Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hello, We have a wordpress blog attached to our magento website located at domain.co.uk/blog/ Moz was coming back showing we had multiple page versions on show (http and https) So i updated the htaccess file to what is below. This has fixed most of the errors, however the homepage is being a little tricky. Moz is now saying that the page is redirecting and redirecting again http://www.domain.co.uk/blog   to
http://www.domain.co.uk/blog/   to
https://www.domain.co.uk/blog/ BEGIN WordPress <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /blog/</ifmodule> RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301] RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /blog/index.php [L] END WordPress Within wordpress settings the urls are set up as follows Wordpress Address URL: https://www.domain.co.uk/blog Site Address URL: https://www.domain.co.uk/blog i tried to add a trailing / to these but it gets automatically removed. So i am assuming that wordpress is serving up https://www.domain.co.uk/blog **RewriteBase /blog/  **is re-directing it to / then my https rewrite is re-directing it again I am not sure where exactly to fix this, could anybody advise? Many thanks,

Hey Mozzers, long time no post. Just a quick one for you regarding URLS, this is an example of a url on a site https://www.thisismyurl.co.uk/products/spacehoppers/special-spacehopper.html Many of these pages are getting flagged for having a url that is too long. The target of this page is "special spacehoppers". Should i be concerned with the url being to long given my keyword is at the end? Would this be a suitable idea? https://www.thisismyurl.co.uk/p/spacehoppers/special.html Would changing products to p be worthwhile? It would remove length from nearly all urls but would require a site wide re-direct. 2)Would removing the "spacehoppers" bit from the url be worth it? Yes it would shorten the url but would also remove the exact keyword from the url which could be detrimental to rankings.

Hey Mozzers, We are improving our B2B site by adding product codes to headings & meta information etc to gain some traction ranking for our own products and those supplied by others when searched for by product code. Almost immediately we are hitting the top half of the first page for most of these and seeing some nice results. We would like to track our placement for these product codes in google but feel this would be a waste of our Moz Keyword limit and we really dont need to check them once a week, just one a month or so. Has anybody got any methods of tracking our ranking for a a big list of keywords say once a month which isn't too labour intensive? Many Thanks

Hi guys, We are currently working on increasing our online marketing presence and with a new website on the cards I am turning to all of our B2B business directories to update, and being tracking referrals etc to see ones that may be worth premium listings. I have a list of 200 business directories to scope and check,  some are relevant some are not, obviously i dont want to sign up to them all and risk a dodgy link profile so im going to be selective, but im not sure how many to aim for etc. So im looking for some general advice and guidance at this early stage so I can properly plan my approach. What advice would you give and are there any major DO's and DONT's of sorting through these directories  to look for some new ways to source customers. EDIT: We are UK based Thanks

Hey Mozzers, Our site uses magento. Pages within the site (not categories or products) are set to display as www.domain.co.uk/page-url/ The hta access is set to redirect all version such as www.domain.co.uk/page-url  to a url ending in a / However in google analytics and in moz landing page tracker these urls are being represented by www.domain.co.uk/page-url/index.php When visiting www.domain.co.uk/page-url/index.php a 404 is displayed. I know that by default when directed to a directory it automatically finds and displays the index file. So i understand why this is happening to some degree. However, when manually visiting this link does not exist. This poses a problem when trying to view the landing pages information in moz pro. I have 20 keywords being tracked in relation to www.domain.co.uk/page-url/ but because moz is recording it as www.domain.co.uk/page-url/index.php the keywords are unrelated so not showing information in relation to the page. Any ideas?

