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Hello ASMC, I believe you are asking whether search engines look at the title tag
<title>This is the title</title>
or if they look at a meta title tag
The answer is that search engines look for the first example, the title tag. The second example is not a normal meta tag and does not need to be used.
I hope this answers your question.
I see a lot of this for phone numbers too.
In reading your question though, I had to ask myself this question, "Are these sites ranking because there are no better alternatives?" If everyone in the space is using duplicate content/content spamming, they will all be in the results because no one is creating a site with better information.
I would view your research as opportunity. If you feel you need to connect with customers based on zip code, build better pages and become the best result for your users.
Hello 858,
Here's the short answer: dashes.
For the long answer, check this post out: http://www.seomoz.org/q/hyphens-vs-underscores
Hope this helps!
Is this what you are looking for?
Isn't increased CTR on searches reason enough?
Many different ideas have been discussed regarding meta descriptions. Overall, most argue Google does not factor meta descriptions into rankings.
Personally, I think it would probably still factor in as a quality signal since the text used by Google often changes based on a particular search. If the description doesn't fit the keyword phrase and/or content, Google will often look for other content to use instead. For that reason alone, I would use a different meta description for every page (at the very least, for every page I want indexed) and I would make sure the description fit the content.
Hello Dana,
I suggest reading this over: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394
Midway down the page, Google states:
Can the link be relative or absolute?
rel="canonical"can be used with relative or absolute links, but werecommend using absolute links to minimize potential confusion or
difficulties. If your document specifies a base link, any relative links
will be relative to that base link.
Hope this helps!
In-house for my own sites and freelance SEO mainly to local businesses. I'm actually more interested in writing software so will be delving into SEO software next.
I couldn't tell from your profile, which are you? Nice to meet you Eyepaq.
You won't be able to delete your root domain. The same index page is resolving for two different URLs.
I think you would want to 301 redirect from www.ferringway.com/index.php to www.ferringway.com. This will keep your links in place and fix the duplicate content problem. You can read more about 301 redirecting here.
To answer your main question, content aggregation is not good SEO.
First, search engines are going to see scraped duplicate content. Second, if you add any ads at all, you will only increase the odds you will be viewed as a profit-seeking-curated-content farmer which may as well be equivalent to spam.
Panda and Penguin were released to deal with sites that provide no-value content aggregation.
If you aren't adding value, don't do it.
OK, all that being said, I do find Flavors.me interesting.
I think it might work as a personal website used to drive traffic through to other channels. Like About.me, but with a bit more oomph!
Provide a solid profile (unique content providing value) that points to the places I spend my time on the Web.
Document refers to the single web page you are placing the canonical link on.
The base link is referring to the URL you can provide as the href property for the base tag. The base tag can be included in the head of your HTML document.
Example base link:
<base href="http://www.ccisolutions.com/">
If you choose to use the example base link above and this relative URL:
Your canonical link will end up referring to “http://www.ccisolutions.com/page1.html”.
Here is a second example, this time using a new base link which includes the products directory:
<base href="http://www.ccisolutions.com/products/">
If you choose to use this new base link and the following relative URL:
Your canonical link will end up referring to “http://www.ccisolutions.com/products/page1.html”.
If you choose to use this new base link and this relative URL:
Your canonical link will actually refer to one-level-up from your base link or “http://www.ccisolutions.com/page1.html”. I'm not sure if you're familiar with the syntax "../" (dot dot slash), but it means to go up one level from the current directory.
The use of base links for canonical linking might be useful for a CMS where the content is generally dynamically created. It might be good to sit down with your developers and discuss which tactic would be best for the site in question.
I am including a link to this SEOmoz blog post in case it is also of help.
Edit: expanded on the explanations...
Speaking from experience, go with a CMS. New content can be created faster and easier. Old content can be updated faster and easier. And, depending on the CMS, site updates can be completed faster and easier (install a new theme, update the CSS, add a new plugin).
Next, a lot of sites perform well by using a slide-show above the fold. I would focus on what makes a better user experience. If users can make decisions more quickly (and then convert), I say do it.
Finally, I think that as long as you make it apparent that your navigation menus are for navigation, search engines don't care which side your navigation on. Crawlers look at your site with a totally different perspective so it's no longer about "which side", but about whether your navigation can be easily identified as navigation.
I also suggest looking around the SEOmoz beginner's guide for more information. Start here.
I doubt there's a filter against xxx, but that doesn't mean there isn't something in the algos that checks for a spammy link profile more aggressively if the xxx is there.
I ran through the first 5 pages of links in Open Site Explorer, and their highest authority links mainly contain the branded keyword phrase "xxx church". Could use some diversity in anchor text. Just because Penguin hit for exact match anchor text for spammy links (from spammy sites and tactics), it doesn't mean you can't use "Check out this porn addiction recovery site if you're having issues with porn in your house." and link to the site with the underlined text.
