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.

  • vdgvince


    Hi, One of the first SEOMoz tool recommand to me, is to avoid multiple links on the same page. This is fully true, i've more than 600 internal links placed in a menu on the header.
    This means that each page contains these 600 links at least. User-experience wise, i need to keep this multi-level menu accessible. What would you suggest me ? => No-follow on the links would be useful and not penalizing (if i still have other do-follow links to these pages) => Javascript menu, so that i can't be crawled by google => Any other suggestion? Thank you in advance!

    | vdgvince
    0
  • ScottBaxterWW


    OK where do we start? Lets go back to June 2011So in June 2011 we left an SEO company that was looking after our account, after a year of being with them and not moving 1 place in the SERPS we decided to cut ties with them and move to a new SEO company... Over the first 6 months things seemed to be going well, for our main keyword "car warranty" we started to climb up the rankings from #6 - #4 - #2, we also moved up for other keywords. One thing that I did notice when we were with the new SEO Company not much on-site optimisation was completed.Move forward to January 2012So over the Christmas period the usual happened, our rankings stayed the same put traffic dropped which is obviously normal for this specific time of year... But on the 7th of Jan 2012 our rankings dropped from #2 - #10, we contacted the SEO company in question and they reported back that a server that had 20links pointing back to our server had crashed on Christmas Day and the links had been de-indexed from Google, they said give it 2 - 3 weeks and the links will be re-indexed and we should pop back up on google.3 Weeks later we were still in the exactly the same position, the good thing was because we run a very good Adwords campaign the traffic to our site didn't drop.The SEO company then came back and said it looks like we have been placed in a 60day filter by Google and once the 60day filter had been reached we should pop back up - 65days came and went and we were still in the exact same position. After us waiting around for months to see if the rankings improved we decided to leave the SEO company and move all our SEO work back in-house.Move forward to February 2012Once we had full control over the account again we made some changes to the on-site optimisation of the site, we improved page titles, descriptions, tags and also our content was re-written - we then waited for Google to pickup the changes and re-index our site. YesterdaySo yesterday we checked our rankings - some of our longer tail keywords had improved but our main big traffic keywords had dropped even further - we had gone from #10 to #16, with the update to the algorithm yesterday targeting spammy websites we feared that we had been hit by the new update. We then cleaned up some links that looked spammy and asked for a reconsideration request. Now looking deeper into our backlinks we still have some spammy non-relevant links as well as a few big sitewide links - 1 sitewide link provides 732,667 links to our homepage and our total links indexed by Google is only 759,144.What do you think we should do...Wait for Google to come back to us after the reconsideration request?Remove more and backlinks?Build more high value links?If anyone can provide me with more information it would be great.Thanks,
    Scott

    | ScottBaxterWW
    0
  • DanishWadhwa


    Hello I have a very basic question, hope you people don't mind answering this. I plan to create a 10 blogs with keyword specific domain name, where in footer i can place back-link pointing to my website and thought to run on C-Class IP's which will cost me of-course. Now 2nd option which will be free, where i can plan to have my blog on wordpress, Timblr, blogger etc free blogging website and use the backlinks from there and all will have different IP which will also best for SEO prospective. Can you suggest me which will be the best option to have blogs on owned domain name or free blogging site, keeping in mind this will be just s prospective to generate backlinks. Do recommend is this a genuine way to get backliks or its another spam, and where we will keep on  updating the all blogs regularly. Thanks in Advance! Regards Danish Wadhwa

    | DanishWadhwa
    0
  • PeterM22


    Hi everyone! What is the maximum length a title tag should be and what range should a seo description be for best practice?

    | PeterM22
    0
  • Squall315


    Hi, please someone help! We have two identical websites, say A & B. Because of the not so good SEO establishment, site B was built and site A was 301 redirected to site B weeks ago. For some reasons, we have to reuse site A, which means we have to cancel the 301 redirection. (Sound a little crazy) So the question are: 1. Can we conduct the action? 2. If we cant, what's the reason? 3. If we can, what would be the best practice? Thanks for help in advance! Plus: we also CARE what would happen to site B if the 301 is cancelled? Will it grow healthy like a new site?

