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Category: Web Design

Talk through the latest in web design and development trends.


  • Who's following the Google style guides especially in HTML, CSS and javascript? What are the benefits of following the style guides? I am thinking of sending the style guides to our web development team before we launch our new site but I think there might be some conflicts. I'm an SEO and not programmer or web developer and I'm sure there are some "rules" that these web dev guys should follow and break as well. Thanks in advance! 🙂

    | esiow2013
    0

  • I researched the major real estate websites: Zillow, Trulia, Remax, Keller Williams, Century 21, etc. They all have a separate mobile site and not a responsive one. The client wants it to be easy to search for properties from a smartphone. Is it possible to get a responsive version of a real estate website on a smartphone?

    | MassMedia
    0

  • Hi, We have a domain with current e-commerce site on, about 5 years old. We have a new website being built with a different company and a new domain name. We are transferring our old domain over to new provider and 301'ing the domain to new domain. However, we can not take the current website with us, so we lose all our links/pages etc.. How important would it be to take a wrap of our current website to keep all the pages alive? Is there anything we can do so oldurl.com/brand/tshirt/ doesnt lose its rank? Can we 301 individual pages if we dont have the actual website? Just the domain name. Any help be great. Thanks

    | YNWA
    0

  • Our site underwent a major update in September 2012. We put the entire site in WordPress and did away with our static pages. Then, in February 2013, we moved our shopping cart pages from a subdomain to our main domain (in WordPress). In both cases, we had to implement a massive 301 redirect through htaccess as most of our URLs changed with the update. Our site consists of the shopping cart (WooCommerce), blog, and supporting pages. We noticed traffic starting to drop around the last week of November (2012) and it has steadily declined ever since. None of our shop pages have a pagerank with virtually all them showing a gray bar with question mark. Only the shop homepage has some pagerank -- that too from 4 previously to 2 now. Some of the words we used to rank very well for before, we don't even show in the first five pages anymore. At first, we thought it was a temporary situation that would self correct over time, but it doesn't seem to get better at all. All said, we have lost over 80% of our traffic from Google organic. Upon repeated reviews, the 301 redirects seem to be done correctly and we don't see any serious mistakes that could cause such a huge drop. So the question is are we missing something? Are we not looking at the right places? Any ideas where we might start looking? We're simply looking for ideas and a fresh perspective.

    | bizmanuals
    0

  • I have mentioned before about rewriting search URLs to look like landing pages, in e-commerce sites. Is this going to be a bad practice to use on a wide scale? I took the time to make a module for the platform I develop on which is going to make it easier to do. Normally a search would look something like shop.com/search_controller?search_term=searchword  and the search pages are disallowed in the robots.txt file. But the module I made lets you configure them to be like site.com/searchword or what ever you want it to be. It also lets you configure the meta title and the meta description of the page too. Here is a screenshot of the options. http://screencast.com/t/PwhBfSia5k The module also appends the urls to the site map of the site too. Will this get people a penalty by google? Or will it get their pages indexed? I have done similar on a small scale of like 5 words per site, I am wondering how it will be seen on a large scale.

    | LesleyPaone
    0

  • Hello guys, One of our clients is planning to have a new landing page for any users hitting the site for the first time. (returning users will still see the current homepage based on cookies ... in other words, the site would technically have 2 home pages). According to this client, they are planning to do something like this: https://www.websitename.com/ (for returning visitors) https://www.websitename.com/newuser (for first time visitors) Our instinct is that is not great to have 2 home pages (that would affect the SEO campaign we are managing for this company) and we are not sure how to handle this. That's why we would appreciate your opinion regarding this topic: From an SEO perspective, do you think this is a good idea? If not, what would you guys do differentiate first-time visitors vs returning visitors without affecting SEO? Maybe just a pop-up? Thanks in advance for your help !

