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Category: Technical SEO

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

  • jhinchcliffe


    Question, I don't want Google to catch my PPC landing pages, but I'm wondering if I make the page no-follow, no-index will it still crawl my landing page for quality score? Just to clarify I do want it to crawl the landing page to boost my quality score on PPC, but I do not want it to index it for SEO. Thanks 🙂

    | jhinchcliffe
    0
  • jogo


    Hello, Our website wingmancondoms.com (a new condom brand) is not ranking in Google on the keywords "wingman condom", and I don't know why. In Yahoo and Bing everything is allright. I saw on this forum that it is maybe best to change my language URL's to wingmancondoms.com/nl /de and /fr instead of a direct URL like http://www.wingmancondoms.com/wingman-kondome (german translation). But is this our problem or are there more problems. Google is indexing our page well, no errors etc. Any other possibilities?

    | jogo
    0
  • edwardlewis


    Has anyone noticed any increases in the length of time it takes for WP posts to get indexed by Google? I have a website with the following: domain.com - CMS with lots of pages/content blog.domain.com - subdomain for the blog using WP It's odd.. the pages on the main site are indexed almost immediately. The posts on the blog are taking between 2-5 days. The blog posts are all unique content, here's an example of a recent one: blog.looksfishy.co.uk/2013/three-rivers-angling/

    | edwardlewis
    0
  • Chris__Chris


    Hi, I have been looking at the on page section and the grading. And I have noticed on nearly all of my pages an error. No More Than One Canonical URL Tag Moderate fix <dl> <dt>Number of Canonical tags</dt> <dd>2</dd> <dt>Explanation</dt> <dd>The canonical URL tag is meant to be employed only a single time on an individual URL (much like the title element or meta description). To ensure the search engines properly parse the canonical source, employ only a single version of this tag.</dd> <dt>Recommendation</dt> <dd>Remove all but a single canonical URL tag</dd> </dl> <a class="more expanded">Minimize</a> Please how do I make sure these canonicals are working properly, My rankings are getting worst fro long tail and short tail keywords. I am not even ranking for the main keywords "Probate" at all now! Our site is probate, we sell probate, we talk aout probate and now we are out of the top 200??? http://www.finalduties.co.uk Kind Regards Elissa HAyes

    | Chris__Chris
    0
  • ShawnHerrick


    This is really two questions in one. 1. If we put a video on YouTube and on our site via Wistia, how would that affect our rankings/authority/credibility? Would we get punished for duplicate video content? 2. If we put a Wistia hosted video on our website twice, on two different pages, we would get hit for having duplicate content? Any other suggestions regarding hosting on Wistia and YouTube versus just Wistia for product videos would be much appreciated. Thank you!

    | ShawnHerrick
    1
  • beck398


    Hi, Ive only just joined SEO moz and after they crawled my site they came up with 3600  crawl errors mostly being duplicate content and duplicate urls. After researching  this it soon became clear it was due to on page pagination and after speaking with Abe from SEO mozhe advised me to take action by getting our developers to implement rel=”next” & rel=”prev” to review. soon after our developers implemented this code ( I have no understanding of this what so ever) 90% of my keywords I had been ranking for in the top 10 have dropped out the top 50! Can anyone explain this or help me with this? Thanks Andy

    | beck398
    0
  • Cocoonfxmedia


    Hi I have just released a post on my blog and I wanted to check my primary keyword for the post to make sure the page scores well. However when I did the page report it showed the Canonical Rel tag was incorrect. example of link the blog is http://www.example.com/Blog/post-comment/ The Canonical tag is below What am I doing wrong, as it looks correct to me?

