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Category: Intermediate & Advanced SEO

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

  • danatanseo


    Hi everyone! I searched existing Q & A and couldn't find an answer to this question. Here is the scenario: The site is: http://www.ccisolutions.com I am seeing instances of category pages being identified as 8 levels deep. For example, this one: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/B8I This URL redirects to http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/headphones - which Xenu identifies as being only 1 level deep. Xenu does not seem to be recognizing that the first URL 301-redirects to the second. Is this normal for the way Xenu typically reports? If so, why is the first URL indicated to be so much further down in the structure? Is this an indication of site architecture problems? Or is it an indication of problems with how our 301-redirects are being handled? Both? Thanks in advance for your thoughts!

    | danatanseo
    0
  • Elihn


    I've noticed that one of our GA tagged urls are ranking organically & therefore is skewing the referral data. The campaign that we were tracking is no longer active but the link still works, but it's going to an old landing page. I asked our developers if we could redirect it but they said that it didn't work. Does anyone have some advise or a solution for this? Thanks!

    | Elihn
    0
  • SeoMartin1


    I´m working on a online brazilian marketplace ( looks like etsy in US) and we have a huge amount of pages... I´ve been studing a lot about that and I was wondering to use If-Modified-Since so Googlebot could check if the pages have been updated, and if it is not, there is no reason to get a new copy of them since it already has a current copy in the index.  It uses a 304 status code, "and If a search engine crawler sees a web page status code of 304 it knows that web page has not been updated and does not need to be accessed again." Someone quoted before me**Since Google spiders billions of pages, there is no real need to use their resources or mine to look at a webpage that has not changed. For very large websites, the crawling process of search engine spiders can consume lots of bandwidth and result in extra cost and Googlebot could spend more time in pages actually changed or new stuff!**However, I´ve checked Amazon, Rakuten, Etsy and few others competitors and no one use it! I´d love to know what you folks think about it 🙂

    | SeoMartin1
    0
  • WebRiverGroup


    Our company is an eCommerce site for aftermarket automotive accessories. We recently started making videos for our customers and hosting them on YouTube channel. With our limited resources, we're unable to produce a video for all our products (videos on benefits and features, installation, new product introductory, reviews, etc.), How does it look if we have other peoples videos on our channel? Will our SEO be affected? Would we be flagged by YouTube?

    | WebRiverGroup
    0
  • jamesjd71


    I have a competitor in the local area.  He registered a new domain name.  www.orangecountypatentlawfirm.com.  It was created back in 11/10 and updated a few months ago on 11/13. My domain is ocpatentlawyer.com.  I put my domain and his domain in the open site explorer. The peculiar thing is that my competitors website mirrors identically to my domain.  (see attached image) my competitors website rose through the SERP very fast.  I never saw it coming.  Anyways, I wanted to know if he was using some type of black hat seo trick to hi jack my domain authority to get his own website to rank higher? Plus, if so, does it hurt my ranking? compare.png

    | jamesjd71
    0
  • Kingof5


    No manual actions on our sites, just Penguin related. I put in a disavow for one site in October and Webmaster Tools kept a message up for some time saying the disavow links file for that site had been updated. I put in a disavow for another site of ours last week and I've had no such message. I checked and the file is there. Was this an intentional change on Google's part? Just want to make sure something's not messed up here.

