HR Advisor

If you only read one thing this week make it this ->

http://www.highrankings.com/useless-seo-tactics-303

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Chris.
So long, and thanks for all the fish.
http://webmaster-talk.eu/

Great post Chris,

Although I was familiar with most of Jill's list. H1, H2's etc not counting for much is new to me.

This could be a great post to send clients who think they know about SEO to.

Cat

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http://web.soothed.com.au/
Web design for natural therapists

Chris, that's a great find! Thanks for posting. Some very sane advice in there.

Have you noticed any (non-spammy) websites that have been badly hit by the Google Panda update? I'm reading about a lot of sites that have ended up being "collateral damage" as a result of the update.

Matt

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Matt Doyle, Elated
3rd Edition of my jQuery Mobile book out now! Learn to build mobile web apps. Free sample chapter: http://store.elated.com/

Nope I just keep reading about how Google is being "cruel" to people trying to scrape (pun entirely intentional) a meager existence from adsense pennies, "earned" from somebody else's work.

But as I don't check " rankings" for anything I'll probably never see it happen.

--
Chris.
So long, and thanks for all the fish.
http://webmaster-talk.eu/

@chrishirst: There's certainly a lot of that about!

It looks like we've been hit by the recent April 11 update and have lost quite a lot of Google search traffic. Still trying to figure out exactly why, since our content is all original and (I like to think!) fairly good quality. Hopefully things will pick up a bit down the line.

If you can spot anything obvious that we might be doing on elated.com to offend Google then I'd love to know!

Cheers,
Matt

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Matt Doyle, Elated
3rd Edition of my jQuery Mobile book out now! Learn to build mobile web apps. Free sample chapter: http://store.elated.com/

How about direct traffic is that down by a similar amount?

A current discussion in the Tek-Tips private forum is about their traffic drop off generally including SE referrals.

From the forums I mod/admin at and ones I just read at there has been a reduction in visitors and signups, it seems like the only busy ones at the moment are where they tolerate spam and allow junk posters with signatures.

The better run places are all "quiet"

--
Chris.
So long, and thanks for all the fish.
http://webmaster-talk.eu/

@chrishirst: Direct traffic is down slightly, but Google organic is down over 3x more than direct is.

I just discovered that 2 of our unused domains were pointing to the elated.com site, so every page on elated.com was also being indexed by google at the 2 other domains. Oops!

eg: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aphotokits.com&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

That can't have helped! Although I believe Google is reasonably good at distinguishing between this type of thing and genuinely scraped content. Fixed now anyway...

So what's your theory as to why there might be a general drop-off with all traffic types, and why the better sites are quiet at the moment?

Cheers,
Matt

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Matt Doyle, Elated
3rd Edition of my jQuery Mobile book out now! Learn to build mobile web apps. Free sample chapter: http://store.elated.com/

They manage to sort out aliased domains sometimes, but it can take between several years and never for it to happen, having a permanent redirect from the aliased domains to the main name does ensure that it happens sooner rather eventually.

That possibly does account for the sudden drop since the "Panda" update.

The general drop off in people actually visiting forums, may be due in some part to the gradual but ever increasing use of RSS feed readers and websites that republish RSS feeds.
After all you only need to read some things once, and unless you are inclined to comment or answer the post you need never to visit the originating page.

--
Chris.
So long, and thanks for all the fish.
http://webmaster-talk.eu/

Hi Chris,

"They manage to sort out aliased domains sometimes, but it can take between several years and never for it to happen"

Wow, really? I never knew it could take that long.

"having a permanent redirect from the aliased domains to the main name does ensure that it happens sooner rather eventually"

OK, so would you recommend setting up 301 redirects from every URL on photokits.com to the corresponding URL on elated.com?

http://photokits.com/ -> http://www.elated.com/
http://photokits.com/faq/ -> http://www.elated.com/faq/

...etc?

Would that usually be picked up in a few days/weeks?

Cheers,
Matt

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Matt Doyle, Elated
3rd Edition of my jQuery Mobile book out now! Learn to build mobile web apps. Free sample chapter: http://store.elated.com/

Usually applying permanent redirects takes three to six months to transfer ALL pages over depending on the size of the site and how often the pages are crawled

The code below should redirect every page and folder to the same page and folder on "newdomain"

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
#
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.newdomain\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Because the sites occuply the same "space" and the way .htaccess works you need the RewriteCond in place to NOT redirect the "newdomain" as well otherwise you end up with a closed loop of redirects.

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Chris.
So long, and thanks for all the fish.
http://webmaster-talk.eu/

Thanks Chris. Yes I've seen people trip up before by missing out that RewriteCond!

The pages do seem to be dropping out of the index since I repointed the domains to "blank" sites, effectively deleting all the pages. About 25% of the pages are now gone. I'll see how it goes - if they stop dropping out then I'll try the 301 approach.

There's probably no "link juice" worth transferring so I don't think I necessarily need to use the 301 approach? I just want the pages out of the index as quickly as possible!

--
Matt Doyle, Elated
3rd Edition of my jQuery Mobile book out now! Learn to build mobile web apps. Free sample chapter: http://store.elated.com/