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Category: Technical SEO

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

  • RichCMF


    Mainly to allow updates without the need for publishing - would Google interpret any differently? Thanks

    | RichCMF
    0
  • Jorge_HDI


    Hi everyone, last week i add "Noindex" tag into my page, but that site still appear in the organic search. what other things i can do for remove from google?

    | Jorge_HDI
    0
  • RAN_SEO


    Two days ago I found out through search console that my website's Robots.txt has changed to User-agent: *
    Disallow: / When I check the robots.txt in the website it looks fine - I see its blocked just in search console( in the robots.txt tester). when I try to do fetch as google to the homepage I see its blocked. Any ideas why would robots.txt block my website? it was fine until the weekend. before that, in the last 3 months I saw I had blocked resources in the website and I brought back pages with fetch as google. Any ideas?

    | RAN_SEO
    0
  • amu123


    Hi All, When I search my brand name in google and in google search result my site appears with sitelink and in site link there is option of search when I search any keyword in that search then that search redirect me to 404 page of my site. I found I have implemented wrong schema at category page for search action and then I fixed the bug but 5 days passed away still google showing 404 of my search action. I have not implemented schema for search action at homepage. Now please let me know what is the issue?

    | amu123
    0
  • bernienabo


    Hi, We have public pages that can obviously be visited by our registered members. When they visit these public pages + they are logged in to our site, we want to redirect them to the equivalent (richer) page on the private site e.g. a logged in user visiting /public/contentA will be redirected to /private/contentA Note: Our /public pages are indexed by Google whereas /private pages are excluded. a) will this affect our SEO? b) if not, is 302 the best http status code to use? Cheers

    | bernienabo
    0
  • OscarSE


    I have a client that had a web agency which systematically implemented hidden content. Is there a tool that will compare source content vs what is readable on from the browser? Otherwise, can you recommend articles that focus on doing this? What are the impact on hidden content these days? Another client had hidden content on the first page and when we took over them they were ranking nr 2 with the home page on their brand name (nr 1 with a sub page). We have checked the link profile with Majestic, Ahrefs and Moz and nothing spammy comes up so I doubt it is Penguin related.

    | OscarSE
    0
  • arun.negi


    We switched the domain from www.blog.domain.com to domain.com/blog. This was done with the purpose of gaining backlinks to our main website as well along with to our blog. This set us very low in organic traffic and not to mention, lost the backlinks. For anything, they are being redirected to 301 code. Kindly suggest changes to bring back all the traffic.

    | arun.negi
    0
  • cmscss


    Hi There, I'm having trouble performing a 'Name change' for a new website (rebrand and domain change) in Google Search console. Because the 301 redirects are in place (a requirement of the name change tool), Google can no longer verify the site, which means I can't complete the name change? To me, step two (301 redirect) conflicts with step there (site verification) - or is there a way to perform a 301 redirect and have the tool verify the old site? Any pointers in the right direction would be much appreciated. Cheers Ben

    | cmscss
    0
  • Katarina-Borovska


    Hi, Does anyone have any experience with acquiring backlinks and their impact on DA and ranks? I am not asking about how to get backlinks, but how soon in your experience you noticed any positive results? Please, can you be specific? I.e. "once I acquired 8 backlinks from websites with DA 70+, my DA changed from x to x and my average rank improved in 4 positions overall/per page". Or any other tangible results. Many thanks. Katarina

    | Katarina-Borovska
    0
  • Ruth-birdcage


    Hello, Should Moz be picking up http errors still if the sites on https? Or has the https not been done properly? I'm getting duplicate errors amoung other things. Cheers, Ruth

    | Ruth-birdcage
    1
  • unidadseo


    How can I delete a question from the Moz Forum?

