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Hi,

I have two pages appearing in positions 11 and 12 for the keyword: 80 btl mortgage. These are:

• https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk/btl/landlord-advice/mortgages/btl-mortgage-80-ltv/
• https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk/btl/product-types/80-buy-to-let-mortgages/

Both pages are good, provide useful information and I would not wish to remove one of them. However, I am concerned that the reason neither one of the pages is on page 1 is because the keywords targeted on both pages is essentially the same.

Should I reoptimise one of them for other variations of 80 BTL mortgage keywords? (e.g. 80% LTV Buy to Let Mortgage, 80 Buy to Let Mortgage, etc etc)

Or, is there another solution I haven't yet thought of?

I welcome your insights!

Thanks!

Amelia

_Google knows that Tenerife is a geographic location in the Canary Islands.  This website has the word Tenerife on it many times.  It has pages with Tenerife in the title, in the URL. _

Egol is just explaining why their page shows up for 'Tenerife' searches.

I have no idea if you're targeting tourists, but I expect you are, this means you're effectively targeting two types of customer - those that plan ahead and those than plan 'on the fly'.

So if I wanted an escort for my trip to Tenerife (LOL, no, I don't... happily married lady!) I might search for one before I leave the UK to get it all organised ahead of time. So I would search 'Escorts in Tenerife' (and maybe localise even further to find one close to where I was staying)...

Or, I may be lonely on one night when I get to Tenerife, and do a search to find an escort from Tenerife.

These two scenarios might show different results - the person searching from Tenerife would get localised results, whereas the person searching from the UK is relying on 'Tenerife' being included on the website to appear in the SERPs.

I hope this makes sense!

I think Egol has a lot of great information to share, and I've often found his /her responses to questions in this forum to be very useful and informative. That last comment though was a little harsh, but the point is: _if you feel the current situation is hard to overcome, then imagine how bad it would be if they did know what they are doing!!! _This is how I read it anyway. Perhaps it's just a case of what my colleague calls ‘the impersonal interaction impertinence imperative’ - sounds like something from the hitch hikers guide, doesn't it! But basically means sometimes written, impersonal communications, can be misinterpreted. I often send stuff that sounds harsher than it's meant to be because I forget that sarcasm and suchlike are not easy to interpret in written form!

I'm glad you found my answer helpful

As always, EGOL has some great insights and I agree with them...

Onsite usage metrics are also used in the algo. I'm not entirely sure exactly what Google uses, but I imagine it's something like bounce rate (though not bounce rate as they've said they don't use it... but they lie too so they might do!...), time on site, pages per visit - that kind of thing. The stuff that tells you if people are engaging with your website.

They also use organic CTR (though again, I don't think this is ever explicitly stated by them) - if your CTR is high then they will reward you (though a high CTR with bad usage metrics would not on its own help you - rather hinder I think).

This is why pi$$ poor sites often end up in high positions - people like them. Doesn't always make sense, but if the site you mention provides something people want, they aren't going to CARE whether it's been 'SEO'd' or not - and really Google doesn't either. If visitor behaviour indicates that people are getting value from visiting that site then Google is not going to move it from its high position - until you provide something that people like more and importantly onsite behaviour indicates the same.

Hope this helps

Thanks Leonie. I'm pretty sure we're not the only ones with this problem!

Hi,

I've apparently got too many on-page links on 79 of my webpages.

The majority of these pages are category pages, like this: https://www.turnkeymortgages.co.uk/mortgage-advice/mortgages/... so, what's a person to do? Obviously the page would be useless without the links. Should I just ignore these 'errors'? Or is there something else I should do? I don't want to appear manipulative by labelling them nofollow...

Thanks,

Amelia

Hi,

This is a fairly old article, but should have some good, relevant tips in nonetheless. http://moz.com/blog/15-tips-to-speed-up-your-website.

You can also see speed reports in analytics - It's under the 'behaviour' menu. I think it tells you how to fix specific elements that are taking a long time to load.

Hope this helps!

Amelia

Thank you Mick.

You want those old spam pages to have a 410 code - gone (permanently). I'm not 100% sure how you will achieve this though... I'd speak to your hosting company and/or web developer.

404 code means the page is 'not found' which isn't the same as 410, which tells the search engines that the page has gone forever, so they won't keep looking for it.

Hope this helps!

Amelia

I think it depends on what they do. A copywriter needs to know different things to a web developer - for example....

