Questions
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Very different results for 2 different pages
Hey Brian, Andy's suggestions are good ones, and I'll just add to this that your Charlottesville page exists in a much less competitive market than your Atlanta page, by dint of population alone. Barring any technical issues with the website, it may be that Google simply finds your bands by location page to be too weak to compete in Atlanta.
Link Building | | MiriamEllis0 -
Sitemap and content question
Hi Brian, To answer your question directly, linking to these pages is the preferable option of the two. That said, if it were my campaign I'd be looking to cut down on the volume of these pages to make them a bit more manageable first. I've listed some suggestions below that may point you in the right direction, take from them what you may! Get Rid of These Location Pages These days, having a "Bands in Atlanta, GA" page isn't necessary to rank for that term. Your site is clearly about booking bands so if you've got a Georgia page in this example and your band's profiles list their locations, this combined with a generally well-optimised site means you can still rank for it just fine. Right now, having 750 orphan pages that are essentially duplicates of each other is not doing you any favors. Consider How the Users Expect to Find a Band The user experience on the site right now is by now means bad but if you were to remove these pages, this is the way I would go about it: Change "Browse Bands" to something more specific to their intent; perhaps "Find a Band". We're talking semantics here but "Browse Bands" suggests to me that I'm about to see a huge list of bands to sift through and I'm just as lazy as the next user. Let the filters do the work. From this band finder page (essentially your existing /bands#band-finder page), have 2 drop-down options at the top. The first one for Location and the other for Type or Genre. Again, minor changes but I would expect that most users want to find a band in a specific location so rather than putting this option in the top corner as a text link, make it the most prominent option on the page. Also stating that the other drop-down is before they click it is another minor difference but helpful. "Now Showing: All Bands" isn't entirely intuitive. Minor detail. Add a Page for Each State 750 location pages is not only hard to manage, it's also hard to offer unique value for. If you add a page for each state this is much easier to do. You can talk about the regional differences between each (most popular genres, different laws, any other common differences or booking requirements etc) You could also include the pre-filtered results for each state on these pages to give users another way to find a band quickly. ie From the California page, show the California bands by default and they can select their specific town/city from there if they like. Another great way to add unique and valuable content would be to have 1 to 3 featured bands on each state's page. This may be risky if it's going to upset other bands so it's obviously your call as well but it lets you expand a little more with something valuable and you could even include the areas they service which is a legit reason to talk about specific locations. Include Serviced Locations on Band Profile Pages The current band profile pages are excellent. Videos, song samples, a list of songs, photos, reviews etc. Great work! The only thing it's missing is the areas they service. This is redundant for people finding the band through location filters but not if they go straight to the "Select a Band" drop-down. Bonus points if this list of locations is also shown on a map rather than just a text list, though text is also important for those using Ctrl-F to find their location. Build Links to State or Band Pages Building location-specific links to either of these pages will add another signal to search engines that you offer the solution to a user's intent. This can be as simple as offering your featured bands a "featured on" type of badge that links back to their profile on your site. Something similar to "as seen on TV" where them linking to you genuinely helps their own site/image by suggesting to their visitors they're trustworthy. Don't Hide Too Much Content Be mindful of how much content is "hidden" in those pop-up windows. Bits and pieces of info is fine but if you do start populating pages with lots of content and obscuring most of it, you're devaluing your hard work! This turned into quite the lengthy response that went on a bit of a tangent but hopefully it's at least somewhat helpful to you anyway! Thin, duplicate pages bad; unique, rich landing pages good!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChrisAshton0 -
Google Indexing our site
Hi Brian, 809 over 863 is over the 93% of the site indexed. I'd wait a little more. Also, I dont think that i will add value that you manually submit the URLs that you think are not indexed. A reminder, WMT is being realy delayed on the latest information shown. In my case, the last record is from 4th may.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GastonRiera0 -
How long should it take for indexed pages to update
