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Category: Technical SEO

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


  • In looking at the inbound links to a client’s Home page, I see that the link from each page of the website back to the Home page is an image, and the ALT text is “Home.” I have a few questions about this, and would appreciate help understanding best practices: --Does it matter that the link back to the Home page is an image (presumably the client’s logo)? -- If we keep the image link, wouldn’t it be better to use “client’s company name” as ALT text rather than “Home”? --Should I recommend using an HTML link back to the Home page, and using the company name as anchor text? (I don't think it's relevant, but the site is built in Drupal.) Thanks!

    | jrae
    0

  • I have used the Crawl Diagnostic reports to greatly reduce the number of 404 errors but there is a bunch of 16 urls that were all published on the same date and have the same referrer url but  I cannot see the woood for trees as to what is causing the error. **The 404 error links have the structure:**http://www.domainname.com/category/thiscategory/page/thiscategory/this-is-a-post The referrer structure is: http://www.domainname.com/category/thiscategory/page/2/ Any suggestions as to how to unravel this would be appreciated.

    | Niamh2
    0

  • Hi guys, so we are on feefo and noticed links coming in per review for different anchor text, this will be done on mass due to the amount of reviews we will get - this is all natural but in SEO site-wide links are typically not. How if at all do you think Google will react to this?

    | pauledwards
    0

  • An ecommerce site I work on has around 16,000 URLs that are 404s in Webmaster Tools. The vast majority are for products that are no longer stocked by the site, which is a natural occurrence in ecommerce. But my question is, could these possibly be harming rankings?

    | creativemay
    1

  • I have three pages of my website ranking for a keyword: landing page and two blogposts. They all rank on top of page 2 (positions 11-13).If I redirect these articles to the landing page, will it help to bring it up in rankings?

    | imoney
    0

  • After watching Rand's video I am trying to think of the best way to make my large site more crawl friendly. Background I have a large site with over 100k product skus and so when you get to a particular page of products there are tons of different refinements and options that help you sort the products. Most of these are noindex followed, but I was wondering if I should be nofollowing the internal links as well in order to keep bots out of those pages and going to the pages that I want them to go too. Is this a good way to handle it? Also, does anyone have good recommendations of links to posts that deal with helping the crawl friendliness of a large site? Thanks!

    | Gordian
    0

  • Hi All, The is the first actual SEO campaign i've worked on and I had a few question about where the site should live on the server and url structure. The site is in WP and we're using Yoast SEO. Anyway the site lives in a a folder called Coastal, which is a child of the WWW folder. So the permalink of the homepage is mcoastalwindows.com/coastal/. The URL is mycoastalwindows.com. The thing is I can still get to the homepage or any of the pages on the site by typing in the /coastal/. Another example is permalink mycoastalwndows.com/coastal/siding/ and url mycoastalwindows.com/siding/. The urls always display without the /coastal/, so I'm not too worried about people linking to them, but Yoast puts a canonical element to the permalink and always includes the /coastal/. Also I'm seeing that Google displays a lot of the urls with the /coastal/, which is an issue seeing as we don't link to the pages that way. My original thought was to solve this at the source and just move everything out of the coastal directory, but the developer swears that it's more secure being in another folder especially with WP. What would you all do and what is best practice? Would you move everything out of the coastal folder, 301 re-direct, do something with. htaccess, or another solution? Appreciate the input thanks!

    | Mario.Souza
    0

  • One of my pages is a help and questions page about completing a conversions and the other is the actual campaign landing page. They are both ranking for the same term. While the subject of both pages is similar the content is not. Is the rel canonical tag appropriate here?

    | cbarron
    0

  • I've got an interesting issue relating to geo-location and I'm not sure how to go about solving it. The site: http://www.onlinecoal.co.uk according to the Moz rank tracker is currently ranking 12th for the term "coal merchants" but has been as high as 5th in recent weeks. However, I've tried the search out in a number of locations (cleared caches, not logged in, different devices etc) and it always seems to returns results with a bias towards local business. The only way I see the results that Moz reports is by using this string: https://www.google.com/?q=coal&pws=0#pws=0&q=coal+merchants&safe=off&start=10 I know from the visits report by analytics that my experience is typical of that potential visitors are finding, Google always returns localised results for the term "coal merchants" My question is two pronged: 1. What causes google to decide that a general search term is best served with localised results? 2. What is my best strategy to deal with this?

