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Category: Technical SEO

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

  • kymodo


    Hi there, I do SEO for .. and it's a great site with all very valuable (and unique) information and resources. It was previously a PageRank 5 but recently (in the past week) it has gone to PR N/A across the entire website. The website is still being indexed in Google and our rankings are still the same. And although I'm aware PageRank means very little these days, I'm a little concerned this may be the start for a decrease in rankings due to something being wrong on the website. Have other people seen this? Would love some input in case you see something that I'm not or what may be causing the issue. Thank you for you time.

    | kymodo
    0
  • VeronicaCFowler


    We recently update our website with DNN 6.  Once the upgrade was done, I kept recieving log in links on my duplicate title and duplicate content error reports.  Is anyone familiar with how to stop these links from showing up? Example of link: http://www.faisongroup.com/Login/tabid/750/Default.aspx?returnurl=%2F Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thank you!

    | VeronicaCFowler
    0
  • jfmonfette


    Hi, Our site has a page for new visitors to select their language to view our website So if you type our brand adress (http://www.bdc.ca) you should be redirected to this "splash" page (http://www.bdc.ca/pages/splashpage.aspx). What is the SEO impact of doing this and is there a better way for users to choose their languages, SEO-wise (and UX wise) ? You'll also see that after the visitor select its language, he's redirected to the actual home page using a two 302 redirects ( one to bdc.ca/en/ and then another one to the actual home page).  I am aware of this and I know this is really bad. Please share what you think would be the best way to manage this language selection in respect to SEO, but with respect to UX too. Thanks ! Jean-François Monfette

    | jfmonfette
    0
  • RocketZando


    http://www.zando.co.za/women/shoes/  (for example) Hello, I'm concerned that WMT is reporting a large spike in blocked URLs - now reporting more blocked URLs  than good URLs. Our product recommendations get generated via an Ajax call and these autogenerated, unique, URLs are rendered in the /recommendations/ folder which sits in the root of our site: http://www.zando.co.za/recommendations/ I can't see how I can prevent Google from calling the Ajax - I can only assume that's what's happening.This is what the code typically looks like:

    | RocketZando
    0
  • Santaur


    Google Web Master Tools is saying that some of my pages have duplicate page titles because of pagination. However, I have implemented the canonical tag on the paginated pages which I thought would keep my site from being penalized for duplicate page titles. Is this correct? Or does canonical tag only relate to duplicate content issues?

    | Santaur
    0
  • RScime25


    I believe this has been addresses and answered previously, but despite searching the Q&A archives, I was unable to find the question and answer. So, please be gentle and patient: We have an eCommerce site with several hundred products, most of which use the structure: www.mysite.com/subcategory/itemA.html. We wish to feature itemA as a "daily special" item, and our Magento developer has recommended: www.mysite.com/internet-daily-special/**itemA.html ** Because itemA.html is the same page—albeit following a different path—will Google see this as duplicate content? Thanks.

    | RScime25
    0
  • DougHosmer


    I have a Joomla site with a home page that I can't get to rank for anything beyond the company name @ Google - the site works fine @ Bing and Yahoo.  The interior pages will rank all day long but the home page never shows up in the results.  I have checked the page code out in every tool that I know about and have had no luck....by all account it should be good to go...any thoughts/comments/help would be greatly appreciated. The site is http://www.selectivedesigns.com Thanks! Greg

    | DougHosmer
    0
  • Studio33


    Hi, Are Meta Title Tag deemed by google to be unique if I use the same phrases by in a different order.  For example 3 different pages <colgroup><col width="475"></colgroup>
    | Online Invoicing Software | Online Invoicing | Invoicing Software |
    | Online Invoicing | Invoicing Software | Online Invoicing Software |
    | Invoicing Software | Online Invoicing Software | Online Invoicing | You will not it is the same keywords just in a different order.  Is this unique enough or will google not be happy about it. Thanks Andrew

    | Studio33
    0
  • tonyklu


    Hi, When i search for my blog post in google i get sitemap results, and when i click on it i get an error, here is the screen shot http://screencast.com/t/lXOIiTnVZR1 http://screencast.com/t/MPWkuc4Ocixy How can i fix that, it loos like if i just add www. it work just fine. Thanks

    | tonyklu
    0
  • JohnBerger


    We have a ton of warnings - over 10 k - that are paths that SEOMOZ is getting redirected to an enable cookies page - but anyone with cookies enabled is not. Does this matter?

