Category: Technical SEO
Discuss site health, structure, and other technical SEO strategies.
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Expressionengine SEO
One of my clients is using expressionengine CMS, and even the simplest things like creating unique page titles seem to be a nightmare. When I try to change page title via cms it also changes navigation menu. Any help will be appreciated.
| Thommas0 -
Are Google now indexing iFrames?
A client is pulling content through an iFrame, and when searching for a snippet of that exact content the page that is pulling the data is being indexed and not the iFrame page. Seen this before?
| White.net0 -
How to fix broken links?
Hi, I use WordPress CMS with Yoast SEO plugin. I have just found out that my 403 errors increased dramatically. It seems that all my tags below of each post are being broken for some reason. When i click on the tags i get the following massage: **403 Forbidden Request forbidden by administrative rules. ** I assume it has something to do with the configuration within Yoast SEO plugin. Dose anyone know how should i fix that? Thanks, Raviv evsGujA
| Indiatravelz0 -
When moving my ecommerce website from one host to another should I also 301 all my image urls?
I'm going to be 301'ing a lot of pages, but should i also 301 my image URLS? Any other helpful hints would be awesome too, as this will be my first move online ever. We've been with our host 3 years. Thanks! Paul Serra STbands.com, Owner
| Hyrule0 -
Proper way of handling wordpress urls and redirects?
I have recently changed some of my urls in wordpress + adding a sub category in the url structure. from
| Livet
www.mydomain.se/category/subcategory to www.mydomain.se/category/subcategory/subcategory2/ My products are stil under www.mydomain.se/products/cool-product and are not affected. Should I 301 the old url (www.mydomain.se/category/subcategory) to the new (www.mydomain.se/category/subcategory/subcategory2/)? If that is so, can someone recommend a good 301 redirection plugin? Thanks!0 -
Site verification in WMT
Hello all, I have a site and I want to set a preferred domain but when I do it says I need to verify my site but it gives me no ideas how to do that. I know that normally you have to do it when you set the account up but I had an analytics account for this domain first then just logged on with those details and I was in with no verification process. Cheers
| jwdl0 -
Link removal from search rank checking sites
I'm going through the link removal process for unnatural links to a site. While I'm able to identify the obvious link profile and seo-article links that Google wants removed, what should we do about the links that are generated by the various seo link investigation and ranking services? Example: http://www.seoprofiler.com/analyze/allamericanfencing.com This site (seoprofiler) automatically creates these links to web sites when it generates its reports. Are those links that need to be removed or disavowed, or will Google not care? I want to err on the side of caution, but don't know how to treat these types of pages. The site didn't ask for or lobby for those links, so it's "natural" in that sense, but they're not editorially earned either (except for happen to be ranking for a similar term). Does anyone have experience on this aspect of the unnatural link grooming process?
| CHarkins0 -
How to target similar keywords for Main Category / Sub Categories?
