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Category: Technical SEO

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


  • Hi, Just wondering if anyone can explain for me why it seems every tag that is entered in WP blog posts on a site creates a duplicate page (identified by ROGER and friends in SEOmoz crawl)? Obviously if you can offer a solution (apart from the extremely obvious "don't use tags") I would be immensely grateful. Thanks so much,

    | ShaMenz
    0

  • We have a domain which performs well within the local search and has got good authority and trust but we are now moving further afield to rank for keywords country wide. Our current domain contains our local area, does this effect your chances of ranking for broader searches? You don't seem to see many general searches bring domains up with the location keywords within their domain.

    | DragonsDesign
    0

  • I have a number of 404 error pages showing in webmaster tools and some of the url's have numbers, % symbols, and some are pdf's.  My usual 301 redirect in my htaccess file does NOT redirect these pages where the url's have special characters.  What am I doing wrong?

    | BradBorst
    0

  • Due to acquisitions over time and the merging of many microsites into one major site, we currently have 20+ TLD's  pointing to the same IP address as our "preferred domain:"  for our consolidated website http://goo.gl/gH33w. They are all set up as 301 redirects on apache - including both the www and non www versions. When we launched this consolidated website, (April 2010) we accidentally left the settings of our site open to accept any of our domains on the same IP.  This was later fixed but unfortunately Google indexed our site under multiple of these URL's (ignoring the redirects) using the same content from our main website but swapping out the domain.  We added some additional redirects on apache to redirect these individual pages pages indexed under the wrong domain to the same page under our main domain http://goo.gl/gH33w.  This seemed to help resolve the issue and moved hundreds of pages off the index.  However, in December of 2010 we made significant changes in our external dns for our ip addresses and now since December, we see pages indexed under these redirecting domains on the rise again. If you do a search query of : site:laboratoryid.com you will see a few hundred examples of pages indexed under the wrong domain.  When you click on the link, it does redirect to the same page but under the preferred domain.  So the redirect is working and has been confirmed as 301.  But for some reason Google continues to crawl our site and index under this incorrect domains.  Why is this? Is there a setting we are missing?   These domain level and page level redirects should be decreasing the pages being indexed under the wrong domain but it appears it is doing the reverse. All of these old domains currently point to our production IP address where are preferred domain is also pointing.  Could this be the issue? None of the pages indexed today are from the old version of these sites. They only seem to be the new content from the new site but not under the preferred domain. Any insight would be much appreciated because we have tried many things without success to get this resolved.

    | sboelter
    0

  • We recently modified the whole URL structure on our website, which resulted in huge amount of 404 pages changing them to nice human readable urls. We did this in the middle of March - about 10 weeks ago... We used to have around 5000 404 pages in the beginning, but this number is decreasing slowly. (We have around 3000 now). On some parts of the website we have also set up a 301 redirect from the old URLs to the new ones, to avoid showing a 404 page thus making the “indexing transmission”, but it doesn’t seem to have made any difference. We've lost a significant amount of traffic, because of the URL changes, as Google removed the old URLs, but hasn’t indexed our new URLs yet. Is there anything else we can do to get our website indexed with the new URL structure quicker? It might also be useful to know that we are a page rank 4 and have over 30,000 unique users a month so I am sure Google often comes to the site quite often and pages we have made since then that only have the new url structure are indexed within hours sometimes they appear in search the next day!

    | jack86
    0

  • Hi there, grateful for any ideas on why this is happening: http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site:www.vitispr.com vs http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site:vitispr.com Google seems to be indexing and caching vitispr.com for our home page but the www. versions for everything else. As you can see the second query finds the home page. Any ideas why that might be? Other info that might be relevant: non-www etc. are all 301'd to www versions. moved domains/urls etc. around in March of this year and for a week or we were redirecting to the non-www version webmaster tools says 'www' preferred Thanks!

    | JaspalX
    0

  • Hi All. I've noticed some issues between the thesis themes and Yoast's plugin, namely, thesis doesn't recognise Yoast's plugin in for title tag and meta description. Is there a way to overide this?

