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Category: Technical SEO

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  • Hi All, ok so at the beginning of July we launched our new website, SEVEN weeks later we have dropped completly off all rankings what-so-ever, (except brand) but weirdly if i pan between browsers we dont use (for saved searches/cookies etc) sometimes the rankings show up where they used to be. Whats strange is we get crawled daily but it took seven weeks for our rankings to drop, ive done all testing i can - no manual actions, no updates when we dropped (15th Aug) no real differences in webmaster tools, no crawl errors, no massive rise in 404s, 500s etc etc, im really a bit stumped! Any help would be mucho appreciated in diagnosing this stumper!

    | Kennelstore
    0

  • Hi folks, Our website is doing well in the Google rankings relative to our competitors who often have higher "Domain authority" than us as reported by Moz.  I'm wondering how closely Moz's "Domain Authority" correlates with Google's. In particular, I wonder how long it takes Moz to discover inbound links.  For instance our page at http://www.educationquizzes.com/ks3/english has many inbound links from pages on an outstanding educational website and yet our page authority is given by Moz as a measly "1"! Any insights would be very much appreciated.

    | colinking
    0

  • Hi everyone, We're going through some of our old posts in our WordPress blog and updating them, adding new information, new links, and photos. My question: If we update the posts significantly, should we also update the "published" date to today? If we only correct some typos or a dead link, we don't touch the date. However, if we've done some real work on the post, we'd like to update the published date in order to bring it to the top of our blog feed and draw new attention to the post. However, I'm a little nervous that this could be seen by Google as spammy, as it's not technically a new post and the URL already exists in Google's index of our site. Here's an example of a post that was published several years ago and then updated a few week's ago with new information (and a new date stamp): http://www.eurocheapo.com/blog/barcelona-tip-five-cheap-eats-under-e6.html Any thoughts on this? Thanks, Tom

    | TomNYC
    0

  • I manage a site for an event that runs annually, and now that the event has concluded we would like to remove some of the pages (schedule, event info, TV schedule, etc.) that won't be relevant again until next year's event. That said, if we simply remove those pages from the web, I'm afraid that we'll lose out on valuable backlinks that already exist, and when those pages return they will have the same URLs as before. Is there a best course of action here? Should I redirect the removed pages to the homepage for the time being using a 302? Is there any risk there if the 'temporary' period is ~7 months? Thanks in advance.

    | KTY55
    0

  • I am having a hard time understanding how Google will deal with this scenario, I would love to hear what you guys think or suggest. Ok  a category page on the site in question looks like this. http://makeupaddict.me/6-skin-care  All fine and well, But a paginated page or a filtered category pages look like these http://makeupaddict.me/6-skin-care#/page-2  and http://makeupaddict.me/6-skin-care#/price-391-1217 From my understanding Google does not index an anchor without a shebang (#!), but that doesn't mean that they do not still crawl them, correct? That is where the issue comes in, since anchors are not indexed and dropped from the urls, when Google crawls a filtered or paginated page, it is getting different results. From the best of my understanding, and someone can correct me if I am wrong but an anchor is not passed in web languages like a querystring is. So if I am using php and land on http://makeupaddict.me/6-skin-care or http://makeupaddict.me/6-skin-care#/price-391-1217  and use something like .$_SERVER['SELF'] to get the url both pages will return http://makeupaddict.me/6-skin-care since the anchor is handled client side. With that being the case, is it imagined that Google uses that standard or is it thought they have a custom function that grabs the whole url anchor in all? Also if they are crawling the page with the anchor, but seeing it anchor less how are they handling the changing content?

    | LesleyPaone
    0

  • Hi All, Within our company we have a media group that publishes magazines and videos, the sites have footers that link to our shopping site, one of them has 118,459 links to one URL, domain authority 23, and the other 17,726 to seven URLs, domain authority 52, (there are some articles which link organically). My question is are these links because they're from identifiable companies with the same ownership worth keeping or are they detrimental? The site being linked to has a DA of 39 Cheers Stew

    | StewMcG
    0

  • One of our clients took over a competitor and it would appear that all links to that take over website got redirected to our client. This resulted in ~430,000 links to our client in a short time period. This also resulted in a partial manual action against the unnatural links. What would Google be looking for us to solve in this case? Should we change all of the links to "no follow", should we remove them completey?

