Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Kate,

Firstly, what do you mean by 'we can fix with a canonical'? If you are trying to solve the issue of duplicate page titles then I'm afraid you can't simply fix this with a canonical tag as this is not what it is designed for. The canonical tag is a way of informing search engines of your preferred version of a group of similar pages. It effectively acts like a 301 redirect. You will essentially be telling google not to index these pages, which unless you have a duplicate content issue, is not what you want to achieve.

The only way to fix the issue of duplicate page titles is to give each page a unique and descriptive title. If using a CMS, you can generate a template that will help to avoid getting duplicate titles.

Secondly, why do you think you have too many links on the page? You may find this blog post by Matt Cutts helpful. In it he explains that keeping links on a page to a maximum of 100 is only a rough guideline. The target was set primarily from a design and user perspective. In other words, if it makes sense to have more than 100 links on a page and it doesn't harm the overall user experience, you shouldn't worry.

Hope that helps,

Adam.

I hate to break this to you but when I do an unpersonalised search in google.co.uk for [lovehugz], the site isn't on page 2. In fact I couldn't see it on the first 6 pages. I did however, see it when I searched [love hugz].

I would say it is odd that it doesn't rank anywhere for [lovehugz] considering it isn't technically a word and the top ranking page is a twitter account. I would have certainly expected an exact match domain to outrank a twitter account on that alone.

I would probably delve into your backlink profile. A quick search on opensiteexplorer.org has certainly revealed a few issues there.

Hi Jasper,

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. It really depends on what your intent with the pages is and which page is ranking higher.

If the most relevant page and the page you want to rank higher is indeed ranking higher then you don't really have a problem. Look at it from this point of view, if you can dominate a whole page of google with your pages (very, very unlikely to happen) it increases the chances of users visiting your site.

It is only really an issue if you are deliberately targeting the same keyword for different pages and want to rank for the same keyword on separate pages. If you are targeting different keywords for each page and they are ranking well for the keywords you are targeting, then it isn't a huge problem that they happen to rank for the same keyword.

Of course, if this is the only keyword that the two pages rank for or the page that is ranking higher is not the page you want to rank higher, then you do have a problem concerning keyword cannibalisation. In this case you will need to analyse both pages to see what is causing the problem. For solutions to the problem you should read Rand's article.

Hope that helps,

Adam.

Sorry Ben but I have to disagree with you here. That is very bad practice and also very poor advice. You shouldn't just ignore 404 pages from a site crawl.

Really the only time you should let pages just 404 is when Google has indexed them, there is no relevant page on your site to redirect them to, there are no high value links pointing to them and they are not being linked to from within your site.

However, in this case the 404 pages are being linked to from within the site. This means that value is being passed to these pages from within the site that could otherwise be passed to other pages.

Best practice in this situation is to fix the links that point to the 404 pages and 301 redirect the 404 pages to relevant pages on the site.

P.s. running a quick site crawl and fixing the 404s should only take minutes and not hours to do!

Hi Andrea,

If the crawl is returning 404 errors then this means, although you have removed the widget, the pages are still being linked to somewhere on your site.

My advice would be to use the Screaming Frog crawler or if you have access to another crawler then use that. Once you have crawled the site using a crawler, you should be able to find out which pages are still linking to the 404 pages. Once you have found these, you will get a better idea of how to fix the issue.

Remember, a crawler will crawl your entire site, including all links, and if 404s are found then these are being linked to internally.

Hope that helps,

Adam.

Here is SEOmofo's article on the (not so) recent change. It is safer to limit your characters to 70 rather than 77 as some titles that are 77 characters are more likely to get truncated in the SERPs. The SEOmofo snippet tester is good because it factors in pixel width rather than character length.

FYI

Google no longer limits titles by character length but rather by pixel width.

I use SEOmofo to craft titles.

Hi Robert,

Firstly, the SEOMoz on-page report is really only a guide and you shouldn't worry too much about using it. To be honest, I rarely use it and just follow best practices.

