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  • GravitateOnline


    Hello, We have a new client that has several sites with the exact same content. They do this for tracking purposes. We are facing political objections to combine and track differently. Basically, we have no choice but to deal with the situation given. We want to avoid duplicate content issues, and want to SEO only one of the sites. The other sites don't really matter for SEO (they have off-line campaigns pointing to them) we just want one of the sites to get all the credit for the content. My questions: 1. Can we use the rel canonical element on the irrelevent pages/URL's to point to the site we care about? I think I remember Matt Cutts saying this can't be done across URL's. Am I right or wrong? 2. If we can't, what options do I have (without making the client change their entire tracking strategy) to make the site we are SEO'ing the relevant content? Thanks a million! Todd

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GravitateOnline
    0
  • tranduchieu


    All the articles on my blog are written on my own. I write about 5 ones per month. I don't know if i should post my articles to other forums or sharing sites to create back links? I have heard that it may cause adverse effect because my blog will be crawled more slowly than those forums, so Google will consider the articles on my blog (as) copies. Is that right?

    Link Building | | tranduchieu
    0
  • alibeef


    what kind of URL should we use? www.keyword.net/keyword-city or www.keyword.net/city which URL you would prefer?

    On-Page Optimization | | alibeef
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  • greenonline


    Hi! We've been running our website www.opzeggen.nl for a while now, but we still have a google page rank of 0. Searching for a keyword like 'opzeggen' does give us good ranking however. Should I be worried about this? And if so, is there a way to fix this? Best Regards, Pieter

    Technical SEO | | greenonline
    0
  • Turkey


    If i have content on my site and the same content duplicated on my facebook pages, will google treat this as duplicate content? At the moment when i copy and paste a line of text from the content on my site Facebook is returned first.

    Content Development | | Turkey
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  • Kush_VMI


    Hi SEOmoz-ers, I was wondering if anyone has data regarding product page abandonment rate (% of potential customers that leave the site after seeing product pages) for websites like Overstock, REI or Zappos? As you may know the above mentioned sites do an exceptional job with product pages. It would be helpful to know what some of the leaders in this space are achieving in terms of conversion rate. What is your personal opinion about this? Thanks,
    Kush

    Conversion Rate Optimization | | Kush_VMI
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  • deuce1s


    Do iFrames embedded in a page get crawled? I have an iFrame which prints a page hosted by another company embedded in my page. Their links don't include rel=nofollow attributes, so I don't want Google to see them. Do spiders crawl the content in iFrames, or do I have to ensure that the links on this page include the nofollow attribute?

    Web Design | | deuce1s
    0
  • akaigotchi


    Hi everyone, During linkbuilding you often stumble upon those links you are not quite sure of. At first it may seem like a brilliant idea to get a link fom that site but on a second look it may be not. So what would be a checklist of things to look for, if one is asessing a website's link quality? (e.g. how do you spot a bad neighborhood?) If you are using SEOmoz tools for the quality asessment, which one would you use? Looking forward to your answers! Thx for the help in advance! Regards Thorsten

    Link Building | | akaigotchi
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  • kynop


    we came across one thing the we did not asked to programm by our intention. we have a magento shop and on the produktpage we have those "compare" buttons. these link have a session id and the follow a 302 back onto the same page. so i beleive the idea is that google will just not follow 302s and thats it. so my questions is: is this right what we beleive if so why is a 302 better compared to a a href="nofollow" ???

    Technical SEO | | kynop
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  • BruceMillard


    We're in the process of launching mobile versions of many of our brand sites and our ecommerce site and one of our partners suggested that we should block crawlers on the mobile view so it doesn't compete for the same keywords as the standard site (We will be automatically redirecting mobile handsets to the mobile site). Does this advice make sense? It seems counterintuitive to me.

