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Digging through analytics today an noticed that our sites top landing pages are for pages that were part of the old www.towelsrus.co.uk website taken down almost 12 months ago. All these pages had the 301 re-directs which were removed a few months back but still have not dropped out of Googles crawl error logs.

I can't understand why this is happening but almost certainly the bounce rate on these pages (100%) mean we are loosing potential conversions.

How can I identify what keywords and links people are using to land on these pages?

Hi Mat.

OK I had optimized this page for "Turkish cotton bath towels" and "Turkish bath Towels". That said, it still had 47 instances of the keyword in alt tags and a further 16 instances on the page. I can see why and where the extra instances are being generated unnecessarily which can be addressed when the product page is redesigned. As for the lat tags this is beyond me as to why its generating these so many times.

BTW, your helps really been useful. This is relatively new to me (2 months working on this site actively) and so much has come to light that you just wouldn't ever ask unless you get "hands on".

Hi Mat

Thanks for the response. I have run all pages being optimsed through the on page checker and am getting A results for those pages optimised.

In regards to keyword stuffing, the issue I have is a lot of the keywords are dynamically generated by the system we use which is frustrating, I will be discussing this with them as I will regarding alt tags (40 instances of our keyword on 1 page in alt tags seems strange). We are about to have the product page redesigned to remove all tabs and have a 1 page affair so all the information is right in front of the customer without them having to click all over the place for more information.

Any further comments greatly appreciated.

At present most of our products are listed in the singular form.

http://www.towelsrus.co.uk/towels-bath-towels/aztex/turkish-cotton-bath-towel_ct473bd182pd2744.htm

However we are optimising for the plural form after carrying out keyword research

The question is should I update the product title to reflect this change? This would then change the URL of the page, H1 tag, H2 tag (both auto generated from the product title)

My concern here is that these pages will then become "new pages" and will need to index and rank, albeit they don't rank well as they have never been optimised until now. I could put 301 re-directs in place on the old URL's or i could just let the return a 404.

What do people think?

I am trying to understand why the on page reporter shows so many occurrences of alt tags containing my keywords. Can anyone shed any light?

This is the URL that's in question.

http://www.towelsrus.co.uk/towels-hand-towels/aztex/turkish-cotton-hand-towel_ct472bd182pd2745.htm

yMlM5.png

At present at a category level, our site does not incorporate images specific to the category you are in and therefore we do not have appropriate alt tags to suffice SEO requirements.It only covers categories you are navigating too.

e.g. http://www.towelsrus.co.uk/towels/catlist_fnct561.htm (no image placement available on page for that category, it only shows sub categories

Does anyone have any suggestions how we get over this? How big a deal is it to not have  image with appropriate keyword driven alt tag? Can you put more than 1 keyword phrase in a alt tag?

Thank you Justin. These things are sometime so obvious and blinker you when you stare at the site all day.

Thanks again for the help.

I am struggling to locate on our website www.towelsrus.co.uk a self cannibalizing keyword. Can anyone help?

http://www.towelsrus.co.uk/Bath-Linen-Bath-Pillows/Aztex/Luxury-Bath-Pillows-With-Suction-Cups-4-Embroidered-Designs_ct463bd182pd2818.htm

void Keyword Self-Cannibalization

Easy fix

<dl>

<dt>Cannibalizing link</dt>

<dd>"Luxury Bath Pillows With Suction Cups, 4 Embroidered Designs"</dd>

<dt>Explanation</dt>

<dd>It's a best practice in SEO to target each keyword with a single page on your site (sometimes two if you've already achieved high rankings and are seeking a second, indented listing). To prevent engines from potentially seeing a signal that this page is not the intended ranking target and creating additional competition for your page, we suggest staying away from linking internally to another page with the target keyword(s) as the exact anchor text. Note that using modified versions is sometimes fine (for example, if this page targeted the word 'elephants', using 'baby elephants' in anchor text would be just fine).</dd>

<dt>Recommendation</dt>

<dd>Unless there is intent to rank multiple pages for the target keyword, it may be wise to modify the anchor text of this link so it is not an exact match.</dd>

</dl>

Hi Marcus.

That sounds like a good Strategy. I am going to look at different structure on our dev site and see what works best overall from both technical and more importantly the customers point of view.

I'll definitely have a look at he apps you mentioned. They seem really interesting.

Once again, many thanks for your advise. Really helpful indeed

Regards

Craig

Hi Marcus,

That's is correct for our site.

