On-Page Optimization

Page Analysis on our asp.net site is showing the following for HTML Text - //

paintball-online.com This is consistent on every page, despite these pages having text. I assume the SEOMoz tool is working just fine and we have a coding issue that may be hindering our SEO efforts. Any ideas/suggestions? Thanks

| Istoresinc

0

301 internal redirects

Hello, I have a lot of low quality pages on my site, many of which have very similar URLs and cover similar topics. I want to tidy up my site by using 301 redirects as Rand suggests here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-solve-keyword-cannibalization 1. As a rough rule of thumb, how many internal 301 redirects is too many? 2. Can lots be to the homepage if they're relevant? (I could have as many as 30) Thanks, Kevin

| KMack

0

Will a large percentage of 404 links negatively impact SERP performance?

We discovered a broken link and issue with a dynamically generated sitemap that resulted in 9,000+ pages of duplicate content (namely there was not actual 404 page, but content for a 404 page that populated on the broken page). We've corrected that issue so the 404 page is working correctly now and there aren't any more broken links on the site. However, we just reviewed our Google crawl report, and saw that now there are 9,000+ 404 links in the Google index. We discovered the initial error when our SERP performance dropped 60% in a month. Now that we've corrected all the duplicate content pages, will vast number of 404 pages negatively impact SERP results? If so, do you recommend doing 301 redirects to the page it should have gone to, and do you know of any automated tools performing the 301's (it's a standard HTML site, no CMS involved). Thanks for your help!

| DirectiveGroup

0

How to Resolve Google Crawling Issues for My eCommerce Website?

I want to resolve Google crawling issues for my eCommerce website. My website is as follow. http://www.vistastores.com/ Google have crawled only 97 webpages from my website. My website is quite old. (~More than 6 months) But, Google have indexed only 97 webpages. I have created one campaign over SEOmoz tool and found some errors over there. So, I just assumed that due to it Google did not crawled my website. But, I have created one another campaign for my competitor website to know actual status and reason behind it. I found that, my competitor website have more error compare to me but, Google have crawled maximum pages compare to me. So, What is reason behind it? How can I improve my crawling rate and index maximum webpages to Google? [6133009604_af85d29730_b.jpg](img src=) 6133009604_af85d29730_b.jpg 6133009604_af85d29730_b.jpg 6139706697_4e252fdb82_b.jpg

| CommercePundit

0

No Index help

Hi, I have alot of notices about webpages that are apparently blocked by no index robots, I look through the code on the site and cannot see any coding for this and am confused how to fix the problem. Help anyone?

| Vetshopgroup

0

Curious meta-tag

Has anyone met this meta tag? <meta name="ranking" content="Top10, Page=1" /> I imagine it has no effect but I'm curios where did it came from, i saw it on many sites

| seo.academy

0

Trackbacks and pingbacks

In seomoz pro campaign it is coming up with an error saying that all my trackbacks on my clients blog are 302 and badish. Should I disable trackbacks and pingbacks to avoid this warning or will it hurt my seo?

| MonsterWeb28

0

Fixing Wordpress Title and Description Tag Placement

I know how important the title and description tag are and I know it is important to have them place at the top of the code. However, when I view the source on a Wordpress template, I see it looks messy. Here is an example of what the source looks like. Is there a plugin or an adjustment to be made so the code is cleaner? To get rid of spaces and blank lines in code. Or should I just not worry about the way the code looks? Notice the first example has a break after the <title>, then after the title there is this <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" /> then the description? Can that be moved? <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" dir="ltr" lang="en-US"> <head profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11"> <title> tite text goes here </title> " /> Here there are no breaks after <title>and the <title> is directly above the description <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" dir="ltr" lang="en-US"> <head profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11"> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" /> <title>tite text goes here</title>

