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Category: Technical SEO

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

  • SureFire


    I'd appreciate peoples' views on the following please. We have been approached by a client whose website does not rank # 1 for their own distinctive brand name due to this position being taken by a site they had developed for them by an affiliate some years back. The affiliate's site is clearly seen by Google as the definitive site for the brand - being older, having more links & in both Yahoo & DMOZ. The relationship has soured with the affiliate & the client wants to take control of the affiliate site & have it 301 redirect to the 'real' brand site. The affiliate won't cooperate (funny that). However whilst the client doesn't have control over the affiliate's website, they do own the domain. Given this, it seems that an option is to temporarily create a 1 page website on another server, change the affiliate website domain DNS settings to point to this, & in turn have that 301 re-direct to the client's website. This is a bit of a round about approach, but necessary because the affiliate won't directly 301 the site they control - despite the client owning it. (As I say the relationship has soured). If you think there's a better alternative approach to this problem (aside from litigation),  I'd appreciate hearing it please. Thanks.

    | SureFire
    0
  • dmac


    I bought a domain a couple months ago while having delusions of granger. The domain is PR2, has around 30 decent backlinks, and a small amount of traffic. It also has one of our keywords in the domain name. I'm thinking of 301 redirect to our homepage. Is there a downside to doing this? We really could use the additional traffic on our site.

    | dmac
    0
  • SoulSurfer8


    is ref=nofollow the same as rel=nofollow? in other words, does ref=nofollow not pass any link juice?

    | SoulSurfer8
    0
  • freestone


    I have a customer with two spellings of their domain name. I set up an account for spelling A and forwarded all the email boxes to spelling B becuase people tend to remember spelling A more of the time.  Spelling B is the real web site. I also want any www. traffic for spelling A to go to spelling B so I used this .htaccess file in the root of spelling A Options +Indexes +FollowSymLinks
    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.B.com/$1 [R=301,L] I use to just forward A to B from the registrar but made this change to allow for email spelled either way. My question is does this create a duplicate site issue for the bots?  Is this in anyway an SEO negative and if so is there a better way to do this. Thanks jw

    | freestone
    0
  • richcowley


    Hi, I'd like to index dynamically generated  - internal website search pages - to Google. A mod rewrite to make the URL strings friendlier might be one way, but as these pages are created on the fly and effectively don't exist till the search keywords are inputted, is it even possible to index them? thanks

    | richcowley
    0
  • neooptic


    Hi. We're working on http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/ at the moment, and I was wondering what's everyone's opinion on footer links. There's quite a lot on the page, and I was wondering if there might be a few too many. If so, what would be the best plan of action? Remove them altogether, stick them in an iframe or in a bit of JS so they can't be crawled? Thanks!

    | neooptic
    0
  • PeterM22


    Hi everyone, I just want to check something. If you have this entered into your robots.txt file: User-agent: *
    Disallow: /fred/ This wouldn't block /fred-review/ from being crawled would it? Thanks

    | PeterM22
    0
  • GlenBOB


    Hi we recently designed our website in work and changed some of the urls. the old site used to be http://www.example.ie/contact-us.htm now it's is http://example.ie/get-in-touch The problem we are having is with sitelinks (the ones auto generate in the serp) ie: about, contact us, team etc etc. Once cliked on, these OLD links are all going to 404 pages because of the change of url. Help with this would be greatly appreciated - I was thinking of blocking these old sitelinks in google web master.

    | GlenBOB
    0
  • nicole.healthline


    In this post, http://www.seomoz.org/blog/ugc-gets-an-a-on-google-test-with-panda-update-12260, it mentions that UGC content performed well after the Panda. One of Google's 23 questions mentions spelling errors. I am wondering how important it is to ensure there aren't any spelling errors or grammar errors in UGC content post-panda?

    | nicole.healthline
    0
  • sethgecko


    Ladies n gents Which sort of URLs do you suggest for Webshops with a deep structure of categories: http://www.yourdomain.com/cat1/cat2/cat3/cat4/cat5/cat6/ (could get really long) or better use just the last 2 categories: http://www.yourdomain.com/cat5/cat6/ ? thanks for your suggestions seth

    | sethgecko
    0
  • mascotmike


    I am considering putting a block of text on may pages, that initially appears as a snippet with a 'show more' button that expands to show the whole lot. Question: If the search engines can see the whole lot, but the visitor only sees the snippet until they click 'show more' then is this cloaking? Is it a really bad idea? Or can I get away with it because I am not being deceptive just improving the design? Help!

