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Category: Intermediate & Advanced SEO

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


  • Hi, I know that this is a 'How long is a piece of string?' type question but at what point should the ranking value of site A pass over to site B following a domain 301 redirect? I have shifted a domain over to a new URL, same hosting server, same IP address. I haven't made any URL changes or any content changes other than to change the site logo to match the new domain name. Domain B is basically an exact clone of domain A. I have redirected Domain A to domain B using the following line at the top of the .htaccess file:- Redirect 301 / http://www.newdomain.com/ I have submitted a sitemap for the new domain via google webmaster tools. It looks like the original domain as been completely indexed by google following the redirect as all rankings have been dropped from the results and there are no results for a site:olddomain.com search. Surely the rankings should have switched over at this point? Any help would be much appreciated.
    Ade.

    | AdeLewis
    0

  • I own a couple domains that are specific to a product and would like to know which one folks on here recommend. Primary Google Search Term Example: "Tax Bond" Example Domain 1: www.taxbonds.net Example Domain 2: www.tax-bond.net I've done research on here before and have come to the conclusion that hyphenated domains aren't bad (no more than 2 hyphens though). So, do I go for the EXACT search term with the hyphen or do I go for the pluralized search term without the hyphen, even though most people will not add the "s" in the Google search? Thanks, Alex

    | dbuckles
    0

  • Hello Everyone, I was looking for some strategies for doing SEO on a site that offers multiple services. Here is the example: There is one company with ONE physical address. They perform the following services: Pest Control Mold Remediation Home Inspections Waterproofing They also handle these services in several surronding cities. They want to maintain one website for branding purposes. Obviously I will create individual pages on their site for each service but was wondering how diffiuclut it will be to rank one website for these various services. Thank you!

    | wparlaman
    0

  • Hi, I wondered if anyone had any tips and advice for link building for mobile sites. Many thanks

    | MarkChambers
    0

  • Our company is both a store and brand as we sell manufacture direct.  We are not included in Google's "Related Searches for widgets:" Picture attached as reference (we are not selling computers ... just an example) What is Google looking for to pull these brands and stores? hXSLn.gif

    | tatermarketing
    0

  • I've been told that my site: "- your site is duplicated on the internet. Both www.joeyvalyphotography.com and joeyvalyphotography.com are valid internet addresses. This is a problem for SEO." I am wondering, what's the cause of this, and how it can fixed. Thanks In advanced, Joey

    | gaji
    0

  • We recently launched a new website and it doesn't consist of that many pages.  When you do a "site:" search on Google, it shows 1,950 results.  Obviously we don't want this to be happening.  I have a feeling it's effecting our rankings.  Is this just a straight up robots.txt problem?  We addressed that a while ago and the number of results aren't going down.  It's very possible that we still have it implemented incorrectly.  What are we doing wrong and how do we start getting pages "un-indexed"?

    | MichaelWeisbaum
    0

  • Hi, I had a website paris-football.com which ranked quite well on specific request as 'paris football" and "paris foot". I decided 2 months ago  to stop this website as I had no time to update it and it was quite rubish in terms of content and make a redirection to a better quality website. I decided to redirect to the deep url http://www.sportytrader.com/paris-foot.php . The destination Url has not beneft from the redirection and has even seen its rankings drop since the redirection. do you think that it would have been better to redirect to the Home Page http://www.sportytrader.com ? Do you think that I can still change the destination url ? Thanks a lot for your help,

    | jarnac
    0

  • We have just taken on a new client who’s core business is based in the UK. They are currently developing a market in Australia and are hoping to develop future markets over the next few years. The website is currently hosted in the UK, under a .co.uk domain, we are redeveloping the website and are wondering if we should move to the .com as the company is now catering to an international market. I was also wondering what the best way of establishing a presence in Australia, using the main website, rather than creating a new one. Thanks Fraser

