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Category: Technical SEO

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

  • danatanseo


    This was a brilliant post. I have a question about Pagination on sites that are opting to use Google Custom Search. Here is an example of a search results page from one of the sites I work on: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/search-return?q=countryman I notice in the source code of sequential pages that the rel="next" and rel="prev" tags are not used. I also noticed that the URL does not change when clicking on the numbers for the subsequent pages of the search results. Also, the canonical tag of every subsequent page looks like this: Are you thinking what I'm thinking? All of our Google Custom Search pages have the same canonical tag....Something's telling me this just can't be good. Questions: 1. Is this creating a duplicate content issue? 2. If we need to include rel="prev" and rel="next" on Google Custom Search pages as well as make the canonical tag accurate, what is the best way to implement this? Given that searchers type in such a huge range of search terms, it seems that the canonical tags would have to be somehow dynamically generated. Or, (best case scenario!) am I completely over-thinking this and it just doesn't matter on dynamically driven search results pages? Thanks in advance for any comments, help, etc.

    | danatanseo
    1
  • eversseo


    I recently rebuilt a static website to a wordpress site...In the privacy settings ....the -"Ask search engines not to index this site" was checked and I didn't notice. I had a top ranking website now its completely gone off google and every where else. I have unchecked it, resubmitted a sitemap to google.....does anyone know if this is permanent damage or if there is something else I can do to help fix this......I'm freaking out

    | eversseo
    0
  • xplodeguru


    I seen on google snippet review and it was showing profile photo in search but when i see directly on google.com it is not showing there.. what's the problem ?

    | xplodeguru
    0
  • enbphotos


    Hi There, I'm a recent addition to SEOmoz and over the past few weeks I've been trying to figure things out.  This whole SEO process has been a bit of a brain burner but its slowly becoming a little more clearer. For awhile I noticed that I was unable to get Open Site Explorer to display information about my site.  It mentioned that that there was not enough data for the URL.  Too recent of a site, no links, etc.  Eventually I changed the the URL to include "www." and it pulled up results. I also noticed that a few of my page warnings are because of duplicate page content.  One page will be listed as http://enbphotos.com.  The other will be listed as http://www.enbphotos.com. I guess I'm not sure what this all means and how to change it.  I'm also not really sure what the terminology even is and something regarding root domain seemed appropriate but I'm not sure if it is accurate. Any help/suggestions/links would be appreciated! Thanks, Chris

    | enbphotos
    0
  • zeepartner


    Howdyho I'm SEOing a daily deals site that mostly runs on https Versions. (only the home page is on http). I'm wondering what to do for canonicalization. IMO it would be easiest to run all pages on https. But the scarce resources I find are not so clear. For instance, this Youmoz blog post claims that https is only for humans, not for bots! That doesn't really apply anymore, right?

    | zeepartner
    0
  • Jdubin


    I am seeing a number of pages that I am doing 301 redirects  on coming up under the "Not Followed" category of the advanced index status in google webmasters.  Google says this might be because the page is still showing active content or the redirect is not correct.  I don't know how to tell if the page is still showing active content, and if someone can please tell me how to determine this it would be greatly appreciated.  Also if you can provide a solution for how to adjust my page to make sure that the content is not appearing to be active, that would be amazing.  Thanks in advance, here is a few links to pages that are experiencing this: www.luxuryhomehunt.com/homes-for-sale/sunnyisles.html www.luxuryhomehunt.com/homes-for-sale/summerield.html

    | Jdubin
    0
  • NWExterminating


    subdomain www.nwexterminating.com subfolder www.nwexterminating.com/pest_control www.nwexterminating.com/termite_services www.nwexterminating.com/bed_bug_services

    | NWExterminating
    0
  • xplodeguru


    I recently purchased EMD and it was been indexed by google. I also add one unique content that was also indexed but didn't try any SEO yet.. I already installed Yoast SEO plugin for that.. can you let me know which is fastest method to get my EMD well ranked...

