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I can't see that being an issue, not one that would affect it that badly any way.
Have you checked that Google is crawling the site correctly? Site set up in Google Webmaster Tools with no error messages?
Double checking that all pages can be indexed and aren't being blocked in the robots.txt file is the best place to start.
How new is the site?
Thanks Gaston,
The site doesn't have any different languages on it, just English.
When using the Google.ie search engine literally every time I search for a term related to our clients it comes back with a list of .ie domains in the results. Every so often there is a few ie.domainname.com results as well though.
We will be creating landing pages on the site to target Irish specific audiences are there any Href tags that we would use to tell Google that these are for an Irish market etc.?
Thanks for the help
Hi,
One of our clients currently owns a .com domain and they are interested in marketing into the Irish market.
They have asked us if they should buy a .IE domain name and then forward it onto their .com one.
I know that Google has been clamping down on people who use the 'Backdoor' method of buying 100's of keyword rich domains and forwarding them onto their website but would it really make a difference if they just bought one .IE domain?
Keen to know if anyone has done this sort of thing before and their experience.
Thanks
Great, will take a look. Maybe run a trial to see if it does exactly what I need 
Thanks for the info!
Good idea!
Although some of our clients that we do SEO for aren't hosting their websites on our server and we don't have access to their server logs etc.
Was hoping for an automated dashboard like MOZ/Screaming Frog/ or A hrefs as mentioned above. Due to the amount of clients we have, opening up and running through all there Log files could be time consuming.
Cheers for the info though, may come in use in the future, or to someone else reading this
Hi All,
We have recently discovered a site was linking to our site but it was linking to an incorrect url, resulting in a 404 error. We had only found this by pure chance and wondered if there was a tool out there that will tell us when a site is linking to an incorrect url on our site?
Thanks
MOZ crawler is telling me we have loads of duplicate content issues. We use a Job Board plugin on our Wordpress site and we have allot of duplicate or very similar jobs (usually just a different location), but the plugin doesn't allow us to add any rel canonical tags to the individual jobs.
Should I disallow the /jobs/ url in the robots.txt file? This will solve the duplicate content issue but then Google wont be able to crawl any of the individual job listings
Has anyone had any experience working with a job board plugin on Wordpress and had a similar issue, or can advise on how best to solve our duplicate content??
Thanks
XML sitemaps are for the benefit of Google or other search engine crawlers. It makes it easier for them to index all your pages so you might see that if you dont use an XML sitemap that Google wont find all of your pages or index them within the search engine.
I don't see why you wouldn't want to use an XML sitemap. They are not hard to create and for the effort they take are very beneficial for your SEO.
I would suggest using both but if you were going to use one over the other I would suggest XML.
Hi All,
I have the following code in one of our Htaccess files and I'm not entirely sure what its doing. Could anyone shed some light and maybe explain the process its going through? I know its something to do with redirecting the urls dependant on the browser language.
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/(En|Es)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(En|Es)/(.*)$ $2?lang=$1 [L,R=301]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.[a-zA-Z0-9]{1,5}|/)$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1/ [L,R=301]
Thanks
I'm getting a Craw issue in my MOZ insights which says
"It looks like you're not using the rel="canonical" META attribute on any of the pages we crawled"
Do we need to have a rel="canonical" on our site? I can't find a reason to use it so don't know why it would be appearing as a crawl error?
Thanks
As long as they still have ALT tags and such I don't think it would make any difference.
The only thing to consider would be the loading speed. As if it has to go off to another server/site to retrieve the image it may take longer to load and affect your page load speed (slow speed is bad for SEO).
Shouldn't have thought so. I have implemented it on a few of my clients sites which aren't HTTPS and they are being indexed fine.
Most of the sites that use AMP pages are things like news article sites etc. which don't really need to be HTTPS as they are not saving any of the customers secure information.
Might be useful if we could have the search term and the site in question?
That way a few different people on here can search for it and see what position you are appearing for them. The search results will vary on loads of different factors, including location of the searcher.
It may be that if you have been searching for that term allot (to see where you place) but don't actually click your website that Google thinks that result is not relevant to you, and therefore displays it further down the results.
Have you tried searching for the term in a 'Private' browser, without any Cookies/Caching going on?
A very basic robots.txt file would look something like the below
User-agent: *
Sitemap: http://www.yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml
Disallow: http://www.yourwebsite.com/url-you-dont-want-indexed
Disallow: http://www.yourwebsite.com/another-url-you-dont-want-indexed
Hope that helps
Hi Everyone : )
We have an E-commerce website has been getting less and less organic traffic each month since October 2015 after it had received a massive spike overnight!
I can't see any logical reason for it or find any updates that would have caused this.
Have anyone got an idea? I know I am not giving much information out but wondered if anyone else had seen a similar issue.
How long ago did you make the change?
People who have done similar have also reported a drop in rankings after switching, this will mainly be down to the backlink profile.
