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Category: Intermediate & Advanced SEO

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  • One of the companies I do work for has a magento site.  I am simply the SEO guy and they work the website through some developers who hold access to their systems VERY tightly.  Using Google Webmaster Tools I saw that the robots.txt file was blocking ALL robots. I immediately e-mailed out and received a long reply about foreign robots and scrappers slowing down the website.  They told me I would have to provide a list of only the good robots to allow in robots.txt. Please correct me if I'm wrong.. but isn't Robots.txt optional?? Won't a bad scrapper or bot still bog down the site?  Shouldn't that be handled in httaccess or something different? I'm not new to SEO but I'm sure some of you who have been around longer have run into something like this and could provide some suggestions or resources I could use to plead my case! If I'm wrong.. please help me understand how we can meet both needs of allowing bots to visit the site but prevent the 'bad' ones.  Their claim is the site is bombarded by tons and tons of bots that have slowed down performance. Thanks in advance for your help!

    | JoshuaLindley
    0

  • Hi, I was at the MozCon conference in Seattle this Summer and heard great concepts about deleting a lot of pages on your site that are deemed excess.  It got me thinking to remove all of our old blogs that were: Sales(ee) less than 400 words Flat out bad blogs When i begin removing these links, i know i will get a lot of 404 errors because of previous social links.  So in your opinion, what would you do?  Do i just 301 those blogs to my main /blog page? Thanks

    | Shawn124
    0

  • i need to put static text (about our company brief 600 words) to all content section of pages of our website. I know it's bad for SEO Duplicate Content. But i need to tell google this is my static content and do NOT crawl it. Or something like that. canonical is for whole page but i need to set it up for certain positions of every page. is that possible?

    | nopsts
    0

  • We have 3 domains in the same industry, but unique content on each site.  The whois info is private, but the domains are all under the same owner registrant info. In terms of rankings, does it matter if we move them all into the same RackSpace cloud account?  Will Google know the relationship somehow and if they do, will they care?

    | TheDude
    0

  • What do you think is better for seo and for sale, I am using woo-ecommerce for health products website. websitename.com/product/keyword OR websitename.com/shop/keyword

    | MasonBaker
    0

  • We ran a ScreamingFrog report of one of our websites and found that there are thousands of instances of a single page with a different URL parameter, for example: purchase.cfm?id=1234
    purchase.cfm?id=1235
    purchase.cfm?id=1236
    purchase.cfm?id=1237 and we do not need purchase.cfm to be indexed for any reason as there is practically no content on that page to begin with, but it's just part of the purchase steps in our website. What is the best way to deal with this for Google & SEO?  Should we do a Meta NoIndex of this purchase.cfm page? Thank you.

    | ErnieB
    0

  • Hi All, I have a query regarding my Product pages on my eCommerce site. I have unique Product descriptions but some of the other page content on the other tabs i.e Hire Terms , Delivery , About the Hire Company  - Are duplicated across ALL my products. Is that okay or how should I deal with them ? See example url of one of my products below below  - http://goo.gl/aSFPqP My products currently rank very badly... 200 + so Any advice would be greatly appreciated thanks Peter

    | PeteC12
    0

  • Moz, We are a UK manufacturer and we historically have a link from the site http://www.findtheneedle.co.uk/ which is sort of a UK manufacturer database/directory I understand directory type links are not what we need nowadays in SEO but i feel with this one being quite well targeted towards UK manufacturing businesses it may be worth keeping the link, From my research we receive little quality referral traffic from this site, Moz OSE doesn't seem to be able to see the link at all, Majestic Says: <colgroup><col width="115"> <col width="122"></colgroup>
    | TrustFlow | CitationFlow |
    | 28 | 35 | Any Advice on this ? Thanks James Any Advice ?

    | Antony_Towle
    0

  • Hi Mozzers, We want to incorporate a 'Dictionary' of terms onto quite a few pages on our site, similar to an FAQ system. The 'Dictionary' has 285 terms in it, with about 1 sentence of content for each one (approximately 5,000 words total). The content is unique to our site and not keyword stuffed, but I am unsure what Google will think about us having all this shared content on these pages. I have a few ideas about how we can build this, but my higher-ups really want the entire dictionary on every page.  Thoughts? Image of what we're thinking here - http://screencast.com/t/GkhOktwC4I Thanks!

