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Category: Technical SEO

Discuss site health, structure, and other technical SEO strategies.

  • monotero


    I do that, because i am using joomla. is bad? thanks

    | monotero
    0
  • gregster1000


    If your cms has created two urls for the same piece of content that look like the following, www.domianname.com/stores and www.domianname.com/stores/, will this be seen as duplicate content by google? Your tools seem to pick it up as errors. Does one of the urls need 301 to the other to clear this up, or is it not a major problem? Thanks.

    | gregster1000
    0
  • MarloSchneider


    One of the sites I work for is an employment site, they have a job database and the job pages tend to get links.  The problem is that every time one of these jobs is filled, the job page goes away.  What should I do to keep the value from these links?

    | MarloSchneider
    0
  • seozeelot


    Our site involves e-commerce transactions that we want users to be able to complete via javascript popup/overlay boxes.  in order to make the credit card form secure, we need the referring page to be secure, so we are considering making the entire site secure so all of our site links wiould be https.  (PayPal works this way.) Do you think this will negatively impact whether Google and other search engines are able to index our pages?

    | seozeelot
    0
  • MarloSchneider


    I have seen many solutions and tried most of them.  But when serving multiple companies the amount of passwords one has gets astounding.  It is hard to find a way to securely store them, but also have the convienence of looking them up. What solutions do you recommend?

    | MarloSchneider
    0
  • Aspedia


    We have shopping cart links (<a href's,="" not="" input="" buttons)="" that="" link="" to="" a="" url="" along="" the="" lines="" of="" cart="" add="" 123&return="/product/123. </p"></a> <a href's,="" not="" input="" buttons)="" that="" link="" to="" a="" url="" along="" the="" lines="" of="" cart="" add="" 123&return="/product/123. </p">The SEOMoz site crawls are flagging these as a massive number of 302 redirects and I also wonder what sort of effect this is having on linkjuice flowing around the site. </a> <a href's,="" not="" input="" buttons)="" that="" link="" to="" a="" url="" along="" the="" lines="" of="" cart="" add="" 123&return="/product/123. </p">I can see several possible solutions: Make the links nofollow Make the links input buttons Block /cart/add with robots.txt Make the links 301 instead of 302 Make the links javascript (probably worst care) All of these would result in an identical outcome for the UX, but are very different solutions. What would you suggest?</a>

    | Aspedia
    0
  • Dameian


    I have a client that insists on using the ProPhoto WordPress theme. This theme has an interesting habit of putting empty anchor tags in the site nav in order to nest css dropdowns. By empty I mean totally empty. For example: <a>Navigation Link</a> Since the anchor does not specify a destiation, do you think it would have any effect on link juice one way or the other? This wouldn't count as an additional link on the page would it? My inclination and personal practice is not to risk quirky things like this, but I'd like a second opinion before I suggest changes to the client's site. Thanks!

    | Dameian
    2
  • seohive-222720


    I have a website that requires the site structure to be changed.  The website doesnt have many backlnks and rankings are fairly low.  I have 11,000 products on the website and want to know the best way to change the site structure without causing 404 errors all over the place.  Do I 301 redirect every page? drop all 11,000 pages from the index by adding a no follow no index to all pages? I have the following structure www.domain.co.uk/make/model/part/product I want to change this to www.domain.co.uk/Part/make/model/product whats the best way to preserve the SEO, link juice and on a large scale? 11,000 pages. thank you shivun

    | seohive-222720
    0
  • Hyrule


    I posted this as a reply on my other question, but never got another responce... I am basically moving ecommerce platforms to answer your question. I am keep the same domain (www.stbands.com). If you want to get even more specific i am moving from storesonline to corecommerce. Here's some more info: All meta tags, URLS, content is virtually going to be the same except my product pages and normal pages will end with .html, however my category pages will still be /categoryname (like a directory). My category URLS seem to build in a mod re-write fashion, which I hear is better for SEO (like /sweatbands/head-sweatbands/). I have set all my pages to use the rel=cananical tag, so if you are on the category  /sweatbands/head-sweatbands/  it cananicals back to /head-sweatbands The images are changing names as I upload them on a product because it auto creates new sizes. This differs from our old host and may affect our vertical image rankings. Should I 301 the image URLS? I am keeping the www. in my domain name, as opposed to just domain.com to keep everything the same. CoreCommerce automatically seems to make my products uppercase in the URL as they are in the title, but the url works both lowercase and uppercase so its not case sensitive. This is just an overview of some things I think I have most of my bases covered, but i'm aiming for a april 1st launch / move for the new site.  Do you guys have any other pointers / suggestions?