That said, there are still several alternatives you could try:

1. You do not necessarily need to have your company name in the title. This is a practice that is quite common place nowadays but realistically, unless you're a strong brand that has huge volumes of branded traffic, you don't need the company name in the title.

2. I would maybe suggest targeting the two keywords on different pages i.e. a Widget Program page and a Widget Software Page. This maybe the most user friendly option and probably the best option overall. Especially if the two keywords attract large volumes in traffic.

Hope this helps,

Adam.

Hi Imre, by all means if you'd like to send me more detais via pm so I can see what you are talking about exactly, then feel free to do so.

Although I feel that my earlier advice will still be true. The anchor (sitelink title) is automatically generated by an algorithm and not manually edited (as yet). I have seen some pretty random sitelink titles for other sites. I have even seen sitelinks where the title has been taken from some random piece of code on the site. Unfortunately, without knowing the exact details of the algorithm, there is very little you can do to influence the anchors other than what Google outlines in their guidelines (which is very little).

Like I said previously, if the title is that problematic and you want it gone, then your only option is to demote the whole sitelink.

Hi Imre,

Unfortunately there's not much you can do about the sitelink titles at the moment. They are fully automated by Google's algo and have no human input, that I'm aware of, as yet. All you can do is make sure your site architecture and linking structure is as good as possible. Google states that 'for your site's internal links, make sure you use anchor text and alt text that's informative, compact, and avoids repetition.'

If of course you are completely unhappy with your sitelink then you can demote them.

Find out more about sitelinks here:

Google sitelinks

Hope this helps,

Adam.

Pranav, I suspect you are misinterpreting what has been said and you are also getting your words confused.

Characters are different to words. For example the url http://www.this-is-an-example.com has four words (this is an example) and 33 characters. What you have been saying is that character number 1 has more weight than character 33. This is inaccurate.

What I believe you are trying to say, is what Matt Cutts mentions in the interview you posted, that multiple keywords in a URL are given less weight after about the fourth or fifth keyword. I suggest that you read the articles you quote more carefully before offering erroneous advice.

You should read this really interesting post about EMDs by Dr. Pete:

Are Exact-Match Domains (EMDs) in Decline?

In your case I would just stick to a .com domain with your business name rather than a keyword rich domain. Also if you are competing in the SEO industry and you do not already rank well for your key terms, then you will find it hard to rank regardless. SEO terms are highly competitive and there are several sites offering this service that will have invested heavily in their own SEO, making it very difficult to compete.

In terms of your other question, it is generally best practice to separate words in a URL with a hyphen (-) rather than underscore (_).

Hope this helps,

Adam.

**1. If you see Google's blog you'll realize that keyword value decreases with each character in the URL. **

http://www.johnfdoherty.com/lessons-from-google-about-url-lengths/

Pranav, I fail to see where you are getting this information from. Firstly, the link you posted is not from Google's blog, it is a blog post from an SEO. Secondly, he does not provide hard evidence to support your claim that keyword value decreases with each character.

This information is misleading and inaccurate.

A search for [car insurance] in google UK returns a moneysupermarket page at number 1 that contains 39 characters in the URL. Looking further down the results there is a post office result with over 50 characters in the URL.

Also, your theory about the 'value of the keyword reducing with each character' is total nonsense.

Personally, I would go with the second option:

courses/togaf/foundation-training

Mainly because it looks a lot neater and you don't really need to mention 'togaf' twice in the URL.

Really you should try to keep your URLs as neat and user friendly as possible whilst keeping the relevant keywords. I generally try to keep them as short as possible without sacrificing essential keywords and pay no attention to the advice about keeping the length of your URL to 35 characters because google only displays 35, this is incorrect.

Hope that helps,

Adam.

Hi David,

Yes, there has been a whiteboard Friday for the last couple of weeks. Just check under the SEO Blog.

