Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks for your help guys - and also reassuring to confirm my initial recommendations were correct.

Hi Mozzers

I have a client that had a lot of soft 404s that we wanted to tidy up. Basically everything was going to the homepage.

I recommended they implement proper 404s with a custom 404 page, and 301 any that really should be redirected to another page.

What they have actually done is implemented a 404 (without the custom 404 page) and then after a short delay 301 redirected to the homepage. I understand why they want to do this as they don't want to lose the traffic, but is this a problem with SEO and the index? Or will Google treat as a hard 404 anyway?

Many thanks

Hi there - thanks for your responses.

Robert - sorry, got my terminology wrong, I meant Moz's KWD tool (not KDS). Too may TLAs around! And I guess that's why I am unclear, as they are all Moz metrics but seem at odds with each other. So wondered whether I was missing something or whether the KWD metric needs to be taken with a pinch of salt.

The content is not good for the hoses, My client is taking some persuasion, and I was going to show him the KWD metric but it kinda says the opposite of what I am trying to tell him as makes it seem a good term to target. I'll just stick with showing him the returns. And get him to focus elsewhere as he won't want to do what is necessary!

EGOL - yes, I agree! I'll just need to work harder to convince him that being on page 1 for the term garden hose is not the be all and end all for him. We have other better directions we can go. I initially got quite excited at KWD 28 (this is the UK) but alas, not to be! I guess that is the danger of looking at any metric in isolation.

Keri - hmmm, I got the opposite once. I was asked when my baby was due to which I hissed 'I am not pregnant' - I felt quite sorry for the sales assistant as they were horrified !

Hi there

A KDS report question...

My client has a keyword with a low KDS (garden hose - 28). Intuitively this seemed too low, and when I checked what ranks, it is all high quality brand sites with high DAs. Admittedly the specific pages ranking have low PAs, but I can't see my client ever being able to compete with these big boys right now.

How come the KDS is so low? This seems just wrong as the metric implies it is a good keyword to target - I know there are always lots of other things to check, but this does make me less confident with KDS reporting

Anyone got any thoughts on this?

Many thanks

Many thanks guys

Hi Mozzers

I'm just doing an audit for a client and see that all non-trailing-slash URLs are 301'd to trailing-slash URLS. So far so good.

But then all the trailing-slash URLs are canonicalled back to the non-trailing-slash URLs.

This feels wrong to me, but is it? Never come across this before. Should the canonicals just be removed?

Any help much appreciated

Hi there

So you would provide lots of great and unique deals info on your site for your visitors before linking across to Expedia just to make the booking? If so that is fine and should not hurt your SEO at all.

If you are replicating Expedia content on your site then that is not so good. Just make sure all the descriptive content is unique and you'll be fine.

All the best, Wendy

Thanks Christy and Don

My clients blog is currently integrated into a subfolder. The current situation is:

www.mainsite.com - with 301 from non www version

mainsite.com/blog/ - with 301 going from www version

Are you saying this is not OK? Should they both be www or non www? Or should I not worry?

Will links going into the blog be helping the mainsite or are they working independently? As there is no duplication I think we are OK, but just wanted to check!

Many thanks

Hi Diana

I went through this same discussion with a client of mine. Only the other way round - ie should he go to local domains rather than the .com that he has. I did a lot of research and came up with the conclusion that local domains are great IF you have lots of local resource to support the site - for local content, local links, etc. If the resource is there then the main benefit is that people in each country often favour visiting sites with a country domain.

Otherwise, If the resource is not there then you are better off with a .com domain where the focus can go towards building overall authority for just 1 site rather than many - as you say, it helps with the link juice. Languages can be placed in subfolders (/de/ etc) and that way Google will know to return the correct version in the country Google version.

Hope that helps - good luck

Hi Mozzers

My client has their main site with www as the preferred version and utilises 301s for the non www version which is good.

For their integrated WP blog, they prefer the non www version, again utilising 301s.

