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Category: Technical SEO

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

  • CalamityJane77


    It stands to reason that Google will favor early adopters of Accelerated Mobile Pages, but it seems heavily geared toward news publishers so far. What about regular Wordpress sites, or ecommerce sites like Shopify, should AMP be pursued on that type of CMS?

    | CalamityJane77
    1
  • KimX


    Buying Guide and Product Category page competing for the same keyword ? Got a “nuts and bold website” selling basic stuff.  Imagine selling simple nuts, bolts and washers (the little ring that goes in between) in different metals.  Imagine a website with a very wide and deep line of these simple products. For long tail keywords we rank well (Example: 0.25 inch bolts). For the keyword:  “Nuts bolts” our main category page use to rank well  low 1<sup>st</sup> page to second page up against the big guys (Amazon, Walmart, Target, Costco, some drug store who may have a mix pack of nuts and bolts, but still Google don’t see the difference and list 2 pages each for these guys). But then in mid-February there were an update and suddenly our “Buying guide for nuts and bolts” rank higher and started to compete with our own product category page. That was never our intention. These two pages now compete for the ranking on page 4<sup>th</sup>. Clearly there were more words on the buying guide page but no changes had been made to it for well months or years. To make up for it some more words were added to the category page, but of cause there is only so many way you can fraise words about “nuts and bolts” without sounding a bit duplicate/re-writing. So what do I do now ??  Clearly the product category page is the one we like to rank highest with the guide a close 2nd. Most customer don’t need the buying guide but it is good to have and great support as we got lot of good comments from customer who read it. Made a link to the buying guide from the category page and wise verses. The category page got an embedded video. Moz list the page authority for the category page to 16 and 1 for the buying guide but clearly G see it differently. Already tried to change the Meta Tag Title and Description a little but it is hard to do if the word “Nuts Bolts” is to appear in the description or people don’t know what to expect. Could just insert a “do not index” for the buying guide but not a good long term solution. Unfortunately I am out of imagination at this point. Any good suggestions ?? Thanks, Kim Any good suggestions ???

    | KimX
    0
  • Closetstogo


    If I'm looking at our internal link count and structure on Google Search Console, some pages are listed as having over a thousand internal links within our site. I've read that having too many internal links on a page devalues that page's PageRank, because the value is divided amongst the pages it links out to. Likewise, I've heard having too many internal links is just bad in general for SEO. Is that true? The problem I'm facing is determining how Google is "discovering" these internal links. If I'm just looking at one single page reported with, say, 1,350 links and I'm just looking at the code, it may only have 80 or 90 actual links. Moz will confirm this, as well. So why would Google Search Console report different? Should I be concerned about this?

    | Closetstogo
    0
  • AL123al


    Hello, working on a squarespace website and I can't see any gallery images being indexed, only blog images. Searching for the problem in Google seems to imply that Squarespace images in galleries can't be indexed due to the use of a CDN. Is that the case? Thanks

    | AL123al
    0
  • promodirect


    Hey all, It's been 3 months now I demoted contact us & about us page via search console but it still appearing in my sitelink. Is there any other guidelines to be followed? Do anyone have the same experience? Susan.

    | promodirect
    0
  • AngelosS


    Hey there I have a website with pretty much 3-4 pages. All of them had a canonical pointing to one page and the same content ( which happened by mistake ) I removed the canonical URL and added one pointing to its page. Also, I added the original content that was supposed to be there to begin with. It's been weeks but those pages are not getting indexed on the SERPS while the one that they use to point with the canonical does.

    | AngelosS
    0
  • ThomasHarvey


    Annoyingly it's time to play with this beast again. I've been given the task of doing the following. Keeping the homepage live Redirecting categories to the specific categories on the new site Catch all redirects Now i've managed to setup the specific categories and the catch all redirects, however I am unsure how to keep the homepage live (which is like this:www.domain.com/ so I can't just exclude that?) Would appreciate any help.

    | ThomasHarvey
    0
  • GravitateOnline


    I can't seem to make any progress with my car dealership client in rankings or traffic. I feel like I've narrowed out most of the common problems, the only other thing I can see is that all their inventory is on a subdomain using a dedicated auto dealership software. Any suggestion of a better way to handle this situation? Am I missing something obvious? The url is rcautomotive.com Thanks for your help!

