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Category: Intermediate & Advanced SEO

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


  • Hi forum, SEOMoz's crawler identifies duplicate content within your own site, which is great. How can I compare my site to another site to see if they share "duplicate content?" Thanks!

    | Travis-W
    0

  • Hello there, I have over 10 WordPress websites that all have the same "About" page because the same company. I have concerns that this will adversely affect my sites and i'm looking for the best way to deal with this. I was either going to remove the "About" page with Google Webmaster Tools and robots.txt or use the canonical meta tag on that page. Any thoughts?

    | SpaMedica
    0

  • I have a client with a multiple brand website currently. The site has landing pages and directories for each of its 20 brands under one URL. The plan is to build 20 separate brand websites with new domains and have the old content redirect to its corresponding new URL. The problem that I envision is being able to successfully carry all of the existing indexed content over while only using 301 redirects and submitting the new domains to Webmaster tools. Has anyone done this in the past successfully and do you have any recommendations?

    | Empower_MediaMarketing
    0

  • I have just seen yoast.com results in Google and noticed that nearly all the indexed pages show a "Jump to" link So instead of showing the full URL under the title tag, it shows these type of links yoast.com › SEO
    yoast.com › Social Media
    yoast.com › Analytics With the SEO, Social Media and Analytics all being clickable. How has he achieved this? And is it something to try and incorporate in my sites?

    | JohnPeters
    0

  • Hey i have a client who currently has a large ecommerce store with over 50,000 hits a months. I've made the recommendation that they should consider adding a blog and invest in content activities. However they won't be able to do so for quite some time. In the mean time what are some ways i can get backlinks (whitehat only). I'm thinking guest posting on high DA blogs and sites is the best bet. Also sponsorship, CSR activties, and the occasional press release. Can anyone recommend any other ways, or methods i can use to obtain good quality links, or articles which discuss this topic. Thanks, Mark

    | monster99
    0

  • So, we have a page, like domain.com/searchhere, but results are being crawled (and shouldn't be), results look like domain.com/searchhere?query1. If I block /searchhere? will it block users from crawling the single page /searchere (because I still want that page to be indexed). What is the recommended best practice for this?

    | nicole.healthline
    0

  • A site has a link to my site as one of their main tabs, which means whenever a user clicks through to another page within the site, my link - being a main tab - is there. This creates thousands of links from this site. How does Google treat this? Do we have a rough formula estimate. In other words, assume it creates 1,000 backlinks would the SEO value be around the same as if I had just 2 link total as a main tab, but on 2 different non-related sites? Or, does it actually count fully as 1,000 links? Links from various sub-domains. Several .EDU's are linking to my site. Different schools within the overall same university. Example: nursing.abc.edu links to my site, but so does business.abc.edu. For SEO does that count as much as if I had links from complete non-related universities, or would Google evaluate that these links are related (since same main domain) and that will discount any links more than 1 to some extent? If discounted, then what do we estimate the discount to be? thank yoyu

    | knielsen
    1

  • Just to be clear, this is for one unique page on a website.  Also, please see my diagram attached. Let's say that a page's URL was originally /original.  So, you optimize the page for a new keyword (keyword 1), and therefore change the URL to /keyword-1.  A 301 redirect would then be placed... /original > /keyword-1 However, let's say 6 months down the road you realize that the keyword you optimized the page for (keyword 1) just isn't working.  You research for a new keyword, and come up with (keyword 2).  So, you'd like to rename the page's URL to /keyword-2. After placing a redirect from the current page (keyword 1) to the 'now' new page (keyword 2), it would look like this... /original > /keyword-1 > /keyword-2 We know that making a server go through more than one redirect slows the server load time, and even more 'link-juice' is lost in translation. Because of this, would it make sense to remove the original redirect and instead place redirects like this? /original > /keyword-2 /keyword-1 > /keyword-2 To me, this would make the most sense for preserving SEO.  However, I've read that removing 301 redirects can cause user issues due to browsers caching the now 'removed' redirect.  Even if this is ideal for SEO, could it be more work than it's worth? Does anyone have any experience/input on this?  If so, I greatly appreciate your time! oDvLl.jpg

    | LogicalMediaGroup
    1

  • Hi, I'm adding content to a client's website through textbroker. It's ecommerce and it's tough to find backlinks. We have decided to write 100 articles of at least 500 words so that we can say in our backlink campaign email that we have 100 helpful articles. We're thinking that people would like that. Also, we think that 100 good helpful articles will give us traffic and natural backlinks. How do we know if 100 is enough? Do we need 200? 500? Thanks.

