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.

  • Nightwing


    Bonjourno from Wetherby UK... Ive used a package called screamong frog to diagnose canonical errors but can anyone tell me what this means? http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/understand-occurances-canonical.jpg Thanks in advance. David

    | Nightwing
    0
  • blinkybill


    Well the title says it all really. Same query, different browsers, same computer and different search results. I thought at first it may have differed because I was logged into my google profile on chrome but I logged out and tested and still different results. Is this normal ?

    | blinkybill
    0
  • JamesDixon70


    Across various websites we found Google cache version in the browser loads the full site and all content is visible. However when we try to view TEXT only version of the same page we can't see any content. Example: we have a client with JS scroller menu on the home page. Each scroller serves a separate content section on the same URL. When we copy paste some of the page content in Google, we can see that copy indexed in Google search results as well as showing in Cache version . But as soon as we go into Text Only version we cant see the same copy. We would like to know which version we should trust, Google cache version or the TEXT only version.

    | JamesDixon70
    0
  • GreenHatWeb


    Hello, I'm helping a university transition to a brand new website. In some cases the URLs will change between the old site and new site. They will put 301 redirects in place to make sure that people who have old URLs will get redirected properly to the new URLs. However they also have a bunch of old pages that they aren't using anymore. They don't really care if people still try to get to them (because they don't think many will), but they do care about the overall search engine rankings. I know that if a site has internal 404 links, that could hurt rankings. However can external links that return a 404 hurt rankings? Ryan

    | GreenHatWeb
    0
  • smartlinksolutions


    I have a customer that has a PR 4 website with over 3000 pages of content.  He decided to build a brand new website with a new domain and it now has a PR of 2.  Our question is, what do we do with the old site?  Do we migrate all the content over to the new site and do redirects on all the pages?  Do we keep the old site up and put links over to the new site?  He was just planning on shutting it down but that seemed like a complete waste of PR and SEO.  What is his best course of action?  Thanks for your replies.

    | smartlinksolutions
    0
  • UnderRugSwept


    I'm sure this has been asked before, but I was looking at all of Google's results for my site and I found dozens of results for directories such as: Index of /scouting/blog/wp-includes/js/swfupload/plugins Obviously I don't want those indexed. How do I prevent Google from indexing those? Also, it only seems to be doing it with Wordpress, not any of the directories on my main site. (We have a wordpress blog, which is only a portion of the site)

    | UnderRugSwept
    0
  • digitalops


    Hello, I have a large list of URL's in an excel sheet and I am looking for a way to check them for 404 errors. Please help! Adam

    | digitalops
    0
  • 2CDevGroup


    Due to necessary pagination on the site that sells thousands of products, and due to products being assigned to more than one category in the Miva Merchant store, we have been battling duplicate content, and Meta tag issues. I asked lot of questions on the Miva forum on how to use rel canonical in Miva, and got this script below to use. It was supposed to solve all of our problems, but now it seems that every page of the site is under Rel Canonical Notices in the Crawl Diagnostics. I am not sure I am reading the Notices correctly, and if we achieved what we want or not. Here is an example of one listing: URL: http://www.domain.com/ABUS.html
    Tag Value: http://www.domain.com/
    Page Authority: 28
    Linking Root Domains: 1 |   |   |   |   |

    | 2CDevGroup
    0
  • mainguy


    I was googling the word "best web hosting" and i notice the 1st and 3rd result were results with google plus. Does Google plus now play a role in improving ranking for the website?I see a person's name next to the website too

    | mainguy
    0
  • levalencia1


    Since 5 days ago I changed my html template in my ecommerce to comply with schema.org for products. How long does it take to be seen on google, our keyword 4700DN, its one that appears in the top 10 results, but it still doesnt show it with schema.org (price+starts+ratings) What should I do? http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?view=cse&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.theprinterdepo.com%2Fhp-color-laser-4700dn-printer-q7493a

    | levalencia1
    0
  • thefresh


    My site is http://www.medic8.com and http://www.mealldubh.org has cloned my site and is now outranking my site. I have submitted DMCA requests to Google with no response. I do not know what to do now but surely it should be obvoius that this site has cloned me and there must be a way to have this scraper removed from the index? Im lost in terms of what I can do next so any help would be greatly appreacited.

