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Category: Technical SEO

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  • we came across one thing the we did not asked to programm by our intention. we have a magento shop and on the produktpage we have those "compare" buttons. these link have a session id and the follow a 302 back onto the same page. so i beleive the idea is that google will just not follow 302s and thats it. so my questions is: is this right what we beleive if so why is a 302 better compared to a a href="nofollow" ???

    | kynop
    0

  • Hi. New here to SEOmoz and also somewhat new to SEO in general. A friend has asked me to help do some onsite SEO for their company's website. The company uses Drupal Content Management System. They have a couple product pages that contain a tabbed section for features, accessories, etc. When they built their tabs, they used a Drupal module called Quicktabs, by which each individual tab is created as a separate page and then pulled into the tabs from those pages. So, in essence, you now have instances of repeated content. 1) the page used to create the tab, and 2) the tab that displays on the product page. My question is, how should I handle the pages that were used to create the tabs? Should I make them NOINDEX? Thank you for your advice in advance.

    | aprilm-189040
    0

  • Site: simpsonelectricnc dot com I'm working on a Joomla website for a local business that isn't ranking at all for any relevant keyword - including the business name. The site is only about six months old and has relatively few links. I realize it takes time to compete for even low-volume keywords, but I think something else may be preventing the site from showing up. The site is not blocked by Robots.txt (which includes a valid reference to the sitemap)
    There is no duplicate content issue, the .htaccess is redirecting all non-www traffic to www version
    Every page has a unique title and H1 tag.
    The URL's are search-engine friendly (not dynamic either)
    XML sitemap is live and submitted to Google WM Tools. Google shows that it is indexing about 70% of the submitted URL's. The site has essentially no domain authority (0.02) according to Moz - I'm assuming this is due to lack of links and short life on the web.
    Until today, 98% of the pages had identical meta descriptions. Again, I realize six months is not an eternity - but the site will not even show up for "business name + city,state" searches in Google. In fact, the only way I've seen it in organic results is to search for the exact URL. I would greatly appreciate any help.

    | CGR-Creative
    0

  • Does it matter for SEO if one uses a base href meta tag or if it is defined using java script?

    | cindyt-17038
    0

  • Hi, My question is directed to CGI Parameters. I was able to dig up a bit of content on this but I want to make sure I understand the concept of CGI parameters and how they can affect indexing pages. Here are two pages: No CGI parameter appended to end of the URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/13/world/asia/13japan.html CGI parameter appended to the end of the URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/13/world/asia/13japan.html?pagewanted=2&ref=homepage&src=mv Questions: Can we safely say that CGI parameters = URL parameters that append to the end of a URL? Or are they different? And given that you have rel canonical implemented correctly on your pages, search engines will move ahead and index only the URL that is specified in that tag? Thanks in advance for giving your insights. Look forward to your response. Best regards, Jackson

    | jackson_lo
    0

  • Hi! I just launched our newly coded site and just realized the installed 301 is NOT working. The URL string is the same EXCEPT for the removal of /shop/. Here is the code in .htaccess: ############################################ enable rewrites Options +FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine on #RedirectMatch 301 ^/shop?/$ http://hiphound.com/ RedirectMatch 301 ^/shop?/$ http://hiphound.com ########################################### When I go to Google and click on an old link I get a 404. No bueno!! Here is an example: http://hiphound.com/shop/rubit-dog-tag-clip I thought (and was told) that the installed 301 would send this page to: http://hiphound.com/rubit-dog-tag-clip It's not. Please HELP!! 🙂 What am I doing wrong??? Lynn

    | hiphound
    0

  • Two sites. One has weaker sales. What would the benefits and problems for SEO of moving the weak site from its own domain to a subdomain of the stronger site?