    | Hyrule
    0
  • madsurfer


    I would like to rank for words as:
    windsurfing equipment
    windsurfing news
    windsurfing sails
    windsurfing boards etc. Now am I wondering if I should use exact those words in the navigation/titles/descriptions because it seems not user friendly. The whole website is about windsurfing thus naming it just “equipement” instead of “windsurfing equipment” would be clear to a visitor that I am talking about that windsurfing related topic. Here is an example: http://madwindsurfing.com/cat/competitions-events/
    I can even change the URL to http://madwindsurfing.com/cat/windsurfing-competitions-events/ What would be the best way of choosing the naming/descriptions when I do on-page optimisation which is good for the engines and for the users and who would you do in my case?

    | madsurfer
    0
  • flarson


    Hi, I have a question regarding our client's site, http://www.outsolve-hr.com/ on ASP.net. Google has indexed both www.outsolve-hr.com/ and www.outsolve-hr.com/default.aspx creating a duplicate content issue. We have added
    to the default.aspx page. Now, because www.outsolve-hr.com/ and www.outsolve-hr.com/default.aspx are the same page on the actual backend the code is on the http://www.outsolve-hr.com/ when I view the code from the page loaded in a brower. Is this a problem? Will Google penalize the site for having the rel=canonical on the actual homepage...the canonical url. We cannot do a 301 redirect from www.outsolve-hr.com/default.aspx to www.outsolve-hr.com/ because this causes an infinite loop because on the backend they are the same page. So my question is two-fold: Will Google penalize the site for having the rel=canonical on the actual homepage...the canonical url. Is the rel="canonical" the best solution to fix the duplicate homepage issue on ASP. And lastly, if Google has not indexed duplicate pages, such as https://www.outsolve-hr.com/DEFAULT.aspx, is it a problem that they exist? Thanks in advance for your knowledge and assistance. Amy

    | flarson
    0
  • 172396002


    dear team, just a question that always annoying me is Google takes typo title keyword on SERP which is not good for client's branding .  i have no problem on the actual page meta title setting(correct KW) as well as internal link text, but only thing i can found this anchor text that other people use for the link is typo, so Google still takes that into account just like serveral years ago on Geroge Bush Miserable Failure? how can i get Google correct this ? only to submit request to them ? thank you, boson

    | 172396002
    0
  • BrandonC-269887


    I'm receiving a duplicate content error in my reports for www.example.com and www.example.com/index.htm. Should I put the rel="canonical" on the index page and point it to www.example.com? And if I have other important pages where rel="canonical" is being suggested do I place the rel="canonical" on that page? For example if www.example/product is an important page would I place on that page?

    | BrandonC-269887
    0
  • calin_daniel


    One of my real estate clients has a website that was built by a small web design company. In reviewing the website I've discovered that many of the images on the website (ie. banners, social networking icons, ect.) are not hosted on my clients server, but on the web developers server. Ex. src="http://www.[WebDevelopmentCompany].com/ubertor/[ClientsName]/properties_image.jpg" Will this funnel pagerank/link juice away from my client's website? This struck me as odd and it's not an issue I've come across before.

    | calin_daniel
    0
  • henners


    The company I work for sells software online. We have deals learning institutes that allow their students to use our software for next to nothing. These learning institutes, which are usually quite strong domains, link to our sign in area. Nice way to get powerful links hey… or is it? There are a couple of problems with these links: They all link to a subdomain  (signin.domain.com) The URLs also contain unique identifiers (so that we know which institute they are coming from). Meaning they all link to different signin URLs. (eg. signin.domain.com/qwerty, signin.domain.com/qwerta, signin.domain.com/qwerts, etc. ) So all these links aren't as effective as they could be (or at all?). In a perfect SEO world  these links would all point to the start page, however, due to the fact that our start page is of a commercial set up this would run the risk of communicating the wrong idea to the institutes and their students. So… are there any extremely brilliant pro mozzers that have a savvy idea how set this up in a more SEO friendly way? Thanks in advance!

