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Category: Web Design

Talk through the latest in web design and development trends.


  • Hi SEOmozers, I have another question.  =]  Thanks in  advance. First question: How important is the breadcrumb for SEO? I know that breadcrumb makes better UX because it shows how the visitor landed on this page and the breadcrumb may show up in the search engine.  But other than that, how important is it? Second Question: If I have a page that can be found via 2 locations, how should I handle this in regards to breadcrumb? For example, I have page A.  You can access page A via Category A and Category B.  Therefore, what I did was list Page A under Category A and when someone visit Category B and click on Page A, it will redirect to the page A that was found via Category A. The problem is on page A, the breadcrumb is Home > Category A > Page A.  So if someone visit Category B and click on Page A, it redirects and the breadcrumb shows Home > Category A > Page A. What should I do with the breadcrumb for Category B > Page A? Should I create another page A and just use canonical on it? Should I create another page A but do not index it? or leave it as is? 1 Page A, can be access via 2 categories. Please advise. Thank you!

    | TommyTan
    0

  • Hi Mozzers I would like to know how crawlers see the ampersand (& or &) in your URLs and if Google frown upon this or not? As far as I know they purely recognise this as "and" is this correct and is there any best practice for implementing this, as I know a lot of people complained before about & in links and that it is better to use it as &, but this is not on links, this is on URLs. Reason for this is that we looking to move onto an ASP.Net MVC framework (any suggestions for a different framework are welcome, we still just planning out future development) and in order to make use of the filter options we have on our site we need a parameter to indicate the difference on a routing level (routing sends to controller, controller sends to model, model sends to controller and controller sends to view < this is pattern of a request that comes in on the framework we will be using). I already have -'s and /'s in the URLs (which is for my SEO structuring) so these syntax can't be used for identifying filters the user clicks or uses to define their search as it will create a complete mess in the system. Now we looking at & to say; OK, when a user lands on /accommodation and they selects De Kelders (which is a destination in our area) the page will be /accommodation/de-kelders on this page they can define their search further to say they are looking for 5 star accommodation and it should be close to the beach, this is where the routing needs some guidance and we looking to have it as follow: /accommodation/de-kelders/5-star&close-to-the-beach. Now, does the "&" get identified by search engines on a URL level as "and" and does this cause any issues with crawling or indexation or would it be best to look at another solution? Thanks, Chris Captivate

    | DROIDSTERS
    0

  • My client was told that having 1 website for 3 different brands/services is better than having 3 websites. I need your help to prove my value to a new client.  This client has worked with Reach Local on PPC for some time and when they first got started the Reach Local Markering Consultant told this cleint that they needed to have one site for better SEO purposes. The client was told that Google ranks websites higher if they have more paid traffic going to them.  I've been doing this for long enough to realize this does not help ranking, at least not enough to make a difference. Keep in mind this is for 3 different companies.  One company does plumbing, another electrical and the last one does air conditioning.  They also have  4 locations but only two locations have mutliple services opperating out of them.  I understand these 2 location will not have there own Google+ Local / Places listing.  Using the same address for 2 different business and expecting a first page ranking is just not possible. Right now when you visit the clients website you see a logo that rotates with a banner section that follows the logo rotation.  First you see the AC Company and then the Plumbing etc.  I see this as confusing to the end user and it is more work to get it ranked for SEO.  I recommended that we build 3 speerate websites for each service and just list out all the addresses that the company services on the contact page.  I would also design inside the footer links to the other services for branding purposes. Please share your thoughts on how you would handle this if you were doing the SEO for your own 3 different business services. I really appreicate any input/insight to this.  Thank you so much in advance!!!!

    | 1SMG
    0

  • If a page is clearly unique and there is obviously no canonical tag needed, does it hurt anything if one has been added?

