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Category: Technical SEO

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

  • PeterM22


    I'm wondering post-panda if its wise to block access to blog post summary pages like this one: http://www.howtotradestocks.org/blog/page/15/ Any thoughts?

    | PeterM22
    0
  • pbhatt


    We have an old meta description that advertises an old offer (FREE X if you Buy Y) that we are no longer running on the site. I changed the meta description, now what is the fastest way I can get Google to update their SERP with the new description?

    | pbhatt
    0
  • MountainMedia


    A client recently bought an older domain that is keyword-rich to an aspect of his company. The main website has both e-commerce and call-to-action elements. Our team is split on whether or not to create a micro-site on that domain focused on that aspect of the work that he does or to simply redirect the old domain to his main website. I have not had the opportunity to look at the link profile of the recently acquired domain nor do I have any idea of how many times it's changed hands (which would seem to now be a possible indicator of doorway pages). If any clarification would help, please let me know and I'll do my best to answer.

    | MountainMedia
    0
  • Bandicoot


    Hi all - I'm working on an SEO project, dealing with my first database-driven website that is built on a custom CMS. Almost all of the pages are created by the admin user in the CMS, pulling info from a database. What are the best practices here regarding SEO? I know that overall static is good, and as much static as possible is best, but how does Google treat a site like this? For instance, lets say the user creates a new page in the CMS, and then posts it live. The page is rendered and navigable, after putting together the user-inputed info (the content on the page) and the info pulled from the database (like info pulled out to create the Title tag and H1 tags, etc). Is this page now going to be crawled successfully and indexed as a static page in Google's eyes, and thus ok to start working on rank for, etc? Any help is appreciated - thanks!

    | Bandicoot
    0
  • jgower


    This is probably SEO 101, but I'm unsure what to do here... Last week my weekly crawl diagnostics were off the chart because http:// was not resolving to http://www...fixed that but now it's saying I have duplicate content on: http://www.......com http://www.......com/index.php How do I fix this? Thanks in advance!

    | jgower
    0
  • sprynewmedia


    Can anyone point me to a page showing how to mark up reference data according to schema.org ?  Ie glossary or dictionary page.

    | sprynewmedia
    0
  • webindustry


    We are designing a .BIZ site where we will push a high percentage of  the traffic ourselves. In other words, we aren't relying heavily on SEO for being found. I have a two part question: 1. Is there really any reason for a young start up .biz company to buy a $100 / year .XXX extension? 2. We don't have the .com (and can't afford it at the moment) but we do have the .co Does the .co have any upside to it that the .biz does not in SER?And do we get penalized for using the .biz? In other words, do SEs prefer the .com and nothing else will do quite as well? Thanks!

    | webindustry
    0
  • paulmund


    HI guys, I ran a report on my site and it shows some duplicate titles (example below). Do I need to add something to the htaccess file or another file to fix this? I understand that the search engines should only see 1 URL for the page. 2 pages have "Bikes for sale | used bikes | second hand bicycles" title pauslwebsite.com/bikes/ paulswebsite.com/bikes/index.asp Thanks

    | paulmund
    0
  • NInc81


    My brother owns a laundromat...Im putting together his site.....I am targetinga small geographic area obviously.... Which domain is more seo friendly for the kw north brunswick nj laundromat? northbrunswicknjlaundromat.com north-brunswick-nj-laundromat.com northbrunswick-nj-laundromat.com northbrunswicknj-laundromat.com I doubt there is a huge difference between any of them and my first instict was to go with "northbrunswicknjlaundromat" but it seems it may be too wordy to not use hyphens. Do search engines care? Thanks in advance for any and all help Nolan

    | NInc81
    0
  • LeslieVS


    My client site royaloakshomesfl.com is coming up in my dashboard as having Search engines have been blocked by robots.txt, only I have no idea where to find it and fix the problem. Please help! I do have access to webmaster tools and this site is a WP site, if that helps.

