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Category: Web Design

Talk through the latest in web design and development trends.

  • CodyWheeler


    Hey guys, We're in the middle of designing our core navigation for our new site, which will feature a blog. I want to make sure the blog is linked to from the main navigation to pass all of the link juice to it, but since it isn't the core feature of the site we want people to view, I don't want it to take attention away from other things. Due to this I am thinking about giving it a main navigation link that opens in a new window. It would still be reachable from every page on the site, but it would allow users to view the blog in a new window rather than leaving the main site. The blog will still be on the same domain in a domain.com/blog subfolder. My question is... is this good practice? Will this pass the necessary link juice from our root domain to our blog, or will opening it in a new window detract from the value of the link? Any other comments / issues with designing the navigation like this that I'm not thinking of would be appreciated! Thanks

    | CodyWheeler
    0
  • sarenausa


    what are the 10 commandments to follow when designing a website?

    | sarenausa
    0
  • hfranz


    I would like to transform  our 400 page website to a CMS system. We rank failrly well for most of our keywords and not so much for others. Our website is currently optimized with lots of unique content, but we need to transform to a  more professional website with lots of options. Will doing this transformation affect our rankings if Redirects are correct ? Any recommedations for a Easy CMS that is very SEO Friendly?

    | hfranz
    0
  • Jvalops


    Hi All, We are redesiging our ecommerce site and product page is bothering us. We want to tidy up. We want to hide some of the description with jquery script. Visitor will be able to view first 30 words and there will be a "read more" text link just after that content. If they want to read more (which we think most will do) they will have to click the text link and rest of the content will slide open in the same page. The whole content is visible from source code. Would this be ok as far as Google and SEO concerned? I hope I explained it well 🙂

    | Jvalops
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  • RyanKent


    I have a site which provides forum sections for various languages. When foreign characters are used in the post title, each letter is replace by a three character replacement such as %93. This conversion makes the URLs long. The site's software automatically uses the thread's title in the URL. It is never a problem except in these instances. Any suggestions on how to handle this issue?

    | RyanKent
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  • brioman


    The idea, examples persons to follow.... well, I need to read about it:)

    | brioman
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  • BG1985


    We have a broad content site that includes crowdsourced lists of items. A lot of the pages allow voting, which causes the content on the pages (sometimes the content is up to 10 pages deep) to completely rearrange, and therefore spread out and switch pages often among the (up to 10) pages of content. Now, could this be causing any kind of duplicate content or any other kind of red flags for Google? I know that the more the page changes the better, but if it's all the same content that is being moved up and down constantly, could Google think we're pulling some kind of "making it look like we have new content" scheme and ding us for these pages? If so, what would anyone recommend we do? Let's take an example of a list of companies with bad customer service. We let the internet vote them up and down all the time, the order changes depending on the votes in real time. Is that page doomed, or does Google see it and love it?

    | BG1985
    0
  • MarkLoud


    Hey Mozzer's, quick question: Does anyone out there have any opinions / research on whether the use of image maps is an effective way of linking to other pages on a site as opposed to using seperate images? Does Google read alternate text from an image map in the same way as a regular image?

    | MarkLoud
    0
  • Ev84


    Hi All, Our website sells products online and is a prestashop system Prestashop comes with a set form you use to fill in products, however to fill it all you end up creating alot of repeated data. What i need to know, is if you have: Product name: Audi A6 Rear Lamp Set Short Description: A Short & Sweet Description Long Description: A Long Boring Description Meta Title:  Same as product name Meta Keywords: What more can be said about an A6 Rear Lamp Set??? Meta Description: Same as long and boring description Im stuck in a position of having the ability to add extra information (i.e Meta-Tags) But really ill end up repeating what is already in the products natural listing. In terms of good SEO, is it better to leave Meta Fields empty, or fill them in and be repetitive for product pages? Thanks all, any guidance will be well appreciated <colgroup><col width="57"><col width="36"><col width="323"><col width="328"><col width="56"><col width="26"><col width="55"><col width="23"><col span="2" width="25"><col width="24"><col width="25"><col width="95"><col width="158"><col width="123"><col width="130"><col width="28"><col width="34"><col span="2" width="64"><col width="537"><col width="188"><col width="319"><col width="303"><col width="329"><col width="177"><col width="96"><col width="128"><col width="172"><col width="547"><col width="62"><col width="87"><col width="85"><col width="94"><col width="162"></colgroup>
    | ID | Active (0/1) | Name* | Categories (x,y,z...) | Price tax excl (+10%) | Tax rate | Wholesale price | On sale (0/1) | Reduction amount | Reduction per cent | Reduction from (yyyy-mm-dd) | Reduction to (yyyy-mm-dd) | Reference # | Supplier reference # | Supplier | Manufacturer | EAN13 | Ecotax | Weight | Quantity | Short description | Description | Tags (x,y,z...) | Meta-title | Meta-keywords | Meta-Description | URL Rewrited | Text when in-stock | Text if back-order allowed | Image URLs (x,y,z...) | Feature |
    |
    | Price tax excl | Percentage Profit |