    | PerchDigital
    0

  • My domain's homepage has been ranking 1st position for an specific term for about 8 months. Our domain got hacked and it took just one day to make the website right again. A week after our homepage didn't appear anymore in Google results, it isn't even indexed. However the rest of our internal pages keep being indexed and ranking as usual. How can I make my homepage appear again in the results? Is there a way to speed up this process? Will it be in the same position as before, or will it have some sort of penalization for the hacking?

    | HerbalTechnologies
    0

  • Hello, Geeks.com currently has approx. 194k pages in Google index. (approx. 30k suppl.) http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ageeks.com+inurl%3Aadditem&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a#sclient=psy&hl=en&client=firefox-a&hs=Ltp&rls=org.mozilla:en-US%3Aofficial&source=hp&q=site:www.geeks.com%2F&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&pbx=1&fp=876898a2ea0c82c7&biw=1512&bih=641 We have many thousands of old product urls which have gone out of stock, never to "see the light of day" again.  14 years worth! Should we be 301'ing all old products pages that go out of stock, if we know for certain we will never carry that SKU again? If we were to do a "mass" 301 of 30k+ urls how would google or other SE's react to that? Could there be any negative implications to doing so? What is considered best practice for eComm sites, as I imagine we are not alone with this type of situation. Thank you in advance. Michael B.

    | JustinGeeks
    0

  • I put my plan to change web hosts on abeyance when an SEO friend of mine told me that it would negatively impact the sites SEO. I am not changing the url or anathing, just the host.

    | ambisuite
    0

  • We are working with a company on re-platforming our website.  On a call yesterday they outlined a strategy to use 200 redirects for our top keywords instead of 301s.  I am not familiar with this type of redirect and was wondering if anyone could provide some more insight.

    | EvergladesDirect
    0

  • Hi! I've already done some research on redirects, but I still have a question concerning a 302 redirect implemented at the homepage of a website. The Website www.domainA.com has a 302 redirect to www.domainA.com/content/.... Also all subsequent pages have the /content/ directory in their URLs: e.g domainA.com/content/products First thing I was wondering about, was the use of a redirect to a new site using an additional directory /content/... Why would anyone do this? Would it be enough to replace the 302 with a 301 redirect, or would you recommend to change the entire structure and eliminate this /content/ directory? The most logical structure would be www.domainA.com/products/.., and not www.domainA.com/content/products, right? Second thing: Given that 302 means temporary redirect, what are the actual implications when redirecting from domainA.com to domainA.com/content? I've heard that 302 redirects don't pass linkjuice and are detrimental for the site's rankings... What are the actual implications concerning the example above (302 redirect from domainA.com to domainA.com/content ? Would be great to get some advice about the first problem and maybe some insights about the second one concerning 302s in general. Thanks in advance! Cheers, Chris

    | adwordize
    0

  • We've got a one-page, 10+ year old domain that has a 65/100 domain authority that gets about 10k page views a day (I'm happy to share the URL but didn't know if that's permitted). The content changes daily (it's a daily bible verse) so most of this question is focused on domain authority, not the content. We're getting ready to provide translations of that daily content in 4 languages.  Would it be better to create sub-domains for those translations (same content, different language) or sub-folders? Example: http://cn.example.com
    http://es.example.com
    http://ru.example.com or http://example.com/cn
    http://example.com/es
    http://example.com/ru We're able to do either but want to pick the one that would give the translated version the most authority both now and moving forward.  (We definitely don't want to penalize the root domain.) Thanks in advance for your input.

    | ipllc
    0

  • Each week I've been looking at my crawl diagnostics and seomoz still flags a few pages with missing meta description although they are definitely in there. Any ideas on why this would be happening?

    | British_Hardwoods
    0

  • Does anyone know of a tool which can check the cache date of each page of a site? i can get each page of the site into a .csv or xml file

    | Turkey
    1

  • Hello, I was wondering as to how much a bigger impact a backlink has when its linked site-wide as opposed to homepage only? What if the PA/DA of the homepage was good enough (mid 80s), would just a homepage link give a decent result? I just want to mainly know the difference in the impact of each, regardless of the DA/PA, as long as it comes from one domain. Thank you.