    | thefresh
    0
  • vibelingo


    Hi, I am a working on a new web site, and I want to redirect all the urls of another site (on a different host) to this one. According to both hosts it is "impossible" to do this for all urls. I don't believe that to be the case, but how do I do this? And, should both sites be hosted on the same server first?

    | vibelingo
    0
  • BruLee


    Hello everyone, Is it bad to have your website pages indexed as .php? For example, the contact page is site.com/contact.php and not /contact. Does this affect your SEO rankings in any way? Is it better to have your pages without the extension? Also, if I'm working with a news site and the urls are dynamic for every article (ie site.com/articleid=2323.) Should I change all of those dynamic urls to static? Thank You.

    | BruLee
    0
  • CassisGroup


    We are well into development of a hotel affiliate website (using Expedia Affiliate Network), and I know there are many challenges to SEO when using an affiliate system - one of the biggest being how to handle duplicate content. Outside of blog posts and static marketing pages, the majority of the textual content is contained in hotel descriptions. We will be creating unique descriptions over time, but we are a small team and this will be a lengthy process. My question for you mozzers, is whether or not it's advisable for ranking purposes to noindex any page with mostly 'stock' content, and only allow Google to index hotel pages with unique descriptions? Thanks for any input!

    | CassisGroup
    0
  • catherine-279388


    Hello Mozers I'd like to know if two existing GPP can have the same name 'spabycar'.  At present 'mobile nail technician' based in W1 and 'spabycar 'WD' are ranking (ironically the one that has the old brand name is very high!). Both need to be 'spabycar' If this is feasible, is there a down side, and is there a good tutorial source for an aspirant to follow? Thanks Catherine

    | catherine-279388
    0
  • Alick300


    Which occurs first caching or indexing?

    | Alick300
    0
  • RichardB2


    HI, I am confused . This week SEOMoz is reporting that all my pages and pages titles are duplicate. This is not the case. I have added geo meta tags to each page - could this be causing the duplicate page content condition? I have no theory about the title duplicate condition. I have uploaded pdfs of these seomoz reports here: http://www.2shared.com/document/JAgS2Ni9/Issue_-Duplicate_Page_Content.html http://www.2shared.com/document/gyXcMsoP/Issue-Duplicate_Page_Title-.html Help please. thanks.

    | RichardB2
    0
  • DMGoo


    Im creating an a to z type directory of internal pages within a site of mine however there are cases where there are over 500 links within the pages. I intend to use pagination (rel=next/prev) to avoid too many links on the page but am worried about indexation issues. should I be worried?"

    | DMGoo
    0
  • Wello1234


    Hi, I have a couple of websites where I can't define the title tag (CMS does not support it) on a few default pages. On these pages "the system" just uses the primary/main title tag (from the frontpage) and my programming skills (as if I have any...!) have not been able to make a html code or something to override the main title tag on these specific pages. Does this make sense at all and can anyone give me a hint, a code to try out or something? Problem is that I now have 3 pages with the same title tag which in terms of SEO isn't too good, so to say... Thanks in advance. Jan

    | Wello1234
    0
  • semer


    I need to  redirect the web pages which do not exist  to 404 error the task need to be done in htaccess file. I am using Linux server. the webpages I want to redirect is my domain name followed by question mark e.g. www.mydomain.com/?dfdds I am using the following snippet in my htaccess file, it redirect to bing.com so far, please tell me how to change the snippet so that it redirect to redirect to 404 error page. ========================== RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} . RewriteRule .* http://www.bing.com? [L,R]

    | semer
    0
  • LCNetwork


    Higher-level page with more power getting pushed out by weaker page in the SERPs for an important keyword. I don't care about losing the weaker page. Should I: 404 the weaker page and wait for Google to (hopefully) replace it with the stronger page? 301 the weaker page to the stronger page? NOTE: Due to poor communication between content team and myself, the weak and strong pages have similar title tags (i.e, "lawsuits" and "litigation")

