Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

  1. Home
  2. SEO Tactics
  3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
Log in to post

Category: Intermediate & Advanced SEO

Looking to level up your SEO techniques? Chat through more advanced approaches.

  • SamCUK


    I'm getting increasingly worried as my site stopped ranking for all keywords 3 days ago and is yet to return. The sites been up about 6 months but I only started link building via MyBlogGuest about 2 months ago. I saw great results the very day before it disappeared as my rankings increased significantly. As far as I know MyBlogGuest is a legitimate way of building links and I was careful to use a variety of anchor text, url and branded links. I just can't explain why it's gone completely. It's still indexed when I check with site: and there are no errors in webmaster tools. The site is http://www.top-10-dating-reviews.com (The site does have some adult content!) and wondered if anyone could take a look to see if I'm missing something obvious. Any help much appreciated!

    | SamCUK
    0
  • mkhGT


    Does www.example.com and www.example.com/?utm_source=Google&utm_medium=Press+Release&utm_campaign=Google have the same SEO backlink value? I would assume that Google knows the difference.

    | mkhGT
    0
  • BobGW


    Hello, I'm assessing what to do to build relationships in my client's niche. For each possible backlink provider, I'm thinking 1. Like them on facebook 2. Follow them on Twitter 3. Add them on G+ 4. Read their recent blog posts. 5. Comment in their facebook account about what I liked about their latest blog posts and tweet (though I don't know what to tweet here) 6. Post helpful blog post comments 7. Get the conversation going, then talk to them introduce my content to them that will help them. (though I don't know how to make the transition) I'm marketing a PDF that is helpful for their site and an HTML article (same content as the PDF) that has been non-commercialized. This is for an ecommerce business. My biggest void is not knowing how to lead a good relationship conversation into a conversion. I don't want to be salesy. But I'm looking for general comments as well, like what to tweet and anything I've left out in the list.

    | BobGW
    0
  • Pretty-Klicks


    I am working with a client who runs a personal training business. He shares a fitness studio with another personal trainer to minimise costs. My issue is that the other guy has 'taken' the Google Places listing address as his business, rather than my client's. The gym itself is not a business, it is simply a shared workspace by two personal trainers - in the same way as a shared office space might be the address of several businesses. This presents a bit of a problem with Google Places verification. Is it best to: 'Alter' the address slightly so it appears to be a separate premises (e.g. 51 Something Street --> 51A Something Street) then use that address in all my citations Leave the address itself the same, but rely on the fact that there are separate domains, phone numbers and business names Any thoughts on this?

    | Pretty-Klicks
    1
  • marciofelias


    I have a customer who just bought a domain (and the full website) of a competitor and decided that they will no longer update the website purchased. The website of my client has a Domain Authority = 50 and DA of the website purchased is 45. Each of them was registered by different companies and are on different servers too.
    The reason for my message is that by being registered by different companies and are in differrent servers I can use the site purchased as a way to make link building to the main website (one way link buiding only from the website purchased to the main website), but I can put the website purchased as a subdomain of the main website and agregate content to the main website.
    In your opinion which would generate more benefits in terms of SEO to the main website? Links from the website purchased or put this website as a subdomain to the main website?

    | marciofelias
    0
  • AWCthreads


    Hi Mozzers, I can't rank (the page is nowhere on the Google grid that I can find) and I've not been able to move the needle at all on it. The page is http://www.lumber2.com/Western-Saddle-Pads-s/98.htm for keyword "western saddle pads." I'm inclined to think I'm cannabalizing the category with the products so I removed the word saddle from the majority of the product names on page. However, saddle pad or saddle pads is in the meta title for most if not all of the products. Do you think I'm cannabalizing with the product titles or is there something else going on? Thanks for any help.

    | AWCthreads
    0
  • CsmBill


    in Wordpress, I want to block Google from crawling my site using the primary navigation. I want to use anchor text links in the body and custom menus in the sidebar to make maximum benefit of the "first link counts" rule. In short, I want to obfuscate all of the links in my primary navigation without using the dreaded nofollow. I do not want to block other links to the pages - body text, custom menus, etc. . This would be site wide. I'd rather not use Ajax or any type of programming unless it's part of a plugin. Can anyone make a simple, Google-friendly suggestion?