Hi all, This is from an on-site point of view for an ecommerce site - Just looking for a bit of advice about how i can create different pages for similar keywords, by this i mean lets say i have 4 categories: Main Category = High Definition Sub Cat 1 = High Definition Camera Sub Cat 2 = High Definition Recorder Sub Cat 3 = High Definition Kits First lets focus on the Main Category: Would you not want to mention Camera / recorder / kits in any of the main category title / meta tags / h tags etc? From a navigation point of view its impossible not to have those words mentioned there, and from a product point of view obviously the "cameras" are going to be on the main category page also... Obviously we can create some written content also, which i presume again would be best not to mention cameras / recorders / kits? OR would it be wise to mention them, but link to those pages? NOW if we look at a Sub Category - Say 1 (Camera) Now obviously everywhere we type in "high definition camera" we are typeing in the keyword for the main category, so is there anyway to limit the effect of this, so that a sub category wouldnt rank above a main category for its keyword... for example if we were to make sure any time the word "high definition" is mentioned in title / meta / h tags, or any specific written content that the word "camera" is directly after it... Also, perhaps in the content of all three sub categories make sure 1 (or would you advise more) link to the main category using keyword "high definition"? Any advice on the above would be greatly appreciated... Also bare in mind i am talking about on site only, i'm just thinking from a creating the page point of view, i know we can try and force the issue afterwards with a few backlinks etc.. On a different note, a simple question... When you do a site:mysite.com search in google... is the list google then presents you in order of how "important" googls see's the pages on that site? Or is it just hompage then random? thanks James
| isntworkdull0 -
Duplicate Content in Wordpress.com
Hi Mozers! I have a client with a blog on wordpress.com. http://newsfromtshirts.wordpress.com/ It just had a ranking drop because of a new Panda Update, and I know it's a Dupe Content problem. There are 3900 duplicate pages, basically because there is no use of noindex or canonical tag, so archives, categories pages are totally indexed by Google. If I could install my usual SEO plugin, that would be a piece of cake, but since Wordpress.com is a closed environment I can't. How can I put a noindex into all category, archive and author peges in wordpress.com? I think this could be done by writing a nice robot.txt, but I am not sure about the syntax I shoud use to achieve that. Thank you very much, DoMiSol Rossini
| DoMiSoL0 -
How to fix rel canonical tags?
Hello there, I am trying to fix the issues with my campaign and I am trying to fix Rel canonical issues. I tried to read a few blogs and other sources which talked about the Rel canonical but I am not able to understand why is Rel Canonical happening? I understand that http://elegancealways.com is not the same as http://elegancealways.com/about-us/ but then I cannot change the link as the link is correct. I read about 301 and 302 redirects. I do not understand that which link is correct then? The errors SEO MOZ is showing is what I am not able to understand as these links are correct. I need help here!! Thanks Vineeta qTc2a2H.png
| vineeta0 -
Help with 301 redirect code
Hi, I can't work out how to make this one work and would apreciate if someone could help.
| Paul_MC
i have a series of folders from a old site that are in the structure:
/c/123456/bags.html (the "123456" changes and is any series of 6 digit numbers), and the "bags.html" changes depending on the product.
I need that to be 301 redirected to the following format:
/default/bags/bags.html0 -
Htaccess - multiple matches by error
Hi all, I stumbled upon an issue on my site. We have a video section: www.holdnyt.dk/video htaccess rule: RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
| rasmusbang
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^video index.php?area=video [L,QSA] Problem is that these URLs give the same content:
www.holdnyt.dk/anystring/video
www.holdnyt.dk/whatsoever/video Any one with a take on whats wrong with the htaccess line? -Rasmus0 -
301: Dynamic URL to Static Page
I've been going around trying to get this dynamic url to redirect in the .htaccess file. I know I'm missing something but can't figure it out. Code: RewriteEngine on
| ohlmanngroup
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^/dynamic-url.php?id=43$
RewriteRule ^$ http://static/page/url/inserted/here? [R=301,L] Suggestions?0 -
Getting Errors On Server Connectivity-??
Hi Guys I am getting a massive crawl errors on googlewebmaster ,stating there is over 2162 errors connect time out - anyone know where I can see exactly where the time out is from? I have browsed through my site and I do not see any connect timeout occured. Thanks Cary
| ilovebodykits1 -
Types of SEO Help
I have a web site that is going well but I think it could be better as far as usability and design. Also, I am sure an SEO professional would have some things to do to optimize. It seems though, that all the SEO companies either want to have along term contract or they don't work with my technology. Does anyone know of a company that would take my Visual Studio/C# project and tweak it for usability, design and SEO features for an hourly or set price?
| Banknotes0 -
Is all in one seo getting rid of my google authorship?
is all in one seo getting rid of my google authorship? I had it before and after installing All in One it is not coming up anymore. I have nothing in the google plus field of the main All in one settings, and I have it inserted in my user->your profile. When I view page source it is there. But it does not show up in the search, see: https://www.google.com/search?q=chicago+nightlife+superstar It even works in the rich snippet tester: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.howlatthemoon.com%2Fdueling_piano_bar%2Fchicago-nightlife-superstar%2F&html= Also my title has changed. It is correct in the tester but not in Google. Please help!!!
