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OSE also clusters by domain, so for a given link you're not going to get near the 700+ which are internal. As a general practice OSE is great for getting at link diversity, goal setting, and seeing where the competition has gotten links in the past. It should give you plenty of ideas that way. Cheers!
One theory is that the Now Media Group name isn't unique enough as there is also www.nowmedia.co.za, a South African company of the same name.
The Knowledge Box also becomes more in-depth the stronger your brand becomes. For example, if you search "WWF" you get the Knowledge Box for the World Wildlife Foundation, and then after the news there's a Wikipedia link to the WWE as it used to be known as the WWF. If Google were a thing in the early 80s, this might have been more hotly contested, with WWF (the wrestling version) likely coming out on top.
Getting more Google+ posts (aside from Test) as well as more followers and shares will help build out your knowledge box. In addition having social media signals from all over (Canada and the US) will contribute as well. Take a look at WWF's knowledge box as a comparison. Cheers!
Great! It sounds like you're on the right track John, especially considering that there are some title and H1 changes took place. Cheers!
When the crawler goes to the desktop site the user agent should change dynamically and it will see that the user agent is set to non-mobile. Be sure to check it out here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/
while responsive design fundamentals can be found here: https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/layouts/rwd-fundamentals/. Cheers!
For syntax I think you'll want:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /dirw/
If the content of /dirw/ isn't worthwhile to the engines then it should be fine to disallow. It's important to note though that Google asks for CSS and Javascript to not be disallowed. Run the site through their Page Speed tool to see how this setup currently impacts that interaction. Cheers!
CrazyEgg--the heat mapping / user interaction site--wrote this blog post back in 2013: http://blog.crazyegg.com/2013/08/12/reduce-your-bounce-rate/ with #7 being exactly what you're asking about, "Nothing’s worse than being blasted with background music or a voice when you’re not expecting it – especially if you’re at work or you have multiple tabs open and can’t figure out which one the sound is coming from!" Many people do break time shopping / research while in the office so having an audio play video or song is almost a guaranteed bounce. CrazyEgg didn't put the stats up to go with this but they're certainly speaking from experience.
To follow up on Tom's great response, even with the 301 redirect in place, you could still be experiencing the delay typical to redirection. Pinging the new domain may help you speed up that process. To do so create a list of the site pages and submit them to PingFarm and 247pinger. Those will help to verify the new site and de-index the old URLs.
Also, as a reference, here's Google's over view of transitioning to HTTPS: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6073543. Cheers!
Hi Charles. Good ideas already. I'd also look for partnerships and promotions around green certification (several sites feature these in relation to their energy uses) with manufactures, stores, repair shops, pretty much anyone dealing with e-waste. If they could be labeled as e-waste neutral via your process that'd be something they would want to brag about. The link back to you would then display their certification. Cheers!
Have you looked within your Analytics to see how many people are visiting the longer FAQ page? Is it driving search visits? Based on what you find there you could get a good idea of how to continue. For example, if you're not getting search visits, but people still like to interact with the page once they're on your site, you could NoIndex the page and copy the content over to S1 and S2 then see if longer FAQ interaction drops. Eventually you could redirect the longer FAQ to either one of the service pages, depending on which you prefer. Cheers!
Hi Margaret. As discussed on the blog post here: http://moz.com/blog/spam-score-mozs-new-metric-to-measure-penalization-risk the tool is just one facet of identifying what sites Google may consider spammy. A score of 5 is currently just outside of the green / ok part of the tool so it's likely very low risk.
In addition to the tool though, consider the site itself.
Those are just some of the things to consider. But it should become fairly clear with a little investigation. Like Khem says, it's better to use the tool to identify trends, versus dissecting more granular details. Cheers!
Thumbs up to Doug. This is also what I said in one of your earlier posts, "D) Adding the blog folder is fine, and helpful in a lot of cases (when you just want to analyze the blog separate from the website, for example). Cheers!"
Hi Tamir.
A) I think you'll still want to redirect the new site back to the old domain because it's been created and is a better user experience for people who started going to it to get pointed back to the correct site. Redirecting it will also eliminate duplicate content issues.You can probably use one line of redirection if the traffic and links are very low so that people just go to the new site's home page since the new site hasn't been interacted with that much, but in addition to links you should look at the Analytics to know if that's the case. If the new site is getting thousands of visitors it'd be a better user experience for the page about X to redirect to the old domain about X.