    | JohnBerger
    0
  • Robdob2013


    Hi, I have a question,  Suppose I change some content on my web page,  i.e. Title, Description, some body text.  And then several days later I see this changes have been reflected within the contents displayed to me when I do a google search. I also notice that at the same time that these contents have been displayed to me that the position of my site has either dropped or increased by several positions.  Is it a reasonable assumption to attribute the position change to the changes I made on the webpage or is there usually a delay in position movement upon changes visibly being displayed? Thanks,

    | Robdob2013
    0
  • WindshieldGuy-276221


    I am considering forwarding 3 very aged and valuable domain names to my main site. There were once over 100 blog posts on each blog and each one has a page authority of 45 and domain authority of 37. My question is should i put up three blogs on the  domains and link them to my site or should i just forward the domains to my main site? Which will provide me with more value. I have the capability to have some one blog on them every day. However, i do not have access to any of the old blog posts. I guess i could scrape it of archive.org. Any advice would be appreciated. Scott

    | WindshieldGuy-276221
    0
  • nyc-seo


    Hello. How much more important does Google consider pages in the root directory relative to pages in a subdirectory? Is it best to keep the most important pages of a site in the root directory? Thanks!

    | nyc-seo
    0
  • Ezpro9


    my client GWT has a number of notices for "blocked by meta-robots" - these are all either blog posts/categories/or tags his former seo told him this: "We've activated following settings: Use noindex for Categories Use noindex for Archives Use noindex for Tag Archives to reduce keyword stuffing & duplicate post tags
    Disabling all 3 noindex settings above may remove google blocks but also will send too many similar tags, post archives/category. " is this guy correct? what would be the problem with indexing these? am i correct in thinking they should be indexed? thanks

    | Ezpro9
    0
  • rakan


    We are an inbound tour operator in Jordan. We have just redesigned and restructured our website. We sell tours in Jordan (Jordan Tours) and this is the primary keyword we are targeting. Our Jordan Tours page includes different tour categories. Each category takes you to a number of tours to choose from. What would be the best URL structure that will optimize our ranking for "Jordan Tours"? A. /jordantours/tour-type-category/tour-name B. /jordantours/tour-name C. /tour-name I have to admit that two weeks ago we launched the new site and went with option C. by intuition, aiming at reducing the clutter for a better user experience. So if C isn't the answer, is it worth making the change and applying 301 redirects after our new pages has been indexed for 2 weeks? Your insight is much appreciated. Thank you, Rakan

    | rakan
    0
  • Rajesh.Chandran


    Hi everyone, I saw many posts related to this query.But i couldnt find a solution for my error.. Here is my question I got 575 Duplicate page title & 600 duplicate page content errors. My site is related to realestate. I created a page title like same sentence differs with locality name Eg:  Land for sale - kandy property Land for sale - Galle property Likewise Locality name only differs..I have created meta title & Content like this. Can anyone let me know how to solve this error ASAP ?

    | Rajesh.Chandran
    0
  • lindsayjhopkins


    SEOMoz (and other platforms) advise that I need to add my keyword to the page URL, however as far as I'm concerned it has been, so why don't these platforms see it. My home page URL is www.salesandinternetmarketing.com, but apparently I haven't added the keyword internet marketing to the URL, what advice can you give me please? Lindsay

    | lindsayjhopkins
    1
  • lans2787


    Hello friends, I have a very basic question but I can not find the right answer... I have made my blog linkbuilding using the adress "mysite.com/blog"  but  now im not sure if is better to do the linkbuilding to "mysite.com**/blog/ "** Is there any diference? Thanks...

    | lans2787
    0
  • tonyklu


    Hi, For some reason 2 pages on my website, time to time get noindex nofollow tags they disappear from search engine, i have to log in my thesis wp theme and uncheck box for  "noindex" "nofollow"  and them update, in couple days my website is back up. here is screen shot http://screencast.com/t/A6V6tIr2Cb6 Is that something in thesis theme that cause the problem? even though i unchecked the box and updated but its still stays checked http://screencast.com/t/TnjDcYfsH4sq appreciated for your help!

