If you haven't seen it already, watch his full MozCon 2012 video here for free: http://moz.com/blog/2012-mozcon-videos-are-here It's the second big image link on the page. It's priceless.
![danatanseo danatanseo](/community/q/assets/uploads/profile/34768-profileavatar-1619579473149.png)
Posts made by danatanseo
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RE: What is rds?
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RE: A Serious drop in Pages crawled per day
Yes, well there are a couple of things to consider and test.
First and foremost, check your GWT code and make sure that nothing's change. Same with Google Analytics.
Have you changed platforms?
If not, I would say it's "Hoy Crap Batman" time and you need to start analyzing everything. What's your Pagespeed? Is your site online? If so, was it offline earlier in the week? (Maybe you weren't checking every minute) If your site is hosted by someone else, get on the phone and demand some answers.
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How do I follow more people on Twitter?
Hi my Moz friends,
I like following all of you, a lot! Because I like following you all so much, but not so many of you like following ME, I have been cut off by Twitter and I'm not allowed to follow any more people until I have more people following ME.
Sad Face
I am sure that more than a few of you have been in this scenario. What should I do? I could dump 10-20 followers but that 's not going to be enough to pacify the Twitter Gods!
Thanks guys,
Dana
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RE: What is rds?
I think Wesley is right. "RDs" mean "linking root domaind" which means the number of root domains (not individiual pages) that are linking to your site (URL). I believe you are seeing this via the Mozbar in Firefox, is that correct?
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RE: Plural of exact domain name
This is really a case by case thing I think. Clearly, "cars.com" is a great domain name to rank for the word "car." But who wants to rank for the word "car?" Certainly not someone who's selling cars. If you're selling cars you might want to rank for longer rail terms containing the singular "car" - like "buy a new car." But let Wikipedia rank for the plain old word "car" because it's not going to bring you well-qualified traffic.
The second example you give "online datings" is just not what any person fluent in English would type in a search bar. In this example, I'd say definitely don't go for the plural.
You should be able to see the difference in search volume between the singular and the plural in Google's Keyword Tool. That should tell you a lot. For example, look at the search volume difference between "communion supplies" and "communion supply" - there's a big difference.
The last reason I would discourage you from buying a plural version of a niche you are interested would be if the existing company has made a brand out of the singular version. For example, Peet's coffee has the domain Coffee.com - Some blogger has bought the domain Coffees.com...and it's totally lame...If you aren't careful with things like this you could get accused of cybersquatting or worse, trademark infringement. It's one of those situations where just because you "can" doesn't mean you "should."
Without knowing more details that's about as much as I can say. I hope it's somewhat helpful!
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RE: City Gird.... Have you heard of it? Do you like it?
Thanks for posting this question. I found them the other day and thought their business model was a lot like getlocal.org
I actually talked to one of their reps and told them I was familiar with their competitor (getlocal), the rep had no idea who getlocal.ord was...It kind of made me feel like they are more interested in getting my money than educating their salespeople about their brand and value proposition. I also questioned the rep and asked why their system was showing that our business wasn't listed in the Yahoo Directory when I know full well that it is. He didn't really have a good answer for that, other than to say maybe we weren't categorized properly, but we are categorized properly. So, right off the bat I was a little skeptical.
It would be great to hear others' eperiences, especially since the CityGrid rep has been calling me every single day asking me if I'm ready to commit yet.
I'm very interested to know what other folks here have to say. FYI - The base CityGrid subscription is $500/year...but that doesn't include the cost of getting listed in some paid directories (like Yahoo) or getting enhanced listings at places like Manta.
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RE: Setting Up Title Tags for Multipe Locations and Products
I would do some keyword research to find out how people looking for your printing services are searching. Are they typing the city first? I don't know. I know from my own searching that when I'm looking for a local business or service I usually tag the city on the end...but that's just me. For example if I'm looking for a new Dentist, I would type "dentist olympia wa"
But don't trust my searching habits, do a little keyword research to find out which combination wins out in search volume. Good luck!