You would have (hopefully) had quite a good backlink profile with links going to your old http domain, so when you switch to your https domain it will have less links, even though you probably have a redirect in place from the http version it will not cary across 100% of the link juice.
Its important to try and change any backlinks that you have control over to point to your https version to make the most of them
Hope that makes sense
Yes, sorry
I used the form on their support site for the webmaster tools : https://www.bing.com/webmaster/support
Although that doesn't seem to be working at this moment so the email address that it was sent to is :
Hope this helps!
Just encase anyone is still having issues with this, or happens to come across this post in the future...
We emailed Bing support who came back and said that they had found their bots were blocked from indexing our site, there was no reason for this but just an error in their system (apparently this is quite common).
They responded pretty quickly and removed the block, a couple of days later we were being indexed and seeing traffic come from Bing!
Ahh yes! I've found it now, forgot I could click on the links to get more info, thought it would just take me to the site.
Turns out most of them are coming from Google Plus which kinda makes sense now.
Thanks
Hi Everyone
Looking in the 'Links to your site' section of webmaster tools today and my top backlinking domain is google.com which is apparently giving me 113 links.
The second top referring site is googleapis.com which apparently isn't even a site when I type it into my browser?
Does anyone else get Google.com as a site linking to them? and why would Google be linking to us, where would these links be coming from?
Any info appreciated
Regards
A more detailed explanation of how you are getting hacked might help
Do you mean you are getting spammy files uploaded to your sites root/editing your current content to include spammy words and links?
The obvious suggestion is to make sure your Wordpress version is up to date but if you are already updating the plugins I would presume you have done this...?
It may be that the hackers have just managed to get into your FTP rather than through your wordpress site so I would make sure you have changed your FTP server password and made it secure.
Are you using any contact forms on your site as this can sometimes be a weakness depending on the plugin used.
Thanks
Hi All,
I had a quick look online but couldn't find any information regarding this so thought I would ask. Please point me in the right direction if it has been asked before of if there are any useful articles online.
We are currently in the process of switching one of our clients old sites from http to https, we have done all of the steps except from making the https version the main domain, or 301ing the http version to the https version.
If we were to do this would we expect to see a drop in domain authority? a drop in keyword rankings? or is there anything else we should be worried about?
Thanks Mozzers
I found this tool to be quite helpful when I did it for our Analytics
http://www.analyticsmarket.com/freetools/ipregex
Let me know if that works for you
We use SEO PowerSuites Rank Tracker program and have been for some time.
They list local listing positions in brackets and display a little map icon next to the number so its easy to distinguish which of your keywords are ranking in local positions.
They have also added a new feature recently which allows you to change the location of which you are searching in (like you use to be able to do in Google before they removed it) so you can check the results depending on the location of the searches.
I have never used any other program so I don't have anything to compare it to but it does what we need it to do so don't feel the need to change!
Hope that helps
I would guess its related to your issue "www and the non-www versions of their websites are both in play" meaning that MOZ is crawling them both as separate sites and you will have different links going to the www version than you will the non-www version, which will give you different spam scores.
It would be good to compare the link data that MOZ gives you between the two URLS, downloading the CSV of both and having them side by side in one spreadsheet might be easier, this should give you an indication of what links are causing the spam score to be higher.
I would also suggest loading both www and non-www versions of your website into Google webmaster tools if you haven't done so already.
There is a good blog article on it here : http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/facebook-organic-post-targeting/
Doesn't say anything about only large pages having access to do it so you might be able to do it with a small amount of followers as well.
From what I understand Facebook gives pages with over a large number of likes/followers the option to target their posts.
I think your page has to have over 5,000 likes (could be wrong)
I don't do a large amount of Facebook posting or advertising myself so someone with more knowledge might be able to shed more light on it but that is what I know
There have been a few reports about people experiencing some drops, nothing being released from Google as per usual but at least other people are seeing an affect
Looks like they have fully rolled out the update now!
http://searchengineland.com/google-drops-change-location-search-filter-from-search-results-237247
A Spam Score of 1 is nothing to worry about.
I think a general rule of thumb is to remove any with a score above 4/5 (may be wrong but I think I read it on MOZ somewhere).
Any link that is that easy to obtain is always going to come across slightly spammy. I wouldn't have thought the link will benefit your site hugely given the type of link it is (a comment on a blog/forum) and I wouldn't suggest that as a technique if you're trying to increase your link profile :).
But at the same time it doesn't sound like it's going to do you any harm, especially if its just the one.
That almost certainly indicates Spam to me, there isn't much more of an indication for Direct traffic.
I'd suggest applying the filter and seeing what happens over the next couple of days and if it is still happening would require further investigation.
What sort of bounce rate are you getting from the Direct Traffic?
If the bounce rate is incredibly high this could be a form of spam, it has been on the rise recently.
The way to filter it out of your analytics is to create an 'Include' filter.
