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Hi Lesley - I was checking duplication issues and then found this blog, which is on wordpress hosting and managed by the social media agency, rather than the client. That said, I should be able to get access.

One issue that keeps arising at the mo is the mixing of paid and unpaid content by bloggers. Keep an eye on that. I always ask bloggers whether they take sponsored posts. If they do, I check whether their sponsored posts carry nofollow tags on backlinks, which they should. If sponsored posts carry follow backlinks rather than nofollow backlinks, I go elsewhere.

It sure was right on target too Miriam - a superb piece - can't think of any further questions

Hello Mozzers, I am working on a website and found the social media agency, employed by the website owner, was running a parallel wordpress blog which duplicates the content on the main website's blog (200 odd pages of this duplicating wordpress blog are indexed - the duplication is exact other than for non-blog content pages - around 60 category, date pages, homepage, etc.

I am planning to 301 redirect the wordpress blog pages to equivalent pages on website blog, and then 301 redirect the homepage, category and date pages, etc. to the website blog homepage, so all the blog pages redirect to somewhere on main website. _Does this make sense, or should I only worry about redirecting the blog content pages? _

Also, the main website is new and there are redirects coming in to pages from old website already. _Is there anything to be cautious about when redirecting to a main website from multiple old websites? _

Thanks in advance, Luke

Thanks Miriam - that's fantastic timing

Hello Mozzers!

If you are a service provider wanting to target geographic locations outside of the region where you're physically located, what's the best approach?

For example, I have a service provider whose main market is not where they're located - they're based in Devon UK, yet main markets are London, Birmingham, Newcastle, Edinburgh. They have clients in all these cities, so I could definitely provide content relevant to each city - perhaps a page for each city detailing work and services (and possibly listing clients).

However, does the lack of a physical presence (and local phone number) in these cities make such city pages virtually impossible to rank these days? Does Google require a physical presence/phone number?

Thanks in advance, Luke

Thanks for feedback Marie... I did notice one newswire specifically told me they didn't auto-syndicate the news release (with links at least sometimes, I presume), so I'm giving those guys a trial on my own site, just to see what happens.

Hi, I've just been researching backlinks and newswires...

One of them told me they put nofollow links on news releases, but some of their network would repro the news release without nofollow links. I suspect the network includes some not so brilliant websites, so even if I just use URL rather than anchor text for backlinks I'm thinking there probably is a risk.

The other seemed to have more control over network, from what they said - they didn't auto-syndicate and used nofollow, but still I suspect there's a risk that your news release will end up on not so good websites.

Has anybody out there recently experienced problems with the backlinks produced by newswire services? Beyond that, your general input would be welcome too.

Thanks Amelia - yes you're definitely on the right lines - Dan's response below is v helpful too, that's for sure. I do struggle with developers from time to time, so teaching myself coding and so on via codeacademy, etc. - learnt at uni many years ago but v out of date! Will come in useful for SEO too.

Many thanks Dan - much appreciated - that process there makes perfect sense even though in my case too :)))) I will report back on progress in a month or so...

Yes a great answer there from Dan - and thanks for your useful input - good point re: not relying on robots.txt alone!

I've seen some major movements re: the sites I monitor over last 48 hours.

Robert's advice is good - however you may want to reference this if you experience larger scale attacks in the future - http://moz.com/blog/to-catch-a-spammer-uncovering-negative-seo  PS. I have never managed to get a porn site to remove a link, so I tend to resort to disavow...

Hello Mozzers,

I am undertaking a site audit and have just noticed that the developer has left the development site up and it has indexed. They 301d from pages on old site to equivalent pages on new site but seem to have allowed the development site to index, and they haven't switched off the development site. So would the best option be to redirect the development site pages to the homepage of the new site (there is no PR on dev site and there are no links incoming to dev site, so nothing much to lose...)? Or should I request equivalent to equivalent page redirection?

Alternatively I can simply ask for the dev site to be switched off and the URLs removed via WMT, I guess...

Thanks in advance for your help!  

