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Alan

Thanks for the reply. The non store parts of the site were of good quality (in my opinion). They were unique articles, videos and the such. I fear that by Google seeing the store it may have classified the site, as you say, 'thin'. The products in the affiliate store out numbered the posts massively, about 11,000 products and a couple of hundred posts.

So you feel that I shouldn't no index the store pages now? Won't removing these pages from the SERPS have a positive impact on the other 'quality' pages

Ok, I accept this one is my fault but wondering on time scales to fix...

I have a website and I put an affiliate store on it, using merchant datafeeds in a bid to get revenue from the site. This was all good, however, I forgot to put noindex on the datafeed/duplicate content pages and over a period of a couple of weeks the traffic to the site died.

I have since nofollowed or removed the products but some 3 months later my site still will not rank for the keywords it was ranking for previously. It will not even rank if I type in the sites' name (bright tights). I have searched for the name using bright tights, "bright tights" and brighttights but none of them return the site anywhere.

I am guessing that I have been hit with a drop x place penalty by Google for the duplicate content. What is the easiest way around this? I have no warning about bad links or the such. Is it worth battling on trying to get the domain back or should I write off the domain, buy a new one and start again but minus the duplicate content?

The goal of having the duplicate content store on the site was to be able to rank the category pages in the store which had unique content on so there were no problems with that which I could foresee. Like Amazon et al, the categories would have lists of products (amongst other content) and you would click through to the individual product description - the duplicate page.

Thanks for reading

Will have a look thanks. I wonder if the control panel on the server also makes a difference.

I guess I need to weigh up fast indexing against not being hosted in the country where my customers live.

Hi Matt

Thanks for the reply. In answer to your question, in the UK only one of the servers was a VPS. The other was a Quad core, 6gb model so hopefully that could handle things.

It's all very puzzling to be honest

A bit of a strange question this one:

I have a domain which, when on my Dutch server, can get new blog posts indexed and ranking in less than 10 mins using the pubsubshubbub plugin. However, I moved the blog and domain to a UK dedicated server and continued to post. Days later none of these posts were indexed. I then moved the domain back to the Dutch server to test this, I posted in the blog and once again, indexed and ranking in 20 mins or so.

To cut a long and tedious story short; In a bid to be closer to my customers I moved the domain to a UK VPS three days back. I posted but no posts are indexed.

Anyone else experienced anything like this? Generally I don't move domains back and forward so much but wanted to test this out. The Ducth server is a 16 core 24gb Direct Admin dedicated, the two UK servers were both running Cpanel.

I understand that it would be best to host as close to possible to the customers but the hardship of getting posts indexed in the UK is becoming a problem.

Thanks, Carl

Ok, a bit of a 'how long is a piece of string' type question this... Looking for the opinions of wiser users than myself in trying to work out how long is a realistic target for getting my domain authority somewhere near that of my competitors. I have been tracking my domain and three competitors in the campaign tool for a few months and they seem to average about 0.5 increase a month in their DA - they are averaging around 65 DA each. My site is currently DA 32, has increased from 21 in 5 months. Is this a decent rate of increase? How long would people expect it to take to increase a domain by 10, 20 etc? I know there are too many variables in the world of seo for a complete 'do this and this will happen' answer, but it's good to have a DA goal to work to, it acts as a good motivator for staff, especially when you begin to close in on competitors. Thanks, Carl

Sorry, been a long day and wanted a second opinion on this please....

I am developing an affiliate store which will have dozens of products in each category. We will not be indexing the product pages themselves as they are all duplicate content. The plan is to have just the first page of the category results indexed as this will have unique content about the products in that section. The later pagnated pages (ie pages 2,3,4,5 etc) will have 12 products on each but no unique content. Would the best advice be to add a canonical tag to all pages in the 'chairs' category pointing to the page with the first 12 results and the descriptions? This would ensure that the visitors are able to browse many pages of product but google won't index products 13 and onwards. Am I right in my thinkings?

A supplemental question. What is the best way to block google from indexing/crawling 90,000 product listings which are pulled direct from the merchant so are not unique in the least. I have previous played with banning google from the product folder but it reports health issues in webmaster tools. Would the best route be a no index tag on all the product pages and to no follow all the products in the category listings?

Many thanks

Carl

Hi all

Had a look for info on this one but couldn't find much.

I know these days that if you have a decent domain good will often automatically put site links on for your home if someone searches for your company name, however has anyone seen these links appear for sub pages? For example, lets say I had a .com domain with /en /fr /de sub folders, each seoed for their location. If I were to then have domain.com/en/ as no1 in Google for my company in the UK would I be able to get site links under this or does it only work on the 'proper' homepage domain.com/

A client of mine wants to reorganise their website so they have different location sections ranking in different markets but they also want to keep having sitewide links as they like the look of it

Thanks

Carl

Anyone finding Google slow to index new websites at the moment? Made a new site on Thursday and posted a number off high quality, relevant, backlinks to it the same day and now on Monday it is still not indexed. Have see the same with a couple of sub domains I have created off a website with a moz score of 40. Normally can get new sites indexed within hours but this seems super slow.

Hi EGOL

Thanks for the reply, your idea about 'uniquifying' (I feel I may have made a word up there hehe) the product pages is certainly one I have been considering. It does raise a couple of issues however. Firstly, I would need to get a considerable amount of data on the products to see which ones are selling. This would need to be long enough to remove any seasonal variations in the stats.

The second issue is that the affiliate products pull from merchant data feeds so any changes I make to the content will get overwritten.

The idea of uniquifying (if I use it enough it might become a 'proper' word!!!) certain pages is one I am open to doing on my smaller sites but for the larger sites it could pose some issues. An example site can be found at www ukchic co uk  - have taken out the dots incase people thought I was posting the url for a cheeky backlink

Looking for a few opinions on this please...Trying to reduce the number of pages I have to seo to rank on my websites and at the same time avoid the google over optimisation issues.