    | LeslieVS
    0
  • blake-76624


    I have a website that I don't use much anymore but it ranks on the first page for one of my main keywords.  I am using another few websites in different niches right now that are doing better and are more functional.  It may cost around 1,300 or so to get the website that I don't use anymore, to look and function in the new ways of the internet.  Would you suggest that I: Do a site redesign (which is more difficult because to make the site do what I want it needs to be out of a wordpress theme) or 301 redirect the site to another one of my sites? Would it make sense to do a 301? The domain is 5 years old but doesn't bring in any leads anymore because it would take a redesign for that to happen.  How can I still benefit from the SEO that I have done on that site? Thanks and sorry if this message is hard to follow.  If I need to clear anything up please let me know.

    | blake-76624
    0
  • zazo


    I've searched extensively for this, but could not find a definitive answer. We recently updated our website and it contains links to about 30 PDF data sheets. I want to determine if the text from these PDFs is being archived by search engines. When I do this search http://bit.ly/rRYJPe  (google - site:www.gamma-sci.com and filetype:pdf) I can see that the PDF urls are getting indexed, but does that mean that their content is getting indexed? I have read in other posts/places that if you can copy text from a PDF and paste it that means Google can index the content.  When I try this with PDFs from our site I cannot copy text, but I was told that these PDFs were all created from Word docs, so they should be indexable, correct? Since WordPress has you upload PDFs like they are an image could this be causing the problem? Would it make sense to take the time and extract all of the PDF content to html? Thanks for any assistance, this has been driving me crazy.

    | zazo
    0
  • poolguy


    Our rankings just plummeted on Tuesday across the board.  There was a DDOS attack on Tuesday and since then the rankings went down and have stayed down, even though the DDOS attack has been resolved.   Also, this is the 3rd or 4th attack they've encountered this year. How long could this last?  How can we deal with this? Thanks

    | poolguy
    0
  • ClaireH-184886


    Hi i have heard so much about Linkedin but i am not sure how to use it. I would like to start off using it for free and have opened an account but i am not sure how to use it to promote my site and to gain traffic before i go to the paid service. Can anyone please give me some basic advice on how to use the free service to gain traffic to my site and also the best way to use it. I want to try and use it to promote my articles on www.in2town.co.uk

    | ClaireH-184886
    0
  • emilyburns


    We are having some difficulty generating a sitemap that includes our SEO-friendly URLs (the ones we want to set as canonical), and I was wondering if we might be able to simply use the non-SEO-friendly, non-canonical URLs that the sitemap generator has been producing and then use 301 redirects to send them to the canonical. Is there a reason why we should not be doing this? We don't want search engines to think that the sitemap URLs are more important than the pages to which they redirect. How important is it that the sitemap URLs match the canonical URLs? We would like to find a solution outside of the generation of the sitemap itself as we are locked into using a vendor’s product in order to generate the sitemap. Thanks!

    | emilyburns
    0
  • ClaireH-184886


    Hi I believe that if you have wordpress then you can automatically ping your site with new content but I am using joomla and would like to know if you can do it with this type of site. I write lots of articles each day and it takes time to keep ping each article so i am wondering if there is an easy way of doing it.

    | ClaireH-184886
    0
  • Socialdude


    My sitemap.xml was appearing in the google serp for certain keywords (&  not my actual page onsite). Please see image. I recently blocked my sitemap.xml with a robots.txt exclusion but now the sitemap.xml is not getting crawled in google webmaster. Is this the correct method of excluding the sitemap.xml for the serp? User-agent: * Disallow: /assets/cache/ Disallow: /assets/docs/ Disallow: /assets/export/ Disallow: /assets/import/ Disallow: /assets/modules/ Disallow: /assets/plugins/ Disallow: /assets/snippets/ Disallow: /manager/ Disallow: /sitemap.xml Sitemap: http://bryansryan.ie/sitemap.xml Any suggestions what should be done here? thanks. nQo2g.png

    | Socialdude
    0
  • CeCeBar


    OK assuming a client's website has the right tracking script (hopefully analytics isn't effected by this issue), ... what happens if the htaccess file has a 301 redirect to the www-address, but within Google Webmaster Tools, the address chosen to crawl by Google is the non-www address? How will Google handle and which address takes precedence in this situation? _Cindy

    | CeCeBar
    0
  • AsadMemon


    A number of my websites created on WP are displaying duplicate home pages with these types of urls. http://www.example.com/page/10/ http://www.example.com/page/11/ http://www.example.com/page/12/ I found these duplicates using the site:search command. Basically, put in any number and the Home Page opens. With the above mentioned url structure. Any idea on why they are created, how they can be stopped and what kind of an impact they would have in terms of SEO and the penalty that comes with duplicate content.

