Thanks Everett - Just popping across to Stack Overflow now!

Hi Ria,

The place falls under the multiple practitioners - single location scenario.

Multi-Practitioner Practices For practices with multiple public-facing doctors, it is acceptable to create local pages for each doctor, in addition to the practice’s local page. If this is the case, do not include your business name in the name of the practitioners’ pages. And try to differentiate between these pages with either a different phone number or suite number for each doctor, when possible. - See more at: http://www.searchinfluence.com/2016/04/google-my-business-for-doctors-visibility-authority-seo/#sthash.mRhgvMae.dpuf

According to Mike Blumenthals' site - the Google instructions for this have vanished! so you can get his take on the same thing here.

"

Individual practitioners (e.g. doctors, lawyers, real estate agents)

An individual practitioner is a public-facing professional, typically with his or her own customer base. Doctors, dentists, lawyers, financial planners, and insurance or real estate agents are all individual practitioners. Pages for practitioners may include title or degree certification (e.g. Dr., MD, JD, Esq., CFA).

An individual practitioner should create his or her own dedicated page if:

• He or she operates in a public-facing role. Support staff should not create their own pages.
• He or she is directly contactable at the verified location during stated hours.

A practitioner should not have multiple pages to cover all of his or her specializations."

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2016/04/10/google-my-business-guidelines-mia/

Hopefully that'll help you deal with your client more confidently

Ray pp Tom.

Redirection Puzzle - it's got me puzzled anyhow!

The finished website has just been converted from an old aspx affair to a wordpress site. Some directory structures have changed significantly; there appears to be a load of older medical articles that have not been added back in and it sounds unlikely that they will be. Therefore unmatched old news articles need to be pointed to the top news page to keep hold of any link value they may have accrued.

The htaccess file starts with ithemes security's code, Followed by the main wordpress block and I have added the user redirects to the final section of the htaccess file . I have been through the redirects and rewrites line by line to verify them and the following sections are giving me problems. This is probably just my aging brain failing to grasp basic logic.

If I can tap into anybody's wisdom for a bit of help I would appreciate it. My eyes and brain are gone to jelly.

I have used htaccesscheck.com to check out the underlying syntax and ironed out the basic errors that I had previously missed. The bulk of the redirects are working correctly.

#Here there are some very long media URLs which are absent on the new site and I am simply redirecting visiting spiders to the page that will hold media in future. Media items refuse to redirect
Line 408 redirect 301 /Professionals/Biomedicalforum/Recordedfora/Rich%20Media%20http:/kplayer.kcl.ac.uk/ess/echo/presentation/15885525-ff02-4ab2-b0b9-9ba9d97ca266 http://www.SITENAME.ac.uk/biomedical-forum/recorded-fora/

Line 409 redirect 301 /Professionals/Biomedicalforum/Recordedfora/Quicktime%20http:/kplayer.kcl.ac.uk/ess/echo/presentation/15885525-ff02-4ab2-b0b9-9ba9d97ca266/media.m4v http://www.SITENAME.ac.uk/biomedical-forum/recorded-fora/

Line 410 redirect 301 /Professionals/Biomedicalforum/Recordedfora/Mp3%20http:/kplayer.kcl.ac.uk/ess/echo/presentation/15885525-ff02-4ab2-b0b9-9ba9d97ca266/media.mp3 http://www.SITENAME.ac.uk/biomedical-forum/recorded-fora/

#Old site pagination URLs redirected to new "news" top level page - Here I am simply pointing all the pagination URLs for the news section, that were indexed, to the main news page. These work but append the pagination code on to the new visible URL. Have I got the syntax correct in this version of the lines to suppress the appended garbage?

RewriteRule ^/LatestNews.aspx(?:.*) http://www.SITENAME.ac.uk/news-events/latest-news/? [R=301,L]

#On the old site many news directories (blog effectively) contained articles  that are unmatched on the new site, have been redirected to new top level news (blog) page: In this section I became confused about whether to use Redirect Match or RewriteRule to point the articles in each year directory back to the top level news page. When I have added a redirectmatch command - it has been disabling the whole site! Despite my syntax check telling me it is syntactically correct. Currently I'm getting a 404 for any of the old URLs in these year by year directories, instead of a successful redirect. I suspect Regex lingo is not clicking for me My logic here was rewrite any aspx file in the directory to the latest news page at the top. This is my latest attempt to rectify the fault. Am I nearer with my syntax or my logic? The actual URLs and paths have been substituted, but the structure is the same).

So what I believe I have set up is: in an earlier section; News posts that have been recreated in the new site are redirected 1 - 1 and they are working successfully. If a matching URL is not found, when the parsing of the file reaches the line for the 1934 directory it should read any remaining .aspx URL request and rewrite it to the latest news page as a 301 and stop processing this block of commands. The subsequent commands in this block repeat the process for the other year groups of posts. Clearly I am failing to comprehend something and illumination would be gratefully received.

