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Category: Intermediate & Advanced SEO

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


  • Hi Guys, There is so much info out there about canonical issues and 301 redirects I'm not sure what to do about my problem. Google webmaster says I have over 2000 duplicate page titles. Google is showing most of my pages in duplicate or triplicate url format. Example: /store/LOVE_OIL_CARIBBEAN_ROSE//store/LOVE_OIL_CARIBBEAN_ROSE/store/love_oil_caribbean_rose/Im using x-cart pro as my cart.When I look at the source code I see each one having a rel=canonical tag with the exact urls you see above. Can someone give me an example of a redirect that I can put in my .htaccess file that would work site wide?I obviously cant go through and 301 this on a page by page basis. It would take a year.Thank You Tim

    | fasctimseo
    0

  • Our site is www.AkinsSeptic.com.  We spent a lot of time on the site and have not received any rankings yet. Can you advise as to what we can do to get this site ranked at all. I know it needs a lot of SEO work and some links, however, it should rank mildly due to the low competition of keywords we are using. Thanks in advance.

    | Tormz
    0

  • There's about 43k pages indexed in  this directory, and while helpful to end users, I don't see it being a great source of unique content for search engines. Would you robots block or meta noindex nofollow these pages in the /blissindex/ directory? ie. http://www.careerbliss.com/blissindex/petsmart-index-980481/ http://www.careerbliss.com/blissindex/att-index-1043730/ http://www.careerbliss.com/blissindex/facebook-index-996632/

    | CareerBliss
    0

  • One of the largest stores in USA for soccer runs a number of whitelabel sites for major partners such as Fox and ESPN. However, the effect of this is that they are creating duplicate content for their products (and even the overall site structure is very similar). Take a look at: http://www.worldsoccershop.com/23147.html http://www.foxsoccershop.com/23147.html http://www.soccernetstore.com/23147.html You can see that practically everything is the same including: product URL product title product description My question is, why is Google not classing this as duplicate content?  Have they coded for it in a certain way or is there something I'm missing which is helping them achieve rankings for all sites?

    | ukss1984
    0

  • Hi, I run an e-commerce store and within the CMS I define the SEO title, SEO description and SEO keywords for each item. I spoke to a SEO firm who advised me to start every product title with the colour, as this will reduce the duplicate page titles and serve me well in the future. Whats everyones view on this? Does naming something Grey Armani Jeans | Armani Jeans from Designer Boutique stand up better against Armani Jeans Grey | Armani Jeans from Designer Boutique? Any help or tips on how to format the page titles and descriptions would be great. Thanks Will

    | WillBlackburn
    0

  • There have been several reference on how Google is trying to build author profiles  so that it can effectively measure the authors authority based on the Rel=Author. I quite liked this idea  , but my site is a user generated content website. So how can i leverage this ? . One thing which i was thinking was  if its a good idea to link to the customers Facebook profile , plan to collect this during sign up.

    | ShoutOut
    0

  • I know that one of the things Google looks for is fresh content. My main site is a wordpress site where I have optimized about 12 static pags and I also do blog posts. Assuming I continue to blog, do I need to give my pages a periodic "face lift" or is enough just to keep blogging and add a static page from time to time? Paul

    | diogenes
    0

  • I recently launched my new website under the same domain as the old one. I did all the important 301 redirects but it seems like every url that was in google index is still their but now with a 404 error code. How can I get rid of this problem? For example if you google my company name 'romancing diamonds' half the link under the name are 404 errors. Look at my webmaster tools and you'll see the same thing. Is their anyway to remove all those previous url's from google's indexes and start anew? Shawn

