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Thanks for the RE.
About redirecting pages that don't exist anymore, I thought of doing that, however isn't that what the 404 page is for? I was going to redirect all other pages to the root, but that would likely mean we'd never get a 404 response.
Maybe I'm not understanding the programming logic involved in something like that.
Hey guys,
We're doing a total revamp of our site and will be completely changing our navigation structure. Similar pages will exist on the new site, but the URLs will be totally changed. Most incoming links just point to our root domain, so I'm not worried about those, but the rest of the site does concern me.
I am setting up 1:1 301 redirects for the new navigation structure to handle getting incoming links where they need to go, but what I'm wondering is what is the best way to make sure the SERPs are updated quickly without trashing my domain quality, and ensuring my page and domain authority are maintained.
The old links won't be anywhere on the new site. We're swapping the DNS record to the new site so the only way for the old URLs to be hit will be incoming links from other sites.
I was thinking about creating a sitemap with the old URLs listed and leaving that active for a few weeks, then swapping it out for an updated one. Currently we don't have one (kind of starting from the bottom with SEO)
Also, we could use the old URLs for a few weeks on the new site to ensure they all get updated as well. It'd be a bit of work, but may be worth it.
I read this article and most of that seems to be covered, but just wanted to get the opinions of those who may have done this before. It's a pretty big deal for us.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/uncrawled-301s-a-quick-fix-for-when-relaunches-go-too-well
Am I getting into trouble if I do any of the above, or is this the way to go?
PS: I should also add that we are not changing our domain. The site will remain on the same domain. Just with a completely new navigation structure.
Thanks for the RE Cyrus. One of my architects and I came to a similar conclusion, but it's definitely good to hear it from another source in the SEO community on the development side of things.
We decided to implement a side-wide rel=canonical to the http URLs to avoid duplication issues, as well as ensure resources are using relative links.
I'm hoping this solves each issue with minimal impact!
If you're just getting started, I'd recommend the Beginner's Guide - http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo
Also - You'll want to make sure you've 301 redirected all of your pre-existing .asp URLs to your new .php URLs. You'll lose all of your incoming links with the URL changes unless you are using an extensionless structure.
Any more input here? Are there any issues with using a sitewide rel=canonical to avoid the duplication of our https URLs?
First - stay calm. Is your traffic noticeably dropping? Have you been penalized in any way in the SERPs? If not, you might just be experiencing regular fluctuations and have nothing to worry about. Look at that first.
Next, I'm assuming you have a Pro campaign set up.
The first course of action there would be to analyze your warnings, errors and notifications to minimize those. Fix the low-hanging fruit there and move on. Next, make sure you're following proper on-page SEO architecture throughout your site. Proper titles, H1s, interlinking, hierarchy, sitemapping, etc.
Now analyze your link profile. Do you have a lot of low quality links? If so, you may need to do some cleanup.
Additionally, you're in an e-commerce sector, so you may also want to check out the most recent Pro webinar - http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/ecommerce-seo-fix-and-avoid-common-issues
There are a number of things that can contribute to this. Without more information, all I can tell you is to start with the basics and move up. Have you made any significant changes lately?
Thanks for the RE, but I'm not sure that answers my question. I'm looking for best practice information about how to build https content. The noindex tip is good. I'll do that. Just wondering how the back end should work to make sure I don't get "insecure content" warnings.
Hi Mozzers - I'm having an issue with https content on my site that I need help with.
Basically we have some pages that are meant to be secured, cart pages, auth pages, etc, and then we have the rest of the site that isn't secured. I need those pages to load correctly and independently of one another so that we are using both protocols correctly.
Problem is - when a secure page is rendered the resources behind it (scripts, etc) won't load with the unsecured paths that are in our master page files currently.
One solution would be to render the entire site in https only, however this really scares me from an SEO standpoint. I don't know if I want to put my eggs in that basket.
Another solution is to structure the site so that secure pages are built differently from unsecured pages, but that requires a bit of re-structuring and new SOPs to be put in place.
I guess my question is really about best practices when using https.
It's hard to pick your exact question out of that long paragraph. I would imagine that's why you haven't gotten any replies.
Could you briefly summarize in one or two sentences what your question is?
In the local search realm, you want to have every directory listing exactly the same as it appears on your contact page. This allows search engines to associate those listings with your business without a doubt. As a good practice, I'd go ahead and make sure they all match, especially Google Places vs. your client's Contact Us page on their website.
Also, Penguin hit directories pretty hard. There is no penalization going on from what I have read, but there has been some major devaluation in links. It's likely the case that your client is not getting nearly as much weight from the directory links as they once were. Check out the link profile and see how many of these there are. I would imagine more reputable links now need to be acquired.
