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Category: Technical SEO

Discuss site health, structure, and other technical SEO strategies.

  • iainmoran


    I've noticed that a few of my top competitors have a small photo (thumbnail) next to their listing. I'm sure it's not a coincidence that they are ranked top for the search phrase too. Is this really a help and how can it be done? Many thanks, Iain.

    | iainmoran
    0
  • AkilarOffice


    Hi, I have a rental website, www.akilar.com, for Spain. My question is, on the home page we have links to the seperate regions of the country. Somehow in the redesign of the site, these links have been placed on every page of the site and hidden in the code at the top. The links are there as well on each page in the header, these are additional. The page quantity is over 2000 pages. Also this is taking the internal links well over the limit. In anyones opinion what damage has this caused as our rankings of late have fallen. Thanks very much for your help!

    | AkilarOffice
    0
  • SeattleJoe


    For blog posts do you think it is better to use something like "Atlanta Plumbing Company" or "Choosing an Atlanta Plumbing Company" (article title). I have been using the article titles but I think it might be hindering rankings a bit. I use to use the keyword but it seems a bit spammy now. I want to create titles for the readers but rank well too. Any suggestions? Thanks!

    | SeattleJoe
    0
  • lartinos


    I am confused as to what to put in as the target URL. Is this just a new URL that I must create a name for? I am having trouble finding any answer for this on the internet, just more people asking the same question. I am finally realizing that all the information is found right here at SEOmoz to both learn and ask questions about.

    | lartinos
    0
  • iainmoran


    I've recently changed my old static website to a WordPress one. I'd like to know what do do (if anything) about my old links. For example a page on my old site was: www.iainmoran.com/corporate-magician.html - now I'm using WordPress, the url is:
    www.iainmoran.com/corporate-magician/ My question is, do I need to set up redirects on these old pages (which no longer exist  or will Google eventually re-crawl my site and update the links themselves? I'm using the Yoast SEO Plugin for WP and it creates a sitemap, which of course will have my new pages on. But don't want Google to penalise me for having broken links, etc. Many thanks, Iain.

    | iainmoran
    0
  • CsmBill


    Hi All! We have a small e commerce site, www.ruggedpcstore.com, built on Wordpress. The home page has a PR of 3, our About page is a PR 0, and all other pages are PR N/A. We've been pulling our hair out trying to fix what's wrong. Any ideas?

    | CsmBill
    0
  • josh123


    It threw an error saying we cannot access the SERPs of this site? Any reason why? It is an https:// site instead of the http://, but even our older domain had an https://

    | josh123
    0
  • iainmoran


    Just joined SEOMoz today and am slightly overwhelmed, but excited about learning loads from it. I've just received my Crawl Report and there is a
    404 : UserPreemptionError:
    http://www.iainmoran.com/comments/feed/ This is a WordPress site and I've no idea what the best course of action to take. I've done some searching on Google and a couple of sites suggest removing that url from within the robots.txt file. I'm using the Yoast Plugin which apparently creates a robots.txt file, but I can't see any way to edit it. Is there another solution for resolving the 404 error? Many thanks, Iain.

    | iainmoran
    0
  • himanshu301989


    Hi everyone, My question is suppose i have a blog having 200 pages arranged in footer like seomoz blog and when i move to 2nd page and say the url is http://www.seomoz.org/blog?page=2 and when i search exact url on google should this page be visible in search result or not. Since all component pages of seomoz blog are visible, i think this should not be a problem but when i see other popular blogs like SEJ and seroundtable none of their component pages are visible in search result. By the way i am using rel=prev and next but not robots: noindex, follow

    | himanshu301989
    0
  • chandubaba


    Day by day google detecting 404 errors urls.  Currently it is cross 1340 urls. Please help me to get out of this shit. You can check the screenshot here You can see the screenshot here- http://img856.imageshack.us/img856/429/954b503e0781462c8a15774.png Please check the website - www.plugnbuy.com Kindly help me. I use nofollow tag but still don't know why google detecting those errors.

