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Category: Technical SEO

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

  • junglefrog


    Hi, I am fairly new to the whole seo thing and am still getting confused a bit as to what to do to sort things out. I've checked the help pages but I cannot seem to find the issue. I've just signed up so my site is crawled for the first time and coming up with more then a 1000 404 errors. I checked a couple of the links via the report I downloaded and it does indeed show a 404 error but when I check the pages all seems to work fine. I did find one issue where an image if clicked on twice was pointing to an url with 'title= at the end. Now I have tried to get of that but couldn't find anything wrong. I'm a bit lost as to where to start!

    | junglefrog
    0
  • getbigyadig


    Anyone have any recommendations?

    | getbigyadig
    0
  • nahopkin


    After running a crawl diagnostics i was surprised to see 336 duplicate page titles. But i am wondering if it is true or not. Most of them are not a page at all but a .php variation. for example: The following are all the same page, but a different limit on viewing listings. Limiting your view to 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 as you choose. .com/?lang=en&limit=5 .com/?lang=en&limit=5&limitstart=10
    .com/?lang=en&limit=5&limitstart=15
    .com/?lang=en&limit=5&limitstart=20
    .com/?lang=en&limit=5&limitstart=25 Same type of things are going on all over the site causing 228 duplicate content errors and the already mentioned 336 duplicate pages. But is "crawl diagnostic telling the truth" or is it just some php thing? I am not a php expert so any input would be much appreciated. What should i do?

    | nahopkin
    0
  • neooptic


    Hi everybody. One of my clients is migrating to a new ecommerce platform, and we need to get a list of urls from the existing site to start mapping out the 301 redirects. Usually, I'd use a tool like Xenu or Integrity to crawl and output a list. However, the database and server setup is so bad that it can't handle the requests from these tools and it sends the site down. This, unsurprisingly, is one of the reasons for the migration. Does anybody know of a way to get a full list of urls without having to make a bunch of http requests which will kill the site? Any advice would be much appreciated!

    | neooptic
    0
  • DMacy


    I am getting duplicate page content and duplicate page title errors for www.mydomain.com and www.mydomain.com/default.aspx. I thought that they were the same page, so I'm not sure how to avoid getting the duplicate content and title errors. Thanks for your help!

    | DMacy
    0
  • digisavvy


    I want to bring my categories down to about 8 or so and the tags... They're just a mess and I'd really like to bring that figure down significantly and setup a standard for usage. My thought was to remove the un-needed tags and categories and setup 301 redirects for the ones that I'm removing. Is that even necessary? Are there tools that can assist with this? What are the "gotchas" I should be aware of? Thanks!

    | digisavvy
    1
  • kchandler


    If i turn an application off displaying a 503 error will that get my site unindexed from search engines?

    | kchandler
    0
  • kevin4803


    So I have a few pages with the same content just with a different URL. http://nadelectronics.com/products/made-for-ipod/VISO-1-iPod-Music-System http://nadelectronics.com/products/speakers/VISO-1-iPod-Music-System http://nadelectronics.com/products/digital-music/VISO-1-iPod-Music-System All pages  rel-canonical to:
    http://nadelectronics.com/products/made-for-ipod/VISO-1-iPod-Music-System My question is... why can't google + (or facebook and twitter for that matter)  consolidate all these pages +1. So if the first two had 5 +1 and the rel-canonical page had 5 +1's. It would be nice for all pages to display 15 +1's not 5 on each. It's my understanding that Google +1 will gives the juice to the correct page. So why not display all the +1's at the same time. Hope that makes sense.

    | kevin4803
    0
  • Trigun


    Hi Guys, To give way to the implementation of Google Panda, I have deleted some of my wordpress blog posts with low quality content. Now, I am seeing some errors in my Webmasters Tools.  What needs to be done so that these errors will be fixed? Thanks....

    | Trigun
    0
  • sesertin


    Hello Everyone, What plugins do you use to speed up wp?

