Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi,

Just checked analytics and there's referral visits from the .co.uk domain. Are you sure the .co.uk domain should not be added to referral exclusion list?

Thanks

Anthony

Okay, thought as much!

Thanks

Anthony

Roger that!

By default GA auto inputs your domain into the referral exclusion list. So currently the .co.uk domain is there. Are you saying that neither domain should be in the referral exclusion list?

Thanks

Hi Mozzers,

Just wanted to double check that when a website domain changes from .co.uk to .com - do you add .com to the referral exclusion in GA? Do you also keep the .co.uk version in the list too?

I have updated the property settings to .com

Thanks

Anthony

Hey guys

Just wanted to thank you all for your suggestions and let you know that all of your suggestions are included in the final blog post here.

I've thanked you all at the end

Thanks again, I really appreciate it.

Anthony

Great shout Craig. Every now and then I'll find a "#" link on live websites. Looks careless and lazy!

Hey Dirk

Great advice! I'm a big fan of Screaming Frog too. A handy free tool especially for small startup websites.

Thanks for commenting

Not forgetting our own personal mobile devices too

We've used all of those

Others we use are Bootcamp, Virtualbox and we also use inspect element in chrome to emulate devices and remote inspect element using Safari.

Love all of these Fuel Interactive! All of which we do here too so it's pleasing to hear other agencies doing the same

I think cross-browser and cross-device QA is extremely important given the browsing habits of the modern day consumer.

Do you use any tools for cross-browser and cross-device QA?

Hey Michael,

Yes, an incorrect robots.txt is definitely more common than you would think.

I guess the overarching tip to the fetch and render function would be to register your site with Webmaster Tools and make use of their tools.

Thanks for sharing!

Anthony

Linda - awesome tips!

Especially number 1. User testing is something that just isn't on some people's radar, yet it can unveil plenty of unforeseen usability issues.

Thanks for sharing

Anthony

Hi guys

I'm looking for tips and advice to help prevent a startup website launch from embarrassment or disaster.

Couple of examples I have so far are:

1. Test contact and download forms
2. Check website for duplicate content, lorem ipsum and missing content
3. Check page load speed

What would be your best advice/tip(s) be?

Thanks

Anthony

@Anthony_Mac85

P.S. Just to be clear, I'm not looking for advice on how to growth hack a startup website launch.

Hi Marcus

Thanks for the reply.

Yeh I think you're right in that it needs to be reviewed on a case by case basis taking into account the goal of the page.

Off topic: Just checked out your latest blog post (cracking post btw!),clicked through to the kwfinder tool out of interest and the keyword data it returns for UK searches appear to be American? Have you tested the tool yourself? Do you find the same problem as me? Feel free to reply to me on Twitter given it's noting to do with this Q & A thread

Cheers!

Anthony

Hi Mozzers

I read an interesting post over on Authority Labs this morning about title tag length and how Google changes the way they are displayed. The author Brian advises that, "if you want your title tag to remain unchanged, it's worth making sure that you're staying within the 50-59 character window and that your titles fit with the content of the page".

This got me thinking...

Given the limited amount of title tag characters that are now shown in the SERPs, I find it difficult to include a primary keyword, secondary keyword and the company name. So, if you're a lesser known brand is it worth sacrificing your company name in the title tags of deeper pages for a secondary keyword to help with rankings, or even a special offer to grab a users eye in the SERPs?

What are people's views on this?

Thanks

Anthony

Yeh that's the same tag I create

Thanks Mark - appreciate that answer.

The firing rules are set to all pages.

I'm amazed that I couldn't find this simple answer in the Google documentation. Unless I've missed it and you can direct me to where it says tag manager code replaces the universal analytics code?

Hi Mozzers

I've created a container for a domain in Google Tag Manager. Within that container I've created a tag for universal analytics with track type "Page view" and the firing rule "all pages".

Can I then replace the Universal Analytics code with the tag manager code? Would it still track all the normal data in Google Analytics?

There are no events setup up yet so that's not a concern but there are goals setup tracking which are triggered by a page view. Would they be affected?

Thanks

Anthony

Hi Gerard

Thanks for sharing that link with me - very interesting.

So according to that post, Google are saying that for the search query "Picosure Tattoo Removal" the URL - "treatments/picosure-tattoo-removal" delivers more relevance, as opposed to the original title tag - "PicoSure Tattoo Removal UK | Serving Manchester..."

Think I'd prefer the original title tag to be honest. What do you think guys?

Thanks

Anthony

PicoSure Tattoo Removal UK

Yeh I guess it doesn't matter either way.

