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Category: Technical SEO

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

  • Dan-Lawrence


    Hi I've recently set up a load of 301 redirects for a clients new site design/structure  relaunch One of the things we have done is take the kw out of the sub-category landing page url's since they now feature in the top level category page urls and don't want to risk over-optimisation by having kw repeats across the full urls.  So the urls have changed and the original pages 301'd to the new current pages. However If rankings start to drop & i decide to change urls again to include kw in final part of url too for the sub category landing pages, whats best way to manage the new redirects ? Do i redirect the current urls (which have only been live for a week and have the original/old urls 301'd to them) to the new url's ? (worried this would create a chain of 301's which ive heard is not ideal) Or just redirect the original urls to the new ones, and can forget about the current pages/url's since only been live for a week ?
    (I presume best not since GWT sitemaps area says most new urls indexed now so I presume sees those as the original pages replacement now) Or should they all be 301'd (original urls and current urls to the new) ? Or best to just run with current set up and avoid making too many changes again, and setting up even more 301's after having just done so ? Many Thanks 🙂 Dan

    | Dan-Lawrence
    0
  • tidybooks


    Hi I've been trying for months now to get our images indexed by Google  Would love to know if anyone can see a reason why they haven't here is the sitemap http://www.tidy-books.com/sitemapseosuite/US/sitemapUS2.xml Also 54 pages were submitted but only 9 have been indexed? Any help would be great Thanks

    | tidybooks
    0
  • JohnHuynh


    Hello, My website www.vietnamvisacorp.com only use english language. I have added the meta language as below: name="language" content="english"/> Is this correct and how to check this follow SEO condition?

    | JohnHuynh
    0
  • PremioOscar


    Hello everybody, I am working on this e-commerce website built on windows access and it's a nightmare to change the html content on it.has anyone used it before? It doesn't allow me to change the content for the html tags even though it should  and i don't have a clue about what to do. Thanks oscar

    | PremioOscar
    0
  • bjs2010


    Hi, So, we know we don't have the best content - so we are hiring writers to create unique content for each product. What happens if this is now copied by another website? What does Google see? Do they recognize us as the original content? Has anyone used DMCA.com ? is it worth it? thanks, Ben

    | bjs2010
    0
  • CandleCam


    I had all of my non www pages redirect to the www versions. My alexa ranking dropped and keeps dropping after I did this. I'm guessing its because its tracking the non www version. Does anyone know if this is correct and should I worry?

    | CandleCam
    0
  • JohnHuynh


    When develop site, I have a test domain is sandbox.abc.com, this site contents are same as abc.com. But, now I search site:sandbox.abc.com and aware of content duplicate with main site abc.com My question is how to remove all this link from goolge. p/s: I have just add robots.txt to sandbox and disallow all pages. Thanks,

    | JohnHuynh
    0
  • JohnHuynh


    When running Seomoz crawl report, I saw a link site https://www.vietnamvisacorp.com/?req=apply-visa with status code 302 and empty title tag Is this an error? and what should I do to fix this problem? Thank you,

    | JohnHuynh
    0
  • IOSC


    In OSE I have 3 of my top 5 pages as store.com, store.com/Default.asp, and store.com/default.asp -- I have a canonical version of at store.com/default.asp. I have inbound links coming to all three urls -- b/c OSE is listing these as seperate pages does that mean the link juice is not being consolidated?  Or is this not something to worry about?

    | IOSC
    0
  • NicDale


    I'm reviewing a website that has used the H3 tag in the Navigation Menu. I've not seen that before and first thought is it is a dodgy.  Tags should relate to content on the page not link to another page. As a result of using H3 in Nav the ratio of content wrapped in Heading tags vs body content is quite high. My recommendation is to remove H3 tag from Nav but having searched Moz and not finding an article to verify that recommendation thought I'd ask the question.