    | henners
    0
  • mikeusry


    Recently I have taken over a website and I made a pretty colossal mistake.  The site was properly constructed via .htaccess to a www domain.  Typically I roll without it and I made a bad assumption that the .htaccess was not previously set correctly because there were hundreds of fundamental mistakes. After a couple of days I noticed the mistake but some of our new (non www) have picked up some solid links etc.  So now I feel that I am in a nightmare of creating redirects etc.  So should I switch back to WWW or not?  Does it matter at this point?

    | mikeusry
    0
  • jfkorn


    My clients business is divided in chain stores. All stores are set under the same franchise. There is one domain www.company.com with branches like www.company.com/location1/content and www.company.com/location2/content etc. I've taken care of duplicate content issues with rel="canonical" and duplicate page titles are also not a concern, anymore. Right now the concept is like this: If you visit the site for the first time you get to choose between the locations. Then a cookie is set and once you revisit www.company.com it will redirect you via a php header command to the location stored in your cookie: www.company.com/location1/content. My question is if this might hurt rankings in some kind of way as these aren't permanent redirects with a 301 but rather individual ones, based on your cookie.

    | jfkorn
    0
  • yaser


    Hi, Does the domain extention ie. .com .org. net effect the chances of me ranking in search engines. Is there a prefrence or does it not matter? Thanks Yaser

    | yaser
    0
  • wazza1985


    Hi Guys, Hope you are all well. Just a quick question which you will find nice and easy 🙂 I am just about to work through duplicate content pages and URL changes. Firstly, With the duplicate content issue i am finding the seo friendly URL i would normally direct to in some cases has less links, authority and root domain to it than some of the unseo friendly URL's. will this harm me if i still 301 redirect them to the seo friendly URL. Also, With the url changed it is going to be a huge job to change all the url so they are friendly and the CMS system is poor. Is there a better way of doing this? It has been suggested that we create a new webpage with a friendly URL and redirect all the pages to that. Will this lose all the weight as it will be a brand new page? Thank you for your help guys your legends!! Cheers Wayne

    | wazza1985
    0
  • johncmmc


    One of the guidelines you provide stipulates: "You should avoid having too many (roughly defined as more than 100) hyperlinks on any given page. When search engine spiders crawl the Internet they are limited by technology resources and are only able to crawl a certain number of links per webpage. In addition, search engine algorithms divide the value of some popularity metrics by the amount of links on a given page. This means that each of the pages being linked to from a given page are also affected by the number of links on the linking page. For these reasons, we recommend you include less than 100 links per page to ensure that they are all crawled, though if your pages have a high page authority, search engines will usually follow more links." As far as these 100 links are concerned, is this in reference to ALL links including outbound, internal, etc? Or is this referring to only outbound links to other sites?

    | johncmmc
    0
  • DavidS-282061


    Ok, So my site's urls works like this   www.site.com/widgets/ If you go to www.site.com/widgets  (without the last / )  you get a 404. My site did no used to require the last / to load the page but it has over the last year and my rankings have dropped on those pages... But Yahoo and BING still indexes all my pages without the last / and it some how still loads the page if you go to it from yahoo or bing, but it looks like this in the address bar once you arrive from bing or yahoo. http://www.site.com/404.asp?404;http://site.com:80/widgets/ How do I fix this? Should'nt all the engines see those pages the same way with the last / included? What is the best structure for SEO?

    | DavidS-282061
    0
  • DavidS-282061


    Is there a tool out there that will help you locate your competitors traffic sources? I would like to see how much of their traffic is coming from SEO related sources - vs. other sources. I know compete will do this - but they are ungodly expensive. Thanks!