    | GriffinHansen
    0

  • So I need to get this page cached: http://www.flowerpetal.com/index.jsp?info=13 It's been 4-5 months since uploaded. Now it's linked to from the homepage of a PR5 site. I've tweeted that link 10 times, facebooked, stumbled, linked to it from other articles and still nothing. And I submitted the url to google twice. Any thoughts? Thanks Tyler

    | tylerfraser
    0

  • A few years ago our company decided to merge all its websites (magazine brands) as sub-domains under one new root domain. So the current situation is like this: brand1.rootdomain.com
    brand2.rootdomain.com
    brand3.rootdomain.com
    ... For the moment the rootdomain has a domain authority of 66. In a few weeks we would like to switch that rootdomain to the strongest (highest trust, pagerank,...) brand. So we get this: www.brand1.com
    brand2.brand1.com
    brand3.brand1.com Before we make the switch i'll have to make a pro and con list. So I hope I can get some advice for you guys if this is a good idea or not.

    | WDN
    0

  • I'm working on a site that is throwing off a -lot- of duplicate content for its size. A lot of it appears to be coming from bad links within the site itself, which were caused when it was ported over from static HTML to Expression Engine (by someone else). I'm finding EE an incredibly frustrating platform to work with, as it appears to be directing 404's on sub-pages to the page directly above that subpage, without actually providing a 404 response. It's very weird. Does anyone have any recommendations on software to clearly map out a site's internal link structure so that I can find what bad links are pointing to the wrong pages?

    | BedeFahey
    0

  • I have a question regarding a warning that I got on one of my websites, it says Duplicate content. I'm canonical url:s and is also using blocking Google out from pages that you are warning me about. The pages are not indexed by Google, why do I get the warnings? Thanks for great seotools! 3M5AY.png

    | bnbjbbkb
    0

  • I use wordpress as CMS on a few sites and I noticed that word press automattically places 301s if I change a url etc. I believe it does it by having the following in the .htaccess file: BEGIN WordPress<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine OnRewriteBase /RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-fRewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-dRewriteRule . /index.php [L]</ifmodule> END WordPress Should I use this? I feel like it limits my control over the 301s.

    | mmaes
    0

  • Will it make a difference if a page has this format for URLs and breadcrumb navigation www.domain.com/category.html
    www.domain.com/category/product1.html vs. www.domain.com/category/
    www.domain.com/category/product1.html
    or
    www.domain.com/category/product1 does it make sense to change the category page or will it not make a huge difference?

    | Motava
    0

  • Does it do anything to place the Canonical tag on the unique page itself?  I thought this was only to be used on the offending pages that are the copies. Thanks

    | poolguy
    0

  • I do NOT have a cms website. just php/html. How do I create a feed so I can register it with feedburner? Not for my blog just the website its self.

    | bozzie311
    0

  • Something I have not come across before, but hope others here are able offer advice based on experience: A client has independently created a series of mini-sites, aimed at targeting specific locations.  The tactic has worked very well and they have achieved a large amount of well targeted traffic as a result. Each mini-site is different but then in the nav, if you want to view prices or go to the booking page, that then links to what at first appears to be their main site. However, you then notice that the URL is actually situated on the mini-site.  What they have done is 'framed' the main site so that it appears exactly the same even when navigating through this exact replica site. Checking the code, there is almost nothing there - in fact there is actually no content at all.  Below the head, there is a piece of code: <frameset rows="*" framespacing=0 frameborder=0> <frame src="[http://www.example.com](view-source:http://www.yellowskips.com/)" frameborder=0 marginwidth=0 marginheight=0> <noframes>Your browser does not support frames. Click [here](http://www.example.com) to view.noframes> frameset> Given that main site content does not appear to show in the source code, do we have an issue with duplicate content?  This issue is that these 'referrals' are showing in Analytics, despite the fact that the code does not appear in the source, which is slightly confusing for me. They have done this without consultation and I'm very concerned that this could potentially be creating duplicate content of their ENTIRE main site on dozens of mini-sites. I should also add that there are no links to the mini-sites from the main site, so if you guys advise that this is creating duplicate content, I would not be worried about creating a link-wheel if I advise them to link directly to the main site rather than the framed pages. Thanks!

