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.

  • classa


    212 are rel canonical and 176 are 301 permanent re-direct. An example of the re-direct is a change I made to the /trackback 302 status on my blog like; http://www.bluesunproperties.com/2012-spring-biker-rally-thunder-beach/trackback/ Are these Crawl Notices something that I should spend resources on, or should I focus more on my errors and warnings?

    | classa
    0
  • tofftrader


    On 22nd Feb, I placed a text ad on a respected industry recruitment website. As the site has many pages, the webmaster made a point of NOFOLLOWING the links back to my site. 6 days later, my site lost 30% of its daily traffic overnight, and it's stayed there ever since. I looked on Webmaster Tools just now, and it says that there are 125,000 links coming in to my site from the site I'm advertising on (even though the links are NOFOLLOWED). Could this have triggered the fall in search traffic to my site? Thanks for any feedback.

    | tofftrader
    0
  • NicB1


    I know ideally you should have as clean as possible url structures for optimal SEO. Our current site contains clean urls with very minimal use of query string params.  There is a strong push, for business purposes to include click tracking on our site which will append a query string param to a large percentage of our internal links. Currently: http://www.oursite.com/section/content/ Will change to: http://www.oursite.com/section/content/?tg=zzzzwww We currently use rel canonical on all pages to properly define the true url in order to remove any possible duplicate content issues. Given we are already using rel canonical, if we implement the query string click tracking, will this negatively impact our SEO?  If so, by how much?  Could we run into duplicate content issues? We get crawled by Google a lot (very big site) and very large percent of our traffic is from Google, but there is a strong business need for this information so trying to weigh pros/cons.

    | NicB1
    0
  • edwardlewis


    Hi there, I have just notced on a website that it has a halt implemented html 5 structure. Well, when I say half implemented, it has the doctype and then one <header>section. After that all of the divs are custom ones that have been added for the CSS. Could this lack of structure have a negative effect on the site? Cheers, Edward </header>

    | edwardlewis
    0
  • Bucky


    Hi, I just upgraded everything, a much faster server.  I have significantly improved page load times. I have 2 questions 1.  I also upgraded my blog which is a component of the site.  I could NOT redirect post-for-post  so made single 301 redirect from all pages from the old blog to the root of new blog.  I did not care about the old blog, the posts are irrelevant now. Will the massive redirects be a problem? 2.  I had some DNS issues and other problems that took me about 24 hours to fix during the transition.  The site is up an fully operational. Will I be penalized?  If so, how long Thank you,

    | Bucky
    0
  • webtarget


    I noticed in Open Site Explorer, I have several incoming links going to dead urls because i re-organized my site. For example, there might be an incoming link to: sample.php?ID=8 The problem is that I moved the file to /subdir1 so it would be nice if it could link to /subdir1/sample.php?ID=8 BUT, on top of that, I have also changed the url to seo-friendly urls. So, really, it should link to /Category_Descripton/ProductName/8 and then get re-written to /subdir1/sample.php?ID=8 So, what are the implications of having these incoming links to dead urls other than the bad user experience. What are the implications from an SEO standpoint? What's the best way to fix this? Thanks.

    | webtarget
    0
  • SoulSurfer8


    Any downsides to adding the rel=canonical tag to the canonical page itself? It will make it easier for us to implement based on the way our site's templates work. For example, we would add to the page http://www.mysite.com/original-page.aspx The canonical tag would also appear on other dupe pages like: http://www.mysite.com/original-page.aspx?ref=93929299 http://www.mysite.com/original-page.aspx?ref=view29199292 etc

    | SoulSurfer8
    0
  • Tszuji


    eBay and Amazon listings - Duplicate Content?

    | Tszuji
    0
  • rolls123


    I have recently set up a website, and as soon as it got indexed by google, I ranked on the first page at number 10... However,  Ever since I have started trying to backlink.. the more I seem to do, the more I seem to drop down the rankings! The same for both Bing and Yahoo...  I am really not sure what the problem is. My site is www.arilinegamesatc.com, and the ranking words are airline games and airline game. Any help woudl be greatly appreciated!

