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Category: Technical SEO

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

  • Deacyde


    Greetings, hope you're doing awesome today! I have a current client in an industry niche, I got them to do a site redesign, based on the many factors needing correction on the current site. I have a good 40 some items still to address, from my frequent manual site audit / proofreading. Reason I am here, is that I'm seeking fresh eyes to address anything I may have missed, of course at a glance, I don't expect a site audit, but do have some concerns about url structure and page titles as you move from category to category. It's a bigcommerce site, so some things that are normal SEO actions aren't as simply implemented. Also, since this is a client, and I'm sure they have competitors using sites like this, I need to keep the url private as well as any specifics, of course for readers in the future, I can or you can mention general issues and solutions. Thank you and please, if interested, will send url at request, can send both the live and dev urls.

    | Deacyde
    0
  • TrulyTravel


    HiI found few errors in Google webmaster tools under structure data. The error shows "Missing: name' but when I click 'Test Live Data' it shows 'All good'. Currently we are using Drupal CMS and please find attached error screenshot.Please advice on this issue.Thanks,SatlaqlGEyp7

    | TrulyTravel
    0
  • mhenze


    Hello Moz Community, I am wondering if these magento settings are correct for seo. www.domain.com 301 > www.domain.com/main-language www.domain.com/main-language/main-keyword (index & follow) www.domain.com/main-language/main-keyword/shopby/size-m (index & follow & canonicalized to www.domain.com/main-language/main-keyword) All layered navigation links are no-follow

    | mhenze
    0
  • mhenze


    Hello MOZ Community, I have some questions where the following is still working for seo in 2016: Is an exact keyword in the domain still a good start? If a domain contains the most important keyword does one still need subfolders with that keyword in the url? Do you need multiple subpages so the main url becomes stronger? Is linkbuilding still the number one factor? Thank you for your thoughts!

    | mhenze
    0
  • JohnPalmer


    Hi all, We are working on a new website and we want to know the best practices for lazy loading of google for content.
    My best sample is: bloomberg.com , look at their homepage. Thank y'all!

    | JohnPalmer
    0
  • knubbz


    Our site has their prices hidden for non logged in users. Its a woocommerce built site and the rich snippet markups are added by woocommerce. I would like to remove the markup for the price becouse : 1, we would like our customers to register for prices. 2 i dont want to get penalties for not showing the same thing to visitors as to "google" .. Any help or thoughts on this one? Thanks / Jonas

    | knubbz
    0
  • dentaldesign


    I've had a message in webmaster tools: Increase in “404” pages on http://www.ethicaredental.co.uk/There are 1000 pages in the crawl error list. But all of them direct to t a 404 page, i.e  http://www.ethicaredental.co.uk/search?searchword=toothwhich, which as far as I can tell has all the necessary features of a good 404 page (clear message saying the page doesnt exist anymore, navigation, and business details.The webiste was built in Joomla previous to a re-design in Wordpress. Is this a Joomla issue?  How can I satisfy webmaster and Googles crawl to understand these are decent 404 pages? Or dop all 1000 pages need to be 301 redirected.??Any thoughts appreciated

    | dentaldesign
    1
  • knubbz


    Hi, Just want to ask you guys if i have missed something in my planning. We have done a migration from Ithemes Exchange to woocommerce. The complete migration are done on our dev server. It has an exakt setup as our live one. My plan is to change our live version with a backup from our migrated and finished site from our dev site. All of our product links will be intact with accept from some that we have combined in to new ones, the ones that are changed has been redirected with a 301. Will this way of launching our site effect our ranking/seo in some way? Thankful for any thoughts about this one! // Jonas

    | knubbz
    0
  • the-gate-films


    I have implemented hreflang on site, seen here http://www.cobaltrecruitment.com/ but Webmaster Tools is returning loads of errors in the international targeting area..... "'“en-sg"' - unknown language code" and "'“en-ar"' - unknown language code" Can anyone suggest what I need to tell my developers to do? Thanks for your help!

