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I'm interested if it's just me that gets frustrated by this? I've just Ctrl + clicked a few links to open them in separate tabs and then realised that none of them had opened. I know it's been like this for a while. It's a usability issue as it goes against expected norms, and now I have to right-click and then click "Open in new tab" on each link, which is more time-consuming and frustrating. More and more websites seem to be losing their Ctrl + click on links ability (JavaScript often breaks it). I don't know if there's a Mac equivalent... Anyway, I hope that doesn't seem like I'm too angry. It just frustrates me a little and I hope it gets fixed. 🙂 Edit - I've just realised these are getting blocked by Chrome's pop-up blocker - but why? It's only an issue on a small number of websites.

A website adds subfolders to a category URL for each filter that's selected. In a crawl of the website some of these URLs reach over 400 characters. For example, if I select shoe size 5, 5.5 and 6, white and blue colour, price $70-$100, heel and platform styles, the URL will be as follows: www.example.com/shoes/womens/filters/shoe-size--5--5.5--6/color--white--blue/price--70-100/style--heel--platform There is a canonical that points to www.example.com/shoes/womens/ so it isn't a duplicate content issue. But these URLs still get crawled. How would you handle this? It's not a great system so I'm tempted to tell them to start over with best practice recommendations, but maybe I should just tell them to block the "/filters/" folder from crawlers? For some products however, filtered content would be worth having in search indexes (e.g. colour).

For one e-commerce website, in place of the proper meta description, Google is showing a 318-character-long mix of snippets from the homepage content for the domain search (e.g. [example.com]). A brand search returns the correct meta description - as do the keywords the homepage ranks for. I know Google changes the meta description if it doesn't think it's relevant, but this one (there is only one) is and has (as far as we know) shown until now, and I've never seen such a mix of text in the SERP, and so many characters - it's picking up random text from bits of anchor text e.g. "privacy policy", title attributes from links, labels from radio buttons and more. The home page W3C validates apart from a couple of basic things like missing alt text. The only things that might be related that don't are some custom meta name tags added by the CMS - but I wouldn't think this would make any difference to whether a meta description is displayed properly or not? I've recommended we wait until tomorrow to see if Google fixes this on recrawl, but does anyone have any ideas if it doesn't? The homepage doesn't feature much standalone text, so I was thinking if we add a few extra words it might encourage Google to pick from that if it doesn't want to use the meta description. The text would have to be useful for users and fit in with the design of course, which could be awkward...

Does anyone have recommendations for any particular site searches for large e-commerce sites based on Magento? Some (hopeful) requirements: Possibility to segment product pages and blog content on results page Doesn't cause any major SEO or technical issues Understands semantic search Ability to filter results Ability to sort (e.g. by price, popularity, new in stock) It'd be really useful to see examples and know if there are any particular issues to be aware of. Thanks. 🙂

Is anyone aware of any e-commerce stores that have any sort of conversion rate from image search? Have any particular changes they've made resulted in an increase or decrease in sales?

Images are compressed and resized to fit into an article, but each image in the article links to the original file - which in some cases is around 5Mb. The large versions of the images are indexed in Google. Does this decrease the website's crawl budget due to the time spent downloading the large files? Does link equity disappear through the image links? Either way I don't think it's a very good user experience if people click on the article images to see the large images - there's no reason for the images to be so large. Any other thoughts? Thanks. 🙂

A national business has one HQ. it's possible for customers to visit. Could there be any disadvantages to listing a national company on Google Places for Business? I'd see it as an advantage as they'll have a greater presence for local searches. From what I understand it won't affect the organic rankings of the company as that's a separate algorithm. There are already some discussions about this in the Q&A, but nothing I can see that's recent and concrete.

Google's Display Network Ad Planner used to be the best for this (although was often still way out), but the data for the sites I used to check has disappeared. Does anyone know any other sites that provide half-decent estimates of traffic? trafficestimate.com, Compete and Alexa are way off. I'd be interested in paid services too. Thanks. 🙂

I believe this has never worked? It'd be an easy way of preventing any penalties from Google's recent crackdown on paid links via advertorials. When it's not possible to nofollow each external link individually, what are people doing? Nofollowing and/or noindexing the whole page?

Last year Google said bad links to 404 pages wouldn't hurt your site. Could that still be the case in light of recent Google updates to try and combat spammy links and negative SEO? Can links to 404 pages benefit a website and pass link juice? I'd assume at the very least that any link juice will pass through links FROM the 404 page? Many websites have great 404 pages that get linked to: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=http%3A%2F%2Fretardzone.com%2F404 - that was the first of four I checked from the "60 Really Cool...404 Pages" that actually returned the 404 HTTP Status! So apologies if you find the word 'retard' offensive. According to Open Site Explorer it has a decent Page Authority and number of backlinks - but it doesn't show in Google's SERPs. I'd never do it, but if you have a particularly well-linked to 404 page, is there an argument for giving it 200 OK Status? Finally, what are the best practices regarding 404s and address bar links? For example, if
www.examplesite.com/3rwdfs returns a 404 error, should I make that redirect to
www.examplesite.com/404 or leave it as is? Redirecting to www.examplesite.com/404 might not be user-friendly as people won't be able to correct the URL in the address bar. But if I have a great  404 page that people link to, I don't want links going to loads of random pages do I? Is either way considered best practice? If I did a 301 redirect I guess it would send the wrong signal to the crawlers? Should I use a 302 redirect, or even a 304 Not Modified redirect?

