Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I tend to agree with Patrick. While an the exact theme may not be achievable, I would strive to make it as close as possible.

100% agree with Tom. There really is nothing I can think to add.

Hi Jonathan,

Didn't realize this was possible now. For the reasons you stated it still would be advised to get a dedicated IP. The last time I looked at prices they were relatively in-expensive.

Hello Happy,

Okay so you have content being served as http on your https page. When you reference an image or script you need to make sure it is a relative reference or a https reference, otherwise you will get these types of warnings.

See Mozilla Facts here

Also see the image attached.

Also the SSL isn't misconfigured it is missing. To configure one properly you need to contact your host and ask them to install a SSL cert (most host will not allow users to do this themselves). If you have not yet purchased a SSL you will need to do so. SSL certs also require dedicated IP addresses which most host also charge for.

In summary if you purchase a dedicated IP and a SSL certification you're problem should go away unless you specifically declare content as http.

Hope this helps,

Don

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Hello Ravi,

The simple answer is PR (Public Relations).

• Social Media
• Target Area Advertising
  YouTube
  Rededit
  Facebook
  Tips for Google Adwords
• Building Back Links
• Price Comparison Site Feeds Or Mobile apps. PC mag rated the top 10 mobile apps here, and Wikipedia list the 4 major ones for US here.

Hope this helps,

Don

Good Morning Justin,

The question is rather subjective. In which there is not a clear answer I can give. Carlos is spot on when he says that simply having more pages but without relevant content is a waste.

However, having more quality pages is in fact good.

Let us try to look at 3 cases. Read each one and put in order which sites you would prefer to visit.

Rachel just moved to Worthington which has a very nice well maintained bike path. She is looking for information about the latest bicycles and is considering buying one, but wants to do some research to see if she can bike to work which is 5 miles away from her new home.

• Case 1: A Local bike shop website, worthingtonbycycles.com
  This site has about 10 pages, it shows the biking paths, some hot spots, where drinking fountains are and list some of the models and brands they carry in store.
• Case 2: A national ecommerce site, everthingbikesonline.com
  This site has thousands of pages of products from bicycle tires to customized bicycle seat covers. It talks about different brands and does pricing comparisons. Promises fast shipping and customer service.
• Case 3. A bicycle enthusiast site, welovebiking.com
  This site also has thousands of pages and has real people talking about a specific brand durability, what modifications can be done, how often they ride and how far they go. If further details up coming trends and show cases break through technologies. It does bike comparisons not only for price but also for value.

Now pretend you're Google, you have only these 3 sites to show the Rachel. Based on what you know about Rachel which site would you return in the number 1, 2 and 3 position?

The answer depends on what exactly Rachel types into the search box. For most all searches I can imagine Rachel typing my answer would be 1, 3, 2. Or 3, 1, 2.

So in this study we find that the small local shop is probably going to out rank the national e commerce site for pretty much anything Rachel may search for. it has less pages but has enough quality to warrant showing it to Rachel. We also see the site by enthusiast is ranking very well it has lots of pages but it also has lots of quality content. The national site didn't rank as well because Rachel isn't concerned about seat covers and tire treed she wants to know about her local commute and what bicycles are best for the distance she has to travel.

If we were to take Rachel out of the picture and just compare the big ecommerce site vs the enthusiast site on a national scale then the enthusiast site wins in most cases where people are looking for information. The caveat is if somebody searches for something very specific like velvet bicycle seat covers model X320. In which case the e commerce site would be the top choice.

I hope that helps and makes sense,

Don

WordPress is good at creating duplicate content. I would check at the official site to see if there is way to disable the archiving "tag" feature as it appears to be redundant.

Andreas recommendation would work as well, simply check if you're at an archive tag page, if so then display the meta tag noindex.

You also could do this inside of a robots.txt

User-agent: *
Disallow: /tag/*

This would effectively stop any pages from being crawled when the crawler sees the "tag" directory.

Hope that helps,

Don

Hi Ishwar,

If you have done so yet it would be best to create your own post. Many people pop in here to help others and when they see this topic as answered they may not look at it. Creating your own post will get the most attention.

Hi Nicole,

Okay so the reason I stated that it appears something is improperly installed is due to the fact a page should in general have 1 head tag, 1 title tag, 1 body tag and 1 document type declaration. Your page has the normal ones you'd expect to see plus another set.

In the code I posted above you have an Iframe, which is basically a tag that says display information from a different source. In this case it is Google, which is fine but it should not contain another set of head, title, and body tags along with a document declaration. Google would never do that. This along with my years of experience looking at and installing ad-ons leads me to believe that something was installed incorrectly or at the very least not coded correctly.

