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Category: Intermediate & Advanced SEO

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

  • Muhammad-Isap


    G'day fellow digital marketers! I'm analysing a new site in analytics. Having been hit by Panda, and being plagued with a variety of issues - one that's got me scratching my head is their blog configuration. Now, on most sites you'll have something like: www.clientsite.com/blog All blog posts would then sit under the blog page: www.clientsite.com/blog/this-is-a-blog-post Anyway, on this blog - when a new post has been created historically - they've all been placed directly under the homepage, so when you click a link on: www.clientsite.com/blog You instead arrive at: www.clientsite.com/this-is-a-blog-post So, we have 150+ posts equally sharing the hompage authority - detracting from their ability to rank for their core services pages. I'm thinking of going to town on the 301 re-direct wagon, changing: www.clientsite.com/this-is-a-blog-post to www.clientsite.com/blog/this-is-a-blog-post But I'd like to know your thoughts and experiences before I get to work! Thanks in advance guys and gals, John.

    | Muhammad-Isap
    0
  • Estherpuntu


    Hi everybody! I have talked with my hosting provider and he offers me two kind of SSL. I've read that the best option for SEO is to convert the hole site to https response (not only the payment pages), but my developer team is telling me that this kind of security to the whole site will be negative for all the websites contained under this IP ¡! So I wonder if somebody who has the https implemented correctly and working properly for SEO could recommend me: which kind of certificate is the correct one and what specific things sould I consider with my hosting provider if it's true that could be a disaster if I implement the https to the whole website beacause I'm blocking the robots and it's dangerous for my domains in this server Please, any help would be really appreciated. Thanks in advance!

    | Estherpuntu
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  • Carla_Dawson


    Hi Everyone, I am participating in the development of a marketplace website where the main channel will be traffic via SEO. We have encountered the directories (levels) vs filters situation. 1. Does everyone still agree that if we have too many levels, authority is loss as you do down through the levels? Does everyone agree that there should be a max of 3 levels and never 4. Example 1 www.domain.com/level1/level2/level3 vs www.domain.com/level1 In theory, the content on "level 3" will have a lower DA than the content on "level1". 2. Does everyone agree that for enterprise SEO (huge marketplace websites) filters are a better idea than levels? Example 2 www.domain.com/level1/level2/level3 vs www.domain.com/filter-option1 In theory, the content on "level 3" will have a lower DA than the content on "filter-option1". Thanks so much in advance

    | Carla_Dawson
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  • welcomecure


    When we use HTML sitemap. Many a times i have seen that the sitemap itself gets mapped to keywords which it shouldn't have got to. So should we keep the HTML sitemap as No-Index, Follow or does anyone has a better solution that the sitemap doesn't show-up for other keyword terms that actually isn't representing this page.

    | welcomecure
    0
  • bidilover


    Hello SEO wizards, The main language on my website is english, and I am wondering if I can add a keyword in russian to couple of pages to the title and image alt tag and maybe header , with the hope that it would rank in google with that russian keyword.. But I am not sure how google would react to that, I tried to search information on that, but could not find a clear answer.... Many thanks for anybody who takes time to respond

    | bidilover
    0
  • phase2solutions


    I run a digital business development consulting company. Our core has always been centered around consulting with client to develop strategy and then working with a set of vendors in a variety of different services types to implement the strategy. I'm struggling right now to determine the best approach for our own SEO. Our website is http://phase2solutions.net. What suggestions would you have on the approach here? Feel free to share your service as well as the tactical end is something we are looking to outsource. Thank you.

    | phase2solutions
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  • DavidC.