There may be some more questions to ask. What are their link building efforts?
A number of pages from http://blog.internetsafety.com with incoming links no longer resolve (404 not found). There are lots of links that actually do look Penguin bait.
It could be link diversity. It could be low quality links. It could be tons of links coming from pages that are now resolving as 404s.
Sorry the news isn't great, but I really don't think it's the domain name that is the problem.
Also just to clarify, when you state they are using "relative" URLs, are you talking about "www.ccisolutions.com/page1.html" vs. "http://www.ccisoultions.com/page1.html"?
If this is true, then both versions are absolute URLs. A relative URL is different. Here are a few examples of relative URLs:
page1.html
/products/page1.html
../products/page1.html
../images/image1.jpg
/images/image1.jpg
image1.jpg
Each of the above are "relative links". Absolute links look like the following and don't necessarily need the "http://":
www.ccisolutions.com/products/page1.html
http://www.ccisolutions.com/products/page1.html
Hope this helps too.
Richard and Moosa are right, use a friendly 404 page to help your users when they reach a page that can no longer be found. Simply redirecting them to the home page doesn't fix the issue of the missing page. Here's an old, but relevant, post on the subject: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/personalizing-your-404-error-pages.
For your second issue, if you've permanently moved to a new product page, you should certainly 301 redirect to not only pass on all the link juice from the old page, but also to provide the best user experience for your customers - they were looking for the product so give them the new improved page :).
It looks like the product pages are dynamically created based on the product id in the URL (e.g. 2776 from your product page example). This product page could be updated to dynamically produce a different title based on this same information.
For example:
$product = getProductByProductID(2776);
$artist = getArtistByArtistID($product->artistID);
<title><?php echo "$product->name by $artist->name"; ?></title>
?>
Mind you, this is PHP code and you are using RESTful URLs so your site is likely written in Ruby - though I'm just guessing here.
For Ruby, this is essentially pseudo-code as I am not a Ruby developer by day (though I did stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night), but I believe you are looking to do something like this in your controller:
def product_page
@product = Product.find(params[:id])
@artist = Artist.find(@product.artistid)
@page_title = "<%=@product.name%> by <%=@artist.name%>"
end
Then in your page template you can use:
<title><%= @page_title %></title>
Hope this helps and sorry if it is too technical/cryptic; but your developers should be able to do something like this pretty easily. It appears to already be underway to produce the rest of the page content. Now they just need to use it to populate the page title (and maybe the meta description - use part of the product description).
Not only the tools, analytics and Roger, SEOmoz also has such a great community. The Q&A forums are a great resource and the blog consistently provides actionable advice. I agree with you totally Cesar. Jared, I had to steal mine heh.
Hello! Here's another similar question that has been answered:
http://www.seomoz.org/q/google-penguin-question-re-footer-links
Personally, I would continue using your brand name and just remove the keywords. Others may feel differently, but I like to continue marketing my brand and a link with my brand name is going to be more natural than exact match anchor text for the keywords I'm targeting.
Here's what I would do:
Website designed by Brand Name
Hope this helps!
Hi Luis,
Here are some tools to find out what keywords a site is using: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/5-free-tools-for-competitor-keyword-research/28015/. If you know your competitors, plug their URLs into those tools to learn what keywords they are targeting.
Also, if you think it would be useful, Adgooroo has a product that will find out what keywords your competitors use for their ad spend. This will give you insight into what keywords are important enough to your competitors that they are actually buying advertising on them. It can also give you insight on which keywords may be worth spending on yourself if the organic competition is too high.
Hope this helps!
Read up on this Webmaster Tools guideline: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66353
Note the following from the guideline if there is a very important reason for why your developer wants to use CSS to move the text off the page:
"However, not all hidden text is considered deceptive. For example, if your site includes technologies that search engines have difficulty accessing, like JavaScript, images, or Flash files, using descriptive text for these items can improve the accessibility of your site."
If there is not a very important reason, and even if there is, suggest they populate the ALT attribute of the image with the text instead.
Hope this helps!
If Penguin has taught us anything it's that low-quality links will hurt you. So whatever you do, I suggest being very careful. If you think you might be getting low-quality links or shares, don't do it because it's not worth it in the long run. Also, Facebook has recently begun purging fake "likes" and Twitter often purges fake followers. I'm not saying "don't experiment" if that is something you are wanting to do and you are willing to accept the risks, but I am saying you should stick to quality versus quantity.
Maybe it's time to run your own contests.
If you have Duplicate Content errors in your campaign, you may still have problems.
You may need to confirm your rel canonicals are set up correctly. Just because they are present, it doesn't mean they are referencing the right location(s) to fixing duplicate content issues.
What type of site do you have?
