Welcome to the Q&A Forum

We did change the way we detected duplicate content earlier this month. Here's a blog post about it at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/visualizing-duplicate-web-pages.

Hope this helps explain things for you! Let me know if you have any more questions.

You'll want a separate account for that subdomain, and also put the robots.txt excluding that subdomain in that subdomain itself.

Jared, I'm seeing her keyword phrase in the H1 tag; can you explain what you meant?

Diane, all of the links in Q&A are nofollowed, so putting in anchor text in your questions in Q&A won't help your site, and the admins often remove them anyway.

I'd remove the spammy-looking screen of text with all of those cities at the bottom of the page, that's not going to help you at all.

You appear to have a broken image on that page as well, at the very bottom that links to In2Town. That link doesn't make sense either, as it says that there is free advertising there with the directories, but I know from previous questions you're targeting that site as a lifestyle magazine.

If you're concerned about page load time, take a look at your image size and resize the images before they're on the page, not in the code. That one about the results is quite large and could be probably 1/10 the file size that it is now without a problem.

Hi Yoseph,

Here are some of the common reasons why only a page or two might be crawled. https://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/409821-why-isn-t-my-site-being-crawled-you-re-not-crawling-all-my-pages If that doesn't solve your problem, an email to the help desk (help@seomoz.org) will be able to fix things.

Keri

Nope! You can request removal of the entire site (meaning dev subdomain). For future reference, you could also request removal of a certain directory on a site, too.

I use WP for our site strikemodels.com, with foxycart for ecommerce. It's not the best nor is it the worst solution. What are you trying to sell? Do you need to keep inventory? Deal with shipping? It's less of a great solution the more complex things get.

Hi Rob,

Here's a helpful post that Barry Schwartz did about why Google may rewrite your title tags. They do this often, and it includes all kinds of sites, even Apple computer. http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/023139.html.

We had an update to Mozscape last week, so everyone's numbers got updated. You'll see small changes like that when we update, it's nothing to worry about.

EGOL does have a good point. You can learn a lot from our blogs, Q&A, and our Beginner's Guide to SEO at http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo.

You may still need to hire a firm, but if you have started educating yourself, you will have a much better feel for if someone is giving you what they think you want to hear, or giving you something closer to the truth.

Is the sandbox on its own subdomain or own domain? If so, verify the site in Google/Bing webmaster tools (subdomains verify as their own site), put in a robots.txt excluding everything, then go and request URL removal of the entire site in the webmaster tools.

Please email help@seomoz.org and let us know via the help desk. There may currently be a glitch with this right now, and opening a ticket (via the help email) will help us track it down. Thanks for doing that, and so sorry for the difficulties you're having.

Hi Calvin,

The best place for an API question is probably over at the API discussion forum at https://seomoz.zendesk.com/categories/6328-seomoz-apis-and-extras, or just sending an email to help@seomoz.org. A few users of the API are here, but those two places are your best options. Thanks!

I'm going to answer your question with another question. What kind of value does a referral for 'donate' give you? Is such a broad keyword one that is going to bring you in the right type of person, or are you better off building content regarding the terms that convert better or target more qualified searchers?

That would seem to be reasonable, with the information you've given. Best of luck!

Just a side note, it's still easy for the search engines to tell the sites are connected when you're using the same Google Analytics account. Check out http://spyonweb.com/www.caliriver.com

Felt kinda like this today? http://www.bing.com/videos/watch/video/kitten-loses-battle-against-mirror/1jrpikc1z

Glad you were able to figure it out!

I can't find anything from Google that talks about order of importance in this case. They list the tags that they understand at https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/79812?hl=en and just say to have them in the head section.

Dr. Pete wrote up a good post about outbound links and the reason for that notice at http://moz.com/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many that should help you get started.

Hi Frederic,

Everything should be fixed now. Go ahead and hook it up, and let us know if you see any problems, but things seem to be working just fine now.

Everyone should be noticing the performance improvements by now. Early Wednesday morning we rolled out an update that has helped things considerably. If you find any bugs or odd happenings, please either send an email to help@seomoz.org or chime in on the thread about the update at http://www.seomoz.org/q/q-a-performance-improvements. Thanks so much for your patience!

I personally use Wordpress with Foxycart.

Some things to think about are: do you need to keep track of inventory with this system? Do you need to display to the user how much product you have available? Do you need to take coupons? Issue gift certificates? Calculate shipping for a wide variety of package sizes and products? Offer multiple shipping methods? Offer sales to multiple countries? Deal with multiple currencies? Allow backorders? Set something as out of stock? What kind of sales reports are you looking for from the system?

Can you say why you want to hide this text? If you could give us an example, it'll help us help you a bit more.

Hi Frank,

Can you let me know what email address you've been using? You should be getting really fast responses from the feedback form or from email help@seomoz.org. Let me know what address you've been using and I'll look into why you haven't been getting a response, and I apologize in advance for any problems you've had.

Keri Morgret
Associate, SEOmoz

Hi! If you download the CSV of your errors, it will tell you the referring URL.

Believe me, I'd love to find the magic bribe to get EGOL to write on YouMoz again! I'm the same way, however, in that I can dash out a response in Q&A or an individual email to someone in 20 minutes, but take two months to turn that into a blog post.

If you download the CSV report, it should list the referring URL.

Michael, you might want to open a new question for this, as old threads don't get bumped when new content appears.

If you don't have any content or anything on the exact match domains, the 301 really isn't going to help you.

We have some other reasons for only one page being crawled at https://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/409821-Why-Isn-t-My-Site-Being-Crawled-You-re-Not-Crawling-All-My-Pages- as well.

One thing to do would be to look in your analytics software for traffic coming from referring sites

Traffic from sites you haven't seen before? Might be your link builders, and in that case you can check out the links.