    | Romancing
    0

  • SEOMoz community, If you have followed our latest Q&A posts you know by now that we have been suffering since the last 8 months from a severe Google penalty we are still trying to resolve. Our international portfolio of sports properties has suffered significant ranking losses across the board. While we have been tediously trying to troubleshoot the problem for a while now we might be up to a hot lead now. We realized that one of the properties outside of our key properties, but are site that our key properties are heavily linking to (+100 outgoing links per property) seems to have received a significant Google penalty in a sense that it has been completely delisted from the Google index and lost all its PageRank (Pr4) While we are buffed to see such sort of delisting, we are hopeful that this might be the core of our experienced issues in the past i.e. that our key properties have been devalued due to heavy linking to a bad neighborhood site. My question two the community are two-fold: Can anyone share any experience if it is indeed considered possible that a high number of external links to one bad neighboorhood domain can cause significant ranking drops in the rank from being top 3 ranked to be ranked at around a 140 for a competetive key word? The busted site has a large set of high quality external links. If we swap domains is there any way to port over any link juice or will the penalty be passed along? If that is the case I assume the best approach would be to reach out to all the link authorities and have tem link to the new domain instead of the busted site? Thanks /Thomas

    | tomypro
    0

  • We have recently started work with a dealership group that operates ~20 separate dealerships (different locations and brands) and individual websites for each. The group also operates two umbrella websites for the group brand that shows the inventory across All 20 dealerships. All websites are basically using the same template and all product listings are from the same data source (same back-end system). All websites are currently also hosted on the same IP address. Typically we work with clients to rectify duplicate content issues and work towards having just one version of any piece of content. However, this is a unique situation in that each dealership has a legitimate brand and marketing need for having their own website. It also is not realistic to ask the client to create unique content for the same product listing 22x. We understand there are numerous options to consider but I would appreciate hearing any advice/feedback from individuals who have dealt with similar situations. If you know of any good resources on such a scenario, that would also be helpful to verify our thoughts. NOTE: the duplicate content for product inventory is not across all 22 sites but just usually between 3-4 for each product. Often each product listing is shown on 1 or 2 dealerships and the 2 umbrella sites (one is the main group site and the other a product used/clearance site). Currently we can see multiple domains indexed for the same product listings.

    | BryanSmith
    0

  • Hi, I write content for the site http://www.healthchoices.ca. We were hit by Panda (a different issue that is resolved now) but even before that, I'd write an entire library of good content. An example: the plant sterols library. Here's an article as an example: http://www.healthchoices.ca/article/where-are-plant-sterols-phytosterols-found There are about eight on average in each medical library, and we cover topics from acne to sexual health. The other half of the business is a directory. We have thousands of local health are providers, a basic version with just an address, and a longer version where we optimize the text. Here's an example: http://www.healthchoices.ca/profile/ct-mri-scans/canada-diagnostic-centres We come up buried on the third page, far after directories with zero content or crappy content. What am I missing? I am getting very frustrated as I've been writing this stuff for a long time and nothing seems to come of it. Thanks so much, Erin

    | erinhealthchoices
    0

  • I thought I was really starting to understand SEO, especially after finding this site. But I must be missing something. BAsed upon linkscape I am  head and shoulders above www.georgiauncontesteddivorce.com  a competitor site to my site www.uncontesteddivorce-nyc.com.  But his site outranks mine for the keyword uncontested divorce lawyer. Well he beats me with 10 facebook shares versus 4 but on every other domain metric and page metric I am much higher. My site is only about a year old, but I can't imagine that this is what is going on. Anybody got any ideas? Thx Paul

    | diogenes
    0

  • We run a lot of "niche blogs" and websites focused on fairly non-competitive keywords. At the start of the year, we used to be able to put up websites and be able to achieve almost instant rankings on these sites. However, recently, it seems to be taking a lot longer for these sites to rank. It also seems to be taking longer for Google to index links. Is this a recent change in Google to protect against spam and help filter out the lower quality sites? Has anyone else noticed this or is it just me?