    | micfo
    0

  • The crawl report tells me "Notices are interesting facts about your pages we found while crawling". One of these interesting facts is that my blog archives are "blocked by meta robots". Articles are not blocked, just the archives. What is a "meta" robot? I think its just normal (since the article need only be crawled once) but want a second opinion. Should I care about this?

    | GPN
    0

  • I've completely disappeared off Google - what happened? Even my brand name keyword does not bring up my website - I feel lost, confused and baffled on what my next steps should be. ANY advice would be welcome, since there's no going back to the way the site was set up.

    | JeanieWalker
    0

  • Hi SEOMOZers, We have a fairly large retail client with both .COM and .CA domains.  Each of the sites are almost identical in design and, in most cases, content (these would be product pages).  The .US site has been live for nearly 2.5 years while the Canadian probably over a year younger or so.  Both sites are hosted in the US. What we're starting to see as of the last few months are searches that used to rank .COM product pages now rank the Canadian page above the US page on Google.com.  We've checked Webmaster Tools for each site and they target the appropriate country.  With nearly all examples we've seen, we haven't noticed any more links pointing to the Canadian page, and where this is becoming a widespread occurence we're not convinced it's a linking issue. My question is why Google might see both versions but rank the Canadian page above the US page on Google.com for a search being performed in the US?  Does anyone have any ideas on why this may be happening?

    | HarborOneBank
    0

  • We have a "secondary main menu" on a site that displays some popular pages of the site. They are in the main navigation of the site as subpages but we wanted to highlight them on every page of the site through this secondary menu. so this secondary menu is the same on every page of the site. So we have the main menu on the top of the site, subpages on the left and this secondary menu below the subpages (in a blue box so they stand out). Is this secondary menu confusing for the structure of the site or negative at all (in relation to robots, not UX)? Should we nofollow these links in the secondary menu? thanks for replies!

    | Motava
    0

  • If i give a self serve banner ad to someone on my blog or a image with a link and they give me a text link ad is that in googles eyes a link exchange or a one way link.

    | DavidKonigsberg
    0

  • Hello, I read an statement somewhere which stated: "2 identical URLs linked to 2 different popular key phrases next to each other (on the same website/domain) will lead to a Google penalize. Google knows, that both terms are popular. This means, Google will ignore the links to your site (you'll not have any benefit) and the site you have your links on loses authority." What are your thoughts on this statement? Thank you.

    | micfo
    0

  • Which techniques are "SEO-Friendly" for creating a sub-menu when you have to go hover a menu to discover the sub-menu? Best regards, Jonathan

    | JonathanLeplang
    0

  • Hi SEOMOZERS, We are planning to do a relaunch (new content, new design) + a domainname change (because it contains a keyword). Some of my team members think it is best to do the domain change already on the old-version to see if there might be some problems. Whereas I think it would be best to implement the domainchange on the new version because otherwise it can be suspected we did the domainchange only for SEO purposes. What are you guys thinking? Thanks Gregor

    | GregorHendrych
    0

  • I asked a question about this site (www.cookinggames.com.au) some time ago http://www.seomoz.org/qa/view/38488/site-indexing-google-doesnt-like-it and had some very helpful answers which were great.  However I'm still no further ahead.  I have added some more content, submitted a new XML sitemap, removed the 'lorem ipsum...' Now it seems that even Bing have ditched the site too.  The number 1 result in Australia for the search term 'cooking games' is now this one - http://www.cookinggames.net.au/ which surely is not so much better to deserve a #1 spot whilst my site is deindexed? I have just had another reconsideration request 'denied' and am absolutely out of ideas/.  If anyone can help suggest what I need to do... or even suggest how I can get feedback from the search engines what's wring that would be fantastic. Thank you David