    | the-gate-films
    0
  • wolfeyes


    Hello Everyone, I need advice with blog post in wordpress. I have one blog which i wish to assign to 2 different categories as the blog is related to both of the categories, for eg infographics & How to. I have noticed that if i have one post related 2 categories it flags as Duplicate content how to over come this issue. Your advice is highly appreciated. Warmest

    | wolfeyes
    0
  • thewebguy3


    Hello, I just had a problem my site started showing up 404 issues for all my wordpress pages and post but visually the page was loading with content but yet all pages and software including google WMT was showing the 404 issue. I never found the issue but was able to move the site into a new hosting and restore from a backup and it work. Google found the issue on Jan 27th and they remove all the pages with 404 from the index and I lost most of my top ranking I have since fix the issue and was wondering if google would restore my ranking in such a case? Regards, M

    | thewebguy3
    0
  • rootwaysinc


    Before few weeks i got Rich snippet for my Android App in Google App Search; but today i see that all my rich snippet data is gone, and all my competitor still get their rich snippet data, we have not updated anything. what is the problem? can anybody tell?

    | rootwaysinc
    0
  • Kilgray


    Hi everyone, We would like to ask suggestions on how to improve our SEO for our static content help website. With the release of each new version, our company releases a new "help" page, which is created by an authoring system. This is the latest page: http://kilgray.com/memoq/2015/help-en/ I have a couple of questions: 1- The page has an index with many links that open up new subpages with content for users. It is impossible to add title tags to this subpages, as everything is held together by the mother page. So it is really hard to for users to find these subpage information when they are doing a google search. 2- We have previous "help" pages which usually rank better in google search. They also have the same structure (1 page with big index and many subpages) and no metadata. We obviously want the last version to rank better, however, we are afraid exclude them from bots search because the new version is not easy to find. These are some of the previous pages: http://kilgray.com/memoq/2014R2/help-en/ http://kilgray.com/memoq/62/help-en/ I would really appreciate suggestions! Thanks

    | Kilgray
    0
  • the-gate-films


    I have a eCommerce site and the site structure is domain/product-name rather than domain/product-category/product-name Do you think this will have a negative impact SEO Wise? I have seen that some of my individual product pages do get better rankings than my categories.

    | the-gate-films
    0
  • MichaelWhyley


    We have an established site www.getinspired365.com that previously wasn't SEO optimised. We are currently in the process of testing out some new pages to see if we can get them to rank in Google, however we are seeing huge fluctuations in where they rank. Within the first few days we saw our page rank on the first or second page, however it has now dropped out of the top 250 search results. We are wondering if we have made any mistakes with our optimisation ? Example Page : Keyword to target - "If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that's a full day. That's a heck of a day. You do that seven days a week, you're going to have something special." URL : http://www.getinspired365.com/if-you-laugh-you-think-and-you-cry-thats-a-full-day-thats-a-heck-of-a-day-you-do-that-seven-days-a-week-youre-going-to-have-something-special We can see it has been indexed by Google but is now not ranking in the top 250 search engine results. We have run the On Page Grader from SEOMoz and it ranks the page as an "A" so we suspect that we are doing the SEO ok on the page, but can't work out why it isn't ranking, despite ranking on the first or second page after a few days ? We have other pages that aren't SEO optimised that rank better than our newly SEO optimised pages e.g. Keyword - "THE BEST LOVE IS THE KIND THAT AWAKENS THE SOUL AND MAKES US REACH FOR MORE, THAT PLANTS A FIRE IN OUR HEARTS AND BRINGS PEACE TO OUR MINDS. AND THAT'S WHAT YOU'VE GIVEN ME. THAT'S WHAT I'D HOPED TO GIVE YOU FOREVER" URL: http://www.getinspired365.com/20130528 Any advice you could offer would be great. Thanks ! Mike

    | MichaelWhyley
    0
  • SBRMarketing


    We're mapping out some URL structures and trying to figure out what would be best for separating folders for articles and videos regarding wording in the folder say: www.site.com/category/article/name-of-article/id#/    ----      www.site.com/category/video/name-of-video/id#/ vs. www.site.com/category/a/name-of-article/id#/    ----      www.site.com/category/v/name-of-video/id#/ Second option came about the ''shorter is better' way of thinking. Downside I see to it is if the link would be copied and pasted somewhere probably would be best for a user to make it clear they are clicking into an article or a video, don't think just an 'a' or a 'v' would be very telling in that scenario. Would it be better for search engines to make it clearer with the whole word in there?  Any other pros and cons to each? Not sure what's the best route here.