    | BobGW
    0

  • I want 301 redirect all a website's subpages with a .aspx extension to a page without the .aspx etension. Example: I want to 301 redirect www.website.com/services.aspx to www.website.com/services Right now if you do not include .aspx on the end of every URL it gives a 404 error. I have used the web.config file to 301 redirect non-www to www and /default.aspx to /. I am not extremely familiar with IIS 7.0 or web.config, so any help would be great. Thanks.

    | VentaMarketing
    0

  • I own a funny video site that is getting about 1-4 of it's videos embedded on various sites daily. In todays form, is widget link still acceptable? This would show up under the video embed. Example: Funny Dog Video From Site Brand Or is it best nowadays to just have Video Provided By Site Brand

    | superlordme
    0

  • Hi, Anyone care to share what are your 3 best ways to rank well on Google? As for me i think: 1.) Link building & Social Media 2.) Onsite optimization 3.) Quality Content What about you?

    | chanel27
    0

  • Hi forum! On Thursday night (12/6/12) we moved a page (and all the linking product pages) from our subdomain, mailing-list.consumerbase.com, to our main domain, www.consumerbase.com/mailing-lists.html Shockingly, today I search for "mailing lists" (our #1 target keyword) and we're on the first page! This page never has not ranked well for this keyword in the past. The problem is, the link displaying on Google is our old mailing-list.consumerbase.com subdomain URL. Did moving this content from the new subdomain to our old, well-established domain cause it to appear better in search? Or, since the URL is on the subdomain, did Google just finally get around to indexing that page? Thanks!

    | Travis-W
    0

  • I've never come across this and haven't been able to really find anything that explains it very well.  I want to get opinions before we make a definitive decision. Here's the scenario... I am working on a site that was built in HTML/PHP and some of the pages are ranking pretty well. (some page 1, but not number 1) We are going to start using the Wordpress platform by year's end. The pages that were built in html have been built a little spammy but they still rank.  I just think they are keyword stuffed a little and not very "reader friendly"  (I think the last person was spinning content). So, we've built completely new content on our new pages and we've commissioned really good content writers for them.  I will be handling the on-page SEO going forward so I know what to do there.  My questions are this.... Should I 301 the old pages to the new pages with the better content? (old pages have the .html or .php extensions so www.example.com/keyword.php will become www.example.com/keyword-keyword Is there any negative side to doing this since the content will be completely different then the old pages that are being 301 from.  (Keywords are pretty much staying the same with the exception of minor variations. ie, www.example.com/red-cashmere-sweater.php to www.example.com/cashmere-sweater) I ask this because I've moved sites before where I've just changed the location of the same content.  I've never done it where the content is changing and so is the URL extension. Thank you in advance for your help and guidance.

    | DarinPirkey
    0

  • Over the weekend, I noticed "www.thematstore.com" drop out of the search results for "chair mats", where previously it was between 10-12 ranked. The other pages on the domain have remained the same in regards to rankings for their intended keywords. The only thing I changed (on Nov 29th) is the title tag from "Chair Mats - Commercial Quality Chair Mats, Custom Made", to "Chair Mats - Best Custom Chair Mats, Commercial Quality". I know there is a lot that needs to be done on the site, and the site architecture is a bit of a mess (I recommended building a new site)... but I was hoping to gradually fix these issues without gambling with a rank drop. Not sure why the home page all of the sudden dropped out, any suggestions?

