REMOVE
-
REMOVE
-
the term is used as the name of the page in the URL.
Can you please show where that is occurring? The full URL to the page is "http://theboardgamers.co.uk/". In Google.co.uk you rank #1 for the term "the board gamers". You should recognize "board games" is a different keyword.
the H1 tag at the top of the page is an exact match
I believe you are mistaken. You are using an image in a H1 tag. Please refer to this Q&A: http://www.seomoz.org/q/would-you-use-images-inside-h1-tags. Even if Google was to consider your ALT tag as the H1 text, it would not be an exact match. An "exact match" is exactly as it sounds, a perfect text match. Any changes, includes the change of tense, plurality, spaces, etc. would affect the search results.
Any advice on this one? As an eCommerce homepage I obviously can't go writing paragraphs full of information about board games. The people visiting aren't looking/needing that (on my site).
There is a variety of methods to improve your relevancy in this area. Just a few to consider:
-
you have a rotating banner at the top of the page. You could replace it with a banner that is helpful to your users and search rankings. One possibility would be a background with the following HTML text "All your favorite board games in one place! The Board Gamers"
-
your image names and alt tags should probably be reviewed
-
you can focus your home page on your brand, "TheBoardGamers" and provide a "Board Games" page
-
You can offer a short snippet of text describing your site
I clearly need to add a block of text/content somewhere but I find it hard to think what to write without doing it for the sake of getting keywords in there.
It is great you are including your users in the thought process. They should be first and foremost in your mind.
-
-
Hi Rhys,
What is the URL of the page you are trying to rank for the term? I could not locate any page on your site optimized to rank for the term "Board games".
I will guess you are trying to rank your home page for the term since it's title is "Board Games | The Board Gamers". First let's take a look at the wiki page which ranks #1 for "board game" and #2 for "board games": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Board_game
This page ranks #1 for the term "board game" and is very well optimized for the term. Specifically:
-
the term is used as the name of the page in the URL
-
the H1 tag at the top of the page is an exact match
-
The very first words of the first sentence on the page are "A board game is..."
-
The term "board game" is used 58 times on the page. To be clear, I am not referring to keyword density, but rather keyword focus. The page is clearly focused on discussing this topic. The use of the term is natural and not stuffed in any way.
Now let's look at your page.....
-
the term is used ONCE on the page, at the bottom of the left sidebar which is not even above the fold. It is part of a community poll asking people if they play board games.
-
the term is used in your title tag
Why would you feel your page should rank for the term? How are you establishing any relevancy? Answer that question and you will begin to help improve your rankings.
-
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Can I remove certain parameters from the canonical URL?
For example, https://www.jamestowndistributors.com/product/epoxy-and-adhesives?page=2&resultsPerPage=16 is the paginated URL of the category https://www.jamestowndistributors.com/product/epoxy-and-adhesives/. Can I remove the &resultsPerPage= variation from the canonical without it causing an issue? Even though the actual page URL has that parameter? I was thinking of using this: instead of: What is the best practice?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | laurengdicenso0 -
Beta Site Removal best practices
Hi everyone.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bgvsiteadmin
We are doing a CMS migration and site redesign with some structural changes. Our temporarily Beta site (one of the staging environments and the only one that is not behind firewall) started appearing in search. Site got indexed before we added robots.txt due to dev error (at that time all pages were index,follow due to nature of beta site, it is a final stage that mirrors live site) As an remedy, we implemented robots.txt for beta version as : User-Agent: *
Disallow: / Removed beta form search for 90 days. Also, changed all pages to no index/no follow . Those blockers will be changed once code for beta get pushed into production. However, We already have all links redirected (301) from old site to new one. this will go in effect once migration starts (we will go live with completely redesigned site that is now in beta, in few days). After that, beta will be deleted completely and become 404 or 410. So the question is, should we delete beta site and simple make 404/410 without any redirects (site as is existed for only few days ). What is best thing to do, we don't want to hurt our SEO equity. Please let me know if you need more clarification. Thank you!0 -
Old Sub domain removal and deletion of content
There are two questions here. I have waited for over 2-3 weeks now and they are still not resolved till now. An old sub-domain is still indexed on Google (blog.nirogam.com) of which all pages have been redirected or 404'd to main domain. There is no webmasters, no authority of this old sub-domain. Hosting of the same might be there. (this has been deleted and does not exist - we own main domain only) How do I de-index and remove them for good? _(Around ~1,000 pages)_I am trying this public tool - any better approaches?Even after removing pages and submission on the tool, 600 pages are still indexed after 2-3 weeks! We deleted a lot of thin content/duplicate pages from the domain (nirogam.com) in Wordpress - All these pages are still in Google's index. They are in Trash folder now. This is causing an increase in 404s in the webmasters etcI have served a 410 header (using wordpress plugin) on all these pages as these should not be directed to anything. However, Google does not always fully understand 410 properly and it still shows up in webmasters as read in this detailed post.All these pages are still indexed.How do I de-index these pages? Any other approach to stop the 404s and remove these pages for good?Any feedback/approach will be highly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pks3330 -
Redirects Being Removed...
