Hard Lessons Learned... What's yours?
-
So I got a whole lot of help these past two weeks and my rankings have been skyrocketing. Then I decided to start working on the on-page SEO in the lowest category of meaning, specifically on long-tail URLs. So I shortened a few of my best keyword pages so they can be fully indexed...
Let's just say that I neglected to remember I had built over 2 years some 30+ PR4-6 links to these pages. Rankings for these keywords dropped from 1-2 US listings to non-existent.
Lesson Learned. But I'm still smirking
What was your big lesson/mistake in the past week?
-
That's a good one! One of my clients did that too on a regular basis. After we found the tag they got over 500 new pages ranking very high, and of course we were credited with the improvement, so that was a nice thank you check
-
I'll bet you won't do that again
-
I'll bet you won't do that again
-
Bumbed!!
We uploaded over 150 new product pages, and after 2 weeks Google had still not indexed them. After a few hours of trying to figure it out, all the new pages had a canonical link to the parent page (it used the parent page template)
We removed the canonical tag, but we are still waiting!
Reminder to self: Check all technical stuffs when publishing new pages!
-
_Ha ha ,.. nice to know that you have lost the rankings .. but still there is way to recover by doing 301 redirect .. yeah I can remember the day when I did a horrible mistake. I changed all the files from html to php. And when I rank report, I realized that I have done a wonderful thing. Not a single page was in first 10 pages of Google. What was a remarkable achievement. _
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Does having too many wordpress portfolio pages with little content hurt a site's SEO?
I have a site that is for a service company, not image based like a photographer or artist. We utilize the Portfolio feature to create a gallery of floor coating finishes (images of all the flooring finish options available) but this solution has created /portfolio/file-name pages for each image. These pages have no other content besides the image. I've run SEMrush audits on this site which shows a high percentage of pages with low text/code ratio and duplicate content (a lot of the finishes have very similar names). This site has been extremely slow to improve any visibility online (more than 9 months) and I'm wondering if this is a factor by possibly having a negative effect on our site. We initially chose the portfolio option because it was the best-looking solution for our users but we can certainly change it to another format if that is better. Thanks!
Web Design | | WillGMG0 -
Community Discussion - How do you sync your marketing with your customers' experience?
Hi everyone! This week's Community Discussion comes from Tuesday's Moz Blog post by Mackenzie Fogelson, "Why Content Strategy Isn't Enough." Mackenzie says: "What you stand for as a company and a brand drives your products, your actions as a company, and also your marketing. More importantly, it will be the spark that ignites a connection with the people in your community. When it comes down to it, people will continue to have access to more: more content, more products, and more choice. The need to build meaningful relationships with your customers is not an optional approach, but a requirement. Identifying and communicating your purpose as a brand is just one part of making this happen. The rest is delivering a seamless, authentic experience." It's becoming more and more important to be aware of all aspects of your brand and your customers' experience. When you think of your content strategy, does it include all the potential customer touchpoints in their journey? Is this something you've already been doing, or is it a new idea to you? What's your strategy for making sure your online marketing efforts sync up with a visitor's or customer's experience?
Web Design | | MattRoney5 -
Moz crawl showing up ?s=keyword pages as errors
Hi all, Hoping someone can she some light on a fix with ref to wordpress and the search function it uses as Moz is craling some pages which reference the search domain.com/?s=keyword Errors showing up are duplicate pages, descriptions and titles. The search function is not important on this site and I have tried to use a plugin which disables the search page which it does but these errors still show up. Can anyone assist as this is the final piece of the puzzle and then we're down to 0 issues on the site.
Web Design | | wtfi0 -
Best course of action when removing 100's of pages from your site?
We had a section on our site Legal News (we are a law firm). All we did there was rehash news stories from news sites (no original content). We decided to remove the entire Legal News section and we were left with close to 800 404's. Around this same time our rankings seemed to drop. Our webmaster implemented 301's to closely related content on our blog. In about a weeks time our rankings went back up. Our webmaster informed us that we should submit each url to Google for removal, which we did. Its been about three weeks and our Not Found errors in WMT is over 800 and seems to be increasing daily. Moz's crawler says we have only 35 404's and they are from our blog not the legal news section we removed. The last thing we want is to have another rankings drop. Is this normal? What is the best course of action when removing hundreds of pages from your site?
