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Category: Technical SEO

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


  • Hi, I need to create a 301 redirect for all internal pages located on organic7thheaven.com to the homepage of our new site at http://www.7thheavennaturals.com/ Currently internal pages of the old site such as the following are returning a page not found www.organic7thheaven.com/products/deepcleansing/miraclemud.asp Can anyone help me in setting up a .htaccess file for this problem please? Thanks

    | MJMarketing
    0

  • Hi Guys, We have recently created a new website for one of our clients and replaced their old website on the same domain. One problem that we are having is that all of the old pages are indexed within Google (1000s) and are just getting sent to our custom 404 page. We are finding that there is an large bounce rate from this and also, I am worried from an SEO point of view that the site could lose rank positioning through the number of crawl errors that Google is getting. Want I want is to set up a 301 redirect from these pages to go to the 'our brands' page. The reason for this is that the majority of the old URLs linked to individual product pages, and one thing to note is that they are all .asp pages. Is there a way of setting up a rule in the htaccess file (or another way) to say that all webpages that end with the suffix of .asp will be 301 redirected to the our brands' page? (there is no .asp pages on the new site as it is all done in php). If so, I would love it if someone could post the code snippet. Thanks in advance guys and if you have any other ideas then be my guest to suggest 🙂 Matt.

    | MatthewBarby
    0

  • We have articles written for how to setup pop3 and imap. The topics are technically different but the settings within those are very similar and thus the inital content was similar. SEOMoz reports these pages as duplicate content. It's not optimal for our users to have them merged into one page. What is the best way to handle similar content, while not getting tagged for duplicate content?

    | Izoox
    0

  • This is so insanely frustrating. One week my client's rankings will be great, working up the second page and on our way to the first. The next week those rankings will drop (according to SEOMoz Rankings) to well below 50. The very next week those rankings will be back up on the second page. It's like a pinball machine with a different rank every week. I'm doing absolutely nothing from week to week, and am not understanding why it's bouncing back and forth so much. I've never seen anything like it, actually. I've never had a client bounce up and down so frequently and in such huge numbers. Any ideas? (http://erasedisease.com) Thanks

    | Linwright
    0

  • We are in the process of upgrading our blogging capability. Our preference would be to host a Wordpress blog under our site url.  However due to our technical set up we've found out that it isn't possible to put Wordpress onto our servers so we'll need to go with a hosted version. Does anyone have any idea or examples of how this could affect our SEO performance? Also - is Wordpress the best tool - seems to be the most popular! Thanks. Jon

    | TTS_Group
    0

  • Here are the questions: If you replace your top menu with a mega menu - like rei.com, target.com etc - that has dramatically more links and lots of non-optimized testimonials and calls for action, and locate the actual code of the mega menu at the bottom of the HTML , How will this affect your sitelinks? Will this now, make your on-page content more visible and indexable? Or does the Google bott dismiss this as just navigation content? In the past, I've have seen this technique work well, but that was before site links were easier to obtain.  Looking at sites with virtually no navigation on their home pages and good authority, I've seen site links seemingly gleamed from alt attributes.

    | Runner2009
    0

  • Have a look at this It's the local listing of weddings Gretna Here is a short version
    http://bit.ly/HD6ay4  There are two listing with the same address and they are the same company but just different Wed address I though this was against the rules! www.gretnaweddings.co.uk and www.gretnaweddings.com Any ideas how they getting away with it!? Cheers Steve

    | ibexinternet
    0

  • Hello. I am working on a website that has over 15000 products. When one of these is no longer available - like it's discontinued or something - the page it's on 302s to a 404 page. Example - www.greatdomain.com/awesome-widget Awesome widget is no longer available www. greatdomain.com/awesome-widget 302s to -www.greatdomain.com/404 page. For the most part, these are not worthy of 301s because of lack of page rank/suitable LPs, but is this the correct way to handle them for search engines? I've seen varying opinions. Thanks!

