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.

  • Diana.varbanescu


    I know buying new websites hoping to 301 redirect them to achieve higher rankings before they’re established is not a good idea, but what about uploading a info pages +  on-page SEO + some link-building and when the site is established (it ranks) direct visitors to a landing page? Buying a new domain for the SINGLE purpose of 301 redirecting won’t boost the rankings (don't think it would get penalties either, unless it’s the only link building activity). Not planning to redirect to the homepage, but to the related sub page on our main site (specific landing page). Will this pass the appropriate anchor text and link authority to the right page on our website and help those pages to rank for their keywords? Only thinking of a few pages (no more than 3).

    | Diana.varbanescu
    0
  • Christy-Correll


    Will having 401s on a site negatively impact rankings? (e.g. 401s thrown from a social media sharing icon)

    | Christy-Correll
    0
  • znotes


    Greetings! I work for an online retailer, and we recently launched a voting tool that allows customers to voice their opinion whether or not we should carry a new item. It's been a huge success and we've been generating thousands of comments. As a result, it's helped our SEO, and our products are showing up on the first page for some keywords without having any external links pointing to these pages. Our plan is to sell a product if it does well during the voting period. Unfortunately, we're not able to process the sale on the voting page, and need to redirect users to another page on our site. I understand that a 301 redirect transfers "linkjuice" to the new destination URL. But does it also transfer "freshness?" I ask because our new landing pages will not be updated as frequently as the voting pages. Example of our Voting Page:
    http://www.uncommongoods.com/voting/product/50012/infant-fortune-cookie-booties Example of Redirected Item Page (where sale can be processed):
    http://www.uncommongoods.com/product/baby-tube-socks-set-of-4 Any help/comments would be appreciated. Thank you!

    | znotes
    0
  • mccormackmorrison


    We have made modifications to the URL structure for a particular client who publishes news articles in various niche industries. In line with SEO best practice we removed the article ID from the URL - an example is below: http://www.website.com/news/123/news-article-title
    http://www.website.com/news/read/news-article-title Since this has been done we have noticed a decline in traffic volumes (we have not as yet assessed the impact on number of pages indexed). Google have suggested that we need to include unique numerical IDs in the URL somewhere to aid spidering. Firstly, is this policy for news submissions? Secondly (if the previous answer is yes), is this to overcome the obvious issue with the velocity and trend based nature of news submissions resulting in false duplicate URL/ title tag violations? Thirdly, do you have any advice on the way to go? Thanks P.S. One final one (you can count this as two question credits if required), is it possible to check the volume of pages indexed at various points in the past i.e. if you think that the number of pages being indexed may have declined, is there any way of confirming this after the event? Thanks again! Neil

    | mccormackmorrison
    0
  • stlastla


    When using the On page report card I get a critical error on Rel Canonical Im not sure if I have understood this right but I think that my problem is that I own a Norwegian Domain name which is www.danske-båten.no This domain works great in norwegian, but I get problems with english (foreign) browsers. My english domain name is http://www.danske-båten.no. When you buy a domain name with the letter Å you get a non norwegian domain name as well. (dont quite get the tecnical aspect of it) Så when I publish a page (using wordpress if that means anything) I get this message: Appropriate Use of Rel Canonical Moderate fix <dl> <dt>Canonical URL</dt> <dd>"http://www.danske-båten.no/ferge-oslo-københavn/"</dd> <dt>Explanation</dt> <dd>If the canonical tag is pointing to a different URL, engines will not count this page as the reference resource and thus, it won't have an opportunity to rank. Make sure you're targeting the right page (if this isn't it, you can reset the target above) and then change the canonical tag to reference that URL.</dd> <dt>Recommendation</dt> <dd>We check to make sure that IF you use canonical URL tags, it points to the right page. If the canonical tag points to a different URL, engines will not count this page as the reference resource and thus, it won't have an opportunity to rank. If you've not made this page the rel=canonical target, change the reference to this URL. NOTE: For pages not employing canonical URL tags, this factor does not apply.</dd> <dd>So What to do to fix this?
    </dd> </dl>