    | Squall315
    0
  • KateGMaker


    We use django for out site and it's working really well, but we're having an issue with duplicate titles and content via the news section. The news is basically stories sourced from other sites and we link to them via our news section. I'm not sure how to fix the duplicate title issue in this case. I noticed people recommend archiving or using a canonical, but because the news section is set up how it is I don't think that would work. Does anyone have a way around this?A

    | KateGMaker
    0
  • DerekM88


    Hi SEOMoz! The company I work for has a website, www.accupos.com, but they also have an old domain which is not used anymore called http://accuposretail.com/ These two sites had duplicate content so I requested the OLD site (http://accuposretail.com/) be redirected to accupos.com to eliminate the dupe content. Unfortunately, I do not understand completely what happened but when they performed this forwarding the accuposretail.com URL is still in use. Now it just displays EXACTLY what accupos.com displays and not something similar. The tech team told me it is forwarded but I can't help but see the URL still in the search box on top. Is this unacceptable? The actual URL has to forward and change to the accupos.com URL in order to not be duplicate content, correct? I have limited experience in this. Please let me know if we are good to go, or if I need to tell them more action is required. Thanks! Derek M

    | DerekM88
    0
  • SEMPassion


    I am an admin on a google custom site search account.  I am also the owner of a verified webmaster tools account for the same site. The Custom Search control panel will not let me add URL's or a Site map for on demand indexing, but says "you must submit a sitemap of your own verified sites". Has anyone else has this issue?  Does the Owner of the custom search account have to be the owner of the webmaster account, or can the logged in admin be? Thanks

    | SEMPassion
    0
  • MQMORAN2323


    With the new changes to the google algorithm.  I'm trying to figure out what links google may think are hurting my site.  Any thoughts?  Thanks

    | MQMORAN2323
    0
  • finalfrontier


    SeoMoz crawler indicated a few times that my site has a duplicate home page error (http://mysite.com and www.mysite.com) I eliminated the the couple remaining internal links that pointed to http://mysite on a couple pages (all other internal links point to http://www.mysite.com) I ran the crawl again and it said no errors this time.  I naturally thought the duplicate page error problem was fixed. However this morning I got the regularly scheduled crawl report from SeoMoz that said again I have those duplicate error pages. No changes were made to any of my site's pages between the crawls. That makes me wonder if the crawler is providing false positives at times or was wrong when it said on the crawl a couple days ago that I don't have any errors (no duplicate page error). Now, I don't know what to think.

    | finalfrontier
    0
  • JAARON


    I've got several pages of similar products that google has listed as duplicate content. I have them all set up with rel="prev" and rel="next tags telling google that they are part of a group but they've still got them listed as duplicates. Is there something else I should do for these pages or is that just a short falling of googles webmaster tools? One of the pages: http://www.jaaronwoodcountertops.com/wood-countertop-gallery/walnut-countertop-9.html

    | JAARON
    0
  • Wallander


    In the interests of making my site faster I have recently come across the suggestion of removing unwanted PHP from my WooThemes WordPress theme. The suggestion is to hard code the choices I have made in the WordPress template to reduce on database calls. Has anyone actually done this to their WordPress theme before and seen any measurable results?

    | Wallander
    1
  • InteractiveRed67


    Hi, I am wondering if someone can confirm that its best practice to have nofollow on secondary links on a page.  For instance the contact page may have a link in the navigation and in the the blurb down the page have another link to the contact page saying contact us here etc..  So in this instance i would put a nofollow on the secondary link in the blurb would this be the best way to impliment this. Many thanks Chris

    | InteractiveRed67
    0
  • FXDD


    Hi Is there a real value in having the keywords in the URL structure? we could use the URL: Mybrand.com/software/tablets/ipad/supertrader.html Or instead have the CMS create the shorter version mybrand.com/supertrader.html and just optimize this page for the keyword 'supertrader ipad software'

    | FXDD
    1
  • MatthewBarby


    Hi Guys, Having a really frustrating problem with our website. It is a Joomla 1.7 site and we have some duplicate page issues. What is happening is that we have a webpage, lets say domain.com/webpage1 and then we also have domain.com/index.php/webpage1. Google is seeing these as duplicate pages and is causing me some real SEO problems. I have tried setting up a 301 redirect but it wn't let me redirect /index.php/webpage1 to /webpage1. Anyone have any ideas or plugins that can be used to sort this out? Any help will be really appreciated! Matt.

    | MatthewBarby
    0
  • Feily


    Having a debate here that needs to be settled. A friend is using twitter to link back to his site but is falling down the google rankings.  I think that he is over using and creating double content  which looks like a robot . Can any body elsse explain this Better Please Thanks in advance for your help

    | Feily
    0
  • hfranz


    Very strange issue I noticed today. In my SEOMoz Campaigns I noticed thousands of Warnings and Errors! I noticed that any page on my website ending in .php can be duplicated by adding anything you want to the end of the url, which seems to be causing these issues. Ex: Normal URL - www.example.com/testing.php Duplicate URL - www.example.com/testing.php/helloworld The duplicate URL displays the page without the images, but all the text and information is present, duplicating the Normal page. I Also found that many of my PDFs seemed to be getting duplicated burried in directories after directories, which I never ever put in place. Ex: www.example.com/catalog/pdfs/testing.pdf/pdfs/another.pdf/pdfs/more.pdfs/pdfs/ ... when the pdfs are only located in a pdfs directory! I am very confused on how to fix this problem. Maybe with some sort of redirect?

