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It is normal to have SSL on page where information is exchanged.

Login/Register
Some Form Submissions (Applications and the Like)

That said, there is very little point in making your entire site SSL, you typically only need to enable it for the sections mentioned above which in most cases have no benefit on your ranking so its not much to worry about.

In the case of changing an existing page from http to https I would use a 301 redirect for only those pages that need SSL and only if the page has search engine value, then update your internal linking structure appropriately, (you don't want to link to a redirect).

Did that answer the question?

I edited the post to include all active users. I don't see the need to calculate inactive at this time, perhaps if we do it every 6 months or so we can catch those inactives.

Here is a link:

Nice work grabbing the data,

Don

Hi Neil,

Open graph tags are different then normal meta tags. It is okay to use both. Open Graph Tags are specific for Social Media, while Meta tags are used for search engines. In some cases you may want to use the same information in them, while in others it would make sense to target your information for the specific platform.

Here is a couple articles to help:

on moz: https://moz.com/blog/meta-data-templates-123
on iaquire: http://www.iacquire.com/blog/18-meta-tags-every-webpage-should-have-in-2013

Hope this helps,

Don

In general the technical correct way to tell Search Engines a page no longer exist is to give a 410 response code.

REF: http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html

The server has not found anything matching the Request-URI. No indication is given of whether the condition is temporary or permanent. The 410 (Gone) status code SHOULD be used if the server knows, through some internally configurable mechanism, that an old resource is permanently unavailable and has no forwarding address. This status code is commonly used when the server does not wish to reveal exactly why the request has been refused, or when no other response is applicable.

If the page has no seo value, or user value then a 410 would be preferred.

As Robert pointed out, if the old url has a valid new url then you should 301 redirect it to the new location.

If the page does have SEO value (like good backlinks, high serp ratings for strong keywords), but no new matching page, you should do one of two things:

1. Create the page
2. 301 it to the nearest possible match

Hope that helps,

Don

Wow, that is really cool.

I was about to mozzie off to bed and thought I would give Moz one last read and saw this.

I'm glad my little project was enjoyed by others. Big thanks to Peter Nikolow for parsing the data to ensure all active users were aggregated and ranked.

Cheers,

Don

Hi James,

I know you marked an answer as "Good" already but I want to add a little something to it.

I think what you maybe running into here is Keyword Cannibalization not over optimization. What I mean here is you are using the same "big keyword" on each one of your product pages. This means your are not only competing with everybody on the web for the keyword "vintage moschino" but yourself as well.

If you look at those ranking above you for some of these types of keywords (vintage moschino, vintage kenzo...) you'll see one thing in common, they have a landing page for the keyword "Vintage X" then products that fall under this category. Though the products maybe named "Vintage Kenzo Flower Print yada yada", they aren't targeting the big keyword "Vintage Kenzo" on the subsequent pages.

My advice, target your keywords in a hierarchy. Just like most CMS systems have a page hierarchy, you should target your keywords the same way. For example

Homepage (Vintage Clothing & Accessories)
   Category 1 (Vintage Women's Shoes)
       Sub Cat 1 Type (Vintage Women's Pumps)
         Sub-Sub Cat 1 Manufacturer (Vintage Chanel Pumps)
            Product 1 (Red Chanel Open Toe Pump)
            Product 2 (Beige Sand Chanel Leather Pump)
        Sub Cat 2 Type (Vintage Women's Flats)
          Sub-Sub Cat 2 Manufacturer (Vintage Chanel Flats)
        Sub Cat 2 Type (Vintage Women's Scarfs)
.......

That is a bit of a simplified example, but the goal here is to create the content at each level for broad keywords. As you go deeper in the site keywords get more specific. This does a couple things, one it creates many more keyword opportunities, and second it draws a high correlation on the broad keywords which are notably harder to rank, to your more specific keywords, giving each level more strength.

I hope this helps,

Don

Hi Mark

Consider this

real-estate agent San Jose

and

real-estate agent

are not the same keywords. While you may search for real-estate agent from San Jose, the results are based on the actual keyword searched for.

