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Category: Intermediate & Advanced SEO

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


  • Hi, I am want to delete a folder and all the contents.  I then need to redirect anyone that is trying to reach a file in that folder to another page on my site. example:   www.mydomain.com/folder/   (contains 50 pages) I want to delete the folder and all 50 pages. So if someone tries to reach www.mydomain.com/folder/page1.php the redirect would take them to a specific page on my site. Doing this to clean up old content. How would I do this on the .htaccess?  I have redirected a page but not a folder. Thanks in advance! Force7

    | Force7
    0

  • I thought it is best to use your current site and build a new page targeting 2-3 key phrases max. Lets say I have a current site that is ranking for a few keywords, why would I build a landing page when I can just add a page to my site and target those same exact keywords?

    | SEODinosaur
    0

  • Hi I've read that creating an RSS feed for one of our ecommerce sites will help the products get indexed faster. Currently it takes google 4-5 days to index our new products, we want to speed that up. Will an RSS feed of the new products we have help? How do you create an RSS feed for this? Our blog gets indexed within minutes, but our main website, 4 days. Help!

    | xoffie
    0

  • Hi Friends, We have a keyword "plus size clothing" but we used this as "plus size clothing 2012" to Cover the both keywords "Plus size clothing" and "Plus size clothing 2012" My question is, are we still focusing on "plus size clothing"  when use "plus size clothing 2012" instead of the main keyword.? What strategy do yo suggest that when to use long tail and when to not. (when I talk to use a long tail than it means use it prominently on the page as main keyword should be used.)

    | alexgray
    0

  • Hi people, After much hard work our site www.noyelling.com.au is doing very well in the SERPS in Brisbane. The only problem is that we've gone from having a full blended listing to what can be seen in the attached image - a map-pack listing. While we are number 1, I don't feel that having the listing as it is is offering anywhere near the value we'd receive from a full blended maps/organic listing. Any ideas on how a full listing can be achieved so that we can be number 1 and be separate from the map-pack we are part of currently? Thanks, Matt Williams www.noyelling.com.au 0t3I1Z2x3W3n3F08342R

    | duncan274
    0

  • My site was routinely ranking in the top 2-3 in Google for my relevant search terms.  Then I started working on my local SEO.  Now I'm in the map list at 1-2, but my site no longer shows up with the rest of the search results. I've heard that this has been happening to other local businesses with a big Google presence. I'm thinking that I should create some micro sites for each location listing that gives a location specific intro and then links to my main site.  Then I can sever my main site from Google places.  Here are my two questions: 1)  Is this going to kill my placement in the map results; and, How long will it take for my main site to get back to its 2-3 spot rankings in Google's regular results?

    | ToughTimesLawyer
    0

  • Hi There's a question today about paying for Yahoo directory - I wondered if these kinds of links would help with getting indexed. We're adding about 10-20 pages of new unique content each day, but it takes google about 4 days to list it and then it only lists a few pages of that 10-20 pages, we have other older sites and blogs that are within the hour. What tips can you give me for getting at least a same day index, and a thorough one at that, so if we publish 20 pages on Thursday by the end of play Friday they're indexed? Would the Yahoo Directory help?

    | xoffie
    0

  • I have noticed a lot of wine sites use "Critical Acclaims" on their product pages. These short descriptions made by industry experts are found on thousands of other sites. One example can be found on a Wine.com product page. Wine.com also provides USG through customer reviews on the page for original content. Are the "Critical Acclaim" descriptions considered duplicate content? Is there a way to use this content and it not be considered duplicate (i.e. link to the source)?

