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Category: Technical SEO

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


  • Hi - We are due to launch a .com version of our site, with the ability to put prices into local currency, whereas our .co.uk site will be solely £. If the content on both the .com and .co.uk sites is the same (at product level mainly), will we be penalised? What is the best way to get around this?

    | swgolf123
    0

  • If I include TM in a keyword string, does this make it another keyword or does Google ignore that? Example: Kentucky Hot Sauce vs Kentucky Hot (TM) sauce. Of course the TM would be done properly via ™ Cheers.

    | Malarowski
    0

  • I'm working on this page at the moment - http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/berghaus-bid6.html. The keyword we're going for is, unsurprisingly, 'Berghaus'. The SEOmoz on page report has flagged up a possible issue with keyword stuffing as the term is mention around 25 times. Is it worth altering this, which could be quite tricky as a lot of the page is dynamically generated? Thanks!

    | neooptic
    0

  • Hopefully this makes sense. So I am working on a site that uses a 302 re-direct for logins. As in it goes from a profile page to the login via a re-direct, most of the time I see sites use this as a meta refresh, but in this case I wasn't sure. Obviously when I run a crawl diagnostic I'm getting a lot of errors as in over 100. Now I know there is no link juice with this, but I was just wondering what other people thought on using 302's for logins? Thanks

    | kateG1298
    0

  • Anyone know of a good plug-­in that reduces the amount parameters used in URLs? I need one for an ASP based system and a PHP based system

    | matmox
    0

  • Why googlebot indexing one page, not the other in the same conditions? In html sitemap, for example. We have 6 new pages with unique content. Googlebot immediately indexes only 2 pages, and then after sometime the remaining 4 pages. On what parameters the crawler decides to scan or not scan this page?

    | ATCnik
    0

  • Hello! I'm an Online Marketeer who's taking on some SEO responsibility internally (after months of researching - information overload) and will be working with an external agency. I'll get to the point here. The difficulty I have is in getting my head around approaching our SEO strategy. I have what I would class as a beginner-intermediate understand of SEO and the tools and techniques available for assistance (many great articles available on this forum and others). I feel that there are some real opportunities for our company that has already placed investment into SEO previously. The difficulty I have is working out how to approach the whole campaign. We are a recruitment consultancy with many many vertical markets, the sheer amount of keywords could be staggering. For some short insights we have a homepage PR 4, Alexa 338,361, PA 56, moz Rank 4.61. I've started by using the SEOmoz pro tool to identify problems with our sites optimisation and improve them. On reflection our site is doing OK, but we really need to show some significant results in search rankings, increases in traffic, and ultimately conversions. I'm a keen user of G-analytics and love the SEOmoz tool (a selection of the tools I will use to measure results). Are there any basic frameworks to devising a strategy that could help point me in the right direction? E.g. Keyword Research
    Identify Keywords
    Optimise Site for keywords
    Setup campaign to measure keywords SERP's
    Perform internal & external SEO techniques
    Wait and see what happens and continuously improve I appreciate there could be no simple answer to this project. If you would like any more information about who we are please let me know by comment. Best Regards,
    Sam.

    | ARMofficial
    0

  • Hi just wondered what other people's experience is with a new domain. Basically have a client with a domain registered end of May this year, so less than 3 months old! The site ranks for his keyword choice (not very competitive), which is in the domain name. For me I'm not at all surprised with Google's low ranking after such a short period but quite surprsied to see it ranking page 1 on Bing and Yahoo. No seo work has been done yet and there are no inbound links. Anyone else have experience of this? Should I be surprised or is that normal in the other two search engines? Thanks in advance Trevor

    | TrevorJones
    0

  • I'm in negotiations to get links placed on a popular blog with good stats.  I'm allowed to pick older posts on the site, and I get to pick the anchor text.  Is it best practice to diversify the links by having different keywords pointing to different pages or am I better off pointing as many links as I can at one page (varying anchor text)? Also, is it best to pick a more recent blog post, or is it ok to pick one from say, 2009?