    | Travis-W
    0

  • Hello Mozzers, I'm looking at a niche party services directory (b2c), established for over 8 years. They're not using nofollow tags on backlinks from their paid entries (free entries only get phone numbers and not backlinks). If they suddenly switch all the paid-for backlinks in their directory to nofollow backlinks, might that have some kind of negative impact. Switching sounds like the best way forward, but I want to avoid any unintended consequences. Perhaps I should only implement this change gradually? Thanks in advance, Luke Edited 30 minutes ago by Luke Rowland

    | McTaggart
    0

  • Hello Mozzers! I'm thinking of using either Squarespace or WooCommerce for an ecommerce website. WooCommerce is great - I've used it before... how flexible is Squarespace from an SEO perspective, compared to WooCommerce? Thanks in advance, Luke

    | McTaggart
    0

  • Our product pages generate a PDF version of the page in a different layout. This is done for 2 reasons, it's been the standard across similar industries and to help customers print them when working with the product. So there is a use when it comes to the customer but search? I've thought about this a lot and my thinking is why index the PDF at all? Only allow the HTML page to be indexed. The PDF files are in a subdomain, so I can easily no index them. The way I see it, I'm reducing duplicate content On the flip side, it is hosted in a subdomain, so the PDF appearing when a HTML page doesn't, is another way of gaining real estate. If it appears with the HTML page, more estate coverage. Anyone else done this? My knowledge tells me this could be a good thing, might even iron out any backlinks from being generated to the PDF and lead to more HTML backlinks Can PDFs solely exist as a form of data accessible once on the page and not relevant to search engines. I find them a bane when they are on a subdomain.

    | Bio-RadAbs
    0

  • Hi all, We just launched a new website: http://www.allwatchapps.com/ There is no link yet, but everything seems allright in google webmaster tools: everypage seems to be indexed, and content keywords are good. However, when I search for "allwatchapps" in google, I got a meta description for the homepage: 26 mai 2014 - Contact. : + 33 (0)6.33.27.78.63 : info@allwatchapps.com : Grenoble - Lyon - Chambéry - Annecy - Paca - Paris ... It is the date of the page, which I want to disable (where does it com from?! I use Yoast SEO plugin and didn't find the option), and the footer contact info, why is that?... Thanks, best, Benoit.

    | 2MSens
    0

  • Hi Community! 2 weeks ago, i sent in our first/HUGE disavow list to Google. Out of the 2700 domains we submitted, 1300 of them we successfully removed, but we have nothing to show Google. Reason is because on our reconsideration request page, we can't submit anything because we didn't receive a message from Google (please see screenshot). I know for a FACT we got hit by an ALGORITHM penalty back in March2013. So, I have this wonderful Gdoc to prove that we worked LONG AND HARD to add and remove links in the past year, but we can't seem to message Google and tell them our story on why we should be reconsidered. How do we tell Google our success of removals? It's been 2 weeks, how much longer until we see a change in traffic? Or do we have to wait for the next update of algorithms by google aka REFRESH to see a change? Let me know and thank you so much in advance! Shawn cYGKLVR

    | Shawn124
    1

  • Hi all, I have a question for everyone. Sitelinks have been around for a while now & I've always seen them when the search is for a brand's name. However, today, when looking at the rankings for one of the campaigns we manage, we noticed there were sitelinks in the number #1 & #2 positions in Google (Australia) for the search term "Dance Costumes". Whilst both the companies have Dance Costumes in their title, so do all the other results & so I don't see why it warrants the sites to be relevant via their brand name.
    Note: The results are organic results, not paid results (where you can add sitelinks). Firstly, has anyone seen this before (screenshot attached)?
    And secondly, is there markup/schema that allows you to do this (none that I know of)? danceCostumes-sitelinks.png

    | KBB_Digital
    0

  • I was doing some research and saw this url structure in a website that was not ranking well and can't help but wonder was the url structure part of the problem as well it looks like this with a period between keywords. domain.com/keyword1.keyword2.html and was wondering if that is acceptable for search engines as opposed to the normal dashes like this expample ... domain.com/keyword1-keyword2-keyword3.html I have never noticed a period to separate words in a url before. Anyone have any experience with this ? Is this going to hurt possible rankings ? Thank you in advance, Joe

