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

Category: Intermediate & Advanced SEO

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


  • Hi All, I am wondering if google still does give importance to the length of the domain or url. If yes then how much is the acceptable length of a domain and URL. Many Thanks!

    | HiteshBharucha
    0

  • Hey guys, If for example, I'm faced with a client who has a website similar to: http://www.symphonyonline.co.uk/ How should I proceed with the on-site optimization? Should I create new pages on the website? Should I create a blog for the site to increase my reach? Please give me your tips on how to proceed with this kind of website. Thanks.

    | BruLee
    0

  • Here are the numbers- Pages submitted on sitemap- About 18k Total Pages indexed on 12/30- About 250k Total Pages indexed on 1/6- About 81k We made no site changes in that week, why the sudden drop? Also why is total pages indexed so much higher than sitemap?

    | EcommerceSite
    0

  • I would like a full list of 301 redirects that we have on our site. Is there a way to export it? I tried Bing Webmaster tools and the list was incomplete. We use IIS. Any ideas?

    | EcommerceSite
    0

  • Hi, We have a new client who has built a brand in the UK on a xyz.com domain. The "xyz.com" is now a brand and features on all marketing. Lots of SEO work has taken place and the UK site has good rankings and traffic. They have now expanded to the US and with offline marketing leading the way, xyz.com is the brand being pushed in the US. So with the launch of the offline marketing US IP's are now redirected to a US version of the site (subfolder) with relevant pricing and messaging. This is great for users, but with Googlebot being on a US IP it is also being redirected and the UK pages have now dropped out of the index. The solution we need would ideally have both UK and US users searching for xyz.com, but would see them land on respective static pages with correct prices. Ideally no link authority would be moved via redirection of users. We have considered the following solutions Move UK site to subfolder /uk and redirect UK ips to this subfolder (and so not googlebot) downside of this is it will massively impact the UK rankings which are the core driver of the business - also would this be deemed as illegal cloaking? natural links will always be to the xyz.com page and so longer term the US homepage will gain authority and UK homepage will be more reliant on artificial linkbuilding. Use a overlay that detects IP address and requests users to select relevant country (and cookies to redirect on second visit) this has been rejected by ecommerce team as will increase bounce rate% & we dont want users to be able to see other countries due to prduct and price differences. Use a homepage with country selection (and cookies to redirect on second visit) this has been rejected by ecommerce team as will increase bounce rate% & we dont want users to be able to see other countries due to prduct and price differences. Is there an easy solution to this problem that we're overlooking? Is there another way of legal cloaking we could use here? Many thanks in advance for any help here

    | Red_Mud_Rookie
    0

  • With Adwords they request a Privacy Policy and T&C's sometimes for an Ad to be approved. Silly question I know but do you think Google looks out for pages like this to identity websites which are more genuine for organic? Thanks

    | activitysuper
    0

  • After having bad experiences with a few seo and ppc companies, I would like to find a company that operates on the premise that they should get paid for producing results instead just for signing a contract. I'm not thinking that any payment is contingent results but that a large portion of the billing is. I also know that it can take several months to get to an seo goal so I'm not taking a "you have one month to fix our site or we don't pay" approach. Is there a company out there that has enough confidence in their white-hat processes that they actually back their services with some sort of guarantee?

    | IanTheScot
    0

  • Hi Mozzers, We're having trouble with duplicate content between two sites, so we're looking to add some oomph to the rel canonical link elements we put on one of our sites pointing towards the other to help speed up the process and give Google a bigger hint. Would adding a hyperlink on the "copying" website pointing towards the "original" website speed this process up? Would we get in trouble if added about 80,000 links (1 on each product page) with a link to the matching product on the other site? For example, we could use text like "Buy XY product on Other Brand Name and receive 10% off!"

    | Travis-W
    0

  • Well just set up SEO Moz to find out someone thought it funny to build a load of links to our site http://bluetea.com.au/ with the anchor txt "Buy Cocks" .... PLEASE PLEASE let me know how much I should worry about this and how can I get rid of it?

