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Category: Technical SEO

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


  • Have been working on a site and the hompage has recently vanished from Google. I submit the site to Google webmaster tools a couple of days ago and checked today and the homepage has vanished. There are no no follow tags, and no robots.txt stopping the page from being crawled. It's a bit of a worry, the site is http://www.beyondthedeal.com
    Any insights would be massively appreciated! Thanks.

    | tonysandwich
    0

  • Hello, On the 26.2.13 we changed domain names having followed the guidance of both Matt Cutts Youtube videos and googles own online documentation. We have a 301 redirect in place from our old domain ukmotorhomehirerental.com to our new site leisurerentalsdirect.com on a page to page basis. The site structure has not been altered in anyway. Google has been informed of the change of address. After the change the new domain transition was pretty seamless and ranked in the same postion in the SERPsThe one thing I've not done yet is tell all the webmasters who link to the old site that the address has changed (could this be it?)

    | Badapplemedia
    0

  • Hi, We are noticing an issue where some product pages are outranking our relevant category pages for certain keywords. For a made up example, a "heavy duty widgets" product page might rank for the keyword phrase Heavy Duty Widgets, instead of our Heavy Duty Widgets category page appearing in the SERPs. We've noticed this happening primarily in cases where the name of the product page contains an at least partial match for the desired keyword phrase we want the category page to rank for. However, we've also found isolated cases where the specified keyword points to a completely irrelevent pages instead of the relevant category page. Has anyone encountered a similar issue before, or have any ideas as to what may cause this to happen? Let me know if more clarification of the question is needed. Thanks!

    | ShawnHerrick
    0

  • Here's the situation... There's a site that is linking to about 6 articles of mine from about 225 pages of theirs (according to info in GWT).  These pages are sales landing pages looking to sell their product.  The pages are pretty much identical but have different urls. (I actually have a few sites doing this to me.) Here's where I think it's real bad -- when they are linking to me you don't see the link on the page, you have to view the page source and search for my site's url. I'm thinking having a hidden url, and it being my article that's hidden, has got to be bad.  That on top of it being a sales page for a product I've seen traffic to my site dropping but I don't have a warning in GWT. These aren't links that I've placed or asked for in any way.  I don't see how they could be good for me and I've already done what I could to email the site to remove the links (I didn't think it would work but thought I'd at least try). I totally understand that the site linking to me may not have any affect on my current traffic. So should I use the Disavow tool to make sure this site isn't counting against me?

    | GlenCraig
    0

  • background info: we have an established  closed  E-commerce system which the company has been using for years.  I have only just started and reviewing the system, I don't have direct access to the code, but can request changes, but it could take months before the changes are in effect (or done at all), and we won't can't change to a new E-commerce system for the short to mid term. While reviewing the site (with help of seomoz crawl diagnostics) I noticed that some of the existing "landing pages" have in the code: <meta name="<a class="attribute-value">robots</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">INDEX,FOLLOW</a>" /> then a few lines later <meta name="<a class="attribute-value">robots</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW</a>" /> Which the crawl diagnostics flagged up, but in the webmaster tools says
    "We didn't detect any issues with non-indexable content on your site." so the question is which instructions does google follow? the first or 2nd? note: clearly this is need fixed, but I have a big list of changes for the system so I need to know how important this is tthanks

    | PaddyDisplays
    0

  • Our pages has so many DUPLİCATE PAGE TİTLE
    I want to change all of them, is it right way?

    | iskq
    0

  • how many keyword per page will optimize my page to list on best rank in Google search ?

    | krisanantha
    0

  • I have installed yoast seo plugin and a theme that I purchased.
    I have added site title and meta description for the index page through yoast seo plugin see here http://screencast.com/t/AdjMynym8Tm however this does not work as can be seen on the test site
    http://importingtips.com/test/ does anyone have any advice? Thanks

    | vivadata
    0

  • I am updating our product descriptions site-wide. I wanted to also update our amazon listings for those same products. Is that considered duplicate content if it would be on amazon and our site? Is there any reason why I wouldn't want to do that? Is google product ads also a problem?