    | sesertin
    0
  • joo


    I start a new webshop within a month about spices and coffee. I'm thinking about the domain name to take. I would like to get visitors from coffee and spice keyword searches. How much does it matter  (in terms of SEO) if I use spiceandcoffee instead of spice-and-coffee? (The site will be hungarian and it sounds easy to remember without the hypen: fuszer-es-kave or fuszereskave.) Does Google weighing more separated keywords in domain, instead of non-separated?

    | joo
    0
  • tdsnet


    Hi, I am looking to find good examples of on-site sitemaps. We already submit our XML sitemap regularly through GWMT but I now wonder if we still need an on-site sitemap, as we have about 30 static pages and 300+ Wordpress blogs which in a sense makes that a spammy page as it has too many links and a higher than average keyword density. The reason I am looking for good examples is that I want to create a basic on-site sitemap that aids navigation but is styled to look ok as well. The Solution I have in mind: mydomain.com/link-example-one.php
    mydomain.com/link-example-two.php
    mydomain.com/liink-example-ten.php mydomain.com/blog then links to my 300 WP blogs, broken down into chunks navigated by using breadcrumbs. Will Google crawl this ok or should I stick to the current format listing ALL posts on one page? Thanks

    | tdsnet
    0
  • tylerfraser


    I have an old blog that I started long ago and it has tons of content. I'm thinking about migrating it my current blog but am worried about panda and bringing over mediocre content. The content is fine, not bad not good. Should I bring it over or should I just delete the blog?

    | tylerfraser
    0
  • ClarityVentures


    Hey Mozzers! I'm a bit confused by a site that is showing a 0 for home page MozRank and MozTrust, while its subdomain and root domain metrics look decent (relatively). I am posting images of the page metrics and subdomain metrics to show the disparity: http://i.imgur.com/3i0jq.png http://i.imgur.com/ydfme.png Is it normal to see this type of disparity? The home page has very little inbound links, but the big goose egg has me wondering if there is something else going on. Has anyone else experienced this? Or, does anyone have speculation as to why a home page would have a 0 MozRank while the subdomain metrics look much better? Thanks!

    | ClarityVentures
    0
  • AlexThomas


    I've got a list of URLs which I need to get URL+domain mozTrust for. Short of systematicly scraping opensiteexplorer.org with my PRO log-in details.. is there any (free) way to do this?
     - The seoMoz API seems to only give mozTrust for it's paid API (not looking for that level of detail in the paid API yet) Cheers

    | AlexThomas
    0
  • blake-76624


    Ok so I am writing different pages and the first heading is an H3 just because I wanted to it be a certain size.  Then as you see the content, I have an H1 tag. Example page: http://www.oxfordmshomes.net/condos/acadia-court-Oxford-MS you can see that "Acadia First" is the first thing you see on the page and it uses an H3 element. Long story short, my hierarchy is wrong.  Does this have any negative effect on my SEO efforts?

    | blake-76624
    0
  • getbigyadig


    I have a static website that I would like to retheme. I have the mockup, and its spliced. The website holds nice rankings right now, and I want to keep them in place. The one thing that will change with this new design is the header will no longer be text, but instead an image.  Is there a way to ensure googlebot still sees the H1 tag header exactly how it is now but use an image for the header instead? I dont want any blackhat tricks that will get me banned. Just wondering if there is a simple way to have googlebot see the header as text (not ALT img txt) so the site does not appear to have changed at all. (It hasnt, I only am changing the graphics and colors of background, and header image for better branding.