| hfranz

0

Long URL in listing job portal

Hello I have job portal and I am listing job offers by: regions, position, sector, language skill For example, when user searchs job in Bratislava, Programmer, information technology, english. My URL is www.presbium.sk/bratislava/pragrammer/information-technology/english Title:Job in Bratislava, Programmer, Information technology, english I know, that URL is too long and no good for SEO. Is it solution? When user chooses max. 2 items for example: www.presbium.sk/bratislava/programmer/ than I put in every next links atribute nofollow and google will index only pages with max. 2 items: www.presbium.sk/bratislava/ or www.presbium.sk/programmer/ or www.presbium.sk/bratislava/programmer/ but not www.presbium.sk/bratislava/protrammer/english/, because english link has atribut nofollow. And I want to ask, what is the best solution for SEO when I am listing job offers by regions, position, sector, language skill and I have than long URL and Title www.presbium.sk/bratislava/pragrammer/information-technology/english Title:Job in Bratislava, Programmer, Information technology, english

| PeterSEO

0

Anchor Texts on Internal Links on my Site Question

[Hey folks, Anchor text question for internal links on my site. We all know that proper anchor text is important for rankings, both in links pointing to your site and links on your site. Google webmaster tools is showing my top internal anchor text links to be letters. This is because of navigation on the site which is in a global footer on hundreds of thousands of pages. Do you think that this dilutes or minimizes the relevance of the real anchor texts that we are targeting which trail behind these, or if this went away it would have no effect on the rest of the anchor texts on the site. How would you handle this, we can just get rid of this navigation because it's passing PR and helping the pages get spidered. Thanks in advance. Anchor text 1. g 2. q 3. d 4. v 5. k 6. t 7. o 8. u 9. a 10. p 11. m 12. r 13. e 14. x 15. y 16. l 17. i 18. z 19. c 20. j 21. s 22. b 23. f 24. h 25. w 26. n](mailto:acaldarea@hotmail.com)

| irvingw

0

Is there a SEO penalty for multi links on same page going to same destination page?

Hi, Just a quick note. I hope you are able to assist. To cut a long story short, on the page below http://www.bookbluemountains.com.au/ -> Features Specials & Packages (middle column) we have 3 links per special going to the same page.
1. Header is linked
2. Click on image link - currently with a no follow
3. 'More info' under the description paragraph is linked too - currently with a no follow Two arguments are as follows:
1. The reason we do not follow all 3 links is to reduce too many links which may appear spammy to Google. 2. Counter argument:
The point above has some validity, However, using no follow is basically telling the search engines that the webmaster “does not trust or doesn’t take responsibility” for what is behind the link, something you don’t want to do within your own website. There is no penalty as such for having too many links, the search engines will generally not worry after a certain number.. nothing that would concern this business though. I would suggest changing the no follow links a.s.a.p. Could you please advise thoughts. Many thanks Dave Upton [long signature removed by staff]

| daveupton

0

Adding dynamic item to static page - good for SEO?

We have a static page we want to rank for a competitive phrase. Would it help, or would it make little to no difference, if we added a small dynamic item to the page so that each time the googlebot visited the page it wouldn't be 100% the same as the last time it visited? The reason to do this would be because of the belief that Google likes pages that update once in a while. The dynamic portion of the page wouldn't be as simple as a page counter, but it wouldn't be very elaborate either. A tiny portion of the page. Think of something like current temperature or current CPU utilization (it won't be that, but it will be a small updating number that is not incrementing like current time or a page counter). Would that make any difference at all? (I know there will be responses that I should add real updating data to the page to make it dynamic; let's take that one off the table for right now --trying to see if there's something I can do that is simpler for now). Thanks.

| scanlin

0

Does a www.domain.com/# count as a link?

Hi I thinking about consolidation some info from 5 pages onto 1 by using the hashtag at the end of the link to send people to the rigt section of the page. Does each link to the www.domain.com/# count as link so that I wont really gain any linkvalue by doing it?

| home111

0

Some of my pages are ranking for terms which I want other pages to rank for. What can I do to effectively switch the ranking?

