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Category: Technical SEO

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

  • Yamsafer.com


    We at yamsafer.me are using a Repsonsive web design! A crawl errors occured which redirects the hompage to an HTTP version instead of HTTPS? Any ideas on why this happened?

    | Yamsafer.com
    0
  • Krupesh


    Wrong canonical URL was applied to thousands of pages of a client website, pointing them all to a single non-existing URL. Now Google has de-indexed most of those pages. We have fixed the problem now, but do we get Search engines crawl those pages again and start showing in Search results? I understand that a slow recovery is possible if we don't do anything. Was wondering if we can fast track the recovery... Any pointers? Thanks

    | Krupesh
    0
  • mathamatix


    Is it a best practice to place your company's phone number in the meta description for a page? Are there any rules as to what is acceptable for meta tags? One of our competitors recently started doing this but for some reason I think it might be against Google's guidelines. They (competitor) is also engaging in web spam, plagiarizing our content,  and other black hat techniques so I'm leery of anything they do.

    | mathamatix
    0
  • ahyde


    I manage the SEO for several different regions which are also based on the same site e.g. example.com/au, example.com/us The /us site has pretty good rankings and changes I'm making to the site are having an impact. The /au site has really bad rankings, even though much of the content is the same. (The /uk site is also awful but we had an issue with 4,500 duplicate pages which were only resolved last week). Crawl diagnostics are only showing 1 major error for a 404 response, I'm receiving a domain authority of 43 and A grade page ranking for some of our targeted keywords. I could believe that this isn't necessarily going to get us a top 10 rating but I would have thought we would be in the top 50, especially for branded keywords. Could the lack of ranking be to do with how our domain redirects? If you go to example.com.au you are taken to the home page rather than being redirected to example.com/au. Once you head to an internal page the URL changes to example.com/au/page

    | ahyde
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  • wearehappymedia


    I've notice many sites MOZ included no longer use the target: blank attribute. I think that's what it's called. Basically when a link on your site opens a new tab in the browser as opposed to replacing the browser window you are in.  Given that MOZ think of everything, I would love to hear opinions on this.

    | wearehappymedia
    0
  • agsln


    My web site http://www.green-lotus-trekking.com is this problem for google search engine optimization? Some little percentage problem or totally I am in Confusion?

    | agsln
    0
  • PaddyDisplays


    This is a repost of this question http://moz.com/community/q/manual-action-found-in-wmts-no-email-no-message-in-wmts But I'm sure there is someone in the moz fourms that have had/seen manual action 🙂 Someone I know said that they were looking though their 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
  • Jayblue


    The page below
    http://www.carefundraisingsupplies.co.uk/fundraising-products/Charity-Collection-Buckets seems unable to budge from a position of near 100 despite previously been around 16 and moving up. We cannot seem to find any issues that are obvious and even some quality link building has moved it down further. Any idease from anyone? The search phrase we are targetting is Charity Collection Buckets

    | Jayblue
    0
  • aj613


    Of course H tags are key signals for relevance in search.  Does an h2 tag send a significantly "louder" signal than an h4 tag?

    | aj613
    0
  • ShaqD


    Hi, according to Webmaster Tools and Siteliner our website have an above-average amount of duplicate content. Most of the pages are the search results pages, where it finds only one result. The only difference in this case are the TDK, H1 and the breadcrumbs. The rest of the layout is pretty static and similar. Here is an example for two pages with "duplicate content": https://soundbetter.com/search/Globo https://soundbetter.com/search/Volvo Edit: These are legitimate results that happen to have the same result.  In this case we want users to be able to find the audio engineers by 'credits' (musicians they've worked with).  Tags.  We want users to rank for people searching for 'engineers who worked with'.  And searching for two different artists (credit tags) returns this one service provider, with different urls (the tag being the search parameter) hence the duplicate content. I guess every e-commerce/directory website faces this kind of issue. What is the best practice to avoid duplicate content on search results page?