    | chandubaba
    1
  • TiffenyPapuc


    Well here goes!  My very first post to SEOmoz. I have two clients that are hosted by the same hosting company.  Both sites have  major duplicate content issues and appear to have no internal links.  I have checked this both here with our awesome SEOmoz Tools and with the IIS SEO Tool Kit. After much waiting I have heard back from the hosting company and they say that they have "implemented redirects in IIS7.5 to avoid duplicate content" based on the following article: http://blog.whitesites.com/How-to-setup-301-Redirects-in-IIS-7-for-good-SEO__634569104292703828_blog.htm. In my mind this article covers things better: www.seomoz.org/blog/what-every-seo-should-know-about-iis.  What do you guys think? Next issue, both clients (as well as other sites hosted by this company) have a robot.txt file that is not their own.  It appears that they have taken one client's robot.txt file and used it as a template for other client sites.  I could be wrong but I believe this is causing the internal links to not be indexed.  There is also a site map, again not for each client, but rather for the client that the original robot.txt file was created for.  Again any input on this would be great.  I have asked that the files just be deleted but that has not occurred yet. Sorry for the messy post...I'm at the hospital waiting to pick up my bro and could be called to get him any minute. Thanks so much, Tiff

    | TiffenyPapuc
    0
  • reliabox


    There is a particular product/service that I resell through an API. There are quite a few of them and each one requires a lot of content. The company provides web content for each product but I'm wondering about the SEO implications of using it? Obviously using the content, it will not be unique so I won't be able to rank (easily at least) for these products. Are there any _negative_results that I can get from using this content though? If I simply won't rank for those products it's not an issue since I get traffic elsewhere. Thanks!

    | reliabox
    0
  • DanCrean


    I have an old Wordpress site and I want to move it to a new server and take it off Wordpress (too many hacks).  I am trying to spider the site so as to get static, non-Wordpress, pages. I am having trouble doing this.  When I spider the site, it changes the URLs.  For instance, if the URL is www.domain.com/page/  the URL I get out of the spider is /page/index.html  And those are not the URLs in the search engine indices.  There are about 2000 pages on this site, so it is not feasible to set up 301 redirects. I tried using these spidering programs: WinHTTack Website Copier and PageNest Does anyone know of another method of turning a Wordpress site into a non Wordpress site?

    | DanCrean
    0
  • Cocoonfxmedia


    Hi Guys Does anyone know if there is away to write say 30 x 301 redirects in one go? I have a list from a client with old links and new links and I want to do it all at once. Any suggestions would be appreciate?

    | Cocoonfxmedia
    0
  • Prospector-Plastics


    We have a client who's main root.com domain is currently penalized by Google, but the subdomain.root.com is appearing very well. We're stumped - any ideas why?

    | Prospector-Plastics
    0
  • wood1e2


    Hi, I have just run a crawl on a new clients site, and there is several 'duplicate page content' and 'Duplicate Page Title'' issues. But I cannot find any duplicate content.  And to make matters worse.  The actual report has confused me. Just for example the about us page is showing in both reports and for both under 'Other URLs' it is showing 1? Why? Does this mean there is 1 other page with duplicate page title? or duplicate page content? Where are the pages that have the duplicate page titles, or duplicate page content? I have run scans using other software and a copyscape scan.  And apart from missing page titles, I cannot find any page that has duplicate titles or content. I can find % percentages of pages with similar/same page titles/content. But this is only partial and contextually correct. So I understand that SEO Moz may pick percentage of content, which is fine, and therefore note that there is duplicate content/page titles. But I cannot seem to figure out where I would the source of the duplicate content/page titles. As there is only 1 listed in both reports for 'Other URLs' Hopefully my long question, has not confused. many thanks in advance for any help

    | wood1e2
    0
  • mmoezzi


    Hi, I am having this issue within SEOmoz's Crawl Diagnosis report.  There are a lot of crawl errors happening with pages don't even exist. My website has around 40-50 pages but SEO report shows that 375 pages have been crawled. My guess is that the errors have something to do with my recent htaccess configuration. I recently configured my htaccess to add trailing slash at the end of URLs. There is no internal linking issue such as infinite loop when navigating the website but the looping is reported in the SEOmoz's report. Here is an example of a reported link: http://www.mywebsite.com/Door/Doors/GlassNow-Services/GlassNow-Services/Glass-Compliance-Audit/GlassNow-Services/GlassNow-Services/Glass-Compliance-Audit/ btw there is no issue such as crawl error in my Google webmaster tool. Any help appreciated

