Welcome to the Q&A Forum

John, did you use an incognito browser where you are not logged in to your Google account?

Hey Chris,

What would be the function of the multiple H1 tags on a single page?
The h1 tag should be used for the heading of the particular page is on. So it should be a short title for the entire page.

If you need multiple h1 tags because you have several different subject within the page then you might think about splitting the content over several pages. This will help your rankings for those pages as well because they are more specialised around a certain subject.

Hope i anwered your question. Let me know if you have more questions or if anything was unclear.

Perhaps you did something to send people who end up on a 404 page back to the homepage and typed in 'www.domain.com' in the place where to want them to end up. You should type in '/' at these kind of plugins to go to the root domain.

In my opinion blog posts build be better.

Blog posts are part of categories and then you can create a category such as 'How to's' and then place all blog posts under that category. This way you can create good looking and good scoring pages (the category pages).

If you use pages you will have to do it with direct links such as a big list of menu items. Nothing wrong with that but i would prefer to use posts.

That shouldn't hurt your site. I rebuild an e-commerce site which had 50.000 redirects in place at the moment i was working on it. Of course it adds a little bit of load to the server but it's not really noticable. This way you will keep the value of the old links.

Thomas Hall is right about the soft 404 pages being generally more acceptable. If you care more about the user experience then about the value from your old links then you could build a dynamic 404 page.

This page should tell the visitor that the product no longer exist and should give them a couple of products which are similar of relevant to the product they were searching for. This way you will improve the user experience with a soft 404.

Just to be clear, you don't have to set a redirect to the home page. You could also do it to the category pages or to popular products. It's very difficult to say since i don't know which branch your in. Who your target group is and what they are interested in.

The 301 redirect would be a better option.

I will try to explain why this is better than a 404 page.

1. If people posted a link to the product PageRank to your website.(This is one of the ranking factors in Google) If the page doesn't exist anymore and brings up the 404 page it will lose the value from all the links to that particular product. If you use a 301 redirect to send visitors to a relevant product or to the homepage then the value from those links will have effect on the page where you send them to.

2. Nobody likes a 404 page. There are very cool things you can do with a 404 page so that they are still helpful to the visitor such as most popular pages, a search function and even jokes. But in the end nobody would have clicked on the link or typed in the url to your website and think: Now i want to see his 404 page.

I hope i answered your question. Let me know if anything was unclear.

That is a very broad question and how effective it will be depends a lot of the keywords you are targeting and the competition for those keywords.

1. Keyword research: From what you said you already know which keywords you want to target, if this is not the case. There are several online tools available such as the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to find out which search queries people actually search for. Based on this you have a basic understanding of which keywords you want to get found on.

2. Website architecture: You should have a very good architecture in your website to be able to pass on PageRank to the most important pages in an efficient way. I will mention a link at the end of the post where you can find more information on this and many other subject.

3. On-page optimization: Make sure to optimize all your pages very well. Make sure you have very descriptive and compelling meta titles and meta descriptions. Have clean HTML code so the search engines can properly navigate through your site. Make sure all your links have a title attribute and all images have an alt atttribute.

4. Content: Write unique content for every page on your website and make sure to use your keywords in those texts. Use headings in combination with regular text to create a clear and easy to read piece of content and make sure that the headings give a short and clear description of the piece of text which it belongs to (try to use keywords in the headings too). Make sure that your content is something everyone will like and will want to link to because it is funny or because it is interesting, to do this you could include links to other pages, relevant images and/or video's.

Link building: Make use of social media such as Facebook, twitter, Google+ and Pinterest to reach your audience and let them know you exist. Links from Google+ even pass PageRank to your website. Reach out to people to let them know that a link to your website would benefit them because it is also interesting for their visitors. More on linkbuilding here: http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies

Link on how to rank well in search engines: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-rank

Hope i answered your question. Let me know if you have any questions or if anything was unclear.

It has a lot to do with the kind of website that you have.

In general you want to get a lot of links to the pages that you want to get found on. (blog posts, product pages etcetera)
But in general the homepage gets the most links because when people see your website and they like it the homepage is the most logical URL to link to.

Strengthening the home page will be helpful to your site because the homepage should be your content hub. You can find more information about content hubs, website architecture and a lot more here: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-rank

Hope i answered your question
Let me know if you have any other questions or if i was unclear about something.