    | AsadMemon
    1
  • DRSearchEngOpt


    I am in a situation where a page was pushed live  (Went live for an hour and then taken down) before it was supposed to go live. Now normally I would utilize the robots.txt or  but I do not have access to either and putting a request in will not suffice as it is against protocol with the CMS.  So basically I am left to just utilizing the and I cannot seem to find a nice way to play with the SE to get this un-indexed.  I know for this instance I could go to GWT and do it but for clients that do not have GWT and for all the other SE's how could I do this? Here is the big question here: What if I have a promotional page that I don't want indexed and am met with these same limitations?  Is there anything to do here?

    | DRSearchEngOpt
    0
  • Improvements


    Hi, I have an SEO question that came my way, but it's a bit too technical for me to handle. Our entire ecom site is in java, which apparently writes to a page after it has loaded and is not SEO-friendly. I was presented with a work-around that would basically consist of us pre redering an html page to search engines and leaving the java page for the customer. It sounds like G's definition of "cloaking" to me, but I wanted to know if anyone has any other ideas or work-arounds (if there are any) on how we can make the java based site more SEO-friendly. Any thoughts/comments you have would be much appreciated. Thanks!!

    | Improvements
    0
  • phaistonian


    Hello, Any idea if Google (or Bing) parses/indexes content from scripts that are loaded using the async="true" attribute? In other words, is asynchronously loaded content indexable? Thank you.

    | phaistonian
    0
  • ICM


    I (obviously) can't delete the archived pages regardless of how much traffic they do/don't receive. Would you recommend a meta robot or robot.txt file? I'm not sure I'll have access to the root directory so I could be stuck with utilizing a meta robot, correct? Any other suggestions to alleviate this pesky duplicate page content issue?

    | ICM
    0
  • Room214


    Hello - My company acquired another company in our industry and our IT team immediately set up the acquired companies domain name as a an alias to our site. This created a duplicate version of our website under another domain name and Google started ranking interior pages from the aliased acquired site for several top keywords that were previously held by our real site. Should we 301 redirect just the top level domain name of the acquired site to the real site or 301 redirect the top level domain name and the interior pages on the acquired site to help ensure that our real domain will take back the rankings it once had? Thanks!

    | Room214
    0
  • JacobFunnell


    Anyone know if hyphens affect the SEO value of keywords? So is: Sandwich-making course Worse than: Sandwich making course I'm talking about in titles and body text. I already know that too many hyphens is a bad idea in URLs and domain names.

    | JacobFunnell
    0
  • hotelesenchiapas


    Hi, I have a few questions for you: I’ll will update my booking system and my website design. Now, I'm ranked in number one position with the keyword HOTELES EN CHIAPAS.  In fact, several urls of my webiste appear in the search engines. Internal URLs like this: www.hotelesenchiapas.com.mx/obmp30/hotel/villa_mercedes_palenque/1/es/ My question is:  I need to conserve this link structure or may i change it for something more friendly like this:  www.hotelesenchiapas.com.mx/Palenque/Hoteles/Villa-mercedes-palenque/ And how affect this change to my rank position ?

    | hotelesenchiapas
    0
  • MichaelWeisbaum


    If you're optimizing an e-commerce site where you sell a certain brand of product, can you re-use the product descriptions from that brand's store? For example, if I'm selling Nike's, can I use the product descriptions and info from the Nike product pages? (This is not what I'm selling).  Or should you write your own descriptions.  I understand that original content is best, but in an online store situation, how do you write up a product description that's different from the original?  It is what it is, right?

