Category: Technical SEO
Discuss site health, structure, and other technical SEO strategies.
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Temporary Redirect Warnings
How big of an seo issue is this. I provide downloadable results for fitness events and after I pull the data I "redirect" it to a plain text file that is actually created on the fly. Is this a problem and, if so, is there a modification that I can implement to avoid having my site suffer for this? Thanks~
| bobbabuoy0 -
Reciprocal link building a bad idea?
Reciprical Link Building or one way traffic? Good morning from 8 degrees c but very sunny wetherby UK Regarding link acquisition ive had it in my head that the best idea is to secure inbound links only i.e avoid reciprocal link building so that when your source links to you you dont give them a link back. But is this no longer valid when targeting inbound links to increase rank? Is it ok to link back or will that "leak SEO juice" or whatever we decide to call it this week.
| Nightwing0 -
Animated Video and Google Ranking, need advice
Hi I will like to have a company create animated video on our home page to offer a better experience in our online store selling furnace filters and increase conversion. Can it hurt ranking? Loading Time? File format? All thing I should worry. But what about videos like this company create: http://webvideo.kickerinc.ca/explainer-videos/?gclid=CJK68770grACFYje4Aod6kR5jA# Do you have recommendation or reference about serious company producing videos animated to had on web site? Thjank you for your help, BigBlaze
| BigBlaze2050 -
External Sitewide Links and SEO
I have one big question about the potential SEO value -- and possibly also dangers? -- of "followed" external sitewide links. Examples of these would be: a link to your site from another site's footer a blogroll link a link to your site from another site's global navigation Aside from the link's position in the HTML file (the higher the better, presumably), are these links essentially the same from an SEO point of view or different (and how)? There used to be an influential view out there that the link juice value of a sitewide link was the same as that of a single link (presumably from the linking site's home page), even though a sitewide link may in fact result a huge number individual links. Is this true or false? What is the math here? Should one worry about having "too many" sitewide links, in the sense that this may raise red flags by way of the algo? I talked to someone a few months ago (before the recent algo updates) who believed that he had got a minus 10 penalty or whatever it was for getting too many sitewide links We offer website design and development as well as SEO, and we put a keyworded link to ourselves in the footer. I think this is a fairly common practice. Is this a good or bad idea SEO-wise? One opinion is that for external sitewide footer links, you should best have a dofollow link on the home page, but nofollow it on all other pages. What is your opinion about that? Is there anything else that is distinct, interesting or important about sitewide links' SEO value and pitfalls? Thank you!
| Philip-SEO1 -
Best META Fields to Include on New Site
I am in the process of transitioning sites to a Drupal CMS and am curious to know what META information to provide on each of the new site pages. Currently, this is the set-up I plan on using: My questions to the community are: whether or not I've added all pertinent information, and if there's anything I'm overlooking
| NiallSmith0 -
Site Purchase and 301
Hello, I just started working with a new client. Since then the client has purchased another company. We have re-branded the new companies home page and 301 redirected the rest of the site's links to the corresponding pages on the holding companies site. Since then the rankings have tanked. I looked at both companies back link profiles and realized that they are quite spammy from the last SEO contractor they hired. That said, the site was ranking fine until last Friday. I was wondering if anyone had seen temporary rankings decrease after 301ing a domain to a different site? Thanks!
| TargetClick0 -
Language parameter
Hi there, I have a quick technical question regarding to on site language. Is it possible to use a parameter in order to define the language of the web. My web is www.vallnord.com and its default language is catalan. I would like the site to display in the language of the user, maybe the browser. Thanks, G.
| SilbertAd0 -
Please recommend a tool to list pages on my site.