No traffic? Then you can ask why the sites with links weren't relevant enough to get any traffic.

Legit agencies won't hide what links the help you earn.

I use Wordpress for my site (strikemodels . com), yet only post a blog once in a blue moon. It's mainly pages that are fairly static. We've been getting enough orders and traffic to keep my husband busy and off the streets.

I'd step back and think "what would you do for your users if the search engines didn't exist". Don't make your sites quite so reliant on the search engines. Make them sites that people want to go to and return to even if the search engines didn't exist.

Stick with writing your own content and not duplicating across sites. I'd also really worry about importing content using Google News, as much of the news you find there is likely to be copyrighted.

What about conducting interviews with the workers at that airport and finding out what the best place to eat is? Where is the shortest security line? What is the secret to easy parking? When is the best time of day to catch a flight? There's a lot of things you could do to make that section have content that nobody else has.

We do try to crawl higher-quality sites and show some of the better, more meaningful links to you.

I was referring more about the content. You can write a great linkbait-worthy content about a new method to wax your car, but if you're selling diaper covers, it's not going to help you. Extreme example, but I'm trying to say to make sure that you write content that your target audience wants to read, not necessarily look just at content that will get links.

Those URLs will be seen as different, but the real question is will the content on those URLs be viewed as different, or do you need a canonical tag.

Hi Amit,

Out of curiosity, if your page is targeting Indian wedding planning, why did you change the geographic target from India to nothing?

I'm going to sidestep the article submission and spun content for the moment and let someone else chime in on that.

I noticed that this IP is in Google with apparently the same page http://64.37.52.67/indian-wedding-planner.php. Is that you, or someone copying your site?

Howdy! We've made some performance improvements to Q&A, and things should be much speedier now. If you see anything amiss, please leave a reply here or send a note to help@seomoz.org. Thanks!

This is unscientific and based on the way I personally search, but I'd ask how people in the area refer to that area for some additional input. Here are some examples of the ways I have searched for locations in areas I've lived in (or had family live in).

In the SF Bay Area, I used to live in Newark. There were about 30,000 people in the city, and it was surrounded by the SF Bay on one side, and Fremont on three other sides. I would verbally tell people in the region that I lived in Fremont, and I'd search for local businesses using Fremont instead of Newark, as otherwise I'd get results for New Jersey.

I have relatives that used to live in Woodstock, VA. Everyone always thinks of Wodstock, NY, and it's hard to find local info, especially when searching from the West Coast. A lot of businesses describe themselves as in the Shenandoah Valley (and it was Shenandoah county), so I'd often search for Shenandoah, or Front Royal, which was the nearest sizable town.

Other relatives live in Battle Creek, Iowa, a town of 800 or so people. Even with adding Iowa, I get way too many results for Battle Creek, Michigan. If I need to search for something (usually on ebay, looking for memorabilia) I will search for Ida Grove or Ida County.

I know this really isn't an answer to your question, but more of some things to think about. Again, I'd ask (if you're not local to the area yourself) how people usually describe where they live, and look at search volume for that. Maybe also run some AdWords targeted to desired zip codes, and then look in the Search Query Reports in AdWords to see what cities people type in to modify their search?

Lesley, if you edit your profile, you can change your nickname that's displayed here. I think that would be a helpful thing to do here, as the current nickname is leading to a bit of confusion. I'd ask the same of anyone that had a nickname like "Wordpress" or "Magento" that wasn't a direct representative of that company.

You can also uncheck the box that says to use your nickname, and you can use you real name for posting instead.

As Robert mentioned, it could be a good idea to include some context with your answer. "I realize that our company is an alternative to product x, but here's why I think there are some issues with product x" and including an outside referenced link could be helpful all around.

Thanks!

You've got a bunch of low-quality links, even before these additional 150 links from two weeks ago. The Facebook likes and shares seem a bit off. SEOmoz has a Facebook page for our fans with almost 27,000 fans, yet your page has over 40,000 likes and a couple of thousand shares.

The top inlinks (by page authority) that I'm seeing are from sites that are totally not related to weddings, and many of them are full of comment spam and have links that are no followed. You really don't have a strong link profile that shows to Google that people who are authorities about weddings, wedding planning, venues, event planning, etc. find value in your site.

I'd stop the spun article submission and the comment dropping, and spend your time on money in making sure that you have content that is valuable, then share that content with people in a related industry.

Antonio, if you could please just offer answers without the added barbs at other users or their methods, we'd really appreciate that. You may want to review our etiquette page at http://www.seomoz.org/dp/blog-disclaimer for more information about our community philosophy. Thanks so much!

On the other hand, would it freak out your visitors to be contacted when they didn't hit the submit button and still have a company directly contacting them?

Hi Timothy,

This is either in the configuration on your end or an issue with the way Roger crawls, and it'd be best handled by the help desk. Could you send them an email at help@seomoz.org with your info and they'll help get you sorted out? Thanks so much!

Keri

Diane,

40 articles a day sounds kind of high for developing quality articles that are the types that people would want to link to. I know some people who work 40 hours or more on a single post -- but then that post gets links, views, comments, etc. for years to come.

You may want to rethink quality vs quantity on posts, and spend more time on fewer posts.

There was a good YouMoz post a couple of years ago with ideas for this, too.

https://moz.com/ugc/7-fiverr-gigs-for-inhouse-seos

We just had a great YouMoz post on this (that was promoted to the main blog) that might help for your next maintenance window. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-handle-downtime-during-site-maintenance

YouMoz posts also use NoFollow when you submit them, but I believe the system removes the nofollow if they are published. Keep in mind that the main purpose of YouMoz is not to get a followed link to your site, and we often let authors know that non-relevant links in posts need to be removed.