    | hfranz
    0
  • ragivan


    My website keeps moving up and down in ranking but stays within page 2 to 3. Everyday its at a new position.

    | ragivan
    0
  • deaddogdesign


    I just fixed a tags duplicate content issue.  I have noindexed the tags.  Was wondering if anyone has ever fixed this issue and how long did it take you to recover from it?  Just kind of want to know for a piece of mind.

    | deaddogdesign
    0
  • AndrewAkesson


    I'm currently working on a live version of a clients website which has duplication issues. With .htaccess, I need to rewrite URL's of the following format: vacancy.php?id=802 to vacancy/?id=802 I tried adding the following line but it returned a 500, and don't want to keep taking the site out. RewriteRule ^vacancy/?id=([0-9]+)$ vacancy.php?id=$1 [R=301, L]

    | AndrewAkesson
    0
  • JustinGeeks


    We launched a site wide implementation of an email overlay with a 10 second delay. Go to http://www.geeks.com to see it live. Looking at our crawl stats in Google webmaster tools I noticed our pages crawled per day is way down, kilobytes downloaded per day is down, and time spent downloading a page is up. Could these metrics be of a result of this overlay? Thank you in advance. -MB

    | JustinGeeks
    0
  • JasonRae


    Ok seo guys, don't get crazy here I am not trying to build a link wheel or anything black hat that's why I am asking. I want to create several sites that are within my niche but cannot be on the same site because it just wouldn't make sense.  So for the purpose of branding a company can we have multi sites with similar templates or does google not want this. I am not trying to rank these for the sole purpose of back linking but I want them all on a mulit site so they can have the same buddy press network. Let me know what you guys think.

    | JasonRae
    1
  • shaneod


    I'm talking to a child abuse protection agency about developing their website and we are looking into keyword for them their site to target. The client asked me yesterday, are there any implications for targeting keywords such as "Child Abuse" etc. I presume there is no problem with this but just thought I would double check?

    | shaneod
    0
  • salemtas


    Just wondering - for a lot of our sites we use tags as a way of re-grouping articles / news / blogs so all of the info on say 'government grants' can be found on one page.  These /tag pages often come up with duplicate content errors, is it a big issue, how can we minimnise that?

    | salemtas
    0
  • JAARON


    I have a extra page that google has indexed: www.jaaronwoodcountertops.com/?iframe=true&width=80%&height=80% Google has it listed as a page with duplicate content as my index page. I've tried to redirect it but the redirect isn't working on this one. Anyone have an idea of how to deal with this guy?

    | JAARON
    0
  • webfeatseo


    I have a client who serves multiple regions but does not have physical locations and operates out of only one. Since he does business this way he only has one Google Places listing with the address hidden. However, he has a phone number on it that is localized to one of the regions. Will this hurt him for ranking in the other regions? To clarify - he has a cincinnati phone number but also has indianpolis, columbus, dayton, and others listed as areas served. Would it be best to just get him a 1800  number and put that in there?

    | webfeatseo
    0
  • levalencia1


    For some reason, my account says it only crawled 3 pages this week, where its usually about 3K. This is my robots which shouldnt affect http://www.theprinterdepo.com/robots.txt and this is my site http://www.theprinterdepo.com any idea?

    | levalencia1
    0
  • watkinsheating


    I'm a little nervous about moving to CloudFlare. I'd love to hear everyone's experience with CloudFlare or other CDNs. PS My site is static and non SSL.

    | watkinsheating
    1
  • NicB1


    Hi, In an attempt to reduce the latency of our site, we are planning on late-loading all content below the fold via AJAX.  My concern is Googlebot won't see this content and won't index it properly (our site is very large and we have lots of content). What is good for our users is not necessarily good for bots.  Will late loading AJAX content be read by Googlebot? Thoughts on how to balance speed vs search engine crawl-ability?

