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Category: Technical SEO

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

  • Socialdude


    Hi Guys, Am I write in saying google will take / create many variable from your title tag? Graphic, Web Design and Online Marketing in Ireland | Company Name results: Graphic Design, Web design, Web design in Ireland, Online Marketing in Ireland, Online Marketing, Graphic and Web Design, etc etc. (plus lots of long tail there as well). Would this be considered the optimal way as 'Design' is the common denominator for Graphic & Web. Then Ireland can be common to every other keyword such as Graphic design, Web design, Online Marketing. (in ireland) The reason why I ask is: lately I've notice title tags being stuffed with keywords and don't actually read correctly in the SERP My suggested way could have more benefits plus it reads well. Your thoughts, thanks.

    | Socialdude
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  • Gyi


    Recently, 196 404 errors appeared in my WMT account for pages that were never created on my site. Question: Any thoughts on how they got there (i.e. WMT bug, tactic by competitor)? Question: Thoughts on impact if any? Question: Thoughts on resolution?

    | Gyi
    0
  • theideapeople


    Hi. We are launching a new website and our .html page extensions will be replaced with a .php page extension. Example:   www.theideapeople.com/web_design.html  (current url) www.theideapeople.com/web_design.php  (new url) Will this require any special treatment to maintain the page SEO ranking?  Does it make a difference if you use a .html or .php?  Thank you for your help and insight! Jay

    | theideapeople
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  • gigmasters


    Recently, Google has started including certain information from our web pages in their search results description that is a bit puzzling. For example if you google 'Wedding Band Raleigh' the description they are using for our site's (GigMasters) page begins with the text 'Results 1 - 10 of 1005' Not sure why they are pulling that information. That is in on the page but its not high up on the page or marked with any special h1, h2, or h3 tag. We do have that information inside of a div which we have named 'Results'. Maybe that's why? Did we inadvertently use some sort of Google rich snippet or schema.org naming convention?! Any insight would be hugely appreciated.

    | gigmasters
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  • crvw


    How far into a page will a spider crawl to look for text? I've heard a spider will only crawl the first 3kb, but can't find an authoritative source for that information.

    | crvw
    0
  • EssexGirl


    I have a client with a waste removal business who had multiple listings on his Google Places account for different service locations. Over the last four months I have been creating separate listings for each separate service location, each under a different Google account and with a unique business name, address, phone number and website URL. They have all been verified by postcard and listed separately in local directories so that they have citations. As I have been creating the new listings I have also been deleted the old ones to make sure they are not flagged as duplicates. 2 months ago all the listings in the client's Google Places account were placed under review. I made some changes and submitted it for re-review but no go with Google. Now all the new listings I set up have also suddenly been placed under review. About a week ago I noticed that information in two separate Google Places listings was being mixed up - for example, the website URL for one listing was being shown in another listing. There is no connection between these two listings other than that they were both set up from the same IP address so this seems very strange. I reported this to Google and asked them to sort it out, then all of a sudden I found that ALL of the new listings had been placed under review. So now my client has no active listings at all. He can't afford to wait another 2 months for Google to review all the listings again so I am wondering whether the best course of action would just be to delete everything and start over. Any advice would be most welcome!

    | EssexGirl
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  • seoug_2005


    Hello, How can we optimize a site like this -  http://www.ziba.com.au/ . The whole site is in flash. What are the alternatives ?

    | seoug_2005
    0
  • LukeyJamo


    Hi, I have on-page optimised a client's website Now take a look at the Title Tag & Meta description of the front page. This is the correct updates I have made - Title: Practice Management and Financial Consultants to the Health Industry
    Description: Award winning Health and Life have been providing accounting, tax and practice management services for Medical, Dental, Allied Health businesses. Now, take a look when the business name is Googled. Notice how the Title Tag switches back to the original, yet the Description Tag is Correct. Now, take a look when the owner's name is Googled. The Title Tag is now correct, but the description is incorrect. Ive set the preferred URL to be the www version Ive spent ages in the custom CMS trying to find what could be causing this The developer says it's a "Google Thing" Anyone have any ideas?