    | mj775
    0

  • Hello, I'm puting a new website on a existing domain. In order to not loose the links that point to the varios old url I would like to redirect them to homepage. The old website was a mess as there was no seo and the pages didn't target any keywords. Thats why I would like to redirect all links to home. What do you think is the best way to do this ? I tried  to ad this in the .htaccess but it's not working; ErrorDocument 404 /index.php Con you tell me how it exacly look? Now the hole file is like this: @package        Joomla @copyright    Copyright (C) 2005 - 2012 Open Source Matters. All rights reserved. @license        GNU General Public License version 2 or later; see LICENSE.txt READ THIS COMPLETELY IF YOU CHOOSE TO USE THIS FILE! The line just below this section: 'Options +FollowSymLinks' may cause problems with some server configurations.  It is required for use of mod_rewrite, but may already be set by your server administrator in a way that dissallows changing it in your .htaccess file.  If using it causes your server to error out, comment it out (add # to beginning of line), reload your site in your browser and test your sef url's.  If they work, it has been set by your server administrator and you do not need it set here. Can be commented out if causes errors, see notes above. Options +FollowSymLinks Mod_rewrite in use. RewriteEngine On Begin - Rewrite rules to block out some common exploits. If you experience problems on your site block out the operations listed below This attempts to block the most common type of exploit attempts to Joomla! Block out any script trying to base64_encode data within the URL. RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} base64_encode[^(]([^)]) [OR] Block out any script that includes a

    | igrizo
    0

  • Hi guys, I have e-commerce site, that sells car tires. I was wondering would I benefit from making all Product Variants ( for example each tire size ) as different page, that has link to the main product to provide some affiliation, or should I make each variant noindex, and add rel=canonical to the main product. The benefits from having each variant indexed can be many: greater click through rate more relative results for customers etc. But I'm not sure how to handle the duplicate content issue ( in this case, only the title, URL and H1 can be different ). Regards.

    | seo22
    0

  • I recently came across an article on HTML entities that discussed how their appear in search results. The same article also mentioned that their use might be considered spam. Since I know nothing of them (other than what I read in the one article) are they a good or bad idea to make meta descriptions stand out from the crowd?

    | casper434
    0

  • I could use suggestions/input. My site is consistently being beaten by doorway pages with zero to no content.  In fact, on the keyword "lawrenceville plumber" I am being beaten by a KID with a blank wordpress installation. I really need help determining what my issues are and what I can do to help.  According to all of the graders, ranks, etc my site is great.  I have written tons of unique content, have added a blog unique articles and self-helps. Please help! My site is www.akinsplumbing.net. Thanks!

    | chuckakins
    0

  • Has anyone had any experience with premium real estate templates and SEO? Are their reviews in this regard? How does one get past the marketing and find out if they are SEO friendly?

    | casper434
    0

  • Hi My root domain is already optimized for keywords, i would say branded keywords, which i do not really need, as the traffic from these does not give me any revenue ( mostly consists of our employees/returning visitors). Now i have run on page optimization for set of keywords for root domain which i like and got good grades (hurray!). But yet my website does not show up on search engines for those keywords. I have got pretty good link building done to my root domain but this is not done for all keywords (but done for branded keywords). It just happened, please do not ask why. So i decided to optimize inside pages in sub directory with new set of keywords i like. Starting with link building, giving anchor text on various other website linking to this particular page. These pages are not ranked in top 50 in google. Is that a good practice? or I would not need those branded keywords, hence should I re-optimize my root domain to suite my new keywords by giving less preference to branded keywords? Is this a good practice?

    | MiddleEastSeo
    0

  • Hello, Im working a e-commerce shop, and my question is about choosing the domain. Presently the website is not performing good with the domain www.casaobjecto.com, that is the brand name of the shop. Now I have made my analysis about keywords and conclude that it would be very interesting to have a domain name with the main keyword that im targeting. The domain is available. If I choose the maintain the www.casaobjecto.com as main domain and the other keyword domain pointing to that site, whats the influence that can take in the keyword im looking for? Or should I replace the target keyword domain (becomes the main domain) by the brand domain name? Whats the best choice? Tks in advance, Pedro M Pereira

