The only thing I can think of is if you are located in the UK. It might of affected your rankings if the firewall uses US Data centres?

If this is your site: http://bearsbys.com/

You are using a .com domain for a UK website so having your IP change to US could mess things up a little. The first thing I would do is go to Google Webmaster Tools and make sure you have set your Location to the United Kingdom.

Check to see if your site is hosted on a UK Hosting provider. Then check and see if Sucuri only uses US Data Centres.

Just make sure you add a robots.txt to the subdomain with

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Or if the old site is not needed anymore, redirect the subdomain to your main domain and remove the site.

Hey Eric,

No, you're right. If that's the degree to which your content is diverging, it may be necessary to have 2 completely separate domains. One set does not have anything to do with the other, and that will absolutely affect relevance and compatibility when it comes to linking practices.

You could go with a subdomain structure and diverge your link profiles - it would have much the same effect as going with 2 separate domains. That being said, it makes life really difficult if you are moving domains or redirecting in the future, so a subdomain structure is pretty permanent and not ideal if most links are coming back to your Home Page.

You could attempt a social media bridge for both sites, but that may be a bit beyond what you are trying to accomplish here. I think you have the right of it based on the facts presented.

Here's wishing you the best of luck on the shift!

Best,

Rob

Hi Eric,

Interesting question is right! I did some consulting for a pharma client recently who was having this exact same problem. They had a divergence of domain authority because they were attempting to appeal to 2 different markets (i.e. 2 different sets of keywords - one for patients and one for providers) using the same domain. Their original answer was to create a subdomain which could be ranked separately so they could appeal to their patients and their providers simultaneously, but that split their link juice too much and they lost out both ways. This is when they contacted me.

My suggestion was to create a site architecture that reflected the needs of the 2 groups that were approaching the site. In other words, creating 2 funnels, 1 each for patients and for providers. Since we instituted that change 3 months back, we hit 1st page and continue to improve. That would be my suggestion here:

Build out 2 niche lines using site structure for health vs. non-health to create relevance in the eyes of Google - that should be enough to take care of the issue you're outlining here. Let me know if there's anything I'm missing here.

Cheers,

Rob

Hello Ahuj,

To answer your final question first:

Crawlers will not stop until they encounter something they cannot read or are told not to continue beyond a certain point. So your site will be updated in the index upon each crawl.

I did some quick browsing and it sounds like an automated sitemap might be your best option. Check out this link on Moz Q&A:

https://moz.com/community/q/best-practices-for-adding-dynamic-url-s-to-xml-sitemap

There are tools out there that will help with the automation process, which will update hourly/daily to help crawlers find your dynamic pages. The tool suggested on this particular blog can be found at:

http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/standalone-google-sitemap-generator.html

I have never used it, but it is worth looking into as a solution to your problem. Another good suggestion I saw was to place all removed deals in an archive page and make them unavailable for purchase/collection. This sounds like a solution that would minimize future issues surrounding 404's, etc.

Hope this helps!

Rob

Hello,

To answer your question in short, there isn't really a way to "speed up" this process, but that shouldn't be the goal in the first place. Keyword research is the foundation upon which you build your rankings, so you should really be prepared to put some serious thought into it.

In terms of making the process more effective, however, there are a few tactics I have used which have helped me. Feel free to follow this checklist:

1. Assess your product categories

Presumably you are not dealing with 1000 different products from unique niches. Start by assigning each of these products to a category and using that category as a landing page. Then you can research each category for relevant keywords.

2. Assign keywords for each category

I would take no more than 10-20 keywords for each category unless the products you are selling are well-known (and therefore, well-searched). No e-commerce site can rank first for every item they carry.

3. Determine the ranking difficulty of your chosen keywords

I use a national keyword checking tool called Authority Metrics (www.authoritymetrics.com) for national keyword research. It shows you organic competition levels and PPC costs along with national monthly searches based on multiple countries. It is not particularly useful for local clients, but as an e-commerce website, I doubt this will impact you. In any case, it will give you more information than Google's Keyword Planner Tool.

