Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I agree, get a great domain name that is short & user friendly and concentrate on building the brand. You can still SEO the site and as Elias mentioned, any benefit of exact match domains is being slowly chipped away so concentrate on your users.

I wish I had known what I know now when I registered my company and domain name!

Hey

This seems like a 'feature' and as it goes I would not want to submit my details in a highly automated fashion like this as duplicate listings on major citation sites can cause problems (duplicate automated Google+ listings) etc.

Audit the listings every so often but there is no need to update the basic Name, Address and Phone number if nothing has changed.

Hope that helps
Marcus

Hey

That's a solid point from EGOL - if there are ones that are working well at the moment, don't rock the boat and look to improve new content. The dynamic thing does make it a bit more tricky but really, it should not be a massive problem.

If your URLs are generated by the script and you have some kind of ID relating to the content you are adding it should be easy enough to put something in place that uses better quality URLs for new content.

If contentID > x Then

Build new URL Structure

Else

Build old URL Structure

End

Whether you do this entirely in the code or with some URL rewriting to add polish is up to you and in some part depends on how things work on your back end but...

Where there is a will there is a way and if you can shorten future URLs it will provide some benefit.

Maybe you could do some testing to see if it is going to be worth your while

1. Create a few hard coded new pages over the next month
2. Track them against the current pages
3. see if there is a statistical improvement in clicks, conversions, impressions etc

I am pretty much of the opinion that if you can change them going forward, you should as they are not brilliant at the moment but I would not expect miracles from this though so don't bust a blood vessel over it.

Cheers
Marcus

Hey

It is not usual for a site to jump from 1st to nowhere. That is for sure. But it could be many things. First up I would check webmaster tools and look for problems there.

• Can Google crawl the site?
• Has the site been consistently available?
• Is the hosting up to spec?
• etc

Beyond that only you know what the link building and 'SEO' looks like. What are you doing to promote this site? Are you playing by the rules?

This is a process of elimination and one that must consider what you did to get this #1 ranking and how that sits with Google guidelines. Certainly though, don't panic, it could be simply that the hosting is dire or some such. Look at the search console diagnostics and report back.

Hope that helps

Marcus

Hmmm, hard to say exactly but maybe if we look at the http status codes and their meanings it may help you to make a more informed decision.

The status codes are detailed in full here:
http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html

In brief, they are as follows:

301 - the requested resource has moved permanently

404 - the requested resource is unavailable

410 - the requested resource has gone

So really, just use common sense. If the pages have an alternative then 301 the missing page to it's closest alternative. If the pages have no alternative and they get many requests then, they should have an alternative so create one, or, link it to the homepage - maybe. If the pages have lots of inbound links and have no replacement, create one, or 301 them to the homepage.

Generally, if the page has no real alternative, does little traffic and has no links then allow it to 404 but use a good custom 404 page to help signpost them on their way.

You also have the 410 gone code but in practice, I have never seen anyone use that so a combination of 301 & 404 pages with a liberal sprinkling of common sense is the best approach.

Some great resources here:

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/http-status-codes

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/are-404-pages-always-bad-for-seo

Hope it helps

Marcus

Hey Butler

Why would you want to do that? Surely, you don't want a redirect on your index page? what could be better than http://www.yourdomain.co.uk/ ?

You are really not going to get a search hike from redirecting to
http://www.yourdomain.co.uk/keyword-goes-here.html

There is nothing really that wrong with this, but certainly, if you are doing it purely for a ranking boost, I would not bother and how would this work for internal navigation? Would the homepage links point to this page?

Maybe I am missing something here but as a general overview I see little point in doing this.

Hope this helps!
Marcus

Have you got historical analytics? You can segregate traffic into paid or organic and find out exactly where his traffic was coming from.

It certainly sounds a bit fishy but where is  he getting these figures from? To be honest, it does not really matter what the old agency were doing and I would not waste too much energy on that!

Cheers
Marcus

Hey, the basic answer here is with HTTP 301 redirections from the original pages to the new page.

Rather than just knowing the cryptic name it helps to understand what is going on behind the scenes a little and why this works. When a page is requested on your site the web server returns a HTTP status code. For a standard page request this is 200 OK and for missing pages a 400 Page Not Found response is returned. There are many other responses but the one we are interested in is for indicating a permanent redirection from the resource on Site A to a resource on Site B and this is a 301 Permanent Redirection.

This provides a range of benefits for users and the search engines

• a user visiting the old site from a search engine result listing is transported to the new resource
• a search engine visiting the link is informed that this resource has moved to a new location and the new page is given
• the page rank and value from any inbound links is forwarded to the new page (not all but most)

So, in this case the 301 redirect provides a complete solution to your problem. It updates and redirects users without requiring anything from them and it allows the search engine to update their records and start concentrating on your new site.