As to the misconfiguration issue, I would look first at how my url rewrites are being done as there is no viable reason the first link you posted should rewrite to a url and serve different content than what is suppose to be there. That tells me that the re-writes are being incorrectly handled.

I hope that helps a little,

Don

It looks like something is installed and configured improperly.

You have 2 head tags on the page that shows up from the redirect.

This is actually inside the first head tag complete with a body tag and another doc declaration.

<iframe id="oauth2relay579972146" name="oauth2relay579972146" src="https://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/postmessageRelay?parent=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.incipio.com#rpctoken=728288212&forcesecure=1" style="width: 1px; height: 1px; position: absolute; top: -100px;" tabindex="-1">

<html><head><title>title><meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="content-type"><meta content="IE=edge" http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible"><meta content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1, minimum-scale=1, maximum-scale=1, user-scalable=0" name="viewport"><script src="https://apis.google.com/js/api.js" type="text/javascript" gapi_processed="true"><script src="https://oauth.googleusercontent.com/gadgets/js/core:rpc:shindig.random:shindig.sha1.js?c=2" type="text/javascript"><script src="https://ssl.gstatic.com/accounts/o/3417060037-postmessagerelay.js">head><body>html>iframe>

That looks like an installation issue.

• Now the misconfiguration issue would have to be why the URL re-writes to page but serves up different content.

• And lastly I think even if you fix those issues you're still going to get duplicate content warnings because you have very thin content on pages.

• Example: Page 1 http://www.incipio.com/cases/tablet-cases/amazon-kindle-cases-sleeves/amazon-kindle-fire-hd-6-cases.html

• Example: Page 2 http://www.incipio.com/cases/tablet-cases/amazon-kindle-cases-sleeves/amazon-kindle-fire-hd-7-cases.html

• On those 2 pages there is a 1 character difference 6 instead of 7. All the other content (header & footer) and 1 letter difference. Than if you go to the actual product page you have the exact same issue same description to the letter except the one number. Yep, you're going to have a duplicate content problem.

• This is something that all e-commerce stores face. You honestly need to write unique content for each and every product you sell. Don't copy & paste stuff from another site like Amazon or the manufacturers site, write your own content.

• In summation, I would recheck any modules/ad-ons/plug-ins you installed as one appears to be incorrect. if that doesn't' fix the re-write issue have a developer that is familiar with your ecommerce platform look at this issue. Lastly, you got to have unique content.

• Maybe not the best news but I hope it helps

• Don

Edit in bullet points to try and make the post a look a little better.  These forums don't take kindly to adding code blocks

Hi David,

Rand covered this very topic in a white board friday. Perhaps you may find it helpful and provide insight on what can happen and why he thinks the way he does.

Here is a link for you.

Hope it helps,

Don

There would not be a direct SEO benefit for doing this. There maybe however a benefit in tracking. If you only used that sub-domain for X ad campaign than you would know all traffic from referral sub-domain would be coming from that ad campaign.

There may be some slight non-optimization for doing it this way. Sub-domains are treated as their own domains to a degree, so you are in affect giving the ad-campaign's link to juice to a new domain entirely. Then forwarding that to a specific page. Opposed to just directly giving the link juice an ad campaign can generate to the actual page.

A couple things here depending on the type of ad campaign there may not be any link juice to worry about, like Google's ad words don't pass link juice. However, if you purchased direct advertisement on certain sites you may get some link juice from those ads running.

The second thing is actually a question. What is the purpose of creating a sub-domain to point to a sub directory? Is it just for tracking? Or were you wondering if you could benefit from a sub-domain being treated as a new domain linking to you? If for tracking; I would think there are other tracking methods that could handle referring traffic.  If it were in hopes of gaining a new backlink from a different domain than I would say it isn't helpful this way. First because it is simply forwarding to the sub-directory and secondly even it weren't forwarding the link would be considered from the same server and not very helpful anyway.

So in short, no benefit other than a potential way to help with tracking.

Hope that makes sense and helps,

Don

edit some grammar

How are you merchant prices / info being displayed on your site? From your site or using IFrames?

Hi Eslam,

I'm glad you found help while you were here. As your site continues to grow you'll find the Moz tools more and more helpful as well as other site's tools.

I have also always felt one of the best part of Moz is the community. I had questions when I first arrived here 4 years ago and found the help I need from both the members and the staff. It is only fair that I share my knowledge with new members.

Good luck to you,

Don

I agree with Massimillano here.

Three things you should do for all common CMS systems (WP, Joomla, ect..)