    | Robertnweil1
    0

  • I am working on a mid size restaurant groups site.  The new site (in development) has a drop down of each of the locations.  When you hover over a location in the drop down it shows the businesses info (NAP).  Each of the location in the Nav list are using schema.org markup. I think this would be confusing for search robots.  Every page has 15 address schemas and individual restaurants pages NAP is at the below all the locations' schema/NAP in the DOM. Have any of you dealt with multiple schemas per page or similar structure?

    | JoshAM
    0

  • Howdy, Mozzers! I am having a battle with my inner-self regarding how to structure a resources section for our website. We're building out several pieces of content that are meant to be educational for our clients and I'm having trouble deciding how to layout the content structure. We could either layout all eight short sections on a single page, or create individual pages for each section. The goal is obviously to attract new potential clients by targeting these terms that they may be searching for in an information gathering stage. Here's my dilemma...
    With the single page guide, it would be nice because it will have a lot of content (and of course, keywords) to be picked up by the SERPS but I worry that it is going to be a bit crammed (because of eight sections) for the user. The individual pages would be much better organized and you can target more specific keywords, but I worry that it may get flagged for light content as some pages may have as little as a 150 word description. I have always been mindful of writing copy for searchers over spiders, but now I'm at a more technical crossroads as far as potentially getting dinged for not having robust content on each page. Here's where you come in...
    What do you think is the better of the two options? I like the idea of having the multiple pages because of the ability to hone-in on a keyword and the clean, organized feel, but I worry about the lack of content (and possibly losing out on long-tail opportunities). I'd love to hear your thoughts. Please and thank you. Ready annnnnnnnnnnnd GO!

    | jpretz
    0

  • Hi guys im new on this comunity, reacently i have an ishue taht i do not know how to solve. Google suggested that you can put microdata on my website and its look very cool on the organic search pages. So whtat happend. I have change my website to a new one with all rich snippets and microdata, submited a xml.sitiemap dinamic one that refresh every time when i putt something new on my website. do a redirection from my old site to a new one. All that google propose. I have check all the pages in webmaster tools and in a that tool google show everything, also microdata have shown on a google organic search aproximetly 7 days when he refresh my pages from old site. After that microdata and little stars just desapired from organic serch on google. I do not know why? I did not do anything. So can anyone help me how to return little stars on my links on google shown on organic serch. website: www.telekoplus.com hosted in Serbia Thank you in advance Beket Borocki P.S Sorry if i have mistakes in writing on English.

    | telekoplus
    0

  • One of our client has a meta expire tag across all pages of their website. Does that tag affect the website overall caching or indexing? Their website pages including home page is crawled every 10 days, however the website is popular high traffic websites, receiving 240,000 visits/month. Please advise what impact this tag will have on the website indexing and caching? Thanks Atomic Team

    | JamesDixon70
    0

  • Hi all! For a while now I've been trying to convince the higher ups that Schema (or related semantic markup languages) would be a plus for our sites. Predominantly we're in ecommerce and so far I still haven't noticed any of our competitors really using Schema. So I was asked to hold off on it until other projects had been handled. But now the coder I had been working closely with has moved to another job so I basically need to re-explain all of this to someone else. But that's not really the point of this discussion post. I recently read Barry Schwartz's post on the Google Structured Data Markup Helper Tool over on Search Engine Land [link] and thought it'd be a good time to bring up Schema to management again. But first, I wanted to ask how Schema has worked for the rest of you. Have you seen any increases in clickthroughs? Have rich snippets in Google made you more visible? Have you seen a decent ROI for the time spent on implementing it? Are you seeing an increase in people implementing it across your verticals? Have you found certain types of semantic data are less useful than others? Any tips, tricks, pointers concerning their use and implementation for those who are considering it? Any good case studies you can share? Thanks all!

    | MikeRoberts
    0

  • We're going from static to a wordpress based ecommerce site. While we can append .html to urls the directory structure will change so that www.oursite.com/productname.html  goes to www.oursite.com/product/productname.html My question is: Is it worth the trouble (from an seo perspective) of using a plugin to append new urls with .html when we're going to have to use 301 redirects anyway? If not should the urls have a trailing slash?

