Welcome to the Q&A Forum

@Catalyst Online: So you you've seen how green the grass is on both sides of the fence. So Is Cesar or Robert that's right ? (drama vs boring)  :))

HI,

Personally I would stay away from satellite sites - very dangerous ground that can back fire very easily.

What I would suggest is focus all efforts that are you planning to put into the satellite sites and build one single competitor site for your main site - and don't inter link (at least not just yet).

Build this new site - you can call it a satellite domain if you want - but act like is a stand alone site with his own path in life

When this site will have authority and only then, link to sites in the industry including yours if you still want to send most of the PR to your current main site. You can even link to competitors if you want to but don't link to the pages that you fight for

One add-on point: if you 301 redirect the co.uk to dot com your client might lose on CTR in the UK as english folks like anywhere else (well maybe France is making an exceptions as tehy only buy from Fr domains  are feeling more friendly towards regional domains (on most of the verticals).

My 2 cents:

First of all with any major redesign there will be a lot of changes on the rankings side: those could be positive or negative or a mix of course.

You really need to plan everything with extra care especially if you rank already ...

A good advice is allways to do everthing step by step. That measn: change the design and don't touch the url structure. Change the design but don't inject new pages or delete old ones.

As soon as teh dust is settled with teh design change you can move forward and remove / add new pages and wait again. When everthing is done you can start the redesign of the url structure but again step by step.

In this way you will be able to track and monitor all changes and be able to go back if something bad really happens.

As for the url change - it's a golden rule not to touch those on an existing domain unless it's really really imperative tod o so.

With any url change, even if 301 are implemente correctly you still face a big possibile drop in rankings !

Been there - done that - got burned.

To stay safe, make and bring on the table a contingency plan just in case.

Overview to your questions:

1. When redesigning we are planning to change the inner page URL. So it it wise

to redirect (301) old URL  to the new URL?  Old url will not be there after redesigning. But its currently having page ranks.

** Even with 301 redirects the site will suffer from the url change. It dosen't mean you don't have to do it but just plan it with care and only if it's really really important to move with the change.

2. Can we redirect more than one old url to a single new page?

** Yes.

3. Google new updates said "they will be going to diminish the exact match results domains". Does that updates affects us?

** Doy ou have an EMD and target the keyword that is in the domain ?

4. Any more suggestions for the redesigning?

** Do everything step by step - build a road map / project plan with the changes- don't dive in live there's no tomorrow as you can run into some serious problems.

Everything can be done and usually a redesign is more then welcomed - especially if it's done from an UX point of view. Do plan however everything with extra care.

HI,

What is your domain name ? Is it by chance an EMD ? (exact match domain - a "keyword domain").

This happened late friday so it could be related with your issue.

(http://www.seroundtable.com/google-emd-update-15776.html)

If so that could be one of the reasons for the sudden drop  - but there can be others too If you will post the url we can have a look and post ideas and opinions.

However my question is simply, has anyone noticed any changes? perhaps to indicate a shift in the algorithm?

** Personally I didn't see any changes in visibility over the weekend for the 220+ websites I have in my watch list but again, the number is low and won't mean there was no big change over the weekend.

However, looking at your visibility it looks like you've moved up since the beginning of the year a lot but there is no steady trend. You have a lot of spikes up and down so if you've seen a some movements over the weekend it could be based on this - your authority is not settled yet but the trend looks very positive overall and you still rank very well for a lot of keywords.

Let's take "Coat Hangers" for example. There is a lot of competition for it and some high players for the query in serps - it make sense to move up and down and even so you still hold a very strong position. With the competition there including adsense blocks you are still very well as position based on your domain authority.

In my opinion (personal opinion) I would say it's a normal movement and you can probably see a better picture in a few days when most of the visibility indexes are updates.

Hope it helps.

Hi,

You are in a pretty bad shape there indeed and it is indeed consistant with the release of Penguin update on Apr 24.

However based on your visibility index you also had a spike up starting with December 2011 and now you are back to flat line again in the visibility index.

Did you also received a link notification via WMT ?

When did you 301 redirect the old site to the new version ?

There were some bad link issues which we've cleared up

** Are those pointing to the first site or to the current official version of the site ?

Did you clean all of them ? Part of them ? What is the ratio ? (eg: you've identify 1000 bad links and cleaned up 800 )

Was the clean-out before or after Penguin 1.1 (May 25)

That will help with a better assessment of the problem you are facing now.