    | NicDale
    0
  • KentR


    Is there a way to tell Goolge to use my title instead of one generated by Google I have unique meta tags for each page, no duplicates, why Google is doing that? Thanks

    | KentR
    0
  • Studio33


    Hi Is adding tags into Blogs a good idea?  Does it help with SEO at all? For example blog/?tag=/Invoicing-Software Will that help us get ranked for Invoicing Software? Regards Andrew

    | Studio33
    0
  • RaviAhuja


    My previous host was using shared SSL, and my site was also working with https which I didn’t notice previously. Now I am moved to a new server, where I don’t have any SSL and my websites are not working with https version. Problem is that I have found Google have indexed one of my blog http://www.codefear.com with https version too. My blog traffic is continuously dropping I think due to these duplicate content. Now there are two results one with http version and another with https version. I searched over the internet and found 3 possible solutions. 1 No-Index https version
    2 Use rel=canonical
    3 Redirect https versions with 301 redirection Now I don’t know which solution is best for me as now https version is not working. One more thing I don’t know how to implement any of the solution. My blog is running on WordPress. Please help me to overcome from this problem, and after solving this duplicate issue, do I need Reconsideration request to Google. Thank you

    | RaviAhuja
    0
  • sally58


    Hi, Until a few months ago, my client's site had about 600 pages. He decided to implement what is essentially a reverse phone directory/lookup tool. There are now about 10,000 reverse directory/lookup pages (.html), all with short and duplicate content except for the phone number and the caller name. Needless to say, I'm getting thousands of duplicate content errors. Are there tricks of the trade to deal with this? In nosing around, I've discovered that the pages are showing up in Google search results (when searching for a specific phone number), usually in the first or second position. Ideally, each page would have unique content, but that's next to impossible with 10,000 pages. One potential solution I've come up with is incorporating user-generated content into each page (maybe via Disqus?), which over time would make each page unique. I've also thought about suggesting that he move those pages onto a different domain. I'd appreciate any advice/suggestions, as well as any insights into the long-term repercussions of having so many dupes on the ranking of the 600 solidly unique pages on the site. Thanks in advance for your help!

    | sally58
    0
  • polidistillerie


    My issue is related with cross-domain duplicate content. In the first domain (aaa.com) I have 30-40 products well described with lots of content (story, description, features, technical sheets etc). This is my primary, brand domain. I want to open an e-commerce in another domain (bbb.com) where I will sell all the products that reside in aaa.com domain. If I'm going to use the content (taken from aaa.com) for describing e-commerce products in the bbb.com domain could it be seen as duplicate content? What do you suggest? It would be a hell to rewrite all the products description and even worse, technical sheets and features/characteristics can't be written differently. Thanks in advace

    | polidistillerie
    1
  • SwanJob


    I have a directory that I am redesigning. Currently, the old directory is all 404 pages. I need to use the URL's in the old directory for the new one. Should I redirect all the old pages to the new pages? Or is it better to delete the old pages, let them de index - so that I can use those same URLs? I really need help with this.

    | SwanJob
    0
  • Dhinesh


    i added website www.nsale.in in add campaign, it shows only 1 page crawled. but its working fine for other sites, any idea why it failed ?

    | Dhinesh
    0
  • FRUTIKO


    Hello I'm newbie here i dont know very well about seo but i would like to ask your help? I'm running report about my website and on report I dont have canonical tag on my products. But if i check from on page report link by link it shows that I have canonical tag. At the same time if i check my pages code i can see below canonical tag codes? Do we use canonical tags wrong? What can cause this different information? Could you please help me? Is it important to use canonical tag beginning or end? I'm using now trial version and trying to understand report is correct what is my mistakes. Thanks in advance My code is

    | FRUTIKO
    0
  • ddktt


    I had a small site that was performing well enough for me for 6 years--nice source of extra family income. It was a very out of date platform (1990's) and I moved it to Big Commerce in December. Since then visits and sales have just plummeted. It has died and I am sad. I want to remain positive. It's a viable niche product line, I have tons of quality inventory, my site platform is current. I am a good writer and am willing to add content if it will help. From what I can determine apart from technical issues I may not know about I think I suffer from THIN CONTENT. I want to pretend I'm opening a new business and start over in today's environment. I have had bad experiences with two SEO consultants (one ripped me off financially, the other gave me advice that hurt me) so I have no choice but to educate myself. I got started in ecommerce back in 1998 with the help of  many wonderful kind people on forums so I'm turning to this resource once again. What would you do first if you were me especially to get some revenue flowing asap? I need help. I need to know if there is hope or if I should liquidate at the nearest swap meet 😉 Thanks! decorativedishes.net