    | RodneyRiley
    0

  • Hello Moz community. I'm looking here for some input from the experts on what could be wrong with a site I'm working on. The site is in Spanish, but I'm sure you'll get the idea. We want to rank the site first page on Google Mexico (www.google.com.mx) for the keyword "refacciones Audi" and some other brands (refacciones = replacement parts would probably be a good translation, just FYI). Now, our page hasn't been completely optimized, so in my mind it's OK not to be on first page yet. However, our main competitor is ranking first page for all the keywords we want to rank for, but when you check their site, you'll find there is hardly any content, no keywords are being used in their content, all pages have the exact same title and meta description, their catalog is in a completely different domain. In short, no SEO whatsoever. Looking at Moz data, our site has a DA of 26, while our competitor's has a 10. They have no external backlinks at all, while we have a few hundred. This leaves me scratching my head: how can a completely non-optimized site outrank us? I decided to check our backlink profile, and a previous SEO agency seems to have built MANY fake blogs with lots of backlinks with rich anchor text. Quite a big percentage of our backlinks are of this kind, so this is the only thing I can think can be affecting our ranking. Will disavowing be our solution? If you'd like to check, our site is: www.refaccionariaalemana.com.mx Our competitors' is: www.saferefacciones.com ANY help will be extremely appreciated as I feel a bit lost. Thanks!

    | EduardoRuiz
    1

  • Here is my specific situation. My company released new versions of a few documents in the fall.  I was hoping that over time the old version would decline and the new version would rise but after 6 months the old version continues to rank #1 and the new version #3. The old version needs to stay on our site but users should really be getting to the most recent version. I think utilizing the canonical tag would solve the issue but i am concerned because the content on the actual pages is not duplicate but it is updated. Below are the two URLs to see the differences in the content. http://www.sei.cmu.edu/library/abstracts/reports/06tr008.cfm http://www.sei.cmu.edu/library/abstracts/reports/10tr033.cfm Is this an appropriate situation to use the canonical tag? If not, is there a better solution.

    | SEI
    0

  • Hi all, I have 2 questions concerning the merge of two websites of ours.
    We would like to combine our .nl and .be website to one big .eu website. Both websites have dutch and english rankings in The Netherlands and Belgium. 1. Will the rankings change because of the domain change to .eu?
    2. Will the rankings in both countries change because of the merge? I hope somebody can help me, Greetings

    | MarikeP
    0

  • A client of mine has a large printed product catalogue that they post on their website as a pdf. Should I take a different approach of posting this catalogue in order to gain SEO value?

    | garymeld
    0

  • On Feb 6th WMT stopped updating the stats for my two main sites.  I have seen other people complain about this but it seems like it's not known what causes it or if it's by design. Does anyone here have any insight on this issue? Thanks, Greg Davis AntiqueBanknotes

    | Banknotes
    0

  • Dear Moz Community, first of all excuse my bad english, i am from europe and my english is not the best 😉
    I use Moz Analytics for several days and try to figure out why our "main keyword" totally dropped after our domain change. We started this year with a new company name and a new domain. Our old domain was dp-hochzeitsfotograf.de and the main keyword we try to rank for was "hochzeitsfotograf" which means "wedding photographer" here in Germany. Last summer we reached position 1 and short before our domain change we still ranked on position 6. We register the domain change in google webmaster tools and redirect all urls via 301 redirect to the new domain. Our new domain name is yourheyday.de and all rankings adopted pretty good except our main keyword (now position 62) which could break our neck the next few month. I would be so so happy and really appreciate if anyone of you have an advise for us. Thanks and many greetings from europe
    Dominik

    | domiji
    0

  • Hi, A while back we took over a website that was built in Wordpress. We rebuilt it on another platform and switched the servers over whilst retaining the same domain.I had access to the old GA Account however so did the old IT company. Therefore I created a new GA account and used that in the new website pages.Recently we found the website had been blacklisted (previous to us taking it over) and now after being crawled a lot, only 2 pages have been indexed (over a 2month period).We have submitted a request for revision (to relist the website) buthave had no movement.**Just wondering if having a old, active account that was still linked to their old website would affect our Google listing?****Will dropping the old GA Tracking code/script into the site and deleting the new account enable Google to index?**Also, there is ample content, metadata and descriptions on the site.I welcome any help on this please!