There really isn't a typical amount of time as it depends on links to your site, crawl frequency of your current page, and how many resources they choose to use on you at that time. There are, however, ways to speed up the process. Claim your site in Search Console (Webmaster Tools) Submit a sitemap Use the "Fetch" tool in Search Console. Build/earn some new links to the pages you care about. All of those will help your pages be reindexed more quickly. Also, if you want the "very fast, slightly cheap" way of doing it, post the links on Google+, ping them with Indexkings and build internal links from new blog posts. All of those definitely help with index status.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MattAntonino0 -
Google Search Console
In Google Search Console, you'll want to verify ALL of those versions of your site. Then, in each version, tell Google which version that you prefer--the www or non-www version of your site. So, verify these: http://www. http:// https://www. https:// Choose to use ONE of those versions of your site. Then set up 301 redirects from all other versions to that version. Even though the redirects are in place you'll still want to verify them all in GSC.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GlobeRunner0 -
301 redirects Ruby on Rails
What if you use a concatenation formula in excel? If you have a list of all the old pages, and all the new then you could put them in separate columns and run a formula to fill in the required areas to the code. Seems like if there's a specific code that just needs the copy and paste touch, that could work in a pinch.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eric_Rohrback0 -
Youtube SEO Best Practices
Hi there. No, none of SEO related benefits would ever come from what email you use to login or URL in your profile. The way to use YouTube for SEO is actually to use it (surprise here:) for it's intended purposes - create awesome video content, put compelling descriptions, titles and thumbnails for your videos, grow the audience and, eventually, people will remember your brand, and start coming to your website from youtube, which will indirectly influence SEO. Cheers. P.S. Here are some links you might find useful: https://www.straightnorth.com/insights/youtube-video-optimization-best-practices/ https://creatoracademy.withgoogle.com/page/lesson/discovery?hl=en https://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2262954/optimizing-videos-for-youtube-search https://moz.com/blog/youtube-ranking-factors-whiteboard-friday https://www.distilled.net/blog/social-media/youtube/youtube-seo/
Technical SEO Issues | | DmitriiK0 -
Youtube Views
We can clean up the channel...the reason we were considering moving to a new channel is because we were considering moving from an xyz@gmail.com login to an @domain.com login. Does anyone have thoughts on the SEO benefits of an @domain.com login vs @gmail.com login? Or is adding my url to the "Associated website" channel setting sufficient for SEO purposes?
Vertical SEO: Video, Image, Local | | brianvest2 -
Will a Javascript object be read without pre-rendering?
The fetch as Googlebot function in GWT is definitely your best bet here. Most JavaScript dropdowns I've run into are being indexed properly by Google by now but if your particular JS implementation isn't being executed when fetching as Googlebot, then you'll need to use a solution like prerender.
Moz Pro | | Daniel_Marks0 -
Absolute URL or Relative URL in my sitemap?
Sorry forgot...here is an example section. Any other edit suggestions? <urlset xmlns="<a href=" http:="" www.sitemaps.org="" schemas="" sitemap="" 0.9"="">http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"></urlset> <loc>/bands-by-location/Charlottesville-VA</loc> <lastmod>2014-05-02T22:47:30+00:00</lastmod> <loc>/bands-by-location/Lynchburg-VA</loc> <lastmod>2014-05-02T22:47:30+00:00</lastmod> <loc>/bands-by-location/Lexington-VA</loc> <lastmod>2014-05-02T22:47:30+00:00</lastmod> <loc>/bands-by-location/Homestead-Resort-VA</loc> <lastmod>2014-05-02T22:47:30+00:00</lastmod>
Technical SEO Issues | | brianvest0 -
Which URL structure should I use?
I would agree with Miram Ellis, I try to make my URLs as small as possible and then use Google Custom Variables to categorise content on the site for Analytics. Therefore my answer would be: samhillbands.com/Charlottesville-VA-Wedding-Bands
Local Website Optimization | | danwebman0 -
Ruby on rails sitemap.xml structure
XML sitemap is well defined here: http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html But i can quickly resume: limitation up to 50000 URLs and up to 50MB as file. If you need more you can split them as sitemap index with several sitemaps. sitemap index are up to 50000 sitemaps and up to 10MB as file. lastmod, priority and change frequency didn't play HUGE role anymore: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-lastmod-xml-sitemap-20579.html https://www.seroundtable.com/google-priority-change-frequency-xml-sitemap-20273.html but just keep them to be fully formatted. sitemaps can be compressed (gzip) sitemap must be UTF-8 encoded but beware of entities - Ampersand, Single Quote, Double Quote, Greater Than, Less Than. You must replace them with % char codes. you can put sitemap location in robots.txt. You can place there also few sitemaps. Sitemaps can be located on 3rd party servers too. I think that this is most important in XML sitemaps.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mobilio0