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Hi, 
I'll keep this one short and sweet!

We've noticed just recently that a number of competitors are bidding on our company name, clearly with the intention of being listed above our organic result. I'm certain that Google used to allow us to bid on our own company name for a negligible amount but now it looks like we're going to have to chase £1 odd per click to  obtain customers who are actively searching for us.

Can anything be done about this or is it now nature of the beast that we're going to have to have a price war on bidding on our own company name?

Thanks for your help!

Chris

We've made a lot of changes to our website (https://refreshcartridges.co.uk/) over the years, with our website developer putting a heavy emphasis on improving page loading times in general.

One of the those changes has been to base64 encode or in-line the majority of images on our site which has reduced our loading times down to under a second for most of our pages for our visitors which are mainly based in the UK.

My question is whether in-lining the images, thus removing the images filenames for index association results in this technique being a net-good or net-bad for our sites SEO in general, particularly on our frontpage.

Cheers all for your feedback.

Umar, please don't worry, I wouldn't touch links or traffic generated by the likes of Fiverr with a ten foot barge pole! 

Many thanks Dave.

To be honest I'm thinking about disregarding the 55 limit altogether and just keeping the length sensible and popping the important keywords towards the beginning of the title so it doesn't matter too much if / when it gets truncated.

For example, something like the following for a product listing:

'Canon PGI-520BK Compatible Inkjet Cartridge. Buy PGI-520 Ink at Refresh Cartridges.'

This covers the keywords Canon, Inkjet, Ink, Cartridge, Cartridges and the name of the product twice along with the inclusion of 'Buy' and the Company Name.

I don't think it looks hideously spammy but please do feel free to give me a slap if you think I may be about to make a terrible mistake  

Thanks again.

Hi,
I'll keep this really short and sweet... I'm just intrigued more than anything.

With the exception of user testing has anybody ever had a good experience with Fiverr? Obviously I'm not  contemplating SEO services for $5 but I'm just curious as to whether anybody has found any services that were genuinely useful in a day to day capacity?

Many thanks for such a thorough and informative response. Pretty much none of our titles need to extend past 55 characters, it's just a case of whether it would be beneficial to cram some more potential keywords in  
If I can be so cheeky, if you were to rewrite the example given of a competitors title 'Brother DCP-197C Inkjet Cartridges. Cheap Brother DCP-197C Ink' to something more to your pallette what would it be? Obviously I appreciate you more than likely have no experience of our niche, I'm just curious.

Thanks again for taking the time to reply.

Hi,
In order to appease the Moz crawler we recently changed over 10,000 URL's in order to make our Meta Page Title less than 55 characters as it suggested. Unfortunately our rankings dropped dramatically pretty much overnight so I am getting the feeling that perhaps our titles are now just a little too concise and need elaborating on just a touch.

Our competitors that rank well seem to use a small amount of keyword repetition.

For example, whereas we may have:
Brother DCP-197C Inkjet Cartridges

They will have:
Brother DCP-197C Inkjet Cartridges. Cheap Brother DCP-197C Ink.

What are your opinions of the fact that:

a) Their Title is over the 55 character figure that is suggested for displaying correctly in the SERPs.
b) The words Brother and DCP-197C are repeated in the title.

The fact their title appears to be working better is almost enough to sway me but the competitors title just looks a little too spammy for me to make a sitewide change without asking some second opinions first.

Cheers all!

Many thanks for your response.

My pondering was how the amount of money bid affects the ranking on pages such as http://bit.ly/1i4dPec

Looking at the above URL you will see products listed in terms of price and as such what differentiates the guy choosing to pay 1p a click or the guy paying £1 a click in this list?

Hi,
I was wondering if I could ask is perhaps someone could give me some clarification as to how the amount we bid on Google Product Ads reflects the product positioning on Google Shopping?

