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Do having keywords in the domain name still help?...............using a city name and then a couple of other keywords with your services?  For example:  dallaspoolbuilders.com or dallaspoolandpatiobuilders.com

Just to be clear can someone answer this for me?

I am about to disavow some links and when I get to webmaster tools I have both the www.site.com and site.com and it's asking me to select one.  Which one do I pick to disavow the links?........www or non-www?

Thanks Andy.  I made this change........domain.com/blue-blog to domain.com/blog using a rewriterule.  It seemed to work.

I did change the structure domain.com/blue-blog to domain.com/blog.  So I did a rewrite rule in the .htaccess file.  That fixed a lot of things however there are still 100 or so 404's.  They are old blog posts and not really that important.

I recently changed the url of my main blog and now have about 100 404 errors.  I did a redirect from the old url to the new one however still have errors.

1.  Should I do a 301 redirect from each old blog post url to the new blog post url?

2.  Should I just delete the old blog post (url) and rewrite the blog post?

I"m not concerned about links to the old posts as a lot of them do not have many links.

I have a wordpress website and have been trying to figure out the best social media plugins to use...........That DON'T dramatically slow down the page speed load times.

Does anyone have recommendations?  What social media plugins have you used that don't have a huge negative impact on page load times?

I have been told that pingomatic.com is all that you need however yesterday I went to a conference and others were recommending to have a good list of pinging services to cover all your bases

Here are 4 that have been recommended:

pingomatic

technorati

blogsearch.google.com

feedburner

Any others that should be included on this list?  My goal is not to spam these ping lists however want to make sure my content is getting indexed quickly

Thanks Dave!

Here are my settings:

Categories - noindex, follow

Tags - noindex, follow

Format - noindex, follow

Author Archives - noindex, follow and disable author archives

Date Archives - noindex, follow and disable the date-based archives

Media - noindex, follow

HI Irving,

The Yoast default doesn't have anything checked making everything indexable and their tutorials don't do a very good job at helping people set it up correctly.

It's interesting to know all the differing opinions on what you should have indexed or not indexed.

Here are the settings I have:

Categories - noindex, follow

Tags - noindex, follow

Format - noindex, follow

Author Archives - noindex, follow and disable author archives

Date Archives - noindex, follow and disable the date-based archives

Media - noindex, follow

Taking a poll out there......In most cases would you want to index or NOT index your category pages using the Yoast SEO plugin?

I have read that its a good idea to have both rel=author & rel= publisher set up on a website If so What is the best way to set it up to where rel=author and rel=publisher appear in your website source code? I use wordpress genesis site and have the Yoast seo plugin **In the user profile section on WP there is an area to enter google Authorship link **In the Yoast dashboard there is a place to enter google publisher link. When I check my source code…….I see rel=publisher only on the home page, however ALL my other WordPress Pages and Posts have rel=author. Does that sound correct?

As long as you don't have one key word anchor text that just dominates the others then you should be fine however best practices are to try and incorporate plain urls for some of the links.  For example it wouldn't look natural if you had one keyword that appeared 100 times while the others only appeared 5 or 10 times

As you are already doing It's a good idea to spread the links around to different pages and use different anchor text if as long as the anchor text is related to that particular page.

I'm curious to know what tools others are using to get their content to index faster (other than html sitmap and pingomatic, twitter, etc)

Would installing the wordpress pubsubhubbub plugin help even though it uses pingomatic? http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/pubsubhubbub/

Has anyone worked with Parallax before?  Is it possible and worth it to do SEO on a wordpress site that uses Parallax?

I have a friend that is asking.  Currently when you navigate their site there is only one URL (home page) and one title tag.

Hi Dan The Yoast Seo plug in for Wordpress allows you to select what you want included on sitemaps. Mine currently includes posts, pages, categories, and video Are you suggesting to only include pages in the sitemap? Why wouldn't we want to include the others?

