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Category: On-Page Optimization

Explore on-page optimization and its role in a larger SEO strategy.


  • Hi guys, We suffered a massive rankings drop in September 2012, same date as Panda 20, so we've been trying to fix the issues since with no little to no success. I think these Q&A's work best if I ask a specific question, instead of just screaming for help, so hopefully we're looking in the right place at least. One area I've been looking into, is of course, content (being a Panda penalty). However, I'm not sure what about our content is causing a problem. We provide a phone unlocking service and have over 6000 handsets that we can unlock. We only allow search engines to index 5 of them, due to these being those with unique product descriptions (there are over 100 more but we want to start getting our rankings back a bit at a time). We also let them index our manufacturer pages, news and support pages, 160 approx in total. On our handset and manufacturer pages we have much of the same content, with a few words difference to alter the price or the name of the manufacturer/phone. We also change our delivery times for some, as it can vary and have a "Why use us" section which is the same for each handset page. In my mind there is no point changing these areas to be unique to each page as they clearly describe our service and what we offer. Changing each one for each page, especially if we wanted to start adding our other remaining 5995 handset would be ridiculously. It would also clearly be manipulative is we're just rewriting the same thing in a slightly different way to benefit a search engine and not the users. Does anyone know if this type of content would be seen as duplicate content and would result in a penalty? And is there anything we can do about it? Thanks,
    Darren.

    | purpleindigo
    0

  • Hi, We have a website that was built in my opinion bizarrely where the bottom half of the page where most of the content is, is a widget. I just wondered if the content being in a widget is indexed any differently. I ask as normal pages seem to index and rank much better than the wordpress template using the widget. Hope someone might be able to clarify this. Thanks

    | denismilton
    0

  • Hello, I own a shop with lots of categories, in each category there is a lot of pictures, some have already alt, must I put the attribute alt in all images, it would be 100% beneficial for my site or could would I be over-optimizing the site? Thank you

    | yuyuyu
    0

  • I have a client who is moving and I'll need to redirect their site to a new city.  Taking local out of the picture, what is the best way to convert the site? Here are somethings I've already done. Changed the title keywords Ensured the page grade is an A for the new keywords. Changed the alt tags on images on the front page. Since I made these changes, the website has actually fallen in ranks from what it was initially ranking for the new city (the website was already ranking organically on page 2 and has dropped to mid page 3.) Thanks in advance

    | jonnyholt
    0

  • We are currently undergoing a site redesign and are trying to figure out the best way to structure the URL's and breadcrumbs for our many locations. We currently have 60 locations nationwide and our URL structure is as follows: www.mydomain.com/locations/{location} Where {location} is the specific street the location is on or the neighborhood the location is in. (i.e. www.mydomain.com/locations/waterford-lakes) The issue is, {location} is usually too specific and is not a broad enough keyword. The location "Waterford-Lakes" is in Orlando and "Orlando" is the important keyword, not " Waterford Lakes". To address this, we want to introduce state and city pages. Each state and city page would link to each location within that state or city (i.e. an Orlando page with links to "Waterford Lakes", "Lake Nona", "South Orlando", etc.). The question is how to structure this. Option 1 Use the our existing URL and breadcrumb structure (www.mydomain.com/locations/{location}) and add state and city pages outside the URL path: www.mydomain.com/{area} www.mydomain.com/{state} Option 2 Build the city and state pages into the URL and breadcrumb path: www.mydomain.com/locations/{state}/{area}/{location} (i.e www.mydomain.com/locations/fl/orlando/waterford-lakes) Any insight is much appreciated. Thanks!

    | uBreakiFix
    0

  • We are currently working on a new page for one of our clients and there is A LOT of writing, so A LOT of differents pages. If I decide to put the texts on table text instead of creating a link for another page, will that influence the ranking in any way ? I've been a web writer for only a year now and still try to figure out how to optimize the written part. Thank you for your answers.

