Dealing with error pages that might keep Googlebot wondering what to do (and wasting Googlebot's time is never a good idea for your site Google crawl rate) is a too often-discussed issue. That's why we return to it again and again and again trying to share some tips and clarifications. The problem is, we can't do without them because error pages always pop up during the life of any website - it's like some sort of an illness: all people get ill from time to time. And Google is often not very quick to figure the problem for the clear reason: Google can never be sure you are serious about removing the page. Thus it will be...
A broken link hurts both your site usability and SEO. Users feel disappointed when clicking a link to land nowhere and search engines certainly don't want them to: so if they find a lot of broken link on your pages, this may hurt your reputation. Anyway, it is quite clear that broken links are bad. But there's hardly any website out there that has no broken links at all - because it is hard to keep...
The following tips are from Ran of Wood and Beyond Here are my 2 tips as to how we deal with product discontinuation to preserve some SEO value and to shift authority gained from indexed products. Hopefully you'd like my tips and I suspect other e-commerce sites might benefit from them as well. Problem: Having products discontinue or out of stock is a real challenge for us,...
This question is being asked so often that I just decided to go ahead and write a post about that: You notice Google report a 404 page on your site; You go to your site and fix the error (delete the link to the non-existent page or just fix the broken URL); Your Google Webmaster Tools account is still reporting the error Is there any way to tell Google the error is fixed? Currently, the only question to this question...
Thinking of the URL structure of your future site is a very important step. Give it more time to make sure you plan everything ahead.
One thing to take into consideration here is whether your site URLs need an extension at the end or not (examples: .html, .php, etc).
Two contradicting points of view are based on the following:
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. One of the main goals of SEO is to build traffic. Why are so many SEO professionals ignoring directories? Search engines have not abolished directories! Google has simply gotten stricter when it comes to acknowledging specific directories. Despite that, they are still beneficial for PR and traffic gain. There are many different types of directories that can be of great value to your website or blog. Check out the article at Search Engine...
For a long time SEOs have been wondering about the SEO value of named anchors (/page#headline1) linking to some parts of the page. It is often used for FAQ pages where each link qauickly takes you to the chosen answer. A really great find by WebmasterWorld member: Google adds Wikipedia on-page navigation to mini-sitelinks within Google SERPs. Here's one of the examples: Here's how Google SERPs look like for [Star Wars]: Notice those mini-sitelinks under...
Getting your page to top 10 results in Google is one thing but getting people to click through is yet another story. It is easier if you are #1 of course - but if you are somewhere in the middle, catching surfers' eye is quite hard. One way is to make your title short and concise, as well as do your best to make it contain the search terms (which will be...
We have already discussed why adding breadcrumbs is beneficial for both user experience and SEO: they help users to understand where they are in relation to the rest of the site and provide better interlinking and thus easier crawling.
However what also should be mentioned is that usng your keywords in each and every level of the breadcrumb path may look like you are stuffing your internal anchor tet with keywords.
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The following tip was kindly provided by Matt Leonard, follow Matt on Twitter or watch his awesome contributions on SEJ! Suppose you’re trying to rank for a specific keyword or phrase. You have your page targeted, you’re focused and now it’s just a matter of time. You’ll obviously want to optimize your internal anchor text, but how can you do that in scale and insure ongoing ...