First change the admin directory to something else. When doing this you likely have to edit configuration files to point to the new location which is pretty simple.

Second protect admin directory with .htaccess & .htpasswd.  There is a nice generator I have used on some of my sites in the past here.

Third create a honeypot / auto IP ban for malicious crawlers or script kiddies. There are several plugins for this if you search the keywords honeypot + cms.

That is a nice post Danny.

For a non-developer the scores seem inline and accurate. If you have an existing site and just want to integrate a shopping tool or platform the list is very much how I would rate them.

If you're a developer and want to self customize Zen or Oscommerce would be the best choices IMO. Many out of the box site software are pretty restrictive and tend to lend their selves to a cookie-cutter look and feel, I'm all for customization.

Well it is April's Fool's day

Fish frys = Link Bait (pun intended)

Perhaps the input is particular...?

Pope's Site with w2 prefix

Hi Errick,

No, pointing a page to itself will not hurt you at all. This is common practice as many pages can have parameters.

So something like

thisfluffysite.com    may become

thisfluffysite.com?product=8282&sample=t

Search engines are well aware that this is why people would and do put canonical tags to itself.

In other cases you may have something like the www.thisfluffysite.com and www.thisfluffysite.com/ and no www thisfluffysite.com etc... all these would be pointing to the one in the canonical tag. In general you would want to fix this issue with 301 re-writes but in some cases that isn't possible so tag to the right version is actually how you handle it.

I have found some crawl reports tell you about it, but that is more of a curtsey than anything else.

Hope this makes sense and helps,

Don

I really appreciate all of you taking the time to tell me about your experiences.

I am only sorry I could only mark 3 of you as good answers. All your input was welcomed and helpful to me in one way or another.

I hope to continue to see you on the boards, maybe just not as much.

Don

I looked at Magneto many years ago and I think it was one that was kind of spun off of oscommerce. If that is true there is a plug-in called easy populate that lets you do just as Monica suggested. Even if not Magneto is so widely used now there has to be a plugin for it. Easy populate allowed you to download or upload files via CSV files which can be easily made in Excel or OpenOffice.

Hope it helps,

Don

I'm curious how many of you all work at home or mostly at home either through an company or freelance. Or are most of you employed at a corporation?

My company was recently bought by a very large global company. Recently I found out that all the SEO and web design is contracted through outside sources. With the headquarters in Europe, this being my primary job function I kinda feel well you know.... down..

Websites I put my life into for the last 7 years are going to be handed over to a corporation to do with whatever they feel they should. I know they were never really mine, but when you spend so much of your life to making them the best you can, so much so to attract the attention of a global billion dollar company, you should feel great right? But I feel like my dog just died.

I don't have a bad impression of the company but the shift of moving me to the IT guy has begun. Normal web updates I would have done, are now being pushed aside. I don't hate IT I like helping others, but I really loved being able to make a difference through the web.

Now I'm left contemplating my future, big corporations have so much bs, I just don't feel comfortable. I would really appreciate you all giving me your thoughts and tell me about any similar experiences you have had in your life.

Cheers,

Don

Brendan's advice is pertinent if your are specifically buying a link, but there is a huge caveat to this information. It is not uncommon for other services such as Yahoo Local, or lead generating resources to provide a service of which includes a link to your website. In these cases you're not actually buying a link but a service.

Google has indeed cracked down on directory type listing websites because they really offer no value to anybody on the web. However when services are attached, such as lead generation, technical advice, consulting etc.. often times a link to your site is part of the service and shouldn't be lumped into calling it a purchased link.. per-say.

Hope this makes sense,

Don

To follow up on what Keszi has said, it is not uncommon for this value to fluctuate from update to update. The reason is because there are so many things that factor into this score. This is further complicated by the fact that the crawl will not crawl every domain every time. This means you may see less / more "linking domains", and "linking c-blocks" which are factors in DA and PA.

I know when you see a 10% fluctuation you may get a little worried. However, when DA is in the 20's the fluctuation will be more prominent than if you were up in the 40's. Reason being is it is exponentially harder to reach higher domain authorities, which means that there will be a larger swab of linking domains and less likely to change much if a few are missed on each crawl.

Hope this helps,

Don

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

Wow Good info Dr. Pete!

I'm a little surprised Google didn't give more a lead time warning, but we have known for awhile something like this was coming.

Great info,

Don

Recommended, I wouldn't put it that way. Another way to look at is will it hurt my page (could it be considered spamming)? The answer to that is no, it won't hurt. Many CMS systems will use a page title as the H1 tag simply because it is likely the most relevant data that is already required to create the amount of dynamic pages they do.

