Skip to content

Welcome to the Q&A Forum

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

Category: Technical SEO

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


  • Greetings All... I've been digging through the search console on a few of my sites and I've been noticing quite a few structured data errors. Most of the errors are related to: hcard, hentry and hatom. Most of them are missing author & entry-title, while the other one is  missing: fn. I recently saw an article on SEL about Google's focus on spammy mark-up. The sites I use are built and managed by vendors, so I would have to impress upon them the impact of these errors and have them prioritize, then fix them. My question is whether or not this should be prioritized? Should I have them correct these errors sooner than later or can I take a phased approach? I haven't noticed any loss in traffic or anything like that, I'm more focused on what negative impact a "phased approach" could have. Any thoughts?

    | AfroSEO
    0

  • Hi, I've seen several questions where people give advice on how to increase  the crawl budget. What I haven't seen anyone comment is what the value of this really is if you have many pages that doesn't get updated very often. Take for example the typical agency page - 50 pages, most of them rarely gets updates. In a monthly basis normally 10% of the website gets updated. Is there really any value then of having 100% of the website crawled on a daily basis?

    | Inevo
    0

  • I have noticed that Zopim Live chat blocking the resources (URL’s). What are the reasons? Now I have fetched blocked urls again for indexing purpose but still I want to know the reason. Any help from experts??? yYJJ8oM.jpg

    | udistm
    0

  • I am working on SEO for an e-commerce client. When I search for brand name in the Google it displays the top link with tabular index of categories. Whereas I want to remove the category called Coffee from the tabular index because it redirecting to the Home page which is not relevant. For your ref. attached is the screenshot. pXjdaCH.png

    | mountain.penguine
    0

  • We have a client whose 301 redirects disappeared and have been gone for about 6 months now. We are going to be putting the 301 redirects back in place. Will we be able to regain any of the previous SERPs or link juice from old links or is all lost? Thanks in advance!

    | SavvyPanda
    0

  • We have an iframed calculator on one website (www.renewablesguide.co.uk) which has a text link to another of our websites (www.solarguide.co.uk) which is where the calculator originates. We allow other sites to embed the calculator which gives us the benefit of a followed link back to our site. However in the case of renewablesguide (which we own) we've added a tab to the calculator on every page which GWT shows up as 24 000 links from this site hitting the Solar Guide homepage. As the link is held within an iframe would this amount of links be seen as spammy?

    | holmesmedia
    0

  • Hi Mozzers, This may be a bit of a n00b question and i feel i should know the answer but alas, here i am asking. I have a page  www.website.co.uk/page/ and im getting a duplicate page report of www.website.co.uk/Page/ i know this is because somewhere on my website a link will exists using the capitalised version. I have tried everything i can think of to find it but with no luck, any little tricks? I could always rewrite the urls to lowercase, but I have downloadable software etc also on the website that i dont want to take the capitals out of. So the best solution seems to be finding the link and remove it. Most link checkers I use treat the capitalised and non capitalised as the same thing so really arent  helping lol.

    | ATP
    0

  • Hello I am building backlinks to home page my question is should I use "/" without qoute after my domain name or not example for both cases is below keyword   here / at the end of http://abc.com is not place or keyword  here / at the end of http://abc.com/ is place. waiting

    | tanveerayakhan
    0

  • Hi i wonder if anyone can help. I have migrated my site to a new host, with a temp domain name i.e., http://www.test1.com The current site is still live on another host with the domain name http://www.perfecttest.com The temp site is now ready to do live. but we want to use the domain perfecttest.com a. What is the process to move the domain to the new host and to change the test1.com to be perfecttest.com. I  kneo that we need to change the domain perfecttest.com nameserver to point to the new host but i am sure there must be more that need to be done inorder to not have issues. Your help will be grateful T

    | Taiger
    0

  • If a site has the tag, can it still be flagged for duplicate content?

    | MayflyInternet
    0

  • Hi, I was wondering if people would recommend squarespace or wordpress for a photographer. I'm mainly curious about how wordpress uses internal links for their images and squarespace images exist on http://static1.squarespace.com. Wouldn't a photographers website, one that focuses on images, be better on wordpress for this readson?

