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Category: Technical SEO

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

  • Gavo


    Currently I have a site where the targeted keywords were on the home page, with links built to the homepage. It has been widely recognised though that Google is looking more and more for specific content on webpages that holds greater relevance to search queries. As such, I switched this targeted page to other created webpages - changing metatags and creating more relevant content for respective keywords. I thought this would improve rankings, however, upon doing this there was a sharp fall in rankings for keywords. Is there anything that I could have done wrong, or can do better so that keywords move back up the rankings?

    | Gavo
    0
  • GardenPet


    ANy ideas why is this the case?

    | GardenPet
    0
  • seomengo


    Hello Community, We have a pagination issue on a set of pages : http://homengo.com/s/location/ http://homengo.com/s/location/?page=1 and so on ( ?page=2, ?page=3, ...). As you can see in the source code the pagination rel and prev are there. First question : does moz crawler know and recognize pagination ? Second question : if yes then do you know what could be wrong with pagination on these pages ? Thanks

    | seomengo
    0
  • TVFreak


    Hi, I have a website that create news articles that sometime includes videos (my own videos). Those videos are accessible in the video section too, most of the time with the same title as the article but with less content. All the video pages list related videos. Should I: Canonicalize the video page to the article Add a link in the video page to the article Add a link in the article to the video page All of the above Other Thanks for the help GaB

    | TVFreak
    0
  • JasonOliveira


    These two links confused me as to what I should do... https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/34648?hl=en

    | JasonOliveira
    0
  • pugh


    I posted last month about problems with a mobile site, which is served from a separate URL (m.mydomain.com) as currently responsive design is not an option. The problem was that the mobile site was being returned in the desktop index along with the desktop site, and the desktop site was being returned in the mobile index instead of the mobile site. I have therefore implemented rel=canonical and rel=alternate as is advised by Google, but this has stopped the desktop site from appearing in the mobile index, but hasn't caused the mobile site to rank instead. What should I do now? One idea I have is to remove the rel=canonical and rel=alternate links so that the desktop site ranks in the mobile index again. There is a redirect in place anyway so when people click on a desktop link from a mobile search, they will still be redirected to the mobile equivalent. I could then set the m.mydomain.com to noindex to stop it from being returned in the desktop results and potentially causing duplicate content issues? What do you think about this as a work around?

    | pugh
    0
  • Gabriele_Layoutweb


    We have a website with 4 product categories (1. ice cream parlors, 2. frozen yogurt shops etc.). A few sub-categories (e.g. toppings, smoothies etc.) and the products contained in those are available in more than one product category (e.g. the smoothies are available in the "ice cream parlors" category, but also in the "frozen yogurt shops" category). My question: Unfortunately the website has been designed in a way that if a subcategory (e.g. smoothies) is available in more than 1 category, then itself (the subcategory page) + all its product pages will be automatically visible under various different urls. So now I have several urls for one and the same product: www.example.com/strawberry-smoothie|SMOOTHIES|FROZEN-YOGURT-SHOPS-391-2-5 and http://www.example.com/strawberry-smoothie|SMOOTHIES|ICE-CREAM-PARLORS-391-1-5 And also several ones for one and the same sub-category (they all include exactly the same set of products): http://www.example.com/SMOOTHIES-1-12-0-4 (the smoothies contained in the ice cream parlors category) http://www.example.com/SMOOTHIES-2-12-0-4 (the same smoothies, contained in the frozen yogurt shops category) This is happening with around 100 pages. I would add canonical tags to the duplicates, but I'm afraid that by doing so, the category (frozen yogurt shops) that contains several non-canonical sub-categories (smoothies, toppings etc.) , might not show up anymore in search results or become irrelevant for Google when searching for example for "products for frozen yoghurt shops". Do you know if this would be actually the case? I hope I explained it well..

    | Gabriele_Layoutweb
    0
  • IrvCo_Interactive


    How do people deal with low value pages on sites which tend to pool pagerank and internal links? For example log in pages, copyright, privacy notice pages, etc. I know recently Matt Cutts did a video saying don't worry about them, and in the past we all know various strategies like nofollow, etc. were effective but no more. Are there any other tactics or techniques with dealing with these pages and leveraging them for SEO benefit? Maybe having internal links on these pages to strategically pass off some of the link juice?

