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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 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

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 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

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'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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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