    | LukeyJamo
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  • seoug_2005


    Is it true that  If there is a huge number of links from the source page then each link will provide very little value in terms of passing link juice ?

    | seoug_2005
    0
  • jimmartin_zoho.com


    When you do a Google image search for one of my client's products, you see a lot of first-generation hardware (the product is now in its third generation). The client wants to know what they can do to push those images down so that current product images rise to the top. FYI: the client's own image files on their site aren't very well optimized with keywords. My thinking is to have the client optimize their own images and the ones they give to the media with relevant keywords in file names, alt text, etc. Eventually, this should help push down the outdated images is my thinking. Any other suggestions? Thanks so much.

    | jimmartin_zoho.com
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  • Inovater


    beta.domain is tracking in seo moz dashboard why is this happening ?

    | Inovater
    0
  • NSJ78


    I have a website that due to the way in which it was put together a few years back always redirects to a /subdomain folder when the top level domain is entered. When analysing the new SERPS tool i spotted that when the .com domain was assessed it didn't pick up the internal links that were pointing to the /subdomain. Q) Could the /redirect cause a problem when crawled by Google, and if i'm linking back to the homepage should i be using the domain or the subdomain as the link (even though one redirects to the other......)

    | NSJ78
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  • Benj25


    So we are targeting a keyword and we are ranking 2nd for it. Another company is ranking number 1. What is the best element to target for us to improve into position number one? Page authority: them 41, us 40. mozRank: them 5.52, us 3.38. mozTrust: them 5.86, us 5.58. mT/mR: them 1.1, us 1.4. Total Links: them 6571, us 68. Internal Links: them 1138, us 1. External Links: them 5431, us 63. Followed Links: them 6569, us 64. Nofollowed Links: them 2, us 4. Linking Root Domains: them 25, us 41. Broadkeyword usage in page title: them YES, us YES. KW in domain: them no, us partial. Exact anchor test links: them 161, us 21. % of links with exact anchor text: them 2%, us 30%. Linking Root domains with exact anchor text: them 2, us 11. Domain Authority: them 41, us 40. Domain MozRank: them 3.7, us 4.5. Domain MozTrust: them 3.8, us 4.5. External links to domain: them 22574, us 217. Linking root domains: them 50, us 48. Linking C-blocks: them 46, us 42. Tweets: them 1, us 12. FB shares: them 6, us 26.

    | Benj25
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  • firstconversion


    http://www.timeout.com/competition/ALHDubrovnik?DCMP=EMC-Travel-2011-07-14 The links pass through an internal system e.g. www.timeout.com/extern_link/?http://www.alh.hr Or what is the benefit to timeout of doing this? Cheers S

    | firstconversion
    0
  • lhc67


    Hi, Mozzers- I've noticed pages that are getting 301 redirected are staying out there longer. It used to be that you would implement a 301 redirect and then after a couple of months the old page would disappear out of Google's index. Over the last couple of months I've noticed pages lingering, popping up.... What gives? Thanks in advance! LHC

    | lhc67
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  • ngw


    Hi *, I have a main site called example.org, and a lot of user generated pages to foo.example.org / bar.example.org and so on. Most of those pages link back to example.org. In example.org I have a page that links to all subdomains. How can I optimize the pagerank of the list page? Should I add nofollow to subdomain sites to avoid passing link juice to those sites and keep normal linking from subdomain sites?

    | ngw
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  • JetBookMike


    I believe we may have an issue with out domains and links which is causing our seo to suffer. As far as I'm aware, our non-www domain is being treated as a different domain name. Open Site explorer returns different information for each one. However, when I go to the non-www domain in my browser (I have to force it using the http as otherwise the browser auto inserts the www) my browser returns a page cannot be found. But there may be a chance this is actually an issue with the server we access the internet via at work. I need to establish 100% beyond all doubt that our non-www domain is not working. This is the www: http://www.jetbookingdirect.com/ This is the non-www: http://jetbookingdirect.com/ If it is definitely not working, is the right thing to do to ask my web host to setup a 301 redirect? Further, I thought redirects could only point to one address. If we 301 redirect, if someone accesses a specific page via the non-www domain, does it then take them to the correct page? Also, is it safe to say that our non-www domain not working has affected our SEO, and if we fix it, will it improve things for us? Thank you so much for clarification on this issue.

