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Anyone..... ?

Does putting a blog on a proxy server (the pointed at the main site) hurt SEO? i.e. can Google tell? And if they can, does it matter?

My server people won't use PHP on their servers but we want a Wordpress blog. So their suggested solution is that they put the blog on a proxy server and point it at the ourdomain.com/blog subfolder on our site. So to all intents and purposes it's hosted in the same place.

They assure me this is normal practice and point out that our (main site) images are already being sourced from a CDN.

Obviously we'll deal with Google not seeing two separate versions of the same site. But apart from this, is there any negative effect we could suffer from in SEO terms?

Many thanks Kristen, I appreciate the answer being specific to the question

1. Yes, we've racked our brains over this one. The business serves London almost uniquely but the HQ is further out. I wonder if anyone has found away around this that works?

2. This is interesting and a bit of a minefield. I guess the only thing we can do is test. Hopefully Penguin 4 will ensure quicker feedback on testing than previously.

Hi Chris

Many thanks for this. I'll look into this.

Point 2 - we already have a listing on Foursquare. Do you have any other suggestions for backlinks? Hard to get too viral with Chimney Sweeps!

Regarding point 3 - all our content is unique except the one you looked at, sods law I guess!

This has been driving me slowly mad for ages - a site that consistently outranks my client site despite my clients site apparently being more SEO friendly on every level:

Google UK search term "chimney sweeps london"

My client site: http://apexchimneysweeps.co.uk

The other site: http://www.firkinschimneysweeps.co.uk

Can anyone shed any light on how this is happening? I really hope I'm being an idiot and missing something obvious!

Comparisons:  (A = apex F = firkin)

Domain age: A 2000 / F 2013

Domain Authority: A 16 / F 9

Page Authority: A 29 / F 22

I would say Apex page content is better and is certainly updated more often.

Thanks Kevin - I'm not sure I completely understand though.

What I'm looking to do is pass the link juice on from about 5,000 backlinks still pointing at our old site (which exists in domain form only a present) to the new site.

Are you saying there's not point in using a 301 if the page doesn't exist? I don't really understand why you'd use a 301 if the page still existed...?

Hi Kevin

Many thanks for this. Is a 404 as effective in passing on link juice as a 301?

Thanks Andy, much appreciated. I'll look forward to the code

I've got a .htaccess file set up on a site to redirect specific old pages to specific new pages on a different site:

eg

Redirect 301 /oldpage.html https://www.newsite.co.uk/newpage.html

Redirect 301 /oldpage2.html https://www.newsite.co.uk/folder/

I have two questions:

1. Is that all the file needs? Or does it need any "rewrite engine on" type code?

2. I would also like to include code to "mop up" any other URLs and redirect them to the root, so that

/anyotherpage.html redirects to newsite.co.uk

Is there a way to do this?

Fantastic - many thanks Chris!

Ah thank you - I was looking at the Behavior link above all that! Sorted now!

Hi Logan

Many thanks for responding - not sure where to find this? I'm not seeing any option for Landing Page reports under Behavior? All I'm seeing is New vs Returning / Frequency & Recency / Engagement - am I missing something?

We are seeing a sharp increase in Bounce Rate on the website via Google Search Console.

Is it possible to drill down and find out which pages are causing this? And if so, is it possible to find out why?

I've got an old defunct domain with a lot of backlinks to individual pages.

I'd like to use these backlinks for link juice by redirecting them to individual pages on the new domain (both sites belong to the same company).

What is the best way to set this up? I presume I need some kind of hosting & site, even if it's just a default Wordpress install, which I can then use to set up the redirects?

Would it be best done using .htaccess file for 301 redirects or some other way?

Thanks Tom, yes that's very helpful

I want to optimise the logo on our site. Our developers have presently got the site logo code like this:

601 character description, no keywords

1. How best to use the alt text and description?

2. Do I concentrate on alt text?

Isn't the 601 character description:
a) too long, and
b) an opportunity to add relevant keywords again, like the alt text?

Thanks Bernadette! What would you say is the best way to identify toxic links?

Thanks Barry, much appreciated!

I've discovered that my clients website used to have another domain name, which they still own but don't use.

It's doing OK considering its not been used for a few years - almost 6,000 backlinks showing on Majestic.

So what's the best way of using this for SEO?

I'm presuming some kind of redirecting? A simple redirect of everything on the domain to the new domain index page? Or going trough all the old pages and redirecting them one by one?

I'm not sure of their reasoning to be honest Andy. As I understand it, in the code there are two different menus - one for desktop visitors and one for mobile. Obviously only one shows up, depending on what the visitor is using. And rather than present Google with 500+ menu links twice, they've put nofollow on all the mobile version so only one set is presented.

Does that makes any sense?

Hi

Our site's front page has almost 900 internal links on it (it's an ecommerce site with about 25,000 products). A lot of these are on a pretty involved dropdown menu, which is on every page.

I can't really do anything to get this figure down (its outside my remit), but one thing the developers have done is make all the menu links nofollow on the mobile version of the menu (site is responsive) - otherwise there would be even more links!

My question is as to whether doing this for the mobile menu is a good idea, in terms of SEO?

Many thanks Britney

Thank you, that makes perfect sense.

Thanks EGOL, that makes sense. I'm looking for backlinks to products essentially, so not a great deal of content but perhaps some "newsability" (we won't be beaten on price in the UK, for instance).

