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Category: Technical SEO

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

  • Exotissimo


    We have several brand related domains which are parked and pointing to our main website. Some of these websites are redirecting using a 302 (don't ask, that's a whole other story), but these are being changed. But it shouldn't matter what type of redirect they are no? Since there has never been any traffic and they are not indexed? But it seems that one of them was indexed: exotravel.vn. A search for our brand name or the previous brand name (exotravel and exotissimo) brings up this parked domain first! How can that be? The domain has never been used and has no backlinks. exotravel.vn is redirecting and I submitted a change of address weeks ago to Google, but its still coming up first in all brand name searches for exotissimo or exotravel.

    | Exotissimo
    0
  • capmartin85


    Hello. 20 days ago, I changed my domain from uclasificados.net to uclasificados.com doing redirect 301 to all urls, and I started to loose rankings since that moment. I was wondering if changing it back could be the solutions, but some experts recommend me not to do that, because it could be worse. Right now I receave almost 50% of traffic I used to receave before, and I have done a lot of linkbuilding strategies to recover but nothing have worked until now. Even though I notified google of this change and I send again my new sitemap, I don't see that have improve my situation in any aspects, and I still see in webmastertools search stats from my last website (the website who used to be uclasificados.com before the change). What should I do to recover faster?

    | capmartin85
    0
  • RG_SEO


    I think the title sums up the question, but does a new subdomain get any ranking benefits from being on a pre-existing high authority domain. Or does the new subdomain have to fend for itself in the SERPs?

    | RG_SEO
    0
  • Marketing_Today


    I'm working on a project where a site has gone through a rebrand and is therefore also moving to a new domain name. Some pages have been merged on the new site so it's not a lift and shift job and so I'm writing up a redirect plan. Their IT dept have asked if we want redirects done by DNS redirect or IIS redirect. Which one will allow us to have redirects on a page level and not a domain level? I think IIS may be the right route but would love your thoughts on this please.

    | Marketing_Today
    1
  • KempRugeLawGroup


    Our county's website has a news' blog, and they want to do an article about an award we won. We're definitely going to do it, and we're happy about the link. However, all the other news' articles they have only have a PA of 1. The DA is 82, and the link is completely white hat. It's a govt site in our locale, however, with such a terrible PA, I'm don't think the link is really all that great from an SEO stand point. Am I right or wrong (or is it some dreadful murky grey area like everything else in this industry (which I'm thankful to be a part of 🙂 )? Thanks so much for any insights! Ruben

    | KempRugeLawGroup
    0
  • Pete4


    I am currently working on a small site with approx 50 web pages.  In the crawl error section in WMT Google has highlighted over 10,000 page not found errors for pages that have nothing to do with my site.  Anyone come across this before?

    | Pete4
    0
  • irvingw


    If I want to override a Disallow directive in robots.txt with an Allow command, do I have the Allow command before or after the Disallow command? example: Allow: /models/ford///page* Disallow: /models////page

    | irvingw
    0
  • Theo-NL


    Hi there, While doing some research on the indexation status of a client I ran into something unexpected. I have my hypothesis on what might be happing, but would like a second opinion on this. The query 'site:example.org inurl:index.php' returns about 18.000 results. However, when I hover my mouse of these results, no index.php shows up in the URL. So, Google seems to think these (then duplicate content) URLs still exist, but a 301 has changed the actual goal URL? A similar things happens for inurl:page. In fact, all the 'index.php' and 'page' parameters were removed over a year back, so there in fact shouldn't be any of those left in the index by now. The dates next to the search results are 2005, 2008, etc. (i.e. far before 2013). These dates accurately reflect the times these forums topic were created. Long story short: are these ~30.000 'phantom URLs' in the index out of total of ~100.000 indexed pages hurting the search rankings in some way? What do you suggest to get them out? Submitting a 100% coverage sitemap (just a few days back) doesn't seem to have any effect on these phantom results (yet).

    | Theo-NL
    0
  • Autoschieber


    Hi, I have editors / copyreader that write twitter headlines & meta descriptions in excel cells. Do you know a way for google docs & excel how to highlight the text of a cell in red if there are more than 140 chars ( or number to define) in the cell so the editor can see if the tweet / description is too long?

    | Autoschieber
    0
  • Michael4g


    One of my sites got hit with duplicate content a while ago because Google seemed to be considering hhtp, https, www, and non ww versions of the site all different sites. We thought we fixed it, but for some reason https://www and just https:// are giving us duplicate content again. I can't seem to figure out why it keeps doing this. The url is https://bandsonabudget.com if any of you want to see if you can figure out why I am still having this issue.