    | RiceMedia
    0

  • I have a client that picked up a bunch of keyword rich domain names and he wants to point them to his current corporate site as domain aliases. Could this in anyway negatively or positively effect his SEO? or ranking? Thanks  - Kyle Chandler

    | kchandler
    1

  • I read a lot of advantages by using Thesis as a platform for blogging, but I like the themes and other plugins from Tumblr. Are there equivalents at Tumblr to the Thesis benefits so I can go a head and go with Tumblr?

    | HyperOffice
    0

  • Hi!! Okay - weird tech question. Domain is http://hiphound.com. I have SSL attaching to checkout and my account pages. Tested and works well. Issue - I am able to reach the home page at https://hiphound.com AND http://hiphound.com. If I access the home page via HTTPS and click on a link (any link) then the site is redirected to HTTP again which is good. My concern is the home page displaying via HTTPS and HTTP. Is this is an issue that can be resolved or is it expected behavior I have to live with.? I am being told by DEV there is nothing they can do about it but want to understand why and if they are correct. Thoughts? Thank you!! Lynn

    | hiphound
    0

  • I was wondering if the location of our domain registrar still play a role in SEO. The thing is that one of our domains are registered with a registrar in another country. It is a national TLD (.no). Could this have any influence on our rankings? The reason for asking is that i came across this article at Search Engine Journal:
    http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-rankings-influenced-by-server-domain-registrar-and-geographic-location/5963/ saying: "
    Hosting is not the only variable Google may look at when determining search relevance for a site, here is a look at hosting, domain registrar information and geographic location." I was wondering if what is said here, still is valid (article is from 2007). Hope you guys can help me out.

    | AndersS
    0

  • Hello, I am having difficulty getting my robots.txt file to be configured properly. I am getting error emails from Google products stating they can't view our products because they are being blocked, and this past week, in my SEO dashboard, the URL's receiving search traffic dropped by almost 40%. Is there anyone that can offer assistance on a good template robots.txt file I can use for a Magento eCommerce website? The one I am currently using was found at this site here: e-commercewebdesign.co.uk/blog/magento-seo/magento-robots-txt-seo.php - However, I am getting problems from Google now because of it. I searched and found this thread here: http://www.magentocommerce.com/wiki/multi-store_set_up/multiple_website_setup_with_different_document_roots#the_root_folder_robots.txt_file - But I felt like maybe I should get some additional help on properly configuring a robots for a Magento site. Thanks in advance for any help. Please, let me know if you need more info to provide assistance.

    | JerDoggMckoy
    0

  • Posting this for Dave SottimanoI Here's the scenario: You've got a set of URLs indexed by Google, and you want them out quickly Once you've managed to remove them, you want to block Googlebot from crawling them again - for whatever reason. Below is a sample of the URLs you want blocked, but you only want to block /beerbottles/ and anything past it: www.example.com/beers/brandofbeer/beerbottles/1 www.example.com/beers/brandofbeer/beerbottles/2 www.example.com/beers/brandofbeer/beerbottles/3 etc.. To remove the pages from the index should you?: Add the Meta=noindex,follow tag to each URL you want de-indexed Use GWT to help remove the pages Wait for Google to crawl again If that's successful, to block Googlebot from crawling again - should you?: Add this line to Robots.txt: DISALLOW */beerbottles/ Or add this line: DISALLOW: /beerbottles/ "To add the * or not to add the *, that is the question" Thanks! Dave

    | goodnewscowboy
    0

  • Hello SEO brethren - I've got a mystery I'm trying to solve. I work in house SEO at http://www.uncommongoods.com/ Our home page is a Pagerank 5. All of our sub-pages are Pagerank 0. Even this one below which has 276 links from 57 domains: http://www.uncommongoods.com/product/recycled-wine-bottle-platters Any clue what is going on here? Is a PR 0 typical for a page with this many links / linking domains? Thanks! -Zack

    | znotes
    0

  • Hi seomozzers I have a question regarding metrics on a site I am looking at. Basically the homepage has the following: DA 33, PA41 mR 5.09, mT 5.84 PR 1 I have also checked an internal page and that has similar mozrank and moztrust and PA 37 but has PR 0. Can anyone shed any light on the possible reasons (other than a Google penalty) why there should be such a difference between PR and mR as I understood that in general the difference is more likely to be 0.5 to 1. As I do not believe that the site has had any 'help' from black hat tactics and is 9 years old I'm a little perplexed. Anyone else experience such a discrepancy? Thanks in advance. Trevor

    | TrevorJones
    0

  • What is Canonical URL Tag?