    | IrvCo_Interactive
    0
  • deep_irvin


    We are having a business operating out of three cities A, B and C with A being the primary address and the business provides its services in B and C as well. Business has decided to shut shop in C and instead add D as another city. Currently the URLs are like www.domainname.com/A/productswww.domainname.com/B/productswww.domainname.com/C/productsPlease help us in understanding the best way to inform google that City C is non operational now.Do we need to do the redirects, and if yes, should we do the redirects to Home Page?Or can we just remove the C city URLs from the webmaster tool and inform Google.

    | deep_irvin
    0
  • NTGproducts


    Is there a way to redirect one page to another, e.g. test.com/ to test.com/home, without passing link juice or any other associated properties of the latter to the former?

    | NTGproducts
    0
  • Saijo.George


    I was wondering what would be the best way to handle temporarily disabled items. There is 302 and 307 and from what I understand 307 redirect is the HTTP 1.1 successor of the 302 redirect. Any one has any experience on how Google handles 307? I am thinking I 307 the temp disabled pages to a generic page like site.com/we-are-adding-some-final-touches-to-this.html where we will explain to users why an item would be disabled and will give them an option to get notification when it goes back up. Finally when it goes back up I remove the 307 redirect and make the page live.

    | Saijo.George
    0
  • RickyShockley


    To accomplish ranking for synonymous search terms, are we better off just letting Google make the connection? Should we put the secondary synonymous term in our page titles? Is it best practice to create a completely unique landing page for the term? Not sure how to go about this. Some examples would be "miami lawyer" or "miami attorney", "obgyn" vs "gynecologist" etc. Any help on this would be much appreciated!

    | RickyShockley
    1
  • AkilarOffice


    example: i have a travel guide domain which will relate to 4 other rental sites (all different domains) if I want to post an article on the main site and as well on one of the other sites, how can this be done in order to not be considered duplicate content as it is authorised buy the author to be in both sites. Original author post on main site. Thanks for the advice in advance, Steve

    | AkilarOffice
    0
  • Liam-Web


    So we decided to add interesting video content we have shot ourselves to improve the user experience on our website. We have read though all the SEO material and advice we could find and decided to use Vimeo to host our videos instead of self-hosting. The videos themselves will not show up on Vimeo or Google as we set our account to 'private', but we notice that to embed the videos on our website - the embed code is an iFrame. My question's are, aren't iFrames supposed to be bad for SEO? Should we look to another video hosting solution instead? If other websites embed our videos on their site using the iFrame, do we get any SEO credit or the backlink? Thx.

    | Liam-Web
    0
  • imagodig


    A client and I are debating between two taglines, which both contain an important keyword phrase. This tagline will exist as the H1 on the homepage, as well as in the header with the logo on internal and landing pages. The tagline structure is either: [keyword phrase] Solutions or Single Source [keyword phrase] Can anyone weigh in on which is better? Thanks much!!

    | imagodig
    0
  • ChristopherGlaeser


    Is there a way to add annotations to the GA visitors graph?  There is a YouTube tutorial on how to do this but the comments suggest is has not be rolled out yet in the US and I can't get it to work. Best,
    Christopher

    | ChristopherGlaeser
    0
  • Aqeel


    What could be the possibility that my Moz crawler showing zero external link for my website http://ultimatecharter.com, i have build many links from different website and when i click them it goes to the website. My website is multi language and the landing page is http://ultimatecharter.com/en/home can this be a possible issue? regards Aqeel

