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Category: Intermediate & Advanced SEO

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  • Would changing the file name of image, not the alt attribute nor the image itself (so it would be exactly the same but just a name change) have any effect on : a) A sites seo ranking b) the individual images seo ranking (although i guess if b) would be true it would have an effect on a) although potentially small.) This is the sort of change i would be thinking of making : ![Red ford truck](2554.jpg) changed to ![Red ford truck](6842.jpg)

    | Sam-P
    0

  • Hi all My category pages will showcase the same products how do I go about optimizing these pages so they don't show up as duplicate content? Would appreciate your all feedaback! Thanks

    | edward-may
    0

  • Hi guys, I am helping a client link their website to Ebay and I am wondering if there is anything specific I should be doing in terms for search engine optimisation. Any advice would be really helpful. Thanks!

    | StoryScout
    0

  • Hi We have implemented HTTPS to the our website. Do we need to now redirect the whole site to HTTPS in the HTTACCESS file? Because when you enter the site via a google search or enter the domain directly the site is set to HTTP once we click on a URL on the page it sets it to HTTPS so do we require to redirect from the start? thanks
    E

    | Direct_Ram
    0

  • Hi, what does it mean when a lot of our keyword phrases rank only when "UK" is typed in the search term? For example:
    "boxes" (not in top 50)
    "boxes UK" (38) "big storage boxes" (45)
    "big storage boxes UK" (33) We haven't attempted to SEO the pages for search terms with "UK" appended to them. Our domain is a co.uk domain. So, what reasons could there be that are we ranking in such a way?

    | Solid_Web
    0

  • Hello Mozzers, I was wondering whether there's any best practice guidance out there re: how to deal with membership/subscriber (existing customer) only content on a website, from an SEO perspective - what is best practice? A few SEOs have told me to make some of the content visible to Google, for SEO purposes, yet I'm really not sure whether this is acceptable / manipulative, and I don't want to upset Google (or users for that matter!) Thanks in advance, Luke

    | McTaggart
    0

  • Hi Can anyone help me. I need some help with some example of large e-commerce sites going to https. Ideally these need to be e-commerce sites but any large site will be great, so that I can show the impact. The site can be based anywhere in the world, its more the impact I am after. Thanks Andy

    | Andy-Halliday
    0

  • Hi all, I was wondering if you have any recommendations for a code monitor? We'd like to keep track of any code and content changes on a couple of websites. We've taken a look at Page Monitor: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/page-monitor/pemhgklkefakciniebenbfclihhmmfcd?hl=en but I'm not sure if it tracks code changes? Any suggestions for free or paid tools would be appreciated. Edit: We'd also like to avoid a tool that requires any tracking code changes or anything that involves a database/FTP connection.

    | ecommercebc
    0

  • Hi I am looking at GWT more and more and I starting not to believe the information within it.  For example we had a link on XYZ.com say 6 months ago.  This link as been removed no reference to our website, however it still showing on GWT inbound links.  I have noticed quite a few sites which have no relevance to our site. Is anyone else finding the information wrong in WMT

    | Cocoonfxmedia
    0

  • Hello, The company that I work for recently implemented a complete redesign for our company website. The former site was old, cumbersome and in desperate need of an update. We streamlined the site structure and made sure to redirect as many pages as we could find to new thematically related pages with 301 redirects. After the launch of our new site we saw a large upswing in "soft" 404 errors despite the fact that most of these pages do redirect upon inspection. So in relation to the soft 404s, for example, is it merely a matter of labeling them as fixed if they redirect properly, or could their be an underling issue with the site itself? Also, a majority or the urls labeled "not found" in webmaster tools are properly redirected. Do these merely need to be marked as fixed, or is there something else that needs to be fixed like the sitemap structure? I appreciate any and all input. Beyond Indigo

    | BeyondIndigo
    1

  • Hello Moz Experts, I am fighting for one of our sites to be mobile optimized, but the fight is taking longer than anticipated (need approval from higher ups). What happens if my site is not ready by April 21st? Will it take long to recover, like Penguin? Or, will the recovery be fairly quick? Say I release a mobile version of my site a week later. Then Google will have to reindex it and rank me again. How long will that take before I regain my traffic? Thanks,

    | TMI.com
    0

  • Hi everybody! Here's my question. After a site migration, a client has seen a big drop in rankings. We're trying to narrow down the issue. It seems that they have lost around 15,000 links following the switch, but these came from pages that were blocked in the robots.txt file. I was wondering if there was any research that has been done on the impact of internal links from no-indexed pages. Would be great to hear your thoughts! Sam

    | Blink-SEO
    0

  • My non-www version account is my preferred domain. Should I submit in both account? Or one account will take care of the disavow?

