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  • footsteps


    Hi all, The last few weeks we started working on several affiliate websites. All was fine, the number of pages indexed in Google increased, rankings increased, visitors increased but; After two successful weeks Google noticed what we were doing and decided to crash our party. What we did; Create an affiliate website presenting shoes for ladies (15.000+ pages)
    Create an affiliate website presenting brand shoes only (25.000+ pages)
    Both sites were new domains and we linked them to each other. Biggest boo boo's we think we have made; We didn't put a no follow on the affiliatelinks We linked the websites to each other causing google to spot 25K new links to a new domain. Stuffed the index with 40K new pages out of nothing Didn't exclude the correct parameters in webmastertools so all items got indexed a multiple times. The above resulted in a drop of 95% of visitors and 3 weeks down the road we gained 10% from our low point. All boo boo's are corrected the last few day's and now we are wondering; How long will it take for Google to forgive us? And are we correct in concluding we messed up big time? Hope to hear your insight and let this story be a warning to others trying on this endeavour. Kind regards, Gerwin

    Affiliate Marketing | | footsteps
    0
  • languedoc


    Hi, We're getting 'Yellow' Search Engine Blocked by Robot Txt warnings for URLS that are in effect product search filter result pages (see link below) on our Magento ecommerce shop. Our Robot txt file to my mind is correctly set up i.e. we would not want Google to index these pages. So why does SeoMoz flag this type of page as a warning? Is there any implication for our ranking? Is there anything we need to do about this? Thanks. Here is an example url that SEOMOZ thinks that the search engines can't see. http://www.site.com/audio-books/audio-books-in-english?audiobook_genre=132 Below are the current entries for the robot.txt file. User-agent: Googlebot
    Disallow: /index.php/
    Disallow: /?
    Disallow: /.js$
    Disallow: /.css$
    Disallow: /checkout/
    Disallow: /tag/
    Disallow: /catalogsearch/
    Disallow: /review/
    Disallow: /app/
    Disallow: /downloader/
    Disallow: /js/
    Disallow: /lib/
    Disallow: /media/
    Disallow: /.php$
    Disallow: /pkginfo/
    Disallow: /report/
    Disallow: /skin/
    Disallow: /utm
    Disallow: /var/
    Disallow: /catalog/
    Disallow: /customer/
    Sitemap:

    Technical SEO | | languedoc
    0
  • kchandler


    A client of ours uses some unique keyword tracking for their landing pages where they append certain metrics in a query string, and pulls that information out dynamically to learn more about their traffic (kind of like Google's UTM tracking). Non-the-less these query strings are now being indexed as separate pages in Google and Yahoo and are being flagged as duplicate content/title tags by the SEOmoz tools. For example: Base Page: www.domain.com/page.html
    Tracking: www.domain.com/page.html?keyword=keyword#source=source Now both of these are being indexed even though it is only one page. So i suggested placing an canonical link tag in the header point back to the base page to start discrediting the tracking URLs: But this means that the base pages will be pointing to themselves as well, would that be an issue? Is their a better way to solve this issue without removing the query tracking all togther? Thanks - Kyle Chandler

    Technical SEO | | kchandler
    0
  • wazza1985


    Hi All, Question: How important are domain names when trying to rank for a competitive keyword? Thanks

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wazza1985
    0
  • Bush_JSM


    Hi, I'm conducting an on-page review for someone and have noticed something I've not seen before. Some of the major internal links from the home page are marked as no follow. For example: <a <span="">href</a><a <span="">="</a>/customer-services" rel="nofollow">Customer Services This is on the top navigation bar and the content in this and all other sections are marked as no-follow but they should all be crawled. Is this an error or am I missing something? Any ideas guys? Thanks Bush

    On-Page Optimization | | Bush_JSM
    1
  • danielmckay7


    Hello, I have a problem with my website. I have a page on my website http://www.ensorbuilding.com/page.php/aboutus but if i type in www.ensorbuilding.com/page.php/aboutus/f8e45e9d9df6140bb5a7ff1173e8d828 or www.ensorbuilding.com/page.php/aboutus/0f0eea5e9ab0a3e8d91fad8fc0d3ce9c it still displays the about us page. Google is seeing this as duplicate content so what I would want to do is 301 redirect anything after www.ensorbuilding.com/page.php/aboutus . How could I implement a 301 redirect in this way?