    | Aqeel
    0
  • csabatoldi


    Hi, i am just a common person and no developper. I am sure that one of you will no the solution to my problem. If you beleive that you are the one SEO expert i need, this is going to cost you 5 minutes of your time. Before i confuse you with my broken English and wrong terminology i have created a short video of my google stats. See attached youtube link. Intro: My site has been hacked, therefore i created a completely new site on a different server with fresh data. Unfortunately google does not seem to recognize all the changes.  My website URL is: goo.gl/mJqXF4 _Sorry for posting in the wrong category. To answer the questions asked there:_My site was hacked via SQL Injects because it was outdated and without any security solution. My local files where not used in any way to create the new site with the exception of some NAS stored pictures. Support or educate me if you prefer, or just let me know what a complete cleanup and restoration of my #4 (keyword: proberaum frankfurt) and #2 (keyword: proberaum) ranking would cost me. Thank you in advance! E59V73q8jtQ

    | csabatoldi
    0
  • satoridesign


    I have a client who's website contains a php file to dynamically call a product xml file from an external source. I asked the web dev company if there was any way to access or change the titles and meta descriptions to be unique for each product and they said no, not with their system. With about 63 product pages is this going to hurt me trying to get him ranked locally? What is the best to handle a situation like this?

    | satoridesign
    0
  • cschwartzel


    I have a friend that uses a free GoDaddy template for his business website. I ran his site through Moz Crawl diagnostics, and wow - 395 errors. Mostly duplicate content and duplicate page title I dug further and found the site was doing this: URL: www.businessname.com/page1.php and the duplicate: businessname.com/page1.php Essentially, the duplicate is missing the www. And it does this 2 hundred times. How do I explain to him what is happening?

    | cschwartzel
    0
  • aronwp


    Im wondering if i should noindex the contact page im doing SEO for a website just wondering if by noindexing the contact page would it help SEO or hurt SEO for that website

    | aronwp
    0
  • danatanseo


    We are considering upgrading our Web eCommerce platform. Our current provider has just implemented Magnolia CMS into their Web store package. Do any of you have experience with this CMS and can you share your experiences and thoughts on whether or not it has any implications for SEO? Thanks!

    | danatanseo
    0
  • Webjobz


    SEO is dead and the winner is ….. Google Adwords Do you agree??? Shares in Google inc on October 24th were trading well over $1,000 per share, joining an elite club of super-shares having risen 42% since the start of 2013. And the reason is in one word ….. “Adwords” If your email inbox is anything like mine, you will have noticed a change in your “junk” emails that get past your filters. The spammers have given up on targeting “penial-enlargement” products (because every spam filter in the world is blocking them) to so-called-legitimate-business activities like SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) or “How to Get your company to #1 on Google” The truth is all those thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours “we”, “you” and your company spent on increasing your Google “organic” rankings over the last five years have been a total waste of money…… and Google are totally to blame … and are making a total gain Once-upon-a-time you could get #1 ranking on google by using clever and current SEO techniques such as link-building, elimination of duplicate content, keyword density etc etc … terms many of you in business will have heard so-called-SEO-experts spruiking too many times and persuading you to part with $$$$ in cash to fix. How many of those so-called-SEO-experts told you you could save thousands of dollars by adopting a simple a cost effective Google adwords campaign??? Not many, the SEO industry is self-promoting and full of smoke-and-mirror (snake-oil) salesman promises. In recent times Google have….. a) Increased the number of paid ads at the top of the page from 1 to 3
    b) increased the number of lines their paid adverts take up
    c) increased the % of the “above-the-fold” advertising space to paid adverts
    d) reduced the distinguishment between paid and organic ads to such an extent that around 50% of us cannot determine what is a paid or organic ad anymore. Being #1 “organically” (un-paid) in Google will NOW only get you 9% of the clicks on that page. 42% of all clicks goes to the top three “paid” listings (Adwords) If you want to get traffic to your site so that people purchase your products, move your marketing budget AWAY from SEO and web design and invest in Google Adwords as soon as possible. It is very easy to setup and administer yourself [staff removed links to copy of blog post]

    | Webjobz
    0
  • monali123


    I was just checking Google Webmaster tools and I found 102 duplicate title pages. Just fixed them all now. 
    Shall I re-submit the site map again or how do we tell Google about the changes and then how much time does it take for them to clear SERPS cache and re-index re-count ?