    | ChelseaP
    0

  • Hi I have a page containing paid links. i would like to add no follow attribute to these links
    but from technical reasons, i can only place meta robots no follow on page level (
    is that enough for telling Google that the links in this page are paid and and to prevent Google penlizling the sites that the page link to? Thanks!

    | Kung_fu_Panda
    0

  • I have client with an old site - www.bestfamilylawattorney.com - which had a lot of spammy links (and bad rankings).  Instead of fixing those issues, we started a new URL - www.berenjifamilylaw.com - with new content and redesign. Should I do a 301 redirect from old to new domain?  If the old site was being penalized, would a 301 transfer that penalty? I just want to make sure I don't end up hurting the new site after doing all the work to start fresh. Thanks.

    | mrodriguez1440
    0

  • Good morning Mozzers! I've just started working in-house for a local company who want to go national. I want to build a long-term strategy but the competitors all appear to be building short term strategies and I fear this is pushing the company towards following a similar approach. The competitor companies and even my company at present are trying to target "Green Widgets in TownX" and then duplicating the page and switching out TownX with TownY. Naturally there are competitors having success with this, but for how long? I really don't want to go down this route. My aim for a long term strategy would be going after "Green Widgets" and then rank naturally for "Green Widgets in TownX" with our generic green widgets page. Now if I'm told I have to go with the competitor strategy regardless of my concerns, are there any good examples of companies that have done this, without the need for being a huge brand first? I know I can obviously try to create unique content on each page and that will help prevent penalties, but it still seems a short-term strategy? Any words of wisdom would be greatly appreciated.

    | PaulGG
    1

  • Hi - I'm working on a university website and have found a load of (1) outbound links to companies that have commercial tie ups to the university and, beyond that, loads of (2) outbound links to companies set up by alumni and (3) outbound links to commercial clients of the university. Your opinions on whether I should nofollow these, or not, would be welcome. At the moment I'm tempted to nofollow (1) yet leave (2) and (3) - quite simply because the (1) backlinks may have been negotiated as part of a package (nobody can actually remember at the university!), yet (2) and (3) were freely given by the university. Your thoughts would be welcome!

    | McTaggart
    0

  • A client had taken a free trial on a directory - a niche directory which only takes food related websites. They mentioned, in passing, that the directory listing was replicated across 90 food-relevant "partner" sites [alarm bells!] - some of which use nofollow - some which don't, apparently. The main directory doesn't use nofollow and offers a mix of monthly-fee based listings or free listings. I've demanded a nofollow backlink from the main site and partner sites, or no backlink... what are your thoughts?

    | McTaggart
    0

  • Hi I have swaped from HTTP to HTTPS and put a redirect on for HTTP to redirect to HTTPS.  I also put www.xyz.co.uk/index.html to redirect to www.xyz.co.uk When I fetch as Google it shows up redirect! Does this mean that I have too many 301 looping? Do I need the redirect on index.html to root domain if I have a rel conanical in place for index.html htaccess (Linix) - RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^xyz.co.uk
    RewriteRule (.*) https://www.xyz.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteRule ^$ index.html [R=301,L]

    | Cocoonfxmedia
    0

  • We plan to perform a domain migration in 6 months time.
    I read the different articles on moz relating to domain migration, but some doubts remain: Moving some linkworthy content upfront to new domain was generally recommended. I have such content (free e-learning) that I could move already now to new domain.
    Should I move it now or just 2 months before migration?
    Should I be concerned whether this content and early links could indicate to google a different topical theme of the new domain ? E.g. in our case free elearning app vs a commercial booking of presential courses of my core site which is somehow but not extremely strongly related) and links for elearning app may be very specific from appstores and from sites about mobile apps. we still have some annoying .php3 file extensions in many of our highest traffic pages and I would like to drop the file-extension (no further URL change). It was generally recommended to minimize other changes at the same time of domain migration, but on the other hand implementing later another 301 again may also not be optimum and it would save time to do it all at the same time. Shall I do the removal of the file extension at the same time of the domain migration or rather schedule it for 3 months later? On the same topic, would the domain migration be a good occasion to move to https instead of http at the same time, or also should we rather do this at a different time? Any thoughts or suggestions?

