I'm developing a store locator web site where users may search for a brand and get a list of stores selling this brand.
Now I'm doing some SEO. My goal is that when someone is googling for a store name or storename + city, then my site will be listed on page one.
If you visit a store on my site today, the title will show:
storename, city, country - at mysite.com
My URL will look like this:
http://mysite.com/store/?store=Mardou+&+Dean&storeid=5459
My question is:
- Should I add city name and country in my URL?
- Would it be good or bad in terms of SEO to have this url:
http://mysite.com/store/Norway/Oslo/Mardou+&+Dean/?storeid=5459
In terms of usability,the last url is best, but not sure if it matters to search engines?
I know that there is a lot more to SEO, but now I'm just wondering about this part.
Depends on how much information you want to expose to search engine, you should adjust the data used in these Microdata.
This article is worth reading:
http://www.vanseodesign.com/web-design/html5-microdata/
The impact of keywords in the URL is not as important as you think. Ensuring that your targeted terms are in the page title, content and headings, internal and external backlink anchor text etc are all much more powerful signals.
Don't confuse "exact match domains" with exact match URLs.
For more "educated" "opinion" on what matters, take a look at http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors
Related
I am developing a simple website and want to implement microdata on it.
The website is for a local business and simply has the default structure (about, services, contact, etc..).
My question is if microdata can be cloned on every page or if I should change from page to page. Logically I would say that I should change from page to page, but on the other hand information like facebook page, twitter and map will keep the same so I don't know what should I do.
I take the chance to ask if there is any better category to list a software company, I am using local business but maybe there should be better ones that I am missing (this applies for meta description and keywords also on the different sections of the site)
You should declare only the start- or contact/aboutme site with your Local Buissiness Information.
On all other site depend on the content like article, product etc.
A friend of mine has opened a local business and not knowing what to do choose a URL with the name of her company (which is a playword). The chosen name is quite bad for google ranking because not meaningful: not indicating the nature of business nor the location (city).
I would like her to buy two new domains:
businessname-business-type-city.com
businessnamebusinesstypecity.com
is that still ok with google? I was doing that some years ago and ranked first on the search.
You can get as many domain names as you want, and set up the DNS to point to the ip of playword. But don't think it would be worth it, and no guarantee it would generate more hits.. Google search take location in consideration, so you're probably best of branding playword, and generate buzz in other ways; social media, flyers, many Google ads, and sponsored posts on Facebook
And be sure to have good semantics on your page
If the domain name is the name of the business then it is meaningful. Value of keywords in domain names has been diminished in recent times. Market the business, not the domain name. (And google local business results will help)
I want to sell some products that are also prezent on another webshop. They are providing a datafeed with every information about the product, and they have nothing against that i post the info on my webshop.
The question is should i worry about duplicate content? The number of products is to high and it`s not worth rewriteing their description. Will google think that i stole the content?
Depends.
Personally i would prevent Google from indexing DC pages by adding this to the <head>...</head>:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow"/>
The URLs, which come into question, won't rank anyway. So it's (usually) Ok to keep them completely out of Google's sight and don't have to worry any more about all the Algorithm-Updates.
Or, if i have a lot of pages and need more Crawl-Budget, i would use the robots.txt file:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /path/to/affiliate/products/
In this case the Linkjuice cannot flow freely within my site anymore, but all the important pages get indexed. Plus it's incredibly easy to implement. (Just don't do this if you have a lot of deeplinks to your Products from your Homepage etc.)
Matt Cutts in 2009:
"Can product descriptions be considered duplicate content?"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z07IfCtYbLw
He doesn't say "its bad" but he clearly shows that Google doesn't like it.
Matt Cutts in 2012:
"Is it useful to have a section of my site that re-posts articles from other sites?"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7sfUDr3w8I States that it's propably a good idea to remove DC Pages (Like content from RSS-Feeds, Press Releases or Product-Description Feeds).