    | jlane9
    1

  • Hi, I have some very weird results in the SERPS - We did not do a complete 301 of the entire domain, but rather individual pages. We did the transfer back on 10th of June, and I was checking to see if there were any results on old domain of pages that were transferred to new domain via 301. There were, but... Now I have the following occurring in the search results: Title of Page (Links to old domain!! )
    www.oldomain.com › ... › Figures & Sculptures › Tall Sculptures (these last 2 breadcrumbs link to NEW domain??!!)
    Bla bla bla (meta description from new domain meta description I know it's Monday, but this one has got me quite concerned! - Any insight appreciated! Am I going nuts?

    | bjs2010
    0

  • We recently started using shareasale.com for affiliate marketing and have received literally hundreds of applications from coupon websites wanting to become affiliates. Most we have not approved as the quality of the sites is poor. However, a few sites seem more legitimate. Could having these types of sites harm our seo in any way?

    | unikey
    1

  • We work in the student loan debt industry, so providing a scholarship for our viewers makes total sense for our business.  Would links to this page be seen by Google as buying links? Does this fall anywhere into gray-hat tactics? My gut tells me no because helping people with student debt is what we do. The scholarship really synergizes with our business model, but who knows..?

    | DemiGR
    0

  • Hi, Client Google rankings have been seriously hit. We have done everything we know of to see why this is the case, and there is no obvious explanation. The client dominated search terms, and are no down on page 7/8 for these search terms. There are no errors in WMT, so we can not resubmit for reconsideration. This is a genuine client and their business has been seriously affected. Can anybody offer help? Thanks in advance!

    | roadjan
    0

  • Hi All, We have implemented Schema.org for our products and currently if you put the url in google, the results showing up are not the meta description but some of the schema.org content along with some other rubbish at the bottom . Do you know if we are doing this wrong  as in GWT it all looks okay and says it fine? You can get the url from here -http://goo.gl/aSFPqP Any assistance, greatly appreciated. thanks peter

    | PeteC12
    0

  • I saw some people freaking out about this on some forums and thought I would ask. Are you aware of there being any downside to use "Fetch as Google" often? Is it a bad thing to do when you create a new page or blog post, for example?

    | BlueLinkERP
    0

  • Greetings: I run a real estate web site in New York City with about 650 pages out of which 330 are property listing pages. About 250 of those listing pages contain less than 150 words of content. In late August I set about 250 of the listing pages that generated the least traffic (generally corresponding to those with the least content) to "no-index, follow". Now Google has removed those pages from their index. The overall bounce rate for the site has been reduced from about 69% to about 64% since the removal of these low quality listing pages. However the click thru rate has not improved and is stuck at about 2.2 pages per visitor. Shouldn't the click thru rate improve if the bounce rate goes own? Am I missing something? Also, is a lower bounce rate something that Google will take into account when calculating rank? Thanks, Alan

    | Kingalan1
    0

  • I'am sorry if my English isn't very good, but this is my problem at the moment: On two of my campagnes I get a weird error on Moz Analytics: 605 Page Banned by robots.txt, X-Robots-Tag HTTP Header, or Meta Robots Tag Moz Analytics points to an url that starts with: http:/**/None/**www.????.com. We don't understand how Moz indexed this non-existing page that starts with None? And how can we solve this error? I hope that someone can help me.

    | nettt
    0

  • I've been asked to rank the website of an international association under the same keywords but in multiple languages (they rank very highly for English speaking countries), however they only have the one website with 1 .com domain. Question: Is the better approach to translate the site in multiple languages and then allow people to select the language they desire? OR Buy ccTLD and run the site multiple times in different languages as separate entities?