I had thought of this and agree its technically the easiest way to deal with this, however I wonder how problematic it would be for the customer if they were trying to navigate say from a product to another category completely, there would be no easy way to do this. I am not convinced that the customer would use the breadcrumb trail to do so.

Maybe there is a way of utilising the primary navigation but limiting the number links from it.

Thanks for your help.

Craig

SEOmoz tools is reporting each page on our site containing in excess of 200 internal links mostly from our primary navigation menu which it says is too many.

This also causes cannibalization on the word towels which i would like to avoid if possible.

Is there a way to reduce the number of internal links whilst maintaining a good structure to allow link juice to filter through the site and also reduce cannibalization?

Hi All,

I finally got to the bottom of the problem and it is that they have not applied canonicalization across the site, only to certain pages which is not my understanding when they implemented the update a few weeks back.

So they are preparing a hot fix as part of a service pack to our site which will rectify this issue and apply canonicalization to all pages that contain query strings. This should clear that problem up once and for all.

Thank you both for your input, a great help.

Hi,

Here are a couple of examples for you.

Duplication issue is showing because of below type of URLs:

http://www.towelsrus.co.uk/towels/baby-towels/prodlist_ct493.htm

http://www.towelsrus.co.uk/towels/baby-towels/prodlist_ct493.htm?dir=1&size=100

```

Yes www.towelsrus.co.uk

The Canonical URL updates were supposed to have been implement some weeks back.

I have asked why there are 2 webmaster tools codes, I expect this is my account plus they have one to monitor things there end.

Query string parameters have been setup, but I am unsure if they are configured correctly as this is all a bit new to me and i am in there hands to deal with this really.

The URLs without query strings are submitted to Webmaster tools via site maps and they are the URLs we want indexed.

Our web hosting company recently applied a update to our site that should have rectified Canonicalized URLs. Webmaster tools had been reporting duplicate content on pages that had a query string on the end.

After the update there has been a massive jump in Webmaster tools reporting now over 800 pages of duplicate content, Up from about 100 prior to the update plus it reporting some very odd pages (see attached image)

They claim they have implement Canonicalization in line with Google Panda & Penguin, but surely something is not right here and it's going to cause us a big problem with traffic.

Can anyone shed any light on the situation???

Duplicate%20Content.jpg

Hi Rebekah,

Really appreciate your feedback.

You are correct in that we are looking to rank for those 3 keywords. I do agree that Towels is too generic, so I'll look at alternative keywords to replace this one.

I think the main issue with towels being mentioned so often is that the majority of these instances are links and to change them will re-write the URL's which then means a lot of additional work. We would have to look at this in more depth before carrying it out.

I'll have a little play around to see what can be easily achieved and if possible rework the menus to reduce the instances.

I am new to this so still getting to grips with a few things.

I have a page here that I want to optimise for 3 keyword phrases.

Towels, Egyptian Cotton Towels, Personalised Towels

http://www.towelsrus.co.uk/towels/catlist_fnct561.htm

SEOmoz reports a huge number of instances of the word towels overall.

• Title 3

• URL 1

• Meta Desc 5

• H1 3

• H2-4 1

• Body 83

• B / Strong 1

• IMG ALT 11

Total Keyword Usage for this Page = 108How could i restructure meta tags and descriptions to still rank for these terms but reduce the level the word towels? Similarly as this is a category how can I reduce the term towels from other on page links?Also any extra advice regarding on page optimisation would be greatly appreciated to help our efforts

That's a great response, thank you, really helpful.

What about making sure the first instance of your keyword is in bold close to the start of the body text?

Again I get mixed views on this.

Thanks

Craig

We employee an outside agency to write content for our website as we do not have the ability in house to write unique and good quality content.

They have just sent an article which is around 300 words. I told them the keyword phrases to use. When I got the document there is only 1 instance of the keyword phrase(s) in it.

Now there seems to be a conflict here amongst posts I have read and general SEO advise as to how many times it should be present (SEOmoz indicates 4 times for instance), our outside agency says it doesn't matter.

Now if I have a page optimised for 2 keywords this starts making things tricky and probably looks keyword stuffed to the reader.

Assuming the keywords are present once in meta tags, H1, meta descriptions and alt text, what do people think is best practice taking into account recent panda updates?

Thoughts appreciated.

Thanks Craig

Hi Greg,

Thanks for your reply. So in a nutshell we just need to get back links updated use the new URL's in order to pull back PA we had previously?

Regards

Craig