    | EcomLkwd
    0

  • Hi, I have one small blog on a specific niche and let's call it firstsite.com (.com extension) and it's hosted on my server. I am going to takeover a second blog on same niche but with lots more links, posts, authority and traffic. But it his on a .info domain and let's call it secondsite.info and for now it's on a different server. I have a third domain .com where I would like join both blogs. Domain is better and reflects niche better and let's call it thirdsite.com How should I proceed to have the best result? I was thinking of creating a new account at my server with domain thirdsite.com After that upload all content from secondsite.info and go to google webmaster to let they know that site now sits on a new domain. Also do a full 301 redirect. Should it be page by page or just one 301 redirect? And finally insert posts (they are not many) from firstsite.com on thirdsite.com and do specific redirects. Is this a good option? Or should I first move secondsite.info to my server and keep updating it and only a few weeks later make transition to thirdsite.com? I am worried that it could be too much changes at once.

    | delta44
    0

  • Do on page site maps help with SEO or are they more for user experience? We submit and update our XML Sitemaps for the search engines but wondering if /sitemap for users is necessary?

    | bonnierSEO
    0

  • What happens if I link to a site using the nofollow tag and they are linking back to me with a dofollow link? Will it give me as much power and link juice as if it was a one way link (to me) or will Google discount the link because it's reciprocal?

    | Livet
    0

  • Hi, I got the message "Increase in not found errors" (404 errors) in GWT for one of my website. I did not change anything but I now see a lot of "strange" URL's indexed (~50) : &ui=2&tf=1&shva=1 &cat_id=6&tag_id=31&Remark=In %22%3EAny suggestion on how to fix it ?Erwan

    | johnny122
    0

  • My rankings suddenly dropped and when trying to understand why I realized that nearly all images in Google's cached version of my site were missing. In the actual site they appear but in the cached version they don't. I noticed that most of the images had a ?6b5830 at the end of the URL and these were the images that were not showing. I am hoping that I found the reason for the drop in rankings. Maybe since Google cannot see a lot of the content it decided not to rank it as well (particularly since it seems to happen on thousands of pages). This is a cached version of my site I am using the following plugins that might be causing it: Yoasts SEO plugin, W3 total cache. Does anyone know what is causing ?6b5830 to be added to the end of most of my URL's? Could this be the reason for the ranking drop? Thanks in advance!

    | JillB2013
    0

  • Our web application targets small business owners and entrepreneurs. However, the developers at our company have a lot of great content to offer the web development community and so we want to start a "behind the scenes" blog where we can discuss technical topics... JavaScript performance, web accessibility, etc. Our customers and the visitors of our website would probably not be interested this new content... So we want to be careful not to cannibalize or damage our current SEO. What are some of the major risks we should watch out for? If we put it on a subdomain, is that enough to not impact our main site SEO or introduce keyword confusion? Conversely, are there opportunities for this side blog to help the SEO and authority of our main website/domain? Thanks for the help!

    | Bill4Time
    0

  • Hey there! I own a desktop website and just now finishe building a mobile site ( not a responsive design one) and I wish to start ranking my site on mobile serch result page. due to the automatic redirection from desktop website to the mobile site im confused: where should link to in order to SEO my mobile site? should i link to domin.com and assume the link juice is passing on? or should i link to m.domim.com?

    | logophone
    0

  • Hi!  We are still working on removing some paid backlinks from an old SEO company.  Used Removeem.com which uses OpenSiteExplorer.  Thought we had them all cleaned up.  Removed many and disavowed the rest.  Submitted a reconsideration request, but our amigos at Google said, "No, no no...." So, the example offending remaining link they gave us was xyzs.blogspot.com.  However, the anchor text link that Open Site Explorer was just xyzs.com.  Interestingly enough, Google told us to look at their list of links and this sample links was not even there.  (neither version.) So, we signed up for majesticseo as it integrates wtih removem via api if you have an account, but that didn't really add any links. Is there a deeper tool we can use?  Any ideas on how to locate some of these hard to find anchor links that Google is talking about? Any other tools out there? Thanks!! Craig

    | TheCraig
    0

  • My issue with duplicate content is this. There are two versions of my website showing up http://www.example.com/ http://example.com/ What are the best practices for fixing this? Thanks!

