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Category: Technical SEO

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


  • Hi - Is there a way of checking whether pages are in the supplementary index? Thanks

    | bjalc2011
    0

  • I have a client who offers residential and commercial services. We are dividing up the site into two sections that distinguish between these services and the clients. On the homepage, we ask site visitors to first choose from the Commercial or Residential services. I don't want to have any main navigation options on the homepage because they will change depending on whether you select the commercial option or the residential. Will this hurt the site in terms of SEO? Are there any suggestions of how to structure the home nav so it is not confusing to the visitor, but won't hurt the optimization of the site? Thank you.

    | WebsightDesign
    0

  • Hi, We're running our own adserver and we use OPENX. The problem is with the iframe invocation type that we have been using to show ads on pages. My question is: How can we track the ad clicks that are being showed in the iframe? I know the method in Analytics to count outgoing links as pageviews or events but I am not sure how to do this for clicks for OPENX Iframes as they don't even include Google Analytics tracking code inside the iframe. any ideas appreciated

    | Gamer07
    0

  • Hi all right now i have 301 redirects setup in my htaccess file i recently redesigned our site so i have been redirecting all the old urls to the new ones. I saw a post about having all your urls the same format, so i updated my htaccess file to redirect all urls from http://www.mysite.com/food to http://www.mysite.com/food/ (added a forward slash). Now on my latest seo crawl i see all my site urls, redirecting to the forward slash url. am i doing this right, thanks will

    | Will_Craig
    0

  • We have a client that has two sites that rank well for different searches in their market. The main pages ranking are things like advice articles and news pieces. For various reasons, they just want one site. I believe they need to duplicate the content from the outgoing site and place it on the main site, with a 301 redirect from each old page to each new one. What happens when they eventually want to redirect the entire domain? Would these smaller, internal redirects become obsolete, therefore removing any link value they once had? I am not sure how this works or if there is a best practice way to do this. Thanks Gareth

    | Gmorgan
    0

  • Hi guys, this is my first ever post on SEOMoz (woo!) I have researched and I did see someone else ask something similar but I still wasn't clear, so i hope this question is not considered a duplicate and can go on to help other people too Enough waffle For various reasons I am moving our company blog to startup a personal blog instead and I have bought a couple of appropriate domain names in a firstname/lastname format for the new blog, basically: myname.me and iammyname.com My question is, which would you consider 'better', if either, for SEO? (bonus point: are there any other non-SEO factors I should consider?) Obviously the second name is longer, but it is a .com and I hear all the time that .com is king and .me is waaaay behind Ultimately I want to rank #1 for my name If it was your site and your blog and you had my choices which one would you go for? Many thanks for your help. I'm looking forward to being part of the SEOMoz community and learning a lot from you guys, cheers, Nick

    | NickDavis
    0

  • Hey all; I hunted around for this in previous questions in the Q&A and didn't see anything. I'm just coming back to SEO after a few years out of the field and am preparing recommendations for our web dev team. We use a custom-coded software for our forums, and it creates a giant swathe of duplicate content, as each post has its own link. For example: domain.com/forum/post_topic domain.com/forum/post_topic/post1 domain.com/forum/post_topic/post2 ...and so on. However, since every page of the forum defaults to showing 20 posts, that means that every single forum thread that's 20 posts long has 21 different pages with identical content.  Now, our forum is all user-generated content and is not generally a source of much inbound traffic--with occasional exceptions--but I was curious if having a mess of duplicate content in our forums could damage our ability to rate well in a different directory of the site. I've heard that Panda is really cracking down on duplicate content, and last time I was current on SEO trends, rel="canonical" was the hot new thing that everyone was talking about, so I've got a lot of catching up to do. Any guidance from the community would be much appreciated.

    | TheEnigmaticT
    0

  • I have a situation where people search for terms like, say 1978 one dollar bill. Even though there never was a 1978 one dollar bill.   I want to make a page to capture these searches but since there wasn't such a thing as a one dollar bill I don't want it connected to the rest of my content which is reality based.   Does that make sense? Anyway,  my question is,  can I publish pages that aren't linked to my menu structure but that will be searchable or, am I going to have to figure out a way to make these oddball pages accessible through my menu?

