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This is a common problem > product pages ranking instead of landing pages (or category pages). There's no silver bullet, but a few tips I can give you.

1. Make sure the landing/category pages is optimized with lots of unique content. A category page that simply links to products is going to have a hard time ranking post Panda. This means unique text, photos and external links.

2. Make sure your product pages all link back to the category/landing pages with proper anchor text. Breadcrumbs at a minimum.

3. Link your category pages to other category pages

4. Optimize your product pages for the most unique thing about them. Instead of "Brand B shoes red size 11" optimize them for "red shoes, size 11, brand B"

Keep going in this direction and you get the idea. Cheers!

I'm going to go against the grain and say this doesn't look like a duplicate content issue to me - at least based on text. There's enough unique content on those pages that you shouldn't be falling into those filters. No one can say for sure - that's simply based on my experience.

That said, there are other signals around these pages that are very similar. Namely things like title tags and anchor text.

Title Tags:

• The Wildlife & Beaches of Kenya - Natural World Safaris
• Ultimate Kenya Wildlife and Beaches Safari - Natural World Safaris
• Wildlife & Beach Family Safari - Natural World Safaris

From a topic perspective, are these differentiated enough? They seem to target very similar topics and keywords. ... and the anchor text to these pages follows similar patterns, mostly internal links from the sidebar.

So long story short, these pages may not be differentiated enough that they may be interpreted as dupe content (or thin content topics, as it were) and there simply aren't enough external signals to keep these pages afloat.

The solution may be to consolidate or group these pages into themes. Make sure you have strong "hub" pages that link everything together (think Trip Advisor)

One other thing of note - I notice the page is JavaScript dependent. Because of this, make sure to perform a "Fetch and Render" in Google Webmaster Tools, and make sure the page displays correctly. If it doesn't, be sure to address any issues.

While I can't say for sure, I'd say you're safer off keeping any existing anchors as-is. Changing existing links could have unintended consequences, and you don't know what the effect will be of keeping them the same.

As for your title tags and other site elements, if you are doing a domain migration, it's best to keep as many elements exactly the same as possible - at least during and in the first couple months after the transition. In this case, I'd ask if your visitors will recognize the new brand name, and if it makes sense to keep the old keywords.

Shouldn't cause an issue either way. Moving from http to https is one of those edge cases. But basically, it's a login page so link equity really isn't a factor (most of those links are likely to be ignored or devalued anyway) and it's not really a reciprocal link.

My advice - don't sweat it.

That's a pickle!

Yeah, whatever you choose I might suggest making the changes gradually. Introduce elements one at a time instead of all at once. In this way, you might be able to preserve some of your established link equity and relevancy signals.

Hi there,

Google tends to consider text in the main content areas more than text in supplemental areas (like the sidebar) and text in certain areas (i.e. the meta keywords tag, title element on images/links) may be ignored entirely. On the other hand, keyword stuffing in any area could lead to problems.

Keep in mind that keyword density isn't a ranking factors. Never has been, never will be. Google tends to look at your page more holistically (or at least they try to) so taking this approach usually requires a bit more natural approach than inserting keywords at strategic locations.

Not to promote my own post, but I highly recommend reading about these advanced SEO concepts for on-page optimization: http://moz.com/blog/7-advanced-seo-concepts These help explain how Google may judge your page beyond keyword usage and placement.

Finally, you typically won't get in trouble for duplicate content if you stuff keywords, but you could easily suffer other algorithmic penalties. The best advice is to write naturally, make sure your content clearly communicates your main ideas, your content is focused around your primary keyword topics, and you provide a user experience that makes people want more.

Hi Ruben,

Thanks for writing in. I'm unfamiliar with Bluehost's HTTPs service, but I assume they are taking care of top level issues. You'll still want to go through the checklist to make sure everything is valid and you follow SEO best practices.In short:

• Check your links
• Check your assets (images, CSS, javascript)
• Canonical tags
• Register with Google Webmaster Tools
• Update your sitemaps and robots.txt files

This covers the important stuff. As you noted, a few more tips here: http://moz.com/blog/seo-tips-https-ssl

As Max said, from a ranking perspective, Time to First Byte seems to be the most important factor. The same author of that post offered some tips to improving time to first byte: http://moz.com/blog/improving-search-rank-by-optimizing-your-time-to-first-byte

Oftentimes, you simply have a lot of assets to load and it's difficult to cut anything back. In these cases, the order that things load becomes increasingly important for user experience (asynchronous java script, for example).

Regardless, doing everything you can to improve speed and checking with Google Page Speed Insights is usually the best advice. I've never, ever seen a website where improving speed performance didn't help with traffic metrics (wether rankings or engagement) so I believe it's an investment worth making.

Personally, i try to avoid this approach and focus on quality over quantity.

A single, well written and shared piece of content has the potential to earn many times more links and traffic than 50 purchased or hastily written articles when the quality is in question.