RewriteRule ^/Blab/Blabbitall/1934/(.*).aspx http://www.SITENAME.ac.uk/news-events/latest-news/ [R=301,L]

#------Old site 1933 unmatched articles redirected to new news top level page

RewriteRule ^/Blab/Blabbitall/1933/(.*).aspx http://www.SITENAME.ac.uk/news-events/latest-news/ [R=301,L]

#------Old site 1932 unmatched articles redirected to new news top level page

RewriteRule ^/Blab/Blabbitall/1932/(.*)/.aspx http://www.SITENAME.ac.uk/news-events/latest-news/ [R=301,L]

#------Old site 1931 unmatched articles redirected to new news top level page

RewriteRule ^/Blab/Blabbitall/1931/(.*)/.aspx http://www.SITENAME.ac.uk/news-events/latest-news/ [R=301,L]

#------Old site 1930 unmatched articles redirected to new news top level page

RewriteRule ^/Blab/Blabbitall/1930/(.*)/.aspx http://www.SITENAME.ac.uk/news-events/latest-news/ [R=301,L]

Many thanks if anyone can help me understand the logic at work here.

Hi,

This is an interesting question and I was just looking it up a few days ago.

Answers to your questions:

1. Yes, google can and does read ampersands and plusses and does show slightly different results depending on which you use.

2. Maybe, if you check the SERPs for ‘black & white football’ and ‘black + white football’ are they different? When I took a quick look they were different - so once your ‘black & white football’ page starts ranking, check SERPs for ‘black + white football’ – you may be in the same place for this keyword, or you may be much lower. If you’re at the same position there’s no need to optimise another page, if you’re lower then maybe you should create a page. Be sure to check search volumes first though, there’s no reason to spend time creating a unique and optimised page for the keyword using a plus instead of an ampersand if nobody is searching for it.

3. Yes they notice and treat each one slightly differently. Take these 3 example searches for ‘design and branding’:

   https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=design+and+branding&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&ip=0.0.0.0&pws=0&uule=w+CAIQICIA&gws_rd=ssl

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=design+%26+branding&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF- 8&ip=0.0.0.0&pws=0&uule=w+CAIQICIA&gws_rd=ssl

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=design+%2B+branding&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&ip=0.0.0.0&pws=0&uule=w+CAIQICIA&gws_rd=ssl

We’re seeing a lot of the same domains showing up - with a lot of the same pages - but in different positions as well as some sites sneaking onto page one for one term, and halfway down page 2 for another. Take www.steve-edge.com – currently at 7^th for ‘design & branding’, 16^th for ‘design and branding’ and 20^th for ‘design + branding’.

So there’s the answer - yes Google can understand plus signs and ampersands, and yes they do treat each query slightly differently. You may be found at the same position for all variations, you may see fluctuations between each SERP, but what’s most important is checking to see if people are actually searching those terms with plus signs or ampersands before going to make the page - because there’s no point creating and optimising a page that nobody is looking for when the page they are looking for is being found fine.

Hope that helps!

Tom

Hi,

Sounds like you’ve taken on a massive job with 12.5 million pages, but I think you can implement a simple fix to get things started.

You’re right to think about that sitemap, make sure it’s being dynamically updated as the data refreshes, otherwise that will be responsible for a lot of your 404s.

I understand you don’t want to add 2.3 million separate redirects to your htaccess, so what about a simple rule - if the request starts with ^/listing/ (one of your directory pages), is not a file and is not a dir, then redirect back to the homepage. Something like this:

does the request start with /listing/ or whatever structure you are using

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/listing/ [nc]

is it NOT a file and NOT a dir

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
#all true? Redirect
RewriteRule .* / [L,R=301]

This way you can specify a certain URL structure for the pages which tend to turn to 404s, any 404s outside of your first rule will still serve a 404 code and show your 404 page and you can manually fix these problems, but the pages which tend to disappear can all be redirected back to the homepage if they’re not found.

You could still implement your 301s for important pages or simply recreate the page if it’s worth doing so, but you will have dealt with a large chunk or your non-existing pages.

I think it’s a big job and those missing pages are only part of it, but it should help you to sift through all of the data to get to the important bits – you can mark a lot of URLs as fixed and start giving your attention to the important pages which need some works.

Hope that helps,

Tom

Hi there,

You can use separate sitemaps along with a sitemap index but when you use you hreflang annotations you must specify all alternates for the URL. or they may not be understood correctly. You’re fine to use a sitemap for all of your content which you don’t wish to add the hreflang tags to, and another for the URLs with hreflang tags.

Just remember to specify every version of each page you mention in your hreflang sitemap along with a <loc>entry all wrapped in a <url>tag:</url></loc>

<url><loc>http://example.com</loc>
<xhtml:link rel="”alternate”" hreflang="”x-default”" href="”http://example.com”">//for users with no version specified
<xhtml:link rel="”alternate”" hreflang="”en”" href="”<a">http://example.com” /> //for English users in any country
<xhtml:link rel="”alternate”" hreflang="”en-us”" href="”<a">http://example.com” /> //us english
<xhtml:link rel="”alternate”" hreflang="”en-gb”" href="”<a">http://example.co.uk” /> //uk english
<xhtml:link rel="”alternate”" hreflang="”it-it”" href="”<a">http://example.it” /> //Italian users in Italy
<xhtml:link rel="”alternate”" hreflang="”it”" href="”<a">http://it.example.com” /> //Italian users anywhere</xhtml:link></xhtml:link></xhtml:link></xhtml:link></xhtml:link></xhtml:link></url>

