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.

  • stukerr


    Hi everyone, The background to my question is that one of the companies I work for has just produced a load of videos answering many of the common questions about their products, for the ecommerce part of their site. I've got these videos transcribed which I want to use as the backbone to some of the main pages on the site (some of which are already ranking reasonably well). I was thinking of putting this content on their department page (so for example their departments would be kitesurfing, land kites, toy kites etc.) above links to their sections (e.g. kite surf kites, kite surf boards etc.). Do you think this would be a good place to put a large amount of text ? (the text will be in a scrollable div) - i.e. could it get in the way of the links which are currently passing juice deeper in to the site ? Alternatives are to put the videos under the links to the sections (which would place them below the fold), or to place each video on its own page and simply link to these pages from the departments page (although it is the department page we wish to rank). Another alternative is to put links to the sections both before and after the new content. Hope that all makes sense! Thanks in advance

    | stukerr
    0
  • BeijerElectronics


    We would like to create either a new website or a new section of our existing website that will feature (in time) a lot of content including a forum, video training, tutorials and downloadable resources. Logistically, it would be much easier to create this in a new site (we'll call it newproduct.com) and refer people to the new site. We would, however, like to keep all of that content on our existing site for the sake of content building and SEO. Should we: Duplicate the content and use no index no follow and/or rel canonical? Host all of the content on our site and set up a vanity domain (www.newproduct.com) to point people to the deep linked area (www.mainsite.com/product/newproductinfo)? Host the content only on an external site with the occasional link back to our main site? I realize there are other options but they're mostly variants of the above. Our main objectives are to make it easy for people to get to while leveraging the new content for SEO purposes. What are the pros and cons of these different approaches? What seems to make the most sense? Thank you!

    | BeijerElectronics
    0
  • PMC-312087


    I just checked webmaster tools and noticed that all of the links I have acquired over the last few months are gone except for 1 website. Did something change just recently? Is this a glitch? http://www.petmedicalcenter.com Thanks in advance for your help! Brant

    | PMC-312087
    0
  • Anti-Alex


    Hello, Google webmaster tools is returning our URLs as 404 errors: http://www.celebritynetworth.com/watch/D5GrrPEN9Oc/tom-mccarthy-floating/ When we enter the URL into the browser it loads the page just fine. Is there a way to determine why Google Webmaster Tools is returning a 404 error when the link loads perfectly fine in a browser? Thanks, Alex

    | Anti-Alex
    0
  • mosaicpro


    I've been on SEOmoz for about 1 month now and everyone says that depending on the type of business you should build up your website structure for SEO as 1st step. I have a new client click here   ( www version doesn't work)... some bugs we are fixing it now. We are almost finished with the design & layout. 2nd question have been running though my head. 1. What would the best url category for the shop be    /products/     - current url cat ex:   /products/door-handles.html 2. What would you use for the main menu as section for getting the most out of SEO. Personally i am thinking of making 2-3 main categories on the left a section where i can add content to it (3-4 paragraphs... images maybe a video).So the main page focuses on the domain name more and the rest of the sections would focus on specific keywords, this why I avoid cannibalization. Main keyword target is "door handles" Any suggestions would be appreciated.

    | mosaicpro
    0
  • simodal


    Hello All, my first web crawl has come back with a duplicate content warning for www.simodal.com and www.simodal.com/index.htm slightly mystified! thanks paul

    | simodal
    0
  • nicole.healthline


    If I create a page that pulls a 10 snippets of information from various external site, would that content be considered duplicate content? If I link to the source, would it be recommended to use a "nofollow" tag?

    | nicole.healthline
    0
  • malachiii


    First, I want to say thank you to the support i've been getting from everyone in this community over the last few months.  Im glad to be a part of something that isnt full of flammers and haters... and happy late 4th of july... I implemented canonical tags on a clients website (job board with tons of job postings) and the pagerank has almost immediately rebounded from 2.3 - 4.6.  it was a little higher pre-panda, but im happy with the rebound. has anyone had experience on how long it usually takes for the keyword rankings to rebound after changes are made? google recached the site this morning, but im still waiting to see traffic bumps. Thanks!

