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Great. Thanks Sean. I wasn't sure. Will send an email to help@moz.com

In the old version of Moz, it was possible to export a historical link report for entire duration of the campaign. Now it only shows 3 months worth of data.

Is it possible to export the data for more than 3 months and if so, how is that done?

Yes, we've had it set up since March 2013. We do have Google UK data and competitor data for the whole period. Just not Google US for some reason.

Hi. I've pulled a historical ranking report but there is missing data for my site for Google US pre 22nd April 2013. Google UK ranking data is available and so is competitor data.

Any ideas?

Hi David,

Thanks for your response. That makes perfect sense.

I assumed that to be the case but thought it was worth checking before making any changes.

I suppose by adding appropriate hreflang="x" mark-up combined with the geo-targeting of root domain and subfolders - that should be enough to inform search engines of our intended geographical targets.

Strangely there wasn't a lot of information out there about this specific question - so thanks again.

Yusuf

I understand that it's possible to target both domains/subdomains and subfolders to different geographical regions in GWT.

However, I was wondering about the effect of targeting the domain to a single country, say the UK. Then targeting subfolders to other regions (say the US and France).

e.g.

www.domain.com -> UK
www.domain.com/us -> US
www.domain.com/fr -> France

etc

Would it be better to leave the main domain without a geographical target but set geo-targeting for the subfolders? Or would it be best to set geo-targeting for both the domain and subfolders.

Hi Everett,

Thanks for your response.

I also believed that the rel=canonical merge the link profiles but so far all the evidence I've seen suggests that it doesn't.

Firstly - Jon Mueller from Google stated that the rel=canonical tag doesn't merge the link profile. That's talked about here.

http://moz.com/community/q/quick-rel-canonical-link-juice-question

Secondly, if I look at some examples, you'd expect pages with rel=canonical tags to have zero authority etc. reported for page alternatives in Open Site Explorer.

e.g. on the ASOS website there is a link to the men's section which uses a query string parameter.

http://www.asos.com/men/?via=top

The canonical url is

http://www.asos.com/men/

Both report different levels of authority. If the link profiles were merged, would you not expect either the same levels of authority reported or the non-canonical version to report no authority?

I understand that Moz tools don't work like Google so I'd like to hear from someone who can explain this.

Thanks,

Yusuf

Hi

I've often wondered about this - whether to use a 301 or leave pages as they are and use the rel=canonical tag.

I would think that a 301 from the duplicate to preferred page would be best. This would mean that any inbound links will pass juice to the preferred page (i.e. site.com/category2/subcategory1/product1). The rel=canonical tag, as far as I know, does not merge the link profile of the duplicate pages.

However, depending on the skill of your developers, other rewrite/redirect rules on your site and your CMS - the rel=canonical might be the only feasible method.

This page explains it very nicely.

http://moz.com/blog/301-redirect-or-relcanonical-which-one-should-you-use

I agree with Jane. Unless there are reasons why the whole site needs to be secure, it makes more sense for just the areas where sensitive information is being submitted to be SSL encrypted.

http: requests are processed more quickly than https: ones due to the SSL handshake required to produce the cryptographic parameters for the user's session - so your site would be a little quicker if you weren't using SSL.

However, if you do decide to use http: rather than https: for the product & category pages like Jane has suggested - you'd need to ensure that the https: versions of these pages redirect to http:... again to avoid duplicate content.

Hi Jason,

It's fine to 301 redirect from http: to https: and it's quite common for sites that use SSL. It's exactly the same principle as redirecting from a non-www to www (e.g. http://example.com to http://www.example.com) - which is considered to be good practice. But there should only be a single redirect. So you should ensure that http://example.com redirects to https://www.example.com without first redirecting to http://www.example.com.

I would also make sure that all pages (not just the homepage) redirect from http: to https: too to ensure there are no duplicate content issues on the rest of the site.

Hi Rajesh

A rewrite is not a redirect. So whether it's a 301 etc is irrelevant.

Rewrites work without redirecting the user elsewhere and simply convert one URL structure to another.

Might be a good idea to talk to a developer about it because rewrites can cause issues with other pages or other rewrite rules if not implemented correctly.

Hi Jenny

jStrong is correct. Subscript (_{) and superscript (^{) tags are not going to have any effect (positive or negative) on SEO.}}

My company has various offices around the world and we're in local search for most of them. This was done by submitting the site to Google Places for each location, including pages on the site for each office with a map, telephone number etc - all using structured data (http://schema.org/PostalAddress).

Google Places verifies your physical address by sending a postcard in the mail with a PIN which allows you to verify the existence of your business at that address so it's difficult to abuse.

Karl is right. It would be over-optimised. But most likely is that the homepage has much greater page authority than this other page which is why Google has decided to rank it instead.

It always amazes me when clients ask for stuff when they don't even know why they would need it. I'm not sure it's even possible to link them, and even if it was....I don't see what value it could possibly provide without all the systems that the tags are intended allowing for integration between them.

