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Category: Technical SEO

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

  • Bio-RadAbs


    Hi guys, I don't index my search pages, and currently my pages are tagged name="robots" content="noindex"> Do I need to specify follow or will it automatically be done? Thanks Cyto

    | Bio-RadAbs
    0
  • GatlinburgMan


    | GatlinburgMan
    0
  • CMTM


    Hi everyone, I think i have crawling issues with one of my sites. It has vanished form Google rankings it used to rank for all services i offered now it doesn't anymore ever since September 29th. I have resubmitted to Google 2 times and they came back with the same answer: " We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the web spam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google. There's no need to file a reconsideration request for your site, because any ranking issues you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the webspam team. Of course, there may be other issues with your site that affect your site's ranking. Google's computers determine the order of our search results using a series of formulas known as algorithms. We make hundreds of changes to our search algorithms each year, and we employ more than 200 different signals when ranking pages. As our algorithms change and as the web (including your site) changes, some fluctuation in ranking can happen as we make updates to present the best results to our users. If you've experienced a change in ranking which you suspect may be more than a simple algorithm change, there are other things you may want to investigate as possible causes, such as a major change to your site's content, content management system, or server architecture. For example, a site may not rank well if your server stops serving pages to Googlebot, or if you've changed the URLs for a large portion of your site's pages. This article has a list of other potential reasons your site may not be doing well in search. " How i detected that it may be a crawling issue is that 2 weeks ago i changed metas - metas are very slow in getting updated and for some of my pages never did update Do you know any good tools to check for bad code that could slow down the crawling. I really don't know where to look other than issues for crawling. I validated the website with w3c validator and ran xenu and cleaned these up but my website is still down. Any ideas are appreciated.

    | CMTM
    0
  • Richline_Digital


    Hi There, We are in the process of revamping our URL structure and my devs tell me they have a technical problem using a hyphen as a word separator. There's a whole lot of competing recommendations out there and at this point I'm just confused. Does anyone have any idea what character would be next-best to the hyphen for separating words in a URL? Any reason to prefer one over another? Some links I've found discussing the topic: This page says that "__Google has confirmed that the point (.), the comma (,) and the hyphen (-) are valid word separators in URL’s.": http://www.internetofficer.com/seo/google-word-separator/ This page suggests the plus (+) symbol would be best: http://labs.phurix.net/posts/word-separators-in-urls This guy says he's tested and there's a whole bunch of symbols that will work as word separators: http://www.webproguide.com/articles/Symbols-as-word-separators-a-look-inside-the-search-engine-logic/ I'm leaning towards the tilde (~) or the plus (+) sign. Usage would be like so: http://www.domain.com/shop/sterling~silver OR /shop/sterling+silver etc... Thanks in advance for your help!

    | Richline_Digital
    1
  • rimon5693


    If i assign unique IP for my blog URL, will it hurt my ranking and seo ? Losing rank and visitor from Search engine after PANDA update

    | rimon5693
    0
  • MichelMauquoi


    Hi, Our Blog (http://blog.thailand-investigation.com) is ranking for some of our major keywords but not our home page (http://www.thailand-investigation.com)!? Our blog is WordPress and our main website is HTML. It seems like the search engines consider that they are 2 separate websites!? When I check the incoming links to our website, I get also the blog links!!!??? Is it normal? Do I have to build a relation of some kind or write some code saying that it is our Blog... I don't know! I'm not a SEO specialist or even a webmaster. I'm a small business owner and take care on my website. I created by myself but never learned! So, please help! Thanks

    | MichelMauquoi
    0
  • kabledesigns


    Starting a second local based service site. Initially going to target a couple counties and move on from there as the business grows. The first site of mine I set up a page for each town [service] + [town] + [state] + [zip]. I am afraid this could get out of control though if I don't have unique content on each page. For the last site I simply copied the page and replace the town name in each as well as the picture, picture title, and image name to make it look more unique for users but not necessarily Google. I had pretty good results but I want this next site to be done properly. Should I only target a few of the major markets to begin with? What about long tail searches for smaller towns that currently bring in a good amount of business? I am concerned about having "too many" long tail pages for each town which would essentially become a listing of every town and county in the state if I was to maintain the pace I want to. Also I would need a good amount of backlinks to each specific town page url if I wanted to do well in each of those specific markets right? Is this where the fine line between niche term and broad search is? Is there any happy medium?

