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You should set up 301 redirects. Doing this will redirect visitors, as well as link juice, from your old blog posts (linked from social media, blogs, other websites, etc.) to your new blog posts.
If you choose to do 301 redirects, you will not need to worry about searching for, identifying, and changing all of your old social media mentions to reflect your new URL format.
Does that make sense?
Mike
Have you looked into URL rewriting?
Jen did a great post on this here.
It more or less allows you to rewrite the URL however you want.
So instead of www.domain.com/blog/post/post-name you could do www.domain.com/blog/article/post-name or www.domain.com/blog/post-name or even www.domain.com/blog-post-name
Depending on your webserver, you should be able to accomplish this in a few lines of code.
Mike
Hi Jack,
According to Rankings - Help
"Why do the rankings in SEOmoz not match what I see in Google? Great question! Although there is never one “right” ranking for any keyword, SEOmoz tries to represent the ranking results that “most” users will see. If you see wildly different results from your search engine compared to your Ranking Report, it could be because of the following reasons:
Personalization – Most search engines will personalize your results based on your search history. Make sure you are logged out when performing a search. For Google, try adding &pws=0 to the end of your query string.
For example, if you searched for “SEO” the URL in Google would look like google.com/search?q=SEO. To turn off personalization, append &pws=0 to the end, so it would look like google.com/search?q=SEO&pws=0.
Geographic Bias – Search engines also customize results based on location. This means users in one city often see very different results than users in another location.
Latency – Rankings can change between the time we retrieve them and the day when they are viewed.
“www” vs. non-“www” Subdomains – The Web App is subdomain specific, meaning it only tracks rankings for the specific subdomain you track. So if you enter “example.com” as your subdomain, but “www.subdomain.com” is what ranks in the search results, this ranking won’t appear in your rankings report. This also might indicate a problem with canonicalization or duplicate content.
If you set your campaign up on the wrong subdomain, the only way to correct it is to start a new campaign. You can either archive or delete your old campaign, or choose to keep it running if you have enough campaign slots available."
And WorldofMoulding.com is coming up at #40 for me when I search "crown moulding" (see screenshot below).
Hope this helps.
Mike
If you scan with Screaming Frog, you can easily find missing meta tags, titles, broken links and more.
It is what we used prior to going live with our website and it was a life/time saver!
And here is a guide done by SEER Interactive that illustrates all of the different things you can accomplish with this tool.
Mike
It can be a few different things. SEOmoz sums them up pretty well here stating:
"Why do the rankings in SEOmoz not match what I see in Google? Great question! Although there is never one “right” ranking for any keyword, SEOmoz tries to represent the ranking results that “most” users will see. If you see wildly different results from your search engine compared to your Ranking Report, it could be because of the following reasons:
Personalization – Most search engines will personalize your results based on your search history. Make sure you are logged out when performing a search. For Google, try adding &pws=0 to the end of your query string.
For example, if you searched for “SEO” the URL in Google would look like google.com/search?q=SEO. To turn off personalization, append &pws=0 to the end, so it would look like google.com/search?q=SEO&pws=0.
Geographic Bias – Search engines also customize results based on location. This means users in one city often see very different results than users in another location.
Latency – Rankings can change between the time we retrieve them and the day when they are viewed.
“www” vs. non-“www” Subdomains – The Web App is subdomain specific, meaning it only tracks rankings for the specific subdomain you track. So if you enter “example.com” as your subdomain, but “www.subdomain.com” is what ranks in the search results, this ranking won’t appear in your rankings report. This also might indicate a problem with canonicalization or duplicate content.
If you set your campaign up on the wrong subdomain, the only way to correct it is to start a new campaign. You can either archive or delete your old campaign, or choose to keep it running if you have enough campaign slots available."
You can also choose to use a different browser to check your rankings.For instance, I use IE for my main surfing habits, Chrome for my SEO and web development, and Firefox to check my Google rankings. I do this, because I do my Google-ing in IE - so things get cached, Chrome has me signed in all of the time because of my Google accounts, and Firefox I never use.
Hope this helps.
Mike
SEOmoz uses https://www.speechpad.com/ for Whiteboard Friday transcription.
If you scroll down to the bottom of the transcription text you will see the SpeechPad URL, as well as http://blog.speechpad.com/video-transcription/ for the actual service.
Mike
Hi Shawn,
Google does not look at page content the same way humans do. Google is more concerned about you providing a good experience for your users. I believe that using tabs, if coded correctly, is one way of providing good experience and additional information.