    | GravitateOnline
    0
  • Marketing_Today


    I'm working on a site that has 280 blog posts that have either been migrated from an old CMS site or created on the Dev version of the new WordPress site. We've written 280 unique meta descriptions so they don't truncate but it there a quick way I can export the current H1s and then import them into Yoast so they are set as the Page Titles? I've written unique Page Titles and meta descriptions for all the Service and Products page and just want a way to speed up the blog posts as their H1s are really good and what I would use as Page Titles anyway. Any help, greatly appreciated!

    | Marketing_Today
    0
  • LoganRay


    Hi Mozzers! I've got a client that is in the early stages of moving the development of their site to another company and therefore, a new server. The site is very large and the migration will take place over 18 months. In the beginning, smaller chunks of the site will be moved, and as that process gets dialed in, larger portions will migrate. It was brought to our attention today that they (on either side of development) have not yet worked out the logistics of keeping the domain and URL structure consistent throughout the migration. The initial proposal was that they publish newly migrated pages to a subdomain, which we obviously want to steer away from. I'm now on a mission to find a solution that will make everyone happy; client, old dev, new dev, and us (as the SEO partner). Does anyone have experience in managing SEO through a migration such as this?

    | LoganRay
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  • Shervin


    Hi, I have these two links: A1  &  A2   and the keywords for them are these: Pest control  for A1  Pest control service for A2 is google smart enough to differentiate these two & rank the exact page for them accordingly? or does google guess pest control keyword in A2 link as well? please help me with this issue. & the same with these : termite inspection & termite inspections Arizona!! many thanks Shervin

    | Shervin
    0
  • tidybooks


    Hi This is lots of questions and don't expect full answers but if anyone can help or put me in touch with some who can that would be great so here are 3 issues we have from some auditing our site Firstly on pages like https://www.tidy-books.co.uk/shop-with-us/sort-by/price/sort-direction/desc so any pages where there is a sortby the cananoical link doesn't seem to be working correctly. So for here it is https://www.tidy-books.co.uk/shop-with-us/sort-by/price/sort-direction/desc"/> but should be https://www.tidy-books.co.uk/shop-with-us"/> secondly with have a lot of duplicate title tags mainly caused from the blog and the above problem see-> http://prntscr.com/b2t9xe but regarding the blog we have an issue where 2 canonical appearing for example this page
    https://www.tidy-books.co.uk/blog/page/19/ there are 2 canonical links appearing https://www.tidy-books.co.uk/blog/page/19/"/> we want it to be this
    https://www.tidy-books.co.uk/blog/"/> Thirdly 
    Our mobile usability issues have gone up a lot see- > http://prntscr.com/b2tado
    I can see what the issue is that this folder https://www.tidy-books.co.uk/skin/frontend/tidybooks/default/images/ was being crawled by google and contains lots of 'index of' pages. I've disallowed directory in robots.txt as shown here -> http://prntscr.com/b2tbc5 is that correct? any help would be great Just to let you know we use magento v1.7 we use SEO suite ultimate extension and we use fishpigs wordpress extension thanks

    | tidybooks
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  • AinsleyAgency


    Hi Moz Community, I am looking for some advice and/or guidance on consolidating multiple sites into the brand website. At the moment, we have our brand website as well as keyword matching/topic matching websites for each service. (Note: We're a professional services firm). The service websites do rank well for their keywords, but it's my hope that the single brand website will create a more unified presence on search. We have just about completed our re-design (consolidating the service websites into the brand website), but before going live, I wanted to reach out to the Moz communtiy to seek advice on things like 301 redirects, submitting sitemaps, etc. This is the first time I am consolidating existing websites into an existing website, so it's a little daunting. Thanks Tim

    | AinsleyAgency
    0
  • Caro-O


    I am in the process of phasing out a website that has been acquired by another company. Its web pages are being 301 redirected to their counterparts on the website of the company that has acquired them. How long should I maintain the hosting of the phased out website? Technically, do 301s still work after the hosting has been discontinued? Thanks, Caro

