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Category: Web Design

Talk through the latest in web design and development trends.


  • Hi, This is my first post to the Moz community. I hope someone can help me, as I'm at my wits end 🙂 Since mid to late April, my client's home page keeps dropping from Google rankings on and off on the desktop in incognito and non-incognito browsing. It seems to always be visible on mobile phones though. One day it's on page 4, the next day it's not anywhere to be found (even though some of her other pages rank). The site is here: evgeniaribinik.com I have done some blog writing (just text) for this client over the last few months, and recently she asked for some SEO help. After looking at her website, I noticed that she had a plugin called WordPress SEO on her site. She wasn't using this for the blogs, however. I don't think she did much of anything with SEO, but she did say that for the last few years, she was always on page 3 or 4 of Google. In mid/late April, she saw that she wasn't ranking at all for the keyword "boudoir photography nyc" anymore, despite a few years of ranking for it. I told her Yoast would be good to use. However, after she installed it, the same issues keep happening. Right now, she has Yoast and WordPress SEO plugins installed (I'm not sure if this is causing an issue as well). But I really can't figure out why she keeps going on and off page 4. She also asked me to optimize older blogs that she wrote herself for SEO. When I look at them, they don't have meta descriptions, good titles or good keywords. I realize this is hurting her, but why would her site be fine for years and all of a sudden not now? Thank you in advance for any help you can give me! Jill

    | lobeng77
    0

  • Hi all, First, we have created a HTML sitemap for our wordpress website. Then we again generated XML sitemap and submitted same in search console. It's been more than a week and still new XML sitemap has not been indexed yet. I can still only see HTML sitemap for search results "company sitemap". Also search console do have only XML sitemap. Both sitemaps are accessible but only HTML has been indexed. Is there anything wrong having 2 sitemaps? Why XML sitemap not been indexed? Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0

  • Our current login page looks like www.website.com/log-in/. We are planning to migrate it to a sub directory login.website.com. For years, our login page is the top landing with highest visits after homepage. If we migrate this now, are we going to loose traffic and drop in rankings? Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0

  • Hi all, We have 3 editions of our product we are trying to rank better. Some of our features level pages from these editions are repeating in these 3 editions. Exactly like below example: clothes.com/cotton-fabrics/shirts clothes.com/wool-fabrics/shirts clothes.com/polyester-fabrics/shirts "Shirts" pages repeat in "cotton-fabrics", "wool-fabrics" and "polyester-fabrics". We have added rel=canonical to rank "shirts" in rank only one category. I wonder do we need to take any other measures to make sure that these pages don't affect us negatively. Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0

  • Our website ranking always fluctuates from US and India. Our primary visitors are from US followed by India. We can see 10 ranking positions difference in these countries whenever we did some changes. Why this? More precisely to say, rankings are inversely proportional like rank drops in other country while improved in one country and vice versa. What could be the possibility? We been facing this from an year and searching for someone who could really make a move on it.

    | vtmoz
    0

  • Hello, Does implementing a lot of inline CSS have a negative impact on SEO rankings? I imagine it could affect page speed, but any other issues I might run in to?

    | STP_SEO
    1

  • Our homepage is outranked by log-in page for "primary keyword" in Google search results; for which actually our homepage was optimised. I have gone through the other answers for the same question here. But I couldn't find them related with our website. We are not over optimised. We have link from top navigation menu of blog to our homepage. Does this causing this?

    | vtmoz
    1

  • Hi Can anyone recommend any tools for understanding how people interact with a page? We use events in analytics and have previously used hot jar. I didn't know if there were any new ones? Thanks!

    | BeckyKey
    2

  • In the process of website migrations and redesign, we create & replace new pages which will lead to multiple redirects unknowingly. Like: page A to page B & page B to page C. Will these kind of multiple redirects hurt? I would be happy to hear what happens with WordPress with this scenario in particular.

    | vtmoz
    0

  • Hi Mozers, my client located in Colorado is opening a similar (but not identical) clinic in California. Will Google penalize the new California site if we use text from our website that features his Colorado office? He runs the clinic in CO and will be a partner of the clinic in CA, so the CA clinic has his "permission" to use his original text. Eventually he hopes to go national, with multiple sites utilizing essentially the same text. Will Google penalize the new CA site for plagiarism and/or duplicate content? Or is there a way to tell Google, "hey Google, this new clinic is not ripping off my text"?

