Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi - I've been looking at review websites like tripadvisor - I looked at Tripadvisor's hotel reviews and the reviews may extend for several pages, yet they don't change title tags and so on, on each of the multiple pages? Surely it would be a good idea, from an SEO perspective, to change title tags (and perhaps other tags) for each of the multiple pages - even if the change was slight - e.g. "The White Swan Hotel - Reviews p 1" - "The White Swan Hotel - Reviews p 2" and so on? Am I missing something?

Have just been looking at a review site and they're using the canonical tag very strangely, to me. For example, they may have several pages of reviews of the same item - they use the canonical tag on page 2/3/4 to point back at page 1 - and yet there is no duplication between the pages. Any idea why they might be doing this?

Hi - I'm assuming image URL best practice follows same principles as non image URLs (not too many files and so on) - I notice alot of web devs putting photos in subdomains, so wonder if I'm missing something (I usually avoid subdomains like the plague)!

Hi guys, I'm working for an electricity company and they want businesses to embed "live energy saving tables" where they choose to, on their website - each table links back to the electricity company. Now I'm only comfortable with editorially given links these days, rather than "you choose to embed this table and it will link back to us - that's the arrangement" set ups - even when they're not using anchor text. What are your thoughts? Thanks, Luke

I noticed "Don’t block your HTTPS site from crawling using robots.txt" here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/https-as-ranking-signal.html Does this mean you can't use robots.txt anywhere on the site - even parts of a site you want to noindex, for example?

Hi - I'm working with a utility company that's produced a calculator for individual households. When you go to their website and type in your address, various household info is pulled across (from various databases) and a calculation is generated on electricity costs/savings per month - the only unique content on each page = numbers. Beyond that, the content on each page is a template. There is actually a unique URL for each household (when you click on your property name a unique results page is generated). I'm worried about thin content penalties - is the best option to nofollow noindex these individual household pages (99% of the site!)???

An energy company I'm working with has decided to target 20,000 odd companies on their own b2b website, by producing a new dedicated page per target company on their website - each page including unique copy and a sales proposition (20,000 odd new pages to optimize! Yikes!). I've never come across such an approach before... what might be the SEO pitfalls (other than that's a helluva number of pages to optimize!). Any thoughts would be very welcome.

Just working with a company that has chosen a home URL with /home latched on - very strange indeed - has anybody else comes across this kind of homepage URL "decision" in the past? I can't see why on earth anybody would do this! Perhaps simply a logic-defying decision?

Hi guys - I'm looking at a website which uses hashtags to reveal the relevant content So there's page intro text which stays the same... then you can click a button and the text below that changes So this is www.blablabla.com/packages is the main page - and www.blablabla.com/packages#firstpackage reveals first package text on this page - www.blablabla.com/packages#secondpackage reveals second package text on this same page - and so on. What's the best way to deal with this? My understanding is the URLs after # will not be indexed very easily/atall by Google - what is best practice in this situation?

A client had taken a free trial on a directory - a niche directory which only takes food related websites. They mentioned, in passing, that the directory listing was replicated across 90 food-relevant "partner" sites [alarm bells!] - some of which use nofollow - some which don't, apparently. The main directory doesn't use nofollow and offers a mix of monthly-fee based listings or free listings. I've demanded a nofollow backlink from the main site and partner sites, or no backlink... what are your thoughts?

Hi - I'm working on a university website and have found a load of (1) outbound links to companies that have commercial tie ups to the university and, beyond that, loads of (2) outbound links to companies set up by alumni and (3) outbound links to commercial clients of the university. Your opinions on whether I should nofollow these, or not, would be welcome. At the moment I'm tempted to nofollow (1) yet leave (2) and (3) - quite simply because the (1) backlinks may have been negotiated as part of a package (nobody can actually remember at the university!), yet (2) and (3) were freely given by the university. Your thoughts would be welcome!

I am looking at a site and am pulling up duplicate title tags because of their lightbox use so... So they have a page: http://www.website.com/page and then a duplicate of that page: http://www.website.com/page?width=500&height=600 on a huge number of pages (using Drupal)... that kind of thing - what would be the best / cleanest solution?