    | Kingof5
    0
  • webmethod


    Hi, I'm looking to revamp the fortunes of an ailing Fashion ECommerce blog, which once had an impact on SEO for the site which it linked to but now has fallen by the wayside. Blog sits here: www.mydomain.com/blog and links to products and categories on the ECommerce site www.mydomain.com. The blog has about 2000 posts on it written over the past 5 years, which are almost all rewritten content about existing stories, events or embedded youtube videos related to fashion on the Web. None of the blog topics are unique, but the posts have been rewritten well and in an entertaining way - i.e. it's not just a copy and paste. The blog is written on an old, proprietary platform and only has basic Social sharing. You can't comment on posts, or see "most popular" posts or tag clouds etc. It is optimised for SEO though, with fashion category tags, date archives and friendly URLs. The company badly needs a shot in the arm for its content marketing efforts - so we're looking into the creation of infographics and other types of high quality, sharable content with an outreach effort. Ideally I want this content to be hosted on the Ecommerce site, but am faced with a few options which I'd appreciate the community's view on: How I should handle the mix of the legacy content on /blog and the addition of new, "high quality" content? (Pimp v1) Leave the /blog exactly as is and add the new, high quality content as new posts to it. Invest in pimping the /blog UI so that it has features such as commenting/tag clouds etc. They could migrate the blog to Wordpress, but leave it on the same URL. (Cut loose) Leave the /blog alone, and start afresh with a new Wordpress blog for the new, high quality content. e.g. /News or news.mydomain.com. The old blog posts probably aren't worth bothering about, but it might be risky to delete them as there are a lot and are better off with them than without. (Pimp v2) Set up a new Wordpress blog (e.g. /News or news.mydomain.com) for the new content and move the old /blog content to it. 301 the old /blog posts to the new location. The depth of old content that exists will add weight to the new content from a user's perspective, but will seem sparse if published on its own. Not sure why I would do this, but it's an option... (Kill) Kill the old /blog content, start a new one for the new, high quality content. Maybe there's another option I haven't considered. Thanks in advance, George

    | webmethod
    1
  • petrakraft


    Don't take that question too serious but all answers are welcome 😉 Answer to all:
    "Gentlemen, I see you did you best - at least I hope so! But after all I suppose I am stuck here to go on reading the SEOmoz blog if I can't sqeeze more secrets from you!

    | petrakraft
    9
  • DarinPirkey


    One of my clients is moving their subdomain to a subfolder on their main domain.  (ie.  blog.example.com to example.com/blog) I just wanted to get everyone's thoughts on some best practices for things we should be doing/looking for when making this move.? ie WMT, .htaccess, 301s etc? Thanks.

    | DarinPirkey
    0
  • Masoko-T


    Greetings A client was hit by penguin 2.1, my guess is that this was due to linkbuilding using directories. Google webmaster tools has detected about 117 links to the site and they are all from directories. Furthermore, the anchor texts are a bit too "perfect" to be natural,  so I guess this two factors have earned the client's site an algorithm penalty (no manual penalty warning has been received in GWT). I have started to clean some of the backlinks, on Oct the 11th. Some of the webmasters I asked complied with my request to eliminate backlinks, some didn´t, I disavowed the links from the later. I saw some improvements on mid october for the most important KW (see graph) but ever since then the rankings have been falling steadily. I'm thinking about giving up on the domain name and just migrating the site to a new URL. So FINALLY MY QUESTION IS: if I migrate this 6-page site to a new URL, should I change the content completely ? I mean, if I just copy  paste the content of the curent site into a new URL I will incur in dpolicate content, correct?. Is there some of the content I can copy ? or should I just start from scratch? Cheers hRggeNE

    | Masoko-T
    0
  • jasondexter


    We have a large client that we've just taken on board for organic search marketing. A great client that continually gets links from the BBC, NY Times etc which actually takes care of having to do any marketing for them. However, they get 10-15 unlinked mentions per day. Just recently, they peaked at 32 mentions in one day from JUST websites. But I need a quick way to filter these out and check if there is a link pointing to their website. I want to be able to build up a list of opportunities without having to manually check each website. How do, Mozzlars!?

    | jasondexter
    0
  • teconsite


    Hi, we have a blog site xxxxxxxxxxx.es, that yesterday dissapear from google ranks all of a sudden it only appears if you write xxxxxxxxx.es I have checked gogle webmaster tools and there are no manual actions, no messages. Also, we don't have much links pointing to this site. Webmaster tools show only 319 links. We don't understand what have happenned. Never see something similar. What do you think? Any help would be appreciated. How do you proceed in this cases? It doesn't seem to be a link problem.  How do you know what kind of penalty do you have? Thank you. Update: Hi, the domain is www.crearcorreoelectronico.es I have check the majestic seo, ose, and wmt and get the links. We have some links that are not good, but are automatic ones, that some portals generate. Maybe is something related with the content. I don't know Thanks

    | teconsite
    1
  • bassbuds


    We've had a massive change in our position, we were pretty stable on certain keywords for quite some time, however in the past week we were bouncing around and then thrown completely off with some of our keywords dropping to page 4 and some to page 2. I've noticed a lot of changes on the google uk serps, and not sure if it is just a penguin refresh or if its a new one that hasn't been announced. anyone else notice?