July 13th - 8 Rules for Exceptional Slide Presentations

July 6th - Leveraging the Power of Slide Decks to Boost your SEO, Social + Content Marketing

June 29th - Getting Started with Guest Posting

Hope that helps,

Adam.

According to sitemaps.org:

Q: <a id="faq_sitemap_location" name="faq_sitemap_location"></a>Where do I place my Sitemap?

It is strongly recommended that you place your Sitemap at the root directory of your HTML server; that is, place it at http://example.com/sitemap.xml.

Although it probably won't cause many SEO issues having your sitemap hosted elsewhere, I would always go with what is strongly recommended. Hope that helps,

Adam.

Using rel=prev and rel=next will help to avoid duplicate content issues and is entirely separate from your meta tags. If you wish to avoid duplicate meta title errors then you will need to add 'page x' to your titles, similar to what Matt Cutts has done with his blog.

Hope that helps,

Adam.

Hi Julien, I just did a basic check of your backlink profile using opensiteexplorer.org

Hi Julien,

Having looked at the backlink profile for both pages I can already see one problem. Your 'Annecy' page has very few links pointing to it whereas your 'Haute-Savoie' page has considerably more links to it. This is not a major problem in itself, however the problem I can see is with the anchors of these links. The majority of links to your 'Haute-Savoie' page contain the anchor 'haute savoie annecy'. This could be contributing to your 'Haute-Savoie' page outranking your 'Annecy' page. You can combat this by creating more links to your 'Annecy' page.

You could also improve your on-page optimisation for both pages. Again, having looked at your 'Haute-Savoie' page, it is quite well optimised for 'Annecy' rather than 'Haute-Savoie'.

Hope this helps,

Adam.

You can do a 'site:yoururl' search in Google to see if your pages are still indexed. If you feel you may have received a penalty then a full site audit wil be necessary.

Hi Al,

Using hidden text is considered black hat and has been identified as spam by most of the major search engines.

Best practice is to use the alt tag for images. There is no need to have a hidden h1 tag and this could even harm your site if you continue to use hidden text.

Hope that helps,

Adam.

Personally I don't see any problem with you identifying your business as Dublin based. You are clearly close enough to the city to service it so I don't see a problem here.

You often see businesses citing their location as London or as having a London office which is technically not in London but in one of the neighbouring counties such as Surrey, Middlesex, Essex or Kent. As long as you are close enough to the main city then I see no problem in claiming your location as that main city. Others may disagree but that's what I think and in practice, many businesses already do this.

Hi Guido,

Firstly I would perhaps look at changing from a subdomain to a subfolder e.g. http://www.zenucchi.it/poltronafraubrescia or http://www.zenucchi.it/poltrona-frau-brescia

There are, of course, certain situations where a subdomain is more appropriate but in your case I believe a subfolder would be more appropriate. You will find that the subfolder will benefit from the added authority of your domain whereas the current subdomain configuration means that you are losing valuable authority here.

I would also advise on having a good mix of brand anchor links as well as commercial i.e. have anchors containing Zenucchi or http://www.zenucchi.it as well as poltrona frau brescia.

Another thing I would look at improving is your on-page optimization. There are quite a few things you could improve so won't go through everything but I notice you don't have the key term 'poltrona frau brescia' in a h1 tag, maybe consider doing this.

Hope this helps.

I doubt that they have a huge effect on your rankings. However it would be something worth testing. As far as I'm aware I don't think anyone has tested this fully, although I may be wrong.

I guess if several thousand people all recommend a site within their links section in g+, it could be seen as an indicator of authority by Google and may have an impact on rankings but I couldn't say for sure.

In terms of your link building strategy, I would probably focus on more conventional methods.

If you need more than 20,000 pages crawled then I believe you could purchase Enterprise from SEOMoz that costs $4k a month but allows 1 million pages to be crawled per month.

If that is too much then you could consider purchasing a screaming frog licence for £99 which allows you to crawl a large number of pages.