I have taken a major hit from the latest update. Site has been online for 10 years, white hat SEO all the way but I do have some legacy pages were I would duplicate title or the description on a new page. Things are just unorganized currently and trying to find the best approach to organizing what I already have as well as track new content. I would like to have a tool that would basically extract a list of my current pages, the title tags and the description in an Excel file. Not sure how the pros organinze the SEO on a site but my biright idea is that I can have a large excel file with the pages listed so I can detect duplicate info. Site only has about 300 pages. Just regular php pages, no CMS. Thanks in advance!
| Force70 -
Wordpress duplicate pages
I am using Wordpress and getting duplicate content Crawler error for following two pages http://edustars.yourstory.in/tag/edupristine/ http://edustars.yourstory.in/tag/education-startups/ These two are tags which take you to the same page. All the other tags/categories which take you to the same page or have same title are also throwing errors, how do i fix it?
| bhanu22170 -
Disappeared from Google with in 2 hours of webmaster tools error
Hey Guys I'm trying not to panic but....we had a problem with google indexing some of our secure pages then hit those pages and browsers firing up security warning, so I asked our web dev to have at look at it he made the below changes and within 2 hours the site has drop off the face of google “in web master tools I asked it to remove any https://freestylextreme.com URLs” “I cancelled that before it was processed” “I then setup the robots.txt to respond with a disallow all if the request was for an https URL” “I've now removed robots.txt completely” “and resubmitted the main site from web master tools” I've read a couple of blog posts and all say to remain clam , test the fetch bot on webmasters tools which is all good and just wait for google to reindex do you guys have any further advice ? Ben
| elbeno1 -
301 Redirecting weird URLs with % in them
I've been working on redirecting links reported as 404 in Google webmaster tools. I've stumbled upon 41 URLs that Google is reporting as 404 that include a '%' in the URL, but I don't know how to redirect. Here is an example: URL: bond_information.htm%20Surety%20Bond%20Information,%20with%20FAQ Attempted redirect: redirect 301 /bond_information.htm%20Surety%20Bond%20Information,%20with%20FAQ http://www.mysite.com/ Unfortunately, after implementing the redirect, http://www.mysite.com/bond_information.htm%20Surety%20Bond%20Information,%20with%20FAQ still resolves a 404 error. Anyone successfully fix these errors using Apache .htaccess?
| TheDude0 -
301 Redirect From Dynamic Page To Static
I want to 301 redirect all "id" and "type" numbers from my page dynamic.php page (I have thousands of IDs and thousands of Types) all to a single URL. So for example the following.... www.mysite.com/dynamic.php?id=1&type=5 www.mysite.com/dynamic.php?id=2&type=5 www.mysite.com/dynamic.php?id=3&type=5 www.mysite.com/dynamic.php?id=1&type=6 www.mysite.com/dynamic.php?id=2&type=6 www.mysite.com/dynamic.php?id=3&type=6 ...would all be sent to: www.mysite.com/page.html How can this be done without doing a redirect for each ID/Type?
| TheDude1 -
Does posting an article on multiple sites hurt seo?
A client of mine creates thought leadership articles and pitches multiple sites to host the article on their site to reach different audiences. The sites that pick it up are places such as AdAge and MarketingProfs and we do get link juice from these sources most of the time. Does having the same article on these sites as well as your own hurt your SEO efforts in any way? Could it be recognized as duplicate content? I know the links are great just wondering if there is any other side effects especially when there are no links provided! Thank you!
| Scratch_MM0 -
Rankings Dropped Dramatically
Hi All, I need some advice on this one, one of our websites is performing very badly and I am lost to know why. We migrated from an old website www.myclient.co.uk and re-directed to www.myclient.com. The issue we had was that the old site relied on search results i.e. www.myclient.co.uk/search+villas+in+marbella However most ranked url's were not as tidy as the example above and had lots of characters. Because of this and the fact that all incoming links were to the homepage we do not carry out any 301 re-directs. In some keywords we have increased our rankings but for others we have dropped dramatically. keyword 1 4th Jan position 22 9th Jan position 90 keyword 2 4th jan position 34 9th jan position 89 keyword 3 4th jan position 12 9th jan position 16 (a smaller drop than the others) We do have some top 10s for this domain so I don't think we have been penalised for anything but I am shocked to see such drops in rankings. I have setup the website so that each page targets different keywords and I have checked and they get A grades within SEOmoz. Any advice would be really appreciated, as the client is not too happy at the moment. Many thanks Andy
| iprosoftware0 -
Tips to get rid of a link from an infected website ?
