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Category: Technical SEO

Discuss site health, structure, and other technical SEO strategies.

  • vectormedia


    Currently doing a technical audit for a website and when I search "Site:website.com -www" the only result is website.com/robots.txt I was wondering if anyone else has come across this before -- or what this may mean from a technical audit standpoint. Thank you!

    | vectormedia
    0
  • Sebes


    Does anyone know a service or API or php lib to compare two (or more) pages and to return their similiarity (Level-3-Shingles). API would be greatly prefered.

    | Sebes
    0
  • Georgios


    Hi everybody! I manage the website for a financial services company. We have more than 5000 reviews on a user review website. We have the possibility to import and display all these reviews on our site. Is this good for SEO? Will Google find it suspicious that our site suddenly displays a lot of new keyword-rich content? What about duplicate content? Please, share your thoughts. Thanks!

    | Georgios
    0
  • AnthonyMangia


    On a recent post in /r/SEO I mentioned that I used SEOHosting.com in the past, and it was met with several warnings that this could result in deindexation or penalization. I just wanted to know if there is anything to back this up. I did some digging on my own and it looks like some of the private blog networks that got shut down recently were using SEOHosting.com, and they were speculating (screenshot of pertinent parts included below) that this is how Google was able to track down their network and shut 'em down. But I've also heard a lot of speculation that the smartest way for Google to map out these networks would be to create tons of content, submit it all, and look for patterns - which has me wondering what role, if any, SEOHosting.com played in taking down the private blog networks earlier this month. Is using SEOHosting.com a legitimate concern?  Is it a threat even to websites that meet Google's quality guidelines?  Is it especially a threat to those that don't? Any thoughts you guys have would be greatly appreciated. XX6nM.jpg

    | AnthonyMangia
    0
  • AlanMosley


    I mentioned my problem a few nights ago, but since then I think I may have found my problem. I have a site that was never really promoted to any great level, but for the main keywords I could find it in serps with out clicking though too many pages. I came up first for the company name in both Bing or Google. Recently I finally decided to promote it and did a bit of a ranking check. First I still come up first for my company name in Bing, but in Google I come up 900+ out of 1000, virtually last. For my main keyword, the title of my site and optimized well for, I come up last, absolutely last. For long tail terms from my home page where I am the only site in the world to have the exact term, I come first in Bing, and absolutely last in Google. I don’t do black hat, but I thought I must be flagged by Google and I asked for reconsideration, they replied that no manual actions had been taken again the site, and referred me to the usual Google guidelines. It was very frustrating, I then had a thought, I had a long forgotten sub domain that had a load of duplicate content, it was a load of Microsoft documentation and other dev stuff from other sources, rss feeds and the like. Nothing sinister, but duplicate all the same. I am now thinking that this maybe my problem. I have 410’ed the whole sub domain as the site has not been maintained for some time anyhow. Does anybody know of simular, sub domain causing loss of ranking for root domain

    | AlanMosley
    0
  • Kyle_M


    If I want my homepage to rank for a keyword (ie "red widgets"), does it support or dilute the homepage's rank if I use the keyword on other pages? I can see it working either way: The search engine looks at your site, sees that the target keyword is used throughout the site, and ranks the site higher as a result. Using the keyword on several pages makes it so none of them stand out, and ultimately it's harder to rank highly. Thoughts?

    | Kyle_M
    0
  • MiamiWebCompany


    I have been searching and testing for hours but cannot find a solution. I am able to get a URL to display with out the file exntension. i.e domain.com/file instead of domain.com/file.php The problem is both versions of the URL above work, therefore a duplicate content issue. How can I force the URL with the file extension not to resolve and give a 404 error? Or just redirect to the non extension URL? IF it helps here is my code. Options +FollowSymLinks
    RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.php -f
    RewriteRule ^(.+)$ $1.php [L,QSA]

