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For various reasons my client wants their homepage removed from google, no just the content of the page off but the page not to be indexed (yep strange request but we are mere service providers) today I requested in webmaster tool that default.asp was removed. Wht says done but the sites homepage is still listed. The page also has a no index tag on but 24 hours and 18k Google bot hits later it still remains.

Anyone got any other suggestions to deindex just the homepage asap please

Thanks for replies. I have decided to take the financial hit and drop the dutch server in favour of a UK one. Hopefully the ranking increase and the extra traffic covers this loss

Thanks,

Carl

Have a feeling that the answer will be obvious here but more opinions are always good...

I own a number of domains, mainly com, which are targeted at the UK but hosted in the netherlands. I have noticed a very high number of dutch hits to my sites. Lower than UK but takings population into account it works out to be higher. I fear my decision to renew my dutch server instead of going for a UK one is helping me rank in the wrong part of the world.

I have paid a couple of months ahead for the dutch server but am wondering if the cost of writing off a couple of hundred pounds will be less than I'm losing due to my location.

Should I take the financial hit on the server in the hope that buying a UK one will increase my relevant traffic?

Just finished watching the Microformats & Schema.org webinar (thanks for a good presentation Richard) and picked up some interesting tips.

It did get me thinking about ways I could use them with a couple of ecommerce sites I am working on. At present there are no reviews on the page so cannot add that tag, however the product pages have a facebook like and a tweet option so maybe I could add a tag based around that?

Another one I am considering is putting the sizes of the items in one 'available in sizes 12-32' for example as women often ponder if a store will have it in their size.

I guess my question is, would these ways of using it be considered too spammy. I note the webinar state using microformats can be useful but there is a risk if they are too spammy etc.

Any opinions would be most welcome,

Carl

I know there are too many variables for a certain answer, however do people take their domain authority into account when using keyword difficulty tool?

I have a new domain which only has a score of seven at the moment.  When using the keyword searching tool what is the maximum difficulty level keywords people would target initially? Obviously I would seek to increase the difficulty of the words over time but to start off its a hard choice between keywords which can be ranked for in a reasonable period of time and the keywords which are getting enough traffic to make the effort worthwhile.

Dr Pete,

The whole thing has been one issue after another with the client. One of those helpful clients whom change their website and page structure without telling you. First you hear about it is when they call you wanting to know why their rankings have dropped!

The idea was to move away from the .com site and use the .co.uk site, however they had a lot of people visiting the .com and wanted to keep that as a live site. What should have been done (what I advised them on) was to canonical from the .com to the uk site, telling google that the uk domain is now the main domain.  Helpful and rather impressively their web developer managed to put the canonical tag on the .co.uk domain telling google the .com was the main domain.

Then, the .com got involved in a trademark dispute so they decided to remove it from the google listings via webmaster tools (it is still removed as it still ranks for the trademark keyword when it's unblocked). The long and short of it was they ended up in a position which the site they wanted to be ranking was being ignored by google in favour of the site they blocked from google!

I guess now it's a question of just waiting for google to recrawl the .co.uk and see the tag has gone.  It's a basic seo error on my part but I would have trusted an experienced web designer to copy and paste a code I gave him on to the correct site.

Don't you just love the clients which won't give you ftp access and insist all changes go through their web developer who is freelance!!

Thanks for the help on this everyone

Carl

Thanks for the reply.

Hopefully the large number of backlinks to it will mean it gets recrawled very quickly. I had spent weeks trying to work out why I could get the .co.uk homepage indexed in google now I know why. Now comes a nice call to the client, eek! Thankfully the web design works freelance and is employed by the client not me

If this wasn't so serious an issue it would be funny....

Long store cut short, a client had a penalty on their website so they decided to stop using the .com and use the .co.uk instead. They got the .com removed from Google using webmaster tools (it had to be as it was ranking for a trade mark they didn't own and there are legal arguments about it)

They launched a brand new website and placed it on both domains with all seo being done on the .co.uk. The web developer was then meant to put the rel=canonical on the .com pointing to the .co.uk (maybe not needed at all thinking about it, if they had deindexed the site anyway). However he managed to rel=canonical from the good .co.,uk to the ,com domain!

Maybe I should have noticed it earlier but you shouldn't have to double check others' work! I noticed it today after a good 6 weeks or so. We are having a nightmare to rank the .co.uk for terms which should be pretty easy to rank for given it's a decent domain.

Would people say that the rel=canonical back to the .com has harmed the co.uk and is harming with while the tag remains in place? I'm off the opinion that it's basically telling google that the co.uk domain is a copy of the .com so go rank that instead.

If so, how quickly after removing this tag would people expect any issues caused by it's placement to vanish?

Thanks for any views on this. I've now the fun job of double checking all the coding done by that web developer on other sites!

My first impression of the site is what an odd mixture of famous person gossip and holiday reviews

From what I can see the advertising on the holiday review pages is pretty targeted, however on the gossip pages it is less targeted. This is probably because very people people are bidding on the names of famous people or soaps. Although you may get some click if the ads were to be for a bands new album after an article about them, I personally feel that the revenue from the gossip pages is very limited.

Revenue wise, i would stick to the holiday revenue market as people like to read reviews on their holidays. I have an adsense site too but that is very limited and deals only with product reviews. If someone has searched for a review of x product then there is a good chance that they are in the mood to buy it. Assuming I have a decent review of it in terms of keyword words for the adsense bots to crawl, I should have some advertisements related to exactly the product people want to buy. If these ads then have the price of the item in it can make the ctr pretty good.

