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You want to implement canonicals in opencart. So all url variations will canonical to what the sole url should be.
http://www.opencart.com/index.php?route=extension/extension/info&extension_id=4225
You will also need to determine how to handle pagination when looking at canonicals. Either rel=next rel=prev or canonical to a view all if present. Google webmaster video on this:
Sheldon,
Appreciate the answer but in my original question I asked if you were unable to do proper mobile practices (canonicals and mobile sitemap).
Content is far from unique. Product level pages are duplicated and category level are blank.
It is a very long story hence why I mentioned, I know what "should" be done here but given resources (developers are idiots and client can't afford dev hours as there are years and years of issues which we are also tackling right now) I was curious what people would do.
Sean
No do not do this.
Which version do you want to keep? You will need to look at the data to determine which version is the most linked to. Than just redirect www to non www or vice versa. You should also setup both non www and www versions of Google webmaster tools.
Also in the version you want to keep, go to your google webmaster tools>configuration>settings and than define which version yo want.
Disvow tool should be considered the last resource for removing links to your site that are shady.
So I wanted to get everyone's opinion. Have a client in online retail on ASP and their developers built a mobile site a while back before we took the client on.
For the sake of this post, just assume, resources are limited anddevelopers are not good (constantly break things we request to get fixed). They never installed analytics on the mobile site, so all I have to go off of is referral data on the main stores GA account for m.example.com
However if I look to see what is indexed by doing site:m.example.com am not seeing many pages.
The mobile site has a ton of internal links in GWT and am questioning its negative impact as there are no canonicals, no mobile sitemap present. In the ideal world, I would implement proper Mobile SEO practices but given the resources of no dev budget and devs not being good, I was thinking about noindexing the mobile site since I can RDP into the site and access robots.
Thoughts?
haha damn. Was hoping it was not something I am in. I already consult for one of the largest ecom online printing businesses.
I will say this. Social is not for every industry. Attributable revenue is not always there, look at assisted conversions and determine what your real goals for social are. As fan count isn't a metric to worry about. Look for either last touch, assisted revenue via Google analytics or some engagement metric. Too many people get caught up in social and how cool it is. At the end of the day, its money that matters.
No you can have someone like a post but not be fan.
Here is an example of an in newsfeed ad to like a page from my own newsfeed
http://awesomescreenshot.com/06b1573w29
If you want to give me more details of the business, I could give you ideas. Don't have to tell me their name. Just what they do so I know the industry.
We do facebook ppc for a few clients and depending on the industry, it works really well. Am able to secure a good fan (in the industry) for maybe $0.25-0.50. Also try and capture their email as well by landing them on a tab which post like they can enter for a contest.
Key is to build out your campaigns very targeted instead of lumping stuff together. Its just like newbies with PPC versus people who are good at it. Granular is good.
As long as you are not building it to target exact match anchor text, I would be cool with the idea. Just a lot of times people build these widgets to get specific anchor text. Especially since those links most likely go site wide, can be a major no no
You should always do the onsite technical towards a hierarchy of targeted keywords but yes relevance does matter. Not only onsite but I have seen impact of anchor text relevance from external sites linking to my sites.
Google is all about quality. Also which user experience would you prefer, one where the content is relevant or is keyword stuffed?
What is your website built on and what are your targeted sites built on? I would just build a wordpress widget that can pull in whatever data you want. Than you can style and do whatever you want to get anchor text/links. But in all honesty, how much value is this really going to send back to your site?
The website is not on wordpress. In their example, the url ends with .aspx which is .NET not wordpress which is php.
To give you an example, we have a client on asp and we had the dev implement a url rewrite as the old urls were not pretty.
ex: www.example.com/categories.asp?id=12 was the old url so we have a field on the category backend called rewrite which we put in new-category and it not only is rewriting that category url to www.example.com/new-category.aspx but it also 301 redirects /categories.asp?id=12 to /new-category
Make sense?
Yes you can 301 a page that has 301s. Just do not want to cause a 301 redirect loop. But the more important question here is why you keep changing urls based solely on keywords. You hint at it above. You do not need to keep changing your url over and over based on whatever the head term is. That is silly and if you think how google would want, this does not make sense. But that's just my two cents.
You can easily compete for rankings against amazon and ebay. I personally would just keep the one domain and rank it for all the terms you are looking for. Just need an effective onsite and offsite SEO plan.
I would not. Just build different sections of the site. An example of this would be an effective online retail store in automotive which has numerous makes/models under one roof. It can be done effectively, you just need to build out a good wireframe.
I do not think it will make any difference. The times where I am leveraging canonicals are for example when you have paginated category pages. But when doing ppc landers, I just noindex them.
Unless the footer links to something that is not included elsewhere, I would not worry about the SEO value. I would though look at a heatmap of this site and see if people are using the footer at all over any other navigational areas on the site. This way you do not hurt the usability of the site.
