Category: Technical SEO
Discuss site health, structure, and other technical SEO strategies.
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How do you fix soft 404 errors?
I'm getting soft 404 errors for a gallery on my site: http://chrle.us/MBKs yet when I visit the url: http://www.chrisboar.com/html/galleries/114/portfolio/weddings-1/0 the image/url is there. Not sure how to fix this. note we do redirect the site to the flash site and only use those URLs for SEO purposes. Maybe that is what is causing it. thanks
| callmeed0 -
Do canonical tags pass all of the link juice onto the URL they point to?
I have an ecommerce website where the category pages have various sorting and paging options which add a suffix to the URLs. My site is setup so the root category URL, domain.com/category-name, has a canonical tag pointing to domain.com/category-name/page1/price however all links, both interner & external, point to the former (i.e. domain.com/category-name). I would like to know whether all of the link juice is being passed onto the canonical tag URL? Otherwise should I change the canonical tag to point the other way? Thanks!
| tjhossy0 -
How to change noindex to index?
Hey, I've recently upgraded to a pro SEOmoz account and have realised i have 14574 issues to do with 'blocked by meta-robot' and that 'This page is being kept out of the search engine indexes by the meta tag , which may have a value of "noindex", keeping this page out of the index.' How can i change this so my pages get indexed? I read somewhere that i need to change my privacy settings but that thread was 3 years old and now the WP Dashboard has updated.. Please let me know Many thanks, Jamie P.s Im using WordPress 3.5 And i have the XML sitemap plugin And i have no idea where to look for this robots.txt file..
| markgreggs0 -
We have duplicate page titles on the footer menu section of our site. Is this considered spammy?
When our new site was in development stages our digital agency convinced me that we should have duplicate menu links in the footer section of the site. The general justification being that the menu links are key word relevant. I have received opposing opinion from SEO advisers indicating that these duplicate menu links could be considered 'spammy'. I would appreciate some views on this please
| saints0 -
Is it a good idea to use the rel canonical tag to refer to the original source?
Sometimes we place our blog post also on a external site. In this case this post is duplicated. Via the post we link to the original source but is it also possible to use the rel canonical tag on the external site? For example: The original blogpost is published on http://www.original.com/post The same blogpost is published on http:///www.duplicate.com/post. In this case is it wise to put a rel canonical on http://www.duplicate.com/post like this: ? What do you think? Thanks for help! Robert
| Searchresult0 -
Title Tags & Url Structure
So I'm working on a website for a client in the Tourism Industry. We've got a comprehensive list of museums & other attractions in a number of cities that have to go online. And we have to come up with the correct url structure, title tags and obviously content. My current line of thought was to work the urls in the following way. http://domain.com/type-of-attraction/city/name-of-attraction/ This is mainly because we think that the type of attraction is far more important then the city (SEO wise) as the country as a whole receives more searches, however we require a city in the url to make it unique because some attractions across cities happen to share names and we don't want to have the names of attractions littered with city names. However for title-tags I wanted to go the other way around, again due to the attraction type being more important then the city. Name of Attraction - Type of Attraction - City - Brand Name or Name of Attraction - Type of Attraction in City - Brand Name I am quite confident in working it this way; however I would appreciate if I receive some feedback on this structure, you think its good or you would make any suggestions / alterations. One last thing, There's the possibility of having many urls ending up with the same city names (For each type of attraction) I would think that just providing a list of links & duplicate text is not enough; would you suggest a canonical pointing to a link containing just information on the city? and using the other pages for user-navigation only? or should i set variables in the text which are replaced by the types of attraction so that the text looks different for each one?
| jonmifsud0 -
Large amounts of ranking data
Hello all, I am currently conducting some keyword. I need to check a websites rankings for around 1000 keywords. I currently use chrome on a Mac. This presents a problem, because all of the APIs I've seen are for excel on windows. Does anyone have any ideas of how to do this on a Mac & Chrome? Thanks, Chris
| chris.kent0 -
Sitel inks suddenly vanished in google search
Hello, My site is designzzz.com if you will search in google the term : designzzz it use to return sitelinks below , but now it isn't, what could be the reason ? cheers
| wickedsunny10 -
Caching Problem !
Hi Webmasters, I have been getting a problem and that is caching problem. I have a SEO blog glanceseo.com and now i am facing caching problem. It takes something 2 months for caching. I want to solve it, please suggest me something... Thanks in advance
| shubhamtiwari0 -
My 404 page shows in the report as an error.
