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Category: Intermediate & Advanced SEO

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

  • Trupanion


    Due to the fact that we aren't in the #1 position, (dropped from #5 to page 2 - You have to love Devs and IT), our heads have hired a SEO Audit/Consultant company to review everything we are doing. I would like to post some of the things they are telling us to do, in which I don't 100% agree with  and would like some other professional feedback.  Especially since their site isn't marketed very well. http://www.trupanionpetinsurance.com Disclaimer: (this site was a complete nightmare when I started a year and a half ago. Yes, there are many issues that still need to be addressed.) Breadcrumb Trail They have asked us to implement a Breadcrumb trail on every page, where the final page is the only H1 Tag. Are breadcrumb trials important for SEO?  (I know they are helpful for Users, but SEO) Are they important for Search Engines to track back for structure. Any thoughts about them? Similar question asked in February : http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-important-are-breadcrumbs

    | Trupanion
    1
  • Trupanion


    Due to the fact that we aren't in the #1 position, (dropped from #5 to page 2 - You have to love Devs and IT), our heads have hired a SEO Audit/Consultant company to review everything we are doing. I would like to post some of the things they are telling us to do, in which I don't 100% agree with  and would like some other professional feedback.  Especially since their site isn't marketed very well. http://www.trupanionpetinsurance.com Disclaimer: (this site was a complete nightmare when I started a year and a half ago. Yes, there are many issues that still need to be addressed.) Website Restructure I agree we totally need to restructure our website.  I have no idea what the previous SEO guy was thinking.  The new SEO company is telling us that the structure is a big part of SEO. I don't believe so, but besides a little loss in 301 juice, is there any other downfalls? Are there any real benefits? Similar question asked the other day (and answered by me): http://www.seomoz.org/q/don-t-want-to-lose-page-rank-what-s-the-best-way-to-restructure-a-url-other-than-a-301-redirect

    | Trupanion
    1
  • diki


    Hi all, our site language is Farsi (Persian) so at first we tried to create URLs that contain our target keywords in Farsi too. The problem with this approach is that our URLs are not shown in a friendly style anymore: a bunch of unicode numeric codes instead of Farsi characters. Do you know which is the best approach? 1. Creating ugly looking URLs containing Farsi keywords 2. Forget about putting our keywords in URLs and have nice English URLs Thanks in advance for your time and help 🙂

    | diki
    0
  • nicole.healthline


    Is there a way to export an exact list of urls found in Google's index?

    | nicole.healthline
    0
  • dkamen


    If I have a homepage with category links, is it alright for those category links to appear in the footer as well, or should you never have duplicate links on one page? Can you please give a reason why as well? Thanks!

    | dkamen
    0
  • marig


    Currently in the process of redesigning a site. What i want to know, is what is the best way for me to restructure the url w/out it losing its value (page rank) other than a 301 redirect?

    | marig
    0
  • Artience


    Hello, people. I have a quick question regarding search in Google. I use search operator [site:url] to see indexing stauts of my site. Today, I was checking indexing status and I found that Google shows different numbers of indexed pages depends on search setting. 1. At default setting (set as 10 search result shows) > I get about 150 pages indexed by Google. 2. I set 100 results shows per page and tried again. > I get about 52 pages indexed by Google. Of course I used same page URL. I really want to know which data is accurate. Please help people!!

    | Artience
    0
  • JSOC


    All, Strange occurrence: My WM Tools shows 0 URLs in the web index. It was 930 something yesterday. Any ideas as to why? Any fixes? I recently changed the preferred domain. Any help would be appreciated.

    | JSOC
    0
  • lomastravel


    So if the metag is not longer used by the search engines should I keep them in my html ?

    | lomastravel
    0
  • nicole.healthline


    What is the best tool to calculate the total link distribution throughout a site? I know opensiteexplorer.com's "top pages" breaks down the numbers for you? Are there any others?

    | nicole.healthline
    0
  • nicole.healthline


    I found that doctor.webmd.com was affected by Google Panda, and then recovered (if you look at traffic on compete.com). What do you think they did to recover?

    | nicole.healthline
    0
  • 94501


    I have a website that has some good rank on competitive terms. Most of the organic search traffic goes to the homepage, but some generally newer and better constructed, more user-friendly sub pages get organic rank/traffic for a variety of different terms/subjects as well. Then, I have about 8 pages that are older and suck. They fail in the SERPs and there's nothing much of interest from a user point of view. Rather than do the work to completely re-do these pages, I'm thinking of just 301ing them to the homepage. My hope is that this will help the homepages terms/rank which are similar to these pages subject & terms. Do you think this will help the homepage and it's terms or merely end the existence of some old pages and sort of evaporate the link juice? Is there some way that Google might see the site on the whole as being less relevant to their shared subject matter, if these pages go away? Thanks!