    Technical SEO | | danielmckay7
    0
  • StalkerB


    I'm sitting on several hundred PLR articles that, with a bit of editing, would fit well into on of my sites. This site otherwise produces new unique content every week, including videos, news and articles. These PLR articles are very popular, copyscape shows at least 30 other sites are using some or all of the pieces, but the articles themselves are the sort of information pieces that don't really get old or change over time. Never having gone for the direct use of PLR articles (have spun quite a few unique pieces in my time though), I'm wondering if there could be a negative effect to using them? We're not in Google News or anything so don't have to worry about that, just wondering if it would diminish the effect of my unique pieces at all?

    Content Development | | StalkerB
    0
  • RENDEV


    Forgive me for the novice question. But I was recently looking at open site explorer and was checking out my site www.visualawards.com , I know we have a re-direct to www.visualawards.com/home.php . After checking both URL's, I found that I have links pointing to both. Is this bad, am I diluting the links? If yes, which one should I point the future ones to, and is there anyway to recover the current links already? Thanks again for your help!!!

    Technical SEO | | RENDEV
    0
  • TKIGWebTeam


    Out of morbid curiosity, are "Content Farms" still a good source to use for backlinking within articles that you share? I have yet to see some results to base an answer off of for myself. Some co-workers are wanting to utilize sites like Suite101, ArticlesBase, etc for sharing articles and gaining the benefit of getting some backlinks from these sites. Is this still a good tactic to utilize? My research is telling me no since the Panda Update... Anyone have any insight on this? Thanks!

    Link Building | | TKIGWebTeam
    0
  • jeffgibson


    My client is a new business <1 year old.  Google has 4 unverified places pages for this business - all have slight errors in the business name and address.  Which one should I claim?  Will Google let me change the business name once I verify ownership?  How will I get rid of the other listings once I claim and correct one of them? In light of these data errors and/or as a general rule do you recommend the paid submission services for UBL and Localeze (http://getlisted.org/resources/why-listing-services.aspx)? Thanks for the help! Jeff

    Image & Video Optimization | | jeffgibson
    0
  • BlinkWeb


    We have an existing e-commerce site built on x-cart. The default store location is www.site.com/store. The domain root however is just a static HTML page (currently using mainly graphics) and a nav menu. What would be a better option: 1. Move the install location to the root directory and get rid of the static HTML page. We would have to manually 301 redirect all the old pages to the new location. Not sure if there are negative implications with that. 2. Just optimize the HTML landing page? Seems like it is better to have products and categories as close to the root domain as possible... 3. 301 redirect the domain to www.site.com/store/ and optimize the homepage within the store. This option means we dont have to worry about 2000 redirects or the hassle of moving the store. Anyone had any experience with this and suggestions?

    Technical SEO | | BlinkWeb
    0
  • TheEspresseo


    I read a lot on SEO, but I read way more on another unrelated subject matter (and have way more to say). Should I split my Twitter account into two distinct accounts (one for each subject matter)? Do you keep a private, personal Twitter for screwing around with your friends and/or getting the word out on social issues pertaining only to your social circle? Or do you just use your professional account for this? Or do you somehow manage to not "waste time" on purely personal social networking? [UPDATE: To abstract my question a bit: should I cultivate distinctly branded personal nicknames for different spaces that I am interested in? I have gone by "Loudogg" all my life but I am now afraid that as I grow professionally in different unrelated sectors that I will dilute my personal brand by Tweeting (and doing other activities) along too many different subjects as "Loudogg". To complicate matters, I am actually involved in more than 2 fields, and would like to grow in at least 3. Should I develop multiple personalities entirely? It just feels wrong.]

