Hi I know this is cheeky but you are all so helpful on here!
-
hi, quick question, I've made a new instillation of wordpress at sussexchef.com/dev and I'm about to start building pages, obvoisly I'm going to move it to sussexchef.com when its all looking right. when I choose my page address links/ permalinks thingy, should I use new url names that don't already exist on the old site? or should I keep the old url names so I don't get loads of 404's, but include the "dev/" in the url name?
Eg the old address sussexchef.com/home
should I use sussexchef.com/dev/home or sussexchef.com/home-sussex-caterers while building the development site? I'm guessing the later my help out in google searches too?
But if I use Dev in the url shurly I will have to go through almost 100 pages removing the dev/ and also changing all the links too? This would be days of work!
So confused!I'd really appreciate your help here.
Ben
-
Hi,
That should be enough to stop the search engines crawling and indexing the test site.
Remember to take it off when you go live though.
-
Hi Guys and girls.
Thanks for the input, I'm not a web developer or an Seo expert, I'm a Chef, I found all the content on Moz amazing! not only has the using moz helped my web rankings its made My wife and I take on a whole new approach to marketing.
Not to mention all you guys are so happy to help out a novice
As for making the dev site Un-crawlable If ticked "discourage search engines from crawling this site" in the reading settings in wordpress, Is that enough or should I do something else too? I'm focusing all my time on building the now site, Should I run of and learn about robots txt file right away or should it be ok for now?
Thanks for your help!
-
Hi,
If the dev site can't be crawled (which is generally the idea), it doesn't matter what you call the URL's on the test site.
If the URL's on the old site are good, keep the same names for the new one to avoid the need for 301's. If the URL's could be better though, change them but 301 the old pages to the relevant new ones.
Hope that helps
-
Surely if you are building this in dev, the new site isn't craw able anyway so I don't know what the issues are.
Always recommend building new sites and making sure Google or any bot / human cannot see them anyway - as there are usually quite a few errors during build, so wouldn't want someone to accidentally find the dev site and get a bad brand experience,
But on the url side of thing, build it without the dev in the url.
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
-
Help me to understand why this page doesn't rank
Hello everyone. I am trying to understand why most of my website category pages don't show up in the in the first 50 organic results on Google, despite my high website DA and high PA of those pages. We used to rank high a few years ago, not clear why most of those pages have almost completely disappeared. So, just to take one as an example, please, help me to understand why this page doesn't shows up in the first 50 organic search results for the keyword "cello sheet music": http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/downloads/Indici/Cello.html I really can't explain why, unless we are under some sort of "penalization" or similar (a curse?!)... I have analyzed any possible metric, and can't find a logical explanation. Looking forward for your thoughts guys! All the best, Fab.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Help needed on HTTPS
Hi Can anyone help me. I need some help with some example of large e-commerce sites going to https. Ideally these need to be e-commerce sites but any large site will be great, so that I can show the impact. The site can be based anywhere in the world, its more the impact I am after. Thanks Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Andy-Halliday0 -
Help with Robots.txt On a Shared Root
Hi, I posted a similar question last week asking about subdomains but a couple of complications have arisen. Two different websites I am looking after share the same root domain which means that they will have to share the same robots.txt. Does anybody have suggestions to separate the two on the same file without complications? It's a tricky one. Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Whittie0 -
Moving blog to a subdomain, how can I help it rank?
Hi all, We recently moved our blog to a sub-domain where it is hosted on Wordpress. It was very recent and we're actively working on the SEO, but any pointers on getting the subdomain to rank higher than the old blog posts would be terrific. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DigitalMoz0 -
Help with https// redirects
Hey there
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jay328
I have a client who just moved from a self hosted CMS to Adobe Catalyst (don't ask!)
