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Category: Technical SEO

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


  • I've noticed an enormous spike in pages indexed through WMT in the last week. Now I know WMT can be a bit (OK, a lot) off base in its reporting but this was pretty hard to explain. See, we're in the middle of a huge campaign against dupe content and we've put a number of measures in place to fight it. For example: Implemented a strong canonicalization effort NOINDEX'd content we know to be duplicate programatically Are currently fixing true duplicate content issues through rewriting titles, desc etc. So I was pretty surprised to see the blow-up. Any ideas as to what else might cause such a counter intuitive trend? Has anyone else see Google do something that suddenly gloms onto a bunch of phantom pages?

    | farbeseo
    0

  • Hi Can anyone recommend a good Schema plugin for wordpress sites, does anyone know if Yoast SEO plugin has schema features ? Cheers Dan

    | Dan-Lawrence
    0

  • hello world. i offer first aid courses in different locations in switzerland. now i'm not sure if i have to make the single registration pages rel="canonical" or not. example:
    location 1 -> course list @ Nothelferkurse Thun
    location 2 -> course list @ Nothelferkurse Bern the content is almost the same. how do i have to handle with it? thanks for your help!

    | alekaj
    2

  • Reviewing our client's URLs for a 301 redirect strategy, we have noticed that many URLs have "/index.shtml." The part we don'd understand is these URLs aren't the homepage and they have multiple folders followed by "/index.shtml" Does anyone happen to know why this may be occurring? Is there any SEO value in keeping the "/index.shtml" in the URL?

    | FranFerrara
    0

  • I've found about 900 instances of decommissioned pages being redirected via 302 to a 404 custom page, even when there's a comparable page elsewhere on the site or on a new subdomain. My recommendation would be to always do a 301 from the legacy page to the new page, but since they're are so many instances of this 302->404 it seems to be standard operating procedure by the dev team. Given that at least one of these pages has links coming from 48 root domains, wouldn't it obviously be much better to 301 redirect it to pass along that equity?  I don't get why the developers are doing this, and I have to build a strong case about what they're losing with this 302->404 protocol. I'd love to hear your thoughts on WHY the dev team has settled on this solution, in addition to what suffers as a result.  I think I know, but would love some more expert input.

    | Jen_Floyd
    0

  • Hi
    Does anyone know of plugins/ extensions for joomla or wordpress to alert us as soon as a site goes down?

    | Bossandy
    0

  • [Hypothetical situation - domain, country and industry changed] Let's say I have registered http://mybrandname.hk (i.e. Hong Kong) and my goal is to reach people in all global locations searching for Hong Kong hotels. The target audience will almost always put "Hong Kong" into their query, e.g. they might search for "Marriott Hotel Hong Kong". Does the .hk TLD implicitly give me a match for "Hong Kong" or would I structure my URLs such that all hotel info pages fall under a top level subdirectory "hong-kong". i.e. is it enough to have a structure like: http://mybrandname.hk/hotel/marriott Or should I have it like: http://mybrandname.hk/hong-kong/hotel/marriott ? It is safe to assume that other on- and off-page best practices will be followed, e.g. links from other Hong Kong sites, some backlinks anchor text including "hong kong", etc. Of course Marriott is just one example, there would be hundreds of hotels in this example.

    | WellsxiFkrI2
    0

  • How often do you guys use the search operator "link:"?  How accurate is the data? Why the numbers of links when we use the parameter is way lower than the number on Google webmaster Tool or open site explorer? It only show the most powerful links?

    | Felip3
    0

  • My client, discoverstl.com, recently changed their site structure so that the detail page for individual property opens as a popup within the main page they are visiting, see http://d.pr/i/e8ik after clicking view details on the featured property on the home page. While the url links out to a properly formatting detail page, such as VIEW DETAILS, the developer says this doesn't affect google as its a javascript tweak that pulls it into the existing page. I'm still not convinced and am looking if this is bad for our SEO campaign. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

    | insitegoogle
    0

  • I'm doing an audit for a new client and their website has tons of 302... (more than 1000)... What is the best/fast way to change all the 302 for 301...?