    | CalgaryRealtor39
    1

  • Hello fellow mozzers, Our in-house CMS - which is usually good for SEO purposes as it allows all the control over directories, filenames, browser titles etc that prevent unwieldy / meaningless URLs and generic title tags - seems to have got itself into a bit of a tiz when it comes to one of our clients. We have tried solving the problem to no avail, so I thought I'd throw it open and see if anyone has a soultion, or whether it's just a fault in our CMS. Basically, the SEs are indexing two identical pages, one ending with a / and the other ending /index.php, for one of our sites (www.signature-care-homes.co.uk). We have gone through the site and made sure the links all point to just one of these, and have done the same for off-site links, but there is still the duplicate content issue of both versions getting indexed. We also set up an htaccess file to redirect to the chosen version, but to no avail, and we're not sure canonical will work for this issue as / pages should redirect to /index.php anyway - and that's we can't work out. We have set the access file to point to index.php, and that should be what should be happening anyway, but it isn't. Is there an alternative way of telling the SE's to only look at one of these two versions? Also, we are currently rewriting the content and changing the structure - will this change the situation we find ourselves in?

    | themegroup
    0

  • Hello, My site URL is http://bit.ly/161NeE and our site was ranked first page for over hundred keywords before March, 30. But all of a sudden, all the keywords on first page dropped to 5th or 6th page. When we search for our site name without ".com", the results appeared on first page are all from other sites. And our page can only be seen on 6th page. We think we have been penalized by Google. But we don't know the exact reason. Can anyone please help? Some extra info on our site: 1. We have been building links by posting blog, articles and PR. All the articles are unique, written by the writers we hire. It has been working fine all the time. We also varied the anchor text a lot. 2. We didn't make any change to the website. But one real problem with our site is that the server is very slow recently and when google crawl our website, many errors were found, mostly 503, 404 errors. And the total number of errors have reach to over 50,000. Do you think this might be a problem for Google not displaying us on first page? Our technicals are working hard to solve server problem. And if it is solved, shall our rankings be back? Please advise. Thanks.

    | Milanoocom
    0

  • http://lsapi.seomoz.com/linkscape/links/nz.yahoo.com?SourceCols=4&Limit=100&Sort=domain_authority&Scope=domain_to_domain&Filter=external+follow&LinkCols=4 Hi folks any idea why the above returns Err 500 ? Seems to pertain to the domain - it works on other sites just not nz.yahoo.com Thanks!

    | jimbo_kemp
    0

  • How do I redirect this url: http://www.example.com/img/head/beauty-spa.jpg" width="114" height="50" alt="image"/></a> </div> <div class="c0 r"><a href="/m/imgres?q=short+holiday+treatments Thank you for your help.

    | petrakraft
    0

  • There is a lot of talk about this all over this site (and other's), but just about every solution mentions using the .htaccess file, which is only a solution for Apache.  My sites are in a shared windows environment, so that won't work for me.  I have access to the IIS manager for the server, and have several page-level redirects in place. My issue is that I cannot find a clear and easy way to re-direct my root (domain.com) domain, to my preferred specific domain (www.domain.com).  I found a few articles online relating to a URL re-write module for IIS, but am not sure if I will be able to install that on a shared web server.  Is there another way to accomplish my goal of not having 2 indexable versions of my site?  I have rel-canonical tags on every page, but would prefer a more trustworthy and established solution. Thanks for any help you can offer. -Dave

    | dschapira
    0

  • I recently took over administration of my site and I have 2 XML sitemaps for my main site and 1 XML sitemap for my blog (which is a sub-page of the main site).  Don't I only need 1 sitemap for my site and one for my blog?  I don't know which one to delete - they both has the same page authority.  Also, only 1 of them is accessible by browser search. http://www.rmtracking.com/rmtracking-sitemap.xml - accessible in browser http://www.rmtracking.com/sitemap.xml - regularly updated in Google Webmaster Tools but not accessible in search browser.  I don't have any error messages in Webmaster tools.