    | ukss1984
    0

  • I have signed up for some rather expensive lawyer directories that have  very high domain PR, 's  of 6 or 7 . Some of these allow you to make blog posts or articles on their site which should be good for SEO because of the high domain PR. I understand that if I do a lot of posts on one of these blogs with links back to my site, I should rapidly reach the point of diminishing returns because they are all coming from the same domain. Therefore, I plan to mix up my blo posts betwee several of these sites and also rewrite them and post them on my own site's blog. My question is this, if I post on any of these sites and I link back to internal pages of my site, and not to the home page, does this offset the "diminishing returns" factor? Paul

    | diogenes
    0

  • Hello, I wish I know your position regarding backlinks from chinese websites. I am able to get a text link(from homepage) from a very big site in chinese. It has PR8 and over 10M users monthly. My site is in english. Will it help me ? Will I be penalised (my site is 5 years old, PR4) and some decent traffic(6-7k daily) Thanks!

    | adresanet
    0

  • If you'd like to take a look, the site under quesiton is http://ArkAnimals.Com. At the moment I am considering doing landing pages by topics and not by the type of animals. I will be blending both wild and domestic animals but how to best do this is confusing since so much has changed over the years. My competitors are focusing on animal types mainly and competition is fierce. Also the site attracts by three main topics not specific animals--so I want to be a bit unique which is why I am considering a topic driven focus. What would you recommend? Background This site has been online since 1994 and on its own domain for a long while. However, over time it has suffered from a lot of things--different designers, expansion, movement of content to niche sites and bad seo. LOL Once everything was on one site with sub directories. Then, it expanded and my online advisors recommended moving topics off into their own niche sites. So, I did that. Ugh. Now, much of that content is being integrated back as I am undergoing an intense revamp (the last one was a disaster). There are a few presenting problems that I could use your perspective and expertise--since I am too close to it. Problems for Needing Your Input The site is over 2600 pages with many in html and others in php.What is the best practice? Moving the remaining html pages over into php? Some of the pages that were not active have a redirect to the blog. I plan on doing page to page 301 redirects once I dig in--unless you have a better idea. There are a lot of well established links to some of the pages. How many topics are too many? I have a wide variety of content. First, the magazine format covered about six topics. Later, I began covering more pet related items and did a lot of different news summaries to keep it fresh. I want to dump the short outdated pages as many of them have obsolete links or are too short to add any value. Or should I update if they help with the seo rather than continue to let them dilute the site? Landing page or blog? Which is better, an index landing page or blog? At the moment the blog appears on the main index for freshness and the site attracts traffic for specific topics not animal breeds or species. I want to move the site from an educational site to serving as a main funnel for potential clients driving them to get on a list or to a niche site for sales related to the particular topic/training of interest. What your take on this if you were to tackle it? Any input would be greatly appreciated. My audience includes those who are pet owners, novice trainers, and animal lovers with no critter sense.

    | TheARKlady
    0

  • A site I work with ranked page 1 for a competitive keyphrase until recently. (Not Panda-related as far as we can tell.) We've done extensive on-site tweaking and the page is still parked at 27-32 in the SERPs. We believe the only viable explanation at this point is an unnatural link profile. Over the course of several years the site has racked up a large collection of footer links with anchor text due to business relationships with the sites in question. So the profile is now skewed, with the result as follows: 100,000 domain links (top 10 competitors range 1800-50k) 87% anchor text optimized (competitors 0-41%) 99% follow links (competitors 85-100%) The vast majority of links are footer links We're working on creating more natural, high-value links but this of course takes time. In the short term, two questions: Should we aim to remove or change some of the footer links? If so, do we remove them, or just change anchor text? How many? How many new links should we pursue each month to make a meaningful impact on the profile without being too aggressive? Any other thoughts on how to fix this are also appreciated. Thanks!

    | kdcomms
    0

  • We recently added a 301 redirect from our non-www domain to the www version. As a result, we now have tons of HTTP errors (403s to be exact) in Webmaster Tools. They're all from over a month ago, but they still show up. How can we fix this?