    | PedroM
    0

  • Hi all, and thanks in advance for your input. I help mostly small local businesses with SEO and other IM strategy, but am having a hard time finding a good tool for local seo searches.  For instance, I have a smaller plumber that covers Denver, but really wants to market to some of the suburbs. What is a good tool to try to find search volume for "littleton plumbers" or similar searches?  By the way Littleton is a suburb of Denver. Thanks again. Chris

    | iFuseInternetMarketing
    0

  • Suppose the "Home" page of your blog at www.example.com/domain/ displays your 10 most recent posts. Each post has its own permalink page (where you have comments/discussion, etc.). This obviously means that the last 10 posts show up as duplicates on your site. Is it good practice to use NOINDEX, FOLLOW on the blog root page (blog/) so that only one copy gets indexed? Thanks, Akira

    | ahirai
    0

  • I'm helping on a site that has tons of content and recently moved from a 10 year old .ASP structure to WordPress. There are ~800 404s, with 99% of them in the same directory that is no longer used at all. The old URL structures offer no indication of what the old page contents was. So, there is basically no way to manually redirect page by page to the new site at this point.....is there any reason not to redirect that entire old directory to the new homepage? Matt Cutts seems to think its OK to point an entire old directory to a new homepage, but its not as good as the 1:1 redirects: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93633 Any thoughts?

    | wattssw
    0

  • sometimes my picture shows up in search results and sometimes it doesn't. I find it depends who's computer I search. Is there a way to make it show up all the time for search results? Also, what determines if your picture shows up besides the article itself or just on the right in a general box showing your google+ profile?

    | StreetwiseReports
    0

  • Hello, For our site: nlpca(dot)com we have 2 locations. One location is based out of a hotel in California, and one location is where we have our offices in Utah. Our site is about both locations, emphisizing California. Do we need to create a Utah page and put the Utah NAD on that page with separate address and phone number? What do we use as an address since we only have a hotel room in California now? What do we need to do to rank for both in the natural and also Places listings? Right now we're #1 for NLP California and #4 for NLP Utah Thanks!

    | BobGW
    0

  • I need to add SSL to our site in some capacity - either entirely, or just on specific pages (form pages, for example.) How do I implement this properly so as not to lose rank?

    | Ocularis
    0

  • Hi there, Quite a lot of my keywords that were on page 1 for quite some time have just been pushed below page 5 on Monday 04/06/12 all at the same time, however some are still on page 1 maybe dropping a rank or two. The link building for these keywords have been pretty much the same, using blogs, product reviews etc. As a precaution I ask bloggers to take a lot of my links off as they were site-wide and keep them on homepage only, is this what has had the negative affect? please note Some of the keywords that were on page 1 and now page 5 were not part of the site-wide activity. Please help!

    | Paul78
    0

  • I have been seeing a large number of access denied and not found crawl errors. I have since fixed the issued causing these errors; however, I am still seeing the in webmaster tools. At first I thought the data was outdated, but the data is tracked on a daily basis! Does anyone have experience with this? Does GWT really re-crawl all those pages/links everyday to see if the errors still exist? Thanks in advance for any help/advice.

    | inhouseseo
    0

  • Hi Folks, I'm considering making a big change to our website and really need some expert advise. Will we lose ranking if we do what I propose? Our site www.meninkilts.com, needs to split users/clients by "Commercial" and "Residential" so we can message/market completely differently to each client. We are considering doing this structure: Landing Page | | Commercial Homepage Residential Homepage Right now we rank well, for our keywords like "Window Cleaning cityname" but are worried that adding a landing page, and splitting our site to two homepages will effect seo (ie: a landing page would only have two buttons: one for commercial and one for residential). What would be the best way to handle this. Looking forward to your insights! Cheers Brent

    | MenInKilts
    0

  • Hi We recently trialed some new page titles which seriously helped our CTR on serps, so we thought we would roll them backwards to our other product pages, only about 5% of the SERPS show the new titles. Do I need to change more on the page to get google to notice these changes?Or just hold on and wait?

