Welcome to the Q&A Forum
Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.
Ah,
In that case I think perfect007 is probably on the right track. Your 404 page has some issues and most of the links on it are going to 404 pages also. That in combination with your meta robots text which is could well be making any issue with spam links worse by spawning more. I think first thing to do is make sure your 404 page is not adding to the problem and see if that at least reduces the issue.
Hi,
Have a look at this tool (https://secure.chartelligence.com/) which overlays dates of google updates and other important events on top of your analytics graphs. Useful to see if there seems to be a close correlation between an update and your traffic drop.
Tough to say how much the link warning on the one site might affect the other. If google thinks they look like part of the same network then it is certainly something you want to try to clean up.
I would still be inclined to check the dates of google updates first and see what correlation exists. I would also look at those banner ads, just from a user point of view that banner up at the top for me really makes the site look like a 'built for ads' type site. Again, any correlation between adding, rearranging the banner ads and the drop in rankings? If you put them in or added to them recently then it is possible the site got picked up and flagged in the next update...
Hi Atul,
Where does GWT show these links originating from (in GWT click through to a specific url and then choose the 'linked from' tab)? They look like auto generated spam type stuff to me. If they are being generated from other irrelevant sites, firstly I would think that the links might well be quite temporary and secondly I wouldn't worry too much about them since there is likely not much you can do about them. Other than the annoyance, they are not likely to affect your site much in my opinion.
Hi,
Nothing sure, but late December saw a panda update, maybe this is relevant maybe not.
If it is relevant a couple of things come to mind:
<address>- Maybe you have some slightly thin content on these pages and a bit of added content might help - difficult to tell, cannot understand it :)</address>
<address> </address>
you have quite a few indexed pages, any indication of duplicate content issues in seomoz or wmt? If so consolidating relevant pages might help.
You have quite a lot of advertising banners on the pages (that big one up top especially hits the eye!), might be worth removing some of them or moving them below the fold on some pages to see if that affects things at all.
Of course, it is always good before doing anything to try to identify exactly what is going on. 20-30% is big, but it is not like you have dropped off the planet. So confirming what sources/keywords/landing pages are contributing to this drop is an important first step as is making sure it is not something else completely (like maybe seasonal variation for example?).
Hope that helps!
Hi Mathew,
Just to play the devils advocate here: are you sure the lost backlinks are the cause of the drop in rankings? Directory and article links are usually pretty low value and you didn't mention why they have been lost (any unatural link warnings that you have been trying to clean up a bit?). Any drops in ranking/traffic that matches a known google update?
1000 of them is quite a lot, if the site has another 1000 or whatever that are still live maybe their loss isnt the problem, their existance is!
I would think immediate actions would be the standard list: onsite improvements in code and content where relevant and try to gain some relevant links from relevant sites.
My two cents!
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,
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.
Hi Brian,
I also don't have any hard stats, but I think these kind of results are somewhat baked into the normal localised and personalised results which are pretty much default now.
Particularly for non english language searches and google.xx country domains the normal results are already slanted towards 'pages in xxx' and 'pages from xxx'. Differences do exist, but not to the degree they did a few years ago in my experience.
Andie is right, they have made the 'pages from xx' a lot less prominent in the UI than it was, but I think that is because it is needed less now since the normal serps are doing a better job of returning user/country relevant data.
Hi Edward,
Looking at your source, I don't see what you mention on line 94, I don't actually see any kind of meta description tag, so that is certainly something you should address.
What Mike suggests appears correct (I have never actually tested combining open graph and meta description tags). That being said, I think your issue is more a question of setup.
Assuming that the plugin you are using allows setup of both the meta description tag and the open graph description then just use them both. Doubling up is fine although they are two different things really, meta description mainly used in serp results, og tags when you share the url on facebook so there might be times you would like them to be slightly different anyway.
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:
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.
Hi Rahul,
I prefer a short overview of what the page/company is all about with a call to action at the end. I also much prefer proper sentences and not bullet points or similar. Something like:
XXXXXX company has been offering trustworthy 24/7 IT support services since 1984. Contact us today for a free IT assessment and a 100% risk free trial.