    | BradBorst
    0

  • My HTACCESS FILE IS AS FOLLOWS: rewriteengine on
    rewritecond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mydomain.com$
    rewriterule ^mydomain/(.*)$ "http://www.mydomain.com/$1" [R=301,L] #4d864805b49b5 I want to move ONLY specific pages from this domain to a new domain How do I edit my HTACCESS (which redirects http:// to www.) to move specific pages from old domain (which I have to delete) to new domain.... I.e. http://mydomaon.com/move.html needs to move to http://mynewdomain.com/move.html Where i can delete the original domains

    | askthetrainer
    0

  • Hey guys, I just transitioned my website and I have a question. I have built up all the link juice around my old url styles. To give you some clarity: My old CMS rendered links like this: www.example.com/sweatbands My new CMS renders links like this: www.example.com/sweatbands/ My new CMS's auto-sitemap also generates them with the slash on the end. Also throughout the website the CMS links to them with the slash at the end and i link to them without the slash (because it's what i am used to). I have the canonical without the slash. Should I just 301 to the version with the slash before google crawls again? I'm worried that i'll lose all the trust and ranking i built up to the one without the slash. I rank very high for certain keywords and some pages house a large portion of our traffic. What a mess! Help!  🙂

    | Hyrule
    0

  • Hey Mozers! We will be creating another brand pretty soon with some pretty cool interactive features and before we start development of the site I was wondering if there are any pros/cons to branding the site sans the www. For example http://example123.com and http://www.example123.com. I would much prefer to brand it has http://example123.com but I just wanted to check first to see if that would have any negative SEO ramifications. It seems that it might just be a preference as I looked at Facebook and Twitter and they both do it differently, same with Groupon and LivingSocial. Looking forward to hearing from you guys!

    | Riggz
    1

  • Hello, I'd like to create a new category for my store. All products will be from other categories, no new products will be added. So this is really content that is already on my site. I will add cateogry specific text in this page with unique title, etc. But the products are all already on my site.Is this duplicate content, will this be a bad move? Thanks

    | tylerfraser
    0

  • Google analytics shows me that this:  http://www.quicklearn.com/default.aspx is my "top content page" This page doesn't redirect to my root domain:  http://www.quicklearn.com IT tells me that "/default.aspx" can not redirect to my domain. I am told: "You can only redirect deeper into the site." We have had an ongoing issue with duplicate content (that we are in the process of correcting). Anyone with experience in redirecting that can help? Any advice welcome

    | QuickLearnTraining
    0

  • Hi guys, To put a long story short we have had to make a copy of our site and put it on another domain so in essence there are 2 copies of our site on the web.What we have done is put a username and password on the homepage - http://www.ughhwiki.co.uk/ now i just want to be 100% sure that the search engines cannot crawl this? Thank you Jon

    | imrubbish
    0

  • What can you do to increase your domain authority?

    | CalgaryRealtor39
    0

  • Hi Guys, I really could do with some gudienace or answers to the following questions: Are the any specific web design or technical issues that are different in Australian search engines compared to the UK? Are there any web design issues that are different to the UK? Are there any useful things I should consider from an SEO point of view if I am launching a website in Australia compared to the UK? Any helpw ould be much apprciated! Thanks Gareth

    | GAZ09
    0

  • We recently put in permanent redirects to our new url, but Google seems to not want to index the new url. There was no problems with the old url and the new url is brand new so should have no 'black marks' against it. We have done everything we can think off in terms of submitting site maps, telling google our url has changed in webmaster tools, mentioning the new url on social sites etc...but still nothing. It has been over 4 weeks now since we set up the redirects to the url, any ideas why Google seems to be choosing not to index it? Thanks