    | tonyklu
    0
  • footd


    Hi there, I run an ecommerce website on Magento. We are no longer using a category. It actually does not appear on the menu: mydomain.com/category.html If this is the case, do you recommend to remove it through the Removal URL feature on GWT? I don't want this to affect the juice of other links of the site such as: mydomain.com/product.html Thanks very much. Regards

    | footd
    0
  • dominator


    Hey all, I am currently optimizing a Magento Multistore running with two store views (one per language). Now when I switch from one language to another the urls shows: mydomain.de/.../examplepage.html?___store=german&___from_store=english The same page can also be reached by just entering mydomain.de/.../examplepage.html The question is: Does Google consider this as Duplicate Content or it it nothing to worry about? Or should I just do a dynamic 301 redirect from the 1st version to the 2nd? I read about some hacks posted in diferent magento forums but as I am working for a customer I want to avoid hacks. Also setting "Add Store Code to Urls" didn't help.

    | dominator
    0
  • Resultify


    Hi How important is it to configure your domain info in the same way as the contact info of your website? I heard having a long expiry date on the domain and having proper contact info helps create domain trust? Any tips on this? Info on how to set this up in an optimal way? Thanks in advance Fredrik

    | Resultify
    0
  • TheUniqueSEO


    Hi Guys I think this sounds like a right noobie question, but I am amongst friends so here goes. So our website is an ecommerce site selling magazines.  There are certain magazines, for example Vogue, where we sell the UK version, USA, italian, spanish, french etc there's basically 13 different Vogue magazines on our site. The more niche ones attract some good long tail traffic.  However, the UK version is competitive and so requires some extra umph to get us a half descent rank. However, when you search "vogue magazine subscription" for example, it's our italian vogue which is listed first. When I looked into this, I found that we had linked out from our UK Vogue to Italian vogue.  Could this have given the italian vogue a marginal boost, as it had the additional internal links? What I have now done is add to some, not all, of the variations something along the lines "you will find the UK Vogue magazine here" where "UK Vogue Magazine" is the anchor text. Is this the right thing to do?  Will this identify that the UK Vogue page is the higher priority page, or the more important page? I was also going to add to a category page a "Top 10 Womens magazines" section, and link to Vogue from there. Am I barking up the right tree? Thanks Guys Paul

    | TheUniqueSEO
    0
  • seospeedwagon


    Hi All, We had a quick question regarding the construction of title tags throughout our site (yay for optimizing!). We were wondering what is considered best practice or what we should be considering when we're deciding how to end our title tags - basically, it's between Tripping and Tripping.com. For example: This is the content | Tripping OR This it the content | Tripping.com Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated! Thanks,
    Bianca

    | seospeedwagon
    0
  • yanaiguana111


    If the content is written by a corporation and cannot be attributed to a specific writer, yet we want to claim the authorship - can a logo be used instead of a headshot in the Google Profile? Researching the above, and found that its a NO, but it can be done somewhat through rel=publisher tag, which at present is not very useful. Any other thoughts?

    | yanaiguana111
    1
  • dwallner


    Hello - I am considering adding geotags to landing pages for services offered. The problem I have is that the physical location of the business, registered on Google places, is different from where these services are performed. The company is a lawn care provider that services several small cities and is based out of our residence. I plan on creating landing pages for each of these cities so I am hoping to use these tags to indicate to the world that this location is my desired audience. Example, the business is in a town called New Market, MN population small so that is my location on Google places. 99.9% of the business we do is done in neighboring cities of Northfield, Lakeville and Eagan. Is is it an acceptable practice to put geotags on landing pages for those cities or would this be considered dirty pool? On the eagan-lawn-care page place a geotag for Eagan and a different one on the Lakeville page? Gracias! Derrick