Thanks Peter - developer was only redirecting from www. version of pages - when other versions exists, so will ensure he redirects from duplicates too, Luke

Hi Mozzers - I'm working on a site migration from a non-canonicalized site - I am wondering about the best way to deal with that - should I ask them to canonicalize prior to migration? Many thanks.

Hi Peter - sorry yes not that clear! I was asking about Keyword density I suppose - I know many SEOers suggest it's irrelevant, yet I spend much of my time removing penalties from sites and Keyword stuffing is causing issues.

If I see a penalty which I think is stuffing related I check densities and drop to 3% maximum  - that appears to have reversed penalty a couple of times.

Thanks Peter for you useful input, as ever. How do you manage onsite keywords in content these days?

It's incredible how often the 301 redirect thing is overlooked by developers managing migrations - oh the number of times I've been called in after the developer has 301'd everything to the homepage (or not even bothered doing any redirects).

Hi Mozzers  - I am looking at new site (not launched yet) - it contains significantly fewer pages than the previous site - 35 pages rather than 107 before - content on the remaining pages is plentiful but I am worried about the sudden loss of a significant "chunk" of the website - significantly cutting the size of a website must surely increase the risks of post-migration performance problems?

Further info - the site has run an SEO contract with a large SEO firm for several years. They don't appear to have done anything beyond tinkering with homepage content - all the header and description tags are the same across the current website. 90% of site traffic currently arrives on the homepage. Content quality/volume isn't bad across most of the current site.

Thanks in advance for your input!

Thanks for advice Paul - I've edited pages with poor backlink profiles out of redirect and 301'd the rest to relevant pages within the new website, and traffic has spiked up a bit. There were some very powerful links (national newspapers, etc) the new site was missing out on.

Thanks Jorge - Not sure how I'd survive without Screaming Frog - haven't gotten around to Xenu Linksleuth yet, but must give it a go sometime soon! Although I use copyscape to check for external duplication, hadn't realised I could use it to check for duplicate text within a website, so I'm v grateful for that pointer Luke

Thanks James - good advice!

Huge thanks for the advice and that brilliant article Anthony :-)!

Hello again Mozzers! Other than the Moz tool, are there any other tools out there for identifying internal duplicate content? Thanks, Luke

Hello Mozzers - I found a sitemap with loads of URL errors on it (none of the URLs on sitemap actually existed) so I went ahead and updated sitemap - now I'm seeing a spike in "not found" errors in WMT - is this normal / anything to worry about when you significantly change a sitemap. I've never replaced every URL on a sitemap before! L

Hi Peter - you make some good points.

Perhaps something like you have in public relations - perhaps you join an institute (or a new branch of Moz) by paying a fee and signing up to a code of conduct - if a client is unhappy with your conduct, they can lodge a complaint and challenge your position as a member of the said organisation. That would be a great way forward and restore some level of trust in the industry. A kind of self-regulation if you like.

Which is the case, unfortunately. Just auditing the backlinks. Gulp. I really do think SEO industry needs to be regulated in some way. There's just so much dubious stuff going on.

Thanks Peter - I note here:

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2115729/10-Steps-to-a-Successful-SEO-Migration-Strategy

Here it's suggested that sites keep old URLs in their sitemaps. I've heard others suggest otherwise. Seems to be a fair bit of conflicting advice out there.

In this case I'm seeing titles like this - they're doubled up on the same page:

vacations in Florida | vacations in Florida

No duplication between pages - just the doubling up of keyphrases on each page. Very odd indeed! SEO agency concerned had actually put this in place for client.

Hello Mozzers - just looking at a website which has duplicate keyphrases in its page titles...

So you have [keyphrase 1] | [exact match Keyphrase 1]

Now I happen to know this particular site has suffered a dramatic fall in traffic - the SEO agency working on the site had advised the client to duplicate keyphrases. Hard to believe, huh!

What I'm wondering is whether this extensive exact match keyphrase duplication might've been enough to attract a penalty? Your thoughts would be welcome.

Hello Mozzers,

If you are amending your urls - 301ing to new URLs - when in the process should you update your sitemap to reflect the new urls?