    | Banknotes
    0

  • A client changed domains and both are being indexed. There are thousands of content pages. I can install a 301 redirect Joomla plugin and configure it so that each page redirects to the new domain. I have a feeling I will need to manual set every page. OR I can create a domain level redirect setting in cpanel using wildcards. I think this will automatically pass every old URL to the new URL. Which is the better approach? The cpanel option sounds like less work.

    | designquotes
    0

  • I am working with a per page results refinement that stores a cookie on the users computer and then keeps that same per page as the user goes around the site. I was just wondering if that was true for Google bot or Bing bot as well. Will they keep the cookie or would they not be able to accept it. I just want to know as I dont want different urls created if they can keep the cookie. Thanks!

    | Gordian
    0

  • Can a link which is nofollwed pass link juice ?  Please see the discussion at - http://www.seomoz.org/q/if-multiple-links-on-a-page-point-to-the-same-url-and-one-of-them-is-no-followed-does-that-impact-the-one-that-isn-t

    | seoug_2005
    0

  • My company specializes in website design and development, and as such, the portfolio section on our website has lots of links to websites we've built. Generally, the way that we do this is that our portfolio sections links to URLs with a naming scheme as follows: http://ourcompany.com/client1 which is either a redirect to http://client1.com if the site is still up, or a version hosted on our website (http://ourcompany.com/client1) if the client is no longer hosting their site. In addition, most of our client sites contain a reciprocal link back to ourcompany.com, usually with the text "Website design and development by OurCompany". I have two questions about this arrangement: Might the reciprocal backlinks from the client sites be affecting the SEO results for ourcompany.com? I know that reciprocal backlinks can be occasionally problematic. If I do a search for "site:ourcompany.com", I'll get results for all of the client sites that we're hosting at http://ourcompany.com/client1, because I haven't excluded them in robots.txt. Of course, the content of these sites has little to do with that of our company, because we have a diverse array of clients and none of them do web design and development (which is the content focus of our site). Might this seemingly unrelated content be affecting our results? Should the client sites be excluded in robots.txt or via nofollow? Thanks very much!

    | fdepino
    0

  • A client wants to know if it's possible to get Google to remove stories from Google News feeds if those stories have nothing to do with the client? Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

    | JamesAMartin
    0

  • I have a website that has a a dynamic URl for individual dealer landing pages - this works based on the geo-location tool on the site. When a user comes it it will recognize their location based on IP address then present the appropriate content based on zip code logic. Example URL: http://www.3mwater.com/?___store=dealer Example URL: http://www.3mwater.com/dealer/ Question: How can I best optimize each individual page for each individual dealer when the URL stays static regardless of dealer? Thank you!

    | Yanez
    0

  • Hello fellow SEOs, I have been doing SEO for about a year now, I'm not expert, but I know enough to get the job done. I'm learning everyday about better techniques. So enough about that... Tonight I noticed that my site has, I believe, been de-indexed. Its a fairly new site, as we just launched it a few days ago and I went in and did all the title tags and meta. I still have to go in to do the h1 and h2 tags...plus add some alt tags and anchor text. Well anyways, after a couple of days after the title tags were implemented. I was propagating all over the place. Using my keyword tool here...I was number on the first page in Google for 71 or the 88 keywords. My new site was just indexed yesterday and thats when i noticed all my keywords. Well today I noticed that I am no where to be found, even if i type in my company's name. PLEASE help me out...any advice would be appreciated. Thank you. p.s. could my competitors could have done something to my site? just wondering... The website is www.eggheadconsultants.com

    | Jegghead
    1

  • We are migrating a very large site to a new CMS and I'm trying to determine the best way to handle all the links (~15k) in our html sitemap. The developers don't see the purpose of using an html sitemap anymore and I have yet to come up with a good reason why we should migrate rather than just get rid of the sitemap since it is not very useful to users. The html sitemap was created about 6 years ago when page rank sculpting was a high priority. Currently, since we already have an XML sitemap, I'm not sure that there's really a need for a html sitemap, other than to maintain all the internal links. How valuable are the internal links found in an html sitemap? And will it be a problem if we remove these from our link profile? 15,000 links sounds significant, but they only account for less than .5% of our internal links. What do all you think?

