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Category: Technical SEO

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

  • catherine-279388


    HI I'm still plugging away at getting to grips with my companies personalized blog.  I've been trying for the past two days to upload a theme to my own test Wordpress blog, in order to correct a bug in the companies theme that makes formatting in the Post disappear.  The code in the themes CSS file seems to be fine. Anyhow what I assumed would be a simple step has given me hours of hassle. I have finally got to the point of uploading an unzipped version of the theme intot ‘/wp-content/themes/’. Now try as I might my Wordpress admin is completely blind to the fact. Any attempt at using the Upload facility (which is what I attempted many hours ago) fails.  There seems to be no place to say, look out there at my directory - a new original theme - unzipped and ready to go. Am I missing something very obvious?

    | catherine-279388
    0
  • uderic


    Do you have any recommendations for tools that scan an entire website and report broken inner links? I run several UGC centered websites and broken inner links, and external, is an issue. Being that these websites are several hundred thousand pages large, I am not really all that excited about running software on my desktop (xenu link sleuth for example). Any online solutions you could recommend would be great!

    | uderic
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  • christinarule


    Do .com rank better then .co? I don't know much about .co so I'm just looking for some insight! Thanks in advance.

    | christinarule
    0
  • kayweb


    mrswitch.com.au is one site that we are consistantly struggling with . . . It has a page rank of 3 which beats most of the competitors, but when it comes to Google AU searches such as Sydney Electrician and Electrician Sydney etc, we just can't seem to get there and the rankings keep dropping. We backlink and update the pages on a regular basis Any ideas? - Could it be the custom CMS system?

    | kayweb
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  • severity


    The crawl of my website http://www.aboutaburningfire.com revealed an error showing a duplicate page title. Can someone please explain to me how to fix this? I'm not sure what it means or how to fix it. | House Church Chicago, Organic Church, Illinois http://www.aboutaburningfire.com/ 1 Pending Pending House Church Chicago, Organic Church, Illinois http://www.aboutaburningfire.com/index.html |

    | severity
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  • NueMD


    I just watched the WBF on cross domain rel canonicals. I understand the concept, but not sure how I go about actually doing the rel canonical? If I have www.mysite.com and someone we just partnered with, www.othersite.com wants to create new pages and use my content, what will the rel canonical tag look like on www.othersite.com? Do I need to also put this tag on www.mysite.com? I want to make sure each of my pages that the other site is copying is getting the "SEO credit."

    | NueMD
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  • 58phases


    What is the best way to get comments indexed that are hidden in a slider using display: none? For example: http://www.coupondudes.com/stores/kmart.com Click on "Add comment" Is there a way to do this without changing the design? If not, should we create a page per coupon with the comments shown. Will that pose duplicate content issues? 20110512-qg1ra18k9khdsqi6j3rkq4dfgb.jpg

    | 58phases
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  • Martin_S


    We have a pagination issue, which the developers seem reluctant (or incapable) to fix whereby we have 3 of the same page (slightly differing URLs) coming up in different pages in the archived article index. The indexing convention was very poorly thought up by the developers and has left us with the same article on, for example, page 1, 2 and 3 of the article index, hence the duplications. Is this a clear cut case of using a canonical tag? Quite concerned this is going to have a negative impact on ranking, of course. Cheers Martin

    | Martin_S
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  • ShaMenz


    I have just discovered a client site that is serving content from a single database into two separate domains and has created xml sitemaps which contain references to both domains in an attempt to avoid being tagged for duplicate content. I always thought that a sitemap was intended to show the files inside a single domain and the idea of multiple domains in the sitemap had never occurred to me... The sites are both very large storefronts and one of them (the larger of the two) has recently seen a 50% drop in search traffic and loss of some 600 search terms from top 50 positions in Google. My first instinct is that the sitemaps should be altered to only show files within each domain, but am worried about causing further loss of traffic. Is it possible that the inclusion URLs for the second domain in the sitemap may in fact be signalling duplicate content to Search Engines? Does anyone have a definitive view of whether these sitemaps are good, bad or irrelevant?

