Welcome to the Q&A Forum

We are mostly a Branding agency, and have not put a lot of effort into SEO for ourselves...

SEO tends to take a backseat to design most of the time,  making it a little difficult for me at times when it comes to SEO.

We recently launched a new site, http://Roninadv.com/ and the developer and I have done quite a bit of work to make it work well for Google.  I was really looking forward to a new crawl report from Roger, but alas, It's like Roger crawled the old site?  The new site has been up since last Monday.

Is there a way to clear out the old errors?  Do I just need to give roger more time?

Well thats no good.  I guess we have to be really careful.  Unfortunately this is one area where I think development has outgrown the ability for crawlers to determine what is happening.  We aren't trying to do anything malicious.  We just want to create a good engaging site.  I'll keep trying and continue to post if I have more luck with our method.

Thanks Carla for the reference.  So if I'm understanding the way this example site works.  Your pulling in the content on each "subpage" dynamically so that Google will never see the content twice when visiting the page?

I like the way this works, although I wish you didn't have to see a loading graphic when the page pulls in the content.

I agree that this method looks good, and I would love to get rid of the hashbangs but thats just part of what makes everything work in our current use case.

Certainly I think this site is a move in the right direction.

Thanks for the links and pointers

We are working on a project that uses parallax to provide a great experience to the end user, and we are also trying to create a best case scenario for SEO.  We have multiple keywords we are trying to optimize.

We have multiple pages with the parallax function built into it.  Basically each member of the primary navigation is it's own page, with all subpages built below it using the parallax function.

Our navigation currently uses the hashbang method to provide custom URL's for each subpage.  And the user is appropriately directed to the right section based on that hashbang.

www.example.com/About  < This is its own page

www.example.com/about/#/history < This is a subpage that you scroll to on the About page

We are trying to decide what the best method will be for trying to optimize each subpage, but my current concern is that because each subpage is really a part of the primary page, will all those URL's be seen as duplicate content?

Currently the site can also serve each subpage as it's own page as well, so without the parallax function.  Should I include those as part of the sitemap.  There's no way to navigate to them unless I include them in the sitemap, but I don't want Google to think I'm disingenuous in providing them links that don't exist, solely for the purpose of SEO, but truthfully all of the content exists and is available to the user.

I know that a lot of people are asking these questions, and there really are no right answers yet, but I'm curious about everyone else's experience so far.

Hey Kelly,

First congratulations on taking your first steps towards optimizing your site.

The main thing holding you back(and every other photographer I ever worked with) is content.  Your site has plenty of beautiful images, but you have almost no real content/words on your site.

Google does not see images at all.  They will see alt tags if you add that to the code of your images.

Also there are some real issues with the code of your site.  I would highly encourage you to learn a little more about how your site is built.  Theres several sections on your site that use blank heading tags(h1, h2, h3) to space things out.  Heading tags are a key indicator to Google about what your page is about.  Using them to create spacers could be a real problem.

Last look at who is ranking number 1 for your key word "Houston Wedding Photographers".

All of the results at the top are actually Google Places listings and not just websites.  Maybe the key to more business is as simple as creating a Google Places listing!

Good Luck!

Hey Garret,  I would definitely say that the domain age plays a role, but I feel like your focusing way to much on why they are beating you, and not enough time on why you don't rank as well as you used too.

In looking at your site you have used the word Juicing over 20 times on your homepage. Plus two times in the Title Tag.  It just doesn't look natural at all.

I think you've probably been penalized for over optimization more than anything else.

As for why they out rank you, their social cues are really strong on the facebook side(over 1000 likes), and they seem to have spent a lot of time creating a site that caters to its users.  The resulting experience for users is probably more time on site, more pages viewed, less bounces, etc.

Google ranks sites that provide the best experience to its users(the searchers).  Not because of exact match domains, title tags, or h1 tags.  Those techniques are all things that SEO's have manipulated over time and just don't work they way that they used to.

I think you should go back to basics, back linking is great and all, but you have a really strong backlink profile already.  Create an awesome experience for the users of your site through good quality content, a consistent UX, and stop focusing on the keyword Juicing so much.

Good Luck!

I think you should focus less on your page content and more on how your website is coded and your inbound link profile.

The title tags and description tags on both of your sites contain special characters that shouldn't be there, like bullets and Check marks.  Clean those up first.

On your tiling website you've included your phone number in the title tag, thats a definite no no and I've seen sites penalized for that in the past.

