Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

  1. Home
  2. SEO Tactics
  3. Technical SEO
Log in to post

Category: Technical SEO

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

  • jwdl


    In GWT it gives an option to do the following but which is best? and why? If you specify your preferred domain as http://www.example.com and we find a link to http://example.com, we'll consider both links the same. | <label for="no_assoc">Don't set a preferred domain</label> |
    | <label for="use_www">Display URLs as ** www.example.com**</label> |
    | <label for="use_nowww">Display URLs as example**.com **</label> |

    | jwdl
    0
  • MarketsOnline


    We've just built a new site for a client. They were adamant on changing the url. The new site is entirely new content, however the subject mater is the same. Some pages are even titled very similarly. Is is advisable to keep the old site running, and link it to the new site? Permanently, or temporarily? Do we simply place redirects from the old site the new? Old site was 30 pages, new site is 80 pages. So redirects won't be available to all the new pages. It seems a shame to trash the old site, it is getting some good traffic, and the content - although outdated is unique and of a high quality. Old url is 4+ yrs old, the new url is new. Some enlightened opinions would be greatly welcomed. Thanks

    | MarketsOnline
    0
  • Zachary_Russell


    Hello Everyone, I'm in a situation that I have no idea how to handle. I have only really dealt with RWD, and not a mobile-specific site. Anyway, I have a client who is launching an m.domian.com for their mobile site, how do I add/configure this in WMT? Thanks Zach

    | Zachary_Russell
    0
  • Ryan_Phillips


    Hello! A question that has been throw around a lot at our company has been "Is duplicate content better than no content?". We operate a range of online flash game sites, most of which pull their games from a feed, which includes the game description.  We have unique content written on the home page of the website, but aside from that, the game descriptions are the only text content on the website. We have been hit by both Panda and Penguin, and are in the process of trying to recover from both.  In this effort we are trying to decide whether to remove or keep the game descriptions.  I figured the best way to settle the issue would be to ask here. I understand the best solution would be to replace the descriptions with unique content, however, that is a massive task when you've got thousands of games.  So if you have to choose between duplicate or no content, which is better for SEO? Thanks!

    | Ryan_Phillips
    0
  • JML1179


    I bought hosting for unlimited domains on Godaddy. It's not a dedicated server. It was just $85 a year. I have unlimited latency but a limited amount of "space." I don't know a lot about hosting servers etc... My question is relatively simple. When I go in GoDaddy to my hosting. There is a site that shows up as hosted, and all of the other sites show up under that site in it's directory. If you type the name of the site I bought the hosted package on, then type a forward slash and the name of one of the other sites on the hosting package, you will actually go to the other website. What is this relationship? Is it normal? Does that make all of my websites subdomains of the main site (that I bought the hosting package on)? I don't fully comprehend how this effects everything...

    | JML1179
    0
  • danatanseo


    Okay, this one's a doozie: My crawl report is listing all of these as separate URLs with identical duplicate content issues, even though they are all the home page and the one that is http://www.ccisolutions.com (the preferred URL)  has a canonical tag of rel= http://www.ccisolutions.com: http://www.ccisolutions.com http://ccisolutions.com http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/IAFDispatcher?iafAction=showMain I will add that OSE is recognizing that there is a 301-redirect on http://ccisolutions.com, but the duplicate content report doesn't seem to recognize the redirect. Also, every single one of our 404-error pages (we have set up a custom 404 page) is being identified as having duplicate content. The duplicate content on all of them is identical. Where do I even begin sorting this out? Any suggestions on how/why this is happening? Thanks!

