Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thank you Dirk.

Just wondering if there is an actual difference between a URL and a Permalink? If there is a difference, and an image is just a URL, would it return a 404 if there is no link (internal or external) to any of the pictures?

Moz detected 404's, ScreamingFrog detected the 404's for some (old) pictures on the current site. GWC does not mention anything on 404s on any pictures.

We have 30,000 pictures on our site. Moz will return 404's on some occasionally, but Google seems to ignore those. Should I 301 redirect all those images when we move to a new site lay-out?

Appreciate your views!

It was always my understanding that Bots crawl the source page.

The content under tabs is (or should be) on the source page then, right?

This is generic, not particularly to the theater example. The theater example is not exactly a tab question. The tabs Theatermania is  questioning are in fact navigation, and link to a new page each.

Tabs function as headers, as Oleg referred in his first comment. So why are tabs 'bad' vs all on one page?

Can someone give me an SEO perspective on true tabs? We are in the middle of redoing our site. Don't want to make a mistake on something as simple as tabs.

Thanks guys!

Hm, have you looked into rel canonical?

If those are all stand alone pages, you will have to redirect, if they are no longer active, or if they can be replaced by the original page.

Andy is correct, those pages likely are not 'created' with intent.

You should look at what is causing this issue and start there. If not, you are going to be redirecting till the cows come home.

If you are deciding on going through 301's, you may want to take a step back and look at the folders of the entire domain. /ll/ is a folder but not a page, nor is /ll/c/.

Good Luck, Alan!

I get the link farm idea. However, a link farm typically is a cluster of spammy or low quality (PR0-1) sites that are set up for a link farm purpose.

If the vast majority of your websites are stand-alone, with quality and age, targeting specific markets, you don't have anything to worry about, in my opinion.

The remark about anchor text, however, is valid. Pull a report in Open Site Explorer and do a quick run over the anchor that is being used. If it is too keyword rich, I would play it safe and change the anchor to just the company name for example. From your comments I understand you are not linking from a pizza restaurant in Oregon to a bowling alley in Miami, correct? Businesses are related or the external link to the next website makes sense, correct? If not, followed or not followed is not the question, the link has to go.

Being honest and straightforward should not trigger a penalty from bots, simply because you happen to own those other websites.

Thank you Travis.

You are correct, Cloaking is what I am concerned about.

However, there is so much software coming out, that one questions whether an overlay from a 'respected' provider (CrazyEgg and alike) would be ignored by Google for cloaking purposes.

The software we wanted to test is Evergage.

Has anyone tried out this (type of) software and seen Google response from it?

Thanks guys for your opinions.

We are looking into personalizing visits on our website. Rather than to write Tb of code on each page, we want to use a little line of Java script on the page, that would allow to place overlay on the site, depending on the visitor. Example: Change the home page picture when a returning visitor comes back on the website and show him/her a different picture bases upon the pages he/she visited prior.

Would that overlay be caught by Google and would G have a problem with that?

We all know about cloaking, but G does not penalize for heat mapping overlays, for example. Or not to my knowledge they don't.

Thanks all for your personal insights!

Peter

Thanks Mike, for your interesting views on other issues that come with a short URL. So true!

I agree on the domain/DX600 and the domain/NX600. This is a WP site, so it should be fairly easy to go with example: [**www.**domain.com/nikon-DSLR-camera-NX600]

Not that my personal opinion matters here, but there is a value for a visitor to see that short URL, rather than the [www.domain.com/cameras/compact/all-in-one/DSLR/20mp/2013/Nikon/NX600], right? As logical as those folders and sub folders may be, it is a blur for a visitor and can very well be confusing for a search bot with all those folders it now has to verify.

The question is purely about the bot: would a bot find it better to have the folders or would it not matter to the bot.

Following an SEOMoz webinar the other day, where the presenter made a case of eliminating folders in URLs, as these could confuse a bot when crawling a site.

I love the idea. However, there are still a lot of Best Practices and guidelines out there that will suggest there should be a logic in the URL, just as there should be in your Navigation.

My question in that regard is whether or not there is any value for a bot to crawl a website URL that follows the navigation by "stuffing" the URL with folders, identical to the navigation present on the site, and even a secondary navigation present on all pages?

Example: the navigation of a site goes [Domain > Folder > Sub folder > Sub-sub folder > product]. What is the benefit of using a URL such as [www.domain.com/folder/sub-folder/sub-sub-folder/product] vs [www.domain.com/product]

Thank you guys for your insights!

PS this is a WP site we are talking about.

You may want to consider bringing your support under a subdomain of your website. This will not really create a complete separation of your site(s) but will resolve your duplicate url issue.

There is a tendency these days to work with folders, rather than subdomains. In this case I would suggest the subdomain though. (example: www.mywebsite.com as your main site and support.mywebsite.com as your subdomain.

I do not know what to do with this... and could use a bit of advice on this issue:

"Doing things right", resulted in great organic rankings and a bonus by showing top of local search results for our area. Sounds great... until Google decides it was time to mix things up a little.

I do not know if this applies to all types of businesses, but for ours it means that you will no longer get any organic page 1 listing if you are a local business that (un)luckily ranks in local results too.

One day G will include local results on a keyword, the next they won't... making our SEOMoz Campaign rankings weekly a true yo-yo of "50 keywords declined by >48 and >49 places", and "30 keywords improved by <47 and <49". It turned this feature in campaigns completely useless for me (ever since SEOMoz decided to include the local result light bulb that is)

Some traffic dropped from 240 a day for one keyword, to 30 now for that same keyword. Frustrated? You bet. I do not understand why Google seems to create a war with local businesses.