Hey Mozzers, Nice quick and simple one for you. Which of these 2 options is better for SEO and userbility and why domain.co.uk/productname.html
domain.co.uk/shop/category/product.html The top one stops stops any funky problems with magento making 2 paths to the same product but the second option feels more natural and helpful to the user. I feel both a valid but I would like some opinions please

Hey, I have noticed that for the last 3 weeks or so the emails from Moz have been displaying incorrect information. The results it shows in the email seem to be from previous crawls. For example The previous week a sitemap that didn't update that caused 400+ pages to appear as 404's. This wasn't reported in the email and it stated there were only 2 errors on the site. (Of which we knew about anyway and choose to ignore). Thankfully i checked the crawl report anyway out of habit and saw the onsite report to show 400+ crawl errors. I went on to fix these errors. This week, the crawl report showed 400+ crawl errors, I immediately logged on to the website to check the campaign to find there are only the 2 expected crawl errors. It is almost as if the info from the campaign is being pulled and emailed to me seconds before it is updated from the crawl info. I am finding this to be the case in both the keyword and crawl errors email reports.

Hey Mozzers, I am optimising a chaotic section of the site including many similar products. Writing unique content etc. The titles and urls were all over the place so my first job was to tidy them up so I could make some sense of the situation, especially as sometimes they didn't even match! I should point out were on Magento, so product name = Both the Heading and Title of the page, the meta title can be set separately. When i refer to title I mean both <title>and <h1></strong><br /><br />Before they existed as such<br />URL:  domain.com/200-x-0-5-g-rs-232-balance.html<br />TItle:   PC-1234 200 x 0.5g x 0.3 RS-232 Balance<br /><br />This format was (Product Code, Capacities, Resolutions, Accuracy, Product Title)<br /><br />The issue was all 60 products in a page followed this format. Navigating through the page was a nightmare and was just a jumble of numbers and highly confusing even to me who learnt what they all mean, especially when you had 8 products from the same range you got presented with<br /><br />APC-1234 200 x 0.5g x 0.3 RS-232 Balance<br />APC-1235 500 x 1g x 0.3 RS-232 Balance<br />APC-1236 1000 x 2g x 0.3 RS-232 Balance<br />APC-1238 5000 x 10g x 0.3 RS-232 Balance<br />APC-1239 10000 x 15g x 0.3 RS-232 Balance<br />APC-1210 20000 x 25g x 0.3 RS-232 Balance<br />APC-1211 50000 x 50g x 0.3 RS-232 Balance</p> <p>I changed them to something more user friendly.<br /><br />URL: domain.com/200g-precision-balance.html<br />Title: 200g Precision Balance<br /><br />This has seen the following benefits<br />- URL is now clear and means something to the user<br />- Product titles are easy to navigate and the page is more pleasing to the eye<br />- The jumble of numbers in the title are now all labelled and shown below each product listing in bullet point so the user can see the basic spec of a product without having to decipher any titles<br /><br />Upon reflection I has a couple of concerns I was hoping you could discuss, I am wondering if I have made the titles too simple.<br />1) I have no product code in the title<br />We have our own products manufactured and sell existing brands with their own product codes. Some of these can be lengthy. Adding them makes them hard to the eye and the page looked cramped.<br /><br />The codes are listed beneath each product title on category pages and on a list on the actual product page, but no where in the titles. <br /><br />2)None of our products have a brand listed in the title<br />None of the products on the site had brand names in anything but the images when i started and as such it snuck under my radar. But should i pre-fix all titles with a brand name?<br /><br />Should </p> <p>URL: domain.com/200g-precision-balance.html<br />Title: 200g Precision Balance</p> <p>become</p> <p>URL: domain.com/BRAND1-200g-precision-balance.html<br />Title: BRAND1 200g Precision Balance<br /><br />My instinct tells me to change things to include brands as its useful to the customer and should have an SEO benefit, but to leave out product codes as they are accessible to the customer where they are now and dont make things messy and unreadable.<br /><br />As always, thanks for the input!</p></title>

