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Questions created by kwoolf
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Do search engines treat masked text differently than solid color fonts?
In my attempt to decrease page load times, I ditched my custom fonts for google fonts. I figured out how to apply CSS mask-image to make this blazing fast loading google font have a chalk texture, which was an awesome improvement over the 3-5 second load times for those locally hosted web fonts. I've read that Google penalize a site for poor contrast ratios between the background and text, but do search engines go by CSS or do they somehow compare the actual rendered site as an image? Using CSS mask-image to give my text that chalk appearance does produce minor transparent patches in text. So have I saved 3 seconds on page load just to have search engines knock points off for funky text issues? All input welcome. The temporary site is here. https://website-1b14f.firebaseapp.com/ Kevin
Technical SEO | | kwoolf0 -
Correlation of PageSpeed Insights and YSLow scores to high rankings in SERPs
I'm pretty well rounded when it comes to SEO, but I'm just frazzled when it comes to YSlow and PageSpeed Insights. Of course, individual factors are important to site performance, but it has become increasingly difficult to recommend open-source and hosted platforms that don't pass muster on many of the performance standards being tested. For example, entity tags, expires headers, and cookie-free domains are nearly impossible to set with hosted platforms, and none of the major open-source CMS like WordPress, Joomla, Magento, Odoo, etc., consistently put javascript at the bottom or make "fewer" HTTP requests. Mobile is now king, so quite a few people (including myself) need to "mobilize" their website by late April or risk dropping in mobile search rankings. Nearly all my clients run multi-lingual e-commerce websites, so that really limits options but makes it that much more important to keep current with Google's SEO recommendations. What platforms perform best taking into account any correlation with YSlow scores/PageSpeed Insights to high floating sites on SERPs? Would one spend the money to "fix" their current platform that has worked very well to date or switch to a mobile-ready platform?
Web Design | | kwoolf0 -
Do cuss words on social media sites affect ranking?
This is a hard one, I'm sure. In regards to search, I've read that Facebook pays close attention to verbs and that Google takes into account related words close to anchor text and search terms. Now I have the unique opportunity to work as the internet sales and marketing consultant for a company in serious need of brand reputation repair. The company has experienced a terrible fallout from a recent product recall. Unfortunately in this case, the company site has really strong reach, which means that our blog posts, product descriptions, and twitter comments can be found copied on hundreds of websites hours after they are posted. The most recent incident has associated our brand name with words like cheaters, scam, phoney, copycat, and other words that will certainly get filtered here. All my attempts to assure unconditional refunds and offer phone support get labeled as a desperate attempt to save the brand. No doubt, the company has issues but will surely overcome them in time. SEO Question: Should I close the Facebook page and set strong filters on a new page to delete the onslaught of negative comments or should we spend the time to clean up the current page? This is a difficult decision, as I know many companies like Hubspot, Mailchimp, and Rackspace actually look at Facebook pages to qualify business leads (no fans, go home). Damage control suggestions also welcome, but the crux of this issue here is how our brand name and product names will be associated with cuss words or negative terms and how this will affect our ranking in SERPs.
Branding | | kwoolf1 -
Trailing Slash: Lost in Redirection?
Question here, but first the lead in. As you all know, 301 redirects don't pass on 100% of link juice. I've set up my site using htaccess to redirect all non-ww to www and redirect all URLs to have a trailing slash. FYI, the preferred domain is selected in WMT and canonical URLs appear in the head section of all pages. So now what happens when sites that link to mine don't include either the www or the trailing slash, which is actually quite common? Of course, asking the site own to correct the link is ideal, but that's not always possible. So if thousands of links on external sites are linking to http://www.site.com instead of http://www.site.com/, won't lots of link juice get lost in redirection? I can't think of anything more I can do to the URLs to reduce duplicate content and juice dilution. Thoughts? Kevin
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kwoolf0 -
Does anyone use Ultimento for Magento?
We're working on a re-design and want to start with SEO rather than leave it until the end. Of course, saving time and money on a custom template would be great. Ultimento found at www.ultimento.com boasts great SEO features. Has anybody used it? Please comment. Thanks in advance! Kevin
Web Design | | kwoolf0 -
301 Redirect for homepage with language code
In my multilingual Magento store, I want to redirect the hompage URL with an added language code to the base URL. For example, I want to redirect http://www.mysite.com/tw/ to http://www.mysite.com/ which has the exact same content. Using a canonical URL will help with search engines, but I would just rather nip the problem in the butt by not showing http://www.mysite.com/tw/ to visitors in the first place. Problem is that I don't want (can't have) all /tw/ removed from URLs due to Magento limitations, so I just want to know how to redirect this single URL. Since rewrites are on, adding Redirect 301 /tw http://www.88kbbq.com would redirect all URLs with the /tw/ language code to ones without. Not an option. Hope folks can lend a hand here.
Technical SEO | | kwoolf0 -
Linking domain dropped followed by significant decrease in Domain Authority
A relatively high ranking site disappeared from the linking root domains of a client site, and the site dropped significantly in domain rank, authority, and trust. Oddly enough, traffic is almost double the previous week, and search results for keywords remain strong. I checked OSE and the linking domain is not listed. There are also several other linking root domains that have never shown in the domain analysis, but we'll leave those for a later topic. I visited the linking root domain that disappeared from the analysis and found everything to be in order. The site is a major local forum with a relatively high domain authority. All links are still there, and there hasn't been any change to the site as far as links are treated according to the owner. The only thing that has changed since the last site analysis is an event campaign ran with unpaid ads posted throughout the forum. The site being analyzed is a catering company that is cooperating with the forum owner and local bar to host a local celebratory event. Of course I'll wait for the next indexing to see if things change, but what could be going on here? This is more of an SEOmoz question, as we're talking over 10 point deduction in domain authority, although search results are still strong.
Reporting & Analytics | | kwoolf0 -
What SEO considerations for multiple languages on a single page?
I am working on a language teaching site for Chinese speakers learning English. I consider myself above average when it comes to basic SEO issues, but all I know here is that Google doesn't like multiple languages on a single page. Without getting into too many details, both Chinese and English text will appear on the same page with links, tags, phonetic spellings, etc. I'm hoping someone here knows the science about using the lang="zh" xml:lang="zh" attributes within text and the effects on ranking for text within the declarations. And it'd be great if there was clarification on the link juice passed using the hreflang attribute for both internal and external links. Also, of course, any info on using both English and Chinese characters in the URL would be most helpful. A heads up on any other language specific SEO issues would also be much appreciated. My goal is to get the most out of both languages per page in terms of ranking.
Technical SEO | | kwoolf0