    | nimblerdigital
    0

  • We are considering adding expires header to our site. If we add this meta tag to expire for a certain date, but we do not make any changes to the site after it expires, can you be penalized for this?

    | tdawson09
    0

  • Hey Everyone! I have an old site with hundreds of blog posts that are very spammy (duplicate content, keyword stuffed, and just plain bad content). I am going to redirect them and delete them from WordPress but I'm wondering where is the best place to redirect them to? Home page, other posts, other pages...? Any thoughts would be appreciated! Thanks!

    | adamxj2
    1

  • Hi there, I recently switch my site to a new ecommerce platform which hosts the SSL certificate on their end so my site no longer has the HTTPS status unless a user is going through the checkout. Google has cached the HTTPS version of the site so in search it comes up sometimes which leads to a nasty warning that the site may not be what they are looking for. Is there a way to tell google NOT to look at the https version of the site anymore? Thanks! Bianca

    | TheBatesMillStore
    0

  • We are using MOZ analytics for some days now, and it really helps us with important information about our rankings.
    I hope you guys can help us out with the following particular case; In google.nl (dutch) we rank position #18 with the following searchterm 'sphinx 345' one of our competitors rank position #3.
    We used the MOZ On Page Grade tool to find out some details about the two pages:
    Our page #18: http://goo.gl/cTsbmI
    Competitor page #3: http://goo.gl/qk21sM Our page hits an A and Keyword usage for "sphinx 345" = 52
    The competitors page hits an A too and Keyword usage for "sphinx 345" = 45 About the link structure; for our page there is no link data found in Open Site Explorer. The url exists about a year and a half now.
    I'm also very sure we have many internal links to this url.
    Does Google and other crawlers have a hard time to crawl our site?(it's a Magento site, our competitors do have custom-made e-commerce systems, maybe that has something to do with it?) As i were saying;we can't figure this out. I hope you guys can help to get us any further. Regards, Wilco

    | wilcoXXL
    0

  • Hi Everyone - I'm not a technical person at all. I have some content that will be hidden until a user clicks "learn more" where upon it will be displayed via jQuery Fancy Box script. The content behind the learn more javascript is important and I need it to be crawled by search engine spiders. Does anyone know if there will be a problem with this script?

    | Santaur
    0

  • My site's subdomains (us.example.com, de.example.com, etc.) are showing millions of links (in Google Webmaster Tools) from the root domain.  This seems very unnatural to me.  Any idea what would be cause this or is this? In addition, I just found out that we deliberately stop googlebot crawling GEO-IP redirects, so that when googlebot tries to crawl our UK, DE, FR, etc. sites, it is not redirected to us.example.com.  I'm thinking they may be linked? Thanks for your help!

    | CMcC
    0

  • Hi - I am trying to help a site to get out from under a Google manual action penalty - down as "Partial Matches - Unnatural Links to site".
    I am checking through their links - the site that links most to them is a local directory style site - it has 2,682 links back into 1 page (Home) The directory site was built by the web co. that built my clients' site and they put a keyword link in the footer of the directory site - the keyword was "Buy Truffles". All my instincts say that is a bad thing! But - this is what is perplexing me - they are ranking no.1 for that keyword! Whereas they have lost rankings (i.e. not top 50) for all the other keywords they were targeting. So I don't get it! Can anyone explain why this is. I feel I should I get that link removed but don't want to take out their only ranking keyword!  Webmaster shows about 55 different pages in the directory site have a link back to my client. Hope you can help.
    Cheers - Steve

    | StevieD
    0

  • When i use this url in open site explorer it says that there are no internal links:
    http://goo.gl/d2s6tJ
    Page Authority is also 1, it should be higher of there are any internal links to it right? But i am very sure there are links to this url on my website. For example on this URL:
    http://goo.gl/ucixRH How certain can i be of this? Because if i can be very certain, than we have a internal linkstructure problem on our entire site i believe.

