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Category: Technical SEO

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

  • amastix


    I'm assisting evaluating 5 different CMS solutions for a client. As a part of this evaluation, I want to ensure we fully explore the SEO capabilities and short comings of the different platforms. Which factors would you recommend we consider? Currently, I'm thinking: custom URLs custom page titles, meta data, etc automatic sitemap updates customize robots/indexing settings site load times rel canonical support code & css quality 301 redirect functionality What else should be on this list? Is there anything on my list that you would de-prioritize? At risk of making this question too large: any opinions out there on what the most SEO friendly CMS systems are?

    | amastix
    0
  • waynekolenchuk


    I have a young site (6 most) that is almost completely indexed by Google but Bing and Yahoo will only index a few pages. Does anyone have any tips for getting more pages indexed in Bing and Yahoo. The site is registered with Bing Webmaster tools and has a valid XML sitemmap.

    | waynekolenchuk
    0
  • KateGMaker


    So we have a lot of UGC on our site and so the title of pages is often created by the user and this has created about 400 pages with over 70 characters and I was just wondering what people think. I know typically keeping them short and sweet is the best thing, but what about when it's the user doing it? Should I go ahead and cut off the titles at 70 characters or keep them? I don't see it hurting traffic so I'm basically just looking for opinions right now.

    | KateGMaker
    0
  • media-surfer


    Hi, My client wants to expand it's business to Germany and logically we need a domain name to match. We've found a great one and regsiterd several variants to it. However I just found out that in Germany it is possible (while here it's not) to register a domain with an umlaut. My question is: will google assign more value to: schädlinge.de than schadlinge.de when users search for schädlinge? If yes, how large will the difference be? (I will use an umlaut in the title etc) Kind regards,
    Jason.

    | media-surfer
    0
  • ClaireH-184886


    hi. i am working on a site at the moment www.in2town.co.uk and i am trying to decide if on the second column of my site where it says uk news, if i should keep it the way it is and have content under the picture or should i get rid of the content under the picture and just have the main title. I am wanting to know if the content under the picture is important for google and for the reader or would it be better just to have the title which is h2. any help would be great.

    | ClaireH-184886
    0
  • jayderby


    Hi there, I'm looking into an issue with a site that was hit after Penguin was introduced. The site lost 70% of traffic over night. The site in question seemed to have a large number of backlinks with over optimized anchor text which seems to most likely be the reason for drop in rankings. But there is also some links from blog networks here too unfortunately, so my question here really is do Google just devalue these links and discount them from consideration in their ranking algorithm or do the links still count but instead of adding positive affects in SERPs add a negative affect? My reason for this question is I'm trying to determine whether it's worth saving this website or just starting fresh with a new domain. That does bring me to another question, if I have to start fresh on a new domain is it a possibility to reuse the content from the old site? (providing I remove the URLs from Google via Webmaster tools). Any help/advice/answers here would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

    | jayderby
    0
  • PatBausemer


    Hi All, Hoping you can help me out with a couple of questions I have. I am looking to create SEO friendly landing pages optimized for long tail keywords to increase site traffic and conversions. These pages will not live on the main navigation. I am wondering what the best way to get these pages indexed is? Internal text linking, adding to the sitemap? What have you done in this situation? I know that these pages cannot be orphaned pages and they need to be linked to somewhere. Looking for some tips to do this properly and to ensure that they can become indexed. Thanks! Pat

    | PatBausemer
    0
  • KateGMaker


    So on our site we have a plugin for our fan gallery. The issue is that I am getting a lot of duplication errors and it's saying the URL is too long and all the errors are coming from the Fan Gallery, which has over 8,000 errors. It seems to be pulling a long form query URL that has over 100 characters. You can't physically see it on the site, but the crawlers can. Anyway I'm trying to figure out a fix for this. One method would be to just stop those pages from being crawled, but I would hate to do that as the fan gallery for us would be a great source of links and content. So I'm wondering if anyone else has had an issue with these types of plugins before where the user can upload a photo or do a video embed and then it submits to the site. If you have a better method please let me know. I usually work on E-comm platforms so my experience with drupal is limited.