The value of linking Webmaster Tools and Analytics is obvious. There's stuff happening off-site that you might want to know about (inbound links, impressions on search, etc) and have integrated into your analytics report...fair enough.

The same is not true of Google Tag Manager, which simply allows you to manage the various tags easily. These tags are normally related to allowing other systems to do stuff (such as collect data). It is these systems that need to be integrated, if possible (e.g. Analytics and Adwords).

I don't think you need to be overly concerned about this if you're already using rel="canonical".

We regularly receive inbound links with these parameters included in them.

The reason why this happens is that we included these parameters to track some of our email and social campaigns and sometimes people find these links and link to them. These are perfectly natural, just that the people that link to them might not know about these parameters and may think they are part of the URL and the links may not work without them.

Hi Susan,

I'm not aware of being able to "link" Tag Manager and Webmaster Tools, but am also not sure why you would need to.

What were you hoping to achieve?

Hi  Vakantiehuizen,

If you're referring to an inbound link or page being indexed containing query string parameters e.g. example.com?utm_source=x, then yes...these may cause issues with duplicate content and SEO. If you have pages with these parameters on your site then you should use the rel="canonical" tag to specify the canonical URL that you'd like Google to rank. Also, you should never include these parameters for internal links on your site.

Although I don't know what you mean when you say "UTM tag link is not a natural link". Could you explain?

Hi Raj

Chris is right. You'll be fine as long as you show the same content to both users and search engines. Presenting different content to users and search engines is what is commonly referred to as cloaking.

What you're referring to here is essentially a rewrite of the URL to make it search friendly. This is a common technique on sites using, for example, Apache's mod rewrite extension (http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_rewrite.html).

The only issue is if search engines index both the search friendly and non-search-friendly URLs so I'd recommend placing a rel="canonical" tag on that page referencing the search friendly URL.

Thanks for your comments Gianluca.

I think Google's guidelines are somewhat ambiguous. Here it does state that "if you're providing the same content to the same users on different URLs (for instance, if both example.de/ and example.com/de/ show German language content for users in Germany), you should pick a preferred version and redirect (or use the rel=canonical link element) appropriately."

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en

I think you've explained it nicely though.

I guess it depends how much duplication there is. If the pages contain completely duplicate content with no unique content at all then the best move would be to noindex or nofollow them. Otherwise rel=canonical is probably fine.

Duplicate content is detrimental but the issue is relatively easy to solve. Just ensure you add rel="canonical" tags to the duplicate pages to allow Google to identify and rank the preferred page.

Hi Asif

That page is being indexed

https://www.google.co.uk/?gws_rd=cr&ei=rpEdU6OzHcOUhQfkjIDwAQ#q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mycity4kids.com%2FDelhi-NCR%2Fsearch%2Fguitar-classes

It's just not ranking that well.

Probably worth trying to obtain relevant, high quality links to that page. Also, does appear to have a lot of keyword stuffing (guitar classes appears over 20 times on the page). The listings could probably benefit from short descriptions rather than key phrase based tags.

Having 'search' in the URL will not (on its own) stop your pages being indexed. A quick search for 'search' shows many pages indexed with search in the URL, domain and subdomain

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=search+&oq=search+&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i60l5.976j0j7&sourceid=chrome&espv=210&es_sm=93&ie=UTF-8

Without seeing the pages, it'll be difficult to ascertain the reason(s) these pages are not being indexed.

Hi Irving,

Sometimes the .htaccess files are hidden so you just need to change your FTP client to allow the viewing of hidden files

http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/article/how-can-i-see-my-htaccess-file

After than, you should be able to view the contents of a .htaccess file by using notepad or any other text editor.

Hi Jorge

The rel="alternate" hreflang="x" tag is not suitable for pages that are in the same language as these are essentially duplicates rather than alternative language versions.

I'd use the  rel="canonical" tag to point to the main page until the translations of those pages are available.

Webmaster Tools should allow you to see any issues.

Hi Tom, yes - I think you'd be better off creating a page on website B which explains that website A is now website B.

I would also explain the site move on all the other redirects (but only for visitors arriving from website A). Yoast writes a good post about how to do this.

https://yoast.com/change-domain-name/

Hi DHStom,

This seems like a reasonable approach.

But is there really a need to have the landing page on the old site to state that 'website A no longer operates..'? Is website well known and/or does it have a loyal customer base? Also does website B offer all the same products as website A used to?

I agree with Andy. I wouldn't expect any issues with an anchor. I'm pretty sure Google would ignore it. Although using a query string parameter (?) would not be good.

Anyway, Google Analytics allows you to track parameters using an anchor and some think that this is a good way of consolidating link juice and avoiding duplicate content issues.

http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2009/02/02/hashing-it-out-referral-tracking/

Yes - that's right.

What you should do is implement it - then click on the link and at the same time check your real time analytics report in GA. They've added a new tab that allows you to see your events in real time. So you should see the event being logged as an active visitor on the site.

