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Hi Kate,

From a quick browse, one slight improvement that you could implement is a template for your title tags and meta descriptions.

Google uses your title tags as ranking signals, and at the moment, yours don't seem to follow any kind of pattern. Best practice would indicate that you include the brand name at the start or the end, and that you could pull in the title of each blog post to use in the title. You should also try to include some sort of keyword for the page in the title if you can.

Although the meta description is not used as a ranking signal by Google, it is one of the first impressions a users gets, so the meta description should be enticing and make the user want to click through to the page.

Hope it helps! Good luck!

Hi everyone,

I'm a recent(ish) beginner to SEO, and while I feel I've got a good grounding in the industry now, there are still certain aspects that make me say "what!?". I'm looking to write a blog post on this and would love to know what parts of SEO still confuse you or make you say "what!?", and explain them from a semi-beginners point of view.

Any comments appreciated!

Thanks!

As Devanur said, just be cautious of the sites that you are linking and have a look at their stats (DA, PR etc) to make sure they're okay.

Hi,

Just wondering if anyone has had this problem before. I'm just checking a client's GWT and I'm looking at their robots.txt file. In GWT, it's saying that it's all fine and returns a 200 code, but when I manually visit (or click the link in GWT) the page, it gives me a 404 error. As far as I can tell, the client has made no changes to the robots.txt recently, and we definitely haven't either.

Has anyone had this problem before?

Thanks!

Perfect, thank you both for your help.

Thanks for your response.

The site currently sits on a .com domain and is split by 8 regions all in English. They are looking to go into non-english speaking countries but not yet.

In Google.com.au when searching for the brand the .com version comes up top with United States next to the URL and the AUS part of the site is below, even though they are geo located. What they are thinking of doing is if they click on the USA link it will check to see if they are in Australia and forward them to the Australian sub-section.

There has been talk about ccTLDs but this would be a massive amount of work and is not currently possible due to the amount of duplicated work that would be involved from their point of view.

I am trying to back up any response that I give ensure the correct path is taken.

Would you recommend not to use IP filtering?

If a large site has multiple regions (Australia, USA, UK, France), how will IP filtering to a particular area affect SEO.

e.g: Ilive in the UK an if I visit the said website I would automatically be redirected to the UK subfolder of the site whereas somebody searching in Australia would be redirected to the AUS folder.

Will there be any detrimental affect on SEO and will the search engines still be able to crawl the entire site no matter which data centre is being used?

I totally agree that they shouldn't be using iFrames and it is part of my recommendations to them, but we need to work with what we have at the moment.

So just to clarify, you would say that www.domain.com which is pulling the data through from iframe.domain.com would rank?

Even though all the content except the navigation, footer, etc is on iframe.domain.com.

OK, so if www.domain.com was pulling through content from iframe.domain.com which domain would you expect to rank?

I would personally expect iframe.domain.com to rank as that is actually where the content is and the www.domain.com provides the link to that page. I am currently seeing both domains rank, which has lead me to ask the question.

A client is pulling content through an iFrame, and when searching for a snippet of that exact content the page that is pulling the data is being indexed and not the iFrame page. Seen this before?

OK, so if www.domain.com was pulling through content from iframe.domain.com which domain would you expect to rank?

I would personally expect iframe.domain.com to rank as that is actually where the content is and the www.domain.com provides the link to that page. I am currently seeing both domains rank, which has lead me to ask the question.

Hi Kate,

From a quick browse, one slight improvement that you could implement is a template for your title tags and meta descriptions.

Google uses your title tags as ranking signals, and at the moment, yours don't seem to follow any kind of pattern. Best practice would indicate that you include the brand name at the start or the end, and that you could pull in the title of each blog post to use in the title. You should also try to include some sort of keyword for the page in the title if you can.

Although the meta description is not used as a ranking signal by Google, it is one of the first impressions a users gets, so the meta description should be enticing and make the user want to click through to the page.

Hope it helps! Good luck!