    | MassivePrime
    0

  • Hello, I'm interested in learning how to assume ownership of a site without Google resetting the PageRank and the links back to zero. I've read that buying sites is one of the most powerful SEO "shortcuts" you can employ, but can be tricky. I've heard that, unfortunately, buying an existing domain and 301 redirecting for SEO credit is not that simple. When the WHOIS registration information on the newly purchased domain is updated to reflect its transfer to you, the new owner, that domain will almost immediately be reset by Google to a PageRank=0. That's the standard practice when a domain changes hands. Since Google is a domain registrar, obviously, change of ownership information is readily available for their use in factoring it into their algorithms. If you decide to 301 redirect the new domain to another domain you already own, you will get credit for the site's current incoming link profile, at least in the short-term. However, this purchased domain will eventually reset to PR=0 (usually during the next PageRank update) AND you will then get no credit for all of those links post-transfer. What is your experience with buying and redirecting domains?

    | Choice
    0

  • I have a page with 2 scroll features. First 1/3 of the page (from left) has thumb pictures (not original content) and a vertical scroll next to. Remaining 2/3 of the page has a lot of unique content and a vertical scroll next to it. Question: Visually on a computer, the unique content is right next to the thumbs, but in the source code the original content shows after these thumbs. Does that mean search engines will see this content as "below the fold" and actually, placing this content below the thumbs (requiring a lot of scrolling to get to the original content) would in a search engine's mind be the exact same location of the content, as the source code shows the same location? I am trying to understand if search engines base their analysis on source code or also visual location of content? thx

    | khi5
    0

  • Hi All, I'm having problems editing the title tags on individual pages on Squarespace. It seems the only way to do it is via the page title name. Here is an example: http://www.autismsees.com/research/. The page is called research, so it makes that the meta title. The problem is I want to keep research on the page and the Meta Title be: Autism Spectrum Research. I'v tried searching over the web, but no luck so far. Thanks for your help.

    | PeterRota
    0

  • Good Morning! My father asked me about Domain Forwarding yesterday and it's impact on SEO. The example he gave was if he had website xyz.com and it was an educational website that sold anger management programs would purchasing the domain socialskills.com and pointing that domain at xyz.com help rank for social skills? My immediate answer was no it would not simply because Google doesn't associate any content with that domain, and Domain Forwarding is different that a redirect, which would apply if a website is already established. Am I correct in my thinking? Thanks guys!

    | HashtagHustler
    0

  • Good Morning! Does anybody have any experience with SEO behind a paywall. If we have a portion of a website that is going to be locked, will google still be able to access all of that regardless of paying? If not is there any way to circumvent that? Any thoughts are greatly appreciated! MOZel Tov!

    | HashtagHustler
    0

  • I have a website is is only of interest to US visitors.  99% (at least) of Adsense income is from the US.  But I'm getting constant attempts by hackers to login to my admin account.  I have countermeasures fo combat that and am initiating others. But here's my question: I am considering not allowing any non US, or at least any non-North American, traffic to the site via a Wordpress plugin that does this.  I know it will not affect my business negatively, directly.  However, are there any ramifications of the Google bots of these blocked countries not being able to access my site?  Does it affect the rankings of my site in the US Google searches. At the very least I could block China, Russia and some eastern European countries.

    | bizzer
    0

  • Hello, So we recently used Google Webmaster Tools in an attempt to block certain parameters on our site from showing up in Google's index.  One of our site parameters is essentially for user location and accounts for over 500,000 URLs.  This parameter does not change page content in any way, and there is no need for Google to index it.  We edited the parameter in GWT to tell Google that it does not change site content and to not index it.  However, after two weeks, all of these URLs are still definitely getting indexed.  Why?  Maybe there's something we're missing here.  Perhaps there is another way to do this more effectively.  Has anyone else ran into this problem? The path we used to implement this action:
    Google Webmaster Tools > Crawl > URL Parameters Thank you in advance for your help!

    | Jbake
    0

  • Hi, We've just increased a lot of branded PPC clicks for one of our clients. I've worked out that roughly 5000 clicks per month has been moved from organic search to PPC (all brand related search queries). These clicks are very cheap, but the client has expressed worries about what these clicks could do to our organic rankings. Lots of brand search in organic results proves to Google that this is a strong brand, right? So what happens when all the searches are still there, but the organic listings stop getting the clicks? Could this have a ring effect on other non-brand rankings?