    | Cocoonfxmedia
    0
  • Dan-Lawrence


    Hi I have a client who wants to re-brand their shopify clothing store under new domain name. Whilst still a clothing store its going to have different department structure and product pages and will hence be a different store/site. Is there anyway to pass any of the history/authority of existing site to the new one such as 301 redirecting the top level pages of existing site to nearest equivalent pages of new site etc or best to just redirect the old site domain to the new ? Cheers Dan

    | Dan-Lawrence
    0
  • catherine-279388


    Hello Mozers Can anybody help me.  It's a bit OCD, but, I really want to find the internal links within a clients site that are generating duplicate urls. I did start looking page by page using search, but got a bit stir crazy! I'm sure one of you smart SEO's will have a simple, clever solution:) Thanks Catherine

    | catherine-279388
    0
  • ciznerguy


    hello www.mysite.com/blog is ranked higher than www,mysite.com. i am trying to find the reason for the blog to rank higher which is not my goal. the blog reached the second page and the main domain is no where to be found. is there anything on Wordpress setup that may cause this? thanks

    | ciznerguy
    0
  • eventurerob


    I do not think I have a problem here, but a second opinion would be welcomed... I have a site which has a the rel=canonical tag with the trailing slash displayed. ie www.example.com/ The sitemap has it without the trailing slash. www.example.com Google has it's cached copy with the trailing slash but the browser displays it without. I want to say it's perfectly fine (for the home page) as I tend to think they are treated (with/without trailing slashes) as the same canonical URL.

    | eventurerob
    0
  • Santaur


    In OSE, it is reporting that i don't have any internal links to my homepage. In the header on every page is my logo in the top left hand corner which links back to my homepage. Shouldn't this mean then that every page should link to the home page? Similarly, internal pages which link from my main nav aren't showing up as having any internal links in OSE. Any ideas?

    | Santaur
    0
  • ChrisHolgate


    Hi,
    We're about to start integrating video content on our eCommerece site in order to bolster the quantity and diversity of useful content that each page presents a potential customer.  We’re talking product reviews, information relating to the differences between different products and company information.  From an SEO perspective it has been suggested that Google will like this however I have a question regarding the actual method of integration. Usually I would just insert some embed code linking to the correct video on our YouTube channel however I’m really conscious that a search engine will just see the embed code, notice the page loads slightly slower and not really gain anything useful from the video file. I’m assuming that this isn’t the case but I have several questions: -          Would you host on YouTube and simply insert the embed code in to the page.  Would any alternative site (or even self-hosted) be preferable? -          Should I be padding out either side of the embed code with a description of the video and an annotation on OUR site? -          Does Google actually look at the link and ascertain the relevance of the video file to the actual page?   If it does this does it gain anything useful that could help on-page SEO? These are probably all pretty basic questions for which I do apologise but I want to make sure that before spending a sizable amount of time on this that we start off with a correct integration! Many thanks

    | ChrisHolgate
    0
  • Collie


    Roger is reporting duplicate page content for my domain name and www.mydomain name/index.html. Example: www.just-insulation.com
    www.just-insulation.com/index.html What am I doing wrongly, please?

    | Collie
    0
  • Prime85


    Good Morning... I am trying to clean up my e-commerce site and i created a lot of new categories for my parts... I've made the old category pages (which have had their content removed) "hidden" to anyone who visits the site and starts browsing.  The only way you could get to those "hidden" pages is either by knowing the URLS that I used to use or if for some reason one of them is spidering in Google. Since I'm trying to clean up the site and get rid of any duplicate content issues, would i be better served by adding those "hidden" pages that don't have much or any content to the Robots.txt file or should i just De-activate them so now even if you type the old URL you will get a 404 page... In this case, are 404 pages bad?  You're typically not going to find those pages in the SERPS so the only way you'd land on these 404 pages is to know the old url i was using that has been disabled. Please let me know if you guys think i should be 404'ing them or adding them to Robots.txt Thanks

    | Prime85
    0
  • te_c


    Hi! It is easy to know if somebody is spam linking your website, looking i.e., looking at open site explorer to analyse the links profile. But, is it possible to know if a competitor of mine is redirecting a bad domain to main with a 301 redirect, thus transfering any bad SEO reputation to me? Best Regards, Daniel

    | te_c
    0
  • callmeed


    When I do a search for Scott Gable (just his name) google comes up like this (without the sitelinks): http://chrle.us/MGer When I add photography to the search query it comes up like this (with the sitelinks structured below) http://chrle.us/MHXy is his name that common that the full sitelinks wouldn't appear below it on the scott gable search? Would 301 redirecting scottgablephotography.com to scottgable.com help fix this?

