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Yes, I would not put them in the sitemap. Main goal of a sitemap is to make it easier for bots to discover the different pages of the site. The pages that have a canonical url pointing to another page don't really need this, as you don't want the search engines to index them anyway.
Hi,
Agree with the arguments of Ryan on the whether or not to put the canonical.
However, if you decide that these pages are almost identical, and that you will use a canonical, it has no use to put all the variations of these pages in the sitemap. However, you should add the canonical version to the sitemap.
It's not a big problem if these pages are in the sitemap, you'll just notice it webmaster tools a low % of indexed pages for this sitemap.
rgds,
Dirk
Hi,
You could check http://referencement.abondance.com/ (France) - not really rocket science but it covers the basics and quality should be ok. Other sources could be http://www.livre-referencement.com/ (ebook or book). Not associated with them, and didn't use them either, so I can't judge the quality. Abondance is referenced on http://ceseo.org/certification/preparer-lexamen/ - CESEO is an organisation which aims to improve the quality of the SEO consultants in France.
Hope this helps,
Dirk
Hi,
Click rate seems incredibly low for 1.4 position. With no additional info it's very difficult to asses what could be the cause. Normally title+meta description are the elements which are important for you click rate (for local only the title). May be the copy could be improved?
Would it be possible to add a screen copy with the actual search results (you can always black out your brandname / url if you want to keep that private)
When I check my own sites in Webmastertools - the only case where I get such low click rates is when people are looking for images, and Google is displaying the image box on the top of the results with 6 images. Even when we are the second image that is shown, the click rate is only 2% (this figure is also coming from a German site).
In Local search results key info (like location, phone number,...etc) is revealed without the need of clicking to the site, which could also lead to low click rates (guess this is probably more in the case of tax consultant than seo)
rgds,
Dirk
Hi,
Probably the easiest solution in your case is to use the geo-targeting settings in Google Webmaster tools (but only if each of your subdomains is targeting a specific country - not a specific language).
If you want to use hreflang - there is quite a good post on it on Moz (http://moz.com/blog/hreflang-behaviour-insights) - must admit I personally never used it.
rgds,
Dirk
If it's always identical, it doesn't seem to bring a lot of added value.
Sometimes, it's just added by default in the CMS, just in case (sometimes CMS's can generate pages you don't expect to exist). Plenty of sites are doing it (Moz as well).
The best way to know if you would need to add canonical is to check your site with a crawl tool (like Screaming Frog or Xenu's Link Sleuth). If you don't find any duplicate url's, you won't need it. You could also crawl the site of your competitor, and check if the url is always identical to the canonical (Screaming frog has this functionality). Also check your landing pages in Analytics & Webmaster tools to see if you see any abnormal url's.
Having canonical urls (apart for the duplicate content part) has no specific other advantages for SEO (but it doesn't hurt either). If your competitor is outranking you, it's probably not because of the canonical, but for other reasons.
Last, some people add canonicals to avoid scraping - they hope that the scraper will also include the canonical. Personally, I doubt that this is very useful. Somebody who scrapes content will probably also get rid of the canonical & replace it with his own url.
Hi,
it's not really necessary to do it, but can be useful to make sure that the right url is being indexed and to avoid duplicate content issues.. Example - using canonical avoids that pages like site.com/index.htm&trackingid=xyz are indexed - only the correct site.com/index.htm will be indexed. Another example could be articles which could published in two sections, but only may be indexed in one section. Be carefuI, I sometimes see examples where the canonical is always identical to the url - even for the examples as given before, which basically renders the canonical useles.
If you are sure that each page of your site has one unique url than you don't need the canonical url.
rgds
Dirk
Hi Neal,
If I understand what you're saying - you're not really doing a migration - you will be running two CMS's in parallel; the current content will remain in Joomla & the new url will be created in Wordpress. People visiting the homepage will be redirected to site.com/wordpress_site/index.htm
If this is the case, this solution doesn't really look future proof. First of all there is the maintenance issue, you'll have to maintain two systems. Very soon, you will probably only update the Wordpress site & neglect the Joomla site and the two sites will become completely disconnected (and the Joomla content outdated). At one point, you will probably want to retire the Joomla application & then you will have to redirect the entire site to the root again.