Really, I don't care about how many posts I've written or how many comments I've made (and by directory submissions I hope you mean Local Directories What I do care about is how users engage with those activities, how often my content is shared by authoritative influencers, and how these activities contribute to SEO success.

Sticking to a structure and/or schedule is important, but I would avoid the cookie-cutter approach to SEO. A couple presentations by Rand that may be helpful.

• Why Content Marketing Fails
• Building a Marketing Flywheel

Hope that helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

On one hand I'd agree with you that you shouldn't have to rewrite those URLs on your end. On the other hand, it's usually best practice to make sure both versions of a URL (with slash and/or without) resolve to the same page. The reason for this is that:

• Search bots, including Google, will often "explore" variations of URLs for discoverability reasons - they want to make sure they are discovering all of your available content.
• People will link to you with and without trailing slashes. If they link to you with a trailing slash and your page breaks, you could be wasting link equity, to say nothing of the bad user experience of people visiting your site from the referral links
• For one reason or another it's common to append URLs with various parameters (for tracking reasons, campaings, etc) and often these URLs are generated by third party services when pointing at your site.

For all of these reasons, it's pretty common to either force redirect trailing slashes (via a 301) or make sure both versions resolve to the same content, and use a rel=canonical tag to indicate to search engines that these are indeed meant to be the same page.

On the other hand, if this is something not feasible and URLs ending in a slash are indeed different pages, you might want to carefully consider what those pages deliver to both humans and bots because it seems inevitable that both will eventually crawl and stumble upon them.

Perhaps not the answer you were looking for, but I hope it helps.

Keep in mind this is a complex situation with lots of moving parts, so there are no "right" answers.

That said, you're dealing with a lot of potential redirects:

• Site migration
• HTTPS
• .php extension rewriting

On one hand, I'm concerned if you stagger these out, you'll be diluting your authority through several 301 redirects.
In this case, might be best to do it all at once.

On the other hand, doing it all at once greatly increases the chance of something going wrong. In this case, best to stagger things out.

At Moz, we went with "do it all at once" when we migrated to moz.com. Needless to say, we didn't do everything perfect and our organic traffic dropped nearly 30%, instead of the 15% we would have normally expected from a smaller migration.

Regardless, I'd still preference the "all at once" approach, and just be very diligent with your redirects, making sure not to drop pages, rewrite content, change title tags, etc.

As for moving big assets over ahead of time, I know some people endorse it, but I haven't seen a ton of evidence that it makes a significant difference. If it complicates things, I'd likely avoid it.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

If Google thinks the 301 leads to a page that isn't relevant enough, they may flag it as a "soft 404" even though it returns a 301.  That's Google's way of saying they think you should 404 these pages instead.

How much will it hurt you? Probably not much, but it's hard to say.

Let's ask these questions:

• How much traffic goes to these pages? If not much, is it okay to 404 them?
• Are there more relevant pages you could redirect these to? (ideally, something with a similar title as the original page?)
• Have you seen much traffic loss overall? If not, it's likely this isn't hurting you.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

Short answer: create a custom 404 page, not just for these pages, but one that can show for everypage on your site.

A few resources:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93641?hl=en

Example: http://moz.com/sadfklfadsadfjs

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=custom+404&pws=0&gl=us&gws_rd=ssl#pws=0&gl=us&q=how+to+create+a+custom+404

The good news is, this actually sounds pretty normal. 24 hours to reflect changes in content is better than many sites. I can't account for why it dropped from 4 to 24, but I'd say this is still in the range of "good"

There are a few possible reasons Google might adjust rankings after seeing a change in your title and meta descriptions. Among them: (keep in mind these are only possibilities)

1. The algorithm determines that the page is less relevant to the target query keywords

2. The title change deviates from earlier anchor text pointing at the page, meaning the page might not be as relevant to the query

3. Over-optimization

4. After changing your title+description, you experience a lower CTR in search results. In theory this could lower your rankings. But because you describe the old title/description still showing in SERPS, this is less likely

5. The drop in rankings is temporary, or is unrelated to any changes you made.

If Google is still showing the old title/description, #5 is a strong possibility. You may want to check Google's cache of the page to see if it's picking up on the changes. Depending on the site this can take anywhere from a few hours to several weeks.

If nothing else, you can always change the title/description back to the original version and test what happens.

Interesting note about iframes. Google typically attempts to associate the content of an iframe with the originating/hosting site. How this plays into how Google interperets the "link" from this site - I have no idea, but I doubt it's very harmful.

The study was looking at the correlation between the amount of HTML and higher Google rankings. Although I don't believe it's an actual ranking factor, we typically find a small but positive correlation with longer content pieces. The simple explanation being that longer content has more "stuff" to rank for, and there's a corresponding correlation to longer content and links earned, which also helps with rankings.

Great question! We do often see a positive correlation between the number of followed outbound links and higher rankings (though I'm not sure we've scientifically measured this recently). Anecdotally, we hear this often as well. Most famously when the NYTimes made external links "followed" which was followed by an increase in traffic/rankings.