    | aaronleven
    0

  • I have a client who is moving their warehouse, and their shop will be down for four days.  I have been doing  some research on the best ways to handle this and I wanted to get the communities feedback on this.  One thought is to have the pages live, but people can't place an order - but this does not provide the best customer experience.  Another thought is to just do temporary redirects for the shop pages, to land on the "sorry we are moving" page for customers.  Another thought was to do 503 HTTP status codes on the pages and then do a temporary redirect to the landing page. Have any of you experienced this issue?  If so, what did you do to minimize the impact to the organic search programs? NOTE: All of their static content will remain in tact.  Only the shop/store will be down.

    | smulto
    0

  • Here's a quick and easy question: Is there any problem with not using dashes in between words for URLs? Obviously the readability factor is a concern, but from a search engine standpoint? Thanks in advance!

    | tbinga
    0

  • We're a small international company that redirects users based on their language identifier.
    I've now taken a big interest in and also how it affects ranking. When I look at my MOZ dashboard the fundedbyme.com domain has a higher ranking than fundedbyme.com/en/ for example. Our company wants to target other markets such as Spain and Germany, I am imposing penalties on myself by not having rel="canonical" in place and redirecting to the TLD?

    | _entreprenerd
    0

  • Currently my website have about 10,000 404 errors for my site as wordpress is adding /feed/ to  the end of  all url in my website.. Should I restrict /feed/ from the robot txt?

    | thewebguy3
    0

  • Hi all! I'm hoping that someone with a lot of experience with XML sitemaps can help me out here... When submitting my sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools, these are the results:
    2,414,714 Submitted
    34,721 Indexed And there's also tonnes of warnings. Would anyone be able to take a quick look at these sitemaps to perhaps advise me on what's going wrong there? These do not load without the www, not sure if this is an issue? http://www.eumom.ie/sitemap.xml
    http://www.eumom.ie/sitemap.xml.gz Thanks everyone in advance!! Gavin

    | IcanAgency
    0

  • We have a technical blog website and our primary income is from blog. Recently we developed a open source free tool and but we are not sure if we need to publish it as wordpress page or as normal blog post. We don't look for an income from these tools. Later we will publish this tool in github. Also we have plan to develop many tools (small open source software) like this. So please advise we should place as Page mywebsite/tool1 mywebsite/tool2 or Normal blog posts mywebsite/toolcategory/tool1 mywebsite/toolcategory/tool2 Thanks!!!

    | Scaria
    0

  • We have added a SSL cert to our site - Should I submit change of address on WMT and submit a new sitemap from the http?

    | webguru2014
    0

  • At the moment we have a html sitemap which is pulling the same h1's/ titles. How big a problem is the duplicate content issue which is medium priority in the moz pro softaware? Would you recommend changes as sitemap page 1 - page 2 etc. Thanks

    | VUK-SEO
    0

  • Hi guys:
    I have a client who is moving their entire ecommerce site from one hosting platform (Yahoo Store) to another (BigCommerce) and from one domain to another. The old domain is registered with the Yahoo as of yesterday and we have redirected the old domain (at the domain level) to the new domain. However, we are having trouble getting the pages to redirect page for page. Currently they are all redirecting to the new domain home page. We did just move the old domain from GoDaddy to Yahoo yesterday thinking this would solve it however as of this morning the old pages are still redirecting to the home page of the new domain. To complete the 301 redirect picture, we uploaded the redirects (all relative links for both from and to) to BigCommerce. And while the domain was hosted at GoDaddy with a redirect to the new domain, they were working. We moved the domain to Yahoo because of email issues thinking it should still work. Is it possibly just a waiting game now as the change populates across the DNS? old url to test:
    rock-n-roll-action-figures.com/fender-jazz-bass-miniature-guitar-replica-classic-red-finish.html

