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Category: Intermediate & Advanced SEO

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


  • Hi, some time ago I have read that there is a limit of 50.000 URLs per sitemap file (So, you need to create a sitemap index and separate files with 50.000 urls each). [Source]. Now we are about to implement the link hreflang in the sitemap [Source], and we dont know if we have to count each alternate as a different url. We have 21 different well positioned domains (Same name, different cctlds, a little different content [varies in currencies, taxes, some labels, etc] depending in the target country) so the amount of links per url would be high. A) Shall we count each link alternate as a separate url, or just the original ones? For example, if we have to count the link alternates, that would make us have 2380pages per sitemap, each with one original url and 20 alternate links. (Always being aware of the 50mb maximum filesize) B) Actually we have one sitemap per domain. Using this, shall we generate one per domain using the matching domain as original url? Or it would be the same if we upload to every domain the same sitemap? Thanks

    | marianoSoler98
    0

  • Hi Mozzers, Client: Big carpet cleaner player in the carpet cleaning industry Main Goal: Creating good content to Get more organic traffic to our main site Structure of the extra content: It will act like a blog but will be differentiated from the regular site by not selling anything but just creating good content. The look and design will be different from the client's site. SEO question: In terms of SEO, what would be the most beneficial for us to do, should we built in this new section/site outside or inside the client's site? I personally think that it should be separated from the main site because of the main reasons: A followed link to the main site Anchor texts implementation linking back to our service pages If we would to choose to build in this content, it would be highly beneficial for getting organic traffic within the main site but I am afraid this will not provide us any link juice  since anchor texts won't be accounted the same since all of those would be located in the Nav bar of the main site. Can someone tell me what would be the best in terms of SEO? P.S: My boss doesn't agree with me and would rather go the second option (build in within the main site) that's why i am asking you guys what would be the most beneficial? Thank you Guys

    | Ideas-Money-Art
    0

  • Our website which was ranking at number 1 in Google.co.uk for our 2 main search terms for over three years was hacked into last November. We rebuilt the site but had slipped down to number 4. We were hacked again 2 weeks ago and are now at number 7. I realise that this drop may not be just a result of the hacking but it cant' have helped. I've just access our Google Webmaster Tools accounts and these are the current results: 940 Access Denied Errors 197 Not Found The 940 Access Denied Errors apply to Wordpress Blog pages. Is it likely that the hacking caused the Access Denied errors and is there a clear way to repair these errors? Any advice would be very welcome. Thanks, Colin

    | NileCruises
    0

  • We have used BrightLocal for some time now. With Bright Local we do not like the reports from a qualitative point of view in that the information is often wrong. 
    Does anyone recommend something other than Bright Local? Thanks,

    | RobertFisher
    0

  • Working on a site, and noticed their canonical tags follow the structure: //www.domain.com/article They cited their reason for this as http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3986.txt. Does anyone know if Google will recognize this as a valid canonical? Are there any issues with using this as a the canonical?

    | nicole.healthline
    0

  • Hello, I have had an article consistently rank between 3-5 for the last two plu syears now. Recently it dropped down to 11-13. All I did was add my Google plus picture to it. I have been hearing things along the lines of content rewrites. I am well aware of the fact that there are many duplicates of my article are out there. Is this the legitament problem though? Those articles have links to my sites. I have even found other articles that link to my article that have been duplicated. So there's all sorts of duplicate syndication out there. Wondering if I should start asking people to take down my article. Any info on recent Google activity on this subject?