    | wilcoXXL
    0

  • A client cannot appear in any search engines in one given country but they are ok in rest of the world. Has anybody had any experience blocking a site from appearing in just google.de, bing.de and yahoo.de for example?

    | Salience_Search_Marketing
    0

  • I would like to block the spider indexing a block of text inside a page , however I do not want to block the whole page with, for example , a noindex tag. I have tried already with a tag like this : chocolate pudding chocolate pudding However this is not working for my case, a travel related website. thanks in advance for your support. Best regards Gianluca

    | CharmingGuy
    0

  • For some reason Google is not pulling the meta description for one of our key pages. Instead it just takes the first sentence from the page which makes the description horrible. Why would it be doing this if the meta tag field is populated?

    | inhouseninja
    0

  • Hi there, We have noticed a sudden drop in traffic for certain keywords. It seems to correlate precisely with a different department adding a whole new recruitment section to the site. However there doesn't appear to be any keyword cannibalization or duplicate content issues. Any ideas would be most appreciated. Thanks

    | Blaze-Communication
    0

  • Hi Everybody, A client has asked me to take a look at Google Enterprise Search for them. It has been a few years since I last fooled around with implementing a Google search box on a website, and that was the free version which included off-site results in the results. This appears to be the main page describing the paid product: http://www.google.com/enterprise/search/ I have three questions: The search testing function on the above page doesn't seem to be working. I'm typing in a URL and search term, as prompted, and the page is simply refreshing. It never provides me an example set of results. Is it working for you? This client has a moderately large e-commerce site (about 200 products). Have you implemented Google enterprise search on such a site and are you happy with its performance? The goal here is to let users search for a topic and be returned both product and informational pages. How well does this tool do this? Am I going to need to know any special types of coding (beyond html/css) to implement this? If so, what are they? If you have experience with this product, I would surely appreciate your feedback. Thank you!

    | MiriamEllis
    0

  • I've been advised by IT that due to the structure of our website (they don't use sub-folders) it's not possible to change 302's to 301's. Is this correct, or am I being fobbed off?

    | lindsaytuerena
    0

  • We have a rather large site.  On SERP,  a page is seeing snippet with top navigation links captured.  But they are not active links on SERP although on the live site they are. And there are 6 sitelinks showing up as well.  Has anyone experienced this before?  Thanks.

    | b.digi
    0

  • I am looking for a tool where I can add a list of URL's and output an XML sitemap. Ideally this would be Web based or work on the mac? Extra bonus if it handles video sitemaps. My alternative is XLS and a bunch of concatenates, but I'd rather something cleaner. It doesn't need to crawl the site. Thanks.

    | Jeff_Lucas
    0

  • I'm totally not an expert in Technical Seo... but i am worry that my server admin neither is. Below is his vhost configuration, anyone can check this? it's this correct and SEO friendly? server { listen *:80; server_name domainaddress.pl domainaddress.com.pl; root /home/www/domainaddress.pl/web; index index.html index.htm key-words.php index.php index.cgi index.pl index.xhtml; location /key {
    rewrite ^/key-words/$ http://domainaddress.pl/ permanent;
    rewrite ^/key-words.php$ http://domainaddress.pl/ break;
    } location / {
    if ($http_host ~ "^www.domainaddress.pl"){
    rewrite ^(.*)$ http://domainaddress.pl/$1 permanent;
    } rewrite ^/key-words.php$ http://domainaddress.pl/ permanent;
    } }

    | Nemo85
    0

  • I've read a lot of information about duplicate content across web pages and was interested in finding out about how that affected the header and footer of a website. A lot of my pages have a good amount of content, but there are some shorter articles on my website.  Since my website has a header, footer, and sidebar that are static, could that hurt my ranking? My only concern is that sometimes there's more content in the header/footer/sidebar than the article itself since I have an extensive amount of navigation. Is there a way to define to Google what the header and footer is so that they don't consider it to be duplicate content?