    | JetBookMike
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  • ashish211


    Hi, SeoMoz robot crawls only two web pages of my website. I contacts seomoz team and they told me that the problem is because of Javascript use. What is the solution to this? Should I contact my webdesign company and ask them to remove Javascript code?

    | ashish211
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  • findachristianjob


    Anyone know whats happening with the Bing Sitemap submissions and the Pending status?  Mine has been pending for over a week now.

    | findachristianjob
    0
  • Anest


    Im trying to increase value to specific pages by putting history, and additional images. Will copying snippets from other sites negatively affect me? Should the content be re-written completely?

    | Anest
    0
  • BrettKrasnove


    Hi, Last week we made a change to drupal core for an update to our website. We accidentally overwrote our good robots.txt that blocked hundreds of pages with the default drupal robots.txt. Several hours after that happened (and we didn't catch the mistake) our rankings dropped from mostly first, second place in Google organic to bottom and mid first page. Basically I believe we flooded the index with very low quality pages at once and threw a red flag and we got de-ranked. We have since fixed the robots.txt and have been re-crawled but have not seen a return in rank. Would this be a safe assumption of what happened? I haven't seen any other sites getting hit in the retail vertical yet in regards to any Panda 2.3 type of update. Will we see a return in our results anytime soon? Thanks, Justin

    | BrettKrasnove
    0
  • petrakraft


    I want the video to be compatible on all mobile phones (Android, iPhone, Blackberry....).

    | petrakraft
    0
  • azguy


    Okay, I was just in my Google Webmaster Tools and was looking at some of the stats. I have 1354 "not found" pages google says. Many of these URL's are bizarre. I don't know what they are. Others I do know. What should I do about this? Especially all the URL's I don't even know what they are?

    | azguy
    0
  • James77


    Hi, I was just wondering what your thoughts are on using a Href in a Div, which contains anchor text. We currently use the Href on the div, as opposed to just the anchor text as I want the whole div to be clickable as opposed to just the anchor text. So currently I have: Keword 1
    Keyword 2 Is this perfectly fine to do it like this as opposed to using <a tags="" ???<br="">I suppose there are various alternatives - if you must use the</a><a tag="" like:<="" p=""></a> <a tag="" like:<="" p=""></a> Keword 1
    Keyword 2 However I would assume a search engine is smart enought to know its the same thing??? Thanks

    | James77
    0
  • Ant71


    Hi, I have a driving instructor wordpress website called www.drivnglessonsbrightonandhove.co.uk, done a little link building. But before I start this properly, I want to change it to www.drivingbrighton.co.uk (as the first is too long to fit on the car etc!!!!) Whats the best way to do this? Is there a way to help keep its position in google as just got into top10 for different keywords?

    | Ant71
    0
  • nicole.healthline


    A new client developed an application that generates dynamic content. They were hit hard from Panda, and I believe it is in part due to this application. About 500 of the urls from this application perform well in SERPs (rank well, drive traffic to the site, low bounce rate, high page views per visit, etc). And there are an additional 9,000 urls (and growing) in the index that don't drive any organic traffic. We are thinking of making the 500 url that perform well into static pages and de-indexing the rest. What are your thoughts on this?

    | nicole.healthline
    0
  • Artience


    Hello, people! I have some questions regarding on Google spider. Many people are saying that "Google spiders only have US IP address." Is this really true? But I also saw video from Google's offical blog and it said "Google spider come from all around the world." At this point I am really confused. Q1) I researched and it seems like Google spiders have only US IP address. THen  what does exactly mean by "Google spider come from all around the world."? Q2) If Google spider have only US IP address, what happen to site which use IP delivery? Is this means that Google spider always redirect to us site since they only have US IP? Can anyone help me to understand?? One more questions! When Google analyzing for cloaking issue, do you think Google analyze when spider crawls the site or after they crawled the site?