    | mattdinbrooklyn
    1

  • Recently changed URLs on a website to remove dynamic parameters. We 301'd the old dynamic links (canonical version) to the cleaner parameter-free URLs. We then updated the canonical tags to reflect these changes. All pages dropped at least a few ranking positions and now Moz shows both the new page ranking slightly lower in results pages and the old page still in the index. I feel like I'm splitting value between the two page versions until the old one disappears... is there a way to consolidate this quickly?

    | ShawnW
    0

  • I got this from my developers. Does anyone know if this will be a SEO issue? We hope to lazy-load images below the fold where possible, to increase render speed - are you aware of any potential issues with this approach from an SEO point of view?

    | KatherineWatierOng
    1

  • Hey guys, I purchased a domain name on May 1st and have been running my site on it since then. At the time when I added the domain name to the shopping cart, I felt that it was the best domain name a human could possibly come up with. But now, after two months, I am not so sure about it. And that means I am thinking of getting a new domain name and redirecting the old domain to the new one. Give that the domain is only two months old, there is not much to lose. However, my domain name does have some valuable backlinks, and has built some credibility in the eyes of search engines. According to MOZ Open Site Explorer, its Domain Authority is 10 and Page Authority (homepage) is 20. It's not much, but I fear that if I switch the domain name, I will reset the clock and the new domain name will have to earn the rankings from scratch That said, after searching this forum, I come across articles like this one from google and this 2012 article from MOZ that gave me some confidence. The MOZ article is from 2102, and there have been several changes since then. Is there an updated version of that article, or another legit article on the internet that you can point me to? As you can tell, I want to be more than sure that we don't take any hit during the migration process. Also want to mention that the site is on WordPress -- in case that is relevant. Thank you for your help.

    | deathbyseo
    0

  • My company runs a contest via a landing page on our website. The full URL to the landing page is rather long so we have a vanity URL that we use for advertising purposes. I have a 301 on the vanity URL to the landing page URL so people visiting it directly end up where they should just fine. But if a user goes to Google and types the vanity URL into the search bar, the landing page is nowhere to be found in the results. What do I need to do to get the landing page to show in results when people search the vanity URL?

    | jarjarjarvis
    0

  • Hi all again ! Thanks in advance ! My client's site is having problems to index all its pages. I even bought the full extension of XML Sitemaps and the number of urls increased, but we still have problems to index all of them. What are the reasons? The robots.txt is open for all robots, we only prohibit users and spiders to enter our Intranet. I've read that duplicate content and 404's can be the reason. Anything else?

    | Tintanus
    0

  • I've seen some older 2012 posts that discuss, but nothing recent given the new changes to emphasize mobile. For website that are already tested and verified as mobile responsive, is best practice to develop a mobile-specific sitemap and submit that as well? Or will any mobile crawlers spider the regular sitemap?

    | Addion
    0

  • Hi All! What constitutes a normal crawl rate for daily bingbot server requests for large sites? Are any of you noticing spikes in Bingbot crawl activity? I did find a "mildly" useful thread at Black Hat World containing this quote: "The reason BingBot seems to be terrorizing your site is because of your site's architecture; it has to be misaligned. If you are like most people, you paid no attention to setting up your website to avoid this glitch. In the article referenced by Oxonbeef, the author's issue was that he was engaging in dynamic linking, which pretty much put the BingBot in a constant loop. You may have the same type or similar issue particularly if you set up a WP blog without setting the parameters for noindex from the get go." However, my gut instinct says this isn't it and that it's more likely that someone or something is spoofing bingbot. I'd love to hear what you guys think! Dana

    | danatanseo
    1

  • Our marketing department has decided that a new site with new content is needed to launch new products and support our existing ones. We cannot use the same subdomain(www = old subdomain  and ww1 = new subdomain)as there is a technically clash between the windows server currently used, and the lamp stack required to run the new wordpress based CMS and site. We also have an aging piece of SAAS software on the www domain which is makes moving it to it's own subdomain far too risky. 301's have been floated as a way of managing the transition. I'm not too keen on that idea due to the double effect of new subdomain and content, and the SEO impact it might have. I've suggested uploading the new site to the new subdomain while leaving the old site in place. Then gradually migrating sections over before turning parts of the old site off and using a 301 at that point to finalise the move. The old site would inform user's there is a new version and it would then convert them to the new site(along with a cookie to auto redirect them in future.) while still leaving the old content in place for existing search traffic, bookmarks and visitors via static URLs. Before turning off sections on the old site we would create rel canonicals to redirect to the new pages based on a a mapped set of URLs(this in itself concerns me as the rel canonical is essentially linking to different content). Would be grateful for any advice on whether this strategy is flawed or whether another strategy might be more suitable?