Some of the pages are ranking for terms I have optimised other pages for. The pages which are ranking are quite rightly falling, because they aren't optimised for the terms they're showing for. However, I have pages which are optomised for those terms. How do I switch the SERPS to the page I want?

| GlobalLingo

1

Does it matter what text you wrap in an H1 tag?

Typically H1 tags are reserved for page headings, i.e. on a blog post the blog post title is very often the pages H1, or top-level heading as the W3C puts it. On the SEOmoz home page they currently have "SEO Software." as their H1 tag, which seems perfectly reasonable and to me fits the W3C criteria. However, what if the primary keyword for SEOmoz was "seo community" so they decided to wrap just those two words in the sentence that follows on their home page and maintain the existing style of the words "seo community" with CSS. (see attachment) Are there any arguments against doing that? Would Google be able to detect this? If so, would Google care? I do believe the overall importance of the H1 tag has lessened to a degree, however I still believe they are valuable to an extent and would love to hear anyone's thoughts. 7NZcD.png

| TakeLessons

1

NOINDEX Pagination Pages

Is it bad to NOINDEX, FOLLOW your pagination pages?

| poolguy

0

Any SEO effect(s) / impact of Meta No Cache?

Hi SEOMoz Guys, Hope you guys are doing well. I've been searching online and bumped into this archived page (http://www.seomoz.org/qa/view/34982/meta-nocache-affect-ranking). I would like to get an updated take on this issue whether or not the meta no cache code on a page bears negative/positive or no SEO impact / effect. <meta http-equiv="Pragma" content="no-cache" /> <meta http-equiv="Cache-Control" content="no-cache"/> Thanks! Steve

| sjcbayona-41218

2

Missing Meta Tag Description

I have received a number of missing meta tag descriptions on my website. They all are with the comments to posts and it says /feed at the end of most of them. What is causing this error??

| haveuheard

0

Title tag best practices when domain and brand are the same

I know the old standard for title tag optimization is to use your brand name in the title for a multitude of reasons, all of which are indisputable The most important reason being any strength and awareness can aid in click-thru. But does this hold true for exact match domains? Considering the way a search result is displayed, any awareness and strength derived from using the brand in the title is automatically included in the search result of an exact match domain without having to sacrifice valuable characters in the title. The organic value (or value beyond simply seeing the brand displayed and nothing else) can't have that much of an impact, can it? For Example, given the result attached, is it worth it to repeat dog.com in the title if it is already showing in the result? dog.png

| NextGenEDU

0

How much does page load time affect SERPS?

I've been digging through SEOMoz and couldn't find a straight answer to this, so I thought I'd ask here. How important is page load time to Google and your SERPS position? If you're answering, I'd also love to know 1) how you know that your answer is correct and 2) if you've personally seen a webmaster improve his page load time and subsequently his position in the SERPS.

| Cairmen

0

Do you ever forget the SEO basics?

We all get a little sloppy at times. Just yesterday , someone pointed out that I accidentally blocked the robots from one of our primary pages, because it was being included in a wildcard match on one of the disallow commands in robots.txt. Sometimes the mistakes are very basic. The one below is just too funny. I thought I would share the love. Search Google for "MD care" MD Care Inc. - Welcome<a id="LXPLSS_979677678U1"></a> <cite>www.mdcarehealthplan.com/</cite> This is an SEO description that will be seen by the search engines and used in the search results. The meta keywords tag is even funnier: <meta name="keywords" content="spam,the,keywords,here,like,this,and this,good" />

| irvingw

2

Third party pages

Suppose you are using a third party tool such as an affiliate program. Typically, all the files are organized under one subdirectory. In addition, you may have little or no ability to modify any of the files in terms of SEO. Would you recommend hiding the entire subdirectory with a noindex? Best,
Christopher

| ChristopherGlaeser

0

Should I use bold for the first few sentences of a text?