    | Ev84
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  • languedoc


    Hi, We're using Magento CE 1.4.0.1 for our ecommerce web site with a fairly flat navigation system i.e. 9 major categories display across the top menu that when you roll over display 2-20 sub categories (which take you to a groups of similar products) and then individual product pages. The categories and sub categories are available to click on as part of a dynamic Html menu system on each page. Each page also shows a small number of related products. This linking structure seems fairly standard and yet Seomoz throws up the error message, "Too Many On-page links" for most pages on our site. Do I need to really worry about this? Is there much can be done to improve this on an ecommerce web site with a large catalogue of products? I've looked at the Knowledge Base but I don't feel the existing responses adequately address the issue for ecommerce sites.

    | languedoc
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  • forecastedinvestments


    Hey Seomoz friends My friends and I started buying and selling art 5 years ago.  We did it all on ebay.  Two years ago I decided to try an attempt at building us a website to further our business outside of ebay.  www.originalartbroker.com I used homestead.com software aka intuit to do this. I was able to get a lot of first page results in seo after a ton of work and willing to do a lot more.  I'm sure the homestead site slowed my efforts down.  I need more power 🙂 What we do.  We sell fine art.  We are trying to aspire to the leading seller of fine contemporary art online.  We will do whatever it takes to get there.  Our issue is not our product.  Our issue is getting traffic to the site.  I only have 175-200 visitors a day.  I need better results for the keywords of our artists and inquires that surround them.  We have a bounce rate of 70%, average time on site of 1 minute 50 seconds, and a slow loading site that is almost impossible to create individual pages for pieces (mgmt nightmare) Outside of our site we have blogs, squidoo pages, facebook account with 2500 fans, twitter page with 2k followers, youtube channel, and a blog on the site for new arrivals. We have a 200-250 piece on our site at any given time.  We add probably ten pieces on average a week.  We don't need any kind of ecommerce management software as most of our sales are done over the phone being that it is higher end art.  I need a site that out performs my competition.  I need to be in the top three when someone types in "leroy neiman" "peter max"  and so on.  I, with limited knowledge, need to be able to use the software everyday to upload new art as it comes in.  I want every piece to have its own page so that I can also add pieces to a google merchant account.  When I add new pieces under a certain artists and it creates its own page i want it to create h tags and an url extension for each product as I add them based off the discription and artists name.  I would like some sort of blog integration to post our new arrivals as we get them.  I would like some sort of customer capture.  I am thinking something along the lines of them prociding email, name, and zip code to see the prices on the site. You are the seo pro so you know what it takes.  I would like to know what a solution would cost to get us on the ground with more seo power.  A site with speed that is easily indexed.  It doesn't need to have a lot of bells and whistles. Please look at my site and let me know what you think.  You can get an idea from that of what we are doing.  Please give me an idea of what you can do and what it would cost. Thank you

    | forecastedinvestments
    0
  • dbuckles


    We have an ASP.NET MVC website with a view that can dynamically display each product we offer. The product name is hyphenated in the URL, and this is what we’re using to pull the product from the database. So an example URL would be: http://www.mysite.com/Products/Florida/Sample-Product-Name We have another view that dynamically lists the products offered for each state. This page would contain links to the URL for each product offered in that state. The URL for Florida would be: http://www.mysite.com/Products/Florida We want to make sure that when we enter a new product into the database, the product is indexed by Google the next time our site is crawled. I know that Google will crawl through the links in our website, so the new product should get indexed as long as we have a link to it. In this case, the link will be on the view that lists the products for the corresponding state. I have 2 questions: 1)      Is my understanding correct that Google will index the product page as long as it can find a link to it somewhere in my site? 3)      To get Google to index each URL for content that is generated dynamically from a database, is having links in my site for each URL the only way to do it? Is there something we can do with the site map? Thanks in advance everyone! -Alex

    | dbuckles
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  • toeplly


    Dear friends, I have clients asking for SEO to drive leads. I have no experience on it, how could I do that? Is there any web layout I can suggest to my client? Another question is how do I implemented the layout on the web structure? I usually structuring my website based on keywords. For example: Homepage niche: plumbing Category: london plumbing, plumbing service, etc Content: Finding London plumbing service in your area, what kind of plumbing service you should pay attention? So, based on these layout, my SEO efforts goes to the content, instead of the homepage. Now, the question is how do I increase conversion with these strategy? Is placing a form above the fold would be wise, then place the content below it. Please advice 🙂 Thanks for your kind support, Albertus

    | toeplly
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  • jid


    Hi there, We have been having a problem with one of our websites.  It appears as though someone has stolen our template and used it for themselves, but in the process also stole our analytics information.  We have problems with the analytics, but are fixing that ourselves.  The problem we have now is that when we tried to put in a sitemap into Google Webmaster Tools the URLs are submitted but have yet to be indexed.  We have tried pinging them, but there has been no change.  This is not a problem for our other websites which are very similar. What could be the problem here?  For reference, the url is http://www.dentistinlittlerock.com Thank you for your responses in advance!

