Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Denise,

Unfortunately not that technical - but a bit scary of the remark 'defaulted all others to the homepage' - it sounds a lot like the 'common mistakes' on this page: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/mobile-sites/mobile-seo/common-mistakes/faulty-redirects?hl=en

Isn't your mobile site a 1-1 copy of the desktop version?

Are you using a CMS or is your site plain HTML. If you manage the pages in Dreamweaver - you can add the rel="alternate" in the section of your HTML. If it's a CMS, you'll probably need to Google a bit to find out how you can implement it.

rgds,

Dirk

Not sure if it's going to work but Karolina Netolicka seems to be product manager for Google Finance - you could try to contact her via her Google Plus Account - alternatively send her an invite / Inmail to her Linkedin Profile - she's also the one who posts on the Google Finance Blog

If you know the syntax of general Google adresses - you could try that as well (very often it's something like firstname@google.com or (firstletterfirstname)familyname@google.com)

Good luck,

Dirk

Hi,

Did you properly set-up the configuration of both sites (see https://developers.google.com/webmasters/mobile-sites/mobile-seo/configurations/separate-urls?hl=en)?

Unless the links are specifically made to the mobile version, they will not appear in Webmastertools. The links from the desktop version will however count as well for the mobile version as Google considers both url's as the same entity (if set-up is done as described above)

rgds,

Dirk

Hi,

Most of the sites reuse stock photo's on different pages - as long as you make sure that the rest of the content on the pages is unique & interesting this shouldn't be a problem. Just don't use the same image over & over again, as it's looks pretty bad & is degrading the user experience.

Dirk

Ravi,

Sorry to tell you the same message again - the problem is not that your images are not getting indexed. They are indexed, as you can check on site:www.urbandazzle.com/ (put on tab Images).

The goal of the sitemap is to help Google discover images as they are published o****n your site. The images you list in the sitemap do not exist on the site on the url you provide in the sitemap (see example above) . As long as there is a mismatch - Google will continue to show that 0% of these images are indexed, which technically is correct.

If you want to use the sitemap to see the % of images that is indexed - you'll need to change the (url of the) pictures used on the site or to replace the (url of the) images in the sitemap by the correct images.

rgds,

Dirk

Hi Rick,

Don't fully agree on that - having almost identical content on different TLD's isn't necessary considered duplicate content - as indicated in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=BE&v=Ets7nHOV1Yo. The sites also use the hreflang tag to indicate that they are related & which version should be shown to which user.

I do agree that it would be better to take into account country specifics like currency & spelling

rgds,

Dirk

Hi Justin,

You might want to look at your server configuration - all the domains seem to have some config issues (no SOA record / no DNSSEC processing). I am not really into this technical stuff, and cannot judge if these issues are really important or not.

http://dnscheck.pingdom.com/?domain=www.zenory.com.au×tamp=1429174636&view=1

http://dnscheck.pingdom.com/?domain=www.zenory.co.nz×tamp=1429174857&view=1

http://dnscheck.pingdom.com/?domain=www.zenory.co.nz×tamp=1429174857&view=1

(I noticed when I tried to crawl the .com.au site with Screaming Frog and got a Connection Error)

Apart from that, as mentioned in a previous answer, the fact that prices are listed in NZ$ is probably a bit strange for .com (and .com.au users). Language used is NZ version - in the States spelling is slightly different (ex. behaviour vs behavior).
Did you manage to create sitemaps for the US & AU versions?

Not related to the ranking issues - but the homepage seems to be very heavy - you might want to work on that (http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150416_2D_J3X/)

Hope this helps,

Dirk

Hi

I just tried the same thing with Screaming Frog and the crawl started without problems. Maybe related to a temporary issue with your server?

It seems your site is extremely slow - especially 'time to first byte' - check http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150416_D1_FZF/1/details/. Is your server properly set-up & dimensioned? If I do a check with pingdom - it seems your server config has some issues: http://dnscheck.pingdom.com/?domain=www.compleetverkleed.nl%2F - you might want to look at that (SOA record is missing which could be caused by  a bad configuration of the nameserver / there is also a problem with DNSSEC) - I am not that technical, so can't help you much with this config issues - but I would check with your hosting company or some technical expert to see what's wrong.