    | marketingmedia.ca
    0

  • Hi community, For several clients, when embedding the Google Maps, the Marker DOES NOT appear. I am copying straight from Google Maps, it appears fine in Google Maps. Is there HTML I can add or is there something wrong with the map marker to begin with? These are verified listings. Help! Thank you! Priscilla

    | FullMedia90
    0

  • I have several page types on my sites that I have blocked using the robots.txt file (ex: emailafriend.asp, shoppingcart.asp, login.asp), but they are still showing up in crawl diagnostics as issues (ex: duplicate page content, duplicate title tag, etc). Is there a way to filter these issues or perhaps there is something I'm doing wrong resulting in the issues that are showing up? Ryan

    | ryanforrest
    0

  • Just running over the page/keyword analyzer and Moz picked up the fact that my link and title are not the same as the keyword I am targeting. I am targeting the keyword "Battlefield 4 CD Key" However my title (and therefore link) are Battlefield 4 CD-Key. Note the dash. Does the dashes matter in SEO or should I try to remove them and have continuity through all of the page.

    | MrPenguin
    0

  • Suppose that you want to rank for two keyword phrases that mean the same thing but are slightly different in spelling. When should you put both keyword phrases on one page versus two pages? What are the pros and cons?

    | ProjectLabs
    0

  • On a site that I'm working on there is a series of posts with the same beginning to their titles. All of the titles start with Christ's Church ("Mormons"): And then about the first four paragraphs of all these posts is exactly the same, it is just explaining this series of posts. I'll link to a couple of examples so you know what I'm talking about. I know there are several other problems with these posts/site 🙂 but I am specifically curious about the partial duplicate title and the first few paragraphs being duplicate. http://www.mormonchurch.com/3259/christs-church-mormons-helping-out-a-friend http://www.mormonchurch.com/2969/christs-church-mormon-happiness-is-found-only-through-christ There are about 30 posts similar to these. Thank you, I look forward to your responses.

    | ThridHour
    1

  • Hi. i submitted the following question to the support team at volusion regarding a large number of 302 temporary redirects on the SEOMOZ crawl of following the reactivation of product reviews on my website. Here is the question and their response. Any opinions.  Thanks TRANSCRIPT: Hi Howard, Looking at the link you have referenced, this page is unable to be accessed unless you are logged into your site, so SEO isn't applicable for the page. We would not be able to change the 302 redirect for this page. Please don't hesitate to contact us if you have any further questions. Thanks,
    Meredith G.
    Here for you 24x7x365 Volusion Support Check out our online support: http://support.volusion.com | 4 days ago (102hrs ago) [8/19/2012 10:06:00 AM] by Customer | | Hi . I had a report of 302 temporary redirects when SEO moz did a simulated site crawl. This is an example of the address of one of the many 302 temporary redirect errors which I think consume link juice or have some type of negative effect on SEO. http://www.mrgrabbar.com/reviewhelpful.asp?ProductCode=GT100&ID=562&yes=yes Since it is a live link I cannot seem to redirect it with a 301 redirect in the redirect manager. Is there anything I can do to handle these temporary redirects. They only are appearing now since I reactivated my reviews and I am concerned about the SEO effect that this may soon have.

    | mrkingsley
    0

  • I went over the list of possible reasons, but I don't think any of them apply to the site in question: sarahhueniken.com. Any other reasons only one page would be crawled?

    | scottsemple
    0

  • Hello, I'm attempting to perform an SEO review of the blog on www.aplossoftware.com. Aplos Software sells financial software and the blog is intended to bring in new visitors to the site with the goal of eventually converting some of them to customers. Here's my questions: 1. On aplossoftware.com site navigation, the blog (http://www.aplossoftware.com/blog/) is currently linked to in the footer in the lower-right under 'Resources'. Do you suggest we keep the site navigation link to the blog in its current location or move it some place else in the footer or in the header? 2. The bounce rate for the blog is over 81%. What is a reasonable goal for a bounce rate for a blog on a business website? What are some tactics to improve the bounce rate? 3. Do you suggest including a call to action to sign up for a free trial on the blog home page and/or individual posts? Thanks!

