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  • Our website displays all of the products in our website If you attempt to visit a category or page that doesn't exist but conforms to our site url structure. Somehow google crawled these pages and indexed them, and they have TONS of duplicate content that hurt us. How do I deal with this problem?

    Technical SEO | | 13375auc3
    0

  • We are rolling out our canonicals now, and we were wondering: what happens if we decide we did this wrong and need to change where canonicals point? In other words, how bad of a thing is it to have a canonical tag point to page a for a while, then change it to point to page b? I'm just curious to see how permanent of a decision we are making, and how bad it will be if we screwed up and need to change later. Thanks!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CoreyTisdale
    0

  • We are redirecting page-level content (about 500 pages) from several sub domains to our main site. With IIS, It’s my understanding that file locations must match. For example: subdomain/pathA/filename1
    mainsite/pathA/filename1 Since the sub domain files are not on the main site, this means we'd create up to 500 zero byte dummy files on the new server and replicate the sub domain directory structure. With IIS is there a work around for handling page level redirects without duplicating the file location? In the case of white papers, videos and case studies, we'll imlement directory level redirection. Thanks in advance.

    Technical SEO | | DigitalMkt
    0

  • Can anyone explain to me why this doesn't work? Redirect 301 /category/diamond-pendants/nstart/1/start/(.*) http://www.povada.com/category/pendants/nstart/1/start/$1 Im trying to replace everything after /start/ and insert it into the new url. Thanks in advance.

    Technical SEO | | 13375auc3
    0

  • is there a search operator in google to sort by highest PR, or an alternate search engine (besides Google directory) to find high PR sites by keyword? I am sending free product out to webmasters to use as a giveaway for their audience, and would like to find the highest PR sites/pages to partner with. I want the highest SEO value out of the products I send out. I'm trying to find outdoor sports related sites, etc, which have done contests/giveaways in the past and linked well to the supplier of the prize. I've been just googling phrases like "backpack giveaway", etc. and this has worked ok, but I'd like to find a tool to search for the highest PR sites around each of the phrases.

    Moz Pro | | rakesh_patel
    0

  • Hi All, I am setting up a new site and I want to make use of subdomains to target multiple countries as follows: uk.mydomain.com us.mydomain.com australia.mydomain.com etc. Now i know what you're all going to say, why not use folders as they are more effective. Well I did think of this but decided against it because I would like to make the best of a low competition industry. I want to push my competitors as far down in the SE's as possible and i plan to do this by targeting generic non locational search terms with both sites so I can hog the top 4 spots.as follows: www.mydomain.com www.mydomain.com/keyterm uk.mydomain.com uk.mydomain.com/keyterm-in-the-UK Whats steps can I take to ensure rank passes to my subdomains? Is it better to start the site with folders like www.mydomain.com/us/keyterm and then 301 them to subdomains at a later stage or should i start with the subdomains?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mulith
    1

  • Have you seen Jen's post on the SEO Blog today about Facebook?  I am really interested in testing out Facebook comments.  Are any of you guys using them? Here are my thoughts: Benefits: Will make it easy for people to comment (assuming they have a facebook account) Their comments are shared on their wall and on their friends' news feeds so you could potentially get a LOT of exposure and traffic. Potential Drawbacks: Who controls the content?  If facebook decides to pull this feature will we lose all of our comments? What is the moderation like?  Do I get to approve which comments are posted? Some people may be reluctant to comment if they know that their friends are going to see what they wrote. What do you guys think?  Are you going to use FB comments?

    Social Media | | MarieHaynes
    0

  • Hi All....just wanted to know if i can get some clarity on what is and is not allowed on the facebook static html pages. I build many that are brand oriented and am concerned about all the unclear rules that somehow i am not aware off....I do know that you cannot have any auto playing media on the page..like video and music....but not sure about a image slide show so i have made all slide shows to force manual. Can you guys share some of the cardinal do's and dont's for building these pages without unknowingly getting your clients page band...... I believe linking out to a website from these pages are allowed but it is not clear.......would appreciate some input....thanks

    Social Media | | nomad-202323
    0

  • I am developing a video strategy for a pediatric dentist office. I am trying to develop a set of topics based on which existing videos perform best. What are the characteristics I should be evaluating (besides basics like views and comments)?