    | Blenny
    0

  • I have TLD that has authority and a number of micro-sites built off of the primary domain. All sites relate to the same topic, as I am promoting a destination. The primary site and each micro-site have their own CMS installation, but the domains are mapped accordingly. www.regionalsite.com/ <- primary
    www.regioanlsite.com/theme1/ <- theme 1
    www.regioanlsite.com/theme2/ <- theme 2
    www.regionalsite.com/theme3/ <- theme 3 Question: Should my XML site map for Webmaster Tools feed all sites off of the primary domain site map or are there penalties for this? Thanks.

    | VERBInteractive
    0

  • I have a very large site and I'm not sure what all to include on the sitemap page. We have categories such as items1, items2 and in the items1 category are 100 vendors with their individual vendor pages.  Should I link all 100 vendor pages on the sitemap or just the main items1 category?

    | CFSSEO
    0

  • For various reasons my client wants their homepage removed from google, no just the content of the page off but the page not to be indexed (yep strange request but we are mere service providers) today I requested in webmaster tool that default.asp was removed. Wht says done but the sites homepage is still listed. The page also has a no index tag on but 24 hours and 18k Google bot hits later it still remains. Anyone got any other suggestions to deindex just the homepage asap please

    | Grumpy_Carl
    0

  • I have launched a new website beginning January this year and have seen slowly more and more traffic coming from google to the website until the 20th of March where suddenly there are no more visitors from the google search engine. The only traffic left is from google images, social networks or other search engines. Without visitors from google search this reduces our overall traffic by ~66%. I can't easily find anymore our website in the search results of google by using terms which we usually ranked quite well. Nevertheless, the website is still indexed as I can find it using the "site:" search query. In google webmaster tools there are no messages and we have only been doing a bit of link building on website and blog directories  (nothing excessive and nothing paid neither). Is there any way to find out if google penalized my website? I guess it has... and what would be the best thing to do right now? The website is hellasholiday (dot) com Thanks in advance for your idea and suggestions

    | socialtowards
    0

  • Hello, We are using WP for our blog and keep getting Dup Page Title errors for our 12 author archives pages. The title of each page is the same, but I am wondering if this is WP issue with canonicalization working properly. The most recent four pages have a linking root domain and carry some Page Authority, but the older pages do not. Is this what Rand was talking about in his Google+ whiteboard Friday talk about blog post relevancy not lasting as long as articles? Here's what it looks like. Side question, is there a reason why the SEO Moz website doesn't have a Google+ button anywhere easy to find? Thank you, Michael

    | MKaloud
    1

  • I often use bit.ly or Google URL shortener in links when other websites post my articles so I can track clicks. However, I am thinking this may HURT my SEO given that it is taking away a back link to my website. Is that logic correct ? If so, what is a good way to be able to track clicks if a website posts your article without jeopardizing the SEO value?

    | StreetwiseReports
    1

  • Hi, I have a new website that deals with 3 very similar businesses  The main purpose of the website is to assist the consumer to search, compare and book chaffered transportation online. The 3 businesses are taxi cab hire, limo hire, party bus hire.  My main domain is www.mytaxicab.co.za.  I also own the domains mylimo.co.za and mypartybus.co.za.  My question is, from a best practice SEO perspective, how should I set this up. Should I have one main site www.mytaxicab.co.za and have the 2 other niche domain names point in eg user types www.mypartybus.co.za and lands on www.mytaxicab.co.za/party-bus-hire or is there a better way? Any help or insite would be appreciated

    | chirsirwin
    0

  • I have had two blogs on the same domain for a while now, and it just occurred to me that no one else seems to do this and maybe it's even weird. http://www.stadriemblems.com/blog/
    http://www.stadriemblems.com/scouting/blog/ One is our main blog, and one is for a very concentrated niche of customers. What are your opinions on this? Everything from SEO to best practices, to overall unusual-ness?

    | UnderRugSwept
    0

  • Hi everybody! I work with tags a lot on my photo blog but I haven't gotten Google to index one tag so far. Any tips on how to do this? Thanks / Niklas

    | KAN-Malmo
    0

  • I'm looking at the navigation structure of Ties.com.  They have various categories like color, pattern, length, brand, etc. Once you click one of the main categories you get the option to "Narrow Your Choices". The structure starts like this: (URL 1) ties.com/black-ties Then when you narrow your search you get this: (URL 2) ties.com/animal-print**+**black-ties (notice + sign) My question: how does Google see URL 2? Is it just like any other link?