    | DavidS-282061
    1
  • rmkjersey


    Hi, my first question and hopefully an easy enough one to answer. Currently in the head element of our pages we have canonical references such as: (Yes, untidy URL...we are working on it!) I am just trying to find out whether this snippet of the full URL is adequete for canonicalization or if the full domain is needed aswell. My reason for asking is that the SEOmoz On-Page Optimization grading tool is 'failing' all our pages on the "Appropriate Use of Rel Canonical" value. I have been unable to find a definitive answer on this, although admittedly most examples do use the full URL. (I am not the site developer so cannot simply change this myself, but rather have to advise him in a weekly meeting). So in short, presumably using the full URL is best practise, but is it essential to its effectiveness when being read by the search engines? Or could there be another reason why the "Appropriate Use of Rel Canonical" value is not being green ticked? Thank you very much, I appreciate any advice you can give.

    | rmkjersey
    0
  • qlkasdjfw


    Hi, On Google Places we have clients that have bad data (incorrect name, address, #) on aggregated sites (citysearch, merchantcircle, yelp) which prevents those sites from pulling into the Google Places accounts. We've been manually correcting listings for a while and many times it still hasn't pulled into the Google Places listings for months on end despite the data matching. What are your experiences with correcting aggregated Google Places data, how long has it taken for this data to pull into your places accounts?

    | qlkasdjfw
    0
  • Gordian


    I have read tons of guides about canonical implementaiton but still am confused about how I should best use it. On my site with tens of thousands of urls and thousands of afiiliates and shopping networks sending traffic,  is it smart to simply add the tag to every page and redirect to the same url. In doing this would that solve the problem of a single page having many different entrances with different tracking codes? Is there a better way to handle this? Also is there any potential problems with rolling out the tag to all pages if they are simply refrencing themselves in the tag? Thanks in advance.

    | Gordian
    0
  • TruvoDirectories


    Hi, in a few weeks we'll do a major change on our website. This involves over 1.5 million pages indexed in Google driving substantial amount of our traffic. Basically we have 2 types of changes: subdomain switches to domain:
    ex. product.company.com will become www.product.com
    for this we know how to manage DNS and Apache rules different url patterns, basically replacing ugly urls by pretty urls
    for this we have advanced 301-mapping rules set up Here is the question - what is best way to proceed with these 2 changes in order to preserve rankings and organic traffic: Do both changes simultaneously? First do url changes, than the domain switch Can you please share your thoughts?

    | TruvoDirectories
    0
  • dvansant


    For a number of reasons I'm confined to having to do a client side redirect for html pages. Am I right in thinking that Google treats zero seconds roughly the same as proper 301 redirects? Anyone have experience with zero second meta refresh redirects, good or bad?

    | dvansant
    0
  • mascotmike


    I have a website that has a page for each town. rather than listing all the towns with a link to each, I want to show only the most popular towns and have a 'more' button that shows all of them when you click it. I know that the search engine can always see the full list of links and even though the visitor can't this doesn't go against Google guidelines because there is no deception involved, the more button is quite clear. However, my colleague is concerned that this is 'making life hard' for the search engines and so the pages are less likely to be indexed. I disagree. Is he right to worry about this??

    | mascotmike
    0
  • bheard


    I am curently managing a .com that targets Canada and we will soon be launching a .com/us/ that will target the US. Once we launch the /us/ folder, we want to display the /us/ content to any US IP. My concern is that Google will then only index the /us/ content, as their IP is in the US. So, if I set up .com and .com/us/ as two different sites in GWT, and geotarget each to the Country it is targeting, will this take care of the problem and ensure that Google indexes the .com for Canada, and the /us/ for the US? Is there any alternative method (that does not include using the .ca domain)? I am concerned that Google would not be able to see the .com content if we are redirecting all US traffic to .com/us/. Any examples of this online anywhere?

    | bheard
    0
  • flowsimple


    Client has two website addresses: Website A is a redirect to Website B. It has one indexed page. But this is the URL being used in collateral. It has the majority of back links, and citations everywhere list Website A as the URL. Website B is where the actual website lives. Google recognizes and indexes the 80+ pages. This website has very few backlinks going to it. This setup does not seem good for SEO. Moreover, the analytics data is completely messed up because Website B shows that the biggest referral source is... you guessed it Website A. I'm thinking going forward, I should: Move all the content from Website B to Website A. Setup Website B to permanently 301 Redirect to Website A. Is that the best course of action?