    | xplodeguru
    0
  • Petersen11


    Hi, When i go trough my page, i can see that alot of my csref codes result in duplicate content, when SeoMoz run their analysis of my pages. Off course i get important knowledge through my csref codes, but im quite uncertain of how much it effects my SEO-results. Does anyone have any insights in this? Should i be more cautios to use csref-codes or dosent it create problems that are big enough for me to worry about them.

    | Petersen11
    0
  • VMLYRDiscoverability


    I am implementing page level re-directs for a large site but I know that I will inevitably miss some pages. Is there an additional safety net root level re-direct that I can use to catch these pages and send them to the homepage?

    | VMLYRDiscoverability
    0
  • callmeed


    I moved a wordpress blog from domain.com to domain.com/blog . I want to redirect the links in google from the old domain.com to the new one, but I also want to put a new site/application at domain.com..so I'm thinking an .htaccess 301 redirect at the root wouldn't work. Any tips?

    | callmeed
    0
  • MadhukarSV


    My website name www.commonsite.com (duplicate name), if i search in google with keyword common site, next to that i'm getting mouthshut bad reviews. I tried various methods till now i didnt get any improvement. Finally my doubt is my site has 6 sitelinks in the search engine. What will happen if i delete that ?? Can i get those pages results next to my main website home page results. Please clarify my doubt about sitelinks.

    | MadhukarSV
    0
  • DeptAgency


    A category page on an e-commerce sites, containing a list of the products within the category, usually shows the product image above the product text link. If both image and anchor text link to the product page, this would mean that the image is counted as the link in terms of ranking value. What would be the best way to make the anchor text count in stead of the image? I guess some ways would be: 1. Not making the product image a link
    2. Using some kind of link masking / redirecting technique for the image
    3. Employing a technical trick to make the anchor text link come first in the code readable by search engines. What would be the easiest way to solve this issue? Or do you believe it's not worth bothering?

    | DeptAgency
    0
  • firstjames


    Hi all, My website is based on Vbulletin forum software, with 10 years of database (about 50GB), my websitetraffic  is about 12mil/month, we using 20 server for  this website. Website down every day, when  i use SEOMoz to crawl my site, SEOMoz crawled 486 page, 462 page return 403 response code > i don't know why ??? I'm looking for someone (some company) who can help us to optimize this database, make it faster. Thanks for any contact/advice/suggestion company from you. Ninh

    | firstjames
    0
  • Cyclone


    For example... Having links that are geo-targeted and pointing to this URL www.test.com/state-service/ or Not having any geo-targeted internal pages and just having links that are geo-targeted and pointing to this URL www.test.com Eventually the site will be a national campaign, so I am concerned about having so many geo-targeted internal pages. Thanks in advance!

    | Cyclone
    0
  • cmaseattle


    So I wanted a quick sanity check on the htaccess syntax for migrating 3 domains into 1 new domain.  For example, we're migrating 3 sites abc.com, def.com and ghi.com, all into 1 new site on ghi.com. Here's the htaccess we're placing on the root of ghi.com: redirect 301 http://www.abc.com/wines.html http://www.ghi.com/wines redirect 301 http://www.def.com/trade.html http://www.ghi.com/trade
    redirect 301 http://www.ghi.com/winery-tours.html http://www.ghi.com/visit/taste On the DNS side of things, we're parking abc.com and def.com on the ghi.com server. I'm not seeing examples of htaccess files for this scenario, and none that use any domain info on the "from" side of the redirect 301 syntax.  Any suggestions before we pull the trigger? Thanks!