Localized results do offer more "local" feeling but they do not auto append city names to keywords. Which would make since, you maybe in a suburb and not necessarily want to only see San Jose agents..

Hope that helps

HI Juan,

It's a bad thing. Will's and Bryan's responses are great.

My personal experience provides another side to this. Years ago I ran an ecommerce site in a smaller market. Business was good, and then I started getting these random emails about orders that I could not find any record of. I spent literally hours going through documents and the database trying to figure out what was going on and came to the conclusion I was getting trolled. But these people were insistent they just wouldn't let up, I was stealing from them and they were threatening me with lawsuits and what not.

About a month after this started I found the problem, 2 copy cat websites had popped up and copied some of my content word for word, markup for markup, resulting in pages on their site with links to "my contact page". Turns out the people did have an order they were just complaining to the wrong company. Though I did convert a couple of these people into customers, the time I spent looking up erroneous orders and responding to emails made it a bad experience.

My thoughts,

Don

Hello Gemma,

Title tag is one of the most important things on your webpage. Like me, this was also my first question here on Moz about 5 years ago. Back then I was referencing Rand Fishkin's post from 2008 about how to structure a title tag. At the time it was recommended to use no more than 80 characters in the title, today that recommendation is 60 characters. In practice I still refer to Rand's original post for guidance and I love to reference it for people who want to learn.

I think you pretty much got your title tag right, but I would think about removing the last bit, "Asbestos Surveyors UK". So you end up with "Asbestos Surveys & Removal, Kent & Sussex - MyBusinessName". 58 chars depending on the length of your business name.

As you can see in Rand's post on how he was able to target multiple keywords, your title tag follows that logic to the T. The last bit is somewhat redundant and just takes up more space. Breaking down the last bit..."Asbestos Surveyors UK"

• Asbestos is already stated and at the very beginning of your title tag which means it has the most weight.
• Surveyors is a noun that can be derived from the act of the survey which is already in your title
• UK while important, is somewhat implied by Kent & Sussex. Having your address on your site, or server in the UK will likely get you that correlation by Google anyway.

To answer your questions specifically;
Did you jam to much in? - No, I don't think so. You want to use as much of that title as you possibly can!
By breaking the location bits away from "Asbestos Surveys", will it rank poorly for "Asbestos Surveys Kent"? - Its hard to say how it will rank because the title tag is only part of the equation. Obviously Asbestos Surveys Kent is stronger when those words are together, but your example will still show strong for that keyword.
Should I only target "Surveys" OR "Removal"? - Well again this comes down to other factors, but I wouldn't remove either one if they are both part of your business model.

All in all I think you did a good job on your title tag creation, it hits all of your keywords and doesn't sound spamming. I would really consider removing that last bit and run with it.

My thoughts,

Don

Hi ddseo,

I think you need to prevent the indexing of https pages.

One method is to create a SSL only robots.txt

like

RewriteEngine on Options +FollowSymlinks RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} ^443$ RewriteRule ^robots.txt$ robots_ssl.txt

This will redirect anything hitting the https port 443 to the robots_ssl.txt  else it sends them to the standard robots.txt file. The robots_ssl.txt file would just block everything like...

User-agent: * Disallow: /

Since you're running Magneto there is likely other solutions, like using mod_rewrite in htaccess, the magneto platform is fairly well supported so simple SEO issues like this may get some quality responses on their official forums.

Hope this helps

Don

100% Agree With EGOL here.

Brand mentioning is not bad, but if you over do it, or use it when it is not needed it can be annoying. Side note, caps really doesn't have a direct effect on SEO, but can really turn off certain folk.

Other industries do this too, as if to say this X would have sucked but its by X

Example: DVD's, James Cameron Avatar
Example: Games, Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa
Example: Books, Stephen King's 900'th novel

Sooooo annoying.

Hi James,

An interesting question, my initial thoughts is that the Yoast article is wrong, or at the very least kind of wrong. In the sense that no one strategy is going to work for every site.

Do you have a link?

Interested to hear other opinions as well.