    | Inevo
    0

  • We are  based in India but have all our  prospective clientele in Europe and North America. The problem is ; despite all our efforts we are getting almost 60% traffic from India which is not our target region. We have already tried following hosting our website on US server adding GB and US language tags webmaster target region only allows  one country so we cannot set the target there Apart from this any other suggestion? Prashant

    | TPS2013
    0

  • I usually verify websites on Google and Bing Webmaster. How important it is to verify on Yandex Webmaster if Russia is not one of the targeted locations?

    | selectitaly
    0

  • Hi, We have been experiencing issues with our hosting company and want to move the hosting to someone else. One problem was that we did Isapi rewrite rule but the company moved to mod rewrite and they never adjusted the rewrite rules. We are considering a move to another hosting company - would that hurt rankings? Are there any SEO considerations to think about when switching to another host?

    | alexkatalkin
    0

  • Last night I switched my site from http to https. Both sites are verified in Webmaster Tools but when I try to use the change of address it says- Your account doesn't contain any sites we can use for a change of address. Add and verify the new site, then try again. How do I fix this?

    | EcommerceSite
    0

  • Hi, my client has the following links pointing to the home page http://www.weddingrings.com/index.cfm http://www.weddingrings.com In this case would I use rel canonical or redirect?

    | alexkatalkin
    0

  • Hi there.. we were having a good increase in rankings since using Moz and then we purchased an ssl certificate so our website would run under https... to make sure our website is only accessed through https, we have used a method on .htaccess (appache) to make sure the website is only reached through https, using: RewriteEngine on
    RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R,QSA] after doing this, from our last crawl perspective, we lost several positions that we were increasing.. what have we done wrong ? we have to fix this asap, please help us...

    | mszeer
    0

  • I am seeking feedback on the best way to proceed with regards to a project I am working on. Say for example the domain was  domain.com and this site wanted to target specific markets such as realtors, attorneys, churches, and restaurants. Which URL structure would be better? domain.com/industries/attorneys or domain.com/attorneys Can I get your feedback along with any supporting articles. This is for a large ecommerce site but these particular pages are solely going to be used for marketing purposes to bring those site visitors to the website to let them know we understand their needs. Thanks for your help> Malcom

    | PrintPlace.com
    0

  • Hey Moz, I am looking to target international audiences. But I may have duplicate content. For example, I have article 123 on each domain listed below. Will each content rank separately (in US and UK and Canada) because of the domain? The idea is to rank well in several different countries. But should I never have an article duplicated? Should we start from ground up creating articles per country? Some articles may apply to both! I guess this whole duplicate content thing is quite confusing to me. I understand that I can submit to GWT and do geographic location and add rel=alternate tag but will that allow all of them to rank separately? www.example.com www.example.co.uk www.example.ca Please help and thanks so much! Cole

    | ColeLusby
    0

  • Hi, I've got an issue that I'm sure many of you are good at dealing with. I'm working with an authority in my client's industry. There is the president, who is definitely an authority. There is his wife, who has a name in the field, is an author in the field, but her name is not near as big as the president. I found a really, really good topic for content that is attracting links in the industry - one of the best content topics possible which really needed to be addressed on my client's website. I let them know that it needed to be an article of authority, but they had their assistant write it. It's good, she's talented - it's informative, interesting, has 2 embedded videos of the president talking, and is 1650 words. We haven't made the videos yet. The thing is, doesn't this need to be written by the authority - president. He's a slow writer with zero time, but I think it needs to be his voice with his name on it to attract links. He's super super busy though. Should I: 1. Suggest that the president do a thorough editing of the article and put his name on it. or 2. Have his wife (who has more time) do a thorough editing of the article and put her name on it. or 3. Leave it as is or 4. Have the president rewrite the entire article when he has time, which he would be resistant to. or 5. Have the president's wife rewrite the entire article, which she would be resistant to? What do you guys think with the little information I've given you?