    | stageagent
    0

  • How do search engines view wording variances? I am trying to target Scottish Wedding Photographer but will google/bing etc be intelligent enough to see plurals, see the word Scotland instead of Scottish, photography instead of photographer? Also with rankings, I had a secondary phrase there to which I'm ranking sort of page 2-3 at the moment (the site is circa 3 months old) but finding that I'm nowhere with the Scottish phrase, I checked 30 pages of results and show nowhere, is this due to the competition for my phrase? My site is www.martinwardphotography.com

    | MartinWardPhoto
    0

  • I'm pretty new to all of this, my new website is starting to come along nicely in the SERPs, now appear on page 4 for my main key phrases were I didn't appear last week at all. I'm now on a mission to get myself ranked higher but my website is pretty much done... apart from the ongoing blogposts that I need to add, I'm a wedding photographer so every shoot is going on to it. My question, my blogposts aren't necessarily targeting my main key phrase, it might be mentioned once or twice but ultimately it'll most likely be the venue that steals the targeting. By adding the blogposts (I still have 36 to do) and using my keyphrase sparing, will this help to elevate me from page 4 in google? I know that I still need to build backlinks etc to but just something I can't seem to find an answer for on google hehe.

    | MartinWardPhoto
    0

  • eg. abcwidgets.com/industries/durable-goods What kind of keywords should pages like these target? Primary service offered + industry name or the reverse order? Something else? Thanks for your feedback!

    | benjdonahower
    0

  • Hi & thanks for looking, I'm not sure if I've adopted the best SEO URL structure for my site, www.vintageheirloom.com For instance, www.vintageheirloom.com/product-category/authentic-designer-vintage-bags/ Works great for the top level category 'All bags', as I'm trying to keyword authentic designer vintage bags. However the sub categories for instance 'Clutch bags' appears as, www.vintageheirloom.com/product-category/authentic-designer-vintage-bags/vintage-clutch-bags/. As you can see at the moment this URL contains duplicate terms vintage & bags. I'm guessing that duplicate keywords in a url isn't too smart, but should amend with Option 1, 2, 3 or something completely different? Option 1 - keep the top level category url the same, change the subcategory: www.vintageheirloom.com/product-category/authentic-designer-vintage-bags/clutch/ Option 2 - amend the top level category: www.vintageheirloom.com/product-category/authentic-designer/vintage-clutch-bags/ Option 3 - amend the top level category as this: www.vintageheirloom.com/product-category/bags/authentic-designer-vintage-clutch/ By the way I'm using WordPress with Woocommerce. I've asked but it's not possible with some technical issues to remove the /product-category/ section. But each product is for example just: www.vintageheirloom.com/shop/vintage-coach-yellow-duffel-sac-bag/ .... sweet. Thanks again !!

    | well-its-1-louder
    0

  • Hi All I am helping with a website with sections for different countries, that is taking the sub directory route for example: www.xxxx.com/uk/
    www.xxxx.com/india/
    www.xxxx.com/egypt/ In Webmaster tools we will be pointing each sub directory to the relevant country so Google knows /india/ is for the Google searches in India and so on.. However, I am a bit unsure about the rel=alternative "hreflang=x" How do I implement this on each page? and is it needed? Bearing in mind we have a facility on the site which translates the words to any of 50 languages.... Thanks Rob

    | acumenadagency
    0

  • Unfortunately, my developer cannot give me an answer to this so I really do hope someone can help. The homepage of my website is http://www.laddersfree.co.uk however I also have a page http://www.laddersfree.co.uk/index.php that has a page rank and essentially duplicates the home page. Does someone know what this is? Do I need to get my developer to do a 404? It is worrying that he has not come back to me. Thanks Jason

    | gymmad
    0

  • Hi, I switched my ecommerce site to a new domain, how can I get my new site indexed aneast art building links when my oils site is still indexed?

    | GTCarter1187
    0

  • I can't find where the # of indexed pages are on my google analytics. I tried the instructions below, but the index status was not an option on my dashboard. View the Index Status page: On the Webmaster Tools home page, click the site you want. On the Dashboard, click Google Index, and then click Index Status.

    | SoftwareMarketing
    0

  • Hello everybody, As you can see here: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:G-iicHoDJeYJ:www.billigste-internet.dk/&hl=da&gl=dk&strip=1 Google index the text "Forside" as the H1 tag, and "Right" and "Left" as body text, on my website. But I do not want that Google indexes this. But when I look in mine source code (see here: view-source:http://www.billigste-internet.dk/) I can not find "Forside", "rigth" or "Left", so I can delete it. Is there anyone who can help me where I need to delete the text "Forside", "Right" and "Left", so Google does not index this text? Hope someone can help.