    | ShaMenz
    0
  • damon1212


    In Google Wemnaster tools, I have the option to set it to either have as default the "www" or without it. What are the pros and cons of one way or the other . . . or is this a way more complicated question/can of worms I have opened?

    | damon1212
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  • RogersSEO


    Hi Everyone, My seomoz crawl diagnostics is indicating that I have duplicate content issues in the wordpress blog section of my site located at:   http://www.cleversplash.com/blog/ What is the best strategy to deal with this? Is there a plugin that can resolve this? I really appreciate your help guys. Martin

    | RogersSEO
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  • SEOProPhoto


    I started managing a fairly small site that consists of a home page, flash portfolio, and a wordpress blog. The home page ( main index ) is canonicalized as:  The wordpress blog is canonicalized as Does canonicalization need to be consistent across the site? Could the difference in canonicalization cause any ranking problems, and or indexing problems for the blog / entire site? Any thoughts are appreciated!

    | SEOProPhoto
    0
  • VividLime


    Hi Guys, Question,
    Lets say I have a page oldfile.php at position #2  then set-up a redirection in the following way 100 incoming external links--> oldfile.php [301 to] newfile.php Google comes along and updates its index to newfile.php and ranking of newfile.php remains at position #2. Everything is good. Lets say in 5months, I come along and delete oldfile.php so we have
    100 incoming external links--> deleted(oldfile.php) or 100 incoming external links-->404 error.       |||| newfile.php Do I then loose the rankings on newfile.php. My thinking is that now that all the external links now point to a page not found, newfile.php should loose rankings Am I correct in my assumption?

    | VividLime
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  • JonathanLeplang


    Hello, I was wondering what can be the causes of pages desindexation by Google? A poor quality pages,...? Thank you for your answers, Jonathan

    | JonathanLeplang
    0
  • IPIM


    We have a UK site selling our product and we are due to appoint a reseller in the USA, they require a .com domain, which makes sense and they also would like to see American spellings etc and currency. also we feature heavily in pubs and they want this referred to as "bars" so there are a few tweaks here and there but mainly just slight variations on spelling and terminology. These are only minor adjustments to our current site, what is the best way of achieving this without falling foul of duplicate content issues.

    | IPIM
    0
  • onurkiyak


    Hi, Our page rank was 5 for the last 3 months. Before it was 4 for a long time. Today our page rank dropped to 0 and I have no idea why.. We didn't buy any links or did anything wrong.. I also checked every keyword rankings we are on but we didn't loose our spot in any keyword.. Is it a short term thing, or am I in the sandbox? How can I fix this problem or avoid from a worse situation..? www.gourmetmarketing.net We just changed the site template few times in last two months.. Thanks

    | onurkiyak
    0
  • sportstvjobs


    Just signed up for pro and did my first diagnostic check - I came back with something like 300 duplicate content errors which suprised me because every page is unique. Turns out my pages are listed as www.sportstvjobs.com and just sportstvjobs.com does  that really count as duplicate? and if so does anyone know what I should be doing differently? I thought it was just a canonical issue, but best I can tell I have the canonical in there but this still came up as a duplicate error....maybe I did canonical wrong, or its some other issue? Thanks Brian Clapp

    | sportstvjobs
    0
  • JasonCooper


    I have a client that just switched their entire site from the standard unsecure (http) to secure (https) because of over-zealous compliance issues for protecting personal information in the health care realm. They currently have the server setup to 302 redirect from the http version of a URL to the https version.  My first inclination was to have them simply update that to a 301 and be done with it, but I'd prefer not to have to 301 every URL on the site. I know that putting a rel="canonical" tag on every page that refers to the http version of the URL is a best practice (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394), but should I leave the 302 redirects or update them to 301's.  Something seems off to me about the search engines visiting an http page, getting 301 redirected to an https page and then being told by the canonical tag that it's actually the URL they were just 301 redirected from.