    | mascotmike
    0
  • bhsiao


    Will it hurt me if i redirect a few hundred old pages to my home page? I currently have a mess on my hands with many 404's showing up after moving my site to a new ecommerce server. We have been at the new server for 2 years but still have 337 404s showing up in google webmaster tools. I don't think it would affect users as very few people woudl find those old links but I don't want to mess with google. Also, how much are those 404s hurting my rank?

    | bhsiao
    1
  • sportstvjobs


    Hi, Does anyone have data to show that a subfolder is better than a subdomain for a blog? From what I've read, it sounds like both are a viable option but you choose subdomain if you want to build your blog as a distinct entity. Do you get ranked more quickly with a subfolder? Do you see X% more lift? Has anyone tested or seen tests around this subject? Any input is appreciated! Thanks in advance.

    | sportstvjobs
    0
  • elias99


    Hi SEOMoz I have a listings site. In a part of the page, I have 3 comboboxes, for state, county and city. On the change event, the javascript redirects the user to the page of the selected location. Parameters are passed via GET, and my URL is rewrited via htaccess. Example: http:///www.site.com/state/county/city.html The problem is, there is A LOT(more than 10k) of 404 errors. It is happenning because the crawler is trying to index the pages, sometimes WITHOUT a parameter, like http:///www.site.com/state//city.html I don't know how to stop it, and I don't wanna remove it, once it's very clicked by the users. What should I do?

    | elias99
    0
  • Romancing


    If your primary target of business is not in China is their any benefit to blocking Chinese search robots in robots.txt?

    | Romancing
    0
  • panini


    Hi guys, Quick question regarding the rel canonical tag. I have lots of links pointing at me with query strings and previously used some code to determine if query strings were in the URL and if they were then not to index that page. If there weren't query strings then the page would be indexed and followed. I assume I can now use the rel canonical tag on each of these pages so the value goes to the proper URL minus any query string. However do I need to have the rel canonical tag above the index, follow tag on the page? So URL is site.com/page.html?ref=ABC meta robots is "index, follow" Rel canonical is "site.com/page.html" Does the order of the meta robots and canonical tag matter? Thanks in advance!

    | panini
    0
  • Benj25


    Sorry for the, again, basic question - can someone define page level link metrics for me?

    | Benj25
    0
  • PHDAustralia68


    Hi Folks I seem to have approx 587 back links to my homepage from this site kitchendetailsanddesign.com since my entire site has under a 1000 back links; I wonder if I should be worried? I've tried contacting the webmaster to remove them but no luck any tips 🙂

    | PHDAustralia68
    0
  • nicole.healthline


    When setting up pagination, what should we limit the page size to? When will a searchbot stop crawling a particular page?

    | nicole.healthline
    0
  • nicole.healthline


    We added the nonidex, follow tag to our site about a week ago on several hundred URLs, and they are still in Google's index. I know de-indexing takes time, but I am wondering if having those URLs in the index will continue to "pandalize" the site. Would it be better to use the URL removal request? Or, should we just wait for the noindex tags to remove the URLs from the index?

    | nicole.healthline
    0
  • atohad


    I have a google places listing that was doing great and was consantly on the top 3 for most of it's keywords. About 3 weeks ago google declined my listing (it was on the same account with other listings that violated google guidelines). The listing still showed up on google while it being reviewed (i assumed that it because this listing didn't violate an guideline.) About a week ago google started showing reviews from Insiderpages with my listing that belonged to a competitor. Today, they fixed that and added a link to my right insiderpages page but weird things started to happen.... My listing started to appear as a NON VERIFIED liting. My website is no longer on the listing. The phone number listed on the listing belong to a competitor!! All the citations are still mine including one from my site! Should i report it to google? i'm hesitating to do so, we are loosing a lot of business as it is with most of our listings down and i'm afraid this might be a small error that if i'll address will take longer to solve. My listing link: http://maps.google.com/maps/place?um=1&ie=UTF-8&q=appliance+repair+nyc&fb=1&gl=us&hq=appliance+repair&hnear=0x89c24fa5d33f083b:0xc80b8f06e177fe62,New+York,+NY&cid=14321731230878083852&ei=01AXTum3J4mmsQKl_KxS&sa=X&oi=local_result&ct=placepage-link&resnum=9&ved=0CJ0BEOIJMAg Thanks!!

