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Personally I would just setup the 301 correctly and not worry about logging the change in WMT. However If you click into your site, hit the gear icon in the upper right hand side of the page, then hit "change site address" you can specifiy a new address. You could also setup the https domain as a new site in WMT and delete the old WMT account, but again if it was me I would just leave things as is and let google pick up the change through your 301
the way I read the information from Google is that if you have all your pages "site wide" redirect too SSL they will factor that into rankings. If you only enable the SSL on sensitive shopping cart pages you will not get credit in Google's eyes.
Its an interesting move, and in general the only "negative" aspect of doing this is site speed. The SSL "handshake" slows down site loading times, but it should be a very small amount. I'm guessing that in the future google will provide some kind of "reward" for sites that do this... possibly a small badge or emblem on the serp page saying something like "secure site".
That is strange, looks like a mobile result for sure. Best guess is you fooled google with a mobile emulator and they served a mobile results page too you.
the screenshot is also showing your location history, do you sync your chrome browser across your phone/table/desktop? I do this and sometimes run into a situation where my phone will pull a recent search I did on my desktop computer. Maybe your desktop chrome browser was pulling a recent search you did on your phone and displaying the mobile results..... regardless this looks to just be a random fluke.
Hi Tanveer-
I think you will find your experience posting in Q&A very positive and I suspect Moz does things the way they do to possibly foster some of that community involvement. I've found that almost any question I had related to Moz I could reach out to the community and get great answers (usually with responses in 10-15 mins on a question). The community at Moz is very large, very active, and very helpful.
This might be overly simplistic but why not just have a "translation" or some other similar type of link accompany each blog post. Something along the lines of:
Post title:
post content
want more information about your region visit our "UK" "french" "us" website for more content in your area.
An alternative route would be to go with subfolders instead of subdomains. Each regional version could be in a corresponding subfolder of your website, instead of subdomain and that way your link equity would be shared without the need for any additional linking as everything would be under one top level domain.
That XML sitemap you linked too is formatted in an odd way. I noticed the site you are generating the xml sitemap for is based in wordpress. There is a really solid sitemap plugin you could use to generate your XML and submit to google instead of the current plugin you are using: http://wordpress.org/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/
I've used that plugnin numerous times and submitted sitemaps to google with no errors. Hopefully that helps you out.
Dan-
Yep you are right on, if you added the above type code below all of the specific page redirects then that would "catch" all the remaining URL's with random parameters in the URL and redirect them to the home page. And its very similar code for the windows server, I'm confident your Dev should know this, if for some reason they don't I can message you the code snippets you would need for the windows server.
Also Everett Sizemore brought up a great point below. If you are redirecting all 404 pages to this 1 custom "404 landing page" that is incorrect. That is called a "soft 404" error. These will actually show up in your WMT account as well as under a section called "soft 404's".
To help figure out what is causing the 404 errors do the following in webmaster tools:
-login to your websites profile, then on the left hand side navigation hit crawl > crawl errors > not found. Under not found review the list of URL's for clues (you can also click on an individual link to see where the 404 page was linked from). Depending on how large your site is, if the 747 not found URL's is a large percentage of your total page count, you could be experiencing a temporary rankings drop that will disappear one you fix your error pages. If you could add a link to a few of the 404 error pages we could help you figure out what is wrong with your site code or server setup.
No problem Dan.
There is definitely no harm in ticking off the errors as "fixed" and then seeing which ones return. If they return I'm betting 1 of 2 things. 1.) That you still have a live link somewhere on the new site pointing to the page. The easiest way to test this is click on one of the pages in WMT and hit the "linked from" button. That shows you where google is getting sent to the page from. The second option is that the pages have an "external" link pointing too them. If that's the case you want to be double sure to redirect it so you get the link credit!
