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Hi RealGoodsSolar,

My understanding is that using a self-referential canonical tag in the Head section will cause the link value for any version of that URL to accumulate for the base URL.

So for page www.mydomain.com/inner-page.html , using this tag in the head:

causes incoming links with tail-end variations like:

www.mydomain.com/inner-page.html#id2  or  www.mydomain.com/inner-page.html?searchresult3

to all count towards www.mydomain.com/inner-page.html

Good luck!

I asked a similar question on a number of Forums a couple of weeks ago. The basic answer was No.

But you can have your server block access to IP addresses from chosen countries. Which may block the search engine spiders from that country, or may not if they come from unusual IP addresses. The fuzzy part is knowing what IP addresses are serving what countries, and keeping up with the changes.

Your safest route would be to either 1)patch up the current cart to not appear outdated to your customers or 2) find a different shopping cart system that uses the same  example.com/category.asp  format for it's URL's.

Patching up what is already working will be the least expensive route...

So is "B" just the More Details page for "A"? And is there a different A,B pair for each individual property listing (A1,B1 and A2,B2 and A3,B3 and etc)?

If so, pick a few and do a little where experiment where B has a canonical tag pointing to A. I would also put a self-referential canonical tag on A pointing to itself (A), just in case there is extra junk on the end of link URLs that are pointing to A.

It will take awhile for Google to re-index. To speed it up, you can use GWMT to "Fetch as Google" the experimental B pages and do "Submit to Index". A few days after that do the same thing for the experimental A pages.

let us know if it works...

Hi James,

Our items are large, and shipping to other countries is just way too expensive. So no plans to ever go international.

My understanding is that a low bounce rate (and other stats that relate to a good visitor experience) often result in higher Google rankings. So we really do want to know if there is some way to shut off the flow of foreign visitors...

I have ecommerce sites the only serve US and Canada. Is there a way to prevent a site from appearing in the Google results in foreign countries?

The reason I ask is that we also have a lot of informational pages that folks in other countries are visiting, then leaving right after reading. This is making our overall Bounce Rate very high (64%). When we segment the GA data to look at just our US visitors, then the Bounce Rate drops a lot. (to 48%)

Thanks!

How you are checking the rank will influence the result. Checking from your own computers that often "visit" your own site can make your own pages show up better in the rankings.

Did you try using a rank checking service, or  an anonymous Google search tool like startpage.com ?

If I understand your question correctly, then I think the answer is Yes.

Did you mean this? If pages that were linking to my website went were deleted (become 404 pages ) ... Do they affect my website in google ranking  ?

If yes, then the links on those pages that were pointing to your site (and helping you rank better) were also deleted. That means you now have less incoming links and that may decrease your rank.

If it was only a few links coming from weak sites, then the effect is probably too small to notice. But if many links were lost, or if they were coming from strong websites, then the effect could be large.

I hope this helps,

Too bad that "Boost" didn't work for you. It is an interesting concept...

I wonder how they "force Google to crawl your bad links"?  Does Google provide some sort of form that URL's can be submitted to for spidering? Or is there some other way to quickly bring individual URL's to their attention?

Hi DHStom,

I took just a quick peek and saw these things:

Language and Location tags both say:  content="<a class="attribute-value">en_US</a>"  but probably should be UK not US.

Pages are a little thin on content. And are those product descriptions copied from another site? Try rewriting the descriptions in you own unique style (to avoid dupe content issues) and maybe add a bit more of your own text about why it's a good choice or some unique uses for the items.

Good luck!

Greg

There is also a good "Copywriting" group on Google+ (called a community there). It gives you a chance to see how different copywriters communicate interpersonally (with eachother and outsiders who ask questions)

Or you could just use your htaccess file to 301 redirect their broken link to whatever page on your site you want it to go to.

Thank you Federico.  I did not know about the ability to use (.*)$ to deal with any junk stuck to the end of html

So when you said "the rewrite conds are not needed" do you mean that instead of creating three lines of code for each 301 redirect, like this...

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mydomain.com$ [OR]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.mydomain.com$

RewriteRule ^pagenam$ "http://www.mydomain.com/pagename.html" [R=301,L]

...that the first two lines can be removed? So each 301 redirect rules is just one line like this...