Hey Mozzers, Questions around this have been asked time and time again. But i have a specific example I would like some advice on. I have 2 products, Product 1: https://goo.gl/Gzo1WC
Product 2: https://goo.gl/VbrHQJ As you can see, the products are almost identical bar some technical specifications. The owner of the business wants them listing as 2 products, combining them into a single listing with configurable options is not an option. As such I have simply made one a canonical of the other. Whilst not ideal this seems to be the best "SEO" fix. Option 2: My second option is to rewrite the descriptions to they are different - not too hard on this product and a future options when i have more time, however.... I am presented with a similar problem for another product where there are 23 versions of the same product, i cannot rewrite the same info this many times. They are different sizes, ranges, capacities, resolutions and accuracies and must be listed separately but contain all the same features and basic product information. The basic info is too important not to talk about, and talking about all the technical specs would be too much and teaching the customers likely to buy them to suck eggs. As such I have taken the 23 products and broken them down into 5 similar groups of 2 to 6 products. I have then picked 1 product from each group and written a unique description and changed all similar products in its group to match choosing 1product in each group as the canonical for all the others. So 23 same products become 5 unique products with 18 duplicated products pointing to them as canonicals. Any product pointing to another only differs in technical info, 95% of the page is the same. Whilst obviously not ideal, Is this an acceptable use of canonicals?

Hey Mozzers, We have several products that all have upto 6 different versions, they are the same product but in a different specification. As users search via these specifications (within our website) it is beneficial to keep all 6 products as different listings on the website. In google however it is not. So we kept all 6 listing but chose 1 to be the google landing page, the only different between them all is the technical specification + occasionally size. But 95% of the pages are the same. Let call the products A, B, C, D, E, F, we made all the canonicals point to C because this is out best selling version of the product. However, google has chosen E to rank instead. What is my best move here? Should i accept the page google has chosen and change the canonicals the point to that version or should I be stubborn and try to get google to change which version it ranks. As always many thanks.

Morning Mozzers, We have finally come to the point where we can start to focus on making good original content. We were wondering how you guys come up with ideas for your content. We are currently doing lots of keyword research to gather ideas and subject areas. But we are struggling with 'angles of attack'. Being an eCommerce site it is easy to do lots of "The 5 best products for this" type of content. But we feel there is limited value in these especially if we want to gain links to our articles in future as valued content. How do you come up with your ideas for more valuable and linkable content especially in very niche product areas. Thanks all.

Hey moz, Im currently converting my site to mobile as its an older template based on tables it will make a lot of CSS redundant. I cant delete as i go incase a page uses it im unaware of so need to clean it up when its done. Is there a tool that crawls my entire website and highlights the unused CSS in the files? Ive found a few paying tools that claim to do so but am reluctant to just spend money on something without a recommendation. Cheers!

Hey Mozzers, Im having a go at making our site mobile friendly without enlisting the help of developers and incorporating additional costs. I am ok with most of it as its just CSS work bar the odd occasion when i need to reposition some elements within the code. However, i have found myself wanting to use display:none {} on many elements that are just not practical on a mobile site. Some pages may have to hide substantial content. Would this be considered an issue or will google just see it as me hiding impractical elements for a different sized screen. I have googled this question for the past hour and there is a whole bunch of conflicting advice. As always, Many thanks

Hey Mozzers, I have several pages on my website that are for user search purposes only. They sort some products by range and answer some direct search queries users type into the site. They are basically just product collections that are else ware grouped in different ways. As such I didn't wants SERPS getting their hands on them so blocked them in robots so I could add then worry free. However, they automatically get pulled into the sitemap by Magento. This has made Webmaster tools give me a warning that 21 urls in the sitemaps are blocked by robots. Is this terrible SEO wise? Should I have opted to NOINDEX these URLS instead? I was concerned about thin content so really didnt want google crawling them.

Hey Mozzers, I have a very long article page that supports several of my sub-category pages. It has sub-headings that link out to the relevant pages. However the article  is very long and to make it easier to find the relevant section I was debating adding inpage anchor links in a bullet list at the top of the page for quick navigation. PAGE TITLE Keyword 1 Keyword 2 etc <a name="'Keyword1"></a> Keyword 1 Content
<a name="'Keyword2"></a> Keyword 2 Content Because of the way my predecessor wrote this article, its section headings are the same as the sub-categories they link out to and boost (not ideal but an issue I will address later). What I wondered is if having the inpage achor would confuse the SERPS because they would be linking with the same keyword. My worry is that by increasing userbility of the article by doing this I also confuse them SERPS First I tell them that this section on my page talk about keyword 1. Then from in that article i tell them that a different page entirely is about the same keyword. Would linking like this confuse SERPS or are inpage anchor links looked upon and dealt with differently?