    | SBRMarketing
    0
  • bjalc2011


    From PR activity we've found that lots of newspaper sites will include reference to a domain name in an article but not actually make this a link through to the domain. For example we will see text like: For further information read the full report at www.bluewidget.com Of course we make attempts to contact the newspaper to request they make it a link but this doesn't always achieve a result. So the question is, does Google place any value for the identified domain in a case like this?

    | bjalc2011
    0
  • eBoost-Consulting


    tl;dr... Removing old blog posts that may be affected by Panda, should we let them 404 or 301 to the Blog? We have been managing a corporate blog since 2011. The content is OK but we've recently hired a new blogger who is doing an outstanding job, creating content that is very useful to site visitors and is just on a higher level than what we've had previously. The old posts mostly have no comments and don't get much user engagement. I know Google recommends creating great new content rather than removing old content due to Panda concerns but I'm confident we're doing the former and I still want to purge the old stuff that's not doing anyone any good. So let's just pretend we're being dinged by Panda for having a large amount of content that doesn't get much user engagement (not sure if that's actually the case, rankings remain good though we have been passed on a couple key rankings recently). I've gone through Analytics and noted any blog posts that have generated at least 1 lead or had at least 20 unique visits all time. I think that's a pretty low barrier and everything else really can be  safely removed. So for the remaining posts (I'm guessing there are hundreds of them but haven't compiled the specific list yet), should we just let them 404 or do we 301 redirect them to the main blog page? The underlying question is, if our primary purpose is cleaning things up for Panda specifically, does placing a 301 make sense or would Google see those "low quality" pages being redirected to a new place and pass on some of that "low quality" signal to the new page? Is it better for that content just to go away completely (404)?

    | eBoost-Consulting
    0
  • Netsociety


    I'm researching Schema opportunities for a bank, but besides the shema markup available today (like bankorcreditunion) and developments with FIBO, I can find no answer as to the effect of tagging interest rates and such in terms of SERP/CTR performance or visibility. Does anyone have a case study to share or some insight on the matter?

    | Netsociety
    0
  • captainjoe


    Hi, I've added the wordpress Wp Customer Reviews plugin to a my client's website and we brought some past clients to put on reviews in order to empower the hReview factor. Google as scraped the website several times since but we don't see any change in the organic serp. Can you please tell me if I've done something wrong or I forgot something? That's the website - Capital Garage Door Thanks!

    | captainjoe
    0
  • cheaptubes


    I launched a new wordpress site at www.cheaptubes.com in Sept. I haven't taken the old one down yet, it is still at http://65.61.43.25/  The reason I left it up is I wanted to make sure everything was properly redirected 1st.  Some pages and images are still ranking but most point to the new site. When I search for carbon nanotubes pricelist and look in images I see some of our images on the old site are still ranking there https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://65.61.43.25/images/single-walled-nanotubes.1.gif&imgrefurl=http://65.61.43.25/ohfunctionalizedcnts.htm&h=359&w=451&tbnid=HKlL84A_9X0jGM:&docid=N2wdCg7rSQBsjM&ei=-A2qVqThL4WxeKCyjdAM&tbm=isch&ved=0ahUKEwikvcWdxczKAhWFGB4KHSBZA8oQMwhJKCIwIg I guess I can put WP on the old server and do some 301s from there but I'm not sure if that is best or if I should just kill it off entirely? My rankings took a hit on Nov 15th and business has been bad ever since so I'm trying to figure this out quickly. Moz.com and onpage.org both say my site has duplicate content on several pages. I've looked at the content and it isn't duplicate. How can I figure this out? Google likely see's it the same way. These aren't duplicate pages, they are different products. I even searched my product pages to make sure I didn't have 2 of each in there and I don't.  With Moz its mostly product tags it sees as duplicate but the products are completely different

