SEO 2017 S&A
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- noRGB0
Does the text content of an alt tag affect site content ranking at all? For example, if Trooper Bill runs QBN.com, a design news site, and he makes the alt tag of every image on the site: alt="QBN.com, Design News, Image Description" does this actually affect site performance, or is it purely for accessibility?
- yes but in your example no..google will know something fishys going on if every alt is uniformtrooperbill
- noRGB2
By the way, congrats on the first child. :+1:
- noRGB0
Bill, got a couple other questions for you. Got an email address?
- canoe1
We built a brand new website hosted on a new server with an existing URL... used Wordpress.
We used Redirection in Wordpress to handle the redirects. The plugn also has a 404 tab.
So in Google Search Console and the Redirection plugin the 404s are sky high. We're talking the site being pinged multiple times for old theme components which we knew were hacked, thus the move.
But this appears to be killing the site's ranks. Am I supposed to let Google know that these IPs are bogus? Do I ban the IPs? What's the story... never been down this path before.
Our Best,
Team Thanks in Advance!
- trooperbill0
Was the new site page for page what the old site was (excluding the hacked pages?) or has the architecture changed? I'd also reinstate all historic meta data and text if possible to kee the old/new sites as similar as possible when transitioning.
Theres also a few other things you can do.
Firstly fix all the 404s and 301 them to a relevant page of the home page. in search console tick them as fixed as you do them (you can only do 1000 or so every day)
next use majestic.com search console, semrush, search metrics ahrefs opensiteexplorer and any other tools you have access for to pull down all the discoverable backlinks for the site, de-duplicate and pivot the data then manually check each link - its a ballache but worth doing. 1 or 2 links per domain should be enough. when de-duping strip out http, https and www from urls to cut the list down even more. then create a domain level disavow file for all the crappy sites that link to you and upload this.
- dbloc1
- I don't think it's schema either. I checked a few sites that had it and there was no phone schema to be found.dbloc
- i will find out for you;)trooperbill
- Thank you!dbloc
- any word Troop?dbloc
- on your Adblock the property:
'clickToCall': true,Squiddy - So it's part of adwords? These aren't showing as ads though. They are organic searches.dbloc
- I think you might be referring to this.
http://cdn.ientry.co…dbloc - dbloc --youre right, I was referring to AFS. Seems this is some new thing google is including in the search resultsSquiddy
- I'm kinda thinking if the number appears on the site it'd be indexed, with the structured data schema to lock it inSquiddy
- trooperbill0
(function(a,e,c,f,g,h,b,d){var k={ak:"1021052042",cl:"naWcCObul... 481-8511"};a[c]=a[c]||function... Date,e)};a[f]()})(window,documen...
Looks like Googles call tracking
- _niko0
Client is asking for a 10 second animation before the site loads, besides this being annoying af, will this hurt google searchability or rankings?
- trooperbill1
@_niko that would be ill advised for a few reasons. i cant see any way where this could be implemented without a major down side. mainly in how Internal Pagerank would be stunted causing all pages 2 clicks inwards to have significantly lower than expected natural rankings.
modal windows would result in a penalty
overlays would result in a penalty
having a splash screen would cause the previously mentioned issue with IPR
how about a full screen/high banner with the animation in place? it would still need navigation and other content to be on the page but this could be below the fold (menus behind a hamburger menu)?
- Mattjanz3n1
Google Sitemaps.... We have two sites merged on the front end. Using domains xyzshop.com and shop.xyzshop.com
We have it setup in webmaster tools as xyzshop.com and submitted the sitemap for that. Everything all good..
Then I realized we want all the products and categories from shop.xyzshop.com in google sitemap too.. but its all on a different domain.
Do we create a profile for the shop.xyzshop.com in webmaster tools and somehow link the two or...not sure. One of the dev's wanted to create a script to join the sitemaps into one, but thats not right as it's a different domain to google.
- Hold on, are both domains serving the exact same content?ETM
- nopeMattjanz3n
- Figured it out. It's actually okay to submit one sitemap with multiple domains as long as the domains are all registered with GWT.Mattjanz3n
- hotroddy0
when a site doesn't use media queries to adapt to mobile (ie. doesn't resize to mobile dimensions on a desktop browser but will magically work when you check on your phone - How are these websites typically built.
Is it sniffing operating system before serving up page? Is this good practice?
Wix website follow this methodology.