    | kylesuss
    0

  • Why SEOmoz says to keep title tag not more than 65 characters? I have this question that what is the disadvantage if my meta title is 150 character? Why everyone focus in keeping it short ? If i put all my important keywords in starting of title tag say in first 65 characters and keep the title 100-150 character how can it hurt my website? Google will consider 65 character, right but it won’t penalize me for having 110 character then please explain Why we focus so much… 🙂 I know i used too many why 🙂 just to tell i am nt a lawyer 😉 just trying to act like one 🙂 , just kidding.

    | ShashankGupta
    0

  • I have an interesting problem SEOmozers and wanted to see if I could get some good ideas as to what I should to for the greatest benefit. I have an ecommerce website that sells tire sensors. We just converted the old site to a new platform and payment processor, so the site has changed completely from the original, just offering virtually the same products as before. You can find it at www.tire-sensors.com We're ranked #1 for the keyword "tire sensors" in Google. We sell sensors for ford, honda, toyota, etc -- and tire-sensors.com has all of those listed. Before I came along, the company I'm working for also had individual "mini ecommerce" sites created with only 1 brand of sensors and the URL to match that maker. Example : www.fordtiresensors.com is our site, only sells the Ford parts from our main site, and ranks #1 in Google for "ford tire sensors" I don't have analytics on these old sites but Google Keyword Tool is saying "ford tire sensors" gets 880 local searches a month, and other brand-specific tire sensors are receiving traffic as well. We have many other sites that are doing the same thing. www.suzukitiresensors.com (ranked #2 for "suzuki tire sensors") Only sells our Suzuki collection from the main site's inventory etc We need to get rid of the old sites because we want to shut down the payment gateway and various other things those sites are using, and move to one consolidated system (aka www.tire-sensors.com) Would simply making each maker-specific URL (ie. fordtiresensors.com) 301 redirect to our main site (www.tire-sensors.com) give us to most benefit, rankings, traffic etc? Or would that be detrimental to what we're trying to do -- capturing the tire sensors market for all car manufacturers? Suggestions? Thanks a lot in advance! Jordan

    | JordanGodbey
    0

  • We are getting ready to do a total redsign of our website, which is a multi-language global website (www.hurco.com).  Today we use an ip address lookup to determine country of origin and redirect to say hurco.de for Germany.  The main reason for this was that our German division was afraid that their potential customers were going to the hurco.com site and seeing product that was not available to them. Is there a better way from an SEO standpoint to structure our website?  Should we have all hurco.com traffic goto  a country selection page and let them go there manually?  Other good practices we should follow?  Would you structure the entire site as //www.hurco.com/en-us or /en-canada (language and country) and then have all international domains 301 redirect to the proper one?

    | fassnachtp
    0

  • Hope someone can HELP. So my site looks like it has the proper 301 redirect to www. for the main domain. But for some reason my articles that have a /trackback on them redirect to same address with out the trackback at the end. How do i fix this? seomoz is saying all my articles need a 301 redirect .all like 100. Thanks any help would be great

    | jstgobig
    0

  • Hi, I got a landing page which went up last night about 11pm. Its been indexed and ranked since then. Its a EMD and has about 600 words of unqiue content. It currently sits on page 9 for what I would say is a non competitive term (the top result is not an EMD and has 10 backlinks from the same site, which has no PR). Now my question is this: Would you say that page 9 is the given position Google thinks this website should sit at? Or because its so new could I very much expect some more movement? Basically up the rankings? Cheers

    | activitysuper
    0

  • Hello, Our website www.footballshirtblog.co.uk recently suffered a major Google penalty, wiping out 6 months of hard work. We went from getting 6000-10000 hits a day to absolutely nothing from Google. We have been baffled by the penalty as we couldn't think of anything we've done wrong. After some analysis of Open Site Explorer, it seems I may have found the answer. There is a ton of bad links pointing to us. A few example domains are: ru.gg/ gogopzh.com/ 0575bbs.com/ This is nothing to do with us and so I can only assume some competitor has done this. As we were only about 4-5 months old, I guess Google has punished us. What do we do now? This is not a situation I have experienced before and would really appreciate your expert advice.

