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Category: Technical SEO

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


  • I am working on a brand new website and really struggling to get the site indexed and listed for it's business name! I don't normally struggle and have got clients ranked for much more challenging keywords so I'm a bit stuck! The site is a new domain and has been live for about two months. The business previously used an old domain and this has been correctly 301'd to the new domain. There is no duplicate content with any other website when checked through Copyscape.com Webmaster Tools has been set-up and verified and this shows the site is being crawled but in Google site:www.website.com.au shows no pages as being indexed. Google Places has been set-up and verified, the site has also been added to local citation sites. There are also a few incoming links from other sources. Robots.txt is fine and has been checked. Business name mentioned in the title tag, footer and throughout the site. Does anyone have any ideas how I might be able to get ranked or is it just a waiting game? Or have I missed out something really obvious?? My last step is doing a crawl test to see if this brings up anything I have missed. Thanks Karen

    | Karen_Dauncey
    0

  • Does anyone know what this company does? We're seeing 400 errors with URLs tagged "vebidoo" Example: &tag=vebidoo_com-21 It says they are a people search.  Can't figure out what they would be linking to us for?

    | EileenCleary
    0

  • I'm reworking most of the page titles on our site and I'm considering the use of the word 'Shop' before a product category. ex.  Shop 'keyword' | Brand Name As opposed to just using the keyword sans 'Shop.'  Some of the keywords are very generic, especially for a top level category page. Question: Is the word 'Shop' damaging my SEO efforts in any way?

    | rhoadesjohn
    0

  • My site has supposedly over 4,000 external links from it. Is there a good piece of software that could scrape my site that tell me from which page all the links originate from and where they're all going? I'm surprised that the number is this high because our entire site is only a few hundred pages. Here's the site XXXkidecalsXXX.com (just remove the XXX for the URL.) If you want to weigh in on any other issues you see with the site, I'd be happy for any suggestions in general.

    | Santaur
    0

  • The ranking of our website has gone down in past 2 months. The reason,
    I believe is that we had more than 300,000 spammy comments posted on it
    (the website is based on wordpress) so Google treated it as
    un-monitored forum and penalized. We have deleted the older comments
    and new comments can no longer be posted. Need suggestions on what else
    should we do to rank better. Any advice would be very welcome.

    | TGA123
    0

  • In our niche we have one main keyword, which represents the entire category. We are using wordpress. I am trying to understand the best URL structure and wonder if the below is a good approach: http://domain.com/keyword This category page will be written to contain an article on the subject. The posts that are put into that category will subsequently appear on this page, below that article. Each of those posts would be targeting a related keyword. e.g. I would write a post which has, as the main target keyword: "MainKeyword training" and another post, which would be targeting "MainKeyword techniques" ... (and so on). Thanks for your advice. Andrew

    | seowhiskey
    0

  • We have to choose to stay working with different domain or move all 6 domains to new domain. Right now we have 6 different brand e-shops with 6 domains that have Domain Authority 30-40. So for example:
    e-shop1.com
    e-shop2.com
    .. And we are thinkig about making brand new domain and move all these domains content and link juice into one domain  with 301 redirect. So we would have one e-shop solution with 6 subdomains like: e-shop1.newdomain.com
    e-shop2.newdomain.com
    ... Like gap.com does with their brands or http://www.andotherbrands.com. That each brand has subdomains but they use same e-shop solution. With same domains or new subdomains strategy, we will improve internal linking structure between all these e-shops. We have also considerd that with new domain we don't have good organic search results within few first months. So we try to see the bigger picture and consider SEO future. SO QUESTION IS:
    Lets leave brand marketing out, then what would you suggest to do? To stay with 6 different DA 30-40 domains or build one stong domain with 6 different brand subpages? We cant use subcategories. All subpages products will be clothes. Latetly there as beed many news and articles that subdomains are part of main domain and vice versa we are looking suggestions from this board. As we right now think that as we have weak domains righ now it would be better idea to start building one strong domain.