    | dwallner
    0
  • SteveBrumpton


    Last week I received an unnatural link warning from Google.  Sad times. I followed the guidelines and reviewed all my inbound links for the last 3 months.  All 5000 of them!  Along with several genuine ones from trusted sites like BBC, Guardian and Telegraph there was a load of spam.  About 2800 of them were junk.  As we don't employ any SEO agency and don't buy links (we don't even buy adwords!) I know that all of this spam is generated by spam bots and site scrapers copying our content. As the bad links have not been created by us and there are 2800 of them I cannot hope to get them removed.  There are no 'contact us' pages on these Russian spam directories and Indian scraper sites.  And as for the 'adult book marking website' who have linked to us over 1000 times, well I couldn't even contact that site in company time if I wanted to!  As a result i did my manual review all day, made a list of 2800 bad links and disavowed them. I followed this up with a reconsideration request to tell Google what I'd done but a week later this has been rejected "We've reviewed your site and we still see links to your site that violate our quality guidelines."  As these links are beyond my control and I've tried to disavow them is there anything more to be done? Cheers Steve

    | SteveBrumpton
    0
  • petrakraft


    Do you consider the guidelines from http://validator.w3.org/ when setting up a new website? As far as I know they don't influence rankings ... What is your opinion about that topix?

    | petrakraft
    0
  • bmcinternetmarketing


    Dear members, As I understand the importancy of Internal Followed Links I want to increase them for www.ruijters.nl. What I do not understand that Open Site Explorer only counts 5 Internal Followed Links. These 5 Internal Followed Links must be the hypelinked images on the homepage? But the website in overall definately has more than 5? Any members who van help me out to fix this problem, so www.ruijters.nl can enjopy his linkjuice? Best Regards, Alain Nijholt

    | bmcinternetmarketing
    0
  • EcomLkwd


    We just finished designing a whole new site that will hopefully convert better than our previous site and we are currently coding it. We are hoping to get the site out in the next month or two (or three!). We want to know what to expect in regard to our sales from SEO. If you successfully launched a site redesign and your conversion rate improved, can you answer this question? How long will it take for my rankings to regain their initial ranking and then hopefully rank even higher?

    | EcomLkwd
    0
  • BigBlaze205


    My shopping cart does not allow to instal a WordPress blog on a sub-domain like: furnacefilterscanada.com/blog/ But I can host my blog on another server with a sub-domain like: blog.furnacefilterscanada.com In a SEO point of view is there a difference between the 2? Link juice? Page authority? Thank you, BigBlaze

    | BigBlaze205
    0
  • devrox


    Hey there, Was wondering if anyone could give me some advice/help on my current problems with my Google ranking. I used to be on page one this time last year (still am on yahoo and bing) but Google has pushed me out of the top 50. Since then I built a new site on wordpress with new content but it hasn't made any real difference. This is my site address: www.elvisimpersonator4u.co.uk I also have a separate blog here: www.thisiselvis.tv The blog did have some duplicate writing on it which I removed a few months back but it still hasn't improved my Google ranking. Would a 301 redirect fix this problem properly? I've done quite a lot of SEO on several pages on the new site to try and improve it but no luck so far. In fact I hope I haven't over optimised! No tools seem to indicate this though. I have no messages in webmaster tools so there's no obvious penalty, my web hosts keep saying I just need to buy more link builds and content writing from them but I've already done a lot of this and it's made no discernible difference. If someone could have a look and give me some advice I would be most grateful! Thanks,
    Jim

    | devrox
    0
  • Amtoj


    hi, Some of the employees have done by mistake on wrong spelling word and the only difference was: difference of "a" he was doing for over 3-4 months the website has started coming on top for those wrong spelled keyword. Now currently he has started to do on right word. I have some questions:
    Will my SEO for correct spelling keyword, be affected with this wrong spelling ? Can i save my efforts somehow ? There was 2 more keywords attached with it ( whose spelling was correct ) , so will i have to submit more directories, articles etc so will my seo get affected for those keywords for overwork ? Thanks

    | Amtoj
    0
  • Sandeep_Matharu


    I'm currently working with a client who provides products in Ireland Is it massively beneficial for the sited to be hosted on an irish server or will there not be much difference with it being hosted in England?