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RE: Any Suggestions For My Site?
Great! Yes, it's a quick and easy fix. I also think Jared's suggestion of adding Structured Data markup is an excellent one.
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RE: Setting Up Title Tags for Multipe Locations and Products
This isn't really an answer about the structure of the title tags. It's more of an observation and comment. If your current title tag is this: Austin 4 X 6 Postcard Printing, Full Color Postcard Prints - nameofcompany.com, unless your company name is zero characters, your titles aren't fully displaying in Google. Google truncates, or in some cases completely replaces title tags that are over 60 characters.
That being said, my suggestion would be to make it: 4 X 6 Full Color Postcard Printing | Austin Texas
This makes the city clearly a "city" and not the name of a design choice for a postcard.
Just my thoughts. Hope that helps a little!
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RE: Any Suggestions For My Site?
Yes, there is something you can definitely do to help the SEO and the accessibility of your site. You need to write "alt" attributes for all of your images. Right now they all say the same thing "image description" - That's really bad. They should each be unique and describe the content of the image. This is the very first thing I would do, and the sooner the better.
Hope that helps!
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RE: Search traffic decline after redesign and new URL
Experiencing a drastic drop in traffic immediately after and often for several months after a redesign/replatform is extremely common. I have seen scenarios where traffic dropped as much as 75% for as long as 4-5 months before beginning to recover. There are so many issues involved in a re-platform and so many possibilities for why and where things may have gone a little astray that pin-pointing any one thing may just be impossible.
That being said, I feel your pain! As a fellow in-house SEO I am sure there is a lot of pressure on you from stakeholders to "fix the Website." We are going to be re-platforming within the coming months and one of my main jobs has been to educate everyone on the potential hit we will take.
If it's any consolation at all, I have seen companies power through that dip and come out way better on the other side. But I've never seen it happen instantly. You may want to discuss strategies like possibly increasing PPC or other paid marketing campaigns to get the company through until things start improving. Ideally, this is a discussion you have before the replatform takes place, but it sounds to me like to came on board after the move had already taken place.
Do what you can to find any potential technical SEO problems, but also encourage your colleagues not to panic and to develop some other campaigns that can bring in traffic until things start to improve.
That was more of a pep talk than anything concrete in terms of help. I know. But Sometimes it just helps to know that what you are experiencing is par for the course for any platform change or site migration.
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RE: No Follows - Sister/manufacturer sites
IMHO in this specific situation I don't think it matters a whole lot, one way or the other. As long as you don't have a page filled with 500 manufacturers and you're linking to all of them, which would be horrible for your users, I really don't think it matters.
Regarding whether or not you should have the manufacturers who've been gracious enough to link to you put "nofollow" on your links? Please don't do that. The business relationship you have naturally warrants a link. If they've been kind enough to give you a regular link, thank them and move on. If you have manufacturers who aren't linking to you and you think they probably should, contact them and ask them for a link. We do this all of the time. We deal with many manufacturer who don't sell directly to the public. They often include a directory that allows regular consumers to "Contact a Local Dealer" or "Find a Reseller Near You." Asking to be included in that type of directory is a completely natural business relationship. Whether that link is rel="nofollow" or not doesn't matter nearly as much as making sure potential customers searching in that manufacturer's directory can find you there and click through to your site.
Regarding "nofollow" of your links out to sister sites or other manufacturers, I would make that decision based on what you want your visitors to do. Do you really want them to go visit these other sites? If so, leave off the "nofollow." If you are simply referencing another site within your content, or to make people aware that you carry specific brands, you might want to use rel="nofollow" You might also consider just mentioning them in the text without a link at all (if your goal isn't really to funnel traffic to their site).
I hope that helps a little!
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RE: Weird 404 Errors
Yes, I have seen this problem before. Bradley and Michael are both correct in that it had something to do with relative versus absolute URLs. In our case, it was being caused because we had relative URLs in all of our canonical tags. As soon as we fixed them to absolute URLs the strange looking 404 errors went away. Hope that helps!