    | MichaelWeisbaum
    0

  • Hello, http://www.example.com  and http://ww.example.com/ Are these seen as two different  URL's ?  Just as with www or non www ? Or it doesn't make any difference ?

    | seoug_2005
    0

  • How do I put something below description, the search box within the website, and map in SERPs of Google? For example, when I enter ‘mit’ as the keyword in Google, the description of MIT is shown more. Many thanks in advance.

    | OSO
    0

  • I am developing a drop down menu and am trying to decide if using javascript instead of just css is worth it. I've done some research on the topic and the opinions seem dated.  I know that at one time not using javascript for a drop down menu was important but now less so.  Google constantly says that they will not discount the links just because they are not shown until javascript is ran. What I want to know is has anyone discovered from testing that using javascript instead of css for a drop down makes a difference? Note: the links will not be located in an external javascript file.

    | seozachz
    0

  • Hey all, Has Google finally grown up to treat sub-domains as they would sub directory? i.e: http://blog.example.com as opposed to http://example.com/blog I desperately wanted example.com/blog but we were forced to launch with blog.example.com because of WordPress limitations and our DNS and load balancing set up on our end. All searches lead me to old documentation 2010 and earlier. Wondering if anyone has any up to date information around this. Cheers, Croozie,

    | sichristie
    0

  • We are experiencing slow response time because our pages are ad heavy. If we load ads in an iframe, will the google bots, when indexing the page, count the time it takes for the contact within the iframe to load? Or is that load time separate from the total page response/load time?

    | kbbseo
    0

  • I have pages with meta data being pulled in via an include.  This was to prevent people from touching the pages themselves.  Is this an optimization issue- or is it OK to do?

    | Tribeca-Marketing-Group
    0

  • Anyone have experience with a cache going missing from a page that had a cache in the past? We’re overhauling a page and noticed the cache was gone from Google results. We don’t know if this event is good/bad/doesn’t matter but I am curious why this happens. I am positive the cache was missing before we updated the page today because a programmer mentioned they did try checking for a cache for a historical load time prior to today for a different project. I have attached two screenshots to illustrate two things: 1)      What google delivers for a cache: of the page instead of the normal cache page 2)      Even though you can see a cache of any of the indexed pages we have from a serp, the cached link is missing in serps for the mentioned page Has anyone seen this before? thanks! IhnAf SL8ax

    | CouponCactus
    0

  • I wanted to find out if anyone could recommend the best technique for protecting a video on a website. We have been able to secure a private interview with one of the largest manufacturers in this customers industry. Unfortunately the interview was done impromptu with an iphone, but the recording is not too bad. The volume is low, but we will also type out the content of the interview on our blog, right beneath where the video is posted for viewing. We were hoping to only post this video on our blog, so that people within our industry will link to that page, increasing our link power. But we wanted to make sure that people couldn't steal the video and post it in other places to avoid giving us our link. What is the best method for accomplishing this? What video format would be ideal to hopefully accommodate windows, mac, IE, Firefox, Safari, mobile phones, ipads etc.? Are we on the right track on how to most effectively use this video for our own benefit?

    | JerDoggMckoy
    0

  • When creating links within your website, is it bad to have a anchor text link pointing back to the same page? Say the page the homepage is optimized for "credit cards".  If I have a "credit cards" anchor text link on the page the link points to, is that bad practice? Secondly, if it's better to put that link on a different page, wouldn't I be placing a keyword that's optimized for a different page on the wrong page? (hopefully I'm making sense) Any guidance would be greatly appreciated!