    | mmoezzi
    0
  • DylanPKI


    Ok - So I am in the position to try and clean up the current Google places nightmare for a company. Right now there is about 3 or 4 different google places listings for them that they have no control over. So here is what I did: 1. I took control of them all by verifying via phone and confirmed all of them. 2. I suspended all the listings but 1 3. I edited the one listing to be accurate and complete.
    Then I waited, and waited... A month later, the old listings are still up and none of the changes to the one listing have been made. Today it gets a bit more complicated. Today I created a Google+ page for the business which seems like it may end up adding yet ANOTHER Google Places listing, is that correct? They are sending a post card to verify, but I have the page all set up ready to go and plan on tying it to the website. I am not exactly sure what my specific question is, but I am looking for any advice anyone has on the best way to go about this situation. Thank you in advance!

    | DylanPKI
    0
  • twotd


    Hi there! I have recently moved a domain that has been indexed by google and setup redirects so that it forwards to the new domain. It seems like the only redirect that actually is working is the canonical and main domain but every other page and or page nested within a folder are not working. Here is an example of some of the redirects. Am I doing this wrong? It seems to be going to the new domain but can't find the actual pages.... RewriteEngine On
    RewriteBase /
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !agoodsweep.com$ [NC]
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://agoodsweep.com/$1 [L,R=301]
    redirect 301 woodstoveservicerepair.html http://agoodsweep.com/woodstoveservicerepair/
    redirect 301 /westchesterchimney.html http://agoodsweep.com/west-chester-chimney/ Thanks in advance for any help!!

    | twotd
    0
  • ssaltman


    We are converting an old static html ecommerce site to a new platform. The old site has excellent ranking for some of the products. In order to maintain our ranking we will implement 301 redirects from old to new pages (as the urls will change to SEF). I am using Googles Keyword tool (in adwords) and entering each page url of the old site (there are hundreds, I'm doing the top 50 in traffic) and generating a set of keywords, then sorting each list by global searches. For each page, Google's Keyword Tool is giving me hundreds of keywords, but in meta tags there should be no more than 15, so I need a method to choose the keywords on the new page. Question:  in the new meta tags should we emphasize the most common keywords (as defined by most global searches) or the least common keywords? I would hate to lose the good ranking for the least common (long tail) keywords.

    | ssaltman
    0
  • Will_Craig


    Hi, I'm working on onsite seo for an ecommerce website and my recent report has shown that I have a high number of pages where there are 'too many links on page'. Does anyone have tips on how to avoid this when we're using mega menus, plenty of navigation for the user and links to products on each page? Thanks

    | Will_Craig
    1
  • PrivatePartners


    I would like to switch my sidebar from listing Category Name with posts listed below each- to a concise custom menu. This custom menu would list the top three products I am promoting first, and then go on to list the categories on my site. Currently it looks like this (but with 6 categories, with between 7-10 items in each - this is on EVERY page) Widgets
    -Green Widget
    -Blue Widget Gidwets
    -Big Gidwet
    -Small Gidwet I rank well in google right now, but I am concerned that changing my sidebar will result in a penalty.  Maybe for over-optimizing my top three products I promote, or possibly for trying to control the flow of link juice. Can anyone chime in here who has adjusted their site structure within wordpress, and tell me what you found worked best? ** Before anyone asks**, this structure does work much better for the user.  My sidebar now is massive, and is confusing even to me.

    | PrivatePartners
    0
  • stewbuch1872


    Developer says "Overly-Dynamic URL. Developer says that this is the hardest and complex part. It will be possible to change all of the search criterias to use ( / )
    But in this case each of the pages will be indexed and every time listing gets added, content will get changed. Which for example Google will start blocking what is the best way to address this and will google block as suggested ? thanks

    | stewbuch1872
    0
  • jhinchcliffe


    Hey everyone, I am doing a duplicate content check using copyscape, and realized we have used a ton of the same content on LinkedIn as our website. Should we change the LinkedIn company page to be original? Or does it matter? Thank you!