    | kabledesigns
    0
  • expertvillagemedia


    Hi I submitted a video stemap to google webmasters a month ago and it shows submitted videos in webmasters account but it is not showing that any video been indexed by google yet. I am not sure whats the issue because its taking long time or may be some error is there. Amit

    | expertvillagemedia
    0
  • jshiraz


    I just want to be sure, but if I install a Wordpress blog in a subfolder of a HTML site, Google will see that as one site, not two different sites, correct?  Even if there is two index files?

    | jshiraz
    0
  • mikescotty


    <a name="_GoBack"></a>I have a real estate client who creates individual property sites (mini-sites), each with their own URL (123MainStreet.com), each linking to 2 or 3 diverse pages on the main broker site (main site). There are a couple thousand on these pages at any one time, feeding into a large broker site. The SEO effect of these mini-sites is that there are many incoming links to the main site from various URLs, however, the mini-sites have little SEO relevance, given that there are few, if any inbound links to the mini-sites themselves, and the mini-sites only exist for the market life of a property. My question is: Does it make more SEO sense to create a series of pages (externalsite.com/123mainstreet) on a single site that already has good traction and relevance?  The inbound links to the main site will have more relevance, but they will all be coming from the same domain (or subdomain).  And although the links will all be coming from the same external site, the inbound links will be from a variety of pages on external site to a variety of pages on the main site. Any insight would be appreciated.

    | mikescotty
    0
  • levalencia1


    Hello I have about 800 warnings with this. Example of one url with this problem is: http://www.theprinterdepo.com/clearance?dir=asc&order=price I was checking and I think all links are important.  But I suppose that if I put a nofollow on the links on the left which are only for navigation purposes I can get rid of these warnings. Any other idea?

    | levalencia1
    0
  • ClaireH-184886


    Hi, I am looking for a joomla expert to look at our site and help speed it up and possibly upgrade the site, now i do remember coming across a site on here where you can put out a tender for joomla programmers but i cannot find it, can anyone please help me with information of how to advertise what we require and what site we should go to. many thanks

    | ClaireH-184886
    0
  • bronxpad


    I previously set the canonical Url in google web masters to the non www version, when I check my on page opt, it tells me that I have a critical issue with this. Should I change it in google web masters back to the www version? if so is there the possibility of negative results? Or is there a better way to deal with this? Note, I have inbound links pointing to both types.

    | bronxpad
    0
  • seoanalytics


    Hello, I use joomla for my website and automatically all those files are blocked is that good or bad, so I remove anything and if so why ? User-agent: *
    Disallow: /administrator/
    Disallow: /cache/
    Disallow: /components/
    Disallow: /images/
    Disallow: /includes/
    Disallow: /installation/
    Disallow: /language/
    Disallow: /libraries/
    Disallow: /media/
    Disallow: /modules/
    Disallow: /plugins/
    Disallow: /templates/
    Disallow: /tmp/
    Disallow: /xmlrpc/ I also added to my robots.txt files my email address ( is that useful, I am afraid google passes PR to the email address  )
    and a javascript: void (0) because I have tabs on my webpage  ( is that useful )
    as well as a .pdf ( is it also useful ) any comments ? does anything need to be changed or is it ok ? Thank you,

    | seoanalytics
    0
  • jazavide


    If a site has an xml feed being used by 100 companies to create the content on their site.  Will those 100 sites receive any link juice? Is there any way content may be classed as duplicate across these sites? And should the page on the site where the xml feed is coming from have the page indexed first?

    | jazavide
    0
  • Houses


    Hi, We are soon moving www.ourumbrellaorganisationwebsite.co.uk/oldsubsidiaryname/index.aspx AND www.differentolddomainname.co.uk to just www.ourumbrellaorganisationwebsite.co.uk (an existing site which will no longer have the old subsidiary name sub section). How do we do the 301 redirects on a Windows server? Helicon has been suggested but I don't know it. I know we need to 301 redirect 'old' pages to the equivalent new ones, but is it a problem to do all of the old pages (there are lots) or should we just just do a few? is there ever a downside to doing individual redirects for an entire old site? Also, once the 301 redirects are in place from the old domain, is it possible to let the old domain expire and if so, at what point? Thanks

    | Houses
    0
  • Vegit


    Hi, I built a niche site yesterday, the domain was 1 week old. What is the safest way to do link building? I.e How many links should i do in order to be in safe? So far, i've concentrated on building my social profile. Like getting as many retweets as possible. Slowly getting facebook likes and added few youtube videos with my link in it. Now i am on to link building. I will only do legit link building methods. Currently i am gonna get 2 press releases. But can you tell me no. of links i must get in a day. PS: The keyword i am competing is highly competitive.

