Welcome to the Q&A Forum
Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.
BDCSEO,
That is not at all uncommon. If the migration was done well it "should" bounce back within a few weeks. A sustained traffic loss usually means something was missed, like losing link equity from legacy redirects that weren't ported over, similar to the issue above.
Cyto,
The Google Webmaster Tools parameter handling, in my opinion, is often best left up to Google. In other words, I rarely change it. Instead, I try to fix the issue itself. In your case, here is what I would advise:
Instead of using a parameter in the URL, use cookies or hidden divs to change the content on the page to the different size. Have a look at most major online retailers. You can select a size or color from the drop down and it never changes the URL.
If this is not possible, I recommend the following:
Ensure the rel = "canonical" tag on all of those pages references the canonical version (e.g. /product-alpha-size1) which will consolidate the link-related metrics like PageRank into the one page.
I don't like using the date-based archives in Wordpress anyway so if it were me I'd hack WP so the /2013 directory is your currently ranking content, which would save you from having to do a redirect.
You can make the "slug" whatever you want in Wordpress so if you're concerned about repeating the keyword in the directory you could change it to healthinsurance.net/2013-insurance or healthinsurance.net/2013-info or whatever you prefer.
Yes, repeating the EMD keyword in the next directory can look a little spammy, but if this is really an example of the situation you're having I don't think this one instance would cause you any problems. I have seen much, much worse.
Hello Jennifer,
I'm sorry I'm so late to the party here but I wanted to point you to a post Dr. Pete did in September:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-do-i-get-googles-bulleted-snippets
Based on what I'm seeing in my vertical (namely coupons). think what it boils down to is organization. There is no "official" way to get these types of listings, but the more organized / structured you can make the data the better. That's why it's so easy for bulleted lists and full tables to get them because the delineation between the coupons is very obvious to bots.
I have also not noticed any relation to these listings and structured data markup as described on Schema.org.
Hello Khi5,
I can't say with 100% certainty, but I feel confident that Google looks at both. I'm not sure about other search engines. Specifically, "page layout" algorithm needs to render the html/CSS - and increasingly javascript - in order to determine if there are too many ads "above the fold". Google also used to render the page to provide "instant previews" of each website in the SERPs.
In other words, the all-seeing eye of Google knows if your "unique content" shows up above or below the fold, or even 6,000 pixels off-screen to the left.
EGOL,
Great question / observation. I'm curious about this too, but do not know how a test could be designed that would rule out other factors. Glancing at the SERPs, I don't see any indication in terms of placement that this is a major factor since results #2, #3 #5-#7 don't have that data, but that isn't exactly scientific. On the other hand, those that do have it seem to be ranked in order of the total amount of items (i.e. 578 Amazon, 484 Zappos, 85 Shoebuy).
Regardless, nine times out of ten I recommend having a single product page with variables as something the user can choose from a drop down, as opposed to different pages. With this approach, in light of your question, it might be worth considering the option of having all of the variables listed as individual product pages on a category page, and using a rel canonical tag on the product pages to canonicalize them all to a single product page. This way you inflate your count on category pages, while avoiding the issues inherent with having separate pages for each variant.
Your question is "What we doing wrong"? Could you be more specific? I see at least 44 pages indexed. Can you provide a few examples of URLs that you think "should" be indexed but aren't? Or is your problem not about how many pages you have indexed?
I think Google is looking for more extreme situations than the one you have. The content is well-written, useful and isn't so far down the page that someone isn't going to see it. However, I don't have to tell you that it's going to take a LOT to compete in that niche.
Good luck.
Hello Richard,
That is a great question and I'm impressed by your attention to detail with regard to page-rank distribution changing as things go in and out of stock.
To answer your question, I don't think you risk being penalized for displaying in this way any more than thousands of other sites, including huge brands, risk it by using drop-down divs (e.g. "read more" , "transcript") and tabbed product description areas (e.g. "sizes", "description", "technical details", "Shipping costs") to break up the pertinent information into bite-sized chunks for the user. I work on a site that has checkboxes the user can uncheck to hide certain items if they don't wish to see them. This all uses similar coding to what you have described.
