no problem
- SEO and Digital Marketing Q&A Forum
- bradwayland
bradwayland
@bradwayland
Job Title: VP Business Development/Partner
Company: BlueCotton
Website Description
royalty free textures for the masses to download.
Favorite Thing about SEO
free market
Latest posts made by bradwayland
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RE: Anyone know of companies or individuals that optimize google adsense for small players?
I'm not looking for PPC help at all. My question is about Adsense not Adwords. I'm a publisher. Moz does not have a list of adsense consultants. I think you aren't understanding what I'm looking for.
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RE: Anyone know of companies or individuals that optimize google adsense for small players?
I visited the site. It doesn't appear that they even market that they work on optimizing Adsense. I'm not a novice at adsense. I'm looking for people who go beyond someone with 6 or 7 years of experience doing the typical fine tuning. Correct me if I'm wrong.
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Anyone know of companies or individuals that optimize google adsense for small players?
I think I've done most of the obvious things like maxing out the ads per page and adding channels but I still think that someone who really knows this stuff could probably increase earnings by 50-100%. Let me know if you have ideas.
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RE: How can I tell Google not to index a portion of a webpage?
So what should it look like in the code?
If my area to block was a product description it might say
"Product Description
bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla"
Secondly, in the robots.txt if I disallow /iframes/ then I would need to make sure we are not using iframes anywhere else?
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How can I tell Google not to index a portion of a webpage?
I'm working with an ecommerce site that has many product descriptions for various brands that are important to have but are all straight duplicates. I'm looking for some type of tag tht can be implemented to prevent Google from seeing these as duplicates while still allowing the page to rank in the index. I thought I had found it with Googleoff, googleon tag but it appears that this is only used with the google appliance hardware.
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Is there a tool that works like crawl test that allows more than 3000 pages?
I enjoy using crawl test inside moz but I need to find a way to crawl all the pages on a site. It would probably be in the neighborhood of 10,000 urls. Does anyone know of a free tool and if not is there a paid tool that will do this?
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RE: Has My Site Been Hit by Panda 4.0?
Were the 300 listing pages ever receiving traffic? If the answer to this question is no or if a significant number of them weren't ever receiving any traffic it might change what I would think you should do. Poor title tags will hurt your visibility in lots of ways. I would not personally tie the title tag strategy to Panda. Panda is a content algo. It seems to look for duplicate, near duplicate, thin content, poor quality content and then make sure that sites with those criteria are not ranking. If you think more broadly about it you might ask why Google would want to take the whole site down in the rankings for thin content on a few or many pages with potentially low or no traffic. I think the reason they are penalizing the whole site is because they don't want webmasters producing this type of content. If they can get content creators to think twice before creating another 20 urls about x topic then over the long haul their job will become much easier. They can fight off spam more easily because it won't work. I was very angry when Panda 4 rolled out and some sites I own got hit. However, I feel empowered now to correct the issue. My suggestion for you is to compare the urls with their links and traffic. There should be some clear cut low quality stuff that you can noindex. On the pages that drive traffic I would make sure you are providing deep, helpful content. Hard to discuss all the things you may need to do over email but I think you are probably getting the idea. PM me if you want to chat more.
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RE: Has My Site Been Hit by Panda 4.0?
If you saw a drop around May 19-20 then I would say it is almost certain that this was Panda. I've been in a similar experience. I own a network of content sites that had never been clearly hit by Panda on the day of launch until Panda 4 where they got hit very hard. When you consider Panda I would think of it less like an algo change and more like a filter. Panda seems to crawl the site looking for certain criteria. If your criteria meets these then all your results get filtered. Remember that Google has clearly stated that their goal with Panda is for sites with thin or duplicated content to not rank high on the page. In my case I am seeing that I still rank for everything that I used to rank 1, 2, 3 for but now I rank 8, 9, 10. I have no proof yet that I can get out from under it but I am making a lot of changes now that I believe will do the trick to fixing my own traffic issues. I found this article to be very helpful as I considered what I should do next
http://cognitiveseo.com/blog/5536/google-panda-4-0-topical-authority-content-update-2014-case-study/
If you want to reach out to me privately I'd be happy to discuss in more detail.