    | ukss1984
    0

  • Hey guys, can you list your top 3 strategies (what you've been focused on - SEO) to get your rankings back, or rank well in general, in Panda. Don't be vague saying link building...we all know that, what type of link building specifically, for example. Thanks

    | PaulDylan
    0

  • Hello, In January, we started a new blog to supplement our core ecommerce website. The URL of the website is www.footballshirtblog.co.uk and the idea behind it was that we would write articles related to our industry to build a community which would ultimately boost our sales. We would add several posts per day, a mix between shorter news stories of around 150 words and more detailed content pages of around 500 words. Everything was going well, we were making slow but sure progress on the main generic keywords but were receiving several thousand visitors a day, mostly finding the posts themselves on Google. The surge on traffic meant we needed to move server, which we did around 6 weeks ago. When we did this, we had a few teething problems with file permissions, etc, which meant we were tempoarily able to add new posts. As our developers were tied up with other issues, this continued for a 7-10 day period, with no new content being added. In this period, the site completely dropped from Google, losing all it's rankings and traffic, to the extent it now doesn't even rank for it's own name. This is very frustrating as we have put a huge amount of work and content into developing this site. We have added a few posts since, but not a huge amount as it is frustrating to do it with no return and the concern that the site has been banned forever. I cannot think of any logical reason why this penalty has occured as we haven't been link spamming, etc. Does anyone have any feedback or suggestions as to how we can get back on track? Regards,
    David

    | ukss1984
    0

  • We are currently listed in a number of Association Buyer's Guides. We signed up for these last year in an effort to increase our external links. With recent Panda changes, do these links carry any value for us? Here are some examples: http://buyersguideforeducators.com/ http://wasteindustrymarketplace.com/ http://wefbuyersguide.com/ We're in about 40-50 of these different directories. Thanks, Ben

    | Colbys
    0

  • Heya! I'm currently engaged in what appears to be a slightly unusual SEO task. I run a large, reasonably well-respected (but not global-standard, yet) site that I'm currently monetising through individual articles targetted at addressing specific search engine queries that I know have decent traffic. It's the EHow / Demand Media model, except with a focus on a single specific (video games) niche, and much, much better quality articles (sufficiently good that they attract a fair amount of praise - all the writers on the site are published authors and the quality's damn high). Most of our articles end up ranking with essentially no backup, but they don't rank high - usually 2nd or 3rd page of Google. I'm trying to determine what the most effective strategy would be for us to boost our article rankings with the least possible expense / effort (we don't have a huge budget). Our long-tail articles are mostly being trumped by articles with either a couple of external links to them or by other articles with no links but from a site with significantly higher Domain Authority (70+ to our 48).I'm working to improve our on-page optimisation, but it's already pretty good (an "A" report from the SEOMoz tools on most or all pages). So, I'm wondering what the best use of our time would be to increase traffic globally across the site. Strategies I'm considering: Focussing on building links to the homepage and to any other pages on the site, by asking for links from community members, doing linkbait articles, directory submissions, guest blogging, and so on. Long-term aim: increase our domain-wide MozRank and MozTrust. Build links to our long-tail articles specifically, most popular first. Get direct links from relevant blogs, press releases, social bookmarking, etc. Long-term aim: get to #1 on Google one page at a time. Something Else? I'm wondering what the big SEO brains here would suggest? Happy to provide additional details if it would help!

    | Cairmen
    1

  • Now, my website is like this: myurl.com/blog/category1/mypost.html myurl.com/category1/mypage.html So I use silos urls. I'd like to improve my ranking a little bit more. Is it better to change my urls like this: myurl.com/category1/blog/mypost.html or maybe myurl.com/category1/mypost.html myurl.com/category1/mypage.html Thanks

    | Max84
    0

  • For example: this client is a custom clothier located in Phoenix, but would like to come up in the search engines for Scottsdale, Tucson, Prescott, Chicago, etc., because he travels to those cities and does business there with his custom clothing business. His website is www.artfultailoring.com Right now, he'll come up for custom suits phoenix, custom shirts phoenix az, etc. So how would I get him to come up in the search engines in more locations than just Phoenix?