    Reporting & Analytics | | joshfialkoff-77863
    0

  • How does google decide if a listing from one city shows up in another? When I do a search for a lawyer in my city my competition from another town shows up - but I don't show up when I search their town.  Only 3 listings show up for both searches - so it's not necessarily a rank thing. Any ideas on improving the distance your listings show up for? Thanks!

    Image & Video Optimization | | musillawfirm
    0

  • Some ideas to start this discussion: Guestblogging / articles Answerings Q&A's as dentist Starting a blog Any other good link building ideas for dentists?

    Link Building | | EdgySEO
    0

  • Hi, I was looking over some mobile phone deals today and after search for Blackberry Torch Deals in Google UK I came across this site - http://www.phoneslimited.co.uk/Blackberry/9800+Torch.html When I hit the page I was amazed it was ranking #1 because it literally just lists affiliate link after affiliate link. The page has next to no unique content and keyword density is non existent. In fact, the whole on page seo is just whack. So why does it rank so well?  The site seems to rank well for a variety of similar keywords? I think we could learn a lot breaking it down

    Affiliate Marketing | | mwoody
    0

  • When changing domains, there's the obvious anxiety about sacrificing the value of your old domain. A client recently changed domains, immediately killed the old site (did everything properly with 301s, Webmaster Tools etc etc etc) and lost rankings completely for weeks.  Turns out the site had been 'burnt' by the previous owner and it took a reconsideration request from Google before things recovered.  Cost them rankings and cash with extra PPC spend. My question is: In order to avoid this potential hazard, what are your thoughts on submitting a change of address in Webmaster tools, but then leaving old site live for a few weeks to see how things pan out? I have never tried it and it seems to go against the grain, but interested to hear other people's experiences and how they have managed to change domain with minimal temporary damage. Thanks.

    Technical SEO | | RiceMedia
    0

  • Hey Guys, I am writing to SEOmoz community because a problem occurred which I do not know how to solve: My domain (xyz.com) occured on very strange sites with very low trustworthiness (even blocked by google). Checking the site, I found out that all of the pictures were ALT=xyz.com. Could this hurt my position of my site on google rankings? How to prevent such actions, what should I do? Thanks for you help in advance!

    Technical SEO | | Kajmany
    0

  • Hello! This is my first question so I hope it will be a good one and everyone finds it useful; I have found many conflicting views and need some clarification. Question: When it comes to optimising for specific keywords, which is best; plurals or singular? Example: Should I optimise for 'conveyor' with medium competition and a larger local [exact] traffic volume, or go for 'conveyors' with a higher competition and a slightly smaller local [exact] volume of traffic? Obviously this example is a bit of no brainer as I would tend to sway towards the lower competition with a good volume of traffic to be more competitive, but when the terms are so closely linked, would it be wise to cover both grounds now and go for 'conveyors'? What is general consensus out there? Thanks in advance! Richard

    Keyword Research | | BlandyDoes
    0

  • Thanks to the great advice i've received on this forum, I'm combining 50 different truck sites into a single, ultimate truck website. So my question is how long should I make a website 301 redirect to the appropriate page on my new website? My thought is that if it works well to have a single website, it might be nice to eventually sell off some of the old domain names that I won't be using anymore. Thanks! Andy

    Technical SEO | | daenterpri
    0

  • We have been hosting our website with a provider (their design and CMS) and we are now moving to a new design, better content focussing on keywords in a different CMS platform on different servers but want to retain the link juice from the old site. We have used Open Site Explorer Report to determine all the links to the old site and the pages they link to. What is the best strategy to keep the link juice flowing to the new site? Example This site <http: www.dogslifedownunder.com="" what-is-worse-then-going-to-the-v-e-t="">links to this page <http: 19105="" www.sydneyanimalhospitals.com.au="" ourstaff="" thevets="" tabid="" default.aspx="">on the old site.</http:></http:> We will have a similar page on the new site with the same staff members called for example: How do we ensure that the we retain the link juice? Any thoughts most welcome.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter.Huxley59
    0

