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I have not already 301'd the site to https. But either url works since I turned on the ssl at my host.

I will check into the Cloudflare.

So you recommend just going forward with the https switch even though I have not done all the things on the checklist?

I may have made a mess for myself. I turned on the ssl a couple of weeks ago (2-3) but didn't do the other things first. Should i remove the ssl from my site until I go through the checklist? I am starting to panic, hoping i have not gotten myself into big trouble.

My internal links, ads, canonical urls all still use http.

Thank you

Thanks James. I don't have a CMS. My pages are all hand coded html pages. (would dearly love to switch to a cms in the future since i have over 100 pages). Does your advice change in anyway?

If I have 4 versions of my site

http://www
http://
https://www
https://

What is the best way to redirect without losing seo positions? i have been mainly using http://www but have recently added my ssl so https works also. I heard at Moz Con that I should get the https working.

All of my marketing and ads are going to http://www

301 redirect 3 of them? Which 3? If https is becoming important, should that be my main url? will it hurt my seo to switch?

Thank you so much in advance!

I am planning my seo project using Moz tools. I am finding keywords that are close to each other. What is the best way to optimize? If I made a page for each of the close words, it would pretty much be duplicate content.

Is it best to go ahead and make a page for each and try to make content a bit different? How different does it have to be?

Or, would i try to use the different versions of the keyword on one good page.

Thank you!

I am using bootstrap 3 and am wondering if moving to bootstrap 4 would be beneficial as far as seo. Any advice?

Thank you!

Moz reports show duplicate content for my www.domain.com and www.domain.com/default.html

How do I format the canonical ref to put on the default.html page?

I am moving a site with great SEO and tons of pages to a new platform. Page names will all be different because they will not have the .html ending and names will change. It is on a system that does not support .htaccess.

So, I don't have a way to do 301 redirects.

How can I keep my competitive status?

Thank you!!

I am showing a duplicate content error in moz. I have site.com and site.com/default.html

How can I fix that? Should I use a canonical tag? If so, how would i do that?

No, I put it on the .htaccess on the new site. I had 301'd the whole old site in my domain name manager. Maybe I should not do that so I can put an .htaccess file right on the old domain?

Actually, I tried that, and the result is still

Old URL: "www.myoldsite.com/my-page/"
New URL: "www.mynewsite.com/404.html

Yes, that helps, thank you!

Can I use this option and somehow direct all traffic from old site to my new home page? I tried this and if someone was trying to find a specific page on the old site they get a 404 on the new.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^OLDSITE.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.OLDSITE.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://NEWSITE/$1 [L,R=301,NC]

I had 2 websites. I decided not to maintain one of them and set it to 301 to my main website. However, i see people getting 404 errors when they land on my main website but with a page name from the old site. How can I set things so that anyone who tries to go to the old site goes to my homepage of my main site?

http://siteA.com

http://oldsiteB.com/oldpagename sends them to http://siteA.com//oldpagename = 404  - I want them to go directly to homepage on siteA.

Do I need to have links to all of these landing pages? I'd rather not if I don't have to

• I love the keyword tool for giving me direction and helping to prioritize. My question:

  Once I have the prioritized keywords, do you recommend having a page for each of the top keywords, using the keyword as the page name? Or is it better to sprinkle the keywords into existing pages?

  Thank you.

I love the keyword tool for giving me direction and helping to prioritize. My question:

Once I have the prioritized keywords, do you recommend having a page for each of the top keywords, using the keyword as the page name? Or is it better to sprinkle the keywords into existing pages?

Thank you.

The reason is that I need to update my website and that seems like an easy way to do it. My business partner can easily add content once I am finished. I do not want to use wordpress or joomla. I like that i can still keep the .html on my pages. The e-commerce part of it is so fabulously easy.

Yes, I would 301 to my own domain. I would not use the .weebly.com in my domain name.

I understand the design/ftp limitations but my main question is about SEO. Is it risky to 301 my domain over to weebly?

A lot of the content is old and I'd like to just move what is still relevant. But if these old pages are indexed, and I suddenly have fewer pages, will that hurt my overall seo ranking of my site? I am not worried about the individual links so much as they don't generate a lot of traffic.

I am thinking of moving my html website to weebly. They offer a 301 redirect for my domain name. Is that ok for SEO?

I have a website with a blog attached to it. It is a wordpress blog which we have not updated since 2013. However, it has a lot of pages going back to 2010.