    | Vegit
    0
  • devoted2vintage


    I am cleaning up my backlink profile for www.devoted2vintage.co.uk but before I start removing links I wanted some advice on the following: I currently have over 2000 backlinks from about 200 domains. Is this a healthy ratio or should I prune this? Is there a recommended max number of backlings per domain? Should I delete links to all or some of the spun PR articles (some of the article web pages have over 40 articles with links back to us)

    | devoted2vintage
    0
  • walshy99


    If you do the following query in google: site:orlandovisiting.com legend sparrow You'll see in the results the title appears as: legend-captain-jack-sparrow-1149.html Where the title tag in the source is: <title>The Legend of Captain Jack Sparrow Opens at Disney’s Hollywood Studiostitle> Eventually it normally rights itself, but does anyone else get this with their sites? Thanks.

    | walshy99
    0
  • conversiontactics


    Hey everyone So I created a new page on a WordPress website, it was live for a few hours till I changed my mind & switched it back to a draft. Just out of curiosity I did the Site:www.example.com/Example search on Google to see if it had been indexed & apparently it had but when I click on cached to see what time it got indexed at exactly it's showing me an error. So does this mean it is indexed or not?

    | conversiontactics
    0
  • alsvik


    I have a page that show traveltips: http://www.spies.dk/spanien/alcudia/rejsemalstips-liste This page shows all traveltips for Alcudia. Each traveltip also has its own url: http://www.spies.dk/spanien/alcudia/rejsemalstips?TravelTipsId=19767 ( 2 weeks ago i noticed the url http://www.spies.dk/spanien/alcudia/rejsemalstips show up in google webmaster tools as a 404 page, along with 100 of others urls to the subpage /rejsemalstips WITHOUT a querystring. With no querystring there is no content on the page and it goes 404. I need my technicians to redirect that page so it shows the list, but in the meantime i would like to block it in robots.txt But how do i block  a page if it is called without a querystring?

    | alsvik
    0
  • kariel


    I help maintain a site and the owners want to start a forum for their club members. This is a site that runs on Joomla, so it's likely we'll use some form of a Joomla module to add the forum functionality. My main question is whether there is anything to be concerned about for SEO purposes when adding the forum. I've never set one up, so I don't know the best practices for forums/discussion boards (although I'm scouring the web for general info). Should it be a subdomain or on the main domain -- or does this not matter? Are there any general setup processes that I should pay attention to for SEO best-practices? This question was mainly about the SEO impact, but if anyone can point me in the direction of forum best practice info as well, It would be appreciated. Cheers!
    Kristy

    | kariel
    0
  • BigBlaze205


    this is my online store http://www.furnacefilterscanada.com I experiencing new site architecture for better buyer experience. I found this solution for setting up categories: http://filtration-montreal.mybigcommerce.com I ask this questions many times about my site architecture, I find this solution, using around 35 categories and sub-categories. Is it O.K. or it can hurt SEO to have to many categories. See example on this trial version of BigCommerce: http://filtration-montreal.mybigcommerce.com I will use the top horizontal menu for the most popular furnace filters sizes. Also, I want to use this cascading dropdown option in the header http://www.asp.net/ajaxLibrary/AjaxControlToolkitSampleSite/CascadingDropDown/CascadingDropDown.aspx where I wiil setup 3 options to select: filter width filter lenght filter depth What is your opinions, I'm I on the right path? Thank you, BigBlaze

    | BigBlaze205
    0
  • solution.advisor


    Hello, I'm new to the community and I wonder if anyone can help us shed a light on this SEO issue we are having. We have 3 magento websites that is being affected. Whats happening is that those site were ranked for a specific keyword for few months, but all of a sudden, it just drop like crazy. It went  from top 10 to about 150 in a bout a weeks period. Some site, it's not even ranked or stopped ranking and visible on the search engine. Is google not liking MAgento for some reason?? Any help or suggestions will be appreciated! thanks

    | solution.advisor
    0
  • healthgrades


    So, totally amateur hour here, but I can't for the life of me find our HTML verification file for webmaster tools. I see nowhere to look at it in Google Webmaster Tools console, I tried a site:, I googled it, all the info out there is about how to verify a site. Ours is verified, but I need the verification file code to sync up with the Google API and no one seems to have it. Any thoughts?

    | healthgrades
    0
  • USACarry


    I'm trying to get my server PCI Compliant and they want me to switch the forums at http://www.usacarry.com/forums/ over to https because of the logins. Could this possibly affect my existing rankings?