    | lcourse
    0

  • Hello all, I run a website which lists direct contact details (tel. and email.) of organisations. I have 100s of similar pages which are very thin on content (by design). Each page has a couple of lines of somewhat unique content. People find the site useful since it simply tells them which number to dial in order to speak to a real person at any given organisation. They can't easily find the information elsewhere and I believe it satisfies search intent. Am I at risk for being flagged for duplicate / low quality content? Should I add more text simply to add 'unique' content to each page even though it adds no value to users? That doesn't seem right either! Looking forward to hear where you guys stand on this, Many thanks,

    | nathandh8
    0

  • So I know what good SEO is, I am performing very well for this client but for some reason Moz Pro is saying their domain authority is declining with each index? Anything I can look into specifically to stop this from happening?

    | D4Creative
    2

  • Hello - Which solution is better For International Website: 1) using a CDN,  or 2) using some VPS's in each location?

    | Vahid-af
    0

  • Hi, My website is only 4 months old and receives about 40 to 50 organic visits every day. It currently has about 100 pages out of which only 3-4 rank in the top 10 for the target KWs. I usually try to publish, at least 1 article a day but sometimes certain articles are more than 2000 words long with a few of infographics and hence takes way more time (maybe even 3 days to publish one) Only over the last week, I am observing that every time i am publishing a page (usually daily) google is indexing them the same day. This I have heard happens for moderately big sites but my site is really small at this stage. Note: For the first 80 pages, I used to "fetch as googlebot" in webmasters as otherwise my site would be crawled once in 2 weeks but over the last 3-4 weeks, i rely on googles scheduled visits. Is this a good or bad sign? I would like to assume its good because of my engagement. Though for only organic visits, my Gogle Analytics bounce rate is 65% in analytics out of the remaining 35%, the avg time on site >7 mins. That means if someone sticks to my site, they consume a lot of my content. Also, since analytics' bounce rate is not same as the search bounce (back button) I would like to consider that the bounce is actually lesser than that.

    | dwautism
    0

  • I work with a company that is about to move to a new platform. Because the category and page structure is different every almost every url but the home page will need to be 301 redirected. I know how to do this and am pretty sure I will find and fix 99% ahead of time and not have too many 404's showing up in webmaster tools to clean up. My question is has anyone who is reading this post had to do this before and what was your experience with organic traffic after you made the switch. I am predicting that even if I successfully redirected 100% of the url's there would be some loss for a couple of months just due to the fact that we are making a major change. My bosses are asking if there will be any loss and I need to tell them what to expect.

    | KentH
    0

  • I had a client ask me a good question. When they pull up a search result they show up at the top but only with a link to their G+ page. Other competitors show their web address and G+ page.  Why are these results different in the same search group? Is there a way to ensure the web address shows up?

    | Ron_McCabe
    0

  • Our client recently switched over to https via new SSL.  They have also implemented rel canonicals for most of their internal webpages (that point to the https).  However many of their non secure webpages are still being indexed by Google.   We have access to their GWMT for both the secure and non secure pages.  
    Should we just let Google figure out what to do with the non secure pages?   We would like to setup 301 redirects from the old non secure pages to the new secure pages, but were not sure if this is going to happen.   We thought about requesting in GWMT for Google to remove the non secure pages.   However we felt this was pretty drastic. Any recommendations would be much appreciated.

