be by a predetermined standard. But like any other automated tool it compares to set requirements that cannot always be met and cannot identify and ok these exceptions.

As long as you understand the error its pointing out and why its pointing it out, and know that despite this the code is rendering correctly and all outcomes are working as expected then there is no problem.

From an SEO stand point, aslong as google see's your site how you want it too i think it is a very very minor factor. Hell all of google returns errors of some variety.

Hi,

I don't want to insult you with to basic of an explanation so please tell me if this isn't what you mean and im over simplifying it.

Find a link on your website,

right click it and click on inspect element, this will bring up a developer panel at the bottom of your browser (its different for each browser, but there are all similar.) It will have the code that makes the link highlighted amongst the rest of the code that makes up the page.

For instance the "The Mission" link in your footer has this code
The mission

<a  ="" link="" tag<br="">href="">  = the URL parameter where the link should follow</a>  = closing the tag where the link stops

Best SEO practice is
The mission

You should then take this 1 step further for best SEO and include a title parameter for the link which would look like this 
The mission

Edit: Can't spell

cheers rob, i will wait a week or 2 before rolling it site wide so i have to evidence of no effect to back me up incase it does go wrong and go from there.

thanks for your time

thanks for the reply rob.

if i had a page with 1000 words would it be too much to hide 800 in a similar way as this and only have 200 showing? or is it fine for the same reasons you have listed? can i go too far with it?

Hi Mozzers, This question has been asked a few times over the years, but opinion seems to have changed drastically and i wanted to get an updated opinion from sources i trust.

On my category pages I have content above products. The content can push the product too far down, and if placed below is never viewed. To battle this I wanted to implement a "Read More" button so i could keep a couple hundred words there and expand it to the rest of the content if the user wanted. If not the products would remain near the top of the screen for better conversion.

I have implemented this on this page to test if it affects my keyword rankings before i go site wide. But also wanted an opinion if this practice is ok. The example page with it implemented can be found here.

The content im hiding isn't huge here but on other pages could be more. Is there a set ratio of text i should aim to keep / hide?

Any pitfalls i should watch out for?

I know google crawls the hidden content as its in the source code but should i be wary of a penalty is too much is hidden?

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.

I think dirk covered it and i was way off Ignore this response

Moz does a crawl weekly in which all your data gets pulled over and your keyword ranks checked etc

Expect your first full report 1 week from when you created your campaign. Some of the data will filter in over the first week. Give it 7 days and your should have a full set of info to work with.

Depending on your moz membership you should have access to tools like the moz crawl test and OSE in which you can start doing things...

https://moz.com/researchtools/crawl-test

you could run this if your wanting something to do whilst information populates. It will give you a nice report you can begin working from (just without the fancy moz interface).

Depending on your level of understanding however the report can be a little daunting - another good place to start is the moz beginner guides

https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo

plenty on here mose websites can get stuck into without seeing their first report.

Hope thats of some use

Hi Prime,
On the presumption that your onsite SEO is complete and your content is indeed excellent I would do the following.

My no1 tip on getting your site index'd would simply to be to simply fetch as google and submit the main page. Set up your analytics and then focus on your local SEO. Do all your local listings, and basically everything moz recommends about local SEO. This should be plenty for you to be index'd.

Then I would stop thinking about "Link Building" in the traditional sense.

Don't fall into the trap of thinking
links = ranks = clicks = visitors

instead try to think of it as
publicity = visitors = natural links = ranks = more visitors

Take some of your excellent content and begin marketing it. Get social media happy, g twitter, facebook, google+ and every other platform you can think of active. Social media activity is a good ranking factor, use it. Get active on niche forums, other niche websites and begin spreading your brand. By this I don't mean spamming forums with links to your website I mean offering excellent advice and relevant links where appropriate. Ensure profiles are complete with links to your website so when you have helped someone and they check you out they find their way back. If you have a marketing budget get some PPC to begin driving traffic, and look at other forms of advertising. If your content really is excellent odd links will begin to sprout up.

This achieves 2 things. It spreads your brand and builds relationships and reputations within your niche.

