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Let me try to clarify:
Behind the list of clients we have case study pages - who is the client, what was their problem, how did we approach the problem, what was the solution.....
The client page is just an easy way to navigate for our new prospects to find clients who have similar problems issues.
I have a couple of pages that are thin content.
One is essentially a page with the icons of our customers and a link out to their website.
The other is a summary portfolio page that has some images of some of the client work we have done with links to internal pages that have more details about each client situation, approach, etc. These deeper pages are just fine.
What is the recommendation for handling these thin content pages? We could add content, but then it wouldn't really help the user very much.
A client of mine migrated their website from one platform to another. The site is primarily about lead generation. The individual managing the migration did most of the right things: They thinned out poor content, they set up the appropriate canonical tags and 301 re-directs, the did outreach to quality websites providing inbound links and were able to achieve a reasonable level of URL updates to new URL structure, they cleaned up most of the on-page user experience and on-page keyword items (title tags, meta descriptions, HTML/JS/CSS coding, usage of HTML5 structure for headers/body/footers, etc.
During the transition, about a dozen primary keyword phrases lost impression and traffic volume - and most likely conversions. A simple analysis showed that the content and on-page elements in these cases were likely muddled with an unclear strategy. Too many different concepts were co-mingled and thus they lost rank on these relevant terms.
Working with the client, we've created a few new pages to separate these important concepts, created nice new content and updated all the on-page elements. We've also altered the 301 redirects and canonicals to better associated backlinks to these divided pages. We've also updated the sitemap and submitted.
Okay - all sounds good - now my question is: So what? What happens next? Should I request a fetch from Google? Should I run a campaign / article that discusses each of these concepts separately and then point the readers to these pages to drive some traffic to the new pages associated with those keywords? Is that even necessary? How do I get Google/Bing to recognize the client uncovered and repaired their previous error - and how long should this take? Days? Weeks? Months?
Thanks
Thanks -
I'm not terribly worried about the test site as we use a password protected and IP blocked development domain that is completely different from the root domain. Its not even a subdomain. Eg. www.realsite.com and www.testdomain.com
My dev team is trying to get me to wait and just do a massive 301 redirect > moving the URLs with the query strings (old site) to new page (e.g. multiple many:1) vs doing the canoncial. The new site won't create the query string issue.
The challenge I see is that the 150,000+ indexed URLs really should be around 7,000, so the organic value of the real 7,000 pages (other than possibly the root domain) are probably getting punished, even though the site is doing decently well.
I have an e-commerce client that is migrating platforms. The current structure of their existing website has led to what I would believe to be mass duplicate content. They have something north of 150,000 indexed URLs. However, 143,000+ of these have query strings and the content is identical to pages without any query string. Even so, the site does pretty well from an organic stand point compared to many of its direct competitors.
Here is my question:
(1) I am assuming that I should go into WMT (Google/Bing) and tell both search engines to ignore query strings.
(2) In a review of back links, it does appear that there is a mish mash of good incoming links both to the clean and the dirty URLs. Should I add a rel=canonical via a script to all the pages with query strings before we make our migration and allow the search engines some time to process?
(3) I'm assuming I can continue to watch the indexation of the URLs, but should I also tell search engines to remove the URLs of the dirty URLs?
(4) Should I do Fetch in WMT? And if so, what sequence should I do for 1-4.
How long should I wait between doing the above and undertaking the migration?
When I'm in WMT/Search Console -
One thing that seems a bit odd to me is that most of the average positions for each of the URLs displayed is about the same. Say they range from 1.0 to 1.3. Does this mean that Google is displaying the dozen or so URLs to different people and generally in the 1st or 2nd position. Does this mean that my dozen or so pages are all competing with each other for the same query?
On one hand, if all of my dozen pages displayed most of the time in the SERP all at the same time, I would see this as a good thing in that I would be 'owning' the SERP for my particular query. On the other hand, I'm concerned that the keyword I'm trying to optimize a particular page for is being partially distributed to less optimized pages. The main target page is shown the most (good) and it has about a 15x better CTR (also good). But all together, the other 11 pages are taking in around 40% of impressions and get a far lower CTR (bad).
