Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi! I've had a bunch of duplicate content issues come up in a crawl, but a lot of them seem to have canonical tags implemented correctly. For example: http://www.alwayshobbies.com/brands/aztec-imports/-catg=Fireplaces http://www.alwayshobbies.com/brands/aztec-imports/-catg=Nursery http://www.alwayshobbies.com/brands/aztec-imports/-catg=Turntables  http://www.alwayshobbies.com/brands/aztec-imports/-catg=Turntables?page=0 Aztec http://www.alwayshobbies.com/brands/aztec-imports/-catg=Turntables?page=1 Any ideas on what's happening here?

Hi. I've been working on http://www.alwayshobbies.com/ for a number of months. All was fine, but then we had a site migration which involved a huge number of redirects. There's been a couple of similar moves in the past. As a result, rankings have plummeted. To resolve this, we're considering letting all the old pages 404 by turning of the redirects, and removing all links to them where we can. Some key pages could have canonicals added, but basically we're looking to purge as much as possible. Does this sound like a reasonable tactic?

Hi all! I'm running two separate campaign crawls at the moment that I'm having a few issues with. The first is http://www.muchbetteradventures.com/. I'm tracking this at root to try an pick any problems with a previous version of the site, which is on the v1.muchbetteradventures subdomain. However, I'm only seeing 100 or so pages as being crawled in Moz, compared to thousands in Google. There's no access blocked alerts in Moz either. The second is http://www.sothebys.com/. I started this crawl at root a few days ago and no pages at all have been processed. Very odd! Any advice would be much appreciated.

A bit of an odd one. In Webmaster Tools, there's the option to order sites by site health. When we do this our site - http://www.neooptic.com/ - is near the bottom, despite there being little or no crawl errors. Any ideas why this could be happening?

Hi! Since the new Penguin rollout, we've seen rankings drop for http://www.leanonturkey.co.uk/ for the terms 'turkey recipes' (UK) and 'low fat recipes' (UK) from #4 and #15 respectively. This may be down to very strong competition, but I'm also concerned over the on-page content, which may not be detailed enough. Any tips would be much appreciated!

Hi! Got quite a tricky problem regarding a client, http://www.muchbetteradventures.com/ and their previous site, http://v1.muchbetteradventures.com/ Here's the background: We have approx 1500 'listing' pages like this: http://v1.muchbetteradventures.com/listing/view/1925/the-barre-des-ecrins-or-the-dome-des-ecrins-mountaineering-trip They bring in min 2k hits/month, and also add to the overall site authority I suspect. They will eventually all have a home on main domain. When they do, they will also each have been rewritten to be unique, so the value of them will increase (many are currently not). We also have landing pages like this: http://v1.muchbetteradventures.com/view/559/volunteering-holidays- which despite being hideous are ranked fairly well (page 1 for key terms). We cannot currently  fulfil all these on main domain, but do not want to shut them down and lose positioning. Choices as I see it: Make a landing page e.g. muchbetteradventures.com/volunteering and a) redirect from old landing page, b) redirect all related 'listings' to this page. May help preserve rankings of main landing page (the most important), but not of any listings? Import all listings to have a home on main domain, (probably as children of a landing page, but not rewritten to be unique just yet). Make them not accessible from homepage, and change functionality of them so that new visitors from google are told we cannot currently help them with this trip. This is more work to complete so will take longer to do and is a distraction from our core focus so needs good justification! Stay running largely as we are, slowly redirecting 1 page at a time as we carry over more and more options to main domain. This will take over 12 months min.

Hi! I recently put this page live for a new client targeting the term 'hospitality IT' in the UK. http://www.antana.co.uk/hospitality-IT.html I've done a bit of guest blog writing and the page is currently #10. There are very links to the site overall, and only a handful to the page itself. Should I focus on building links to the root domain or the page, and is there any other quick changes I can make to give it a boost? Thanks!

Hi! A client has just had 14k 404s pop up in his WMT. I think this is because a page that they redirected to had moved. My question is, can I clean these up by redirecting the page the original redirect was one? If so, will it have any negative impact?

My client has moved address to a location in the same city. Will updating his Google Places page lead to a drop in rankings? If so, what is the best way to resolve it?

Hi! I'm working on http://www.hgsplumbingandheating.co.uk/ at the moment, and it's going pretty well for local terms such as 'Norwich plumber' etc. Has anyone got any tips though on how it can be improved, especially with regard to getting the homepage ranking above the Places listings? Thanks!

I've been asked to do an audit of http://www.equipment4garages.com/. The first thing I did was check the code, and saw that the whole thing has a clone of the original site in an iframe. I can't for the life of me think why anybody would do that, so I was wondering if someone here could shed some light on it?

Hi! I've been working on a campaign for http://www.alwayshobbies.com/, which has seen a 35% in drop in traffic since changing ecommerce platforms. It's now been two months, but there is no sign of recovery. We are in the middle of cleaning up the link profile as part of a resubmission request, but that has been ongoing since before the migration. A lot of redirects were needed after 10k 404s appeared in Webmaster Tools after the new launch, but these have been reduced to around 500. We've been pretty thorough here, but I thought it would be worth checking in case there's something we've missed.