    | RosemaryB
    0

  • Hello geniuses!!! Here's my Friday puzzle: We have a plastic surgery client who already has a website that's performing fairly well and is driving in leads. She is going to be offering a highly specialized skincare program for cancer patients, and wants a new logo, new website and new promo materials all for this new skincare program. So here's the thing - my gut reaction says NO NEW WEBSITE! NO SUBDOMAIN! because of everything I've read about moving things on and off subdomains, etc (I just studied this: http://moz.com/blog/subdomains-vs-subfolders-rel-canonical-vs-301-how-to-structure-links-optimally-for-seo-whiteboard-friday). And, why wouldn't we want to use the authority of her current site, right? While she doesn't necessarily have a high authority domain - we're not talking WebMD, here - she does have some authority that we've built over time. But, because this is a pretty separate product from her general plastic surgery practice, what would you guys do? Since we'll be creating a logo and skincare "look and feel" for this product, and there will likely be a lot of information involved with it, I don't think we'll be able to just create one page. Is it smart to: a) build a separate site in a subfolder of her current site? (plasticsurgerypractice.com/skincare) b) build a subdomain? (skincare.plasticsurgerypractice.com) c) build her a new site (plasticsurgeryskincare.com)

    | RachelEm
    0

  • Hey guys, what do you do when you planning a new  website and doing keyword research for a site when the avg. search volumes are relatively low. We set up run contact centres for UK charities including voice, webchat, sms, email and response fulfillment etc. It seems that people aren't really searching that often for this 'sexy subject'. Average volumes for searches with some intent/qualifier range from between 10-100 monthly searches. What sort of strategies would you adopt in this scenario? Do you optimise for what you can and then make a large focus on other digital marketing tactics such as content marketing, social media, email marketing etc. Thanks for your time guys Leo

    | Leo_Woodhead
    0

  • Hi I just realized that my e-commerce products do not have any difference except the SKUS, PRICE and THE PRODUCT name. Apart from  each page has  the same sidebar and a piece of content ( same ) under each product pages. And this is the reason why i am getting too many duplicate urls warning through Moz analytics. I do not have any other contents to add for each product because of the nature of the product. Only the price, product name and the SKUs will be different and rest will all be same for each products. How can i fix this ? Thanks

    | MindlessWizard
    0

  • Do 303 redirects work more like 301s or more like 302s when it comes to passing SEO authority?

    | MiguelSalcido
    0

  • Our 1,300 page site conversion from static html to Wordpress platform went flawlessly with the exception of 1 significant issue....an old, important, highly ranking page was 301 redirected to the wrong corresponding new page.  The page it was redirected to is about a similar product, but not the same.  This was an oversight that slipped through.  It was brought to my attention when I noticed this new page was still holding the old page's rankings but the bounce rate skyrocketed (clearly because the content on the wrong new page was not relevant). Once identified, we cleaned up the redirect.  My fear is that all the juice built up on the old .html page that ranked well has now permanently been passed to an irrelevant, insignificant page. -Is there any way to clean up this mistake? -Is there anything I can do to assist Google in associating the correct 'new' page with correct 'old' page after the wrong redirect was initially set-up? -Am I going to have to start from scratch with the new page in terms of trust, backlinks, etc. since google already noted the redirect? Thanks!

    | seagreen
    0

  • Hi all, I'm following up on a recent post i've made about our indexing and especially ranking problems in Google: http://moz.com/community/q/seo-impact-classifieds-website Thanks to all good comments we managed to get rid of most of our crawl errors and as a result our high priority /duplicated content decreased from +22k to 270. In short, we created canonical urls, run an xml sitemap, used url parameters in GWT, created h1 and meta description for each ad posted by users etc. I then used google fetch a few times (3 weeks ago and last week) both for desktop and mobile version for re-approval. Nothing really improves in google rankings (all our core keywords are ranked +50)since months now: yet yahoo and bing organic traffic went up and is 3x higher than google's. In the meanwhile we're running paid campagins on facebook and adwords since months already to keep traffic consistent, yet this is eating up our budget, even though our ctr and conversion rates are good. I realize we might have to create more content on-site and through social media, but right now our social media traffic is already around 50% and we are using more of twitter and google+ as well since recently. Our organic traffic is only 14%; with google only a third of that. In the end, I believe this breakdown should look more something like organic 50%-70%, (paid)social,referral and direct traffic. 50%-30%... I can't believe we are hit by a penalty although this looks like it is the case. Especially while yahoo and bing traffic goes up and google does not. Should I wait for a signal once our site is "approved" again through GWT fetch? Or am i missing something that i need to check as well to improve these rankings? Thanks for your help! Ivor ps: ask me for additional stats or info in a pm if needed!