    | Sandeep_Matharu
    0
  • DeliaAssociates


    I have a potential client that is looking to change their domain for branding reasons, but does not want to lose their solid SERP position.  I'm not concerned about links continuing to pass juice as he was (though I am concerned about the link profile). What I am concerned about is domain age (moving from a 4 year old domain to one that has just been parked for 4 years but not used, or one that is currently just a redirect to his site), and the fact that his current URL is an EMD.  He is using his state (only really does work there), plus two solid keywords in the domain, and wants to switch to brand name with one of the two solid keywords he was using. My initial thought is "if it's not broke, don't fix it."   How worried should I be about rankings if we change this domain. Thanks for the help, and fire back any questions.  Sorry I'm a little vague.

    | DeliaAssociates
    0
  • Googleankan


    Hi, On our site we have a lot of video content. The player is hosted by a third party so we are using an iframe to include the content on our site. The problem is that the content it self (on the third party domain) is shown in the google result. My question is: Can we ask the third party to disallow the content from indexing in their robots.txt or will that also affect our own use of the video content? For example we use video-sitemaps to include the videos in Google video search (the sitemap links to the videos on our own domain, but we are still using iframes on the pages to collect the content from the third party domain that will then be blocked by robots.txt). I hope you understand what I mean... Any suggestions? Thanks a lot!

    | Googleankan
    0
  • aactive


    Hi, I have a number of sub-folders that I have to move, each of which contains a number of files. subfolder A has files a, b & c subfolder B has files d, e & f
    subfolder C has files g, h & i A, B & C folders need to be X, Y & Z Will the following work? RewriteRule ^subfolder-A/* http://www.domain.com/subfolder-X/ [R=301,L]
    RewriteRule ^subfolder-B/* http://www.domain.com/subfolder-Y/ [R=301,L]
    RewriteRule ^subfolder-C/* http://www.domain.com/subfolder-Z/ [R=301,L] will this result in visitors to http://www.domain.com/subfolder-B/f.html being redirected to http://www.domain.com/subfolder-Y/f.html? All on the same domain. in reality we are talking hundreds of sub folders and thousands of files so we don't want to have to reference every file individually in the htaccess. Thanks

    | aactive
    0
  • inhouseninja


    For a conference page marketing built the meta tag didn't have correct year and date of the conference. I updated and used webmaster tools submit to index to try and get it updated in google search quickly but meta tag has not updated. Are there other avenues to get this corrected?

    | inhouseninja
    0
  • sxsoule


    We have 150,000 410 server errors. Many of them should be redirected to an existing url. This is a result of a complete website redesign, including new navigation and new web platform. I believe IT may have inadvertently marked many 404s as 410s. Can I fix this or is a 410 error permanent? Thank you for your help.

    | sxsoule
    0
  • FDFPres


    Hi Mozzers, I have a UK based ecommerce site, that sells only to the UK.  Over the last month Google has started ranking my site on foreign flavours of Google, so I keep getting traffic coming to my site from Europe, America and the far east that we could never sell to, and as a result bounce is going up and engagement is going down. They are definitely coming to the site from google searches that relate to my product type, but in regions I do not service. Is there a way to stop google doing this?  I have the target set to UK in WMT, but is there anything else I can do?  I worried about my UK ranking being damaged by an increasing overall bounce rate. Thanks

    | FDFPres
    0
  • theLotter


    For complicated internal reasons (which I swear have validity) we are starting websites that will then disallow from Google for ~1 year. Is there any value in purchasing "premium" domains with SEO juice or will we lose the value in the time we are hiding the website from Google?

    | theLotter
    0
  • ClaireH-184886


    Hi, i am having problems optimizing my home page for the words, lifestyle magazine, online magazine and lifestyle news. my site is here www.in2town.co.uk I am just wondering if i have to much content on the page for google to understand that it is a lifestyle magazine. I am wondering if i should just have the links on the page and no introduction to the articles which i have seen here with a site http://www.femalefirst.co.uk and i am wondering how sites like this are ranking better than ours when they have hardly any content on their home page http://www.nelifestyle.co.uk/
    http://www.lifestyle.org/
    http://www.internationallifestylemagazine.com/ any advice would be most welcome