4. Create your sitemap/category pages

This should be done after you have determined what keywords you can/will be ranking for. My strategy tends to involve a 2-pronged approach where I use 1 sales funnel for low-hanging fruit (long-tail keywords or unique products) and another for large-scale keywords which will take time to rank. This allows you small-scale income very quickly, while also allowing you to build your site organically.

5. Create content for each category, and your top-sellers

Obviously you need quality content to rank. I like to focus on a percentage of products that I feel have the best chance of success. There is no hard rule about this, but I typically go for about 5% of my overall product list. Generally speaking, 10% of your products will yield 75% of your overall sales. Find the balancing point between your keyword's monthly searches and the ROI you stand to gain from ranking each of these products.

This has gone beyond keyword research and into sales and CRO, but I hope it helps to give you a helpful outline of my approach to the e-commerce landscape. This process will put you in good shape for establishing your site and getting purchases.

Feel free to follow up with me if you have further questions.

All the best,

Rob

Hi Tim,

I was literally working on this exact issue with a client yesterday. There is absolutely nothing about this to worry about. Although auditing programs like Screaming Frog will bring this up as an "issue", a manual look reveals nothing to be concerned about.

The only issue you might have is, as CleverPhD pointed out, if you have any internal linking that might be sent to the "incorrect" url, that would be something to fix. Otherwise, this is totally fine.

Best regards,

Rob

Hello Chad,

Absolutely, depending on how you structure your tags. The biggest problem with multiple H1's is that using different keywords can confuse Google and Users about what a page is attempting to rank for. If you have multiple keywords you are attempting to rank for, you are better off creating different pages with a small number of H1's optimized to each keyword respectively. This will help Google contextualize the page.

This comes up frequently on Moz Q&A, and opinion has shifted throughout the years, but it is now considered best practice to use a single keyword/H1 tag for each page for best ranking potential.

Hope this helps,

Rob

Hello KJ,

You absolutely don't want to begin creating subdomains for different locations. That will split your link flow across multiple domains (rather than consolidating it within a single domain).

It sounds like you are attempting a silo structure for your website (multiple locations targeting the same keyword) but this can be seen as stuffing if performed incorrectly. Using multiple pages to rank for a single keyword is problematic as it hits both Panda and Penguin red flags. What you want to do is begin ranking for different keywords or at least ensuring that your content for each of these locations pages is unique and sufficiently long (500 words+) to avoid arousing suspicion.

Your site structure sounds like it is okay. For example, a silo we put in place for one of our clients followed the following pattern:

domain.com/country/region/city/service

We hit about 15 cities using this tactic, and they have been sitting 1st page for the last year or so. We also built sufficient links to the home page and relevant pages and ensured that our technical SEO was spotless, so perhaps these are the areas you might engage your team to move forward on.

If you want to know more about our process, feel free to touch base and I will provide what advice I can.

Hope this helps and best of luck moving forward!

Rob

Hello Mick,

What you are describing here sounds like an on-page Silo to me. It will not generate any negative feedback from Google if you do it correctly. We actually recently instituted this strategy with a windows and doors company in the UK (windows & doors London, windows & doors Suffolk, windows & doors Ipswich, etc.) and have had tremendous results. Combined with a solid link-building campaign, they shot up the rankings to be #1 and have held it for over a year now. We have not seen any negative attention or penalties.

The upshot is that this tactic, if properly implemented, will generate significant ranking boosts alongside a decent link-building approach. You will do quite well if you are going after geo-specific keywords and you build your site architecture around them. I cannot vouch for individual pages put together piecemeal, however. The structure we put in place took about 2 months and was well-researched beforehand.

If you want, feel free to reach out and I would be happy to send along more advice regarding our process.

Hope this helps and best of luck with moving forward!

Rob

Hello Anirban,

The main reason large-scale websites like Indeed feature so prominently on SERP's is that there are more ranking factors at work than just content. While Panda has been created to avoid duplicate content issues and it is widely known that duplicate content can lead to penalties and reduced ranking potential, duplicate content can be over-shadowed by other ranking factors, like a website's link profile and it's Authority relative to websites in its niche.

