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Yes, I only really use it for the ranking. Though, having said that I have recently used the Audit tool, which alerted me to some errors I'd not yet discovered....

I've noticed the same thing.

I guess it's a good indicator if you think of it in relative terms, but I wouldn't take the estimated traffic figures as gospel.

I may be being pedantic here but I think the correct status code should be 410 not 404 if the page has gone for good and you don't have a relevant place to redirect traffic to, as per the scenario described.

I believe if Google finds a 410 page, it'll be removed from the index but because 404 is 'file not found' the page may stay in the index, potentially giving bad user experience as outlined by Matt Williamson.

However, I would always redirect if you can - even if you just send traffic to the homepage, it's got to be a better user experience than sending them to a 404 page. I think anyway!

More info here: http://moz.com/learn/seo/http-status-codes

You mention a concern over too many redirects - I think this page may help eliminate your fears: http://www.stateofdigital.com/matt-cutts-there-is-no-limit-to-direct-301-redirects-there-is-on-chains/

Thanks,

Amelia

Was going to suggest the same thing!

If you find a way to do this, please let me know!

I researched this earlier in the year and there wasn't anything available (though I'm not looking for stock market mark-up but mortgage product mark-up - but still financial products). I did email Schema to suggest they made something available for financial products. I guess the more people who ask for it the more likely it'll become available?

I was trying to politely say that you have some old advice that I don't think is worth investing any time on.

If you want nitty-gritty details read the moz blogs and seo starter guides for newbies. Read from 2014 onwards (SEO info gets out-dated very quickly and you kind of have to keep up-to-date with it regularly - the longer you do it the more adept you'll become at sorting the wheat from the chaff in terms of 'advice' - I have read newly published SEO guides this year offering advice that if followed could potentially get a site blacklisted today but would have worked in 2009! - it's annoying because any Tom, Dick or Harry can say they are and SEO expert - it doesn't mean they are one!)

Ignore any 'advice' that says 'this is an easy fix' because there aren't any.

Good luck.

I would take any SEO 'rules' with a pinch of salt.

Build pages for people first, worry about search engines afterwards. At the end of the day, search engine spiders are never going to buy cat toys off of you, but people will (assuming your example). Make your site easy for people to use, and the conversions will follow. Google is looking more and more at user engagement (check out the latest whiteboard Friday - http://moz.com/blog/the-massive-ranking-factor-too-many-seos-are-ignoring-whiteboard-friday) so look at ways of improving these before worrying about where to put your links - it really doesn't matter overly much.

Good luck,

Amelia

PS - this 'first link rule' sounds like 'old' advice to me, and may have worked well several years ago, but I highly doubt it makes much difference in 2014 (2015 soon!).

A similar thing happened to me once. In my case, the DNS settings were incorrect. Check that

I second TheeDesign - do the change of address in Webmaster tools. Double-check your 301's. Then check them again...

Good luck, it's possible to do without a penalty. I did it earlier in the year, I lost a little traffic in the first month, then gained ever since (except for current - no one wants to visit a mortgage broker's website during Christmas because they have much better things to do, like eating mice pies and sipping mulled wine!!!)

I would employ a translator. People can interpret nuances in languages that a machine (however brilliant) just cannot. Google translate is great if you just want to translate a few words here and there but a whole website? It'll read like a badly translated flat-pack furniture installation manual!

Good luck, whatever you choose to do

My guess is that these URLs you list have been hacked. I would inform the site owners if you can find their contact details. They can sort it out from there to remove the offending pages. If I owned one of those websites, I would want to investigate the possibility of being hacked.

well said

Thank you for answering this question, it's much appreciated.

Thank you. Yes, I use SEMRush - I actually really like their tools for both SEO stuff and Adwords.

I'm going to do as you suggest - make the content more different on each page.

Thanks again for your time to answer this, it's much appreciated.