Cheers,

R

Yes, on our case some links that were removed in April are still showing up in WMT. Some links removed in August just got out of the WMT list.

Some links from the April set are on pages with a high crawl rate (based on some initial data) so I was also wondering what is happening. Maybe those links are still on pages that are in the sup index and it can take more  - although I would place "a few months" in the more bucket.

However I still strongly believe that is either a WMT update (display) issue or a sup index thing - or a combination of both.

Since you've mention the links were in the blogroll - it make sense to have most of those eon pages in the sup index but still the number should be at least smaller already since you've mention the links were gone a few months ago.

Hi,

Can you post the url and the phrases you've used ?

@all: Are you happy with the position you currently have ? (in house, agency or working on your own projects).

Or are you stuck but you would like to move ? (from in house to agency, from agency to in house and so on )

Really curious about the level of "happiness" with current positions in the community - and again, it's mainly about the Q and A community as I've seen a lot of activity on the blog from people that are not present here..

Lol.

Deb is right - the page is not indexed

Ya, You may be right...I am Unable to find any best SEO Extension for magento.

Yes, but a combination of tools will cover all your needs. However you will have to trow a commercial extension in the mix to have s olid on page optimisation for the ecom..

As for 1.7 - i would roll back for now - there are several issues with customization ( but it depends on what you are using as theme).

It's similar with the dot md TLDs.

Both are country specific TLDs but if the settings are right (on mage and within Web master Tools) you can use the dot co as a global domain with no problem.

The difference is very small - but there are some UX issues especially if the same domain with dot com is in a similar niche.

By small I mean if all other things equal on a doc com and on a dot ca, the dot com will still have the edge on a global scale.

Unfortunately for magento there is no best all in one SEO extension.

However you can use a combination of tools that should cover (most of) your needs.

Some of those extensions are:

• Yoast's canonicals (http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/Yoast/extension/906/canonical-url-s-for-magento)

• sitemap managment ( http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/Sonassi+Hosting+%26+Design/extension/3629/sonassi_sitemapchunk )

+ http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/Yoast/extension/920/yoast-metarobots

If you go on the commercial side you will find several additional very good options that could really help ( and save time and money)

Hope it helps.

Nice topic - really nice read.

Someone should promote the chat as a blog entry - really good case study here !

Some questions that can be on the list:

• How dose he (the client) measures success  out of SEO?  What are the SEO KPIs and targets ? ( with those you can really get a very good feeling on what type of client you have or you will have). You can also elaborate based on the answers and drill down to understand better their view. Leave room for your proposals and other better KPIs that you can propose.

• What keywords he would like to target ? (in order to have a good starting point for your keyword research session)

• In his view, what are the main competitors and why ? (starting not only with rankings but also with content, UX and social exposure)

• What SEO efforts have been done on the website so far ? (really important one - you will probably need a list and dates for changes in order to have a clear assessment of the project)

• Dose he track and monitor the site ? if yes, with what tools ? (GA, WMT, SeoMoz etc). Ask for access if possibile (sign and nda if needed)

• Ask more about the current tracking: dose the client have goals and tracking events setup in Google analytics. Dose he review the feedback from those tools and what decision did the client take so far based on this feedback. Dose he uses event tracking - when, why.

• Separate chapter about Domain Authority - Link building. Any activities done so far ? Try to see if he knows the trends with link building as you can provide a lot of support about the topic - it's a dangerous topic and you need to be in the driver seat.

• If not clear, ask about the monetization channels of the website. What is the website income: sales, Saas, adsense, baners, partnerships - it's only for branding etc.  At the end of the day you will need to help him reach those targets: income, visibility , exposure etc.

Just a few random ones - Hope it helps

As free tools your best bet will be Alexa. But you will need data from your website (google analytics for example) and Alexa numbers for your website in order to do an assessment for the competitors based only on Alexa numbers.

Alexa.com is not very reliable but if you are in the US, for a US market is closing in to the real numbers in most of the niches pretty well.

Hope it helps.

I would never index or let google crawl search pages - very dangerous ground.

In order to get specific : can you provide the live link ?

Yahoo Directory entries (but depending a lot on location and niche) are still ok for referral traffic. Some US Yahoo Directory niches are still receiving a lot of traffic and the ROI on the entry can get positive.

I would't do it from an SEO point of view though on Yahoo or any other directory. Some very "good" directories got penalized by Google for passing PR so you are on the safe side if you keep away from it.

No follow links from directories are good though - you balance the follow vs no follow ratio so that can also help.