If you view this text only version of the dell.com page you referenced, you will see how Google is viewing that page - there are no tabs, simply text and hyperlinks.
As far as SEO is concerned, it used to be the goal to put all of your important content, above the fold; however, that is not as important as it once was.
If you Google: site:www.dell.com Native HD 1.0 MP webcam with dual digital array microphone, you can see that the Inspiron 15z Ultrabook appears in one of results. This text is on the Tech Specs tab and is still being indexed by Google.
Long story short - Google "should" (depending on the way you set up your tabs) be able to crawl, index, and rank your page when you use content on tabs.
Does that answer your question?
Mike
Hi Matt,
Matt Cutts actually suggests that you should use the disavow link tool with caution and only in certain circumstances.
Also, there is an article on Search Engine Land regarding things to think about prior to using the disavow tool, which states, "If you haven’t actually been penalized and you start disavowing your links, you’re essentially outing yourself to Google that you manipulated the system. Make sure that you equivocally know you were penalized and it’s not just some random fluctuation in rankings, a sitemap or indexing problem, or an accidentally no-indexed page."
Google Webmaster Tools calls out the following, "This is an advanced feature and should only be used with caution. If used incorrectly, this feature can potentially harm your site’s performance in Google’s search results. We recommend that you disavow backlinks only if you believe you have a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site, and if you are confident that the links are causing issues for you. In most cases, Google can assess which links to trust without additional guidance, so most normal or typical sites will not need to use this tool."
I am not saying that you shouldn't use the disavow tool - simply suggesting that you use caution.
Mike
I personally think this may confuse users. For instance, if they click on your company logo from another page and are directed to www.site.com/super-awesome-best-thing-ever stead of www.site.com... that might appear kind of strange to them.
Why don't you either:
optimize your homepage for super-awesome-best-thing-ever
create a landing page for super-awesome-best-thing-ever
If you are trying really hard to rank for super-awesome-best-thing-ever, I would try the above 2 options first. If you still aren't getting the results you want, then maybe try the homepage redirect; however, I think that is somewhat odd functionality for the user.
In most cases, the super-awesome-best-thing-ever is going to be more specific. For instance, if bestbuy.com redirected to bestbuy.com/electronics-retailer that would confuse me... A LOT.
Have you tried other options first?
Mike
Hi David,
Read the Beginners Guide to SEO.
That will should answer 97% of your questions.
Then read the SEOMoz Help for 2% more.
And finally ask very specific questions here for the final 1%.
Good luck.
Mike
Hi Chad,
I think you are asking if it is problematic for all of the pages on your website to be using the same meta keywords and meta description tags.
These tags look like this:
The "content" of these tags, and actually your title tags as well, is duplicated across all of the pages on your website (I am referring to the website listed in your profile - Auben Realty).
The title tag is extremely important and provides search engines with a quick glimpse of what a page is about prior to even viewing the page. These should be unique to each page on your website as they are a page ranking factor.
The meta description tag is not important for search engines, but it is for visitors. This is the description visitors will see when your web pages appear in a search engine's results page. Although this tag is not part of a ranking factor, it is good marketing to have these descriptions be unique to each page.
The meta keywords tag can be removed from all of your website's pages. This tag is not used in any way with Google. I have read that Bing uses this tag to look for basic keyword stuffing. And while other search engines may use the keywords tag for some ranking factor - more than likely you are not getting traffic from those search engines, because they are not used nearly as much.
If you check out the SEOmoz Guide to SEO, you will find additional information on these tags and a bunch of general SEO tips.
Hope this helps.
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
You are correct in saying that you would have to divide your link building efforts if you have multiple sites. If you use subdomains, you would get some of the value of linking across all of your sites; however, I don't think that would be good necessarily for your example.
I would suggest that you have landing pages specific to each category of law, then subpages under each landing page that are pertinent to that specific category.
For instance, you could have a Family Law page, which would then have subpages of Divorce, Child Custody, Child Support, Adoption, etc. You could still very well rank well for each of your categories and subcategories.
I would think that your clients would think you were experts in each of your category pages, but I am not too familiar with lawyering 
Hope this helps.
Mike
According to SEOmoz Help:
"So, in sum, the On-Page Tool only automatically runs reports on pages that are already ranking in the top 50 for one or more of your keywords. Thus, your On-Page Rankings Reports update after your rankings update each week. If you have no pages ranking in the top 50, then you'll have no automatically generated On-Page Reports. If you have 30 pages ranking in the top fifty, then you should have 30 On-Page reports."
So, only 5 of your pages are ranking in the top 50 for your selected keywords.
