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Category: Technical SEO

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

  • ShaMenz


    My Tech lead is concerned that his use of a script to generate XML sitemaps for some client sites may be causing negative issues for those sites. His concern centers around the fact that the script generates a sitemap which indicates that every URL page in the site was last modified at the exact same date and time. I have never heard anything to indicate that this might be a problem, but I do know that the sitemaps I generate for other client sites can choose server response or not. What is the best way to generate the sitemap? Last mod from actual time modified, or all set at one date and time?

    | ShaMenz
    0
  • 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
  • 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
    0
  • 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
  • E2E


    A client would like to set up a knowledge base to work in conjunction with their website and we are tossing up whether to go with a hosted solution (and therefore set up as a subdomain) or find a solution that we host on the clients domain (which will presumably have more SEO benefit).  We are leaning towards the latter (although are mindful that we need to balance the client’s desire for a quality KB solution).  Appreciate your feedback.

    | E2E
    0
  • evoNick


    We recently removed /img and /imgp from our robots.txt file thus allowing googlebot to crawl our image folders.  Not sure why we had these blocked in the first place, but we opened them up in response to an email from Google Product Search about not being able to crawl images - which can/has hurt our traffic from Google Shopping. My question is:  will allowing Google to crawl our image files eat up our 'crawl allowance'?  We wouldn't want Google to not crawl/index certain pages, and ding our organic traffic, because more of our allotted crawl bandwidth is getting chewed up crawling image files. Outside of the non-detailed crawl stat graphs from Webmaster Tools, what's the best way to check how frequently/ deeply our site is getting crawled? Thanks all!

    | evoNick
    0
  • MarloSchneider


    I know that I used to be able to do this, but I can't seem to remember. One of the sites I am working on has had a lot of pages moving around lately.  I am sure some links got lost in the fray that I would like to recover, what is the easiest way to see links going to a domain that are pointing to 404 pages?

    | MarloSchneider
    0
  • tylerfraser


    How can you see what pages are cached by bing. I'm basically looking for these google approaches for bing: cache:domain.com site:domain.com Thanks Tyler

    | tylerfraser
    1
  • DarwinChinaSEO


    hi guys, a question please. if site:112.65.247.14 , you can see google index our website IP address, this could duplicate with our darwinmarketing.com content pages. i am not quite sure why google index my IP pages while index domain pages, i understand this could because of backlink, internal link and etc, but i don't see obvious issues there, also i have submit request to google team to remove ip address index, but seems no luck. Please do you have any other suggestion on this? i was trying to do change of address setting in Google Webmaster Tools, but didn't allow as it said "Restricted to root level domains only", any ideas? Thank you! boson

    | DarwinChinaSEO
    0
  • musillawfirm


    I clear the cache and log out from any accounts and I still get different results for the same keyword if I use different browsers. Any idea whats going on? And which browser would have my true ranking?

    | musillawfirm
    0
  • DanHill


    With the nofollow tag used very widely on the internet these days I was just wondering about how an RSS feed might help me find a way around it.  Basically my question is this : I post a comment on a blog, it's approved and my comment together with my link(nofollow tag applied) is there. Now when the blogs RSS feed updates, does this nofollow tag get applied to the feed? As far as I can tell it does not - but I'm not too clue'd up on how the feed is generated. Anyone want to help me understand how it works and if what I'm suggesting would be 'a way around the nofollow tag' ? Thanks 🙂

    | DanHill
    0
  • DanHill


    Hi I'd just like to ask the opinion of my fellow members here : We are currently ranking second for a very important keyword and would obviously like the top spot on the SERP - the site that is ranking first has the domain name as the keyword phrase(along with a good amount of quality links from a variety of domains) - now I know it is possible to outrank them since I do remember reading about this in one of Rands posts(I think it was the whole white hat black hat one he posted recently) - bascially we have more domain authority, slightly less links but from double the amount of root domains and a higher page authority too! Does having the keyword as your domain make THAT much of a difference when we are(imo) quite close in terms of great content and link profiles(and all the onpage factors) ? Thanks!

