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Hey there

Presume you're using WordPress here. From my past experience - no, that won't have a long-term detrimental effect on your site's ability to rank, once the site goes live.

If you're concerned, however, you could install a "construction" or "coming soon" page, which will allow the site to index, but prevent other URLs from being found/crawled (so long as you don't submit a sitemap until you're ready).

Seedprod's free plugin is highly recommended, and I've used it before to good effect: https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/coming-soon/

Hope this helps.

This may have something to do with Google's recent change to show results as country-specific by default, rather than whichever TLD you use (.co.uk, .de, .fr etc).

This is causing a few rank checkers to throw off a few wild results. I've seen all the major ones be affected by this.

If you can't recreate the results and traffic is normal, don't worry too much, as the software people will be making fixes soon.

FYI - if you want to get round Google's change and still get specific results from a specific country, you can add:

&gl=us
&gl=uk
&gl=fr etc.

To the end of your query string. Replace the country code with whichever you need.

Hey Arnaud

I think is is definitely worth testing for UX and CRO purposes, and I don't think you'll do your pages "harm", from an SEO POV.

If the overlays appear onclick when in the category, and the rest of the category page is readable and crawlabe, it shouldn't cause any problems.

What's great is that you've already considered how you could rank those individual products themselves by giving them their own URL. Those might struggle a bit though if the URLs are not linked to directly from within the product category silo, or elsewhere on the site.

However, I don't see that as necessarily a bad thing. Unless you have a specific product type that sells very well and has significant search volume itself, I'd wager that most of your inbound organic traffic would best be served by the category pages anyway (IE, if searching for blue widgets, the category shows all the widgets you have, not just one type). That itself is more likely to match the user intent of those people entering your sites.

I would just ensure that you nail the tech and onsite aspects of those category pages - and the rest should be fine.

I'd go ahead and 301 redirect those websites and pages.

With a 301 redirect you will also pass on any link equity the infringing websites once had, which in turn may help your organic ranking performance.

However, in order for that to happen, you need to ensure that you redirect the individual pages on those websites to the most relevant/equivalent versions on your own. Otherwise, you may see those 301 redirects treated as soft 404 errors.

Hope this helps.

Possibly. Internal links and their anchor text can certainly give Google a priority on what the page is about, and which preferred landing page you want to rank.

However, there can be more to it as well. How much does the sub-page 'talk' about the keyword? What is its content like? Do you have any canonical issues? How about the homepage, how much content is on there about the keyword.

You could be cannibalising efforts by having a number of pages all talking about the same thing. Content is quite often just as 'confusing' to Google as the internal links.

Hi there

In your dashboard, click "Add Widget".  In this case, I think selecting a "table" widget would be best.

For the dimension, search for the "page" dimension.  There's lots in there, but you just want to select "page" by itself in this case.  For the two metrics, you can add "pageviews" and another one - maybe "avg time on page" or "% of new sessions".  Whatever you think is most useful.

The most important step is setting up the filter.  Click "add a filter" and then select "only show".  In this case, you will want to only show "page" containing "/Sofas/", "/Beds/" etc. (minus the quotations of course).

You'll end up with something like this: http://i.imgur.com/0bPFfwL.png

Give the widget a title for reference, such as "Most popular Sofa Pages" and then click save.

You should end up with a report like: http://i.imgur.com/dFUHl0z.png

To rinse and repeat, all you need to do is go to the widget, click the edit icon, and then at the bottom of the popup will be a "clone widget" option.  Do that, adjust the filter for each category you have, and you're done!

Hope this helps.

0bPFfwL.png dFUHl0z.png

Hi there

Looks like when you've been adding the code, you've pasted in special characters or something like that.  This is why you're getting the “en-sg" error.

If you look at the source code in Chrome, you can see the code is italicised:

http://i.imgur.com/IfTwvpj.png

What I'd do is retype the code manually, or remove any special formatting from the text before adding it into your HTML.  You want to just get the raw quotation mark in there ("), rather than the special character.

Hope that makes sense

Regarding Q1) I'm just wondering - did you run these ads on both desktop and mobile?  And if so, can you see any correlation between the lm.facebook.com referral and the 'proper social traffic' and the device that they came from?

I think Matt's point was that he'd prefer to let Google generate meta descriptions - in the hope they'd be unique - rather than using the same one repeatedly.

My view? You should be writing unique meta descriptions for all of your key landing and sales pages.

Not for SEO - far from it.  But because it's the shop window that people will see before they reach your site via organic search.  You have a great opportunity to make it compelling, to attract the click away from others around (or above you) and to get your unique selling points across.

Google can never do a better job at that than you.

Hi Mark

It certainly can make a difference, for some of the reasons that you've alluded to.  If we break hosting's influence on ranking down to its 3 core factors, we have:

1. Security
2. Location (which ties into:)
3. Speed

Security is pretty basic - the more at risk your site is to being hacked, the bigger the risk of that hack happening and a drop in rankings occurring (which can then be very hard to regain).  If you're managing the server yourself, make sure you take all of the necessary steps.  If you're using managed solutions, vet the provider as much as possible.