    | ivordg
    0

  • Hello, I have lots of product for floor and wall tiles. which have following details - Product name of tiles, Then Image, Then - $10.50/m² then  (Price Per Box: $16.50 | Tiles Per Box: 20) Now my query is google merchant has given me error like this - Temporary item disapprovals due to incorrect prices. In google merchant xml i am uploading the price $16.50 so is it google confuse with $10.50/m²  & $16.50? What will be solution? ( above figure are just example if confuse with question then you can visit any site who have floor or wall tiles you will get better idea) Thanks in advance for your input.

    | devdan
    0

  • Hi all, We're creating a section for a client that is based on road trips - for example, New York to Toronto. We have a 3 day trip, a 5 day trip, a 7 day trip and a 10 day trip. The 3 day trip is the base, and then for the 5 day trip, we add another couple of stops, for the 7 day trip, we add a couple more stops and then for the 10 day trip, there might be two or three times the number of stops of the initial 3 day trip. However, the base content is similar - you start at New York, you finish in Toronto, you likely go through Niagara on all trips. It's not exact duplicate content, but it's similar content. I'm not sure how to look after it? The thoughts we have are:1) Use canonical tags 3,5,7 day trips to the 10 day trip.
    2) It's not exactly duplicate content, so just go with the content as it is We don't want to get hit by any penalty for duplicate content so just want to work out what you guys think is the best way to go about this. Thanks in advance!

    | digitalhothouse
    0

  • Hello Everyone, I currently have a dynamic site and it is my understanding that switching to a static site would be beneficial. I already have some 301's in place from when my site had a .php extension to the new extension now with ./?... etc.  Is it okay to re redirect them?  How many redirects are too many? Thank you in advance for suggestions.  Have a Fabulous Friday! Sandra

    | rankmenow
    0

  • Good afternoon & Happy Friday! I've ran into the following disclosure multiple times on different blogs. It seems to me like it would be a red flag and counter productive for both the blogger and the brand sending the samples as "free samples" are subject to google link scheming. Am I correct? What are your thoughts on bloggers using this disclaimer in regards to SEO? Disclosure: Some of these products were samples provided to me to try. Opinions and the choice to review are 100% my own! I was not financially compensated for writing this blog post. This post contains affiliate links.

    | 90miLLA
    0

  • Thanks for all your help on this.

    | VUK-SEO
    0

  • I'm working on a new website with aggregator of content.
    i'll show to my users content from another website in my website in LIGHTBOX windows when they'll click on the title of the items. ** I don't have specific url for these items.
    What is the best way to say for SE "Don't index these pages"?

    | JohnPalmer
    0

  • I have an e-commerce website and am trying to create product category pages. I am under the impression that Description is the text that would appear under the title on a google search and I believe the meta description is just what google reads? Is having BOTH important or just description? Is it ok to duplicate the description for the meta description? I know its not good to duplicate descriptions on other products and pages.

    | nchachula
    0

  • We implemented rich snippets for People listings about 2 months ago, and they haven't shown up in SERPs yet. I followed all of the advice listed here, and everything seems to be working and being crawled correctly. I'm not sure what else to try at this point. Here is an example page that should be showing snippets:  http://www.travelleaders.com/travel_agent/Agent-Details.aspx?id=6982 Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

    | john_marketade
    0

  • Hey there. For some reason when doing crawl tests I'm finding pages with the domain name being tacked on the end and causing 404 errors. 
    For example:  http://domainname.com/page-name/http://domainname.com This is happening to all pages, posts and even category type 1. Site is in Wordpress
    2. Using Yoast SEO plugin Any suggestions? Thanks!

    | Jay328
    0

  • Can you have a website with multiple pages of the exact same copy, (being different locations of a franchise business), and still be able to rank for each individual franchise? Is that possible?