Hi, During some netlinking analysis I found that a website linking to one of the sites I do SEO for triggers my antivirus... It seems infected by JS/Dldr.Scripy.A Java script virus. Being the first time I deal with this kind of problem, and having not found any info on the Q&A or anywhere else, I wonder a few things : 1°) How to verify the reality of the threat and be sure it's not a false positive ? Is there some tool to scan the website, maybe an online vrus scanner ? 2°) How to contact the webmaster since I cannot look for a "contact us" page ? I looked in a whois, but I only got the e-mail of his hosting service, can I contact them directly ? 3°) Any tips or important things I should know ? Thanks for your help
| JohannCR0 -
Looking for sites hit by Penguin for research
I'm doing some link profile analysis and need examples of sites hit by Penguin (not Panda). If you have a site that was hit and are willing to share, please PM me: Your site homepage URL Main keyword(s) you lost rankings for (preferably keywords your homepage was ranked for but no longer is) I will keep your information strictly confidential and will not share it. (I will publish the results of my findings, but will not mention any of the sites used for research.) Thanks.
| AdamThompson0 -
What should be use 301 or 302 redirection for 404 pages
Please suggest which redirection we should use for 404 pages- 301 or 302. If you can elaborate it with reason then it will be highly appreciated.
| koamit0 -
Cn I use SEOMOZ to find "Bad Links"
We were hit by the Penguin update and I am told it make be because of "Bad Links", but no one can seem to tell me how to find them. We never buy links, and in fact the only links I know about are those from paid affiliates through shareasale - and these affiliates are paid based on performance, not links. 1. Does anyone know how to figure out what links are bad? 2. Once I know, how do I get them to stop linking to my site? Thanks!
| trophycentraltrophiesandawards0 -
Value of key word based URL
I was researching some keywords and I found something that kind of confuses me. If you search google for Denver IT Consulting the second hit is for a site** - **denveritconsulting.com. This is a one page site with just a paragraph of text and links to the actual company's site but it's getting the second place on a pretty good keyword. I also checked open site explorer and they have no links at all. I am assuming that their placement is based solely on the exact match of the keywords in the URL? Does anyone have any feedback on this? I have purchased and used keyword based URLs in the past but I have never done or seen something like this that is so successful. Any input on this would be great. Thanks!
| ZiaTG0 -
Google Search Parameters
Couple quick questions. Is using the parameter pws=0 still useful for turning off personalization? Is there a way to set my location as a URL parameter as well? For instance, I want to set my location to United States, can this be done with a URL param the same way as pws=0?
| nbyloff0 -
Impact of Adding a Mobile Site
Hi, we ranked very well for keywords trophies and trophies and awards on our home page, trophycentral.com for quite a while (many years). Recently we dropped off the charts, but are not sure why. So we posted this issue last week and got some great suggestions and are in the process of addressing them. However, we are now wondering if we caused this issue when we launched our mobile site a few months ago (timing makes sense). Has anyone had trouble with a mobile site impacting their traditional site? I am wondering if maybe google is splitting the traffic to the trophycentral domain and the m.trophycentral.com domain? Here is the code we have< script type="text/javascript" src="http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/sportsawards/mobile-redirection.js">script>Appreciate your comments!
| trophycentraltrophiesandawards0 -
301 Re Direct Question for www
Can smeone check this code to make sure it is right so thaqt my site uses www always. RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^exercisebiology.com [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.exercisebiology.com/$1 [R=301,L] I had the hostgators customer service personnel perform this. But I cannot get it to redirect. But he says it works.
| anoopbal0 -
Changing E Commerce platforms
Hey All, Im Olga and new to search engine optimization and web development. I recently changed from O S Commerce to Go daddy Quick shopping Cart. Before on my old site I had a lot of images show up on google searches on the first page in the image section that have recently vanished due to the change. I think that is where the majority of my sales were coming from as I did not really rank for any keyword searches. My old web designer did everything for my old site and told me a year ago he was to busy to help me out anymore and I did not know how to work OS Commerce hence the change to quick shopping cart. Does anyone know how to get images back into google images, or any other beginner strategies to help me rank in google. I have used all of the tools on this program and pretty much got everything figured out only I think the industry I am in is VERY competitive. Would love any advice or help. Thanks, Olga Girls Gone Biker
| girlsgonebiker0 -
Google Gone Mad or Its Some kind of BlackHat ?