    | fraserhannah
    0

  • I have a competitor who leapfrogged in Google SERPs after they purchased a domain that was let let go by a related authoritative organization and used it to redirect traffic from it to their website using frameset code. Is this a legit practice? Is this blackhat SEO? Here's the entirety of the code from the retired domain: <html> <head> <title>www.competitors-website.com title> <META name="description" content="www.competitors-website.com">   <META name="keywords" content="www.competitors-website.com"> head> <frameset rows="100%,*" border="0"> <frame src="http://www.competitors-website.com" frameborder="0" /> <frame frameborder="0" noresize /> frameset> html>

    | Linesides
    0

  • Hello all, I am trying to perform a predictive competitive SEO analysis to estimate what I will need to do to surpass my competitors. I am unsure of how to do this and would like some advice or link to an article. What I am trying to do is predict where I can rank in three months, six months and one year as well as what I need to do compared to my competitors.  Specifically also to estimate how many links I would need to acquire to both my page as well as domain. I have already pulled my competitors domain links, page links, and age. Adam

    | digitalops
    0

  • I have been submitting articles to directories for about 3 years. With the Panda update, it seems that these directories are now obsolete. So, if there is no link value from these articles: 1) should I remove these articles (at east the better ones) and place them on my site/blog? 2) If not, would there be any benefit at pointing some bookmarks at these old links to maybe get some juice out of them?

    | inhouseseo
    0

  • We built a site for one of our clients about 3 years ago and added Meta tags to each page of the site. But when you do a google search on the keywords the site still does not come up. I thought it would be spidered into the system by now. Web Site - www.specialtysealgroup.com Let me know what we can do to improve our GOOGLE rankings.

    | thine123
    0

  • I have a URL string which I don't want to be indexed. it includes the characters _Q1 ni the middle of the string. So in the robots.txt can I use 2 wildcards in the string to take out all of the URLs with that in it?  So something like /_Q1.  Will that pickup and block every  URL with those characters in the string? Also, this is not directly of the root, but in a secondary directory, so .com/.../_Q1.  So do I have to format the robots.txt as //_Q1* as it will be in the second folder or just using /_Q1 will pickup everything no matter what folder it is on? Thanks.

    | seo123456
    0

  • Site: bussongs.com I have a fairly successful (400k visits/month, 1.2m PV/month) site which features a directory of lyrics-style content. The bulk of the content is not unique and exists in many places across the web. I figured adding commenting would help add more bulk to each page and give some long-tail on-page KWs. The comments are non-AJAX and Google is crawling the information. There's 10k comments across the site. I have some automated filters to remove profanity and junk but otherwise comments are published in real time. Because of the niche I target, the quality of spelling/grammar is very low. I don't have any pagination at the moment so some pages are now quite long and the quantity of UGC content is considerably larger than the main content of the page. Traffic went down post-Panda and has picked up slowly over time - almost back at normal levels. But I feel I could better manage comments and that they do have an impact on SEO. Do these comments have value? Should I use AJAX to stop crawling? Implement pagination to limit page length? Use plus/minus ranking to give prominence to the better comments? Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.  Thanks!

    | kmander
    0

  • We have bought into a really powerful search, very exciting We can define really detailed product based 'landing pages' by creating a search that pulles on required attributeseghttp://www.OURDOMAIN.com//search/index.php?sortprice=asc&followSearch=9673&q=red+coats+short-length Pop that in a link Short Red Coats on a previous page and wonderful, that gives a page of short red coats in price ascending order, one happy consumer, straight to a page that meets their needs Question 1 however unhappy Google right? Question 2 can we meet Google's needs 100% with a  redirect permanent in an .htaccess file E.G redirect permanent /short-red-coats/ http://www.OURDOMAIN.com//search/index.php?sortprice=asc&followSearch=9673&q=red+coats+short-length
    Many thanks
    CB

    | GeezerG
    0

  • We're a big social networking site with over 1 million indexed pages and over 4 million visits a month. Our PR is 7. We're about to acquire and rebrand the content of a large reviews website, current PR 3. The new content will be treated as a 'site within a site' with different navigation and interface. With these factors in mind I think we need to create a new subdomain for the reviews site but I need to factor in the SEO implications, bearing in mind that new advertisers are going to be looking closely at our stats. Migrating the content to a new subdomain I understand will be easier than siting it in a new folder. Any advice appreciated

    | CecilyP
    0

  • I want to fix issue regarding duplicate categories & product pages on my multiple eCommerce websites. http://www.vistastores.com/patio-umbrellas-fiberbuilt-umbrellas-llc-7gcrw-teal.html - Want to rank with this... http://www.vistapatioumbrellas.com/patio-umbrellas-fiberbuilt-umbrellas-llc-7gcrw-teal.html - Duplicate one! http://www.vistastores.com/patio-umbrellas - Want to rank with this... http://www.vistapatioumbrellas.com/patio-umbrellas - Duplicate one!