| howlusa0 -
Best URL format for pagination
We're currently changing the URL format of our website search, we have been discussing a lot and cannot decide the past way to pass the pagination parameter for SEO. We narrowed down to the options. www.website.com/apples/p2 - www.website.com/apples?page=2 - www.website.com/apples/page/2 What would give us best ranking returns? What do you think?
| HelpSaude0 -
SEO for User Authenticated Content
Hi Everyone - I have a potential client who is seeking SEO for a site that contains about 95% of content only accessible through user authentication . Does anyone have tips for getting this indexed without having to open it up to the public? I was considering adding "snippets" into the robots.txt or creating an additional page with snippets linking to the login page. I'd appreciate any thoughts! Thanks!
| manutx0 -
Site not passing page authority....
Hi, This site powertoolworld.co.uk is not passing page authority. In fact every page shows no links unless it has a link from an external source. Originally this site blocked Roger from crawling it but that block was lifted over 6 months ago. I also ran a crawl test last night and it shows the same thing. PA of 1 and no links. I would like to point out that the problem seems to be the same for all sites on the same platform. Which points me in the direction of code. for example there is a display: none tag in the ccs which is used to style where the side bar links are. It's a Blue Park platform. What could be causing the problem? Thanks in advance. EDIT Turns out that blocking the ezooms crawler stopped it from being included.
| PowerToolWorld0 -
Todo steps when you switch products offline.
Dear SEOMoz community, By means of this message I hope someone can clear this up for me. Let's say you have a web shop and sometimes you have to put a product offline, because they are not in production anymore. Could anyone tell me they activities that you have to undertook when you switch products to offline? Think about the redirection of URL, etc. Preferably a specific answer will be most appreciated :). Thanks in advance, Martin
| Onlinedesignmeubel0 -
For an image which is in the CSS and not the HTML, can you add an alt tag?
I would like to improve SEO on a page with three big images, which are currently hosted in the CSS. The sample I am working with is at http://xquisitevents.com/about-us/ and I put my cursor over the big picture of the wedding dress with bouquet, I inspected the element and saw this code in a div tag: #upperleft { background-image:url(images/AboutTopLeft.jpg); Can I add an alt tag to the CSS somehow, or can I have it added to the HTML? What is the best way to handle this, to include keywords like exquisite weddings and special event designs?
| BridgetGibbons0 -
Which one is the best
Dear Seo experts, 1,5 month ago i started a informative website, i started it with a blank registrated domainname. Now 1 month further I've stacked the website with content and did much linkbuilding. Yesterday i ve bought a domainname from quarantine, its a domainname around 6 years old and has a bunch of backlinks already. What to do next? The first one has good content and good recent linkbuilding done. The second is a better domainname and is old and has old backlinks. And also higher PA and DA then the first one. Should i now go for the first one and 301 redirect the old domainname to the new one. Or should I do it the opposite way, 301 redirect the new website to the old domainname and move all content to the old domainname and try to move all linkbuilding to older domain? Hopefully anyone could give me a great answere, thank you so much! Kind regards, Menno
| MennoO0 -
Confirmation of penalty
Hi, I have been discussing with friends about possible penalties on few domains [listed below]. I would appreciate if any of seomoz staff could check them and explain if these sites are penalized in full, or part of these websites are penalized or homepage being penalized, any identification of penalty being imposed, and how to get these sites restored. http://www.google.com.pk/#sclient=psy-ab&q=123businesslistings.com&oq=123businesslistings.com&gs_l=hp.3...4797.4797.1.5047.1.1.0.0.0.0.0.0..0.0...0.0...1c.1.8.psy-ab.xDG3ytsYUVU&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_qf.&bvm=bv.45107431,d.aWc&fp=db751f8c4669b6fe&biw=1441&bih=603 keyword searched=123businesslistings.com
| ClaudioJudsoni0 -
New domain's Sitemap.xml file loaded to old domain - how does this effect SEO?