You can read a MOZ blog post on it here with instructions on how to create the filter: https://moz.com/blog/stop-ghost-spam-in-google-analytics-with-one-filter
We have used it and it worked for us
You probably want to contact a member of the MOZ help team directly rather than posting it on a forum...
They're more likely to see it and respond if you visit https://moz.com/help/contact/account - Scroll down to the bottom and enter the details in the form.
I am still able to access these settings under the 'Search Tools' tab
It might be that they are testing users actions by removing it for a few people, Google are always doing this.
Worth keeping an eye on it if you still can't find it though, might be an indication of things to come.
Cheers
We have used Rank Tracker for a good while now and find it to do its job very well.
I think they do a free version but the paid version allows to you save reports and brand them so you can send them to your clients etc.
Worth a look - http://www.link-assistant.com/rank-tracker/
Thanks for the quick response. That actually sounds like a good way to tackle it!
I'd be interested to hear if anyone has done this before and saw any negative effects from doing it.
Thanks again.
So we have a landing page that is ranking for a few of our targeted keywords but we are thinking about splitting the page into two and moving some of the content onto its own page.
Our page at the moment has allot of content for keyword A and a little bit for keyword B, we are ranking for quite a few search terms around keyword A and a couple (but allot less) around keyword B, so we want to create a new page with content for keyword B
...hopefully that makes sense...
So my question is are there any best practices around this sort of thing? We obviously dont want to negatively affect the rankings we are already gaining for keyword A and I'm worried that moving content around will do that.
Thanks!
Thanks for clearing this up.
It sounds like noindexing might actually make the most sense then.
Thanks everyone!
Regards
Yes, surely noindexing them would mean that our content in the blog posts on those pages wasnt being read by the search engine? Not ideal by any means!
I will look into the rel next/previous option.
Thank you for your input.
Hi All,
I have a couple of crawl errors coming up in MOZ that I am trying to fix.
They are duplicate page title issues with my blog area.
For example we have a URL of www.ourwebsite.com/blog/page/1 and as we have quite a few blog posts they get put onto another page, example www.ourwebsite.com/blog/page/2 both of these urls have the same heading, title, meta description etc.
I was just wondering if this was an actual SEO problem or not and if there is a way to fix it.
I am using Wordpress for reference but I can't see anywhere to access the settings of these pages.
Thanks
It can sometimes take a while and they may have to keep moving it back due to the crawl index getting larger or encounting problems that they had not expected.
It should have been refreshed with the latest update yesterday though
https://moz.com/products/api/updates
Could be that your domain authority has just stayed the same? Better than going down!
Although sometimes it can take the system a few days to update the DA within your MOZ dashboard etc.
Great, as we thought!
Thanks for the explanation, makes even more sense now!
As an agency we get quite a few of our clients come to us saying "Ooo, this company just contacted me saying they've run an SEO report on my site and we need to improve on these following things"
We had one come through the other day that had reported on something we had not seen in any others before.
They called them self-referencing links and marked it as a point of action should be taken. They had stated that 100% of the pages on our clients website had self-referencing links.
The definition of self-referencing is when there is a link on a page that is linking to the page you are currently on. So for example you're on the home page and there is a link in the nav bar at the top that says "Home" with a link to the home page, the page you are already currently on.
Is it bad practice? And if so can we do anything about it as it would seem strange from a UI point of view not to have a consistent navigation. I have not heard anything about this before but I wanted to get confirmation before going back to our client and explaining.
Thanks Mozzers!
I read an article about this a while back.
I think the conclusion was that it depends on what you are searching for as Google may change the title to fit the users search term better.
If you do a site:yoursite.co.uk search on Google it will bring up the indexed pages and should show the correct title.
Are you having the same issue in other search engines? Or just Google?
Stolen content is a big issue today and recent reports have shown that people who steal the content from you will usually knock you out of your search engine position, no matter what your authority, backlink, or social share profiles look like.
This great presentation given by Jon Earnshaw at Brighton SEO last week gives a better idea of how it has affected other websites : http://www.slideshare.net/jonathanearnshaw/is-your-content-working-better-for-someone-else
Google use to have a Scraper report that you could file the offending site and get it removed from the SERPS but they have removed this.
I found a similar way to report the stolen content on this blog post :
http://www.techng.info/removing-your-stolen-content-from-google-search-using-dmca/
Hope this answers your question, even if it is a bit delayed from the original post
Adding a # to the beginning of a line of code in the htaccess file will make it redundant, it is used for adding comments into the file.
Try it without the # at the beginning but with both full URLs
Redirect 301 http://site.com/folder-old/page-old/ http://site.com/folder-new/page-new/
I always use 301 redirects without the full URLs and it works fine so try the below if the above doesn't work.
Redirect 301 /folder-old/page-old/ /folder-new/page-new/
If I remember correctly I think there did use to be a video on their Crawl Diagnostics help page (first link I posted) but it looks like they have removed it.