Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Miriam

Yes, it does seem to be cookie related, but if you put moz.com/logout into your address bar and hit enter that seems to clear the session cookie that is causing the issue.

It may be quicker to do that and less destructive to other cookies you have active which you may not want to be cleared.

Peter

Hi Ash

Firstly let me say that I think your site looks good.

On the Quicklinks section, I don't think that is an issue. The number of internal links you have and your use of anchor text is not excessive at all.

This video by Google's Matt Cutts recorded earlier this year may help you: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ybpXU0ckKQ

The only thing I would be a little careful of is the balance of the visual blocks (which do contain some text) to the main text area of the page. There is more info here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/page-layout-algorithm-improvement.html but having said that the impact of that is only really on the entry pages to your site. Once you get to the pages you are linking to with the "read more" lnks then the balance is fine.

The only thing you may want to give attention to from an SEO perspective is the keywords used in your pages is whether or not you reference the fact that your pages are for "over 50s" enough. I couldn't see much reference to that. Whilst your site is called Over50choices suggesting the content is for over 50s, you need to be able to back that up with content that specifically talks about the "...over 50s..." or "...over fifties...", not in an excessive spammy way - as you need to write for your site visitors not humans - but enough to bring those words into the context of the pages.

I hope that helps,
Peter

Hi Amanda

You could just change your single pattern matched 301 to point all links to your old site to the home page of the new site. That way at least someone who clicks on a link to your old site will find the new site. Also without a 301 for all the links on your old site those old URLs are going to sit around in the indexes of search engines for a long time.

Peter

Hi David

First step would be to remove the link herself from those sites if she could get access. If that didn't work then at least try to contact the sites and ask them to remove the links

But if she is unsuccessful with those routes she would be to go through Google Webmaster Tools and start a process of disavowing those links one by one. This video by Google's Matt Cutts may help explain: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=393nmCYFRtA

Peter

I think it is true that many web developers think that because they build websites they also need to do SEO. But they are different disciplines and unless they have people with both disciplines in-house they may not be any good at SEO.

Yes, they need an understanding, but sometimes a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Without checking out what the web development company has to say about SEO - and I don't suggest you post their name here - it's difficult to say, but what you have described does make it sound that something with the SEO was not good!

Peter

Hi Amanda

How many 301 redirects do you have on your old site? From what you have said it sounds like just one. Is that correct of have I misunderstood something?

If you have pattern-matched all the URLs from your old site to your new site and if those URLs don't exist on your new site, then a 404 is exactly what you will get.

A single pattern-matched redirect will only work if the relative path on the new site to pages is the same relative path that it was on the old site. So if you have the following:

oldsite.com/big-widgets.html
oldsite.com/little-widgets.html
etc

and you just create a single 301 redirect that says all the pages on oldsite.com have now moved to newsite.com, then the URLs on the new site will be expected to be found at the same relative paths as follows:

newsite.com/big-widgets.html
newsite.com/little-widgets.html
etc

If they are not then you will get 404s.

If your new site has the same pages as on your old site but at a different relative path then the only way to 301 redirect the old URLs is to directly cross reference them. So, for example, if the big-widgets.html page on your new site was now at a URL of widgets-big.html you would need a direct 301 redirect from oldsite.com/big-widgets.html to newsite.com/widgets-big.html for the correct page to be found.

Having rambled on about this it may be that you have done nothing like I have said (sorry about that!), but it's just that when you said "so we switched to a 301 redirect", i.e. that sounds like just one 301 redirect, not many of them.

I hope my ramblings help!

Peter

Hi, fair comment, it is a legitimate tactic in the context of the example Matt gives in that video.

My concern - and that is where I should have taken more time to examine the backlink profile of monsterbins.com - was that I quickly saw those two sources of backlinks from the satellite sites and then (wrongly) thought you may have a bunch of others doing the same. So apologies for thinking that!

On the matter of your satellite sites, Takeshi is correct that domains with hyphens can be seen as spammy (see more info here: http://moz.com/learn/seo/domain). You purpose though is correct - to build quality content around the individual categories that make up the whole. But without a link profile to them, then you are likely to struggle. In this context and in my view, you are going to be better off growing content rich pages on the monsterbins.com site (e.g. a bins blog!) and promoting that site alone with valuable information that people will share and link to.

All the best to you with what you are doing.

Peter

Hi Kelley

I agree with your view of rightwingeye.com. It's just farming links.

If you have lots of incoming links to your site from sites like this one then yes, it is a risk. They will be serving very little link equity individually, but collectively they will deliver more, However, having links from sites like these is not worth having compared to the fall out if your site is seen as harvesting links from a lot of low quality sites.

Peter

Hi Kelley,

Welcome back to Moz and glad to hear your husband is better.

It sounds that the SEO company are spinning a yarn or two! Penguin and Panda are reasons for losing ground, but Hummingbird - at this stage! No, I don't believe that.

