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Hi all

We are marketing an e-commerce site and seem to have a weird issue. For some reason the clearly specified meta description is not being used in the SERPs. Had a look in the source but all tags seems to be there.

The site can be found here:
www.bangerhead.se

A sample search in Google that uses the wrong info in the SERP:
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&rlz=1C5CHFA_enSE548SE548&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#safe=off&q=bangerhead

Any ideas to why this is? Grateful for any inputHave a nice day

Fredrik

Hi

I got good news and I got bad news for you:

Good news: your not nuts. The text is visually there.
Bad news: the text is actually not in the original source code since its loaded with AJAX.

An easy way to check this is to do a view source on the page. Dependent on browser the function is in different places but in Google Chrome its under View -> Developer -> View source. When your seeing the source code try to do a search and you see that the word "handbook" is not there.

So what does this mean: 1. It means that the moz tool can not handle this AJAX way of making the page. 2. It could also mean that Google can not index the site.

Good look forward

Fredrik

Hi

In my opinion the logo should not contain H1 or H2 tags, if it does not contain indexable text such as slogan, byline etc.

H1 should be used for the most important heading comparable to how its used in a word document. This should also be your main heading. Also there should be only one H1 on a page.

H1 should be used for the second most important heading comparable to how its used as a subheading in a word document. This should also be your main heading. There could then be multiple H2s on a page since they describe sub content.

You can find more useful information about this and other SEO challenges in the great Moz Guide.

Hope this answers you question.

Have a great day

Fredrik

Forget to mention, this has been discussed before in this thread:
http://moz.com/community/q/visitsweden-indexing-error

Unfortunately those suggestions did not seem to solve the issue.

Hi

Been building and optimising sites for 15 years and this is one of the hardest problems I ever came across. So any help would be very much appreciated. Here we go:

For some mysterious reason this URL http://weekend.visitsweden.com/no/ has been indexed as http://weekend.visitsweden.com even if we tried all we can to correct it. The problem is that since the latter points to the first URL with a 301 it refuses to get any page rank. Also it does not get visible in Google at all.

Just a recap of what we have tried so far:

• Add site to webmaster tools
• Add proper sitemap.xml
• Add 301 redirect to the correct URL

An easy way to locate the problem is to search for the main content of the site. As you can see it returns the wrong URL and the correct URL does not even get listed.

Again, any help is very much appreciated.

Kind regards

Fredrik

Hi

Again thanks for your quick response. Unfortunately we still have the same issue even though we have performed many checks and tests. Any more smart ideas on how this can be corrected?

Regards

Fredrik

Hi again

The weirdest this is that it does not seem to update. When I do a site:weekend.visitsweden.com/no/ the page is still nowhere to be found.

https://www.google.no/?gws_rd=ssl#q=site:weekend.visitsweden.com%2Fno%2F

Any ideas?

Again thanks

Fredrik

Thanks for the great input! Have now tried to do the changes as per your suggestion.

Does it look better now?

Again thanks

Fredrik

Hi all

Just got a new site up about weekend travel for VisitSweden, the official tourism office of Sweden. Everything went just fine except som issues with indexing.

The site can be found here at weekend.visitsweden.com/no/

For some weird reason the "frontpage" of the site does not get indexed. What I have done myself to find the issue:

• Added sitemaps.xml
• Configured and added site to webmaster tools
• Checked 301s so they are not faulty

By doing a simple site:weekend.visitsweden.com/no/ you can see that the frontpage is simple not in the index. Also by doing a cache:weekend.visitsweden.com/no/ I see that Google tries to index the page without the trailing /no/ for some reason.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://weekend.visitsweden.com/no/

Any smart ideas to get this fixed or where to start looking?

All help greatly appreciated

Kind regards

Fredrik

Having the same WHOIS info as contact info on the site would possible be a sign of authenticity i guess? More on topic here:

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-question-do-whois-privacy-services-harm-seo/5874/

Hi

Having keywords in the domain name can help you rank for this, not as much as it used to help but still some.

You should also think about how relevant the domain is for the users, does it connect to the overall scope of the site?

If you are to use SSL on your domain some companies might refuse u a certificate if you are using brandnames in the domain. Sounds far fetched but happend to me a few times.

Hope this could help you out?

Kind regards

Fredrik

Hi

I fully agree with you, there is no need to put a "fake" H1 instead of the logo. Just add the logo, and if you want you can add the company name in both the filename and the alt text of that image.

H1 is for marking the most important heading of the page. Think of it as you would structure the headings in a school paper. H1 would then represent a very important section. But after all the headings are for the user to understand, not the bots indexing the site.

So all in all, I think you already knew the answer to this one

Fredrik

Hi Chandana

There are a few major things to consider when updating the site:

**Keep same URLs **

Maybe the single most important factor is to not change allready ranking URLs. I do understand that changing the look of the site might require this, but you should at least do your absolute best not to change them. Also if you have a mutlilevel structure such as www.example.com/category/page be very careful changing the category since that will mean you also change all subpages.

I would check pagerank and incoming traffic from search for each of the pages, then make a note on what pages are most important. You can use www.opensiteexplorer.org and Google Analytics for this.