    | CyberAlien
    0

  • My site is built on PHP, but has a help.website.com page based on a helpdesk platform. I also have a wordpress blog. So, these are three "different systems" under the same domain. When I crawl my site, neither the blog nor the help page show up. How can I make them show up? Thanks!

    | rodelmo88
    0

  • Does anyone have any first hand experience or must have recommendations around ATG & Endeca integration? I am somewhat familiar with ATG and the Oracle ATG guide, but if anyone has any specific SEO considerations they'd like to share? i.e. jumpservlet and SEO URLs Thanks!

    | ACNINTERACTIVE
    0

  • Hi All, If a website www.mywebsite.com has received 100 unnatural links and because of that rankings are dropped. I want to follow the below strategy to protect my website from these 100 unnatural links. Please let me know if it will work: Buy a new domain www.newdomain.com with new whois record (Not related to www.mywebsite.com ) Do 301 redirection of all 100 unnatural links (Those are pointing to www.mywebsite.com) to www.newdomain (New domain) Do 302 redirection from www.newdomain (New domain) to  www.mywebsite.com (Old Domain) After applying the above strategy, will google still consider those 100 unnatural links for Old domain??

    | RuchiPardal
    0

  • Hello everyone Can some please tell me how to add meta description for your homepage in yoast wordpress SEO. I've wrote the description in titles and Metas section but it didn't work. Only my title page worked fine. I really need help on this one. thank you

    | nashnazer
    0

  • Hi Mozzers, I am doing an audit for one of my clients and would like to know if actually the website I am dealing with has any issues when disabling CSS. So I installed Web developer google chrome extension which is great for disabling cookies, css... When executing "Disable CSS", I can see most of the content of the page but what is weird is that in certain sections images appear in the middle of a sentence. Another image appears to be in the background in one of the internal link section(attached pic) Since I am not an expert in CSS I am wondering if this represents a CSS issue, therefore a potential SEO issue? If yes why it can be an SEO issue? Can you guys tell me what sort of CSS issues I should expect when disabling it? what should I look at? if content and nav bar are present or something else? Thank you dBCvk.png

    | Ideas-Money-Art
    0

  • Hi there! I am currently working on building up the SEO ranking on a page using a specific keyword - dresses. Within this page, we have an online image library full of dresses which are then added to multiple pages determined by brand, colour, type etc for people to search. I am adding hundreds of images all of dresses - I wanted to know if I name these images using the keyword: for example 'dresses_1, 'dresses_2' - will that have a knock on effect on page I am trying to build up and optimise for the keyword 'dresses'??? Any help is appreciated.

    | Jaybeamer
    0

  • Does anyone know if the sitelinks demotions tool actually works. I went in and demoted a bunch of pages on my site but the pages are still showing up as sitelinks in search results. I did this like 2 months ago so I am assuming that is plenty of time for it to take. Any help with this would be great. Thanks!

    | ZiaTG
    0

  • I'm working on the SEO for a page on my website for using a specific keyword. When I do the on page grader, It has unticked - 'Avoid Keyword Self-Cannibalization'. What is the best way to sort this issue? I've noticed that the page is using 2 URLs - does this play a role with this and my ranking in Google?

    | Jaybeamer
    0

  • A client has 2 domains that he wants to use for the same site. At the moment one domain is just an abbreviation of the main domain (not sure why) as follows: www.mygreatpropertycompany.com
    www.mgpc.com (just redirects to the above) He is complaining that when he searches for 'mpc' there are no results (at all) so I'm wondering what the best approach is.There is currently nothing on the main domain that refers to 'mgpc' in it's abbreviated sense - the only place it's being used is the company's email addresses ([email protected]). The redirect is simply a html file in the root of www.mgpc.com as follows: Is there anything I can do to help him out? (this is one of those 'doing a friend a favour' tasks!) Thanks!