    | cindyt-17038
    0

  • I have a question about using Schema data. Specifically: Should I use Event Schema for a page that reports on an event? I provide high-quality coverage (reporting) about new products being introduced at an industry trade show. For the event, I create a single page using the event name, and provide a great deal of information on how to attend the show, the best places to stay and other insider tips to help new attendees. Then during the show, I list the new products being introduced along with photos and videos. Should I use event schema data for this page, or does Google only want the event organizer to use that data? Any benefits or drawbacks to using event schema? Thanks! Richard

    | RichardInFlorida
    0

  • Hello everyone ,, We have a website include a panoramic images for many pages this panorama is really unique and we did a hard work to collect it , we thought that will be very useful for our target audience !! We have tried to search about how to make a panoramic content working and support the SEO , Unfortunately NO result and NO information yet, _Could you help us in that filed _ _Thanks _

    | Visual-ex
    0

  • I have a client that operates a local service-based business. They are thinking of expanding that business to another geographic area (a drive several hours away in an affluent summer vacation area). The name of the existing business contains the name of the city, so it would not be well-suited to market 'City X' business in 'City Y'. My initial thought was to (for the most part) 'duplicate' the existing site onto a new site (brand new root domain). Much of the content would be the exact same. We could re-word some things so there aren't entire lengthy paragraphs of identical info, but it seems pointless to completely reinvent the wheel. We'll get as creative as possible, but certain things just wouldn't change. This seems like the most pragmatic thing to do given their goals, but I'm worried about duplicate content. It doesn't feel as though this is spammy though, so I'm not sure if there's cause for concern.

    | stevefidelity
    0

  • Someone I know said that they were looking though there WMTs and under Manual Actions they found they had a partial penalty.  There is no date against it and they never got an email and there are no messages WMTs for it.  I haven't personally dealt with a Manual penalty before, but I would have expected there to be a message in WMTs for it ( an email might have been missed because of a spam filter etc).   Could it be a very old penalty?

    | PaddyDisplays
    0

  • Hi Guys, my website is under a negative seo attack. One simply question about disavow tools. Everyday I have to upload a file with the new bad backlinks (domains). The fact is that when I try to upload a new disavow report the tool continue to show me the file of the day before and If I upload the new file it replace the old one. So.... what I have to do? 1. Upload a new file with the backlink domain of the day that replace the old one
    2. Or upload a new file with the old backlinks plus the new one? Thank you very much.

    | Italianseolover
    0

  • I recently been given a site that has over one-hundred thousand 404 error codes listed in Google Webmasters. It is really odd because according to Google Webmasters, the pages that are linking to these 404 pages are also pages that no longer exist (they are 404 pages themselves). These errors were a result of site migration that had occurred. Appreciate any input on how one might go about auditing and repairing large amounts of 404 errors. Thank you.

    | SEO_Promenade
    0

  • Hopefully someone can shed some light on this for me. Reading about GTLDs, I came across this quote from TSO Host: 'What we don’t know is whether an extension can double up as a keyword, which is picked up by Google and treated identically to the rest of a domain name. I.e. - would ‘bristolguitars.music’ have more ranking potential than ‘bristolguitars.com’ as ‘music’ is a relevant search word?' Source: https://www.tsohost.com/blog/how-do-new-gtlds-affect-seo Does anyone know if a GTLD extension does double up as a keyword? For example, if Nike buys 'Nike.shoes', does this double as the keyword 'Nike shoes', or is Google and other search engines just looking at the domain name _before _the GTLD extension? I'm looking at .photography for examples (not my niche) and seeing folks are having mixed results ranking for 'Keyword + Photography', so would be keen to hear your thoughts.

    | ecommercebc
    0

  • Dear Mozzerz We took over www.urgiganten.dk not long ago and last week we opened up for indexation, after having taken the old website down for a couple of months. One week after opening for indexation we saw a huge increase in crawl errors.Google is discovering some weird links to e.g http://www.urgiganten.dk/30-garmin-urremme/ which returns a 404. In GWT we are told that we are linking to this url from http://www.urgiganten.dk/garmin-urremme. But nowhere on http://www.urgiganten.dk/garmin-urremme will you find this link. However you will find the following script in the source code, which is the only code part that contains "/30-garmin-urremme/":Can it be true that google take the id and adds it to our tld to form a url? We have seen quite a lot of these errors not only on Urgiganten.dk but also some of our other websites!