    | bassbuds
    1
  • Creode


    We've had some shuffling for a keyword in the SERP results over last few days! Anyone else seeing their rankings bounce all over? It's only affecting one keyword that was previously a stable performer - this has occurred for the last few weeks (with no major changes to the page). Would be keen to hear your thoughts!

    | Creode
    1
  • DougHoltOnline


    In David Mihm's article on Local Search Ranking Factors, he lists "HTML NAP Matching Place Page NAP". What is this exactly?

    | DougHoltOnline
    1
  • S2RSolutions


    Hello all. What would be some of the best practices or good resources on site redesign while maintaining inbound links? We would hate to have the natural, organic links to the site we have generated over the past 3 years to all of a sudden become broken. The domain is not changing but the URL structure very well may. For example, www.domain dot com/blog/postabouttopic which has many inbound links may move to www.domain dot com/news/blog/postabouttopic Is it a matter of simply using 301 redirects from the old pages to the new pages? Is there any issues to be aware of when having hundreds of 301 redirects? Is there a best practice? A good site that explains this in detail? Thank you for your time! Have a great day!

    | S2RSolutions
    0
  • tylerwp


    I have an A grade for a specific keyword, my competitors ranked above me have poor grades.
    My "Root Domains Linking to the Page" is higher than competitors ranked above me.
    Yet I'm ranked 7th on google. 
    Even worse the 3rd place ranked URL has very poor page authority and linking. What is giving these poor sites such great rankings? Jxluy8Z.png

    | tylerwp
    0
  • rhoadesjohn


    Ok, I'm reaching out to all of you Moz'rs for some help with this one. My client's site has dropped off the face of google in a real short period of time.  It went from page 1 (avg rank 3 to page 6 (avg rank 50) and below in the matter of 2 weeks. Here's some facts: 1.  DA is a 22 and homepage PA is a 31.  It outranks all other sites in its competitive set. 2.  The homepage used to be the page that displays for keyword searches, now its the FAQ page, which has a lower PA of 23. Why has the home page seemingly vaporized?  And, why is the FAQ showing as the first result? What should I start checking.  I feel paralyzed, not sure where to start. More info: a.  There are no alerts present in Webmaster Tools. b.  For some reason the homepage (domain.com) was 301'd to domain.com/home.html.  Domain.com is indexed by Google, however, domain.com/home.html is not.  If this is the issue, what is the best way to handle it? Thanks in advance for your help!

    | rhoadesjohn
    1
  • herlamba


    I currently have my sub-product hosted on a subdomain that I have, for example say it is: x.mysite.com. I plan to migrate and move this to mysite.com. I was planning to do this by having mysite.com pointing to x.mysite.com and do a 301 redirect x.mysite.com to mysite.com. Is it as simple as that? Any other consideration, tips and tricks that I should be aware of so that my SERP doesn't get messed up. Any articles or guides on this subject matter would be highly appreciated

    | herlamba
    0
  • BobGW


    Hello, We have like twenty 404s left to find. How do you find these when: 1. They don't show up in Google Webmaster Tools 2. They don't have any other internal or external pages linking to them. 3. They don't show up in site:domain.com (We have 9000 pages and only 600 show up - I fixed those out of the 600). 4. They are probably causing high bounce rates. 5. They're not in the sitemap Thanks!