You might want to consider upgrading to Pro Elite. The crawl limit is increased to 20,000 pages.

I have had a question from a retailer asking if they can take all our content i.e. blog articles, product pages etc, what is best practice here in getting SEO value out of this?

Well firstly, there is no SEO benefit to either party here unless the retailer provides a link to your site. This can actually cause damage to the retailer's site with regards to duplicate content issues. Forget about canonical tags here, they are not designed to avoid duplicate content issues when copying someone else's content.

My advice would be to advise the retailer to create their own unique content rather than copying your content. They can provide links to product pages on your site but they should try to create unique descriptions for the products rather than copying your content.

With regard to other retailers copying your content, they do so at their own risk as Google could decide to penalise these sites (assuming they haven't already done so). It is best practice to create unique content rather than copying other people's content.

Hope this helps.

I would have to disagree with Mat about Flippa. Although you can find some interesting sites for sale on there, prices tend to be rather inflated and perhaps doesn't present the best value for money. Considering you are looking for blogs, I would also suggest that Flippa is not the best option in this case.

However, I would definitely agree with Mat's suggestion about approaching blog owners directly to see if they are interested in selling. You are more likely to find better value for money with this approach as many blog owners won't have an idea how much their blog is worth. They may also be very keen to sell a blog that they no longer have time to update. You will certainly be better off with this approach.

It is never a good idea for anyone to copy another site's content. Regardless of the connection between companies, I would always advise on creating unique content for both sites. As you are the original creator of the content, you shouldn't face any penalty but the independent retailer could face duplicate content issues, if they copy the content from your site.

I would certainly advise against the independent retailer copying your content. However, it would probably be more beneficial and suitable to have the retailer link to your site instead.

Hope this helps.

Just to add to this....

I'm not sure why you are so concerned with PA and DA metrics. Whilst useful, you should not be getting to obsessed with influencing these metrics. Surely your overall goal should be to outrank your competitors in search engines rather than beating their PA and DA scores? Of course, with a successfully implemented SEO strategy you should find these will naturally improve along with your rankings.

Concentrate more on your overall SEO strategy rather than trying to improve just your PA and DA.

I'd have to agree that doing what you have done should not have impacted the rankings so dramatically. I have seen minor fluctuations when modifying title tags but not to this extent. I would give it a few days to see if things settle down. If you stil see the same problems after a few days then I would suggest that something else is likely the cause of the dramatic drop in rankings.

Generally it is considered best practice to separate words using a hyphen (-) rather than an underscore (_) as Google recognises hyphens as spaces. It also looks much neater using hyphens in urls as opposed to underscores which is why I advise using hyphens instead.

However, it doesn't really make a huge difference as Google can generally recognise the keywords without the use of hyphens. There are of course exceptions to this. The most famous example of this being www.expertsexchange.com. I'm sure you can see the issues with this domain.

Hope this helps.

Welcome to SEOmoz Aidan,

The best advice I can give you is to stay away from reciprocal link schemes. The links are not worth it and are in violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines which can negatively impact your site in search rankings. Read about this here:

Link Schemes

Google is massively clamping down on this and has even demoted many of these poor quality directory sites from its index.

Hope this helps.

3 of your most common anchor text terms:

waste disposal london

house clearance london

waste disposal

You are almost certainly being effected by the recent update which penalises this very thing. Although you have over 2,000 links containing a brand anchor (http://www.diamondwaste.co.uk/) the 40,000+ links containing commercial anchors are seriously harming your site.

Also, having looked at some of these links, I would say they are quite spammy and of very poor quality. Ultimately, you have a lot of work to do in cleaning up your backlink profile before submitting any type of reconsideration request to Google.

I just setup custom google search engines in Chrome and adapt the search parameters to remove all personalization from searches.

Works for me!

Many have their own views on whether exact match (or similarly broad match) domains are still worth getting.