    | BostonWright
    0

  • Hi When creating Google places you can add additional information but where does this information go? its not showing up on the page when you place page? Whats the best practice when creating pages in relation to optimising them ? thanks

    | Bristolweb
    0

  • Hi i am trying to work out how to use google plus to increase brand awareness and to increase traffic to my site, but i am not sure how to do this. can anyone please give me step by step instructions on setting it up and using it to generate traffic please

    | ClaireH-184886
    0

  • I use a justhost.com reseller account to host about 15-20 of my own websites.  None of the sites are related, nor do I interlink or do anything blackhat with any of them.  All of the sites have unique content.  Some of it isn't great, but I didn't use a writing service on any of then, it was all written by myself. Recently I found a list of my sites (as well as about 200 others hosted by justhost) on a hacker website that listed the cpanel usernames.  I alerted the host and the issue is being fixed.  I am changing all of my usernames and passwords for all of the sites. Anyway, I recently took a look at some analytics and rankings and noticed that I lost a lot of my rankings on a handful of those sites recently.  I know there was the big de-indexing of junk blogs recently, but I don't think that is the case.  I can still find all of my sites in Google, they are just out of the first 50 results, when a majority of them were ranked from 5-20 in the SERPs. Here are three of the sites and their phrases: http://nintendoconsoles.com/ "nintendo consoles" - This domain I bought from someone so there could be some sort of sandbox period for it. http://webhostingfordrupal.com/ "web hosting for drupal" - This was a new register. http://seotirical.com "seotirical" - we don't show up, but all of the tweets and links to us do. - This was a new register. I realize these sites aren't perfect, and might not have been ready for the first page.  The Nintendo site is about 3 months old, but the Drupal site has been around for 8+ months.  I might try adding a fresh piece of content tonight to see if that helps, but I thought it was curious that it happened across the board with about 5-6 sites on my one reseller account.  I don't even know if the top portion of this post has anything to do with the problems, but I thought I'd see if anyone has insight. Cheers,
    Vinnie

    | vforvinnie
    0

  • I want to give access to this account to an additional user. Is this possible?

    | MishconAdmin
    0

  • Hello fellow Moz'rs! I'll get straight to the point here - The issue, which is shown in the attached image, is that for every URL ending in /blog/category/name, it has a duplicate page of /blog/category/name/?p=contactus. Also, its worth nothing that the ?p=contact us are not in the SERPs but were crawled by SEOMoz and they are live and duplicate. We are using Pinnacle cart. Is there a way to just stop the crawlers from ?p=contactus or? Thank you all and happy rankings, James

    | JamesPiper
    0

  • OK so this is a really, really basic question.  However, I'm seeing some meta written differently to normal and I'm wondering if a) this is correct and b) whether there is any benefit. Normally it's like this: However, I am seeing it written like this is some places: So, the content= and name= are swapped around.  I assume the people that did this were thinking that bringing the content forward would mean that Google reads keywords first. Just wondering if anybody knows whether this is good practice or not?  Just spiked my interest so apologies for the basic nature of the question!

    | RiceMedia
    0

  • Hi, We've been testing internal tracking for 4 weeks on a couple of pages using the basic string ?internalcampaign=X, but hese pages have started appearing in the search results. We don't currently have the facility to add canonical tags to correct this. Does anyone have any other solutions to this problem other than deleting the internal tracking or adding filters on the server? Thanks!

    | NSJ78
    0

  • I'm having difficulties with SEOmoz Rank Tracker tool. During last month, it hasn't worked properly. I was suggested to use "campaign based rank tracking tool"- I would like to learn if anyone has already used it? Thanks, Sema

    | WTGEvents
    0

  • need help with keeping track of when new pages pop up that might compete internally with already optimized pages.

    | SEOmoxy
    0

  • Hello, I'm seeing the following Analytics data for some of my keywords: Multiple Visits Pages/Visit: 1 Avg Visit Duration: 00:00 % New Visits: 100% Bounce Rate: 100% The data is the same on all "affected keywords". What is going on and how do I fix it? Thanks for the help!