If it's WordPress driven, do you use Yoast's WordPress SEO Plugin?
Dangerous.
I would read more about Penguin before going further. Also here's another post that may provide insight:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/web-directory-submission-danger
Hope this helps!
You should be able to search by the filename and/or by the Alt text used to describe the image. I would start with the filename. If the filename is generic (e.g. 001.jpg), then it will be close to impossible to find, and this is a very good example for why your filenames should be more descriptive.
Hope this helps!
Today I've reached a personal goal of mine in the SEOmoz community. I've breached the SEOmoz Top 100 in Community Ranking.
By participating in comments on the YOUmoz and SEO blogs and by answering questions here in the Q&A forum I've been able to accumulate 599 mozPoints. That's a long way from the 28 points I had when I sat down to write this post.
Hopefully my participation in the Q&A forums has been helpful and continues to be helpful as I push for my next goal of becoming an Authority.
Thanks for the great community everyone!
No problem, glad I could help.
The Holiday Inn Express reference is in regards to a series of commercials they ran some time ago lol...
Here's a Youtube video from one of them:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=l8Ah8WTL2i8
It basically means that I don't normally code in Ruby, but I think I can still help you out ;).
Hi Scott, yes, this should be correct. After updating this value, you may need to log back in to continue using the admin area. This is because you are likely logged in at the old sub-domain of simply onestopmuscle.co.uk rather than the new sub-domain of www.onestopmuscle.co.uk and with the new redirect, you have to log in again. It's kind of strange behavior I know :).
Hard question there Tyler. There are many things to consider.
Have you already done marketing with the old name? How many repeat customers do you get? Is your intent to rebrand?
If it makes sense to rename, rebrand, and build on a new domain name, unless you are writing new content (e.g. product descriptions), you can run into duplicate content issues if you run with two sites. Additionally, the new site will not have any reviews or other engagement which may be present in the existing site.
If the only reason for the change is to move to what you believe is a better platform and to improve the design, then it might be best to go the 301 redirect route and maintain the rankings you already have. People expect websites to change (improve) as time goes by.
Here's a good website migration guide.
Google has provided some tips too.
Hope this helps!
Ah ok, do you think Links to Subdomain (bit flag value:4294967296 - Total links (including internal and nofollow links) to the subdomain of the URL) minus the Subdomain External Links (bit flag value:64 - The number of juice-passing external links to the subdomain of the URL) will give you the number of NoFollowed links?
Edit: updated second bit flag
I'm not sure what CMS you are using, but I've seen this before with Joomla when setting the SEO Settings in the Global Configuration section of the Administration panel. Specifically, when working with the Apache mod_rewrite setting; which is related to the .htaccess question you had.
There are a number of things wrong with the way some CMS's have set up their redirects and how they present content. You may end up playing with each combination to fix your issue (depending on how you want to fix it).
If I were looking into this, I would do the following:
However you figure out the issue, I suggest looking at how your CMS is actually producing the canonical tag. Right now this URL (http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/CEW.cat) is using the following canonical:
rel="canonical" href="on-disc-printing"/>
I don't think that is what you are looking for in your canonical tags.
I hope this helps and answers your questions.
Excellent news that you were able to get it to work.
I'd say yes your social media links have zeroed out because they used the old URL without the www. It's not a Google thing though and won't be fixed by re-indexing the site. However, my understanding is that Wordpress 301 redirects the links from the non-www URL to the www URL so your link juice should still flow to the new URLs and the shared links will still resolve to the right page. The only caveat is that the actual number for likes and shares in your social share buttons has reset to 0.
In my opinion, it's a good move (you're just missing the "eye-candy" for now) and this number will rise again as people begin to share using the new URLs.
Hi Tyler,
Sorry it took a while to get back to this thread. I don't think there's one "right answer" for how to proceed and you've obviously given this much thought.
But, I can give you my point of view and what I believe to be the best answer in this situation and likely what I would do.
Personally, I would use the new name. It sounds like your business is excited about it and now you just want to maintain your rankings.
Knowing this process would involve a migration to a new website complete with a new domain name, I would start reviewing all of the steps included in the posts I provided above. Make your 301s are going to be done right and will not miss any high-ranking, high-traffic URLs.
Prior to performing the migration announce the re-branding effort on your current site and let your customers know what to expect.. Ask for feedback. Let your customers know you are making these changes to better serve them you'd love their input.
Once you've tested the new site fully and are ready to go to production, announce the date of the change and then implement. You will see fluctuations in traffic, but if you follow all of the advice in the posts above you will have the best odds for success.
Hope this helps 
Hello HQP,
You should be able to find this information here: http://apiwiki.seomoz.org/url-metrics.
The total juice-passing (followed) external links to a page should have a bit flag value of 32.
The total juice-passing (followed) external links to a root domain should have a bit flag value of 128.