I'm not 100% positive on why MOZ is not showing the errors as quickly, but MOZ does a "deep" crawl of the web and then does a lot of computing. WMT is literally just crawling your site, and spitting out anything it finds to your account. A much easier job for WMT, hence it is pretty quick to report site errors too you. The errors in your MOZ account will most likely update when MOZ pushes their next mozscape index update (this will also be useful for you because MOZ will have better data about "external" links than WMT)
From the error you sent me it looks like you are going through a move of a site from .aspx to .php or .html. When you change languages like this you can end up with a lot of gnarly 404 pages, especially from search pages that have variables in the URL. If you have a large amount of these errors, so many that you feel you are getting a temporary "penalty" for too many site errors you can write a quick snippet of code in the .httpdconf file on your apache server to fix these old useless pages. (if your not on an apache server this can still be achieved, the code would just be different.)
make sure to put this snippet below all of your other individual page redirects
#redirect all old dead .aspx pages to the new homepage
RedirectMatch 301 /(.*).aspx /
You should still make your best effort to redirect each old page to its corresponding "new" page. However at a certain point if you have thousands to redirect, and many are just pages with with search parameters in the URL... there comes a point where you want to just hit all the remaining pages in 1 fell swoop.
I'm not certain on how long it would take the 301 to fully "pass" page rank in Google's eyes. I think it is safe to assume that once the old page no longer has a 404 link, and it is not showing up any longer in Google searches then the PR has been passed. MOZ page authority should reflect it once MOZ pics up the change, but MOZ authority is just very "similar" to PR. Its not an exact science, MOZ should pic up the change easily though, it will just take them a little longer time.
Dan-
It sounds like you have already spot checked a few of the pages and they are still returning errors. In my experience WMT is very quick to re-crawl pages you have marked as fixed to see if they truly are fixed. For example if you mark 100 pages as fixed, then 24 hours later 95 of the pages come back, its always been the case for me that the 95 pages still had an issue and were not "fixed".
I would pull up the error report in WMT again, spot check a few of the examples and see if the pages still error out. If they do I would export that list from WMT, send it to your Dev and ask him to fix all redirection errors.
Dana your thought was right on. Also you don't even really need to worry about changing anything on the "old" page per se. You could just open up the .htaccess file on your server and redirect the old page to the new. For example:
/olddirectory/oldfile.html http://example.com/newdirectory/newfile.html
I just want to make sure I fully understand the question, so you have several hundred domain names all of which just have a generic Godaddy (or registrar) parked page? If that is the case 1.) that is confusing why you would have so many domain names! and 2.) It sounds like your company is possibly trying to re-sell the domain names so I would think at a minimum you would want to create a custom parked page that had your contact info and an easy way someone could get in touch with you about bidding on the domain.
If you do really just have several hundred domain names your not currently using redirecting them back to your site will have next to no "SEO" value, unless as Richard Mentioned some of them have backlinks. If non of them have backlinks then redirecting them all to your main page is essentially the same as going: 0 + 0 = 0. If I were you I would keep and redirect possibly a few domains that have close mis-spellings of your main website. Then I would tell your boss that you didn't want to renew the remaining 100+ "useless" domains, take that money saved and better invest it somewhere else (a Pro Moz membership, attend a conference ect...)
Did the language of your website change, meaning did you move from .aspx to .php or .html? If so we have experienced a similar situation where thousands of old pages were indexed by Google, once the site was moved to a new language we were penalized until we redirected all of the old pages.
We just went through this exact process with a website. We agonized over whether to do the move since the .html pages were ranking and converting well. In the end the client wanted it so we decided to make the switch, this is what we did:
1.) Took all well ranking .html pages and 301 to their new version in apache .htaccess file, example code
Redirect 301 domain-name/old-page.html domain-name/new-page/
2.) Installed the SEO plugin by Yoast and made sure to tune all title/meta info for each page
3.) Made the change and stayed patient. We saw a traffic drop for 9 days following the move. Then on the 10th day we got close to pre-move levels, and 2 full weeks later we were back at pre-move levels with improved average site time, bounce rate and conversions.
*we are almost 2 months into the move now and traffic is higher than ever.
This is a neat idea and like Oleg said should be straightforward for you to do if you just cookie all visitors. You could then check what cookie they have, and show the defined images (or pull several images from your DB). I don't know of any "pre-made" tool that will do this for you, dynamic remarketing through Google adwords is somewhat similar but that is showing a set of images to users who are no longer on your site (user goes to x product page, and are shown x product later when they are watching video on youtube ect...)