    | LCNetwork
    0
  • nlopes


    I've got several errors pointing to canonical tag, but do not know how to solve.Any help? Rel Canonical Found 6 days ago <dl> <dt>Tag value</dt> <dd>http://www.yougraph.com/</dd> <dt>Description</dt> <dd>Using rel=canonical suggests to search engines which URL should be seen as canonical.</dd> </dl> <a class="more expanded">Minimize</a>

    | nlopes
    1
  • IvieDigital


    I'm working on a site that has a jquery image rotation. Wondering if how the developer set it up is consider blackhat or spammy at all. The jquery has 3 images that rotate. Each image has text in it - which is then placed in a H1 or H2 tag behind the images. When viewing the site with images and javascript turned off it looks like the text is the same color as the background and not lined up nicely so that it is visible to anyone who has images and javascript turned off. Let me know if this is a bad practice. If so, what is the best practice to handle this? If the text were another color and aligned neatly visible behind the image would it be safe? Should we just be using an image alt tag instead? What about losing the H1, H2 power then? Any other suggestions for improving the SEO for jquery image rotations where important text appears? I can PM the site URL if you want to take a look. Thanks in advance!

    | IvieDigital
    0
  • semer


    when I search my website on google by site:www.mydomain.com I have found my domain with www has been de-indexed by google, but when I search site:mydomain.com,  my home page--**mydomain.com **show up on the search results without www,   put it simple, google only index my domain without www, I wonder how to make my domain with www being indexed, and how to prevent this problem occure again.

    | semer
    0
  • SeoSheikh


    Hi, i have a question about anchor text within my sites content. It 'jumps' to content displayed further down the page via a side navigation at the top. These links don't take you away to any other page, instead take you further down the page to the relavent content. My question is this: I've noticed in the URL that the anchor text - #jumpnavlink is placed at the end of the pages URL like so.. www.mywebsite.com/example-page.php#jumpnavlink Is this creating a problem for duplicate content?
    Is it creating a new URL for viewers to use?
    Is it ok to have lots of these running throughout my sites content pages? Many thanks for any light that is shed on this one! Cheers
    Alex

    | SeoSheikh
    0
  • BlazeSunglass


    I have a Magento site.  In order to reduce duplicate content for products of the same style but with different colours I have combined them on to 1 product page. I would like to allow the pictures to be dynamic, i.e. allow a user to search for a colour and all the products that offer that colour appear in the results, but I dont want the default product image shown but the product image for that colour applying to the query. Therefore to do this I have to append a query string to the end of the URL to produce this result: www.website.com/category/product-name.html?=red My question is, will the query variations then be picked up as duplicate content: www.website.com/category/product-name.html www.website.com/category/product-name.html?=red www.website.com/category/product-name.html?=yellow Google suggest it has contingencies in its algorithm and I will not be penalised: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2007/09/google-duplicate-content-caused-by-url.html But other sources suggest this is not accurate.  Note the article was written in 2007.

    | BlazeSunglass
    0
  • Nightwing


    Greetings from 13 degrees C wetherby UK 🙂 Ive hit a roadbloack in my attempts to get a target term onto page one, below is a url pointing to  a graph illustrting the situation. The target term is on the graph (I'm reluctant to stick it in here incase this page comes up) http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/glass-ceiling-office-to-let.jpg This is what Ive done to date for page -
    http://www.sandersonweatherall.co.uk/office-to-let-leeds/ 1. Ensured the Markup follows SEO best parctice
    2. Internally linked to the page via a scrolling footer
    3. Shortened the URL
    4. Requested the Social media efforts points links to the page
    5. Requested additional content But i wonder... Is the reason for hitting a glass ceiling now down to lack of content ie just one page or is there a deeper issue of an indexing road block? Any insights welcome 🙂