    | CommercePundit
    0

  • Tomorrow morning I have a call with an SEO company interested in doing some work with our company. Its a larger company who do a lot of SEO work, and seem to have good feedback around the place. But we have been very very white hat in our all our our SEO work so far, and some of their wording on their site talks about "Negotiations and acquisitions of link partners".. which gives me the feel they might be a little grey hat.. What are some good questions we should ask these guys to make sure what they are doing is legit, and not going to get us stung for anything? And what sort of work should we get them to do, if we are happy to take care of content creation, on page optimisation and social media activities? Thanks!

    | timscullin
    0

  • A competitor has allegedly purchased a site wide HIDDEN link on a property that links to our website. Would this link hurt our rankings? Requests to the site to remove those links didn't go well -- they state they can legally link to any site they like and are not going to remove those links. Technically speaking, this is what the link looks like in their html: Our Primary Keyword The thousands of hidden links from this website will now vastly outnumber our existing backlinks.

    | Nick_Seo_Moz
    0

  • Hello all . Im experiencing a sudden ranking drop for one of my websites . Keyword = Green Tea Search Engine = google.lk URL = www.eswaran.com/greenTea.html This page was at 7th on 1st page . Since coupe of weeks back its moving backwards . I didn't even do any link building for this page other than doing little changes to titles tags . What would be the reason for such a issue ?

    | Osanda
    0

  • Anybody have some good advice as to how to handle customer accounts when merging eCommerce sites? These include email accounts and store accounts. We're trying to limit customer concerns when people discover the sites are merging. Thanks.

    | AWCthreads
    0

  • I have an issue where I've created a site, (www.tntperformance805.com), using WordPress as a CMS. I enabled the option to use a static page as the home page, and created that page as /home. Well, now the issue that exists is that Google is indexing both www.tntperformance805.com, and www.tntperformance805.com/home/. I've already setup a 301 redirect, pointing /home/ to the main domain, and even have rel=canonical set up automatically, pointing every page to the www version of that particular page. However, Google Webmaster Tools is still reporting the pages as having duplicate page titles and descriptions. I've even had the page removed from Google's cache and index. I'm assuming Google is not considering the 301 redirect, even though it's setup properly. Should I add rel="canonical" href="http://www.tntperformance805.com" /> to the body of the /home/ post, to ensure that it is giving credit to the main domain? I am assuming the page is only redirecting to , as that's the www version, but I thought the 301 redirect would enforce that the search engines should give all credit to the main domain. Thanks in advance for the help everyone. I look forward to some insightful feedback. Best Regards, Matt Dimock

    | National-Positions
    0

  • I have been wanting to set our site up to redirect non-www to www for the SEO benefits so often described here on SeoMoz. I see a lot on Apache but not so much for IIS. Is there any developers here that can point me to a how tutorial for people with little IIS experiences?

    | KJ-Rodgers
    0

  • Do you know any tool that can find the http response code for a bulk list of urls?

    | Melia
    0

  • Though I would ask the community this as it relates to positioning of external links on page vs. code and body vs footer. Working with a strategic partner for some data sharing arrangements and the question exists whether followed links in the template footer to our partners website provide better value vs. Body Links with context behind a CSS Tab (All code for Tabbed content is resolved on the same page)?  Yes there are links coming back from the partner site as well.

