Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I'm getting a bunch of 404 crawl errors in my Google Webmaster Tools because we just moved our site to a new platform with new URL structure. We 301 redirected all the relevant pages. We submitted a new site map and then deleted all the site maps to the old website url structure.

However, google keeps crawling the OLD urls and reporting back the 404 errors. It says that the website is linking to these 404 pages via an old outdated sitemap (which if you goto shows a 404 as well, so it's not as if Google is reading these old site maps now). Instead it's as if Google has cached the old sitemap but continues to use it to crawl these non-existent pages.

Any thoughts?

This seems like a dumb question, but I'm not sure what the answer is. I have an ecommerce client who has a couple of subdirectories "gallery" and "blog". Neither directory gets a lot of traffic or really turns into much conversions, so I want to remove the pages so they don't drain my page rank from more important pages. Does this sound like a good idea?

I was thinking of either disallowing the folders via robot.txt file or add a "no index" tag or 301redirect or delete them. Can you help me determine which is best.

**DEINDEX: **As I understand it, the no index meta tag is going to allow the robots to still crawl the pages, but they won't be indexed. The supposed good news is that it still allows link juice to be passed through. This seems like a bad thing to me because I don't want to waste my link juice passing to these pages. The idea is to keep my page rank from being dilluted on these pages. Kind of similar question, if page rank is finite, does google still treat these pages as part of the site even if it's not indexing them?

If I do deindex these pages, I think there are quite a few internal links to these pages. Even those these pages are deindexed, they still exist, so it's not as if the site would return a 404 right?

ROBOTS.TXT As I understand it, this will keep the robots from crawling the page, so it won't be indexed and the link juice won't pass. I don't want to waste page rank which links to these pages, so is this a bad option?

**301 redirect: **What if I just 301 redirect all these pages back to the homepage? Is this an easy answer? Part of the problem with this solution is that I'm not sure if it's permanent, but even more importantly is that currently 80% of the site is made up of blog and gallery pages and I think it would be strange to have the vast majority of the site 301 redirecting to the home page. What do you think?

DELETE PAGES: Maybe I could just delete all the pages. This will keep the pages from taking link juice and will deindex, but I think there's quite a few internal links to these pages. How would you find all the internal links that point to these pages. There's hundreds of them.

thx u.

Hi Everyone -

I'm not a technical person at all. I have some content that will be hidden until a user clicks "learn more" where upon it will be displayed via jQuery Fancy Box script. The content behind the learn more javascript is important and I need it to be crawled by search engine spiders.

Does anyone know if there will be a problem with this script?

I have a client who has an online outdoor gear company. He mostly sells high end outdoor gear (like ski jackets, vests, boots, etc) at a deep discount. His store currently only resides on Ebay. So we're building him an online store from scratch. I'm trying to determine the best site architecture and wonder if we should include subcategory pages. My issue is that I think the subcategory pages might be good from a user experience, but it'll add an additional layer between the homepage and the product pages. The problem is that I think a lot of user's might be searching for the product name to see if they can find a better deal, and my client's site would be perfect for them. So I really want to rank well for the product pages, but I'm nervous that the subcategory pages will limit the link juice of the product pages.

Home --> SubCategory --> Product List --> Product Detail

Home --> Men's Ski Clothing --> Men's Ski Jack --> North Face Mt Everest Jacket

Should I keep the SubCategory page "Men's Ski Clothing" if it helps usability?

On a separate note, the SubCategory pages would have some head keyword terms, but I don't think that he could rank well for these terms anytime soon. However, they would be great pages / terms to rank for in the long term. Should this influence the decision?

You probably have more links pointing to your PAGE, but your competitor probably has more links pointing to their DOMAIN.

I do have SOME text on the landing pages. Here's an example of one of the landing pages... remove the XXX in the url (I don't want this page to get indexed some how):

XXXkidecals.com/product-category/school-labels/XXX

There's probably 90 words describing the content of the category page. And there's about 50 images.

If you think the ratio of content landing words to images is fine. What do you suggest in terms of Alt Tags -- do I use any keywords?

A site I manage is mostly images on our main landing pages and very little text based content. And many of the images are used across multiple landing pages which we're trying to optimize for different keywords. My problem is trying to use best practices for images and yet at the same time rank well for different keywords.

How can I optimize for certain keywords, when the majority of "content" is likely coming from image file name and alt tags which have the EXACT SAME images across multiple landing pages.

Hope that makes sense?