Am I interpreting this data correctly? Is WMT showing me what pages a particular query sends traffic to? Is there any way to extract the keywords that a particular page receives? When I reset my query and then start by selecting a specific page (exact match) and then select queries - is this showing my the search queries that drove traffic to that page?
Is there a 'best practices' process to try to target a keyword to a specific page so that it gets more than the 60% of impressions I'm seeing now? Obviously I don't want to do a canonical because each keyword goes to many different pages and each page receives a different mix of keywords. I would think there would be a different technique when your page has an average position off of page 1.
Is OSE still a worthy analyzer of the factors breaking down Google rank of a page or website?
More so over the past six months, I've seems to noticed how the page comparison in OSE seems to have less and less correspondence to Google rank. For instance, I'm analyzing sites where the top result has a Page Authority rank of 11, Subdomain MozRank of 3.53, outranking a page coming in in spot #14 with Page Authority of 36, Subdomain MozRank of 3.94. I see this frequently, that by the factors measured in OSE, a certain page with favorable scores is being outranked by a page with poor OSE scores.
Of course, I realize how sophisticated Google's algorithm is and the OSE can't reverse engineer the whole thing. Also, there are lots of other factors, such as personalized search results, banklink velocity, and who's in my G+ circles, that isn't taken into account in OSE. Yet, I see this more-and-more, where websites kicking ass in OSE measurements rank poor, and poor websites ranked in OSE come out near the top in Google.
So, given this, where OSE is apparently a less effective tool to help analyze the factors building Google rank as Google evolves and values brand, what should a chap do? I already know the predictable answers of do RCS, build your community, and so on. But, I want to know what's driving the juice behind these top ranking websites, and OSE doesn't seem to be cutting it anymore...
Your thoughts?
Which of these strategies, if any, cross the line from relationship building to link buying? Assume all links are do-follow.
You're a local business. You give the local Boys & Girls club a few hundreds buck a year. In return, you get a very nice link on their Sponsorship page for 12 months.
You send a sample of your product to influential bloggers, for the purpose of a review and hopefully a link back to your website.
One of your clients is a college bar. You invite 50 college kids over for a slow evening and stuff them full of chicken wings. Then, you ask them to please review and link to the bar on their college wiki.
You give a client a free service, in exchange for that client linking to your business on its blog roll.
You take a blogger out to lunch, and pick up the tab. Later that day, the blogger writes up an amusing little story for the blog, and links back to your desired website.
In your email newsletter, you put out a request to your customer base, "Please link to my website, and I'll provide you a special 20% off coupon."
Could spammy non-keyword rich anchor text liks help your website rank?
Of course, there's been a lot of discussion around Google's update of its link scheme. Specifically, they target press releases with do-follow links on keyword-rich anchor text and "Large-scale article marketing or guest posting campaigns with keyword-rich anchor text links". Well, that leaves the question unanswered, what if you're doing these spammy linking techniques, but on non-keyword rich anchor text, such as "click here", "find information", and "click here". Will you still get smacked down by Google then?
Given that links on non-keyword anchor text can still help increase domain authority, it seems like Google left a door open here for large scale publication of a certain class of spammy links that can still assist rank, no? Also, in answering, please distinguish between best practice, and effective. For instance, purchasing links isn't a good practice, but it can still be an effective technique. While spammy links on non-keyword rich anchor text is certainly not a good practice, is it nonetheless effective?
How does a Responsive Site poentially kill SEO?
I've seen a few feeds on twitter how a website took a rankings dive after implementing a Responsive theme; yet, it's not clear to me what is actually going on within a Responsive site that would cause the SEO rank to tank? I can only speculate that it introduces a bunch of 404 errors, or that it changes all of the URLs into gibberish, so you loose all of the links coming into your website if not 301'ed?
