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Category: Intermediate & Advanced SEO

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


  • We recently added an education center to our site with articles and information about our products and industry. What is the best way to link to and from that content? There are two options I'm considering: Link to articles from category and subcategory pages under a section called "related articles" and link back to these category and subcategory pages from the articles: category page <<--------->> education center article education center article <<---------->> subcategory page Only link from the articles to the category and subcategory pages: education center article ---------->> category page education center article ---------->> subcategory page Would #1 dilute the SEO value of the category and subcategory pages? I want to offer shoppers links to more information if they need it, but this may also take them away from the products. Has anyone tested this? Thanks!

    | pbhatt
    0

  • I'm managing a restaurant chain with 10 locations.  Can they all share the home page url of the corporate site in Google Places or is it better to link each location url separately? Meaning can I use www.company.com for all locations in Google places for all locations or is it better to go with www.company.com/location.html for each location. The page authority of the home page is 60 while individual location pages the page authority is in the 20's. Hope this makes sense. Thanks
    Gary

    | YMD
    0

  • I'm integrating microformats into my website. I have added the code into of the website. But my developer said it should be in the of the website and it should not be visible for public. I don't know anymore who is right.

    | circles
    0

  • We are working with a site that has what appears to be a frame in the middle but it is not targeting a new html page it is just a div hiding content until you use the scroll bar. What are best practices for working with this?

    | siteoptimized
    0

  • I am running a word press install for my blog and recently had 3 of my main keywords set as categories. I recently decided to create a static page for the keywords instead of having the category page showing all the posts within the category, and took it off the navigation bar. I read about setting the categories to use NO index so the search engines can shine more importance on the new pages i created to really replace where the category was showing. Can this have a negative effect on my rankings? http://junkcarsforcashnjcompany.com junk car removal nj is showing the category section, So i placed the no index on it. Will the search engines refresh the data and replace it with the new page I created?

    | junkcars
    0

  • Hello, We're putting (roughly, depending on the category) 500 words under the products or categories under category pages. We're having a writer do these who has to learn the products from scratch. With over 100 categories, it's not possible for the client to write 500 words for each one. We're wondering, 1. What should go into a category description? 2. How do you prep a writer to write these, and is it possible to do so and get good content? I'm afraid that we're writing just words for long tails, and I know on the product pages, home page, and articles that it has to be the best content, probably written by the client himself if he is knowledgable enough. Open to your suggestions on what should be in these, how long they should be, and who should write them.

    | BobGW
    0

  • Hello friends, I have a problem with my website... I am building my site in 2 parts, the blog part is ready and there is a link to the blog part on the index of my web.. but I do not know why the blog part have 0 PA... According with OSE, my index have good PA and DA,,, but when I visit my home blog section, I can not see any PA... someone coud give me an idea what is wrong? my website with PA and DA is www.garotabella.com.ec and the blog without any PA is www.garotabella.com.ec/blog

    | lans2787
    0

  • I am including a screenshot of a very interesting search result I received while InPrivate Browsing in Google using IE9.  I was spot-checking some keywords while private browsing and the first one I searched was "presonus studiolive." Then, I searched a completely unrelated term "communion supplies." I am attaching a screenshot of the search results page I then received from Google. Interesting, no? I can't even begin to wrap my head around the implications of a search results page that mixes results from two completel unrelated terms. Thoughts? 7QNxPHM.jpg

    | danatanseo
    0

  • I want to block bots from all of our client sites on our staging server.  Since robots.txt files can easily be copied over when moving a site to production, how can i block bots/crawlers from our staging server (at the server level), but still allow our clients to see/preview their site before launch?

    | BlueView1301
    0

  • I've added category pages for counties/town on http://www.top-10-dating-reviews.com but will google see these as doorway pages? If you click on categories from the menu at the top and view some of the pages you'll hopefully see what I mean? Should I continue building these or delete them? Any advice appreciated.

    | SamCUK
    0

  • Hi Community, is there any experience to tell here about  the disawow tool from Google? Any review? It have helped revocer sites  beaten by Penguin or penalized after WMT Unnatural Link building message? Which tools and methods you use to find bad back-links to submit for the disawow tool? Thanks for your feedback,

    | Braumueller
    0

  • I've added category pages for counties/town on http://www.top-10-dating-reviews.com but will google see these as doorway pages? If you click on categories from the menu at the top and view some of the pages you'll hopefully see what I mean? Should I continue building these or delete them? Any advice appreciated.