I had a similar case when we did a partial migration (part of the site migrated to the new cms in a subfolder / part remained on the old cms on the root). The part which was migrated was one of the traffic generators of the site & we really had a very big drop in traffic (as this new part was almost disconnected from the rest of the site. To be honest, there were also a lot of other issues with the new cms, which probably had part in the traffic loss )
I would recommend you to check if you can't migrate the content from the old cms into the new one (at least the part which is generating traffic). If this is not possible, or difficult on short timeframe - I would 301 the Joomla site to archive.site.com (or site.com/archive) & put the new site on the root. In a second step - you can then put the content from the old site into the new one and redirect from the archive to the new site.
Dirk
Both measures are not really reliable to know how many pages are actually in the index.
Googles definition on 'Total Indexed': Shows the total URLs available to appear in search results, along with other URLs Google might discover by other means. This number changes over time as you add and remove pages. The number of indexed URLs is almost always significantly smaller than the number of crawled URLs, because Total indexed excludes URLs identified as duplicatesor non-canonical, as less useful, or that contain a meta noindex tag. (source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2642366)
=> basically this number contains all the pages Google has been crawling since the launch of your site, and is quite useless as absolute figure, it's the evolution over time which is more important
site:domain.com will show you pages that are eligible to show in the search results, but is not a really reliable measure either - it's quite possible that more pages are indexed. On very big sites you will see this number change when you go to page 2,3,...Etc It is a good check to see if your site is indexed or not.
That said, the number of pages in the index is not a very important figure, it's rather the ranking of your site for your main keywords which is important, as it is the main driver of your traffic.
Hi,
A bit strange. I assume that you are using a generic TLD (.com, .net, .org or something similar) and the the language used on the site is Spanish. With the limited information you give is not easy to find out what is causing this problem.
You could set the hreflang tag to "es" to make it very obvious for Google that you are targeting the Spanish market.
How is your link profile - is the majority of the links coming from Spain (or Spanish speaking countries) or do you have a lot of links coming from Sweden?
Are the "Swedish" queries you find in GWT also Spanish, and are they similar to the queries from other countries? Do you see Sweden as an important source of traffic in Analytics?
rgds,
Dirk
Hi Dan,
As far as I know geo targeting in Webmastertools in only possible on the domain level (and only for generic tld's like .net, .com,...etc). I agree with Robert, in your case I would certainly not do it, as you try to attract 3 different countries with one TLD.
For one of the Spanish sites I manage we tried the geo targeting in GWT, but it didn't seem to give specific benefits. The only measurable effect we noticed was that the traffic from S-America was decreasing (slightly) , but there was no increase in traffic from Spain. We didn't experience a significant increase in rankings in Spain either, so we removed the geo targeting (this site had quite generic content, so not really linked to a specific location in Spain).
We still have the geo targeting active on a shop specifically targeting the Spanish market, but we still get approx. 45% of our traffic from S-America (which from our perspective is useless traffic as we don't ship to these countries)
Dirk
Click on your profile picture (right upper corner) - Select Billing&Subscription - then Billing Information -> your invoices are listed here.
You could install the Google Analytics debugger (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-analytics-debugger/jnkmfdileelhofjcijamephohjechhna). Check the Javascript console in Chrome for Analytics related error messages to be sure that the event tracking is properly setup (when triggering the event)
Hi,
I did a quick crawl of your site with Screamingfrog - basic site structure seems to be ok - most of the pages are within 1/2 clicks from the homepage. The url's are pretty long - but that is not necessarily a sign that they are far from the root.
I noticed that you are using a lot of (very) heayv images on the site and that these images are pushing the content to the bottom, invisible without scrolling. Example http://www.radianceofpalmbeach.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/fattransfertobutt2.jpg -> 1.150 KB for one image. This has an impact on the loadtime of your pages - see: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150110_FW_KEY/1/details/ . Some of the images are put on the non-www version, so needing an additional redirect.
If I look at your page titles, H1, meta descriptions - it seems that they are very specific, but not really answering the questions a potential user of this site may have. Example http://www.radianceofpalmbeach.com/services/non-invasive-treatments/skin-rejuvenation/matrix-ir-laser-treatment/ => page title: Matrix IR Laser Treatment - New Radiance Palm Beach H1: Matrix IR - Metadescription: Matrix is an amazing wrinkle reduction procedure that uses ...etc -> few people will be looking for Matrix, so probably you need to do some keyword research and see what are the keywords which by your target audience.