Location - this is a two-fold factor.  There is some correlation (albeit it is not a big one) that if you had two equal websites, one in the UK and one in the US, and you're trying to rank in Google UK, the site hosted in the UK might rank a bit better.  It's not huge, but worth keeping in mind.  What is more of a factor in server location is the actual location of the server itself and where your typical users (or target users) are based in the world.  The closer your users are to your server's datacentre, the faster the server response is likely to be.  Faster websites are happy websites.  That leads us to the main point on:

Speed.  As a (very general) rule, the more allocated RAM and bandwidth, plus the greater server's processing capabilties, the faster it is likely to be.  Typically, this means that dedicated servers (where it's you and only you taking 100% of the server's resources) will perform better than a dedicated VPS (100% of the resource, just less resource), shared VPS, or shared hosting.  The bigger your site becomes and the bigger bandwidth footprint it creates, as it were, the more you'll need a server that can handle that. **There is a good correlation between site speed and organic rankings. **If the server is slowing you down, it could be holding you down as well.

But servers are just the start - there are a number of server and site configurations that can have a big impact on site speed - stuff like a Content Delivery Network (CDN), Gzip compression, image size.  Swing over to GTMetrix and add in a URL and you'll get a speed analysis, plus tips on how you can improve your speed score and overall site speed.

Hope this helps.

To lift a quote from Keri Morgret in this thread from a few years ago:

"It refers to the part of the IP address that's different. The same class C address means something has the same third octect in the address. In the following, the first three IPs are in the same class C, and the fourth address is not.

192.168.1.1
192.168.1.2
192.168.1.3
192.168.100.4

...it's a hint to Google that the sites are all related to each other and on the same server, and that the links may not be very natural since there is the good possibility that the same person set them up."

There's no golden rule that your sitemap > indexed pages or vice versa.

If you have more URLs in your sitemap than you have indexed pages, you want to look at the pages not indexed to see why that is the case.  It could be that those pages have duplicate and/or thin content, and so Google is ignoring them.  A canonical tag might be instructing Google to ignore them.  Or the pages might be off the site navigation and are more than 4 links/jumps away from the homepage or another page on the site, make them hard to find.

Conversely, if you had lots more pages indexed than in your sitemap, it could be a navigation or URL duplication problem.  Check to see if any of the pages are duplicate versions caused by things like dynamic URLs generated through search on the site or the site navigation, for example.  If those pages are the only physical pages that you have created and you know every single one has been submitted in a sitemap - and so any other indexed URLs would be unaccounted for, that may well be cause for concern, so check nothing is being indexed multiple times.

Just a couple of scenarios, but I hope it helps.

Hi Ruben

This looks to me to be an auto-scraper and trackback tool.  It's pretty primitive and useless, by all accounts.

The bad news is that there's very little you can do to prevent it, other than contacting the person themselves and asking them to look into the issue.

The good news is that I'm very confident that this will be having no negative effect on your site.  As is the case in the web, blogs and tools exist like this and work away on literally millions of sites.  I have no doubt that the algorithm takes this into account and simply devalues/ignores any of these kind of links.  With the pingbacks being so little, it certainly won't be having an affect.

If it was nearing the hundreds of thousands, it may become an issue - and so my advice to you would be to make a weekly note of these kind of links and if/when they appear.  Save the URLs away in a spreadsheet and should they become very large in numbers, add them to a disavow file and submit that to Google.  Just this week we've had Matt Cutts encourage the use of pre-empting bad links and negative SEO attacks by submitting a disavow file, even if you haven't received a warning/penalty or any ill-effects.

I don't think this is anywhere near the stage where you need to concern yourself with that, but in order to be future-proof, make a note now and weekly as you go along.  Only if the links started being really big in numbers (10,000+) would I look at submitting a disavow file.  But I'd be pretty confident that you won't have the need to do this.

Hope this helps ease your concerns a bit.

"if you go to the time and effort of producing great content why would you want it to be on someone else’s site when it could be on yours."

Bang on. I think you're absolutely right there.

However, that doesn't mean guest blogging should be discounted, rather it should be used in tandem.

I always approach guest blogging with a view of introducing myself or a product/company/brand to a new audience.  Publishing content on your own site is great, but if you don't have connections or an established audience, it can sometimes fall on deaf ears.

Guest blogging allows you to strike up that connection.  Yes, you may get a link out of it as well that could be quite strong, but if you can get this new audience to revisit your site regularly and link to it directly, or share it on social media, then it's even better.

Have a look at active social media profiles and blogs that are prominent in your industry.  Then look to create content that serves their community.  Don't just go in and say "hey, I like your blog about shoes, I've got a guest post about the top 7 shoes here that you'll like" - that's just bad.