    | Rezza
    0

  • In Facebook when i place my site URL the image does not load? It loads some generic image or logo but not other image thats related to the page. Is there any Tag we need to add in the website so the image loads? Is it good to use a tag as this for description? property="og:description" content="Some data" />

    | bsharath
    0

  • Hi, We currently made a re-design of a website and we changed all our urls to make them shorter. I made more than 300 permanent redirections but plenty more are needed since WMT is showing some more 404s from old urls that I hadn't seen because they were dynamic. The question is, please, is there a limit? I think we have more than 600 already. We don't want to create a php commando to redirect all the old ones to our home, we are redirecting them to their correspondent url. By the way, Im doing them with the 301 method in .htaccess. Thanks in advance.

    | Tintanus
    0

  • We have seen consistent network traffic over the past month, then starting yesterday, huge spikes in hits (hits as in crawls to pages causing an increase in megabytes downloaded) started coming in from Rogerbot, Google, Bing, and Yahoo. A specific example from Rogerbot is as follows: rogerbot/1.1+(http://moz.com/help/guides/search-overview/crawl-diagnostics#more-help,+rogerbot-crawler+pr2-crawler-104@moz.com) Useragent from the bot IP address: 54.226.73.52 Domain / hostname: ec2-54-226-73-52.compute-1.amazonaws.com Physical location: United States flag United States, VA, Ashburn We've have thought about doing a crawl-delay to prevent these bots from hitting us so hard, but that still doesn't help us answer why this even started in the first place. Any clue on what may be going on here?

    | eTundra
    0

  • Hi Community, I have receiving an increasing number of temporary re-direct status codes via MOZ crawl diagnostics. I have taken a look more closely and these URLs are 'trackback urls' from blog posts, the website is Wordpress integrated. What is best practice for these 302 temporary redirects? I have read that best practice for a 302 is to 301 re-direct a URL, but is this the case for a trackback URL?

    | SO_UK
    0

  • Hi eveyone, got a quick question about URL structures: I'm currently working in ecommerce with a site that has hundreds of products that can be accessed through different URL paths: 1)www.domain.com/productx 2)www.domain.com/category/productx 3)www.domain.com/category/subcategory/productx 4)www.domain.com/bestsellers/productx 5)... In order to get rid of dublicate content issues, the canoncial tag has been installed on all the pages required. The problem I'm witnessing now is the following: If a visitor comes to the site and navigates to the product through example 2) at time the URL shown in the URL browser box is example 4), sometimes example 1) or whatever. So it is constantly changing. Does anyone know, why this happens and if it has any impact on GA tracking or even on SEO peformance. Any reply is much appreciated Thanks you

    | ennovators
    0

  • In running a crawl of a client's site I can see several URLs listed in the sitemap that are then blocked in the robots.txt file. Other than perhaps using up crawl budget, are there any other negative implications?

    | richdan
    0

  • Hi, We have 2 sites, site A and site B. For now, some of our articles are duplicated on site B with rel canonicals towards site A. Starting now, Site B will be the main site for this category, we'll only post the content on this site. We will keep the old content on site A. But what do you think will happen if we invert the canonicals for the old articles? They would go towards site B. Would google eventually update its index, a bit like it would do for a redirect? Thanks !

    | AdrienLargus
    0

  • I have a site that is hosted on a very old platform and would like to move it to WordPress.  We are a surf shop and the summer months are the busiest for us.  I want like to make sure that if I transfer my site that it won't hurt our rankings in any way.  What would the best way of doing this be? i.e start building the WordPress site and once it is finished, point the domain to it? Will this have any ramifications for our rank?  Thank you!