    | OhYeahSteve
    0

  • 1. We have the site Holidayshuahin.com Apparently Holidayshuahin.com is on a blacklist of barracuda we think this happens when somonelse owned this domain. What does this mean for our Google rankings today? We did not optimise the site for SEO but i think it should still show up somewhere in top 100 as there are not that many pages in the niche. holidays hua hin What should we do change domain name? 2. We have 346 links from Holtidayshuahin.com to our own site Dreamestatehuahinc.om that we do not spend time to optimize on. Dreamestatehuahin.com Is not ranking as good as we expected could this have any thing to about these backlinks from our blacklisted holidayshuahin.com site? Also when so many links, should i make them no follow link, what would be best for the link profile of dreamestatehuahin.com in context of links from holidayhuahin.com Look forward for your answers thank you

    | nm1977
    0

  • In google adwords I set destination link like this http://www.abcd.com/ and like this http/:www.abcd.com so how google adwords react on both this? And how it will show data in adwords? Thanks! Dev

    | devdan
    0

  • We have 2 identical ecommerce sites. Using 301 is not an option since both are major brands. We've been testing cross domain canonicals for about 2 dozen products, which were pretty successful. Our rankings generally increased. Then things got weird. For the most part, canonicaled pages appeared to have passed link juice since the  rankings significantly improved on the other site. The clean URLs (www.domain.com/product-name/sku.cfm) disappeared from the rankings, as they are supposed to, but some were replaced by urls with parameters that Google had indexed (apparently duplicate content). ex: (www.domain.com/product-name/sku.cfm?clicksource?3diaftv). The parametered URLs have the correct canonical tags. In order to try and remove these from Google's index, we: 1. Had the pages fetched in GWT assuming that Google hadn't detected the canonical tage. 2. After we discovered a few hundred of these pages indexed on both sites, we built sitemaps of the offending pages and had the sitemaps fetched. If anyone has any other ideas, please share.

    | AMHC
    0

  • I am looking at a site and am pulling up duplicate title tags because of their lightbox use so... So they have a page: http://www.website.com/page and then a duplicate of that page: http://www.website.com/page?width=500&height=600 on a huge number of pages (using Drupal)... that kind of thing - what would be the best / cleanest solution?

    | McTaggart
    0

  • Hi Moz! My client has messy URLs. does it make sense to write new clean URLs, then 301 redirect all old URLs to the new ones? Thanks for reading!

    | DA2013
    0

  • I switched from one domain to another because I wanted a domain that had our company name so it was more brand-y. However, the old domain had better DA/PA. Originally I set up a global 301 from the old to the new, but now I'm finding that I actually need to set up individual 301's from each URL of the old site, or at least from each page. However, I am using Wix so it looks like I can't always do URL-URL 301's, although I can redirect any URL to a page on the new website. The problem is that, in some cases, the content on the new site is different (or, for example, I can only link a particular blog post on the old site back to the new site's blog's main page). How closely do URLS/pages need to resemble each other for link juice to be transferred? Also, should I try to set up all these redirects manually or bite the bullet and go back to using the old domain? The problem is that I did a lot of beginner SEO junk for the new domain, like submitting to a few higher-quality directories, and getting our website on various industry resource sites, etc. I'd need to re-do this entirely if I go back to the old page.  What do you think?

    | BohmKalish123
    0

  • I switched from one domain to another because I wanted a domain that had our company name so it was more brand-y. However, the old domain had better DA/PA. Originally I set up a global 301 from the old to the new, but now I'm finding that I actually need to set up individual 301's from each URL of the old site, or at least from each page.  The new domain is http://www.bohmkalish.com and the old domain was http://www.ssdlawcalifornia.com. However, I am using Wix so it looks like I can't always do URL-URL 301's, although I can redirect any URL to a page on the new website. The problem is that, in some cases, the content on the new site is different (or, for example, I can only link a particular blog post on the old site back to the new site's blog's main page). How closely do URLS/pages need to resemble each other for link juice to be transferred? Also, should I try to set up all these redirects manually or bite the bullet and go back to using the old domain? The problem is that I did a lot of beginner SEO junk for the new domain, like submitting to a few higher-quality directories, and getting our website on various industry resource sites, etc. I'd need to re-do this entirely if I go back to the old page.  What do you think?

    | BohmKalish123
    0

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