    | atohad
    0
  • nicole.healthline


    Is it necessary to block an rss feed with robots.txt? It seems they are automatically not indexed (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/12/taking-feeds-out-of-our-web-search.html) And, google says here that it's important not to block RSS feeds (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/10/using-rssatom-feeds-to-discover-new.html) I'm just checking!

    | nicole.healthline
    0
  • blueroom


    Are there current articles that describe the differences in Yahoo/Bing vs Google SERPs? We have solid top 10 rankings in Google for a bunch of competitive keywords but aren't ranking well in Yahoo.

    | blueroom
    0
  • zharriet


    From an SEO perspective, how do you know when to upgrade web hosting to VPS or Dedicated Server? Added: We have a Dedicated IP Address and plenty of bandwidth and disk space. We've done a lot of work on page speed. What we don't need is slow-downs due to the sharing space. Our business is seasonal  with much higher traffic for three months of the year. I'm leaning towards moving it up a notch. What is the next level after this? And yes, our web host just confirmed that some of the things I want to implement can't be done because we are on a shared server. He recommended going to Dedicated Hosting. And finally: If we want to be absolutely positive that shared hosting problems won't affect us, and to customize, and also to increase speed, dedicated server seems to be the way to go?

    | zharriet
    0
  • EricPacifico


    A client wants to relocate the majority of his niche news site, www.example.com, into a c-level domain on the same domain (news.example.com). Right now, almost all the articles are populating in Google News and generating traffic, thanks to the site's age, content and its newsmap. With the relocation, 80% of the files pulled into Google News, will now be news.example.com/tech/article-sample, as opposed to how they have been historically, www.example.com/tech/article-sample. Will that break Google News auto submission process, hurt their google news positioning, and require them to reapply for consideration? Secondly, a good chunk of landing pages (30+) and articles (3-4k) will be relocated to the new news.example.com domain. Everything after the .com/ will of course remain the same, but the c-level will be new so essentially, a new URL. I know that redirecting will lose some pagejuice, but since its a c-level, its going to be basically like moving the urls to a brand new domain?

    | EricPacifico
    0
  • Litb


    hi, i want to submit sitemap to search engines as many as possible, but i can't find them. anyone can help me?

    | Litb
    0
  • Brian_Worger


    I have a Driving School website www.1stclassdriving.co.uk. The site is structured geographically with one page per Area
    (post code) and one page per Driving Instructor. There are links from each Area page to the instructors
    working in the Area. The principal search keyword that I want to optimise on is
    "Driving Lessons" The thinking was to target each individual Area page for
    "Driving lessons in xxx" where xxx is the particular geographic area
    and each particular Instructor to "Driving Lessons in yyy" where yyy
    is the main  town . The ideal would be that a search on "Driving
    Lessons" would pick up the root page - search on an area, say "Driving
    Lessons in Croydon" would pick up the Croydon area page and a search on a
    town, say "Driving lessons in Mitcham" would pick up the Instructor
    that covered that town page. However having read Rebeccas Keyword research guide I am
    concerned that this strategy is wrong because of the volume of pages that use
    "Driving Lessons in xxxx". Does this fall foul of "Keyword cannibalization" ?
    and if so what is the best way of being able to achieve our objective?

    | Brian_Worger
    0
  • seomagnet


    We have a site which was de-moted from PR4 to PR3 with the latest Google update. We have not done any SEO for a long time for the site and the content is the same with over 100 page. My question is, in order to update the site, which is the best to do it, do we: 1. re-introduced new content to replace old once 2. re-write old content 3. Add new pages Many thanks in advance.

    | seomagnet
    0
  • neooptic


    We're working on an SEO update for http://www.gear-zone.co.uk at the moment, and I was wondering if someone could take a quick look at the new robots file (http://gearzone.affinitynewmedia.com/robots.txt) to make sure we haven't missed anything? Thanks

    | neooptic
    0
  • JSOC


    All, My site: http://www.nationalbankruptcyforum.com shows an average time spent downloading a page of 1,489 (in milliseconds) We've had spikes of well over 3,000 and lows of around 980 (all according to WMT). I understand that this is really slow. Does anyone have some suggestions as to how I could improve load times? Constructive criticism welcomed and encouraged.