    | KateGMaker
    0
  • DTOSI


    "At the end of July I received a message in my Google webmaster tools saying "Googlebot can't access your site" We checked our robots.txt file and removed a line break in it, and then I had Google Fetch the file again. I have not received any more messages since then. When we created the website I wrote all of the content and optimized each page for about 1 local keyword. A few weeks after I checked my keywords and did have a few on the first page of google. Since then almost all of them have completely disappeared. Because we had not link building effort I would not expect to still be on the first page, but I should definitely be seeing them before the 5th or even 10th page of Google. The address is http://www.tile-pompanobeach.com I'm not sure if these horrible results have something to do with the message from Google or something else. The problem is this client now wants to sign a contract with us for SEO and I really have no Idea what happened and if I will be able to figure it out. The main keyword for my home page is tile pompano beach and I aslo was using Pompano Beach Tile store for the About page which was previously on the first page of Google. Does anyone have some input?

    | DTOSI
    0
  • ClaireH-184886


    Hi. I am hoping that some of you can help me with the in2town site www.in2town.co.uk The site is a news/lifestyle magazine site. The site is a cross between, huffington post, digital spy, female first and the sun newspaper. Basically the site is a news site as well as covering showbiz news, travel news, health news and advice etc What i would like is for people to look at the site and let me know what they feel i should do to improve the site to make it better for our readers and to gain more readership. I would also like to hear from people on how they find moving around the site as well as the speed of the site. At the moment the site is with an american hosting company and i am in the process of talking to UK hosting companies to move the site. The site is currently on a dedicated server. It would mean a lot if people could give me their advice on how to improve the site and make it a beter experience for our readers while at the same time being able to generate income with the site. Just a quick note, all content is original and we have a number of people who write for the site. many thanks

    | ClaireH-184886
    0
  • frankrizzo


    Hi, My question is in reference to an E-commerce site- Our SEO MOZ scan is showing many errors for Duplicates- such as Duplicate titles - The majority of these are on the products map- and the page titles are Products Map :: Company Name How do we get correct this or does Google not penalize for it? Thanks.

    | frankrizzo
    0
  • GAZ09


    Hi Guys, Can someone please provide some pointers on how to best increase your Domain Authority?? Thanks Gareth

    | GAZ09
    0
  • CoL-PR


    Hi everyone, I'm working on a website that uses a lot of short urls eg http://www.forest.com/oaktrees. A quick check reveals these are currently 302 status. My question is should these be made 301s - a lot of them are in off-page content and looking at GA attract a lot of clicks. I've not managed to see a definitive answer to this after several Google searches. All help and advice greatly appreciated. Bw Jon

    | CoL-PR
    0
  • emmyjo


    When you Google my site the organic search results look normal. The preview site images even display my actual site when you roll over the results. However, when you click a result you are directed to various Spam pages, not my website. How is this possible? This only happens when you click through from search engines. If you type the URL directly in your browser, you are not redirected to a spam site. the site: funeralhomeoptions.com Have any of you seen or experienced this before?

    | emmyjo
    0
  • seosquared


    When creating a url rewrite or shortcut, does this create duplicate content issues? split your rankings / authority with google/search engines? Scenario 1 wwwlwhatthehellisahoneybooboo.com/dqotd/ -> www.whatthehellisahoneybooboo.com/08/12/2012/deep-questions-of-the-day.html Scenario 2 bitly.com/hbb -> www.whatthehellisahoneybooboo.com/08/12/2012/deep-questions-of-the-day.html (or to make it more compicated...directs to the above mentioned scenario 1 url rewrite) www.whatthehellisahoneybooboo.com/dqotd/ *note well- there's no server side access so mentions of optimizing .htacess are useless in this situation. To be clear, I'm only referring to rewrites, not redirects...just trying to understand the implications of rewrites. Thanks!