    | flowsimple
    0
  • christinarule


    If you have a membership site, which requires a payment to access specific content/images/videos, do search engines still use that content as a ranking/domain authority factor? Is it worth optimizing these "private" pages for SEO?

    | christinarule
    1
  • automart


    My site is getting crawl errors inside of google webmaster tools. Google believe a lot of my links point to index.html when they really do not. That is not the problem though, its that google can't give credit for those links to any of my pages. I know I need to create a rule in the .htacess but the last time I did it I got an error. I need some assistance on how to go about doing this, I really don't want to lose the weight of my links. Thanks

    | automart
    0
  • seoessentials


    Hello - I have a client who is a realtor and changed agencies. I edited their Google Places entry and the new name of their agency and address are showing - but so is their old listing. The agency they left is now trying to sue them for showing up in a number one position with Google Places under their agency name. Is this an indexing issue with Google? Their name shows up under both agency names. The corrected one shows most often, but the old one is still popping up on occasion. Thanks,

    | seoessentials
    1
  • JohnECF


    If I have a subdomain (a blog) that is having tags and categories indexed when they should not be, because they are creating duplicate content. Can I block them using a robots.txt file? Can I/do I need to have a separate robots file for my subdomain? If so, how would I format it? Do I need to specify that it is a subdomain robots file, or will the search engines automatically pick this up? Thanks!

    | JohnECF
    0
  • IM_Learner


    Hi, Currently, page A is redirecting to page B. I am in the process of developing new site for the same domain and this time page B will be redirected to page C. This is gonna happen on many pages. Is it correct or should i adopt some other strategy? Will it have adverse effect on the speed of my site? Page A -----> Page B ------> Page C Regards, Shailendra

    | IM_Learner
    0
  • shupester


    For php pages youve got Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
    Header( "Location: http://www.example.com" );
    ?> Is there anything for html pages? Other then Or is placing this code redirect 301 /old/old.htm http://www.you.com/new.php in the .htaccess the only way to properly 301 redirect html pages? Thanks!

    | shupester
    0
  • besartbajrami


    Hello, Some pages of my clients website are removed from Google Index. We were in top 10 position for some keywords but now I cannot find those pages neither in top 1000. Any idea what to do in order to get these pages back? thank you

    | besartbajrami
    0
  • oxygenretreat


    Designed my website with one keyword, one page adage.  Wondering if i am creating an issue with internal anchor text and use of plurals for keywords.  For instance, say I want my index page to rank for keyword exotic vacations, and an inner page to rank for exotic vacation.  I do this as i notice there is a major discrepency with google when calling both the singular and plural term of certain keywords (like the example above, for instance).  I see in yahoo it views singular and plural as essentially the same word, but google appears to rank them separately.  Anyways since google is where the majority of my search traffic comes from, I separated my most competitive keywords for both singular and plural usage and created external links with anchor text that reflects this separation. I am concerned though that I may not be handling the Internal anchor text properly.  What i have done is take a keyword l want to rank for (for example "exotic vacations") and attach it a page (for example index page) and use the anchor text "exotic vacations" on this page and link it to the inner page "exotic vacation." Reason: I want to rank for the term exotic vacations on the main page, but have a relavant page to link to this term so the closest would be the keyword exotic vacation on an inner page. I would appreciate any feedback on this.  I think I am running into a problem with this strategy especially on the main index page/inner page keywords (plural to singular).  I also notice google will find an inner page for a time then switch it to the default domain name index page when searchign for a keyword.  Kinda keeps going back and forth. I never see any indent search results.

    | oxygenretreat
    0
  • BeIntermedia


    First off, SEO learner, not a professional, therefore question is not for any client. A new (less 1 yr) ecommerce site in a particular sector is now moving into partnership with relevant websites to be their online store. A 'store' link on the partner site will redirect to the ecommerce domain to a dedicated area (on a domain/directory path) with the partner's branding. To do this though means duplicating the entire catalogue for each partner that comes on board for this scheme. So the original ecommercesite.com/categories also delivers ecommercesite.com/partner1/categories (with partner's brand identity) ecommercesite.com/partner2/categories (with partner's brand identity) and so on Won't duplicating the product catalogue in directories cause problems in delivering effective SERPs for the original ecommerce site?