    | Artience
    0
  • BrandonDoyle


    I run the website http://buildyourjacket.com. We have other domains as well, most importantly www.buildyourjacket.com and cvcsports.com. If you Google "letterman jackets" (our primary search term) cvcsports.com shows up as the first result (yay!). But that is not what we want. Until a few weeks ago, Google would show http://buildyourjacket.com as the domain for the first search result from "letterman jackets". But then a few weeks that changed. I don't know how that could have happened. There are two reasons why we want the domain http://buildyourjacket.com to be the one that shows up: 1) It's a better sounding/looking domain and 2) When it was showing up, Google also showed right below the domain another link of our that said "Build Your Own Jacket" which definitely helped us get more clicks. Can someone please help me and tell me what I should do? Thank you so much.

    | BrandonDoyle
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  • magdaknight


    I've got a handcoded site with around 1500 unique articles and a handcoded sitemap. Very old school. The url structure is a bit of a mess, so to make things easier for a developer who'll be making the site database-driven, I thought I'd recategorise the content. Same content, but with new url structure (I thought I'd juice up the urls for SEO purposes while I was at it) To this end, I took categories like: /body/amazing-big-shoes/
    /style/red-boots/
    /technology/cyber-boots/ And rehoused all the content like so, doing it all manually with ftp: /boots/amazing-boots/
    /boots/red-boots/
    /boots/cyber-boots/ I placed 301 redirects in the .htaccess file like so: redirect 301 /body/amazing-boots/ http://www.site.co.uk/boots/amazing-boots/ (not doing redirects for each article, just for categories which seemed to make the articles redirect nicely.) Then I went into sitemap.xml and manually overwrote all the entries to reflect the new url structure, but keeping the old dates of the original entries, like so: <url><loc>http://www.site.co.uk/boots/amazing-boots/index.php</loc>
        <lastmod>2008-07-08</lastmod>
        <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
        <priority>0.5</priority></url> And resubmitted the sitemap to Google Webmasters. This was done 4 days ago. Webmaster said that the 1400 of 1500 articles indexed had dropped to 860, and today it's climbed to 939. Did I adopt correct procedure? Am I going about things the right way? Given a little time, can I expect Google to re-index the new pages nicely? I appreciate I've made a lot of changes in one fell swoop which could be a bit of a no-no... ? PS Apologies if this question appears twice on Q&A - hopefully I haven't double-posted

    | magdaknight
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  • leadsprofi


    Hi Mozzers! Randfishkin just posted yesterday a very nice important and helpfull post, about keyword difficulty. I will be happy, if you can write here the metrics from reports of keyword difficulty, to know more about position of our website on SERP, and to know more what to engage if someone is ranking higher than me, with same metrics of the report of keyword difficulty. It would be very nice, if we talk on this topic here about keyword difficulty how to's. Thanks

    | leadsprofi
    0
  • dmac


    First of all, sorry this Q is all in one block, but iPads don't like this site or vc/vs. When using the SEOmoz on-site keyword optimizer tool, it suggests at least one link to be to an off-site page. Would it be considered a link exchange if we linked out to an niche SUPER Authority sit that had a link back to our website? It seems like a naturally good strategy, but I'm afraid google may not agree. If the answer is no, there are many similar sites that mention our company in ver good ways, awards, etc.., but with no links. I would think this is a no-brainer. Personally I would like to eventually harvest all this press coverage to benefit our site. Btw, I was grey before I learned about SEOmoz, just like the rest of our niche. Now I'm shooting to be Snow White! Hopefully it works out. 🙂 I also wrote two landing pages that I tried to SEO the right way. I would love to hear your feedback to know if they are truly effective and if they are actually white. I think they are, but don't know "all" the rules of being white http://jamproa.com/ideology/product-innovation.php http://jamproa.com/industrial-design/what-is.php Thanks!

    | dmac
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  • claudmar


    The same piece of content is pulled in and presented (syndicated) within a frame on different web sites (owned by the same company). However, I would like only one web site to rank on Google's search results for that content. How do I set this up? Thanks, claudia

    | claudmar
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  • jfeld222


    It appears that every page on our site (www.bridgewinners.com) also creates a version of itself with a suffix. This results in Seomoz indicating that there are thousands of duplicate titles and content. 1. Does this matter? If so, how much? 2. How do I eliminate this (we are using joomla)? Thanks.