    | Intrested
    0

  • Hi all, Just a quick question .. I currently have a competition running on Facebook for fan page likes likes but I also have a post on my blog also talking about the competition which links to Facebook and my main e commerce site. since the competition is doing relatively well i would like to draw more attention to it but via my blog rather than linking to Facebook ... how would you go about it? Many thanks

    | GarethEJones
    0

  • I have two categories currently "Men's Christian Jewellery" and "Women's Christian Jewellery" but neither pick up search engine traffic as well as just "Christian Jewellery" as a unisex category. My question is this; if I create a new category "Christian Jewellery" but then remove the two others and create 301 redirects from them to this new category, will this transfer all of the juice from the other pages to this new one? Thanks in advance for any replies! 🙂

    | acecream
    0

  • Hi All, Perhaps it's been like this all along (I don't think so) but can someone tell me why some pages with Google sitelinks now look like this (see the "Coke" search) while others look like this (see the "Amazon" search image). Is this because of Rich Snippet use? One of my client's SiteLinks used to resemble the Amazon one, but now resembles the Coke one (not preferred). Any input? Thanks, Chris Elevated Synergy Group - SEO coke.png amazon.png

    | Chris.Bleill
    0

  • Hello folks! I am just about to launch a mobile specific version of our website. We were not able to make the main site responsive so have decided to make a seperate copy on an m dot subdomain. I have kept the url structure identical between both sites and added a canonical url on the mobile pages pointing to the desktop site. I will detect and redirect all mobile devices and googlebot mobile crawler to the m dot site. The questions i have are as follows... Is that the best approach if you use a mobile specific site on a seperate subdomain? What type of redirects should i use to send mobile users (and googlebot mobile)  to the mobile site? My mobile site does not have all the pages the desktop site has. What happens if i redirect a mobile user from a page on the desktop site to a page on the mobile site that does not exist? (will give 404 currently). I guess i could maintain a list of valid mobile urls but this would be a pain (and a bit of an overhead) Your help is most appreciated Regards

    | RobertHill
    0

  • On our website, www.BusinessBroker.net, we have 3 different versions of essentially the same page for each of our State Business for Sale Pages.   Back in August, we did a test and did 301 redirects using 5 States.   For a long while after doing the redirects, the pages fell out of Google search results - we used to get page 1 rankings.   Just recently they started popping back up on Page 1.   However, I noticed that the new page meta data is not what is being picked up -- here is the example. Keyword Searched for in Google -- "Maine Business for Sale" Our listing shows up on Page 1 -- # 8 Result URL returned is correct preferred version: - http://www.businessbroker.net/state/maine-Businesses_For_Sale.aspx However, the Page Title on this returned page is still the OLD page title - OLD TITLE -- maine Business for Sale Ads - maine Businesses for Sale & Business Brokers - Sell a Business on Business Broker Not the title that is designated for this page - New Title - Maine Businesses for Sale - Buy or Sell a Business in ME | BusinessBroker.net Ditto for Meta Description. Why is this happening? Also have a problem with lower case showing up rather than upper case -- what's causing this? http://www.businessbroker.net/state/maine-Businesses_For_Sale.aspx versus -- http://www.businessbroker.net/State/Maine-Businesses_For_Sale.aspx Any help would be appreciated. Thanks, MM