You cannot have one sitemap for hreflang=”en” and another for hreflang=”it” but you can use a separate sitemap on example.it specifying static pages on that domain:

<loc>example.it <loc><loc>example.it/page2</loc></loc></loc>

Your hreflang sitemap on example.it would have the same hreflang tags as the .com, but with the Italian domain specified in <loc>:</loc>

<url><loc>http://example.it</loc>
<xhtml:link rel="”alternate”" hreflang="”x-default”" href="”<a">http://example.com” /> //for users with no version specified
<xhtml:link rel="”alternate”" hreflang="”en”" href="”<a">http://example.com” /> //for English users in any country
<xhtml:link rel="”alternate”" hreflang="”en-us”" href="”<a">http://example.com” /> //us english
<xhtml:link rel="”alternate”" hreflang="”en-gb”" href="”<a">http://example.co.uk” /> //uk english
<xhtml:link rel="”alternate”" hreflang="”it-it”" href="”<a">http://example.it” /> //Italian users in Italy
<xhtml:link rel="”alternate”" hreflang="”it”" href="”<a">http://it.example.com” /> //Italian users anywhere else</xhtml:link></xhtml:link></xhtml:link></xhtml:link></xhtml:link></xhtml:link></url>

So, each domain would need its own ‘sitemap 1’ (the hreflang sitemap) and its own sitemap 2 specifying the pages which weren’t in the hreflang sitemap, and its own sitemap index pointing to both sitemaps. Unless you verify both properties under the same WMT account, then you could use a sitemap containing every <loc>from all different sites, along with all their international variations, and reference that 1 international sitemap in your sitemap index for every site – this post will explain multiple domains: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/75712</loc>

This webmaster help pages explains about sitemap hreflang implementation: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2620865?hl=en

Hope that helps,

Tom

Hi,

Yes this will work if you’re on a new domain, a subdomain, or even just in a folder on the existing domain.

As long as the URLs you were using aren’t being used for the parent companies' content you can redirect them all back to your subdomain with the method above.

Hope that helps,

Tom

Hi there,

You’d redirect just the same as redirecting an entire site, except only create rules for the pages you used to own. Mirror your old content on your new site (if you can use the same URIs that would make things easier) and then write a series of rules to redirect only your content.

If your URIs are staying the same you could do something like:

RedirectCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/your-old-content/$ [NC,OR]
RedirectCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/folder/your other content$ [NC,OR]
RedirectCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/mynews/.* [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newsite.com/$1 [R=301,L]

You could use regex to match lots of your URLs at once, but you’d need to be careful not to redirect the new owners pages too. When I redirect an entire site I always create a final rule which says anything else? Send it to the homepage like this:

RedirectRule .* http://www.newsite.com/ [R=301,L]

But this time you would leave that off, as any requests not caught by your rewrite condition will belong to the new owner and go to where they’re intended on the old site.

Hope that helps explain things,

Tom

Hi there,

If you don’t want these pages to appear in the index then yes, noindex follow would be the best directive to ensure any link juice still flows through them pages into other indexed pages, such as your blog posts found on those pages etc.

The harm of using noindex is when you are actually bringing in organic traffic through those pages, so have a look in analytics before you start noindexing. Take a look at organic traffic where your paged pages are the landing page – you could use a filter for something like page/ or page/[0-9]+ (or however your urls are structured for pagination) to look at all of these pages.

If those pages are bringing in organic traffic, why not optimise your metas and encourage even more users onto those pages? If they aren’t getting any entrances from search, you’re safe to do whichever you prefer - you could noidex,follow them to drop them from the index and keep the PR flowing.

Those pages aren’t harming you so you’re safe to leave them if you’re unsure, but always check entrances from search before you drop ANY page from the index. That way you can be sure you won’t lose any of your traffic.

Hope that helps,

Tom

Hi there,

You’re fine to have your product description quoting the text around the side of the product, but if you were to change it to something like this without quotes:

The words around the edge of the lazy susan read: Explore nature. Dream big. Take time to smell the flowers. Enjoy the changing seasons. Seize the day. Relish the night. Live life to the fullest.

…that would have the exact same SEO value as the existing description. Quotes are only counted as exact match keywords when searching in Google (and most other search engines), but don’t actually affect the way the page is seen by Google. The same way that using bold and italics to emphasise your keywords would not directly influence rank (but make your content more easily digestible, earning it more links and indirectly affecting rank), your quotes are also used to enhance human readability – but either would be fine.

Take a real world example: I pulled a page from my history which included a quote, “favor composition over inheritance” - (http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/65179/where-does-this-concept-of-favor-composition-over-inheritance-come-from)

Take a look at the screenshot I took below (from an unclean browser, sorry) – or you can run a search yourself – and we still see Wikipedia at the top, with its DA 100 (and no quotes); we see stackoverflow rising above stackexchange, with a higher DA; one result has more links than the stackexchange page, one has fewer. But they still perform better.