    | Michael4g
    1
  • zeepartner


    We recently changed our domain from http to https. When a user enters any URL on http, there is an global 301 redirect to the same page on https. I cannot find instructions about what to do with robots.txt. Now that https is the canonical version, should I block the http-Version with robots.txt? Strangely, I cannot find a single ressource about this...

    | zeepartner
    0
  • inhouseninja


    I'd like to be able to easily track blog posts by month but in Google reports when you set a date range obviously older blog post still appear and with amount of blog posts we generate without seeing the date in the title it's not obvious what was published and when it was published. For example if a Blog Title was "/dangers-of-sharing-KM-knowledge-01-11-15 would it hurt SEO? The reason is I'd like to have a quick way to know how new posts do each month compared to older content

    | inhouseninja
    0
  • BarcelonaExperience


    Hey guys! We run a tour company in Barcelona. Our company name is Barcelona Experience. We're customizing our URL's to include keywords which can be found in all the important areas on the page (title tage, meta descp., etc).
    We want to change "www.barcelonaexperience.com/bike-tours" to "www.barcelonaexperience.com/barcelona-bike-tours"
    We're worried the repetition of "barcelona" could be a bad thing. True, or not true? Thanks!

    | BarcelonaExperience
    0
  • catalinmoraru


    Hy guys, I have two questions and one might be a dumb question but there it goes. I just want to be sure that I understand: IF I tell webmaster tools to ignore an URL Parameter, will google still index and rank my url? IS it ok if I don't append in the url structure the brand filter?, will I still rank for that brand? Thanks, PS: ok 3 questions :)...

    | catalinmoraru
    0
  • WillW


    I am working on fixing accessibility issues on client's site, and they have contracted with a vendor who provides both tools to monitor the site and consulting to help us fix issues that are found. When there are spatial relationships between elements on a page that would be not be evident to someone listening via a screen reader, a strategy that they recommended to us to is to add text helpers that are not visible, but still read by the screen readers. An example: Directions to our Fifth Avenue Store I have seen this technique used on a major brand site but I am concerned that their brand strength insulates them from a hidden text penalty far more than my client's brand would. Also, their implementation uses class names like "ada_hidden" which may help search engines understand the intent, or may not at all. I am looking for opinions regarding the use of this technique. Normally I wouldn't use it for risk of penalty, but here the intent is to improve the user experience of the pages. Anyone used similar techniques for ADA/WCAG, or solved the problem in a more SEO-friendly way? Thanks, Will

    | WillW
    0
  • Orly-PP


    Hi! So we recently (a month ago) lunched a new website, we have great content that updates everyday, we're active on social platforms, and we did all that's possible, at the moment, when it comes to on site optimization (a web developer will join our team this month and help us fix all the rest). When I search for our brand name all our social profiles come up first, after them we have a few inner pages from our different news sections, but our homepage is somewhere in the 2nd search page... What may be the reason for that? Is it just a matter of time or is there a problem with our homepage I'm unable to find? Thanks!

    | Orly-PP
    0
  • benseb


    Hi We have a few pages within our website which were at one time a focus for us, but due to developing the other areas of the website, they are now defunct (better content elsewhere) and in some ways slightly duplicate so we're merging two areas into one. We have removed the links to the main hub page from our navigation, and were going to 301 this main page to the main hub page of the section which replaces it. However I've just noticed the page due to be removed has a PA of 69 and 15,000 incoming links from 300 root domains. So not bad! It's actually stronger than the page we are 301'ing it to (but not really an option to swap as the URL structure will look messy) With this in mind, is the strategy to redirect still the best or should we keep the page and turn it into a landing page, with links off to the other section? It just feels as though we would be doing this just for the sake of google, im not sure how much decent content we could put on it as we've already done that on the destination page. The incoming links to that page will still be relevant to the new section (they are both v similar hence the merging) Any suggestions welcome, thanks

    | benseb
    0
  • bearpaw


    We sell food products that, of course, can be used in recipes. As a convenience to our customer we have made a large database of recipes available. We have far more recipes than products. My concern is that Google may start viewing us as a recipe website rather than a food product website. My initial thought was to subdomain the recipes (recipe.domain.com) but that seems silly given that you aren't really leaving our website and the layout of the website doesn't change with the subdomain. Currently our URL structure is... domain.com/products/product-name.html domain.com/recipes/recipe-name.html We do rank well for our products in general searches but I want to be sure that our recipe setup isn't detrimental.