    | imageworks-261290
    1

  • Hey guys, My first post here and ironically highlights a ridiculously stupid mistake! Ok, here's the deal... I started building links to one of my new page on a fairly good, old site (DA = >35). Before starting to build links, I added fresh new content, and while doing that, I accidentally added a "nofollow" and "noindex" tag to the page! Guess what, google DID de-index the page ! So the questions is (and YES, I did change the meta tags): Will google re-index the page with some good linking? Will it treat the page as a new, fresh page even though it was present for over a year? I had already started link building to that page, and now technically the links are pointing to a page that does not exist in the index, so once it does get re-indexed, will Google FLAG it as having too many links? Would I be ranking it as a new page? Will its previous ranking (for very few keywords) will come back? Thanks and Regards, Amod

    | bonusjonathan
    0

  • Hello, We've 301 redirected our .com domain to .co.uk. A few dayes ago, I've started to get traffic from the .com domain to the hompage. Any idea how this can happen? 100% New visits Low bounce rate 80% of the referral traffic Our website is www.theloanengine.co.uk Any suggestions are welcomed. Cornel

    | Cornel_Ilea
    0

  • I have just been building a website for a client with pages that contain a lot of text content. To make things easier for site visitors I have created a menu bar that sticks to the top of the page and the page will scroll to different areas of content (i/e different Div id anchors) Having done this I have just had the thought that this might inadvertently introduce duplicate content issue. Does anyone know if adding an #anchor to the end of a url will cause a duplicate content error in google? For example, would the following URLs be treated as different:- http://www.mysite.co.uk/services
    http://www.mysite.co.uk/services#anchor1
    http://www.mysite.co.uk/services#anchor2
    http://www.mysite.co.uk/services#anchor3
    http://www.mysite.co.uk/services#anchor4 Thanks.

    | AdeLewis
    0

  • I used the following guide to implement the endless scroll https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/getting-started crawlers and correctly reads all URLs the command "site:" show me all indexed Url with #!key=value I want it to be indexed only the first URL, for the other Urls I would be scanned but not indexed like if there were the robots meta tag "noindex, follow" how I can do?

    | wwmind
    1

  • I have a niche domain seems to have been hit by Penguin. It had very good rankings before the update, and I think at least a good part of the penalty might be due to overoptimized anchor text. So here is the question; If I decide to take this site down, should I 301 the entire domain to a relevant sub-folder of another site? i.e comtemporaryfurniture.com to domain.com/category/modern-furniture.html Will the penalty get passed onto the new domain? If the penalty is partly due to anchor text, then pointing it to another site's subfolder would mean the tartget URL has more varied anchor text and could boost rankings.

    | inhouseseo
    0

  • What options do I have if all my images are pulled in by tags background images? It's a customized CMS and the designer put all images in the CSS so he would have more control over image size.  I would like to somehow add description elements to the alt tags Thank, Eric

    | SeaDrive
    0

  • Should I disallow my store directory in robots.txt? Here is the URL: https://www.stdtime.com/store/ Here are my reasons for suggesting this: SEOMOZ finds crawl "errors" in there that I don't care about I don't think I care if the search engines index those pages I only have one product, and it is not an impulse buy My product has a 60 day sales cycle, so price is less important than features

    | raywhite
    0

  • So I have blog with 5 posts. I don't know why but 1 of my posts rank higher than my main page...and it's not even trying to rank for the keyword. I'm not saying it's a bad thing because the post has some amazon on it but my main site is supposed to rank higher. Something wrong?

    | 678648631264
    0

  • I have a client who is ranking #1 for every term related to "bathroom renovations (main city)". They have now started to take on dealers/franchisees in neighbouring cities, and each location would now like to be ranking for THEIR cities. Is it better to use bathcompany.com/location or location.bathcompany.com? Considerations: The site has the address and phone number of the main location listed in the header, so if we do /location you will still see the main NAP. Using /location, If someone browses beyond the location landing page, they will venture into pages that target the main city (ex. "Bath Remodelling (Main City)") Using a subdomain will mean that we will need to duplicate content such as their image gallery, and we will have to create new content for their service pages or risk duplicate content. (ex. "shower remodelling (city)") Questions By using /location they will benefit from the strength of the subdomain, while using a new location-based subdomain will this mean we will have to start from scratch in terms of domain authority / link-juice? Will the NAP in the header affect the ranking of these location pages?

    | ATMOSMarketing56
    0

  • I have always worked with sites where content has a reasonably long life-span but need to now consider SEO for a site where content is changing very rapidly. I have read that Google will re-spider your content more frequently if it finds that it is changing frequently but are there effective ways to let the search engines know as new articles are published? Also, if content is removed within only a day or two of being published, can this have a negative impact on SEO?