    | JSOC
    0
  • Bandicoot


    Hi All - I am currently attempting to move a blog (companyname.blogspot.com) that has a 2/10 GPR to a custom domain name so that I can get my targeted keywords in the domain name. The new domain will just be www.targetedkeyword.com. There are easy instructions for doing this with the A record and CNAME changes in the Blogger help, but I am worried about losing rank and links if I do this. Can you guys help me understand what the ramifications would be, and how I can accomplish this without losing the 2/10 mojo? Thanks!

    | Bandicoot
    0
  • Seaward-Group


    Our developers have requested our "Link Share Matrix" - does anyone know what a Link Share Matrix is? Google and the Wiki haven't provided any decent results so I still don't know exactly what it is. Thanks in advance 🙂

    | Seaward-Group
    0
  • CameronT


    Hi, We currently use a drop down menu option for our paginated pages using JavaScript, what would be the best search engine friendly way around this?

    | CameronT
    0
  • jallenyang


    Using robots.txt to prevent search engine from indexing the page is not a good idea. so what is the sense of robots.txt? just for attracting robots to crawl sitemap?

    | jallenyang
    0
  • eder.machado


    Hello I'm starting an SEO work on a site that has the domain "www.dominiodocliente.com" and "www.dominiodocliente.com.br." The problem is that the domain name. ".com" already has a low rank for keywords chosen as the domain "Com.br" has no rank. On the other hand, the domain ". Com" has 224 results in google as the domain "Com.br" has 1970 results. My question is: Which domain should I focus on SEO work? Tks

    | eder.machado
    0
  • Gyi


    Hello friends, We are facing the prospect of switching to a new hosting account or company. We are currently using a third-party reseller account but are outgrowing that account. We are considering VPS and dedicated servers. However, this will mean updates for IPs and nameservers. Does anyone have experience with SEO consequences of making switch? Best practices? Tips? Obstacles? Any and all comments/advice welcome. We're trying to balance the potential SEO ramifications of making the switch with the consequences of reduced site speed.

    | Gyi
    0
  • nicole.healthline


    If I have an article, titled 7 signs of unhealthy eating and the title tag for five different pages looks like this: keyword | article title ex: Binge Eating | 7 Signs of Unhealthy Eating ex: Lack of Fruits & Vegetables | 7 Signs of Unhealthy Eating etc, etc.

    | nicole.healthline
    0
  • EssEEmily


    I'm stumped and I'm hoping some mozzers will be able to help. I run our company blog (http://scottymacblog.com/). The last couple of days I have noticed that the blog is receiving some traffic from cnn.com. I looked, but cannot find any mention of the blog on cnn. Adding to my frustration is that the content on cnn is constantly changing. Our blog doesn't do any sort of advertising and no one affiliated with the blog posts on cnn. As great as it is to be getting traffic from such a valued source, I have no idea why. Has something like this happened to (for?) anyone else?  Any ideas on how I can research the source of the link? Thanks in advance!

    | EssEEmily
    0
  • nicole.healthline


    I know that ideally a url should be something of the nature domain.com/topic, but if the url contains additional characters, for example, domain.com/topic?keyword, can the search engines still understand the complete words in the domain? Even though there are additional "incorrect" characters? Or do they stop "reading" once they find odd characters? Thanks!

    | nicole.healthline
    0
  • nicole.healthline


    Added the noindex meta tag to some pages on my site and I am wondering if anyone has any idea how long it will take to deindex the urls?

    | nicole.healthline
    0
  • nicole.healthline


    Does Google or other search engines include XML files in their index? More specifically, I am wondering how Google knows the difference between an xml filetype and an RSS feed.

    | nicole.healthline
    0
  • wedmonds


    Hi All, If you find a crawl error on your page.  How do you find it? The error only says the URL that is wrong but this is not the location.  Can i drill down and find out more information? Thank you!

    | wedmonds
    0
  • nicole.healthline


    I found this very useful post on SEOMoz http://www.seomoz.org/blog/525600-metrics-how-do-you-measure-measure-a-link, but its a bit dated. Also, it doesn't really help in terms of applying exact metrics to measure the quality of a link. Does anyone have any other suggestions to help automate / determine the quality of a link?