    | AU-SEO
    0

  • I have 2 ecommerce sites, each with a blog. I am increasing my linkbuilding efforts, but I don't want to build too many links directly to my 2 sites over a short period of time. I have decided that I will add a certain number of links to sites/pages that are already linking to my main sites (for example, a blog post on my blog, guest post on another blog, article submission, etc.). How much of a benefit can I expect in terms of rankings? Has anyone tested this out or experimented with something like this? What are the pros and cons? I appreciate thoughtful comments.

    | inhouseseo
    0

  • What markup should local businesses employ on their website? I'm aware of the newer schema.org markup but does Google still use rich snippets, geotags, etc.?

    | BryanPhelps-BigLeapWeb
    0

  • I currently have 1 website, but am planning on dividing it into sub-domains specific to geographic locations such as xxx.co.uk, xxx.it, xxx.es, etc... We are working on creating original content for the sub-sites, however upon launch many will be duplicate pages. Is there a problem with cross sub-domain canonical links? Thanks!

    | theLotter
    0

  • I know its effective practice cuz we're getting our arse kicked. I'm curious if its best practice (white, gray or black hat). I'm checking a competitors link profile on its landing page that is hitting the top of page 1 for several keywords. This competitor (national chain) has a strong domain authority (69). The particular landing page I'm checking in OSE has two 301 redirects from its own site among some other directory links to the page. The page shows 15 external links and half of them are very strong including it's own 301's. Aren't they essentially sending their own juice to the landing page to bolster page/domain authority to rank higher in the SERPS for those keywords? Is this a common practice using the 301's to a landing page? Is it white, gray or black hat? They are appearing suddenly appearing on the first page for several category keywords, so we're doing some snooping. Thanks.

    | AWCthreads
    0

  • Would anyone reccommend a preferably UK based SEO provider for blue chip Forex Broker. Thank you

    | buzzmartseo
    0

  • Let's say i want to rank for rental car service and purchases a domain  rental-car-service and creates a site  http://www.rental-car-service.com There will be few persons who won't use anchor text to link to the site, but will simply link using URL ( in this case http://www.rental-car-service.com ) So, will a link to  http://www.rental-car-service.com from another site using http://www.rental-car-service.com as anchor text help the keyword rental car service ?

    | seoug_2005
    0

  • I am working with a client who apparently has been penalized by Bing. The site has been around for many years and they are an industry leader in their field. The site was previously indexed and received a substantial amount of traffic from Bing. Last week the site disappeared from Bing's index. A site: and url: search both show no results. Does anyone have a significant amount of knowledge or experience related to Bing penalties? Here is what I have done so far: http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2009/03/19/getting-out-of-the-penalty-box.aspx This 2009 article states Bing's Summary Tool offers a "Site Status" section with a "Blocked" indicator which informs webmasters if a site is penalized. I have seen it before a long time ago, but apparently the field no longer exists. Is there a definitive means of determining if Bing has manually penalized a site besides a response from their Content Inclusion Request? Danny Sullivan wrote a great article about how Bing removed some sites for thin content last month. It seems two of the sites which were a focus of the article have been re-included in Bing's index. Bing claims an algorithm change where Danny seems skeptical. Either way this could be the same issue. http://searchengineland.com/bing-bans-holiday-deals-sites-102856 there are two recent complaints on Bing's forums about a similar issue where various webmasters shared their sites have been removed. There are no responses to these posts from Bing: http://www.bing.com/community/webmaster/f/12252/p/670360/9665163.aspx#9665163 and http://www.bing.com/community/webmaster/f/12252/t/670550.aspx?PageIndex=1 (the comments are relevant but not the initial post). Any ideas or suggestions would be helpful.

    | RyanKent
    0

  • SEOMOZ Pro is showing some duplicate content errors and wondered the best way to fix them other than re-writing the content. Should I just remove the pages found or should I set up permanent re-directs through to the home page in case there is any link value or visitors on these duplicate pages? Thanks.

    | benners
    0

  • A deep page is ranking for a competitive and essential keyword, I'd like the home page to rank. The main reasons are probably: This specific page is optimized for just that keyword. Contains keyword in URL I've optimized the home page for this keyword as much as possible without sacrificing the integrity of the home page and the other keywords I need to maintain. My main question is: If I use a 301 redirect on this deep page to the home page, am I risking my current ranking, or will my home page replace it on the SERPs? Thanks so much in advance!