For example, Wikipedia is widely cited by webmasters around the world, but it features a lot of repetition and is an internal linking nightmare where crawling and indexing are concerned. That being said, it is normal to find a Wikipedia page every time a "What Is" query is made.

Youtube is in a similar situation. There are duplicated videos and content galore on that domain, but it is linked to so frequently that it simply cannot be beaten when it comes to domain authority and relevance.

While Indeed is probably being impacted by duplicate content, this pales in comparison to its link profile and the relevance it has in its industry.

Hope this helps! Let me know if I can help with anything else.

Best regards,

Rob

Hello KJ,

You absolutely don't want to begin creating subdomains for different locations. That will split your link flow across multiple domains (rather than consolidating it within a single domain).

It sounds like you are attempting a silo structure for your website (multiple locations targeting the same keyword) but this can be seen as stuffing if performed incorrectly. Using multiple pages to rank for a single keyword is problematic as it hits both Panda and Penguin red flags. What you want to do is begin ranking for different keywords or at least ensuring that your content for each of these locations pages is unique and sufficiently long (500 words+) to avoid arousing suspicion.

Your site structure sounds like it is okay. For example, a silo we put in place for one of our clients followed the following pattern:

domain.com/country/region/city/service

We hit about 15 cities using this tactic, and they have been sitting 1st page for the last year or so. We also built sufficient links to the home page and relevant pages and ensured that our technical SEO was spotless, so perhaps these are the areas you might engage your team to move forward on.

If you want to know more about our process, feel free to touch base and I will provide what advice I can.

Hope this helps and best of luck moving forward!

Rob

Hi Eric,

Interesting question is right! I did some consulting for a pharma client recently who was having this exact same problem. They had a divergence of domain authority because they were attempting to appeal to 2 different markets (i.e. 2 different sets of keywords - one for patients and one for providers) using the same domain. Their original answer was to create a subdomain which could be ranked separately so they could appeal to their patients and their providers simultaneously, but that split their link juice too much and they lost out both ways. This is when they contacted me.

My suggestion was to create a site architecture that reflected the needs of the 2 groups that were approaching the site. In other words, creating 2 funnels, 1 each for patients and for providers. Since we instituted that change 3 months back, we hit 1st page and continue to improve. That would be my suggestion here:

Build out 2 niche lines using site structure for health vs. non-health to create relevance in the eyes of Google - that should be enough to take care of the issue you're outlining here. Let me know if there's anything I'm missing here.

Cheers,

Rob

Hello Julio,

Yoast is a great plugin to use as a general framework for SEO practice - this does not mean you have to follow the instructions to the letter, but it does give you some ideas in how to create quality content and it is extremely easy to use. I use it as my go-to plug-in whenever I am setting up a site on Wordpress.

Somewhat dated, but still fairly effective, guide to using Wordpress:

http://moz.com/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success

Here are some more plugin options for you to consider:

http://moz.com/ugc/roundup-of-35-wordpress-seo-plugins

Help with optimizing Wordpress:

http://moz.com/webinars/advanced-wordpress-seo

These will all help - in short, I would strongly suggest Yoast as an SEO tool for Wordpress. Feel free to fire any questions you have my way.

Rob

Hello Christopher,

Bolding in and of itself confers no technical SEO advantage. However, it does have a "soft" SEO impact in that it can make content more accessible and readable from a user perspective. This might make it more likely to be shared, linked to, or otherwise cited, improving your potential reach and therefore helping with positive ranking signals to Google.

Dry, basic text can make a reader bored and increase Bounce Rate.

However, well-cited, original content with proper emphasis on relevant topics and words can make all the difference when it comes to user reception.

See the difference? Google will too, over time.

Hope this helps!

Rob

Hello Ahuj,

To answer your final question first:

Crawlers will not stop until they encounter something they cannot read or are told not to continue beyond a certain point. So your site will be updated in the index upon each crawl.