How can i make my actual 404 page not show up as a 404 error in the report?
| LindseyNewman0 -
Duplicate Content Issue
SEOMOZ is giving me a number of duplicate content warnings related to pages that have an email a friend and/or email when back in stock versions of a page. I thought I had those blocked via my robots.txt file which contains the following... Disallow: /EmailaFriend.asp Disallow: /Email_Me_When_Back_In_Stock.asp I had thought that the robot.txt file would solve this issue. Anyone have any ideas?
| WaterSkis.com0 -
Showing duplicate content when I have canonical url set, why?
Just inspecting my sites report and I see that I have a lot of duplicate content issues, not sure why these two pages here http://www.thecheapplace.com/wholesale-products/Are-you-into-casual-sex-patch http://www.thecheapplace.com/wholesale-products/small-wholesale-patches-1/Are-you-into-casual-sex-patch are showing as duplicate content when both pages have a clearly defined canonical url of http://www.thecheapplace.com/Are-you-into-casual-sex-patch Any answer would be appreciated, thank you
| erhansimavi0 -
Where a Blog should be located?
Hello Guys, My question is, in a Company where do a Blog should be located? In a subdomain? a subfolder? a in a independent domain? Tks in advance! Regards,
| PedroM0 -
Can you help me understand leveraging semantic markup
Hi, i am trying to understand about leveraging semantic markup but even though i have read the page on the link, i am still not sure of what it means and how i can use it in my site www.in2town.co.uk which has been built using joomla If anyone can help me understand then that would be amazing and help me understand how it would benefit my site.
| ClaireH-1848860 -
Error: Missing Meta Description Tag on pages I can't find in order to correct
This seems silly, but I have errors on blog URLs in our WordPress site that I don't know how to access because they are not in our Dashboard. We are using All in One SEO. The errors are for blog archive dates, authors and just simply 'blog'. Here are samples: http://www.fateyes.com/2012/10/
| gfiedel
http://www.fateyes.com/author/gina-fiedel/
http://www.fateyes.com/blog/ Does anyone know how to input descriptions for pages like these?
Thanks!!0 -
Is a shorter subdomain better?
For example, consider the two subdomains below: learn.bluelinkerp.com learnmore.bluelinkerp.com Would there likely be an appreciable difference between the two based on length alone? Also, would it be better to use a term that relates to our product in general such as "software.bluelinkerp.com"? Thanks!
| BlueLinkERP0 -
Do i have my robots.txt file set up properly
Hi, just doing some seo on my site and i am not sure if i have my robots file set correctly. i use joomla and my website is www.in2town.co.uk. here is my robots file, does this look correct to you User-agent: *
| ClaireH-184886
Disallow: /administrator/
Disallow: /cache/
Disallow: /components/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /installation/
Disallow: /language/
Disallow: /libraries/
Disallow: /media/
Disallow: /modules/
Disallow: /plugins/
Disallow: /templates/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /xmlrpc/ many thanks1 -
Is it something really obvious or is off-site link building all thats missing?
I'm trying to get a client ranked for the keyword Quaich and its like pulling teeth 😞 This keyword performs brilliantly for adwords but I've never got it ranked at all in googles SERPs. Last November I created this page: http://kiltmakers.co.uk/quaich Which ranks as A with seo-moz but still nothing. I'm still a newbie to SEO work but can someone point me in the right direction? Is it just the domain authority that the issue - should I switch my focus to link building off-site?
| sunscreem0 -
An expert opinion would be much appreciated.
Another story about a site that has been trashed by Penguin/Panda. My site's been around for 10 years. It's had ups and downs but right now it is WAY down. The site is in a competitive arena but I am targetting less competitive niches within and I can confirm these are much less competitive, quite specialised and only people with relevant experience can produce content of any value. (that's not saying people can't produce abundant garbage that ranks!) According to Google there are no manual spam actions but pages that once had top 5 positions are now nowhere to be found. Pages that contain links to these once popular pages are appearing in SERPS but not the pages themselves. Or at least I've not trawled below page 50..... I'm trimming away old pages and low content pages and I'm going to start cleaning up backlinks (already got rid of a few old sitewide links but things have just got worse!). It truly is as though ex-high ranking pages are having their heads held under the water but I don't know why and I can't understand why considerably lower quality pages are ranking but mine are not. I don't overoptimise and I design pages to contain helpful content and the service people receive is also good quality (I have testimonials!) What I need is just someone to take a look and help me understand why my site has been slammed and what steps I need to take. There is no doubt the site is being held back. I've read several articles on what to do to improve things and I am working on it but I would love an expert opinion. Can anybody offer some suggestions & what would you need from me...?
| cmarket0 -
How to verify a page-by-page level 301 redirect was done correctly?
