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Category: Intermediate & Advanced SEO

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


  • So I've read through all of the answers that suggest using a subdirectory is the best way to approach this -  you rank more quickly and have all of your content on one site.  BUT what if you're looking to move into a totally new market that your current site/content isn't in any way relevant to? Some examples are Supermarkets such as Tesco (who seem to use a mix of methods) http://www.tesco.com/groceries/, http://www.clothingattesco.com/, http://www.tesco.com/bank/ which links out from their main site to http://www.tescobank.com/ etc and Sainsburys http://www.sainsburys.co.uk/ who use subdomains - here they have their grocery offering, their bank offering, clothes, phones etc split into subdomains. If you have a product that is totally new to your Brand and different from all the products on your current site, does this change the answer to subdirectory vs subdomain? Would be great to hear your expert opinions on this. Thanks

    | giffgaff
    2

  • I have a 301 Redirect http://www.wheelchairparts.com to http://www.wheelchairparts.com/store/pc/home.asp The problem is my PA and most of my Links have been lost. I thought a 301 redirected EVERYTHING?

    | Mike.Bean
    0

  • Hi Mozzers, I read on SEJ yesterday than apparently the Panda update was due in the 2 - 4 weeks. I still have a large of my products which I have not got around to rewriting unique product descriptions for. I know these product descriptions are duplicated on other affiliate sites so do it think it in light of the panda update coming , would it wise to put a NO INDEX Meta tag on these product pages until I get around to rewriting the descriptions.  That way, I may not hit my Panda and it will buy me a bit more time. Just an idea , but thought I'd run it by. thanks Pete

    | PeteC12
    0

  • Hi I have a site www.example.com and finally have got the developers to add Google webmaster verification codes for: example.com m.example.com As I was advised this is best practice - however I was wondering does this mean I now need to add the disavow file. Thanks Andy

    | Andy-Halliday
    0

  • Google Webmaster Tools reports "Access Denied" 403 errors.  They also provide an explanation of what they mean at https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2409441?ctx=MCE&ctx=AD&hl=en. What are the implications of these Access Denied errors?  Should they be 301 redirected internally?

    | RosemaryB
    0

  • Hi Mozzers, My on page content comes under my H2 tag. I have a few subheadings within my content to help break it up etc and currently this is just underlined (not bold or anything) and I am wondering from an SEO perspective, should I be making these sub headings H3 tags. Otherwise , I just have 500-750 words of content under an H2 tag which is what I am currently doing on my landing pages. thanks pete

    | PeteC12
    0

  • We are currently developing an e-commerce platform that will feed multiple stores. Each store will have its own domain and URL, but all stores will offer products that come from the same centralized database. That means all products will have the same image, description and title across all stores. What would be the best practice to avoid getting stores penalized for duplicate content?

    | Agence_Bunji
    0

  • Hello, I am wondering if there seems to be a preference for adding hreflang tags (from this article).  My client just changed their site from gTLDs to ccTLDs, and a few sites have taken a pretty big traffic hit.  One issue is definitely the amount of redirects to the page, but I am also going to work with the developer to add hreflang tags.  My question is - is it better to add them to the header of each page, or the site map, or both, or something else?  Any other thoughts are appreciated.  Our Australia site, which was at least findable using Australia Google before this relaunch, is not showing up, even when you search the company name directly. Thanks!Lauryn

    | john_marketade
    0

  • I am not entirely pleased with my website's name and have been willing to change it for years. I feel it is not brand-able. But since its an old domain name and overall figures of DA, PR, Moz score etc. are very good, I have been wary of changing the name and doing a 301 permanent re-direct from the existing name to the new one. Please suggest me if I should go for it. If yes, what are the best practices to go about it.