    | BobGW
    0
  • brianhalweil


    We publish four local food and drink magazines, each with its own website and related web content. Even though the content across all four titles shares a common mission, there is little overlap in actual stories. That is, each site has its own story content, events calendar and business listing guide. Still, since we share an editorial staff and a common look among all four, we are debating the pros and cons of a few different wordpress and SEO configurations, and would welcome the community's input on the pros and cons. Here is what we are considering for the Wordpress configuration: Wordpress Multisite - concerns about 10-15% performance hit, incompatibility with certain plug ins, need to more ‘expert’ development InfiniteWP - concerns that adding a 3rd party plugin to the mix might complicate things Parent / child themes A single wordpress site with different content subfolders for each locale - simplifies events / guide listings / seo, but too much in one place? Problems with current config (four different wordpress installs across four different base domains - ediblemanhattan.com, ediblebrooklyn.com, ediblelongisland.com, etc) SEO value is currently spread across four base domains Four different wordpress installs / upgrades / templates / plugins must be managed separately Four different namespaces for registered users make cross-domain registration more difficult, less usable The independent site approach is potentially problematic if we were to decide to combine certain site features - for example guide and event listings - into a single site experience filterable by zip / location Our questions: WP config: independent sites vs. multisite vs. parent/child themes vs. other? SEO config: should we move to shared parent domain?  If we do, should we use locale-based subfolders or second level domains (brooklyn.ediblemag.com vs. ediblemag.com/brooklyn)? Operations: We think there are SEO advantages to move all four sites share the same base domain - ex, ediblemagazine.com, but are there operational disadvantages we are not considering? Ability for local site editors to work within their locale section only Ability for ad sales to target a single locale, example, run of site display ads on specific locales Ability to segment users by their locale - ex. enroll users in email lists for edible brooklyn only

    | brianhalweil
    0
  • rja214


    Hello and thanks in advance for any help you can offer me! Customgia.com, a costume jewelry e-commerce site, has two types of product pages - public pages that are internally linked and private pages that are only accessible by accessing the URL directly.  Every item on Customgia is created online using an online design tool.  Users can register for a free account and save the designs they create, even if they don't purchase them.  Prior to saving their design, the user is required to enter a product name and choose "public" or "private" for that design.  The page title and product description are auto-generated. Since launching in October '11, the number of products grew and grew as more users designed jewelry items.  Most users chose to show their designs publicly, so the number of products in the store swelled to nearly 3000.  I realized many of these designs were similar to each and occasionally exact duplicates.  So over the past 8 months, I've made 2300 of these design "private" - and no longer accessible unless the designer logs into their account (these pages can also be linked to directly). When I realized that Google had indexed nearly all 3000 products, I entered URL removal requests on Webmaster Tools for the designs that I had changed to "private".  I did this starting about 4 months ago.  At the time, I did not have NOINDEX meta tags on these product pages (obviously a mistake) so it appears that most of these product pages were never removed from the index.  Or if they were removed, they were added back in after the 90 days were up. Of the 716 products currently showing (the ones I want Google to know about), 466 have unique, informative descriptions written by humans.  The remaining 250 have auto-generated descriptions that read coherently but are somewhat similar to one another.  I don't think these 250 descriptions are the big problem right now but these product pages can be hidden if necessary. I think the big problem is the 2000 product pages that are still in the Google index but shouldn't be.  The following Google query tells me roughly how many product pages are in the index:  site:Customgia.com inurl:shop-for Ideally, it should return just over 716 results but instead it's returning 2650 results.  Most of these 1900 product pages have bad product names and highly similar, auto-generated descriptions and page titles.  I wish Google never crawled them. Last week, NOINDEX tags were added to all 1900 "private" designs so currently the only product pages that should be indexed are the 716 showing on the site.  Unfortunately, over the past ten days the number of product pages in the Google index hasn't changed. One solution I initially thought might work is to re-enter the removal requests because now, with the NOINDEX tags, these pages should be removed permanently.   But I can't determine which product pages need to be removed because Google doesn't let me see that deep into the search results.  If I look at the removal request history it says "Expired" or "Removed" but these labels don't seem to correspond in any way to whether or not that page is currently indexed.  Additionally, Google is unlikely to crawl these "private" pages because they are orphaned and no longer linked to any public pages of the site (and no external links either). Currently, Customgia.com averages 25 organic visits per month (branded and non-branded) and close to zero sales.  Does anyone think de-indexing the entire site would be appropriate here?  Start with a clean slate and then let Google re-crawl and index only the public pages - would that be easier than battling with Webmaster tools for months on end? Back in August, I posted a similar problem that was solved using NOINDEX tags (de-indexing a different set of pages on Customgia): http://moz.com/community/q/does-this-site-have-a-duplicate-content-issue#reply_176813 Thanks for reading through all this!

