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Category: Intermediate & Advanced SEO

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

  • ufmedia


    So I’m working on optimizing a directory site.  Total size: 12.5 million pages in the XML sitemap.  This is orders of magnitude larger than any site I’ve ever worked on – heck, every other site I’ve ever worked on combined would be a rounding error compared to this. Before I was hired, the company brought in an outside consultant to iron out some of the technical issues on the site.  To his credit, he was worth the money: indexation and organic Google traffic have steadily increased over the last six months.  However, some issues remain.  The company has access to a quality (i.e. paid) source of data for directory listing pages, but the last time the data was refreshed some months back, it threw 1.8 million 404s in GWT.  That has since started to grow progressively higher; now we have 2.3 million 404s in GWT. Based on what I’ve been able to determine, links on this particular site relative to the data feed are broken generally due to one of two reasons: the page just doesn’t exist anymore (i.e. wasn’t found in the data refresh, so the page was simply deleted), or the URL had to change due to some technical issue (page still exists, just now under a different link).  With other sites I’ve worked on, 404s aren’t that big a deal: set up a 301 redirect in htaccess and problem solved.  In this instance, setting up that many 301 redirects, even if it could somehow be automated, just isn’t an option due to the potential bloat in the htaccess file. Based on what I’ve read here and here, 404s in and of themselves don’t really hurt the site indexation or ranking.  And the more I consider it, the really big sites – the Amazons and eBays of the world – have to contend with broken links all the time due to product pages coming and going.  Bottom line, it looks like if we really want to refresh the data on the site on a regular basis – and I believe that is priority one if we want the bot to come back more frequently – we’ll just have to put up with broken links on the site on a more regular basis. So here’s where my thought process is leading: Go ahead and refresh the data.  Make sure the XML sitemaps are refreshed as well – hopefully this will help the site stay current in the index. Keep an eye on broken links in GWT.  Implement 301s for really important pages (i.e. content-rich stuff that is really mission-critical).  Otherwise, just learn to live with a certain number of 404s being reported in GWT on more or less an ongoing basis. Watch the overall trend of 404s in GWT.  At least make sure they don’t increase.  Hopefully, if we can make sure that the sitemap is updated when we refresh the data, the 404s reported will decrease over time. We do have an issue with the site creating some weird pages with content that lives within tabs on specific pages.  Once we can clamp down on those and a few other technical issues, I think keeping the data refreshed should help with our indexation and crawl rates. Thoughts?  If you think I’m off base, please set me straight.  🙂

    | ufmedia
    0
  • KateWaite


    Hi I'm an in-house SEO and we've recently seen Panda related traffic loss along with some of our main keywords slipping down the SERPs. Looking for possible Panda related issues I was wondering if the following could be seen as duplicate content. We've got some very similar holidays (travel company) on our website. While they are different I'm concerned it may be seen as creating content that is too similar: http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/destinations/africa-and-the-indian-ocean/kenya/suggested-holidays/the-wildlife-and-beaches-of-kenya.aspx http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/destinations/africa-and-the-indian-ocean/kenya/suggested-holidays/ultimate-kenya-wildlife-and-beaches.aspx http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/destinations/africa-and-the-indian-ocean/kenya/suggested-holidays/wildlife-and-beach-family-safari.aspx They do all have unique text but as you can see from the titles, they are very similar (note from an SEO point of view the tabbed content is all within the same page at source level). At the top level of the holiday pages we have a filtered search:
    http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/destinations/africa-and-the-indian-ocean/kenya/suggested-holidays.aspx These pages have a unique introduction but the content snippets being pulled into the boxes is drawn from each of the individual holiday pages. I'm just concerned that these could be introducing some duplicating issues. Any thoughts?

    | KateWaite
    0
  • MBASydney


    Howdy Moz Fans, Just wondering if anyone knows any tools to which can identify link types. E.g. is the link - navigational, in the footer or in the body text. Specifically for internal links. Any suggestions? Cheers, RM

    | MBASydney
    0
  • Shawn124


    Hi Y'all, Bing uses Pinterest as part of its image search by using pins of users...But what about Tumblr?  Is Tubmlr still a good source for a ranking factor when pointing an image link to your blog? Our industry is pretty boring, so we would get a few clicks here and there a month, but nothing compared to Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest...but overall is Tumblr a good backlink every time a blog is posted for search algorithms?