    | OzDave
    0

  • Not sure whether this is considered black hat or not but I know it is done and I would like to know which is the most effectrive method. If you were to acquire multiple sites in the same niche to your main site (either by buying existing sites or perhaps registering expired domains) which already had strong aged backlinks, is it better to either: a) 301 the new domain to the main site (or a subpage perhaps) b) create 'minisites' on the new domains (trying to mirror the URL structure of the previous incarnation if possible to scoop up and remaining inbound backlink juice, on seperate IPs to the main site as well) and then place several links to the main site & subpages. Would the decay of link juice through 301's mean you lose benefit that way or is it the same as a normal link?  Would the 301 method mean any IBL's into URL's other than the homepage be lost?  The homepage of the minisite will likely have 4 or 5 internal links so will this dilure the effect of the links to the main site? Thanks in advance!

    | OzDave
    0

  • My friend's website is for a local business in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania but the MOZbar shows that his server is located in Canada.  Will this be detrimental to his SERP rankings?  The site was just launched a week ago. I saw various opinions in other forums and I could not find similar questions in this forum.  Thanks in advance. -Dan

    | superTallDan
    0

  • Hello - Our company will soon be launching a major product enhancement and we have discussed using a splash page when a visitor hits our homepage to promote the launch.  I'm thinking something similar to what Apple did on Apple.com to announce addition of The Beatles catalog ot iTunes.  I've never actually implemented anything like this before and wanted to get feedback from the community on how best to handle this from an SEO perspective. Thanks, Jason

    | TKSearchGuy
    0

  • If the purpose of constructing a site or blog is for SEO ie a linking microsite, is it better to keep as a subdomain or to register on its own domain. The question is how much of the Domain Authority of that site will flow through the subdomain to linked site. I note that these subdomains have PA of 1, does this answer my own question?? Thanks eg widgets.yolasite.com or widgets.wordpress.com

    | seanmccauley
    0

  • I have a property website, for each property are 4-5 tabs each with their own URL, these pages include the overview page which is content rich, and auxilliary pages such as maps, availability, can I use a canonical tag to merge the tabs with very little content to their corresponding overview page which is content rich? I.e. www.mywebsite.co.uk/property-1/overview This page has tabs for map, town info, availability which all have their own url i.e. www.mywebsite.co.uk/property-1/map
    www.mywebsite.co.uk/property-1/availability
    www.mywebsite.co.uk/property-1/towninfo Because these auxilary pages do not contain much content can I place a canonical tag in them pointing back to the content rich overview page at www.mywebsite.co.uk/property-1/overview?

    | assertive-media
    0

  • When I design sites for clients I try to keep the homepage clean and simple.  As a result, I usually end up with very little actual content. For SEO purposes.  What is the minimum # of words that I should have on any given homepage to avoid being penalized by Google? Does it have to be at least 150 or something like that?  Even though my internal pages have plenty? thanks, Martin

    | RogersSEO
    0

  • Hi everyone, I'm driving myself insane trying to figure this one out and am hoping someone has more technical chops than I do. Here's the situation... I'm getting duplicate canonical tags on my pages and posts, one is inside of the WordPress SEO (plugin) commented section, and the other is elsewhere in the header. I am running the latest version of WordPress 3.1.3 and the Genesis framework. After doing some testing and adding the following filters to my functions.php: <code>remove_action('wp_head', 'genesis_canonical'); remove_action('wp_head', 'rel_canonical');</code> ... what I get is this: With the plugin active + NO "remove action" - duplicate canonical tags
    With the plugin disabled + NO "remove action" - a single canonical tag
    With the plugin disabled + A "remove action" - no canonical tag I have tried using only one of these remove_actions at a time, and then combining them both. Regardless, as long as I have the plugin active I get duplicate canonical tags. Is this a bug in the plugin, perhaps somehow enabling the canonical functionality of WordPress? Thanks for your help everyone. Robert Dempsey

    | robertdempsey
    0

  • Is there a way to attach a transcript to a video so that it is searchable without cluttering up the page with the full text?  Occasionally you have a video where visitors are entertained and don't need or want a transcript, but it would still be useful to have it indexed as it is an accurate representation of the video.