I would do this from anywhere from 2 to 6 months. Asking for links as a new website even if your content is top notch is hard and has a very low success rate. Asking for a link from a website you have spent 2-6 months supporting and having a presence on is a lot easier. Especially if you can design a piece of content you know that site needs. Is a certain question being asked a lot on a website? Make something providing the answer then approach them with the content.

Alternatively make the first move. Found another website that cracking in your niche but not directly competitive? Review them, award them, and tell them about it. Websites like to brag when they receive a 5* award or review and will often link back to it.

Don't act to receive a link, act to advertise your brand.

I apologise if this isn't a direct answer to "how to link build". But i wanted to stress the difficulty of link building, even more so for new sites. I would rather spend 6 months of time on social media, building relationships and working myself into a position into the niche to ask for a high authority link with some success rather than spend 6 months of NO responses from link requests.

Hi John, sorry ive been on leave so not checked back on the  forums.

Glad it looks like its working for you. I dont think the comments do anything except signify where word press has begun writing to the .htaccess (i dont run wordpress so can't be sure). Normally comments do nothing but signify something useful to the user.

I can try to breakdown the code a little for you, but my htaccess isn't fantastic so its by no means complete.

Firstline:  RewriteCond%{REQUEST_FILENAME}!-d

RewriteCond% = This says use this condition if....
{REQUEST_FILENAME}!-d =  ... is NOT a directory

RewriteRule^(.*)/$ /$1 [L,R=301]
I believe this bit takes a snapshot of the url upto the final / then rewrites it to that snapshot.

The combination of these must mean it doesn't affect your wordpress admin directory. I know this code can break if your install is within a directory (as is discussed in the stackover flow link) but they have provided a solution for that in that topic. I would say test if on your live website to make complete sure it will work as this may be slightly different to your local install. Have a back-up ready just incase it doesn't.

Make sure you check every url including

Homepage
Pages
Posts
Category Pages
Sub Category Pages
Post Pages
Any images or files

To make sure it is working as expected on all of them.

Hi John,

I asked something similar myself something myself but im on the Magento platform. This should matter as the solution wasn't platform specific. It just involved editing htaccess file. If your up for editing your .htacccess file then it could be of some use. The topic URL is below and it contains multiple solutions for editing and removing the / and the debugging process we went through along the way. (Courtesy of Andy and Dirk) Hopefully its of some use to you

https://moz.com/community/q/cms-pages-multiple-urls

SUMMARY:
If you know how to edit your .htaccess and your ready to dive straight in this code should do it.

RewriteCond%{REQUEST_FILENAME}!-d
RewriteRule^(.*)/$ /$1 [L,R=301]

If you want the page with explanations and walk-through please see the original topic as editing your htaccess  badly can cause all sorts of errors.

Edit: I realised i was probably a tiny bit lazy and should of probably included this link which is the original link i got sent from stackoverflow with instructions on how to to edit your .htaccess file.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21417263/htaccess-add-remove-trailing-slash-from-url

Dirks answer later in the post offer guidance on applying it to certain parameters which should prove helpful if your still having loop problems with the admin page.

Sorry the wording made this seems unclear

The /products/ section isn't a product. It is a parent category called Products,

Our set-up is  domain.com/cateogry/sub-cat/sub-cat/

but the main category is called "products".

It is this main parent category im thinking of removing and moving all other category 1 step up the hierarchy.

Hello again Mozzers,

I am debating what could be a fairly drastic change to the company website and I would appreciate your thoughts.

The URL structure is currently as follows

Product Pages
www.url.co.uk/product.html

Category Pages
www.url.co.uk/products/category/subcategory.html

I am debating removing the /products/ section as i feel it doesn't really add much and lengthens the url with a pointless word. This does mean however redirecting about 50-60 pages on the website, is this worth it? Would it do more damage than good? Am i just being a bit OCD and it wont really have an impact?

As always, thanks for the input

Morning Mozzers,

Currently our website has 2 navigation bars.