    | AWCthreads
    0

  • I am running into an issue where I have pages with completely different body and meta description but they are still being marked as having the same content (Duplicate Page Content error). What am I missing here? Examples: http://www.wallstreetoasis.com/forums/what-to-expect-in-the-summer-internship
    and
    http://www.wallstreetoasis.com/blog/something-ventured http://www.wallstreetoasis.com/forums/im-in-the-long-run
    and
    http://www.wallstreetoasis.com/image/jhjpeg

    | WallStreetOasis.com
    0

  • Greeting, I am in the process of 301 a group of pages on our site. We are thinking about switching from ASP to a Linux Server. Question 1. - Would anyone have any information of creating a Sever Spoof so that the Linux Server will recognize asp pages for a 301? Question 2 - How will this style of 301 Effect SEO rankings? Thanks, Tony

    | Tonyd23
    0

  • The base href has been set in the following format: <base href="//www.example.com/"> I am working on a project where many of the programming team don't believe that SEO has an impact on a website. So, we often see some strange things. Recently, they have rolled out an update to the website template that includes the base href I listed above. I found out about it when some of our tools such as Xenu link checker - suddenly stopped working. Google appears to be indexing the the pages fine and following the links without any issue - but I wonder if there is any long term SEO considerations to building the internal links in this manner? Thanks!

    | Nebraska
    0

  • I'm using wordpress for my website but m unable to implement Canonical tag property for pages under the same category, Like for matt's blog: The Tag is same .. for all pages under that category: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/type/googleseo/ & http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/type/googleseo/page/2/ is it some hack or some plugin ? please suggest! thanks

    | AnkitRawat
    0

  • We were told by a consultant that in SEO it is best practice to canonicalize our homepage URL with the trailing slash. What do you think about doing this for the homepage? Is it important for other site links to have the trailing slash as well