Hi,

I am in a little bit of a pickle, and hope that you clever people can help me...

A little background:

In April this year we relaunched one of our brands as a standalone business. I set up page to page 301 redirects from the old website to the new branded domain. From an SEO perspective this relaunch went amazingly smoothly - we only lost around 10% of traffic and that was just for a couple of months. We now get more traffic than ever before. Basically it's all going swimmingly.

I noticed yesterday that the SSL certificate on the old domain has expired, so I asked IT to repurchase one for us to maintain the 301 redirects. IT are saying that they would prefer to do a name server redirect instead, which would remove all the page to page 301s.  They are saying that this would maintain the SEO. As far as I am aware this wouldn't. Please can someone help me put together a polite but firm response to basically say no?

Thanks, I really welcome and appreciate your help on this!

Amelia

DMCA is free, yes.

Sounds like you could file a DMCA on the copied site.

Not sure what to say about the dodgy 301s though. Sorry, I wish I could help more

It doesn't seem normal. Have you done a whois lookup on the domain? May be worth contacting the domain owner, because it could all be a horrible mistake on their part.

I don't really know what to suggest you do beyond this though... I'd be interested to know what other people say.

I thought pagerank algorithm was largely redundant these days? But good points, thank you!

Yes, I am very interested in universal search.

Phew... I'm not weird!!!

Thanks for your comment, you raise a good point about bad user experience. I'm looking at stuff to improve ours, but tbh it's not that bad... I need to look at our longtail landing pages in better detail, but our main core pages have low bounce rates which I take as being a positive thing.

I used to work for a company that had a subsidiary company that did online videos, the premise for selling the videos to SEO clients was that if people watch a video then bounce rate goes down and dwell time goes up, which is a good thing for rankings... Been thinking about this as an option, but it's expensive to get GOOD videos. (I don't mean over-priced, I mean out of my price range).

Amelia

Hi folks,

I may be shooting WAY off the mark here for it to be laughable, but I wondered if anyone else was thinking about this.

I was trying to get to sleep last night, but was thinking about rankings (as you do... You DO think about rankings instead of counting sheep don't you... I'm not weird or anything am I... AM I?) and it occurred to me that maybe Google uses frequency of brand queries as a ranking signal - was wondering if anyone had done any research into this?

Assuming that if more people are searching for a brand name, then there must be an outside influence on this behaviour (offline ads or editorial for example) - and this all points to a site or company being popular or interesting - maybe Google looks at the growth in brand name queries, and boosts based on this...

I have done no research into this (I was just thinking about it instead of counting sheep last night... because I probably AM weird...) but was wondering what people here thought of this.

Also, I don't have time (or intelligence TBH) to run an experiment on this, but maybe one of you bright sparks would?

Best wishes,

Amelia

PS - if I'm being STOOPID please be gentle with me

Pixel, you're much more helpful than me!

Yeah, if sites that are linking to you have been hit then you may lose rankings. Penguin may have devalued some of your links as well (not the same as penalised, be aware), which would also lose you rankings.

Like a previous commenter has said, wait a week or so before panicking.

Look at onsite stuff as well, really a site doesn't need that many links if the content and site are well built and follow best practice. (by not many links I mean not many high value ones - you'd need thousands of poor value ones to rank well - but you'd always be looking over your shoulder for a big fat penguin chasing you down!)

Also, look at your competition - what's happened to the sites that share your vertical? Has any of them suddenly shot up in the serps? Maybe they've had a penguin penalty lifted and you're the collateral? Sometimes we lose ranking because another site in the same vertical does something better than us - hard to admit I know, but worth bearing in mind.

Best of luck with this!

Amelia

Build great content that people want to link back to.

If your competitors have stolen your content and are profiting from it then do everything you can to get it removed! DMCA, write to the sites, write to the hosts.

Do NOT move the content to an archive URL before doing the DMCA or Google won't know that you originally created it. This happened to us - another mortgage broker stole some content from one of our main sales landing pages, we didn't notice until after redesigning our website, and of course our new urls had a later date stamp than the site that stole our content so our listings started to drop (whole site, not JUST the page that had been copied). We got the listings back within a month of filing the DMCA,  but still, it galls that our content may have persuaded customers to contact the other company! They should have been our customers!

By all means rewrite/refresh the content if its 2 years old, but do it as well as the DMCA.

Good luck with this - I feel your pain,

Amelia