    | Shawn124
    0
  • TheaterMania


    Hi there, I work for a Theater news site. We have an issue where our system creates a chunk of duplicate content in Google's eyes and we're not sure how best to solve. When an editor produces a video, it simultaneously 1) creates a page with it's own static URL (e.g. http://www.theatermania.com/video/mary-louise-parker-tommy-tune-laura-osnes-and-more_668.html); and 2) displays said video on a public index page (http://www.theatermania.com/videos/). Since the content is very similar, Google sees them as duplicate. What should we do about this? We were thinking that one solution would to be dynamically canonicalize the index page to the static page whenever a new video is posted, but would Google frown on this? Alternatively, should we simply nofollow the index page? Lastly, are there any solutions we may have missed entirely?

    | TheaterMania
    0
  • CallMeNicholi


    I've searched the forum on this and online and can't seem to find a definitive answer. Some e-commerce sites that are http use a 302 redirect to the https login while other sites use a 301 redirect. I know 302 is generally not recommended but in this case it may make sense. Can anyone advise on the correct practice?

    | CallMeNicholi
    0
  • DemiGR


    http://bit.ly/YGOCNr This site was created about a 18 months ago, and since then we did our own in house SEO. Well we did hire one recommended company on the Moz list for a few months and they did great linkbuilding but were super expensive.  We always saw steady increase in organic clicks both via google and bing.  We got to a maximum of around 25k organic clicks/month in July before we started to tank.  We are now down to around 16k/mo and continuing to drop quickly. Nothing has changed as far as what we are doing for SEO.  The only thing that comes to mind was back in July we saw some negative SEO against us.  Fortunately we keep a very close eye on our back links so we disavowed all of the toxic links pretty much as they were found.  There was about ten of them from places such as: sharklinks.info
    bookmarkingforseo.com
    compasslinks.info We don't have any manually actions in webmaster tools.  Anyone want to help point me in the right direction? We have some competitors out ranking us with a horrible back link profile, beyond crappy website/content etc.  I guess this is the nature of the beast and google doesnt always get it right, but I would love to hear your thoughts on why we are going backwards.

    | DemiGR
    2
  • MBASydney


    Hi i'm currently doing a internal link analysis for one of my clients and want to pull internal link data for the entire website. So i can look at the distribution of internal anchor text and to identify ways in which we can optimize internal linking. I have had a look at screaming frog the trouble is, this data is only exportable one page at a time. Meaning, you can’t export an entire site “In Link” data. The site has 200+ pages so pulling in link data for each page would take quite long! Can anyone recommend anyways or tools which can look at the entire link profile for a website. I have checked OSE but there's not much data because the site is relatively new. Cheers, RM

    | MBASydney
    0
  • TheaterMania


    Hello, I work for the Theater discovery website, theatermania.com. Users can browse current shows on a city-by-city basis, such as New York: http://www.theatermania.com/new-york-city-theater/shows/ My question is, is there any SEO benefit in us creating a single page that lists all shows (both current and non-current) across the US? My boss mentioned that this could help our long tail results, but I'm not so sure.

    | TheaterMania
    0
  • YairSpolter


    We have a mobile site that uses angular js, so we are using Pushstate and adding the   tag to each page so Google receives an HTML snapshot. My question is if Bing supports this meta tag and will fetch the correct version of the page?

    | YairSpolter
    0
  • poiseo


    Hello,we're about to disallow search results from crawling in robots.txt, but in GWT we have to specify URL parameters. URLs with 'search' parameter look like these: http://www.example.com/?search=keyword So in GWT we're setting the following parameter: search Question, what settings to set for it?

