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Category: Intermediate & Advanced SEO

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  • I'm working on a site that has historically had issues ranking the homepage.  We cleaned up some on page issues and then it went into a high and low pattern - page 4 then page 12 etc (was static around page 9 before), settling at page 6. The link profile was not good and there were a high level of links that should have been no-follow as they were clearly looking paid for - we addressed this along with some other poor links.  This effectively dropped ranking down to page 23, but not unexpected considering the very big drop in followed links. Meanwhile we have embarked on a fresh steady link building strategy with nice clean links, varied anchor text coming from varying DA domains, smattered with a few no-follow links - strongly focussing on being as natural as possible. At the Penguin update the homepage has totally disappeared.  Frustratingly just after the update (same day) we removed a 301ed old domain from the profile.  This was the old company URL which we discovered had a lot of spam linking associated with it.  An oversight - there were other 301 domains that were removed some time ago which were totally unrelated to the main site and we were told all other domains were simply bought and redirected to stop hijacking - all but this were. Considering the work we have done would it be good assumption this domain 301 could be the underlying factor?  So far organic traffic is steady, in fact a tad up. What would you guys do?

    | MickEdwards
    0

  • Hey guys/gals I have tried asking this very specific question 3-4 times already and some how my specific question seems to be getting side tracked and my very specif question pertaining to my URL structure keeps getting bypassed and overlooked. I am wondering about if this URL structure would become a possible issue in the somewhat near future with GOOGLE considering what I have seen go down in the SEO world the past 2 years. Does this URL Structure  look SPAMMY? http://www.pcmedicsoncall.com/computer-repair/laptop-repair/ www.pcmedicsoncall.com/computer-repair/laptop-repair/laptop-screen-repair/ Below is a Screen shot of the Site which I designed where I have created a SILO Site Architecture. .....PLEASE... Look at the Picture Thank you Marshall SEOMOZ-PC-MEDICS-ON-CALL-1.jpg

    | MarshallThompson31
    0

  • It looks like our CMS may not be configured correctly as there is an empty section in the rel="canonical" rel="canonical" href="{page_uri}" /> Will having the above meta tag be harmful to our SEO?

    | voicesdotcom
    0

  • Hi, We have a client with an old domain that they want to redirect to their primary domain. They also have a few older domains pointing to the old domain. Do you recommend leaving them as redirects that point to the old domain? This will create a redirect to a redirect situation. Or, is it better to go ahead and redirect those older domains to the primary one's, removing one layer of redirect? Thank you! Jessie

    | JessieT
    0

  • Think about the switching anchors from the backlinks and the 100s of sidewide inlinks... I gues Google will understand that it's just a RSS feed right?

    | Zanox
    0

  • So, the thing is, we don't want these websites associated with anything pro-life or Christian. So, we can't list them in those directories. And we can't list them in abortion provider directories because they don't do abortions. The organizaitons are Christian, pro-life -- but the target audience is the complete opposite. How can I effectively market their services without crossing any boundaries?

    | CGR-Creative
    0

  • Hi, I have a lot of near dupe content caused by URL params - so I have applied: How long will it take for this to take effect? It's been over a week now, I have done some removal with GWT removal tool, but still no major indexed pages dropped. Any ideas? Thanks, Ben

    | bjs2010
    0

  • I am trying to market my company to North Carolina & West Virginia. This is a bit of a challenge since the name is "Decorative Concrete of Virginia." My idea was to create landing pages for the specific areas (Greensboro & Raleigh, NC for now).... A new landing page them that I purchased came with a plugin that would allow you to generate a ton of landing pages with little effort by replacing some elements of the landing page, depending on the URL... For example, I have these two URLs set up right now: http://www.decorativeconcreteofvirginia.com/northcarolina/test/raleigh/nc http://www.decorativeconcreteofvirginia.com/northcarolina/test/greensboro/nc My question is... Is merely changing the city in each landing page enough, or should I change some of the other content too? I was going to create one landing page for NC, and then try to include all of the cities on that one page... but perhaps it would be easier to rank if I had one for each city. Any thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks! Tim

    | Timvroom
    0

  • Why the archive sub pages are still indexed by Google? I am using the WordPress SEO by Yoast, and selected the needed option to get these pages no-index  in order to avoid the duplicate content.