I have heard some suggest you should submit a new sitemap alongside old sitemap to support indexing of new URLs, but I've no idea whether that advice is valid or not.

Thanks in advance, Luke

Thanks for the clarification Peter - appreciated! Luke

You're right to be scared! Earn backlinks via quality content and clever PR instead.

RE: News releases... http://searchengineland.com/google-links-in-a-press-release-should-be-nofollowed-like-advertisements-168339

Thanks Peter - I'm used to seeing .html and .xml sitemaps but not .php - do you know whether a .php sitemap is a problem in any way?

Thanks SErOb - good advice!

Hello Mozzers, I often seem to work on websites with several types of sitemaps - e.g. an html sitemap - an xml sitemap - almost always with identical structure and content. Does anybody know the thinking behind this?

Currently looking at site with php and xml sitemap sitting alongside one another. I'm guessing one is for site users to read (and also to aid indexing) and the other for search engines, to further aid indexing.

Does Google have any preferences? Is there anything you should be wary of re: Google, if there are multiple sitemaps?

Hello,

I am having real problems with Moz tools.

I can log in to Moz analytics (crawl diagnostics) and analyse one site and I get 2 [internal] duplicate page errors

Yet when I enter via pro.moz.com (crawl diagnostics) I am finding over 100 duplicate page content warnings?

Any idea why this is happening?

Thanks for feedback EGOL and Oleg - can't see there's a problem myself, though I haven't carried out any testing - I remember Rand debated this very issue a few years back.

Hi Mozzers - was just wondering whether matching H1 and Title tags are still OK, or whether there's an over optimization risk if they exact match?

You might find this useful: http://searchengineland.com/what-everybody-missed-about-hummingbird1-176031

Hi Mozzers - I'm just looking at a site which has been damaged by a very poor site migration.

Basically, the old URLs were 301'd to a page on the new website (not a 404) telling everyone the page no longer existed.

They did not 301 old pages to equivalent new pages. So I just checked Google WMT and saw 1,000 crawl errors - basically the old URLs.

This migration was done back in February, since when traffic to the website has never recovered. Should I fix this now? Is it worth implementing the correct 301s now, after such a timelapse?

I've heard lots of people suggest that woocommerce is a great e-commerce platform to work with from an SEO perspective - is that the case in your opinion?

Hi Ruben, This is pretty useful (and don't miss the comments at the bottom!): http://boagworld.com/mobile-web/separate-mobile-site-vs-responsive-design/ - I kind of agree with Nielsen - a separate mobile site can be more bespoke and therefore delivers better UX. That said, if you get the right responsive developer on the project (pm me if you want any recommendations - I have worked with one of Europe's best responsive developers and have heard great things about an agency down in Texas too), things can work out very well indeed.

(PS - this was interesting too: http://mobile.smashingmagazine.com/2012/08/22/separate-mobile-responsive-website-presidential-smackdown/)

If a client is employing me to remove poorest backlinks identified at audit stage, I usually make 3/4 approaches to webmasters first, and see how that goes - and usually manage to take down the majority of spammy backlinks that way.

Hello Mozzers. I've just been looking at a site with capitals in the URL - capitals are used in the product descriptions, so you'll have a URL structure like this: www.company.com/directory1/Double-Beds-Luxury  (such URLs do not work if I lower the case of the capitals).

There are 50,000 such products on the site. Clearly one drawback is potential customers might type in, or link to, the lower case of the URL and get a "not found" result (though the urls are relatively long so not that likely I'm thinking). Are there any additional drawbacks with the use of capitals outlined here?

Thanks Amelia

Thanks Gary - good to know - much appreciated, Luke

Thanks CommercePundit - yes, this site needs a great deal of work, that's for sure.

Thanks for useful feedback EGOL - yes I'm on to advising on content (or lack of!) next (gulp!).

Hello Mozzers, just looked at a website and just about every product page (there are hundreds - yikes!) is duplicated like this at end of each url (see below). Surely this is a serious case of duplicate content? Any idea why a web developer would do this? Thanks in advance! Luke

prod=company-081
prod=company-081&cat=2