    | ClarityVentures
    0

  • Hi Moz fans, I had a telephone conversation with an SEO company last week and they mentioned that the following "versions" of my domain were causing a canonicalisation issue; http://www.example.com www.example.com example.com I've already fixed the /index.html issue but do the above 3 also need to be fixed? Is the best solution to use a 301 redirect? As a side note, the SEOmoz web app doesn't identify these as being duplicate content... Regards, Ash

    | AshSEO2011
    0

  • SEOMOZ say's: I have six (6) duplicate pages. Duplicate content tool checker say's (0) On the physical computer that hosts the website the page exists as one file. The casing of the file is irrelevant to the host machine, it wouldn't allow 2 files of the same name in the same directory. To reenforce this point, you can access said file by camel-casing the URI in any fashion (eg; http://www.agi-automation.com/Pneumatic-grippers.htm). This does not bring up a different file each time, the server merely processes the URI as case-less and pulls the file by it's name. What is happening in the example given is that some sort of indexer is being used to create a "dummy" reference of all the site files. Since the indexer doesn't have file access to the server, it does this by link crawling instead of reading files. It is the crawler that is making an assumption that the different casings of the pages are in fact different files. Perhaps there is a setting in the indexer to ignore casing. So the indexer is thinking that these are 2 different pages when they really aren't. This makes all of the other points moot, though they would certainly be relevant in the case of an actual duplicated page." ****Page    Authority                                                                               Linking Root Domains http://www.agi-automation.com/                                        43                                   82 http://www.agi-automation.com/index.html                    25                                     2 http://www.agi-automation.com/Linear-escapements.htm                                                                  21                                 1 www.agi-automation.com/linear-escapements.htm    16                                  1 http://www.agi-automation.com/Pneumatic-grippers.htm                                                                                                                                                         30                             3 http://www.agi-automation.com/pneumatic-grippers.htm     16                     1**** Duplicate content tool estimates the following: www and non-www header response; Google cache check; Similarity check; Default page check; 404 header response; PageRank dispersion check (i.e. if www and non-www versions have different PR).

    | AGIAutomation
    0

  • Why does Trip Advisor rank higher than our official hotel website royallahaina.com for royal lahaina resort? Our other properties rank higher than trip advisor but this one doesnt.

    | TSpike1
    0

  • Would there be any benefit or penalty for implementing a links directory with over 300 external links to websites that somtimes return the link? Or would it be more beneficial to simply ask for one way inbound links when gaining links? For example this section of this website: http://directory.flyawaysimulation.com/ This is their directory and most but not all of the sites in that directory link back to them. Your ideas, thoughts or suggestions are greatly appreciated.

    | Peter264
    0

  • "Google+ members, and to a lesser extent others who are signed into Google, will be able to search against both the broader web and their own Google+ social graph. That’s right; Google+ circles, photos, posts and more will be integrated into search in ways other social platforms can only dream about." What is meant by " and to a lesser extent others who are signed into Google"  ? Does it mean that non-google plus members won't be able to view Google+photos, posts ?

    | seoug_2005
    0

  • Recently our company has acquired several high ranking retail websites which sell only our brand of products. We are now considering consolidating all our online sales from these different retail sites to be direct to our main website. The question we have is how do we do this without negatively affecting SEO for these high ranking retail sites?

    | DennyGan
    0

  • A site I have currently had the mega site links on the SERP results. Recently they have updated the mega links to the smaller 4 inline links under my SERP result. Any idea what happened or how do I correct this?

    | POSSIBLE
    0

  • We're closing down one of our eCommerce sites. What is the best approach to do this? The site has a modest link profile (a young site). It does have a run of site link to the parent site. It also has a couple hundred email subscribers and established accounts. Is there a gradual way to do this? How do I treat the subscribers and account holders? The impact won't be great, but I want to minimize collateral damage as much as possible. Thanks.