    Technical SEO | | BruceMillard
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  • gvnns


    Hi, we're a b2b publishing house and we 15 different b2b portals in several industries. There is a non profit org, that has created a microsite keyword rich (www.5permilledifferenza.net). We would like to help it with our portals. We've placed banner on them, but now we would like to write posts in each portal that contain the keyword. Now the point is that our editors cannot write every time an original blogpost for that. The non profit has given us a sample text, beatiful and quite long, with some anchor text in it. Which is the best strategy then? It's a new situation we've never encountered. I have in mind the following choices just say to our editors to post it customizing it when possible. we would then have 15 pages quite similar in 15 different portals of different industries that point to the same links make it short, with only one anchor text, and then have 15 different pages allow the editor posting only if the editors are 'inspired' and could write an original content (we would have then just 2 or 3 post with link) upload the same pdf, with the same links built in, on every portal (that could be connected with either of the previous) Thanks!

    Link Building | | gvnns
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  • challen


    If you use a non-landline number e.g 0330 or 0845 etc does this affect your position within google places? Is it better to use a local number e.g 0208 (uk) And if you use a local number for your google places account but have a different number on your website will this have a negative effect?

    Image & Video Optimization | | challen
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  • fleurya


    Hi All, I am wondering what is the current story with directory submissions. Are they not good news now? Will they upset the panda? Should I make directory submissions? Andrew

    Link Building | | fleurya
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  • lovealbatross


    Hi Guys, Any advice much appreciated on this! Recently set up a new campaign on my dashboard with just 5 keywords. The domain is brammer.co.uk and a quick Google site:brammer.co.uk shows a good amount of indexed pages. However - first seomoz tool crawl has only crawled 1 url!! "Last Crawl Completed: Apr. 12th, 2011 Next Crawl Starts: Apr. 17th, 2011" Any ideas what's stopping the tool crawl anymore of the site?? Cheers in advance.. J

    Moz Pro | | lovealbatross
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  • deuce1s


    Hey All, So to make a long story short, we own a site that has been passed through many hand and many strategies. We are in the financial field and rank high for many relevant search terms. My job is now to audit/optimize and purge out site of the garbage that has collected over the years (since 2002). During the audit I have found many issues, fized them, but I am not sure own how to proceed with the follwing issues. Any advice to solve the following would be greatly appreciated! 9932 orphan files - does just removing them affect my SEO.. I like a clean house, can I somehow use them to my benefit? Hundreds of 404s with many external "follow" links that we are no longer getting juice from 8 Sitelinks in webmaster tools, but only 4 show in our search I am straight n00b so sorry if this is 101 for anyone you but your input would be greatly appreciated!! Thanks!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | deuce1s
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  • jsoldi


    I'm looking at the Open Site Explorer for my site, and it shows 9 links to my site, all from 2 domains (showing all links from all pages and for both www and not www version of my domain name). But I know for sure that there are other sites linking to my site. Are they not there because they are not important or because the links have not been crawled yet?

    Moz Pro | | jsoldi
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  • leadsprofi


    Tell us, a technician method of building do-follow link on high quality social websites. Thanks

    Link Building | | leadsprofi
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  • mattys


    Hi My client has a series of websies, one main website and several mini websites, articles are created and published daily and weekly, one will go on a the main website and the others on one, two, or three of the mini sites. To combat duplication, i only ever allow one article to be indexed (apply noindex to articles that i don't wanted indexed by google, so, if 3 sites have same article, 2 sites will have noindex tag added to head). I am not completely sure if this is ok, and whether there are any negative affects, apart from the articles tagged as noindex not being indexed. Are there any obvious issues? I am aware of the canonical link rel tag, and know that this can be used on the same domain, but can it be used cross domain, in place of the noindex tag? If so, is it exactly the same in structure as the 'same domain' canonical link rel tag? Thanks Matt