    | MiamiWebCompany
    0
  • Horlogeboetiek


    Hi All, As we all know, having to much links on a page is an obstacle for search engine crawlers in terms of the crawl allowance. My category pages are labeled as pages with to many "one page" links by the SEOmoz crawler. This probably comes from the fact that each product on the category page has multiple links (on the image and model number). Now my question is, would it help to setup a text-link with a clickable area as big as the product area? This means every product gets just one link. Would this help get the crawlers deeper in these pages and distribute the link-juice better? Or is Google smart enough already to figure out that two links to the same product page shouldn't be counted as two? Thanks for your replies guys. Rich

    | Horlogeboetiek
    0
  • thomasfasting


    A lot of my top pages point to images in a gallery on my site. When I click on the url under the name of the jpg file I get an error page not found. For instance this link: http://www.fastingfotografie.nl/architectuur-landschap/single-gallery/10162327 Is this a problem? Thanks. Thomas. JkLej.png

    | thomasfasting
    0
  • melissa1


    At the moment it's possible to access the home page of my website via two different urls, with and without www.  and you've told me that this can  be resolved with Canonicalization and a 301 redirect.  Do I do this with my web hosting package or in my html pages?  If I can't do it with my web host (1&1) then is there an idiot's guide of how to do it yourself? I've also got both the domain vamospaella.co.uk and vamospaella.com. Is it better to have one of these redirecting to the other for UK traffic (at the moment .co.uk redirects to .com) Thanks

    | melissa1
    0
  • vforvinnie


    I have a series of websites that all feature a library of the same content.  These pages don't make up the majority of the sites content, maybe 10-15% of the total pages.  Most of our clients won't take the time to rewrite the content, but it's valuable to their site. So I decided to noindex, follow all of the pages.  Outside of convincing them all to write their own versions of the content, is this the best method?  I could also block the pages with robots.txt, but then I couldn't pass any link juice through the pages. Any thoughts?

    | vforvinnie
    0
  • dreadmichael


    I am using Wordpress and the Redirection plugin. I have recently launched a new site and while it was in development, a lot of broken pages were created and indexed. These are terminating in 404s. I am looking to redirect all traffic from: /replay/postname/ to the homepage. When I use this regular expression: Source: /replay/* Target: / it removes the /replay/ but leaves the postname. Any idea how I could redirect all traffic inside of /replay/ to the homepage? Thanks a bunch, Josh

    | dreadmichael
    0
  • Caseman


    It says I have too many hyperlinks on almost all my blog posts, but some of them don't even have a single hyperlink? What should I do?

    | Caseman
    0
  • zeegirl


    Hi guys Newbie here looking for some advice from you SEO gurus. I've installed SEOMoz's chrome app and, visiting my site's homepage, when I open click the SEOMoz icon and it opens the dialogue window, i get analytics for a doubleclick url. Now, my homepage does have a doubleclick tag on it, but it's waay down in the page source. Is there something I should be doing here to stop this happening? Surely the app should find my site's URL over the DoubleClick tag? Looking at the guidelines for DoubleClick, it says that the Floodlight tags need to be placed between the tags. They're sitting outside these tags on my homepage. Do you think this might be causing the issue? I'm sure this is going to be an embarrassing lesson in SEO 101, but I'm keen to learn and to fix this if possible. Thanks!

    | zeegirl
    0
  • CatalystSEM


    Hello 'mozzers! For our example purposes, let's say we have a national cog reseller, www.cogexample.com, focusing on B2C cog sales.  The website's SEO efforts revolve around keywords with high search volumes -- no long tail keywords here! CogExample.com sells over 35,000 different varieties of cogs online, broken into search engine friendly categories and using both HTML and Meta pagination techniques to ensure adequate deep-linking and indexing of their individual product pages. With their recent fiscal success, CogExample.com has signed 2,500 retailers across the United States to re-sell their cogs. CogExample.com's primary objective is B2C online sales for their highly-sought search terms, ie "green cogs". However, CogExample.com also wants their retailers to show up for local/geo search; ie "seattle green cogs". The geo/location-based retailer's web-content will be delivered from the same database as the primary online store, and thus is very likely to cause duplicate content issues. Questions 1. If the canonical meta tag is used to point the geo-based product to the online primary product, the geo-based product will likely be placed in the supplementary indexed. Is this correct? 2. Given the massive product database (35,000) and retailers (2,500) it is not feasible to re-write 87,500,000 pages of content to sate unique content needs. Is there any way to prevent the duplicate content penalty? 3. Google product feeds will be used to localize content and feed Google's product search. Is this "enough" to garnish sizable amounts of traffic and/or retain SERP ranks?

