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Category: Intermediate & Advanced SEO

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  • http://www.google.co.uk/search?ie=UTF-8&q=coach+hire&pws=0&gl=GB The link above takes you to a SERP for a general phrase with no hint of locations involved (Coach Hire). However oddly enough there is a single google places listing that has pooped up at #4. Liverpool Minibus Coach hire <cite>www.localcoachhireuk.co.uk/</cite> Now if this was "Coach Hire London" I would expect places, and indeed there is a list of places. But how do you get a places listing ranking for a phrase without a place name? Also of interest is the fact that this website doesn't even exist! It is a 301 redirect to another site. Google seems to be picking up the 301 since it shows the redirected site in the page snapshot and has no pages indexed for this domain. So an un-indexed site with a 301 redirect is #4 for the top phrase in this industry. I have no doubt that this will only be a temporary thing but it would be interesting to know how it was possible.

    | PPCnSEO
    0

  • Why is our blog title saying "the blog" before it in Google? X4vTU.png

    | Tatango
    0

  • If they are no follow, how can I benefit?  If Google isn't using this data, than why would we bother to LIKE anyone or anybody?

    | SEObleu.com
    0

  • I've been doing a bit of stats research prompted by read the recent ranking blog http://www.seomoz.org/blog/gettings-rankings-into-ga-using-custom-variables There are a few things that have come up in my research that I'd like to clear up. The below analysis has been done on my "conversions". 1/. What does "/aclk" mean in the Referrer URL? I have noticed a strong correlation between this and "gclid" in the landing page variable. Does it mean "ad click" ?? Although they seem to "closely" correlate they don't exactly, so when I have /aclk in the referrer Url MOSTLY I have gclid in the landing page URL. BUT not always, and the same applies vice versa. It's pretty vital that I know what is the best way to monitor adwords PPC, so what is the best variable to go on? - Currently I am using "gclid", but I have about 25% extra referral URL's with /aclk in that dont have "gclid" in - so am I underestimating my number of PPC conversions? 2/. The use of the variable "cd" is great, but it is not always present. I have noticed that 99% of my google "Referrer URL's" either start with:
    /aclk   - No cd value
    /search - No cd value
    /url - Always contains the cd variable. What do I make of this?? Thanks for the help in advance!

    | James77
    0

  • I'm interested in gathering some further data for my site. What I would like to do is as well as collecting the search Keyword for users coming to my site, I would also like to gather the search engine position for that keyword LIVE - IE what is the current position of that keyword in the SE at the time the user put in their search. This data will be really useful when digging down on my analysis. Does anyone have any simple ideas of how you would go about implimenting this? Many thanks

    | James77
    0

  • If someone wants to trade links, how can I be sure the link is followed?

    | SEObleu.com
    0

  • My clients site in in flash! I am taking it down and building an all HTML site.  the domain is 11 years old and google has only indexed 3 pages...Yikes!  My question is that when I rebuild the site and optimize it for certain keywords and get my placement moved higher and then switch back in 6 months to the all flash site. Will I lose my gained rank?

    | SEObleu.com
    0

  • Hello SEO MOzzers,  I am today wanting your feedback on a site that I recently went live with.  My Google rankings for the main keywords are doing very well considering the site has been live for 3 weeks now.  I of course have a list of items that i'm still working on, completing meta description tags, title tags, adding copy content to category pages, updating h1 tags, working on our backlinking campaign, etc. Is there anthing any of you SEO Mozzers can see that I may have missed? the web domain is www.carbodypanels4u.co.uk Keywords "body Panels"
    "car body panels"
    "Car Make body panels"
    "Car make Model body panel" Im sure you get the gist of the keyword structure. Your feedback is much appreciated as always. shiv