I have a client who recently changed their domain when they redesigned their site. The client wanted the old site to remain live for existing customers with links to the new domain. I guess as a workaround, the developer loaded the new domain's sitemap.xml file to the old domain. What SEO ramifications would this have if any on the primary (new) domain?
| julesae0 -
Isnt it better to have headlines in H1 and H2 tags instead of p tags?
I am working with a simple site http://http://lightsigns.com/Uniko_Manufacturing_Limited.html They seek more SEO traffic. However, the two big headlines that read "Wholesale Supply to the Sign and Display Industries" which is on line 241 and 242 of the source code, its in a p tag, i.e. <p <span class="webkit-html-tag">style</p <span>="padding-top: 0pt; " class="paragraph_style_1">Wholesale Supply to the and <p <span class="webkit-html-tag">style</p <span>="padding-bottom: 0pt; " class="paragraph_style_1">Sign and Display Industries Likewise, the product titles are in p tags, also. For example, on the Slide-in Light Box product page, http://lightsigns.com/Slide_In_light_box.html , I have done keyword research and no one is using the words slide in light box.Plus, it is also a p tag, ie. line 43 reads style="padding-bottom: 0pt; padding-top: 0pt; " class="paragraph_style">Slide-in Light Box If I suggest that they make an H2 tag with SEO-optimized keywords such as Display Light Box - Slide-In LIght Box, would this indeed help SEO? In summary, is it correct to say that H1 and H2 tags are stronger signals to the search bots of what the page is about?
| BridgetGibbons1 -
WWW wordpress multisite network for Main
I have a year old site with not many links, and my original intent was non www so http://rootdomain.com However, since its a subdomain multisite, I have received notice from google webmaster tools because of poor quality on one of my subsites.maindomain.com I do have the google account setup to be "root domain only" - however, i am still being penalized it seems. So should I convert my wordpress main site to use WWW. and modify my google webmaster/analytics profile, update my site links, etc. Or what do you suggest?
| inllc0 -
Magento and Duplicate content
I have been working with Magento over the last few weeks and I am becoming increasingly frustrated with the way it is setup. If you go to a product page and remove the sub folders one by one you can reach the same product pages causing duplicate content. All magento sites seem to have this weakness. So use this site as an example because I know it is built on magento, http://www.gio-goi.com/men/clothing/tees/throve-t-short.html?cid=756 As you remove the tees then the clothing and men sub folders you can still reach the product page. My first querstion is how big an issue is this and two does anyone have any ideas of how to solve it? Also I was wondering how does google treat question marks in urls? Should you try and avoid them unless you are filtering? Thanks
| gregster10001 -
Do I need both canonical meta tags AND 301 redirects?
I implemented a 301 redirect set to the "www" version in the .htaccess (apache server) file and my logs are DOWN 30-40%! I have to be doing something wrong! AddType application/x-httpd-php .html .htm RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^luckygemstones.com
| spkcp111
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.luckygemstones.com/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.htm
RewriteRule ^(.)index.htm$ http://www.luckygemstones.com/$1 [R=301,L] IndexIgnore *
ErrorDocument 404 http://www.luckygemstones.com/page-not-found.htm
ErrorDocument 500 http://www.luckygemstones.com/internal-serv-error.htm
ErrorDocument 403 http://www.luckygemstones.com/forbidden-request.htm
ErrorDocument 401 http://www.luckygemstones.com/not-authorized.htm I've also started adding canoncial META's to EACH page: I'm using HMTL 4.0 loose still--1000's of pages--painful to convert to HTML5 so I left the / off the tag so it would validate. Am I doing something wrong? Thanks, Kathleen0 -
My website keeps getting hit every other month. What should I do?