    | jfeld222
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  • Artience


    HEllo~~~~ People. I have a question regarding on cloaking. I will be really greatful if you can help me with question. I have a site www.example.com and it is targeting for multi countries. So I use sub directories for targeting multi countries. e.g. www.example.com/us/ www.example.com/de/ www.example.com/hk/ ....... so on and on. Therefore, when people type www.example.com, I use IP delivery to send users to each coutries. Here is my question. I use 301 redirect for IP delivery, which means when user enter www.example.com, my site read user's IP and send them to right country site by 301 redirect. In this case, is there any possibility that Google considers it as cloaking? Please people.... share me some ideas and thoughs.

    | Artience
    0
  • lzhao


    We’ve been noticing a huge uptick in Google’s spidering lately, and along with it a notable worsening of render times. Yesterday, for example, Google spidered our site at a rate of 30:1 (google spider vs. organic traffic.)   So in other words, for every organic page request, Google hits the site 30 times. Our render times have lengthened to an avg. of 2 seconds (and up to 2.5 seconds). Before this renewed interest Google has taken in us we were seeing closer to one second average render times, and often half of that. A year ago, the ratio of Spider to Organic was between 6:1 and 10:1. Is requesting a crawl-delay from Googlebot a viable option? Our goal would be only to reduce Googlebot traffic, and hopefully improve render times and organic traffic. Thanks, Trisha

    | lzhao
    0
  • MarcLevy


    Hi, We have a client who just sprang a new project on us. As always, they went ahead and did some stuff before bringing us into the loop!  (oh the joy of providing SEO services!) Anyway, i'm pretty swamped right now and need some extra brains on this. Basically the client had www.examplesiteA.com online for many years (an affiliate site which had built up a strong brand in the industry). They have now decided to turn this affiliate site into a full blown service platform and so with the new site being built they 301'd the whole thing over to www.examplesiteB.com - this is where they want all the old affiliate content to be hosted. So essentially examplesiteA.com is now examplesiteB.com and a new site is being placed on examplesiteA.com - still with me? So this has all happened and a brand new website is on examplesiteA.com and the old examplesiteA is now sitting exactly as it used to, but on the examplesiteB domain. The 301 redirect has been removed and the new examplesiteA seems to have been crawled, but the homepage is not indexed. When you search for examplesiteA, examplesiteB is the top result. Now they are similar domain names and to be fair I have very little data at this point i.e. I don't know when the 301 redirect was removed and it maybe that this all fixes itself with time. How is link equity effected now that examplesiteA.com was 301 redirected to examplesiteB.com and cached in this way, but now the 301 redirect has been removed and does not exist? Would link juice have been diluted throughout the process? Obviously if we had been in on all this before anything was implemented we would have done things differently. Interested to hear what others would do coming in at this point. Thanks and look forward to the advice!

    | MarcLevy
    0
  • MichaelWeisbaum


    Does it matter if a canonical tag points to the URL in which the tag is on? Example Page: http://www.domain.com Canonical tag: rel="canonical" href="http://www.domain.com" /> I only ask because a client of mine has a CMS that automatically does that to every page on the site and there's no way to remove it.  Will this have a negative impact or does it not matter at all?  Any insights would be great because I can't find a clear answer anywhere online. Thanks!

    | MichaelWeisbaum
    0
  • DROIDSTERS


    I have tow domains (destination/town - travel websites), www.gansbaai.com, and www.danger-point-peninsula.co.za. The one, gansbaai.com is an old domain I bought under which I will be launching a new website in a couple of months. danger-point-peninsula.co.za, is another domain I acquired also about gansbaai, the area. I will we using the domain gansbaai.cm, but want to get the best link juice out of danger-point-peninsula. How do I merge the domains?

    | DROIDSTERS
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  • schmeetz


    OK, so i used am xlm sitemap generator tool, xml-sitemaps.com, for Google Webmaster Tools submission. The problem is that the priorities are all out of wack. How on earth do i organize it with 1000's of pages?? Should i be spending hours organizing it?