    | danatanseo
    1
  • jonny512379


    What is the best way to stop duplicate content warning (and Google classing them as duplicate content), when it is caused by CAPITALS (i.e www.domain.com/Directory & www.domain.com/directory ). I try to always use lower case (unless a place name then i use Capitals for the first letter), but it looks like i have slipped up and got some mixed up and other sites will also be linking to Capitals Thanks Jon

    | jonny512379
    0
  • expertvillagemedia


    Hi all Today I saw a strange result in google's search page. When I typed a keyword: Rezeptfrei bestellen, it gave me results like number 1- http://www.rezeptfreibestellen.com/ If I check this site in opensiteexplorer, this is nothing but a new site with no backlinks, or any other offpage work. Onpage work is simply keyword stuffing and domain name is also same as keyword. Now why google ranked this website above others? Where are google EMD and Penguin, Panda? Amit

    | expertvillagemedia
    1
  • KristopherWho


    Can I promote a business page from Kuduz or City Search? Will other website link to these pages?

    | KristopherWho
    0
  • massimobrogi


    Hello, just click the following link, http://www.tuscany-cooking-class.com/es/alojamiento/villa-pandolfini/ It might be show the 404 page, but follow this way, www.tuscany-cooking-class.com/es then select alojamiento link, then select first property name with villa-pandolfini, Now you can view the page content, why it behave like this, We are using joomla with customized. Anyone help me to fix this issue Thanks Advance Alex

    | massimobrogi
    0
  • FisnikSylka


    Hello there, I own a "how to" website with 1000+ articles, and the number of articles is growing every day. Often some articles are easier to understand if I link a certain step to an article that was written before, because that article explains the step in more detail. Should I use "read here/read more" or the "title of the article I'm referring to" as anchor text? When is internal linking too much? Should I use nofollow?

    | FisnikSylka
    0
  • PooleyK


    Hi, My crawl has diagnosed a client's site with eight 404 errors. In my CSV download of the crawl, I have checked the source code of the 'referrer' pages, but can't find where the link to the 404 error page is. Could there be another reason for getting 404 errors? Thanks for your help. Katharine.

    | PooleyK
    0
  • edreamis


    Hi to all, I can not find which are  the errors in my web pages with the tag cannonical ref. I have to many errors over 500 after seomoz crawling my domain and I don't know how to fix it. I share my URL for root page: http://www.vour.gr My rel canonical tag for this page is: http://www.vour.gr"/> Can anyone help me why i get error for this page? Many thanks.

    | edreamis
    0
  • Richard555


    Hi, sorry its a Friday question... Page A: www.example.com/house/ Page B: www.example.com/house/kitchen Can I 'no_index' page A without it effecting page B being indexed? Views? Many thanks!

    | Richard555
    1
  • levalencia1


    Hello. I have about 300 warnings of overly-dynamic urls. In urls like this: http://www.theprinterdepo.com/clearance?dir=asc&order=price&p=10 As you can see all parameters are needed, and my ecommerce solution generates them automatically. How can I get rid of these warnings? I suppose that by using robots.txt, but I have no idea about it. In my google webmaster tools I have already configured that these parameteres the crawler should not index them. Check the image here: http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/64/37092444.png/

    | levalencia1
    0
  • ScottClark35


    Once a campaign has been set-up in SEOmoz how can additional meta tags be added?  I have not found a simple method to making this happen.  Please advise.

    | ScottClark35
    0
  • DHS_SH


    I manage an E-commerce website and we are looking to make some changes to our product pages to try and optimise them for search purposes and to try and improve the customer buying experience. This is where my head starts to hurt! Now, let's say I am selling a T shirt that comes in 4 sizes and 6 different colours. At the moment my website would have 24 products, each with pretty much the same content (maybe differing references to the colour & size). My idea is to change this and have 1 main product page for the T-shirt, but to have 24 product SKU's/variations that exist to give the exact product details. Some different ways I have been considering to do this: a) have drop-down fields on the product page that ask the customer to select their Tshirt size and colour. The image & price then changes on the page. b) All product 24 product SKUs sre listed under the main product with the 'Add to Cart' open next to each one. Each one would be clickable so a page it its own right. Would I need to set up a canonical links for each SKU that point to the top level product page? I'm obviously looking to minimise duplicate content but Im not exactly sure on how to set this up - its a big decision so I need to be 100% clear before signing off on anything. . Any other tips on how to do this or examples of good e-commerce websites that use product SKus well? Kind regards Tom

    | DHS_SH
    0
  • mgordon


    A client of mine whats to add reviews from other sites such as Judys Book and Yahoo to their site. (Yes the actual content of what was posted in the review. They are proud of what their clients are saying). I am not sure if using schema mark up and including the review body on the clients web site was safe or would it be considered duplicate content? Is there a "good practice" for this? Any assistance or suggestions are welcomed. Thanks!