    | ddktt
    1
  • mcardenal


    Hi I just got back from first crawl report and there were plenty of errors. I know this has been asked before but I am newbie here so bear with me. I captured the video. Any ideas on how to address the issue? ktXKDxRttK

    | mcardenal
    0
  • seo.owl


    Hi I learned from a very senior SEO that I must link my images if I want Google to read my alt tag for my images. I don't believe this though... is it true? If the answer is not true (which I suppose it is), then maybe you can help me answer this: 1. was he confused or why would he tell me this? 2. i didn't know what i should do so now, whenever i embed an image on my blog posts, i just link them to the blog post in which the image shows... in essence, by clicking the image, the page gets refreshed. does this sound like a good strategy for images? thanks in advance!!!

    | seo.owl
    0
  • cajohnson


    Today I was going through my Google Webmaster URL Errors (404s) info.  I came across two links in my URL Errors report that are NOT actually hyperlinks on the source page. Both of these links are from two different forum-type websites.  In both cases,  the post references a URL on my website (incorrectly, hence the 404 error) in the text of the post but did NOT actually link to my site.  I looked at the source code...no href. Both forum posts simply had a tag or tag around the incorrect URL text referencing my site. I have never seen this before or heard that Google will follow a URL that is not actually a hyperlink.  Anyone else?

    | cajohnson
    0
  • SEOisSEO


    Hello, In the lack of good info about this on the Internet, let me try here. I know that it is a good idea to put LSI keywords in natural flow in the body text of the article. But shall I also put LSI keywords as a meta? In the same manner as doing with non-LSI keywords? Or shall I only reserve meta for non-LSI keywords? In body text, shall I emphasize LSI keywords in bold? As non-LSI keywords already does. This is a bit confusing as I don't wan't LSI keywords to take over show from my long tail (phrase) keyword. I will appreciate if someone could share a bit light over this. Thanks in advance!

    | SEOisSEO
    0
  • amarjitkapur


    Hi, I am little bit confused I have set my preferred domain to www but anyone can access my site via both www and non www domains, do I need to 301 redirect all non www to www or not , If yes then I want to know Why and If no then also I want to Why.

    | amarjitkapur
    0
  • DROIDSTERS


    I have a rewrite on the CMS I work on. What happens here is that if someone creates a page on the website and uses spaces as the name then the CMS automatically replaces the spaces with -'s. I noticed this morning that the %20 URLs are accessible but not indexed at all. Only the - URLs are indexed. could this cause duplicate content or penalties? I know best practice is to have only ONE URL for a page but somehow the developer can't redirect the %20 URLs to the - URLs. Opinions?

    | DROIDSTERS
    0
  • iskq


    Our site is a home to home moving listing portal. Consumers who wants to move his home fills a form so that moving companies can cote prices.  We were generating listing page URL’s by using the title submitted by customer. Unfortunately we have understood by now that many customers have entered exactly same title for their listings which has caused us having hundreds of similar page title. We have corrected all the pages which had similar meta tag and duplicate page title tags. We have also inserted controls to our software to prevent generating duplicate page title tags or meta tags. But also the page content quality not very good because page content added by customer.(example: http://www.enakliyat.com.tr/detaylar/evden-eve--6001) What should I do. Please help me.

