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Category: Intermediate & Advanced SEO

Looking to level up your SEO techniques? Chat through more advanced approaches.

  • AlexanderWhite


    Please select best theme for me, from the below themes. I want to create printing website. I select these themes after long research. http://us-themes.com/demo/?theme=ImprezaWP http://themeforest.net/item/salbii-responsive-multipurpose-wordpress-theme/full_screen_preview/6265876 http://themeforest.net/item/codeus-multipurpose-responsive-wordpress-theme/full_screen_preview/6906054

    | AlexanderWhite
    0
  • RocketWeb


    We are replatforming an ecommerce site and will need to change 90% of the urls.  Many current urls contain uppercase characters and the new system forces all lowercase.  We are concerned with submitting the urls all at once to google it might look like spam, receive some sort of penalty or negatively affect organic search. In the last month this site received 428k unique visitors, 3.2 mil page views and has about 10k urls.  They are a top 3 competitor in their vertical. We are certainly planning to do all 301 redirects. What can we do additionally to reduce the risk of penalties here?

    | RocketWeb
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  • webbmason


    I have a site that has been active for years - thinkbiglearnsmart.com. Awhile ago I had purchased about 50 domain names that were relevant to my company. I still have those urls and would like to use them to point to different pages on my site - just because they have good key words in the URLs. For example - one is dreamweavertrainingclassesonlinelive.com.  Currently they are all redirecting to my homepage. A. is that hurting me? B. I would like to redirect to the more relevant page. ie the page dedicated to Dreamweaver training (http://thinkbiglearnsmart.com/dreamweaver-creative-cloud-training-course/ ) Will this hurt my Dreamweaver keyword for example because there is already a 301 redirect on that page from a very old Dreamweaver link which was something like thinkbiglearnsmart.com/dreamweaver C. On my hosting account where I can select where the URL forwards to - it has an option for "Location forwarding" and "Frame forwarding" - currently they are set to Frame forwarding - which one is best? Any help is much appreciated!!! Thank you!

    | webbmason
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  • trophycentraltrophiesandawards


    www.trophycentral.comHi, we were hit very hard a few years ago by Panda and have been try to recover.  We completely revamped our site (structure, canonical, duplicates, content, etc.) and had a couple of keywords recover. However, most traffic has not comeback and still cannot be found in the top 30 pages or so for major phrases.  We have compared ourselves to major competitors in our industry and see very few differences. The only thing I see as a difference is that many of our products are in multiple sections. For example, we have all baseball awards (trophies, pins, medals) grouped together.  We then have just baseball medals together and just baseball pins together.  Is this something that could be causing us not to rank?  I am asking because the phrases that are ranking are the ones that don't have multiple categories.  We have no manual penalties, but now I am thinking this is what Google might consider a doorway page?As an experiment, I just noindexed all but one category for baseball and soccer to see what happens.Does this make sense?  Has anyone else seen this?Thanks!

    | trophycentraltrophiesandawards
    0
  • Ivek99


    Hi how to build authority links and how they look ?  If you could give a few examples so that i can see how it looks. and i have 9 linking root domains which is really low. so what are linking root domains ? and what i need to about that ? Thank you 🙂

    | Ivek99
    1
  • Jen_Floyd


    So, I've been asked if it makes SEO sense for our company to grab a bunch of second-level gTLD (which we were earlier calling gTLD subdomains incorrectly) so that we can capitalize on redirecting them to our relevant pages that might not be ranking as well (if Google treats them like EMDs). For instance, buy something analogous to red.shoes, blue.shoes, purple.shoes and so on and then redirect them to our relevant pages for that product.  Someone owns the .shoes domain but is happy to sell us second-level domains like red.shoes for $20-30. The question is, if we scoop up 100 or so of these relevant to our product, will it matter?  I guess it depends on how Google is going to treat these.  Anyone know?