    | TauriUrb
    0

  • I had a .in TLD version of my .com website floated for about 15 days, which was a duplicate copy of .com website. I did not wish to use the .in further for SEO duplication reasons and had let the .in domain expire on 26th April. But still now when I search from my website the .in version also shows up in results and even in google webmaster it shows the the website with maximum (190) number of links to my .com website. I am sure this is hurting the ranking of my .com website. How can the .in website be removed from googles indexing and search results. Given that is has expired also. thanks

    | geekwik
    0

  • Several sites use Google favicon to load favicons instead of loading it from the Website itself. Our favicon is not being pulled from our site correctly, instead it shows the default "world" image. https://plus.google.com/_/favicon?domain=www.example.com Is the address to pull a favicon. When I post on G+ or see other sites that use that service to pull favicons ours isn't displaying, despite it shows up in Chrome, Firefox, IE, etc and we have the correct meta in all pages of our site. Any idea why is this happening? Or how to "ping" Google to update that?

    | FedeEinhorn
    0

  • My website has been hit by a Google Penguin penalty. At this point, it seems very few websites have recovered from this penalty even after it was lifted. That said, I'm still wondering if I should start a new website or my current one to another domain. When I started my website, I registered the domain name http://www.thewebhostinghero.com A few years later, I bought webhostinghero.com as it became available. Actually, webhostinghero.com redirects traffic to thewebhostinghero.com at the registrar level. There are barely any links pointing to webhostinghero.com. TheWebHostingHero.com is quite a big website with over 1400 pages and some very useful tools (http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/free-tools) that took me so long to develop, I just can't believe I'd have to throw it all out the window. So that said, do you think it would be possible to move all or some of the content from thewebhostinghero.com to webhostinghero.com? Would that make sense? Would webhostinghero.com come out as a copy of thewebhostinghero.com since the domain is similar, etc.? Of course, moving the content from thewebhostinghero.com to webhostinghero.com would have to be done without any 301/302 redirects to avoid passing bad link juice. At the same time, I don't want to end up with duplicate content on both domains.

    | sbrault74
    0

  • I have ran into something I have not ran into in the past. cpanel, setting a 301 redirect. --Drop down domain choice ----- / ----  ?attachment_id=539 http://ipromotis.com (Only box marked is redirect with or without www) Produces 301 Redirect http://ipromotis.com to http://ipromotis.com

    | yeagerd
    0

  • We all use Deutsch language and (.com) domains for the sites. I ranked well in google.com ,but not so well in google.de , google.ch , my competitors  ranked much better  in google.de,google.ch. I checked most of their outbound-links, but get few information. Links from (.DE) domains or links from sites located in German help  the rank for special google seach center ? (google.de, google.ch) . Or some other factors  i missed? please help.

    | sunvary
    0

  • If I have two links in the sitemap (for example: page1.html and page2.html) but the web-site contains more pages (page1.html,  page2.html and page3.html) is this a sign for Google to not to crawl other pages? I.e. Will Google index page3.html? Consider that any page can be accessed.

    | ditoroin
    0

  • I've just done a search using east england document storage site:ukdocumentstorage.com and found our specific east england document storage page is ranking really low down in our list of pages compared to others. How could this happen?

    | janc
    0

  • Hopefully this is an easy one to answer. When canonical tags are added to web pages should there be a canonical tag on a page that canonicalizes(?) (new word!?) back to itself. i.e. four page all point back to page Z. On page Z there is a canonical tag that points to page Z? My feeling without any technical know how is that this is just creating an infinite loop i.e. go to this page for original content, (repeat) Or this could be completely correct! Don't want to go back to the developer and point out the error if I'm wrong!

    | ZaddleMarketing
    0

  • Hi!  We received a manual penalty notice.  We had an SEO company a couple of years ago build some links for us on blogs.  Currently we have only about 95 of these links which are pretty easily identifiable by the anchor text used and the blogs or directories they originate from. So far, we have seen about 35 of those removed and have made 2 contacts to each one via removeem.com. So, how many contacts do you think need to be made before submitting a reconsideration request?  Is 2 enough? Also, should we use the disavow tool on these remaining 65 links?  Every one of the remaining links is from either a filipino blog page or a random article directory. Finally, do you think we are still getting juice from these links?  i.e. if we do remove or disavow these anchor text links are we actually going to see a negative impact? Thanks for your help and answers!! Craig