About the places listing, I'm not sure why that would occur, but it really doesn't matter for the end result here. If the Big G says you need to re-verify I would do it. It's a quick thing to do and that can't be helping their rankings.
Awesome. Thanks for all the clear answers guys. Sounds like pretty simple stuff. Just never done a site this graphically intense before.
Appreciate it!!
Hi guys. We're in the process of building a new site, and are using a lot of icon based linking, image linking, etc. There is some basic text linking here and there, but not a whole lot.
My concern is, because I'm not using actual anchor text, but just images, that crawlers are going to have a more difficult time determining what pages are about.
Do I have a valid concern, or am I just worrying about nothing?
If this concern is valid, what is the best way to remedy this concern? Alt img tags?
Thanks guys. This is an interesting case indeed. Maybe it's just me being an SEO, but I tend to look at the URL on a good majority of the pages I hit. I don't want to confuse my users or provide them with inaccurate information.
.4mm and 4mm is a big difference.
I'm going to try out the decimal point and see how it behaves. I'll report back once we get the pages up.
I'm in the process of creating new product specific URLs for my company. Some of our products have decimals in them for their names as a unit of measurement.
For example - .The URL for a 050" widget would be something like:
http://www.example.com/product/category/.050-inch-widget
My question is - Can I use a decimal in the URL without ticking off the search engines, and/or causing any other unexpected effects?
Sounds like solid advice to me. I'm very glad I attended today. I was about to pull the trigger on 75+ redirects 
Thanks for taking the time to Chime in Dr. Pete and thanks to Robert as well for the great answer.
Thanks for the suggestion.
This may work for some, but we're not really looking to create any kind of mini-sites. With the way the trends are going it seems that having one property is going to be the way to go, unless there is a really good reason to separate your brands, which, in our case, there is not.
Seems solid to me. Kinda what I was thinking, but also looking forward to other replies. This seems to be something there is a lot of confusion about. Appreciate the input Robert.
So I had asked this question a while back in a previous thread and thought I had the correct answer to it, but just actually heard differently on a webinar by Dr. Pete.
Basically, we have a large number of domains that just replicate our website. Some are brand names, some are exact match keyword domains, some are clever plays on words. This is a tactic that our marketing department thought was a good idea. Obviously its not.
My question is - Some of these domains actually have a significant amount of link value coming into them. How people found them I'm not sure, but nonetheless, I want to try to take advantage of the incoming links somehow if possible.
Dr. Pete recommended against 301 redirecting back to our main domain all at once because that would be a signal to Google that something fishy is going on.
This is what I was going to do, but now I'm really not sure what to do now... If possible, it would be great to get Dr. Pete in this thread to get his comments. I wasn't able to get an answer on the SEO in 2012 Pro Webinar.
You may want to check out the Beginner's Guide section on linking
http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/basics-of-search-engine-friendly-design-and-development
Looks like a good start to me.
The content strategy is solid. Just be sure you're creating good high quality content that people will want to read and share. You'll probably see the most results from linkbuilding. You may want to work in a social aspect as well. Twitter and Facebook are great ways to spread your content like wildfire. The 2011 rankings report showed a strong correlation between Facebook shares and rise in rankings.
One thing you may want to think about is instead of thinking of this as an SEO campaign, think of SEO as something you constantly do, assuming you have the resources to do so. To me, campaigns are like diets. If you "go on a diet" at some point you'll probably go off of that diet and gain all the weight back.
If you "do a campaign" you'll at some point reach the end of that campaign and your rankings will start to diminish.
Could you just handle this on the end state page - i.e. where the redirect points?
Welcome to example.com, formerly example2.com - etc.
Yea, that's on the list to do. The site is about halfway finished so there is still a lot of errands to take care of such as that. Sitemapping is something I haven't done a lot of in the past so I'm not fully aware of all of it's benefits.
So to be clear using that method I can generate a sitemap that will create every possible page that can be generated from those parameters, then they'll be crawled?
Is there anything additional I can do to ensure they are crawled? I suppose I could do a writeup of each product over time in our blog and link to them that way.
Hey guys,
I've got an issue with a site I'm working on. A big chunk of the content (roughly 500 pages) is delivered using parameters on a dynamically generated page. For example:
www.domain.com/specs/product?=example - where "example' is the product name
Currently there is no way to get to these pages unless you enter the product name into the search box and access it from there.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but unless we find some other way to link to these pages they're basically invisible to search engines, right?
What I'm struggling with is a method to get them indexed without doing something like creating a directory map type page of all of the links on it, which I guess wouldn't be a terrible idea as long as it was done well.
I've not encountered a situation like this before. Does anyone have any recommendations?
I think you mean canonicalization.
With the way your permalink structure is set up, no, you don't need to tag your posts with an exact match of the title. You're already going to have an exact match of the title in your URL.
