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Category: Technical SEO

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

  • ukss1984


    In an attempt to improve the speed of our site, We have installed Cache_Lite extension for PHP. Its a PEAR based system which converts dynamic pages into static pages. The system is set to delete the temp files every 15 minutes, at which point any changes / new content will appear on the system. I don't see any risk of doing this but thought it safe to double check if there could be any impact on Google by doing it?

    | ukss1984
    0
  • CommercePundit


    Today, I have watched such a great video on YouTube from Google Webmaster Help with following subject. Does selling the same product on three different domains look spammy? Now, I have same issue with my three websites. You can find out details as follow. Traditional Table Lamp in Brushed Steel Finsih with Green Glass http://www.lampslightingandmore.com/50_63_21594/traditional-table-lamp-in-brushed-steel-finsih-with-green-glass.html http://www.vistastores.com/indoorlighting-roycelighting-rtl50091-12b.html 7.5' Patio Umbrella Push Tilt - Olefinhttp://www.vistapatioumbrellas.com/marketumbrellas-californiaumbrella-slpt758-f13-red.htmlhttp://www.vistastores.com/marketumbrellas-californiaumbrella-slpt758-f13-red.htmlThere are three different website with 4000+ same products, same Title tag, same Meta description, same price, same details, same SKU number, same images and same details.There are very few pages indexed by Google for VistaStores.com. [I have submitted series of question on SEOmoz Q & A forum to resolve my website's crawling issue.]I assume that, this is one of biggest reason to stop my crawling. So, How can I fix it?

    | CommercePundit
    0
  • Socialdude


    Hi I'm helping a collegue with his website. For what ever reason the pages in the Solutions Menu are not being found in the search result for keywords related to the pages. (Homepage mainly comes up in the search result). Does anyone have any advise to why this may be happening? *To give you a bit of a background understanding, previously all the menu content was copied (which I made him change), he also had hidden text on some pages (i made him remove, white text on white background) plus the url structure changed as well. Persoanlly I think he is over using , links, internal linking is not great & the general content is not great in the menu. Your Thoughts are welcomed, thank you.

    | Socialdude
    0
  • CommercePundit


    I have created one campaign over SEOmoz tools for my website. I have found 89 duplicate content issue from report. Please, look in to Duplicate Page Content Issue. I am quite confuse to resolve this issue. Can any one suggest me best solution to resolve it?

    | CommercePundit
    0
  • irvingw


    I am attending SMXEast and one of the speakers is strongly encouraging to use the markup from schema.org. Does anyone have experience with the markup from schema.org and were you able to track any outcome in the search rankings based on adding this markup?

    | irvingw
    0
  • RobMay


    For our corporate business level domain, we are exploring using a hyphenated sub-domain foir a project. Something like www.go-figure.extreme.com I thought from a user perspective it seems cluttered. The domain length might also be an issue with the new Algorithm big G has launched in recent past. I know with past experience, hyphenated domains usually take longer to index, as they are used by spammers more frequently and can take longer to get out of the supplementary index. Our company site has over 90 million viewers / year, so our brand is well established and traffic isn't an issue. This is for a corporate level project and I didn't have the answer! Will this work? anyone have any experience testing this. Any thoughts will help! Thanks, Rob

    | RobMay
    0
  • getzen56


    Hi all, My site was hacked about a year ago and as a result I now have a ton of back links from irrelevant sites pointing to pages on my site that no longer exist. The followed back links section on the Competitive domain analysis tool shows about 3 pages worth of these horrible links. I have 2 questions: how bad is this for my site's SEO (which isn't good anyway, Page Rank 0) and how do I get rid of them? Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks, Andy WkXz0

    | getzen56
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  • Webxtrakt


    A SEOmoz report indicates that we have a large number of links on our pages, mainly due to an embedded mega-drop down and lots of product display options that are user activated, but otherwise hidden. Most of the links have the paramter href="#", because the links are used in combination with jQuery to trigger actions. It is still possible to trigger the actions without the href parameter, so the question is: Do links without href parameters count towards the total amount of links on the page, since a link without a href parameter is actually an internal page link? Our site (this version of the site has not had empty tags removed): http://emilea.be/

    | Webxtrakt
    0
  • NEWCRAFT


    I WAS WONDERING WHAT THE BESTPRACTICE IS WHEN USING CANONICAL TAGS: or 2:

    | NEWCRAFT
    0
  • Hakkasan


    Hello, For functionality purposes, I need to wrap separate blocks of content with a tag. The main question is whether Google will follow this URL, even though it is not a hyperlink on the page, just a URL used for functionality purposes. We will have 10-20 of these types of span tags with a different URL for each one, and we just want to be sure that Google will not be following these URLs that are not links. Thanks!