    Hello Moz Community! I was hit with a REAL bad penalty in May 2013, and the date corresponds to Penguin #4.  Never received a manual spam action, but the 50% drop in traffic was very apparent.  Since then, I've had a slow reduction in traffic, to where I am today... which is almost baseline.  Increases in traffic have not occurred regardless of efforts. In researching a little more, I see that my old SEO companies built my links with exact keyterm matches, many of them repeated over and over, verbatim, on different sites.  I've heard two pieces of advice that I don't like 1) scrap the site, or 2) disavow all the links. I would rather see if I can get the webmasters to change the link to something generic, or my brand name, before I do either of these. To scrap my site and start new will be damn near impossible because I'm in an extremely competitive niche, and my site has age (since 2007), so rather work with what I have. A couple of questions, for folks who are in the know about this penalty, if I may: This penguin update, #4, on May 22nd, was it ONLY because of the link text? Or was it also because of the link quality?  None of the updates before it harmed me, and I believe those were because of the quality? Could it be for links linking from my blog to my site?  My blog (ex. www.mysite.com/blog), has close to 1,000 blog posts, and back in the days I would write these really long, keyword stuffed links leading to www.mysite.com.  I've been in the process of cleaning these up, and shortening them, and changing them to more generic (click here's), but it is a LONG and painstaking process. If I get webmasters to change text to just the url or brand name, that's better than disavowing, correct?  As long the linking site has a decent spam score and PA/DA on OSE? Is having SOME exact anchor text okay on these links?  Is it just the abuse that's the problem?  If so, how many should I leave? (like 5 max per keyword?) Or should I just change to the url, or disavow altogether, any and all links that have exact keyword matches? I've downloaded my link profile from OSE and Majestic, and will do so from Ahrefs (I believe it is)?  Does Webmaster Tools have any section that can help give me insights into the issue?  If so, can you point me in the right direction? Can I get partial credit, for some work done?  For instance, say a major update, or crawl, happens, and I've only fixed/disavowed 25% percent of the links by then, is there a possibility that I get a small boost in traffic? Or am I in the doghouse till they are all fixed? Say I clean/disavow everything up, will my improvement be seen in the next crawl? Or the next Penguin update?  As there may be a substantial difference in time there. 😎 I see AHREFS, has some information on anchor text... any rules of thumb as to percentages of use of a certain anchor text, to see if I'm abusing or not, before I start undertaking all of this?  Thanks! Could the penalty have "passed" altogether, and this is just where I rank? Thanks guys, but the last thing I want to do is ditch my site... I will work hard on this, but need some guidance. Much appreciated! David

    | DavidC.
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  • IsHot


    Got hit with a manual penalty in Feb2014. Got it removed in 6 months (before the Penguin refresh). Whole site got deindexed at one point including BRAND searches. (Brand searches has since come back) Disavowed over 20k domains (yea spam was bad). But still have a good amount of authority links such as huff post, edu, wiki, apple apps, reddit etc. About 97% of our links are on page 2 or beyond. Cant get past that spot 11 'Wall'. The suppression machine is not kind. We even had a very popular article get tons of shares, media pick up, and the original article would not rank on the first page for its title. Our 'brand + keyword' gets about 2k searches a month. Just 'keyword' gets nothing, which i find amusing. So whats the prognosis doc? Another year, 3 or never? Anyone else in same boat? Wait for the next penguin refresh and hope for the best? Cheers eXfPjzX.png

    | IsHot
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  • TimHolmes


    Howdy all, In recent weeks I have seen a steady increase in the number of smartphone related url errors on Googles Search Console (formerly webmaster tools). THe crawler appears to be searching for a /m/ or /mobile/ directory within the URLs. Why is it doing this? Any insight would be greatly appreciated. Unfortunately this is for an unresponsive site, would setting the viewport help stop the issue for know until my new responsive site is launched shortly. Cheers fello Mozzers 🙂 Tim NDh1RNs

    | TimHolmes
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  • teconsite


    Hi everybody! While I was checking all points of the Technical Site Audit Checklist 2015 (great checklist!), I found that the distrubutors of my client are copying part of the content to add it in their websites. When I take a content snippet, and put it in quotes and search for it I get four or five sites that have copied the content. They are distributors of my client. The first result is still my client (the manufacturer), but... should I recommend any action to this situation. We don't want to bother the distributors with obstacles. This situation could be a problem or is it a common situation and Google knows perfectly where the content is comming from? Any recommendation? Thank you!

    | teconsite
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  • benhond


    Dear all, Earl 2015 i launched www.taobao.nl.  Its a platform that shows the products of chinese marketplaces in our local language (auto translated) and provides the option to pay in our local currency & methods. (i blocked all the auto translated product pages via http://www.taobao.nl/robots.txt) All content (category pages, general pages etc) are unique and written by us. In the past I've set up several websites and shops and i know it always takes time and effort to get a site to good positions, but i never experienced that my efforts did not pay of. Until now 😞 The url is not blocked by Google and i see a (very) limited amount of traffic in WMT & Analytics, but the site is >page 30 on its most important keyword 'taobao'.  This, while the competition on this keyword is low in my country (google.nl). My main competitor (taobao.com.nl) seems to do worse on most SEO elements i was able to check, but they rank very well on 'taobao' and all related keywords. What could be the reason of this very poor ranking and what should i really adjust / improve?
    (besides backlinks: i'm working hard on that) Your input is deeply appreciated!! Sander

    | benhond
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  • RWW


    I would like to obfuscate my HTML so that people do not see that I used a Template on my site. Does obfuscating HTML have a bad effect on the ranking in google? Thanks!