    | getbigyadig
    0
  • Filolari


    Hi, I was ranked 16th (second page) on google italy for the keyword "realizzazione siti internet" (high and competitive serach volume) on an internel landing page:  http://www.spotview.it/soluzioni-web-complete/realizzazione-siti-internet.html and everything went fine, that was my strategy planed for placement of selected keyword.The same page was ranked also for more relating keyworks just few position far from the main keyword. Now starts the strange behavior, suddenly on the end of september google.it decides to switch the landing page to the home page of the site! (absolutely not optimized for "realizzazione siti internet") and the for the others releated keyword the url disappear completely from the serp. Checking back into my link building database I found that some guys of my staff inserted wrong new links with the exact keyword "realizzazione siti internet" pointing to the home! not so good! those wrong links are about 10 with exact keyword and another 10 with releated keyword. So I decided to continue inserting links pointing to the right landing page http://www.spotview.it/soluzioni-web-complete/realizzazione-siti-internet.html to balance and to let google switch back to exact url. moreover I also tried to remove some wrong link with a little rate of succes 😞 Could somebody please tell me why now at about 45 day past the "landing switch error" the problem is not solved? somebody has suggestion or strategies to apply? thanks in advance

    | Filolari
    1
  • pixelpointpress


    Our client was having a design firm do some website development work for them. The work was done on a staging server that was blocked with a robots.txt to prevent duplicate content issues. Unfortunately, when the design firm made the changes live, they also moved over the robots.txt file, which blocked the good, live site from search for a full week. We saw the error (!) as soon as the latest crawl report came in. The error has been corrected, but... Does anyone have any experience with a snafu like this? Any idea how long it will take for the damage to be reversed and the site to get back in the good graces of the search engines? Are there any steps we should take in the meantime that would help to rectify the situation more quickly? Thanks for all of your help.

    | pixelpointpress
    0
  • 540SEO


    Here is the robots.txt from a client site. Am I reading this right --
    that the robots.txt is saying to ignore the entire site, but the
    #'s are saying to ignore the robots.txt command? See http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots.html for documentation on how to use the robots.txt file To ban all spiders from the entire site uncomment the next two lines: User-Agent: * Disallow: /

    | 540SEO
    0
  • soltec


    Is there a difference between , and font-weight: bold, in terms of SEO weighting? Does font size make a diffence, relative to the average font size of the page?

    | soltec
    0
  • ChristianMKTG


    Dear all, I have a site which owns .be, .cn, .biz, .com.mx, .de, .us, .info, .net, .org  and all run from the same server and have no difference in content i.e. .com.mx/our-services is the same as .com/our-services Google webmaster help created a video that said multiple international TLDs, same content 'should be ok' - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ets7nHOV1Yo - however, I would like confirmation from practitioners! What is the best practice in this case? Considering none of the content is customised, should I create root level redirects to our .com, or leave as is? Thanks! Christian watch?v=Ets7nHOV1Yo

    | ChristianMKTG
    0
  • smstv


    My WP blog is adding my email during the crawl, and I am getting 200+ errors for similar to the following; http://www.cisaz.com/blog/2010/10-reasons-why-microsofts-internet-explorer-dominance-is-ending/tony@cisaz.net "tony@cisaz.net" is added to Every post. Any ideas how I fix it? I am using Yoast Plug in. Thanks Guys!

    | smstv
    0
  • eseyo2


    A site that I look after is having lots of soft 404 responses for pages that are not 404 at all but unique content pages. the following page is an example: http://www.professionalindemnitynow.com/medical-malpractice-insurance-clinics This page returns a 200 response code, has unique content, but is not getting indexed. Any ideas? To add further information that may well impact your answer, let me explain how this "classic ASP" website performs the SEO Friendly url mapping: All pages within the custom CMS have a unique ID which are referenced with an ?intID=xx parameter. The custom 404.asp file receives a request, looks up the ID to find matching content in the CMS, and then server.transfers the visitor to the correct page. Like I said, the response codes are setup correctly, as far as Firebug can tell me. any thoughts would be most appreciated.

    | eseyo2
    0
  • Bligoo


    Its a bad idea to do a 301 to the home page of the site on all 404 pages as a way of pagerank recovery? If so, why? Thanks,

    | Bligoo
    0
  • strasshgoa


    In my crawl diagnostic summary its showing an error with duplicate page title and duplicate page content...why its been shown and how it can be rectified? I have pne page web site so i was unable to give options for sub domain name is it because of tht?I hope this error wont hamper my SEO process.

