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Yes, pagespeed is a confirmed Google ranking factor. You should try to optimise as much as possible. Depending on what's currently wrong this can be anywhere from a half hour job to a full site rebuild. If you had multiple high quotes, it's probably leaning toward the latter. Happy to take a look if you leave a domain here or drop me a PM. But yes, site speed does matter. The more difficult & competitive the keywords, the more it matters.
I'd be really shocked if this were a yes. My own experience says no, SSL is SSL and you should be fine.
The only thing I would add to that is if the SSL ends up slowing your site down, it can do as much harm as good. Make sure you're getting strong performance out of your site before AND after the SSL.
It's a very tough question and one that is common with a lot of e-commerce.
The only really complete solution I have for you that addresses each of your needs is to not base the page "content" on the specs.
Make specs a table on the page but put in enough unique content about each model and variation that it has its own truly unique content.
I know this solution means writing at least say 200-300 words of unique content for every model but 100k words solves the whole issue. It just depends if it is worth them all ranking. But this solution gives you:
a) unique content
b) chance for every page to rank & no canonicals back to one page
c) much more long tail search volume
d) specific searches for every one of your potential customers.
That's really the best I can do ... it takes the duplicate content issue away and solves every problem except the one of having to create this much content in the first place.
Do you know that the read more tag on that page actually displays less and read less actually displays more?
When I put that page through Pingdom Melbourne I get a 5.09 second load time and 1.6 MB page size. That's a bit long and you get a 45/100 (red) score on Google Developer's Tool for mobile and a 70/100 on desktop: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.yellowoctopus.com.au%2Funique-gifts%2Fgifts-for-men
The site at #1 gets a 79/100 mobile and 92/100 desktop and is only 209 kb and loads in 2.37 seconds on Pingdom: http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/bol6kH/http://www.giftsforblokes.com.au/
You have what looks to me like some link spam going on. There are 30 domains that link to you on just one IP address and another 20 from a second IP. That's 50 domains across just two IP addresses. The odds of that being natural are astronomical and very, very unlikely. https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/referring/v2/ips/subdomains/fresh/all/1/refdomains_desc?target=yellowoctopus.com.au
You also have a staggering number of links from .org, .net, .uk, .ru, .de, .info and so on. This is also a high indicator of link manipulation. The site at #1 doesn't have this issue at all.
The vast, vast majority of your backlinks come from images and the anchor text is your brand, not anything to do with men. 45% of your links over time have been deleted, also a very bad quality sign: https://majestic.com/reports/site-explorer?folder=&q=yellowoctopus.com.au
The site I see at #1 is roundly kicking your site's tail at every corner. The site I see at #2 loads a slightly larger page than you but does it in much less time: http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/dW9TDy/hardtofind.com.au Most of the sites above you also have a better (clean) backlink profile. Hardtofind has over 23,000 links showing up in Majestic, which is huge. Only about 15% of their links are images where yours is closer to 80%. Only 20% of their links are nofollow while 50% of yours are.
Your page is the only one in the top 6 that uses meta keywords and you use them a little bit "old school" - they can generally only be a negative ranking factor and it seems they aren't helping you.
The content across all 4 pages is quite the same so it shouldn't matter that much.
I would say your slightly spammier link profile, slightly slower load times and slightly fewer dofollow, good links are pushing you down. Their stuff is, frankly, better at the moment. And I see DJs and Kmart above you - bad luck about that but if they want your category you're going to have to spin miracles to beat them.
I would check Search Console for a penalty notification although this is most likely an algorithmic adjustment. Those links aren't counting for you. If someone did a disavow on them they may have also gone "too far" with it. It's hard to say. I would check search console settings, including claiming all versions of the site and make sure the HTTPS and www version are your preferred versions.
Then I would try to draw non-image links to the page, maybe add some new content above or below products, work on your link profile overall and push the domain as a whole as well.
Hi Brett,
I moved to Australia a year ago and dealt with the same thing. Most citation sources are US/UK. I have compiled a list of AU and CA ones for my own use. To help you along, I just posted the CA list here:
http://www.highonseo.com/2012/12/canada-citation-list/
Hope that helps. It's a compilation of a LOT of lists from around the web. If you download the XLS at the end, it has the pagerank, mozrank, domain authority, etc. for every site on the list, update as of this morning.
Penguin doesn't (AFAIK) penalize "too many links." It penalizes "too many _______ links." What I mean is "too many unnatural links" or "too many footer links" or "too many links from the same domain" or "too many purchased links." It's "too many ________" in our experience.
We use a link profile graph like the one I did for Scott on his blackfriday site. http://scott.offord.me/KvTb
See how the blue graph is WAY out of alignment with everything else?
THAT is an unnatural link profile that got slammed.
A few things are probably affecting you more than you are seeing:
Your main site has over 1200 links but this page of your site has 4 that I see: http://bit.ly/S0YetL
You say this isn't a competitive search but at the very top, it is. Not that Moz data is the be-all end-all but your Page Authority/Domain Authority is 31/23. The lowest PA on the top 10 is 45 and the lowest DA is 35. Both beat your site by a hefty margin.
Of your 1200 links to the main domain, their DA dropoff is very rapid. OSE only shows 18 external links from 10 unique domains. That really isn't going to compete yet with www.orange coat.com who Google shows with 86,000 links and OSE shows 15,000+ links from 122 domains. Your numbers just aren't there.
I've seen well optimized Joomla sites rank well - I just don't think yours commands the authority necessary to take on the top domains on this search. It may seem like a low competition search but even Adwords shows it as "high" competition, despite just 1300 searches / month.
Hope this helps.