Hey Mozzers, I was looking for a little guidance and advice regarding a couple of pages on my website. I have used 'shoes' for this example. I have the current structure Parent Category - Shoes Sub Categories - Blue Shoes
Hard Shoes
Soft Shoes
Big Shoes etc Supporting Article - Different Types of Shoe and Their Uses There are about 12 subcategories in total - each one links back to the Parent Category with the keyword "Shoes". Every sub category has gone from ranking 50+ to 10-30th for its main keyword which is a good start and as I release supporting articles im sure each one will climb. I am happy with this. The Article ranks no1 for about 20 longtails terms around "different shoes". This page attracts around 60% of my websites traffic but we know this traffic will not convert as most are people and children looking for information only for educational purposes and are not looking to buy. Many are also looking for a type of product we dont sell. My issue is ranking for the primary category "Shoes" keyword. When i first made the changes we went from ranking nowhere to around 28th on the parent category page targeted at "Shoes". Whilst not fantastic this was good as gave us something to work off. However a few weeks later, the article page ranked 40th for this term and the main page dropped off the scale. Then another week some of the sub category pages ranked for it. And now none of my pages rank in the top 50 for it. I am fairly sure this is due to some cannibalisation - simply because of various pages ranking for it at different times.
I also think that additional content added by products on the sub category pages is giving them more content and making them rank better. The Page Itself
The Shoes page itself contains 400 good unique words, with the keyword mentioned 8 times including headings. There is an image at the top of the page with its title and alt text targeted towards the keyword. The 12 sub categories are linked to on the left navigation bar, and then again below the 400 words of content via a picture and text link. This added the keyword to the page another 18 or so times in the form of links to longtail subcaterogies. This could introduce a spam problem i guess but its in the form of nav bars or navigation tables and i understood this to be a necessary evil on eCommerce websites. There are no actual products linked from this page. - a problem? With all the basic SEO covered. All sub pages linking back to the parent category, the only solution I can think of is to add more content by Adding all shoes products to the shoe page as it currently only links out the the sub categories Merging the "Different Type of Shoe and Their Uses" article into the shoe page to make a super page and make the article pages less like to produce cannibalistic problems. However, by doing solution 2, I remove a page bringing in a lot of traffic. The traffic it brings in however is of very little use and inflates the bounce rate and lowers the conversion rate of my whole site by significant figures. It also distorts other useful reports to track my other progress. I hope i have explained well enough, thanks for sticking with me this far, i havn't posted links due to a reluctance by the company so hopefully my example will suffice. As always thanks for any input.

Hey Mozzers, I think i know the answer to this one but i just wanted to check my thinking if you wouldnt mind. I have an ecommerce website with lots of very similar products, for example Blue widget
Waterproof blue widget
Blue widget with Alarm One of the pages is ranking top 10 for "blue widget", however the other intermittently swap with it, knocking that page out and itself into the top 10. Then a few weeks later it swaps back again. This seems like a clear case of keyword canablisation to me. And i am wondering on the best solution. 301: Obviously not an answer as i need all 3 products visible
Canonical to one of the pages: Doesn't seem correct either, the products are similiar but not the same, all 3 could rank for different longtails etc I was suffering from something similiar on my closely related category pages and I combated that by interlinking them all with the relevant keywords to point to the relevant pages. Should i do the same for these products such as... 
From 'Blue Widget' product link to "Blue widget with alarm" and "Waterproof Blue Widget"
From Waterproof blue widget and blue widget with alarm link to "Blue Widget"     (using the anchor text in the ""). This should tell serps that all pages are about blue widget but the main one is the "blue widgets" page. Correct? As a follow up. Is this one of the reason ecommerce sights have related products options?

