Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

  1. Home
  2. SEO Tactics
  3. Technical SEO
Log in to post

Category: Technical SEO

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

  • EricPacifico


    A programmers 'accidentally' put "name="robots" content="noindex" />" into every single page of one of my sites (articles, landing pages, home page etc). This happened on Monday, and we just noticed today. Ugh... We've fixed the issue; how long will it take to get reindexed? Will we instantly retain our same positions for keywords? Any tips?

    | EricPacifico
    0
  • jbreeden


    Hello, friends. We have an ecommerce site and we also own several keyword-rich domains but haven't done anything with them yet. Is there any value in using domain masking to point them to either product pages or special landing pages on our primary ecommerce site? Here's an example: Primary site is widgetzone.com Keyword rich URL is acmewidget.com (which is totally blank and isn't indexed) It could point to our category page for Acme Widgets: widgetzone.com/category/acme-widgets or it could point to a new landing page: widgetzone.com/acme-widgets My concern is that because the keyword-rich URL hasn't been utilized at all there's really no point in redirecting it. I'm of the mind that it's either going to be ineffective at best or a duplicate content issue at worst. What do you guys think? As a follow-up, if we don't redirect these domains, what should we do with them? Just try to sell them off rather than create totally new sites?

    | jbreeden
    0
  • adamzski


    Hello should I be brutal with noindex? should I noindex anything of no value to websurfers? from my understanding, nofollow is different to to noindex? Google follows through the site crawling and discovering subpages but will not put the noindexed page in serps. Is that right? I have subcategory pages in a business directory site, these pages just have links to there subpages.

    | adamzski
    1
  • merkal2005


    One of my customers is willing to add Google +1 button on their Flash websites. Is it possible? How can we add Google +1 button on a Flash site? Thanks in advance!

    | merkal2005
    0
  • Nobody1556905035114


    Google Webmaster Tools is reporting a heck of a lot of 404s which are due to an external site linking incorrectly to my site. The site itself has scraped content from elsewhere and has created 100's of malformed URLs. Since it unlikely I will have any joy having these linked removed by the creator of the site, I'd like to know how much damage this could be doing, and if so, is there is anything I can do to minimise the impact? Thanks!

    | Nobody1556905035114
    0
  • adamzski


    Hello, does the order of pages in a site:www.tld.com  search show how important each page is to google? what if the homepage is not the first result?

    | adamzski
    0
  • DavetheExterminator


    I have two separate domains set up on one hosting account through godaddy.  Will this affect the SEO negatively?  They are completely different sites with their own unique domains but on my local files the second domain is set up as a subfolder for the original hosted domain.  Any thoughts?  Thanks in advance.

    | DavetheExterminator
    0
  • CoL-PR


    A developer asked me if it's ok to add a string of characters (output by Sharepoint) to the image filename. Not a good idea for SEO I said....I've already suggested using keywords for filename and including keyword descriptions in the alt and title attributes. It's a SharePoint shopping cart. Does anyone have any suggestions, experience or workarounds for this?

    | CoL-PR
    0
  • augmoz11


    My client is running a online news website, which is running for 4 years. He's now looking to change the site into a new domain. I would like to know what  are the factors to look out for when changing the site into new domain (In SEO point of view)

    | augmoz11
    0
  • AHH888


    Based on what I've read so far, the best blog URL for SEO purposes is a subfolder (www.example.com/blog) rather than a subdomain (blog.example.com). I am having a lot of trouble adding a blog to our e-commerce store which is hosted by volusion. I have looked into installing Wordpress into a subdirectory but apparently Volusion does not allow the mysql/myphpadmin/database access needed to successfully do this. I have also looked into trying to publish my blog through ftp using Blogger, but they stopped allowing this a while ago. Does anyone know a way to add a blog to my volusion store's subdirectory? Thanks

    | AHH888
    0
  • adamzski


    A site I have lost 30% of its traffic in June then another 10% in July, is it Panda? The site has 10's of thousands of AP or other syndicated articles on it, they are not there for SE benefits, they are categorized and relevant to the people who read them, the site gets half of its traffic from type ins/bookmarks. Should I nofollow the articles or rel="canonical" them? what can help...... Cheers