Brad
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RE: Best practice for a website where the publications (catalogues) expire frequently
I think this assessment is spot on. I think the superior strategy would what you mentioned at the end. If you updated the content continuously I believe you would create the most value for the user.
Best posts made by bradwayland
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RE: Meta Description
Bing Webmaster Tools should be able to help here.
http://www.bing.com/webmaster/help/submit-urls-to-bing-62f2860a
You can submit up to 10 urls a day for immediate crawl. I know the point is for new sites but this should be effective for you as well.
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RE: I want to blog (but where?)
I think it depends on what your goals are. I own an ecommerce site with a blog but also own are large network of design & development blogs. Merely having a blog on your site won't help anything. However, if you are going to product quality content on that blog that relates to the topic of your site then it can be very effective for building links. High quality video, infographics, etc have proven to be good for grabbing some links. They are easy for media/bloggers to promote. If your goal is more along the lines of "I want a blog to see if I can gain readership or ad revenues" then I would probably start something. Blogs that are attached to existing brands don't do as well from a perception standpoint. Users will tend to thing you are just trying to beef up your existing brand. On the other hand, a stand alone "brand" for your blog will be free of any perception like that. If you producing quality content on the site then over time it will have an opportunity to take off. One other thought. You might consider making a small acquisition of someone in the travel space. Getting the initial traffic to work with could prove to be the hardest part. There are probably thousands of little travel blogs out there you could buy up for 5-10k that already have some content and some earnings. Hope this helps. Let me know if you have any followup.
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RE: Re-code website and start from scratch?
I can see how changing the domain name might help you with the EMD update but I'm not sure I understand how this will solve your panda/penguin issues. What is it that you will do with a new code base that you haven't done by changing content, meta tags, meta titles, etc? I'm not sure how substantial the site is in terms of revenue etc but unless you were doing some really spammy stuff I would continue working on your current site and probably even domain. I think you might want to take your SEO hat off for a while and start focusing on your users. Does the new content help users accomplish what they need better? Ultimately the only long term strategy would be to change your focus and produce the highest quality and most helpful content you can come up with. In many cases Panda and Penguin penalize people that are too focused on the SEO side. Considering your users will help mitigate this issue. It's a long road but many times starting from scratch is the longest road you could possibly come up with.
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RE: More than 2K dofollow links, from one site with one anchor text?
In this case I would not change anything. Google sees links in templates all the time. It is natural for websites to link to places in the header, footer, sidebar etc where those links will get duplicated. A natural backlink profile will have some links that look like this. Let me argue from the inverse. Are you suggesting that I should just simply find a site that will link to one of my competitors for their main keywords from 2000+ sidebar pages? Very rarely have I heard of Google penalizing anyone over a single link. It appears you got the result you wanted so now go out and build some additional trust. Keep building the case for that keyword to rank. Hope this helps.
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RE: 301 redirect for blog post URL change
Gina,
The 301 is exactly what you should do. No big deal. Since it is still early it makes sense that you would want to go with a more "perfect" url. I own a network of blogs and we have found that the right URL can be very important to long term ranks. Good luck!
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RE: SEO Migration / Transition from Current Platform. Have Experience?
I've gone through this many times. Here are some high level points to consider.
1. Keep as much of the content the same as possible
2. Keep as many urls the same as possible
3. Be sure you have managed your potential 404 errors prior to launch
Many times people just accept that some new commerce platform uses a different url structure for products (as an example). I personally don't accept that answer from the dev team on the surface. If I have 5000 product pages then I'm not really interested in changing that URL structure unless it is ABSOLUTELY necessary. Sure, 301's work great but if you are trying to minimize potential downsides it would be better to not have to place 5000 301s.