Hi Mozzers, This question has been asked a few times over the years, but opinion seems to have changed drastically and i wanted to get an updated opinion from sources i trust. On my category pages I have content above products. The content can push the product too far down, and if placed below is never viewed. To battle this I wanted to implement a "Read More" button so i could keep a couple hundred words there and expand it to the rest of the content if the user wanted. If not the products would remain near the top of the screen for better conversion. I have implemented this on this page to test if it affects my keyword rankings before i go site wide. But also wanted an opinion if this practice is ok. The example page with it implemented can be found here. The content im hiding isn't huge here but on other pages could be more. Is there a set ratio of text i should aim to keep / hide? Any pitfalls i should watch out for? I know google crawls the hidden content as its in the source code but should i be wary of a penalty is too much is hidden?

Hi Mozzers, I have a couple of questions regarding starting out into social media with an e-commerce website. Most of my experience lies in niche content where a social media following is more natural. Having completed most of the site audit (at least the planning). Its time to begin planning the next move into writing articles on the blog and heading out into social media to facilitate link building whilst i finish off creating the last of the updated website content. I have plenty of subjects I can think to write about and many keywords to target with articles on the website. But I could do with some advice linking this into social media. We have youtube, google+, facebook and twitter accounts but all of them are inactive bar profile information and have almost no following. We sell technical measurement equipment across a selection of niches. My plan is as follows so far, 1. Write 5-10 amazing new articles across the selection of products
2. Link to them all on each social media platform to begin populating each with content
3. Populate the website homepage with links to all our social media accounts to encourage following
3b. Include adverts stating discount codes etc can be obtained by following us on social media a little unsure where to progress from this point, I have no budget available at the moment, but may be able to obtain some if I can achieve some results without. As always thanks for your time.

Hello again Mozzers, I am debating what could be a fairly drastic change to the company website and I would appreciate your thoughts. The URL structure is currently as follows Product Pages
www.url.co.uk/product.html Category Pages
www.url.co.uk/products/category/subcategory.html I am debating removing the /products/ section as i feel it doesn't really add much and lengthens the url with a pointless word. This does mean however redirecting about 50-60 pages on the website, is this worth it? Would it do more damage than good? Am i just being a bit OCD and it wont really have an impact? As always, thanks for the input

Morning Mozzers, Currently our website has 2 navigation bars. The top Navigation is the typical **Home - Products - Services - Contact - About **type thing The side navigation contains a link to top level categories, if a category is selected it shows the child categories
Eg. Socks
Shoes
Boots Cateogry level (Socks) Blue Socks
Red Socks
Green Socks The top navigation has drop-down menus built in whilst the side nav does not. Would it be worthwhile to edit the nav bars so that the top nav bar contains the categories with the child categories displaying in dropdown list when clicked. Top Nav
Home - Socks - Shoes - Boots when hovering over socks you would see Socks
Blue Socks
Red Socks
Green Socks My reasons for the change I could remove the thin content "Products page" It would add a link to the categories and sub categories from every page on the website as it would be in the top navigation bar i think this would help with ranking for some of the sub-category pages that struggle. It would allow me to remove the left nav bar on the homepage, moving more content above the fold and give the website a more modern feel. What do you think? Is would this be a positive or negative change?