    | CsmBill
    0
  • Lakshdeep


    We have a similar problem to http://www.seomoz.org/q/can-a-xml-sitemap-index-point-to-other-sitemaps-indexes Can a XML sitemap index point to other sitemaps indexes? According to the "Unique Doll Clothing" example on this link, it seems possible http://www.seomoz.org/blog/multiple-xml-sitemaps-increased-indexation-and-traffic Can someone share an XML Sitemap index within a XML sitemaps index example? We are looking for the format to implement the same on our website.

    | Lakshdeep
    0
  • BM7


    Hi thereGurus, sorry Aspirants  ;-), I have a really nice looking menu used in my standard page template that has some SEO issues now due to possibly causing 'too many onsite links' penalty/downgrade on some of my bigger pages going >120 links. Wanting to keep the nice menu, I want to work around the issues if possible. The menu is comprised of 7 buttons with various keywords pertinent to the site.  On the menu, hovering over the keyword in a button eg 'Technology' causes this button with word inside to do an animated slide down and a picture representative of 'Technology' to appear where the button was with the original button directly below it, which then a side menu slides out of to the right to reveal 5 anchor links that represent the 'Technology' menu category. The first option in this sub-menu is supposed to have the same anchor link as the description image and the button/button text that being it is like a category description. Trouble I am having is that the slide out menu requires a separate div for javascript reasons. I have one anchor covering the button and the pop-up image, but then I need a second anchor for the first line of the slide out menu (otherwise fails W3C). This is adding 7 duplicate anchors to the page on a e-Commerce page that already has too many anchors IMHO. I read in HTML5 you can have an anchor holding a div inside, but how about an un'd  div? The next four items on the slide out menu go to other anchor links so it first anchor needs to end prior to these, hence halfway through a div. Is there another way of making multiple items (across div boundaries etc) only go to/count as one single anchor link? Thanks for your help, Brad

    | BM7
    0
  • BobAnderson


    If visitor stats affect rankings should we be worried as we are making our website probably the most user friendly useful site in our field but this includes cutting down the time it takes for a user to order and our pages are also one page so all the information is there and easy to use the problem is this results in 1 page visits and probably one of the lowest visit times of our industry. Say for example a user sees all of the information and and gets a quote  another website has 5 pages the users spends more time and visits more pages to find how to order but they eventually leave after they have give up would this site win via Google user stats?

    | BobAnderson
    0
  • WebbyNabler


    Is there a benefit to diversifying your hosting providers?  I mean if there are 10 client sites on one shared hosting package and they all have links to my company because we give ourselves credit on all the sites we build. Will Google give the links to me less weight or even look at it as some link building scheme? Does private registration prevetn things like this. Would it help if i got my own IP's from different C blocks?  Thank you in advance Mozzer family!!

    | WebbyNabler
    0
  • MarieHaynes


    I do a lot of checking for duplicate content on sites.  I use chrome and generally I highlight a phrase, do right click and then "Search Google for...".  However, I would like to have a quick shortcut where I can search Google for a phrase that is enclosed in quotes. Is there a chrome extension for this?  If not, can I build one? Thanks.

    | MarieHaynes
    0
  • BigBlaze205


    My online store is selling air furnace filters. We only have 3 different filters to sell. (standard, mid-range quality and high quality) Each filters is available in 50 different sizes. This is a TOTAL of 150 products or 3 products with 50 options!!! My store is setup with the ''150 products'' option. MY PROBLEMS: All the page Title are the same, only the filter is change in the page title. ex: 10x20x1 furnace filters - shop at furnace filters canada 12x20x1 furnace filters - shop at furnace filters canada 14x20x1 furnace filters - shop at furnace filters canada ect... It is the same with the Meta Description, all the same only the size change. It is the same with the product description, all the same, only the size is changing. Trying to come out with 150 different page title, meta and product description is almost impossible. And you know like me, most shoppers will use there filters sizes in there keywords search term or phrase. YES, I have duplicate content all over my store. Is there a solution to this? This is my online store http://www.furnacefilterscanada.com/ Thank you, BigBlaze