    | KS__
    0

  • Hi Mozzers, I am going through my categories on my eccomerce hire site trying to improve things and just wanted to check this query with you My understanding is that if I have the same H1 and title tag, then that would give more weight for that keyword phrase? Would I also be correct in assuming that the H1 is more important than the title tag or should both be treated as equals in terms of SEO. My dimemla is that for certain products we hire, there's only really one clear winner in terms of keyword phrase. The others I find in keyword planner are way down the volume list , so I have tended to put the H1 and title tag as the same and then have H2 tag and a slightly different heading. Is that the best philosphy or should I really mix them up , so the the title tag, h1, h2 are different ? Also Currently My on page content mentions the the H1 tag near the beginning of the content. Is this correct or should I really be using the H2 tag phrase near the beginning of the content. For example - One of the products we hire out is carpet cleaners. Therefore the main keyword phrase is carpet cleaner hire
    and for our local pages its' carpet cleaner hire <city name="">.
    This is my title tag and H1 tag and then for my h2 tag , I have something like "carpet cleaning equipment" with the content
    mentioning carpet cleaner hire near the beginning.</city> I don't want to look likes its over optimization or mention the word hire to much but being a hire website, it's difficult not to and other keywords that don't mention it in it, are to varied so could increase bounce rates ?. When I look in GWT against my content keywords - the word hire shows a full bar. Just wondered what peoples thoughts are if what I am doing it okay?
    thanks
    Pete

    | PeteC12
    0

  • My copywriter and designer are putting together a new homepage design that eliminates my H1, which is currently my primary term. After I let them know that it's imperative to have that term included in the H1, they asked what I would think about splitting their newly proposed tagline up into H1 and non-H1 content using CSS to style both segments the same way. To the user the tagline would read something like:
    An In-Home Nursing Service With A Patient-First Focus But it would be coded like this: An In-Home Nursing Service With A Patient-First Focus Are there any drawbacks to executing the H1 like this?

    | Andrew_Mac
    0

  • Background Information A website that we inherited was severely penalized and after the penalty was revoked the site still never resurfaced in rankings or traffic. Although a dramatic action, we have decided to launch a completely new version of the website. Everything will be new including the imagery, branding, content, domain name, hosting company, registrar account, google analytics account, etc. Our question is when do we pull the plug on the old site and how do we go about doing it? We had heard advice that we should make sure we run both sites at the same time for 3 months, then deindex the old site using a noindex meta robots tag.We are cautious because we don't want the old website to be associated in any way, shape or form with the new website. We will purposely not be 301 redirecting any URLs from the old website to the new. What would you do if you were in this situation?

    | peteboyd
    0

  • So I have a tactical question and I need mozzers. I'll use widgets as an example: 1- My company used to sell widgets exclusively and we built thousands of useful, branded unique pages that sell widgets. We have thousands of pages that are ranking for widgets.com/brand-widgets-for-sale. (These pages have been live for almost 2 years) 2- We've shifted our focus to now renting widgets. We have about 100 pages focused on renting the same branded widgets. These pages have unique content and photos and can be found at widgets.com/brand-widgets-for-rent. (These pages have been live for about 2-3 months) The problem is that when someone searches just for the brand name, the "for sale" pages dramatically outrank the "for rent" pages. Instead, I want them to find the "for rent" page. I don't want to redirect traffic from the "for sale" pages because someone might still be interested in buying (although as a company, we are super focused on renting). Solutions? "nofollow" the "for sale" pages with the idea that Google will stop indexing "for sale" and start valuing "for rent" over it? Remove "for sale" from sitemap. Help!!

    | Vacatia_SEO
    0

  • Hello, Our IT department has informed me that they have seen extremely heavy traffic from the Yahoo Slurp bot in recent days. They are claiming this bot has single-handedly caused one of our servers to crash. I am a bit skeptical of this, as I have not found these particular legitimate search engine bots to be aggressive resource hogs, especially for an enterprise-level web server. I have requested to examine the server logs myself, but have not had success with this. IT is requesting to block this particular bot, but I am apprehensive about doing this, as I don't want this to have any negative implications on our site showing in Yahoo News or other Yahoo properties. Does anyone else have experience with this bot being an overly-zealous resource drag, and if so, what is the best course of action to satisfy all parties?

    | RobbieFoglia
    1

  • So I have a site and I was creating dynamic pages for a while, what happened was some of them accidentally had lots of similar meta tags and titles.  I then changed up my site but left those duplicate tags for a while, not knowing what had happened. Recently I began my SEO campaign once again and noticed that these errors were there. So i did the following. Removed the pages. Removed directories that had these dynamic pages with the remove tool in google webmasters. Blocked google from scanning those pages with the robots.txt. I have verified that the robots.txt works, the pages are longer in google search...however it still shows up in in the html improvements section after a week.  (It has updated a few times). So I decided to remove the robots.txt file and now add 301 redirects. Does anyone have any experience with this and am I going about this the right away? Any additional info is greatly appreciated thanks.