    | CalamityJane77
    0

  • Our website has been migrated from Joomla to Wordpress at the end of 2015 and we have tasted the loss of 20% of the traffic. After an year at the end of 2016, we have relaunched the website in same word press with new theme.  Again we lost n rankings and traffic. I would say ranking. Because mostly people land on our website by searching for our brand. Now we almost went invisible for "keywords" we been targeting. We have checked all the possibilities like duplicate content, redirection, alt tags, speed, canonicals, backlinks, etc..and couldn't find what is hitting us. What could be such strong factor hitting us ?

    | vtmoz
    0

  • Hi people. I have just built my website www.bellagiolimousines.com.au using WIX. I am in the process of optimising for SEO, and after reading a couple of older posts i.e 2012; I read that some SEO consultants do not like WIX. However with their recent upgrades, I was hoping if anyone else has had any recent experience with WIX? I have spent a considerable amount of time building this site, and I don't want to waste anymore time in optimising it, if I am not going to receive a top 3 organic SERP. Hope to hear from someone real soon!

    | Giorgio68
    0

  • https://www.tcs.com website has multiple H1 tag on around 40 out of 1000 pages. Webpage has different section and each section is important that's why used multiple H1 tag (one h1 for each section) **I understand, google will not penalize for multiple H1. But having multiple H1, for site like tcs, is it good or should use only one H1 tag? **Pls check https://www.tcs.com to see heading tag(6 heading tag used).

    | JayprakashSEO
    0

  • I am a Real Estate Developer.  Once a home goes off market (is sold),  I had been using a 404 for that page. The problem:   When the home goes up on market again,  google will not re-index the new page (same URL) I have also tried to manage it a different way.  Instead of removing the page, I left it as-is.  At some later point time, the house goes back up on the market.  The page is refreshed with new content.  However, google decides to use cached version. Please note in either case,  the property appears on the main page for a period of indexing. I have been doing this for 10 years, the problem is increasing with time.

    | Buckey
    0

  • Hi all, I was told that I could change my homepage Canonical tag to match that of my XML sitemap, this sitemap is being generated for me automatically and shows the homepage as e.g. https://www.mysite.com/index.html, yet my Canonical tag has been set to https://www.mysite.com. Google currently shows as https://www.mysite.com/ being indexed, but https://www.mysite.com/index.html is not currently displayed in search results. Can someone please tell me if I should change the Canonical to the index.html version, or if I should do nothing, or remove the Canonical tag altogether? Thank you for looking.

    | scarebearz
    0

  • My dev and I are migrating an existing multi page application to a single page application with prerender.io. Does anybody have any experience with doing SEO for single page applications? Any other consequences we should take into account? Anything important to expect. Any insights would be 10/10 appreciated.

    | Edward_Sturm
    0

  • Hey everyone, I'm going to change my website's  Domain, Server, CMS and Theme I can't find any full & detailed answer to how to do that without losing anything, is anybody here has a full resource or could tell me a how-to checklist for doing that. Thanks in advance,

    | Mahmoud.ahmad.taha
    0

  • I have a services page with a lot of rich text and a slideshow of images.  Currently, I am using a column of buttons to various services, and am wondering if a sidebar menu would be more effective for Google to crawl and rank?

    | cinchmedia
    0

  • Have just migrated current and active site to Magento 1.9 and a new hosting package (dedicated and reasonably powerful for what we need). But we seem to have had a drop in conversion rate.  I don't really know whether it's anything to be concerned about the moment. I've set up extensive server level 301 redirects for old pages. Would be glad of any thoughts? Thanks you

    | seoman10
    0

  • I know that HTTPS can have a positive influence on SERPS.  Does anyone have any thoughts or evidence of this effect being different depending on the page content? For example, I would think that for e-commerce sites HTPS is a must, and I guess the change in rankings would be more significant. But what about other situations, AMP pages for example? Of if you run Adsense, or Affiliate links? Or if your page contains a form?

    | GrouchyKids
    1

  • Today I start the face to face interviews with website companies. So far most have pushed WordPress, few have offered either and one insisted on Joomla. Our 50+ products and services are primarily customized, so we sell -10 on our shopping cart. We rely primarily on organic Google rankings, SEO and content is critical. What do you, my fellow Mozzers, recommend for our next website platform for our mobile world and Google friendliness? TY, KJr

    | KevnJr
    0

  • Hello I have a website having products out of stock. Right now they are not listed on the website but working with 200 status code and they are indexed in Google as well. I need to understand if they affect my website? is it negative for SEO? what would be the best way to handle out of stock products? what if they are out of stock for a long time and discontinue for future? how search engine treat those products? are they consider as hidden links as they are not accessible from website as google says every page should link from atleast one static page. Please advise

    | ShaunPhilips
    0

  • Hi all, If there are multiple sub-domains like abc.website.com, 123.website.com, etc...and if the top pages of website are linked from multiple sub-domains via top menu or footer links; will this hurts? Will too much interlinking of few top pages of a website from it's sub-domains dilute link juice? How many links ideally we can add to website from a sub-domain? Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0