    | strasshgoa
    0
  • ChristianMKTG


    Hi all! I have just begun work on a Drupal site which heavily uses the URL Aliases feature. I fear that it is creating duplicate links. For example:: we have http://www.URL.com/index.php and http://www.URL.com/ In addition we are about to switch a lot of links and want to keep the search engine benefit. Am I right in thinking URL aliases change the URL, while leaving the old URL live and without creating search engine friendly redirects such as 301s? Thanks for any help! Christian

    | ChristianMKTG
    0
  • petersen


    I am working on a project, where we have one website, with a country specific domain, which is currently ranking well in local search. The client now wants to expand his business into two new countries (all english speaking) and would like to rank for the same keywords in these two new countries. The customer do not want to create new websites for the new countries. Because its a local domain and the website is setup for local search in GWT with locally hosted server, i expect challenges in optimizing for new countries without impacting the current local ranking. Question 1: What would be the recommended approach for maintaining their existing ranking on local search, while optimizing for the new countries.

    | petersen
    0
  • CeCeBar


    A client has new website design completed by another developer, was launched in April of this year. No 301 redirect was set up so duplicate content is an issue. Client has had a website with same domain name for about 10 years, but has not had any SEO work completed before or since his new site design. For non-www there are 6 referring links - 1 considered to have authority, for www there are also 6 but 3 considered to have authority. More links seem to coming from www than non-www. But for one of the clients keywords they are ranked #1 for their area and that links to their non-www address. And even though no redirects set up by developer, non-www has had far more visits according to Google Analytics. So many basics that still need to be done for site: no meta-descriptions on any page, H1 and page titles could use keywords, call to action moved above fold, etc. Considering this is a new site, and new SEO work and many more inbound links needed, does it matter which address I redirect to? _Cindy Barnard

    | CeCeBar
    0
  • idreams


    Hello All this is my first question here. we have recently changed our website design and backend. so the problem now is in google it is showing the old url's and when ever a client come from google he is prasented with a 404 error page if this happenes many times. will google penalise our site ? if yes. how to prevent this from happen. waiting for some replies.. thanks

    | idreams
    1
  • Dallas


    Hello Team, I noticed that my site has 1,000s of 404 errors. Not sure how this happened, maybe when I updated our CMS. My question is, should I worry about them. Should I delete them or just leave them alone. Thank you for your feedback!

    | Dallas
    0
  • Paul78


    Hi there, We are re-branding & re-structuring our website, there will be quite a number of 301 re-directs, possibly hundreds. The question is: Should i wait until the re-branding has been completed and do al the 301's in one go?, or should I try and do 301's as i go along? Kind Regards

    | Paul78
    0
  • A.Popoviciu


    Hello, I recently received a project that has incredible SERP variation - one month in the top - next month not even in 100. I tried fixing some problems, I also found out the website owners were changing their content - taking their offers down, and so on, and I thought that was the main reason the SERP variate so often. Now I discovered a page that wasn't changed - meaning it's place in the menu and dropped down from the 4'th page to ..i have no idea where it is. The page is: www.filadelfiaturism.ro/oferte-Cazare-Romania/116/oferte-1.html - I looked for the exact title and it didn't ranked at all. Could someone give me some advice?

    | A.Popoviciu
    0
  • Yo_Adrian


    I'm working on a site that has a lot of indexed pages and backlinks to both domain.com and www.domain.com. Will using a 301 redirect to send domain.com to www.domain.com merge all of the indexed pages and links over to www.domain.com, thereby strengthening the www?

    | Yo_Adrian
    0
  • ClaireH-184886


    Hi i am wanting to gain links to my site and make the links relevant and have seen many sites that do not have the keyword on their site and have been told as well as having the keywords in the image that they will also have anchor text from other sites. Can anyone please tell me the important of anchor text and how i should use it. Is it wise to build anchort text links within your own site and what other sites should you be looking for. I have used a few article sites to gain anchor text links but most of these are no follow which does not help me. any advice would be great

    | ClaireH-184886
    0
  • SparkplugDigital


    Hi, Does anyone have an idea on how to determine how many sites within a list of 50 sites link to a specific site? Thanks!