    | bearpaw
    0
  • ChristianRubio


    OK, Title tag, no problem, it's the SEO juice, appears on SERP, etc.  Got it. But I'm reading up on H1 and getting conflicting bits of information ... Only use H1 once? H1 is crucial for SERP Use H1s for subheads Google almost never looks past H2 for relevance So say I've got a blog post with three sections ... do I use H1 three times (or does Google think you're playing them ...) Or do I create a "big" H1 subhead and then use H2s? Or just use all H2s because H1s are scary?  🙂 I frequently use subheads, it would seem weird to me to have one a font size bigger than another, but of course I can adjust that in settings ... Thoughts? Lisa

    | ChristianRubio
    0
  • henandstag

    This question is deleted!

    | henandstag
    0
  • Nanook1


    Is it better to use 301 redirects or canonical page? I suspect canonical is easier. The question is, which is the best canonical page, YYY.com or YYY.com/indexhtml? I assume YYY.com, since there will be many other pages such as YYY.com/info.html, YYY.com/services.html, etc.

    | Nanook1
    0
  • scott315


    I am getting ready to move a clients site from another company. They have like 35 tempory redirects according to MOZ. Question is, how can I find out then current redirects so I can update everything for the new site? Do I need access to the current htaccess file to do this?

    | scott315
    0
  • kevinbp


    I notice that many sites have sub headings appearing below their google results. http://i.imgur.com/A5JxMKD.png
    See image for example. Q: what are these called? and how do we get them? A5JxMKD.png

    | kevinbp
    1
  • marcuslind90


    I have a website listing real estate in different areas that are for sale. In small villages, towns, and areas, sometimes there is nothing for sale and therefore the page is completely empty with no content except a and some footer text. I have thousand of landing pages for different areas. For example "Apartments in Tibro" or "Houses in Ljusdahl" and Moz Pro gives me some warnings for "Duplicate Content" on the empty ones (I think it does so because the pages are so empty that they are quite similar). I guess Google could also think bad of my site if I have hundreds or thousands of empty pages even if my total amount of pages are 100,000. So, what to do with these pages for these small cities, towns and villages where there is not always houses for sale? Should I remove them completely? Should I make a 404 when no houses for sale and a 200 OK when there is? Please note that I have totally 100,000+ pages and this is only about 5% of all my pages.

    | marcuslind90
    0
  • Lulus_Likes


    Hello everyone! I am new to the community and I have a question about determining keywords. I have created a blog {LulusLikes.com} to practice my SEO. I have installed the Yoast SEO plugin and I have noticed the plugin always encourages you to choose a different focus keyword. So if my focus keyword is "Dog of the Week" and it's a weekly contest, wouldn't that be my focus keyword each time I had that type of post? How should I choose my focus keyword for that type of post? I hope that makes sense. Thanks!

    | Lulus_Likes
    0
  • GoldenRanking14


    Hello I'm a seo newbie and some help from the community here would be greatly appreciated. I have submitted the sitemap of my website in google webmasters tools and now I got this warning: "When we tested a sample of the URLs from your Sitemap, we found that some URLs were not accessible to Googlebot due to an HTTP status error. All accessible URLs will still be submitted." How do I fix this? What should I do? Many thanks in advance.

    | GoldenRanking14
    0
  • daedriccarl


    Hi Anyone else having problems with Google's Pagespeed tool? I am trying to benchmark a couple of my sites but, according to Google, my sites are not loading. They will work when I run them through the test at one point but if I try again, say 15 mins later, they will present the following error message An error has occured DNS error while resolving DOMAIN. Check the spelling of the host, and ensure that the page is accessible from the public Internet. You may refresh to try again. If the problem persists, please visit the PageSpeed Insights mailing list for support. This isn't too much an issue for testing page speed but am concerned that if Google is getting this error on the speed test it will also get the error when trying to crawl and index the pages. I can confirm the sites are up and running. I the sites are pointed at the server via A-records and haven't been changed for many weeks so cannot be a dns updating issue.  Am at a loss to explain. Any advice would be most welcome. Thanks.

    | daedriccarl
    0
  • Digital-DMG


    We had a discussion about the importance of 404-errors as result of products which are out of stock. Of course this is not good, but what is the leverance in terms of importance: low-medium-high?

    | Digital-DMG
    0
  • ashishb01


    Hi, Just finished upgrading my site to the ssl version (like so many other webmasters now that it may be a ranking factor). FIxed all links, CDN links are now secure, etc and 301 Redirected all pages from http to https. Changed property in Google Analytics from http to https and added https version in Webmaster Tools. So far, so good. Now the question is should I add the https version of the sitemap in the new HTTPS site in webmasters or retain the existing http one? Ideally switching over completely to https version by adding a new sitemap would make more sense as the http version of the sitemap would anyways now be re-directed to HTTPS. But the last thing i can is to get penalized for duplicate content. Could you please suggest as I am still a rookie in this department. If I should add the https sitemap version in the new site, should i delete the old http one or no harm retaining it.