    | jhinchcliffe
    0
  • PFTools


    I have many duplicate pages. Some pages have 2-3 duplicates. Most of which have Uppercase and Lowercase paths (generated by Microsoft IIS).  Does this implementation of 301 and rel=canonical suffice? Or is there more I could do to optimize the passing of duplicate page link juice to the canonical. THANK YOU!

    | PFTools
    0
  • jsillay


    We have just a few 404 errors on our site. Is there any way to figure out which pages are linking to the pages that create 404 errors? I would rather fix the links than create new 301 redirects. Thanks!

    | jsillay
    0
  • littlesthobo


    Good morning. Just done my WMT ritual morning check and one of my sites has been blacklisted for malware. It's a wordpress site - I've run various scans, e.g. http://sitecheck.sucuri.net/scanner/ and also installed wordfence and scanned with that and wordfence produced some offending files which I have now deleted. I've also installed website defender in the hope that it wont happen again.  I'm pretty good with staying on top of updates and rarely let a few days pass without upgrading new version of wordpress or plugins etc.  I've also checked my users to make sure no new admins or anything and also changes passwords. I've asked for a review from Google and just wondered how long these reviews take? Also, has anybody got any advice, is there anything else I should be doing? Thanks

    | littlesthobo
    0
  • rock22


    Any ideas why this happened?  Our sitemap looks the same.  Also, our total number of pages indexed has not decreased, just the sitemap.  Could this eventually affect my pages being in the index?

    | rock22
    0
  • isntworkdull


    Hi all, I decided yesterday to make a load of changes to my website, and today i woke thinking, should i have done that! So below is an example of what i have done (i will try to explain clearly anyway), can you let me know if you think what i have done would harm or help my website in search results etc... ok, so lets take just one category - Cameras And it has the sub categories - box dome bullet it also has other sub categories (which are actually features, but the only way i can show them on my site is by having them as a sub-category with its own static page, and adding the products to these as secondary categories) vandal proof high resolution night vision previously i  have it set up so that every single category / sub category / feature had its own static page, with a canonical tag to itself (i.e cameras.html canonical was to cameras.html, vandalproof.html canonical was to vandalproof.html). Any of the categories / sub cats / features that had more than one page were simply not in search results due to the canonical pointing to "Page 1"... What i have now done: Last night i decided to change all this, now for all categories / sub cats / features i have add rel=prev / next where applicable, and removed the canonical from second / third / fourth pages etc, but left the canonical on "page 1". I also removed any keywords from page 2,3,4 etc and changed descriptions to just page "X" + category name. So for example, page one looks like: and page two looks like: I also went a little further (maybe too far) and decided that the features pages would canonicalize back to cameras so for those i now have: Page 1: Page 2: Any advice is welcome on the above, in regards to which way may be better and why, and obviously if anything jumps out as a mistake... Please advise James

    | isntworkdull
    0
  • All-Star-Vacation-Homes


    Hello SEOmoz Community, We are going to start a blog on our website and have a slight dilemma.  Our site is a .Net site and the blog platform we've chosen (BlogEngine) only allows us to use the following url structure: www.domain.com/blog/post/post-name.  We've looked at other .Net blog software and this one meets all of our needs except for the ideal URL Structure. We would like to remove the /post/ directory; however have not technically found a way to do it.  We wanted to get some opinions on whether or not we should just start with this URL structure and not worry about the extra directory, or work to find another solution that eliminates this extra directory.  Ideally we want to keep the posts as close to the root as possible for link juice distribution, and the extra directory could get in the way. Also, if anyone has any advice on a more flexible .Net blog platform, suggestions would be greatly appreciated. We thank you so much in advance for your time and help.