Good luck!

I did some more research and seems that you are probably right. Publishership shows the big box on the right of the search results. Try googling Moz: https://www.google.com/#output=search&sclient=psy-ab&q=moz&oq=moz&gs_l=hp.3..0l4.430.621.0.822.3.3.0.0.0.0.333.806.0j1j0j2.3.0...0.0.0..1c.1.15.psy-ab.u-o2krTtAw0&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_cp.r_qf.&bvm=bv.47244034,d.d2k&fp=c582336016c8cd9&biw=1745&bih=980

I can really remember seing brand logo's in the search results though. If i ever see one again i will verify whether a rel=author or rel=publisher tag was used.

Thank you for confirming

I have seen company logo's in the search results from time to time. Can't think of an actual query right now where i found one though..

Unless it were people using it as an rel=author tag it should work (maybe google is still testing it and that's why we see them so rarily).

But that would be against Google's guidelines if i'm not mistaking. I'm not 100% sure that an author needs to be an individuel person. Can anyone confirm this?

Very good one Takeshi. Didn't think about whether the site in question had similar products like these. You are also right about the user reviews.

User reviews are a great way of getting unique content on a page. If you implement user reviews and ratings make sure you mark them up with structured data such as HTML5 Microdata. This way it can appear in the rich snippet. This page explains a lot about it: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=173379&topic=1088474&ctx=topic

It's indeed not something people would look for..

Very difficult problem you have there, at least it's good that you're making changes to it.
Don't forget to set a 301 redirect to the new page on any page you delete and if there is no new page then to the most relevant or the home page.

From what you told me i don't think it is an option to rebuild the entire site. The structure which is now there is way too difficult to change as much as it should in order for the best results.

The swingset website doesn't have very big descriptions either. I think you can make some good improvements on that area at least. There is one webshop in particular which i always use as a reference for how much content you should have on a product and that is vat19.com.

Not only is their marketing strategy perfect for their target audience. They offer so much information about their products. Images, text, specifications and video.

I hope i helped you at all with your problems and if you have any other questions or need more advice or a brainstorm partner let me know either in this thread (if it's relevant) or in a new thread (the you could send me a private message to let me know where to find it :)) or you could of course send me a private message directly, but then other people couldn't benefit from the problems and solutions we found.

Good luck with .. well everything

Chris, they do this in a lot of cases. If you have a Google+ company page try including the rel=publisher tag on a page where you did not use a rel=author tag. Use Google's structured data testing tool and you will see that they do show the publisher photo (which should be a company or brand logo.

Ah, it's difficult to see anything on the page because i can't read Turkish.

The only thing you should know is that every single page in a website should have unique content. So if two pages are exactly or almost exactly the same then Google will think it's duplicate content.

In my experience Google uses the Rich snippet information above the Authorship(publishership).

One more thing though. You mention a **company **logo and the rel=author tag.
You should create a Google+ company page and use the rel=**publisher **tag.

Hope i have answered your question

4000 products is indeed a hell of job to tackle if you want to write an original description for every single one of them. It is recommended to do this since it will improve the site.

I agree with Doug that you should start on the products which sell the most because you want to get found better on these products. I would start doing a given amount of products each day and keep good track of which products you did and which you didn't change.

Furthermore what i think is the most important thing is the title tags and description tags of those 4000 pages. Are they well optimized? Even if the pages are ranking well at this moment the title and description tags are the only way you can convince the visitor to click on your link in the search results and therefore they should be compelling and descriptive.

That does make the situation quite difficult.
Are there a lot of different combinations possible?

You could create a product page for every combination. This way your dealers can still direct the phone customers to the appropriate URL and you would still have a clean URL structure. For example: www.domain.com/category/outback-5ft-playset.

This still isn't perfect but as far as i can see it's the best option given the weird circumstances.

Hmm, all links are pointing to the home page with the brand name. That doesn't seem like a natural link profile and that is something which could get penalised.

But one problem at a time. Do you think the URL structure suggestion i provided will work?

It would be better to post on a regular schedule. (In your given example that would be every two weeks).

This is for a variety of reasons.

1. The search engines will see that you have a fresh batch of content every now and then.
2. Users will see that there is a blog post every two weeks and if they think that your blog is interesting enough to follow they will visit you every two weeks to read the new post.

Hope i answered your question