    | unidadseo
    0
  • fogtheagency


    Hi I try to  create sitemap for www.example.com, this website has link  www.blog.example.com. after creating the sitemap using different tool. the sitemap not include www.blog.example.com and its relative files how can i get both  example.com and blog.example.com in one sitemap

    | fogtheagency
    0
  • searchspot


    My Wordpress website is set up with a magazine style theme (Newspaper). Maybe that's the issue overall here. Questions: 1) Pages vs Categories vs Posts I currently have a category with a few dozen posts under it. The category page itself has a ~1000 word article on it. It paginates every 10 posts or so at the bottom, but most of the page is duplicate because it's only swapping out a few links. Should I instead make the "category" a page with the posts childed under it? What's the best way to go about that? 2) Canonical and Pagination I get errors about a ton of duplicate content for paginated categories and my author page (all posts are under the admin account, which has ~40 pages or so. Every page is just a list of posts and it bitches about duplicate Titles and Descriptions on every one of the paginated posts). Should I canonical these back to the root author? Same question regarding pagination for categories, assuming I'm not going to be switching them to Pages. 3) Home Page Links Right now my home page just shows a few links to the top posts of all time. After that, it shows the 5 newest posts. On the sidebar it lists a few random pages/posts. There are also a few "category listings" which just shows random posts relevant to that category. Do I want something more static/structured? The navbar does list most main content pages under their appropriate category, but the home page itself is pretty much dynamic.

    | searchspot
    0
  • eduapps


    Hi, One of the top landing pages in my website has disappeared from GSC Search Analytics results. But I do get a good traffic from that page until now. What might be the reason for GSC to stop showing it on the results?

    | eduapps
    0
  • palila


    Im seeing in my Google search console some of my old html pages. I never redirecting them and now they get 404 errors.  Below is my current htaccess file, how would I changed it so that any html page i.e. intercallsystems.com/index.html forwards to my new site intercallsystems.com ? I have about 5 html pages that I want to redirect. Thank you for the help! Rena Currently my htaccess says: 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

    | palila
    0
  • HealthmateForever


    can redirect URL website also shown on the google ranking?  and higher than the original website? For example, I create URL B which redirect to website A, and do good SEO on URL B, can URL B rank higher than my original website A?

    | HealthmateForever
    0
  • advertisingtech


    Hello,Due to various technical questions we have decided to implement our multi-language support in a way that example.com servers the English search query's and example.es Spanish. Now there is big volume for English query's in Spain serp. If i have example.es domain for Spain and use language tags will searchers find my .com still for their English terms or automatically only .es will be served for google.es?We would just specify hreflang=EN for the example.com and es for the example.esThank you,

    | advertisingtech
    1
  • LabeliumUSA


    Hello everyone ! I need help setting up a robot.txt. I'm trying to block all pdf files in particular directories so I'm using this command. In the example below the line is blocking all .gif in the entire site. Block files of a specific file type (for example, .gif) | Disallow: /*.gif$ 2 questions : Can I use this command to specify one particular directory in which I want to block pdf files ? Will this line be recognized by googlebots ? Disallow: /fileadmin/xxxxxxx/xxx/xxxxxxx/*.pdf$ Then I realized that I would have to write as many lines as many directories there are in which I want to block pdf files. Let's say I want to block pdf files in all these 3 directories /fileadmin/directory1 /fileadmin/directory1/sub1 /fileadmin/directory1/sub1/pdf Is there a pattern-matching rule I could use to blocks access to pdf files in all subdirectories instead of writing 3x the above line for each subdirectory ? For exemple : Disallow: /fileadmin/directory1*/ Many thanks in advance for any insight you may have.

    | LabeliumUSA
    0
  • advertisingtech


    Hello, our website is targeted for the Czech Republic. When I monitor our rankings, we have very high rankings in all of the other SERPs like .com and .fr .de but we are in the very end of CZ serp. Not CZ is the only SERP where we have two languages (Czech which is on subdomain cs.domain.com and domain.com which is for english). Now i am concerned about the example.com. Why is it not ranking at all (very low in czech serp like 130 vs 10-15 in other serps) We have used href lang tags to specify the language I think Can it be because of my cs. domain is optimized for a keyword which is not the example.com keyword ?  (I think this is not the reason) - my example.com domain optimization is for "Kids clothes in Czech Republic" but cs domain for "Used clothes in Czech Republic" is it a linking issue? Should I have more local Czech links? Im out of ideas.

