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Rajiv,
In GA are you looking under Goals or Events? Go to Behavior ---> Events.
Do you see anything there? And are you sure people are clicking those buttons?
That landing page is massively keyword stuffed. If it works for you then fine, but if you're having trouble ranking I would look into drastically reducing keyword use on the page.
Good luck!
Hello Kevin,
Just by asking this question you exhibit way more intuitive knowledge than many seasoned SEOs out there.
First you need to think about the intent of the searcher. Do they want to read about Biggie's influence on hip hop, or do they want to buy a pair of Biggie Smalls Versace sunglasses? Being an ecommerce site, I'd go with the latter.
Second, you need to think about scaleability. It is great to customize every title tag and meta description completely, but that isn't always scaleable across several thousand products.
Some other tips:
I always liked adding in offers and unique selling propositions on key products. The offers might be temporary and subject to change, which is why you need to keep it scaleable. The last thing you want is an angry shopper who saw an offer in the SERPs that is no longer available on the site. This might only be your top 10-50 products out of thousands, but typically those represent the majority share of revenue on most ecommerce sites anyway. Some examples:
Buy Biggie Smalls Versace Sunglasses - Free Shipping from Company!
Biggie Smalls Versace Sunglasses: Save 10% with Company!
Authentic Biggie Smalls Sunglasses from Versace - Save at Website.com!
You get the point. These titles are obviously written for shoppers. They are at the point of the buying cycle where they know exactly what they want and are just looking for a good deal from a trusted, reliable store.
If you're targeting someone earlier in the buying cycle who wants Versace sun glasses but do not yet know which kind, they should end up on a category page.
If you're targeting a Biggie Smalls fan who doesn't even know they "want" a pair of sunglasses yet, well that's an entirely different type of landing page and marketing activity. Conversion rates from the SERPs for that target market would be dismally low on a product detail page. An article about Biggie Smalls would be more appropriate. Something specifically dealing with the phenomenon of merchandising around the name of a deceased artist might be particularly appealing and link-worthy.
Good luck!
Hello William,
In the future it would be best to start a new thread for your own question, but this time I will answer this here since it is related to the one above.
Yes, you should use a cross domain rel canonical tag, as it could be harming BOTH sites to have that duplicate content out there. You could rewrite the titles and descriptions for one or the other, but I would not rely on Google to "know" which one you want to rank without harming the other.
I have to disagree that the credit goes to whichever version was found "first". I think attribution of authoritativeness and/or origination is a bit more complicated than that. For example, if page A and B both have the same content and page A is found first, but page B has 20 high-quality external links on a domain with a lot of authority and page A only has 1 link and is on my mom's blog... I doubt Google is going to think my mom is the original just because her site was crawled first.
Yes it can be a problem and yes you should do something about it if you can prove that your client wrote the content and that it isn't just the same manufacturer supplied product description that everyone gets.
First ask the offending site to remove their copied content. If that doesn't work you can file a DMCA complaint here:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dmca-notice?pli=1&&rd=1
Dmitrli,
Regarding the blocking of affiliate URLs in the robots.txt file, you can and probably should do this, by first running those through an internal link redirect. For example:
If the Merchant gives you the following URL:
http://www.merchant.com/affiliate-id=123&landing-page=abc
You wouldn't show that URL to Google or users. Instead, you would show them:
http://www.youraffiliatesite/affiliate-link?id=123
And then in your robots.txt would be:
Disallow: /affiliate-link?id=*
Hello Santaur,
I'm afraid this question isn't as easy as you may have thought at first. It really depends on what is on the pages in those two directories, what they're being used for, who visits them, etc... Certainly removing them altogether wouldn't be as terrible as some people might think IF those pages are of poor quality, have no external links, and very few - if any - visitors. It sounds to me that you might need a "Content Audit" wherein the entire site is crawled, using a tool like Screaming Frog, and then relevant metrics are pulled for those pages (e.g. Google Analytics visits, Moz Page Authority and external links...) so you can look at them and make informed decisions about which pages to improve, remove or leave as-is.
Any page that gets "removed" will leave you with another choice: Allow to 404/410 or 301 redirect. That decision should be easy to make on a page-by-page basis after the content audit because you will be able to see which ones have external links and/or visitors within the time period specified (e.g. 90 days). Pages that you have decided to "Remove" which have no external links and no visits in 90 days can probably just be deleted. The others can be 301 redirected to a more appropriate page, such as the blog home page, top level category page, similar page or - if all else fails - the site home page.
Of course any page that gets removed, whether it redirects or 404s/410s should have all internal links updated as soon as possible. The scan you did with Screaming Frog during the content audit will provide you with all internal links pointing to each URL, which should speed up that process for you considerably.