    | JoLindahl91
    0

  • If anyone optimised their sitemap recently and would like to share some tips it would be much appreciated:-) Cheers

    | dublinbet
    0

  • We want to "revamp" our client's website, by improving the overall looking (content, images, structure). Our client is a small retail business but wants to have more traffic. What advice can you give me ?

    | marketingmedia.ca
    0

  • Due to the management software used for a lot of our websites, the URLs for specific pages appears as: brand.com/page/pagename/number I want to add slug URLs so that they appear as: brand.com/pagename First of all, do you think this is an effective use of my time and will it significantly benefit SEO in the long run. Secondly, these pages have developed a decent PA over time and I don't want to lose that. Will adding 301s for all the renamed pages be enough to not have a negative effect?

    | maxweb
    1

  • I have a javascript scrolling news ticker on my site but it seems to play havoc with my anchor text. I like it because it scrolls through showing a new set of pages. I set it to the ones I've just uploaded and it seems to help them get followed and indexed. However when I use site explorer I can see the recorded anchor text for a link to a page is incorrect and it's taking the text from the news ticker. Even when a link has come from the news ticker url it seems to take  anchor text from the ticker order list before or after. It's as if it records the anchor text and then when it follows the link to the page the ticker has changed to a new link Is this ticker bad for seo?  it certainly jumbles up my anchor text, could that be a good thing? Is there an SEO friendly news ticker for newly added products?

    | Peter2468
    0

  • Hi everybody! I'm trying to design the mobile version of an ecommerce with lots of filters in the menu (size, colours, material, etc.) I'd like to know if it's better for this kind of sites to use an m.version or a complete responsive design. I have analyzed my keywords and it's true that my website is founded in a really similiar way in both cases (desktop and mobile) so I wanted to design the whole site in responsive at first, but I'm afraid of being penalized if I hide content in the mobile version. This is why I'm thinking about making the responsive for desktop and tablets and the m. option as well, so as to hide menus and images. What's your advice? Thanks in advance!

    | esthergvent
    0

  • The following types of links are appearing in my webmaster tools crawl errors report under 'other'. I've noticed they are in my sitemaps ( I run wordpress and use a plugin called Google XML sitemaps). How do I get rid of this error? http://www.musicliveuk.com/bands/postname%/

    | SamCUK
    0

  • Hi I have a client project site thats been operating successfully in the UK now for a few months and looking to expand offer to USA. Their dev team thinks best to have a UK & US subfolder with IP sniffer serving up the relevant version depending upon ip location Apart from price differences and some spelling differences content will likely be duplicate. Please can anyone offer advice in regard to the above such as links to latest international seo resources/articles etc (i have seen Aleydas great WBF). If anyone has any experience of above scenarios (i.e. knows of probs with ip sniffer method in regard to seo or essentially having dupe folders for uk & usa just with local differences) then any advice comments will be much appreciated ? Many Thanks Dan

    | Dan-Lawrence
    0

  • Hi When filling in inventory files to upload to the likes of Amazon clients will usually be copying and pasting the product descriptions from the website product descriptions into the Amazon product description field Should they really be re-written to avoid dupe content issues ? I presume not since it is the official description of the product. Please note that i'm talking here about the manufacturers website/product descriptions and their own Amazon shop descriptions.  So theirs is the original authoritative description. Cheers Dan

    | Dan-Lawrence
    0

  • I cannot seem to get my website indexed by Google! I submitted the sitemap using Google WMT about a month ago but only one page is being indexed. There are very few backlinks to the site, so I don't believe there are any penalties due to over-optimization that would prevent indexing.  Also, my robots.txt file is properly configured and is not preventing any pages from being crawled. I've tried using the "Fetch as Google" settings in WMT with no luck. Any ideas?

    | socialfirestarter
    0

  • I have a niche website that focusses on selling pizza delivery bags, the search keywords that are used by users are about 7 and their are another 15 long tail keywords. The question is do i optimize every keyword per one page only? i have a blog on the website www.prodelpizzabags.com/blog/ if i write a blog post that would "compete" internally with another keyword, what should i do, what are the best practices I would be thankful for any insights regarding keyword/page optimization

    | akramsabra
    0

  • What is the best way? Using a different domain Using a subdomain of the main site Using a folder of the main site What's your take?