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RE: Is www.domain.com/page the same url as www.domain.com/page/ for Google? (extra slash at end of url)
My favorite article on this subject is Maile Ouye's "To Slash or Not to Slash" in the Official Google Webmaster's blog.
While you might be able to initiate a 301 redirect for the scenario you mentioned: www.domain.com/page/ versus www.domain.com/page , it's worth noting that Maile says:
"If both slash and non-trailing-slash versions contain the same content and each returns 200, you can:.....Rest assured that for your root URL specifically, http://example.com is equivalent to http://example.com/ and can’t be redirected even if you’re Chuck Norris."
Rarely does a Googler state something that clearly.
Definitely one of my favorite quotes from the Webmasters' Blog!
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RE: Terms of Service
I agree with Nakul and Keri.
I think there are probably a lot of folks here who don't have any idea about the FTC disclosure (and a lot that do). Could either one of you summarize its purpose and how to implement it properly?
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RE: I do not want all my META descriptions to be unique.
I agree with Allen. I would add that if the content of those 20 pages is so similar that they all should have the same meta description that could be a really bad thing. Pages don't need to be verbatim identical to be considered duplicate content. Google can consider them duplicates for content that is substantially similar, even if every word on the page is different. Check out Eric Enge's interview with Matt Cutts on this subject: http://www.stonetemple.com/matt-cutts-and-eric-talk-about-what-makes-a-quality-site/
I am hoping that these pages are indeed, 20 unique pages. If so, Allen is absolutely right. Go after what's unique about each one of those pages and you'll gather a wider range of potential traffic. If they aren't really unique pages, you're just cannibalizing your content and in the end, not really helping your own cause.
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RE: Product Colours change on ecommerce store... similar descriptions.
I agree with Chris. In the specific example of coffeemakers, I would run a simple usability test (i.e. via http://www.usertesting.com). Have your visitors shop both ways and see which they prefer.
Personally, for things like coffeemakers or even clothing, I have an expectation that if other colors are available I am going to be able to select that color from one drop down menu on a core product page
Chris's point about potential cannibalization issues is a very good one too.
Hope that helps!
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RE: Is The Pro Account (300 Keywords) PER Campaign or Overall??
Thanks for the endorsement!
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RE: Who knew Penguins were so scary?
We saw no positive or negative impact from Penguin 1.0. interestingly enough.
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RE: Who knew Penguins were so scary?
Am I the only SEO on the planet who is basking in the afterglow of the most recent Penguin update? The main site for which I do in-house SEO picked up 72 newly ranking terms in one day with this most recent update. Hallelujah! It's about time some hard work started to pay off! The best thing? They aren't just any 72 keywords, they are 72 targeted keywords. Love it!
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RE: Need very urgent advice on Wedsite Migration questions please.
Hi Marshall,
The advice I have for you is broad and probably more philosophical in nature than the technical and logistical advice that you are seeking. I am chiming in because my company is in the process (or soon to be in the process) of moving to a platform. It's not as serious as a migration (moving from one domain to another), but still, some of the same issues apply.
- If you can afford it, hire a consultant who has successfully migrated sites from Joomla to WordPress to help you iron out details.
- Prepare to endure a big dip in traffic and business that may be prolonged (5-6 months), and, honestly, from which you may never completely recover.
- Determine now what resources and strategies you are going to use to power through this dip and keep traffic coming to your site [i.e. Google Adwords, Remarketing campaigns, offline advertising like print and radio, etc)
- If you report to someone who is directing this move, be sure you are managing their expectations. I can almost guarantee you that at least initially, you are going to lose the positioning you currently have.
Keep this in mind, it's possible to do absolutely everything right during a migration and still experience some really negative repurcussions. As with any major business move, there will inevitably be problems come up that you didn't anticipate. Hopefully, you already balanced the pros and cons of a move before making the decision to do so.