So we have no duplicates, but is this different use of sub domains going to hurt SEO with regards to the links pointing in? ie do the links pointing into the blog benefit the main site or are we missing a trick and should change the blog to www?

Many thanks

Wendy

Thanks very much for the advice Rob, it does really help - and its good to hear I am not alone!

A lot of the links to the old site were due to newsworthy stuff - my client runs an industry tracking monitor - from the BBC and other authoritative sites, and some are still there. So as you say, definitely worth still 301ing - and maybe some juice will flow!! At the moment the links are simply going nowhere and error-ing!

Thanks!

Hi there

Would really appreciate your help in dealing with the following scenario:

My client is an authority brand in their sector. They were bought end 2011, and a new website was launched under the new owner's brand. For whatever reason no 301 redirects were put in place from the old site to the new site.

I am now auditing the new site and the traffic is pitifully low, way lower than they used to enjoy on the old site. The old site is defunct and Google is no longer indexing it. However OSE shows that the link profile of the old site was very good with thousands of good quality links, whilst it is non-existent for the new site.

I am thinking that even though Google does not index the old site, we should try and get access and put 301s in place on the old pages to help transfer across all the link juice to boost the new site.

Do you agree or am I missing something here? Will page rank be transferred across even though the old site is dead? What else could we do? Would change of domain in WMT help? Although how would that work for a defunct site?

We should probably 301 anyway as it would be good to ensure that folk following all those links can find my client's new site, but it would be great if page rank flowed too!

All ideas appreciated! Many thanks
Wendy

Hi there - I had found the tool eventually, but it was deeply buried! Why has it been demoted?

I just want to add that I too find this tool indispensable. I do a lot of one off site audits where there is no point setting up campaigns. So this tool is critical for me and I echo Karen, Tamara and Jeff's comments! Please don't take it away!!

Hi there

I'd like your opinions please!

My client currently has their website at

not-very-good-url.it which has a really good link profile

they also have duplicate sites at:

much-better-brand-name-url.it and

much-better-brand-name-url.com

but both these other sites have only a handful of links in.

How important do you think a better brand url is?

And therefore do you think it would be better to 301 to a better brand URL and take the risk that the link profile will get hit? Or leave the main site where it is and 301 the other two to it?

Many thanks

Thanks Andy

1. hmmm some of pages are pretty much ONLY made up of many different snippets of content all of which are appearing on other pages. It's a horrid theme, but the cost to change it may not be worth the ROI. Your suggestion to beef up content that we can is good though, so thanks

2. Reason given not to noindex was that top level category pages can be good for category keywords, but I have always thought the downsides of the dupe content would outway any benefits that category KW could bring - cos only really in URL, title and headings anyway

I have a couple of WordPress clients with the same issue but caused in different ways:

1. The Slash WP theme which is a portfolio theme, involves setting up multiple excerpts of content that can then be added to multiple pages. So although the pages themselves are not identical, there are the same snippets of content appearing on multiple pages

2. A WP blog which has multiple categories and/or tags for each post, effectively ends up with many pages showing duplicate excerpts of content. My view has always been to noindex these pages (via Yoast), but was advised recently not to.

In both these cases, even though the pages are not identical, do you think this duplicate content across multiple pages could cause an issue?

All thoughts appreciated

Hi jazavid

Another way you can check is to run a crawl test under the SEO Web Crawler Tool.

Open the results in Excel. You will see the Yes/No to duplicate content question in column L. Column M is headed up as 'URLs with Duplicate Page Content (up to 5)' For every URL that says Yes to duplicate content, you will see listed up to 5 other URLs that are considered as duplicate

Hope this helps

Canabalising is a tricky thing.