    | seohive-222720
    0

  • Hi- I have a client who has setup a new criminal law firm in the last few months. The URL is like: www.somenamelawyers.com ['somename' is the same # characters as their company name] I have run a successful AdWords a/c for them and many of the big traffic and conversion keywords include 'criminal lawyers'. From a SEO perspective, the long goal is to get traffic for 'criminal lawyers' and keywords that phrase match that. So I am considering migrating them to www.somenamecriminallawyers.com. I have researched this issue and understand the technicalities involved in moving. My question here is 'is this change worthwhile'. I think it is worthwhile because it really is in a sense rebranding them to be more clearly in a specific business domain, ie. criminal law. Also, they are a new outfit so they don't have a lot of backlinks yet. And mainly, they will get a SEO boost to their core keywords 'criminal lawyers'. Thanks in advance for your thoughts- Jules

    | Juller
    0

  • We have an underscore in a lot of our links. My question is since it is difficult to change existing site architecture, is an underscore really that negative? Here is an example: http://www.winematch.com/profile_368-2005-Artesa-Vineyards--Winery-Merlot-Reserve.html Eventually we want to change this to http://www.winematch.com/wine/2005-Artesa-Vineyards-Winery-Merlot-Reserve.html but it is a big project.

    | roundbrix
    0

  • Hi, I have to block unwanted urls (not that page) from being indexed on google. I have to block urls like example.com/entertainment not the exact page example.com/entertainment.aspx . Is there any other ways other than robot.txt? If i add this to robot.txt will that block my other url too? Or should I make a 301 redirection from example.com/entertainment to example.com/entertainment.aspx. Because some of the unwanted urls are linked from other sites. thanks in advance.

    | VipinLouka78
    0

  • I'm working with a publisher who said that having DFA links on his site will hurt his SEO. He is taking my link and pointing it back to his site and then to mine.  Does that sound right to you?

    | GFTMarketer
    0

  • We have multiple freelance writers that work for us. Should we require all of them to create a google + profile with authorship?

    | nicole.healthline
    0

  • (please ignore ridiculousness of hypothetical situation) Lets say Amazon had a food division which was at food.amazon.com. I partnered with Amazon's food division and now food.amazon.com will point to my website (food.com). Amazon adds a CNAME record so food.amazon.com resolves to food.com. If food.amazon.com has built up significant page rank / domain authority, will food.com be getting those benefits? Also, lets say food.amazon.com/rice has a lot of PR / authority -- will food.com benefit from the value of those internal pages?

    | chadburgess
    0

  • Over the past few months I have encountered webmasters who claim to be using instruments far better than open site explorer but they will not disclose what they are. Are there better ways of determining the value of a link than OSE? Is "link juice" more important than page/domain authority where the link resides? Or vice-vesa. Any help understanding this would be appreciated. I do not want to offend other webmasters but I also do not want to be fooled by them either while negotiating a link exchange with them

    | casper434
    0

  • I want to enable crawling facility for dynamic generated search result pages which are generating by Magento Solr search. You can view more about it by following URLs. http://code.google.com/p/magento-solr/ http://www.vistastores.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=bamboo+table+lamp
    http://www.vistastores.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=ceramic+table+lamp
    http://www.vistastores.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=green+patio+umbrella Right now, Google is not crawling search result page because, I have added following syntax to Robots.txt file. Disallow: /*?q= So, How do I enable crawling of search result pages with best SEO practice? If any other inputs in same direction so, it will help me more to get it done.

    | CommercePundit
    0

  • Which one is bad? External - when someone adds an incorrect link to your site, maybe does a typo when linking to an inner page. This page never existed on your site, google shows this as a 404 in Webmaster tools. Internal - a page existed, google indexed it, and you deleted it and didnt add a 301. Internal ones are in the webmaster's control, and i can understand if google gets upset if it sees a 404 for a URL that existed before, however surely "externally created" 404 shoudnt cause any harm cause that page never existed. And someone has inserted an incorrect link to your site.

    | SamBuck
    0

  • If we have one page on our site that is is only linked to by one other page, what is the best way to block crawler access to that page? I know we could set the link to "nofollow" and that would prevent the crawler from passing any authority, and we can set the page to "noindex" to prevent it from appearing in search results, but what is the best way to prevent the crawler from accessing that one link?

    | nicole.healthline
    0

  • If we have pages on our site that link to search results is that a bad thing? Should we set the links to "nofollow"?

    | nicole.healthline
    0

  • I see that GoDaddy offer a 'Certified Domain' option. Does this help SEO at all?