    | ErikDster
    0

  • I have a website that contains some products and the old structure of the URL's was definitely not optimal for SEO purposes.  So I created new SEO friendly URL's on my site and decided that I would use the canonical tags to transfer all the weight of the old URL's to the New URL's and ensure that the old ones would not show up in the SERP's.  Problem is this has not quite worked.  I implemented the canonical tags about a month ago but I am still seeing the old URL's indexed in Google and I am noticing that the cache date of these pages was only about a week ago. This leads me to believe that the spiders have been to the pages and seen the new canonical tags but are not following them.  Is this normal behavior and if so, can somebody explain to me why? I know I could have just 301 redirected these old URL's to the new ones but the process I would need to go through to have that done is much more of a battle than to just add the canonical tags and I felt that the canonical tags would have done the job.  Needless to say the client is not too happy right now and insists that I should have just used the 301's.  In this case the client appears to be correct but I do not quite understand why my canonical tags did not work. Examples Below- Old Pages: www.awebsite.com/something/something/productid.3254235 New Pages: www.awebsite.com/something/something/keyword-rich-product-name Canonical tag on both pages: rel="canonical" href="http://www.awebsite.com/something/something/keyword-rich-product-name"/> Thanks guys for the help on this.

    | DRSearchEngOpt
    0

  • Hello, I have a client who I have taken on (different to my other client in another question), My client has a ecommerce website and in nearly all of his products (around 30-40) he has a little information checklist like.. Made in the UK
    Prices from 9.99
    Top quality
    Free delivery on orders over.. This is the duplicate content, what is the best practise for this as the SEOmoz crawler is giving me a multiple of errors.

    | Prestige-SEO
    0

  • Is there any risk with placing the same customer quote (3-4 sentences) on multiple pages on your site?

    | Charlessipe
    0

  • I have a client who is a acupuncturist and operates clinics both in Chester and  Knutsford  in Cheshire the site performs well for  Chester based terms such as "Chester acupuncture"  this is the primary location the client wishes to focus efforts on but would also like to improve rankings for the Knutsford  clinic and area. I have setup local places pages for each clinic  and registered each on different local directories. Both clinic addresses are placed on each page of the website and have a map to each on the contact page. Most of the on-page SEO elements such as page titles, descriptions and on-page keywords mainly focus on the term "Chester" over "Knutsford"  is it advisable to target both  locations in these page elements or will local search have an effect on this and will reduce/ dilute overall rankings for Chester clinic? I haven't setup and separate page for each clinic location as this might help in terms of SEO for improving ranking for both locations but from a user point of view it would just duplicate the same content but for a different location and also would create duplicate content issues. Any advice/ experience on this matter  would be greatly appreciated.

    | Bristolweb
    0

  • So I am a new blogger that has been submitting guest blog posts to a number of different blogs. It was recommended that I use the MBG Tracker so I can track the back links. The problem is that I am totally lost on how to use this tool. As I said before I am new to this whole thing and I am not really sure what constitutes a "base link" and a "back link." In the author bylines we are linking to different pages within a larger website. If anyone can help me I would really appreciate it!

    | Stroll
    0

  • hello, I have finally put my first foot on the path of trying to learn and understand mobile SEO. I have a few questions regarding mobile SEO and how it works, so please help me out. I use wordpress for my site, and there is a nifty plugin called WP touch http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wptouch/ What it basically does is, it converts your desktop version into a mobile friendly version. I wanted to know that if it does that, does this mean whatever SEO i do for my regular web site gets accomplished for my moible version as well? Another simple question is, if i search for the same term on my mobile phone then on my desktop how different will the SERs be? thanks moz peeps

    | david305
    0

  • We are currently migrating our site to a new CMS and in part of this migration I'm getting push-back from my development team regarding the HTML sitemap. We have a very large news site with 10s of thousands of pages. We currently have an HTML sitemap that greatly helps with distributing PR to article pages, but is not geared towards the user. The dev team doesn't see the benefit to recreating the HTML sitemap despite my assurance that we don't want to lose all these internal links since removing 1000s of links could have a negative impact on our Domain Authority. Should I give in and concede the HTML sitemap since we have an XML one? Or am I right that we don't want to get rid of it?