Hi! I'm doing some SEO work for a new client. I've been tasked with boosting some of their products, such as http://www.lawnmowersdirect.co.uk/product/self-propelled-rear-roller-rotary-petrol-lawnmowers/honda-hrx426qx. It's currently #48 for the term Honda Izy HRG465SD, while http://www.justlawnmowers.co.uk/lawnmowers/honda-izy-hrg-465-sd.htm is #2, behind Amazon. Regarding links, there's no great shakes between the pages or even the domains. However, there's major difference in content. I'm happy to completely revamp it, I just wanted to check I'm not missing anything out before starting to rewrite it altogether! Thanks

Hi! I just checked the WMT account for one of my clients, and I noticed their web dev's site has 2.6k links pointing to it. These seem to be from their hosted HTML newsletters, such as http://imail.illusionmedia.co.uk/t/r-l-diurkky-dtakrkki-b/. They redirect to the the main site, but are used for tracking. The client recently got an unnatural link warning, even though their profile looks OK to me. Is there a chance that these links could have anything to do with it?

OK, bit of an odd one. The SEOmoz crawler has flagged the following pages up as duplicate content. Does anyone have any idea what's going on? http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/blog/november-2011/gear$9zone-guide-to-winter-insulation http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/blog/september-2011/win-a-the-north-face-nuptse-2-jacket-with-gear-zone http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/blog/july-2011/telephone-issues-$9-2nd-july-2011 http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/blog/september-2011/gear$9zone-guide-to-nordic-walking-poles http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/blog/september-2011/win-a-the-north-face-nuptse-2-jacket-with-gear-zone https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/googlebot-fetch?hl=en&siteUrl=http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/

Does anybody know if the SEOmoz crawler picks up canonical tags when its looking for duplicate content? I've got a ton of errors in one of my projects even though they all have canonical tags. Thanks!

Hi! This follows on from my last question. I'm trying to improve the page load speed for http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/. Currently, Google rate the page speed of the GZ site at 91/100 – with the javascript being the only place where points are being deducated. The only problem is, the JS relates to the trustpilot widget, and social links at the bottom of the page – neither of which work when they are deferred. Normally, we would add the defer attribute to the script tags, but by doing so it waits until the page is fully loaded before executing the scripts. As both the js I mentioned (reviews and buttons) use the document.Write command, adding this would write the code off the page and out of placement from where they should be. Anyone have any ideas?

I've been working on http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/ for a while, and we moved on to a SEO-friendly platform in November last year. Rankings have stabilised after dropping heavily on the old platform, but they haven't improved inline with the amount of link building we've done. Does anybody have any ideas for tricks that we could have missed? Any advice would be much apptreciated.

Hi everybody, I need to rewrite this url using mod rewrite, but I've got stuck. http://www.diamondgeezer.com/theultimate/search/index.php?sortprice=asc&followSearch=9673&q=eternity+rings I'd like it to show this one instead: http://www.diamondgeezer.com/eternity-rings I'm no expert on this stuff, so any help would be great! Thanks

Hi everybody. One of our clients has recently moved from one ecommerce platform to another. During the move, a huge number of URLs have been tidied up to remove dynamic parameters. The old URLs have been redirected to the new, tidy ones. My question is whether it's worth telling Google in the WMT URL parameters section not to index the parameters of the old URLs. Will this affect the redirects in any way? Thanks!

Hi everybody! I've been looking at my Webmaster Tools stats, and it looks like not all the URLs in the sitemap tree have been indexed, according to WMT at least. Is this reliable, and if so, is it worth investigating further? | Sitemap | Status | Type | Downloaded | URLs submitted | URLs in web index |
| | /ISitemap1.xml | | Sitemap | Dec 15, 2011 | 2,000 | 1,309 |
| | /isitemap.xml | | Index | Dec 15, 2011 | 8,695 | 4,127 |
| | /isitemap2.xml | | Sitemap | Dec 15, 2011 | 2,000 | 998 |
| | /isitemap3.xml | | Sitemap | Dec 15, 2011 | 2,000 | 819 |
| | /isitemap4.xml | | Sitemap | Dec 15, 2011 | 2,000 | 719 |
| | /isitemap5.xml | | Sitemap | Dec 15, 2011 | 695 | 282 | Thanks!

Hi everybody. One of my clients is migrating to a new ecommerce platform, and we need to get a list of urls from the existing site to start mapping out the 301 redirects. Usually, I'd use a tool like Xenu or Integrity to crawl and output a list. However, the database and server setup is so bad that it can't handle the requests from these tools and it sends the site down. This, unsurprisingly, is one of the reasons for the migration. Does anybody know of a way to get a full list of urls without having to make a bunch of http requests which will kill the site? Any advice would be much appreciated!

Hi there. I've got a client that runs a photography studio and is seeing a massive drop in traffic. I was wondering if it could be seasonal - it's her first year trading so she has nothing to compare it against - or whether it could be some other issue. Thanks!