    | Jen_Floyd
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  • Berner


    Thank you for taking the time to read my question. I have a website - berneseoftherockies.com - it is a bernese mountain dog website My competitors are Rockymountainpuppies(dot)com and Coloradobernesemountaindog(dot)com When using the Moz tools, I see they have no incoming links, except for one site has 5 links from its own pages. But when I type in Bernese Mountain Dogs Colorado - I am no where to be found, except for a you tube video. So what am I doing so wrong? They are basically doing nothing, and killing me in the serps. I have gotten social media stuff like Google +, facebook, twitter, pinterest, and youtube. They are still behind the times. So any thoughtful advice is appreciated. I mainly cater to the state of Colorado where I live. So just curious if there is something at the top of your head that you may think of that's causing my issues? Like could it be my hosting? Like can you have a black listed host? I am with Hostdime I did have a few, like 10 foreign backlinks, which I did remove or disavow I think its called. I have used the title tag tools here to get proper size title tags, and decent keyword density. I built the site for people first, then Google etc. So not sure if you are allowed to tell me, but maybe you can advise me on a decent seo company, or maybe give me a couple tips that may help me out. Please no - read the moz book, I am reading it and trying to do what I am reading. But maybe something simple is keeping me from showing up, while these other sites are. Thank you so much for any advice.

    | Berner
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  • McTaggart


    Hello Mozzers! If you are a service provider wanting to target geographic locations outside of the region where you're physically located, what's the best approach? For example, I have a service provider whose main market is not where they're located - they're based in Devon UK, yet main markets are London, Birmingham, Newcastle, Edinburgh. They have clients in all these cities, so I could definitely provide content relevant to each city - perhaps a page for each city detailing work and services (and possibly listing clients). However, does the lack of a physical presence (and local phone number) in these cities make such city pages virtually impossible to rank these days? Does Google require a physical presence/phone number? Thanks in advance, Luke

    | McTaggart
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  • IceIcebaby


    Hi Moz Community, Google is indexing some developer pages from a previous website where I currently work: ddcblog.dev.examplewebsite.com/categories/sub-categories Was wondering how I include these in a robots.txt file so they no longer appear on Google. Can I do it under our homepage GWT account or do I have to have a separate account set up for these URL types? As always, your expertise is greatly appreciated, -Reed

    | IceIcebaby
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  • RichardTay


    Hi, I am working on a website with a large number (millions) of images. For the last five months Ihave been trying to get Google Images to crawl and index these images (example page: http://bit.ly/1ePQvyd).  I believe I have followed best practice in the design of the page, naming of images etc. Whilst crawlng and indexing of the pages is going reasonably well with the standard crawler, the image bot has only crawled about half a million images and indexed only about 40,000. Can anyone suggest what I could do to increase this number 100 fold? Richard

    | RichardTay
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  • Blink-SEO


    Hi all. I've been working on a page for months now and can't seem to make any progress. I'm trying to get http://www.alwayshobbies.com/dolls-houses on the first page for term 'dolls houses'. I've done the following: Cleaned up the site's overall backlink profile Built some new links to the page Added 800 words of new copy Reduced the number of keyword instances on the page below 15 Any advice would be much appreciated. I don't think it's down to links as the DA/PA isn't wildly different from its competitors. Thanks!

    | Blink-SEO
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  • GipsyDharma


    Hi everyone! I would really appreciate your help on this! The website URL is: www.gipsydharma.com It has now been over a year, but we're finding it very difficult to start ranking for any useful keywords. Some keywords like: leather boots / boots for women / handmade clothing at some point went up to page 20, but have now dropped again below page 50. Now, most of our traffic comes from social media so the business is going OK. But the question still remains, what does Google have against the above URL? Its not a super amazing website, but it provides unique and engaging content and has zero spam. I also don't think its over optimized, but I may be wrong on this. Recently, I've also noticed that the Domain Authority has also been going down, it was 46 at some point and now its 40. There's no visible penalty and all the pre-Penguin links (of which there weren't that many, I think) were cleaned up months ago, without Google suggesting that. There are very few keyword rich backlinks and a lot of them come naturally anyways. So again, any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance for your help!

    | GipsyDharma
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  • followuk


    Hi, I'm a little worried/interested in the affects of my new navigation on ranking. So here is the current site - followuk.co.uk/mothers-day I have chosen an internal page because 99% of my traffic goes to these and generally external links and social shares happen on these pages (naturally because of the nature of the content). As you can see I have a nav bar on the left which links to all other pages. In my new design I will get rid of this nav bar altogether and have a breadcrumb which will give the user the option to root back to a category page which will contain these links instead. Kind of like this: Home > Important Dates > Mothers Day (if your on the mothers day page) I'm in two minds because maybe pages are passing PageRank helping each other to rank, but on the other side maybe the strong pages which do rank well and gain links/social shares are not ranking as well because they are passing link juice through the navigation to other pages. Any thoughts?