I've seen plenty of articles about using Twitter to build links, but how about building links to a Twitter account? Does registering on sites and directories like Topsy, Twellow and Klout help? We can link to Twitter accounts on our own websites and other social profiles, and use it as our link on blog comments etc, but is there anywhere else specific?

I'm starting a photography/travel/music blog and thought it might be a good idea to stick the occasional affiliate link in when it's appropriate. Does anyone have any recommendations? The related items would mainly be to DVDs, books and music, and sometimes something more travel specific like flights. Are the programmes from the likes of Amazon and ebay good, or would it be better to sign up to a system that covers many companies? It'll be my own CMS if that makes any difference. Thanks. 🙂

One website I'm working with keeps a HTML archive of content from various magazines they publish. Some articles were repeated across different magazines, sometimes up to 5 times. These articles were also used as content elsewhere on the same website, resulting in up to 10 duplicates of the same article on one website. With regards to the 5 that are duplicates but not contained in the magazine, I can delete (resulting in 404) all but the highest value of each (most don't have any external links). There are hundreds of occurrences of this and it seems unfeasible to 301 or noindex them. After seeing how their system works I can canonical the remaining duplicate that isn't contained in the magazine to the corresponding original magazine version - but I can't canonical any of the other versions in the magazines to the original. I can't delete the other duplicates as they're part of the content of a particular issue of a magazine. The best thing I can think of doing is adding a link in the magazine duplicates to the original article, something along the lines of "This article originally appeared in...", though I get the impression the client wouldn't want to reveal that they used to share so much content across different magazines. The duplicate pages across the different magazines do differ slightly as a result of the different Contents menu for each magazine. Do you think it's a case of what I'm doing will be better than how it was, or is there something further I can do? Is adding the links enough? Thanks. 🙂

On a news website we have a system where articles are given a publish date which is often in the future. The articles were showing up in Google before the publish date despite us not being able to find them linked from anywhere on the website. I've added a 'noindex' meta tag to articles that shouldn't be live until a future date. When the date comes for them to appear on the website, the noindex disappears. Is anyone aware of any issues doing this - say Google crawls a page that is noindex, then 2 hours later it finds out it should now be indexed? Should it still appear in Google search, News etc. as normal, as a new page? Thanks. 🙂

Here's the situation for the website in question: The company produces printed publications which go online as a page turning Flash version, and as a separate HTML version. To complicate matters, some of the articles from the publications get added to a separate news section of the website. We want to promote the news section of the site over the publications section. If we were to forget the Flash version completely, would you: a) add a canonical in the publication version pointing to the version in the news section? b) add a link in the footer of the publication version pointing to the version in the news section? c) both of the above? d) something else? What if we add the Flash version into the mix? As Flash still isn't as crawlable as HTML should we noindex them? Is HTML content duplicated in Flash as big an issue as HTML to HTML duplication?

I noticed a few strange crawl errors in a Google Webmaster Tools account - further investigation showed they're pages that don't exist linked from here: http://404checker.com/404-checker-log Basically that means anyone can enter a URL into the website and it'll get linked from that page, temporarily at least. As there are hundreds of links of varying quality - at the moment they range from a well known car manufacturer to a university, porn and various organ enlargement websites - could that have a detrimental effect on any websites linked? They are all nofollow. Why would they choose to list these URLs on their website? It has some useful tools and information but I don't see the point in the log page. I have used it myself to check HTTP statuses but may look elsewhere from now on.

A news website I'm working on has pages for various sectors, much like any major news site  (in this case for example - defence, energy, trade & finance etc.). I've been asked to add content of 150 words or more to each sector, containing keywords we're targeting. I can see the value of this SEO-wise but can't see how we can write anything that adds value for the user. I don't want to add some rubbish for the sake of keywords, I want the information to be useful.The best idea I can come up with is to write an overview of the challenges and topics making the news in each sector, perhaps a bit of historical detail - but I don’t think this will add much value from a user-perspective, and it's not something where there will be the resources available to update often (or to provide some 'best on the web' type info). Any other ideas? Or do you think my idea is a great one? ;-)The pages in question are like the majority of news pages; each item with a synopsis and the usual extra things like a poll and 'most read' box. I've looked at other news sites and can't see one that has any extra content in the way we require.Thanks.

Has anyone had any experience working with any? Are there any you'd particularly recommend/avoid? Thanks. 🙂

The last time I checked (early this year), the PageRank on the sites I manage varied, with the highest showing as 6. It made sense as the PR6 site has loads of links and has been around for a long time, whereas the other sites hadn't. Now all of our websites are showing the same PageRank - 6, even one that has recently launched and another that has barely any links/traffic or anything to it. I didn't check the PR of that one last time (I'd be surprised if it was 2), but the sites now showing as 6 ranged from PR3 to PR6 back then. We changed server in February...so could this issue be something to do with all of the sites being stored on the same server? It doesn't seem right but it's the only thing I can think of. At the moment, the Domain Authority for these six websites ranges from 27 to 62.