301 redirects

If you have to change your URL structure then make sure you do proper 301 redirects to the new URLs. This will not prevent you from loosing ranking on the page but will help you recover faster.

On-page SEO

Make sure your new site is optimized as far as possible for on-page SEO. Before you move, test the old page, then make sure the new page is atleast as good. Maybe also a good idea to look at headings and try to follow the same structure. Use the quite excellent tool from SEOMoz for this. You should find it here: http://www.seomoz.org/tools

Internal Link structure

This is not all that easy but try to look at how your internal link structure looks at the old site and move this to the new site. What footer links you got? What keywords you use in the links? What menus you use? If your new site is going for a dropdown menu this typically adds a massive amount of links to your site. This might be important.

Be careful

When making new sites its easy to get too busy designing and building the new site. Just play it cool and make sure not to make any mistakes such as leaving a no index tag or forgetting to remove a default robots.txt. Take an extra day to go through it all.

Spot mistakes as quick as you can

Make sure to use Google Webmastertools and Analytics to spot any problems and correct them as fast as you can.

Hope these simple tips helps you get going with your move.

Good luck and hope your new site turns out well.

Fredrik

Hi

Why not either strip away or add trailing slashes on all your URLs? This way you are sure to get around the problem.

If you add something similar to this, it will for example remove trailing slashes on all URLs:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^.yourdomain.com$ [NC]

RewriteRule ^(.+)/$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]

Hope this helps

Hi

Your boss is right, building links is a very important task. But, as you hint at yourself, its all about doing it the correct way. So asking the community before getting started was a smart move.

I have had many clients that could not resist the temptation of buying low quality links. A few months later they are all paying the price of this by being penalised by Google. So before we get started, stay clear of buying low quality or any links for that matter.

My first move is always to identify a few competitors and see what kind of links they are getting. Chances are that if they can get links this way so can you. For this http://www.opensiteexplorer.org is a great tool. To get an instant overview what links your competitors have use these settings:

Show: followed and 301s
Links from: only external
To: pages on this root domain

This would now give you a good list of links to your competitor. Sort the list by page authority and start investigating their most valuable links.

Further ideas to how to get links could be:

• Write for other blogs, and become a regular contributor
• Create stunning content that people want to link to
• Interview someone influential

For more useful information on to proceed with links please see these resources:

http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/eight-link-building-tips-whiteboard-friday

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-noob-guide-to-link-building

Hope this is enough to get started.

Good luck and may the linkbuilding force be with you

Fredrik

Hi Ron

As Paul stated there are many ways of doing sliders. Most of the new sliders out there do work with JavaScript but often used already loaded dom elements for the slides. That means that the actual content is in the HTML and the JavaScript is used to animate or style them. This content would then be indexed just as a normal div would.

You can also use http://www.seobrowser.com/, (simple option is free) to see the page as Google would see it. If you then can read your content it should be possible to index it.

One thing to think of is that sliders, as the name implies, often contains more than one slide. If the slider has a heading in it it might be a good thing to make the first heading H1 and secondary sliders H2. This way you can place your most important content in the first slide.

Not sure if you use Jquery but if you do http://jquerytools.org/ offer great power and flexibility. Please note that I am NOT connected to them or work for them. We have just used their scripts on variious of our projects.

I had a quick look at your example and unfortunetely that would have a very hard time getting indexed since content is in the javascript. I would consider putting all content in the HTML and then just hide and show sections using Jquery instead.

Have a great day and good luck

Fredrik

Thanks

Learned the hard way when it was all too late

Fredrik

Hi Claudio

Some PR sites are great and some not so great. You have to check the domain and pagerank of the page where your release will be posted. Will it also rotate and be shown on frontpage? How long? Also make sure you have proper links back to your landingpage and make sure they are not put as nofollow.

You can use www.opensiteexplorer.org to investigate the pageranks etc

Here is also a list of free PR sites:

1. Free-Press-Release.com
2. PRLog.org
3. ClickPress.com
4. NewswireToday.com
5. Express-Press-Release.net
6. Free-Press-Release-Center.info
7. TheOpenPress.com
8. PressMethod.com
9. PressBox.co.uk
10. BusinessServicesuk

Good luck

Fredrik

HI Chris

We have been using CDN networds to achieve this for many years and have not seen any issues with duplicate content. As I understand it, one piece of content should only exists at one URL. So if the same URL is served from a number of different IPs there should be no issues with duplicate content.

To make absolutely sure you can keep an eye on warnings in Google Webmaster tools and implement canonical tags.

Hope this helped to shed some light on this issue.

Have a great day

Fredrik

Hi

In my opinion the logo should not contain H1 or H2 tags, if it does not contain indexable text such as slogan, byline etc.

H1 should be used for the most important heading comparable to how its used in a word document. This should also be your main heading. Also there should be only one H1 on a page.

H1 should be used for the second most important heading comparable to how its used as a subheading in a word document. This should also be your main heading. There could then be multiple H2s on a page since they describe sub content.

You can find more useful information about this and other SEO challenges in the great Moz Guide.

Hope this answers you question.

Have a great day

Fredrik