Just to add to Ryan's already stellar answer, the temporary page should actually (probably; not privy to all details of your situation) have a canonical tag referencing one of the other more permanent pages with similar content.
Posts made by BradyDCallahan
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RE: Canonicals question ref canonicals pointing to redundant urls
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RE: Link juice on sub domains
If the link is not the destination URL the user lands on (in some cases), then yes, it's not the optimal situation for the maximum amount of authority being passed. But that's also dependent upon how the user is being redirected...
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RE: SERP Title shows up-with-dashes
Ha, no worries. Somehow it happens all the time! Good luck in solving your SERP title issue!
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RE: WWW to Non-WWW = Less Indexing?
If both the www. and non-www. URLs were being indexed - creating duplicates for nearly every page on your website - then the significant drop in number of pages indexed makes sense.
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RE: 301 Redirects Relating to Your XML Sitemap
I think that - adding the new URL while keeping the old ones in XML sitemap for a bit - is your best idea. You can manually add your new URL to index using GWT tools, as well, but I think it's best practice to wait for your site to be crawled again before removing old links from XML sitemap.
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RE: Twitter and SEO
Unfortunately that's probably a question better answered by somebody else. I'm not well versed in Twitter when you start talking about different languages/countries, etc. I'd say that's okay, but you may save time by just trying out your content/social strategy in one language first.
There's a lot going on there (customs, cultural differences) these audiences could be vastly different as far as what makes them tick and what makes them likely to engage. Like I said, you're probably better off having someone else chime in on that.
Sorry! Good luck, though.
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RE: Backlinks from the Same Domain (But Different Pages)
A natural backlink profile has diversity - get ready for it - naturally. While in a perfect world, you want a strong variation in the number of domains linking to your pages, however if the same site chooses to link to your page(s) on their own, without your or any other outside influence, I don't see an issue with this.
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RE: Twitter and SEO
There's a lot here, but I'd like to address the overall strategy here. Just know and keep in mind the new Twitter/Google agreement is nice, but it's an incredibly small slice of the SEO pie, if you will.
Building a twitter following by delivering legitimate content to a relevant audience is great - and yes, could be featured prominently in SERPs - but don't hop on twitter for that. It won't work. I'd develop a larger social media, content marketing, and branding strategy first to solve the problem of getting the brand/company name out there and building followers.
The impact you're looking for will come naturally then. But it's a long term strategy that takes discipline and time. There's no quick win here. Just my two cents.
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RE: SERP Title shows up-with-dashes
In my experiences, any time there's a dash in the SERP title, it means Google re-wrote it to some extent. Whether they've shortened it, changed it to something completely unique, it always re-writes with a dash and not a colon, or some other separator.
What Google is essentially saying is, "we think this title better describes your page." The first obvious places to look are length and keyword placement/usage: if the title is too long, shorten it. If the main keywords in your title aren't prominently displayed on the page (H1, H2s, body copy, other internal pages using that anchor text, etc.) then I'd try and make those types of changes.
Don't go overboard with keyword stuffing or anything like that, of course. It's usually not too hard to get these changed back, just do a little digging, keyword research, and make some of the changes I've recommended. I bet you'll see the title change to what you've suggested after optimizing and another crawl or two.
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RE: Duplicate blogs across different domains
You really shouldn't be creating duplicate content of any kind for multiple clients. Even on different domains for businesses in different countries, this is not the best SEO strategy for you or the businesses. Work hard to create valuable, unique content ideas that the customer of the business may actually want to read, digest, and share.
If there's really no content for the business or industry, don't have a blog. Find other ways to include great content on the main pages to ensure there's robust, strong content for users to see and search engines to crawl and index appropriately.
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RE: Yahoo and Bing Ranking Hits
I wouldn't say you've overreacted, it's definitely worth keeping an eye on. But just know that those search engines typically perform together, so it's almost like a drop in performance in only one of them.
Check for any weird crawl issues that may have accidentally been set-up in robots.txt or on the page-level (specifically blocking other bots but allowing Google's?) or any glitches that could be making your pages "look" different to Bing/Yahoo.
However, my guess is it's just testing and things will bounce back shortly. Maybe some strong competitors entered the fray? Check Bing/Yahoo SERPs manually for clues... hope it bounces back for you! And kudos on strong Google organic performance.