The stackexchange page with 5 counts of “favor composition over inheritance" (with quotes) is still outranked by the others.

• The 3^rd result uses the keyword 6 times, twice in quotes.
• The 2^nd result uses the keyword once without quotes.
• The 1^st Wikipedia result uses the term once without quotes and still ranks #1 due to its other (better) metrics.

There are a number of factors which could affect the position of these pages for this keyword, such as anchor text for links to those pages, partial match keywords in the text and other ranking factors which I did not look into – but hopefully it will give you a real example of quotation marks not directly affecting the value of a keyword in Google’s eyes.

Write the descriptions the way you that sounds best to you – and optimise them for human readability, as quotes versus no quotes doesn’t make much of a difference.

Hope that helps,

Tom

QfVCYKH.png

Hi,

You are correct in thinking the hreflang tag should be different on each page, pointing to the different versions of that page, not the homepage.

Unless you feel like manually coding each page you could use php and $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] or js and window.location.pathname to get the current page path and append that to your domain in the hreflang tag in your head?

Or if that seems like a lot of work you can specify your alternate URLs for each language through a sitemap like this:

<loc>http://www.example.com/></loc>

<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="es" href="<a href=" http:="" spanish.example.com="" "="">http://spanish.example.com/</xhtml:link>" />

<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="<a href=" http:="" www.example.com="" "="">http://www.example.com/" /></xhtml:link>

<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="<a href=" http:="" www.example.com="" "="">http://www.example.com/" /></xhtml:link>

There’s a good post here on the 3 different ways to implement your hreflang tags, per page, in a sitemap and in the http header here: http://www.branded3.com/blogs/implementing-hreflang-tag/

Hope that helps,

Tom

Hi,

To answer your first question, using hreflang tags in your sitemaps is a perfectly fine implementation of the tags, they will work whether they’re coded into the of each page, set in the sitemap or set in HTTP headers. This page will be useful for you as it explains all three methods quite well: http://www.branded3.com/blogs/implementing-hreflang-tag/

But when you add them to your sitemap you should include all variations of the page, along with a default – so if a French or German searcher accesses your site, you can define whether they’ll be served the Spanish or English page, like this:

<loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>

To answer your second question about countries, you are fine to use hreflang=”es” to define all Spanish traffic, but using country codes can be useful in some circumstances. For instance if you have a site talking about football, you could use hreflang=”en-us” for a page which refers to the game as ‘soccer’ and use hreflang=”en-gb” for the page calling it ‘football’.

This Google Webmaster support post explains using both quite well under ‘Supported language values’ which I recommend you take a look at as well: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

Hope that helps,

Tom

Hi,

If you have manually set up your geo redirect in your htaccess then you could modify your rules to redirect only if not Moz’s crawler (rogerbot) like this:

uk redirect

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !=rogerbot

RewriteCond %{ENV:GEOIP_COUNTRY_CODE} ^GB$

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://uk.abcd.com$1 [L]

Which means both conditions must be satisfied before the redirect happens, the user agent must not be rogerbot, and then it checks the country code. You may have to adjust it a bit depending on your setup but it’s just the same as adding an exception based on IP, so if you could already do that you can set up a user agent condition just as easily.

If you’re using PHP you could use $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] wrap your geoip function with something like:

if($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] != 'rogerbot' ){

You will have to check if it is not empty before you implement it (or work it into your code) as some servers have $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] as not set.

Thanks, hope that gives you a few ideas to try!

Tom

Hi,

If you want to add a sort of meta description template then you'll have to use a plugin, or use some php to create your meta description in the head. Like using your page title and category - "We've got all the news on category, read post title on website name"

But what actually happens in SERPs when you have no description is the section of your page which contains the keyword is used as the description, giving you another eye-catching bolded keyword. Will those uniform meta descriptions templates help your click through rate as much as a bolded keyword, which you know the searcher has typed into the search bar? Probably not.

You should focus your efforts on your highest performing pages and add unique meta descriptions enticing searchers to click through to your site, working your way through to pages which perform less well. Try using a spider such as Screaming Frog to crawl your site and show you the titles and descriptions of all your pages together. It has a nice little tool built in to preview what your page would look like in Google SERPs, and you can get a feel for what a searcher will see.

Hope that helps,

Tom

Hi there,Because an anchor is a location on the same page, Google treats this as being the same page. This means all that link juice will be attributed to the original url.Your orphan page idea does sound like the best way to direct the flow of link juice to where you want it to be, or you could use your landing page as you said and let the pagerank flow naturally through your site via your menus and internal linking.But, if your landing page is performing well you may want to leave it as is so your scholarship information at the bottom of the page isn't stealing attention away from your call to action. This could then reduce your conversions from your best page.Each situation is different, but you're probably better off using a page specifically for this information. If you don't need it in the future, you could just 301 those lovely edu links to any page you liked.Hope this helps,Tom

Hi there,

Missing meta descriptions mean your pages do not include the meta description tag, or it's empty. Depending on which CMS you’re using you could find a plugin to help you quickly add titles and descriptions to pages. If you’re using wordpress as many people are then Yoast will be your best bet, as it’s bulk title and description editor will let you quickly fix these issues: https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/seo/

You will be able to find plugins for different content management systems which do the same thing with a quick Google.