    | advertisingtech
    0
  • romaro


    Hello, doing an audit found in our sitemaps the tag which at the time was to say that the url was mobile. In our case the URL is the same for desktop and mobile.
    Do you recommend leaving or removing it?
    Thank you!

    | romaro
    0
  • cafegardesh


    Hi guys I involved in difficult situation. in google webmaster tools -> internal links some important pages doesn't have any links from all pages. for example home page just have 9000 internal inks but there are 29000 indexed pages by google and some not important pages have 27000 internal links.(more than home page) Site made by angular v1 Is there anyone can help me why google could not find all internal links?

    | cafegardesh
    0
  • christmaslaserlights


    My company website (https://factoryexpodirect.com/) organic traffic is dropped in March 2017 and after that it never recovered. I am not sure what is the reason. Can anyone help me out to figure out the reason.

    | christmaslaserlights
    0
  • Savage-Solutions


    I'm working on a site that has around 500 product listings. This is for a rental company without any sort of ecommerce platform, so, there's no prices, no adding a product to a cart, etc. Also, there are no different sizing / color options for each product, so each product is the canonical version. After some restructuring, we're starting to see a lot of 404s and just some general mess. I have a couple of thoughts. My first is to just noindex each product. We hardly get any direct traffic to an individual product page, and if they land anywhere related to products, it's usually a category page. If I noindex the products, I don't have to worry about the 404s. My second is to implement the rel=canonical tag on each product to correspond to its primary category. While this is sort of liberal use of the canonical tag, I'm thinking that it could help drive more organic traffic to the category pages. Does anyone have any insight or thoughts on this? Thank you very much!

    | Savage-Solutions
    0
  • irene789


    My client has "load balancing" site traffic in the following way: domain: www.example.com traffic from US IP redirected to usa.example.com traffic from non-US IP redirected to www2.example.com The reason for doing this is that site contents on the www2 contains herbal medicine info banned by FDA."usa.example.com" is a "cleaned" site. Using HK IP, when I google an Eng keyword, I can see that www.example.com is indexed. When googling a Chi keyword, nothing is indexed - neither the domain or www2 subdomain. From Google Search Console, it shows a Dell Sonicwall geo ip filtering alert for www2 (Connection initiated from country: United States). GSC data also confirms that www2 has never been indexed by Google. Questions: Is geo ip filtering the very reason why www2 isn't indexed? What should I do in order to get www2 to be indexed? Thanks guys!

    | irene789
    0
  • Gabe_BlueGuru


    I am working with a realty company that is hosted on a subdomain of the larger, parent realty company: [local realty company].[parent realty company].com How important is it to ride on the DA of the larger company (only about a 40)? I'm trying to weigh the value of creating an entirely separate domain for simplicity of the end user and Google bots: [local company].realtor They don't have any substantial links to their subdomain, so it wouldn't a huge loss. I have a couple options... Create an entirely new site on their current subdomain, leveraging the DA of the larger parent company. Create an entirely new site on a new URL, starting from scratch (which doesn't hurt you as much as it seems it once did). Create two sites, a micro site that targets a sector of their audience that they really want to reach, plus option (1) or (2). Love this community!