Just taking a brief peak at your inbound links, I'm guessing links from sites like this is more likely to be the reason for you problems than over optimization: blackhatpwnage.com/how-to-get-high-page-rank/

Your back link profile overall is very key word specific.  That combined with all of the above is the more likely reason for your problems than "over optimization" of your keywords.

Best of luck!

I agree that it sounds like penguin or some other penalty is probably occuring, but all to often I think people forget to look at who took the top spot and why they are suddenly ranked.  This might offer some insite as to what you might need to do to regain the position besides just reviewing your backlink profile.

Best of luck!

Glad to hear you agree with the coding issues.  It really is a mess in there, and I completely understand that other factors are causing the issue.

However if you ever needed a good reason to justify spending the time/resources to fix your site here it is:  yes I do believe it is a factor in your rankings if for no other reason than page load speed.

I've always practiced the clean house, clean mind principal, and I believe that applies to websites as well.  Anywhere things can be condensed for simplicity's sake it will be better. Imagine you are a search engine spidering sites all day and you come across that mess of code.  Not only does it take twice as long to get through all of the site's code, but in addition there are multiple and <title>tags.  Which ones are right?  Are they trying to game the system somehow?</p> <p>There are so many little things adding up to a well coded/seo'd site I find it hard to believe that it would have zero impact on your rankings.  At the same time I'm not sure what the overall impact is on your site.  To me that all comes down to how well you compare to your competition.  If every one you compete with has a site with messy code, its probably a non issue, but at the same time that means in order to get ahead all you need to do is clean up a little.</p> <p>Hope that helps!</p></title>

I'm not an expert with Joomla by any means, but based on your original post you seem confidant as to what the description tag should be, but then its not showing up in the actual code, so I feel like something with your Joomla setup isn't working.  Or possibly you have two plugins that are conflicting with one another?

I think you should focus less on your page content and more on how your website is coded and your inbound link profile.

The title tags and description tags on both of your sites contain special characters that shouldn't be there, like bullets and Check marks.  Clean those up first.

On your tiling website you've included your phone number in the title tag, thats a definite no no and I've seen sites penalized for that in the past.

Just taking a brief peak at your inbound links, I'm guessing links from sites like this is more likely to be the reason for you problems than over optimization: blackhatpwnage.com/how-to-get-high-page-rank/

Your back link profile overall is very key word specific.  That combined with all of the above is the more likely reason for your problems than "over optimization" of your keywords.

Best of luck!

Hi Muhammad,  If you go thru the code on the page thats shows in your google search above, I found multiple title tags in the code causing the issue.  You have your normal title tag around line 350(in just normal view source mode)  and Then around line 1112 you have a second title tag in the code.

Overall in viewing the source of your site, there seems to be a whole lot of embedded code.  I would definitely recommend working on a way to trim out the amount of code being used, it seems there should be a better way.  In addition to extending the load time of your site, it makes situations like this extremely cumbersome to debug.

Best Of Luck!

We are working on a project that uses parallax to provide a great experience to the end user, and we are also trying to create a best case scenario for SEO.  We have multiple keywords we are trying to optimize.

We have multiple pages with the parallax function built into it.  Basically each member of the primary navigation is it's own page, with all subpages built below it using the parallax function.

Our navigation currently uses the hashbang method to provide custom URL's for each subpage.  And the user is appropriately directed to the right section based on that hashbang.

www.example.com/About  < This is its own page

www.example.com/about/#/history < This is a subpage that you scroll to on the About page

We are trying to decide what the best method will be for trying to optimize each subpage, but my current concern is that because each subpage is really a part of the primary page, will all those URL's be seen as duplicate content?

Currently the site can also serve each subpage as it's own page as well, so without the parallax function.  Should I include those as part of the sitemap.  There's no way to navigate to them unless I include them in the sitemap, but I don't want Google to think I'm disingenuous in providing them links that don't exist, solely for the purpose of SEO, but truthfully all of the content exists and is available to the user.

I know that a lot of people are asking these questions, and there really are no right answers yet, but I'm curious about everyone else's experience so far.

Are you logged into Google?  Do you have search history enabled?  What is your geo targeted location?

Any of these can drastically change the rankings you will see.  The effects of personalized search.

The fact that you are seeing a higher ranking in your results than what SeoMoz reports leads me to believe one of the above issues is causing your issue.