    | cgray01
    0

  • I use a Search Engine Spider Simulator to analyze the homepage and I think my client is using black hat tactics such as cloaking. Am I right? Any recommendations on to improve the top navigation under Resorts pull down. Each of the 6 resorts listed are all part of the Paradisus brand, but each resort has their own sub domain.

    | Melia
    0

  • So I've been wracking my brain about a problem. I had posted earlier about our degrading rank that we haven't been able to arrest. I thought we were doing everything right. Many years ago we had a program that would allow other stores in our niche use our site as a storefront if they couldn't deal with setting up their own site. They would have their own homepage with their own domain but all links from that page would go to our site to avoid duplicate content issues (before I knew about canonical meta tags or before they existed, I don't remember). I just realize that we had dozens of these domains pointing to our site without nofollow meta tags. Is it possible that this pattern looked like we were trying to game Google and have been penalized as some kind of link farm since Panda? I've added nofollow meta tags to these domains. If we were being penalized for this, should this fix the problem?

    | IanTheScot
    0

  • I noticed that every other site url in the serps for my main keywords has a www. on their display url except mine. I have the site set to display the www. Can this potentially hurt my SEO and what can I do to fix this? Thanks Aaron. www.png

    | afranklin
    0

  • Recently we realised that our client's SERPs were almost always lower on Bing.com and Bing (canada) when comparing with Google.com and Google.ca We want to know if there's different ranking or blocking factors for Bing and if someone had similar expriences. It would also be appreciated if you have releavent and trusted information on this topic, from blog posts, forums, etc. What are your thoughts on this?

    | RichardPicard
    0

  • For several of my clients landing pages that show up in the Maps results the website url has been overwritten by the maps url (maps.google.com). Even though on my places page I have the correct website set up. Does anyone have any idea why they would be doing this and how I can correct it? Thanks kinldy in advance, Aaron. maps-url.png

    | afranklin
    0

  • So our website (www.FrontlineMobility.com) Has a canonical link redirect to the non www. version. However when I put in website.com it comes up with a small list of links and says this site links to www.website.com. So I'm curious if I used to wrong canonical linking method( that is the method I tried and I placed it in the Head Tags.) I greatly appreciate any assistance in this matter ^.^

    | FrontlineMobility
    0

  • Hi, Understand that if a Page A is being canonicalized to Page B, most probably Page B's ranking will increase (given their content and structure are all the same). But when the canonical tags are removed from Page B, Page A's rankings and traffic may recover to the original before it was canonicalized. The theories seem very true but does anyone have any case studies or direct experiences which proves these theories? Thanks.

    | globalsources.com
    0

  • On an ecommerce site there are typically a lot of pages that may appear to be duplications due to category browse results where the only difference may be the sorting by price or number of products per page. How best to deal with this? Add nofollow to the sorting links? Set canonical values that ignore these variables? Set cononical values that match the category home page? Is this even a possible problem with Panda or spiders in general?

    | IanTheScot
    0

  • A few years ago, I established about 25 different flickr groups. Part experiment to see if it would help with SEO (at the time Flickr groups were do follow) and also to promote my travel website Most of these groups are now on the front page for their keyword.  Most of them show the standard Flickr Snippet, but a few don't. I'm wondering if any brainiacs know how to get all of them to show a custom snip. Here's one that has a unique snip http://www.flickr.com/groups/best-san-francisco-restaurants/ the Best San Francisco Restaurants group icon ... Group Stats - traffic & page views for Best Restaurants San Francisco · JulieMarg, 0, 35 months ago ... http://www.flickr.com/groups/travel-like-james-bond-007/ Oct 12, 2008 – the Travel Like James Bond group icon ... On my website, I've got a post about Traveling like James Bond, detailing hotels & places & events ... and one that shows the standard (it's AT&T Park San Frrancisco) http://www.flickr.com/groups/711180@N24/ Flickr is almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world. Show off your favorite photos and videos to the world, securely ...