    | Greenie
    0

  • We're considering moving a site to a host that also offers hosting for adult websites. Can this have a negative affect on SEO, if our hosting company is in any way associated with adult websites?

    | grapevinemktg
    0

  • Hi 🙂 My blog is http://www.dota2club.com/ and i am not sure should i use Categories as tags or normally tags like most ? And how much are important tags generally ? Right now you can see that i am using Categories as tags , is this ok ? Thank you !!!!

    | wolfinjo
    1

  • Hi I have what most of you may think is a dumb question but here goes. please be nice... 🙂 So I have a client (http://www,ace-alarms.co.uk) who are having a real problem ranking for ANY of their key words. I know it's a reasonably competitive area but I've not seen such a stubborn domain and it seems that no matter what we do there's nothing listed. i'm thinking that there may be a problem with the domain name. My question is; how can I find out if this is a problem domain. Thanks in advance Steve

    | stevecounsell
    0

  • I'm curious what might cause an inordinate amount of 404s in the reporting from SEOMoz's dashboard. I'm exploring links that are marked as 404s and they are (for the most part) working. I talked with the sysadmin and there were no outages this weekend. We also had a number of 500 errors reported in Webmaster Tools but everything seems to be up. Any ideas?

    | SystemIDBarcodes
    0

  • Hi Guys, Just wondering if anyone can help me out... We have recently been hit by the Google penguin update and I'm currently working though all the bad / spammy backlinks that previous SEO companies have built for us. I have come across 1 particular domain www.justgoodcars.com they seem to have a lot of different domain names: <colgroup><col width="390"></colgroup>
    | http://www.justpulsarcars.com/nissan-pulsar-warranties/1/United_Kingdom/all.html |
    | http://www.justpumacars.com/ford-puma-warranties/1/United_Kingdom/all.html |
    | http://www.justpuntocars.com/dutch-site/fiat-punto-warranties/1/United_Kingdom/all.html?selectcountry1=United_Kingdom |
    | http://www.justpuntocars.com/fiat-punto-warranties/1/United_Kingdom/all.html?selectcountry1=United_Kingdom | Now all of theses domains names have exactly the same IP Address?? Above is just a few I would say there are 100s of them. Do you think this could have an affect on us? Thanks, Scott

    | ScottBaxterWW
    0

  • hi seo addicted, i've got a question for you: i've recently created the english version of a site. to do this i decided to create the same site into another domain becouse i must index the site in  others countries. But now i've got some seo problems; in fact if  you search for "zenucchi" the first result is zenucchi.com ( the new one )... on the contrary  if you searched for that query before it would appear zenucchi.it with 6 under result insted of the .com .. the point is: 1. is that becouse i've made a mistake by buying to different domains? 2. how can i fix it ? hope to recive some answers.... thanks, guido

    | guidoboem
    0

  • Many SEO's said that if i have a keyword suppose 'coat stand' that is very competitive and second keyword is 'cheap coat stand' that is less competitive .If we promote long tail keyword (cheap coat stand) than ranking of 'coat stand' will improve.Is it true?

    | Alick300
    0

  • I've found a .gb.net domain with a highly competitive exact match term for sale. Do .gb.net domains rank well within google? Or are they considered not as authorative? Is it worth purchasing one?

    | SamCUK
    0

  • We have multilingual eCommerce websites with some content variations but majority of the content remains the same We have used rel=alternate hreflang on corresponding ccTLDs respective countries. for example on example.com -which is the oldest of these sites- we have used Now should we also use link rel="canonical" href="example.com" on all ccTLDs? What are the advantages and disadvantages of using it?

    | CyrilWilson
    0

  • We manage content for  a partner site, and since much of their content is similar to ours, we canonicalized their content to ours. As a result, some URLs have anything from 1,000,000 inbound links / URL to 10,000+ links / URL --all from the same domain. We've noticed a 10% decline in traffic since this showed up in our webmasters account & were wondering if we should nofollow these links?