    | SparkplugDigital
    0
  • theLotter


    301 redirects are clearly preferable to 302 redirects for pages that need to be indexed by search engines. If I have 302 redirects to minor pages not getting much traffic regardless of the code, how important (if at all) is changing the redirects to 301? Thanks!

    | theLotter
    0
  • SEOPA


    We're rolling out quite a bit of pro video and hosting on a 3-party platform/player (likely BrightCove) that also allows us to have the URL reside on our domain. Here is a scenario for a particular video asset: A. It's on a product page that the video is relevant for. B. We have an entry on our blog with the video C. We have a separate section of our site "Video Library" that provides a centralized view of all videos. It's there too. D. We eventually give the video to other sites (bloggers, industry educational sites etc) for outreach and link-building. A through C on our domain are all for user experience as every page is very relevant, but are there any duplicate video issues here? We would likely only have the transcript on the product page (though we're open to suggestions). Any related feedback would be appreciated. We want to make this scalable and done properly from the beginning (will be rolling out 1000+ videos in 2010)

    | SEOPA
    0
  • Bragg


    Hi All, We're creating a sub-domain for a new program launch on a client site and we need to choose the "right" sub-domain name that properly reflects the offering and hopefully keyword driven. The client is already using the preferred sub-domain name but until we get clarification that we can take it over, I'm doing my due diligence and expecting a worst case scenario in that we cannot use it. The current preferred sub-domain is only a landing page (not a full site) and it does NOT rank for anything and it's not being built out further. My question: Would pluralizing our preferred keyword have any effect in the way SEs see the two sub-domains as they're very closely related? hardcandy.sitename.com or hardcandies.sitename.com The new sub-domain would be a fully-functional-SEO-friendly site (well that's the plan anyway). Thanks for all your help.

    | Bragg
    0
  • Greenman


    Hi, some weeks ago a created a blog:  mykeyword.wordpress.com Some one told me that it has got more trust that a "normal" www.mykeyword.com
    Is it true? So, i wrote some articles and dropped  a guide (linking inside to mysite.com) to blog. My question is:
    Right now i'm writing a lot of article ad i'm looking for the best channel where publish my content (post with link inside). My focus is improving quantity and quality of backlinks. Which way must i use? 1. Use my mykeyword.wordpress.com (give freshness to blog and new backlink)
    2. Create ad internal blog   mysite.com/blog and add article (without link?)
    3. "Don't lose time" - Put new article only in external blog that will link to my site. I must manage a lot of new sites and i should increase SERP position. So, i have to choose the right way right now. Thanks 😉

    | Greenman
    0
  • Brandtailers


    A recent SEOMoz crawl report is showing a bunch 404's and duplicate page content on pages with urls like http://domain.com/categories/about/feed/feed/feed/feed/feed and on and on. This is a wordpress install. Does anyone know what could be causing this or why SEOMoz would be trying to read these non-existent feed pages?

    | Brandtailers
    0
  • stefanok


    Hi there I have a domain which has a sitemap in html for regular users and a sitemap in xml for the spiders. I have a warning via seomoz saying that i have too many links on the html version. What do i do here? regards Stef

    | stefanok
    0
  • mikescotty


    I'm recommending some on-page optimization for a home builder building in several new home communities. The site has been through some changes in the past few months and we're almost starting over. The current URL structure is http://homebuilder.com/oakwood/features where homebuilder = builder name Oakwood Estates= name of community features = one of several sub-paths including site plan, elevations, floor plans, etc. The most attainable keyword phrases include the word 'home' and 'townname' I want to change the URL path to: http://homebuilder.com/oakwood-estates-townname-homes/features Is there any problem with doing this?  It just seems to make a lot of sense. Any input would be appreciated.