    | jbk365
    0

  • Hi guys, I'm working with a client who would has offices in two cities in Australia, and they provide a certain service to both cities. They would like to rank for keyword phrase for the service for both cities. E.g. Window Cleaning Brisbane, Window Cleaning Darwin. I strongly believe in focusing on relevance and visitor experience first, rather than ham-fistedly trying to rank for those phrases. Having said that, I'm thinking of creating two pages for those phrases as a sub-page to the service itself, with the title of those pages containing the geographically specific phrases. E.g.: Window Cleaning -->Window Cleaning Brisbane -->Window Cleaning Darwin The pages would highlight the 'reach' of the service in the two cities, as well as some specific information such as the history of both offices, any distinctions between the services provided, the teams at both locations, and so forth. I feel that although this seems like a valid reason for doing this, I may be overlooking something. What do you guys think?

    | carlod
    0

  • We use Wistia.com to embed our videos. They have different options for embed settings and we prefer to use the SEO embed setting, however, when we use that setting we aren't able to insert the video in a table side by side with another image or text. When we try, the video jumps out of the table and the table gets (for lack of a better work) out of wack. When we embed the video with the iframe embed setting, the video can be placed in a table with no issues, but then we don't get the SEO credit. We have our site in wordpress. I'm not sure if that has something to do with the tables getting messed up. Check out this link to see an example of how we want the video to show up. http://www.3000doorhangers.com/ Any suggestions as to how we can use the SEO embed setting within a table as shown in the above link?

    | JimDirectMailCoach
    0

  • Our goal was to accomplish a site that has parallax scrolling and great onsite optimization. We noticed that most Awwward winning sites www.awwwards.com have great parallax scrolling but no SEO. Can the MOZ community critique this site from an SEO perspective? (Note this site was optimized for Chrome or Firefox. If you are using IE, you will be redirected to the old site.) www.posicionamientowebenbuscadores.com Note the site is in BETA still. It has the following technologies CSS3 HTML5 REsponsive Wordpress Parallax Scrolling Onsite Optimization (SEO) No mobile (ran out of funds...)

    | Carla_Dawson
    0

  • We have a network of websites in Linux-based PHP and we may be switching them over to ASP.NET and using SiteCore CMS.  Right now, we don't have a CMS.  We would also be switching from using file extension www.site.com/file.php to no extensions www.site.com/file/ therefore altering our directory structure.  We are aware of the potential impacts to traffic of the initial migration, but are now more curious about SiteCore CMS and SEO, performance and indexation/crawlability. Has anyone made this move before or considered making it?  Can you offer any success stories, horror stories?

    | Eric_edvisors
    0

  • After launching my redesigned website (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com)  Google ranking has dropped significantly for competitive keywords.  The previous version of the site and the new version both have approximately 450 pages. My website developer was careful to implement 301 redirects. Monitoring Google Webmaster tools it shows that Google has picked up a quantity of duplicate content. More than 950 pages or shown in their index while my site only has 450 pages. There are also certain pages which require canonical which tags my developer is in the process of implementing. The relaunch was July 10. My developer is of the opinion that this fluctuation in ranking is normal and that it will take Google about one month to reindex the new site and remove the old pages from the directory. Is this accurate? Anyone have any ideas on why my site has tanked in Google's search results? Thank you very much. Sincerely,
    Alan Rosinsky

    | Kingalan1
    0

  • Hi, Does anyone know if the YOAST SEO plugin works 100% on responsive wordpress template? In other words, when you configure the custom title and metadescription is it also configured for the tablet and cellphone views as well? Thanks Carla

    | Carla_Dawson
    0

  • I am creating a strategy for multiple regions and the US comes to market different than EAME (Europe, Africa, Middle East) and China. We were planning on using language and iso codes in subfolder's but the corporation only wants their content to be in German, English, and Queens English. Our current decision is to use /en-US/, /en/, /de/, /en-CN/, /zh-CN/. /en/ and /de/ will be what we use for EAME. This doesn't seem like the best idea as I think /en/ will get indexed as the US version and not the EAME version. Any suggestion or if clarification is needed is greatly appreciated.