Hope this helps.
Mike
Hi Scott,
I would not worry about that being considered duplicate content. Is it duplicate? Yes - however you are listing your mission in business directories, so some duplicate content is assumed.
When Google indexes, it can easily determine where the duplicate content originated and gives complete credit to that source... in this case, your homepage.
You can even Google: "seomoz is the world's most popular provider of seo software" and see that this same paragraph is listed on LinkedIn, CrunchBase, VendorStack, StartupGenome, etc.
These business directories are all reputable, so I would not worry about it. If you do see random webpages or your own webpages duplicating your content, then you should be more concerned about fixing that.
Hope this helps.
Mike
Correct. When you setup to campaign a subfolder, you will only get crawl diagnostics and reports for that particular subfolder.
SEOMoz Help states, "The PRO Web App crawls, grades and checks rankings only for pages found on that domain or subfolder. When tracking a subfolder, we will only crawl pages that exist in that specific folder. We will not crawl links that go to other folders."
If you were to create 2 campaigns:
And both pages are in English, you will get different crawl diagnostics and other metrics for these campaigns.
Does that make sense?
Mike
Hi John,
I would actually suggest trying to put St. Charles, MO in your title tag like the competitor that is ranking above you.
That will help with ranking higher for the keywords "St Charles Lawn Care" AND is way easier than creating additional pages AND your homepage already has very good rankings.
If you haven't already, make sure you are listed in all of the local business directories at GetListed.org to further increase your local presence.
Good luck.
Mike
Did you submit a new sitemap in your Bing Webmaster Tools?
Mike
Hi Darcy,
For assessing your competitors, I have heard that SEMRush.com is the way to go. I have only used the trial of it (which I found simply OK); however, I have been assured by some SEO authorities that the paid for version gives you A LOT more information.
As far as if you wanted to check the organic searches that your website is receiving or keywords that your site "may" rank high for, you can use Google Webmaster Tools > Search Queries will give you the information for your own site.
Hope this helps.
Mike
It looks like it is pulling some localized results for that. I am in Minneapolis, MN and do not see rockymountainfurniture.com in the first 50 results; however, when I change my location to Atlanta, GA (I looked at the location in your profile), I do see them on page one.
Mike
Keyword density can help Google identify what your page is about.
There is not a certain % of keyword density that will give you good or bad results - the thing to keep in mind while you are writing is your visitors. You want to mention your keyword where applicable in your content; however, you do not want it to seem forced.
Best way to judge how well content is optimized? - I like using SEOmoz On-Page Optimization tool.
David Naylor has a pretty cool keyword density tool which returns some good info.
Hope this helps.
Mike
I just asked the Moz team this earlier this week.
They are working on functionality similar to this where you can add multiple users to one account; however, they have no ETA on when this will be available.
Mike
As long as you are linking out to relevant content, it is perfectly fine to be cross linking between sites (as long as you are not doing like a site-wide footer link or something spammy).
Search engines do not find it odd when two sites that are relevant to each other link to each other, because that appears natural.
Hope this helps.
Mike
No. Google will not index your page differently; however, it can potentially slow your pages down, because you will have additional code.
Here is what Google has to say on the matter, "Where possible, use absolute rather than relative links. (For instance, when linking to another page in your site, link to www.example.com/mypage.html rather than simply mypage.html)."
There are a few reasons behind this thought process: 1) crawlers cannot get confused when crawling your pages, because the complete path is available 2) should your site content be scrapped, the links would point back to your own page 3) if you have poor site structure, this can increase errors (for instance if you switch to HTTPS for a signin page and you continue to use relative pathing for navigation, you could then have links to the HTTPS version of your website and the HTTP version).
Also, just for reference, when you are looking at using relative or absolute for canonical pages, Google states, "rel="canonical" can be used with relative or absolute links, but we
recommend using absolute links to minimize potential confusion or difficulties."
Hope this answers your question.
Mike
Do a scan with Screaming Frog. It can point out exact pages where you are having broken links.
They have a free trial and a paid version.
This program is great for diagnosing many different website related issues.
Hope this helps.
Mike
Create landing pages for both on your website. So domain.com/location1 and domain.com/location2.
Then use GetListed.org and get both locations listed in the list of business directories.
Hope this helps.
Mike
A sitemap is like a map with driving directions for Google. Sure they can probably find their way through your site, but with a map they can get through more efficiently and make sure to look at all of your pages.
It is not required for a site to get indexed.
If you entire site is indexed, you don't "need" a sitemap; however, it is good practice to have one.