Don

I agree with Lynn

Your canonical tags are pointing to outside the subdirectory

example:

http://www.hilden.co.uk/blog/member-spotlight-joy-arkley-from-the-yr-hen-llaethdy-holiday-cottage/

is canonicaled to http://www.hilden.co.uk/bed-linen.html

Also just a heads up you don't need the <meta content="INDEX,FOLLOW" name="robots"> tag as that is the default behavior.

Hope this helps,

Don

Wow that sure does make things tricky. I like Monica's suggestion that you contact them directly. They  maybe more receptive to doing an addendum to the article. Some web-masters are a tad jiggy about removing content or adding noindex tags when content is performing on their site well.

Best of luck, and since this is a unique question I gave you a thumbs up on the original question.

Yep our updates are usually available by Tuesday, but didn't get our second campaign until today. As noted by Alick and Ryan there is a notice on the pro panel. Image below.

Hope it helps,

Don

JIPqgSz.png

Hi Ana

Based on my personal experience with CMS such as Prestashop, they are using URL re-write methods in the .httaccess file. If they are not set up correctly a crawler such as Moz Bot will end up at the wrong url, thus indexing it. Since you can navigate the site and get the correct URLS through clicking, my first thought would be to look on the Prestashop forums to see if there is any updates or advice on fixing the navigation.

Hi Julien,

That is difficult to answer. Google will take into the "intent" of the persons search. That is to say if I search from something generic like Car, Google thinks I want to see Cars (Buy& Sell) or Images. But that does not mean that if you type in Therapy Toy you will always see sites with Therapy Toys, however from a result standpoint it makes sense for Google to return a site with more than 1 option for such a broad term.

You will find that Google will return different results for plural keywords and non plural keywords as they are actually different words and may carry different intents.

Based on my example above (Therapy Toys, Therapy Toy, and Therapy Smart Toy) the one with the most searches is Therapy Toys. So, if it was my site I would take that into account and try to target that traffic (if possible) with my design.

Hope that makes sense,

Don

Completely agree with SilverDoor (thumbs up). Backlinks should always point to the most relevant page.

The way I always approach it by not driving myself nuts over pushing up Domain Authority or a certain page's Page Rank rather focus on the unique content that will drive itself to get links. Once you have the content in place, you of course have to do some work getting yourself noticed, but once that happens you'll find backlinks coming from multiple places with no additional work required.

Google evaluates the landing page as the page you link to in that keywords specific ad.

So, what I did. Was create a list of keywords I want to advertise for for each of my pages. (Example attached)

Then I named the ad group the name of the name of the landing page like custom-rubber-compounds.html

Keywords: rubber compound, custom compounds, compounding process

Now all these keywords are linked to our custom-rubber-compounds.html page. Since they all use the same ad Google evaluates that landing page for each keyword.

You should also read Will Craig's post about Quality Scores here on SEOmoz if you're seeing below normal ratings and what it really means.

Google would not have switched to https itself if it didn't see the value in doing so. Right now it maybe of minimal value SEO wise but I would wager a paycheck that within the next 2 years it is going to be a top SEO recommendation.

Okay so to your question... it is still very common for websites (e-commerce especially) to have SSL and Non-SSL portions of their sites. Like Amazon or Apple .com. Really the first thing I would tackle would be to get a new cert up and running to at least get back to where you were before it expired.

Then just make the decision do I need to HTTPS my whole site or not. If you didn't have it before, I would not go out of my way to make it happen until it is more of value (which I guess is in a couple years).
Here is a contradictory thought at Yoast.com https://yoast.com/move-website-https-ssl/

In summation; get an ssl asap to get back to where you were. Don't go through the effort of switching to full HTTPS if your site is already performing well.

Last note for those who maybe starting out, if you plan on building your site today, I would start with using HTTPS from the get go.

You make a very good point. It is kind of like a little reward for those like yourself who have been proactive and adaptive without being told to be. Kudos,

Don

Hello Kingalan,

https://www.hochmanconsultants.com/articles/link-miser.shtml good read

Matt Cutts Speaks on page rank sculpting and outbound links
Important snippet from Matt Cutts's blog: "A: I wouldn’t recommend closing comments in an attempt to “hoard” your PageRank. In the same way that Google trusts sites less when they link to spammy sites or bad neighborhoods, parts of our system encourage links to good sites."