    | cheaptubes
    0
  • MarcelMoz


    Hi there, We are about to take over a player in the market with some good DA en PA's. We choose to redirect all the pages from the domain we take over to our main domain for now, later we want to redirect all categories to relevant and similar categories on our own domain. The company we take over is using a server which will be cancelled in a while. For now we set up the 301 redirect(s) on their server we take over. Because of the extra costs we will cancel the server in a few weeks/months. What is a common way to keep 301 redirects alive after cancelling the server of company we take over? I hope someone can give me the help I need in this one. Thanks in advance! Cheers,
    Marcel

    | MarcelMoz
    0
  • KempRugeLawGroup


    When we ask google to Fetch a page, I usually just do the desktop one. However, should I be using the other 3 options as well? Mobile Smartphone, Mobile xHTML, and Mobile cHTML? I guess since they give you the options, just doing desktop means that it won't go to mobile until a regular crawl, but I just want to make sure that is the case. Thanks, Ruben

    | KempRugeLawGroup
    0
  • the-gate-films


    Does anyone know if specifying the organization's logo schema is required if corporate contacts schema is in place? I have the corporate contact schema in place  on my site but not the second one. The site is http://www.cobaltrecruitment.com/ Thanks,

    | the-gate-films
    0
  • onurkiyak


    Quick question to all you folks: does including the date in a blog article's permalink affect rankings? For example, here's an article with the month and year, as well as the blog title: http://www.ayzanyc.com/blog/2012/12/difference-between-hot-chocolate-hot-cocoa/ Is it better to omit the date and just put the blog title? Also, if is better to avoid using the date, is it worth it to change the link structure of our previous articles (given that the URL will now be different), or should we just focus on future articles? Thanks ahead of time for your advice.

    | onurkiyak
    0
  • ClaudioHeilborn


    Hi MOZ users and friends. I have a website that have a php template developed by ourselves, and a wordpress blog in /blog/ subdirectory. Actually we have a sitemap.xml file in the root domain where are all the subsections and blog's posts. We upgrade manually the sitemap, once a month, adding the new posts created in the blog. I want to automate this process , so i created a sitemap index with two sitemaps inside it. One is the old sitemap without the blog's posts and a new one created with "Google XML Sitemap" wordpress plugin, inside the /blog/ subdirectory. That is, in the sitemap_index.xml file i have: Domain.com/sitemap.xml (old sitemap after remove blog posts urls) Domain.com/blog/sitemap.xml (auto-updatable sitemap create with Google XML plugin) Now i have to submit this sitemap index to Google Search Console, but i want to be completely sure about how to do this. I think that the only that i have to do is delete the old sitemap on Search Console and upload the new sitemap index, is it ok ?

    | ClaudioHeilborn
    0
  • JFA


    Hi All, My client grabbed a Matterport camera and I'm trying to get the most out of the embedded models from an SEO standpoint. Other than slapping alt text on iframes, the only thing I turned up was a wordpress plugin that appears to point links you share of the embed (not just the page it is on) back to your own website instead of matterport's. Any thoughts appreciated.

    | JFA
    0
  • MNKid15


    We are a US based company that ships only to US and Canada. We've had two issues arise recently from foreign countries (Russia namely) that caused us to block access to our site from anyone attempting to interact with our store from outside of the US and Canada. 1. The first issue we encountered were fraudulent orders originating from Russia (using stolen card data) and then shipping to a US based International shipping aggregator. 2. The second issue was a consistent flow of Russian based "new customer" entries. My question to the MOZ community is this: are their any unintended consequences, from an SEO perspective, to blocking the viewing of our store from certain countries.

    | MNKid15
    0
  • htmanage


    I have run my seomoz campaign through my wordpress site and found duplicate content. However, all of this duplicate content was either my logo or images and no content with addresses like /?attachement_id=4 for example . How should I resolve this? thank you.