Say you add a new page and want it to get indexed quickly by Google, you would just update your sitemap and submit it to Google. It alerts them you have made changes and to reindex your site.
If you Google site:logobids.com you can see which of your pages Google has indexed.
Hope this helps.
Mike
Crawl Notices are merely a "heads-up" notice. You having a 301 redirect from http://mysite.com to http://www.mysite.com is perfectly normal and correct if that is the very you want displayed to users.
One thing to note, you may be getting this message if:
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 believe it really comes down to personal preference.
Generally, when you see sub.domain.com, you usually see the non-www version; however, it really does come down to personal preference.
You are not going to be penalized or anything for using the www version.
It is slightly less work for the user to not have to type www.sub.domain.com vs just sub.domain.com - but I don't think 4 extra keystrokes is going to be that big of deal.
Mike
Hi Jack,
Server errors. Redirect loops. Disallowed pages in robots.txt. etc.
Here are some suggestions from www.seomoz.org/help/crawl-diagnostics:
"Why didn’t you crawl all my pages? I only got a one page crawl. Looks like you missed a bunch!
If you suspect you didn’t get a full crawl, or Rogerbot missed some of your pages, there could be several reasons why this happens.
If you are certain you don't have any of the above problems, then I would suggest contacting help@seomoz.org
Good luck.
Mike
Hi Ed,
First - cool websites! Visually they look really nice.
According to Matt Cutts, Google does not consider bounce rate as a ranking factor. Think of it this way, if you Google weather in Minneapolis then click on the weather.com page, and see the high today is 36 degrees <sigh>then leave the page, you are bouncing. BUT, does that mean that weather.com didn't answer your question and should be ranking lower because of a higher bounce rate? That is why Google claims they do not consider bounce rate a ranking factor, because users could easily find the answer to their question and leave a site within seconds.</sigh>
That said, if you look at OpenSiteExplorer.org you will see that your SparrowMakeup.com.au site has very high authority, while your Make-up-Artists.com.au does not.
If I were you, I would incorporate the cool functionality of your portfolio into your main SparrowMakeup.com.au site. I understand your reasoning for having two separate sites, because of the different look/theme; however, I think when people are looking at a portfolio, they expect to see something more artsy and different looking. I think you could definitely get away with incorporating the same functionality from your portfolio site onto your main site.
Since it appear that you don't have any text on the portfolio page, it isn't super likely that you'd rank for that page, but directing someone to an "external" website might be confusing, since the portfolio is essentially an extension of the main site. If you want to continue to have it be a separate site, that is fine; however, I would recommend that you open your portfolio page in a new window... that way, once/if they close your portfolio window, they are brought back to your main website.
Does that all make sense?
Hope this helps.
Mike
If you 301 redirect the old category page that had the bad backlinks, you will be indirectly pointing those bad backlinks from the old category page to the new one.
If it shows as 404 in webmaster tools and you are no longer using that page, that means it is displaying the correct error. It should eventually be removed from Google's index if it is still in there or you could remove it from Google's index in WMT if you wanted to.
Hope this helps.
Mike
It can actually take GWT weeks or months to actually remove these warnings from their reports.
As long as you have personally verified that they are fixed on your live site, you do not need to worry.
I just verified that your /estimate-request.html is using the description you stated above; however, Google is still using the meta description you had in place on Jan 30,2013.
Once Google re-indexes your page, it will appear correctly in the SERPs, but like I said, it may take months for this fix to be reflected in Google Webmaster Tools.
Does that help?
Mike
According to Google -
"How often does Google crawl the web?
Google's spiders regularly crawl the web to rebuild our index. Crawls are based on many factors such as PageRank, links to a page, and crawling constraints such as the number of parameters in a URL. Any number of factors can affect the crawl frequency of individual sites.
Our crawl process is algorithmic; computer programs determine which sites to crawl, how often, and how many pages to fetch from each site. We don't accept payment to crawl a site more frequently. For tips on maintaining a crawler-friendly website, please visit our Webmaster Guidelines."
Hope this helps.
Mike
I would suggest removing them.
You are spot on with the fact that competitors can use them. Also, they add unnecessary html to your page.
In addition, most pages usually only target one, maybe two keywords, so having a list of keywords really would not be beneficial.
Mike
You sir are a gentleman and a scholar.
Thanks for your help Matt.
That's a bummer Jesse.
I would not take any action until you read through the following articles below.
First READ THIS from Google.
From what I have read, you should make you sure you are documenting your attempt to get the links removed. Matt Cutts states that using the disavow tool without requesting link removal first
Duke Tanson wrote a great article on how he used the disavow tool to removal an unnatural link profile warning.
