Skip to content

Welcome to the Q&A Forum

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

Category: Intermediate & Advanced SEO

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


  • I'm working with a company who will likely have to change their URL because of a trademark dispute. They will be able to maintain the new URL for some period but will soon need to drop the existing URL all together. Aside from the usual keyword considerations when choosing a URL, are there any SEO strategies I should consider as we execute this change?

    | Jon_KS
    0

  • I'm sure a few people have been asking this direct question throughout the forums but most of them are masked by indirect questions like "my traffic has dipped" and the like.  Does anyone have a firm confirmation that Panda has hit? My indication that it has hit is that I'm experiencing a ~%30 increase in traffic to my e-commerce client from organic searches after this past weekend.  We haven't made any significant changes to content besides daily postings, but even that doesn't account for a %30 spike that has maintained for 3 days straight. So again, what have you guys experienced?  Anything to support this?

    | linztm
    0

  • Hi I would like to know why the traffic for the website link http://theindustrymeasure.com/2010/07/15/rediffmail-login has dropped suddenly on google.I used to get around 5000 page views on this page and then suddenly dropped to 15-20 . I still get good traffic from yahoo (around 500). Just before the drop I noticed that I started to get spammy trackbacks from Many questionable sources. I have not approved any of these trackbacks. The trackbacks are regular frequency of. 1 per day. is there any action which I can take to ensure that I get back my traffic. Traffic to other links are fine , only this page seems to have dropped off ever since the spam attack. As per seomoz tool I have a grade a for keyword rediffmail

    | ShoutOut
    0

  • I am working with an affiliate website which has many product listings but the "Buy Now" button on each product listing is an external link (affiliate link) to the appropriate product page on the actual website where the product can be bought. Each of these external links passes through an internal redirect, which is implemented as a 302. Consequently, when SEOmoz crawls that site, it gives me a warning that there are hundreds of 302 redirects on the site. Do you think this will hurt the site's potential to rank? Should I remove the redirects and leave them as direct links to the external site?

    | AlexFusman
    0

  • I have a site for which the primary keyword has multiple abbreviations. The site is for the computer game "Football Manager", each iteration is often referred to as FM2012, FM12 or Football Manager 2012, the first two can also be used with or without spaces inbetween. While this is only 3 keywords to target, it means that every key phrase such as "FM2012 Tactics", must also be targeted in 3 ways. Is there a recommended approach to make sure that all 3 are targeted? At present I use the full title "Football Manager" in the the title and try to use the shorter abbreviations in the page, I also make sure the title tags always have an alternative e.g FM2012 Tactics Two specific questions as well as general tips: Does the <abbr>HTML tag help very much?</abbr> Are results likely to differ much for searches for "FM 2012" and "FM2012" i.e. without the space.

    | freezedriedmedia
    1

  • I've been trying to register a business on Google Places now for a few months. As part of the verification process, Google send a postcard to your business address so that you can enter the pin online and verify your address. They also say that it takes up to 3 weeks, however this is now the 3rd time I've requested a pin and none have turned up so far. The latest one was requested well over 3 weeks ago. Has anyone else had problems getting a local results postcard? It's driving me nuts!

    | PeterAlexLeigh
    0

  • I am pretty excited about changing all my title tags (for the most important 7 pages) since I have seen my rankings jump up in the SERP just by adding the main keyword for my website in the title tag. To make it easier I will explain my business. Simply,  I run an online jewelry shop, so basically the keywords I want to use is "Jewelry online" and for the main categories "Necklace", "Rings" and "Bracelets". What I am unsure about is whether to use all the keywords in the main pages title tag or should I just use the main keyword "Jewelry online". I don’t want to create competition between my own pages of course. Jewelry Online - Trendy Fashion Jewelry | Homepage Or Jewelry Online - Necklace, Rings, Bracelets | Homepage And the same goes for the main categories, should I include "jewelry online" or not, like: Bracelets - Fashion Jewelry Online | Homepage Or Bracelets - Trendy_ Bangles_ and Arm Cuffs | Homepage Any suggestions what is the best practice for the title tag on main page and the main categories? Thanks

    | ikomorin
    0

  • What is the average % of links from a sitemap that are included in the Google index? Obviously want to aim for 100% of the sitemap urls to be indexed, is this realistic?