    | xoffie
    0

  • I have a blog on Trulia and Active Rain which are real estate websites. I see that they both are Do Follow. My question is how much link juice do these sites pass a long to my site when I write a blog post on these sites and create a link to my main site? I've heard somewhere that even though a link has a Do Follow attribute it passes little link juice in certain cases like a no follow attribute. Also, if a link is a No Follow link, does it still pass along some link juice or is it completely juiceless. Is there a way to see which sites pass the most link juice to my site? Thanks all.

    | bronxpad
    1

  • Hey folks, I've got a question regarding URL structure. What is best for SEO given that there will be millions of lawyer names and 4 pages per lawyer www.lawyerz.com/office-locations/dr-al-pacino www.lawyerz.com/phone-number/dr-al-pacino www.lawyerz.com/reviews/dr-al-pacino www.lawyerz.com/ratings/dr-al-pacino OR www.lawyerz.com/office-locations-dr-al-pacino www.lawyerz.com/phone-number-dr-al-pacino www.lawyerz.com/reviews-dr-al-pacino www.lawyerz.com/ratings-dr-al-pacino OR www.lawyerz.com/dr-al-pacino/office-locations www.lawyerz.com/dr-al-pacino/phone-number www.lawyerz.com/dr-al-pacino/reviews www.lawyerz.com/dr-al-pacino/ratings Also, concerning duplicate file names: In the first example there are 4 duplicate file names with the lawyers name. (would this cause Google to not index some) In the second example there are all unique file names (would this look spammy to Google or the user) In the third example there are millions of duplicate file names (if 1 million lawyers then 1 million files called "office-locations"  etc (could so many duplicate filenames cause ranking issues) Should the lawyers name (which is the main keyword target) appear in the filename or in the folder - which is better for SEO in your opinion? Thanks for your input!

    | irvingw
    0

  • We are currently in one location and we are moving our office. Would it be better to leave all the directories and add new listings with the new address? This way we get 2 listings until someone in this address claims a business here. or Would it be better to change all the existing to the new address?

    | SEODinosaur
    0

  • Hi All, As far as I know, Google also gives "importance" ranking to pages based on the number of clicks from the homepage that it takes to reach them. The question I have is How Google treats menu items that are revealed only with hovering / click? Menu Items such as the SEOMoz Blog that can be reached when hovering "Community" here in the top menu. Is it an equivalent to the Q&A Forum? Would it be the same if the menu would have opened with a click instead of hovering? Thanks

    | BeytzNet
    0

  • Is it necessary or good practice to list "static" site routes in the sitemap? I.e. /about, /faq, etc? Some large sites (e.g. Vimeo) only list the 'dynamic' URLs (in their case the actual videos). If there are urls NOT listed in a sitemap, will these continue to be indexed? What is the good practice for a sitemap index? When submitting a sitemap to e.g. Webmaster tools, can you just submit the index file (which links to secondary sitemaps)? Does it matter which order the individual sitemaps are listed in the index?

    | shawn81
    0

  • I want to know the top trending words in countries other than USA. Any suggestions for an alternative to Google "Hot Searches" in Australia, Germany, Russia and Sweden? Thanks!

    | theLotter
    0

  • I have a site and we rank very competitively on Google, but we would like to increase our exposure on Bing and Yahoo.  I was wondering if anybody might have some tips or pointers for increasing your ranking on Bing.  Also, if anybody knows of any Bing ranking guides or top ranking factors for Bing that would be very useful too. Thanks, Jason

    | Jason_342
    0

  • Hey guys, I've come to the conclusion the sheer amount of crap links a site of ours has is un repairable. We own a .net version with the same brand name so I'm planning to move our ecommerce store over with all its content. I can move the site in one swoop but I believe Google will see it as duplicate content if we don't allow the old site to de index first. I would simply take it down for a month but we still get some orders now and then. Anyone have any ideas? I was thinking of leaving an image up on each page that is no index no follow linked to the new site that explains the site is being moved, etc.