I did some quick browsing and it sounds like an automated sitemap might be your best option. Check out this link on Moz Q&A:

https://moz.com/community/q/best-practices-for-adding-dynamic-url-s-to-xml-sitemap

There are tools out there that will help with the automation process, which will update hourly/daily to help crawlers find your dynamic pages. The tool suggested on this particular blog can be found at:

http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/standalone-google-sitemap-generator.html

I have never used it, but it is worth looking into as a solution to your problem. Another good suggestion I saw was to place all removed deals in an archive page and make them unavailable for purchase/collection. This sounds like a solution that would minimize future issues surrounding 404's, etc.

Hope this helps!

Rob

Hello,

To answer your question in short, there isn't really a way to "speed up" this process, but that shouldn't be the goal in the first place. Keyword research is the foundation upon which you build your rankings, so you should really be prepared to put some serious thought into it.

In terms of making the process more effective, however, there are a few tactics I have used which have helped me. Feel free to follow this checklist:

1. Assess your product categories

Presumably you are not dealing with 1000 different products from unique niches. Start by assigning each of these products to a category and using that category as a landing page. Then you can research each category for relevant keywords.

2. Assign keywords for each category

I would take no more than 10-20 keywords for each category unless the products you are selling are well-known (and therefore, well-searched). No e-commerce site can rank first for every item they carry.

3. Determine the ranking difficulty of your chosen keywords

I use a national keyword checking tool called Authority Metrics (www.authoritymetrics.com) for national keyword research. It shows you organic competition levels and PPC costs along with national monthly searches based on multiple countries. It is not particularly useful for local clients, but as an e-commerce website, I doubt this will impact you. In any case, it will give you more information than Google's Keyword Planner Tool.

4. Create your sitemap/category pages

This should be done after you have determined what keywords you can/will be ranking for. My strategy tends to involve a 2-pronged approach where I use 1 sales funnel for low-hanging fruit (long-tail keywords or unique products) and another for large-scale keywords which will take time to rank. This allows you small-scale income very quickly, while also allowing you to build your site organically.

5. Create content for each category, and your top-sellers

Obviously you need quality content to rank. I like to focus on a percentage of products that I feel have the best chance of success. There is no hard rule about this, but I typically go for about 5% of my overall product list. Generally speaking, 10% of your products will yield 75% of your overall sales. Find the balancing point between your keyword's monthly searches and the ROI you stand to gain from ranking each of these products.

This has gone beyond keyword research and into sales and CRO, but I hope it helps to give you a helpful outline of my approach to the e-commerce landscape. This process will put you in good shape for establishing your site and getting purchases.

Feel free to follow up with me if you have further questions.

All the best,

Rob

I really don't think there's any "right" or "wrong" way to go about this. As Ray said, this is a very, very small aspect of your on-page SEO and shouldn't take up too much of your time in terms of worrying.

When in doubt, ask yourself "will this make sense from my reader's perspective?" On average, if you follow that line of thought, you won't go far wrong.

If you are hitting the 200-300 comments/page mark it might be better to get into pagination from a sheer UX perspective - depending on their dedication to the content matter, it is unlikely that the average user is going to want to sift through so many comments after reading your content.

I don't know what audience you are targeting, but it seems to me that 25-50 would be sufficient to capture the essence of most commenting sections regardless of topic and would also help with loading times.

Ray makes a great point about the canonical tag and rel tags though - as with everything, your strategy has to account for your specific situation and marketing approach.

Hey Eric,

No, you're right. If that's the degree to which your content is diverging, it may be necessary to have 2 completely separate domains. One set does not have anything to do with the other, and that will absolutely affect relevance and compatibility when it comes to linking practices.

You could go with a subdomain structure and diverge your link profiles - it would have much the same effect as going with 2 separate domains. That being said, it makes life really difficult if you are moving domains or redirecting in the future, so a subdomain structure is pretty permanent and not ideal if most links are coming back to your Home Page.

You could attempt a social media bridge for both sites, but that may be a bit beyond what you are trying to accomplish here. I think you have the right of it based on the facts presented.

Here's wishing you the best of luck on the shift!

Best,

Rob