    | malachiii
    0
  • hnydnn


    Hi There, This has turned out to be slightly long winded! Congrats to anyone who manages to follow what I am on about and cheers to anyone that can help! The company I work for has several hundred backlinks from customer sites (authority sites) that link to their unique login pages (e.g. customer.oursitesname.com/unique-identifier). From these pages they can access our learning platform. For maximum SEO benefits we have been trying to think of a way to get these customers to link to our start page. This is what we have come up with. Customers would link to us using a URL with this format www.oursitesname.com/#customer-unique-identifier. (I have read somewhere that Google “ignores” everything after a #). This URL would then cause a Jscript pop-up or drop-down to open. The pop-up or drop-down would be hidden for the normal user and only be visible for users that visit over the unique URL. The pop-up or drop-down would be unique for each customer (mainly for branding purposes). The pop-up or drop-down would contain signup/login fields. So now to my question, will this get us in trouble with Google? Is there a better solution than this? Are we over thinking it and should we just do something like this: www.oursitesname.com/customer-login/unique -identifier and set www.oursitesname.com/customer-login/ as the canonical? Does the Google bot get suspicious of hundreds of canonical tags pointing back to the one URL? Thanks in advance! Henry

    | hnydnn
    0
  • fourthdimensioninc


    Hi there, i'm having some trouble understanding why I'm still getting duplicate page title warnings on pages that have the rel=canonical attribute. For example: this page is the relative url http://www.resnet.us/directory/auditor/az/89/home-energy-raters-hers-raters/1 and http://www.resnet.us/directory/auditor/az/89/home-energy-raters-hers-raters/2 is the second page of this parsed list which is linking back to the first page using rel=canonical. i have over 300 pages like this!! what should i do SEOmoz GURUS? how do i remedy this problem? is it a problem?

    | fourthdimensioninc
    0
  • MarloSchneider


    I have quite a few website in Wordpress but I continuously run into the same issue. With permalinks it is not recommended to use /%category%/%post_name%/  because it puts an undue load on your bandwidth, server and makes the crawler crawl a ton of duplicate content pages.  On one site changing to that hierarchy even crashed some of the pages (probably a permissions error). I would like a correct information hierarchy, but this doesn't seem like correct play. What do you use as your URL hierarchy?
    Do you have any plugins or fixes for this issue? Thanks

    | MarloSchneider
    0
  • jallenyang


    our site has complete redesign including site architecture, page url and page content (except domain). It looks like a new site. The old site has been indexed about thirty thousand results by google. now what should i do first?

    | jallenyang
    0
  • ClaireH-184886


    I have read that google do not look kindly at sites that exchange links so i am trying to find a way of generating links to a new site. I am building a new site and need to start to get google to index it and build important links to generate traffic. I have looked at link exchange sites but have read that this is not great with google and it is better if you have sites where there is just one way linking. I do not want to buy links and would like to find a way of generating free links which can help build up traffic and the status of my new site. Any help would be great

    | ClaireH-184886
    0
  • QuietProgress


    Hello Everyone, I have a friend with a blog site that has over 2000 pages indexed in Yahoo but none in Google and no page rank. The web site is http://www.livingorganicnews.com/ I know it is not the best site but I am guessing something is wrong and I don't see it. Can you spot it? Does he have some settings wrong? What should he do? Thank you.

    | QuietProgress
    0
  • vijayvasu


    I am looking for some help to know more about shopping engine optimization for an online retailer. I would like to know about the best seo tools for this and also any companies that you can recommend. Thank you Mozzers! Vijay

    | vijayvasu
    0
  • OptioPublishing


    I have a new site with a new domain that ranked well the 1st week or so after it was indexed then it totally dropped off the SERP. My question is, does Google Sandboxing affect new sites on new domains that don't have any incoming links? The site dropped off before I began link building - from what I've read unnatural link build is often the cause. Can you still be sandboxed without any link building? If this is the case, are there things I can do to get out of the sandbox? Thanks folks, Jason

    | OptioPublishing
    0
  • wcksmith


    We understand the value of a keyword phrase included in the URL.  Is there more value to having that phrase in the folder name of the URL or the file name or does it matter? Example: http://www.biztoolsone.com/website-design.php or http://www.biztoolsone.com/website-design/ Which is best? Thanks,  Wick Smith