    | poiseo
    0
  • Bua


    I recently migrated a site from Joomla to Wordpress. In advance I exported the HTML pages from Joomla using Screaming Frog and did 301 redirects on all those pages. However Webmaster Tools is now telling me (a week after putting the redirects in place) that there are >7k 404s. Many of them aren't HTML pages, just index.php files but I didn't think I would have to export these in my Screaming Frog crawl. We have since done a blanket 301 redirect for anything with index.php in it but Webmaster Tools is still picking them up as 404s. So my question is, what should I have done with Screaming Frog re exporting to ensure I captured all pages to redirect and what should I now do to fix the 404s that Webmaster Tools is picking up?

    | Bua
    0
  • Pascaltall


    Hi, First excuse my but english. I am from France. Since two years i have lost place for the most important of my keyword in google search. The loss is gradual. It's been more than two years as I do not do link building. I do not know what to do. I just read your article on link building. (http://moz.com/blog/beginners-guide-to-link-building)
    I would like if possible for someone to take a look at my website to see what is wrong and what i have to do do. For reasons of discretion I do not want to link the site name here, but you can see the domain name by following this link. http://riador.com/lien.html
    Thank you to all.

    | Pascaltall
    0
  • followuk


    Hi, Two questions here, First: Does the position of content have any impact on performance? For example say a page displays a league table (20 rows) so eats up most of the above-fold space. Would that table being top followed by content have a negative impact? Would creating 'some' content before a table help? Second: Does topic modelling actually help relevance signals? So say I sold guitars and the page had the word 'guitar' throughout the content, would including electric, acoustic, strings, amps etc also in the content help the page become more relevant for the term 'guitar'? Or would it just expand the terms the page would be eligible to show for? Thanks.

    | followuk
    1
  • nopsts


    I have 6 different iframe blocks (with same content in those iframes) in every page of my website. I know iframe don't be crawled by search engines but, maybe you experts give me some advice? Is that negative for SEO ?

    | nopsts
    0
  • ShaqD


    Hi guys, I'm deep into the Schema.org meta-tags implementation for the reviews on my website and I'd love to know how do you think I should implement it when I have Positive-Negative reviews as opposed to star ratings.  I couldn't find a site that had this with schema tags for reference.  Fiverr used to have thumbs up/down, but recently changed to star rating. On our services marketplace we allow users to review the providers they worked with and ask them for a positive-negative review - thumbs up/down with an additional open text area. I thought about adding a schema.org meta-tags like this: Lets assume one of our providers got two reviews, one is positive and the second is negative. So, first I thought about adding an aggregateReview meta-tag on top, just like this: And also add a meta-tag for any review, like this: Two days ago by
        Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
        Joe is a great guy, I'd recommend him to my friends. Does that make sense? Has anyone had the chance to implement a schema.org meta tags for this kind of situation or familiar with a website who does it that way? Thanks so much for your help! Shaqd

    | ShaqD
    0
  • C.A


    Hello Everyone, I'm doing a backlink research and we are considering how to define a strategy. My website is located in Spain and I am focusing on ranking my website on Google.es for public coming from Spain. The thing is that until now I used to look carefully at the IP address of my backlink prospects, to check if the website was really hosted in Spain. I know Matt Cutts used to say very long ago that hosting location of a website was important. But taking into account that nowadays with cloud servers, CDNs, AnyCast and such technologies it's no longer possible to accurately identify the location of a website, specially if the CDN of the websites uses AnyCast, so that an IP address can be used by different machines in different locations. Do you guys think I should keep looking at the IP address location on my backlink prospects?

    | C.A
    0
  • vijayvasu


    Hello, What is the best and quickest way to identify spammy sites that link to a website, and then remove them ( google disavow?) Thank you dear Moz, community - I appreciate your  help 🙂 Sincerely, Vijay

    | vijayvasu
    0
  • entourage212


    I own : waterfrontrealestatemiami.com & miamisrealtor.com I am the beginning phases of developing and designing a website for a Realtor within South East Florida (Miami) She specializes in luxury waterfront properties (homes mainly) but does not want to be to limited, as she is open to anything within the area. But the bread and butter is luxury waterfront properties. I am torn between the right domain choice. Any suggestions between the two listed above? Please list why, Thank you for your help.