    | Caro-O
    0
  • ThinkAOR


    I have a client with 2 sites - one for an external audience and one for their ~2,000-3,000 employees. The external site (call it acme.com), built on WP with a custom theme, is pretty small. The internal site (call it acmeinternal.com) has TONS of high quality content with incredible engagement metrics, but it's built on a separate CMS with an entirely different custom theme. The problem we're trying to solve now: Can we bring the internal site over to the external domain (acme.com and acme.com/internal, for example) so that client.com can benefit from the quantity and quality of content and behavioral metrics associated with the internal content? The external and internal audiences, and the corresponding content for each, are both entirely mutually exclusive. A potential client of theirs who would come to acme.com would have no reason to visit acme.com/internal (we'd actually prefer to not provide navigation to it for them), and the internal audience would treat acme.com/internal as their landing page, and all the posts would then live at acme.com/internal/news/post-name. I'm assuming there are reasons why we couldn't have half of the site on one template using one CMS, having certain SEO tags, certain HTML structure, etc where the other half of the site is using a completely different template with a different CMS with different SEO tags, different URL structure etc? To reap the reward of the great content, would we have to essentially recreate the internal site's content on the external site's cms and template? Is it even possible for the domain authority of acme.com to improve based on the engagement on acme.com/internal/_xxxx _if there's virtually zero linking back and forth between acme.com and /internal/? Any advice would be much appreciated!

    | ThinkAOR
    0
  • SkycraftNate


    Hey there all, We are having the toughest time trying to figure out why our domain authority went from 12 to 3 with a search visibility score of literally zero.  Back in Feb when the D.A.'s were all updated, we went down while all our competitors went up.  We've been stuck at 3 for a few months and we can't understand why and aren't sure if we are dealing with a penalty of sorts. www.skycraftstudios.com is our site. We have a total of 60 some odd links in Search Console (some are garbage that we have disavowed, others are quality) but none of them are getting picked up in the newer MoZ index. We have added a few quality links lately, and even sped up our site quite a bit in conjunction with standard best practice optimizations, and even added an SSL cert, yet we stuck at a terrible D.A. of 3 and aren't even able to get into the top 10 pages of our main targeted term which seems incredibly odd to us.  The site has been up for almost 2 years. Could this be simply a matter of not enough quality inbound links from the index?  Any insight here would be appreciated.

    | SkycraftNate
    1
  • Kirowski


    One of my clients is a leading bank in my country and want to switch to .bank TLD from the local one. Does anyone have experience of what are the benefits or drawbacks of the switch? Is it really a trusted domain with all the security benefits they promise or just another low level TLD with chances to get attaced even more often than before?

    | Kirowski
    0
  • musthavemarketing


    Hi I have been involved in the redesign/development of a website which has up until now had a lot of international traffic.  On day of migration I uploaded all the 301 redirects to the website (wordpress) using Simple 301 redirect plugin.  I tested a number of them and they appeared to be working. I also submitted the new sitemaps to Search Console. Since migration international traffic - particularly from countries such as india, Phillipines, Sri Lanka etc have significantly dropped off whereas the local traffic and some of the international traffic such as USA has remained fairly consistent.  Looking at Analytics and entrances recently it appears as though search results are/were showing a number of pages with 404's (one in particular which received significant traffic and for which I had created a 301 redirection) - I have checked this page using the old url and it re-directs correctly for me and today asked a colleague in India to also check - he is getting the redirection fine.  Does Google.in take a significantly longer time to pick these up in search results? Or am I missing something?

    | musthavemarketing
    0
  • AlexElks


    Good day! I have done a scan on my site with browseo.net ( and a few other similar scanners ) and got the mess seen in the screenshot. I've tried deleting all the files in the website folder, replace it with a single image file, but it still shows the same error. What could this mean and should i be worried? P.S Found my answer after contacting the helpful support of browseo.net : It took me some time to figure out what was going on, but it seems as if you are mixing content types. Browsers are quite smart when it comes to interpreting the contents, so they are much more forgiving than we are. Browseo crawls your website and detects that you are setting utf-8 as part of the meta information. By doing so, it converts the content in a different character encoding then what they are supposed to be. In a quick test, I tried to fetch the content type based on the response object, but without any success. So I am suspecting that in reality your content is not utf-8 encoded when you parse it into joomla. The wrong character type is then carried over for the body (which explains why we can still read the header information).  All of this explains the error. In order for it to work in browseo, you’d have to set the content type correctly, or convert your own content into utf-8 before parsing. It may be that you are either storing this incorrectly in the database (check your db settings for a different content type other than utf-8) or that other settings are a bit messed up. The good news is, that google is probably interpreting your websites correctly, so you won’t be punished for this, but perhaps something to look into… From  Paul Piper VKNNnAL.png?1

    | AlexElks
    0
  • A_Q


    Hi Mozzers, I'm in the process of migrating a whole site, which has excellent rankings built through ongoing SEO over the years, from http to https. What is the safest way of doing this, while maintaining rankings? I'm assuming 301 redirect of every page from http to https? Thanks!

