Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi, I am wondering what the best practice is when a site has an index page and a home page? I have two pages, listed below, and want to know if I should 301 redirect my "index" page to my standard home page.  The home page is where I would like all traffic to fall on for our website.  Additionally, I used the rel=canonical tag years ago on the index page to indicate that the home page is the main content. Home Page - https://www.1099pro.com/ (PA 45) Home Page Canonical:  rel="canonical" href="https://www.1099pro.com/"/> Index Page - https://www.1099pro.com/index.asp (PA - 33) Index Page Canonical:  rel="canonical" href="https://www.1099pro.com/"/> It seems to me that there is some extra juice that could be passed to my home page (which is the page that ranks highly for our major keywords) by 301 redirecting the index page.  Is there any reason why I should not do that? Really appreciate any help - especially with extra explanations - for the simple minded like me ;)! -Michael

Hello Fellow Moz'ers, My company's website, www.1099pro.com, is currently OLD and not mobile-friendly!  However, we rank #1 for out most important keywords and don't want to lose that ranking. I've recently redesigned our site, currently in testing, to use the same standard desktop pages but to also have responsive, mobile friendly, pages for different view ports. My question is if anyone knows an estimated time frame that search engines (mainly Google) takes to re-crawl the site and restore SERP rankings to their previous levels?  The reason is because we are HIGHLY seasonal and if we are not back at our top rankings by early December, at latest (November would be better), then we stand the chance to lose a considerable amount of traffic/revenue. -The Unenlightened One

Hello To Those Who Are Wiser Than I, I am wondering if the href link "title" tag is needed, or serves any purpose, on mobile websites?  Also, does it effect SEO in any way? I ask because generally the href link title tag provides more information to the user when they scroll their mouse over the link - but this action does not happen on mobile!  Users have no mouse and thus no extra information would be displayed. I'm really wondering if it still matters for SEO purposes on mobile though. -The UnEnlightened

Hey, I am working on transitioning a website and all of my current URL's will be slightly changed (moving to dynamic pages).  I understand that I will need to 301 redirect all the old pages to their new counterparts but I would like to know how long it will take for the 301 redirects to take full effect in the search rankings. I ask because my site is an e-commerce site that receives 90% of it's business in January and the transition would take place December 15th.  If my search rankings are not back up to par by January 1st then I will take a drastic hit to revenue. Please help this SEO noob out!

Hello Geniuses, Prodigies, and Experts of the Field, My website pages for www.1099pro.com have too many links on one page, something like 150-175, and I understand that each page should ideally be under 100.  Most of these links, approx 105, come from dropdown navigation options in the header toolbar or the footer links. It is my take that these links make our site easier to navigate but I'm sure that they are hurting my pagerank / SERPs.  Is there a best way to handle a situation like this?  I'd really prefer not to alter the header/footer layout of the entire site by removing 50-75 navigational links.  The only other idea I have is below but I have no idea if it would work. For any link that I do not care to pass pagerank, institute a "nofollow" parameter.  This would be my favorite option if it is viable.

Hey, I'm in the process of learning SEO, or attempting to, for my company and am chipping away at the process ever so slowly! How can I tell if a site that links to my company's site, www.1099pro.com, has a negative effect on my page/domain authority? Also, if a page doesn't show up in the search rankings at all for it's keywords when it really should (i.e it has the exact keywords and page/domain authority far surpasses even the top results) how can I tell if Google has removed the page from its listing and why? Thanks SEO Gurus

I am working for a business and I would like my Google+ posts to show the business picture/information and not my own.  Does this mean I would leave authorship blank and use a rel=publisher tag instead?  Or is it bette rto do both? I don't really know much about the subject so feel free to let the schooling begin!

Hey, The new MOZ toolbar is unable to identify the meta description on any of the pages for my doman www.1099pro.com.  Is there any reason that someone can see why that would be? The tag should be correct on all pages. Thanks! -Mike

My website can be accessed with a number of different URL's and I am trying to consolidate the traffic to one point.  Is there any problem, SEO or technical, with forcing all users who come to my site to going to our https domain?  I have already set a preferred domain in WebMaster Tools and set rel=canonical for each page.  For instance, anyone entering the below sites would be forced to land at https://www.1099pro.com. 1099pro.com www.1099pro.com http://1099pro.com http://www.1099pro.com

Hey, My company currently has one chief website with about 500-600 other domains that all feature the same material as the chief website.  These domains have been around for about 5 years and have actually picked up some link traffic. I have all of these identical web-pages utilizing rel=canonical but I was wondering if I would be better served, from SEO purposes, to 301 redirect all of these sites to their respective pages on our chief website?  If I add 500 301 redirects, will the major search engines consider this to be black-hat link-building even though the sites are related and technically already feature the same content? For an example, the chief website is www.1099pro.com and I would 301 redirect the below sites to the chief site: 1099softwarepro.com 1099softwarepro.info 1099softwarepro.net 1099softwarepro.biz 1099softwareprofessionals.com 1099softwareprofessionals.info ...you get the point