We have a Google Product Data Feed which is then linked up to our Adwords account so that we can determine a PPC bid amount. In instances like this it doesn't seem to make sense that one person may be paying 10ppc and another 20ppc when the buyers criteria for sorting merchants was purely down to the price.

Since the buyer has the option to sort their products in price from minimum to maximum the sort order cannot be manipulated by Google based on the amount the merchant was paying. As such, how is determining a cost per click figure relevant when the customer is searching by base price low > high on Google Shopping? Surely I should just set the limit to £0.01 and rely on the customer determining the sort order (which ultimately will lead to a higher conversion rate) than allowing Google to skew the results based on bidding 20-30 times this amount?

I should state that I'm in the UK. I do realise that a high PPC amount will increase our chance of exposure on standard search pages but my question does relate solely to results listed on Google Shopping.

Thanks for your help!

Chris

Hi Bob,

Thanks for your response. My main reason for wanting to keep things below 55 characters is because Moz is currently giving me several thousand warnings for going over this length!

'Google typically displays the first 50-60 characters of a title tag—or as many characters as will fit into a 512-pixel display. If you keep your titles under 55 characters, you can expect at least 95% of your titles to display properly. We recommend that you keep your title to 55 characters or less to ensure that customers see your full title—and to avoid replacement text that may not provide the same incentive to click as a custom-written tag.'

I also wasn't sure as to whether a longer title diluted the effectiveness of each keyword within the title.

Hi all,

Our category Meta Title Tags are a little woeful and so I'm in the process of rewriting them.

Let's say you have a product for sale.... some inkjet cartridges for a Canon BJ10V printer for example. In an effort to keep things concise I was thinking that for this category I should have the meta title set simply as:

'Canon BJ10V Inkjet Cartridges' and perhaps our company name after this text (and a pipe delimiter)

This takes us just under 50 characters which is ideal but doesn't include any real keyword variation and will result in the company name being duplicated at the tail of the title tag on 6,000 odd pages.

A large number of my competitors have title tags along the lines of:

'Canon BJ10V Cheap Inkjet Cartridges for Canon BJ-10V Ink Printers'

I understand the reasoning behind this but does the variation of keywords compensate for the fact that the title looks spammy (to both humans and Search Engines).

What would you do? Keep it clean and concise or stuff the title full of keywords. In the event of the former would you include the company name in each title in the knowledge they would be well under 50 characters without?

Thanks for your help.

Many thanks all. The crawler is currently in the process of creating an image sitemap as we speak. We tweaked the website a little to ensure the ALT text is spot on for the product in question before starting this process.

As mentioned my only reason for asking was to ensure that we weren't providing what would essentially have been redundant information for no reason whatsoever (ie Meta Keywords) but you've convinced me that it is a good idea.

Speak soon and thanks again.

Hey,
I've checked the Moz Forum but can't find anything recent that is still available.

Does anyone have any experience of an application which will crawl a website and create a list of URL's and spelling mistakes. Ideally free but if not then happy to pay.

We've found a few that will do 1,000 odd pages but we have a 20,000 page website that needs checking.

I realise there are a number of browser plug-ins which will check on a page by page basis but due to the number of pages we need to check this wouldn't really be practical.

Many thanks

Chris

Ah, that's a shame.... Was worth a go.
The thing I hate about Wordpress is that the most unlikely plug-in's or themes can cause unexpected issues. At the same time however it's great that it's so easy to temporarily switch things around without losing any work or vast amounts of time in order to try to pinpoint the cause of the issue.

Sorry I haven't been of any help but, again, goodluck!

Hi there,

Are you able to temporarily disable the 'Who we are' sidebar widget and confirm that the content of the page reappears without scrolling? Troubleshooting could then be targeted specifically towards this widget.

Of course, if my hunch is wrong and it's not the sidebar widget just disable and re-enable widgets one by one until you find the culprit  

Good luck!

We've just installed the server side script 'XML Sitemaps' on our eCommerce site.

