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My website is not a news or magazine site, but we do have a news section updated 2-3 times a week with industry related news.
We are working on a new structure for the URLs.
Should the date be included in the URL?
From this article from Google I understand that as long as we submit a news sitemap it doesnt matter whether or not numbers are included in the URL, correct?
https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/68323?topic=11665
I would never ask someone to disagree with Matt!
I was more asking based on Matt's video if linking between sites should be discouraged even if it would be beneficial to users or if it should be avoided because has negative SEO ramifications.
My company has a main xxx.com website and geo-specific subsites - xxx.co.uk, xxx.es, etc...
We link to each of the subsites from the menu, however it also makes sense from a content perspective to link between the sites on internal pages. However, in this video Matt Cutts seems to discourage this - http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-linking-20-domains-together-likely-a-cross-linking-scheme-167089
Do you think its worthwhile to keep the inter-site linking to just the menu or okay (or even helpful) to link between the different sites.
I launched a new website ~2 weeks ago that seems to be indexed but not cached.
According to Google Webmaster most of the pages are indexed and I see them appear when I search site:www.xxx.com.
However, when I type into the URL - cache:www.xxx.com I get a 404 error page from Google.
I've checked more established websites and they are cached so I know I am checking correctly here...
Why would my site be indexed but not in the cache?
Did I miss an alogrithim update that happened last month?
The rankings for my tracked keywords do not seem effected (so I didn't notice until now) but according to SEMRush the number of keywords I am ranked for dropped significantly in June. Traffic did not significantly drop in one day, but compared to last month is 20% lower (and should have been ~30% higher based on industry trends)
According to SEMRush other websites in my industry, including the most reputable ones still ranked #1 for the most competitive terms - seem to have also dropped significantly this month the number of positions they were ranked for...
Thanks!
Just to confirm, this is in addition to the social media icon + link visible to users, right?
Hi,
I want to add rel=publisher to my website. According to Google support I should use the following tag -
Add to homepage - [rel="publisher">Find us on Google+](https://plus.google.com/my page])
A few questions:
Thanks!
Use them wherever it is the most relevant for your business - website, blog, etc... and then promote via social media, infograph sites and other off-page efforts.
It's a new site and I have now confirmed it's not readable
Not the answer I was looking for, but thanks for all the help!
Text on my site seems to be readable in a text only version (the page is not cached so I viewed it by disabling JAVA and then copy and pasted the page into Word)
However, when I look in the page source I don't see the text there.
The text was created using Open X html boxes to help us with formatting, but is this causing an SEO problem?
Thanks - that could be a decent alternative to offer!
I'm totally with you.... any ideas of a better response I can give them (proof from a source) that the impact on speed will be negligible?
They are concerned adding an extra line of code will slow down the speed of the site...
I want to add hreflang on my website but the dev guys think it will hinder performance?
Any thoughts/experience with this one way or the other?
Thanks!
There has never been a reputable source making that claim. I've read speculation that Google boosts your rank if you use Adwords, but that also is not based on actual numbers...
Make sure that when you are checking your rankings you are using a clean browser without any saved cookies and add &gl=uk to the top of the URL.
If they are still different it's possible that you've gone up in the time between the last ranking check....
Hi,
We have a multilingual website with both latin and non-latin characters,
We are working on creating a friendly URL structure for the site.
For the Latin languages can we use translated version of the URLs within the language folders?
For example -
www.site/cars
www.site/fr/voitures
www.site/es/autos
Thanks for the response! are there any automated tools I can use to check for sites scraping my content?
I've been noticing that other sites (none as strong as mine) are scraping my content.
I have rel=author on my website to claim the content as mine.
How concerned should I be about others scraping our content, could this harm us?
Any suggestions about how to stop content scrapers?
Thanks!
My website uses a prefix at the end to instruct the back-end about visitor details.
The setup is similar to this site - http://sanfrancisco.giants.mlb.com/index.jsp?c_id=sf with a 302 redirect from the normal link to the one with additional info and a canonical tag on the actual URL without the extra info ((the normal one here being http://sanfrancisco.giants.mlb.com,)
However, when I used www.xml-sitemaps.com to create a sitemap they did so using the URLs with the extra info on the links... what should I do to create a sitemap using the normal URLs (which are the ones I want to be promoting)
Is there any way to use href (or a similar tool) for geo-targeting states in the US?
Yep, Mike's understanding is correct.
The two pages would be very similar, just one would be shorter.
page.fr is pretty much the same page as page.com, but in French and shorter
If I want to add rel=publisher from my Google + page to company website do I still need 1,000 followers or has Google lifted that requirement since launching the feature?
I am considering using a cross-domain canonical tag for pages that are very similar but one has less content than the other.
The domains are geo specific, so for example.
www.page.com - with content xxx, yyy, zzz,
and
www.page.fr with content xxx
is this a problem because while there is clearly duplicate content here the pages are not actually significantly similar since there is so much less content on one page than the other?
Thanks - I'll do that!
Right, it's a broken link where the webmaster added an extra space which is causing it to go to a 404 error - easily identifiable and fixable (if the webmaster responds to me)
I was just confused about why this showed up on my list from Google in the first place and want to make sure it's not actually causing me harm....
In my list of 404 errors from Google webmaster I have one with the "linked from" section showing an external link. This seems like a broken link (which obviously I will try and fix to get the link juice) but why would Google recognize it as a 404?
