Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi

Not sure why this is happening, but I am having a lot of trouble viewing your gzipped sitemap.

Your robots.txt file is pointing at a gzip sitemap

http://www.tomlondonmagic.com/robots.txt

http://www.tomlondonmagic.com/sitemap.xml.gz

Is that what you submitted to google?  Try submitting the non gzip version and see if that makes a difference:

http://www.tomlondonmagic.com/sitemap.xml

Thanks

I think to get any helpful responses you will have to give some specific details.

It could be down to a number of factors, so in order to help the community is going to need to know what your site is to be able to look at it and give you some pointers.

With the info you have given, you are just going to get a bog standard list of all possible reasons for delisting, which isn't going to help you at all.

Hey There

I would say if you think the content will be useful for your visitors/customers then add it.  If you are wanting to add the content to attract new browsers through the SERPs then you are out of luck.  As you say the content is not unique, so you are unlikely to be attributed as the source/original author of the content.

I don't think (although someone will come along and put me in my place) you will be penalised for adding the content, you just won't receive any SERP boost for it.

But as I say, if it helps your customers, then go ahead and add it.

Thanks EGOL

This all makes sense.  It's nice to get a bit of a sanity check.

I think I worry because in the SERPs we struggle against our competition, but once we get a browser conversion is good.  So I keep worrying about the SERPs.  But I know I need to just concentrate on writing good content and adding depth to the site, and that will hopefully give us the pay day we are looking for.

Thanks

Paul

Excellent, great stuff

Thanks for your help.  I think these blog posts provide real value to the customers, which is the main thing.

Thanks

Paul

Hi guys

I have an eCommerce site and a blog. the blog is on a suddomain. I am writing content about our products on the blog, I.e. Full in depth reviews and top 10 lists etc.

These blog posts link back to the main product page.

It would also be nice for customers on the site to a "blogs about this product" section. However, would a link from the product page to the blog weaken the internal link from the blog to the product?

Thanks

Paul

Hi Tom

Thanks for taking the time to help me.  I like your ideas.  It's good to get input from someone with fresh eyes.

I hadn't thought about outreaching to Glamour, because we are a third party agent who sell subscriptions on behalf of the publishers of Glamour.  In effect we supply them with supplementary subscription orders, in addition to those they get themselves, so I think they would be unlikely to want to push people to us.  However, they may like to link to  that content, as it puts a fresh spin on their title.  I will look into that.

I like the idea about speaking to other bloggers.  Would you suggest opening with asking them what they think of the blog, and what they think about this topic of buying a magazine as a gift?  What's the best way to find these people?  Search for fashion blogs, twitter accounts etc?

Infographics, I have mused on these for a while.  They are all the rage, but I often wonder what percentage of total infographics actually become wide spread.  Therefore is it worth the time and effort creating one?  I might spend an hour or 2 playing with the idea and if it looks good I will add that to our blog also.

Thanks again

Paul

Morning Guys

As part of a bigger SEO Project I am writing some blog posts.  I am trying to use information we have based on shopping habits within our store.

So I have written this first blog post:

http://blog.uniquemagazines.co.uk/2013/03/top-10-womens-magazines-purchased-as.html

What can I do with my blog now to get more exposure?  I have submitted our blog to a couple of RSS directory lists.  I also created a pintrest board, and announced the blog post on our facebook and twitter accounts.

I am hoping to do 1 of these bigger posts per week, and this took me about 3-4 hours to research the stats and compile the information, so obviously the more I can get out of it the better.  Also, I am hoping over a number of weeks I can identify what sort of content relates best to our customers/browsers.

Thanks

Paul

That does indeed help.

Thanks

Paul

Hi Guys

I have worked throug this SEOMoz article to examine our back link profile

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-check-which-links-can-harm-your-sites-rankings

This is an image of the chart I ended up with.

http://bit.ly/Z7Pp1G

Does this look like an OK back link profile?  Should I be doing something about the high number of 0 and -1/NA rank links?

Thanks

Paul

backlinkprofile.gif

Hi LIttlesthobo

We did run a competition/giveaway for around 2 years.  What we found though was that we got the same people entering the competition all the time.  i.e. professional compers.

Are you saying that your competitions give you continued social interactions and are generating back links for you?

Thanks

Paul

Hi Egol

Thanks for your assistance.  We are looking at building more content through Q&A sections, video etc.  As you say this is a significant investment.  How do you gauge the ROI on a content writing project like this?  At the end of the day we are in this to generate revenue, or otherwise we might as well put on our coats and go home.