I do have SOME text on the landing pages. Here's an example of one of the landing pages... remove the XXX in the url (I don't want this page to get indexed some how):

XXXkidecals.com/product-category/school-labels/XXX

There's probably 90 words describing the content of the category page. And there's about 50 images.

If you think the ratio of content landing words to images is fine. What do you suggest in terms of Alt Tags -- do I use any keywords?

If a blog does product reviews and we give them a free product for a review is it breaking terms of service if we ask for a follow link for the product?

"1) do you really need to repeat those links?"

I don't think so... what do you think is the best way to promote social sharing?

"2) why do you care how many external links your site carries?"

I'm worried that we could be losing our juice by having so many compared to how many links we have pointing to us. Do you not think that I should worry about this at all?

My site has supposedly over 4,000 external links from it. Is there a good piece of software that could scrape my site that tell me from which page all the links originate from and where they're all going?

I'm surprised that the number is this high because our entire site is only a few hundred pages.

Here's the site XXXkidecalsXXX.com

(just remove the XXX for the URL.)

If you want to weigh in on any other issues you see with the site, I'd be happy for any suggestions in general.

I'd like to thank everyone for responding.

thx for the compliment, we spend a lot of time on the design of all our elements.

i thought it might also have to do with some javascript, but like yourself, I'm not a programmer and can't tell. At least we were thinking the same thing.

sorry, if you remove the XXX, it will bring up our site, but I don't want this SEO Moz thread to be popping up when people search for it in google.

On my first crawl of a new campaign, the software only crawled 3 pages.

XXXaceXXXscholarships.org

any ideas?

Google Web Master Tools is saying that some of my pages have duplicate page titles because of pagination. However, I have implemented the canonical tag on the paginated pages which I thought would keep my site from being penalized for duplicate page titles. Is this correct? Or does canonical tag only relate to duplicate content issues?

I'm trying to do my best to control the link juice from my home page to the most important category landing pages on my client's e-commerce site. I have a couple questions regarding how to NOT pass link juice to insignificant pages and how best to pass juice to my most important pages.

INSIGNIFICANT PAGES:

How do you tag links to not pass juice to unimportant pages. For example, my client has a "Contact" page off of there home page. Now we aren't trying to drive traffic to the contact page, so I'm worried about the link juice from the home page being passed to it. Would you tag the Contact link with a "no follow" tag, so it doesn't pass the juice, but then include it in a sitemap so it gets indexed? Are there best practices for this sort of stuff?

Thanks Mike and Charles. I actually am concerned about the duplicate content issue because the site is mostly images and not a lot of text, so I decided to convert the text in the footer into an image on all pages but the homepage.

I'm surprised that keyword density doesn't matter at all. In the on page optimization here at SEO Moz they still recommend using your keyword phase at least 4 times.

My client has a lot of text about their company in their footer. Is the text in the footer associated with the on page keyword usage and density for all pages or none of the pages?

In OSE, it is reporting that i don't have any internal links to my homepage. In the header on every page is my logo in the top left hand corner which links back to my homepage. Shouldn't this mean then that every page should link to the home page?

Similarly, internal pages which link from my main nav aren't showing up as having any internal links in OSE.

Any ideas?

The industry that my 3-commerce store caters toward has seasonal demands. For example (this is not my industry but the idea applies), let's assume that I have a sporting goods store and that I sell footballs in the fall, but I sell more baseballs in the summer. Would you ever consider changing the primary keyword on the HomePage title and within the body to target different keywords (football vs baseball) during different seasons (fall vs summer)? Or would you just create individual product pages which target the keywords and link back internally to your homepage?

Or is there a better way to target seasonal demands where conversions for the entire website vary greatly from season to season.

Sorry for all the elementary questions.

Thx Matt

Hi Everyone -

In google webmaster tools, in the Content Keywords section, when I click on a link of all of my top keywords they display a single "Top URLs". The URL which they display is not my homepage but a random category landing page of our e-commerce website. Should I be worried about this? Does this suggest that google is ranking this one URL ahead of our homepage?

I just signed up for SEO Moz pro for my site. The initial report came back with over 700+ duplicate content pages. My problem is that while I can see why some of the content is duplicated on some of the pages I have no idea why it's coming back as duplicated. Is there a tutorial for a novie on how to read the duplicate content report and what steps to take?

It's an e-commerce website and there is some repetitive content on all the product pages like our "satisfaction guaranteed" text and the fabric material... and not much other text. There's not a unique product description because an image speaks for itself. Could this be causing the problem?

I have lots of URLs with over 50+ duplicates.

Thx for any help.