    | callmeed
    0
  • onlinemarketersdotca


    My crawl report shows that there are 22 Meta Tag Descriptions missing.  I double checked on Google and it shows the meta descriptions just fine.  What's wrong with the report or am I missing something?

    | onlinemarketersdotca
    0
  • puremobile


    My URL is: pure mobile . ca when searching on google for "puremobile note 2 defender" the search results are coming up with the incorrect title pages of my search results - for some reason all the search results are coming up with "unlocked cell phone" at the end of the title. but on the android and on my desktop - they show the correct title of my pages. we used to deal with unlocked cell phone ( over a year ago) - and all meta tags and title tags have been fully updated. how can i let google know to update these results.

    | puremobile
    0
  • MattieMac


    Just saw a huge update on the Serps for "SEO Company" and  "Seo Firm " and this site has tons of big Google no's no's going to it. www.seospecialists.co it has links coming from Porn and Gambling sites. It is heavily over optimized for both keywords. I won't cry the sky is falling[SEO is broke] but I am curious to know why Google thinks they are worthy to rank that high.

    | MattieMac
    0
  • ChrisTalin


    Hi, I was hoping for some concise answers on lazy loading and seo. From the user standpoint, lazy loading images in our galleries makes the most sense by reducing load times without needing to paginate our content onto multiple page loads (i.e. all our content on one page, but loading as needed). example gallery: http://roadcyclinguk.com/news/gear-news/pro-bikes-franco-pellizottis-bianchi-sempre-pro.html The flip side is that this ends up with our images not getting fetched properly and I was wondering what the options are around this. It has been suggested that we add a <noscript>tag against the images, but I wanted to check that this will get read properly by the googlebots.</p> <p>Thanks all!</p></noscript>

    | ChrisTalin
    0
  • b4004040


    We're about to change web hosting providers and I'm wondering whether there's an "optimal" way to do this without losing any SEO value. Is it as simple as changing hosts without SEO in mind - point the domain to the new host?

    | b4004040
    0
  • SEO-Novice


    I have an odd question concerning SERP rankings on Google along with PageRank and Google Trust. I have a website created in HTML with a WP blog created in a sub-directory. I am finding that the blog is getting relatively good rankings yet it seems the root domain is not getting any of the rank or trust passed onto it as it consistently is outranked by the blog. In fact, for a few of our targeted keywords the root domain does not even show up at all, yet the blog does. Our blog is #2 in Google SERPs, a top Google Place ranking, a Youtube video in the top 10 and a Google Ad place somewhere in the mix of first page ads.  The root domain is nowhere to be found. Is there something I need to correct either on the site, in Google Webmaster or in WP Settings that I am not aware that is pushing all the Google Rank and Trust to the blog instead of the other way around? I considered changing the WP Site URL to the root domain thinking it will pass more SEO mojo to the root. But I don't think this is the way to go. I am kind of at a loss, any help is appreciated.

    | SEO-Novice
    0
  • Prime85


    I have a magento site and would like to do a 301 redirect from page A  to page B. Page B was created after Page A but contains the same products. I want page A to be replaced in the search engines with page B while carrying the link juice from page A. Is this possible?  Am I better off just blocking page A through the robots .txt file? Thanks

    | Prime85
    0
  • greenhornet77


    So apparently we have some sites that are just duplicates of our original main site but aiming at different markets/cities. They have completely different urls but are the same content as our main site with different market/city changed. How do I know for sure which ones are indexed. I enter the url into Google and its not there. Even if I put in " around " it. Is there another way to query google for my site? Is there a website that will tell you which ones are indexed? This is probably a dumb question.