A good take away, he is point blank saying good links make you look good.

Hope this helps you,

Don

You do have a lot of pages, I will point out that you have some duplicate title tags, and pages without meta descriptions.

Golf, Overseas, T-Shirts.. I would recommend running a Crawl Test as it will point out major issues like this.

Site seems to provide a good user experience, very pleasant looking & easy to use, from there I guess you need to make sure you have done the SEO Basics.

Hope that helps,

I will disagree a bit on the overall direction of JV's post. Just because a domain / page is low value doesn't mean the link is in anyway going to hurt your site. If they are not considered to be a spam site the worst thing that can happen is they pass no value.

I am just a tad concerned about the general fear that Google has struck into the SEO community, bad sites are bad sties, low ranking sites are not necessarily bad sites. That distinction is important.

That said I would not do go out and do a naked chicken dance to get a link from said site, I just wouldn't say it isn't worth asking.

By definition, if the purpose of buying the domain is to manipulate your search rankings then that is black hat. Ryan laid out the only case I can think of that would be an exception to this rule, that is buying a domain that is in your industry or field and redirecting the traffic would be more of a business acquisition then manipulation.

I think there are a lot of people who get tripped up trying to understand the differences between various SEO practices. Why is putting keywords in your title tag, and h1 tags considered white hat when one can argue that you are purposely doing this to manipulate search results, but participating in a link ring considered black hat?

The difference are subtle, the big thing being anything that is done with the sol purpose to trick a search engine into ranking you higher then your site naturally warrants is black hat. Making changes to your site that make it easier for search engines to understand, crawl, or attribute credit to is white hat.

A good analogy would be putting on a nice suit for an interview, this would be considered white hat since you are just trying to present yourself in the best possible manner. (Proper Title Tags, H1 Tags and Page Content, Link Structure, Anchor Text)

However, stealing a new suit, or bribing somebody at the company to say good things about you is considered black hat. (Link Exchange Rings, Buying Links, Buying Social Media, Spamming Forums ect..)

In the end both practices may get you the job so to speak, but more then likely, eventually, the company will find out about it and which practice will you be more proud of? Putting on a nice suit? or paying somebody to say good things about you?

Interesting question, I have never heard downloads having a negative impact on SERP's but I can clearly see why they "could".

I don't know if this is a factor or not, this may be tough to answer accurately. I do not see "downloadable .exe files" on any tried and true ranking factors list (like searchmetrics.com) but that really could only mean somebody hasn't done a comprehensive A & B test.

With your concern about it "possibly" having an effect, have you considered capitalizing on the fact you do offer a download? For example create a downloads page, adding appropriate keywords, call to action content (ie buy pro version ), ad-blocks (if appropriate), download review section (to garner trust), and notable mirrors with same download content if applicable.

This would do 2 things, first add value to your site, and completely remove the fear of the download having any negative impact on the page in question.

My thoughts good luck

HI Diane

You're asking about algorithms and what Google uses to rate a site and or page. The easy answer is the better the site is overall the easier you'll find it to rank a specific page for a specific terms.

But the more complicated answer is, that nobody in the general public knows or is telling what metric weights google gives to specific things like domain authority, site design, and page popularity.

The reason a site can generate a page and have it rank very well with minimal changes is because the page is exactly what searchers want to see.

Have you heard of "Space Jam" the movie from the 90's? They built a website about the same time and it today is still number 1 for the term space jam. Now if google finds that searching for "Space Jam" and returning NASA's space jelly page is more satisfying to users then that page may become number 1.

I would try to use a Mod Re-Write with 301 to handle the new url with the ? attached. That way your old domain points to the new domain with 301 taking into account the ? at the end.

This may do it...

 <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^olddomain.com$ [OR]
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.olddomain.com$
  RewriteRule (.*)$ http://www.newdomain.com/$1? [R=301,L]</ifmodule> 

I'm not a pro at Apache re-writes but when I get stuck on coding unfamiliar things I love Stackoverflow just don't get offended by the Elite snobs

Hello,

That is not the purpose of the canonical tag. You should not attempt to use canonical tag to fix this sort of problem. The general purpose of the canonical tag is to filter dynamic urls to a single root page.