So our question is should we handle page redirection/rewriting in php or in .htaccess (with a specific problem we are running into outlined below).
We have an ecommerce store in a subfolder of our site (example.com/store/). In the next folder down we have a group of widgets(www.example.com/store/widget-group1). Recently we put a .htaccess redirect in the top level folder (example.com/store/.htaccess), in order to re-write some URL’s and also 301 a page to another page. This seems to be negatively affecting our /widgets-group1/ subfolder however (organic traffic to example.com/store/widget-group1) took a nose dive 3 days after putting the .htaccess redirect in place on the /store/ folder and it has not recovered 8 days later).
*Nothing appears outwardly wrong with the current setup to the eye when viewing the pages or requesting as googlebot (the only issue being the nose dive in organic traffic lol)
*both subfolders are setup in apache config file to allow local overrides of .htaccess as follows:
<directory store="" widget-group1="">Options -Indexes FollowSymLinks -MultiViews
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
allow from all</directory>
<directory store="">Options -Indexes FollowSymLinks -MultiViews
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
allow from all</directory>
have you tried to "disallow" google from crawling your images directory in your robots.txt file? If you get a lot of traffic from google image search you would probably not want to do this, but if the current problem you posted about is your #1 priority to fix, not allowing google to crawl your image directory should fix your problem.
The wordpress hacking was almost surely due to having outdated version of WP, or having a vulnerable plugin installed. There are a few helpful plugins you can use to secure your WP site, plugins like (http://wordpress.org/plugins/better-wp-security/).
also a couple things to note, you should also take basic measures to project the site by changing the default table prefixes of your DB from _wp, create a new admin user and delete the default "admin" accoun & limit access to your wp-admin section in your .htaccess file.... these security plugins will give you a whole checklist of items to "secure".
If I am understanding your questions correctly couldn't simply utilizing rel canonical to allow you to sleep better at night?
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394
Also this is a pretty new feature out of Google that you might find interesting
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/x-default-hreflang-for-international-pages.html
Buy Google and tell the engineers to place my site number one for every relevant query : )
Honestly create a content strategy, you could hire X number of experts who's sole job is to create great content/ useful features and tools for your site. If you have unlimited budget there is no reason not to keep your strategy squeaky clean in my opinion.
I thought about the lag in updated info from Google, but that page (with the exact url) has been there for over 5 years.
Also its not just the about page, it is literally every other page on their site except for their homepage is a void of reported pagerank.
I guess I am going to chalk this one up to an error in Google's external PR reporting system. I have seen PR delays, but I have never seen Google report only the homepage (of a site this big) has any sort of PR.
I totally agree but look at this:
Lets look at this page as an example:
It is one click away from their PR 7 homepage with it's link being in the upper left of the page. (prime for passing a lot of PR)
After looking into it at first I thought my toolbar was messed up, then I checked the seomoz historical pagerank checker (I use the SEO Quake toolbar) and it also says this page has a PR of 0?
As I see it:
they are either doing something really sneaky (which I kind of doubt)
or Google's PR stats available to the outside world are messed up for this site???
Its basic purpose is to allow search spiders to better understand what is what on your site. For instance, if you are selling a product and implement your product markup correctly Google can tell (and somewhat understand) what is what from the price, to quality (customer reviews), to what it should tell people it does (description) and looks like (image).
Some of these are already integrated into the SERPs others are expected to be integrated at a later date. Cooking seems to be one that has been a test bed for markup for Google. Look at the differences between this page and this page.
It is not really intended for browsers, just for search spiders. People do not require markups to tell us what is what because we can make logical sense of what is on webpages.
If you are just starting to markup your site use this: http://schema.org/
Just got a copy thanks guys!
http://searchengineland.com/download-the-latest-google-search-quality-rating-guidelines-97391
Google has been on a conquest taking them down online but I would really like to take a look at it if you have a copy!