    | greenhornet77
    0
  • Prime85


    Hello, I was hoping to get some help or tips on how to best control the canonical tag on a Magento based website. When you go into the Magento admin and enable the option to use the canonical tag on pages, all that does is input the canonical tag to the exact page just with the http:// in the url. My goal is to use the canonical tag on specific pages and point it to other pages, not just the same page with an http:// For example, right now for page: example.com/question/baseball the canonical tag is pointing to http://example.com/question/baseball What i want is to be able to do is take: example.com/question/baseball and have the canonical tag point to example.com/question/baseballbats Is this possible?  Does what I'm saying make sense? Please let me know what you all think.... Thanks!

    | Prime85
    0
  • JCunningham


    A client of ours owns several domain names that are keyword similar to the domain they actually use to run their site. They are asking us if we should 301 redirect all of these websites to the domain they use. However, I don't want this to work against them and their site get penalized later for this.  I have heard buying out competitors and redirecting their domain to yours is frowned upon and penalized when you get caught (they did not do this).  We are also wondering if there is a limit as to how many domains you can 301 redirect and what type (keyword similar, misspellings, .net's, etc.) and if you are penalized after too many (i.e. >50). All of the domains in question are keyword/brand name similar only and do not exist as actual websites. We just want to do the right thing. Thank you for your help.

    | JCunningham
    0
  • cschwartzel


    What is really the difference between an noindex and nofollow and why/when do you want to use them? Built my first wordpress site and the blog "posts" that make up my home page confuse me....as far as passing link juice to my home url...not sure what I am asking here! How do I use nofollow/noindex or is the issue I should be looking at is 301/canonical. Or neither?

    | cschwartzel
    0
  • Chris__Chris


    Can some one please answer a question for me, I have a crawl error stating that I have [#### Rel Canonical 326](http://pro.seomoz.org/campaigns/243472/issues/18) Can you please advise me on how serious these Errors are? I was told by one person not to worry but It seems far to many to me. thanks

    | Chris__Chris
    0
  • MyFairyTaleBooks


    Hi Guys, I have been struggling with this one for quite some time. I am no SEO expert like many of you, rather just a small business owner trying to do the right thing, so forgive me if I say something that makes no sense 🙂 I am moving our eCommerce store from one platform to another, in the process the store is getting a massive face lift. The part I am struggling with is whether I should keep my existing URL structure in place or use 301 redirects to create a cleaner looking URLs. Currently the URLs are a little long and I would love to move to a /category/product_name type format. Of course the goal is not to lose ranking in the process, I rank pretty well for several competitive phrases and do not want to create a negative impact. How would you guys handle this? Thanks, Dinesh

    | MyFairyTaleBooks
    0
  • jj3434


    Hi Is it beneficial to participate on forums in our market place to help become an authority in Googles eyes? I assume even if we don't get links it still  useful in terms of co-citation... Thanks

    | jj3434
    0
  • anishtapan


    I am redirecting my domain, based on Geo Location. For example : if someone browse from india www.example.com they will redirect to www.example.in Does redirecting domain on Geo based will cause SEO or Any kind of duplicate content issue, as i am using same content on both TLDs.

    | anishtapan
    0
  • MagicianUK


    Hi, I have a website for my business which does nicely in the rankings. I have recently created a new separate website to target a specific niche area and have put this under a different URL.  I'm going for a whole different look, feel, style and layout here so didn't want to just add a new page to my existing site. The content between the new and existing sites is 95% different, although my contact details (phone, email, address, etc) and some images/logos are the same.  WIll Google mind this at all?  Thanks!

    | MagicianUK
    0
  • SEI


    My development team recently discovered an issue with 301 redirects caching in IE9. They did some research and found the situation was very complicated so their solution was to use 302s and no longer use 301s.  As a temporary solution to a few URLs I was okay with this, but we have a site redesign launching in a few months and I am quite worried if we have to do all of our redirects as 302s. Has anyone else had this issue with IE9 and 301s. I could use any advice on how to overcome this issue. Thanks!