    | rolls123
    0
  • david305


    hey moz peeps, got a general question: what is the suggested custom crawl rate in google webmaster tools? or is it better to "Let Google determine my crawl rate (recommended)" If you guys have any good suggestions on this and site why that would be very helpful, thanks guys!

    | david305
    0
  • BailHotline


    Hello Everyone, The problem I'm having is not knowing where to have the robots.txt file on our server. We have our main domain (company.com) with a robots.txt file in the root of the site, but we also have our blog (company.com/blog) where were trying to disallow certain directories from being crawled for SEO purposes... Would having the blog in the sub-directory still need its own robots.txt? or can I reference the directories i don't want crawled within the blog using the root robots.txt file? Thanks for your insight on this matter.

    | BailHotline
    0
  • Ideas-Money-Art


    Hi Guys, I know that since a couple years Google can crawl and read better Javascript(JS), but JS can still harm your website especially in the navigational bar but I don't know how to identify it. Can Someone tell me how to identify in the source page when JS can harm your website?

    | Ideas-Money-Art
    0
  • Ideas-Money-Art


    It might sound like a dumb question but can someone provide me a technique to determine if the navigational links of a website is true HTML? Thank you!!

    | Ideas-Money-Art
    0
  • Ideas-Money-Art


    Hi everyone, I have an issue determining what type of duplicate content I have. www.example.com/index.php?mact=Calendar,m57663,default,1&m57663return_id=116&m57663detailpage=&m57663year=2011&m57663month=6&m57663day=19&m57663display=list&m57663return_link=1&m57663detail=1&m57663lang=en_GB&m57663returnid=116&page=116 Since I am not an coding expert, to me it looks like it is a URL parameter duplicate content. Is it? At the same time "return_id" would makes me think it is a session id duplicate content. I am confused about how to determine different types of duplicate content, even by reading articles on Seomoz about it: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/duplicate-content. Could someone help me on how to recognize different types of duplicate content? Thank you!

    | Ideas-Money-Art
    0
  • jg100


    due to out database each sub category has to be assigned to a category. i.e. /abc would have to be assigned to the category ''letters'  in the url structure; so...it would be www.example.com/letters/abc . The question is does is matter which way round the category and sub are arranged? Assuming we are optimizing for ''abc' , does it matter if we structured as; www.example.com/letters/abc www.example.com/abc/letters Thanks in advance.

    | jg100
    0
  • RobertHill


    Hi SEOmoz experts, We will shortly be launching a new product range (B-Events) on our Events website and I was wondering if moving our current A-Events specific blog will impact the SERPs at all? Quite a few of our blog posts rank well for longtail A-Events terms, so we're a little reluctant to move it. But for the long term it makes more sense than creating & maintaining 2 separate blogs. Current Blog URL: domain.com/a-events/blog New Blog URL: domain.com/news New A-Events Category: domain.com/news/a-events New B-Events Category: domain.com/news/b-events I intend to 301 redirect all of the old URLs (200+) to their new blog category equivalent, will this be enough to keep their positions in the SERPs? Can you recommend / think of anything else, that we might not have considered. Any help would be much appreciated!

    | RobertHill
    0
  • AITLtd


    After checking they do bring back a 404 page, so i am wondering what to do. Do i remove all the blog tags? We use a Drupal cms system.

    | AITLtd
    0
  • MPO


    Hi there, Does anyone have any experience with leverage browser caching on Nginx? Every time I run the pagespeed test from Google my site comes up with this as a high priority issue that needs to be addressed. I can see that it is mostly images that doesn't have an expiry date and tried putting the following into my conf file: location ~* .(jpg|jpeg|gif|css|png|js|ico)$ {
    expires max;
    } But this results in breaking my page off and all elements where out of place and missing images. Also tried excluding css and js but hen all images where still missing. My site is running on Drupal and I use APC for PHP to increase the load time on the site. Hope somebody might be able to help me out.

    | MPO
    0
  • webtarget


    Hi, Can someone tell me if there's a way using htaccess to say that everything in a particular directory, let's call it "A", is gone (http 410 code)? i.e. all the links should be de-indexed? Right now, I'm using the robots file to deny access. I'm not sure if it's the right thing to do since Google webmaster tools is showing me the link as indexed still and a 403 error code. Thanks.