    | OOMDODigital
    0

  • Hi Folks - Need your advice on the pros and cons of going with a sub-domain vs a sub-directory approach for a multi lingual website. The best would be a ccTLD but that is not possible now, so I would be more interested in knowing your take on these 2 options. Though, I have gone through http://www.stateofsearch.com/international-multilingual-sites-criteria-to-establish-seo-friendly-structure/ and this somewhat vouches for a sub-directory, but what would you say'?

    | RanjeetP
    0

  • HI, I have site named www.cufflinksman.com related to Cufflinks. I have also install WordPress in sub domain blog.cufflinksman.com. I am getting issue of duplicate content a  site and blog have same categories but content different. Now I would like to rel="canonical" blog categories to site categories. http://www.cufflinksman.com/shop-cufflinks-by-hobbies-interests-movies-superhero-cufflinks.html http://blog.cufflinksman.com/category/superhero-cufflinks-2/ Is possible and also have any problem with Google with this trick?

    | cufflinksman
    0

  • my site has less than 3 OBLs. (do follow) is it a good idea to give a couple do follow links to authoritative sites for domain authority purposes? thanks guys!

    | tm4615
    0

  • I have a handful of pages listed in the Error Crawl Report, but the report isn't actually showing anything wrong with these pages. I am double checking the code on the site and also can't find anything. Should I just move on and ignore the Error Crawl Report for these few pages?

    | ChristinaRadisic
    0

  • Hello,
    I was recently put in charge of one website with about 15 extra Domains. I previously asked if Domain Parking hurts your SEO as duplicate content - and i learned that the answer seems to be yes. My next logical question is:
    What should I do with all those EMD, keyword friendly domains? As I understand, 301 redirecting the domains to the root domain is a safe bet, but that means the extra domains will point to the original root domain no mater what comes after the forward slash.   So www.ExtraDomain.com/AboutUS will point to www.OriginalDomain.com - is there a way to keep the forward slashes relavent to the content on the original root domain, if so How? Your Advice, Links, and Comments are greatly appreciated.
    Thanks
    Nikita

    | thealika
    0

  • If two pages are very similar, and one should rel= canonical to the other, will the page authority pass from the page with rel= canonical to the target page? Also, what happens when you a page rel=canonical's to itself?

    | SkinLaboratory
    0

  • Hi, I work for a SaaS company which uses two different subdomains on our site. A public for our main site (which we want to rank in SERPs for), and a secure subdomain, which is the portal for our customers to access our services (which we don't want to rank for) . Recently I realized that by using our product, our customers are creating large amounts of low quality links to our secure subdomain and I'm concerned that this might affect our public subdomain by bringing down the overall Authority of our root domain. Is this a legitimate concern? Has anyone ever worked through a similar situation? any help is appreciated!

    | ifbyphone
    0

  • I am going to be working on a site where the contact form is being flagged as duplicate content the URL is the same apart from having: /contact/10119 contact/31010 ...at the end of it. The only difference in the content of the page that I can see is the Captcha numbers? Is there a way to overcome this to stop duplicate content? Thanks in advance

    | J_Sinclair
    0

  • We have a subdomain with lots of content that we think Google may consider thin, so we're thinking of removing it to improve our SEO. Is the best way to do this to simply remove the directory and then 301 everything to our homepage? Basically the subdomain consists of product images with links to retailers where they can be purchased. We've basically used it to refer our Facebook fans to when they like a product they've seen on our Facebook page, so the subdomain was not meant to rank for SEO purposes. However, it is integrated with our main webpage, and it is possible that it is hurting our SEO efforts. The subdomain is photos.yournextshoes.com and the main domain www.yournextshoes.com

