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Hi! We're going through older questions that are marked unanswered. Since it's been a few months, I'm wondering if you've recovered, or figured out why your rankings dropped, and if you have any insights to share with us. Thanks!

Hi! We're going through some of the older unanswered questions and seeing if people still have questions or if they've gone ahead and implemented something and have any lessons to share with us. Can you give an update, or mark your question as answered?

Thanks!

I think Baptiste is referring to Google's preference for not including search results in their search results, as the URL in the example appeared to be a search result.

Hi! We're going through some of the older unanswered questions and seeing if people still have questions or if they've gone ahead and implemented something and have any lessons to share with us. Can you give an update, or mark your question as answered?

Thanks!

Are you still having this problem? If so, I think the best thing is to email help@seomoz.org with your question -- I'm guessing that the foreign characters are part of the problem here, and it's something they should know about if they don't already. Thanks!

Hi Paul,

We're going through and following up with older questions that are still marked unanswered. Do you have any questions still? Can you share what you did, and any lessons learned so we can have them for the archives for the next time someone's in a similar situation?

Thanks!

Hi! We're going through some of the older unanswered questions and seeing if people still have questions or if they've gone ahead and implemented something and have any lessons to share with us. Can you give an update, or mark your question as answered?

Thanks!

Hi! We're going through some of the older unanswered questions and seeing if people still have questions. Were you able to get that page's updates appearing in the search index? If so, can you share any lessons learned with us? Thanks!

Hi! We're going through some of the older unanswered questions and seeing if people still have questions or if they've gone ahead and implemented something and have any lessons to share with us. Can you give an update, or mark your question as answered?

Thanks!

Hi! We're going through some of the older unanswered questions and seeing if people still have questions or if they've gone ahead and implemented something and have any lessons to share with us. Can you give an update, or mark your question as answered?

Thanks!

Hi! We're going through some of the older unanswered questions and seeing if people still have questions or if they've gone ahead and implemented something and have any lessons to share with us. Can you give an update, or mark your question as answered?

Thanks!

Hi! We're going through some of the older unanswered questions and seeing if people still have questions or if they've gone ahead and implemented something and have any lessons to share with us. Can you give an update, or mark your question as answered?

Thanks!

Hi Josh,

We're going through some of the older unanswered questions and seeing if people still have questions or if they've gone ahead and implemented something and have any lessons to share with us. Can you give an update, or mark your question as answered?

Thanks!

Hi Nicole,

Did you make any decisions on comparison shopping engines? Do you have anything you can share with us that others might find helpful, or do you have some more questions still? We're going through and trying to clean up the questions that are still marked unanswered. Thanks for your help!

Hi! We're going through old questions that are still marked unanswered. Did you decide to change things? Can you tell us what you did and any lessons learned? Thanks!

Hi Shailendra, we're going through some of the older questions that are marked unanswered and following up to see if you still need advice, or if you'd made a decision and can share any of the results with us. Thanks!

Just wondering if you're still looking for advice, or if you have any lessons learned you can share with us about how you'd do this differently next time. We're following up on a lot of the older questions that are still marked unanswered right now.

I noticed this question is still listed as unanswered. Did you come up with a solution you can share with us, and any information about how well it worked? Or are you still looking for advice? Would be great if you could pop back in with an update. Thanks!

Hi everyone,

Since there are multiple people with this question, I've asked the help desk to come over here and let you know what's up (as I'm not sure myself). So sorry you're having problems.

Actually, Rand tried to respond to this last night, but it looks like Roger must have gone and done something with his response. I've let Rand know his reply didn't make it, and he'll be back in later this morning with a reply. Thanks for your patience!

Hi Ilya,

It's been a few months since your original question. Are you still looking for some advice regarding this? Or do you have something you could share with us about what you did and let us know what we should do or not do if we're in a similar situation?

Thanks!

I don't know if it's on the list, but did you know that there is a wishlist you can contribute to? Visit http://seomoz.zendesk.com/forums/293194-seomoz-PRO-feature-requests and you can add your own feature requests, and others can vote on that request.

I took a quick look at your site and I see a couple of problems right off.

1. both www and non-www display. Decide which you want to use, and write a redirect to the proper version (let us know if you'd like help figuring out how to do that).

2. You may have duplicate content problems beyond just the non-www and www. How much of your product descriptions are taken straight from the manufacturer? The first product that I randomly tried had the exact same description in Amazon. The search engines don't want to show results from 20 domains that are products with identical descriptions.

Also, did you redo any URLs and possibly forget to redirect pages? Look at your server error log or in Google Webmaster Tools and SEOmoz tools for 404s and redirect pages as appropriate.

Other people will likely have additional suggestions, but here are a couple to get you started.