Example

www.myclothingstore.com/mens/t-shirts/smiley-face?size=XL&color=Red
www.myclothingstore.com/mens/t-shirts/smiley-face?size=L&color=Red
www.myclothingstore.com/mens/t-shirts/smiley-face?size=XL&color=Blue

Canonical to www.myclothingstore.com/mens/t-shirts/smiley-face

In this example the only difference of these pages is the size & color selected. The page is the same, the parameters are different. So by putting a canonical tag on this page, you help the search engine filter out the dynamic urls and rank the canonical tag.

It sounds like you may have an issue with Keyword Cannibalization, or it could simply be that your inner page is much better for the keyword then the homepage.

I'm sure somebody here would be happy to assist you further if we could take a look at the 2 pages in question and the exact keyword that you're using in Google.

Hope this helps

Hi Mayank,

After you fixed the Robots.txt you can ask Google to recrawl it. I recommend you do a fetch first to make sure it is crawlable.

Depending on  the site, and frequency Google sets up its own recrawl rate but using the methods above you can be sure the problem is fixed.

Hope this helps,

Don

Hello,

Duplicate content is usually pretty simple to deal with see Sheena's response.

I would recommend at this point in design looking at the URL structure not primary as trying to avoid a negative, rather how to incorporate the most positives. That is how can you get the most SEO value out of the url's. Since you're at the point where you can make these changes, then now is the time to evaluate how you want your site to appear to the users and search engines.

Here are 2 Good, nay VERY GOOD post on Moz to help with this process.

1. Moz: Guide To SEO Chapter 4
2. Dr Pete: Anatomy Of A URL

I hope this is helpful,

Don

Monica said basically everything I would and probably a little better. The review system is extremely helpful in generating unique content, for a few reasons. One, you don't have to write it yourself (just review it), second customers want to hear from other customers, third the way a user describes a product may actually attract keyword opportunities you may not have thought of on your own.

www.barcelonaexperience.com/barcelona-bike-tours

Would not be considered spamming. First your domain is likely considered one word "barcelonaexperience", even if it wasn't using the same word more then once is some what common.
Example www.Some-Hosting.com/hosting/dedicated-servers
Example www.Board-Games-Shop.com/shop/classic-games

I think you are 100% okay!

This can be very frustrating. I watched one of our competitors sling shot to to out rank us on many of the terms we were competing on. We had them here at Moz as a tracked competitor and when Panda / Penguin updates hit they tanked. That was satisfying

Just keep on doing things right, Google has the money as really is trying to stop these sorts of tactics.

A couple things.

First Google is also a Web Registrar so they have the ability to know what domains are registered. It appears that Google has a cached version of the domain exotravel.vn indexed. It also appears to have Social Media exposure.

The redirect if setup is not correctly working. A ping and Whois search on http://exotravel.vn/ brings up no response from the server. Check the mxtoolbox entry here

Once you fix your 301 redirect issue, and have content ready for those keywords submit a site map to Google and give it some time to update.

Hope this helps,

Don

HI Don,

This is a regular concern I have seen here on Moz. Really we want to understand the purpose of Disavow, which is to remove penalties that were brought on by Link Spamming that many companies did to boost their rankings. Sometimes their selves, sometimes by hiring bad SEO companies. Either way the idea is a last resort for those who had fallen in a pit.

Early on people worried that Google's algorithm change could in fact bring a new type of SEO (Negative SEO) that is where a company is paid to use the same old spam tactics but instead of targeting the hiring company they target their competitors in hopes to inflict a penalty on them. Google was well aware of this possibility and tried their best to prevent that from happening. You should see Matt Cutts video about this topic on youtube here.

There are some crappy sites out there that regularly create links to good sites for whatever reason. This is actually normal, and should not be much of a concern unless it becomes apparent that you are being targeted by a Negative SEO campaign. If so, then yes use the disavow tool. If you already have a very strong back link profile the impact of a few random bad links should have no impact.