Since April 2012, my website impressions has dropped about 88% according to GWT. Every other month or so, the impressions are dropping by about 30%. My total traffic (visitors, not impressions) has dropped by about 25% but now I am getting lots of junk traffic. A few of the major keywords I used to rank for are still ranking in the top 10 but only in the USA. Lots of the keywords have gone to page 2 or 3 in the US and are gone to hell in other countries. Now I know I'm mostly responsible for this mess. About 3 years ago, I hired a freelancer to write news for my blog and she did a great job for quite some time so I stopped monitoring her work for duplicated content. Unfortunately, she started to provide me with copied content after a while and did so for almost 9 months before I noticed it. I had also hired RankPoop - errr I mean RankPop - to build some backlinks and that eventually got me in trouble too. I got an unnatural links warning in GWT in July 2012. Since then, I had more than 50% of the bad links taken down. There are still lots of them but they sure account for way less than 50% of all the backlinks. I have not submitted a reconsideration request yet as I haven't compensate for all the links taken down yet. I also started adding LOTS of fresh, unique and useful content to the website. I've added near 400 articles (sometimes up to 7 or 8 articles a day) over the last 5 months. I've also set lots of the duplicated posts to "noindex" and when they're not indexed anymore, I completely removed them in order to avoid any copyright issues (some were 100% identical to the source). I keep doing this gradually to avoid 404 errors. In early March of this year, I did a complete redesign of the site. The navigation structure stayed the same and visually, the layout is quite the same although the graphical elements are much more professional and the site is much faster. As much as I would've like to avoid a complete redesign, major technical issues from the previous design (and development platform) was now forcing me to do so. Unfortunately, I updated the website design right before the last Panda update so now I don't know if the recent traffic lost is due to the new design or because of Panda... or both. Google is like a police officer who repeatedly give you tickets for the same offense, yet they won't tell you what that offense is. My website is located at http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/ Any advice is welcomed. P.S. sorry for my english, I speak french.
| sbrault740 -
Cached pages still showing on Google
We noticed our QA site showing up on Google so we blocked them in our robot.txt file. We still had an issue with them crawling it so we blocked the site from the public. Now Google is still showing a cached version from the first week in March. Do we just have to wait until they try to re-crawl the site to clear this out or is there a better way to try and get these pages removed from results?
| aspenchicago0 -
Canonical tag in the Michael Torbert SEO plugin
I am confused about a canonical tag that appears in the header section of a site that uses the WordPress All in One SEO plugin by Michael Torbert. That is a very popular one. It says, I thought that telling Google that a page is canonical means "Don't index this one, it is not the primary page." But in fact, this is the primary page because when you go to www.xquisitevents.com it redirects to xquisitevents.com. Is this done properly or not? Ditto for all the other pages, i.e. xquisitevents.com/about-us has a canonical tag in the wordpress plugin, etc. Which is the real primary page? And does the primary page correctly have the canonical tag in the plugin?
| BridgetGibbons0 -
Choosing the right page for rel="canonical"
I am wondering how you would choose which page to use as a canonical ? All our articles sit in an article section and they are called in the url when linked from a particular category. Since some articles are in many categories, we may have several links for the same page. My first idea was to put the one in the article category as the canonical, but I wonder if Google will lose the context of the page for it's ranking because it will not be in the proper category. For exemple, this page in the article section : http://www.bdc.ca/en/advice_centre/articles/Pages/exporting_entering.aspx Same page in the Expand Your Sales > Going Global section : http://www.bdc.ca/EN/advice_centre/expand_your_sales/going_global_or_international_markets/Pages/RelatedArticles.aspx?PATH=/EN/advice_centre/articles/Pages/exporting_entering.aspx The second one has much more context related to it, like the breadcrumb is showing the path and the left menu is open at the right place. For this example, I would choose te second one, but some articles may be found in 2 or 3 categories. If you could share your lights on this it would be very appreciated ! Thanks
| jfmonfette0 -
Google Penalty Investigation
Hi All, I've recently had a google penalty, and have spent a long while working through tying up any loose ends with my site (I'm building a new one, so you'll still see some probs on my current one). My search referrals do slowly seem to be recovering, but only for variations of terms that are similar to 'bike repair'. Now, my site does primarily offer bike repair advice, so that's a good thing, but I'm not yet ranking for any of my specific keywords. One example is that I used to rank quite high for the term 'schrader valve'. Is this a signal of anything in particular? Or can I not read anything specific into this? Thanks!