It's difficult to explain why your site has disappeared for so long and then to come back so quickly. Could it be that for some reason the SEO company put a robots.txt on the site that disallowed any indexing of the site other than the home page? I have seen that happen once before where the result was only a home page was indexed. It might be worth checking the date/timestamp of the robots.txt on the server to see when it was last updated.

How do you tell if the 140 + 20 sites are good or bad? Only really by going through each one checking their content and also perhaps checking them in Open Site Explorer. Target the ones you have identified already first and then begin to go through the others.

I hope that helps. All the best to you.

Peter

As Takeshi has said, I think the design of the site could do with some attention - especially the header.

Backlinks as Takeshi has also said can be an issue are are for this domain, but the biggest issue is that this isn't site where people buy bins from.

You linked to: http://plastic-storage-bins.com, but when you get down to the buy links you get taken to another domain: http://monsterbins.com which actually from a design point of view looks better and is also better off with backlinks.

Essentially, you are never going to rank your plastic-storage-bins.com site very well because it's just acting as a gateway to monsterbins.com and as such it's also passing most of the link equity it will earn to monsterbins.com.

The backlink profile on monsterbins.com suggests you are running at least one other satellite site (akro-bins.com) to send links to monsterbins, so I would be cautious as it could be perceived to be a little spammy.

I hope that helps,
Peter

Hi Danny

Yes the same. As Jesse said, it seems to be cookie related. It was happening earlier in the week too then there seemed to be a day when it was OK, now it's back.

I think it's caused when your login times out because of inactivity, but when you try to login again then the cookie thinks you are still logged in and so you never get taken to the login screen.

I have been clearing it by entering moz.com/logout into the address bar.

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

Hi, if you use Followerwonk that will show you all your followers in one place.

However, there isn't a differentiation with Twitter (unless it is something they have added recently) between a personal or a business account. So you can only check each of the profiles and try and work out which ones are personal and which are for business. Some will be obvious, some less so.

I know it's not the answer you were looking for specifically, but I hope it helps,

Peter

Hi,

I would go with option B as option A implies sub-folders. Rand Fishkin suggests the same in this blog post: 11 Best Practices for URLs which was written 7 years ago (that long?!), but I think this principle still holds true.

I hope that helps,
Peter

Hi,

You can subscribe to the Moz Top 10 here: http://moz.com/moztop10 if that is what you mean?

Peter

OK, I understand now.

Looking at the source code I think it is making it hard for a crawler (Moz or Google) to make sense of it. Combine that with the AJAX running as it is I think it is not straightforward for a person to navigate either - just saying it how it is for me as a visitor to the site

With regard to Google, I think this is further compounded for them to relate what they can crawl to pages it will serve as relevant results for a search.

On the AJAX stuff this blog post by Matthew Edgar on Moz may help:

Can Google Really Access Content in JavaScript? Really?

Particularly striking for me is what Matthew says at the end:

Yes, Google can execute some JavaScript to find content but Google has limitations on what it can do, and what it can understand. The best practice remains the same: put the content you want Google to crawl and index in basic HTML. For example, use jQuery tabs to put the content on one file instead of AJAX tabs that spreads out the content across several files. In short, make it easy for Google to access your content.

Sorry, I don't mean for my thoughts to be seen as negative, but I hope the info helps you in some way.

Peter

Hi, I looked at your site and could not see how the pagination is working as all I get if I scroll through the properties on the right-hand side is the page loading more properties dynamically so I never get to the end of page 1 it seems.

What am I misunderstanding?

Peter

Hi Ryan

There's a lot going on here, but from the sound of it, I think you are going the right way with it by not just focussing on the URLs (which are important) but backing it up with good content using various media.

I think the structure you have for the URLs is good too as domain->location->product. All I would say is to be careful on the product part of the URL (alo relating to your page Title tags) that it is a term that people understand and would use. For example, I have no idea what a Jet Park is, but it is possible I have been living in a cave on this and it is an understood term by your target market.

As I said in the paragraph above, make sure your page Title tags are correctly optimised as that is probably more important than the page URLs.

Finally, if you changing URLs, don't forget to create a set of 301 permanent redirects or add to the set for each page address you change and make live. You will get a small loss in current SEO value by using the 301 redirects, but by better optimising which is your reason for doing this you will gain back the ground and more.

I hope that helps,
Peter

That's a really helpful and comprehensive answer Marcus. Thank you for that!<thumbsup></thumbsup>

Peter

Hi

I would think that renting a Regus office address is no different to renting office space in any serviced office location.

It will always take a bit of time to establish a new address/location and be able to SEO around it, but name, address, phone number (with the local code prefix) on the site page(s) is an definite requirement.

Provided your client is not going to be there for a short time then I would back that up by growing citations of their office so that all "signposts" so to speak point to their legitimate office location.

Rand Fishkin spoke on this subject in a Whiteboard Friday back in May. You can watch it here: <a title="http://moz.com/blog/discovering-local-citation-opportunities-whiteboard-friday">Discovering Local Citation Opportunities - Whiteboard Friday</a>

I hope that helps,
Peter