I tried the structured data testing tool and the title tag displays correctly.

Hmmm, think I'll wait a few days and see it sorts itself out. Then try amending the title tag option

Thanks

Hey Chris

Just done some reading into putting a rel canonical on a page pointing to itself and it seems that it's harmless. Matt Cutts even says so in this video.

Also, a couple of people have said that "having a tag on your page protects you somewhat from scrapers and people stealing your content.  If your page is indexed first with your tag, any syndicated or duplicate versions from 3rd parties in theory should not be able to rank that content." Found that in this thread here.

They don't seem to be doing any harm so think I'm going to leave them

Anthony

Thanks for your responses Chris and Jane - both very useful!

I will try your suggestions and thanks for the other tips re: dupe content on directory listings and and canonicals. I'll get those sorted too

Anthony

Hi Mozzers

Does anyone know why my clients title tag appears like it does in the image attached?

It seems as though Google is pulling the parent page url and putting that at the front.

All other title tags are normal.

Anyone any ideas and is it anything to be worried about?

Thanks

Anthony

@Anthony_Mac85

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HI Dan

Sorry for the late reply on this! I've attached a screenshot of the 302 redirect report in Moz.

The top one redirects to http://www.deskcentre.co.uk/shop/chairs/operator-chairs.html

Not sure if this is the screenshot you were after but just let me know if you need anything else.

Thanks for taking the time to help me out on this

Anthony

@Anthony_Mac85

vA1nTRT

Thanks guys!

God I feel so stupid - I should have checked that. I got so obsessed about the magento/wordpress thing that checking the canonical completely slipped my mind!

Oh well at least if anyone else ever has the same problem, the resolution is here for all to see!

Take care,

Anthony

HI MozzersIn my websites sitemap.xml, pages are listed, such as /blog/ and /blog/textile-fact-or-fiction-egyptian-cotton-explained/These pages are visible when you visit them in a browser and when you use the Google Webmaster tool - Fetch as Google to view them (see attachment), however they aren't being indexed in Google, not even the root directory for the blog (/blog/) is being indexed, and when we query:site: www.hilden.co.uk/blog/ It returns 0 results in Google.Also note that:The Wordpress installation is located at /blog/ which is a subdirectory of the main root directory which is managed by Magento. I'm wondering if this causing the problem.Any help on this would be greatly appreciated!AnthonyToTOHuj.png?1

Hi Mozzers

I need a little help with Magento redirects.

We are using the Ultimo theme [1] and our crawl report has discovered several thousand 302 redirects occurring for links such as: Product comparison links and add to basket links which are formatted as “REPLACE THIS WITH THE INITIAL LINK” are rewritten to links such as “REPLACE THIS WITH THE REWRITTEN LINK ”.

Is there any way to stop this from happening? Should I change these rewrites to 301 redirects? Or is this perfectly normal?

[1] - http://themeforest.net/item/ultimo-fluid-responsive-magento-theme/3231798

Thanks in advance

@Anthony_Mac85

thanks Kerri. I will get in touch if I have the problem next time the rankings are checked.

Hi Tim

I just googled "semoz reporting wrong data" and found this thread. I'm finding the same problems with a client of mine. Seomoz ranking report is way off what the real rankings are. To put the personalised search theory to bed I rung a friend at the other end of the country to run a search on a couple of keywords and he reported the same rankings as mine and not the ones SEOmoz is reporting.

Very puzzling indeed.

did anyone from SEOmoz get back to you?

Thanks

Anthony

@Anthony_Mac85

Thanks for taking the time to answer.

Yeh I mean regular expression, it's apache mod-rewrite and we use .htaccess

I'm struggling to figure out to 301 old url query strings to the new ones. There are several possible query strings for each product category so would take forever to do them one by one in magento re-write. The query strings will be the same i.e. ?price=1%2C10 but the category url will be different as you can see in my example above.

any ideas or do I need to hire an expert?

Thanks

Hi SEOmoz community!

I'm hoping somebody with a little Magento and Reg Ex knowledge will be able to help me out here.

I need to 301 some old categories along with their old query strings. Below is an example.

Old URL

/bed-linen/pillowcases-html.html

Users can then filter by price or range which then creates a query string such as...

/bed-linen/pillowcases-html.html?price=1%2C10

New URL:

/bed-linen/pillowcases.html

So the new query string will be

/bed-linen/pillowcases.html?price=1%2C10

Does anybody know the Reg Ex to 301 this? Can this be done in Magento re-write module or by htaccess only?

Thanks in advance

Anthony

@Anthony_Mac85

Brilliant Rafi!

