Ask Kalena

Oooh you're back! Lookin good. Have you lost weight? Yes, that was a compliment designed to butter you up for my next question. Subscribed to my feed yet? :-)

Hi Kalena

I use a company that “specializes” in mortgage sites and hosting. Since I am in the process of applying everything I am learning, I saw fit to have my site graded by one of the many online tools available.

The tool showed that my site is coming up for both the www and non www versions of my domain. When I enquired with my host about doing a 301 for my domain to one version, they said

“There is nothing we or you can reset on the Xsites as this is beyond anything we have control over. We do not support any of this nor have the capability for any one else to have it”.

How much is it going to hurt me in SEO if I don’t get this fixed like the site grader suggested?

Alex

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Hi Alex

What you’re referring to here is domain canonicalization.

Search engines can sometimes index both www and non www versions of your domain, creating duplicate content headaches for you and also link popularity dilution. Therefore, it’s best for SEO purposes if you can stick with one version of your domain and make sure all links point to that version. The www version is my recommendation because most sites will link to you using that version anyway.

Judging by the response you got from your hosts, it sounds like they’re not familiar with the issue of domain canonicalization, which is concerning. If your site host won’t allow you to use a 301 to create a conditional redirect to your preferred version, you probably need to get a new host!

Alternatively, you can use the Canonical Link Element. You can also specify your preferred URL version in Google Webmaster Tools.

My blog post Does the canonicalization of my URL impact my search engine rankings? might also be of interest.

Dear Kalena

A client asked me to check results on about 30 of her company’s list of search terms (breast augmentation L.A.; breast augmentation Beverly Hills; nose job L.A. etc. etc.)

Question: am I going to get reliable results by just typing those terms into a Google search box on my computer — 90 miles away from the client — and noting the SERPs?

Charles

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Hi Charles

With Google Personalized Search, Google Social Search and Universal Search thrown into the mix, these days the SERPs that one person sees may not be the same SERPs another person sees – even if they are located in the same room!

If your client wants to know specific rankings, make sure you are logged out of any Google accounts and then run the checks. It might be faster if you use an online rank checking tool – you can find these listed under the tools category at SearchEngineWiki.com or by running a Google search.

BUT, if I were you, I would run those search terms through keyword research tools to make sure your client is targeting the right terms in the first place. It might be that she is targeting terms that very few people type into search engines, OR terms that are too competitive for her to achieve high rankings. Your keyword research might pinpoint better choices for her.

Good luck!

Hey Kalena,

What are your thoughts on having links to other pages of my web site at the bottom of each of my web pages? Will this help or hurt our rankings? Is this a more outdated practice?

Thanks! -Lisa

Hi Lisa,

Including Links within a site wide footer is a fairly common practice that has been around for a long time – and in fact has seen a bit of a resurgence in the designs of a lot of Web 2.0 sites.

Providing you are sensible in the use of these types of links they should help, rather than hurt your rankings.  In many cases the footer provides a logical place to provide links to the main sections of your site – and also allows you to include search engine friendly text based (and keyword rich) anchor text.

Footer links can make it easier for users to navigate your site – without having to scroll back to the top of the page.  However,  I recommend that you use footer links in moderation – I suggest a maximum of a dozen or so.  If there are too many (particularly if they are heavily keyword optimised) they can start to look spammy (to search engines as well as users) and may start to have a negative impact on rankings and conversions.

Google has also suggested that you should try and limit the number of links per page  to a maximum of about 100.  If you have a large number of links in your page footers this could become an issue.

As a general rule, if it’s good for your users it will be good for search rankings.  If you are thinking of doing anything to your site primarily for the benefit of the search engines rather than your users, then you should think long and hard before going ahead with it.

Andy Henderson
Ireckon Web Marketing

Hi Kalena,

I have just encountered something I am not sure about and I really need some advice on this. The site I am working on has the following issue;

It is a business with 100 franchises. The franchisees are complaining they do not come up in any searches. I have checked it and they don’t. Not even when you type in their exact URL into the search engine.

