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Category: Technical SEO

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


  • Greetings!  On Dec 1, 2011 in a SEOMoz campaign, two crawl metrics shot up from zero (Nov 17, Nov 24). "Title missing or empty" was 9,676. "Duplicate page content" was 9,678. Whoa!  Content at site has not changed. I checked a sample of web pages and each seems to have a proper TITLE tag. Page content differs as well -- albeit we list electronic part numbers of hard-to-find parts, which look similar. I found a similar post http://www.seomoz.org/q/why-crawl-error-title-missing-or-empty-when-there-is-already-title-and-meta-desciption-in-place . In answer, Sha ran Screaming Frog crawler.  I ran Frog crawler on a few hundred pages.   Titles were found and hash codes were unique.  Hmmm. Site with errors is http://electronics1.usbid.com Small sample of pages with errors: electronics1.usbid.com/catalog_10.html
    electronics1.usbid.com/catalog_100.html
    electronics1.usbid.com/catalog_1000.html I've tried to reproduce errors yet I cannot. What am I missing please? Thanks kindly, Loren

    | groovykarma
    0

  • Hi there - My web developer is saying that I can't do a URL redirect with a "#" in it. Currently, the URL is actually an anchored link within a page (which the URL indicates with a #). I want to change the content to a new URL, but our website links internally to the old URL, so we would need to do a URL redirect (assume 301). Can you tell me if this is possible and how? Thanks!

    | sfecommerce
    0

  • Hello, What are the top 5 sites for video submissions ? Any suggestions about which points should be taken into consideration when submitting videos ? Thanks

    | seoug_2005
    0

  • If your working with a local business, is it a good idea to reach out to similar businesses in other states and ask for a link? Example: I own a paint shop in Minnesota, and I reach out to a paint shop in California to see if we want to link to each others site to help our SEO.  Because we aren’t in competition with each other wouldn’t this help us both?

    | marker-311528
    0

  • Hello, my question is how often should we need to re- submit our site map in google webmaster tools? like we are using prestashop and we keep on adding new products to our site. is we have a plugin to generate the site map from our backend. is it necesary to login in to google webmaster tools every day and re submit our sitemap to google?

    | idreams
    1

  • What's the best way to stop Wordpress spam? We don't let comments go live without moderation, so the spammers don't succeed, however it wastes time going through the comments. A captcha code could work but a lot of software can crack it. Are there any good captcha solutions or could something else work better/in conjunction? Also, is there anywhere to report spam IP addresses? Not sure much happens when you mark a comment as spam in Wordpress.

    | giantpeach
    1

  • I will be redesigning a website in wordpress. currently the website is html/css based My concern is i dont want to lose any of the Search engine rankings. what should i put in place to avoid that situation

    | mancmusicman
    0

  • Howdy. I have just read this QA thread, so I think I have my answer. But I'm going to ask anyway! Basically DomainA.com is being retired, and DomainB.com is going to be launched. We're going to have to redirect numerous URLs from DomainA.com to DomainB.com. I think the way to go about this is to continue paying for hosting for DomainA.com, serving a .htaccess from that hosting account, and then hosting DomainB.com separately. Anybody know of a way to avoid paying for hosting a .htaccess file on DomainA.com? Thanks!

    | SamTurri
    0

  • We use Amazon to host our assets (images, videos, PDFs, etc). These assets can be used across multiple sites we own and we reference them appropriately via our CMS. example asset URL: https://s3.amazonaws.com/lawgical/assets/data/539/original.png We have an infographic we recently distributed that is hosted on Amazon. Obviously we want any link value to go back to our primary URL where we laid out the infographic, however some of the infographic sites are just referencing the above source image URL. Are we losing SEO / link value by not have the infographic hosted on our domain? Do search engines count these image references as a "link"? For your reference... Infographic post: http://www.serve-now.com/articles/841/process-server-vs-sheriff-infographic Example infographic site usage: http://www.infographicsposters.com/law-infographics/which-is-better-process-server-or-sheriff

    | trentc
    0

  • My Client had a site that ranked for a pretty competitive two word phrase, but for a variety of reasons had to transfer the site to a different domain name (with none of the previous keywords). We've 301'd everything just fine to the new site, but our traffic for that two word phrase, as well as related long tail traffic, is beginning to drop. Could the drop be related to something that we didn't do well in the transfer? Or is it due to the new domain name now not being an exact match? Sitenote question: Our Google Analytics is still set up for the former domain name and shows data just fine. Is there any reason to switch GA to the new domain? What are the pros/cons? Much thanks in advance!