Hello Mozzers, I was wondering whether there's any best practice guidance out there re: how to deal with membership/subscriber (existing customer) only content on a website, from an SEO perspective - what is best practice? A few SEOs have told me to make some of the content visible to Google, for SEO purposes, yet I'm really not sure whether this is acceptable / manipulative, and I don't want to upset Google (or users for that matter!) Thanks in advance, Luke

I just ran a website (Drupal) through screaming frog and the only 404s I found related to web pages which were the same as URLs already used on the website plus the company phone number so... www.company.com/[their phone number] - www.company.com/services[their phone number] - any ideas what might be causing this problem?

Hello, I have just been approach by a website owner - site isn't mobile friendly in any way - and they've seen a significant fall off in traffic since 23 Jan... backlink profile is clean (and no linkbuilding undertaken) - nothing else has changed... - more than half their traffic is via mobile devices and they've lost a good 1/3 of their traffic - and drilling deeper it's their organic traffic that's been hit. Anybody else seeing similar? edit... for reference: https://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/google-released-mobile-algorithm-think.html

Hello Mozzers, I'm noticing increasing numbers of clients' competitors getting physical addresses and phone numbers in multiple locations, no doubt partly for SEO purposes. These are little more than ghost presences (in hot desk style office space) and the phone numbers are simply diverted. Do such physical addresses put them at an SEO advantage (over and above those who don't have hot desk style space and location phone numbers). Or does Google weed out hot desk type office spaces where they can? Your thoughts/experience would be very welcome! Thanks in advance, Luke

Hello all - I've just been trying to crawl a site with Screaming Frog and can't get beyond the homepage - have done the usual stuff (turn off JS and so on) and no problems there with nav and so on- the site's other pages have indexed in Google btw. Now I'm wondering whether there's a problem with this robots.txt file, which I think may be auto-generated by Joomla (I'm not familiar with Joomla...) - are there any issues here? [just checked... and there isn't!] If the Joomla site is installed within a folder such as at e.g. www.example.com/joomla/ the robots.txt file MUST be moved to the site root at e.g. www.example.com/robots.txt AND the joomla folder name MUST be prefixed to the disallowed path, e.g. the Disallow rule for the /administrator/ folder MUST be changed to read Disallow: /joomla/administrator/ For more information about the robots.txt standard, see: http://www.robotstxt.org/orig.html For syntax checking, see: http://tool.motoricerca.info/robots-checker.phtml User-agent: *
Disallow: /administrator/
Disallow: /bin/
Disallow: /cache/
Disallow: /cli/
Disallow: /components/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /installation/
Disallow: /language/
Disallow: /layouts/
Disallow: /libraries/
Disallow: /logs/
Disallow: /modules/
Disallow: /plugins/
Disallow: /tmp/

Hello Mozzers, I'm looking at a niche party services directory (b2c), established for over 8 years. They're not using nofollow tags on backlinks from their paid entries (free entries only get phone numbers and not backlinks). If they suddenly switch all the paid-for backlinks in their directory to nofollow backlinks, might that have some kind of negative impact. Switching sounds like the best way forward, but I want to avoid any unintended consequences. Perhaps I should only implement this change gradually? Thanks in advance, Luke Edited 30 minutes ago by Luke Rowland

Hello Mozzers! I'm thinking of using either Squarespace or WooCommerce for an ecommerce website. WooCommerce is great - I've used it before... how flexible is Squarespace from an SEO perspective, compared to WooCommerce? Thanks in advance, Luke

Hello Mozzers, I'm looking at a niche party services directory (b2c). However, they're not using nofollow tags on backlinks from their paid entries (free entries only get phone numbers and not backlinks). If they suddenly switch all the paid-for backlinks in their directory to nofollow, might that have some kind of negative impact. Switching sounds like the best way forward, but I want to avoid any unintended consequences. Thanks in advance, Luke

Hi Mozzers Just noticed this pattern on a retail website... This URL product.php?cat=5 is also churning out products.php?cat=5&sub_cat= (same content as product.php?cat=5 but from this different URL - this is a blank subcat - there are also unique subcat pages with unique content - but this one is blank) How should I deal with that? and then I'm seeing: product-detail.php?a_id=NT001RKS0000000 and product-detail.php?a_id=NT001RKS0000000&cont_ref=giftselector (same content as product-detail.php?a_id=NT001RKS0000000 but from this different URL) How should I deal with that? This is a bespoke ecommerce CMS (unfortunately). Any pointers would be great 🙂 Best wishes, Luke  

Hello Mozzers, I was just wondering whether Google prefers www or non www URLs? Or doesn't it matter? Thanks in advance!

Hello, I've just read... “Publisher tags should only go on the most significant page of your site, usually the homepage.” Is this correct?