    | htmanage
    0
  • Deacyde


    I'm writing meta descriptions for this site, trying to keep them different, however, for two product types, I want to add the same info I added in the other likeminded product's meta descriptions. Is this ok as long as it's not the whole sentence or am I really to rewrite the same info another way, which is hard for " quick shipping available for x amount of colors ". Any Advice?

    | Deacyde
    0
  • the-gate-films


    I've implemented breadcrumb trail markup on my site and I wanted to check that it's implemented correctly. Is it true that the breadcrumb does not link to the current page as this would be redundant, so it only links to 'ancestor' pages? (You can see for example on this page that the breadcrumb links to two levels below the home page): http://www.cobaltrecruitment.com/sectors/construction-property-engineering/real-estate-general-practice So basically breadcrumb trail should have a simple link for each level (except for the current page). Thanks,

    | the-gate-films
    0
  • agencepicnic


    Hi everyone, as a way to find new business leads I thought about targeting websites that have poor meta descriptions or where they are simply missing. A quick look at SERPs shows this is still a major issue for many businesses. Is there any way I can quickly find pages for which meta description is lacking? Thank you! Best regards, Florian

    | agencepicnic
    0
  • karl62


    Hi, I am currently working on a large car dealership website. I have just had a Moz crawl through and its flagging a lot of duplicate page content issues, these are mostly for used car pages. How can I get round this as the site stocks many of the same car, model, colour, age, millage etc. Only unique thing about them is the reg plate. How do I get past this duplicate issue if all the info is relatively the same? Anyone experienced this issue when working on a car dealership website? Thank you.

    | karl62
    1
  • rootwaysinc


    We have a site for Property management software, we have done everything like set proper Title and descriptions, heading tags, robots tag is also ok, set schema and its ok with Google webmaster too also we are doing Social media promotion. can you please check our website and tell me what is the problem??

    | rootwaysinc
    0
  • CamperConnect14


    Hi I thought that if I wanted to rank a local site for the core Keyword, 'Landscaping Location' that variations of this keyword should be used on the same page. But I recently read that if I wanted to rank for: Landscaping Location
    Landscaping in Location
    Landscaping Services in Location that I should use separate page for each term. Is this correct? A small local website will probably only have a few pages and so making up pages solely to go after Keywords can't be right. But then would opportunities be missed? Thanks for your help with this!!

    | CamperConnect14
    0
  • wearehappymedia


    Hello I'm just wondering how much of a difference it makes having links to a site from 2 separate domains that are on the same IP, compared to if the domains were on separate IPs? Thank you! Sam

    | wearehappymedia
    0
  • Deacyde


    Sorry for the title of this, but didn't know the best way to put it. I have a question with category naming for products, To keep things simple, I'll use shoes for this example. Say I have a category, running-shoes, so the url would be, site.com/running-shoes/ and inside this category I have purple-pumas so the url is site.com/running-shoes/purple-pumas/ And I have the title Purple Puma Running Shoes Is that ok, or should I just use the title Purple Pumas ? The breadcrumbs shows Home > Running Shoes > Purple Puma Running Shoes  then and I wasn't sure if that would be too much? Or how about using another version of the keyword for the title, like Purple Puma Jogging sneakers? Any ideas? Thank you!

    | Deacyde
    0
  • CamperConnect14


    Hi, We have redirected a small WP website to a new site and domain and it has lost all DA and PA. Does anyone know if there's a fix for this? Would reverting back to the old domain help? We redirect www.northcornwallgardens.co.uk to cornishlawns.co.uk Thank you James

    | CamperConnect14
    0
  • the-gate-films


    Do 404 errors on a large scale really matter? I'm just aware that I now have over 60,000 and was wondering if the community think that I should address them by putting 301 redirects in place. Thanks

    | the-gate-films
    0
  • zoe.wilson17


    How I can create robots.txt file for my website guitarcontrol.com  ? It is having login and Guitar lessons.

