Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Des,

You will probably want to look at implementing rel=alternative hreflang="xx" in this case and you usually do not want to be putting a rel=canonical pointing at the .com site from the .co.uk site. Google has removed the text referring to the canonical tag from the relevant help page on hreflang exactly due to the confusion you mention in your question. As I understand it you can still use a self referencing rel=canonical tag if you like, but the hreflang is the best way to declare to google that you have language/region specific content available on other urls. Having both hreflang and a canonical tag pointing to the .com site might get you UK searches showing the .co.uk site url (from the hreflang) but showing title and description text from the .com site (because of the canonical tag). Check out these 2 links for a bit more info:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en
http://dejanseo.com.au/canonical-vs-hreflang/

Hope that helps.

Hi,

Agree with Dana that the moz on page grading tool is really not that relevant, and I would stress that it is probably even less relevant to non english sites. I have sites where it tells me no instances of xxx were found in the title, body etc... but it certainly is!

Agree also with Francisco and Dennis that you should check your analytics and see if a google update coincides with your rankings drops (and also that your site looks very nice!).

Open site explorer in this case is showing slightly dated link data, if you check out your link profile in ahrefs https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/overview/subdomains/wo-men.ro it looks like there has been a big increase in links over the last 2-3 months and a lot of those are exact match of one sort or another. Might or might not be related to the exact drops you are looking at for products, but that link profile is very suspicious looking now and it would be a shame for a site that looks good and obviously has had a lot of work put into it to be undone by something like that.

Thats a pretty good video, hadn't seen it before. Check out this article for another good rundown on using rel canonical and prev/next and implementation: http://www.ayima.com/seo-knowledge/conquering-pagination-guide.html using them both alone or in combination depending on the situation is certainly the best way to approach this issue.

Is it just me or is it getting a bit silly in here??

HI Thomas,

You could use a wordpress multi site installation for this which allows for setting up different wp installs on subdomains or sub directories as Ryan suggests. This will allow you to have separate 'sites' while all still being controlled from one wp admin panel and with a bit of coding/setup work to tweak things if needed. You can also use a domain mapping plugin to run multiple domains (.com, .com.au, .co.uk etc) from the subfolders if that is in the plans.

Hi,

In regards the suspicious links, if you look at the ahrefs link I mention above you will see that you have gone from about 8,000 to 68000 links in the last 3 months or so after being flat before that for many months. Worse, of those links about 80% have the term caduri ideale (ideal gifts or something like that I think?). This does not look like normal link growth from bloggers etc. This looks like keyword targeted link building on site wide links (since the number of linking domains has gone up much much less than number of links). If the rankings/visits drop is only from google, it is during (or shortly after) an algo update and it is related to keywords you see in that ahrefs link in the referring anchor phrases then I think you have a good idea where some part of the problem may be.

Hi Anthony,

Header tags are used to indicate structure in your html document, the styling you apply to them can be anything you like and think makes the page easier to read. While it is a bit unusual to have small headings and larger paragraph fonts, it is certainly not black hat.  Is it worth using h3 and h4? You are probably not going to see any seo benefit from using them, but if your document structure makes sense to have them, then use them. Can you use more than one h2? Yes! Check out this post by Yoast which should answer most of your questions regarding structure and proper usage.

In regards what text is best, I would go with your second 'more readable' suggestion. Write your content with users in mind first, it is easy to get caught up in minor variations with the idea that it might make some difference to your rankings. 99/100 it wont, and you will just get a page that reads a bit oddly for real users.

I really don't think it is worth doing that!

What Istvan says is 100% correct, you will beat him in time. Why start wasting your time on your competitor's site rather than focusing on your own?

HI Thomas,

The multisite setup is just a way of controlling the content. If you set it up on subfolders then google will see the sub folders as normal and all on the same domain. If you set it up using domain mapping then you are in effect setting up different domains (even though you are hosting the content all in the same place) and google will see the content as separate domains. If you are planning to go the subfolder route you could set up wordpress to get the same behavior without using multisite, it just might be quite dev intensive depending on how different you want the regional variations to be.

Whichever route you choose an important thing will be to make sure your regional hreflang tags are set up correctly - this will likely need a bit of tweaking given your description but is worth it to get it right.

In regards link building it is still an important part of the mix, but it has to look natural and even if those links we are talking about are natural, they dont LOOK natural. The simple fact that you mention that you can contact the bloggers and ask for them to change the link text indicates they might not be 100% natural links if you see what I mean. If you can, I would try to reduce the number of links (less sitewides in blogroll, a lot less actually) mix up the anchor text with a very high percentage of branded terms (so domain name/company name) and if they are site wides look at making them no-follow. There is a lot of info on Q&A and blog posts here in regards natural/un-natural links, here for example: http://moz.com/blog/17-types-of-link-spam-to-avoid but search in the qa and you will get lots more info.

In regards what to do, I would say that in comparison with your competitor you have a way to go before your domain metrics will match theirs (even if they are doing similar type link building). So keep doing what you are doing in term of making the site user friendly, keep adding blog content and expanding product info (without excessive keyword stuffing). And be patient! A good video for ecommerce technical seo is here: http://moz.com/webinars/ecommerce-seo-fix-and-avoid-common-issues which might help onsite stuff.