    | CatalystSEM
    0
  • bioworld


    On February 8th, 2012 my site's non-branded search traffic dropped overnight by over 80%. It appears I've been hit by a Google penalty. I submitted a reconsideration request and one of Google's staff replied letting me know it was NOT a manual penalty. So it's clearly a result of an algorithm. What is the cause? I haven't made significant changes to the website in the previous months do to being out of the country and the holidays. I'm extremely careful not to out source SEO so there is no chance of questionable link building strategies, unless my competitor launched an attack on my site. I've considered these possible causes: Duplicate content - My site had some redundancy from a marketing plan before Google Panda launched. Last month, I removed all duplicate content. Unnatural link building - I've been moving slowly my site, page by page, from adbio.com to bioworldusa.com after a brand change. Perhaps the 301 redirects triggered a flag in Google's algorithm. I've since removed all redirects to see if that will fix the issue. Poor User Experience - I recently upgraded my Drupal CMS and had to change themes. Currently my theme is an ugly, grey theme which may cause a higher than usual bounce rate. I've been trying to compensate by making sure the content is high quality. The penalty affected these website: www.bioworldusa.com (2/8/12) blog.bioworldusa.com (2/8/12) www.adbio.com (2/17/12)

    | bioworld
    1
  • waynekolenchuk


    On a Wordpress site I'm working on you can get to any product from home in 2 clicks but I'm a llittle concerned about the URL which looks like this: domain/categoryname/subcategoryname/productpage Will I have trouble getting my products indexed?

    | waynekolenchuk
    0
  • jimaycock


    My Crawl Diagnostics Summary says I have 5,141 errors of the 4XX (Client Error) variety.  Yet when I view the list of URLs they all resolve to valid pages. Here is an example.
    http://www.ryderfleetproducts.com/ryder/af/ryder/core/content/product/srm/key/ACO 3018/pn/Wiper-Blade-Winter-18-Each/erm/productDetail.do These pages are all dynamically created from search or browse using a database where we offer 36,000 products. Can someone help me understand why these are errors.

    | jimaycock
    0
  • ArtiKalra


    I have 170 K pages on my website which I want to be indexed. I have created a multiple HTML sitemaps (e.g. sitemap1.html, sitemap2.html,...etc) with each sitemap page having 3000 links. Is this right approach or should i switch to xml based sitemaps and that too multiple one. Please suggest.

    | ArtiKalra
    0
  • showme


    Hi, Recently we made change in our website link generation logic, and now I can reach the same page from different pages with slightly different URLs like this: http://www.showme.com/sh/?h=wlZJNya&by=Featured_ShowMe and http://www.showme.com/sh/?h=wlZJNya&by=Topic Just wondering is this a bad practice and should we avoid it? Thank you, Karen

    | showme
    0
  • ivan.precisodisso


    So... We are running a blog that was supposed to have great content. Working at SEO for a while, I discovered that is too much keyword stuffing and some SEO shits for wordpress, that was supposed to rank better. In fact. That worked, but I'm not getting the risk of getting slaped by the Google puppy-panda. So we decided to restard our blog from zero and make a better try. So. Every page was already ranking in Google. SEOMoz didn't make the crawl yet, but I'm really sure that the crawlers would say that there is a lot of 404 errors. My question is: can I avoid these errors with some tool in Google Webmasters in sitemaps, or shoud I make some rel=canonicals or 301 redirects. Does Google penalyses me for that? It's kinda obvious for me that the answer is YES. Please, help 😉

    | ivan.precisodisso
    0
  • pauledwards


    Hi there, i have been looking into schema and noticed some articles on it recently too. Who here has used schema/mark-up language in their code? I heard Google will be looking for at this soon to interpret data better. Is it schema .org where i can get the code information from? Any help much appreciated.