    | MichaelNewman
    1

  • Hi, Is this syntax ok for the bots, especially Google to pick up? Still waiting for Google to drop lots of duplicate pages caused by parameters out of the index - if there are parameters in the querystring it inserts the code above into the head. Thanks!

    | bjs2010
    1

  • My site is bestwebconsult [dot] com When I do a search for my exact domain name in Google and bing, it does not appear at all. I have submitted a sitemap to Webmaster Tools. It is a relatively new site completed with in the last month. Built with Joomla. This leads me to believe that something is misconfigured on the website. Please advise, thanks!

    | crave81
    1

  • Hi folks, a website is hosted with a TLD like .com in the USA. The content etc. is obviously all english but now we want to focus on a specific Google like .co.uk What must be necessarily be done to rank better? Is it enough just to buy a .co.uk domain and set the nameserver up or do we need to get a british hosting? Thanks in advance. Mike

    | KillAccountPlease
    0

  • I just realized yesterday while doing some audit work on our site (which is still relatively new) that all of our audio assets are stored on a separate sub-domain. We are an eCommerce site that sells audio books, and every product page has a sample audio file to listen to.  But all those files are stored on a sub-domain of the main site.  "cdn-media.oursite.com". First, I understand that media(our audio files) has some inherent SEO value if hosted correctly.  Is that true?  And if so, how important would you think it is? Secondly, assuming that it does have value, are we losing that value by having them hosted on a sub-domain?  I have read things that say sub-domains are bad, and I have read things that say that Google at least has been treating sub-domains as sub-folders, but I can't find anything definitive one way or the other. On another note, another thing I saw is that people are linking to the sound files directly in various places, and those links are going to the sub-domain, not the main domain.  There aren't even pages on the sub-domain, just the files, so those links deliver a "visitor" to a page that is completely blank except for a tiny little audio player.  Not sure what to do about that, but that can't be good one way or the other right? How big of a problem is this really?  Is it worth me going to our IT dept. and trying to change it?  It sounds like it would be a pretty big deal to change, so I'll need a few voices to back me up if that's the case.

    | DownPour
    0

  • Hello all, I look after (in house) 3 domains for one niche travel business across three TLDs: .com .com.au and co.uk and a fourth domain on a co.nz TLD which was recently removed from Googles index. Symptoms: For the past 12 months we have been experiencing canibalisation in the SERPs (namely .com.au being rendered in .com) and Panda related ranking devaluations between our .com site and com.au site. Around 12 months ago the .com TLD was hit hard (80% drop in target KWs) by Panda (probably) and we began to action the below changes. Around 6 weeks ago our .com TLD saw big overnight increases in rankings (to date a 70% averaged increase). However, almost to the same percentage we saw in the .com TLD we suffered significant  drops in our .com.au rankings. Basically Google seemed to switch its attention from .com TLD to the .com.au TLD. Note: Each TLD is over 6 years old, we've never proactively gone after links (Penguin) and have always aimed for quality in an often spammy industry. **Have done: ** Adding HREF LANG markup to all pages on all domain Each TLD uses local vernacular e.g for the .com site is American Each TLD has pricing in the regional currency Each TLD has details of the respective local offices, the copy references the lacation, we have significant press coverage in each country like The Guardian for our .co.uk site and Sydney Morning Herlad for our Australia site Targeting each site to its respective market in WMT Each TLDs core-pages (within 3 clicks of the primary nav) are 100% unique We're continuing to re-write and publish unique content to each TLD on a weekly basis As the .co.nz site drove such little traffic re-wrting we added no-idex and the TLD has almost compelte dissapread (16% of pages remain) from the SERPs. XML sitemaps Google + profile for each TLD **Have not done: ** Hosted each TLD on a local server Around 600 pages per TLD are duplicated across all TLDs (roughly 50% of all content). These are way down the IA but still duplicated. Images/video sources from local servers Added address and contact details using SCHEMA markup Any help, advice or just validation on this subject would be appreciated! Kian