    | jaychow
    0

  • Really stupid question (I think) but does Left or right hand navigation help or hinder SEO and/or user experience? Re-doing our site at the moment and I quite like right hand navigation as it seems to highlight our content better but not sure if it would hinder anything SEO wise - site is based on a responsive theme and side navigation is only called after content anyway so don't think it would make a difference SEO wise Noticing more and more sites moving towards right hand nav and I quite like it, would also differentiate us in our niche as everyone else uses left hand nav As I say probably a stupid question but thought I would ask! 🙂

    | Jon-C
    0

  • I am not able to convincingly decide between using redirects versus using 404 errors. People are giving varied opinions. Here are my cases 1. Coding errors - we put out a bad link a. Some people are saying redirect to home page; the user at least has something to do PLUS more importantly it does NOT hurt your SEO ranking. b. Counter - the page ain't there. Return 404 2. Product removed - link1 to product 1 was out there. We removed product1; so link1 is also gone. It is either lying in people's bookmarks, OR because of coding errors we left it hanging out at some places on our site.

    | proptiger
    0

  • Hello to all participants! I'm starting on responsive design with css media queries and I was wondering if hidding content can, in this case, can also be bad for seo? I know that hidding content is bad (eg. display: none;), but is it also like that with responsive design or does Google see it other way? If I have a news column with title, image and text for 1024px and hide the text and image leaving just the title for 768px, or smaller, will Google consider this black hat and will it be bad for seo? are there any articles I can read about this subject, and other similar subjects? sorry for my english 🙂 thanks

    | Lusodados
    1

  • Hello, I was thinking about putting a box down at the bottom of my client's main articles that let's the reader easily copy the html code it takes to link to the article they're reading.  Maybe I'd put it after the author bio. Do any of you do this? If so, what format do you use? It has to look nice of course. This is a non-techie industry. Thanks.

    | BobGW
    0

  • I have  a client that currently has a side navigation and wants to know how changing to a top nav will affect her SEO. We always recommend top nav for user experience but I am not sure if there is a direct effect on SEO. Would the change affect it? Thoughts?

    | hwade
    0

  • For a user / seo perspective, what is the best way to code a drop down menu nav bar? Is it best to use css, javascript or a scripting library like jquery? I am thinking about overall best practice that will not have a negative impact on serps. I am also thinking about what will work best on all types of devices i.e. desk tops, lap tops, smart phones and tablets. What are the Pro's & Cons of Using CSS for Drop Down Menus. What are the Pro's & cons of using Javascript for drop down menus. And the same question for jquery. Thank you all in advance for your ideas.

    | bronxpad
    0

  • Hi Guys, I wonder if any of you have used / are using WPengine. I am had thought about using them before and was really impressed by there load speeds. They are pretty expensive though when compared to others. Now, I already have ok hosting but everything is run through a cdn and S3 for streaming HD Videos. Is it worthwhile shelling out for WP engine (pro) or is it better to just stick with an OK host and cdn. Opinions are greatly appreciated. Thanks Jenson

    | jensonseo
    0

  • I have seen some kind of free online software that lets you create product catalog layouts based on your ecommerce product database but I can't remember the name of company or the url of their site? Anyone heard of this?

    | larahill
    1

  • Hello people, I know that majority of SEO gurus (?) claim that H1 tag should only be used once per page. In the landing page design I'm working with, we actually need to repeat our core message stated in H1 & H2 - at the bottom of the page. Now the question is: Can that in any way cause any ranking penalty from big G? In my eyes that is not attempt to over optimize page as it contains SAME info as the H1 & H2 at the top of the page. Confusing, so I'm hope that some SEO gurus here will share some light on this. Thanks in advance!

    | RetroOnline
    0

  • Dear all, what would be the ideal layout of a webpage for SEO? How would a homepage and landingspage look like? Thanks in advance! Best regards, Ben

    | HMK-NL
    0

  • Hi, I would like your thoughts about pages vs. posts for SEO. I understand the difference in terms of WP structure and have read the SEOmoz blog post about setting up your site for SEO success (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success). However, if you're trying to rank for a particular keyword, it seems that either one could work, from an on-page SEO perspective, as far as title tag, URL, meta description, etc. So how do you decide whether to set up a page vs. a post? What are the pros and cons, from an SEO perspective, about using one vs. the other? Thanks in advance! Carolina