I would like to know if anyone knew if the relevance of a page changes if I bold the first few sentences. Our journalist wants to bold the first few sentences in every article to make it easier to read, how does that affect SEO?

| mtueckcr

0

Canalogical Tag

Hello, I wanted to have a clean url for example : site.com/producta and our web developer installed this module which does this great. However there are now two products one with unclean url for example sit.com/productaxmlayoiadkja and the clean one - on both pages page it says: <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.site.com/producta">Is this correct? Reason being is I'm aiming for the long tail and the site is not getting any visitor although we have unqiue 250 products+ and getting less then 20 visitors a day after almost a year! I would appreciate any help because I'm getting in real trouble because the site is performing so badly!

| reallyitsme

0

Too many links

Hello, sorry question 2! I run the report it says we have 120 links roughly per page. I know this is bad however I have question about an oscommerce site. I identified some links that can be deleted for example Product picture is a link then the title and then its says details (so I can delete the details and that should save about 15 links) Now I really can only delete the breadcrumb for example car>>ford>>spareparts>>engine If I delete the breadcrumb I would lose four links would you say thats a good idea? or leave the breadcrumb due to the seo benefits. Many thanks for your help. Sonja

| reallyitsme

0

Date stamp in serp

I have a website with sauna reviews. These are mostly pages that exist for years and regularly change because comments/reviews are added by visitors and/or because I change information on the page. When searching in Google for competitive keywords I noticed that the snippet of my direct competitor included a date stamp in the format (9 hous ago). How can I include a time stamp in the snippet, and more important how can I make sure that the timestamp is very recent. Is it sufficient to add a date on the page every time the page is updated or is ther emore to it?

| oeroek

0

The URL Inside

Howdy SEO'ers, I have a quick question for the SEO gurus out there. When constructing "better" search friendly URLs would one of these be better than the other? Example 1: http://Domain.com/Category/Sub-Category/Product-name Example 2: http://Category.Domain.com/Sub-Category/Product-name In this example the category could be phones and the sub-category brands of phones. Is either one of these URLs "better" than the other in terms of ranking? Thanks! I'll hang-up and listen to your answer. 🙂 Jonathan

| creativedepartment

0

How to make google not index quotes from other sites?

Hey guys, I have a site where we post quite a lot of info from other sites. We don't want google to de-index our pages because parts of it are quotes from other sites. What would you use to make it so Google sees it's a quote from another site? Or to just make Google not index the quote? Thanks!

| StefanJDorresteijn

0

Impact of website redesign when changing to wordpress

Agency designed website and not sure what platform was used. Are now working minor redesign of site but wants to do so in word press. I don't have any problem with word press but don't want to start over ranking for key phrases. I don't want to change URL from mysite.com for the home page. What is the right way to make sure this is done correctly. I could not find a resource on the site. I don't mind researching this but am not sure what to search for to find info. Thanks

| arainey007

0

Sitemap generator and /index.htm

I use DMX Zone sitemap generator in Dreamweaver. When generating the sitemap, it includes both http://www.domain.com and http://www.domain.com/index.htm. Should the /index.htm be deleted from the sitemap, or will the 301 redirect take care of that? Best,
Christopher

| ChristopherGlaeser

0

Directory Structure

Hi, We are creating a new content directory for online courses hosted on our site. Like a typical directory, we have high level categories and then more granular subcategories. A course will typically only be in one high level category and then multiple subcategories. What would be the best URL structure for an individual course? Should we force users to pick one 'master' subcategory that gets included in their URL? Or should we just not include the subcategory at all in the URL? Right now we've been thinking about: OurUrl.com/upper-category/sub-category/course-title or OurUrl.com/upper-category/course-title

| mindflash

0

Authority of a page

What factors contribute towards the authority of a page ? No. of links to a page ?

| seoug_2005

0

Keyword placement on home page or throughout the website

OK, I find the courage to ask this because there is not supposed to be a dumb question. Like all of us, I want my website to rank great with a particular keyword. Do I have to use this keyword only on my home page (the start page which I want to appear on top Google results), or does it make a difference if I use the keyword on several articles that I post on my website. These articles all have seperate links. Eg i want the www.website.com to be found by Google, but this website contains www.website.com/link1.html, www.website.com/link2.html.. etc. Will keyword usage on link1.html, link2.html etc be relevant so that www.website.com is found by Google? Or is every single page for itself? Hope I have explained that well and I would really appreciate your feedback.

| polyniki

0

Nofollow all outgoing links?