    | wcksmith
    0
  • Benj25


    Apologies for the very basic question - I am trying to determine exactly what link juice is. Every article I seem to find assumes that you already know what link juice is. From what I can tell it is how your internal links push around from your homepage and how they flow through your site. I don't understand how to optimize this and how to improve it throughout my site - or what the opportunities are. I'll attach an image of my site link numbers compared to a few rivals (names removed) to illustrate the difference - not vs the first column but certainly the other two. Can someone shed some light on Link Juice for me and point me in the right direction? Thanks. Oy2c5.png

    | Benj25
    0
  • Hakkasan


    We are trying to convince a client to do a massive rewrite from all URL's looking like this: "www.company.com/category/categoryId=82374" to something like "www.company.com/womens/jackets/rain" How would you describe the importance and impact of doing URL rewrites to an ecommerce site?  What evidence/research can we share with them to convince them it is worth the time and effort to do?

    | Hakkasan
    0
  • bhsiao


    When I googled my top keyword today, my site on google showed a description of my site from YEARS ago. It is completely irrevelant and misleading to visitors. Why would this have happened and is there anything I can do about it? Thanks!!! Betsy

    | bhsiao
    0
  • nicole.healthline


    Which is better to fix a pagination problem, javascript or HTML/DIVs? I know in one Google Webmaster Forum, a Google engineer recommends Javascript, but I've also seen people use DIVs.

    | nicole.healthline
    0
  • seoidea


    We were ranked on first page among top 5 position a year ago for most of our pages. On one fine day, google decided to drop us from the results although google keeps indexing our pages. Google index our pages regularly but doesn't show them in its results. All google traffic we receive is for our own site name and its variations. I wanted to know - how do we know if google has panelized us. Why has google panelized us ? If they have panelized us, what can we do to get out of it ? Also I wanted to know if any tool will help me identify such thing. We have not done any link building. Our site page rank is 4 (it was 5 few months ago). All we did was on page optimization. Thanks for your help!

    | seoidea
    0
  • soeren.hofmayer


    Hello, Does anyone know of or have a tool that takes referrer URLs coming from Google which extracts the search query from the URL string? Thank you

    | soeren.hofmayer
    0
  • BradBorst


    I have a paragraph at the top of my homepage.  I was told I could use css to make the content visually appear at the bottom of the page but it would still get indexed at the top of the page, still giving it the same level of importance.  Can anyone tell me how to do this?

    | BradBorst
    0
  • Hyrule


    Note: This is KILLING my customer experience. Here is my webpage: http://www.stbands.com Here is a speed test that may help you (look at the poor ratings in the upper corner) http://www.webpagetest.org/result/110628_MW_Y8CQ/1/details/ I have an F on "Cache Static Content" - anyone know how I can fix this? Also, it is a e-commerce website hosted through core commmerce. I have some access to code but not all of it. Some of it is dynamic. However, if you tell me specific things I can forward it to their very awesome tech department. They are very willing to work with me and are now considering implementing a CDN after I schooled them. Any help is greatly appreciated. Don't be afraid to get very technical - I may not understand it, but the engineers there will.

    | Hyrule
    0
  • Entrusteddev


    I have a clients site, which we publish fresh news content daily and have done for some time. this has built up a huge archive of news over the past few years. All the news resides in a /news sub folder. The most interesting news articles are syndicated through facebook and twitter. Note: All the news is original content. The archive is based around a chronological filing system so /news/2010/December would retrieve news articles published in December 2010. My first question is this, in the Post Panda seo world, since the news in the archives receives little to no traffic, will these be classed as low quality pages, even though they are generally informative and timely news articles? My Second Question, It's my understanding that a site can be penalised for harbouring low quality pages, thus would I be better to do away with my news archive of around 600+ articles and impose a rule that news is removed from the site after a set period (say 6 -12 months)?

    | Entrusteddev
    0
  • wcksmith


    We inherited some sites from another vendor & they have these tags in the head of all pages.  Are they of any value at all? Thanks for the help! Wick Smith

    | wcksmith
    0
  • nicole.healthline


    Is it a bad idea to use rel=canonical from several pages back to one (if you are planning on no-indexing them)? Does this concentrate the “link juice” from those several pages back to one?

    | nicole.healthline
    0
  • RiseSEO


    Does anyone know how recipes are treated by search engines? For example, I know press releases are expected to have lots of duplicates out there so they aren't penalized. Does anyone know if recipes are treated the same way. For example, if you Google "three cheese beef pasta shells" you get the first two results with identical content.

