Hi Miriam

The other aspect of this that got me thinking when I saw the update was around multiple sites for the same business. I have seen this in several niches where the same business has 2 or 3 different websites ranking on page 1 for their main term. Each of these sites has unique content etc however they are all linked via the same address. I have been waiting for Google to resolve this issue as it is technically a doorway page unique just more sophisticated. It wouldn't be hard for them to devalue a site if they see it ranking well and it is the same business as another site ranking.

I wonder if they will deal with this issue in this update.

Hi Shawn,

In theory it's possible, but it's pretty difficult and can take an awful lot of optimisation.  As well as who else is bidding, Google take into account your quality score.  You'll need to optimise your quality score a lot by having very relevant keywords, ads, and landing pages and segment everything down into a lot of ad groups to have any chance.  Then you'll need to achieve a high CTR, have low competition and constantly optimise everything (taking out low performing keywords, adjusting ad copy etc).

It can be a long road, but in theory you can get there - by following the above though you will in theory continually drive your costs down, so whilst you may never get to $0.01 you may get closer than you are now!

Hope that helps

Just to confirm what my findings discovered, it showed that Wikipedia does (or at least did then) actually provide value from an SEO sense. The external links are indeed nofollow however Google could be wavering the nofollow status of those links because of the fact it is "Wikipedia".

From the research I have done I would say they are worth it. The external links in Wikipedia are nofollow however I have seen reason to believe that Google still counts links from Wikipedia. This test is a few years old now so it may have changed but this is what I found.

I built a new site on a new domain for a client that was a local restaurant. Once the site was live it gathered a couple of links all very small in terms of pagerank value. The site sat at PR0 for over a year.

Some time after that the site was listed on the villages Wikipedia page as an external link (of course no followed). The wikipedia page itself was a PR3. After the next PR toolbar update my clients site received a PR2 update.

From that I knew fully well that there was no other links pointing to the site that would have affected this. Since that day I have always assumed that Google pushed value to sites linked from Wikipedia followed or no followed. But as I say, this test is about 4-5 years years old now.

Hope this helps.

Glad I could help

The only other issue I see with this is your sitemap will get outdated quickly if you have a lot of content/pages being added to your site. Additional work or development may be needed to create a fluent sitemap that auto-updates alongside the website.

HI Jean-Francois

I would try to keep you sitemap as clean as possible. But could you export all the data into a CSV and clean up the pages using a formula. If you got a full list of your URLs in column A in Excel. Then used the following formula

=LEFT(A1,Find("ref=",A1)-1)

Put this formula into cell B1 and drag the formula down all the rows. This should strip out all of the parameters you do not want. Then simply remove the duplicates and you have your list of URLs to create a clean sitemap.

Let me know if this helps.

Hi Jeroen

I would look more into making sure the URLs are kept fairly short and friendly. I wouldn't expect a huge SEO impact from this, I would look more into the question "does including the brand name in the URL improve usability for my visitors?". Maybe you have several "ProductA" all by different brands? If this is the case then yes I would include the brand name in the URL.

If you are selling only BrandX products on your store and nothing else then I would not bother putting in the brand name as you are already including the brand in your main site URL. Having it twice could make the URL look at bit keyword stuffed.

Hope this helps.

Adam

Hi Hugh

You could easily get this information by using a standalone desktop crawler to go through the site and see how many URL and internal and external links there are.

The best would be Screaming Frog as this was built with SEO functionality in mind however the free version only allows you to crawl 500 pages which is close to your limit.

If you are looking for a free crawler then xenu links sleuth should do the trick. However this only works on WIndows machines so if you have a mac then Screaming Frog may be your best solution.

Hope this helps.

Adam

Hi Miriam

The other aspect of this that got me thinking when I saw the update was around multiple sites for the same business. I have seen this in several niches where the same business has 2 or 3 different websites ranking on page 1 for their main term. Each of these sites has unique content etc however they are all linked via the same address. I have been waiting for Google to resolve this issue as it is technically a doorway page unique just more sophisticated. It wouldn't be hard for them to devalue a site if they see it ranking well and it is the same business as another site ranking.

I wonder if they will deal with this issue in this update.

From the research I have done I would say they are worth it. The external links in Wikipedia are nofollow however I have seen reason to believe that Google still counts links from Wikipedia. This test is a few years old now so it may have changed but this is what I found.

I built a new site on a new domain for a client that was a local restaurant. Once the site was live it gathered a couple of links all very small in terms of pagerank value. The site sat at PR0 for over a year.

Some time after that the site was listed on the villages Wikipedia page as an external link (of course no followed). The wikipedia page itself was a PR3. After the next PR toolbar update my clients site received a PR2 update.

From that I knew fully well that there was no other links pointing to the site that would have affected this. Since that day I have always assumed that Google pushed value to sites linked from Wikipedia followed or no followed. But as I say, this test is about 4-5 years years old now.

Hope this helps.

HI Jean-Francois

I would try to keep you sitemap as clean as possible. But could you export all the data into a CSV and clean up the pages using a formula. If you got a full list of your URLs in column A in Excel. Then used the following formula

=LEFT(A1,Find("ref=",A1)-1)

Put this formula into cell B1 and drag the formula down all the rows. This should strip out all of the parameters you do not want. Then simply remove the duplicates and you have your list of URLs to create a clean sitemap.

Let me know if this helps.

Hi Shawn,

In theory it's possible, but it's pretty difficult and can take an awful lot of optimisation.  As well as who else is bidding, Google take into account your quality score.  You'll need to optimise your quality score a lot by having very relevant keywords, ads, and landing pages and segment everything down into a lot of ad groups to have any chance.  Then you'll need to achieve a high CTR, have low competition and constantly optimise everything (taking out low performing keywords, adjusting ad copy etc).

It can be a long road, but in theory you can get there - by following the above though you will in theory continually drive your costs down, so whilst you may never get to $0.01 you may get closer than you are now!

Hope that helps

Hi Jeroen

I would look more into making sure the URLs are kept fairly short and friendly. I wouldn't expect a huge SEO impact from this, I would look more into the question "does including the brand name in the URL improve usability for my visitors?". Maybe you have several "ProductA" all by different brands? If this is the case then yes I would include the brand name in the URL.

If you are selling only BrandX products on your store and nothing else then I would not bother putting in the brand name as you are already including the brand in your main site URL. Having it twice could make the URL look at bit keyword stuffed.

Hope this helps.

Adam

Just to confirm what my findings discovered, it showed that Wikipedia does (or at least did then) actually provide value from an SEO sense. The external links are indeed nofollow however Google could be wavering the nofollow status of those links because of the fact it is "Wikipedia".