    | nicole.healthline
    0

  • Hi I was wondering if there was any consensus over whether links in script tags pass any value - such as the link code below? Thanks

    | James77
    0

  • I have several sites that have cross domain canonical tags setup on similar pages.  I am unsure if these pages that are canonicalized to a different domain should be included in the sitemap.  My first thought is no, because I should only include pages in the sitemap that I want indexed. On the other hand, if I include ALL pages on my site in the sitemap, once Google gets to a page that has a cross domain canonical tag, I'm assuming it will just note that and determine if the canonicalized page is the better version.  I have yet to see any errors in GWT about this.   I have seen errors where I included a 301 redirect in my sitemap file.  I suspect its ok, but to me, it seems that Google would rather not find these URL's in a sitemap, have to crawl them time and time again to determine if they are the best page, even though I'm indicating that this page has a similar page that I'd rather have indexed.

    | WEB-IRS
    0

  • Hello, We have an exact match domain, that for it's exact match term is stuck at position 23. We launched around June 20 I'm talking about only the exact match term On the home page, we have yet to put keyword into the content, h1, or meta description, although they do occur in fragments in the meta description. The keyword is in the title This is not a very competitive industry For other sites that I built a couple of years ago, exact match domains (for their exact match term) would get on the first page after the sandbox was complete (4-6 months) for non-competitive industries even without backlinks. Are we experiencing a sandbox? How long? What information do you need? Thank you.

    | BobGW
    0

  • I am thinking of doing some press releases from PRWEB. they offer a press release with live links for better seo effect. Is this really effective ? Has any one seen this to be benficial ?

    | jlane9
    0

  • Hello, We have a website to sell personal development trainings. The owners want to start 2 blogs - one for each owner - that promotes their personal coaching practices. What's the SEO advantages of embedding both blogs in the current site vs starting 2 brand new blogs with their names as the domain names?

    | BobGW
    0

  • One of our client gets links from his content but he has ads everywhere. We were thinking he would get more links if he took down the ads. I think when people see a bunch of ads on a site they associate it with crap spammy content . What do you guys think? More specific adsense link and banner units. one square one letter board one tiny square all above the fold.

    | OxzenMedia
    0

  • Hi 🙂 I need help for my blog, my blog http://www.dota2club.com/ for many keywords it is not in first 50 results on google. What am i doing wrong ? Can you tell me what errors / mistakes i have made and what can i do to improve my blog ? Thank you !!!

    | wolfinjo
    0

  • Hello, I need to share pictures albums. I would like to know if any of you have an opinion on the best tools available to share pictures on the web? When I say 'the best tool' I mean from an SEO perspective. So, based on your experience, is there tools with which I have better chances to get my pictures indexed? Thanks  !! Note: CNET has created a great article that present the major players

    | EnigmaSolution
    0

  • In Google Webmaster tools after doing a Google Fetch for our Blog which is showing Access Denied for 900+ pages this is the report that comes up and I wonder if this is causing the 900+ pages to show "Access Denied" and if so how to rectify it? The page seems to redirect to itself. This may result in an infinite redirect loop. Please check the Help Center article about redirects.```
    <code>HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
    Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
    Location: http://nile-cruises-4u.co.uk/blog/
    Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5
    X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
    Date: Thu, 05 Jul 2012 07:04:05 GMT
    Content-Length: 157 <title>Document Moved</title> Object Moved This document may be found here I</code>

    | NileCruises
    0

  • RSS feeds, at least on paper, should be a great way to build backlinks and boost rankings.  They are also very seductive from a link-builder's point of view- free, easy to create, allows you to specifiy anchor text, etc.  There are even several SEO articles, anda few products, extolling the virtues of RSS for SEO puposes. However, I hear anecdotedly that they are extremely ineffective in getting their internal links indexed.  And my success rate has been abysmal- perhaps 15% have ever been indexed,and so far, I havenever seem Google show an RSS feed as a source for a backlink.  I have even thrown some token backlinks against RSS feeds to see if that helped in getting them indexed, but even that has a very low success rate. I recently read a blog post saying that Google "hates aRSS feeds" and "rarely spiders perhaps the first link or two."  Yet there are many SEO advocates who claim that RSS feeds are a great untapped resource for SEO.  I am rather befuddled. Has anyone "crackedthe code" onhow to get them,and the links that they contain, indexed and helping rankings?