    | nicole.healthline
    0
  • debi_zyx


    Hi, All! This is a question asked in the old Q & A section, but the answer was a little ambiguous and it was about 3 years ago, so I decided to repost and let the knowledgeable SEO public answer... From David LaFerney: It’s clear that it’s much easier to get high rankings for a term if your domain is an exact match for the query. If you own several such domains that are very related such as – investmentrealestate.com, positivecashflow.com, and rentalproperty.com – would you be able to benefit from those by 301ing them to a single site, or would you have to maintain separate sites to help capture those targeted phrases? In a nutshell – SEO wise, is it worth owning multiple domains to exactly match valuable search phrases? Or do you lose the exact match benefit when you redirect?>> To clarify: redirecting an old domain with lots of history and links to a new exact match domain seems to contain SEO benefit.  (You get links+exact match domain, approximately.)  But the other way around? Redirecting a new exact match domain to an older domain with links?  Does that do anything for the ranking of the old domain for the exact match keyword?  Or absolutely nothing?  (My impression has been that it's nothing, but the question came up for a client and I just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing something.) Thanks in advance!

    | debi_zyx
    0
  • jcmoreno


    Hi I'm working on performing SEO on a portal that's implemented on WebSphere Portal with Lotus WCM. Now WebSphere Portal comes with some limitations such as non-pretty urls among other things. Portal also generates non-normalized urls, so you have to turn on a process for detecting and normalizing urls for the Googlebot, etc. Does anyone have any experience with SEO in this platform, and could offers me a few tips for this specific platform? Thank you

    | jcmoreno
    0
  • Donaab


    We have problem because our content are classifieds. Every ad expired after one or two mounts and then ad becomes inactive and we keep his page for one mount latter like a same page but we ad a notice that ad is inactive. After that we delete the ad and his page but need to redirect that URL to search results page which contains similar ads because we don't want to lose the traffic form that pages. How is the best way to redirect ad URL? Our thinking was to redirect internal without 301 redirection because the httacces file will be very big after a while  and we are thinking to try a canonicalization because we don't want engine to think that we have to much duplicate content.

    | Donaab
    0
  • nicole.healthline


    What SEO advice do you have for RSS feeds? Specifically, does the URL structure matter? Should the be noindex, follow or noindex, follow? Any other advice?

    | nicole.healthline
    0
  • wedmonds


    Hi Guys, New guy here with some questions regarding the difference between www and non www. I am helping with a site at the moment and gradually working my way through bits and learning all the time.  I was watching one of the seomoz videos and it brought my attention back to www vs non www. I understand that google will treat these as two seperate sites but wanted to check what the stats are telling me. I was under the impression that www.mydummysite.com was getting most links etc as this is what I have always used.  However when I used Opensite explorer it told me something different as follows: www.mydummysite.com 32/100     29/100     5     16 mydummysite.com 32/100     29/100     2     1,500 Am i correct in saying that i should be adding a redirect from www.mydummysite.com to mydummysite.com ????  I am thinking that this is telling me that I am potentially missing out on 1,500 links to my site but it could mean I am missing out on just 16.  Eitherway I guess its something I should fix right? Do I just redirect that page or would all pages beneith it such as mydummysite.com/news also need redirect??? Can i use Canonical Rel links for this now? Thanks for taking the time to read and reply! 🙂

    | wedmonds
    0
  • KennethDreyer


    Hi there, I'm current working on a site that is optimized for SEO and doing quite well in the rankings. We have noticed a big increase in mobile users to the site (mainly iOS and Android), so we have no started planning a mobile site as well. Do you guys have any recommendations we should keep in mind before we get started? One thing I'm still not sure of is whether we should aim to preserve all urls and cloak the pages (show mobile version to iOS and Android, and desktop version to everyone else) OR make a separate site for the mobile version (mobile.domain.com)? Would either solution affect the other? Regards,
    Kenneth

    | KennethDreyer
    0
  • RajeevRatra


    We are aggressively optimizing one of our internal pages for SEO related terms. http://www.arnima.com/Search-Engine-Optimization.aspx Some sample search terms are: SEO Florida, Florida SEO, SEO Tampa, Tampa SEO etc Based on recent work, we find that our anchor text distribution is good, if not very good. Our PA is for the internal page is 60 and our DA is 62 yet our Google rank for the above search terms is continually dropping. We have gone from #2 to #8 in the last few weeks. We have checked the websites of all that appear above us and their PA and DA are substantially less than us. Their anchor text links do not appear to be as well structured either. We have many unique domains - websites that we built - that point directly back to our SEO page. Some of these are fairly highly ranked sites... We are totally baffled. Can someone shed some light on this? What could the reason be? Any (and all) help and insights would be much appreciated! Thanks in advance.

    | RajeevRatra
    0

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