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After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

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  • Peter264


    The question is in the title: Should HTML Heading Tags ALWAYS be in Hierarchical Order? For example, using them in order: H1, H2, H3... etc. Or is it OK to have H2 tags before the main H1 tag on a page? - for example sidebar content with H2 headings before the main content H1 tag? Your thoughts are greatly appreciated.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter264
    0
  • bThere


    I have read here that domain names with keywords might add a boost to your search rank For instance using a completely inane example monkey-fights.com might get a boost compared to mfl.com (monkey fighting league)  when searching for "monkey fights" There seems to be a hot debate as to how much bonus the first domain might get over the second, but leaving that aside for the moment. Question 1. Would monkey-fights.mfl.com get the same kind of bonus as a root domain bonus? Question 2. If the answer to 1 above was yes would a 301 redirect from the suddomain URL to root domain URL retain that bonus I was just thinking on how hard it is to get root domains these days that are not either being squatted on etc. and if this might be a way to get the same bonus, or maybe subdomains are less bonus prone and so it would be a waste of time Thanks

    Technical SEO | | bThere
    0
  • djo-283669


    My company has an ecommerce website that's been online for about 5 years.  The url is www.betterbraces.com.  We're getting ready to launch an australian version of the website and the url will be www.betterbraces.com.au. The australian website will have the same look as the US website and will contain about 200 of the same products that are featured on the US website.  The only major difference between the two websites is the price that is charged for the products.  The australian website will be hosted on the same server as the US website. To ensure Australians don't purchase from the US site we are going to have a geo redirect in place that sends anyone with a AU ip address to the australian website. I am concerned that the australian website is going to have duplicate content issues.  However, I'm not sure if the fact that the domains are so similar coupled with the redirect will help the search engines understand that these sites are related. I would appreciate any recommendations on how to handle this situation to ensure oue rankings in the search engines aren't penalized. Thanks in advance for your help. Alison French

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | djo-283669
    0
  • Cornucopia


    Is there an advantage/disadvantage to adding an .html suffix to urls in a CMS like WordPress. Plugins exist to do it, but it seems better for the user to leave it off. What do search engines prefer?

    Technical SEO | | Cornucopia
    0
  • vijayvasu


    Hey Mozzers, So I've been reading somethings lately and some are saying that the top search engines do not use ror.xml sitemap but focus just on the sitemap.xml.  Is that true? Do you use ror? if so, for what purpose, products, "special articles", other uses? Can sitemap be sufficient for all of those? Thank you, Vadim

    Technical SEO | | vijayvasu
    0
  • ErnieB


    I would like to see if there is a way to add conditional logic to the robots.txt file so that when we push from DEV to PRODUCTION and the robots.txt file is pushed, we don't have to remember to NOT push the robots.txt file OR edit it when it goes live. My specific situation is this: I have www.website.com, dev.website.com and new.website.com and somehow google has indexed the DEV.website.com and NEW.website.com and I'd like these to be removed from google's index as they are causing duplicate content. Should I: a) add 2 new GWT entries for DEV.website.com and NEW.website.com and VERIFY ownership - if I do this, then when the files are pushed to LIVE won't the files contain the VERIFY META CODE for the DEV version even though it's now LIVE? (hope that makes sense) b) write a robots.txt file that specifies "DISALLOW: DEV.website.com/" is that possible? I have only seen examples of DISALLOW with a "/" in the beginning... Hope this makes sense, can really use the help!  I'm on a Windows Server 2008 box running ColdFusion websites.