    | monali123
    0
  • waqid


    A client just setup word press. They have a ton of content on their blogger account. Today they stated they were moving the content to their blog. My knee jerk response is to leave it where it is. I am posting this question to re affirm my position. Unless there are some pro's to moving this over.

    | waqid
    0
  • waqid


    Had a potential client contact me the other day about his site being penalized by the big panda. A few days later he tells me that his current SEO copied his site over to a new domain name via 301 redirect. Its been a week and he's ranking for search terms as though nothing has happened. He was not ranking anywhere near page 1 (with his old domain name) before this redirect. Im curious if anyone has experienced the same anomaly. Surely he will drop once the next ranking update comes.... right?

    | waqid
    0
  • MLTGroup


    A site I reviewed was showing up in Google rankings for key phrases specific to a city, however the page that was showing up had the 'city' key phrases commented out. Does Google still read and utilized commented out text? Or is it more likely that the page in question got indexed before the key phrases were commented out and it's just still appearing for the related search queries?

    | MLTGroup
    1
  • riyas_


    Dear Mozers, We are creating a mobile version for a real estate website. We are planning to dynamically serve different HTML on same URL. I'm a little confused about the on-page optimization for the mobile version. The desktop version pages has lot of text content and I strongly believe that made us ranking for various keywords. Now if I'm creating this mobile version do I need to serve all the same exact text content on the mobile version too? I found zillow.com using the same method, their desktop version has lot of text content and mobile version is clean without any text. Does this affect the sites SEO anyway? Please help, share your thoughts. RIyas

    | riyas_
    0
  • Silviu


    Hello everyone, Recently we've changed the URL structure on our website, and of course we had to 301 redirect the old urls to the coresponding new ones. The way the technical guys did this is: "http://www.domain.com/old-url.html" 301 redirect to "/new-url.html"
    meaning as a relative redirect path, not an absolute one like this:
    "http://www.domain.com/old-url.html" 301 redirect to "http://www.domain.com/new-url.html" This happened for few thousands urls, and the fact is the organic traffic dropped for those pages after this change. (no other changes were made on these pages and the new urls are as seo friendly as possible, A grade on On-Page Grader). The question is: does the relative redirect negatively affects seo, or it counts the same as an absolute path redirect? Thanks,
    S.

    | Silviu
    0
  • djlittman


    I am looking for more information on Attracta, which is now a certified app for Plesk and Parallels Automation.  You can apparently install Attracta for Parallels from the Apps Catalog.

    | djlittman
    0
  • waqid


    Anyone have any input on the tactics being used for a national company trying to target local city pages. For instance, you might be a national printing company and you are trying to compete against local printers in cities by creating a specific page for that city + print keywords.

    | waqid
    0
  • TurnerPR


    About a month ago, we had a massive jump in 4XX errors. It seems the majority are being caused by the comment tool on wordpress, which is generating a link that looks like this "http://www.turnerpr.com/blog/wp-login.php?redirect_to=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.turnerpr.com%2Fblog%2F2013%2F09%2Fturners-crew-royal-treatment-well-sort-of%2Fphoto-2-2%2F" On every single post. We're using Akismet and haven't had issues in the past....and I can't figure out the fix. I've tried turning it off and back on; I'm reluctant to completely switch commenting systems because we'd lose so much history. Anyone seen this particular re-direct love happen before? Angela

    | TurnerPR
    0
  • seomengo


    Hello there, I have a website with a PR5 and seo "juice" is passing down smoothly except for results pages  (sorry french ) : http://homengo.com/comment-ca-marche/presentation/ is getting a PR http://homengo.com/s/vente/paris_dept-75/ is not The same goes for all results pages which could indicate a problem. Is there something wrong with these pages, i can not figure it out, or do you have some tools which could help identify the trouble ? Thanks a lot