    | MichaelWeisbaum
    0
  • Kofoed


    Here is a short question re. 301. I read Dovers article on how to move an old domain to a new one. Say you have been a little inexperienced regarding linkbuilding and used some cheap service in the past and you have steadily seen that certain keywords have been depreciating in the SERP - however the PR is still 3 for the domain - now the qustion is should you rediect with a 301 in .htaccess to a new domain when you know that google does not like certain keywords with respect to the old site. Will the doom and gloom carry over to the new site?

    | Kofoed
    0
  • digitalarts


    For a specific term, we have the potential opportunity to purchase the domain (complete with site) that sits just above us in the Google search results... The domain has reasonable page authority of 49, domain authority of 38 with 168 linking root domains - 311 total links... Would the most beneficial use of the domain be to retain the site content as is and incorporate a few relevant links back to our site or... 301 the entire domain?

    | digitalarts
    1
  • pasape


    Hello friends, I have several problems with my website related with duplicate content. When we changed any family name, for example "biodiversidad" to "cajas nido y biodiversidad", it creates a duplicate content because: mydomain.com/biodiversidad and mydomain.com/cajas-nido-y-biodiversidad have the same content. This happens every tame I change the names of the categories or families. To avoid this, the first thing that comes to my mid is a 301 redirect from the old to the new url, but I wonder if this can be done more automatically otherwise, maybe a script? Any suggestion? Thank you

    | pasape
    0
  • NarenBansal


    On our website http://www.thefutureminders.com/, we have three form fields that have three pull downs for Month, Day, and year. This is creating duplicate pages while indexing. How do we tell the search Bot to index the page but not crawl through the submit button? Thanks Naren

    | NarenBansal
    0
  • JHill


    Hi All New to PRO but we're seriously committed to getting this working. And firstly thank you to anyone who offers any useful thoughts and insights. We've launched a new site, unfortunately late to the market for the season and are really struggling to get search engine recognition. Site:  http://www.ignitehats.co.uk/ We're continuously adding new content, slowly gathering more links and working hard to promote socially. But even on our clearest search terms like "Ignite hats" we're down on page 4. Both GWT and the Seomoz tools highlight no big problems (a few titles that are too long) but otherwise nothing. Maybe wrongly we requested that the Google spam team review our site incase it was being penalised, but got a template response saying the site was not in their spam system (phew, there wasn't a reason it should be we believe). We're wondering if this is just that our site is just too young? It's been live for 6 weeks. But worry maybe this is not the case. We've had success with another site we run much sooner than this. Any help or pointers would be really appreciated. Similar stories and what others have done, at least to give us some confidence to carry on would be great. Thanks for reading.

    | JHill
    0
  • dawa


    Hi, one of my customers had probably block the IP of SEOMOZ's bot. Could you give me : IP User-agent's name thks for helping me 😉

    | dawa
    1
  • theLotter


    It there a problem disallowing all https URLs to be indexed in order to avoid duplication? This is the article recommending this practice - http://blog.leonardchallis.com/seo/serve-a-different-robots-txt-for-https/ Thanks!

    | theLotter
    0
  • levalencia1


    Hello. My Seomoz report this week tells me that I have about 500 pages with Too Many On-Page Links One of the examples is this one: https://www.theprinterdepo.com/hp-9000mfp-refurbished-printer (104 links) If you check, all our products have a RELATED products section and in some of them the related products can be UP to 40 Products. I wonder how can I solve this. I thought that putting nofollow on the links of the related products might fix all of these warnings? Putting NOFOLLOW does not affect SEO?