    | stlastla
    0
  • omarfk


    we have two different content perlanguage (Fr. EN )) they are not Duplicated and they are completly different. what is better for the URL a language sub domain or a folder fr.mycompany.com or mycompany.com/fr/

    | omarfk
    0
  • mickey11


    If you a symbol in the title of a webpage will this dilute the keywords in the title
    thus making it rank worse in search engines here is an example <title><br /> Black Shoe Polish<br /></title> versus <title><br /> ▶ Black Shoe Polish<br /></title> will the extra symbols count as words and thus the dilute the effectiveness of the Black Shoe Polish keyword. sort of making like 4 words instead 3. By the way, The reason to use a symbol is to make it stand on in the search engine results

    | mickey11
    0
  • mickey11


    Will updating each page often for example everyday or few days, rank the page and/or website better in google. The reason I ask is that I made 18 websites about three months ago and the traffic initially was alot higher and has fallen little by little thru the 3 months. Also how well my pages rank has also fallen. I just put out the websites, have done nothing else. No linking, etc. No updates. It is evident that without new links coming in, the website will fall in rank ie., link aquistion velocity But my question is if I update the pages and change content frequently will this improve my position in google and other search engines. The traffic on websites over the three months if graphed sort of looks like a stair case going down.

    | mickey11
    0
  • dantmurphy


    I am currently registered with google places for 'video conferencing in Melbourne australia' however I don't show up on page 1 of the places sesrch results for this search term. How can I improve it. I do note that my office address is in a residential area and not Melbourne CBD. Thanks Dan

    | dantmurphy
    0
  • HardyIntl


    Hi, I'm working with a domain that stays on the root domain if the www is not included. But if the www is included, it stays with the www. LIke this: example.com
    or
    www.example.com Of course, they are identical and both go to the same IP. Do search engines consider that to be duplicate content? thanks,
    michael

    | HardyIntl
    0
  • watchcases


    If you have a lot of pages with 1 or 2 inbound links, what would be the effect of using rel="canonical" to point all those pages to the home page? Would it boost the rankings of the home page? As I understand it, your long-tail keyword traffic would start landing on the home page instead of finding what they were looking for. That would be bad, but might be worth it.

    | watchcases
    0
  • ryanwats


    Is there a penalty for implementing a rel canonical between to pages that don't have the same content?  I was told that you should avoid using a rel canonical if the pages score lower than 50-60 on the Similar Page Checker: http://www.webconfs.com/similar-page-checker.php The overall theme of the pages I am considering this for are similar but the actual content is different.

    | ryanwats
    0
  • Fubra


    Hey, We are doing a re-design on our websites and we have run into a little problem. Basically we need to put the nav code at the bottom of the page (so when you view source all the nav code it at the bottom) but the nav will of course still show at the top. Will this cause any issues with our SEO? Will it make the nav seem less important or get crawled less? Thanks for the help in advance! Ricky

    | Fubra
    0
  • DanDeceuster


    I am redoing a site and the URL's are changing structure. The client's site was in magento and in the store they would get two URLs, for example: /store/categoryname/productname and /store/categoryname/productname?SID=dslkajsfdoiu947598whouieht983hg98 Do I have to 301 redirect both of these URL's to their new counterpart? Both go to the same content but magento seemed to add these SIDs into the navigation and Google has both versions in the index.

    | DanDeceuster
    0
  • SL_SEM


    So my devs have the canonical URL loaded up on pages automatically, and in most cases this gets done correctly. However we ran across a bug that left some of these blank like so: Does anyone know what effect that would have? I am trying to provide a priority for this so I can say "FIX IT NOW" or "Fix it after the other 'FIX IT NOW' type of items". Let me know if you have any ideas. I just want to be sure I am not telling google that all of these pages are like the home page. Thanks!

    | SL_SEM
    0
  • Socialdude


    Hi, I recently did a site crawl using seomoz crawl test My homepage seems to have 3 cases of duplicate content.. These are the urls www.example.ie/ www.example..ie/%5B%7E19%7E%5D www.example..ie/index.htm Does anyone have any advise on this? What impact does this have on my seo?