    | fibers
    0

  • Hi, Apologies in advance for the long winded question... we need some guidance with our category/product/options structure in our shop. We primarily sell car parts and lots of our parts have multiple fitments for what is basically the same part. Some ranges can have 1,000s of products. We can't work out what is an appropriate level of information and granularity for our product structure.We recognise the importance of having fitments and specific terms in the product title and URL, but we also know that having loads of almost identical product pages is a definite negative and fragments our SEO potential. But where's the happy medium? For example, let's say we have a specific brand of brake pad (we'll call it Brako) with 4 different product-models (Super1, Super2, Super3, Super4), each fits 100 different cars, which are made by 10 different manufacturers. We have a few different ways of presenting/splitting up these 400 simple products: (ignore the URLs here, this is just to illustrate the browsing structure & likely product page titles) 1 category for the Brake Brand with 400 product pages inside, 1 product page for each specific combination of brake product-model and car-fitment. /Brako/Brako-Super1-brakes_BMW-M3.html 1 category, 400 product pages, 0 choices on each product page. 1 category for the Brake Brand with 40 products inside, 1 product for each specific combination of brake product-model and car-manufacturer. Each product page would then let you choose from a dropdown which of the 10 specific cars you had. /Brako/Brako-Super1-brakes_BMW.html 1 category, 40 product pages, 10 choices on each product page. 1 category for the Brake Brand with 4 sub-categories inside for the brake product-models with 100 products inside each, 1 product for each specific combination of car-fitment. /Brako/Brako-Super1-brakes/Brako-Super1-brakes_BMW-M3.html 1 category, 4 sub-categories, 40 product pages, 10 choices on the product page. 1 category for the Brake Brand with 4 sub-categories inside for the brake product-models, with 10 products inside each.1 product for each specific combination of brake product-model and car-manufacturer. Each product page would then let you choose from a dropdown which of the 10 specific cars you had. /Brako/Brako-Super1-brakes/brakebrand-Super1-brakes_BMW.html 1 category, 4 sub-categories, 40 product pages, 10 choices on each product page. 1 category for the Brake Brand with 4 products inside, 1 product for each brake product-model. Each product page would then let you choose from 2 dropdowns, each with 10 options: one for car manufacturer, the next for car model. /Brako/Brako-Super1-brakes.html 1 category, 4 product pages, 100 (10x10) choices on each product page. 1 product page containing options to choose all 400 Brako products using 3 drop down boxes: Car Manufacturer, Car Model and Product-Model /Brako/Brako-brakes.html 1 category, 1 product page, 100 (10x10) choices on each product page. Or we could mix it up and split the sub-categories by manufacturer: 1 category for the Brake Brand with 10 sub-categories (1 sub-category for each of the car manufacturers with 40 products inside each), 1 product page for each specific variation of car-fitment and product-model. /Brako/Brako-brakes-BMW/Brako-Super1-brakes_BMW-M3.html 1 category, 10 sub-categories, 40 product pages, 0 choices on the product page. 1 category for the Brake Brand with 10 sub-categories (1 sub-category for each of the car manufacturers with 10 products inside each), 1 product page for each specific variation of car-fitment. Drop dowjn box on the product page lets you choose product-model (Super1-4) /Brako/Brako-brakes-BMW/Brako-brakes_BMW-M3.html 1 category, 10 sub-categories, 10 product pages, 4 choices on the product page. 1 category for the Brake Brand with 10 sub-categories (1 sub-category for each of the car manufacturers with  products inside each), 1 product page for each specific variation of product-model. /Brako/Brako-brakes-BMW/Brako-Super1-brakes_BMW.html 1 category, 10 sub-categories, 4 product pages, 10 choices on the product page. Obviously, option 1) is going to be the best search match for someone searching for 'BMW M3 Brako Super1 brakes' but that page will have almost identical content to 100 other pages and very similar content to a further 300 pages, which takes it's quality ranking down a lot. At the other end of the scale of complexity is option 5) which concentrates all search potential for the Brako Super1 down to a single page, which can be well written and have great content, but wouldn't have a match in the title, url or product name for anyone searching for 'BMW M3 Brako Super1 brakes'. 'BMW M3' would be mentioned in the page, but only once in a drop-down along with 100 other cars and possibly once in the content if there's something noteworthy about that application. So which option would you go for and why?

    | DWJames
    0

  • Hi all, We're seeing a very strange result in Google Webmaster tools.  In "Links to your site", there is a site which we had nothing to do with (i.e. we didn't design or build it) showing over 1600 links to our site! I've checked the site several times now, and the only reference to us is in the rel="author" tag.  Clearly the agency that did their design / SEO have nicked our meta, forgetting to delete or change the author tag!! There are literally no other references to us on this site, there hasn't every been (to our knowledge, at least) and so I'm very puzzled as to why Google thinks there are 1600+ links pointing to us. The only thing I can think of is that Google will recognise name="author" content as a link... seems strange, though.  Plus the content="" only contains our company name, not our URL. Can anybody shed any light on this for me? Thanks guys!

    | RiceMedia
    0

  • Been scouring the interwebs and haven't found much information on redirecting two serparate pages to a single new page.  Here is what it boils down to: Let's say a website has two pages, both with good page authority of products that are becoming fazed out.  The products, Widget A and Widget B, are still popular search terms, but they are being combined into ONE product, Widget C.  While Widget A and Widget B STILL have plenty to do with Widget C, Widget C is now the new page, the main focus page, and the page you want everyone to see and Google to recognize. Now, do I 301 Widget A and Widget B pages to Widget C, ALTHOUGH Widgets A and B previously had nothing to do with one another?   (Remember, we want to try and keep some of that authority the two page have had.) OR do we keep Widget A and Widget B pages "alive", take them off the main navigation, and then put a "disclaimer" on the pages announcing they are now part of Widget C and link to Widget C? OR Should Widgets A and B page be canonicalized to Widget C? Again, keep in mind, widgets A and B previously were not similar, but NOW they are and result in Widget C. (If you are confused, we can provide a REAL work example of what we are talkinga about, but decided to not be specific to our industry for this.) Appreciate any and all thoughts on this.