    | adamzski
    0
  • rcarll


    The content management system for my e-commerce site will not allow me to add both: unique content and unique title tags to each of my product category pages. Since I am forced to choose one or the other...which one is more important for rankings? And please dont answer "get a new CM system"...thats not an option. Thanks

    | rcarll
    0
  • travelinnovations


    A client has a url which is duplicated by filters on the page, for example: - http://www.example.co.uk/Home/example.aspx is duplicated by http://www.example.co.uk/Home/example.aspx?filter=3 The client is moving to a new website later this year and is using an out-of-date Kentico CMS which would need some development doing to it in order to enable implementation of rel canonical tags in the header, I don't have access to the server and they have to pay through the nose everytime they want the slightest thing altering. I am trying to resolve this duplicate content issue though and am wondering what is the best way to resolve it in the short term.  The client is happy to remove the filter links from the page but that still leaves the filter urls in Google.  I am concerned that a 301 redirect will cause a loop and don't understand the behaviour of this type of code enough. I hope this makes sense, any advice appreciated.

    | travelinnovations
    0
  • Robbern


    My site's URL (web address) is: http://tinyurl.com/3svn2l9 Hi there, We operate a travel site that lists numerous tours, accommodation and activities. Since 6th August 2011 we have dropped from top 10 SERP rankings of our pages to around result number 100 (page 10) and losing massive amount of visitors via Google Search. Our Yahoo and Bing rankings are still in the top10. We need your advice and quick! The last changes we have made are the following: -redirected the non-www version to the www version on the 1st August -bought advertising with a follow link in a sidebar that is being populated across the site (+4000 pages) about 2 months ago -added a blog to the website 2 weeks ago and posted 2 posts to date. Additionally, our website structure allows visitors (and bots) to see the same listings via different URLs which caused duplicate content. This has been the case since the launch of our website about 1 year ago. To prevent this duplicate content we have placed canonical tags on the individual listings pages. Why did our site all of a sudden plummet in the rankings?

    | Robbern
    0
  • RyanWhitney15


    I've read through the Redirect guide here already but can't get this down in my .htaccess I want to redirect some pages specifically (/contactinfo.html to the new /contact.php) And I want all other pages (not all have equivalent pages on the new site) to redirect to my new (index.php) homepage. How can I set it up so that some specific pages redirect directly, and all others go to one page? I already have the specific oldpage.html -> newpage.php redirects in place, just need to figure out the broad one for everything else.

    | RyanWhitney15
    0
  • android_lyon


    Hello, I have duplication with my home page. It comes in two versions of the languages​​: French and English. http://www.numeridanse.tv/fr/ http://www.numeridanse.tv/en/ You should know that the home page are not directories : http://www.numeridanse.tv/ Google indexes the three versions: http://bit.ly/oqKT0H To avoid duplicating what is the best solution?
    Have a version of the default language? Thanks a lot for your answers. Take care. A.

    | android_lyon
    0
  • seoug_2005


    I would like to track twitter traffic to my account in GA. After going through the step in the help tutorial about how to do it, I managed to generate this url ( with the help of url builder ) http://twitter.com/UltraSEO?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=Social%2BMedia&utm_campaign=Ultraseo Now what should i do next ?  Please help.  How can i track visits to my twitter profile ?

    | seoug_2005
    0
  • SteveMaguire


    Over the last couple of years I've repeatedly submitted (about 4 times) our site to dmoz.org, hoping to get listed but have never been successful in getting the site recognized. We have an eCommerce site that deals in automotive parts and accessories. What does it take to get your site accepted in dmoz and how do you go about it? Thanks, Steve

    | SteveMaguire
    0
  • Wedideas


    Hi, we're thinking of moving our very well established forum to a subfolder on our main domain. I have read that this would be much better for seo reasons/domain authority rather than using a sub domain. Is this correct? Our forum has 15,000 users and gets roughly over 502,087 impressions from 101,147 visits a month. Thanks, James

    | Wedideas
    0
  • adamzski


    Google has indexed a lot of old non www.mysite.com contnet my page at mysite.com still answers queries, should I 301 every url on it? Google has indexed about 200 pages all erogenous 404's, old directories and dynamic content at mysite.com www.mysite.com has 12 pages listed that are all current. Is this affecting my rankings?