    | RiseSEO
    0
  • marika-178619


    If Google knows about our sitemaps and they’re being crawled on a daily basis, why should we use the http ping and /or list the index files in our robots.txt? Is there a benefit (i.e. improving indexability) to using both ping and listing index files in robots? Is there any benefit to listing the index sitemaps in robots if we’re pinging? If we provide a decent <lastmod>date is there going to be any difference in indexing rates between ping and the normal crawl that they do today?</lastmod> Do we need to all to cover our bases? thanks Marika

    | marika-178619
    0
  • glennfriesen


    If a link exists, and nobody clicks on it, could it still be valuable for SEO? Say I have 1000 links on 500 sites with Domain Authority ranging from 35 to 80. Let's pretend that 900 of those links generate referral traffic. Let's assume that the remaining 100 links are spread between 10 domains of the 500, but nobody ever clicks on them. Are they still valuable? Should an SEO seek to earn more links like those, even though they don't earn referral traffic? Does Google take referral data into account in evaluating links? 5343313-zelda-rogers-albums-zelda-pictures-duh-what-else-would-they-be-picture3672t-link-looks-so-lonely.jpg Sad%20little%20link.jpg

    | glennfriesen
    1
  • wcksmith


    We've inherited some sites from another developer that had the following tag: All references I can find to it are from 2004.  What is the purpose and is it worth including in pages/sites we build?

    | wcksmith
    0
  • Gyi


    Anyone have a good reference for implementing a content delivery network? Any SEO pitfalls with using a CDN (brief research seems to indicate no problems)? I seem to recall that SEOmoz was using Amazon Web Services (AWS) for CDN. Is that still the case? All CDN & AWS experiences, advice, references welcomed!

    | Gyi
    0
  • nicole.healthline


    when viewing urls in google's index, is it more accurate to refer to site:www.domain.com or google webmaster tools (urls in web index)?

    | nicole.healthline
    0
  • nicole.healthline


    In the google webmaster forums, google specifically states that you should not include search results in the google index. What is the best way to make dynamic, great content show in search results without receiving a penalty?

    | nicole.healthline
    0
  • senith


    Im moving a website that was .php to wordpress with a few static HTML pages. Which is better use permanent 301 redirects and delte the old pages, leave the old pages and use canonical urls and 301 redirects or something else?

    | senith
    0
  • madabouthats


    First off I am VERY new to his SEO stuff and If you guys could be so kind as to help. I was setting up my first campaign for my web site and when i entered it into the URL search it came back with having 2 web sites that it searched. Both are mine but one has the "www.website.com" and the other just has the "website.com" how can i fix this so i just have one? thanks in advance for your help

    | madabouthats
    0
  • impressem


    We manage a couple of sites with 100s of pages... Most of the sites have content that is not helpful as landing pages but obviously has relevent content related to our desired search terms. Some of links go off site to another domain. I am trying to understand the issue of "link juice" and if I gain it or lose it by putting "nofollow" designation on some of the page links. Specifically, do I increase the value of my pages if I put no follow tags on lower tier links off of these pages. Here is a page in question - http://www.vahmarketing.com/product/ductless-hoods Is there a best practice or SEO rule for using "no follow"? Thanks, Bob Nance

    | impressem
    0
  • indurain


    I'm trying to find out if there's a way we can combat similar content on different pages on the same site, without having to re write the whole lot? Any ideas?

    | indurain
    0
  • Benj25


    Hi guys, Started my free trial - very impressed - just thought I'd ask a question or two while I can. I've set up the website for http://www.worldofbooks.com (large bookseller in the UK), using Magento. I'm getting a huge amount of not found crawl errors (27,808), I think this is due to URL rewrites, all the errors are in this format (non search friendly): http://www.worldofbooks.com/search_inventory.php?search_text=&category=&tag=Ure&gift_code=&dd_sort_by=price_desc&dd_records_per_page=40&dd_page_number=1 As oppose to this format: http://www.worldofbooks.com/arts-books/history-of-art-design-styles/the-art-book-by-phaidon.html (the re-written URL). This doesn't seem to really be affecting our rankings, we targeted 'cheap books' and 'bargain books' heavily - we're up to 2nd for Cheap Books and 3rd for Bargain Books. So my question is - are these large amount of Crawl errors cause for concern or is it something that will work itself out? And secondly - if it is cause for concern will it be affecting our rankings negatively in any way and what could we do to resolve this issue? Any points in the right direction much appreciated. If you need any more clarification regarding any points I've raised just let me know. Benjamin Edwards