    | SEI
    0
  • Aggie


    Hoping someone can help.  I've tried the Google forum which is it's usual vacuous hole of no help. We recently upgraded our CMS which now includes automated sitemaps (not sure if this impacts news sitemaps, though).  Anyway, after rollout, we're no longer getting any traffic from Google News. Sequence of Events: 1. Dec. 13 launch 2. Google news referral traffic stopped 3. IT tried to 'fix' and now we're getting the elusive 'publication name' message The publication name specified in your Sitemap does not match the publication name we have for your site in our database. Please check that the publication name in your Sitemap exactly matches the publication name displayed for your articles in Google News. 4. Retested sitemap When I retest the news sitemap, it returns 0 errors. When I do a site:mnn.com (our website) on the Google New Homepage, new content is showing up in SERP Yet, still no google news referral traffic. Our news sitemap is www.mnn.com/googlenews.xml Can someone help?  We're a news site, and can't afford to lose this traffic.  Would love an early Christmas present. Thanks!! Lisa

    | Aggie
    0
  • JagexSEO


    Hi, I am investigating forum solutions. I would be interested in hearing people's thoughts / experience on what criteria and requirements to consider purely from an SEO perspective when looking at a forum solution.

    | JagexSEO
    0
  • fifthlayer


    We are moving our website from http://mysyncpad.com to http://syncpadapp.com The old site ranks pretty well for some specific keywords, will a 301 allow the new site to rank as well or will it be penalized by good for the transfer?

    | fifthlayer
    0
  • digital.moretogether.com


    Hi, I recently noticed that our organic traffic has started to drop and maybe coincidently our adwords traffic has increased. I was asked to investigate the drop. I know that from the google update that unnatural backlinks would be penalized so I thought it might be the backlinks from a site that we advertise on because of the sheer number we have required from them in the last month. Would you think that would be the cause? if not, what could it be? and if it is, how do I go about correcting it as fast as possible? Any Help with this would be greatly appreciated. Many Thanks, Colin

    | digital.moretogether.com
    0
  • highwayfive


    Anyone else had any sudden drops in rankings this week? Is there an update going on? One of my primary keywords has dropped from 6th to 49th in the google.co.uk search results. Not in webmaster tools to flag an issue. I have downloaded the links from webmaster and it does look if some content has been scraped and then linked back to us from a large number of sites that we have never sort links from. I have upload the google disavow link tool. Only one keyword appears to be effected not all of them? Any ideas? Thanks

    | highwayfive
    0
  • VinceWicks


    Hey guys, I'm on a Mac and that's why I can't use the usual PC software for checking if my links have been indexed. Here's the deal. I ordered some guest posts. The guest poster did it for me and put my back links. Now, I want to quickly check which pages (with my backlinks) have been indexed. I have a lot of guest posts. So, I need something  that can check if those pages have been indexed by Google. I need an online tool or something that will work for my Mac. Help. 🙂

    | VinceWicks
    0
  • greenhornet77


    Hi there, I have one client (atlantawidgets.com) who has a main site. But also has duplicate sites with different urls targeting specific geo areas. I.e.  (widgetmakersinmarietta.com) Would it be best to go ahead and create a static home page at these add'l sites and make the rest of the site be nonindexed? Or should I go in and allow more pages to be indexed and change the content? If so how many, 3, 5, 8? I don't have tons of time at this point. 3)If I change content within the duplicate sites, what % do I need to change. Does switching the order of the sentences of the content count? Or does it need to be 100%fresh? Thanks everyone.

    | greenhornet77
    0
  • Juandbbam


    Hello, I have a client with a Wordpress network of blogs, each blog is owned by a different blogger. Many of them were migrated time ago from Blogger. I have seen that the way used to redirect them is a meta refresh, so no authority is being passed. I cannot find any reliable way of making a 301 from Blogger, There are some plugins, but I'm afraid of using them. Any of you have experience with this situation please? I have even thought about placing a global rel canonical before the meta refresh, but I think that here the problem is the meta refresh itself.... Thank you in advance

    | Juandbbam
    0
  • ngupta1


    I have been searching around but unable to gather information as to how we can control or list  top pages of a website on Google's first page , i.e. if we type seomoz in google , we can see the main listing with 6 subdomain listings , which link to Blog , Seo tool , Beginner Seo guide , Learn Seo , Pricing & Plans and login My question is can we control these listings i.e. what to display and what not , and if yes how can we make this type of visibility on first page , by using html or xml sitemaps or theirs something mostly websites are missing. Cause this type of data is coming up for very less websites and mostly websites are with single urls. c43Ki.jpg

    | ngupta1
    0
  • Charlessipe


    I've heard that having rel=author enabled on your pages can be great for increasing click through rate but you should not use it on every page on your site. What are the pros and cons of using rel=author on product pages? Do you use rel=author on your product pages or just on your blog articles?