The top Navigation is the typical **Home - Products - Services - Contact - About **type thing

The side navigation contains a link to top level categories, if a category is selected it shows the child categories
Eg.

Socks
Shoes
Boots

Cateogry level (Socks)

Blue Socks
Red Socks
Green Socks

The top navigation has drop-down menus built in whilst the side nav does not.

Would it be worthwhile to edit the nav bars so that the top nav bar contains the categories with the child categories displaying in dropdown list when clicked.

Top Nav
Home - Socks - Shoes - Boots when hovering over socks you would see

Socks
Blue Socks
Red Socks
Green Socks

My reasons for the change I could remove the thin content "Products page"

It would add a link to the categories and sub categories from every page on the website as it would be in the top navigation bar i think this would help with ranking for some of the sub-category pages that struggle.

It would allow me to remove the left nav bar on the homepage, moving more content above the fold and give the website a more modern feel.

What do you think? Is would this be a positive or negative change?

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.

Im at the difficult point where developing filters etc are not a great option due to the age of our CMS. Before I can secure a greater budget I need to show results.

This rules out (for now) any mass changing of nav bars which are sadly a bit static. This means doing it via pure and fairly basic page structure at the moment. Hence my difficulty sorting out a normally fairly easy problem.

Hello again Mozzers,

We have a category, lets call it widgets. Within widgets are about a hundred or so products. For usability my predecessor made the following layout

Widgets Main Cateogry  - Links off homepage - (no content just links to the 3 sub-categories)
- Widgets by Resolution
---- About 20 subcategories 
eg. 0.1 Resolution widgets
      0.2 resolution widgets
- Widgets by Capacity
---- About 20 subcategories
eg. 1 capacity widgets
     2 capacity widgets
- Widgets by Type
---- About 12 subcategories

This was a major improvement from a userbility perspective as it made a very complex product range navigatable by the major features or basic type. However, as you can imaging we now have 60+ very similiar pages all displaying very similiar products a nightmare for SEO. It also isnt ideal for user navigation as it take too many clicks to get to the products.

I propose the following fix, and i wanted your opinion.

Widget Main Category - Link from homepage (Consolidated with Widgets by Type)
-300 Words of content
-Links to the 12 Sub-type Catoregies (These are pages i can fill with content + products. This would give me a more ordinary structure of which I can focus each page to a keyword)

The tricky part comes with incorporating the capacity and resolution options.

1 Browse Capacity Page
(20 sub categories all the same except capacity quantity & products)
1 Browse by Resolution Page
(20 sub categories all the same except resolution value & products)

The owner want them, I was going to link from the main widgets page to each of these to give the customer the option. What I can't decide is how to deal with them from an SEO point of view. Should they be no-followed? canonicaled? Can there be any advantage to having so many pages covering slightly different variations or as i suspect it is dangerous to the overall health of the site.

To complicate things further, Canonical tags may not be an option due to an old magento version running that doesnt support them. Is there an alternative way around?

As always many thanks.

P.S. The 301 directs would add a time aspect that in my opinion would make me think twice. But if you dont mind re-directing the 150 pages go for it.

Either way dont worry. It should be fine.

Hi John,

Let me firstly say that this isn't as much as a problem as you think (at least in my opinion).

"So, we have 150+ posts equally sharing the hompage authority - detracting from their ability to rank for their core services pages."

This is simply not true as far as I am aware. Your homepage will only pass authority to the pages it links too. Just because they appear to be under the homepage directory doesn't really mean anything. Each page is treated as an individual and will only gain authority from those pages that link to it..

Now technically, yes from a good SEO point of view your blog posts should be /blog/subjectpost.html as it is both informative to the user and search engines by telling them this is part of your blog and is about whatever subject.

BUT... /blog/ doesn't tell people anything about the content of the post itself. Say the category is widgets, then   /widgets/widgetkeywordpost.html is beneficial because it tells everyone visiting the page that this post is about widgets.

There will be a simple setting somewhere in ur CMS where it will decide where the post should be created. So changing this to /blog/ wont be too hard. If it were me, I would change it but only because OCD. I dont think you would be experience anything negative because of this.