    | mgordon
    0
  • Houses


    Our site has quite a few 302 redirects that really ought to be 301's. Our IT department is really busy so the question is, given that the 302's have probably been in place for years, is it worth changing them to 301's now? Thanks

    | Houses
    0
  • copyjack


    I work with a number of independent insurance agencies across the United States. All of these agencies have setup their websites through one preferred insurance provider. The websites are customizable to a point, but the content for the entire website is mostly the same. Therefore, literally hundreds of agency sites have essentially the same content. The only thing that changes is a few "wildcards" in the copy where the agency fills in their city, state, services areas, company history, etc. My questions is: will this syndicated content hurt their ranking potential? I've been toying with the idea of further editing the content to make it more unique to an agency, but I would hate to waste a lot of hours doing this if it won't help anything. Would you expect this approach to be beneficial or a waste of time? Thank you for your help!

    | copyjack
    0
  • Nightwing


    Greetings from 11 degrees C partly suuny Wetherby 🙂 Every so oftem you hit an SEO mission that just consistently hits a brick wall. For the third time i'm investigating why this page:
    http://www.collegeofphlebology.com/varicose-veins/what-are-they/ fails to even reach the bottom of page 3. Ive gone back to basic and ran an SEO audit of sorts in an attempt to see if I'd missed anything. Here is the audit: http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/audit-for-moz.jpg So my question is please: From a technical SEO perspective is there anything wrong with this page http://www.collegeofphlebology.com/varicose-veins/what-are-they/  to explain why it does not rank for target term "Varicose Veins" Thanks in advance,
    David

    | Nightwing
    0
  • digmarketingguy


    Hi, I have been having heaps (thousands) of SEOMoz crawl errors on urls that don't exist normally like: mydomain.com/RoomAvailability.aspx?DateFrom=2012-Oct-26&rcid=-1&Nights=2&Adults=1&Children=0&search=BestPrice These urls are missing siteids and other parameters and I can't see how they are gererated. Does anyone have any ideas on where MOZ is finding them ? Thanks Stephen

    | digmarketingguy
    0
  • MattBarker


    Hi folks. The site in question is at http://bit.ly/UDV186 It is split into English and Spanish versions, each at root/en and root/es respectively. The home page is in Spanish. We're trying to rank the site for English keywords so we want to switch the homepage to English and put the Spanish version as secondary. What are the best practices for this? Can we just literally swap the two versions around onto the existing URLs, i.e. take the English text and put it onto the home page? Provided all links point to the correct page, would that be fine? Are there any other best practice considerations to take? Thanks in advance.

    | MattBarker
    0
  • Event36030


    Posting this on behalf of a friends at a breast and ovarian cancer support organization... We're trying to improve our web site's results in search engines. I've been reading up on SEO and learning that it's wise to optimize for more specialized keywords rather than for highly competitive keywords (e.g., "triple negative breast cancer," instead of "breast cancer"). Practically speaking, how does this work when you're optimizing content? Does "triple negative breast cancer" need to appear multiple times in the page's content and is there an optimal place on the page where it should appear? Do keyword tags actually work, or should we not even bother spending time on adding them? How about title tags and description metatags? Will they help with search results? I know that increasing the number of outside links makes a difference, but will it help if I provide links from one page on our web site to another? Thanks!

    | Event36030
    0
  • OrionGroup


    Howdy SEOmoz Fans, Im wondering what happens to an existing YouMoz blog post if it gets promoted to the main SEOmoz blog? Does SEOmoz do a 301 redirect to the new URL? It seems like the old post disappears, but perhaps I'm not digging deep enough. Anyone have experience with this happening on SEOmoz? I'd like to know so I can figure out how to do something similar to that on one of my own sites (promoting UGC to a main blog). Thanks!
    ~Scott

    | OrionGroup
    0
  • tribes


    Example: /Zambia/kasanka-&-bangweulu or /Zambia/kasanka-and-bangweulu which is the better url from the search engines point of view?

