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Hi Justin,

Cutts has said more recently that there should not be any problem going the all https route, although he notes to try it out first on a 'lower traffic domain' if possible(!). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4801641 Quite a few popular sites are heading this way (twitter, fb, paypal for example)

Assuming that is correct and you are not seeing any ranking/indexing issues with the site currently in https, there should not be an obvious reason to worry.

For your second question, again there should be no issue with running the blog on a non https url, but you would do well to avoid having links to the https version of the blog that are then 301 redirected to the http version. So making sure all your internal links to the blog are already http would be a good idea and ideally all links from the blog back to the site would already be https.

Beyond the page loading times, https urls can often have gotcha moments where certain elements of the page (js or css links, image urls etc) can be non https and produce warnings in some browsers which is bad for user experience. Sometimes the pages these errors occur on can be pretty deeply hidden so good to be methodical. Also need to keep in mind that your robots.txt and sitemap should also be served on the https protocol and make sure that your sitemap is not automatically generating https urls for all the site (blog included) which can potentially create unneeded confusion.

Hope that helps!

Hi Rose,

Indeed some hosting companies will throw up these ready cpc templates as soon as a domain expires and/or a hosting account goes into arrears. Bad form if you ask me, but it happens.

I would say no. There are a couple of posts already on q&a detailing the benefits(?) and risks:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/do-link-wheel-works

http://www.seomoz.org/q/hi-i-wanted-to-clarify-whether-what-i-am-describing-is-a-link-wheel-and-is-this-black-hat

Hi Carla,

I have never heard of one file type being better or worse for image ranking, I would think it makes no difference so use the type that makes the most sense for the kind of image it is (ie jpg for photos, png for logos and generally whichever will give you a lower file size). That being said, I did a search for 'Línea Solarium Recto' and your images are the first ones shown so it might depend on what phrase you are trying to rank for with certain images, the pngs in other words are certainly showing up for quite specific searches.

Hi Dimitrii,

The only way to do this is to run multiple adwords accounts and it is against google policy and can result in all your accounts getting suspended (see the 'gaming the network' sections here). Not something to risk!

That being said, make sure you use all available extensions on your single ad to fill up as much screen space as possible.
Especially make sure your sitelink extensions are completely filled out with title plus two rows of description each.

If your branded campaign is showing the ad plus four full sitelink extensions and your organic results are showing expanded sitelinks also then on most laptop and non tv sized computer screens the fourth organic result is going to be below the fold.

Hi,

You don't mention what keywords you are searching for, but I would think it is the recent(ish) case of google trying out putting the brand name plus colon at the front of titles in the serps. It has been discussed a few times on this forum, I first read about it here: http://www.gordoncampbell.co.uk/colons-page-titles and it seems to be happening quite a lot! If the keywords you are seeing the results for include the brand aptus then this is almost certainly the reason.

Well, here is a theory, not going to say a completely thought out one!

I have seen quite a few examples like this in industries which could be said to have traditionally attracted seo over-optimisation (specifically travel and gaming related). Almost seems like even the hint of optimization (more than a handful of exact match links) is enough to get a site thrown down the rankings and sites that are really not particularly optimised on site, but definitely do not have much of an optimised link profile are being pushed up to the top.

Of course SEO is another industry that attracts this kind of stuff, although your specific search has a couple of pretty optimised sites in the 2-10 positions, so surely it depends on a whole range of factors.

Not 100% sure this is even exactly related to the recent penguin 2.0 update since I was seeing some flux on various rankings from the first week of May (from Europe).

Actually, thats not much of a theory at all, just an observation!

Maybe Dr Pete will chime in... seems something up his alley......

Hi Elissa,

If you look at the source code for (as an example):
http://www.finalduties.co.uk/probate/father-and-son-battle-over-13th-century-inheritance/

You will see a bit in the head like this (just under the rel=canonical):

So you are giving a link to 2 versions of the same page in your code.
The short tag is put in since wordpress 3 (maybe you recently updated wordress?).

You can see 2 ways of removing this tag here:
http://www.mydigitallife.info/how-to-disable-and-remove-shortlink-link-rel-hook-in-wordpress-header/

Hopefully that will help with the duplicate content / rel canonical issues in site explorer (I don't think I see any of these ?p= links in the google results for your site as of yet).

Hi,

There are some differing opinions on the benefits of using base64 images to reduce http requests. From an seo point of view I don't think it will make much of a difference one way or the other if you are only talking about 20 icon images, but from a performance point of view I would use css image sprites which also reduce http connections and are (in my opinion) easier to maintain.

Hi,

First of all check the basics here to make sure that nothing obvious is wrong.

If it is a new campaign then the system often seems to wait to get some quality indicators that your keywords and ads are highly relevant and  deserve to have full expanded sitelink extensions.

I would try using the brand name again (where relevant and normal sounding) in some of the sitelink titles and/or descriptions, link to relevant secondary pages about the company and bid high on the keywords. Since it is a branded query you should have a mid to high quality score already and once the campaign is running a little while you should have a high click through rate also - this combination should be enough to ensure maximum quality score and you descriptions should be shown.

If it is a new site or a brand with little branded traffic this process can take longer to complete (which is why you bid high in the beginning to make sure your ads show - once adwords sees brand relevancy the cpc should drop).

Hi,

Well I will throw a couple of comments in the hat!

I have the same issue on a couple of ecom sites I monitor, internal search results are showing in the serps for various terms, and am pondering what to do about this because as you say, it doesnt seem very sustainable long term and you never know when the axe might drop.

