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Hi Mozzers,

Just wondering if someone could point me in the direction of some useful industry benchmarks stats. I'm currently looking at a healthy active living website but trying to find out some average benchmark stats (things like av bounce rate, av time on site, pages per visit etc) for this sector so I can compare this with the site analytics.

Having had a look around I can't find a great deal out there relating to average benchmark stats for this sector. Your help greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Simon

From my experience of hreflang it seems that Google still doesn't always display the correct URL in SERPs. In addition we still see duplicates flagged up in Webmaster tools even though hreflang is present on these pages.

We have only ever used hreflang for different English language versions rather than different languages so I can't call upon any personal experience examples to illustrate when using only language variables.

I've found using the SEOMoz SERP Control panel so I can switch between different search engines (e.g Google UK, Google Us, Google Aus) is great for keeping track of how you appear in SERPs in each country you are targetting.

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By setting both a country and language in your subfolder you will be able to geo-target each country separately in in your Google webmaster account in order to give Google a clear indication of what language and country you are targeting. This in addition to hreflang should in theory ensure that searchers in each location see the correct version for their country.

In practice I've found that this is not 100% always the case, where occasionally you get the wrong version in SERPs, but generally it is probably the best practice if you are wanting to use a .com domain rather than separate TLDs.

You could make use of differentiating each of the title tags with use of page 2, page 3 etc but in addition if you really want to capitalise on the strength of the pages you could make use of the rel=next  rel=prev mark up to give a strong indication to Google that these are a paginated series. This will consolidate the indexing properties across all the pages.

Look at the following example lifted from Google webmaster Central

Let’s say you have content paginated into the URLs:

http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=1
http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=2
http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=3
http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=4

On the first page, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=1, you’d include in the section:

On the second page, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=2:

On the third page, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=3:

And on the last page, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=4:

By all means make each of the titles unique, but also connect them all in the series by implementing rel=next rel=prev.

Thanks Irving. Yes, our marketing department would like to cross-promote our other sites, so the SEO element is not our main concern here. Clearly nofollow the links seems the best policy to ensure we cross link without falling foul of Google.

Thanks Malcolm and Don for your responses. My feeling it that we should avoid linking site wide from the footer and maybe just link from the home page and no other and also 'nofollow' these links.

We have five sites which are largely unrelated but for cross-promotional purpose our company wishes to cross link between all our sites, possibly in the footer.

I have warned about potential consequences of cross-linking in this way and certainly don't want our sites to be viewed as some sort of 'link ring' if they all link to one another.

Just wondering if linking between sites you own really is that much of an issue and whether we should  'nofollow' the links in order to prevent being slapped with any sort of penalty for cross-linking.

Have you submitted your URLs in a xml sitemap to the major search engines? In addition, check your robots.txt - it may be that you preventing certain pages from being crawled.

301 redirects are fine. They pass the majority (but not all) of the link authority. It is 302 temporary redirects that you should avoid as these are intended as temporary and therefore link authority is retained by the original URL.

As far as I'm aware James, using sub-folders will mean that authority is passed to your domain as a whole but you will still need to build authority separately for each of your subfolders for them to rank in each country SERPs that you have targeted in webmaster tools and using the hreflang tag.

Hi, I'm looking into a similar fall experienced across several of our sites since Nov 21. From what I can gather, Panda is all about 'quality quality' and some of the signals used to indicate 'quality' are bouncerate, time on site, browse rate, CTR from search, rather than whether the content is well written.

I've identified that some of our pages have high bounce rates and maybe that is part of the reason we have seemingly been hit. Perhaps reducing bounce rates, improving on site clicks, improving browse rates etc will allow your site to bounce back. Personally, I'm still scratching my head wondering whether Panda really is to blame for our fall but improving 'quality' and the user experience certainly has to be one of our main goals.

Thanks Wissam. I posted the same question in a Google forum and was told that I should remove the canonical reference (but retain the hrelang elements) as some of the content was not entirely identical and had regional differences.