    | GodfreyB2B
    0

  • Wich wordpress pinterest theme is your favourite I am looking for one more new, modern and responsive to replace the one i have on this web sonrisas

    | maestrosonrisas
    0

  • So I feel like I've almost convinced my boss to hire out a re-design for our website (which is SORELY needed.) I'm at the step where I need to start finding quotes and site builders. I want a responsive design site built modern and professional... Love the moz site but not responsive enough. My current favorite example is at www.hasoffers.com Does anybody have any suggestions of where to go? And as a bonus, if anybody is brave enough to ballpark what a site like this would cost that would be awesome. Doesn't have to be exact or even that close... Thanks for any advice given.

    | jesse-landry
    0

  • Hi, 1. At the end of the URL, should we have "/" or not (for e.g. my website www.example.com/abc/) 2. What is the optimum level of site depth 3. Google crawler will go through the breadcrumb or url (If a page is at 6th level through breadcrumb and at 4th level through URL, at which level will google crawler recognize this.

    | adiez1234
    0

  • Hi Mozzers, Quick question, which I hope one of you can answer... Let's say I have a website (i) www.example.com and on that a subdomain exists, (ii) subdomain.example.com. Let's say I want to change my main domain from www.example.com to www.newwebsite.com.  I'd 301 all content, use GWT to notify Google of a change of address etc etc. Having done that, is it still possible to keep the original subdomain active? So, even though www.example.com has been redirected / transferred to www.newwebsite.com, subdomain.example.com would still exist. If that is possible, what is the implication for Domain Authority?  On the one hand, I have transferred the main site (so DA from that will transfer to the new site); but part of that root domain is still active. Make sense?  Any answers? Thanks everyone...

    | edlondon
    0

  • Hello all, I have a question regarding a website I am working on. I’ve read a lot of Q en A’s but couldn’t really find the best answer. For one of our new websites we are thinking about the structure of this website and the corresponding URL-structure. Basically we have a main product (and a few main keywords) which should drive the most traffic to our website, and for which we want to optimize our homepage. Besides those main keywords, we have an enormous base of long-tail keywords from which we would like to generate traffic. This means we want to create a lot of specific pages which are optimized. My main question is the following: We are thinking of two options: Option 1: www.example.com/example-keyword-one Option 2: www.example.com/directory/example-keyword-one With option 1 we will link directly from our homepage to the most important pages (which represent our most important keywords). All the pages with the long tail content will be linked from another section on our website, which is one click away from our homepage (specifically a /solutions page which is linked from the footer). All the pages with long-tail content will have this structure www.example.com/example-keyword-one so the URLs will not contain the directory /solutions With option 2 we will use more subdirectories in our URLs. Specifically, for all the long tail content we would use URLs like this: www.example.com/solutions/example-keyword-one
    The directories we want to use wouldn't really have added value in terms of SEO, since they don’t represent important keywords. So what is the best way to go? Option 1, straightforward, short URL’s which don’t really represent the linking structure of our website, but only contain important keywords. Or option 2, choose for more directories in our URLs which represent the linking structure of our website, but contain directories which don’t represent important keywords. Would the keyword ‘solutions’ in the directory (which doesn’t really relate to the content on the page) have a negative impact on our rankings for that URL?

    | NielsB
    0

  • Hey guys how do I pull an old sitemap or URL structure of a site ! This company I am helping out . Build a new site without any 301 redirect ! It's been about 2 months and hosting company sent me. SQL database file said we basically need to build another site ! Wondering if there are any other ways to see what exact urls were existent before their change over

    | BizDetox
    0

  • I am working on a site that has a HUGE number of duplicate pages due to ECWID ecommerce platform.  The site is built with Joomla!  How can I rectify this situation?  The pages also show up as "external " links on crawls...  Is it the ECWID platform?  I have never worked on a site that uses this. Here is an example of a page with the issue (there are 6280 issues) URL: http://www.metroboltmi.com/shop-spare-parts?Itemid=218&option=com_rokecwid&view=ecwid&ecwid_category_id=3560081

    | Atlanta-SMO
    0

  • I have a site entirely done in html, no CMS used. The blog page however, is wordpress. Wondering if this will effect us negatively in terms of SEO, having the blog that is linked to our site, a wordpress site. My gut is absolutely not, but the questions was asked....what do you think?