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RE: Yahoo and Bing Ranking Hits
It's not a surprise that both Bing and Yahoo rankings are dropping together, as performance on these engines seem to be more or less the same in my experiences.
If Google ranking and traffic are up however, you may not have anything to worry about. Instead of just focusing on rank, prioritize by search volume and target keywords for your business. If your priority or "money" keywords are still reaching your website - and you're still getting good traffic quantity via Google search - I'd give Bing/Yahoo time to come around.
They test their organic results too, so maybe it's just a short-term test. Another good bit of advice moving forward: never overreact to a rank report or two. Sometimes it's something you've implemented or your competitor, but sometimes it's just normal SERP flux or random results. These inconsistencies will sort themselves out.
Sorry for not having insight on the specific market, but figured I'd chime in.
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RE: Rel=“next” and rel=“prev” on category pages and galleries
Yes, the canonical included with the rel next and prev is fine.
I'm just not sure the gallery of images is an appropriate use of real next/prev. Are all these images on one page? If so, I'm not sure those html elements are necessary.
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RE: Next Gen Gallery Crawler Problem
You may want to double check that. I'm not a Yoast specialist, per se, but I've never had that plugin not solve this type of problem. And from what you've described, I'm sure Yoast can help with that. It's a little complex, maybe take a second look-through with a developer.
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RE: Cross Domain duplicate content...
If the alternative is just de-indexing those duplicate pages on one website, then I'd definitely recommend the cross-domain canonicals, yes.
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RE: Next Gen Gallery Crawler Problem
Download the Yoast SEO plugin. It'll help you solve nearly all problems. Hands down the best WP plugin for SEO.
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RE: Broken Backlinking
I've done this at times at pretty large volume (100s of outreach emails), and typically I've gotten about a 10% response rate. Keep in mind that didn't necessarily mean we got a link, but some type of relationship was formed, potential for the business to earn more work (better than links, btw), or something else productive. Even if it was just a citation we consider that a "win."
But some advice, do not employ this tactic at large scale unless you are in a web-saavy, tech-based industry. Online marketing, design, and photography businesses, for example, are far more likely to earn links via broken link building than a manufacturing plant. In my experience, there are just some industries this tactic is a complete and utter waste of time.
If you find success in this tactic early-on though, there are some great social tools that help you automate some of this email work. I've heard very good things about BuzzStream.
Oh, and make sure it's not your only link earning/building tactic.
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RE: Next Gen Gallery Crawler Problem
Yes, if /page/gallery/1/, /page/gallery/2/ are exact duplicates just place a canonical tag on the /page/gallery (and the duplicates) referencing /page/gallery.
Another recommendation to avoid duplicate/confusion by search engines: apply rel="next" and rel="prev" to the series of gallery pages. Once you get enough images, I'm guessing the URL structure will become /page/gallery/page_2, 3, 4, etc. (or something like that).
The next/prev elements let the search engine know they are a series of a type of content (in this case, images) and are associated.
That type of content can be real headaches for us SEOs! Good luck.
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RE: Cross Domain duplicate content...
First of all, these are great questions.
My first question would be are the sites hosted on the same server or near-same IP address? If they are, and given much of the content is duplicate, chances are Google/search engines already understand these websites are somehow related. This is just something to consider...
Answer #1: If you de-index a group of products on one website, chances are, yes the other site would see some improvement just based on there being one less competitor. But I would do some extensive competitive research first to see if how the other sites are ranking next to your two sites.
Ultimately, I would side with a cross-domain canonical over de-indexing that way you're passing some value from one site to the other. I would do this on a product by product basis however, making sure the product niche you keep indexed matches with the site's overall niche theme and not vis versa.
Answer #2: My second paragraph sort of addresses your second question. Think from a semantic and topical understanding perspective here: if it's a healthcare product, make sure the site with the healthcare niche is the one being indexed, not just the general merchandise website. Even simply from a branding and general marketing perspective that makes more sense, IMO.
Answer #3: It sounds like, if there's duplicate descriptions (I'm guessing images, headers, and other content pieces) the canonicals likely would be honored. Even across domains, duplicate content can be a concern (especially if they're hosted together). Remember though, canonical tags are just a mere suggestion, so it could take some time for Google to honor it, but from the information you've given, I think that's your best shot.