    | BostonWright
    0

  • Hi, I have a website http://goo.gl/IrJz4 and currently it was ranking well in Google US serps. And now i want to rank well it india too. Does doing more links will bring the results or do i need to do any on page seo ? Please advice me.

    | Dexx22
    0

  • I have modified a the URL structure of a whole section of a website and used mod_rewrite 301 redirect to match the new structure. Now that was around 3 months ago and I was wondering how long should I keep this redirect for? As it is a new website I am quite sure that there are no links around with the old URL structure but still I can see the google bot trying from time to time to access the old URL structure. Shouldn't the google bot learn from this 301 redirect and not go anymore for the old URL?

    | socialtowards
    0

  • Can anyone recommend an SEO friendly Joomla extension to use for SEO on an existing website? I have downloaded sh404sef but I don't want to change my URL's and make them longer than they are at the moment. Any ideas?

    | Karen_Dauncey
    0

  • Hi, I've just created a campaign for my new wordpress blog and found 11 301 redirects which I was not aware of. It looks like wordpress has created them automatically. Does any one know how wordpress handles this issues or where are they stored so I can delete them? They are of no use for me. 9 of these redirects point to the same url with an added '/' and are in pages 1 is on a post. I've been changing the permalink and some urls several times and maybe one of these times the Wordpress has automatically created the 301 redirect. But why? I do not want to keep the old url. the last redirect is very strange it goes from http://www.mydomain.com/folder to http://www.mydomain.com where folder is the folder where I installed wordpress. But again, I want no one to type the url with the folder name or even know this folder exists. Any comment on this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks a lot, David

    | dballari
    0

  • Good morning from 7 degrees C mostly cloudy wetherby UK 😉 Here is todays musing... When you enter a term in Google it predicts what your trying to enter but I wonder what is influencing the order of the phrases. For example when you enter cms website the terms it autofills are not alpahabetical eg: cms website
    cms website templates
    cms website design below link illustrates this:
    http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/google-auto-fillcopy.jpg So my question is please: "Is this a volume thing in that Geoogle works out whats in demand via ppc ads and then ranks them acccordingly"? Any insights welcome 🙂

    | Nightwing
    0

  • Hello, I see hundreds of notices for blocked by meta-robots/meta robots nofollow and it appears it is linked to the comments on my site which I assume I would not want to be crawled. Is this the case and these notices are actually a positive thing? Please advise how to clear them up if these notices can be potentially harmful for my SEO. Thanks, Talia

    | M80Marketing
    0

  • Hi Fellas, I wanted to know once you verify the BIng Webmaster tool (via xml file) for a dev site, do you have to do the verification process again for the final site? I thought I needed to do the verification again but once I added the final website (which have almost a similar URL) into the webmaster tool account, it seemed that I didn't have to verify it. I am a bit confused. Thank you for clarifying

    | Ideas-Money-Art
    0

  • I've just ran a report and I have a lot of duplicate page titles, most of which seem to be the review page, I use Magento and my normal url would be something like blah-blahtext.html but the review url is something like blah-blahtext/reviews/category/categoryname So I want to block the /reviews url bit as no one ever leaves reviews and it's not something I will be using in the future. Also I have a dynamic navigation which creates urls that look like product-name.html?size=2&colour=14 these are also creating duplicate urls, anyway to fix this? While I'm asking, anyone any tips for Magento?

    | Beermonster
    0

  • Let's say I do a guest blog post on a PR5 site. Let's also say the post is deep within the site, and the page rank that flows to it is only maybe PR1 or 2. Let's also say it doesn't get many links to it so it forever stays that way. Will Google realize even though the PR of that page is low, it's on a PR5 site, thus giving it more link power than it the overall site were a PR2 site? Did that make any sense?