    | adamzski
    0
  • ronnyg28


    I have looked everywhere to find the answer to this but cannot find it. How do you get the search engines to treat a domain hack as a word? e.g if you search "whois" , who.is will return and the url will be highlighted in green showing that the search engines recognise it as a word. I own a domain hack but when i search the keyword, it never returns with the url highlighted in green. I would really appreciate any help on this. Thanks, Ronan

    | ronnyg28
    0
  • seoug_2005


    The cache of one of our site is being displayed in a strange way in Google. The site in question is -  http://www.ugwebmart.com/en/ The cache is shown like this - Title is shown first description Followed by URL What could be the reason for this. Normally, cache is shown in a box like this ..... in a  rectangular box This is Google's cache of .... . It is a snapshot of the page as it appeared on...

    | seoug_2005
    0
  • ibex


    I'm currently using <pr>tags for paragraphs and came across an article that said it is better for search engines to see the</pr> tag than
    tag to separate paragraphs.

    | ibex
    0
  • Socialdude


    Hi, My sitemap.xml is not submitting correctly in Google Webmaster. There is 697 url submitted but only 56 are in Google index. At the top of webmaster this is what it says ->>> http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml has been resubmitted. But when when I clicked status button RED X occurs. Any suggestions about this, thanks...

    | Socialdude
    0
  • akim26


    Scenario: example.com/red-shoes gets 301 redirected to example.com/brown-boots because we have stopped selling red shoes and now only sell brown boots (which is a fairly new page with no authority). the red-shoes page ranked well for "red shoes" and "footwear". Will Google still index and show the red-shoes url in the SERPs? Will the "red shoes" and "footwear" keywords still rank well? Or does the redirected/new boots page need to properly support these keywords? The boots page has inherited the juice from the shoes page, but how does it help the boots page rank well? Only for keywords that both pages targeted, like a general "footwear" type keyword? Thanks in advance!

    | akim26
    0
  • DavetheExterminator


    Should I redirect index.html to "/" or vice versa?  Which is better for duplicate content issues?

    | DavetheExterminator
    0
  • gavinhoman


    I am getting a warning about having too many links on my page www.accessoriesonline.co.uk (152) but I don't want to remove any links from the site. Its an ecommerce site with categories across the top, featured products and then a further category navigation in the footer. Would it be beneficial if I added a rel="nofollow" to the links in the footer as these are duplicates of the one's in the header or would this harm the links in the header and the destination URL's which I definitely want to be crawled? Also, does anyone know if SEOMOZ considers links with a rel=nofollow as an actually link when they calculate their overview? Thanks in advance

    | gavinhoman
    0
  • inhouseninja


    Hi there, When I did a redesign a few years ago, I had it in my mind that site links in 3 or 4 columns at the bottom of the home page, and every other page, would be good for SEO.  Having links to interior pages using keywords and phrases from the home page and all that…. I think this might now be outdated thinking?  As long as there are some links from the home page to important interior pages to pass link juice that is what matters?  Google might not even looks at links in the footer?  Is this correct? Thoughts? Thanks so much!

    | inhouseninja
    0
  • RikkiD22


    Hello, Has anyone got any experiences of using schema mark-up on an ecommerce site? If so, what has been the outcome since doing in? I am just wondering if it is worth marking up our products with the full product set of schemas and what the impact would be?

    | RikkiD22
    0
  • SparkplugDigital


    Hi, I am trying to find the number and preferably a list of outbound links on a site that has thousands of pages. Is there a good tool that you can recommend? Unless I missed it, I haven't seen this feature in SEOMoz. Thanks!

    | SparkplugDigital
    0
  • Brendo


    So Google Shopping has finally landed in Australia so we've got some work todo hooking it up to our client ecom sites. Right now we have a handful of clients who are setup, the feed is getting in their ok but all products are sitting in "disapproved" status in the dashboard and clicking into each individual product the status says awaiting review. I logged a support ticket with Google to get some more info on this as it doesn't look right to me (ie the disapproved status in dashboard) and got a useless templated answer. Seems that if I switch the country destination to US the products are approved and live in google.com shopping search within the hour. Switch back to Australia and they go back to disapproved status. Anyone having the same issue/seen this before? I simply don't trust Google support and wondering if there's other factors at play here.