    | tarafaraz
    0

  • Hi, We're setting up a forum for our users (our target audience responds extremely well to forums). I was wondering if it should be set up on a sub-domain or not. I'm leaning towards sub-domain, but our devs say this will impact how they approach it so I'd like to give them an answer asap so we can proceed with planning it! Thanks, Amelia

    | CommT
    0

  • If it's technically necessary to add an extension to a domain URL... Should I use brand.nl/nl or should I use brand.nl/keyword as the homepage? In my opinion it's better to use the language extension as it is much easier for other websites to link to. The client could make a separate page with content about the keyword. I also think it's much more difficult for direct traffic to access the website with this long URL. Any other thoughts?

    | WeAreDigital_BE
    0

  • New PPC Client (out of necessity) had their site redesigned for mobile without much care given to it by a "SEO Expert". None of the meta data was copied over to the new images and pages, much of the old content was simply deleted, intra site links completely changed. Huge hits in organic rank, resulting in traffic declines occurred as their lead volume hit zero the following month (April 21 until Present). Any concerns I should have in doing a simple rollback beyond redirects and GWT (Search Console) ops? Current plan is 1. Setup redirects back to old site 2. Launch PPC campaign to recover call volume and leads. 3. Optimize old site for mobile simultaneously with simple responsive framework for menu, text. 4. Start disavowing poor-quality links that were added (got 10 with spam rating >4). 5. Eventually move them back to Wordpress and the theme they paid for with site content, meta data, etc all in tact.

    | jclmns
    0

  • Hello friends, i have a very good question. In a website of coupon codes, how should be a perfect Title, Description, H1 and H2? For example: If our main keyword is "Promo codes Amazon" but we we want to get good results with "Coupon codes Amazon", "Discounts Amazon" and "Coupons Amazon", how should be a perfect SEO? In some sites, people we use some tactics like month or year in title and descriptions or number of coupons and offers. Thanks so much.

    | pompero99
    0

  • With Google figuring out how to make Ajax and JS more searchable/indexable, I am curious on thoughts or techniques to prevent this. Here's my Situation, we have a page that we do not ever want to be indexed/crawled or other. Currently we have the nofollow/noindex command, but due to technical changes for our site the method in which this information is being implemented if it is ever displayed it will not have the ability to block the content from search. It is also the decision of the business to not list the file in robots.txt due to the sensitivity of the content. Basically, this content doesn't exist unless something super important happens, and even if something super important happens, we do not want Google to know of its existence. Since the Dev team is planning on using Ajax/JS to pull in this content if the business turns it on, the concern is that it will be on the homepage and Google could index it. So the questions that I was asked; if Google can/does index, how long would that piece of content potentially appear in the SERPs? Can we block Google from caring about and indexing this section of content on the homepage? Sorry for the vagueness of this question, it's very sensitive in nature and I am trying to avoid too many specifics. I am able to discuss this in a more private way if necessary. Thanks!

    | Shawn_Huber
    0

  • Hello! We could use some assistance diagnosing an issue. In order to avoid asking a convoluted question, I will try to break it down below: 1. A random foreign site is hacked and a subdirectory is added that is completely irrelevant to the root. a). i.e. http://www.um.org/prom_dresses/ 2. http://www.um.org/prom_dresses/ is just a phishing prom dress page 3. When you search "prom dress shop", the website that used to rank first (for good reason) was www.promdressshop.com. 4. www.promdressshop.com's home page has now been replaced by:  um.org/prom_dresses/ – who is using prom dress shop's title tag and meta description. How is it possible that this hacked page (on um.org) is not only ranking above us, but is also starting to replace www.promdressshop.com's pages in search results. We do not believe www.promdressshop.com has been hacked but are open to any ideas. Please let me know if you would like any additional info. Thanks in advance! new

    | LogicalMediaGroup
    0

  • How do I go about it if my physical address (office) is in Country A but I want to rank my website in Country B, C and D (without having an office or physical address in the countries B, C and D)? I am aware of people setting up virtual offices in other countries/cities and adding them to Google Places/Maps with toll free phone numbers, but I don't wish to do any of that. I know Google will catch up with this one day or the other and punish me hard for trying to play games with it. Is there a way rank a website in another country without actually having a physical location there? If yes, please guide me how to go about it.

