Questions created by Blenny
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Is there a way to tell which redirect - from another domain - is driving traffic to your website?
My company acquired another domain/website several year's ago. We want to see - for accounting purposes, how much traffic/revenue that site's REDIRECTS are driving to our website now. Is there any way to pull this information? I thought of comparing when the site was originally redirected to our traffic/revenue changes - but so much has changed from the acquisition that I wouldn't have faith in this value. Thanks for any assistance you can provide.
Technical SEO | | Blenny1 -
Brand in Title Tag - a Ranking Factor for Scaling Big Websites?
I'm in the middle of redesigning title tags on a large ecommerce site - approximately 9000 product pages. The old structure was -(product name/description) | (Website/Brand) So an example would be - Big League Chew - 13 oz. | Target - With 'Target' Being the site's brand and appearing on each. With Google's new Title Tag display, our title tags are too long now. Unfortunately, our Brand/Website is HUGE - over 18 characters. My question is two fold - 1. Is it OK to remove brand from the title tags of some particularly long names? Will this impact ranking? 2. Does Google look for brand in these title tags, and more specifically: brand consistency in title tags? I'd love to cut the brand out of some as the product name is the biggest click-through element by far - but I don't want to affect rankings. My 'gut' says that I should focus on clickthrough rate with title tags and cut brand where necessary. Does anyone have thoughts on this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blenny0 -
Moz Company & Personal Account Conflict
Hey Moz - I just had a question regarding the Moz Pro Account. Sometimes I find myself torn between using my personal Moz account, and the Moz Pro Account associated with my company (and my team). Is there a way to link a personal account WITH a company pro account, so I could post as myself, build my own cred, but still enjoy the benefits of Pro on my company's dime? Thanks!
Product Support | | Blenny0 -
Acquired Old, Bad Content Site That Ranks Great. Redirect to Content on My Site?
Hello. my company acquired another website. This website is very old, the content within is decent at best, but still manages to rank very well for valuable phrases. Currently, we're leaving the entire site active on its own for its brand, but i'd like to at least redirect some of the content back to our main website. I can't justify spending the time to create improved content on that site and not our main site though. What would be the best practice here? 1. Cross-domain canonical - and build the new content on our main website? 2. 301 Redirect Old Article to New Location containing better article 3. Leave the content where it is - you won't be able to transfer the ranking across domain. Thanks for your input.
On-Page Optimization | | Blenny0 -
AJAX and Bing Indexation
Hello. I've been going back and forth with Bing technical support regarding a crawling issue on our website (which I have to say is pretty helpful - you do get a personal, thoughtful response pretty quickly from Bing). Currently our website is set with a java redirect to send users/crawlers to an AJAX version of our website. For example, they come into - mysite.com/category..and get redirected to mysite.com/category#!category. This is to provide an AJAX search overlay which improves UEx. We are finding that Bing gets 'hung up' on these AJAX pages, despite AJAX protocol being in place. They say that if the AJAX redirect is removed, they would index and crawl the non-AJAX url correctly - at which point our indexation would (theoretically) improve. I'm wondering if it's possible (or advisable) to direct the robots to crawl the non-AJAX version, while users get the AJAX version. I'm assuming that it's the classic - the bots want to see exactly what the users see - but I wanted to post here for some feedback. The reality of the situation is the AJAX overlay is in place and our rankings in Bing have plummeted as a result.
Technical SEO | | Blenny0 -
BingHoo Tools No Longer Directly Supporting AJAX
This post was derived from the fact that our website, which uses AJAX and AJAX urls formatted using Google's crawl guidelines (and ranks well), is being completely misread by BingHoo's bots (and destroying our rankings). After some research, we found that Bing's tools used to contain an option for their crawlers to interpret AJAX-infused urls, but that this feature was removed with the latest update. I've seen others post on this issue with no response, so I figured I'd post the customer support email we received below - kind of strange thing to receive. Takeaway - even AJAX done right is rough in BingHoo. (sorry I can't post my site here..). Hello, This is Roxanne of Bing Technical Support and I will be assisting you with this issue. I understand that you cannot find the Configure Bing for AJAX Crawling box in Bing Webmaster. Let me explain. We appreciate your feedback about Bing Webmaster tools. We regret to inform you that Bing Webmaster Tools is no longer directly supporting AJAX. We'll pass this feedback onto our Bing development team. If you are having ajax-specific related issues with your site in Webmaster tools, please let us know. We apologize for the time spent and the inconvenience this may have caused you. If you should require further clarification and need more assistance, please feel free to reply to this email. Thank you and have a great day! Regards, Roxanne Bing Technical Support
Technical SEO | | Blenny0 -
Proper way to 404 a page on an Ecommerce Website
Hello. I am working on a website that has over 15000 products. When one of these is no longer available - like it's discontinued or something - the page it's on 302s to a 404 page. Example - www.greatdomain.com/awesome-widget Awesome widget is no longer available www. greatdomain.com/awesome-widget 302s to -www.greatdomain.com/404 page. For the most part, these are not worthy of 301s because of lack of page rank/suitable LPs, but is this the correct way to handle them for search engines? I've seen varying opinions. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Blenny0 -
New CMS system - 100,000 old urls - use robots.txt to block?