    | Nightwing
    0
  • LoudClear


    Hi guys, I recently taken over SEO for strikebowling.com.au and I'm stumped to what has happened with the keyword 'Bowling' for the home page. Historically they have been ranking 5-6 for the year and they do come up in the local results. Start of September, bang they drop out of the top 100 for Bowling. No other words seem to be effected. However the keyword 'Bowling Alley' did improve around the same time for an internal page. What could have happened? A single keyword penalty? No messages in Webmaster tools No dodgy link building Look forward to some theories. Regards, Corey

    | LoudClear
    0
  • classa


    My on page optimization grade is an "A" with the following factors; Factor Overview <dl class="scoreboard clearfix"> <dt>Critical Factors</dt> <dd>4 / 4</dd> <dt>High Importance Factors</dt> <dd>7 / 7</dd> <dt>Moderate Importance Factors</dt> <dd>8 / 9</dd> <dt>Low Importance Factors</dt> <dd>11 / 11</dd> <dt>Optional Factors</dt> <dd>5 / 5</dd> </dl> The main thing I appear to be missing is keywords in my URL. How truly important is that in today's SEO world and how much time or ranking would be lost if I do not have control to change the external links to my website if I decided to migrate to a keyword relevant url?

    | classa
    0
  • GrassRootsSEO


    I am working on a site for a colleague and have installed wordpress on their server in the wp directory, they want the root domain redirecting to the wp directory but everything i have tried seems to throw up errors. i need sample.co.uk to redirect to sample.co.uk/wp/ no matter which html file they are trying to access on the root of the sample.co.uk site help?

    | GrassRootsSEO
    0
  • Endora


    In my SEO MOZ reports I am getting over 400 errors as Meta-robots Nofollow. These are all leading to my admin login page which I do not want robots in. Should I put some code on these pages so the robots know this and don't attempt to and I do not get these errors in my reports?

    | Endora
    0
  • Blenny


    This post was derived from the fact that our website, which uses AJAX and AJAX urls formatted using Google's crawl guidelines (and ranks well), is being completely misread by BingHoo's bots (and destroying our rankings). After some research, we found that Bing's tools used to contain an option for their crawlers to interpret AJAX-infused urls, but that this feature was removed with the latest update. I've seen others post on this issue with no response, so I figured I'd post the customer support email we received below - kind of strange thing to receive. Takeaway - even AJAX done right is rough in BingHoo. (sorry I can't post my site here..). Hello, This is Roxanne of Bing Technical Support and I will be assisting you with this issue. I understand that you cannot find the Configure Bing for AJAX Crawling box in Bing Webmaster. Let me explain. We appreciate your feedback about Bing Webmaster tools. We regret to inform you that Bing Webmaster Tools is no longer directly supporting AJAX. We'll pass this feedback onto our Bing development team. If you are having ajax-specific related issues with your site in Webmaster tools, please let us know. We apologize for the time spent and the inconvenience this may have caused you.  If you should require further clarification and need more assistance, please feel free to reply to this email. Thank you and have a great day! Regards, Roxanne Bing Technical Support

    | Blenny
    0
  • Probikeshop


    Hi, I would like to know what are the best practices in 2012 to index our website in less than 24 hours? (or less..) Thanks for your answer 😄

    | Probikeshop
    0
  • Probikeshop


    Hi, I permit to contact the community again because you have good and quick answer ! Yesterday, I lost the file .htaccess on my server. Right now, only the home page is working and the other pages give me this message : Not Found The requested URL /freshadmin/user/login/ was not found on this server Could you help me please? Thanks

    | Probikeshop
    0
  • Alick300


    Is there cg-bin folder of any site related to SEO in anyways and why we always block Cgi-bin folder in robots.txt.