My thoughts - and these may not be 100% correct! - are as follows;

1. dog-collar

2. All depends on how the navigation works for your site, Do you have lots of categories under Dogs? Just list the sub categories and call this one 'dog collars'. You should be doing stuff to make sense to your site visitors as well as worrying about Google, and this makes sense

3. Your titles can hold up to 70 characters - you have plenty of space to make sure the titles are not duplicates even if they both start with Dog. Just make sure you use all your space and have it read well and not 'stuffed'

4. I would use anchor text that makes sense for the readers of wherever the link is being served. There has been all sorts of discussion on too much exact text anchor linking being penalised, but if you keep the readers in mind you should be OK. ie use the website URL when it makes sense. Or 'dogs', or even 'spiked dog collar' if you are actually describing it or talking about it on the website.

I hope this helps - good luck

Wendy

Great, many thanks guys - I will keep going with what I was intending to do!

Wendy

I am producing a long glossary of terms and want to make it easier to jump down to various terms.

I am using the<a id="anchor-text"  ="" attribute="" so="" am="" appending="" #anchor-text="" to="" a="" url="" reach="" the="" correct="" spot<="" p=""></a>

<a id="anchor-text"  ="" attribute="" so="" am="" appending="" #anchor-text="" to="" a="" url="" reach="" the="" correct="" spot<="" p="">Does anyone know whether Google will pick this up as separate duplicate pages?</a>

<a id="anchor-text"  ="" attribute="" so="" am="" appending="" #anchor-text="" to="" a="" url="" reach="" the="" correct="" spot<="" p="">If so any ideas on what I can do? Apart from not do it to start with? I am thinking 301s won't work as I want the URL to work. And rel=canonical won't work as there is no actual page code to add it to.

Many thanks for your help

Wendy</a>

Hi Eliz

You could just noindex the tag archives so in time they would drop out of the index.

The easiest way to do this is if you have an SEO plugin installed like Joast or All in One SEO. Both these plugins give you check boxes to tick saying you want to noindex tag archives (as well as lots of other stuff). You can also noindex categories and Archives which can give the same problem.

If you don't have one installed then I suggest you download Joast's.

Good luck

Wendy

Thanks n1ar

There are only 54 crawl errors and 1133 not selected so unfortunately that's not the problem

I thought it must be a dupe content issue but cannot find a tool that will help me identify what the pages actually are! I wondered whether they are pages blocked by robots.txt, as that shows as 0 but I know a load of WP pages are blocked. How did you manage to identify the pages when it happened to you?

And thanks for that article Keri - always good to know you are not alone!

Hi fellow mozzers

Has anyone seen a huge shift in the number of pages 'Not Selected' under Index Status in Google WMT, and been able to identify what the problem has been?

My new client recently moved their site to wordpress - and in doing so the number of pages 'not selected' rose from ~200 to ~1100, It was high before but is ridiculous now.

I am thinking there must be a new duplicate content issue which should be cleaned up in my quest to improve their SEO.

Could it be the good old WP tag/category issue? In which case I won't worry as Joost is doing its job of keeping stuff out of the index.

There are loads of image pages which could well appear as dupe as have no content on them (i do need to fix this), but Google is already indexing these so doesn't explain the ones 'not selected'.

I've tried checking dupe title tags but there are very few of them so that doesn't help

Any other ideas of how to identify what these problem pages maybe?

Thanks very much!

Wendy

Thanks Mike - no map when company is used either.

Think you are right though - focus elsewhere!

Hi guys

Does anyone have a gut feel for how often the Places search option is used via the left hand side menu of Google?

I have a non-slip solutions (flooring/decking etc) client. Google does not provide a 'local search' type results page even when the location is added to the search term. So I am thinking I should prioritise energies on the website and not local search activities (like citations).

But I am wondering how many searches are conducted using the Places option.

Any views?

Many thanks

Wendy

This issue was discussed on the Citations mozinar last night

Apparently Google gets very confused if what are effectively different businesses share the same telephone number. It keeps trying to merge accounts.

The recommendation provided was to ensure each business has a unique number and all should list OK

Hope that helps

Thanks Chad and activitysuper for your replies

Hi everyone

I am moving a blog from one site to another. I have all the 301 redirects etc under control, but my question has to do with image links in the blogs.

