@diverso,

When Google bot visits your page at this address: http://www.designdiverso.com
it indexes the content it gets. After that, it happens to visit this link http://www.designdiverso.com/index.html and it thinks it is a different page. Bot indexes the content and now sees that content is the same. Sites with duplicated content are ranged lower in SERP.

What i told you to do is to get some knowledge on this. Search for a complete solution to this with help of .htaccess file. You seem to ignore

I don't mind that at all. If you are in rush, i'm sure there are many seo in-knows available locally.

There is a couch version of permanent redirects. More read here: http://docs.couchcms.com/tags-reference/redirect.html

Reference for links:
http://docs.couchcms.com/tags-reference/link.html
http://docs.couchcms.com/concepts/pretty-urls.html

I strongly advise you to follow the tutorial or refresh it if you did.
http://docs.couchcms.com/tutorials.html

Looks, you need to get back to basics and there is nothing wrong with that. Unless you want to end up grasping the tops and leave roots in soil. As an example of such waste of resource is your removed slash in some arbitrary way and place. You were given an example of how to do it properly for the mentioned template.

@trendoman

my bad thought you meant to help me out with this, first of all just can't understand where that index.html is coming from is not in my root so where is it?
secondly I can't understand exactly what you mean by the above, where can I find seo knows-in thought that couch cms forum was meant for helping with these kind of issues, are you suggesting I look for solutions elsewhere?

I can't get a hold of the developer who helped with this, so shall I just migrate to another cms instead? what do you suggest to do?

[trendoman]

@diverso, this index.html comes from the sitemap you provided. I will post context, so you find it faster (if you ever wish so).

Code: Select all

<url>
<loc>
http://www.designdiverso.com/thoughts/strategy/why-whiteboard-videos-are-a-hit-with-the-masses.html
</loc>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.designdiverso.com/index.html</loc>
</url>
<url>
<loc>
http://www.designdiverso.com/thoughts/creative/high-impact-creative-marketing.html
</loc>
</url>

As to the rest of the issues you posted or will post in future.
CouchCMS is for everybody. You do with it whatever you want to do. This CMS is easy and sophisticated. You can do miracles in no time, if you follow the docs.

I can't get a hold of the developer who helped with this

Now everything is clear. You didn't develop your site. You have little awareness of what this CMS is about. So, I can tell for myself only. I will help someone who respects.
This forum is not a sweat shop. I don't work for you, dude. Yet

@diverso, this index.html comes from the sitemap you provided. I will post context, so you find it faster (if you ever wish so).

Code: Select all

<url>
<loc>
http://www.designdiverso.com/thoughts/strategy/why-whiteboard-videos-are-a-hit-with-the-masses.html
</loc>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.designdiverso.com/index.html</loc>
</url>
<url>
<loc>
http://www.designdiverso.com/thoughts/creative/high-impact-creative-marketing.html
</loc>
</url>

As to the rest of the issues you posted or will post in future.
CouchCMS is for everybody. You do with it whatever you want to do. This CMS is easy and sophisticated. You can do miracles in no time, if you follow the docs.

I can't get a hold of the developer who helped with this

Now everything is clear. You didn't develop your site. You have little awareness of what this CMS is about. So, I can tell for myself only. I will help someone who respects.
This forum is not a sweat shop. I don't work for you, dude. Yet

listen very carefully, dude, first off I didn't mean no disrespect, by that I meant I've been helped developing this site because I'm mastering dozens of sites and I can't do it all, so yes I've much respect for people who keep their words and not fluffers that go around and about in forums posing as someone who is knowledgeable and helpful and than back stab you like you're doing, if you got hurt, I'm sorry hope you got band aids for your feelings in the crib you're laying at, this is my job I ain't here for the geeks of it, so thanks for not helping me

[trendoman]

I'm mastering dozens of sites

Yeeaaah..

Returning to the original problem:

Code: Select all

According to piwik reports my pages are not even ranked on google which is really bad

This does not seem to be true. Google is indexing most if not all of the pages on your site.
https://www.google.com/#q=site:designdiverso.com

Perhaps you can explain more clearly what is the problem you are experiencing.

what shall I write on the sitemap.php and especially on my .htaccess

You shouldn't have to write anything on your sitemap.php. It is meant to work as-is. As for the .htaccess, you should use gen_htaccess.php to generate a new .htaccess file each time you add a new template, including this sitemap. Do you know how to do that?
http://docs.couchcms.com/concepts/pretty-urls.html

Try adding the sitemap.php file to your site. Then look at it, compare it to the sitemap.xml you created, and you will see if there are any discrepancies that need to be corrected. The advantage of using a Couch generated sitemap is that you don't have to update it every time you add a page to your site. It happens automatically.

Finally, you should set up a free Google webmaster tools account to manage all of your sites' relationships with Google. It will help you find and correct problems.
http://www.google.com/webmasters/

[KK]

@tim made a post as I was in the process of composing mine. But I'll go ahead with posting mine as I had originally composed.

Hey @trendoman, @diverso, please cool down guys
This is turning into an all out verbal war.

@diverso,
let us take up the issue from the beginning. You mentioned -

just wondering is there a way I can improve my google rank seo through couch cms?
According to piwik reports my pages are not even ranked on google which is really bad, I put a lot of effort into creating my page, I really could use some tips.

There are actually two separate issues -
1. getting Google to index your pages
2. getting Google to rank those pages high when somebody searches for relevant data.

The sitemap can help only with the first issue (i.e. make Google index your pages).
From what I could see (and you can too by doing a Google search for site:www.designdiverso.com) all the 43 pages constituting your site have already been indexed by Google.

So, I don't think you should worry too much about the sitemap.