Should we get out of Local results or does anyone have any ideas, suggestions?

Thanks a bunch guys!

The issue would be having 2 pages with separate Title (or identical title is even worse) on those two URLs. If you have permanent 301 redirect set up for one to point to the other, your links will follow naturally.

You would not need to change anything on your external links, but I would suggest your future links to stay consistent and point to the chosen URL.

Your point in having the next business list at your old address is a valid concern. If you are keeping a presence at this old address and opening an additional new address, you do not have to change the existing listings and citations. Simply start building an additional local listing.

If you are moving all together, leaving the old location, you likely will have a lot of work ahead of you. Most importantly, develop a plan on how and when to change your listings to the new address. It is a massive job and you want to be prepared, knowing what and where you need to change when that day comes.

Good luck!

Thanks Joanne!!! Great tip for those who have this problem occur as well.

In a nutshell, only your Analytics is out of wack. Your hosting server (usually) will not show increased traffic. Many newly launched sites are affected by a variety of similar 'referrers'

Personally, I ignored the referrer and it disappeared as sudden as it came, after one month. Exactly as the article suggests.

There has not been a PR update in the past few days (as far as I know). Therefore it is doubtful that your browser PR return is steered by G, but something else is overtaking your stats.

Your site is hosted on a shared domain. If something happens to any of those sites, your site would/could see an immediate effect.

I would move away from sharing the same URL and go for hosting on a dedicated server.

Good luck!

What do you mean by that, Donnie? It is fairly clearly linked to the presence of local results on the query. Results without a local character are not affected (from what I see at least).

Google pushed the local search results in a prominent spot on a ton of search results. That means (for me) that all first page rankings (including a lot of 1st place rankings) have completely disappeared.

Subfolders still rank and homepage still ranks where local search is not included. This is weird. Is this a glitch or is there something we can do about this?

As an update, those visits as we see them in Analytics are not hitting our servers. Not sure how they are doing this, but traffic does show in analytics but we do not see any spike on our servers.

We take the country out through filters at this point so we can at least review some true data.

Your question about how to ignore it after the fact can be done similar:

Go to Google Analytics > Custom Reports > Add Filter > EXCLUDE the country > Save

Now your GA will show all past results without those entries.

It is a custom report, but better than no data at all?

Hope this helps

Yep, I found that as well. The "Paid To Click" is an old trick, but they are not coming in through PPC though. Adwords is not showing any sign either, nor is tracking of PPC. that toolbar is an interesting path I have to say.

Thanks for the research Keri!

Great idea too, Valery.

The visits however are for 85% new visitors, all with unique IP addresses. Don't really think it is a scraper, but it is well possible there is a connection somewhere out there.

Thank you!

awesome answer Ryan, thank you! We blocked the referrers IP but that does not seem to make any difference (yet).

Just puzzled by a site that has no apparent meaning and thousands of people must have a login to that thing. Maybe it is a reroute from somewhere else... no clue.

Will give your advice a go tomorrow and surely will let you know the outcome.

Peter

For a few days now we are being stalked by a "referrer" site out of Bangladesh, called sky lancers dot net. Their home page is nothing but a login and password. All traffic comes from one invisible inner page. They don't seem to try to login, nor do they use PPC to get to the site. They send thousands of visitors a day.

Anyone has any idea what this site is trying to achieve and what their goal may be?

All they do is get the bounce rate to skyrocket, the time on the site to go down and the avg page views of course to go down as well, as they click out immediately after they hit the homepage.

Any suggestions on what to do about this practice? And what are they trying to achieve?

Thanks for your insights guys!

Thanks Nick!

Honestly, I have searched how I could address a technical question but up till now have not been able to find how to address a problem. Just a hint.

That is actually what I am referring to: it says "Next Crawl in Progress" with the little beetle scrolling... but it has been doing this for 5 days straight now. It even says Crawl started on Feb 10.

So I am wondering, is it normal to be crawling for 5 days straight.

That is actually what I am referring to: it says "Next Crawl in Progress" with the little beetle scrolling... but it has been doing this for 5 days straight now. It even says Crawl started on Feb 10.

So I am wondering, is it normal to be crawling for 5 days straight.

Our campaign website crawl has been 'crawling' now for 5 days. Is this a normal phenomenon or is something hanging up?

sorry, on the video from Distilled Link Love 2011

thank you thank you Phil.

It was actually a video from Distilled that pushed me to do it. (Rand Fishkin funny line on video xml maps for youtube videos)

Do you have something to read up, on in regards to video, within Distilled or SEOMoz by chance?

Perfect, thank you Vahe.

Hey Mozzers,

We have a vacation rental site where every property has its own video of the property. (i.e. YouTube embedded video)

So, with more than 1000 homes, how do you make a video xml map?

Or, should we have an xml map with 1000 links on it?

Can't wait to see your insights!

For an online commercial site, would a booking engine/reservation system best fitted in a subdomain structure or a folder?

We have always preferred folder for blog, any other content. A reservation system with lots of search results, lots of variables, we are leaning towards a subdomain in a WP site.

Pro's and Con's are highly appreciated!

Think of our company as a real estate company, having hundreds of homes, each home has an optimized page and comes with a WP light box and 15 specific photos of a property.

The code of the property would be unique, and so is the title tag (key phrase) for each property unique. Each property has a picture of the front, the living room, the master bedroom, a bathroom, the pool, the kitchen...

Say the home code is HC007FE and the keyword is "greatest home example ever".

How would you suggest naming the pictures and additionally the alt txt for these pictures?

Thanks for your help!