    | cmaseattle
    0
  • ahirai


    Sorry in advance if this isn't the best place to ask this question. Google Webmaster Tools has recently identified a ton of "Not Found" pages, which are actual pages with some digits appended at the end. For example, suppose an actual page on my blog is: (A) http://www.example.com/blog/2012/09/my-post-title/ This page works just fine. However, GWT has identified the following page as a "not found" page: (B) http://www.example.com/blog/2012/09/my-post-title/9157586677/1846732913010 This appears to be happening to hundreds of posts on my site. In each case, the "9157586677" portion of the URL is identical, but the remaining 13 digits change from page to page. I haven't been able to determine exactly what is causing this to happen - it's probably a social plug-in for Wordpress, or perhaps Disqus, but I'm not sure which one. I'll go through a process of elimination to narrow it down over the coming week. As a quick fix, I'd like to create a ModRewrite rule so that requests for (B) get 301 redirected to (A). Since there are hundreds of posts, I need to do this in a way that works regardless of what's in the "/2012/09/my-post-title/" part of the URL. Unfortunately, mod-rewrite is outside of my area of expertise. Can somebody please suggest how I can handle this? Thanks in advance. PS - As for tracking down the cause, I've looked at the source of the pages in the "Linked From" area of GWT and the Not Found link is nowhere to be found. That is why I assume the bad link is being generated by some javascript that is a part of one of my plug-ins. Update: It seems like Disqus is the source of these phantom links. There's considerable discussion here. I'll continue searching for a long-term solution. Meanwhile, I'd still appreciate help with the mod-rewrite question above. Thanks again.

    | ahirai
    0
  • choiceenergy


    I have a banner in the header that is constant across all pages except the one it links to.  It goes in before the content div and this search term is #1 across google in almost every variation, but it appears to link in a lot of the non relevant pages for #2 spots in some cases. While this is a relatively new domain (started 03/12), but this has been a constant rank for about 2 months. I'm wondering if this may be hurting the keyword targeting of my internal pages and if i should no follow that header image on all pages except the homepage?

    | choiceenergy
    0
  • JohnBerger


    I have product category pages that correctly have the prev next but the moz crawl is giving me duplicate content errors.  I would not think I also need to have canonical - but do I ?

    | JohnBerger
    0
  • Jon_bangonline


    We have a large amount of clients and when we are updating their Google Plus Places listing, the ad is still presented as active, however it is not live on Google and when you click to view the listing we get this message 'We currently do not support this location' I have researched this and found many people are having this issue, but no solutions as of yet. Can anyone shed some light on to this because some of our clients are not thrilled at the moment. Thanks Jon

    | Jon_bangonline
    0
  • esiow2013


    Hi guys, I've already added the following syntax in robots.txt to prevent search engines in crawling dynamic pages produce by my website's search feature: Disallow: /search/. But soft 404s are still showing in Google Webmaster Tools. Do I need to wait(it's been almost a week since I've added the following syntax in my robots.txt)? Thanks, JC

    | esiow2013
    0
  • kongregate


    Is there any community consensus about whether Microdata or RDFa Lite is the superior rich-snippet format? I work as a design/front-end-developer and in terms of pure coding, RDFa Lite seems the superior method. It looks to be more flexible and more extensible. The W3C spec is also more mature—it's a W3C Recommendation where Microdata is only a W3C Working Draft—so it's more likely to reach full standardization sooner. Also, because it's a Recommendation it's less likely to change. However, I hear Google "strongly recommends" the use of Microdata. Do they not support RDFa/RDFa Lite? There doesn't seem to be a great deal of discussion on this anywhere so I'm tempted to think it's sort of irrelevant. I am aware that Schema.org is, supposedly, now supporting RDFa Lite.

    | kongregate
    0
  • 858-SEO


    we are in the process or rewriting all the pages on one of our sites and will be changing some urls around. i was just wondering if dashes or underscores are better in the urls SEO wise? www.site.com/word-word-word/   or
    www.site.com/word_word_word/ i personally like the underscores better but some colleagues tell me that dashes are better, any tests out there on this issue?? Thanks

    | 858-SEO
    0
  • Ellsworth


    Over the years, we have acquired a great number of variations of our domains, or industry-specific domains to protect our brand. Currently, the majority of those domains are parked at the registrars. Would we do any harm to our rankings if we pointed the dormant domains to our website (www.ellsworth.com)? If not, are there any recommendations as the best way to do this, or just point them to the same IP?

