Latest posts made by DirkC
Best posts made by DirkC
-
RE: Implementing Schema.org on a web page
Hi Anirban,
The impact of adding the few lines of extra code of schema.org will be zero on the load time of your pages.
Apart from that, serving different content to bots & human users could be considered cloaking by search engines.
Implementing schema.org on the normal pages should do just fine!
rgds,
Dirk
posted in On-Page Optimization
-
RE: Do I need to re-index the page after editing URL?
Hi,
You should redirect the old url's to the new ones using a 301 redirect. Normally it's not really necessary to submit for re-indexing, Google is quite good in finding new url's itself.
The fact that Screamingfrog still finds the old url's is a sign that on your site you are still using links to the old url - you should update the internal links to the new url (you can easily get this info from Screaming frog - take the url's that have a 404 - check at the bottom of the page "In Links" - this will give you all the pages where the links need to be updated.
rgds,
Dirk
posted in Intermediate & Advanced SEO
-
RE: Coming soon SEO
Hi,
Why would you do that for? A coming soon page has no value for visitors, and as a result no value for search engines.
If you're going to create a new site, I would first launch the new site and then redirect the old pages to the new ones.
rgds
Dirk
posted in Technical SEO
-
RE: Is there any SEO value of an HTML Sitemap, or is it strictly UI/UX?
According to Google webmaster guidelines - a sitemap for users still has some value:
Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map has an extremely large number of links, you may want to break the site map into multiple pages. (source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en)
I agree with Patrick that now most people don't bother to consult sitemaps - if they need to consult it to find their way on your site you probably have a UX problem.
For SEO purposes - it still can have some advantages:
- it can ensure that your site becomes flatter (content is less clicks away from the homepage)
- Google wants that "Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link." .A HTML sitemap can help with that as well - especially if you have a highly dynamic site where a lot of content is only accessible by (product) search
Sites like Linkedin.com still use these HTML indexes (although they are not called sitemaps but member lists) - as you can check when you visit the site in "Incognito" mode in your browser.
rgds,
Dirk
posted in Link Building
-
RE: What is the best way to learn google analytics?
Google Academy http://www.google.com/analytics/learn/index.html would probably be a good starting point. Or just trial/error with some support from online help. It's pretty self-explanatory.
rgds,
Dirk
posted in Search Behavior
-
RE: Huge Traffic Drop without any change on website
Hi,
Sudden traffic drops could have 3 principal causes:
-
you're being hit by an algorithm update - when I check http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change I don't really see a change on the date your problem starts. You could check in analytics if the traffic drop in mainly coming from organic traffic, or if the drop is for all traffic sources. Check your webmastertools - see if search queries dropped drastically (with the 2 day delay in Webmastertools it's probably to soon to do that). Do you see a manual action in your webmastertools? Check google - use the queries where you used to get the traffic from - does your ranking still looks ok - or did your site disappear from the results? If not - check the next point:
-
there is a problem with your analytics tag - install the Analytics plugin in Chrome (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/page-analytics-by-google/fnbdnhhicmebfgdgglcdacdapkcihcoh) and check your most important pages - see if the Analytics tag is measuring data. Go to Analytics - take the day where the traffic drop started & compare with the previous day - take the view on an hourly basis. If the drop appears on a very specific timepoint - than probably there has been some modification on your site which had an impact on your measurements.
-
last - check if your robots.txt is not blocking access to your site - take your main pages and check if they can be fetched by Google (there is a tool in Webmastertools)
Hope this helps. In my experience, a very sharp drop on a very specific moment (change occurs in 1 hour) is mostly caused by a problem with the analytics tag.
rgds,
Dirk
posted in Reporting & Analytics
-
RE: Image File Names for eCommerce?
I think these names would be fine and following google guidelines for image search (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/114016?hl=en) - quote: "The filename can give Google clues about the subject matter of the image. Try to make your filename a good description of the subject matter of the image. For example, my-new-black-kitten.jpg is a lot more informative than IMG00023.JPG. Descriptive filenames can also be useful to users: If we're unable to find suitable text in the page on which we found the image, we'll use the filename as the image's snippet in our search results."
rgds
Dirk
posted in On-Page Optimization
-
RE: Internal Links - Dofollow or Nofollow and why?
The main reason to use internal "nofollow" links on your site if the links would go to technical pages like login pages, or links to pages that you don't want to have indexed. As Ryan says - if you link to other relevant articles there is no reason to use nofollow.
Dirk
posted in Intermediate & Advanced SEO
-
RE: Canonical issues using Screaming Frog and other tools?
Hi,
The difference between them
-
canonical : url has a canonical url - which can be self-referencing (canonical url = url) or not
-
canonicalised: url has a canonical url which is not self-referencing (canonical url <> url)
-
no canonical : quite obvious - the url has no canonical.
Potential issues could be - url's that you would like to have a canonical don't have a canonical or url's that are canonicalised don't have the right canonical url. You can use the lists (both canonicalised & no canonical) from Screaming Frog to check them - but it's up to you to judge whether the canonical is ok or not (no automated tool can guess what your intentions are).
Typical mistakes with canonicals: all url's have the same canonical url (like the homepage), or have canonical url's that do not exist. You could also check this with Screaming Frog using the setting "respect canonicals" - this way only the canonical url's will be shown in the listing.
Also keep in mind that canonical url's are merely a friendly request to Google to index the canonical rather than the normal url - but it's not an obligation for Google to do this (check https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en quote: "the search results will be more likely to show users that URL structure. (Note: We attempt to respect this, but cannot guarantee this in all cases.)"
Dirk
posted in Technical SEO
-
RE: How new website / blogs can earn backlinks?
There are quite a lot of posts on Moz that cover link building. There is of course the beginner's guide, and this category page, which highlights the most important articles on link building.
Remember that all blogs once started from zero: without quality content, quality sites are not going to link to you. Create your content strategy and start building relationships. It will probably take time and a lot of effort, but it pays of in long run.
Hope this helps,
DIrk
posted in Link Building
Blog Posts
12/2/2015
By executing this easy-to-use script, you'll be able to unlock a mountain of useful data.
Passionate about online marketing since 2000