    | Brendo
    0
  • 13375auc3


    Does removing content ever make sense? We have out of stock products that are left on the site (in an out of stock section) specifically for SEO value, but I am not sure how to approach the problem from a bottom line conversion stand point. Do we leave out of stock products and hope that they turn into a conversion rate via cross selling, or do out of stock products lower the value of other pages by "stealing" link juice and pagerank from the rest of the site? (and effectively driving interest away) What is your perspective? Do you believe that any content that is related or semi-related to your main focus is beneficial, or does it only make sense to have strong content that has a higher rate of conversion and overall site engagement?

    | 13375auc3
    0
  • TopGearMedia


    Hello, I am not technically very sound and I need some good articles that teach me how to think about and go about website pages structuring and url rewriting that is seo friendly. I will be most obliged if some of you great seomoz-ers can pitch in with help. Regards, Talha ZigZag Solutions

    | TopGearMedia
    0
  • robanewman


    Im pretty new to all this so hopefuly im going the right way ive been using SEOMOZ Pro for about 3 weeks. I have a website and a blog, I noticed that my website (flash based) was not doing very well but my blog was doing well. So i decided to turn my blog into a website for my main website and my old website into another category for my services. So I have now transferred everything over to my blog and on website grader I have got my rating upto 74/100 from 17/100 which is higher than anyone else in my keyword, my traffic ranking is higher but Im not even in the top 50 in google, they do have more backlins than me significanlty more but I am working on it. So the question is it the backlinks that help MOZ ranking, and how long does it take before google recognises my links to give me a position on google. My keywords are coventry wedding photographer and my site is rnblog.co.uk

    | robanewman
    0
  • SEO_ACSI


    Hi, Concerning the upcoming (We're from the Netherlands) Panda release: -Could the fact that our affiliates use XML-feeds of our content effect our rankings in some way -Is it possible to indicate to google that content is yours? Kind regards, Dennis Overbeek dennis@acsi.eu | ACSI publishing | www.suncamp.nl | www.eurocampings.eu

    | SEO_ACSI
    0
  • adamzski


    I have a site with 200 links on the homepage, how much will it boost nofollowing the other links boost the 50 pages we care most about?

    | adamzski
    0
  • ClaireH-184886


    Hi my site has vanished from google. We have been for a very long time. for example if you put in gastric band hypnotherapy then we would be first page number two and also lots of other keywords but now we have vanished from google and i do not know why or how to solve this. can anyone please help me and help me understand what i need to do to solve this please My site is http://www.clairehegarty.co.uk I am not sure if i have been banned or why i have dropped out of google

    | ClaireH-184886
    0
  • pbrothers24


    For example, I have a piece of content about furniture and it ranks in top 5 in the SERPs for the phrase "furniture". If I were to 301 redirect that piece of furniture content to a piece of content about trucks, would the referring keyword "furniture" continue to rank over time for the trucks content? My instincts tell me that in the short term the content piece about trucks would receive traffic for the term "furniture", but over the long term, the trucks content would lose rankings for the term "furniture" since the piece has to do with trucks and not furniture. Any thoughts?

    | pbrothers24
    0
  • issuebasedmedia


    We have a site we'd like to have pulled from Google's index. Back in late June, we disallowed robot access to the site through the robots.txt file and added a robots meta tag with "no index,no follow" commands. The expectation was that Google would eventually crawl the site and remove it from the index in response to those tags. The problem is that Google hasn't come back to crawl the site since late May. Is there a way to speed up this process and communicate to Google that we want the entire site out of the index, or do we just have to wait until it's eventually crawled again?

    | issuebasedmedia
    0
  • waynekolenchuk


    I need to redirect a windows-hosted domain with permanent (301) redirects so as to preserve most of the link juice. I would be using asp page-level redirects, as there are only about 50 relevant pages. Are these as effective as linux-based 301 redirects in conserving link juice?

