Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Carlos,

SEO in general isn't a black&white, "I implement and it is working" science. The results will appear with time.

If I had to compare SEO I'd do it like this: It is an ongoing&endless chess game, with unlimited number of players who can move at the same time. And there is Google from the other hand, who can change the rules of the game at any point.

Seeing results in this industry (or as you have mentioned it: SEO time) will be quite different with every project. Because it doesn't only depend on you and/or Google. There are the other websites who are constantly evolving and developing.

I hope you will see your results soon.

Keszi

Hi Mof3kz,

Whenever I had to deal with a similar situation to yours I was always checking what we have done, what did change in the past few weeks.

Even, if you have been working with some great link partners, take your time and write an email. Ask them if they have experienced a fluctuation lately in the search engines on their ranking.

Possible situations:

1. The major link partners have experienced big fluctuations, maybe their links profile had a bigger change and since you are connected it will in some way effect you too.

2. They didn't experience any fluctuations: this is when you ask yourself, ok, then what the hell happened here? Stay chill! try to get on-site ask yourself if you are optimizing the right way. Try to avoid any possible issue from your site, add better content if possible, check for crawlability, etc. etc.

3. The link partners tell you they have experienced some kind of fluctuations, but not big ones. Now this part is tricky. As we all know, search engines like Google are constantly changing the algorithms, trying out new filters to show up the most relevant content. Some filter (new or existing one) has triggered out your possible loss. It might be temporary, it might be something stable. In these cases I usually advice the same thing as @ the point 2.

I hope this resolves your situation! Good luck!

Gr.,

Istvan

Shaq, the reason it is not higher is, because it wasn't updated at all since 2013.

Regarding DA, check again the http://moz.com/learn/seo/domain-authority link that I have provided in my previous answer.

Moz clearly states, that you can not directly(or it can be a hard task to) influence this metric (check the SEO best practices part in the bottom of the article).

Quote:
"Unlike other SEO metrics, Domain Authority is difficult to influence directly. It is made up of an aggregate of metrics (MozRank, MozTrust, link profile, and more) that each have an impact on this score. This was done intentionally; this metric is meant to approximate how competitive a given site is in Google.com. Since Google takes a lot of factors into account, a metric that tries to calculate it must incorporate a lot of factors, as well.

The best way to influence this metric is to improve your overall SEO. In particular, you should focus on your link profile—which influences MozRank and MozTrust—by getting more links from other well-linked-to pages."

Hi André,

First of all I would advice you to read through the following article: http://www.johnfdoherty.com/hreflang-markup-testing/

John Doherty's article will basically answer your question.

Gr.,

Istvan

SEO tools are like personal assistants:

• you will never find the "best"
• they never do your job (only assist you/speed you up)
• if you have the budget to have more, you get more work prepared by them

That is my shortlist

I personally use Screaming Frog + Moz, + Majestic + Xovi

I hope this helps.

Gr., Keszi

Hi Simon,

I usually do prefer the www. version, but I believe there no major difference between the two versions when you are building up a fresh website.

Still, it is important to underline the fact, that you need to choose one of the two versions and eliminate the other one be redirecting: www -> non-www or non-www. -> www.

This way you will eliminate many duplicates from the start (and you will help your link juice flow better).

I hope it was helpful,

Istvan

Hi Thomas,

I remember that there was a mozinar (https://moz.com/webinars/advanced-wordpress-seo) that helped me a lot answering these kind of questions. I think that would be useful for you too.

Regarding your question: if it is useful for the visitors, but you believe it causes (in any way) duplicate content.... I would set them to noindex, follow.

If you have the time, watch the mozinar, it describes the issue quite in detail.

I hope it will help you.

Keszi

Hey there!

I think I have found what your problem is with you canonical link

In your code you have:

And probably you are somewhere forcing the URls to have a / at the end.

So basically you are confusing browsers and search engine bots, because they now cannot tell which is the real version:

SE enters the page. Then it sees that the right version should be the one WITHOUT a "/" at the end, then that pages has a 301 redirect to the version which HAS a "/" at the end of the URL (but that has a canonical which points out that the preffered version should be ). So it is a non-ending circle.