If your site is made up of static pages you’ll need to add a unique meta description to each page, remembering it should be below 160 characters to fit neatly underneath your page title in SERPs, like this:

http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo

http://searchengineland.com/nine-best-practices-for-optimized-title-tags-111979

Hope that helps,

Tom

Hi Cindyt,

When I try to access that example URL I get a 404 on rock-n-roll-action-figures.com, which leads me to believe you still haven’t fixed your redirection issue. If you’re using an Apache server you can redirect page for page with these few lines in your .htaccess:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !newdomain.com$ [NC]

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

The only difference between this and what Ray described was happening on Tuesday, is that it captures the entire path that is being requested with ^(.*)$ and appends it to the end of the new domain with the $1 – which is the reference for our first (1) captured group (the brackets). Very simple to implement.

Remember the rules are executed top to bottom in your .htaccess, so if some page URLs have changed and need to be redirected individually you should add them before your ‘everything’ rule.

Hope this helps,

Tom

Hi,

Google is quite clever at distinguishing what your code does and since you can search for the sentence inside the hidden element and find the page, it is being indexed.

What you’re seeing in the Google cache is what a user without javascript enabled would see, so it’s personal choice if you think this is a problem for your site or not. But if Google thinks your site has poor usability for non-js browsers your rankings may be impacted.

There are a few things you could do if you wanted to fix this:

1. Remove the hide class from your code and have javascript add this class so only users with javascript enabled will have the content hidden from them, leaving it visible to crawlers and in your text-only cache.

2. Google recommends using

<noscript>tags to display content that is dynamically added by javascript. I know your js is not adding the content, just displaying it, but it will have the same effect in the text-only cache – your content will be visible both with and without javascript enabled.</p> <p>Hope this helps,</p> <p>Tom</p> <p> </p> <p> </p></noscript>

Hi,

For starters you could use the ‘Fetch as Google’ option in Webmasters Tools and see what your page looks like to search engines, or use a tool like browseo.net to do the same thing. Or you could make sure the page is indexable and link to it from somewhere and do a search for “one of your hidden text strings” (in quotes) to see if that content has been crawled and indexed.

If you can’t see your content then you may have a problem, and as crawlers can distinguish between hidden and nothidden text it may be more than just blocking your content from helping you rank. It might actually look like you’re trying to stuff keywords into your content without showing them to the user.

I think the easiest and simplest fix would be to remove the class which makes these elements invisible, and dynamically add that class with a little bit of jQuery just for users with scripts enabled:

This way when a crawler (or a user with javascript disabled) visits your site they will be served the page with the content visible, with it only being hidden if the visitor is accessing the site with javascript enabled.

Hope this helps,

Tom

Hi,

That line of htaccess says:

If the host is legacytravel.com OR www.legacytravel.com, then lets try this rule below.

One conditions will always be true since the htaccess is on your site. So they cancel each other out, and are not needed.

The rule says if the URI matches the regular expression '^carrollton-travel-agent$' then redirect (r=301) to the target URL and stop processing rules (L flag for last)

Your RewriteRule target doesn't need characters escaping because it is not a regular expression, just a URL to redirect to. You also don't need the quotes, they're useful for grouping arguments with spaces in them but that's not affecting it.

Really this rewriterule doesn't accomplish anything, it redirects /carrollton-travel-agent to /carrollton-travel-agent, forcing the www. no matter which version is accessed. But if that is what you're wishing to achieve then there's a much simpler solution:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.legacytravel.com$ [NC]

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.legacytravel.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Notice we only use the \backslash to escape characters in regex patterns, and not in our target URL. What that rule will do is redirect any visitor where the host is missing the www to the equivalent page with the preceding www.

Hope that helps.

Hi,

Since an iframe is just a window into your site, it cannot harm your site and it doesn’t put you in a spammy neighbourhood as all of the links to your page are from within your own site.

It will be registering views and visits on your analytics too, so you’re still getting some extra traffic. If you feel this Iranian traffic is unwanted, not converting or are simply just annoyed that this site is using your content as their own, you can actually block iframe calls quite easily.

There are a couple of things you could do:

.htaccess

Simply add this line to enable iframe calls from your own domain, but block them from external sites:

Header always append X-Frame-Options SAMEORIGIN

Or disable iframe calls entirely with:

Header set X-Frame-Options DENY

These directives will only work if you have enabled mod_headers in apache.

Another way to deal with it would be to use a javascript redirect when the top url does not match the page URL like this:

if(top != self) { top.location = self.location; }

Hope this helps,

Tom

Hi Jamie,

If you don’t need the http version accessible and want to force the https you could simply redirect all traffic to the secure site with a 301, transferring all your pagerank to the main site.

If you need both versions of the site accessible, for instance if you only needed https for logged in users, and you only want one version to appear in SERPs the best thing would be to use a canonical tag to consolidate all that SEO juice into the version you wish to rank.