    | juliemarg
    0

  • HI folks, I have a warning that I have missing meta tag descriptions on two pages. 1) http://bluetea.com.au/wp-login.php 2) http://bluetea.com.au/wp-login.php?action=lostpassword Is this something I should just ignore? Or is there a best practice I should be implementing? Thank you for your time

    | PHDAustralia68
    0

  • I wanted to site wide link a few sites together as they are sort of in the same network of ownership and wanted some advice. 1X PR1
    2X PR2 
    2x PR3 Would it be best to just get home page links before the footer, the links will be within a paragraph of text OR Just site wide link them in the footer with a heading of "Our Shopping Network"

    | upick-162391
    0

  • I run an IT company and the company name does not contain the key word I am trying to rank on. I also have a bunch of pages with page rank that containing the actual keywords, for example: http://www.mycompanyname.com/tech-support/locations/brighton My target keyword is  "Tech Support Brighton" My Home page is PR4 and my location based pages are PR3. My plan was to build 3 or 4 location pages for the locations we provide tech support for and target location based keyword Anchor text to these URL's e.g "Tech Support Brighton" and then for the home page build links that have the anchor text "Tech Support". Does this sound sane? Many Thanks, K

    | SEOKeith
    0

  • Hello, i started a Technology Gadgets blog an year ago, since then i focused on writing unique and quality content. I did a bit a forum posting, blog commenting, directory submission and link exchanges with other relevant sites but still i didn't get the traffic which i wish for. At the moment, i am getting only 2000 UVs which is nothing in my opinion. What else should i do to? Help please

    | Ibbi1122
    0

  • On our website we do a lot of dynamic resizing of images by using a script which automatically re-sizes an image dependant on paramaters in the URL like: www.mysite.com/images/1234.jpg?width=100&height=200&cut=false In webmaster tools I have noticed there are a lot of 400 errors on these image Also when I click the URL's listed as causing the errors the URL's are URL Encoded and go to pages like this (this give a bad request): www.mysite.com/images/1234.jpg?%3Fwidth%3D100%26height%3D200%26cut%3Dfalse What are your thoughts on what I should do to stop this? I notice in my webmaster tools "URL Parameters" there are parameters for:
    height
    width
    cut which must be from the Image URLs. These are currently set to "Let Google Decide", but should I change them manually to "Doesn't effect page content"? Thanks in advance

    | James77
    0

  • Hi I am getting conflicting advice about using collapsible / Expanding content within a site I am working on and it effecting Google rankings, just wondered what the general consensus is. http://www.sethalling.com/plugins/wp-faqs-pro/ Mike

    | TomBarker82
    0

  • Usually duplicated content is a brief to fix. I find myself in a little predicament: I have a network of career oriented websites in several countries. the problem is that for each country we use a "master" site that aggregates all ads working as a portal. The smaller nisched sites have some of the same info as the "master" sites since it is relevant for that site. The "master" sites have naturally gained the index for the majority of these ads. So the main issue is how to maintain the ads on the master sites and still make the nische sites content become indexed in a way that doesn't break Google guide lines. I can of course fix this in various ways ranging from iframes(no index though) and bullet listing and small adjustments to the headers and titles on the content on the nisched sites, but it feels like I'm cheating if I'm going down that path. So the question is: Have someone else stumbled upon a similar problem? If so...? How did you fix it.