    | ashishb01
    0
  • MTalhaImtiaz


    I am currently doing a site audit. The total number of pages on the website are around 400... 187 of them are image pages and coming up as 'zero' word count in Screaming Frog report. I needed to know if they will be considered 'thin' content by search engines? Should I include them as an issue? An answer would be most appreciated.

    | MTalhaImtiaz
    0
  • SOtBOrlando


    I know how to do this with a wordpress.org site but I have a client that does not want to switch and without a plugin I am lost. any help would be greatly appreciated. Jeremy Wood

    | SOtBOrlando
    0
  • EcommerceSite


    We have category pages and some of those pages have pagination due to us having additional items. Screaming Frog could not find the items that were after page 1. Is this a problem for Google? These item pages are still in the sitemap. I am sure they can find them to index them but does it hurt rankings at all.

    | EcommerceSite
    0
  • McCaldin


    Hi, I'm doing a link audit.  My sites' keyword rankings and organic traffic have been sent to the Phantom Zone since the last Penguin Update. I've got 70+ and counting follow backlinks to my main domain and one of the my subdomains from http://www.secretsearchenginelabs.com/; should i disavow them? There's a load of links to many recognisable sites in there and my instinct's all out of whack with this decision. I think that these links were all manually added by a link building company on our behalf. It does look manipulated to me but i'd like a second opinion before I dump all of those links. Thanks Thanks

    | McCaldin
    0
  • joony


    hello Moz We know that this year, Moz changed its domain to moz.com from www.seomoz.org
    however, when you type "site:seomoz.org" you still can find old urls indexed on Google (on page 7 and above) We also changed our site from http://www.example.com to https://www.example.com
    And Google is indexing both sites even though we did proper 301 redirection via htaccess. How long would it take Google to refresh the index? We just don't worry about it? Say we redirected our entire site. What is going to happen to those websites that copied and pasted our content? We have already DMCAed their webpages, but making our site https would mean that their website is now more original than our site? Thus, Google assumes that we have copied their site? (Google is very slow on responding to our DMCA complaint) Thank you in advance for your reply.

    | joony
    0
  • vivekrathore


    My site has 10 lakh approx. genuine urls. But due to some unidentified bugs site has created irrelevant urls 10 million approx.  Since we don’t know the origin of these non-relevant links, we want to redirect or remove all these urls. Please suggest is it good to redirect such a high number urls to home page or to throw 404 for these pages.  Or any other suggestions to solve this issue.

    | vivekrathore
    0
  • TheKrazyCouponLady


    I have over 500,000 429 errors in webmaster tools. Do I need to be concerned about these errors?

    | TheKrazyCouponLady
    0
  • SEOPractices


    Hello Mozers, Could you please share the best Dynamic Sitemap Generator you are using.  I have found this place: http://www.seotools.kreationstudio.com/xml-sitemap-generator/free_dynamic_xml_sitemap_generator.php Thanks in advanced for your help.

    | SEOPractices
    0
  • ey_sja


    Example URL:  http://www.sja.ca/English/Community-Services/Pages/Therapy Dog Services/default.aspx The above page is generated dynamically depending on what province the visitor visits from.  For example, a visitor from BC would see something quite different than a visitor from Nova Scotia; the intent is that the information shown should be relevant to the user of that province. How does this effect SEO?  How (or from what location) does Googlebot decide to crawl the page? I have considered a subdirectory for each province, though that comes with its challenges as well.  One such challenge is duplicate content when different provinces may have the same information for some pages.  Any suggestions for this?

    | ey_sja
    0
  • waqid


    Its only been 10 days and i have repurchased the domain name/ renewed. The who is info, website and contact information is all still the same. However we have lost all rankings and i am hoping that our top rankings come back. Does anyone have experience with such a crappy situation?

    | waqid
    0
  • wplodge


    I'm building a new website and am setting up internal link structure with subcategories and hoping to do so with best Seo practices in mind.  When linking to a subcategory's main page, would I make the internal link  www.xxx.com/fishing/ or www.xxx.com/fishing/index.html or does it matter?  I'm just trying to avoid duplicate content I guess, if Google saw each page as a separate page.  Any other cautions when using subdirectories in my navigation?