    | DanHill
    0
  • LDS-SEO


    I've been seeing a lot of people recommend creating a video sitemap or Media RSS feed (mRSS) and submit to Google.  We have videos hosted on Brightcove and most on YouTube.  Brightcove can generate the sitemap for us.  But does anyone know how to generate a YouTube Video Sitemap for those videos embedded on our pages? Note:  I realize I could manually assemble the video sitemap, however manually assembling the sitemap is probably not an option for us due to the volume of videos we've published.

    | LDS-SEO
    1
  • jackson_lo


    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
  • GriffinHansen


    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
  • RiceMedia


    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
  • askthetrainer


    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
  • Audiohype


    Hi All, Just wondering if anyone could shed some light on the following. If I was ranking number 1 for a term, what would the effects be of creating another site, hosted on the same server / IP, same whois info, same URL but a different TLD, and trying to get this to rank for the term also. Does G restrict search results to one IP per page or is this perfectly possible? (The term is fairly uncompetitive) Thanks, Ben

    | Audiohype
    0
  • Red_Mud_Rookie


    One of my clients is an email subscriber-led business offering deals that are time sensitive and which expire after a limited, but varied, time period. Each deal is published on its own URL and in order to drive subscriptions to the email, an overlay was implemented that would appear over the individual deal page so that the user was forced to subscribe if they wished to view the details of the deal. Needless to say, this led to the threat of a Google penalty which _appears (fingers crossed) _to have been narrowly avoided as a result of a quick response on our part to remove the offending overlay. What I would like to ask you is whether you have any safe and approved methods for capturing email subscribers without revealing the premium content to users before they subscribe? We are considering the following approaches: First Click Free for Web Search - This is an opt in service by Google which is widely used for this sort of approach and which stipulates that you have to let the user see the first item they click on from the listings, but can put up the subscriber only overlay afterwards. No Index, No follow - if we simply no index, no follow the individual deal pages where the overlay is situated, will this remove the "cloaking offense" and therefore the risk of a penalty? Partial View - If we show one or two paragraphs of text from the deal page with the rest being covered up by the subscribe now lock up, will this still be cloaking? I will write up my first SEOMoz post on this once we have decided on the way forward and monitored the effects, but in the meantime, I welcome any input from you guys.

    | Red_Mud_Rookie
    0
  • 5225Marketing


    Hi, I'm working to optimize a site that currently has about 5K pages listed in the sitemap.  There are not in face this many pages.  Part of the problem is that one of the pages is a tool where each sort and filter button produces a query string URL. It seems to me inefficient to have so many items listed that are all really the same page.  Not to mention wanting to avoid any duplicate content or low quality issues. How have you found it best to handle this?  Should I just noindex each of the links?  Canonical links? Should I manually remove the pages from the sitemap?  Should I continue as is? Thanks a ton for any input you have!

    | 5225Marketing
    0
  • mmaes


    I have read through the many articles regarding the use of Meta Noindex, but what I haven't been able to find is a clear explanation of when, why or what to use this on. I'm thinking that it would be appropriate to use it on: legal pages such as privacy policy and terms of use
    search results page
    blog archive and category pages Thanks for any insight of this.

    | mmaes
    0
  • hiphound


    Hi!! Another noob question: Should I be nofollowing my site's cart and checkout pages? Or as SEs can't get to the checkout pages without either logging in or completing the form is it something I shouldn't worry about? Have read things saying both. Not sure which is correct. Thank you! Appreciate the help. Lynn

    | hiphound
    0
  • briankb


    We have hundreds of domains which are either alternate spelling of our primary domain or close keyword names we didn't want our competitor to get before us. The primary domain is running on a dedicated Windows server running IIS6 and set to a static IP. Since it is a static IP and not using host headers any domain pointed to the static IP will immediately show the contents of the site, however the domain will be whatever was typed. Which could be the primary domain or an alias. Two concerns. First, is it possible that Google would penalize us for the alias domains or dilute our primary domain "juice"? Second, we need to properly track traffic from the alias domains. We could make unique content for those performing well and sell or let expire those that are sending no traffic. It's not my goal to use the alias domains to artificially pump up our primary domain. We have them for spelling errors and direct traffic. What is the best practice for handling one or both of these issues?