Hello. My website has recently switched to a new CMS system. Over the last 10 years or so, we've used 3 different CMS systems on our current domain. As expected, this has resulted in lots of urls. Up until this most recent iteration, we were unable to 301 redirect or use any page-level indexation techniques like rel 'canonical' Using SEOmoz's tools and GWMT, I've been able to locate and redirect all pertinent, page-rank bearing, "older" urls to their new counterparts..however, according to Google Webmaster tools 'Not Found' report, there are literally over 100,000 additional urls out there it's trying to find. My question is, is there an advantage to using robots.txt to stop search engines from looking for some of these older directories? Currently, we allow everything - only using page level robots tags to disallow where necessary. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | Blenny0 -
Facebook Places & Business Pages - Any way to consolidate
Hello, I've read multiple posts on this, and the new timeline layout rolling out for business pages..but I haven't seen an update to this issue. My company has a retail store and an online store. Because of this, we had to create a places page and a regular business page. When people "check-in" via Facebook, the check-in goes to the places page. But our main marketing efforts and large fan base are at the business page. Facebook used to allow you to combine these. In a perfect world, all would live on one business page. Has anyone heard an update on this feature? Thanks either way.
Social Media | | Blenny0 -
Rel Canonical tag usage on ECommerce website
Hello, I have read up on the rel canonical tag and I'm ready to apply it to my site's categorization structure. However, I'm concerned that, because my website does not have a "view all" button for our product pages, the rel canonical tag would not be appropriate. For example, if you come to my site's main category url, you come to mysite.com/main-category At this level - you get the top 12 items in the category. if you want to see the next page, you click a crawlable link that goes to mysite.com/main-category12-24 etc. etc. The site does not offer a view all function. Would applying the rel canonical tag be appropriate in this instance, or do I have to let Google crawl and index each page independantly? Thanks.
Web Design | | Blenny0 -
Search directory - How to apply robots
Hi. On the site I'm working on, we use a search directory to display our search results. It displays as follows - Mydomain.com/search-results/# With the dynamic search results appearing after the hash tag. Because of the structure of the website, many of the lefthand nav defers back to this directory. I know that most websites "noindex, nofollow" the search results pages, but due to the ease of customers generating them, I'm afraid that if I do this, we'll miss out on the inevitable links customers will provide...and, even though it's just the main search directory, these links will still help my domain. The search is all java-generated so there's nothing for spiders to follow within this directory - save the standard category nav. How should I handle this? Thanks.
Web Design | | Blenny0 -
ECommerce Site Breadcrumbs Best Practice
I'm working on an Ecom website and I was wondering - For breadcrumbs - is there an SEO and/or UEx preference when it comes to taking them back to the homepage? I have the option of going CATEGORY > SUB CATEGORY > SUB CATEGORY or HOME > CATEGORY > SUBCATEGORY > SUBCATEGORY Each example is hyperlinked except for the lowest level. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Blenny0 -
CSS Hiding Text - Does this matter to search engine crawlers
Hello, I'm working on a site and a developer is using CSS to mask crawlable links below. Then, java, advanced search links go on top of this. So, if you disable Java, but have CSS enabled, you don't have a lefthand nav. With both CSS and Java disabled you have a fully crawlable website. Is this a red flag? I understand a user without java would have a problem since most people don't disable CSS. But, is this a problem for search crawlers? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Blenny0 -
Videos increase ranking of products in SERPS from Ecommerce Website
Just noticed something I've never seen before..and I just wanted to see if anyone else experienced this. I work for a 15000+ item eccommerce website, and today I noticed that on a few brand searches, several individual product pages were coming up. This is actually unusual because most of our individual item pages (including these) aren't ranked well enough to show up well in a brand search (and don't try to target brand terms either), but a correlation here was that both items contained videos referenced within. These were not videos hosted on our YouTube brand page either..these were videos done by separate manufacturers - one was hosted on their site, one on ours. Google actually pulled the snapshot of the video to the SERP as well... even though it was embedded within other product copy. Has anyone else noticed any preferential treatment given to effectively random items on your eCommerce website because it was augmented by video? I can assure you there was nothing otherwise unique about these products and they're not really that sought after. Neither item or url was new, and neither were the videos within. Also, this was a Universal Google search, not one for videos. (Sorry, I'm not allowed to reference directly). Thanks.
Algorithm Updates | | Blenny0 -
301ing entire E-Com website - Using TopPages Report as a Guide
Hi Folks, My company is in discussions with an ERP provider to migrate our existing website to a new backend system, new url structures..the whole 9 yards. We have over 15,000 products, and a lot of "odd" url structures created by an outdated system that we were unable to adjust. All and all, if you're talking about a raw url count, it's in the 100s of thousands. During discussions, we were told that bulk 301 redirects would be a problem. They could be performed manually though (greaaattt). Due to this, I ran an OpenSite Explorer report, and isolated our top pages. After exporting the CSV, I was able to breakout "all" urls that have links from other domains. My question is, has anyone used the OpenSite Explorer on a website of similar size, to form the basis of a migration? Do you have enough confidence in the tool to use it in this way, or should we re-negotiate our agreement until a way can be found to mass 301 ALL urls. I'm at least a little concerned that OpenSite Explorer isn't indexing all of the links out there. Gasp..or would there be a better tool to accomplish what I'm trying to do? Thanks!
Moz Pro | | Blenny0