    | seosquared
    0
  • ClaireH-184886


    Hi, i am looking for a good template club for joomla. I am looking for a template club that offers magazine and news style templates which are optimised and are not slow. A template i have been using has been reported as running slow and i want to change our template. any help would be great.

    | ClaireH-184886
    0
  • footyfriends


    Hello folks Apologies for my ignorance, but a SEO novice here… One of our competitors boasts over 300,000 external links, however when we analysed their links via http://www.opensiteexplorer.org we can only see around 10,000 in there “Number of Domains Linking to this Page” section. Can someone please assist and point out something which I assume is painfully obvious! Cheers, Chris

    | footyfriends
    0
  • Kinsel


    So since the Penguin update the clients of the company I work for have gradually been losing traffic and money. Noone (except for me) has noticed this yet and connected the dots. Yesterday we all get called in to have a bollocking and the manager asks the head of our department if he would be confident of being able to get 600+ visitors a day to an 'average website' that has just started up, to which he replied 'yes'. Since I started here back in February there has not been a single new client that has been able to gain that many visitors (many have not gained even 25% of that figure), which in the post-panda and post-pegnuin world, I find completely understandable. When I first started here they were using SEO 'tactics' which people used to employ 5+ years ago and didn't even use exact match keyword data.I have had a few talks with them about how SEO has changed over the last few years and they still don't seem to understand that it is now significantly more difficult to gain traffic using SEO than it once was. If you were asked about the same question, thinking about the 'average' client you might get, would you be confident enough to guarantee that at the 6 month mark they would be getting 600+ visitors a day?

    | Kinsel
    0
  • Hughescov


    As the title states, my page authority (PA) has completely disappeared for certain pages on my site.
    I have recently had a redesign and optimised the page names, redirecting the page it has replaced.
    This has been nearly 2 months now and the new pages are showing PA of 1 still.
    The 301 redirects definitely work so what am I doing wrong? Thanks in advance!

    | Hughescov
    0
  • dencreative


    Hi there, I've got two sites mysite.com and mysite.org .org is indexed by google, .com doesnt seem to be. .com is used for some material that is sent out, and accounts for about 20% of incoming visotors. (80% end up on .org) Is there any positive or negative effect from this? Would I benefit from 301'ing the .com to .org?

    | dencreative
    0
  • DougRoberts


    First the good news. One site that I've been working on has seen an increase in traffic from 2k/month to 80k! As well as lots of visitors, the site is also getting lots of comments with one page getting more than 70 comments/day and showing no sign of a slow down! Approximately 3000 comments in total and growing! What is the best approach for handling this? I'm not talking about the review/approval/response but just in the way these comments are presented on the website taking both seo and usability into account. Does anyone have any particular recommendations? Options I've considered are: Just show the most recent x comments and ignore the rest. (Nobody is going to read 3000 comments!) Paginate comments (risk of duplicate content? Using Ajax could hide long-tail phrases in comments?) Show all comments (page load speed is suffering and this is likely to be causing problems for mobile visitors) How do active comments on a page contribute to an article's freshness? Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

    | DougRoberts
    2
  • NileCruises


    Google has identified Malware on on eof our Wordpress sites. In webmaster tools it names the 10 pages where code has been injected. I cant' find them easily via the WP dashboard and wondered if anyone had had any experience of this and what steps they took? Plus are there any measure I can take to fight against this? The site is on the latest WP version. Thanks, Colin

    | NileCruises
    0
  • AndreVanKets


    Hi All, To my knowledge, Hcards for rich snippets are generally used by bloggers etc. I would like to use the business logo rather than a photo of myself, as well as the business twitter, G+ local profiles and Bio for the business. The Author page will be the "about us" page with info about the company. Is this OK? Or does it have to be personal?