If you can however, you may find that you will get more keyword traffic by switching up the title and H1 text a little. In all likely hood the Title and H1 maybe very similar (except for in some HTML 5 pages where there can be multiple H1 tags). This being the case you can use the same main keywords but expand on them in the H1 tag since it is not truncated or limited to a certain amount of characters. Making the H1 tag sound more natural and likely creating longer tailed keywords users may search for.

Hope this 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*

Yes if it is a follow link. The anchor text helps the search engine understand what the page they are linking to is, but the link itself will pass link juice. Therefore your page authority and domain authority will increase which are known factors in SERPs.

Hope that helps,

Don

Hi Nick,

To expand on what Ryan has stated. Google does use IP addresses to serve results. If somebody in Chelsea types in "Plumber" Google will decide what it thinks the person is looking for. If in case it is happens to be a local plumber than in all likely-hood, a site ranking for Chelsea plumber would be a top result. To specifically answer the question we would have to know what Google thinks a person means when they just type the broad keyword "plumber" and the answer may actually differ from region to region.

Hope this helps,

Don

Moz "used" to provide this service but has since switched gears. There are many of the Moz staff who have worked with other companies so much so they actually recommend them. See this page...

My advice ask a lot of question. You want somebody who has worked in your industry before and anybody who promises the moon is full of poo.

Hope it helps you and others,

Don

You may want to rely on more then just one site's DA metric to make your actual assessment. Moz's number while helpful is just a very educated guess; which can not take into account all the factors. What is most important is conversion rates, sales, or keyword rankings depending on what your goal is.

It is not uncommon for our DA to go up or down a few points month to month. This usually has a correlation to how many linking domains and the like the crawl comes back with. Not ever site will get scanned every crawl, so this number doesn't play a huge role in how successful I view my efforts.

Hope that helps,

Don

It is very unlikely that you would receive any penalties for having 404 errors in such a short time frame. It is common for 404 errors to happen, from others linking to pages on your site that don't exist or removed content. Search engines typically just ignore the pages and move on.

It would only be problematic if your site continually creates new 404 errors. This would show a pattern of bad site design and may hurt you.

Hope this helps,

Don

Yep! Winners will be announced June 15th 3 days before my birthday, ticket to Moz Con would be a nice gift!

Hi Steve,

It is pretty well known duplicate content is not a "good thing" but it doesn't mean it will hurt you directly. Google rarely will penalize a site for duplicate content REF: Matt Cutts

It does however make ranking a specific page harder when you're competing with yourself. Most SEO tools will warn you about each case of duplicate content it finds which can also be annoying.

In the best case scenario you may rank multiple pages for longer tailed keywords for example.. something like

Main Keyword: Gourmet Shopping
Tails: Dayton Ohio, Tampa Florida, Los Angles California, Topeka Kansas

In such case you may would rank 1 of those pages over the other for Gourmet Shopping however if there was enough specific location specific content you may find other pages ranking well in those city state type searches.

Hope that makes sense,

Don

Are more outlets (filters) coming?

Yahoo News / NPR / CNN / etc......

Parenthesis would be ignored by crawlers.

I would try to get them out of there honestly. It doesn't make for a pretty URL harder to type on mobile devices.

Hello Goran,

Have you checked if your site maybe be using duplicate content? I searched Google.ba and noticed you do come up but your page and layout is very similar if not exactly the same as the #1 search result.

• REF: http://www.telekoplus.com/mobilni-telefoni/htc/desire-620-dual-sim-cena/
• VS: http://www.mobilnishop.com/mobilni-telefoni/htc/Desire-620-Dual-SIM-3730/

If you copy another sites content Google will use the site that first appeared or the one they feel is the original author. Content is very important, but it MUST be unique content!

Hope this helps,

Don

Hi

I think you're on the right track.

A very good blog post by Jared Gardner has recently addressed this question on the Moz Blog.

Hope it helps,

Don

Hello,

There is this post here on Moz which has some great guidance. But to adequately answer your question I wonder if you're using a CMS? If so there maybe a few nice add-ons / modules  to help with this task.

My basic advice would be to:

• Identify the pages top keyword and use it in the url.
• Short URLS are better
• Limit parameters
• Try not to go more than 2 folders deep (ie /computers/accessories/)
• Use Hyphens instead of Underscores
• Avoid Stop Words

I hope this helps,

Don

Hi Angelos,

Sounds like you have a couple things going on here.

First lets look at this statement.

After looking into my website I see that a lot of links in my content and menu have as a link the http url

In this case you need to fix anything that references an http URL. HTTP and HTTPS are for all intents and purposes two different domains, it is like you own amazon.com and you are linking to ebay.com then ebay having redirects back to amazon.com. Need to fix this.