That being said, if you've got a solid business plan and solid business model, you should be able to power through the inevitable "dip" and come out better on the other site.
I'm sure there are a number of people here who could recommend consultants who have experience in this type of migration. I'd say the investment would be very worthwhile.
Dana
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RE: Is anyone here managing or doing SEO for a site using GoECart?
Thanks so much for responding. I posted a response but it didn't get posted here which is weird so I wonder if Q & A is somewhat broken at the moment.
Are you able to share the URL of your GoECart store? Also, can you share what platform you were on prior to switching platforms?
If you can't share it here that's fine just send me a private message. I swear on my reputation here at SEOMoz that I will not divulge any business-sensitive information.
Thanks for answering!
Dana
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RE: Question regarding eCommerce sites, relative URLs and secuirty certificates
Thanks Streamline! Would this happen because of the ".." before the forward slash? In other words "/blog" would be okay yes?
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RE: Penalty for Changing Home Page Title Tags
I have changed title tags on several sites, several times and those sites never experienced any kind of negative impact.
There was one instance in 2009 when I updated a title tag on an ecommerce site. This was one of many changes made at the same time. One of the changes I was "directed" to make was to add about 6-8 really spammy direct links using exact match anchor text to the home page. The site dropped from 1st position for its brand name. The cause was determined to be my optimized title tag....not the spammy links the CEO decided to add to the home page.
Within a few days the site was back in the number one spot. I think this is a good example of the correlation = causuality Brandlabs mentioned above.
Just because I know Brandlabs specializes in Volusion, you might find it interesting that the scenario I just described occurred on a Volusion store.
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Question regarding eCommerce sites, relative URLs and secuirty certificates
We recently installed a new SSL certificate on an ecommerce site. Our IT Director is insisting that all pages on the site must be coded in such a way so that the address bar maintains a green background when a visitor is navigating the site after navigating to a secure page or logging in.
I have worked on many ecommerce sites and never has this been an issue. Amazon does not use the green bar....but they are Amazon.
In order for this to work, he is insisting that all internal URLs be coded as relative instead of absolute.
How bad is this for SEO or does it really not matter that much? How crucial is it for trust and security?
Opinions welcome!
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RE: Our rel=author profile not show in google result
Testing, testing, testing...just keep those SERP pages testing....RAWHIDE
Oh, here's the tune that goes with my lyrics:
Be patient it's the Blues Brothers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdR6MN2jKYs Just subsitute the words "rolin' rollin' rollin'" with "testin'' testin' testin' "
Seriously, Google's testing all the time. I am sure the same thing is happening with Knowledge Graph and Structured Data as we all eagerly participate as guinea pigs in Google's tests.
One thing's for sure...Google's SERPs are going to change a t light speed over the net 5 years.
Dana
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RE: Is The Pro Account (300 Keywords) PER Campaign or Overall??
It's total overall. As you add keywords to your account you'll see the amount of available keywords decrease. Does that help? I hope so
Dana
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RE: Optimization help
I wouldn't worry about using it verbatim to be quite honest. Write a good piece of content about IT support in New York State or New York City, make interesting, informative, and perhaps use "IT Support NY" as your title tag and call it a day.
That's my two cents
Dana
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RE: If I enbed the same video from my YouTube account on two different websites, will I get a duplicate content penalty?
Matt's suggestion of adding unique, valuable and interesting contextual info around the video is a very good approach.
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RE: How can Google index a page that it can't crawl completely?
Awesome explanation Oleg. We had some other product pages (128) to be exact, that fell victim to the same coding error. I found it interesting that not only were most of them indexed, some of them actually had PageAuthority and or PageRank.
I am thinking Google may have allocated authority to some of these product pages because they had decent link profiles, despite Googlebot not being able to access the whole page. Is that possible?
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RE: If I enbed the same video from my YouTube account on two different websites, will I get a duplicate content penalty?