    Technical SEO | | ErnieB
    0
  • MyNet


    I need to redirect a page/URL that is purely .html to a new location.  I don't know how to do this.  All the redirects I can find are for server side code pages .php/.aspx etc.  From my understanding I can't put a server side redirect in a .html file.  I am hosting on a microsoft server, however the new page I am redirecting to is .php.  I am running some WordPress (.php) files on the server.  I need to make it redirect before the old page loads so visitors don't start reading something that is about to get redirected Can someone please help me?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MyNet
    0
  • EugeneF


    I thought that the important factor in the value of a link was how many outing links a page has total.  Some tools seems to tell me that the important data point is how many EXTERNAL links a page has.   Which number should I be paying attention to when looking at pages I want to get linked from? (Yes, I know there are many other factors that are important)

    Link Building | | EugeneF
    0
  • MichaelWeisbaum


    Do these typically have a negative impact on SEO?  I know this is kind of a vague question, does it make it harder to spider?  Are there SEO friendly ways of coding these?  There are so many sites out there that have these, so I've got to assume it's different on a case by case basis.

    Web Design | | MichaelWeisbaum
    0
  • mcintyr


    SInce Panda, We have seen our home page drop from #2 in google.ie serp to page 3 but it  has been replaced in the same position @#2 by our relevent sub page for the keyword that we ranked#2 for. Is this a good or bad thing from and seo point of view and is it better to have deep pages show in serp rather than the homepage of a site and what is the best line of action from here in relation to seo. Is it best to work on subpage or home page for that keyword and should link building for that phrase be directed towards the subpage or the homepage as the subpage is obviously more relevent in googles eyes for the search term. It is clear that all areas of the site should be looked at in relation to link building and deep links etc but now that google is obviously looking at relevancy very closely should all campaigns be sectioned into relevent content managed sections and the site likewise and treated on an individual basis. Any help that you may have would be very welcome. Paul

    Algorithm Updates | | mcintyr
    0
  • pauledwards


    Hi everyone, just a quick question, what are your views on the use of strong tags in content? how many is too many? What is you have strong tags around every keywords for a sentance etc?

    Technical SEO | | pauledwards
    1
  • pbhatt


    We recently acquired a company, and now we are going to redirect all of the pages on their site to their respective pages on our site. Do we need to keep the original pages on their site active? For how long? Ideally, we would like to redirect everything and remove the old site entirely so we don't have to pay to keep hosting it. Is this possible? Thanks!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pbhatt
    1
  • idv


    Hi I am working on a site http://www.harrisbassett.co.uk that for search terms such as 'Chartered Accountants Swansea' appears near the top of the 2nd page of Google. When looking at what is listed on the 1st page for 'Chartered Accountants Swansea' I would appreciate any advice/guidance on what else could be done to give the site a final push to get on the 1st page of search results. Over the past 2 weeks I have been building inbound links from local citation sites yelp, qype etc along with sites from competitor analysis via opensiteexplorer. Looking at the sites that are on the 1st page I cant understand why many of them are ranking higher than me? Any insight and plan of attack would be most appreciated from any  search experts on the forum. Many Thanks

    Link Building | | idv
    0
  • pbrothers24


    For example, I have a page A that should be redirected to page D, but instead A redirects to B, B redirects to C and C redirects to D. It's something I came across and wondering if its worth the dev time to change it. Thanks!

    Technical SEO | | pbrothers24
    0
  • holdtheonion


    Hello: I previously asked this question, but I would love to get more perspectives on this issue. In Blogger, there is an archive page and label(s) page(s) created for each main post. Firstly, does Google, esp. considering Blogger is their product, possibly see the archive and tag pages created in addition to the main post as partial duplicate content? The other dilemma is that each of these instances - main post, archive, label(s) - claim to be the canonical. Does anyone have any insight or experience with this issue and Blogger and how Google is treating the partial duplicates and the canonical claims to the same content (even though the archives and label pages are partial?) I do not see anything in Blogger settings that allows altering these settings - in fact, the only choices in Blogger settings are 'Email Posting' and 'Permissions' (could it be that I cannot see the other setting options because I am a guest and not the blog owner?) Thanks so much everyone! PS - I was not able to add the blog as a campaign in SEOmoz Pro, which in and of itself is odd - and which I've never seen before - could this be part of the issue? Are Blogger free blogs not able to be crawled for some reason via SEOmoz Pro?