The script gives us the option of (easily) creating an image sitemap but I'm debating whether there is any reason for us to do so. We sell printer cartridges and so all the images will be pretty dry (brand name printer cartridge in front of a box being a favourite). I can't see any potential customers to search for an image as a route in to the site and Google appears to be picking up our images on it's own accord so wonder if we'll just be crawling the site and submitting this information for no real reason.

From a quality perspective would Google give us any kind of kudos for providing an Image Sitemap? Would it potentially increase their crawl frequency or, indeed, reduce the load on our servers as they wouldn't have to crawl for all the images themselves?
I can't stress how little of a hardship it will be to create one of these automatically daily but am wondering if, like Meta Keywords, there is any benefit to doing so?

Hey, thanks for getting back in contact.

Yeah, we were contemplating doing that. It does seem to be further diluting the emphasis on people making a purchase however which was our real concern - If someone does a search for a DX4050 printer then it seems relevant to just yield a list of products rather than loads of additional content that is unrelated to their purchase.

I guess pretty much anything we do is going to potentially detract from the user experience in the name of giving the possibility of people linking to us. Making something that is truly relevant and natural while at the same time adding to the user experience and attracting the possibility of external links would appear to be the challenge!

Hey all,

I'm in need of some serious inspiration and I'm hoping one of you generous people can help.

We're looking to do a spot of link building for an eCommerce site which I would describe (without putting it down too much) as 'boring'. This isn't our fault per se as the site sells printer cartridges and there's only a certain amount of excitement such a product can create.

As a result natural linkbuilding is quite tricky, especially when it comes to creating links to anything other than our homepage. For the past couple of years we have focused on creating good content and indeed have a thriving database of hundreds of helpful articles and videos on the site. These are generating decent traffic (and rank #1 for many different help related search terms) but the problem with these articles is that they don’t convert in to sales at all well. I’m also conscious that it will ultimately end in us developing a link profile which would classify us as a printer repair resource rather than cartridge sales website.

I have read numerous guides on Moz but they all tend to focus on products which are a little sexier than those that we sell. Getting someone to share and link to a truly unique product would be incredibly easy compared with asking someone to engage, share and link to the latest Epson cartridge.

I started writing articles on some decent quality business blogs however the links given don’t look particularly natural and the link would always be to our homepage.

We have the staff and the time but we built a whole host of rubbish links back before Penguin and I want to ensure that we are going to head in the right direction before embarking on something new. If you had a site which was really dull how would you devise a link building strategy that was relevant and, most importantly, natural?

Thanks for your help.

Chris

Hi All

Many thanks for your responses.

I love the idea of the website http://theuserismymom.com/ and will probably give it a go for the sake of $100 but am conscious that this wouldn't give a varied spectrum of reviews from a wide demographic.

I guess a combination of user testing with people that we know physically in the office and usertesting.com is the way forward.

Thanks for your help.

Hello

We're soon going to be embarking on a fairly major site overhaul and while this isn't a particularly SEO related question, I’m keen to integrate user feedback quite heavily in this process and would appreciate your opinion as how best to collect this feedback.

These are the kind of questions that I would like to pose:

1. Is it clear when you visit the site, what it is that they do?
2. What is your first thought about the site when you visit it?
3. On the homepage, where is your eye drawn to immediately?
4. When wishing to purchase a product, would this product page draw you into the sale?
5. Do you get a general feeling of trustworthiness on the site?
6. Using the series of drop downs on the homepage, please choose any product and follow the process through to the checkout. Did you feel that this was engaging throughout?

Rather than yes/no answers I’d like the user to spend a good 5-10 minutes giving their detailed opinions so that we can gain some genuine inspiration on how best to improve the site.

What would be the best method of collecting this data? I was thinking perhaps Amazon Mechanical Turk but the thrust of the work offered there seems to be so diverse that I’m not sure we’d get people in tune with offering the kind of detailed answers that I’d be hoping for.

Thanks for your help.