    | Alick300
    0
  • MatShepSEO


    I have a client with a website that is hosted on a shared webserver running on an Nginx server. When I started working on the website a few months ago I found the server was throwing 100s of 403s and 503s and at one point googlebot couldn't access robots.txt. Needless to say this didn't help rankings! Now the web hosting company has partially resolved the errors by switching to a new server and I'm now just seeing intermittent spikes in Webmaster Tools of 30 to 70 403 ad 503 errors. My questions: Am I right in saying there should (pretty much) be no such errors (for pages that we make public and crawlable). Having already asked the web hosting company to look in to this. Any advice on specifically what I should be asking them to look at on the server? If this doesn't work out, does anyone having a recommendation for a reliable web hosting company in the U.S. for a lead generation website with over 20,000 pages and currently 500 to 1000 visits per day? Thanks for the help Mozzers 🙂

    | MatShepSEO
    0
  • Nightwing


    Greetings from medieval York UK 🙂 Everytime to you enter my name & Liz this page is returned in Google:
     http://www.davidclick.com/web_page/al_liz.htm But i have the following robots txt file which has been in place a few weeks User-agent: * Disallow: /york_wedding_photographer_advice_pre_wedding_photoshoot.htm Disallow: /york_wedding_photographer_advice.htm Disallow: /york_wedding_photographer_advice_copyright_free_wedding_photography.htm Disallow: /web_page/prices.htm Disallow: /web_page/about_me.htm Disallow: /web_page/thumbnails4.htm Disallow: /web_page/thumbnails.html Disallow: /web_page/al_liz.htm Disallow: /web_page/york_wedding_photographer_advice.htm Allow: / So my question is please... "Why is this page appearing in the SERPS when its blocked in the robots txt file e.g.:  Disallow: /web_page/al_liz.htm" ANy insights welcome 🙂

    | Nightwing
    0
  • GeorgFranz


    Hi, I've a calender page which changes every day. The main url is
    /calendar For every day, there is another url: /calendar/2012/09/12
    /calendar/2012/09/13
    /calendar/2012/09/14 So, if the 13th september arrives, the content of the page 
    /calendar/2012/09/13
    will be shown at
    /calendar So, it's duplicate content. What to do in this situation? a) Redirect from /calendar to /calendar/2012/09/13 with 301? (but the redirect changes the day after to  /calendar/2012/09/14) b) Redirect from /calendar to /calendar/2012/09/13 with 302 (but I will loose the link juice of /calendar?) c) Add a canonical tag at /calendar (which leads to /calendar/2012/09/13) - but I will loose the power of /calendar (?) - and it will change every day... Any ideas or other suggestions? Best wishes, Georg.

    | GeorgFranz
    0
  • proaspirant


    Hi all, I am really excited to be here. I joined seo moz three weeks ago.  Seo moz crawled my website twice and still under competitive domain analysis my domain authority is 1 and everything else underneath is zero. I fixed some errors and warning after first crawl but still nothing in root domain metrics. Can anyone please explain whats happening? Thank you!

    | proaspirant
    0
  • smilingbunny


    Would you ever wrap a Logo in an H1 tag? The logo is an image, but is in an area that would cause it to make the most sense when forming my page into a proper hierarchy format. Thanks in advance for any help!

    | smilingbunny
    0
  • kevinyu1029


    I just realized that my blog, (www.onbetterterms.com) just recently got blacklisted.  That blog actually redirects to www.springcoin.com/blog On May 25th, Google released the Penguin 1.1 update.  After looking at my rankings, I found out that all my keywords positions were dropped. I have no idea why, and don't know how to fix this.  Any help would be greatly appreciated.

    | kevinyu1029
    0
  • qbeeker


    We are migrating to a new website that will be using entirely new URLs under the same domain as the old website. The old website is a custom PHP script and the new website uses Drupal. I know that I should use individual 301 redirects to the corresponding new pages. My question is just how to set up the hundreds of 301 redirects from the old website to the new one? Here is the process I've come up with. Please let me know if there is an easier and better way for this. Before actually changing to the new website: download an advanced report with all pages on this domain from OSE. Find corresponding pages on the new website Make the hundreds of 301 redirect lines in an .htaccess file with the following code: redirect 301 /oldurl.html http://domain.com/the-full-url Thanks in advance for your help!