The URL structure for the business’s franchises work like this;
www.clientsite.com/studio/location (actual URL provided)

A related problem may be that there are 3 separate XML sitemaps:
1) www.clientsite.com/sitemap/sitemap.xml
2) www.clientsite.com/sitemap/location(Alpha)sitemap.xml
3) www.clientsite.com/sitemap/location(postcodes)sitemap.xml

The first is their MAIN sitemap. The other two are sitemaps for all the locations of their franchises (100 in total) These locations and their URLS are not included in the MAIN sitemap. Is having multiple sitemaps detrimental to the SEO.?

Yen

Hi Yen,

You may be surprised, but this is a VERY common issue for franchise websites that are based on a template structure, and you’ll realise that the reason the franchisee pages are not being found in search results is actually pretty simple… But first, I’ll address your sitemap query.

Multiple Sitemaps

Using multiple sitemaps is not the problem here.  If you do a search for  site:clientsite.com in Google you will see that the pages in question are actually indexed – which means that the search engines have found and crawled them.

I think though that it is probably unnecessary for your site (with just a couple of thousand pages) to have multiple sitemaps.  Multiple sitemaps are recommended (and in fact required) for very large sites, but there is a specific protocol involving a sitemaps index file (that you do not seem to be using).  You can find out more about it, with clear instructions and examples on how to correctly use sitemaps at sitemaps.org.

So the issue with your site is not indexing – it is ranking.  You don’t specify what search queries you would hope/expect the pages to be found for, but for all the examples I tried, the franchisees pages did come up for a query of their business name itself – which is more evidence that the pages are indexed OK.  From what I could see, all your franchisees seem to have a single page  of content – based on a standard template, with just the business name and contact details changed.  So in effect each franchisees page is one of 100 essentially “identical” pages on the site.

Website Templates

This is a clear issue of duplicate content which is very common for franchise sites based upon standard templates (which provide templated content rather than just the structure or design).  In this instance, each franchisee has just a single page within the same root domain (1 of 100 almost identical pages), with relatively little keyword rich content, so I am not surprised (and neither should you be) that it does not rank at all for general keyword phrases.  In fact if each franchisee had their own individual domains, with multiple pages of optimised keyword rich content – if they were based on the same template, they still would not rank any better.

I get asked about this type of issue a lot.  Excited and enthusiastic new franchisees (and multi level marketers) have setup their website using a template provided by “the business” and pretty soon begin to wonder why the eagerly anticipated enquiries and sales aren’t flooding in from their websites.

Quality, Keyword Rich, Unique Content

One of the very first things that most SEOs learn is that to get good rankings you need quality, keyword rich and UNIQUE content.  Using a templated approach is clearly NOT a strategy you should follow to get unique content.  For a graphic example try this search query : “incalculable numbers of real people“  – which is snippet of text taken from a website template for a well known international “We are Not Multi Level Marketing” organisation (probably not the one you are thinking of).

The above, fairly specific, and you might expect, “unique” query returns over 40,000 results. Is it any wonder that most of these sites will never be found through organic search?

That’s not to say that there is no value in these templated systems – many have been setup to very cleverly guide people through to the signup process – but if you “own” one of these sites you will need to use other methods to get traffic to it (PPC, Advertising, etc) and not rely on organic search traffic.

So Yen,  back to your question… If your franchisees want to be found for generic keyword searches, I suggest that they register their own domains, and create their own unique, keyword rich content rather than depending on the corporate “template”.

Andy Henderson
WebConsulting

Hi Kalena

Could you please tell me if there are any special seo rules to keep in mind when developing or commissioning an ecommerce site?

Thanks
Natalie

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Hi Natalie

It’s hard to answer that question because every ecommerce site is different and presents its own challenges.

For example, if it is a large e-commerce site, it may be database driven, which means that product pages may contain session ids or multiple parameters that might confuse search engines. That would require a server-side solution of some kind.

It might offer thousands of products, meaning keyword research is a huge job and optimizing individual pages is extremely time consuming. That might require a script to integrate a meta tag / title tag template on every page.

It might be in a very competitive industry, meaning SEO of pages may not have much of an impact unless the site is hugely popular with very strong Google PR and backlinks.

I would say the most important thing you can do before SEOing an ecommerce site is RESEARCH. Your SEO Requirements Document will be crucial here, as will a very good dig into the site and the client company. To learn more about what should be included in your SEO Requirements Document, see my article: Before Launching Your SEO Campaign.

Learn as much as you can about the company, their customers, their goals and their target markets before you start any SEO activity.