    | tribes
    0
  • paj1979


    Upon receiving my first crawl report from new pro SEOMoz acc (yaay!) I've found that the wordpress blog plugged into my site hasn't been getting crawled due to being blocked by metarobots. I'm not a developer and have very little tech expertise, but a search dug up that the issue stemmed from the wordpress site settings > privacy > Ask search engines not to index this site option being selected. On checking the blog "Allow search engines to index this site" was selected so I'm unsure what else to check. My level of expertise means I'm not confident going into the back end of the site and I don't have a tech guy on site to speak to. Has anyone else had this problem? Is it common and will I need to consult a developer to get this fixed? Many thanks in advance for your help!

    | paj1979
    0
  • Letty


    In my SeoMoz crawl report I get multiple 4XX errors reported and they are all on the same type of links. www.zylom.com/nl/help/contact/9/  and differiate between the number at the end and the language. But I i look in the source code we nice said: <a class="<a class="attribute-value">bigbuttonblue</a>" style="<a class="attribute-value">float:right; margin-left:10px;</a>" href="[/nl/help/contact/9/?sid=9&amp;e=login](view-source:http://www.zylom.com/nl/help/contact/9/?sid=9&e=login)" onfocus="<a class="attribute-value">blur()</a>" title="<a class="attribute-value">contact</a>"> contact a> I already tested the little helpfull tool Xenu, but this also doesn't give any broken links for the url's which I found in the 4xx error report. Could somebody give me a suggestion Why these 4xx errors keep coming? Could it be that the SeoMoz crawlers break the part ?sid=9&e=login' from the URL. Because if you want to enter the link, you first get a pop-up to fill in a login screen. Thanks for you answers already

    | Letty
    0
  • Jani


    I read somewhere that reverse proxys can cause issue for search engines. Our server is using SQUID. What potential issues there might be?

    | Jani
    1
  • solution.advisor


    He we have 2 website that have same exact content, both are redirect to one url. Is it safe to let google know by verifying both website with same ownership in webmaster tools? thanks

    | solution.advisor
    0
  • NeilD


    We plan to do away with fixed footer content and make, for the most part, the content in the traditional footer area unique just like the 'main' part of the content. This begs the question, do Google know what is footer content as opposed to main on page content?

    | NeilD
    0
  • DLaw


    I have a local business with a contact page that I want to add schema markup to. However, I was wondering if having the address with schema info on the contact page instead of the home page has any adverse effects on the rich snippet showing up in search. There's no logical place to add schema for a local business on the home page, so having it on the contact page—not in the footer or sidebar—is the only option.

    | DLaw
    0
  • Zachary_Russell


    Hello Everyone, I made a post a few months ago about one of my sites, Poker On A Mac dropping off the face of google. I found out that it was hacked, and redirecting traffic from google to other, pharmacy websites. Doing some research, I found out it was the WordPress PharmaHack, and we ended up recovering from it. Now, since October 23rd traffic has went down again mainly organic traffic, I tried to see if it was hacked again, with the same thing and their was nothing I noticed. I was wondering if anyone could give me any insights as to why this happened? Thanks Zach CwFda.png

    | Zachary_Russell
    0
  • ooseoo


    Hi there, In order to reduce the huge amount of duplicate content and titles for a cliënt, we have disallowed all  spiders for some areas of the site in August via the robots.txt-file. This was followed by a huge decrease in errors in our SEOmoz crawl report, which, of course, made us satisfied. In the meanwhile, we haven't changed anything in the back-end, robots.txt-file, FTP, website or anything. But our crawl report came in this November and all of a sudden all the errors where back. We've checked the errors and noticed URLs that are definitly disallowed. The disallowment of these URLs is also verified by our Google Webmaster Tools, other robots.txt-checkers and when we search for a disallowed URL in Google, it says that it's blocked for spiders. Where did these errors came from? Was it the SEOmoz spider that broke our disallowment or something? You can see the drop and the increase in errors in the attached image. Thanks in advance. [](<a href=)" target="_blank">a> [](<a href=)" target="_blank">a> LAAFj.jpg

    | ooseoo
    0
  • rikmon


    Hi Search Experts! We are just launching a new site for a client with a completely new URL.  The client can not provide any access details for their existing site.  Any ideas how can we get the existing site de-indexed from Google? Thanks guys!