    | A_Q
    1
  • Jane.com


    We have 250+ products dynamically inserted and sorted on our site daily (more specifically our homepage... yes, it's a long page). Our dev team would like to explore rendering the page server-side using ReactJS. We currently use a CDN to cache all the content, which of course we would like to continue using. SO... will Google be able to crawl that content? We've read some articles with different ideas (including prerendering): http://andrewhfarmer.com/react-seo/
    http://www.seoskeptic.com/json-ld-big-day-at-google/ If we were to only load the schema important to the page  (like product title, image, price, description, etc.) from the server and then let the client render the remaining content (comments, suggested products, etc.), would that go against best practices? It seems like that might be seen as showing the googlebot 1 version and showing the site visitor a different (more complete) version.

    | Jane.com
    0
  • A_Q


    Is it possible to force Google to use only the Meta description put in place for a page and not gather additional text from the page?

    | A_Q
    0
  • Critical_Mass


    I'm getting a warning about "Url blocked by robots.txt." on my video sitemap - but just for youtube videos? Has anyone else encountered this issue, and how did you fix it if so?! Thanks, J

    | Critical_Mass
    0
  • FeliciaCrawford


    When Laura Lippay came to me with the idea to write a series of posts on the Moz blog about SEO and accessibility, it really got my gears turning. As the blog manager, I realized I'd been thinking about all sorts of ways to make the blog the best it can be, but accessibility was one place I had yet to explore in-depth. While I have my own goals and projects around this topic churning along in the background, I'd love to hear what the community's done to be inclusive to all users of the Internet. What've you struggled with in terms of making sites you've worked on accessible -- both technically and as an initiative in general? What's often missing that you've become passionate about including? Do you have any big wins you're especially proud of and want to share? Looking forward to reading your thoughts and stories, folks! 🙂

    | FeliciaCrawford
    1
  • AngelosS


    Hey there Mozzers, So I have a website that uses URL Parameters for product variations. So for example when I am in the product "test" that product has 5 different variations. So the url is as followed /product/test /products/test?variant=10271886529 /products/test?variant=10271886530 etc. Does Google understand that this is the same page ? Does it automatically exclude the variable in the url?

    | AngelosS
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  • irrfans4


    Hi, We have recently, https on website, all set perfectly. We also moved to php7 from 6. These two changes shouldn't harm our ranking, for keyword Virginia Beach, we used to show at first 5 position in Google.com. But for past 2 months ranking is dancing. This is insane. we have seen us on position #5 several times over the past few weeks, then it just disappears. website vabeach.com Your help will be appreciated.

    | irrfans4
    0
  • EntertainmentIdeas


    Hi I am have moved my website from .aspx to business catalyst. I have found out (when the site already migrated!) that Business Catalyst does not support .aspx 301 redirects. On a previous post from 2012 (https://moz.rankious.com/_moz/community/q/aspx-files-will-simply-not-work-as-redirects) , someone has recommended a java script re direct. I have tried this but google search console is classing this as a 404 resulting in no link juice and my website dropping pages on google. I have tried to do 301 redirects at my server level but wont work. Anyone know a solution? Thanks in advance Keith

    | EntertainmentIdeas
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  • WWWSEO


    Week over week, I've noticed that organic traffic (and oftentimes revenue) for the homepage are down across most of our sites compared to last year. Brand search interest is down for a number of the brands, but in a lot of these cases, it's not down so much that it would make sense for how much the homepage is down (for example: brand search interest was down 4% last week compared to last year, but the homepage traffic was down 32% in visits). What I've done is generate entry page reports (this year vs. last year) and then bucket the pages by homepage, category pages, and product pages. In most cases, category pages are up year over year for traffic and revenue. I'm concerned that the homepage being down is more than a brand heat issue, but I haven't come across anything out of the ordinary in Google Search Console and keywords are pretty consistent in performance for the most part. Branded keywords continue to rank at #1, too. Any thoughts as to what else I can look into?