If there’s only a few secure pages with links to other non-secure pages then meta robots noindex,follow would work well, since the SEO juice will flow through those noindexed page and into the rest of your site, but if the whole site is duplicated on both versions this could be a big mistake.

No-indexing an entire https version would be a bad move even if you were using noindex,follow since your internal linking will be to the secure pages. Even though pagerank will be passed through those pages it will eventually come to a dead end or leave through an external links. With the canonical tag, any links pointing to your secure version will pass their SEO juice to the non-secure site, rather than be lost in the noindexed site where it has nowhere to go.

Have a little read of this interview with Matt Cutts a few years back for further clarification, it’s got a good quote about how PR flows through noindexed, followed pages: http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-matt-cutts.shtml

Matt Cutts: A NoIndex page can accumulate PageRank, because the links are still followed outwards from a NoIndex page.

Eric Enge: So, it can accumulate and pass PageRank.

Matt Cutts: Right, and it will still accumulate PageRank, but it won't be showing in our Index. So, I wouldn't make a NoIndex page that itself is a dead end. You can make a NoIndex page that has links to lots of other pages.

So it’ll be different depending on your circumstances but if you’re in doubt, the canonical tag is your best bet as you’re only consolidating those pages in googles eyes. If those pages perform well and you noindex them without sending that PR somewhere useful you could be throwing away all that benefit.

Hope that helps,

Tom

Hi there,

Question 1: I'll come back to that...

Question 2: You can use redirect chains but you shouldn't. Although a desktop browser will redirect through the chain quite quickly (providing there are no mistakes), a mobile browser takes 0.6 seconds to get a connection to a page, so each redirect quickly adds up to poor user experience for any mobile users. And although Google has stated it’s crawler does well to deal with 1 or 2 redirects, it can come across problems with longer redirect chains and you could see your final page not getting crawled from the redirect as it should. Both Yahoo and Bing have stated their crawlers do not perform well when it comes to redirect chains. As you make the transition to the new domain you should update your original redirects to send the visitor to the correct page after the first redirect.

Question 3: Best practise for redirects is to specify the more specific rules first, if you're using regex with redirectmatch or rewrite rule, then you'll want to put them after your more specific oldpage.html to newpage.html, so that the more specific rule is given the chance to match before the regular expression is given a more broad chance to match. And finally add an 'if all else fails' rule at the bottom to redirect all requests that were not dealt with by a previous directive.

There's a nice post here on execution order in your htaccess if you'd like to give it a read:http://www.adrianworlddesign.com/Knowledge-Base/Web-Hosting/Apache-Web-Server/Execution-order

Back to Question 1:

If you're choosing not to follow Daniels advice and make the change all at once, you can 301 the new sites backlinks into the existing site, and 301 the old URL structure to the new URLs. But when you do implement the change, you'll want to modify all of your existing redirect to point to the final page the user should end up at, and not force them through a maze of redirects. Then you can then just remove the redirect from the new site, and have those users land on the pages the new links you built are pointing at. Don’t forget Google takes time recrawl, index and ‘trust’ new redirects and attribute all PR and SEO juice to the correct pages.

If at any point you plan on having the same content live on both domains without a redirect in place it would be best practise to use the rel=canonical link attribute in your to signal to google which is the preferred version on content to show in SERPs.

Hope that helps give a bit more information,

Tom

Hi,

Both versions of the URL aren’t appearing in search results but both are accessible from the same URL, depending on which device you attempt to access the site with. But when you search for a page on your site on a mobile phone and hit the link to the page you’re requesting, then you're directed toward the mobile page thanks to your redirect, even though you aren’t hitting a link to the mobile subdomain.

If you wanted to remove the canonical tags from all your pages that would see your mobile pages indexed in SERPs, but you’d be causing yourself a duplicate content issue and forcing both those pages to compete with one another for the same keyword(s).

So when you search for a page on your site in Google after removing the canonical tag, you’d see the full site URL and then the mobile URL, giving the user the choice to click either. When they click to go to the full site they’ll still be redirected to your mobile page.

I can understand your concern that your mobile site isn’t getting indexed and therefore will not be found in Google but you’re misunderstanding the point - these pages are essentially 2 versions of the same page, containing the same content and different styles. Rather than forcing mobile and main site to compete with each other, you can have the best of both worlds with your current (correct) implementation of the canonical tag.

Thanks,

Tom

Hi there,

I’ve taken a quick look at your site, and the reason these pages are not getting indexed is because of the rel=canonical link element in your which indicates to google which version of the page you’d like to be indexed. Note this is just a guideline to Google, but since you’re using it properly they are only indexing the none mobile version of your site.

I can see that you’ve got a redirect in place to send mobile traffic to the mobile page, and there is no need to have both versions of a single page being indexed, and therefore competing against each other in SERPs. As these pages are next to identical in content, googlebot is seeing your rel=canonical and attributing all the SEO juice to your original page.

When someone searches for one of your products they see the result for your desktop page as only one result, not 2 results competing against each other. The user then clicks on the link and is directed toward the mobile site if they’re a mobile user, and your full site if they’re a desktop user.