Going after the head term and you can always use some onsite and link building to rank for the other longer tail terms. Also try leveraging user reviews if possible (and indexable). Why not see if you can get people to leave reviews on how your prices are so good its like always buying on sale compared to competitors. Get people to link to this page and I would not be surprised if you can get it to rank for your other targeted phrases
All depends how you can categorize them. I have done/worked on sites that are more than 2 clicks and they do just fine with revenue.
Do the 20 categories have any parent categories you can put them into to put in the navigation? Also what about drop down navigation. This can allow them to dive deeper if they want or browse if they need to.
Can you give me some examples or a screenshot?
Well if you have all your anchor text going to a head term and not the brand, that is a red flag. So yes anchor text diversity does help reduce it by getting more links. But it is not all about volume. It is about quality.
What is the site you are trying to link build for? What industry or what does it have on it? It will give me a better idea of some suggestions.
What is the site built on? If wordpress, check out wpengine (no affiliation). Just saw this post and wanted to respond as I had tons of downtime when I migrated a site to a shared environment on another host. Site kept having downtime no matter what I tried with support. So you can imagine the frustration and how this can impact the business not just from a search perspective. I think the question here is how stable do you need something. Does shared work? Yea sure. But if you are putting something that is the core of your business on a $4.95mth host, than you get $4.95 worth of insurance.
Not going to rehash what has already been mentioned. Just want to say think Brad covers what you need to do. Take a look at that and get back to us.
Judging by what you said here "Yes, my focused anchor text has more links than other, but i've done very few links so far, like 10 bookmarks, 2 directories, 3 press releases, and a few article submissions. So far all the links are with DA 80+."
That is not good link building really. Its crap. yes they may have high DA but its directories. Whatever your niche is, you need to get good resources to link to you not directories. What I would do not only for yourself but your competitors is run an anchor text diversity report here and there to keep an eye on it. You can do this by exporting your 301+followed to root domain into excel and than doing a pivot pie chart to keep an eye on this.
Let me just start with saying...stop and take a step back.
Above you mention a bunch of outdated (directory submission) or just bad techniques (link exchange). I suggest you take a look at the SeoMoz beginners guide first to see what is all involved in SEO and than start from the ground up
I would shy away from all of this. Typically they are more of the black hat type companies who are trying to get a ton of clients at low cost and claim to get you results. When in fact they will do more damage than good.
If you are looking to get SEO help, I would suggest either looking on here for an SEO to ask if they could take a look or check out the link SEO 5 links to.
Correct once /login gets redirected to https://www.example.com/login all nav links etc are https
What I ended up doing was blocking /login in robots and now doing canonicals on https as well as nofollow the /login link that is in the nav that redirects
Willl see what happens now.
Gotcha. Yea I commented above how I was going to add a canonical as well as a noindex in the meta but was curious how it handled the redirect that was happening.
thanks for your help 
Yea I was going to nofollow the link in the nav and add a meta tag but was curious how the robots file would handle this since the url is a redirect.
Thanks for your input
I have an ecommerce site where https is being crawled for some pages. Wondering if the below solution will fix the issue
www.example.com will be my domain
In the nav there is a login page www.example.com/login which is redirecting to the https://www.example.com/login
If I just disallowed /login in the robots file wouldn't it not follow the redirect and index that stuff?
The redirect part is what I am questioning.
So I have a store which has been around for a while and is custom built on ASP.net. Store has thousands of sku's and at least a few hundred subcategories.
Have been tackling a bunch of the onsite issues and for categories which have more than 6 products in them, there are multiple pages and a view all present.
example.com/category?PageIndex=2
example.com/category?PageIndex=3
example.com/category?PageIndex=4
example.com/category?viewall=True
As well as the following for every page
example.com/category?PageIndex=2&viewall=True
So I know how I wish to handle the pagination/canoncial issue as per google's suggestions you do it to the view all or they have the rel=next/prev.
But my question is google says if view all is present they should already do a good job at ranking the view all version. Well in the rankings, there are a lot of page1 variations showing.
So once this is implementated, is it safe to assume that I will see a drop? Feel like if it was a brand new site it is easy but for something this old and established, it could cause some decent harm which at the current time we are already tackling a massive list of issues which in the long haul will improve it.
Looking for some insight for someone who has dealt with ASP.net and this specific area.
thanks
Sean
Hey Sean,
We have talked before as we work on one of the spree stores. You need to get content up on all these pages.
For example
http://spreecommerce.com/extensions/267-spree_product_zoom
If it is all user generated content, than you need to make some fields required to help automate this when people add new extensions. Such as title, description.
-Sean
When did you add the campaign? You will have some information but not all of the report within a few hours. If not you could always delete the campaign and add it again if you think there is an issue.
Crank out some good content and link back with varied anchor text using some of those higher search volume terms. Also try and generate good content on other websites (guest blogging, providing a resource section on some site) and leverage varied anchor text back to your pages you are trying to rank.
Focus on your category pages for sure. And outside of that, you should try and dominate comparison shopping engines if it applies to your market.