You can also get the total juice-passing (internal or external) links to a page with a bit flag value of 256.
Hope this helps!
It won't hurt rankings, but I think this is a great opportunity for you to turn those broken links into good links. You should find all of your broken links, contact the site owners, and let them know they can fix that link with a new link to a different page on your site that is still relevant.
Here is a guide for this:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/broken-link-building-guide-from-noob-to-novice
Hope this helps!
What kind of link building are you doing? Good links shouldn't be the cause of decreased rankings. Also, are you using exact match keyword phrases in your links? This can contribute to lower rankings if all your links are exact match keywords (even if your domain name is an EMD).
If you are just buying links, my suggestion is to stop. If you need some suggestions for good ways to build links I say start here with a post from Jon Cooper: http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies.
Are you talking about the "crawl notices" in your campaign summary?
If so, those are just notices letting you know the crawler "saw" them. You can review those notices to be sure your canonical URLs are set up correctly, but other than that you shouldn't need to do anything.
Canonical tags are used to cover these duplicate content situations so you don't need to "eliminate" pages. I think you are good. Perhaps someone else can join the discussion for further clarification too.
Hope this helps!
Before you cancel read the above. Ryan is exactly right about the Q&A forums. $99/month to have your questions answered by peers in the know? That's cheap!
Another thing I will be keeping in mind is, as a Pro member, I get $600 off MozCon 2013. That's like getting the Pro membership for a year at 1/2 price.
This is a good question though and I think you're going to see a lot of people answering, "Yes! It does provide value."
Hi James, you should check this previous question out.
Basically, you can include your infographic as you've described in the iframe, but add your link after the iframe code but still as part of your embed code.
Here's an example:
<iframe src="http://www.tbd.com/embed/golf"></iframe>
Hope this helps!
Then yes, I would migrate the archives to the new site if it was me.
For a large site, a lot of errors will be duplicates or at least similar. Identify, and group them. Then fix the squeaky wheels (the errors with the most occurrences).
Have a ton of duplicate content?
99% chance it can be fixed with a good 301 redirect solution.
Inappropriate or non-existent keyword usage on-page?
Follow the easy fix suggestions from your campaign (learn more about on-page reports here). Often, your pages are dynamically created and by working with a good developer you can fix issues with missing page titles and descriptions easily and often with one-punch knockout success.
Overall, there is not going to be a quick and easy way to fix all of your issues, but you should be able to identify the areas where you might see the most success in the least amount of time.
I'm going to thumbs up Irving's response on this. I will add that my preference would be to use this URL structure if you only have one type of training per vendor:
/courses/togaf-foundation-training
/courses/microsoft-msce-training
And if you have multiple training courses per vendor, I would use the following:
/courses/togaf/foundation-training
/courses/microsoft/msce-training
Hope this helps!
Indeed! Just as your content should be relevant and valuable (not for keyword density) so should your links be relevant and not just for links. Good point David.
I just submitted a YOUmoz post on this topic. Hopefully it runs the gauntlet and is approved.
The Mozscape API used to provide everything if you did not provide a Cols parameter to the request. Now you need to send a Cols value with the summed up total of all the bit flags you want the request to return. You can find all of the URL Metrics bit flags and their values here.
Here's an example using your URL and these bit flags: Title (1), URL (4), External Links (32).
http://[member-ID]:[secret key]@lsapi.seomoz.com/linkscape/url-metrics/greatbritishchefs.com?Cols=37
The value 37 represents the bit flags you want to get back added together like so:
Title (1) + URL (4) + External Links (32) = 37
Hope this helps!
Sounds like you might have to jump into the code. Here is a post from their forums regarding usage for page titles.
As David says, you can fix your duplicate content issues easily with Yoast's Wordpress SEO plugin. Here's a link:
Not sure if you still need this or not. You could take a look at MogoTix (free if your event is free).
Depending on what your development possibilities are, you could also create a custom solution.There are open source PHP QR code generator classes that allow you to create QR codes containing a URL that, when visited/scanned, updates your database of past attendees.
Hello Theresa,
There could be many reasons Moz is reporting a different ranking than what you see. First, have you already confirmed you are not receiving personalized results when you search for this phrase? Cyrus Shepard provides a method for un-personalizing Google Search in this post.
Also, here's another related question with some tips.
I think you should continue looking at doing a 301 redirect instead.
You can use the canonical tag, but you should do so in cases where you intend to have different URLs for one main page (e.g. www.example.com/blue-widget.html, www.example.com/widgets/blue-widget.html). Here is a another question regarding canonicals where Ryan Kent provides a good explanation for this.
You can learn more about 301 redirecting here. Yoast also provides some information for how to do it here.
Take a spin through Fabio Ricotta's slide-deck from MozCon 2012. There are a number of E-Commerce examples for including products on other pages to increase conversions.