    | Felip3
    0

  • MOZ reports these as duplicate page content errors and I'm not sure the best way to handle it. Home
    http://myhjhome.com/
    http://myhjhome.com/index.php Blog
    http://myhjhome.com/blog/
    http://myhjhome.com/blog/?author=1 Should I just create 301 redirects for these? 301 http://myhjhome.com/index.php to http://myhjhome.com/ ? 301 http://myhjhome.com/blog/?author=1 to http://myhjhome.com/ ? Or is there a better way to handle this type of duplicate page content errors? and

    | ElykInnovation
    0

  • Hello friends, I need help . I lost everything , i don't know what happen to my website (hindustanfoods.com). My site is suddenly disappear from google search .. In 2013 it was on first page on top but suddenly this i lost my position not only position i lost from any pages.  It is not showing anywhere. I have hosted a temp domain which links to some of the restaurant to our main (hindustanfoods.com) website and this website is seems good on google search where it has only 4 or 5 page website and main website has good pages. Somebody help should we need to work from start...................please help me

    | Tufail
    0

  • Hi Moz community,
    I'm a fairly new SEO Specialist with a brand new website.  We initially had a very basic holding website until the fully functional website was completed.  I have to do some redirects as we have both .html and .php files & we don't want to lose SEO value for specific pages (like the index, news, etc).  I also want to redirect from a www url to a non-www url. I am trying to accomplish redirects with the following code: RewriteEngine on
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.mywebsite.com [NC]
    RewriteRule (.*) http://mywebsite.com/$1 [R=301,L] RedirectMatch 301 /index.html (.*).(php|html) http://mywebsite.com/index.php RedirectMatch 301 /cupcakes-slideshow/glutenfree-slideshow.html (.*).(php|html) http://mywebsite.com/gluten-and-glutenfree.php RedirectMatch 301 /press.html (.*).(php|html) http://mywebsite.com/news-and-reviews.php Please let me know if I am on the right track.  Thanks so much in advance!

    | JSimmons17
    0

  • Hi everyone, I'm probably missing some GLARING error here, but I'm hoping you can help me! We recently built a new website on Wordpress and attempted to use a redirect plugin to take care of some old pages. The issue we are having though, is that when you click an old link you are not automatically redirected and instead are given a 404 error page. Then, when you try to view another page (by clicking a navigation item), every pages shows a 404 error. I implemented a redirect plugin, however it seems to start to work then still throws the 404 page. I believe this has something to do with the htaccess file which has the standard WP rewrite info in there... The way the old site was setup was kind of janky, so wondering if it's on that side or if I'm just going crazy. An old URL example would be http://orchards inn.com/index.php/specials and the new page is http://orchardsinn.com/special-offers. Sometimes the redirect seems to work, and others it actually throws a 404 page, then every other page in the navigation is 404'd as well. Your help is GREATLY appreciated!!

    | marisolmarketing
    0

  • We have hundreds of domains that we are either doing nothing with, or they are very shallow. We do not have the time to build enough quality content on them since they are ancillary to our flagship sites that are already in need of attention and good content. My question is...should we redirect them to the flagship site? If yes, is it ok to do this from root domain to root domain or should we link the root domain to a matching/similar page (gymfranchises.com to http://www.franchisesolutions.com/health_services_franchise_opportunities.cfm)? Or should we do something different altogether? Since we have many to redirect (if this is the route we go), should we redirect gradually?

    | franchisesolutions
    0

  • Does google rank in order of page authority with   "site:www.example.com"  or is it random? As most of the results of the first 6 pages for our site  are internal search results pages ( eg www.example.com/search/product-results)
    The fact that search results are index at all is frustrating, they are not linked to internally or externally.  The open site explorer does not have any back links for any of the search pages, and I checked the submitted site map and no search urls are submitted, so I don't know how google are finding the search urls.  Also tested some of the search urls with aherf and no back links. But since its ranking the search pages ahead of the category(landing) pages with "site:" has me worried that not only are they indexing the urls, but they giving them higher page authority

    | PaddyDisplays
    0

  • Hi all, I'm trying to determine why my site (surfaceoptics.com) ranks so much lower than my competitor's sites. I do not believe the site / page content explains this differential in ranking, and I've done on-site / on-page SEO work without much or any improvement. In fact I believe my site is very similar in quality to competitor sites that rank much higher for my target keyword of: hyperspectral imaging. This leads me to believe there is a technical problem with the site that I'm not seeing, or that the answer lies in our backlink profile. The problem is that I've compared our site with 4 of our competitors in the Open Site Explorer and I'm not seeing a strong trend when it comes to backlinks either. Some competitors have more links / better backlink profiles but then other sites have no external links to their pages and lower PA and DA and still outrank us by 30+ positions. How should I go about determining if the problem is backlinks or some technical issue with the site?