    | ShaqD
    1
  • Kulraj


    My website Homepage: http://kulraj.org Here is the page I am working to rank for:** http://kulraj.org/2014/07/15/hedonic-treadmill/** When I search specifically for 'kulraj hedonic treadmill' just to test it, the first result is this: kulraj.org_/tag/_hedonic-treadmill. It shows the shortened version of the article that is within the Tag page. [I'm new to SEO and Moz, please keep in mind] Moz has told me I have duplicate content, which is regarding my main Blog page and Tags page, which is true the content is duplicate. However, the actual blog post itself is not displayed anywhere else on the website, or anywhere else on the web. Moz confirms this, and reports no duplicate content warning. My questions, therefore, are: 1. How do I actually go about installing a rel canonical tag within a standard WordPress dashboard (I'm using Genesis Framework) - I'm finding great difficulty finding instructions on this anywhere on the web. I clearly need to fix the issue with Blog page and Tags Page. 2. Why would my blog post be omitted, and are there any suggestions I could implement to bring it into the main search results. Other things I've noticed: 1. If I type this URL in: kulraj.org/hedonic-treadmill, it automatically redirects to http://kulraj.org/2014/07/15/hedonic-treadmill/ 2. Inside Google Webmaster Tools it says: No new messages or recent critical issues. 3. Regarding the above, when I click 'Labs > author stats' within Webmaster Tools, it shows nil stats, so something there is not quite right either, even though Google+ Authorship is confirmed.

    | Kulraj
    0
  • Digi1234


    Hello, I have a vanity (clean looking) URL that 302 redirects to the ugly version. So in other words http://www.site.com/url 302 >>> http://www.site.com/directory/directory/url.aspx What I'm trying to do is get the clean version to show up in search. However, for some reason Google only indexes the ugly version. cache:http://www.site.com/directory/directory/url.aspx is showing the ugly URL as cached and cache:http://www.site.com/url is showing not cached at all. Is there some way to force Google to index the clean version? Fetch as Google for the clean URL only returns a redirect status and canonicalizing the ugly to the  clean would seem to send a strange message because of the redirect back to the ugly. Any help would be appreciated. Thank you,

    | Digi1234
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  • MyOwnSEO


    I work with a law firm and we are having a hard time busting into the first page of results for any of our keywords.  I am new at SEO and have been trying to analyze how are competitors have an edge over us when on paper we are better optimized than their websites.  One glaring difference is they have fewer webpages, which possibly makes each of their pages more keyword rich. Would it be smarter to condense our many webpages/topics into less, more general web pages? I hope my question is even making sense, thanks for any possible help! Our site is http://www.utahdefenseattorney.net/

    | MyOwnSEO
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  • LesleyPaone


    I have a blog that preforms fairly well on a sub domain, but after reading a post that Rand made to the Q & A I am thinking about moving it to the main domain in a sub directory. What are your thoughts on this? Here are some stats on it. The blog currently gets about 5 x the traffic of the main domain. The domain is older, 2008 creation date. They pretty much register for the same keywords.

    | LesleyPaone
    0
  • Mike.NW


    Hi Moz, Do I need to duplicate a schema tag if I already have an open graphs tag pertaining to that particular property? Ex. Title of a product. Thanks,

    | Mike.NW
    0
  • westsaddle


    I have a series of pages on my website organized in a hierarchy, let's simplify it to say parent pages and child pages. Each of the child pages has product listings, and an introduction at the top (along with an image) explaining their importance, why they're grouped together, providing related information, etc.
    The parent page has a list of all of its child pages and a copy of their introductions next to the child page's title and image thumbnail. Moz is throwing up duplicate content warnings for all of these pages. Is this an actual SEO issue, or is the warning being overzealous?
    Each child page has tons of its own content, and each parent page has the introductions from a bunch of child pages, so any single introduction is never the only content on the page. Thanks in advance!

    | westsaddle
    0
  • Zippy-Bungle


    I just did a search for something and my own website tured up at 1, but this other wbsite turned up at 2 with what looked like my content http://sport.aliexirs.ir/ASTM-A-Plate-Grades-HIC.html. so I clicked on it and it is my website running inside a frame. so what is this all about? Do I need to worry? And what should I do?

