Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks EGOL,

Yes, I understand well that .pdf documents can be indexed. That's not my concern. My concern is that a bot that navigates to one of our many .pdf tech specs documents, which, incidentally, contains no outbound links to anything, would then become trapped and not be able to continue crawling the site. This is particularly true because we have them set up to open in a new window. In the example above, sure, there's a text reference back to the site "www.kingdom.com" - but it isn't a link in the .pdf. There are no links, in any of our .pdfs.

So, what is the best way to deal with this? Go back and rework our .pdfs so they at least contain a link back to the homepage? In addition toAs well as configure the hyperlinks so they open in the same window instead of a new one?

No, in my opinion, you don't need to start over. I've seen worse things happen and still have the site rank fairly quickly and well. Just adjust the settings so that google and other engines can now crawl the site and submit the sitemap via GWT. Other than a temporary bump in the road, I don't think it's going to have a long-term impact on your SEO.

Hope that helps!

Dana

Thank you Charlie. In our case, our .pdfs contain no links in them at all. There is nothing for a bot (or a human) that will navigate them out of the .pdf....not even the back button.

Considering that, and EGOL's response below, would the best course of action be to include, at the very least, an active link back to our homepage from all of our .pdf files?

We have as many as 6,000 .pdfs.

Thanks,

Dana

In December 2008 I helped a company transition from BV4 to Volusion. Like your situation, our URLs were years old at that point (the original Website launched in 1996).

I really only have 2 pieces of advice:

1. Make sure you've set up your 301 redirects properly (we didn't, and it took 6 weeks to sort out the mess).

2. Hang on for the ride.

Be prepared for a major dip in traffic, particularly if you are re-writing all of the URLs. But take heart. Sometimes the dip is necessary to move onward and upward. Seth Godin wrote a whole book on The Dip. Now might be a good time to buy your CEO a copy.

Cheers! I hope all goes well and that it moves you one step closer to awesomeness!

Dana

I agree with Anthony. I managed 6 Volusion stores for one company for several years. It's a decent platform, but don't rely on them for your technical SEO advice. Some of their tech reps are very green.

I'm not sure that a canonical tag is going to effectively solve the problem. Also, if implemented, it would completely undermine your original homepage. I don't think you are going to want to do that.

Have you analyzed your inbound links and the anchor text associated with it? It's quite probable that you attracted a number of inbound links that contain anchor text specific to your original city and that this is a big contributing factor to the "national" page outranking the "city" page for said "city." While not impossible to address, trying to get the folks who are linking to you to update their links may not be productive either.

The one thing you can control is how you are linking internally and what anchor text is pointing to what page. I think if you send enough signals from your own pages that this new "city" minisite is the right and best location for people searching for information or products pertaining to that city, eventually it will bump up ahead of the other page.

THis could take a good amount of time. Depending on how long the original page had to build up its links and authority, it probably will take at least that long, and maybe quite a big longer to build up the same kind of authority on the new page.

I know this isn't probably the definitive answer you're looking for, but I really do think that this one is a matter of time, effort and patience.

Dana

Have you tried Screaming Frog? If not, you might start there. I believe there is a function that allows you to pull all anchor text into Excel. This would allow you to figure out how many co-occurences you have of certain phrases. Once you have that, it might be easier to work the other way and then track down the URLs where that anchor text is located.

You may have tried this already but just thought I'd suggest it.

Dana

We have a blog on our main Website. Every time we publish a blog article, a very similar scenario plays itself out. Out CEO's conclusion? "Google Love's Blogs!" So we are trying to blog about every new product etc.

You are right too, in a week or so, our rankings drop back down after the post has been out for a week or so.

Lesson" Write a blog post about every single one of your products every single week!

Right. Not realistic.

I don't really know how to ring this bell. Maybe that's Google's reason for valuing posts like these so highly...because really, no one's going to publish a new blog post every week about every single one of their products.

Or are they????

Dana

Thanks so much Alan for this great response. While I am not as technically savvy as you and Jason, I knew that I shouldn't 100% rely on Pingdom either, so I am very familiar with the other tools you mentioned and use them routinely.

Since my hands are tied as I have no access to either server or source code. as I mentioned to Jason, I will be taking these suggestions to our IT Director to see how far I can get in addressing these issues.

I am on the PageSpeed warpath, and really appreciate your generous response.

I'll let you know what happens!

Dana

Dean,

This is a great, great question and I am eager to find out what my fellow technical SEOs think because I have faced very similar situations on one of my sites. Thanks for asking this question.

My gut instinct is to select #3 of your options. But not really being a developer, it's hard for me to articulate as to why I think this is the best option. I am really only thinking of it from a user-end standpoint in that I want to know where, in the hierarchy of the site this page lives so that if I need to find it again, I can.

