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Hi Alex,

From the looks of it, there seems to be a lot of 301 redirects going around. As far as I am aware 301 redirects dont always pass 100% of the weight accross to the new URLs. There is some sort of decay factor involved.

There also seems to be the case of the main links to the site passing through two 301 redirects. This is possibly one of the causes of drop in site strength.

What may be worth considering is checking how many links point to the main URL, rather than links into the redirected URLs.

Was the site fine before the 301 redirects were implemented?

Ben

Hi Omar,

It really depends how you do it. If you are removing the dropdown from the navigation completely then these pages are going to be losing out on a lot of internal links as a result - every page on the site that was previously linking to them would have stopped.

Alternatively if you were just going to remove the dropdown from the homepage only i.e. have a different navigation format for the hompage, then it will not affect the pages as much.

Bear in mind that both ways you are removing links to these pages so there's a chance they will suffer slightly. You could test the effects by removing one category and monitoring rankings as a result.

On another note, I noticed some no followed links to internal pages at the bottom of the homepage. Have you done this for any particular reason? You may be losing PR for no reason.

Ben

Hi Sean,

Note that the meta description tags aren't going to be impacting your rankings. Google doesn't use this tag when determining a pages relevance.

What you do want to be considering is the impact it will have on the click through rate of your listings. By having short meta descriptions you are losing out in two areas:

• Less space is taken up on the page by your listing making it less obvious
• Less time to convince users that they should click on your advert.

Perhaps consider adding on a call to action on the meta description tags to counter both of these issues. Something link - "check out our huge range of third party extensions"?

Hope that helps,

Ben

Interesting stuff. You're right it is probably more down to the diversity factor.

Hope you keep your good positions

Man that looks dodgy! Just had a look. Although one of the factors I will often use to help judge a site is link profile. It seems to be a PR3 with plenty of links on the MozBar.

I think it is used to ping sites to create a spike in the analytics for referring sites, these people will then look into what brought all the traffic which is how it gets the traffic to your site.

The product may be legit, but it looks like it's designed for "evil deeds"

Hi Daniel,

Links from your target location will help, both in terms of IP and TLD (.co.uk). I wouldn't overlook the opportunity to get links from international sites though as they will all pass value and strengthen your domain.

Also it's important to get links from other areas, not just directories.

If your customers would find it useful I can't see it being too much of a problem. I like a small selection of links in the footer. Often customers will look in the footer for contact links and information.

If it's just for SEO and you are putting in some keyword links I would probably say avoid it.

Hi Walid,

I would personally eliminate A and B purely based on the fact that they aren't targeted enough. I would put the "Free dliver on $50 purchase" in the meta description to encourage the click through, but C seems the most concise and targeted out of all of them.

Plus I'm a big fan of the " | " symbol

Hi Dave,

I am personally against the idea of article spinning as a whole. It's strange to see the Market Samurai guys positioning this as a tactic. I would be interested in knowing if there are firms out there who do employ this tactic.

I myself am a fan of content creation, but I much prefer "real" websites as opposed to article directories and find that the entry level for these sites requires better content. This requires unique, higher quality content which really rules out the spinning side of things.

I tried spinning a couple of times and got very disappointing results, but if these guys are saying it is one of the most effective tactics it would be useful to hear a few more opinions. It can be quite dangerous when guys with that much weight suggest tactics like this if they aren't based on real results.

Ben

That's interesting, so the new link was a longer link that included the target keywords?

As far as I am aware, each time you get a new link from the same site it's value is decreases - the first link is always the hardest to get.  This was my understanding as to one of the reasons sitewide links become less valuable. A couple of things spring to mind:

1. By adding a sitewide link, you must have increased the amount of links from the site? There could have been a large increase in the amount of links - possibly enough to make a difference.

2. Is your sidebar coded so that it appears higher up the page than the content? It's been shown that more weight is given to links that are higher up the page. It could be that the link has been moved a lot higher up the page and given more weight due to this.