    | Techboy
    0

  • I have a client with a htaccess file that is a total mess! What are the best practices to organize all the re-directs, and make it more manageable in the future. Any resources would be appreciated.

    | anchorwave
    0

  • Is it possible to make your site un readable by the back link checkers such as open explorer ? Or would it have a negative effect on search engine rankings. Sorry I have been in the business for 10 years and it has never crossed my mind. Figured I would say that before I get all the "I can't believe you don't know that" type comments 🙂

    | onlinemediadirect
    0

  • Hi everyone, The company I work for has two domains, one for the english version of the website and another one for the french version. Example: www.digitalmusic.com (in english) www.musiquedigitale.com (in french) (these are examples***) I would like to know if on SEO standpoint it would be better to only have one domain so all of the links link to the same domain. Would it increase the domain authority and our rankings ? We will then have: www.digitalmusic.com/fr/page1 for pages in french www.digitalmusic.com/en/page1 for pages in english with all the 301 redirects required... Thank you in advance for your answers.

    | Maxxum
    0

  • My site was hacked and that seemed to have a pretty big effect on search rankings.  I'm pretty sure I've gotten the hack completely removed (as of 10/16.) During the hack and even now, all of my posts created after Aug 1 don't rank in regular Google searches at all even if I search for the titles in quotes.  But I can tell they are indexed because I see them when I do a site search in Google.  And I see that they are cached.  Posts from before Aug 1 rank well in Google searches. The issue with August and after posts no longer appearing started in mid September.  Prior to that the some of the August posts were actually performing very well.  The September date corresponds to when we first started working on removing the hack. It looks like the August and after posts all have a pagerank of 0, whereas the mozrank is much higher.  I've request reconsideration from Google and was told that no manual action was taken against my site. I know that's a lot of background, but I'm wondering how long do I need to wait before the August and after posts start ranking?  Is there anything I can do in the mean time to address this pagerank issue?

    | Chris-at-Magoosh
    0

  • Hi, We have a site www.anteater.com.au. It's a pest control company here in Sydney Australia. Now I've just renamed it to www.anteaterpestcontrolsydney.com.au yesterday for SEO purposes. I'm doing 301 redirects. My question is, is it worth it to do this? Will we have any advantage in the long run with just this URL change? Or would it be better to just leave it as is as www.anteater.com.au Any comments would be appreciated. Cheers.

    | Peter.Huxley59
    0

  • Here's a strange one: I am working on a site for a local business and targeting local searches. The names have been changed to protect the innocent. Various keyword position tools show the site ranking very well for searches like "Anytown Widget Store". Doing the same Google search from a browser in Anytown, the site shows up much lower.  So I tried changing the location in Google to other cities, using a variety of browsers and it comes up much higher out of town than in town. I have seen plenty of geographic discrepancies before, but usually they went the other way - searches from the actual local area did slightly better than the same searches done elsewhere, which would make sense. Any thoughts on why this would happen?

    | Nick_Ker
    0

  • Aloha, I do a small study of 302 redirects. I wonder if you have any examples of sites where the use of a 302 is made.
    For example, to ski resorts: where there is a summer version and a winter version. In this case, the field of 302 will return the version of the relevant season. ex: http://www.valmorel.com/ >> 302 >> http://www.valmorel.com/fr/hiver/accueil-hiver.html I wonder if the use of 302 is the right solution.
    What do you think? D.

    | android_lyon
    0

  • I recently did a crawl test and it listed over 10,000 pages, but around 282 of them generated 404 errors (bad links) I'm wondering how much this hurts overall SEO and if its something I should focus on fixing asap ? Thanks.

    | RagingBull
    0

  • Hi, My press release section is showing pagination issues (duplicate pages) http://www.me-by-melia.com/press/ I know they are showing 27 duplicate page titles which would be a easy fix. Do you recommend pagination? Let me know if u see any other issues.