    | 94501
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  • nicole.healthline


    When working with a very large site, are there any tools that will help you calculate the number of links in the Google index? I know you can use site:www.domain.com to see all the links indexed for a particular url. But what if you want to see the number of pages indexed for 100 different subdirectories (i.e. www.domain.com/a, www.domain.com/b)? is there a tool to help automate the process of finding the number of pages from each subdirectory in Google's index?

    | nicole.healthline
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  • nicole.healthline


    If you plan on doubling the size of your site with original, unique content, is it better to publish it all at once or over a period of time? Is there any penalty for publishing it all at once?

    | nicole.healthline
    1
  • fertilityhealth


    I have been hearing that panda can penalize a website for low quality pages.  I have run duplicate content check and done my best to go through the whole website.  I hear many people talking about deleting hardest hit pages, or fixing hardest hit pages. My question is how can I find which pages on our website are hardest hit?  Is there anyway to check a website for pages that might score low.  We do have a ecom section to the website which I am concerned might be considered low quality for each product page.  Any advice would be a great help.

    | fertilityhealth
    0
  • dignan99


    Hey all... I've been doing some competitive analysis lately on different niches in different cities, and upon looking at source code have noticed MANY sites(typically 2-3 of the top listed sites in each niche) who have hidden text, blocked by a box/logo, colored the same as the background, or both. Is this a typical practice? My understanding is Google seriously frowns on this, so is it worth reporting competitors who are doing such things? I don't see any grey areas in this matter and think it's a serious violation, but here these sites are at the top.

    | dignan99
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  • fertilityhealth


    How do you set up a website or home page to get the individual listing below the description text.  For example with the SEO moz listing there are many of the categories listed below the description.  Such as SEO Blog, SEO tools ... Is there a way to add this to a home page so good will pick it up this way?  I attached a screen shot of what I am talking about because I think I am likely using the wrong terminology. Npcpu.png

    | fertilityhealth
    0
  • dignan99


    Hi everyone. While I have read answers regarding this on Mike Blumenthal's blog, I have not been able to get an exact clarification on having multiple Google Places listings. According to Mike Blumethal, Google accepts multiple listings in the Places area for specific industries. e.g. One listing for a Dental office, one listing for EACH dentist.  This could include a separate website for each. If this is the case, how far away are we from having one maxed out business owning muiiple positions in the local listing space in the search engines. specifically Google? I would love a good explanation of what is and isn't allowed to have multiple listings.

    | dignan99
    1
  • emerald


    I'm about to buy one directory link (just the one!) but can't decide which URL to place my link on in that directory because of the varying metrics - which is better of the below (bearing in mind my own site is still a PR0 sitewide)? www.exampledirectory.com/categoryA/subtategory1/
    Metrics: 21 linking domains, PA 44, DA 59, PR0 www.exampledirectory.com/categoryA/
    Metrics:1 linking domain, PA 35, DA 59, PR5 I know PR is no longer relevant and usually ignore this metric (except for possible penalties) and just focus on Seomoz toolbar metrics, but as my own site itself is PA:37 and DA:28 homepage but PR0 completely sitewide (over 6 months old but relatively new site), I thought this might help to balance things. Thanks for your advice.

    | emerald
    0
  • RyanKent


    I would like to hear feedback on the best SEO practice for forum category pages. An example would be a forum about cars. You can have a Chervorlet category which contains forums for every chevy model. Often this category page is simply a list of all the forums. If I noindex, follow the page then am I missing an opportunity? I am thinking of Google sitemaps for example where this page can be used for a category link. If I noindex the page, there probably isn't another great place for a sitemap to link to. I could fill out the page with wiki-like generic chevy information. Please share any thoughts or best practices.

    | RyanKent
    0
  • oznappies


    On a site I am working on we provide a landing page summary (say top 10 information snippets) and provide a link 'see more' to take viewers to a page with all the snippets. Now those first 10 snippets will be repeated in the full list. Is this going to be a duplicate content problem? If so, any suggestions.