Web Design | | MFC0 -
Duplicate Content? Designing new site, but all content got indexed on developer's sandbox
An ecommerce I'm helping is getting a complete redesign. Their developer had a sandbox version of their new site for design & testing. Several thousand products were loaded into the sandbox site. Then Google/Bing crawled and indexed the site (because developer didn't have a robots.txt), picking up and caching about 7,200 pages. There were even 2-3 orders placed on the sandbox site, so people were finding it. So what happens now?
Web Design | | trafficmotion
When the sandbox site is transferred to the final version on the proper domain, is there a duplicate content issue?
How can the developer fix this?0 -
Website Drops Some Traffic after Redesign. What's Happening?
What it is NOT: No Link was broken. I have used Moz, Screaming Frog, Excel, etc - there are not broken links. We have not added spammy links. We kept the same amount of links and content on the homepage - with an exception of 1 or 2. All the pages remained canonical. Our blog uses rel=prev rel=next, and each page is canonicalized to itself. We do not index duplicated content. Our tags are content="noindex,follow" We are using the Genesis Framework (we were not before.) Load time is quicker - we now have a dedicated server. Webmaster tools has not reported any crawl report problems. What we did that should have improved our rankings and traffic: Implemented schema.org Responsive design Our bounce rate is down - Average visit length is up. Any ideas?
Web Design | | Thriveworks-Counseling0 -
The use of foreign characters and capital letters in URL's?
Hello all, We have 4 language domains for our website, and a number of our Spanish landing pages are written using Spanish characters - most notably: ñ and ó. We have done our research around the web and realised that many of the top competitors for keywords such as Diseño Web (web design) and Aplicaión iPhone (iphone application) DO NOT use these special chacracters in their URL structure. Here is an example of our URL's EX: http://www.twago.es/expert/Diseño-Web/Diseño-Web However when I simply copy paste a URL that contains a special character it is automatically translated and encoded. EX: http://www.twago.es/expert/Aplicación-iPhone/Aplicación-iPhone (When written out long had it appears: http://www.twago.es/expert/Aplicación-iPhone/Aplicación-iPhone My first question is, seeing how the overwhelming majority of website URL's DO NOT contain special characters (and even for Spanish/German characters these are simply written using the standard English latin alphabet) is there a negative effect on our SEO rankings/efforts because we are using special characters? When we write anchor text for backlinks to these pages we USE the special characteristics in the anchor text (so does most other competitors). Does the anchor text have to exactly I know most webbrowsers can understand the special characters, especially when returning search results to users that either type the special characters within their search query (or not). But we seem to think that if we were doing the right thing, then why does everyone else do it differently? My second question is the same, but focusing on the use of Capital letters in our URL structure. NOTE: When we do a broken link check with some link tools (such as xenu) the URL's that contain the special characters in Spanish are marked as "broken". Is this a related issue? Any help anyone could give us would be greatly appreciated! Thanks, David from twago
Web Design | | wdziedzic0 -
Is my company's privacy policy diluting our SEO efforts?
Good morning! I'm new to the SEOmoz community. This morning, I spot checked a couple pages using the Term Extractor. When looking at the results, I noticed that we're ranking for many of the terms contained in our privacy policy. Our privacy policy is set up in the footer of our page templates and appears as a light box that pops up over the page you're viewing, so it looks like every page (from a search engines perspective) contains every word of our 900-word privacy policy. Since several of our legal terms are showing up as "targeted terms" within the tool, would it benefit me to change the privacy policy link from a light box to something else? Perhaps a link to a static page that contains our privacy policy instead? Are the search engines smart enough to see the repeating text and ignore it from page to page, or am I just diluting all of my SEO efforts here? I'm after big wins here, and don't want to be too nitpicky, but concerned this could be a big SEO no-no that I might want to correct. Thanks in advance for your expertise! Ben Culbert
Web Design | | SheriGolla0