I use Wordpress and Thesis and have them do all the work for me, so I'm not a hands-on expert and can't verify the accuracy of the following URLs, but it looks like they may address your questions. Let us know if one of these works for you.

http://enarion.net/web/htaccess/trailing-slash/

http://soulpass.com/2008/01/11/htaccess-add-trailing-slash-to-url/ (be sure to read whole post)

I agree with Ryan and EGOL. Spend your time and energy on making content that users want to read, not in trying to outguess the search engines.

Hi Shari,

The best place for an answer would be with the help desk. Send them an email at help@seomoz.org and they'll be able to help you. Thanks, and sorry for your troubles!

Here's a post from Dr. Pete about doing just that. He lost traffic, he lost indexed pages, and had to beg to Google for a reinclusion request even after he fixed things back again. You don't want to do it.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/catastrophic-canonicalization

First, a warning to others that this site is not safe for some workplaces.

You submitted the home page to your site. That page is indexed, along with 6,000 or so other pages from your site. Google knows about that page and has ranked it. I think your question is how to get your site to rank better?

Have you read SEOmoz's Beginner's Guide to SEO? Have you run any SEOmoz Pro Reports on your site to see its suggestions for improving your keywords? You're asking a very broad question, and may have trouble getting people to provide answers without asking some more specific questions.

Can you give us any more details, such as the specific page URL? Is your page indexed and you are wanting to increase its ranking, or are you trying to get the page indexed?

Using GWT is easy and a great help, but it doesn't affect the site itself when people come to the site from something other than Google, nor does it help the other search engines.

You might also want to check out this thread with a related question about ranking reports and the new super site links. I've asked Aaron to come over here and comment as well, so the rest of the group can also have the answer.

http://www.seomoz.org/q/are-the-latest-ranking-reports-counting-the-new-large-format-site-links-as-positions

Also be aware that Linkscape does not crawl the entire web, but about 25% of it, focusing on the highest quality sites. This is why Anthony was asking about the type of links and the type of pages they are on.

Yes, this is something to email the help team about. Thanks for the quick answer Brendan!

If you go to the human-readable version of the license, the attribution states:

Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).

Most of the time, people don't ever specify how they want to be attributed. Make it clear how you want it attributed, and you'll be helping both yourself and the end user.

Hi Michael,

Let us know if you have questions about how to implement this. You will want to chose one version of your site, either www or non-www, and stick with that. Using Open Site Explorer to see whether www or non-www has the most backlinks can help with this decision.

Usually you do use an htaccess file to set this up, but sometimes you're on IIS or you don't have access to that file and need to work around it. If this is your case, let us know and we'll give you some help.

Also, some site owners will run link checking tools on their sites that look at their off-site links and see if any return 404s. If you're not returning a 404, the site owners may not know (via an automated tool) that the link is broken.

Also check out these posts from Search Engine Roundtable. There have been reports from the past few months about Google not listening to what you write for your title tag.

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-title-tag-13704.html

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-title-selection-12989.html

Hi Ryan,

Send an email to help@seomoz.org with this question since it sounds like a bug, and they'll get back to you within about a day. Thanks!

Hi Daniel, you're probably best off sending an email to help@seomoz.org and let them know about this problem (if you're still having it). So sorry you're having troubles!

Keri

Great to hear! So sorry that you hadn't received a response to your question; I believe the question came through when we had the Q&A downtime last month. Thanks for updating us, it's always good to know how things turn out.

From a user's perspective, be sure to look at how the site will show up on a mobile device. Here's a great post from The Oatmeal about what users want vs what they get from a restaurant website in general. http://theoatmeal.com/comics/restaurant_website

Looks to me like that's a download site where not everything is particularly 100% legit to download. We strongly frown on providing advice to sites that are promoting illegal activities.

Hi Wayne,

This sounds like a question to send over to help@seomoz.org. You'll want to include what browser (and version) you're using, and some more information about what it looks like when it doesn't work (does everything not work, is Roger sticking his tongue out at you, are certain parts broken, etc). It'd probably also be helpful to list any other extensions you have.

Thanks!

Hi Scott,

Rand wrote a good post about diagnosing why the "wrong" page may be showing up in the search results. This may be a good place to start investigating. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/wrong-page-ranking-in-the-results-6-common-causes-5-solutions

In my case, I had the strong feeling it was a bot or automated query of some type that did not represent a human. I was in fact frustrated that Google didn't filter it out as impression fraud. The searches were for things that just didn't exist.

Let us know how your EMD goes, might be interesting, but I wouldn't expect a whole lot if your situation was similar to mine.

I created a negative phrase match that covered that query and some other fishy queries. I do NOT feel that the search volume was real. We had a very low CTR and did not want to bring down the quality score of that ad group, so we excluded it as soon as possible.

Rod, I think the best thing here is to email help@seomoz.org and give them your username and outline your situation and they can tell you what's up and if you've found a bug.

Mysterio, your answer does not at all address the question. If you could reply only when you do know the answer, and then add a little information about the answer, that would be great. Thanks!