    On-Page Optimization | | mattys
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  • FirePowered


    www.firehost.com/?ref=pressrelease example - http://cl.ly/2O1d1x2m3b1b3K1K0h2J

    Technical SEO | | FirePowered
    0
  • dcutt


    I have not found a clear answer to this particular aspect of the "first link priority" discussion, so wanted to ask here. Noble Samurai (makers of Market Samurai seo software) just posted a video discussing this topic and referencing specifically a use case example where when you disable all the css and view the page the way google sees it, many times companies use an image/logo in their header which links to their homepage. In my case, if you visit our site you can see the logo linking back to the homepage, which is present on every page within the site. When you disable the styling and view the site in a linear path, the logo is the first link.  I'd love for our first link to our homepage include a primary keyword phrase anchor text. Noble Samurai (presumably seo experts) posted a video explaining this specifically http://www.noblesamurai.com/blog/market-samurai/website-optimization-first-link-priority-2306 and their suggested code implementations to "fix" it http://www.noblesamurai.com/first-link-priority-templates which use CSS and/or javascript to alter the way it is presented to the spiders. My web developer referred me to google's webmaster central: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66353 where they seem to indicate that this would be attempting to hide text / links. Is this a good or bad thing to do?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dcutt
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  • inhouseninja


    Hi All, So once you use OSE Tool to point you in the right direction of sites that might be able to give you links, what are the best practices for then reaching out to the website?  I get that you need to give value in your request for a link and offer something of value – but what else to think about?? Ie Call them, email them, email who?  Follow up with phone call??? Do you just use the standard contact form on their website?  Presumably you need to track all this, just do it in a spreadsheet? What do you say in the email?  Do you offer them a link (if you can?) I guess it’s a thing that sounds easy enough – go get a link – but I would imagine that people who have done this enough with some success can maybe share some of the things that particularly worked or did not work… At the moment it just seems a daunting  / time consuming task  - even thinking of getting an intern to help do all this – pros and cons to that as well??? Thanks for your time!

    Link Building | | inhouseninja
    0
  • webdecorators


    I have a list of keywords in a campaign that I need to update. I use the keyword report card to review those keyword performance by page. I dont currently see a way to update those keywords, I only see the option to add or delete. I don't want to delete and re-enter because then I will lose that "mapping". Is there a way to simply update a keyword?

    Keyword Research | | webdecorators
    0
  • mjmorse


    Can you analyze outbound links from a given page with Open Site Explorer?

    Moz Pro | | mjmorse
    0
  • GriffinHansen


    Two sites. One has weaker sales. What would the benefits and problems for SEO of moving the weak site from its own domain to a subdomain of the stronger site?

    Technical SEO | | GriffinHansen
    0
  • larahill


    Is there a way to leverage paid advertisements placed in industry specific publications to get SEO benefits? I am looking to advertise in publications like trade journals or magazines, but want to also reap SEO benefits by getting a link. So I am avoiding buying banner ads, but instead trying to find opportunities for links from editorial mentions, quality article or editorial submissions, etc. Advice on the link proposition, or best way to approach editors, please? Many of these publications are traditional print publications, and their sites are really seo'd. Thanks.

    Link Building | | larahill
    0
  • cindyt-17038


    Does it matter for SEO if one uses a base href meta tag or if it is defined using java script?

    Technical SEO | | cindyt-17038
    0
  • JeanYates


    I could go widget crazy with my website, there are so many cool buttons and linking this and likes and etc. There's one that is used a lot, called "Addthis" that adds a series of small icons to share a page via facebook, twitter, etc. The javascript looks innocent enough, but there's a link, and who knows what google makes of it. Then there are the dozen or so Facebook widgets - are they safe to use without negative SEO consequences? Does anyone know of any other pitfalls with using the numerous addons offered free to enhance your site? Thanks for any wisdom out there! Jean

    Social Media | | JeanYates
    0
  • BradBorst


    I have attended a number of social media webinars with tips on getting the most out of Facebook and Twitter.  Now, I would like opinions from someone who is not trying to sell me something. We post 2 daily blog articles to our Facebook company page which auto re-posts to Twitter every day.  Is that enough, or is it necessary to hire someone to engage people with additional conversation? If your answer is that additional conversation is needed, are there any companies or individuals that you recommend to provide these services at a reasonable cost?