    | MWM3772
    0

  • Hello folks! Name is Mike, i'd like to ask some of you your opinion on this matter. My company hired an SEO company (reputable company in LA) to get our rankings where we want them to be.  They've been somewhat successful, we were actually quite happy with their performance.  I do mostly print marketing and graphic design for my company, I do manage our website and online store.  As a cost saving measure we've decided to cut their service (expensive) and the SEO is now brought in-house - that means its my responsibility now.  By no means am I a complete newbie, I pretty much know what I need to do in order to maintain our rankings and improve as well.  And with the knowledgebase here at SEOMOZ i should be fine (i hope). Thing is that I have asked our previous SEO company to supply a list of all inbound links they created.  They've been silent, no response.  Am I asking for too much??  I ran some of my links through OpenSite Explorer (great tool by the way) and found tons of incoming links using black hat tactics.  I don't see how anybody could benefit making these links but the SEO company who we recently got rid of.  I am quite certain they are responsible for these links.  Black hat tactics such as keyword stuffing and anchor links (with very small font) on the footer of some random website.  Kinda upsets me that we paid so much money for this type of crap.  They never offered any advise with respect to on-site SEO which I am now finding out I have a lot of on-site optimizing thank to SEOMOZ. I don't know if its such a big deal or if am simply overreacting.  I am concerned of my company's site getting penalized by the search engines and making my job as in-house SEO much more dificult. Is this a big deal? Should I ignore it and begin building my own quality links and content? Thanks

    | mike_sif
    0

  • Working on developing a news product and wondering if there are tools available to gauge search interest in a particular topic. For those that work in news, what are your favorite SEO tools?

    | nicole.healthline
    0

  • I'm curious to know what tools others are using to get their content to index faster (other than html sitmap and pingomatic, twitter, etc) Would installing the wordpress pubsubhubbub plugin help even though it uses pingomatic? http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/pubsubhubbub/

    | webestate
    0

  • Last week I decided to switch for a UK server to a US one at Hostgator since most of my visitors are from the US. About nine hours later 99% of my pages disappeared from google rankings, only a few non-relevant pages are at position 100-200. All decent (1000-2000 word) articles on specific topics, are gone. These pages were getting 2-3 minutes per user of readership and a low bounce rate, so I think they were pretty good quality. Does anyone think it's possible I got accidentally added on a blacklisted IP? Or why would something like this happen. Since then, I've tried switching back to the old IP for 3 days, that didn't work. Now I've filed a reinclusion request with the details. Has anyone had a similar experience? What can possibly cause this massive drop in rankings and traffic? Any help is much appreciated!

    | zpeti
    0

  • Hi all, we recently launched some articles with photo galleries. Our CMS produces a single URL for each photo you click--> www.domain.com/article-url/photogallery/1, www.domain.com/article-url/photogallery/2 and so forth... We have 6-15 photos in our galleries. Each photo has a caption which contains 1-3 sentences. We do not advertise on our pages, so these gallery pages just contain of the top navigation, sidebar, footer, picture and the caption. My question: Google is indexing these URLs, do you think that they will be considered spammy, as there is almost no content on these pages? Should we noindex them? Or canonical them to the article URL? Or write more content to each photo and let them be indexed??? Thanx....

    | accessKellyOCG
    0

  • Hi, I have few articles on my site that are quite good both SEO wise (getting organic search traffic) and as a reading material. They get lots of traffic and people are staying and reading them (2-4 minutes on page). The problem with these articles is that people are reading them and then leave. These are landing pages for certain queries so I assume that the readers are getting what they wanted but when they finish they exit. The bounce rate is 70%-85%. Are these type of pages good or bad for my site? Last note, my site is an e-commerce store. I do try to "motivate" more people to navigate to other pages but the majority do and will probably leave (because they were looking for answers and not products). Needless to say that the articles are related to my site's subjects and products.

    | BeytzNet
    0

  • I am looking to create some more trust on my website by subscribing to BBB.  I have heard that my site is penalized and loses "link juice" if I place the BBB logo link in my page footer on every page of my website.  Does anyone know how much I am penalized? Should I only put it on my conversion pages and maybe my main 10 sub pages? My main goal is to assist in getting conversions but I don't want to do it at the expense of getting a penalty. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thank you, Boo

    | Boodreaux
    0

  • Hi guys I have been passed this website: http://www.text-link-ads.com Has anyone ever used text-links ads before?? Can anyone please show me the way and suggest any really good lin buying companies?  I am really fiding it hard to find good places to place inbound links into our website.. Thanks Gareth