If nofollow keeps link juice from leaking from a site, why not use nofollow on all external links? What would be the benefit of an external link that does not use nofollow? Best, Christopher

| ChristopherGlaeser

0

Internal link to the home page

When building menus and other internal links, should the link to the home page be http://www.domain.com/ or http://www.domain.com/index.html or does it matter? Best,
Christopher

| ChristopherGlaeser

0

Domain.com and www.domain.com

I recently changed the settings in Google Webmaster Tools so that domain.com and www.domain.com are the same. Several quick questions. About how long will it take for Google to list www.domain.com and stop listing domain.com? The .htaccess file uses a 301 to redirect all domain.com paths.to www.domain.com paths. Now that Google has been informed these two are the same, are the 301 rules to add www necessary? The default page is index.php. so domain.com gets 301 to www.domain.com gets 301 to www.domain.com/index.php. Is this the correct way to do things? Are there SEO consultants who will help on small projects such assist on issues like this? Best,
Christopher

| ChristopherGlaeser

0

4XX comments/feed/

I have an error in my SEOMoz crawl report is a 4XX client error on two of my websites, in both cases the error is coming from the link on my wordpress blog which is http://www.techelectricity.com/blog/comments/feed/ and http://blog.rangeroffroad.com/comments/feed/ (comments/feed/ is always the problem) Should I just ignore this error because it's supposed to open your RSS reader and not a link, or is this really an error I should address? thanks!!

| texmeix

0

Too many links on page has a state directory how do i lessen this?

I dont mean how do i take away links on the page but i know right off i am going to have at least 50 right off the bat and with my footer and menu bar and such im up over the limit of 100. My seo guy took care of it on my one site and dont know how Site with issue is www.Preexistingconditioninsuranceplan.com/pcip-states one that was fixed that doesnt appear to be too many on seomoz was http://criticalillnesspolicies.com/insurance-coverage/united-states/ if anyone can inform or decypher the code please let me know

| lance01

0

Site Speed Expert Referral Needed

We're looking for someone who can diagnose some site speed issues AND adjust the code, servers, etc. as needed. Does anyone know of an expert in this area?

| BryanPhelps-BigLeapWeb

0

Does anyone have any experience with using Altruik for optimizing a retail site?

Greetings - can anyone offer an opinion on the services of http://www.Altruik.com/? They claim to be able to effectively optimize the deep pages of online retailers. I welcome any and all feedback! Eric

| Ericc22

0

Dropped rankings due to too many links, help needed

We have just re-designed our site and added a big drop-down navigation menu to help users get straight to the category/sub-category they are looking for, take a look at http://www.discountfiresupplies.co.uk to see what I mean. Since doing so our rankings have dropped which we've been told may be because there are now so many links on (particularly) the home page diluting the rankings of that page. We've been advised that if we hide the drop-down menus using "style='display: none'" until they are required that the search engines will ignore them which we have now done but is this correct or will they still be indexed? And if so do you have any other suggestions? Thanks, Tariq

| tjhossy

0

Submitting multiple sitemaps

I recently moved over from html to wordpress. I have the google sitemap plugin on the new wordpress site, but in webmaster tools, it's only showing 71 pages, and I have hundreds, but many are html. Is it okay, to submit an html sitemap as well as the wp sitemap that's already in there?

| azguy

0

How to find competition for a particular keyword

Is there any operator to find the level of competition for a particular keyword in Google ? Is intitle:keyword a fair indicator ?

| seoug_2005

0

Change Homepage internal Link from Image to Targeted Anchor Text -- Spam??