    Social Media | | BradBorst
    0
  • yudz


    Hey SEOmoz guys, My question is simple. Have you re-test your metrics (DA, PA, mR etc) correlation with SERPs in google panda update? are they still valid in determining authority, trust and popularity in panda update? are they still usefull? Thanks! Yudhis

    Moz Pro | | yudz
    0
  • sbg781


    Hi. I am responsible for choosing an ecommerce platform and overseeing the implementation of a large ecommerce site. The site will have tens of thousands of products and will be fairly complex. Eventually the site will integrate with the suppliers back end inventory/order management system, which is some sort of custom Windows/.NET system. (I'm not very technical if you haven't noticed....) Primarily I want a platform that is SEO friendly, and I have to be sure that the site is developed properly from an SEO and usability perspective. I thought I would go with an asp.net solution (aspdotnetstorefront, specifically) to facilitate the future integration, but I am questioning this choice after reading some of the comments I have found here at SEOMoz. So is asp.net really a bad choice SEO-wise? I almost considered Magento, but was having trouble finding a good solution provider to work with. I also worried about integration issues down the road. I would appreciate any advice or input anyone may have. Thank you!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbg781
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  • davebrown1975


    Hi All, I'm trying to decide whether to switch to a more relevant domain name for an SEO project. For a while now I've already been doing the standard SEO work on an existing website, content optimization, link building etc but I can't help feeling I won't ever get the full benefits of SEO until I also change the domain name. The current website is for a law firm in new jersey called sandz.net which obviously has no immediate impression it is for a law firm so I'm looking at setting up a new domain and doing 301s to a new site. My concerns are that as its a highly competitive market,  I've initiated the campaign to target local searches so I'm wondering just how beneficial buying a domain name with the term lawyer or attorney which actually be. And of course the ideal domain names such as njlawyer, NJattorney  .COMs are all taken so I would be looking at perhaps a .ORG with the intention that all printed material the firm has still contains their original name, sandz.net and by word of mouth they should tell people their site is sandz.net as its easy to remember but for the sake of SEO and links then these should all be focused on a new domain.. Any thoughts appreciated.. Thanks

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | davebrown1975
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  • damoncali


    I've got a small, 3 month old site that was ranking for a few low-competition keywords. Then, yesterday, it dropped out of the rankings almost completely. The only way to find it is to google the URL/site name, and then it does come up. There are pages in the index, they're just not ranking like they did two days ago. I'm not doing anything black hat or even slightly shady - just writing articles and clean link building. Is this a normal part of the Google process? I've never seen it happen on any other sites I've been involved with.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | damoncali
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  • DojoGuy


    I know people suggest having a H1 with your keyword on your page somewhere to help with SEO. My current wordpress theme has the post title as a H2. Is there a big difference in using H1 vs H2

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DojoGuy
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  • hellemans


    Hi all, I just noticed some extra links in the SERP where a webpage was showing events in the city. Does anyone know how these events can be indexed and placed by google in teh SERP? I have attached a screenshot, the underlying pages don't seem to be that special. I was wondering if there are special guidelines when optimising for events. It seems that Google will only show upcoming events for the next few days... Any help is greatly appriciated! Cheers!

    Algorithm Updates | | hellemans
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  • pauldoffman


    Bit of an odd one but I've been getting a large and steady stream of traffic over the last few months from a very random keyword that according to addwords figures shows "on data". Its our second biggest referring term only beaten by our brand name. We get more traffic from this term than keywords we have invested a lot of time in that show thousands of traffic volume in addwords. When looking at behavioral data its gets odder, a bounce rate of 98.11% time on site 2 seconds and page visits 1.02.  So this traffic isn't real traffic and it's not real people. So my questions are, what is it? why do we get this random traffic, has anyone els noticed things like this and is it a problem? I presume it must be something to do with some sort of spam but apart from that i'm stumped. It's just one of those things that has been bugging me so I would appreciate any help. Kind Regards Paul

    Reporting & Analytics | | pauldoffman
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  • fleurya


    My two best key words are "gps tracking" and "vehicle tracking". For the Irish market I have got the two domain names: www.vehicletracking.ie www.gpstracking.ie Have a very poor landing page on www.vehicletracking.ie and just redirecting www.gpstracking.ie to our site. I am wondering what I should do thie these two assets? Should I be running them as micro sites? re directing them? Or something else? Let me know what you think. Andrew