    Branding | | TheEspresseo
    0
  • Motava


    We have a potential client with a URL structure in this fashion: http://www.site-url.com//cpage/page.html pretty strange, right? my question is: How bad are the 2 forward slashes // for SEO? How bad is it to have that extra layer of /cpage in the URL? this doesn't appear to serve any other purpose than making the URL longer than necessary.

    On-Page Optimization | | Motava
    0
  • TheEspresseo


    On one hand it seems like having my cake and eating it too: blogging about SEO using my clients as case studies in order to give them a couple backlinks. On the other hand it seems like asking for it from Google or from competitors. Got any advice? And what of mentioning actual domains and brand names when asking questions here in the forum? One one hand it seems like I'd get more specific advice, on the other hand, once again, it seems like it comes with some amount of risk. Any advice? Thanks!

    Industry News | | TheEspresseo
    0
  • RobotCo-op


    In Google Webmaster Tools for my site, the #1 keyword is "ago", probably because we format datestamps like "3 days ago".  Is there a way to tell google not to count the word "ago"?  Seems like a common enough word that google should be ignoring it. I have a feeling the answer to my first question is "NO!", so my follow-up question is: is there a best practice for formatting dates for SEO? Thanks!

    Keyword Research | | RobotCo-op
    0
  • danielkamen


    I have a small client with a website PR2, 268 links from 21 root domains with mozTrusts 5.5, MozRank 4.5 However whenever I check in google for the amount of link:  Google always give the response none.  My client has a blog and many articles on the blog.   However they have submitted their blog article every time to article directories as well, plain and simle creating duplicate and content.  Is this the reason why their link: is coming up as none?  Is there something to correct the situation?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danielkamen
    0
  • danielkamen


    My client has a website with 160 pages specific to each storefront location.  Their strategy was to not have any links to the homepage so they cannot leave that storefront site.  I feel it makes sense to create a breadcrumb navigation so the user doesn't have to retype in the url to get back (and provides some internal link juice as well).  Has anybody ever came across the same situation or have done testing to know what the bounce rate is?  Or possibly pose the right response to convince my client they should in fact have a breadcrumb navigation?

    Search Behavior | | danielkamen
    0
  • iAnalyst.com


    What would be the best way to go about this? A site just put a blog on http://blog.domain.com/ Should there be a separate XML Sitemap for that particular subdomain or should the original XML Sitemap for the main domain be sufficient? Looking forward to your responses. Thanks

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iAnalyst.com
    0
  • inetteam


    Using SEOmoz tools what is the best way understand what are the new link only acquired from month to month?  For example if I had 450 links in February and then grew to 500 in March?  I would specifically like to know what those 50 are that grew.  How can i do that?

    Link Building | | inetteam
    0
  • DiamondJewelryEmpire


    whats would be some crucial numbers for mr. Google to chose Landing page over other pages? Your thoughts? Your experience?

    Link Building | | DiamondJewelryEmpire
    0
  • pivotpointsecurity


    Currently our meta title says "Network Security Audit | Pivot Point Security" which is pretty broad considering how many services we offer.  In trying to restructure our keywords, marketing and SEO focus, I came up with a new title.  The problem I have is figuring out which keywords to use in the title, and with a company name with 3 words - I am running out of room. The new title idea is "Information Security Assessments - Penetration Testing | Pivot Point Security" So my questions are the following.  Do I need to put the company name? Should I choose different keywords?  I'm sort of at a stand still trying to figure out the best possible title since meta keywords or description won't really help ranking.