I hope this helps,

Don

Hi,

I pointed out that Google is a web registrar to elude to the fact they can search registered domain names and return those as results. Google can WILL also use anchor text and links from any site they find a link to your site. Even if you disallow crawling via robots.txt.  If somebody is linking to you and Google finds it, and there are no more appropriate results they will return it when somebody searches those keywords.

I would say first your main issue is the redirect. Second you must not have a strong enough keyword profile or you just launched and have not given Google enough time to get an updated SERP out. Either way fixing the redirect should be your primary focus.

To answer your question sorry for being blunt here, the reason the parked domain is out ranking your live domain is because as far as Google is concerned it is the most relevant result. There is social media, it is registered and there is a cache of anchor text that is out ranking your live domain right now. You need to fix the redirect, build a link profile on new domain and give it time.

It may not make much sense if you look at it from only your side. But Google isn't a magic genie that can update billions of SERPs every minute. The best thing you can do is help them help you.

By fixing the redirect you tackle the issue 2 ways. 1. Even if Google returns your parked domain the user is sent to the correct domain. Second Google will see the redirect and index it appropriately thus removing the ranking from the parked domain.

I hope this helps and I didn't mean to sound rude if it came off that way,

Don

This may be not at all helpful, but I will provide my feedback.

Restructure Home Page to Better Show Our Services. It maybe helpful in your Special Offer section to show details about a particular course / program in a tooltip, then on the corresponding page give some course details, speaker info, training info, and syllabus rundown.

Possibly Add a Slider to the Home Page (I know engagement rates with these are generally low) I'm okay with sliders when done correctly. Keeping content fresh inside them and making them minimal click through. For example Amazon uses them but will only have 4 offers. Anything more then that I think they figured out is not going to get seen.

Restructure the Course Pages Completely (https://purplegriffon.com/courses/itil-training/itil-foundation-training/itil-foundation) Yep agree, more content details as stated above.

Restructure the Events Pages Completely (https://purplegriffon.com/event/2028/itil-foundation). This is actually one of the more informative pages, I will touch on layout (personal opinion only) in closing.

Improve & Streamline the Booking Process & AJAXIFY the Booking Process I didn't find this at all distasteful. Looks good and is smooth. What sort of AJAX calls were you wanting to add? Examples, error checking?

Improve Responsive Elements I don't have much to add here the only responsive element I seen was the Google map.

Okay, now to my personal opinion. First I didn't look at any source code, I didn't evaluate it from an SEO perspective, I only looked at it from a personal engagement point of view. This is where I differ from the modern layouts that have become much more popular as of late. The site in essence reminds me of a Google page like: https://www.google.com/services/?fg=1 and to me that isn't a plus. I understand from a dynamic perspective and the challenges us web designers are up against when trying to make a site that is for all devices. However, huge areas of white space, larger ass footers, over-populated navigation is really a turn off to me. Most people now-a-days have larger 24"+ monitors and this drive to consume  the whole screen makes the pages actually harder to read on desktops. Since, your field is IT related we can assume at least half of your users will be on desktops?

Overall, I think the site is good, I would move some things around like the huge map on https://purplegriffon.com/event/2028/itil-foundation and make it more of click to interact element. Bringing up the "Register for this Course" from the bottom of the page. I like the call to action buttons being consistent and very easy to find. Color scheme is nice and not at all off putting.

Well not for nothing but I hope it helps,

Don

Try

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^5.10.105.45/~isea/
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.NewDomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Or

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} /~isea/$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.NewDomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

** (edit) Make sure your sever has Mod Rewrite Enabled*

I agree with Hutch42, the isolated pages are what the industry calls "orphan pages". There is some good info about the subject you may want to dive into before you make your final decision.

Hello Akshay,

I looked at this particular page and variations of them and do correctly see the rel="canonical" tag.

You should note that the Google HTML improvements will only change after they rescan your site. It is not immediate, and depending on Google's crawl schedule. Meaning they crawl some sites minute by minute while others may not get crawled but once a week or longer. If you have fixed the problems Google recommends, on the next update you should see the results.

A few other things you may want to look at while you're in there.