    | csmm
    0

  • Is there a primer anywhere that will help me understand how rel=me works and how to implement it properly? I do NOT have a blog but I do have a Google+ account. I want to put my mug into my SERPs so I need to understand both the concept and the technical details of implementing this. I am very comfortable with markup so I will be able to do this if I understand WHAT I am doing and HOW it is done. Thanks for your help! Chris Streeter

    | DVRSystems19
    0

  • Highly discussed in our team is the question: Should all parent navigation items be clickable, or only the ones that have no child menu appearing on mouse over? At Starwood Germany, we  would like to adjust the main navigation for all our websites in order to improve consistency and user friendliness. At the moment, most of our websites feature both clickable non-clickable parent items, depending on whether the items have a corresponding child menu (appearing on mouse over) or not. See example here: http://www.imperialvienna.com/en Some of our team members believe it might be irritating and/or confusing for the user if some items are clickable while others are not. What do you think? Any thoughts and insights would be truly appreciated!

    | DFM_GSA
    0

  • My website http://www.socialseomanagement.com/ is using tons of bandwidth.  I received a message from the hosting company saying I exceeded my monthly bandwidth and it has only been a few days.  Can anyone take a look and make suggestions? Thanks

    | JChronicle
    0

  • I'm looking at making an embedable calculator and asking users to embed it to their website. I had the idea of using javascript to include the calculator which would also conatain a text link back to my site in order to gain some back links. If it's possible Google won't see the link (as they may not execute the javascript), is it safe to place the link in the <noscript>tag? If so, Will it be indexed and will Page Rank be passed?</span></p> <p>Thanks in advance for your answers. </p> <p>Anthony</p> <p><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><br /></span></p></noscript>

    | BallyhooLtd
    0

  • I am building a website which will have a main navigation related to the site and each link of the main navigation will have a secondary navigation. We do not want to use a megamenu style navigation. I will try to explain it with a example: Let's start with an example for a computer store "My PC Store", the Main Navigation would be: Desktop PC's Notebook & Tablets
    Multimedia
    When clicking on the "Notebook & Tablets" the user is directed to the page domain.com/notebook-tablet.html and on this page the secondary navigation appears: Laptop Netbook Tablets / iPad I am confused on how I should organize the semantic navigation for best SEO performances and I need advice / suggestions. I thought about 2 different ways to do it but which one is more appropriate in terms of SEO? PROPOSITION A Home Page: <header> My PC Store <nav> Desktop PC's Notebook & Tablets Multimedia </nav> </header> Sub-Page (Notebook & Tablets): <nav>(or <aside>?) Desktop PC's Notebook & Tablets Multimedia </aside> </nav> <header> Notebook & Tablets <nav> Laptop Netbook Tablets / iPad </nav> </header> As you notice on the home page the Main Site Navigation is included in the <header>while it is not in the sub-pages. PROPOSITION B Home Page: <header> My PC Store <nav> Desktop PC's Notebook & Tablets Multimedia </nav> </header> Sub-Page (Notebook & Tablets): <header> Notebook & Tablets <nav> Desktop PC's Notebook & Tablets Multimedia </nav> # Notebook & Tablets * Laptop Netbook Tablets / iPad </header> The main navgation remains always in the <header>(home page / sub-pages) of all page. I need suggestions... How would you guys organize the nav ? </header> </header>

    | netbuilder
    0

  • In an effort to decease our page load time, we are looking at making a change so that all product images on any page past page 1 load with a place holder image.  When the user clicks to the next page, it then loads all of the images for that page. Right now, all of the product divs are loaded into a Javascript array and loaded in chunks to the page display div. Product-heavy pages significantly increase load time as the browser loads all of the images from the product HTML before the Javascript can rewrite the display div with page-specific product HTML. In order to get around this, we are looking at loading the product HTML with a small placeholder image and then substituting the appropriate product image URLs when each page is output to the display div. From a user experience, this change will be seamless and they won't be able to tell the difference, plus they will benefit from a potentially a short wait on loading the images for the page in question.  However, the source of the page will have all of the product images in a given category page all having the same image.  How much of a negative impact will this have on SEO?