    | erin_soc
    0

  • We are working with a client that has 2 different restaurants. One has been established since 1938, the other was opened in late 2012. Currently, each site has its own domain name. From a marketing/branding perspective, we would like to make the customers [web visitors] of the established restaurant aware of the sister restaurant. To accomplish this, we are thinking about creating a landing page that links to each restaurant. To do this, we would need to purchase a brand new URL, and then place each restaurant in a separate sub folder of the new URL. The other thought is to have each site accessed from the main new URL [within sub folders] and also point each existing URL to the appropriate sub folder for each restaurant. We know there are some branding and marketing hurdles with this approach that we need to think through/work out. But, we are not sure how this would impact their SEO––and assume it will not be good. Any thoughts on this topic would be greatly appreciated.

    | thinkcreativegroup
    0

  • My site used to be crawled regularly, but not anymore. My pages aren't showing up in the index months after they've been up. I've added them to the sitemap and everything. I now have to submit them through webmaster tools to get them to index. And then they don't really rank? Before you go spouting off the standard SEO resolutions... Yes, I checked for crawl errors on Google Webmaster and no, there aren't any issues No, the pages are not noindex. These pages are index,follow No, the pages are not canonical No, the robots.txt does not block any of these pages No, there is nothing funky going on in my .htaccess. The pages load fine No, I don't have any URL parameters set What else would be interfereing? Here is one of the URLs that wasn't crawled for over a month: http://www.howlatthemoon.com/locations/location-st-louis

    | howlusa
    0

  • Hi there, I run a wordpress website and have removed the .html from my links. Moz has done a crawl and now a bunch of duplicated are coming up. Is there anything I need to do in perhaps my htaccess to help it along? Google appears to still be indexing the .html versions of my links

    | MrPenguin
    0

  • Hello, I've adding OpenGraph, Twitter cards and Google's Schema code to my website to help these services pick the correct information about my website. I'm doing this as per the Moz SEO cheatsheet. Does these rich snippets need to be on the index page only, or should they appear on every page?

    | popcreativeltd
    0

  • I am switching a local businesses website to a new template.  The url structure will be different.  What is the best way to not loose the old urls and what content should I serve on them? For example: The url oldwebsite.com/product-a will no longer exist when I switch to the new template.  I dont want to loose the current page rank and associate seo juice.  At the same time, I do not have the resources to remap every page to the correct new page.  My initial thoughts are to just display the homepage content on all of the old urls.  Is this a good practice?

    | bloomnation
    2

  • We are making significant URL changes to our website. Because the URL is changing the social sharing buttons are not showing previous shared counts. I have read several resources like the one below that is linked to in several other similar questions. http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2172926/How-to-Maintain-Social-Shares-After-a-Site-Migration However I would love to get some insight from someone who has done this and there thoughts on the outcome. As an ecommerce site the "Social Proof" of products that have received social shares is a big deal to us. In Mike Kings example above the counts are being attributed to the OLD URL which is problematic over time. Our site has been up for over 12 years and has had several major changes to it, and I am certain there will be more in the future, being able to preserve the count on the current URL is ideal. While I agree with him that over time I believe social platforms will let data pass through 301 redirects, until then I need to find the best way to do this.  Also with his example and others I have seen people mention than new likes from the new url can reset the counter. If you have gone through this and have ideas pleas share them. I look forward to your thoughts thanks.