    | WWWSEO
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  • benj2034


    Hi Moz, I've had a complaint from a company who we use a feed from to populate a restaurants product list.They are upset that on our products pages we have canonical tags linking back to ourselves. These are in place as we have international versions of the site. They believe because they are the original source of content we need to canonical back to them. Can I please confirm that canonical tags are purely an internal duplicate content strategy. Canonical isn't telling google that from all the content on the web that this is the original source. It's just saying that from the content on our domains, this is the original one that should be ranked. Is that correct? Furthermore, if we implemented a canonical tag linking to Best Restaurants it would de-index all of our restaurants listings and pages and pass the authority of these pages to their site. Is this correct? Thanks!

    | benj2034
    1
  • nlogix


    Hi team, Can anybody please help me to find how my preproduction website and urls are  getting indexed in Google.

    | nlogix
    0
  • ViviCa1


    My company is planning to migrate an existing (ecommerce) micro site - which sits on its own domain - into their main ecommerce site. This means that the content will be moved from www.microdomain.co.uk to www.maindomain.com/category. Some products already exist on the main domain. The micro site is fairly small with just over 400 pages - I am planning to map each URL to the new URL (exact corresponding page) and create 301 redirects for each. Where any additional content does not exist yet on the existing main domain, we will create it and 301 redirect to it. The micro site currently ranks fairly well for some keywords - being such a specialised micro site, (some of) the keywords also form part of the domain name, however, they won't on the main page although they may form part of the URL (category). As an example (using a made up URL), our micro site www.bread-sticks.co.uk ranks on page 1 for the keyword bread sticks - we don't just sell bread sticks on www.bread-sticks.co.uk but also rolls and bread though, bread sticks is one category of very closely related categories. Say our main domain is www.supermarket.co.uk (selling a wide range of food / drink products. The micro site will be moving to www.supermarket.co.uk/baked-products/ - which is a category. Within that category, there are sub categories, i.e. bread sticks, rolls and bread which will sit under www.supermarket.co.uk/bread-sticks/ etc. What would be the best way for ensuring that our main domain would take over the rankings from our micro site, given that it will be sitting on our main domain as a category (one of many)? Can we expect www.supermarket.co.uk/baked-products/ or www.supermarket.co.uk/bread-sticks/ to replace www.bread-sticks.co.uk in the rankings simply by 301 redirecting? Thanks for your help!

    | ViviCa1
    0
  • VDigitalServices


    Hi everyone, Below is an example of some JSON product schema markup I'd like to integrate into my site. My question is, what do I need to do to incorporate the individual reviews on a product page as well? I've tried a few different things but I can't get it to validate.

    | VDigitalServices
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  • davedon


    Hi gang. Our site currently has a 302 redirect from the HTTP version of the homepage to the HTTPS version of the homepage. I understand this really should be changed to a 301 redirect but I'm having a little trouble figuring out exactly how this should be done. Some places on the internet are telling me I can edit our htaccess file to specify the type of redirect, however our htaccess file seems to be missing some of the information in theirs. Can anyone tell me what needs to be changed in the htaccess file - or if there's a simpler way to change the 302 to a 301? Many thanks 🙂 htaccess: BEGIN WordPress RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule . /index.php [L] END WordPress EXPIRES CACHING ExpiresActive On ExpiresByType image/jpg "access plus 6 months" ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 6 months" ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 6 months" ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 6 months" ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 10 days" ExpiresByType application/pdf "access plus 10 days" ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash "access plus 10 days" ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access plus 6 months" ExpiresDefault "access plus 2 days" EXPIRES CACHING

    | davedon
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  • solvid


    Noticed page indexation drop in Search Console for most of my sites. Guys from Search Engine Land seem to know about that: http://selnd.com/1YqiOoQ Did anyone else noticed something weird?