Something we did try in the last 12 months was adding more detail to our products.  Ok, let's be specific.  We sell Magazine Subscriptions, so we started adding details to the magazines about the target audience, if a kids magazine we listed what the target age is.  We listed the ISSN numbers, as schools and libraries search by these.  We added a whole raft of information bits to the magazines.  The net effect, we dropped in the search results.  This is probably down to other factors.

So now we are looking to build a Q&A, but I don't need to tell you how much of an investment that will be.  And with our experiences its difficult to walk down that path not knowing if it will make any difference, and what ROI we can expect.

What makes it even tougher is a competitor of ours who does very little in the way of content marketing, and does nothing more than add a magazine to their site, gets ranked far higher than us.

So we work our socks off going backwards, and this competitor simply adds product and does fantastically well.  There seems to be something amiss there.

I am waffling on now so I will end that there

Thanks for your help

Paul

Hi seomoz guys

So I read a lot on seomoz and other sites, and see a lot of info about earning links, but this all seems to be aimed at blogs and brochure sites.

Being blunt, we sell stuff. Our competitors sell the same stuff. We are limited on what we can do product description content wise as our suppliers expect us to use the content they supply.  We are now putting together q and a pages based on a great article in the seomoz blog.

Does anyone have any great ideas for developing link bait or just getting links to an eCommerce site?

We know our service is good, and our product is good, but that's not enough to convince someone to link to us.

Help

Thanks

Paul

Thanks Chris

I checked the links to the UK Vogue page with both the internal link checker on web master tools and screaming frog.  There were less to the UK page. So that's pretty clear I need to improve the architecture of links here.

Regarding the top 10 women's magazines area, what would be the most effective way of utlising that content?  I could do something as simple as a numbered list 1-10 with the mag names in a side bar, or I could do a seperate page, with a paragraph of content or 2 for each title.  This could take the form of a blog post.

I guess I could do both?

Thanks for your extremely helpful input.

Paul

Hi Guys

I think this sounds like a right noobie question, but I am amongst friends so here goes.

So our website is an ecommerce site selling magazines.  There are certain magazines, for example Vogue, where we sell the UK version, USA, italian, spanish, french etc there's basically 13 different Vogue magazines on our site.

The more niche ones attract some good long tail traffic.  However, the UK version is competitive and so requires some extra umph to get us a half descent rank.

However, when you search "vogue magazine subscription" for example, it's our italian vogue which is listed first.

When I looked into this, I found that we had linked out from our UK Vogue to Italian vogue.  Could this have given the italian vogue a marginal boost, as it had the additional internal links?

What I have now done is add to some, not all, of the variations something along the lines "you will find the UK Vogue magazine here" where "UK Vogue Magazine" is the anchor text.

Is this the right thing to do?  Will this identify that the UK Vogue page is the higher priority page, or the more important page?

I was also going to add to a category page a "Top 10 Womens magazines" section, and link to Vogue from there.

Am I barking up the right tree?

Thanks Guys

Paul

Just checked google analytics, and the mobile site is getting traffic from google, yahoo and ask engines.  So inbound traffic is coming through.  And it is converting to sales, which is the important bit.

I will update the DTD, and monitor it over the next few days/weeks and see what happens.

Thanks for all your help Mike.

That's great Mike, thanks for your help.

I have also found this webmaster guideline

" Pages we determine aren't viewable on a mobile phone won't be included in our mobile site index (although they may be included in the regular web index). This determination is based on a variety of factors, one of which is the "DTD (Doc Type Definition)" declaration. Check that your mobile-friendly URLs' DTD declaration is in an appropriate mobile format such as XHTML Mobile or Compact HTML (3). If it's in a compatible format, the page is eligible for the mobile search index"

This links through to http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=72462

I think I should change the DTD to a mobile friendly one and see if that helps.

Thanks Mike

Silly question, but how to you check specifically the google mobile index?  Is this just by doing a site:m.uniquemagazines.co.uk search in a mobile device?

Thanks

Paul

Thanks Mike

I must admit I have done so much reading, to the point of confusing myself totally.  When you say no pages are indexed to you mean in the mobile index?

When I do a search on normal google, site:m.uniquemagazines.co.uk it tells me that 5480 pages are indexed.  Now, I am hoping this is because initially we didn't have a rel=canonical on the mobile content and so it has ended up being listed in normal serps as duplicate.

This may be why the m.uniquemagazines.co.uk domain is not indexed in the mobile serp index.

I am assuming that in web master tools our mobile site should show a number for indexed pages next to the Mobile submitted section.

Many thanks for your help

Paul

Wow, so many responses

Just as an update I have implemented canonical and alternate tags on the desktop and mobile site to clarify to google et al that the mobile site is the same content as desktop, just an alternate delivery.

Will see what that does for me.