Title Tag (Too Long)
Meta Description (Too Long)
Keywords Meta Tag (useless)

Title Tag: 72/70 Easy fix remove the "space" at the beginning and replace the "space-space" with a comma.
Improved fix: Rewrite the title tag. "pressure" and "cleaner" is used 3 times in the title (See Rand's post back in 2008 for an example)

Description Tag: 248/150Fix: Re-write the meta description tag see Moz's Description tag lesson.

Keywords Meta Tag. This tag is useless, no search engine you want sending you visitors actually pays attention to it. It also tells your competitors exactly what keywords you're targeting.

Hope this answers your question and beyond,

Don

Cloaking no. What you would be doing is trying to help Google understand the images.

I feel this would be similar to detecting a language or IP and serving an image with text correctly translated. The purpose isn't malice in fact quite the opposite.

I have been leery of CDN's for any other purpose then delivering script for exactly the reason your client is in. When you think about it you can have 2 to 200 urls delivering the same images. Every time a bot crawls the site it sees X image is from a new location. How is the crawler suppose to understand what is actually there?

Anyway my thoughts, hope it helps.

Don

Hi,

They shouldn't hurt the rankings directly. However, the user experience from my point of view would be horrible. No matter how tasteful they are done, they always annoy me. I just finished up writing a SEO article this morning, and I remember vividly advising against this.

Hope it helps,

Don

This is a VERY old way of indicating a link to the "homepage" which is usually index.html /.php /.asp .

The term "Home" was very prevalent in the late 90's early 2000's. This gave rise to companies with home in their name like homestead.com (webhost / design). Many companies and people still see the word home and relate it to root. However the top 10 websites in the world do not use the term except Yahoo.com. Though you may find many "house" icons still about.

The newer generation just generally knows that clicking the logo will take you back to the root, Back in the early days of the web people needed to understand what each link meant, there weren't many standards but "home" caught on quickly and is still used a lot today. In addition to this many host still use the term "home" to indicate the users public_html folder where their pages are served from. It maybe that somebody who worked at the company found "/home" very comfortable looking due to these reasons.

I agree though having it in the url is pretty silly nowadays. I would suggest they just 301 it back too root -> site.com

Hope this helps,

Don

Hi ATP,

There are a some post here on the forums, unfortunately with somewhat different points of view about multiple H1's. I have a feeling nobody knows for sure. However if we take Matt Cutts' word on it, you don't have much to worry about for 2-3 H1 tags on a page on Google. I can't say much about the other search engines. Apple.com uses multiple H1 tags.. but then again when has Apple ever followed the norm.

Post 1 (3 years old, okay multiple h1's for html 5)
Post 2 (1 year old, not so great multiple h1's)
Post 3 (1 year old, mixed point of view's staff endorsed)

I know all search engines behave in their own way. With that in mind, it is of course advised you always use you best judgement. If Bing drove 90% of our traffic I would be very leery of pushing the envelope with them, and if I did I would watch the results very closely.

I am not currently developing any HTML 5 site, but I do try to stay up to date on the current SEO trends. Recently a user asked about his site and view points, which I answered in similar fashion here.

Hope that helps you as well,

Don

Hi Kenneth,

I am sure somebody maybe to do a full analysis but just quickly stopping by the page here are a few things I picked up on right away.

• A ton of links on your page (300+)
• Your unique content is below all the links (moving unique content to be read first is a good idea)
• Competing content if you search Fightstore + boxing gloves your home page is actually Google's preferred result (fight gloves vs boxing gloves also competing)
• You're competing against huge retailers
• You have duplicate content.

Using Siteliner I did a quick scan for you.. here are the results they are reporting:

http://www.siteliner.com/www.fightstorepro.com?siteliner=site-dashboard&siteliner-sort=scan_time&siteliner-from=1&siteliner-message=

Hope it helps you in the right direction,

Don

Hi Neil,

Sounds like you have put some thought into this and want to start off in the right place.

Categories: In your line of thinking you seem to landed on wanting category pages either for organization or for keyword opportunities, which is great. However, without knowing exactly what your categories are, or what type of website you're using, it is hard for us to commit further on this line of thinking.