    | stats44
    0

  • Today, I have checked Google webmaster tools to get answer of following question. Who links the most to my website? I was assumed that Google webmaster tools provide me list of external website where I have created my text links. But, I can't get it when see my own website links the most to me. (4652??) I checked my other websites which are integrated in Google webmaster tools. They also developed on same platform as well as same internal linking structure. But, I am not able to find out similar issue over there. That's why I am quite confuse with Vista Store. How can I solve it? Does it really matter? "Open Site Explorer is my favorite one and always using that to get it done. But, Google webmaster tools is also active & free so why should I not jump in to... 🙂 "

    | CommercePundit
    0

  • Hi, I have 6 duplicated pages. I want to know the best way to resolve this issue. The title for all pages is 'Paradisus All Inclusive Luxury Resorts - Book your stay at Paradisus Resorts' http://www.paradisus.com/booking-template.php | http://www.paradisus.com/booking-template.php?codigoHotel=5889 |
    | | http://www.paradisus.com/booking-template.php?codigoHotel=5891 line 9 http://www.paradisus.com/booking-template.php |
    | | http://www.paradisus.com/booking-template.php?codigoHotel=5910 line 9 http://www.paradisus.com/booking-template.php |
    | | http://www.paradisus.com/booking-template.php?codigoHotel=5911 line 9 |

    | Melia
    0

  • Hi all, I have an ecommerce site which has a standard block of text on 98% of the product pages. The site also has a blog. Because these cause duplicate content and duplicate title issues respectively, how can I ever get around this? Would having the standard text on the product pages displayed as an image help? And how can I stop the blog being listed as duplicate titles without a nofollow? We already have the canonical attribute applied to some areas where this is appropriate e.g. blog and product categories. Thanks for your help 🙂

    | CMoore85
    0

  • If you want to add both "noindex, follow" and "noopd" should you add two meta robots tags or is there a way to combine both into one?

    | nicole.healthline
    0

  • I am working on a job site that only ranks well for the homepage with very low ranking internal pages. My job pages do not rank what so ever and are database driven and often times turn to 404 pages after the job has been filled. The job pages have to no content either. Anybody have any technical on-site recommendations for a job site I am working on especially regarding my internal pages? (Cross Country Allied.com)

    | Melia
    0

  • I uploaded a video to youtube one time and then went to upload it again, but saved differently with different tags.  Youtube rejected the second upload as being the same as the first. Really, it was the same... just a different file with different tags. Now, I was thinking about making and uploading some similar but not identical videos for embedding on some web pages. Was thinking I'd make the voice overs different, but the images mostly the same montage. Do you think Youtube/Google will see it as the same video? I kind of assume that it didn't fly when I first tried it some time ago because youtube was looking at the audio in the way it can make a transcription. Do you think if the audi,o, file name, tags were different, it wouldn't matter if the video was the same? Thanks!

    | 94501
    0

  • In doing some research on this issue, I came across this blog post which seems to suggest it certainly will be a trigger to search engines. http://www.seounique.com/blog/multiple-h1-tags-triggers-google-penalty/ Could be a false positive on his specific case, but I was wondering what the community thought. Thanks in advance!

    | jim_shook
    0

  • I have 2 job sites that I am managing and working on. One of the sites has  a great deal of job vacancies and expired job pages that have been indexed. This one below: http:// job search.cctc .com/cctc Jobsearch/expandedjobsearch.do This job site does not have any job pages index: http://www.cross countryallied. com/ctAlliedWebSite/ travel-nurse-jobs/job-search.jsp Why and what can I do to get the dynamic pages index and ranking? Any help tips would be much appreciated. Thanks

    | Melia
    0

  • 1.       When I disable java-script in Firefox and load our home page, it is missing entire middle section. 2.       Also, the global nav dropdown menu does not display at all. (with java-script disabled)    I believe this is not good. 3.       But when type in  <website name="">in Google search and click on  the cached version of home page > and then click on text only version, It displays the Global nav links fine.</website> 4.       When I switch the user agent to Googlebot(using Firefox plugin "User Agent Swticher)), the home page and global nav displays fine. Should I be worried about#1 and  #2 then? How to find what Googlebot actually sees on a page? (I have tried "Fetch as Googlebot" from GWT. It displays source code.) Thanks for the help! Supriya.