Hi everybody. One of my clients is looking to move their e-commerce site to a new platform in the next few weeks. However, they been told by several sources that traffic will drop after a migration, which they want to avoid in the run up to Christmas. I've not heard this before, and I thought as long as you pay attention to structure, indexing and redirects a migration should have no impact. We'd be moving to a site with cleaner code, so surely there wouldn't be some kind of penalty for that? Your thoughts would be great! S

Hi I'm planning to redirect one large ecommerce site to another. Here's how I was thinking of doing it: crawl both sites with Xenu and export urls to a CSV match urls where possible, redirecting pages from site A to relevant ones in site B all others will be redirected to site B's home page Now, I'm dealing with thousands of URLs here, so any way to make it easier would be great. Could this mean just redirecting all of Site A's pages to Site B's homepage would be worth it? Or does redirecting relevant pages where possible seem the best idea? Thanks guys!

Hi there. We've been working on this site for a few months now - http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/. We were hired as the previous agency was seeing traffic fall by 40% year on year consistently. Now, we've managed to stop that drop, but traffic recovery in Google (Bing and Yahoo are fine) is being really sluggish. Here's what we've done: Converted URLs from dynamic to static Sorted duplicate content errors Cut down the number of on-page links (Still not under a hundred, but that's really tricky) Carried out on-page optimisation on hundreds of inner pages, including adding new content Does anybody have any ideas on anything we cou;d be missing? We're just starting to get going on link building, so that's the next step. Thanks!

Is anyone else having problems with this? Every search I do seems to throw up an error in the traffic fields.

Can anybody recommend some good sites for submitting graphic design/photoshop tutorials for link building? Ones that host the content themselves instead of linking to the tutorial would be best. Thanks!

I'm working on this page at the moment - http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/berghaus-bid6.html. The keyword we're going for is, unsurprisingly, 'Berghaus'. The SEOmoz on page report has flagged up a possible issue with keyword stuffing as the term is mention around 25 times. Is it worth altering this, which could be quite tricky as a lot of the page is dynamically generated? Thanks!

I'm working on this page at the moment - http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/berghaus-bid6.html. The keyword we're going for is, unsurprisingly, 'Berghaus'. The SEOmoz on page report has flagged up a possible issue with keyword stuffing as the term is mention around 25 times. Is it worth altering this, which could be quite tricky as a lot of the page is dynamically generated? Thanks!

Hi there. Recently, we've made some changes to http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/ to implement canonical tags to some dynamically generated pages to stop duplicate content issues. Previously, these were blocked with robots.txt. In Webmaster Tools, everything looks great - pages crawled has shot up, and overall traffic and sales has seen a positive increase. However the SEOmoz crawl report is now showing a huge increase in duplicate content issues. What I'd like to know is whether SEOmoz registers a canonical tag as preventing a piece of duplicate content, or just adds to it the notices report. That is, if I have 10 pages of duplicate content all with correct canonical tags, will I still see 10 errors in the crawl, but also 10 notices showing a canonical has been found? Or, should it be 0 duplicate content errors, but 10 notices of canonicals? I know it's a small point, but it could potentially have a big difference. Thanks!

Hi. We're working on http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/ at the moment, and I was wondering what's everyone's opinion on footer links. There's quite a lot on the page, and I was wondering if there might be a few too many. If so, what would be the best plan of action? Remove them altogether, stick them in an iframe or in a bit of JS so they can't be crawled? Thanks!

Hi. Does anybody know where the rankings summary has moved to in the campaign reports? I want to know how many keywords have moved up or down in the last week and can't find it anywhere!

We're working on an SEO update for http://www.gear-zone.co.uk at the moment, and I was wondering if someone could take a quick look at the new robots file (http://gearzone.affinitynewmedia.com/robots.txt) to make sure we haven't missed anything? Thanks

We're currently working on an SEO project for http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/. After a crawl of their site, tons of duplicate content issues came up. We think this is largely down to the use of their brand filtering system, which works like this: By clicking on a brand, the site generates a url with the brand keywords in, for example: http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/3-season-synthetic-cid77.html filtered by the brand Mammut becomes: http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/3-season-synthetic-Mammut-cid77.html?filter_brand=48 This was done by a previous SEO agency in order to prevent duplicate content. We suspect that this has made the issue worse though, as by removing the dynamic string from the end of the URL, the same content is displayed as the unfiltered page. For example http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/3-season-synthetic-Mammut-cid77.html shows the same content as: http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/3-season-synthetic-cid77.html Now, if we're right in thinking that Google is unlikely to the crawl the dynamic filter, this would seem to be the root of the duplicate issue. If this is the case, would rewriting the dynamic URLs to static on the server side be the best fix? It's a Windows Server/asp site. I hope that's clear! It's a pretty tricky issue and it would be good to know your thoughts. Thanks!

Does anybody know if there's any easy way to use the On-Page Optimisation tool on intranet or not publicly accessible pages? Thanks!