    | Ellsworth
    0
  • OCFurniture


    Both SEOmoz and Google webmaster tools are returning over 4000 error 404.The majority or returned error URLs are for images, and all URLs end up with %20target=as shown belowimages/products/detail/AD9058RoundGlassTableChairs.jpg%20target=images/products/detail/BM921ModernRoundDiningTable.jpg%20target=images/products/detail/CR701506CappuccinoCoffeeTableSet.jpg%20target=any suggestions?RegardsTony

    | OCFurniture
    0
  • janrain


    Since our organization uses Google Business Apps, everyone in our org has a Google account under our company's domain name. When Google+ came out a lot of our employees set up two separate Google+ accounts (one under their work email address and one under their personal email address). Some people use one account more than the other. I'm about to set up rel=author on our blog, but I'm not sure which profiles to link to: personal account, business account or the account the individual uses the most?

    | janrain
    0
  • ilyaelbert


    Hello I'm currently working on two sites and I had some general question's about duplicate content. For the first one each page is a different location, but the wording is identical on each; ie it says Instant Remote Support for Critical Issues, Same Day Onsite Support with a 3-4 hour response time, etc. Would I get penalized for this? Another  question i have is, we offer Antivirus support  for providers ie Norton, AVG,Bit Defender etc. I was wondering if we will get penalized for having the same first paragraph with only changing the name of the virus provider on each page? My last question is we provide services for multiple city's and towns in various states. Will I get penalized for having the same content on each page, such as towns and producuts and services we provide? Thanks.

    | ilyaelbert
    0
  • TopFloor


    My client, www.warehouse-lighting.com, has all the links to its category pages on a left-side navigation structure.  Their competitor, www.prolighting.com has all of its category-page links listed under the drop-down menu of the top-level navigation.  I’m wondering if one way is better than the other for SEO and why?

    | TopFloor
    1
  • fireman


    My site can be accessed either with or without the www. Does this affect my search positions and do error 301-redirect cause any ill effects?

    | fireman
    0
  • Host1


    In google webmasters tools you have the feature "Crawl Errors". This one displays the top 1000 crawl errors google have on your site. I have around 16k crawl errors at the moment, which all are fixed. But i can only mark 1000 of them as fixed each day/each time google crawls the site.  (This as it only displays top 1000 errors. When i have marked those as fixed it won't show other errors for a while.) Does anyone know if it's possible to mark ALL errors as fixed in one operation?

    | Host1
    0
  • RanjeetP


    Hi Mozzers, I would like to keep it short, while checking the Index Status in my Google webmaster tools, I noticed that the number of URLs "Not Selected" is more than the no. of URLs under "Ever Crawled" the difference is also a large no, a 5 no. figure. Does anyone seen a similar pattern or any insights on this would be quite helpful. Cheers,

    | RanjeetP
    0
  • giftbasket4kids


    Hello All, I am an internet retailer www.giftbasket4kids.com  hit by Penguin and have made many changes to my site since first being hit on May 2011. It seems I lost my ranking in some keywords on the two following landing pages. I am OK on my other keywords /landing pages. http://www.giftbasket4kids.com/shop-by-category/gift-basket.html  keyword “Gift Basket Ideas” http://www.giftbasket4kids.com/pages/birthday-gifts.html Keywords “Birthday gift for kids, boys, Girls, Children” it seems all keyword that includes “Gift, Gifts” and “birthday”. Note: sometime most of the lost keywords come to 2<sup>nd</sup> page for a day or two then they disappear again I received a Google notice first week of August that there are unnatural links pointing to my site. There was couple of paid banner advertising. I stopped the links and request reconsideration. A week later I got response that there are still unnatural link pointing to the site. I request for reconsideration again and asked Google to let me know which links are in question.it is over 3 weeks I did not get  answer yet as I suspected. I have optimized most of my product (80 fresh content well optimized product pages) and added a lot new content. I am making links differently. I am using Squidoo lens to promote my products. I do not know what else I can do.  I have been told maybe I should restart new site! All my other keywords are ok . I do not want to start over. Can I make new landing pages and promote them? Would it work or the site is penalized for those keywords? I appreciate your advice in advance. If anyone knows of recoveries of a site like mine? I am looking for an SEO who has experience with relates to sites like mine. Do I have a chance to recover from penguin?

    | giftbasket4kids
    0
  • SteveK64


    Why are my back links not being recognized by any software other than google webmaster?