    | tclendaniel
    0

  • Hi there, We have a .co.uk website which was ranking well for a number of highly competitive keywords, however in February 2012 those rankings for those keywords suddenly dropped off Google all together and have never came back. A few possibilties to why this has happened: We launched a .ie website which has exactly the same content, could this be the reason for the drop? I have put in all the necessary steps in making sure Google ranks these geographically correct by using hreflang and making sure everything is setup properly in webmaster tools. Why I think it could be this: If I copy and paste the first few paragraphs of text from the pages in the .co.uk website that were ranked highly in Google.co.uk it's the .ie version that appears not the .co.uk version. Here is the webpages in question: http://www.avogel.co.uk/health/menopause/ http://www.avogel.ie/health/menopause/ Forgot to mention, the reason we have these two websites is due to different currency and legalities. Hope someone can help me out with this.

    | Paul78
    0

  • Hello, I work with SEO for a company that just bought another in the same field. What is better to do? Just a 301 domain? Make 301 per page for a related page (more than 10,000 URLs,  i'am afraid that this may be interpreted as blackhat ) or make crossdomain canonical tag urls related to (I believe this is not good, because the pages are not fully equal). thank's

    | j0a0vargas
    0

  • I have a real estate Wordpress site that uses an IDX provider to add real estate listings to my site. A new page is created as a new property comes to market and then the page is deleted when the property is sold. I like the functionality of the service but it creates a significant amount of 404's and I'm also concerned about duplicate content because anyone else using the same service here in Las Vegas will have 1000's of the exact same property pages that I do. Any thoughts on this and is there a way that I can have the search engines only index the core 20 pages of my site and ignore future property pages? Your advice is greatly appreciated. See link for example http://www.mylvcondosales.com/mandarin-las-vegas/

    | AnthonyLasVegas
    0

  • Hi there I'm looking to optimise this site for SEO -> Gets about 3,000 visits per day but all from branded searches. Gets virtually no 'keyword searches' It's just  a landing page at the moment. Would you recommend I integrate a blog with it, so we can start targeting more long tail keywords (free football game etc) Any thoughts/advice appreciated 🙂 Thanks Howard

    | HowardK
    0

  • I have just noticed that Twitter canonicalise back to their homepage from every profile page that I checked. Check the source on any profile, and the canonical looks like this: rel="canonical" href="https://twitter.com/" /> Have I completely missed something here?  I don't get why Twitter need to, or indeed would want to do this. As far as I understand it, Twitter is hinting to Google that they should ignore profile pages and only rank the homepage.  Except Google doesn't.  If you search for "Rand Fishkin Twitter", you'll get Rand's page.  Search "[Anyone You Like] Twitter" and you'll get to their exact page. Hope somebody can shed some light on this, as it seems counter intuitive to tell Google to ignore profile pages when I imagine a significant chunk of their search traffic comes from people searching Google for specific profiles. Cheers, Mark

    | markadoi84
    0

  • Hi there, In February 2012 one my web pages (.co.uk) dropped from page 1 to page 5 for the keyword 'Menopause' and was replaced with a .PDF Late January 2012 I launched a duplicate version of this webpage however targeting .ie due to difference currency and legalities, I had made sure in webmaster tools that both websites were both Geographically correct, I am also using hreflang tags on both webpages. One thing that is strange is if I copy the first few paragraphs of the webpage in question into Google.co.uk, it's the .ie webpage that appears. Any help would be appreciated in why this has happened. Kind Regards

