Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi John,

First and foremost, you want to know for your own peace of mind that pages from your site are crawlable and indexed.

The first thing I would do is identify your most important "money" pages and go add them to the index via Webmaster Tools in both Google and Bing using their "Fetch as Googlebot" and "Fetch as Bingbot" tools. In both cases, a clean fetch of those pages will tell you that the pages are accessible and crawlable. In addition to that, once a URL has been successfully fetched, both allow you to request that the URL be submitted to the index (and also linked URLs). There are limits on the number of URLs per month that you can submit, so make sure you pick the most important ones.

Perhaps another way to approach this is to go back to your analytics and see if you are actually getting any traffic from those terms that your Boss is obsessing on. While everyone wants to rank, the fact is that with personalized and localized results, it is quite common for a site to appear in SERPs from time to time and actually bring traffic for terms that it "doesn't rank for". If you are actually getting some traffic for those terms from a search engine, you have actual proof that your site has been served up in a result for that term...from that point you know that your job is improving how frequently that happens.

While you probably wouldn't want to say this to your Boss, responsibility for your rankings rests largely with him/her also. If they want to play with the "Big Boys", then they have to step up their game in the offline world as well. They should be asking you what the company can do to make the website more visible, not the other way round.

You need to address the question mark over the ecommerce platform. Again, for your own peace of mind (and given that there are some minor issues with nearly every CMS/Shopping Cart "out of the box") I would dive into any forum, available documentation etc that you can find on the platform you are using.

Use the Pro-tool to crawl the site and check that it is not creating duplicates etc. Find out about every known issue, find & present solutions, get your techs to write a fix if necessary. Make sure that you know when software updates are available, and that you are kept in the loop whenever changes are made that you have not initiated...KNOW that your ecommerce platform is NOT the problem and make sure that your Boss knows you can say that because you did the work.

Personally, I would also take a good shot at getting on the "front foot" by developing a solid marketing strategy that includes both online and offline activities. Basically, you need to show your Boss that you are in control here...you see the problems, understand why they exist and have a strategy for dealing with them.

Lastly, remember that as a SEOmoz Pro Member you can ask one Private Question in Q&A every 30 days. With all the negative attention you are getting, it might be a good thing to ask if a Staff Member or Associate can review the site and see if they can pinpoint any particular issues with the ecommerce platform, site content or optimization strategy. This will either get you some great help in fixing any issues you may not have seen, or just give you a confidence boost to help deal with the heat you are taking.

As for the endlessly forthcoming "expert" who found a tool to play with, you are probably going to have to find a way to put that unhelpful input into a proper perspective. Just remember, if you put up with the constant whining of the mosquito for long enough, sometimes you can actually manage to swat it right out of the air - and it feels GOOD!

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Rick,

While I know that Ryan decided to drop the https:// protocol problem, I just wanted to explain why it could be an issue for you.

It may not be a concern  for a lot of personal sites, but for those where the site may be serving a strongly recognized brand it definitely should be a concern. That recognition could be coming both from your online visibility and/or from your involvement in offline communities or activities. Basically, if you have a reputation or following, people who know of your site will be much more likely to type your URL straight into a browser to go there.

I, for example, have come to know and love noahsdad.com through your involvement here in SEOmoz Q&A. I've visited the site, love your work and from time to time it crosses my mind to drop in and see what Noah has been up to lately. Since I know the site's domain, when that happens, I click inside the field at the top of my browser and replace everything after the www of the site that is open with noahsdad.com.

Now, in the event that the page I had open in my browser when I did that happened to be using the https:// protocol and I didn't realize that (which often happens), I would actually be asking my browser to go to https://www.noahsdad.com...and I think now you see why this could be an issue for you.

Hope that helps

Sha

Thumbs up for the catch too Ryan!

Hi Glenn,

Another way to supplement your intelligence on new links to your site is to add Linkstant, which was built by Tom Critchlow and Rob Ousbey from Distilled.

This works similarly to the way analytics does. You place the code and if a new link is clicked that has not been seen by the tool before it will be reported. It's not perfect, but given that most savvy webmasters would check a link by clicking after it is placed, it can be quite quick in surfacing new links for you.

Because of the way the tool works, initially you will see it report links you already know about, but after a time the links reported will be bringing you news of new acquisitions.

Hope that helps,

Sha

URL rewrites effectively change nothing from the SE point of view - the URL stays the same in the browser & the server just loads the alternative page content.

By the same token, just using 301's for both stages as Stephen suggested is not going to create a problem for the domain either, UNLESS there is already a chain of 301 redirects behind the existing domain.

If your client is super concerned about adding more than one 301 redirect, they might know something that you don't. Matt Cutts talked about chaining 301's together in this webmaster video.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Yes, sorry...I tend to refer to them as "simple" rewrites because a lot of people get confused by the difference

Sha

...or use simple rewrites (without a redirect statement) until you are ready to move the site and then apply 301 redirects as normal. Such rewrites simply serve the alternative page content when a request is made for the target URL.

Sha

Hi Mister G,

.htaccess files are the means used for creating redirects in a LAMP setup using an Apache server.

To create redirects on a Windows box you need to use a quite different method.

This quick reference chart for creating redirects should give you the information you need for most normal redirect situations.

However, when working with .htaccess we would normally create a single rule that redirects all .html files to the .aspx file of the same name. Ours is a LAMP shop, so Windows is not our forte, but I believe you can do the same thing with the proviso that your server is set up for it. A little hard since I don't know exactly which Windows Server setup you are dealing with, but This link might help you out in doing that.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Steven,

Don't you just love that moment when you realize that you were clever enough to figure out the answer without help from anyone else?