    | cschwartzel
    0

  • Hey guys! I'm struggling with why Google is ignoring my Meta Title / Description. I made a pretty drastic change to both about a week ago and on the results it hasn't changed. I'm on first page with several keywords and I think this weird caching is hurting me on where I'm at on the page. Thoughts / Ideas?

    | curtis_williams
    0

  • So I am looking at a site for a client, and I think I already have my answer, but wanted to check with you guys. First off the site is in FLASH and HTML.  I told the client to dump the flash site, but she isn't willing right now. So the URLS are generated like this. Flash: http://www.mysite.com/#/page/7ca2/wedding-pricing/ HTML: http://www.mysite.com/?/page/7ca2/wedding-pricing/ checking the site in Google with a site:mysite, none of the interior pages are indexed at all. So that is telling me that Google is pretty much ignoring everything past the # or ?. Is that correct? My recommendation is to dump the flash site and redo the URLS in a SEo friendly format.

    | netviper
    0

  • I have a client with a site that has the company that built their website's link in the footer.  How can I remove this?  I am pretty proficient with Wordpress but I am drawing a blank.  The site is www.northatlantacleaning.com Thanks and I do extend the courtesy of awarding 'Best Answer' and thumbs up etc to good responses.

    | Atlanta-SMO
    0

  • I am planning on creating a multi language website that targets different countries and would like to know what would be the best way to translate my content from English to multiple different languages (French, Spanish, Swedish, Chinese, etc.). I would hire a translator but doing so for all these different languages would be too costly. Using Google translate will leave me with at best a rough translation. What are my other options? Is there a website that can provide me a better translation? Would Fiver be a better/cheaper alternative? Thoughts?

    | Shawn124
    0

  • I've been tasked with re-building our company's mobile site and honestly have zero experience doing so. I know my way around HTML pretty well and have built several websites but never for mobile. Does anybody have any recommendations for me as far as tools to use to construct a proper mobile site? I basically want a simple page with four buttons on the front and a little drop down menu in the top corner. (not that this matters terribly but just saying, shouldn't need to be overly complicated.) Thanks in advance!

    | jesse-landry
    0

  • I've got a site that ranks very well in my local area for mobile app development related keywords.  We use terms like "NYC" and "New York" in our title tags. However I do not believe that this is NORMALLY a "local" geo keyword. The reason that I believe this is because my competitors rank all over the USA (and even in Europe) for these keyterms, but we only rank in our local area of New York. Is it possible that by including geographic terms like NYC and New York, that we are actually HURTING our rankings in other cities like Los Angeles and Chicago?   If we removed these words, could we see rankings increases in other parts of the world? The other side of the coin is that if we remove the "NYC" and "New York" keyterms, could we see serious drops in the local area as a result?

    | Fueled
    0

  • Hi, Can the website pages have the site name like Title of the page | Sitename.com I have a site with 50K pages and all pages have | Sitename.com mentioned would that be a good practice or bad? Thanks Martin

    | mtthompsons
    0

  • http://fandicoach.com/products Right now I have these accordion things on the website. Are they bad for google in terms of being an SEO best practice? I want to avoid doing anything black hat. Thanks!

    | OOMDODigital
    0

  • We've enabled event tracking to monitor clicks to pdfs on our website. All of these pdfs are hosted in a subdomain. The thing is, we offer some valuable pdfs that get a lot of traffic from search engines but I can't track them on Google Analytics. Do you track such pdfs? I can't place tracking code as they are pdfs on a subdomain. Thoughts?