    | Jantaro
    0

  • Hey all, I just had a crawl test done on my site(created using wordpress) and I received a ton of missing meta tag descriptions to fix. The odd thing is though I use "All in One" SEO Tool and the actual pages or posts on the site do have meta tag descriptions, however I noticed for every post an RSS Feed is being automatically generated and this Feed is the link missing the meta tag descriptions. Most of the errors display "Comments on" with a /feed in the end of the url. I am totally clueless on how to resolve these errors as I havent installed any WP plugins that generate feeds automatically. Has anyone encountered this problem before or know how to fix this?? The site url is http:// GovernmentGrantsAustralia . org I have left spaces above to avoid being a link dropper 🙂 Would really appreciate if anyone can help! FYI: I just found this link after digging through all the Q&A history, however I tried it and am not sure if it has worked as I still see the errors on my SEOmoz report. The link is:
    http://www.seomoz.org/qa/view/41413/wordpress-missing-meta-description-tag-comments Hope someone can help me figure this one out! Thanks, Justin

    | justin99
    0

  • Hi Folks, We have a blog post on one of our sites that ranked very highly for lucrative term for about a period of two months. It had over 2000 Facebook likes, about 20 tweets and the same amount of Google +1's. The post ended up receiving several high quality natural links, and we also pointed a few authoritative links to it from our network of sites. After we saw the ranking starting to slip we did a bit of link building (which we shouldn't have done) and ended up making a big mistake. The link building company was only supposed to do 30 links and they ended up doing 600. Once we figured it out, we immediately submitted a disavow request and told Google about our mistake. I also thought maybe we then had a manual spam penalty applied so I also submitted a reconsideration request (and also told them about our mistake) but got back a canned reply saying "no manual penalties" were found. After we did all that, we saw the rankings fall out of the top 50 with the next 10 days. I'm confident we can throw up a new similar blog post and see close the same rankings we experienced with the original post. But before I do that, I have two questions: Should we 301 the old post to the new post? Could that some how "pass" the bad rankings along to the new post? What should we do about the natural links we received? Should we try and reach out to the sites and get them to change their links to the new post? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

    | shawn81
    0

  • We run a jobboard.  The title tag on a page for a job is often over 70 characters.  An example of one would be: " Supplier Quality Inspector (Electrical Manufacturing) Job in Orlando, FL 32809 at Pro Image Solutions | Orlando Jobs!" The company name 'Orlando Jobs!" comes at the end but is also a really good keyword e.g. 'Orlando' and 'Jobs'  I am interested in suggestions as to how to make these titles better. For example take off the company name when we go over 70 characters?  Move the company name to the front of the title because the company name is also good keywords?  I am looking for the best way to handle the issue is all.  Thanks.

    | JobBiz
    0

  • I'm doing a Wordpress project that will feature about 100 products and am thinking of using WP e-Commerce but am concerned about SEO. Does anyone have any comments on SEO strength/weakness of WP-eCommerce plugin for Wordpress?

    | waynekolenchuk
    0

  • Hi all! I look after a website where it's been discovered a section of the website has the noarchive robots meta tag active on it causing it to not get cached but has been indexed. Out of curiosity has anyone seen any negative effects from Google for having pages that aren't cached? It's not the strongest section on the website so makes it tricky to judge myself but interested if anyone had any thoughts on the matter. Cheers,

    | thisisOllie
    0

  • I recently launched a site - http://www.footballtriviaquestions.co.uk and the site uses Paypal. In order to test the PayPal functionality I set up a zapto.org domain via a permanent IP service that points directly to the computer I've written the website on. It appears that Google has now indexed the zapto.org website. Will this cause problems to my main website, as the zapto.org website will pretty much contain content that is an exact duplicate of what is held on the main website. I've looked in Google webmaster tools for the main website and it doesn't mention any duplicate content, but I'm currently not in the top 50 ranking for "football trivia questions' on Google despite SEOMoz ranking my home page with an A rating. The page does rank at position 16 in Yahoo and Bing. This seems odd to me, although I do have very few back links pointing to my site. If the duplicate content is likely to be causing me problems  what would be the best way to knock the zapto.org results out of Google

    | ipr101
    0

  • Hi, I work on this site: http://www.towerhousetraining.co.uk/about-us. This is the home page URL. Should this be 301'd to: http://www.towerhousetraining.co.uk? I have created a site map, which I submitted to Google Webmaster Tools, which includes these URL's: /about-us, /training-we-offer & /contact-us. There are a total of 3 pages on the website. Webmaster tools has only indexed 2 out of 3 pages. I think this is something to do with the /about-us URL, as when I do a site: search, these pages appear: www.towerhousetraining.co.uk/, /training-we-offer & /contact-us. I am not sure why Google has indexed the home page as www.towerhousetraining.co.uk/ and not /about-us? Is it a bad idea in general not to have your homepage as your root domain? I added a  to the homepage, but am wondering if this was the right thing to do? Any help would be appreciated.