    | SamCUK
    0

  • Hi, Until now I've adviced a lot of web shops to avoid having long URL structures for their categories and products (aka. remove the useless slugs). Recently I discovered that Google started rolling out more and more results that looks like these screenshots: http://filer.crenia.no/McDn & http://filer.crenia.no/McYO (look at the URL in the SERP) I'm assuming the slugs are a vital part of creating these SERP results. Personally, I also think they look better and favor them compared to the old SERPs. Does anyone have any experience with these, what impact they have or any reason not to add slugs to URLs again?

    | Inevo
    0

  • Im looking for tips or best practices when sending out PR for link building. I send out at least 4 press releases per month using prweb’s advanced release which allows anchor text. For the past few months I’ve been rotating branded terms, exact match keywords and full URL’s as the links, but always linking to my home page or to one particular subpage. Most of the releases are to announce upcoming projects or to announce a recent website launch for a client, less often we’re highlighting a service or special we want to promote. Im wondering if I should be linking to more sub pages to spread links around, and if I should be focusing more on branded terms vs. exact match anchors. Due to the cost involved I just want to be sure im getting the most out of it.

    | nbeske
    0

  • Hi Mozzers, Let's say you have www.mysite.com/page, which is a duplicate of www.yoursite.com/page. www.yousite.com/page has a rel canonical link identifying www.mysite.com/page as the original source. www.mysite.com/page has a followed backlink going towards www.yousite.com/home-page. mysite.com has a DA of 44
    yoursite.com has a DA of 33 Google has chosen to index www.yoursite.com/page instead of www.mysite.com/page. Is the followed backlink responsible for the wrong page being indexed? Thanks!

    | Travis-W
    0

  • There is a client we have, John Smith, and he owns www.johnsmith.com. John Smith is also known as John A. Smith, Johnny Smith, and Jonathan Smith. He wants to show up in the top 3 for all his variations, but the catch is he doesn't want his variations anywhere on his www.johnsmith.com Does anyone have any tips or ideas on how we could do that better? Thank you

    | Rocket.Fuel
    0

  • I'm seeing varied opinions and methods preferred for domain/URL structure on international websites. A specific example we have now is an international brand in Asia, USA, Brazil/South America, Australia, New Zealand and Africa. Their current domains are all fragmented across the brand and our goal is to have them unified, examples of their issue here; country.brand.com 
    www.brand.com.au
    www.brand.co.nz What I'm looking for is an approach that will have the best long term impact but no short term losses as well. I'm leaning toward www.brand.com.eu or www.brand.com/eu/ Looking at SERP's for other countries, subdomain geographic segmenting doesn't seem to show on any first pages in the SERPs.  There is one other option I'm still interested in finding out more about, geographically segmenting sites and pages through canonical or hreflang. Interested in hearing some additional POV's. Thanks! Anthony

    | Cuker
    0

  • Hi, Share your thoughts about Your Top 5 Backlink Types for 2013, what's the best this year and what will be worthless.

    | aivaras
    0

  • How can I export SEOmoz website rankings to Google Spreadsheet? I have applied other SEOmoz API's and Google Spreadsheet combos effectively but cannot find anything online for this. I would like to display current ranking and ranking history for specific keywords in Google Spreadsheet and have them update automatically using the SEOmoz API.

    | Michael_Rock
    0

  • Hello out there My website www.painterdublin.com and www.tilers-dublin.com were heavily hit by google panda update on 27.9.2012 and EMD update few days after. I lost about 70% of the traffic mainly from combination of the keywords from my domain name (painter dublin and tilers dublin) and never managed to recover from it. I am wondering if I should also concentrate on rewriting the content of both home landing pages in the terms of "KEYWORD DENSITY". Do you think my content is "OVER OPTIMIZED" for my main keywords? (painter dublin, tilers-dublin). What is the correct use? Is there any tool to guide me? I am aware I am using those terms quite often. I don't want to start deleting those terms before I know the right way to do it. Is there anybody willing to have a look at my sites and give me advice please? kind regards Jaro

    | jarik
    0

  • Our homepage (here) has four large promotional sections taking up most of the real estate. Each promo section has an image and styled text. We want each promo section to link to the appropriate page, so we created the promo sections as and wrapped each in an anchor. That works fine for users but I tried viewing our site in a text-only browser (Lynx) and couldn't follow those links! My fear is that GoogleBot can't follow them either and doesn't know what anchor text to pull. So, my question: What's the best way to make this entire block clickable, but still have it crawlable by robots? Or is our current implementation ok? For reference, here's a simplified version of the relevant code block:                                       | | All Diamonds Extra 20% Off |         [| | Jessica Simspon Extra 20% Off |](http://jessicasimpson.jewelry.com/shop/)      

    | Richline_Digital
    0

  • What would you recommend as best practice? Our ecommerce site has a lot of PDFs supporting the product page. Currently they are kept in a sub domain and so are all images. Would it be better to keep them all in a subfolder? I've read about blogs being hosted on a subfolder to be better than subdomain but what about pdfs and images? thoughts?