    | urgiganten
    0

  • We have a GEO-IP redirect in place for our domain, so that users are pointed to the subfolder relevant for their region, e.g: Visit example.com from the UK and you will be redirected to example.com/uk This works fine when you manually type the domain into your browser, however if you search for the site and come to example.com, you end up at example.com I didn't think this was too much of an issue but our subfolders /uk and /au are not getting ranked at all in Google, even for branded keywords. I'm wondering if the fact that Google isn't picking up the redirect means that the pages aren't being indexed properly? Conversely our US region (example.com/us) is being ranked well. Has anyone encountered a similar issue?

    | ahyde
    0

  • I'm hoping someone in the Moz community can help me with this one! Essentially, we have a .co.uk brand which wants to have more of an international presence. My question is, purely based on the fact that we're a .co.uk, will we find it more challenging to develop a search engine presence in European/BRIC markets? In a perfect world, we'd have a .com/country or a .es/ etc, but if this isn't possible, how hindered are we if we stick with the .co.uk and want to build a presence in Spain?

    | ecommercebc
    0

  • Hi there, Google Webmaster Tools 'Who links the most' informs me there are 534 links from a site called econintersect.com linking to my site and 102 links from similar pages.com. I have never requested these links and am keen to know if they are harming my site due to poor link quality? Simon

    | simmo235
    0

  • I'm sure this type of question gets asked a lot, but I need some help here. Site: www.lodgmate.com We sell hotel supplies. Site has been active over a year. It has never been listed by Google for term "hotel supplies", at all. Have run numerous analytics, including Moz. While not perfect, no major flags. Moz gives the page an "A" for "hotel supplies", but none of the search engines return this site for that term. Did have an issue with too many key words, but that has since been corrected. Have never engaged in any questionable SEO tactics. I can understand not placing high in search, but not at all?? What's wrong? Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

    | mhans
    0

  • I have been instructed by Moz that I have some missing meta description tags; however, this is what comes up when I searched for more help on this site: "The proper coding for a meta HTML tag is These Meta descriptions can be nested anywhere in the element." Obviously the actual coding is missing... so can anyone tell me what the proper coding for a meta HTML tag is? Thanks!

    | marissaRT
    0

  • I have facing the question about re-indexing in the google search engine, the case is: i have changed my site meta description but google indexed display part description why?? my site is http://www.green-lotus-trekking.com/everest-base-camp-trek/  whats the problem in meta tag description? Please let me know about this?

    | agsln
    0

  • Hey Guys,I was wondering how Panda behaves with news publisher sites.A site with +-1M visits a day  that publishes +-300 news articles a day and the life of each article is one week top, given the nature of a news articles -->only relevant now.After one week the the news articles have virtually no page views. This results on a site with thousands of quality content pages that has no page views for years.Is it possible that the site gets penalized by panda for having thousands of pages with no visits?

    | Mr.bfz
    0

  • Hi all- A client has tried installing Yoast on her site and received at fatal error (below). She's been able to restore her site and get it functioning again, but I'm wondering if there's a work around so we can use the plugin. It's a Wordpress site using the Standard Theme. I've searched the forums (and here!) and haven't found anything helpful yet. Do you have any suggestions? Thanks! "Fatal error: Cannot redeclare yoast_breadcrumb() (previously declared in /vservers/nwconstructi/htdocs/NWCL/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-seo/inc/wpseo-functions.php:108) in /vservers/nwconstructi/htdocs/NWCL/wp-content/themes/StandardTheme_272/lib/standard_yoast_breadcrumbs.php on line 280"

    | DonnaDuncan
    0

  • Hi I manage the SEO in house for the site http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/ A new add on to our services has been launched in the form of an online store allowing us to sell, for example, expedition clothing that is relevant to the trips we offer. The store is managed elsewhere and sits on a subdomain of the company who are providing this service for us. There are sitewide links throughout this site back to our homepage: http://naturalworld.newheadings.com/index.php I'm just a bit concerned about these links from an SEO perspective and was wondering if we should request these are set up as no follow. Would appreciate any thoughts on this. Thanks!