    | qbeeker
    0
  • RKanfi


    The concept of using text sliders in an e-commerce site as a solution to placing SEO text above or in between product and high on ages, seems too good to be true.... or is it? How would a text slider for FAQ or other on-page text done with sliding paragraphs (similar but not this specific code- http://demo.tutorialzine.com/2010/08/dynamic-faq-jquery-yql-google-docs/faq.html) might effect text-on-page SEO. Does Google consider it hidden text? Would there be any other concerns or best practices with this design concept? faq.html

    | RKanfi
    0
  • blinkybill


    I am assuming that the list presented by Google Webmaster tools (TRAFFIC | Links To Your Site) is the one that will actually be used by Google for indexing ? There seem to be quite a few links that there that should not be there. ie Assumed NOFOLLOW links. Am I working under an incorrect  assumption that all links in webmaster tools are actually followed ?

    | blinkybill
    0
  • catherine-279388


    Hi I've had a couple of Google Places Pages for a few years.  They rank well.  I've just discovered Getlisted, via a tutorial. It will not see that I have claimed these pages.  Can see Yelp etc.  Any ideas. thanks Catherine

    | catherine-279388
    0
  • ClaireH-184886


    hi, i do not have the budget to have a redesign, so i am thinking about getting a newspaper template for www.in2town.co.uk and i would like some advice. I am using gavick pro at the moment but there templates seem slow, so i am looking for a joomla newspaper template with k2 enabled and would like to know if anyone could recommend a company and template. I would also like to know if people think i should stick with the design i have at the moment for a year or so when i can afford a company to design a professional template or do you think i should go our an buy a template any help would be great.

    | ClaireH-184886
    0
  • ZeeCreative


    I've noticed that Google is able to find, crawl and index preview subdomains we set up for new client sites (e.g. clientpreview.example.com). I know now to use "meta name="robots" and robots.txt) to block the search engines from crawling these subdomains. My question though, is how is Google finding these subdomains? We don't link to these preview domains from anywhere else, so I can't figure out how Google is even getting there. Does anybody have any insight on this?

    | ZeeCreative
    0
  • LocalLocal


    Site was hit by Panda Aug. 22nd.  Lost 90% of Google traffic. I know 🙂 We think we found a reason and made few changes to landing pages structure. Updated sitemaps submitted. When can we expect effect (if any) - few days or after next Panda data refresh? Thank you!P.S. What is also interesting, similar traffic loss from Bing/Yahoo happened at exactly the same date. Does that mean Bing is "stealing" search results from Google when can't provide their own relevant results? 🙂

    | LocalLocal
    0
  • RobertChapman


    I'd dread the answer being the latter rather than the former as we've spent two years building it blog.domain... However I noticed SEOmoz are domian.tld/blog and it got me thinking.... Cheers. R.

    | RobertChapman
    0
  • Zilla


    I am looking at changing the platform of an established (7 years) site to PHP based. Currently most of the URLs have the file extension .htm (“x.com/filename.htm” ) with some URLs being indexed as directory URLs (“x.com/directory/” feeding from “x.com/directory/index.htm”) So I am considering two options A. Changing just file extensions & create 301 redirects, (x.com/samefilename.htm” -> “x.com/samefilename.php”) and for directory URLs (“x.com/samedirectory/index.htm” -> “x.com/samedirectory/index.php”) B. At the same time taking the opportunity to change the file hierarchy to be more user / seo friendly by changing all URLs to directory URLs – this would be a more extensive redirect than just changing the file extension. I am interested in what risks / impact would there be of this and the questions I would like some help with are: Are there any short term risks to rankings with a filename extension change like this? Should an exercise like this be staggered or is it ok to carry out the site-wide change in one go? Does a more extensive filename and structure redirect like in option B above introduce more risk than just changing to the .php extension or would the search engines consider this the same? For the directory URLs do I even need a 301 redirect after changing index.htm to index.php or will the Search engines not even recognise a change (indexed URL will remain the same)? Your opinions on the above questions and any other advice / experience you can share would be much appreciated. Thanks, Adrian.

    | Zilla
    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.