    | Bio-RadAbs
    0

  • My boss wants me to register a domain with a US company. However, most of our customers are in the UK. Though I would host any future website using a UK hosting provider, I don't know if registering the domain with a US provider would make any difference SEO-wise?

    | JacobFunnell
    0

  • We own and operate a site called: http://www.phonesale.com/ For the past 5-6 months, we have been working to recover our organic traffic which was hit heavily May 2012. We have made many strides in terms of eliminating technical issues w/ the site as well as cleaning up our link profile to no avail. Is there anything else that we can do to help get back into Google's good graces, both on page and off page?

    | eugeneku
    0

  • I read that Google will "honor" these tags if your website has two url's with duplicate content.  The duplicate content does not show up in my SEOmoz crawls report but they do in the search engines and many of "non authoritative links" that are generated from my search feature j(ugly url's with % ...not real user friendly)  are ranking higher than the "good URL" links. So if I do the canonical tags I guess my higher ranking bad urls will drop.   I even read that google might even completely overlook the links.  I read somewhere that the best way to do this is with a 301 redirect...is that correct? I m ranking pretty good with my main keyword terms so I am afraid to make changes not knowing the effect. Any suggestions? Thanks, Boo

    | Boodreaux
    0

  • My client is wondering if I could provide him with a list of his site's 15 Top performing SEO keywords. However, based on the layout of everything I've used here on SEOMoz, I don't believe that's possible. Or, am i incorrect? Can you indeed come up with a list of Top (XX) SEO keywords for a given time period, for a campaign/website? Thanks ahead of time.

    | BrandLabs
    0

  • Last night all our indexed pages are gone from google. Completely deindexed - banned. Links could not cause it, all of them are related, anchors diversified and spam is never used. Content is the same like our other website has, just some small changes. First stronger website is working as usual. So can it be that duplicate content caused a complete ban? (Website is 6 months old. Content has never been properly indexed, due to same reasons i think. Last week we made changes, ant it started to get indexed quite well until tonight..)

    | bele
    0

  • Hey guys, A site that I'm currently working on as different domains for each website language. So for example: word1word2.com for the english version word3word4.com for the french version word5word6.com for spanish version .... Is it better to move all of the different languages to the same domain and use subfolders for each language /fr/... Please note that the domains being used bring in organic traffic as well as they are EMDs. Thank You.

    | BruLee
    0

  • I'm working on a wordpress adult dating review site and have started to set up categories for each of my main keywords. I have also started to add sub categories by county and town and so far have done so for the counties of 'Lincolnshire' and 'Derbyshire'. The problem is though that for each of my subcategories the page titles are appearing the same. For example: www.mysite.com/category/online-dating/lincolnshire/spalding (root category online dating) shows the title as 'Spalding'. www.mysite.com/category/adult-dating/lincolnshire/spalding also has the title 'Spalding' even though it's root category is different (adult dating). It's probably easier to go to http://www.top-10-dating-reviews.com to see how it's set up. If you click in the category text in the top menu and navigate to dating/derbyshire/alfreton for example and then adult dating/derbyshire/alfreton you'll notice the page titles are the same. I use all in one SEO pack and have rewrite titles checked with category titles set to %category_title% | %blog_title%. I also use category SEO updater. In order to prevent duplicate content issues how can I simply make the title of each category category root title/category subtitle(county)/category subtitle 2(town). The title of each category page would then read for example Online Dating Lincolnshire Spalding.

    | SamCUK
    0

  • I've been looking at a site which has a strange ranking/indexing issue. The website has several translated versions of the site for different languages and these translated pages seem to be outranking the UK pages in the UK search results. All of the translated pages are in sub folders, eg domain.com domain.com/fr domain.com/sv domain.com/it domain.com/es I cant work out how or why Google would see these pages with non english content as more relevant than the UK pages? One thing I did notice is that there are no meta language tags on there. Could this be the issue?

    | edwardlewis
    0

  • Our indexed images in Google images are directing to:
    http://www.cbuy.tv/?escaped_fragment= for example, instead of: the http://www.cbuy.tv/#!  version. Is there something we can do on our end to fix this or is this a bug with Google?