    | solvid
    1
  • usDragons


    My client had an old site hacked (let's call it "myolddomain.com") and the hackers created many links in other hacked sites with links such as http://myolddomain.com/styless.asp?jordan-12-taxi-kids-cheap-T8927.html The old myolddomain.com site was redirected to a different new site since then, but we still see over a thousand spam links showing up in the new site's Search Console 404 crawl errors report. Also, using the links: operator in google search, we see many results of spam links. Should we be worried about these bad links pointing to our old site and redirecting to 404s on the new site? What is the best recommendation to clean them up? Ignore? 410s? Other? I'm seeing conflicting advice out there. The old site is hosted by the client's previous web developer who doesn't want to clean anything up on their end without an ongoing hosting contract. So beyond turning redirects on or off, the client doesn't want to pay for any additional hosting. So we don't have much control over anything related to "myolddomain.com". 😞 Thanks in advance for any assistance!

    | usDragons
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  • leo92


    Hi all, One of our most important pages seems to be missing from the Google index. A number of our collections pages (e.g., http://perfectlinens.com/collections/size-king) are thin, so we've included a canonical reference in all of them to the main collection page (http://perfectlinens.com/collections/all). However, I don't see the main collection page in any Google search result. When I search using "info:http://perfectlinens.com/collections/all", the page displayed is our homepage. Why is this happening? The main collection page has a rel=canonical reference to itself (auto-generated by Shopify so I can't control that). Thanks! WUKeBVB

    | leo92
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  • APFM


    My company has several subdomains whose specific purpose is to act as a landing page/site for our paid search and/or email program. One of the things I've noticed on these subdomains is that they are not being excluded from the SEObots. Could the lack of proper SEO techniques on these subdomains impact our main www subdomain? What is the proper configuration we should use to make sure these sites are not considered for SEO?

    | APFM
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  • MickEdwards


    The site has 2 main categories for scooters.  One category is Type of Scooter menu item with nested types and the second category is Manufacturer menu item with nest makes.  So all the scooters can be found in either of these categories depending on how you search. The Manufacturer category is mainly thin content and set as noindex, as well as the nested makes categories. However when searching for products Google is invariably using the breadcrumb for the Manufacturer category rather than the Type of Scooter category, which is indexed. Should this be of concern Google using breadcrumbs of non indexed URLs, even if they are followed and therefore the site navigable?

    | MickEdwards
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  • ShockoeCommerce


    I run an ecom store that has about 800 live products. When everything got set up, no one set up the title tags correctly. So I am going through to update them in bulk. What I was going to do was to take the product name (which serves as the H1 tag), use that with a postfix | CompanyName. If length is an issue I trim it down. But the question is, will having essentially duplicate information in here be an issue? Also, when someone was setting up meta descriptions, they often used basically the product name or a half sentence. Would it be better to remove the descriptions and allow google to decide? I even had some that were literally just the brand name of the product, which I already removed.

    | ShockoeCommerce
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  • Swanny_s


    Hey guys, Hoping someone may have some advice on a wordpress site. Most of their URL's are duplicates due to a PortfolioID appearing in the URLs causing a duplicate title tags
    It's the same page but it's being flagged as duplicate. Would you remove the portfolioID url or 301 redirect? Many thanks
    Simon

    | Swanny_s
    0
  • johanisk


    I have a site that ranks differently for the same search term on mobile and desktop computer. I'm based in Glasgow, and the search term is (I've replaced the term with X's)  XXXXXX XXXXX Glasgow Searching from a location in Glasgow: Desktop:  Snackpack : 2, Organic : 6
    Mobile: Snackpack: 1, Organic : 10 I'm keen to improve on the Organic positions as this term is a lead generating one for me.  My site is mobile friendly and scores 69/100 on the speed test.  Do you think bumping the pagespeed well "into the green" would help improve it's position? Is there anything else I should look at?