    | Zippy-Bungle
    0
  • aafpitadmin


    Content from our medical journals gets indexed by the National Library of Medicine / PubMed on a monthly basis. The link to the full article appears in the upper-right corner on PubMed, yet I'm unable to find PubMed (nlm.nih.gov) backlinks in the reporting tools. Example:
    Article Title: Respiratory Syncytial Virus Infection in Children (allintitle query)
    Article URL: http://www.aafp.org/afp/2011/0115/p141.html
    PubMed URL: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21243988 The PubMed link is to http://www.aafp.org/link_out?pmid=21243988 ,
    a 301 redirect to the article, http://www.aafp.org/afp/2011/0115/p141.html Any idea why this link isn't appearing in backlinks? This isn't just for one article, we have roughly 2,000 articles from 1998 to the present. Articles from the past 12-months are access-restricted, and after 12-months the articles become public.

    | aafpitadmin
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  • stephen_reply


    Hey Moz, We're migrating an old site on an old server over to a new server/DNS. The plan is to keep the same URL structure and reuse our existing URL's. As long as we make minimal changes to each page's content, we should be able to update our DNS entry and get all the pages recreated and assigned to their correct URLs without any reduction in SEO rankings. Is this correct? This site gets a lot of organic traffic and ranks highly on some challenging keywords, so it's key that we retain our rankings as much as possible. I've read that it's wise to lower the DNS time-to-live to one hour, about a day before the move, to help Google crawl the DNS a little quicker. Are there any other recommendations you guys can offer or past experiences?

    | stephen_reply
    0
  • 3mobileIreland


    Hello, I was sent a report from a colleague containing redirect errors: The link to "http://www.xxxx.com/old-page/" has resulted in HTTP redirection to "http://www.xxxx.com/new-page".Search engines can only pass page rankings and other relevant data through a single redirection hop. Using unnecessary redirects can have a negative impact on page ranking. Our site is host on Microsoft Servers (IIS). I'm not sure what is causing these errors. Would it be the way the redirect was implemented.

    | 3mobileIreland
    0
  • Jacobsheehan


    Hi team, I'm in the process of making some aesthetic changes to my website. Its getting quite cluttered so the main purpose is to clean up its look. I currently have 3x social links in the header, right at the top, and i would really like to move these to the footer to remove some clutter in the header. My concern is that moving them may have an impact on the domains ranking in google. Website: www.mountainjade.co.nz We've made some huge gains against our competitors over the past 6 months and I don't want to jeopardise that. Any help would be much appreciated as i'm self taught in SEO and have learnt through making mistakes. This time however, with Moz, i'd rather get some advice before I make any decisions! Thanks is advance, Jake S

    | Jacobsheehan
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  • Runner2009


    Just moved a WordProcess site over to a new host and skinned it. Found out after the fact that the site had been hacked - the db is clean. I did notice at first there were a lot of 404s being generated, so I setup a script to capture and then return a 410 page gone - and then the plan was to submit them to have them removed from the index - thinking there was a manageable number But, when I looked at Google WebMaster Tools there was over 1,300,000 404 errors  - see attachment. My puny attempt to solve this problem seems to need more of an industrial size solution. My question, is that what would be the best way to deal with this? Not all of the pages are indexed in google - only 637 index but you can only see about 150 in the index. Where bing is another story saying that over 2,700 pages index but only can see about 200. How is this affecting any future rankings - they do not rank well, as I found out because of very slow page load speed and of course the hacks? The link profile looking at Google is OK, and there are no messages in Google Webmaster tools. am5cMz2

    | Runner2009
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  • activenz


    We are an adventure travel tour company, who run hiking, kayaking, biking adventures in several countries. We have a travel tour operator website with a blog in a sub folder of the site. We want to add a section/category in the blog itself with a hiking club mini directory, that lists all hiking clubs in 1 or 2 specific countries. The reason we want to do this is because the people searching online for these clubs are our target market and potential clients. We hope to rank for some of these searches, and encourage interest in our blog/website in the process. We also want the potential to build relationships with these clubs. The question I want to ask is: if we add say 100 to 200 listings, and make all outgoing links no follow, will this harm our page authority, reputation with SE's or pose any other risk for our site. The other question is, do you think that this will dilute the context of our content - as its slightly different in context to the rest of our site content. Are we better to set up a separate site for this purpose.