    | rja214
    0
  • TomKing


    Hi all, We create approximately 8-10 circa 800 word articles every week with the majority being added to our blog - I do tend to internally link from the blog to relevant pages on our website... I have been introduced to some 'syndication tools' such as; TribePro Onlywire SocialAdr ...and wondered whether these are deemed as 'gaming the system' and so potentially 'grey hat'? I would appreciate comments from anyone who has a view and particularly from anyone who has possibly used any of these tools... Many thanks Andy

    | TomKing
    0
  • yatesandcojewelers


    After reading Rand's great article about building Seo focused pages to serve topics, not keywords (http://moz.com/blog/topics-people-over-keywords-rankings-whiteboard-friday ) I started looking at my site. Question:  I have 2 very similar category pages, orginally built to go after similar but different keyword terms. For example, one is:  domain.com/blue-rings.html  and the other is domain.com/blue-bands.com.  (bridal jewelry)  "Blue" is just a hypothetical type. At one time I could rank for "blue-rings" and "blue-bands".  But with google changes, I think it's better to focus on a general term, right?  Not set up similar pages, with same product, for very similar keywords. I'm thinking that having these 2 pages could be actually hurting, as they are competing with each other. Any recommendations? Thanks folks! Ron

    | yatesandcojewelers
    0
  • AymanH


    Hello Moooooooooooz ! I got a SEO fight today and though the best would be to involve more people into the fight ! 😛 Do you think it's better to get A- company.com/services/service1.html or B- company/service1.html I was for A as services is also googled to find the service1. I also think that it's better to help google to understand where the service is on the website My friend was for B as URL has to stay as short as possible What do you think ? ps: I can create the URL I want using Joomla and Sh404. The websites has 4 different categoies: /about, /services/ products, /projects Tks ! 🙂

    | AymanH
    0
  • SOM24


    I have a website that is showing lots of errors (pages that cannot be found) in google webmaster tools.  I went through the errors and re-directed the pages I could.  There are a bunch of remaining pages that are not really pages this is why they are showing errors.  What's strange is some of the URL's are showing feeds which these were never created.  I went into Google webmaster tools and looked at the remove URL tool.  I am using this but I am confused if I need to be selecting "remove page from search results and cache" option or should I be selecting this other option "remove directory"  I am confused on the directory.  I don't want to accidentally delete core pages of the site from the search engines. Can anybody shed some light on this or recommend which I should be selecting? Thank you Wendy

    | SOM24
    0
  • BeytzNet


    Hi, Is there a recommended setting (or even plugin) to use when saving image files on my Wordpress blog?
    Which folders etc. Thanks

    | BeytzNet
    0
  • BobAnderson


    Why do most blog owners not put content that is unique to the home page above the fold before posts begin?

    | BobAnderson
    0
  • rhoadesjohn


    I'm working on a client's site and noticed a brisk drop in rankings.  In doing some digging I found that the homepage (domain.com) is 301'd to domain.com/home.html.  Here's my problem/questions: 1.  domain.com is indexed by Google 2.  domain.com/home.html is not indexed by Google 3.  both domains have some healthy linking 4.  Is the fact that domain.com/home.html impacting rankings? 5.  How do carefully handle this situation (ex. redirect domain.com/home.html back to domain.com?) 6.  See the attached jpeg for a visual representation of my debacle. hcIiPAs

    | rhoadesjohn
    0
  • JohnW-UK


    A client has just switched from us to another provider and I have been checking up on the work done and the only change they have made is to bold lots of keywords on each page - I thought this was a practice that did not work - is there any evidence of this working or not working? Any articles/proof that we are not using out dated practices as we stopped doing this ages ago and yet the new provider is doing this. Who is right or wrong?

    | JohnW-UK
    0
  • RickyShockley


    Hey guys, I recently got a press hit featuring a tip I provided for an article on marketing medical practices. The article is on examiner.com and I am wondering what their reason may be for no-following the links in their articles ...ttp://www.examiner.com/article/the-biggest-challenges-medical-marketing-and-how-to-overcome-them-1 Don't get me wrong, I understand and am excited about the intrinsic benefits of being featured in such an article...just wondered why something like that would be no-followed! Would love to hear your thoughts. Thanks, Ricky

    | RickyShockley
    0
  • seoninjaz


    We recently took a good look at one of our content site's sitemap and tried to cut out a lot of crap that had gotten in there such as .php, .xml, .htm versions of each page. We also cut out images to put in a separate image sitemap. The sitemap generated 83,000+ URLs for google to crawl (this partially used the Yoast Wordpress plugin to generate) In webmaster tools in the index status section is showing that this site has a total index of 1.5 million. With our sitemap coming back with 83k and google indexing 1.5 million pages, is this a sign of a CMS gone rogue? Is it an indication that we could be pumping out error pages or empty templates, or junk pages that we're cramming into Google's bot? I would love to hear what you guys think. Is this normal? Is this something to be concerned about? Should our total index more closely match our sitemap page count?

