Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Michelle & Blake

SEO has been changing a lot, especially over the last few months in particular. I would encourage you to optimise your product pages with clear structured categorised titles. They will inevitably incorporate keywords, but don't focus on the keywords as such, focus on clearly explaining the products to your site visitors in the subsequent product description.

In the future, sites that use multiple keywords per product are not going to gain an advantage by doing that - in fact it may even have a negative impact. SEO needs to be about writing for your audience, your site visitor, and making sure the content of your pages answer the questions they may be asking about your products and perhaps what related products you have.

It may hep your SEO in future to use structured data markup with your products (see http://schema.org/) but at this stage focus on getting your pages right as they are.

Using the same keywords for multiple products under the same category will be fine, but just distinguish them by using other words that describe them. For example, red sofa, black sofa, white sofa all repeat the word "sofa" but they are different.

Duplicate content will only come into play if you repeat a large proportion of the content of a page across two or more other pages on your site. If you focus on providing good clear descriptions for each product, you won't go far wrong.

I hope that helps,
Peter

Hi, the occasional server error won't affect your site in SERPs, but persistent issues over a shorter period of time are likely to. With this you would also be likely to see those errors reported in Google Webmaster Tools.

Essentially, if the search engines cannot index a site then they don't have anything to include in SERPs.

I hope that helps,
Peter

Hi Stephane

All sounds pretty wild and disconcerting. Where are you drawing your ranking results from? Could it be that personalisation is kicking in when you are logged in or out of Google or perhaps that you are testing results from different locations?

If you are not already then I would recommend you using the tools that come with Moz to do rank checking for the countries you are targeting. Moz's ranking tool depersonalises results as much as possible thereby giving you a more consistent way from week to week to check.

If you are using Moz to check your rankings then it's probably worth contacting Moz support to ask them to take a look.

Peter

Hi, it very much depends on the individual site and how often it is updated normally.

For pages like on this forum. Google spiders and updates within 30 minutes or so it seems. If your site is updated less often then it will take longer for Google to revisit.

A week would be a reasonable average I guess. I assume you submitted a sitemap? Was it just the Title tag and Meta description that changed?

It's possible you could still be queued for a revisit but I would have thought it wouldn't take much longer.

Peter

I love your whimsical answer Dana

Peter

Hi Josh

Without knowing the URL that you are specifically researching it's difficult to be sure, but I understand if you don't want to share that.

On the Open Site Explorer itself, what do you see if you click the Linking Domains tab?

If I put my site's domain in I see a list of the linking domains with a + symbol alongside each one. If I click that link, then it shows a link to each page on that linking domain that links to my site.

There is also a filter on this tab above the list of links which allows you to Shown Domains with links to: this page, pages on this sub-domain or pages on this root domain. Selecting on any of these and clicking the Filter button will show different pages of results.

I hope that helps,
Peter

Hi Gregory

To answer your question re the two links you have shown as examples...

http://mysite.com/http://mysite.com/randomword

Yes, this is essentially two links as follows: http://mysite.com/ and http://mysite.com/randomword so you need to split these.

http://mysite.com/">najboljih  and this

http://mysite.com/…word/new-word.html

The first one is not a valid link - this decodes to http://mysite.com/">najboljih

The second one has tried to encode non-standard characters so it is represented as two digit Hexadecimal codes - this decodes to http://mysite.com/ÔǪword/new-word.html which with the %xx codes could decode to a genuine URL but it looks suspect.

Are these links from another site?

Peter

Hi Rajat

The analytics code may have given some signals to Google of pages to index but to test it the staging server's pages are in Google use site:mysite.com/staging (NB. no spaces between site and the domain name).

Peter

Hi Ash

The value of anchor text for internal links doesn't change as far as I know dependent on where they are used. It's more a case of making sure you use anchor text appropriately.

By that I mean particularly on pages where you have article body text. It's good to have links in your body text, but not too much. Only link text which will help the visitor navigate to where they want to go, not for the benefit of search engines to spider your website. Too many links just disturbs the reader and diverts them from linking through to stuff that's important. It also looks spammy to search engines.

Peter

Hi Doug, one aspect you haven't mentioned which I have found still works for a service business covering an area is to use Google Places.

Providing the business has a physical address at the centre of their 'patch' so to speak then that's a marker on the map from which the service operates in a radius.

In terms of landing pages on the site then yes do that with a clear reference to the town/city address and phone number (which will be certified by the office's corresponding Google Places page) and include on that page a list of areas covered which are geographically associated with the office location.