Hey, I am a confused canonical and here's why - please help! I have a master website called www.1099pro.com and then many other websites that simply duplicate the material on the master site (i.e  www.1099A.com, www.1099T.com, www.1099solution.com, and the list goes on).  These other domains & pages have been around for long enough that they have been able to garner some page authority & domain authority that it makes it worthwhile to redirect them to their corresponding pages on www.1099pro.com. The problem is two-fold when trying to pass this link-juice: I do not have access to the web-service that hosts the other sites/domains and cannot 301 redirect them The other sites/domains are setup so that whatever changes I make to www.1099pro.com are automatically distributed across all the other sites.  This means that when I put on www.1099pro.com it also shows up on all the other domains. It is my understanding that having on a site such as www.1099solution.com does not pass any link juice and actually eliminates that page from the search results.  Is there any way that I can pass the link juice?

I have multiple product landing pages that feature very similar, but not duplicate, content and am wondering if this would affect my rankings in a negative way.  The main reason for the similar content is three-fold: Continuity of site structure across different products Similar, or the same, product add-ons or support options (resulting in exactly the same additional tabs of content) The product itself is very similar with 3-4 key differences. Three examples of these similar pages are here - although I do have different meta-data and keyword optimization through the pages. http://www.1099pro.com/prod1099pro.asp http://www.1099pro.com/prod1099proEnt.asp http://www.1099pro.com/prodW2pro.asp

Do search engines consider keywords such as "1099 E-File Software" & "1099 "EFile Software" the same? Many of the keywords for my website will have a dash "-" when properly spelled out but there are many users who would simply omit it when spelling the word.  Another example would be "W-2 Software" as opposed to "W2 Software".

I have a tax software website for which there a multiple pages that compete using different keywords.  However, all pages but my home page have recently fallen out of the rankings completely and I really just don't know why. For instance, my page - http://www.1099pro.com/prod1099proEnt.asp - has the title keywords "1099 Efile Software | 1099 Software | 1099 Electronic Filing".  When I run a Moz report on the keyword "1099 E-File Software" I get an "A" rating and it finds a total of 8 instances of the keyword.  However, when I run a Moz report on the keyword "1099 Software" it finds a total of 26 instances of the keyword - still with an "A" rating. When I search the actual text/html there are only 6 instances of the keyword "1099 software" which leads me to believe that Moz/Google/Search Engines are ignoring the middle term in words like "1099 printing software" or "1099 e-filing software" and only picking up "1099 software".  Is this supposed to be happening?  Does anyone know why or how many terms can be ignored in that fashion? I used to have multiple landing pages in the top 3 results and now all of my other landing pages have completely fallen from the rankings even though I am not keyword stuffing and am providing unique & relevant content.  If anyone has an idea as to why my rankings have dropped so drastically I would really appreciate it (I take no part in black-hat link building so that isn't the reason).

Is there a problem with placing a rel=canonical link on the canonical page - in addition to the duplicate pages?  For example, would that create create an endless loop where the canonical page keeps referring to itself? Two examples that are troubling me are: My home site is www.1099pro.com which is exactly the same as www.1099pro.com/index.asp (all updates to the home page are made by updating the index.asp page).  I want www.1099pro.com/index.asp to have the rel=canonical link to point to my standard homepage www.1099pro.com but any update that I make on the index page is automatically incorporated into www.1099pro.com as well.  I don't have access to my hosting web server and any updates I make have to be done to the specific landing pages/templates. I am also creating a new website that could possible have pages with duplicate content in the future.  I would like to already include the rel=canonical link on the standard canonical page even though there is not duplicate content yet. Any help really would be appreciated.  I've read a ton of articles on the subject but none really define whether or not it is ok to have the rel=canonical link on both the canonical page and the duplicate pages.  The closest explanation was in a MOZ article that it was ok but the answer was fuzzy. -Mike

Hey, I recently modified my pages to conform more closely to the "A" page rankings for MOZ's on-page report card but saw declines in my keyword rankings. They keywords in question appear in my title tag, description, one image alt tag, either an h1 or h2 tag, and 4 times throughout the text of the document. I don't think MOZ would recommend these changes if it was seen as stuffing - is there any other reason why my rankings might have dropped by 1-4 positions? Also, does anyone know of a good article/book for Yahoo/Bing SEO? My Yahoo & Bing rankings are far below Google's in most cases.  Any help would be appreciated! -Michael