Very nice of you to "take one for the team"  by leaving the post to help others who might follow in your footsteps

Sha

Hi Sean,

There are few things that could be at play here ...first of all, it is not unusual to rank well for terms that are not particularly competitive. (Competition is measured by how many pages are out there that are actually optimized for a term).

The other thing to be aware of is that the standard reports you might receive in your email often give you the On-page Grade for keyword terms against your home page. If you have actually optimized a completely different page on your site for that term, you would not expect to get a fantastic grade against the home page.

If you look at the list on the left side of your reports it will tell you the URL of the page it is grading against. To check how the grade looks against the actual page where you optimized for the term, open the On-page tool and run the keyword term against the  specific URL.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Marc,

Good to see you here in Q&A.

If you're still finding your way around SEOmoz, this post has a few resources that will help you figure out where things are.

Have fun with it,

Sha

I think that the appearance of thin content / over optimization may be affecting your ranking for the term.

If you make some small changes on the things I mentioned you may find that the rankings improve.

Sha

Hi again,

Since there are a lot of directives in this that are specific to certain conditions in your site that we cannot see, you should leave them alone.

Your redirect should appear at the beginning of the .htaccess anyway, so your best course of action is:

1. Make a copy of your existing .htaccess file with a different name so that you cannot accidentally lose it by overwriting
2. Place your redirect code at the beginning of the .htaccess (remembering that "RewriteEngine On" should appear only once)
3. Save and upload your new .htaccess file
4. Check in your browser to see if the redirect works (as many known pages as possible)
5. If it works, CELEBRATE!
6. It it breaks, replace your file with your copy of the original and ask the original developer, or one with access to the detail of your site to sort it out for you.

Incidentally, the rule you have above will redirect from www to non-www...just to be sure that is what you intended.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Guido,

I would agree with comments from eyepaq and Saijo with regard to redirects. Since there is a slight loss of link value with a 301 redirect, it is best to always send links to the target URL.

As to why the page is not ranking, I just wanted to add a reminder that there is more to that than just pointing links to the page. From that point of view there are a few things to consider with this page:

• There is very little content on the page, but when I view source I see a significant number of exact match instances of your keyword term.
• Most notably, there are several alt tags which offer no descriptive value for the user and are simply repetitive use of the exact match term for each photo. This is likely to be seen as manipulative. There is nothing wrong with including your term in alt tags, but they should always serve as short explanation of the image content.

We need to be even more careful of search engine sensitivity to signs of over optimization when there is very little text on a page.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi designsecrets,

I'm assuming that you are referring to the SEOmoz bot (Roger) and seeing only one page of your site crawled.

If this is correct, then there has been a similar known issue in the past.

You will need to go to SEOmoz Help and ask the Help Team to look at the campaign and sort out the problem for you. Make sure that you provide them with your campaign number and/or domain to make it easy for them to locate the problem.

You can also access the Help area by clicking the Help link at the top right of any page on the site.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Adam,

I am also seeing social interactions as blank, but my growth rate data is showing as normal.

Obviously something happening with the tool.

Best thing to do in a situation like this where you have a problem with campaign data is to email the SEOmoz Help Team direct help @ seomoz.org.  by clicking the "Help" link at the top right of this page to discover the swanky new SEOmoz Help Hub!

Make sure you give them a list of campaign numbers affected (u can see the campaign number in the URL when inside a campaign).

I'll be doing the same for my own campaigns.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Thanks Daniel,

Lots of additional features & improvements still in the works - updates @rmoov

Sha

Hi Tim,

We just opened free Beta during this last weekend on a link removal management service that we developed.

The free trial will allow you to run a campaign including the domains you mentioned in your post.

The tool allows you to drop in a list of URLs, pull contact information from ICANN (the whois data mentioned above)  for each of the domains, customize emails, send follow-ups, receive notification of cleanups from webmasters etc.

Hope it helps,

Sha

Hi Donnie,

Probably the best place to get good information on optimizing for any of the comparison shopping sites (including Google & Bing) is the CPC Strategy Blog.

While the company offers management services for those wanting to pay to have someone else run their comparison shopping feeds, they also share huge amounts of information about what they do through the blog and occasional webinars.

There is quite a lot being discussed there at present about Google's new "Trusted Stores" program, which is definitely worth a read too.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Gotta Love that SEOmoz transparency!

Looking forward to collecting my hug from Roger at Mozcon!

Sha

Hey Rob,

While I confess that cookies (or biscuits) ROCK my world, I think the reward might be a little the worse for wear by the time it finds me here on Kangaroo Island, but I think the explanation AND the solution is fairly simple. It can be fairly well explained by 3 facts:

1. As you mentioned, the links were previously in existence on the site ... when I checked the source on the page you supplied via Wayback Machine (I love that thing!!), I found that there were actually 8 different links on the page.
2. We know that the most recent update of Mozscape (underlying OSE results), while recently released will contained data which is from crawls anywhere between February & April as explained in this post from Rand about a week ago. So links removed recently may still be seen in OSE.
3. Google WMT is notorious for failing to update link information, 404 errors etc. I have had experience of one site which still showed warnings in WMT almost a year after they were fixed. It happens time and time again, site after site. So once again the data in WMT is quite likely from crawls that occurred when the links were there & the warnings are out of date.

The obvious Solution would be to lodge a Reconsideration Request with Google ASAP and see if you can't alert them to the fact that a lot of remediation work has been done.

Hope that helps,

Sha