    | RWW
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  • lauramrobinson32


    Hello, I have a question for the group, our main US site-  http://www.datacard.com is utilized to move content to other regional sites like http://www.datacard.co.uk/ and http://www.datacard.fr/ and http://www.datacard.com.br/.  Anyhow, we essentially have some regional content on those sites, but for ease of maintaining and updating the content we have a company translate this for us and then undergo an in country review for local people in our company to review the content. That being said the meta descriptions, titles, code, everything gets translated to that language. I know there are issue for SEO for these purposes as we get much better rankings with http://www.datacard.com.  The regional sites are newer so this could be part of it. We don't have an agency helping us with SEo and i get a lot of questions on what can be done internally for this for regional sites with our current structure. Any tips you have? It would be greatly appreciated! Laura

    | lauramrobinson32
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  • Ideas-Money-Art


    Hi Guys, I have a massive project involving a migration of 4 sites into 1. 4 sites include: **www.MainSite.com ** www.E-commerce.com www.Membership.com www.ResearchStudy.com Goal of this project is to have 1-4 regrouped into Main Site I will be following the best practice from this post https://moz.rankious.com/_moz/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos which has an awesome checklist. I am actually about to start Phase 3: URL redirect mapping. Because all of these sites have hundreds of duplicates, I figured I should first resolve the Main Site dup issues  before creating the URL redirect mapping but what about the other domains (2,3,4) though?  Should I first resolve the Dup issues on those ones as well or it is not necessary since they will be pointing into the Main Site new domain? I want to make sure I don't overwork the programming team and myself. Thanks For sharing your expertise and any tips on how should I move forward with this.

    | Ideas-Money-Art
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  • ennovators


    Hi there, got a quick question regarding faceted navigation. If a specific filter (facet) seems to be quite popular for visitors. Does it make sense to replace a dynamic URL e.x http://www.domain.com/pants.html?a_type=239 by a static, more SEO friendly URL e.x http://www.domain.com/pants/levis-pants.html by creating a proper landing page for it. I know, that it is nearly impossible to replace all variations of this parameter URLs by static ones but does it generally make sense to do this for the most popular facets choose by visitors. Or does this cause any issues? Any help is much appreciated. Thanks a lot in advance

    | ennovators
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  • Kelly3330


    Hi I am using Wordpress/Woo commerce for my site Thetotspot.co.uk http://www.thetotspot.co.uk/?action=yith-woocompare-add-product&id=1412&_wpnonce=a5560b1b07 But I am getting a lot of temporary redirects registering in Moz for things like the above - woo compare / add to cart links Anyone come across this - how did you get solve? I am using Yoast SEO currently, have no indexed archives and pages of archive etc.

    | Kelly3330
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  • GAZ09


    Hi Guys Some help here please would be much appreciated. I have created a super URL re-direct to my Amazon product page. So my question is If I spend time and money build SEO links to my re-direct URL will it still rank high in Google or does Google NOT like or rank re-direct URLs ??? Thanks Gareth

    | GAZ09
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  • TinaMumm


    Hello, I have a site that just keeps getting hit with a ton of bad, unnatural backlinks due to the sins from previous SEO companies they've hired. About every quarter, I have to add more bad links to their disavow file... still. Is it time to move them to a new domain? Perhaps a .net? If so, do we just completely trash the old domain & not redirect it? I've never had a client like this in the past but they still want to maintain their branded name. Thanks for your feedback!