    | webtarget
    0
  • SamCUK


    Is it me or is google all over the place tonight? Whilst checking my rankings I came across a site with a page authority of 29 and 23 links from 5 domains ranking at number 6 for a competitive keyword! This site came from nowhere and I'm getting different results every time I search! Weird....

    | SamCUK
    0
  • MarkChambers


    Hi, Any advice on approaches for mobile SEO much appreciated. For example, what things do I need to do to optimise a mobile version of a desktop site? E.g. optimise titles, meta description, headings and copy, do I need to submit a mobile sitemap to Google? Do I need to link from the mobile page to the corresponding page on the desktop site and vice versa? Will Googlebot Mobile naturally find the site from the desktop link? What about link building for mobile sites, any thoughts on this, are there specific mobile sites that will link such as directories for a start? Any other tips or resources? Any SEOMoz resources on this? What about the same domain versus the subdomain debate about hosting the mobile site? Any thoughts? Many thanks

    | MarkChambers
    0
  • CraigAddyman


    I haven't heard of such a tool but I would have thought it would be pretty useful for measuring changes etc Does anyone know of such a tool?

    | CraigAddyman
    0
  • eugenecomputergeeks


    I'm currently writing articles for my site Eugene Computer Geeks and remember reading somewhere that having more then 100 outgoing links is a bad idea. I plan on writing lots of guides, and most of them will have several relevant  links. Some examples are:   a virus removal/prevention guide I want to link to the different antivirus programs I'm recommending.  Or on the "Free WIFI in Eugene, OR" guide, I plan on linking to all the businesses' websites that offer free wifi. **Would having too many outgoing links hurt my rankings in anyway? ** If so, should I use the "nofollow" tag to prevent any harm?  I always thought that having lots of relevant outgoing links was a good thing, but lately have been reading otherwise.  What is all your opinions here at SeoMoz?

    | eugenecomputergeeks
    0
  • BobGW


    When I click on the text-only cache of nlpca(dot)com on the home page http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:UIJER7OJFzYJ:www.nlpca.com/&hl=en&gl=us&strip=1 our H1 and body content are at the very bottom. How do we get the h1 and content at the top of what the robots see? Thanks!

    | BobGW
    0
  • MPO


    Hello all, I have a problem related to "canonical issues" that I would like to get your view on: The issue: Our site: http://www.texaspoker.dk/ has a "canonical issue" with the home page. We added a redirect to www.texaspoker.dk, but this hasn't solved our problem. In the latest "too many on page links" analysis made with SEOmoz' exelent SEO tool, we get the following error: http://www.texaspoker.dk(101 on page links) http://www.texaspoker.dk/?page=2 (on page links) So, made simple, the analysis tells us that both http://www.texaspoker.dk and http://www.texaspoker.dk/?page=2 has too many on page links. How do I eliminate / remove the unwanted http://www.texaspoker.dk/?page=2 and how did it, in the first place, get there? Thanks a lot!

    | MPO
    0
  • blakadz


    I have setup my website to use canonical urls on each page to point to the page i wish Google to refer to. At the moment, my non-www domain name is not redirected to www domain. Is this required if i have setup the canonical urls? This is the tag i have on my index.php page rel="canonical" href="http://www.mydomain.com.au" /> If i browse to http://mydomain.com.au should the link juice pass to http://www.armourbackups.com.au? Will this solve duplicate content problems? Thanks

    | blakadz
    0
  • prospects


    my crawl is showing duplicate content between my sitename.com and sitename.com/ i remember the beginner's guide referencing that these are separate websites - but how do you modify their title info on a wordpress.org blog, and what's the difference between getting to these two sites? also, are there any wordpress.org plugins to mass fix meta descriptions, and not founds, retroactively? i have all in one seo, but not sure how to apply the changes retroactively. a new crawl shows too many to fix manually (89+) missing metas,  mostly due to multiple pages on categories, etc. and other time consuming, tedious generations.. any help appreciated, thanks

    | prospects
    0
  • AlightAnalytics


    I have a site that has a lot of contact modules.  So basically each section/page has a contact person and when you click the contact button it brings up a new window with form to submit and then ends with a thank you page.  All of the contact and thank you pages are showing up as duplicate page titles and content.  Is this something that needs to be fixed even if I am not using them to target keywords?