    | cewe
    0

  • Hi, I have one existing web site, I am building the backlinks by myself and also hire some people to do it for me in blog, forum, bookmarks, articles etc. Questions: 1. what is the max number of backlinks per day which will not trigger google to put my site into the sandbox? I heard some people said 100, some people said 30, and some people said it does not matter if this is not a brand new site. 2. I have 5-6 pages which I want to promote, does the Max number of backlinks apply to the whole site or to the particular page? I am also building a brand new site, is the restriction more tighten for the a brand new site? I heard some people said for the brand new site, the first month, you can only have 10 backlinks per day, now sure it is true or not. Please advise. Thanks -David

    | David680
    0

  • So if you are AB testing two pages: index.html and indexB.html Shouldn't I nofollow indexB.html? It has all the same content, just a different design.

    | tylerfraser
    0

  • Recently, there has been considerable discussion and debate about the value of choosing keyword-rich and exact-match domains. In a recent webmaster Q&A, Matt Cutts seems to suggest that google is planning on "turning down the dial" on keyword domain signals: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAWFv43qubI How will these changes (if at all) impact your advice to clients on domain selection?

    | Gyi
    0

  • Is it better to have an error page return a 404 or 200? If I change it to 200, will I still be able to see reports of 404's and/ or broken links? Is there a valid SEO reason that Google would have for not wanting error pages to return 200? In other words, is there any SEO reason to absolutely change it to return a 404? I would rather let it return 200 if no priority reason to change. [title edited by staff to provide clarity]

    | cindyt-17038
    0

  • We're launching a new site and we're trying to crawl it to check for any problems.  It's millions of pages and Xenu seems to start encountering errors as the numbers mount past 500,000.  Does anyone know of an alternative, free or paid, that could handle the size better?

    | eLocalusa
    0

  • Wordpress offers Canonical URLs in the "All in one SEO" settings.  I know that canonical tags for page content will cause the search engine to ignore the content, but I don't understand this setting in Wordpress.  The Canonical URLs box for my blog had been checked until a couple weeks ago.  I unchecked it (removing the canonical tag) and now I have about 300 duplicate content pages acccording to my SEOMoz reports.  It appears that it's just the blog tag in the url now that is causing the confusion.  Here's an example of the same url with two tags: http://www.rmtracking.com/blog/tag/aclu/ http://www.rmtracking.com/blog/tag/rfid/ Should I activate the canonical URL setting in Wordpress again.  If not, how can I fix this? Your assistance is greatly appreciated. Regards, Brad

    | BradBorst
    0

  • I'm trying to work out the best way to resolve an issue where Google is seeing duplicate versions of a homepage, i.e. http://www.home.co.uk/Home.aspx and http://www.home.co.uk/ The site runs on Windows servers. I've tried implementing redirects for homepages before (for a different site on a linux server) and ended up with a loop, so although I know I can read lots of info (as I have been doing) and try again, I am really concerned about getting it wrong. Can anyone give me some advice on the best way to make Google take just one version of the page?  Obviously link juice is also being diluted so I need to get this sorted asap. Thanks.

    | travelinnovations
    0

  • Hello fellow mozzers! One of our clients does an excellent job of providing excellent content, and we don't even have to nag them about it (imagine that!). This content is usually centered around industry reports, financial analyses, and economic forcasts; however, they always post them in the form of pdfs. How does Google view PDF's, and is there a way to optimize them? Ideally, I am going to try to get this client set up with a blog-like plateform that will use HTML text, rather than PDF's, but I wanted to see what info was out there for PDF's. Thanks!

    | tqinet
    0

  • Hello, I want to know how to implement 503 status for a website hosted on Windows server? Will this code trigger automatically as per some specific condition or is it done manually? THanks & Regards

    | IM_Learner
    0

  • I am working on a website that all of its primary contents are videos. They have an assortment of free videos, but the majority or viewable only with a subscription to the site. If you don't have a subscription, you can see a 2 min video clip of the contents of the video. But all the videos can be anywhere from 10min to 1.5 hours. When I am auto-generating the sitemap.xml, can I put the full length of the videos for paying members in the XML in the video:duration property? Or because publicly only 2 minutes is available (unless you pay for a membership) is that frowned upon?

    | nbyloff
    0

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