    | CWseo
    0

  • I went to Google Webmaster Tools this morning and found that one of my clients had 11 crawl errors.  However, Webmaster Tools is not showing which URLs are having experiencing the errors, which it used to do.  (I checked several other clients that I manage and they list crawl errors without showing the specific URLs. Does anyone know how I can find out which URLs are experiencing problems?  (I checked with Bing Webmaster Tools and the number of errors are different).

    | TopFloor
    0

  • http://www.optiproerp.com/products.aspx page is not indexed in Google but still has a PageRank of 1. How? Regards

    | IM_Learner
    0

  • Hi, I'm migrating my site from a .com domain to local country domains. I'm wondering what to consider if i chose to move the .com to .us domain. What should I consider before deciding? BR

    | Quru
    0

  • My company currently operates four websites, independently of each other, a corporate website and three separate store brands. innovativemattresssolutions.com - corporate website mattressking.net sleepoutfitters.com mattresswarehouse.com All of our stores have the same branding, same TV spots, same print ads, etc across the company, we just swap out logos on all marketing pieces. It is proving nearly impossible for us to maintain four separate websites, currently on three different platforms. all four are hosted separately as of now. We would like to combine all four websites to one Wordpress Multisite installation so we can manage the pages from one place, using the same theme and even content in many places because all brands share the same info, policies, products, etc. We would set up wordpress multi using subfolders for installation and point the URL directly to resolve to the appropriate subfolder. The only site that would crosslink to the others would be the corporate website. Is this a bad idea for SEO? What other options would we have? Should we keep the corporate site on its own installation, but put the other three brands on a multisite install? Would duplicating content on the three brand pages be an issue? Less of an issue if they were not on multisite? Any insight is much appreciated.

    | Karrie_Beth
    0

  • We are working with a site that is difficult at best to update. The client intends to re-do the site in 18 months or so but needs to start generating more traffic (and sales) now. What are thoughts on creating landing pages as micro-sites that point to the current site conversion page as a stop gap? Beyond not sharing authority is there any known penalty? By the way they don't have tremendous ranking right now - often bottom of page two - and the micro-site won't duplicate any content.

    | InformaticsInc
    0

  • Today after I noticed a huge drop in organic traffic to inner pages of my sites, I looked into the code and realized a bug in last commit cause the server to showing captcha pages to all Googlebot requests from Apr 24. My site has more than 4,000,000 in the index. Before last code change, Googlebot are exempt from being shown the captcha requests so each inner pages are crawled and indexed perfectly with no problem. The bug broke the whitelisting mechanism and treat requests from Google's ip addresses the same as regular users. It leads to the captcha page being crawled when Googlebot visits thousands of my site's inner pages. This makes Google thinks all my inner pages are identical to each other. Google remove all the inner pages from SERP starting from May 5th before when many of those inner pages have good rankings. I formerly thought this was a manual or algorithm penalty but 1. I did not receive a warning message in GWT
    2. The ranking for main url is good. I tried with "Fetch as Google" in GWT and realize all Googlebot saw in the past 14 days are the same captcha page for all my inner pages. Now, I have fixed the bug and updated the production site. I just wanted to ask: 1. How long will it take for Google to remove the "duplicated content" flag on my inner pages and show them in SERP again? From my experience, Googlebot revisits urls quite often. But once a url is flagged as "contains similar content", it could be difficult to recover, is it correct? 2. Besides waiting for Google to update its index, what else can I do right now? Thanks in advance for your answers.