    | Socialdude
    0
  • HDI


    Whenever I crawl my site with any kind of bot or a sitemap generator over my site. it comes up with /$1 version of my URLs. For example: It gives me hdiconference.com & hdiconference.com/$1 and hdiconference.com/purchases & hdiconference.com/purchases/$1 Then I get warnings saying that it's duplicate content. Here's the problem: I can't find these /$1 URLs anywhere. Even when I type them in, I get a 404 error. I don't know what they are, where they came from, and I can't find them when I scour my code. So, I'm trying to figure out where the crawlers are picking this up. Where are these things? If sitemap generators and other site crawlers are seeing them, I have to assume that Googlebot is seeing them as well. Any help? My developers are at a loss as well.

    | HDI
    0
  • Gareth_Cartman


    Hello all, Hope everyone is well and are enjoying the summer. I am currently working with a site: www.corporatehealth.co.uk and have been trying to rank on the first page for the keyword occupational health. currently we are ranking on the second page: http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=occupational+health&pws=0&gl=uk#q=occupational+health&hl=en&pws=0&gl=uk&prmd=ivnsb&ei=38dUTuHCDdGKhQetqZn5BQ&start=10&sa=N&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=80a9548917d021a&biw=1920&bih=878 I understand I need to get more links pointing to the site and page itself. My idea was to do a 301 redirect from the occupational health page to the homepage and add occupational health content to the homepage as ultimately they are an occupational health service supplier. Was hoping to get anyones thoughts on the issue. Thanks in advance Shehzad

    | Gareth_Cartman
    0
  • STPseo


    Hola fellow SEO peoples! Site: http://www.sierratradingpost.com robot: http://www.sierratradingpost.com/robots.txt Please see the following line: Disallow: /keycodebypid~* We are trying to block URLs like this: http://www.sierratradingpost.com/keycodebypid~8855/for-the-home~d~3/kitchen~d~24/ but we still find them in the Google index. 1. we are not sure if we need to specify the robot to use pattern matching. 2. we are not sure if the format is correct. Should we use Disallow: /keycodebypid*/ or /*keycodebypid/ or even /*keycodebypid~/? What is even more confusing is that the meta robot command line says "noindex" - yet they still show up. <meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow, noarchive" /> Thank you!

    | STPseo
    0
  • mautofied


    I have over 6,000 duplicate title and duplicate content errors going to this link: http://community.mautofied.com/memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=100299 How do I fix this?

    | mautofied
    0
  • IvieDigital


    We have a client whose site is fairly new. There isn't much in the way of SEO results so far. In their content management system they have implemented friendly URLs and changed the extensions from aspx to htm. Now the htm pages are all indexed in Google but when I run a campaign report in SEOmoz it shows that all pages are duplicated with there being both htm and aspx pages for each page. Should we do 301 redirects from the aspx pages to the htm pages? Or would we be safe by removing the htm pages and letting Google reindex the site with the aspx page extensions? Does Google have any kind of preference as to what the page extensions are as long as the  URLs include keywords?

    | IvieDigital
    0
  • IoanSaid


    I have a blog on a separate address to my website. http://cheshireweddingphotographyblog.co.uk/ and http://celynnenphotography.co.uk Now I'm going to have a new website which is going to be wordpress based and it will sit on the main website (http://celynnenphotography.co.uk ) and include both gallery and blog. now the blog does well enough on google, etc.. so i wanted to mix their SEO juju and all that, but what happens with my blog? Do i: Stop paying for hosting, nice and simple. OR Do I need to do something?

    | IoanSaid
    0
  • STF


    Can anyone tell me why some google results show the main page and then a listing of all subsequent pages (i.e. results for SEOMOZ) while others just show the main page with nothing under it. I have two different sites (one personal the other biz) and they both show their search results differently. Is it something in the site creation or how it is crawled by google? Thanks. bKs3C

    | STF
    0
  • kchandler


    This is a pretty quick and simple (i'm hoping) question. What is the best way to completely block a sub domain from getting indexed from all search engines? One item i cannot use is the meta "no follow" tag. Thanks! - Kyle

    | kchandler
    0
  • ed123456


    We have people posting broken links to our site is this looking us link juice as they link to 404 pages. We could redirect to the homepage or just render the home page content, in both cases we can still display a clear page not found message. Is this legal (white hat).

