Acorn Domains SEO

Admin · May 23, 2013

Anyone want to give me some SEO tips for Acorn Domains? It is slowly slipping down the Page 1 of big G for "domain forum" and "domain name forum".

Any thoughts appreciated.

Some things I thought; too many low quality inbound links, too many links on the homepage?

Admin

PoshTiger · May 23, 2013

hmm... hardly any inbound links have the word forum in it - they're nearly all acorn domains or something similar...

Your onpage could do with a bit of work too...

I'd make 'UK Domain Forum Acorn Domains' at the top with the folder icon a h1 tag as you don't have one at the moment and make the alt tag different as you don't have the word forum in that either, it's currently 'Buy Sell Discuss UK Domain Names at AcornDomains.co.uk'

I wouldn't make too many changes too fast though.

Hope that helps...

Admin · May 23, 2013

You need to log out to see my H1 text, I tried it on the logged in version and it takes up too much screen space and I didn't want to place SEO techniques or site functionality for members.

Thanks for the input.

Murray · May 23, 2013

I will have a more indepth look later, but one very obvious and big thing you could change is 301'ing non www. to www.

acorndomains.co.uk

To

www.acorndomains.co.uk

All these links not being redirected http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=acorndomains.co.uk

Tsk

Admin · May 23, 2013

OK so I think I added a 301 redirect from acorndomains.co.uk to all using the www. version

Thanks!

Admin

AuthorityDomain · May 24, 2013

I agree with Murry you have lots of links to the non www as well as to the www. This could cause confusion to big G with which page to rank. Also it could be seen as dupe content with both pages indexed. Although probably not too bad as you are still ranking well. My guest is that its the backlinks affecting your rankings a little bit.

The 301 should help pass those links to the www version. You could if you wanted to reach out to those who linked to the non www & ask them to change the link to use the www.

BTW I have you at no3 for 'domain name forum' and no7 for 'domain forum'

Backlink profile using https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/overview/subdomains/acorndomains.co.uk shows your top 10 anchor phrase backlinks don't contain 'domain forum', where as if you look at ********************* the link profile has many anchor phrases containing keywords 'domain forum'.

I'd consider building new links using a range of anchor phrases to include domain forum, uk domain forum, acorndomains.co.uk - uk domain forum etc

Hope this helps

Admin · May 24, 2013

If any member wouldn't mind adding or changing their anchor text to link to Acorn to "Domain Forum" that would help a lot.

Cheers for the insights

Admin

Murray · May 25, 2013

admin said:
If any member wouldn't mind adding or changing their anchor text to link to Acorn to "Domain Forum" that would help a lot.

Cheers for the insights

Admin

I wouldn't personally recommend this, you have gotten good natural links, you don't want to turn those into potentially looking manipulative and lose any value.

I would wait a couple of weeks and see how much of a difference just 301'ing the non www. will make; hopefully quite a bit.

Admin · Jun 14, 2013

Thanks for all your suggestions, Acorn has regained its previous ranking standings as #1 in Google UK for "Domain Forum" and #3 in Google global.

It's actually higher for "domain name forum" reaching #2 global

Admin

kate-brownhill · Jun 15, 2013

Murray said:
I wouldn't personally recommend this, you have gotten good natural links, you don't want to turn those into potentially looking manipulative and lose any value.

I would wait a couple of weeks and see how much of a difference just 301'ing the non www. will make; hopefully quite a bit.

Fully agree with that. You have a natural link profile which any real SEO should be striving for. The days of over optimising link profiles are long gone. Leave the current natural anchor texts in your link profile alone.

Regards, Kate.

Edwin · Jun 15, 2013

+2!

Having a wide diversity of incoming links is a great think to strive for in 2013, so the last thing you want is to suddenly see a bunch all flip over to the same anchor text.

DarkSky · Jun 15, 2013

A few things come to mind,

title for the root is "UK Domain Forum Acorn Domains - Domain Names" - having "domain" repeated 3 times within 7 words is something to think about.

secondly, google does take site performance in to account, it only ranks 81/100 currently, I always aim for at least 95/100. https://developers.google.com/speed...A_2F_2Fwww.acorndomains.co.uk_2F&mobile=false

thirdly, mobile. No mobile version/responsive design. and a page speed of 73/100 for mobile.

fourth, on page content, tags, duplicate blocks of text, portions of css and js within the page rather than external - vb3 is pretty old school and even with vbseo it still outputs content in a form that many SEO's would love to tear apart and rewrite (like xenforo).

Lots of work to do!

Admin · Jun 15, 2013

gee thanks! lol

Appreciate the input and agree with what you said.

Will be upgrading the server (again) at the end of the month so will let that go through before I start changing anything else.

On my to do list!

Cheers

Admin

Curt · Jun 17, 2013

Canonical

Looks like you have the canonical tag on every single page, referring back to the homepage.

Also you could tidy the urls, remove those numbers if possible but I know the software can be responsible for that.

Admin · Jun 17, 2013

Curt said:
Looks like you have the canonical tag on every single page, referring back to the homepage.

Also you could tidy the urls, remove those numbers if possible but I know the software can be responsible for that.

Is the canonical page specific then?

Curt · Jun 17, 2013

admin said:
Is the canonical page specific then?

Yep, the canonical tag is used to prevent duplicate content.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cm9onOGTgeM

Murray · Jun 17, 2013

Curt said:
Looks like you have the canonical tag on every single page, referring back to the homepage.

Good spot.

Google ignores the canonical tag if it thinks you have used it wrong though, they take it as a suggestion not set it stone, so it's probably not caused a problem, but it's def not the correct use.

It should be used if have multiple paths to the same page creating variable URLs.

So say

/article
/news/article
/news/category/article

All different URLs for the same article meaning it looks like duplicate content.

But if you stuck a canonical URL in it google would ignore the other two.

Curt said:
Also you could tidy the urls, remove those numbers if possible but I know the software can be responsible for that.

This would be a waste of time in terms of optimization.

Admin · Jun 17, 2013

Canonicals should be page specific now.

Thanks for the tip.

Alan

DarkSky · Jun 17, 2013

admin said:
Canonicals should be page specific now.

Thanks for the tip.

Alan

for this page it is

Code:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.acorndomains.co.uk/Forum News &amp; Feedback" />

(incorrect)

close but no cigar!

Murray · Jun 17, 2013

DarkSky said:
for this page it is

Code:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.acorndomains.co.uk/Forum News & Feedback" />

(incorrect)

close but no cigar!

Seems to be redirecting to the sub forums.

But the url it's using doesn't have .html on the end so its getting redirected to the homepage.

I'm pretty sure you don't even need to use the canonical tag admin, acorn from a brief look doesn't seem to have canonical issues

^ Someone might want to double check that a bit deeper indepth though if they have time.