    | TrevorMcKendrick
    0

  • Hi everyone, My programmer told me it is impossible to do a permanent redirect from www.website.com/index.html to www.website.com due to cms technical limitation which I do not want to believe hence is it possible / is there documentation available instructing on how to do a proper 301 permanent redirect on OpenCMS 7.5.4? Thanks a lot! Steve

    | sjcbayona-41218
    0

  • My website, www.rcnightmare.com has a forum, the most popular entry point for seo traffic.  I have tried unsuccessfully to really make the forum's content outweigh the actual content of the "forum" itself.  For example google analytics says "post" is my strongest keyword across the site. the forums url is www.rcnightmare.com/forum, I am looking for some answers from people familiar with Vbulletin for things I can change to help this

    | TheTippingPoint
    0

  • Ok, so I am finally focusing more on SEO of my hobby website as I am notice the relavent keywords are not really onsite what I want, for example, according to analytics "post" is my most popular  keyword which I assume is from the vbulletin forum. My question today is that according to the moz scan, my forum has too many external links, my question is what are some measures I can do whether within the vbulletin forum or custom coding to reduce the amount of links/increase power? www.rcnightmare.com

    | TheTippingPoint
    0

  • Hi, We have a page with some good "keyword" content (user supplied comment widget), but there was a design choice made previously to late load it via JavaScript.  This was to improve performance and the overall functionality relies on JavaScript.  Unfortunately since it is loaded via js, it isn't read by Googlebot so we get no SEO value. I've read Google doesn't weigh <noscript>content as much as regular content.  is this true?  Once option is just to load some of the content via <noscript> tags.  I just want to make sure Google still reads this content.</p> <p>Another option is to load some of the content via simple html when loading the page.  If JavaScript is enabled, we'd hide this "read only" version via css and display the more dynamic user friendly version. - Would changing display based on js enabled be deemed as cloaking?  Since non-js users would see the same thing (and this provides a ways for them to see some of the functionality in the widget, it is an overall net gain for those users too).</p> <p>In the end, I want Google to read the content but trying to figure out the best way to do so.</p> <p>Thanks,</p> <p>Nic</p> <p> </p></noscript>

    | NicB1
    0

  • Hi all, I have a question, which i hope you can answer for me. I have a site www.betxpert.com (a danish betting site) and we have tried to do some SEO to improve conversions. One of the steps we have taken was to link to all of our bookmaker reviews in our menu (a mega menu). All of our bookmakers have an img and text link in the menu. The menu is shown on every page of the site. Since we have made this change we have been plumeting down the SERPs. For the search "betsafe" this page http://www.betxpert.com/bookmakere/betsafe is no longer in the top 50. We also added the "stars" so that the google result will show our over all review for the bookmaker, in order to stand out in the SERPs. Can anyone explain to me what the problem might be? Over extensive internal linking or?

    | rasmusbang
    0

  • I've noticed in my stats that google is indexing some non-pretty URLs from my wordpress-based blog.
    For instance, this URL is appearing google search: http://www.admissionsquest.com/onboardingschools/index.php?p=439 It should be: http://www.admissionsquest.com/onboardingschools/2009/01/do-american-boarding-schools-face-growing-international-competition.html Last week I added the plugin Redirection in order to consolidate categories & tags. Any chance that this has something to do with it? Recs on how to solve this? Fyi - I've been using pretty URLS with wordpress from the very beginning and this is the first time that I've seen this issue. Thanks in advance for your help!

