Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Diane,

http://www.numion.com/stopwatch/Start.html?Url=http%3A%2F%2Fin2town.co.uk%2Fnews%2Ftravel-holiday-news%2Fsainsburys-customers-10-points-back-on-easyjet-flights-with-nectar&WebtimerButton=00%3A00%3A01.851

Try measuring the speed of your pages with this.

What hosting do you have?

Hi Diane,

Many things effect bounce rate, you must also be careful when using Google's bounce rate stats as they don't always tell the full story (if you're linking to external domains as a big part of your biz it will count that as a bounce also). But very specifically to your site I'd say you have some trust and load time issues.

Re; Trust - elongated faces and repeated images don't say to me that this is a professional site, so that wont help your bounce. The logo also needs a bit of a revamp imo.

Load Time - It took me 10 seconds to travel from home to travel - thats about 10 times more time than i would expect.

If you address those two issues, trust and load time, firstly, and use Google analytics as a benchmark (that magical 67%) and then dig a little deeper.

Lastly: Re your biz model, I'd recommend trying to match the ads to the consumer a little more closely, if Im interested in Travel, maybe some travel ads? The ads I found were not retargetting ads or travel based ads. How do you hope to get people to this site: if its just via unique content driven via Google then keep in the theme of the clicked SERP?

He just said it. Is this a new domain? Im in the same boat as you for some of my domains.

Hi Jamie

OK, recently updated the sitemap and linked up all the pages we completed within yesterday (about 16 original content bits). I am HOPING they all go up together, 2 or 3 pages a day is killer.

Thanks

Hi

The Googlebot seems to come around healthily, every day we see new pages that we've written the week before get ranked, however, if we are adding 12-15 new products/blog entries/content bits each day, only about 2-3 ever get indexed per day and so, after a few weeks, this builds up to quite a time lag.

Is there any way to help step up the amount of new pages that get indexed every day? It really will take 2 or 3 each day, but no more than that, it seems strange. We're fairly new, around 6 months creating content but domain name 18 months old.

Will this simply improve over time, or can something be done to help google index those pages? We dont mind if the 15 we do on Monday all get indexed the following Monday for example?

Hi

We have a set of reviewed products (in this case restaurants) that total an average rating of 4.0/5.0 from 800 odd  reviews.

We know to use schema/restaurant for individual restaurants we promote but what about for a list of cities, say restaurants in boston for example. For the product page containing all of Boston restaurants -

should we use schema.org/restaurant (but its not 1 physical restaurant)

or schema.org - product + agg review score?

What do you do for your product listing pages?

If we get it wrong, is there a penalty? Or this just simply up to us?

I ask because I notice in individual Google profile you must fill in "contributor to" to get the rel=author to work, but that doesn't exist in the company Google profile. Im guessing the "Links" page in the Google + for a company then is how to verify?

Hi

OK, so is it the same rel=author steps or is this now a rel=publisher thing?

Thanks

Hi,

Is there a way to get the benefits of rel=author for protecting site content but to disconnect that from the face photo on the SERPS?

We added rel=author to our unique and individually written product descriptions and reviews. This has led to a decrease in click thru thus far. I suspect this is because when searching for a product to buy the user sees the face and thinks "review" or at least "not corporate".

I don't nec. want to dump rel=author in the sea yet for our ecom pages, has anyone had success with product page rel=author?

Four our keywords, we are the only company of 10 well known travel sites that have the face in the SERPS, far from improving our CTR, it has trashed it.

Any ideas?

Hi kane

Thanks a lot for your response

In the long run, it may not be the only way to make money, but in order to contract the product, I gotta get the hits running through the site... bit of a viscious circle. I was a bit worried the rank will fall but I think you're right, with an affiliate site theres only so much you can do, as long as you follow best practice.

Ive been worried about it also for bounce rate stats but having watched rands whiteboard friday, seems its not something I need to worry about YET...

Thanks Kane

Hi

Like everyone I've read a lot about rel=author but is there a reason not to use it?

For instance, if you're running the content, as I am, for a travel company, we have individual writers writing the content and guides to cities/hotels/tours etc, but none of our competitors are using rel=auithor, so we certainly do stand out. But does the "personal" touch of rel=author dilute trust in some cases?

For instance, if you're booking a specific hotel in London and you type in the hotel name looking for the best rate, do you really want to see a face you don't know beside a "corporate result"?

Is anyone in an industry where rel=author is being used in conjunction with products/product reviews. It will work for Gary V and wine, but will it work everywhere? Rel=author is touted everywhere as a sure fire bet... but are there times to back off from using it?

Hi Sean

No, absolutely no black hat whatsoever, but as an affiliate perhaps Google wouldn't want us to outrank the original supplier of the rates?

And in answer to your second comment, we don't use the information from a competitor at all, what we do, is use the rates provided from the publisher (so for example, we don't use content from Delta airlines but we have their rates for flights).

However, you are right in that a publisher can pull the plug on affiliate for just marketing better than them. Annoying though, we put a lot of time and effort into our rankings to sell their products... for them to pull the plug for doing it too well.

Hi

We're an affiliate travel site, and not only are we outranking the site who provides the rates, we're also outranking some of the very big travel companies that provide rates to them.

Of course, that's great. But it's also worrying, following the advice of SEOMOZ to the letter we've managed to acheive great ranking for product names and even cities/place, we've got 100% unique content (the affiliate site offer XML but we haven't taken it) with our own pictures, reviews and videos, but is this going to be enough?

I'm concerned that, outrank these bigger companies on enough keywords and they will either a) complain to google or b) stop providing us with rates.

What steps should I take in this situation? I feel it is our "competitors" job to up their game, rather than for us to try to sail under the radar, but unfortunately and I've been involved in SEO where this has happened before, if you start to rank well, they'd rather pull the plug on you than up their game.

Is there any advice out there on this type of thing, how I can at least stay in Google's good books if a competitor does decide we don't "deserve" our ranking?

Hi There,

I'm a consultant and am used to working for brands that have their own product. Currently I am advising a hotel site that is an affiliate of another branded site. They do rather well at what they do but I am looking for some advise.

I am aware that google tends not to "like" affiliates, I assume this is because the product is not theirs or that they have thin content.

With this affiliate they have not used any XML information, they have built all their own pages, taken non of the content from the master site, but eventually, in the buying process the customer has to go off to a white label version of the master company site.

Even though all the landing pages have unique content and are currently doing well in the SERPS im concerned that with a Google update sometime in the future, perhaps there will be a penalty. We've done all we can content wise (videos, unique photos, unique words, social etc).

q1 - is there any way to link the two sites, the white label and the main content site so google doesn't see it as leaving one site for another?

q2 - how is this situation best handled?