In the meantime, the site look great, your conversion rate sounds ok for retail, so if you are not already I would be thinking about PPC campaigns which should convert well and also give some insight into real search phrases. Leverage your social media followers and try to engage them more. Make use of and try to build your email lists. The normal stuff in other words while you are waiting for your seo efforts to come into effect! Hope that helps!!

Hi Dario,

Are you sure you are seeing video results for the search? If you are then what thumbnail is showing if not your declared one?

Be that as it may it might be worth adding the meta thumbnail as well as thumbnailUrl like so:

Check out the comments here for a bit on which thumb seems to be getting shown and if you really want to get confused check out the source of the youtube video and see what the have done there! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQk5AQsSI9Y, something like this:

Hope it helps!

Hi Faye,

As Martijn said there is an issue with your main menu, if you turn off javascript in firefox and visit the site... no menu at all!

You can see the result in your sitemap.xml also, only 2 urls are created in it, the homepage and the dentists page which you have a link to in the body text.

Try redoing your menu in css, it should fix the problem. Have a look here:
http://www.cssnewbie.com/easy-css-dropdown-menus/

I just grabbed this example, if you search for css dropdown menus you will find many more.

As Andy says you could pull the information into a popup/lightbox/div using javascript and source it all from the same url, so should do the trick.

Just thinking out loud now, but it might be worth testing putting the generic texts back into some of the product pages and seeing what happens. 250 word unique texts for each product might be enough to make the moz crawler (and the search engines) see enough value and difference on each page for it not to be an issue anymore. You could test in a single category for example and cross check against analytics and ranking data to see what happens.

Hi Luke,

It really depends quite a lot on which exact keywords/phrases you are talking about. From a quick look at the two sites in open site explorer it is true that you have more linking domains than the other site. But...

If you look at the homepage metrics, they are ahead of you in the moztrust and mozrank metrics. This 'might' be partly due to a better internal linking strategy on their part.

The external links from both sites look a bit unnatural in that they have a number of non branded exact match links which are obviously pretty much there to try to influence rankings. Yours however are going the 'buliding materials' route and theirs are going the 'windows' route. They also have a lot less exact match and a lot less in percentage terms than your site which could be a factor if google is (likely) discounting a good chunk of those links. Again though, it really depends what keywords you are talking about.

Hope that helps.... a bit!

Hi Steve,

htaccess can be tricky! That link above is a good overview of the options. What you want in your case I think is to make sure that the specific individual page url rewrites are before the generic domain rewrite so they are triggered first and the generic redirect is only triggered if none of the individual page urls above it are hit.

Hi,

That sounds like an issue with the cms itself, it is creating the dashed urls but also keeps a record of the original urls and delivers them if requested. If the urls with blanks in them are not being linked to internally and not being linked to by external sites then really you have no problem, only you are looking at the spaced urls nobody else (including the search engines) know they exist, so no issues with duplicate content.

I will have a stab at it

I am a bit confused over your main problem since you say that individual properties have great unique content and are good for sharing, but then that they have similar descriptions and you would prefer for them not to be emphasized in google.

If I understand right, this seems to be mainly an architecture type issue since you want to put emphasis on location + type of accommodation so that users are landing on the 'category' page such as it is and can then drill down.

If so, I don't think you have any problems if the category/url structure is right so something like
Florida/Miami/Condos gives a pretty good indication of the way you are intending visitors to discover your content. You will want to make sure that each page in that trail has some unique content beyond a simple list of properties. The individual property pages could then be optimized more for the name of the rental than its location (although obviously location would also be included).

I would think that schema markup might be your friend here. Have a look at http://schema.org/LodgingBusiness and particularly the location details and see how you can apply this to the individual pages.You could then replicate the locality information through your url/folder structure.

Using breadcrumbs (and structured markup with them) would also help emphasize this to both users and search engines... and maybe you will get some of those lovely breadcrumb links in your serps!

Hope that makes sense!

Hi Matthew,

It would help to have a url to look at but I can suggest a couple of things to consider:

1. If you are using the screaming frog free version it limits you to 500 pages, the moz scan will go up to 10,000 so that might account for the mismatch in numbers.

2. The moz results will be valid results for the latest scan, so if you are seeing errors in the moz reports they are current errors.
If you download the error report in csv, then select all your data and do the ctrl-windows-L command it will convert your data to filterable tables. You can then filter by dup title/dup content and the far left column will be the duped pages and the far right column where each page is linked from.

3. I dont know anything about the specific CMS but all cms usually have the ability to spawn out duplicate links through various automatic mechanisms like links to print versions of pages and things like that. If this accounts for a chunk of your dup content then it should be a pretty easy dev fix to get rid of these systematic type errors in one go which should reduce the number of duplicate issues and let you focus more clearly on 'real' duplicate content issues.

Hope that helps!

HI,

This one is pretty good: http://www.noupe.com/php/htaccess-techniques.html

And the boilerplate htaccess file often gives a good starting point (and its commented): https://github.com/h5bp/html5-boilerplate/blob/master/.htaccess

For redirects Lesley is right, they can get complicated and often need a bit of fiddling to avoid server 500 errors.

Had a bit of a dig and found this post which seems to confirm the reference being followed such as it is although not clear if any real ranking benefit.

http://dejanseo.com.au/seo-experiment-with-non-link-references/

Certainly is an interesting case and I agree nice to be able to 'fix' these errors and if there is some seo side benefits of any kind, so much the better!