Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi all,

We have a lot of FAQ sections on our website, splitted in different places, depending on products, technologies, etc. If we want to optimize our content for Google's Featured Snippets, Voice Search and etc. - what is the best option:

• to combine them all in one FAQ section?

• or it doesn't matter for Google that this type of content is not in one place?

Thank you!

Thanks, Jordan.

Thanks, Andy! I will check your tool suggestion.

(Closing this thread as no one else participated.)

-Lily

Hi all,

I was wondering if it is possible for Google to diregard the canonical tag, if for example they decide it is wrongly put based on behavioural data.

On the Natviscript Blog's individual blog posts there is a canonical tag for the www.nativescript.org/blog/details (printscreen - http://prntscr.com/e8kz5k). In my opinion it should not be there, and I've put request to our Engineering team for removal some time ago. Interestingly, all blog posts are indexed and got decent amount of organic traffic despite the tag.

What do you think? Could it be that Google would disregard the tag based on usage data from let's say GA?

Thanks,

Lily

Hey, guys,

We are using the pro-sitemaps.com tool to automate our sitemaps on our properties, but some of them give this error "This url is not allowed for a Sitemap at this location" for all the urls.

Strange thing is that not all of them are with the error and most have all the urls indexed already.

Do you have any experience with the tool and what is your opinion?

Thanks

Hey there, just to make sure - have you added your TLD domains to the referral exclusion list?

Thank you, guys!

@ Dan, I will get in touch! Thanks for your quick response

Cheers,

Ani

Hi guys,

Does somebody experienced an issue with Screaming Frog spider while trying to crawl a website?  It's weird since no error message appears and at the same time the crawler cannot crawl anything. There is no restriction in the robots.txt. Has someone encountered such an issue?

Thank you.

Cheers

Hi guys,

We're in the process of moving one of our sites to a newer version of the CMS. The new version doesn't support page extensions (.aspx) but we'll keep them for all existing pages (about 8,000) to avoid redirects. The technical team is wondering about the new pages - does it make any difference if the new pages are without extensions, except for usability?

Thanks!

Valuable tips are shared here, fellow SEOMOZers! It also worth adding some other ideas:

• build your authentic profiles in the social web (create Facebook, Twitter, G+ profile) and foster the communication with your clients and suppliers (if relevant). Listen to them, follow them, share their content and promote their content. By doing this, you should manage to "sell" your content in a better way as you will have a community that you converse with you. Make sure that you regularly check for those people who influence the others and craft a strategy to attract them on your side (it depends on your website topic + whether it is B2B or B2C). Social media activities not only help you expand your reach among your most relevant prospects, but also aid you generate positive social signals which search engines pay attention to.

• if your client does not run a startup company, then it's time to look back and find those people who shared the content, who tried to establish a conversation and outreach to them with something hot that you have right now for your company/product

• don't forget your customers, once you've acquired them, always get back to find out what they like about your product and how they use it. Make a contest, a giveaway or simply support a community that is relevant to your website and is committed to giving to the others. You will show that you care about growing communities and by supporting non-commercial initiatives, you will show the genuine human nature of your company. Don't simply acquire, but give  and you will receive even more.

I would like to also highlight what Matt has said, just make sure that your links are diversified, don't use the same anchors all over again. Additionally, it's important to monitor and watch our for suspicious spikes in your links (add links gradually over the time and conduct an audit for negative SEO, caused by a competitor...)

• Even though this is directly related to your question, I just want to quickly remind you not to overlook the power of good interlinking. Start establishing a good internal structure for your website first and then proceed with the link building process.

Excited about this discussion, it's nice to follow new tips and exchange knowledge after the latest G updates.

Cheers

Hi guys, we're in the process of implementing rel=author markup on our blogs containing more than 3,000 posts. They are written by about 50 different people, and some of them don't blog anymore or are no longer with the company.

Should we have rel=author for all blog posts, even those published in 2006?

Thanks for your help!

Thanks for your replies.

After some digging I found that since July 2010 the google.* / referral traffic increased dramatically (from 6K to 66K per month), followed by the drop in October 2011.

Almost all of those people are using IE 8 or 9 but nothing specific in terms of location or new / returning.

Is it possible for IE to strip the query after the domain name so it appears to be referred from google.TLD/ only?

Hi all,

Our UX designers are working on a new page design, and the breadcrumb position looks somewhat strange - it's almost in the middle of the page.

The new page looks like this (the breadcrumb is below the head banner), but it's a showcase page that contains about 150 items. Each of them has a small thumbnail, title, category and short description. They've decided to use the head banner's place and have there all items, grouped in categories that visitors can browse. The breadcrumb menu is at 900 pixels from the top of the page

In other words, you have the major part of this page content in front of the breadcrumb menu.

Are there any SEO implications in such case? Should we use breadcrumbs on this page if they're not at the top?

Thanks,
Maggie

Hi guys,

As we know, GA shows google as traffic source in two ways: google / organic for organic searches and google.TLD / referral for everything else: google groups, base.google.com, static pages, google reader, google image search, google search appliance/mini.

What we noticed is that around Oct 20th there's a huge drop of google.TLD / referral traffic to our site. Do you experience something similar? I couldn't find anything Google-related that happened around this specific date.

We use GSA for our site search and I'm wondering if this could be the reason - maybe someone from our development team made changes to GSA settings that affected this traffic source.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Thanks.

Thanks for your reply, Stephen.

Products on Site B get similar traffic volumes to Site A. The decision to split SiteAProduct and have it on a separate domain was made back in 2004 because of a partner relationship, which is no longer in place.

Sorry for missing some details in my initial question.

Site B is the company site, while Site A is one of its product brands. There's no topic duplication and they don't compete for traffic. Site B gets 8-9 times the traffic of site A, as it contains other products as well. There's about 10% duplication in the linking root domains. Site A has over 55K pages, and site B has over 400K pages.

The team developing the site A product hopes that by moving the whole site to siteb/folder it will gain more authority, better ranking positions and more traffic overall.

We have the following case:

Site A with domain authority 65 and 2,750 linking root domains (139K total links) and

Site B with domain authority 68 and 1,336 linking root domains (38K total links)

There's a suggestion to move Site A as a folder of Site B so it becomes something like this: domainB.com/domainA using 301 redirects for the existing domain A. We'd like to better understand what such move will result in.

I imagine at first Site A will drop in rankings, but after that will it be better for it to be under Site B domain? Also, moving all the pages a step behind in the URL path may slightly affect their rankings.

What do you think? Would you move Site A or leave it as a separate domain? I understand there can't be an exact estimation what will happen, but I'll appreciate your thoughts.

From time to time we're promoting blog posts written by our employees on their external blogs (separate domains) to our official company blog. This happens when the content is valuable for our visitors and it's worth to be shared. The post is copied in its entirety and we add the sentence This post was originally published on <external blog="" post="" link="">at the top. Will this be considered duplicate content? Should we add anything else to the republished blog post? Thanks!</external>

Transcribing the whole videos won't work in this case. Also, the videos are quite technical. I guess we'll give it a shot with longer descriptions and see what happens.

Hi guys,

We have a video section on our site containing about 50 videos, grouped by category/difficulty. On each video page except for the embedded player, a sentence or two describing the video and a list of related video links, there's pretty much nothing else. All of those appear as duplicate content by category.

What should we do here? How long a description should be for those pages to appear unique for crawlers?

Thanks!