    | iskq
    0
  • KentR


    Hi, When i search for specific keyword that i rank in Google, my title page is completely different from what i see on actual page, but when i search for my other keyword that i rank too, i can see exact same title that i have on my page for the same URL, I'm using Thesis theme to manage my meta tags, How can i change that Title, my CTR dropped dramatically for the past week since it happened Thanks

    | KentR
    0
  • Mitty


    Hi all, I had an issue where it turned out a calender was used on my site historically (a couple of years ago) but the pages were still present, crawled and indexed by google to this day. I want to remove them now from the index as it really clouds my analysis and as I have been trying to clean things up e.g. by turning modules off, webmaster tools is throwing up more and more errors due to these pages. Below is an example of the url of one of the pages: http://www.example.co.uk/index.php?mact=Calendar,m1a033,default,1&m1a033year=2084&m1a033month=3&m1a033returnid=59&page=59?phpMyAdmin=xxyyzz The closest question I have found on the topic in Seomoz is: http://www.seomoz.org/q/duplicate-content-issue-6 I want to remove all these pages from the index by targeting their top level folder. From the historic question above would I be right in saying that it is: http://www.example.co.uk/index.php?mact=Calendar I want to be certain before I do a directory level removal request in case it actually targets index.php instead and deindexes my whole site (or homepage at the very least). Thanks

    | Mitty
    0
  • iskq


    SOMOZ crawl our web site and say we have no duplicate page title but Google Webmaster Tool says we have 641 duplicate page titles, Which one is right?

    | iskq
    0
  • ICON_Malta


    Could someone please confirm that if I do not want to block any pages from my URL, then I do not need a robots.txt file on my site? Thanks

    | ICON_Malta
    0
  • seoworx123


    We have a social networking site called Yookos (www.yookos.com). As per the norm, many of the pages of the site carry user generated content and can only be accessed by the users themselves. i created a keyword list that our technical person the uploaded onto the site but SEOmoz shows that these keywords cannot be picked up.
    What is the best way to make sure that our site is also picked up via search engine searches.

    | seoworx123
    0
  • Godad


    Hello! Some of my WordPress blog posts aren't showing on the Google search result, even if I type the post title. What could be the issue? Is it my site text selection disabled issue or WordPress SEO by Yoast plug-in issue or something else? Moreover, if I search some of my post text (article content), I can't see relevant post on Google search. I use following code to protect my articles. Is it SEO friendly? .content {
        -webkit-user-select: none;
        -khtml-user-select: none;
        -moz-user-select: none;
        -ms-user-select: none;
        user-select: none;
    } my site:- http://goo.gl/tD2fS Thanks!

    | Godad
    0
  • KentR


    Hi, Im using Thesis theme for one of my wordpress website, for some reason, some of my pages are 'noindex" and 'nofollow" even though i have these boxes unchecked Does anybody know the solution to that? Thanks

    | KentR
    0
  • KentR


    Hi What's the best way to remove sitemaps.xml from the SERP Thanks

    | KentR
    0
  • andromedical


    My URL is: http://tinyurl.com/nslu78 Hi, I really hope someone can help because my site seems to be penalized since last year now. Because we were not SEO experts but doctors and wanted to do things in a white hat way so we have given our SEO strategy (on-site and off-site) to the best US SEO agencies and now we are penalized. We was ranking on the 1st page with 15 keywords and now we don't even are in the first 10 pages. I know that our sector is suspicious but we are a real laboratory and our site is 100% transparent. I understand that a lot of people can think that we are all the same but this is not true, we are not a virtual company that don't even show their name or  address, we show name, address, phone number, fax, email, chat service, VAT number everything so please help us. We have spent 3 months analysing every paragraph of google guidelines to see if we were violating some rule such as hidden text, link schemes, redirections, keyword stuffing, maleware, duplicate content etc.. and found nothing except little things but maybe we are not good enough to find the problem. In 3 months we have passed from 85 toxic links to 24 and from 750 suspicious links to 300. we have emailed, and call all the webmasters of each site several times to try to delete as many links as possible.We have sent to google a big excel with all our results and attempts to delete those badlinks. We have then sent a reconsideration request explaining all the things that we have verified on-site and off-site but it seems that it didn't worked because we are still penalized. I really hope someone can see where the problem is.
    thank you

    | andromedical
    0
  • MikeRoberts


    Okay, so this is driving me nuts because I should know how to find and fix this but for the life of me cannot. One of the sites I work for has a long-standing crawl error in Google WMT tools for the URL /a%3E that appears on nearly every page of the site. I know that a%3E is an improperly encoded > but I can't seem to find where exactly in the code its coming from. So I keep putting it off and coming back to it every week or two only to wrack my brain and give up on it after about an hour (since its not a priority and its not really hurting anything). The site in question is https://www.deckanddockboxes.com/ and some of the pages it can be found on are /small-trash-can.html, /Dock-Step-Storage-Bin.html, and /Standard-Dock-Box-Maxi.html (among others). I figured it was about time to ask for another set of eyes to look at this for me. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