Hello again Mozzers, We have a category, lets call it widgets. Within widgets are about a hundred or so products. For usability my predecessor made the following layout Widgets Main Cateogry  - Links off homepage - (no content just links to the 3 sub-categories)
- Widgets by Resolution
---- About 20 subcategories 
eg. 0.1 Resolution widgets
      0.2 resolution widgets
- Widgets by Capacity
---- About 20 subcategories
eg. 1 capacity widgets
     2 capacity widgets
- Widgets by Type
---- About 12 subcategories This was a major improvement from a userbility perspective as it made a very complex product range navigatable by the major features or basic type. However, as you can imaging we now have 60+ very similiar pages all displaying very similiar products a nightmare for SEO. It also isnt ideal for user navigation as it take too many clicks to get to the products. I propose the following fix, and i wanted your opinion. Widget Main Category - Link from homepage (Consolidated with Widgets by Type)
-300 Words of content
-Links to the 12 Sub-type Catoregies (These are pages i can fill with content + products. This would give me a more ordinary structure of which I can focus each page to a keyword) The tricky part comes with incorporating the capacity and resolution options. 1 Browse Capacity Page
(20 sub categories all the same except capacity quantity & products)
1 Browse by Resolution Page
(20 sub categories all the same except resolution value & products) The owner want them, I was going to link from the main widgets page to each of these to give the customer the option. What I can't decide is how to deal with them from an SEO point of view. Should they be no-followed? canonicaled? Can there be any advantage to having so many pages covering slightly different variations or as i suspect it is dangerous to the overall health of the site. To complicate things further, Canonical tags may not be an option due to an old magento version running that doesnt support them. Is there an alternative way around? As always many thanks.

Hey Mozzers, Im undertaking a content audit and its going very well, we have written some better content for the first set of pages, it still needs some improvement but we have a good base and starting point from which we can make an SEO log and work on it over time. For the content I used the following formula for how many times to include a keyword Word Count / Length of Keyword. (eg. 600 words / 3 word keyword = 200). Then 1-4% of this (2-8 times). This has worked well for me in the past and has been a good base guide. I have ran the pages through Moz optimiser and every single page hit an A for keyword page optimisation. However many of the pages failed on keyword stuffing, which obviously has high priority. My dilemma is that, moz counts 15 as the cut off for keyword stuffing with the written text we have done really well with using it a set number of times. But these pages are product category pages. The keyword in the extreme of cases is listed 7-9 times in the side nav menu. 7-9 times in the product category listings. Take for example *** it is optimised for thermometers (i know it a tough single word keyword, and we have fairly modest aims with it, im using it here for example purposes). The word is used a good number of times within the article but is sent through the roof with the links to the sub categories. This page for example mentions the keyword 30 times. Can anybody suggest any ways to improve on this? Is how we display the categories in the nav bar and in the page excessive? As always many thanks!

Hi Mozzers, This may be a bit of a n00b question and i feel i should know the answer but alas, here i am asking. I have a page  www.website.co.uk/page/ and im getting a duplicate page report of www.website.co.uk/Page/ i know this is because somewhere on my website a link will exists using the capitalised version. I have tried everything i can think of to find it but with no luck, any little tricks? I could always rewrite the urls to lowercase, but I have downloadable software etc also on the website that i dont want to take the capitals out of. So the best solution seems to be finding the link and remove it. Most link checkers I use treat the capitalised and non capitalised as the same thing so really arent  helping lol.

Hi Mozzers, I wanted to discuss bounce rates as i am trying to drive my websites down and would appreciate some pointers. Firstly, the facts. Ours is an e-commerce website we attract 10000-12000 visitor a month, 8000 of which land on a single page and the other 4000 rest of website. On a whole the rest of the website has a bounce rate of 48-56% which im fairly comfortable about, but have made small gains with little changes. The problem is the single page attracting 8000 visitors. The page is an informative article about the various types of a select product and its most common uses. When i started the page had no internal links and was suffering from a 88% bounce rate. I have since inserted products into every sub-section of the post and lots of links to products, category pages etc. This has gone really well and the pages linked from it attracted 1000 more views month 1, and 1500 month 2 with the bounce rate dropping to 76% (small win). However I am still not happy as this is still very high. I would like to work towards dropping it below 60%. The article attracts traffic from hundreds of longtail keywords around the subject "different types of this product". The average time spent on the page is 4-5 minutes so I know people are reading the article and finding it useful. How else can I look to encourage more click-through?