No you won't get penalized for duplicate content because what you are doing is, in effect, syndicating content. YouTube owns the original content and will get credit for the original content. This is a similar scenario to say, a new story from Associated Press that gets picked up and published in newspapers across the country. They are syndicating, not duplicating the content. However, the credit for that content creation is retained by the original source.
Hope that helps!
Dana
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How can Google index a page that it can't crawl completely?
I recently posted a question regarding a product page that appeared to have no content. [http://www.seomoz.org/q/why-is-ose-showing-now-data-for-this-url]
What puzzles me is that this page got indexed anyway. Was it indexed based on Google knowing that there was once content on the page? Was it indexed based on the trust level of our root domain?
What are your thoughts? I'm asking not only because I don't know the answer, but because I know the argument is going to be made that if Google indexed the page then it must have been crawlable...therefore we didn't really have a crawlability problem.
Why Google index a page it can't crawl?
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RE: Why is OSE showing no data for this URL?
Hi Paul,
We discovered that the problem was being caused by a trailing "comma" at the end of the keyword string that we once used to populate the Meta keywords tag. Unfortunately, the keyword information in those fields is still being parsed. The parser did not know what to do when it encountered a comma followed by nothing.
We did run a query and found that this problem was affecting 128 of our product pages and had been for a long time. We haven't been populating the keywords for almost a year now, so the problem is at least that old.
The commas are now gone.
Thanks again to you and Andrew!
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RE: Why is OSE showing no data for this URL?
Thanks so much Paul,
Yes, when I ran a "Fetch as Googlebot" it returned a "Success" message, but when I looked at what Google is seeing there is no content on the page.
"borked" - great term...I am definitely going to have to file that one away for future use!
If the problem is isolated to this page, that's one thing. I am more concerned that this problem is effecting a larger number of pages.
Once I figure it out, I'll come back here and post what we found/fixed.
I really appreciate the comments from you and Andrew very much!
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RE: Why is OSE showing no data for this URL?
I just ran the source code for this page through the validator at: http://validator.w3.org/
There are a multitude of problems that need to be addressed. Thanks very much Andrew. I do have enough HTML knowledge to provide guidance to our IT manager on how to fix the problems. I don't have access to much of the source code, so it will certainly be a "project" to fix the issues.
I am sure these problems are everywhere all over the site, as many people with very little experience in coding and design have had their hands in the pot (so to speak) over the years.
At least this will allow me to prove to our CEO that our underlying code is indeed presenting a problem for indexing and crawling.
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RE: Why is OSE showing no data for this URL?
I did some comparisons with other pages and it doesn't seem that the drop-down frequency selector is the culprit. This page also has one: www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/product/shure-slx24-sm58-wireless-microphone-system-h5
but the cache in Google seems to be fine for this page and OSE displays data for it just fine.
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RE: Why is OSE showing no data for this URL?
Could the coding issue be related to the drop down box that's located just above the pricing on the right hand side? That is one thing that makes this product page different from others on our site.
Thoughts?
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RE: Why is OSE showing no data for this URL?
I also see what you mean that there is a problem with Google's cache. The cache date is really old (April 11) and there is no preview of the page.
Anyone who can point me in the right direction?
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RE: Why is OSE showing no data for this URL?
Thanks so much for responding Andrew. I have suspected problems with our code for a long time, but I am not a coder, sp it's been a challenge to attempt to identify the specific problem.
I believe this is not just a problem with this page, but could be a problem across many pages on our site.
Can you are any of my fellow Mozzers point to what you are seeing in the source code that leads you to believe it is corrupted?
Many thanks for any help. I truly appreciate it!
Dana
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Why is OSE showing no data for this URL?
Hi all,
Does anyone have any ideas as to why OSE might not have any data for this URL:
http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/product/shure-slx24-sm58-wireless-microphone-system-j3
It is not a new page at all. It's been on the site for years.
Is OSE being quirky? Or is there an underlying problem with this page?