    | SEMPassion
    0

  • Our website displays all of the products in our website If you attempt to visit a category or page that doesn't exist but conforms to our site url structure. Somehow google crawled these pages and indexed them, and they have TONS of duplicate content that hurt us. How do I deal with this problem?

    | 13375auc3
    0

  • Can anyone explain to me why this doesn't work? Redirect 301 /category/diamond-pendants/nstart/1/start/(.*) http://www.povada.com/category/pendants/nstart/1/start/$1 Im trying to replace everything after /start/ and insert it into the new url. Thanks in advance.

    | 13375auc3
    0

  • Hey Guys, I am writing to SEOmoz community because a problem occurred which I do not know how to solve: My domain (xyz.com) occured on very strange sites with very low trustworthiness (even blocked by google). Checking the site, I found out that all of the pictures were ALT=xyz.com. Could this hurt my position of my site on google rankings? How to prevent such actions, what should I do? Thanks for you help in advance!

    | Kajmany
    0

  • When changing domains, there's the obvious anxiety about sacrificing the value of your old domain. A client recently changed domains, immediately killed the old site (did everything properly with 301s, Webmaster Tools etc etc etc) and lost rankings completely for weeks.  Turns out the site had been 'burnt' by the previous owner and it took a reconsideration request from Google before things recovered.  Cost them rankings and cash with extra PPC spend. My question is: In order to avoid this potential hazard, what are your thoughts on submitting a change of address in Webmaster tools, but then leaving old site live for a few weeks to see how things pan out? I have never tried it and it seems to go against the grain, but interested to hear other people's experiences and how they have managed to change domain with minimal temporary damage. Thanks.

    | RiceMedia
    0

  • Thanks to the great advice i've received on this forum, I'm combining 50 different truck sites into a single, ultimate truck website. So my question is how long should I make a website 301 redirect to the appropriate page on my new website? My thought is that if it works well to have a single website, it might be nice to eventually sell off some of the old domain names that I won't be using anymore. Thanks! Andy

    | daenterpri
    0

  • A couple of issues at play here as I wrestle with the best permalink structure for a site I'm toying with now. 1.  I know that WordPress wants a unique number in the post to improve performance and db calls. 2.  I know that for basic on-page SEO, most of us would opt for CATEGORY/POST or maybe even just post.  I constantly change those.  It's a bad habit, but sometimes you want the killer headline and a decent title in the post. So here is the issue: I can rewrite or use a plugin (anyone have a favorite) the permalinks to speed up site performance.  We all know Google wants that.  Maybe the permalink becomes /1234-foo But you know, a number in front of the URL just isn't awfully user friendly.  If someone wants to read the foo post, it's nice to send them  directly there. So would you trade off a slowdown in site speed for the prettiest permalinks for usability and SEO? And since you're asking a WP question, has anyone heard of a hard cap on static pages where the database starts dragging? The site I have in mind has 400 each posts and pages.  Would moving platforms to Drupal or Joomla allow handling that many pages more effectively? Thanks for contributing and any help you can give. George

    | georgebounacos
    0

  • Okay, so I'm working with a site that has pretty good domain authority, but the interior pages are not well linked or optimized. So, it ranks for some terms, but everything goes to the home page. So, I'd like to increase the authority of the interior pages. The client is not wild about spreading targeted juice via something like a footer. They also don't like a "Popular Searches" style link list. The objection is that it's not attractive. They currently use cute euphemisms as the linking text, so like "cool stuff" instead of "sheepskin seat covers." In that made up example, they'd like to rank for the latter, but insist on using the former. What about a slide show with alt text/links? Would that increase the authority of those pages in a term-targeted kinda way? Are there other options? Does it matter how prominent those links are, like footers not as good as something higher up the page? They currently use a pull-down kind of thing that still results in some pages having no authority. Do bots use that equally well? Thanks!