    | AWCthreads
    0

  • We recently made some updates to our site, one of which involved launching a bunch of new pages. Shortly afterwards we saw a significant drop in organic traffic. Some of the new pages list similar content as previously existed on our site, but in different orders. So our question is, what's the best way to diagnose whether this was the cause of our ranking drop? My current thought is to block the new directories via robots.txt for a couple days and see if traffic improves. Is this a good approach? Any other suggestions?

    | jamesti
    0

  • My crawl reports are saying there are too many links on page, could this be due to the Add This app on page

    | BarrattsShoes
    0

  • I am doing a variety of SEO link building techniques. I am doing: guest blog posts article submissions directories bookmarks web2.0 properties link acquisition I don't expect much from the article submissions, web 2.0, and directories, so I am using these methods for the long tail and less competitive keywords. Is this a good idea? When we talk about a link profile, is it per page or for the whole site? Does it matter if you have a more diverse link profile for a single page or does it have to be diverse for the whole site? Appreciate any informed comments!

    | inhouseseo
    0

  • Hi All I'm about to start on a new project where I've been having lots of discussions with the developers involved on the merits of both wordpress and joomla. I'm experienced with wordpress but haven't really done too much with Joomla. I've found some general info on Joomla online, most issues seems to be around duplicate content, but can't seem to find too much else. Therefore I thought I'd throw it out there for discussion as I'd love to hear from those of you who have used both CMS's and the drawbacks/ pitfalls or plus points in both. The project is based around a non transactional site, offering a service, but no product. There's lots of thought leadership type content planned, either through interviews, surveys, articles, video etc, and some linkbait etc. Lot of content will also be newsworthy so keep Google news etc in the back of your mind too. Lots of social integration too... Looking forward to hearing what you might have to say Mozzers.

    | PerchDigital
    1

  • Hi, On the 'Viper chill' blog (some may of heard of this blog) he talks about interlinking content in an attempt to build up link juice to get more from the content and pass more PR to the target website. Here is the link to the post, a few scrolls down and your see a diagram. http://www.viperchill.com/link-trio/ I have also attached the image to this post, so we can discuss in more detail by referencing to it. Now this guy knows what his talking about, lots of big players back him up, but does this method actually work better then having one link from each article pointing to the target website? If an article links to another article surely the PR flows into other links on the page as well as your own down grading the power of it? If the answer is yes, would this work for guest blogging? link-triage.png

    | activitysuper
    0

  • Our company runs a number of individual online shops, specialised in particular products but all in the same genre of goods overall, with a specific and relevant domain name for each shop. At the moment the sites are separate, and not interlinked, i.e. Completely separate brands. An analogy could be something like clothing accessories (we are not in the clothing business): scarves.com, and silkties.com (our field is more niche than this) We are about to launch a related site, (e.g. handbags.com), in the same field again but without precisely overlapping products. We will produce this site on a newer, more flexible e-commerce platform, so now is a good time to consider whether we want to place all our sites together with one e-commerce system on the backend. Essentially, we need to know what the pros and cons would be of the various options facing us and how the SEO ranking is affected by the three possibilities. Option 1: continue with separate sites each with its own domains. Option 2: have multiple sites, each on their own domain, but on the same ecommerce system and visible linked together for the customer (with unified checkout) – on the top of each site could be a menu bar linking to each site: [Scarves.com] – [SilkTies.com] – [Handbags.com] The main question here is whether the multiple domains are mutually beneficial, particularly considerding how close to target keywords the individual domains are. If mutually benefitial, how does it compare to option 3: Option 3: Having recently acquired a domain name (e.g. accessories.com) which would cover the whole category together, we are presented with a third option: making one site selling all of these products in different categories. Our main concern here would be losing the ability to specifically target marketing, and losing the benefit of the domains with the key words in for what people are more likely to be searching for (e.g. 'silk tie') rather than 'accessories.' Is it worth taking the hit on losing these specific targeted domain names for the advantage of increased combined inbound links?

    | Colage
    0

  • Is the new gTLD scheme from ICANN worth the money? I manage a brand relatively well-known in our own market segment. Would I benefit from moving from .com and national TLDs for my international sites to my own brand TLD? Are there any obvious SEO pros and cons?

    | KnutDSvendsen
    0

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