    | AlightAnalytics
    0
  • MichaelRyan22


    I own a company for teams Ex  myteams.com . A team registers and they get a site at team1.myteams.com.   Content on each sub team site is mostly unique and I have several back links on each to the main site myteams.com. I also provide them with a unique URl  team1.com will show team1.myteams.com. So couple questions As far as SEO should i be pushing the  team1.com url or team1.myteams.com url? Is a link from team1.com or team1.myteams.com better for my site, their site or both How many back links should the sub sites have? Thanks

    | MichaelRyan22
    0
  • rolls123


    When i get my crawl diagnostics, I am getting a blocked by Meta Robot, which means that my page is not being indexed in the search engines... obviously this is a major issue for organic traffic!!! What does it actually mean, and how can i fix it?

    | rolls123
    0
  • Entrusteddev


    Hello, We need to find out if links that we setup, which are older than 12 months hold any value? Do new links hold more value than old ones and therefore should we let the old links become inactive? If we do let the links become inactive after 12month will that effect the PA/DA of the site?

    | Entrusteddev
    0
  • mof3kz


    Ok so maybe not ask for "forgiveness" because I am not sure what we did to get penalized. I believe our site is being penalized 1. most of our usual keywords are not ranked in their usual placements in the search results. 2. some of our keywords are listing the wrong pages as search results and 3. our search results are landing on pages 8 or 9 on Google (not 2 or 3 as before). This is an ecommerce site. How do we figure out what trigger the penalty (if at all) and how do we fix it so that we can get our ranking back (is that even possible)? Please advise - much help is needed!

    | mof3kz
    0
  • SkiBum


    The site in question is stanwix.info. I set this up years ago as a community project before I had even heard of seo.  It carries quite a bit of content but has appallingly "SEO Unfriendly" URLs  some content is recorded as duplicate 3 or more times because of these dynamic URLs according to the crawl statistics returned by SEO Moz. Currently it ranks well for the keyword stanwix - not too surprising as the only significant local competition is a large commercial holiday complex located several miles away out on the coast. As a sort of showcase, I have been trying to come up with a strategy to re-optimise stanwix.info so that it can outdo the commercial site stanwix.com  I am pretty sure that step 1 involcves upgrading from the current archaic version of Joomla to the latest release even though that will break some of the modules currently installed. My pal who actually coded the site did a fair bit of hacking of the modules to get them to work properly. OR do I simply bin it and start a fresh site consigning years worth of community content to the darkness and replace with fresh material - I'm not keen on this option as I have put a lot of heart and soul into this project.   I am in a quandary here as the problems are so numerous that whatever I do will break the site for some time. The reason I want to keep the site is because the business directory provides a useful locally relevant source of links for other clients and I am also going to set up a separate website for the community centre on a subdomain - this time running in wordpress which I do have a fair bit of experience with. Your advice for my addled brain would be much appreciated.

    | SkiBum
    0
  • BenRush


    I am looking at potentially using some Schema mark up on hotel listing pages. This is for an OTA where lots of hotels from all over the world are available for selection (think hotels.com, booking.com, agoda.com etc) For the itemscope itemtype on say the hotel name should I be defining it as http://schema.org/hotel or http://schema.org/localbusiness For example against the hotel name I would have: Grand Plaza Hanoi I assume its the former, but I was just after some 2nd opinions. Thanks, Ben