Peter

Hi, if you put site:xxx.com into Google where xxx.com is your client's domain name, does Google report anything?

Peter

Hi Greg

If these links have been arriving at your site and producing 404s then they must have a legitimate format so you should be able to redirect them. BUt it may be a limitation of your cPanel redirect form that is rejecting the links you are entering.

In your form, essentially you should need to select the domain you are creating a redirection for (.e.g. bestdryingrack.com and then copy the text after the domainname/ (i.e. after the forward slash) into the textbox alongside. In the redirects to box below enter the full URL including http:// for the page you want the link redirected to.

If you are on a Linux server then your cPanel will be adding the redirections it creates into a file called .htaccess in the root of your web server. If the form doesn't work, then it may be worth trying to add the redirections manually to the .htaccess file.

There is a site here which will help you create the 301 redirects and may not be as fussy as your cPanel form is.

I hope that helps,

Peter

Hi Rajat,

No what I mean is put the following query into the search box

site:<yourdomainname>/<yourstagingfolder></yourstagingfolder></yourdomainname>

where yourdomainname is your domain name (e.g. mysite.com) and yourstagingfolder is your staging folder (e.g. staging), so ike this:

site:mysite.com/staging

Peter

Hi, the Moz assessment of keyword difficulty for "send SMS online" is 62% which is defined as follows:

Highly Competitive
Powerful sites with strong pages tend to dominate these results. Links in quantity and quality (at both the domain and page level) are required to earn top rankings.

I think if you don't have a site established and a track history for this already, then your chances of ranking well enough to earn traffic from search engine clicks is small to zero. If you have a product to sell for this term then my advice is that you are better off spending any money you have to pursue this by using Google Adwords. But then at the USD 2.12 cost you listed, then it's possible you won't see a return there unless you are hoping to sell packages for sending SMS online in high volumes.

I hope that helps,
Peter

Sorry Doug, I had assumed Google Places / Google+ Local had not been set up.

I understand more now. I think it is a tricky one as without a certified address I think it's difficult to optimise web pages.  I agree, the wider the area the less specific/relevant it's going to be,

I think your strategy to set up specific landing pages for an area where the trades person works in and can publish testimonials relevant to that location is an excellent one. If they are a builder or decorator for example, then if their customer is willing, then it would be good to include a case study of the work done along with before/after photos with alt tags optimised to include the location.

There's a lady on Moz called Miriam Ellis who is really knowledgeable on Local SEO. Hopefully, she will pick up and be able to comment on this thread and give some direction. Meantime, in case you haven't seen it, she wrote a very helpful blog post: Top 20 Local Search Ranking Factors: An Illustrated Guide.

I hope that helps a little further,
Peter

Hi, no problem. Keri has answered your query re the Moz crawler not finding them.

Peter

Hi Iris

Yes, I recommend you do exactly that.

IMHO, tag links are useful for someone browsing your site to help them find categories of pages which suit what they are looking for. But tag links are generally not so good for search engines as they auto generate pages which you have no or limited SEO control over.

Peter

Hi Nick

If you are ranking well for a number of private equity definitions and terms and have been increasing rank in those terms, then I would consider that a win. That are you are losing rank for "private equity firms" is possibly down to Google understanding the intent of search queries better and deciding that your site is better served and more authoritative for the other terms.

I know that sounds strange as your domain is exact match, but Google won't be ranking because of that. As your site offers a service via subscription to private equity firms then that takes your site one step away from Google providing a result for that query which probably hampers your site compared to other sites that possibly rank higher.

I hope that helps,
Peter

Hi Luke

HTML sitemaps are suitable for humans because you can then put them up as a HTML page that can be viewed and clicked from. XML sitemaps are really for search engines and are the standard that Google, Bing and Yahoo all prefer. See more info here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sitemap#XML_Sitemaps

I hope that helps,
Peter

Hi Rajat

In terms of your site having 1000+ images in reality it is just one. In my view, if your pages are 2000+ words long then the re-use of the subscribe button shouldn't be a problem. All I would say on that is does that button need to appear on every page or just some types of pages? Only use it where needed.

Yes you could add a nofollow link but again ask yourself why the button is there. Is it there just as a call to action for users or does the page it directs to have more related information and therefore more value to Google to index and provide extended information. If just a call to action then probably best to make the links nofollow and just have follow links on one page.

On the legal disclaimer, I say keep it as text. If the repeated content is small then it isn't an issue.

I hope that helps,
Peter