Not sure where you are sourcing your reviews from but have a search in good for the hotel reviews people are searching for and you will get some good traffic numbers. You can find review keywords getting 10k searches a month on exact search and have a competition rate of less than 15 in the moz tools.

One final remark. On my browser you seem to have a large white space on the right of the article. I assume that's because of the joomla theme you are using? If adsense allows it, maybe pop a flight cost calculator in there. These are available from a lot of holiday affiliate programs. If people read a review about x hotel then they would be keen to find a cheap way of getting there....

Hope any of this helped

Carl

Thanks for the replies. A little more info, previously both domains have been used for various projects in the fashion niche. One used to be a blog and the other a fashion article site, however neither of these projects were bring in a decent ROI so am working on launching a store on them. It will be a mixture between unique products and affiliate based product imports.

In terms of back links, to be honest, while both domains have fashion related backlinks they are most either on blog or article keywords or just using the domain name as anchor text so there is little benefit to be gained from them in ranking for terms such as 'dresses' 'trousers' etc

thanks.

Could i get a little domain advice please.

Launching a new website project and want to put it on a domain we already own (both domains are in the same niche as the larger project).  The new project will be aimed at the UK market.

The choice is:

.co.uk we own with a good name, however it's Domain Authority rank is 7 and it's only about 8 months old.

.com domain which is 6 years old, has a Domain Authority rank of 33 but is not as good a domain name.

The Competitive Link Analysis tells me that the rivals for the keywords we would be targeting are between 24 and 42.

Which domain would people go with? All things equal it would be a fair guess that the older, higher Domain Authority ranked .com will require less work to rank in the engines, however it's not as good brand wise.

Thanks

Carl

I had a similar ish issue with an ecommerce store of my own. It has 90,000 products on and I was spending far too long targeting individual product names. It proved to be a false economy to me; while it was good to rank no1 for the actual product name, the number of people who search Google for exact product names was tiny. As A result I have now dropped this approach and I'm targeting more generic keywords such as 'black dress' 'red tights'

Try and target a few dozen broader keywords which bring in many more searches. If you build up your domain authority enough then the individual pages will rank of their own accord (depending on your site quality and the competition, of course)

Little bit of an odd question this, but how would one go about getting Google to not index certain content on a page? I'm developing an online store for a client and for a few of the products they will be stocking they will be using the manufacturers specs and descriptions. These descriptions and specs, therefore, will not be unique as they will be also used by a number of other websites.

The title tag, onpage h1 etc will be fine for the seo of the actual pages (with backlinks, of course) so the impact of google not counting the description should be slight.

I'm sure this can be done but for the life of me I cannot remember how.

Thanks

Carl

• sorry if this has been asked/been written about previously, I had a search but couldn't find anything.

I am using the keyword difficulty tool to narrow down on some keywords and whilst the % score for each keyword is being displayed, the Google Adwords data is blank. It just shows the animation as if it was pulling the data but after some ten mins or so not data is pulled, just the animation still running.

Is there a problem with the tool or does the problem lay at my end?

Thanks,

Carl

I'm a member of raven tools and, maybe it's just me, I dont find it that useful for link builiding. What I do like about it though is the ability to manage all my seo clients and my own websites from one place. It's easy to view the analtyics for a lot of websites quickly, the ranking reports are great and my clients love the the automated monthly reports it sends out, all branded in their logo etc. I personally think raven is a great tool to manage the reporting and analtyic side of my work.

Sorry if asked in the wrong section (or indeed if this is even a relevant question), but couldn't find an off topic section

Am considering buying a Kindle ebook reader for various reasons, one of which would be to read the QandA and the community posts without being stuck at my desk all the time.

Does anyone use a kindle to browse these sections? Does it work ok? I don't want to get a full tablet as I have no need for all the functions on it.

Thanks,

Carl

It would be nice to see the weekly search impressions a keyword gets. It's good to know if you are ranking and how many hits you get from that keyword but what would also be nice would be the search impressions on a keyword. At first glance, a 100 clicks on a keyword in a week could seem good but if you had 10,000 impressions then you can get more easy traffic by upping the ctr

Thanks for the replies gents'. I guess I'll have to do it the old fashioned way of going out and reviewing fashion blogs and try to convince people that they should write a blog on my site instead of their own. I need to establish a strong brand so being invited to write becomes an honour and people would jump at the chance.

Hi

But stuck on growing the community aspect of a fashion website i am developing. The site already has a comprehensive shop with 200,000 products in, a large article and video section in but it is lacking a little in fresh, up to date content.

The long term plan is to create a large forum and have a good level of interaction there but that will take a while as the site grows. To get the site growing I want to bring in columnist and bloggers to write about what they are liking in fashion, which famous people are wearing what and so forth. The trouble is I am having issues finding people. There are tons of people running their own wordpress sub domains with similar sites but not sure where I would find these kind of people. I would be looking to reward them with their labour by either paying per post or allowing them to put adsense etc on their pages.

Anyone else grown a community from the start, where did you find bloggers etc?

thanks.

Carl

Hi

All the keywords are removed from the page. I do take issue with the 'If there is nothing on the page about X, it won't rank for X, even if a lot of links are pointing at the page with anchor text X.'

I have many websites, both ones I own and client's sites, which are ranking for keywords not contained on the website at all. With enough links you can even rank a coming soon type page.

Thanks for the replies everyone. Have started a limited campaign of sending backlinks to the websites below me. If I can get down to position 11 that will do in the short term/