    | BenRush
    1
  • jdeb


    Hi, We're doing a big content update on our product pages and I'm looking for some advice about our internal linking. In a nutshell, the current design we're using links out from every product page (i.e. plants) to a set of accessory pages (i.e. things to help you plant the plants). The screenshot shows how this works. The accessories we sell are a very small part of our business and don't attract significant or valuable search traffic. It's the plant pages that pull in the visits and make the money.
    The reason for all these links to accessory pages is for usabilty & to reduce the volume of support calls about accessories (we get a lot of those). So my concern is that by linking out to these relatively low value accessory pages from all of our plant product pages, we will be spilling link juice from all our important pages to a small set of unimportant ones. Should I be concerned about this and if so, what should I do differently? I have considered: Making an intermediary page, listing the relevant accessories, so  that each product page links to one intermediary page, which then links to all the accessories. Using nofollow on the accessory page links - there is so much info out there about this, much of it conflicting, that I just don't know if that's a good or bad idea. Using some kind of java-based pop-up box to list the accessory links that will hide the links from spiders. Linking back from the accessory pages to the relevant product sub-category pages to loop the flow of link juice. All ideas welcome zoBgC

    | jdeb
    0
  • SEOKeith


    Quite simply, is it best to allow index of category / tag pages on a Wordpress blog or no index them? My thought is Google will / might see it as duplicate content? Thanks, K

    | SEOKeith
    0
  • macky7


    Hi All, I have a question. I have 2 sites with me in the same sector and want some help. site 1 is a old site started back in 2003 and has some amount of links to it and has a pr 3 with some good links to it but doesn't rank much for any keywords for the timing. site 2 is a aged domain but newly developed with unique content and has a good amount of exact match with a .com version. so will there be any benefit by redirecting site 1 to site 2 to get the seo benefits and a start for link bulding? or is it best to develop and work on each site? the sector is health insurance. Thanks

    | macky7
    1
  • ChristopherGlaeser


    My web host account allows me to have multiple domain names.  Internally, the first domain is the main domain, and the additional domains are virtual domains, but externally, the intent is for each domain to appear as a unique domain.  When accessing a virtual domain, the server first processes the main .htaccess file, and then processes the .htaccess file for that virtual domain.  I'm sure this is a common setup, and this is not unique to my web host. Due the main .htaccess file, references to virtual.com are rewritten as main.com/virtual.  The web pages are displayed correctly, but of course, this rewrite is not what is desired.  What is the common solution?  For example, is there a conditional rewrite rule that says ignore the rest of the rewrite rules in this .htacces file? Best,
    Christopher

    | ChristopherGlaeser
    0
  • Hyrule


    Hey guys, What a headache i've been going through the last few days trying to make sure my upcoming move is near-perfect. Right now all my urls are written like this /page-name (all lowercase, exact, no forward slash at end). In the new CMS they will be written like this: /Page-Name/ (with the forward slash at the end). When I generate an XML sitemap in the new ecomm CMS internally it lists the category pages with a forward slash at the end, just like they show up through out the CMS. This seems sloppy to me, but I have no control over it. Is this OK for SEO? I'm worried my PR 4, well built ecommerce website is going to lose value to small (but potentially large) errors like this. If this is indeed not good practice, is there a resource about not using the forward slash at the end of URLS in sitemaps i  can present to the community at the platform? They are usually real quick to make fixes if something is not up to standards. Thanks in advance, -First Time Ecommerce Platform Transition Guy

    | Hyrule
    0
  • Adrian_Kingwell


    I am project managing the rebuild of a major corporate website and need to set up 301 redirects from the old pages to the new ones. The problem is that the old site sits on multiple CMS platforms so there is no way I can get a list of pages from the old CMS. Is there a good tool out there that will crawl through all the sites and produce a nice spreadsheet with all the URLs on it? Somebody mentioned Xenu but I have never used it. Any recommendations? Thanks -Adrian

    | Adrian_Kingwell
    0
  • scotennis


    Hi folks, I came across a strange search result. Search on Google Australia for "income portfolio". http://www.google.com.au/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=income+portfolio See the first result? It's a login page. How is that search result showing? And in position #1! Where is it getting its title and descriptions tags from? Does Google have a way to somehow see what is behind the login? Appreciate your thought.