So if you add a / to the end of your URl, your problem should be solved.

Final thought: Screaming Frog is working well.

I hope this was a solution.

Cheers,

Istvan

Hi Martins,

In my belief, if the page product/review is not linked from any indexed page with a follow link it makes it kind of hard for search engines to reach and index the page.

This is my opinion, but I will document a little bit and come back to you later on.

Istvan

You should add the Meta Description to your website not to your campaign. If you need help, I have sent you a Private message.

Greetings,

Istvan

Hi Sorin,

I would work this issue out trough Google Webmaster tools. It would be a possible solution to set up the parameter and tell Google to ignore it.

This way you wont have duplicate content issues because of the affiliate parameter in your links.

Another solution to this would be to insert in each and every page a canonical to itself (this way example.com/?affiliateID would have a canonical set up to example.com)

Another one: the solution that you have provided, but I wouldn't redirect all of them to the homepage. Just think as a user, you go on a link that should point to a product, then you get redirected to a homepage... what would you do? I would close the "tab".

301 and canonical will loose some of the link juice provided but still pass on somewhere close to 85-90%.

I hope this was helpful,

Istvan

Hi Edreamis,

What you see in your SEOmoz campaign regarding canonical "errors" are basically notices from their crawler. Non of the online crawlers can tell you if there is a canonical issue, they can just warn you to check it, which is sometimes really helpful.

I believe all your pages have their canonical set to the same URL (I have checked aprox. 10 and this was the conclusion) so basically this is what SEOmoz is also trying to tell you with their canonical notices.

I wouldn't worry about it.

Gr.,

Istvan

Hi Rusty,

Usually when I am seeking for the entrance keywords I am checking on Google Analytics. It gives me a better retrospective. But that doesn't mean you cannot do that with seoMoz.

Still on GA sometimes I have found some quite interesting data to work with.

Istvan

Hey,

Focus on quality vs. quantity. Your competitor might be collecting links from every scratch website, but if you focus on quality, with time you will beat him.

Gr.,

Istvan

P.S. If you are going to pay for poor quality links... Why would your website rank better?

Hi there,

I have a question for you:  what content do you have on the products pages?

I am asking this, because I have seen some websites which produced very cool "how to" articles and focused less on the product pages. I would focus more on creating better content on the product pages, then focusing how to draw back the existing rankings.

I hope that will help in some way!

Good luck,

Istvan

Hi,

I'd completely deny access for robots to the subdomain. For this I would create a robots.txt for the subdomain (place it in the folder of the subdomain) which would state the following:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

This way your content from the subdomain won't be crawled by search engines -> no content duplication issue for search engines.

Gr., Keszi

I totally agree with you Matt.

Nowadays even Google's Keyword suggestion tool is crap. Just check on what Rand talked about in a blog entry here on SEOmoz: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/be-careful-using-adwords-for-keyword-research

If it was me, I would go for Matt's solution: allocate time for keywords research, try to figure out how you potential visitor is thinking.

Gr.,

Istvan

Hi,

I'd go for redirect all the pages. Even if doesn't have 1 link (external), but until it is not an orphan page, it still got some value from internal linking.

That is my personal opinion.

Gr., Keszi

Hi JJ,

The usage of canonical tag on the document could help you out.

For ex. in the file: 24%22-Sting.html you can insert the canonical tag

You should insert the canonical tag before the .

This way you will exclude the following pages to be indexed:

| www.joannalark.com/store/products/24"-Sting.html?setCurrencyId=1 |
| www.joannalark.com/store/products/24"-Sting.html?setCurrencyId=6 |
| www.joannalark.com/store/products/24"-Sting.html?setCurrencyId=7 |

Also you will transfer the "link juice" from these pages and focus only on one page: 24%22-Sting.html

I hope it helped,

Istvan

Hi Ravi,

I personally use Screaming Frog to create the sitemaps. I create an advanced exclude/include list for the crawler, then run a crawl on my website and export the sitemap.

After the sitemap is created I double check it in an editor like notepad++

I hope this will work out for you too.

Keszi