    | airnwater
    0

  • Good Morning/Evening Mozzers, I arrive at work this morning with 5 emails from GWT for my separate domains reading, **"Googlebot can't access your site - **Over the last 24 hours, Googlebot encountered 39 errors while attempting to connect to your site. Your site's overall connection failure rate is 15.1%." I have passed this on to the Web Dev team to resolve ASAP. My Question, will server connectivity issues harm my rankings? Is there a danger if this continues that URL's could be de-indexed? Input would be greatly appreciated.

    | RobertChapman
    0

  • With the recent updates to the algorithm having to do with link networks and over optimization it has got me to thinking about the footer links we add to each site that we build and do web design for linking back to ours. I could certainly see how Google could make the assumption that these are all on the same server, pointing back to one main site, and penalize us for that. Should we no=follow these links? They may say something like, "Website Designed By: Company Name". They do provide a valuable source to some extent of traffic to the site from people interested in our designs. Any thoughts?

    | JoshGill27
    0

  • I need to built a multi language site (to built a Pilates, Yoga site) and I will use a site builder. After posting questions on wix.com I came to the fact I should continue my research because there are not SEO friendly. Do you have a suggestions? Limited to html knowledge, using a website builder is my only option. Here are some of the features I need: Multilanguage Web Site Mobile version SEO Friendly Nice Template Selections( this is important) HTML customization Twitter, Facebook, Blog... I'm not looking at free website builder, when you want good features, there is a price to paid. Thank you for your help and suggestions, BigBlaze

    | BigBlaze205
    0

  • In the menu bar and footer the main page is called Home.  Would it confuse people to rename it to Business Name Home or Business Name? How do you handle this?

    | CFSSEO
    0

  • Hello Mozers, What is the best page size ( or the max page size ie KB ) for a home page or a 2nd level page. Thank you - I appreciate you looking at this question. Vijay

    | vijayvasu
    0

  • I am working with their web designer and need to figure out a way to rebuild their site which is currently all in flash. I was wondering if there was a way to do this without spending a ton of time in completely re-doing the site from scratch.

    | awalker84
    0

  • Hi Guys, We redesigned the website and somehow our canonical extension decided to add a trailing slash to all URLs. Previously our canonical URLs didn't have a trailing slash. During the redesign we haven't changed the URLs. They remained same but we have now two versions indexed. One with trailing slash one without. I've now fixed the issue and removed the the trailing slash from canonical URLs. Is this the correct way of fixing it? Will our rankings be effected in a negative way? Is there anything else I need to do. The website went live last Tuesday. Thanks

    | Jvalops
    0

  • Curious for your thoughts on this - are there any SEO downsides to not having any substantive content on the home page (big background design)? We would obviously have appropriate page titles and link structure, etc. Our guess is that if the home page doesn't have much copy, that odds are that other specific pages will tend to perform better for non-brand search terms, which seems OK.  If people DO find the homepage, it would likely be a brand search or an ad referral, in which case the minimalist, non-copy design would be conversion-friendly. Does that theory hold any water? I suppose a middle ground might be a single H1 line unobtrusively on the page. Thanks in advance for any insight, guys! Sincerely, Stephen

    | PerfectPitchConcepts
    0

  • I'm using a few different plug ins to give me various Facebook functions on my site. I'm curious there are any developers out there would could take a look at my source code and see if it looks there is some code being duplicated that's slowing down my site. Thanks so much!

    | NoahsDad
    0

  • Where should reciprocal links be placed on our website?  Should we create a "Resources" page?  Should the page be "hidden" from the public?  I know there is a right answer out there!  Thank you for your help! Jay

    | theideapeople
    0

  • Hi, i am in the process of setting up a business directory site that will be used in a number of cities, though i am initially launching with only one city. My question is, what is the best URL structure to use for the site and should i start using this URL structure from day one? At the moment i am using www.mysite.com.au as my primary website where it contains all listings for the the one initial launch city. Though to plan for the future i was considering this URL structure: www.mysite.com.au/cityname so for example, if i launch in the city Sydney initially then all website traffic that goes to www.mysite.com.au would simply be redirected (302 temp redirect?) to www.mysite.com.au/sydney. When i expand to other cities www.mysite.com.au would simply be a "select your city" screen that then redirects to the city of choice (similar to www.groupon.com page). How would doing a 302 redirect from www.mysite.com.au to www.mysite.com.au/city impact on SEO for the initial launch? Or should i just place this on the root domain since no other cities exist at the moment?