    | AndreVanKets
    0
  • vansy


    The crawl shows a lot of duplicate content on my site. Most of the urls its showing are categories and tags (wordpress). so what does this mean exactly? categories is too much like other categories? And how do i go about fixing this the best way. thanks

    | vansy
    0
  • uMoR


    Hello Everybody,
    I manage an e-commerce website and we have a duplicated content issue for subcategory. The scenario is like this: /category1/subcategory1
    /category2/subcategory1
    /category3/subcategory1 A single subcategory can fit multiple categories, so we have 3 different URL for the same subcategory with the same content (except of the navigation link). Which are the best practice to avoid this issue? Thank you!

    | uMoR
    0
  • innofidelity


    In my report this indicates 404 : Error http://www.thexxxhouse.com/what_sets_us_aparat.html This web page removed from server .How to fix this in SEO friendly way .

    | innofidelity
    0
  • reddogmusic


    Until recently all of our product pages (we run an eCommerce site) had product descriptions copied directly off the manufacturer's sites. Obviously this isn't good from an SEO perspective, so we were planning to write our own original copy. My question is: should we keep the manufacturer's copy too? This is often good, useful content from a customer's perspective, but obviously it's not original. Any help appreciated! Alex

    | reddogmusic
    0
  • vansy


    This is probably going to look bad, but Im  going to do it anyway. Ive owned my own business for over twenty five years. Due to the economy and a health crisis, my business has come to an end.  Im left pretty much with nothing except my family, which is on shakey grounds as well. anyway. Ive been working on the IM, SEO thing for about two years. Ive made some money, but nothing that would make a difference to my situation. I now have a site in a competitive niche. The site is rated A by the app here on seomoz. But my site is lacking in authority backlinks. I write my own posts, about two a day, and honestly, it is of much better quality than those ranking . My site stays right around #11. Every other day, the site goes to #7 or 8. When that happens, I make between 300-400 a day. Then it falls back to 11. So the on site is good, rated A here. My site is speedy Not enough backlinks The content is good I was foolish enough to believe the G story about backlinks not being important. Concentrate on the content. All of that crapola. The sites that are ranking well have all the typical xrumer links. Totally not related links. Junk. And from what Ive seen, I believe the sites ranking 1-3 are making about $1000. a day. So you can imagine what being this close, after losing so much is doing to me. So.... Right now I am just writing content, pinging, social bookmarking and submitting rss feeds  daily. Does anyone have any real information on how to bump my site up in rankings. Please, no stories about guest blogging, or attempts to sell me your SEO service I know I would do it for someone else and I have many times in the past. If you can help me, please reread, and contact me.  I wish you all the best. Sorry for the melodrama.

    | vansy
    0
  • qdigi


    Hi SEO Moz, We want to use a knowledge base plugin (cheaper & faster than building it ourselves) where we can have Q&As for our website. We want this to help with our SEO by adding in our keyterms that we want to rank for. We've looked into TenderApp & Get Satisfaction which look like good solutions - however, as they're both on a sub-domain do we get any seo benefit from this? When people link to our knowledge base, will this help our website at all - or is the benefit going to go to TenderApp/Get Satisfaction? For instance - Our website URL is http://widget.products.com The KB URL is http://widgetsupport.products.com If the above plugin is not a good solution, is there anything else that is better? Any help will be greatly appreciated!! Thanks.

    | qdigi
    0
  • Tulos


    We need to move a site from a domain to another one, and there are also hundreds or even thousands of subdomains to move. What would be the best practise to do it in order to save at least some of the visibility in search results?

