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Hi Jaishree

It's hard to say without looking at the actual website and SERP's but I'd like to share some thoughts:

I would never use a blog to rank for your most important keywords. It will probably not have as high a conversion rate as your product pages, and it's pages are usually not optimized for a single query. Use your blog to rank for the longtail keywords that do not require a single optimized landingpage.

Also social media is not the way to go when you're looking for better rankings (I think). Don't get me wrong, it's great for driving traffic and building your brand but I personally don't think it will do any good for your rankings in the short term.

So what would I do? When on page optimization is finished, I normally have a look at the SERP's and see if I can understand why I rank where I rank. That is, are pages above you technically better? Is their off-site SEO better than yours? Try to analyse this and the next logical step in your SEO strategy will present itself. the comparison feature in OSE is great for this.

One thing that could make a difference is adding a few (only a few!) deep links to your product pages with optimized anchor texts. However, make sure you only do this if you have a strong healthy link profile because otherwise you're bound to be eaten alive by the Penguin!

Best of Luck,

Sven Witteveen
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Hi Kinsana,

It's almost always a good idea to start a blog! The more (quality) content you have, the better you will rank. However, I would reconsider your idea for two reasons:

1. First of all, you generally want to concentrate the value of your entire website on one domain. This way your current website will all benefit from the SEO value you build with your blog. I'd therefore put the blog in a subfolder (www.example.com/blog/).
2. I image it could be rather confusing for visitors to have two seperate websites for one company with exactly the same url (apart from the .net/.com obviously). Imagine a visitor landed on your blog via google and returns to your website the next day by typing your adress in the browser. The autocomplete function will send him to the .net version (based on history) and the visitor might not understand why your website seems to be nothing but a blog. If you are going to use two domains, at least make sure it's clear that one is a blog and the other one isn't.

Personally I agree with Adam, just redirect the .net to your .com and place your Blog elsewhere.

Best of luck!

Sven Witteveen
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Hi Konstantin,

A rel=canonical in the head section of a html page will not redirect users to another site. The canonical link tag tells google (or other search engines) where the 'original' version of a page can be found and what the preferrred url is. This canonical version is most likely to show up in search engines (although search engines do not always follow the rel=canonical).

If you want users to end up at site2.com/page1 when they type site1.com/page1 in their browser, you need to use a 301 redirect.

Kind regards,

Sven Witteveen
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Hi Ray,

This doesn't sound good..

I'm not that familiar with sitemap.xml protocols but have you checked in webmaster tools that understands your sitemap correctly? Also there might be some info in crawl dates and crawl errors in your webmaster tools.

I can't imagine you've been banned from google because of just one link.

Greets,

Sven Witteveen

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Yes it can. Whether or not this will in fact hurt your SEO position depends on the backlinks these websites are receiving.

All the links that point to your domains pass linkjuice. This linkjuice is sent to you primary domain because of the redirects. This means that you will lose all backlinks currently pointing at these domains. My advice is to try and figure out how many links we are talking about, and how much link juice they pass to your current site. You could use opensiteexplorer.org or your webmaster tools for that.

However, If you really don´t mind the cost of keeping the domains at all, i´d say just keep it like it is.

Good luck!

Sven Witteveen
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Hi Bob,

If I understand correctly you have some pages on your website that generate some report in some other place and immediately afterwards redirect themselves to this new report.

I think it depends on how important these pages are whether or not this is a problem. If for example a landing page returns a 302 status, that´s a problem. However, if the page generating the report and redirecting itself does not need to be indexed it´s not really an isseu.

You might want to add a rel="nofollow" to the buttons and links that point to the page generating the text reports.

I was looking through some old questions of ours and saw that this one is still open. However, seogadget has obviously solved this problem when they introduced their Google Adwords Excel Plug-in!

Indeed!

In case of problematic keyword selfcannibalization you can choose from two options:

1. Combine two landing pages into one of the two, and deleting (or noindex) the other one.
2. Avoid overlap as much as possible by making sure the exact query you want to rank for on page A does not appear on page B (and vice versa).

I think it depends on the situation whether you want to go for option 1 or 2. In your case it seems pretty much okay, but to be sure you could cut down on the word ciclismo on the general shimano page.

Best of luck!

Sven Witteveen

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Hi,

I would definately go for merging both of them together. Allthough WMT recently  significantly increased the number of backlinks shown, any extra information you can gather is great. I guess together they provide a pretty good overview of your backlink profile.

Btw, it's ofcourse very interesting how many of the links reported in WMT and OSE overlap, and how many are unique for each one. So if you're going for option 3, please share some of the results with us!

Greets,

Sven Witteveen
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Hi,

If you connect your analytics to your webmaster tools, you can indeed see some (rough) estimates on Search Engine CTR (and more). This you will find under 'traffic sources'=>search engine optimization.

For comparing current traffic with earlier time periods you can click the checkbox 'compare to previous period' in the date range selection menu. The report will then also show % changes in traffic etc.

On the point of what keywords to use, look around the SEOmoz website for 'keyword research' topics. That topic is far too broad to be answered in this thread. A good starting point might be the keyword research section of the SEO Guide.