    | activenz
    1
  • DianeDP


    Hi, I managed a website port to a WP responsive deisgn for a client, see http://chicagotelephony.com. Unfortunately, he wanted me to work with a graphic designer rather than a web geek, so the resulting website has messed up URLS, i.e. index.php is smack in the middle of almost all the pages. I know that is all wrong, but I also realized that she was not fluent in the way the Genesis framework was set up or how the particular template I selected, operated. So I just wanted to get it out there.... and now it is live, but has all these errors. Do I have to do 301 redirects? Is there a setting or a button inside of the WP template that would put correct slugs but get rid of the index.pho within the URL? For example, http://chicagotelephony.com/index.php/cloud-based-solutions/  and http://chicagotelephony.com/index.php/var-network-value-added-reseller/ should be chicagotelephony.com/cloud-based-solutions/ and chicagotelephony.com/var-netowrk-value-added-reselle/ and so forth.

    | DianeDP
    0
  • Carl287


    I just wanted to get opinion on some of the fundamentals and semantics of optimisation and content generation/distribution - your thoughts and opinions are welcome. OK, for example, lets assume (for illustration purposes) that I have a site - www.examplegolfer.com aimed at golfers with golf related content. The keywords I would like to optimise for are: golf balls golf tees lowering your golf handicap drive a golf ball further Now, I'm going to be creating informative, useful content (infographics, articles, how to guides, video demonstrations etc) centred around these topics/keywords, which hopefully our audience/prospects will find useful and bookmark, share and monition our site/brand on the web, increasing (over time) our position of these terms/keywords in the SERP's. Now, once I've researched and created my content piece, where should I place it? Let's assume it's an infographic - should this be hosted on an infographic sharing site (such as Visually) or on my site, or both? If it's hosted or embedded on my site, should this be in a blog or on the page I'm optimising for (and I've generated my keyword around)? For example, if my infographic is around golf balls, should this be embedded on the page www.examplegolfer.com/golf-balls (the page I'm trying to optimise) and if so, and it's also placed elsewhere around the internet (i.e on Visually for example), this could technically be seen as duplicated content as the infographic is on my site and on Visually (for example)? How does everyone else share/distribute/host their created content in various locations whilst avoiding the duplicated content issue? Or have I missed something? Also, how important is it to include my keyword (golf balls) in the pieces' title or anchor text? Or indeed within the piece itself? One final question - should the content by authoured/shared as the brand/company or an individual (spokesperson if you like) on behalf of the company (i.e. John Smith)? I'm all for creating great, interesting, useful content for my audience, however I want to ensure we're getting the most out of it as researching influencers, researching the piece and creating it and distributing it isn't a quick or easy job (as we all know!). Thoughts and comments welcome. Thanks!

    | Carl287
    0
  • DCochrane


    After a new site redesign ...would it hinder our rankings if we 301 redirected all old URLS that are returning 404 error codes to the root domain (home page) ? Would this be a good temporary solution until we are able to redirect the pages to the appropriate corresponding page? Thanks so much!

    | DCochrane
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  • Kenny-King


    My client is migrating their site to a new domain. I just did a big redesign, including URL structure change, and 301s from old URLs to new URLs. Now they want a new name, so we're moving forward with a new domain name. However, we're going to keep the site on the current domain while we ease customers into the new name. During that time, I'm going to be building links to the new domain name and 301 Redirecting that new one to the current domain name. Then, once we migrate the site to the new domain name, I'm then going to redirect the current domain name to the new domain name. So, my question(s) is/are: Is the above process the best way to use 301 redirects to to build links to the new domain while we transition everything? Should I (or can I) do 3 redirects from the oldest URLs, to the current URLs then to the new URLs? General question... I can't seem to find this anywhere online, but what is the best practice for what order URLs should be in in the htaccess file? Thanks!

    | Kenny-King
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  • namansr


    My site is www.findyogi.com - a shopping comparison site The mobile site is hosted at m.findyogi.com I fixed my sitemap and attribution to mobile site in May last week. My mobile site pages are getting de-indexed since then. Website - www.findyogi.com/mobiles/motorola/motorola-moto-g-16gb-b95ef8/price - indexed Mobile - m.findyogi.com/mobiles/motorola/motorola-moto-g-16gb-b95ef8/price - _not indexed. _ Google is crawling my website and mobile site normally. What am I am doing wrong?