Sorry Niners52

I'm just saying to use the apostrophe key on your keyboard to type the apostrophes. Otherwise you might get an odd character like the second apostrophe which looks like a proper apostrophe - but isn't - and that will throw up an error.

Hope that makes sense.

Be careful if you're copying and pasting from here into your code - and ensure that the apostrophe's look like this (') instead of this (‘).

This doesn't sound right. Mine have been updating weekly. Try contacting help@moz.com. They should be able to help.

Hi

You need to add an onclick event...

[Ask a Question](javascript:__doPostBack('ctl00$MainContent$AskQuestionButton',''))

and

but replace 'event action', 'event label' and 'event value' with values you can understand like 'top quote button', 'homepage' etc.

It seems to me that your developers are placing the 301 redirect rules in something like a .htaccess file. In this case, it is better to have fewer redirect rules to keep the size of the file down.

But why don't they store the original URL and new URL in a database - which can be queried and the appropriate 301 header initiated to allow the redirect to take place (if appropriate)? This way you could easily add a few thousand without any performance issues.

As far as the titles/urls are concerned, the system shouldn't change the URL every time the title changes. This will cause problems in the future. I'd ask the developers to change this.

Nor would it do anything negative. Searches for 'buy local' and buy local appear to return the same results...in my location anyway.

Hi Mario,

I agree with Jeff. You need to move your site up a folder.

You could write rules that remove the '/coastal/' from the canonical URL for the Yoast plugin, 301 redirect /coastal/* to /* etc - but this is really messy.

It's fine to have your site on the root domain....it's no less secure.

Hi. Just looking at your backlinks, you only appear to have one external backlink which is from a directory.

http://www.hotvsnot.com/Home/Do-It-Yourself/

I would suggest trying to gain more links from high quality links related to your industry by producing great content that receives natural inbound links and/or getting in touch with site owners to see if you can contribute to their sites.

Hi

I was curious about this too. And then I found this

https://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/20770156-Open-Site-Explorer-to-crawl-HTTPS

Looks like it was in development but had some issues. Hopefully it'll be available soon.

The best way to solve this issue is to mark these pages as duplicates by using the rel="canonical" link element,

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66359?hl=en

Yahoo answers appears to use country subdomains

e.g. uk.answers.yahoo.com for UK and fr.answers.yahoo.com for France.

They don't have a tr.answers.yahoo.com so guess that it doesn't exist.

Hi Bob,

This effect is done using a background image.

The image being used is this one:

http://www.3dcart.com/images/5/main-panorama3.jpg

It has a width of 2500 and height of 444. This ensures that it takes up the whole screen on devices less than 2500px wide (which is most of them). The image has feathering on the left and right - which allows it to fade to the same as the black background on devices largest than 2500px.

The site specifies the image, width and background colour in their CSS file:

.panel0 {
     height: 444px;
     background: #18100d url(../images/5/main-panorama3.jpg) no-repeat center top;
}

and to display the background image - they use HTML similar to this:

[SOME STUFF]

I hope that helps.

Sorry Dan. I feel I didn't really answer your question properly.

What I would do is check if these pages have any external links using something like Open Site Explorer or Majestic SEO. If they don't, then it would be fine to change the URLs and 301 redirect the existing pages to the new ones as it's likely that the existing PageRank is passed from your own internal links. If external links do exist then you might want to consider doing nothing - depending on the authority of these links.

It might be on most pages but still be an error - for instance if you're using mod_rewrite and the dot has been placed in the rewrite rule then a single error could potentially affect many pages.

If these pages rank well and it's for purely aesthetic reasons that you'd like to remove the dot, then you may want to consider leaving the pages as they are since using a 301 redirect may result in a loss of some of the existing PageRank.

Hi Dan

This is likely to be a coding error where the dot has been placed there by accident.

Dots are allowed in URLs. For instance, it's common to have dots in versioning web service interfaces

e.g. example.com/2.0/stuff

However, it's not very clean so I would attempt to get this resolved.

Hi Ilcho,

If you want to keep the link juice, you should definitely 301 all the URLs to relevant pages on your site.

However, I wouldn't redirect all of these to the homepage. Apparently internal 301s to the homepage are treated as 404s by Google

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsDeu5PUx2A

Yusuf

I may be relying on out-of-date information. I read about this here

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/five-situations-where-you-should-use-nofollow-for-linking/6361/

Are you saying that you have the same link displayed multiple times in your navigation menu? If so, you should probably rel="nofollow" the duplicates.

Disqus doesn't use iframes. The content is displayed on page as HTML within a div tag.

We use Disqus for comments on the TranslateMedia blog.

http://www.translatemedia.com/400-million-chinese-cant-speak-mandarin.html/

If you view the source code you can see the comments in there.

I have a feeling this might be because Open Site Explorer reports on the number of Facebook likes on a given URL (e.g. your homepage) rather than the site as a whole - which is the 4k figure you're referring to.