From Google:
| URL: | www.broken URL |
|
| Error details | In Sitemaps | Linked from | |
<colgroup><col></colgroup>
| http://externalwebsite.com |
| |
|
We are developing a mobile version of our website that will utilize responsive design/dynamic serving.
About 70% of the main website will be included in the mobile version. What (if anything) should be the redirect for pages not included in the mobile version of the site?
Also - for one specific section users will be redirected from that page to the homepage, what is the redirect that should be used for this?
Thanks!
There was a Panda update so it could likely be from that - http://searchengineland.com/google-panda-update-25-seems-to-have-hit-151732
We are planning on creating a mobile site using a different URL. Our current sitemap creator won't dynamically detect mobile pages using the rel="alternate" tag but can can create a Project for that domain in Sitemap Creator and use the "mobile" option when you export it. The Sitemap Creator will then insert the mobile:mobilecontent tag for all the URLs in that sitemap. </mobile:mobile>
Is this okay or will it cause problems?
For complicated internal reasons (which I swear have validity) we are starting websites that will then disallow from Google for ~1 year.
Is there any value in purchasing "premium" domains with SEO juice or will we lose the value in the time we are hiding the website from Google?
Thanks for all the responses. I can't use subfolders because that is the structure of the languages on the site
www.site/fr
www.site/es
etc....
We are launching subsites for legal reasons so need to have them.
Any other suggestions?
We are planning on opening localized versions of our website throughout the world and in the US.
For countries these websites will be:
etc....
For the US would it be better to add the states onto part of the domain name or use a sub-folder. What is the advantage/disadvantages of each?
Meaning, should it be:
or
We have an affiliate that wants us to link to his site to help him get started. His website looks okay and is in the same niche as us. However, he has PR 0 and no Page Trust.
We could work in a natural looking link in a news article, but there is no way he could be considered any kind of "authority" link. Can linking to his site harm us?
In the past week we have started having problems syncing Google + with Hootsuite. Has anyone else had this problem and/or suggestions of how to resolve it?
Thanks!
Definitely not important. I still add them in because I think it helps our content writers structure the page and some minor search engines use them. I know some people think they can actually cause harm and don't use them at all. Whatever you do, make sure not to spend too much time on them and not to keyword stuff.
The only time they have any relevance is if you are using them for Google news.
That is a cool tool that tells you about the quality of your website text, but I want to know if specific text on my page is readable by Google.
That is a cool tool that tells you about the quality of your website text, but I want to know if specific text on my page is readable by Google.
Hi,
Is there a way to test if my content is readable while it is still in testing mode (meaning there obviously wont be a cache)
Thanks!
Hi,
My menu has a image with links to some of the main pages on the site and text underneath it explaining what the banner is.
Will it be beneficial or harmful to have the text hyperlinked to the same pages the images go to?
Any stats about whether the number of long tail searches has been increasing or decreasing in the past year?
Thanks!
Your Belgian page is probably less strong than the other ones you own. On the page itself try increasing fans + engagement. Off page - increase the links going towards the Facebook page from your website and other external websites.
After the last Panda update on Jan. 22 my rankings dropped significantly in the AU and UK but not in the US.
We operate in UK and AU and not the US so if anything the rankings should be the opposite (which also obviously would be preferred)
Any ideas for why this would occur?
My site has many error URLs that Google webmaster has identified as pages without titles.
These are URLs such as: www.site.com/page???1234
For these URLs should I:
1. Add them as duplicate canonicals to the correct page (that is being displayed on the error URLs)
2. Add 301 redirect to the correct URL
3. Block the pages in robots.txt
Thanks!
Google seems to have discontinued their robots.txt checker.
Is there another tool that I can use to check my text instead?
Thanks!
my website is translated into 10+ languages, but our news articles are often only published in 1-2 languages. Currently, URLs are created in the unpublished news languages that then 301 redirect the user to main news page since the content doesnt exist in that language.
Is this implementation okay or is there a preferred method we should be using so that we don't have a large number of pages on the site with redirects?
Thanks!
It has to be noindex because our development team does not have the capacity to make these websites unique structure/template from our main site.
For example - the main site is www.red.com and the new site will be www.blue.com and the only way to launch www.blue.com is to have it basically be the same site as www.red.com (and it needs to be launched now for legal reasons).
We are also launching localized versions of our website such as www.red.co.uk and are planning on using the canonical tag for these sites. However, I thought that for the sites with a different URL we could risk having Google see us as a Network since the content will be so similar and traffic flowing in both directions - and this is something important to avoid so in order to use the completely new sites they need to be separate in terms of content, ip, hosting, etc... (and have traffic only flow in one direction).
Do you disagree?
Thanks!
This is the 4th message since December 23....that seems too much, correct?
For legal reasons my website is going to launch non-branded websites. We do not have the capacity to make these site sufficiently unique from the main site so we are planning on having them be NoIndex NoFollow.
Are there any potential SEO problems here?
What will the implication be if in ~1-2 years from launching the NoIndex NoFollow we make the site unique, take away the tag and want to start promoting these sites organically.
Thanks!
Thesis is a good theme with built in SEO advantages. Headway is great if you are looking for one with the most flexibility.
As Matt said, using Yoast and ensuring everything is set up important is just as important as picking a good theme (if not more)