Hello, I told some tech guys to do a page-by-page relevant 301 redirect (as talked about in Matt Cutts video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1lVPrYoBkA) when a company wanted to move to a new domain when their site was getting redesigned. I found out they did a 302 redirect on accident and had to fix that, so now I don't trust they did the page-by-page relevant redirect. I have a feeling they just redirected all of the pages on the old domain to the homepage of the new domain. How could I confirm this suspicion? I run the old domain through screaming frog and it only shows 1 URL - the homepage. Does that mean they took all of the pages on the old domain offline? Thanks!
| EvolveCreative0 -
Duplicate Content
Hi, we need some help on resolving this duplicate content issue,. We have redirected both domains to this magento website. I guess now Google considered this as duplicate content. Our client wants both domain name to go to the same magento store. What is the safe way of letting Google know these are same company? Or this is not ideal to do this? thanks
| solution.advisor0 -
Update index date
If I update the content of a page without changing the initial url and google crawls my new page, will the index date (that appears in the SERP) change to the latest update? In positive case how many change should I do to consider an update? tks
| fabrico230 -
Canonical Question
Can someone please help me with a question, I am learning about Canonical URls at the moment and have had some errors come up, it is saying ```![Priority 1](http://try.powermapper.com/Reports/89db420a-2cf2-46dc-bae4-543efbefc241/report/Report/p1.png)This page has multiple rel=canonical tags.Line 9 Best Practice[![](http://try.powermapper.com/Reports/89db420a-2cf2-46dc-bae4-543efbefc241/report/Report/dropbox.png)](http://try.powermapper.com/Reports/89db420a-2cf2-46dc-bae4-543efbefc241/report/res/2.view.htm#)![Help](http://try.powermapper.com/Reports/89db420a-2cf2-46dc-bae4-543efbefc241/report/Report/help.png)Search engine behavior is unpredictable when a page has multiple canonical tags. <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.finalduties.co.uk/" /><link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Final Duties – Low cost probate RSS Feed" href="http://www.finalduties.co.uk/feed/" /> <link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Final Duties – Low cost probate Atom Feed" href="http://www.finalduties.co.uk/feed/atom/" /><link rel="pingback" href="http://www.finalduties.co.uk/xmlrpc.php" />That canonical link to Feed? should that be there, I know the Plugin has done this but I am lost to what should be there, I have no duplicate pages as far as I am aware than needs a canonical URL ??Thanks ``` >
| Chris__Chris0 -
How to optimize for new subdomain when root domain has all link juice and built up authority?
We recently took control of a root domain for a business that was not doing e-commerce. They just had a single page business card website at the root domain. However, it had been around long enough to have built up some amount of domain authority and link juice. When we took over to enable the site with e-commerce, we redirected the root domain to point to a www subdomain where the store is now located. Now, in my seomoz campaign, i see that all the link juice and authority stats are in the root domain metrics, and the subdomain we are tracking has nothing. What is the best way for me to take advantage of all the built up authority for the root domain to help with the newly enabled ecommerce site at the subdomain? or am I basically starting from scratch since i have been reading that link juice does not flow as well from root domains to subdomains. thank you and happy new year to all!
| devinjy0 -
301 redirect of one site version to new domain
Hello all. I today have domain.com that has 10 language versions and the structure is by folders: domain.com/ru/
| Gregos
domain.com/pl/ etc. Soon I plan redesign,new CMS and I plan to register 9 new ccTLDs. My question is: Can I 301 redirect domain.com/ru/ to domain.ru without having some bad effect on domain.com? I mean,the main domain,com is not going to be affected by permanent redirect of one url to completly new domain right?0 -
Competitor in 70% of results?
I'm trying to rank in the UK for a keyword where one of the competitors takes up around 70% of the top 100 positions. How is that possible? Is this google really giving the most relevant results to searchers? I can't think that a user wants to be presented with the same site on nearly all of the top 10 pages?
| SamCUK0 -
How does this rank? - a page that is 301 redirected
How does a 301ed page rank in google? In google I searched for" ikea.ca" which is set up as a 301 redirect to www.ikea.com/ca/en and was surprised to see the url --> www.ikea.ca actually ranking. IKEA Canada <cite>ikea.ca/</cite>IKEA Featuring Scandinavian modern style furniture and accessories. Include storage options, lighting, decor products, kitchen appliances and beds. Bedroom - Kitchen - Living Room - IKEA North York
| Morris770 -
Client error 404 pages!