  • Hi, Is there anything I need to do in Google Analytics to setup tracking for traffic coming to a site via it's Google Places page? I can see some traffic from maps.google.com in the Traffic Sources > Referring Sites report, but it does not appear to marry up to the data reported in the Google Places dashboard. Thanks

    Image & Video Optimization | | WCR
    0

  • We have a broad content site - the majority of our traffic overall comes in via deep links.Google analytics consistently shows 17-20% of daily traffic under the "direct" bucket, with the rest of the traffic about equally split between Referring sites and Organic search.However, if we look at the specific content in the "direct" bucket, the URLs that are being hit do tend to mirror rather closely the Search traffic.  The close mapping to our Search traffic doesn't seem to make much sense  - while some of it is probably bookmarks, it seems doubtful that that could be responsible for more than, say, 20% of this direct traffici based on the # of pages and types of pages (many of the pages that do well in search are honestly not ones that someone would be likely to bookmark).  The traffic reported by google as "direct" for a given day tracks a lot closer to Search than Referral URLs (which tend to be he more viral content on our site). Any idea what could be causing this traffic to show as Direct?  Do people tend to bookmark pages while doing searches to come back to them or something? THANKS everyone for the responses.  Still not quite sure what it is, continuing to look into it, particularly technical issues that the link to the Avinash post might prove very helpful for

    Search Behavior | | BG1985
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  • Not sure whether this is considered black hat or not but I know it is done and I would like to know which is the most effectrive method. If you were to acquire multiple sites in the same niche to your main site (either by buying existing sites or perhaps registering expired domains) which already had strong aged backlinks, is it better to either: a) 301 the new domain to the main site (or a subpage perhaps) b) create 'minisites' on the new domains (trying to mirror the URL structure of the previous incarnation if possible to scoop up and remaining inbound backlink juice, on seperate IPs to the main site as well) and then place several links to the main site & subpages. Would the decay of link juice through 301's mean you lose benefit that way or is it the same as a normal link?  Would the 301 method mean any IBL's into URL's other than the homepage be lost?  The homepage of the minisite will likely have 4 or 5 internal links so will this dilure the effect of the links to the main site? Thanks in advance!

    Technical SEO | | OzDave
    0

  • We have a broad content site that includes crowdsourced lists of items. A lot of the pages allow voting, which causes the content on the pages (sometimes the content is up to 10 pages deep) to completely rearrange, and therefore spread out and switch pages often among the (up to 10) pages of content. Now, could this be causing any kind of duplicate content or any other kind of red flags for Google? I know that the more the page changes the better, but if it's all the same content that is being moved up and down constantly, could Google think we're pulling some kind of "making it look like we have new content" scheme and ding us for these pages? If so, what would anyone recommend we do? Let's take an example of a list of companies with bad customer service. We let the internet vote them up and down all the time, the order changes depending on the votes in real time. Is that page doomed, or does Google see it and love it?

    Web Design | | BG1985
    0

  • Hi, I won't bore you with all the details but we may have to temporarily move part of an existing domain onto a separate domain for a couple of months. The content being moved includes most of our key branded and organic SERP pages. We've owned the new domain for years but it's never been live or indexed. After a couple of months, all the content will move back to the original domain but will move to a slightly different structure and different page names. Most of the page content will remain largely the same. I"m concerned, but don't really have any experience with this kind of thing. Can anyone shed some light. Perhaps on a scale of 1 to 5 you could give me your thoughts: 1. Should be fine, as long as you set up all the redirects properly 5. Do everything in your power not to do it! Using the new domain and other factors will be problematic. Thanks for any help you may be able to provide!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rfjc
    0