    | GAZ09
    0

  • Hello All, First of all I would like to thank everybody here for sharing such great knowledge with such amazing and heartfelt passion.It really is good to see. Thank you. My story / question: I recently sold a site with more than 100k pages indexed in Google. I was allowed to keep links on the site.These links being actual anchor text links on both the home page as well on the 100k news articles. On top of that, my site syndicates its rss feed (Just links and titles, no content) to this page. However, the new owner made a mess, and now the site could possibly be seen as bad linking to my site. Google tells me within webmasters that this particular site gives me more than 400K backlinks. I have NEVER received one single notice from Google that I have bad links. That first. But, I was worried that this page could have been the reason why MY site tanked as bad as it did. It's the only source linking so massive to me. Just a few days ago, I got in contact with the new site owner. And he has taken my offer to help him 'better' his site. Although getting the site up to date for him is my main purpose, since I am there, I will also put effort in to optimizing the links back to my site. My question: What would be the best to do for my 'most SEO gain' out of this? The site is a news paper type of site, catering for news within the exact niche my site is trying to rank. Difference being, his is a news site, mine is not. It is commercial. Once I fix his site, there will be regular news updates all within the niche we both are in. Regularly as in several times per day. It's news. In the niche. Should I leave my rss feed in the side bars of all the content? Should I leave an achor text link on the sidebar (on all news etc.) If so: there can be just one keyword... 407K pages linking with just 1 kw?? Should I keep it to just one link on the home page? I would love to hear what you guys think. (My domain is from 2001. Like a quality wine. However, still tanked like a submarine.) ALL SEO reports I got here are now Grade A. The site is finally fully optimized. Truly nice to have that confirmation. Now I hope someone will be able to tell me what is best to do, in order to get the most SEO gain out of this for my site. Thank you.

    | richardo24hr
    0

  • Hi everyone, I have a client with multiple locations in the same city. I would like to have their Goolge places listing show up under the main website listing. Currently, one of the Google places listings in being pulled in directly below the main website but not the other. The Zagat rating is being pulled in as well. I would like to have both locations show up when you type in the name of the business. Any ideas how to do this?

    | SixTwoInteractive
    0

  • I need some SEO advice on an odd scenario: We are launching a new product line (party supplies) on it's own domain (PartySuperCenter.com).  Due to some internal/technical reasons we will not be able to launch the site until the summer.  We already have the product in our warehouse so the owners want to created a section on our current site (CostumeSuperCenter.com) for the new products.  Once the new site is up the product will be removed from our current site and moved to the new site. I am concerned about the effect this will have on our SEO - having thousands of product pages appear and then disappear after a few months.  I was thinking about blocking the pages using the "noindex" tag.  Is this how you would handle it? Thanks in advance for your help!

    | costume
    0

  • I have a potential client who is looking for a digital marketing strategy that targets other CPA's.  Essentially, they provide cost reduction/tax services that certain CPA's may not provide.  As you can imagine, the CPA's are searching for other CPA's with this type of service. I was thinking social/email marketing to keep my company's brand at the top of mind of some of these other CPA's.  They have a national practice and can middle market cpa's around the country.  I am also gonna recommend they slightly modify their business model so they can reach out to other industry sectors (b2B). Any insights on how to tackle this strategy?  What strategies would you consider for them?  Does anyone have any CPA's they do business with?  Thanks.

    | JQC
    0

  • Hi, I have a 2 month old blog with me, i have submitted a few press releases for the start, later in these 2 months, i got about 40 guest posts, which i've written and submitted at myblogguest site. My niche is in health. Currently my serps are at 16th page which is not a good position. I want to do more link building, but at myblogguest, no one are interested in my niche and don't want to publish content related to my niche, so it becoming hard for me to find guest blogs related to my niche. But i want to get more links in order for my blog to rank well. Is it ok if i write guest posts in other niches as well like technology and put a link in author's resource box? Does it become useful? please help as i find no other sources for my link building task, i tried researching for guest blogs in google also, but i don't find any related to my niche. Seems like, i cannot go further with my link building. Please help me. Thanks
    Dheer

