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I tried putting this URL into Open Site Explorer and OSE cannot access any data for this page. Is anyone else seeing the same problem? I had the same problem when I moved one level up in the structure by following the breadcrumb. OSE couldn't access that category page either. Have you noticed this before?
Yes. Option #3. If it expired in the last year, it may just be in limbo. I'd find out, but don't sound overly interested. if the call forwards to some "attorney" selling domain names for ridiculous prices, forget it and go with option #1. I think if the content was great your hypotheses that people would be less likely to link may prove untrue. Good luck and I want to know what happens.
Yes. I believe there is an advantage in choosing your second option, for exactly the reason you state. In other words it's better for you and your own organization of your content. It will also make it much easier when and if you implement URL rewrites to give you SEO friendly URLs because if you use any relative URLs on your pages, they will be much easier to identify correctly and update if they are constructed "/state/michigan."
I don't believe there is going to be an advantage or disadvantage to your campaigns or SEO if you choose one versus another. That's my personal opinion. I certainly don't pretend to know what Google favors or doesn't favor at any given point in time.
I certainly hope this helps!
I think that's a personal choice more than anything else. If he really feels that those old pages are detracting visitors from the content he really wants them to be seeing, then perhaps 301 redirects would be fine. But, since the content is unique and his site is ranking very well, I see no harm in leaving them as is. Personally, I'd take them case by case, research how many inbound links they have, how much traffic they get (if any) and make a judgement call. It may be that you get rid of some, keep some and 301 redirect some depending on what the page is. Sorry that's not more definitive, but it's likely no one here knows his content better than the two of you. I'd just say it doesn't have to be all of one thing, whether it's leave them alone or redirect them.
Hope that helps!
Hi Brandon,
If your site is connected to Google Webmaster Tools, you can find out what page is the source of the link producing the 404. This can be done by logging into your GWT dashboard, clicking Site Health then click on "Crawl Errors" and then click on the "Not Found" tab. You will see a list of links producing 404 errors. Click on the link you want to investigate and you'll get a pop open window with more info. You will see three tabs "Error details," "In sitemaps," and "Linked from." Click linked from and you'll see the information you are wanting.
If you are not connected to Google Webmaster Tools yet, the process is fairly simple, even if you have limited access to your site. There are several ways to load your site into GWT and verify ownership, including simply installing a meta tag, or uploading a simple file to your root directory. GWT offers a wealth of information that can be a great supplement to the info you get from SEOMoz.
I hope this helps!
Dana
Yes, we have a similar situation for our YouTube channels. In our case, some of the old videos are even for obsolete products. We leave them all, even when we do an updated video on the same product. That total view count for your YouTube channel overall can go a long way towards bulding credibility in a new viewers mind.
Hope that helps a little. Just my two cents 
I forgot to address your question about duplicate content. Are you using canonical tags in your blog? If you place a rel=canonical tag on each of your blog pages with the full URL of the page you want to be viewed as the source of the original content, this should solve the duplicate content problem. If you already have tags in place then you may have another issue. If you are using canonical tags, you may want to go through and make sure they don't all look like this:
The tags should be specific to each page. This may be something
you've already done, and I might be explaining
in a way that's too basic. If so, I apologize. Just trying to make
sure you're covered!
I notice that when I navigate to an interior page, then want to go back to the Home page, that the little hyper-link in the upper left inside the home page logo actually took me to this URL:
http://www.thematstore.com/index.htm
instead of http://www.thematstore.com
I loaded them both into OSE: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/comparisons?site=www.thematstore.com&comparisons%5B0%5D=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thematstore.com%2Findex.htm&=Compare
You can see that the /index.html version of your homepage has the lion's share of internal followed links. This might be something you want to correct so all those internal pages are actually linking back to http://www.thematstore.com
I agree with Irving's suggestion to get rid of those footer links to other search engines.
I disagree with Irving's statement that keyword tags "can only hurt" you. I don't think they are hurting you. But he is correct in that you don't really need them. It does help your competitors discover what keywords you're going after.
Since you are so close to page one, I would do just those things and see if your ranking improves. If it does. Proceed cautiously with Irving's suggestions "c" and "d." I'm not saying they aren't good suggestions, but that if you do everything all at once, and your ranking sinks, you won't have any idea what had the negative impact. I would be especially cautious in removing that page and "de-optimizing" things.
