Recommended reports
SEO Best Practice: Index Inclusion
The SEO Best Practice: Index Inclusion Guide is part of Econsultancy's renowned SEO Best Practice Guide and is has been created with the help and frontline insight of globally-esteemed SEO practitioners, in order to give you the edge in your natural search marketing activity.
SEMPO State of Search Marketing Report 2012
The State of Search Marketing Report 2012, published by Econsultancy in association with SEMPO, looks in-depth at how companies are using paid search, search engine optimization (natural search) and social media marketing. The report looks closely at current practices and emerging trends across paid search and SEO, as well as their relationship with social media.
Managing Director at True Clarity
29 November 2006 12:47pm
We have recently re-configured this website to follow all the best practice guidelines e.g. readable urls, no flash, more descriptive content, titles etc etc.
Using google webmaster tools, I can see the last index happened on Oct 4th, so it appears google is ignoring the site (it's working really well in MSN and Yahoo).
The site in question is http://www.atacuk.com/ can anybody help PLEASE!!!
eTail Optimisation Specialist at Click Funnel Ltd
29 November 2006 14:45pm
Hi there Andy,
Unless the site is updated on a regular basis Google won't tend to visit the site more than once a month anyway so the fact that it hasn't visited your site since 4th October shouldn't be cause to panic yet.
If you've made significant changes to the site it might be worth telling Google about it using the Google Sitemaps tool. I also notice that you dont have your own site map in place. This is a must!!
Also have you implemented a robots.txt file on the root server? All major search engines look for this file to help identify which areas should be visited and indexed accordingly.
The code on your site isn't really search engine friendly either and could do with a complete restructure using CSS and ideally you should remove any javascript within the site because this makes it harder for the search engines to index your site accurately.
Hope thats of help!
Andrew Allfrey
www.e-prominence.co.uk
Online Marketing Consultants
E-Business Consultant at Dan Barker
29 November 2006 16:08pm
hi, Andy,
I think you may be being a little hasty. your pages are listed, just not very highly ranked for any terms.
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=site%3Awww.atacuk.com&btnG=Search&meta=
Here are a few terms you do rank for (though somewhat lowly)
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=atac+sysco+sulphur+in+lpg&btnG=Search&meta=
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=%22atac+on-line+analysis+for+oil%22&btnG=Search&meta=cr%3DcountryUK%7CcountryGB
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=atacuk+viscometers&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8
You currently have around 38 inbound links listed in yahoo, and around 52 in msn, whereas the top result for 'atac' has over 1,500 in msn. Try building those inbound links (particularly to pages other than your homepage) before worrying too much.
Another thing that might be worthwhile looking at is original content: most of your site content is made up of product descriptions (which seem to be carbon copies of the info on manufacturer sites). It's probably going to be difficult to outrank the original manufacturer if you're using the same content &, assuming google's 'duplicate content' filters are only going to get better, you might as well avoid those now.
Something else I would look at is action points. What are potential customers supposed to do on your site (other than read)? A 'contact us' type call to action (button) on each of the product pages would probably work well both in terms of lead-generation & in terms of measuring the effectiveness of the site.
Managing Director at True Clarity
29 November 2006 17:06pm
Daniel,
Thanks your advice is reassuring. I'm a little confused about the point about original content, unfortantly ATAC are the manufacturer in this case and the other sites using the content are the people doing the copying!
Does the advice of making copy unique still hold for this situation?
Thanks,
Andy.
Managing Director at True Clarity
29 November 2006 17:13pm
Andrew,
Not sure what we've done wrong with google sitemap, we certainly have added one to the site.
http://www.atacuk.com/sitemap.xml
Also my understanding was because we want all the content on the site to be spidered we don't need a robot.txt, they are just for excluding content?
I know the HTML is shocking :) the aim is to sort that out next.
Cheers,
Andy.
E-Business Consultant at Dan Barker
29 November 2006 17:57pm
that makes things a lot clearer & may solve your problem completely. I'd seen 'syscoanalytics.co.uk' in the search results (when searching for terms from your product pages), and assumed them to be the manufacturer of 'sysco' products.
I've now had a look at syscoanalytics.co.uk & see that it is an exact replica of the atac site (ie. they are both pointing to the same content). this makes the point on duplicate content especially important, and may be the reason atacuk.com seems to be ranking so badly. here are the two main reasons this is a bad idea:
the simple solution is:
- 301 redirect www.syscoanalytics.co.uk (and syscoanalytics.co.uk, and atacuk.com, and any other of these duplicate content domains you have) to www.atacuk.com
try that & see what happens over the next month or so (along with link building). feel free to email me at danielb@brkr.org if any of this isn't clear.Managing Director at True Clarity
29 November 2006 20:57pm
Daniel,
Many thanks that makes a whole lot of sense. I've set up all the redirects and will wait now with fingers crossed. You've been a great help.
Thanks,
Andy.
Online Marketing / SEO at forum30.co.uk
30 November 2006 09:27am
Daniel's spot on with the redirect issue (but of course he would be with a great name like that...).
When you set up the 301-redirect it's also worth making sure you redirect your http://yourdomain.com to the http://www.yourdomain.com - otherwise you can have the same issue across both 'sub-domains'.
Google doesn't penalise you as such for multiple URLs pointing to the same content. But it wants to provide the best results for searchers, and so 'selects' one URL to index for the content. Sometimes it's not always the one you want, and the 301-redirects will go a long way towards ensuring it will happen.
The best way to get google to come back to your site frequently, and to rank highly for your preferred search phrases is inbound links.
Without these, you're limiting the opportunities for Google to spider your site. To obtain and sustain good rankings in Google, links are king. Content and site structure is obviously important, and can go a long way to help you rank for non-competitive terms, but for more competitive phrases, links are what counts. Especially if they're 'relevant'. But that's a whole other issue for discussion.
Cheers,
Daniel
Head of Digital Marketing at Future Publishing
30 November 2006 10:53am
I spent some time with Steve Johnston yesterday, who is the top ranking Google Consultant in Google, and we discovered that Google has already started to ignore duplicate content - it seems to be only indexing one set.
On 16:08:55 29 November 2006 danielb wrote:
Online Marketing / SEO at forum30.co.uk
30 November 2006 11:29am
I'm not sure I understand your point.
Isn't this what Google has been doing for years now?
Cheers,
Daniel