SEO for Metasearch sites like KAYAK or Trivago
-
Interested in getting some opinions of best practices for large dynamic sites?
My main question is, should we be focusing on a different "strategy" if we have a similar type site or does the same principles still apply? Second question is would building a blog presence in our community be a better strategy than trying to get our dynamic pages to rank?
If there is a great step by step or white paper resource anyone could recommend, would be greatly appreciated, as our technical team is just diving into SEO.
If anyone cares to take a look, our site is SupremeGolf.com
-
Adding a blog is a good way for you to publish unique, useful content for your visitors, which will help with organic rankings if you don't allow the other pages to be indexed.
However, if you allow the other pages to be indexed and Google determines that the content on those pages is not unique, or doesn't provide added value, then the entire domain could be penalized (i.e. Panda) so in that case a blog wouldn't help much.
-
Thanks for the info.
My thinking is to incorporate a blog into our platform.. That will allow us to create original content around specific keywords/ phrases that we want to rank organically for..
Do you agree with adding in a blog is a good way to increase organic rankings?
-
I would be concerned with even having a site like this these days. I know other large brands get away with it, but it won't be long before Google takes over those niches completely. If it's scaleable and automated, Google will own it.
Best practices for sites like that involve adding value above and beyond the curation of the content from other sources. If you have an audience already then user-generated content could be one way to go. Editorial content that is 100% unique and useful is great too, but difficult to scale on a site like that.
Another best practice would be to limit the amount of pages Google has indexed. Don't ever allow pages with zero listings to be indexed (i.e. a search that returned 0 results).
Good luck.
-
Thanks for responding Everett! I was asking the latter... Our site is identical to KAYAK.com or Trivago.com... We have a "dynamic" site that pulls in other sites deals... Do you know of any good resources regarding best practices for our type of site that I could check out when building out our SEO plan?
Thanks again!
-
Are you asking how to rank better on meta search sites, or how to rank a meta search site on Google? If the latter, you're better off keeping your internal "dynamic" search result pages unindexable by Google.
-
Ryan totally nailed it!
Here is right principles will remain the same. No matter how big or small the size of your website is, you have to avoid duplicate content, include unique title tag, Meta descriptions, robots.txt site maps and more.
When you talk about building a strategy to win the online industry, now this can always be different and also changing on continuous basis depending on the dynamics change within the industry. Try to build a strategy that suites your condition instead of going for industry trends and common factors.
Obviously, building links is a principle which will remain the same but where to build link is very much based on your strategy.
I will second Cyrus webinar as it contains pretty much everything you are asking for!
Hope this helps! -
I see strategy and principles as separate things. To me principles are things like crawler accessibility, lack of errors, mobile accessibility, black and white sorts of issues. Every site should follow those.
Strategy on the other hand can be widely different. You could develop a strategy where you're competing on educational terms and creating content around specific training or aspects of a swing similar to how bodybuilding.com breaks down exercises into video, descriptions etc. The tie-in to your current site in that example would be course pros that are best at teaching certain aspects of the game, or courses that emphasize being able to shoot a draw or fade. That sort of content would really lend itself to blogging and community.
For the basics of SEO, Cyrus had a great webinar a little while back covering the steps involved in researching and developing your strategy into your site here: http://moz.com/webinars/seo-basics-the-fundamental-signals-used-to-rank-our-content-higher Cheers!
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 Image Quality In Online Store Effect Main Site SEO?
My client is building a new shopping cart that will be mobile friendly BUT will have terrible image quality - tiny images, with text on them. How will these tiny images impact the SEO on the main site? Should they put the store on the mainsite.com or on a subdomain (store.mainsite.com)? Does google see subdomains as part of the main site? I would think that having thousands of shopping product pages could be beneficial to the main site SEO, as long as the images don't negate the content. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jerrico10 -
Web Site Ranking
Hi Folks, I made some changes on my website www.gemslearninginstitute.com and published it two days ago. It was ranking on Google first page for a few keywords. I did not touch the pages which were ranking on first page. Since then I am not seeing the website ranking on the Google. Does it take a few days to rank again? How can I ensure that next time if I update the website or publish some blog on my website then it should not effect the ranking. Secondly, if I would like to rank in three different cities then do I need to create separate pages for each city or how should I proceed with this. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fslpso0 -
International SEO Question
_The company I work for has a website www.example.com that ranks very well in English speaking countries - US, UK, CA. For legal reasons, we now need to create www.example.co.uk to be accessible and rank in google.co.uk. Obviously we want this change to be as smooth as possible with little effect on rankings in the UK. We have two options that we're talking through at the moment - Use the hreflang tag on both the .com and the .co.uk to tell Google which site to rank in each country. My worry with this is that we might lose our rankings in the UK as it will be a brand new site with little to no links pointing to it. 301 redirect to the .co.uk based on UK IP addresses. I'm skeptical about this. As a 301 passes most of the link juice, I'm not sure how Google would treat this type of thing - would the .com lose ranking? So my questions are - would we lose ranking in the UK if we use option 1? Would option 2 work? What would you do? Any help is appreciated._
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | awestwood0 -
We are moving one website to a different domain and would like to know what is the best way to do it without hurting SEO
The website we want to move, let's say www.olddomain.com has a low quality back links profile, in fact it received a manual notification from google of unnatural links detected; but the home page has a PR 3. We want to move it to a different domain let's say www.newdomain.com. We would like to know if it's better to do a 301 redirect to the new domain, in order to transfer the link juice or if it would be better to do a 302, taking into account that this redirect won't pass any link juice, so it would be like start from scratch with this new domain. Thanks for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DoitWiser0 -
Entire site code copied - potential SEO issues?
Hi folks, We have noticed that our site has been directly duplicated by another site. They have copied the entire code, including the JS, CSS and most of the HTML and have simply switched their own text and images onto the template. (We discovered it because they even copied over our analytics tracking and were appearing in our reports - duh!) Does anyone know if there are potential SEO issues in copying the code like that, or do duplicate content issues only apply to indexable HTML content? Thanks! Matthew (I didn't want to out them by sharing their URL because it could have been an external contractor that built the site and they probably had no idea.)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MattBarker0 -
Is the eCommerce site Shopify SEO friendly?
We ave a prospect client that wants to start doing SEO for his Shopify site, we are unsure if this will be SEO friendly. Will we have enough control to get great placement? Are we better off rebuilding the site for the client in an OpenCart?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODinosaur0 -
SEO for Global Navigations
I did my first SEO audit from the book SEO Secrets by Danny Dover on my new website at http://melo4.melotec.com:4010/ In the book he says to disable Javascript and see if the global navigation still works. So when I did that the dropdown menus in my navigation don't show. I'm assuming this is a problem but when I check the cache text only version of the site, the dropdowns are in the text only version. Are their any experienced SEO's out their who can weigh in on this issue? Should I have my developer redo the navigation without any javascript? Thanks, Shawn
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Romancing0 -
SEO Reco?
We're looking for a recommendation for a very good SEO agency that has experience with link building (white hat only). Any suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BruceMillard0