    | Hakkasan
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  • seomasters


    Im trying to find an api which I can intergrate with my database for onsite keyword checking.  Does anyone know if there is one available on the market? thanks, Chris

    | seomasters
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  • Opiyo


    The website is http://www.masterpieceinteriors.co.uk/ I'm not sure why the homepage title is reading 'masterpieces' in Google but looks fine here. There seem to be 2 versions of the homepage coming up in google - you can see them both by searching 'masterpieceinteriors' and then 'masterpiece interiors'. Some help would be hugely appreciated!

    | Opiyo
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  • seoug_2005


    I would need clarification from an old seomoz post -  http://www.seomoz.org/q/rankings-changing-based-on-location-within-a-country-normal Particulary the following part - If you type in "Clear browser cache", Google KNOWS what browser you are using and can add the "Firefox" term in on your behalf, without it being apparent to the user What does it mean ? Thanks

    | seoug_2005
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  • poolguy


    What is a tool to use so that I can visualize all links to all pages on the site so that I can discover how certain duplicate content URLs are being created?

    | poolguy
    0
  • mickey11


    I found the following blog. It is pagerank 5 do follow http://www.unssc.org/web1/programmes/rcs/cca_undaf_training_material/teamrcs/forumdetail.asp?ID=32 If you attempt to leave a comment with html, the html is removed. There is a button which allows you to leave a comment but if you do it gets redirected to the domain of the blog not your site. However there are still people leaving links with the url of the intended site. As late as today. look at this comment
    Comment posted by : Alex on 09/09/2011 I love to se percorsi on this site very often How is this done, if anyone knows I got the code done to this your keywords The important part being mce_real_href

    | mickey11
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  • adriot


    Hi, We have a www domain that I have changed to a non www domain. The www domain had been in place for some time and had a good page rank, PR4. After this change the page rank dropped significantly (PR0, and now recently back to PR2) despite it being a 301 redirect which I thought  "should" carry over the page rank. Yes, I am aware I should have just left it be. Hind sight 20/20 .. ya ya ya 🙂 My questions Is the 301 the correct method for this? Why did the page rank drop despite the 301? Should we go back to the www domain at this point? Thanks Kris

    | adriot
    0
  • Bush_JSM


    Hi Mozzers, I have a question regarding a tactic I'm considering for a client.  My client has a web hosting company and is ranking well for his keywords and in position 3 for his main term. There is a site available on flippa that is a keyword rich domain and has a decent link portfolio and domain authority and the price is attractive. I'm considering buying it to 301 it to his domain but I've never done this tactic before. Is this grey/black hat? Has anyone done this before and to what extent did it work? Thanks Bush

    | Bush_JSM
    0
  • pauledwards


    Hi everyone I would appreciate some advice on the following. I have a page which has some nice content on but it also has a search functionality. When a search is run a querystrong is run. So i will get something like mypage.php?id=20 etc. With many different url potentials, will each query string be seen as a different page? If so i don't want duplicate content. So am i best putting canonical tags in the head tags on mypage.php ? to avoid Google seeing potential duplicate content. Many thanks for all your advice.

    | pauledwards
    0
  • debeenus


    Hi there, I am trying to eliminate the 'www' using a 301 redirect script as I have duplicate page titles for both versions (with and without the 'www') I checked the page authority and found the pages without the 'www' to be ranked higher. For this reason I believe it would be wise to go for this option. I have an .htaccess file, all I need is the code and I should be ok 🙂 Thanks!

