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Ha! I had no idea. Thanks Hutch. You teach me something new everyday!

I thought that you had to have the ECommerce tracking in place, which is the UA code + ecommerce tracking in order to track conversions. I thought that Google Tag Manager was just for making sure your codes are correct.

I wonder if it is because you have it set to display only a rating of 5, and not the true review aggregate. I think if you still have star ratings showing then that should be fine.

Can you click on the red bubble with the ! to see what the error is?

Thanks for the feedback. Our search function gets used a lot. Mostly by returning electrical contractors who just land on the home page. We have a ton of parts on our site, whereas our main competition doesn't. Usually someone looking for a part in Google will find us rather quickly. Our platform gives us a list of search terms in site and their conversions. Although it would be helpful to have all of that data in one place.

Does the search only return results from your site or is there a possibility of search results showing that go to other sites?

Hey there,

I was wondering if anyone here in the community has experience using Google's Custom Search options on your site. We are thinking that it might be a solution for our site simply because we have to identify our search terms individually by product, which would take us a very long time to do. The custom search seems to use meta data as the parameters for search, which would be ideal.

I was just wondering if anyone had any insights as to how this might have affected your site's performance and customer experience. Our clients are not the best when it comes to technology, and from what I can see, this might be confusing for them, just because the results look like an actual Google SERP. I am not sure if that is something that can be customized either.

Any input would be appreciated.

I agree with Laura, Big Commerce, OpenCart, OSCommerce, these would all be great solutions. I think Big Commerce is the best hosted platform on the market right now. OpenCart and OSCommerce are not hosted solutions, and they are both open source so you would have to have some coding experience to get them set up.

It is really important to have diversity in your link profile. However, if you have 2-3 links from one domain, it isn't terrible. Now if you have 100 links from one domain, that could be seen as spammy. I am not sure if there is a way to break these down by percentage of value, like you are referring to as Google has started to change the way it values back links. The second link on the same domain would be more valuable if it were on a different domain.

If the PDF is available in other places, then it could be considered duplicate content. If you want to prevent that then no index the PDF. Unless the PDF is something you want to rank for.

If you redirect site b to site a now, you will be passing along the negative effects of the penalties. Site a no longer exists in the search world if your redirect is that old. The best thing to do would be to fix the penalties, disavow bad links and submit a reconsideration request. Redirecting site b to site a would mean starting all over, and you would still have to deal with the penalties or site a won't rank at all. I suppose you could just kill site b, and make site a live again. You would still be starting over with site a, either way.

I just moved my site from Volusion to Big Commerce and made all of the changes you listed above.

Somethings I noticed is that it took us a little longer to regain organic traffic than if we had not made any additional changes aside from moving platforms and changing URL structure. It wasn't a huge difference, only about 2 weeks.

Once the changes had been implemented, the site was fully indexed and all of the 404 errors were fixed we surpassed our previous organic traffic by 25% and moved our keywords up significantly. I also noticed that I had far less duplicate html errors in GWT while the old site was deindexing and the new site was becoming indexed.

I would make the changes up front. If these changes are better in the long run, why not get them done when it is convenient? Just make sure to add all of the versions of your site to GWT and set the preferred version to the https.

In my experience, leaving the products up with links to the category page or a similar item has worked the best for me. A lot of people still search for items that were discontinued 2-4 years ago, so removing the pages didn't work well for us.  There is a meta tag you can use to tell Google the product is discontinued, but most of my customers really like being able to go to the old products and find similar models. I am in the generator industry, so years down the road someone could be searching for their model looking for a manual or something which is another big reason we keep the old products up.

We also carry small parts, When those items are discontinued we redirect to category page with a message that says the product you are looking for is no longer available, please see these other suggestions or call us.

If something is just out of stock, we leave the product alone and update the availability.

If you have more than on canonical on a page, Google will ignore them all. Pick the page that will be the canonical and add the same tag to the subsequent pages with duplicate content.

www.site.com = canonical

the canonical tag on all subsequent pages will be link link rel='canonical' href='www.site.com'

Wherever you have duplicate content you should try to minimize the effects, usually with canonical tags.

I would shy away from your strategy only because showing viewers one thing and bots another is frowned upon. What's wrong with PPC visitors landing on your SEO pages?

Moz has the On Page Grader. You can also use the "analyze page issues" function inside your campaign. Go to Search in the left nav menu, click on crawl diagnostics, and then a drop down will appear that says "analyze page issues". You can type in a URL there and get some more information. I use both of these tools and find them to be extremely helpful in catching anything I might miss.

I agree with Richard, based on your explanation, this is the proper way to do the 301 redirects. Your plan will work just fine.

GWT is Google Webmaster Tools

You will first need to remove the 301 redirect to site b, then add a redirect from b to a. If you don't remove the first redirect you will create a redirect loop and neither page will be visible.

How long has site b been up? I would say that making a change now is going to be confusing. If this change was done recently, within the last 3 months, you need more time to determine the benefits of site b. There is no overnight result, but the change was made initially for a reason right?

Depending on how long the 301 redirects have been in place, you could have trouble getting site a to rank again. The 301 redirects would have removed Site As URLs from the index, meaning you would be starting over, again. Aside from that, it will probably be very confusing for returning customers. They have already seen a change once, now they are going to have to make another adjustment. Those things would be my first two concerns.

I think that they help more for conversions and click through rate personally. It could help with your brand recognition, which can have a positive effect on your SEO. I use them more for CTR than SEO. Which I guess the CTR is important to SEO as well. So in a round a bout way, call to actions can help your SEO.

Did you also move to HTTPS? It looks like your canonical tags are set to the https version of your site. Have you added that site to GWT?

There is something in your CSS/HTML file that is taking forever to load. I would look for bad JS. The page spins for about 45 seconds before it actually loads.

In GWT, go to Crawl > Sitemaps > and look at your submitted sitemap. Make sure it sees all of the pages. You should also be able to see if pages are being indexed. It looks like you have about 565,000 pages indexed for www.jmac.com. You still have 360,000 pages indexed for www.jmacsupply.com. So, I would infer that the old site is still being deindexed and until that is finalized you might be having issues with duplicate content. Two weeks is a little premature to freak out in my opinion. This can take 4-6 weeks to finalize. There is always a period of time after a migration where traffic kind of plummets. If after 4 weeks you are still having issues, I would try fetching some pages as Google and seeing what happens.

Google's mobile bot tends to crawl pages faster than the desktop bot. That would explain why your mobile page is ranking in engines for specific product searches. If I just Google the name of your company, your mobile site is a few pages deep.

Some things to check would be that your 301 redirects have been implemented accurately, make sure you have set the preferred domain in GWT, add both the www version and non www version of the site as well as the https and non https version of your site, and make sure that your canonical tags are set correctly. If the https is your preferred version, whenever someone types in jmac.com they should land on the https version, and that is not happening.

Is it impossible to write unique content for these pages? Even a small amount of unique content on top of the exact same copy would be beneficial.