    | JasonCooper
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  • sportstvjobs


    I launched my site back in November and in the last 6 months have been pretty stoked about some of the links we've received from some .edu 's and some other big sites.... but I still don't register any PageRank. Is this normal or have I made some fatal flaw that is killing me in the eyes of google? Thanks Brian Clapp Founder, SportsTVJobs.com

    | sportstvjobs
    0
  • AquariumDigital


    My site has a forced redirect on the home page to https://. But that's only on the home page...other site pages are visible. How does this impact search engines crawling my site?

    | AquariumDigital
    0
  • andresgmontero


    Hi, if I have a website in Google Webmaster Tools > Geographic Target set to United States, but I want to promote it in other specific countries, 1. Do I have to change the geo-targeting in GWT so it does not target a specific country? (discarding the option of adding sub-domain to GWT) 2. If I remove the GWT geo-targeting would it affect my rankings in the US? Thank you

    | andresgmontero
    0
  • kylesuss


    We are an automotive dealership that is required to keep a manufacturer appointed website. It's pretty terrible so we are having a new site developed in addition to that. We plan on transferring our current domain name to the new site but I am not sure what to do with the older, less useful site. Should I try to have both sites appear in the search results to capture more traffic? Or is that inefficient? Should I make the new site no follow?

    | kylesuss
    0
  • CPE


    New to S.E.O. so excuse my  naivety. I  have made lots of new links some of them paid for e.g. Best of the Web but I don’t see any change in the latest competitive link analysis. Some of the links we have been accepted for just do not show. Also the keywords we are trying to promote the most have disappeared off the radar for over 2 weeks now. I think we have followed the optimization suggestions correctly. Please could you enlighten me. Regards Paul www.curtainpolesemporium.co.uk

    | CPE
    0
  • PeterM22


    hi mozzers, I have a website made in dreamweaver. Right at the very top of all of my pages is a text advert with a link to an affiliate in the ad. This link is very lucrative and gets a lot of sales, but i'm concerned it may have some negatives from an SEO perspective. As it's the first text on every page, i'm guessing bots will read it first. Could this potentially cause problems? If so, is there a best practice that would allow me to keep it there and keep the bots happy? Cheers, Peter

    | PeterM22
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  • dim_d


    We recently fixed a redirect issue in a website, and although it appears that the redirection is working fine, the url in question keeps on getting crawled, indexed and cached by google. The redirect was done a month ago, and google shows cached version of it, even for a couple of days ago. Manual checking shows that its being redirected, and also a couple of online tools i checked report a 301 redirect. Do you have any idea why this could be happening? The website I'm talking about is www.hotelmajestic.gr and its being redirected to www.hotel-majestic.gr

    | dim_d
    0
  • Conor_OShea_ETUS


    Whenever the homepage of my client's homepage appears in Google results, the search engine is not showing our URL as our domain, but instead a partner domain that is linking to us.  (The correct title and meta description of our homepage is showing.) I believe this is caused by the partner website (with a much higher pank rank) linking to our homepage from their footer to a URL with it's own domain that 302 redirects to our homepage. Example: Link:  http://www.partnerwebsite.com/?ad2203 302 redirects to:  http://www.clientwebsite.com/?moreadtracking The simple fix would be for the client to ask for removal of the 302 hijacking link - but they are uncomfortable with  this request since they had requested it prior, and their relationship is not the best. Is there any other way to fix this?

