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Category: Technical SEO

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


  • Hey all, I just had a crawl test done on my site(created using wordpress) and I received a ton of missing meta tag descriptions to fix. The odd thing is though I use "All in One" SEO Tool and the actual pages or posts on the site do have meta tag descriptions, however I noticed for every post an RSS Feed is being automatically generated and this Feed is the culprit without meta tag descriptions. I am totally clueless on how to resolve these errors as I havent installed any WP plugins that generate feeds automatically. Has anyone encountered this problem before or know how to fix this?? The site url is http:// GovernmentGrantsAustralia . org I have left spaces above to avoid being a link dropper 🙂 Would really appreciate if anyone can help! Thanks a million, Jus

    | justin99
    0

  • I've been cleaning up the back link profiles for a certain page on our site, my question is once I'm happy with the new link profile and I want to submit the URL for reconsideration can I submit just one URL or will Google take a look through the entire site?

    | DanHill
    0

  • We're looking for a new CMS and out development company suggested Sitefinity. I've had great success with Wordpress. Is either system better. I love worpdress but have had no experience with Sitefinity. Thanks!

    | StandUpCubicles
    0

  • If I wanted to rank for "red hot widgets" and my domain was redhot.com, would it be better to obtain backlinks (via "red hot widgets" anchor text) pointing to: A) redhot.com (homepage) or B) redhot.com/widgets Many thanks.

    | martyc
    0

  • Hi All, We lost a lot of good rankings over the weekend with no obvious cause. Our top keyword went from p3 to p12, for example. Site speed is pretty bad (slower than 92% of sites!) but it has always been pretty bad. I'm on to the dev team to try and crunch this (beyond image optimisation) but I know that something I can effect is the number of 301 redirects we have in place. We have hundreds of 301s because we've been, perhaps incorrectly, adding one every time we find a new crawl error in GWT and it isn't because of a broken link on our site or on an external site where we can't track down the webmaster to fix the link. Is this bad practice, and should we just ignore 404s caused by external broken URLs? If we wanted to reduce these numbers, should we think about removing ones that are only in place due to external broken URLs? Any other tips for safely reducing the number of 301s? Thanks, all! Chris

    | BaseKit
    0

  • Hi, I'm looking to register some country specific domains, and I'm looking for either a host that offers international hosting options in these countries, or recommendations for companies I should be looking at. The countries in question are: Germany France Spain Italy Portugal Thanks in advance for any help.

    | notnem
    0

  • Hello, I have ran Link Analysis report in Site Explorer for my client qtmoving.com http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/comparisons?site=www.qtmoving.com These competitors are the top 3 that consistently appear in the Local
    Search top 7 or the Local Search Blended SERP. I don't understand why I have No Internal Followed Links, no Internal Links, and only 2 external followed and external links.  This doesn't make sense to me because I know there are links internally and that there are some sites that link back to us: I'm not sure how this can happen when we have the following sites that
    link to us:
    http://www.bbb.org/manitoba/business-reviews/moving-storage-companies/quick-transfer-ltd-in-winnipeg-mb-14125
    http://www.yelp.ca/biz/quick-transfer-ltd-winnipeg
    http://www.ourbis.com/617657-quick-transfer-ltd-winnipeg Your help is greatly appreciated. Thank you, Lyn

    | CohesiveMarketing
    0

  • Hey All, trying to figure out how concerned I should be about this. So here is the scoop, would appreciate your thoughts. We have several eCommerce websites that have been affected by Panda, do to  content from manufacturers and lack of original content. We have been working hard to write our own descriptions and are seeing an increase in traffic again. We have also been writing blogs since February and are getting a lot of visits to them. Here is the problem, our blog pages are now outranking our homepage when you type in site:domain-name Is this a problem? our home page does not show up until you are 3 pages in. However when you type in just our domain name in google as a search it does show up in position one with sitelinks under it. This is happening across both of our sites. Is this a cause for concern or just natural due to our blogs being more popular than our homepage. Thanks! Josh

