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When it comes to formatting URL's, I think it's important for the URL's to make as much sense as possible from a hierarchical stand point. Moz has a really good article on the optimal URL structure. So you can sort of think of the blog keyword as the subcategory keyword from the example in that article.
Further more, look at how both moz and Matt Cutts structure their blog URL's.
https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/
Hope that helps!
That's very helpful. And that article was a good read. Appreciate the help!
One thing I kind of left out is that on my home page (index.htlm) my canonical is just set to www.mysite.com, and the redirect is just to redirect non-www request to www request. So I just wasn't sure if I should remove that canonical since the redirect is already taking care of it? Both the canonical and the redirect have been there for approximately about 2 years so the redirect already kicked in a long time ago.
I don't think that leaving the canonical there would devalue the page at all, but just want to get another opinion.
I've been reading through a few of blog posts here on moz and can't seem to find the answer to these two questions:
How long should I leave an existing page up after a 301 redirect? The page old page is no longer needed but has pretty high page authority. If I take the old page down—the one that I'm redirecting from—immediately after I set up the 301 redirect, will link juice still be passed to the new page?
My second question is, right now, on my index.html page I have both a 301 redirect and a rel canonical tag in the head. They were both put in place to redirect and pass link equity respectively. I did this a couple years back after someone recommended that I do both just to be safe, but from what I've gathered reading the articles here on moz is that your supposed to pick one or the other depending on whether or not it's permanent.
Should I remove the rel conanical tag or would it be better to just leave it be?
That makes sense. The address that the previous agency submitted was his home address. He has a small commercial business address in a neighbor city, but the majority of his business comes from around his home address. He told me his thinking was that by submitting his home address, his website would be more likely to show for potential customers due to google map proximity, which makes sense to me.
Hi Miriam,
That could very well be the case. We're still waiting on the google+ login credentials from the previous agency. If that is the case, I should still include the full NAP on the website and Moz Local, right? Would moz local complain at all about the full NAP not showing up on google+ if I submit the full NAP to moz local?
I have a client who has a small ready mix concrete delivery business. A couple months ago the client payed another agency to add their business to google places/business—whatever their calling it these days, and to bing places.
So instead of the agency submitting the full address, and the full NAP, they just submitted the Name, City, State, and phone (left off the street address). I guess their rational was that by doing it this way, my client would show up for a more broad region instead of a small specific region for local search.
It's been about 2-3 months now since the agency completed the work and I noticed that my client just started showing up on the maps today.
When my client first hired me, I advised them to let me submit their full NAP, with the street address to Moz Local, and add the NAP micro-data to the footer of their website, with the hopes that google would start paying attention to their location and begin indexing and ranking their website. But after seeing their website begin to show up on the maps, I'm wondering if that's the right decision.
So my question is: Should I submit the _full NAP—_with street address—to moz local, or should I submit the NAP without the street address?
And depending on which of those I should do, how should I proceed with the google+ business page and the bing for places page?
That makes a lot of sense. We might as well target as large of a targeted audience as possible to maximize our efforts.
I have a client that I've been working with for a little over a year now and I've been struggling to generate new business from his online presence. Initially, I completely re-designed his website with semantically correct html markup, and used all of typical, site level SEO tactics, i.e., keywords in title tags, h tags, paragraphs, correct NAP, etc.
We've only seen very low marginal returns off of our efforts. Part of the problem is that my client is not an attorney, but instead he runs a social security disability advocacy firm. He still performs all of the operations that an attorney performs, but due to the fact that he is not an attorney, we cannot optimize his site for search phrases containing "attorney", which is a common keyword that people would generally use to find the services that my client offers.
So I've decided to try a different approach. A content marketing approach. The only reason I prolonged avoided this approach for so long is that, to be frank, I had no idea how to target his ideal clients with content. After talking to my client the other day and recommending this new approach, I uncovered some similarities between his previous clients. Most his clients live in rural areas, and they like nascar, hunting, fishing, etc. So I suggested that I create blog for him, and begin finding some freelance writers that can create some killer content about nascar, hunting and fishing.
Admittedly, I don't have a much experience with a content marketing approach, but I want to learn everything there is to know about it.
I guess I'm a little unsure about this approach that we're getting ready to try, and would love to hear from some people that have been down this path, and might be able to offer any advice.
I really want to help my client's business flourish, and it's now very clear to me that solely relying on an old SEO line of thinking is not doing the trick anymore. Any tips, tactics and strategies would be greatly appreciated.
Am I on the right track here? How would we get this content in front of his ideal clients, and market it in such a way that he will get a good return on his investment?
I'm getting ready to do a redesign for a client and one thing that annoys me about the directory structure of the website is that he has files buried deep in the directories. For example, the images are buried like four folders deep in some cases and I would like to move all of those images into an images folder directly below the root. All of those images, however, have already been indexed by google and show up in google images.
If I start moving those images around, could it hurt his rankings?
That's interesting, and thanks for the insight on that ratio. I had a feeling the quality of the links might be playing a factor. I have one sight sending me literally thousands of links, and even though the site is very high authority, and I'm paying them top dollar, I'm beginning to suspect the link juice coming from that site is not good.
That makes sense. They're definitely beating me on domain authority. So I guess I just need to get more quality links to more pages on my website.
Thanks Chris. Strange thing is: I received a B for the keyword I'm being out-ranked on, and my competitor received an F.
Judging by open site explorer, I'm crushing my competitor in every imaginable way. And yet, somehow they have a higher page authority than me and, consequently, are ranking higher than me. How is this possible? My site is on the left:
First of all, thanks for the awesome videos.
I live in kind of a small town and work with a lot of local brick and mortar businesses. I could really benefit from some videos on local SEO and local inbound marketing.
Thanks,
Scott
I just got a new client today and his entire website layout and structure is using tables instead of divs.
This client is on a tight budget and wants to avoid unnecessary hours for re-coding the website, but at the same time he wants me to improve his SEO organically. This is the first time I've been asked to do work on an existing website that uses pure tables for the entire layout and I'm wondering if this effects the SEO in any way. So my question is, will tables effect rankings and SEO in any way?
I have a client who is an Attorney and participates in a couple of different Q and A legal sites. One of these legal sites is recommending to my client that he copy and paste his blog posts onto his profile page on the Q and A site.
I understand my client wanting to copy and paste his blog posts onto these sites, as it will not only get his content in front of a larger audience, but also lend credibility.
However, I've always heard that that could cause some duplicate content problems. Will my client's blog likely get penalized by google for copying and pasting his blog posts onto other relevant sites?
That helps a lot. I already added this for a 301 redirect a couple of days ago.
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^suncoastlaw.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.suncoastlaw.com/$1 [r=301,nc]
Should I just add your last two lines to the bottom of this .htaccess?
I only have one index.htm and I'm seeing a duplicate content error. What could be causing this?
I just updated a clients website which resulted in about 6000 duplicate page content errors. The way I set up my clients new website is I created a sub folder calles blog and installed wordpress on that folder. So when you go to suncoastlaw.com your taken to an html website, but if you click on the blog link in the nav, your taken to the to blog subfolder. The problem I'm having is that the url's seem to be repeating them selves. So for example, if you type in
in http://suncoastlaw.com/blog/aboutus.htm/aboutus.htm/aboutus.htm/aboutus.htm/
that somehow is a legitimate url and is being considered duplicate content of of http://suncoastlaw.com/aboutus.htm/. This repeating url only seems to be a problem when the blog/ is in the url. Any ideas as to how I can fix this?