    | Conor_OShea_ETUS
    0
  • vijayvasu


    Hi All, My site www.gunshotdigital.com has been losing traffic since the last month. I have no actual reason as to why this may be, I have not changed anything on the site either so I am totally baffeled. Can one of you awesome experts pl let me know why this may be? Thank you so much in advance, www.gunshotdigital.com Vijay

    | vijayvasu
    0
  • IPIM


    I am getting flagged for duplicate content, SEOmoz is flagging the following as duplicate: www.adgenerator.co.uk/ www.adgenerator.co.uk/index.asp These are obviously meant to be the same path so what measures do I take to let the SE's know that these are to be considered the same page.  I have used the canonical meta tag on the Index.asp page.

    | IPIM
    0
  • jmsobe


    I am in the process of trying to get google to follow a large number of old links on site A to site B. Currently I have 301 redirects as well a cross domain canonical tags in place. My issue is that Google is not following the links from site A to site B since the links no longer exist in site A.  I went ahead and added the old links from site A into site A's sitemap. Unfortunately Google is returning this message inside webmaster tools: When we tested a sample of URLs from your Sitemap, we found that some URLs redirect to other locations. We recommend that your Sitemap contain URLs that point to the final destination (the redirect target) instead of redirecting to another URL. However I do not understand how adding the redirected links from site B  to the sitemap in site A  will remove the old links. Obviously Google can see the 301 redirect and the canonical tag but this isn't defined in the sitemap as a direct correlation between site A and B. Am I missing something here?

    | jmsobe
    0
  • PeterM22


    Hi mozzers, For my website I use various affiliate programs on commission junction. Some of the text ads are in javascript. Will google read the text ads or not? Cheers, Peter

    | PeterM22
    0
  • ticketplatform


    Hi everyone.  I'm sure this falls under novice seo question.  But how do i remove duplicate pages from my site.  I have not created the pages per say.  Their may be a an internal link on a page that links to the page causing the duplication.  Do i remove the internal link here is a sample of a duplicate page http://www.ticketplatform.com/about/ticket-industry-news-details/11-03-07/Ticket_Platform_to_help_LilysProject_com_to_raise_money_for_ALYN_Hospital_in_Israel.aspx?ReturnURL=%2fabout%2fticket-industry-news.aspx http://www.ticketplatform.com/about/ticket-industry-news-details/11-03-07/Ticket_Platform_to_help_LilysProject_com_to_raise_money_for_ALYN_Hospital_in_Israel.aspx?ReturnURL=%2fhome.aspx&CntPageID=1 I know the url is way too long.  working on it Thanks for your feedbacks.

    | ticketplatform
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  • kwoolf


    I am working on a language teaching site for Chinese speakers learning English. I consider myself above average when it comes to basic SEO issues, but all I know here is that Google doesn't like multiple languages on a single page. Without getting into too many details, both Chinese and English text will appear on the same page with links, tags, phonetic spellings, etc. I'm hoping someone here knows the science about using the lang="zh" xml:lang="zh" attributes within text and the effects on ranking for text within the declarations. And it'd be great if there was clarification on the link juice passed using the hreflang attribute for both internal and external links. Also, of course, any info on using both English and Chinese characters in the URL would be most helpful. A heads up on any other language specific SEO issues would also be much appreciated. My goal is to get the most out of both languages per page in terms of ranking.

    | kwoolf
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  • Blockinc


    I just noticed that I have the exact same page showing up separately in my Google Analytics reports. One has a "/" at the end and the other does not. Otherwise, these are the exact same URL's. Is this something I need to be aware of from a duplicate content perspective? If so, how do I go about fixing this? I thought the SE's would automatically see that a URL with a "/" at the end is the same as one without, but if that is the case, why is it showing up in my reports as two separate pages?

    | Blockinc
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  • Breakout


    My site has the rel canonical tags set up for it.  The developers say that it is set up correctly.  Looking at the source code myself, it looks (to my untutored eyes) to be set up correctly.  However, on the On Page Report Card for every page I have checked, it says that it doesn't point to the right page.  I'd really like to change all my 'B's to 'A's, but I simply can't see what the issue is.