    | KS__
    0

  • Hi guys So we had a domain that was only for one country, www.example.com 1 year later we decided to go to another country so we will have all the current website under a country subdomain like : ae.example.com we did a 301 redirect
    Should I perform a change of address action from www.example.com to ae.example.com  ? please help
    Thanks

    | awrikat
    0

  • This client sells event management software and puts all their clients on different subdomains of their main domain. Looking in SEO tools like OSE, when I run a backlink analysis, it pulls up all the backlinks to the subdomains as well as those for the main domain. In webmaster tools when I look at queries, impressions and clicks, they get at least 30 times more traffic and impressions on keywords found in their subdomains and very few on their own. In other words, all these tools are providing a collective analysis of main domain and all subdomains. All the backlinks and keywords recorded for those subdomains are not at all relevent to the keywords they want to rank for. For example, their software supports Boy Scouts, so keywords they rank for according to WT include merit badge, scout camp, etc., but of course, that's on the subdomain. As a result, if you were to take a snapshot of their online presence as these tools do, you would think they were a boy scout website and not a software developer if you include the subdomain, along with its PR, backlinks, keywords, etc. So the question I have is, does Google connect all these subdomains with the main domain and then water down the main site with irrelevant keywords, content and backlinks? Or does Google see all those subdomains as completely separate and we don't need to worry or move their clients off their subdomain? I'm worried about Google assigning a "boy scout" relevancy to them. Am I wrong?  What would you do?

    | katandmouse
    0

  • How to and what to check in competitors' strengths/weaknesses?

    | Green.landon
    1

  • Hello We had good traffic from ratings ( stars ) . I have added Offer details in the rich snippets in various currencies - the snippet testing tool likes it , but for some reason the stars on my site have completely dissapeared and been gone for almost a week.  I need the offer information in there for google shopping automatic updates and google told me that it's implemented correctly for the shopping part.. but I really don't know what to do about this. Any ideas why would be really appreciated. http://www.return2health.net/yeast-imbalance/threelac-candida-defence/ Thanks 🙂

    | s_EOgi_Bear
    0

  • Hi, I need help with this decision, thanks in advance. My client has 2 websites but they have the same content: one has 4 years http://radiocolombia.com.co/ and the the other one 7 years: http://radiocolombiainternacional.com/web/ This  content has been duplicated for years, how do I know which website is more relevant for google? we have  to pick one. Please any advice? Thanks, David

    | seoweb33
    0

  • We have a client site (a dentist) that has 10 locations and 20+ services (braces, teeth whitening, cosmetic dentistry, etc, etc.). We're trying to figure out the ideal approach to optimally cover all their locations and services, but each option we consider has drawbacks: Optimize service pages for service name + each location name (or at least the biggest location names), with service name and location names in the title tag. That results in a too long title tag, plus possible user confusion, since they are searching for "braces richmond" but the title tag lists other cities, some of which are in a different state. Optimize service pages for service name + each location name, but don't include the locations in the page title. This is the current option being used, but it appears to be hurting the rankings at least a bit not having the location name in the page title. Create a page for each service + location combo. That will be 200+ pages, which will mean the pages will be deeper in the site, with less link juice. Create new domains for each location/state covered. But then we have to start over building link juice. How have other sites dealt with this? What has worked best and what hasn't worked?

    | AdamThompson
    2

  • What good/bad experiences have people had trying to optimize a single URL for multiple locations in different states? eg optimizing a page of the site for "dentist atlanta", "dentist orlando", and "dentist miami" (the client has offices in all these locations). Has anyone found that Google has an algorithm that get's suspicious if you try to optimize a given URL for either too many locations and/or for locations that are too far apart?