    | Melia
    0

  • We've been racking our brains over this since the recent search engine changes (the notorious and non-cuddley Google Panda update) and have, within reason, corrected as many of the problems that we possibly can yet still our traffic drops further. http://www.bedandbreakfastsguide.com used to rank fairly equally with it's competitors however since the update (and a number of suggestions from another SEO company), the traffic has dropped by about 90% and it's dropped almost completely from the search results (unlike the competitors who are breaking many faux-pars yet remain well ranked). I don't think we're seeing the wood from the trees anymore so I'd be grateful if someone could take a look and see if we've missed anything glaringly obvious? Any thoughts welcome. Thanks Tim Big changes around the same time/since that might be worth noting: Setup a canonical domain name of www.bedandbreakfastsguide.com and (using IIS7) 301 redirect all other traffic over. Setup canonical URL meta tag for all results pages so they point to a single page Moved the redirect page (the one which sends users to the B&B's site) to another subdomain. Redesigned the URLs where possible to use "friendlier" and more keyword rich urls and 301 redirecting for the old urls Added XML sitemaps to the various tools (we found out they weren't there before) Added a robots.txt file Lowercased all urls Where possible removed duplicate results pages and pointed them at a single page Restructured the page titles to be more relevant Setup nofollow on the external urls

    | TimGaunt
    0

  • I recently submitted an XML sitemap on Webmaster tools: http://www.uncommongoods.com/sitemap.xml Once Webmaster tools downloads it, how long do you typically have to wait until the pages index ?

    | znotes
    0

  • Hey all, I'm about to setup a 301 on a website that has pretty good SEO rankings and I have the ability to change all the old inbound links that point to the old site, to the new site - should I leave them pointing to the old site that has the 301 on it or change all the old inbound links to the new domain name? Which has better SEO value? Thanks for helping, Anthony

    | Grenadi
    0

  • There is a blog www.blogname.com and someone creates 2 mobile versions: iphone.blogname.com mobile.blogname.com they are the perfect copy of www.blogname.com (articles, tags, links, etc etc) How Google will manage them? Right now, my article gets backlink by three sites www.blogname.com iphone.blogname.com mobile.blogname.com

    | Greenman
    0

  • I just wanted to say thank you all for the advice you've given on this board. When I first joined we had been stomped by Panda three times and our traffic was down about 40% from last year. Since then, we've followed recommendations here and while we aren't quite back to where we were before, our traffic for the last three days from Google is higher than any time since May and trending higher. We are also up in Google rank for 70% of our tracked keywords and showing up for 15% that we weren't even on the radar for in August. We still have a lot of work to do but know that we are on the right track. We can now do the same on a site that survived the initial hit but got slapped in July. I just want to reiterate what others have said: Get rid of duplicate urls - 301 redirect all dups to a single page Flesh out or drop pages with low content value Find 404 pages that used to exist and instead of 404s, 301 redirect to current resources Fix speed issues This forum was well worth the subscription.

    | IanTheScot
    1

  • Our commerce system allows products to be shared across multiple categories/sections of our site. E.G. /boxes/blue-box.html /circles/blue-box.html This enables the product to show up in different areas of the site, but does not link to an evergreen URL. We are considering using the canonical tag to resolve this issue, but our question relates to the similarity of the pages. Each section folder (e.g. /boxes/ and /circles/) has a different header, left navigation and footer. They are similar in layout and some content is the same, but a good portion is different in the header and nav. Each category nav basically deals with deeper links in it's own category. The product title, image, description, etc. is all the same and makes up the bulk of the page. Is this a good candidate for the canonical tag or should we attempt to accommodate an evergreen URL?

    | josh-att
    0

  • Hi Guys I have been un-able to find a definite answer to this on various forums, your views on this will be very valuable. I am doing a few Amazon affiliate sites and will be pulling in product data from Amazon via a Wordpress plugin. The plugin pulls in titles, descriptions, images, prices etc, however this presents a duplicate content issue and hence I can not publish the product pages with amazon descriptions. Due to the large number of products, it is not feasible to re-write all descriptions, but I plan re-write descriptions and titles for 50% of the products and publish then with “index, follow” attribute. However, for the other 50%, what would be the best way to handle them? Should I publish them as “noindex,follow”? **- Or is there another solution? Many thanks for your time.**

    | SamBuck
    0

  • Hello and Welcome Moz friends! Thanks for taking the time to look at my problem. On my website I've optimized our content to match the keywords I have selected for the site. I constantly am Re-writing articles, reading SEOMoz on tips and tricks how to make link juice flow. Yet only one of my keywords ranks decently, the rest never show up. I have the hardest time getting traffic to my site, and sales after that. Maybe I am implementing something incorrectly or there is something I am not doing. www.FrontlineMobility.com If you have any tips or anything to give me I would gladly accept it, any criticism is also appreciated. Thank you Friends, hopefully you can help me.