They would be a couple of things that spring to mind. I too would be interested in hearing about peoples experiences with sitewide links as I moved away from them a while back in favour of a few in content links from a site.

Steer clear of duplicate content.

If the article is a high quality one then in my opinion it doesn't belong in an article directory - it belongs on a blog or site with a solid readership who can then respond and promote it.

If you're creating lower quality articles for the sole purpose of article directory submission then I would still say one submit the one, there aren't many benefits from duplicating this content.

Not affiliated with these guys in any way, and haven't worked with them either, but I did once have a conversation with Nick from Killer Infographics (http://www.submitinfographics.com/KillerPortfolio.pdf). I haven't had a need for an infographic yet but they seemed like an interesting option.

Please don't take this as an endorsement as I haven't tried them. I know they do concept to completion but I don't think they promote them, but isn't the idea of an infographic that they're fairly easy to promote anyway? Viral content and all that

The most important thing to consider if you are concerned with rankings is what the search engines are going to see. By the sounds of it, there are going to be multiple versions of the same content all dependant on search query.

Search engines will not be visiting your site through a search but most likely via a link from other sites. Once they come back to re index your site you need to be aware of what  they are going to be seeing. Is there any way of you checking the site in the same way a search engine would? Perhaps using a tool like www.seo-browser.com may be useful.

It may be a bit of a grey area as it does have similarities to cloaking, but it is designed with improved user experience in mind. It would be worth trying to find someone who has experience with the same thing to advise further.

Hope this has helped a bit.

I think navigation probably plays a large part, as well as website structure. If you have clear navigation with obvious subcategories you are more likely to get these pages as sitelinks.

I have seen sites with no clear structure in the navigation have some strange pages picked for sitelinks - the pages were quite deep ones which kinda rules out PR or page strength.

I also know that Google needs to determine that these results will be useful to a users query, so that fits in there somehow.

Hi Atul,

As far as I am aware, Google will count all 50 of them, the only thing that changes is the way the PR is distributed. Even though you have nofollowed 20 of them, Google will still only pass on 1/50th of the PR to the followed links, meaning the PR that would have been sent to the nofollowed links vanishes.

This means that the page will only pass on 3/5ths of the PR it would have done if all the links were followed.

Hope this helps

No worries, best of luck with it

In that case you will have all new URLs and the google toolbar won't be pulling off the data. This is why the homepage still has the PR as it hasn't changed.

It's just a case of waiting to get that back, you have done a redirect but it may take a while for these to be updated on the website. As the URL is different Google will still be waiting to update the toolbar.

I would personally not worry about it, at least you have the mozbar details.

Hope this helps,

Ben

Hi Zack,

Have you recently changed the extensions on your URLs? e.g. removed .html

This could be one cause.

Ben

Hi Alan,

It's not as easy being hosted on windows. I would suggest a 301 redirect from this URL to the homepage through IIS and after having a quick look around there seems to be this guide. http://www.hpseo.co.uk/301-redirect-tutorial-iis/

Have a look see if that helps. You could also try adding the rel=canonical tag into the head pointing to the homepage to help the search engines determine the right one.

Have a look at this article for the differences http://www.seomoz.org/blog/301-redirect-or-relcanonical-which-one-should-you-use

Ben

Hi Guys,

Thanks for the responses, I appreciate both of your points.

The main reason for me to do it is increased visibility in the SERPs. The original site sometimes ranks1st and 2nd and has that position pretty much secured. It no longer requires active resources for link building and over time it will get these naturally.

I ask because I have recently acquired the .com TLD and instead of just 301'ing this, I thought I could make use of it and get maybe position 3 and 4 out of it.

All content is unique, all links are natural and editorial references and there is competition that could touch it (that I can see :).

The question really boils down to whether G will rank two sites that exist on the same IP on the same SERP? Does anyone know if this is possible or if there are factors in place to prevent this.

Thanks

Ben