  • In the case of an eCommerce store with a large catalogue of branded goods the inventory is constantly being adjusted as products become discontinued. Each year most fashion brands have 2 or 3 launches. At this same time they will delete some (not all) of previous years collections. Once we have sold through the remaining inventory of last season's products the question is how to proceed? a) delete products to avoid customers landing on page, then only to be disappointed when product is no longer available to purchase.. b) keep products however mark as discontinued / no longer available and show a link to a similar product if applicable.. I am coming around to the opinion that b) provides a better user experience. However will this growing catalogue of old products (pushed to bottom of category page) help keep content of site full and have SEO advantages? If this is the case then that helps confirm b) as best choice??

    | seanmccauley
    0

  • Hi all, Any feedback on Squarespace, SEO capabilites and ranking factors? I have a client wishing to use the platform and despite the good reviews, which appear to be from resellers by the way, the forums say not. Although apparently Rand Fishkin, SEOMoz (yes right here!) gave them a big thumbs up “The square space team have put together a remarkable platform, SEO friendliness! Really not sure here and don’t agree, there are many limitations and hosting with a template provider is always big no no. Cheers
    Virginia

    | VirginiaC
    0

  • Can anyone give advice about SEO - specifically blogging in Wordpress and embedding it in your Muse site - that is specific to the 2017 updates. I found a lot of negative information, but that was mostly on forums from 2+ years ago. On their own forums, Muse says that you can get SEO plugins that help with this, but I am not sure I can trust those with clients yet. I have worked in Wordpress for years, but prefer the design freedom adobe provides. Specifically I am worried about whether the traffic to the site would be credited to the wordpress blog (on a different URL) or if it positively impacts my own URL used for the muse site. Would it be considered duplicate content? Also, are there any solutions that I don't know to ask about? Thanks in advance for listening.

    | Jesiwicks
    0

  • Last year, we redesigned our site and made it responsive. Our page views only grew by only 3% (the previous year they grew by 40%). If we exclude homepage views from our calculations, we get a drastically different picture-- and see over 30% growth for both total and unique pageviews. Any thoughts?

    | Anna72
    0

  • Recently I had to install reCAPTCHA on my site. The site contains domain name generators and they were being misused, in the words of my host: _Addition of a Captcha will go one of two ways - hit the bruting on the head as intended - OR it will increase the load and the impact by rendering the Captcha's. _ Have noticed that reCAPTCHA adds a fair amount of code 32% of page size and 5 requests. I want to replace reCAPTCHA with an alternative, has anyone got any ideas? Cheers. Justin

    | GrouchyKids
    0

  • Hi - I'm just looking at the text on a redesigned homepage. They have moved all the text to the very bottom of the page (which is quite common with lots of designers, I notice - I usually battle to move the important text back up to the top). I have always ensured the important text comes at the top, to some extent - does it matter where on the page the text comes, for SEO? Are there any studies you can point me to? Thanks for your help, Luke

    | McTaggart
    2

  • Hello folks, I'm looking at hosting options. In your opinion, what's the best provider out there and why? Cheers, Gill.

    | Cannetastic
    0

  • I'm getting error messages that a website cannot be crawled and it might be due to the following issues: Couldn't access the webpage because the server either timed out or refused/closed the connection before our crawler could receive a response. How to fix: Please contact your web hosting technical support team and ask them to fix the issue Could Possibly Be:
    1. DDoS protection system.
    OR
    2. Overloaded or misconfigured server They asked me to talk to my hosting company about this issue and he's at a loss (I don't think he knows everything he needs to know potentially). Have you seen these issues before? Where is the best spot to start troubleshooting this issue?

    | PrimeMediaConsulting
    0

  • I would like to find out what is the standard approach for sections of the site with large number of records being displayed using pagination. They don't really contain the same content, but if title tag isn't changed it seem to process it as duplicate content where the parameter in the url indicating the next page is used. For the time being I've added ' : Page 1' etc. at the end of the title tag for each separate page with the results, but is there a better way of doing it? Should I use the canonical url here pointing to the main page before pagination shows up in the url?

