Questions created by lcourse
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Can I filter the results of an user comparison by language/country?
Is it possible to filter the follower list after comparing the followers of 2 twitter accounts? E.g comparing Twitter acc. A and B, select followers of both, receive follower list --> no language/country filter available. Any chance?
Social Media | | lcourse0 -
Noindex or canonical tag for products which have no unique product description?
I have several ecommerce sites in the same niche and there are a high number of products shared among these sites. I understand that having unique product descriptions for each site may be ideal, but for several reasons this is not an option for the short term. Sales-wise it would be useful to continue products on several sites at the same time. Also it would not be a problem if only the product pages of our main store would show up in the google index. I thought about adding noindex xrobots tag to avoid that product pages are indexed in more than one store to avoid issues with duplicated or thin content or would you implement canonical tag here? What would you suggest?
On-Page Optimization | | lcourse0 -
Best practice for footer in ecommerce - Shall I add Top Category links?
What would you recommend regarding links to "Top Products" and "Top Categories" in footer? Would you add them to give extra link juice to top categories? would you try to avoid category links in footer that are already in the header navigationor in the main content area to avoid linking twice from all pages? would you vary these top category links in footer according to main category
On-Page Optimization | | lcourse0 -
Will changing order of bullet points in product descriptions add some uniqueness?
We write our own unique product descriptions and have a unique product video for each color variation and multiple unique product images and display seperate user reviews per color variation. We prefer to have seperate product pages for each color variation for several reasons (targeting color searches and user experience seeing all color variations when browsing category pages). Product descriptions of color variations are quite similar.
On-Page Optimization | | lcourse
I was thinking about spinning dynamically order how bullet points of product descriptions are presented to add some more uniqueness. I am not expecting a massive impact, but do you think this increases a bit googles perception of page uniqueness?0 -
Ideal product descriptions. What instructions to give to copywriter?
I plan to hire a copywriter to write high quality unique product descriptions for luxury products in one of our ecommerce sites. Apart from being well written and unique, any suggestions on what specifications to give to copywriter?
On-Page Optimization | | lcourse
E.g. length of text per product, obviously no keyword stuffing, but any instructions regarding keywords? Any good posts or specifications you can refer me to on the topic? thanks0 -
How to implement products in facebook to generate maximum traffic to site and facebook profile page?
Lets take the example of a hotel reservation site offering 500 hotels. Any suggestions on how to present the 500 hotels within their facebook page so that they generate maximum traffic and interaction? No intention to offer checkout on facebook. E.g. adding image of each hotel in the photo album with link to website and some information about hotel. Any ideas? Any good posts or articles on the topic?
Social Media | | lcourse0 -
1 Ecommerce site for several product segments or 1 Ecommerce site for each product segment ?
I am currently struggling with the decision whether to create individual ecommerce sites for each of 3 consumer product segments or rather to integrate them all under one umbrella domain. Obviously integration under 1 domain makes link building easier, but I am not sure how far google will favor in rankings websites focussed on one topic=product segment. Product segments are medium competitive.Product segments are not directly related but there may be some overlap in customer demographics- Any thoughts ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse1 -
Is using dots in URL path really a problem?
we have a couple of pages displaying a dot in the URL path like domain.com/mr.smith/widget-mr.smith It displays fine in chrome, firefox and IE and for the user it may actually look better than replacing it by _ or -. Did this ever cause problems to anybody?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
Any statement from google about it?
Should I change existing URLs? If so, which other characters can I use in the URL instead of underscore and dash, since in our system dash and underscore are already used for rewriting other characters. Thanks0 -
Should I noindex the site search page? It is generating 4% of my organic traffic.
I read about some recommendations to noindex the URL of the site search.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
Checked in analytics that site search URL generated about 4% of my total organic search traffic (<2% of sales). My reasoning is that site search may generate duplicated content issues and may prevent the more relevant product or category pages from showing up instead. Would you noindex this page or not? Any thoughts?0 -
Can you recommend a tool to identify contact email for list of 1000 domains?
We researched a list of about 1000 domains, which are all in one industry segment. Any tool you can recommend to identify corresponding contact emails, based on domain whois or email on website or in contact page? what is your experience with sending emails just to info@DOMAIN_NAME ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse0 -
Need to shorten and change site-wide meta titles (50.000 pages). OK to do all at once?