Note

There are a few things to take into consideration here to make sure this works well

1. You need to manually redirect page A to page B so there maybe a fair bit of work involved for a larger site
2. The redirections may need to be in place for a good while and if you generate a lot of direct traffic - keep an eye on the indexation and web logs for the old site to decide when you can kill it dead

Ultimately, you want the old site to remain in place, redirecting requests until it no longer receives any traffic (or such a low level that it is practical to remove it). If you do get a lot of direct traffic, be sure to update people so they can update their records.

Approach

Which brings us to the technology and approach required. I see you are using .Net aspx pages which is not really my bag but I can give you an overview of the options. You also seem to have wildly different page rules so a cute solution that just dynamically changes the domain but keeps the page the same is not going to work here (sorry).

1. Page Level Redirects: add code to the individual pages to redirect to the new page
2. Add redirection rules to the global.asax config file
3. Create rewrites in the IIS GUI

Beyond the rewrites

An oft overlooked strategy with 301's is to get them done and then really concentrate on the new site. Start building links, try to repoint some of your high quality older links to the new site and start building and promoting new content to get some really high quality links to the new site. All of these strategies will bolster the new site and help it replace the old site  as quickly as possible.

Summary

If you have a big site, manually rewriting all the URL's to the their counterparts on the new site is going to be a bit of a job but one that is worth doing. If you want to prioritise the job look at your most popular pages in your analytics and this gives you a plan of attack. Once you have created specific rules for this you can create a catch all rule to redirect all remaining pages to the sites homepage.

That, pretty much covers it. If we have a windows server / IIS / asp.net guru here who can dive in and fill you in on the specifics of the actual syntax and approach then you should be good to go.

Shout if you have any questions.
Marcus

Hey Sophy

Could be a lot of things, could you supply a link?

• maybe the blog page is more relevant for that term or you have two competing pages
• maybe the blog page picked up some external links with that anchor so became more relevant than the homepage
• maybe the sites structure or linking gives more relevance to that page for that term

The solutions are kind of similar to the suggestions above

• make sure the homepage is more relevant for that term
• make sure the two pages are not competing for that term
• do some link building for that  term to the homepage
• ensure the internal linking and anchors are not promoting that page for that term

Hard to go further  than these general hints without a URL but happy to take a look if you want to post a link.

Hope it helps!
Marcus

Hey

Yeah, I have to second what Keri says here. This is crazy competitive so you are not going to rank a new site for these terms overnight.

The site itself has no domain authority, there is no useful or interesting content and I can't see that any of the blog posts have won any

Content wise, if this was me, I would probably look to provide the best guide on how to reclaim your PPI for free and use that to pull in links but even that would be problematic as the moneysavingexpert site (a big brand in the UK) has already done that so you are fighting a bit of a losing battle.

If we discount the money saving expert site we have several other heavy hitting domains:

• www.which.co.uk
• www.guardian.co.uk
• www.thisismoney.co.uk
• www.fsa.gov.uk
• www.telegraph.co.uk

Then, amongst them we have some other PPI sites but looking at the link profiles, we are talking 15,000 linking sites in some cases. Now, obviously, most of that is going to be low quality but that is what you are up against here.

So, only way to do this white hat is to go after really long tail, dig into the keywords, look at PPI for specific vendors, types of loans etc and start to build some really strong content and promote it as best as possible.

For starters, look at some of the suggested searches:

• mis sold ppi calculator
• mis sold ppi template letter
• reclaim ppi
• ppi refunds
• mis sold ppi barclays
• mis sold ppi scams
• mis sold ppi reasons
• mis sold ppi hsbc

Maybe take one of those and break them down even further so mis sold ppi hsbc

• mis sold ppi hsbc loan
• mis sold ppi hsbc credit car
• dhsbc ppi claims
• hsbc ppi refunds
• hsbc ppi reclaim
• hsbc loans ppi
• hsbc fined ppi
• hsbc ppi credit card

If we break one of them down even further we get even more ideas:

Searches related to mis sold ppi hsbc credit card

• is there ppi on hsbc credit card
• shsbc credit card ppi claim address
• payment protection insurance hsbc credit card
• hsbc credit card ppi reclaim
• hsbc mis sold payment protection
• hsbc payment protection insurance mis sold
• hsbc personal loan ppi
• hsbc mis selling ppi

You could probably go deeper still

There is always a way, but you are just not going to drop into a market like this and shoot to the top of the deck but if you could lay down a 12 month strategy to have the most generally helpful PPI blog out there and cover every minute detail starting at the long tail then you could create something that would outrank the mostly spam based strategies of the few PPI companies on the first page.