Good luck!
I'd like to add that you want to make sure you're going with a company that doesn't hire people to leave fake reviews on your site to populate that content. The Shopper Approved website says that all reviews are from "actual paying customers" so I'm guessing you're ok there.
I looked at the Shopper Approved site and saw this:
"Every rating you collect is added to a static, search engine optimized page, that can show up in Google, Yahoo, and Bing to boost your reputation."
You should find out where that page lives because I couldn't find any review content from several different products in the SERPs, and I didn't see any indexable version of the content in the code on your product pages.
I typically advise making promotion URLs "evergreen" so you can re-use them. For example, if you know you're going to have a Christmas sale every year don't make the URL /christmas-sale-2015/. Just /christmas-sale/ will do. Then when the promotion is over you can put up messaging saying when they should check back (if it's a regular promotion) and provide a link to your main promotions page. You can just re-use this same page every year and it will gain more and more links over time and become increasingly powerful.
If the promotion is a one-time deal and not something that you do each month, quarter, year... then I would 301 redirect the out-of-date promotions pages to the main promotions landing page. You can update the content on that page regularly and optimize it for things like "sales, discounts, deals, promotions, promos...".
Hello Christian,
You have three choices here, listed in order of preference in my opinion:
#1 View All Canonical - This may not be a good choice for you, however, because there are hundreds of pages of reviews, which may take too long to load on a single page.
#2 Rel Canonical - You are actually already doing this:
#3 Rel Next Prev - This "would" be the ideal fix, but Google doesn't seem to treat it the way they're supposed to.
In summary: I think you're fine the way things are. No need to be concerned here.
There are a number of ways to handle this situation. Rest assured that you're not going to get "penalized" by Google for this. Every hardware and parts maker, whether it's auto, home improvement or replacement parts for appliances -- is dealing with the same thing. Here are some choices you may have considered:
1. Choose a canonical version and canonicalize all of the others to it. This means each one is a separate product that can be found on the site, but Google will only show one of them in the search results. There are obvious cons to this setup, such as being less likely to rank for specific long tail queries related to the make/model.
2. Keep each one separate and self-canonicalizing. Rely on Google to figure out that they're not the same product, and to show the most appropriate one for each query.
3.Combine them all into a single product page and use drop-down selectors to choose make/model or whatever other variants are available for the product.
Which one of these seems best for your situation?
The Facebook reviews don't appear to have any micro-data markup in the code. They're there, but not marked up. What is marked up is listing your website as the item reviewed instead of the product from what I can see, and the itemscope isn't filled out:
div class="sub-footer" itemscope="" itemtype="http://data-vocabulary.org/Review-aggregate">
gomme-auto.it
|
votato
9.81
su
10
da
1704
You should mark up each of the FB reviews with this schema:
And the aggregate of those reviews with this schema:
http://schema.org/AggregateRating
What they are reviewing is the product on the page, not the website itself. Therefore, you'll be using this schema to mark up the thing that is being reviewed:
You may want to hire a developer to do this. Schema can be kind of tricky sometimes. Let us know how it goes!
Hello Ross,
The spam comments below have been reported.
To your questions:
I don't know of any way to "restore" data that you never exported or saved, but there are several documented processes for automating it each month. For example, I recommend this solution: interface: https://gsuite.google.com/marketplace/app/search_analytics_for_sheets/1035646374811
This should also take care of your other question about getting more rows of data than what's provided in the GSC interface.
Just because you mark up the page doesn't mean Google will update their SERPs to show enhanced listings for that page. They will often ignore markup on sites that they deem to be low quality, or which do not have enough brand recognition and/or authority yet. They may also choose not to show it if they think the reviews are fake or censored to show only the good ones.
Here are some reasons why Google may decide not to show rich snippets in SERPs after you have used the Data Highlighter (which I'm assuming is what you used since I don't see any actual Schema markup in the code): https://developers.google.com/structured-data/policies?rd=1
I like that idea in theory and in practice for some sites. But in practice for most of the sites I deal with I have enough trouble trying to get buy-off for custom copy on each product page, let alone five or ten totally unique, separate descriptions that don't all sound boilerplate.
I'd love to see a few examples though if you don't mind sharing. You can PM me if you like.
Cheers,
Everett
Yes, your sitemap should be clean of anything other than a 200 (ok) status code.
If you are getting thousands of 410's then the URL mapping must not be correct. Otherwise, they'd be 301s. Export all of those URLs returning a 410 status code and pull in metrics for them from Google Search Console, Analytics, and for backlinks (Moz, aHref, SEMRush...). Did any of them get more than a few visitors in the 90 days prior to the migration? Did any of those result in sales? Do any of them have backlinks?