    | johanisk
    0
  • TomVolpe


    Redirection Puzzle - it's got me puzzled anyhow! The finished website has just been converted from an old aspx affair to a wordpress site. Some directory structures have changed significantly; there appears to be a load of older medical articles that have not been added back in and it sounds unlikely that they will be. Therefore unmatched old news articles need to be pointed to the top news page to keep hold of any link value they may have accrued. The htaccess file starts with ithemes security's code, Followed by the main wordpress block and I have added the user redirects to the final section of the htaccess file . I have been through the redirects and rewrites line by line to verify them and the following sections are giving me problems. This is probably just my aging brain failing to grasp basic logic. If I can tap into anybody's wisdom for a bit of help I would appreciate it. My eyes and brain are gone to jelly. I have used htaccesscheck.com to check out the underlying syntax and ironed out the basic errors that I had previously missed. The bulk of the redirects are working correctly. #Here there are some very long media URLs which are absent on the new site and I am simply redirecting visiting spiders to the page that will hold media in future. Media items refuse to redirect
    Line 408 redirect 301 /Professionals/Biomedicalforum/Recordedfora/Rich%20Media%20http:/kplayer.kcl.ac.uk/ess/echo/presentation/15885525-ff02-4ab2-b0b9-9ba9d97ca266 http://www.SITENAME.ac.uk/biomedical-forum/recorded-fora/ Line 409 redirect 301 /Professionals/Biomedicalforum/Recordedfora/Quicktime%20http:/kplayer.kcl.ac.uk/ess/echo/presentation/15885525-ff02-4ab2-b0b9-9ba9d97ca266/media.m4v http://www.SITENAME.ac.uk/biomedical-forum/recorded-fora/ Line 410 redirect 301 /Professionals/Biomedicalforum/Recordedfora/Mp3%20http:/kplayer.kcl.ac.uk/ess/echo/presentation/15885525-ff02-4ab2-b0b9-9ba9d97ca266/media.mp3 http://www.SITENAME.ac.uk/biomedical-forum/recorded-fora/ #Old site pagination URLs redirected to new "news" top level page - Here I am simply pointing all the pagination URLs for the news section, that were indexed, to the main news page. These work but append the pagination code on to the new visible URL. Have I got the syntax correct in this version of the lines to suppress the appended garbage? RewriteRule ^/LatestNews.aspx(?:.*) http://www.SITENAME.ac.uk/news-events/latest-news/? [R=301,L] #On the old site many news directories (blog effectively) contained articles  that are unmatched on the new site, have been redirected to new top level news (blog) page: In this section I became confused about whether to use Redirect Match or RewriteRule to point the articles in each year directory back to the top level news page. When I have added a redirectmatch command - it has been disabling the whole site! Despite my syntax check telling me it is syntactically correct. Currently I'm getting a 404 for any of the old URLs in these year by year directories, instead of a successful redirect. I suspect Regex lingo is not clicking for me 😉 My logic here was rewrite any aspx file in the directory to the latest news page at the top. This is my latest attempt to rectify the fault. Am I nearer with my syntax or my logic? The actual URLs and paths have been substituted, but the structure is the same). So what I believe I have set up is: in an earlier section; News posts that have been recreated in the new site are redirected 1 - 1 and they are working successfully. If a matching URL is not found, when the parsing of the file reaches the line for the 1934 directory it should read any remaining .aspx URL request and rewrite it to the latest news page as a 301 and stop processing this block of commands. The subsequent commands in this block repeat the process for the other year groups of posts. Clearly I am failing to comprehend something and illumination would be gratefully received. RewriteRule ^/Blab/Blabbitall/1934/(.*).aspx http://www.SITENAME.ac.uk/news-events/latest-news/ [R=301,L] #------Old site 1933 unmatched articles redirected to new news top level page RewriteRule ^/Blab/Blabbitall/1933/(.*).aspx http://www.SITENAME.ac.uk/news-events/latest-news/ [R=301,L] #------Old site 1932 unmatched articles redirected to new news top level page RewriteRule ^/Blab/Blabbitall/1932/(.*)/.aspx http://www.SITENAME.ac.uk/news-events/latest-news/ [R=301,L] #------Old site 1931 unmatched articles redirected to new news top level page RewriteRule ^/Blab/Blabbitall/1931/(.*)/.aspx http://www.SITENAME.ac.uk/news-events/latest-news/ [R=301,L] #------Old site 1930 unmatched articles redirected to new news top level page RewriteRule ^/Blab/Blabbitall/1930/(.*)/.aspx http://www.SITENAME.ac.uk/news-events/latest-news/ [R=301,L] Many thanks if anyone can help me understand the logic at work here.

