Welcome to the Q&A Forum

It all make sense.

Also the fact the url of the exe is an .aspx page could be seen as deceitful. I wouldn't do it like that. Since you use dot.net, use a httphandler and match url with file extension. And I would not serve an .exe, zip it and serve a .zip file.

And I strongly support donford advice about a download page for all the good reasons he is referring to.

Check the content of your "ecomm_prodid" parameter, usually the source of all nightmares.

When you include multiple product id you need to format it properly, and google example is wrong and missing a comma. I just googled to search for a good example: http://marketlytics.com/setup-adwords-dynamic-remarketing-using-tag-manager/

Question. If the fluctuations were due to the different pages competing with each other, shouldn't you see the different pages exchange places, one goes up, the other far down, then swap places and keep dancing?

Yes make sense. It's also what the people at koozai describe in the link Sheena posted.

Yet, my personal seo-religion so far have dictated me to never remove, every time I asked myself if I should, I got to the conclusion was better not to.

Let me re-check your motivation to do so:

• These pages sent no organic traffic at all in this 8 months

That's horrible, but removing them is going to improve something else? Maybe, or maybe not. You can find out only trying out (testing).

• Often really similiar landing pages exist (just minor keyword targeting difference and I would call it "thin" content)

If you are worried about duplicate content penalization, there's no such thing as a duplicate content penalization, google doesn't penalize duplicate content, google just make a choice, choosing one among different duplicate page to rank. Matt Cutts on that here.

If you have multiple landing pages for similar keyword with thin content, improve the content. You can find authoritative voices advocating multiple landing pages for related keyword interlinking as a perfectly whitehat LSI SEO strategy.

• Moreover I had some Panda Issues in Oct, basically I ranked with multiple landing pages for the same keyword in the top ten and in Oct many of these pages dropped out of the top 50..

I doubt your algo penalization is due to those 0-traffic landing page mentioned above, remove them and see what happen, but I bet won't change it. Instead I would look honestly at all your website and ask myself what spammy, stuffing, nasty dirty little things did I in the past?

Many, for pure backlinks check the most comprehensive are ahrefs.com and https://majestic.com

Have you checked with OSE and other tools to see the page juice/authority they may have?

Just for the sake of documenting it, our DA dropped 5 points too, our main competitor dropped just by 2 points. We have 1.4k backlinks, they do have 140k backlinks.

Honestly, all being said, I would choose the URL structure which makes more sense disregarding the SEO effect. I mean, secure the keyword you want to rank for are there in the url, but do not move them leftward just for the purpose of SEO. As far as I can tell from my little experience is not a factor which weight so much to justify a weird URL structure just for the purpose of putting the most relevant keyword on the far left.

Said that, all the keywords you want to put in the URL must be in the url part processed server side. Crawlers do not process javascript, any framework, like angularjs I mentioned earlier, will make it possible to show different url in the browser through url routing, client side. Which means javascript dynamically change the content of the page without a roundtrip to the server. It's the javascript which detect the URL change, not the server. So the crawler will never navigate it, google will never know it exist.

Yes, there are ways to have google crawler index those javascript generated pages, you can find instructions here https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/ but I strongly suggest you to do not go that way.

Instead, have your CMS generate an html page with all the content you want to index, and dynamically show and hide portions of the content using a javascript framework like angular, if it helps (for bookmarking purpose or UX) use client side url routing to change the url when you show the different portion of the content. That way google will crawl the page with all the content, it's white hat as long as you don't cloak.

So, what you have to do is design your pages, deciding which content goes there keeping in mind SEO target, keyword diversity and semantic; a part of course from the most important... UX.

Now, getting back to the original question, should you put the keywords you want to rank in the url, yes, put those you want to rank in the url processed server-side, the others if useful for UX, bookmarking, etc... process client side with a javascript framework using client side url routing.

Hope it helps. Good luck.

I think you need an in deep analysis.

There's something definitely very wrong. I can see only 13 keywords, with a backlink profile of more than 500 linking root domains. Your traffic seems to have been in constant decline for a while but in May something happen which sort of killed it completely.

Also looks like you gained around 15/20 thousands links between Oct 9 and 15, that's smelling.

On the 8th of Sep you got 150 root linking domain in one day, wow, that's smelling even more.

In my opinion, as of the current state of client side technology, the way to go is angularjs.

When you talk about shorten the url you are probably referring to url routing which is one of the capability of angularjs, but other frameworks are doing a good job in that area as well.