    | Amjath
    0

  • I have an issue with duplicated pages. Should I use cannonical tag and if so, how? Or should change the page titles? This is causing my pages to compete with each other in the SERPs. 'Paradisus All Inclusive Luxury Resorts - Book your stay at Paradisus Resorts' is also used on http://www.paradisus.com/booking-template.php | http://www.paradisus.com/booking-template.php?codigoHotel=5889 line 9 | | http://www.paradisus.com/booking-template.php?codigoHotel=5891 line 9 | | http://www.paradisus.com/booking-template.php?codigoHotel=5910 line 9 | | http://www.paradisus.com/booking-template.php?codigoHotel=5911 line 9 |

    | Melia
    0

  • My company website is multi-language and multi-country. Content created for the Global (English-language only, root directory) site is automatically used when no localization exists for the language and country choice (i.e. Brazil). I'm concerned this may be harming our SEO through dupe content penalties. Can anyone confirm this is possible? Any recommendations on how to solve the issue? Maybe the canonical tag? Thanks very much!

    | IanTreviranus
    0

  • What's up guys, Having some troubles with SERP rankings. My sitemap (navigation) is appearing instead of my actual keywords. I have tried a few methods to fix this; setting a preferred domain, using a 301 redirects, deleting out of date pages via Google webmaster tools. Nothing seems to work. My next step was to refresh the cache for my entire site - does anyone know how to do this? Can't see any tools... Any help would be great. Cheers, Jon.

    | jamesjk24
    0

  • If we host the video on a third party player & use their player (such as Brightcove), will we get credit for the video (will it show in SERPs on our domain? Or, do we need to host it on our own site?

    | nicole.healthline
    0

  • Hola, Thanks in advance for reading and trying to help me out. A client of mine recently created a large scale company directory  (500k+ pages) in Drupal v6 while the "marketing" type pages of their site was still in manual hard-coded HTML. They redesigned their "marketing" pages, but used Drual v7. They're now experiencing server conflicts with both instances of Drupal not allowing them to communicate/be on the same server. Eventually the directory will be upgraded to Drupal v7, but could take weeks to months the client does not want to wait for the re-launch. The client wants to push the new marketing site live, but also does not want to ruin the overall SEO value of the directory and have a few options, but I'm looking to help guide them down the path of least resistance: Option 1: Move the company directory onto a subdomain and the "marketing site" on the www. subdomain. Client gets to push their redesign live, but large scale 301s to the directory cause major issues in terms of shaking up the structure of the site causing ripple effects into getting pulled out of the index for days to weeks. Rankings and traffic drop, subdomain authority gets lost and the company directory health looks bad for weeks to months. However, 301 maintains partial SEO value and some long tail traffic still exists. Once the directory gets moved to Drupal v7, the directory will then cancel the 301 to the subdomain and revert back to original www. subdomain URLs Option 2: Block the company directory from search engines with robots.txt and meta instructions, essentially cutting off the floodgates from the established marketing pages. No major scaling 301 ripple effect, directory takes a few weeks to filter out of the index, traffic is completely lost, however once drupal v7 gets upgraded and the directory is then re-opened, directory will then slowly gain back SEO value to get close to old rankings, traffic, etc. Option 3: 302 redirect? Lose all accumulate SEO value temporarily... hmm Option 4: Something else? As you can see, this is not an ideal situation. However, a decision has to be made and I'm looking to chose the lesser of evils. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks again -Chris

    | Bacon
    0

  • Can Google know how many clicks a website has received from emails ? What if the GA is not installed ?

    | seoug_2005
    0

  • When you say site speed, does it mean speed of loading of each of the pages of the website or speed of home page loading. What do site speed tools measure ?

    | seoug_2005
    0

  • Morning, We're moving our site to a new server today and having never done so before in an SEO capacity, are there any SEO implications, pitfalls, things to watch out for? Advice and comments appreciated. Thanks.