    | JU1985
    0

  • I have a PR4 site with good traffic but the blog is not very popular--the posts do not generate any backlinks and hardly get any traffic. Yet, I continue to kick out a new post every week. Site: http://www.stadriemblems.com/
    Blog: http://www.stadriemblems.com/blog/ I keep posting content so that Google keeps crawling the site and viewing it as fresh (and yes, I'm posting for my human visitors' benefit too!), but I'm wondering if eventually this will hurt more than help if Google detects all these new pages are not being linked to, and therefore starts viewing the site as low quality and devalues it. So should I: Keep posting Stop posting and build links to the posts Try to promote my blog to get more traffic and hope people link to it Something else or some combination of the above

    | UnderRugSwept
    0

  • Hi, I am about to purchase hosting for my WordPress site which is primarily targeting the UK and wondered if server location still has an impact on SEO? Also can anyone recommend a reliable hosting provider with CPanel?

    | Wallander
    0

  • I am working on a team (my part is the SEO) where the developer added the .html extension to the permalinks. I don't understand why, on Wordpress, you would do this. Is there any benefit, or penalty for it as an SEO standpoint? I usually just set mine up %postname% as the permalink structure, but I am not the web design lead on this project. I asked the designer why, but he seems to be reluctant to answer any of my emails about his work, (like he is above that or something). Not wanting to make things worse, I dropped it and thought I would ask here since I saw a few posts in reference to it today in the forum. Is there an advantage or disadvantage (either way) to using the .html extension on a Wordpress site?

    | kbloemendaal
    0

  • Hi, Our site has a very high domain strength.  Although our site ranks well for general search phrases, we rank poorly for image search (even though our site has very high quality images). Our images are hosted on a separate CDN with a different domain.  Although there are a number of benefits to doing this, since they are on a different domain, are we not able to capitalize on our my site's domain strength?  Is there any way to associate our CDN to our main site via Google webmaster tools?  Has anyone researched the search ranking impacts due to storing your images on a CDN, given that your domain strength is very high? Curious on people's thoughts?

    | NicB1
    0

  • Hi, Does anyone have practical knowledge of the best permalink structure to use in WordPress? I have seen recommendations for just the post name or category and post name and then some who suggest having 3 digits as part of the structure for pick up in Google news. I am left a little confused - does anyone have practical experience of the best structure please?

    | Wallander
    0

  • Hi SEOmozers Tried finding a solution to this all morning but can't, so just going to spell it out and hope someone can help me! Pretty simple, my client has one site www.domain.com. UK-hosted and targeting the UK market. They want to launch www.domain.us, US-hosted and targeting the US market. They don't want to set up a simple redirect because a) the .com is UK-hosted b) there's a number of regional spelling changes that need to be made However, most of the content on domain.com applies to the US market and they want to copy it onto the new website. Are there ways to get around any duplicate content issues that will arise here? Or is the only answer to simply create completely unique content for the new site? Any help much appreciated! Thanks

    | Coolpink
    0

  • hi i have been trying to find all the links that i have to my site http://www.clairehegarty.co.uk but i am not having any luck. I have used the open explorer but it is not showing all the links but when i go to my google webmaster page it shows me more pages than it does on the semoz tool. can anyone help me sort this out and find out exactly what links are going into my site many thanks

    | ClaireH-184886
    0

  • Our e-comm site includes more than 250 brand pages - lrg image, some fluffy text, maybe a video, links to categories for that brand, etc. In many cases, Google publishes our page title and description in their search results. However, in some cases, Google instead publishes our H1 and the aforementioned fluffy page content. We want our page content to read well, be descriptive of the brand and appropriate for the audience. We want our meta titles and descriptions brief and likely to attract CTR from qualified shoppers. I'm finding this difficult to manage when Google pulls from two different areas inconsistently. So my question...  Is there a way to ensure Google only utilizes our title/desc for our listings?

    | websurfer
    0

  • I've come across a method implemented by some SEO agencies to fill up pages with somehow relevant text and hide it behind a javascript dropdown. Does Google fall for such cheap tricks? You can see this method used on these pages for example (just scroll down to the bottom) - it's all in German, but you get the idea I guess: http://www.insider-boersenbrief.de/ http://www.deko-und-kerzenshop.de/ How is you experience with this way of adding content to a site? Do you think it is valuable or will it get penalised?

