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Hi David,

This does happen occasionally. The simple solution is to put a meta before the closing head () tag in to the template's code, as below:

This will block robots from showing the DMOZ directory description.

Hope that helps.

Matt

Hi Mozzers,

We're currently in the process of a website redesign with new CMS and have the opportunity to change URL and structure. I would love some opinions as to what the best practise will be.

A quick prerequisite, the website is entirely about France. French property, living, holidays, forum - everything. Therefore, we're unsure of the usage of the word France/French.

Presently, we're running Classic ASP which allows for one subfolder then dynamic article ID. In my examples, I will take our activity holidays URL. At present this is /france-activity-holidays/DisplayArticle.asp?ID=12345. We know that DisplayArticle.asp?ID=12345 will simply become [article-title], however, its the preceding subfolders I would like some help with.

Here are our thoughts on the options available. Can you please vote as to which you think is the best?

1. /france-activity-holidays/ (one subfolder per category, as at present)
2. /france/holidays/activity/  (always have a first subfolder with the word france)
3. /holidays-to-france/activity-holidays/ (france in the primary subfolder)
4. /holidays/activity-holidays-france/ (france in the secondary subfolder)
5. /holidays/activity/ (because the whole website is about France, it is redundant to have /france/)
6. /French-holidays/activity/

My gut feeling is either number 2 or 5. Concise, good for UX, OK for SEO. However, there is very little information around that is relevant to our sector.

Thanks in advance!

Matt

Thanks for the responses all.

I've always had the suspicions that subfolders are the way to go, and will incorporate this into our development.

Thanks

Matt

Hi Mozzers,

We're in the process of re-developing and redesigning several of our websites, and moving them all onto the same content management system. At the moment, although the websites are all under the same brand and roughly the same designs, because of various reasons they all either live on a separate domain to the main website, or are on a subdomain. Here's a list of what we have (and what we're consolidating):

• Main site - http://www.frenchentree.com/
• Property database - http://france-property.frenchentree.com/ (subdomain)
• Forum - http://www.france-forum-frenchentree.com/ (separate domain)
• Classified ads - http://www.france-classified-ads-frenchentree.com/ (separate domain)

My question to you lovely people is: should we take this opportunity through the redevelopment of the CMS to put everything into subfolders of the main domain? Keep things as they are? Put each section onto a subdomain? What's best from an SEO perspective?

For information - the property database was put onto a subdomain as this is what we were advised to do by the developers of the system. We're starting to question this decision though, as we very rarely see subdomains appear in SERPs for any remotely competitive search terms. Our SEO for the property database is fairly non-existent, and only ever really appears in SERPs for brand related keywords.

For further info - the forum and classifieds were under a separate brand name previously, so keeping them on separate domains felt correct at that time. However, with the redevelopment of our sites, it seems to make more sense to either put them on subdomains or subfolders of the main site. Our SEO for the forum is pretty strong, though has dwindled in the last year or so.

Any help/advice would be very much appreciated.

Thanks

Matt

Perhaps it made its way into the perks section? Is this what you're looking for? http://moz.com/perks

Best

Matt

Hi Mozzers,

Is anyone aware of a tool that will tell me how many outbound external links there are on my website? Basically, I have a theory that our website is littered with links to other websites, but need to know the approximate figure. As far as I can tell, none of the Moz tools tell me this?

Any help appreciated!

Cheers

Matt

Hi Daniel,

It's a tough choice, really. I have 80 categories in my classified ads site under 12 headings. I have taken a Gumtree-style move though, and have spread them across the page (http://www.gumtree.com) rather than just having on long list down a page.

From an SEO point of view, yes, it would be good to cover off all of the potential search phrases, but not at the cost of duplicating categories. You need to think of it from a user's point of view - if you have (for example) "Cars for sale" and "secondhand cars" as two separate categories, users may not know which section to look in (not to mention any keyword dilution). Moreso, and coming from someone who manages a classified ads site, it is really annoying (for admins and users) when users put items for sale in the wrong category. If you're adding multiple similar categories, this will quickly become an issue, in my opinion.

What we tried to do was to create dynamic search engine friendly titles and headers... Therefore we eliminated the need to create multiple categories for different regions, or even for similar products. Whatever language or software you're using, it should be fairly easy to set this up. We also added "similar" searches on search results pages and product pages in order to get links to the more niche search terms. We're in the top 3 for all of our high value key phrases with this approach.

Best,

Matt

No worries... I was intrigued as well!

Actually... Just found the answer here - http://www.seomoz.org/help/ose-terms-metrics

"Tweets:   Total tweets and retweets of this URL since March 2010, including tweets of the URL with unique parameters added. Data provided by Topsy."

Best,

Matt

Hi Rich,

I would hazard a guess as to say that data comes from Followerwonk, since this was a recent aquisition of SEOmoz. Just a guess though...

best,

Matt

Hi Matt,

In your Crawl Diagnostics area, download the full CSV file. This will contain all of the pages on your site that have been crawled. You can filter out pages that do not have errors, should you need to.