    | iAnalyst.com
    1

  • Hi, I have an e-commerce website that has an articles section: There is an articles.aspx file that can be reached from the top menu and it holds links to all of the articles as follows: xxx.com/articles/article1.aspx
    xxx.com/articles/article2.aspx I want to add several new articles under a new sections, for example a complete set of articles under the title of "buying guide" and the question is what would be the best way? I was thinking of adding a "computers-buying-guides.aspx" accessible from the top menu / footer and from it linking to: xxx.com/computer-buying-ghudes/what-to-check-prior-to-buying-a-laptop.aspx
    xxx.com/computer-buying-ghudes/weight-vs-performance.aspx 
    etc. Any thoughts / recommendations? Thanks

    | BeytzNet
    0

  • http://www.gglpls.com/ is this site legit? Submit website to google + directory?

    | SEODinosaur
    0

  • Hi, I'm using AddThis sharing on my site. The implementation is by embedding a href's all over the site. Do these buttons take my LinkJuice? Thanks

    | BeytzNet
    0

  • Dear SEOmozzers, I am focusing on those keywords I find using the "Keyword Analysis" tool that are not too competitive (among 20%-30% competitiveness). I then buy domains that include those keywords. The sites are in Italian and targeting the Italian search engines, so the competition is lower than it would be in the US. Basically, I'd like to build niche sites and I'd like to ask a few questions that I hope somebody with a good experience in this field can answer: How do I optimize a niche site. Specifically, how do I go about link building? How many backlinks should I get to see some results? How long does it take for a typical niche site to start appearing in the search engines for a certain keyword, after launching an effective link building campaign? Please kindly provide any recommendations you believe to be important when building niche sites. For example, is there a company/professional you know that specializes in this field and who is trustworthy/reliable? Thank you very much for your help. All best, Sal

    | salvyy
    0

  • My company is moving forward with creating a subdomain for mobile visitors (m.examplesite.com). I know there is much discussion on subdomain vs one url with different style sheets.  That ship has sailed and the subdomain is the way we are proceeding. Google appears to recommend leaving both sites open to the normal Googlebot and redirecting the mobile bot to the mobile site (as we will be redirecting mobile visitors to the mobile subdomain). Has anyone had experience with this.  Any duplicate content issues? Does anyone feel strongly that the normal Googlebot should be blocked from the mobile site (this seems to go against Google's recommendations)? It seems like another option is to use the canonical tag and let the search engines know the traditional site is the canonical page/version. Any recommendations?  Any other issues that should be considered?

    | btdavis
    0

  • I have no access to an old wordpress site of a client's, but have parked the domain on their new site, gone into webmaster central and requested a change of address and wait... the old domain still shows in the search listings in place of the new site domain and the log files show 404 errors from links to the old site which go nowhere - can anyone suggest a way of managing this on the new site - is there a workaround to what should have been done - 301 redirects on the old site before it was taken down. many thanks

    | Highlandgael
    0

  • I launched http://rumma.ge in February of this year.  Because I'm using a domain hack (the Georgian domain), I'd really like to rank for just the word "rummage".  After launching, I was steady at around page 4/5 on searches for "rummage".  However since then I've tumbled out of the first 100.  In fact I can't even find the site in the first 20 pages on Google for that search.  Even a search for my exact homepage title text doesn't bring up the site, despite the fact that the site is still in the index. I'm wondering if one of the following could be the root cause: We have a ccTLD (.ge)--not sure about the impacts of this, but seems like it might not be the root cause because we were ranking for "rummage" when we first launched. Tried running an Adwords campaign but the site was flagged as a "bridge page" (working on getting this addressed). I'm wondering if this could have carryover impacts into natural search rankings? We've tried doing some press and built up a decent number of backlinks over the past couple of months, many of which had "rummage" in the anchor text. This was all organic, but happened over the span of a month which may be too fast? Am I being penalized? Beyond checking indexing of the site, is there a way to tell if I've been flagged for some bad behavior?  Any help or thoughts would be greatly appreciated.  I'm really confused by this since I feel like I've been doing things right and my rankings have been travelling downward. Thanks!! Matt

    | minouye
    0

  • Hello, What is the best thing to say when soliciting a link for link building. Say you're contacting a site with a resource section where your competitors are listed. What would you say to be the most persuasive. Thanks.

