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After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
You shouldn't have to worry about it.
I would reference this article where Matt Cutts explains that if you are professionally translating it for usability... you are good; however, if you use Google translate to spam your content in a bunch of languages... that is bad.
Hope this helps and answers your question.
Mike
You don't need to really worry or stress about the missing meta descriptions and long titles.
Meta descriptions do not impact your rankings and Google will automatically create a description for your page if it appears in the SERPs.
Title tags that are too long do not impact your rankings... at least not directly. If your title tag is over by 10 or even 20 characters, it will not impact whether your pages ranks or not. The 70 characters is a suggestion as that was the number of characters that would display in the SERPs; however, now it is based on pixil width. The only other important info you need to know about titles is that you put your most important keywords towards the beginning of the title.
If you are unsure about how or are unable to edit these pages to add or edit the description and title, it isn't going to make our break your site from a ranking standpoint.
Some CMS will automatically generate 301s if you edit a URL's structure. It does this so that any old links pointing to the old URL will be brought to the edited URL. The CMS will not fix broken links that point to the old URL, but on the server side, if someone clicks on an old, broken link, they will be brought to the edited URL page - if that makes sense.
I understand that you want to attack warnings and notices and get things perfect; however, sometimes it just isn't possible. Whether it is a CMS issue or knowing how to fix something complex - what does matter is that you investigate each warning and notice and make sure that it is not negatively impacting your site. From the sounds of it, the handful of warnings and notices you have are just fine.
Hope this helps answer your question.
Mike
I don't completely understand where you are saying the noindex/nofollow is located. If both are in the head, it applies to the whole page; however, "nofollow" can be used specifically for links (in most cases blog comments).
The easiest thing you can do is ask yourself, "Do I want this page to be indexed by Google?" If no, then you want to use the noindex directive; however, if you want the page indexed, you will want to make sure you are not using the noindex directive.
As far as nofollows are concerned, those can/should be used for blog comments. Nofollow can be used in other instances, but it generally isn't a tag that you throw around much.
This Matt Cutts article talks about how the nofollow directive works in relation to link juice... it is worth a read.
Hope this answers your question Gina.
Mike
Keri's example of Moz's "top secret project" is a good one.
If you Google "top secret project" they are appearing at the bottom of the second page SERP.
Not knowing the product kind of makes it difficult to go on that; however, some of these ideas may work.
I would create a landing page for the physical product, then additional pages optimized around the product launch:
Create a landing page that is specific to any question that a visitor would/could have about the product.
Does that help/give you some ideas?
Mike
Screaming Frog - I usually wait for SEOmoz or Webmaster Tools to identify issues, then use Screaming Frog to verify that I have fixed them. It is a great tool and FREE if your site is under 500 pages.
Here are the SEOmoz definitions of the other warnings you are talking about:
"Meta Robots Nofollow - When the meta robots tag for a page includes 'nofollow', no link juice is passed on through the links on that page.
Blocked by Meta Robots - This page is being kept out of the search engine indexes by meta-robots."
I am guessing someone put the following in the head of those blog posts:
It is just telling Google to not index the page and to not pass page rank or anchor text for any links on that page.
Typically the "nofollow" is used in blog comments, so commenters cannot provide links back to their personal websites.
"noindex" shouldn't have any affect on rankings. It is just telling Google that certain pages are not worth putting in their index (copyright, terms of use, etc.).
"nofollow" links if not implemented correctly can look kind of spammy to Google, but in most cases you should be fine.
Does that help?
Mike
Hi Gina,
You should try to fix any errors. Errors can impact your users' experience, as well as interfere with web crawlers and even impact your rankings.
404 errors:
Warnings are more or less a "if you have time and can, you could fix these". They really do not impact your rankings, but if you are trying to be perfect, you could fix them.
Notices are just a "heads-up". They do not impact rankings, UNLESS you are blocking robots ; )
Long story short, fix Errors, work on Warnings when you have time, verify you already knew about the Notices.
Hope this helps.
Mike
Rand talks about co-occurrence/co-citation in this WBF video.
He gives some great examples of how this can potentially increase rankings. It is a very interesting video.
Hope this helps.
Mike
I found this from the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF):
"429 Too Many Requests
The 429 status code indicates that the user has sent too many requests in a given amount of time ("rate limiting").
The response representations SHOULD include details explaining the condition, and MAY include a Retry-After header indicating how long to wait before making a new request.
For example:
HTTP/1.1 429 Too Many Requests
Content-Type: text/html
Retry-After: 3600
<title>Too Many Requests</title>
I only allow 50 requests per hour to this Web site per logged in user. Try again soon.