    | prima-253509
    0

  • I have a client that has two domians registered - one uses www.keywordaustralia.com the other uses www.keywordaelaide.com He had already bought and used the first domain when he came to me I suggested the second as being worth buying as going for a more local keyword would be more appropriate. Now I have suggested to him that a blog would be a worthy use of the second domain and a way to build links to his site - however I am reading that as all links will be from the same site it wont be worth much in the long run and an internal blog is better as it means updated content on his site. should i use the second domain for blog, or just 301 the second domain to his first domain. Or is it viable to use the second domain as the blog and just set up an rss feed on his page ? Is there a way to have the second domain somehow 'linked' to his first domain with the blog so that google sees them as connected ? NOOBIE o_0

    | mamacassi
    0

  • Hi gang. I'm a new SEO and I'm currently working on the redesign of a website. I have just discovered a ton of hidden pages that are filled with duplicate content, basically reiterating the main keyword in a variety of different variations. Each page is titled with the variation on the keyword phrase and then has one paragraph of text very similar to the previous page, etc. Here is an example of one of the offensive pages (nice lookin' site, eh?): http://www.vasectomy-reversals.com/vasectomy_reversal_surgery.html The new site will not have any of these pages.  I'm writing the 301 redirects now and want to redirect these offensive pages to the most relevant page on the new site. But, I'm afraid to redirect the offensive pages. Should I leave them alone, or can I have the former developer remove them?  Help. Don't know how to handle these pages and their redirects. Thanks for your help! ~ Mills

    | Mills
    0

  • We have a site search that is causing a huge amount of errors as the SEOmoz crawler is showing these as duplicate content. Our first thought was to do a no-follow on the site-search directory, but we realized that the site search is /site-search.aspx and URl strings appear at the end for hundreds of pages. How dow we/how can we no-follow an undetermined amount of URL strings?

    | Apptixweb
    0

  • I apoligize if this question as been asked before, I couldnt' find in the Q&A though. I noticed Google has been indexing our IP address for some pages (ie: 123.123.123.123/page.html instead of domain.com/page.html). I suspect this is possibly due to a few straggler relative links instead of absolute, or possibly something else I'm not thinking of. My less-evasive solution a few months back was to ensure canonical tags were on all pages, and then replaced any relative links w/ absolutes.  This does not seem to be fixing the problem though, as recently as today new pages were scooped up with the IP address. My next thought is to 301 redirect any IP address URL to the domain, but I was afraid that may be too drastic and that the canonical should be sufficient (which it doesn't seem to be). Has anyone dealt with this issue?  Do you think the 301 would be a safe move, any other suggestions? thanks.

    | KT684
    0

  • Hi, I am new here and I have noticed that open site explorer reports about half of the links on  my page. I am really interested in knowing your perspective on this. cheers, Vishal

    | vishalkhialani
    0

  • Hi, I've discovered that Googlebot's are voting on products listed on our website and as a result are creating negative ratings by placing votes from 1 to 5 for every product. The voting function is handled using Javascript, as shown below, and the script prevents multiple votes so most products end up with a vote of 1, which translates to "poor". How do I go about using robots.txt to block a URL with specific parameters only? I'm worried that I might end up blocking the whole product listing, which would result in de-listing from Google and the loss of many highly ranked pages. DON'T want to block: http://www.mysite.com/product.php?productid=1234 WANT to block: http://www.mysite.com/product.php?mode=vote&productid=1234&vote=2 Javacript button code: onclick="javascript: document.voteform.submit();" Thanks in advance for any advice given. Regards,
    Asim

    | aethereal
    0

  • In all of my campaigns, I have a lot of URLs with too many links on the page (defined loosely as around or over 100 links per page); these links are virtually all found on blog pages. The link count shoots up quickly when you start using things like tag clouds, showing all the tags/categories a post is in, in addition to all the cross linking thats typical of blog posts. My question is: Does this matter? Do you work to get blog pages down under that 100 link limit, or just assume most blogs are like this and move along? If you think it does matter, what strategies have you used to cut down the number of links while still keeping popular elements like tag clouds?

