Questions created by Paul78
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Removing extension
Hi there, I have thousands of pages that use the extension .php and thought about cleaning these URLs up for example rather than www.mysite.com/trainers/adidias/samba.php I could have have www.mysite.com/trainers/adidas/samba/ is it worth changing? Currently driving around 1 million visits to the website each month from organic search and slightly concerned it could have a negative impact on my rankings. Thanks for any help.
Technical SEO | | Paul780 -
URL tracking on offline material
Hi there, Hope someone can give some advice. We are doing some magazine advertising, the main purpose of the advert is to promote one of our new products, however the URL goes something like this: http://www.domain.com/products/new-product-libra-furniture/ which is just too long for anyone to remember, I think it should be simply domain.com/libra which redirects to the product page, however how can I track this in Google Analytics? if using a 301 that's impossible? Any advice would be grateful.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Product discontinued
Hi there, We have ranking top 3 for a competitive keyword, however the product linked to that keyword has just been discontinued, normally if we have alternatives to this product I would keep this page live and direct users to those alternatives products. What is best practice here? keeping the page live and telling users that this product has been discontinued and offering a helpline number? or just removing the page all together? (404) Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Should I do a 301 redirect
Hi Everyone, Hope you can help me out here. I have .co.uk & .ie website with similar content. On a particular section of the .co.uk website it is updated daily (Q&As, Blog posts etc) .ie does have this section but to a lesser degree, no daily updates etc, I was wondering if we should simply do a 301 redirect when someone is on the .ie website to .co.uk, it means the user is getting a much better experience however not entirely the consequences from search engines on this? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Paul781 -
URL for offline use.
Hi there, We currently have a url www.example.com/health/back-pain/ We are wanting to promote this page on our product packaging however making the URL simpler www.example.com/back-pain/ is it just a case of using a 301? are there any issues here? Thanks for any feedback
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Websites with same content
Hi, Both my .co.uk and .ie websites have the exact same content which consists of hundreds of pages, is this going to cause an issue? I have a hreflang on both websites plus google webmaster tools is picking up that both websites are targeting different counties. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Where to look...
Hi there, I am based in the UK and I am looking to hire someone to help in our SEM efforts. I'm not sure if I should hire an agency or bring someone in house maybe for a couple of days per week. Has anyone has experience in any of the above? if so especially for in house what was the day-to-day activities of this person? Kind Regards
Industry News | | Paul780 -
301 redirect
Hi there, I have some good links pointing to one of my web pages at the moment, however we are just about to launch a new design with new URL structure and I am clear that I need to do a 301 redirect on the URL to the new URL. However, do I keep the old URL live forever? or can I remove it after a while? Kind Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Sitelinks (breadcrumbs) in SERPs
Hi there, I have a .co.uk & .ie website both have the exact same content, only differences is the UK website is selling the product in pounds and the Irish website is selling in Euros plus both websites have different contact numbers. I decided to use rel canonical on the .ie pointing to the .co.uk website as I think it was having an issue in my SERPs for the .co.uk website in Google.co.uk, anyway since doing this, I am seeing strange things happening in SERPs for my keywords, for example if you click the link below, my website is number 2 for 'hot flushes' if you hover over or click on 'health or 'menopause' in the breadcrumbs in SERPs it takes you to the .co.uk website, is this normal? Click here
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Tags on blog post
I have just ran a report on SEOMOZ and it's came back saying I have over 1000 pages on my website with duplicate content, I thought wow that's not good, however when I looked at the report it was counting duplicate content because I have used more than one tag on a blog post, for example the blog post: www.example.com/blog-post/ Has the tags example 1 example 2 example 3 Meaning I have these URLs www.example.com/blog/tag/example-1 www.example.com/blog/tag/example-2 www.example.com/blog/tag/example-3 All 3 URLs above have the same content as www.example.com/blog-post/ because of the tags, is this a problem? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Paul781 -
Hreflang
Hi there, I have 2 websites, one being .co.uk the other .ie, both websites have the exact same content and both websites using the English language, is there any point in using the hreflang? UK Version Irish Version Thanks for any feedback
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Mobile SEO
Hi there, My website when searching via mobile is now showing the mobile version of the site in SERPs, well for quite sometime now to be honest, anyway the ranking in mobile are no different to what they are on desktop, is there actually anything I can do to influence my mobile SERPs? 9 times out of 10 it's desktop websites that are ranking about me in mobile search. Any help would be appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Breadcrumbs in SERPs