The image links all point over to the old site once the posts are copied over. Is this a major problem from an SEO perspective? Lots of links pointing out to an old site? It won't matter from the users perspective as I have 'none'  for the image URL, so the user will never know.

I will reload all the images if necessary but boy that will be a lot of work. Or is there a shortcut?

Thanks very much

Wendy

The pages behind the login? No not yet - they are a new client, so I am just auditing at the moment to identify what we need to do

Many thanks for your replies!

Hi Marisa

seomoz are crawling unecessary pages, (they return pages ignored by screaming frog for example)

BUT my concern is that if Google can also see them, even if they choose to ignore them my client maybe getting slammed for duplicate issues or the pages behind the login may suddenly appear in the index.

We'll get no index / no follow added, and fix the dupes, but am really interested as to how seomoz sees behind the login

Great, many thanks Nakul - they are a new client so am waiting on getting access to WMT - will go through with a fine tooth comb! Just seems really weird with regards to the pages behind the login ...

Hi there

My client's site is showing around 90 pages indexed in Google. The seomoz crawl is returning 1934 pages.

Many of the pages in the crawl are duplicates, but there are also pages which are behind the user login.

Is it theoretically correct to say that if a seomoz crawl finds all the pages, then Google has the potential to as well, even if they choose not to index?

Or would Google not see the pages behind the login? And how come seomoz can see the pages?

Many thanks in anticipation!

Wendy

great that's what I hoped - we are dealing with what's inside it!

Thank you

Hi there

My client has p class="seoText” in his html

Do you think this is something to get cleaned up? How much note does Google make of HTML? Will Google read this and 'think hold on a minute' do you think ... ?

Its small I know but trying to capture any advantage we can at the moment - there are other bigger things we are working on!

Thanks

Thanks Keri - that's it. We have the domain.com 301 redirecting to www.domain.com so guess we have it covered anyway

Cheers

Hello there

I have just compared some sites in Open Site Explorer.

The page domain, subdomain and domain stats are all different. I get the difference between page and domain stats. But why are the subdomain stats different? There are no subdomains on the site so I expected them to be the same.

What is my confused brain missing???

Many thanks

Wendy

Thanks very much everyone - very helpful.

Good point re page speed - the pages are certainly slow to load so this could well be due to the huge amount of js and bad code.

And yes, think the duplicate tags should be sorted - this shouldn't be difficult.

Has anyone got any tangible results that they've seen as a result of cleaning up js and code?

My client has a site that we are trying to optimise. However the code is really pretty bad.

There are 205 errors showing when W3C validating. The >title>, , <keywords> tags are appearing twice. There is truly excessive javascript. And everything has been put in tables.</keywords>

How much do you think this is really impacting the opportunity to rank? There has been quite a bit of discussion recently along the lines of is on-page SEO impacting anymore.

I just want to be sure before I recommend a whole heap of code changes that could cost her a lot - especially if the impact/return could be miniscule.

Should it all be cleaned up?

Many thanks

Thanks everyone - apart from following up on backlinks, will try the GWMT route and hope for the best!

Hi Neil

I have just checked this and am getting matching  figures

What metric and dimension have you set up your custom report on?

I used the metric as visits and dimension as source/medium - and then filtered on organic and the figures matched.

best

Wendy

My new client has had his URL for 8 years and built up good SEO, visitors and links. He has now lost it and the cost of getting it back is prohibitive.

Apart from contacting all the places he is currently getting links from, is there anything he can do to salvage SEO and site visitors? Is there anyway he can get 301s done if he no longer owns the URL?

If he starts again with a new URL, and loads all the new content on it, will submitting a site map help Google understand its not duplicate and all the content is just at a new URL?

He is hoping that contacting Google and explaining will help them "look kindly", but I have never heard anything like this happening!

Any ideas?

Many thanks