Hope this helps

Marcus

Hey, I will second this  opinion here.

Definitely no-index your landing page if it is not for a search engine audience & ensure you keep the content of the page consistent as that will have an impact on page relevance and quality score.

Think consistent messaging from keyword to advert copy to landing page.

Hope that helps
Marcus

Hey Craig

You have four possible URLs here:

fentonit.co.uk
www.fentonit.co.uk
fentonit.com
www.fentonit.com

You want to sort this out like how you have suggested and then check the http response codes to ensure that you are getting all variations redirected to www.fentonit.co.uk. If you are using htaccess something like this should do the job (server setups vary sometimes)

RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^fentonit.co.uk [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.fentonit.co.uk/$1 [L,R=301]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^fentonit.com [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.fentonit.co.uk/$1 [L,R=301]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.fentonit.com [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.fentonit.co.uk/$1 [L,R=301]

You may also have an index page that you need to take care of

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index.php\ HTTP/ RewriteRule ^index.php$ http://www.fentonit.co.uk/ [R=301,L]

Also, it makes sense that all your internal links point to the www.fentonit.co.uk root and if you are a real perfectionist that any external links use the same root as well.

I'm off to the pub

Marcus

Hey Sophie

In this instance, I am guessing you don't want to lose that page from ranking but the page itself is called 'eco-products' and the term you are targeting on the homepage is eco-products so you seem to have a conflict of interest between those two pages.

Lets look at the homepage:

**Title: **Nigel's Eco Store - Environmentally friendly products and eco friendly gifts for sustainable living 
Keyword Usage: 2 - once in a page title, once in an image title (0 times on the page itself)

Lets look at the /eco-products/ page

Title: Eco Products
Keyword Usage:  13 times on page & 27 times in total taking all HTML elements into account

Anchor Text

Additionally, lets look at the anchor text to the pages. The homepage has the standard logo and image links from the main nav but  the eco-products page has tons of links with the term 'eco products' from the 'posted in tags'.

Summary

In brief, without looking at the external issues, the ranking is kind of right. Everything on your blog page is saying hey, I am about eco products but your homepage hardly uses this term at all.

Your homepage ranks first (uk at least) for a bunch of other terms:
environmentally friendly products store
eco store

So, is this such a bad thing? I imagine, if you really want to rank the homepage for this term you could rename that page / tag to something else and work that phrase into the homepage a little more. You seem so strong for eco + x that it would likely be doable (and you have the historical ranking for the term).

Maybe it may be a good chance to look at your landing pages and add a new page to catch this traffic?

There are plenty of options but the approach depends on what you are looking for here but there is certainly no mystery why that page ranks for that term over your homepage. I think the simplest solution is just a case of changing the name of that page/tag to something more suitable and building some relevance for eco products on the homepage OR looking at a new optimised landing page for that term.

Hope it helps!
Marcus

Lots of folks saw results suffer on or around the 17th and this could be in relation to the Panda update announced on the 24th of Jan going on previous form and pre announcement shock waves.

It's probably safe to say that you have been affected by Panda or a similar issue and need to review your site in more depth. Assuming Panda is the culprit look for duplicate content and running your site through copyscape.com would likely be a good place to start.

Also, dig into your analytics, look at the two weeks before and after the 17th and then look at landing pages, see which pages have been most affected and use that information and anything from copyscape to help understand what may be the issue.

Hope that helps!
Marcus

Hey Mark

There are a couple of well established WordPress ecommerce plugins but if you are looking for e-commerce with a theme integrated then it's hard to beat the WooCommerce plugin with a woothemes theme.

http://www.woothemes.com/

Supports a wide range of payment gateways although there is nothing wrong with using paypal and the site does not need to redirect to a paypal URL - it can all be done behind the scenes.

Woothemes also provide a range of affilliated wooworkers so you can pretty much make this a one stop shop and know that the person you use to edit the theme will have previous experience.

http://www.woothemes.com/affiliated-woo-workers/

Note - I don't in any way work with or for woothemes, but seemingly re reading this, am a bit of a fanboy. That said, they are very cool, give it a look.

Hope this helps

Marcus

This is worth a read:

http://www.webpronews.com/google-duplicate-content-2011-12

It is not review specific but I think the point stands - don't use Google Translate for website content and if you want to do this, get them rewritten by a translator.

Point being, if your reviews are auto translated, it will not be perfect language so.... is not great content and in some respects, having barely coherant reviews could be a negative equity and is certainly not going to add that credibility you were looking for.