    | ed123456
    0
  • invision


    Google somehow managed to find several of our images index folders and decided to include them into their index. Example: websitesite.com/category/images/ is what you'll see when doing a site:website.com search. So, I have two-part question: 1) Does this hurt our site's ability to rank in any way?
    Because all Google sees is just a directory listing page with a bunch of links to images in the folder. 2) If there could be any negative effect, what is the best way to get these folders out of Google's index?
    I could block via robots.txt, but I'm afraid it will also block all the images in that folder from being indexed in Google image search. I could also turn off directory listing in cpanel / htaccess, but then that gives is a 403 forbidden. Will this hurt the site in anyway and would it prevent Google from indexing the images in the directory? Thanks,
    Tony

    | invision
    0
  • seozachz


    A prominent SEO consultant recently told me that using display:none in the css is still a bad idea.  We built a simple drop down menu using widely used jquery techniques and it uses display:none to slideToggle the menu. Does anyone else think this is a bad idea?  If so, how should I change it since just about every jquery drop down I come across uses the slideToggle/display:none.

    | seozachz
    0
  • JacobFunnell


    We're going to add a new forum to our website. We don't anticipate very large volumes of users. I read somewhere in The Art of SEO that forums should be 'built in bbPress'.  I'm very much a programming novice so I'm still trying to get to grip with the basics of forums. I'd be grateful to know the main SEO considerations (however basic) that I should tell my web developer who is building the new forum.

    | JacobFunnell
    0
  • seoug_2005


    When i enter a keyword in  google.com.au, and click on a link "Pages from australia" ( in the middle left ), i expect to australian sites only. But there are sites with .com extension. Then what is the meaning of link "Pages from australia". What does it signify ?

    | seoug_2005
    0
  • MaartenvandenBos


    Hi, I am working on a SEO project for a client.
    Some of the urls have a + between the keyword.
    like www.example.com/make+me+happy/ Is this good or bad for seo?
    Or is it maybe better to use - ? Thanks!

    | MaartenvandenBos
    0
  • BostonWright


    Is it better to use a PDF or hard code restaurant menus (or any document for that matter) in HTML? I want the content to be indexed and thought PDF was the way to go for several reasons, but I wanted to get confirmation on this before I move forward.

    | BostonWright
    0
  • iJeep


    I change the domain of my site in March (pretty much exactly when Panda hit, by coincidence).  Our search traffic has dropped by 90% in that time with little recovery.  In webmaster tools it shows about 400,000 pages on the new domain and about 85,000 still indexed on the old domain. I set up custom 301 redirects to all of the new pages on the new domain so everything that was moved has a good one hop redirect. I've been told that the only thing I can do is sit back and wait for everything to finish transitioning.  The problem is that it has been 5 months of poor traffic, which means 5 months of slow sales. Is there anything I can do the speed up the transition?

    | iJeep
    0
  • LukeyJamo


    Hi, One of our clients has a store with over 30,000 indexed pages but less then 10,000 individual products and make a few hundred static pages. Ive crawled the site in Xenu (it took 12 hours!) and found it to by a complex mess caused by years of hack add ons which has caused duplicate pages, and weird dynamic parameters being indexed The inbound link structure is diversified over duplicate pages, PDFS, images so I need to be careful in treating everything correctly. I can likely identify & segment blocks of 'thousands' of URLs and parameters which need to be blocked, Im just not entirely sure the best method. Dynamic Parameters I can see the option in GWT to block these - is it that simple? (do I need to ensure they are deinxeded and 301d? Duplicate Pages Would the best approach be to mass 301 these pages and then apply a no-index tag and wait for it to be crawled? Thanks for your help.

    | LukeyJamo
    0
  • seanmccauley


    I am interested in your thoughts on the effect of number of outbound links (obls) on link juice passed? ie If a page linking to you has a high number of obls, how do you compute the effect of these obls and relative negative effect on linkjuice. In the event that there are three sites on which you have been offered the opportunity of a link Site A  PA 30 DA50      Obls on page 10 Site B  PA 40 DA50      Obls on page 15 Site C  PA 50 DA50      Obls on page 20 How would you appraise each of these prospective page links (ignoring anchor text, relevancy, etc which will be constant) Is there a rule of thumb on how to compare the linkjuice passed from a site relative to its PA and the number of obls? Is it as simple as page with 10 obls passes 10x juice of page with 100 obls?