I also noticed that your site loads a lot of javascript (61% of the content downloaded is javascript) - which is huge.

Hope this helps,

Dirk

Hi

Not sure if I understand 100% how the redirects will be implemented. Probably the easiest way to find out if it's going to work is to create a small test environment where you implement the solution (both scenario's) and then check with the Google Mobile Friendly test if Google sees the page as Mobile Friendly or not. If not, you'll have to find another solution.

rgds,

Dirk

Hi Amelia,

Don't know the mortgage business well, but I imagine that people are looking for keywords like "best fixed rate mortgage" or "10 year fixed rate mortgage" etc.

For these queries, the canonical url you use  doesn't make much sense. I would try to have url's that correspond to each of these queries - this could be done by rewriting the url's - or by using parameters.

In your case the url

https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk/compare-products/tracker-rates/?PrevTab=fixed-rates&PVal=250000&Amt=100000&Tme=5&SearchId=5523

could have this canonical:

https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk/compare-products/tracker-rates/?Tme=5
(in case you decide to keep the parameters - it's probably better to replace 'tme' by 'duration' - see also link below)
or
https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk/compare-products/tracker-rates/5-years
(of course, you must make sure that these canonical pages exist)

To be very honest, I think the "/compare-products/" in the url doesn't add much value - I would rather replace it by /mortgage-comparison/ or /buy-to-let-mortgage-comparison/

I would also update the H1 for each of these url's - currently it's a bit generic (Compare buy to let mortgages) - for the example above  I would change it to something like : "Mortgage comparison: Best tracker rates - 5 years" (according to Semrush 'mortgage comparison' is more popular as search term than 'compare mortgage'

There is a interesting post of webmastercentral on facetted navigation which would be worth reading: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.be/2014/02/faceted-navigation-best-and-5-of-worst.html

Hope this helps

Dirk

Hi,

You're site is not the only one - there seem quite a bit sites which redirect to these fake e-shops. Most likely the cause of this problem is a vulnerability issue with the slider on your site - check these links: http://wptavern.com/100000-wordpress-sites-compromised-using-the-slider-revolution-security-vulnerability & http://wptavern.com/critical-security-vulnerability-found-in-wordpress-slider-revolution-plugin-immediate-update-advised

I noticed you already installed sitelock which is a good thing. You should however also block access to pages like yourdomain/wp-content/themes/maya/inc/admin_scripts/ .  Also check that Wordpress is up-to-date (as well as the other plugins you are using), change all your passwords on the server (also change your email passwords). If needed, get professional assistance to help you out of this mess, especially if you're not technically skilled.

It's quite important that you now delete all the external content on your site. Don't postpone this - the brand owner could file a spam report, or even take legal actions (one of the url's your site is redirecting to seems to be a phishing site of canada-goose.com - http://www.jackenoutletde.org/login.html

This case is quite similar to this one http://moz.com/community/q/chinese-site-ranking-for-our-brand-name-possible-hack - but the roles are different - this question is from a site owner which didn't rank for it's own brand name because of hacking issues (which would be Canada Goose in your case)

rgds,

Dirk

PS you'll find a Belgian IP address in your sitelock logs - that's me, not the hacker

Hi,

If it's really for temporary events that have a limited life you could use the unavailable-after metatag - which indicates until which date the event should remain in the index. If it's about recurring events - I would do like Egol says.

More info on the tag can be found here: http://googleblog.blogspot.be/2007/07/robots-exclusion-protocol-now-with-even.html & here is an interview with Matt Cutts on the tag (the context is e-commerce - but it could as well apply to temporary events): http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-seo-advice-unavailable-e-commerce-products-186882

rgds,

Dirk

It's not the size of the page that matters - it's the speed the page is  downloaded on the user's device that matters (although there is of course a relation between these two). In general people expect a site to load in 2/3 seconds. There is an interesting article about that on the kissmetrics site: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/speed-is-a-killer/ - with a lot of useful resources & links. If you do search here on moz you'll probably find a lot of useful info as well. I think with the increasing focus on mobile, speed will become more important as ranking factor.