    | TinaMumm
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  • teconsite


    Hi community! For this case, which would be the best strategy for image filenames? This is a funiture company, with its own brand. What they sell is what they have created and designed Let's think on a kitchen. And we have a page we want to rank for the primary Kw "modern kitchen", and secondaries "white modern kitchen", "modern minimalist kitchen", "modern kitchen designs". Would you use the brand name in the filenames? I mean:
    ---------- white-modern-kitchen-brandname.jpg
    ---------- modern-minimalist-kitchen-brandname.jpg
    ---------- modern-kitchen-brandname.jpg Would you use just the kws in the filename and the brand in the alt text?
    ---------- filename: white-modern-kitchen.jpg  Alt: "White Modern Kitchen, Brand" or should we use the brand in both items: filename and Alt? ¿Which would be the best way to do it in this case? Any suggestions? Thank you!

    | teconsite
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  • walletapp


    Hi there MOZ community.  I am new to the QandA and have a question. I have a blog Its been live for months - but I can not get the posts to rank in the serps.  Oddly only the categories rank.  The posts are crawled it seems - but seen as less important for a reason I don't understand.  Can anyone here help with this? See here for what i mean. I have had several wp sites rank well in the serps - and the posts do much better. Than the categories or archives - super odd. Thanks to all for help!

    | walletapp
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  • ATP


    Hey Mozzers, Im undertaking a content audit and its going very well, we have written some better content for the first set of pages, it still needs some improvement but we have a good base and starting point from which we can make an SEO log and work on it over time. For the content I used the following formula for how many times to include a keyword Word Count / Length of Keyword. (eg. 600 words / 3 word keyword = 200). Then 1-4% of this (2-8 times). This has worked well for me in the past and has been a good base guide. I have ran the pages through Moz optimiser and every single page hit an A for keyword page optimisation. However many of the pages failed on keyword stuffing, which obviously has high priority. My dilemma is that, moz counts 15 as the cut off for keyword stuffing with the written text we have done really well with using it a set number of times. But these pages are product category pages. The keyword in the extreme of cases is listed 7-9 times in the side nav menu. 7-9 times in the product category listings. Take for example *** it is optimised for thermometers (i know it a tough single word keyword, and we have fairly modest aims with it, im using it here for example purposes). The word is used a good number of times within the article but is sent through the roof with the links to the sub categories. This page for example mentions the keyword 30 times. Can anybody suggest any ways to improve on this? Is how we display the categories in the nav bar and in the page excessive? As always many thanks!

    | ATP
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  • Erik-M


    Hello, I have a client that currently that has 9 different markets with different sub-domains on one server (aka one htaccess file.). All the sites have very similar Navigation and some of them contain the same products aka same URLs. The site is using Magento CMS and I'm trying to figure out how to redirect some products that have been removed from one of the stores. The problem I'm running into is when I try to redirect one store url, it redirects all the site's URLs. Example http://store.domain1.com/ http://store.domain2.com/ I'd like to redirect http://store.domain1.com/old-url.html to http://store.domain1.com/new-url.html without making http://store.domain2.com/old-url.html redirect. I've literally been pulling out my hair trying to figure this one out but have had no luck. Does anybody have any ideas on how I could do this without having the sites redirect or create any loops? Any wisdom from you apache experts would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Erik

    | Erik-M
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  • DavidC.


    I had a massive drop in traffic in Mid 2013, and a slow reduction since then. It has sort of leveled off now, but it's not exactly climbing I've never received a manual spam action. The answer to my question seems pretty obvious, now that I write it out... but have you heard of anyone getting penalized, without specifically receiving a warning? Thanks!

    | DavidC.
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  • DavidC.


    Is ease of navigation a ranking factor? Thanks!

    | DavidC.
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  • jtollaMOT


    Our domain was originally pointing to a Squarespace site that went live in March. In June, the site was rebuilt in WordPress and is currently hosted with WPEngine. Oddly, the site is being indexed by Bing and Yahoo, but is not indexed at all in Google i.e. site:example.com yields nothing. As far as I know, the site has never been indexed by Google, neither before nor after the switch. What gives? A few things to note: I am not "discouraging search engines" in WordPress Robots.txt is fine - I'm not blocking anything that shouldn't be blocked A sitemap has been submitted via Google Webmaster Tools and I have "fetched as Google" and submitted for indexing - No errors I've entered both the www and non-www in WMT and chose a preferred There are several incoming links to the site, some from popular domains The content on the site is pretty standard and crawlable, including several blog posts I have linked up the account to a Google+ page