In fact, I wouldn't ever recommend doing this. If you match the title of every one of your blog posts with a tag you're going to have a unique tag out there for every single blog post, with just one article in it. That's not very useful if you ask me and is definitely going to cause duplicate content issues.
I tend to think of tags as more of a way for my user to navigate my blog - which is what they're really meant for. If I click a tag (unless a blog is really young) I expect to see want to multiple articles related to that tag so I can read more about that topic.
One last tip - Check out theYoast SEO Plugin for some help with Wordpress canonicalization management. It really helps when you're using tags and categories - http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/
That's an extremely large question and it's going to depend on a lot of things.
It's great that you're taking action, but as Big Bazza said, be careful as you do so. SEO has changed a lot in the last couple of years, and will continue to do so until it becomes a more mature industry (which will be many many years in the future.
Rather than us tell you what your course of action should be, I would recommend educating yourself and developing a continuous education system for yourself so you stay up to date - reading blogs like SEOMoz, Distilled, Search Engine Land, etc.
After reading the beginner's guide and getting a feel for what SEO is really all about in June 2011 (it may very well be different in July 2011) and becoming familiar with the bascis, I would recommend reading Danny Dover's (a former SEOMoz employee) SEO Secrets. It'll take you down the intermediate road to SEO methodology.
You may also want to check out the newest Search Engine Ranking Factors report from SEOMoz - http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#predictions-2
As well as the Webinar which will cover it - which takes place tomorrow!! - http://www.seomoz.org/webinars
SEO is a very broad skillset, but if you really like it, you can become really great at just a couple of parts of it and be an extremely valuable asset to any organization.
Good luck and glad to have you on board.
Sounds like more of a user issue than an SEO issue really. Personally I would let them choose. You don't know what language someone is going to prefer. I'd go for the root domain.
If you want to disable comments you can do that in the discussion settings. There is no need to mess with any code.
Check out Yoast SEO plugin for canonicalization in Wordpress. That'll make sure all of your SEO is going to one page. Wordpress notoriously duplicates pages when you use categories.
I'm not sure where your 404 error is coming from, but I do know that when you play with the code in wordpress you can mess things up easily if you don't know exactly what you're doing. It's happened to me on more than one occasion
Eeek. Sounds like one of those 5 signs that you've got a bad SEO client.
I'd be compelled to ask your client why he/she thinks this is a good business decision. Obviously the sheer quantity of followers you have isn't going to do a darn thing unless those followers are organic and relative to your business. It's just going to inflate his follower count artificially and add no value to the business.
I'd say the risks are worse than the rewards...
Yep. I use all in one SEO pack for meta descriptions. Remember meta tags aren't as much about SEO as they are about creating a compelling cilckable intro when it comes to blogs. Often times Google is going to use your meta content for the text below your title on the SERPs pages. Write some compelling copy there and you'll see positive results.
Yoast is nice too. I find it useful for canonicalization.
This is all assuming you're using Wordpress of course
Webtrends has a pretty awesome tracking tool for Facebook. It'll run you a pretty penny but it's pretty incredible.
If this is one client, unless they are separate business entities, hands down it should be one site. It's A LOT easier to SEO one site than it is three, and your work is going to pay off a lot more as well.
I'm guessing this is because this is a site with a lot of links. The more links you have on one page, the less weight each one of them passes. He's probably just trying to pass as much juice as possible by nofollowing the duplicate links in the images.
It looks ok to me - built pretty well from what I can tell. I pulled up an OSE report on your http://www.minespress.com/category/golf-shirts link and it shows no data. This is probably just an issue of OSE not having data for that deep down in your site.
Here is what OSE will tell you if no data is available for a URL.
No Data Available for this URL
Although our index is large, there are a number of reasons why we may not have data for the page you've requested. These can include:
Recency of Page Creation:
Linkscape crawls the web constantly, but we update the index only once every 30-40 days. Thus, pages and links created since the last index update won't be available until we've seen them. A typical timeline for getting a page/site included in Linkscape is 45-60 days, sometimes less for very important or well-linked-to pages.
Deep Down in the Web:
Our crawl focuses on a breadth-first approach, and thus we nearly always have content from the homepage of websites, externally linked-to pages and pages higher up in a site's information hierarchy. However, deep pages that are buried beneath many layers of navigation are sometimes missed and it may be several index updates before we catch all of these.
Blocked Pages:
If our crawlers or data sources are blocked from reaching your URLs, they may not be included in our index (though links that points to those pages will still be available)
No Links:
the URLs seen by Linkscape must be linked-to by other documents on the web or our index will not include them.
If anyone else catches anything that I'm missing please feel free to say so. I can't see any problems though.
Interesting question - Just wondering what the application could be for the answer?