    Keyword Research | | fleurya
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  • WDN


    A few years ago our company decided to merge all its websites (magazine brands) as sub-domains under one new root domain. So the current situation is like this: brand1.rootdomain.com
    brand2.rootdomain.com
    brand3.rootdomain.com
    ... For the moment the rootdomain has a domain authority of 66. In a few weeks we would like to switch that rootdomain to the strongest (highest trust, pagerank,...) brand. So we get this: www.brand1.com
    brand2.brand1.com
    brand3.brand1.com Before we make the switch i'll have to make a pro and con list. So I hope I can get some advice for you guys if this is a good idea or not.

    Technical SEO | | WDN
    0
  • liors


    Hi There, I am looking for a tool that will allow me to learn about the new links our competitors get each month. Do you know a tool that lets you know each time your competitor has a new link?

    Competitive Research | | liors
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  • eazytiger


    A client has a site they'd like to translated into French, not for the french market but for french speaking countries. My research tells me the best way to implement this for this particular client is to create subfolders for each country. For ease of implementation I’ve decided against ccTLD’s and Sub Domains. So for example… I'll create www.website.com/mr/ for Mauritania and in GWT set this to target Mauritania. Excellent so far. But then I need to build another sub folder for Morocco. I'll then create www.website.com/ma/ for Morocco and in GWT set this to target Morocco. Now the content on these two sub folders will be exactly the same and I’m thinking about doing this for all French speaking African countries. It would be nice to use www.website.com/fr/ but in GWT you can only set one Target country. Duplicate content issues arise and my fear of perturbing the almighty Google becomes a possibility. My research indicates that I should simply canonical back to the page I want indexed. But I want them both to be indexed surely!? I therefore decided to share my situation with my fellow SEO’s to see if I’m being stupid or missing something simple both a distinct possibility!

    International SEO | | eazytiger
    0
  • eseyo


    I see that you have already answered this question before back in 2007 (http://www.seomoz.org/qa/view/2163), but wanted to ask your current opinion on the same question: Should I add a site-wide footer link to my client websites pointing to my website, or should I create a "website credits" page on my clients site, add this to the footer and then link from within this page out to my website?

    Web Design | | eseyo
    0
  • dirkla


    I have a website in a niche that's highly graphical in nature. Most of the pages that I rank well for are mainly textual at the moment, but I'm gradually adding image galleries to these pages. The galleries consist of a number of thumbnails that are html linked to the large version of the image (via the Lightbox script). My question: will the page lose pagerank because of the many links from the thumbnails to the images (upto 30/page besides the normal links)?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dirkla
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  • SimCaffe


    What could the reasons that a domain is ranking for the plural version of a key word on SERPs page 1 and for the singular version not at all? Google knows that both key words belong together, as in the SERPs for one version also the other version of the key word is being highlighted. If I search for the domain with the plural keyword it shows up on the first page in SERPs, but If I search for the same keyword as singular (in German it is just removing an “s”) I see the plural version highlighted many times but I cannot find my domain. What could be the reason for this behavior? penalties?

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SimCaffe
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  • DigitalLeaf


    Hi, With a the growing trend towards social media signals starting to have a decent impact on Search Engine algorithms, i'd like to know what tools people use for "social media site audits". I generally use a fair amount of manual observations for social media profiles such as profile completeness. Hubspot offer a few really nice tools over at http://grader.com/ that allows a quick 'score' for an account. I then take a look at the 'buzz' around a company over a few mediums such as Twitter Search, Google blog search, BoardReader, HowSociable.com and SocialMention.com Facebook Insights is good (if you own the domain) for testing the number of likes. Im still yet to see a decent tool for testing entire domains for # retweets, Diggs etc. What are your favourite tools for SEO Social Media Audits?