    | BobGW
    0

  • Hi there, I'm working on an e-learning site with the following content pages: main page, category pages, course pages, author pages, tag pages. We will also have an internal search for users to search by keyword for courses & authors & categories. Is it still recommend to "noindex, follow" and disallow in robots.txt internal search results? Or for a site like this, is it better to use faceted navigation? It seems that faceted navigation is mostly for e-commerce sites. What is the latest thinking on SEO best practices for internal search result pages?

    | mindflash
    0

  • A website has duplicate content pages to make it easier for users to find the information from a couple spots in the site navigation. Site owner would like to keep it this way without hurting SEO. I've thought of using the robots.txt file to disallow search engines from crawling one of the pages. Would you think this is a workable/acceptable solution?

    | gregelwell
    0

  • Hello All, Wow, people answer very quickly, concisely and are well informed. Very impressive. I have a question that may be a little different. I have a current site which ranks well, and has lots of links etc etc.. 1. http://www.symbolphot*.com     **            * replace the * with an o**. Key search term for this site:  "B*ston Wedding Photographer" The second site i own: 2. B*stonWeddingPhotographer.com is currently empty. I can do whatever i want with this site. I was thinking that since my site is mostly images, i could start a duplicate wordpress blog with the same images, but different page text and alt tags to the same images. Obviously, since 'b*ston wedding photographer" is the phrase i want to rank #1 for, how should i go about leveraging the power of the URL? Do you have alternate suggestions beyond duplicating image content? I don't really see a way around that as it's ultimately the images i'm selling to potential clients. And the last part of my question is, how strong are my chances of ranking #1 for "Bston Wedding Photographer"  while publishing good content on Bstonweddingphotographer.com ?

    | symbolphoto
    0

  • Hi guys, We used this plugin with good results in the past - http://cleverplugins.com/shop/seo-booster-pro/. Basically, the plugin checks the incoming traffic and when it sees traffic from Google evaluates the SERP where it's coming from. If the keyword was placed on the second page, it automatically ads a link in the sidebar pointing to the article page. The anchor of the link is the actual keyword. This way, the link gets a bit of extra juice and most of the times it gets bumped to the first page. We would like to use something similar to our ecom shops. We need to custom program it as it does not exist as a pre-made plugin. We have a concern though - one of the points of the last Google updates addressing link juice and authority manipulation. Please let me know if you use any related SEO technique (or even this plugin) and what are your thoughts on implementing a such tools on an ecomm site. Thanks in advance

    | tolik1
    0

  • So my site has duplicate content issues because of the index.html and the www and non www version of the site. What's the best way to deal with this without htaccess? Is it a 301 redirect or is it the canonical, or is it both?

    | bronxpad
    0

  • How do I handle building links to an eCommerce site where the product pages change regularly because product is only available for a certain time frame? Should I focus on building links to the category pages instead?

    | mj775
    0

  • Is there a tool that lists all external followed URLs? Or maybe separates nofollowed and followed external URLs?

    | MangoMan16
    0

  • Hello, I would like to hear everybodies opinion on directories for link building now that penguin is out. Here's a good background post: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/web-directory-submission-danger Do you think their out? How do you still use them? Which ones do you stick to?

    | BobGW
    0

  • SEO companies/people are always stating that unique, quality content is one of the best things for SEO... But what happens when you can't do that? I've got a movie trailer blog and of late a lot of movie agencies are now asking us to use the text description they give us along with the movie trailer. This means that some pages are going to have NO unique content. What do you do in a situation like this?

    | RichardTaylor
    0

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