    | namansr
    0
  • absoauto


    Hey everyone, For the URL - http://www.absoluteautomation.ca/dakota-alert-dcpa-p/dkdcpa2500.htm - I have the following tags in the header: rel="canonical" href="http://www.absoluteautomation.ca/dakota-alert-dcpa-p/dkdcpa2500.htm" /> rel="alternate" media="only screen and (max-width: 640px)" href="http://www.absoluteautomation.ca/mobile/Product.aspx?id=37564" /> Yes Google WMT is reading these as duplicate pages with duplicate titles, meta descriptions etc. How can I fix this? Thanks!

    | absoauto
    0
  • summer300


    Can anyone confirm if its the geographic location of the web hosting or the domain hosting that can affect seo ? I have a client who has their domain hosting and Website hosting in Australia however their they have a .co.nz and their target market is in New Zealand. thank you

    | summer300
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  • Lvet


    Hello, We realised that one of our clients, copied a large part of content from our website to his. The normal reaction would be to send a cease and desist letter. Nevertheless this would probably mean loosing a good client. The client dumped the text of several articles (for example:
    http://www.velascolawyers.com/en/property-law/136-the-ley-de-costas-coastal-law.html  ) Into the same page:
    http://www.freundlinger-partners.com/en/home/faqs-property-law/ I convinced the client to place our authorship tags on this page, but I am wondering if this is enough. What do you think? Cheers
    Luca

    | Lvet
    0
  • kirmeliux


    We accidentally introduced Google to our incomplete site. The end result: thousands of pages indexed which return nothing but a "Sorry, no results" page. I know there are many ways to go about this, but the sheer number of pages makes it frustrating. Ideally, in the interim, I'd love to 404 the offending pages and allow Google to recrawl them, realize they're dead, and begin removing them from the index. Unfortunately, we've removed the initial internal links that lead to this premature indexation from our site. So my question is, will Google revisit these pages based on their own records (as in, this page is indexed, let's go check it out again!), or will they only revisit them by following along a current site structure? We are signed up with WMT if that helps.

    | kirmeliux
    0
  • richdan


    I am trying to perform a crawl analysis on a client's website at https://www.bravosolution.com I have tried to crawl it with IIS for SEO, Sreaming Frog and Xenu and not one of them makes it further than the home page of the site. There is nothing I can see in the robots.txt that is blocking these agents. As far as I can see, Google is able to crawl the site although they have noticed a significant drop in organic traffic. Any advise would be very welcome Regards Danny

    | richdan
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  • Unturned


    Hey Mozsters, I'm competing with one website for a niche, he's currently beating me and recently changed his Title to match mine exactly. Are there any negative repercussions from this? Should I change mine so users aren't confused? Why would someone do this?

    | Unturned
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  • Booj


    If I want clean up my URLs and take the "www.site.com/page.html" and make it "www.site.com/page" do I need a redirect? If this scenario requires a 301 redirect no matter what, I might as well update the URL to be a little more keyword rich for the page while I'm at it. However, since these pages are ranking well I'd rather not lose any authority in the process and keep the URL just stripped of the ".html" (if that's possible). Thanks for you help! [edited for formatting]

    | Booj
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  • DonnaDuncan


    I have a client that has over 90,000 incoming links from a single IP address. I can't figure out who's linking to them. I've used several different reverse IP lookup tools and can tell that the server is in Europe and ISP is AT&T Global Network Services Nederland B.V.. (http://www.ip-adress.com/reverse_ip/194.196.0.36) Says there's 0 hosts on that IP. Any suggestions?

    | DonnaDuncan
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  • Searchresult


    Hello Moz, Since a while i am struggling with a SEO case: At the moment a https version of a homepage of a client of us is indexed in Google. Thats really strange because the url is redirected to an other website url for three weeks now. And we did everything to make clear to google that he has to index the other url. 
    So we have a few homepage urls A https://www.website.nl
    B https://www.websites.nl/category
    C http://www.websites.nl/category What we did: Redirected A with a 301 to B, a redirect from A or B to C is difficult because of the security issue with the ssl certificate. We put the right canonical url (VERSION C) on every version of the homepage(A,B) We only put the canonical urls in the sitemap.xml, only version C and uploaded it to Google Webmastertools We changed all important internal links to Version C We also get some valuable external backlinks to Version C Is there something i missed or i forget to say to Google hey look you've got the wrong url indexed, you have to index version C? How is it possible Google still prefers Version A after doing al those changes three weeks a go? I'am really looking forward to your answer. Thanks a lot in advanced! Greetz Djacko

    | Searchresult
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  • JordanBrown