    | UnderRugSwept
    0

  • In summary, we're currently having issues with our htaccess file. 301 redirects are going through to the new described URL but in addition the new URL is followed by a ? and the old URL. How can we get rid of the ? and previous URL so they don't appear as an ending. None of the examples we've found re this issue online appear to work. Can anyone please offer some advice? Can we use a RewriteRule to stop this happening? Here's a summary of the htaccess file REDIRECT CODE BEGINS HERE LONG LIST OF REDIRECTS, which appear to be set up perfectly fine. REDIRECT CODE ENDS DirectoryIndex index.php <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On Options +FollowSymLinks
            DirectoryIndex index.php
            RewriteEngine On
            RewriteCond $1 !^(images|system|themes|pdf|favicon.ico|robots.txt|index.php) [NC]
            RewriteRule ^.htaccess$ - [F]
            RewriteRule ^favicon.ico - [L]
            RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
            RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
            RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php?/$1 [L]</ifmodule> DirectoryIndex index.php

    | petersommertravels
    0

  • Has anyone here managed to beat a keyword/exact match domain to top spot? I am currently second and wondering if it is worth the time and effort to knock it off the top spot. How hard is it to get these very annoyingly favoured domains off 1st? Any help and advice much appreciated.

    | pauledwards
    0

  • Hi everyone, From the beginning of March bots and crawlers begin to disappear from site completely for 1-2 hours and then come back again. It never happened earlier, they constantly crawled our site without stopping. We didn't make any changes on the site. After that pages and images start to disappear from G index. Does anyone have the same trouble?

    | bubliki
    0

  • I have a client that was working with another SEO consultant and they pretty much dropped the ball big time! The SEO company took his site off of wordpress and put it on another CMS (http://www.wsinetsuccess.com/WSI-E-Fusion). My client would like to take hes site off of the WSI E Fusion platform and back onto wordpress. My question is how is the best way to going about doing this with out loosing all of the PR to the site? Should I find all of the URLs that are on the site and just 301 them to the right page? Thank you very much for your help.

    | pakevin
    0

  • Hi Mozzers, I have a question. The webmaster of a client of mine needs to make changes to some files which will effect the URL's. Essentially everything is staying the same but the end of the URL will change from .html to .asp. This is because the site will be dynamically loading content (perhaps from a database) (i.e. latest news to come from their blog etc..)  In order to do this we would need to change the filenames of the whole website.  (i.e. personnel.html would become personel.asp). Changing URLs can harm indexation but a small change to the end - would Google drop these pages? A 301 redirect is not possible from old URL to new. What impact would this have on Rankings? Thanks Gareth

    | Bush_JSM
    0

  • When I check my bing cached page it comes up with a "Reported Web Forgery!" warning. I've looked at google web tools and no malware has been detected. I do have another site that has a very similar web address jaaronwoodcountertops.com and jaaron-wood-countertops.com. Could that be why? How do I go about letting bing and or firefox know this is not a forgery site?

    | JAARON
    0

  • Are they really important? Many preach they are, and there are tonnes of services out there who give you thousands of forum profile links in no time. I strictly believe in genuine links built the hard way, and definitely don't want to get into anything which is black hat. Please suggest if building several Forum Profile Links is an appropriate way of building links?

    | KS__
    2

  • I have encountered something odd with Google indexing. According to the Google cache my site was last updated on April 6. I had been making a series of changes on April 7th and none of them show up in the cached version of the site (naturally). Then, on the 8th, my rankings seem to have dropped about 6 places and the main SERP is showing a text that isn't even on the Web site. The cached version has the correct page title from the page that was indexed on the 6th. How do I learn where Google is picking this up from? There is a clean page title tag on my Web site. I've checked the server, etc to see what's going on. The text isn't completely unrelated, but it definitely impacted my ranking. Does Google ever have these hiccups when indexing?