    | sbrault74
    0

  • I've just logged into webmaster tools and have over 100 404 errors. I'm running wordpress and I recently added child pages to 2 of my categories like so. www.mydomain.com/category1/lincolnshire www.mydomain.com/category1/cambridgeshire  etc... The 404 errors though are for pages or categories I've never created though. I have over 20 root categories but decided to test adding child pages to only two of them. The 404 errors are for www.mydomain.com/category5/cambridgeshire .... It seem that gogle has tried to crawl these pages that don't exist. Can anyone explain what's going on? When I click 'linked from' in webmaster tools it's showing links from pages on my site that don't exist also.

    | SamCUK
    0

  • Hello, I have a wordpress website that i have updated with a lot of content about the products i sell.  Some of the pages link back to my ecommerce website (all links are targeted at the proper/related page).  I put a lot of time and effort into creating the content and providing all of the information that i think users or consumers would find useful, but the site doesn't rank at all.  I'm wondering what your opinions are as to why this is not being shown in the serps. The URL is http://goo.gl/Qz5jSQ All opinions welcome. Thanks

    | Prime85
    0

  • For some reason, my spiders can't see a client's metadata even though I can see it in the source code. Any reason why that would happen?

    | HillyCE
    0

  • We write our own unique product descriptions and have a unique product video for each color variation and multiple unique product images and display seperate user reviews per color variation. We prefer to have seperate product pages for each color variation for several reasons (targeting color searches and user experience seeing all color variations when browsing category pages). Product descriptions of color variations are quite similar.
    I was thinking about spinning dynamically order how bullet points of product descriptions are presented to add some more uniqueness. I am not expecting a massive impact, but do you think this increases a bit googles perception of page uniqueness?

    | lcourse
    0

  • Based on what I've read, it seems like everyone agrees an IP-based, server side redirect is fine for SEO if you have content that is "geo" in nature. What I don't understand is how to actually do this. It seems like after a bit of research there are 3 options: You can do a 301 which it seems like most sites do, but that basically means if google crawls you in different US areas (which it may or may not) it essentially thinks you have multiple homepages. Does google only crawl from SF-based IPs? 302 passes no juice, so probably don't want to do that. Yelp does a 303 redirect, which it seems like nobody else does, but Yelp is obviously very SEO-savvy. Is this perhaps a better way that solves for the above issues? Thoughts on what is best approach here?

    | jcgoodrich
    0

  • Wanted to know what you would do with regards to urls – in an ideal world how would you structure them? Keen to know as me and dave are soon to have a meeting about this and were wondering about changing them from the current – http://www.looking4parking.com/airport/gatwick to something like - www.looking4parking.com/gatwick-airport-parking We will soon have pages for the specific parking types that will be a lot more engaging to users with some really useful content on benefits, features, how a certain type of parking works, images, video etc. Currently going to a type of parking, such as meet and greet just brings up a dropdown modal – I was thinking of having the url structure looking like this – www.looking4parking.com/gatwick-airport-meet-and-greet-parking www.looking4parking.com/gatwick-airport-on-site-parking www.looking4parking.com/gatwick-airport-park-and-ride We will then have specific pages for each parking product – in which this product will have unique content built around it – each will have an overview of the product, benefits, features, reviews, images, directions to the car park, find your route and eventually a video on each product So for example we currently have the product “Jet Parks 2” at Manchester airport – the current url is - http://www.looking4parking.com/airport/manchester/park-and-ride/jetparks-2 I would like to change this now we have the opportunity to refresh the whole system, to something along the lines of **domain/location/product title - **www.looking4parking.com/manchester-airport-parking/jetparks-2 or as we have some similar products at certain airports (mainly where the airport has multiple terminals) we would just change it to the following - www.looking4parking.com/manchester-airport-parking/jetparks-3 What are peoples thoughts/opinions on the above?