Another thing to take into consideration when using canonical tag: make sure you're placing the canonical tag on the page/website that's performing worse of the two. There may be exceptions based on the niche and from a semantic perspective, but in general, you don't want to hurt your own performance by referencing the less authoritative page.
Good luck! Hope my advice helps.
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RE: Can We Outrank The Google Places Local Listing 7 pack in 2015?
I believe it rolled out internationally this past month (December). Check out SERoundtable for updates. Barry's great with that stuff.
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RE: Magento Canonical & Default Robots Settings
Regardless of CMS, all pages will have the follow, index tags. This just means search engines will crawl and index the pages appropriately, as well as "follow" any links on the pages (to other internal pages and external website pages). This is standard.
While e-commerce websites can have some complicated issues in terms of duplicate content, in general it's smart to have self-referencing canonical tags applied to pages you create. This will also help keep things in order and when duplicate content gets created (in e-commerce it's inevitable).
It'll be easier to change the self-referencing tags to the appropriate URL you want indexed in favor of it.
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RE: Can We Outrank The Google Places Local Listing 7 pack in 2015?
Are you still seeing a 7-pack? From what I've seen, the latest Pigeon update has removed almost all local 7-packs for a more compact, 3-pack or the new "local stack" (or whatever we're calling it). When I Google "toronto dentist," I'm getting a more compact 3-pack, granted I am in the States.
To answer your original question, I'd probably say no just because it's probably not the best way to focus your local SEO efforts. In most cases the local packs are at the top of SERPs (underneath ads, of course) but very rarely are they half-way down the SERP. I have some clients targeting keywords with SERPs that trigger the local pack between organic listings 1 and 2, but that's becoming rare.
Your goal should be to rank in the local pack (or higher in it, if you're already there). What I can say is the way to possibly jumping the local pack and the way to move up in the pack are likely the same tactics: basic local SEO. There are a ton of blog posts out there from awesome experts like Andrew Shotland and Mike Blumenthal, but some important initial questions to ask yourself and audit your website with:
- Basic SEO principles: duplicate content (all forms), good title tags, img tags, etc.
- Local SEO principles: business city/state in title tags, NAP on (basically) every page, local phone number used (not 1-800), etc.
- Technical principles: all the basics, 404s, bad 301s/302s, XML sitemap, using schema for local business (or more specific schema [there's now a dentist one, I believe], etc.)
If you're a multiple location business there's a whole lot more to the Local SEO principles, but I'd recommend checking out some of the experts' and their blogs for those. Some of those recommendations and answers can be too long for a Moz Q&A.
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RE: Faking headings, good or bad?
Given they were
tags and not something more powerful like an
, I'm not sure how detrimental it would've been, however, I think your SEO agency is right to change the HTML element to something else.
How the
tags were being used was outside their initial design (page hierarchy and design), as davebuts pointed out above.
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RE: Rel=“next” and rel=“prev” on category pages and galleries
While I'm just going off of your description, you shouldn't need rel="next" and rel="prev" pointing from one category page to another. However, if you're talking about one category that has multiple pages of blog posts, for instance, then yes, I'd definitely recommend adding those tags to help search engines understand the relationship between that pagination. Just make sure they're implemented in the .
Here's Google's webmaster central blog post on the matter: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html. I'd read, memorize, and then bookmark.
Again, I'm not totally sure what you mean by the description of the image gallery. However, if there are multiple pages of images (pagination) within the gallery, then yes, add the rel="next" and "prev" tags there, as well. If there are lots of images, your best bet might be creating a "View All" page you could combine that as the canonical URL along with your rel="next" and "prev." That may be excessive given your website though.
I don't think you need the link element tags pointing from one image to another, that's not really how the rel="next"/"prev" elements were meant to work. But that should get you jump started with your understanding! Let me know if you have any other questions.
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RE: Do I put a canonical tag on the page I am pointing to?
Yes, I'd also put the canonical tag on Page A referencing the Page A URL.
In general, self-referencing canonical tags are a good thing to implement site-wide. Then, when you do need to make a change and have one duplicate page's canonical tag point to another URL (in this case, Page B to Page A), the tag is already in place and you can make the change more easily.