    | 94501
    0

  • The client is already on /en and in my opinion there is not much to be gained by switching to /uk

    | Red_Mud_Rookie
    0

  • We are doing some optimisation on sites in the APAC region, namely China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan. We have set the url generator to automatically use the heading of the page in the URL which works fine for countries using Latin characters, but is causing problems, particularly in IE, when it comes to the double byte countries. For some reason, IE struggles with double byte and displays URLs in their rather ugly, coded form. Anybody got any suggestions on whether we should persist with the keyword URLs or revert to the non-descriptive URLs for the double byte countries? The reason I ask is it's a balance of SEO benefit vs not scaring IE users off with ugly URLs that look dreadful and spammy.

    | Red_Mud_Rookie
    0

  • Hello to the SEOmoz community! I am new to SEOmoz, SEO implementation, and the community and recently set up a campaign on one of the sites I managed. I was surprised at the amount of duplicate content that showed up as errors and when I took a look in deeper, the majority of errors were caused by pages on the root domain I put through Google Analytics URL Builder. After this, I went into webmaster tools and changed the parameter handling to ignore all of the tags the URL Builder adds to the end of the domain. SEOmoz recently recrawled my site and the errors being caused by the URL Builder are still being shown as duplicates. Any suggestions on what to do?

    | joshuaopinion
    0

  • We are migrating content from 10 sub domains to our www site.  On an IIS sever, what is potential server load impact, if any, for setting up 500 plus page level redirects?

    | DigitalMkt
    0

  • Hi, I want to implement an interstitial similar to http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/defaultinterstitial.cms. Within few seconds it gets redirected to http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/. What are the SEO implications of having this sort of arrangement? Regards

    | IM_Learner
    0

  • Hi there, Whilst checking out the SERPS, as you do, I noticed that where our category page appears, google now seems to be counting the number of products (what it calls items) on the product page and displaying this in the 1st part of the description (see image attached). My problem is we employ pagination, so that our category page will have 15 items on it, then there are paginated results for the rest, with either ?page=2 or page-2/ etc. appended to the URL. Although this is only a minor issue, I was just wondering if there was a way to change the number of products displayed on that page to be the entire number of products in that category, is there a microformat markup or something that can over-ride what google has detected ? Furthermore is this system of pagination effective ? I have considered using javascript pagination, such that all products would be loaded on to the one page but hidden until 'paginated', but I was worried about having hidden elements on the page, and also the impact of load times. Although I think this may solve the problem and display the true number of products in a section! Any help much appreciated, Stuart b4urme.jpg

    | stukerr
    0

  • I know I can use the site: query to see all the pages I have indexed in Google, but I need a listing of just the URLs.  We are doing a site re-platform and I want to make sure every URL in Google has a 301.  Is there an easy way to just see the URLs that Google has indexed for a domain?

    | EvergladesDirect
    0

  • Can anyone share thoughts on this: Does the S recently (mid april) we revamped our website (same content, new layout, strong brand), but a few days later our google rep contacted us to tell that she got a "red flag" for one of our SEA campaigns (we broke the bridge page policy, not on purpose to be clear), they were completely correct on this matter. We even got some extra time to correct this, normal policy is only 10 days. But, we were a little slow, so all our Adwords Campaigns are suspended and we get the message "Site suspended". We are working to have this fixed, our Google rep even granted some more time to fix this. Now, almost simultaneously, same time frame, all our new pages, that were already ranking well tx to proper 301 rules, suddenly fell out of the google SERPS, nothing to be found anymore up till now. Our website is live since 1996, no issues, up till now. There seems to be a strong correlation to what happened in our SEA and what happened in our SEO can anyone share some info?

    | TruvoDirectories
    0

  • Found a PR4 domain that had expired and not been renewed. Best way to get all the link juice from it? just 301 the whole thing to MY main domain?

    | bozzie311
    0

  • We have millions of urls and the technical expertise to write code to fix the spelling of keyword variants Google has discovered and shows us in Web Master tools.  Since Google has recognized these as variants, is it worth our time to write code that will fix the spelling of obvious misses?

    | snoopcat
    0

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