    | RMATVMC
    1

  • Hi Mozzers, I have a client who uses an important customer database and offers gift cards via https://clients.mindbodyonline.com located within the navigation which causes sitemap errors whenever it is submitted since domain is different. Should I ask to remove those links from navigation? if so where can I relocate those links? If not what should I do to have a site map without any errors? Thanks! 1n16jlL.png

    | Ideas-Money-Art
    0

  • http://www.my-french-house.com/ has been online since around 2004 and has nearly always been in the top 10 serps for terms like 'property for sale in france'. However, over the last 12 months we've been hit really hard by Google and have fallen dramatically in rank. Can anyone give any insight into what may have happened? As an aside, we've had no message in the Google Webmaster Console and have not contacted Google about the apparent penalty / penalization. Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated. Cheers Jim

    | jimpannell
    0

  • Just want to know even those Google states it doesn't use them is there any benefit from using them for the other search engines?

    | ReSEOlve
    0

  • In an effort to do some housekeeping on our site we are wanting to change the URL format for a couple thousand links on our site. Those links will all been 301 redirected to corresponding links in the new URL format. For example, old URL format: /tag/flowers as well as search/flowerswill be 301-ed to, new URL format: /content/flowers**Question:**Since the old links also exist in our sitemap, should we add the new links to our sitemap in addition to the old links, or replace the old links with new ones in our sitemap? Just want to make sure we don’t lose the ranking we currently have for the old links.Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

    | shawn81
    1

  • I have a client who has an online outdoor gear company. He mostly sells high end outdoor gear (like ski jackets, vests, boots, etc) at a deep discount. His store currently only resides on Ebay. So we're building him an online store from scratch. I'm trying to determine the best site architecture and wonder if we should include subcategory pages. My issue is that I think the subcategory pages might be good from a user experience, but it'll add an additional layer between the homepage and the product pages. The problem is that I think a lot of user's might be searching for the product name to see if they can find a better deal, and my client's site would be perfect for them. So I really want to rank well for the product pages, but I'm nervous that the subcategory pages will limit the link juice of the product pages. Home --> SubCategory --> Product List --> Product Detail Home --> Men's Ski Clothing --> Men's Ski Jack --> North Face Mt Everest Jacket Should I keep the SubCategory page "Men's Ski Clothing" if it helps usability? On a separate note, the SubCategory pages would have some head keyword terms, but I don't think that he could rank well for these terms anytime soon. However, they would be great pages / terms to rank for in the long term. Should this influence the decision?

    | Santaur
    0

  • I recently changed the URLs on a website to make them tidier and easier to follow. I put 301s in place to direct all the previous page names to the new ones. However, I didn't read moz's guide which says I should leave the old sitemap online for a few weeks afterwards. As I result, webmaster tools is showing duplicate page titles (which means duplicate pages) for the old versions of the pages I have renamed. Since the old versions are no longer on the sitemap, google can no longer access them to find the 301s I have put in place. Is this a problem that will fix itself over time or is there a way to quicken up the process? I could use webmaster tools to remove these old urls, but I'm not sure if this is recommended. Alternatively, I could try and recreate the old sitemap, but this would take a lot of time.

    | maxweb
    0

  • Have a client that has a https site do you think its better than http for this kind of site and is there any studies done regarding any difference in rankings?

    | ReSEOlve
    0

  • Hi Guys, I need some opinion on a website i am working on www.colourbnners.co.uk They updated their website in August but the company they used did not take into account the URL structure and hence there's a massive loss in links in August time. They also dropped off Google for all their key terms except their brand name 'colour banners'
    Since then, they have implemented a 301 redirect. Some key points They have not received any manual warnings in WMT I have disavowed some poor quality links that they have built over the years I am building high quality links quite selectively/slowly There were a lot of duplicate content issues - these have been resolved now.
    So my question to you SEO pros is do you think its penguin? or something that i am missing?
    If it is penguin, what is the best form of attack to get it removed? regards gezzagrez

    | gezzagregz
    0

  • I've been manually removing spammy links from crappy sites and overly used money terms for several months... how long does it take for those links to stop showing up in crawl reports?

    | pixelproductions
    0

  • A site i'm working on has about 12 language domains - .es, it, .de etc. On each page of every domain the header has links to every homepage.  At the moment these are all set to no-follow as an initial step to stop potential link profile issues spreading around. Moving forward i'm not totally sure how to handle these links.  On one side I see and agree that no-follow is not necessary, but do-follow is just filtering out and weakening link juice.  What is the best way to handle this scenario?

