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Category: Intermediate & Advanced SEO

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  • Hi, I was slightly affected by the panda update on the 14th oct generaly dropping by about 5-8 spots in the serps for my main keywords, since then I've been giving my site a good looking over. On a site I've got city listings urls for certain widget companys, the thing is many areas and thus urls will have the same company listed. What would be the best way of solving this duplicate content as google may be seeing it? I was thinking of one page per company and prominenly listing the areas they operate so still hopefully get ranked for area searches. But i'd be losing the city names in the url as I've got them now for example: mywidgetsite.com/findmagicwidgets/new-york.html mywidgetsite.com/findmagicwidgets/atlanta.html Any ideas on how best to proceed? Cheers!

    | NetGeek
    0

  • Is there any delay between crawling a page by google and displaying of the ratings in rich snippet of the results in google?

    | NEWCRAFT
    0

  • The Problem I have a stable of clients spread around the U.S. in the maid service/cleaning industry -- each client is a franchisee, however their business is truly 'local' with a local service area, local phone/address, unique business name, and virtually complete control over their web presence (URL, site design, content; apart from a few branding guidelines). Over time I've developed a website template with a high lead conversion rate, and I've rolled this website out to 3 or 4 dozen clients.  Each client has exclusivity in their region/metro area. Lately my white hat back linking strategies have not been yielding the results they were one year ago, including legitimate directories, customer blogging (as compelling as maid service/cleaning blogs can really be!), and some article writing.  This is expected, or at least reflected in articles on SEO trends and directory/article strategies. I am writing this question because I see sites with seemingly much weaker back link profiles outranking my clients (using SEOMoz toolbar and Site Explorer stats, and factoring in general quality vs. quantity dynamics). Questions Assuming general on-page optimization and linking factors are equal: Might my clients be suffering because they're using my oft-repeated template website (albeit with some unique 'content' variables)? If I choose to differentiate each client's website, how much differentiation makes sense? Specifically: Even if primary content (copy, essentially) is differentiated, will Google still interpret the matching code structure as 'the same website'? Are images as important as copy in differentiating content? From an 'machine' or algorithm perspective evaluating unique content, I wonder if strategies will be effective such as saving the images in a different format, or altering them slightly in Photoshop, or using unique CSS selectors or slightly different table structures for each site (differentiating the code)? Considerations My understanding of Google's "duplicate content " dynamics is that they mainly apply to de-duping search results at a query specific level, and choosing which result to show from a pool of duplicate results.  My clients' search terms most often contain client-specific city and state names. Despite the "original content" mantra, I believe my clients being local businesses who have opted to use a template website (an economical choice), still represent legitimate and relevant matches for their target user searches -- it is in this spirit I ask these questions, not to 'game' Google with malicious intent. In an ideal world my clients would all have their own unique website developed, but these are Main St business owners balancing solutions with economics and I'm trying to provide them with scalable solutions. Thank You! I am new to this community, thank you for any thoughts, discussion and comments!

    | localizedseo
    0

  • My site have significantly went down in google ranking today.  Is there a recent update with regards to google panda? Also, please help me review my website for possible errors so I may apply the necessary changes for my site to recover.  Here is my url:  http://www.homeescapade.com Thanks and God Bless

    | Trigun
    0

  • Hi, If I have a website with the domain crazysocks.co.uk and a title tag 'black socks' would I see any benefit redirecting blacksocks.co.uk to crazysocks.co.uk, to give my keyword 'black socks' a boost in the SE's from the EMD. I see it loads where an EMD is indexed for its term but when you click the result it redirects to a branded domain. I personally cant see this being true but wanted to double check.

    | activitysuper
    0

  • My boss has decided that on our new website we are building, that he wants all content and images managed by not allowing copying content and/or saving images. Some of the information and images is proprietary, yet most is available for public viewing, but never the less, he wants it prohibited from copy and/or saving. We would still want to keep the content indexable and use appropriate alt tags etc... I wanted to find out if there is any SEO reason and facts to why this would not be a good idea?Would implementing code to prohibit (or at least make it difficult) to save images and copy content, penalize us?