    | Bio-RadAbs
    0

  • Hi I've touched upon this before on previous questions so apologies for repeating myself. In a nutshell out of the 60 webpages submitted to Google 11 have been indexed and out of the 140 images submitted none have indexed any ideas would be great! Here is a screen shot of what Google Webmaster is showing  http://www.tidy-books.com/sitemapshow.png and here is the sitemap - > http://www.tidy-books.com/sitemap/us/sitemap.xml Thanks

    | tidybooks
    0

  • Hey fellow Mozzers, Just got back from Mozcon and enjoyed getting to know a handful of you. I do in house SEO for a B2B wholesaler. We have a B2C website directory for homeowners to locate contractors to work on their home. On the site we have a products section which includes tech specs but not pricing. Our contractors have been asking us to add the ability to purchase their items online, so we are wanting to add a B2B sub-domain (store.domain.com) to our website for the contractors to purchase products online. We do not want consumers to be able to purchase the items and will have pricing behind a log in. I have a few questions that I'm hoping you might be able to answer: 1. What would be the best practice to not have duplicate content errors with products that are listed on both sites? Should we rel-canonical items shown on both domains or do something else?
    2. We are not against having the new site be crawled, but will Google be upset/ding rankings because pricing is behind a log-in? Are there certain best-practices for B2B ecommerce sites?
    3. Do you know of any other sites that have done this/do you have any recommendations on how to best implement this?

    | AC_Pro
    0

  • Hi guys and girls, looking for some help on the topic of links and the options I have before me in the content editor JCE for Joomla. Is this worth setting? Will it help? Please see the screen shot for the options I have and let me know if I should be creating links that are nofollow, help, or any of the other option I have? This is one of the pages I'm looking at for example.. http://www.a1gt.com.au/training-courses/certificate-iii-in-automotive-mechanical-technology In this case the site is linking to a gov training site and I feel the relationship is beneficial and started to wondering if the advanced options have any advantages today? Thank you for your help in advance 🙂 Ben. [](<a href=)" target="_blank">a>

    | yoonet
    0

  • Greetings: Companies such as Shutterstock often require that buyers place credit attribution on their web pages when photos you buy from them appear on these  pages.. Shutterstock requests that credit attribution links such as these be added: Songquan Deng / Shutterstock.com Do these links negatively impact SEO? Or do search engines view them as a positive? Thanks,
    Alan

    | Kingalan1
    0

  • We're considering changing our content management system.  This would probably change our url structure (keep root domain name, but specific product pages and what not would have different full urls). Will our rankings be affected if we use different urls for current pages? I know we can do 401 redirects, but anything else I should consider? Thanks, Dan

    | dcostigan
    0

  • Hello Moz Forum, I am still in the process of cleaning up the lack of attention to detail and betrayal set by our soon to be ex-SEO company. You can see a previous question I ask regarding betrayal SEO. I am analyzing every page on our website and i am noticing this /index.php/ in most of our URLs. We want to leave our expression engine cms and convert to wordpress. I have been reading about index.php but most of it is over my head for now. What does concern me is the "layman's" findings i am seeing through analytics. Our main domain has two URLs. one that ends in .com and the other ends in .com/index.php/ The one that ends in .com has a higher page rank than the ladder. And there are other internal pages with the same two variations. Can someone please explain to me what is /index.php/ ? what are the benefits of it? what are the cons? What will happen to my site once we move to wordpress? As always, your comments and suggestions are greatly appreciated.

    | CamiloSC
    0

  • Hi, I have a page on my site with a google map embed, and a path drawn on the map. The path is made from a long string of coordinates. For ease I have the co-ordinates placed in a script tag at the foot of the page, amongst my javascript My question is, will this script tag hurt the seo for the page? I've read that inline js and 'data islands' can be bad, so I've been careful to keep it out of the main body of the page. Thanks, any help appreciated!