    | oznappies
    0
  • adriandg


    Aside from the obvious usability issue of having a super long domain name.  Let's just for a moment image that that doesn't matter at all. Is there a point at which having another keyword in your domain name is not giving a significant boost to SER? Lets be more specific.  Often we see two keyword domains, and they rank well. and I have also seen many 3 keyword domains raking well.  but what about a 4, 5 or 6 keyword domain name? like: keyword1keyword2keyword3keyword4keyword4keyword6.com <-- obviously it looks ridiculous, but we are ignoring that factor for the duration of this question. I would also like to know in multiple keyword domain names, does the location of the keywords have any relevance? is it like title tags? closer to the front = more boost? And furthermore one last question on the same subject.  Does google consider varations of words when it gives the boost to "exact match" domain name in search results. for example: BookStory.com V.S. BookStories.com when someone searches for "story books" would these two get the same bonus?

    | adriandg
    0
  • IKT


    Target website in question is ikt.co.id,it is hosted in our server located in US, what I am going to do right now is create a new subdomain id.ikt.co.id that served EXACTLY the same content but it is hosted in our Indonesia server. Whenever people go to any page within ikt.co.id, it will detect their country, if they are from Indonesia, I will redirect them to our Indonesia server. Okay, from SEO point of view I know there are couple problems such as Content duplication, and perhaps there are more. I think to handle the content duplication I can cannonical all URL on id.ikt.co.id to the ikt.co.id version instead. The same thing for social sharing, all links shared will be the one from ikt.co.id, so all of those link juices go to ikt.co.id, and for good measure I can also set the robots.txt to tell them not to index id.ikt.co.id ... All sounded good to me, until the I became paranoid and start thinking "have I missed anything that might hurt my SERP" ? here is the question, did i miss something important, if i did could you please tell me what it is and if possible brought the solution you think might work into this discussion?? Again thanks a lot for your help 😃

    | IKT
    0
  • costume


    My IT department is getting ready to setup the rel canonical tag, finally.  I took a look at the code on our test server and see that they are using a single quote in the tag syntax (see code block below).  Should I be concerned?  Will Google read those lines the same? <link rel='canonical' href='[http://www.wholesalecostumeclub.com/easter-costumes/bunny-suits](view-source:http://www.wholesalecostumeclub.com/easter-costumes/bunny-suits)' />VS. **versus** <link rel="canonical" href="[http://www.wholesalecostumeclub.com/easter-costumes/bunny-suits](view-source:http://www.wholesalecostumeclub.com/easter-costumes/bunny-suits)" />

    | costume
    0
  • VividLime


    Hi Guys
    I have a client who ranks well within a competitive sector of the travel industry. They are planning CMS move which will involve changing from .cfm to .aspx We will be doing the standard redirects etc However Matt's statement here on 301 redirects got me thinking
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zW5UL3lzBOA&t=0m24s He says that basically you loose a bit of page rank when you do a 301 redirect. Now, we will be potentially redirecting 1000s of links and my thinking is 'a lot of a little, adds up to a lot'  In other words, 1000s of redirects may have a big enough impact to loose some rankings in a very competitive and aggressive space. So recommended that we contact the sites who has the link highest value and ask them to manually change the links from cfm to aspx. This will then mean that there are no loss value as with a 301 redirect. -But now I have another dilemma which I'm unsure about. So the main question:
    Is link age factor in rankings ? If I  update any links, this will make said link new to Google, so if link age is a factor, would this also lessen the value passed initially?

    | VividLime
    0
  • nicole.healthline


    We have decided to move some thin content from our primary domain to an independent domain in order to lift the panda penalty. Does anyone have suggestions for how to avoid being seen as a doorway page? Thank you in advance.

    | nicole.healthline
    0
  • Francis_GlobalMediaInsight


    This site has over 5,000 pages & over 1000 URLS are going to be restructed. But this restrucuring will happen only 2 months later. Hence do we have to wait for 2 months before we submit for XML sitemap files to search engines. We would not like to wait, but our SEO consultant expert says we need to wait until the above refrred URl's are rewritten.

    | Francis_GlobalMediaInsight
    0
  • schmeetz


    mywebsite.com has a niche related blog on mywebsite.com/blog. Should i be separating it with a subdomain blog.mywebsite.com? Could the blog content be diluting my website's message? My Reasoning Google Webmaster Tools --> Significance is leaning towards general terms (blog topics related) as apposed to mywebsite.com targeted terms.