    Technical SEO | | pivotpointsecurity
    0
  • hockerty


    When reading about multi-language site structure, general knowledge says that there are 2 right ways of doing it right: Assign one domain per region/ language: www.domain.fr www.domain.de www.domain.co.uk ... If a country has more than one language, such as Switzerland, you can create folders for those languages: www.domain.ch/fr - in french www.domain.ch/de - in german Have a unique domain www.domain.com for the whole site and create folders for language region: www.domina.com/fr www.domain.com/uk ... If a language is spoken in more than one country, you can create subfolders www.domain.com/fr-ch - french in switzerland www.domain.com/de-ch - german in switzerland At first sight, it seems that option 1 is the right one. However, sites such as www.apple.com are using option 2. I am unable to decide... what would you recommend? Any objective criteria?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hockerty
    0
  • CareerBliss


    Our site, CareerBliss.com, primarily offers unique content in the form of company reviews and exclusive salary information. As a means of driving revenue, we also have a lot of job listings in ouir /jobs/ directory, as well as educational resources (/career-tools/education/) in our. The bulk of this information are feeds, which exist on other websites (duplicate). Does it make sense to go ahead and robots block these portions of our site? My thinking is in doing so, it will help reallocate our site authority helping the /salary/ and /company-reviews/ pages rank higher, and this is where most of the people are finding our site via search anyways. ie. http://www.careerbliss.com/jobs/cisco-systems-jobs-812156/ http://www.careerbliss.com/jobs/jobs-near-you/?l=irvine%2c+ca&landing=true http://www.careerbliss.com/career-tools/education/education-teaching-category-5/

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CareerBliss
    0
  • ref.price


    Fellow SEOs, I’m looking for a new way to reach out to bloggers and site owners for links. There are quite a few link bait techniques to lure bloggers thanks to = amazing content, infographics,...but there are not so many articles on ways to contact bloggers/webmasters and ask for links... We all know that contacting site owners directly and politely asking then to place a link on their home page is as useful as a comb in Bruce willis’s hand. Link exchange is as dead as the Dodo and business partner links are usefull and easier to get but opportunities are often limited. I have been organizing contests for bloggers recently and it has been quite successful up to now, but I always like to have a spare trick up my sleeve. So if any of you have a decent method to reach out to  bloggers/webmaster and get decent links please let me know, I will be forever thankful ; ) Cheers

    Link Building | | ref.price
    0
  • waynekolenchuk


    I have been working on a domain for site which has only been up for a few months. I have mainly been working on building trust and authority for the site, with only a few links to my keyword phrases, which I was saving for the end, and concentrating on good quality non-spammy type links. It was progressing nicely until last weekend when I went from the first page on Google to the 3rd and 4th pages. Was there some kind of update?

    Technical SEO | | waynekolenchuk
    0
  • AmsiveDigital


    Working with a large number of duplicate pages due to different views of products.  Rewriting URLs for the most linked page.  Should rel=canonical point to the rewritten URL or the actual URL? Is there a way to see what the rewritten URL is within the crawl data? I was taking the approach of rewriting only the base version of each page and then using a rel=canonical on the duplicate pages.  Can anyone recommend a better or cleaner approach? Haven't seen too many articles on retail SEO when faced with a less than optimized CMS. Thanks!

    Technical SEO | | AmsiveDigital
    0
  • hockerty


    Hi, I am managing a site in 5 different languages/regions. Our language structure is as follows: www.domain.com/en-us/ - For US www.domain.com/en-uk/ - For UK www.domain.com/fr/ - For France ... However, SEOMOZ does not allow to set up a domain with "/" as a campaign. How can I do it? Thanks

    Moz Pro | | hockerty
    1
  • Aardvark


    Hi, I work for Perfectly Engraved. A lot of our links point to http://www.perfectlyengraved.co.uk/. However that address forwards to - http://www.perfectlyengraved.co.uk/ecommerce/scripts/default.htm. Should we ensure our links point to http://www.perfectlyengraved.co.uk/ecommerce/scripts/default.htm or does it not make difference? I've put our forwarding code below. <%@ Language=VBScript %> <% Option explicit Response.Buffer = true Response.Redirect "http://www.perfectlyengraved.co.uk/ecommerce/scripts/default.htm" %> Also, would it help if we did a 301 redirect from http://perfectlyengraved.co.uk/ecommerce/scripts/default.htm to http://www.perfectlyengraved.co.uk/ecommerce/scripts/default.htm? As both addresses for every page on our site return the page with or without www Thanks

    Link Building | | Aardvark
    0
  • Spreader7376


    That's it. I'm thinking of making a Tumblre blog (s) for inbound links. Is it worthwhile?