    | Martin_S
    0

  • If another site hosts the video and you show it on your site in an iframe, would the video show up in SERPs on your URL? I believe it would show up on their URL. Do you need to host the video on your own server in order for it to show up on SERPs?

    | nicole.healthline
    0

  • If we host a video on a third party site and use an iframe to display it on our site, when the video is indexed in SERPs will it show on our site or on the third party site?

    | nicole.healthline
    0

  • My question is about long url titles, my client is using wordpress and the rankings are going well apart from two, which for some reason just wont move. After using some of the tools available on SEO moz which i have found very helpful I have spotted a re-occuring warning throughout the site, the titles, in word press you have this setting (below) page title : %page_title% | %blog_title% My question is my client has quite good brand online but I done want to impact this. The problem I have is that I have a Keyword in the title then the clients company name which is three words and takes up a lot of space. I am thinking about removing this but in two minds so i was kinda hoping for a bit of advice as this looks like a standard in wordpress. Mike

    | TomBarker82
    0

  • Should I be worried that this will affect SEO?  Most sites redirect to the index.html page, right? [edited by staff to remove toolbar data]

    | moskowman
    0

  • There is a website I am analyzing that ranks highly in firefox - position #2 on top page. But in Google they are ranked only on the top of the 4th page. How is this possible? Looks like some of the codes in the links are different. Why? Link from Firefox link: http://www.google.ca/#q=hamilton+web+design&hl=en&prmd=imvnsfd&ei=nIB3TtG_BYTe0QHm05HnCA&start=0&sa=N&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=6448f668fd4b6f72&biw=1024&bih=627 Link from Google Chrome: http://www.google.ca/#q=hamilton+Web+Design&hl=en&prmd=imvnsfd&ei=4353TvWmAaPW0QHhq9zYBg&start=30&sa=N&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=c8e758962267edc1&biw=1024&bih=673 http://www.google.ca/#q=hamilton+web+design&hl=en&prmd=imvnsfd&ei=nIB3TtG_BYTe0QHm05HnCA&start=0&sa=N&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=6448f668fd4b6f72&biw=1024&bih=627

    | websiteready
    1

  • Hi there. We are an internet marketing agency and recently did a fair amount of working trying to optimise for a number of different locations. Although we are based in Preston (UK), we would like to attract clients from Manchester, Liverpool, etc. We created landing pages for each of the locations that we wanted to target and each of the services - so we had an SEO Manchester page and a Web Design Manchester page for example. These were all written individually by a copywriter in order to avoid duplicate content. An example of one of the first of these pages is here: http://www.piranha-internet.co.uk/places/seo-blackpool.php We created a 'where we cover' page and used a clickable map rather than huge long list of text links, which we felt would be spammy, to link through to these pages. You can see this page here: http://www.piranha-internet.co.uk/where-we-cover.php Initially we gained a great deal of success from this method - with the above Blackpool page ranking #7 for "SEO Blackpool" within a week. However these results quickly disappeared and now we don't rank at all, though the pages remain in the index. I'm aware that we don't have many external links pointing to these pages, but this cannot explain why these pages don't rank at all, as some of the terms are relatively non-competitive. A number of our competitors rank for almost all of these terms, despite their pages being exact duplicates with simply the city/town name being changed. Any ideas where we've gone wrong?

    | Piranha_Solutions
    0

  • If a listing on a website is no longer available to display is it better to resolve to a 301 redirect or use a 404? I know from an SEO point of view a 301 will pass on the link value, but is that as valuable as saying tto the user hey that page is no lonoger available try something else?

    | AU-SEO
    0

  • Hi , I am considering to use Facebook comments on my site . But  i heard that Disqus  is also a good platform for comments. So i want to know using Disqus    is having an negative impact on SEO ?

    | ShoutOut
    0

  • Okay, I've read the posts by Google about the new prev, next tags  and the suggestion for using a view all option. I've also read the posts here on SEOMoz on the topic but none of them quite address what we have. First, Some of our  main categories are very large (over 6000 pieces of jewelry) so a view all option would take forever to load be completely useless to a visitor. Second, our category home pages provide (here's an example😞 A description of the category with links to important sections and articles A row of new items A dozen of the popular items from the category. Links to related articles if applicable. So we have a real category home page with content instead of just categories that start immediately with pages of product. Should we set the canonical url for all of the browse pages to the main category page, create a view all page or just use the next and previous rel tags with the category home pages as the first in the series?