Best wishes,

Amelia

Thank you Monica. I like your answer best, it's the most positive! I don't want to delete any pages so if I take your experience that the same site can appear for the same keyword more than once on page 1, and that 'all' I need is more links, then that's pretty clear...

You're right, the two pages are NOT identical, I try to be really careful with duplicate content! It's a bugbear of mine.

I will definitely look at the other sites that appear above ours and see if we can do anything to improve ours.

Thank you,

Amelia

LOL that's great!

Hmmmm... maybe this should be in my strategy! (KIDDING)

You're right, we don't have many links. I'm not actively building links as I worry about Penguin these days. I am trying to optimise onsite as well as I can, and have a plan to carry out PR work to get national press coverage to earn links that way instead of building them in the old-fashioned way that I used to do back in 2009...! I think this is a better approach as news coverage for companies that offer financial services like we do is more likely to build trust than pretty much any other method of link bulding would.

The upside of this is it kills two birds with one stone - gets us links from authority sites AND builds trust in our brand with the public - I see this as a 'win win' situation.

Thanks for your input today, it is greatly appreciated!

Best wishes,

Amelia

(Not Provided) means I don't actually know for sure exactly what keywords are driving traffic to these pages. However, I am tracking 8 related keywords:

<colgroup><col width="333"></colgroup>
|

• 80 buy to let mortgages

• 80 ltv buy to let mortgages

• 80 btl mortgage

• buy to let mortgage rates 80 ltv

• 80 buy to let mortgage

• buy to let mortgage deals 80 ltv

• 80 ltv buy to let mortgage

• 80 btl mortgages

|

The product page (https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk/btl/product-types/80-buy-to-let-mortgages/) is on page 2 for all the above keywords. The best position is 11, and the worst is 16. Obviously I want page 1!

The Landlord Advice article (https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk/btl/landlord-advice/mortgages/btl-mortgage-80-ltv/) is on page 2 for just three of the tracked keywords:

• 80 btl mortgage
• 80 btl mortgages
• buy to let mortgage deals 80 ltv

My concern was that the product page was being held back from page 1 because Google has difficulty distinguishing between them and deciding which to put first. As it stands, the product page is not 'optimised' for all the keywords it appears for as we took the view that trying to get a page to list for multiple keywords was not going to be easy so my colleague wrote the advice page to cover off some of the keywords. This doesn't seemed to have done the trick though!

Your point about customers is really important. You're absolutely right: we need to determine what visitors are expecting when they search for these keywords - I suspect they want to see rates, which is why we created the macros to place at the top of the pages to display the most up-to-date rates (updated twice daily, which is more often than our competitors do!), but that does homogenise the content somewhat. I did wonder if we should display more than three rates on one page but, the market for these products is small so I think there may ONLY be three products available anyway...

I don't think people particularly read the content on any of our pages (nobody has the time) but I can use SessionCam to spy on visits. I think I will do this to see if the content is actually being read. It may be that all we need to do is display a rates table because that's all people want, but Google wants content....

Thank you so much for taking time to answer my question, I really appreciate it.

Best wishes,

Amelia

Thank you - I question the logic behind this though... The two pages are not identical, so I don't believe that a canonical tag is appropriate here. I am open to being persuaded otherwise though!

I am appreciative of the time you have taken to answer this question.

Best wishes,

Amelia

Thank you, yes one page definitely gets more traffic and converts better than the other. I have a third 80% BTL mortgage page, which targets longtail: https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk/btl/landlord-advice/mortgages/80-buy-to-let-mortgages/  - this was written to be an informational article rather than a sales page. It links through to the product page (https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk/btl/product-types/80-buy-to-let-mortgages/) and other, similar product pages (other high LTV mortgage pages - e.g. 85% LTV BTL mortgages - this is the highest LTV the market goes on BTL mortgages at the moment).

I appreciate your answer and input and am grateful to you for putting the time in to answer.

Thank you for your input, it's much appreciated.