I disagree with your option #2 from an SEO standpoint because anything after a "#" or hashtag in a URL is ignored by search engines....so putting it there isn't going to benefit your SEO in any way.

Interested to hear what others think,

Dana

Do you have "View All" as an option for your paginated pages? If not, you might consider it, and then just include the "View all" version of the page in your site map. Just a thought...

Great! Yes, it's a quick and easy fix. I also think Jared's suggestion of adding Structured Data markup is an excellent one.

Yes, I agree with Chris. Can you tell us what platform you are using for your site. Is it Word Press, Drupal, Joomal?  It sounds like your CMS is automatically concatenating  a title tag for dynamic page queries that include the property specific info. This is one thing that really drives me crazy as an SEO. Without question, whatever platform you are on, you need to be able to, as a site manager, SEO or Webmaster, be able to customize the title, description , canonical and Robots meta tags for every single page on the site. Unfortunately, there are many, even some of the best ones, that won't let you do that.

In this instance I would create a Custom 404 page that says something like "We are sorry, this product is no longer available. Here are some helpful links to continue searching our site..."

You could also go the route that eBay uses, although it might prove to be a content management nightmare. eBay leaves up closed auctions for a really long time, but adds the message "This auction has ended."

For classified ads, I wouldn't 301 because, depending on what the item is, it could end up being misleading.

Just my thoughts! I'm interested to know what others think.

Hi Sean,

My gut reaction is "Heck Yes!" I would move the documentation, but perhaps, if you can convert it to .pdf file types,  so you can embed a link back to your relevant page or main website from inside the document. This will also keep a link in the document if someone decides to share it off site somewhere, making for some handy links back to your site.

Interested to know what others think!

Dana

Hi Fabrizio,

Mike's answer is a good one and I would also definitely recommend Dr. Pete's post.

What I would like you to be aware of is the risk in what you are wanting to do. If you are already ranking well, for the love of all that is holy in this world, leave your URLs alone. Here is what Dr. Pete had to say about the "risk factor:"

"All Change Is Risky

I know it’s not what the motivational speakers want you to hear, but in the real world, change carries risk. Even a perfectly executed site-wide URL change – with pristine 301-redirects – is going to take time for Google to process. During that time, your rankings may bounce. You may get some errors. If your new URL scheme isn’t universally better than the old one, some pages may permanently lose ranking. There’s no good way to A/B test a site-wide SEO change.

More often, it’s just a case of diminishing returns. Going from pretty good to pretty gooder probably isn’t worth the time and effort, let alone the risk." - Dr. Pete Meyers

You need to manage expectations on this one if you decide to go forward and make stakeholders aware that they could be looking at a significant downside (decrease in traffic and links) immediately after implementation. That doesn't mean that there couldn't be a significant upside eventually, but there are no guarantees.

I love your site by the way. My daughter and I have been subscribers on and off for years. Cheers!

Dana

Hi Karen,

It sounds like you investigating the right things. You mentioned that the old domain was 301-d to the new domain. My next question might be too obvious, so [please forgive me if it seem overly simple. What about all the pages on the old domain? Are they still indexed? Did you 301 just the domain, or did you also 301 all of the old pages to relevant new pages? I'm just trying to maybe help you get to the bottom of the problem by proceeding down the path you've already started by using the process of elimination.

Dana

No, I wouldn't worry about this at all. This is why Google has already allocated a finite number of "Fetches" and URL + Links submissions to your account. These numbers are based on the size of your site. Larger sites are allocated more and  smaller sites less. [Please see my revised statement below regarding Google's "Fetch" limits - it isn't based on site size]  I don't think enough Webmasters take advantage of the Fetch as often as they should.

Hope that helps!

Dana

We recently had mod_deflate and mod_expire installed on our server in an attempt to improve pagespeed. They worked beautifully, at least we thought they did.

Google's pagespeed insights tools evaluated our homepage at 65 before the install and 90 after...major improvement.

However, we seem to be experiencing very slow load on our product pages.

There is a feeling (not based on any quantifiable data) that mod_expire is actually slowing down our page load, particularly for visitors who do not have the page cached (which would probably be most visitors).

Here are some pages to look at with their corresponding score from the Pagespeed Insights tool:

Live Sound - 91 http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/live-sound-live-audioWireless Microphones - 90 http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/microphones

Truss and Rigging - 79 http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/lighting-truss

light weight product detail page 83   http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/product/global-truss-sq-4109-12-truss-segment

heavy weight product detail page 77  http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/product/presonus-studiolive-16-4-2

Any thoughts from my fellow Mozzers would be greatly appreciated!

You are welcome David, and no this isn't a lifetime limit at all. I believe it resets at least once every 30 days, maybe more often than that. I manage four different sites, some large, some small and I've never run out of fetches yet.