Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Yeah, the author in particular looks as spammy as a well known Monty Python sketch.

Thanks for your help.

Cheers Andy, would you also remove all of these?

author" content="<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Ink Cartridges, Inkjet Cartridge, Printer Cartridge, Toner Cartridges Refresh Cartridges</a>" />
expires" content="<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank">0</a>" />
robots" content="<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank">noodp,index,follow</a>" />
Language" content="<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank">English</a>" />
Cache-Control" content="<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Public</a>" />
verify-v1" content="<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank">sJXqAAWP6ar/LTEOMyUgG6nqothxk62tJTid+ryBJxo=</a>" />

Hey,

I know this has been discussed to death but look back through previous postings there doesn't seem to be a consensus on the exact Meta tags that an eCommerce site should include, specifically whether to remove the keyword tag or not since it is believed that Yahoo potentially still makes use of it.

Currently our homepage has the following Meta Tags:

<title>Buy Printer Cartridges | Ink and Toner Cartridge for Inkjet and Laser Printers</title>

Description" content="<a class="attribute-value">Visit Refresh Cartridges for great prices on ink cartridges, toner cartridges, ink, printers and accessories.</a>" />

Keywords" content="<a class="attribute-value">ink cartridges, cheap cartridges, inkjet cartridges, inkjet ink cartridges, ink cartridge, printer ink cartridges, laser cartridges, toner, laser printers</a>" />

Content-Type" content="<a class="attribute-value">text/html; charset=iso-8859-1</a>"/>

author" content="<a class="attribute-value">Ink Cartridges, Inkjet Cartridge, Printer Cartridge, Toner Cartridges Refresh Cartridges</a>" />

expires" content="<a class="attribute-value">0</a>" />

robots" content="<a class="attribute-value">noodp,index,follow</a>" />

Language" content="<a class="attribute-value">English</a>" />

Cache-Control" content="<a class="attribute-value">Public</a>" />

verify-v1" content="<a class="attribute-value">sJXqAAWP6ar/LTEOMyUgG6nqothxk62tJTid+ryBJxo=</a>" />

viewport" content="<a class="attribute-value">width=1024</a>" />

This is too messy but before I do something drastic that I'll possibly regret please can you confirm that, in your opinion, I am best to remove everything with the exception of this:

<title>Buy Printer Cartridges | Ink and Toner Cartridge for Inkjet and Laser Printers</title>

Description" content="<a class="attribute-value">Visit Refresh Cartridges for great prices on ink cartridges, toner cartridges, ink, printers and accessories.</a>" />

Content-Type" content="<a class="attribute-value">text/html; charset=iso-8859-1</a>"/>
viewport" content="<a class="attribute-value">width=1024</a>" />

I realise there is a verify-v1 tag in there but this can be done through a file on our server so while cleaning up that might as well go. Would there be an argument for keeping any of the other tags or are they all pretty much redundant now?

Many thanks!

Chris

Hi Gregory,

That's a nice idea, I think I'll give that a go.

I think all I want at this point is for someone to take a couple of hours every month to take a look, see what work we've done, provide some fresh ideas, point us in the right direction and then leave us alone for another month while we work on the points given along with integrating our own ideas.

Thanks again 

Hi Keri,

Thanks for your response; I did think about contacting a couple of them even though I didn't think that we would be a great match together just to see if anything came up.

Then I figured if these guys are used to earning $500 an hour then it didn't seem fair to take up their time in this way if I knew we probably wouldn't end up working together!

Hey,
I love the resources available to me through Moz.com and although I've found it's possible to make a half decent attempt at improving our site using these tools. I have however got to the point where it would be nice to have a second opinion as my view on our site and what can be achieved is no doubt somewhat stale.

Obviously asking the community through Q&A is a start and I have benefited greatly in the past from your advice but I wouldn't expect anybody to give our site more than a two minute glance for free. As such I'm hoping to locate someone that I can pay to talk things over with just to get some fresh ideas and perhaps a list of tasks that my staff and I can continue to undertake over the coming months.