    | NicB1
    0
  • levalencia1


    Okay, lets say that I already fixed all my technical seo stuff. All my crawl errors and warnings are gone. Now I really want to start seo so I have a few questions. 1. I know I should work based on a page and not on a domain, so it means I should choose which keyword to optimize each page for? only one keyword per page? or it might be more? 2. Some keywords are very competitive for me, example for my site www.theprinterdepo.com, the best keyword to rank would be printers, but it would take years a beginner to do that, what should I do? 3.  If highly competitive keywords are not an option, which keywords shuold I use? the ones that have more global monthly searches? Thanks

    | levalencia1
    0
  • AndrewAkesson


    We’re using wordpress, and we have the following in the .htaccess: BEGIN WordPress RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule . /index.php [L] END WordPress We have a URL like http://subdomain.example.com/select-a-card/?q=fuel, and I want to rewrite it so that it becomes http://subdomain.example.com/fuel-card/ What do I need to add to the htaccess to do this?? Thanks,

    | AndrewAkesson
    0
  • SilbertAd


    Hi there, I am looking for a sitemap creation tool, so I can submit my site to Google. My site is www.vallnord.com On the other hadn I would like to speed up my web. Any tip? Regards, Guido.

    | SilbertAd
    0
  • Blobe


    I have my root domain and as I am a web designer, I use subfolders as sandboxes for client websites. I would not like these to be searched though because they are just demos, ideas and such. Would this be a robots.txt matter or can I have SEOMoz wok with a campaign where I can exclude subfolders? Thank you in advance! : )

    | Blobe
    0
  • FrederikTrovatten22


    I guys.. I have a very annoying issue.. My Wordpress-blog over at www.Trovatten.com has some indexation-problems.. Google Webmaster Tools data:
    GWT says the following: "Sitemap contains urls which are blocked by robots.txt." and shows me my homepage and my blogposts.. This is my Robots.txt: http://www.trovatten.com/robots.txt
    "User-agent: *
    Disallow: /wp-admin/
    Disallow: /wp-includes/ Do you have any idea why it says that the URL's are being blocked by robots.txt when that looks how it should?
    I've read a couple of places that it can be because of a Wordpress Plugin that is creating a virtuel robots.txt, but I can't validate it.. 1. I have set WP-Privacy to crawl my site
    2. I have deactivated all WP-plugins and I still get same GWT-Warnings. Looking forward to hear if you have an idea that might work!

    | FrederikTrovatten22
    0
  • lyndas


    Hi, we just put our association's site in SEO Moz so we can tackle SEO and we received thousands of duplicate page content and duplicate title warnings. I searched the forum before asking 🙂 Appreciate some guidance on how many things are wrong with the URL's below that are getting flagged as duplicate page content. 1. Does the repetition of the page title and section hurt SEO? 2. Does the iMIS15 in the URL (the server) detract from relevant ranking? 3. From the forum, it looks like canonical tags should be added to the version of the page that starts with .....?hkey  (is there a way to predict and "canonize" these? Or recommendations?) http://www.iiba.org/imis15/IIBA/About_IIBA/IIBA_Website/About_IIBA/About_IIBA.aspx?hkey=6d821afa-e3aa-4bef-bafa-2453238d12c6 http://www.iiba.org/imis15/IIBA/About_IIBA/IIBA_Website/About_IIBA/About_IIBA.aspx Thank you.

    | lyndas
    0
  • photogaz


    Looking at the over-optimisation list it pretty much seems to me something that everyone is doing so are we suddenly going to find the best results actually de-indexed. Maybe Google will slowly shut off indexing stage by stage so everyone changes. What are your thoughts?

    | photogaz
    0
  • shehzad


    Hello, I recently moved to rackspace and before i signed made sure with them that i would get a UK based IP. It is a Cloud hosting solution. I have checked with whois and a few other sites and the IP is being shown as US, they asked me to do a traceroute and it shows up in the UK: http://network-tools.com/default.asp?prog=trace&host=164.177.146.74 can anyone confirm if this is UK based and ok from an seo point of view as we are targeting a UK audience. Any help will be much appreciated. Thank you Shehzad

    | shehzad
    0
  • Charlessipe


    Let's say you get a ton of traffic and top ranking for a plural version of a keyword but almost 0 traffic for the non-plural version. Is it a good idea to try to allocate resources to the non-plural version?

    | Charlessipe
    0
  • Pork


    I currently have a website domain.com.au, an American branch of the company who own domain.com are currently having their site built and want to forward there domain.com to domain.com.au while construction is taking place. Are there any negative effects to parking the domain.com on my domain.com.au? What is the best method to do this without causing any problems for my domain.com.au?