    | schmeetz
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  • jotham2


    I like images to align right at top of content page.  img tag before h1 tag looks better on page, but wondering if h1 tag before img tag is preferred by spider.  Irrelevant? or possibly matters?   thanks for any thoughts.
    All about Stuff or All about Stuff or even
    All about Stuff

    | jotham2
    0
  • nicole.healthline


    An example would be domain.com/keyword/keyword2   vs domain.com/keyword-keyword2 Are there any advantages / disadvantages to one over the other?

    | nicole.healthline
    0
  • ControlByWeb


    We are currently working on a site re-design and are getting close to launch. When launching the newly designed site, what is the best way to roll it out? 301 Redirects with an under construction page?  Just upload the entire site at once? or al little of both? Thank You

    | ControlByWeb
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  • meardna77


    Where is the best information on internal linking. I'm so confused and everything I read says something different. Ahhhh Thanks

    | meardna77
    0
  • seoug_2005


    I want to block spiders from specific  specific part of website (say abc folder). In robots.txt, i have to write - User-agent: * Disallow: /abc/ Shall i have to insert the last slash. or will this do User-agent: * Disallow: /abc

    | seoug_2005
    0
  • Pawngo


    Our developer wants to use javascript, document referral or adding a URL parameter, in order to show a modal window telling them 'We are now...'.  A cookie seems to be too much work.  All of which don't play nice with the search engines. Do you know of a technique or method that allows us to be SEO friendly and still give a good user experience?  Thanks.

    | Pawngo
    0
  • PerchDigital


    Calling all Magento Kings out there! I'm working on a client' site - powered by magento. I'm looking to rewrite a lot of the URLs. I know there is the URL rewrite tool, but I think what I need to do may go beyond this. Typical example would be: Old URL - http://www.xxxxxxxx.co.uk/fabric/product/product-black-screen-print-and-silver-fabric.html New URL - http://www.xxxxxx.co.uk/fabric/product/silver I know that magento's URLs seem to be created through categories so wanted to double check with someone the best way to do this. Also, I've heard that 301 redirects of non www to www in the .htaccess has a knock on effect on discounts? All comments greatly appreciated.

    | PerchDigital
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  • Scott-Thomas


    For sites with multiple top-level domains that have been secured for a business or organization, I'm curious as to what is considered best practice for setting up 301 redirects for secondary domains. Is it best to do the 301 redirects at the registrar level, or the hosting level? So that .net, .biz, or other secondary domains funnel visitors to the correct primary/main domain name. I'm looking for the "best practice" answer and want to avoid duplicate content problems, or penalties from the search engines. I'm not trying to game the system with dozens of domain names, simply the handful of domains that are important to the client. I've seen some registrars recommend hosting secondary domains, and doing redirects from the hosting level (and they use meta refresh for "domain forwarding," which I want to avoid). It seems rather wasteful to set up hosting for a secondary domain and then 301 each URL.

    | Scott-Thomas
    0
  • JohnHillman


    We are considering using javascript to format URLs to simplify the navigation of the googlebot through our site, whilst presenting a larger number of links for the user to ensure content is accessible and easy to navigate from all parts of the site.  In other words, the user will see all internal links, but the search engine will see only those links that form our information hierarchy. We are therefore showing the search engine different content to the user only in so far as the search engine will have a more hierarchical information architecture by virture of the fact that there will be fewer links visible to the search engine to ensure that our content is well structured and discoverable. Would this be considered cloaking by google and would we be penalised?

    | JohnHillman
    0
  • MaryDoherty


    A Google verification meta tag was created and implemented on a site that I am now responsible for (I took over an SEO project after a long lapse), but no one seems to know what Google account was used to create the meta tag in the first place. I'm finding it very difficult to backtrack from verification meta tag to the Google account, and all the online help is for those having trouble moving forward with the verification. Any suggestions or advice?

    | MaryDoherty
    0
  • cttgroup


    Hi all...bit of a newbie into the SEO world! So excuse me if this question makes me sound simple 🙂 Basically we have recently had a link analysis done on our site but I'm finding it a little bit difficuilt to actually understand what it all means. What are followed and nofollowed links? What is the sort of ratio needed between the two for best results. And my next question being what are followed linking root domains and nofollowed linking root domains?

    | cttgroup
    0

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