    | TheCraig
    0

  • We serve ads on our site using a sub-domain. All ads use a re-direct from ads.domain before redirecting users to the proper, normal, internal url. Most the content on our home page is ad block driven. Is it possible and does it make sense to enter the sub-domain as url parameter in Google Webmaster tools, letting Google know that this is something to be ignored. Many thanks

    | CeeC-Blogger
    0

  • My client is planning on integrating progressive loading into their main product level pages (those pages most important to conversions and revenue). I am not skilled on "progressive laoding" but was told this is what Facebook does. Currently, the site's pages are tabbed and use Ajax. Is there any negative impact by changing this up by including progressive loading? If anyone can help me understand what this is and how it might impact a site from an SEO perspective, please let me know. thanks a ton!! Janet

    | ACNINTERACTIVE
    1

  • Hello... I'm looking for some advice on Wordpress plugins to make my site optimized for mobile visitors. There are tons of plugins to choose from, but I'm looking for something that will keep the look of the site the same, just optimized to perform and view better on mobile devices.. Does anyone have any advice on good Wordpress plugins that will help accomplish what I'm looking for? Thanks

    | Prime85
    0

  • Hi if i am using paging in my website there is lots of product in my website now in paging total paging is 1000 pages now what title tag i need to add for every paging page or is there any good way we can tell search engine all page or same ?

    | constructionhelpline
    0

  • I am kind of new to all this but I would like to understand canonicalization. I have a website which when you arrive on it is www.mysite.com but once inside and flicking back to the homepage it reverts to www.mysite.com/index.html. Should I be doing something re canonicalization? If so what? Will the link juice be diluted by having two home page versions? Thanks

    | FCAbroad
    0

  • I really don't know what to do about this situation. Roger here at SeoMoz has partially crawled my site and came up with a huge list of errors, the majority of them being duplicate page titles, the others being short titles and canonical errors. How do I fix this if I have a huge site? So far Roger has crawled 10,005 pages, he's reported 7,000+duplicate page titles. What do I do??? How in the heck do I fix all those errors??? Just to let you know, I am not able to go into my HTML myself and fix anything, only the Turnkey Company I decided to do business with can go in there and fix anything. Am I in screwed? I just don't know what to do about this situation. I want my site to be the best it can be and I know there may be errors here and there but the number of errors on my site I think is to high. Please if anyone can give me some great advice I would really appreciate it!!! I need all the help I can get!!!

    | allie74
    0

  • I have set up several url parameters in webmaster tools that do things like select a specific products colour or size. I have set the parameter in google to "narrows" the page and selected to crawl no urls but in the duplicate content section each of these are still shown as being 2 pages with the same content. Is this just normal, i.e. showing me that they are the same anyway or is google deliberately ignoring my settings (which I assume it does when they are sure they know better or think I have made a mistake)?

    | mark_baird
    0

  • I'm seeing more and more websites that have all their content on one page.  I came across www.otbthink.com today and am wondering if I'm missing something here. I ask this because I am trying to figure out how to link to their copy writing portion of their website.  I have a client that is in their area and needs someone to do some copy writing work for them.  All the content there is being served through css.  The search engines will see it but how do you optimize for this sort of site?  How do you link to a particular section of this site?  Am I missing something obvious here? Thanks.

    | DarinPirkey
    0

  • Hi, per this thread: http://www.seomoz.org/q/800-000-pages-blocked-by-robots We had a huge number of pages blocked by robots.txt by some dynamic file that must have integrated with our CMS somehow. In just a few weeks hundreds of thousands of pages were "blocked." This number is now going down, but instead of by the hundreds of thousands, it is going down by the hundreds and very sloooooowwwwllly. So, we really need to speed up this process. We have our sitemap we will re-submit, but I have a few questions related to it: Previously the sitemap had the <lastmod>tag set to the original date of the page. So, all of these pages have been changed since then. Any harm in doing a mass change of the <lastmod>field? It would be an accurate reflection, but I don't want it to be caught by some spam catcher. The easy thing to do would be to just set that date to now, but then they would all have the same date. Any other tips on how to get these pages "unblocked" faster? Thanks! Craig</lastmod></lastmod>

