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Thanks Matt, that's really useful

Thanks for both your replies - I will check out the tools and recommendations you suggested.

I'm sure I remember somewhere reading a recommendation that it was only necessary to submit the basic site structure in a sitemap. It sounds like this is not the case and that a site map should , if possible, be comprehensive.

Would it be better to have a basic sitemap giving the main navigational URLs than having nothing at all?

That sounds like an interesting suggestion and definitely something to look into, thank you. Sadly, the developer for the site is on holiday until next Monday, so I won't be to get an answer until next week.

Theoretically, if the changes were not possible, would it be better to have one single meta description on the home page and none across the rest of the site? Or would it be better to leave the site as it is?

Hi there, thanks for the reply. We are using an in-house CMS.

Hi there,

I’m currently researching how I can generate an XML sitemap for a large website we run. We think that Google is having problems indexing the URLs based on some of the messages we have been receiving in Webmaster tools, which also shows a large drop in the total number of indexed pages.

Content on this site can be accessed in two ways. On the home page, the content appears as a list of posts. Users can search for previous posts and can search all the way back to the first posts that were submitted.

Posts are also categorised using tags, and these tags can also currently be crawled by search engines. Users can then click on tags to see articles covering similar subjects. A post could have multiple tags (e.g. SEO, inbound marketing, Technical SEO) and so can be reached in multiple ways by users, creating a large number of URLs to index.

Finally, my questions are:

1. How big should a sitemap be? What proportion of the URLs of a website should it cover?
2. What are the best tools for creating the sitemaps of large websites?
3. How often should a sitemap be updated?

Thanks

Recently, I’ve recommended to the team running one of our websites that we remove duplicate meta descriptions. The site currently has a large number of these and we’d like to conform to SEO best practice. I’ve seen Matt Cutt’s recent video entitled, ‘Is it necessary for every page to have a meta description’, where he suggests that webmasters use meta descriptions for their most tactically important pages, but that it is better to have no meta description than duplicates. The website currently has one meta description that is duplicated across the entire site.

This seemed like a relatively straight forward suggestion but it is proving much more challenging to implement over a large website. The site’s developer has tried to resolve the meta descriptions, but says that the current meta description is a site wide value. It is possible to create 18 distinct replacements for 18 ‘template’ pages, but any sub-pages of these will inherit the value and create more duplicates. Would it be better to:

1. Have no meta descriptions at all across the site?
2. Stick with the status quo and have one meta description site-wide?
3. Make 18 separate meta descriptions for the 18 most important pages, but still have 18 sets of duplicates across the sub-pages of the site.

Or…is there a solution to this problem which would allow us to follow the best practice in Matt’s video?

Any help would be much appreciated!

Thanks everyone - those are great responses

I've noticed recently that a number of content scrapers are linking to one of our websites and have the duplicate content on their web pages. Can content scrapers affect the original website's ranking? I'm concerned that having duplicated content, even if hosted by scrapers, could be a bad signal to Google. What are the best ways to prevent this happening?

I'd really appreciate any help as I can't find the answer online!

Great answers guys - thanks. It's good to know that my gut feeling was close to the mark!

We're thinking of simplifying our website which has grown to a very large size by removing all the content which hardly ever gets visited.

The plan is to remove this content / make changes over time in small chunks so that we can monitor the impact on SEO. My gut feeling is that this is okay if we make sure to redirect old pages and make sure that the pages we remove aren't getting any traffic. From my research online it seems that more content is not necessarily a good thing if that content is ineffective and that simplifying a site can improve conversions and usability.

Could I get people's thoughts on this please? Are there are risks that we should look out for or any alternatives to this approach? At the moment I'm struggling to combine the needs of SEO with making the website more effective.

Thanks for your reply Everett, that definitely answers the main part of my question,

I'd be interested if anyone has any experience in using the Confluence add-ons for SEO?

Thank you both - it sounds like we could have made a mistake here. I thought that there might be something fishy going on when I couldn't find any more information on how to do this!

Phil - the link is http://www.reelseo.com/embedded-youtube-indexed-google/.

We've recently moved to using YouTube for embedded videos on our site. We have a number of videos that are embedded and then a larger number of videos which are part of our YouTube channel.

I've been reading recently that it's possible to get Google to list embedded video links pointing to your site rather than to YouTube itself. I am interesting in driving traffic directly from the search results to our pages rather than via YouTube. Could somebody provide a basic step by step guide on how to do this please? Or is this something that is not possible? I've been doing a lot of research online but, sadly, can't work out how to do this.

I think this is a difficult question so apologies in advance and any help would be appreciated!

We currently have a large amount of support center content sitting on our main pages which we don’t think is very effective (mainly basic how to guides). We think it is difficult for visitors to understand and the UI is very poor. In order to solve this we’re currently moving this content onto a subdomain using Confluence, a wiki based team collaboration tool (from a company called Atlassian).

What we’re planning on doing is very much like what Atlassian themselves have done on this page: https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/ALLDOC/Atlassian+Documentation

What are the SEO issues / dangers that I need to consider before moving this content? I’m assuming that as this content will still be on the same domain then we can minimise link equity / authority loss by setting up re-directs to the new content. Also, has anyone had any experience of using Confluence and whether individual pages can be optimised for SEO? I notice that there are lots of add-ins that can be used, one of which is an SEO add-on which allows you to customise things like meta description tags.

Thank you all - basic stuff I know. All three of your answers put together answer my question so excellent stuff.

It's interesting that even when I've moved onto more complicated SEO concepts a simple issue coming out of the blue is the one that throws me. Maybe this shows that sometimes it's best to keep things simple?

What do people think is the best way to increase unbranded organic traffic specifically? We have worked on on-page optimisation / keywords / some social media, but there has been no noticeable increase over the last 6 months.

Do you think increasing unbranded traffic is an objective worth pursuing?

Yes it does.Thanks Chris!

Hi Tom, that makes sense Thanks for your reply and for your excellent response!

Hi everyone. I'd really appreciate your help with this one

I've just watched Matt Cutt's video 'what percentage of PageRank is lost through a 301 redirect?' and I am confused. I had taken this to mean that a re-direct would always lose you page rank, but watching it again I am not so sure.

He says that the amount of page rank lost through a 301 redirect is the same as any other link. Does this mean that no page rank at all is lost during site migrations? Or is it the case that first page rank would be lost from the original link and then more page rank would be lost from any subsequent redirects?

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