Best of luck!

Historical data can indeed not be copied from profile to another. It is therefore a good idea to create such profile's as soon as you start your SEO efforts. When this is not an option for you I'd suggest you make an advanced Segment.

In this advanced segment you can filter the branded keywords and non organic traffic. However, you cannot filter IP adresses in advanced segments. (see the analytics university I suggested earlier for help

Whether or not you can find additional software that will help you monitoring your SEO efforts, I would strongly suggest you have your Google Analytics set up properly. It is often the source of many usefull insight's regarding your website and your SEO campaing. Trust me when I say it's worth mastering this software.

Hi Shashank,

These websites explain how to make profiles and apply filters to it:

http://www.canadianschoolguide.com/setup-website-profiles.php http://groups.google.com/a/googleproductforums.com/forum/#!topic/analytics/uC6l1DLSLgM

It doesn't show how to filter out certain IP adresses so I've attached a screenshot that illustrates that.

You're right that the keywords you typically want to exclude are branded keywords. However you may also already rank 1st or 2nd for some important keywords that are not targeted in your SEO efforts.

For any other Google Analytics questions you can check out http://www.google.com/analytics/iq.html. You can view short easy to understand video's on any topic related to Google Analytics.

Good Luck!

SEO_Profile.png

I think you can come a long way with Google Analytics and a basic rank checker.

1. The basis is to create a filtered profile for Google Analytics which includes only Organic Search Engine traffic and excludes any keywords for which you already rank very well at the start of your SEO campaign (and preferably also exclude traffic from your IP).
2. Look for increases/decreases in traffic and see if you can mach them to A) changes in rankings for the keywords visitors used or B) changes made by you to that aim to affect the click through rate of the pages the new visitors landed on).
3. See how much conversions (subscriptions or sales or time on site or whatever) are made by the visitors that are (probably) attributable to SEO.

It will never be a fully exact science but I personally think that you can lay a pretty good claim to SEO benefits if they are calculated this way.

Sven Witteveen
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I did a quick check on both pages:

http://www.deporvillage.com/ciclismo/zapatillas-shimano
and
http://www.deporvillage.com/shimano

Both get an A for on-page optimization for the word: shimano. Also on the page /shimano there are 41 instances of the word ciclismo. You might want to avoid this word on the general /shimano page if you have a separate landing page for 'zapatillas ciclismo shimano'.

However, generally speaking there isn't much to worry about if you do not in fact rank with both pages for one keyword.

Sven Witteveen
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Rand has said the following about it in his blog:

....Keyword self-cannibalization - the practice of heavily targeting the same keyword phrase on multiple pages of a site....

Having multiple pages for one keyword or phrase is not ideal since this means you are competing with yourself. All the backlinks, content, internal linkjuice etc. is devided over multiple pages instead of concentrating it on one page.

Ofcourse, if these pages are on position one and two in the SERP this situation is perfectly fine. However, if they hold position 11 and 15 the combined force of these two pages may be enough to rank 5th or 6th. That would generate a lot more traffic since results after postion 10 generate virtually no traffic.

I hope this helps!

Greets,

Sven Witteveen
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Hi Jack,

All though I do agree with you in general, I think this case is slightly different:

1. According to opensiteexplorer.org there are no backlinks to this page containing the word mussoorie.
2. The linkprofile of this page looks very unnatural (almost no branded/url anchors and all are very nice search queries). It is thus very likely that they purchased these links (i.e.use black hat SEO).

Greets,

Sven Witteveen
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Hi wildhawk,

All websites on the first page for this query have quite a high PA and DA. They have thousands of backlinks (probably payed for them considering the anchor texts) and are also ´quite relevant´ for the search query.

The basis is this:

You rank based on your on-page optimization (relevance) and off-page optimization (importance). You may have a page that is far more optimized for a specific keyword and thus are also more relevant. That doesn't mean you outperform the 1-10 results on the combined result of relevance + importance.

Long story short: My guess is that you need to work on your linkprofile.

I wish you all the best and keep in mind that you are trying to compete in an extremely competitive market.

Sven Witteveen
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When linking to another site you pass 'link-juice'. Consequently, you vouch for this website. By adding a nofollow tag to your link, you can avoid this. I'd recommend doing so if you suspect Google might penalize your non-adult website.

You can add a nofollow like so:

example

I've also seen quite a lot of these:

example.com/home.html
example.com/cms/index.html

Hi Brad,

I'd love to have all these loads of quality content for our site. However, there is a limit to what you can use to rank. Suppose you move your blog to your ecommerce domain (which I think is a good idea), you suddenly have a lot of pages on this website. Combine this with the 6000 product and category pages you speak about, and you might just have too many pages to rank properly.

With a site this big you need a perfect internal linking structure:

1. If you spread you linkjuice too thin you might see your rankings drop, I've seen that happen before. Make sure that your authority grows along with your content, and that google can keep up indexing everything.

2. See what pages could potentially rank for high volume and competitive terms, and make sure that they get lot's of linkjuice. Longtail is great but you might want to rank for some high volume keywords as well!

Keep up the good work!

Sven Witteveen

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