Check out this serp preview tool, it is really useful in getting an idea of how your site will actually show up, I use it all the time! http://www.seomofo.com/snippet-optimizer.html
Hi Christopher,
I suppose it depends on the 3rd party site but I am not aware of any of the well known ones allowing this kind of thing. Just thinking out loud but if you are getting loads of onsite reviews, that obviously indicates a willingness of the customers to leave a comment, so you could try to push some of those reviews to the the 3rd party sites just by linking to the relevant page and inviting customers to leave a review there instead (or also). I have had some success linking to the review sites with a 'we would love for you to leave a comment/review' type text at the end of final conversion pages and/or in order confirmation emails also.
Hope that helps!
Hi,
At first glance it seems you have a rel canonical issue. All of your blog posts have a rel canonical pointing to: <link <span class="webkit-html-attribute-name">rel="canonical" href="http://www.hilden.co.uk/bed-linen.html" /></link <span>
Probably not what you had in mind!
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!
Indeed if it is not showing a 404, that makes things a bit difficult!
You could try another way, use OSE!
Use the exact page, filter for only internal links, boom 127 pages that link to it. There might be more, but this should get you going!
Hi Darin,
Both these softwares are made for exactly this kind of job and they are not huge system killing programs or anything. Seriously I use one or both almost every day. I suggest downloading them and seeing how you go, I think you will be happy enough with the results.
Xenu will also do a similar job and doesn't have a limit which I recall the free version of screaming frog has: http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html
If you have loads of links to this missing page it sounds like you maybe have a template problem with the links getting inserted on every or lots of pages. In that case if you find the point in the template you will have fixed them all at once (if indeed it is like this).
Hi Oliver,
So if I understand right it is happening mainly in cases where the search string has quite a few words + priceminister brand and also when the brand is tagged onto the end of the search query rather than the beginning. Still no great ideas on how to approach but at least the scale and dynamics of the problem is more defined.
You say that it is a minority of the searches and that is obviously a good thing! I am wondering with the analytics data you have how much volume you are seeing in regards the brand at the front or at the end of the search query? Granted if it is at the end and users are clicking through to amazon you will not have a complete picture, but if they are actively searching for your brand then you should still see a pretty good chunk of the traffic. I guess what I am saying is, although obviously frustrating, maybe this is an issue you are noticing a lot more in comparison with 'normal' users and while annoying is not having a huge impact on the bottom line?
Not being much help! Be interesting to hear how this case plays out over time though. Perhaps google is messing with results and your branded terms will start surfacing more in the (hopefully near) future.
Hi Jonathon,
Well yes the big meta desc text is an issue, not great for google but even worse for user experience in term of a nice targeted description texts that show up in the serps and entice searchers to click on your site rather than the others. So you want a nice clear call to action text that says in 156 characters or less why users should check out your site (or more specifically this particular category/page of your site). Have a look at this serp preview tool, it is really useful: http://www.seomofo.com/snippet-optimizer.html
As to the technical implementation, it sounds like you have a custom template in use and the description text is being put into the meta desc field also. It is an easy fix for you or your developer to switch that over to using the category meta desc field from the magento admin instead.
Hope that helps.
Hi,
A couple of things could be and probably are at work in this situation.
1. For the 301 redirects, if the site is big (12000 urls), depending on how often and much google crawls the site it could easily take more than a month for it to find and identify all the new urls/301 redirects etc and then update its cache of indexed pages. So in this case its is a matter of patience. If the 301s are implemented correctly, they will eventually be indexed.
2. You have done 3 or 4000 301s, for the rest of the the old 12000 urls what are you showing, a 404? It is a big undertaking to redirect that many pages, but worth thinking about the technical side of what is happening, part of your 98000 indexed urls could be a mix of old and new if the old ones are not being redirected to a page that clearly states that they are either somewhere else (301) or no longer available (404).
3. A common problem with e-shops is duplicate content due to various things like product filters, search string variables etc that are going to pages that are indexable and do not have rel canonical tags. A good way to see if this is the case is to search for likely url parts in your cms that could lead to this issue (maybe you have filters that result in urls like xxx?search=123 or xxx?manufacturer=23 etc) and then do a google search along the lines of site:xxx.com inurl:manufacturer which should give a good idea of if/where you have this problem. This case of duplicate content could be even more pronounced if it was occurring on your old cms urls AND your new cms urls and a combination of these are in your 98000 total.
Hope that helps!