    | peterdbaron
    0

  • Say I have a page:  mydomain.com/page But I also have different views: /?sort=alpha /print-version /?session_ID=2892 etc.  All same content, more or less. Should the subsequent pages have ROBOTS meta tag with noindex?  Should I use canonical?  Both? Thanks!

    | ChatterBlock
    0

  • Hi All, We started using SEOMoz this week and ran into an issue regarding the crawler access in the on-page report module. The attached screen shot shows that the HTTP status is 200 but SEOMoz still says that the page is not accessible for crawlers. What could this be? Page in question
    http://www.tiasnimbas.edu/Executive_MBA/pgeId=307 Regards, Coen SEOMoz.png

    | TiasNimbas
    0

  • My ecommerce company uses Omniture tracking codes for a variety of different tracking parameters, from promotional emails to third party comparison shopping engines. All of these tracking codes create URLs that look like www.domain.com/?s_cid=(tracking parameter), which are identical to the original page and these dynamic tracking pages are being indexed. The cached version is still the original page. For now, the duplicate versions do not appear to be affecting rankings, but as we ramp up with holiday sales, promotions, adding more CSEs, etc, there will be more and more tracking URLs that could potentially hurt us. What is the best solution for this problem? If we use robots.txt to block the ?s_cid versions, it may affect our listings on CSEs, as the bots will try to crawl the link to find product info/pricing but will be denied. Is this correct? Or, do CSEs generally use other methods for gathering and verifying product information? So far the most comprehensive solution I can think of would be to add a rel=canonical tag to every unique static URL on our site, which should solve the duplicate content issues, but we have thousands of pages and this would take an eternity (unless someone knows a good way to do this automagically, I’m not a programmer so maybe there’s a way that I don’t know). Any help/advice/suggestions will be appreciated. If you have any solutions, please explain why your solution would work to help me understand on a deeper level in case something like this comes up again in the future. Thanks!

    | BrianCC
    0

  • Hello when I do a Google search my sitemap.xml shows up for lots of queries. Does anyone have any advise on this? Should I remove url in Google Webmaster? Thanks,

    | Socialdude
    0

  • Guys, I was just wondering what is the current up-to-date resolution for HTTP and HTTPS, One of my client needs SSL for transaction,and they only need single page to be encrypted(SSLed) , So should I Force SSL that page only and direct entire HTTPS pages to HTTP to avoid duplicate page issue, or would it considered cloaking. It is been long time i did something similar, Or current Search Engines algo can handle it by themselves and i should just leave it . Thanks!

    | DigitalJungle
    0

  • Hey all, I'm new to the SEOmoz thing but I like it so far. I think I have my site listing so messed up that it's effecting my rank. I have 3 domains. 1.) rt112media.com 2.) route112media.com 3.) route112.net. Each domain was purchased through GoDaddy.com and still remain there. I have my own hosting account which I was registered as rt112media.com with route112media.com and route112.net listed as add on domains. Technically, I would like for my main site to be route112media.com for everything. However when I registered the site as rt112media.com I didn't know the issues I would have as far as different domains so I registered with rt112media.com as my main domain name. Anyways, as of now I have rt112media.com as my main domain through my cpanel hosting.I have both domains route112media.com and route112.net set for 301 wildcard redirects to rt112media.com on my hosting account and my GoDaddy account. When I started my WMT account I didn't really know which domain to use cause I figured I could link them all to one. So, I signed up as routet12media.com. After a little while I realized it was not recieving anything because everything was being redirected to rt112media.com Anyways both addresses have been crawled and indexed so they are showing as two. So, I requested to change the route112media.com address to rt112media.com in WMT. That was about 2 weeks ago and it is still pending request. I'm not having further problems with WMT because of the www.rt112media.com vs http://rt112media.com. I am the verified owner of both but I can not switch the www.rt112media account to show the non www. account as the main one because I have the other pending. My site is still being crawled as 2 versions rt112media.com and route112media.com. So what is my best option? And what would be the worst cause scenario if I wanted to start completely over using route112media.com as my main domain with hosting and all. Sorry this was so long I just wanted to explain my situation. I'm lost. Any advice would be appreciated! http:/rt112media.com