  • A couple of issues at play here as I wrestle with the best permalink structure for a site I'm toying with now. 1.  I know that WordPress wants a unique number in the post to improve performance and db calls. 2.  I know that for basic on-page SEO, most of us would opt for CATEGORY/POST or maybe even just post.  I constantly change those.  It's a bad habit, but sometimes you want the killer headline and a decent title in the post. So here is the issue: I can rewrite or use a plugin (anyone have a favorite) the permalinks to speed up site performance.  We all know Google wants that.  Maybe the permalink becomes /1234-foo But you know, a number in front of the URL just isn't awfully user friendly.  If someone wants to read the foo post, it's nice to send them  directly there. So would you trade off a slowdown in site speed for the prettiest permalinks for usability and SEO? And since you're asking a WP question, has anyone heard of a hard cap on static pages where the database starts dragging? The site I have in mind has 400 each posts and pages.  Would moving platforms to Drupal or Joomla allow handling that many pages more effectively? Thanks for contributing and any help you can give. George

    Technical SEO | | georgebounacos
    0

  • I recently had a satellite office across the country come to me and say that they couldn't find us on Google, based on a number of keywords they were searching on.  I thought that isn't right... I know we rank for those terms. So, I did a search here, and there we were for those very terms, and ranking quite nicely. Sooo, what's going on there?  I know there are variations from Google.com to Google.ca in terms of ranking. But within Google.ca I've not seen this before. Can anyone shed some light on that?

    Algorithm Updates | | atcosl
    0

  • I've seen the cross domain canonical not work at all in my test cases. And an interesting point was brought to my attention today. That point was that in order for the canonical tag to work, the page that you are referencing needs to have the exact same content. And that this was the whole point of the canonical tag, not for it to be used as a 301 but for it to consolidate pages with the same content. I want to know if this is true. Does the page you reference with a canonical tag have to have the same exact content? And what have been your experiences with using the canonical tag referencing another page on a different domain that has the same exact subject matter but not the exact duplicate content?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GearyLSF37
    2

  • Any thoughts on using companies like Text Link Ads (www.textlinkads.com) to do link building?   Seems a bit dangerous to me, but if the articles are decent and relevant -- can it hurt you? Any thoughts would be appreciated.   Thanks. MM

    Link Building | | MWM3772
    0

  • I know traditional link exchanges aren't very valuable and Google doesn't respect them as much, but what about 3-way link exchanges?

    Link Building | | visionnexus
    0

  • Hi everyone, I love this community and have a question: I recently read the textbook Art of SEO which was written by some of the creators of this community.  In that book, there is a chapter on link building.  Within that chapter, they discuss social media sites and how to leverage them. In that section, they refer to this article: http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/22-dofollow-social-media-sites-offering-profile-links.html. This article gives 22 social media sites that it says if you simply sign up, make a profile, and have your profile point to your web site, there will be a benefit because these sites profile sections DoFollow links. My question is: Is there a tool that can tell me whether or not these 22 sites still DoFollow links?  Or at least if there profile section does pass link juice?  Any advise is greatly appreciated. Sincerely, Jeffrey Ferraro

    Link Building | | JeffFerraro
    0

  • Should we be concerned about any adverse consequences to our site's SEO value when moving the site's assets (javascript files and css files) to a CDN (Akamai)?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Volusion.com
    0

  • I have a large US travel site and am looking to make targeted pages for specific locations, attractions etc around the United States.  With many of the TLD's already purchased for these niches, I thought about using the .us extension as it seemed relevant to the topics.  Does this hurt seo possibilities or does the .us extension come across as spammy?