    | BobGW
    1

  • Over the weekend our website received large amounts of spammy comments / user profiles on our forums. This has led to Google giving us a partial manual action until we clear things up. So far we have: Cleared up all the spam, banned the offending user accounts, and temporary enabled admin-approval for new sign ups. We are currently investigating upgrading the forum software to the latest version in order to make the forums less susceptible to this kind of attack. Could anyone let me know whether they think it is the right time for us to submit a reconsideration request to get the manual action removed? Will the temporary actions we have taken be enough to get the ban lifted, or should we wait until the forum software has been updated? I'd really appreciate any advice, especially if there is anyone here who has experienced this issue themselves 🙂

    | RG_SEO
    0

  • Hi all. We have an ecommerce site which features various product sections. In each section you might have 60 products each displayed neatly in pages of 10. We recently added functionality, so that if a product is out of stock, it will automatically drop that product to the back of the list and bring another in stock one forward. We're just worried that Google will view the same information, repeatedly rotating on the first page of 10 products (the page that ranks) and think we're in some way trying to trick Google into thinking the content is fresh? Does anyone have a throw on this?  Is it likely to penalise us? Thank you!!! Ben

    | bnknowles1
    0

  • Hi, We have problems with old Meta titles in the index of google.nl. If you look for example at this wine: https://www.wijnvoordeel.nl/Italie/Just-Hugo::5460.html The Meta tile is: **Just Hugo | Heerlijke Hugo | Het zomerdrankje van 2014 | Wijnvoordeel ** If you look at the results in Google: https://www.google.nl/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#safe=active&q=just hugo The Meta tile is: Just Hugo - Wijnvoordeel(this is an old/automatic generated Meta tile). I already added the code "", but I don't see any progress. Does anybody knows what could be the problem? Thanks for the help! Douwe Veldstra

    | Eluscious.com
    0

  • I just read an article about Panda and it warned against against Clone sites: "Clone sites are a strong panda factor (JM, Mar 10, 2014)" I don't have any clone sites, but there are dozens of sites with imitations of mine.  We were the first in the area of interest, and then all these other sites that imitated us popped up.  None are exact replicas.  But many have spun some of our articles and used them to create their sites; the site structures are not identical though. Google seems to know we are the original site on the topic since we are ranked #1 for most terms. Would these be considered clone sites in their eyes?

    | bizzer
    0

  • I was reading Danny Dover's book and decided to try some websites and so far everyone I have looked at has had navigation that does not work with disabled javascript.  Is this still as important as it was at the time of publish (2011)?  Thanks!

    | Sika22
    0

  • Hey MOZperts, I run a marketplace called Zibbet.com and we have 1000s of individual stores within our marketplace. We are about to launch a new initiative giving all sellers their own stand-alone websites. URL structure:
    Marketplace URL: http://www.zibbet.com/pillowlink
    Stand-alone site URL: http://pillowlink.zibbet.com (doesn't work yet) Essentially, their stand-alone website is a duplicate of their marketplace store. Same items (item title, description), same seller bios, same shop introduction content etc but it just has a different layout. You can scroll down and see a preview of the different pages (if that helps you visualize what we're doing), here. My Questions: My desire is for both the sellers marketplace store and their stand-alone website to have good rankings in the SERPS. Is this possible? Do we need to add any tags (e.g. "rel=canonical") to one of these so that we're not penalized for duplicate content? If so, which one? Can we just change the meta data structure of the stand-alone websites to skirt around the duplicate content issue? Keen to hear your thoughts and if you have any suggestions for how we can handle this best. Thanks in advance!

    | relientmark
    0

  • My Domain Authority has tumbled in the last six months from 28 to 21. Search traffic has dropped from about 4,500 per month to 3,000 per month with most of the drop being in the more competitive terms. Lead generation is off by about 70%. This is after spending $12,000 on "optimization" with a MOZ recommended SEO firm and spending another $17,000 implementing their suggestions. My real estate brokerage firm has completed some press worthy deals in the last month. If I can get these deals mentioned in a reputable newspaper like The New York Times (or other real estate publications like NY Observer, Real Estate Weekly) will this help domain authority? If my domain authority is this low, how difficult is it to move it higher? Before reaching out to these publications, should I create a blog post about these transactions on my website? Any suggestions as to how I can improve domain authority? My URL is www.nyc-officespace-leader.com. I should add that my SEO firm had about 30 toxic links removed and filed a disavow for about another 80 links. MOZ is only showing about 25 domains linking to our site. I suspect not enough to get us to rank. Thanks, Alan

    | Kingalan1
    0

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