Dynamic vs Static: Depending again on what type of website you're building or working on and the amount of items you'll ultimately end up with its hard for me to give a recommendation. That said, I do have some general rules I like to follow. If we are talking +100's of properties I would absolutely go dynamic.

Dynamic requires more initial coding to get setup, but once done you end up with a very easy way to add properties with minimal effort.

If you're only listing 20-40'ish properties, you may find that putting the personal touch into each page and going static is a better route.

In the end the dynamic vs static debate comes down to time and reward. If I were selling 10, 50 million dollar properties you could bet your left one, that I would absolutely take my time and do them static. But if I had to list 50, 60k properties and 2 150k's I would spend my time on the back end coding something that allows me to plug and play the stats.. so to speak.

To summarize I used property sales as an example here, but it wasn't quite clear if you were talking about selling properties, or possibly hotel rooms. In any case, using categories is usually a good thing.  In the Dynamic vs static debate it all comes down to time vs reward, which is the best way to use your time given the potential return?

Also don't forget about the Schema when you make your decision. https://schema.org/RealEstateAgent

Hope this helps you,

Don

HI Travis

Yes, you can use your .htaccess file to fix this. (This file should be located in your home directory)

A simple example would be

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^YourDomain.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.YourDomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

What this does is looks for any request for non-www urls, if found it 301 redirects it to the www version of the page.

Hope this helps,

Don

Hi,

I recently answered a question just like this here. This also includes a link to a video by Matt Cutts in regards to this topic.

The key here is that Google will take the "search words" and try to general results that are the most applicable to that search. In many cases that means they generate their own descriptions.

This is a huge task and Google does a very good job with most searches, however I have never seen a perfect search engine. In your case Globe Car and GlobeCar are 2 different keywords sets to Google. For very popular terms like WordPress and Word Press, Google has learned to treat them the same, but it can't do this for every word or set of words.

I hope this helps,

Don

Hi StratosJets,

In general the more pages you have the more content you have. More content is usually a good thing. I think before anybody can give you a solid recommendation we would want to know why you are wanting to remove 10K+ pages from the index.

You see, Google looks at your website like a splash of paint on white canvas. Your website in a whole is going to have a large splash around your main pages, then some secondary splash clusters around other content types. Just because these secondary splashes aren't performing as well as the main splash doesn't necessarily mean you want to remove them, as they help paint a picture of the complete site.

If the purpose of removing pages that are driving "some" traffic is only to try and boost the other pages I would say don't do it. You maybe able to restructure your navigation so that these smaller traffic pages don't get as much link juice as some of your higher performing pages. I know this can be a bit challenging in some CMS suites, but removing pages that are bringing in traffic only to try and boost other pages is a very advanced SEO metric and should really only be tackled when you have gathered lots of data.

Imagine you remove 10k pages that on average get 2 hits per month each, are you reasonably sure that the remaining 2k pages will generate 20,000 more hits once those pages are gone? Or is it more likely you lose those 20,000 hits along with the traffic patterns those 20,000 hits would normally bring in?

That being said there are cases to be made for removing pages, specifically ones generated by CMS platforms.

When is it okay to remove pages: The general rule here is if the page has no value or negative value for your viewers / customers.

No value pages: These are pages that have been redone, or their content is also available on another page which is more in depth and/or more user friendly. (Thin Content type pages)

Negative value pages: These are often generated by CMS sites, eCommerce CMS's may have auto generated pages like "Manufacturer Info" or "Item Review" pages, which you aren't using. Blog sites may have "Monthly Archives" or "Similar Post" pages which can create duplicate content if not used correctly. These pages can confuse your users and search engines as to what your site is really about.

If you find your site has tons of no value pages and negative value pages I would say okay go for it, but be very careful look at your page metrics, be sure the pages you are removing are in fact useless and provide no value for your viewers / customers.

If you decide to go the route of removal, the best way from my experience is to 301 pages which have correlating content on another page, and only 404 any page that have absolutely no value and page alternatives. If you 404 a page make sure you remove it from your sitemap and try submit it for removal. Lots of 404's isn't a good thing either...

I hope this helps,

Don