Take a look at this article on the Google Webmasters Blog:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

This line is key: ‘With rel="canonical", properties of the two URLs are consolidated in our index and search results display wikia.com's intended version.’

Let me know if there’s something I’ve missed here, but it looks to me as though you are using the rel=canonical tag correctly.

Thanks,

Tom

Hi Rich,

Elaborating on FedeEinhorn’s answer, if the page structure is the same you could just redirect all requests to the same URI on your new domain, as he stated. You could do this very easily with a .htaccess file on the root folder of your old domain (providing you’re running an apache webserver like most people). To redirect using regular expressions and capture groups we can use the RedirectMatch directive, which would look like this:

RedirectMatch 301 ^(.*)$ http://www.newsite.com$1

As simple as that, you’ve redirected all existing pages to the same page on the new domain. If you haven't used this before, here's a brief look at how that works for you:

Firstly, RedirectMatch simply tells apache we’re using the RedirectMatch directive from mod_alias.

301 specifies a 301 SEO friendly redirect which passes all that lovely SEO juice to your new site.

^(.*)$ is our regular expression. It states, from the start of the requested URI (^) start capturing the request (using the brackets to show what we want to capture), capture it all (with . meaning any character or symbol and the * meaning 0 or more of the preceding . , which will lead to everything being caught by our capture group (the brackets). And the $ meaning the end of the requested URI.

The final part of this redirect is specifying the page to redirect to, but as we have captured the request in the previous part, we use $1 to append our first capture (only capture in this distance) to the end of our new domain.

If you have completely changed your site, you may wish to redirect all requests to your homepage or another page, it is as easy as modifying the previous code to redirect without appending our capture to the end of your redirection target, so this would be acceptable:

RedirectMatch 301 ^(.*)$ http://www.newsite.com

But since we don’t need to use anything from the requested URI, we should really remove the brackets (the capture group) for the sake of tidiness, resulting in:

RedirectMatch 301 ^.*$ http://www.newsite.com

You could use a mixture of these 2 code, for instance if your blog posts are all identical but your main site pages have all changed - this code would redirect all pages starting with /blog/ to their double on the new domain, but redirect all other pages to a /we-have-moved/ landing page:

RedirectMatch 301 ^(/blog/.*)$ http://www.newsite.com$1

RedirectMatch 301 ^.*$ http://www.newsite.com/we-have-moved/

Hope that's useful,

Tom

Directories and forum posts as easy backlinks are being devalued more and more by google, so there often isn't a lot of SEO value for these links.

Just have a look at this video on searchenginewatch: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2326161/Matt-Cutts-Using-Article-Directories-for-Links-Just-No

But that's not to say that forums and directories don't have their place in a natural link profile, but you want to select decent directories and forums based on whether or not they will send the traffic you want to your site. For example, directories called things like "seobacklinkdirectory" or "freeseolinks" that promise followed indexed backlinks probably aren't being used by humans to find websites, but by SEOs wanting free back links. These sorts of links are not going to benefit your business or your site.

But a nice niche directory where your audience will search for businesses like yours could add value, and maybe lead to some conversions. The same applies for forum posting - if you're adding value with your comments and subtly linking back to your site every now and again, you'll drive relevant traffic to your site which has the potential to convert. If you're dropping 100 links into a different forum each day before they ban you, you're probably not going to see any benefit.

Hi Tom,

I agree with David on this - the best way to obtain links to your content is to create linkworthy content.

If the content you create is interesting, value-adding and answers a question that your industry/readers are asking then it should naturally acquire links. You will also find that you pick up links if you have content on your site that is seen as a great industry resource - this might come from being the first person in the niche to create content on a particular topic or event, or it could come from addressing an issue from an unusual standpoint.

You can also increase the link potential of your content by looking at the existing content on the domain you'd like a link from. Are there any gaps in the content - and could you write something that would fill it? This makes a conversation with your desired domain much easier as you can approach them in a friendly tone and manner and show them what you've written, and explain why it's of value to their readers.

Good luck, hope the above helps

Tom

Hi,

If you simply want to stop these pages from being indexed until they have some non-duplicate content on them, you could use the meta robots tag in your

This is how that would look:

<meta name="robots" content="<strong>noindex</strong>"></meta name="robots">

And this will immediately drop these pages from the index when googlebot crawls a page with this directive in the

If you wish to stop these pages being crawled by rogerbot (moz’s crawler) so the duplicate content errors do not show up, you could add these lines to your robots.txt:

User-agent: rogerbot

Disallow: /oopspage1.html

Disallow:/oops/page2.php

User-agent: *
Allow: /

This will still allow googlebot  to crawl these pages, and will keep them in the index, so when you do update the content you won’t have any problems if you forget to remove the meta robots tag on these pages.

Be careful with robots.txt and remember that Disallow:/oops/ will stop crawlers from crawling subpages of the /oops/ folder, so you need to remember your filenames. But in this case, since you’re only setting these rules for rogerbot, it wouldn’t be catastrophic for your site but it’s best to take care either way.

In reality though, duplicate content is a problem when multiple pages are competing with each other for the same terms. Sometimes the wrong version of the page will be displayed above your preferred version. Unless you’re looking to rank for your ‘Oops nothing here’ phrase, these duplicate content problems are nothing to worry about and the notices will soon disappear from your crawl errors when you create some fresh content for them.