That should be all of the information you need.
Good luck.
Mike
Hi TJ,
I have actually made the switch to friendly URLs in DNN, so I know your pain.
Best practice is to make the 301 redirect in one jump. So instead of going from oldsite > dnn > dnn-friendly, you should set up your redirects to perform oldsite > dnn-friendly and dnn > dnn-friendly.
Redirecting with a chain A > B > C can slow your site down for users, as well as slow down the crawlers, which is bad.
Does that answer your question?
Mike
I would have a single locations page that lists all of your businesses locations by city, state.
I would link the city, state to a landing page for the specific city,state.
Each city, state landing page would have a unique, URL, title, headings, content, etc that would use a format like Keyword | City, State | XYZ Company - because if someone Googles your company name, you should already come up... it is more important to have the keywords, then city or city, then keywords in your title - do some keyword research on this to see which is best for you.
THEN register each of those city,state landing pages using GetListed.org - this will help you build up your local presence in those areas since you have a physical office location.
If you wanted, you could do the footer idea... I think that gets to be kind of spammy, but I guess it all depends on the industry and the number of locations.
Hope that helps.
Mike
Hi Mark,
This sounds like a bug or issue with the SEOmoz software.
Contact help@seomoz.org and ask one of the help associates to look into this for you.
If you do not have many pages, it definitely shouldn't take that long.
The help team responds extremely quickly!
Good luck.
Mike
I would suggest contacting the customers as a common curtsey. We do customer quotes, but we pull them from success stories, which the customer knows we will be publishing already. While the customer did send you an email with a review or quote, they probably didn't know you would be making their comment public.
I personally would feel better asking the customer, even if you don't plan on using their name or initials, it would still be good. Also, I think if when you contact them you ask if you can use their name, that would be good. I think seeing a name associated with a quote gives it a little more oomph and shows that you aren't just make up quotes.
Just my thoughts.
Mike
TextMarketing is spot on!
Either re-writing from memory or having someone else write the content based on a generic layout are two ways around having duplicate content.
And just for some additional info, this what Google considers duplicate content: "Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar." and "...content is deliberately duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or win more traffic. Deceptive practices like this can result in a poor user experience, when a visitor sees substantially the same content repeated within a set of search results."
Duplicate Content = BAD SEO and BAD User Experience.
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
If you have not implemented the blog yet, you will not have to use 301 redirects. You only need to 301 if you have existing content, then want to point it to the newer URL.
Here is a real-case scenario:
We had an old URL
domain.com/content.asp?ID=9XXX123M85&AID=KXXX123JSL
We used URL rewriting to change that to domain.com/product - this tells the server to fetch the information from the ugly URL and display it using the new friendly URL. We then had to set up a 301 from the ugly URL to the new URL, ONLY BECAUSE the ugly URL was already in place and receiving inbound links from other sites.
At this same time, we also created a new page
domain.com/content.asp?ID=9XXX123M85&AID=XXXNEWPAGE
We used URL rewriting to change that to domain.com/solutions/feature - again, this tells the server to fetch the content from the ugly URL and display it using the friendly URL. This time, we did not need to set up a 301, because this was a brand new page.
From my research and understanding, there are no negative repercussions in using URL rewriting on new pages; however, if you use URL rewriting, you SHOULD also incorporate a 301 to redirect inbound links that were previously pointing to the old content.
Good luck Rich.
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
Whoa! Information overload!!!
I don't know of anything that shows you a graphical representation of your site's linking structure; however, I do know of a program that will list out all of the linking pages on your site and the number of in and out links, including anchor text, etc. The number of in links can be an indicator of structurally how your site is organized.
404 errors or not bad as long as they are known. If you no longer have a page and you decide not to redirect from the old page to a new one, that is fine. Google is just giving you a heads up that your site or someone else's is linking to a non existent page. If you do nothing to fix these 404 errors, the page will eventually be removed from Google's index and not be a problem.
/document_security.htm looks like it is being linked to from /services_storage_fast_retrieval.htm and /services_archive_storage.htm
I would recommend downloading and installing Screaming Frog that is the program I was referencing in my response to #1 and that is how I found the issue in #3.
Seer Interactive also wrote a great blog on all of the things this tool can do.
Hope this helps.
Mike
Hi Carla,
Read this article on WordPress security goes into detail on, "... some common forms of vulnerabilities, and the things you can do to help keep your WordPress installation secure."
From my understanding, the gist of it is:
Hope this helps.
Mike