Any good recent guidelines on how to best configure Yoast SEO plugin?  I have it installed however there are a lot of settings that I am unsure of.

Hi Thomas, I checked the Yoast plug in settings and cant find where it gives you the option of redirecting to / or .htm.

Also, should I leave with the trailing slash /?   I don't want to keep confusing google.

When my developer migrated the site to wordpress all my urls defaulted to having the trailing slash.  Before this my urls did not have the trailing slash.

I recently moved a website to wordpress which the wordpress default includes the trailing slash (/) after ALL urls.

My url structure used to look like:  www.example.com/blue-widgets

Now it looks like:  www.example.com/blue-widgets/

Today I checked the urls using Open Site Explorer and below is what I discovered:

www.example.com/blue-widgets returned all my links, authority, etc HOWEVER there is a note that says........."Oh Hey! it looks like that URL redirects to www.example.com/blue-widgets/. Would you like to see data for that URL instead?"

When I click on the link to THAT URL I get a note that says_.....NO DATA AVAILABLE FOR THIS URL._

Does this mean that www.example.com/blue-widgets/ really has NO DATA?

How do I fix this?

When optimizing videos for a website should the Alt and Title be the same or is that too much?  If so what is the best practice for optimizing images on a website?

For example

title=Blue widgets in Atlanta

alt=Blue widgets in Atlanta

Also, I'm assuming the image name should be Blue widgets in Atlanta

I just installed webbug.  Do I just enter the url and then click "get"?

Where would I typically see if it's giving me a 301?

This is what I see

HTTP/1.1 200 OKServer: nginx/0.7.65Date: Mon, 19 Nov 2012 14:13:37 GMTContent-Type: text/htmlContent-Length: 899Last-Modified: Wed, 24 Oct 2012 18:58:50 GMTConnection: closeAccept-Ranges: bytes

WP Engine - Finely Tuned WordPress

Sorry, we couldn't find the domain you're looking for. Did you just signup?  We're still creating the account. Did you point DNS to the correct IP address? Please find the current IP address for your site, under the WP Engine plugin page in the /wp-admin/ for your site. Did you configure the domain under your account at WP Engine? * * * If you've completed the above, then please contact us at help.wpengine.com, so we can help get this fixed as soon as possible.

I don't think it has effected traffic or indexation yet.  However he did this about 4 days ago and I didn't realize it until now.

Right now it seems that he redirected ALL www to non-www.

If I follow a link from www.example.com/page1 it is redirected to example.com/page1

So even though it does not matter too much you still suggest I redirect to www.example.com?

Thanks Marcus.  This has had me worried for the last few days.

The developer had already changed it without checking with me.  

Will it hurt anything if I change it back to www.example.com?

I believe I have to change it in several different places right?

via WPengine dashboard, user portal in the domains tab, and google webmaster tools

Is there anywhere else that I should check to make sure it's set up correctly?

I had a website moved to wpengine lately and when the developer set it up on wpengine he used http://example.com/.  For the last few years the site has been directing to http://www.example.com/

Should I redirect the site to http://www.example.com/ to avoid losing indexed pages and google rankings?

I agree with the above.  301 redirect.  Keep in mind that changing urls however will result in some traffic loss...the only question is how much.

The more 301s you have the more your rankings will suffer in the transition.

Do not move your entire site with just 301s.

If you are changing domain below might be a safer option.

If you are simply migrating a site to Wordpress I don't believe 301 redirects are necessary.  All you need to do is make sure the same url structure is used.

Its basically like doing a website redesign.

Now if you are moving to a new domain:

1.  get the new pages live first.  Add canonical tags pointing old pages to new pages.

2.  Watch search results and see your existing ranking results move to new pages.  Wait until all significant search traffic has shifted to new pages

3.  take down old pages and replace with 301 redirect.