Does your client have any webmaster tools warnings about suspicious back link profile? If so, you should be able to file a response showing all your documentation on getting them removed and google potentially will take measures to not attribute any value to those links.
Well the question I am curious to get an answer to is why would google not think you deserve the rank? Are you doing black hat techniques?
Outside of that, the big boys can just yank the plug of information from you to hurt your business but that is the fine line you play near when your business involves using information from a competitor.
See all these external resources but do not see a mention of using Google Analytic's site speed reporting which is within your GA dashboard. See you use GA for this site, so take a peak in there and see what it is showing you.
Given the recent warnings in google webmaster tools for some website owners I would say they are looking at your backlink profile for unnatural link profiles with heavy exact match anchor text and links from untrusted sources.
In terms of onsite, footer nav links using exact match, keyword stuffing on page, duplicate content. I feel as if none of this is new news but they are trying to enforce and be more aggressive with how they treat websites on these factors.
Well do you have backlinks going tho those pages you will 301? Or are they getting their links juice because they are linked from the homepage navigation?
Because if it is the later, you are not getting any link juice from those pages being 301'd
It really boils down to linking what makes sense. Do not write trying to get exact match anchor. Also keep an eye on your % of anchor text. If you have 20% of your followed backlinks be a specific head term, that is a no no.
How are your permalinks setup? Posts typically have a dated url structure which could add to their freshness for the site. It is also argued one of the things you should do with post permalinks is move away from that url structure if you want your post urls to rank for a period of time.
Outside of that it really has to do with the site. Are posts given any better visibility from an internal linking standpoint? Are their technical aspects different? title tags, h1 tags etc?
You need to write out every different aspect down and start thinking of what it can be.
Well how about getting people in the industry to review your software? Giving away trials or even free copies/downloads and asking them to blog about it and they will naturally link back to the product pages or even the category/subcategory pages for these products?
I would start there. Also are there any industry blogs that you could guest blog on? And what about your own internal content? Do you write tutorials or installation guides? Start cranking out your own content and leverage internal site linking.
Well when you say local are you looking for people who are searching "service keyword canada". For example "best dentist in canada" or something like that?
Having pages built out by location is going to be key opposed to just trying to write content on one page. But the trade off is you do not want to just write poor content for the sake of building out pages. You need to come up with a strategy that makes sense. So I will use the dentist example above. Say you are a website that talks about the best healthcare by region.
You would make a page per location and highlight businesses. Top paragraph would be an h1 for the city/area plus the service and then have a paragraph of unique content about it. Each business could be a page and link back to the main page. Also maybe writing about news in blog posts in the area and using more internal linking will be key (not using exact match anchor text all the time but something that just makes sense).
At the end of the day google is trying to get poor websites who are listing because they either stuffed title tags, crammed keywords in filler content in a footer and other poor seo tactics. If you optimized your site properly with keyword research in a logical manner I do not suspect to see an impact. The only impact you could see is the devaluing of links from poor websites to yours and you see a trickle down effect.
If your company is Acme Inc. any branded keyword is considered variations of your company name:
Acme
Acme Inc
Amce Inc
etc.
You figure out what regex works in google analytics or whatever analytics platform you have so you can filter these into groupings of branded and non branded when looking at traffic reports.
To answer your first question...
Are you drilling down the disqualified leads to a specific area of your ppc account? I would first look at that. Is it in display and on certain sites? Is it a certain group of terms? Assume you have event tracking setup on the contact form so you can do this drill down and do some email match ups to get the data you need.
To comment on #2
Have you thought about trying other areas like linkedin ads where you can target businesses or specific positions at a company before? You can do the same drill down on facebook but imo facebook is less likely to convert if you draw them away from facebook for a landing page.
I am not aware of FB scripts but just wanted to post to see why you are opposed to GA data? Especially with the new social metrics automatically now pulled in, makes life easy. If you are concerned about GA just being last touch attribution, you can just look at multi channel for assisted conversions.
They are just looking to find someone who is a sucker. Hold to your pricing and eventually they will crack. But at the end of the day something is worth what someone will pay. So it could be valued at that if they are able to find someone who is dumb.
So it really boils down to, is it worth it for branding? If not, don't get emotionally attached and move on to another domain.
Have you looked into using buddypress at all? Think this will accomplish most of what you are looking to do.
You are able to have forums, blogs, private messaging, groups as well as feature content on a site's homepage.
Here is an example of a site on buddypress:
So here is what you need to do. Compile all this data:
Pivot out your rankings to see if a landing page type or keyword type dropped. If so, follow the trail and see if it correlates to any specific links you acquired or any specific anchor text you acquired.
Look at your link profile and see if you are too heavy in any specific areas or if you have any links that may be deemed shady.
Define mid size company? If you are talking enterprise level you can use something like marketlive which isnt bad.
But even large scale stores are still on what others may deem smaller platforms:
yahoo store - Would not use it but there are some big stores still on it
BigCommerce - Can handle a ton of skus and has ability to customize well for SEO
Open Source projects like Spree Commerce - Built on ruby but prepare to do a lot of custom work.