    | MichaelWeisbaum
    0

  • Hi All, If I had a site about a cartoon character (for example). When I add keywords to the 'keywords' meta tag, would I be best to put specific phrases such as Cartoon Character, Cartoon Character on TV, Cartoon Character on Television or would the following have the same effect: Cartoon Character, Tv, Movie, Television I was wondering if  having the above instance might be less effective as the search engines might read TV, Movie, Television as less relevant to Cartoon Character. Hope that makes sense!  🙂

    | wedmonds
    0

  • Ok I know there's a lot of information already on here about Article Marketing for SEO, but I need to know if anyone here has recently ran an article campaign successfully? Correct me if I am wrong, but submitting the same article to a bunch (more than 1-2) article directories for back links is a bad idea. Right? Maybe it worked in 2006, but now even the site themselves (Article Directories) are just so polluted with spam from the pass that, that Even if you submitted a genuine article.. it would still not give you as much Juice because the sites themselves are considered spamy. Looking at Alexa's ranking of Ezine Articles kind of proves that, after Panda Hit. The bottom line is, my boss says I have to start writing articles for backlinks. He wanted me to blast them across multiple directories. So I need to be absolutely certain that where I place these articles will have Quality impact on our sites SEO. Tips, Advice, Links, THANKS! We are a prominent ecommerce site in the food service industry.

    | Burkett.com
    0

  • We are debating on whether to use primary keywords in the URL for every page for a new client for the sake of SEO.  What is the feeling in the Community on which version is smarter? Version 1:  www.abccompany.com/miami-moving-company/about-us www.abccompany.com/miami-moving-company/contact-us etc. etc. Version 2:  www.abccompany.com/about-us Thank you for your thoughts!

    | theideapeople
    0

  • Hi from Madrid! I am managing the Marketing Department of a ticketing site in Europe similar to Stubhub.com. We have thousands of events and, until now, we used templates for their descriptions. A lot of events share the same description with minor changes. They also have a lot of tickets on sale, so that's unique content different on each event. Now the last Google Panda update hit Europe and I was wondering if that will affect us a lot. It's hard to tell for now, because we are in the middle of the summer and the volume of searches in our industry depends decreases a lot during this time of the year. I know that ideally we should have unique descriptions but that would need a lot of resources and they are not important for our users: they just want to know the venue, the time and the price of the tickets! Have you experienced something about Google Panda update with a similar site or with another e-commerce industry? Thanks!

    | jorgediaz
    0

  • Hi, All! If I 301 redirect site www.abc.com to www.def.com, it should pass (almost) all linkjuice, rank, trust, etc.  What happens if I then redirect site www.def.com to www.ghi.com?  Does the value of the original site pass indefinitely as long as you do the redirects correctly?  Or does it start to be devalued at some point? If anyone's had experience redirecting a site more than once and they've seen reportable good/bad/neutral results, that would be very helpful. Thanks in advance! -Aviva B

    | debi_zyx
    0

  • Hi Mozfans 🙂 I'm doing a sitescan for a new client. http://www.vacatures.tuinbouw.nl/ It's a dutch jobsite. Now the problem is here: The url http://www.vacatures.tuinbouw.nl/vacatures/ is in google.
    On the same page there are jobs (scroll down) with a followed link.
    To a url like this: http://www.vacatures.tuinbouw.nl/vacatures/722/productie+medewerker+paprika+teelt/ The problem is that the second url don't show up in google. When i try to make a sitemap with Gsitecrawler the second url isn't in de sitemap.. :S What am i doing wrong? Thanks!

    | MaartenvandenBos
    0

  • Hi guys, Ok this is a bit of a sitemap 101 question but I cant find a definitive answer: When we're running out XML sitemaps for google to chew on (we're talking ecommerce and directory sites with many pages inside sub-categories here) is there any point in mentioning the homepage or even the second level pages? We know google  is crawling and indexing those and we're thinking we should trim the fat and just send a map of the bottom level pages. What do you think?

    | timwills
    0

  • Hi within my campaigns i get an error "crawl errors found" that says duplicate page content found, it finds the same content on the home pages below. Are these seen as two different pages? And how can i correct these errors as they are just one page? http://poolstar.net/ http://poolstar.net/Home_Page.php

    | RouteAccounts
    0

  • My firm recently overhauled a client's website. As part of the project, we gave the content a new structure, eliminating certain pages and creating several new ones. However, I just found out that some of the "old" pages (the ones we supposedly eliminated) still appear in the Google SERPs. Somehow, the client - who handled the coding - let these pages remain live even though they can no longer be accessed through the site navigation. This seems like something that could hurt the client's SEO rankings, but I want to make sure before contacting the client and suggesting they take down the old pages. Can anyone confirm my suspicion?