    | Route112Media
    0

  • Several of my sites are aliased (hosted in subdirectories off the root domain on a single hosting account, but visible at www.theSubDirectorySite.com) Not ideal, I know, but that's a different issue. I want to block bots from viewing those files that are accessible in subdirectories on the main hosting account, www.RootDomain.com/SubDirectorySite/, and force the bots to look at www.SubDirectorySite.com instead. I utilized the canonical meta tag to point bots away from the sub directory site, but I am wondering what will happen if I use robots.txt to block those files from within the root domain. Will the bots, specifically Google bot, still index the site at its own URL, www.AnotherSite.com even if I've blocked that directory with Disallow: /AnotherSite/ ? THANK YOU!!!

    | michaelj_me
    0

  • I'm using sh404SEF on my Joomla 1.5 website. Last week, I activated the security functions of the tool, which includes an anti-flood control feature. This morning when I looked at my new crawl statistics in SEOMoz, I noticed a significant drop in the number of webpages crawled, and I'm attributing that to the security configurations that I made earlier in the week. I'm looking for a way to prevent this from happening so the next crawl is accurate. I was thinking of using sh404SEFs  "UserAgent white list" feature. Does SEOMoz have a UserAgent string that I could try adding to my white list?  Is this what you guys recommend as a solution to this problem?

    | JBradySD
    0

  • Hello, my boss has decide a build website we have more than 12500 products in ourwebsite its mtscellular.com, im new as seo but im confused and need help i want to know how somebody help me to increase my website traffic

    | jimmylora
    0

  • We have a page on a website (let's name it ABC) which ranks very well on Google for a specific keyword but this keyword is not the main activity of website ABC. For this reason we created website XYZ for offering the services related to the specific keyword. How shall we redirect the visitors from website ABC to website XYZ so XYZ gets all the weight ? Is it best to do an HTTP301 from the specific page on site ABC or from site ABC, remove nearly all content related to the keyword and create a link to website XYZ ? Your advice is well appreciated.

    | netbuilder
    0

  • I don't know why but our company site can not be found by google at all. I have submitted to google webmaster, have social media point to, etc, Is there any reason for this? url for our website is www.bistosamerica.com Thank you

    | BistosAmerica
    0

  • I have a page that has a missing Title Tag. I had a look at the page and it looks like an action, this is part of th cart. http://mydomainxyz.com/billing/status/index.php?action=phpinfo Is this a problem? How dod i deal with this?

    | stefanok
    0

  • I'm new to SEOMoz.  Been digesting the crawl data and have a tonne of action items that we'll be executing on fairly soon.  Love it! One thing I noticed is in some of crawl warnings include pages that expressly have the ROBOTS meta tag with the "noindex" value.  Example:  many of my noindex pages don't include meta descriptions.  Therefore, is it safe to ignore warnings of this nature for these pages?

    | ChatterBlock
    0

  • My site features businesses that offers activities for kids.  Each business has its own page on my site.  Business pages contains a listing of different activities that organization is putting on (such as events, summer camps, drop-in activities).  Some businesses only offer seasonal activities (for example, during Christmas break and summer camps).  The rest of the year, the business has no activities -- the page is empty. This is creating 2 problems.  It's poor user experience (which I can fix no problem) but it also is thin content and sometimes treated as duplicate content. What's the best way to deal with pages whose content can be quite extensive at certain points of the year and shallow or empty at other parts?  Should I include a meta ROBOTS tag to not index when there is no content, and change the tag to index when there is content?  Should I just ignore this problem?  Should I remove the page completely and do a redirect? Would love to know people's thoughts.

