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 Christy,

Nope, Never did figure out an answer!

I took a break for a while but now I'm back trying to divine a solution.

Re: Dana's suggestion, I did make sure that our canonical plugin was using absolute urls, but it looks as though that did not solve the issue.

Not sure how to locate a potential PHP glitch that might be causing this... any pointers?

Like a charm, Mark. Thanks!

Haha, I actually just realized that I will only have to punch the formula in on a row by row basis once; after that I can simply arrange the table columns in the same way and copy the KEI column with the formulas into the new doc.

Might be a little time consuming the first time, and you probably wouldn't want to do it for a spreadsheet containing more than a couple hundred keywords, but not bad overall.

I did find something that seems to work pretty well. the formula is _=(B2^2)/C2 _where column one is keyword, column two is local monthly searches, and column three is competition. The KEI formula goes in column four.

This is all well and good, but it takes quite a bit of time to adjust this formula row by row; any ideas on how to simply apply this to the entire table?

I suppose another way to phrase this is that I am looking for an Excel formula to help me determine KEI, or Keyword Effectiveness Index, with greater accuracy.

Thanks, Thomas. I'll check it out.

"So do you think there is a relationship between search volume and competition/value of a keyword?"

Well, yeah. Specifically, what I'm looking for is a formula that will organize my export results with simultaneous lowest possible competition score per highest possible local monthly search. I want to find the happy medium between the two to assign some sort of cumulative score, and then arrange according to that.

It probably sounds like I'm looking for a silver bullet...I just have a lot of data to sift through.

Hi All,

I was wondering if anyone had an excel formula that they use to manage large amounts of data in spreadsheet exports from the Google Adwords Keyword Tool?

Specifically, I am interested in something that establishes a solid corollary between a given keywords competition score and the amount of local/global monthly searches.

Any suggested ideas or methods are very welcome. Thanks!

Thanks David. Very helpful info.

Ok then you should be all set if your tests on GWMT did not indicate any errors.

Yup, I understand that you want to see your main site. This is why I recommended blocking only /Blog and not / (your root domain).

However, many blogs have a landing page. Does yours? In other words, when you click on your blog link, does it take you straight to Blog/posts or is there another page in between, eg /Blog/welcome?

If it does not go straight into Blog/posts you would want to also allow the landing page.

Does that make sense?

Well what Martijn (sorry, I spelled his name wrong before) and I were saying was not to forget to allow the landing page of your blog - otherwise this will not be indexed as you are disallowing the main blog directory.

Do you have a specific landing page for your blog or does it go straight into the /posts directory?

I'd say there's nothing wrong with allowing both Blog/Post and Blog/post just to be on the safe side...honestly not sure about case sensitivity in this instance.

Correct, Martijin. Good catch!

Hey There,

I would direct you to this very similar thread. Seems like it will likely answer your question.

Well, no point in a blog that hurts your seo

I respectfully disagree with Martijin; I believe what you would want to do is disallow the Blog directory itself, not the whole site. It would seem if you Disallow: / and _Allow:/Blog/Post _ that you are telling SEs not to index anything on your site except for /Blog/Post.

I'd recommend:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /Blog/
Allow: /Blog/Post

This should block off the entire Blog directory except for your post subdirectory. As Maritijin stated; always test before you make real changes to your robots.txt.

Thanks, Miriam!

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!

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!

I can't get it to work for anything other than restaurant search terms at the moment. Can you confirm you've tried it and it worked for something non-food industry oriented? Also curious about what contributes to their numbered rating system and how to possibly optimize for that now.

Sorry to answer your questions with more questions!

I was just looking at it on Chrome for the sample term "italian restaurant". It also works in Firefox for me. Are you running a Mac? I'm on one of our office PCs right now.

Local Carousel is pretty cool, Linda. I did not know it had launched yet!

I assume they finally switched over a proprietary rating system and it's not Zagat based any more (I can only get the carousel to come up for restaurants)?

Well said, Marcus.

With regards to question number one in my initial post, I can only assume that Moz and other ranking platforms will in fact broaden the local search radius to a national level by default.

That again raises the question of what to do if you or an entity you represent wish to rank internationally...

Marcus,

I totally agree that this is a good thing and can't deny it's pretty helpful for us. I think in general it's pretty cool to see a tech giant taking major strides toward helping small businesses compete and building local community networks up. Kind of refreshing actually...

