Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Miranda,

Yes, the initial "fast" crawl is limited to 250 pages. It gives you a quick start opportunity for working on your campaign while waiting for a full crawl to complete.

This is an improvement that was added a few months ago. Before that time you had to wait a week for the full crawl if your site was large.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi,

If these are pages that you "don't want to be ranked" then you should add meta "noindex" tag to them immediately so that they are removed from the index and will not be added with new crawls.

As evidenced by your own question, they are pages you don't care about. That means you have no reason to make them great pages. This said, leaving them available for indexing is a "panda slap" waiting to happen.

I would treat the "noindex" as a priority.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Nice solution Kieran!

I use the same method, to compare URL list from Screaming Frog output with URL Found column from my Keyword Ranking tool - of course it doesn't catch all pages that might be indexed.

The intention is not really to get a complete list, more to "draught" out pages that need work.

Hi Kenji,

That would be great - the other thing to look at is developing awareness of your brand through other channels so that people get to know about your organization and come looking for you specfically. It might be worth talking about this with those people you include in your brainstorming.

For example, can you:

• distribute information through schools/universities so that students know about you?
• spread the word through philanthropic organizations to individuals & corporates?
• connect with media/film students at a local college to get short videos, articles, presentations developed for your organization as part of their project work?
• Get some high profile benefactors & students who have been successful to participate in social media, relating their experiences & answering questions?

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi searchpl,

If you are worried about "freshness" for ecommerce sites, there is one very important thing to do - eliminate wasted effort.

The fact is that what I call the "freshness effect" does not apply to every keyword term. Google appears to be determining whether fresh information is, or is not more relevant according to the individual term. If you manually check SERPs you will see this easily.

So, eliminating wasted effort while working toward providing new and relevant content all comes back to good old fashioned research. The smart approach is to spend some time manually checking SERPs for your "money" keywords. If you see evidence of the "freshness effect" for particular terms, those are the ones you could consider focusing new content development efforts on.

The keyword terms that might be affected will entirely depend upon the types of products in your stores - for example, I know that "weight loss" is a term where the "freshness effect" seems evident in SERPs.

Of course, if you decide to develop new content you should follow the advice already given by EGOL and James on quality and method. Incidentally, I would say the smart thing to do in this situation would be to come up with the type of content that is easy to add on a continuous basis - things like ongoing series, videos, podcasts, and cleverly managed user generated content.

Incidentally, if you listen carefully to information coming out of Bing via Duane Forrester, you may notice that Google is not the only Search engine that takes notice of freshness

Hope that helps,

Sha

Also: Don't stress too much if you are using automated feeds to update your product offerings on a daily basis ... you may already be providing fresh content if products are frequently added. The challenge then is to ensure that quality is up to scratch

Hi vittana_seo

Given the unique nature of the service you are providing and the specific "customer" groups you wish to target, I would go right to the source.

Talk to/set  up brainstorming sessions with representatives of each potential group and ask them how they would describe what you do (terms they might type into a Search Engine etc):

1. past recipients
2. potential recipients who are in the system
3. past contributors - Individuals
4. past contributors - corporate

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi jassy,

I think the question is basically "is it a problem that most of the external links are pointing to the original page and not directly at the one I prefer (and have redirected to)".

Since the chances of getting external links altered is slim & most of the link value is passed with a 301, then the broad answer would be "no", but the more important task would be to fix the redirect issues you highlighted as quickly as possible.

Sha

Hi Matt,

Search engine crawlers will follow the redirects and pass link value as long as they are 301 (Permanent) Redirects.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Maybe a little like using a 10 pound sledgehammer to crack a peanut shell, but those vector images are always going to be good to look at!

Sha

Hi Noah,

Obviously Rand is the one to answer the first part of your question.

As for the blog post you mentioned, I'm thinking perhaps it was Dr Pete's "Content Marketing for the Talent Impaired"?

Sha

Hi Chukwuemeka,

First a quick note - it is not possible to write a script that does this using html, but by converting your normal html files to PHP, you can achieve your aim for a standard site without having to use a CMS like Wordpress.

This post in the Youmoz Blog Adding "Related Post" Links without a Database should provide everything you need to make it work.