    | jtollaMOT
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  • FPD_NYC


    Hi everyone, EDIT: I'm going to link to the actual page, please remove if there are any issues with confidentiality. Here is the page: https://www.legalzoom.com/knowledge/llc/topic/advantages-and-disadvantages-overview It's ranking #2 on Google for "LLC" This page is a couple months old and is substantially heavy in content, but not much more so than all the dozens of other pages online that are competing with it. This is a highly competitive industry and this particular domain is an extremely huge player in this industry. This new page is suddenly ranking #2 for an extremely competitive head term, arguably the most important/high volume keyword being targeted by the entire site. The page is outranking the home page, as well as the service page that exactly targets the query - the one that you would think would be the ranking page for this head term. However, this new page is somewhat of a spin-off with some additional related content about the subject, some videos, resources, a lot of internal links, etc. The first word of the title tag exactly matches the head term. I did observe that almost no other pages on the site have the exact keyword as the first word of the title tag, but that couldn't be sufficient to bring it up so high in the ranks, could it? Another bizarre thing that is happening is that Google is ignoring the Title Tag in the actual HTML (which is a specific question that is accurate to the content on the page), and re-assigning a title tag that basically looks like this: "Head Term | Brand." Why would it do this on this page? Doesn't it usually prefer more descriptive title tags? There are no external links coming up on Moz or Majestic pointing to this page. It has just a couple social shares.  It's not being linked to from the home page or top nav bar on the main site. Can anyone explain how this particular page would outrank the main service page targeting this keyword, as well as other highly authoritative, older pages online targeting the same keyword? Thanks for your help!

    | FPD_NYC
    1
  • teconsite


    Hi! I am now studing a website, and I have detected that they are maybe generating duplicate content because of image galleries. When they want to show details of some of their products, they link to a gallery url
    something like this www.domain.com/en/gallery/slide/101 where you can find the logotype, a full image and a small description. There is a next and a prev button over the slider. The next goes to the next picture www.domain.com/en/gallery/slide/102 and so on. But the next picture is in a different URL!!!! The problem is that they are generating lots of urls with very thin content inside.
    The pictures have very good resolution, and they are perfect for google images searchers, so we don't want to use the noindex tag. I thought that maybe it would be best to work with a single url with the whole gallery inside it (for example, the 6 pictures working with a slideshow in the same url ), but as the pictures are very big, the page weight would be greater than 7 Mb. If we keep the pictures working that way (different urls per picture), we will be generating duplicate content each time they want to create a gallery. What is your recommendation? Thank you!

    | teconsite
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  • nickruss


    Hi, We run a series of weather websites that cater for the units (feet, metres, Celsius, Fahrenheight etc.) for the users by means of detecting their geo-location. So users in the US see the site in feet, Fahrenheight and pretty much the rest of the world gets metric units. My concern is that if we view the cached version of our pages as seen by the Googlebot out of Mountain View, California, it shows that our geoIP switch to imperial units has been activated for every location in the World. The question is, does the fact that we appear to cater for countries who use metric units by showing (in Google's eyes) Imperial units by default count against us from an SEO point of view? Thanks in advance for any comments, Nick

    | nickruss
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  • CostumeD


    We have 2 sites that have been set up slightly differently. On 1 site we have the Company name in the H1 and the product name in the page title and H2. On the other site we have the Product name in the H1 and no H2. Does anyone have any advise about the best information to have in the H1 and H2

    | CostumeD
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  • Obbserv


    Hi everyone, On June 15th, 2015 we saw a huge drop(70%) in image impressions and clicks for website: http://www.zakoopi.com/ What can be the possible reason for that? Please let me know what can be done to improve the impressions.