    | debeenus
    0
  • jamesjackson


    Hi, I have code for redirecting trailing slash to non-trailing slash, which works fine: RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^.yourdomain.co.uk$ [NC]RewriteRule ^(.+)/$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L] (got code from http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/to-slash-or-not-to-slash.html) But I cant find a code for redirecting to the trailing slash version anywhere, and I cant modify the above code myself. Can someone help resolve this issue please, or point me to a resource. Thanks very much James

    | jamesjackson
    0
  • highersourcesites


    Recently i decided to change my domain name - and although i have written several useful and working .htacess files with 301 redirects, this one became more complicated by the fact that I went through TWO domain name changes, before settling on the second one. Having seen some issues with the browser not being able to interpret correctly the .htaccess file, i temporarily suspended the .htaccess file, and opted instead for site forwarding. I don't know the mechanics behind site forwarding, or whether it is seo friendly or just a method for ip addressing, a sort of pseudo domain name server record change.
    I let it lie for a few weeks, until the dust settled, and yesterday put back the basic .htaccess file, with a 301 redirect, which directs the original domain name to be forwarded to the new one ( also it has a conditional in place to solve canonical issues). It works fine. But right now i am not seeing the link juice, the domain age, the domain page rank that it has. It has gone to zero, when it used to be three, sometimes four. I also made the change of address using webmaster tools. How long ( forever?) will it take to see my old page rank come back, even if it loses 10% from the change? And does site forwarding help or hinder seo ranking?

    | highersourcesites
    0
  • seanmccauley


    I have noticed some interesting changes in how google are returning searches for specific branded products. In this case 'tom ford glasses' position 12 result has three product extensions (see image) This is similar to the product extensions which occasionally occur on adwords. Have you seen this happen and if so any ideas how it all works? TR3nz

    | seanmccauley
    0
  • VinceWicks


    I've got an interesting situation. I hope you can help. I have a list of links but I'm not  sure which pages of my site they are from. How do I know which page a specific link is  from? Thanks in advance.

    | VinceWicks
    0
  • soulnafein


    Hi, I've just taken over development and SEO for a site and we're having difficulty getting some key pages indexed on our site. They are two clicks away from the homepage, but still not getting indexed. They are recently created pages, with unique content on. The architecture looks like this:Homepage >> Car page >> Engine specific pageWhenever we add a new car, we link to its 'Car page' and it gets indexed very quickly. However the 'Engine pages' for that car don't get indexed, even after a couple of weeks. An example of one of these index pages are - http://www.carbuzz.co.uk/car-reviews/Volkswagen/Beetle-New/2.0-TSISo, things we've checked - 1. Yes, it's not blocked by robots.txt2. Yes, it's in the sitemap (http://www.carbuzz.co.uk/sitemap.xml)3. Yes, it's viewable to search spiders (e.g. the link is present in the html source)This page doesn't have a huge amount of unique content. We're a review aggregator, but it still does have some. Any suggestions as to why it isn't indexed?Thanks, David

    | soulnafein
    0
  • netviper


    Hi Guys, I need some help on this htaccess issue in Magneto. So here is what I am trying to do: I wanted to change mysite.com/index.php/etc to mysite.com/etc so I turned on the web friend URLS. That did that, BUT there are still two versions of every page on the site. www.mysite.com/etc and mysite.com/index.php/etc So that isn't good for SEO. So then I applied a 301 matching redirect, RedirectMatch 301 /index.php/(.*) http://www.mysite.com/$1 That solved that problem. But now I am not able to log into the admin. It is mysite.com/index.php/pg45admin.  It should redirect to mysite.com/pg45admin but the page just hangs.... It goes into a continuous loop. I tired using the custom URL and then the site crashed and I had to redo it. So what do I need to do for this to work?

    | netviper
    0
  • Scratch_MM


    Currently, my client's blog makes a duplicate page every time someone comments on a post. The previous SEO consultant told the developer to not put a canonical link directing it to the main blog post. Did taking out the canonical link result in these duplicate pages? My question is why would she recommend this action? Is it best to now add in the canonical link in or should we implement a 301 redirect or insert a index: no follow? Would adding a canonical link keep duplicate pages from happening in the future?

    | Scratch_MM
    0
  • seorunner


    We are currently working to improve the deployment of a review widget on our website. The widget was deployed about 18 months ago and all reviews are behind Java navigation. I have been working with our IT staff to get the reviews into an HTML page which will either live on the product page as a tab or will be a link from the product page. Our IT staff has suggested leaving the Java navigation for users and creating separate HTML pages specifically for search engines. Based on my experience, this sounds like a bad idea, basically creating pages just for search engines that will not be use by site visitors, although the visitors will have access to the same content via the Java navigation. Anyone care to comment on this? Is creating HTML pages specifically for search engines a bad idea? An acceptable idea?