    | madegood
    0

  • Hi, I have a homepage with a carousel rotator that has text in it. My question is what's the best practice in using H1 tags within the carousel. Will placing H1 tags in each be considered excessive H1 use and if so can this still cause SEO problems? Thank you

    | mirel
    0

  • Hi, I'm looking to redesign my current live website to a new Wordpress site using "Studiopress Enterprise Theme". I'm new to Wordpress and therefore will be embarking on lots of testing & development.
    I do not want to hurt my current live website whilst testing the new Wordpress site. However, it would be nice to bring the test site into the current live environment without changing untold urls, etc. Question
    What is the best practice to setup this new Wordpress environment for my domain: www.sampledomain.co.uk How would you restrict Google, Bing, etc from indexing, etc. whilst testing in the live environment. What other consideration should I be aware of Thanks Mark

    | Mark_Ch
    0

  • Hi, We recently did a website upgrade and as a result url structure changed. There is 140 404's in Google webmaster. Just wondering on best best practice. What should be done with pages that are defiantly not being used any more? For example we used to how .com/why-choose-us* this section is gone for Good - Should I redirect to closest page on site such as .com/about or noindex all together? We also had lots of pages that were on a similar topic but now have condensed these into one or two pages on the new site. Is it OK to 301redirect 10+ 404's to one page on the new site. These will only be redirected to closely related topics so from a user point of view the new presented content will be fine. (Is this bad from a search engine point of view as in pointing lots of old 404's to one particualr page on new site) Your input is welcomed. Thanks,

    | AdvanceSystems
    0

  • Hi My site is ranking quiet well for the past 10 years although it is becoming a bit dated. I am thinking of  revamping it using Modx.  Will this affect the ranking . Does a HTML site rank higher then CMS or does it no longer matter. I believe one of the reasons my site ranks so well is because it is  a very basic HTML design.  Should I just put a new HTML template on it Thanks

    | Niteowl
    0

  • Rand made the following post in 2009.  In July of 2013 I question whether this is still best practice.  Obviously, much has changed in our industry in four-and-a-half years! "...if you're seeking to maximize your ranking ability for a given piece of content, it's my personal belief that you should, most of the time, keep it on 1 subdomain under 1 root domain (but feel free to use subfolders as it makes sense). Starting a blog? I almost always recommend yoursite.com/blog over blog.yoursite.com. Want to launch a new section of content? Use yoursite.com/newstuff rather than newstuff.yoursite.com." Source: http://moz.com/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites

    | JorgeUmana
    0

  • My client has a blog that posts information about products to support its ecommerce store. The blog's main purpose is to support the products listed on the main website, but it has become so strong that its posts sometimes rank in the SERPS in place of the website product page, which is undesirable. The blog posts always link to the product that they are supporting. Are there any other methods, other than doing a 301, that could help the product page to rank instead of the blog post?

    | pugh
    0

  • I know dramatic losses in organic traffic is a common occurrence, but having looked through the archives I'm not sure that there's a recent case that replicates my situation. I've been working to increase the content on my company's website and to advise it on online marketing practices. To that end, in the past four months, I've created about 20% more pages — most of which are very high quality blog posts; adopted some rich snippets (though not all that I would like to see at this point); improved and increased internal links within the site; removed some "suspicious" pages as id'd by Moz that had a lot of links on it (although the content was actually genuine navigation); and I've also begun to guest blog. All of the blog content I've written has been connected to my G+ account, including most of the guest blogging. And... our organic traffic is preciptiously declining. Across the board. I'm befuddled. I can see no warnings (redirects &c) that would explain this. We haven't changed the site structure much — I think the most invasive thing we did was optimize our title tags! So no URL changes, nothing. Obviously, we're all questioning all the work I've done. It just seems like we've sunk SO much energy into "doing the right thing" to no effect (this site was slammed before for its shady backlink buying — though not from any direct penalty, just as a result of the Penguin update). We noticed traffic taking a particular plunge at the beginning of June. Can anyone offer insights? Very much appreciated.

    | Novos_Jay
    0

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