    | wplodge
    0
  • ztalk112


    Hi, Newbie alert! I need to set up 301 redirects for changed URLs on a database driven site that is to be redeveloped shortly. The current site uses canonical header tags. The new site will also use canonical tags. Should the 301 redirects map the canonical URL on the old site to the corresponding canonical for the new design . . . or should they map the non canonical database URLs old and new? Given that the purpose of canonicals is to indicate our preferred URL, then my guess is that's what I should use. However, how can I be sure that Google (for example) has indexed the canonical in every case? Thx in anticipation.

    | ztalk112
    0
  • IgorMateski


    I've discovered a ton of 404s from Google's WMT crawler looking for mydomain.com/sitemap_archive_MONTH_YEAR. There are tons of these monthly archive xmls. I've used a plugin that for some reason created individual monthly archive xml sitemaps and now I get 404s. Creating rules for each archive seems a bad solution. My current sitemap plugin creates a single clean one mydomain.com/sitemap_index.xml. How can I create a redirect rule in the Redirection WP plugin that will redirect any URL that has the 'sitemap' and 'xml' string in it to my current xml sitemap? I've tried using a wildcard like so: mysite.com/sitemap*.*, mysite.com/sitemap ., mysite.com/sitemap(.), mysite.com/sitemap (.) but none of the wildcard uses got the general redirect to work. Is there a way to make this happen with the WP Redirection plugin? If not, is there a htaccess rule, and what would the code be for it? Im not very fluent with using general redirects in htaccess unfortunately. Thanks!

    | IgorMateski
    0
  • webignite


    We acquired a .clinic domain for a client, they are right now running under a .ca and I was just wondering if there were any cons to making the switch. On the flip side are there any pros? I've tried to search for the answer but couldn't seem to come across anything, thank you if you have any knowledge or could point me to a resource.

    | webignite
    0
  • IgorMateski


    Hi. Im doing a backlinks audit to two sites, one with 48k and the other with 2M backlinks. Both are very old sites and both have tons of backlinks from old pages and websites that don't exist any more, but these backlinks still exist in the Majestic Historic index. I cleaned up the obvious useless links and passed the rest through Screaming Frog to check if those old pages/sites even exist. There are tons of link sending pages that return a 0, 301, 302, 307, 404 etc errors. Should I consider all of these pages as being bad backlinks and add them to the disavow file? Just a clarification, Im not talking about l301-ing a backlink to a new target page. Im talking about the origin page generating an error at ping eg: originpage.com/page-gone sends me a link to mysite.com/product1. Screamingfrog pings originpage.com/page-gone, and returns a Status error. Do I add the originpage.com/page-gone in the disavow file or not? Hope Im making sense 🙂

    | IgorMateski
    0
  • imaginex


    Hello, I have a website that was started in 1999. On the website I have map pages for each of the offices listed on my site, for which there are about 120. Each of the 120 maps is in a whole separate html page. There is no content in the page other than the map. I know all of the offices love having the map pages so I don't want to remove the pages. So, my question is would these pages with no real content be hurting the rankings of the other pages on our site? Therefore, should I block the pages with my robots.txt? Would I also have to remove these pages (in webmaster tools?) from Google for blocking by robots.txt to really work? I appreciate your feedback, thanks!

    | imaginex
    0
  • bhsiao


    I am thinking of moving my html website to weebly. They offer a 301 redirect for my domain name. Is that ok for SEO?

    | bhsiao
    0
  • hammadrafique


    I've heard that Google is now indexing links and stuff available in javascript and jquery. My webmastertools is showing that some links are blocked in robots.txt of jquery. Sorry I'm not a developer or designer. I want to know is there any impact of this on my SEO? and also how can I unblock it for the robots? Check this screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/3VDWikC.png

    | hammadrafique
    0
  • moliver1022


    If I use a CSS overflow scroll for copy, will my SEO rankings be affected? Will Google still be able to index my copy accurately and will keywords used in the copy that are covered by the scroll be recognized by Google?

    | moliver1022
    0
  • IceIcebaby


    Hi Moz Community, I know that hiding h1 tags isn't a good practice for SEO and google, but we have banners that look much nicer than the stock text Magento uses for its titles. The banners have the same text and the h1 is in the source code, just not visible on front end. The option Magento gives is "hide title on the page." So I'm not sure if this is actually the bad way to hide it or if it's fine for search engines. Thanks,
    -Reed

    | IceIcebaby
    0
  • Rignite


    Hi there, Is it a good idea to no index tag, category, and author pages on blogs? The tag pages sometimes have duplicate content.  And the category and author pages aren't really optimized for any search term. Just curious what others think. Thanks!

    | Rignite
    0

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