Hi there, Breadcrumbs now showing for my websites in Google.co.uk & Google.ie I have 2 websites .co.uk & .ie both having the same content. There are legalities for having 2 separate domains. Anyway... When I click on one of the breadcrumbs in the SERPs in Google.ie it takes me to the .co.uk website, however the title for that result takes me to the .ie website as it should. I have checked my breadcrumbs on the .ie website and all is fine, however in SERPs it takes me to the .co.uk website, any ideas why this maybe? Kind Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Making anchor text look more natural
Hi there, I have recently been approached by a company looking to do some SEO work for them, having had a look at their link profile, they had being using a lot of exact match anchor and have seen a drop in the rankings, no surprise there. I was thinking of asking the website where they have placed these links and changing them, so there is a mixture of exact, phrase, brand etc, what do you think? would this be best practice? or just leave these as they are and start building fresh links? Kind Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Anchor text
Hi there, I am looking at creating some back links into my website using guest blogging, be it product reviews, competitions or writing the post myself. I had a look at my competitors back link profile, all I can say is that they all look artificial (paid for) the article itself reads well, however when I see something like this: 'If you house got burgled and you never had home insurance in place, you could lose thousands of pounds of household goods' It just looks paid for, the question is if I am placing a guest post on a blog, what is best practice in making the link look more natural? Thank you
Link Building | | Paul780 -
Best practice?
Hi there, I have recently written an article which I have posted on an online newspaper website. I want to use this article and put it on my blog also, the reason the article will be placed on my blog is to drive users from my email marketing activities. Would it simply be best practice to disallow Google from crawling this page? or put a rel canonical on the article placed on my blog pointing to the article placed on the online newspaper website? Thanks for any suggestions
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
URL blocked
Hi there, I have recently noticed that we have a link from an authoritative website, however when I looked at the code, it looked like this: <a <span="">href</a><a <span="">="http://www.mydomain.com/" title="blocked::http://www.mydomain.com/">keyword</a> You will notice that in the code there is 'blocked::' What is this? has it the same effect as a nofollow tag? Thanks for any help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Maximum number of links
Hi there, I have just written an article that is due to be posted on an external blog, the article has potentially 3 links that could link to 3 different pages on my website, is this too much? what do you recommend being the maximum number of links? Thanks for any help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Planning to out source
Hi there, I am planning to out source my SEO and one company has caught our attention, they propose this: Article submissions Directory submimssions Blog post comments Social bookmark submissions Press Release submissions The above sounds a bit spammy, however the success they have had with such activity with other websites has been fantastic. Please let me know your thoughts
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Retailers Issue
Hi there, We have 20 retailers who are about to launch websites and are going to be selling our products on their websites, however with they have no content for these products they are wanting to take our content we have for our product pages on place the content on their websites, is this going to cause an issue for me? We are ranking well for competitive keywords in this niche and do not want to do anything to harm it. What I would say is the retailers in question of no intention short term anyway of doing anything with SEO. Thanks for any help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
URL for offline purposes
Hi there, We are going to be promoting one of our products offline, however I do not want to use the original URL for this product page as it's long for the user to type in, so I thought it would be best practice in using a URL that would be short, easier for the consumer to remember. My plan: Replicate the product page and put it on this new short URL, however this would mean I have a duplicate content issue, would It be best practice to use a canonical on the new short URL pointing to the original URL? or use a 301? Thanks for any help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Majestic SEO - Neighbourhood Checker
Hi there, I have placed an article on a blog which I am very happy with, the webmaster has came back to me and suggested more blogs which they are relevant to my niche, so all good, however when checking the neighbourhood checker in Majestic SEO, I had entered one of the domains he suggested then Majestic SEO gave me this message: Note: we recommend checking this IP: 99.45.343.45 (this is because some domains have multiple IPs or this one changed it recently). please note IP is just an example. Once I checked the IP, all the domains he had suggested were all listed under that IP, should I avoid placing anymore articles on these domains? from an SEO perspective. Kind Regards,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Is my other domain making me not rank?