As long as you never specifically target Google (as in say "If Googlebot, then show this content, else show this other content) I think you'll be fine.
With that said, you may want to look into using a View-All rel canonical page to take care of that page-rank distribution issue you mentioned, depending on how it impacts the load-time of the page and how many links you will be sending part of your page-rank to: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/view-all-in-search-results.html . If it were me I'd just stick to the solution you first asked about, but there are plenty of options.
Also think about the UX when a visitor lands on the out-of-stock product page. All it takes is a few quality raters or a few hundred organic visitors who land on that page while it's out of stock to give it a bad rating or a fast back-click to the SERPs and you could find yourself battling the effects of Panda, at least as far as I understand the process. Some options to improve that user experience include: Estimated date that the product will come back; ability to backorder; ability to sign up for an email alert when it gets back in stock; related product links with images.
Good luck!
Everett
Hello Sarmad,
I don't recommend having a single-page website on the front-end. You can handle the loading of content however you like: Javascript, lazy loading, dynamic serving.. as long as each section/page has a different URL. A hashtag is not a new URL, but rather a named anchor link to somewhere else on the same page. Thus, using this technique you would only have a single page indexed in Google, not a lot of room to target different topics.
Lots of sites use the parallax design style, but have multiple pages. Parallax and single-page are not necessarily synonymous. The most common use on a multi-page site would be to tell a story on a landing page or the home page.
More concerning to me right now is that it looks like they're putting their clients' sites on their own subdomains, which are fully indexable by Google: https://goo.gl/z9dSDl .
That sounds like a reasonable approach. If you wanted to be extra careful you could also ad a robots follow,noindex tag to the header of the paginated pages since they all have very little unique content to add.
A third option, which I would only use if people are linking into those paginated pages (very rare), is to rel canonical the paginated pages to the first page.
Hello Vlevit,
If you can be more specific we may be able to be of more help. Google doesn't want you to show internal search result pages, but if this is a different type of situation it there may be an exception. Are these search result pages, product pages, category pages, content pages.... is it an eCommerce site, community, content site... ?
Generally speaking, 1M+ pages with no links going into them and content that is either sparce/thin or partially/fully duplicated on other similar pages (like a search for widgets and a search for green widgets showing overlapping content) is exactly the type of thing that will get you in hot water that would affect even the rankings of your home page.
Do you feel like your question has been answered or would you like to be more specific about your site and goals?
Cheers,
Everett
QubaSEO,
I think many people give Google too much credit. As Andy said, one would need more information to tell you whether noindexing those thin product pages is a good move. At minimum, link, traffic and sales data for each of the URLs.
My advice is to read these posts and do the research necessary to make a customized decision for your site, as opposed to seeking general "best practice advice".
Darcy,
Blocking URLs in the robots.txt file will not remove them from the index if Google has already found them, nor will it prevent them from being added if Google finds links to them, such as internal navigation links or external backlinks. If this is your issue, you'll probably see something like this in the SERPs for those pages:
"We cannot display the content because our crawlers are being blocked by this site's robots.txt file" or something like that.
Here's a good discussion about it on WMW.
If you have parameters set up in GWT and are using a rel canonical tag that points Google to the non-parameter version of the URL you probably don't need to block Googlebot. I would only block them if I thought crawlbudget was an issue, as in seeing Google to continue to crawl these pages within your log files, or when you potentially have millions of these types of pages.
Hello Cherie,
You're probably already aware that it is possible to install WP in a subdirectory: http://codex.wordpress.org/Giving_WordPress_Its_Own_Directory . The problem, as Syed mentioned below, probably has something to do with Volusion being on ASP.net and Wordpress requiring a Linux/PHP host. In my experience, just about every decision you make going forward will be more difficult to get done if you go with an ASP.net site because a lot will revolve around having someone use Internet Server Application Programming Interface (ISAPI).