Just noticed that google completely screws up our meta titles in the SERPs. Google decided to show titles which are not understandable to visitors and worst of all even shows titles in different languages than the actual page. The words of the displayedf titles are nowhere on the page (actually they are parts of old title tags that we stopped using 6 months ago and that we used on different pages). Pages are crawled weekly. All our meta titles are a bit longer than the 70 character limit, so I plan to rephrase and shorten them so that they are all max. 66 characters. Dynamically we choose different variations of title texts based on character length of keywords. Having titles that fit into SERPs without cutting are supposed to have less probability to be changed by google. I heard some people reporting loss of rankings after site-wide meta title changes. Especially since we changed title tags sitewide already about 6 months ago I am a bit concerned. How would you proceed? Just do the site-wide change all at once?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse0 -
Adding video snippet caused drop of star rating snippet in google SERP. Any solution to show both?
We are using on our product pages review schema markup which showed up well in google SERP. Now we added schema video markup as well and google shows in SERP now only the video snippet, but not the review snippet anymore. Any idea whether there may be a solution to show both video and review snippets?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse0 -
Changing meta title dynamically e.g. with number of reviews in title. Is this a problem?
I would like to put the number of reviews in the meta title of a product page. I noticed that tripadvisor for example does the same. However I read in some places that people encountered problems with frequent title tag changes. Did you ever encounter problems by just changing numbers in title tag?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
Do you think it is really a problem if just the number of the reviews changes? what about putting number of reviews in the meta description instead?0 -
Title tags with >70 characters but most important words at start. Is this really a problem?
Is there in fact any kind of negative impact having title tags longer than 70 characters, as long as I place the most important keywords at the start and make sure that title still is compelling when cut somewhere around 70 characters? Are the additional words after the 70 characters limit just ignored? May additional words dillute the strength of the first words or may they even be helpful ? Any experience or any studies you know about impact of longer title tags? Or any statement from google about it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse0 -
Using AggregateReview markup to generate star sinppets for wordpress blog posts? OK or Spam?
Do you believe using a plugin that allows visitors to rate your blog posts and then generating AggregateReview markup code for each blog post is in accordance with google guidelines? I saw there are a couple of wordpress plugins that offer this functionality. Anybody who had any negative experience? Star icons will certainly increase visibility in SERP.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse0 -
Ever had a case where publication of products & descriptions in ebay or amazon caused Panda penalty?
One of our shops got a Panda penalty back in september. We sell all our items with same product name and same product description also on amazon.com , amazon.co.uk, ebay.com and ebay.co.uk. Did you ever have a case where such multichannel sales caused panda penalty?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse0 -
What time to expect until onpage change is reflected in google ranking?
Most pages on our site are crawled by google about once per week. We plan to implement a new navigation structure with much more interlinks among our pages. I would like to test it first just for a few pages to measure impact. How long may it take approximately until an onpage change related to link structure is reflected in google rankings? Any experience?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse0 -
Is having duplicated content on different domains a problem when using alternate tag, but no canonical?
We will be launching a couple of new language versions. I understand that ccTLD is mostly considered as best option, however I thought that to start with it might be better to launch the new language version first on a subdirectory of our established domain with strong backlink profile as it may rank much better until I can attract some strong links to new ccTLD. I would wait for the pages of new language versions to be indexed on the main domain and then after a month launch the same content paralell on the ccTLD setting up an alternate tag in the main domain pointing to the ccTLD. I would not setup any canonical tag. As I understand google would rank whatever of the 2 versions ranks higher. Should not cause duplicated content issues right?
International SEO | | lcourse
Any thoughts? EDIT:
For clarification. The language we are launching are mostly spoken in several countries. E.g. for Portuguese I would add in main domain an altnernate tag for Brazilian visitors to Brazilian ccTLD, but no alternate tag for Portuguese visitors. For Corean I would add in main domain an alternate tag for visitors in south corea, but not one for visitors in north corea.0 -
Stopped ranking. Suspect links with keyword in blog posts and blog username. What to do? Disvow?