    | matt-14567
    0

  • Friday google applied the Panda Update for the rest of the world, I checked my rankings and nothing seemed to have changed , does anybody notice any of the effects already? Is it to soon to draw any conclusions after 2 days?

    | Arnx
    0

  • Hi is it a very big problem if my title is too long? I have PRODUCT NAME Company Name for Lingerie, Swimwear, Bras and Panties In shopping cart with the PRODUCT NAME generated dynamicly, so the product name could end up 20 or so characters but usually would be less

    | adamzski
    0

  • We're an ecommerce site and  we have a second, older domain with  a better keyword match URL than our main domain (I know, you may be wondering why we didn't use it, but that's beside the point now). It currently ranks fairly poorly as there's very few links pointing to it. However, the exact match URL means it has some value, if we were to build a few links to it. What would you do with it: 301 product/category pages to current site's equivalent page Link product/category pages to current site's equivalent page Not bother using it at all Something else

    | seanmccauley
    0

  • For proper SEO, which version would you prefer? A.  www.abccompany.com B.  www.abccompany.com/index.html Is there any value or difference with either home page URL??

    | theideapeople
    0

  • We are an ecommerce site established in 2005 and currently have some great rankings. We are about to move away from our existing platform, actinic and move on to Magento. This will change all our url's. What are the steps we should be asking our web developers to follow in order to minimize the consequences of moving? Thank you.

    | LadyApollo
    0

  • Hi i have read some info that says that sub domain names help with increase traffic but i am not sure if this is true. I would like to know if i should use a subdomain name to increase the size of my website and increase traffic. I have also read that it is a good idea to put a blog on a subdomain name. Can anyone share their experience and let me know if they have found that sub domains are a good idea

    | ClaireH-184886
    0

  • SEO Gurus, There seems to be a tendency that whenever you need to optimize a project for a multi-word key phrase, lets say for example "hostels in boston" SEOs see it as a best practice to refelct the key phrase in the domain without dashes yet when being used in a directory/page name context dashers are being used? Does anyone have any experience to share on this topic what works better? From my experience using dashes has been quite successful in the past but I am questioning this approach for a new project I am about to start. To clarify the question, in your eyes what would work better for the keyphrase "hotels in boston" www.hotelsinboston.com www.hotels-in-boston.com Thanks /Thomas

    | tomypro
    0

  • I used Open Site Explorer and found a link to our site on http://www.business.com/guides/bedding-supplies-3639/  The link was setup to go to an important, deep page on my website, but the structure of our urls changed and the url no longer exists. The link (anchor text 'National Hospitality Supply') does direct to our homepage, www.nathosp.com. My question is, am I receiving full link juice? Or would I be better served to create a 301 redirect to the revised / new page url? In case it matters, if I had my choice I'd prefer the link to go to the intended deep page. Thanks in advance for your insight. -Josh Fulfer

    | mhans
    0

  • Hi there, I have a website that is aimed primarily at the US market. However, I have the option to make some content for people in my niche for people in the UK. Is there anything I can do to help the site rank on google.co.uk for the UK content, baring in mind that most of my content is aimed at the US. Thanks, Peter

    | PeterM22
    0

  • Our site <cite>www.skaino.co.uk/</cite>  seems to be having real issues with being picked up with Google. The site has been around for a long time but no longer even ranks on google if you search for the word 'Skaino'. This is odd as its hardly a competitive keyword. If I do a site:www.skaino.co.uk then it shows all the pages proving the site has been indexed. But if I do cache:www.skaino.co.uk it shows a blank cache. I'm starting to worry that Google isn't able to crawl our site properly. If it helps to clarify we have a flash site with a HTML site running underneath for those who cant view flash. Im wandering if I've missed something glaringly obvious. Is it normal to have a blank google cache? Thanks AJ