    | BigBlaze205
    0
  • cewe


    Hi, I have a few questions around the best approach to retain as much link juice / authority from transitioning multiple domains into 1 single domain over the next year or so. I have 2 similar websites (www.brandA.co.uk and www.brandB.co.uk) which I need to transition to a new website (www.brandC.co.uk) over the next 2 years. Both A&B are established and have there own brand value, brand C will be a new website. I need to start introducing the brand from website C onto A&B straight away and then eventually drop the brands from A&B and just be left with C. One idea I am considering is: www.brandA.co.uk becomes brandA.brandC.co.uk (brandA sits as a subdomain on brandC website) Ultimately over time I would drop the subdomain (brandA) and just be left with www.brandC.co.uk The other option is: www.brandA.co.uk becomes brandC.co.uk/brandA...with the same ultimate aim as above. In both above case the same would be done for brandB, either becoming a subdomain of a folder on brandC website What I need to know is what is the best way to first pass any SEO goodness from the websites for brandA and brandB to the intermediate solution of either brandA.brandC.co.uk or brandC.co.uk/brandA (I see this intermediate solution being in place for approx 2 years). And then how to transition the intermediate solution into just having brandC.co.uk Which solution will aid growing the SEO goodness on the final brandC.co.uk website? Does google see subdomains as part of the main domain and thus the main domain will benefit from any links going to the subdomain or is it better to always use /folders as google sees these as more part of one website? ...or is there another option that I haven't considered? I know it's rater confusing so please give me a shout if you want anymore info. Thanks James

    | cewe
    0
  • edmundsseo


    The site I am working on is enormous. We have 71 sitemap files, all linked to from a sitemap index file. The sitemaps are not up to par with "best practices" yet, and realistically it may be another month or so until we get them cleaned up. I'm wondering if, for the time being, we should just remove the sitemaps from Webmaster Tools altogether. They are currently "broken", and I know that sitemaps are not mandatory. Perhaps they're doing more harm than good at this point? According to Webmaster Tools, there are 8,398,082 "warnings" associated with the sitemap, many of which seem to be related to URLs being linked to that are blocked by robots.txt. I was thinking that I could remove them and then keep a close eye on the crawl errors/index status to see if anything changes. Is there any reason why I shouldn't remove these from Webmaster Tools until we get the sitemaps up to par with best practices?

    | edmundsseo
    0
  • savageseo


    I've just launched a new site and have undertaken the following: Keyword friendly page titles Meta description Not a great deal of content on the site yet - but have a blog which we're trying to update as much as we can Analytics and Webmaster tools set up Dmoz submission Facebook, Twitter and Google+ page Google places set-up - waiting for postal pin I've signed up to here to help me to start building a link profile. However, would like to hear any more hints, tips or help on items I should be doing for a new site looking to move up rankings. Thanks

    | savageseo
    0
  • Nortski


    Hi everyone. A little background: I have a website that is 3 years old.  For a period of 8 months I was in the top 5 for my main targeted keyword.  I seemed to have survived the man eating panda but not so sure about the blood thirsty penguin. Anyway; my homepage, along with other important pages, have been wiped of the face of Google's planet.  First I got rid of some links that may not have been helping and disavowed them.  When this didn't work I decided to do a complete redesign of my site with better content, cleaner design, removed ads (only had 1) and incorporated social integration.  This has had no effect at all. I filed a reconsideration request and was told that I have NOT had any manual spam penalties made against me, by the way I never received any warning messages in WMT. SO, what could be the problem? Maybe it's duplicate content?  In WMT the Index Status indicates that there are 260 pages indexed.  However; I have only 47 pages in my sitemap and when I do a site: search on Google it only retrieves 44 pages.  So what are all these other pages? Before I uploaded the redesign I removed all the current pages from the index and cache using the remove URL tool in WMT. I should mention that I have a blog on Blogger that is linked to a subdomain on my hosting account  i.e. http://blog.mydomain.co.uk.  Are the blog posts counted as pages on my site or on Blogger's servers? Ahhhh this is too complicated lol Any help will be much appreciated! Many thanks, Mark.