| madegood0 -
What is Too Many On-Page Links?
in campaigns i see " Too Many On-Page Links " what is this ? can anyone please tell me ?
| constructionhelpline0 -
Page Indexing increase when I request Google Site Link demote
Hi there, Has anyone seen a page crawling increase in Google Web Master Tools when they have requested a site link demotion? I did this around the 23rd of March, the next day I started to see page crawling rise and rise and report a very visible spike in activity and to this day is still relatively high. From memory I have asked about this in SEOMOZ Q&A a couple of years ago in and was told that page crawl activity is a good thing - ok fine, no argument. However at the nearly in the same period I have noticed that my primary keyword rank for my home page has dropped away to something in the region of 4th page on Google US and since March has stayed there. However the exact same query in Google UK (Using SEOMOZ Rank Checker for this) has remained the same position (around 11th) - it has barely moved. I decided to request an undemote on GWT for this page link and the page crawl started to drop but not to the level before March 23rd. However the rank situation for this keyword term has not changed, the content on our website has not changed but something has come adrift with our US ranks. Using Open Site Explorer not one competitor listed has a higher domain authority than our site, page authority, domain links you name it but they sit there in first page. Sorry the above is a little bit of frustration, this question is not impulsive I have sat for weeks analyzing causes and effects but cannot see why this disparity is happening between the 2 country ranks when it has never happened for this length of time before. Ironically we are still number one in the United States for a keyword phrase which I moved away from over a month ago and do not refer to this phrase at all on our index page!! Bizarre. Granted, site link demotion may have no correlation to the KW ranking impact but looking at activities carried out on the site and timing of the page crawling. This is the only sizable factor I can identify that could be the cause. Oh! and the SEOMOZ 'On-Page Optimization Tool' reports that the home page gets an 'A' for this KW term. I have however this week commented out the canonical tag for the moment in the index page header to see if this has any effect. Why? Because as this was another (if not minor) change I employed to get the site to an 'A' credit with the tool. Any ideas, help appreciated as to what could be causing the rank differences. One final note the North American ranks initially were high, circa 11-12th but then consequently dropped away to 4th page but not the UK rankings, they witnessed no impact. Sorry one final thing, the rank in the US is my statistical outlier, using Google Analytics I have an average rank position of about 3 across all countries where our company appears for this term. Include the US and it pushes the average to 8/9th. Thanks David
| David-E-Carey0 -
Webmaster Tools vs Screaming from for 404's
Hey guys, I was just wondering which is better to use to find the 404's effecting your site. I have been using webmaster tools and just purchased screaming frog which has given me a totally different list of 404's compared to WMT. Which do I use, or do I use both? Cheers
| Adamshowbiz0 -
403 error
Hey guys, I know that a 403 is not a terrible thing, but is it worth while fixing? If so what is the best way to approach it. Cheers
| Adamshowbiz0 -
Stopping slow steady decline
I work for an ecommerce company and I have been tasked with trying to understand our lack of organic traffic. For the past two years our organic traffic is in free fall. We have 80% drop in organic visits since summer 2011. I can't put my finger on what is causing it. Here are a few hypothesis I've tried. Penalty - I don't think it is a penalty because we still have some first page results. Penguin- I know in the past (10 years), we haven't used gray hat (paying for blogging) strategies. But I don't see a steep decline that would lead me to think its a penguin update. Panda - For the past two years we have been re-writing content for our 10,000 products and creating videos. But even though our content is better than every, we haven't had any uptick in organic traffic. Does anyone have any suggestions on where / how to investigate these issues further? I've attached our organic traffic graph. October 2011 we launched a new site, saw a large dip in traffic. It slightly rebounded, and then has slowly suffocated ever since. organic-graph.jpg
| smcmark0 -
Can Silos and Exact Anchor Text In Links Hurt a Site Post Penguin?