    | FrontlineMobility
    0

  • Our site works on templates and we essentially have a link pointing to the same place 3 times on most pages. The links are images not text. We are over 100 links on our on page attributes, and ranking fairly well for key SERPS our core pages are optimized for. I am thinking I should engage in some on-page link juice sculpting and add some "no follow" tags to 2 of the 3 repeated links. Although that being said the Moz's on page optimizer is not saying I have link cannibalization. Any thoughts guys? Hope this scenario makes sense.

    | robertrRSwalters
    0

  • Background info This is a new site and I am using Wordpress for a CMS not a blog and I have set a static page as the home page. The problem is when I configure the home page as a static page in wordpress it sets a 301 redirect to that page, which is this domain.com/software-consultancy (so the software-consultancy page is now domain.com). I thought about creating a separate Home page but I didn't see the point as the pages would be almost identical. **"Should I target keywords to the home page?" ** If I start link building using the phrase "software consultancy" to the home page should I link to domain.com or the 301 redirect URL domain.com/software-consultancy ? My thoughts are that if the URL has the keywords I am targeting in it will help with SEO. Or should I create a separate home page and just link the company name back to the home and have a separate page for "software consultancy" my thought is that having exactly what the company does on the home page would be better. But I don't want to lose out on search engine traffic by not having the keywords in the URL I am going to be link building for. I guess if I link build to the 301 redirect URL I can always revert back to this URL if I want to change? FYI here is my site structure: The site is for a small software consultancy and I have the following structure: domain.com/software-consultancy  -- (Set as Wordpress static Page so essentially a 301 redirect to / ) domain.com/software-consultancy/areas domain.com/software-consultancy/areas/london domain.com/software-consultancy/areas/new-york I would really appreciate some feedback on this, even if it's experience / advice and there is no exact answer. Many Thanks, J

    | SEOKeith
    0

  • I'm sure we have all read about the latest round of Google's algorithm changes also known as the "Panda 2.5" updates. This latest update seems to have hit some pretty large press release sites including PR Newswire and Businesswire (both of these have a great page rank and domain authority making them a great tool for SEO's in regards to inbounds links). Ultimately this update has directly affected their sites traffic, keyword rankings, and the number of indexed pages in Google. But what will this do to our smaller sites that benefit from these great links? Will these panda updates continue to target these content farms and lower their domain authority? Will that extrapolate out and effect the domain authority of our sites? What are your thoughts for those of us that utilize these services, should we re-evaluate our process? I look forward to a great discussion. Regards - Kyle

    | kchandler
    0

  • We are a virtual company doing business in 30 states nationwide. All our business is done via the phone, fax, email and express mail. Back in 2008 I optimized our small 8 page website for our key terms and was able to rank the site #1 nationally for our main keywords.  (I did a 6 month consulting gig for the company). The site remained #1 in Google until last year when some serious competitors entered the space and knocked us down to the middle of page one. Then with the Panda update #1 &  #2 we have seen our traffic drop 50% mostly due to not receiving the City + Keywords rankings any more. I have now been hired full time to bring us back but my question is this Do I need to build out city specific pages on the existing website? Do I need to buy keyword specific domains and create microsites? Do a combination of both? I would love to do both but I have to prioritize my efforts. Any thoughts would be great.