    | ChatterBlock
    0

  • Our website has some pages with content shared from a third party provider and we use AJAX as our implementation. We dont want Google to crawl the third party's content but we do want them to crawl and index the rest of the web page.  However, In light of Google's recent announcement about more effectively indexing google, I have some concern that we are at risk for that content to be indexed. I have thought about x-robots but have concern about implementing it on the pages because of a potential risk in Google not indexing the whole page. These pages get significant traffic for the website, and I cant risk. Thanks, Phil

    | AU-SEO
    0

  • don't know why I did not see it before but my server "Expires:" tage is set to: Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT Also I have no "Last-modified" http header either Crazy! How much do you guys think this type of thing hurts a site?

    | kevin4803
    0

  • Hello everybody! I have quite simple question about URL rewriting from subcategory to category, yet I can't find any solution to this problem (due to lack of my deeper apache programming knowledge). Here is my problem/question: we have two website url structures that causes dublicate problems: www.website.lt/language/category/ www.website.lt/language/category/1/ 1 and 2 pages are absolutely same (both also returns 200 OK). What we need is 301 redirect from 2 to 1 without any other deeper categories redirects (like www.website.com/language/category/1/169/ redirecting to .../category/1/ or .../category/). Here goes .htaccess URL rewrite rules: RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/$ /index.php?lang=$1&idr=$2&par1=$3&par2=$4&par3=$5&par4=$6&%{QUERY_STRING} [L] RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/$ /index.php?lang=$1&idr=$2&par1=$3&par2=$4&par3=$5&%{QUERY_STRING} [L] RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/$ /index.php?lang=$1&idr=$2&par1=$3&par2=$4&%{QUERY_STRING} [L] RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/$ /index.php?lang=$1&idr=$2&par1=$3&%{QUERY_STRING} [L] RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/([^/]+)/$ /index.php?lang=$1&idr=$2&%{QUERY_STRING} [L] RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/$ /index.php?lang=$1&%{QUERY_STRING} [L] There are other redirects that handles non-www to www and related issues: RedirectMatch 301 ^/lt/$ http://www.domain.lt/ RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.lt RewriteRule (.*) http://www.domain.lt/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.)/$RewriteRule ^(.)$ http://www.domain.lt/$1/ [R=301,L] At this moment we cannot solve this problem with rel canonical (due to our CMS limits). Thanks for your help guys! If You need any other details on our coding, just let me know.

    | jkundrotas
    0

  • I'm building several local websites and looking for the fastest, cost effective service out there to list them in all the major local directories like yelp etc.. I've been using UBL but 3 months later i don't see my listing in many of the directories they claim to list at... Thanks!

    | atohad
    0

  • Hi i have been reading that if you have links going out of your site then this can damage your site, so i have been trying to find out, how i can do no follow links for some of the affliate sites that i have on my site. I have a couple of adverts on my site and i would like to turn these into no follow links while the rest of my internal links on my page are to stay follow links but in joomla i am not sure how to do this. can anyone please give me some advice

    | ClaireH-184886
    0

  • We are getting a duplicate content error, with "online form/" being returned numerous times. Upon inspecting the code, we are calling an input form via jQuery which is initially called by something like this: Opens Form Why would this be causing it the amend the URL and to be crawled?

    | pauledwards
    0

  • Why is it that when I run an "On Page Optimization Keyword Report" for my website I get a different score when using http://www.tandmkitchens.com vs http://tandmkitchens.com. My keyword is "Kitchen Remodeling" http://www.tandmkitchens.com scores an A http://tandmkitchens.com scores a B It's the same page yet one url scores higher than the other. Any help! Thanks
    Gary

    | fun52dig
    0

  • Does Bing accept the pagination hints? Thanks.

    | gmk1567
    0

  • Hi, My product categories have 2-3 pages each. I have paging implemented with rel=next and rel=prev. from some reason Google GWT now reports the pages as having duplicate titles and description. Should I be worried? Should I set a different title like "blue category - page x" ? Thanx, Asaf