Hey Mozzers, I've recently been doing a content audit on the category and sub-category pages on our site. The old pages had the following "profile" Above The Fold
Page Heading
Image Links to Categories / Products
Below the Fold
The rest of the Image Links to Categories / Products
600 words+ of content duplicated from articles, sub categories and products My criticisms of the page were
1. No content (text) above the fold
2. Page content was mostly duplicated content
3. No keyword structure, many pages competed for the same keywords and often unwanted pages outranked the desired page for the keyword. I cleaned this up to the following structure Above The Fold
H1 Page Heading 80-200 Word of Content (Including a link to supporting article)
H2 Page Heading (Expansion or variance of the H1 making sure relevant) 80-200 150 Words of Content
Image Links to Categories / Products
Below the Fold
The rest of the Image Links to Categories / Products The new pages are now all unique content, targeted towards 1-2 themed keywords. I have a few worries I was hoping you could address. 1. The new pages are only 180-300 words of text, simply because that is all that is needed to describe that category and provide some supporting information. the pages previously contained 600 words. Should I be looking to get more content on these pages?
2. If i do need more content, It wont fit "above the fold" without pushing the products and sub categories below the fold, which isn't ideal. Should I be putting it there anyway or should I insert additional text below the products and below the fold or would this just be a waste.
3. Keyword Structure. I have designed each page to target a selction of keywords, for example.
a) The main widget pages targets all general "widget" terms and provides supporting infromation
b) The sub-category blue widget page targets anything related and terms such as "Navy Widgets" because navy widgets are a type of blue widget etc"
Is this keyword structure over-optimised or exactly what I should be doing. I dont want to spread content to thin by being over selective in my categories Any other critisms or comment welcome

Hi Mozzers Having worked on my companies site for a couple of months now correcting many issues, im now ready to begin looking at a content review, many areas of the site contain duplicate content, the main causes being 1. Category Page Duplications
e.g.
Widget Page Contains ("Blue Widget Extract")
Widget Page Contains ("Red Widget Extract")
Blue Widget Page Contains ("Same Blue Widget Extract")
Red Widget Page Contains ("Same Red Widget Extract") 2. Product Descriptions
Item 1 (Identical to item 2 with the exception of a few words and technical specs)
Item 2 Causing almost all the content on the site to get devalued. Whilst i've cleared all moz errors and warnings im certain this is causing devaluation of most of the website. I was hoping you could answer these questions so I know what to expect once i have made the changes. Will the pages that had duplicate content recover once they possess unique content or should i expect a hard and slow climb back? The website has never receive any warnings from Google, does this mean recovery for penalties like duplicate content will be quicker Several pages rank on page 1 for fairly competitive keywords despite having duplicate content and keyword spammy content. What are the chances of shooting myself in the foot by editing this content? I know I will have to wait for google to crawl the pages before i see any reflection in the changes, but how long after google has crawled the page should I get a realistic idea of how positive the changes were? As always, thanks for you time!

Hi guys, this type of question has been asked a few times before but I couldn't find something that told me what i need so apologies if its a tad repetitive. I use Magento, and have several pages using its CMS. However, it produces 2 URLS for each page with a simple /. For example, website.com/hire
website.com/hire/ I know google treats this as 2 separate pages, which would be the better solution. 1. Write a URL re-write for every CMS page
RewriteRule ^hire$ http://www.website.com/hire/ [R=301,L] (Is this right?) 2. Write a general rewrite rule to always add the /
No idea where to begin with this 3. Add a Canonical tag to the page which i think is possible in magento by adding this to the Custom Design Layout XML option in the page CMS. <action method="addLinkRel"></action> <rel>canonical</rel> <href>http://www.website.com/hire/</href> This would make the /hire/ page self-reference and the /hire page reference the /hire/ page I think. Which one of these solutions is the best and any pointers with the coding would be grand.

