Recently revamped site structure - now not even ranking for brand name, but lots of content - what happened? (Yup, the site has been crawled a few times since) Any ideas? Did I make a classic mistake? Any advise appreciated :)
-
I've completely disappeared off Google - what happened? Even my brand name keyword does not bring up my website - I feel lost, confused and baffled on what my next steps should be. ANY advice would be welcome, since there's no going back to the way the site was set up.
-
Well I'd say that the nonindex issue Gareth pointed out, and the major markability error I discovered are your two biggest concerns initially. But yeah, once the dust settles, the other issues I point out are all a concern. Unique content that's specific to each page is quite important to long term SEO success.
-
Wow Alan - I'm surprised at how quickly you were able to find so many issues -- HUGE thank you!!!! Egad I had no idea about this stuff - especially the videos - I wrongly assumed that because the videos are stored on the backend in a single location, that having them placed in multiple areas was fine. I cannot thank you enough for pointing these errors out -- I really appreciate your expert advice!
-
Once you fix the noindex, here's some other stuff. It's a "quick hit - what stands out" kind of an audit to see if there are any really obvious red flags.
1. Odd Links
Looking at the source of your POS Nightclub and Bar page I found some odd things going on related to links. Specific examples:
A) You've got a link off to the right side of the page just under the main navigation bar (under the "News" link). This link is titled "News" and it rotates different links to different news items. One of them goes to a site called Spoke.com and the rest go to other DInerware.com pages.
Each of these links has a link "title" attribute that appears to contain the intro text of whatever it's pointed to. The problem here is it's significantly filling content at the source level that's totally irrelevant to the page. If this is happening on the entire site,there's a lot of topical dilution.
While this issue itself shouldn't be a problem big enough to be concerned with, I do believe its harming your sites quality from a topical perspective. And since this is stuff only search engines see, or is only seen when hovering over whatever individual article is viewed in the rotator, it's not good to have so much content there. Not good at all.
Also, the Spoke directory isn't exactly a high quality directory. So linking there isn't helping your site's perceived trust aspects.
2. Apparent mass repetition of video content
Am I correct in that you've got some videos posted to multiple pages of the site? Causing serious duplicate content problems? Many pages seem to have almost no unique text while having several videos. If these are then shown on more than one page, not only do you lose out from a lack of HTML text based content (a significant factor), but you get hammered by the duplication.
3. Links to PDFs
I see links to PDFs in the right column of the Product Training page, and none of them have the php code at the end of them. Yet within the page itself, PDFs have it http://www.dinerware.com/pdf/DinerwareCFGManual.pdf?phpMyAdmin=6e28a551fa44f2aa65e57201d6164da9
What's that about?
4. Markup Language Fail - The biggest problem
When I run your site through the W3C Markup Validation check, it fails and can not process. This alone means you've got a site coding problem that's most likely causing serious problems with search engines.
Go to http://validator.w3.org and enter in http://www.dinerware.com/pos-product/training/
I doubt the complete breakdown that I got when submitting that URL is temporary - and if you see it too, that's a critical issue.
-
No problem!
-
HOLY SMOKES!!! Gareth - thank you so SO SO much! I'm not a back-end web person, but will get the right folks on it asap - wonder how that mistake could have been made -- I'm grateful to you!
-
Hi Jeanie, I just had a quick look at your site and noticed you have noindex, nofollow on all of the pages I checked. You may want to adjust this as you're telling the search engines not to index these pages. Take a look at your source code and you'll spot it quite easily.