    | FierceFrame
    0

  • Hi I think it was at BrightonSEO where PI DataMetrics were talking about similar pages on a website can cause rankings to drop for your main page. This has got me thinking. if we have a category about jumpers so: example.com/jumpers but then our blog has a category about jumpers, where we write all about jumpers etc which creates a category page example.com/blog/category/jumpers, so these blog category pages have no index put on them to stop them ranking in Google? Thanks in Advance for any tips. Andy

    | Andy-Halliday
    1

  • Hi all, Weird issue with one of my websites. The website URL: http://www.athletictrainers.myindustrytracker.com/ Let's take 2 diffrenet article pages from this website: 1st: http://www.athletictrainers.myindustrytracker.com/en/article/71232/ As you can see the page is indexed correctly on google: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:dfbzhHkl5K4J:www.athletictrainers.myindustrytracker.com/en/article/71232/10-minute-core-and-cardio&hl=en&strip=1 (that the "text only" version, indexed on May 19th) 2nd: http://www.athletictrainers.myindustrytracker.com/en/article/69811 As you can see the page isn't indexed correctly on google: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:KeU6-oViFkgJ:www.athletictrainers.myindustrytracker.com/en/article/69811&hl=en&strip=1 (that the "text only" version, indexed on May 21th) They both have the same code, and about the dates, there are pages that indexed before the 19th and they also problematic. Google can't read the content, he can read it when he wants to. Can you think what is the problem with that? I know that google can read JS and crawl our pages correctly, but it happens only with few pages and not all of them (as you can see above).

    | cobano
    0

  • Why is is that when I search "protonmail.ch", sitelinks show for our company. However when you search for "ProtonMail", no sitelinks show, even though our homepage is now on the top result. We've been trying different things to improve the navigational structure of the homepage, such as using the <nav>tag. If you have any thoughts on why sitelinks might not be showing up, we'd really appreciate it! Thank you </nav>

    | kevinzh
    0

  • Hey there Awesome team of Webmaster Forums, Lets assume that I have a page that have deals in it. Those deals after a certain period of time expire. What should I do with the expired pages?My opinion is this.The page keeps the same URL but inside there is a content saying "Sorry but this deal has expired .... "and have some relevant deals beneath ORRedirect to a universal expired page. Kind Regards

    | Angelos_Savvaidis
    0

  • Hey Mozzers, Help please. I am migrating content for a new website (1000's of pages) and am using the canonical tag on a number of pages. For the pages which I am asking Google not to recognise / index as the master version, and in the interests of time do I need to take the time to fill in the meta <title><description> etc each time?</p> <p>Ben</p></title>

    | Bendall
    0

  • I can't seem to get Google to read the title of my homepage the way I would like it to be read and I have double checked in all areas of my Wordpress Platform where the title may be defaulting and all it set up correctly. I have also ensured that the "force re-write of titles and meta descriptions" have been checked through a plugin I am using to monitor SEO (Yoast)... here is an example of how Google is reading my homepage title: XYZ Company: Primary Keyword in Ontario Canada - XYZ Company I would like it to read: Primary Keyword in Ontario Canada - XYZ Company But for some reason it keeps pulling in my website title. I have always re-submitted my URL to Google but no luck with the title change. If anyone has any insight as to why this is defaulting as such I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks!

    | MainstreamMktg
    0

  • I am frustrated....Google Webmaster tools shows this as dup title tags....I've fixed other oages with this issue, but can't figure this out?!  here is the page itself...  http://www.seadwellers.com/tag/padi-1/ I can't figure out where this freakin page even iS?! | 2 |
    | <a id="zip_1-anchor" class="zippedsection_title"></a>padi Archives - Sea Dwellers Dive Center of Key Largo, Florida Keys/category/padi//tag/padi/ | Any help with this thing wold be greatly appreciated...

    | sdwellers
    0

  • Hi I am wondering if the <sup>tag in html is picked up by google as a reference point?</sup> I.e when you put a superscript in word it puts a small number next to your sentence. Then you have a list of reference at the end of the blog/article does google recognise this?