One of our staff thought it was a good idea to comment in 30 blogs in our niche using "keyword" as username in blog post linked to our website and additionally adding links to our website in the posts. We now got caught by panda or penguin (google confirmed no manual penalty was taken) and not ranking anymore for this keyword. No notification in webmaster tools neither. We have links from around 90 root domains of which 30 are from these blog posts. What would you suggest to do? Just building more legitimate links so that share of bad links goes down?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
Using google disvow tool? We would then loose potential to get later legitimate links from these sites? Any ideas/suggestions?0 -
Outreach to bloggers for product reviews. All at once or stretched over time?
We have identified about 150 bloggers in our niche worldwide and want to send them a free product sample for a review on their blog. From former similar promotion we know that actually the vast majority will accept. Would you send the proposal at once to all bloggers or just contact lets say 5 per week over 6 months? Do you think it is better to vary the products to be reviewed instead of sending all the exact same product model? Not sure how bloggers will like it if they notice that we made the same proposal to every blogger and that on all blogs in our niche about the same time suddenly reviews of same products appear? Any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse0 -
How to identify 404 that get links from external sites (but not search engines)?
one of our site had a poor site architecture causing now about 10.000s of 404 being currently reported in google webmaster tools. Any idea about easily detecting among these thousands of 404, which ones are coming from links from external websites (so filtering out 404 caused by links from our own domain and 404 from search engines)? crawl bandwidth seems to be an issue on this domain. Anything that can be done to accelerate google removing these 404 pages from their index? Due to number of 404 manual submission in google wbt one by one is not an option.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
Or do you believe that google automatically will stop crawling these 404 pages within a month or so and no action needs to be taken? thanks0 -
Alternate tag. Anybody had success getting English websites only with localized currency served with alternate tag?
I have an English website with USD prices and US phone.
International SEO | | lcourse
Via currency dropdown visitors in Ireland can choose EUR as currency, visitors from Denmark Danish crown etc and via GEO IP I also serve local contact phone numbers. So I though it made sense to define this with the alternate tags, but now after several months google still does not pickup these pages in local searches. Did anybody have success with getting a website just with currency parameter ranked locally using the alternate tag? Does it help to have also static links (not only dropdown links) to currency versions on the page? Any other thing that could help to have google pick these up? Below my code sample:0 -
Is "Car Discount" a problematic anchor text for CarDiscount.com (google penguin)?
I have a couple of partial match domains in the format KEYOWRDdiscount.com and also the website name resembles domain name. "Car Discount" is not my website but just an example to illustrate:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
Is "Car Discount" a problematic anchor text for CarDiscount.com?
Should I try to modify existing external anchor texts to "CarDiscount" or "CarDiscount.com" instead of "Car Discount" Do you know of any cases where such anchor texts coinciding with partial match domain were likely reason for penguin penalization? Thanks.0 -
Schema markup in SERP in s ome languages but not in English. Any suggestions?
I have schema markup on a category page and on a product page on a website in 10 languages. Product page markup is showing in google SERP in all languages (both star rating, number of votes). Category page markup is showing very inconsistently. For English google SERP do not pick it up at all. For Spanish and German they are showing completely in SERP (votes, minimum price), for other languages, just part of makrup (minimum price) is shown in google SERP. In rich snippet tool they show up correctly in all languages. Any suggestion what can be done to get schema of category page picked up more consistently? Any experience of other markup formats than schema being picked up better? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse0 -
Do you know a case where product variations caused panda?
Would like to add 300 products to ecommerce site of which 150 products are just variations in different colors. In this particular case there are some reaons for: Not writing partially unique product descriptions for each product variation Not setting them up as variations on one product page So I would have several product pages with nearly identical product descriptions (proprietary description written by us), just name of color in title and description and EAN in description being different, as well as over time different user generated content showing up. Also different product images used. I would not mind if google would not index some product variations. Do you think I should be concerned about Panda? Do you know any website which had a Panda problem caused by product variations? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse0 -
Best Practice for ALT tags of flags to interlink multinational site
For a partial keyword match domain name what would you recommend as ALT tag to internlink country domains (different CCTLD)? Option 1)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
DOMAIN.com DOMAIN.de DOMAIN.co.uk => I am a bit concerned about this option in terms of potential penalty for keywords in ALT (since partial match domains) Option 2)
UK
DE
FR ... Option 3)
English UK
Deutsch Deutschland
Deutsch Österreich
Francais France => concerned here about mixing lots of languages in ALT tags in each page, which may confuse google language detection.0 -
Large number of new web pages to launch in bulk or to stretch over longer time?
