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Hi guys,

I have a client who bought over a fairly well known competitor. They now want to amalgamate the brands and redirect visitors from the competitor's site to their site. There is a healthy volume of organic search queries for the competitor's name. I was thinking about the following strategy:

• Email all subscribers to let them know about the change
• Use a meta refresh redirect on the competitor's site to explain about the move
• After a set period, remove this meta refresh and replace with a 301 redirect
• Use a canonical tag on the competitor site assigning value to the main brand
• Set up a landing page on the main site that's optimised for the competitor's brand name and explains about the move.

Do you think that this is a good strategy for managing the transition?

Thanks!

Hi Cyril, a 301 redirect would be preferable to a canonical link in this case.

Thanks for your replies Adam and Miriam.

You have confirmed what I was thinking already - that I could optimise for phrase like "x near Dublin" but it will be very hard to rank higher than competitors who are physically based within the city limits.

Hello,

I'm hoping to get some opinions on optimising a site for a client based 30 minutes outside of Dublin. Obviously there is a higher search volume for "x in Dublin" than "x in small town". What do you think the best strategies are for incorporating the "Dublin" into keywords? For example is it OK to use phrases like "x near Dublin" or "x in Greater Dublin", or do you think this is a bit misleading?

The client in question sells good online, so the customer wouldn't physically have to visit the store.

Thanks!

Hi Nathan,

I generally A/B test every element I'm considering changing, but due to the nature of meta data this doesn't really work for title testing. I'm therefore pretty meticulous about research and strategy before I make any changes.

I would say that the frequency really depends on your level of traffic. If you have 100,000 visitors a month, I would consider figures reliable and safe (from the point of view of not messing around TOO much) to change it every two months and monitor results. If your traffic is 1,000 visitors a month, you might have to leave the experiment running longer (perhaps 4 months) to get reliable statistics.

Good luck!

It is a high authority domain, and one of the few paid inclusion links that doesn't seem to fall foul of Google (probably because the fee is for an "editorial review" rather than the link itself). I've rarely seen a click coming through from the directory, so listing would be for SEO purposes only.

I've never seen any significant ranking increases as a result of listing with Yahoo (I'm based in the UK), but it can help increase trust. I would say that if you have a large budget it's worth a try, but if you're working with a small budget the cost probably doesn't justify the returns.

Good luck!

Commas in the URL aren't necessarily at an SEO disadvantage. It might be a good idea to change them for better usability and better CTRs, but as Russ says, I don't think this is an urgent task.

Hi Dena,

I wouldn't say images are strictly necessary, but it would certainly be much more of a challenge to create a good user experience without them.

Stock images are cheap and even standard digital cameras can produce high quality photos, so it seems like a bit of a no-brainer to include them given the importance of visual stimulation on the web.

Good luck with the client!

I know that a sitemap can help SEs to find and index pages, and also deal with canonicalisation issues, but I have a client who is insisting that we build a sitemap containing links to every possible category on a huge ecommerce site.

We already have tabbed modules that allow users to sort by brand, product type, location etc, plus a strong search function that allows them to select multiple options.

I'm worried that a sitemap stuffed with keywords like "Product A by brand B in Location C", "Product A by brand B in Location D" etc. will just seem spammy and do more harm than good.

Any thoughts would be appreciated! Thanks.

Hi Victoria - I'd agree with Kane. You won't be penalised but you probably won't get much value for these pages. It's a good idea to link to the original publisher to be on the safe side.

Hi Lucas,

If the URL is automatically changing to the non-trailing slash version it sounds like there is already a redirect in place. This is good practice for SEO.

Multiple versions of a page (e.g. www,mystite.com, mysite.com, www.mystite.com/, mysite.com/) can split ranking power and lead to lower rankings overall. A 301 redirect transfers the majority of the "link juice" to the page that it is redirecting to.

This post on the official Google blog is a great starting point to learn more about trailing slashes and their implications for SEO: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/to-slash-or-not-to-slash.html

Hi Steve,

I agree with Brent - ideally you want each product page to contain a good amount of helpful, unique content. This is the best way to gain all-important deep links to products. Having different pages for different sizes could be unnecessarily confusing for users.

Hi Aaron,

I would conduct keyword research in the normal way - search volume, competition, relevance for your wesbsite etc. Niches that are filled with spam are just like any other competitive niche - except the competition is easier to beat once you establish authority.

Once you have a bank of keywords that you feel would drive quality traffic, begin to work on producing quality content around them.

It will take work and patience to differentiate yourself from the spam. Building links from authoritative sources, press releases, social media promotions and generating quality content can help to establish the site as an authority on the subject.

The bottom line is that search engines and searchers hate spam. By differentiating your website from the spam and working to gain trust and authority, the chances are that you will be rewarded.

Best of luck!

Optimising multiple pages for the same keyword can be detrimental. This can lead to "keyword cannibalisation", where pages are forced to compete with each other for the same query. This can result in lower overall rankings.

Ideally each page should be optimised for a different keyword - e.g. your homepage could be optimised for "leather shoes" and your category pages could be optimised for "men's leather shoes", "women's leather shoes", "kid's leather shoes" etc,

Having one page for each topic/keyword and making it as useful and comprehensive as possible will attract more links than having three or four different pages about the same topic.

If you're worried about keyword cannibalisation you can use internal anchor text to indicate which page should be considered the authority for that keyword - e.g. your "men's leather shoes" page could have the anchor "leather shoes" that directs back to the home page.

Hi Claire,

Article marketing can still work if the articles are high enough quality - but if they are high enough quality it would be more beneficial to submit them to a high authority niche site rather than one of these directories.

I tend to go with a 90/10 rule - 90% of my content goes on our own site, and 10% are guest posts on a blog with a strong reputation that will earn trust and authority. I think your time might be better spent writing one really great post for a really great site rather than 10 decent posts for directory sites.

Good luck!

Hi Pete,

Sorry I was referring to the titles themselves. If Google doesn't think that the title is a good match for the query (maybe it contains different keywords or is too spammy), it will select another snippet of text to show in place of the title in the SERPs. This obviously isn't ideal as it takes the control out of your (and you client's) hands.

Hello Pete,

I agree with what kchan has said - capitals in print may grab our attention but capitals on the web are hard to read and look spammy.

Google probably won't penalise in any major way, but there's a possibility that the titles will be treated as spammy and not shown in SERPs.