I usually have multiple browsers just for this purpose.  I tend to have at least one browser that I almost never use for the purpose of "checking" rankings(opera or safari).  I usually clear all cache and history from the browser to anonomize the results as much as possible. As well as to make sure that I'm not logged into Google.

Hey Angela,

A majority of the keywords in WMT are related to impressions.  I would pick a few of the top improper key words and search them to see if your site is still showing up.

If yes: Is the Pharma hack title/description still showing up?  You can try resubmitting your pages for indexing through webmaster tools individually.  You could also resubmit your sitemap thru WMT if you have a whole lot of pages.

If No: Try limiting the scope of data you are looking at in WMT to when you know for sure that the issues were fixed.  Beyond just the issues being fixed though you need to determine when Googlebot actually updated its records to reflect the removal of the pharma hack, so keep limiting the scope until you see all of the pharma hack key phrases go away.

I've been the victim of pharma hack before, and unfortunately it just takes a little time for everything to clear up.  Hopefully the above suggestions are helpful.

If your unfamiliar with your hosting console you may want to test the process before you actually follow through with it.  Or plan to do it super early or super late in the day to minimize downtime if you hit a snag.  There are so many different hosting consoles and possibilities that are impossible to cover here.

I'm going to make the assumption that your host will allow you to redirect a domain to a different folder.

so:  www.example.com  -points to ->  /htdocs

and dev.example.com -points to -> /dev

In the past I typically just use the wordpress console to make the change under the general settings to the correct domain(note this will break the wordpress for the moment on the development domain dev.example.com).  I then redirect my primary URL(www.example.com) to the folder I'm using for the development domain.

IF your host doesn't allow this, there are other options besides changing the data at the database level within PHPmyadmin.  If your comfortable with PHPMyAdmin then go for it.  Either way it wouldn't hurt to setup dev2.example.com and follow thru the process just to test things out and know the steps before you break anything.

Good Luck!

If you check here there are a few specific reasons why your results might vary in more detail:

http://www.seomoz.org/help/rankings

About 1/4 of the way down they detail a few reasons for the differences.

They also mention trying "To turn off personalization, append &pws=0 to the end, so it would look like google.com/search?q=SEO&pws=0."

And then theres always the chance for latency: the difference in time between when SeoMoz does the search and then sends you the report.

Glad to hear you agree with the coding issues.  It really is a mess in there, and I completely understand that other factors are causing the issue.

However if you ever needed a good reason to justify spending the time/resources to fix your site here it is:  yes I do believe it is a factor in your rankings if for no other reason than page load speed.

I've always practiced the clean house, clean mind principal, and I believe that applies to websites as well.  Anywhere things can be condensed for simplicity's sake it will be better. Imagine you are a search engine spidering sites all day and you come across that mess of code.  Not only does it take twice as long to get through all of the site's code, but in addition there are multiple and <title>tags.  Which ones are right?  Are they trying to game the system somehow?</p> <p>There are so many little things adding up to a well coded/seo'd site I find it hard to believe that it would have zero impact on your rankings.  At the same time I'm not sure what the overall impact is on your site.  To me that all comes down to how well you compare to your competition.  If every one you compete with has a site with messy code, its probably a non issue, but at the same time that means in order to get ahead all you need to do is clean up a little.</p> <p>Hope that helps!</p></title>

Thanks Carla for the reference.  So if I'm understanding the way this example site works.  Your pulling in the content on each "subpage" dynamically so that Google will never see the content twice when visiting the page?

I like the way this works, although I wish you didn't have to see a loading graphic when the page pulls in the content.

I agree that this method looks good, and I would love to get rid of the hashbangs but thats just part of what makes everything work in our current use case.

Certainly I think this site is a move in the right direction.

Thanks for the links and pointers

Hey Kelly,

First congratulations on taking your first steps towards optimizing your site.

The main thing holding you back(and every other photographer I ever worked with) is content.  Your site has plenty of beautiful images, but you have almost no real content/words on your site.

Google does not see images at all.  They will see alt tags if you add that to the code of your images.

Also there are some real issues with the code of your site.  I would highly encourage you to learn a little more about how your site is built.  Theres several sections on your site that use blank heading tags(h1, h2, h3) to space things out.  Heading tags are a key indicator to Google about what your page is about.  Using them to create spacers could be a real problem.

Last look at who is ranking number 1 for your key word "Houston Wedding Photographers".

All of the results at the top are actually Google Places listings and not just websites.  Maybe the key to more business is as simple as creating a Google Places listing!

Good Luck!