    | KJ-Rodgers
    0

  • Today, I was reading help article for URL parameters by Google. http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=1235687 I come to know that, Google is giving value to URLs which ave parameters that change or determine the content of a page. There are too many pages in my website with similar value for Name, Price and Number of product. But, I have restricted all pages by Robots.txt with following syntax. URLs:
    http://www.vistastores.com/table-lamps?dir=asc&order=name
    http://www.vistastores.com/table-lamps?dir=asc&order=price
    http://www.vistastores.com/table-lamps?limit=100 Syntax in Robots.txt
    Disallow: /?dir=
    Disallow: /?p=
    Disallow: /*?limit= Now, I am confuse. Which is best solution to get maximum benefits in SEO?

    | CommercePundit
    0

  • Hi We have a listing website that has a huge amount of listings.These listings are changing all time, they become passive or deleted. We would like to choose the response code for the passive for deleted pages. Which response type must we use ? Redirect to last category with 301 Give 410 Gone response code Give 404 Response code which option would we choose ? and any ideas ?

    | SEMTurkey
    0

  • Dear Seomoz members, We are going to migrate our website to different server location(new data center). does this impact on our SEO rankings? If so what and all checklist i have to do....to retain my SEO rankings. Regards, kathiravan subbiah Caratlane.com

    | kathiravan
    0

  • Hello! My question is as follows: Suppose there is SiteA which is a blog that has a url structure of http://www.siteA.com/blog/category/article Now suppose I'd like to redirect those articles to a new domain (which has the same url structure) BUT excluding a certain category, say, 'blah/' so in other words, some examples: http://www.siteA.com/blog/shoes/best-shoes-to-buy ->redirects-> http://www.siteB.com/blog/shoes/best-shoes-to-buy/ (there is a trailing slash here for some reason) BUT http://www.siteA.com/blog/blah/foo-bar -NO REDIRECT- (because it's in the /blah/ category). Any and all feedback & help would be much appreciated 🙂  Thanks!~

    | apo11o177
    0

  • Need a trained eye to help with a quick search to see if there’s a poison pill buried somewhere on my site! This is an e-commerce site that I’ve worked on and ran for 5 years which ranks from middle to top in just about all of the quality analytic scores when compared to top 10 competitors in Google, yet this site can hardly stay on the 3<sup>rd</sup> page let alone the 1<sup>st</sup>.  Only weakness in metrics that I see is that I need more linking root domains and traffic.  Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated.  Lowell

    | lwnickens
    0

  • For my top 132 keywords, my target ranks an average of 7 positions lower in Bing and an average of 9 positions lower in Yahoo.  Does anyone have some good resources to read, or any tips on why we would rank so much poorer in Bing/Yahoo than in google?

    | adriandg
    0

  • What's the Effective way to let major search engine to index Login-first SNS sites? the reason of asking that is because i saw a search engines index Millon of SNS pages but most of them requested to login, how search engine get through this? http://www.baidu.com/s?wd=site%3Akaixin001.com&pn=50 thanks Boson

    | DarwinChinaSEO
    0

  • Then why does SEO moz have this list: http://www.seomoz.org/dp/seo-directory ?? Included in that list are some pretty spammy looking sites such as: <colgroup><col width="345"></colgroup>
    | http://www.site-sift.com/ |
    | http://www.2yi.net/ |
    | http://www.sevenseek.com/ |
    | http://greenstalk.com/ |
    | http://anthonyparsons.com/ |
    | http://www.rakcha.com/ |
    | http://www.goguides.org/ |
    | http://gosearchbusiness.com/ |
    | http://funender.com/free_link_directory/ |
    | http://www.joeant.com/ |
    | http://www.browse8.com/ |
    | http://linkopedia.com/ |
    | http://kwika.org/ |
    | http://tygo.com/ |
    | http://netzoning.com/ |
    | http://goongee.com/ |
    | http://bigall.com/ |
    | http://www.incrawler.com/ |
    | http://rubberstamped.org/ |
    | http://lookforth.com/ |
    | http://worldsiteindex.com/ |
    | http://linksgiving.com/ |
    | http://azoos.com/ |
    | http://www.uncoverthenet.com/ |
    | http://ewilla.com/ |

    | adriandg
    0

  • Hi guys, I have these types of URLs  with the format below that are seen as duplicate contents http://www.mysite.com/index.php?a=11&b=15&d=3&c=1 I wanted to permanently redirect them to my homepage.  I am thinking if this is possible in .htaccess using rewrite conditions? Thanks in advance...