If you take a look at the following, it actually appears that you cannot turn location based search off now; just widen the geographical area.

https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/179386?hl=en

To clarify; I am talking about pure organic results, not a 7-pack (formerly 10-pack?). Take a look at the attached image to verify if you'd like.

As I said, you can change the target location using the Search Tools function, however I can't see that many people knowing to do this and the query automatically detects your location by default.

web-design-query.png

With regards to the co-occurrence of the keyword and brand comment, I'd just like to point out that in this case they are effectively the same thing. From a branding perspective, if you are choosing a name for your business you could not do better than incorporating a relevant keyword you're trying to rank for.

You can of course change your location from the auto detected one to whatever you wish using search tools, but I doubt most would do that.

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...

Thanks, Takeshi.

As it turned out, most of the 404s would not have been passing very much juice anyway. We did decide to go ahead and hedge our bets by simply redirecting the majority of them to the root anyway and marked them as fixed in GWMT.

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!

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...

Hi All,

Although my Moz error scans have been pretty clean for a while, a law firm site I manage recently cropped up with 80+ 404 errors since the last scan.

I'm a little baffled as the url it shows being returned looks like this:

http://www.yoursite.com/ http://www.yoursite.com/resource.html

For some reason it seems to be initiating a query to call the root domain twice before the actual resource.

I installed ModX Revolution 2.2.6-PL on the site in question, and am hoping a canonical plugin I just started using will take care of these.

Has this happened to anyone else? What did you do to solve the issue?

Thanks for your time and any tips!

Happy Friday Everyone,

I have a quick question:

I am in the process of crunching some numbers to try and figure out an organic traffic forecast for a client.

One of the crucial metrics I can't seem to figure out is traffic rate of growth over the next year or so.

The reason this is complicated for me is that I have only ever done this sort of thing for an established business before, and had plenty of past organic traffic data to work with.

What I am looking for is a source that could give me a reasonable idea of what kind of growth rates I might expect for a startup with practically no data; I would be perfectly happy with a national average for online retail startups.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Hey Lynn,

Option 1 worked like a charm!

Thanks for your help, it's a new CMS for me and I'm still getting used to it.

Cheers!

Hey All,

I'm experiencing a bit of a problem with creating a custom, separate Meta Title for CMS pages in Magento 1.6.1.0.

I know this can be added through _CMS => Page => Page Information => Page Title, _but this method presents issues, as a length of 70 characters is a little too long for breadcrumbs.

I would like a way to add a second specific meta title field that overrides this first Page Title field_. _

I did find something that does this in Magento Connect for around $50.00USD, but this seems like something that should be easy and free to do.

Any suggestions as to a workaround or alternative free plugin would be most welcome!

Thanks!

Ah yes, I suspected that there would simply be too many variables to tell without actually getting our hands dirty

Thanks for the great answer, EGOL!

Hi All,

I've just agreed to undertake an AdWords campaign for a client, and I was wondering if there was any competent way to project an estimate for what their CTR might be before the actual campaign begins?

I do know that the average Google gave in 2012 was about 2%, although I've read that a diligent content marketer can certainly achieve double digits.

I'm just trying to figure out how to roughly quantify what CTR might be for the client before we get started, and if there was a way to do that **per keyphrase **that would be so much the better.

Does anyone have a formula they use? Any ideas?

Thanks!

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 Miriam,

I did know that they were adding enhanced capabilities to the new Places, although I did not know it was going to now be that easy to verify.

Traditionally, I've found it a real pain to verify, especially when a PO Box is involved. I did recently realize that I could simply call the Google Local team, though, and things have proceeded much more smoothly from there.

I'm keen to get switched over to the new Places dashboard myself, although when I asked if I could be switched early, they said I'd have to wait until my account was randomly updated (not surprised, I wasn't really expecting them to.)

Thanks, Miriam.

I had kind of figured Mike was probably right, since he's a very reliable Local SEO guy. It's pretty bothersome that Google would release a product for public use with so many bugs, but I guess it's not really that surprising.

At this point, I am beginning to wish that I had never combined these pages, and am glad I only did it on my own personal account and not for a client.

I think in the future I may just let Places be Places and Plus be Plus until the kinks are all ironed out.