    | Tulos
    0
  • SharewarePros


    Dear Mozer's Today I get from Google Webmaster tools a "Notice of DMCA removal" I'll paste here the note to get your opinions "Hello, Google has been notified, according to the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), that some of your materials allegedly infringe upon the copyrights of others. The URLs of the allegedly infringing materials may be found at the end of this message. The affected URLs are listed below: http://www.freesharewaredepot.com/productpages/Ultimate_Spelling__038119.asp" So I perform these steps: 1. Remove the page from the site (now it gives 404). 2. Remove it from database (no listed on directory, sitemap.xml and RSS) 3. I fill the "Google Content Removed Notification form" detailing the removal of the page. My question is now I have to do any other task, such as fill a site reconsideration, or only I have to wait. Thank you for your help. Claudio

    | SharewarePros
    0
  • ir-seo-account


    The page in question is: http://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/sony-rx100/sony-rx100A.HTM Review metadata checks out in google's rich metadata tester, but doesn't get displayed on the SERP for "Sony RX100" (see second page).

    | ir-seo-account
    0
  • OTSEO


    We have a site coming into beta next week. Playing around with SEO Moz, I had trouble getting the keywords to rank at all. Was this because the site is entirely https? If yes, what else can SEO Moz NOT do if the site is all https? Thanks!

    | OTSEO
    0
  • tab54


    I am sure you have been asked this many times... What is the BEST Wordpress Plug-in for SEO  - Easy to Title Page, Meta Tags, etc... ?? Thanks

    | tab54
    0
  • TP_Marketing


    Hello, currently the main site im working on is a .com, but have the .ca version purchased from register.com.  should i have this setup to redirect to the .com site. will google see these as dup content.  We have the .ca for our canadian customers but both sites are identical. Thank you

    | TP_Marketing
    0
  • pattersonla


    My keyword rankings did not update. It says updates every Thursday and the last update shows as Aug 23 (which was the original update). Any idea why this would happen and how I can get the updated info?

    | pattersonla
    1
  • davidangotti


    In the past, I had blocked a section of my site (i.e. domain.com/store/) by placing the following in my robots.txt file: "Disallow: /store/" Now, I would like the store to be indexed and included in the search results. I have removed the "Disallow: /store/" from the robots.txt file, but approximately one week later a Google search for the URL produces the following meta description in the search results: "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more" Is there anything else I need to do to speed up the process of getting this section of the site indexed?

    | davidangotti
    0
  • Ben_Alvord


    Hi All, I'm dealing with an internal IT staff that is trying to change an entire site to run on HTTPS instead of HTTP.  The way they want things configured, all links pointing to HTTP URLs would redirect to the HTTPS. I'm assuming this would adversely affect page rank/domain authority, etc... am I right there? Thanks, Ben

    | Ben_Alvord
    0
  • ElmarReizen


    Currently we work with page titles which display the number of products we have as a counter. This number is highly volatile and can change every day, so that our page title changes all the time. We did this to improve user experience, meet expectations and improve click through rates. Question is whether this can hurt our rankings and if someone has experimented with this or has experience with this?

    | ElmarReizen
    0
  • LindaSchumacher


    Hello everyone, I am in the process of having my consulting website redesigned and have a question about how this may impact SEO. I will be using the same URL as I did before, just simply replacing an old website with a new website. Obviously the URL structure will change slightly since I am changing navigation names. Page titles will also change. Do I need to do anything special to ensure that all of the pages from the old website are redirected to the new website? For example, should I do a page level redirect for each page that remains the same? So that the old "services" page is pointed to the new "services" page? Or can I simply do a redirect at the index page level? Thank you in advance for any advice! Best, Linda

    | LindaSchumacher
    0
  • CommercePundit


    I have set canonical to all narrow by search URLs. I think, it's not working well. You can get more idea by following URLs. http://www.vistastores.com/table-lamps?material_search=1328 http://www.vistastores.com/table-lamps?finish_search=146 These kind of page have canonical tag which is pointing to following one. http://www.vistastores.com/table-lamps Because, it's actual page which I want to out rank. But, all narrow by search URLs have very different products compare to base URLs. So, How can we say it duplicate one? Which is best solution for it. Canonical or NOINDEX it by Robots?