    | Joes_Ideas
    0

  • Hello, I have a client with 300 products. He's thinking of about 20 main categories built mainly with the user in mind. How deep should each category be? For example, 3 clicks from the home page, 18 products on 2 pages (9 products per page)? or 2 clicks from the home page simplifying as many categories as possible to get them on one page? or what is the best practice for product indexing and usability? Thanks.

    | BobGW
    0

  • For example: http://www.site.com/category/sub-category http://www.site.com/category/sub-category/1 http://www.site.com/category/sub-category/2 http://www.site.com/category/sub-category/3 Thanks in advance! 🙂

    | esiow2013
    0

  • In this video from Google Webmasters about content, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8s6Y4mx9Vw around 0:57 it is advised to "archive any content that is no longer relevant". My question is how do you exactly do that? By adding noindex to those pages, by removing all internal links to that page, by completely removing those from the website? How do you technically archive content? watch?v=y8s6Y4mx9Vw

    | SorinaDascalu
    1

  • A website will include a link to a youtube video associated with my channel. Does my website also get SEO credit, even though that website isn't linking directly to my site, but rather to a video on my youtube channel. The youtube video is also uploaded to my website, but this website wants to link to the video directly on youtube. Website is "www.hawaiijobengine.com" and youtube channel is "hawaiijobegnine.com" - how does Google know these 2 are same owner? thank you

    | knielsen
    0

  • How do I correctly link my social media pages? I have link going from my Twitter, Facebook and Google + to my website. But a quick Open site explorer check says that I have, 0 Facebook Friends, 0 Twitter followers and 0 Google + Followers. Where as in relaity, I have 100 - 1000 follwers on each. Infact, the hyperlink from my Twitter Profile section doesn't appear as a no follow link atall on an OSE check of my website. Am I linking social media wrong?

    | Paul_Tovey
    0

  • We have a website with lots of categories and there are problems that some subcategories have identical content on them. So, is it enough to just add different text on those problematic subcategories or we need to use "canonical" tag to main category. Same dilemma is with our search system and duplicate content. For example, "/category/sports" URL would have similar to identical content with "/search/sports" and "/search/sports-fitness/" URLs. Ranking factors is important for all different categories and subcategories. Ranking factors is also important for search individual keywords. So, the question is, how to make them somehow unique/different to rank on all those pages well? Would love to hear advices how it can be solved using different methods and how it would affect our rankings. When we actually need to use "canonical" tag and when 301 redirect is better. Thanks!

    | versliukai
    0

  • Hi, I have used anchor text more heavily. I built over 80 links so far, all are quality links like press releases & social bookmarks. I used to be ranking on #7 page for my keywords, then all of sudden i am not even on 50th page. Is this is because of Anchor text usage? Now should i remove those links or dilute my anchor texts by getting more links with different anchor texts. This is because the keyword i am targetting is pretty tough. So i think 80 links is not good enough. Let me know your thoughts. Here is the screenshot of the links i got so far which i think valuable. And the rest are social bookmarks. http://screencast.com/t/TJiDOanxnfZ

    | Vegitt
    0

  • Hi Forum! I've searched previous questions, and couldn't find anything related to this.  I know the word "free" when used in email marketing can trigger spam filters.  If I use the word "free" in my metadata (title tag, description, and keywords just for fun) will I be penalized in any way? Thanks!

    | Travis-W
    0

  • From an SEO perspective what are the advantages of VPS Hosting VS Shared Hosting for a local website that has less that 200 pages and gets max 2000 hits per month? Is VPS Hosting worth the extra expense for a local Real Estate Website?

    | bronxpad
    0

  • If I want to transfer my website from yahoo to another web host without having any down time how would I do that?

    | bronxpad
    0

  • We are making some linkbuilding. And have very nice backlinks offer. So we are planning to put our 3 websites in it. Our 3 websites are on separate IP, but same C-block. Can it be a red flag for google? Can i put my 3 backlinks in one blog post?

    | bele
    0

  • Is having a 301 redirect a must for rankings when it comes to the www and non-www version of a site? I am on the bottom of page 1 for my main key phrases but I can't do a 301 redirect with my web host that I've been with for over a year. I've been considering changing web host (currently with Yahoo) but I also have concerns about transferring the site and the impact it might have because of the changing ip address. So my options are Stay Put Change Web host Which would you recommend?