    Sorry Posting it again. How I can change the product URL structure. Please let me know how to fix woocommerce permalink in wordpress. My current URL is http://www.ayurjeewan.com/product/divya-ashmarihar-kwath and I want to like (only post name) http://www.ayurjeewan.com/divya-ashmarihar-kwath Attached is the screenshot of option available. qa2hZMP.jpg

    | JordanBrown
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  • ahyde


    On one my sites Moz is picking up 4483 duplicate content pages. The majority of these are from our blog and video sections on our site. We're using a URL shortener and it appears that some of the pages are the full version of the URL then the shortened version. However if you go to the full version you get redirected to the shorter one. So I would assume that the Moz crawler should get the same redirect? We're also getting pagination being shown as duplicate pages, which I would half expect, but the URLs Magento is creating are truly bizarre: e.g http://www.xxx.com/uk/blog/cat/view/identifier/news/page/news/index.php/alarms-doorbells/?p=2 Alarms and doorbells is one of our product categories, which is displayed in the LHN on the blog page but has nothing to do with the blog itself. On another site on the same Magento instance, with the same content (they're for two different regions) we're show as having 248 duplicate pages, again in the video and news section, but this is a completely different scale of issue. Has anyone else encountered issues like these? I'm probably going to put a noindex in place on these two sections until we can get a solution in place as we're completely unranked in google on this site. Thanks

    | ahyde
    0
  • BigJoe


    Hi, When we do direct mail to our customers talking about a specific product we sell we usually put a link in the letter so the customer can go directly to the product just by typing a short link, something like:
    www.example.com/blue-widget This link will then re-direct to:
    www.example.com/shop/product/brand-name-big-blue-widget-with-green-ends-200m-50diameter.php Which we are happy with at the moment but I want to check we are doing it correctly in terms of redirects, we currently re-direct it using .htaccess like:
    Redirect /blue-widget http://www.example.com/shop/product/brand-name-big-blue-widget-with-green-ends-200m-50diameter.php This re-directs it as a 302 but should it be done as a 301 ? I am not sure why we did 302's to start with but I am thinking they should be 301's, I think it might have been because the URL we were redirecting from was imaginary ? Also should we use the Redirect line in the .htaccess or should we do each one with a RewriteRule ? Thanks BigJoe

    | BigJoe
    0
  • garrettkite


    After the latest crawl of one of my client campaigns in Moz, I noticed that their domain authority dropped by 3 since the last crawl just one week ago. That seems pretty drastic. I took a look around to see what might have been the cause, and in looking at the Links > Competitive Metrics > History section of Moz, I found that the site had a decrease of total links from 5,339 to 1,072 (see image) - also a drastic decrease. My question is, what would cause such a huge, sudden decrease in links over just the course of one month? I haven't changed anything up with the approach to their online strategy, in fact we have put increased emphasis on the creation of natural links so this huge decrease comes as a real surprise. I should also mention that Total External Links also decreased, but only from 243 to 205. Any insight into these numbers and what could have possibly caused such a drastic decrease would be very much appreciated! Screen-Shot-2014-07-23-at-10.00.28-AM.png

    | garrettkite
    0
  • Dan-Lawrence


    Hi Looking in GWT > Google Index > Index Status says 0 pages indexed Yes if i search manually on google for brand site is listed, and i see organic traffic from Google in analytics I take it this is likely an error in GWT and nothing to worry about ? Cheers Dan

    | Dan-Lawrence
    0
  • CarlWint


    Hi All, Just a quick question regarding Meta Descriptions, I am currently looking at a site where an awful lot of the Meta descriptions are similar (not 100% duplicated). The reason being is that the site contains a lot of the same products, but different weights. For example a 500g, 1kg & 2kg version of the same product. Therefore the Metas are same, apart from the weight that's being discussed. In my opinion the duplication is probably a little too close. Do you think in this circumstance its better to have no Meta descriptions defined at all? Thanks!

    | CarlWint
    0
  • Twist360


    Like most sites today we have a whole raft of social links in our footer, these are on every page of the site and link out to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc Should these links be nofollow to avoid juice leaving our site or would you recommend allowing them to be followed to increase the power of these social sites? Is there a definitive Yay or Na on these social links?