    | SteveK64
    0
  • PatioLifeStyle


    [1] My site development tool (XSP) has recently added the canonical reference as an auto-generated tag, so every page of my site now has it. Why is SEOmoz warning me that I have hundreds of pages of canonicals if it's supposed to be a GOOD thing? [2] Google is still seeing the pages without the canonical tag because that's how they were indexed. Will they eventually get purged from their index, or should I be proactive about that, and if so, how? Thanks for any input.

    | PatioLifeStyle
    0
  • JoeLin


    We recently updated our website and during the push,  someone mistakenly 301 redirected "www.brandx.com" to "brandx.com" instead of the otherway. Since then, our website no longer turns up for the search "brandx" on Google. We have reversed the mistake a few days ago, but we're still not turning up, and we used to rank #1 in Google SERP. Could it just be due to timing between the crawls and that our www. site didn't make it in Google's index due to this mistake? We have submitted our new sitemap to google a couple of days ago as well, as a side we're still showing up #1 in Bing's results however. And it should still show up based on SEOMoz's SERP report. Any help would help as I'm growing increasingly concerned.

    | JoeLin
    0
  • bobforesi


    I am an internet retailer hit by Panda and have made many changes to my site since first being hit on feb 2011. I had a slight recovery last september but have since slipped back again. I have scoured the internet for panda recoveries for internet retailers like me but I have not seen any. If anyone knows of recoveries of a site like mine (wackyplanet.com) -- we are on a yahoo store platform I would aappreciate any info as I am looking for an SEO who has experience with Panda as it relates to sites like mine.

    | bobforesi
    0
  • KristyO


    Hi, I recently (about 2 months ago) moved a blog from a separate domain name over to my eCommerce site to help with marketing. http://www.moondoggieinc.com/blog. I seem to have gotten it all to work right, but I'm getting tons of 404 errors and they all have " in them for example: http://www.moondoggieinc.com/blog/”http://www.moondoggieinc.com/custom_dog_tanks_and_tees.php” I'm not sure how this happened of how to fix it, but there are about 250 pages like this. I know how to redirect them all with a 301 in htaccess, but Im not sure if that's the appropriate course to fix this or if that's just putting a patch on something that's causing a more major issue. Or do i just need to write 250 301 redirects? Thanks! Kristy O

    | KristyO
    0
  • OlivierChateau


    We are in the process of making significant URL name/structure change to one of our property and we want to keep the social equity (likes, share, +1, tweets) from the old to the new URL. We have been trying many different option without success. We are running our social "button" in an iframe. Thanks

    | OlivierChateau
    0
  • Mase


    Not sure why I did it this way, but I need to know if this is bad for SEO - I suspect it is. Consider this is how the Logo and company name is shown on each page of our site. # UpCounsel, Inc Where the #title tag has a background image showing our company logo, rather than the actual company words. Then the CSS is also displacing the company text in favor of the logo, but also helps with accessbility so the first thing they see on the site is the company name. My question is - I should probably not use an H1 tag for this, right? And then in order to change this around, I should use H1's for the important title of the page. I understand there is some question about whether the page <title>and H1 should be the same, but we don't need to go there right now. ;-)</p></title>

    | Mase
    0
  • Timmmmy


    I have a website that has two issues related to SEO: 1) the main website (product.com) is not mobile-friendly and 2) I have a shopping cart site (buymyproduct.com) using Magento that basically duplicates our product pages that exist on the main marketing website. Uses click "buy now" on a product page and are sent to the checkout at "buymyproductnow.com". The company cannot overhaul product.com website right away and our shopping site (buymyproduct.com) uses a responsive theme and works well for iphone and iPad so I am thinking of making buymyproduct.com the mobile-friendly version of our website by using a sniffer on product.com and forwarding users to the mobile friendly version. If I add canonical references from the shopping cart product pages and articles back to product.com associated pages, will this lessen the blow to any seo issues? What other factors am I missing/need to consider Complicated and painful. Maybe doing nothing right now is best. Thanks for any feedback.