Just got a client whose site dropped from a PR of 3 to zero. This happened shortly after the Penguin release, June, 2012. Examining the site, I couldn't find any significant duplicate content, and where I did find duplicate content (9%), a closer look revealed that the duplication was totally coincidental (common expressions). Looking deeper, I found no sign of purchased links or linking patterns that would hint at link schemes, no changes to site structure, no change of hosting environment or IP address. I also looked at other factors, too many to mention here, and found no evidence of black hat tactics or techniques. The site is structured in silos, "services", "about" and "blog". All page titles that fall under services are categorized (silo) under "services", all blog entries are categorized under "blogs", and all pages with company related information are categorized under "about". When exploring the site's links in Site Explorer (SE), I noticed that SE is identifying the "silo" section of links (i.e. services, about, blog, etc.) and labeling it as an anchor text. For example, domain.com/(services)/page-title, where the page title prefix (silo), "/services/", is labeled as an anchor text. The same is true for "blog" and "about". BTW, each silo has its own navigational menu appearing specifically for the content type it represents. Overall, though there's plenty of room for improvement, the site is structured logically. My question is, if Site Explorer is picking up the silo (services) and identifying it as an anchor text, is Google doing the same? That would mean that out of the 15 types of service offerings, all 15 links would show as having the same exact anchor text (services). Can this type of site structure (silo) hurt a website post Penguin?
| UplinkSpyder0 -
Will rel=canonical work here?
Dear SEOMOZ groupies, I manage several real estate sites for SEO which we have just taken over. After running the crawl on each I am find 1000's of errors relating to just a few points and wanted to find out either suggestion to fix or if the rel=canonical will resolve it as it is in bulk. Here are the problems...Every property has the following so the more adverts the more errors. each page has a contact agent url. all of these create dup title and content each advert has the same with printer friendly each advert has same with as a favorites page several other but I think you get the idea. Help!!! .... suggestions overly welcome Steve
| AkilarOffice0 -
Anchor text analysis
Hello! I'm doing a systematic review of my site after getting a bit of a heavy punishment from google last month. I think things are going in the right direction, but wanted some advice on anchor text. Here is a link to the top 200 terms as exported from WMT; https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AkGVm349qCtIdHYzR01EVDhBOHFIekJZS0FVbG9RN1E#gid=0 Can someone give me some advice on whether anything looks suspicious or not? or is it not that simple? My site is madegood.org. Thanks so much in advance. I've had some fantastic help on here already, but really any advice is appreciated. Cheers
| madegood0 -
Is it worth it to change old URLs to lower case?
Hi Mozzers, My site has a ton of URLs with upper case letters, such as http://www.consumerbase.com/Lawyer-Mailing-Lists.html I know upper case URLs are bad, but I am wondering if it is worth it to change old, already created pages. Should I change these URLs to all lower case and 301 redirect the old URL to the new one, or will that temporarily de-index all of these pages? Thanks!
| Travis-W0 -
Robots.txt best practices & tips
Hey, I was wondering if someone could give me some advice on whether I should block the robots.txt file from the average user (not from googlebot, yandex, etc)? If so, how would I go about doing this? With .htaccess I'm guessing - but not an expert. What can people do with the information in the file? Maybe someone can give me some "best practices"? (I have a wordpress based website) Thanks in advance!
| JonathanRolande0 -
How to handle city-based product selection and duplicate content?
Hi everyone, I've been searching the interwebs for a solution to my problem, but haven't really found anything conclusive. I've got a client with duplicate content issues; their website not only has a nation-wide website, but also 10 different sub-categories for different cities, with each subcategory having the same content as the main website. The reason they wanted city-based websites was due to the changing product offerings in each city. So City 1 may not have all the products available that City 2 does. Needless to say this has caused some duplicate content issues as most sections of the website have been multiplied by 10. When a visitor lands on any page of the website, they are greeted by a pop up asking for their location, which will then redirect them to their selected version of the website. As the copy cannot really be changed enough for each city to make it unique, I've been looking into canonical tags, but this would mean the localised versions will not be indexed by Google. Has anyone had any experience of a similar situation where the product range changes according to location, but it doesn't hurt SEO? Thanks in advance for any advice!
| Nimbus30000 -
Google Published Date - Does Google Lie?