    | bronxpad
    0

  • Hi- We have clients who are using an e-commerce cart that sits on a separate domain that appears to be providing site wide links to our clients websites. Therefore, would you recommend disallowing the bots to crawl/index these via a robots.txt file, a no follow meta tag on the specific pages the shopping cart links are implemented on or implement no follow links on every shopping cart link? Thanks!

    | RezStream8
    0

  • Hi Forum! How do I replicate how this company (Eloqua) has placed their Google+ page on the right side of SERPs where normally paid ads are?  (see attached image) I took this screenshot earlier this morning, but for some reason I cannot re-create it. Thanks for all your help! googleplus-1.png

    | Travis-W
    0

  • Hello, A client of mine has a brand with a website for over 10 years now.
    About 4 years ago the have opened a webshop on an other domain (like www.brandnamewebshop.com). At this moment the brand domain has a seomoz authority of 45.
    The webshop domain authority is 25. The question:
    Would it not be better to transfer the webshop to the brand domain because of the domain authority? If so, how can this be done the best way? With a 301?
    I also think: what a loss of energy of building the authority on the other domain.
    Is it an idea to use both domains for a webshop and rewrite the content? Or is there an other way to still make use of the built up domain authority? Would it really help the other domain when I make a 301 redirect (and make use of the pointing links to the webshop domain?). I hope somebody have some experience with this...
    Looking forward to the possibilities! Gerjan

    | Seeders
    0

  • Hello All, I came to the forum two weeks ago and prior to that studied SEO until my brain almost melted two weeks before. Now, I've read some great articles here on SEOMoz which have been fantastic. Mainly being this one: http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo. So anyway, I genuinely throught I got it about a week ago. Here's what I did: First I decided on my keyword: "PC Repair Sheffield". Then, I made a website and on-page optimizaed as best as I possibly could (Graded A on the SEOMoz on-page exam tool). So I decided firstly to add myself to the Independant newspaper Business Directory, because it's free and has a great domain authority. I then went to Yahoo answers, found a Question i knew the answer too and made a whole article on the question, I provided a really useful answer and put a link to my full answer in the 'Source' section. This was a NoFollow Link. Every week, I write a new article and put it in my 'Blog' page. In the articles, I like to cover some problem that I've encountered throughout the week, if, for example, I write about a Hard Drive I replaced in Sheffield, I write about that and link it to my 'PC Repair Sheffield' page. Every article contains a video from Youtube, which is another 'NoFollow' link. Past that, I just find forums which are preffereably not 'No Follow' links and try to help people by answering their questions, but putting more details on my site for them toi see, with a link. That is pretty much the extent of what I 'Get' so far. But I do read a lot of the posts on here and I'm always seeing the Experts on SEO criticise these things and say it's bad without actually explaining why, or how to improve this, or what to do instead in some kind of simple way? I mean, this blog i'm writing, is there really any point? It's unlikely anybody is going to see it, sharing it is just a rediculous assumption. Nobody shares a page on how to fix a hard drive from a local sheffield site. I don't think that NoFollow links are a waste of time, but that's my personal assumption. I think that makes it more natural in a way.. 'Write Fresh Content' and get natural links is a crazy suggestion, nobody is ever going to share it. It's just not the way the world works for small businesses. No task is easy, but none are impossible either, i know that I could do SEO, i'm just not entirely sure 'what to do'.

    | Paul_Tovey
    0

  • I have been wondering for a while which web host provider is the best for SEO purposes? Things to consider. Shared Hosting vs Dedicated Server Location of the Host Provider Site Up Time One question that I have been thinking about is what impact would changing a host provider have on a websites serps ranking? Is there a possible negative impact and if so how can it be avoided? Name the top 3 Web Hosts for SEO.