    | Benj25
    0
  • NetPicks


    The site I've inherited had operated on index.html at one point, and now uses index.php for the home page, which goes to the / page. The index.html was lost in migrating server hosts. How do I redirect the index.html to the / page? I've tried different options that keep giving ending up with the same 404 error. I tried a redirect from index.html to index.php which ended in an infinite loop. Because the index.html no longer exists in the root, should I created it and then add a redirect to it? Can I avoid this by editing the .htaccess? Any help is appreciated, thanks in advance!

    | NetPicks
    0
  • dreadmichael


    Hi everyone, I've used crawlers like Xenu to find broken links before, and I love these tools. What I can't figure out is how to find specific pieces of code within my site. For example, Webmaster Tools tells me there are still links to old pages somewhere on my website but I just can't find them. Do you know of a crawler that can search for a specific link within the html? Thanks in advance, Josh

    | dreadmichael
    0
  • kenbrother


    I have a project with 8 domains and each domain is showing the same content (including site structure) and still all sites do rank. When I search for a specific word-string in google it lists me all 8 domains. Do you have an explanation, why Google doesn't filter those URLs to just one URL instead of 8 with the same content?

    | kenbrother
    0
  • OneMedical


    My site (www.onemedical.com) has a PageRank of 0, and I can't figure out why. We did a major site update about a year ago, and moved the site from .md to .com about 9 months ago.  We are crawled by Google and rank on the first page for many of our top keywords.  We have a MozRank of 4.59. I figured this is something that would just take time to work out of the system, but nothing seems to change while we patiently wait. One more thing to note - when a user comes to the homepage (city selector) and selects their region they will then be cookied and directed to their relevant city site on subsequent visits.  But even our city-specific pages (ie www.onemedical.com/sf) have pageranks of 0. My management team keeps asking me about this and I suspect there is something silly that we keep overlooking...but for the life of me, can't figure it out. Any help would be appreciated.

    | OneMedical
    0
  • KnutDSvendsen


    Today we use country-specific .tlds but have the US site on .com/us; .com is now a 'flag-site.' Ikea uses that structure too (.com/.com/us). Looking potential risk to redirecting current US site to .com.

    | KnutDSvendsen
    0
  • kenbrother


    In a bigger project are several domains that show the same content like the main-site (there is a reason to have it like that). Now those "double-content domains" are indexed and ranking in Google. But now I see that all those double-content domains have no pagerank visible, despite they do all have their unique own backlinks. Do you know why those domains don't show Pagerank? Can it really have something to do with the double-content situation?

    | kenbrother
    0
  • NickPateman81


    Having trouble getting star ratings to appear in the SERPs. Here's the 'marked up' HTML that a designer implemented into a website, I'm pretty sure it's missing a bunch of stuff: Read the reviews 5 Any help much appreciated!

    | NickPateman81
    0
  • Turkey


    hi i have rockshore.uk.com which is not indexing properly. the internal pages do not show up for the text they have on them, or the title tags. the site is on aekmps shops platform. I understand that a .uk.com is not a proper TLD but i think i have a subdomain of .uk.com Can anyone help? thanks

    | Turkey
    0
  • brentmitchell


    This may seem like a silly question, but I had my site designed by a third party and I don't know how to find this info. I want to add Google +1 button to my site. I've already added the script that makes it work in my , but don't know how to add the  to the part of my site I'd like the icon to appear. If you take a look at my site, http://www.youdrivethesuccess.com/, you will see the twitter and facebook icons that follow you around the site in the top right of the page.  I'd like to drop in the +1 right next to them, but I don't know how to get to it. How do I access this on the server? What section of my FTP do these lil icons live? A folder? Any direction is greatly appreciated...thanks.

    | brentmitchell
    0
  • nicole.healthline


    How do search engines treat urls that end in hashtags? For example, www.domain.com/abc#xyz.

    | nicole.healthline
    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.