I appreciate that Moz has a list of recommended SEO companies however these all seem to be targeted towards larger brands and I can imagine a relationship with one of these companies being less personal than I would like. Asides from going through lists of users and checking out their profiles individually, is there a resource that lists the smaller independent on Moz.com and if so where can I find it?

Alternatively are their any external resources that might help me to find someone that would be a good match?
Thanks for your help.

Chris

Many thanks for your response. The 301's were implemented around April 2012 - There were a couple of  URL's which were missed however and this would probably explain the cached versions that you've picked up on.

I've just checked two dozen URL's at random and have only picked up on three pages that are cached and these are the first three results on the first page. The remaining pages don't seem to have cached versions available which would insinuate that Google hasn't been able to crawl them for some time.

I've just set up Google Webmaster Tools to ignore the dispmode variable so thanks for the heads up on this feature which I've completely glazed over in the past. On the assumption that the 301's were set up correctly would you imagine that configuring WMT do disallow crawling of these pages would speed up the removal process?

I'll keep this one short and sweet  

Many moons ago we used to have several different methods of sorting our products and this change in sort order was achieved by having ?dispmode=list or ?dispmode=grid after the product URL. Best part of a year ago we decided to scrap this feature and 301'd all the ?dispmode URL's back to the base URL.

The funny thing is that Google don't seem to have dropped a single one of the old URL's from their index and a search for site:www.refreshcartridges.co.uk dispmode returns almost 8,000 results.

This isn't a massive problem but I'd have expected in the past year they'd have picked up on a couple of the 301's and would have started removing the old results. I'd hate to think we were getting any kind of penalisation for duplicate pages.

I know the answer to this question is going to be 'just be patient, the old results will disappear' but just to ensure we're not missing anything stupid. I'd really appreciate it if someone could check out www.refreshcartridges.co.uk/brother-c-223.html?dispmode=list to confirm there's nothing more we could be doing to get these old results removed from the index.

Many thanks

It's not an issue at all - Don't get me wrong I'm not in a hurry to get the low quality stuff back again!  

Hey,
Over the last six months or so we've been going through our backlink profile and cleaning up links from poor quality sources. Week by week there have been small changes in our Google Webmaster Tools 'links to your site' section to reflect this.

I logged on this morning however and there has been a dramatic shift in the information displayed. Pretty much every bad link has been removed from the list including sites I know for a fact are still linking to us as they didn't communicate at all to our removal requests.

Additionally, rather than showing the top 1000 links to our site as it used to, WMT is only showing 73 linking domains. The remaining 73 domains are good natural links from high quality sources.

I'm guessing Google are just in the middle of an update and that the remaining linking domains (including the bad ones) will reappear shortly. This isn’t a request for advice or help but I’m just curious as to whether anybody else is seeing anything similar?

Thank-you so much for your response, Oleg.

I have read through both guides and, on the basis that we have a dedicated server with TONS of unused bandwidth / CPU resources / Disk Space I think it might be an idea to self-host... Even if nothing else it would be nice not to have YouTube harassing our customers with adverts / related videos!

That having been said it would be nice to have the self-help guides on both our site and YouTube.  This would mean that we could potentially gain visitors via our Youtube channel but that people who were already on the site would see our self hosting version and so would be less likely to leave after watching the video.

Would you anticipate any duplication issues if we were to post our content on both our own site and YouTube?

Hi,
We're about to start integrating video content on our eCommerece site in order to bolster the quantity and diversity of useful content that each page presents a potential customer.  We’re talking product reviews, information relating to the differences between different products and company information.  From an SEO perspective it has been suggested that Google will like this however I have a question regarding the actual method of integration.

Usually I would just insert some embed code linking to the correct video on our YouTube channel however I’m really conscious that a search engine will just see the embed code, notice the page loads slightly slower and not really gain anything useful from the video file.

I’m assuming that this isn’t the case but I have several questions:

-          Would you host on YouTube and simply insert the embed code in to the page.  Would any alternative site (or even self-hosted) be preferable?

-          Should I be padding out either side of the embed code with a description of the video and an annotation on OUR site?

-          Does Google actually look at the link and ascertain the relevance of the video file to the actual page?   If it does this does it gain anything useful that could help on-page SEO?

These are probably all pretty basic questions for which I do apologise but I want to make sure that before spending a sizable amount of time on this that we start off with a correct integration!