    | Gabe_BlueGuru
    0
  • thefrost


    Hello to all. The latest Google algorithm changes have had a big impact on the way that Google news features stories, at least in my country. I've been featured heavily in Google News until about 6th of october, when the changes had the biggest impact, but since then, I haven't been featured at all. Prior to this, I would be featured for keywords on almost any article, not necessarily on the 1st position, but I was almost always there. Posts still show up in the dedicated News category, but not in the main search pages. I've seen a lot of websites being impacted, but some with lower ranks than mine still show up there. I haven't done any changes prior to the 6th of october, and I haven't done any link building campaings, just getting links from higher ranking news sites in my country, for articles I wrote. What I'd like to know is if there were any major changes for Google News and I'm not complying with any of them, or If i could check to see if there are any other problems. I don't have any penalties disclosed by Google, and no new errors in the Webmasters console, I'm just baffled by the fact that overnight the website was completely cut off from being featured in Google News. And one other strange thing, I'm now ranking better for searches that are kind of opposite to my website's main theme. Think about mainly writing about BMW, and less about AUDI, but ranking a lot better for the latter, and a lot less for the other. Thank you.

    | thefrost
    0
  • slecinc


    I did some research today, one of our keywords is "mobile column lifts."  I recently redid a page on our website to target this keyword.  When I Google search this keyword I see that a page on our site titled "Reconditioned Mobile Lifts" is ranking for this keyword.  I took a look with Moz, our mobile column lifts page ranks 90 for the keyword, and the reconditioned lifts page ranks 73 the keyword.  Why is this happening?  How can I fix this? https://www.slec.com/mobile-column-lifts/ https://www.slec.com/reconditioned-mobile-lifts/

    | slecinc
    0
  • Roverandom


    We have several web pages with the same structure released in several countries. Each website contains information about spam callers in the country the website has been released for. Now I have the problem that I see a slow degradation of search traffic in the US. The UK website on the other hand is doing quite well, actually improving. According to MOZ our mobile search visibility dropped significantly in the last week and I am at the moment not able to pin this down. Can anyone please give me a hint at what data best to analyze to find the source of this problem? TIA Best
    Thomas

    | Roverandom
    1
  • advertisingtech


    Hello, we have our website in two languages. The subdomain cs. for czech and main domain for english. Somehow this has caused google not to rank our main domain in local CZ SERP for many english keywords and we have not found out a reason other than it might think of them as duplicates or that we at the start had put targeting for the cs. domain to CZECH. (Its been 4 months, english keywords in Czech serp are easier and still it ranks them on the very last place, yet for example.com ranks them in google.com co.uk, fr etc in top 10) We will close our cs.example.com subdomain and use only example.com hoping this will not cause google to display only one domain and raise it in CZECH rankings. **Can i 301 redirect cs.example.com to example.com and all the categories of cs.example.com to relevant english categories. This should be ok? **

    | advertisingtech
    0
  • alexrbrg


    Context: I'm asking my client to create city pages so he can present all of his appartements in that specific sector so i can have a page that ranks for "appartement for rent in +sector". The page will present a map with all the sector so the user can navigate and choose the sector he wants after he landed on the page. Question: The UX team is asking if we absolutly need to reload the sector page when the user is clicking the location on the map or if they can switch the content within the same page/url once the user is on the landing page. My concern: 1. Can this be analysed as duplicate content if Google can crawl within the javascript app or if Google only analyse his "first view" of the page. 2. Do you consider that it would be preferable to keep the "page change" so i'm increasing the number of page viewed ?

    | alexrbrg
    0
  • CampfireDigital


    One of my clients is having an issue where their Google search result title and description are just showing "Cookies are required to access this site." instead of the actual meta values. The problem is only in Google as Yahoo and Bing seem to be fine. You can see in the image below or by running a search your self for "be well bodyworks longmont" I've never seen anything like it and couldn't find any reference to anyone else having this issue... I would very much appreciate any insight as to what is going on. Thanks! c5PGL

    | CampfireDigital
    0
  • lina_digital


    For the 3xx’s I’m not sure if it’s okay for us to redirect to these so please advise on that

    | lina_digital
    0
  • Laura-EMC


    Another question for the Moz Community. One of my clients has 4.5k duplicate content issues. For example:  http://www.example.co.uk/blog and http://www.example.co.uk/index.php?route=blog/blog/listblog&year=2017. Most of the issues are coming from product pages. My initial thoughts are to set up 301 redirects in the first instance and if the issue persists, add canonical tags. Is this the best way of tackling this issue?