We are going to launch about 60.000 new web pages under one established domain (google pagerank 6), which currently has about 30.000 web pages. So web pages will triple. New pages contain keyword variations of existing pages with pages targeting specific niches. All pages with unique and useful specific content for visitor. All pages heavily interlinked among each other. Would you recommend to stretch launch of new pages over some time period, or do you see no problem to launch them all on one day? In about 3 months we plan to launch another 180.000 new web pages. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse0 -
Same posts on facebook and google+. Is this a problem?
I plan to publish same posts on facebook and google+. As they are in 10 different languages, I would rather not make modifications for facebook and google+ respectively. Do you see any problems with this? Do you think it matters whether I first publish on google+ or first on facebook? Any problem if I publish posts on one social media account which I already published in another social media account for another company of mine some months ago? thanks
Social Media | | lcourse0 -
Spellcheck necessary for user generated content?
We have a lot of user generated reviews on our key landing pages. Matt Cutts recommended using correctly spelled content. Would you perform a spellcheck of all already published user reviews or would you leave already published reviews rather intact and only perform spellcheck for new reviews before they are published? Since reviews have been marked up using schema.org, I am not sure whether posterior editing of lots of reviews may raise a flag with google regarding manipulating reviews. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse0 -
Rel=author: inactive google+ better than no authorship?
some doubts about implementing rel=author: I have no google+ account so far and I have no intention to start activities in google+. Shall I still add rel=author and create a new empty google+ account (without google+ activity but using gmail) or would you recommend rather not to add rel=author in this case? I have 2 sites ranking in top10 SERP for my targeted keyword. One online shop and on another domain a non-commercial site with information on the topic. Would you rather associate same or different google+ accounts (from different people) with these two sites for both rel=author and rel=publisher? thanks.
Conversion Rate Optimization | | lcourse0 -
Create different pages with keyword variations VS. Add keyword variations in 1 page
For searches involving keywords like "lessons", "courses", "classes" I see frequently pages in the top rankings which do not contain the search term in the title tag, despite these terms being quite competitive. It seems that when searching for "classes", google detects that pages about "courses" may be just as relevant. What do you recommend? option 1: creating 10 pages optimized on 10 different keyword variations, each with a significant part of unique content or option 2: one page and dropping throughout the page 10 keyword variations in body and headlines Given that keywords are all synonyms and website has already high domain authority in the niche. thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse0 -
Interlinking 60 ccTLD country versions of website
We will be launching 60 new ccTLD country versions of an established core website.
International SEO | | lcourse
Quality, human translated content in 35 languages.
We have a CSS dropdown menu with the 60 country flags and country/language name as anchor text. Formatted as deeplinks to the corresponding pages in the 60 country versions, that we planned to add on each page. How would you recommend to implement the interlinking between these 60 ccTLD? My concerns are: won't we dillute the link value of our links in the main page content too much with links to 60ccTLD on each page? may we trigger a google penalty as the new ccTLD have no other links yet and each page will have the same anchor text and links from exactly the same 60 domains. would you place the country dropdown rather at the bottom of the page (e.g. footer) to avoid that google will not crawl all links in main content page. Any thoughts or suggestions are appreciated1 -
Country name displayed after domain name in google SERP
our online shop targets clients in the US and worldwide (same URL - no subdirectories - currency changes based on IP). when searching in google.ie or google.no for our site google displays in the SERPS "US" or "United States" after the URL for our site, but for most other US competitors it does not show the country in the SERPS. I deleted our google places listing 2 weeks ago, since I suspected it may be related, but no change so far. In google webmaster tools we have targeted the shop domain to United States, which may be another factor. Unfortunately we can not undo this setting since without it our google US ranking for the most relevant competitive keyword drops from position 8 to position 100+. Server location is in Germany which despite lots of US links and US contact info and USD currency appparently makes google think that the site is not targeting the US. Does anybody know what triggers the country name in the SERPS (google places or webmaster tools or other) and can give advice if there is any way to get rid of it.
International SEO | | lcourse0