    | VERBInteractive
    0

  • We have a lot of detail pages on our site that reference specific scholarships.  Each page has a different Title and Description.  They also have unique information all regarding the same data points.  The pages are displayed in a similar structure to the user so the data is easy to read. My problem is a lot of these pages are being reported as duplicate content when they certainly are not. Most of them are reported as duplicates when they have the same sponsor.  They may have the same contact information listed.  These two are being reported as duplicate of each other.  They share some data but they are definitely different scholarships. http://www.collegexpress.com/scholarships/adelaide-mcclelland-garden-club-scholarship/9254/ http://www.collegexpress.com/scholarships/mary-wannamaker-witt-and-lee-hampton-witt-memorial-scholarship/10785/ Would it help to add a Canonical for each page to themselves?  Any other suggestions would be great. Thanks

    | GeorgeLaRochelle
    0

  • Hi, I just signed up with SEOMOZ and found some major duplicate content issues with Wordpress. I have installed Yoast SEO plug in but honestly am a little lost on how Wordpress handles it all and need guidance. I would love to hire someone to do some desktop share / Skype sessions to teach me the proper way to set this up but did not see if there was any place on SEOMOZ where employers and providers can connect. I am interested in more than just this one issue, looking for a freelancer ongoing to work on our site for SEO. Any suggestions? Thanks in advance Force7

    | Force7
    0

  • I was wondering if there was a way to use SEOmoz's tool to quickly and easily find all the URLs on you site and not just the ones with errors. The site that I am working on does not have a site map. What I am trying to do is find all the URLs along with their titles and description tags. Thank you very much for your help

    | pakevin
    0

  • Hi from sunny but freezing wetherby UK.. Ive noticed when you enter "York solicitors" some listings have + Show map symbol. Hers is a screen shot to illustrate: http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/plus-map-serps-langleyscopy.jpg I'd like to know please what i would have to do to emulate this. Thanks in advance, David

    | Nightwing
    1

  • This year we are using a new supplier and they have provided us a product database of approx. 5k products. About 80% of these products were in our existing database but once we have installed the new database all the URLs will have changed. There is no quick way to match the old products with the new products so we would have to manually match all 5k products if we were were to setup 301 rules for the old products pointing to the new products. Of course this would take a lot of time. So the options are: 1. Is it worth putting in this effort to make the 301 rules? 2. Or are we okay just to delete the old product pages, let the SE see the 404 and just wait for it to index the new pages? 3. Or, as a compromise, should we 301 the old product page to the new category page as this is a lot quicker for us do do than redirecting to the new product page?

    | indigoclothing
    0

  • Does anyone know where I can find a tutorial for moving a blogger.com (blogspot) blog that's currently hosted on a subdomain (i.e. blog.mysite.com) to a subdirectory (i.e. mysite.com/blog) with the current version of blogger? I'm working on transferring my blogger blogs over to wordpress, and to do so without losing link juice or traffic, this is one of the steps I have to take. There's plenty of tutorials that address moving from blogspot.mysite.com to wordpress and I've even found a few that address moving from blog.mysite.com (hosted on blogger) to a root domain mysite.com. However, I need to move from blog.mysite.com (blogger) to mysite.com/blog/ - subdirectory (wordpress). Anyone who knows how to do this or can point me in the right direction?? Thanks.

    | ChaseH
    0

  • How to automate the process of checking the operators of search teams.
    such as:
    inurl:? lang = ru site: tochka.net
    inurl: print site: tochka.net
    inurl: print site: tochka.net / *
    inurl: nomobile = 1 site: tochka.net / *
    inurl: comments site: tochka.net
    inurl: comments site: tochka.net / *
    inurl:? a_aid site: tochka.net ... with the conclusion of the number of pages in the search. There is a program to identify?

    | meteorr
    0

  • Have a feeling that the answer will be obvious here but more opinions are always good... I own a number of domains, mainly com, which are targeted at the UK but hosted in the netherlands. I have noticed a very high number of dutch hits to my sites. Lower than UK but takings population into account it works out to be higher. I fear my decision to renew my dutch server instead of going for a UK one is helping me rank in the wrong part of the world. I have paid a couple of months ahead for the dutch server but am wondering if the cost of writing off a couple of hundred pounds will be less than I'm losing due to my location. Should I take the financial hit on the server in the hope that buying a UK one will increase my relevant traffic?

    | Grumpy_Carl
    0

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