Previously on our ecomerce websites we would have a category page for, say, 12 times, we would then seo that page for generic terms related to the page; ie, blue dress, cheap blue dress, blue party dress etc. The individual product pages would then be seoed with the title and h1 tags containing the exact product name and the url containing the product name too. This worked fine but we are suffering from some duplicate content issues of late (the products are mixture of few unique items and probably 95% imported affiliate datafeeds) as we have an average of 80,000 products per store we have neither the time nor the staff to rewrite everything (the products update daily directly from the merchants so would need to be done daily)

What we are planning on moving toward is blocking the individual product pages from Google and instead putting all efforts into the category pages. The category page will contain plenty of quality unique content related to the category so the only duplicate content would be a line of the product name and price.

Whilst we would still rank the category page for broad keywords we also would like to now rank the category page for 16 individual product names as there is a good profit to make made by the sheer volume of product names we plan on ranking for. Obviously we could not get all the products into the url and the page title as that would be silly but would it be acceptable to have multiple h2 tags on the page, each with a different entry, the product names  (H1 will be saved for the category name).

We can easily bold these keywords to help in the optimisation as per the seo moz onsite analysis tool and we can add image text to ensure the product name is featured at least twice on the page.

As so few sites actually seo for the long tail product names, most retailers rank by virtue of their domain quality alone, our onsite seo doesn't have to be 100% but getting the best we can out of the page will help the efforts.

Many thanks

Carl

I would be interested to see how it works for you in the ecommerce field. My marketing company primarily runs ecommerce sites so getting backlinks can be trickier if they were, say, information resource sites.  We have active forum communities on most of our sites so we need to use the community side to grow the sites I feel.

HI

Thanks for the reply.

The is it legal is an argument going on between their lawyers and the trade mark owners at the moment so not sure about it. Normally, no problems in ranking for a product trademark if it's on your page etc however in this site it was specifically seoed for the traded marked term so given they have links with the trademark term in and no right to use the trademark now this is the problem.

Ironically this keyword is proving harder to get off the first page than it was to get on the first page. Everything has been tried (bar removing the whole domain from google). Have no index tags on the default.asp yet still have an index page listed for some reason, have a canonical tag pointing to another page to try and get the homepage off but still it remains.

Getting to the stage now where i feel like buying some links to the page and emailing google with receipts saying 'look im bad' and seeing if they actually do anything!

The problem with this .co.uk is that all the trademark stuff was done on the .com and when the legal issue started we decided to remove the .com and use just the .co.uk they owned (it's a uk company anyway so no problems there) however we are now also ranking for the term with the co.uk despite having zero backlinks with the anchor text or any mention of the term on our site.

I think it's due to their developer getting confused and putting a canonical tag on the .com which they wanted to stop using, pointing to the UK domain which they want to use. I have a nasty feeling that when he did that it has carried over the link juice which really doesn't help

yes, we have resorted to this. We have a canonical tag to the blocked .com version of the site so hopefully that gets rid of the page. The client want's it removed 'yesterday' but only so much I can do when I don't control Google personally!

Thanks again for the advice

as a footnote, they stopped seoing for the banned term at least 6 months back so even taking into account delays in the moz link reporting it should have picked up the links. I can find the links for the keyword with the .com but none for the uk

In need of some second opinions here. I have a domain softboxsystems.co.uk which ranks for the keyword sofrigam. It is not meant to!

Have posted previously on this but to cut long story short, the clients .com started to rank for this term and then they lost the contract to supply the services so got a legal request to stop ranking for it (it had been seoed so was ranking 100% on off page issues).

The client is a UK company so they decided that they would block the .com from google and use the co.uk domain for a period of time instead while they worked on deranking the domain.

The .com domain was therefore blocked from the index, the .co.uk homepage would not rank for anything then it turned out that they had placed a canonical tag link from the .co.uk to the blocked .com!!! On my suggestion this was removed and the homepage of the .co.uk appeared in google in a matter of a couple of days (other pages on the site were indexed but not the home).

Now, somehow the co.uk domain homepage is ranking for the banned term. I have checked open link and there are not any links pointing to the domain with the anchor of sofigram, nor is the term mentioned onsite.

I now have the client panicking on the phone to get the page out of google again asap before the competitors legal people get wind of it. I am still trying to deindex the .co.uk homepage in the short term. I have readded the canonical back to the .com as that worked at not getting that page indexed previously.

The main issue I have is how on earth I am ranking for this term in the first place and  more importantly how do I stop from ranking for this term!

The only terms I can find as anchor text in the moz tools are the keywords I have been seoing for

help hehe

thanks

Very true, I agree with you fully on this. However the client is very much in a 'get it out of the engine and we will worry about the traffic 'tomorrow'' frame of mind.

To be honest as long as the page still works for direct traffic we could seo a replacement homepage /welcome.asp to rank for the company name easily enough but for now it's the hassle of trying to get the page out

I fully agree with you about the trademark but you know clients can be when they hear the words 'legal action. Hopefully we can get the page out and appease the trademark owner.

Thanks for your advice on this matter

It's a very strange situation I admit. The main reason is that they used to have a contract to supply certain services on behalf on a third party. They seoed for the company name but have since lost the contract and now being threatened with legal action for ranking for the trade mark because they no longer have permission to use it. We plan on creating a new homepage at welcome.asp which would be seoed as the site homepage for both branded and non branded terms. However we need to get the trademark issue out the way asap

Thanks for the reply.

You're correct that they still want the homepage working but not indexed. They wish for sections to remain indexed. I will try the robots idea but it I block the site there would it still crawl the page to pick up the no index tag?