    | Nortski
    0
  • ChadEisenhart


    I have mainly focused on SEO for local businesses and one of the 1st steps after optimizing my on page SEO I would attempt to claim all my free listings as those on GetListed.org. But this client is focusing on a more national market and lists an 800 number on his website. Should I suggest he display his local number also. And when I reference his phone number on the Get Listed.org opportunities should I also use his local number? Thanks

    | ChadEisenhart
    0
  • jimmy0225


    Hi, Iwas wondering what sites you use to check if your website has clean HTML & CSS code. I know there are many for load time. I remember coming across one that checked HTML and CSS and also listed the errors. Thanks in advance for any input Jimmy

    | jimmy0225
    0
  • SamCUK


    Yesterday I saw significant improvements in rankings and the first page resulapp for several keywords appeared to have changed and included my site. Today the results appear to have reverted back and my site is nowhere to be seen. At least before I was in the top 100 but now I'm nowhere?

    | SamCUK
    0
  • OkanKortan


    Hello when i was search "galatasaray" keyword (google.çcom.tr) i saw the results like this . Any idea about this situation ? search term : Galatasaray google.com.tr D93Si2A D93Si2A

    | OkanKortan
    0
  • intmktcom


    Hello, I have a website which is initially appeared in search engine as without www. Last week I made changes in preferred domain name that it appeared with www. In search engine it still shows as without www. I notified to google through webmaster tools that now my domain name is with www but it still shows without www. I want to know that does it affect in SEO and rankings. In Google webmaster tools I added my url with and without www however I kept preferred domain as with www. Do I need to make any extra changes in order to avoid confusion for search engines. Please guide. Thanks

    | intmktcom
    0
  • Kingof5


    We've about to relaunch one of our ecommerce sites and have a question regarding H1 & H2 tags. We use our primary keyword for each category in that category page's H1. We also include a block of text at the bottom of the page explaining the benefits of the products, the various styles we offer, personalization options, gift packaging, etc. We were planning on having an H2 at the beginning of that text that read 'About [keyword:]', but the question of duplicate H1 & H2 tags has come up. Is penalization possible for having them almost the same? It's not like they're not relevant - the H1 is referring to the category itself and the H2 references our explanation of the category. Just curious what the best way to approach this would be.

    | Kingof5
    0
  • tempowebdesign


    Although Matt Cutts said Press releases are not that great we still find success with PRweb.com.  Anybody finding any other sites that work?

    | tempowebdesign
    0
  • Hermski


    Hi everyone I don't seem to be able to keep big G off my back, even though I do not engage in any black hat or excessive optimization practices. Due to another unpleasant heavy SERP "fluctuation" I am in investigation mode yet again and want to take a closer look at one of the warnings within the SEOmoz dashboard, which is "Too many on page links". Looking at my statistics this is clearly the case. I wonder how you can even avoid that at times. I have a lot of information on my homepage that links out to subpages. I get the feeling that even the links within the roll-over menus (or dropdown) are counted. Of course, in that case then you will end up with a crazy amount of on page links. What about blog-like news entries on your homepage that link to other pages as well? And not to forget the links that result from the tags underneath a post? What am I trying to get at? Well, do you feel that a bad website template may cause this issue i.e. are the links from roll-over menus counted as links on the homepage even though they are not directly visible? I am not sure how to cut down on the issue as the sidebar modules are present on every page and thus up the links count wherever you are on the site. On another note, I've seen plenty of homepages with excessive information and links going out, would they be suffering from the search engines' hammer too? How do you manage the too many on page links issue? Many thanks for your input!