    | team_tic
    1

  • I've tried applying a couple times through their form over the last six months with no response. Has anyone here been accepted as a news source, and if so, what did you do? To clarify, I mean accepted into the Yahoo News index (submission form here: http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/news_global/submitsource.html?from_url=http%3A%2F%2Fhelp.yahoo.com%2Fkb%2Findex%3B_ylt%3DAm2jThOClBnKBsnrNsRjE6a5OSV4%3Fpage%3Dproduct%26amp%3By%3DPROD_NEWS%26amp%3Blocale%3Den_US&last_url=http%3A%2F%2Fhelp.yahoo.com%2Fkb%2Findex%3B_ylt%3DAm2jThOClBnKBsnrNsRjE6a5OSV4%3Fpage%3Dproduct%26amp%3By%3DPROD_NEWS%26amp%3Blocale%3Den_US) We've already been accepted into Google News and Bing News, but not Yahoo News

    | nicole.healthline
    0

  • Hi, I am considering making the 301 redirect from the domain to a 302 temporary redirect. Currently if a user lands on "www" version of the site, they are redirected to the non "www" version. But after the redirect, they will land on an external webpage (so if a user lands on the "www" version, they are redirected to a different website, not related to my domain). Reason I'm considering this is because I have received a large number of spammy backlinks on the "www" version of the site (negative seo). So I'm hoping that the temporary redirect will help me recover. Your thoughts on this: 1. Is this the best way to do a 302 redirect (redirecting the www version to an external domain)? 2. Will the redirect help the main domain recover, considering all spammy backlinks are pointing to the www version? 3. What are the pros/cons, if any? Thanks in advance for your thoughts! Howard

    | howardd
    0

  • We are currently in the process of moving our site from a mixed case structure i.e -> <sitename>/franchise/childrens-child-care/party/Bricks-4-Kidz/company-information.cfm</sitename> to all lowercase i.e -> <sitename>/franchise/childrens-child-care/party/bricks-4-kidz/company-information.cfm.</sitename> In order to maintain as much link juice as possible, should we be using 301 redirects to point from the old to the new? or would it be more advantageous to wait for the next crawl and the link juice would also be somewhat maintained even though the all the upper case letters have been converted to lowercase?

    | franchisesolutions
    0

  • Can it hurt your website if there are thousands of links to your website from multiple websites with identical content? Is there a right way to use PR for SEO?

    | sbrault74
    0

  • Hi! Got quite a tricky problem regarding a client, http://www.muchbetteradventures.com/ and their previous site, http://v1.muchbetteradventures.com/ Here's the background: We have approx 1500 'listing' pages like this: http://v1.muchbetteradventures.com/listing/view/1925/the-barre-des-ecrins-or-the-dome-des-ecrins-mountaineering-trip They bring in min 2k hits/month, and also add to the overall site authority I suspect. They will eventually all have a home on main domain. When they do, they will also each have been rewritten to be unique, so the value of them will increase (many are currently not). We also have landing pages like this: http://v1.muchbetteradventures.com/view/559/volunteering-holidays- which despite being hideous are ranked fairly well (page 1 for key terms). We cannot currently  fulfil all these on main domain, but do not want to shut them down and lose positioning. Choices as I see it: Make a landing page e.g. muchbetteradventures.com/volunteering and a) redirect from old landing page, b) redirect all related 'listings' to this page. May help preserve rankings of main landing page (the most important), but not of any listings? Import all listings to have a home on main domain, (probably as children of a landing page, but not rewritten to be unique just yet). Make them not accessible from homepage, and change functionality of them so that new visitors from google are told we cannot currently help them with this trip. This is more work to complete so will take longer to do and is a distraction from our core focus so needs good justification! Stay running largely as we are, slowly redirecting 1 page at a time as we carry over more and more options to main domain. This will take over 12 months min.