    | pauledwards
    0
  • ltom


    Hello everybody! Quick and short question: What is better when you want to rank for your your brandname? www.jobsbrandname.com or www.brandnamejobs.com I think for SEO it's better to use the last one but marketing has the wish to use the first one. Thanks for your responce!

    | ltom
    0
  • reallyitsme


    Hi, I have an established ecommerce site online since 2008 when I set it up I did not really think about it and i called it mywidget. However the traffic is minimum 10 times higher for plural and all the long tails ie bluewidgets, cheapwidgets are all plural. I rank very well on the widget but not widgets - I know there is more competition but still it would be best to have the most commonly used phrases in the url. Now I have registered mywidgets should i transfer my shop to mywidgets and setup a permanen redirect 301 for all the  products url and categories. I'm guessing I will be negatively impacted in the short term but in the long term it should be worth it. Would you agree sorry its a massive decision for me and any help would be much appreciated. Many thanks

    | reallyitsme
    0
  • Inevo


    When searching for "kredittkort" on Norwegian Google I get a search results that looks like this. I want to replicate this, but I'm not sure what information they've provided and how they've done it. It's seems like their both listing products AND have sitelinks connected to a subsite. How is this possible? The sitelinks aren't even subpages of the ranked site. How have they managed this? Also, is the product previews they have?

    | Inevo
    0
  • ProjectLabs


    It is well known that exact match domains are quite effective right now for ranking for a specific keyword phrase. Does this work equally well for Blogspot or Typepad exact match subdomains? For example http://seattledentist.blogspot.com

    | ProjectLabs
    0
  • wellnesswooz


    How can I best change the name of a directory on my website (example: http://www.website.com/nameofdirectory/)? The directory has lots of content included in it which has links from all over my website. I guess I have to adjust those links? How do I easily collect all of the links? Which is the code I should use in my htacces? Thank you! With kind regards,
    Dieter

    | wellnesswooz
    0
  • ukkpower


    I am told that I have 150 duplicate page content. It seems that it is the login link on each of my pages. Is this an error? Is it something I have to change? Thanks Login/Register at http://irishdancingdress.com/wp-login.php?redirect_to=http%3A%2F%2Firishdancingdress.com%2Fdress

    | ukkpower
    0
  • mccormackmorrison


    I am little embarresed to say that the custom 404 page is appearing in a client's Sitelinks for their brand name search term. I have demoted this page from Sitelinks for the brand term but it still appears 😞 What is the best practise for a custom 404 page appearing in a sitemap and/or being blocked by robots.txt? Thanks

    | mccormackmorrison
    0
  • AndrewAkesson


    I'm having real trouble with getting working redirects in place to use on a site we're re-launching with a modified url structure. Old URL: http://www.example.com/example_folder/ New URL: http://www.example.com/example-of-new-folder/ Now, where the old URL's have a trailing slash the web.config simply will not accept it. It says the URL can start with a slash, but not end with a slash. However, many of my URL's do end with a slash so I need a workaround. These are the rules I'm putting in place: <location path="example_folder/"></location> Thanks

    | AndrewAkesson
    0
  • ProjectLabs


    Google says to make your pages as useful as possible, but it considers site speed into its ranking algorithm. How do you balance adding rich media like embedding useful YouTube videos with keeping your page load times low?

    | ProjectLabs
    1
  • tylerfraser


    How can I get my website out of google? I want all pages completely gone. Thanks!