    | KateWaite
    0

  • SSL certificates can obviously be a used as a ranking factor by Google, but would a site with no need for an SSL certificate notice a gain by adding one? Is it possible to demonstrate you have an SSL certificate without having some https pages on your site?

    | sthompson
    0

  • Hi, We are working with a client that has 2 sites in the same sector.  They are currently on separate servers, with separate blogs, images galleries etc. Both sites rank combined for over 200 terms. IF we were to "combine" the sites on one CMS, with one IP, two separate front ends, one blog stream, one image gallery what do you think the SEO impact would be from this? We had an issue with another client whose sites were too close and we had to separate in order to get them both to rank. Further to this we want both sites to now have their own https certificate however this wouldn't be possible if combined. Interested to hear thoughts on this.  Thanks

    | lauratagdigital
    0

  • Any one with experience with a specialist magneto dedicated hosting in UK/Ireland?  Just getting a few quotes and looking for recommendations ( and any I should avoid) Thanks

    | PaddyDisplays
    0

  • Followed Google's instructions for using the Change of Address Tool in GWT to move rethinkisrael.org to www.fromthegrapevine.com.  I'm getting this message, "We tried to reconfirm ownership of your old site (rethinkisrael.org) and failed. Make sure your verification token is present, and try again."Even though the site is verified, we undid the DNS change, and checked the meta verification tag.  The tag is correct.  And, since the site is ALREADY verified there was NO way to 'veryify' in GWT again.  The message in GWT says "verification successful."We redid the DNS change, tried again to do the address change and get the same error message. Any ideas?

    | Aggie
    0

  • Hello, all SEOers~ I just renewed my web site about 3 weeks ago, and in order to preserve SEO values as much as possible, I did 301 redirect, XML Sitemap and so on for minimize the possible data losses. But the problem is that about week later from site renewal, my team some how made mistake and removed all 301 redirects. So now my old site URLs are all gone from Google Indexing and my new site is not getting any index from Google. My traffic and rankings are also gone....OMG I checked Google Webmaster Tool, but it didn't say any special message other than Google bot founds increase of 404 error which is obvious. Also I used "fetch as google bot" from webmaster tool to increase chance to index but it seems like not working much. I am re-doing 301 redirect within today, but I am not sure it means anything anymore. Any advise or opinion?? Thanks in advance~!

    | Yunhee.Choi
    0

  • Hi there, There is about 2.8 KB of java script above the content of our homepage. I know it isn't desirable, but is this something I need to be concerned about? Thanks,
    Sarah Update: It's fine. Ran a Fetch as Google and it's rendering as it should be. I would delete my question if I could figure out how!

    | SSFCU
    0

  • for example - if i want to know who has ranked for the term "seo company" on google for the last 12 months (or there abouts), can it be done? James

    | isntworkdull
    1

  • Hi, I own a web agency and we often register domain names for our clients. When we register those, I just realized that we always use the same registrant name and other whois (ex : Louis-Philippe Dea), for all domain names. Can this hurt the SEO of our clients? Hope that you'll understand when I'm trying to say in spite of my bad english :S Thanks 🙂

    | Louis-Philippe_Dea
    0

  • Thank you Thank you Moz People!! I have a successful vacation rental company that has terrible seo but getting better.  When I first ran Moz crawler and page grader, I had 35,000 errors and all f's....  tons of problem with duplicate page content and titles because not being consistent with page names... mainly capitalization and also rel canonical errors... with that said,  I have now maybe 2 or 3 errors from time to time, but I fix every other day. Problem Maybe My site map shows in Google Webmaster submitted 1155
    1541 indexed
    But google crawl shows 23,000 pages probably because of duplicate errors or possibly database driven url parameters... How bad is this and how do I get this to be accurate,  I have seen google remove tool but I do not think this is right? 2)  I have hired a full time content writer and I hope this works My site in google was just domain.com but I had put a 301 in to www.domain.com becauses www. had a page authority where the domain.com did not.   But in webmasters I had domain.com just listed. So I changed that to www.domain.com (as preferred domain name) and ask for the first  time to crawl.   www.domain.com .   Anybody see any problems with this? THank you MOZ people,  Nick