Note that this specification does not define how the origin server identifies the user, nor how it counts requests. For example, an origin server that is limiting request rates can do so based upon counts of requests on a per-resource basis, across the entire server, or even among a set of servers. Likewise, it might identify the user by its authentication credentials, or a stateful cookie.
Responses with the 429 status code MUST NOT be stored by a cache."
From doing a quick read, it looks like this error would be thrown when API request are called too quickly... so... yeah?
Sorry I can't be any more helpful.
Mike
Name.
Address.
Phone Number.
Just make sure that your website is matching your Google Places page and any other business directories you list in. The consistency helps ensure that you are the specified business.
Makes sense?
Mike
Rand talks about co-occurrence/co-citation in this WBF video.
He gives some great examples of how this can potentially increase rankings. It is a very interesting video.
Hope this helps.
Mike
You shouldn't have to worry about it.
I would reference this article where Matt Cutts explains that if you are professionally translating it for usability... you are good; however, if you use Google translate to spam your content in a bunch of languages... that is bad.
Hope this helps and answers your question.
Mike
Hi Troy,
The issue with /index.asp is coming up because of your Home link in your footer. Instead of resolving to home "/" it is being pointed to "/index.asp".
And the reason it is also showing the www-version is because when the crawler is on lucid8.com and it crawls the link to the right of customer/partner login "customers", the crawler is brought to www.lucid8.com/downloadplus/Resource_login.asp Then, from here, if you click on any of the hyperlinks, you are brought to the www-version of the page instead of the non-www you specified as your preferred.
Jesse is correct in saying you need to choose either a www or non-www version; however, you also need to fix the /index.asp issue.
Hope this helps.
Mike
If you are using IIS, then you would want to configure these fixes in your web.config file.
I think you'd want something like this:
<configuration><system.webserver><rewrite><rewritemaps><rewritemap name="Redirect"><add key="/index.asp" value="/"></add></rewritemap></rewritemaps>
<rules><rule name="CanonicalHostNameRule" enabled="true"><match url="(.*)"><conditions logicalgrouping="MatchAll" trackallcaptures="false"><add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="^www.lucid8.com$" negate="true"></add></conditions>
<action type="Redirect" url="http://www.lucid8.com/{R:1}"></action></match></rule></rules></rewrite></system.webserver></configuration>
If that does not work, I would recommend breaking it into sections - for example, try doing the redirect code first, then the canonical code second, or vise versa. I always look up examples of web.config configurations on stackoverflow.com.
Hope this helps Troy.
Mike
"I accidentally manually submitted the url to google and manually in submitted it to index and that when this issue began...."
It sounds like you accidently added this URL to the index. You can follow the procedure outlined below to request Google remove the specific URL from the index:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=59819
I checked your site's structure using Screaming Frog and it does not appear that you are linking to any non-.html versions. If I perform a scan using one of your non-.html pages, it appears that it only links to itself.
Since you have the 301 redirect in place, you can choose to wait it out and Google should correct things eventually; otherwise, requesting Google remove the URL is a faster... PERMANENT process.
Good luck.
Mike
It all depends whether it makes sense for your business.
For instance if you sell shoes, you would probably not benefit from having an Armani microsite and a Nike microsite UNLESS you want users to assume you ONLY sell Armani or ONLY sell Nike.
The company I work for uses microsites, because our main site is just too generic. We sell software and our software can be configured for any industry, but to say that can deter some people. So we have our main site (just examples here) software.com and microsites food.software.com, jewelry.software, animal.software.com - this approach works for us, because we have slightly different solutions for each of these industries and we do not want to look too generic or single people out if we listed these on our main site.
Some of it has to do with SEO, but really think about it from a marketing standpoint and how you want to market to your visitors. We want to market to visitors with a microsite saying, "We have awesome food software" instead of saying with our main site, "We can tailor your software for the food industry".
It has worked great for us having microsites. It is a little more work, because you need to manage multiple sites and have unique content across multiple sites, but we are seeing really good returns.
Hope this helps.
Mike
Keri's example of Moz's "top secret project" is a good one.
If you Google "top secret project" they are appearing at the bottom of the second page SERP.
Hi Gina,
You should try to fix any errors. Errors can impact your users' experience, as well as interfere with web crawlers and even impact your rankings.
404 errors:
Warnings are more or less a "if you have time and can, you could fix these". They really do not impact your rankings, but if you are trying to be perfect, you could fix them.
Notices are just a "heads-up". They do not impact rankings, UNLESS you are blocking robots ; )
Long story short, fix Errors, work on Warnings when you have time, verify you already knew about the Notices.
Hope this helps.
Mike