    | ClaireH-184886
    0
  • Robdob2013


    Hi, Its been 12 days since google revoked the manual link penalty they had one me, I'm still ranking 335 for my domain keyword,  there has been no movement yet..  Googlebot spiders my site daily, and I have also tried resubmitting the page from within GWT, Fetch Web Page.. How long do you think it should be before I see some movement...?  or should I file another reconsideration request just incase they forgot to remove the penalty and just thought they did.. Thanks,

    | Robdob2013
    0
  • Studio33


    Hi, We are new to SEO and have some meta Q's Should Meta descriptions and meta keywords be different on every page? Is it bad to have the same meta data repeated on the site? If it has to be different does it have to be totally different per page of just slightly different? Should the description contain keywords is there an advantage to that? Thanks Andrew

    | Studio33
    0
  • littlesthobo


    I need to migrate a wordpress site from domainname.com to domainname.co.uk. If I just put a 301 on every page on the .com will that cover it? Would it make sense to go and change all the backlinks/profile links to the new .co.uk site or doesn't it matter if you have a 301 redirect on it? Thanks

    | littlesthobo
    0
  • ClaireH-184886


    Hi, i am looking for some live websites that use google adsense who have changed their layout since the panda update If anyone can please point me in the right direction so i can see good examples of how sites have now changed their google adsense layout so we can learn from this, then that would be great regards

    | ClaireH-184886
    0
  • RoxBrock


    My SEO Moz crawl is showing duplicate content on my site. What is showing up are two articles I submitted to Submit your article (article submission service). I put their code in to my pages i.e. " <noscript><b>This article will only display in JavaScript enabled browsers.</b></noscript> " So do I need to delete these blog posts since they are showing up as dup content? I am having a difficult time understanding rel=cannonical. Isn't this for dup content on within one site? So I could not use rel="cannonical" in this instance? What is the best way to feature an article or press release written for another site, but that you want your clients to see? Rewritting seem ridiculous for a small business like ours. Can we just present the link? Thank you.

    | RoxBrock
    0
  • indieshuffle


    Mystery of the day! Back on December 28th, there was a 404 on the sitemap for my website. This lasted 2 days before I noticed and fixed.  Since then, Google has not indexed my content. However, the majority of content prior to that date still shows up in the index. The website is http://www.indieshuffle.com/. Clues: Google reports no current issues in Webmaster tools Two reconsideration requests have returned "no manual action taken" When new posts are detected as "submitted" in the sitemap, they take 2-3 days to "index" Once "indexed," they cannot be found in search results unless I include url:indieshuffle.com The sitelinks that used to pop up under a basic search for "Indie Shuffle" are now gone I am using Yoast's SEO tool for Wordpress (and have been for years) Before December 28th, I was doing 90k impressions / 4.5k clicks After December 28th, I'm now doing 8k impressions / 1.3k clicks Ultimately, I'm at a loss for a possible explanation. Running an SEOMoz audit comes up with warnings about rel=canonical and a few broken links (which I've fixed in reaction to the report). I know these things often correct themselves, but two months have passed now, and it continues to get progressively worse. Thanks, Jason

    | indieshuffle
    0
  • PrizeWize


    Hey Guys, Finally got an answer i was looking for about 301's and link juice (pagerank) loss. Matt Cutts posted the following video on Youtube yesterday confirming there is no linkjuice (pagerank) loss from a 301 redirect. Check out Matt Cutts video and discuss the concequences and tactics here 🙂 http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Filv4pP-1nw watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Filv4pP-1nw

    | PrizeWize
    1
  • DoMiSoL


    Hello! I have a problem of duplicate title on 59 pages in Worpress. I Guess it happened after a recent WP update, because, suddenly, I got a peak of 59 from zero in a day. The SeoMoz crawl report states that there are 59 duplicate title. As you may see in the picture those are all media pages, whose title is written really badly with the formula postname/filename/blogTitle, ending up with trunkated, too long, title tags, that result in duplicate page title. How can I simply hide these mediapages or sculpting the title tag the way I want? I am using all-in-one-seo WP plugin, which doesn't seem to provide a solution. Thank you all! DoMiSol Rossini SOwZg5C.jpg

    | DoMiSoL
    0

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