I've asked whether I should do the same (i.e not specify a canonical) when the content is entirely identical but equally relevant to different countries. Would the hreflang be enough to prevent them being considered duplicate?

Hi Wissam, yes indeed all the pages are informative article pages. I want each country specific version to rank highly in it's own country i.e en-us article to rank in US, en-au in Australia etc. Does specifying a canonical strangle your ranking in all the other countries?

When using hreflang in order to deliver the relevant version in SERs, should we also make use of a reference to a canonical version to avoid duplication?

Currently, we provide different regional versions of our content where the content is largely the same aside from minor changes due to spelling, units of measurement although occasionally larger amends are required.

We have implemented hreflang referencing all the alternative country Urls, e.g en-us, en-gb, en-aus etc but also specificied the canonical as the en-gb version since we are a UK based website and the majority of the content originated from the UK version of our site.

Recently, our rankings across all countries have been falling markedly and I'm wondering whether the canonical element may be at fault. We have not been engaging in any black hat activities that might have been responsible for any sort of fall.

When we implemented the hreflang and canonical in July 2012 our traffic has actually been increasing significantly until literally 21 Nov when the search traffic is plummeting considerably across all countries. It would be useful to know if you need to specify a canonical version when using hreflang or could there be another reason for our ranking falls.

Many thanks in advance of your assistance.

If i have a lengthy article which I decide to split into two separate articles E.g part 1 and part 2 but I target the same keyword in both articles, is this bad from an SEO point of view?

For example, if I publish an article about 'healthy snacks ideas' and call the first article 'Healthy snack ideas part 1' and the second article 'Healthy snacks ideas part 2' in order to differentiate between them, would these two articles effectively just compete against one another? Is using part 1 and part 2 in article titles bad practice?

Essentially what I am wondering is should you never ever have more than one article that is targetting the same keywords or should I just target slightly different keywords for each article even if they are very closely related?

Hi Scott, depending on the volume of new pages being created you could always make use of the 'Fetch as Google' contained in the 'Health' tab facility in your Webmaster account to make sure that your most important new pages are indexed.

Periodically you could add a new sitemap but on a daily or perhaps weekly basis submitting the important pages for indexing through your Webmaster account could be the way to go.

One of our sites utilizes a single .com domain but offers differentiated article page for users depending on their location.

For example:

example.com/articles/how-to-learn-seo-gb-en for UK

example.com/articles/how-to-learn-seo-us-en for US

example.com/articles/how-to-learn-seo-au-en for Aus

Currently we use example.com/articles/how-to-learn-seo as the relative link on the site and then the user is redirected by 302 to the correct article for them based on their location.

I've read countless pages about 302 redirects (and largely why you shouldn't use them because of link juice, indexing etc) but what alternative can we use since we don't want to permanently redirect to one URL but rather redirect to the relevant URL based on the users location.

All the stuff I've read talks about redirecting using 301s but this surely only works when you are redirecting from one URL to one permanent new URL as opposed to redirecting to one of many country specific URLs.

It's not really a solution for us to set up separate TLDs for each country so what is the best mechanism for redirecting user to the correct article for them and making sure that link juice is shared, pages are indexed etc?

I hope I've explained this well enough for any of you to offer advice. Many thanks in advance.

My site contains a number of listings for charities that offer various sporting activities for people to get involved in order to raise money. As part of the listing we provide an outbound link for the user to find out more info about each of the charities and their activities.

Currently these listings are blocked in the robots.txt for fear that we may be viewed as a 'link farm or spam site' (as there are hundreds of charities listed on the scrolling page) but these links out are genuine and provide benefits and are a useful resource for the user and not paid links.

What I'd like to do is make these listings fully crawlable and indexable to increase our search traffic to these listing, but I'm not sure whether this would have a negative impact on our Pagerank with Google potentially viewing all these outbound links as 'bad' or 'paid links',

Would removing the listing pages from our robots.txt and making all the outbound links 'nofollow' be the way forward to allow us to properly index the listings without being penalised as some kind of link farm or spam site? (N.B. I have no interest in passing link juice to the external charity websites)