    | neooptic
    0

  • I read a paper that penguin 2.0 is already running As anyone more information about that or any tool to seen how rankings has been affected

    | maestrosonrisas
    0

  • Hi SEOMoz, Today www.carrentalbuddy.com.au was hit pretty big by the Penguin 2.0 update (I believe). We had some pretty strong rankings for multiple search terms and we believe we have done everything by the book for Google. We can't seem to figure out why our rankings have dropped so dramatically recently and was hoping that some SEOMoz's could take a quick look to help us fix this problem. Kindest Regards, Chris

    | kymodo
    0

  • I know there isn't any official documentation from Google about exact number of seconds a user should spend on a site, but does anyone have any case studies that looks at what might be a good "dwell time" to shoot for? We're looking on integrating an exact time on site into or Google Analytics metrics to count as a 'non-bounce'--so, for example, if a user spends 45 seconds on an article, then, we wouldn't count it as a bounce, since the reader likely read through all the content.

    | nicole.healthline
    0

  • Hi We have a static sitemap and a blog...Uh oh!  We are are just realizing that the 2 are not very compatible!!  We need a dynamic sitemap.  Is there such a thing as a "set and forget" sitemap that updates itself without us maintaining a database of sitemap data? Thanks Andrew

    | Studio33
    0

  • Hi, I run a hotel booking site and the booking engine is setup on a subdomain.
     The subdomain is disabled from being indexed in robots.txt Should the links from the main domain have a nofollow to the subdomain? What are you thoughts? Thanks!

    | vmotuz
    0

  • If I aquire a website in the same industry targeting the same keywords. Should I merge them into one? I understand it's a bad idea to have multiple websites promoting the same thing, but i'd like to capture the customer base of a competing website. What's everyone's thoughts? A- Merge new to main website with 301's? will google like that? B- Keep them separate? Will google like that? C- Don't bother. D- Toss the computer and get into Horticulture

    | residualboulders
    0

  • Hi, Should all the page titles of our blogs include a Keyword(s) and\or our website name?

    | Studio33
    0

  • I am migrating a WP site from one domain to another for a client. WP is installed at the root. Typically I would simply issue a 301-redirect for the entire domain, however, in this case, the client wants the content in 2 specific subfolders to remain live on the old site and have everything else redirected. Example: olddomain.com/subfolder-1/ olddomain.com/subfolder-2/ Question: what would the the htaccess code look like to pull this off? Thanks!

    | SCW
    0

  • Hi, I want to ask forum members’ opinion on content automation. And before I raise the eyebrows of many of you with this question, I’d like to state I am creating content and doing SEO for my own website so I’m not looking to cut corners with spammy tactics that could hurt my website from an organic search perspective. The goal is to automate pages in the areas of headings, Meta Titles, Meta Descriptions, and perhaps a paragraph of content. More importantly, I’d like these pages to add value to the users experience so the question is…. How do I go about automating the pages, and more specifically, how is meta title, meta descriptions etc. automated? I’d also like to hear from people that recommend steering clear of any form of content automation. I hope my question isn’t too bit vague and I look forward to hearing from other Mozzers. Regards, Russell in South Africa

    | Shamima
    0

  • We sell 1000s of audiobooks and get our cover images and descriptions from the publisher’s sites. When I download a cover image such as this one (http://www.audiobooksonline.com/media/Alex-Cross-Run-James-Patterson.jpg)
    I always rename and re-size it before installing at our Web store. Would this process result in any publisher’s metadata in the image we use at our Web store and/or anything else Google would not like?
    Is there an online utility that would allow me to see metadata in our images?

    | lbohen
    0

  • Hi, Our sitemap is created by our e-commerce software - Magento - We are probably going to make a lot of products Meta No Index for the moment, until all the content has been corrected on them - but by default, as they are enabled, they will appear in Sitemap. So, the question is: "Should pages that are Meta NOINDEX be listed in a sitemap"? Does it matter? thanks!