    | handygammon
    0

  • Hi all, I'm hoping someone will be able to help me with an extermley frustrating problem with 301 redirects in .htaccess. Basically I'm trying to redirect some old pages (from our old website) that stil rank to the new equivilent. For example - old url = www.domain.com/frames/news/company-news/news-reader.php?newsStoryID=395 New www.domain.com/news/article-title I've tried the simple redirect 301 /frames/news/company-news/news-reader.php?newsStoryID=395 http://www.domain.com/news/article-title But this doesnt work. I've also tried - RewriteEngine on
    RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^newsStoryID=395$
    RewriteRule ^/news-reader.php$ http://www.domain.com/news/article-title/? [L,R=301] Could anyone help? I've followed lots of tutorials that all match the above but it just doesn't work! The only other thing within the htaccess file is from wordpress for pretty permalinks - BEGIN WordPress <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
    RewriteBase /
    RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
    RewriteRule . /index.php [L]</ifmodule> END WordPress Many thanks in advance!

    | EclipseLegal
    0

  • Dear All, I am kinda of stuck and need your helps, I have major client's site which is located in subdirectory. Instance:  http://www.majorclient.com.cn/cn/ and as you can see domain name is already localized and they are not planning to make any english version of the site, So there will be no /eng/ folder but  clients whole website is /cn/ subdirectory which is totally unnecessary and i would like to 301 whole site to **http://www.majorclient.com.cn ** But the problem is that this site has been /cn/ folder forever since the beginning and lot of trusted links are pointing to www.majorclient.com.cn/cn/ So should i move it or just configure 301 www.majorclient.com.cn to www.majorclient.com.cn/cn/ leave it there and don't bother. Help?

    | DigitalJungle
    0

  • I have 15,000 pages. How do I have the Google bot crawl all the pages? My site is 7 years old. But there are only about 3,500 pages being crawled.

    | Ishimoto
    0

  • Hi Guys, While redesigning existing websites that will have page name changes such as: example.com/products to be called example.com/solutions example.com/about-us to be called example.com/about should I 301 the old url to the new url. In the past I have not done this & I'm just wondering from an SEO point of view how bad is this? (On a scale of 1 to 10 how bad is this not 301ing urls, 10 being really bad & 1 being fine), Thanks.

    | Socialdude
    0

  • So we've been having some difficulty with one of our websites since we split it in half and moved one section of content to a new domain with a new name, at the end of May. http://www.dialtosave.co.uk/mobile/ was moved to http://www.somobile.co.uk And in the following 6 weeks, the google organic traffic has fallen to miniscule levels, that seem to indicate a more serious issue than just low ranking. Initially when the site was moved, the 301s transferred the authority very quickly and the new website pages ranked well. Now, some of them simply won't rank at all unless you include the name of the website "somobile". Here is one of the current rankings that indicates an issue:
    "somobile" - 1
    "somobile mobile phones" - not in top 50 These are some of the terms we used to rank in the top 10 on Google UK, and still do on Bing UK, but don't rank in the top 50 on Google UK now:
    samsung galaxy ace
    apple iphone 5 deals
    samsung tocco icon Our webmaster central account says that only 30% of the pages in our sitemap are in the index. It seems like a penalty has been imposed, but our reconsideration request (just submitted because it seemed like a sensible next step) came back saying there were no manual actions taken. Can you see what it is that might be causing the problem for us? I would have thought it was the new domain (with less direct links and less brand credibility), or content issues, but I would have thought that would just reduce the ranking by a few pages rather than just hide the pages altogether.

    | purpleindigo
    0

  • I'm using Thesis Theme.  I know load time is important and will continue to be a bigger deal as time goes on.  Any advice would be much appreciated!!

    | chadmorgan
    0

  • Hi, Last week I build around 10-15 high quality related links to my trampoline pads website which was ranking number 2 for "trampoline pads" and number 1 for "trampoline pad". After building the links this week it has dropped in the serps to around number 5-6 for both. Is this an effect of the link building and will it bounce back in? the url is http://www.trampolinepad.co.uk/. Kind Regards,
    Simon

    | GardenGamer
    0

  • I have read in many places that the maximum number of results that will be displayed on the SERP from a domain or subdomain is 2.  Is this still the case?  I have seen many instances where there are well more than 2 results from a domain displaying on the SERP.  For example, search 'cvs pharmacy' on Google. There are 7 results from the cvs.com domain. Is it the case that the search engines will display more if it's a branded search?

