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The reputation and integrity of the major players would be at stake here. If they changed their user agent identification (to spoof Googlebot or Bing or whatever) that could be detected, and they would be castigated. The crawler IP address and its user agent ID would be out of sync...
This seems to be very common... home pages should outrank deeper pages, yes?. Are there any external backlinks (from relevant, authoritative sites) to your deep-content landing pages? Perhaps all your credibility resides on your home page. Have you done any off-page SEO for the landing pages?
Just one factor out of many, but if something as insignificant as the bounce-rate for that URL for your specific search term being higher than another URLs bounce rate... is an example of how dynamic the SERPs can be.
If I click on yours, and go immediately back to Google SERP page, and then click on another URL... and this happens thousands of times could that impact your SERP position next month?
Was there a change in your bounce rate during the period?
SEO does not exist in isolation. Your actions and your competitors actions are concurrent. Perhaps a competitor has improved their (on-page and/or off-page) SEO more than you did in the same time-frame? Don't assume that negative SEO is the only effect. There are many things happening simultaneously and in many places.
Did their backlink profile change? Did their content change? Did yours? Were there any algorithm changes? There could be many, many factors to consider in detail when trying to understand reasons for any ranking changes, positive and negative.
URL Readability = Clickability (providing the URL is not too long.)
When you see results in SERPS, the readability (reading ease for a human reader) can help your click-thru rates. It helps the reader to understand if they are interested in your content. Also, it helps search engines to know what your page is about. Underscores are not nearly as good. Category names are often automatically hyphenated by most shopping cart systems, no?
Hi John and others. It's been over a year John, did you get listed yet? As noted above, some categories may not have editors who are active, and some editors reject listings for any reason, accepting only the best, most important, and most relevant ones. Some categories are almost impossible, even if your site is relevant and has quality content.
Were you successful in getting a DMOZ listing for your site?
It seems that Shopify (shopping cart platform) does this automatically?
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Have you inspected the backlink profile for your page vs. the top ranking competitors? What are you seeing as far as relevance, quality and quantity of inbound links?
If you are looking for directories, this is a good resource:
http://info.vilesilencer.com/niche
Where there is good page rank and relevance, a few directory links may not hurt, use with caution.
If you have many inbound links or landing page traffic for the old page URLs, will you be redirecting those old URLs to your new URLs?
Voted +1 for Ricky's response, good suggestions. Have you looked http://www.blogengage.com/ for ideas? Depending on your market specifics, you may need to design more tailored strategies and tactics.
Have you looked at Ahrefs, MajesticSeo, AuthorityLabs? It may depend on your specific keywords, whether or not you will find historical data with any given tool. Also, your historic ranking (average SERP ranking) can be available in Google Webmaster Tools / Google Analytics.
I'll just leave this here.
https://twitter.com/SEOmessiah/status/425417000186150913
What is the value to you? Exposure? Traffic? Links?
Duplicate content has little value in the eyes of Google.
And this:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/demystifying-duplicate-content-penalty.html
If a directory has good page rank, there may be some value there, but that needs to be tested and proven.
If there is a good directory of directories, this is it:
Demonstrate competence by responding directly to the concerns of the odesk request with relevant and well-grounded SEO practices, guidelines, and plans. Give some examples of similar work you've done from your portfolio.
A house built on sand? Low quality pages will not attract natural links. Without good content, there's no there, there.
Build a quality site with good content, and useful design, relevant to your prospects and clients needs, before you do anything else. Deliver value first.
Even with fewer links, a site with higher quality content can often outrank a site that has more links, and will also be more link-worthy.
Hi Adam, More good points. As you wrote:
How to efficiently and iteratively check and re-check this work with SEO-Migration-QA Tools? ... For a list of a few hundred URLs .. old ..vs.. new? (Without a labor-intensive process.)
Surely, this is a common problem and has already been faced, and solved, by many.
If a such a Porting-QA tool does not yet exist, there must be a good market for one?
Jared has added some good points. Have you looked at your competitors? Understanding how and why their sites outrank your site? Have you prioritized your entire list of potential keywords and search queries?
Hi Ryan, and thanks, again! You do raise good points on Quantitative vs. Qualitative factors.
Yes, the human component is important, but Googlebot+Algo is a mechanical device, and given the list of top 100 URLs and top 200 keywords, prioritized, it should be possible to inspect each page, old .vs. new, using an SEO-QA tool, mechanically. If the porting team invented random garbage for HTML Titles, Meta Descriptions, etc. then the new SERPs would be devastating to the business as soon as the test site goes live.
The new site may LOOK better to the naked eye than the old one, but Google will not treat the new site very kindly in the SERPs. There is always room for improvement but when a site already has had lots of SEO work done, and the porting team omits that from the new site, a disaster looms.
Checking a prioritized list of ON-Page SEO ranking factors for a prioritized list of 100 URLs and prioritized list of 200 keywords should be a fairly mechanical task. A QA tool could do it in a few minutes, while a human may take a few weeks.
**The SEO-QA-Tool could indicate a prioritized list of major SEO gaps and problems to be fixed before going live, for a HUMAN to review and take well-considered action on. **
_Update/Edit :: SEO is never really DONE, there is always room for improvement and things are always changing... even the SEO Ranking Factors. There are currently accepted authoritative opinions that have been published here, and in other places, for SEO Ranking Factors and generally accepted SEO standards. The difference between $4 per hour and $100 per hour SEO work is the quality of the SEO tools being used, and how well those SEO standards are understood, and even the experts often disagree. _
Ref: http://moz.com/search-ranking-factors and http://moz.com/blog/ranking-factors-2013 and http://moz.com/blog/future-of-search-ranking-factors and http://searchengineland.com/seotable
_Update/Edit-2: The key point here being, the SEO features of the OLD site have not been migrated to the NEW site, so the porting team has more work to do. How to QA that work without a huge labor expense? Some basic SEO-Migration-QA tools are needed, based on a sound SEO methodology such as: _http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2115729/10-Steps-to-a-Successful-SEO-Migration-Strategy
Hi Ryan, Thanks for taking time to reply. You have some good points, but for the purely MECHANICAL factors such as HTML Title, Meta Description, IMG file names and HTML alt tags, and listing all the internal (and external) links with anchor text — side-by-side, old .vs. new — an automated On-Page SEO QA tool — would surely be very useful to assist anyone porting a website. I am surprised not to find one online as yet.
It's a kind of in-vitro A/B testing. Without such a QA procedure, going live with a test site could be disastrous, if the old site ranks well, the new site may rank very poorly.
We do have a list mapping old-url to new-url, prioritized. We have a list of keywords, prioritized.
Surely there is a niche market for some kind of automated Porting-QA reporting tool?
In a perfect world, there would be an SEO tool to predict the impact of porting before going live. Look before you leap.