To be more specific on the size, according to this article - the average page size for the top-1000 websites is increasing and was 1600K in July '14. There is a negative correlation between page size & number of visits (no surprise). I would certainly not go above the 1600K (even this number seems already quite high for me)

rgds,

Dirk

Like Monica is suggesting- keywordtool.io is great. Being a bit of a car freak myself - Brand + Modelname + (model)year are the most popular terms for new cars - in combination with review/price/launch date... Given the fact this particular model was already shown on the Paris motorshow there should be enough information available to write some interesting stuff about it.

rgds,

Dirk

They send tons of links from other domains that have been hacked to the waldorf domain. If you check open site explorer you see that there are 100nds of links to a page type /style.asp  - all with anchor text replica watches, probably the previous target. I guess they did the same thing for the soccer site - but that these links do not yet show up in open site explorer. Seem to be the only plausible explanation why this site would rank for another sites brandname.

Apparently Google' algorithm is unable to catch these quite obvious tricks (cloaking, spammy links, duplicate content,...).

rgds,

Dirk

Hi,

Don't know exactly the technique they use - but they hacked the site - presented the content of your site to Google as you can see here: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:zFtvwoO5EhoJ:www.waldorf.org.za/foot.asp+&cd=1&hl=nl&ct=clnk&gl=uk - it's an exact copy of your site - so they present your site to Googlebot. It's not only the homepage - other pages are indexed as well: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:jC3Etl7Fd2EJ:http://www.waldorf.org.za/foot.asp?products/28122.html%2Bhttp://www.waldorf.org.za/foot.asp&hl=nl-GB&gbv=2&&ct=clnk

They implemented a 302 on the page (I guess based on referrer that redirects you to the cheap soccer site) - if you visit the url directly you just get an innocent linux install page.

File a complaint @Google & warn the owner of the domain that the site is hacked (the hackers also inserted spammy links on the normal version of the site) - would start with Google so you have proof about what's happening.

rgds,

Dirk

Hi Craig,

Don't see any issue in using the word "comic book" in your H1. A bit reluctant to give Amazon as an example but they also add the word "Paperback" in the H1 title - they just format the book title &  "paperback" differently - but it's still wrapped in the H1. Just make sure that the other content on the page is unique & you should be ok.

Dirk

Hi,

I did a test crawl of your site with Screaming Frog & didn't find anything special. Sampling a few pages of your site didn't reveal anything really specific regarding to the SSL certificate. I would try to contact Moz support directly (http://moz.com/about/contact).  They should be able to give you some more info on the error you encounter.

Sorry that I can't offer more help

rgds,

Dirk

Hi,

1 Given the fairly small amount of url's the easiest way to check is to do a site:yourdomain.com & see which url is missing (normally you should see 23 results here).

2. Google works in mysterious ways - quite possible that the page in the other language is dropped next week, or just  remains in the index

3. Probably Google decided that this particular page wasn't interesting enough or considered it a duplicate of another page of your site.

4. Improve the content on the pages is probably the best way to get pages in the index. Must say that most sites don't get to 100% index ratio of the url's in their sitemaps. It's quite possible that the page that is dropped is something like a 'contact us' or "disclaimer' page which has no value for search.

In general, the number of url's of the sitemap that are indexed is just giving an indication how good your site is indexed. Being in the index is just the first step, it's the ranking & especially the search traffic that count. For one url dropped I would not put too much effort in figuring out which one it is.

Hope this helps,

Dirk

Hi Justin,

Your sitemap should contain all the url's of your site. Most CMS have a function that runs every night & regenerates the sitemap, so that it always contains the most up-to-date info. If you haven't updated the sitemap since launch it will not be up-to-date.

If your CMS doesn't offer this function, you could always use an external sitemap generator which crawls your site & generates the sitemap for you. If you google for sitemap generator you will certainly find some examples.

If you are using Screaming Frog, it can also this. If you're not using it yet - it could be a (small = 99GBP/yr) investment worth considering as it gives a complete check-up in terms of SEO. In your case - you should generate it for each of the domains.

rgds,

Dirk