    | nickcargill
    0

  • Hi all, I'm trying to determine if canonical or 301 is a better way of handling an issue on my site. The Background I've got a Wordpress website where pages are in-depth reference articles and the posts are for short news blurbs. When I produce a new resource page, I also make a short post telling readers about the new resource. I use Yoast's Wordpress SEO plug in. Sometimes, Google will rank the 200 word post higher than the 2000 word resource page. I suspect that is because of the order in which they were crawled by Google, but I do not know for sure. The Question To make sure that the resource page is seen as the most important location on the site for the topic, should I use the canonical section in the Yoast plugin on the post to point to the page? Or should I wait, and after a few days (when the news blurb is off of the first page) just 301 the post to the page? Are there any link juice considerations when using the canonical option? Thanks for the help! Richard

    | RichardInFlorida
    0

  • Good morning, As many of you have read, Google seems to have confirmed that they will give a small boost to sites with SSL certificates this morning.  So my question is, does that mean we have to switch our entire site to https?  Even simple information pages and blog posts?  Or will we get credit for the https boost as long as the sensitive parts of our site have it? Anybody know?  Thanks in advance.

    | rayvensoft
    1

  • I am looking at a site that has global or duplicated content in 4 tabs for things like shipping, quality etc on tabs on each product page. The content is very good for UX and helps conversions but poor for SEO.  Each product page has unique and tagged photos, unique title and a unique description. Is there away to specifically tell search engines that individual parts of a page are duplicated for good reason? Linking to the content to a single page decreases conversion dramatically but having it on tabs could effect ranking and quality as it is duplicated. Can anyone offer any advice with this?

    | Ian_W
    0

  • I'm working on a resort that has different type of rooms available. Does anyone know how to use schema.org to set it a hotel with different hotel room types. I looked at the hotel schema but I did not see any room types. Thanks!

    | ppapola
    0

  • I'm working on a new project and we would prefer to not use the www. - for name/branding reasons. Are there any SEO ramifications from setting the domain without the www and using 301 redirects for all home page extensions to forward to -> domain.com(without the www)? Furthermore, we will be hosting many profiles on this site and would like to structure them for optimal SEO.  Would there be an issue with using sub domains - user.domain.com, or would sub directories be more optimal? Thank you in advance!

    | NickMacario
    0

  • Hello good people, Website A was doing great in terms of traffic and ranking.
    Website B had seen a steady decline in traffic and visibility for several years, most likely due to thin content issues. Website B was merged into website A. Content was redirected on a per page basis with a rewrite rule that takes domain name and the change in URL structure into account. After merging the two websites, traffic and rankings of Website A started dropping. What would be the best course of action here? Weed out thin content and stick with the merger? Removing all of Website B's content and the redirects to Website A? ?? Thanks! Jan 1pYROKn

    | jansievers
    1

  • Hi to all. I have a huge problem about my web site traffic. We published our mobile site version under mobile domain in m.etilercerrental.com. And we published mobile site sitemap under main site such as sitemap-mobile.xml and notify google from webmaster tools. After a while whole site traffic gone down so badly. Almost 60% gone down which doesnt make sense. Mobile sitemap is hosted under desktop site. And we didnt add any link to switch sites between mobile and desktop version. We automaticly redirect between desktop and mobile versiyons by detecting useragent. One another this is we have announcement section in dekstop version but we dont have it in mobile. But we are not making any redirection to mobile site when user visits the announcement section even by mobile phone. Because we are not displaying it in mobile version.
    One last this is we are making redirections automatically and  not asking user preference such as showing a link in the bottom of page to switch sites betwenn mobile and pc version. While developing mobile site we followed instructions in this https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/?hl=tr For find the details I would like to give you some site urls. Site Url                    : http://www.etilercarrental.com/
    Sitemap Xml             : http://www.etilercarrental.com/sitemap.xml
    Mobile Sitemap Xml  : http://www.etilercarrental.com/sitemap-mobile.xml

    | gkhnrtk
    0

  • Hi, My client has an online ecommerce site where he sells wedding items. His previous SEO company added his URL to many websites that are related to porn. Those are high authority websites but are irrelevant to my client's business. Should I disavow those links?  

    | alexkatalkin
    0

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