    | Charlessipe
    1
  • BonsaiMediaGroup


    There is a term for how data or content is structured and for the life of me I can't figure it out. The following is the best I know of how to explain it: magnolia is of Seattle. Seattle is of Washington. Washington is of the US. US is of North America. North America is of Earth. etc etc etc etc. Any help is much appreciated. I'm trying to use the term to communicate It's application to SEO in that Google analyze how information is structured to understand the breadth and depth of your sites content...

    | BonsaiMediaGroup
    0
  • Cary_PCC


    We have two subdomains that have been verified in Google Webmaster Tools. These subdomains were used by 3rd parties which we no longer have an affiliation with (the subdomains no longer serve a purpose). We have been receiving an error message from Google: "Googlebot can't access your site. Over the last 24 hours, Googlebot encountered 1 errors while attempting to retrieve DNS information for your site. The overall error rate for DNS queries for your site is 100.00%".  I originally investigated using Webmaster Tools' URL Removal Tool to remove the subdomain, but there are no indexed pages. Is this a case of simply 'deleting' the site from the Manage Site tab in the Webmaster Tools interface?

    | Cary_PCC
    0
  • MagicDude4Eva


    Some time back we implemented the Google recommendation for pagination (the rel="next/prev"). GWMT now reports 17K pages with duplicate title-tags (we have about 1,1m products on our site and about 50m pages indexed in Google) As an example we have properties listed in various states and the category title would be "Properties for Sale in [state-name]". A paginated search page or browsing a category (see also http://searchengineland.com/implementing-pagination-attributes-correctly-for-google-114970) would then include the following: The title for each page is the same - so to avoid the duplicate title-tags issue, I would think one would have the following options: Ignore what Google says Change the canonical to http://www.site.com/property/state.html (which would then only show the first XX results) Append a page number to the title "Properties for Sale in [state-name] | Page XX" Have all paginated pages use noindex,follow - this would then result in no category page being indexed Would you have the canonical point to the individual paginated page or the base page?

    | MagicDude4Eva
    2
  • designquotes


    If we are to change our branding and set up a new domain name to match that branding, we will need to set up redirects for all URLs. The new website would exactly match the old. Using HTACCESS we can redirect all URLs fairly easily. Will this exercise cause use to lose authority?

    | designquotes
    0
  • adelemaree


    My website is showing with errors due to duplicate titles, these errors add up to over 150 errors. The problem is a lot of my products are similar, just in different lengths, colors etc. For example
    http://www.ugg.org.au/en/classic-candy-short-australia-ugg-boots/48-classic-candy-short-australia-ugg-boots-blue.html
    http://www.ugg.org.au/en/classic-candy-button-short-australia-ugg-boots/31-classic-candy-button-short-chocolate.html
    http://www.ugg.org.au/en/classic-candy-button-short-australia-ugg-boots/28-classic-candy-button-short-black.html How can I avoid this error without having to merge all my products and colors into one page?  As that would make my catalogue look too small! Thanks in advance

    | adelemaree
    0
  • jcherland


    I run a website that tracks entertainment for the entire state of South Dakota.  While I've made some fantastic strides in gaining traffic, I feel lost on how to manage all those entries in an SEO friendly manner.  I have a TON of errors showing on my crawl diagnostics and I just don't know what to do.  The nature of the website is such that there are going to be duplications all over the place.  I know that I can help some of this by getting my canonical links setup properly (that's coming in my next version of the site's theme), but what else should I do to make those event listings friendly for the SE's?? http://www.entertainsd.com

    | jcherland
    0

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