Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi JourneyMan,

Thank you for taking the time to answer my question. No, apparently the web designer did not include the GA code in all the pages. I'll ask the web hosting company to put it back ASAP.

You say that my site has a lot of SEO related issues. I wish I knew what you are talking about. I'll try to find a reliable/trustworthy company that can work on the site and solve the issues you are referring to. Hopefully, she will not forget about the GA code...:-)

Thank you and have a great day.

• Sal

Hi Robert,

Thank you so much for your feedback. I am learning so much from people like you!

The problem with me is that I study a lot of SEO but I am really bad at taking care of the technical issues (coding, web design, etc...). I have to ask other people to do it for me. As you know, sometimes you hire people who do not care about your site and problems emerge. I would have never found out about the fact that the web designer forgot to include the GA code in the site, for instance.

Thank you for your recommendations on how to make the site more SEO-friendly. I'll follow them. Finally, I'd like to know if it is possibile to find a reliable (and not too expensive :-)) company I can hire to do just that: analyze my site and get rid of all the those technical problems (bad coding, missing WordPress plug-ins that are good for SEO, et similia) that I cannot detect, as I am incredibly ignorant in this field. I feel that it's the technical issues that prevent my sites from performing a little better.

Thank you again and all the best to you!

• Sal

P.S.: I love and miss the wise US sayings

Hi,

I have a question regarding my site (http://www.pokeronlineitalia.com) that has, all of a sudden, lost rankings on several keywords; plus, Google Analytics and the plug-in Clicky installed on my site (the site is built on WordPress) claim that my site has no visitors/visits anymore.

I would like to provide a little background of what has happened. Three weeks ago I asked my web hosting company to do a 301 redirect from http://pokeronlineitalia.com to http://www.pokeronlineitalia.com. At the same time I asked a web hosting company to to a redesign of the site. Strangely, the day after the new redesigned site went online Google Analytics and the Clicky plug-in showed that my site, from one day to the other, had no visitors/visits anymore (I had installed Google Analytics and Clicky before the 301 redirect). In addition, I noticed that I had lost positions on many keywords for which I used to rank on the second page.

However, the PR of the site has remained intact and Google is indexing it without problems. Plus, I still rank high for a keyword. I tend to believe that because of this, my site was not penalized by mighty Google...but I'd like an SEO expert to tell me what he thinks about it. In particular, please answer this: has my site lost rankings because of the 301 redirect? Has my site been penalized because of the redesign? Is this only a temporary situation?

Thank you very much for your help.

• Sal

I was about to make a mistake. Luckily, I read your answer and I have changed my mind.

Thank you very much.

• Sal

P.S.: I've never been to Seattle and the post "Seattle rocks" was just an example. Although, I feel that Seattle must be a great place. I'll visit it one day

Thank you for taking the time to support your claim with an example. I really appreciate it. I now understand what would work best for me.

All best,

• Sal

What a wonderful answer! Thank you.

Hello,

This question is for the WordPress experts out there. I've always wondered if it is better for SEO to focus on a particular keyword by writing a page or a post dedicated to it. For example, if I want to rank high for the keyword "Seattle rocks", do you think I'd be better off writing a page titled "Seattle rocks" or a post titled "Seattle rocks".

The ideal for me would be to create a category with the URL that includes that keyword for my WordPress blog, but I do not know if I can do a good job in terms of SEO optimizing the keyword. For instance, if we consider the keyword in the example above, I'd create a category which will have the following URL:

http://www.seomozthebest.com/category/seattle-rocks

Do you think I can still focus on that keyword having such URL? As you know, WordPress would allow me to write some text in the description tag, which will be visible on the site. I guess that I could use the description box to create some optimized content using the keyword "Seattle rocks" and then launch a link building campaign using the anchor text "Seattle rocks" directing to the URL: http://www.seomozthebest.com/category/seattle-rocks

Do you think that I can optimize the keyword by creating a category?

Thank you for reading such long question. I tried to be as clear as possible.

• Sal

Thank you again.

I let the guys at the web hosting company do the redirect.

All the best.

Hi Alan,

Can you please tell me if I need to do the redirect in file "robots.txt"? Do you know the 301 code to edit?

Thank you.

Hi,

Thank you for explaining the situation. I will contact my web hosting company and will ask them to make the change.

Best regards.

Hi,

Thank you for the reply. I appreciate it.

All best.

Hi,

I am pretty new to SEO. I know I have made so many mistakes and I am trying to learn now here on SEOmoz. At this moment, I am trying to find the answer to a situation that puzzles me. Since English is not my native language, I will do my best to be clear. I hope that a seasoned SEO expert out there can help me with this.

I have a website (http://www.pokeronlineitalia.com) that in the very beginning I optimized for the URL http://www.pokeronlineitalia.com. I was even able to list this URL into the DMOZ directory. The problem is that after a while the web hosting company I use - I don't know why yet - decided to make my site available as http://pokeronlineitalia.com. This means that if a person types in http://www.pokeronlineitalia.com, she gets redirected to http://pokeronlineitalia.com (the traditional URL without the "www"). Since when I started the site I was even more clueless than I am now about SEO, I thought that that would not make any difference. Even the guy at the web hosting company told me that that would be ok in terms of SEO. I thought that that was the case and closed an eye. The fact is that now I am using several tools to measure the strength of my site in the eyes of the search engines and noticed that http://www.pokeronlineitalia.com seems stronger. Using a the tool I cannot mention, I compared the two URL and found out this:

The total number of unique domains with backlinks pointing to a specific page is:

137 for the site WITHOUT the "www" and 2,210 for the site WITH the "www"

The total number of links pointing to a specific URL is:

864 for the site WITHOUT the "www"; and 61,871 for the site WITH the "www"

The number of domain backlinks is:

66,928 for the site WITHOUT the "www"; and 61,892 for the site WITH the "www"

Moreover, as I have said, http://www.pokeronlineitalia.com is listed in DMOZ while the site without the "www" is not.

My questions are the following:

Is the site WITH the "www" in the URL stronger than the site WITHOUT the "www"? If so, can the guys at the web hosting company fix the issue and make sure that a person can go straight to http://www.pokeronlineitalia.com without being redirected to the site without the "www"? Finally, if the issue gets fixed, will the site with the "www" be indexed normally by the search engines? I have noticed that pages in the site with the "www" do not get indexed. Is it bad in the eyes of the search engines to go back to http://www.pokeronlineitalia.com? What would you do?

I would really appreciate the opinion of an expert on this issue. Thank you for reading such incredibly long question.

All the best,

• Mark