    | bronxpad
    0

  • Hello, Well I have a problem with a competitor. What happens is that when i search for the keyword "Cadeira de rodas" in www.google.pt a site of a competitor appears in the first place and I'm in second. Well thats life, right? My problem with that competitor (http://www.cadeirasderodas.net/) is using a page exclusively to the keyword. The title, domain and the only keyword is all "Cadeira de rodas" and then there is a redirection  to another site after you enter. Since Google consider this as a fraude, where can I denounce this situation? Tks in advance! PP www.invacare.pt

    | PedroM
    0

  • if we put 'no follow' on some of these links does that mean the search engines won't index the no follow pages even if those pages are linked to from elsewhere? no link juice will flow from the page with the (no follow) links on? Just trying to understand why my rankings have dropped so dramatically in the last 6 weeks or so since we redesigned the site, and it might be that now we have too many links on the homepage. This is the page http://www.suffolktouristguide.com/ All suggestions appreciated!

    | SarahinSuffolk
    0

  • Hi.. We have taken a automobile spare parts clients SEO deal. 4 keywords to work on and competition is not that great also. So looks good. For the first 2 months, we have finished doing its social bookmarking, social blogging , few directory submission and thre complete onsite SEO. Now for the new months, what should be the new plans ? What all things we can do for those 4 keywords ? I mean, what more methods to promote ? For this month, I have a new plan. Find all the related websites and send a personalized email to all asking them for a Link exchange. Tell me more.

    | mageclub
    1

  • My website is around 2 years old and despite the fact the my site has 45,000 urls indexed and ranks highly for some competitive terms on Google, my pagerank is 0. I appreciate that pagerank is not the be all and it would never have really concerned me, however around 1 month after the site was launched, it went up to PR1 before dropping to 0 on the next pagerank update where it has remained since (1.5 years later). I haven't done any blackhat seo, nor would I have lost any good links at the time it dropped.  The site is much more established and ranks well for quite a lot of terms so why is it still Pagerank 0?  Could there be some sort of issue do you think? Thanks

    | Optimise
    0

  • I have a client whose site has each page in multiple languages. each is in specific directories. Needless to say each page is showing up with the same site title, meta data, and content. When my campaigns are crawled they show up as thousands of page errors. Should i add each of these into robots.txt? would this fix the issue of duplicate content?

    | gkellyiii
    0

  • Hello All, I am still very new to this but am starting to get a grasp of things in the SEO world, but there are still a few things that I just don't get yet. For example, I've been trying to find out a great strategy for Link Building, what better way than looking at already existing SEO companies? So I did a quick search on a website (http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.springer-marketing.co.uk) and tried to look at all of the External incoming links. So I did a filter of Followed+301, Only External and all subdomains. But about 20 of the links for this site are coming from itself. Now, i'm not an expert, but presumably you can't just give yourself strong links? Is this some kind of trick, how or why would somebody do this? Mind Blows Paul

    | Paul_Tovey
    0

  • If anyone can take a minute to help me out with this, I'd really love to get some expert opinions. I can produce really strong content like a machine and, over the years, I've had tons of pages on my website that had links pointing to them (didn't know about SEO then) deleted and now I'm starting to dig them up. I have dozens with a moz rank higher than 25.  My question is what do I do with these urls, should I rewrite them and get the innerlinking strength or should I do a 301 redirect to a similar page? Considering the incoming links and individual seomoz  pr rank of these pages , am I sitting on something valuable?

    | ksundheim1
    0

  • how is Google evolving in terms of value for DA vs PA? Is having a link from a DA 75 + PA 25 better than having a link from a DA 50 + PA 50, assuming such 2 websites are otherwise identical? I have a couple of .EDU backlinks where DA is around 80, though PA 1. Would be DA 40 with a PA 40 be more valuable? I hear Google is placing increasing value on the domain and less on the page authority. 
    Any insight appreciated thank you

    | knielsen
    0

  • I saw this article, http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/common-ecommerce-technical-seo-problems/, and noticed that Geoff mentioned that product URLs format should be in one of the following ways: Product Page: site.com/product-name Product Page: site.com/category/sub-category/product-name However, for SEO, is there a preferred way? I understand that the top one may be better to prevent duplicate page issues, but I would imagine that the bottom would be better for conversion (maybe the user backtracks to site.com/category/sub-category/ to see other products that he may be interested in). Also, I'd imagine that the top URL would not be a great way to distribute link juice since everything would be attached to the root, right?