    | Obbserv
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  • TMHoward86


    Morning all, I've started a pretty aggressive Video content push in recent weeks. All our videos are on our YouTube channel. I decided to go with hosting the videos on YouTube based on my research on moz.com, especially considering the potential reach of the content on YouTube. What I'm finding is that the YouTube channel is doing great. We've hit 200 subscribers and 15K views in a little under a month. Wayyyy more than I could have ever hoped for. But the blog posts on our website are getting minimal traffic and no search visibility. That doesn't necessarily bother me, since the intention of our marketing campaign is to use YouTube to drive traffic to our website. So I guess my question is really more to do with optimizing the site with Video Sitemaps and best practices for Google Webmaster Tools. Right now we have YouTube videos embedded on blog posts like this one that have a time-stamp. But I've been working to create Gallery-style pages (no time-stamp) which would have multiple YouTube videos embedded on them like this one. These make it easier for visitors to watch multiple videos without needing to skip around to multiple blog posts. The challenge I'm running into is that when I go to submit a Video Sitemap to GWT I get an error saying that I have duplicate page content within the video sitemap. I've used several WP plugins to do this. It seems that when there is a video embedded on multiple URLs (pages + posts) the plugins will ignore the posts and only add the pages to the video sitemap. Here is my regular Sitemap Here is my video Sitemap I've attached a screenshot of my current Yoast Video SEO config if that's useful for reference. Does anyone have experience with using multiple sitemaps in GWT? I'm starting to think that maybe I shouldn't even bother with a video sitemap. Maybe those gallery-style pages should just go in the regular sitemap? Any thoughts or advice would be highly appreciated! Thanks llQfydA

    | TMHoward86
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  • Nobody1596916721222


    I work for a software company that is redeveloping the website (same domain.) We have tons of content in the form of articles and documents for support, how to use the product better, case studies, and blog posts. I've downloaded a landing page report and many of these have low impressions and little or no clicks (some ranked high other very low.) Should I redirect all this content to the new site where some of it won't exist or forget about it because of the lack of juice? Is there a rule-of-thumb threshold for redirecting for content?

    | Nobody1596916721222
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  • Robertjw


    I have a site that has had a few problems over the last year.  We had a manual penalty in late 2013 for bad links, some from guest blogs and some from spammy sites.  Reconsideration requests had me disavow almost all of the incoming links. Later in 2014, the site was hit with link injection malware and had another manual penalty.  That was cleared up and manual penalty removed in Jan 2015.  During this time the site was moved to SSL, but there were some redirect problems. By Feb 2015 everything was cleared up and a an updated disavow list was added. The site recovered in March and did great.  A mobile version was added in April. About May 1st rankings dropped again.  Traffic is about 40% off it's March levels. Recently I read that a new disavow file will supersede an old one, and if all of the original domains and URLs aren't included in the new disavow file they will no longer be disavowed.  Is this true?  If so, is it possible that a smaller disavow file uploaded in Feb would cause rankings to drop after the May 3 Quality update?  Can I correct this by disavowing all the previously disavowed domains and URLs? Any advice for determining why the site is performing poorly again?  We have well written content, regular blogs, nothing that seems like it should violate the Google guidelines.

    | Robertjw
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  • johncurlee


    Hi Moz community experts, I have a question about the sitemap into search engine like here : http://i.imgur.com/gQ0JhuH.jpg. Do you know what I need to do to get the same structure or do decide which pages we  want to present into our result. We created a new page and we would like to see it into the resultat when the visitor is searching for our branded keywords. Thank in advance for your support. gQ0JhuH.jpg.

    | johncurlee
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  • GAZ09


    Hi Guys Any help would be much appreciated here. Can anyone tell me if I was to use a keyword super url re-direct could it still be possible to rank high in Google ?? ?? Does Google have an issue with re-directs ?? Thanks Guys Gareth

    | GAZ09
    0
  • eLab_London


    Hi Mozzers! For parametric URL's would you recommend meta robot or robot.txt file?
    For example: http://www.exmaple.com//category/product/cat no./quickView I want to stop indexing /quickView URLs. And what's the real difference between the two? Thanks again! Kay

    | eLab_London
    0
  • jmorehouse


    Webmaster Tools correctly identifies the query strings/parameters used in my URLs, but still reports duplicate title tags and meta descriptions for the original URL and the versions with parameters. For example, Webmaster Tools would report duplicates for the following URLs, despite it correctly identifying the "cat_id" and "kw" parameters: /Mulligan-Practitioner-CD-ROM
    /Mulligan-Practitioner-CD-ROM?cat_id=87
    /Mulligan-Practitioner-CD-ROM?kw=CROM Additionally, theses pages have self-referential canonical tags, so I would think I'd be covered, but I recently read that another Mozzer saw a great improvement after disallowing all query/parameter URLs, despite Webmaster Tools not reporting any errors. As I see it, I have two options: Manually tell Google that these parameters have no effect on page content via the URL Parameters section in Webmaster Tools (in case Google is unable to automatically detect this, and I am being penalized as a result). Add "Disallow: *?" to hide all query/parameter URLs from Google. My concern here is that most backlinks include the parameters, and in some cases these parameter URLs outrank the original. Any thoughts?

