Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Cheers Dirk,

I will look to implement this fix, as always you've been great!

The first option question is fairly simply and is doable with a little bit of javascript / jquery and either the data attribute or css classes.

http://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_global_data.asp <--- For info on the data tag

Say you had your page, you tag each entry with relevant HTML data attributes (I would stick with 1 page listing all of your hotels for example and allow them to be filtered)

• Cruise1/Hotels/

• Hotel 1 (data-food="included") (data-price="19.99") (data-rating="5")

• Hotel 2 (data-food="notincluded") (data-price="9.99") (data-rating="3")

• Hotel 3 (data-food="included") (data-price="4.99") (data-rating="2")

Then a little bit of javascript code activates on a button or drop down menu etc, so when "Food Included" button is clicked make all hotels where data-food="notincluded" vanish. You just repeat the process for every variable your after and can make it as complex or simple as you like. I wouldn't recommend doing it  yourself unless you know how but your developer most likely will, its fairly basic javascript. This method means that all of the information is loaded initially for google to crawl and any filtering happens in the users browser so doesn't hide any information from google bots.

As for the second question. I think your worrying about something that doesnt need to be worried about. In my opinion it doesn't matter if it makes logical sense so long as it makes user sense. If i was using your website and i saw Mediterranean cruises or Italy and greece. I would presume Italy meant just italy, Greece meant just Greece and Mediterranean meant numerous locations across the Mediterranean. I would do it exactly how you have done.

If it were my site I was building from scratch I would have the following layout.

• Home Page

• Port A

• Hotels

• Hotels 1

• Hotels 2  (site.com/porta/hotels/hotelname)

• Excursions

• Excursion 1

• Excursion 2 (site.com/porta/excursions/excursionname)

• Port B

• Port C

Obviously Port B & C would mimic port A. This way each hotel, each excursion and each port would each have a unique page crafted and target towards keywords each with a unique title and page content.

Then I would address the cruises themselves I would have a landing page for each cruise like you do now, this page would have a unique title and content (all your descriptions etc that remain constant.)

• site.com/cruise1/
• site.com/cruise2/
• site.com/cruise3/

Then a page for each for each category under each of those as below, again this would have a consistant title (Cruise 1 Itinerary) etc

• site.com/cruise1/

• site.com/cruise1/itinerary/

• site.com/cruise1/shoreexcursions/

• site.com/cruise1/hotels/

Then importantly, I would have the content on these pages dynamic and changeable rather than creating a new page. So if i had 2 dates for cruise 1  (2nd and 17th for example) instead of having

• site.com/cruise1/itinerary/2nd
• site.com/cruise1/itinerary/17th

which would create 2 pages with the title (Cruise 1 Itinerary) I would have

• site.com/cruise1/itinerary/

• dropdown menu containing all dates

• div containing timeable

• div containing list of ports

As standard these page would have the closest cruise information so there was always content. Then have a database containing all the information on a set cruise. If 2nd is selected from the drop down menu. The (div timeable) is updated to the new values and (div ports) is updated to a list of ports. These links can then go towards the static page created that remains constant.

Edit:

This should stop duplicate pages and titles and keep the very user friendly format you have now.

Thanks for the reply patrick,

As a follow up, how would I go about re-directing these sites? Their content changes whenever I update the main site so i presume they are linked somehow. I have access to the root folder on the main site and cannot find any reference to them there.

If they are being hosted else-ware how is the content being updated immediatly

Hi Marston,

This is still rather confusing, but I think im on the right line of thinking. Let me know if this is correct.

Lets take 2 cruises both to the same location on different dates, my search parameters return

Cruise1 June to USA
Cruise2 July to USA

Is your problem (simplified) that

website.com/cruise1/shore-excursions/      &    website.com/cruise2/shore-excursions/

would be exactly that same as each other and when you compound this into many cruises with many variables you get many pages with many duplicated titles and content?

Hi Brad,

Im not an "expert" but do a fair bit if developing in my spare time. My understanding is that this shouldn't affect you from an SEO stand point. Its only the databases and administration files behind the scenes that are ran from the same place, and if set up correctly google bots dont crawl these anyway. Each site is still technically self contained and a website in its own right. You are not trying to anything naughty like linking between the sites to boost rankings etc and are treating them as separate entities. Also I believe the "store" system in magento is designed with exactly what you are doing in mind.