    | eTundra
    0

  • My website is brand new, has an A Grade on-page optimization report for my two keywords. Now, the problem that all of my competitors have an average Domain Authority of 50 with a Page Authority of 40. Now, I don't want to enter something I just cannot win, what is a Realistic Expectation for my DA ranking within a three months? Just for clarification, I try to build 5 new links a week, update my blog and I am quite active within forums.

    | Paul_Tovey
    0

  • Hello All, My website is a PC Repair website called 'Paulspcrepair.co.uk' (example). And recently I want to start my SEO branch to the website, now, would it be better : A: Use my domain Authority already obtained and create a new page, highly optimized for SEO searches. OR B: Create a whole new website, such as 'PaulsSEOWorkshop.co.uk'. If so, why? I can't decide what to try.

    | Paul_Tovey
    0

  • I've been looking for quite some time for a way of incorperating rel=next/rel=prev into my vBulletin forum however I've had no joy. I want to try and consolidate my ranking as I have a very large amount of user generated content, but not enough links. Any help would be most appreciated. P.S - I have the vbSEO software and as far as I can see, there's no way of doing it through here.

    | Optimise
    0

  • I'm working on diagnosing the reason for a traffic drop for a site.  When I look at the referring domains report in ahrefs I see a huge drop in the number of referring domains that happens exactly on the day of the traffic drop.  However, when I look at the new/lost backlinks report there is no coinciding loss in links. How is this possible?

    | MarieHaynes
    0

  • Hi, What does Google look at when assessing a backlink? How important is it to get a backlink from a website with relevant content? Ex: 1. Domain/Page Auth 80, website is not relevant. Does not use any of the words in your target term in any area of the website. 2. Domain/Page Auth 40, website is relevant. Uses the words in your target term multiple times across website. Which website example would benefit your SERP's more if you gained a backlink? (and if you can say, how much more would it benefit - low, medium, high).

    | activitysuper
    0

  • I've been link building for a long time but have recently discovered that most of my links are from NoFollow links, such as twitter and Youtube. How can I tell if a website is a 'NoFollow'?

    | Paul_Tovey
    0

  • Hey forum, About my site, idealchooser.com. Few weeks ago I've defined a parameter "sort" at the Google Webmaster tool that says effect: "Sorts" and Crawl: "No URLs". The logic is simple, I don't want Google to crawl and index the same pages with a different sort parameter, only the default page without this parameter. The weird thing is that under "HTML Improvement" Google keeps finding "Duplicate Title Tag" for the exact same pages with a different sort parameter. For example: /shop/Kids-Pants/16//shop/Kids-Pants/16/?sort=Price/shop/Kids-Pants/16/?sort=PriceHi These aren't old pages and were flagged by Google as duplicates weeks after the sort parameter was defined. Any idea how to solve it? It seems like Google ignores my parameters handling requests. Thank you.

    | corwin
    0

  • This is a fairly technical question... I have a site which has 4 subdomains, all targeting a specific language. The brand owners don't want German users to see the prices on the French sub domain and are forcing users into a re-direct to the relevant subddomain, based on their IP address. If a user comes from a different country, (ie the US) they are forced on the UK sub domain. The client is insistent on keeping control of who sees what (I know that's a debate in it's own right), but these re-directs we're implementing to make that happen, are really making it difficult to get all the subdomains indexed as I think googlebot is also getting re-directed and is failing to do it's job. Is there are a way of re-directing users, but not Googlebot?

    | eventurerob
    0

  • We have recently moved our back office systems, on the old system we had the ability to use upper and lower case letters int he url's.  On the new system we can only use lower case, which we are happy with. However any old url's being used from external sites to link into us that still have uppercase letterign now hit the 404 error page.  So, how do we find them and any solutions? Example: http://www.christopherward.co.uk/men.html - works http://www.christopherward.co.uk/Men.html - Fails Kind regards Mark

    | Duncan_Moss
    0

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