Hey, there are a bunch of ways to identify guest blog opportunities, and some sites / services etc, but I tend to think a lot of that is played out to some extent and if they are accepting content from any Tom, Dick and Harry then how much value will your post have from a pure SEO / exposure / link perspective AND for how long?

I tend to think, rather than looking for Blogs that accept guest posts, look for the best Blogs in your target niche and try to spark up a relationship with the owners. Then, try to find a gap or someway you can contribute always focusing on the 'what is in it for them' angle AND be focused on doing it for the exposure you can generate.

Sure, you want a link or two but make sure it is super valuable, super relevant to their core audience and then that post may pick up more links, shares etc from the current audience and subsequently, the links to your site and more importantly the exposure will have more value.

Forget about volume, think about quality and focus on getting links that your competitors can't just pull up in OSE and copy.

Hope that helps!

Marcus

Totally agree, it's kind of a non issue, improve the canonical if you can but really, don't sweat it.

That is certainly my understanding - the homepage is a special case.

This pretty much details it in full:

To slash or not to slash

Hey,

in an ideal world, make sure it is has no trailing slash. But, as per the Google specific recommendations, make sure both resolve as a 200 OK rather than redirecting / to non /.

Think about it -

The browser removes the trailing slash. Also, go to any big site, Google, SEOMoz - the all have no slash. But.. check it in webbug and they resolve on both.

For me, having a trailing slash on the root or anywhere is just something else for folks to forget to add if they are linking or some such.

Here I would just remove the trailing slash in your canonical if you can just to be sure but the usual rules don't apply on the homepage and www.example.com & www.example.com/ are regarded as the same thing.

I have constant crisis of confidence - i often wonder if I am making it up as I go along or somewhere down the history of all the hundreds of SEO audits I have done I actually learned something along the way! I have actually googled something that I was unsure about and found my own blog post about it before. I think, much like Homer Simpson, every new thing I learn now pushes out an older thing!

Hope that helps!
Marcus

Hey Alex

There is a good overview of this here:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/to-slash-or-not-to-slash.html

Outside of the homepage, a slash url and a non slash URL are regarded as two seperate pages so are technically duplicates. Now, Google will generally deal with this but it is not optimal (which is what we are all about eh) so you should make a call and either go / or no / and then 301 the other version to the default.

The homepage should resolve on both and 200 for both and not redirect to the non slash. The browser will generally remove the slash on a root URL.

This is from the above link:

Rest assured that for your root URL specifically, http://example.com is equivalent to http://example.com/ and can’t be redirected even if you’re Chuck Norris.

If you are using a CMS there are usually plugins or configuration options to enforce a slash if that is your preferred option.

The big deal here is to

A - be consistent

B - 301 the alternative to the preferred for crawl optimisation and to ensure no daft duplication issues crop up.

Hope that helps!
Marcus

Okay, so the crawler is seeing it for the www. version but not for the non www version.

If we look in a browser at:

http://dunninggolf.com it redireects to www.dunninggolf.com

If I look in webbug at the headers it does not redirect and returns a 200 Okay status code for the non www version of the URL.

I think this could be the issue here and that for some reason, when bing visits the site is giving out some strange 301 response which then sends out a loop of 302 redirects.

Okay, there is a tool here that lets you visit the site as if you were bing bot and get the HTTP headers:

http://view-http-headers.gishan.net/fetch-as-bing-bot-tool.jsp

You have to select bingbot rather than IE6 from list of user agents.

If you visit the www.dunninggolf.com version then it returns a 200 OK

If you visit the http://dunninggolf.com version then it returns a 301 redirect (which in turn seemingly issues the loop of 302 temp redirects that never go anywhere).

Okay, there is your issue. The site has some issue with bingbot (and possibly others) when visited via the http://dunninggolf.com URL. This issue is not visible in webbug or a browser. That said, we do seem to get some redirection from http://dunninggolf.com to http://www.dunninggolf.com.

So, taking a stab in the dark, I would say there is some kind of meta refresh or something going on after the page has been returned as a HTTP 200 result. I am not on my windows PC so can't examine the headers more closely but this is certainly your issue here.

You need to find out the following.

1. How are they doing the redirect?

2. why are they redirecting this way?

3. why are they serving up these 301 /  302 loops via http://dunninggolf.com

Ultimately, this is an issue for the developers. You should advise them on correct protocol (a 301 via the HTTP headers from http://dunninggolf.com to http://www.dunninggolf.com and not via this whacky redirect they currently have in place).

Wowzers, that was a tricky one!

Hope this helps and sorts out your headache!

Marcus

Hmm, five months is a bit long.

Lets look at what we do know.

1. Bing is telling you that the page it is trying to fetch is redirecting and the bingbot does not follow redirects (1).

2. If I fetch your page in a browser or a even just the headers in webbug I get a HTTP 200 OK status code and no 301 redirect.

So, the site itself seems fine. The pages are serving up fine and they are returning the correct HTTP status codes.

So.. have you tried analysing the page in the SEO Analyser? http://www.bing.com/webmaster/help/seo-analyzer-97615e21

If so, what does that tell you? It should detail the HTTP response codes that bing is seeing.

One possiblity is that there is something whacky going on for the bing user  agent but fetching the page as bingbot also returns a 200 status code.

There is no robots.txt so I would put that straight first up as suggested and at the very least go with:

User-Agent: *
Allow: /

Without access tp webmaster tools and digging further it is hard to see what is going on but 5 months seems too long. That said, there are no issues preventing crawling or indexation in so far as a 15 minute look can identify.

Daft question but have you submitted the URL via:

http://www.bing.com/toolbox/submit-site-url

I have just submitted it just in case you have only done via webmaster submit.

Anyhow, it's not secret that bing can be horribly slow and it seems that it still believes you have 301 in place for some reason and I could not find one.

Maybe one for Bing Webmaster Support as it seems there is no good reason why they would not index this site and the tools at your disposal are not working as they should: http://www.bing.com/webmaster/help/webmaster-support-24ab5ebf 

References

1. http://www.bing.com/webmaster/help/fetch-as-bingbot-fe18fa0d

It looks like the site was down for a long period of time and was redirecting to another site: http://web.archive.org/web/20090615041707/http://dunninggolf.com/

It also then looks like there was a holding page up for a while.

I can't see the complete history on archive.org and nothing since Feb 2011 but it looks like these historical redirects are your problem.

Few questions

How long has the new site been up?

Have you won any new links?

It seems that Bing still believes this site is redirecting somewhere else so you may just have to wait a while till they update their index. You could ask them to remove all of the links that they do currently hold.

If Bing webmaster tools is anyting like Google Webmaster tools the information there is horribly out of date so it may just be a matter of waiting this out till they recrawl the site and refresh everything.

A good use of your time may be just getting your on page ducks in a row and making sure everything else is okay.

• The canonical looks fine.
• There are no 301's on the pages I visited
• You have no robots.txt file
• Google is indexing it okay

Ultimately, I think this is a case of waiting it out. If you want to speed things up, try to get some fresh links to the site from well ranking sites to help drive the crawlers your way.

Hope that helps!
Marcus

Hey Nathan

A link from any well crawled resource will help - you will see that Q&A posts on SEOMoz can be indexed in minutes which is kind of crazy.

But, a general tip is to link out to any new content from your Google+ account.

Ultimately, if you publish loads of content and are well regarded, you will index quickly. If not, you can sit back and hope or try to get a few links to that content from resources that are indexed somewhat quicker and piggy back on those.

Hope that helps!
Marcus

Hey Stephen

Can you post a URL so we can take a look? Anything else would be a complete shot in the dark.

Marcus

Pleasure.