Second a 503 error indicates a page is unavailable. This could be a number of things, improper redirects from the http to https, the server having issues, or dns having issues. If we are talking about the domain in your profile I was unable to reach it at all. For a better look at this issue let us know what domain we can look at.

Hope to help,

Don

Hello Aashath,

If you recently switched hosting providers then you would have been assigned a new DNS (Domain Name Server). This tells the internet where you site is actually located. When you change your DNS it takes time before the changes are propagated through the internet. Google could being trying to resolve your old IP address, when it finds nothing there it can't return results. Usually this only takes a couple days to propagate.

You can read more about changing DNS on Matt Cutts blog here.

Some things you can do to help Google,

• Submit a new sitemap with last update time
• Make sure your Google Analytics account is still active and update code if needed
• Give it some time

Hope this helps,

Don

Hi,

So you have a few options.

1. Create a non-product page that list similar items and an no-longer available. This gives the users a notice they arrived at the right page but were too late. Along with actionable options it may convert into sales of similar items.

2. 301 the url to the parent category, this is a flat out redirect and maybe the easiest to setup but I don't like the user experience it provides, it does give the benefit of passing the link juice back to the parent.

3. Meta Tag NoIndex this is a pretty much a search engine only fix, it doesn't pass the link juice anywhere but prevents errors from getting to search engines and crawlers.

You can read more about my thoughts and some other opinions on a similar question posted last week here:

I hope this helps and good luck,

Don

HI Alberto,

Keep in mind I have not seen your page. I am talking in general specifics. The over all point is if you have a link to another site which is there for reference the user there is no reason to not make it an actual link. Any reason you can think of not to make it a link would also be a reason to remove it.

If you feel you have too many links on a specific page then you probably do! Pick the most pertinent ones and axe the others.

There are ways to maximize link juice and page authority by using some more advanced SEO tactics, See Rand's post about link sculpting. I will say this is some advanced level planing and not something you would just single out one page to do.

Remember SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. White hat SEO deals with how you can best present your page to search engines with out frustrating your users. When you purposely make a change that negatively effects your users and possibly tricks search engines to rank you better you have crossed into grey or black hat SEO. Something that will eventually bit you in the ass.

The choice is of course yours, and if you would like me to look at the page in question you can PM me a link I will be happy to do so. I do stand by everything I said in all my replies while speaking in general terms.

Don

Actually no I wouldn't recommend that.

The reason is if the link is helpful it should be a link right? From a users point of view do you not find it frustrating to see a link that is not a link?

My suggestion is to evaluate each site you're linking to, if they deserve the link leave it in. Otherwise simply remove the link.

The reason behind my suggestion is the way the internet and page rank / authority is supposed to work. When a web master find a link to a site that is beneficial to their sites users, then they link to them. This generates page authority to the linked site but also helps the web master serve their users. In turn it also associates the web masters site with the linked site.

The web has taken many twist and turns since the original method of passing link juice was developed. Tools such as robots.txt, nofollow noindex, and disavow have been added to deal with the changing environment. But, the core of the system still remains.

Hope this make sense,

Don

If you mean a link like:

www.google.com

VS

www.google.com

Then yes, because the first one is not technically a link.

HI Alberto,

Understanding the purpose of the NOFOLLOW tag is what would make your decision. In general you should NOFOLLOW.

Edit for Reference: Google NoFollow Tag

• Untrusted Content (like user generated un-moderated)
• Paid Links Or Paid Advertisements
• Links to Pages That Serve No Search Engine Value (sign up, registration, etc..)

In your case you have "resources" which in theory adds value to the page and the users experience. A single page with resource links is not going to hurt your site at all. Without seeing the exact page I would lean to say it would be fine as follow links. That being said, you want it to be tasteful non-spammy and indeed a boon to the user experience and not just a big list of garbage.

Hope this helps,

Don

Hi Becky,

How did you do the redirects?

Did you generate a new sitemap?

Is there anything that would block crawling the non www version?

Do you still have www links on any of your pages? (typically this isn't an issue because most people use relative linking but figured I'd ask).

A quick note www. and non www are considered two different sites just as http and https are.

Hope to help

Don

Alberto, have you considered a Jquery Dialog box. While technically it is a popup, you need an an event to trigger it. If you don't have something like an ONLOAD event and more of a click to learn more then the dialog is much better than a traditional popup. It is less likely to frustrate people.

Example..http://jsfiddle.net/umkbsms3/1/

Good luck with whichever route you go with!

Don