    | entourage212
    0
  • Muhammad-Isap


    We're in the middle of a disavow process and we're having some difficulty deciding whether or not to disavow links from Justia.com and prweb.com - justia.com alone is giving us 23,000 links with just 76 linked pages. So, to allow, or disavow? That's the question! What do you think guys? Thank you. John.

    | Muhammad-Isap
    0
  • IrvCo_Interactive


    A client website was moved about six months ago to a new domain. At the time of the move, 301 redirects were setup from the pages on the old domain to point to the same page on the new domain. New pages were setup on the old domain for a different purpose. Now almost six months later when I do a query in google on the old domain like site:example.com 80% of the pages returned are 301 redirects to the new domain. I would have expected this to go away by now. I tried removing these URLs in webmaster tools but the removal requests expire and the URLs come back. Is this something we should be concerned with?

    | IrvCo_Interactive
    0
  • innermedia1


    Hi, I have a website that was rebuilt and redesigned earlier this year, and it's struggling to rank. The problem is that the wrong pages are ranking for the key terms. For example, there is a page for 'Loft Conversions Essex' but the page that's ranking is actually the FAQ page (which doesn't mention the word 'Essex' at all). I have been through all of the usual items, and none of them seem to apply: The landing pages have been properly optimised (not overly so), while the pages that rank only contain the terms within the menu (the link that goes to the actual landing page) We thought it may be a redirect issue since the site was a bit of a mess before the rebuild, so we removed all of the redirects and resubmitted the htaccess file but that hasn't helped Internal anchor text is relevant There aren't a huge number of external links to the old site pages, and many of these pages didn't exist at all so I don't think that's an issue Most of the pages were built at the same time so there's no real reason why one would have more authority than another There are no canonicals interfering with these pages I can't really canonical these since we do want the pages to rank, it's just that they're all ranking for the wrong thing (so the SERPs are a lot lower than they should be). Most of these pages are pretty new, as I said, so while we have tried smaller content changes I don't think a full refresh will really help. To make it even weirder, the pages that rank for each term change regularly but it's never the right page. Help! EDIT: Thanks for the responses everyone!

    | innermedia1
    0
  • Shawn124


    Hi Guys, I just got a remove url email from someone asking us to remove their link.  What website or tool is best to see ALL of your external links sitewide from your website?  And as a bonus, columns of "nofollow" and "follow". Thank you!

    | Shawn124
    0
  • UEUP


    Bit of a weird one but I'm hoping someone can help our team of two sort it out. I'm a copywriter/marketer who's been learning SEO on-the-go, along with our web developer, for the past ~9 months. We've inherited what I consider to be a mess of a situation involving two main e-commerce sites. The company has a sporadic history of spinning off brands, in hopes to either build business in a new market or sell the brands off or what-have-you. The original company rose to prominence manufacturing disc packaging and selling it to software companies, which has obviously been on the way out for some time now. So they've dipped into a handful of other business products for marketing/office use. The company used to sell all products, in individual AND box quantity, on one site (since 1996). In 2012 they decided to move individual quantity sales to a different site with the domain name of one of the brands, focus it more on consumers and small business, etc. We have more flexibility to make changes to the consumer site, so in my opinion it's in better shape. The consumer site (DA 39) offers "retail pricing" with flat rate shipping and free shipping over $25. The b2b site (DA 37) offers "industry pricing" with a weight-based shipping model. Traffic on the business site is down 70% since 2010. We've also been asked to take certain products down in hopes that viewers will pick up the phone and buy a customized version from a sales rep instead. Since probably 3/4 of the products are on both sites, nearly all the category and product pages are competing in SERPs. Not only that, but the business site's product pages invariably link to the corresponding page on the consumer site -- hundreds of links pointing to the consumer site. We know for a fact that people are price checking product+shipping between our own two sites. The issues are further exacerbated because we have even more spinoff domains -- an informative site for a particularly successful product line, an e-commerce site just for vinyl products, etc. etc. So I guess I'm trying to figure out how to make the most of the situation we're now in. Our hands are somewhat tied because we're not 'decision makers'. But we've got a meeting tomorrow to talk about the future of one of the sites, so I figure I at least want to be informed. I am concerned about making further decisions without considering the consequences, especially when our bonuses are tied to web sales... I feel like this is just scratching the surface of the problem so let me know if you guys have further questions.