    | levalencia1
    0
  • debi_zyx


    Hi, All! This might be really obvious, but I have little coding experience, so when in doubt - ask... One of our client site's has navigation that looks (in part) like this: <a <span="">href</a><a <span="">="http://www.mysite.com/section1"></a> <a <span="">src="images/arrow6.gif" width="13" height="7" alt="Section 1">Section 1</a><a <span=""></a> WC3 told us the tags invalidate, and while I ignored most of their comments because I didn't think it would impact on what search engines saw, because thesetags are right in the links, it raised a question. Anyone know if this is for sure a problem/not a problem? Thanks in advance! Aviva B

    | debi_zyx
    0
  • berglin


    I have an online store through hosting service Volusion. I have asked them about this and was told that this is normal. I would like to confirm this with you guys because I'm not convinced of the quality of their customer service and I'm not an expert. When I check Analytics the landing page that is visited most often is www....../default.asp and the second most visited is www........./     . These are, of course, both my home page. Volusion has radio button that allows the admin to "enable canonical links", which I have enabled,  and they told me that it is normal to see this on google analytics regardless. When I type in either of those addreses, the homepage comes up as the address that I typed. In other words it doesn't redirect so that it is always the same. Am I right to be concerned about this?

    | berglin
    0
  • ClaireH-184886


    Hi, my hosting company after they updated my joomla website lost thousands of pages of content, i am now searching for all broken links and re doing the content to get my links back, but i am having a problem understanding how to redirect these links. For example, i have now managed to retrieve this page http://www.in2town.co.uk/news/have-your-say/liberal-dem-leader-says-he-will-be-the-next-prime-minister-what-do-you-think but the old url for this page was http://www.in2town.co.uk/Have-Your-Say/Liberal-Dem-Leader-says-He-Will-be-The-Next-Prime-Minister-What-Do-You-Think/menu-id-4953 i do not have the unfriendly url for this page, so what i am trying to find out is, how to tell google that the above page is now http://www.in2town.co.uk/news/have-your-say/liberal-dem-leader-says-he-will-be-the-next-prime-minister-what-do-you-think in my joomla site. if anyone could please explain how to do this with joomla 1.5 then you will make me very happy as then i will be able to retrieve some of my lost links

    | ClaireH-184886
    0
  • ClaireH-184886


    Hi here is my site map http://www.in2town.co.uk/sitemap-xml?sitemap=1 But i am concerned that i have not set my joomla site map correctly. The reason why i think this is, because i have a lot of articles on the site and google are not picking them up in my google webmaster tools. On my old site google was quick to pick up all the articles. Can anyone offer me any help on this and let me know if my site map should be set to show all of my articles

    | ClaireH-184886
    0
  • apmgsmith


    I've just joined SEOMOZ last week and have not even received my first full-crawl yet, but as you know, I do get the re-crawl report.  It shows I have 50 301's and 20 rel canonical's.  I'm still very confused as to what I'm supposed to fix...And, all the rel canonical's are my sites main pages, so hence I am still equally confused as to what the canonical is doing and how do I properly setup my site.  I'm a technical person and can grasp most things fairly quickly, but on this the light bulb is taking a little while longer to fire-up 🙂 If my question wasn't total jibberish and you can help shed some light, I would be forever grateful. Thank you.

    | apmgsmith
    0
  • Prime85


    My site, http://goo.gl/h0igI was ranking on page one for many of our biggest keywords.  All of a sudden, we completely fell off.  I believe I'm down somewhere between page 40-50.  I have no warning or error messages in webmaster tools. Can anyone please help me identify what the problem is?  This is completely unexpected and I don't know how to fix it... Thanks in advance

    | Prime85
    0
  • NicB1


    Hi, We have a few pages that from an SEO perspective have poor URLs.  We are planning on changing them (and 301 redirecting) the old page to the new page.  I heard in the past, this can temporarily negatively impact your SERP rank etc.  Since the old URLs are bad, even if there is a temporary negative hit, changing them in the long run it is better, but curious if anyone has any experience on what to expect.