    Link Building | | Spreader7376
    0
  • GroupM


    Hey all, I recently found an issue on the website of one of my clients, so I want to hear what could be the reason for it. We are working with that client since September last year and we had created around 300 links to it. However, I recently found out using Majestic SEO and Open Site Explorer that for every page there are like 3-4 links passing value... I checked the whole report immediately, but the thing is that all links are in place and they have relevant URLs and anchortext as wel. I am thinking about an onsite issue, which can be blocking the links  (I checked the robots.txt and the http header to see if they return any errors, but no luck). Any suggestions.... Any help is greatly appreciated 🙂 Best Regards

    Link Building | | GroupM
    0
  • Neustop


    I am working with a local business owner who has purchased multiple domains. One includes the geographic area she serves and the type of business she runs. The other includes her business name and the type of business she runs. She is unsure of which domain she would like to use as the main URL for her business website. When choosing a domain for a small, local business, would you consider it advantageous to have the main geographic area that the business serves in the URL rather than the actual name of the business? What would be the best use of domain name which isn't selected from a SEO standpoint?

    Image & Video Optimization | | Neustop
    0
  • WCR


    Or perhaps my question is actually how often does the seomoz bot crawl the web? I ran some benchmark link counts for a number of websites about this time last month and I noticed when I went to update them for this month the data is the same. Thanks.

    Moz Pro | | WCR
    1
  • paulsid


    Hi, We have been performing our own onsite of offsite SEO along with external assistance and have ranked well over the years with minimal impact from Google updates. Howevr the last so called Panda update has affected us heavily pushing our main phrase 'web design melbourne' from 2nd to 7th where we have been for almost 2 months now on Google.com.au irrespective of onsite or offsite work. We have been trying to find signs of any onsite, IP, duplicate content, titles or other issues that may be holding us back to no avail. The only flag that Google webmaster tools is showing is a number of bad internal site links, which I think is a glitch with the CMS we are using. Even the SEO MOZ tool gives us a higher ranking compared to most competitors on page 1 of Google.com.au for our main phrase. The biggest difference between us and competitors is we chose to target an internal page specific to the topic rather than our homepage. With this sadi we have also reduced our keyword density and content quantity inline with the other sites homepages. Can anyone help shed some light on this? and perhaps something obvious that we have missed, or where we should be looking? Thanks.

    Technical SEO | | paulsid
    0
  • jjwelu


    Realized some major slipping on some of my most important keywords- mn realtors and minnesota homes for sale- my site is joeandcindy.com    After months of working on traffic, blogs etc, wondering what could slap me 10-25 spots in just  a few days.  There were no errors showing up on the report that I can see.  Just looking for some quick advice on what I might be missing and some quick action steps I might take to reverse the trend.  Thanks!

    Algorithm Updates | | jjwelu
    0
  • JeanYates


    I have a javascript dropdown menu on every page of my site. It lists all the wineries I write about and sell. About 300 links.  I've been told that google doesn't like so many links on a page, but that it doesn't spider javascrpt. Then I hear that it does. Am I being penalized by all the links? Or does the spider really not see them? I don't want to give up my javascript menus, unless I have to. Should I put a no follow on each link inside the code? And on the other hand, am I losing google juice by not letting it see all the pages on my site that I link to in the javascript menu? Thanks in advance for your help!

    On-Page Optimization | | JeanYates
    0
  • opwdecks


    On the home page of my site I have a read more link that takes you to a different URL with basically the same content, just more of it. Home Page: http://www.opwdecks.com/ Read More Link on Home Page: http://www.opwdecks.com/deckmaintain.htm I think this may be affecting my seo. Any suggestions on what I should do about this? Should I add a canonical to the home page and/or on the other page? Both pages are indexed by google. Thanks for any help or tips.

