I have created 3 Landing Pages. What is the best way to reference them in Google?
1) Save it in my sitemap.xml?
2) created real links in my site that redirect to these pages ? (hidden link ?)
why you prefer one technique over another?
You should probably put them in sitemap.xml for starters. You should then have appropriate real links to these landing pages with link text that is appropriate for the audience. Hidden links etc sound like 'black hat' SEO techniques which will backfire and get your site penalized.
Each landing page in the site should be differentiated (eg. drug sites with info for doctors and another for patients). If they are just displaying the same content they are not likely to help your SEO ranking efforts.
Related
We've a multiregion with multilanguage ecommerce site. Each country site has two or more languages based on the country. For example, Our Brazilian site has 2 languages but our US site has 6 different languages.
We're using subdomain structure for our URLs. Ex: http://us.site.com/en, http://us.site.com/es
Now we're closing down one of our country. Which has the biggest index in our country list. But we don't know what to do before closing it. What do you guys suggest before loose organics or get banned?
Here is our scenarios:
Redirect all the traffic one of our other country
Completely close down the site and show "not found" all the indexed pages
Redirect all the indexed pages to our "Select your country" landing page
Thank you
Possibly create a landing page providing options to browse another language page? After all user experience is one of the most important factors. Will redirecting the traffic with a 301 will land users onto a page in a language they might not be able to understand. I would keep some of these points in mind.
I was searching on the web after I analyzed the link structure of Yoast. There he uses links to redirect users to a different page.
Here a example:
https://yoast.com/out/synthesis/
Can someone tell me what this is called, or how I create such links as well?
It's actually really simple. He isn't using it for SEO purposes since it's just a 301 redirect. He is purposefully hiding the affiliate url AND adding 'onclick' Google Analytics tracking to the link. Also - the "/out/" directory is being blocked by robots.txt and then redirect's back to the index page.
To answer your question:
This is not for SEO reasons. He is using it for both tracking click and hiding his affiliate link/url.
These are called internal links, when you link to you one of your domain or subdomain pages. Internal links adds values for SEO as it makes the crawlers aware of those existing pages. There are many options for generating internal links. It depends on your page structure etc. Some of the common options are by using html sitemap like trip advisor's does, using header and footer. For html sitemaps, go to http://www.tripadvisor.com/, scroll all the way bottom to the footer section. There you can sitemap link, which is a path way for many internal links.
I have a site with an input text.
User types the name of a city, hits enter and it's linked there.
my sitemap.xml looks like this:
<urlset>
<url><loc>http://www.example.com/rome.html</loc></url>
<url><loc>http://www.example.com/london.html</loc></url>
<url><loc>http://www.example.com/newyork.html</loc></url>
<url><loc>http://www.example.com/paris.html</loc></url>
<url><loc>http://www.example.com/berlin.html</loc></url>
<url><loc>http://www.example.com/toronto.html</loc></url>
<url><loc>http://www.example.com/milan.html</loc></url>
<url><loc>http://www.example.com/edinburgh.html</loc></url>
<url><loc>http://www.example.com/nice.html</loc></url>
<url><loc>http://www.example.com/boston.html</loc></url>
...
</urlset>
My question is:
Will I be penalized (from a SEO point of view) because my links only appear on the sitemap.xml instead as in a list of anchors in the html page.
Note: the anchor approach was excluded because I have about 5,000 listed cities
It won't be penalised. Google themselves say the primary purpose of a sitemap is "a way to tell Google about pages on your site we might not otherwise discover."
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/156184?hl=en
You are rare in that you are using the sitemap correctly to help Google find your pages.
Often SEOs just add one for the sake of it, rather than taking the time to identify and using it to fix potential crawling errors.
The only negative aspect for SEO I can think of is that page rank will not flow between your pages if there is no direct link.
No, you will not be penalized. The sole purpose of sitemaps is to tell search engines where to find your content. That content may or may not be available through hyperlinks on your website.
We have a ton of content on our website which a user can get to by performing a search on the website. For example, we have data for all Public companies, in the form of individual pages per company. So think like 10,000 pages in total. Now in order to get to these pages, a user needs to search for the company name and from the search results, click on the company name they are interested in.
How would a search bot find this page? There is no page on the website which has links to these 10,000 pages. Think amazon, you need to search for your product and then from the search results, click on the product you are interested in to get to it.
The closest solution I could find was the sitemap.xml, is that it? Anything which doesn't require adding 10,000 links to an xml file?
You need to link to a page, or for it to be close to the homepage for it to stand a decent chance of getting indexed by Google.
A sitemap helps, sure, but a page still needs to exist in the menu / site structure. A sitemap reference alone does not guarantee a resource will be indexed.
Google - Webmaster Support on Sitemaps: "Google doesn't guarantee that we'll crawl or index all of your URLs. However, we use the data in your Sitemap to learn about your site's structure, which will allow us to improve our crawler schedule and do a better job crawling your site in the future. In most cases, webmasters will benefit from Sitemap submission, and in no case will you be penalized for it."
If you browse Amazon, it will be possible to find 99% of the products available. Amazon do a lot of interesting stuff in their faceted navigation, you could write a book on it.
Speak to an SEO or a usability / CRO expert - they will be able to tell you what you need to do - which is basically create a user friendly site with categories & links to all your products.
An XML sitemap pretty much is your only on-site option if you do not or cannot link to these products on your website. You could link to these pages from other websites but that doesn't seem like a likely scenario.
Adding 10,000 products to an XML sitemap is easy to do. Your sitemap can be dynamic just like your web pages are. Just generate it on the fly when requested like you would a regular web page and include whatever products you want to be found and indexed.
i have build an e-commerce site, and I'm slowly looking into SEO. My question is simple, should i nofollow pages like "terms and conditions", "deliveryterms", "contact page". The reason I'm asking, is that my Terms and Conditions are ALOT alike the other sites out there, and i think it would be 80% duplicate content - furthermore these sites are not relevant (in my opinion) compared to my product pages.
On my site i also have some DIY-guides, which i won't nofollow, since it's original content and very relevant to my site. So I'm only talking about pages like the above mentioned.
Should i or should i not nofollow pages like this (only pages with very limited unique content)? What are the pros and cons of doing one or the other?
Matt Cutts (Search/Quality group in Google) does not recommend Page Rank Sculpting (includes use of no-follow) in general, but he does say
There may be a miniscule number of pages (such as links to a shopping cart or to a login page) that I might add nofollow on, just because those pages are different for every user and they aren’t that helpful to show up in search engines.
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/
No. Nofollow is to block spam and abuse. If you block pages that you know aren't spam, like you own internal pages, you are abusing nofollow and breaking the Internet. Or, more importantly to you, you are harming your own SEO efforts. By using nofollow to your own pages you are sending PageRank to those pages anyway but since those pages essentially doesn't exist that PageRank is lost. Addironally, internally links count as votes just like incoming links from other sites do and the anchor text from internal links also help with SEO. By blocking those pages any links on those pages can't help you rank better.
Do not use nofollow on internal links. Also, do not use nofollow on external links that you control.