    | AdamThompson
    2

  • Hi guys, hope you've had a manageable working week. Just after some advice! What would you think to changing the permalink structure of an already established entertainment website so that the category and postdate also appears in the URL, i.e "2014-01-01/news/this-is-the-post"? I have done it before without thinking about all the crawl errors it would cause and quickly reverted everything. However, I am now eager to get listed in Google News (don't worry, this isn't the only reason to change the URL) and think it might help things overall. Thoughts? Worth the effort or a pointless exercise?

    | Whittie
    0

  • What to do to make "phones-ring". How will make this happen?

    | Green.landon
    0

  • Super confused about this. Our office is located in Los Angeles, but it is not a storefront, and our clients are from all over the country... and our business involves travel to other countries. So there is nothing "local" about us. But everything I read seems to say we should be doing local SEO. How to approach this?

    | benenjerry
    1

  • Hello, One my the sites I work with, http://www.oransi.com, has seen a significant decrease in crawl Googlebot activity in the last 90 days. See screenshot. This decrease in crawl stats runs in conjunction with less Kb downloaded per day & an increase in how much time it took Google to download a page. The client did just go through a redesign, however that happened on 4/16/15, which was after the decrease in Googlebot activity, so that should not be the issue. Same could be said for the mobilegeddan algorithm change. Any help would be greatly appreciated. 5u1lM6B

    | BrandLabs
    0

  • Hello Mozzers Moz On page grader shows A grade for the particular URL,but my page was not ranking on top 100 Google search. Any help is appreciated ,Thanks

    | sobanadevi
    0

  • A few additional interesting details: A blog post we wrote with the same keyword  ranks 8, but this page does not crack the top 20. Crazy competitive term-- top SERP are from HBR, Entrepreneur and Inc. We use Instapage as landing page builder-- could this effect our rankings? URL is not a subdomain Pretty stumped over here.  Thanks y'all!

    | lbernes22
    0

  • Challenging issue All the "usual suspects" have been discarded: all pages included in google index, no google penalties, metas optimized, kw's segregated by pages/cluster of pages to avoid cannibalization... BUT, we know we are missing something website is www.e-florex.com and is an e-commerce site based on magento Any ideas you might think are worth exploring? Thanks in advance for your help Juan

    | juanmarn
    0

  • Sitting in Country A I want to see how much traffic a particular keyword receives in Country B. Whats the best way to do it? Also, will the search results differ if I am analyzing the above sitting in Country A viz-a-viz Country B. In other words, will the IP of the country I am making the search from play a role in the results?

    | KS__
    0

  • Hi Mozzers Having worked on my companies site for a couple of months now correcting many issues, im now ready to begin looking at a content review, many areas of the site contain duplicate content, the main causes being 1. Category Page Duplications
    e.g.
    Widget Page Contains ("Blue Widget Extract")
    Widget Page Contains ("Red Widget Extract")
    Blue Widget Page Contains ("Same Blue Widget Extract")
    Red Widget Page Contains ("Same Red Widget Extract") 2. Product Descriptions
    Item 1 (Identical to item 2 with the exception of a few words and technical specs)
    Item 2 Causing almost all the content on the site to get devalued. Whilst i've cleared all moz errors and warnings im certain this is causing devaluation of most of the website. I was hoping you could answer these questions so I know what to expect once i have made the changes. Will the pages that had duplicate content recover once they possess unique content or should i expect a hard and slow climb back? The website has never receive any warnings from Google, does this mean recovery for penalties like duplicate content will be quicker Several pages rank on page 1 for fairly competitive keywords despite having duplicate content and keyword spammy content. What are the chances of shooting myself in the foot by editing this content? I know I will have to wait for google to crawl the pages before i see any reflection in the changes, but how long after google has crawled the page should I get a realistic idea of how positive the changes were? As always, thanks for you time!

    | ATP
    0

  • Hello, We have been using Zendesk to manage our customer support tickets for approx 2 years. We recently noticed that the attached forum had lot's of spam comments attached to it. Promoting Viagra and the like. The system was installed as a subdomain of my site support.mysite.com We have since deleted our account with Zendesk but Moz and Google are reporting loads of inbound links to that subdomain that are all total spam with Viagra in the anchor text etc. The subdomain no longer exists and now throws a 404. Can these links still hurt me? Is there other steps I need to take? I have disavowed all the links.