    | Hermski
    0
  • TheDude


    I am trying to redirect old dynamically created pages to a new static one (single page).  However, when I implement the redirects, it still uses part of the old dynamic url.  For instance... dynamic.php?var=example1 dynamic.php?var=example2 dynamic.php?var=example3 should all redirect to: static.html.  However, they are redirecting to: static.html?var=example1 static.html?var=example2 static.html?var=example3 The page is resolving fine, but I don't want google to misinterpret the new static page as numerous page with dup content. I tried this in PHP on the dynamic.php page as follows, but it the problem above persisted: header('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');
    header('Location: http://www.mysite.com/static.html'); I tried doing it in my .htaccess file as follows, but the problem persisted: redirect 301 /info/tool_stimulus.php?var=example1 http://www.mysite.com/static.html
    redirect 301 /dynamic.php?var=example2 http://www.mysite.com/static.html Can anyone solve this in PHP or w/ htaccess? Help!!! 🙂

    | TheDude
    0
  • PrizeWize


    Hey guys, Hope everybody is having a good day. Today i came across something i have never seen in the serps before that i would like to share and getting feedback on. When i search for 'woonverzekering' on google.nl #1 is: **Url:          ** www.independer.nl/woonverzekering/intro.aspx
    **page titel:  **Woonverzekering - Independer.nl When i search for 'woonhuisverzekering' on google.nl #1 is: **Url:  **         www.independer.nl/woonverzekering/intro.aspx
    page titel: Woonhuisverzekering? Vergelijk alle soorten woonverzekeringen - Independer.nl So basically 2 different queries show the same url with 2 different page titles in the serps. The only 'weird' thing i could find was a nobreakspace in the page title code: Woonhuisverzekering? Vergelijk alle soorten woonverzekeringen - Independer.nl I'm i missing something completely obvious here? Is this a commonly used technique.  Is the page title getting chopped up because of   ? What are they doing to get 2 page title results on 1 url?

    | PrizeWize
    0
  • knielsen


    lost a lot of rankings. 2 things have happened to my site over the past 2 weeks and I am trying to establish which may be the case: My site has 30.000 links from a top news site (on main bar across all pages - not for SEO, it just happened). My site lost 3,000 links from this site last week, when they were doing some cleaning up, which means I still have 25,000+ links from them. My site - job site - has published another job board's jobs so I get paid per click. This means ratio of my job vs external jobs is 1 to 5. So basically, I added last week 5 times more jobs that is already live on external site to get paid per click. In other words, my own site's unique content went down big time. Which of the 2 is more likely to cause the massive drop in rankings since last night?

    | knielsen
    0
  • jhinchcliffe


    Let me be very clear, I am not looking for info on how to rank keywords so please do not post about that. I have a list of keywords I chose and want to rank for, and every group of keywords are related. I was wondering, what is a good strategy for determining which keywords to start with? Should I take one keyword from each group so it looks more natural? Should I do a group of 10 related keywords at a time? Any ideas? Links? Tips? Resources? What have you done in the past?

    | jhinchcliffe
    0
  • seohdsupply


    We are vetting a vendor for our mobile website and they are recommending using a 302 redirect with rel=canonical vs. a 301 redirect due to 301 caching issues.  All the research I've done shows that a 301 is by far the better way to go do to proper indexing, which in turn will enhance our page authority.  Thoughts on why a 302 would be a better fit than a 301 on our mobile site?

    | seohdsupply
    1
  • WebbyNabler


    Google somehow has indexed a page of mine without the .html extension.  so they indexed  www.samplepage.com/page, so I am showing duplicate content because Google also see's  www.samplepage.com/page.html   How can I force google or bing or whoever to only index and see the page including the .html extension?  I know people are saying not to use the file extension on pages, but I want to, so please anybody...HELP!!!

    | WebbyNabler
    0
  • knielsen


    I run a job site - www.hawaiijobengine.com. Last week I incorporated jobs from Indeed.com (in order to make money every time a user clicks on Indeed jobs). Before, I had around 1200 jobs posted directly on my site and with Indeed's jobs I probably have around 4,000 jobs. When users click on the Indeed jobs they are taken to the employers website, application portal or other job board. Question: is there a good chance Google will have crushed me on my rankings due to the ratio of unique content on my site now having dropped massive with the Indeed jobs incorporated? Is there a chance Google is just temporarily dropping me due to this and in 1 weeks time the algorithm will probably have worked out what is happening and get more back to my previous rankings?