    | followuk
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  • 94501


    Hi, I've been looking at how various sites handle rel author tags linking to Google+ accounts to get rich snippets results. I've found more than a few that have the same code on every page, even though those actual pages clearly have different authors and some may not even mention the rel author's name. A site I'm working on has different authors for different pages. Although the convenience of putting the same rel author on every page seems dreamy, it also seems like a disaster waiting to happen, since it would appear to be trickery about who the author is and possibly one Google update away from disaster. Can you call a site owner or employee an author on pages that to the reader appear to be written by others? Am I being too cautious or what? Thanks! Cheers... Darcy

    | 94501
    1
  • CSawatzky


    Greetings Mozzers, I'm completely new to 508 compliance and I hadn't really heard of it until yesterday. It came up in a conversation about W3C compliance (which I know Google doesn't necessarily validate for), but I hadn't ever heard of 508. So question is, what is 508 and what needs to be done on the back end to become compliant here or to check for compliance. I do know that 508 refers to government regulation to make your website accessible to all. Thanks for helping out on a rookie question 🙂 Cheers,
    Pedram

    | CSawatzky
    0
  • maxweb


    Whilst looking for link opportunities, I have noticed that the website has a few profiles from suppliers or accredited organisations. However, a search form is required to access these pages and when I type cache:"webpage.com" the page is showing up as non-indexed. These are good websites, not spammy directory sites, but is it worth trying to get Google to index the pages? If so, what is the best method to use?

    | maxweb
    0
  • petertong23


    Hi Mozzers, Question for all of you. Any idea why this page isn't indexing in Google? It's indexing in Bing, but we don't see it in Google's results. It doesn't seem like we have any noindex tags or anyway issues with the robots files either. Any ideas? http://ohva.k12.com/

    | petertong23
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  • theLotter


    The "How it works" video that is embedded on my sites homepage is currently linked to an individual YouTube account not our company account. I would like to change the ownership so that the company profile can enjoy the added views (currently 13K +).  Is there a way to move the video to a different account without losing the views it has already accumulated? Also, a related technical question - our R&D team says the video is slowing down the site.  It links to YouTube but there is nothing in the source of our page about YouTube.  Any suggestions for embedding it more effectively?

    | theLotter
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  • Andy-Halliday


    Hi I was wondering if someone can give me a bit of advice - outside of my full time job I run three websites - all in the same area, but all do three different things 1. Directory (DA19) 2. Blog (DA 23) 3. Products (DA35) I want to merger all three website into one and all be on one website (rather do it now than keep working on three websites). I have included the DAs of each site (  I know they are not amazing, but i've only recently started working on two of them), but I want to place all three websites under the Blog url. Regarding 301's of the pages, would I be better doing at the top level and 301 all the pages to the home page, or spending the time and 301 the old product page for instance to the new product page - this is a much bigger project, but what are the potential gains. Is there anything else I should consider when switching the sites - all three are wordpress sites (I know it has its limitations but they are easy to create). Thanks in Advance Andy

    | Andy-Halliday
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  • ClassicDriver


    Hi Mozzers, First time poster here, enjoying the site and the tools very much. I'm doing SEO for a fairly big ecommerce brand and an issue regarding internal search results has come up. www.example.com/electronics/iphone/5s/ gives an overview of the the model-specific listings. For certain models there are also color listings, but these are not incorporated in the URL structure. Here's what Rand has to say in Inbound Marketing & SEO: Insights From The Moz Blog Search filters are used to narrow an internal search—it could be price, color, features, etc.
    Filters are very common on e-commerce sites that sell a wide variety of products. Search filter
    URLs look a lot like search sorts, in many cases:
    www.example.com/search.php?category=laptop
    www.example.com/search.php?category=laptop?price=1000
    The solution here is similar to the preceding one—don’t index the filters. As long as Google
    has a clear path to products, indexing every variant usually causes more harm than good. I believe using a noindex tag is meant here. Let's say you want to point users to an overview of listings for black 5s iphones. The URL is an internal search filter which looks as follows: www.example.com/electronics/apple/iphone/5s?search=black Which you wish to link with the anchor text "black iphone 5s". Correct me if I'm wrong, but if you no-index the black 5s search filters, you lose the equity passed through the link. Whereas if you canonicalize /electronics/apple/iphone/5s you would still leverage the link juice and help you rank for "black iphone 5s". Doesn't it then make more sense to use canonicalization?