It is possible to set up the WP site on another host, but if you found Magento too complex, this might not be the best way to go either:
Can I ask why you want to move if your rankings good and business is going well? There are probably a lot of improvements you could make with the help of a good Wordpress developer.
If you really must move over to Volusion and want to keep the WP blog, this may be one of those times when the "Put your blog on your primary domain" rule of thumb is put aside for an exception.
Something could have been "created" 100 years ago, but only "Published" for the first time last month. I think datePublished is what you should use for articles, blog posts, etc... dateModified is also important for when you update the page to show it's fresh and needs to be re crawled and rendered.
I wouldn't show any of them on the front end, though some people do prefer to see the Date Last Modified or Original Publish Date somewhere so they know if it's still relevant. It depends on the type of content you're publishing and if the topic moves quickly.
If you want to provide the markup to search engines without showing it on the front end use JSON-LD.
LOL, well you know the Moz folks. If they bent the rules just a bit they'd have a thousand haters calling them out on it publicly by the end of the day. So they tend toward sticking with legitimate best practices and unfortunately there is no such thing at the moment that I can find for "thumbs up or down" but I think a scale of 0-1 is definitely appropriate and will bring this up to the powers that be.
Thanks!
Hello Ocelot,
I am assuming you have a site that has affiliate links and you want to keep Google from crawling those affiliate links. If I am wrong, please let me know. Going forward with that assumption then...
That is one way to do it. So perhaps you first send all of those links through a redirect via a folder called /out/ or /links/ or whatever, and you have blocked that folder in the robots.txt file. Correct? If so, this is how many affiliate sites handle the situation.
I would not rely on rel nofollow alone, though I would use that in addition to the robots.txt block.
There are many other ways to handle this. For instance, you could make all affilaite links javascript links instead of href links. Then you could put the javascript into a folder called /js/ or something like that, and block that in the robots.txt file. This works less and less now that Google Preview Bot seems to be ignoring the disallow statement in those situations.
You could make it all the same URL with a unique identifyer of some sort that tells your database where to redirect the click. For example:
www.yoursite.com/outlink/mylink#123
or
www.yoursite.com/mylink?link-id=123
In which case you could then block /mylink in the robots.txt file and tell Google to ignore the link-ID parameter via Webmaster Tools.
As you can see, there is more than one way to skin this cat. The problem is always going to be doing it without looking like you're trying to "fool" Google - because they WILL catch up with any tactic like that eventually.
Good luck!
Everett
Hello Chris,
Do you mean how often a snippet will get re-evaluated by the algorithm? I think that's pretty much a continuous process. Some snippets will be more volatile than others based factors like the news cycle, the intent implied by the keyword, seasonality, user-feedback signals that tell Google if people are happy with the result...
I don't think humans are generally going through the search results and reviewing snippets, as that just would not be scaleable. Quality Raters may look at them, but their feedback is considered more at the macro-level, as in "did this change to the algorithm improve the results, or make them worse?" To my knowledge, they're not out there individually zapping snippets they don't like.
Thank you Thomas,
I did have a look at the site and came to the conclusion that it had relatively no domain authority or page/URL-level authority from quality backlinks. The page had no links, and the domain only had a couple, neither of them great. As you mention, this industry is very competitive. It is one of the most competitive niches online.
My recommendation was to embark on a content marketing campaign, possibly one that highlights medical care / law / coverage disparities between countries. The domain itself is very brandable, and if they were to latch onto a hot-topic issue in the right way they could get quoted as experts in that industry by major news outlets, or at least some decent blogs. Meanwhile, steady posting about the lindustry on the blog, occasional white papers or studies created by the company about the the industry... will help build their body of content and present their expertise on the topic. Any tool (calculators, price comparison charts, etc...) would also help. I also mentioned a recommended minimum budget for content creation and paid promotion of it over the next six months.