    | CBuy
    0

  • I have a client who is wishing to switch from an established, but unattractive domain, to a domain he just purchased that is more attractive. For example purposes, his existing site is "His-Company-Website.com" and the site he just purchased and wants to transfer to is "HisCompanyWebsite.com." The only difference is the old site has hyphens in between the words and the new one does not. He is not making this choice from an SEO perspective, but more of a "I don't want to keep saying all those hyphens when telling people about my website." But he said he doesn't want to lose his search engine rankings as a result. So he knows this won't necessarily increase his ranks, but doesn't want them to drop as a result. When speaking with him, I thought we could simply toss in a 301 redirect at the root level and pipe them over to the other site, but he wanted some actual proof. I went back to look at what I thought would be a similar case that I did earlier in the year (transferring from a .net to a .com) and noticed that we did see some rather substantial drops in at least traffic, so I am not so sure about this plan any longer. So my questions for my far more insightful colleagues... What would be your suggestion on this problem? Transition to the more user friendly domain or stick with the unfriendly domain? If he does elect to transition to the new domain, what all can I do to preserve his search engine rankings? Should a rankings and/or traffic drop be predicting when completing this? Thank you all in advance. Any other tidbits anyone has to offer would be great. Looking forward to your replies.

    | ClayPotCreative
    0

  • What are best practices for moving code into other folders to help speed up a crawling for bots? We once moved some javascript from an SEO's suggestion and the site suddenly looked like crap until we undid the changes. How do you figure our what code should be consolidated? What code do you use to indicate what has been moved and to where?

    | siteoptimized
    0

  • In the old days frames were a problem because they could end up being orphaned pages that get indexed and appear in the SERPS but had to navigation so they were useless. Are frames still a problem with Google and if so what are the suggested solutions?

    | siteoptimized
    0

  • On our site we have some similar pages for example in our parts page we have the link to all the electrical parts you can see here http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/c/43/53/160/Electrical  and we have a very similar page going from our accessories page to electrical here http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/c/43/72/221/Electrical  We are thinking about putting rel="canonical" from the accessories electrical page to the parts one.  We would do this for several pages not just this one. Thoughts???

    | DoRM
    0

  • For an SAB (Service Area Business) with a hidden address - Can you have more then one listing? Can you use a free Google Voice number? Can you forward the number to a main number? Can the listing be in an office building? Such as a rented space... For a non SAB listing with the address visible - Can you use free Google voice numbers for each listing and  forward them to one main number?

    | Bryan_Loconto
    0

  • We have a secure version of our site, as we often gather sensitive business information from our clients. Our https pages have been indexed as well as our http version. Could it still be a problem to have an http and an https version of our site indexed by Google?   Is this seen as being a duplicate site? If so can this be resolved with a rel=canonical tag pointing to the http version? Thanks

    | annieplaskett
    1

  • For searches involving keywords like "lessons", "courses", "classes" I see frequently pages in the top rankings which do not contain the search term in the title tag, despite these terms being quite competitive. It seems that when searching for "classes", google detects that pages about "courses" may be just as relevant. What do you recommend? option 1: creating 10 pages optimized on 10 different keyword variations, each with a significant part of unique content or option 2: one page and dropping throughout the page 10 keyword variations in body and headlines Given that keywords are all synonyms and website has already high domain authority in the niche. thanks

    | lcourse
    0

  • I have an ecommerce store that has a variety of images including some super high quality images that are 8 mg. This style of image could be completed for hundreds of products in the store. Does anyone have any tips on what I should be watching out for here? Is 8 mg too unusable?

    | LukeyJamo
    0

  • Will a back-link from "domain.com/abc" and "blog.domain.com/abc" have same value from an SEO perspective? Assume same article written on both sites. 
    I have been told the bots look at the domain value and the only links from blogs that have less value are in case of comments. As long as the "blog.domain/abc" page includes a full article and not a blog comment then it counts fully for SEO. Is this correct?

    | knielsen
    0

  • Hello there. We have a blog for one client with 270 posts and we want to keep only the best posts, in order to avoid Panda penalties. In your opinion how can we understand which one is worth while to keep online in the blog and which one is better to delete from the blog? Which Google Analytics metric would you use to determine the quality of the posts and then grade them? Before make this big curator work we wanna show an Excell file to our Client. Many thanks for all your suggestions. YESdesign team

    | YESdesign
    0

  • We have five sites which are largely unrelated but for cross-promotional purpose our company wishes to cross link between all our sites, possibly in the footer. I have warned about potential consequences of cross-linking in this way and certainly don't want our sites to be viewed as some sort of 'link ring' if they all link to one another. Just wondering if linking between sites you own really is that much of an issue and whether we should  'nofollow' the links in order to prevent being slapped with any sort of penalty for cross-linking.

