Hi GYMSN,

The most obvious explanation would be the content itself.

If you are following the general idea that pages are for "evergreen" content and posts are for "news", then it follows that the content in your posts tends to be much more topical than that in your pages.

If the content happens to also be timely (appears before others), fresh (up-to-date) and well written/good quality, then it should rank well and may even have a little potential for virality if very topical.

This would easily explain a significant difference in rankings.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Richard,

As an SEO who works with small to medium-sized businesses, I have to say that the more genuine understanding a client has of what we are doing and why, the less time I have to waste explaining things to them.

My most cherished client is one who has taken the time to develop a real understanding of the process and the pitfalls. Investing in making yourself more helpful to those who are helping you is always a good idea...and since it is likely they may also be represented at Mozcon, it could be an awesome opportunity to spend some time and gain a deeper understanding of the work they are doing and the challenges they face in doing it.

My special client is the ONLY one who doesn't say things like "do we really need to bother with that" on a regular basis. I love him for it and I know it makes me more valuable to him in the long run.

Hope we'll see you at Mozcon

Sha

Glad to help anytime Simon.

I know it's probably hard to believe right now, but I'm sure it won't be long and you'll be explaining stuff to others here in Q&A!

Once all the pieces start to fall into place everything becomes much easier to understand and if you spend some time around the SEOmoz community you'll be flying in no time!

Here's a post with links to all of the most important resources here are SEOmoz which might help you find your way around.

Look forward to catching up with you around the community

Sha

Hi again waspman,

No worries...it takes a little getting your head around when you start out

As Chris confirmed, the root domain is waspkilluk.co.uk.

The most common subdomain is the www, which is standard, but you can also create other subdomains if you wish.

Perhaps the most visible real world example of a site that uses subdomains is Google -  which uses subdomains to manage each of its specific products within the site. If you take a look at the URLs when you are using Google products you will see examples like places.google.com, maps.google.com, blogger.google.com, webmasters.google.com, www.google.com etc.

A subdomain is referred to as a "third level" domain, created within another domain. As a rule, each level of a domain is defined by the dots (.) appearing in reverse order within a URL.

So, in the Google Maps example:

the Top Level Domain (TLD) is .com

the second level domain is the chosen domain name google

the third level domain (or subdomain) is maps

In your case it is a little more complicated. You have an extra level in your domains because your Top Level Domain is the country designator .uk so your second level is actually .co, but for the purposes of understanding subdomains it won't hurt for you to think of .co.uk as your top level domain.

Generally, most small sites don't require extra subdomains, so often the only subdomain in play is the www.

Matt Cutts has a simple tutorial on the parts of a URL that makes it much easier to understand what is going on at a glance.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi waspman,

No, you are absolutely not doing anything wrong

The simple answer is that you are acquiring links primarily to the sub-domains and not the root domains.

To explain:

"mozRank is SEOmoz's global link popularity score. It compares the relative link value (ranking power) between URLs on the Internet. It is similar in premise to Google's original PageRank metric but is updated more frequently and offers greater precision."

You can read more about all of the SEOmoz Metrics at the Open Site Explorer explanatory page.

So, if you go to Open Site Explorer and run a query for your sub-domain you will see the number of external links to that URL. If you then remove the www and run the query for the root domain you will see that there are 0 links to that URL.

Since mozRank = link popularity - it should be higher for the sub-domain because that is where the links are pointing, and of course you want to ensure that your links are always consolidated to just one domain. So, things are exactly as they should be.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi JU1985,

Good call from Donnie!

I would be keeping both pages live and adding a unique explanation to each page that lets them know that the product they searched for has been superseded by Widget C.

When deciding on the right solution for any issue like this, the first thing to consider is the effect your solution will have on the user. Ask yourself "If I search for Widget A and land on a page that offers Widget C, what will I think?".

The answer for me is that I will most likely assume the result is incorrect and return to the search engine looking for a better result. That is not the best user experience possible and therefore unlikely to provide the best conversion rate possible.

So for me, any solution that simply delivers the client to a different product without an explanation (301 or rel=canonical)  is least preferred.

The key to good business is good customer service - essentially being as helpful to your potential customer as possible. If a customer arrived at your offline store and said "I'm looking for Widget A", would you push them quickly across the store and say "here's Widget C"? Or would you explain that "Widget A has now been superseded by Widget C" and provide Widget C for them to look at?

The more you can emulate the offline store experience in your online store, the better the chance that the customer will feel comfortable buying from you.

Incidentally, I would make sure that the Widget C description added to the pages includes a Buy button and sufficient information that the customer can proceed to purchase without having to go to the Widget C page.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi David,

Having the 301's in place is a good thing rather than a problem. They have been created by Wordpress so that you do not have broken links on your site (because you have created links and then deleted them by changing the permalink).

There are 3 major reasons for using 301 (Permanent) Redirects:

1. To move pages (or whole sites) to a new location and maintain accessibility to them
2. To eliminate broken link issues when URL's that may already have been crawled and/or seen by search engines or site users. (Links can be created by ordinary users who may have bookmarked or shared the URL)
3. To ensure that multiple URL's which render the same content are not seen by search engines as duplicate content. For example, a canonicalization issue can exist when http://mydomain.com (root domain) and http://www.mydomain.com (the subdomain) generally produce the same page of content, but can be seen as duplicates of each other because they are distinctly different URLs. Dr Pete's Duplicate Content in a Post Panda World is the definitive post on the different reasons for duplicate content and the best options for fixing them.

The 301's have no influence on users as they cannot see them - they are written to the .htaccess file. The idea of having them there is to catch any incoming traffic that comes via existing links to those pages that no longer exist.

There is a good explanation of 301 Best Practice in the Learn SEO section here at SEOmoz.

When working through the things identified in the crawl test, the Errors (red) and Warnings (yellow) are the things to pay attention to first. If you check the single line explanation above the blue tabs you will see this message "Notices are interesting facts about your pages we found while crawling." So they are not really problems that need fixing.

A couple of other great resources if you are just starting out are The Beginners Guide to SEO and the rest of the Learn SEO section.

Hope that helps,

Sha

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world

Hi ahw,

A 500 Server Error is generally caused by one of two things:

1. A hardware error in the server itself
2. A software error - something in the code which causes the server to barf

From your description, it sounds like the 500 errors may be appearing intermittently - ie a page is Ok, then errors, then is Ok etc.... This would tend to suggest that the problem is a hardware fault, but it is still possible that it may be caused by random code which is not encountered every time a page is loaded.

The most reliable way to determine which problem you have is to check whether you are experiencing the 500 errors with a static file - ie an image, video, pdf, xml, css etc. If you are seeing the error with a static file, then the problem is 100% Server hardware fault (or Server misconfiguration, but this should return a permanent 500 Error).

If "the sitemap also goes down on a regular basis", means that your sitemap also is intermittently returning a 500 Error and it is a static xml file, that may be your clue.

If yours is a LAMP based system (Apache/Linux) and you have root access to your Server, my boss is a Systems Administrator and able to take a look at it for you, but his gut feeling is that you are looking at a hardware problem. This means your best course of action would be to contact your Hosting provider as soon as possible and ask them to take a look at it.

Hope that helps,

Sha

oops,

Thanks for the pickup

Hi Serge,

The reason your redirect is creating a 302 is that it is an unspecified Redirect.

Any redirect that is unspecified will by default be seen as a 302 (Temporary)

To create a 301, you need to specify like this

[R=301,L]

Hope that helps,

Sha