I was browsing google.co.in and searched for "Mussoorie Hotels" without quote and came across the attached result! the website sitting on #9 is sitting with a wrong page .. i.e a Hotel Page of other place .. i.e nainital can someone tell me is there something wrong with google or the guy is using some blackhat technique for his/her website ?? M trying to rank for the keyword "mussoorie hotels" from past 4-5 months 😞 Still no luck even in top 5 pages :() mussoorie-hotels.jpg
| WildHawk0 -
Can I turn off Google site links?
I thought at one time I had turned off the option to have Google sitelinks. I did this so that each of our pages that had a strong presence would occupy a unique slot on the first and second page of Google. This was important to us as we were battling some reputation management issues and trying to push out negative listings from the front page. Recently I noticed sitelinks were back up and when going into Google Webmaster Tools, I could figure out how to opt out of them. Any suggestions?
| BRConsulting0 -
Does it really matter to set 301 redirect for not found error pages?
I've very simple question for not found error pages. Does it really require to set up 301 redirect for all not found error pages which detected in Google webmaster tools? Honestly, I don't want to set 301 redirect exclude externally connected pages. So, what will impact on ranking after follow this process?
| CommercePundit0 -
Blog Comments and Forum Posts
Hi, After recent update from Google i.e penguin update. Do Blog comments and Forum Signatures work? Or will they harm my site. Suppose i have a health related blog, and i engage in making comments in technology related blog and forum. Do i am potentially prone to hit a penality? Any suggestions would be appreciated.
| Indexxess0 -
Third Party Ranking Software
I have used a number of different tools for getting ranking information and have been using Cuterank but it now seems to be report the wrong results. Any suggestions for the best third party ranking software. It would allow me to check google, yahoo and bing ranks, compare month on month and produce branded PDFs. Any ideas? Thanks in advance.
| highwayfive0 -
301 Redirect Question for trailing slash & index.php
1. Can you show me how to do a redirect for forhttp://www.exercisebiology.com to http://www.exercisebiology.com/ I want to add the trailing slash. 2. Also how to redirect from http://www.exercisebiology.com/in... to http://www.exercisebiology.com/. When I tried to redirect the index.php last time, I couldn't login to the forums. Everytime when someone tries to login to my forums, it takes them the to the home page. I did it through the hostgator CP. I am thinking someone could help me here. Thank you so much!
| anoopbal0 -
Change of domain name?
Hello, We are currently developing a new site for an existing online clothing retailer. The existing site is on a .co.uk domain, however we are targeting a global market and wondered whether we could/should launch the new site under a .com address and whether this would be beneficial? Most of our back links come from Affiliate blogs and we could quite easily change these to the new URL. Thanks Bilal
| PLP1 -
Does turning website content into PDFs for document sharing sites cause duplicate content?
Website content is 9 tutorials published to unique urls with a contents page linking to each lesson. If I make a PDF version for distribution of document sharing websites, will it create a duplicate content issue? The objective is to get a half decent link, traffic to supplementary opt-in downloads.
| designquotes0 -
Different Domain Structure & hyperlinks pointing to them_Need Clarification
Hi, I have a question regarding the Domain Structure and hyperlinks should point to. I know that all of the below domain/URL structure are different. The first thing I have read is that we should do 301 redirect from non www domain.com domain.com/ to www domain/site URL. www.domain.com www.domain.com/ What about the trailing slash, does the Google considers the building links to www.domain.com/ is same as with out trailing slash, www.domain.com Or we have to any 301 redirect for these domain URL format as well. Please clarify my doubt. The same doubt is there for these two URL Structure as well. http://www.domain.com (Root domain with out trailing slash) http://www.domain.com/ (Domain with trailing slash) And if I am concentrating on my Homepage what is the best URL structure to follow whether the root domain or the domain with trailing slash. Can someone please clarify above doubts Thanks Vicky
| vickygoal0 -
What is the proper way to deal with multiple product pages?