Here's the scenario. I create a page called "ABC" and it gets published and found by Google lets say on the 13th of April. on the 15th (or 14th) i decide to update the URL, page Title, and content. (Redirect old URL to new URL as well) Will Google still show this page as being published on the 13th? or would it update the publish date according to the new URL? Greg | | | | | | <a id="question_reply-to-question-36769-description_codeblock" class="mceButton mceButtonEnabled mce_codeblock" style="color: #000000; border: 1px solid #f0f0ee; margin: 0px 1px 0px 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: transparent; cursor: default; vertical-align: baseline; width: 20px; border-collapse: separate; display: block; height: 20px;" title="Create Code Block" tabindex="-1"></a>Create Code Block | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
| AndreVanKets0 -
Would using javascript onclick functions to override href target be ok?
Hi all, I am currently working on a new search facility for me ecommerce site... it has very quickly dawned on me that this new facility is far better than my standard product pages - from a user point of view - i.e lots of product attributes for customers to find what they need faster, ability to compare products etc... All in all just better. BUT NO SEO VALUE!!! i want to use this search facility instead of my category/product pages... however as they are search pages i have "robots noindex them" and dont think its wise to change that... I have spoken to the developers of this software and they suggested i could use some javascript in the navigation to change the onlclick function to take the user to the search equivelant of the page... They said this way my normal pages are the ones that are still indexed by google etc, but the user has the benefit of using the improved search pages... This sounds perfect, however it also sounds a little deceptive... and i know google has loads of rules about these kinds of things, the last thing i want is to get any kind of penalty or any negative reaction from an SEO point of view... I am only considering this as it will improve the user experience on my website... Can any one advise if this is OK, or a "no no"... P.s for those wondering i use an "off the shelf" cart system and it would cost me an arm and a leg to have these features built into my actual category / product pages.
| isntworkdull0 -
Re-using site code.
Hi, I'm looking at launching a new website, and am keen to understand whether re-using the basic code behind one of my other sites will cause me an issue. I'll be changing the directory structure/ file names, etc - but it will basically leave me with a very similar-looking site to another in my portfolio - using code thats all ready out there, etc. Thanks, David
| newstd1000 -
Massive Nonsensical 301 on Large ecommerce Site
We are in the process of launching a large ecommerce site, which is a rebuild. Their old URL structure does not make it possible in our eyes to logically map every URL to it's corresponding new page. We have done our best to properly and manually redirect all pages that were receiving any amount of organic traffic and have also covered all pages that had external links. Our question is we will end up with potentially tens of thousands of 404 errors that will never fix themselves. The manual work will need to stop at some point. Would it be better to leave these 404's the way they are and just let them fall out of the index or should we take everything we cannot assign appropriately to a page like the products root or the home page? I'm also open to hearing any suggestions about how others have solved massive nonsensical 301's. Thanks in advance,
| Bevelwise0 -
Avoiding duplication in TLDs
I have started a ecom site with following config global version geekwik.com priced in usd india version geekwik.in priced in inr mostly the content in both sites is same (90% same), major difference is currency (and payment gateway) and helpline numbers etc How do I setup robots.txt and google webmaster so that indian users get results from India TLD and global users get results from global TLD and there is no duplication of content. .
| geekwik0 -
Drupal duplicate pages
Anyone else encountered massive numbers of duplicate pages being reported on SEO Moz crawls for Drupal based sites? I assumed it was b/c there was no redirect on the print format pages, so I fixed that with a cannonical tag. But still seeing 2 or 3 duplicate pages reported for many pages. Any experience fixing this would be awesome to hear about. Thanks, Kevin
| kevgrand0
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