We'll get to work on it - I'll let you know how we get on. Thanks!!!

Hi Rafi

Firstly thanks for taking the time to help me out here - really appreciate it.

We've tried two plugins, "Redirection" and "Simple 301 Redirects" and both are sending 302 redirect headers. Using the chrome network inspector it's definitely sending the 302 headers.

The server is a Windows server, so not Linux/Apache.

I hope this information helps

Thanks

We recently built a new website with a new site structure. To prevent there being a load of 404's I redirected the old pages to the new relevant pages with 301 redirects.

A few days later the SEOmoz crawl report alerted me to a load of 302 redirects. When I looked into this for some reason all of the 301 redirects I set up are reverting to 302 redirects.

I did a test by 301 redirecting a made up URL to an existing page and the same thing happens - it 302 redirects.

I can't find any settings in WordPress to possibly explain why this is happening. Has anyone got any ideas why this could be?

When you say improve your SEO do you mean improve your rankings?

I don't think you can but what you could do is downlod a csv report of the keyword rankings which will have the labels next to the keywords. You can then copy and paste the keywords in groups of labels into your new campaign. Obviously you will need to create your labels again in the new campaign. I hope this speeds things up a little for you

It's best practice to have your business name in the page title, after the primary keyword (and secondary if using one) . Including the location of your business at the end will also help that particular page rank higher for when a user performs a search with the location in their query.

Google will only display 70 characters of the page title in the search results but the robots will still read on past 70 characters.

As long as the page title does not contain repeated keywords or keyword stuffed then you shouldn't worry about going over the recommended 70 if it's your business name and location at the end of the title tag. It's only my opinion but I wouldn't recommend going over 85.

I see. I don't think it's possible to do what you are after I'm afraid

I know how to copy a full page of peoples Twitter names and profile URLs to the clipboard with one click of a mouse?

Would this be useful for you?

Hi Nakul

We don't have a lot of outgoing links, it would be linking from a blog post of ours.

I've always thought that as long as the site being linked to is relevant then it doesn't matter what country. I just wanted to make sure.

Thanks

Would linking to a site in the US from the UK do harm or good if the site being linked to is industry related? i.e. a UK web design company linking to a US web design career site.

Hi Jasmine

Thought I had already replied yesterday - obviously not.

Thanks for the advice about optimizing for clicks and when to change to optimizie for conversions. All taken on board!

We are still in the negotiation period with the client but i'm definitely a lot more confident that we will do a good job for our client taking on the advice received here.

Thanks again

All the best

Anthony

Thanks Jasmine Aye - it really sounds like you know what you are talking about.

It's mainly CTR and cost per conversion that's really poor.

We will take your advice and work with what we already have.

On of our clients goals for people to fill in a contact form in order to get them to sign up to managed email campaigns so I guess just "email marketing" is too broad. Would you agree?

Thanks  fidelityim - That video is very helpful although it freezes with a minute to go!

It is poor performing because of poor click through rates and poor conversion rates - cost per conversion is really high.

We are going to create new campaigns within the same account and have a well thought out, well structured ad groups. We are going to pad this out on paper before we actually put it in adwords to make sure we have it absolutely spot on from the start.

We already plan to bid high at the beginning until the quality score improves.

So I guess my question has been answered - create new campaigns within the same adwords account

Thanks for taking the time to answer - we really appreciate it!

Thanks David. So you think pausing the current campaigns (about 12), and creating new ones in the same adwords account is the best option.

Would you advise to keep the old campaigns to be paused forever, or delete them once we see CTR and quality score improve in the new campaigns?

Hi

We have a client who has a poor performing adwords account and has suggested starting a new account with a different gmail account, different card details and a different subdomain. More specifically we will be using unbounce to create landing pages.

I was wondering the following:

Will Google be able to relate the new account to the old account? If so will they then use the old accounts history with regards to quality score etc...?

The keywords being targeted are in and around "email marketing" which is highly competitive - would a new account struggle at first and need to bid excessively high because of lack of history?

They have a high budget - does this affect how quickly and how Google looks at an account - will they get priority?

Would it be better to scrap this idea and pause the old campaign and start new campaigns in the same adwords account?

Would it be better to scrap this idea and repair the existing campaigns/ad groups?

Keen to get people's thought's on this one as I can't seem to find a clear cut answer from the web.

Thanks

Anthony

The no follow attribute is per link and not per page. So if you have two links on page A, and only one has the no follow attribute, Googlebot will still follow the other link to page B and will pass on juice. How much juice depends on several factors such as the relevancy of the link and the quality of links pointing to the page where the link came from. I hope this helps