    | RyanCrawf1984
    0

  • Our company is ranking no.1 for brand keyword, however, when you try to find it by two words(with space between) then all those shows up and the website is nowhere to find. Any suggestions on how to solve this without the need to be ranked for something related

    | GardenPet
    0

  • We have a lot of WordPress sites with pages that contain only a form.  The header, sidebar and footer content is the same as what's one other pages throughout the site.  Each form page has a unique page title, meta description, form title and questions but the form title, description and questions add up to probably less than 100 words. Are these form pages negatively affecting the rankings of our landing pages or being viewed as duplicate or no content pages?

    | projectassistant
    0

  • Dear all, So far, I couldn't find any satisfying answer to my problem - I hope you might be able to help: Due to the fact that our website consists of user-generated content, we've got many many outbound links to other sites. Until now, it was possible to assign a follow-attribute to these links. In the ages of "pandas" however, we realised we had to limit this possibility as well as the amount of outbound follow links already published. My question now is whether there is some kind of rule of thumb as to what ratio of outbound follow and nofollow links is advisable. I'd appreciate any ideas or comments. Thanks a lot!

    | Mulle
    0

  • Good Evening MOZ community I am currently working on a website my company has just launched. I am in charge of the entire commercial side of the business from pricing to brand management including all elements of digital marketing. First of all I should make it clear I am by no means an SEO expert. However I appreciate the importance of organic search and particularly on page optimization and no I need to build it into our site from the onset. My problem lies in that our website stocks roughly 2000 individual products (Tools and Engineering products) and I am struggling to overcome the following; 1. I do not have the time or resource to re-write original product descriptions and specifications for 2000+ products 2. How can I create healthy on page SEO without having to do this? (we are not able to provide budget to outsource these efforts at the moment) Will copying manufacturer descriptions cripple our SEO 3. Many product specifications need to be displayed exactly as they would on the original manufacturer websites. How can I include exact copies of these without being penalized by google for duplicating content? Essentially I realise the importance of on page SEO and want to build it into the site for the future but need to find a way of optimizing it with minimal time. I understand much of this is a big ask but any hints or tips you may have would be greatly appreciated. Thanks Rob 🙂

    | robmarr789
    0

  • How do you all handle homepage optimization, if you (or a client) offers a variety of services? Our homepage has the strongest link profile of any of our pages, but it lists all the areas of law we cover. Therefore, it has too many keywords and none really rank well. Should we just pick our most profitable areas and optimize for that? www.kempruge.com in case anyone would benefit from looking at the actual page. Thanks, Ruben

    | KempRugeLawGroup
    0

  • For the page http://www.thinkdigit.com/top-products/Laptops-and-PCs/top-10-laptops-124.php google is showing another page in cache (http://www.thinkdigit.com/top-products/Ultrabooks/top-10-ultrabooks-153.php). Please let me know how this happened and how to correct it.

    | 9dot9
    0

  • Question for my fellow Mozers I have a ranking question that I cannot put my finger on. I have a site (visitplano.com) where the client wants to rank for the keyword "Plano". I can't say if the site was previously ranking for this keyword, but I looked into the basic SEO practices and found that the keyword is incorporated in: Domain Title Content There is a lack of internal linking and anchor text within the content External links - 1,558 DA - 46 PA - 55 Currently, the website does not rank for the keyword "Plano". Could someone shed some light on why they aren't ranking or what I may be missing? I would greatly appreciate your help.

    | flcity15
    0

  • I am getting Soft 404 errors in my Google Webmasters Tools don't know how to fix it the site in on WordPress CMS the site is "http://appdictions.com/" i am getting errors in the http://appdictions.com/members section...suggestion to fix the issue will be appreciated..

    | preferati
    0

  • Would like to get peoples suggestion on how you handle different business locations in different cities.  We have tried multiple tactics for different clients.  Some have worked better than others. Example:  We have a window company that does great in Austin.  Now they want to move into Dallas.  In the past, we have created "landing pages" optimized for that locality.  However, with Googles new updates I dont think this will work anymore.  With others, we have added a "tab" and have similar pages of the entire site optimized for that location.  This seems to have been working better. What are your suggestion of how you handle different locations from city to city. Any input is appreciated!  Thanks! Charles

    | seomozinator
    0

  • Why does Google webmaster tools shows  5 URLs that have been 301 redirected as having duplicate meta descriptions?

    | Madlena
    0

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