    | bjs2010
    0

  • Hey, See attachment. Website is Omega Red. The page I want to rank for seems like it is being held back by other closely related pages with similar titles. I am looking to rank for electrical earthing with this page. On the graph it shows how the other pages have interacted over a period of time on the website and how if they drop out of the top 50 this page then moves up in Google. I don't really want to canonicalise the other pages into one but maybe this is what needs to happen? Any suggestions? bWymgVt.jpg

    | Hughescov
    0

  • Hello, One quick question about rel canonical. If i use SeoMoz amazing on-page optimization tool i get a grade B if i use www.mydomain.com and my keyword. I get a grade A if i use https://www.mydomain.com and same keyword. I get the grade B coz i don't get the check mark to "Appropriate Use of Rel Canonical" box. Should i use this rel canonical stuff if i  am 301 redirecting www. version to https://www. version already. Regards, OÜInigo

    | InigoOU
    0

  • Hi, we're planning on implementing a full-page video as our homepage's background. In addition to the effect on page loading time, are there any other SEO issues this could cause? Thanks in advance for any help!

    | Nimbus3000
    0

  • I have had a long discussion with a client and their external SEO partner about their current footer. They have added all their product categories, both main and sub, to the footer. From a pure SEO perspective is it still advisable, after all the pandas and penguines, to stay away from keyword important site wide footer linking to internal pages? As the links will become a repeatable element and also containing the most important keywords, isn't the links actually hurting more than helping? With 5000 index pages, it will risk "marking" the most important keywords as repeatable, lowering ranking, instead of increasing as their external part say.

    | Macaper
    1

  • Hi All I am Working on travel site for client where there are 1000's of product listing pages that are dynamically created.  These pages are not SEO optimised and are just lists of products with no content other than the product details. There are no meta tags for title and description on the listings pages.  You then click Find Out more  to go to the full product details.  There is no way to SEO these Dynamic pages This main product details has no content other than details and  now meta tags. To help increase my google rankings for the rest of the site which is search optimised would it be better to block google from indexing these pages. Are these pages hurting my ability to improve rankings if my SEO of the content pages has been done to a good level with good unique Titles, descriptions and useful content thanks In advance John

    | ingageseo
    0

  • Google used to display all my pages now most are under repeat the search with the omitted results included."_ what dose that mean? Dose this predict something bad?_ All pages are unique.

    | Joseph-Green-SEO
    0

  • I had a quick question, I want to do schema markup for a local business. Do I need to put it on every page, or just the home page? Also, where should put it i.e. Header, Body, or footer

    | PeterRota
    0

  • I am trying to assess the impact of duplicate content on our e-commerce site and I need to know if the duplicate content is affecting only the pages that contain the dupe content or does it affect the whole site? In Google that is. But of course. Lol

    | bjs2010
    0

  • If I have internal links pointing to pages that are META NO INDEX, will Google still index them? Or does that only apply to pages that are linked to from an external domain? Thanks!

    | bjs2010
    0

  • What should I cover in a SEO proposal? Is there any sample SEO Proposal template in SEOMoz?

    | kashyaplakkad
    1

  • Hi, We're integrating over a dozen of videos to the site to be featured in a slideshow manner. A selected video will be featured in the center of the page, meanwhile the user can click on the small thumbnails and change it to something else. For the selected videos, there will be a transcript shown right next to the video. The trick is, we cant show the transcripts for all the videos at once, since that's just bad user experience - the page will be miles long. We want to hide the transcripts for the videos which are not shown either in a div - or in some other Google friendly manner. The question is? Is this Google - legit? Is there a chance of being flagged, since so much content will be hidden?

    | sophia123
    1

  • I am desperately hoping that someone can help with this enquiry. I set up a site www.drug-rehab.ltd.uk about two years ago, on wordpress. I was enjoying top four positions for my local search. Until, in my ignorant stupidity, I changed the site to html as the page load was about 15 seconds a page on wordpress. At the time I didn't redirect the pages - I assumed that they would be deleted and Google would update the changes quite quickly. I then employed an seo agency to try and fix the problem, and have been using these guys for about 6 months and there isn't any change in the seo, despite them creating the re-directs from the orphaned pages 6 months ago. This are low competitive keywords. I can find the indexed pages by URL on Google. i.e. http://www.drug-rehab.ltd.uk/drug-rehab-buckinghamshire.html But I can't find the keyword phrase 'Drug Rehab Bedfordshire' etc anywhere. I wrote to Google for page reconsideration and they told me that it doesn't have any spam penalties against it, and there is nothing to consider. Does anyone please have any ideas how I might be able to revive this site? Many thanks Chris

    | Tiedoctor
    0

  • Hi, If we take the Moz stats into account here, how comes sometimes weak Moz stat domains out ranking strong Moz stat domains? For example: A inner page with DA56 / PA40 is outranking a Wikipedia inner page with DA100 / PA82. That's a massive difference basically twice as strong on the Wikipedia page but being out ranking. In this case I assume the onpage SEO is playing a big part, but can onpage optimisation be that powerful? And I see this all the time, what SEO factors cause this? Thanks.

