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What are are you searching for? I notice that if you do a site:.capacitr.com you get the 1,950 results you mention above.
If you do a search for site:www.capacitr.com then you only get 29 results.
Its looks like there's a whole load of pages being indexed on other subdomains - fb.capacitr.com and lab.capacity.com. (Which has 1,860 pages!)
What are these used for, do you really want these in the index!
It's not just the search engines you need to consider. Is the speed of your site affecting user experience? Are people giving up because it's just too slow? How many abandoned sessions are you getting? Do you have any opportunity to get feedback from your users?
Agree with Kane. If you're going to be building a blog elsewhere then just setup a 301 redirect to that.
Hiya,
Without knowing a little more about your site and the blog here are some things I would consider:
I'm going to assume that you're trying to decide what to do with the blog while still retaining the maximum benefits for the overall seo of your site.
You say that the blog has thousands of URLs. What you need to do is determine how many sites are linking to your blog content. (You can do this using Open Site Explorer or look in Google webmaster tools or Google Analyrics to see who is reffering traffic.
The first question I would ask is whether you need to remove the content at all? Would it be possible just to put up a banner on top of the existing pages to say that the blog is no longer active.
How many search visitors does the blog get? If the blog posting are getting visitors, then you need to ask yourself if you're happy to give these up.
Would anyone else be interested in taking over the blog?
If you decide to remove you content:
Put 301 redirects to direct traffic to you main site. You'll preserve some of the value of your inbound links.
Do your blog pages relate to specific content on the main site that may be of interest to the visitor? If you can determine specific pages that are strongly related to the removed pages then link to those.
I wouldn't just remove the pages and respond with a 404 error. You'll lose any value from the links to those pages.
Hope this helps!
This might help: http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/index.html
It's google's guide to making ajax applications crawlable!
Good luck!
A good place to start is to look at google's webmaster guidelines:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769
Copyblogger has some great advice on headlines/titles and copy-writing in general.
I'd recommend: How to write magnetic headlines
There's lots of advice out there, I've just not found a really nice single source for search snippet copy-writing and optimisation.
I'd be concerned that your javascript/ajax loader for the search results is going to hide the actual content from search engines. No point even worrying about the page navigation on these category pages if the content is invisible!
Use webmaster tools to take a look at how googlebot is going to see your site.
Just looking at the source of the page I can't see any mention of the content just the "
" placeholder.
I can't see the page navigation either.
Going forward I'd also try to get some more rich category specific content on the first page of each category...
I don't know how far I'd trust such third party sites. Take a look at Google Webmaster Tools. There's a Fetch as Googlebot tool under diagnostics.
Here's the Google help about it::
Google certainly does read title and heading tags!
As far as the navigation bar goes - always think about humans first. Sometimes you can improve relevance by avoiding generic names. Avoid generic terms like "Articles" for instance and replace it with something that better describes the content behind the click "nutrition guide" or "food facts"...
The fact that your navigation is being read first isn't a problem - it's a convention that is hardly going to be penalised by a search engine.
I can't say i understand it either. If Dutch is the language you're targeting then I can see it's frustrating that this is the language search that seems to be coming up with the wrong page!
Are you setting the language correctly? A quick look at the source seems to show the language code wrapped in IE conditionals.
Don't know if this helps (it's a bit old):
I've sent you a private message, but as I mentioned in the message I suspect that there are some language factors coming in to play.
You provided me with the keyword, your domain and the specific ranking page and told me that you were using google.be
I noted when using the keyword ranking tool on SEOmoz, the results were different depending on the language selected:
google.be (dutch) - homepage was ranking at #8
google.be (english) - optimised page was ranking at #7
google.be (french) - optimised page was ranking at #10.
My guess here is that the optimised page isn't looking particularly dutch!
I don't know if anyone else has any advice on this as I do not have any multi-lingual SEO experience!
Hope this helps.
Like the approach you take to smooth things out, and agree that client education is important.
I hope that my clients focus on KPI's that really matter to their business (conversions!) and not get bogged down chasing rankings! Although it is important for them to understand why ranking matter and how we track them.
If you see negative changes in keywords that were getting you good click-throughs/conversions then you need to do something about it.
If you're manually checking you need to remove personalisation other wise the SERPS you see will more than likely be different to the one that SEOmoz (or any other ranking tool sees).
Before you spend time buildling a widget, I'd do some research and find out if it's something that webmasters are likely to use (and how many of them would be interested!)
My advice would be to try and identity a "need" first and then come up with something that satisfies that need (and of course give you a backlink too)
What do you know about your visitors? What type of people are they and why are they visiting your site?
Who's currently linking to you and why?
On your website you say "created to help kids, parents, and teachers recall the words and lyrics to loved children songs"
Do you provide nice and easy ways these people can print the lyrics (with your branding and link of course). Getting traffic from off-line sources is still traffic!
Do you have a mailing list? You could offer the lyrics to a song every week. Might to sustain awareness of your site and increase returning visitors.
Testing is definitely the key here. You need to find out what's going to work best for your site and your visitors. Take advice, and make the best first guess you can but don't be afraid to test other ideas. It can be revealing!
Keep an eye on other factors too - you don't want to damage visitor engagement by making the ads too intrusive etc...
I think the obvious answer is that you need to build links. Can you think of any way you can give your visitors and incentive to link back to you? Getting your visitors to do your link building for you would be ideal!
Have you taken a look at not just the number of backlinks your competitor has, but where they are getting their backlinks from?
You can then try to get links from the same places (take a good look at why people are linking to your competitor though!)
Also try to get a feel for the kinds of sites, and the reasons why people are backlinking and then try to cast your net to capture all sites that match this profile.
Hope this helps.
Agree with the others. Don't worry too much about fluctuations - it's when you don't bounce back up again that you need to be concerned. Keep an eye on overall trends, and for competitive keywords keep a close eye on the competition.
Look out for new-comers in the SERPS, and look out for new content. fresh page can out-rank older pages but may weaken over time.
Don't fall into the trap of thinking that the job's done once you achieve a high ranking. You need to stay ahead of the competition.
Good luck!
Market Samurai's keyword research is just a front-end to the google keyword tool. I must admit. I do like the ability in MS to keep the keyword research together, but find myself more often than not using Google's tool directly.
I don't find MS's way of assessing the competitiveness of keywords too useful. It's all very nice knowing how many pages are being displayed in the SERPS or have keywords in their title tag, but this doesn't tell you how easy it's going to be to get your page into a competitive position.
This is where I find SEOmoz's keyword difficulty tool incredibly valuable.
I prefer having SEOmoz collect my ranking/traffic data automatically over having to manually update MS.
SEOMoz give you a lot - on-page analysis, social reports, link analysis etc, but it really does depend on what you need and what your budget is,
My advice would be to try both and see which one helps you achieve your goals as quickly and easily as possible.
Based on the benefits I have directly experienced, and the added value I've been able to provide my customers, I would choose SEOMoz.
Hope this helps.
I think you need to be clear that by Meta-tags, you're referring to meta-description (and title). I agree, getting these right can make a real difference. With a compelling title and meta-description you can get more than your fair share of traffic, even if you don't rank #1! All you need to do it get the searcher to believe that they are going to find what they're looking for!
Meta-Keywords is probably best ignored. I believe there is a risk that Bing make use an over-stuffed meta-keywords tag as a negative signal.
What's the website, the optimized page and the keyword you're targeting?