    | Timmmmy
    0
  • Zachary_Russell


    Hello, The site i'm referring to is http://www.pokeronamac.com, it was hacked via something called the "WordPress Pharma Hack" http://theblawblog.wordpress.com/2012/06/21/restoring-a-pharma-hacked-wordpress-site-wp-3-4/ We restored it as far as I can tell, but if anyone can confirm this by doing a site search and not getting redirected it would be appreciated. You will see that some search results still show up as spam, but when I click on them, they 404. I want to know If I should submit a reinclusion request, I wasn't notified by WMT of malaware, so I want to know the SOP here. Thanks Zach

    | Zachary_Russell
    1
  • Harley2g


    Having a discussion on if we should include our domain at the end of each site page. Re read over the following pages and question remove the brand to keep under 70 characters? or Shorten the page Title before the brand? Let the title exceed 70 characters? What is your thoughts?

    | Harley2g
    0
  • JohnBerger


    Our store is in magento and many recommend to turn of category names in product paths as magento creates duplicate pages for the same content when products are in multiple categories.  I have a canonical plugin that should fix dup paths. This has not bothered me until I decided to create GA goals for seeing multiple products and realized I dont have an easy filter because the paths dont have categories. I think I can add a suffix to products like /?t=p  - If I can do so will that be enough for me to create goals in GA - or am I better off adding back category paths.

    | JohnBerger
    0
  • Zachary_Russell


    I am in the middle of optimizing sites for SEO, and am wondering how big of a factor it is to get page load speed under 1.5 seconds? I am prioritizing tasks and I want to know how much this could affect trafiic? Thanks

    | Zachary_Russell
    1
  • ProjectLabs


    Suppose you are being outranked for a keyword phrase by a competitor but you have a significantly higher page authority and domain authority. 9 out of 10 people would consider the content better on our page. We have more links pointing to our page from highly authoritative sites than they do. What other reasons could explain why we are being outranked?

    | ProjectLabs
    0
  • Highforge


    We have a client we inherited that has flat text list of all the cities and counties they service on their contact page. They service the entire southeast so the list just looks crazy ridiculous. --------- Example: ---- South Carolina: Abbeville, Aiken, Allendale, Anderson, Bamberg, Barnwell, Beaufort, Berkeley, Calhoun, Charleston, Cherokee, etc etc ------ end example ------ The question is, will this help or hinder their seo for their very specific niche industry?  Is this key word spamming?   It has an end-user purpose so it technically isn't spam, but perhaps the engines may look at it otherwise.  I couldn't find a definitive answer to the question, any help would be appreciated.

    | Highforge
    0
  • LocalLocal


    We had a bunch of catalog pages "noindex,follow" 'ed. Now should we also submit removal request in WMT for these pages? Thank you! LL

    | LocalLocal
    0
  • benjaminspak


    I'm curious do you think Google would fault you or you'd get less link power if you made a page (on your website) of your guest posts from across the net and linked out to them?

    | benjaminspak
    1
  • 858-SEO


    Our site is has content in English and in Spanish. The spanish side was translated by me, Spanish is my first language, so i know that the translations are good and its original content. We were Pandalized/Penguinnized pretty bad earlier this year. We have completely cleaned our site of anything that could be considered thin content or grey hat techniques. An associate is telling me that we need to put the spanish version of the site on its own domain, does this make sense to anyone? The spanish side of the site gets only about 5% of the visitors, bu i still don't see the logic in taking all those pages and putting them on a different domain. Would this help recover from Panda/Penguin. Thanks

    | 858-SEO
    0
  • SiteWizard_LLC


    I'm a website developer, and in the past I have usually added a tiny backlink to the footer of my clients' websites like this: Website Design by MyCompanyName I understand that Google sees this as a low-quality backlink.  However, I was wondering if such links can hurt my rankings.  Does Penguin sees these links as spam?  If so, should I add a rel="nofollow" to the links?  Is there anything else I should change? I do not want to remove these links completely because they are good for marketing my business.  I just want to minimize any negative SEO impact of the links. I appreciate your input.  Thanks.

    | SiteWizard_LLC
    0

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