-
http://www.dinerware.com - Thanks, Alan
-
Jeanie - what's your site? Can't offer help without knowing that.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
What Tools Do I USe To Find Why My Site No Longer Ranks
Hi, I made the mistake of hiring a freelancer to work on my website [in2town.co.uk](link url) but after having a good website things went from bad to worse. The freelancer was kicked off the platform due to lots of compliants from people and creating backdoors to websites and posting on them. It cost me money to have the back door to our site closed. I then found lots of websites were stealing my content through the rss feed. Two of those sites have now been shut down by their hosting company. With all these problems I found in Feb that the hundreds of keywords that I ranked for had vanished. And all the ones that were in the top ten for many years have also vanished. When I create an article which includes https://www.in2town.co.uk/skegness-news/lincolnshire-premier-inn-staff-fear-for-their-jobs/ they cannot be found in Google. Normally before all these problems, my articles were found straight away. If I put in the title name Lincolnshire Premier Inn Staff Fear For Their Jobs and then add In2town in front of it, then instead of the page coming up with the article, it instead shows the home page. Can anyone please advise what tools i should be using to find out the problems and solve them, and can anyone offer advice please on what to do to solve this.
Technical SEO | | blogwoman10 -
Duplicate Content Showing up on Moz Crawl | www. vs. no-www.
Hello Moz Community! I am new to SEO, Moz and this is my first question. My questions; I have a client that is getting flagged for Duplicate Content. He is getting flagged for having two domains that have the same content i.e. www.mysite.com & mysite.com. I read into this and set up a 301 redirect through my hosting site. I evaluated which site had a stronger Page Authority and had the weaker site redirect to the stronger site. However, I am still getting hit for Duplicate pages caused by the www.mysite.com & mysite.com being duplicates. How should I go about resolving this? Is this an example of a Canonical tag needed in the head of the HTML? Any direction is appreciated. Thank You. B/R Will H.
Technical SEO | | MarketingChimp100 -
Google rankings strange behaviour - our site can only be found when searching repeatedly
Hello, We are experiencing something very odd at the moment I hope somebody could shed some light on this. The rankings of our site dropped from page 2 to page 15 approx. 9 months ago. At first we thought we had been penalised and filed a consideration request. Google got back to us saying that there was no manual actions applied to our site. We have been working very hard to try to get the ranking up again and it seems to be improving. Now, according to several serps monitoring services, we are on page 2/3 again for the term "holiday lettings". However, the really strange thing is that when we search for this term on Google UK, our site is nowhere to be found. If you then right away hit the search button again searching for the same term, then voila! our website is on www.alphaholidaylettings.com page 2 / 3! We tried this on many different computers at different locations (private and public computers), making sure we have logged out from Google Accounts (so that customised search results are not returned). We even tried the computers at various retail outlets including different Apple stores. The results are the same. Essentially, we are never found when someone search for us for the first time, our site only shows up if you search for the same term for the second or third time. We just could not understand why this is happening. Somebody told me it could be due to "Google dance" when indices on different servers are being updated, but this has now been going on for nearly 3 months. Has anyone experienced similar situations or have any advice? Many thanks!
Technical SEO | | forgottenlife0 -
Question about duplicate content in crawl reports
Okay, this one's a doozie: My crawl report is listing all of these as separate URLs with identical duplicate content issues, even though they are all the home page and the one that is http://www.ccisolutions.com (the preferred URL) has a canonical tag of rel= http://www.ccisolutions.com: http://www.ccisolutions.com http://ccisolutions.com http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/IAFDispatcher?iafAction=showMain I will add that OSE is recognizing that there is a 301-redirect on http://ccisolutions.com, but the duplicate content report doesn't seem to recognize the redirect. Also, every single one of our 404-error pages (we have set up a custom 404 page) is being identified as having duplicate content. The duplicate content on all of them is identical. Where do I even begin sorting this out? Any suggestions on how/why this is happening? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | danatanseo1 -
Repeating brand name on all subcategory levels
As part consolidating our site navigation, I have an opportunity to change how we name url s on child pages. At present, I think there are 2 problems that could be fixed.
Technical SEO | | stephenfishman
1.As you drill down, the brand name is not part of each url.