    | Bull135
    0

  • I am promoting a jewelry e-commerce website. The website has about 600 pages and the SEOMOZ page index report shows this number. However, webmaster tools shows about 100,000 indexed pages. I have no idea why this is happening and I am sure this is hurting the page rankings in Google. Any ideas? Thanks, Guy

    | ciznerguy
    1

  • I changed my theme on April 12th and within 24 hours my traffic plummeted 98%.  I have also seen a huge difference in my keyword ranking.  A few things have been tweaked, but with no results. I need to get to the bottom of this fairly quickly. Do you have any recommendations of a trustworthy someone I could hire to dig deeper and find out what the %#^!$@ is going on?  I didn't see that SEOmoz does the "hire and let us check it" thing. Of course, if anyone has any free suggestions...I'm open to those as well. 🙂 Thanks Heather

    | Gotmoxie
    0

  • I went into my Google+ profile this morning to try to add a new guest blog in the 'Contributor To' section but I can't find it. Did they move it somewhere?

    | JonathanGoodman
    0

  • I have a site mexat, it's current Alexa Rank is 4,497. So, I want to reduce alexa for this site upto 1500 in One Month. I have done following activities- Install Alexa toolbar on my computer. 2)Put Alexa Header code in Source code of my site. 3)I have a big traffic on daily basis upto 1500 visitors. 4)I am posting Blogs, Social Bookmarking, web 2.0 Profile Creation on daily basis. But I didn't get good result. So please share me some Useful Strategy for this project.

    | afycon
    0

  • I have a photo that was uploaded back in 2005. It is an aerial shot and has received a fair bit of traffic over the years. I'm pretty sure it was ranked #1 in Google Images for the town name for a while. Now, however, it never ranks. Well actually it does. But every single time it is a version on a different website that is being used without permission. 
    And I'm not talking about one website. Every time I fill out a DMCA and have the image removed only to see a completely different website featuring in the top 10. This has happened 5 times so far and I'm just about to fill out another DMCA request. What is going on? Surely Google in its infinite wisdom is smart enough to check the timestamp or date cues on page to figure out which is the original. These other sites are often complete unknowns compared to my site which is a 12yr old authority site on the subject.
    Don't get it!

    | Cornwall
    0

  • I have just downloaded the SEOMoz crawl error report, and I have a number of pages listed which all show FALSE. The only common denominator is the referrer - the sitemap. I can't find anything wrong, should I be worried this is appearing in the error report?

    | ChristinaRadisic
    0

  • Hi, i have a business site which is dropping down the ratings and I would like your help in understanding why. I know a business site is different from other sites such as news sites and blogs where the front page changes all the time. I would like to know what is the best way to get google to visit the site on a regular basis, should i have a page that changes all the time or should i keep changing all the pages on the site. One of the important pages was always number one in google and now we are number 11 http://www.clairehegarty.co.uk/virtual-gastric-band-with-hypnotherapy any help and advice on how to combat dropping in the rankings would be a great help

    | ClaireH-184886
    0

  • We redesigned our website at http://www.aptinting.com a few months ago. We were fully expecting the crawl frequency to be very low because we had redesigned the website from a format that had been very static, and that probably has something to do with the problem we're currently having. We made some important changes to our homepage about a month ago, and the cached version of that page is still from April 2nd. Yet, whenever we create new pages, they get indexed within days. We've made a point to create lots of new blog articles and case studies to send a message to Google that the website should be crawled at a greater rate. We've also created new links to the homepage through press releases, guest blog articles, and by posting to social media, hoping that all of these things would send a message to Google saying that the homepage should be "reevaluated". However, we seem to be stuck with the April 2nd version of the homepage, which is severely lacking. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

    | Lemmons
    0

  • Hi guys, ok, i'm at the end of my line with this one, my site www.golfclothingdirect.co.uk has taken a pounding since 4th April and i'm blowed if i can find a real reason for it.  Traffic has been increasing slowly in line with budget, sales were picking up, and coming into season should have been better - 24th & 25th robot had an access issue - host contacted and said there had been a site issue, but resolved and now all A OK.  Sales are terrible and traffic is grinding. All comments greatly taken on board! Thanks Mark

    | UrbanMark
    0

  • Hi all. I have made some changes on the website so i like to crawled them by the search engines Google especially. I have made these changes around 2 weeks ago. I have submitted my website on good bookmarking websites. Also i used a tool available in Google webmasters "Fetch as Google", Resubmitted a sitemap.xml. Still my pages are not crawled your opinion please. Thanks

    | lucidsoftech
    0

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