I have a number of 404 pages coming up which are left over in Google from the clients previous site. How do I get them out of Google please?
| PeterC-B0 -
WordPress - How to stop both http:// and https:// pages being indexed?
Just published a static page 2 days ago on WordPress site but noticed that Google has indexed both http:// and https:// url's. Usually I only get http:// indexed though. Could anyone please explain why this may have happened and how I can fix? Thanks!
| Clicksjim1 -
Number of links you should have on a taxonomy term??
According to SeoMoz, my taxonomy terms contain more than 100 links (links to articles in my case) and it tells me that I should reduce it. I have seen a video by Matt Cutts, the google software engineer, and in that video he said that Google's engine has dramatically improved ever since and 100 is not the limit anymore. What do you guys think is the best practice here? To clarify the subject even more: I want to learn this from link juice perspective, does it effect how link juice is distributed? Let's say I have 5 taxonomy terms and all of them have 200 articles and these 5 terms are listed on the home page of a PR7 website. In this case some of the PR will be passed to these 5 taxonomy terms. However, if I increase taxonomy terms to 10, then i will reduce links to 100, but the PR will be distributed even more. This means each taxonomy term will have even less PR value. Am I wrong? Any ideas?
| mertsevinc0 -
Google WMT continues reporting fixed 404s - why?
I work with a news site that had a heavy restructuring last spring. This involved removing many pages that were duplicates, tags, etc. Since then, we have taken very careful steps to remove all links coming into these deleted pages, but for some reason, WMT continues to report them. By last August, we had cleared over 10k 404s to our site, but this lasted only for about 2 months and they started coming back. The "linked from" gives no data, and other crawlers like seomoz aren't detecting any of these errors. The pages aren't in the sitemap and I've confirmed that they're not really being linked from from anywhere. Why do these pages keep coming back? Should I even bother removing them over and over again? Thanks -Juanita
| VoxxiVoxxi0 -
Multiple Domains pointing to one IP
Hi we have some issues with Multiple domains pointing to one IP. is this considered duplicate content by Google? If so, what is the best thing can we do to avoid this? thanks
| solution.advisor0 -
Do I need redirects for a .asp to a .htm?
We move to a new site and some of the pages were widgets.com/test.asp, do I need to redirect that to widgets.com/test.htm? It is the same url just the difference between .asp and .htm
| EcommerceSite0 -
Robots.txt file
How do i get Google to stop indexing my old pages and start indexing my new pages even months down the line? Do i need to install a Robots.txt file on each page?
| gimes0 -
Will Moving to a Different Country Hosting Affect my SEO?
Hello Mozzers, I have a website with the country specific TLD. It's very new (less than a month old) and already started ranking for the main target term (It's #5 as I write this). It's a somewhat exact match domain. Right now I am on shared hosting and the way in which the site is growing, I think I might need to move to a VPS soon. Right now, I pay extra and chose a shared hosting in my own country. But VPS in my country is very costly. I'd get twice the features if I go with a US hosting provider for the same price. If I move to a new VPS outside of my country, would it affect my rankings? What do you think? Thanks.
| jombay0 -
Best way to retain banklink values when moving site?
Hi all, I want to get some opinions on what the best practice is when transferring backlink values from an old site to a new one. On the old site, I currently have a product page and this particular product has multiple models all listed on the one singe page. However on the new site, every model of this particular product has its own page. These product model pages would have relatively similar content apart from several key details which differentiates the models. Firstly would you guys recommend this splitting of models of the same product to different pages? If so, my initial thought process is to 301 redirect the old product page to the new model page that is most popular, and adding rel canonical tags to the other model pages. Would you consider this best practice? Or are there better ways I can be doing this to retain backlink values without also getting penalised due to possible content duplication? Thanks! Jac - sent from my manager's account.