    | niallfred
    0

  • Hi Moz! We're trying to serve different content to paid and non-paid visitors from the same URL. Is this black hat? Here's the reason we want to do this -- we're testing a theory that paid ads boost organic rankings. This is something we saw happen to a client and we want to test this further. But we have to have a different UX that's more sparse and converts better for paid. Thanks for reading!

    | Horizon_SEO
    0

  • We have different plans that you can signup for - how can we rectify the duplicate page content and title issue here? Thanks. | http://signup.directiq.com/?plan=100 | 0 | 1 | 32 | 1 | 200 |
    | http://signup.directiq.com/?plan=104 | 0 | 1 | 32 | 1 | 200 |
    | http://signup.directiq.com/?plan=116 | 0 | 1 | 32 | 1 | 200 |
    | http://signup.directiq.com/?plan=117 | 0 | 1 | 32 | 1 | 200 |
    | http://signup.directiq.com/?plan=102 | 0 | 1 | 32 | 1 | 200 |
    | http://signup.directiq.com/?plan=119 | 0 | 1 | 32 | 1 | 200 |
    | http://signup.directiq.com/?plan=101 | 0 | 1 | 32 | 1 | 200 |
    | http://signup.directiq.com/?plan=103 | 0 | 1 | 32 | 1 | 200 |
    | http://signup.directiq.com/?plan=5 |

    | directiq
    0

  • I am trying to deal with the duplicate content issues presented by Magento's layered navigation feature (aka faceted navigation). I installed Amasty's Improved Navigation extension (https://amasty.com/improved-layered-navigation.html) and it offers the option to hide the layered navigation from specific user agents (ie googlebot, bingbot, etc). This seems like cloaking to me and I hesitate to try it, unless hiding faceted navigation from specific user agents is known to be acceptable to Google (white hat practice). Does anyone know if this the case?

    | Kyle_M
    0

  • I'm trying to find a plugin for Wordpress that enables you to no-index an individual page from Google news but not from Google search results. We want to remove some of our pages from Google news without hurting others.

    | uSw
    0

  • Having read the Neil Patel's guide to DA, I am still at a loss as to practical steps, I can do to help improve my Domain Authority. This is a summary of findings / action plan so far: 1. Building quality incoming links by producing excellent content that people will love! 2. Having "related articles" to keep users on site for longer, and provide more information I am certain I am missing some more steps? More worryingly my DA has gone down from 8 to 5!  I do not know how to improve it? Please help with real practical steps that I can use.

    | propertysaviour
    0

  • Hi All, Like to know is there any better way to do 301 redirection. My Client whose website name is Online Plants created with OpenCart. Over the period of time he added nearly 10,000's of products and now he is cleaning them ( by grouping similar attribute under one products) which is right way to do. For example , Product A with different size ( X,XL,XXL ) previously had 3 product entry ( A - X, A - XL, A - XXL ) , now he is moving all of them under one. So while moving he is deleting the other two entry. Now whats the best way to inform google . Putting a manual 301 redirection for each and every product is impossible as there are more products. Whats the best way to go ahead on this.

    | Verve-Innovation
    1

  • We have several large ecommerce websites, and we've added some tracking parameters to GWT for google to ignore. All pages are correctly canonicaled. Google has been ignoring the parameters and the canonicals, and still ranks many parametered pages for us. Has anyone run into this?

    | AMHC
    0

  • Hello everyone, A few days back, we have permanently removed 3 main categories from our E-commerce website and because of that our more than 50k URLs are showing 404 error (according to Google Search Console). What are the good practices to handle such extensively 404 pages? Please help!!

    | Obbserv
    0

  • what a PBN is? please describe how you use them for SEO.

    | Green.landon
    0

  • We have just acquired a competing website and are wondering whether to leave it running as is for now, or set the domain to redirect to our own site. If we set up this redirect, what would happen to the old site in Google SERPs? Would the site drop off from results? If so, would we capture this new search traffic or is it a free for all and all sites compete for the search traffic as normal? Thanks in advance. Paul

    | kevinliao
    0

  • Hello Team, How can we create dynamic pages or more pages on website but maintaining SEO standards.

    | Obbserv
    0

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