    | USACarry
    0
  • spes123


    Hi all Can anyone suggest how I can find where gtoogle is finding approx. 1000 pages not to select? In round numbers I have 110 pages on the site site: searech shows all pages index status shows 110 slected and 1000 not selected. For the life of me I cannot fingure where these pages are coming from. I have set my prefered domain to www., setup 301 's to www. as per below RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^growingyourownveg.com$
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ "http://www.growingyourownveg.com/$1" [R=301,L] site is www.growingyourownveg.com any suggestions much appreciated Simon

    | spes123
    0
  • hgw57


    Hello, I've made a site for a client about 1 year ago. The rankings are quite okay, but the home page suffers from a penalty I think. I found out via OSE that PageAuthority strangely is higher on the 301-ed page www.myanmar-rundreisen.de - PA 32
    myanmar-rundreisen.de/ - PA 33 I don't understand what is happening here as I am using the usual htaccess 301-redirect: Rewrite domain.com -> www.domain.com RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} .
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.myanmar-rundreisen.de [NC]
    RewriteRule (.*) http://www.myanmar-rundreisen.de/$1 [L,R=301] which is working fine with other domains ... I tried also (last line) RewriteRule (.*) http://www.myanmar-rundreisen.de/$1 [L,R=301] So thanks to anyone who can share an idea on that ... Guenter K04xy.jpg

    | hgw57
    0
  • BlueLinkERP


    Our number of external links has dropped by over 50% in mid-September! So far our domain authority hasn't been impacted and traffic is only slightly down. I did not hear of any major Google changes . . . did this happen to anyone else?

    | BlueLinkERP
    0
  • Nightwing


    Buon giorno from 10 degrees C wetherby Uk... This page http://www.ramsdensforcash.co.uk/cash-for-gold/ has languished in the backwaters of the SERPS for target term "Cash for Gold" for too long (6 months). Heres what ive done so far: On page markup optimized - tick
    Internally linked - tick
    Checked and resolved duplicate contnet - tick Today i took a close look at how a competitor sites performs for targetted content and ramsdens is not far behind. So the only thing ive got left is internal & externall link building. SO i guess i'm asking..."Is link building the only tactic left?" Grazie tanto, David

    | Nightwing
    0
  • BigBlaze205


    I'm planning to add a dropdown menu in my online store header. The dropdown menu will have about 175 options with 175 internal links to different products. Can it hurt my SEO for aving more then 175 internal links on my header. This header will be on every pages. Thank you, BigBlaze

    | BigBlaze205
    0
  • AlabuSkinCare


    Hi Folks, I have a two part question. I'd like to add a feature to our website where people can click on an ingredient (we manufacture skin care products) and a tool-tip style box pops up and describes information about the ingredient. Because many products share some of the same ingredients, I'm going to load this data from a source file via AJAX. My questions are: Does this type of remotely-fetched content have any effect on how a search engines views and indexes the page? Can it help contribute to the page's search engine ranking? If there are multiple pages fetching the same piece of remotely-fetched content, will this be seen as duplicated content? Thanks! Hal

    | AlabuSkinCare
    0
  • AlabuSkinCare


    Hi folks, We have three places with unique content for our company. Our ecommerce site (hosted on big commerce), our help desk knowledge base (subdomain, hosted on zendesk), and our blog (separate domain, self hosted wordpress). We're about to refocus our efforts on generating high quality content, and I'm trying to figure out the best strategy to organize it. I think from an SEO perspective, if we had all of the content hosted directly on our ecommerce site, that would be best. Unfortunately Big Commerce doesn't have much by way of content management. We can't (yet) install a blogging platform or CMS onto our root domain. What's the next best option? Does it do any good to move our blog to a subdomain? Should I try to post all content on our root domain and just deal with the lack of content management (i.e. just make a new web page for each blog entry). Basically, what's the best strategy in this situation for SEO? Any advice appreciated. Thanks so much! Hal

    | AlabuSkinCare
    0
  • stayathomemum


    Hi, we did a crawl report and have over 3000 duplicate page titles. I'm not sure why this is happening... could it be because we have put posts in multiple categories? Can anyone help us with a quick fix? our site is www.stayathomemum.com.au thank you kindly, Chris

    | stayathomemum
    0
  • JodiFTM


    Hi! I moved my Wordpress blog back in August, and lost much of my site traffic.  I recently found over 1000 crawl errors in Webmaster Tools because some of my redirects weren't transferred, so we are working on fixing the errors and letting Google know. I'm wondering how long I should expect for Google to recognize that the errors have been fixed and for the traffic to start returning? Thanks! Jodi - momsfavoritestuff.com

    | JodiFTM
    0
  • casper434


    Has anyone used the new SEO settings for dsIDXpress?

