Questions created by corwin
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Webmaster tool parameters
Hey forum, About my site, idealchooser.com. Few weeks ago I've defined a parameter "sort" at the Google Webmaster tool that says effect: "Sorts" and Crawl: "No URLs". The logic is simple, I don't want Google to crawl and index the same pages with a different sort parameter, only the default page without this parameter. The weird thing is that under "HTML Improvement" Google keeps finding "Duplicate Title Tag" for the exact same pages with a different sort parameter. For example: /shop/Kids-Pants/16//shop/Kids-Pants/16/?sort=Price/shop/Kids-Pants/16/?sort=PriceHi These aren't old pages and were flagged by Google as duplicates weeks after the sort parameter was defined. Any idea how to solve it? It seems like Google ignores my parameters handling requests. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | corwin0 -
Image Maps
Hey forum, I'm curious about Image Maps. Few things I'm not sure about: 1. Will the links be followed? If so, will Google respect rel="nofollow"? 2. Will the image be considered 1 image? (indexed as image, etc.) Or will each map segment be treated as a separate image? 3. Any other SEO pros\cons to consider when adding an image map to an existing page? Thanks, Corwin.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | corwin0 -
Soft 404
Hey forum, My site is a Price Comparison site. Lately I've been getting some "Soft 404" errors with the Webmaster tool. I'll try to explain the steps causing it: 1. There's a valid link to a product 2. At some point the product is temporary out of stock or unavailable. 3. Google crawls this product page, getting a valid page with a message explaining this product is unavailable at this time. 4. Google see this page for few different products and (I assume) figures it's a none existing page and so it's a soft 404. The possible solutions I see are: 1. Return real 404, I'm not a fan of this solution, because these links will very likely be valid again when the product is back in stock. 2. Live with some "soft 404" errors in the webmaster tool. 3. Find another way to explain to Google that it's not a real 404. This sounds great but I'm not sure how this can be done. Any thoughts which would be the best method? Or maybe another solution I haven't thought of? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | corwin0 -
Rewriting URL
I'm doing a major URL rewriting on our site to make the URL more SEO friendly as well as more comfortable and intuitive for our users. Our site has a lot of indexed pages, over 250k. So it will take Google a while to reindex everything. I was thinking that when Google Bot encounters the new URLs, it will probably figure out it's duplicate content with the old URL. At least until it recrawls the old URL and get a 301 directing them to the new URL. This will probably lower the ranking of every page being crawled. Am I right to assume this is what will happen? Or is it fine as long as the old URLs get 301 redirect? If it is indeed a problem, what's the best solution? rel="canonical" on every single page maybe? Another approach? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | corwin0 -
Slash at the end of a url
I keep reading contradicting information, so I figured I'll ask here. What's the best practice for slash '/' at the end of a URL? Should it be idealchooser.com/search/laptop/ or idealchooser.com/search/laptop (no trailing slash)? The options: 1. Accept both equally 2. Accept 1 and redirect the other with 301 3. Accept 1 and treat the other as a wrong URL returning 404 Which would be the best for SEO? Thank you.
On-Page Optimization | | corwin0 -
Slowing down SEOmoz Crawl Rate
Is there a way to slow down SEOmoz crawl rate? My site is pretty huge and I'm getting 10k pages crawled every week, which is great. However I sometimes get multiple page requests in one second which slows down my site a bit. If this feature exists I couldn't find it, if it doesn't, it's a great idea to have, in a similar way to how Googlebot do it. Thanks.
Moz Pro | | corwin0 -
Major SERP Fluctuation
I'm working on iDeal Chooser, a Comparison Shopping site and we've been having a weird problem with some of our major keywords on Google for the past couple of months. We keep moving between the first page of the results to disappearing completely. For example a Google search for "price drop alerts" returns idealchooser.com as result 3-5 for a while and suddenly doesn't return us at all, then we are back to the top results only to disappear again later. We can't figure out what causes it, we didn't see any pattern and it seems completely random. We can be the 4th result for 2 weeks and suddenly we are gone for another 2 weeks. SEOmoz PRO had some good SEO suggestions which we implemented, however nothing that could explain this and even after fixing these issues this weird behavior continues. Any idea will be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
Algorithm Updates | | corwin0