    | NicB1
    0
  • eCommerceSEO


    Hi, We have just released a new version of our website that now has a human readable nice URL's. Our old ugly URL's are still accessible and cannot be blocked/redirected. These old URL's use a URL param that has an xpath like expression language to define the location in our catalog. We have about 2 million pages indexed with this old URL param in it while we have approximately 70k nice URL's after the migration. This high number of old URL's is due to facetting that was done using this URL param. I wonder if we should now completely block this URL param from Google Webmaster tools so that these ugly URL's will be removed from the Google index. Or will this harm our position in Google? Thanks, Chris

    | eCommerceSEO
    0
  • levalencia1


    I have 7000 warnings of urls because of a 302 redirect. http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/215/44060409.png/ I want to get rid of those, is it possible to get rid of the Urls with robots.txt. For example that it does not crawl anything that has /product_compare/ in its url? Thank you

    | levalencia1
    0
  • QPLF


    It does sound like a silly question but bear with me a little... I recently installed on my Joomla website a module that automatically creates rel canonical tags for pages that contain lists that can be sorted by different criteria: (price, alphabetic order, etc...) I know that a proper canonical tag should look like this: However, the module I'm using creates the following structure Will this work? I mean, will it be "understood" by the bots? To see what the module actually does, you can visit the following link http://www.quipeutlefaire.fr/fr/index.php?sort=price&sort_direction=desc&limit=10&limitstart=0&option=com_auctions&category=240 In the source code you will see that the canonical tag is Which is the original "unsorted" page. Thanks in advance for your help

    | QPLF
    0
  • TheARKlady


    In my work as an SEO writer, I work closely with web designers and usually have behind the scenes access. However, the last three clients who hired me have web designers that are not allowing admin access to anyone else (including the clients) outside of their companies/small business. Is there a work around for the Rel Canonical element that usually is placed in the header? I am using All-In-One-SEO plug-in to address part of this issue. Sage advice or discussion on this is appreciated!

    | TheARKlady
    0
  • jargomang


    If I have a .com.br domain with all my content in Portuguese, will it make a difference if I host in the US or if I host on a server in Brazil? I thought I had the answer to this from Rand in one of his Whiteboard Fridays a while back where he said hosting in the target country would help, but the lady who did the international SEO presentation in MozCon 2011 said any SEO who says this helps doesn't know international SEO.  Can anybody point me to a case study on this? I have US and Brazilian dedicated servers but I'd prefer to get rid of the Brazil server expense.

    | jargomang
    0
  • ClaireH-184886


    Hi i am trying to understand how services such as pingler.com help your site. I think i understand about the google ping service which tells google that you have updated a page but how does pingler work. Pingler claims that it sends traffic to your site but i do not understand this. Any help would be great

    | ClaireH-184886
    1
  • AidanMcCarthy


    If we accept "the first link from a page to another is the one that transfers anchor text and PR" - does that then apply just the same for internal linking as it does with linking from domain to domain?

    | AidanMcCarthy
    0
  • echo1


    We have changed our website template about a month ago and since then we experienced a huge drop in rankings, especially with our home page. We kept the same url structure on entire website, pretty much the same content and the same on-page seo. We kind of knew we will have a rank drop but not that huge. We used to rank with the homepage on the top of the second page, and now we lost about 20-25 positions. What we changed is that we made a new homepage structure, more user-friendly and with much more organized information, we also have a slider presenting our main services. 80% of our content on the homepage is included inside the slideshow and 3 tabs, but all these elements are JavaScript. The content is unique and is seo optimized but when I am disabling the JavaScript, it becomes completely unavailable. Could this be the reason for the huge rank drop? I used the Webmaster Tolls' Fetch as Googlebot tool and it looks like Google reads perfectly what's inside the JavaScrip slideshow so I did not worried until now when I found this on SEOMoz: "Try to avoid ... using javascript ... since the search engines will ... not indexed them ... " One more weird thing is that although we have no duplicate content and the entire website has been cached, for a few pages (including the homepage), the picture snipet is from the old website. All main urls are the same, we removed some old ones that we don't need anymore, so we kept all the inbound links. The 301 redirects are properly set. But still, we have a huge rank drop. Also, (not sure if this important or not), the robots.txt file is disallowing some folders like: images, modules, templates... (Joomla components). We still have some html errors and warnings but way less than we had with the old website. Any advice would be much appreciated, thank you!

    | echo1
    0

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