    | waynekolenchuk
    0
  • PlusPort


    I've read some information about the extension of an url. But i couldn't find a clear answer. What is better for SEO, an extension with html or without? /make-money-online/how-to-make-a-million-dollars-in-1-year/ or /make-money-online/how-to-make-a-million-dollars-in-1-year.html/ Is there a difference between a normal website or a blog?

    | PlusPort
    0
  • jameda


    Hi, we have our regular website at jameda.de and a mobile only page at jameda.mobi Users on mobile devices will be automatically redirected to .mobi if they click on a link to jameda.de in the SERPs. What is the best practice to ensure, that Googlebot is indexing jameda.de and Googlebot Mobile is indexing jameda.mobi without duplicate content issues and having Link-Juice benefits on mobile search at the same time? Thanks a lot

    | jameda
    0
  • bonnierSEO


    We have heard Bing takes canonical tags as hints, but do they support cross-domain canonical tags? I don't think this has ever been discussed? Does anyone have an answer or insight? Thanks!!

    | bonnierSEO
    0
  • chaya


    I have launched my own website, www.silverloops.com, and I am trying to learn and integrate SEO.  My website is hosted by Volusion, so I have incorporated all the SEO through their program and I have not had any customers yet.  I am trying to read about SEO and prepare some type of plan to improve my website.  Can anyone help me out with this?

    | chaya
    0
  • PEnterprises


    I have a couple of old wordpress sites that are old affiliate blogs. I currently sell products that are on amazon on these sites and sell quite a bit of volume. I have found a source and can afford the inventory to replace Amazon with my own product. So the dilema is how to turn these wordpress sites into ecommerce sites. The thing I am worried most about is that each site gets about 100-200 visitors a day for great buying keywords. I obviously don't want to lose my rankings. What are the options of turning a wordpress site into a store. I am not interested in plugins or some of the other solutions that make the store look very cheap and I would assume horribly convert. If you have inner pages ranking for keywords how does that work? Do the post pages become product pages? So to sum up I guess I am asking, what are the options that are of the higher quality that will also help me keep my rankings? Thanks

    | PEnterprises
    0
  • seoug_2005


    When Google indexes a flash file, do they use a library for such a purpose ? What set me thinking was this blog post  ( although old ) which states - "we expanded our SWF indexing capabilities thanks to our continued collaboration with Adobe and a new library that is more robust and compatible with features supported by Flash Player 10.1."

    | seoug_2005
    0
  • afranklin


    If you search on Google for yosemite rentals the first organic result that shows up is www.redwoodsinyosemite.com. How are they able to get the links under description: Agent Login - Our Gallery etc ..

    | afranklin
    0
  • kylesuss


    We just had our site redesigned. Previously, it was indexed under www.suss.net, but now the developer has it at suss.net with www.suss.net 301 redirecting to suss.net. Is this bad for SEO?

    | kylesuss
    0
  • Romancing


    should I add anything else besides User-Agent: * to my robots.txt file? http://melo4.melotec.com:4010/

    | Romancing
    0
  • CreativeChoices


    Hi there, SEOmoz crawler has identified a set of duplicate content that we are struggling to resolve. For example, the crawler picked up that this page www. creative - choices.co.uk/industry-insight/article/Advice-for-a-freelance-career is a duplicate of this page  www. creative - choices.co.uk/develop-your-career/article/Advice-for-a-freelance-career. The latter page's content is the original and can be found in the CMS admin area whilst the former page is the duplicate and has no entry in the CMS. So we don't know where to begin if the "duplicate" page doesn't exist in the CMS. The crawler states that this page www. creative-choices.co.uk/industry-insight/inside/creative-writing is the referrer page. Looking at it, only the original page's link is showing on the referrer page, so how did the crawler get to the duplicate page?

    | CreativeChoices
    0

Got a burning SEO question?

Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


Start my free trial


Browse Questions

Explore more categories

  • Moz Tools

    Chat with the community about the Moz tools.

  • SEO Tactics

    Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers

  • Community

    Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!

  • Support

    Connect on product support and feature requests.

Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.