Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Wow, thanks guys! This is indeed an enterprise level site, so especially thanks to CleverPhD for the breakdown on trailing slash v. no trailing slash. Redirecting as we speak.

Hi All,

A recent Moz scan has turned up quite a few duplicate content notifications, all of which have the same issue. For instance: domain.com/page and domain.com/page/ are listed as duplicates, but I was under the impression that these pages would, in fact, be the same page.

Is this even something to bother fixing or a fluke scan? If I should fix it does anyone know of an .htaccess modification that might be used?

Thanks!

Hey Dan,

I had kind of assumed that it might be a false alarm from the Moz scan. I typically use Xenu to check for broken links periodically and it hasn't shown any.

Thanks for the tip!

Could you detail this process a bit more?

Hi All,

I have a client with a sizeable international manufacturing operation who we've managed to get up to a DA of 40 over time. However, things seem to have levelled out, and I'm not sure how to mix it up to get the numbers back on the rise.

We create regular blog and social content, run press releases bi-weekly, optimize on-page content and stay on top of all technical issues. What else can we do??

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated, Thanks.

Hi All,

I have noticed that Open Site Explorer does not appear to be totally accurate in the linking root domains it shows for a given site.

For instance, I have a site that I know for a fact is listed on dmoz (and has been for far longer than last Mozscape update), which should show up near the top of the stack. What gives? Do you think that this is also affecting my projected DA, PA, etc?

Thoughts and theories welcome.

I'm using Interspire's shopping cart system with a few modifications. There's absolutely no official support for it at this point, so I appreciate your help.

The cart is a standalone php page, so I think that just blocking that off should be sufficient.

Thanks!

Thanks, Lesley. I've just added the cart page to the disallow list.

Hi All,

I'm having an ecommerce cart issue. Basically, each time a purchase is made, the cart pops up with a unique id (eg www.mysite.com/cart.php?action=add&product_id=3728), This is being caught by MOZ scans as an individual page in some instances.

Could I simply add Disallow: /cart.php to my robots.txt to nix this issue? In theory it should keep all subsequent query strings from being indexed, right?

Thanks!

Hi All,

Does anyone know of optimization best practices for the now largely defunct Interspire Web Publisher?

Specifically, I'm looking for a canonical plugin or workaround to try and get rid of a few duplicate content issues (most importantly root vs. index.php).

I'd like to just redo the site with a cms that has better support...unfortunately client budget constraints are a little tight at the moment.

Thanks!

Hey There,

You can actually reach the Google Places team via phone. They are one of the only divisions I know of that you can actually talk to "in person".

I wrote a blog entry detailing exactly how to do this a short while ago: http://www.got2web.com/google-plus-seo-local-plus-claiming.html

To summarize the important bit from it:

**"Visit this address to get the process started: http://support.google.com/places/bin/static.py?hl=en&ts=1399021&page=ts.cs **

**Under "Which verification method did you try" select " I tried PIN verification for a single listing" .  At the next prompt, check "The status is NOT needs action". At the verification method prompt, check "Postcard"  and then last check "Yes" when asked "Have you waited 15 days". **

You will be given a "call us" link and a contact form. Never mind the form and click the call link. You'll enter your name and number and a real live Google rep will call you within a minute."

I would call and then explain to them that you'd like to change your address. You should not have to re-verify at all.

Hope this helps!

Hey Thomas,

It is considered acceptable to create a country specific domain for each nationality your company is active in, in fact, this is what many large international businesses do; for instance Adidas has adidas.co.uk, adidas.de, etc.

However, it is not necessary to do so, and you would need to begin building links back up from "ground zero". It seems it would be both more SEO-friendly and cost effective to go ahead and use a new folder, or subdirectory, for each country.

Check out this previous Moz thread for more info.

This article may help explain directory structure to you a little bit.

At any rate...I'd recommend subdirectories as your best bet, so you're on the right track. Hope this helps!

It's pretty simple to configure a corner logo and watermark action in Acrobat if you wanted to just modify the exported PDFs. You could set up an action for each different brand; it only takes like two seconds to open a PDF, apply the action and save it.

You do need to have Adobe Acrobat and not just Reader though...

Gregster,

I assume that you have found an answer to your question by now. However, I wanted to offer up what looks to be an extremely in depth and comprehensive walkthrough on Magento SEO from yoast.com. They have several sections on duplicate content, as well as a canonical plugin you may find useful.

http://yoast.com/articles/magento-seo/

Best of Luck!

Hey All,

I think it's a known fact at this point that when signed into a personal Google account while doing a search, the results are very oriented around keywords and phrases you have already searched for, as well as your account's perceived location; for instance when I wanted to check one of my own web properties in SE listings I would sign out or it would likely appear first as a false reading.

Today I noticed something very interesting: even when not signed in, Google's listings were giving precedence to locality. It was to a very extreme degree, as in when searching for "web design," a firm a mile away ranked higher than one 1.5 miles away and such.

It would seem that the algos having this high a level of  location sensitivity and preference would actually be a boon for the little guys, which is, I assume why it was implemented. However, it brings up a couple of interesting questions for me.

1. How is this going to affect Moz (or any SE ranking platform, for that matter) reports? I assume that Google pulls locations from IP Addresses, therefore would it not simply pull the local results most relevant for the Moz server(s) IP?

2. What can one do to rise above this aggressive level of location based search? I mean, my site (which has a DA of 37 and a PA of 48) appears above sites like webdesign.org (DA of 82, PA of 85). Not that I'm complaining at the moment, but I could see this being a fairly big deal for larger firms looking to rank on a national level.

What gives? I'd love to get some opinions from the community here if anyone else has noticed this...

Hi Jo,

Sounds like you are on the right track. I'd agree with Francisco in creating one umbrella page for the main brand, and then a separate +Local page for each individual location.

You can request that the Places page be merged with it's +Local version over the phone as long as all the information matches.

My firm recently authored a blog post about doing just this in fact. Perhaps you'll find it useful: http://www.got2web.com/google-plus-seo-local-plus-claiming.html

As an added interesting fact, you can also request that a brand page be combined with a +Local page. This gives the +Local page priority, but moves all of your images, posts, etc. to it.

In the past, I too have had this issue.

I've found repeatedly that the quickest way to get verified is to get the Google Places/Local dept. to actually call you and speak to a real live person. This way, you can verify instantly over the phone and not worry about postcard PINs.

Furthermore, I expect you'd be able to actually verify all your business locations during the same call, though it might take a while.

Directions as follow to reach Google:

What you want to do is to verify ownership of your business over the phone. In order to do this, you actually need to call Google. Visit this address to get the process started: http://support.google.com/places/bin/static.py?hl=en&ts=1399021&page=ts.cs

Under "Which verification method did you try" select " I tried PIN verification for a single listing" .  At the next prompt, check "The status is NOT needs action". At the verification method prompt, check "Postcard"  and then last check "Yes" when asked "Have you waited 15 days".

You will be given a "call us" link and a contact form. Never mind the form and click the call link. You'll enter your name and number and a real live Google rep will call you within a minute. Simply explain to them that your are trying to verify your Local+ or Places page, and ask if you can do it by phone.

You should be all set within two weeks, tops.

Hi All,

I've just checked my GWMT profile for one of my client's sites and found that there are currently over 600 404 Error notifications! This is not that surprising given that we very recently redesigned and launched their new corporate site, which previously had a ton of "junk" legacy pages.

I was wondering if it would work in terms of efficient SEO to simply apply a 301 redirect from the 404 page to our root to solve this issue?

If not what would be a good solution?

Thanks in advance for all your great advice!