    | schmeetz
    0
  • IKT


    What is your thought if your site's analytic is showing you something like that graph? is it "DAMN!!! it is not supposed to be like that, the X are supposed to be greater then Y by at least two or three" And what is your next strategy? is it "okay, i need to put on backburner for my link building kungfu now immidiately...." Please share your thought.. because i dont know if i should be happy or not looking at something like this showing up on my analytics... Please do share your opinion GoodBad.png

    | IKT
    0
  • SNHU


    I have been doing SEO for the University I work at. We are optimizing our degree pages on a page-by-page basis. So hypothetically we have a page optimized for "online accounting degree" and another for "online marketing degree", etc. Although our focus is on specific page optimization, we hope the by-product is that the whole domain will   start to rank better for "online degree". First of all, is this a reasonable expectation? Second, if this IS the case, will pages full of irrelevant keywords hurt the overall strategy? For example, our registrar and financial aid PDFs that are full of legal/financial mumbo-jumbo. Are these lowering our keyword density of relevant keywords across the domain?

    | SNHU
    0
  • Bombbomb


    I have a PHP website that produces an actual page when /index.php/GarbageURL/MoreDirectories/Page.suffix/DirectoryAgain is typed in a browser. Why? How? For what purpose? The content and HTML is produced in the source, but the images and css are broken due to the location of the file, obvi. I don't understand what this default tendency is for.

    | Bombbomb
    0
  • AndreVanKets


    Hi all I am a bit unsure of something and would appreciate it if someone could clarify (without the sad trombone hinting that my question is stupid like the last time i asked a question) Our Newsletter was recently posted on a website and i am not sure if the link pointing back is actually passing link juice. When clicking the link, a Java pop up box appears saying "click here to go to authors site" I am wondering if this was implemented to avoid google passing its juice? Or if google can index the pop up and give us credit for the link? Please have a look at the article, and let me know what you guys think? http://www.bestholidaynews.com/adventure-and-activities/africa/our-top-3-overlanding-egypt-trips-2.html Thanks in advance Regards Greg

    | AndreVanKets
    0
  • nicole.healthline


    We are considering moving some thin content from our site to a subdomain as a potential "panda" fix. But, we are unsure if Google will treat the subdomain as a completely separate domain or not. Does anyone have any data / Google info that might answer this question? Thanks in advance for your help!

    | nicole.healthline
    0
  • nicole.healthline


    If 75% of a site is poor quality, but still accounts for 35% of the traffic to the site, should the content be 404ed? Or, would it be better to move it to a subdomain and set up 301 re-directs? This site was greatly affected by Panda.

    | nicole.healthline
    0
  • Partouter


    Hi all, I have a development subdomain, which gets copied to the live domain. Because I don't want this dev domain to get crawled, I'd like to implement a robots.txt for this domain only. The problem is that I don't want this robots.txt to disallow the live domain. Is there a way to create a robots.txt for this development subdomain only? Thanks in advance!

    | Partouter
    0
  • Alter_Imaging


    We have a .com site here in the US that is ranking well for targeted phrases. The client is expanding its sales force into India and South Africa. They want to duplicate the site entirely, twice. Once for each country. I'm not well-versed in international SEO. Will this cause a duplicate content filter? Would google.co.in and google.co.za look at google.com's index for duplication? Thanks. Long time lurker, first time question poster.

    | Alter_Imaging
    0
  • IKT


    http://www.godaddy.com/search-engine/seo-services.aspx?ci=44163 it said "Includes Standard Search Engine Visibility to Improve Search Rankings" it begs for question... Search Engine Visibility??? Improve SERP?!?!!? is it really that good? O.o; or have i successfully been eaten my promotional messages? Can anyone with experience with them share some information with me ? 🙂 (The price tag is mighty interesting)

    | IKT
    0
  • webseoservices


    I have a client who has a virtuemart site and all of the "ask a question on this product" had been indexed on google. I have managed to get a noindex meta tag into the ask a question page, will these be dropped from the index next time they are crawled and google sees the noindex?

    | webseoservices
    0
  • pdmonline


    Hi, I am in the process of re-vamping a website that hasn't been touched for years and whose rankings slowly dropped. Any best practice in how to do it making sure that there's not any more loss and - hopefully - it could go back to the old glory? The website is http://www.nlp-world.com Thanks

    | pdmonline
    0
  • DojoGuy


    Everyone knows backlinks ( plus content ) is the key to good rankings. BUT, how do you ask for a backlink without sounding douchey? Does anyone have a template or something they could share?