    | MickEdwards
    0

  • We recently moved our Wordpress site to a new host (WPEngine). We had forums on the old web host, which we need to migrate to a new forum platform (Xenforo) and integrate into the WP site. Since WPEngine only allows Wordpress on their servers, we need to install the forums at another web host, on one of our other domains.  We might point to the forums through a subdomain, like this: forums.our-primary-domain.com The main reason we're re-installing the forums is for SEO value. HOWEVER, since our forum content will be on another domain, will we have an issue?  If so, is there a workaround that would give us 'credit' for that content? Thanks much.

    | jmueller0823
    0

  • I want to install a pop up on my site for collecting email addresses. I use nopcommerce as my platform. I was quoted a price to custom develop it but thought there might just be a simple plugin. I can find them for wordpress but that is all. Does anybody have experience with this?

    | katazoom
    0

  • I host several websites for my clients in my Go Daddy account. I've currently got each site on it's own hosting plan (about $5-$9 per month per site) but I was recently on the phone with Go Daddy and they suggested migrating everything to an Ultimate hosting plan, which allows me to host an unlimited number of websites, sql databases, etc for a set price. Will this negatively effect my SEO as all of my sites will essentially be tied together? I can save a few hundred dollars per year, but it's definitely not worth it if all of my clients' sites tank.

    | socialfirestarter
    0

  • I am hoping someone might be able to help me, I am doing some work on a website. A new version of the site was recently launched and since then rankings have plummeted and the new blog pages are ranking better! When the new version of the site went live, the domain changed to the non-www version, plus an incorrect robots.txt file and we have never really been able to fully recover (both of these things were beyond my control!). The robots.txt file was corrected and some of the external links links changed to the non-www but there is a 301 redirect in place so changing to the non-www shouldn't have been the reason to drop the site out completely. Before the launch of the new website, the site was ranking on the front page of Google for a lot of relevant keywords such as outdoor blinds, outdoor blinds Perth, cafe blinds, patio blinds, etc. The quality of the links is pretty bad and I am attempting to remove them before doing a disavow of all the really bad quality links but unless we were really unlucky I don't think it's the links right now that are causing the problem. I have ran the site through numerous crawl tests, checked the robots.txt, there are no messages in GWMT, the pages are indexed but I have a feeling there is something wrong with the site that is stopping this site from ranking well. If anyone could give me any insights I would be really grateful. I know the site could be better structured from a keyword/ structure perspective but the site was ranking fine!

    | Karen_Dauncey
    0

  • I looked at Moz's recommended companies but they are all for huge blogs and websites. I cannot afford those fees. My blog is small but growing and was hit by a Google Panda tweak back in July. My organic traffic disappeared overnight and although I've been working hard to improve my blog, I still get no organic traffic after being on the first page. I would like to pay someone to look at my site and give me help but I cannot pay what these huge companies are asking for. Any advice?

    | blogger2013
    0

  • Hi All, I have been working on a list-post which spans over 100 items. Each item on the list has a quick blurb to explain it, an image and a few resource links. I am trying to find an attractive way to present this long list post in Wordpress. I have seen several sites with long list posts however; they place their items one on top of the other which yields a VERY long page and the end user has to do a lot of scrolling.  Others turn their lists into slideshows, but I have no data on how slides perform against 10-mile-long-lists which load in 1 page. I would like to do something similar to what List25.com does as they present about 5-10 items per page and they seem to have pagination. The pagination part I understand however; is there a shortcode plugin to format lists in an attractive way just like list25?

    | IvanC
    0

  • Hello All I have a very strange query regarding the "Links to your site" section in webmaster's account my account does not show the Link data after so many days (more then 30 days) of verification. Can you please help me out how can I get my data in the webmaster's account?
    Please note I have verified the account using Google Analytic verification process. (does this affect?) I have seen this issue in my two websites which I have verified by Google Analytics. Please help me out.