    | ClassicDriver
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  • marknorman


    When considering on page / on site seo what process do you use / take to evaluate how much content is needed to be competitive and rank well?

    | marknorman
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  • AshShep1


    Hello your help please! I have 2 KWs that i have targeted Inner pages for and they have got them to page 2 in SERPs, but now its getting difficult to move them up to page 1. Will targeting the home page with a higher authority, for the same terms, help or hinder the inner pages current position? Many Thanks Ash

    | AshShep1
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  • AlexanderWhite


    Kindly let me know best software or online tool to create videos for website and youtube. I am also looking for animation videos etc.

    | AlexanderWhite
    0
  • theLotter


    I want to block all the inner archive news pages of my website in robots.txt - we don't have R&D capacity to set up rel=next/prev or create a central page that all inner pages would have a canonical back to, so this is the solution. The first page I want indexed reads:
    http://www.xxxx.news/?p=1 all subsequent pages that I want blocked because they don't contain any new content read:
    http://www.xxxx.news/?p=2
    http://www.xxxx.news/?p=3
    etc.... There are currently 245 inner archived pages and I would like to set it up so that future pages will automatically be blocked since we are always writing new news pieces. Any advice about what code I should use for this? Thanks!

    | theLotter
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  • activitysuper


    Hi, Sitewide footer links, is this bad for SEO? Basically I see all the time the main navigation repeated in the footer, sometimes as almost something to just fill the footer up. Is this bad for SEO (im guessing it is) and can you explain why you think it is? Cheers

    | activitysuper
    0
  • Gordian


    Does anyone have suggestions on places that provide in depth site / analytics reviews for SEO?

    | Gordian
    0
  • AlexanderWhite


    I have wordpress website. Now I am planning to add html service landing page into it. (by uploading html page on the root folder). After uploading it may look like below URL. My question is can I Html in wordpress website? Google like it or not? http://www.purpleflareagency.com/las-vegas-printing.html

    | AlexanderWhite
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  • CobraJones95


    I'm considering moving two niche ecommerce sites over to LemonStand, but wanted to see if the SEOMoz community had any opinion of it before forking out several grand getting the sites moved over. Both of my websites were based off of an SEO driven ecommerce strategy, so it's really important to me that the platform will perform well in organic rankings. Thanks!

    | CobraJones95
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  • Mark_Ch


    Hi All, I'm a little confused. I have read a number of articles from authority sites that give mixed signals over the importance of menu links vs body content links. It is suggested that whilst all menu links spread link juice equally, Google does not see them as favourably. Inserting a link within the body will add more link juice value to the desired page. Any thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks Mark

    | Mark_Ch
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  • kimmiedawn


    Here is the situation: A site was moved from its original domain to its new domain, and at the same time, the external wordpress.com blog was moved to a subdirectory, making it an onsite blog. The two pages that rank the highest on the site have virtually no links from the blog and no external links, while all the other pages are linked extensively from the blog and have backlinks. Their targeted keywords are not so much easier to rank than the other pages for that to be the sole cause. To confuse the matter even more, there was a manual penalty affecting incoming links which was removed last month. The old site, which has many backlinks to the new site, is still in Google's index. The old blog however, has been redirected page by page and is not in Google's index. Most of the blog posts are short 1-paragraph company updates and potentially considered low quality content because of that (?) The common denominator among the two highest ranked pages (I'm talking top 3 in SERP v. page 3 or 4) seems to be either the lack of external backlinks or the lack of internal links from the blog. Could there be an issue with the blog such that internal links from it are detrimental rather than helpful?

    | kimmiedawn
    0
  • gohawks7790


    My real estate website, www.RiverValleyGroup.com, is currently not ranked in the top-50 for any of the keywords that I am currently targeting. I am targeting keywords such as 'Louisville homes', 'homes for sale in Louisville KY', etc....I am starting to think maybe my site needs to be revamped? I'm fairly new to SEO and have no idea how to get on the 1st page of Google for targeted keywords. Please help!