Can someone clarify, what are the actual mechanical issues on a Responsive website that becomes a concern to SEO? Thanks.
Thanks, your reply helps keep this in perspective.
if it is proven that you created these links my guess would be
you could be held liable in court.
This would be another interesting tangent discussion. Of course, the defense would be the first amendment right of freedom of publishing. In my feeble knowledge, I'm not aware of a court case that has encountered this issue, but it's an interesting legal question: Could you be held civilly liable for merely publishing links?
Why is competitor A spending their time and money trying to harm Competitor
B whenthey can simply protect themself with the Disavow Tool Why not
spend those time and money on building quality links.
Buying links on Fiverr = $5 and five minutes.
Disavowing links = a couple of hours of analysis or paying someone a bit of cash for the analysis.
So, it's easier to create the havoc, than to clean it up. I'm sure we're all on the same page that such a technique isn't ethical, doesn't help you build up your business, is bad business karma, and so on. But, is it feasible? Apparently so. Especially when the stakes are high, for Commerce sites, it seems like this would become a tempting strategy for the less ethically inclined.
I need help reconciling two points of view on spammy links.
On one hand, Google seems to say, "Don't build spammy links to your website - it will hurt your ranking." Of course, we've seen the consequences of this from the Penguin update, of those who built bad links got whacked.
From the Penguin update, there was then lots of speculation of Negative SEO attacks. From this, Google is saying, "We're smart enough to detect a negative SEO attack.", i.e: http://youtu.be/HWJUU-g5U_I
So, its seems like Google is saying, "Build spammy links to your website in an attempt to game rank, and you'll be penalized; build spammy links to a competitors website, and we'll detect it and not let it hurt them."
Well, to me, it doesn't seem like Google can have it both ways, can they? Really, I don't understand why Competitor A doesn't just go to Fiverr and buy a boatload of crappy exact match anchor links to Competitor B in an attempt to hurt Competitor B. Sure, Competitor B can disavow those links, but that still takes time and effort. Furthermore, the analysis needed for an unsophisticated webmaster could be daunting.
Your thoughts here? Can Google have their cake and eat it too?
I've read articles that indicates Google will provide a higher rank to listing with higher click through rates (i.e, http://bit.ly/132mUd0, "If a search result achieves a higher than average click through rate then it may be given a higher ranking.")
First, this seems like a chicken-and-egg scenario: it seems like results with higher rank will have higher CTR from increased exposure, no?
Second, if this was an accurate ranking signal, it seems like it would be so easy to black hat (as well as other web usage signals, such as goal conversions and time on site). I'd just pay some Indian dude to search for my website on different IPs and click through in the SERP.
Your thoughts about this scenario?
Hi there, should less-than-optimal links be preserved, if those links contribute to a more attractive anchor text percentage profile?
I'm working on a client who spun a bunch of articles, using keyword word anchor text. No surprise, the strategy worked great up to the penguin update. About 90% of the client's links come from these spun articles. The other 10% of links are naturally occurring, quality links. Furthermore, these quality links are also keyword rich.
Now, it occurs to me that if I remove / disavow the links coming from the spun articles, I'm left with the 10% of quality, anchor text rich links. I'm concerned that Google will see this percentage as too high, and lower the rank.
Furthermore, I have a vague memory of watching some YouTube video, where an ex-Googler says that your brand name should be about 60% of your anchor text, and everything else lower. Finally, when I examine the anchor text in links coming into the ranking sites, they have 5-15% anchor text density on their keywords.
So, I feel a bit of a contradiction: I should clean up all of the crappy links from the spun articles, but then that risks having only the keyword rich anchor text links active? Therefore, I'm considering leaving some of the crappy links active on non-relevant keyword text, such as the good 'ol "click here" link.
Also, before answering this, I can already predict some of the answers on philosophical grounds: those crappy links from spun articles are not natural and garbage, so get rid of them. Fair enough, but I'm also interested in an answer on only the dimension of what will produce the highest rank for my client?