    | AdoptionHelp
    0

  • Hello, We have many pages in our crawler report that are showing duplicate content.  However, the content is not duplicateon the pages.  It is somewhat close, but different.  I am not sure how to fix the problem so it leaves our report. Here is an example.  It is showing these as duplicate content to each other. www.soccerstop.com/c-119-womens.aspx www.soccerstop.com/c-120-youth.aspx www.soccerstop.com/c-124-adult.aspx Any help you could provide would be most appreciated.  I am going through our crawler report and resolving issues, and this seems to be big one for us with lots in the report, but not sure what to do about it. Thanks
    James

    | SoccerStop
    0

  • I sell RV Parts online.  Our organization is called The ROUTE 66 RV Network, so we brand everything around ROUTE 66.  When we launched our store 2 years ago, we launched it with the domain: parts66.com We have a PR of 2, and we have been doing an SEO linkbuilding campaign ever since it has been around. Our primary keyword that we are trying to rank for is RV PARTS We also own the domain: rvparts66.com My question is: Is there a significant benefit to switching our URL to RVPARTS66.COM?  Does having our primary keyword a part of our URL give us an SEO benefit?  If so, what is the best way to keep any credit we have built for our original domain? We are in the process of a complete site overhaul which will launch in a couple weeks, so if there is ever a time to switch domains, the time is now. Thanks! jc

    | steve-288618
    0

  • How to change "votes" to "reviews" in the search result while implementing microdata / rich snippet?

    | gmk1567
    0

  • Any thoughts on the EzineArticles plugin for WordPress?  I read that it provides "the ability to simultaneously publish new posts to the web and submit them as articles to EzineArticles.com"  Could this lead to duplicate content penalties?

    | martyc
    0

  • Another problem SEOMOZ reported is that my title tags are too long. However, when I type in the title and the description for a particular page on Joomla, the description later appears not only as the meta description, but as part of the page title as well, thus the title appears to be too long. I have no idea how to seperate those two. Anyone?

    | polyniki
    0

  • Hi there everybody, I am a total SEO newbie and i am burning with questions. I had my site crawled and found out that it contains too many links. The reason is that it is a site where I constantly write news and articles and each one of them is a new Joomla item, thus a new link. I actually thought lots of content is good for SEO. How am I supposed to reduce the link amount?

    | polyniki
    0

  • Hi all For various reasons some of our pages were renamed from: http://www.meresverige.dk/rejser/malmoe to: http://www.meresverige.dk/rejser/malmo We have made proper 301 redirects and also updated sitemap.xml accordingly. The change was done about 5th of September. The content on the pages remain identical. This page, and all pages below it in the structure now get very low or no page-rank at all. Much lower than it was before the name change. Any ideas to how long, if ever, it will take for Google to transfer the page-rank from the old page? Any suggestions to what we can do to make the process faster?

    | Resultify
    0

  • We have a compeditor who we are in a legal dispute at the moment, and they are using under hand tactics to cause us to have bad links and crawl errors and i do not know how they are doing it or how to stop it. The crawl errors we are getting is the site having two urls together, for example www.testsite.com/www.testsite.com and other errors are pages that we do not even have or pages that are spelt wrong or have a dot after the page name. We have been told off a number of people in our field that this has also happened to them and i would like to know how they are doing it so we can have this stopped Since they have been doing this our traffic has gone down by half

    | ClaireH-184886
    0

  • My website has thousands of pages and I have so many keywords on the bottom of page 1 and on page 2 of SERPs. I am considering making the site smaller to lessen the dilution of the overall domain authority and in theory the remainder pages should get pushed up in rank. Do you feel this theory is flawed? Is it better to 301 or remove the pages if they don't have backlinks directly to the internal page? These are pages I would re-enable down the road once overall domain authority is increased. thanks, David couponcactus.com