    | tylerfraser
    0
  • levalencia1


    I have about 300 errors about duplication of content. But I also have like 3000 warnings for: 2500, too many links on page 2000, meta title longer than 66 characters 200, too long url. I have analyzed my competition, and 90% of them have also too many links on pages and long meta titles. Are these 2 really factors to improve my google ranking? My site is: theprinterdepo.com and my main keywords are printers, refurbished printers, laser printers

    | levalencia1
    0
  • ProjectLabs


    Do you think it helps SEO significantly to add a feed on your homepage that shows a snippet of your latest blog posts? If yes, have you seen any results from doing this?

    | ProjectLabs
    0
  • DerekM88


    In looking through my top pages in Google Analytics, my #2 page (oddly enough) looked like this "/?fb_xd_fragment=". Apparently, this is because we added the Facebook Like button to many of our pages. But I'm worried these show very skewed PageView data and lower Time Spent on each page. The average time on this page is 5 seconds whereas the average sitewide time is much higher. Further, it shows 9,000 pageviews coming from only 250 Unique Visitors. I'm sure this is messing with our SEO. Is there a fix for this? Should I even be worried about it? I heard that I can remove it from my GA stat reporting, but I don't want it to be causing problems in the background. Please advise..my boss wants to keep the Facebook Like button the pages as it has brought us some good response. The page that this is on is: www.accupos.com Maybe there's an alternate version of the Facebook Like that we don't know about... I would appreciate any help on this DM

    | DerekM88
    0
  • Bristolweb


    I wish to setup a business page on google+ business page for my  clients but it requires a personal profile,   my clients don't want a personal profile but do want the business page. Currently i have set them up with pages on my personal profile but  do can i allow the client to manage it? so i am not sure this is the best way Whats the best way for web developers  to setup Google+ accounts for clients?

    | Bristolweb
    1
  • VictorVC


    I have noticed that when I do a site:mysite.com search and all my indexed pages come up, that when I hover over the arrows and bring up the previews some of the pages have things in a red rectangle and some of the pages even have zig zag-like tears/perforations running through them. What do these signify?

    | VictorVC
    0
  • Mattchstick


    We have a large E-commerce site (magento based) and have submitted sitemap files for several million pages within Webmaster tools. The number of indexed pages seems to fluctuate, but currently there is less than 300,000 pages indexed out of 4 million submitted. How can we get the number of indexed pages to be higher? Changing the settings on the crawl rate and resubmitting site maps doesn't seem to have an effect on the number of pages indexed. Am I correct in assuming that most individual product pages just don't carry enough link juice to be considered important enough yet by Google to be indexed? Let me know if there are any suggestions or tips for getting more pages indexed. syGtx.png

    | Mattchstick
    0
  • AnthonyLasVegas


    I have real estate based websites that add new pages when new listings are added to the market and then deletes pages when the property is sold. My concern is that there are a significant amount of 404's created and the listing pages that are added are going to be the same as others in my market who use the same IDX provider. I can go with a different IDX provider that uses IFrame which doesn't create new pages but I used a IFrame  before and my time on site was 3min w/ 2.5 pgs per visit and now it's 7.5 pg/visit with 6+min on the site. The new pages create new content daily so is fresh content and better on site metrics (with the 404's) better or less 404's, no dup content and shorter onsite metrics better? Any thoughts on this issue? Any advice would be appreciated

    | AnthonyLasVegas
    0
  • jtay123


    Hi I have just run a crawl test on screaming frog and it is showing quite a few 403 forbidden status codes. We are showing none of these in webmaster tools, is this an issue?

    | jtay123
    0
  • duncan274


    So when I look in wmt its telling me our site is about fish oil etc when we are web designers. We have blocked these pages in robots text and removed them. WMT is showing 500 errors in crawl errors and telling us we have health issues on our site. what should we do and how do i bulk select these errors is wmt  to mark as fixed (if they are fixed)

    | duncan274
    0
  • daracreative


    Hi I am trying to find broken links on my site, Is there a tool for this? Free or Paid tool is fine thanks.