The problem: Their url indexed with google is https://domain.com, Adobe Catalyst does not support third party SSL certificates or https domains. Now when people google them https://domain.com shows up in search, HOWEVER it does not have a trusted certificate and a pop up window blocks the site. They are a mortgage company so SSL is really not needed. What can I do to get google to recognize the site at http: vs. https? Would this be something in GWMT? Thanks!0 -
How can I improve my rankings in Google with help of seomoz
Hey guys, I have joined seomoz today and set up campaigns for my sites. I got reports about keyword rankings, errors, notices etc. But I am still confused about how to use seomoz in order to improve my rankings. My point is does seomoz provides any services for improving position in google or simply seomoz provides only reporting? These reports are good but my ultimate goal to join seomoz is to improve my rankings for my each website and each post. Please help. BJ
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | intmktcom0 -
Infinite Redirect Loop without trailing slash, please help
I've been searching for an answer all day, I can't seem to figure this out. When I Fetch my blog as Google(http://www.mysite.com/blog) WITHOUT a trailing slash at the end, I get this error: The page seems to redirect to itself. This may result in an infinite redirect loop **HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently** When I Fetch my blog as Google WITH the trailing slash at the end(http://www.mysite.com/blog/), it is fine without errors. When I pull it up in a browser comes up fine both with and without the trailing slash. My .htaccess file in the root directory contains this: RewriteEngine On
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | debc
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index.htm\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index.htm$ http://www.mysite.com/ [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$1 [R=301,L] My .htaccess file in the blog directory contains this: BEGIN WordPress <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /blog/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^./index.php/. [NC]
RewriteRule ^index.php/(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/blog/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /blog/index.php [L]</ifmodule> END WordPress Do I have something incorrectly coded in these .htaccess files that could be causing this? Or is there something else I should look at? Thank you for any help!!0 -
Multiple Keyword Research Questions, Help
Hello , I've been trying for several days to understand how keyword research works for a multi purpose website,I've read guides, articles even some chapters from the book" The Art of Seo" by O'Reilly and still no luck. It seems i can't wrap my head around keyword research,lets say I have a social gaming community website and I'm trying to rank it first on some low competition keywords + some long tail keywords.The website has functions like leaderboards, profiles,events, competitions,etc so it's not actually a news related website but it will have a blog. My website being on the games niche It would imply that I should target words that contain the word "Games" but this word generates millions of searches globally so ranking first its nearly impossible if the website is brand new. This made me pursue generic keywords formed with 2 / 3 words like fresh games, new games, mmorpg games, fps games,etc which still generate lets say 30.000 searches globally each. Due to the different areas of the website like latest game events,latest games competitions,etc I'm confused If i should pursue website specific keywords like latest games events, fresh games events, latest games competitions, upcoming games competitions but these too generate 30.000 global searches each,so... 0.should i use generic keywords or keywords that include site features? So let's say I decide to pursue generic "games" keywords,due to a high competition based on the keyword I decide to go a layer deeper and for the keyword "fresh games" I obtain keywords like** "fresh games 2011,top fresh games 2011, upcoming fresh games** " and thus building a list of 30 keywords that contain " fresh games".If i do this for the rest of the keywords: ** new games, mmorpg games, fps games,etc** I end up with a list of 10.000 keywords or more since each keyword generates other keywords. Is this the correct approach ? since generating 10.000 keywords sounds a lot and I'm getting the feeling that It's not how it supposed to be done,like were would I insert 10.000 keywords? So how do I know which keywords to pick and aim in order to try to get no.1 ranking? and why those? How many keywords should I use? and where should i put them? since it's not a news website so writing a lot of articles isn't an option. Should I focus on 2 words keywords with around 10.000-30.000 seaches or 2 words keywords + long tail keywords with less traffic like 100 - 5000? Is there a guide for the Keyword Analysis Tool since if i enter "fresh new games" i get a 39% keyword difficulty,is that hard to rank? and I don't know what all those color mean since some of them have higher numbers then others that are found at the top and how can i get beat a website that has has rank 10. So hopefully with your help & by some miracle I will finally be able to build a keyword list. Thank you !
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | arching0