Best,

Matt

Regards revisit-after: It's widely considered a myth, developed by one tiny search engine in Canada. There has never been any documented support/usage by the major search engines though.

Here's a link to another Q&A from a little earlier in the year - http://www.seomoz.org/q/meta-tag-revisit-after-useful

Regards why your competitor is beating you in SERPs: could be any number of things... Site age does help, but is not the be all and end all.

Cheers

Matt

Hi Sean,

Sure it is. Just run the page through SEOmoz's OpenSiteExplorer - http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/. Put in the exact URL, and change the params to "only external" and you can see all of the backlinks to that page, plus the linking domain's authority, etc. It's a very good tool.

Cheers

Matt

Hi Brandon,

I had something very similar with my site very recently. Our main area of business is to do with French property, and we realised that we have 4 areas of the site all directly targeting the same keywords. Our homepage was by far the strongest on "French Property" keyword historically, but it suddenly started plummeting down the rankings.

Since we have re-targeted the other 3 areas of the site away from "French Property", our homepage has surged back up the rankings, so there is definitely danger in targeting the same keyword on multiple pages/areas.

The difference between your site and mine however, is that we were targeting almost exact matches. You seem to be targeting slightly different keywords, so I would suggest that you are safe, on the whole. I mean, if you're selling Mars bars, it's going to be pretty difficult not to mention Mars bars on almost every page! One thing I would suggest is your homepage will more often than not rank highest for your site's overall area of business, so make sure you homepage is optimised with your most valuable keyword.

I hope that helps!

Matt

The easiest way to minimise downtime is to lower the "TTL" (time to live) within your DNS provider, so that when you make the switch to point the domain to the new server location, this will happen quicker. The lowest (safe) amount you should have for TTL is 3600, which in human terms is 1 hour. Once the switch is successful, I would recommend putting it back to the default, which is usually 86400.

Hope that helps.

Matt

It's really hard to pin down three things, and all of my tips would cross over one another to some degree, but I'll wade in with mine anyway...

For me, it's roughly the same as yours, but perhaps my priorities would be slightly different:

1. Content. It's king. Write excellent quality, valuable content and people will want to share it socially, link to you from their website, and most importantly, users will read it and engage with it. This is the vast majority of your link building effort right here (which is why I won't include a bullet on link building).

2. Architecture, structure and on-page optimisation. If you have a good flat architecture that is technically structured, marked up well and geared towards SEO best practises, you will reap the benefits.

3. Analysis. To the point of being anal retentive. Probably one of the most little mentioned parts of an SEO's job is to analyse everything. See what your competitors are doing well, see what niches you can fit into, research your own market, analyse technical mistakes/improvements, analyse how users engage with your site, how they navigate, what they do when they're here, how they found you, how else they can find you, and so on. Good research means that you can gauge what you need to be doing better, what new things you should do, and when.

That's mine very much in a nutshell. I hope others will come along and share their's too.

Matt

Hi David,

This does happen occasionally. The simple solution is to put a meta before the closing head () tag in to the template's code, as below:

This will block robots from showing the DMOZ directory description.

Hope that helps.

Matt

Hi Daniel,

It's a tough choice, really. I have 80 categories in my classified ads site under 12 headings. I have taken a Gumtree-style move though, and have spread them across the page (http://www.gumtree.com) rather than just having on long list down a page.

From an SEO point of view, yes, it would be good to cover off all of the potential search phrases, but not at the cost of duplicating categories. You need to think of it from a user's point of view - if you have (for example) "Cars for sale" and "secondhand cars" as two separate categories, users may not know which section to look in (not to mention any keyword dilution). Moreso, and coming from someone who manages a classified ads site, it is really annoying (for admins and users) when users put items for sale in the wrong category. If you're adding multiple similar categories, this will quickly become an issue, in my opinion.

What we tried to do was to create dynamic search engine friendly titles and headers... Therefore we eliminated the need to create multiple categories for different regions, or even for similar products. Whatever language or software you're using, it should be fairly easy to set this up. We also added "similar" searches on search results pages and product pages in order to get links to the more niche search terms. We're in the top 3 for all of our high value key phrases with this approach.

Best,

Matt

Well I guess my next question in that case is 'did you buy or source links from a link farm?!' My understanding is that it's very rare for there to be manual intervention in this fashion, and if you have received a penalty, it's probably for good reason.

Having looked through OSE there's nothing that's massively obvious (for me), but will probably be more obvious for you. Bear in mind that data in OSE could be some weeks old.

Cheers

Matt

Hi Lynn,

I once spoke to an SEOmoz staff member about this, and they told me that there is no logic to the way Roger crawls a website - it's completely random. I have looked through my last 10 or so CSVs and each time I have a different order. The first few links of my latest report are from the second level of architecture, so I would concur that it is at least randomly reported, if not randomly collected.

Matt