Hi there, We have a .co.uk website which was ranking well for a number of highly competitive keywords, however in February 2012 those rankings for those keywords suddenly dropped off Google all together and have never came back. A few possibilties to why this has happened: We launched a .ie website which has exactly the same content, could this be the reason for the drop? I have put in all the necessary steps in making sure Google ranks these geographically correct by using hreflang and making sure everything is setup properly in webmaster tools. Why I think it could be this: If I copy and paste the first few paragraphs of text from the pages in the .co.uk website that were ranked highly in Google.co.uk it's the .ie version that appears not the .co.uk version. Here is the webpages in question: http://www.avogel.co.uk/health/menopause/ http://www.avogel.ie/health/menopause/ Forgot to mention, the reason we have these two websites is due to different currency and legalities. Hope someone can help me out with this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Question about copying content
Hi there, I have had a question from a retailer asking if they can take all our content i.e. blog articles, product pages etc, what is best practice here in getting SEO value out of this? Here a few ideas I was thinking of: I was thinking they put canonical tags on all pages where they have copied our content? They copy the content but leave all anchor text in place? Please let me know your thoughts. Kind Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Penalized for duplication?
Hi there, In February 2012 one my web pages (.co.uk) dropped from page 1 to page 5 for the keyword 'Menopause' and was replaced with a .PDF Late January 2012 I launched a duplicate version of this webpage however targeting .ie due to difference currency and legalities, I had made sure in webmaster tools that both websites were both Geographically correct, I am also using hreflang tags on both webpages. One thing that is strange is if I copy the first few paragraphs of the webpage in question into Google.co.uk, it's the .ie webpage that appears. Any help would be appreciated in why this has happened. Kind Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Wrong page being ranked
Hi there, This seems a bit of a strange one, I have a particular keyword which I am trying to rank for, all internal links with the appropriate anchor text are pointing to the page I want to rank for, for this particular keyword, all external links are pointing to the page I want to rank for, for this particular keyword, however Google is ranking another page on my website for this keyword and the bizarre things is the page which is being ranked is a .PDF I am really not sure what else to do to give Google the hint that they are ranking the wrong page, any ideas? Kind Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Webpages look like they have been de-indexed
Hi there, My webpages seem that they have been de-indexed, I have no page rank anymore for my webpages, my homepage which was a PR4, is now saying N/A, plus lots of my rankings have dropped, what check should I been making to identify that this is the case? Kind Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Trying to understand why it happened
Hi there, Quite a lot of my keywords that were on page 1 for quite some time have just been pushed below page 5 on Monday 04/06/12 all at the same time, however some are still on page 1 maybe dropping a rank or two. The link building for these keywords have been pretty much the same, using blogs, product reviews etc. As a precaution I ask bloggers to take a lot of my links off as they were site-wide and keep them on homepage only, is this what has had the negative affect? please note Some of the keywords that were on page 1 and now page 5 were not part of the site-wide activity. Please help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Removed Site-wide links
Hi there, I have recently removed quite a lot of site-wide links leaving the only link on homepage's of some websites, since doing this I have seen a dramatic drop on my keywords, going from position 2-3 to nowhere. Has anyone else experienced anything like this, should I expect to see a return on these keywords? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Fresh content has had a negative affect on my SERPs
Hi there, I was ranking pretty well for highly competitive keywords without actually doing any link building please see graph attached, so I thought I have an opportunity here in getting to page 1 for these keywords, the plan was to write fresh & original content for these pages, because hey Google loves fresh content, right? Well it seems NOT, after one week of these pages been re-written (21st Feb 2012), all of these pages dropped all together, please note: all the pages were under the same directory: /health/flu/keyword-1 /health/flu/keyword-2 and so on... I have compared both pages as I have back ups of the old content On Average there are more words on each of the new pages compared to previous pages Lower bounce rate by at least 30% (Via Adwords) More time on site by at least 2 minutes (Via Adwords) More page visits (Via Adwords) Lower keyword density, on average 4% (new pages) compared to 9% (old content) across all pages So since the end of February, these pages are still not ranked for these keywords, the funny thing is, these keyword are on page 1 of Bing. Another NOTE: We launched an irish version of the website, using the exact same content, I have done all the checks via webmaster tools making sure it's pointing to Ireland, I have also got hreflang tags on both website (just in case) If anyone can help with this that would be very much appreciated. Thanks ZCJDa
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Fresh content has had a negative affect on SERPs
Hi there, I was ranking pretty well for highly competitive keywords without actually doing any link building please see graph attached, so I thought I have an opportunity here in getting to page 1 for these keywords, the plan was to write fresh & original content for these pages, because hey Google loves fresh content, right? Well it seems NOT, after one week of these pages been re-written (21st Feb 2012), all of these pages dropped all together, please note: all the pages were under the same directory: /health/flu/keyword-1 /health/flu/keyword-2 and so on... I have compared both pages as I have back ups of the old content On Average there are more words on each of the new pages compared to previous pages Lower bounce rate by at least 30% (Via Adwords) More time on site by at least 2 minutes (Via Adwords) More page visits (Via Adwords) Lower keyword density, on average 4% (new pages) compared to 9% (old content) across all pages So since the end of February, these pages are still not ranked for these keywords, the funny thing is, these keyword are on page 1 of Bing. Another NOTE: We launched an irish version of the website, using the exact same content, I have done all the checks via webmaster tools making sure it's pointing to Ireland, I have also got hreflang tags on both website (just in case) If anyone can help with this that would be very much appreciated. Thanks usD8G.gif
International SEO | | Paul780 -
Bing, what does it take?
