Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Slap to the forehead!

Of course that makes complete sense.

It's been a very long Monday.

Thanks for your help.

-Christina

I'm dealing with an eCommerce website which has a category, subcategory, products.

Moz is showing all of these and the individual products as missing a canonical.

The site is very thin on content at the moment, but all the pages are clearly different, and I don't see why they need a canonical unless this is some rule that eCommerce sites have to follow.

Should I ignore Moz's missing canonical report?

My understanding is if the product appears in multiple categories, then a canonical should be put in place to the product.

Any advice would be appreciated.

• Christina

Hi Nigel

Neither, they use server side filtering.Regards- David

Nigel,Thanks for the reply, the cgi-bin folder is never used by any of my sites but I put this in just as a matter of course, the folder would normally contain old cgi scripts so would not usually affect the crawling of a robot in any case.The reason for the problem turns out that our host had blocked rogerbot along with several other malicious bots, they have now lifted this block and the site is able to be crawled.- David

Our hosting provider has banned Rogerbot as they see it as problematic!!!!

They are a great hosting provider so this is going to be a difficult one.

Moz are reporting the robots.txt file is blocking them from crawling one of our websites.

But as far as we can see this file is exactly the same as the robots.txt files on other websites that Moz is crawling without problems.

We have never come up against this before, even with this site.

Our stats show Rogerbot attempting to crawl our site, but it receives a 404 error.

Can anyone enlighten us to the problem please?

http://www.wychwoodflooring.com

-Christina

Cheers Ioganr

That does make it easier for me to understand, I'll certainly be ready up on everyone's suggestions today and trying out a regex.

Thank you for your help.

Christina

Semalt are my biggest problem, I block them to find they are then using another domain name.

I get hit by them hundreds and on occasions thousands of times a month.

Do you know if GA considers them spam?

Cheers

Christina

Hi, thanks for your help.

I think who I consider spam and who GA considers spam could be very different.  Semalt are my biggest problem but they don't show up in Hostname (Audience > Technology > Network > Hostname)

And I'm not sure what I'm supposed to change within the text for the filter pattern, as suggested by the blog:

yourmaindomain.com|anotheruseddomain.com|payingservice.com|translatetool.com

Do I only need to change the first part (bold) to the host name?

Thanks again for any assistance you can give.

I'm working my way through Google Analytics adding filters to all Spam referrals.

1. Am I doing this correctly:-

Filter > Custom > Exclude - Campaign Source > Filter Pattern - Website address

2. I understand I can also strip out referral spam from past data

Can anyone tell me how to do this or direct me to a blog or article about this?

3. Who on earth are Semalt, and why do they keep changing their URL and bombarding our websites?

Appreciate any help.

Christina

We have had to do this to a couple of websites, but we put canonicals in place which saw no negative affects.

Have you checked out Google's Analytic's training, they have video about how to do this.  You should be able to access it from your analytic's account.

Also here is a link to Google Goals: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1032415?hl=en

Not sure if this is what you are after, we tend to set up goals in Google Analytics, we can then match that goal to our lead forms, all thanks to our great web developer.

I know you've asked someone else for this answer, but as it's something I think I can help with, I hope you both don't mind my answering it. If I'm trending on toes please let me know so I don't make the same mistake in future - Cheers Christina

Yes you need keywords, and the closer to the beginning of the title the better.

But unless the sentence of the title makes sense to the user then you are likely to have a lower CTR.

Think about your keyword and what the page is about.

As an example my title tag would simple say 'Web Design Company - DR Adept'.

A client (we designed their website) recently employed an SEO who required FTP access or access to the CMS.

We told the client they would need to take full responsibility for any updates the SEO carried out, otherwise, the SEO could send over the changes and we would put them in at no extra cost to the client.

The client didn't want to take responsibility and denied the SEO access to the CMS, and told the SEO to send over the completed work for us to put into the site.

The SEO was not happy with this arrangement, and didn't seem to understand that we needed to trust him before access was would be given at a future date.

Other SEO's have never had a problem with this arrangement, but this SEO claimed what they do is secret and for no one else to see.

SEO want's to proceed, client doesn't want to proceed, we are happy to update the website with the client's approval.  This particular client has a reputation for backing out of things.  Also from the initial client, SEO contact the SEO was ready to update the website within 24 hours.

Are we being unreasonable?

If you were doing well before this happened you could try news jacking and write an article which has a bit of news about Simon Covell's divorce but then goes on to give the reader advice.

Are the numerous Free SEO reports that are available around the internet, where I simply put a website address in and wait for the results actually any good?

I tend to stick with Moz & Semrush which takes a little time pulling all the information I need together, but many of our clients are being approached by SEO's waving these free reports at them.

Should I see these reports as valid, or ignore them and only concentrate on Moz.

Any views will be greatly appreciated.

-Christina

I've noticed this, but after the last algorithm update, the sites I kept my eye on dropped out of the search engines altogether.  And the others moved down off of page one.

We will certainly look into a staging server.

Although the web developer does some magic and I'm not usually updating the live site.

You either have to comply to their guidelines or use a different method to grow your business such as using social media.

If your website isn't that powerful then changing title tags can drop the sites rankings for that set of keywords if you are looking for an exact match.

The titles you are proposing seem relevant, and there isn't that big a change so your rankings should be ok.

Before changing title tags I usually test keywords in PPC to see which have better CTRs.  I also pay a lot of attention to the terms my clients use and not what people within my industry use.