    | seanmccauley
    0
  • seanmccauley


    Following on from earlier Q, what do you all use to count links out from a page. I believe there is a bing tool which does this, though rather than a list of sites a simple number would be ideal?

    | seanmccauley
    0
  • R2iSEO


    I'm comfortable with the steps of moving a site to a new domain name as recommended by Google. However, in this case, the domain name I'm asked to move to is not really "new" ... meaning it's currently hosting a website and has been for a long time. So my question is, do I do this in steps and take the old website down first in order to "free up" the domain name in they eyes of search engines to avoid large numbers of 404s and then (in step 2) switch to the "new" domain in a few months? Thanks.

    | R2iSEO
    0
  • Pooria


    I have seen few websites selling same package of IP-Hosting, I consider that kind of smart SEO solution if it really be effective, But I have doubt. I have a few websites using a dedicated server for 6 years with only 1 valid IP and with that experience, I think rich content, title tags and anchor links are most important factors but I never tried such IP SEO, has any one tried IP hosting? Then comes second questions, If you have experienced and recommend IP Hosting, the reasonable application could be wordpress to manage all the sites in diffrent servers, and by using plugins such as autoblog or RSS importer we can update all the sites with minimum effort, But the problem is that neither of these 2 plugins are really working hassle free, They do not work at all or they stop wroking all the sudden, preferably I need a solution for Wordpress multisite Would you offer any alternative? I appreciate if you share your ideas... P.S.: My objective to apply IP hosting is not geo-targeting I use to launch .COMs normally without any particular geo-target.

    | Pooria
    0
  • Marketingquotes


    Hi Everyone, I have just joined the community and am looking for some help regards Offsite SEO and Link Building. I have done some basic SEO on my website 'Marketing Quotes' Added to web directories (although I am told they do not carry much weight) I have written content and articles around them (on ezine, squidoo etc.) I have written unique content for the site I have done guest posting on blogs Not sure what to do next though for high power links. I did notice a Q&A on contacting webmasters and asking for links (after building a relationship) but wondered if there was anything (offsite wise) that I have missed out? Appreciate any advice. Regards, David

    | Marketingquotes
    0
  • nicole.healthline


    We want to add a video transcript to the same page as the video, but it doesn't really fit the design of the page. Is it fine to use CSS/DIVs to either have a "click to read full transcript" or a scroll box?

    | nicole.healthline
    0
  • tylerfraser


    Hello, My question is: how important is it to wait for the a redirect to get seen and cached before you take down the old page? More in depth: my old platform has seriously limited my ability to add sitemaps and make edits to htacces. I just want to change nameservers (which will delete everything on there) and upload the htaccess is that alright? Another way of saying it: when redirecting a page, is it necessary for google to see the old page before it is deleted? Thanks Tyler

    | tylerfraser
    0
  • Placeboo


    I joined SEOmoz knowing very little about SEO (it turns out even less than I thought!) I signed up because my business website that had be ranking very well for years made a fast and furious fall to the purgatory of page 2, 3, whatever. We'll I've definitely learned a lot and made a several changes that have helped. Specifically link building (directory submissions) and eliminating duplicate content. But we're still far below where we used to be and I've done everything I can do without making a career change to SEO. I've hired a few offshore SEOs to help but they have all failed to live up to their promises. So, I would love to find a GOOD SEO that can 1. Fix the remaining on-page technical issues in our CMS website (Business Catalyst), and 2. help us develop an SEO strategy for the next year. (I prefer not to post the name of the website for competitive reasons) Our keywords are really not very competitive at all due to the uniqueness of the business. Where should I look for help? Thanks

    | Placeboo
    0
  • fasctimseo


    Hi Guys, Google webmaster is showing 1000 duplicate title tags because its picking up our pages like this. How can I correct this? Please explain in detail please. Thank You Tim      /store/ICICLES_NO_7_CLEAR_WITH_PINK_NUBBY//store/ICICLES_NO_7_CLEAR_WITH_PINK_NUBBY