But if self-referencing tags are in place from the beginning, they can also help squash lots of other duplicate content problems that end up occurring on more complex websites.
Hope that makes sense!
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RE: I am ranking for local broad terms, but I am not ranking when geo-modifier is included.
Without having any additional context, my best guess would be one (or likely more) of your competitors have targeted these keywords with standard local SEO tactics: hyper-localized, local address/business schema markup, address and other local neighborhood information, relevant on-site content, etc.
Maybe they've focused more on semantic aspects of on-page SEO factors (co-citation, location of targeted keywords in relationship to one another, other semantic relationships) than you have? While it sounds like you've done a good job including your website (a backlink) in high-quality local directories (more than your competitor[s] have at least), but what about links overall?
While local-relevant links are nice, high-quality links in general will still carry a website a long way as far as ranking and consistent organic traffic. It appears Pigeon - the most recent local update - is steering closer to generic web ranking signals, not just the local stuff.
Hope that helps! Would be happy to try and provide more information if you're able or willing to answer some of these questions.
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RE: Redirect effecting ranking?
If you had any type of duplicate content penalty - or other Panda related "slap" - it would effect the entire domain's rankings, not just the one subfolder where the duplicate content problems existed. I've never heard of an algorithmic penalty that only effected one area of a website… it almost always slaps the entire domain.
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RE: Should I delete 'data hightlighter' mark-up in webmaster tools after added schema.org mark-up?
Ah, ok. My mistake, I didn't drill down enough. One thing I did notice: you have authorship markup on those product pages as well. That should be removed.
According to Google's guidelines, for product pages that are not specifically written/constructed by an "author," that markup should not be there. Rel="publisher" is the only necessary markup for non-blog or article content.
The schema markup you've implemented looks good in the page source, and checks out as being correctly implemented (without any duplicates) using Google's Structured Data Testing Tool (found in Google Webmaster Tools). It appears the data highlighter markup is not causing duplicates.
I'd recommend double-checking all the product pages you've added schema to that you originally had from the data highlighter markup. There may be duplicates, there may not. To be honest, I've always gone right to schema.org, but checking for duplicates should be the only thing you should have to worry about.
Good luck!
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RE: Redirect effecting ranking?
In general, redirects dilute the link "juice" - or authority - a page has accrued from links and other search-related metrics. When you redirect that page to another, all of the authority does not flow to the new page. A portion of that page's link value/authority does flow to the new page. The majority is lost.
However, in your case, it sounds like there are many other things affecting your website's performance in SERPs. I'd expect your duplicate issues - even if recently resolved - to hold your website back for a time longer, but if all those other issues clear, yes, the redirect could be the main reason for the effected ranking.
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RE: Should I delete 'data hightlighter' mark-up in webmaster tools after added schema.org mark-up?
Where have you added schema markup? What pages?
After briefly scanning a few pages on your site, I'm not seeing any code from schema.org in the page source. Has this been implemented/gone live yet?
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RE: Is it a good idea to remove old blogs?
It depends on what you mean by "remove."
If the content of all those old blogs truly is poor, I'd strongly consider going through 1 by 1 and seeing how you can re-write, expand upon, and improve the overall blog post. Can you tackle the subject from another angle? Are there images, videos, or even visual assets you can add to the post to make it more intriguing and sharable?
Then, you can seek out some credible places to strategically place your blog content for additional exposure and maybe even a link. Be careful here, however. I'm not talking about forum and comment spam, but there may be some active communities that are open to unique and valuable content. Do your research first.
When going through each post 1 by 1, you'll undoubtedly find blog posts that are simply "too far gone" or not relevant enough to keep. Essentially, it wouldn't even be worth your time to re-write them. In this case, find another page on your website that's MOST SIMILAR to the blog post. This may be in topic, but also could be an author's page, another blog post that is valuable, a contact page, etc. Then perform 301 redirects of the crap blog posts to those pages.
Not only are you salvaging any little value those blog posts may have had, but you're also preventing crawl and index issues by telling the search engine bots where that content is now (assuming it was indexed in the first place).
This is an incredibly long content process and should take you months. Especially if there's a lot of content that's good enough to be re-written, expanded upon, and added to. However making that content relevant and useful is the best thing you can do. It's a long process, but if your best content writers need a project, this would be it.