    | Paul78
    0

  • For over 20 years the company I work for has used www.company.net as their TLD, because we could not register www.company.com at that time. However, currently we also own www.company.com www.company.com has a 301 re-direct to www.company.net  We are a global company, and market leader in our industry. Our company name is associated with the product we make, and our competitors use our company name as their targeted keywords to attract visitors to their sites because our company name is synonym with the product we and they make. As we are a global company we also have lots of TLDcc's. The email address of all our employees worldwide have a .net email address extension. Would you advice switching from www.company.net to www.company.com??? And if so, what would be the reasons for this switch. Would it only be for branding purposes? Looking forward to some insights before taking on such an invasive switch (because of the switch of all email addresses of employees worldwide). Best regards, Astrid Groeneveld

    | Cordstrap
    0

  • My company is purchasing www.boughtsite.com. This new site has multiple sub-domain sites: customsite1.boughtsite.com, customsite2.boughtsite.com, etc. 1. Is it possible to redirect everything from www.boughtsite.com to www.mycompanysite.com while leaving the other sub-domain sites active? These other sites have different audiences than our main site. 2. Would it be an okay solution to just place a link on boughtsite.com to mycompanysite.com telling visitors "We have been re-branded to  My Company" 3. Can I use an i-frame to move customsite1.boughtsite.com to www.mycompanysite.com/customsite1 instead? Thanks for your input!

    | pbhatt
    0

  • I'm using Yoast's Wordpress SEO plugin on my wordpress site which allows you to quickly set up nofollow / no index on specific taxonomies. I wanted to see what you guys thought was the best practice in setting up my various taxonomies. Would you noidex, but follow all of these, none of these, or just some of these: Categories, tags, media, author archives ( (My blog is mainly a single author blog (me) but my wife does sometimes write posts. So I didn't know how this effected everything. Also I could simply make the blog a single user blog and just have her posts be guest posts, but I'd rather leave her as a user.), and  date archives. The example I read on line only no-index's the date archives. Just curious what you guys thought. Thanks.

    | NoahsDad
    0

  • We currently have all content on one URL and use # and Javascript refresh to paginate pages, and we are wondering if we transition to the Google's recommended pagination if we will see an improvement in traffic. Has anyone gone though a similar transition? What was the result? Did you see an improvement in traffic?

    | nicole.healthline
    0

  • Is there ever a circumstance to request a reconsideration through Google Webmaster Tools without having first received some type of warning message from Google? For instance, if its discovered that the site was violating Google's policy for a long time inadvertently, the problem is fixed now, just wanted to let you know. Or is it sort of like don't wake the beast and never communicate with Google unless they initiate the conversation?

    | wattssw
    0

  • What if you run a university website with 20 faculties, how would you approach building a blog for them? Would you do it like most universities do - put all blogs in a subdomain and each individual faculty in a subfolder. Like this: https://blogs.monash.edu/ Would you put the blog in a subfolder and create categories for each faculty - like Mashable does for tech, entertainment, etc. Or, create separate subfolders for each faculties? If you have other ideas, please share. For argument's sake, the goal of the blog(s) is to generate leads. It's part of a larger content marketing effort and they want to maximize the blog's SEO benefit. And by the way, please state what you think are the advantages/disadvantages of your chosen option. Thanks!

    | andrep
    0

  • Hi there, I have had a question from a retailer asking if they can take all our content i.e. blog articles, product pages etc, what is best practice here in getting SEO value out of this? Here a few ideas I was thinking of: I was thinking they put canonical tags on all pages where they have copied our content? They copy the content but leave all anchor text in place? Please let me know your thoughts. Kind Regards

    | Paul78
    0

  • Hi, My new site design for small hope went live about 3 months ago and I changed the URL structure. I'm kind of new to the SEO game, but I've done quite a bit of research, successfully implemented all the 301s I need and tested them and everything is working fine. But I'm having a little trouble with this propagating through Google et al. Most of the advice is to sit tight and wait but I want to be a little more proactive. So even though the 301s are in place, can I ALSO send emails to our partners and request link changes? Would Google find this suspicious behaviour and penalise us? Thanks, Adam

    | NaescentAdam
    0

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