    | Cocoonfxmedia
    0

  • So we launched a site about a month ago. Our old site had an extensive library of health content that went away with the relaunch. We redirected this entire section of the site to the new education materials, but we've yet to see this reflected in the index or in GWT. In fact, we're getting close to 500 soft 404's in GWT. Our development team confirmed for me that the 301 redirect is configured correctly. Is it just a waiting game at this point or is there something I might be missing? Any help is appreciated. Thanks!

    | MJTrevens
    0

  • Hello, I want to ask you guys what's the best way do to Interstitial without penalty?
    and feel free to give me samples from another major websites. Thanks!

    | JohnPalmer
    0

  • I have a wordpres site that relies heavily on images and their usefulness. Each post links to larger sizes of the images with links back to the post and the "gallery" all images uploaded to the post. Unfortunately this goes against the "rules" and our attachment page show as duplicate content in Google (even though the image titles are different). There must be a way to utlise and make the most of attachment pages without getting duplicate content warnings?

    | DotP
    0

  • Between  MOZ's last scan of my site and the one before my domain authority dropped from 35 to 29. I'm not sure where to begin investigating this and how I can leverage MOZ in this case. Any guidance would be greatly appreciated.

    | bearpaw
    0

  • Hi, I was wondering exactly when duplicate content is duplicate content? Is it always when it is word-for-word or if it is similar? For example, we currently have an information page and I would like to add a FAQ to the website. There is, however, a crossover with the content and some of it is repeated. However, it is not written word for word. Could you please advise me? Thanks a lot Tom

    | National-Homebuyers
    0

  • Hi I'm a bit new to SEO and am looking for some guidance. Although there is no indication in Webmaster tools that my site is being penalised for bad links, I have noticed that I have over 200 spam links for "Pay Day Loans" pointing to my site.  (This was due to a hack on my site several years ago). So my question is two fold. Firstly, is it normal to have spammy links pointing to your site and secondly, should I bother to do anything about it? I did some research into the Disavow tool in Webmaster tools wonder I should use it to block all these links. Thanks

    | hotchilidamo
    0

  • Any thoughts on why there would be an across the board drop in keyword ranking for a site that hasn't changed any of it's content marketing strategies? All above board and DA continues to be strong. All indicators that the site is healthy. Many competitors in the space (in Australia) continue to rank in the top pages with little change. As an example take the term "web design sydney" the leading pack here have ranked for 3+ years with very little change and rather consistent questionable tactics. It's a mystery. 🙂

    | wearehappymedia
    0

  • I have few hundred videos in Youtube and i have a new order to advertise a real estate company. Can i insert the 1 min AD into my video and still be able to Monetize them in Youtube?

    | bsharath
    0

  • Hello, On my site (www.bridgman.co.uk) we had a lot of duplicate page issues as reported by the Seomoz site report tool - this was due to database driven URL strings. As a result, I sent an excel file with all the duplicate pages to my web developer who put rel canonical tags on what I assumed would be all the correct pages. I am not sure if this is a coincidence, or a direct result of the canonical tags, but a few days after (yesterday) the amount of pages indexed by google dropped from 1,200 to under 200. The number is still declining, and other than the canonical tags I can't work out why Google would just start de-indexing most of our pages. If you could offer any solutions that would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Robert.

    | 87ROB
    0

  • Not an unusual situation, I have a blog on blog.domain.com it has quite a few blog postings.  The platform is old and will be scrapped, but the blog content itself is going to be moved to domain.com/blog. The current process is we are manually listing all linked to/content pages and we are going to 301 redirect them to their counterparts on the new blog.  This is going to be a tedious process. A) Is there any way to automate the moving of the blog? B) What is the best way to do the massive 301 redirect, php headers, .htaccess?  Should we move the individual pages with redirects, or redirect the domain in the .htaccess (this will be very difficult to match all the titles and file structure)?

    | MarloSchneider
    0

  • Hi, we received an email about a guy who wants to copy and paste our content on his website, he says he will keep all the links we put there and give us full credit for it, so besides keeping all the links on the page, which is the best way for him to give us the credit? a link to the original article? an special meta tag? what? Thank you PS.Our site its much more authorative than his and we get indexed within 10min from the moment we publish a page, so I don't worry about him out raking us with our own content.