    | jmorehouse
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  • artscienceweb


    Hi Moz Community! I've been working with a clients website for about a year now. They were hit with the original Panda update because of some spammy links from a shady SEO firm. We've made a decent climb back but not a full recovery. There are some weird things happening that I would love some insight into. 1. Ranking for keywords we don't optimize for: I noticed some low keyword volume for a keyword term that is close to our main term, but is slightly different. We don't optimize for this term at all on our website. We rank third for this term, and actually show site links in the result, which doesn't happen for any of our other pages. 2. Index not found when doing site: search: Other oddity is that when you search site:www.mywebsite.com, I see all the pages within the site except the homepage. Not sure whats going on here, but when I fetch the homepage in GWMT, it returns the homepage. When you query the homepage by itself, it also ranks. Any help would be appreciated! Regards, J

    | artscienceweb
    0
  • vivekrathore


    Hi, When i check cached copy of url of my site http://goo.gl/BZw2Zz , the url in cache copy shown by Google is of some other third party site. Why is Google showing third party url in our site's cached url. Did any of you guys faced any such issue. Regards,

    | vivekrathore
    0
  • footsteps


    Dear all, I would very much like to have your advise about whether or not to implement bulk 301 redirects. We have 3 retail websites with the same technical architecture, namely: Netherlands-example.nl Belgium-example.be France-example.fr These three websites are all bilingual, namely: Netherlands-example.nl/nl Netherlands-example.nl/fr Belgium-example.be/nl Belgium-example.be/fr France-example.fr/nl France-example.fr/fr We’re going to do a CMS update and therefore we have to change a bulk of 301 redirects: Part 1: For France (France-example.fr) URL’s in the Dutch language (France-example.fr/nl) will be redirected to Belgium (Belgium-example.be/nl). It’s a matter of about 8.000 redirects. Part 2: For the Netherlands (Netherlands-example.nl) URL’s in the French language (Netherlands-example.nl/fr ) will be redirected to Belgium (Belgium-example.be/fr). It’s also a matter of about 8.000 redirects. Question:
    What will be the best way to implement these redirects? Fully implement part 1 first (8.000 redirects) and then a couple of weeks/months later a full implement of part 2? Or will it be better to implement small batches like 200-500 per 2 weeks? I’d like to hear your opinion. Thanks in advance. Kind regards, Gerwin

    | footsteps
    0
  • Kenn_Gold


    I work for a company that recently acquired another company and we are in the process of merging the brands. Right now we have two website, lets call them: www.parentcompanyalpha.com www.acquiredcompanyalpha.com We are working with a web development company who is designing our brand new site, which will launch at the end of September, we can call that www.parentacquired.com. Normally it would be simple enough to just 301 redirect all content from www.parentcompanyalpha.com and www.acquiredcompanyalpha.com to the mapped migrated content on www.parentacquired.com. But that would be too simple. The reality is that only 30% of www.acquiredcompanyalpha.com will be migrating over, as part of that acquired business is remaining independent of the merged brands, and might be sold off. So someone over there mirrored the www.acquiredcompanyalpha.com site and created an exact duplicate of www.acquiredcompanybravo.com. So now we have duplicate content for that site out there (I was unaware they were doing this now, we thought they were waiting until our new site was launched). Eventually we will want some of the content from acquiredcompanyalpha.com to redirect to acquiredcompanybravo.com and the remainder to parentacquired.com. What is the best interim solution to maintain as much of the domain values as possible?  The new site won't launch until end of September, and it could fall into October. I have two sites that are mirrors of each other, one with a domain value of 67 and the new one a lowly 17. I am concerned about the duplicate site dragging down that 67 score. I can ask them to use rel=canonical tags temporarily if both sites are going to remain until Sept/Oct timeframe, but which way should they go?  I am inclined to think the best result would be to have acquiredcompanybravo.com rel=canonical back to acquiredcompanyalpha.com for now, and when the new site launches, remove those and redirect as appropriate. But will that have long term negative impact on acquiredcomapnybravo.com? Sorry, if this is convoluted, it is a little crazy with people in different companies doing different things that are not coordinated.