    | CouponCactus
    0

  • I have a site thatsit.net.au I have never really promoted, but it used to
    rank ok, the other day I decided I should spend some time on it as its my own
    site and potential customers expect to see my own site rank well. I did a bit
    of checking and in Bing I come up in first 4 for Web Development Perth, that is in
    the .au TLD for Australia,
    but in Google I am like 700+. If I take this line out of my home page and put it in quotes “a local Perth web development company”  I see I am the only person in the world to have
    this long tail query in both Bing and Google. If I search for the same without
    quotes in Bing I come up first. If I do so in Google, I come up absolutely last.
    I thought I must be flagged, but Google have replied that there is no manual
    action taken on my site. I have no answer for this, It is hard to believe if I am the only person in
    the world to have a long tail term that I would come last for it. Any ideas? I hope Matt Cutts reads this, and can come up with an explanation
    besides write good and useful content.

    | AlanMosley
    0

  • Hi, I am trying to block all the archive pages of my blog as Google is indexing them. This could lead to duplicate content issue. I am not using default blogger theme or classic theme and therefore, I cannot use this code therein: Please suggest me how I can instruct Google not to index archive pages of my blog? Looking for quick response.

    | SoftzSolutions
    0

  • Hello, Last February one of my clients websites was delisted. It turns out that some time ago that had attempted to launch a social network along time lines of ning. The project had fallen apart of the was still up. At some point spammers found it and started using it as part of a link farm. Once it was discovered, the subdomain it was posted on was removed and the website returned to search within 2 weeks. Last week, the website disappeared again OSE shows that in the last 2 months the website has got 2000 (There are about 16,000 total spam links) additional spam links now pointing and the root domain. On top of that, Google Webmaster Tools is reporting about 15,000 404 errors. I have blocked Google from crawling the path where the path were the spam pages used to be. If there a way to block the 1000s of inbound spam links?

    | Simple_Machines
    0

  • We have started SEO for our nestle-family.com/english/ site. However, till date only just 1 page has been crawled. What are the reason for the pages not being crawled?

    | Francis_GlobalMediaInsight
    0

  • Hello~ People! I have a questions regarding eTag. I know Google support If-Modified-HTTP-Header aka last modified header. I used eTag instead of last modified header. It seems like Google does support, yet here is my questions. code.google suggest as following. GData-Version: 2.0
    ETag: "C0QBRXcycSp7ImA9WxRVFUk." but I used etag as following . ETag: "10cd712-eaae-b279a480" I didnt include "GData-Version: 2.0". is this mean Google may not support my etag?

    | Artience
    0

  • Hi. We have just launched a new website that is fully secure with the HTTPS url. You can still access the home page with an ordinary HTTP address. That is what we want to change. Should we forward the HTTP url to the HTTPS? Redirect? It is the same URL for both. http://www.parrotmoon.com   Thank you for all ideas! Jay

    | theideapeople
    0

  • If two websites are on the same  c class IP address, what does it mean ? Does two websites belong to the same company ?

    | seoug_2005
    0

  • Hi i am trying to find out if it is possible for me to put a search term down and found out what companies are using this. I know you can do this with google but i am finding that it is not bringing up the right results. What i am trying to do is, search for a search word that is being used on their content pages, so for example, if i put down the word holidays in spain, i want to find that word being used in their content and not the site being in google. Hope this makes sense, so i am trying to find how many companies out there use a certain search phrase in their content any help would be great

    | ClaireH-184886
    0

  • Hi what is the best way to promote a blog or a blog article. What i want to do is to find a site when i can put part of the article on that site and then have a link going to my blog for the article. Can anyone recommend any sites that do this please or the best ways to promote a new article from a blog

    | ClaireH-184886
    0

  • Hello, we've changed our CMS recently, everything seems to work well, but for some reason google, and other crawlers can't see or index other pages than main. There is no restriction in robots, nor any other visible issue. Please help if you can. Website: http://www.design-glassware.com/

    | divan
    0

  • Hi can anyone recommend some good hosting companies in the UK as my hosting company are now considering charging for technical advice. I use some standard packages as well as a dedicated server and would be grateful if you could give me some examples on prices as well as service which includes technical service.

