Welcome to the Q&A Forum

In the past few weeks I have started getting messages from Google webmasters about an increase in server errors.

According to our r&d team these messages come at times our site has been down and Google is not an accurate measure of the site health.

1 - are they correct and is there a better tool to be using?

2 - could be harmed that Google is occasionally running into this problem..that is then fixed within a few hours?

Thanks!

Yes, def planning on changing it to benefit us but also want to make sure it isn't harming us (in terms of priorities for us fixing).... This doesn't seem like something Google will penalize us for?

My website uses the same anchor text to go to different pages, with section headers indicating where they go.

Is this a problem? f so, why?

Here is an example of what I mean:

Women

Shoes - link to women shoes

Clothes - link to women clothes

Accessories - link to women accessories

Men

Shoes - link to men shoes

Clothes - link to men clothes

Accessories - link to men accessories

Kids

Shoes - link to kids shoes

Clothes - link to kids clothes

Accessories - link to kids accessories

We use OpenX on our site as a way to track and add banners that are only for our site and not advertising.

Is there anyway to get SEO benefits from it or even add SWFObject to the flash ads?

Thanks for confirming what I thought (and wanted to hear)

Is there any problem updating the date and text of a news article if the URL remains the same?

For example, if we published a minor sports story on Monday and on Wednesday there was a small update to the story I would like to take my original article and change the date + first paragraph of the text to make it still relevant for my users to read without having to write an entirely new article since this is not a major story and there is not much new content to add.

Any SEO issues with take the original article and changing the first paragraph + title?

There was recently a huge increase in 404 errors on Yandex Webmasters corresponding with a drop in rankings.

Most of the pages seem to be from my blog (which was updated around the same time).

When I click on the links from Yandex the page looks like it is loading normal, expect that it has the following message from the Facebook plugin I am using for commenting

Any ideas about what the problem is or how to fix it?

Critical Errors That Must Be Fixed

| Bad Response Code: | URL returned a bad HTTP response code. |

Open Graph Warnings That Should Be Fixed

| Inferred Property: | The 'og:url' property should be explicitly provided, even if a value can be inferred from other tags. |
| Inferred Property: | The 'og:title' property should be explicitly provided, even if a value can be inferred from other tags. |
| Small og:image: | All the images referenced by og:image should be at least 200px in both dimensions. Please check all the images with tag og:image in the given url and ensure that it meets the recommended specification. |

Can I add a website that I don't own?

Is there a way I can check what are the Keywords that drive traffic to a specific website using SEOMoz?

Thanks for your help... think it worked!

I am putting together a presentation for my managers about why link building and social media is important for SEO so that we can get more resources allocated to these areas.

Does anyone have advice/links of convincing arguments for me to include?

Thanks!

In the past month I have seen a huge increase in the visits + conversions from Facebook (which is obviously great).  However, from Google Analytics it appears that most of my visits are not coming from my brand page.

Is there an explanation of what these referral paths mean?

Top Facebook referral paths:

/

/l.php

/home.php

/ajax/emu/end.php

/brand - much less visits than above URLs

A section of pages on my site are indexed (I know because they appear in SERPs if I copy and paste a sentence from the content), however according to the text-only cached version of the page they are not being read by Google.Why are they indexed event hough it seems like Google is not reading them..... or is Google in fact reading this text even though it seems like they should not be?Thanks for your assistance.

My Google +'s for my domain were 403 last month and 35 this month....

Based on this I'm assuming OSE's numbers are not cumulative.  Are they based on the previous month or a different time period?

Any explanations would be helpful.

Thanks!

I only have 5 products I would do this for...

I currently operate a Facebook page with ~4,000 fans who are fairly active.

In the nearby future I am planning on opening up websites in my most important target locations (mostly for legal reasons)

We offer several worldwide products that are extremely popular and not all represented on Facebook.

Given the above background info, my questions are:

1. Is it worthwhile to open and build up Facebook channels per language
2. Is it worthwhile to open and build up Facebook channels per "product"

What are the SEO implications of each in addition to improving our social profile.

thanks!

OK perfect, that was the exact answer I wanted to hear

The content is directly connected to what my company does but is by definition repetitive such as "stock x went up to y today"

It is important for users to see and for us to publish as an industry leader but by definition of the content will be somewhat of a repetitive template.

My company often puts out short news bulletins to announce short news updates.  We have to write about these topics for our customers and to remain as an industry leader.  However, there is not much real and interesting content to write about these topics.

What is the minimum length you think these articles should consist of so that Google won't see them as weak/useless pages and possibly give us a Panda penalty for them?

In addition to Crimsons answer, you can also put a canonical tag on the preferred version of your homepage so that users will see both pages without being redirected but Google will understand that only one should be indexed.

A site dedicated to the Spanish Christmas raffle - which is quite popular in Spain but much less so in the rest of the world.

Since I am targeting non-Spanish players there is low competition for the keywords, but also less potential from them.  I am leaning towards putting off this project since I think a big part of my work will be besides ranking generating world interest in the raffle and convincing people of its importance.

I am thinking about launching a website connected to Christmas - which gives me less then 2 months to develop and begin ranking for the site.