    | ryanwats
    0

  • If I set up a vanity URL that just 301's to the main site, do the search engines look at the keywords in the vanity URL when determing how to rank the site. For example, if I set up a vanity URL of www.coolnewtechgear.com, and redirect it to www.company.com/products/, would the search engines view the keywords of cool, new, tech, and gear and associate that with the page it's getting redirected to? Or does it ignore the vanity URL and only look at the content of the page itself?

    | ryanwats
    0

  • I have a lot of warnings for "Overly-Dynamic URLs" but all the pages listed have a canonical with a static url , does this mean that I can ignore the warnings? Seems to me that I can but I just want to make sure?

    | Arnx
    1

  • Anyone can point their domain to any IP address they want.  I've found at least two domains (same owner) with two totally unrelated domains (to each other and to us) that are currently pointing their domains to our  IP address.  The IP address is on our dedicated server (we control the entire physical server) and is exclusive to only that one domain (so it isn't a virtual hosting misconfiguration issue) This has caused Google to index their two domains with duplicate content from our site (found by searching for site:www.theirdomain.com)  Their site does not come up in the first 50 results though for any of the keywords we come up for so Google obviously knows THEY are the dupe content, not us (our site has been around for 12 years - much longer than them.) Their registration is private and we have not been able to contact these people.  I'm not sure if this is just a mistake on the DNS for the two domains or it is someone doing this intentionally to try to harm our ranking.  It has been going on for a while, so it is most likely not a mistake for two live sites as they would have noticed long ago they were pointing to the wrong IP. I can think of a variety of actions to take but I can find no information anywhere regarding what Google officially recommends doing in this situation, assuming you can't get a response.  Here's my ideas. a) Approach it as a Digital Copyright Violation and go through the lengthy process of having their site taken down.  Pro: Eliminates the issue.  Con: Sort of a pain and we could be leaving possibly some link juice on the table? b) Modify .htaccess to do a 301 redirect from any URL not using our domain, to our domain.  This means Google is going to see several domains all pointing to the same IP and all except our domain, 301 redirecting to our domain.  Not sure if THAT will harm (or help) us?  Would we not receive link juice then from any site out there that was linking to these other domains?  Con: Google will see the context of the backlinks and their link text will not be related at all to our site.  In addition, if any of these other domains pointing to our IP have backlinks from 'bad neighborhoods' I assume it could hurt us? c) Modify .htaccess to do a 404 File Not Found or 403 forbidden error? I posted in other forums and have gotten suggestions that are all over the map.  In many cases the posters don't even understand what I'm talking about - thinking they are just normal backlinks. Argh! So I'm taking this to "The Experts" on SEOMoz.

    | jcrist
    1

  • I'm having several site issues and I want to see if the Q parameter in the URL is the issue. Both of these index. Any capitalization combination brings up another indexed page: http://www.website.com/index.php?q=contact-us. and http://www.website.com/index.php?q=cOntact-us The other issue is Google crawl errors. The website has received increasingly more spam crawl errors. I've read that this is a common issue and most likely is a Google Bot problem. Would removing the q parameter fix this entirely? Here is an example: http://www.website/index.php?q=uk-cheap-chloe-bay-bag-wholesale-shoes

    | DanSpeicher
    0

  • Based on this post from 2009, it's recommended in most situations to set up a microsite as a subdirectory as opposed to a subdomain. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites.  The primary argument seems to be that the search engines view the subdomain as a separate entity from the domain and therefore, the subdomain doesn't benefit from any of the trust rank, quality scores, etc.  Rand made a comment that seemed like the subdomain could SOMETIMES inherit some of these factors, but didn't expound on those instances. What determines whether the search engine will view your subdomain hosted microsite as part of the main domain vs. a completely separate site?  I read it has to do with the interlinking between the two.

    | ryanwats
    0

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