    | mikescotty
    0
  • Pherogab


    Hi, I'm creating recommendations for one of my client's site. It's a news site highly based on a regional aspect. One of the main features would be that you can navigate on a high level, we call it inter-regional (with all the regions news) and on the regional level (with only news related to the region) which act as a filter which means that most of my content will be duplicate. To allow the user to navigate the site on the two levels means that all the news pages will be duplicated, one with the inter-regional URL and one with the regional URL. Example: http://www.sitename.com/category/2011/11/07/name-of-the-article http://www.sitename.com/region-name/category/2011/11/07/name-of-the-article The regional URL is the official one, since it has all the keywords I want, and I'm planning to have a canonical on both version with the regional URL. Is there a risk that this would affect my ranking? Any alternatives? I read that I could prevent SE to crawl inter-regional articles using my robot.txt but I'm not fond of that. Thanks!

    | Pherogab
    0
  • esendex


    Hello, Our website currently has what I would call educational and sales pages - which sells our services and also a techy section for the developer community. The developer pages on the website have some of the highest authority pages that we have and equates for about 50% of the content. It has been proposed to move the developer pages onto their own domain - away from the main website. Now, would this crush a lot of the SEO benefit that we have on our main site? Does anyone know of a workable solution that would help retain the SEO. Would linking to our main site from the developer site help? It would be great to hear what people think, Thanks,

    | esendex
    0
  • bonnierSEO


    If there are canonical tags pointing to the web version of each mobile page, what should a robots.txt file for a mobile site have?

    | bonnierSEO
    0
  • gmk1567


    How to control date display in the Google video SERP? Even if pages don't have dates in it, Google displays dates for some results. Try with this: Search query: Thanks video Check the third result. Thanks.

    | gmk1567
    0
  • Horizon


    All, My site is rather complicated, but I will try to break down my question as simply as possible. I have a robots.txt document in the root level of my site to disallow robot access to /_system/, my CMS. This looks like this: # /robots.txt file for http://webcrawler.com/
    # mail webmaster@webcrawler.com for constructive criticism **User-agent: ***
    Disallow: /_system/ I have another robots.txt file in another level down, which is my holiday database - www.mysite.com/holiday-database/ - this is to disallow access to /holiday-database/ControlPanel/, my database CMS. This looks like this: **User-agent: ***
    Disallow: /ControlPanel/ Am I correct in thinking that this file must also be in the root level, and not in the /holiday-database/ level? If so, should my new robots.txt file look like this: # /robots.txt file for http://webcrawler.com/
    # mail webmaster@webcrawler.com for constructive criticism **User-agent: ***
    Disallow: /_system/
    Disallow: /holiday-database/ControlPanel/ Or, like this: # /robots.txt file for http://webcrawler.com/
    # mail webmaster@webcrawler.com for constructive criticism **User-agent: ***
    Disallow: /_system/
    Disallow: /ControlPanel/ Thanks in advance. Matt

    | Horizon
    0
  • stefanok


    I was reading  the "How Search Engines Work" which is chapter 1 of the Beginners Guide to SEO by SEOMOZ. Came across an interesting point: "Don’t put the text that you want indexed inside images. For example, if you want your company name or address to be indexed, make sure it is not displayed inside a company logo." Surely most people will alt text their images with keywords or am i missing something here?

    | stefanok
    0
  • Trigun


    Hi Guys, I've been doing much cleaning on my blog lately and deleted numerous categories including their posts with low quality content. After deleting the categories, Google Webmaster Tools is reporting some 404 errors about the RSS Feeds for the deleted categories. I've created a 404.php file inside my theme and placed the following code header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
    header("Location: http://www.mysite.com/My404Page/", true, 301);
    exit();
    ?> this have catched all 404 errors and redirected them to the specific page. Unfortunately, it could not catch the inactive feed urls.  Is there a way to do this so that all inactive feeds will be redirected to my 404 page? Thanks in advance....

    | Trigun
    0

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