Hi I know this is cheeky but you are all so helpful on here!
-
hi, quick question, I've made a new instillation of wordpress at sussexchef.com/dev and I'm about to start building pages, obvoisly I'm going to move it to sussexchef.com when its all looking right. when I choose my page address links/ permalinks thingy, should I use new url names that don't already exist on the old site? or should I keep the old url names so I don't get loads of 404's, but include the "dev/" in the url name?
Eg the old address sussexchef.com/home
should I use sussexchef.com/dev/home or sussexchef.com/home-sussex-caterers while building the development site? I'm guessing the later my help out in google searches too?
But if I use Dev in the url shurly I will have to go through almost 100 pages removing the dev/ and also changing all the links too? This would be days of work!
So confused!I'd really appreciate your help here.
Ben
-
Hi,
That should be enough to stop the search engines crawling and indexing the test site.
Remember to take it off when you go live though.
-
Hi Guys and girls.
Thanks for the input, I'm not a web developer or an Seo expert, I'm a Chef, I found all the content on Moz amazing! not only has the using moz helped my web rankings its made My wife and I take on a whole new approach to marketing.
Not to mention all you guys are so happy to help out a novice
As for making the dev site Un-crawlable If ticked "discourage search engines from crawling this site" in the reading settings in wordpress, Is that enough or should I do something else too? I'm focusing all my time on building the now site, Should I run of and learn about robots txt file right away or should it be ok for now?
Thanks for your help!
-
Hi,
If the dev site can't be crawled (which is generally the idea), it doesn't matter what you call the URL's on the test site.
If the URL's on the old site are good, keep the same names for the new one to avoid the need for 301's. If the URL's could be better though, change them but 301 the old pages to the relevant new ones.
Hope that helps
-
Surely if you are building this in dev, the new site isn't craw able anyway so I don't know what the issues are.
Always recommend building new sites and making sure Google or any bot / human cannot see them anyway - as there are usually quite a few errors during build, so wouldn't want someone to accidentally find the dev site and get a bad brand experience,
But on the url side of thing, build it without the dev in the url.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Please... Help me convince my boss that Keyword Density is not-important / damaging.
If you can, please provide any and all talking points that I can use in this argument. It seems that no matter what I show him, including Matt Cutts' video debunking Keyword Density back in 2011, it doesn't seem to stick. He is fully, 100% convinced that keyword density is hugely important and we need to focus our time and energy on it. Any sources you might have to help me show him that this is a myth would be hugely appreciated. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TaylorRHawkins2 -
Should I switch my website builder/host? Please help.
My website: www.joeborders.com is hosted with a service called jigsy: www.jigsy.com. I'm losing my mind trying to figure out if I should stay or not. Lol. I am positive I have done waaaayyy more work on my seo than many people ranking above me. I used to be on the first page, but over the last year I've slowly dropped in rankings. I've checked everything! I need to do some work on my blog, but I'm really thinking now that it might have something to do with my host. Some concerns I've identified: 1) I can't give pages individual h1 tags. The same one is blanketed across the site. 2) I'm told there are a lot of .css and JavaScript. 3) i cant redirect blog posts.....so moz is tagging me with 250 critical issues because my posts are on both www and http versions of my site .But that's all I know. I've talked with squarespace and WordPress and they have no way of transferring my site. It would probably take me a good 30 hours to set everything up....should i move? Please help 😞
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joebordersmft0 -
Open Site Explorer - Spam analysis: need help with inbound links... from my site!
hallo, reading my spam analysis report from open explorer, I found somenthing I don't understand (please see attached image): The long list of links inside the red rectangle are inbound links with a spam score of 5 coming from my same site. How is that possible? Should I remove those links? Also , I see that many of those links are links present in the top navigation bar (about page, home page, service description etc.) or in the sidebar section of the website (categories, recent posts, recent comments). Should I treat them differently? Thank you for your time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | micvitale0 -
Transferring Domain and redirecting old site to new site and Having Issues - Please help
I have just completed a site redesign under a different domain and new wordpress woo commerce platform. The typical protocol is to just submit all the redirects via the .htaccess file on the current site and thereby tell google the new home of all your current pages on the new site so you maintain your link juice. This problem is my current site is hosted with network solutions and they do not allow access to the .htaccess file and there is no way to redirect the pages they say other than a script they can employ to push all pages of the old site to the new home page of the new site. This is of course bad for seo so not a solution. They did mention they could also write a script for the home page to redirect just it to the new home page then place a script of every individual page redirecting each of those. Does this sound like something plausible? Noone at network solutions has really been able to give me a straight answer. That being said i have discussed with a few developers and they mentioned a workaround process to avoid the above: “The only thing I can think of is.. point both domains (www.islesurfboards.com & www.islesurfandsup.com) to the new store, and 301 there? If you kept WooCommerce, Wordpress has plugins to 301 pages. So maybe use A record or CName for the old URL to the new URL/IP, then use htaccess to redirect the old domain to the new domain, then when that comes through to the new store, setup 301's there for pages? Example ... http://www.islesurfboards.com points to http://www.islesurfandsup.com ... then when the site sees http://www.islesurfboards.com, htaccess 301's to http://www.islesurfandsup.com.. then wordpress uses 301 plugin for the pages? Not 100% sure if this is the best way... but might work." Can anyone confirm this process will work or suggest anything else to redirect my current site on network solutions to my new site withe new domain and maintain the redirects and seo power. My domain www.islesurfboards.com has been around for 10 years so dont just want to flush the link juice down the toilet and want to redirect everything correctly.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | isle_surf0 -