Search queries are going to be done with a keyword, which means the results that are returned are going to be the pages that are most relevant to that keyword. I don't really think you can put a standalone value on the most important page on your site without factoring in Google's primary method of relevance - the search terms.
Perhaps you could tell us what you hope to gain by learning the answer to this question and we can be more helpful to you.
If you're asking if the shift alone is going to affect you I'm not really familiar enough with either platform to tell you if one is better at SEO than the other. But I can tell you this.
The learning curve of the functionality of a new CMS will no doubt have an effect on your SEO if you're not up to speed with how it works and how to best utilize it.
I would advise you to become as familiar as possible with your new CMS before porting over to it. Try to get a trial of some sort and ensre it has all of the SEO features you need. Make sure all of your questions about SEO functionality are answered before you take the change live.
Lot's of good questions in here. I'll do my best to answer a few.
Most main level navigation on Wordpress themes is going to be across the top, or on the right side with a category widget. The reason being because this is basically the paradigm for blog content. Content appears on the left to maximize the viewing area to how we read (left to right), and main navigation appears up top to make better use of the limited real estate we have to create the site (for things like CTA graphics and such). You'll be hard pressed to find a theme with left-hand navigation, as most sites are migrating away from this structure nowadays.
Main page navigation is very important to search engines. A link in the main navigation of a site makes a page stand out to the search engines as being quite important, and also delivers a lot of link juice to the subsequent page. Keep in mind you can only have so many links in your main navigation before your user experience suffers. If something is important on your site and you can link to it from the main navigation (such as your main products page) you should give it a link in the main navigation.
There is some debate about jQuery. It's really cool for nice navigation schemes, but can get sticky as to whether or not bots can read it. Google is taking steps to be able to, and can read it given you use simple enough coding, but if you can do it with CSS, you'd be smart to do so. You don't want to get stuck hoping Google can read your site.
The thing with footer links is this - They used to be valuable for SEO because you could have a bunch of links on your homepage that would link throughout the whole site. Now search engines are devaluing them because a lot of sites were abusing them. However, they're still quite useful for a quasi site map. They're used now for more of a user experience thing than an SEO thing.
Also always always keep in mind that not all designers (in fact very few) are SEO savvy. Just because you see it in a lot of designs doesn't make it right for SEO.
Well explained. Traffic increasing SEO is definitely an indirect result of the higher activity a site increases - as long as it's quality traffic.
To elaborate on what Ryan said, if you're going to adversite, make sure it's going to be high quality traffic that is going to want to interact with your site. Traffic alone won't help. It has to be suited to your audience so they'll like, share, talk about your site, etc.
That's what is going to help you win the uphill battle.
To clarify - It's a popularity thing to me. It's not directly related to overall traffic, but if a site gets more traffic, it's going to be talked about more, linked to more, etc, which increases SEO.
That's what I was getting at. Guess I didn't make that clear 
This is giving you a score of the popularity and trust of the links. Links that are more popular and that have more trust will provide you with better link juice than those with low popularity and low trust.
These pages should be helpful for you.
Sounds like a result of the Panda update. Is this syndicated content or original content? From the looks of it it may be syndicated, or at least some of it.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/fat-pandas-and-thin-content
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/googles-farmer-update-analysis-of-winners-vs-losers
It also looks like the point of the site is less to give the visitor good content and more to attempt to collect ad revenue. The adblocks go well past the actual content of the site in many places, and they're on both sides of the blog. The domain authority is a 19, which tells me this site is in no shape to have as many ads as it does. This is no doubt being punished.
You may also want to run a crawl with the Campaign tool to check for duplicate content issues if you're not using a canonicalization plugin.
Of course they take traffic into account. The more traffic a site has the higher the likelihood is that it is going to move up in the rankings. Some traffic is more valuable than others. If a site is getting a ton of traffic, but it's all just bouncing back to the previous page or bouncing back to the SERP, then that traffic isn't going to be as valuable as traffic that flows through and interacts with a site.
Do you mean do they rank pages based on how much traffic is flowing through from each link? Perhaps you could be more specific with your question and exactly what you mean by do they "look at traffic".
There's no way that I know of to adjust the frequency of their crawl. I'd put in a call to support about this. You'll get a much quicker response from SEOMoz staff there than you will here.
I don't know what the rest of that passage says, but I don't see in that excerpt how the author says they should be separate. All he is saying is what a blog is meant to accomplish.
It can still be a part of your site, hosted on your domain, without being fully and completely integrated with all of the pages. It can look a little different, have a different feel about it, etc, but still be run within the parameters of your website.
If you're wondering if you get any SEO benefit from this, I would say the benefits are going to be indirect in the form of more traffic to your pages eventually causing your rankings to climb, etc, but I don't think you're going to see any direct benefit such as ranking higher for those keywords on your own site.