    | IanTheScot
    0

  • Say we have a subdomain with resources (resources.site.com) and a partner site (partner.com) and have an agreement to share content (I know - this isn't ideal but it's what I've got to work with). Please comment on the following: the use of cross-domain canonicals on "shared" articles an intro and/or conclusion paragraph that is unique on the site that re-publishes that could say something like "our partner over at resources.site.com recently published the following report ... yada, yada....." other meta tags to let Google know that we are not scraping, e.g. author tags any other steps we can take to ensure neither site gets "dinged" by the search engines. Thanks a bunch in advance! AK26

    | akim26
    0

  • Has anyone ever done any testing on setting "priority' and "frequency" in their sitemaps? What was the result? Does specifying priority or frequency help quite a bit?

    | nicole.healthline
    2

  • I know that Google states 'several' weeks but just wondering if anybody has any experience with a Reconsideration request and if they got any type of reply and what their general experience was. thanks

    | BelfastSEO
    0

  • On SEOmoz's On-page tool it is telling me that I should cut the number of phrases for a specific key phrase almost in half, from 27 to 15.  However my keyword density for this page is only 1.68%.  I would have thought that was a good keyword density to have, if not even a little higher. Should I trust the tool and decrease this keyword phrase?  Would love to hear from anyone with experience in this. If you want to see the page it is http://www.mybluedish.com/.  The key phrase is "satellite internet"

    | MyNet
    0

  • I am wondering what my fellow mozers think. Pretty set about my direction but want to get any other input to aid in my decision. Have an ecom site with a www.blog.maindomain.com. The blog is fairly new and no major rankings. There are only about 30 posts. This isn't a super competitive market and the blogging won't be a huge part of our content strategy but I would like to use it for passing juice etc. Would you go through the trouble to move the blog to www.site.com/blog and redirecting all the old content to new?

    | PEnterprises
    0

  • SteriPEN is a portable water purifier that kills viruses, protozoa, e-coli, etc. Because of the technical and safety requirements nature of the product, our website has much documentation of testing, organisms affected, and more. These are in pdf form and can often be found through google search (and through links on specific pages). Because of the keyword-richness of these documents pertaining to microbes SteriPEN kills, etc. does it make sense to convert these pdf's into html text and images? Then I was thinking perhaps writing a blog post AND generating key links on important landing pages to these documents (as html). Removing pdfs may be harmful? Not a clue as to the cost/benefit.

    | Timmmmy
    0

  • We currently have "view 12" as the default setting when someone arrives to www.mysite.com/subcategory-page.aspx. We have been advised to change the default to "view all products" and make that the canonical page to ensure all of our products get indexed. My concern is that doing this will increase the page load time and possibly hurt rankings. Does it make sense to change all our our subcategory pages to show all the products when someone visits the page? Most sites seem to have a smaller number of products as the default.

    | pbhatt
    0

  • I am working on improving a website that has each section split into four pages. For example, if Indonesia Vacation was a section, it would have its main page, www.domain.com/indonesia-vacation, and the about, fact sheet, and tips on three other pages www.domain.com/indonesia-vacation-1 www.domain.com/indonesia-vacation-2 www.domain.com/indonesia-vacation-3 The pages share very similar title tags and I am worried it is hurting the main page for placement.. So to conserve link juice, would it make sense to have them all one page? There is not so much content that it would affect load time. My strategy would be to have all content available and part of the main page and 301 the three URL's back to the main page: www.domain.com/indonesia-vacation Any insight would be greatly appreciated!!!