    | Laura-EMC
    0
  • British-Car-Registrations


    Hi, I am looking at all the pages which Google are indexing for my website and have come across pages of another company's website. I have contacted them through their online form and Facebook page asking for them to remove their listings for us, but to no avail so far. Is there a way I can do this myself?

    | British-Car-Registrations
    0
  • ninel_P


    My friend has a site: http://www.behindthehedges.com/ and is having trouble getting accepted into Google News. I read over the technical guidelines and best practices listed on Google's site. It appears they have everything covered. However, they keep getting rejected. Any ideas?

    | ninel_P
    0
  • aua


    Hi, Is there any negative SEO consequences from having too many pages private or not published. Can it like slow the site down or does it not matter? Someone in my dept. has so many pages started/not complete and besides being messy, I wonder if it has any negative impact on the site. Thanks

    | aua
    1
  • seoman10


    I realise ALT tags are important from an accessibility perspective but in terms of organic search, do they carry much value? I have a big site and it doesn't look like ALT tags have been added generally, it would be a massive job to fix and I'm just trying to weigh up what to concentrate on first. Does anybody have any real life experience?

    | seoman10
    0
  • k3nn3dy3


    Are there any tools (online preferably) which will take a sitemap.xml file and generate a visual site map? Seems like an obvious thing to do, but can't find any simple tools for this?

    | k3nn3dy3
    0
  • AJFanter


    need advice  - we are launching a new responsive website. one team member very vocal that we should launch as mobile. site first then take that away. I think is a waste of time .. thoughts?

    | AJFanter
    0
  • Gavo


    If I need to teach a layman how to do SEO, where should I start and what main principles should I cover first? There's so much to go through but I need an organised way to approach this without overwhelming a person. Would appreciate your advise if you have taught a lay person this new skill. Thanks!

    | Gavo
    0
  • RaviM


    I want to remove number of product appearing in search result. Sharing the screenshot as reference. ecrUriH

    | RaviM
    0
  • get1200


    Hi, I am thinking of signing up for Newswire and send PR every month? Will it have any SEO benefits in terms of backlinks? I am just worried because of Panda release those PR services might have no value anymore...

    | get1200
    0
  • RobinJA


    Incorrect Logo is Displaying on Google Knowledge Graph for our company. We have structured schema for logo etc. But still, Google is fetching and showing logo from some other sources on google search results. What will be the right fix for this? Our site url : http://www.travelyaari.com/

    | RobinJA
    0
  • rkdc


    One of our sites shows thousands of 301 redirects due to domain without www in Bing Webmaster under crawl Information page. It’s been like this for a long time. None of the internal pages have domain without www, it was tested through Screaming Frog. We do have www preference set in google webmaster, but unfortunately bing doesn’t have this option.  We also specify URL with www preference through structural data, but that still doesn’t help. Did anyone have similar problems with Bing, and how did you resolve it?

    | rkdc
    1
  • advertisingtech


    Hello, We have a listing / classified advertisement website. The homepage is optimized for the main keyword lets say  Prague clubs. The homepage shows around 50 latest listings. Now the homepage is not ranking well for the keyword. (By not well i mean in 3 months we have no ranking in the target SERP) Im thinking the issue might be that the keyword "Prague clubs" is not in any of the URL or category names. What do you think if i name one of the categories also to lets say "best prague clubs". This way i will have around 50-80 urls having the target keyword in them. (advertisements + the category itself)  Will this help or actually dilute the keyword? What you think?