Personally, I would always advise to go for brand domains and work on building your brand. This is because Google is attaching much less importance to exact match domains, although some may argue this point with evidence to the contrary. The recent Penguin update also had an effect by hitting sites with over-optimised link building practices due to over use of keyword anchors.

Ultimately if your company is called 'GreatestCompanyInTheWorld' then you should get www.greatestcompanyintheworld.com rather than www.broadmatchkeyword.com

Try this:

RedirectMatch 301 ^/content/.*$ http://www.mysite.com

I think that should work. Let me know if you have any problems.

Adam.

Your welcome.

Coincidentally, I had this question on my analytics exam that I took recently.

There was a penguin data refresh on 25th/26th May which had minor algorithmic changes. This could be a possible cause, if the dates match.

Check your webmaster tools to see if you've had any messages from Google. A penalty could have caused such a drop. Carefully review all of your backlinks and your content to see if there are any issues there such as duplicate content or spammy links.

Adam.

I believe this may answer your question:

What does google[referral] mean?

Adam.

Although you cannot keep the historic data in the system if you delete the keywords, you can export your entire ranking history to csv for reference.

Your question has two parts to it really.

Is there an easy way to reduce this list without having to go in word by word and pause or delete them?

Unfortunately if you have started a campaign and want to keep the historic ranking data of certain keywords whilst removing others then you have to manually remove the keywords you no longer want. Otherwise you will lost the historic data.

Like is there a bulk upload type of system?

There isn't a bulk upload option but there is a way you can simplify the task. As Donnie says, you can upload a comma separated list of keywords. If you are downloading a list of keywords from google to upload or you have a list of keywords on separate lines, just put the words into a text editor and use regex to replace line breaks with a comma (replace \n with ,). Then you can simply copy and paste into SEOmoz.

If you do not need the historic data then you can just follow this method.

Hope that helps,

Adam.

#1 A domain has many links to it, but has been 404ed for 4 months. Should I redirect to a page I own and is almost exactly the same content. Will the fact that it was once 404ed be an issue?

This sounds like a good idea to me. Make sure the page you are redirecting to is relevant to the original page. There shouldn't be an issue here as fas as I can tell.

#2 I have an old domain that has many links but has been stagnant for a long time. Are these links still valuable and I should I redirect them to an important page on a different site?

Whether the links are valuable depends on their quality. You should get an indication of their quality from how the site performs in the serps. If it is performing well then it probably does have valuable links. In this case I would be tempted to keep the domain running and add fresh content to the site. You could then link to another relevant site that you own and benefit from the value this provides. Either way, if you have a site that has value and performs well for certain keywords, it would be a shame to just redirect it to another site when you could gain commercial value from it.

Adam.

When I go to delete a keyword, I get a message that says all history will be lost so I guess the answer is yes you will lose the ranking history if you delete the keyword.

It is possible to evaluate a site and suggest areas that may have caused it suffer with the penguin update. However you should be very careful about which firm you choose as many not so reputable sites are cropping up offering such services. If you want to use an seo firm then I suggest you take a look at the SEOmoz recommended companies.

To be honest you probably don't need someone to tell you what's wrong, with a bit of reading and self analysis you will be able to find what has happened and more than likely it will be down to your backlinks.. Your money may be better spent hiring s reputable SEO to help fix the problems rather than tell you what the problems are.

Adam.

I would certainly look at having more brand term anchors than commercial ones so I would start at greater than 50%.

Google places certainly helps your local results but it shouldn't have too much impact on your .com ranking as far as I know.

There may well be some other issues with the site but without doing an audit of the site in question, I can only speculate.

That looks like a very unnatural link profile to me. I assume you are talking about commercial term anchors when you mention 'targeted keywords'? If so then you would certainly need to build a much larger proportion of brand anchors for your links.

There is no magic number when talking about percentages of commercial to brand anchors. It varies between countries and industries. However, I can certainly say that only 15% brand anchors is way too low. To find the best ratio may take a bit of experimentation.

Adam.