Hi We have a team in France who deal with the backend of the site, only problem is it's not always SEO friendly. I have lots of 404's showing in webmaster tools and I know some of them have previously had redirects. If we update a URL on the site, any links pointing to it on the website are updated straight away to point to the most up to date URL - so the user doesn't have to go through a redirect. However, the team would see this as the redirect not being 'used' after about 30 days and remove it from the database - so this URL no longer has any redirects pointing to it. My question is, surely this is bad for SEO? However I'm a little unsure as they aren't actually going through the redirect. But somewhere in cyber space the authority of this page must drop? Any advice is welcome 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
301 vs 410 redirect: What to use when removing a URL from the website
We are in the process of detemining how to handle URLs that are completely removed from our website? Think of these as listings that have an expiration date (i.e. http://www.noodle.org/test-prep/tphU3/sat-group-course). What is the best practice for removing these listings (assuming not many people are linking to them externally). 301 to a general page (i.e. http://www.noodle.org/search/test-prep) Do nothing and leave them up but remove from the site map (as they are no longer useful from a user perspective) return a 404 or 410?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | abargmann0 -
Last Panda: removed a lot of duplicated content but no still luck!
Hello here, my website virtualsheetmusic.com has been hit several times by Panda since its inception back in February 2011, and so we decided 5 weeks ago to get rid of about 60,000 thin, almost duplicate pages via noindex metatags and canonical (we have no removed physically those pages from our site giving back a 404 because our users may search for those items on our own website), so we expected this last Panda update (#25) to give us some traffic back... instead we lost an additional 10-12% traffic from Google and now it looks even really badly targeted. Let me say how disappointing is this after so much work! I must admit that we still have many pages that may look thin and duplicate content and we are considering to remove those too (but those are actually giving us sales from Google!), but I expected from this last Panda to recover a little bit and improve our positions on the index. Instead nothing, we have been hit again, and badly. I am pretty desperate, and I am afraid to have lost the compass here. I am particularly afraid that the removal of over 60,000 pages via noindex metatags from the index, for some unknown reason, has been more damaging than beneficial. What do you think? Is it just a matter of time? Am I on the right path? Do we need to wait just a little bit more and keep removing (via noindex metatags) duplicate content and improve all the rest as usual? Thank you in advance for any thoughts.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Can I use rel=canonical and then remove it?
Hi all! I run a ticketing site and I am considering using rel=canonical temporary. In Europe, when someone is looking for tickets for a soccer game, they look for them differently if the game is played in one city or in another city. I.e.: "liverpool arsenal tickets" - game played in the 1st leg in 2012 "arsenal liverpool tickets - game played in the 2nd leg in 2013 We have two different events, with two different unique texts but sometimes Google chooses the one in 2013 one before the closest one, especially for queries without dates or years. I don't want to remove the second game from our site - exceptionally some people can broswer our website and buy tickets with months in advance. So I am considering place a rel=canonical in the game played in 2013 poiting to the game played in a few weeks. After that, I would remove it. Would that make any sense? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jorgediaz0 -
Removing a Page From Google index
We accidentally generated some pages on our site that ended up getting indexed by google. We have corrected the issue on the site and we 404 all of those pages. Should we manually delete the extra pages from Google's index or should we just let Google figure out that they are 404'd? What the best practice here?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dbuckles0