Out of recent personal experience, I decided to "de-optimize" a page that had SEO copy in small text way at the bottom of an e-commerce page. I was #2 in Google and hoped that by de-optimizing I could move up to #1. Guess what? I took out my keyword-stuffed copy, and boom, dropped to #4.
This is why I say proceed with caution. Do one thing at a time and evaluate the results before moving on and changing something else.
Hope this helps!
This appears to be a pagination issue. If so, then the solution may be fairly simple. You have a few options. You might want to first make sure that your canonical tags are in order. How you do those will depend on whether or not you want pages in a paginated series (like a category page with more than one page of products listed) included in Google's index. If you want them indexed, then each paginated should have its own rel=canonical tag, specific to that page. If you really only want the first page included in the index, then you could include a tag like this at the top of each page in that
partcular paginated series. You may also need to include rel=next and rel=prev,
depends on your content.
Here is an excellent video on pagination from Google that describes various options,
depending on what type of content you have and how you would like it to be indexed:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/03/video-about-pagination-with-relnext-and.html
I understand your position very well because I work in e-commerce too, and many times, the only difference from one product to the next is dimensions. I work with audio visual equipment and this is often the scenario for things like power cords, cables, microphone cables, audio snakes, etc.
If all of your product descriptions are the same, then yes, it's duplicate content. If you are super-concerned about that, then that makes the case for creating hub pages with options that allow people to select the size of the furnace filter they want.
Personally, on large e-commerce sites, I'm not sure that spending tons of time writing elegant, unique descriptions for products that are obviously the same is worth your time. Google understands the difference between a site that is e-commerce based and a site that is content based (like a blog).
I would say, set it up both ways and have some users test it. Which way makes it easier and faster for them to find exactly what they want? Choose that one. I think if you choose the one that is better for usability, the SEO will follow.
Personally, I like hub pages. You know, you could do both. Most E-commerce platforms allow you to build a hub page, and then also have individual product pages that just aren't part of the navigation structure. I have used both Volusion and 3DCart to accomplish this. It just means building all the product pages, creating a "parent" page for your hub page, associating the products with the parent and then just not placing those individual products in any categories. That way, they still get indexed and if someone does search by dimension, it's possible the product page matching their search will be the one they see in the SERPs. That's hard to predict of course, but it would at least make that a possibility.
Also, last thought, if you do a good job of featuring the dimension in your page title and meta description, and also on the page, then I really don't think the duplicate content issue will be a problem.
Google did some user testing on this topic, to find out if users preferred longer pages or paginated pages. According to their research, users preferred longer pages because there is always latency when moving from one page to the next. Here's the video where a Googler cites that research: http://youtu.be/njn8uXTWiGg If you want to have it both ways, you could always break your content into pages, but put a "View All" option at the top. Personally, I am one of those folks who doesn't mind scrolling down through comments. If given the choice to continue on to a second page of comments, I probably wouldn't.
From an SEO standpoint, provided the pagination is handled properly, I don't think there's an advantage one way or the other, unless you take into consideration that your bounce rate could potentially go up with paginated pages. Even if it did though, I doubt that would significantly hurt you from an overall SEO viewpoint.
This sounds like a fun project, seriously (no sarcasm intended here), because you have so many possibilities of getting great quality links that everybody struggles to get. Here are my ideas:
Educational sites - schools (.edu links anyone?), school raitings sites, school stats, etc.
Divorce lawyers - (people often move after getting divorced) - Lawyers also have very specific states where they are licensed to practice
Local chamber of commerce sites
Local storage companies
State government resources for child support, driver's licensing, hunting licenses, voter's registration (.gov links anyone), anyone relocating is going to need new ID and re-establish child support through new agencies.
Just some thoughts! Hope they are helfpul,
Dana
My first inclination is to say "be patient" and ride out the dip. I have never seen a complete site overhaul that didn't experience a dip in traffic. Next, I would say "Are your ducks in a row?"
What I mean by that is:
If the answer is yes to all of the above. Be patient. I know it's hard, but don't freak out and sit tight. You should be fine after a little time.