Consistent Ranking Jumps Page 1 to Page 5 for months - help needed
Hi guys and gals, I have a really tricky client who I just can't seem to gain consistency with in their SERP results. The keywords are competitive but what the main issue I have is the big page jumps that happen pretty much on a weekly basis. We go up and down 40 positions and this behaviour has been going on for nearly 6 months.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jon_bangonline
I felt it would resolve itself in time but it has not. The website is a large ecommerce website. Their link profile is OK in regards to several high quality newspaper publication links, majority brand related anchor texts and the link building we have engaged in has all been very good i.e. content relevant / high quality places. See below for some potential causes I think could be the reason: The on page SEO is good however the way their ecommerce website is setup they have formed a substantial amount of duplicate title tags. So in my opinion this is a potential cause. The previous web developer set-up 301 redirects all to their home page for any 404 errors. I know best practice is to go to the most relevant pages, however could this be a potential issue? We had some server connectivity issues show up in webmasters tools but that was for 1 day about 4 months ago. Since then no issues. they have quite a few 'blocked URLs' in their robots.txt file, e.g. Disallow: /login, Disallow: /checkout/ but to me these seem normal and not a big issue. We have seen a decrease over the last 12 months in Webmasters Tools of 'total indexed web pages' from 5000 to 2000 which is quite an odd statistic. Summary So all in all I am a tad stumped. We have some duplicate content issues in title tags, perhaps not following best practice in the 301 redirects but other than that I dont see any major on page issues, unless I am missing something in the seriousness of what I have listed.
Finally we have also do a bit of a cull of poor quality links, requesting links to be removed and also submitting a 'disavow' of some really bad links. We do not have a manual penalty though. Thoughts, feedback or comments VERY welcome.0 -
Panda'd - and I think I know how to fix it...
Hi, I have a non-core site that seems to have been affected by a Panda refresh in late December http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change#2012 Anyway, I couldn't figure out for the longest time why this site, which is full of high-quality, expert-level content would get dinged -- i made several moves to try and eliminate duplicate content -- even though I couldn't find evidence of the duplicate content, but it's a wordpress site so there's lots of opportunities to accidentally introduce it through archives, tags and whatnot. The classic SEO mistake I was making was I was forgetting about a type of post we were doing to facilitate one of our email campaigns. On most, sites there's always something you aren't optimizing, and that's the stuff that can really create unintended issues in google, because the decisions made on those pieces, is often more operational toward the other campaigns, than strategic to search. these posts, are thin little articles, written by humans, but the text is actually submitted to another external site, published there and then recreated as content that the email campaign links to. These posts are segregated from the normal feed on the wordpress site, and the last time I had reviewed this content, we were not using a method for creating that involved publishing it to facebook first. But, OK, so I'm going to stop indexing this content, that's a given. I believe that is the Panda issue -- I could be wrong, but it makes sense, since otherwise the site is maybe the least likely site to be affected by Panda that I've ever been involved with. Do I do anything else, after fixing a Panda issue? Is there a reconsideration request for this or something. Should I send a singing telegram to Cutts? I researched a few articles, and there wasn't much on what to do after you fixed it, but to wait. Just wondering if anyone else who fixed a Panda thang, utilized any communication channel to let google know. thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | reallygoodstuff0 -
Help Identifying Unnatural Links
http://bit.ly/XT8yYYHi,Any help with the below will be most appreciated.We received an unnatural links warning in Webmaster Tools and noticed a large drop in our rankings. We downloaded and carried out a full link audit (3639 links) and logged in an excel spreadsheet with the following status: OK, Have Contacted, Can't Contact, Not SureWe have had some success but the majority of the ones we identified are not contactable.We use the dis-avow tool to tell Google of these. We then submitted a reconsideration request where we explained to Google our efforts and that we can supply them with our audit if necessary by email as you can't upload any evidence.A few days later we received a response suggesting that we still have unnatural links. We are a little stuck as we don't know what they can be:1. Is Google actually looking at our dis-avowed links before making this judgement?2. We have missed something that Google is considering bad but we can't see in our audit?Again we need a little help as we are trying to sort this out but can't see what we are falling down on.I can provide our spreadsheet if necessary.Many ThanksLee
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LeeFella0 -
Redirect Help - Domain Change and Website Redesign
Hi there, I've redesigned a website for a client, but we are also changing domains and I'm trying to figure out the best way to set up the redirects from their old domain to the new one. 95% of their search engine traffic originally came through brand related keywords that landed on their homepage, and most of the remaining 15% landed on 3 other pages. The new site has pages to replace these 3 main SEO pages, and I'm about to set 301 redirects from their old domain, but I can't figure out the quickest/best way to do it. Is it possible to set up a specific redirect for the 4 main pages (Home + plus the 3 others) then a "catch all" type of thing for the rest of the pages, that redirect either to the homepage, or some sort of "Check out our new Site" landing page. How do you do this, or is there a better way to set it up? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | timscullin0