    | casper434
    0
  • editabletext


    In an effort to clean up my blog content I noticed that I have a lot of posts getting tagged for duplicate content. It looks like ... http://carwoo.com/blog/october-sales-robust-stateside-european-outlook-poor-for-ford http://carwoo.com/blog/october-sales-robust-stateside-european-outlook-poor-for-ford/954bf0df0a0d02b700a06816f2276fa5/ Any thoughts on how and why this would be happening?

    | editabletext
    0
  • JeanYates


    I'm trying to clean up my spam incoming links and can't find where to download a complete list. Google Webmaster Tools has a button to download "Sample Links" or "Latest Links" but they don't show them all. Looking for wisdom from all the gurus out there. Thanks, Jean

    | JeanYates
    0
  • DuPont


    Hello, everyone.. I am looking for some links to stories, articles, what have you describing medium to large complex sites that have moved, changed CMS, changed domains, etc, and ended up in a total SEO disaster. Really appreciate anything the community here has or can find! Thanks!

    | DuPont
    0
  • imageworks-261290


    does anyone have any examples of how to use rich snippets for events? There are so many different variables and the Google examples are in sufficient

    | imageworks-261290
    0
  • Your_Workshop


    Does anyone have any insights on toggle menu's or collapsible navigation structure and if its good/bad for Search?

    | Your_Workshop
    0
  • Firestarter-SEO


    I have no clue how to set this up in the Bigcommerce store platform

    | Firestarter-SEO
    0
  • Kessie


    Can I use the following title on my web site, the url is www.aplacetorent.ie and im adding places to rent as a keyword. Im worried I not allowed to repeat the aplacetorent keyword. this is what it will look like - http://www.aplacetorent.ie/ dublin/places-to-rent I mean that i want the title tag on some category pages to look like the above, as someone told me u cannot repeat a keyword twice in a title.

    | Kessie
    0
  • CurtCarroll


    I have a word press site with a rel canonical plug in. The rel="canonical" href= is there and the url in there works and goes to the actual page.So why does the seomoz keep giving the warning: Appropriate Use of Rel Canonical

    | CurtCarroll
    0
  • Sparkstone


    Hi Guys, I'm just wondering which offers more SEO value and which is easier to set up out of: blog.domain.co.uk domain.co.uk/blog Thanks, Dan

    | Sparkstone
    0
  • iProspect-Ireland


    Hi all, I'll soon be doing some work for a worldwide company who are launching a new site. The new site is a near clone of another of their sites in another country. Obviously I'll need to make use of rel="alternate" hreflang="x" on both sites. I've read all the Google documentation etc but was wondering if you guys could point me in the direction of a few sites which are currently implementing the tag successfully. Thanks in advance,

    | iProspect-Ireland
    0
  • MarbellaSurferDude


    I've recently taken over SEO for my company. There are a lot of old links that point to our old URL (www.examplecountry.com changed to (www.examplewhatwedo.com). We have the correct redirects in place and Open Site Explorer shows many of the links pointing to the old site even though I'm inputting the new URL. I just want to put my mind at rest that any value these links have doesn't got lost due to the URL change. Unfortunately a lot of them have the old URL as the anchor text....which I guess will decrease their quality? Thanks!

    | MarbellaSurferDude
    0
  • JuiceBoxOM


    I'm trying to simplify a conversion process with an onclick event to show text rather than having a completely separate page, but wondering if this is going to negatively impact on SEO, especially considering it's hidden text. I've seen a couple of things out there where you could position the text off the screen and the onclick results in it coming on.

    | JuiceBoxOM
    0
  • BistosAmerica


    I know SEO Moz has a lot of info about 404 301 302 etc but I am trying to figure out easy way to fix two of the broken links from flash. I am redirecting following links with wordpress redirect plug in http://soobumimphotography.com/gallery.php?GalleryID=126&GalleryName=Wedding&OrderNum=1 http://soobumimphotography.com/gallery.php?GalleryID=126&GalleryName=Wedding&OrderNum=1 What would be the best way to solve this?  Is there anyway I can remove those?

    | BistosAmerica
    0
  • rimon5693


    I have a custom 404 page with popular post and category links in the page, everyday i have 404 crawl error on webmaster tools, what should i do?

    | rimon5693
    0

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