    | gohawks7790
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  • Sika22


    One of our sales team members has created a 25 page word document as a topical page.  The plan was to make this into an html page with a table of contents.  My thoughts were why not make it a pdf?  Is there any con to using a PDF vs an html page?  If the PDF was properly optimized would it perform just as well?  The goal is to have folks click back to our products and hopefully by after reading about how they work.

    | Sika22
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  • MozAddict


    Hello Mozzers! We have an ecommerce site built on Magento. We would like to use attribute filters in our layered navigation for landing page purposes. Each page will have a unique URL, Meta Title and Meta Description. For example: URL: domain.com/art/abstract (category is Art, attribute is Abstract) Title: Abstract Art For Sale Meta: Blah Blah Blah Currently these attribute pages are not being indexed by google as they are set in google parameters. We would like to edit google parameters to start indexing some of the attribute filters that users search for, so they can be used as landing pages. Does anyone have experience with this? Is this a good idea? What are the consequences? Will this dilute Page Rank? Could this destroy the world? Cheers! MozAddict

    | MozAddict
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  • DrMcCoy


    I have around 20 temporary redirects that i can not really change.  they look like this: http://www.bestfitbybrazil.com/reviewhelpful.asp?ProductCode=PANT+PA4069GRAFFITI&ID=17&yes=yes/login.asp See attached As you can see they are from LOGIN.ASP.  This are system calls.  I think the last thing I tried was blocking them in my robottxt file.  but it doesn't seem to make a difference.  Am I being effected by these redirects? How will Google look at them? QmiQcD6

    | DrMcCoy
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  • nicole.healthline


    We want to move our author byline to the bottom of the page, but we are wondering if this will affect how authorship displays on a page?

    | nicole.healthline
    1
  • en-gageinc


    Hi Moz Community, I have an escort directory website that is built out of ajax. We basically followed all the recommendations like implementing the escaped fragment code so Google would be able to see the content. Problem is whenever I submit my sitemap on Google webmastertool it always 700 had been submitted and only 12 static pages had been indexed. I did the site query and only a number of pages where indexed. Does it have anything to do with my site being on HTTPS and not on HTTP? My site is under HTTPS and all my content is ajax based. Thanks

    | en-gageinc
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  • Horizon


    Hi Mozzers, We're currently in the process of a website redesign with new CMS and have the opportunity to change URL and structure. I would love some opinions as to what the best practise will be. A quick prerequisite, the website is entirely about France. French property, living, holidays, forum - everything. Therefore, we're unsure of the usage of the word France/French. Presently, we're running Classic ASP which allows for one subfolder then dynamic article ID. In my examples, I will take our activity holidays URL. At present this is /france-activity-holidays/DisplayArticle.asp?ID=12345. We know that DisplayArticle.asp?ID=12345 will simply become [article-title], however, its the preceding subfolders I would like some help with. Here are our thoughts on the options available. Can you please vote as to which you think is the best? /france-activity-holidays/ (one subfolder per category, as at present) /france/holidays/activity/  (always have a first subfolder with the word france) /holidays-to-france/activity-holidays/ (france in the primary subfolder) /holidays/activity-holidays-france/ (france in the secondary subfolder) /holidays/activity/ (because the whole website is about France, it is redundant to have /france/) /French-holidays/activity/ My gut feeling is either number 2 or 5. Concise, good for UX, OK for SEO. However, there is very little information around that is relevant to our sector. Thanks in advance! Matt

    | Horizon
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  • DaveBrown333


    I just added the author and publisher tags to my client's site and posted a dance class announcement on Google + with hashtags. When I  did a test search on Google, they were showing up above the Place listings and the description under the title was taken from their DMOZ listing, not from the web site description. This is the first time I have seen this. Has anyone else seen DMOZ descriptions showing up in Google SERPs?

    | DaveBrown333
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  • propertypalseo


    Hi there, We are a real estate listings portal and we also create micro sites for real estate agents. These micro-sites are hosted on our same server, similar in structure, different in design... different in content.  They all link to us but not within each other. They all link to us because they have to access our login system in order to manage their property listings on their own micro sites (which updates on our own website too). (Also as marketing for others to see that we have built their sites with our engine). Would all these backlinks be considered to be coming from the same c-block? Thus, being sub-optimal for our SEO efforts? Should we worry about grouping them and giving them separate IP addresses? Should we add nofollow tags to these links or are there any other things you would worry about? Many thanks.