    | fasctimseo
    0
  • ptpgen


    Hi all! My site is on the WP platform and I'm having a crawl error. Wondering if you guys could possibly help me figure out what's going on? I have a good number of 404 errors where the links seems to be appended and I can't figure out why. I've scoured my individual posts and cannot seem to find the broken link? The crawl error looks a bit like this: http://preciousthingsphotography.com/2007/12/10/chicago-family-photographer-welcome/http:%2F%2Fpreciousthingsphotography.com%2F2007%2F12%2F10%2Fchicago-family-photographer-welcome%2F You can see that my original link is somehow being doubled with the slashes being replaced? This is happening on all of my posts. Any ideas as to what could be going on? Thanks so much!

    | ptpgen
    0
  • Socialdude


    Hi, I have a website currently on the domain example.co.uk (.com is not available) I'm looking to enter other markets such as Brazil, Russia - obviously content will need to change to suit the desired market / language. I'm looking for some information on the best practice to enter foreign markets. I was thinking maybe to create individual sites for each location eg: example.br example.ru This way I could localise each site in terms of business directories, content, language etc. Or have my example.co.uk with various languages on it Experience, suggestions are welcomed - thanks.

    | Socialdude
    0
  • AsafY


    Hi, Some time ago I have implemented schema.org product schema on all of my product pages. The rich snippet tool provided by Google shows that the relevant info is extracted (they say that preview is not supported so no preview there) My issue is that I can't see any rich snippet displayed for any on my searches, which leads me to think that there is something wrong with my implementation. sample page: www.funstuff.co.il/tabid/62/ProdID/933/products.aspx [editor's note: adult oriented content, NSFW] Any one has an Idea? Thanks, Asaf

    | AsafY
    0
  • GEMoney_No


    My E-commerce team is implementing functionality that allows us to display different content based on what channel and even what keyword the customers used to reach our page. This is of course a move that we believe will strengthen our conversion rates, but how will this effect our organic search listings? Do you guys have any examples of how this could affect us, and are there any technology pitfalls that we absolutely need to know about?

    | GEMoney_No
    0
  • seoug_2005


    In the SEOmoz post - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/robot-access-indexation-restriction-techniques-avoiding-conflicts, it's being said - If you have a robots.txt disallow in place for a page, the canonical tag will never be seen. Does it so happen that if a page is disallowed by robots.txt, spiders DO NOT read the html code ?

    | seoug_2005
    0
  • seoug_2005


    If i use nofollow on links ( internal or external ), will it reduce the link count as regard to Google. If there are 50 external links, and i nofollow 20 of them, will Google count this as 30 external  links.

    | seoug_2005
    0
  • onetwentysix


    Hello, We are having some problems with a few of our pages being crawled by Google and it looks like the slash at the end of the URL is causing the problem.  Would appreciate any pointers on this. We have a redirect in place that redirects the "no slash" URL to the "slash" URL for all pages. The obvious solution would be to try turning this off, however, we're unable to figure our where this redirect is coming from.  There doesn't appear to be an instruction in our .htaccess file doing this, and we've also tried using "DirectorySlash Off" in the .htaccess file, but that doesn't work either.  (if it makes a difference it is a 302 redirect doing this, not a 301) If we can't get the above to work, then the other solution would be to somehow reconfigure the page so that it is recognizable with the slash at the end by Google.  However, we're not sure how this would be done. I think the quickest solution would be to turn off the "add slash" redirect.  Any ideas on where this command might be hiding, and how to turn it off would be greatly appreciated.  Or any tips from people who have had similar crawl problems with google and any workarounds would be great! Thanks!

    | onetwentysix
    0
  • MichaelWeisbaum


    What changes to a website constitute resubmitting a sitemap?  For example, if I add new in-site links, should I then resubmit?  Or is it more for changes to URLs, Page titles, etc?

    | MichaelWeisbaum
    0

Got a burning SEO question?

Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


Start my free trial


Browse Questions

Explore more categories

  • Moz Tools

    Chat with the community about the Moz tools.

  • SEO Tactics

    Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers

  • Community

    Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!

  • Support

    Connect on product support and feature requests.

Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.