    | rikmon
    0
  • RandyRoussie


    On Sept 29th our website 'keyword' rankings who totally destroy. We were always #1 to #2 for these keywords 1. listing presentation
    2. real estate presentation Our website is: http://www.agentpresentations.com We asked Google through Webmaster Tools to reconsider the site and they replied back saying nothing was wrong. We run Google Adwords and we contacted them and they looked at the keywords and sent screenshots to us showing the ranking we still there. But they are not... as proven in Webmaster tools. So Adwords told us to ask Webmaster Tools to reconsider the site again. Nothing yet... What do you suggest?

    | RandyRoussie
    0
  • netviper


    So I was working on a Genesis theme website where they have the H1 Tag as the Logo on the homepage.  I wanted this changed because I always use my H1 tag to include a keyword I want to rank for.  I was told by the Genesis Forum Manager that Yoast said the Logo should be the H1 tag on the homepage.  (Yoast has a WP SEO Plugin that is very popular) That makes no sense to me, so I was looking for Opinions. Thanks,

    | netviper
    0
  • junkcars


    I have two keywords I am ranked for but google is showing two different title tags. One is the more updated version while the other is the older version. In all in one seo pack it shows the updated title tag but google still shows the old Why is this?

    | junkcars
    0
  • esiow2013


    Hi, I just want to ask if it is necessary to implement pagination(rel=next, rel=prev) to my category pages because Google webmaster tools is telling me that these pages are having similar meta title and meta description. Ex. page1: http://www.site.com/iphone-resellers/1 meta title:Search for iphone resellers in US page2:http://www.site.com/iphone-resellers/2 meta title:Search for iphone resellers in US page3:http://www.site.com/iphone-resellers/3 meta title:Search for iphone resellers in US Thanks in advance. 🙂

    | esiow2013
    0
  • SebestynMrton


    Dear Support, what to do in case of https pages. seomoz does not give any data about it. please help asap. Thank you.

    | SebestynMrton
    0
  • MarkScully


    Hi guys, I know this is an easy question and I'm already quite sure of the answer for it but it would be good to get some other views. This website - http://www.collapso.net/ have 261,923 backlinks to our website according to Ahrefs. They have 1000's of pages like this - http://www.collapso.net/countiesnew/Cork.html which link to our site. 43.95% of the backlinks to our site are from these guys but we've been fortunate enough to never receive any warnings via WMT or ever experienced drop offs in traffic. My question is - Do we have this site remove all the links to our site or leave them alone? Given there's such a large quantity of links, I'm not exactly sure what the impact would be on us. My instinct says get rid of them. Although part of me questions what such a massive drop in our link profile would look like to Google.

    | MarkScully
    0
  • Zachary_Russell


    I am curious, what is the best way to link things from an SEO perspective 1. Full Path; http://yoursite.com/links/alink/ 2. Absolute Path /links/yourlink/ 3. Relative Path ../yourlink/ Just curious if there has been any quantifiable data on this. Thanks Zach

    | Zachary_Russell
    0
  • Houses


    Hi, How do we sort duplicate content issues with: http://www.ourwebsite.co.uk/ being the same as http://www.ourwebsite.co.uk/StyleType=SmallFont&StyleClass=FontSize or http://www.ourwebsite.co.uk/?StyleType=LargeFont&StyleClass=FontSize and http://www.ourwebsite.co.uk/legal_notices.aspx being the same as http://www.ourwebsite.co.uk/legal_notices.aspx?theme=default