    | UEUP
    0
  • deelo555


    I have a site which is around 9 months old. For most search terms we rank fine (including top 3 rankings for competitive terms). Recently one of our pages has been fluctuating wildly in the rankings and has now disappeared altogether from the rankings for over 1 week. As a test I added a similar page to one of my other sites and it ranks fine. I've checked webmaster tools and there is nothing of note there. I'm not really sure what to do at this stage. Any advice would me much appreciated!

    | deelo555
    0
  • wesdunn1977


    Hi All First question here so go easy.. I have a property site which is working well so far considering it;s early days, unfortunately some of my earlier efforts did not go so well and one in particular I pretty much destroyed in my attempts to improve the site SEO. Lucky enough my SEO skills have improved quite a bit lately, largely thanks to the great tools, tutorials and experts here at Moz 🙂 My question is whether I can use a 301 redirect to pass the domain authority and any link equity from an unused site to the one that ive done a better job on? it would seem a little sketchy to me and I would prefer not to get slapped and penalized "again" for doing something dodgy... Thanks everyone and thanks for all the help over the last 6 months or so.. Wes Dunn

    | wesdunn1977
    1
  • deelo555


    I have an ecommerce website and have a product slider with 3 images. Currently, I serve them at the native size when viewed on a desktop browser (374x374). I would like to serve them using retina image quality (748px). However how will this affect my ranking due to load time? Does Google take into account image load times even though these are done asynchronously? Also as its a slider, its only the first image which needs to load. Do the other images contribute at all to the page load time?

    | deelo555
    1
  • BrandonEML


    Good Afternoon, My website uses Joomla CMS and has the htaccess rewrite code enabled to ensure the use of search engine friendly URLs (SEF's). While browsing the crawl diagnostics I have found that Moz considers the /index.php URL a duplicate to our root. I will always under the impression that the htaccess rewrite took care of that issue and obviously I would like to address it. I attempted to create a 301 redirect from the index.php URL to the root but ran into an issue when attempting to login to the admin portion of the website as the redirect sent me back to the homepage. I was curious if anyone had advice for handling the index.php duplication issue, specifically with Joomla. Additionally, I have confirmed that in Google Webmasters, under URL parameters, the index.php parameter is set as 'Representative URL'.

    | BrandonEML
    0
  • Andy-Halliday


    Hi All Does having quite a few Duplicate meta descriptions hurt SEO. I am worried that I have too many and thinking this could be the reason for my recent drop in search visibility. Thanks in Advance. Andy

    | Andy-Halliday
    0
  • intentionally


    Working on a client project - a UGC community that has a DTC model as well as a white label model. Is it categorically better to have them all under the same domain? Trying to figure which is better: XXX,XXX pages on one site vs. A smaller XXX,XXX pages on one site and XX,XXX pages on 10-20 other sites all pointing to the primary site. The thinking on the second was that those domains would likely achieve high DA as well as the primary, and would passing their value to the primary. Thoughts? Any other considerations we should be thinking about?

    | intentionally
    0
  • 94501


    I'm working on a site that has too many pages in Google's index as shown in a simple count via a site search (example): site:http://www.mozquestionexample.com I ended up getting a full list of these pages and it shows pages that have been supposedly excluded from the index via GWT url parameters and/or canonicalization For instance, the list of indexed pages shows: 1. http://www.mozquestionexample.com/cool-stuff 2. http://www.mozquestionexample.com/cool-stuff?page=2 3. http://www.mozquestionexample.com?page=3 4. http://www.mozquestionexample.com?mq_source=q-and-a 5. http://www.mozquestionexample.com?type=productss&sort=1date Example #1 above is the one true page for search and the one that all the canonicals reference. Examples #2 and #3 shouldn't be in the index because the canonical points to url #1. Example #4 shouldn't be in the index, because it's just a source code that, again doesn't change the page and the canonical points to #1. Example #5 shouldn't be in the index because it's excluded in parameters as not affecting page content and the canonical is in place. Should I worry about these multiple urls for the same page and if so, what should I do about it? Thanks... Darcy