    | MikeRoberts
    0
  • JillB2013


    Google used to crawl my site every few minutes. Suddenly it stopped and the last week it indexed 3 pages out of thousands. https://www.google.co.il/#q=site:www.yetzira.com&source=lnt&tbs=qdr:w&sa=X&ei=I9aTUfTTCaKN0wX5moCgAw&ved=0CBgQpwUoAw&bav=on.2,or.r_cp.r_qf.&fp=cfac44f10e55f418&biw=1829&bih=938 What could cause this to happen and how can I solve this problem? Thanks!

    | JillB2013
    0
  • ZeeCreative


    We are dealing with a foreign company that has completely ripped off our entire site template, design and branding. This is such an inconvenience and we've had similar things happen enough in the past that we're considering blocking large ranges of IP addresses from accessing our site, via htaccess. Is this something that will potentially cause problems with search engine bots crawling or indexing our site? We are in the US and our site is hosted in the US, but I'm not sure if the major search engines could potentially be using foreign based bots. Looking for any insight on this or if there are any other potential SEO problems to consider. Thanks

    | ZeeCreative
    0
  • Dan-Lawrence


    Hi For an ecommerce site thats been developed via a combination of wordpress and magento and has yoast installed, will the sitemap (& other yoast features) map (& apply to) the entire site or just wordpress aspects ? In other words does one need to do anything else to have a full sitemap for a combined magento/wordpress site or will Yoast cover it all ? This link seems to suggest should be fine but seeing if anyone else encountered this and had problems or if straightforward ? http://fishpig.co.uk/wordpress-integration/docs/plugins.html cheers dan

    | Dan-Lawrence
    0
  • Dan-Lawrence


    Hi, I'm monitoring a site thats had a new design relaunch and new robots.txt added. Over the period of a week (since launch) webmaster tools has shown a steadily increasing number of blocked urls (now at 14). In the robots.txt file though theres only 12 lines with the disallow command, could this be occurring because a line in the command could refer to more than one page/url ? They all look like single urls for example: Disallow: /wp-content/plugins
    Disallow: /wp-content/cache
    Disallow: /wp-content/themes etc, etc And is it normal for webmaster tools reporting of robots.txt blocked urls to steadily increase in number over time, as opposed to being identified straight away ? Thanks in advance for any help/advice/clarity why this may be happening ? Cheers Dan

    | Dan-Lawrence
    0
  • Dan-Lawrence


    Hi I have a few general misc questions re Robots.tx & GWT: 1) In the Robots.txt file what do the below lines block, internal search ? Disallow: /?
    Disallow: /*? 2) Also the sites feeds are blocked in robots.txt, why would you want to block a sites feeds ? **3) **What's the best way to deal with the below: - old removed page thats returning a 500 response code ? - a soft 404 for an old removed page that has no current replacement old removed pages returning a 404 The old pages didn't have any authority or inbound links hence is it best/ok to simply create a url removal request in GWT ? Cheers Dan

    | Dan-Lawrence
    0
  • andystorey


    Hi all I have numerous pages (37) with a title element that is too long.  
    Over by 24 is the worst.      Here's an example http://cycling-jersey-collection.com/browse-collection/de-nardi-colpack-serhiy-honchar-ukrainian-national-champion-santini-jersey/ Now, the easy route would be to remove "- Cycling Jersey Collection" (the name of the site) which would solve all of these too long warnings. However, given I want to rank well (and I do) for "cycle jersey collection" would removing these hurt my ranking position? Thanks andy