    On-Page Optimization | | opwdecks
    0
  • super99


    Hiya! I've got a relatively new domain, and one of my goals is to be 100% white hat, squeaky clean as I really would love to see my site succeed in the long term. So far my linkbuilding efforts are going pretty well. I'm beginning to buy some ads, and some of the bloggers I'm buying ads from don't use advertising networks, they just host your jpeg from their own blog... For the little picture that will show up in the side column of their blog should this be no-followed? And if it's not do we know if google assigns a penalty? I'm ok with asking the blogger to do that, but I notice my competition is not (and I know they know better) so I feel like it puts me at a bit of a disadvantage. Secondly - I'm 100% avoiding sites that sell text links (even ones with high pagerank, like pagerank 6), is this the right path to go? I read this article from Matt Cutts and was wondering if this is still true, reputable sites that sell links maintain their pagerank but aren't able to pass pagerank? http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/text-links-and-pagerank/ "Reputable sites that sell links won’t have their search engine rankings or PageRank penalized–a search for [daily cal] would still return dailycal.org. However, link-selling sites can lose their ability to give reputation (e.g. PageRank and anchortext)."

    Link Building | | super99
    0
  • JeanYates


    I'm removing old products (wines)  from my site, and I've been using 301 redirects for each product page back to the winery page. My question is, am I using best practice? I want people who search for these now nonexistent products to go to the winery page where they will see what is now available. But does google approve? I've also tried leaving the product's page intact but saying that it is no longer available and putting a link in the text that points to the winery page. Which is better, in the eyes of the god google? Thanks!

    On-Page Optimization | | JeanYates
    0
  • maxkennerly


    Title says it all. Assuming that you're talking about similar content (let's say, widgets), which is better: using within-page links for variations or using separate pages? I.e., do we have a widget page and then do in-page links to describe green, blue, and red widgets, or separate pages for each type of widget? In-page pro: more content on a single page, thus more keywords, key phrases, and general appearance of real content. In-page con: Jakob Neilsen says they're confusing. Also, for SEO, you only get one page title, rather than a separate page title for each. My personal bias is for in-page, since I hate creating dozens of short pages for what could be on one page, but my suspicion is that separate pages are better for SEO.

    On-Page Optimization | | maxkennerly
    0
  • Ticket_King


    After running one of my landing pages through the SEOmoz on-page keyword optimization tool, I see that my keywords are 13 characters from the front of the title.  My page is already receiving an A letter grade.  The 13 characters in front of my keyword phrase are not vital, but they related to the keyword phrase.  Is it that important that I drop the related word, in order to get my keyword phrase to start at the front?

    Moz Pro | | Ticket_King
    0
  • SEO-Doctor


    Can you get away with providing totally different content to US visitors and UK visitors from the same url. watch?v=XWfqyy7J34s

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEO-Doctor
    0
  • cmaddison


    A photographer client has a flash website, purchased as from a (well respected) template company. The main site is at the root domain, and the HTML version is at www.example.com/?load=html If I visit the site on a browser without Flash installed, I am re-directed automatically to the HTML version. I'm concerned as the site has some great links and the HTML version is well optimised, but doesn't appear anywhere in Google for chosen keywords (ranks perfectly for brand related searches). Google is indexing the Flash version of the site, but I would rather it didn't (there's no real content (just Javascript to load the SWF) and all of the pages load under one URL). How can I block the Flash version from Google but still make the incoming links count towards the HTMl version of the site? If I re-direct Google to the HTML version, is this cloaking, and is it frowned upon? Thanks for any advice you can offer.

    Technical SEO | | cmaddison
    0
  • AspenFasteners


    I believe that the Google and Bing crawlbots understand wildcards for the "disallow" URL's in robots.txt - does Roger?

    Technical SEO | | AspenFasteners
    0

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