    | FidelityOne
    0

  • I am looking at our site structure, and don't want to have to rebuild the way the site was linked together based on it's current folder structure so I am wondering what option would work better for our URL structure. I will uses car categories as an example of what I am talking about, but you can insert any category structure you like. For example I would like to have pages like this: www.example.com/ford-convertibles
    www.example.com/chevy-convertibles But instead due to the site structure I will need to have pages like this: www.example.com/ford/convertibles
    www.example.com/chevy/convertibles But wonder if I shouldn't do the following to ensure the proper phrase is known for the page: www.example.com/ford/ford-convertibles
    www.example.com/chevy/chevy-convertibles The "/ford/ford-convertibles" just seems odd to me as a human, but I haven't seen anything on how well a keyphrase in a URL split by /'s does and I know dashes for phrases are fine. This means I am inclined to go with the"/ford/ford-convertibles"style because it keeps the keyphrase separated by dashes even if it is a bit repetitive. There will be other pages too like "/ford/top-10-fords-ever" but I don't wonder about that since it isnt "ford/ford-xxxxx" Thoughts on whether /'s in a keyphrase are as good as dashes?

    | SL_SEM
    0

  • Working with a company that is considering moving to a new domain and wanted some advice.They have 2 domains (they own both) and one is a shorter version of the other. The current domain is over 10 years old and has a domain authority score of 80. It is 9 characters long. The new domain (which they also own) has a DA score of 43 and is only 3 characters long. The debate is as much about branding as anything but there is a concern on how it will affect search. I was hoping for so advice and any pitfalls others may have experienced. Thanks!!

    | 2comarketing
    0

  • Howdy SEOmoz fans! (couldn't resist). I'm moving a wordpress blog from blog.domain.com to domain.com/blog. Trying to do it right the first time and cover all my bases. Issues I'm trying to handle correctly, in varying degrees of importance: External LInks Internal Links Google Friendly Traffic Routing in a dynamic environment (wordpress, 301, .htaccess, etc.) Thanks so much for any and all input!

    | NTM
    1

  • If your website CMS forces you to redirect from the homepage should it be a 301 or 302 Example includes www.direct.gov.uk which 302's it My view is that it should be a 302 in this instance and almost all others should be a 301 - the reason for this is that you want the www.direct.gov.uk  to be the "primary" and one that is displayed in Google, whereas for anything else you want the URL of the location. Yes I know that ideally you don't have any redirection at all...

    | AxonnMedia
    0

  • Hi, I want to know how to create a server side 301 redirection on IIS7. I found on google the below details; IIS Redirect In internet services manager, right click on the file or folder you wish to redirect Select the radio titled "a redirection to a URL". Enter the redirection page Check "The exact url entered above" and the "A permanent redirection for this resource" Click on 'Apply' But couldn't find anything like that. Can anyone help me out. thanks & regards

    | VipinLouka78
    0

  • over the 4-5 months i have published over 3000 unique articles which i have payed well over 10 000usd for, but i still only receive about 20 google visitors a day for that content. i uploaded the 3000 articles after i 301 redirected the old site to a a new domain (old site had 1000 articles, and at least 300visits from google a day), and all the old conetnt receives the traffic fine (301 redirect is working 100percent now and pr went from 0 to 3pr) articles are also good ranging from 400-800 words. 90 percent of them are indexed by google, most of them have been bookmarked to digg reddit etc website domain is over 10 years old - alltopics.com  why google doesnt send me the traffic i deserve?

    | rxesiv
    0

  • I have a client who has done a lot of link building, and just migrated his site from an old platform to a more seo friendly one, but now he is moving pages on the new site. Old Site --> (301 re-direct) --> New Site --> (301 re-direct) --> Changed Page -->(301 re-direct) Changed page again, etc All his changes are making a lot of etra work for me every month and I feel he is wasting a lot of link juice, How Would you explain to the client why they shouldn't be using several re-directs? What can I do to make sure that they keep as much link juice as possible?

    | anchorwave
    0

  • Hi, A friend has just bought 3 domains and is not planning to build websites with them for around 2 years. He asked me what the best thing to do with these domains was...I have 2 ways of look ing at it: a) Putting a holding page on these and submit to Google Webmaster Tools - this way they are indexed by Google and hold search engine trust when the site finally goes up - HOWEVER, if they are not updated with fresh content would that work against them in 2 years time? b) Simply redirect them to their existing site and don't do anything else. Let me know your thoughts. Adido.

    | Adido-105399
    0

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