    | DojoGuy
    0
  • NoisyLittleMonkey


    When submitting compressed sitemaps to Google I normally use the a file named sitemap.gz A customer is banging on that his web guy says that sitemap.xml.gz is a better format. Google spiders sitemap.gz just fine and in Webmaster Tools everything looks OK... Interested to know other SEOmoz Pro's preferences here and also to check I haven't made an error that is going to bite me in the ass soon! Over to you.

    | NoisyLittleMonkey
    0
  • Troyville


    Post panda, there is definitely more talk about scrapers or other (more authoritative) sites outranking the original content creators in the SERPS. The most common way this problem is addressed (from what I've seen) is by rewriting the content and try your hardest to be the first one to be indexed or just ignoring it from an on page standpoint and do more link dev. Does anyone have any advice on the best way to address?  Should site owners be looking deeper into their analytics and diagnostics before doing the rewrites?

    | Troyville
    0
  • inmonova


    Hi guys! When dealing with linkbuilding for a multi language page such as www.inmonova.com is it better to get external links pointing at inmonova.com or is it better to point: English links to inmonova.com/en Spanish links to inmonova.com/es German links to inmonova.com/de What is your opinion?

    | inmonova
    0
  • Damiano


    One of our websites has two languages, English and Italian. The English pages are available at the root level:
    www.site.com/   English homepage www.site.com/page1
    www.site.com/page2 The Italian pages are available under the /it/ level:
    www.site.com/it   Italian homepage www.site.com/it/pagina1
    www.site.com/it/pagina2 When an Italian visitor first visits www.mysit.com we'd like to redirect it to www.site.com/it but we don't know if that would impact search engine spiders (eg GoogleBot) in any way... It would be better to do a Javascript redirect? Or an http 3xx redirect? If so, which of the 3xx redirect should we use? Thank you

    | Damiano
    0
  • MyNet


    The SEOmoz crawl tool is giving me a lot of crawl errors because my blog feed and my blog tags do not have meta descriptions.  Can you even give this type of content meta descriptions?  If so how can you do it, as this content is created dynamically by Wordpress?

    | MyNet
    0
  • iAnalyst.com


    We have a really large site we're working on who's product pages rank well for the most part but also have multiple products listed in different categories with different URL's. I'm assuming there's no downside to adding canonical tags to these right? Its peak season so I don't want to do anything that could, even temporarily, bring down their rankings. Thanks!

    | iAnalyst.com
    0
  • onmaso


    Ok, like 1 year ago my site was doing good in google search engine. But I decided to change CMS and design of the site. Did some mistakes like, changed site links structure (when I notice it later I changed it back), then some of the pages were lost because I simply didn't need them on the new cms and there were no feature of keeping them. Site has a  lot of backlinks and was strong in rankings. It's been almost a year or maybe already a year and I can't get even to top100 for those keywords... But I was in (top10-20) Site is still getting links, ranking well on yahoo and baidu, but google, just won't let my main keywords to come back. I rank for some that doesn't make sense to me and I even wasn't working on them.

    | onmaso
    0
  • BenRush


    Hi All, Lets assume there is site A and site B, both sites are live on the internet today as standalone businesses, but they sell very similar products. Site B has built up some link equity and will eventually become the domain for site A due to an organisational re-brand. For the time being however site A will remain, but site B needs to disappear temporarily, but not lose the link equity which has been built up against it. My current thinking is to 302 redirect site B to site A such that users and search bots accessing site B will be redirected to site A whilst leaving the link equity that exists against site B fully intact and allowing us to continue to grow it should we wish to. The question is, does anybody have a view on how long it is safe to use a 302 temporary redirect for? i.e., is 8-10 months to long. Thanks, Ben

    | BenRush
    0
  • Troyville


    A site has category pages as such:  www.domain.com/category.html, www.domain.com/category-page2.html, etc... This is producing duplicate meta descriptions (page titles have page numbers in them so they are not duplicate).  Below are the options that we've been thinking about: a.  Keep meta descriptions the same except for adding a page number (this would keep internal juice flowing to products that are listed on subsequent pages).  All pages have unique product listings. b.  Use canonical tags on subsequent pages and point them back to the main category page. c.  Robots.txt on subsequent pages. d. ? Options b and c will orphan or french fry some of our product pages. Any help on this would be much appreciated.  Thank you.

    | Troyville
    0
  • TomBarker82


    Ok, I am getting a lot of conflicting information about press release sites. i have been doing press release's for a while (mostly manually), I have also tried a few companies that claim to do it well (never do). After the Panda update the PR sites I have been using are just not as effective. Does anyone else have this problem or are there better PR sites that can be recommended.

    | TomBarker82
    0

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