    | Houses
    0
  • GManSEO


    We have created a video for a category page with the goal of building links to the page and improving the conversion rate of visitors to the page.  This category is Christmas oriented so we want to get the video dropped in ASAP. Unfortunately there was a mixup with our developer and he created a lightbox pop-up to display the video on the category page.  I'm concerned this will hurt our ability to get the video indexed in Google. Here was his response.  Is what he says here true? "With the video originally being in lightbox the iFrame Embed was enough since the video can't be on the page, it would have to be hidden on the page which is ignored by Google.  The SEO would be derived from modifying the video sitemap to define the category page as the HTML page for the Wistia video and Google will make the association. The sitemap did all the heavy lifting, the schema markup did not come till later so it had no additional affect on Google other then to re-enforce the sitemap." Thanks for your help!

    | GManSEO
    0
  • linklater


    We have a fairly stringent blacklist and by the looks of our crawl reports we've begin unintentionally blocking the SEOmoz crawler. can you guys let me know the useragent string and anything else I need to enable mak sure you're crawlers are whitelisted? Cheers!

    | linklater
    0
  • ClaireH-184886


    I am hoping the community of semoz will help me in deciding what hosting company i should use as there are hundreds of them. I have asked previously about dedicated servers but was shocked to have only received one responce. Recently i have been having nothing but problems with my hosting company so now i am trying to find a UK hosting company that can offer a dedicated server. I would be grateful if people could let me know what companies they use for their sites and if they use managed hosting companies.

    | ClaireH-184886
    0
  • Joseph-Green-SEO


    Hi All Is there a tool to check a website if it has stand alone unreachable pages? Thanks for helping

    | Joseph-Green-SEO
    0
  • rfksolutionsltd


    Hi Looking for a bit advice our client - www.financial-wise.co.uk We worked with this client on his old website www.mortgage-wise.co.uk we had him ranking for most local searches. The client then re-branded the full company and got another company in to do this, they did him new website www.financial-wise.co.uk, the company then launched the new domain with the old one still showing, some of the content was the same, including homepage. Anyway the issue im having now is, for certain searches im struggling to get them ranking again and for searches such as financial wise, its inner pages showing instead of the homepage? I have che checked and homepage is indexed, i have also re-written all the text on the homepage but still having some issue, its almost like the homepage has been penalised any help would be great?

    | rfksolutionsltd
    0
  • Vinss


    Hello Seo Experts, Can any one help me with this issue...  I do have issues with my subdomains, My site name is http://www.bharatdesi.com, should I have subdomain http://www.bharatdesi.com/hyderabad this way or hyderabad.bharatdesi.com. Please any can answer my question, which way I have to organize my subdomains... and also give me some examples.. Thank you.

    | Vinss
    0
  • JoaoPdaCosta-WBR


    Hello guys, My website is currently holding two different URLs for the same page and I am under the impression such set up is dividing my Page Authority and Link Juice. We currently have the following page with both URLs below: www.wbresearch.com/soldiertechnologyusa/home.aspx
    www.wbresearch.com/soldiertechnologyusa/ Analysing the page authority and backlinks I identified that we are splitting the amount of backlinks (links from sites, social media and therefore authority). "/home.aspx"
    PA: 67
    Linking Root Domains: 52
    Total Links: 272 "/"
    PA: 64
    Linking Root Domains: 29
    Total Links: 128 I am under the impression that if the URLs were the same we would maximise our backlinks and therefore page authority. My Question: How can I fix this? Should I have a 301 redirect from the page "/" to the "/home.aspx" therefore passing the authority and link juice of “/” directly to “/homes.aspx”? Trying to gather thoughts and ideas on this, suggestions are much appreciated? Thanks!

    | JoaoPdaCosta-WBR
    0

Got a burning SEO question?

Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


Start my free trial


Browse Questions

Explore more categories

  • Moz Tools

    Chat with the community about the Moz tools.

  • SEO Tactics

    Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers

  • Community

    Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!

  • Support

    Connect on product support and feature requests.

Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.