Hi there, I have been optimizing my website for Google over the past year or so, and now have around 50 keywords or so, moderate/highly competitive keywords on page 1, however there are a few keywords which I have been trying to optimize for which I am finding it difficult getting these keywords onto page 1. However I just noticed through analytics that I am getting quite a bit of traffic through Bing on these keywords, so I thought I would take a look to see where I was ranking for these keywords and to my surprise top 5 for which these keywords. So the question is, what does it take to rank high in Bing? as my results are so different when comparing my Google results to Bing. Thanks
SERP Trends | | Paul780 -
High Authority, What Value?
Hi there, We have recently had one of our products reviewed on the BBC, however there is no actual link going to our domain, it just mentions www.mydomain.com but not linking, does this have any value in SEO? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Company Blog Vs External Blog
Hi there, We write articles for our blog on a regular basis, maybe two times per week. One of those articles I usually place on an external blog first getting some external links pointing into my product pages and using a rel canonical on that article on my blog pointing to the external post, so that the external post get's all the credit. The reason I put this on my blog is I use this to point to from my email marketing activities. The question is, do you think this makes best practice? trying to get more out of this blog post.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Canonical URL Tag Usage
Hi there, I have a .co.uk website and a .ie website, which have the exact same content on both, should I put a canonical tag on both websites, on every page? Kind Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Robots
I have just noticed this in my code name="robots" content="noindex"> And have noticed some of my keywords have dropped, could this be the reason?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Copying my content
Hi there, I run a successful e-commerce website, which the product pages are rich with content linking to other products etc, one of our retailers who sell our products I just noticed copied and pasted the content I have written for these product pages leaving in all the links, which it turn are linking back to my product pages, is this a good thing? or should I make that retailer put in canonical tags? Thanks for any help
Technical SEO | | Paul780 -
Concerned
Hi SEOmoz fans, Hang on a minute, I sound like Rand, watching to many WBF's. Ok let me start, I am currently doing all the marketing for a website which has both .co.uk & .ie due to legal reasons, the website and .co.uk & .ie have all the same content and even when I am writing new pages, which is on a regular basis I make sure both are being updated, anyway after all the research there should not be an issue with this (duplicate content) as Google recognizes that it's the same domain etc, however I was really ranking well for a specific keyword no.5 , very competitive now the page being ranked for that keyword is a .pdf in the site but is ranked no.68. Now, I thought this is very strange as you can imagine, I never do any black hit linkbuilding or anything like that, that's a NO NO for me, anyway i put the URL which was ranking well in Google into the Google search box, and yes it appeared, so no sign the URL has been banned, however when I paste in the first few paragraphs of that page which was ranking well in Google.co.uk into the Google search box it's the .ie website which appears not the .co.uk Can anyone help me out, advice etc Kind Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Javascript
Hi there, Quick question: Does Google parse javascript? I have a html ad which contain the anchor text linking to one of our product pages, however the ad unit are javascript based and from this the code is not visible on page source through the browser. Kind Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Alarming
Hi there, I just noticed that some of my best performing keywords have taken a drop down the ranking by maybe 10 positions, some of them being ranked no.1 for quite sometime. My link building activities are such things as guest posting on relevant and topical websites and always have original content. Is it a coincidence? For many months now I have been using the keyword analysis tool in SEOMOZ checking my own page authority & linking root domains, nothing changed on any of these keywords except for improvement on SERPs, however today I have noticed at the same time some of my best performing keywords have dropped is that the page authority & linking root domains for those keywords changed also, and for the better but dropped in SERPs. Any idea on what's going on? anyone experienced this? Kind Regards
Algorithm Updates | | Paul780 -
What is the Value?