    | TheCraig
    0

  • Look at what www.shutterstock.com/cat-26p3-Abstract.html does with their search results page 3 for 'Abstract' - same for page 2-N in the paginated series. | name="robots" content="NOINDEX, FOLLOW"> |
    |   | Why is this a better alternative then using the next/prev, per Google's official statement on pagination? http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1663744 Which doesn't even mention this as an option. Any ideas? Does this improve the odds of the first page in the paginated series ranking for the target term? There can't be a 'view all page' because there are simply too many items. Jeff

    | jrjames83
    0

  • Hi, I have many URL for commercialization that redirects 301 to an actual page of my companies' site. My URL provider say that the load for those request by bots are too much, they put robots text on the redirection server ! Strange or not? Now I have a this META description on all my URL captains that redirect 301 : A description for this result is not available because this site's robots.txt.  If you have the perfect solutions could you share it with me ?  Thank You.

    | Vale7
    0

  • Greetings Team, I have a webiste home page optimize for the keyword ''example apartments'' and i have included in the title but that i have another page called site.com/exampleapartments  and is optimize for the keyword example apartments How can i make them different ?

    | WorldEscape
    0

  • Hi all, I have a PHP function which i use to make all links clickable. Problem is, if some one writes a link in a a-tag, the URL inside the href value is made clickable. Not good. Can someone perhaps help me with the issue? Function: function makeClickableLinks($text)
    {
    $text = preg_replace('/<//', ' $text = preg_replace('(
    )', '
    ', $text);
    $text = preg_replace('!((https?://www.|https?://|www.)(([a-z0-9-]+.)+[a-z]{2,6})(/\S+|/)*)!ie', '"[".shortenurl("\1")."]("".(strtolower('$2'))"', $text);
    $text = str_replace('( <a href',="" '<a="" $text);<br="">$text = str_replace(')" target', '" target', $text);
    $text = str_replace('):" target', '" target', $text);
    $text = str_replace(')..." target', '" target', $text);
    $text = str_replace(').." target', '" target', $text);
    $text = str_replace(')." target', '" target', $text);
    return $text;
    }</a> <a href',="" '<a="" $text);<br="">Pleeeeease heeelp 🙂 Can't fix it on my own - been at it for ages. -Rasmus</a>

    | rasmusbang
    0

  • I asked a question a few weeks ago about a main keyword that we are targeting that is fluctuating up and down. The keyword is "trash bags" and that is what my company sells. All different colors, thicknesses and sizes. This isn't just a random keyword we are trying to optimize for, this is our business. Before I started optimizing the website for "trash bags" we used the term "garbage bags", now that we started we have been off the charts and on the charts, but we have never regained rankings. The trend finally looked like it was going upwards... but now I see I dropped off of google again. Is this normal? Should I be worried that google is penalizing me for this keyword (There is many links that have trash bags in the anchor text - but we do sell that!)? Here is a screenshot of our ranking history for trash bags:  https://www.diigo.com/item/image/3vpdp/no01

    | EcomLkwd
    1

  • My company will be taking over an ecommerce site that is built to get local city/state traffic where the competition is slim to none for the given keyword. This site gets 2500+ visits per day, and we're looking to maintain and eventually grow that traffic. We would like to move that site onto our ecommerce platform which will force URL change and of every 'keyword' city/state page on the site. We're undecided whether to keep it on an unfamiliar platform that already gets traffic or to move it and possibly face the 404's or weeks of redirecting a single keyword-city/state page to another. Any advice or insight would be great!

    | BMac54
    0

  • In reference to mobile - am I walking a fine SEO line when it comes to hidden content on mobile? On the responsive variations of sites we are working on some content is hidden (that displays on the desktop version of the site) so that pages on mobile can display correctly. Is this negative for SEO? Appreciate any feedback Cheers.

    | Oxfordcomma
    0

  • I'm setting up a site to display a different site header graphic depending on which U.S. State the IP address is coming from.  In theory we may end up doing 50 different images, although we'll probably start with 4 or 5 and then the other states will get a "default". How will the SE's treat this... if it's just an image change, but the text on the page is the same, will it affect anything?  Any best practice advice out there? thanks!