    | MattAaron
    0

  • Regarding image optimization for an ecommerce site.
    In your "category" pages you list your products with a small thumbnails / miniature image. When the user clicks on the product name or on the thumnails, he lands on the product page with the real size product image. How do you optimize the thumbnail image? Do you use a different ALT? Is Google smart enough to index the real size image? On one hand the image located on the "product" page has lot more content around, is bigger & more interesting for both the user and Google. On the other hand the "category" page has more autority ( links) than the product page... To reformulate my questions: Do you think ALT tag is important for your thumbnail image on your category pages. Do you write different ALT tag for your thumbnail image ( on your category pages) & and your real size image (on your product page)? Which ALT tag / image do you think is the most interesting for Google? What do you think? Cheers, Ludo

    | triplelootz
    0

  • We are assisting a client in setting up English and Spanish sites in Texas. They want to be able to find customers who are Spanish speaking predominantly or totally along with the customers they now get who are English speakers. We are building them a new site and I have researched to find answers all over the board or less than clear. Should the structure be such that we have one site with a set of English and Spanish pages all with Spanish links to Spanish pages and English links to English pages. Should we instead just have an English site for those people who utilize English and a different site for those who utilize Spanish? Thanks

    | RobertFisher
    0

  • My favorite golf ball is the Srixon Tour Yellow ball. Srixon has a product detail page here  (www.srixon.com) AND there's also a product detail page here at shop.srixon.com. Is there any sort of SEO penalty here because there's some duplication? Does the fact the store is a separate subdomain make this more allowable? Many branded manufacturer websites work this way but it just doesn't make sense to me to have two product pages that you have to manage content when you can have just 1 with a call to action. I also work for a branded manufacturer and am considering rebuilding our website from the ground up with the online store and the main/marketing website blended into one to eliminate this duplication. We have this same duplicated marketing/store setup as well. any feedback is greatly appreciated. Confused.

    | Timmmmy
    0

  • We are a small startup company looking at starting a complaints website in India   having user generated content(complaints) . Would some one help me to draw overall strategies  on how we can achieve good traffic over one year.  We realise that there is no magic wand to improve positions in search ranking for a site which hosts user generated content esp. since we dont know what key words to target. In this context i was looking form some expert suggestion on how we can go ahead with the SEO for the next 1 year .. We are open to paying for the services if you prove that you have the required experience .  Otherwise  any suggestions from other who have experience in such situations  are welcome ...

    | ShoutOut
    0

  • I'm working with a VERY large site that has recently been redesigned/recategorized. They kept only about 20% of the URLs from the legacy site, the URLs that had revenue tied to them, and these URLs use underscores. Whereas the new URLs created for the site use hyphens. I don't think that this would be an issue for Google, as long as the pages are of quality, but I wanted to get everyone's opinion on this. Will it hurt me to have two different sets of URLs, those with using hyphens and those using underscores?

    | Business.com
    0

  • Hi there. We've been working on this site for a few months now - http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/. We were hired as the previous agency was seeing traffic fall by 40% year on year consistently. Now, we've managed to stop that drop, but traffic recovery in Google (Bing and Yahoo are fine) is being really sluggish. Here's what we've done: Converted URLs from dynamic to static Sorted duplicate content errors Cut down the number of on-page links (Still not under a hundred, but that's really tricky) Carried out on-page optimisation on hundreds of inner pages, including adding new content Does anybody have any ideas on anything we cou;d be missing? We're just starting to get going on link building, so that's the next step. Thanks!

    | neooptic
    0

  • I am running a large ecommerce fitness equipment store. It is on magento and there are lots of little issues with the site. Things like url strucutre, not enough text for google to read as far as menus and too many images etc. I am wanting to work with a company that totally understands what I need done to the site to fix it and make sure its in its absolute best shape for seo. I need a real consultant that can help me make changes to my site. I cannot seem to find someone when outsourcing to overseas like india and stuff. Does anyone know of anyone or a company I can contact? If you know of multiple please list. Thank you very much Jake

    | PEnterprises
    0

  • Hi Everyone, We're an exciting London-based SaaS startup with big plans for global expansion. Two of our biggest target markets are Brazil and Mexico, with plans for an office in Sao Paulo. We are looking to hire some in-house SEO staff for both territories, but we'd also like to supplement this with some local expertise. That could be from an agency, freelancer or full-time employee. Gimme a shout! I'm Chris Gilfoy and I'm Head of Search at BaseKit. [email protected] / +44 7969 285 203. Thanks, Chris

    | BaseKit
    0

Got a burning SEO question?

Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


Start my free trial


Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.