    | Vegitt
    0

  • My commercial real estate  web site (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com) allows visitors to search for office space listings. The site sources listings through a third party and they are displayed in an i-frame. The i-frame directs visitors to listing pages such as: http://listings.nyc-officespace-leader.com/getspace.mpl?sp_id=A0173921&cust_id=offspldr Atleast 10,000 of these pages have backlinks to my site. My question is the following: Could these tens of thoudands of alpha numeric URLs be detrimental to my sites ranking on Google after the Panda/Penguin updates? SIte traffic dropped from 7,000 per month to about 3,300 after the April Google update. Rewriting content for dozens of  pages and adding a blog have only somewhat mitigated the negative effects of Panda/Penguin. Could Google be viewing these links from the third party lisitng provider as a negative when they viewed these links as a plus before? Any downside to removing the third party links and  parsing these listings from landlord websited and displaying them as part of my site with their own URL, title tag, description tag? Obviously the new URLS would not be alphanumeric. If these links have not caused the drop in traffic last April, what could be responsible? Thanks in advance for your opinion!!! Alan

    | Kingalan1
    0

  • Hello, Some of the hottest link building techniques right now are guest posting, viral content, and link bating. But I often see SEOs produce content that has very little relevance to the actually industry they are in. For instance, a dentist might build links by guest posting on a tech site, an attorney might create an infographic on color psychology, and an accountant might venture into celebrity gossip. While more advanced SEOs try to make sure that the content they produce has some relevance to their industry (even if it's marginal), where is the line drawn?

    | lezal
    0

  • Hi guys, This question was loosely answered here (http://www.seomoz.org/q/will-google-index-a-site-with-white-text-will-it-give-it-bad-ratings), but I wanted to elaborate on the concern. The issue I have is this, http://www.searchenginexperts.com.au/preview/white-text-white-background-issue Of the four div elements on the page, which; is best practice for SEO? and which of them would not be penalized by google on the grounds of hidden text? The reason I ask is that I have a site that is currently implementing the first div styling, but if you either remove the image OR uncheck the repeat-x (in inspect element) the text is left as white on white. I have added the transparent image on green to prove that having a background colour to back up the tiled image is not always going to work. What can be done in this scenario? Thanks in advance, Dan (From my managers account)

    | RuchirP
    0

  • Ive noticed there are quite a few websites copying the content from my site I have in Google news. After speaking to a friend, they told me that there are plugins to help prevent this from happening or leaving some sort of finger print in the copied content. My site uses author tags already. Does anyone have recommendations of plugins to use?

    | JohnPeters
    0

  • I have a couple of reviews from clients on Google that seem to have just disappeared. What gives?

    | bronxpad
    0

  • We publish really solid content on our blog, but are having trouble acquiring comments and subscribers due to the dull nature of our industry.  So we are considering dofollowing blog comments as incentive.  Of course, the comment will be moderated.  Do you think this is a good idea?

    | Choice
    0

  • I am trying to implement Structured Data markup on a large e-commerce site that has ancient code and is not on any standard e-commerce platform. It is a Webstore we self-host that was developed for us and heavily customized. What's worse is that I don't have access to the source code. I have to somehow instruct our IT Director how and where to place everything. So I'm going to need to be meticulously specific. As I began wading through our code and determining where to insert code as instructed by Schema.org I ran across this on one of their pages: "This class contains derivatives of properties from the GoodRelations Vocabulary for E-Commerce, created by Martin Hepp. GoodRelations is a data model for sharing e-commerce data on the Web that can be expressed in a variety of syntaxes, including RDFa and HTML5 Microdata. More information about GoodRelations can be found at http://purl.org/goodrelations/." I went to check it out and it appears that this could be a great resource as it has a snippet generator and several "cookbooks" for adding micro data to our site. Here's a link to their snippet generator: http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/tools/grsnippetgen/ However, with a catalog of 5,000 SKUs, needless to say we aren't going to plug in our products into this generator one-by one. Has anyone here successfully used GoodRelations to help them implement micro data into a large E-commerce site that isn't a standard platform (not Magento, WP, Joomla or Volusion) ?? I would be very greatful to anyone who can share their experiences and or make suggestions on how we might best proceed. Thanks! Dana