    | seomengo
    0
  • danlovesadobe


    Hey Moz Community, I need your help. I have (had) a google local business listing. I made some changes last week to clean it up. Now it's gone and I've had a massive fall in my rankings (see images). Changes I made: I changed the business name from a spammy name: BYOL Graphic Design & Web Design Courses. TO: **Bring Your Own Laptop PTY LTD. ** I added Local business schema to my website. I added my telephone, address etc. Previously it was all an image. I tinkered with a few other things while I was there too but I can't remember them all. Other notes: Initially I blamed the dramatic drop on Hummingbird but after doing some research I'm not so sure. I think it's because I was messing around with Google Local. My listing is/was here: https://plus.google.com/111689574762050943425 (though it doesn't work any more). My website is www.bringyourownlaptop.com.au Questions: Do you think the loss of my Google local listing could be the cause of such a big drop? If it is my Google local listing - Is there a way to find out what I did wrong? Is there a place to ask for it to be re-checked? Is it better to just start again with a new listing? Do you think it's tied together with a Hummingbird change some how? What else can I check? What would you do? Thanks for your time. Dan 
    _The nervous business owner. _ InKrwvX.png Hv36XUu.png

    | danlovesadobe
    0
  • wiredseo


    So, everything after a hash (#) is not supposed to be crawled and indexed.  Has that changed? I see a clients site with all sorts of URLs indexed like ... http://www.website.com/#!category/c11f For the above URL, I thought it was the same as simply http://www.website.com/.  But they aren't, they're getting indexed and all the content on the pages with these hash tags are getting crawled as well. Thanks!

    | wiredseo
    0
  • WebsiteEditor


    I am at lost. My website has been live for about 3 months. Typing my name or my direct page title into google puts me on page 15. My site is indexed by google, a site:mywebsitename search - produces 202 results. My on page SEO isn't amazing buy it isn't terrible either. The website has 35+, 500 words+ reviews and a few incoming links from some occasional link building. 0 duplicate content. The website is animexcess.com
    My thoughts on what might be causing the problem, i am hoping that someone with a bit more SEO knowledge than myself can point me in the right direction. During development, i had duplicate content up on the site as placeholder while i wrote my own - All duplicate content has been removed for about 3 months now, but can this still be affecting me ranking? and to this extent? The entire website is in a sub-directory with 301 redirects - can this be affecting my ranking to this extent? The domain had a prior owner. Waybackmachine tells me that the domain had a page up in 2007. I bought it in 2010. If the prior owner built up a bad rep on this domain can is still be the cause for poor ranking 6 years later? I cannot file a reconsideration request since there are no manual actions taken against my site in WMT, any way around this? Its only been three months. I know 3 months isn't a very long time in the google ranking world but my my 2 week old, built in 1 week, secondary website is ranking on page 1 for some pretty solid terms, so i don't think 3 months is to short a time to expect a bit of results. My website is being crawled daily.
    Any advice on how to move forward with fixing my website ranking will be much obliged. Thank you.

    | WebsiteEditor
    0
  • webseoservices


    Hi everyone, has anyone had any experience with Getshopped eCommerce plugin for Wordpress and it's permalink structure? Currently the permalink reads something like http://www.sitename.com/products-page/product-category/product-description/ I would like to modify it to be http://www.sitename.com/product-description/ but the SEO Plugin I am using All-in-One SEO only allows me to edit the "product-description" part of the permalink and not the "products-page/product-category/" part of it The permalink structure is set to /%postname%/ under Settings in Wordpress. Any help/comments will be greatly appreciated Thanks

    | webseoservices
    0
  • NoisyLittleMonkey


    I'm using php to try access Google web master tools but its now emailing me about a Suspicious sign in prevented. How can I get round this in a way that it wont effect the security of my account? $ch = curl_init(); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "https://accounts.google.com/ServiceLogin");
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true); $data = array('accountType' => 'GOOGLE',
    'Email' => '[email protected]',
    'Passwd' => '***',
    'source'=>'PHI-cUrl-Example',
    'service'=>'lh2'); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, 0);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $data); $hasil = curl_exec($ch); echo $hasil; ?