I am in the following situation: 1. Homepage is designed to target one main keyword. 2. All current pages link to the homepage with the image/logo, nowhere on the site do we link to the homepage with the target keyword. 3. It is an established page (Moz rank of 58) If I suddenly added text above and made the homepage link targeted anchor text, would Google consider this spam? We are ranked #13 in Google and our looking for ways to move up, but I do not want to risk any type of Google penalty.

| MattAaron

0

Multi-language domain strategy crossroad

I've come to a crossroads with a multilingual domain strategy. Most of you know, Canada has two official languages; English & French. I'm trying to decide on two domain structures to handle languages: 1. Create sub-directory folders for both languages: www.sitename.ca/en/ www.sitename.ca/fr/ Take into account that all page names will be in their respective language. or 2. Create a single sub-directory folder for French only: www.sitename.ca www.sitename.ca/fr/ I'm leaning towards Option #2 because English is our target and want to give those pages more "weight" rather than pushing them down another level (flatter site structure for primary pages). Yes, I could also have all French pages at the root but I think having them a) in one sub-directory is easier to manage and b) SE (specifically Google) likes the division better for languages. I'm just not sure if there's a point to doing it for English too. Note: There'll be several hundred pages for each language. What's best practice (of course) and is there a difference if any....or was this just long winded for nothing? Thanks for any insights.

| Bragg

0

Link Juice not passing for root domain to an internal page

Hi Im working in a SEO proyect for the web fagorarrasate.com, it has good root domain ranking, but it seems like the root domain isn't passing any of its link juice to other internal pages of the site although there are links which link to these sub pages For example if I seach in Google for the page http://www.google.com/search?aq=f&gcx=c&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=Stamping+System+and+Presses The firs page appears without any page ranking, so it seems that the root domain is not passing any of its ranking Why could this be happening? Thanks Jordi

| joralles

0

Why did our ranking go up, then drop down again?

Hello SEOMoz community. I work for a website that runs a collectibles news service and sells collectibles online. I recently renamed one of the pages from "Stock for Sale" to "Collectibles for Sale" anticipating this would help our ranking for the term "collectibles for sale". This changes the Title, URL and h1 to Collectible for Sale. A few days later we were up to 5th on Google UK for that keyword. But now after the weekend we've dropped off the face of the earth... Or at least somewhere low down in the rankings. I imagine there could be multiple reasons for this, but what are the most likely causes? There is not much text on the page, it contains an iFrame with image boxes that link to relevant collectibles categories. Website: www.paulfrasercollectibles.com

| PaulFraserCollectibles

0

Excessive Internal Linking...But it's a product page. What to do?

A few of our companies sites' product pages have the warning about excessive internal links. But these pages are product pages (for example). Should we be worried about this warning? Are there ways to avoid it? Or is it just the nature of the beast...? Thanks in advance!

| DevonIntl

0

Best Layout for Product Page SEO

Hi I am looking to revamp my website and would like to know your views on the best product layout for SEO - in particular if it better to have tabulated content like play.com http://goo.gl/4xdqp or non tabulated content like Amazon. http://goo.gl/cojKj Are there any pros or cons to each approach? I believe tabulated looks better and is easier to navigate but do the engines see this as hidden text? I have been told this is an issue with expandable divs. Many thanks David

| DavidLenehan

0

This is a real dumb question about on page optimization

I've been reading the docs for using this site and am puzzled by the on page optimization reports, and the tactics for creating the reports. In no place can i find that you first must use the keywords you have identified to track in the campaign on pages on your web site. Am i missing something? From just reading how to do your campaign, it would appear that you never have to touch your pages with the keywords you want to track, all 500 of them for one page, if that's what you want to do. Not knowing how the application works, it is possible to imagine anything, including not needing to do the obvious steps of writing a well optimized page first. I want to presume that first you optimize your pages with the keywords you want to track, then go ahead and run your campaign. Although this is the obvious thing, I don't see that part of the seo puzzle being mentioned in any of the docs. Where do i hunt for that part of the equation?

| highersourcesites

0

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