    | All-Star-Vacation-Homes
    0
  • zco_seo


    Hi all,  I have a question regarding content duplication.My site has posted one fresh content in the article section and set canonical in the same page for avoiding content duplication._But another webmaster has taken my post and posted the same in his site with canonical as his site url. They have not given to original source as well._May I know how Google will consider these two pages. Which site will be affected with content duplication by Google and how can I solve this issue?If two sites put canonical tags in there own pages for the same content how the search engine will find the original site which posted fresh content. How can we avoid content duplication in this case?

    | zco_seo
    0
  • acs111


    We're building a blog on a subdomain of the main site. The main site is on Shopify and the blog will be on wordpress. I'd like to keep the user experience as simple as possible so I'd like to make the blog look exactly like the main Shopify site. This means having a menu in the blog that duplicates the Shopify menu. So is it bad for SEO to have someone click on the 'about us' button in the blog subdomain (blog.mainsite.com) which takes you to the 'about us page' on the main shopify website (mainsite.com)?

    | acs111
    0
  • TomLondon


    Hi All, I had around 2,300 pages in the google index until a week ago. The index removed a load and left me with 152 submitted, 152 indexed? I have just re-submitted my sitemap and will wait to see what happens. Any idea why it has done this? I have seen a drop in my rankings since. Thanks

    | TomLondon
    0
  • EcommerceSite


    I have a very large sitemap. I submit  it to both Google and Bing, but do I need a link to it? If someone went there it would probably lock their browser. Is there any danger of not having a link if I submit it to Google and Bing?

    | EcommerceSite
    0
  • puremobile


    I have a site that does a 301 redirect from http to https I currently have a sitemap auto submitted to google webmaster tools using the http pages. (because i didnt have https before) should I disable that sitemap for http and create one for the https only?

    | puremobile
    0
  • hhdentist


    Hi - Over the past few months, I've identified multiple sites which are linking into my site and creating fake pages (below is an example and there's over 500K+ of similar links from various sites}.  I've attempted to contact the hosting companies, etc. with little success.  Was wondering if my best course of action might be at this point: A) which servers (or IP address). B) Use the Google Disavow tool? C) both. example:  {  http://aryafar.com/crossings/200-krsn-team-part19.html  } Thanks!!

    | hhdentist
    0
  • James77


    Hi, I was wondering if anyone had a solution to linking without loosing link equity? From what I have read using 'no follow' on both internal and external links DOES NOT pass any equity across the link to the link target, but also, the latest thought goes that it DOES loose link equity (as if it were a FOLLOW' link). So is there a method of retaining link equity using another method? Thanks

    | James77
    0
  • danatanseo


    I have been doing something Richard Baxter recently suggested and reviewing our server logs. I have found an oddity that hopefully some of you smart Mozzers can help me figure out. Here is the line from the server log (there are many more like this): 157.55.32.166 - - [04/Mar/2013:08:00:59 -0800] "GET /StoreFront/category/www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/shure-se-earphones HTTP/1.1" 200 94133 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)" "-" See how the www.ccisolutions.com appears after /StoreFront/category/ ? We used to see weird URLs reported in GWT that looked like this, but ever since we fixed our canonical tags to be absolute instead of relative URLs, they no longer appeared in our Webmaster Tools reports. However, it seems there is still a problem. Where/how could Bingbot be seeing URLs configured this way? Could it be a server issue, or is it most likely a data problem? Thanks in advance! Dana P.S. Could this be resulting from our massive use of relative URLs all over the site?

    | danatanseo
    0
  • accessKellyOCG


    Hi everyone! Some days ago, I noticed that one of our URLs (http://www.access.de/karriereplanung/webinare) is no longer in the Google index. We never had any form of penalty, link warning etc. Our traffic by Google is constantly growing every month. This single page does not have an external link pointing to it - only internal links. The page has been indexed all the time. The HTTP status code is 200, there is no noindex or something in the code. I submitted the URL on GWMT to let Google send it to the index. It was crawled successfully by Google, sent to the index 5 days ago - nothing happened, still not indexed. Do you have any suggestions why this page is no longer indexed? It is well linked internally and one click away from the home page. There is still the PR of 5 showing, I always thought that pages with PR are indexed.......