    | propertypalseo
    0
  • AlexanderWhite


    Which domain is better for SEO. vehiclewrapslasvegasnv.com Or vehicle-wraps-lasvegas-nv.com Thanks in advance for your help.

    | AlexanderWhite
    0
  • ATMOSMarketing56


    A client of ours recently had a new site built and made the switch to HTTPS. We made sure to redirect all of the HTTP pages to HTTPS and submitted a new sitemap to Google. GWT says the sitemap was submitted successfully but only 4 pages have been indexed where there should be over 2000. This has led to a plummet of organic traffic and we can't find the issue. Has anyone else had issues/success with doing a HTTPS switch that knows how to fix this problem?

    | ATMOSMarketing56
    0
  • Clickmetrics


    We have numerous versions of what is basically the same site, that targets different countries, such as United States, United Kingdom, South Africa. These websites use Tlds to designate the region, for example, co.uk, co.za I believe this is sufficient (with a little help from Google Webmastertools) to convince the search engines what site is for what region. My question is how do we tell the search engines to send traffic from other regions besides the above to our global site, which would have a .com TLD. For example, we don't have a Brazilian site, how do we drive traffic from Brazil to our global .com site? Many thanks, Jason

    | Clickmetrics
    0
  • khi5


    I was planning to remove lots of URL's via GWT that are highly duplicate alike pages (similar pages exist on other websites across the web). However, this Google article had me a bit concerned: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1269119?hl=en I already have "noindex, follow" on the pages I want to remove from the index, but Google seems to take ages to remove pages from index, which appear to drag down unique content pages from my site.

    | khi5
    0
  • DrMcCoy


    Ok, I know this question has been out there before, but i don't know how fo search for it specifically enough.  I have several keywords that rank higher on my home page.  As you know MOZ assigns keywords to whichever page on your site popping up in search first.  So even though i have A-grade optimized pages for a particular keyword, that page may not pop up BEFORE the homepage for instance, on searches.  In many cases, the homepage is grade "F" for a particular keyword, yet its pulling up first for most of my keywords.  I know that my homepage has more rank because it gets the most visits and i'm sure we can't really optimize the homepage for EVERY keyword.  What is the best thing to do in this situation?  Do i just need to wait for my optimized page to catch up in rank, or is there a trick to optimizing homepage to ALL key words at grade "A" level?  Do i need to keep back-linking to my optimized page directly to get the juice up?  I created all these great optimized pages for specific keywords, but my homepage which shows "F" grade is the one pulling up 4th or 5th on searches Help??

    | DrMcCoy
    0
  • Mr.bfz


    Hey Guys,A site that has  5+ million pages indexed and 300 new pages a day.I hear a lot that sites at this level its all about efficient crawlabitliy.The pages of this site gets indexed one minute after the page is online.1) Does this mean that the site is already crawling efficient and there is not much else  to do about it?2) By increasing crawlability efficiency, should I expect gogole to crawl my site less (less bandwith google takes from my site for the same amount of crawl)or to crawl my site more often?Thanks

    | Mr.bfz
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  • dancape


    HI Everyone, We have clients for whom we are going to work with in different countries but sometimes with the same  language. For example we might have a client in a competitive niche working in Germany, Austria and Switzerland (Swiss German) ie we're going to potentially rewrite our website three times in German, We're thinking of using Google's href lang tags and use pretty much the same content - is this a safe option, has anyone actually tries this successfully or otherwise? All answers appreciated. Cheers, Mel.

    | dancape
    1
  • FCRMediaLietuva


    http://www.1588.lt/imone/fcr-media-lietuva-uab Is there something wrong with the code? Can't make the "stars" to appear in the search. Testing tool shows that everything is OK.

    | FCRMediaLietuva
    0
  • kimmiedawn


    I manage a real estate broker's site on which the individual MLS listing pages continually create 404 pages as properties are sold. So, on a site with 2200 pages indexed, roughly half are 404s at any given time. What can I do to mitigate any potential harm from this?