If an e-commerce site selling backpacks has 200 items and they only show 30 per page, what is the proper way to deal with page 2, page 3, etc? Do you let each page rank separately? even though they are competing on the same keywords? Do you use canonical tags on pages after the first page?
| youngsgarden1 -
Ask a Question
Using SEOmoz for the first time, the initial crawl said we have 9,00 errors which were basically 4,500 duplicate pages and 4,500 dupllicate page titles. (ie http://domainname/etc .html, and http://www.domainmname/etc .html
| FFTCOUK
We altered our website accordingly by changing all internal links to http://www.domainmname/etc .html as Google and all other rngines are listing us using the www. prefix. On the next crawl we now have even more of these duplicate errors. How d we go about removing them as we only have one file for each on the server. Google has down graded our website in April by 35% and ass this is a retail site we are losing a lot of business. I would very much appreciate it if anyone has the time to amswer. Howard0 -
My site is showing blanks for the competitive analysis and only 1 for domain. Why?
I have filled in all the details and set the campaign up as a root domain. The site has been up for 4 days, and has been crawled. Please help!
| EdgePM0 -
How to defend against link cloaking
Hi, I own a website where recently a lot of backlinks have been going to my old domain that 301's to my new domain. During the past 2 months I have noticed a massive amount of links pointing to my old domain. When I go to look at the links and go to the page all I see is a search bar which to me this seems like link cloaking. I am not sure what I should do. Obviously I am not doing the link building and someone is targeting anchor specific keywords from multiple domains that all look the same. My question is should I report it myself in google webmaster tools before I get hit with a filter or penalty, or would this force them to penalize me. And if I do get caught up in a penalty I would not know how to fix this since I doubt the webmaster is linking to me out of the kindness of his heart. Any advice? Thanks
| dreamfire0 -
How to best remove old pages for SEO
I run an accommodation web site, each listing has its own page. When a property is removed what is the best way to handle this for SEO because the URL will no longer be valid and there will be a blank page.
| JamieHibbert0 -
Which Wordpress Framework for Best SEO
Which wordpress framework would you use for SEO. From what I have had a look at: Thesis is good but you cannot use other SEO plugins with it such as yoast SEO as it is not compatible Genesis or woo framework are good and a plugin like yoast SEO works well with them. What are your thoughts?
| VivaArturo1 -
Using video transcripts v captions and avoiding duplicate content?
Part 1: After editing a You Tube transcript, I typically re-upload as a caption file (with time codes)...for SEO does it matter whether you upload as a transcript v. captions? Is one better than the other? Part 2: If you upload a transcript (or caption) to YouTube, then post that video/transcript in your blog, wouldn't you get pinged for duplicate content?
| vernonmack0 -
How is this site doing this?
http://www.meccabingo.com It shows a splash / promotion page yet you check the cache and it's the real homepage, they are doing this so they don't lose rankings but how are they redirecting users to that but Google is caching the real homepage? is it friendly? thanks!!
| AdiRste0 -
Remove Bad Links Or Build New
Hello, After deeply assessing our back links we have come to the conclusion that we have too many links that have been devalued and also some spammy looking links.... Our next question is do we remove these bad links and start a fresh or do we just build new white hat links?? Thanks, Scott
| ScottBaxterWW0 -
What is the best way to find stranded pages?
I have a client that has a site that has had a number of people in charge of it. All of these people have very different opinions about what should be on the site itself. When I look at their website on the server I see pages that do not have any obvious navigation to them. What is the best way to find out the internal linking structure of a site and see if these pages truly are stranded?
| anjonr0 -
Need help with Joomla duplicate content issues
One of my campaigns is for a Joomla site (http://genesisstudios.com) and when my full crawl was done and I review the report, I have significant duplicate content issues. They seem to come from the automatic creation of /rss pages. For example: http://www.genesisstudios.com/loose is the page but the duplicate content shows up as http://www.genesisstudios.com/loose/rss It appears that Joomla creates feeds for every page automatically and I'm not sure how to address the problem they create. I have been chasing down duplicate content issues for some time and thought they were gone, but now I have about 40 more instances of this type. It also appears that even though there is a canonicalization plugin present and enabled, the crawl report shows 'false' for and rel= canonicalization tags Anyone got any ideas? Thanks so much... Scott | |
| sdennison0 -
Backlinks Indexing
Is there a way of indexing my backlinks?? I have a lot backlinks but Google can't find them
| CodePlus0 -
Why isnt my Site getting Re Crawled !!!