    | 94501
    0
  • masoudfatemi


    Hi about 4 months ago, I had ranking #1 to #4 for "SEO" in Persian in my country; but someone made about 1000 spam links to my site and some other industry sites. I disavowed the links when I see (after 2-3 days of OSE detection). But now I'm in the page 2 of rankings for the most important keyword I ever had. The point is, My visits increased in this months, but I lost my rankings for this keyword not others. The spammy links targeted my main keyword. Whats you idea to get my ranking back? I'm writing content about SEO, Marketing and blogging for about 4 years and I don't have any bad resume in buying links or stuffing keywords or ... All natural.

    | masoudfatemi
    0
  • Kingalan1


    Greetings MOZ Community: When visitors enter real estate search parameters in our commercial real estate web site, the parameters are somehow getting indexed as internal links in Google Webmaster Tools. About half are 700 internal links are derived from these dynamic URLs. It seems to me that these dynamic alphanumeric URL links would dilute the value of the remaining static links. Are the dynamic URLs a major issue? Are they high priority to remove? The dynamic URLs look like this: /listings/search?fsrepw-search-neighborhood%5B%5D=m_0&fsrepw-search-sq-ft%5B%5D=1&fsrepw-search-price-range%5B%5D=4&fsrepw-search-type-of-space%5B%5D=0&fsrepw-search-lease-type=1 These URLs do not show up when a  SITE: URL search is done on Google!

    | Kingalan1
    0
  • Sika22


    I finally got our title tags honored and now Google is just making the descriptions whatever it wants.  This is happening on pretty much every one of our pages.  An example: http://www.sqlsentry.com/products/plan-explorer/sql-server-query-view SERPS = SQL Server MVP Aaron Bertrand shares a demo kit for Plan Explorer to give you better insight into the advantages of the tool, and to help you share its virtues ... Description tag = SQL Sentry Plan Explorer is a free query plan analysis tool that will allow you to find the most expensive operators by CPU, I/O, or both. I can see the description tag when I view source so I know that it is pulling it from the table correctly.  What can I do to fix this?

    | Sika22
    0
  • TMI.com


    I have a blogger site that is adding parameters and causing duplicate content. For example: www.mysite.com/?spref=bl
    www.mysite.com/?commentPage=1 www.mysite.com/?m=1 www.mysite.com/?m=0 I decided to implement a canonical tag on these pages pointing to the correct version of the page. However, for the parameter ?m=0, the canonical keeps pointing to itself. Ex: www.mysite.com/?m=0     The canonical = www.mysite.com/?m=0 So now I have two canonicals for the same page. My question is if I should leave it, and let Google decide, or completely remove the canonicals from all pages?

    | TMI.com
    0
  • Resultify


    Hi Been building and optimising sites for 15 years and this is one of the hardest problems I ever came across. So any help would be very much appreciated. Here we go: For some mysterious reason this URL http://weekend.visitsweden.com/no/ has been indexed as http://weekend.visitsweden.com even if we tried all we can to correct it. The problem is that since the latter points to the first URL with a 301 it refuses to get any page rank. Also it does not get visible in Google at all. Just a recap of what we have tried so far: Add site to webmaster tools Add proper sitemap.xml Add 301 redirect to the correct URL An easy way to locate the problem is to search for the main content of the site. As you can see it returns the wrong URL and the correct URL does not even get listed. Again, any help is very much appreciated. Kind regards Fredrik

    | Resultify
    0
  • EdBen


    HI have been working on the site http://www.schoolguide.co.uk/ we had something odd happen around the 25 of August our ranking just tanked. Now there was no warning in webmaster tools. Moz weather forecast didn't show anything crazy. We didn't do anything major to site. The site lost pretty much all it's long tail ranking and about 5% of the indexed pages. What could cause this? The only thing of prominence we did was get a link from huffington post article. Thanks again everyone Ed