Straight from Google:
<a class="zippy zippy-auth zippy-expand">Authorization policy</a>
A trademark owner (or contact person listed on the trademark complaint) can provide Google with authorization to let specific AdWords accounts use the trademark in ad campaigns. Here are some important things to know about authorizations:
Any AdWords advertiser wanting to use a trademark after a complaint was filed must be authorized, including the trademark owner themselves, official affiliates and partners, regional branches, franchisees, and subsidiaries. Trademark owners can authorize advertisers (including themselves if they have an AdWords account) in their complaint form or in a separate authorization form.
Authorization is given to individual AdWords accounts, so the trademark owner must submit the customer ID of each AdWords account they want to authorize. Any master (MCC) account numbers will automatically have authorization extended to all current and future child accounts.
For advertisers: To request that an account be authorized, please contact the trademark owner directly and ask that they fill out the form mentioned below. Google cannot arrange the authorization for you.
For trademark owners: Use this authorization form to request authorization for an AdWords account.
http://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=6118
Blog. It lets me incorporate content as I create it, manage my on-page with a fairly robust plugin and therefore have the on-site I need while giving people reason to read, visit, and link to me.
We've seen that the most important thing in Local is consistency. That said, I'd take the longer but more profitable road. Update everything - do searches on the old name, searches on the phone number, searches on the biz address, etc. just to find everything you can possibly change. I'm sure there are ways around it but realistically, doing the work will be the best in the end.
You're not considering a lot of factors that go into SEO:
Page speed could be better on #1.
Over optimization on page 2 - with many links with anchor text that includes "editing"
"editing" appears 80 times on page 1, 66 times on page 2, despite page 2 having more text. I'm not saying this is a case of keyword density/spamming it, but maybe they're on the line and #2 is under it.
Better overall inbound link authority to #2 possibly.
Page 2 has repetition of both keywords in the title. Google already punishes this if you don't have noODP by replacing your title with a more suitable one. They aren't big fans of duplication but even so, #2 has a much different title.
Co-citation. Even with a better DA and PA, the related inbound links may be more relevant to essay editing on page 1. Also, more domains may point directly at the subpage essay-editing.html than they do the absolute page at /essay-editing/index.php
Analytics matter. If #2 bounce rate is double #1, and the time on site for #1 is 4 minutes longer per visitor and they get more traffic through an email list that actually stays on site, they'd have a natural boost in the "analytics" department, as well.
There are always a million reasons why one site could or may outrank another. All you can realistically do is improve your site as much as possible, create relevant links back, get citations that all match, engage on social and have a site that responds well when people click it.
It is very likely that Google does discount the weight of links passing value in the footer (or sidebar).
I would say if you're only linking internal links in the footer just do so naturally and without overoptimised anchor text you should be fine. Where people get in trouble is if they're really trying to do "PR sculpting" (see: http://www.seoblog.com/2014/07/attempting-pagerank-sculpting-terrible-idea/)
Do what works best for your users and your site. That should be priority #1 anyways and you will be ok from there.
Adam - use Topsy.com
Search your domain like domain.com and you'll see what's being shared. Click on the timelines to see when things were shared and then on each individual link, open that up and click "influential only" and you'll see your top sharing Twitter users.
I would probably recommend not sites, but landing pages.
yourinsurancesite.com/business
This way you keep the bulk of the SEO on one domain (as opposed to subdomains or niche site domains). You also stay with one login for all edits, etc. which helps streamline. Then, you can easily run campaigns to these main subfolders and track analytics per type of ins. more accurately.
I would say subfolders per agency would be the easiest and most logical SEO solution. There will be situations where this isn't necessarily the best (very big companies can usually afford to do proper SEO more than one domain and then having more domains can benefit you in the long run.) But for most insurance agencies and this type of sub-agency, I would think subfolders would be best. One of my best friends runs his own State Farm agency and they run it similarly.
http://www.statefarm.com/ agent/US/STATE/TOWN/AGENT-NAME-UID
No real surprise. Any site that gets abused eventually goes from dofollow to nofollow. I'm pretty sure at one point Twitter, Wiki, Pinterest and more of the main sites were follow ... but then it gets abused like crazy and then boom, nofollow.
By far the most SEO-friendly platform overall is going to be Wordpress.
While other platforms can be made to do what Wordpress does, almost a quarter of websites online are powered by Wordpress which gives it a huge community to draw resources and information from.
I don't mind Joomla (i'm the one guy, I know) and I have friends who prefer Drupal or other things for security reasons (the biggest always gets attacked most, right?) but Wordpress has Yoast SEO plugin and that is a huge help.
I have a few ecomm stores online and I use Woocommerce with Wordpress for most. I have a Magento store but ... shew. It's so much harder, it's so much more resource intense and it's not as good for anything unless you're a developer.
I would also suggest Ubersuggest with wildcards.
How * money *
Why * car *
Whatever your questions are - you can just wildcard some stuff in there. I like "How does * make money?"
The tool you're likely talking about was Keyword Questions by WordTracker. That's been rolled into the main tool:
Hope that helps!
Go to Wolfram Alpha
Enter the domain without any subdomain (ie. wordpress.com)
In the 3rd result box, top right, push "subdomains."
When it opens, push "more" (top right of the box)
You'll get something like this:
I agree with Samuel's response. Yes, you should disavow the bad links. Why wait to drop in rankings and see how long it takes to regain them? Given the time available you should always be creating the best profile you can and now that Google has given us this tool, use it.
(Just a note - we've proactively disavowed over 1200 clients link profiles and have NOT seen a negative effect on them. We have seen some good results even for those who didn't "have a penalty.")
Wow! I haven't seen that before but it's interesting they'd take it that far.
A couple quick searches shows more of these than just the example:
They're taking it VERY seriously ... although my initial thought is "people still use Yelp?"