    | zoe.wilson17
    0
  • Blenny


    My company acquired another domain/website several year's ago. We want to see - for accounting purposes, how much traffic/revenue that site's REDIRECTS are driving to our website now. Is there any way to pull this information? I thought of comparing when the site was originally redirected to our traffic/revenue changes - but so much has changed from the acquisition that I wouldn't have faith in this value. Thanks for any assistance you can provide.

    | Blenny
    1
  • EveryActionHQ


    Hello, Moz Community! We're working on creating an affiliate badge for events that make our best-of list and we're wondering: if every event website embedded the badge (could be as many as 70), would having the same image hosting URL for each one raise concerns with Google? Thanks!

    | EveryActionHQ
    0
  • CuriosityMedia


    We want to use the hreflang tag on our site (direct users searching for the Spanish version of spanishdict.com to spanishdict.com/traductor). Before doing so, we were wondering how link juice flows through hreflang? Any insight or resources on this would be very helpful. Thanks!

    | CuriosityMedia
    0
  • f_ryf


    hello Currently I'm working with a retail customer to optimize his search experience. There's some odd behaviour about aggregate ratings for products. Products without a price (price based on daily demand) are shown with proper delivering the 'rich snippet' search result. On the other hand, products with a price are shown normally without any mark up. Here's what I did for now checked mark ups code wise (used the markup validator) re-submitted xml sitemaps search query is (for test purposes): [product name] + [retailer brand name] the question is: why aren't just these specific aggregated ratings (with a price) shown and the other ones are shown properly? Furthermore, is it a question of relevancy (can't imagine that cause the search query is really specific to the needed result)? thank you!

    | f_ryf
    0
  • AdamBohr


    Hello all, I'm working on a large site that is being prepared for a migration. After scraping on screaming frog, WMT, and deepcrawl, and deduping I have a list of 404 pages that need redirected. Many of these URLs are just incomplete URLs. For example the incomplete URL would be: "https://moz.rankious.com/_moz/beginners-guide-to" when it should be "https://moz.rankious.com/_moz/beginners-guide-to-seo" I have been finding the correct page manually searching google. With hundreds more to go, I am looking for a way the would be a little less laborious. Thanks! https://moz.rankious.com/_moz/beginners-guide-to-seo

    | AdamBohr
    0
  • 1akal


    I have website http://www.vipcollisionlv.com/ and when i check the cache status with tags **site:http:vipcollisionlv.com, **some page has no cache status.. you can see this in image. How to resolve this issue. please help me.

    | 1akal
    0
  • smokstore


    hi,guys,john here, i just began use the MOZ service several days ago, recently i noticed one thing that one keyword on the first google search result page, but when i done some external links,the rank down from 1 to 8, i think may be the bad quality external links caused the rank down. so my question,should i delete the bad quality links or build more better quality links? which is better for me. easy to delete the bad links and hard to build high quality links. so what's your better opinion,guys? thanks John

    | smokstore
    0
  • PMPLawMarketing


    We noticed that Moz does not use a robots "index" or "follow" tags on the entire site, is this best practice? Also, for pagination we noticed that the rel = next/prev is not on the actual "button" rather in the header Is this best practice? Does it make a difference if it's added to the header rather than the actual next/previous buttons within the body?

    | PMPLawMarketing
    0
  • tdawson09


    Is it still a good practice to use "div's" to place content at the top of the HTML code, if your content is at the bottom of the web page?

    | tdawson09
    0
  • Netsociety


    Hello everybody, I am currently investigating a website which is rendered by an AJAX Framework (Angularjs) using the HTML5 +API history - Pushstate methods.
    Recently Google announced that they are able to execute Javascript and can therefore see the content and links to discover all pages in the structure. However it seems that it doesn't run the Javascript at ALL times. (after some internal testing) So technically it is possible it arrives on a page  without seeing any content and links, while another time he can arrive, run Javascript and read/discover the content and links generated by AJAX.
    The fact that Google can't always interpret or read the website correctly can therefore have negative SEO impact? (not the indexation process but ranking) We are aware that is better to create a snapshot of the page but in the announcement of Google they state that the method that is currently used, should be sufficient. Does anybody have any experience with this AND what is the impact on the ranking process? Thanks!

    | Netsociety
    0

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