Instead, read through the blog, understand what the community are talking about and then make your approach.  Your outreach then becomes something like "hey, I've noticed your members are confused about X, I'd love to produce an article/infographic etc. that helps explain X for them" or even "hey, I recently read this X article you published - I actually disagree and would like to offer a counter point of view - do you think your readers would be interested?"

You're on your way now to producing content that's specific to that target audience.  If it's specific to them and it's well received, your dramatically increasing your chances of them visiting your site and hopefully sticking around once they see your existing content.

That to me is the value of guest blogging.  Keep your best content to yourself, but create bespoke content for those that you want to attract.

The key thing to consider here is whether or not that product page is accessible in any other way.

Take the URL appearance out of the equation and look for the quickest route to navigate to that product page.  If it takes more than 3 steps to get to, you can think of it as a "deep page" and it may take longer to crawl.

Removing a category would help, but only if that is reflected in the navigation on the site and not just the URL appearance.

Of course, if a product page has a lot of external links going towards it and is featured prominantely in an XML sitemap, it negates the worry of it being not crawled as often to a degree.  Ideally, you want your core landing pages or product pages as close to the root domain as possible (1 or 2 steps).  3 is usually the maximum for best practice, but with enough links and social shares Google will recognise it as an important page in its own right and will frequently recrawl it.

Hey

Could be web crawlers and othet bots.  You can jump in and take a look for yourself:

In GA, click on the Audience Tab, then Technology, then Network.

This will then list all of the ISPs that have visited your site.  I'm pretty confident that you will find the culprit in there.

Now, if you're thinking - this is skewing my reporting, I don't want it in there - you can block that referrer in your GA report.  Here's how you do it:

First - always make sure you keep an unfiltered version, just in case something goes wrong.

In your filtered view, go to the Admin Tab, select the view you want to edit, and then click on filters.

Click "add a new filter", then add a new filter like this:

http://i.imgur.com/6WBhyJA.jpg

Here, I am blocking Google's crawler. To block any other, all you'd need to do is to take the service provider name that you find in the technology -> network report and add it into that filter field (the brackets and ^ icon make it an exact match filter).  You can verify the filter before you apply it, and from therein that ISP will be removed from your report.  It won't retrospectively apply the filter, however.

Hope this helps.

Tom

I disagree with the post above.

The most important thing for your title tag is to make it compelling enough to click.  It's your biggest shop window - you need to use the space.  A "Keyword - Keyword | Brand" isn't going to do that.

You will, of course, want to include your primary keyword in there, but you tell me which of these you'd prefer to click:

"Blue Widgets - Red Widgets | The Widgets Co"

"Cheap Blue Widgets - Free USA Shipping! | The Widgets Co"

Try and get your key selling points in the title tag as often as your keywords.  Give the user a reason to click.

In addition, title tags are truncated/shortened based on character width, not the number characters.  Dr Pete at Moz put together a great preview tool that you can check your title tags in to make sure they won't be shortened.

Hope this helps.

Hi there

Umbraco is a solid CMS and a good choice.  It may not be as user-friendly out of the box as something like Wordpress, but it's certainly capable of being very SEO friendly.  No CMS has one SEO 'advantage' over the other, Umbraco is as customisable as Wordpress and Joomla, for example.  The problem would be how the CMS creates content for your site.

The one thing I would always consider is: if you're planning on using category/tag pages etc. for your blog content, make sure those pages are noindexed.  You don't want Google to flag the pages as duplicate content.

Take a good look at how Umbraco generates pages, folders and categories - right down the architecture of your site for all URLs.  Make sure none of those URLs could be seen as duplicate content.  If they do, follow this guide to help remove the problem.

Here are some other useful links to get you going:

Our.Umbraco Forum - http://our.umbraco.org/forum

Umbraco Wiki - http://our.umbraco.org/wiki

Umbraco Projects - http://our.umbraco.org/projects

Umbraco.TV - http://umbraco.tv

Nibble.be - http://www.nibble.be

And here are some useful Umbraco plugins:

Google Analytics for Umbraco

301 URL Tracker

WWW Forcer

Cogworks CogPageReview

Broken Link Checker

Robots.txt Editor

AutoTag

Canonical Meta Link Package

Google Sitemap for Umbraco

Auto Link

Presuming they have html tags enabled, as well as <a>tags, this should work:</a>

<a></a>

<a></a>YourWordsHere

To make the link appear in a new window, add target="_blank">

Just a quick bit of advice, I'd seriously only recommending blog commenting when you're adding value to the blog and the discussion, and never for pure backlink purposes.  However, relevant blog commenting can be a great traffic and conversion tool.

Just make sure you no follow them.  If the links were do follow it could be seen as a paid link scheme - I know that sounds quite contrived, but that is how Google might (and has) viewed affiliate links that pass link equity in the past.  They are, in effect, paid links that may help improve organic visibility.

You don't want to risk being a part of that "link scheme", so make sure you no follow your links.  It does seem quite absurd I know and you'd think that common sense would prevail if someone was using affiliate links and wasn't aware of the SEO ramifications, but it's better to be safe than sorry.