Hello Micromano,
See this thread on Stack Exchange. You can mark up your organization, as well as any organization (or other "entity") that you describe / discuss on your website. Marking up an organization doesn't mean you are necessarily affiliated with them UNLESS you use the "SameAs" tag to connect that data with your own website, wiki page or social profiles...
Also, you may want to look into using JSON-LD instead. You would still base it on the Schema.org hierarchies, but the code is slightly different. The cool thing about JSON is that you don't have to show all of the data you're marking up. It can just be in the source code and not visible on the page, similar to meta descriptions as far as that aspect goes.
Here's what I would do.
1. Put Organization Schema for YOUR business (or your client's) in the HTML header of EVERY page using JSON-LD. Here's a generator I like. Also check out the JSON-LD Playground for testing your code. Don't forget the SameAs tags pointing to other sites/pages that you can verify as "official". This includes Wikipedia pages, Wiki Data pages and social profiles.
2. Also surround information about YOUR business (logo, NAP...) with traditional Schema.org Organization markup.
3. Use traditional Schema.org Organization markup for the business listings, and include a SameAs tag around a link to their official websites.
Here's a good Stack Overflow thread to check out: Mixing Together Schemas.
Just adding to the great answer above, if you are logged into the Google account associated with that Knowledge Graph (such as the one used for Google Local listings / Google+) and click on the "Feedback" link in grey at the bottom of the KG box it will allow you to suggest edits for various fields, including social profiles.
You can also provide feedback in the same exact way without being logged into the account, but I don't think it would have nearly as much success at getting added for all to see.
If you consistently see the IP address and redirect, or change content, based only on that then you will want to exempt Googlebot from those personalizations in one way or another. There are many options to this, like blocking the resources that handle this (i.e. the JavaScript.js file associated with personalization based on history or geo-location), or what was suggested above. Blocking that piece of script in the robots.txt file is less likely to be seen as cloaking.
All of this begs the question though: If you're looking at the IP, then setting a cookie, then updating the content based on the cookie, it shouldn't be an issue in the first place. Googlebot isn't accepting your cookies. So if I were to browse in Incognito mode using Chrome (and thus not accept cookies), would I see the same site and product assortments no matter which location I was in? If that's the case, maybe you don't have a problem. This is pretty easy to test.
Ultimately, I think you're going to want a single product page for each Sku, rather than one for each product at each location. The content, pricing, etc.. can be updated by location if they have a cookie, but the URL should probably never change - and the content shouldn't change by IP if they don't have a cookie.
1. Check IP
2. Embed their location in a cookie
3. Set cookie
4. If cookie is excepted and thus exists, do personalize.
If the cookie does not exist, do not personalize. You can show a message that says you must accept cookies to get the best experience, but don't make it block any major portion of the content.
Google is a corporation whose sole purpose in the universe is to make money. I would never think of anyone as a "hater" for legitimate criticisms of an entity that has all the rights of a human being, but none of the responsibilities or risks of one.
It seems like maybe we're getting off topic. Why does the affiliate have to suffer in order for the merchant to succeed and vice versa? The real problem here seems to be that you are giving your affiliates the same content you use on your own site. Either make them write their own content or change what's on your site and feed them the old content. It is more work, but you could start slowly by writing fresh (exclusive) content on your site for the most important products. This would give you the ability to test it out unless there is some site-wide (e.g. Panda) issue going on .
As both an affiliate and a merchant, I've always found it best if each has their own content. For one thing, the affiliate site sits earlier in the funnel so it would make sense that they wouldn't be using the same message as the merchant sites product detail page, which is about as far into the funnel as you can get without being inside a shopping cart.
If you are unwilling to do this I think EGOL said it best:
"However, if your rankings are falling it could be competitors (and your good affiliates) are working harder than you."
If you really want to be seen as the authoritative version when there are multiple sites with the same content, the biggest factor in my experience is simply links. Domain authority plays a role too, but a couple of deep links into your product page will make all the difference. I presented about some ways to get links into product and category pages at SMX West, 2012 (link to presentation) and also wrote a blog post about it here on SEOMoz. Hopefully that will help you get started, but there's no easy, scaleable way to do this that isn't a little bit on the gray side. To do it "right" in Google's eyes just takes a lot of elbow grease.
One last thing. As an affilaite there is no way I would agree to putting a cross domain rel canonical or rel author tag on my site that points to the merchant's site. You would lose any affiliate worth their weight in salt that way.
To sum things up for Gavin, here are your two options as I see it, but they aren't mutually exclusive:
1. Rewrite your descriptions and either give the old descriptions to affiliates (e.g. have a database with two different descriptions for every product) or stop giving descriptions to affiliates and make them write their own.
2. Build more external links into your product pages.