The second point (i.e. getting a good ranking) is altogether a different ball game.
From what I can see, you have implemented most of the recommended things (meta tags, prettyURLs etc.) so there is little we can do to improve on that.
The PR will now depend mostly on how many quality backlinks you can get and that is a different pursuit really.

That said, there is one point I'd like to add -
I can see that you have used the 'session/cookie' method of implementing a multi-lingual site.
One drawback of this approach (and this is mentioned in the original thread viewtopic.php?p=9010#p9010) is that there would be only a single URL for all languages.

This can have SEO implications as only the first language pages will get indexed by Google (in your case only the FI pages are getting shown).

I think we'll need to do something about this.
Maybe we should add a parameter in the URLs to explicitly show which language is being shown.

Please grant me a few days time. I'll work on this and try to get back with a solution. Don't worry it won't require a major change in the way your site is currently structured. I'll need a little time for this though as I have my hands full at the moment.

Thanks.

@tim made a post as I was in the process of composing mine. But I'll go ahead with posting mine as I had originally composed.

Hey @trendoman, @diverso, please cool down guys
This is turning into an all out verbal war.

@diverso,
let us take up the issue from the beginning. You mentioned -

just wondering is there a way I can improve my google rank seo through couch cms?
According to piwik reports my pages are not even ranked on google which is really bad, I put a lot of effort into creating my page, I really could use some tips.

There are actually two separate issues -
1. getting Google to index your pages
2. getting Google to rank those pages high when somebody searches for relevant data.

The sitemap can help only with the first issue (i.e. make Google index your pages).
From what I could see (and you can too by doing a Google search for site:www.designdiverso.com) all the 43 pages constituting your site have already been indexed by Google.

So, I don't think you should worry too much about the sitemap.

The second point (i.e. getting a good ranking) is altogether a different ball game.
From what I can see, you have implemented most of the recommended things (meta tags, prettyURLs etc.) so there is little we can do to improve on that.
The PR will now depend mostly on how many quality backlinks you can get and that is a different pursuit really.

That said, there is one point I'd like to add -
I can see that you have used the 'session/cookie' method of implementing a multi-lingual site.
One drawback of this approach (and this is mentioned in the original thread viewtopic.php?p=9010#p9010) is that there would be only a single URL for all languages.

This can have SEO implications as only the first language pages will get indexed by Google (in your case only the FI pages are getting shown).

I think we'll need to do something about this.
Maybe we should add a parameter in the URLs to explicitly show which language is being shown.

Please grant me a few days time. I'll work on this and try to get back with a solution. Don't worry it won't require a major change in the way your site is currently structured. I'll need a little time for this though as I have my hands full at the moment.

Thanks.

@KK @tim

Thank you a lot for bringing some hands down, sense, and clear things up, so as I was referring to "rank" I meant after having discovered from my piwik account that google has basically no interest in my pages, I've tried auditing my site and it came up that I'm stuck between nothing and 0, so no good news at all.

However as some other issues have been brought up I've been trying to solve those as well, little did I know about it, especially I still don't get where the index.html file is so how about that /slashes issue then? is it relevant at all?

Concerning the backlinking I've recently discovered this tool in order to create backlinks, what do you think about it? http://smallseotools.com/backlink-maker/

Also this is what I've been using for rank checking: http://smallseotools.com/google-pagerank-checker/

If I compare my efforts to a better known company around here, url

There's quiet a difference in terms of backlinks/external links as they have 992020 according to the tool, and ranking as they've a stunning 6, however when i check here http://smallseotools.com/backlink-checker/ results is much more closer to mine, can't get handle yet on this facts though.

And regarding your point the multi languages url, I'm all hears, as I pointed out that as well in my earlier posts even not being an expert myself I thought that it might have had a negative rep on seo.

So please guys I'm looking forward to get some help with this, so bring it on, any hint or implementation is more than welcome, hope I can manage to get some decent rank, of course one more thing, (I'm already aware I've neglected somehow posts creation, that is also because I'm truly in a tight spot as I'm mastering many sites)
This I'm planning to solve myself asap somehow.

One more thing I need to add, I'm a little concerned about the use of H1 tags, are they used properly in my page? eventually when I try to make a search on google.fi I don't really appear that might be also a thing to check out?

Thank you immensely for taking the time to think abut this solution.

Hi,

I just took a quick look at the site http://www.designdiverso.com and for page ranking you made some mistakes, the use of a lot of images and leave the alt tag blank, also most pages have not much text and page titles are way to long. So if I where you I would leave all technical couch stuff for the moment and start first with some basic SEO improvements. I suppose you know where to find that.

Try to focus on some key words you want google to rank you for then use those words in your page, your page descriptions and alt tags and so on. If google reads your page now your main key words it will link your site to are : katso, tapaustutkimus, jatkuvasti, design ......
Again I just had a quick look but as far as I can see there are hardly any (same) words that are used in: page title, page description, alt tags and in the page text.

Hi,

I just took a quick look at the site http://www.designdiverso.com and for page ranking you made some mistakes, the use of a lot of images and leave the alt tag blank, also most pages have not much text and page titles are way to long. So if I where you I would leave all technical couch stuff for the moment and start first with some basic SEO improvements. I suppose you know where to find that.

Try to focus on some key words you want google to rank you for then use those words in your page, your page descriptions and alt tags and so on. If google reads your page now your main key words it will link your site to are : katso, tapaustutkimus, jatkuvasti, design ......
Again I just had a quick look but as far as I can see there are hardly any (same) words that are used in: page title, page description, alt tags and in the page text.

thank you for pointing this out, I've filled up the missing "alt" on the images, however about the title tag, are you referring to these: <title>.... or these <meta property="og:title"?

Hi Diverso,

As far as I know both shouldn't be longer than 50 characters.

My advice to you:

- read https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo
- Use something like http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/