    | Breakout
    0
  • AndreVanKets


    Hey all, The idea is that whenever i post a new article on my blog on my "money site" would it be OK to syndicate the same article to all of my other blogs like wordpress, tumblr etc? So for example the exact same content that is on my website will be on myblog.wordpress.com and myblog.tumblr.com but with a URL at the bottom pointing to the original source. (the money site article URL) Are there any foreseeable problems with this? The objective being having the content distributed across the web as much as possible I apologise if this has been asked before, i could not find the answer. Regards Greg

    | AndreVanKets
    0
  • paulogoncalves


    Hi I have a question My site is hosted on a server in the city of my target audience Should i use a Content Delivery Network anyway? Even if the closest edge location of the cdn is in the neighbor country? Thank you Paulo

    | paulogoncalves
    0
  • nipponx


    Hi Actually im running a web shop in several languages: english, french, spanish, italian, russian, german, japanese, korean and japanese ! lol Im trying to optimize my web site for SEO so i changed URL rewriting rules for example French example:                                                                                                                          From: http://www.test.com/je-suis-francais.html -> http://www.test.com/Je-suis-français.html Japanese example: (i use UTF8 encoding)                                                                           From: http://www.test.com/watashiwa-nihonnjin-desu.html -> http://www.test.com/私は日本人です.html So i get something like wikipedia (url with accents, ideogramms in several languages) Do you think wikipedia and me are doing wrong ?

    | nipponx
    0
  • erinhealthchoices


    Hi everyone, I love the duplicate content feature; we have a lot of duplicate content issues due to the way our site is structured. So, we're working on them. However, I'm not fully understanding the results. For example, say I have an article on breast cancer symptoms. It shows up as duplicate content, by having two urls that point to the exact same page. http://www.healthchoices.ca/articles/breast cancer symptoms and http://www.healthchoices.ca/somerandomstringofcode. I fully understand why that is duplicate content. I am not sure about this though, it picks up the same url twice and calls it duplicate content. For example, saying that http://www.healthchoices.ca/dr.-so-and-so and http://www.healthchoices.ca/dr.-so-and-so is duplicate...however is this not the same page? Is there something I'm missing? Many of the URL's are identical. Thanks, Erin

    | erinhealthchoices
    0
  • SEO-Team


    We are redesigning our website and looking at our large data in the viewstate hidden field. Our thoughts are to move to bottom of page but our developers are stating this is an old myth and no resent documentation if it improves our SEO. Does ViewState (big data in hidden fields ) effect SEO in any way? If ViewState (hidden field) is present at the end of HTML document instead of near the start of HTML document then will it increase our ranking in search engines? Does Google or any other engine read the hidden fields? or do they ignore them? Can you point me to some valid documentation to back this up? Feed back is appreciated. Cathy

    | SEO-Team
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  • raywatson


    For content syndication, let's say I have the choice of (1) a link back or (2) a cross domain rel canonical to the original page, which one would you choose and why? (I'm trying to pick the best option to save dev time!) I'm also curious to know what would be the difference in SERPs between the link back & the canonical solution for the original publisher and for sydication partners? (I would prefer not having the syndication partners disappeared entirely from SERPs, I just want to make sure I'm first!) A side question: What's the difference in real life between the Google source attribution tag & the cross domain rel canonical tag? Thanks! PS: Don't know if it helps but note that we can syndicate 1 article to multiple syndication partners (It would't be impossible to see 1 article syndicated to 50 partners)

    | raywatson
    0
  • JordanJudson


    When the crawl diagnostics came back for my site its showing around 3,000 pages of duplicate content. Almost all of them are of the catalog search results page. I also did a site search on Google and they have most of the results pages in their index too. I think I should just disallow the bots in the /catalogsearch/ sub folder, but I'm not sure if this will have any negative effect?

    | JordanJudson
    0
  • musillawfirm


    What does it take for results to show up above Place Page results.  It seems like Google Local gets a lot of emphasis .  Any thoughts?