    | barnesdorf
    0

  • I am working on an eCommerce website that has been written in WordPress with the shop pages in E commerce Plus PHP v6.2.7. All the shop product pages appear to work fine in a browser but 404 errors are returned when the pages are crawled. WMT also returns a 404 error when ‘fetch as Google’  is used. Here is a typical page: http://www.flyingjacket.com/proddetail.php?prod=Hepburn-Jacket Why is this page returning a 404 error when crawled? Please help?

    | Web-Incite
    0

  • I have an event calendar that has multiple repeating items into the future. They are classes that typically all have the same titles but will occasionally have different information. I don't know what is the best way to deal with them and am open to suggestions. Currently Moz anayltics is showing multiple errors (duplicate page titles, descriptions and overly dynamic urls). I'm assuming that it's showing duplicate elements way into the future. I thought of having the calendar no followed at all but the content for the classes seems valuable. Thanks,

    | categorycode
    0

  • Hi guys, I would like your opinions on this site www.colourbanners.co.uk Seems to be ranking for 'colour banners' but has dropped for keywords such as 'banners' and 'pvc banners' which were ranking well. There has been no manual actions against the site so im assuming this is an algo penalty? Any ideas/suggestions what could be causing this? regards Gerry

    | gezzagregz
    0

  • I am trying to find an answer to this question it has alot of url on this page with no data when i go into the data source and search for noindex or robot.txt but the site is visible in the search engines ?

    | ReSEOlve
    0

  • Hello,
    I have a client who unfortunately got breached (not sure how) and as a result 6 HTML files promoting gucci bags and Louis Vuitton bags were put in the root.
    I found the files within a week of them being put there but what I didn't realise (and only found yesterday when looking at the backlink profile) was that there are literally hundreds if not thousands of spammy domains pointing at these files. Some of the sites 404 but some are posts on other bloggers sites who auto accept comments and they total 10,000 links so impossible to remove. Question is: Will Google understand what has happened and ignore these links (especially because the pages don't exist on the server?) Should I use the Disavow tool to block these 1000 odd domains (can it do any harm?) and more links are being found every day so do I just keep doing it? Is there another way to explain to Google what has happened? Your help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks
    James

    | JDLitchfield
    0

  • TL;DR: I am writing copy for some web pages. I am duplicating some bits of copy exactly on separate web pages. And in other cases I am using the same bits of copy with slight alterations. Is this bad for SEO? Details: We sell about 10 different courses. Each has a separate page. I'm currently writing copy for those pages. Some of the details identical for each course. So I can duplicate the content and it will be 100% applicable. For example, when we talk about where we can run courses (we go to a company and run it on their premises) – that's applicable to every course. Other bits are applicable with minor alterations. So where we talk about how we'll tailor the course, I will say for example: "We will the tailor the course to the {technical documents|customer letters|reports} your company writes." Or where we have testimonials, the headline reads "Improving {customer writing|reports|technical documents} in every sector and industry". There is original content on each page. The duplicate stuff may seem spammy, but the alternative is me finding alternative re-wordings for exactly the same information. This is tedious and time-consuming and bizarre given that the user won't notice any difference. Do I need to go ahead and re-write these bits ten slightly different ways anyway?

    | JacobFunnell
    0

  • How do I get my g+ picture to start showing up again? It just stopped showing up, and I'm not sure how to get it to come back. Thanks, Ruben

    | KempRugeLawGroup
    0

  • I have a dentist who has multiple locations and a unique domain for each location. www.DentalCareofLacey.com www.DentalCareofSumner.com www.DentalCareofVashon.com The current plan is to setup 301s to redirect to the parent site (www.atlasdentistry.com/locations/lacey). Would there be any negative impact if we continue to purchase a unique domain for each branch office and just set it as a 301 to the parent site? Does having too many 301 redirects look too spammy to Google?

    | marlattts
    0

  • I need to hire an SEO specialist technician to take a look at a few things under the hood that I can't seem to figure out... is this the right place to ask for this type of paid help?

    | co.mc
    0

  • Hi all, When I put "site:bettingexchange.it" on www.google.it in the SERP it's NOT showed the HOMEPAGE "bettingexchange.it". Google starts with other pages lik "bettingexchange.it/siti/". It's the first time I see something like this, How is it possibile?
    How can I reintroduce the homepage?

    | bettingexchange
    0

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