    | adamkirk
    0

  • Hi Can anyone answer this question confidently, I know Google is moving away from lots of links within the footer.  However we specialise in websites for the travel industry and having a link to all the areas at the footer can be quite handy.  Our websites complete this automatically. Here is an example where due to design of the site the links don't quite fit well, so we need to change anyway.  But before completing the work I wondered if there was a better way to do this. http://www.dreamvillasitaly.com/ Many thanks Andy

    | iprosoftware
    0

  • I am trying to plug holes in my site and the one thing that is lacking is unique videos. I was wondering what is the best way to go about videos for seo purposes? Should I just post onto a youtube channel and then embed into my site or should I look to just place videos on my site with software or should I use any of the other venders out there like Vimeo? Not sure which is the best route. Any tips?

    | bronxpad
    0

  • Hi, I was wondering what people would recommend for website monitoring (IE is my website working as it should!). I need something that will:
    1/. Allow multiple page monitoring not just homepage
    2/. Do header status checking
    3/. Do page content checking (ie if the page changes massively, or include the word "error") then we have an issue!
    4/. Multiple alert possibilities. We currently use www.websitepulse.com and it is a good service that does all the above, however it just seems so overly complex that its hard to understand what is going on, and its complex functionality and features are really a negative in our case. Thanks

    | James77
    0

  • What are the Pro's and Con's of using Java Script and PHP in a site when factoring in SEO?

    | bronxpad
    0

  • Our web services provided suggested that Google doesn't like in-text links that open the link in a new tab. Can anyone verify this? We often link to outside credible resources for our audience, though it seems smarter to open in a new tab rather than risk that the person will not navigate back to our site after finding us. Thank you in advance!

    | jhamlin
    0

  • Hi - We created a custom 404 page based on SEOMoz recommendations.  But.... the page seems to be receiving traffic via organic search.  Does it make more sense to set this page as "noindex" by its metatag?

    | sftravel
    0

  • I have a site that provides online education and as such, most of the user activity happens behind a login. This has me thinking about potential SEO impacts with a few questions that maybe someone could lend some light on: How important is activity (above just search activity) to the search engines Would it help to enter these pages, even though they're behind a login, into GA as we have with the front-end of the site Does a subdomain make a difference (right now we implement the course as a subdomain of the main site Lastly, as I was looking at compete.com, I am wondering how they get these use statistics?

    | uwaim2012
    0

  • We are currently working on creating 2 sites for a company, one with no adult content, one with adult content. Will it affect the non adult content site if i link to the other one in terms of Google and being blocked by some internet providers.

    | MattWheatcroft
    0

  • Hi, I've recently redesigned our website with the main changes being sidebar changes and source ordering (making the main content appear before the sidebars). No URL changes have been made. A few days after making these changes our positions dropped heavily and have been dropping ever since. It's been a week and a half now and traffic is down by around 40%. Google has the new changes cached. Do people feel this just a temporary drop and will we rankings to go back at least or should we revert to the old structure? Website: http://www.diyorgasms.co.uk (NSFW) Thanks

    | diyorgasms
    0

  • Hi, I am having an issues among others, regarding indexing dynamic pages. Our website, www.me-by-melia, was just put live and I am concerned the bottom naviagtion pages (http://www.me-by-melia.com/#store, http://www.me-by-melia.com/#facebook, etc) will not be indexed and create duplicate pages. Also, when you open these pages in a new tab, it takes you to homepage. The website was created in HTML5. Please advise.