    | andresgmontero
    0

  • Hi. I work for a regional news source, and our (separate) Spanish-language news publication recently changed its domain name. The publication lost its Google News inclusion. Most of their traffic came from Google News, so traffic tanked. They're trying to get back in. They reapplied but didn't get approved. They're now in the 30-day waiting period to reapply again. The website is run by a third-party company, which handled the domain name change in April (2015). That company has been running their site for a couple of years. Our in-house devs' hands are tied on helping, because we (at the mother company) don't manage their site. This third party has not been responsive. The Spanish pub folks have reached out to me to help them prepare for Round 2 of reapplication. I'm the mothership in-house SEO, but I've never experienced this situation before. Because everything seems to be in order besides the ham-handed changes, my best advice to them so far is: You'll have to wait until Google gets to know you again, unfortunately. Does that sound right? Any pointers out there for bringing their best possible A-game to the next round?

    | christyrobinson
    1

  • Google webmaster tools is telling me I have 8 "soft 404's". They are all like this page... 
    http://www.seadwellers.com/search/page/8/ All 8 pages are the same except the number at the end...... I just can't figure this....any insight at all is appreciated and do i need to correct somehow?

    | sdwellers
    0

  • On 6 June, Google search traffic to my Wordpress travel blog http://www.travelnasia.com tanked completely. There are no warnings or indicators in Webmaster Tools that suggest why this happened. Traffic from search has remained at zero since 6 June and shows no sign of recovering. Two things happened on or around 6 June. (1) I dropped my premium theme which was proving to be not mobile friendly and replaced it with the ColorMag theme which is responsive. (2) I relocated off my previous hosting service which was showing long server lag times to a faster host. Both of these should have improved my search performance, not tanked it. There were some problems with the relocation to the new web host which resulted in a lot of "out of memory" errors on the website for 3-4 days. The allowed memory was simply not enough for the complexity of the site and the volume of traffic. After a few days of trying to resolve these problems, I moved the site to another web host which allows more PHP memory and the site now appears reliably accessible for both desktop and mobile. But my search traffic has not recovered. I am wondering if in all of this I've done something that Google considers to be a cardinal sin and I can't see it. The clues I'm seeing include: Moz Pro was unable to crawl my site last Friday. It seems like every URL it tried to crawl was of the form http://www.travelnasia.com/wp-login.php?action=jetpack-sso&redirect_to=http://www.travelnasia.com/blog/bangkok-skytrain-bts-mrt-lines which resulted in a 500 status error. I don't know why this happened but I have disabled the Jetpack login function completely, just in case it's the problem. GWT tells me that some of my resource files are not accessible by GoogleBot due to my robots.txt file denying access to /wp-content/plugins/. I have removed this restriction after reading the latest advice from Yoast but I still can't get GWT to fetch and render my posts without some resource errors. On 6 June I see in Structured Data of GWT that "items" went from 319 to 1478 and "items with errors" went from 5 to 214. There seems to be a problem with both hatom and hcard microformats but when I look at the source code they seem to be OK. What I can see in GWT is that each hcard has a node called "n [n]" which is empty and Google is generating a warning about this. I see that this is because the author vcard URL class now says "url fn n" but I don't see why it says this or how to fix it. I also don't see that this would cause my search traffic to tank completely. I wonder if anyone can see something I'm missing on the site. Why would Google completely deny search traffic to my site all of a sudden without notifying any kind of penalty? Note that I have NOT changed the content of the site in any significant way. And even if I did, it's unlikely to result in a complete denial of traffic without some kind of warning.

    | Gavin.Atkinson
    1

  • Hello Moz Team, I'd like to inquire about our forums section on how to optimize them the best way. So, we started a forums section and our audience likes them very much, we were able to get a few hundred subscribers and it has been very active http://violintutorpro.com/forums/ I created a campaign in Moz Analytics and it came back that we had tons of dupe content, all coming from the tags in the forums. We can remove the tags just so we won't have dupe content, but, how can we use each topic as a content on their own. We currently have a few hundred of dupe content.

    | jac.reyes
    0

Got a burning SEO question?

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


Start my free trial


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