    | Trigun
    0

  • In 2012 we will be rolling out a directory of local services for our industry. This will ultimately be thousands of additional pages, with city/zip searching, individual provider pages etc. The main reason is for UX -- providing local resources for our industry to compliment the online experience (we're an online B2C retailer) My question is if there are pros/cons to putting this on a subdomain, or if having it on the root is ideal. I don't see a huge influx of backlinks (making a sub fine) but I suppose that could change down the road. I do see some indexing benefits for new terms like 'service x in los angeles' etc, but that would also be fine on a sub. It feels like it would be cleaner to keep separate and on a sub, but maybe we're missing something. We certainty don't want to hurt anything on our primary site which drives the business. Thoughts?

    | SEOPA
    0

  • When there is a 500 Internal Server Error, is it better to return an HTTP 500 response and custom error page from the requested URL, or is it better to return a 302 redirect? The redirect would send the browser to the custom error page, which would return the HTTP 500 result. We tell Google not to index or follow our error pages, so if Google sees an error at a URL, we don't necessarily want Google to think that the URL should be ignored. That's why the alternative would be to redirect to a custom error page with it's own URL. Similarly, what's the best approach if the response is a 404? Return HTTP 404 and custom 404 page from the requested URL, or redirect? Thanks.

    | dbuckles
    0

  • I'm an SEOmoz Newbie and have a very specific question about the auto generated WordPress Pages. SEOmoz caught and labeled the auto generated WP pages as Crawl Warnings like: Long URL - 302 - Title Element to Long - Missing Meta Description Tag - Too Many On-Page Links So I have learned the lesson and have now made those pages "no follow" / "no idex." HOWEVER, WHAT DO I DO WITH THE ONES THAT HAVE ALREADY BEEN INDEXED? Do I... 1. Just leave them as is a hope they don't hurt me from an SEO perspective? 2. Redirect them all to a relevant page? I'm sure many people have had this issue. What do you think? Thanks Dominic

    | amorbis
    0

  • Hi, i am running a global concept that operates with one webpage that has lot of content, the content is also available on different domains, but with in the same concept. I think i am getting bad ranking due to duplicate content, since some of the content is mirrored from the main page to the other "support pages" and they are almost 200 in total. Can i do some changes to work around this or am i just screwed 🙂

    | smartmedia
    0

  • in my title tag i want to have: 3D Renders of Office Refurbishment & Interior Design Kent | Complete Group which unfortunatly is longer than 70 characters, however, to make it fit in 70 characters i could put: 3D Renders of Office Refurb & Interior Design Kent | Complete Group Notice that refurbishment has been changed to refurb, would this be ok for SEO purposes?

    | CompleteOffice
    0

  • Today, I was checking Google Analytics for my website. I found too many variation in Visits between Google & Bing. I can understand that, We are not getting specific visits from Bing due to bad ranking. Then, I have done detail R & D + read few useful articles to get it done. I found such a important discussion on Bing forum which is associated to draft on page. I also checked Bing webmaster tools to know more about my website. I found that, crawling from Bing is really slow and let duane know about it via Twitter. I have read Bing rankings cheat sheet. But, I am really confuse after reading it. Because, I am following Google webmaster guidelines as well as Bing webmaster tools guidelines. So, How can I improve my performance over Bing? Is there any rock solid method for Bing like Google which may help me to achieve milestone? I have one request for Rand to write down marathon blog post to rank high on Bing....

    | CommercePundit
    0

  • Hi Everyone, I am curious to know if IP Address plays any role in SEO....What if a website sharing an I.P with a porn site, BlueFart site, fake viagra pills site etc.? Does it affect the SEO? Please share your opinion on this. Thanks

    | seodoz
    0

  • Hi, In the early days of my blog, I used permalinks with the following format: http://www.mysitesamp.com/2009/02/04/heidi-cortez-photo-shoot/ I then decided to change this format using .htaccess to this format: http://www.mysitesamp.com//heidi-cortez-photo-shoot/ My question is, why do rogerbot still crawls my old URL format since these urls' no longer exists in my website or blog.