Dana
Hi Kyu, Yes, you are on the right track with your approach to 301 redirects. The question you ask about having different Title tags and meta descriptiong completely solving a duplicate content problem is a very good one. For example, say you had to very similar products on an e-commerce site. You decide to use exactly the same on-page copy for the on-page description, but you write unique meta description and title tags. Let's say you went one step further, and even put canonical tags on each of these pages. From the viewpoint of GWT or SEOMoz's crawler, no, duplicate content wouldn't be identified. Googlebot, however, could see this differently and determine that it is indeed duplicate content. Matt Cutts has even gone as far to say that content that is "substantially similar" can be flagged as duplicate content. That being said, even if your content isn't showing as duplicate with some of the tools you can use, if you know it's duplicate, fix it and make it as unique as possible.
Hope that helps!
Dana
You came to the right place for the validity you seek I frequently vet things here in the forum and it has proven very helpful in convincing other members of my team to go one way or the other. Also, I completely agree with George's suggestion to use the "alt" attribute if it is indeed an image we are talking about, but it appears we are really talking about a bonafide
That being the case. Stick to your guns and insist on it being visible. If you really feel that it disrupts the design...it would be better to leave it out than to make it invisible.
Good luck!
Dana
Hi Antonio,
These are great questions because I am working on 3 WP sites right now too. I have heard that WordPress SEO by Yoast is a very good plugin for SEO, but am interested to know what others think in the comments here.
Personally, I don't think that there is anything wrong with having matching keywords in the URL and the page title. Yes, Google pays a lot of attention to page titles. As long as neither are stuffed, overly repetitive or you don't go crazy repeating those same keywords all over the page, I think having the URL and Page Title in synch is a very effective tactic.
Yes, the input fields on the plug-in you are using are meta tags. Consequently, populating the keywords field is something I wouldn't recommend. Google pays no attention to those keywords and they won't be visible on the page anywhere (i.e. they will not be populating any
Curious to know what other have to say and whether or not they recommend Yoast.</h></h>
I would highly recommend submitting a sitemap. I am surprised you haven't already. Is it because there are so many articles? Is there any way to generate an automated list of your article URLs? If you can then formatting a sitemap shouldn't be that difficult even if there are a huge number of them. I also like your idea of adding the "View all" option. The company where I do in-house SEO is battling pagination issues at the moment and we believe this is a good solution and it is one that is supported and even recommended by Google here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/03/video-about-pagination-with-relnext-and.html
I hope that helps a bit!
It is my understanding that Rich Snippets are not recognizable by all search engine bots. The advantage to schema.org is that it is an agreed-upon format that works equally well in all the major search engines. Consequently, skip rich snippets and just go with schema.org.
Interested to know what others have to say. Great question!
Okay, this one's a doozie:
My crawl report is listing all of these as separate URLs with identical duplicate content issues, even though they are all the home page and the one that is http://www.ccisolutions.com (the preferred URL) has a canonical tag of rel= http://www.ccisolutions.com:
http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/IAFDispatcher?iafAction=showMain
I will add that OSE is recognizing that there is a 301-redirect on http://ccisolutions.com, but the duplicate content report doesn't seem to recognize the redirect.
Also, every single one of our 404-error pages (we have set up a custom 404 page) is being identified as having duplicate content. The duplicate content on all of them is identical.
Where do I even begin sorting this out? Any suggestions on how/why this is happening?
Thanks!
Hi Joel,
If you visit http://www.schema.org you will find detailed instructions about each type of markup and how to code it. Also, Here's a link to a Google video and help article on the subject of structured data: https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=99170&ctx=cb&src=cb&cbid=-1vinosestbcbn
As you do your markup you will want to use the Structured Data Testing Tool to view how your listing will appear in the SERPs. Keep in mind that it's completely optioinal for Google to display any of it, so they might or might not. It also could take a while for the structured data version of a page listing to begin displaying. Once you are satisfied with how your listing looks in the testing tool, just give Google some time to start displaying the info.
You will also want to establish authorship for your page by joining Google+ and connecting your profile to your Website. If you are a brand or a business, then you would want to establish the brand or company as the publisher. You may have done this already but if not I can provide detailed instructions on how to do that too.
Good luck!
Dana