    | knielsen
    0
  • WebbyNabler


    In the HTML improvements section of Google Webmaster Tools, it is showing duplicate content and I have verified that the duplicate content they are listing does not exist.  I actually have another duplicate content issue I am baffled by, but that it already being discussed on another thread.  These are the pages they are saying have duplicate META descriptions, http://www.hanneganremodeling.com/bathroom-remodeling.html (META from bathroom remodeling page) <meta name="<a class="attribute-value">description</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">Bathroom Remodeling Washington DC, Bathroom Renovation Washington DC, Bath Remodel, Northern Virginia,DC, VA, Washington, Fairfax, Arlington, Virginia</a>" /> http://www.hanneganremodeling.com/estimate-request.html (META From estimate page) <meta name="<a class="attribute-value">description</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">Free estimates basement remodeling, bathroom remodeling, home additions, renovations estimates, Washington DC area</a>" /> WlO9TLh

    | WebbyNabler
    0
  • EcommerceSite


    We had an old site that used the urls for items site.com/32423432 we changed that to site.com/item name The old stuff has gone away and we have 301 redirects up. For some reason we are getting hit with duplicate titles on those pages and duplicate meta tags. The site relaunch was in November and we have a had a few problems but this just started showing up in the last week after having gone down. Any thoughts on a fix?

    | EcommerceSite
    0
  • stevedeane


    Hi guys, I have a client who wants to rank well for two very "difficult" keywords and eight easier ones. The easy ones are "treadmills + city" and the difficult ones are "treadmills" and "treadmill". We have got great traction on the "+city" keywords and he now ranks on page one for all those. However, we have noticed that although he ranks on page 2-3 for "treadmill" treadmills", those rankings fluctuate widely day to day. Rankings for the "+city" versions are stable, a rising slowly as I would expect. Rankings for the difficult keywords can be 235 one day, 32 the next week, 218 the day after that, then stable at 30ish for a week, then fluctuation again. I know Google update every day, but what are the likely causes of the easier keywords being stable, while the harder ones fluctuate? Thanks.

    | stevedeane
    0
  • NileCruises


    On our Google Webmaster Tools I'm getting a Severe Health Warning regarding our Robot.txt file reading: User-agent: *
    Crawl-delay: 20 User-agent: 008
    Disallow: / I'm wondering how I can fix this and stop it happening again. The site was hacked about 4 months ago but I thought we'd managed to clear things up. Colin

    | NileCruises
    0
  • SEOAccount32


    I am an SEO for a people search site. To avoid potential duplicate content issues for common people searches such as "John Smith" we are displaying the main "John Smith" result above the fold and add "other John Smith" search results inside an iframe. This way search engines don't see the same "other John Smith" search results on all other "John Smith" profile pages on our site and conclude that we have lots of duplicate content. We want to get away from using an iframe to solve potential duplicate content problem. Question: Can we display this duplicate "John Smith" content using a delayed AJAX call and robot.txt block the directory that contains the AJAX call?

    | SEOAccount32
    0
  • SCW


    Hey folks, I am about to dive into my first ASPX project. Nearly every link on the home page results in a pop-up window displaying the related page content. Despite this quirky approach to IA and UX... a quick crawl test reveals good accessibility with very few Client Errors and no Server Errors. Questions (to those with ASPX experience, please): 1.) In dealing with aspx, is there anything I paying particular attention to? 2.) Are redirects handled with htaccess? 3.) Since the crawl test pulled the urls and meta descriptions related to the aforementioned "pop-up" pages - is it safe to assume the content in the pop-up pages is also being accessed by the search bots? Thanks for your input - much appreciated?