    | Trigun
    0

  • My videos are still doing really well in universal search, but I've noticed a drop in the actual youtube serps. It used to be that videos with lots of views, comments & likes had priority in the youtube results. Now it looks as if the number of videos you have uploaded, even if they have few views, ranks above the individual numbers on a video. I'm thinking that I shouldn't create a channel for a client who might only have 3 - 5 videos uploaded per year. What say you?

    | juliemarg
    0

  • Our Client owns two ecommerce websites. Website A sells 20 related brands.  Website has improving search rank, but not normally on the second to fourth page of google. Website B was purchased from a competitor.  It has 1 brand (also sold on site A).  Search results are normally high on the first page of google. Client wants to consider merging the two sites.   We are looking at options. Option 1:  Do nothing, site B dominates it’s brand, but this will not do anything to boost site A. Option 2: keep both sites running, but put lots of canonical tags on site B pointing to site A Option 3: close down site B and make a lot of 301 redirects to site A Option 4: ??? Any thoughts on this would be great.  We want to do this in a way that boosts site A as much as possible without losing sales on the one brand that site B sells.

    | EugeneF
    0

  • Primarily questions I want to know definitive answers to: Do incoming links to a YouTube video affect Google's decision to show a YouTube video thumbnail in the results? If so, does YouTube rank the video higher due to incoming links? Does YouTube take any off-page factors into consideration when ranking a video? Does anyone else have any other helpful tips/thoughts/suggestions? Please don't answer this just to get points and give me fluff information. I'd really like to get some concrete data/info 🙂 Cheers!

    | alhallinan
    0

  • Hi Guys, One of our clients has a good web site with lots of content that is ranked already on #2 for the top keyword (singular and plural) on Google UK. The keyword itself is a competitive one. The top spot is occupied by a wikipedia article that doesn't have much content in general.  Can anyone come up with an advice what strategy we have to apply to outplace that article? Thanks!

    | myclicks-163603
    0

  • I have thousands of duplicate page content errors on my site, but I'm not exactly sure why. For example, the crawl is reporting this page - http://www.fantasytoyland.com/2011-glee-costumes.html is a duplicate of this page - http://www.fantasytoyland.com/2011-jersey-shore-costumes.html . All of these products are unique to the page - what is causing it to flag as duplicate content?

    | FutureMemoriesInc
    0

  • Hello, I had a site with two topics: Fashion & Technology. Due to the Panda Update I decided to change some things and one of those things was the separation of these two topics. So, on June 21, I redirected (301) all the Fashion pages to a new domain. The new domain performed well the first three days, but the rankings dropped later. Now, even the site doesn't rank for its own name. So, I thought the website was penalized for any reason, and I sent a reconsideration to Google. In fact, five days later, Google confirmed that my site is "still violating the quality guidelines". I don't understand. My original site was never penalized and the content is the same. And now when it is installed on the new domain becomes penalized just a few days later? Is this penalization only a sandbox for the new domain? Or just until the old URLs disappear from the index (due to the 301 redirect)? Maybe Google thinks my new site is duplicating my old site? Or just is a temporal prevention with new domains after a redirection in order to avoid spammers? Maybe this is not a real penalization and I only need a little patience? Or do you think my site is really violating the quality guidelines? (The domain is http://www.newclothing.co/) The original domain where the fashion section was installed before is http://www.myddnetwork.com/ (As you can see it is now a tech blog without fashion sections) The 301 redirect are working well. One example of redirected URLs: http://www.myddnetwork.com/clothing-shoes-accessories/ (this is the homepage, but each page was redirected to its corresponding URL in the new domain). I appreciate any advice. Basically my fashion pages have dropped totally. Both, the new and old URLs are not ranking. 😞