Is this too short a timeframe and I should put off this plan until next year or can I actually begin ranking for low competitive keywords within my timeframe.

yes, thanks.

.co.uk is not available otherwise that would be my first choice

since it is not available is .uk a good alternative or does Google view it as questionable?

Thanks.  My question was less about the www and more if it is okay to have a URL that ends .uk instead of .co.uk which is the standard structure.

I have the following list of domains to choose from:

http://www.xxx.net/

http://www.xxx.uk/

www.es-xxx.com

Which of these domain structures seem the best, or are all 3 questionable?

Hi,

I am planning on setting up cross domain analytics for my website.  I have found lots of sources about the code to use, but haven't been able to find something about what parameters to consider.

Would appreciate my fellow mozzers helping me to put together a list of all the variations of elements I may want to track to ensure I am setting it up correctly.

Thanks!

Yep, just did a minute ago.

However, figured I would ask here also in an attempt for immediate gratification

Was an interesting thread about the services... but did I miss where it says whether they work in non-US countries (my question)?

I am planning on launching a local SEO campaign in RU, DE, UK, AU, SW, FR and ES... is using UBL and/or localelize worthwhile for me or are those US focused services?

I was under the impression that was an outdated list... no?

If I was going to submit to 5 directories where would you recommend?

Does anyone have any recommendations for press release distribution services in RU, DE, UK, DK, AU, ES and/or Hungary?

Thanks!

As a fellow SEOMozzer who doesn't work only in the US, having a list of press release services throughout the globe would be very helpful!

My specific markets are AU, UK, RU, DE, FR and ES

Why not try Fiverr?

For $5 you can buy +1s, shares, retweets, etc....  Just beware, as you probably know from the intro of your questions - these are likely to look good in terms of numbers (so potentially helpful for your branding) but are pretty worthless for anything else.

Thanks.

That is very helpful. I have 3 different types of links from the main site to the subsite.  2 of them are addressed in the article but the third is not.  Do you have any suggestions?

1. Links from the menu on the main site to subsites ==> We need to add the  onclick="_gaq.push(['_link', ... to enable the cross site tracking.
2. Play picking during play confirm ==> We need to add onsubmit="_gaq.push(['_linkByPost', this]);" to our postback on the page.
3. Play picking using 302 redirect when the play.aspx request page is loads ==> Here it's not clear what we should do to handle the cross site tracking when a user is moved from site to site using an http redirect.  (The 302 redirect is being implemented because for business reasons we need to redirect users to different sites based on their location and we don't want Google to think we are being manipulative)

I currently have one main .com site and am planning on launching geo-location subsites .co.uk, .com.au, .ru, etc...

Traffic will flow between both sites and some of the content on the subsites will be duplicate and therefore include a canonical tag to the main site.

I want to set up GA to capture who is going to the subsites and vice versa and correctly capture crossover traffic.  Any advice on implementing advanced analytics directly (or links to sources that will direct me the right direction for this project)

The purpose is to expand our brand to promote different services in different geographic areas.  There will be ~7-10.

I am planning on launching white label sites for my company.

Obviously they will have unique/valuable content.

Is it important for them to have unique IP addresses and/or design templates?

If yes - why?

Do you think it would be important for the 3 sites to use unique templates/ip addresses?

Thanks. All the Russian employees at my company have asserted Google is barely used but it certainly makes my life easier if they are wrong!

Doe anyone have an email address I can use to contact Google Ireland?

One of my competitors posts ads in Australia and I want to see if they would let us also (I work in one of those industries where Google doesn't normally allow PPC)

Thanks!

I was looking through the pages indexed by Google (with site:www.mywebsite.com) and one of the results was a page with "noindex, follow" in the code that seems to be a page generated by blog searches.

Any ideas why it seems to be indexed or how to de-index it?

Does anyone have suggestions for a better RU keyword tool than Yandex and/or is there a way to see exact searches in Yandex's keyword tool?

It seems like the data is not at all accurate.  For example - we are ranked #2 for a keyword which has over 40,000 monthly searches (searches according to Yandex keyword tool and position confirmed with someone doing a manual search in Russia).

However, we are not getting any traffic for this keyword and according to Yandex webmaster tools the keyword only got 10 impressions this past month.

Any ideas for me... or would using Google be preferable eventhough people in Russia don't really use Google?

Is it possible to change RankTrackers settings to see if my keywords are in the top 500 spots instead of only the top 50?

Hi,

Thanks for the detailed answer.

We have many duplicate pages, but they all have canonical tags on them... shouldn't that be solving the problem.  Would pages with the canonical tag be showing up here?

My site was penalized for specific pages in the UK On July 28 (corresponding with a Panda update).

I cleaned up my website and wrote to Google and they responded that "no manual spam actions had been taken".

The only other thing I can think of is that we suffered an automatic penalty.

I am having problems with my sitemap and it is indexing many error pages, empty pages, etc... According to our index status we have 2,679,794 not selected pages and 36,168 total indexed.

Could this have been what caused the error?

(If you have any articles to back up your answers that would be greatly appreciate)

Thanks!

any kind of time estimate for when we should be re-crawled?