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Are those main category pages (like /collections/living-room-furniture) or are they different?
Hi,
I noticed you have your own CDN like domain on dq1.me which has multiple sub-domains. On some of the articles I looked at there were images being used on the page being pulled in from various sub-domains of the dq1.me domain. Furthermore, some of your tags such as og:image were using the same images but on the primary www.careeraddict.com domain.
I'd suggest you try to sort this confusion out, and have a canonical image URL that is used everywhere across the site. I imagine there are many confusing signals for Google with there being 2-4 URLs per image which are potentially all being used in different places.
Good luck!
-Tom
seoelevated is correct.
Reference example from Google here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en
Hi,
What happens when using HTTP? Are you able to share the .htaccess code?
The same .htaccess setup should work for for both protocols, but with .htaccess the devil can be in the details sometimes. A good tool for testing it is here: https://htaccess.madewithlove.be/
Do other redirects from HTTP to HTTPS work ok? I'm wondering whether your Apache setup perhaps has a different virtual host setup for HTTP and thus a different .htaccess file.
Best,
Tom
Hi Dana,
Expires headers and other caching headers can help improve site performance (as you said), and that will be a good thing for SEO. There is no reason to be concerned - they are common headers and there isn't much they could do to have any negative impact on SEO.
Good luck!
Tom
Hi there!
Ok, it is difficult to know all the ins and outs without looking at the site, but the immediate issue is that your robots.txt setup is incorrect. robots.txt files should be one per subdomain, and cannot exist inside sub-folders:
A **robots.txt **file is a file at the root of your site that indicates those parts of your site you don’t want accessed by search engine crawlers
From Google's page here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6062608?hl=en
You shouldn't be blocking Google from either site, and attempting to do so may be the problem with why your hreflang directives are not being detected. You should move to having a single robots.txt file located at https://www.clientname.com/robots.txt, with a link to a single sitemap index file. That sitemap index file should then link to each of your two UK & US sitemap files.
You should ensure you have hreflang directives for every page. Hopefully after these changes you will see things start to get better. Good luck!
Hey NeatIT!
I see you have a working solution there. Did you have a specific question about the setup?
I did notice that your setup cane sometimes result in chaining 301 redirects, which is one area for possible improvement.
Let me know how we can help! 
If you configure the reverse proxy (and redirect traffic going direct to the true hosting [x domain] to the sub-folder on the [y domain]) then it will absolutely be counted as part of the main domain as if it was really just in the sub-folder.
If I have understood it correctly, you want:
If so I think this should probably do what you want:
RewriteRule ^$ - [L]
RewriteRule categoryA/ http://www.newdomain.com/newcategoryA/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule (.+) http://www.newdomain.com/ [R=301,L]
The first rule says "if this is the homepage stop evaluating rules". The second maps a category page over to the new version and stops evaluating rules; you'll need to duplicate this one for all the specific categories. The last rule is your catch-all rule for redirecting everything else to the homepage of the new domain.
If you want to easily test/check then I highly recommend this .htaccess checker tool.
Good luck!
If you have many URLs from the old site in the index that are all in the same directory (or a handful of directories) you can quickly and easily remove whole directories of URLs from the index via Google Search Console. We have found it to work very quickly.
Go into Search Console, selected ‘Remove URLs’ under ‘Google Index’ in the left hand menu.
Add the page or folder you want to remove, and click next. If you add the homepage, that's the same as all pages on the site. If you add a folder you'll get three options under the ‘Reason’ drop down.
One of those options is ‘Remove directory’. Select that.
...... it depends!
It depends on the industry you are targeting, the quality of your link requests (personalised, relevant etc.), how many sites you are targeting and their status in the industry, what the other players are doing and probably lots of other things...
I would be really hesitant to put a number on it, because it is depending on all these things. However, if you are writing personalised requests to relevant sites, and are offering some value to those you are requesting links from, then I'd say 1 in every 2 or 3 is a good hit rate to aim for initially if you want a target.
Great question!
Firstly - unfortunately, Steve's suggestion isn't going to be viable for you. The # portion of the URL is not available to your code server-side, so you won't be able to determine where the rel canonical should point.
Furthermore, if they are committed to keeping the flash for now, and all as a single unit so one URL (the homepage), then you are going to have to accept that some juice intended for subpages is going to go to the homepage. You cannot do anything about that aspect, so you need to focus on the rest of the problem. However, whilst far from ideal, at least the juice is hitting the site somehow.
So… what to do?
Firstly, I'd start getting into the mindset of thinking in terms of the HTML site as the main/canonical site, and the Flash site as the 'enhanced experience' version. In this way, the HTML version is going to be the version that should be crawled by Google, and should be linked to.
Actions:
Is this cloaking? No! The HTML version is the main version, remember? It's no more cloaking than if you detected the user agent and then chose to serve the Flash version to Googlebot.
I actually discussed this with Jane Copeland at the fantastic Distilled link building event a couple of weeks back, and she agreed with me and said if it would stand up to a manual inspection then it is the right course of action.
Get all links in articles, press releases, directories or whatever else that are linking to specific pages and are originating from in house (or any source you have control over) to link to the HTML pages.
If the user arrives, has Flash and has arrived to an HTML link, you can now redirect to the Flash link for that page so they get the 'enhanced experience'. Don't use a 301 redirect -- remember the HTML version is the main version!