    | davidmaxwell
    0

  • My client can't do domain.com/blog because he's on wix. I'm thinking blog.domain.com. Do you have any resources for the pros and cons of this? I understand that google looks at them very similarly now, is that true for google +?

    | tylerfraser
    0

  • I can't remember the tool I used in the past but it searched a number of data centres which gave a pretty good indication of what your new rankings would be once full updated, is this still the case today? If so, can anyone recommend any tools?

    | designguy76
    0

  • Hey Friends, Please help i have a question .. could you please tell me with the answer about google updates . is there any google algo is changed. because my website has loss the position. Please help me. i checked today removalinmelbourne.com.au it was on first page and suddenly today i lost this. Please guys help me and give me some good ideas to make me back .............. 😞

    | Tufail
    0

  • We use a wordpress site and have tried some SEO plug-ins in the past.  In the analysis, I am getting more than 2,000 pages have titles that are too long and from the results it looks like it was a result of one of these past SEO plug-ins. Do I need to go through and change all those titles?  How bad is it that so many of the old blog posts are too long?  Some are too long only in the archive link... So confused and hating the idea of reworking thousands of posts!  Thanks y'all!

    | Longsphoto
    0

  • Brief background: A few months ago, our firm exchanged blog posts with another law firm in Pennsylvania with followed links. Though we did exchange links, the posts weren't spammy. They wrote "A Floridian's Guide To A Car Accident In Pennyslvania" and we wrote one for Pennsylvanians in Florida. (The reason for this is that Personal Injury law varies drastically from state-to-state, and Florida has a ton of people who move back and forth). My question: His firm got a message from google saying our link to him violated googles' guidelines. I went and removed the link, BUT I didn't get any message saying his link to our site was a violation. Shouldn't we both have gotten messages? Perhaps, mine is "in the mail" so to speak, but I would think both would go out at the same time, so I'm wondering if there is another possible reason? Thanks, Ruben

    | KempRugeLawGroup
    0

  • Hello, Let's say that there is a link to site A from site B. The domain authority of site B is 85, but the link is on a page that has a page authority of only 1. Does much authority get passed along from site B to site A? (Let's assume site A has a domain authority of 35, if that's relevant.) Thank you!

    | nyc-seo
    0

  • Hi SEOMOZ and it's USERs, Been trying to find my answer online but now after three weeks of reading blogposts I'm going to try this. 🙂 My website was ranking really good on 10 important keywords but not so good on the long tail, between 11 - 50 on maybe 30 different other, not so important keywords.
    So I began doing some work (I'm a newbie) but this is what I did:
    1. Changed top navigation structure to get 4 other pages (w/ keywords as links) in it. (used a dropdown)
    2. Wrote plenty of text that was a good fit for the page. (The text is OK and not to spammy looking.)
    3. Added three links from high quality sites with keywords as links to these pages. I added them from my own site that is on the same server, same IP. 😉 I know, not looking so good.
    4. Changed URL structure on a couple of pages to get a keyword in it. (did a correct 301)
    5. Changed to better Titles and headings on the page. Keywords in them both but not the same. The result:
    1. My 10 most important keywords I began ranking even better. I rank no. 1 on 9 out of 10.
    2. Almost all the other pages went from ranking ~ 15 - 50 to not > 50. It has now been 4 weeks since I did most of the changes and 3 weeks since all the pages was hit > 50. So now I'm thinking about what to do?
    1. Should I clean up my text, titles so they don't look to over optimized?
    2. Should I remove my links from my own pages? (my link profile in general is actually pretty good.)
    3. or should I just wait? Because changing more will just indicate to Google that somehing fishy is going on 😉 ? In the beginning I hoped that Google killed my rankings just because of the big changes. But now after 3 weeks I'm more sceptical and thinks I've been hit by a over-optimizing filter. According to webmaster tools I've not been hit by a manually penalty. Please, help me. I would really appreciate all ideas from people here with more experience.

    | Drillo
    0

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