    | danatanseo
    0

  • Hello, We're writing our biggest article and trying to make it best-of-the-web. Custom illustrations, comprehensive content, maybe video slideshows How do I help people navigate this big thing? Is there some pretty navigation systems you've seen work? There's a lot of sections and my only idea so far is to use an anchor/id href attribute for each section having a big list of sections at the top of the article.

    | BobGW
    0

  • I have error messages in Google Webmaster that state that Googlebot encountered errors while attempting to access the robots.txt.  The last date that this was reported was on December 25, 2012 (Merry Christmas), but the last cache date was November 16, 2012 (http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Awww.etundra.com/robots.txt&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a). How could I get this error if the page hasn't been cached since November 16, 2012?

    | eTundra
    0

  • Hi everyone.  I have a hopefully interesting client question I wanted to pose.  I do work for a company with three distinct locations that have unique offerings, service areas, etc. I wouldn't want to see the three locations as subfolders (example company.com/locationone/, company.com/locationtwo/) of one site.  They are large and unique presences.  Fortunately, they did not organize their locations in such a way, and currently have their locations organized as subdomains, as in locationone.company.com, locationtwo.company.com.  I might have preferred locationone.com, locationtwo.com, etc., but that is what I am working with. Their developer has been building new content on fourth level domains, as in newcontent.locationone.company.com and newcontent2.locationone.company.com.  In one case one of these fourth level domains also contains a different but parallel checkout process to the one already present on third level domain locationone.company.com. I am looking for advice on how to interlink these sites, and whether to discourage them from building out new fourth level domains (newcontent3.locationone.company.com, etc.) or even to get rid of the current fourth level domains altogether.  I'm not sure if the fact that they're subdomains and not subfolders matters as much as it used to. Is this a case of subdomain phobia, or are my concerns justified?  Any special advice on dealing with interlinking across fourth, third, and second level domains? Thanks!

    | rlevers
    0

  • I want to make some changes to my Wordpress site, and want to somehow set up a live staging area. Does anyone know of a good way to do this? I want all of the same content there I just want to be able to make changes to it and try it all out before going live. Any thoughts on this? Also I want to be sure the staging site doesn't get indexed since it will be a complete duplicate of my existing site. Thanks!

    | NoahsDad
    0

  • Hi Mozzers! We are going through a rebranding process, and as of this morning we have 3 domains, all with identical content. For example (not real domain names): www.fantastic.com
    www.fantasticfireworks.com
    www.fireworks.com We are using 3 domains to ease the rebranding transition. We currently only want people to visit 'www.fantastic.com,' and if they visit the other 2 domains we want them redirected. Since we will be using these other domains eventually, should we use 302 redirects instead of 301s?  The other domains are new and do not have any domain authority or sites linking in, so we do not need to worry about link juice. Does it really matter what type of redirect we use? Thanks!

    | Travis-W
    0

  • I run a website at the bottom we have scroller box which the old SEO guy used to contain all of the crap content so we can rank for keywords not on the page and put all of the links in to spread the link juice into the other inner category pages (some of these pages are only listed on our innerpages otherwise). We are trying to remove this content and add decent content above the fold with relevant long tail keywords in (it is currently decent but could do with expanding if we are removing this large chunk of text in theSEO box and some long tail keywords will be missing if we just remove it) we can add a couple of links into this new content but will struggle to list the category pages not on the left hand navigation. If we were to list all of the pages in the left hand nav would we dilute the power going to the main pages currently or would we be in the same position we are now? For example at the minute I would say the power is mainly going to the left hand nav links and then a small amount of power to the links in the SEO content if we put these into the nav will it not dilute the power to the main pages. Thank you for your time and hopefully your help.