    | coremediadesign
    0

  • Hi Mozers, We recently switched servers and it came to my attention that we have two sitemaps a XML version of the sitemap and a .aspx version of the sitemap. This came to light as the .aspx version of the sitemap is causing the site to come to a screeching halt as it has some complex code and lists over 80,000 products. My question is do we need both versions of the sitemap? My understanding is that the XML version is for Search Engine bots and the .aspx version is for customers. I can't imagine that anyone is using our .aspx version as it is basically a page with 80,000 links and it's buried away on the site, so we were hoping to kill off the .aspx version of the sitemap and keep the .xml version for Search Engine Bots. I wanted to check here first to make sure we did not any negative search engine implications. Any help would be most appreciated. Thanks so much! Patrick

    | gatorpool
    0

  • Hi, we are amplifying our site, but one of the things we can´t include on our AMP version is the Facebook comment box. Some of our articles have hundreds of comments on them and we noticed that Google was crawling those comments and using them as a ranking signal (the more comments the better we discovered). Now we are wondering if these articles would drop if we launch the AMP version without the comment box. As this would reduce the written content on those pages a lot. Anybody tested this before or has an idea on that would work out? Thanks for your help!

    | guidetoiceland
    1

  • One of our clients looking to redesign their website since we're redesigning the whole website we thought it would be good idea to separate services into individual pages so every service will have it's own page (currently there is 1 page that describes all of the services). what we're planing to do is to write unique content for each service page (about 300-400 keywords), but we also want to use some of the existing content which is kind of explains the process of provided services. so here i need your help! what would be the best practice to use same part of existing content on every service page without getting penalized for duplicated content? here is how we want to structure the page with h1 and h2 <main> Service name (same as page title) Subline new and unique content about 300-400 keywords Part of old content which is going to be placed on every service page </main> any help would be much appreciated!

    | MozPro3
    0

  • Im running a castingsite today, where the jobs-overview page is the highest ranked on google on the important words. There is a big of reasons for that, it's updated daily, the domain is old and wellknown and so. Anyways, the today is this: (Yes it's ugly and old-school :))
    Current design:
    http://www.onlinecasting.dk/auditions.asp I've created a new design, which is much nicer and with added pictures. The pictures in the new design, will be somewhat unique to the specific jobs, so the current ones are mostly for testing New design: (Not implemented)
    http://www.onlinecasting.dk/auditionsnd.asp Question:
    So my question is. Do you think this NEW design could affect my site / page in a bad way in SEO or?
    I'm planning basically just to overwrite the old auditions.asp file with the new code. What do you guys think.

    | KasperGJ
    0

  • Would any developers who have worked with CPA/Accountants know if QuickBooks Proadvisor provides an API feature for reviews? Asking for a client and I can't get through ProAdvisor support without being a customer!

    | marketingmediamanagement
    0

  • Our site was done with asp.net and a lot of scripting. I want to see what Google can see and what it can't. What is the best tool that duplicates Googlebot? I have found several but they seem old or inaccurate.

    | EcommerceSite
    0

  • I was under the impression our site had a mobile dedicated design, but my developers are telling me we have an adaptive design. The mobile site is set up different and has different content and the url is as follows: www.site.com/MobileView/MobileHome.aspx Can it still be considered adaptive if the URL is not the exact same? Hopefully this make sense and I appreciate anyone's input!

    | AliMac26
    0

  • Just wanted everyone's input/opinion on this article that basically states Google will move to a solely mobile index in the future https://www.nngroup.com/articles/mobile-vs-responsive/ That seems like it would negatively impact sites that have a separate URL for their mobile site. In this particular case I'm talking about... the mobile site URL is this layout: www.site.com/MobileView/MobileHome.aspx Any thoughts/input would be enormously appreciated.

    | AliMac26
    0

  • Hi! I have to choose a premium woocommerce product filter plugin, but I can't make up my mind since there are so many options out there. I tried to compare some of them, but I would like to hear from  experts or people who already bought and run one of them on their websites in order to focus on the better one.  Is there a particular plugin which stands out from the crowd? Are there product filter plugins you definitely do not recommend buying? What I am looking for is a SEO oriented plugin( some search results by filters like sizes, colors, in stock /out of stock should not be indexed at all while categories should be normally indexed), easy to use (I am not a developer and I have to be able to set up filters by myself easily), compatible with wpml and and, last but not least, the plugin support should be reliable and helpful. I am looking forward to your suggestions. thanks in advance

    | manunika
    0

  • Dear team, If a website with a domain name - example - raisins.com wishes to change to peanuts.com is this a dangerous task or a relatively simple one? I hope that by keeping my Q short, provides ease.