    | musillawfirm
    0
  • jmsobe


    I have come across a situation where we have discovered duplicate content between multiple domains. We have access to each domain and have recently within the past 2 weeks added a 301 redirect to redirect each page dynamically to the proper page on the desired domain. My question relates to the removal of these pages. There are thousands of these duplicate pages. I have gone back and looked at a number of these cached pages in google and have found that the  cached pages that are roughly 30 days old or older.  Will these pages ever get removed from google's index? Will the 301 redirect even be read by google to be redirected to the proper domain and page? If so when will that happen? Are we better off submitting a full site removal request of the sites that carries the duplicate content at this point? These smaller sites do bring traffic on their own but I'd rather not wait 3 months for the content to be removed since my assumption is that this content is competing with the main site. I suppose another option would be to include no cache meta tag for these pages. Any thoughts or comments would be appreciated.

    | jmsobe
    0
  • EricVallee34


    I'm just starting to provide paid consultation to a few clients who have approached me for SEO help. As I've not completed a lot of projects, I'm looking for guidance on how to set expectations.  I get the feeling that one of my clients is going to expect that once our initial work (keyword research, addressed their primary technical issues, fixing on-page issues) that they will automatically appear on the first page of Google. In a project with 50 keywords, I believe this may be true for a few keywords where there isn't a lot of competition.  However, I believe that for many of the keywords, we won't be able to achieve ranking on the first page unless we do an on-going link-building program.  Is this assumption accurate?

    | EricVallee34
    0
  • catherine-279388


    Could anyone recommend a plugin for creating wordpress post descriptions.  There is a confusingly large selection of choices in the wordpress plugins directory.

    | catherine-279388
    0
  • Motava


    We are working on a site that has 50+ pages that all have duplicate content (1 for each state, pretty much). Should we 301 all 50 of the URLs to one URL or should we just completely get rid of all the pages? Are there any steps to take when completely removing pages completely? (submit sitemap to google webmaster tools, etc) thanks!

    | Motava
    0
  • Falconberg


    Just finished reviewing the first crawl of my first SEOmoz campaign for a site that I am working on.  The site I"m working on uses Wordpress as a CMS, and most if not all of the warnings and notices have to do with author, category, and tag pages. Should I block these from being indexed? Why or why not?

    | Falconberg
    0
  • Yozzer


    Mozzers: We have a instance where a client is looking to 301 a www.example.com to                                                                                                                           www.example.com/shop I know of several issues with this but wondered if anyone could chip in with any previous experiences of doing so, and what outcomes positive and negative came out of this. Issues I'm aware of: The root domain URL is the most linked page, a HTTP 301 redirect only passes about 90% of the value. you'll loose 10-15% of your link value of these links. navigational queries (i.e.: the "domain part" of "domain.tld") are less likely to produce google site-links less deep-crawling: google crawls top down - starts with the most linked page, which will most likely be your domain url. as this does not exist you waste this zero level of crawling depth. robots.txt is only allowed on the root of the domain. Your help as always is greatly appreciated. Sean

    | Yozzer
    0
  • EricVallee34


    I'm helping a client redesign their website and they want to have a home page that's primarily graphics and/or flash (or jquery).  If they are able to optimize all of their key sub-pages, what is the harm in terms of SEO?

    | EricVallee34
    0
  • rasiadmin1


    We recently changed our CMS from php to .NET. The old CMS did not allow for folder structure in urls so every url was www.mydomain/name-of-page. In the new CMS we either have to have .aspx at the end of the url or a /. We opted for the /, but now my page rank is dead and Google webmaster tools says my existing links are now going through an intermediary page. Everything resolves to the right place, but looks like spiders see our new pages as being 302 redirected. Example of what's happening. Old page: www.mydomain/name-of-page New page: www.mydomain/name-of-page/ What should I do? Should I go in and 301 redirect the old pages? Will this get cleared up by itself in time?

    | rasiadmin1
    0

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