To recap: **1) **Go through each blog post 1 by 1, determine what's good enough to edit, what's "too far gone." 2) Re-write, edit, add to (content and images/videos) and re-promote them socially and to appropriate audiences and communities. 3) For the posts that were "too far gone," 301 redirect them to the most relevant posts and pages that are remaining "live."
Again, I can say firsthand that this is a LONG process. I've done it for a client in the past. However, the return was well worth the work. And by doing it this way and not just deleting posts, you're preventing yourself a lot of crawl/index headaches with the search engines.
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RE: Flash site ranking well for a competitive keyword
The TLD element is definitely a strong point.
Something else to consider: have you investigated the website's backlink profile? Especially given the industry, I wouldn't doubt there was some manipulative link practices going on with the anchor text "lead generation" from spammy sites.
Just a thought.
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RE: Should we use brand name of product in URL
Inserting the brand name again in the product page portion of the URL is unnecessary and looks like a keyword stuffing technique. Assuming the brand you're representing gets a lot of search traffic, focusing on the power of your domain should be more than enough to attract visits to your site.
Focusing on users should be your main focus when designing URL structures. As a potential customer, repeating the brand name in the URL of pages would be unnecessary and unattractive. Thus, it will (probably) have the same effect on search engines. As Adam said, short and user-friendly is the way to go.
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RE: How can I submit a reconsideration request while not having any manual action?
You can't - and more importantly don't need to - submit a reconsideration request if you haven't received a manual action message in Webmaster Tools.
Sounds like you're on the right track if you've used the Disavow Tool. Hopefully you personally reached out to all the webmasters linking to you before using the tool? If not, using the Disavow may not be as effective. Make sure you've purged ALL the links that may draw suspicion. Personally, I'd rather disavow a link that's "good" if I have any questions about it instead of leaving a link that's "bad" in the backlink profile.
In order to begin to recover from the algorithmic penalty, I'd recommend you begin creating a white-hat link building campaign based around unique and valuable pieces of content. Good content that's relevant and important to your target customer with attract links naturally (over time).
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RE: Were our URLs setup correctly?
Ruben,
I'd agree with your assessment that those URL formats are too long and unnecessary. This URL structure looks a lot like keyword stuffing and EMD (exact-match domain) as well as PMD (partial-match domain) were valued by the people who made the website. In their defense, depending on how old the website is, those extra keywords may have actually helped the pages rank better for relevant queries years ago.
I wouldn't worry too much about redirecting those URLs or changing them today, however. I suppose you could but today search engines are far more sophisticated. I don't think it'd be a great investment of your time.
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RE: Best Practices for Moving a Sub-Domain to a Sub-Folder
Moving a subdomain permanently can be a huge project! This question is probably better answered through a blog post that includes a walkthrough of what to check - and double check - before finalizing anything. Below are some of the blog posts I've found that best detail this process. If you come across any questions, feel free to reach out! I'd be happy to help. But I'm sure the blog posts will do the trick (including one here at Moz!)
Good luck!
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RE: Google contradictory communications about manual action being applied
That story sounds a lot like an algorithmic penalty and not a manual one. I've heard of people receiving manual action messages as a mistake or with a similar story to yours, maybe a Google slip-up?
I'd take a good, hard look at your website from a neutral perspective. Take your bias out of it, regardless if you think you're a company that's only ever done white-hat SEO techniques. Are pages "really" meant for users? Is there information you could probably remove that's "unnecessary" or "duplicate"?
If you have to, hire someone to do this in a consultant role. It'd probably pay off in the long run. Good luck!
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RE: Unnatural Links on Forum Posts
I'd take a strong look at where those conversations are taking place. If the forum is spammy - or has been in the past - a simple mention and link of your business (even if it's being done legitimately) will raise a red flag. It also may say something bigger about your link profile as a whole. Are all your links coming from similar sources (i.e. forums)?
As far as removal, you could try and contact the person directly through the forum (if possible). It may require you signing up for that forum. You could also try and use the disavow tool as a last ditch effort. Not sure how successful that would be, however.
My ultimate suggestion? Diversify your backlink profile.
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RE: Duplicate Content Report
Hmmm, not really sure what you're talking about. Can you expand on the problem?