[moderator note - please use the PM system and exchange email addresses there. We've removed emails from this thread before it gets indexed and exposed to the world]
A session only ends now if:
-an ip goes 30 minutes without a new pageview
-at the end of the day
-when they close their browser (I have heard if you reopen it quickly it might still count as the same session)
-and since Aug 11, When any traffic source value for the user changes. Traffic source information includes:utm_source, utm_medium, utm_term, utm_content, utm_id, utm_campaign, and gclid. This includes all Google tracking URLs.
It is my understanding that as long as one of these rules is not violated, you will not start a new session. In other words if a person goes to your site, leaves and comes back within 30 minutes it is still the same session. I believe they do this to help account for people "shopping around" on several sites. That is of course if they don't come via a URL with the above parameters...
Someone correct me if i'm wrong.
All the content will be accessible through the sitemap which will be displayed in both versions (the user and the bot) version of the site. The only difference is the navigation will change from one version to another. It could be perceived as a gray area, even though we really are just making it more friendly to bots not trying to be deceptive at all.
We usually operate under the principal that would this be ok if it were manually reviewed? In our plan, I am pretty confident that it would pass. We are planning on making what is displayed to bots very basic text link navigation. Our XML and html sitemaps will correspond well with the bot navigation (so to show G we really are not trying to hide anything). And yes we could make the nav more search friendly, but one of our main goals is to have the site look as clean as possible. As far as I can tell Amazon uses this method to avoid duplicate content issues and make their site generally more crawlable which is why I think it is on the table as an option.
We are getting ready to launch a site that has great navigation for users, but it is not so great for search engines. As long as we are ethical about it, does anyone see a downside to detecting a bot user agent and displaying different nav to it? I suppose some could consider it cloaking, but I noticed amazon uses this strategy and they don't seem to be getting a big penalty lol. We are not going to do anything shady with it, just offer the bot a different way to access our content. Any thoughts?
Yea I agree. I have performed many searches on Google shopping and grouped listings seem to perform substantially better than individual listings.
However, that sucks because you don't want to list your products right next to your competition's if you don't want to right? Well the easy work around IMO is to amazon.com. Create a unique SKU and list that on your Google base feed as one of your unique identifiers. Also upload your product inventory to Amazon using this same SKU. Alter these product's prices in relation to your commission you are forced to pay amazon. In a head to head comparison (like what customers will see on Google shopping) it will drive customers to your store instead of Amazon. Using this method you will have all the benefits of a grouped listing, but none of the disadvantages. Plus, the sheer amount of ratings Amazon has will result in them pulling up your listing compared to others. Essentially you are paying amazon a small set fee in order for their help in Google Shopping results. I have used this strategy in the past for products that don't come from the manufacturer with a UPC, and it has worked for me.
Good luck!
No problem, if you have any issues with it feel free to let me know. You can do a TON of different stuff with the WP template tags. For reference here is a page that lists all of the different tags in WP: http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags
You can add Meta descriptions in wordpress 2 different ways. If you have a small site and want to simply add a generic description all you need to do is open up header.php in your themes directory and add the following code:
This will pull the site description that can be set in the "general settings" in the WP admin section. If you are looking to generate dynamic meta info then this is best done with a plugin (although it is not very hard to simply pull the excerpt or any post meta and have that display). That would look something like:
If you want to go the plugin route I would second the All in one SEO and SEO plugin by Yoast. Additionally Premium Dev offers an SEO plugin that is pretty sweet but you have to pay to get access to all their plugins so you are probably better off with the free ones.
First, I doubt there would be any chance of you getting any sort of penalty due to the fact that explosives were mentioned. If this were the case fireworks manufacturers would be out of luck as far as SEO goes!
Second, I have actually pulled something like this off in the past, but with a newspaper article. I would start off by contacting the author of the piece, seeing as how he/she is the one who is familiar and even might have a relationship with you company. They also often link to their contact forum or even put their email address on the page. If that doesn't work, I would say the webmaster is a solid backup plan. An editor at the publication should also be able to do it but I would say he/she is less likely to than the first two options. To increase your odds in your email, you might even want to include the hyperlink code you wish inserted to make it easier (also more likely) for them to add it.
Goodluck!