Thanks in advance for any light you can shed on this,
Dana
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RE: Need Advice: How should we handle this situation?
I agree with Mike. It sounds like you've probably already learned that lesson the hard way.
One other thing I would suggest is don't take down that blog post that was ranking well. Just leave it alone. Look at it this way, if you produced great content once and achieved a great ranking, you should be able to produce another piece of great content.
If you do decide to remove the old post, I would advise you not to 301 redirect the old link to your new content. Better safe than sorry!
I hope this helps. Please let us know what happens.
The reason I advise you not to take down that old post, is that's entirely possible that your are experiencing a temporary decrease in positioning and that you might see it pop back up in a week or two. I have definitely seen wild volatility like this, even with well-established product pages on ecommerce sites.
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RE: Am I blind or has Google finally shut down its "Related Searches" option?
Donna Keegan just wrote a post in Site Pro News Saying the "Related Searches" feature is gone.
It isn't gone. It's just been moved. That's why I thought they'd taken it down.
Google has moved Related Searches out of the tool bar options in the drop down box and is now automatically including them at the very bottom of the first page of search results. I am including a screenshot so everyone can see what I'm talking about.
Donna's post is here: http://www.sitepronews.com/2013/05/08/google-removes-more-search-features/ - I have already left a comment letting her know that, indeed, Related Searches are alive and well, they just aren't hidden in the drop down menu any more.
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Is anyone here managing or doing SEO for a site using GoECart?
We are preparing to update/migrate to a new ecommerce platform. We are in the process of choosing right now. One of the things we know we want is faceted navigation, but I am well aware of the problems this presents for SEO.
Are any of you amazing people here using, managing or have experience with GoECart? I am interested to know your feedback, particularly from an SEO viewpoint.
Thanks in advance!
Dana
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RE: Struggling to get indexed and ranked
Hi Karen,
It sounds like you investigating the right things. You mentioned that the old domain was 301-d to the new domain. My next question might be too obvious, so [please forgive me if it seem overly simple. What about all the pages on the old domain? Are they still indexed? Did you 301 just the domain, or did you also 301 all of the old pages to relevant new pages? I'm just trying to maybe help you get to the bottom of the problem by proceeding down the path you've already started by using the process of elimination.
Dana
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RE: Is there something fundamentally wrong with our site architecture?
Thank you so much Peter. This is excellent advice and has dot fallen on deaf ears! As we move forward, not only with trying to make the current site better but also to redesign a site on a new platform that is easier for our customers to use, your advice is going to come in very handy. Thanks so much for taking the time to comment and advise!
Dana
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RE: What vanity Url should I use for Google+ business page?
Hi Ceclia,
Is there anything preventing you from using both? As in," touristic-name-location" If not, that's what I would do.
Just my two cents!
Dana
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RE: Difference Between www.domain.com and www.domain.com/ ?
My IT Director and I just had an interesting back and forth discussion about this. I'll spare you the witty repartee and take you straight to a post in the Google Webmaster's Central Blog:
To Slash or Not to Slash?
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/to-slash-or-not-to-slash.html
Quote:
"If both slash and non-trailing-slash versions contain the same content and each returns 200, you can:
- Consider changing this behavior (more info below) to reduce duplicate content and improve crawl efficiency.
- Leave it as-is. Many sites have duplicate content. Our indexing process often handles this case for webmasters and users. While it’s not totally optimal behavior, it’s perfectly legitimate and a-okay.
- Rest assured that for your root URL specifically, http://example.com is equivalent to http://example.com/ and can’t be redirected even if you’re Chuck Norris."
We particularly enjoyed Maile Ohye's reference to Chuck Norris. It's handy as a search term if you ever want to find her post again
Hope this helps!
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RE: Should we include our header logo in a sprite or leave it as a regular image?
Thank you to you both. Agreed that testing is really the only way to know. I doubt that the pagespeed is going to be significantly impacted by the logo alone...but we won't know until we try it. Then we can decide which way to go.