Welcome to the Q&A Forum
Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.
So, why do you consider the result inaccurate? If they are coming up that close to the top then perhaps a number of people are using that keyword to search specifically for those businesses. Google believes that their content is good, and, that you may have been looking for them, albeit with them on the 2nd page Google hedged its bets that you were not.
You are correct, the more user readable friendly (short, easy to understand, without long alpha-numeric strings) your urls are the better they should perform, as long as your on page content is considered relevant by Google for whatever terms it is using.
This is not an SEO function, this has to do with how your site is coded and how that code interacts with the app. You will need to bring in a Dev to troubleshoot your code and find a solution.
There is nothing wrong with unlisted pages, it is even recommended for any content behind login screens or procedurally generated pages like carts. If something it not listed, Google will not see it so it will have add no value to your site from a search perspective.
Set up Canonical tags and use Google's UTM codes to track your non-internal links (as your internal links will be tracked just fine by Google Analytics without any need for using redirects).
Google is all about serving the best experience with the best content. When you put tabbed content on a website, especially if the tabs serve multiple topics, you are watering down that page. Also because a portion of the content starts at hidden, it makes a worse UX experience for a user to directly get to your content (because they have to click).
Without knowing more I would guess the issue is tabbed content does not perform as well as content that is always displayed on a page. Always look to your content first, then worry about things like title tags.
That sounds rough. What you will want to do is alter your content for your single city based website to reflect that you serve that city, then when Google is looking for a match for a person near that city, it should see that site as the best match do to the weight it puts on geolocation. In the long run, you will want to re-write all of your content on one site so that your two sites will not be hurting each other or look like copy/paste spam sites.
Jon,
If there is no content and these pages are just the download link then instead of putting a canonical link on them, set them as noindex. I assume you have a landing page that directs people to your downloads, this is where you should optimize your content to get organic traffic, the direct download pages (with 0 content) will have no real value from a search perspective.
Each domain should have its own robots.txt and sitemap.xml and you should only reference that domain in its sitemap.
You should find the locations of those links and correct them to point to the proper URL. I find that Screaming Frog's crawl is the easiest for this, you can find every link and see where they are located.
There are 2 parts of your robots.txt that could be causing this, and it all just depends on how each bot is reading regular expressions in your robots.txt:
First, your Disallow: /? can be read as Disallow all paths starting with "/" with 0 to infinity characters "" and one character "?". Try replacing this part with Disallow: /*? to make it not crawl anything with a query string (which is what I believe you were going for).
Second, you have a open Disallow followed by the User-agent: rogerbot and while this should not be read this way, once again it all depends on how each bot reads the commands. To fix this you should change your Disallow following your Googlebot-Image as Disallow: /
I have never been a fan of paying for "premium" domains, especially since Google put out that the TLD does not affect ranking. Anytime I am rolling out a new site I will just find the best available option that does not have a bunch of negative baggage associated with it. In general, you should expect to have a harder time ranking a URL with a hyphen in it, but if you are concerned you can always shop around for other .(dot) extensions.
If your content cannot be seen without logging in or getting past a "gate" then in general, Google will not serve people to that content. If you are planning on trying to spoof it so that the Google bot can crawl the content but people cannot see it, don't, Google will find out and then at best you will just see all of your rankings tank. Google wants to searve people the best, easiest content that will give them what they are looking for so if you are not openingly providing that content then Google will not send you traffic for those queries.
What you should see is search engines delivering people directly to your product page instead of landing them on your interstitial category page, which should help you out. In general, the less pages a potential customer has to navigate to get to the product that they are looking for, the more likely they will purchase it.
So this will really depend on how your website is set up, what CMS you are using etc. In general whatever CMS your site is one should have, on each page, the ability for your to edit all fields for that page, including the title tag.
Alan,
Triggered emails can be very effective when done right, the key I have found is making sure that your follow up email provides your potential client with value (not money or a discount, just value). A
As for to many emails, you should be able to cap your send frequency to people so that you do not get excessive. I try not to send more than 2 emails a week and only if the person does a high value action or specifically requests it.
When you first start sending emails (especially if you have not been using this list regularly) you will see a larger amount of unsubscribes, this is normal anytime you start getting in front of customers more often, don't worry, the people unsubscribing from 1-2 monthly emails were not going to become customers. Really what it comes down to is you will need to feel out your niche, some industries it is great to do weekly sends, others once a month can be to much.
Alan,
I work with a number of different B2B companies that use email marketing regularly. You are correct that Mondays and Fridays are bad days to send as we have done a good amount of send time testing and those days always perform poorest. We have found, across almost all of our clients, that Tuesdays between 11am-1pm EST are the best time to send in the US for our clients, but as Kelly mentioned, you should conduct your own tests to find out when your audience is best engaged.
While it is possible, it is not easy to set up nor would i recommend it. If you are having issues to the level that you are considering using GTM as your CMS, it is time to invest in a proper CMS for your website.
This is more of a UX questions, but generally if you are delivering a help content, opening it up in a tab is fine. Many times there will be other on pages interactions that a visitor may want to make as well, so you do not want to remove them completely from the page.