Hi there, I own a website (non-commercial) which has around 300 pages full of original content, in average about 500 words or so per page. I also own another website (commercial) I was thinking of pointing keywords for all of these pages in the non-commercial website pointing to the commercial website, all the articles are around 2-10 years old, what is the value of doing this sort of link building? Kind Regards,
Link Building | | Paul780 -
Does PR actual mean anything?
My website is really ranking well, even product pages have a PR of 4. I ran the keyword analysis tool for the product page in question (which has a PR of 4) with the targeted keyword for the page which is currently ranking 8th (not so good) the keywords analysis tool give me some data back with the page authority being 1 and it also mentions that it has 0 page link root domains, however I know this is not true. I expected the page authority in seomoz to be higher than 1 due to it having a PR of 4, so how valuable is PR? does it even matter? Another thing I noticed is that the website above my listing have PR of 1 and 2. Looking forward to some feedback
Technical SEO | | Paul780 -
Follow up to Archive of Content
This is a follow up to the Question I ask: http://www.seomoz.org/q/archive-of-content I have decided that I am going to move the articles from example.com (non-commercial) to website.com (commercial) however I was having a think, some of the articles on example.com and ranking well for some keywords, maybe getting around 20,000 visits from natural search, would it be possible when moving this article just to do a 301 redirect from the page with the article example.com to the new website? Hope that makes some sense. Kind Regards,
Technical SEO | | Paul780 -
Archive of content
Hi there, I have recently joined a company to look after the e-marketing side of things, anyway the company I work for have been writing articles for a website that they own for over 2 years, probably about 200 or so unique articles on that website, however over the past year or so there has been no contribution to this site and was wondering if it would be worthwhile transferring these article over to our blog?, as this is where all the attention is in terms of marketing etc Kind Regards,
On-Page Optimization | | Paul780 -
Rich Snippets
Hi Everyone, Just a few questions on rich snippets please: We have now integrated microdata (data-vocabulary.org) on all our product pages http://www.avogel.co.uk/herbal-remedies/arnica-gel-atrogel/ which I have tested on the rich snippets testing tool which Google provides and all is working fine. However I have been told by our developer that it is using hidden markup, will this have an affect on the rich snippets being showing in the organic results? Kind Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Back Links
Hi there, I have been guest posting on blogs trying to build some back-links into my website, which so far is going not too bad, however I was wondering when writing these guest posts should I limit my post to let's say 2 back-links per guest post? If 2 back-links are going to different pages on my website, does the first back-links in the guest post have more value than the 2nd back-link? Kind Regards,
Link Building | | Paul780 -
Duplication Issue?
One of our copywriters has just written a blog to be posted on our own company blog to be reviewed by myself, however I had noticed that the blog post has some duplication issues with one of our own product pages, about 60% duplication, is it still worth posting? Will search engines still index the blog post? Kind Regards,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Domain Favoured by Google
Hi there, We have just launched our website in Ireland .ie and was wondering would the .ie website be favoured by Google over a competitor with a .co.uk or .com domain? Kind Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Meta Revisit?
Hi there, We have just migrated to a new website with a new design etc and I have noticed that we now have this code on our website: From my understanding this is telling search engines to come back to your website in 10 days time to crawl the website? I'm sure I have read on serveral occasions that you should not does this and let search engines crawl your site when it see's fit to do so? Hope someone can help me out on this Kind Regards,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
301 Dilemma
Hi Everyone, I have written new content for a product page and at the same time put it on a different URL: example.com/product The previous URL was something like this: example.com/brand/type/product (PR4) So all in all this is an easy enough 301, however, we also have a shop page for this product: example.com/shop/brand/type/product_shoppage.php (PR4) Should I also do a 301 from this page to the new page?: example.com/product Can you have two 301 redirects like what I am proposing? Kind Regards,
On-Page Optimization | | Paul780