    | Twist360
    0
  • Gordian


    In dealing with Panda do you think it is a good idea to put all refinements for category pages in the robots.txt file? We already have a lot as noindex, follow but I am wondering if it would be better to address from a crawl perspective as the pages are probably thin duplicate content to Google.

    | Gordian
    0
  • A_Q


    Hi there, I just wondered if anyone on the forum had experience of using Wistia video rich snippets and how to control the thumbnail image that appears in SERPs? I have selected a thumbnail with the video information on the Wistia account, but a different one actually appears in the results pages (the image being used doesn't actually appear on the page at all, but it is elsewhere on the site). Has anyone had anything similar and what did you do the control the thumbnail being used? Thanks!

    | A_Q
    0
  • MarcelMoz


    Hello, Since Panda 4.0 has been launched, all of my optimized META description have been gone in Google.
    A while ago, I posted a question about this problem here: http://moz.com/community/q/all-meta-descriptions-gone. I know about Google's own will to decide which META description will be shown. And also about unique content of the descriptions. All pages did have an optimized description before Panda 4.0 and there were no troubles at all, what tells me there is something else going on. I tested some things: Rewrote 50 descriptions to very uinique ones, only five got indexed. This tells me that duplicate content of the descriptions is not the problem (they have never been 100% duplicate, product type was a variable which was always different for each page). Removed cache in GWT and fetched again as Google, didn't help. I checked the pages I tested and they all have been indexed again without showing the optimized descriptions. More information: The first time I changed some META descriptions and fetched the pages again in GWT, Google picked up my new META descriptions and showed them. A few days later, most of them disappeared again (so Google is aware of the description but seems to ignore it). Some pages show the optimized description when I change my search query (only a few, mostly the optimized description never got shown) Technique is ok. Source code shows the right optimized description. META robots isn't blocking anything except NOODP/NOYDIR (always has blocked those). Websites using the exact same CMS, website template, META descriptions (style and build-up), do not have these problems I compared elements like place of description in source code, usage of meta robots, og:description, crawl-delay in robots.txt, and special characters in descriptions between websites that are showing optimized vs. website that don't show optimized descriptions. I can't find any connection. Something I noticed is a change is my Robots.txt file: my webmaster has added the following command:
    Crawl-delay: 2 May this have to do with my problem? I guess it doens't. I did some research and there are more websites that are suffering this problem beside mine. This tells me it must be Google (and so Panda 4.0) that is responsible for this change. I realy want my optimized descriptions back. Does anybody have an idea what to do?
    Thanks in advance. Marcel

    | MarcelMoz
    0
  • Dan-Lawrence


    HI How important is it to use the hreflang attributes and supporting sitemaps (and do you need both) ? Since if sites are being set up on country specific tlds (but on top of WP multisite network.domain.com environment) and geotargeted in GWT, as well as country meta tags and local schema etc etc that should send enough signals shouldnt it 🙂 ? Implementation of hreflang seems like an absolute technical nightmare All Best Dan

    | Dan-Lawrence
    0
  • Taswirh


    I recently purchased a Expired domain from auction and after I started my new site on it, I am noticing 500+ "not found" errors in Google Webmaster Tools, which are generating from the previous owner's contents.Should I use a redirection plugin to redirect those non-exist posts to any new post(s) of my site? or I should use a 301 redirect? or I should leave them just as it is without taking further action? Please advise.

    | Taswirh
    1
  • Vspeed


    What are the best methods for ensuring that the correct spelling/formatting of a brand name rank in the SERP when an alternate formatting/spelling of the brand name is searched. Take for example the brand name (made up for example purposes), "SuperFry". Many customers search using the term "Super Fry" (with a space). To make things worse, not only does Google not return the brand name SuperFry, but it also auto corrects to another brand name "Super-Fri". Is there a common best practice to ensure the customer finds the intended brand name when they simply add a space in the search term? I assume a quick fix would be to create an ad words campaign for the alternate spellings/formatting. What about an organic solution? Perhaps we could create a special page talking about the alternate ways to spell the brand name? Would this solution send mixed signals to Google and potential hurt the over all rankings? Thanks much for any advice!

    | Vspeed
    0

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