Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Cole

Yes, we use content page specifc URLs for any links we feel appropriate.  Directories are not a highly thought of any more as a good SEO practice, as this became repositories for links links etc.  This adds no real value to the user of potential user of a directory.

If the directory is something like Yel, we would want only parts of our site to link to their category heading where we are listed under.  So we would not want our generic home page linking to a specific heading in Yel, as this is not useful to the end user, who would click the link and then have to start to search for what they really wanted.

Specific links at this level are liked by Google, because the link is 100% relevent to the user

Hope this helps

Bruce

Hi

This is a really interesting article by Matt Cutts

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569?hl=en

I think this will help you to clarify your concerns on syntax etc

Bruce

Could it be that the domain WM has not set their site preferences in GWT and therefore Google are crawling alternative version?

w w w . mountview . org and mountview . org need to have their preferences set equaly in GWT for Both domain versions or Google with see them as two different sites.

Bruce

Hi Kiwi man

Before you do any adjustments, download and cut and slice the adwords report data for this shopping campaign, analyse it and re-analyse it.

Check the campaign setup and see where your current money is going with your downloaded stats.

"Shopping" is hugely competive and you need to distil your target and also your products very very carefuly before spending more.  Look out for high click throughs with no conversions or high bounce rates.

Hope this helps

Bruce

Hi Sam

They are updated on the 8th day after the campaigns where created and then on the subsequent 8th day, this allows for a full weeks data to be measured.  You should expect to see your update shortly

Moz emails you when all the updates have been run with a summary report once complete.

Bruce

Hi Wattlebristol

Really interesting post and one that gets us all frazzled.

Web Design Bristol.  Really interesting search phrase.  I cannot think when I would have put this phrase into a search engine looking for Website Designers. I note you only have one match for this phrase on you homepage.

Can we recommend that you do some deeper research into what real customers are actually searching for when looking for a company to create our website.

When too close to the coal face, we cannot see the wood for the trees, to mix metaphors.

Who would really in reality would search for this phrase.  Step way way back and put yourselves in the shoes of a real business looking to help building a webste...If we where looking for a company to BUILD our website, this is perhaps not the first words to trip of our tongues. A few might be....

Website companies, Website building companies, Ecommerce Websites, we need a new website, companies who build websites etc

I think we also had the same problem a while ago with a really annoying competitor, who outranked us on one keyword, but having had some feedback from their main supplier, we realised that in fact we outperformed them on gross sales.

Not perhaps the ideal answer, but one we think is worth responding with

Bruce

If there is any chanse that both sites will be live & crawlable at the same time, remember to put canonicals in the headers of the old site pages, so Google knows it is duplicated data.

Bruce

Hi Carl

No problem.  Quick tip, try and make the 301s match as close as possible from the old page content to the new page content.  If it is not quite 100% it will still pass the reduced juice to the new page, but if it is way off then any juice will be lost.

Bruce

First off, are the blog and the main site on the same domain?  If they are then they are almost internal links and this should be classed as such

If the links go to totally different domains, then this will be reciprocal linking, which is not liked by Google, but also recognised as required, but will cost some authority.  What is a big no no is back and forward irrelevent links.

What is OK.  but will cost some authorityParent company A has three brands with 4 sites.  The parent site, links to the brand site via "our other brands" page only and this is reciprocal from the brand site, from their "Our Other Brands" page linking back. 
This is logical from Google and the customers point of view

What is not OK and will definately cost in authority and unatural links penalties

Parent Company links to all the pages in all the brands pages and they do the same back and to each other.  Links are sporadic and all over the place.

This will also work with topics and also other content.

Hope this is of use

Bruce

You can have as many 301s as required, no problem at all.  Google will not mind at all.

You will lose some authority of between 1 to 10% via the redirected to...pages, but this is to be expected.  DA reflects the site and PA the page, so if you need to change the domain, then you will drop a bit, but will with good SEO bring this back up reasonable quickly.

WMT only specifies which version of the site you prefer, so Google knows that www.example.com and example.com are the same site. if you don't make a specification Google will not make the association and will class both as separate domains.

Bruce

Hi Cole

I am not sure why you would want to totally delete the disavow file, but its your call of course.

If you have deleted it yes recrawl to get Google back up to date with the changes quickly rather than wait for the regular crawl.

PS great to see you have sorted this, what was the problem?

Bruce

Unless Google has issued a warning penalty, they either know about the site and ignore it anyway or have not found these links.

Therefore yes build better content to drive traffic, but I wouldn't worry too much about the problem now you have done the disavow.

Hope that helps

Bruce

Hi Cole

Check you listings on Google Plus is complete and includes full business address, with building, street and zip code, make sure your site does too.

Investigate anything that looks odd and reach out to Google.

easy to re-invow.  Just remove the site from the text file and resubmit it.  The text file should contain all the disavow links and is like a master for Google to reference.  Add/remove to this list as required.  I doubt that this is the cause, more like something is not fully joined up for Google, like address etc.

Hope that helps

Bruce

h1 tags are useful, but are not needed by Google, as they will crawl the page to see the content.  However if you have h2 h3 etc tags, but don't have an h1 then crawls will not read any tag at all, as they must be present, completed and sequential.

Hope that helps

Bruce

In our opinion,

Distil all the keywords to a handful, Your budget will be swallowed whole if your not careful, pick the best and just stick to to those.  Set your initial budget high for a week and then drop it way down, once you start to see which words work best. Make sure your adverts are linked to the right page and use keyword destination URLs.  Check the quality score for the keyword.  If it's a low score, revisit. Final thought, don't tweak daily unless you can see a problem that is costing money.  Leave the campaign alone for 7 days and then revisit.

Bruce

HI Thomas

If the redirects look dodgy get rid of them.  Redirects feel spammy unless they are 100% legitimate and can be justified as logical to the end user.  We have all got caught in searches in the past where you click a clink and then get a cascade of redirects going on.  Google want clear transparency for entry to a site.

Bruce

Have you physicaly checked the pages reported.  It is really easy to get a duplicate with working on a large site, especially if common themes are on the site and therefore a page title can easily be duplicated in error

Let us know

Bruce

Analyse why traffice is not going to the main page. A few things to look at:

Do a page rank check on Moz on each page using the keyword, and follow the guidelines and make adjustments.

See if the actual pages are getting the same keyword as a trigger, you might find it is actually another word that is ranking higher.

Hope that helps

Bruce

Hi Tom

It might also be worth checking if the clients e-commerce platforms will allow you to add tags into the head.  Some ERP website or cloud based sites don't so worth checking from the get go

Bruce