RewriteRule ^pagenam$ "http://www.mydomain.com/pagename.html" [R=301,L]

...without causing problems if the visitor is coming into the mydomain.com version or the www.mydomain.com version?

If so, that will sure help decrease the size of the file. But I thought that if we are directing everything to the www version, that those first two lines were needed.

Thanks again!

Thanks Federico, I do have a good custom 404 page set up to help those who click a link with a typo.

But I still would like to know how to solve the questions asked above...

When someone links to your website, but makes a typo while doing it, those broken inbound links will show up in Google Webmaster Tools in the Crawl Errors section as “Not Found”. Often they are easy to salvage by just adding a 301 redirect in the htaccess file.

But sometimes the typo is really weird, or the link source looks a little scary, and that's what I need your help with.

First,   let's look at the weird typo problem. If it is something easy, like they just lost the last part of the URL, ( such as www.mydomain.com/pagenam ) then I fix it in htaccess this way:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mydomain.com$ [OR]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.mydomain.com$

RewriteRule ^pagenam$ "http://www.mydomain.com/pagename.html" [R=301,L]

But what about when the last part of the URL is really screwed up? Especially with non-text characters, like these:

www.mydomain.com/pagename1.htmlsale              www.mydomain.com/pagename2.htmlhttp://   www.mydomain.com/pagename3.html"             www.mydomain.com/pagename4.html/

How is the htaccess Rewrite Rule typed up to send these oddballs to individual pages they were supposed to go to without the typo?

Second,  is there a quick and easy method or tool to tell us if a linking domain is good or spammy? I have incoming broken links from sites like these:

www.webutation.net      titlesaurus.com     www.webstatsdomain.com      www.ericksontribune.com        www.addondashboard.com       search.wiki.gov.cn       www.mixeet.com       dinasdesignsgraphics.com

Your help is greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Greg

I think it would be best to not specify the year in the URL and just have an /upcoming-events.html  type of page. That way any incoming links to it keep adding to the page authority, no matter how old they are. And the links in your own site's navigation do not need to be changed each year.

But you should update it regularly to remove the past events and add new events. Weekly would be great, monthly would probably be the longest you would want to go between updates.

Being solidly on page 2 and 3 after only 14 months means you are doing great. I have sites that are 5 and 7 years old that still show up on page 2 for some of the keyword phrases we target.

PPC can be a powerful way to cover the gap until you get on page 1.  It all really depends on what your market is. Some high competition areas (like weight loss, or payday loans) are outrageously expensive. Other areas (like garden tools) are fairly cheap. I find it profitable for some of my items, but not for all. After running campaigns for a while, pause the losers and let the winners run. If your area is not highly competitive, you can do a lot of PPC for the cost of a $100 link...

Can you share your URL so we can make more accurate comments?

I'm not an SEO pro, just a guy with a couple of ecommerce stores trying to keep up with the changes. But getting to pages 2 or 3 does mean you are doing the basics right. The way I understand is that it takes an additional "order of magnitude" of effort and luck to jump up each page level.

So if jumping from page 4 to page 3 requires an effort level 6, then jumping from page 3 to page 2 will take and effort of 60, and jumping from page 2 to page 1 will take an effort of 600.

How long has it taken for your site to get to the page 2/3 zone?

Hi Little Bigman,

I just finished doing a little research on hiring a group to help with link building. All the quality places wanted about $200 per link. So if you are happy with the links you get for $100 each, it's probably best to stick with them. Can you share the name of your current source?

$10 a link from some mysterious overseas agency sounds way too dangerous. Besides, the SEO value of one great link will probably easily be 10x that of some crappy link....

Strangely enough, Moz's "On Page Grader" does suggest bolding your keyword at least once and actually lists the number of bolds in the row of counts at the top.

So maybe it's still a little bit effective?

I have a suggestion, but please do your own research to verify this...

My understanding is that you can set up a block of text on your site that is not visible until a visitor does something like clicks a tab or does a mouseover, and if you use the CSS command display:none; to make it invisible, that text will not be read by the major search  engines. That text can get displayed when the visitor clicks the tab or does a mouseover by having the CSS command switch to display:block; (or some other version of display). I think this is because a spider can't activate the tab or mouseover function.

I've read this a few places and avoid doing display:none; on valuable content for this reason (better safe than sorry). But I have not read about someone using it to purposely hide content to prevent duplication issues or dilution of keyword density.