Thanks for the responses.  I found a good explanation here also

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/to-slash-or-not-to-slash.htmlThis post from Google Webmasters says that either one is fine.  Just make sure you do one or the other.Regarding your root domain -

• Rest assured that for your root URL specifically, http://example.com is equivalent to http://example.com/ and can’t be redirected even if you’re Chuck Norris.

Does having a trailing slash make a url different than the same url without the trailing slash?

www.example.com/services

Or

www.example.com/services**/**

Does Google consider these to be the same link or does Google treat them as different links?

Some agencies use article syndication to get links back to your website.

There are many schools of thought on article syndication. As long as you don't have a copy of that article on your site you should be safe however I have read recently that the technique is a waste of time these days.

Good article on article syndication vs duplicate content

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/syndicated-content-duplicate-content/28833/

You are only penalized when you have duplicate content that resides on your website.  For example if you have  blog post on your website and that same post exists on another website. ..........that is duplicate content and you could be penalized.

If you are guest posting and using the same content for each one the owner of the website that you are posting on needs to be concerned with that.  It's a good idea for a website owner to run content through copyscape before agreeing to post it on their website.

Thanks CMC!  Others I have discussed with said it doesn't matter and that their is no "preferred" structure.

One person said:

Google uses urls only at the spidering stage and then reintroduces them when composing the SERPs but the "machine" does not use them at all - your pages are known by an internal number, not the url.  As long as the urls are easily spiderable the urls do not matter

Thanks Irving.

I am currently using this version www.example.com/service#1

I'm having a site migrated to wordpress and noticed that their default was for every service listed under the main navigation title (services) to have /services/service#1, etc.

I'm having to change the wordpress default so my urls don't change.  Just wanted to make sure that the version I am using now is safe

Which URL structure does google prefer..............OR DOES IT REALLY MATTER?

Option A

www.example.com/services/service#1 - this is the default that wordpress uses

Option B

www.example.com/service#1

Hi J.P.

I just updated some title tags as well.  I just posted the page link to my google + profile.  I will let you know how quickly google updates them in the serps.

Sorry about not clarifying that

Tools or tags used to channel spidering and indexing and circulate page rank (e.g. robots.txt file, pagination with rel="next" and rel="prev", x-robots-tag, etc.....)

I just read an article on pagerank sculpting in visibility magazine that inspired my question

Sorry about not clarifying that

Tools or tags used to channel spidering and indexing and circulate page rank (e.g. robots.txt file, pagination with rel="next" and rel="prev", x-robots-tag, etc.....)

I just read an article on pagerank sculpting in visibility magazine that inspired my question

Thanks for the post Peter!

In addition to the canonical tag are there any others that you guys have heard of people having success with?

Thanks Adam for posting a response.  Very helpful.  I read an article about pagerank sculpting and it got me thinking about the best use of canonical, robots.txt files, etc...

My site currently does not have any canonical tags or any of the others used to channel page rank.  I have been told that the proper use of certain tags can possible help with rankings by directing page rank to the more important pages.

I've noticed that some website owners use canonical tags even when there may be no duplicate issues.For examplewww.examplesite.com  has a canonical tag.......rel="canonical" href="http://www.examplesite.com/" />www.examplesite.com/bluewidget  has a canonical tag.......rel="canonical" href="http://www.examplesite.com/bluewidget/" />Is this recommended or helpful to do this?

On page is good however can always be tweaked a bit.  Site is all about one topic so very relevant.

Domain Auth = 41

Page Auth = 51

Thanks Egol.  What is your website?  I would like to check it out.

When you say focus on making a better website what do you mean by that?

Say you have a site that has better Domain/page authority, more links, more social media sharing, and a lot more indexed pages (thanks to blogging) than the competition.

Of course all of these metrics are based off of data from SEOMoz open site explorer tool which I am not sure if it produces accurate data.

1.  Other than exact match domains or the age of a domain what would be other reasons why competition would outrank you?

2.  Can anyone suggest other ways to help increase a sites domain/page authority besides creating more indexed pages, link building, etc..?