    | NoisyLittleMonkey
    0
  • thomasvanderkleij


    I have a social networking site with user- and company profiles. Some profiles have little to no content. One of the users here at moz suggested noindex-ing these profiles. I am still investigating this issue and have some follow up questions: What is the possible gain of no-indexing uninteresting profiles? Especially interested in this since these profiles do bring in long-tail traffic atm. How "irreversable" is introducing a noindex directive? Would everything "return to normal" if I remove te noindex directive? When determining the treshold for having profiles indexed, how should the following items be weighed Sum of number of words on the page (comprised of one or more of the following: full name, city, 0 to N company names, bio, activity) (unique) Profile picture (Nofollowed) Links to user's profiles on social networks  or user's own site. Embedded Google Map Thanks!

    | thomasvanderkleij
    0
  • Ideas-Money-Art


    Hi mozzers, Since August 22nd, (not a site I manage) has had a Server error 500 and all the pages got deindexed? This is obviously a server issue but why it got deindexed is it because it's been a while since it had this server issue? On the pages I checked the pages loads correctly so I am a bit confused here! His webmaster account show 1500 server errors! Can someone tell me what is going on and how to fix it? Thanks

    | Ideas-Money-Art
    0
  • AshShep1


    Hi Im struggling with this probably easy concept, so I am sure one of you guys out there can answer it fairly easy! My website is over50choices.co.uk and whilst using the free tools in Majestic it said that I had: 77 Referring Domains pointing to www.over50choices.co.uk and only 35 pointing to www.over50choices.co.uk/ And in Moz it said: The URL you've entered redirects to another URL. We're showing results for www.over50choices.co.uk/ since it is likely to have more accurate link metrics. See data for over50choices.co.uk instead? Does this mean that my domains arent set up correctly and are acting as separate domains - should one be pointing to the other? Your help appreciated. Ash

    | AshShep1
    0
  • herlamba


    I am having a hard time figuring out why is it that when I search for my website name, it didn't show up in google's search result? Here's a link to my site. I've been twiddling for days looking for answers in my google webmaster tools. Here's a link of the crawl stats from google webmaster tool. As you can see it is actually crawling some pages. However my looking at my indexed status, I am getting 0 as you can see here (http://cl.ly/image/3G1R1p0b3k1P). I've double checked for my robots.txt and nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary there. I am not blocking anything. Any ideas why?

    | herlamba
    0
  • duncm


    This is a random issue that I've been trying to get to the bottom of over the last few months. First I thought it might be that I have a spammy host, so I changed it. My site loads a little faster but the homepage is still totally non-visible. Other pages and posts index no problem..  It's really quite frustrating. http://bit.ly/1hA8DqV Any suggestions welcome. Standard WP, running Wordpress SEO by Joost and a few other basic plugins...

    | duncm
    0
  • sedamiran


    Hi all, One of my client has a magento website and I recently received received 404 errors for about 600 links on GWT and I tried to give 301 redirection via bulk upload but i get errors. It's magento 1.7 and I have following columns on csv file. I included first sample row as well. <colgroup><col width="120"><col width="71"><col width="120"><col width="402"><col width="253"><col width="120"><col width="120"><col width="120"><col width="120"><col width="120"></colgroup>
    | url_rewrite_id | store_id | id_path | request_path | target_path | is_system | options | description | category_id | product_id |
    | 125463 | 1 | 22342342_54335 | old_link | new_link | 0 | RP | NULL | NULL | NULL | |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   | The error msg I receive is below. I was wondering if anyone has tried this before and if you know you how to fix this. Manual redirection works fine but probably this first 600 error is just a start, I'll be getting more 404 errors soon, somehow i need to figure out how to fix this. I appreciate if any one has experience on this and guide me through. Thanks in advance, Here is the error: SQL query: INSERT INTO 'mgn_core_url_rewrite'
    VALUES ( 'url_rewrite_id', 'store_id', 'id_path', 'request_path', 'target_path', 'is_system', 'options', 'description', 'category_id', 'product_id' )MySQL said: #1452 - Cannot add or update a child row: a foreign key constraint fails ('ayb_mgn2'.'mgn_core_url_rewrite', CONSTRAINT 'FK_101C92B9EEB71CACE176D24D46653EBA' FOREIGN KEY ('category_id') REFERENCES 'mgn_catalog_category_entity' ('entity_id') ON DELETE CASCADE ON) <colgroup><col width="120"><col width="71"><col width="120"><col width="402"><col width="253"><col width="120"><col width="120"><col width="120"><col width="120"><col width="120"></colgroup>
    |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |

    | sedamiran
    1
  • Theo-NL


    The website of a partner of mine was recently migrated to a new platform. Even though the content on the pages mostly stayed the same, both the HTML source (divs, meta data, headers, etc.) and URLs (removed index.php, removed capitalization, etc) changed heavily. Unfortunately, the URLs of ALL forum posts (150K+) were redirected using a 302 redirect, which was only recently discovered and swiftly changed to a 301 after the discovery. Several other important content pages (150+) weren't redirected at all at first, but most now have a 301 redirect as well. The 302 redirects and 404 content pages had been live for over 2 weeks at that point, and judging by the consistent day/day drop in organic traffic, I'm guessing Google didn't like the way this migration went. My best guess would be that Google is currently treating all these content pages as 'new' (after all, the source code changed 50%+, most of the meta data changed, the URL changed, and a 302 redirect was used). On top of that, the large number of 404's they've encountered (40K+) probably also fueled their belief of a now non-worthy-of-traffic website. Given that some of these pages had been online for almost a decade, I would love Google to see that these pages are actually new versions of the old page, and therefore pass on any link juice & authority. I had the idea of submitting a sitemap containing the most important URLs of the old website (as harvested from the Top Visited Pages from Google Analytics, because no old sitemap was ever generated...), thereby re-pointing Google to all these old pages, but presenting them with a nice 301 redirect this time instead, hopefully causing them to regain their rankings. To your best knowledge, would that help the problems I've outlined above? Could it hurt? Any other tips are welcome as well.

    | Theo-NL
    0
  • JBlank


    I have recently started to implement switchboard tags to connect our mobile and desktop pages, and to ensure that our mobile pages show up in rankings for mobile users.  Because our desktop site is much deeper in content than our mobile site, there are a number of desktop pages we would like to have point to one mobile page.  However, with the switchboard tags, this poses a problem because it requires multiple rel=canonical tags to be placed on the one mobile page.  I'm assuming this will either confuse the search engines, or they will choose to ignore the rel=canonical tag altogether. Any ideas on how to approach this situation other than creating an equivalent mobile version of every desktop page or implementing a user agent detection redirect?

    | JBlank
    0
  • OOMDODigital


    I'm in the middle of a log jam with linking google analytics to google adwords. I have a client whose account lists properties for five distinct websites. Company A www.website1.com/
    www.website2.com/
    www.website3.com/ There are individual adwords accounts for each property that I'm trying to link up. Here's the issue I"m having. I can link up Website1.com Analytics to Website1.com Adwords. Then I'll link up Website2.com Analyitics to Website2.com Adwords. This will cause Website1.com to be linked up to Website2.com's Adwords. How do I fix this?

    | OOMDODigital
    0
  • RuudHeijnen


    Hi guys, We have this website http://www.m-health-expo.nl/ but it is not indexed by google. In webmaster tools google says that it can not fetch the site due to the robots.txt but i do not see any faults in it. http://www.m-health-expo.nl/robots.txt Do you see something strange, it really bothers me.

    | RuudHeijnen
    0
  • danny.wood


    Hey all, Recently launched a new site on S3, and old pages that I haven't been able to redirect yet are showing up as 403s instead of 404s. Is a 403 worse than a 404? They're both just basically dead-ends, right? (I have read the status code guides, yes.)

    | danny.wood
    1
  • yolkcreative


    Hi I have a client who wants some advice on the following and I haven't come up with anything decent yet. So wanted to throw it out here. They own a domain like soccershoes.com which also houses their web site. They have now bought ussoccershoes.com because this US based search term is more popular than simply soccer shoes. How can they utilise this new domain effectively to drive traffic to their main web site? Thanks for any input.

    | yolkcreative
    0

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