    | omarinho
    0

  • Our client is in the planning stages of a site redesign that includes moving platforms. The new site will be rolled out in different phases throughout a period of a year. They are planning to put the new site redesign on a subdomain (i.e. www2.website.com) during the roll out of the different phases while eventually switching the new site back over to the www domain once all the phases are complete. We’re afraid that having the new site on the www2 domain will hurt SEO. For example, if their first phase is rolling out a new system to customize a product design and this new design system is hosted on www2.website.com/customize, when a customer picks a product to customize they’ll be linked to www2.website.com/customize instead of the original www.website.com/customize. The old website will start to get phased out as more and more of the new website is completed and users will be directed to www2. Once the entire redesign is completed, the old platform can be removed and the new website moved back to the www subdomian. Is there a better way of rolling out a website redesign in phases and not have it hosted on a different subdomain?

    | BlueAcorn
    0

  • I am cleaning up a fairly large site. Some pages have a trailing slash on the end some don't. Some of the existing backlinks built used a trailing slash in the url and some didn't. We aren't concerned with picking a particular one but just want to get one set and stick to it from now on. I am wondering, would I clean this up within the same redirect in the htaccess file that takes care of the www and non www? example RewriteEngine On
    RewriteBase /
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.domain.com/ [NC]
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com$1 [L,R=301] I currently use that to redirect the www. to the non www as you can see. However here is what I was confused about. Would this code be enough to redirect ALL pages with a / to the ones without? or would I also need to add another code (so there is 2) to my htaccess like below? RewriteEngine On
    RewriteBase /
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.com/ [NC]
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com$1 [L,R=301] RewriteEngine On
    RewriteBase /
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.domain.com/ [NC]
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com$1 [L,R=301] That way, now, even the non www pages with a trailing slash will redirect to the non www without the trailing slash. Hopefully you understand what I am getting at. I just want to redirect EVERYTHING to the non www WITHOUT a / Thank you Jake

    | PEnterprises
    0

  • In Google's SEO Guide, they say avoid the use of drop-down menus, page 12: http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/www.google.com/en/us/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf But, is this always true? What if you create the drop down purely using HTML & CSS? Is it fine to use a bit of javascript to create the drop-down menu, or should it only be HTML & CSS?

    | nicole.healthline
    0

  • SEOmoz Community, I am a business owner and have spent the past year studying SEO. I've been through countless hours of videos and reading. For those questions that go beyond anything i've watched or read i've referred to this community. Everyone here has been VERY helpful and I have based some major decisions on what i've learned from everyone here. We launched our site this morning and now i'd like to see how we did from your point of view. Is my overall site/URL structure up to par? I still need to build backlinks and things of that nature but getting the site live is a major milestone for us. Any comments (good and bad) are welcome. Site: www.Suretegrity.com Thanks, Alex

    | dbuckles
    0

  • I'm currently having trouble with what appears to be a cached version of robots.txt. I'm being told via errors in my Google sitemap account that I'm denying Googlebot access to the entire site. I uploaded clean and "Allow" robots.txt yesterday, but receive the same error. I've tried "Fetch as Googlebot" on the index and other pages, but still the error. Here is the latest: | Denied by robots.txt |
    | 11/9/11 10:56 AM | As I said, there in not blocking on the robots.txt for 24 hours. HELP!

    | Elchanan
    0

  • If I link an iframe to pull its content - does that count as inbound link for the iframed content? Am I passing linklove to that page? I am on x.com and have an iframe pull content from z.com. Does this give linklove from x to z.com? (I am NOT asking if the z context is indexed in x, although I am weary to follow the most frequent statement that they do not. Google states that they will try to pull the content from the iframe, but don't guarantee it.)

    | andreas.wpv
    0

  • So, for example, subdomain.domain/folder subdomain.domain/folder2 Is it possible to set up a 301-re-direct for an entire folder on a subdomain? If so, how? What is the correct code for this?

    | nicole.healthline
    0

  • How to remove date stamp in the SERP? I removed dates In the blog posts of one of the blogs and it removed date stamp in the SERP. How about regular sites? Thanks.

