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Hi

I am trying to put together a case study with big brands that have changed their domain names over the last 2 years. So far I have:

t-mobile.co.uk -> ee.co.uk

guardian.co.uk -> theguardian.com

Are there any others you could think of? It'd be much appreciated!

Thanks,

C

Hi all,

Have you ever created an hreflang sitemap using in-house resources or a third-party company for a group of over 70 sites, each with hundreds of pages and all with localised URLs?

If so, would you mind sharing how you did it, or the contact details of the company you used?

In this specific case there is nothing in the URL or code that I can use to group the alternatives automatically.

Thanks,

Carlos

You are right, when I used screaming frog with Googlebot as the agent it didn't pick the link

Their selling point was that because bloggers would be rewarded for their links they'd feature our brand and products more often in their posts..... I don't think it is the case. We are just losing organic links and paying for traffic that used to be free.

I'll make sure they are taken out of the program.

Thanks for your help!

Chris, thanks for your advice, but I think we are going into a completely different subject.

• Some of those links were created years ago. Created by the bloggers because they simply wanted to. We didn't request them or had any input on what that anchor text would be.

• I suppose that when I wrote "That link, and hundreds just like that" could have been misinterpreted. There are hundreds of bloggers, linking to hundreds of different pages from our site, all with different anchor text. Again, 100% organic.

We didn't build those links or tell them what the anchor text should be (there are not two with the same anchor text). They were 100% organic links for years, but once Skimlinks joined our affiliate programs, SKIMLINKS changed all those links into affiliate links.

Ok, maybe if I give some background it will be easier to understand.

That link, and hundreds just like that one used to be organic links, that bloggers created because they wanted to link to an specific product from our site. As soon as Skimlinks joined our affiliate program all those links became affiliate links.

As a result; sales that used to be attributed to the referral channel, are now attributed to the affiliate channel. But what worries me the most is whether those links are still SEO-friendly or not. In the source code they still look SEO-friendly.

They are not affiliate links, they are organic links. What happens is that the blogger uses a tool called Skimlinks (they are the affiliate) that turns organic links into affiliates.

Skimlinks gets paid by us and then they pay part of the comission to the blogger.

If I were to kick Skimlinks out of the program, the organic links would stop redirecting to our site via a 302.

In the source code there is no affiliate tagging in the links, it looks clean. I'm guessing the redirect is done using JavaScript. My questions is: does Google see a clean link, or do they also get redirected via 302 when they try to follow it?

Hi All,

If you're not familiar with Skimlinks, what they do is turn organic links into affiliates links so that publishers can earn commission through our affiliate program. Pretty much every SEO's nightmare.

myfashionlife.com/archives/2013/07/16/get-anne-hathaways-paper-denim-and-cloth-look/ anchor text "Floppy straw hat"

Looking at the source code the link looks clean, but as soon you click on it you get redirected via a 302 to our site. My questions is; is it just users that get redirect or is it the same for search engines?

Screaming frog recognises the link as a 200.

Are we losing all the link juice, or is it fine? I've have half a mind to kick them out of the program.

Cheers

Hi Mike - Thanks for your response. I can see how breadcrumbs could inflate internal links, but I don't it is the case this time.

Mens_Bags-600/ - 436 products, all with links to that page.

Womens_Bags-226/ -   771 products, all with links to that page.

Both pages can be found in the site-wide navigation.

According to Webmaster Tools, the men's page has 203,062 internal links and women's 8,644.

If the difference were due to the breadcrumb, the women's page should have had more links, right?

Cheers,

Carlos

Hi all,

I have around 400 links in the navigation menu (site-wide) and when I use webmaster tools to check for internal links to each page; some have as many as 250K and some as little as 200.

Shouldn't the number of internal links for pages found in the navigation menu be relatively the same? Or is Google registering more internal links for pages linked closer to the top of the code

Thanks!

This is the only case study I have seen about alt tags http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/how-many-words-in-alt-text-for-google-yahoo-bing/

16 words of 7 + 8 characters each

EMD is not really a penalty. Look at it this way; before the update because you had an exact match domain Google gave you 10 points, after the update Google has reduced that number to 3 points. You simply have lost the advantage you had of owning an exact match domain.

Moving the content to a new URL won't help you at all, what you need to do is continue to build high quality links, write great content, improve social interactions with your website, etc. (nothing new)

It depends of your CMS, and duplicate Titles and Descriptions won't help you much.

You need to talk to your developer and see if they can implement an automatic system for Meta Information i.e. [keyword/s] | [call to action] | [brand]

Sorry that I couldn't be of much help!

The search engine will break it up, whether you rank for the more competitive variations of "buy natural progesterone cream uk" will depend of the page/domain authority your site has and how relevant your content is to those keywords.

I still think that the solution is the same as to many of the problems with Panda and Penguin. I own several EMD's and for most of them I still continue to rank relatively well.

I did drop 2 to 7 positions for pretty much all my competitive keywords after the update, which is what you'd expect to happen after the update. For the EMD's that have dropped from page 1 to 9 there is usually another reason behind it.

The way I see it my websites no longer get that automatic extra boost that comes with an EMD, and I need to work harder like non EMD's normally do.

This is an on-going discussion, I'm sure we'll have many different views to the problem.

Hi,

Does anyone know of a reliable social metrics tool?

So far I've tried Open Site Explorer, Tom Anthony's tools  and SEO Quake

With each one of them I get very, very different numbers.

Cheers,

Carlos

Hi Adam,

It is true that too many 301 redirects could look a bit fishy.

If what you want is for people that see bobspizza.com on advertising material and type the url on their browser to be redirected to your site (and have no possible issues with Google), I'd would use a 302 redirect.

The only problem with 302 redirects is that the link juice pointing to bobspizza.com won't pass onto menu.com .

There are many hosting providers that will allow you to park and 301/302 an unlimited number of domains.

Cheers

After the 5th of October? The EMD update was released on the 28th of September.

Funny enough, there was a Penguin update on Friday, the 5th of October. The impact of the EMD update on non English websites is very, very small if anything at all.

My money is on your website being affected by Penguin, not EMD

Hi Allen,

So you have your .com.au that is set to target Australia and you want a .com which will have the same content and will target some other country?

All you need to do is implement the rel="alternate" hreflang="x" tags - http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077

If you implement those tags your sites will not experience duplicate content issues.

Implementing the Rel=canonical will result in only one of our sites ranking, with the rel="alternate" hreflang="x" tags both your sites have a chance to rank in the respective countries.

Thanks,

Carlos

Before the recent update from Google having the keywords in the domain helped a lot.

I'm sure that they still help somehow, but to get back to where you were you will need to build up the authority of your site (good links, social signals, quality content, etc - nothing new).

As Simon said, also check your WMT account and see if you have any messages from Google regarding unnatural links.