Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I'm not sure if this has been fixed, but I've just run Screaming Frog on your site and is couldn't see any major issues.

One thing you might want to look into is the H1 tags on your shop items in uncategorized, don't seem to be populating properly.

All I see is PHP script.

Hope this helps.

Use Screaming Frog to see what can be spidered and where from.

I'd say it''s all down to content and how much of Good Relevant content you have.

If you have enough content to fill a website about all of these individual areas then a sub domain offers you the ability to demonstrate your expertise in these areas and Google will see that your focussed in that area. Also it means that the first word will be a keyword in your domain which is excellent.

However if you have only a few pages for each site that would be bad as Google would see it as it is your making something solely for Google ranking which it would very much frown upon.

If your doing something to your site just for Google ranking then generally as a rule of thumb the answer s no don't do it. A well structures site is much more preferable.

1akal,

The answer to this is one that I have thought about very carefully in the past as we have thousands of pages on our website.

I first of all did this programmatically taking the first 150 letters of the body of each page, or description of a product.

I soon realised that the search results weren't exactly what I was after and soon found myself manually updating the extracted text to suit the product and search keywords.

Over the years I have edited the majority of the pages manually and constantly update the information as keywords drop out of top ranking pages.

You get out only what you put in in this case and if it means manually writing the content then so be it I'm afraid, but you may want to take the initial step of extracting some of the rich content in there first as a starter.

Google treats 'most' subdomains as separate websites, GA allows you to use the same account to monitor more than one domain/sub-domain, however Google sees them as separate. What Google also checks is where the domains are hosted if they are on the same range of IP Addresses etc.

I can't see Google penalising you for having the x.domain.com pointing to the main domain as it's all to one page, if however you had the main domain pointing to all pages from a single sitemap style page Google would think that you're trying to spam it and would penalise you heavily possibly even ban.

I have 10 different websites within the group to look after most of the pages all link back to http://www.eriks.co.uk to pass juice back to the most important site

Speed of load and downtime as mentioned above can seriously damage your ranking. We moved host a number of years ago and we have never looked back.

We moved to one of the most expensive hosts but the best up-time and their data centre isn't on a flood plain!!

Their Internet connections are fast and also duplicated to ensure high up-time. Along with power and sites.

Great idea using Screaming Frog first then :-

Then use Google Web Master Tools > Crawl > Fetch as Google to see what Google sees

If you look at your GA you should see All Visits to the left there's a drop down which allows you to filter your traffic using segments instead of creating a new view. In here there's a segment for Paid Search Traffic

Here however is a Segment for Search Only Traffic :

https://www.google.com/analytics/web/template?uid=uU7kkJBMR9OiwPYvEasNUw

This will allow you to add the segment to your own GA account.

By adding both segments to the graph you will see the vs effect

Google just does this to help the users make an informed choice of what to use/click.

There isn't much you can do to prevent this either, I don't think they are even PPC links either so I don't even think you can pay your way out.

Regards

Hi Martijn,

Whilst I'd agree wholeheartedly with your response and they are both good places to see your inbound links. We always want to be watching what Google are doing with it's existing tools and they give us clues about what Google thinks is important.

What Vikas was asking is why the tool was acting like it did.

Best Regards

Dave

No, as one would be canonical, What you need to remember is are you doing this for the user or for Google? if your doing it for Google then don't.

The only thing I would say is that the Google alerts would have to be set up using a fake email account!

Interesting scenario. Luckily I have a Sculpture who hides me from the internet!

No I'd leave them in as there may be other Indexes that link to them or even blogs, sites or even somebody may have sent an email with the original link in.

301 doesn't hurt your ranking and would continue to deliver those 404 results for you.

This is a battle over useability and relevance. You have to decide who your audience is and what they would like to see. Wikipedia is very good on SEO as they use in text link (and just about everyone on the planet visits them!!).

However some users wouldn't still realise that the in text links could be pressed, so you may get more bounce or people may not feel comfortable trying to find things on your site, some people still like a logical journey to the things that interest them.

Dependent on your type of site I would use both!! however I would use canonical links in your text providing that the your structure is such that all your pages naturally already get spidered.

Also don't do this programmatically or you will get it wrong, i.e. if Wikipedia's page on Fury Seals linked to a Page on Industrial Seals Google would penalise the Fury Seals Page because of irrelevance.

The good news is that I now have a similar problem, we used to have hundreds of links now I have 6?! I typed info:eriks.co.uk and this gives you a number of links to choose. Even when selecting via this screen the same occurred.

Something must be happening at Google regarding Site Links I'm guessing, Moz?

This is where it is Google Webmaster Tools > Crawl > Fetch as Google

Without a doubt the best tool, another option is to switch off CSS from Firefox Web Developer Tool Bar, which in my opinion is the best toolbar for developers by far! (apart from Moz OOPS!)

301 Re-directs all the way ensuring that all of your old URLs resolve to relevant content. One thing I would advise against is a splash screen and making sure that all of your content is available within 3-4 clicks.

Good Luck

The easiest way would be a permanent re-direct on the offending URLs.

Check the incoming variable i.e. vc and permanently re-direct if it's an offending using 301.Google when seeing the 301 will drop the URL from the index.

There is a URL removal tool in Google Web Master Tools if the URL contains any personal information.

I had a similar issue a few days ago, the index is already starting to clear up, from a corrupt XML site map.

A few years ago I added a location finder which then auto generated product content for ERIKS. This generated 1000's of URLs overnight, the problem was Google thought I was spamming it's indexes. Google does follow all links on a web page/sitemap however it's what it does with them that counts. The ERIKS Hose Technology Site http://www.eriks-hose-technology.com relies on this type of coding using Classic ASP.

I have a number of other sites which also rank highly on Google You'll find Revolvo by searching for 'Split Roller Bearings'. So it's also not as bad at ranking as some people may tend to think. I would agree however that English URLs are better than coded. The main issue here is to make sure that your main keyword is in the URI to ensure that Google knows what your page is about.