    | EdBen
    0
  • Kingalan1


    We operate a commercial real estate web site (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com) in New York City. Our home page text is about 500 words. Currently the home page text is of a promotional nature and not very engaging. We are attempting to write a check list for companies that are seeking to lease commercial space and make the text very useful, practical and engaging. However we are having difficulty covering all the bases with less than 1,000 words. If the home page text has 1,000-1,300 words is that detrimental from an SEO point of view? On the plus side I would think this would allow us to include several secondary keyword terms and to add plurals and variations of the two or three top phrases. Any thoughts or suggestions? Thanks, Alan Rosinsky

    | Kingalan1
    0
  • CodeCadet


    Hello, I was just asked to help rank a keyword that has fairly low competition but the #1 result is a definition.
    I do not want to post the keyword here but for an example type in "resting" and you will see that Google returns a definition of the word. Now, lets say the result directly below the webster definition is a company with the name "Resting". What type of tactics would you employ to outrank a definition?! My first guess would be that I should establish this brand with Google by creating a Google Places listing for it. What else could I possible do? Should I just build standard relevant back links and optimize the content as normal? Thanks in advance!

    | CodeCadet
    0
  • alexkatalkin


    Hi, we have plenty of 404 errors. We just deal with those that are of the highest priority (the ones that have high page authority). We have also a lot of errors like this: http://www.weddingrings.com/www.yoy-search.com . Does it make sense to redirect those to the home page or leave them as an 404 error?

    | alexkatalkin
    0
  • rajeevEDU


    We all know Google displays nearby results by locating our ip address. My question is how does these results differ? For eg 1. If someone from Newyork search for "chinese Restaurant in Newyork" 2. Someone from California search for "chinese Restaurant in Newyork" 3. Someone from California changes his location to Newyork and search for "chinese Restaurant in Newyork" What are the factors the Google SERP looks into to display the result in local terms?

    | rajeevEDU
    0
  • weddingphotojournalist


    I have been having problems with Google indexing my website since mid May. I haven't made any changes to my website which is wordpress. I have a page with the title 'Peterborough Cathedral wedding', I search Google for 'wedding Peteborough Cathedral', this is not a competitive search phrase and I'd expect to find my blog post on page one. Instead, half way down page 4 I find Google has indexed www.weddingphotojournalist.co.uk/blog with the title 'wedding photojournalist | Portfolio', what google has indexed is a link to the blog post and not the blog post itself.  I repeated this for several other blog posts and keywords and found similar results, most of which don't make any sense at all - A search for 'Menorca wedding photography' used to bring up one of my posts at the top of page one. Now it brings up a post titled 'La Mare wedding photography Jersey" which happens to have a link to the Menorca post at the bottom of the page. A search for 'Broadoaks country house weddng photography' brings up 'weddingphotojournalist | portfolio' which has a link to the Broadoaks post.  a search for 'Blake Hall wedding photography' does exactly the same.  In this case Google is linking to www.weddingphotojournalist.blog again, this is a page of recent blog posts. Could this be a problem with my sitemap? Or the Yoast SEO plugin? or a problem with my wordpress theme? Or is Google just a bit confused?

    | weddingphotojournalist
    0
  • Netrepid


    Just started work on a great MMA news site. In their footer, they have a plugin for random posts, which creates URL strings with '?random=1' on the end and then 302 redirects to a random article on the site. I know SEO-friendly protocol for redirects is to use 301 and not any of the other 300's. However, I don't really see the need to do 301s for these because of the fact that they are random! That said, I also don't want to leave 1000s of errors that can hinder the 'crawlability' (don't judge me - that's a word :)) of my client's site. My thought right now is to noindex the urls with the '?random=1' in the string, so the spider doesn't worry about crawling those links. Not sure if that is proper code, but it seems that would be quick and effective. Is there a better way to attack this? If you know, please share with me! WP publishers who use random post plugins: have you experienced this? How did you fix it within the friendly confines of Wordpress?

    | Netrepid
    0
  • freshleafmedia


    I have found that for some Google searches the old version of the site on a completely different domain is appearing on page one of the results, while the newer site is only on page 3. The old site is redirecting to the new site with a 301 redirect, however there is also an additional redirect on the new site to force SSL. Despite this when you view the Google cache of the result that appears in Google the content of the page is still the old site. Is this normal or is Google not following the chain of 301 redirects? Edit: I just found out that downloading the page by right clicking a link and clicking download rather than viewing it in a browser leads to the old site appearing and the 301 redirect not being followed.