2. Also, the urls show abreviations that are not customer friendly. Are these worth changing? I am redirecting pages whether I change the naming or not. Below is my current navigation and below that the changed navigation I am considering. Many thanks to all that look and share their thoughts. Handcrafter --- details -- This is an e-commerce site with on hand products and similar products which are custom ordered from a catalog: Current Navigation Drill Down: /ctgy/brandname.html /ctgy/brandname-onh.html
/ctgy/onhmir.html then the specific products:
/onhmir/30322-onhmir92_741.html
/onhmir/30324-onhmir96_743.html The catalog has more products and so has 1 extra level of child category pages:
ctgy/brandname.html
/ctgy/brandname-cat.html
/ctgy/brandname-catmir.html
/ctgy/design1catmir.html
/ctgy/design2catmir.html then the specific products:
/catmir/30322-catmirhappy.html
/catmir/30324-catmirhappy.html Changed Naming Under Consideration:
On pages above the product page, (category pages) spell out all words and place the brand name in the parent url. The result would be: /ctgy/brandname.html /ctgy/brandname-on-hand.html
/ctgy/brandname-on-hand-mirror.html then the specific products:
/brandname-on-hand-mirror/30322-onh-mir92_741.html
/brandname-on-hand-mirror/30324-on-hand-mir96_743.html The catalog has more products and so has 1 extra level of child category pages: /ctgy/brandname-catalog.html
/ctgy/brandname-catalog-mirror.html
/ctgy/brandname-catalog-mirror-style1.html
ctgy/brandname-catalog-mirror-style2.html then the specific products:
/brandname-catalog-mirror-style1/30322-cat-mirhappy.html
/brandname-catalog-mirror-style1/30324-cat-mirhappy.html0 -
Importance of keyword in the content to rank well
Well, I am very beginner seo. our website is www.theprinterdepo.com and our main keyword for the moment is refurbished printers, but there might be hundreds of more keywords. I was analyzing the SERPs and found that for our keyword, the first 2 websites that come up have very different content 1.http://www.geeks.com/products.asp?cat=PRN They rank first, but I dont see a lot of text with the keyword in their text or links 2. http://www.valstarprinters.com/ They mention the keywords lots of times in the text, probably they are doing keyword stuffing? So this makes me thing, how the 1st one ranked there? just by link builiding?
Technical SEO | | levalencia10 -
How to noindex lots of content properly : bluntly or progressively ?
Hello Mozers ! I'm quite in doubt, so I thought why not ask for help ? Here's my problem : I need to better up a website's SEO that consists in a lot (1 million+ pages) of poor content. Basically it's like a catalog, where you select a brand, a product series and then the product, to then fill out a form for a request (sorry for the cryptic description, I can't be more precise). Beside the classic SEO work, a part of what (I think) I need to do is noindex some useless pages and rewrite important ones with great content, but for the noindexing part I'm quite hesitant on the how. There's like 200 000 pages with no visits since a year, so I guess they're pretty much useless junk that would be better off in noindex. But the webmaster is afraid that noindexing that much pages will hurt its long tail (in case of future visits), so he wants to check the SERP position of every one of them, to only eliminate those that are in the top 3 (for these there's no hope of amelioration he thinks). I think it would be wasting a lot of time and resources for nothing, and I'd advise to noindex them regardless of their position. The problem is I lack the experience to be sure of it and how to do it : Is it wise to noindex 200 000 pages bluntly in one time (isn't it a bad signal for google ?) or should we do this progressively in like a few months ? Thanks a lot for your help ! Johann.
Technical SEO | | JohannCR0 -
Any good ideas on how to quickly rank a new site for a new product laucnh?
Hi, I'm thinking of examples like the wii u - when it was announced all wii u sites were new. what ways could one get an edge quickly when competing against other sites without a great deal of authority on this 'new' keyword? obvious ones are social bookmarking, what else could easily be used to quickly (<24hrs) at least help a bit in non competitive kws?
Technical SEO | | dmn020