    | scotennis
    0
  • raulo79


    Hi all, I'm developing a dynamic qr code service.. The service works in the following way: You create an account with an associated QR CODE pointing to a url like:
      - http://domain.me/username The user can change the target of this url.. he can:
       - point to an external url ( his website for example)
       - point to a vCard download page
       - a mobile ready webpage ( no redirection in this case)... Visiting http://domain.me/username my company logo is displayed and we redirect the visitor with a: header("Refresh: 5;URL=http://userdomain.tld"); Google is indexing many user's URLs, this is good for those users pointing to the mobile ready webpage, in this case there is no redirection, but Google is indexing many urls that redirect to an external url and I don't know how to avoid this.. I can't do an header('Location: http://www.example.com/'); because I need to display our logo after redirection.. how can I do google friendly? Sorry for my english, I hope you can undestand the problem. Best regards.
    Mauro.

    | raulo79
    0
  • SL_SEM


    I am getting the IT staff to move our blog from "blog." to "/blog" using mod_proxy for apache, but I had a couple of questions about this I was hoping someone here might be able to help with. Is it correct that just setting up mod_proxy will make the blog available at both URLs? the "blog." subdomain and the "/blog" folder? If so, what is the best way to 301 redirect all traffic from "blog." to "/blog"? I assume this could be handled with a blanket 301 style rewrite, but I wanted to get some other opinions before getting with my IT guys to do it. I am technical enough to talk about this, but not do it myself, so experienced opinions are appreciated. Thanks!

    | SL_SEM
    0
  • wellnesswooz


    Hi, In my crawl diagnotics, I received an error for duplicate content: 1. www.website.com 2. www.website.com/ 3. www.website.com/index.html Which code do I have to add to my htaccess to avoid this?

    | wellnesswooz
    0
  • JonathanSmith


    Hi, I am working on a large WP site for a client and have an issue with duplicate content and page numbers. I am using the Yoast SEO plugin but can't seem to resolve the issue. Let me give an example: If I go to a popular category, for example F1, there are over 10 pages of content for the category and although the URL changes, the Title and Meta Description stay the same. Now...if I was using a template for the title and description I could add the page number variable, but as I am overwriting the template with SEO specific category information I can't use variables and hence the problem! This is such a common problem I know somebody will have an answer! Thanks

    | JonathanSmith
    0
  • 9xbmarketing


    Looking to create a full screen sliding site for optimum use on tablets. Found this: http://codecanyon.net/item/fss-full-screen-sliding-website-plugin/full_screen_preview/159103 What is the general feeling on using FSS in terms of SEO? Should it be avoided? What's the alternative? Thanks!

    | 9xbmarketing
    0
  • hickboy5


    We have rolled out Schema tags for our homepage which has been very beneficial for us. We obviously don't want to go overboard however; can you please clarify, should Schema tags be limited to the homepage location, or implemented through the site? Thanks

    | hickboy5
    0
  • webtarget


    Hi, I'm going to describe a scenario on one of my sites, I was wondering if someone could tell me what is the correct use of rel="canonical" here. Suppose I have a rewrite rule that has a rule like this: RewriteRule ^Online-Games /main/index.php So, in the index file, do I set the rel="canonical" to Online-Games or /main/index.php? Thanks.

    | webtarget
    0
  • PerriCline


    In my weekly crawl report I suddenly have a huge number of title not found and missing page descriptions errors for all of my pdf files.  The pdfs do have a page title (defined in the file/properties tab) However these page titles are not being picked up by the crawler or google.  Any ideas how do I fix this?  ( I am using the Adrobat 9 Distiller)

    | PerriCline
    0
  • DerekM88


    I've just watched the very helpful video on Google Local best practices at http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/all-about-google-places and see MANY areas in which we are not utilizing our local marketing efforts. Given that we do not have TOO much local demand, I would say that the main reason for doing this work is to gain momentum in our broad-scale Google SEO efforts/results. But I am worried that Google might see us as a local company and stop showing us in the SERPs for non-local searches. Is this a good strategy to market locally, or to stick to backlinks on a broad international-based scale. Does it even help my overall SEO rankings (for broad keywords like Point of Sale and POS Software) to have a strong local and hyperlocal presence? Thanks! Derek M

    | DerekM88
    1

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.