    | JMagary
    0

  • Hi!Two years ago, we changed the domain elmundodportivo.es to mundodeportivo.com. Apparently, everything was OK, but more than two years later, there are still 41.000 pages indexed in Google (https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aelmundodeportivo.es) even though all the domains have been redirected with a 301 redirect. I detected some problems with redirections that were 303 instead of 301, but we fixed that one month ago.A secondary problem is that the pagerank for elmundodportivo.es is 7 yet and mundodeportivo.com is 3.What I'm doing wrong?Thank you all,Oriol

    | MundoDeportivo
    0

  • I've run the seomoz on page report and found an interesting issue. I'm using wordpress and it seems that every picture I add to my articles seem to be added as separate pages to the site. I'm having to go to each and every picture and creating a meta tag and description to it. I still get duplicate content issues with the same. On my Disqus system, I get the same pictures added just as a page or article would look like. What can I do to avoid this?

    | emasaa
    0

  • Hi, This may seem like a simple question but a new client of mine wishes to use a domain name with the word "free" in it. The website will offer free activity vouchers. I couldn't see this being a problem as there a lot of websites that do this although he was told it may present a problem with the search engines thinking the site was spammy. It won't be and will be offering information and vouchers on local sporting activities. I was wondering if anybody could clarify this please so I can give him a more definitive answer to his question. Thanks for your help.

    | malinkymedia
    0

  • Hi if i'm bulk uploading 301 redirects whats needed to create a csv file? is it just a case of creating an excel spreadsheet & have the old urls in column A and new urls in column B and then just convert to csv and upload ? or do i need to put in other details or paremeters etc etc ? Cheers Dan

    | Dan-Lawrence
    0

  • Hi I'm just setting up some 301 redirects for a new site design about to go live. The old site structure had some 'overview' pages in the urls (without any content) that just 302'd to a sub page. Do i need 301 redirect these overview page urls or since they had no content theres no need and I probably shouldn't or should i ? Also for pages that have no direct equivalent replacement is it still best to 301 to nearest relevant page or just leave it.  For example a thank you page that currently shows after user submits email form wont be on new site (since message shows on form page after submission rather than new page). Should i 301 to form page or just leave it ? Cheers Dan

    | Dan-Lawrence
    0

  • So obviously a link profile featuring quality / authoritative / relavant in-bound links is preferable, but here's my question: If I'm starting work on a brand new domain, should I build links that one would consider neutral (i.e. from a non-spammy, but unrelated site) or should I not bother and only focus on quality links? Thanks

    | underscorelive
    0

  • Hi, Our website is well established and has been growing every month until around Jan. 6th 2013. All of sudden our search rankings on Google dropped dramatically (nearly 50%). We getting tens of thousands fewer visitors through search results than normal. At the same time as the drop (almost to the day) we changed our forum software from Vbulletin3 to Vbulletin4. The forums are on a different subdomain, and our forum developer said there is no way the change would affect the main site. Is that true? So  far, we have not been able to figure out what caused the sudden change. Maybe a Google update?

    | AVman
    0

  • Good afternoon SEOmoz community. I was looking for a specific answer or advice or opinion about linking out to other sites. My Site www.tacticalbootstore.com has been undergoing a complete content rewrite.  In the process we have been told and read where it can be good to link out to other authoritive sites. One of the pages we have rewritten is here. http://www.tacticalbootstore.com/belleville-boots-sizing-chart-a-97.html We have not added the graphics yet as they are being built now. This is just an informational page about sizing of a particular manufacturers boots.  Once you get to the bottom of the text we have added a link to the actual manufacturers page. Is this helpful for us in the SERPS or not? Thank you for your time. Chris

    | scamper
    0

  • I am a bankruptcy attorney in Southern California. I have been doing my own SEO since I had a couple of bad experiences paying someone to "do" it in the past. If you want it done right, do it yourself I suppose. Anyway, I have been ranking well in Google local results. At first I peeked in at 3/3 showing on the first page of the searches. Then I climbed to Number 2 in local searches, probably as a result of finding sites and making sure my addresses, phone numbers and business names were all correct. However, this week (as I climbed to #3 spot in the local search for my city+ bankruptcy attorney, my Google local result dropped to page 2. One of my employees rated me on google local and gave me a google + which is gone and the pictures that I uploaded to Local Google are gone. I don't know if this is some kind of penalty because an employee gave me a rating (they were completely up front about working for me) or if something else is going on. I was also trying to claim my business on Yahoo (which resulted in some kind of "Account Suspension"). I have no idea what is going on. You can take a look at my site if it helps: http://ashcraftfirm.com We are trying to rank for "murrieta bankruptcy attorney" Thanks for any help you can provide.