    | accessKellyOCG
    0
  • matiw


    Hello, I own a website wich lately (since like few months ago) have a unstable ranking, I mean that one day I get 800 organic visits (good sells) and then a week when organic visits fall to 700,600,500,400.. then up again Why does this happen? I am lossing ranking :S site : todorepuestoselectro(dot)com Thank you very much im learning a lot here!

    | matiw
    0
  • razasaeed


    We are getting different titles in Search Engine Result Page, where PakWheels: is added to the actual title of page. Your expert opinion is highly appreciated. What can be the possible reason of "PakWheels:" appearing. This is a case for only home page of website. Search query 'cars in pakistan' shows 3rd result with title Pakwheels: Cars, Used Cars, New Cars, Latest Car Prices & News ... Whereas the actual title of page is without 'PakWheels:'

    | razasaeed
    0
  • VillasDiani


    On my website http://villasdiani.com I have in main navigation menu Vills and Hotels which are both categories, when I open them they open archives. Why those are archives and when I open other categories like Kenya news there are regular posts and no archives?

    | VillasDiani
    0
  • Muna


    We have revamped our website http://www.wsinetpower.com/ after te revamp the SEO rankings went down and the inner pages are not appearing in serach. What could be the reason

    | Muna
    0
  • CoGri


    A while ago I altered some of the URL's of my website. Google now thinks that I have two duplicate pages (duplicate content), I have asked my third party web developers (Who use .NET and a custom built CMS system) to simply 301 redirect the old URL to the other. However, my web developers say the following: "Solving the problems by 301 permanent re directs are out of the question as this would create infinite loops. Likely to bring down our server." They also wont do a canonical, as they say there is only one page (but two URLs) Firstly, has any one heard of this before and do they think this is true? Also, does anyone have an alternative method of getting rid of the old URL? Any thoughts would be much appreciated.

    | CoGri
    0
  • EdwardDennis


    Hi all, A client has just got their .edu domain and they want to change their current domain name (a .com) to this new .edu domain. The domain's CMS is Wordpress. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but basically I will need to create a new site (but  they want to keep current design),  move everything across to the new domain name, and 301 URL per URL? What about all the citations that the old URLs have gotten? The website is listed on Google listings/maps for some of their local keywords. Is there anyway to preserve this? Thank you all in advance.

    | EdwardDennis
    0
  • MozAddict


    Does google consider it to be spam by having multiple languages posts on a blog such as English, Arabic, spanish blog posts.

    | MozAddict
    0
  • ClaireH-184886


    Ok so here is the question. A few months ago i decided to join pingler.com and pay for the service as i was using the free service, but after four months now i have not noticed any changes and i am just wondering if i am wasting my time using the paid service. would love to hear from people who have or are using the service and let me know if this is a waste of time and my money could be better spent elsewhere. look forward to hearing your thoughts

    | ClaireH-184886
    0
  • featherseo


    Here's the situation: Downloaded a backup of a full database from CPanel, because we needed to perform some queries on it. Found out that after restoring it, CPanel had not been able to zip up the full database because the server memory was set so low (some posts weren't showing up after the restore). SO, how would I go about determining exactly what content is missing from the site? What search engine queries would you perform? Is there a plugin I could use to establish the inconsistencies between the database content and the search results? Your help is appreciated in advance!

    | featherseo
    0
  • designquotes


    We already know that over optimsied anchor text for external will cause a penalty. But what about internal links? All of our blog posts include an advertisement linking sales pages. These links all use the exact same anchor text. Is linking to an internal page from so many other pages (blog posts) likely to trigger a penalty? Here is an example: http://www.designquotes.com.au/business-blog/four-ways-to-enhance-your-e-commerce-site-for-busy-shoppers/ This links to http://www.designquotes.com.au/web-design-quotes Many of the posts link to the same page using the anchor text "Compare Web Design Quotes from Local Designers."

    | designquotes
    0
  • wethink


    I am looking at the report called: Rankings Report for [Competitor XXX] For all keywords in the report, the rankings on the main  page say "Not in Top 50"... however when I drill down I can see that this is not true...  there is a graph with valid rankings which were gathered as recently as March 20, 2013 (2 days ago)  is this a known bug? Regards Jim Donovan

    | wethink
    0

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