    Branding | | Millibit
    2

  • I had 12 to 15 1st page Google rankings in the iPhone, iPad, app review vertical. As of 04/26/11 I have lost all rankings, traffic has gone from 1,000 to 1,200 a day to 150 to 350  a day. I was using a plugin for auto press releases, but have removed this and deleted the urls. I also have changed themes and hosting over the last 3 weeks. I have been trying to get SEO help, but cannot seem to get anyone to help me. thank you Mike

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | crazymikesapps
    1

  • Hello to the SEOmoz community! I am new to SEOmoz, SEO implementation, and the community and recently set up a campaign on one of the sites I managed. I was surprised at the amount of duplicate content that showed up as errors and when I took a look in deeper, the majority of errors were caused by pages on the root domain I put through Google Analytics URL Builder. After this, I went into webmaster tools and changed the parameter handling to ignore all of the tags the URL Builder adds to the end of the domain. SEOmoz recently recrawled my site and the errors being caused by the URL Builder are still being shown as duplicates. Any suggestions on what to do?

    Technical SEO | | joshuaopinion
    0

  • We are migrating content from 10 sub domains to our www site.  On an IIS sever, what is potential server load impact, if any, for setting up 500 plus page level redirects?

    Technical SEO | | DigitalMkt
    0

  • Okay, so I'm working with a site that has pretty good domain authority, but the interior pages are not well linked or optimized. So, it ranks for some terms, but everything goes to the home page. So, I'd like to increase the authority of the interior pages. The client is not wild about spreading targeted juice via something like a footer. They also don't like a "Popular Searches" style link list. The objection is that it's not attractive. They currently use cute euphemisms as the linking text, so like "cool stuff" instead of "sheepskin seat covers." In that made up example, they'd like to rank for the latter, but insist on using the former. What about a slide show with alt text/links? Would that increase the authority of those pages in a term-targeted kinda way? Are there other options? Does it matter how prominent those links are, like footers not as good as something higher up the page? They currently use a pull-down kind of thing that still results in some pages having no authority. Do bots use that equally well? Thanks!

    Technical SEO | | 94501
    0

  • We're working on revamping the URL structure for a site from the ground up. This firm provides a service and has a library of case studies to back up their work. Here's some options on URL structure: 1. /cases/[industry keyword]-[service keyword]   (for instance: /cases/retail-pest-control) There is some search traffic for the industry/service combination, so that would be the benefit of using both in URL. But we'd end up with about 70 pages with the same service keyword at the end. 2. /cases/[industry keyword] (/cases/retail) Shorter, less spam potential, but have to optimize for the service keyword -- the primary -- in another way. 3. /cases/clientname (/cases/wehaveants) No real keyword potential but better usability. We also want the service keyword to rank on its own on another page (so, a separate "pest control" page). So don't want to dilute that page's value even after we chase some of the long tail traffic. Any thoughts on the best course of action? Thanks!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kdcomms
    1

  • I normally advise clients never to optimise around keywords with very low or even zero recorded Google search volumes. However, if the core keyword has decent volumes but the organisation is serviing specific towns/cities/locations would you consider it valid to optimise for : core keyword + focused location (even if this has zero search volumes). The Google Places results are obviously highly relevant but depending on the core keyword you sometimes get the 3-box places at the top but sometimes in the middle of the natural results.

    Image & Video Optimization | | bjalc2011
    0

  • So, a couple of weeks ago I started my first CPA website, just as an experiment and to see how well I could do out of it. My rankings were getting better every day, and I’ve been producing constant unique content for the site to improve my rankings even more. 2 days ago my rankings went straight to the last page of Google for the keyword “acne scar treatment” but Google has not banned me or given my domain a minus penalty. I’m still ranking number 1 for my domain, and they have not dropped the PR as my keyword is still in the main index. I’m not even sure what has happened? Am I not allowed to have a CPA website in the search results? The best information I could find on this is: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=76465 But I’ve been adding new pages with unique content. My site is www.acne-scar-treatment.co Any advice would be appreciated.

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | tommythecat
    1

  • Is it a good practice to append our brand name at the end of every page title?  We have a very strong brand name but it is also long.  Right now what we are doing is saying: Product Name | Long brand name here Product Category | Long brand name here Is this the right way to do it or should we just be going with ONLY the product and category names in our page titles? Right now we often exceed the 70 character recommendation limit.