    | Melia
    0

  • Our shop site has a 3 tier drop down mega-menu so it's easy to find your way to anything from anywhere. It contains about 150 links and probably 300 words of text. We also have a more context-driven single layer of sub-category navigation as well as breadcrumbs on our category pages. You can get to every product and category page without using the drop down mega-menu. Although the mega-menu is a helpful tool for customers, it means that every single page in our shop has an extra 150 links on it that go to stuff that isn't necessarily related or relevant to the page content. This means that when viewed from the context of a crawler, rather than a nice tree like crawling structure, we've got more of an unstructured mesh where everything is linked to everything else. I'd like to hide the mega-menu links from being picked up by a crawler, but what's the best way to do this? I can add a nofollow to all mega-menu links, but are the links still registered as page content even if they're not followed? It's a lot of text if nothing else. Another possibility we're considering is to set the mega-menu to only populate with links when it's main button is hovered over. So it's not part of the initial page load content at all. Or we could use a crude yet effective system we have used for some other menus we have of base encoding the content inline so it's not readable by a spider. What would you do and why? Thanks, James

    | DWJames
    0

  • Aloha, This is probably a noob question, but here we go: I got a CMS e-commerce, which does not allow static "rel=canonical" declaration in the header and can only work with third-party modules (xml packages) that append "rel=canonical" to all pages dynamic pages within the URL. As a result, I have pages I'm declaring incomplete rel="canonical" as such: Instead of: rel="canonical" src="www.domainname.com/category.aspx" I get: rel="canonical" src="/category.aspx" Coincidentally (or not), after the implementation of the canonical tag, pages that were continuously increasing in rankings started dropping, and, within a week, disappeared from the index completely. Could the drop be a result of my canonical links pointing to incomplete URLs? If so, by fixing this issue, do I stand a chance of recovering my pages' SERPs?

    | dimanyc
    0

  • I understand the concept of linking your pages internally to help  pass juice to one another but it seems to me that the navigation bar with links to your main pages that appear on every page kind of eliminate the linking strategy. For Example: At the top of every page is a Home, About, Services, Contact, etc. Do the bots count these as links from each page? There must be something I'm missing here! Help me out guys!

    | bcarp88
    0

  • Hi there. I'm building an HTML 5 site and through research of new HTML 5 elements I've seen little conclusive information about the interpretation of the new <hgroup>tag, in terms of SEO application and interpretation. In particular does Google interpret the nested heading tags as individual elements or does it combine them into one entity? For example, say I have: <hgroup> # Article Heading ## Article Sub-heading </hgroup> How is this interpreted by Google and what would be some good SEO best practices regarding the <hgroup>tag in HTML5: Is it interpretted as a single tag (" Article Heading: Article Sub-heading ") or two separate heading tags (one and one )? Also, how much does the ordering of the tags matter (say for example I wanted something like the following for visual purposes? <hgroup> ## Article Sub-heading # Article Heading </hgroup> One last thing: is it safe to assume that it is indeed OK to have multiple tags on a single page (as referenced by Matt Cutts a while back in a Webmaster Video)? Thanks! </hgroup> </hgroup>

    | LMDNYC
    2

  • Hey everyone I have run into a problem and would greatly appreciate anyone that could weigh in on it. I have a web client that went to an outside vendor for marketing. The client asked me to help them target some keywords and since I am new to the SEO world I have proceeded by researching the best keywords for the client. I found 6 that see excellent monthly searches. I then registered the .com and or .net domain names that match these words. I then started building landing pages that make reference to the keyword and then have links to his site to get more info. My customer sent the first of these sites to the marketer and he says I am doing things all wrong. He says rather then having landing pages like this I should just point the domain names at internal pages to the website. He also says that I should not have different looks for the landing pages from the main site and that I should have the full site menu on each landing page. I wanted to here what everyone here has to say about the pros and cons of the way to do this cause the guy giving the advice to me has a lower ranking site then I do and I have only started working on getting my site ranked this year. He has atleast according to him been doing this forever. Thanks, Ron

    | bsofttech
    0

  • Anyone already use it? There is some speed benefit? http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/docs/module.html 

    | Naghirniac
    0

  • A little bit confused with the new stuff. The web 2.0 webpages are so much better? What changes?

    | Naghirniac
    0

  • For the SEO perspective, there is a limit for the number of 301 redirection inside the htaccess file?

    | Naghirniac
    0

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