Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hello Guys,

Due to some issue our Moz Report has not been updated since 1st February. Could you please check it and update our campaign?

Hi Keri,

I am also facing this issue with your links data as most of it is outdated and can you please confirm that link data is up to date as 1 month period is quite long and to analyse our site and competitors we have to be quick on analyzing and observe the results.

Hi Tom, Thank you so much for pointing this out. I was not aware to the fact that quotation can make a such big difference. Thanks Again.

Hi Guys,

Need help in understanding whether having duplicate pages on your site push you down in rankings. Our all product pages getting indexed by Google with different parameters i.e. filters, affiliate id, utm_source etc. and then we have 10-15 duplicate for one product page. I am observing dip in rankings whenever Google starts indexing these duplicate but when I asked this question to John Muller and other Google team they said if you set up canonical then you don't have to worry about having different urls for same page but we are not ranking on Google and if we do then we dropped from page 1 to page 2 or sometimes page 3.

Example - http://goo.gl/G5p3X5

Any suggestions.

Hi Dean,

Thanks for your prompt reply. We are using rel canonical tag from different variants to one URL. Do you think adding all variant in one page and giving option to click on the color image to choose color variant help in rankings?

Hi guys,

Please advice me on something improving my product pages ranking. We are doing well for head terms, categories but not ranking for product pages.

We have issues with product pages which I am think is hard to tackle. For instance we have duplicate products (different colors), duplicate content internally (colors) and from manufacturer websites.

Product pages linked from sub-category i.e. Home > Category > Sub-Category (20 per page) using pagination for next 20 and so on.

Product pages linked internally via widgets that says other Similar products, featured products etc.

Another issue with our product pages is that we are using third party reviews platform and whenever users add reviews to product pages this platform creates an hyperlink to different anchors which is not relevant to product. Example - http://goo.gl/NUG652

Can somebody please give some advice on how to improve rankings for product pages. writing unique content for thousands of pages is not possible. Even our competitor not writing unique content.

Check the cached text version of your page in Google and compare it with that of first 5 results. It might be that through you have it in H1 tag however, during crawl process Google is finding it below the content which it is highlighting for your page. Compare it with top ranking sites and you might have to simply fix the code of the page.

Since, the brand name was Ross & Bute earlier, it might actually take some time before Google can pick the change in brand name especially if the site had a lot of authority and links coming from authority sites with "And". Having said that you can try some of the following to speed up the process:

1. Press Release in Big PR sites talking about the change in name

2. Contacting and getting the anchor changed for already created brand links

3. Getting Yahoo, Business and other directory links updated

4. and wait for Google to pick up the changes

IMO, Anchor text diversification has a lot to do with your niche market and industry. For instances, in your industry if all the sites ranking on top have very targeted anchor text with no major diversification as such then you might want to take that route while if sites in your industry have unrelated (with respect to keywords targeted) anchor text - like brand names, click here, read more then you should work in that direction because you might play but cannot compete in soccer while wearing tennis shoes.

Here is how you get the highlighting done where character is >140

1. Goto new rules in Conditional formatting dropdown

2. Select "use a formula to determine which cell to format"

3. In the edit section under "format value where formula is true" give following:

=len(A1)>140

and then select custom formatting (fill color)

Now simply use format painter option to fill the complete column (all individual cells) with this formatting

*Note I am using Excel 2010

Here is how you get the highlighting done where character is >140

1. Goto new rules in Conditional formatting dropdown

2. Select "use a formula to determine which cell to format"

3. In the edit section under "format value where formula is true" give following:

=len(A1)>140

and then select custom formatting (fill color)

Now simply use format painter option to fill the complete column (all individual cells) with this formatting

*Note I am using Excel 2010

If you hide the address in Google Places account, Google will remove all instances from public view whether in Google Place page. It will only show this address to you when logged-in

Unfortunately there is nothing you can do to speed-up the process especially when Google Places is having some real troubles in managing data these days.

Technically you can delete the old files if the redirect is in place correctly.

However, do test it out after you delete the pages to ensure that everything is fine. You can use Google WMT's 'Fetch as Googlebot' to know the exact response Google gets.

I will say that you should worry about traffic and not PageRank with the change you intend to make.

If you implement the 301 redirect correctly from old URLs to new, you should be on the same traffic levels within a month (maximum) after this change. However, the double check if the redirect are working properly from the time of switch.

There is no limit to number of 301 redirect that you can add however, avoid and chain redirect like

Page  A >> Page B >> Page C

Only issue that you might face is increased server latency with so many redirects in the htaccass (if you are using this method to redirect) as for every request this file will be scanned for a possible redirect. An alternate can be that you keep the old pages on the site and do a php script 301 redirect  at page level which will be time taking as you might have to manually update the code of each page. Note that the script should be at the very beginning of the page so Google crawls it first and moves on. With this method you can ensure that page speed is not affected for the pages where no redirects are added.

You can choose any of the platforms on a self hosted domain.

What you should be focusing on is the quality of content. The content should be unique with your thoughts and inferences/inputs even if it is about a generic topic that can add value to the users. Also, share your posts and participates in discussions on social communities to create a buzz as as as gain authority as an author in the respective niche. This is the only way forward if you want to future proof it from Google's algorithmic changes.

Depending upon the domain authority you can have sitelinks for multiple internal pages. We have extended sitelinks for many of our brand terms where one of the category page ranks on top along with 6 sub-categories pages as sitelinks.

With proper SEO strategy, you can have sitelinks for your client's different location specific pages.

"Fetch as GooleBot" gives you the details that Google will fetch from your source code (no ajax code will appear for instance)  along with server response code.

If you want to see how your page will show in SERP's preview you need to use the tool "Instant Previews" under Labs section of the Google webmaster tool.

As per Google, depending upon the user-agent you should display the website. So, for Googlebot-mobile only mobile site remains visible and for Googlebot (desktop) only desktop site is shown. Google preaches adding a 301 redirect to mobile version depending upon user-agent detection. Find complete article here:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/02/making-websites-mobile-friendly.html

This change should solve your current issues with the rankings

The above rel canonical on the page is perfectly fine. They should not be reason for your ranking drop and can be left untouched. However, make sure that all pages have canonical set as respective page URLs.

These are generally added give a directive to search engines about the one version of URL to be indexed. Reasons for the same can be numerously like reducing duplicate content on the site (especially ecommercce site) to ensuring the link value passes to main URL where people link to your pages using utm parameters.

You can read more about canonical tags here: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394

To answer your specific question, a lot of times Google displays algo created title tags if it believes that the one supplied by the webmaster is not good enough or does not contain the query term being searched for.

If Google is changing the title tag even when the search term is present in the title you have mentioned on the page then you might consider changing it and making it more meaningful. Having said that, there is no guarantee that Google will pick and display your changed title even if it matches the search term and is grammatically correct and good to read.