    | briankb
    0
  • kchandler


    I've been doing some site analysis for a new SEO client and it has been brought to my attention that their robots.txt file redirects to their homepage. I was wondering: Is there a benfit to setup your robots.txt file to do this? Will this effect how their site will get indexed? Thanks for your response! Kyle Site URL: http://www.radisphere.net/

    | kchandler
    0
  • Aspedia


    We have shopping cart links (<a href's,="" not="" input="" buttons)="" that="" link="" to="" a="" url="" along="" the="" lines="" of="" cart="" add="" 123&return="/product/123. </p"></a> <a href's,="" not="" input="" buttons)="" that="" link="" to="" a="" url="" along="" the="" lines="" of="" cart="" add="" 123&return="/product/123. </p">The SEOMoz site crawls are flagging these as a massive number of 302 redirects and I also wonder what sort of effect this is having on linkjuice flowing around the site. </a> <a href's,="" not="" input="" buttons)="" that="" link="" to="" a="" url="" along="" the="" lines="" of="" cart="" add="" 123&return="/product/123. </p">I can see several possible solutions: Make the links nofollow Make the links input buttons Block /cart/add with robots.txt Make the links 301 instead of 302 Make the links javascript (probably worst care) All of these would result in an identical outcome for the UX, but are very different solutions. What would you suggest?</a>

    | Aspedia
    0
  • jfkorn


    My clients business is divided in chain stores. All stores are set under the same franchise. There is one domain www.company.com with branches like www.company.com/location1/content and www.company.com/location2/content etc. I've taken care of duplicate content issues with rel="canonical" and duplicate page titles are also not a concern, anymore. Right now the concept is like this: If you visit the site for the first time you get to choose between the locations. Then a cookie is set and once you revisit www.company.com it will redirect you via a php header command to the location stored in your cookie: www.company.com/location1/content. My question is if this might hurt rankings in some kind of way as these aren't permanent redirects with a 301 but rather individual ones, based on your cookie.

    | jfkorn
    0
  • flowsimple


    Client has two website addresses: Website A is a redirect to Website B. It has one indexed page. But this is the URL being used in collateral. It has the majority of back links, and citations everywhere list Website A as the URL. Website B is where the actual website lives. Google recognizes and indexes the 80+ pages. This website has very few backlinks going to it. This setup does not seem good for SEO. Moreover, the analytics data is completely messed up because Website B shows that the biggest referral source is... you guessed it Website A. I'm thinking going forward, I should: Move all the content from Website B to Website A. Setup Website B to permanently 301 Redirect to Website A. Is that the best course of action?

    | flowsimple
    0
  • christinarule


    If you have a membership site, which requires a payment to access specific content/images/videos, do search engines still use that content as a ranking/domain authority factor? Is it worth optimizing these "private" pages for SEO?

    | christinarule
    1
  • Carlito-256961


    I've seen that for some domains Google will show a nice clickable site heirarchy in place of the actual URL of a search result.  See attached for an example.  How do I go about achieving this type of results? categorized.png

    | Carlito-256961
    0
  • DavidS-282061


    It seems that .html pages do better for the long tail...

    | DavidS-282061
    0
  • Technical_Contact


    Hi all, I'm new to SEO and excited to see the launch of this forum. I've searched for an answer to this question but haven't been able to find out. I  "attended" two webinars recently regarding SEO. The above subject was raised in each one and the speakers gave a polar opposite recommendations. So I'm completely at a loss as to what to do with some domains that are related to a domain used on a live website that I'm working to improve the SEO on. The scenario: Live website at (fictitious) www.digital-slr-camera-company.com. I also have 2 related domain names which are parked with the registrar: www.dslr.com, www.digitalslr.com. The question: Is there any SEO benefit to be gained by pointing the two parked domains to the website at www.digitalcamercompany.com? If so, what method of "pointing" should be used? Thanks to any and all input.

    | Technical_Contact
    0

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