- is it considered duplicate content?hotroddy
- rule of thumb, if Wix is doing something, do the oppositeGuyFawkes
- i think i lost a job because i told client to move away from it and that I wasn't going to spend time learning it.hotroddy
- wix guys go wix because their cheapGuyFawkes
- good point!hotroddy
- Wordpress has a plugin called Mobble which does this. Let's you sniff the platform and serve up content / styles based on that.Centigrade
- good to know centihotroddy
- trooperbill0
theres many ways you could achieve what i think you're saying. do you have an example?
afaik wix uses a table based layout that naturally adapts to its canvas. its a mix of old school html3/4 and some clever coding.
- detritus0
Hey Trooper - do outbound links have any positive impact on PageRank, do you know?
I have site with a roster of artists and I think it would be a good idea to link to them. there is a reason we don't already, but I'm wondering whether that reason would be mitigated if it were offset by a net benefit in google score?
Thanks for any insight you can provide (I googled but couldn't see anything conclusive)..
- pockets0
is it bad practice to have h1's with "display:none;" applied?
- trooperbill2
yes its bad to use display non period. the exception being for menus.
a recent updated called "medic" has targeted hidden content amongst many other things so accordion menus and tabbed interfaces are now more strongly not advised.
- cherub0
Web SEO confuses me to no end. Trooperbill I should have emailed you when you offered, I'm so confused.
Ok, I don't understand how subdomains interact with SEO. And I don't understand what cases you want a subdomain and what cases you want a totally different TLD URL.
Example: www.bhphoto.com changed their name to www.bhphotovideo.com because many photographers are making the natural progression to video, so it makes sense to get that extra market.
But, they could easily have just made video.bhphoto.com instead of opting for awkwardly appending the word "video" to the end of their already workable "bhphoto" OR they could have made www.bhphoto.com/video/menu.html
According to this article:
https://seo-hacker.com/domain-do…the top sites have short names, the site says 6 characters or less, and they must have realized this, so why did they lengthen their name making it arguably worse?
Ok, after reading this:
https://seo-hacker.com/subdomain…"You see, search engines treat subfolders as if it was part of the second-level domain (SLD) while they treat subdomains as if it was a different site altogether – with much less authority to boot."
I think they are saying subdomains are like a hack. Your foreign language version of spanish.bhphoto.com even if everything else was equal besides language it still wouldn't get the same weight/ranking.
Is that about right?
- If you are an established company, have hundreds if not thousands of pages indexed, have return links on millions of other websites, and or can afford to...utopian
- ...pay Google on a monthly basis for SEO marketing, then it does not really matter how short, long and or obscure that your domain name is.utopian
- Oh I see. Having massive amount of pages indexed is worth more street cred than a site with few pages and return links, even if they are good ones.cherub
- quantity > qualitycherub
- mekk0
I got an existing project and nearly all headlines instead of H1 are made like this: <span class="h2">..</span> - seems to follow some kind of pattern that I don't see.
Leave as span or change markup to proper headlines?
- I would say always use proper heading tags <h1> etc.fadein11
- yeah, makes sense to me too, I'm just curious why someone would do it this way.mekk
- so many cms seem to do this automatically, even when you go into the source code and change it, they change it back. eg hubspothans_glib
- depends on how you set up your RTE. In my case however it is all within the magento template files.mekk
- cherub0
Anyone?
- mekk0
what's better?
mysite.com/category/sub-category...
or
mysite.com/some-other-link-to-su...
Some websites link every category to root level, I think for importance. SEO guys say it makes subpages in the tree more visible.
I think that's crap, because on mysite.com/category/sub-category... maybe my mysite.com/category/ is a landingpage I want to use. It's just inconsistent. Also I think google is intelligent enough to find out the actual site structure aside from the use of / or - URL
Thoughts?
- cherub0
Under "Arguments for flat URLs" #3. "Usability"
"The shorter a URL is, the more user-friendly, sharable, and marketable it is, leading to increased conversion."
As far as user experience goes, I would agree that really long, deeply nested URLs aren't user friendly. But it's still more user friendly than www.somesite.com/2x546zb3/menu.h…...
and that's short.Basically a hierarchical struture is intuitive for the end user. But, at the cost of SEO.
- i prefer short urls with an end point that is keyword rich. i question deeply nested urls bein user friendly as theyre not interactie breadcrumbs. better to havtrooperbill
- /bags/leather-hand-b... (cat)
or
/bags/abc-123-leathe...
over
/bags/handbags/leath...trooperbill - plus this means you can have a product repeated in different categories but always referenced to a static URL (no canonicalisation needed) better for SEOtrooperbill