    | ClaireH-184886
    0

  • I was looking through our links since the last OSE update and was surprised to found several links which I have no idead how they got there. What made me suspicious is that the anchor text is relevant, but when i'm checking the page I don't see the link anymore (or can't access it, like in the first example). Some of those links : http://www.samsung.com/global/business/telecomm/product/download/SMT-G3210_opensrc_v2.01.tbz?diskuse=1&reakce=116246&clanek_id=11555 http://www.nyse.com/sspexternal/widget/nyse_dna.gg?location1=1&id=31866&sl2=1?id=28523&ncid=12930 http://www.census.gov/housing/povmeas/pov00/povpu00.sas7bdat?acad=20&dpt=10&niv_scol=CM2&annee=2010&form_action=resultat http://www.aarp.org/espanol/estados/texas.html/privmsg.php?mode=post&u=23 http://www.census.gov/procur/www/2010dris/web-briefing/cust-satisfaction-internal-dmd.wpd?p=9836 http://www.ups.com/asia/cn/chsindex.html/board27-das-wohnzimmer/board31-die-couch/search/Environmental_health/Food_safety__illness_and_contamination.aspx http://my.so-net.net.tw/hvgo2000/web/images/03?faq&page=4392 http://www.familytreemaker.com/users/c/l/a/index.html?replyto=104201 I don't even know if those links are real since I can't access many of those pages...

    | Aeronet
    0

  • | | Hi. We receive advice to include so many Meta values in the Head Tag on each page.  Which ones are really needed and are really valuable in the SEO effort? |
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    |   | | Thank you for your help and ideas! Jay

    | theideapeople
    0

  • Anyone have any success stories on what they did to get out of Google penalty?

    | phatride
    0

  • So, I am working on a shopping cart platform (X-Cart) and so far don't like it. Also, the web designer is not someone I've worked with before and he is understandably conservative about access--which limits what I can and cannot do from the back end. One of the things I like to do is include text for the search engines. However, based on conversion, etc., I think the product images on a landing page (main brand info with specific products that show up) should show up first to move toward conversion first. I am thinking of adding the text below the product images on the brand pages so the viewer sees the products first while still keeping the content seo. My practice is to use between 300-350 words minimum on a page. Just wondering what best practices you have for a shopping cart. Care to share? Any tips or hints? Thoughts on what I might do that would be most effective? As always, thanks in advance for your sage advice!

    | TheARKlady
    0

  • Hi I'm thinking about changing the title tag for all my pages daily, updating it with the most current price information. (As I think this could improve CTR) All the other keywords in the title tag would remain the same however. Does anyone think this is likely to cause a problem with regards to ranking in Google and other search engines? Thanks for any / all replies! Cheers

    | joeprice
    0

  • We are a dealership group, we have 2 locations that have multiple brands/multiple business names. IE Chrysler store along with smart... and Infiniti along with Mitsubishi. On Google Places, we can only claim one location per business (based on their guidelines), yet these brands are different. Any suggestions on overcoming this obstacle?

    | autoczar
    0

  • I was under the impression that you really should have a robots.txt page, and not having one is pretty bad. However, hubspot (which I'm not impressed with) does not have the capability of properly implementing one. Will this hurt the site?

    | StandUpCubicles
    1

  • When you use text in a div like this: <div id="container"> <h1 id="doc-header">Your Business in your Location - Your Services</h1> <p>Top industries are getting hit.p> <div id="branding"> <a href="#"> <img id="logo" src="images/logo.png" alt="Your Site" /> </a> </div> Are there SEO consequences when you put text in divs?