    | BeIntermedia
    0
  • NorbertoMM


    Hi guys, i'm having problems with duplicated page title, and i want to know what is the best way to avoid this problem. The example is like this: Title page (A): Product name A - category - section Title page (B): Product name B - category - section, What you think guys i can resolve this problem, Thank you so much for your help.

    | NorbertoMM
    0
  • simplesimon


    I have two websites, www.joecline.com and www.affinityproperties.com. Originally, I wanted joecline.com to be focused on west austin only. I now realize that I only have time to really handle the promotion of one site. I'm wondering SEOwise, which url would be better to keep. I would consolidate all content on one site and 301 the migrated site to the new URLs in the domain which I would keep. Any ideas would be great. Thanks Joe

    | simplesimon
    0
  • Carlito-256961


    I've seen that for some domains Google will show a nice clickable site heirarchy in place of the actual URL of a search result.  See attached for an example.  How do I go about achieving this type of results? categorized.png

    | Carlito-256961
    0
  • DavidS-282061


    It seems that .html pages do better for the long tail...

    | DavidS-282061
    0
  • kayweb2


    Hi, Just a question, On one campaign for example - Vegas Hotel (vegashotel.com.au) Google ranking for **Clubs King Cross **is ZERO on Google AU when really its result 2 on google AU There are tones of other keywords the same 😞 Please let me know why Thanks MOZ Kiddies 😄 Ray

    | kayweb2
    0
  • eyepaq


    Hello, Dose anyone has experience with Amazon s3 ? Hosting images, site elements and static files (pdf etc) on Amazon S3 bucket can influence the link structure / juice ? (by having external links to the amazon s3 bucket / account). If you host all the site images and site resources with Amazon S3 will all those "links" count as outgoing external links ? Is it worst then having everything linking internally ? Dose anyone knows if that can hurt you ? Personally I was not able to test it and I am sure I can't test it in the near future. Hope someone has and I can skip some steps with this. Thanks !

    | eyepaq
    1
  • DavidS-282061


    My dmoz description is not as KW rich as my sites normal description.  IS there an advantage or disadvantage to either? If so,  How do I prevent google from doing this?

    | DavidS-282061
    0
  • toddyC


    Hello all We have an e-commerce website with approximately 3,000 products. Many of the products are displayed in multiple categories which in turn generates a different URL! 😞 Accross the entire site I have noticed that the product pages are always outranked by competitors who have lower page authority, domain authority, total links etc etc. I am convinced this is down to duplicate content issues. I understand there is no direct penalty but how would this affect our rankings? Is page rank split between all the duplicates, which in turn lowers it's ranking potential? I have looked for a way to identify duplicate content using Google analytics but i've been unsuccessful. If the duplicate content is the issue and page rank is divided am i best using canonical or 301 redirects? Sorry if this is an obvious question but If i'm correct we could see a huge improvement in rankings accross the board. Wow! Cheers Todd

    | toddyC
    0
  • PGRob


    We are using some branded terms in URLs that we have been recently told we need to stop using.  If the pages in question get little traffic, so we're not concerned about losing traffic from broken URLs, should we still do 301 redirects for those pages after they are renamed? In other words, are there other serious considerations besides any loss in traffic from direct clicks on those broken URLs that need to be considered? This comes up because we don't have anyone in-house that can do the redirects, so we need to pay our outside web development company.  Is it worth it?

    | PGRob
    0
  • labradoodlelocator


    I was wndering if there was a trick to getting google to crawl my website daily?

    | labradoodlelocator
    0
  • LianWard86


    Due to some historic difficulties with our URL Rewriter, we are in the position of having the root of our site 301 redirected to another page. So the root of our site: http://www.propertylive.co.uk/ has a 301 redirect to: http://www.propertylive.co.uk/home.aspx We're aware that this isn't great and we're working to fix this completely, but what impact will this have on our SEO?

    | LianWard86
    0

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