    | Pork
    0
  • RichFinnSEO


    So I have been working with a domain since November last year that still shows no improvement in regards to the link analysis.  I am baffled because we have gotten them onto the first page on Google for a few of the keywords we are optimizing.  Any help with this is greatly appreciated and I am a noob so definitely open to learning.  Thanks in advance to all of you. Domain in question - www.modernportablerefrigeration.com Domain is currently on a shared server if that makes any difference. Cordially, Todd Richard [email protected]

    | RichFinnSEO
    0
  • klkirby


    I thought it was here before but now the seomoz folks don't seem to be responding in this forum. Is there another place to go to get seomoz to answer a question?

    | klkirby
    0
  • TSpike1


    Would it be wise for me to start implementing onsite optimization changes on a website, such as the changing urls, adding in keywords in meta tags, meta descriptions, etc if the website is about to get a totally new design. For example if I wanted to change the url structure and onsite optimization features would the changes still be on the new website.

    | TSpike1
    0
  • fxtrader1979


    When I first setup my site the domain was learnbonds.com.  I moved hosts a couple of months ago and as part of the process I asked them to make the site show as www.learnbonds.com  which they did. Now however when I goto www.learnbonds.com in open site explorer it says there is no data.  When I enter learnbonds.com into open site explorer it gives me data but says that the site has been redirected to the www. version which shows no data. Also in google webmaster when I try to set the preferred domain as the www. version it gives me the following message: Part of the process of setting a preferred domain is to verify that you own http://www.learnbonds.com/. Please verify http://www.learnbonds.com/. I am concerned that this is hurting my SEO and would appreciate any advice you can give. Thanks Dave

    | fxtrader1979
    0
  • musicforkids


    I made two separate campaigns before I understood the meaning of "subdomain". I make one campaign for my www.com and another for my .com. I now realize I should have made the .com the domain and the www. the subdomain in the same campaign. Is there a way to edit this? Thanks!

    | musicforkids
    0
  • jonmorse86


    Hello there, We have a company website: http://www.parklanechampagne.co.uk/ and a Wordpress blog: http://www.alastairharrison.me/ and I would like the blog on the subfolder http://www.parklanechampagne.co.uk/blog so that we get maximum SEO benefit from updating this regularly (I understand this would be better than putting it on a subdomain blog.parklanechampagne.co.uk?). The Wordpress blog is hosted externally but I was after some advice on how we can move this blog to the parklanechampagne/blog subfolder? Any help gratefully received - I've asked several SEO and web agencies this question and had a lot of contrasting replies! Many thanks, Jon

    | jonmorse86
    0
  • Metropolis


    I have seen a few articles regarding HTML 5 and its implications re: SEO Has anyone implemented HTML 5 for SEO? and has there been any discernible impact? http://www.netlz.com/seo-blog/2012/04/09/seo-for-html5/ http://searchengineland.com/seo-best-practices-for-html5-truths-half-truths-outright-lies-99406 https://seogadget.co.uk/xhtml-20-and-seo/

    | Metropolis
    0
  • ToddSEOBoston


    Hi SEOmoz community. I have a unique situation where I’m evaluating a website that is trying to optimize better for local search and targeting 97 surrounding towns in his geographical location. What is unique about this situation is that he is ranking on the 1st and 2nd pages of the SERPs for his targeted keywords, has duplicate content on 97 pages to his site, and the search engines are still ranking the website. I ran the website’s url through SEOmoz’s Crawl Test Tool and it verified that it has duplicate content on 97 pages and has too many links (97) per page. Summary: Website has 97 duplicate pages representing each town, with each individual page listing and repeating all of the 97 surrounding towns, and each town is a link to a duplicate page. Question: I know eventually the site will not get indexed by the Search Engines and not sure the best way to resolve this problem – any advice?

    | ToddSEOBoston
    0
  • ClaireH-184886


    Hi I am looking for advice to get my new articles out there and my news stories. I would like to know if i should ping my articles and news stories each time i write a new one and if so which ping services do you recommend and what do they really do. Can anyone recommend any other services that i could use to promote my new articles and news stories to gain more traffic. Many thanks

    | ClaireH-184886
    1
  • RuudHeijnen


    A client of mine has an international company named www.taxglobalizers.com if you come from Holland they 302 redirect you to the www.taxglobalizers.com/en version of the site and if you come from Holland they redirect with a 302 to www.taxglobalizers.com/nl version. I think it is best to change this in a 301 redirect. Am i correct in this? Kind Regards, Ruud

    | RuudHeijnen
    0
  • SEOLeaders


    We have one client who has an established eCommerce Site and has created another site which has the exact same content which is about to be launched. We want both sites to be indexed but not be penalised for duplicate content. The sites have different domains The sites have the same host We want the current site to be priority, so the new site would not be ranking higher in SERPs. Any advice on setting up canonical, author tags, alternate link tag etc Thanks Rich

    | SEOLeaders
    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.