So, no real problem with translating them, but don't use Google Translate for it.

Hope this helps

Marcus

Hey MPO

This is a fairly common feature now and can be handled entirely in CSS rather than having some archaic system that  detects the user agent and then displays a version relevant to that device. With this approach, the page is the page and the content is the same so there really is no SEO implication to worry about.

As a jump in point, if you pick up a Wordpress or Joomla theme from a vendor like woothemes.com or yootheme.com you will find they work on PC's, tablets and smart phones. They tend to trigger a simplified mobile theme for the smart phones whilst using the full theme for a tablet.

The themes have some great CSS features built in to automatically resize images for different devices etc and really take care of most of the heavy lifting.

Wordpress as well is a great SEO platform so as a starting point: Wordpress + Professional Theme + Yoast SEO plugin is pretty solid. Sprinkle a bit of design loveliness and some worthy content and you are well on your way.

In short, this should not be something you need to worry about in 2012!

Marcus

Great response from Tim.

To add a few further pointers:

1. There are some great lists of citations around so take a look  and get a list together

2. Total volume of citations matters and more is generally better (there are diminishing returns obviously) and you wan to make sure you have all of the important ones your competitors have. You can easily dig in and see you local competitors citations with some Google-Fu:

“Competitor biz name” AND “Competitor zip” -site:http://www.competitorssite.co.uk

This will show you a good batch of citations for your competitors (look at the top 3) and you can create a hit list.

3. Quality of citations - beyond getting the NAP 100% consistent and dialled in make sure you look at each one of the citations as a potential advertisement for your business. Build in your keywords and the service areas into the description as well to work on that co-occurance of keywords and improve the ability for your site to rank for these sub areas.

4. Reviews - 5 reviews will generally give you a bit of a boost (around 2 places). 10 reviews will give you a quality score in your listings again which can influence clicks and more importantly persuade customers to get in touch. Create a policy to drive positive reviews. Don't cheat, but ask clients you know who are happy if they would not mind reviewing. If you can figure out a way to get them to work in your keywords and location into the review as well then that will only help (again, don't cheat, don't build dodgy reviews, they will know and it will hurt the other good work - do this properly).

5. Make sure your on page optimisation is dialled in 100% - no excuses on that one

**6. **As with the citations make sure your Google+ listing is as good as it can be. Images, video, a great description. Don't just copy and paste the same description, write it out each time so it is a little different. Take your time. Do it properly.

7. Local links are also important so if there are local business organisations or sites then look to get links (and possibly citations) from those sources as well.

---

Local is deep and complex when competitive but in most cases, in the UK at least where we operate, it is easy to get up there with some simple strategies as listed above and small businesses can get found by local customers without having to do some of the bigger player strategies that are sometimes out of reach.

Hope that helps!
Marcus

Hey,

I don't believe that the search engines can penalise based on this at the moment and I am sure I have heard Matt Cutts from Google talk about this at some point so I would not worry about it too much. It's the content that is important rather than the tools used to put that content online.

That said, with the current push towards 'quality sites' tables are a very old hat way of doing things and are not exactly mobile friendly. If you are looking at building something from the ground up then try to avoid HTML tables if you can with an eye towards the future.

Cheers
Marcucs

If you have done a lot of work and have a manual penalty then play it out a while longer and see what happens. If you simply don't get a response or the link profile is just too rotten to repair then it may be time to burn the house down and start again.

I have had a quick look at the link profile and have seen a lot worse. You have two main keywords targeted with thousands of links from only a handful of sites so if you have got rid of a lot of sitewides, it may be a lot more balanced. That is not taking

Your questions.

1. If it was on the 24th then the link profile is highly likely

2. I have to admit I am not sure about this one. In theory, it should not, but I would really want to cut all ties with the previous site so you may need to deindex all that content first. In reality, the 302 redirect is for content that has been moved temporarily and not for redirects that are temporary so this is not really the correct usage of the redirection.

Possibly a custom 404 with some links to the new site and a change of URL in webmaster tools may be a better option but I am unsure of any best practice here and you may have to ride out a bit of turbulence when first moving.

3. Yep, the date alone tells us that to a degree of certainty and it's further compounded by the use of the sitewides etc.

4. That's not a five minute answer and really depends on whether there are any natural and quality links or is it 99% junk? If the latter, then with the rumoured update to penguin getting more aggressive, then it could be time to move on.

What i would do is compare against other people in your niche. Look at some market leaders, figure out what a normal link profile looks like and determine how close you are to that.

Hope this helps

Marcus