    | Bondara
    0

  • Hi! I recently put this page live for a new client targeting the term 'hospitality IT' in the UK. http://www.antana.co.uk/hospitality-IT.html I've done a bit of guest blog writing and the page is currently #10. There are very links to the site overall, and only a handful to the page itself. Should I focus on building links to the root domain or the page, and is there any other quick changes I can make to give it a boost? Thanks!

    | neooptic
    0

  • Hi, We have a page that went live nearly 2 months ago.  https://www.invoicestudio.com/Secure/InvoiceTemplate Why does google not notice it.  Both site: URL's return nothing. site:www.invoicestudio.com/Secure/InvoiceTemplate site:www.invoicestudio.com/Secure This is an important page for us and do not understand why google doesn't like it. Hope you can help Thanks Andrew

    | Studio33
    0

  • Hi, Should I, or do I need to, use HTTPS (note the "S") in my canonical tags? Thanks Andrew

    | Studio33
    0

  • Hi guys, what is the difference between a manual penalty in the results and an algorithm? If its algorithm its usually a couple of pages but a manual do you get deindexed or put say 10 pages back? Any advice on how to best determin if a push back in results is manual or algorithm would be great. This will best help me judge how long it will take to get back to where I was with one of my sites once i have cleaned up some of my back-link profile. Thanks.

    | pauledwards
    0

  • Our eCommerce platform provider has our site load balanced in a few data centers. Our site has two of our own exclusive IP addresses associated with it (one in each data center). Problem is Google is showing our IP addresses in the SERPs with what I would assume is bad duplicate content (our own at that). I brought this to the attention of our provider and they say they must keep the IP addresses open to allow their site monitoring software to work. Their solution was to add robots.txt files for both IP addresses with site wide/root disallows. As a side note, we just added canonical tags so the pages indexed within the IP addresses ultimately show the correct URL (non IP address) via the canonical. So here are my questions. Is there a better way? If not, is there anything else we need to do get Google to drop the several hundred thousand indexed pages at the IP address level? Or do we sit back and wait now?

    | ovenbird
    0

  • I've been wondering something about rich snippets for a while. I can plainly see how rich snippets and micro-data stuff can be super helpful for pages that feature things like event schedules, recipes, specific products with reviews, and articles written by influential authors. But is it worth trying to force micro-data into pages that don't readily lend themselves to the established rich snippet archetypes? For example, say I was making a website for a carpet cleaning service. The company provides a service, rather than selling a tangible product, so there aren't individual items of which to tag pictures and reviews. The company doesn't hold any kind of events, so the scheduling stuff doesn't apply. The company doesn't necessarily present itself with any one person as the "face of the company", so there isn't anyone to tag as the "author" of the content. And obviously (I hope), people should not be eating/drinking carpet detergents, so recipes wouldn't work. Given these restrictions, is it of any value to use any of the more generic micro-data structures like "thing" (http://schema.org/Thing) or "intangible" (http://schema.org/Intangible) to mark up stuff like "this is a picture of a carpet that we cleaned, but you can't actually buy from us"? Or are the rich snippets more of an "if your content fits with one of Google's promoted use cases, that's great, but otherwise don't bother" situations? Thanks!

    | BrianAlpert78
    0

  • I found myself in a weird position today having to defend the use of breadcrumbs.... This is what I wrote.... From an SEO point of view it is best practice to have breadcrumbs as they are high up in the code and help the search engines crawling the site. Do you need a breadcrumb for SEO – Yes – as well as from a usability point of you view users can navigate a breadcrumb instead of hitting the back button. What would you have said?

    | JohnW-UK
    0

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