Hello Again, Looking for a little help to help me understand what exactly is going on here. Ive taken over maintenance of a website and have so far fixed a lot of issues. ahrefs has shown me that a second version of my companies website exists that exists at a second url. This second website is linked to the actual company website like I haven't seen before. www(dot)#(dot)co(dot)uk  is the main company website. But a second accessible version exists and is accessible at www(dot)#(dot)co(dot)uk The instruments version is a direct copy and all of the links point directly to my main site. Any changes I make on the main version are automatically applied to the other version. It shows up as a SPAM back link on moz as all of the link points to my website etc Ideally in my mind, the instruments version homepage should simply re-direct to the main homepage to solve this "duplicate content and spammy backlink" issue however, the instruments version is the same suffix that all our company emails work with. Basically, HELP lol. I have no understanding of how this is set up, and the best way in which to deal and if it could affect anything such as company emails.

Hello Again, I have taken over managing a website for about 2 months and have fixed a whole heap of problems. Im now turning my attention to the URL rewrites as there are ALOT of them. I have fixed the most problematic offenders that were blocking products and all sorts of mischief but I now want to clean them up. The website is on Magento, and there are 240 custom URL rewrites. Question 1: Am i correct that I should edit the links on my website so that they link directly to the new page instead of utilising the re-direct for best SEO results. Question 2: If my website doesn't utilise the URL rewrite (fixed in question 1) its only purpose is to transfer link juice from any external link the page had before. If this page didnt have any external inbound links then I can delete the URL rewrite as it serves no purpose. Question 3: If Q1 and Q2 are correct, what is the quickest way to check the inbound links to a page quickly so I can make a quick decision on if i should remove the re-write. Many Thanks in advance!

Hi All, I came back from work today from a week off to find my site has gone from 681 external inbound links to 202. With this my domain authority, moz trust and moz rank have all also taken a slip. Compounding this, I am seeing a slip most of my keywords rankings. If i try to use the open site explorer to explore my links and see what going on i get the message It looks like we haven't discovered link data for this site or URL. If i check the just discovered links like it suggests I get It looks like there's no Just-Discovered Links data for this URL yet. I know these features worked before the index as i used them. Is this all attributable to the moz index issues that have been noted or could something have happened to my site? Since i started 2 months ago I have made many changes including... Updating the site map that was 4 years out of date and included 400 broken urls Removed blank pages and other useless webpages on the site that contained no content (from the previous administrator) Edited a few pages content from keyword spammy stuff to nicely written and relevant content Fixed url rewrites that made loops and un-accessible product pages All these changes should be for the better but the latest readings have me a little worried. Thanks.

Hi everybody, My Website is ranking well for several keywords and long-tail keywords. However, all these visits are going directly to some .PDF guides that exist on our products and information on industry sectors the company is based around. I feel the PDF's are bad simply because they dont offer easy interaction with the rest of the website. I am considering making each PDF into a webpage but am not 100% sure of the pro's and cons of doing so. I will still need to the PDF's accessible for user to download but don't want my new webpages to get tagged as duplicate content. Is it possible to,
1 - change the PDF's so they send any link authority to the new webpage
2 - make google aware that I want the webpage not the PDF to be the "ranking" page What is the likely hood of destroying my rank for these keywords on the PDF by making these changes and then not being able to rank the webpage for the same keywords? It would be pointless if I just lost all the traffic lol.

I have just taken over admin of my company website and I have been confronted with crawl error 902 on the existing campaign that has been running for years in Moz. This seems like an intermittent problem. I have searched and tried to go over many of the other solutions and non of them seem to help. The campaign is currently set-up with the url http://companywebsite.co.uk when I tried to do a Moz manual crawl using this URL I got an error message. I changed the link to crawl to http://www.companywebsite.co.uk and the crawl went off without a hitch and im currently waiting on the results. From testing I now know that if i go to the non-www version of my companies website then nothing happens it never loads. But if I go to the www version then it loads right away. I know for SEO you only want 1 of these URLS so you dont have duplicate content. But i thought the non-www should redirect to the www version. Not just be completely missing. I tried to set-up a new campaign with the defaults URL being the www version but Moz automatically changed it to the non-www version. It seems a cannot set up a new campaign with it automatically crawling the www version. Does it sound like im out the right path to finding this cause? Or can somebody else offer up a solution? Many thanks,
Ben .