I am moving my website to weebly so I can't move my blog over. I could recreate all the posts and make redirects to the new url. However, the posts are old and outdated so it doesn't really make sense, aside from seo.

I need advice. Would I take an seo hit if i start over with a blog and leave the old posts behind?

Thanks!!!

Thank you Jane. I am unable to PM you. Your name doesn't show up in the drop down list. What is the username I should use?

The unrelated keyword after the dash is not in my title tag. I am not using Wordpress. It is an html website.

The title (top link) in my organic result in google search has my page title then a dash and another keyword. This keyword is not related to the search result. It may discourage clicks. Where does google get that and how can i change it?

For example:

Page Title - unrelated keyword
url
link description

I have a page that ranks well (#4) for a good keyword. However, the url has the keyword in it but is misspelled. I would like to change the url to have the correct spelling but do not want to lose the ranking that I have.

What is the best and safest way to proceed?

I would like to make a custom page set to highlight data on my product pages. However, I don't have a CMS catalog. I use static html pages with names that correspond to the products. They are not all in a "product" folder so don't all have "product" in their name. (or any other consistent term that I could filter out)

So it seems that I can't make a custom page set of my product pages.

Is it worth renaming all my pages, or moving them into a folder in order to be able to use the product tagging? That would mean that I would have to make 301 redirects for all existing product page urls. Would that adversely affect rankings and wipe out any advantage of the data highlighting?

Will it hurt me if i redirect a few hundred old pages to my home page?

I currently have a mess on my hands with many 404's showing up after moving my site to a new ecommerce server. We have been at the new server for 2 years but still have 337 404s showing up in google webmaster tools. I don't think it would affect users as very few people woudl find those old links but I don't want to mess with google.

Also, how much are those 404s hurting my rank?

I have an online store with 10 catagories, many of those have subcategories. I have a tree style navigation menu on the page. This helps people quickly find what they need. However, I end up with about 125 links on the page that way.

Does google really penalize me for this?

Is there anyway around this?

Advice much appreciated!

Thank you! That was the issue. I found that I could modify the description within DMOZ.

When I googled my top keyword today, my site on google showed a description of my site from YEARS ago. It is completely irrevelant and misleading to visitors.

Why would this have happened and is there anything I can do about it?

Thanks!!!

Betsy

If the urls look like this...

http://www.domain.com/bird-cage-covers-page-2/?p=catalog&mode=catalog&parent=18&pg=2&CatalogSetSortBy=name

Would I tell Google to ignore p, mode, parent, or CatalogSetSortBy? Just one of those or all of those?

Thanks!!!

Hi,

The two sites are unrelated to each other so my concern is not duplicate content between the two, there is none.

However, on each of the sites I have the duplicate content issues. I do have admin privileges to both sites.

If there is a Wordpress plug in that would be great. Do you have one that you would recommend?

For my ecommerce site using pinnacle cart, I have duplicates because of the way people can search on the site. For example:

|

http://www.domain.com/accessories/

http://www.domain.com/accessories/?p=catalog&mode=catalog&parent=17&pg=1&CatalogSetSortBy=date

http://www.domain.com/accessories/?p=catalog&mode=catalog&parent=17&pg=1&CatalogSetSortBy=name

http://www.domain.com/accessories/?p=catalog&mode=catalog&parent=17&pg=1&CatalogSetSortBy=price

|

These all show as duplicate content in my webmaster tools reports. I don't have the ability to edit each head tag of pages in order to add a canonical link on this site.

I have 2 sites with duplicate content issues.

One is a wordpress blog.

The other is a store (Pinnacle Cart).

I cannot edit the canonical tag on either site. In this case, should I use robots.txt to eliminate the duplicate content?

Thanks for your help, http://www.normas9000.com

If I type in mydomain.com, it brings me to the index.html version of my home page. So, I can 301 the default.html version to go to index.html and then make all my internal links go to index.html

Am I understanding you correctly? Thanks!

Hi,

I have a website that is about 7 years old. I had been using index.html as the home page. When I redesigned my site about 3 months ago I changed it to default.html. The old index.html page was still on my server. I just realized my mistake. All of my links to the home page lead to the new default.html.

However, people are still landing on the old index.html. I have change the old index.html to the new design  but that means i have 2 "home" pages out there. Should i delete one? Should I leave them both there but use the canonical tag for one so it is not considered duplicate content?

What is best for my rankings?