    Social Media | | DigitalLeaf
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  • PeterMurray


    I read/was told that it was a good idea to order your HTML to show the most important content first. So, on many sites I had put my global navigation div, for instance, below my main content div. Does this still apply? And does wise use of HTML 5 mean this is no longer necessary (eg use of "nav" section tag to indicate this section is about navigation). In the same vein, how does Google know that my sidebar nav is my sidebar nav (which your site seems to say is probably given less weight than top nav), and how does it know my topnav is my top nav? Maybe a daft question, but when someone asked me yesterday I realised I didn't know! (Phew - at last I have asked a short question!).

    On-Page Optimization | | PeterMurray
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  • tomcraig86


    Does using referral programs, such as by using index.php?referral_id=0001 pass any link juice back to the page index.php? I'm creating a web app that ideally I'd like people to be able to link to and bookmark - so that they can pull up their own settings. Is there any way that I can solve both of these at once? The use of PHP GET and the use of SEO. I'd really like to get a solution as I'm developing my new website! Any help would be appreciated!

    Link Building | | tomcraig86
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  • KeriMorgret


    I'm in the process of buying and running an existing forum that is running on DotNetNuke 5.2.0 and Active Fours 4.1. As part of the transfer, I'm asking that the site be upgraded to the latest version of DNN and AF 4.3. AF 4.3 has SEO-friendly URLs instead of the current long, ugly default URLs, and I'm looking forward to implementing that feature. My specific question is: What would you do to prepare for this upgrade in terms of the content, especially related to the URL changes? I've gone into Google Analytics and downloaded content by page title, exported the first 1000 results, and put those titles into Word and corrected spelling errors in the title so URLs will be based on correct spellings. General background: The site is not currently monetized, and there will not be an initial focus on monetization and likely only smaller efforts (affiliate Amazon links in a resource section) in the future. The site is free for users. I'm fine with taking a hit in organic traffic in the short term. About 1/3 of the traffic is from search engines right now, and less than 30% of the visitors are new visits. The site is going to continue much the same as it has until now. Same moderators, same purpose, same skin, etc. I have access to GA, site is verified in GWT, need to verify in Bing, and I do have root access to the server. I've already started working on image file sizes, both of user-submitted images and site-related images like the header. Until now, I have no experience with DNN or AF or any of the extensions (and am appalled at the price and lack of features of some of those extensions, compared to what I'm used to for WordPress). More general questions: In terms of SEO, I'm intending to treat the upgrade of the forum with the friendly URLs as a re-launch. I'm wanting good URLs, put in a site map, fix non-www to www, etc. When I start making the changes and submitting the site map and generally drawing Google's attention, I want Google to like what it sees, and have as much optimized as possible when googlebot comes around. My goal is to draw more targeted visitors from search that are interested in the content in the site. What other suggestions do you have for the site prep, both from being a forum in general and specifically on DNN/AF? I'm not putting the URL out just yet, as we haven't announced to the users the change of ownership is taking place. Thanks everyone!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KeriMorgret
    1
  • jingliang3_rogers.com


    Hi, I would like to know if currently Google tracks pagerank. Also, I would like to know if link values are calculated from 1 - 100 number? For example could a front-page link from a large
    PR 9 news site  have a value of 80 and a link from PR1 blog have a value of 1? Is this generally how link values are calculated? Im pretty new to SEO, so i would just like to know about link weights and how they are calculated?

    Link Building | | jingliang3_rogers.com
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  • hiphound


    Hi! I just launched our newly coded site and just realized the installed 301 is NOT working. The URL string is the same EXCEPT for the removal of /shop/. Here is the code in .htaccess: ############################################ enable rewrites Options +FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine on #RedirectMatch 301 ^/shop?/$ http://hiphound.com/ RedirectMatch 301 ^/shop?/$ http://hiphound.com ########################################### When I go to Google and click on an old link I get a 404. No bueno!! Here is an example: http://hiphound.com/shop/rubit-dog-tag-clip I thought (and was told) that the installed 301 would send this page to: http://hiphound.com/rubit-dog-tag-clip It's not. Please HELP!! 🙂 What am I doing wrong??? Lynn

    Technical SEO | | hiphound
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