    | simon_realbuzz
    0

  • Hello there, we have a problem. Let's say we have a website www.mainwebsite.com Then you have 40 websites like this: www.retailer1.mainwebsite.com www.retailer2.mainwebsite.com www.retailer3.mainwebsite.com www.retailer4.mainwebsite.com www.retailer5.mainwebsite.com www.retailer6.mainwebsite.com … an so on In order to avoid the duplicate content penalty from Google we've added a rel="canonical" in each 40 sub-websites mapping each page of them to www.mainwebsite.com Our issue is that now, all our retailers (each owner of www.retailer-X.mainwebsite.com) are complaining about the fact that they are disappeared from Google. How can we avoid to use rel="canonical" in the sub-website and not being penalised by Google for duplicate content in www.mainwebsite.com? Many thanks, all your advices are much appreciated. YESdesign team

    | YESdesign
    0

  • I need help on how to structure my wordpress site to avoid duplicate content issues. Basically I have a main category page for each of my targeted keywords (about 12). From each of those though I want to create a category for each county in the uk and then about 15 towns within each county. This means I'm creating a LOT of categories. Eg: /plumbers/lincolnshire/lincoln x 15 other counties and towns /local-plumbers/cambridgeshire/cambridge x 15 other counties and towns (I have about 12 main keywords I'm going after) I'm basically creating a category for every town in the UK going after long tail keywords. What is the best way to manage this in wordpress? Advice from another question I posted on here is to write a unique category description for each one as the posts in each category are almost identical. The other problem here is I'm ending up with hundreds of links on a page. (They can't all be seen by the user as I'm using a drop down menu plugin). Any advice appreciated.

    | SamCUK
    0

  • Dear SEO moz, As a SEO marketer on a pretty big website I noticed a HUGE amount of dropping pages indexed by google. We did not do anything to block googleblot in the past 6 months, but since November the number of indexed pages decreased from 3.4 milion (3,400.000) to 7 hundred thousand (700,000). Obviously I want to know which pages are de-indexed. Does anyone you know a tool which can do this?

    | JorisHas
    1

  • I own a couple of old sites with DA of 15 and 17 which don't really rank for anything, as well as my main site which as DA of 29. Can I forward these domains to my main site to increase the DA of my main site. Alternatively is there any other way of making use of these sites?

    | benacuity
    0

  • Couldn't fit the entire question in the main bit so the explanation is here: Working on a client's website which is hosted by volusion and also been doing SEO for them for about a year. Now we've finally got them ranking at the lower end of page 1 (around 10+) for their main keyword. They now want to move from volusion over to Amazon Web Store 😢 which seems to be an SEO nightmare from even my basic understanding of SEO. From looking at the coding and the way Amazon Web store is built on top of how restricted you are from doing anything with it, I am almost certain the shop will be extremely difficult to optimise and we will have to completely change nearly all of the content. Finally! the actual question; I was thinking I could get them to delay their move to Amazon webstore until they are ranking in the top 5 for this top keyword. Once they switch over, i assume they'll keep this ranking for at least a short while? This keyword attracts a high volume of traffic and if this traffic is clicking on the result for their website, and google sees that people are finding this website valuable (not clicking back onto google results). Will they be able hold onto this high ranking? Basically what I'm asking is, this will be a terrible outdated badly SEO'd shop, but if a high volume of people are clicking on it and staying on it from their lingering ranking will Google just let it stay at the top? A massive amount of gratitude in advance for anyone who tries to help with this! 😄

    | acecream
    0

  • love to know what mistakes people have made in the past that can help me and others not to make the same mistakes going forward ...thankyou

    | ReSEOlve
    0

  • My commercial real estate web site is being migrated to Wordpress from Drupal. Is it advisable to place  dynamic content that will use taxonomy under "Posts" ? Listings will be changed every few months and there could be anywhere from several hundred to several thousand of them on the site. Developers have given me different advice. One has been adamant that listings and neighborhood pages (there will be about 25 neighborhood pages) should not be in the post section which is to be strictly reserved for blog entries. The last thing I want is to create a site structure which is unfriendly to SEO!!!! I would very much appreciate the perspective of anyone proficient with Wordpress and SEO. Thanks!!!
    Alan Rosinsky

    | Kingalan1
    0

  • I am about to post my first Infographic and have a question. The graphic is fairly long and was wondering, is it better to split this graphic up in to chunks? So that it loads in stages? I am new to this and would be great if someone could point me to the latest and best practices for infographics. I have seen a few articles but they appear to be old. Thanks for your help

    | JohnPeters
    0

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