    | SCW
    0
  • NetvantageMarketing


    Working with the main site featured in this Open Site Explorer comparison (you'll need a pro account to view this), and have been for quite some time. Recently we've slid behind Ebay (huge brand, I get it), but the other competitors don't really make sense to me. Main phrase is pontoon boats, and maybe I'm too close to this, but we seem to be in the best shape overall in terms of the domain, the page itself, and even our social media is pretty successful (we're closing in on 5,000 likes and have a pretty engaged audience). More internal linking is an opportunity, but I'd like another set of eyes (or several for that matter) to weigh in on opinions. I'm a bit stumped. Thanks Mozzers!

    | NetvantageMarketing
    0
  • Harbor_Compliance


    Hello everyone, I've been building links for a while now and none of them show up in Explorer.  My domain authority hasn't changed for about a month or so.  When does Google do crawls and when does SEOMoz do crawls? Thanks

    | Harbor_Compliance
    0
  • lcourse


    I have a couple of partial match domains in the format KEYOWRDdiscount.com and also the website name resembles domain name. "Car Discount" is not my website but just an example to illustrate: 
    Is "Car Discount" a problematic anchor text for CarDiscount.com?
    Should I try to modify existing external anchor texts to "CarDiscount" or "CarDiscount.com" instead of "Car Discount" Do you know of any cases where such anchor texts coinciding with partial match domain were likely reason for penguin penalization? Thanks.

    | lcourse
    0
  • WebbyNabler


    I spoke with a potential client yesterday and for legitimate reasons they have multiple domain names, all very closely related in name to each other pointing to one site. His main site. So for example this is how things look, mainsiteva.com, mainsitedc.com, mainsitepa.com, mainsiteca.com, mainsitega.com, mainsitela.com ALL forward to mainsite.com This is being done because they used to have different sites for different geographies. Will google look at this as some form of manipulation?

    | WebbyNabler
    1
  • rodrigofreitas


    I have a small translation agency in Brazil (this website), totally dependent on SEM. We are in business since 2007, and we were on top position for many relevant keywords until the middle of 2011, when the ranking for the most important keywords started dropping. In that time, we believed that we needed to redesign the old static website and replace it by a new modern one, with fresh content and with weekly updates, which we did, and it's now hosted on Squarespace. I took care to keep the old links working with 301 redirections. When we made the transfer from the static site to Squarespace (Mar/2012, see the attachment), the ranking dropping became even more serious. Today, we have less than 50 unique visitors per day, in a total desperate situation! To make things worse, we received an alert from Google on 23/September/2012 talking about unnatural inbound links, but Google said that "As a result, for this specific incident we are taking very targeted action on the unnatural links instead of your site as a whole", so we thought we didn't need to worry about. Google was correct, I worked many hours to register our website in web directories, I thought there would be no problem since I was doing this manually. My conclusions are: Something happened prior to Mar/2012 that was making us losing territory. I just don't know what! The migration to Squarespace was a huge mistake. I lost control over the html, and squarespace doesn't do a good job optimizing the pages for SEO. We also were also blasted by Penguin on September, but I believe this is not the main cause of the drop. We were already running very badly at this time. My actions are: a) I generated a DTOX report and I'm trying to clean up the links marked as toxic. That's a hard work! After that I will submit a reconsideration request. b) I'm working on the site: Improving internal link building for relevant keywords Recently I removed a "tag cloud" which I believe was hurting my SEO. Also, I did some redirections that were missing. c) I trying to generate new content to improve link building to my site. d) I'm also considering to stop putting all my coins on this domain, and maybe start a fresh new one. Yes, I'm desperate! 🙂 I would appreciate a lot to hear from you guys, expert people! Thanks a lot, MWcEdPa.png?1

    | rodrigofreitas
    0
  • davhad


    I am using the Chrome extension and looking at a SERP, when a page is said to have 2000 incoming links, does that include tweets with a link back to this page? What about retweets. Are those counted separately or as one? And what about independent tweets that have exactly the same content (tweet text + link)

    | davhad
    0
  • BrianAlpert78


    Hey everyone, I've been trying to figure out a way to set up some 301 redirects to handle the broken links left behind after a site restructuring, but I can only ever find information on 2 methods that I can't use (as far as I can tell). The first method is to do some stuff with an htaccess file, but that looks like it only works on Linux-based servers. The method described for Windows servers is generally to install this IIS rewrite/redirect module and run that, but I don't think our web hosting company allows users to log directly into the server, so I wouldn't be able to use the IIS thing. Is there any other way to get a 301 redirect set up? And is this uncommon for a web hosting company to do, or do you all just run your sites on Linux-based servers or your own Windows machines? Thanks!