    | seoninjaz
    0
  • stephenshone


    Hi, I asked a question around 6 months ago about our rankings steadily declining since April of 2013. I did originally reply to that topic a few days ago, but as it's so old I don't think it's been noticed. I'm posting again here, if that's an issue I'm happy to delete. Here it is for reference: http://moz.com/community/q/site-rankings-steadily-decreasing-do-i-need-to-remove-links Since the original post,  I have done nothing linkbuilding-wise except posting blog posts and sharing them on Facebook, G+ and Twitter. There are some links in there which don't look great (ie spammy seo directories, which I'm sending removal requests to) although quite a lot of others are relevant. Here's my link profile: <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.thomassmithfasteners.com</a> I've tried to make the site more accessible - we now have a simple, responsive design and I've tried to make the content clear and concise. In short, written for humans rather than search engines. As of the end of November, 'nuts and bolts' has now disappeared completely, and 'bolts and nuts' is page 8. There are many pages much higher which are not as relevant and have no links. We still rank highly for more specialised terms - ie 'bsw bolts' and 'imperial bolts' are still page 1, but not as high as before. We get an 'A' grade on the on-page grader for 'nuts and bolts, and most above us get F. I was cautious about removing links as our profile doesn't seem too bad but it does seem as if it's that. There are a fair few questionable directories in there, no doubt about that, but our overall practice in recent years has been natural building and link earning. So - I've created a spreadsheet and identified the bad links - ie directories with any SEO connotations. I am about to submit removal requests, I thought two polite requests a couple of weeks apart prior to disavowing with Google. But am I safe to disavow straight away? I say this as I don't think I'll get too many responses from those directories. I am also gradually beefing up the content on the shop pages in case of any 'thin content' issues after advice on the previous post. I noticed 100s of broken links in webmaster tools last week due to 2 broken links on our blog that repeated on every page and have fixed those. I have also been fixing errors W3C compliance-wise. Am I right to do all this? Can anyone offer any suggestions? I'm still not 100% sure if this is Panda, Penguin or something else. My guess is Penguin, but the decline started in March 2013, which correlates with Panda. Best Regards and thanks for any help, Stephen

    | stephenshone
    0
  • williamelward


    So many coupon sites and other websites these days will only link to your website if you have a relationship with Commission Junction or one of the other large affiliate networks.  It seems to me that links on these sites are really unfair as they allow businesses with deep pockets to acquire links unequitably. To me it seems like these are "paid links", as the average website cannot afford the cost of running an affiliate program.   Even worse, the only reason why these businesses are earning a link is because they have an affiliate program; that to me should violate some sort of Google rule about types and values of links.  The existence of an affiliate program as the only reason for earning a link is preposterous.  It's just as bad as paid link directories that have no editorial standards.  I realize the affiliate links are wrapped in CJ's code, so that mush diminish the value of the link, but there is still tons of good value in having the brand linked to from these high authority sites.

    | williamelward
    0
  • LosNomads


    I have rather an unusual situation where a recently launched affiliate site does not have any unique content as its all syndicated content. For that reason we are currently using the noindex,nofollow meta tags to keep the pages out of the search engines index until we create unique content for the pages. The problem is that due to a very tight timeframe with rebranding, we are looking at 301 redirecting (on a page to page basis) another high authority legacy domain to this new site before we have had a chance to add unique content to it and remove the noindex,nofollow tags. I would assume that any link authority normally passed through the 301 would be lost in this scenario but Im uncertain of what the broader impact might be. Has anyone dealt with a similar scenario? I know this scenario is not ideal and I would rather wait until the unique content is up and noindex tags are removed before launching the 301 redirect of the legacy domain but there are a number of competing priorities at play outside of SEO.