    | BobAnderson
    0

  • Hi eCommerce gurus, We sell a number of products, electrical in nature where the unit is from a group (sub-model is probably a good description) but each has important different physical properties. An example description is: #1 Clipsal C-Bus Wireless Plug Adapter 1 Channel Leading Edge Dimmer, 3A C-Bus Wireless Plug Adaptors allow mains GPO operated equipment to be controlled as part of a C-Bus Wireless network. The buttons on a C-Bus Wireless Plug Adaptor are able to control a load connected directly to the unit and control loads connected to other C-Bus Wireless units. Also, buttons on C-Bus Wireless Wall Switches can control a load connected to a Plug Adaptor.Each button can be programmed to function as an on/off, dimmer or scene control, as well as a number of other options. The other 2 in this group are: #2 Clipsal C-Bus Wireless Plug Adapter 1 Channel Trailing Edge Dimmer, 2A #3 Clipsal C-Bus Wireless Plug Adapter 1 Channel Relay, 10A but the item description details are really the same as #1. This trips Roger's duplicate content error and so probably Google's as well. I can consolidate into one product with 'options' but then can't list the three products discretely on Google shopping etc, and currently the 'Category' is a much wider 'Wireless Automation Products' which I don't really want to sub-categorise into 'C-Bus Wireless Plug Adapters' with three items in it making it harder for people to find. I can 'Spin' the description but this seem stupid and even more so for other items I have that have 12 different derivations of the same basic product Any Suggestions?

    | BM7
    0

  • Having moved a site across to Magento, obviously re-directs were a large part of that, ensuring all the old products and categories linked up correctly with the new site structure. However, we came up against an issue where we needed to add, delete, then re-add products. This, coupled with a misunderstanding of the csv upload processing, meant that although the old urls redirected, some of the new Magento urls changed and then didn't redirect: For Example: mysite/product would get deleted re-added and become: mysite/product-1324 We now know what we did wrong to ensure it doesn't continue to happen if we weret o delete and re-add a product, but Google contains all these old URLs in its index which has caused people to search for products on Google, click through, then land on the 404 page - far from ideal. We kind of assumed, with continual updating of sitemaps and time, that Google would realise and update the URL accordingly. But this hasn't happened - we are still getting plenty of 404 errors on certain product searches (These aren't appearing in SEOmoz, there are no links to the old URL on the site, only Google, as the index contains the old URL). Aside from going through and finding the products affected (no easy task), and setting up redirects for each one, is there any way we can tell Google 'These URLs are no longer a thing, forget them and move on, let's make a fresh start and Happy New Year'?

    | seanmccauley
    0

  • Going through Bing's SEO Analyzer and found that Bing thinks having multiple H1's on a page is an issue. It's going to be quite a bit of work to remove the H1 tags from various pages. Do you think this is a major issue or not? Does anyone know of any case studies / interviews to show that fixing this will lead to improvement?

    | nicole.healthline
    0

  • A strong news site has an "archived.domainname" folder, where they have older articles listed. I can get a link on a page where there is a 4 year old article, which will be in this archived sub-domain. My questions: Will Google view a link from a 4 year old article as less valuable. Will Google notice the article is 4 years old and find it odd why the page all of a sudden has a link to my site, and thus devalue such link the sub-domain "archived" does that tell Google it is old and a link will be less valuable thank you

    | knielsen
    0

  • I know this subject has been discussed many, many times before. But it is now 2013, and Google continues to tweak and change their algo to build upon the best delivered results for users. So the questions are: Does Google still treat subdomains as a completely separate and unique domain from the root? If so, is it a good SEO strategy to split up, when it fits, a website into subdomains with links pointing back to the root or main domain? As a company we have several subdomains with some of our categories. For example our main site is www.iboats.com. This site has all our boat products. But we set up subdomains several years ago for the following: boatcovers.iboats.com boatpropellers.iboats.com biminitops.iboats.com And we have our fourms as a subdomain: forums.iboats.com Splitting them out were originally done for SEO reasons, but now is more for better managing our main categories. It appears that Google is treating our subdomains as part of our main root domain anyway, so I don't see the SEO value anymore. If we were to move the subdomains into subfolders of the root, I'm wondering if we might see a boost in SEO value having more pages within the main website? I'd be interested in everyone's thoughts on this subject.