In terms of servers, lots of websites bar the absolutely huge ones out there are hosted on shared servers anyway, you just simply don't see it and the bots know its not an important factor (unless in extreme cases where dodgy stuff is happening i believe). The personal sites I develop are technically sub domains and I still get them ranking completely independently and treated as separate entities.

Please dont take just my opinion as the answer, wait for someone with a little more experience, I dont want to just spam the obvious but it might also be worth a post on the Magento help forums as the community there may be able to offer some magento SEO expertise that this forum cant.

Hello Again,

Looking for a little help to help me understand what exactly is going on here.

Ive taken over maintenance of a website and have so far fixed a lot of issues. ahrefs has shown me that a second version of my companies website exists that exists at a second url. This second website is linked to the actual company website like I haven't seen before.

www(dot)#(dot)co(dot)uk  is the main company website. But a second accessible version exists and is accessible at www(dot)#(dot)co(dot)uk

The instruments version is a direct copy and all of the links point directly to my main site. Any changes I make on the main version are automatically applied to the other version. It shows up as a SPAM back link on moz as all of the link points to my website etc

Ideally in my mind, the instruments version homepage should simply re-direct to the main homepage to solve this "duplicate content and spammy backlink" issue however, the instruments version is the same suffix that all our company emails work with.

Basically, HELP lol. I have no understanding of how this is set up, and the best way in which to deal and if it could affect anything such as company emails.

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.

Hi Bob,

Don't upgrade just because somebody says you need to, consider the variables and then decide if its the right choice for you. Yes its good to be up to date with the latest HTML5 and responsive designs etc but you have to way up cost vs reward.

We faced a similar debate this month after "mobilegeddon", and had to consider the change to a responsive site. After a bunch of calculations we concluded that it would take 7 years on average to earn back the costs of upgrading our website and it would simply not be worth it as our site is performing well in every other aspect.

If your site is still valid HTML, ranking well for its keywords, user friendly, looks modern and up to date then the only consideration really is the "mobile friendly" test which Lesley has detailed. In which case, its just working out if the realistic mobile gains are worth the outlay.

Disclaimer: Im sure some people will totally disagree and argue that a mobile friendly site is an absolute must. Whilst I cannot argue that this is certainly the future I believe each site must be taken individually on its own purpose & merits.

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?

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.

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!

Hi All,

I came back from work today from a week off to find my site has gone from 681 external inbound links to 202. With this my domain authority, moz trust and moz rank have all also taken a slip. Compounding this, I am seeing a slip most of my keywords rankings. If i try to use the open site explorer to explore my links and see what going on i get the message

It looks like we haven't discovered link data for this site or URL.

If i check the just discovered links like it suggests I get

It looks like there's no Just-Discovered Links data for this URL yet.

I know these features worked before the index as i used them. Is this all attributable to the moz index issues that have been noted or could something have happened to my site?

Since i started 2 months ago I have made many changes including...

• Updating the site map that was 4 years out of date and included 400 broken urls
• Removed blank pages and other useless webpages on the site that contained no content (from the previous administrator)
• Edited a few pages content from keyword spammy stuff to nicely written and relevant content
• Fixed url rewrites that made loops and un-accessible product pages

All these changes should be for the better but the latest readings have me a little worried.

Thanks.

Only issue with this is that it makes people wanting the access to PDF unable to do so.

Hi everybody,

My Website is ranking well for several keywords and long-tail keywords. However, all these visits are going directly to some .PDF guides that exist on our products and information on industry sectors the company is based around.

I feel the PDF's are bad simply because they dont offer easy interaction with the rest of the website. I am considering making each PDF into a webpage but am not 100% sure of the pro's and cons of doing so. I will still need to the PDF's accessible for user to download but don't want my new webpages to get tagged as duplicate content.

Is it possible to,
1 - change the PDF's so they send any link authority to the new webpage
2 - make google aware that I want the webpage not the PDF to be the "ranking" page

What is the likely hood of destroying my rank for these keywords on the PDF by making these changes and then not being able to rank the webpage for the same keywords? It would be pointless if I just lost all the traffic lol.

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!

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!

I dont have access to the DNS, my access is limited to the Magento CMS, and ftp access to the root folder.

I guess its a case of popping an email off to the guys who built the site and control the web space and getting them to address the issue?

I added the line and it did indeed break the website, got internal service error etc

So it seems the file is working

Thanks Toby, here is the entire HTACCESS file with your fix implemented. Doesn't seem to have worked if i go to

http://atp-instrumentation.co.uk with no www it still fails to load

Edited out to shorten convo