    Algorithm Updates | | mlentner
    1

  • But if it is like Pete said, I don't understand why e.g. SEO Moz has a Canonical Tag on this Page http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps Which leads to the exact same page!? What is the benefit of doing so? Regards

    On-Page Optimization | | Here4You
    0

  • I am new, and I just got back my crawl results (after a week or more). The first thing I noticed is that the "duplicate page title" is in the thousands, my urls and page titles are different. The only thing I can see is that our company name is at appended to the name of every title. I did search and found one other person with this problem, but no answer was given. Can anyone offer some advice? This doesn't seem right... Thanks,

    Moz Pro | | AoyamaJPN
    0

  • With the recent update from Google Panda would links from affiliate Coupon Sites now have an negative impact in Organic Rankings or site value? A reason for this question is because many Coupon Sites usually have poor content and a poor quality score. Thanks

    Affiliate Marketing | | Tonyd23
    0

  • Hi, While searching on Google, i came across a new search result page without underlines in the titles of search snippets. Is Google experimenting with something new or there is some problem in my browser. I checked it in Firefox but at the same time when i checked it on IE, normal page was visible. Regards photostream

    Industry News | | IM_Learner
    0

  • As you may know Google has API’s http://code.google.com/more/ I can see ones for Blogs, News etc. but not for general search am I being dense? If someone can point me in the right direction that would be great. Justin

    Industry News | | GrouchyKids
    0

  • Hi, My website is appearing on page 1 of Google for a specific keyword, however when clicking on the search result, the page is out of date. As a short term solution, I have 301 redirected the url to a more up to date page on my website and beginning to optimise the on page content of this new page Is there any recommendations on what to do with the old page that appears on page 1 Google - as the page title, meta description and url displayed is out of date? Any help, best practise would be great...

    On-Page Optimization | | simonsw
    0

  • Hello, Here is my situation - i'm number 10 for a moderate keyword and i want to rank higher . Using the Open Site Explorer i studied the links of 12 competitors and noticed the following : There are only 2 sites that are doing 100% white hat - one of them is on first page only because has a big,big domain autority, the other because is a brand name. The rest of my competitors are on first page using  directory submissions (i discovered 200+ directories - and not counting those that are not indexed.), buying links (for ex check these 2 :http://www.dentistsburbank.com/links , http://www.dentistinaustin.com/links/ - there are 50+ more sites like this), spam forums and article submissions. For my site i tried to get only quality links, tried link bait, quality articles - etc(and this for more that 18 months). Unfortunately it seems that my efforts are not enough(seems that links from military.com are not enough to beat 200 low quality directories) and i want to ask the community what should i do. Shall i invest in directory submissions (it will cost around $1500) ? If not in directories in what shall i invest the money ? Are there any companies able to create successful link baits ? Shall i report the paid links hoping that Google will take action ? Any other ideas 🙂

    Link Building | | allyteal
    0

  • Hello, it will be much appreciated if anybody could please invite me to Quora, my email address maddogx@gmail.com thanks again!

    Social Media | | maddogx
    0

  • Hi, I am going to publish a press release on a number of different websites. First and foremost, I want to build anchor links back to website for specific keywords. Secondly I want to measure clickthrus from each site using parameter tracking in GA. I want to know if I put in a url with ?utm_source=xxx, will this have any impact upon my linkbuilding efforts? i.e. will search engines attribute the keyword to the long url with tracking or the url without tracking. I understand that everything from the ? mark is ignored. However, i just want to double check before I publish release. Thanks for your help. Mik

    Reporting & Analytics | | increation
    0

  • Regarding link building, what counts the most in terms of PR and relevance(topic). Is it whether, the link comes from a domain/page with high domain/page rank or that the link come from a domain with similar/relevant content? I know, we should always aim to get links from domains with both relevance and good page rank. But which is most important? For example: If we have a web site about swiss made watches. Should i focus on getting links from other domains with information about swiss made watches. Or can i achieve just as good link juice, by getting links from un-related web sites with high PR? We will of course get more qualified traffic from related domains. But from a pure search ranking, what plays the biggest factor?

    Link Building | | petersen
    0

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