    | daracreative
    0
  • tylerfraser


    Hello, I need to redirect just the homepage of my blog somewhere. So blog.com But there are other redirects in there and I don't want to override them. So blog.com/post.html How do I just redirect the homepage of wordpress page without redirecting all the other pages. This is what I did that recreated the issue. redirect 301 / blog2.com Thanks! Tyler

    | tylerfraser
    0
  • stefani969642


    I just signed up for SEOMoz, and I have thousands of errors. What am I supposed to do to fix all this? It seems overwhelming.

    | stefani969642
    0
  • adamgthorndike


    Hi, We recently had a domain name change, as we had an established site we had all pages redirected to the new domain. This was over a month ago but despite the redirect SEOmoz doesn't recognise any links to and from the site. Is this due to simply time duration and SEOmoz can't pick up on any redirected info, or could there be a problem with the redirect? Thanks, Adam

    | adamgthorndike
    0
  • TrulyLuna


    Hi All, This is my first post, I've been a Pro member for a while now, read many posts but have never asked a question here. I have an established Magento site that I need to do a lot of SEO work on. I am a newbie at SEO, so I wanted to ask for advice here. I just changed one of the category names, the url, meta title, and meta description. When making the change I selected the checkbox in the Magento backend that says "Create Permanent Redirect for Old URL" Example:
    Old Category: http://www.domain.com/old-category-name.html
    New Category: http://www.domain.com/new-category-name.html Everything worked fine with the exception of one alarming thing... I lost all of the page authority for the category itself and all of the sub categories and pages below it.  Now the category and all pages below it show (on the moz toolbar) a PA of 1 and 0 links and 0 domains. I updated the sitemap.  I did not do a 301 redirect in the .htaccess, I only chose the option to redirect on the Magento backend when changing the name and url of the category. I need to change a lot of other category and page names and urls but now I'm a bit gun shy, as I do not want to do something that will damage what little page rank I have at the moment. I'm looking for some advice from one of you guys who might be able to help me do this the correct way.  I did some research on Google, but I'm still not sure of the correct method to accomplish this. Thanks in advance for any help that you can offer.

    | TrulyLuna
    0
  • mikemunter


    I've downloaded the Seomoz csv file from the crawl data on my site and it found lots of 404 errors, duplicate content, etc. The problem is that when i go to my wp-admin and look for the pages to delete them, I dont see them.  Can anyone point me in the right direction?  I've checked with HostGator and they say it's a WP problem. I need help locating where they are so i can clean them up or delete them. Thanks Mike

    | mikemunter
    0
  • niallfred


    SEO Moz is reporting that I have 50+ pages with a duplicate content issue based on this URL: http://www. f r e d aldous.co.uk/art-shop/art-supplies/art-canvas.html?manufacturer=178 But I have included this tag in the source: rel="canonical" href="http://www.f r e daldous.co.uk/art-shop/art-supplies/art-canvas.html"/> (I have purposefully added white space to the URLs in this message as I'm not sure about the rules for posting links here) I though this "canonical" tag prevented the duplicate content being indexed? is the reporting by SEOMoz wrong or being over cautious?

    | niallfred
    0
  • agirlandamac


    I'm an SEO beginner,  and on a new ecommerce (shopify) store I have a collection of paint. Each of the 52 products will link to the technical data sheet PDF.  Should these links be no follow? or noreferrer? If all the links to this PDF signal that it is important - it is not more important than the home or product collection pages. Thanks!

    | agirlandamac
    0
  • waynekolenchuk


    Does anyone some suggestions for best practices when trying to rank categories using Wordpress? Unless you filter it,  a category provides a complete list of all posts in that category. I can add a good title and description but am not sure beyond that. Has anyone tried using a sticky post in the category and putting keyword body text in that? Lookin' for ideas.

    | waynekolenchuk
    1

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