B) You have to have an exact match for a page to work, i.e. you have to have the .html at the end if you want to completely mimic the old site. Otherwise, yes, you'll need to redirect from http://www.old-domain.com/our-destinations.html to http://www.old-domain.com/our-destinations
D) Adding the blog folder is fine, and helpful in a lot of cases (when you just want to analyze the blog separate from the website, for example). Cheers!
For the other languages, it's going to be a conditional redirect, which is best handled by 302. Here it is from Google: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/05/creating-right-homepage-for-your.html :
A third scenario would be to automatically serve the appropriate HTML content to your users depending on their location and language settings. You will either do that by using server-side 302 redirects or by dynamically serving the right HTML content.
Remember to use x-default rel-alternate-hreflang annotation on the homepage / generic page even if the latter is a redirect page that is not accessible directly for users.
Note: Think about redirecting users for whom you do not have a specific version. For instance, French-speaking users on a website that has English, Spanish and Chinese versions. Show them the content that you consider the most appropriate.
Cheers!
Hi Andy. There are quite a few settings you can adjust to make the server load less while the crawl is running. These can be found with descriptions here: http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/user-guide/configuration/
For example, by not checking Images, CSS, SWF, and Javascript you'll be able to lessen load substantially, or if you'd like to crawl just a portion of the site you can set it to not check links outside of the start folder.
To have even more control over the crawl, you can use regular expressions to exclude certain pages, or sections that match a given pattern. The page above is fairly robust, so it should help you dial back the crawler to be friendlier to your server. Cheers!
Hi Angelos. I agree. Having a 301 redirect that's always in place for going to /en is a bit redundant. If /en is the default option the default should be the root.
Other redirection should be handled via 302 to the various languages with all the proper href-lang and alternate attributes. Per Google, "For language/country selectors or auto-redirecting homepages, you should add an annotation for the hreflang value "x-default" as well: " Cheers!
Hi Daren. It's hard to say without going into the details specific to the site, but in general it shouldn't hurt it. There probably aren't a lot of inbound links to the helpdesk and that area probably doesn't serve as a main landing page from the search engines either. If you NOINDEX / FOLLOW that section you'll be able to keep those pages out of the SE and still allow the on page links to be measured.
Be sure to check Analytics to verify what kind of traffic you're getting from organic visitors and run the site through OSE and GWT to see if for some reason the helpdesk is getting a high number of links. In the rare case it is, it'd probably be better to redirect those portions to a public facing FAQ, or a few other pages topically dedicated to the content that you're deciding to remove from the search engines. Cheers!
Whatever you do regarding going from the new domain back to the old domain is going to require 301 redirection whether or not the pages have .html at the end.
There really is no way to see what your old rankings were without having kept historical data on it--spreadsheets, Moz Analytics, Rank Tracking software, etc. One thing you can do though, is run the old domain through as many link finding tools--like OSE--as possible in order to establish which pages were the most popular via the most links. Next, you can go to archive.org and use the Way Back Machine there to see if they have copies of the old site. From there, you should be able to get an idea of title tags, etc.
It's important to know that this change will further confuse the search engines for a time and could add further delays on getting back towards the old rankings. The path with the least resistance would be matching the old domains that had the most links exactly as they used to be. Cheers!
True. It'd be interesting to know if there was a dogma tipping point. Plenty probably goes into it--like bounce rate of mobile searchers encountering non-mobile sites, load times, chrome crashes, Android stats, Analytics data, etc. Eventually though all that data is going to be pretty clear one way or the other.
Bummer. I was hoping that would catch it. Definitely seems to be a lot of fingers in the pie though! I'm not a Moz employee but they are here in the Q&A so they should be able to help you out soon. You can also reach out to them via the Contact Help Team here: https://moz.com/help/contact
Cheers!
Hi Eric. I'd recommend using folders as being navigational and/or site-section specific. As such, they can be shorter--like the two letter abbreviation for states--and create less worries about URL length that way. A ton of other signals are going to be contributing to a page being recognized as being about a resort in Florida than FL vs Florida in the URL alone.
Once you have your structure figured out, using hyphenated URLs that often mimic the title tag of the page is generally a best practice as this gives the user the best idea of what a link is about while also containing keywords when someone links to the page solely via URL. The Moz blog has plenty of examples such as: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-stop-spam-bots-from-ruining-your-analytics-referral-data.. Short domain, short folder name, then the content. Each bit is readable and understandable as to why it's there.
See: http://moz.com/learn/seo/url for more. Cheers!