    | advertisingtech
    0
  • LindsayDayton


    I really really thought the answer was always no. There's plenty of other things you can do to improve search visibility for a PDF, but I thought the nature of the file type made the content itself not-parsable by search engine crawlers... But now, my client's competitor is ranking for my client's brand name with a PDF that contains comparison content. Thing is, my client's brand isn't in the title, the alt-text, the url... it's only in the actual text of the PDF. Did I miss a major update? Did I always have this wrong?

    | LindsayDayton
    0
  • WeAreDigital_BE


    Hi everyone, Best practice question: When adding your sitemap to your robots.txt file, do you add the whole sitemap at once or do you add different subcategories (products, posts, categories,..) separately? I'm very curious to hear your thoughts!

    | WeAreDigital_BE
    0
  • WeAreDigital_BE


    Hi Mozzers, For an international client, we want to install hreflang tags for 3 different languages for their website in Belgium: dutch, french and english. The dutch version (nl-be) and the french version (fr-be) can perfectly be installed, but our developer has troubles implementing the english version (en-be). According to  ISO 639-1 , "en-be" is apparently not supported. Unfortunately, we can't generalize the hreflang tags (), because our client has different websites in each country, so we need to specifically target Belgium here. Does anyone have a solution? Thanks,
    Jens

    | WeAreDigital_BE
    0
  • SoulSurfer8


    We have PPC landing pages that are also ranking in organic search. We've decided to create new landing pages that have been improved to rank better in natural search. The PPC team however wants to use their original landing pages so we are unable to 301 these pages to the new pages being created. We need to block the old PPC pages from search. Any idea if we can use rel=canonical? The difference between old PPC page and new landing page is much more content to support keyword targeting and provide value to users. Google says it's OK to use rel=canonical if pages are similar but not sure if this applies to us. The old PPC pages have 1 paragraph of content followed by featured products for sale. The new pages have 4-5 paragraphs of content and many more products for sale. The other option would be to add meta noindex to the old PPC landing pages. Curious as to what you guys think. Thanks.

    | SoulSurfer8
    0
  • Alder


    Hey y'all, could use community help with some strange behavior I'm seeing with a particular ranking. A week ago a high volume keyword ranking above the fold dropped off the map. I immediately thought must be an algorithmic penguin penalty (no manual action message) or panda / dupe content issue. I think it's dupe content at this point because I found my former ranking page in the omitted results section for the keyword we used to rank for. The strange thing is that without making any changes, Google would momentarily show our domain ranking high page one again, but with a strange query string URL. At first just domain.com/page/? whereas the old ranking was held by domain.com/page/ but now I see several long query string URLs floating around that the engines don't seem to know what to do with. Canonical tags are in place to canonicalize any query string URL back to the top and I have now designated query string URLs as unimportant in Search Console parameter filtering but these URLs persist. I ended up deduplicating content to a page on another domain we own (think that was the original problem) and there seemed to be a positive effect but now we are top of page 2 with a much longer query string URL as the ranking page. It seems Google wants to rank everything but the former ranking URL even though it's the most authoritative by far, has canonical signals in place, and is now no longer duplicate content. Content checker tool showed 60% similarity to the other piece, which is a ratio I've never known to cause dupe content. We found the source of the query string URLs to be from an external site that has a link to us but it's a buggy site so filtering on the page adds the string to our URL, so Google can find them and thinks they're significant. Long question short, has anyone had trouble like this? Getting weird parameter / query URLs to get out of the index in favor of the non-parameter folder? Is it possible the main folder page got hit with Penguin and is "banned?" Still, I don't know why Google would go out of it's way to rank query string copy pages in its place if that were the case. Any help greatly appreciated. An example of the URL looks like this:
    domain.com/page/?CustomerSubscriptionTrack1PageSize=1&CustomerSubscriptionTrack1Order=Sorter_ID&CustomerSubscriptionTrack1Dir=ASC&CustomerSubscriptionTrack1Page=3&WorkOrder_TBLOrder=Sorter_AssetID&WorkOrder_TBLDir=ASC&ID=106

    | Alder
    0

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