The last crawl for my website was done long back ! What is the use if you dont re-crawl ? My website is www.caraccessoriesdelhi.in I have corrected all the errors. When will you recrawl it ? This is absolutely not done ! The last crawl was done on 3rd May !
| VarunBansal0 -
Page rank and ranking down
Hi I blog at Technostarry. Some 3 months back during page rank update, my page rank went down from 3 to 2. I don't know the reason behind this. And now, my traffic and ranking is also down. I am not involved in any bad SEO practices, I don't copy paste and I write original content. I am too confused as why and what has happened with my site. If someone could analyze my blog and look at my weak points then that would be great. I would like to get any suggestions to get back my ranking and also page rank back. Thanks.
| technotech0 -
Problem with Rel Canonical
Background: We check to make sure that IF you use canonical URL tags, it points to the right page. If the canonical tag points to a different URL, engines will not count this page as the reference resource and thus, it won't have an opportunity to rank. If you've not made this page the rel=canonical target, change the reference to this URL. NOTE: For pages not employing canonical URL tags, this factor does not apply. Clearly I am doing something wrong here, how do I check my various pages to see where the problem lies and how do I go about fixing it?
| SallySerfas0 -
What factors matters the most when using a 301 permanent redirect?
Hi SEOmozzers, I have a client that has couple of duplicates but I am debating if i should just kill those pages or use 301 Permanent redirects. I know SEO moz provides 2 important factors to look at which are PA and link root domain. 1.Which one matters the most? or which one should I look at first to make a decision? 2. I have empty pages creating duplicate content with a PA of 14 and 1 linking root domain. my thought is to kill the page by inserting a meta NO INDEX. If you don't agree and think I should 301 to an existing page that needs link juice, let me know. Thank you mozzers 🙂
| Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Duplicate titles Question
Hi eveyone, I have around 1000 duplicate titles and meta description. The poblem was that I had pages in my home page and different pages had the same title. For example, index.php/site/articles/should_you_eat_protein_every_2-3_hours_for_muscle_growth/ /index.php/site/articles/should_you_eat_protein_every_2-3_hours_for_muscle_growth/N12//index.php/site/articles/should_you_eat_protein_every_2-3_hours_for_muscle_growth/N1444//index.php/site/articles/should_you_eat_protein_every_2-3_hours_for_muscle_growth/N1448//index.php/site/articles/should_you_eat_protein_every_2-3_hours_for_muscle_growth/N1448/P6//index.php/site/articles/should_you_eat_protein_every_2-3_hours_for_muscle_growth/N1452/I have 172 of the same page!So I took off all the pagination on my home page and just added 'click fo more'. When they click more, it takes them to the category.So my question is will google slowly start deleting or non-indexing these duplicate titles or pages as I have removed it from my website? (Just so that you know I added a canonical link and figuring out how to add page numbers to met titles and meta description tags for categories with pages)
| anoopbal0 -
.htaccess when integrating one website into another
My client would like to integrate one of it's smaller websites into its main website. I've identified around 20 pages which I'd like to 301 redirect to specific pages on the main website, and this is simple enough. The problem I have is that I am not sure how I can then put a catch-all to redirect all other pages on the site to the homepage of the main website. I'd originally though something like this would work: redirect 301 / http://www.mainwebsite.com/ (catch-all)
| AndrewAkesson
redirect 301 /about.asp http://www.mainwebsite.com/about (specific redirect 1)
redirect 301 /latest.asp http://www.mainwebsite.com/news (specific redirect 1)
etc. Any ideas?0
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