Language used on the different pages is very commercial and not very informative.While most of the images are quite good in terms of quality, the images of staff are not sharp, and certainly do not look professional (example http://www.radianceofpalmbeach.com/about-new-radiance/neil-c-goodman/- the profile picture looks like a scan from a picture taken in the 80ties)
Dirk
Dave,
While checking your site, it seems that the tracking code is not always loaded - so probably it's more a technical glitch after the maintenance. Not clear what is causing it - when you install the tag assistant plugin you will see yourself. Seems to happen on first visit.
When it's not loaded your source (homepage) looks like this:
Dirk
Hi Dave,
How is overall traffic - did you see the same traffic drop. Sometimes Google traffic is reported as referrer traffic (for one of the sites I manage which is largely dependant on image search almost all google traffic is reported as referrer rather than search traffic)
I noticed that you're using a (very) old version of the GA tracker - consider updating to the last version (universal). If I check the page with the Tag Assistant plugin I get 3 warnings (sync version / code outside head / depreciated method get_tracker)
Dirk
To be honest - it's very difficult to see the difference between your site & the one of your competitor, except that his site looks a bit more modern. Content & Images are almost identical, it seems you are both taking the information from the same source.
I doubt your competitor is doing something on your website; I think he's doing exactly the same as you are doing, just in a slightly better way. In fact, it seems that there are a lot of other players who are doing exactly the same - like http://www.salarpuriasattvaeastcrest.org.in/
Your site has a .com extension - and also exists as http://salarpuriasattvaeastcrest.net.in => duplicate content.
Homepage also exists as /Default.aspx
The recipe for all these sites seems to be the same - take an exact match domain - put some images & the content from the one who is constructing the building and than hope you get the first position. Looks like gambling to me - sometimes you win, sometimes you loose.
If everyone is doing the same thing, you should try to differentiate and try to be better than the rest
rgds,
Dirk
Dave,
I doubt that the downtime (especially because it has been only a few hours) has anything to do with the drop in traffic. In my experience, even an unscheduled downtime of 24hr doesn't have any impact on SEO traffic.
If you are hit by Penguin, check your low quality links in Google Webmastertools, and try to contact the sites to eliminate the links to your site (if the link quality is very low, almost impossible to get these links removed). For the ones that do not answer, disavow the links.
Do the same for low quality links you can find using other tools: ahrefs.com, majesticseo.com, opensiteexplorer.com.
Check the profile of Marie Haynes - she has quite some experience on link removal and unnatural links & has written some interesting stuff about it http://moz.com/community/users/308135 - check the posts at the bottom of her profile.
Dirk
Hi,
Never heard of SEO Spyglass before - are you sure that the authority rankings they provide are reliable? Did you also notice a decrease in traffic? Did you notice anything special in Google Webmastertools?
When I checked your site I found a lot of content below the fold & pages which are very heavy (>1.5K) due to the images. Is the content you added to the blog original, or taken from other sources?
Dirk
Hi Alan,
The redesign has a more 'modern' look, but content is more difficult to access. As it still in draft, it's difficult to assess what the final result are going to be, but here my first impressions
On the old site, it's quite obvious where to click to get more detail on one of the properties. On the new site, you need to click on the 'details' before you get to the additional info. The additional info is opening in an overlayer - given the fact that Google doesn't really like content which is hidden, it's may be better to make a seperate page for each rental property. As the format for the images is fixed, it seems that some of the images are stretched to fit.
The home of the original page contained a lot more info than the current one.
Not sure what you're going to put into the navigation - the left bar / right bar puzzles me.
If I resize my screen - the content is not always resizing in a smooth manner, it seems you have optimised the site for very specific screen sizes, sizes which are in-between need horizontal scrolling to see the full content (example screensize 768x1024 => only 60% of content is visible)
I would say - looks better than the old site, but take care that you don't try to do everything on one page, and make sure that content remains visible, regardless of the size of the screen.
Rgds,
Dirk