    | jfkorn
    0

  • Hello, I have a sports website in which users write their opinions about the sporting events that take place every day throughout the year. Each of these sporting events generates a new page or URL indicating the match with date. For example:  www.domain.com/baseball/boston-v-yankees-04-24-2012-1234.html The teams face several times a year, and each match creates a different URL or page. I would like to link old pages to new pages and vice versa. How would you recommend these pages to be linked? Linking them to each other or linking old pages to new pages that are generated or otherwise? I would appreciate your orientation and help in this case. Thank you.

    | NorbertoMM
    1

  • Hi Mozzers, Do you think there are any negative effects of having no images on a page but several hundreds words of text? (There is a logo image and call to action buttons). Thanks!

    | Charlessipe
    0

  • Hi everyone, I have a website with a lot of internal search results pages indexed. I'm not asking if they should be indexed or not, I  know they should not according to Google's guidelines. And they make a bunch of duplicated pages so I want to solve this problem. The thing is, if I noindex them, the site is gonna lose a non-negligible chunk of traffic : nearly 13% according to google analytics !!! I thought of blocking them in robots.txt. This solution would not keep them out of the index. But the pages appearing in GG SERPS would then look empty (no title, no description), thus their CTR would plummet and I would lose a bit of traffic too... The last idea I had was to use a rel=canonical tag pointing to the original search page (that is empty, without results), but it would probably have the same effect as noindexing them, wouldn't it ? (never tried so I'm not sure of this) Of course I did some research on the subject, but each of my finding recommanded one of the 3 methods only ! One even recommanded noindex+robots.txt block which is stupid because the noindex would then be useless... Is there somebody who can tell me which option is the best to keep this traffic ? Thanks a million

    | JohannCR
    0

  • Newbie here,and learning fast. But... I can't help but feel the technical elements of SEO (i.e. canonical tags, javascript amongst others) are holding me back. My knowledge of  programming and coding is basic at best. Do I have to have an understanding of this to get ahead in SEO or is it simply a case of reading some more and knowing the techniques? What percentage of SEO is technical (e.g. html coding etc...) Thanks in advance. N. p.s. could someone explain what canonical tags are?

    | Buzzwords
    0

  • In need of some second opinions here. I have a domain softboxsystems.co.uk which ranks for the keyword sofrigam. It is not meant to! Have posted previously on this but to cut long story short, the clients .com started to rank for this term and then they lost the contract to supply the services so got a legal request to stop ranking for it (it had been seoed so was ranking 100% on off page issues). The client is a UK company so they decided that they would block the .com from google and use the co.uk domain for a period of time instead while they worked on deranking the domain. The .com domain was therefore blocked from the index, the .co.uk homepage would not rank for anything then it turned out that they had placed a canonical tag link from the .co.uk to the blocked .com!!! On my suggestion this was removed and the homepage of the .co.uk appeared in google in a matter of a couple of days (other pages on the site were indexed but not the home). Now, somehow the co.uk domain homepage is ranking for the banned term. I have checked open link and there are not any links pointing to the domain with the anchor of sofigram, nor is the term mentioned onsite. I now have the client panicking on the phone to get the page out of google again asap before the competitors legal people get wind of it. I am still trying to deindex the .co.uk homepage in the short term. I have readded the canonical back to the .com as that worked at not getting that page indexed previously. The main issue I have is how on earth I am ranking for this term in the first place and  more importantly how do I stop from ranking for this term! The only terms I can find as anchor text in the moz tools are the keywords I have been seoing for help hehe thanks

    | Grumpy_Carl
    0

  • Can somebody help me figure out this bing redirect error. The link to "http://w******/flea-control" has resulted in HTTP redirection to "http://w******/feas/flea-control/".Search engines can only pass page rankings and other relevant data through a single redirection hop. Using unnecessary redirects can have a negative impact on page ranking. I am using wordpress. I am actually linking to the /feas/flea-control/ version. I have looked every where for help. I got this error using bings seo toftware

    | OxzenMedia
    0

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