    | gmk1567
    0

  • Our client was just acquired by a larger company and they want to merge their 100-page website into the larger, parent company's 500+ page website.  They currently have a strong ranking for a focused group of keywords and are worried about losing their ranking position for those important keywords.  The keywords are roughly 80-90% of the focus of the old site, but will represent only 30-40% of the focus of the new site. Will this move hurt their rankings?  What can we advise them to do to retain the value of their current ranking strength for the target keywords?

    | DenisL
    0

  • I have a customer who runs campaigns on adwords and we have had real problems with his ads being taken down due to certain ingredients being present in supplements. Now we move towards his SEO campaign and we wondered if the natural listings are effected by sites that list banned substances or pages listed on the adwords policy as being banned ? Has anyone experienced a site being downgraded by link being present from sites that provided products or services that are banned from being advertised on Google adwords ?

    | onlinemediadirect
    0

  • I have been using SCRIBD to embed PDF documents on my site but until recently I did not include the link back to SCRIBD. Will my site get credit for this content or will it go to SCRIBD? Is there a better way to embed PDF documents for SEO?

    | casper434
    0

  • I have added a number of widgets and gadgets to my site that I suspect act like Iframes. If true do these widgets and gadgets and the content that they are linked to help or hurt my site from an SEO perspective? Examples are facebook gadget, wordpress blidget, weather gadget, google maps widget.

    | casper434
    0

  • i created a new design of my website, very clean and highly orientated towards conversion. its a far better looking site than the old one but the navigation is almost the same. a few days after i uploaded the new site we were ranked number 1 on the biggest keyphrase in my industry. Does google crawl design feature, maybe with something like conversion heat mapping software and include that as a ranking factor? love your thoughts on this one.

    | corgi
    2

  • We have a large quantity of URLs that we would like to de-index from Google (we are affected b Panda), but not Bing. What is the best way to go about doing this?

    | nicole.healthline
    0

  • An e-commerce site I am working on currently displays 6 Super-Categories with a drop down that contains about 100 Categories for items which filter down to sub-cats and then the actual products. The issue is that every page starts off with these 100+ links just in navigation alone.  I can only assume this is crippling our ability to spread link juice efficiently. I have looked at larger sites that have moved towards side navigation. A few examples: *amazon.com *walmart.com *newegg.com My issue is that we would like to move towards less links on the homepage to funnel our incoming links more efficiently but I cannot figure out how large sites cope with this.  As far as I can tell they are using side nav that disappears after selecting a category of item in which the navigation is replaced with filtering tools and the nav is hidden above (see the sites above). Is this the best way to handle this issue?  Also is there a way to find out exactly what they are doing because I am trying to explain this to our IT person and I just get a response that our site is fine how it is and these navigation links don't affect anything...even though each page starts off with the same 100 follow links of navigation. Thanks

    | MichealGooden
    0

  • Hi there if you get a domain off someone and change registrant details and hosting, to what extent does this affect the power of the site? Any opinions of interest, many thanks.

    | pauledwards
    0

  • One of my clients believes someone is trying to hack their site.  We are seeing the requests with a server protocol or HTTP 1.0 so they want to block 1.0 entirely. Will this cause any problems with search engines or regular, non-spamming visitors?

    | BryanPhelps-BigLeapWeb
    0

  • For example, if I search for an 'x' item in a site's search box and if the site displays a list of results based on the query, would that page be crawled? I am asking this question because this would be a URL that is non existent on the site and hence am confused as to whether Google bots would be able to find it.

    | pulseseo
    0

  • can someone please explain this "NOTICE" i am getting from my campaign...Is this a problem that needs attention?

    | SEObleu.com
    0

  • Hi I stupidly thought that it would be a good idea to set up a reciprocal links page on my website named 'links'.  I did this because my competitors were linking to these pages so I though it would be a good idea and I genuinely didn't know that you could be punished for this.  Within about 3 weeks my rank dropped about 3 pages. I have since removed the links and the page was cached last Friday but the site still appears to have a penalty.  I assumed when Google cached the page and saw the links were not there anymore that the penalty would be lifted. Anyone got any ideas? ps. The competitor websites had broken their links pages into various categories relating to the website i.e. related directories etc. so this might be why they weren't penalized.

    | BelfastSEO
    0

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