It could verified with a pretty easy test. Just add some gibberish content to an existing page,  but hide it using display:none;  Then use GWT to ask for a recrawl, wait a few days, and do a search for the gibberish content. If it doesn't show up in the results, that is a good sign it worked. Let us know if you test it....

To make it nice for the visitor, I suggest that at the bottom of the Archives section of the page linked above that you put an additional blue box (like you have for 2013) that just says Older. Below that put a link that says something like 2011 and 2012 issues and have it go to a new page with individual links to all the archived issues. That may also prevent Google from eventually considering them orphan pages.

I asked this also a couple month ago and got a good answer here:

http://moz.com/community/q/when-googling-site-mydomain-com-what-does-listing-order-tell-us

FYI - it appears that if you have a responsive site that has blocks of text that are duplicated, but Hidden or Visible depending on the screen width, that On-Page Grader will count any keywords in that text twice.

I have text shown in one location to Desktop users that needed to be re-located to a different part of the page for Tablet and Phone users to keep the layout nice. And my OP Grader keyword count doesn't match what I saw on the page doing Ctrl-F to find the keywords, unless you count the Hidden text. (not hidden like cloaking or some black hat thing - just not displayed on certain devices)

I guess On Page Grader just reads the source code and ignores whether the text is hidden or visible. It would be nice if it read the code as if it was a Desktop device. (suggestion for Moz staff)

Does anybody know if Google also ignores device dependent Hidden vs Visible areas???

Hi Martin. It will help everybody to give you good suggestions if you will tell us...

1. How many products? Dozens, hundreds, or thousands?

2. What ecommerce system are they using? Magento, Woocommerce, Yahoo, OpenCart, or _____ ?

Hi Gary. I use CopyScape at copyscape.com

The free version only reads from a webpage, so you would need to create a temporary page, publish all or parts of the article you are curious about, check it, then delete the temporary page.

Hi Christopher,

I'm not going to touch question #1 - that's a big can of worms that everybody has different opinions on. The big factor seems to be "Did you get a manual penalty?" If yes, there is a fairly standard set of steps to follow that wraps up with a Disavow. If no, you may or may not get any good out of doing a Disavow.

But question # 2 is easier. I used the Link Detox tool at linkdetox.com to check my backlinks and really liked the way it clarified and classified each link. There is a trial package hidden way down at the bottom of this page: http://www.linkdetox.com/plans-pricing/   that lets you buy two opportunities to run your site through the program for 100euros ($130). That's what I used.

You could also first check out the Penguin Analysis tool at penguinanalysis.com and invest $10 to run a few of your primary pages through it to see how likely it is that you have a algorithmic penalty from Google. If you don't, then chasing after a Disavow project may not be worthwhile. There was a Moz blog about it here: http://moz.com/blog/its-penguin-hunting-season-how-to-be-the-predator-not-the-prey

Good luck!

Hi Chris,

If your product is in a market that is saturated, high volume, and highly competitive (like iPods or hiking boots) then stick with Egol's advice.

But from your profile it appears you sell specialty table legs, and I think that may be in a different realm of Adwords where the volume and competition are both low. The products my two stores sell are specialty items that are low volume and low competition, so I can share my experience.

The executive summary is "Start generic and start cheap". Doing that will give you an education focused on your niche at a reasonable cost.

My specialty items do not have a high search volume, so starting with broad keywords allowed Adwords to give me data on the full range of keyword searches it was actually displaying for. Depending on the search volume, it can take a week or three for Adwords to create a good list of actual keyword searches. As this list develops, use negative keywords to prune out phrases that are just wrong. Also start to add phrase and exact match for the phrases that appear often.

And I mentioned "start cheap" because Adwords has this weird habit of over-valuing itself. If I start with a bid of $0.15 it will immediately tell me that I need to bid $1.80 to be on the first page. If I ignore that expensive suggestion, I appear anyways. It may take a couple of days, but I will appear on page 1 or 2. Then I can start upping my bid a nickel at a time until I appear in the upper slots.

So budget $100 to do live research on Adwords, and consider it a market research expense. During that time, also go to the library and use their public computer to make a test purchase after clicking one of your ads - to be sure the tracking is correct. Also never delete a campaign, instead pause it so that the old data is always there to refer back to.