    | PlusPort
    0

  • Hello, We get tons of comments on Facebook about our blog. We get no comments on our actual blog. So I'm really leaning towards putting facebook comments to replace my blogs comments - http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/13/series-a-whopper-benchmark-invests-33m-in-new-bi-company-domo/ I was looking at techcrunch's code and it looks like none of that information is actually being consider content on their site. The code looks like: Even with tons of comments. So I am thinking that a huge amount of facebook comments does nothing for your onsite SEO. You get no more content and nothing is changing on your page, despite even an unprecedented amount of conversation. Perhaps the only thing you would get from this is the off site SEO - which would be traffic and exposure on facebook. I'm not asking if I should do this or not. I'm really asking: do you agree with what I said above. Thanks Tyler

    | tylerfraser
    1

  • For example lets say I'm looking to rank for “Window Glass Replacement”. What kinds of articles should I create for this? Does it matter? Should I create articles such as How to know if your windows need replacement, then have the text in my link say “Window Glass Replacement.” Should I try and vary the link name? Should I vary the titles of my articles, or just make sure the content is different?

    | marker-311528
    0

  • "Most business map their IP address/Hostname" What does above statement imply ?

    | seoug_2005
    0

  • Hi, i have a problem with the following website: http://goo.gl/EuF4E Google always indexes the site with session-id, although i use canonical url in this page. Indexed sites: http://goo.gl/RQnaD Sometimes it goes right, but sometimes wrong. Is it because we separate our session-id with ";" as separator? In the Google Webmaster Tools, i can´t choose jsessid as a parameter, so i think google does not recognize this. But if we have to change it (f.e. ? as separator) we have to spend many days in programming. Any ideas? thanks for your help!

    | tdberlin
    0

  • When I fetch my website as Googlebot it returns 404s for all the images on the page. This despite the fact that each image is hyperlinked! What could be causing this issue? Thanks!

    | Netpace
    0

  • I thank anyone reading this for their consideration and time. We are a large site with millions of URLs for our product pages.  We are also a textbook company, so by nature, our products have two separate ISBNs: a 10 digit and a 13 digit form.  Thus, every one of our books has at least two pages (10 digit and 13 digit ISBN page).  My issue is that we have established a 301 for all the 10 digit URLs so they automatically redirect to the 13 digit page.  This fix has been in place for months.  However, Google still reports that they are detecting thousands of pages with duplicate title and meta tags.  Google is referring to these page URLs that I already have 301ed to the canonical version many months ago!  Is there anything that I can do to fix this issue?  I don't understand what I am doing wrong. Example:
    http://www.bookbyte.com/product.aspx?isbn=9780321676672
    http://www.bookbyte.com/product.aspx?isbn=032167667X As you can see the 10 digit ISBN page 301s to 13 digit canonical version.  Google reports that they have detected duplicate title and meta tags between the two pages and there are thousands of these duplicate pages listed. To add some further context:  The ISBN is just a parameter that allows us to provide content when someone searches for a product with the 10 or 13 digit ISBN.  The 13 digit version of the page is the only physical page that exists, the 10 digit is only a part of the virtual URL structure of the website.  This is why I cannot simply change the title and meta tags of the 10 digit pages because they only exist in the sense that the URL redirects to the 13 digit version.  Also, we submit a sitemap every day of all the 13 digit pages so Google knows exactly what our physical URL structure is.  I have submitted this question to GWMT forums and received no replies.

    | dfinn
    0

  • My website is www.theradiatorgallery.com I have been trying to get on 1st page for designer radiators. I am currently ranked 21st just dropped to the 3rd page within the past hour, i was 20th before this. There are some sites that i would think i would rank better than due do i have better on page optimization, higher PA, DA and PR based on seo moz reports. Is there something wrong with my site that i am missing? the sites i feel i should rank better than are; radsnrails.co.uk, warmrooms.co.uk and a couple others Any help would be great! Thanks Guys

    | myloseo
    0

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