Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Steven,

My guess would be you are seeing the downtrend, because of the season.

Here is the data I pulled from Google Trends for "hockey stick" - as you can see, the peaks tend to be in December and January for the year.

My guess things will be slow until next year when the season picks back up.

Hope this helps.

Mike

I am guessing it is because of how you are implementing your breadcrumbs.

Google is using your breadcrumbs to make a rich snippet.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/185417?hl=en

Hope this helps.

Mike

Hi Ross,

I am seeing it when I do that same search.

The SERP uses Domain.com > Reviews vs the actual URL, but when I click on it, I am brought to the URL that you were looking for.

Mike

PHH6dMy

When I do a search for your URL, I am seeing that it was added to Google 17 hours ago.

Mike

Remove the 301 redirect completely (depending on your circumstances)

OR

Use NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW on the page that you don't want the Moz crawlers to evaluate.

Hope this helps,

Mike

Hi Ben,

When I am fixing 404s, I like to use Screaming Frog (paid if over 500 pages) or Link Sleuth (free), because they do a real-time scan of your site and will find 404 pages and all internal links pointing to those pages.

And since it is real-time, you can do an immediate scan to make sure you fixed your problems (where the Moz scanner takes a week to rescan your site).

Hope this helps,

Mike

Screaming Frog differentiates this with Outlinks (onpage links pointing to another resource on your site) and External Outlinks (onpage links pointing to another domain).

Does that help?

Mike

Hi Alexander,

If not a lot of people are linking to them AND if the page has an expiration date of sorts, you'd probably want to 410 the page.

404 and 410 both tell Google that the page no longer exists; however, the 410 (GONE) is more specific than the 404 (NOT FOUND).

The 410 "should" naturally get the page out of Google's index faster as well.

Or, if it is an ongoing thing, you could consider changing your URL to /group-course and then just constantly change the content on that particular page, letting the URL accumulate inbound links and drive traffic... I don't know exactly how you are using the page, but just an option.

Hope this helps.

Mike

I know this is already answered, but SEER did a great guide to Screaming Frog Guide to Doing Almost Anything: 55+ Ways of Looking at a Tool.

There are some really cool tips in there.

Mike

Hi Aditya,

1. That is personal preference. Search engines used to associate paths ending in / as a directory and paths not ending in / a file. Here is a great article on the subject from Google Webmaster Tools Blog.

2. I would say optimum is 3 to 4, but depending on the size of your site, you could probably go up to 6 without too much of a problem.

3. URL.

Hope this helps,

Mike

No problem.

Mike

And for all of us that were able to attend but weren't able to write everything down

I saw Sha Menz speak at MozCon this year. She works for rmoov and she seemed to really know her stuff - so I would probably go with rmoov.com.

Mike

Hi Christina,

For the location that you actually have an office, I would suggest having a single page devoted to that particular location (landing page as Bereijk suggests). Then I would use GetListed.org and list that physical location's information in all of those business directories.

I would then create landing pages for the other locations using a similar structure seen in Perfecting Keyword Targeting & On-Page Optimization.

That said, if the particular search terms you are going after include local results, only queries regarding your physical location will appear in the local results. So for instance is someone searches "SEO" from say Essex and your physical address is in Essex, and if Google applies the local SERP, your address and site information may appear; however, for the location landing pages you create, someone would have to do a search for "SEO London" to find your SEO London page, because it does not have a physical address located in London... does that make sense?

(the above is just from my personal experience. we did this for a ton of different locations at a previous job I held. in my opinion it was a waste of time, because my particular industry [at the time] would not have searched for "ERP software los angeles" - because software is not part of the localized SERP [at least at the time] so no one was even making it to those pages)

Hope this helps (and sorry for rambling),

Mike

Hi James,

I personally feel that it is a great overview and is still relevant today.

Matt Peters has a good blog post about the 2013 Search Engine Ranking Factors which you may also find useful.

Mike

Right on.

Yeah, I would just leave them as 404s and if they are indexed by Google, they will eventually be removed from the index.

Mike

I am a little confused by your question, but let me see if I understand what you are saying:

You have a product page, then you have any accompanying pop-up for it, and you just changed all of the URLs for the pop-ups and the old pop-up URLs are redirecting to the product page?

Were you getting a lot of people linking to the pop-up URLs? That is really the only reason you'd need to 301 them (in my opinion). If not, then ONLY redirect the popular pop-up URLs. This would definitely help with load times.

And your dev team is probably correct. If you have 100,000 lines of redirects, that is going to slow things down. Depending on your environment, you could potentially set up rules that would redirect things; however, it may be difficult depending on your URL structure/pattern.

As far as 410 or 404, a 410 usually alerts Google to remove the URL from its index faster than a 404, but in the end they essentially work the same.

Hope this helps,

Mike

Go find a college kid who is good at webdesign. I bet you could hire him/her yet for the summer and you could get them wicked cheap. If you only have 30 pages, you'd probably only need a handful of templates/layouts. And since you are going to use a free CMS, you could probably get away with only paying a couple grand.

Good luck.

Mike

Hi Jesse,

It all depends

Depending on the number of pages, the number of layouts, whether they need to write copy, perform usability testing, etc. And depends on the type of platform they are developing on OR if you are going to get a new platform.

The price changes with the number of iterations needed to layouts/design and the time frame you are looking at.

It also depends on whether you have a freelancer or agency do it. Without knowing the complete scope, I would guess somewhere between $50k-$250k if it is a pretty large site. If it is only like 50 pages and you only did a few templates, you could maybe get away with spending $10k-$30... depending on the people you work with.

First, I would look at design firms available in your area. Check out the websites they have developed and contact someone at the company they developed for and ask them about their experience. Do this for a handful of firms. Then contact each firm and ask them for a quote. After you have quotes from firms, go out and ask some freelancers... look at their work... ask for a quote. You will probably have to have some sit down, in person interviews with these people to make sure that they really get what you are asking for.

I know that doesn't completely answer your question, but hopefully it gives you a few things to think about.

Mike

If you an agency and can allow Sprout Social to access their social profiles, then you can just setup another group under Settings > Users & Groups. But grouping is only available in Standard, Deluxe, and Premium plans.

If you do not have access to social profiles, you "could" just add the other three brand names to your keywords and it would essentially search for your initial brand + the three others. The reporting may get a little messy, but you could easily filter things out by checking/un-checking the keyword(s).

Mike