    | LosNomads
    0
  • Chammy


    Hi Mozzers I'm just doing an audit for a client and see that all non-trailing-slash URLs are 301'd to trailing-slash URLS. So far so good. But then all the trailing-slash URLs are canonicalled back to the non-trailing-slash URLs. This feels wrong to me, but is it? Never come across this before. Should the canonicals just be removed? Any help much appreciated

    | Chammy
    0
  • PrasanthMohanachandran


    Am working on a website http://www.greavescotton.com. A month ago most of the keywords were in first page. This month I have noticed the fall of keyword rankings. I have checked the webmaster tools for any mails and messages but I did not find any. So can anyone please visit the site and check it and please give me the suggestions accordingly to increase the traffic and keywords. Also I would like to know the advantages of commenting in Youtube.com.

    | PrasanthMohanachandran
    0
  • SMG-Texas


    Fellow Mozzers, I'm having a hard time wrapping my brain around a redirect issue and thought it was worth posing the question to the Moz community.  I did a search first but couldn't find the exact answer I was looking for. How does a 301 redirect work when you redirect a sub domain example.homepage.com to www.homepage.com but you keep the sub directories of example.homepage.com/page-1 active and are trying to rank them?  I'm dealing with a current project where this is happening and this doesn't make sense to me, to redirect the subdomain if you're also trying to rank/create search traffic for pages, sub directories on example.homepage.com. This also get's into the debate of if a sub domain site is viewed as it's own website and therefore has to rank itself.  If this is true, it seems like we're kind of killing the authority of the site by redirecting it. Additionally, www.homepage.com has a much stronger link profile than example.homepage.com I hope this makes sense.  Any thoughts are appreciated.  Thanks for your time.

    | SMG-Texas
    0
  • Intergen


    I need your support.  I've been doing "SEO" for several years - but sticking to sustainable methods. No junk links Decent content Decent site etc The site is advisein.com and it was ranking well for several terms such as: best lsat prep best lsat preparation best lsat course etc. Also there are some youtube videos (with the google thumbnail) that were doing extremely well in search and even those dropped in the rankings. Can any of you tell if there are some glaring issues that I am missing that would make the website and youtube videos drop 30 - 40+ spots in SERP's over the past few months after dominating for the last 3 years? Thank you in advance and I welcome additional questions and any ides....

    | Intergen
    0
  • yacpro13


    Hello, here's our situation:We have an ecommerce website, say www.example.com. For support, we use zendesk which offers a great platform that makes publishing FAQ and various resource articles very easy. We're torn between publishing these articles on our actual website, or publishing them via Zendesk. If we publish them on our website, the url would be something like:
    www.example.com/articles/title_article.html On the other hand, if we publish them via zendesk, the url would look like:
    support.example.com/articles/title_of_article We would like to publish them via Zendesk, however, we do no want to miss out on any SEO benefit, however marginal it may be. Doing it this way, the domain would have all of the ecommerce pages (product and category pages), and the subdomain would have ALL other types of pages (help articles and also policies, such as return policies, shipping info, etc etc). I know a long time ago, folders were preferred over subdomains for SEO, but things change all the time.Do you think setting up all the ecommerce pages on the domain, and all content pages on the subdomain, would be a lesser solution? Thanks.

    | yacpro13
    0
  • co.mc


    We moved a website over to a new domain name. We used 301 redirects to redirect all the pages individually (around 150 redirects). So my question is, when should we just kill the old site completely and just redirect (forward/point) the old domain over to the new one?

    | co.mc
    0
  • jyoung222


    A client of mine is about to launch into the USA market (currently only operating in Canada) and they are trying to find the best way to geo-target.  We recommended they go with the geo-targeted subfolder approach (___.com and ___.com/ca). I'm looking for any ways to assist in not getting these pages flagged for duplicate content. Your help is greatly appreciated. Thanks!