    | tdawson09
    0

  • I've just run a SEOMOZ crawl report and it tells me that the category pages on my site such as http://www.top-10-dating-reviews.com/category/online-dating/ are blocked by meta robots and have the meta robots tag noindex,follow. This was the case a couple of days ago as I run wordpress and am using the SEO Category updater plugin. By default it appears it makes categories noindex, follow. Therefore I edited the plugin so that the default was index, follow as I want google to index the category pages so that I can build links to them. When I open the page in a browser and view source the tags show as index, follow which adds up. Why then is the SEOMOZ report telling me they are still noindex,follow? Presumably the crawl is in real time and should pick up the new follow tag or is it perhaps because its using data from an old crawl? As yet these pages aren't indexed by google. Any help is much appreciated! Thanks Sam.

    | SamCUK
    0

  • We recently noticed google is showing approx 23,000 indexed .jsp urls for our site. These are ancient pages that haven't existed in years and have long been 301 redirected to valid urls. I'm talking 6 years. Checking the serps the other day (and our current SEOMoz pro campaign), I see that a few of these urls are now replacing our correct ones in the serps for important, competitive phrases. What the heck is going on here? Is Google suddenly ignoring rewrite rules and redirects? Here's an example of the rewrite rules that we've used for 6+ years: RewriteRule ^(.*)/xref_interlux_antifoulingoutboards&keels.jsp$ $1/userportal/search_subCategory.do?categoryName=Bottom%20Paint&categoryId=35&refine=1&page=GRID [R=301] Now, this 'bottom paint' url has been incredibly stable in the serps for over a half decade. All of a sudden, a google search for 'bottom paint' (no quotes) brings up the jsp page at position 2-3. This is just one example of something very bizarre happening. Has anyone else had something similar happen lately? Thank You <colgroup><col width="64"></colgroup>
    | RewriteRule ^(.*)/xref_interlux_antifoulingoutboards&keels.jsp$ $1/userportal/search_subCategory.do?categoryName=Bottom%20Paint&categoryId=35&refine=1&page=GRID [R=301] |

    | jamestown
    0

  • White hat **** Can 20 website with page rank of 3 make your site rank higher?

    | spidersite
    0

  • We are planning on having a job posting page for each city that we are looking to hire new CFO partners in. But, the problem is, we have LOTS of locations. I was wondering what would be the best way to have similar content on each page (since the job description and requirements are the same for each job posting) without being hit by Google for having duplicate content? One of the main reasons we have decided to have location based pages is that we have noticed visitors to our site are searching for "cfo job in [location] but we notice that most of these visitors then leave. We believe it to be because the pages they land on make no mention of the location that they were looking for and is a little incongruent with what they were expecting. We are looking to use the following URLs and TItle/Description as an example: | http://careers.b2bcfo.com/cfo-jobs/Alabama/Birmingham | CFO Careers in Birmingham, AL | | Are you looking for a CFO Career in Birmingham, Alabama ? We're looking for partners there. Apply today! | | Any advice you have for this would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

    | B2B.CFO
    0

  • Greetings Mozians! I'm working on this small biz french website in north east canada. It's very small and the domain is new, we have no backlinks, so it's hard to rank for keywords. We do have a specific target with few expressions in mind. It's not really competitive but we don't rank really well. Do you have any articles or document that you would suggest me reading? Thanks a lot everyone. Here's the site : http://www.copiescourrierplanslg.com/accueil

    | Akeif
    0

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