    | TomVolpe
    0
  • SoulSurfer8


    Keep getting WMT no return tag error. Also got an email today on this issue. Here are a couple pages showing up in the error report: Originating URL: /hawaii/kauai-real-estate/ Alternate URL: /jp/hawaii/kauai-real-estate/ Here are the hreflang tags for each page: /hawaii/kauai-real-estate/ /jp/hawaii/kauai-real-estate/ The only thing I can see is the hreflang= is at the end of the snippet but doesn't seem like that would matter. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

    | SoulSurfer8
    0
  • Bill_King


    Hey folks! I have a ton of old conversion pages from past trade shows, old webinars, etc that are either getting no traffic or very little. Wondering if I should just 404 them out? Here's an example: http://marketing.avidxchange.com/rent-manager-user-conference-demo-request-2015 For the pages getting traffic (from PPC, referral links, organic) my presumption is to keep those. The only problem is we have multiple instances of the same asset (prior marketers would just clone them for different campaigns), so in those cases should I 301 them to one version? Looking for advice on best practices here for future instances. Such as future trade shows, after we use the conversion pages at an event, should I just delete/404 them? Cleaning up old pages should I just delete/404? They don't have any value really and they're annoying to have hanging around. Thanks!

    | Bill_King
    0
  • kirupa


    Hello, I would appreciate it very much if you share with me your thoughts on  what domain name I'd better pick out in terms of productive SEO: sirocco-webdesign.com or sirocco-web-design.com? I know hyphens are not good, but second domain looks better, I think.

    | kirupa
    0
  • Kilgray


    Hi, We have carried out changes in our website title tags. However, when I search for these pages on Google, I still see the old title tags in the search results. Is there any way to speed this process up? Thanks

    | Kilgray
    0
  • kfallconnect


    Hi, I recently noticed an increase in duplicate content, but all of the pages are 404 error pages. For instance, Moz site crawl says this page: https://www.allconnect.com/sc-internet/internet.html has 43 duplicates and all the duplicates are also 404 pages (https://www.allconnect.com/Coxstatic.html for instance is a duplicate of this page). Looking for insight on how to fix this issue, do I add an rel=canonical tag to these 60 error pages that points to the original error page? Thanks!

    | kfallconnect
    0
  • MH-UK


    Hey Moz, It's actually my first post - although I look at the Q&As on a daily basis! I was hoping to get your opinions on how to handle dynamic product url that can change regularly. Before we start, our product page urls get populated by the product titles. So the situation is this. Let’s say we have a product url: /product/12345-abcde-fghj/ Then the client decides to change the title a week later, so the url changes with it to): /listing/12345-klm-qjk Another week later, the agent changes to: /listing/12345-jkhfk-jhf-kjdhfkjdhf So to note, the product ID will always remain the same. Naturally, 301 redirecting every time would cause a bit of page authority to be lost every time 301ed. Also potentially creating new a few hundreds of 301 redirect daily sounds totally mental. (I have been informed by the dev we expect a few hundreds to change url daily) Although I understand there’s no limit on how many 301s you can have on a single domain, this would look completely unnatural - really not ideal. So the potential solution we thought was: we’ll keep the original url, and make sure that is the only url that will get indexed**/product/12345-abcde-fghj/**and put canonical tag on any of the new urls, directing to the original url. The problem we will have then is that the most current url may not exactly match the description of the product -wouldn’t be ideal for ux. Has anyone had dealing with issues like this in the past? Would love to get your input! Many Thanks

    | MH-UK
    0
  • jayoliverwright


    Excluding Screaming Frog, what other tools/software to use in order to crawl all image URLs in a site? Because in Screaming Frog, they don't crawl image URLs which are not under the site domain. Example of an image URL outside the client site: http://cdn.shopify.com/images/this-is-just-a-sample.png If the client is: http://www.example.com, Screaming Frog only crawls images under it like, http://www.example.com/images/this-is-just-a-sample.png

    | jayoliverwright
    0
  • davidwaring


    I've been seeing some search results for my site that look like the first result here, where the URL slug is used as SERP title: https://drive.google.com/a/fitsmallbusiness.com/file/d/0B37y4RslpuY-a0hQYjlJQ0NxeFJicDF6RVlURFVSNFN0aGhB/view?usp=sharing The article title (and Yoast snippet title) are both "28 Press Release Examples From The Pros", but for some reason I'm seeing "press-release-examples" in the search results. I've seen this for multiple articles, and I see it now and then with different articles. I'm aware that Google often changes the titles in search results, but it seems very weird to me that they would opt for just the URL slug here. Thoughts? Has anyone else seen this issue? Any idea what might be causing this? All help much appreciated.

    | davidwaring
    0

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