    | freshleafmedia
    0
  • WebRiverGroup


    What is the best way to handle special characters? We have some URL's that use special characters and when a sitemap is generate using Xenu it changes the characters to something different. Do we need to have physically change the URL back to display the correct character? Example: URL:  http://petstreetmall.com/Feeding-&-Watering/361.html Sitmap Link:  http://www.petstreetmall.com/Feeding-%26-Watering/361.html

    | WebRiverGroup
    0
  • rachelmanning888


    I am working on a project where the client has a main .com site and the following additional sites which are all interlinked: .com site targeting US
    .com site targeting China 
    .HK site targeting Hong Kong All sites contain similar information (although the Chinese site is translated). They are not identical copies but being shopping sites, they contain a lot of similar product information. Webmeup software (now defunct) showed that the inbound links to the main site, from the additional domains are considered risky. Linkrisk shows them as neutral. The client wants them to be interlinked and would not want to remove the additional domains as they get a good amount of traffic. In addition, the messages and products for each country domain have been tailored to a degree to suit that audience. We can rewrite the content on the other domains, but obviously this is a big job. Can anyone advise if this would be causing a problem SEO wise and if so, is the best way to resolve it to rewrite the content on the US and Hong Kong sites? Alternatively would it be better to integrate the whole lot together (they will soon be rebuilding the main site, so it would be an appropriate time to do this).

    | rachelmanning888
    0
  • ddspg


    I have a number of clients offering a number of services on our platform. Currently we have only client profiles online but were thinking now to create landing pages for each client and each service based on long tail keyword patterns we saw emerge.
    This would increase the number of landing pages by 10x but since those long tail keyword landing pages are fairly similar for each client+service combination we were wondering what issues we could run into with this approach.
    Can our domain get penalized if we do this or would possible duplicate pages just not rank? Or is this all with in the rules?

    | ddspg
    0
  • Dom441


    I have two possible landing pages to focus off page links and paid ad links to, one page has space for content but basically only serves as a springboard to a map view style listing page. The idea is to use this page full of good content to build search engine value. The map view page is the most functional and is what visitors would ultimately be seeking, but has no real room for content. Are these content landing pages useful? Would it be better to focus on user functionality even though there is no space for content, and would search engines naturally apply for value to these pages? Are these landing pages necessary? The url's in question are http://www.rentcollegepads.com/marquette/search and http://www.rentcollegepads.com/marquette Thanks guys!

    | Dom441
    0
  • keL.A.xT.o


    Hi everyone! Luke here from CHARGED.fm hoping that a brilliant mind could help me with another annoying (at least for me) technical seo question. It's about how we list the events on our ticketing site. Here's the rundown: We currently list tickets by event id, but our competitors keep the event page in the same silo and use the venue name and date of event in the url. So we do this: http://www.charged.fm/kinky-boots-tickets (disregard redirect for now) List the events where you can choose from these: http://www.charged.fm/event/tickets/2518362/kinky-boots
    http://www.charged.fm/event/tickets/2511448/kinky-boots Moz lists these as duplicate content, so we're wondering how to resolve this. We're also wondering if it would be benficial to keep the events page in the same silo like our competitors: http://www.vividseats.com/theatre/kinky-boots-tickets/kinky-boots-9-20-1537274.html (notice how they go /theatre/kinky-boots-tickets/event/) Would it be beneficial to list like this? Is it inconsequential? Could we leave things the way that they are or should we at least add the venue and date to the events page URL? Thanks a lot for any help,
    Luke

    | keL.A.xT.o
    0
  • drimlike


    Hello, I just realised that Google is listing as backlinks, links from swf games that we created and distributed widely. We never used this method to have backlinks but as we create the games and give them for free to other sites, we added a link back to our site, if the user who played the game want to visit us. But I am worried that this is interpreted as black hat seo, and this affected our ranking badly. Anyone had this kind of issue? How do you think we should be tackling this? Is this could be affected our site? Thanks for your help on this guys 😉

    | drimlike
    0

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