| RuchirP0 -
Registering expired domains
Hi there, I've found a good domain that is available for a new project. It has been expired for about 4 months or so. It has a couple of links, with the domain name as an anchor, nothing horrible. Will buying a domain like this be safe from an seo perspective? I'm guessing it would be treated the same as buying a new domain that has never been registered before, Would I be right? Peter
| PeterM220 -
Link rel next previous VS duplicate page title
Hello, I am running into a little problem that i would like to have a feedback on. I am running multiple wordpress blogs and Seo Moz pro is telling me that i have duplicate title tags on canadiansavers.ca vs http://www.canadiansavers.ca/page/2 I can dynamically add a page 2 to the title but I am correctly using the link rel: next and rel:previous Why is it seen as a duplicate title tag and should i add the page 2, page 3... in the meta title thanks
| pixweb0 -
Removel of duplicate contant
Do to the WordPress programming I'm having a lot of duplicates that I will remove soon. What is the best way to make a decision which ones to keep and which ones to remove?
| Joseph-Green-SEO0 -
2 websites 1 Google account?
quick question, I have set up my second website purely for seasonal stock so getting it online early ready for when the time is right. But i only have a single web master tools & ad words account, would there be any problem with the single accounts having the details for both websites? or would it be wise to have separate accounts for each site?
| GarethEJones0 -
Can you mark up a page using Schema.org and Facebook Open Graph?
Is it possible to use both Schema.org and Facebook Open Graph for structured data markup? On the Google Webmaster Central blog, they say, "you should avoid mixing the formats together on the same web page, as this can confuse our parsers." Source - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/06/introducing-schemaorg-search-engines.html
| SAMarketing1 -
SEOBook RankChecker Works at one location but not another
I use SEOBook's RankChecker to do spot checking of keywords for clients or for potential clients. I like the tool quite a bit, but I've noticed that it recently stopped working at our office (instead of rankings, I just get a series of dashes) but works fine from my home computer. I'm thinking that it may have to do with our company's firewall. Anyone have any thoughts?
| TopFloor0 -
Changing the anchor text of a big amount of links at once is bad for SEO?
Hi there, Our service at fotograf.de is a shopsystem for professional photographers. The customers can build their own website with our tool including an onlineshop to sell their pictures. We have a lot of links from our customers linking to our homepage. The links come from subdomains of our domain and from external domains. We are now thinking about changing the anchor text of half of the links (round about 300.000 links). Do we have to fear a penalization of Google for changing so many anchor texts at once? Do we get better rankings if we choose a more optimized anchor text or does this have no effect because most of the links are from subdomains (each customer has its own subdomain) of our domain? Thanks for answering! Sebastian
| Sebastian230 -
Does http://my.dudamobile.com/ Effect SEO
Hi, Hope everyone is enjoying the new year! I was wondering if converting your desk top website to a mobile one, example via http://my.dudamobile.com/, has any negative effects on SEO. Did it effect your site? Do you recommend doing it? Does it effect links? When people link to your desk top URL does that authority carry to the mobile, or would it be better if they link to the mobile (m.website.com) URL? Is http://my.dudamobile.com/ a good choice? Any feedback, as always, is greatly appreciated! Thanks Jimmy
| jimmy02250 -
Missing page titles
Does anyone know why my SeoMoz crawl reads my page titles differen't to what they truly are on my active site? I changed my pages titles and optimised them several months ago. Is my old page titles still been crawled rather than the new ones how do i fix this is?
| gimes0 -
Is it okay to use anchor text almost exclusively for inbound links?
We are not spammy - each link is earned through a long process of relationship building and targeted guest post writing. Because of this, we like each link to have anchor text and they don't point to the same page or have the same anchor text. Is this still something to be worried about? Do we still need to include plain URLs (wwww.example.com) for some of those links?
| BlueLinkERP0 -
Which factors are effect on Google index?
Mywebsite have 455 URL submitedbut only 77 URLs are indexed. How can i improve more indexed URL?
| magician0 -
Incorrect rel canonical , impacts ?
Incorrect use of canonical code.. and why have they used the strange code surrounding it. Hi there seo guys, I need some help.. a site I am working on has used the rel canonical tag incorrectly. they have used the code on the cannon page not on the duplicate pages.. there is also some other strange code with it. I will show and hide the url.. However I wanted to know if this would stop google bots crawling this page correctly as they dont seem to rank very well either.. here is the code:
| ibusmedia0 -
Can I crawl a password protected domain with SEOmoz?
Hi everyone, Just wondered if anybody has been able to use the SEOmoz site crawler for password protected domains? On Screaming Frog you are prompted for the username and password when you set the crawler running, however SEOmoz doesn't. It seems you can only crawl sites that are live and publicly available - can anyone confirm if this is the case? Cheers, M
| edlondon0
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