My concern with what you suggest re redirects is two pronged:

1. If you are getting decent traffic and/or conversions from these terms currently, then you run the risk of losing these for who knows how long if the redirects for whatever reason don't sit well with google.

2. If you are redirecting what amounts to internal search queries would that not mean you would have to re engineer the search system/urls to some degree? That doesn't seem a undertaking to be taken lightly!

My thoughts might be to try a parallel approach in terms of letting the search results stay in the serps and at the same time working to boost the relevant product pages you were planning to redirect to.

If you can get those pages ranking for the same terms then if/when google decides your search results don't belong in the serps then you will have a ready made replacement to a degree. You could also try linking to the relevant pages at the top of the search results page instead of redirecting. This might help push the product pages higher and perhaps more importantly could help with your immediate problem of many visits but few conversions on these pages. That being said, wouldn't the search results page be linking to these product pages anyway?

My two cents!

Hi Micheal,

I am going to have to throw my theory/observation out in this case! Just had a quick look at ahrefs and looks like these guys have been doing some major link building in the last couple of weeks (with main keyphrase brisbane seo).

https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/overview/subdomains/http%253A%252F%252Ftotaldigitalsolutions.com.au

Just too soon to show up in the moz metrics. You wouldn't think this kind of thing would keep them in the top spot for too long, but there you go. **Note to self to check out a couple of the other cases I had seen for very recent funny stuff!

Hi Daniel,

At first glance I'm not sure a robots.txt issue would be responsible for the rankings drop you describe. What pages are still blocked that you dont want blocked? Maybe something else is going on in regards the rankings?

For issue 2, have you submitted an image sitemap.xml? If so what is the address? I see plenty of your images in google image search, so some of them at least are being indexed.

Hi Morris,

A soft 404 is basically exactly what you have with your current setup, it is a page not found that is returning a 200 header response (or any other header that doesnt match the intent of the page which is actually a 404 page not found). It is problematic for a number of reasons, mainly that google can and will index and crawl the page and that it makes it pretty difficult to use tools to identify your real 404 issues when the headers are not declaring that the page is in fact a 404 not found!

So yes, you need to get rid of that 200 response header and replace it with a proper 404 header. Luckily this is usually a pretty easy fix for developers, details of which depend a bit on how your system is setup but it shouldn't be difficult.

Hope that helps!

Hi,

If you want to have one ad that displays on both desktop and mobile do NOT check the mobile box. This check box is used to indicate that the ad is to be 'preferred' for mobile devices in relation to other ads of the same type (ie text ads) in the same ad group. Google does not recommend having ad groups with only mobile optimized ads in them saying they may show up on desktop and tablet searches anyway.

So if you want to create text ads that show across all devices simply create them as normal and do not check the mobile box. If you want to have a text ad that has different wording for mobile users (lots of reasons why you might want to do this) then best practice is to create at least two text ads, one for desktop/tablet and one for mobile (with the mobile box checked). You can see what devices each ad has been shown on by selecting the 'Device' option from the Segment drop down in the ads tab to get exact numbers of impressions, clicks, CTR etc for each ad.

Hi Tim,

If you have deleted the pages and there are still links to them either from the same site or from external sites then these are indeed 404 (page not found) pages and they will continue to be until you either remove all links to them or 301 redirect them to new pages. Are you sure you have removed all the links to them from your site's pages? If you run the site through a moz scan then this will tell you the referring page that linked to the 404 page (the far right column) and you can go and check to see where the links are and remove them.

By the way, if it is an all html site and you have ftp access... cant you just download all the files and work on it locally?

Hope that helps!

Hi Bob,

Why not start simple and leverage the questions your clients are already asking you? There must be lots of common issues they face during a printing process. We seem to talk at least 3-4 times with the printers while we are getting anything printed. This could be spun out initially as a faq type page, but I would think that some of those questions would naturally lead to posts that could expand on more details, the theory behind practices etc. Just a thought!

Hi Daniel,

Maybe something else changed in the weeks prior to this that had an effect, like a template or layout change? Is it just you or have other sites fluctuated in the serps also? You have probably gone through this process, but worth mentioning since the robots.txt itself doesn't look very suspicious.

As for the image indexation, I think I have your culprit. In your existing sitemap http://www.scojo.com/sitemap/sitemap.xml there are 582 image urls and they seem to be all going to a 404 page.

Hope that helps!

Just thinking out loud here but linkedin would be an obvious choice for the more b2b market contacts. Twitter to connect with journalists and industry news type contacts. Perhaps youtube or similar if you are thinking about how to or demonstration videos and such which might be a way to target individual consumers.

Hi Micheal,

I suspect the mobile site might be responsible for the indexed urls issue. Your mobile site has loads of indexed pages with the shorter urls: https://www.google.com/#output=search&sclient=psy-ab&q=site:m.eventective.com&oq=site:m.eventective.com&fp=9861fb8dc6b3e7c

Before the 301 redirects on the mobile site were created, were the rel canonical links pointing to the truncated urls on the main site? Seems to be the case on this random page I grabbed:

view-source:http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:2AwUe7jXqvMJ:m.eventective.com/Canada/Ontario/Ottawa/569913/

So a kind of odd mixture of 301s on the main site, and a well indexed mobile site saying the rel canonical on the main site is the shorter url. Seems maybe the rel canonical won! Are you sure this is a recent issue? Maybe it has been like this for a while and just not noticed much?

I would think that with the 301s and rel canonicals now properly implemented on the mobile site then the index will slowly sort itself out. I suppose you could put a rel canonical on the main site page also referencing itself, might speed up the process a bit more.

Agree with Jesse that it is not likely a major worry and wouldn't think this alone would cause a ranking issue.