    | jyoung222
    0
  • jacksghost


    I have a 10 yr old website that we are just now adding a Symantec SSL with Extended Validation.  I've seen some older posts about whether switching to URL's to HTTP effects Google ranking and I understand it may in the short run, but I wondered if anyone had any updated info about how best to go about this.  Are there any step by step articles that could walk me through this? Our certificate is already installed now, but we haven't forced it out there yet.  If I understand right, we will use the HTTPS on the entire site.  I am not very experienced with 301's, but I believe I can set this up in Godaddy.com where our domain is reigstered so that our old HTTP forwards to HTTPS.  Also, I don't think this effects anything within GWT so I don't think I have to make any changes there. Am I missing anything? FYI, the prices for this on the Symantec site are pretty high for a small business like ours.  I looked around and found https://www.thesslstore.com/, an SSL reseller, had cheaper prices listed on their site.  As it turns out, I called to ask a technical question and the sales person offered to email me a custom quote that was even cheaper than what was listed on their site.  So if you are dealing with a limited budget, I might recommend you call The SSL Store and get a quote from them.  I am not an affiliate and having nothing to do with them, I was just happy with their service and I believe it cost me about 1/2 of the price on the Symantec site.  Hope that helps someone.

    | jacksghost
    0
  • JohnW-UK


    Hello,We have a wordpress site that has some "hidden" pages with weird URL's. Due to the way the site was built (not by us) if we setup our standard practice for 404 pages some site functionality will be lost.Standard Practice for 404's www.domain.com/fafsaf shows 404 error pageProposed solution:- www.domain.com/safaf >forwards to> www.domain.com/404 - shows 404 error page. Will this stop the search engines indexing the pages? - we have also amended the robots.txt to try and stop some pages being indexed but we still keep finding the odd little "hidden" page.The aim is to try and get all the search engines just to index the few simple pages on the sitemap instead of finding all these extra pages.

    | JohnW-UK
    0
  • csfarnsworth


    I have certain URL's that I have fixed before in google webmaster. With smartphone addition. It start appearing again. How can I fix the Google webmaster errrors for smartphones?

    | csfarnsworth
    0
  • ThisisPlanB


    Hi, A client of ours has previously been hosting their main website on a sub-domain of their primary URL. They currently have a training application being hosted on the main domain. They also currently have a redirect in place so when you go to www.xzy.com, you're redirected to xzy.xzy.com. If need need to stick with this set-up for the website relaunch later this month, my question is: are there any SEO drawbacks to having the entire site hosted on a sub-domain? Should we fight to get the training application off the main domain, at which point we can host everything on the main domain? Many thanks! Dan

    | ThisisPlanB
    0
  • ross254sidney


    I have blog website – packforcity.com, all articles were having almost same title tags (as need of the website) I only change the city name for example What to Wear in Miami in February What To Wear In Dubai In February What To Wear In Budapest In February What to Wear in Beijing in February What to Wear in Los Angeles in January What to Wear in Miami in January What to Wear in Las Vegas in January Is this over optimization?? Before December, My all keywords were ranked on the first page and my old articles still ranked, but my January and February articles (newly posted articles) were ranked No where in Google. Has my website hit by google?

    | ross254sidney
    0
  • Modi


    Hello, Need Advise. We are in Automobiles We have an Automotive site - build 3 yrs back - which is our main site (Site A) We built a separate niche site on Used cars 2.5 yrs back (Site B - url http://www.usedcarindelhi.com) - did seo - promote it for a year and later on in feb 2013 - did 301 domain redirection to Site A Now - we thinking to rebuild Site Site B again and remove redirection Will there be any harm on Site A, as we have now removed the redirection or shall we pass on link from home page of Site B to Site A i.e say Powered by Site A (on Top) or at all no direct linking is actually needed. PS :- Also - can anyone let know the backlink quality of www.usedcarindelhi.com. Its PR 3, DA - 18, Majestic Citation Flow - 18, Trust Flow - 11 . Pl advise

    | Modi
    0
  • Olivier_Lambert


    Hi, I have a website where many searches are made by the googlebot on our internal engine. We can make noindex on result page, but we want to stop the bot to call the ajax search button - GET form (because it pass a request to an external API with associate fees). So, we want to stop crawling the form button, without noindex the search page itself. The "nofollow" tag don't seems to apply on button's submit. Any suggestion?

    | Olivier_Lambert
    0
  • jcgoodrich


    I have a responsive site and we hide elements on smaller media types. For example, we have an extensive sitemap in the footer on desktop, but when you shrink the viewport to mobile we don't show the footer. Does this practice make Google's mobile bot crawler much less efficient and therefore impact our mobile search rankings?

    | jcgoodrich
    1

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