    | CommercePundit
    0
  • theconversion


    Hi, I just starting to do seo hosting for my seo campaign, using 5 IP in europe and 5 IP in US, all class C and have different IP and different domain. is it still work ? or it just will wasting my time ? thanks

    | theconversion
    0
  • GBC


    We recently had an issue when a load of new files were transferred from our dev server to the live site, which unfortunately included the dev site's robots.txt file which had a disallow:/ instruction. Bad! Luckily I spotted it quickly and the file has been replaced. The extent of the damage seems to be that some descriptions aren't displaying and we're getting a message about robots.txt in the SERPs for a few keywords. I've done a site: search and generally it seems to be OK for 99% of our pages. Our positions don't seem to be affected right now but obviously it's not great for the CTRs on those keywords affected. My question is whether there is anything I can do to bring the updated robots.txt file to Google's attention? Or should we just wait and sit it out? Thanks in advance for your answers!

    | GBC
    0
  • Hughescov


    I'm looking to redirect non www to www and also .co.uk to .com. http://www.xxxxx.com is the intended target. http://xxxxx.com & http://www.xxxxx.co.uk & http://xxxxx.co.uk to redirect. I managed to do some of this but if I come through to a service page /services/cars.asp it redirects to the homepage. All I have so far is this code: <% If InStr(Request.ServerVariables("SERVER_NAME"),"www") = 0 ThenResponse.write "http://www." & Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_HOST") & Request.ServerVariables("URL") & "?" & Request.ServerVariables("QUERY_STRING")Response.EndEnd if %> What am I missing?

    | Hughescov
    0
  • fenwaymedia


    Hello We have a link back to our site www.fenwaymedia.co.uk from the sepperro.com domain in the site's footers and Google Webmaster Tools reports 80 links coming back from the site. I've thought about making the footer link nofollow and including a single dofollow link back to www.fenwaymedia.co.uk in the sepperro.com homepage. Is this a good solution, if it isn't, what is the best course of action to take to defend against possible penalties caused by all those inbound links from a single domain? Thanks!

    | fenwaymedia
    0
  • leadsprofi


    Hi the best of the best on the seo world. I like to ask something, i like to know: So, from your strongest-bestest-proffessionallll experience, the web-scripts you use,must be the best of best scripts, i like to ask: for your newsletter, are you using external service? client managment,pro members,are you using any external service from another website or have you do the programming itself? and dont forget to say, your services without any comment are number one on the world,but your community now and your design,and your big heart to leave us talking together here and unlimited questiond to ask, you have attested that you are the best. But tell us more of your services what you use on your encyclopedy of seo, we like to know more from you. Thanks Meti.

    | leadsprofi
    0
  • jez000


    Hi guys, Fairly sure of the answer from what I've read so far, but I just wanted to doublecheck I have it right. Page A gets a significant amount of referring, followed traffic, and also ranks in Google. Page A uses a 302 redirect to Page B (on a completely different domain), which means that 0% of Page A's link juice is being passed on to Page B. If I were to change the 302 redirect to a 301 redirect, then the link juice passed on to Page A from the followed, referring traffic will be (mostly) passed on to Page B. Is that correct? Cheers, Jez

    | jez000
    0
  • Tourman


    Deciding on whether to go for a Sub directory or CC tld structure. So the tradeoff would be one server location (which can affect local rankings if the server is outside the country) VS a better passing of link authority. What factor is more important?

    | Tourman
    0
  • vansy


    I am using a anonymous browser to check this, or different computers. Each day it changes from #7 on page one, to #18 on page two. This has been going on daily for two weeks. Anyone know why would this happen? thanks

    | vansy
    0
  • Sean_Dawes


    I have an ecommerce site where https is being crawled for some pages. Wondering if the below solution will fix the issue www.example.com will be my domain In the nav there is a login page www.example.com/login which is redirecting to the https://www.example.com/login If I just disallowed /login in the robots file wouldn't it not follow the redirect and index that stuff? The redirect part is what I am questioning.

    | Sean_Dawes
    0

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