Hope this helps,

Tom

No problem Derrick, my pleasure.

Tom

Hi Derrick,

if you wish to use robots.txt you could simply use:

Allow: /service-area/*
Disallow: /service-area/

This will allow access to any child of /service-area/ but not /service-area/.

You could redirect this page to your homepage if you wished, and to stop children of this page being redirected you could use RedirectMatch instead of the Redirect directive and use a simple regular expression to only redirect if the URI ends with /service-area/, like this:

RedirectMatch 301 /service-area/?$ http://www.lvpoolcleaners.com/

The $ sign at the end signs that the apache should only redirect if the URI is ending in that pattern, and the ? after the trailing / allows the redirect to happen with or without the trailing slash.

But perhaps the simplest solution to this problem would be making your /service-area/ link point to '#' if the Joomla menu will allow it. This will append an empty anchor to the url, it will not refresh or redirect the page and anchors in URLs are not counted as duplicate URLs.

For human usability this would be the nicest way to interact with the menu, as you don't want a visitor being interrupted mid-way through their buying cycle by being sent back to the homepage when they didn't ask for it.

Hope that helps!

Hi there,

There are many great social sharing plugins that will do what you ask, you could check out http://wordpress.org/plugins/addthis/screenshots/ which has a floating sidebar option.

But if you have a plugin which you like using currently, you could add some simple css styles like:

#socialsidebar ul {
display:block !important; /* display the list vertically if previously set to display inline (horizontal) */
position:fixed;
right:0;
top:50%;
}

You'll have to adapt that little snippet depending on the plugin you're using and whether or not the share buttons are displayed in a list etc, but it shouldn't be too tricky to set your share buttons to a 'fixed' position using something along those lines.

Most comment plugins these days nofollow links in comments, since it is standard practise to reduce comment spam for backlinks. But if you're wanting to modify any plugin you could head to Plugins>Editor in your wordpress dashboard and modify the plugin files to allow followed comments.

Take care to back up any plugin files before you attempt this especially if you are not an advanced user. But it would just be a case of searching for rel="nofollow" and removing it from the comments system that will be rendered on your page.

Do take care when modifying plugin files because a single syntax error in a 'required' (as opposed to 'included') php file will throw an error and not display your site when visitors try to access it.

Hope that helps!

Hi,

Duplicate content is bad for search because it forces pages on your site to compete with each other for rank. If each tag only contains one post then you are duplicating every post twice - once in the original post and once in the tag which is displaying the same post and only that post.

If you use a lot of the same tags for each post, for example you tag every post 'blog' and 'daily’, then those pages will contain the same posts and therefore be duplicate content.

It may be worth checking your analytics to see if any of these pages are getting entrances from organic search, which will tell you if the 'duplicate' is outranking the original post. But often this is because that page contains a lot more information on the subject than a single blog post. So you may not be able to replicate that success with a smaller single blog post.

As the previous answer stated using a robots.txt indicating Disallow: /tags/whatever2 will tell a spider not to crawl that page, you could do it selectively by disallowing only the tags which are being flagged as duplicates, or disallow all tagged pages from being crawled with Disallow: /tags/*

But every site is different and you will need to decide for yourself if your 'duplicate' content is actually harming your site, you might find that those pages are full of keywords naturally and are attracting all your traffic.

Hope that helps!

A new client has come to me because they have found themselves in hot water with Google having received a manual spam action for unnatural inbound links.

The sad case in this story is that I completely believe that the client has been a victim of an attack by a competitor. They finally made it onto page 1 in their competitive niche, and within a few days random links started appearing on spammy sites (often foreign language sites.) By the time the message came from Google about 2 weeks later several thousand of these links had been built.

The first stage was to get the client to be very honest with me about anything he personally had done that might be considered manipulative. Unfortunately following some bad advice several months ago the client purchased one site-wide link (already in the process of removing it.) The same company that gave him this advice also built just under 100 links to his website (over the course of a couple of days) in early December.

So - we know the client hasn't been whiter than white, and we are going to undo anything that he had responsibility for asap. We are also working to ensure that he is earning really high quality links in the right way (already have some great press coverage in the pipeline and are working on unique content.)

My question is - given some past mistakes made by the client - is there any way that we credibly get across the fact that this recent huge volume of spam is absolutely nothing to do with him in a reconsideration request? Of course we can start work on removing these links and can disavow anything we can't remove - but my expectation is that should this be successful the same competitor is going to continue throwing spam links at my client.

I appreciate that previous actions by the client would in themselves have been worthy of a manual spam action - but it seems far too much of a coincidence given the timing if this penalty was unrelated to the recent attack.

I'd really appreciate any insights from the Moz community and will look forward to sharing our eventual success story as a YouMoz post!

Tom

Hi I'm working on a clients site that has an odd structure with 8000+ 302 temporary redirects. They are related to actions on the site (they have to be there and work this way for the site to function) but they also have a stupid number of perameters. Would it be ok to block them all in the robots.txt file? Would that make any difference?