If the user arrives via a Flash link, but doesn't have Flash, but does have javascript you can detect the # variable and redirect them to the HTML page to help them along.
Educate the relevant stakeholders regarding point 2. I see you have a 'flashmode=0' option, tell them about this and how to use it get the URLs they need.
So where does this leave us?
The search engines can crawl all your lovely content, and they can ignore the flash version completely.
You are getting inbound links to specific pages. These pages have their own titles and meta descriptions… and content! Because they are the real site!
Users with Flash arriving via these links are landing on the correct Flash page of the site and are experiencing the rich site that you want them to.
Users arriving without Flash are getting the correct page if they arrive via an HTML URL. If they arrive via a Flash url then they get the correct page if they have javascript on (e.g iPad users), or they get the fallback of the homepage (rare).
I had a client with an almost identical situation, and I rolled out an almost identical solution to this, and they got crawled very quickly, shot up in Google and have stayed there for months.
Hope it helps. Let us know how you get on!
Hi Asif!
Firstly - I'd suggest that as soon as possible you address the core problem - the use of session ids in the URL. There are not many upsides to the approach and there are many downsides.That it doesn't show up with the site: command doesn't mean it isn't having a negative impact.
In the meantime, you should add a rel=canonical tag to all the offending pages pointing to the URL without the session id. Secondly, you could use robots.txt to block the SEOmoz bot from crawling pages with session ids, but it may affect the bots ability to crawl the site if all the links it is presented with are with session ids - which takes us back around to fixing the core problem.
Hope this helps a little!
I'm not sure if anyone has any solid data on this, and even if they did I think it would be so conditioned on many other factors that it wouldn't be much help.
The pro's of allowing dofollow links from commenters on your blog is obviously that it encourages people to get involved, and maybe they stick around and become part of the community. The downside is the spammers who will invade!
You can argue both sides...
If people are going to bother to comment with good quality comments which are useful to building a community, and for they themselves to be persuaded to stick around is going to require that you are creating great content. If the content is crappy then people won't bother crafting great replies. So if the quality is crappy and you allow dofollow then you'll get (other than the spammers...) people who are maybe nice but aren't really interested in your community, they just want a link.
if the content is great then do you need the dofollow to persuade people to comment?
On the flipside, if the content is pretty good maybe a dofollow link helps to push people over the edge and make them bother to write the comment... If the community is small you should be able to manage the spam.
At the end of the day - I think you need to test in your niche and see what happens... Good luck!
Hi!
There shouldn't really be a necessity to mix rel=canonical with meta noindex; the rel=canonical would take care of it without sending mixed signals to Google.
For your scenario, how to treat the paginated pages depends on whether they are the only/best way to discover the products listed on those pages. If they are, then noindex, follow probably makes sense. I think it would likely be the best answer.
Good luck!
I would say a bit of both. It is fine to repeat your primary keyword phrase several times on the page; the number of times depends upon the amount of content. SEOmoz's On Page tool recommends 4 repetitions. However, you should also try to use some synonyms and secondary target keyword phrases also.
A good resource I saw posted today which might be of interest:
If I have understood it correctly, you want:
If so I think this should probably do what you want:
RewriteRule ^$ - [L]
RewriteRule categoryA/ http://www.newdomain.com/newcategoryA/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule (.+) http://www.newdomain.com/ [R=301,L]
The first rule says "if this is the homepage stop evaluating rules". The second maps a category page over to the new version and stops evaluating rules; you'll need to duplicate this one for all the specific categories. The last rule is your catch-all rule for redirecting everything else to the homepage of the new domain.
If you want to easily test/check then I highly recommend this .htaccess checker tool.
Good luck!
Hi Stephon,
At $99, the monthly cost of the SEOmoz pro membership would be insanely cheap if it actually performed automated SEO.
However, if you are running a business that benefits from an easily discoverable website (almost any business!), and you've not yet performed any SEO then there is almost certainly going to be a very high ROI on doing so.
If your budget doesn't reach to hiring an SEO company, then you could consider learning the basics yourself. The book "The Art of SEO", combined with the tools on offer at SEOmoz could get you doing the basics yourself quite quickly, and if you stuck at it you could move on to the advanced stuff.
Otherwise, there are many great SEO companies out there, but be sure to do thorough homework before you go for it with anyone.
Best of luck!
Hi there!
Ok, it is difficult to know all the ins and outs without looking at the site, but the immediate issue is that your robots.txt setup is incorrect. robots.txt files should be one per subdomain, and cannot exist inside sub-folders:
A **robots.txt **file is a file at the root of your site that indicates those parts of your site you don’t want accessed by search engine crawlers
From Google's page here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6062608?hl=en
You shouldn't be blocking Google from either site, and attempting to do so may be the problem with why your hreflang directives are not being detected. You should move to having a single robots.txt file located at https://www.clientname.com/robots.txt, with a link to a single sitemap index file. That sitemap index file should then link to each of your two UK & US sitemap files.
You should ensure you have hreflang directives for every page. Hopefully after these changes you will see things start to get better. Good luck!
Ok, cool. To reiterate - with escaped_fragment you are just serving the same content in a tweaked format and Google recommend it rather than frown upon it. Good to be sure though.
See you at SearchLove!
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