How do i fix the problem of having 2 url's splitting my rankings?
-
please excuse my noobness.
i have a nice site, www.soundsenglish.com which I built from scratch and learned by doing. It has lots of nice content and it does ok, my rankings are woeful mostly cos of all the mistakes i made building it...i'll fix that stuff. This stuff i don't know about.
from my adsense i get 2 listings www.soundsenglish.com and soundsenglish.com
wierdly the second one gets consistently higher paying ads although most of the visitors come through the first but they are both the same landing page same content -as far as i can tell.
when i try to find rankings, use the seo tools etc i get diferent scores, so whatever it is, it is splitting the sites - can't be a good thing.
i have no idea why this happens and i have some inkling that maybe i need something to do with cannonical redirects or maybe a 301 redirect. both of which i have little idea how to do.
If that isn't enough naive blundering about for you, i have a little more...
it occurs to me that this prpoblem is probably happening with every page on my site,
i.e. the 'juice ' is not getting credited onto that one page.
this surely means cannonical redirects but even afterreading up on them
idon't quite get it. or rather ido but idon;t get how to apply it to my context.
-
great articles thanks!
-
thanks for answering! yes it on Apache. i'll give that a go.
-
You need a 301 redirect from a www to a non www. Or vice-versa.
You need to read this article: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection
Here is some help if you have a windows server:
http://www.seomoz.org/q/301-redirect-on-windows-iis-help-part-2
A Canonical tag can be used when the split pages are the same pages but with two different URLs. So site.com/sneakers.php and site.com/sneakers, here you could create a canonical tag to let the bots know which page you'd prefer them to index.
Read more here: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/canonicalization
-
Which server type are you using? Apache?
If you are:
- Choose the one you prefer, www. or without www.
- Redirect all your pages to the one you choose, let's say you go with the one without www.
In your .htaccess:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^soundsenglish.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://soundsenglish.com/$1 [R=301,L]3. Go to Google Webmaster Tools > Configuration > Settings > Preferred Domain (choose the one you chose)
4. Check that all your links in your page point to the correct one. If you link to your internal pages like this you can skip this step.
[5. Wait for the results.
Hope that helps!](page.html)
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Large site with content silo's - best practice for deep indexing silo content
Thanks in advance for any advice/links/discussion. This honestly might be a scenario where we need to do some A/B testing. We have a massive (5 Million) content silo that is the basis for our long tail search strategy. Organic search traffic hits our individual "product" pages and we've divided our silo with a parent category & then secondarily with a field (so we can cross link to other content silo's using the same parent/field categorizations). We don't anticipate, nor expect to have top level category pages receive organic traffic - most people are searching for the individual/specific product (long tail). We're not trying to rank or get traffic for searches of all products in "category X" and others are competing and spending a lot in that area (head). The intent/purpose of the site structure/taxonomy is to more easily enable bots/crawlers to get deeper into our content silos. We've built the page for humans, but included link structure/taxonomy to assist crawlers. So here's my question on best practices. How to handle categories with 1,000+ pages/pagination. With our most popular product categories, there might be 100,000's products in one category. My top level hub page for a category looks like www.mysite/categoryA and the page build is showing 50 products and then pagination from 1-1000+. Currently we're using rel=next for pagination and for pages like www.mysite/categoryA?page=6 we make it reference itself as canonical (not the first/top page www.mysite/categoryA). Our goal is deep crawl/indexation of our silo. I use ScreamingFrog and SEOMoz campaign crawl to sample (site takes a week+ to fully crawl) and with each of these tools it "looks" like crawlers have gotten a bit "bogged down" with large categories with tons of pagination. For example rather than crawl multiple categories or fields to get to multiple product pages, some bots will hit all 1,000 (rel=next) pages of a single category. I don't want to waste crawl budget going through 1,000 pages of a single category, versus discovering/crawling more categories. I can't seem to find a consensus as to how to approach the issue. I can't have a page that lists "all" - there's just too much, so we're going to need pagination. I'm not worried about category pagination pages cannibalizing traffic as I don't expect any (should I make pages 2-1,000) noindex and canonically reference the main/first page in the category?). Should I worry about crawlers going deep in pagination among 1 category versus getting to more top level categories? Thanks!
Moz Pro | | DrewProZ1 -
My website was at the top of Google search for some years... suddenly I almost can't reach first page! Moz ranks my website better than the competitors... what might be going one? Could anybody help me out? Thanks!
Hello Guys! My website was at the top of Google search for some years... suddenly I almost can't reach first page! Moz ranks my website better than the competitors... what might be going one? Could anybody help me out? Moz rank us grade A... the competitors B or C .. I think we have better back links than they do... Would you need any kind of data or report to help me here? Thanks!