    | kimmiedawn
    0
  • GregB123


    I have a couple of new product videos for my ecommerce site. I am wondering if it benefits my marketing more to put the videos on Youtube, or on some video hosting service like Wistia or Vimeo? The benefits of putting them on Youtube seem to be ease of embedding, the ability to get a link back from the Youtube page, and having them appear in Youtube searches. (I hear that Youtube is now one of the most used search engines) I'm really not sure what the benefits of using a hosting service are. But I do remember reading articles saying it was better than using Youtube for some reason.... Help?

    | GregB123
    0
  • activenz


    Hi There, I have three separate questions which are all related. Some brief back ground. My client has an adventure tourism company that takes predominantly North American customers on adventure tours to three separate destinations: New Zealand, South America and the Himalayas. They previously had these sites on their own URL's. These URL's had the destination in the URL (eg: sitenewzealand.com). 2 of the three URL's had good age and lots of incoming links. This time last year a new web company was bought in and convinced them to pull all three sites onto a single domain and to put the sites under sub folders (eg: site.com/new-zealand). The built a brand new site for them on a Joomla platform. Unfortunately the new sites have not performed and halved the previous call to action rates. Organic traffic was not adversely affected with this change, however it hasn't grown either. I have been overhauling these new sites with a project team and we have managed to keep the new design but make usability/marketing changes that have the conversion rate nearly back to where it originally was and we have managed to keep the new design (and the CMS) in place. We have recently made programmatic changes to the joomla system to push the separate destination sites back onto their original URL's. My first question is around whether technically this was a good idea. Question 1 Does our logic below add up or is it flawed logic? The reasons we decided to migrate the sites back onto their old URL's were: We have assumed that with the majority of searches containing the actual destination (eg: "New Zealand") that all other things being equal it is likely to attract a higher click through rate on the domain www.sitenewzealand.com than for www.site.com/new-zealand. Having the "newzealand" in the actual URL would provide a rankings boost for target keyword phrases containing "new zealand" in them. We also wanted to create the consumer perception that we are specialists in each of the destinations which we service rather than having a single site which positions us as a "multi-destination" global travel company. Two of the old sites had solid incoming links and there has been very little new links acquired for the domain used for the past 12 months. It was also assumed that with the sites on their own domains that the theme for each site would be completely destination specific rather than having the single site with multiple destinations on it diluting this destination theme relevance. It is assumed that this would also help us to rank better for the destination specific search phrases (which account for 95% of all target keyword phrases). The downsides of this approach were that we were splitting out content onto three sites instead of one with a presumed associated drop in authority overall. The other major one was the actual disruption that a relatively complex domain migration could cause. Opinions on the logic we adopted for deciding to split these domains out would be highly appreciated. Question 2 We migrated the folder based destination specific sites back onto their old domains at the start of March. We were careful to thoroughly prepare the htaccess file to ensure we covered off all the new redirects needed and to directly redirect the old redirects to the new pages. The structure of each site and the content remained the same across the destination specific folders (eg: site.com/new-zealand/hiking became sitenewzealand.com/hiking). To achieve this splitting out of sites and the ability to keep the single instance of Joomla we wrote custom code to dynamically rewrite the URL's. This worked as designed. Unfortunately however, Joomla had a component which was dynamically creating the google site maps and as this had not had any code changes it got all confused and started feeding up a heap of URL's which never previously existed. This resulted in each site having 1000 - 2000 404's. It took us three weeks to work this out and to put a fix into place. This has now been done and we are down to zero 404's for each site in GWT and we have proper google site maps submitted (all done 3 days ago). In the meantime our organic rankings and traffic began to decline after around 5 days (after the migration) and after 10 days had dropped down to around 300 daily visitors from around 700 daily visitors. It has remained at that level for the past 2 weeks with no sign of any recovery. Now that we have fixed the 404's and have accurate site maps into google, how long do you think it will take to start to see an upwards trend again and how long it is likely to take to get to similar levels of organic traffic compared to pre-migration levels? (if at all). Question 3 The owner of the company is understandably nervous about the overall situation. He is wishing right now that we had never made the migration. If we decided to roll back to what we previously had are we likely to cause further recovery delays and would it come back to what we previously had in a reasonably quick time frame? A huge thanks to everyone for reading what is quite a technical and lengthy post and a big thank you in advance for any answers. Kind Regards
    Conrad

    | activenz
    0

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