So much more could be said, but I need to go eat breakfast. You are welcome to contact me through one of my stores. Just google my name without the "ory". Good luck!

Hi Fedrico. I agree with you when the need is for ongoing SEO work. But the original poster said:

_..._hire an SEO specialist technician to take a look at a few things under the hood that I can't seem to figure out...

Which I understand to mean he has a couple of puzzling technical issues he needs help with. Those can sometimes be straightened out quickly.

From the research I did, the "recommended companies" on the Moz list are all fantastic, but are all geared towards working with large business on long monthly contracts.

If you just need some quick help I suggest doing this:

1. do a few searches here for terms related to your issue

2. check the profiles of those responded with intelligent answers - some of them will be with small SEO agencies

3. contact them, explain your problem, and ask for a quote to resolve it

Good luck!

Thanks Rick. Unfortunately these are articles and blogs. None of them are actually FORUMS.

I'm really looking for other SEO related forums where the members ask and answer questions for eachother, like here at the Moz Q&A Forum....

Any other suggestions?

I learn so much from reading the Moz forum everyday. I would like to expand my learning and start following some other SEO forums as well.

What are your recommendations for additional SEO forums?

I once read a small study about trust badges that said they were definitely important, but that people didn't really notice any difference between big-name (expensive) badges and obscure (cheap) badges. If I can find a link to the article I will post it.

If you don't have any badges at all, you should see if adding any badges increases your conversions. Your SSL Encryption badge is a good start. And see if your shopping cart provider has a badge available.

In the US having the Better Business Bureau (BBB) badge would also be a good way to start, and I think you still get a backlink when you sign up.

Trying to set up the styling on a new Shopping Cart, and having trouble with Internet Explorer (IE)

When I view it in IE, I click on F12 to identify the code viewer (like FireBug) and it lets me choose to view it using the browser IE9 or earlier. So far, so good...

But right next to the browser selector is the "Document Mode" selector and sometimes it says "Quirks Mode" and sometimes it says "IE9 Standards" (when using  IE9 browser) - and parts of the page styling goes crazy when I switch back and forth from Quirks to Standards.

Help!  Which does IE9 and IE8 actually use?  Does it have to work for both?  Is there a way to force it to one or the other?

Any guidance or tips is appreciated. Thanks,

Greg

To find all the pages on my site that are indexed by Google I can search using site:mydomain.com and it gives pages of results.

But what does the order of results relate to? Is it page rank or strength?

My list of pages doesn't appear to be in order of strength. And it's definitely not by age or alphabetical...

Logging out, clearing my cache, and logging back in seems to have fixed it.

It keeps loggng me out, not showing my campaigns, and generally being weird.

Is anybody else experienceing this?

A Thursday morning brainstorm that hopefully an important Google manager will see...

Google could quickly end all the problems of link buying, spammy links, and negative SEO with one easy step: Only count the 100 best follow links to any domain.

Ignore all the nofollows and everything beyond the 100 best. They can choose what "best" means.

Suddenly links would be all about quality. Quantity would not matter. Fiverr links, comment links, and all the other mass-produced spam links would literally be ignored. Unless that's all a domain had, and then they would surely be stomped by any domain with 100 decent natural links.

Would it be an improvement over today's situation?

I have some old images that are no longer used, but they have a few decent external links pointing to them.

Can I 301 them to the page they used to be on? And if yes, will their link juice flow to the page?

I don't have documentation, but the new page it redirects to has this tag:

So I would guess I did the 301 redirect the to this new page at the same time I launched the new page (there was no major design changes - just shortening the URL and getting rid of the capitals and underscores)

Thanks David. That does explain the issue better.

However, the occasional really long lag time for OSE to re-crawled pages that have been 301 redirected is still a problem for those of use who subscribe to Moz and are trying to use it to monitor and improve our SEO. But I think there is an easy solution...

Give Moz subscribers a new tool like GWT's "Fetch as Google" - but call it "Fetch as Moz" and have it trigger BOTH the Moz spider and the OSE spider to go re-crawl that page. This would let us quickly and positively know that our data for 301'd pages has been transferred to the new page.

Can this be done?

Hi J,

My screen does not show what you describe. See the attached image...