    | seorunner
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  • GardenGamer


    Hi, I launched a playhouses website in april this year and have been steadily link building to it over the past few months. I have gotten all of the internal optimisation correct (that I can see) however it is still not ranking for any keyword and suprinsgly all of our traffic is comming either direct or through bing. The website is showing as being in googles index however it is still not ranking for even the smallest of niche keywords. The only penalty I can see is that we have some spammy blog links that my colleague has gotten which I have been trying to counteract with high quality guest blogging. Any input is welcome the url is http://www.playhouses.co.uk/ Simon

    | GardenGamer
    0
  • Socialdude


    I have 5 keywords that I would like to target. I have created & optimised 5 pages on my website for these words. (1 keyword optimised per page) Should I inbound keyword anchor text to my specific pages or hit the home page with the anchor text?

    | Socialdude
    0
  • ukss1984


    One thing I have noticed recently is "review ratings" appearing in the Google search results. I have attached a screenshot which shows an example of this. I think this is a really good feature and helps make a listing stand out in the SERPs, I would certainly be more likely to click this one. My question is how do you code for it so that Google will display it?  The URL of the page in question is http://www.footy-boots.com/inter-milan-away-shirt-2011-2012-9430/ 4nXyk

    | ukss1984
    0
  • OveritMedia


    This question is about useragents and alcohol sites that have an age verification screen upon landing on the site.

    | OveritMedia
    0
  • craigsmith333


    A robots.txt file is properly implemented on the mobile site to block Googlebot from crawling, yet, when running a site: query for the site in google, it still returns over 104,000 pages from the mobile site in the index. Why could this be happening?

    | craigsmith333
    0
  • merkal2005


    Have you ever checked HubSpot's website grader at www.websitegrader.com? I usually notice that the tool gives an error namely "Permanent Redirect Not Found" with below explanation: "Search engines may think www.example.com and example.com are two different sites.You should set up a permanent redirect (technically called a "301 redirect") between these sites. Once you do that, you will get full search engine credit for your work on these sites. :(Website Grader) Can we trust this tool?

    | merkal2005
    0
  • seoug_2005


    For one of our client's side,  most of the backlinks are going to printer friendly version page. I recommeded to him to use the canonical tag on printer friendly version pointing to other page. Luckily, while searching i came across this posts at - http://www.seomoz.org/q/solving-printer-friendly-version The solution recommended was this - <link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" media="print" href="our-print-version.css"> My questions are - 1. what should i write in place of  our-print-version.css Should it be print.css ? 2. Where do i place this code ? in which file ?

    | seoug_2005
    0
  • catherine-279388


    Can anyone recommend a WP plugin which creates a description from the individual blog post it's describing?

    | catherine-279388
    0
  • propertyshark


    This is a follow-up question from one posted earlier this month. I can't linked to that because it's a private question so I'm trying to summarize it below. We have a number of domains – about 20 - (e.g. www.propertysharp.com) that point to our main domain ip adress (www.propertyshark.com) and share the same content. This is no black-hat strategy whatsoever, the domains were acquired several years ago in order to help people who mistyped the websites url to reach their desired destination. The question was whether to redirect them to our main domain or not. Pros were the reportedly millions of incoming links from these domains - cons was the fact that lots of issues regarding duplicate content could arise and we actually saw lots of some pages from these domains ranking in the search engines. We were recommended to redirect them, but to take it gradually. I have a simple question - what does gradually mean - one domain per week, per month?

    | propertyshark
    0
  • DavidChase


    Discussion around AJAX implementations and if anybody has achieved high rankings with a full AJAX website or even a partial AJAX website.

    | DavidChase
    0
  • tommr1


    I noticed in the crawl that there seems to be some duplicate content with my word press blog. I installed a seo plugin, Yoast's wordpress seo plugin, and set it to keep from crawling the archives. This might solve the problem but my main question is can the blog drag my site down?

    | tommr1
    0
  • NicB1


    Hi, Part of our site displays localized results based on the user's IP (we get the zipcode based on IP).  For example a user in NY would get a list of NY based stores, while a user in CA would get a list of CA based stores.  So if CA Googlebot comes to our site, it will get results based on Mountain View CA.  Given the pages are generated based on your zip, I'm not sure how we'd indicate to Google that we have results for lots of locations and not just the Googlebot IP locations.  (users can change their zipcode, but by default we use geolocation). Our landing pages contain localized content and unique urls with the zipcode etc, but it isn't clear how Google will find results for KY etc.