Many thanks Jordan - I've read that guide and it's really useful.

What I'm still unsure about is whether it's worth me getting someone to do, timewise.  The guide seems aimed at getting backlinks from bloggers - can that make a big difference on higher competition search terms? My rivals have many backlinks from Govt. & national media sites, for instance.

Hi Martijn

Many thanks for your response. We have been redirecting old product URLs to the shop URL (not the front page, but the front page of the shop)  but I think ideally we just want rid of all these pages as the client is considering getting rid of the shop completely.

What would we do with robots.txt in this instance? Is there a tutorial you could point me at?

I've got a UK-based site with about 10,000 backlinks, according to majestic, and just 4 according to Open Site Explorer? Confusing! Rivals tend to have more - 28,000 in the case of our nearest competitors.

So I'm not sure the best way to go about building backlinks? Or if it's worth actively seeking to build them?

The index page of the site has a Moz PA of 45 (DA = 35) and I'm looking for any ways to increase these - need to get the DA up to 73 to compete with largest rivals.

One of our main rivals has about 60 .edu links - would be great to emulate that, but I'm also not sure how you go about this? i.e. when you spot a good backlink someone else has, how would you begin the process of also getting that link?

I had a problem with a lot of crawl errors (on Google Search Console) a while back, due to the removal of a shopping cart. I thought I'd dealt with this & Google seemed to agree (see attached pic), but now they're all back with a vengeance!

The crawl errors are all the old shop pages that I thought I'd made clear weren't there anymore. The sitemaps (using Yoast on Wordpress to generate these) all updated 16 Aug but the increase didn't happen till 18-20.

How do I make it clear to Google that these pages are gone forever?

Screen-Shot-2016-08-22-at-10.19.05.png

Thanks Dmitril, I'll have a look through those

Does anyone have any recommendations for Youtube SEO Resources in 2016?

I've done a lot of work with Local SEO on video but having to move up a notch to national SEO in a competitive field

Thanks for your response BlueCorona!

The pages concerned are for products and the 'wraparound' text regards free delivery and next day delivery - this is relevant to all the pages and also helpful to tempt the user to click as it's pretty much the best deal in the country. Would you still say that is detrimental?

Individual meta descriptions over time... we have 25,000 products and add / remove many products on a daily basis so I don't think it's really a realistic option.

Thanks Marisa - my changes are certainly customer-based (definite statements about free delivery and next day delivery)

Thanks Marisa, pretty much as I was thinking (hoping!)

If there is one different word in each description, that is presumably enough to stop them being seen as duplicates?

Also, I was intrigued that you said "Google doesn't officially use meta descriptions" - is there some doubt over this? I thought they'd confirmed it themselves?

I think the choice I have to make is, is it better to have 100% unique descriptions that are too short (keyword only, as at present), or much less unique ones that are 130+ characters. I guess the latter wins.

I'm working on a large website (circa 25k pages) that presently just replicates each page title as a meta description. I'm thinking of doing a 'find and replace' in the database so I change:

to

where the preceeding and following text would be the same in each case eg

Is this unique enough? Obviously the individual keyword would make it technically unique each time....and manually changing them would take the rest of my life

Thanks Andy - I was thinking about using video syndication software to solve the time issue, but I can certainly see your logic with Youtube / Google

This doesn't seem to have been discussed here for a number of years, so I'm wondering what people think of video syndication in 2016?

Is it a good idea for website SEO (backlinks in accompanying text)? Or for raising general web presence? Or generally pushing the video itself up the SERPS?

Or is it better to concentrate everything on Youtube?

I'm looking to raise a website profile that produces 4-5 videos a week presently but is only getting an average of 500-1000 views in each video.

Hi Ikkie

That's great & very helpful - many thanks

Search console is showing quite a lot of soft 404 pages on my site, but when I click on the links, the pages are all there. Is there a reason for this?

It's a pretty big site - I'm getting 141 soft 404s from about 20,000 pages

Thank you, that gives me a lot of clarity

Thanks Egol - this website took over a year to build and cost 7 figures to build, so not so simple I'm afraid. (It's integrated with stock controls in a shop and warehouse and all sorts)

Really not a problem - thank you for responding

Thanks Highland - ironically that's the exact setup at the moment - a wordpress.com blog hosted on a subdomain!

So my idea was to move it to a subfolder for better SEO - then the hosts chipped in with their refusal to run PHP.

This is in a high-competition niche where every detail can make a difference.

I guess you're saying it's impossible to have a WP (.org) site hosted elsewhere and pointed at the URL domain.com/blog ?

Ah OK, that's a much happier thing to hear! Thank you

Thanks Gaston, much appreciated and as I feared.

I'm feeling a bit stuck as to what to do here then. I want to run Wordpress (principally for the ease of client use and the Yoast SEO plugin), but the hosts simply won't allow PHP.

So if a different server / IP number isn't a solution, I wonder if there  is any way I haven't thought of to run Wordpress in an effective manner as a subfolder of the site? Or perhaps an alternative to WP that has great SEO - the hosts say they run "web servers with .Net applications hosted on them using IIS "

Does anybody have any ideas?

- would it hurt link juice to host a blog on a different server to the rest of your website?

I have a web host saying they can't run Wordpress as they won't support PHP for "security reasons" - one solution would be to set up Wordpress on a different server and redirect domain.com/blog there (I presume this is do-able?).

But I don't know if that affects the SEO adversely?