Maybe it's a language thing, but I may still be misunderstanding you.

If I understand correctly, the product name is "White Grain", the category that product falls in is "Gallery Wood", what is "Brown Engineered Flooring"? What is the relation with the product name and the category name?

• Is it a sub-category as Sheena was suggesting? If so the url structure she suggested make perfect sense. Of course from a pure seo prospective you want to put the keyword to the leftmost possible place in the url, but it may do more harm than good if it doesn't make sense sematically.
• Is it a synonym of the category? If so I would replace the category name in the url.
• Is it something else?

Don't laugh, but personally my advice is to gain some backlinks to that page if you want to improve ranking.

All the on-page optimization suggestion you can easily find in the page grader tool here on moz.

If you want to rank well for “Brown Engineered Flooring”, you know what you have to do, put it in the url path, put it in the title, in the h1, in the body, don't stuff the page with it and remember the usual recommendation: before the fold is better than under the fold, at beginning of the title is better than in the middle, etc...

Is google WMT showing any manual penalty? And as far as I can see from a quick look you seem to be indexed for a very very limited number of keywords, how many keywords are originating traffic if you look at WMT?

Why not to redirect? If you don't you will keep seeing them in error in WMT, which is not a good thing. Also returning 410 in theory is an option, but I tried in the past and WMT ignores that.

I think one thing you should keep in mind is that 301 is meant for content being moved. In other words moving one page from one site to another, or from one path to another, without changing the content of the page. If you move a page you use 301, google see the change and discount a small portion of the page juice (1%? 5%? no one knows exactly) but pass the vast majority to the same page on the new location.

But... Once upon a time a popular black hat technique was to get control of a page (actually many pages, as many as they could) with a good juice and do a 301 redirect to another page, a target page, to just pass juice.

So... Google, wearing its shining armor, decided to fight back, and changed their algorithm to penalize that, in other words if you do a 301 redirect from one page with a certain content to another page with a totally different content, google notes that, doesn't like it, and penalize the ranking of the target page.

Exactly how much of the two page content should stay the same to pass google antispam rules nobody knows, you can find out running some tests, my guess is probably it's also very specific to the page, domain, authority, etc...

I heard, but I never tested myself, than if you do a 301 redirect from one page on a domain or path, to the same page on a different domain or path, and slowly in the following months you change the content of the target page till it's completely different from the original, Google won't penalize you.

Have you google adwords campaigns running? Are they maybe showing adsense ads?

Personally I would disavow them anyway too.

Maybe was obvious to everybody but 301 redirect for every single page is also a fundamental step, otherwise you are going to have broken external links, not to mention WMT which I don't think would be satisfied by just the canonical update.

Sitemap must be updated as well.

We recently switched a website from HTTP to HTTPS and in term of performance there was no difference after the update, at least according to WMT and analytics.

I was kind of scared before to update but at the end everything was smoother than expected, WMT took around 10 days to completely re-index the https version.

But of course we kept finding some non https link embedded here and there in some pages for days and we had to manually edit some content to avoid ssl warning from browsers.

I have no idea what CMS you are using but check the server side code generating the link, not just the code sent to the browser.

We recently switched to SSL, and our CMS was already building internal links on pages using the protocol of the http request.

Tough question.

I think the foundation idea is good, you definitely need to distance yourself from the bad name associated with that business sector if you want to rise the probability of gaining good backlinks.

But I would put it in a subfolder on the same domain. And I would design the site and the homepage to give prominent visibility to your foundation.

It would require a lot of effort, time and money to promote the foundation-domain, and the juice/authority/rank/trust you will gain won't be that easy to transfer to the firm-domain, you can't just wait for the foundation-domain to gain trust/authority/rank/juice and then “spam” it with links to the other domain, you won't transfer much juice that way.

On the other side if you build it as a subfolder you may gain less backlinks but each one will give juice to the firm-domain directly, immediately and 100% of that juice.

Also... What Matt Cutts or Rand Fishkin or many others would answer to you? Probably, that you should completely forget seo, juice, and so on... And just focus on what is better experience for your users, what is better for the image of that company, what is so completely “white” hat that could be confused with milk? And in your case, what is better than frankly and honestly promote that foundation directly from the firm-domain? It's going to improve confidence and trust for the firm-domain from day one, they would benefit no matter how much easier it's going to make your work trying to gain backlinks.