Moz Pro | | wesleyms0 -
Why does one page rank while a similar page doesn't?
We have a blog post (actually several of them that have the same SEO characteristics) that brings a fair amount of traffic to our site (relatively speaking), and according to Google Webmaster Tools it averages in the top 10 in SERPs for various terms. This page has no external links to it, and very few internal links pointing to it. When I run Moz's On-Page Grader for the various keywords it ranks for, the page get's an F on all of them. It was not optimized for any keyword, and it isn't our best content; it was a blog post written a few years ago and forgotten about and was never promoted in any way. The topic does happen to be about something that people search for frequently. According to the keyword difficulty tool, all of the keywords it ranks for have 40-45% difficulty. We have lots of other pages on our site that we have tried to optimize and that get A's and B's in On-Page Grader, that have both internal (from the home page and main menu) and external links pointing at them, etc, but they don't rank well at all. Keyword difficulty for these keywords is in the same range, from 37 - 53%. Why does this one page rank so well when the other pages don't? Additionally, we have been looking at a competitor who has a page that ranks #1 in universal results for numerous keywords according to SEMRush, yet the page gets an F On-page Grader for those keywords. The page has 3 links to it, all from the same domain and it has a very low domain and page authority. The Domain Authority of this page is 47 and the page authority is 33 according to Open Site Explorer (compared with our DA of 30, and PA of 1), and the social metrics are a bit higher than ours, but neither has a lot (they may have 15 likes to our 10). Why does this page rank so well for them? How can we get our Page Authority higher? Thanks for any and all help.
Moz Pro | | mukunig1 -
Crawlers reporting upper case letter url versions although these have been 301'd to lower case !?
Hi I have a client e-com site who's dev platform is on a windows server Their product pages have been auto-named after the product title, with the first letter in each word being upper case, which has hence translated to the URL having upper cases instances too. I asked them to set up 301 redirects for all url's that had upper case instances to lower case versions, which they say they have done. However I'm still seeing url's with upper case instances showing up in webmaster tools and moz crawl reports but when I copy & paste them into a browser they do redirect to, & resolve in, the lower case version. Its also upper case versions reported in the Google cache! So how come webmaster tools & Moz etc are reporting the upper case versions, surely if redirected it should be the lower case versions All Best Dan
Moz Pro | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Ranking report orderng when exporting to pdf
When I am in my rankings report I like to view the results in order of ranking, so that the keywords with higher position in google for example appear at the top, which is great. However when I export it to PDF it seems to default back to appearing in alabetical order... is there a way around this? Thanks!
Moz Pro | | stardigital0 -
What is the best ranking checker solution for 100's of sites
Hello, We used IBP for over 2 years and it worked great. We were able to schedule every clients site to auto run and email our clients. Now IBP is terrible due to Google's new updates. We are looking for something cost effective since we have 100's of websites we check on a weekly basis. We are either looking for a great software that uses proxies to check, or a service that offers unlimited sites and is cheap per month. We have searched for many, however there are so many that we aren't sure what is good and what isn't. We tried Jonathan Ledgers new one and it's not good, we looked into Web CEO and it's per amount of websites which is expensive. We tried cute rank tracker which is free and added proxies and it doesn't work, it lags out and doesn't even track ranks properly. It wouldn't hurt if it had a built in report analysis of the website as well. So whats a good one?
Moz Pro | | MarketingOfAmerica0 -
My Google Keyword Rankings are Missing. Anyone else having this problem?
I logged in to pull my reports for my clients and noticed that I am missing all of my ranked keywords for my campaigns for the Google columns. One word is ranked. All the rest have a TUES sign that looks like it references Tuesday. Is anyone else having this issue? I had over 30 words ranked last week. Only showing 1 today. The rankings for Bing and Yahoo are intact though. There is no report showing a decline in ranking for all those words either (in the google column.) This is also happening in another campaign of mine but they have a WEDS in place of the google ranking... ugh Frustrated...
Moz Pro | | JChronicle1 -
How many of my linked pages should I redirect (301's)
I'm moving my store to a new site and will have a much friendlier but completely different URL structure. I used Open Site Explorer to find inbound links to 513 pages and have done about half so far. The remaining pages have one link each at a page authority of 27 or less - but there are still 250+ of them. I have to manually view each old page, search for the product on the new site, and enter the redirect as there is no way to translate old URL's to new ones. How important is it for rankings to redirect the remaining 250 or so pages?
Moz Pro | | agirlandamac0