So to make a long story short - I really don't say "start panic" or whatever, i just say "remove everything from your site which could send out negative signals to Google, so you don't have to worry about it anymore" and then you can go on and build up your Brand to sell as many products as possible ;o)
Do worry about the content the site comes under the category of Affiliate sites so the product description would be same. it wont effect your site
If you want to do it properly I would get all the content re-writen. There is an amazing service out there too callws wordai.com.
Their site will re-write the content for you as if a human has on the Turing Plan.
You can then check the content with copyscape.com too see how unique it is!
Best of luck.
We're about to embark on a restructuring of our Website, and we will be separating some of our customers into different groups.
Currently all of our customers visit our homepage: www.example.com
What we are going to be doing is sending customers to specific landing pages depending on marketing segmentation.
For instance, people who we know are more likely to book a hotel might go to www.example.com/hotels, whilst people who like cars will go to www.example.com/cars.
The content might be ever so slightly different (a banner or parameter might change) but the vast majority of text (copy, layout) will stay the same.
Firstly, are Canonical Tags appropriate to use in this case to direct any Google juice back to www.example.com?
Secondly, since we will be marketing to specific groups, we will not want these pages to be indexed by Google, nor for them to appear in search rankings. With this in mind, are Canonical Tags still the correct tag to be using? That is, do Canonical Tags pass on the Google Juice to the canonical page, meaning the referrer page is not indexed?
If the core content of all those pages is the same then I think using the canonical tag will work. If Google accepts the canonicalness of the pages then it will always send people to the page you specify.
What do you mean by "sending customers to specific landing pages depending on marketing segmentation"? How is that implemented?
If all that changes is adverts then why not use the one page and dynamically insert the adverts that suit the visitor?
Seems that if you don't want the specific landing pages indexed by Google, or appearing in the search rankings, then the pages wouldn't have any 'Google juice' to consolidate. In that case, canonical tags won't hurt, but I don't think they'll have any effect.
To keep the landing pages from being indexed, you could use robots.txt, as well as the robots meta tag.
I run a site where users have their own profile pages. They are also able to post products for sale (that they have made) and write/import blog posts. I am going to be implementing a sitemap and I need to make a final decision with the URL strategy.
Here's what I currently have for products (where 1234 is the product ID that I use to lookup that product):
N.B "product" is a fixed string (although it's another word in the actual site) - all others are dynamic depending on the item.
example.com/product/1234.product-category.product-name
should I change to any of these? i.e:
example.com/maker/users_name/product-category/product-name/1234
example.com/product/product-category/product-name/1234
example.com/product/1234/product-category/product-name
The main items for consideration are:
Where should the product ID go in the URL? Both in terms of readability by the user but also in SEO terms
Should I include the user's name (as he/she made that product) ?
Should I attempt to remove the ID altogether?
I think the first example (example.com/product/1234.product-category.product-name) is the best format but I would consider changing then "." to "-". I am just thinking that if somehow a product name ends in something that triggers an different handler on your server like ".php" or ".jsp" you might have some undesired effects.
Where should the product ID go in the URL? Both in terms of readability by the user but also in SEO terms
I don't really think it matters too much where the product ID goes but as far as the user reading it, I think they pay attention to the end of the line so I would put the ID first leaving the most descriptive part (the product name) at the end.
Should I include the user's name (as he/she made that product) ?
Not sure if you allow your users to change user names, but if you did I would leave the user name out. An example would be someone getting married and changing their last name. This would hurt your SEO since the URL would change but search engines would have already indexed it the old way. You'd have to put some permantent redirects in place to handle this which could be avoided by just leaving the username out.
Should I attempt to remove the ID altogether?
You should leave the ID in the URL in the event that two products have the same name and your algorithm to generate the URL creates a duplicate link.
I prefer this:
example.com/users_name/product-category/product-name/1234
However, one should be aware that the url gets too long some times. It is difficult to represent or promote in a blog or a forum. Why not simply use
example.com/1234 and use the Title to put the other details like category and product name?
Now a days, I think search engines are getting smarter and short urls are used more and more.