    | AsafY
    0

  • Greetings, I am new to the community and am checking out Pro. The domain authority for two of our sites www.lumber2.com and www.americasworkclothes.com has dropped 10 points each respectively. I've worked on getting our lumber 2 site on registries from getlisted.org (i think there are 5 or 6 of them). Our page authority has improved significantly along with mosrank and moztrust. However, at the same time our domain authorities just tanked 10 points each. Since each site dropped 10 points, I'm wondering if its the ros links affecting them. Here's the domain data: Lumber 2 site: DA 21: 50,489 links from 12 domains
    America's Work Clothes: DA 20: 33,839 links from 5 domains We have left nav run of site links between our two sites and have had them in place for a couple of years with steady domain authority progression. Suddenly DA tanked. Is there a chance there is too much run of site linking? I already removed a few links, so you won't see all of them. Can anyone help? Thank you. Steve

    | AWCthreads
    0

  • Post-Panda, should I worry about adding a bunch of geo-targeted landing pages at once? It's a community, people have added their location on their profile pages.  I'm worried if we decide to make all the locations into hyperlinks that point to new geo-targeted pages, it could get us extra traffic for those geo-specific keyword phrases but penalize the site as a whole for having so many low-quality pages. What I'm thinking is maybe to start small and turn, say, United States into a hyperlink that points to a page (that would house our community members that reside in the United States) and add extra unique content to the page.  And only add a new location page when we know we'll be adding unique content to it, so it's not basically just page sorting. Thoughts? Hope that makes sense. Thanks!

    | poolguy
    0

  • On all my campaigns I'm returning high levels of 'Missing Meta Description Tags'. The problem with fixing this is they're all for category, tag and author pages. Is there a way to add a meta description to these pages (there are hundreds) or will it not really have any ranking effect?

    | SiliconBeachTraining
    0

  • We have been using OSE for a little over 2 Months now and our link demographics haven't changed although we have been getting lots of backlinks from other blogs and webpages. Google Webmaster Tools displays these links but OSE, even after the updates, doesn't.
    Our domain is about 1 Year old and has had indexed content on it since June this year. Google Webmaster Tools shows 24 Links to our domain but OSE only 3. The domain is http://www.wellbo.de

    | wellbo
    0

  • We are in the process of changing our folder/url structure.  Currently we have about 5 sitemaps submitted to Google. How is it best to deal with these site maps in terms of either (a) replacing the old URLs with the new ones in the site map and (b) what affect should we have if we removed the site map submission from the Google Webmaster Tools console. Basically we have in the region of 20,000 urls to redirect to the new format, and to update in the site map.

    | NeilTompkins
    0

  • SEOmoz tools is saying there is duplicate content for: www.mydomain.com www.mydomain.com/index.html What would be the best way to resolve this "error"?

    | PlasticCards
    0

  • Bit of a strange question here that would be keen on getting the opinions of others on. Let's say we have a web page which is 1000 lines line, pulling content from 5 websites (the content itself is duplicate, say rss headlines, for example). Obviously any content on it's own will be viewed by Google as being duplicate and so will suffer for it. However, given one of the ways duplicate content is considered is a page being x% the same as another page, be it your own site or someone elses. In the case of our duplicate page, while 100% of the content is duplicate, the page is no more than 20% identical to another page so would it technically be picked up as duplicate. Hope that makes sense? My reason for asking is I want to pull latest tweets, news and rss from leading sites onto a site I am developing. Obviously the site will have it's own content too but also want to pull in external.

    | Grumpy_Carl
    0

  • I want to enter some products as blog posts. I don't want users to see the post info, but do want SE's to see rel="author". I can do this by setting display to "none" in a CSS style. The post info does not appear in the browser but is still in the page source. Will search engines be able to see the post info?

    | waynekolenchuk
    0

  • Hey guys. I am more looking for advice to confirm something on this one if anyone could offer help? My client has a reciprocal only link directory that is actually ranking higher than their company website. Surely from an SEO point of view, in this instance, it would make sense to kill the link directory and put a re-direct on the whole thing over to their main site? Would appreciate any advice on this one 🙂

    | Nextman
    0

  • Will there be any additional SEO value if we add link title in addition to anchor text.? Can you compare link title with image title? Thanks.

    | gmk1567
    0

  • Can I use canonical from one site to another having different domains?

    | mgfarte
    0

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