    | AdrianCGreen
    0

  • A few things around re-designing an older but well performing site for search and retaining/ improving SEO value. Lots of effort has been put into content marketing and optimising individual pages on this site, it has a lot of links coming in from well-respected sites (but the domain name will remain the same so that shouldn't be an issue) so I'm very anxious about how the redesign will effect ranking, although the new site will be far more user friendly, beautiful, responsive where the old one is not and faster to load. Would really like to avoid the search engine drop when the site first goes live if at all possible- One idea on this was to make the new site live on another domain - .co.uk for example, whilst keeping the old site up on the .com for a month or so, then switching the records so the new site is then visible on .com and the .co.uk redirects to it. Does this sound at all sensible?! Also any more advice on how best to ensure the new site will do better, not worse for search is hugely appreciated. We have cut a lot of content to make it more user friendly and easy to find information. We will be making sure all old links are redirected to new site (but as there are fewer pages on new site, will it matter if 5 old URLS point to one new URL for instance?) Also what's the difference between 301 and 302 redirects! Thank you so much in advance, massively appreciated your time!

    | Emjmoz
    0

  • An SEO provider suggested we add breadcrumbs to the top of each page about 3 years ago, which we did. 3 years later we are going thru the site and find it really busy with lots of redundant and distracting elements. We would like to remove the breadcrumbs from the top of the pages. Is there any real SEO downside to doing so?
    All URLs are listed on our site map so I don't see why Google would not index all pages. Our domain is www.metro-manhattan.com I have uploaded a sample page with a breadcrumb. Thanks,
    Alan kbbpS

    | Kingalan1
    0

  • Hi all, Assuming a company has two services: SEO and PPC. Here is the situation: I would like to focus on SEO for now but also don't want to leave my PPC service out of the page. SEO accounts for 60% of the content, while PPC accounts for 40%. Assuming the content (SEO + PPC) of the page will not change, which title tag would you prefer, and why? SEO | brand name (Is it appropriate that the title focus on SEO but the content of the page contains PPC) SEO | PPC | brand name (Will the keywords dilute each other?) SEO | SEM Agency | brand name (The idea behind it is that SEM includes SEO and PPC so I think Google would be OK with the page ranking for SEO and also including PPC in the content. I really appreciate your help and explanation. Thank you!

    | Raymondlee
    0

  • Hi all, Here is the situation. There are two services A and B in the page. B is more like a complement to A (they have something in common). C is the umbrella term over A and B. However, our company focuses more on A (70%) than B (30%).   Questions: 1. Can I rank the keyword A for the page, while the page has B? (e.g. A | brand name) Will it hurt the seo, with B being in the page? 2. If I write the title tag this way:  A | B | brand name . Will A and B dilute each other? 3. How about this: **A | C | brand name **(the idea behind this: We focus on A, but also include C because we have B in the page.) Does this make any sense? I am a newbie to SEO and I realize that could be confusing. Thank you for any support and explanation.

    | Raymondlee
    0

  • Hello awesome MOZ Community! Our development team uses a sub-domain "dev.example.com" for our SEO clients' websites. This allows changes to be made to the dev site (U/X changes, forms testing, etc.) for client approval and testing. An embarrassing discovery was made. Naturally, when you run a "site:example.com" the "dev.example.com" is being indexed. We don't want our clients websites to get penalized or lose killer SERPs because of duplicate content. The solution that is being implemented is to edit the robots.txt file and block the dev site from being indexed by search engines. My questions is, does anyone in the MOZ Community disagree with this solution? Can you recommend another solution? Would you advise against using the sub-domain "dev." for live and ongoing development websites? Thanks!

    | SproutDigital
    0

  • I must admit that I have not kept up to date with SEO best practice and changes over the last few years not since digesting Danny Dover's bible and using his advice to optimise and rank two of our sites. I have a third site which doesn't rank so well. Would you be interested in using it as a case study that you can dissect and make you input on this forum. The site is www.glassesnow.co.uk   I look forward to your thoughts...

    | seanmccauley
    0

  • We are considering using CloudFlare as a CDN for a large group of sites. The fees are $5 to $200 depending on many factors. We tried the free trial on one site and were impressed with the results. I am wondering if any of you have any longer term experience with this and performance metrics, etc.

    | RobertFisher
    1

  • Hi, Sorry the similar question could have been ask previously but I couldn't get an exact answer. Someone put a h1 tag on our homepage (which do not have before) and the is within the top nav. But it has a css style class in that h1 tag to make it appear at the bottom of the page so not everyone would be aware of that small h1 title. I personally do not think that's going to help with seo. However I want to know if this practice is going to be: beneficial, or not at all? or harmful instead? Thanks LM

    | LauraHT
    0

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