    | gcashcraft
    0

  • OK, i have recently noticed google is adding a keyword to my titles... I have attached an image which shows the results from a google site:mywebsite search... 8 out of the 10 results on the screen shot clearly have the keyword ( - CCTV Cameras) added to the end of the title. Now a lot of those pages are support pages i.e "Help & Support", "returns" etc etc.. nothing really to do with cctv cameras. The only thing i can think of, is the most common anchor text used on backlinks to my website (according to siteexplorer) is the keyword cctv cameras... (i am currently working on removing a load of the backlinks to my site due to what i think is some kind of google penalty as the anchor text is all keywords etc...) But it seems strange if google has started to discount these backlinks, that it then uses that keyword to add to my titles - unless of course, google thinks that it is my brand name... Any body have any thoughts on this? FqwooQY.gif

    | isntworkdull
    1

  • Bug? or just because the change happened beyound the Top 50 within Bing & Yahoo SERPs? The Keyword Ranking for in the example "dry desulfurization" shows a change of >40 up, but the history (Google) does not show these changes. May be, it is that the change was within Yahoo and Bing Rankings, and because the keyword is not showing up within the Top 50, I just can't see? ... but Rogerbot is considering. Thanks for any response 🙂 rankings-change-bug.jpg

    | inlinear
    0

  • We're thinking about adding a blog to our site, but our CMS blogging features are not good. Someone suggested using a wordpress blog and putting it in an iframe on our site. I replied that all the SEO impact of our blogging efforts will be lost because of the iframe. I am right or wrong ? If I am right, could you suggest better alternatives ? Thanks in advance ! Jean-François Monfette

    | jfmonfette
    0

  • Hello, We have a parallel mobile website and recently we implemented a link pointing to the desktop website. This redirect is happening via a javascript code and results in a url followed by this paramenter: ?m=off Example:
    http://www.m.website.com                                 redirects to:
    http://www.website.com/?m=off Questions: Will the "http://www.website.com/?m=off" be considered duplicate content with "http://www.website.com" since they both return the same content? Is there any possibility that Google will take into consideration the url ending in "/?m=off"? How should we treat this new url? The webmaster tools URL parameter configuration at the moment isn't experiencing problems but should we submit the parameter anyway in order not to be indexed or should we wait first and see the error response? In case we should submit this for removal... what's the best way to do it? Like this? Parameter: ?m=off Does this parameter change page content seen by the user? - doesn't affect page content Any help is much appreciated.
    Thank you!

    | echo1
    0

  • Hi Mozzers, There are lots of articles on using multiple domains for a company and we all know the story behind that. I have a different question though - I designed and built a really great WordPress theme for my company and it runs on xyz.com and has run on their for well over a year and has decent authority. I would now like to expand my business and offer a different service and I'd like to market the new service on abc.com My question is: If I use unique content on the second domain, but the same WordPress theme, will it have a negative SEO effect on either site? I should mention: I have my reasons for not just using the same domain for both services. I'd love to see what everyone thinks 🙂

    | ChristopherM
    0

  • Hi , I m looking for suggestions for my website i believe is suffering from the panda updates. Can someone point out what possible issues within the site that might be causing with recent panda updates? here is the link http://goo.gl/St3aP thanks nick.

    | orion68
    0

  • Hi, i have had a message from google telling me i am losing revenue because i have not authorised the following sites translate.googleusercontent.com  authorize
    www.google.co.uk  authorize can someone please tell me if i should authorise them, i am a bit puzzled about the google.co.uk one and i think i understand the other one as it will be people using a translater service on my site. please can someone help me on this.

    | ClaireH-184886
    0

  • I am launching a new website (related to IT services) on Monday 6th May 2013. What should be my SEO/SMO/PPC strategy for a brand new website with new domain ? I have a blog within the website as well. Is it better to promote internal blog or should i focus on external bogs like wordpress ?

    | afycon
    0

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