    Moz Pro | | holdtheonion
    0
  • dcmike


    Some say hyphenated domain names are "spammy". I have also noticed that Moz's On Page Keyword Tool does NOT recognize keywords in a non-hyphenated domain name. So one would assume neither do the bots. I noticed obviously misleading words like car in carnival or spa in space or spatula, etc embedded in domain names and pondered the effect. I took it a step further with non-hyphenated domain names. I experimented by selecting totally random three or four letter blocks - Example: randomfactgenerator.net - rand omf act gene rator Each one of those clips returns copious results AND the On-Page Report Card does not credit the domain name as containing "random facts" as keywords**,** whereas www.business-sales-sarasota.com does get credit for "business sales sarasota" in the URL. This seems an obvious situation - unhyphenated domains can scramble the keywords and confuse the bots, as they search all possible combinations. YES -  I know the content should carry it but - I do not believe domain names are irrelevant, as many say. I don't believe that hyphenated domain names are not more efficient than non hyphenated ones - as long as you don't overdo it. I have also seen where a weak site in an easy market  will quickly top the list because the hyphenated domain name matches the search term - I have done it (in my pre Seo Moz days) with ft-myers-auto-air.com. I built the site in a couple of days and in a couple weeks it was on page one. Any thoughts on this?

    Technical SEO | | dcmike
    0
  • KMack


    I am new to SEOmoz & trying to work my way through the ca-trillion errors that have been found on my site, but for each one I want to ensure that I am helping rather than harming my site. The tool has (as a "notice") said that my category pages & Archives are NO-INDEX, is this how these pages should be dealt with? In addition, the crawler has also (as a "warning error) discovered that my categories, and Archives do not have a meta description..is this of great importance for non indexed pages of this type? Thanks so much to the SEOmoz forum members, you have so far been of invaluable help to me.

    On-Page Optimization | | KMack
    2
  • WebsiteConsultants


    I currently have a site (startuploans.org) that runs everything as http, recently we decided to start an online application to process loan apps. Now, for one certain section we configured ssl to work (https://www.startuploans.org/secure/). If I go to the HTTPS url for any of my other pages they show up...I was going to just 301 everything from https but because it is in a subdirectiory I can't... Also, canonical URL's won't work either because it's a totally different system and the pages are generated in an odd manor. It's really just 1 page that needs to be disallowed.. Is there any way to disallow all HTTPS requests from robots.txt while keeping all the HTTP requests working as normal?

    Technical SEO | | WebsiteConsultants
    0
  • esendex


    A while ago we purchased some domains that are related to our industry. I'm fairly sceptical about using them, but I am interested what peoples thoughts are. We are currently producing quite alot of engaging content and although it's industry related, it is sometimes quite broad and not always appropriate for our company blog. I have been debating whether or not it will be a good idea to use one of the domain names that we have purchased to create more of an industry blog that is off our website. I'm not sure if this is considered a "black hat" technique by using domains registered to us? And also whether or not Google will punish because we are blogging from the same IP address and linking back to our site ? I look forward to hearing what people think. Thanks,

    Link Building | | esendex
    0
  • CommercePundit


    I am targeting my website in US so need to get high organic ranking in US web search. One of my competitor is restricting website access to specific IP address or Geo location. I have checked multiple categories to know more. What's going on with this restriction and why they make it happen? One of SEO forum is also restricting website access to specific location. I can understand that, it may help them to stop thread spamming with unnecessary Sign Up or Q & A. But, why Lamps Plus have set this? Is there any specific reason? Can I improve my organic ranking? Restriction may help me to save and maintain user statistic in terms of bounce rate, average page views per visit, etc...

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit
    1
  • RikkiD22


    Question says it all I guess. What would your recommend as the best free tool to check internal broken links?

    Technical SEO | | RikkiD22
    5

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