    | NicB1
    0
  • DavidS-282061


    I have multiple product pages on my site -  what is better for rankings in your experiance? If I 301 the pages to 1 correct version of the product page - or if I rel caanonical to the one correct page?

    | DavidS-282061
    0
  • QubaSEO


    OK. I'm working on an international site. The site is setup with folders for UK, US, AU    e.g www.site.com/UK/index.aspx The root  (non folder based) is the international version of the site  e.g www.site.com/index.aspx www.site.com/index.aspx has the lions share of links. Therefore, the pages immediately linked from www.site.com/index.aspx have page rank distributed between them. My UK, US and AU home pages are linked via a country selector  from the www.site.com/index.aspx page via an aspx redirect page that 301's to the appropriate country home page. Therefore the home pages of UK, US, AU are recieving some of the 'juice' that is coming in to www.site.com/index.aspx (but only a fraction via the redirect links) Am I right in thinking that pages on the international version of the site will have much more potential to rank (because of their 'juice') than the pages on UK, US and AU versions of the site? If so, am I right in thinking that these will tend to rank over the equivalent UK, US and AU versions of the pages in each country version of Google despite having set directory level Geo-targetting in GWT?

    | QubaSEO
    1
  • DavidS-282061


    My site ranks for both domain versions but more non-www than www - Should I make it one or the other? How do I tell Yahoo to just choose one? Ehh?

    | DavidS-282061
    0
  • DavidS-282061


    If in open site explorer my 404 pages have a higer page authority - what benefit would i see in rankings if I 301 redirected those pages to the right page. For example www.site.com/widget is a 404 but has authority according to open site explorer - but the page i see in the serps is www.site.com/widget/ with the / at the end. so what benefit would i see in rankings if I 301 redirected those pages to the right page?

    | DavidS-282061
    0
  • Techboy


    I have a number of images on my website with a watermark. We changed the watermark (on all of our images) in May, but when I search for my site getmecooking in Google Image Search, it still shows the old watermark (the old one is grey, the new one is orange). Is Google not updating the images its search results because they are cached in Google? Or because it is ignoring my images, having downloaded them once? Should we be giving our images a version number (at the end of the file name)? Our website cache is set to 7 days, so that's not the issue. Thanks.

    | Techboy
    0
  • eriksimpson


    Over the weekend, our website (http://www.esdandassociates.com) completely dropped off the google database in our top keywords. The only way that our site can be found is if you specifically type in the company name. Other search engines were unaffected and rankings remained the same or rose for the week. Previous keywords that we ranked in the first couple of positions (san antonio advertising agency, san antonio public relations) are now not in the top 50. We have not made any recent changes to our site besides basic content updates and all appears normal regarding crawler access. I have also not been able to find anything irregular in webmaster tools. Any ideas?

    | eriksimpson
    0
  • upper2bits


    Our homepage has a few hundred links and our index pages(pages that link to our spintext pages) have about 900 links on them with no content.  Our SEO guy said we have to keep the links under 1000 but I wanted to see what you guys think.

    | upper2bits
    0
  • waynekolenchuk


    I have the chrome toolbar installed. In the SERP a site I was looking at had 686 links from 12 domains linking to the root domain. When I checked this site in OSE with filters set to all pages in root domain it shows 65 links from 12 domains. Can anyone explain the difference?

    | waynekolenchuk
    0
  • danlae


    Helping my wife with ecommerce site. Selling clothes. Some photos are given by producer, but at times they are not too good.  Some are therefore taking their own photos and i suspect ppl are copying them and using them on their own site. Is there anyting to do about this - watermarking of course, but can they be 'marked' in anyway linking to your site ?

    | danlae
    0
  • themegroup


    Hello all! While doing some routine health checks on a few of our client sites, I spotted that a new client of ours - who's website was not designed built by us - is returning a 500 internal server error when I try to look at the robots.txt file. As we don't host / maintain their site, I would have to go through their head office to get this changed, which isn't a problem but I just wanted to check whether this error will actually be having a negative effect on their site / whether there's a benefit to getting this changed? Thanks in advance!

    | themegroup
    0
  • nickswan


    Hi all, I'm working on a site redesign and it is possible the new site could issue a lot of 301 redirects as we may migrate from one forum solution to another. Is there any issue with crawlers getting a lot of 301 redirects from a site? Thanks Nick

    | nickswan
    0

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