Many thanks

Lovely, thanks again buddy - Very much appreciated   

That's cool.  It did seem odd including my brand since we are a small company however the advice given in the private question was specifically to include the brand name.  Unless there are any advances I'm going to change the title now as per Irving's advice to:

Buy Printer Cartridges | Ink and Toner Cartridge for Inkjet and Laser Printers

Thanks again for your help guys.

Many thanks Irving; that's spot on.

One question, would you suggest leaving off our brand name entirely?

Thanks again.

Many thanks Tom.  With regards to the Brand Term would you suggest my company name or some brands that we stock - I'm guessing the former but I'm thinking if this gets included on more than a couple of pages I could suffer duplication issues.

In my mind this seems unspammy and unlikely to conflict with other page titles such as 'Toner Cartridges' and 'Inkjet Cartridges'.  I would also plan to leave the company name off of any other titles.

Low Cost Printer Cartridges | Refresh Cartridges

It does seem very untargeted however.

Hi Everett,

Many thanks for getting in contact.  I did actually ask this as a private question and got quite a good response and thought it might be a good idea to share it in case anybody else has this issue.  A screenshot is included as a link.

| | Nov 30, 2012Jasmine AyePaid Search Marketer at Distilled

Hey Chris,

In this instance it appears that Google is grouping all vendors by ink-type. Specifically here: http://www.google.co.uk/products/... There are several vendors listed. ColcUSA seems to have the price advertised at £5.

I don't know how your name came up that way, and I'm not able to replicate the issue. When I even searched "Refresh Cartridges Ink" I couldn't get that to reappear.  When I did, ColcUSA did appear as the vendor on the right side.

But the prices being advertised are not yours and Google is just suggesting the cheapest price that the ink retails for. Does this happen every time you search?

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| | Dec 2, 2012 | EditChris HolgateDirector at Refresh eCommerce Ltd

Hi Jasmine,

Hmmmmm.... perhaps this search is regionalised somewhat; the issue doesn't affect our main site but we have three stores and the incorrect product data appears for the Google Local searches.  I should have posted a screenshot really in the first instance I suppose so here's one now  

http://imgur.com/1FFkx

It's definitely stating the products are from us and if you click through it does indeed link to the correct page on our website but the prices are completely different.

We do have a Google Product feed but this does convey the correct pricing which then does appear when going a Google Product Search rather than a Google Local Search.

I hope I'm making sense but in all honesty, I've confused myself somewhat!

Many thanks

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| | Dec 3, 2012Jasmine AyePaid Search Marketer at Distilled

UGH!!! i just typed this answer and the internet ate it! grrr....

http://imgur.com/dTDzz This is an alternate way to view the information. The list view that you're showing me has cut this information down incorrectly and inserted avg star reviews per product, most local store, and cheapest price.

I'm afraid the only way to get this changed is to call AdWords and complain. Now that Google Shopping & AdWords have been blurred together they might be able to help, or register your complaint differently.

There's not really a way to change it because the information you put together is correct, but Google's formula for presenting this information is a mashup of all the data they have available to them.

I'm not even capable of clicking on any of these listings (in list or tile format) that will allow me to click through directly to your site. I get a list of retailers with correct prices.

Does this make any sense? I know it doesn't help the fact that your store is being shown with an incorrect price, but it's definitely not your fault.

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| | Dec 5, 2012 | EditChris HolgateDirector at Refresh eCommerce Ltd

Ahhhhhhhhhh.... I see, so the price given is the lowest price available on the Internet, not the actual price that we're selling the items at.  This is really, REALLY unclear in list view mode.

I guess that's good news however; I was worried that we'd set something up incorrectly and that Google would come down on us like a ton of bricks in a couple of weeks time.

Thanks for your help, it's very much appreciated.

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| | Dec 5, 2012Jasmine AyePaid Search Marketer at Distilled

Yay! Glad I could help! I'll mark this as resolved, but this question should still be open to discussion. If you have any problems in the future please feel free to pick it back up!

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| | Dec 5, 2012 | EditChris HolgateDirector at Refresh eCommerce Ltd

Many thanks Jasmine!

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