Questions created by jim_shook
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Putting rel=canonical tags on blogpost pointing to product pages
I came across an article mentioning this as a strategy for getting product pages (which are tough to get links for) some link equity. See #21: content flipping: https://www.matthewbarby.com/customer-acquisition-strategies Has anyone done this? Seems like this isn't what the tag is meant for, and Google may see this as deceptive? Any thoughts? Jim
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jim_shook0 -
Potential keyword cannibalization?
Hi, I'm doing an audit of a site for a very competitive term (project management software). The site ranks for its root domain on the second page. They have a lot of other non-blog pages that are geared towards longer tail versions that include that term (project management software pricing, project management tool comparison, etc). My question is: are those pages cannibalizing potential search traffic? Should they just stick to the one page (root domain) and include those longtail keywords on the page instead of creating various pages that seem to possibly be cannibalizing traffic? Is this a fair conclusion that these other pages is causing them to rank lower for the main head term?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jim_shook0 -
I'm updating content that is out of date. What is the best way to handle if I want to keep old content as well?
So here is the situation. I'm working on a site that offers "Best Of" Top 10 list type content. They have a list that ranks very well but is out of date. They'd like to create a new list for 2014, but have the old list exist. Ideally the new list would replace the old list in search results. Here's what I'm thinking, but let me know if you think theres a better way to handle this: Put a "View New List" banner on the old page Make sure all internal links point to the new page Rel=canonical tag on the old list pointing to the new list Does this seem like a reasonable way to handle this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jim_shook0 -
Is there a good tool for finding co-occurance words/terms?
It would be great if there was a tool that helped find words/terms frequently used with other terms. For example, a search in this theoretical tool for "mobile app development" could bring up "iPhone app development" and "mobile app design" as examples of frequently co-occuring words. Any ideas or tools for this kinda thing?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jim_shook1 -
Server responds with 302 but the pages doesn't appear to redirect?
I'm working on a site and am running some basic audits, including a campaign within Moz. When I put the domain into any of these tools, including response header checkers, the response is a 302 that says there is a redirect to an Error Page. However, the page itself doesn't redirect, and resolves fine in the browser. But all of the audit tools cant seem to get any information from any of the pages. What is the best way to troubleshoot what is going on here? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jim_shook0 -
Internal anchor text. Should we still use keywords?
I have a review site that has approximately 70 category pages. I'd like to include a few of them (not all 70) in the footer of the page for easy navigation and to direct the crawlers to the best ones. Is it advisable to use anchor text of "Category + reviews" or just leave it as "Category". I certainly dont want it to be overoptimized, but I do think its a good usability cue, so I'd be surprised if it was against guidelines. Any thoughts?
On-Page Optimization | | jim_shook0 -
Title tag of product page including category keyword?
I'm doing some work on a site that essentially is about giving and getting reviews. It's heirarchy has categories and products within those categories. For the title tag of the product pages, they currently have "Best {Category} | {Product} Reviews" I've advised them that they should remove the "Best {Category}" part because a) they're already targeting the category pages themselves and b) from a user perspective, the product page should just have a title tag that makes sense for that particular page (the page is not necessarily the "best" and certainly is not a series of products within that category). I wanted to post here to confirm that my advice is sound. Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | jim_shook0 -
Best way to handle pages with iframes that I don't want indexed? Noindex in the header?
I am doing a bit of SEO work for a friend, and the situation is the following: The site is a place to discuss articles on the web. When clicking on a link that has been posted, it sends the user to a URL on the main site that is URL.com/article/view. This page has a large iframe that contains the article itself, and a small bar at the top containing the article with various links to get back to the original site. I'd like to make sure that the comment pages (URL.com/article) are indexed instead of all of the URL.com/article/view pages, which won't really do much for SEO. However, all of these pages are indexed. What would be the best approach to make sure the iframe pages aren't indexed? My intuition is to just have a "noindex" in the header of those pages, and just make sure that the conversation pages themselves are properly linked throughout the site, so that they get indexed properly. Does this seem right? Thanks for the help...
Technical SEO | | jim_shook0 -
Best way to fix a whole bunch of 500 server errors that Google has indexed?
I got a notification from Google Webmaster tools saying that they've found a whole bunch of server errors. It looks like it is because an earlier version of the site I'm doing some work for had those URLs, but the new site does not. In any case, there are now thousands of these pages in their index that error out. If I wanted to simply remove them all from the index, which is my best option: Disallow all 1,000 or so pages in the robots.txt ? Put the meta noindex in the headers of each of those pages ? Rel canonical to a relevant page ? Redirect to a relevant page ? Wait for Google to just figure it out and remove them naturally ? Submit each URL to the GWT removal tool ? Something else ? Thanks a lot for the help...
Technical SEO | | jim_shook0 -
What is the best way to make sure competitors or others aren't buying links on my sites behalf to penalize us?
Is there a good way to do this? Does the Open Site Explorer have an ability to screen by when the link was found, or help by picking up on potentially shady links? Thanks much..
Link Building | | jim_shook0 -
My site has multiple H1's, one in the logo image and one as a header. Is there any official stance from the search engines on this?
In doing some research on this issue, I came across this blog post which seems to suggest it certainly will be a trigger to search engines. http://www.seounique.com/blog/multiple-h1-tags-triggers-google-penalty/ Could be a false positive on his specific case, but I was wondering what the community thought. Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jim_shook0