    | Gustav-Northclick
    0

  • Say your client has a national product, that's known by different brand names in different parts of the country. Unilever owns a mayonnaise sold East of the Rockies as "Hellmanns" and West of the Rockies as "Best Foods".  It's marketed the same way, same slogan, graphics, etc... only the logo/brand is different. The websites are near identical with different logos, especially the interior pages.  The Hellmanns version of the site has earned slightly more domain authority. Here is an example recipe page for some "WALDORF SALAD WRAPS by Bobby Flay Recipe" http://www.bestfoods.com/recipe_detail.aspx?RecipeID=12497&version=1 http://www.hellmanns.us/recipe_detail.aspx?RecipeID=12497&version=1 Both recipie pages are identical except for one logo.  Neither pages ranks very well, neither has earned any backlinks, etc... Oddly the bestfood version does rank better (even though everything is the same, same backlinks, and hellmanns.us having more authority). If you were advising the client, what would you do.  You would ideally like the Hellmann version to rank well for East Coast searches, and the Best Foods version for West Coast searches. So do you: Keep both versions with duplicate content, and focus on earning location relevant links.  I.E.  Earn Yelp reviews from east coast users for Hellmanns and West Coast users for Best foods? Cross Domain Canonical to give more of the link juice to only one brand so that only one of the pages ranks well for non-branded keywords?  (but both sites would still rank for their branded keyworkds). No Index one of the brands so that only one version gets in the index and ranks at all.  The other brand wouldn't even rank for it's branded keywords. Assume it's not practical to create unique content for each brand (the obvious answer). Note:  I don't work for Unilver, but I have a client in a similar position.  I lean towards #2, but the social media firm on the account wants to do #1.  (obviously some functionally based bias in both our opinions, but we both just want to do what will work best for client). Any thoughts?

    | crvw
    0

  • We have an eCommerce website with original software products. We want to syndicate our content to partner and affiliate websites, but are worried about the effect of duplicate content all over the web. Note that this is a relatively high profile project, where thousands of sites will be listing hundreds of our products, with the exact same name, description, tags, etc. We read the wonderful and relevant post by Kate Morris on this topic (here: http://mz.cm/nXho02) and we realize the duplicate content is never the best option. Some concrete questions we're trying to figure out: 1. Are we risking penalties of any sort? 2. We can potentially get tens of thousands of links from this concept, all with duplicate content around them, but from PR3-6 sites, some with lots of authority. What will affect our site more - the quantity of mediocre links (good) or the duplicate content around them (bad)? 3. Should we sacrifice SEO for a good business idea?

    | erangalp
    0

  • Hi, I've got an issue where our web developers have made a mistake on our website by messing up some URL's . Because our site works dynamically IE the URL's generated on a page are relevant to the current URL it ment the problem URL linked out to more problem URL's - effectively replicating an entire website directory under problem URL's - this has caused tens of thousands of URL's in SE's indexes which shouldn't be there. So say for example the problem URL's are like www.mysite.com/incorrect-directory/folder1/page1/ It seems I can correct this by doing the following: 1/. Use Robots.txt  to disallow access to /incorrect-directory/* 2/. 301 the urls like this:
    www.mysite.com/incorrect-directory/folder1/page1/
    301 to:
    www.mysite.com/correct-directory/folder1/page1/ 3/. 301 URL's to the root correct directory like this:
    www.mysite.com/incorrect-directory/folder1/page1/
    www.mysite.com/incorrect-directory/folder1/page2/
    www.mysite.com/incorrect-directory/folder2/ 301 to:
    www.mysite.com/correct-directory/ Which method do you think is the best solution? - I doubt there is any link juice benifit from 301'ing URL's as there shouldn't be any external links pointing to the wrong URL's.

    | James77
    0

  • We have a massive site that is having some issue being fully crawled due to some of our site architecture and linking. Is it possible to have a XML sitemap index point to other sitemap indexes rather than standalone XML sitemaps? Has anyone done this successfully? Based upon the description here: http://sitemaps.org/protocol.php#index it seems like it should be possible. Thanks in advance for your help!

    | CareerBliss
    0

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