    | Kenn_Gold
    0
  • Obbserv


    Hi Team, What are the points we are missing on our website from technical SEO front? http://www.giftxoxo.com/

    | Obbserv
    0
  • welcomecure


    I was been ranking on page no.3 for many of my keywords. Suddenly they all dropped to Page No.9& Page no.10. Now 10 days back one of my keyword got back to page no.4 & now suddenly today it went back to page no.9 again. I haven't done any changes to the site. My page speed is less than 4secs. Checked everything & all seems fine. No errors or manual actions notification in Webmaster too. Should i wait for the rankings dance to get over or should i start doing something. Currently i am planning to get fresh pages with good content added to the website for the whole month of July. Suggest me what to do?

    | welcomecure
    0
  • Marketing_Today


    I'm looking at running a campaign to get a site ranking for terms that include "near me" so for instance, "personal trainers near me", "yoga lessons near me" I'm wondering if this should be a local campaign because of the the "near me" in the term and Google basing results on IP addresses of the searcher (if that's possible possible instead of town names) or will it come down to words on the page including "near me" Any help or examples would be hugely appreciated, thanks community!

    | Marketing_Today
    0
  • edward-may


    Hi Guys, A part from the obvious I have searched Dmoz to see if my company was listed and its still not listed after 8 months.  I have 3 top level domains same content, but targeting different countries, can I submit all 3 domains or only one? Any other way to find out if my domain for NZ was approved? I would love to submit the AU,and COM but not sure if I would be going outside their guidelines. Any insight would be much appreciated Thanks

    | edward-may
    0
  • candiceone


    Hi there! I have been working on improving a site for almost a year now, and though we have made great strides in ranking for many relevant keywords our site is hovering at the bottom of page 2 and fluctuates from position 14 to 18 for almost a year. I am pretty prompt at addressing HTML improvements suggestions in WMT, but don't know where I should focus my limited time to get the most results. Competing websites have more backlinks than we do, but content is very thin and I don't think they update or add new content every week like we do. Please help! Am I missing something obvious?? Thanks in advance 🙂

    | candiceone
    0
  • sohail1


    Currently I am doing SEO of an Arabic website. I need to optimize it for GCC region. Its target is very big i.e. 1 million unique visitors per month (organic). The domain is new means there is no domain authority right now. What should be the best strategy in this scenario?

    | sohail1
    0
  • 94501


    Am starting to work with a new site that has a domain name contrived to help it with a certain kind of long tail search. Just for fictional example sake, let's call it WhatAreTheBestRestaurantsIn.com.  The idea is that people might do searches for "what are the best restaurants in seattle" and over time they would make some organic search progress. Again, fictional top level domain example, but the real thing is just like that and designed to be cities in all states. Here's the question, if you were targeting searches like the above and had that domain to work with, would you go with... whatarethebestrestaurantsin.com/seattle-washington whatarethebestrestaurantsin.com/washington/seattle whatarethebestrestaurantsin.com/wa/seattle whatarethebestrestaurantsin.com/what-are-the-best-restaurants-in-seattle-wa ... or what and why? Separate question (still need the above answered), would you rather go with a super short (4 letter), but meaningless domain name, and stick the longtail part after that? I doubt I can win the argument the new domain name, so still need the first question answered. The good news is it's pretty good content. Thanks... Darcy

    | 94501
    0
  • edward-may


    Hi Guys, Sorry if this is an ammature question, just wanted to know I noticed a few people talking about no follows and do follows for backlinks.  Is there suppose to be some way to set you website up as nofollow and dofollow for backlinks?  I noticed a few people saying to make sure that some directories are nofollow, i would like to know if I can set this up for my own site as I'm a bit conscious and paranoid about others that might backlink to my site who have huge spam or negative seo etc? Any insight into this would be much appreciated Thanks all

    | edward-may
    0
  • WCR


    Hi Moz Community. We have a client that has Website A and Website B. Website A is going to be replaced by Website C, a new website and brand. Some products sold on Website A are going to be split out to Website B & C. i.e. Say Website A sells eight products - then four will go to Website B and four to Website C. OUR QUESTION Technically we know we can 301 redirect the Website A products to the relevant Website B & Website C products. 1. Given this convoluted structure, will there be any negative ramifications for SEO? and; 2. Which website would you redirect the homepage to, B or C?

    | WCR
    0

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