Hiya Mozzers - I have a blog separate from main website which is duplicating the blog on the main website. This separate blog is duplicating the main website blog, so it needs to be closed down and redirected. There are some 200 pages of separate blog (identified via Screaming Frog). So I am suggesting the blog pages should be 301 redirected from the separate blog to the equivalent blog pages on the main website. Q1) Should the root domain of the separate blog be 301 redirected to the main www.mainwebsite.com/blog page, or to the root domain of the main website? Q2) Should the blog pages, which lack equivalent content on the main website, be 301 redirected to the main www.mainwebsite.com/blog page, or to the root domain of the main website? Thanks for your help on this one, Luke

Hiya Mozzers, I have just been checking a website for duplication issues (this is a new website - they have just migrated across from old website to this new "main website"), and I found a wordpress blog on a different URL, duplicating the "main website"'s blog. Should I just close down this wordpress blog, 301 redirecting from the wordpress blog to the "main website"'s blog (equivalent blog posts to equivalent blog posts, with other indexed non-specific pages 301 redirected to "main website"'s blog homepage)? Thanks in advance for your help.

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

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

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.

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!  🙂

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 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!

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

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

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?

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?

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?

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?

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

Hiya Mozzers, My client is about to offer discounts (to a few large multinationals... for staff) and there's every possibility these will appear on the web, with a backlink to my client's website (perhaps direct via websitest / via online newsletters and so on). I am thinking of telling client to restrict the number of companies they interact with while I monitor backlinks in case there's some kind of problem with backlinks generated. I am also telling them on no account to ask for backlinks or encourage keyword rich links. Any thoughts on this, anybody? Is there a risk of penalty or am I just being paranoid?

Hello -just fed website into Screaming Frog and ended up crashing computer as these img/img/img urls went into the 10s of thousands (and the numbers of img/img/img/ in each URL ended up going into the dozens and probably hundreds and more per URL). Never seen anything like it! Any idea what might be going on with this website and why it's generating so many of these URLs - it is anything to worry about? Here's example of shorter URL... www.company.com/discover/img/img/img/img/img/img/img/img/img/img/img/img/img/img/img/img/photo-competition-winners

Hiya Mozzers I often work for hotels. A common scenario is the hotel / resort has worked with their Property Management System to distribute their booking availability around the web... to third party booking sites - with the inventory goes duplicate page descriptions sent to these "partner" websites. I was just checking duplication on a room description - 20 loads of duplicate descriptions for that page alone - there are 200 rooms - so I'm probably looking at 4,000 loads of duplicate content that need rewriting to prevent duplicate content penalties, which will cost a huge amount of money. Is there any other solution? Perhaps ask booking sites to block relevant pages from search engines?

Hi, I've just found two sitemaps - one of them is .php and represents part of the site structure on the website. The second is a .txt file which lists every page on the website. The .txt file is blocked via robots exclusion protocol (which doesn't appear to be very logical as it's the only full sitemap). Any ideas why a developer might have done that?

Just seen my first rather dramatic sitewide footer links penalty. Virtually all organic search traffic fell off site for 3 months. The footer links were a mix of keyphrases targeted at internal pages and keyphrases targeted at a handful of other associated companies (a group of enterprises owned by same businessman, with websites hosted in the same place). The website developers felt they were improving search engine visibility. Anyway, as soon as I started work with this client I requested immediate removal of the footer links and traffic immediately recovered to pre-penalty levels (within a couple of days). Have any of you experienced anything similar?

Hi, I'm altering title tags in a well established site (many of which are duplicates) and was wondering whether there's a risk associated with adjusting them all in one go? Should I just make gradual changes instead in case I flag anything?

Hello Mozzers! I've just been trawling through a website and noticed all of the images had their own URLs. There's a bespoke CMS and that's how it works with images... So out of 1447 urls, 1314 are images. Firstly, is this an issue / problem from an SEO perspective. If it is, how should I deal with it? Thanks in advance, Luke

Hi Mozzers! I've just been viewing a website with a flat URL structure - the site has a definite structure - with various sections - and yet the URL structure doesn't reflect this... The developer tells me this is purely for SEO purposes! Would be interested in your thoughts...

Hello all - I am looking at a website with 8 heavily keyword optimized site-wide links in the footer. Yes, there are only 8 but it looks a bit spammy and I'm tempted to remove them. I imagine there's some possibility of a Google penalty too? What would your advice be? Thanks, Luke