    | andystorey
    0
  • dooberry


    Hi all, I run a large, well established hotel site which fills a specific niche. Last February we went through a redesign which implemented pagination and lots of PHP / SQL wizzardy. This has left us, however, with a bit of a duplication problem which I'll try my best to explain! Imagine Hotel 1 has a pool, as well as a hot tub. This means that Hotel 1 will be in the search results of both  'Hotels with Pools' and 'Hotels with Hot Tubs', with exactly the same copy, affiliate link and thumbnail picture in the search results. Now imagine this issue occurring hundreds of times across the site and you have our problem, especially since this is a Panda-hit site. We've tried to keep any duplicate content away from our landing pages with some success  but it's just all those pesky PHP paginated pages which doing us in (e.g. Hotels/Page-2/?classifications[]263=73491&classifcations[]742=24742 and so on) I'm thinking that we should either a) completely noindex all of the PHP search results or b) move us over to a Javascript platform. Which would you guys recommend? Or is there another solution which I'm overlooking? Any help most appreciated!

    | dooberry
    0
  • BoniSatani


    A website that I am working on has more than 200  internal links (Its because of the design and various kind of service that we offer). I want to know its SEO impact. I also want to know the SEO impact when a website has less internal links compared to more internal links

    | BoniSatani
    0
  • iskq


    Hi, The Original Page: http://www.enakliyat.com.tr/evden-eve-nakliyat-firmalari/ Page 2: http://www.enakliyat.com.tr/evden-eve-nakliyat-firmalari/?sayfa=2 Page 3: http://www.enakliyat.com.tr/evden-eve-nakliyat-firmalari/?sayfa=3 Page 4:http://www.enakliyat.com.tr/evden-eve-nakliyat-firmalari/?sayfa=4 we added this rel="canonical" href="http://www.enakliyat.com.tr/evden-eve-nakliyat-firmalari/" /> tag all these pages Is it right?

    | iskq
    0
  • sbrault74


    Until yesterday, my website had about 1200 pages indexed in Google. I did lots of changes: removed low quality content, rewrote passable content to make it better, wrote high quality content, got lots of likes and shares on social networks, etc. Now this morning I see that out of 1252 pages submitted, only 691 are indexed. Is that a temporary situation related to the recent updates? Anyone seeing this? What should I interpret about this?

    | sbrault74
    0
  • Studio33


    Hi, Our website is developed in .NET.  We need to add a new "out the box" blog module.  Is there such a thing as a blog module that is good for SEO.  For example updatable Page Titles and Title Tags etc.  If so can anyone recommend one Thanks Andrew

    | Studio33
    0
  • Circa


    Hey Everyone; I recently found that there are tons of links to my url (30+) from several sites with the anchor text "download child porn, kiddie porn, and the likes". Although the sites linking to us where the person built the links do not have this content (thank god) it is just my url + the horrible anchor text someone is putting. [added image] Obviously I would not do that to my own site especially since I was ranked for over 15 keywords in the top 5 spots on Google and Bing. I am guessing its a competitor and I am wondering that is there any way I can remove them? Is this negative seo? Also could this be the reason my site has dropped off google page 1 last month for all my positions? I am consistently trying to rebuild but my positions are flying all over the place. Im going from ranking #12 one week to #198 the next; then to #60 and finally not even on google or bing anymore; then back to #50, etc for the past month and a half... Its very aggravating and it has hurt a few of my websites; im at a total loss on how to recover now if this is the case...It seems they have started to build these links in January from what I can find on the postings.. Thank you SEOMOZ im so happy im a member now. Any suggestions on how i can get these links off or if it is why my site has lost its original rankings.. Should I just can my website and start all over with a different URL? How can I watch out for this in the future? Any help would be so so so greatly appreciated and valued 🙂 xpVjMw8

    | Circa
    0
  • adriandg


    Same keywords, different positions of different companies.  Aren't they using the same algo for their rankings?

    | adriandg
    0
  • etruvian


    Our site's Facebook Plugin is really slowing page speed down.  As far as users are concerned, the page loads fast enough and they can already start interacting with the page before the last sidebar widget has loaded.  But the FB widget is really slow to load and is dragging the performance down in Google Analytics Page Speed for example.  Any thoughts on whether this should be an SEO concern, and whether Google differentiates between different elements of the page when deciding whether a page is a bad user experience? Thanks!

    | etruvian
    0

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