I'm starting to wonder if Moz works and appears differently on different systems. Maybe things are different using Firefox, or IE, or Chrome?

I'm using Firefox. What are you using?

where-moz-pro.jpg

It's not that Moz Analytics is hard to understand once you have it set up. It's mostly that getting it set up is so difficult.

Moz Pro will let you set up your campaign for www.mysite.com, but Moz Analytics will not - it keeps switching it back to just mysite.com (stripping off the www part). Ask David Lee there at Moz, we've been working for weeks to get this fixed.

Also when you put in Competition URL's it does the same thing, but it should not. The stats for a www.competitor.com are often different than the stats for competitor.com - and we need to compare to the version that they show up in Google as.

The campaign set up screens really need a bunch of pop up tips on what sort of input is expected in the blanks. For example, we had a bunch of problems entering our G+ business account because we were cut-n-pasting in the URL that appears while we are logged into our G+ account - but the Campaign set up form wants the URL for those who are NOT signed in (which doesn't have /b/ in the middle). Nothing on the page tells you this.

I would start with doing a usability study on the Campaign Set Up screens before worrying about usability of the reporting screens. Use people who do not live and breathe the latest and greatest online interaction. If we get terribly frustrated just trying to set up a Campaign, then we will already be primed to look unfavorably on any little problem with the reporting interface.

Maybe I like Moz Pro better because the Campaign set-up steps are a little more old-school, a little easier to understand, and it's less likely to change what I enter...

Hi David,

Sorry to be blunt here, but no it doesn't make sense - and I also think it is incorrect...

Websites do internal 301 redirects all the time (redirecting from old page to new page within the same site) BUT your explanation above appears to say that OSE does not follow those redirects and move the data from old to new url ?  That would make for a pretty useless SEO program...

Your message also appears to say that if we have to go contact everybody that links to www.mysite.com/old-page.html and have them change their link to www.mysite.com/new-page.html  ? That's just silly...

I think your explanation is incorrect because SOME of the 301 re-directs I have done on my site have passed the data perfectly in OSE and Moz. Run OSE on these two URLs and you will see:  Old URL = www.bestdryingrack.com/clothes_drying_rack.html    New URL it was 301'ed to = www.bestdryingrack.com/clothes-drying-rack-main.html

So it appears that inconsistency is the a big problem here. That should be some firm rule like: "Moz will transfer all data across 301 redirects on the same domain within 1 month"  This would let us analyze or sites without trying to keep track of silly situations of which new pages have the proper data and which ones we still need to fudge between old and new page data.

I hope this all makes sense...

I do not know of a handy button back to Moz Pro. Instead I just keep this link bookmarked: http://pro.moz.com/campaigns

You wrote: "Feeling increasingly frustrated and starting to avoid using Moz."  Yep, me too. There seems to be too many bugs and too much inaccurate data. Sometimes I think I stay subscribed just access to this Forum...

Hi David,

I waited another week and just now checked the new and redirected URL again. The data STILL has not transferred over to the new URL.

It's been a long time. This excessive lag time in moving data across re-directs really needs to be fixed.

Personally I can mentally keep track of it, but what about the other SEO programs out there that are using Moz data? They have to experiencing "garbage in - garbage out" problems on any analysis involving re-directed URL's.

Can you check into this and let us know what's up?

Unless I missed it, the current site doesn't have Buy buttons or a Shopping Cart. So it's more of a portfolio site than an ecommerce site.

If you're not planning to add Buy buttons and a Cart, you could use almost any CMS. With the small number of pages there, you could even use hand-coded pages (I do that for my sites which have around 80 pages)

If you want a fast and inexpensive solution, there are probably a lot of themes for Wordpress and other CMS that are much nicer portfolio designs than the current site.

It will help to know more about your site. Do you have a subdomain like mobile.mysite.com that goes along with your normal desktop site? Or do you just change CSS based on screen width (responsive design)?

There are probably many ways to code and display the buttons.

If they show up nicely, and function properly, that is probably more important than having the W3 Validator see them as error free. From what I hear, few sites pass the validator test 100%...

Hi Cindy. My stores used to be on Yahoo Merchant Solutions, so I know that changing things in that system can be tricky. Besides being a Moz member, you may also want to join the Yahoo Store Owners forum at yourstoreforums.com to get tech and marketing advice on Yahoo store issues.