I'd recommend considering content that isn't moving over. Have you done your homework on how much of it is getting traffic? Or, is everything moving over? When I switch platforms the goal for my teams is to make the switch in a way that the average user would never know. Google certainly will know when you have gone from volusion to magento but making it less noticeable to users is important. It is difficult enough to switch platforms so you don't really want to bring new potential CRO issues into the conversation.
I saw a person on here yesterday that had 10,000 404 errors after the switch. To me this is just poor planning. You should not have to wait for webmaster tools to tell you there is a 404 problem. Google has a history of penalizing sites that are inaccessible or have a large number of 404 errors for even a brief period of time. I had a blog that I purchased and switched the PHP handler on. After 3 weeks I realized that every post was getting 404 errors. I fixed the issue but never got back 1/2 the traffic I lost.
All in all, Google does a fantastic job of handling your changes. If your titles, content, and urls are the same for your main traffic pages then you should expect it to be a fairly seamless transition. Hope this helps.
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RE: 302 redirects - redirecting numerous domains into main primary domain
This is pretty dangerous business. Not sure what they spent on all those domains but I could quickly see Google stripping out all the value if this isn't handled properly.
I recently acquired a small competitor. There were good business reasons for the acquisition but we still wanted to tread carefully with the new domain. Here is what we are doing.
The domain was actually a website that we did not want to maintain so we 301 redirected all the urls up to the homepage and then placed an announcement on that page of our acquisition. The announcement is an image that clicks through to our website. We intentionally did not include any anchor text. Next we issued a press release of the acquisition. The press release is a good line in the stand in case Google did anything crazy to us. We would be able to point back to the date and let them know this was a business move. Next we started reaching out to all the backlinks and making a friendly request to move their links from the previous name to ours. In our eyes any site that moves it to us is a long term win because the risk of the value being stripped out goes way down. Next we sent an email to the customer base informing them of the acquisition and a discount code for trying out our services. Finally, once the outreach to change links is done and the smoke clears (3,6, 12 months down the road) we will place the 301 redirect on the domain to our site.
This is the only way I would suggest buying domains and redirecting. Buying domains for search purposes is blackhat, period. Buying competitors or other sites that help your business but also could help you in search is not. We have decided to take a safer approach to maximize value and mitigate risk.
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RE: Big drop in Moz Domain Authority in the latest mozscape update
Overall I saw many of the sites that I monitor falling 1-3 points during the last update. It seems that the scale was raised a bit. However, one site where we are working very hard to earn quality links moved up 3 points against the trend. Maybe the data I'm seeing is flawed but it appears that the trend was that a lot sites saw a subtle drop.
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RE: Multiple Sizes of eCommerce Product Best Practice
I own a site in the custom t-shirt space. We deal with a similar issue to what you are talking about. Each product comes in lots of different sizes. To make matters worse we have several products that are nearly identical with just minor difference being the manufacturer of the goods. For example hanes, fruit of the loom, gildan all sell a main t-shirt that is pretty much identical with the exception of the tag. We have always had the sizing information on 1 product page.
I believe you are going to want to focus on 1 page with all the shapes and materials. I clearly don't know our business but I think I disagree with your assessment about the usability. I believe it will be more familiar to users as well as easier to manage. We have had a lot of results filtered out by panda updates because our "commodity" shirts described above are not unique enough. If you create 36 different pages I think you will be fighting duplicate content for a long time.
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RE: Unused url 'A' contains frameset - can it damage the other site B?
I'm curious to hear what you find out about this one. I'm not an authority on this but it sure doesn't seem very clean. I would want to take site A and 301 all the old to the new and get rid of this structure completely. I'm sure you have already considered that. When I talk to people I always tell them we are trying to be the least imperfect. Having this frameset A certainly doesn't seem like the least imperfect approach in most competitive spaces. Good luck!
Co-Owner of BlueCotton.com. Started working with BlueCotton in 2003. Run all Business Development / Web Development / Marketing for BC. Also own a network of design and development blogs.