I hope this will help solve your problem ... if there is anything that you don't understand just let me know in the comments or come back to this thread.

I owe my boss a BIG beer gift this Christmas for writing the code that makes this work

Sha

Glad you got it worked out

Don't forget if you need extra help on something you can always use the Private Message system in your profile to contact people direct.

Have a great weekend,

Sha

Hi Matt,

I would agree 100% with Ryan's comments on robots.txt.

In addition to this, it is a notoriously unreliable method for blocking...if the crawler happens to come to your site via an external link to any page other than the home page it will not see robots.txt.

Sha.

Hi Zsolt,

Did you actually look at the link I gave you with the code that you needed?.

The answer is to stop trying to use Redirectmatch and use the code I gave you in that example:

RewriteEngine on

RewriteBase /score

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} score=
RewriteRule ^/*$ newlocation.html? [R=301,L]

This is the simplest, cleanest, and most reliable solution to your problem.

Sha

Hi again,

We set up an example page for you with working tests and links to example code and zipped version.

Hope that is what you need,

Sha

Hi Zsolt,

Just so we understand exactly what you are asking here ...

What you are wanting to do is permanently redirect any and all URLs containing "thisword" to a single URL on the same domain? Is that accurate?

Sha

Hi Vipin,

Since you have all of the URLs in your robots.txt file (which incidentally is pointless since the pages are no longer there to crawl), I would suggest as follows:

• Create a 301 (Permanent) redirect in your Windows Server's "Internet Services Manager" (since you have moved files to .aspx you will be using a Windows server)
  Since you indicated that you "moved" the pages in question from html to aspx, I would expect that you should be able to redirect to corresponding pages.
  If I were doing this in a LAMP system (not Windows) I use a single line of code to rewrite all .html extensions to .aspx as a 301 Redirect.
  Logically, it should be possible to do the same on a windows server, but since ours is a LAMP Shop I can't offer specifics on that I'm afraid

• Once the redirects have been created, remove all of those URL's from the robots.txt file

Hope that helps,

Sha

Glad to help

Just another thought on using video on-site...if it were possible to grab very short video reviews from actual clients while using your services, that could be gold in terms of converting visitors to your site.

Not entirely sure about the detail of how to make it happen, but I'm imagining a happy, smiling bride and groom shooting a 30 second video snippet while in the back of the limo being driven to the reception..."the limo is gorgeous, our day has been wonderful and Joe our driver even brought barley sugar candy to help settle my butterflies on the way to the church!"  these are the type of videos that will engage your audience and tell the story of your business.

Best of luck with it,

Sha

Hi again,

I would say that both approaches are valid, as long as you are very strategic about targeting your content.

My personal preference is to work first on building better content on-site (I am a member of the "why help someone else when you can help yourself" movement :), but if there is an opportunity to use the domain authority of another site to improve your own site, then that can obviously be of value too (especially if you are trying to build the strength of your own domain).

The key is to target the content you develop for each and NEVER use the same content for both.

When it comes to targeting, I follow two basic rules - articles on other sites should be aimed at an audience seeking "how to" assistance, while on-site content should be the type that will help to "engage" your audience with your company or brand.

For example:

An article on an external directory might be "How Early Should I Book My Wedding Limo", while a new page of on-site content might be "Why You Can Trust Us To Drive Your Daughter To Her Prom"

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hmmm...

Hi echo 1,

My view of Press Releases is quite different. The sole aim of a press release is to provide writers/bloggers/journalists with the key information they need to research and write stories or articles of their own which will promote your site (or your business, products & services).

A Press Release that is likely to be successful in achieving its aim is by necessity quite structured, following a pre-determined format and containing particular facts and information ordered quite specifically to make the prospective writer's job easier. So, by its very nature, a good Press Release is not what I would consider suitable page content for my site. For this reason I would never consider adding releases to my on site content.

Of course, the other natural conclusion from this is that if my Press Release reads like great page content for my site, then it does not follow the basic principles of a well constructed release and should be looked at closely before it is submitted.

If you are submitting to the major online Release sites, they all have resources which will basically teach you the format that you should use for your releases.

Hope that helps,

Sha