    | BrianAlpert78
    0
  • EcommerceSite


    In webmaster tools my site is showing that it is taking longer and longer to load, and it has now doubled. Is there a way to check which pages are the problem? The site is quite large so I can't check them one at a time.

    | EcommerceSite
    0
  • SeattleJoe


    Hi everyone! I have a client that was ranking very nicely for a number of keywords. In the 5 pack for most of the keywords we were targeting. His account went under review for some unknown reason about 2 months ago. It disappeared from the listing... Then a few weeks ago it became approved again. He is now no longer ranking for any of those keywords. He is ranking for some obscure ones but the money words are gone. Do you think this was due to the review? Some sort of GP update over the last 60 days? All of my other clients are still ranking strong in Google Places. Any ideas?

    | SeattleJoe
    0
  • panini


    Hi Mozzers, A quick question regarding Google Penguin recovery. A domain I have was hit by Penguin and we got a message in Webmaster Tools. We went to work fixing links we thought were most harmful, documented the evidence and did a reconsideration request. Google's reply was "No manual spam actions found". If reconsideration requests aren't the way to go then of course I will continue to build good natural links. But if I remove more links which I consider to be harmful will I ever know if the penalty is removed? Is there a point at which the algorithm would remove the penalty and inform me? Thanks!

    | panini
    0
  • PatriotOutfitters81


    Our website has dynamic URLs and we are moving to another server/platform. 301 redirects is looking like a highly unlikely solution. A 3rd party company is handling the back-end of the website which they say works more like a "search engine" than a traditional website. Maybe that explains why they're having a hard time with the 301 redirects. Worst case scenario: we can't use the 301 redirect. What else can we do? We are considering "Indicate your canonical (preferred) URLs by including them in a Sitemap" as Google describes here: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139066#2. I'm wondering if this method only applies to duplicate content........and what would happen once the old website results in a 404 page...... HELP! We need to cross over to the new platform as soon as possible.

    | PatriotOutfitters81
    0
  • drimlike


    Hello everyone, We are facing a challenging decision about where our website (Flash Gaming website) is going. We are in the process of creating html5 games in the same theme of the flash games that we provide to our users. Now our main concern is to decide how to show this new content to the user? Shall we create brand new set of urls such as : http://www.mydomain.com/games/mobile/kids/ Or shall we adapt the main desktop url : http://www.mydomain.com/games/kids/ and show the users two different versions of the page depending on whether they are using a mobile device (so they see a mobile version) or a pc/laptop (so they a see desktop version). Or even redirect people to a sub-domain : http://m.mydomain.com/ The main idea we had is to keep the same url structure, as it seems that google is giving the same search results if you are using a mobile device or not. And creating a new set of urls or even a sub-domain, may involve a lot of work to get those new links to the same PA as the desktop URL that is here and know since a while now. Also the desktop page game should not be accessible to the mobile devices, so  should this be redirected (301?) to the mobile homepage of the site? But how google will look at the fact that one url is giving 2 different contents, CSS etc, and also all those redirects might look strange... we are worried that doing so will hurt the page authority and its ranking ... but we are trying to find the best way to combine SEO and user experience. Any input on this will be really appreciated. Cheers,

    | drimlike
    0

Got a burning SEO question?

Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


Start my free trial


Browse Questions

Explore more categories

  • Moz Tools

    Chat with the community about the Moz tools.

  • SEO Tactics

    Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers

  • Community

    Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!

  • Support

    Connect on product support and feature requests.

Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.