    | jid
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  • RyanKent


    My site automatically builds a title element basic by taking the forum thread title and adding the board description to it. Let's use a fictional site as "Gaggle - Chevy Corvette Lovers forums" in this example. A user makes a post titled "Transmission Problems" then the automatically created title would be: Transmission Problems | Gaggle - Chevy Corvette Lovers forums The process seems to be helpful. Overall thread ranking is good. The added words provide value to users searching for information as "Transmission Problems" is too vague, whereas by adding Chevy Corvette the search can be optimized better. The only issue is a small percent of my pages are being flagged by reporting tools with "Title Element Too Long" So I wish to ask, is there any real harm in this case? Google will simply truncate the title, right?

    | RyanKent
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  • Jvalops


    Hi there, We are getting our website redesigned and would like to know whether to increase the links on our site wide navigation or not. At the moment we have around 30 links from the navigation. We want to use exploding navigation menu and increase the links to our most important categories. Say if we increase to 60-70 would that be alright. (what will be the highest we can go for) At the moment categories that get links from navigation are ranking pretty good. If we increase would we loose those rankings. What will be the pros and cons of increasing navigation links? Second question we are also adding fooer links to top 10 categories in the footer. Would this be ok as far as seo and google concerned. Many Thanks

    | Jvalops
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  • bizarro1000


    Hi, I am looking to get a site of mine a much needed redesign and was wondering what other peoples experiences have been with rankings in Google after the new site has gone live. It will be converted from html/css design to a PHP based CMS with added functionality such as filtering, sorting etc. I'm aware of some of the preventative measures that can be done to prevent loss of rankings (e.g. 301 redirects) but are there any others and in your experiences have they been successful preventing the site dropping out of favor or losing rankings? Kind regards Rosh

    | bizarro1000
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  • damon1212


    Specifically, I just redesigned my site.  I'm reading Danny Dovers book, and learned about checking the cache version of the site to see what google is REALLY seeing . . . . . . which evidently is my old site. Obviously, my sites not going to make any real progress with SEO as long as the site is out of date.  It says it last checked the site on 5/5 and I launched the site on 5/9. Obviously, it does not do these things immediately, but anyone have any ideas on how long it should take before google starts to show me some love?

    | damon1212
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  • brian.james


    I have a retail business in the UK whose website has *.com address and it has taken 3 years to reach a page rank of 3. We are building an updated site which will have a completely new url structure and optimized for SEO. We are considering launching the new site at a *.co.uk as we understand this will have advantages in local search and ranking as we are primarily targeting UK traffic. Does anyone have comments on **.com vs .co.uk and/or have any advice on how to handle the migration while minimizing any drop in traffic and ranking?

    | brian.james
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  • RishadShaikh59


    Is Wordpress good enough to be used as a full fledge CMS for a large website. In particular, I'm talking about a news website. We have been online since 2002 but pretty soon we will have digitized our print newspaper archives of about 60 years. So, my question is, is it OK to use Wordpress for the entire website and if so what are some of the important things that need to be kept in mind. Cheers!

    | RishadShaikh59
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  • oznappies


    I have initial content that is dislayed for 10secs and then collapsed and replaced by a div that was hidden (display:none). Will the hidden text be used by Google or will they consider it as page stuffing? If so, is there any recommendations on how to handle this. The goal was to maxamize screen real estate for the human visitor without adding clutter.

    | oznappies
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  • Lael


    I know that for best results with search engines, tables should not be used.  However as I look to redesign our older e-commerce site, I find that not only our website but many other e-commerce sites use tables. Is it acceptable to use tables in e-commerce or am I just viewing outdated e-commerce sites.  Could you recommend a good shopping cart solution? We currently use volusion. Thanks for your time and see you in Boston next week!

    | Lael
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  • SEOTeamSF


    Hello Mozzers, We're currently evaluating a client site where the previous web developer redesigned the site and got lazy, 301 redirecting hundreds of pages to the home page instead of to their respective new URLs. Ugh. In any case, we will probably fix this for the sake of implementing best practices. But I am curious how search engines treat 301'd URLs, as they are supposed to be permanent redirects. Will search crawlers ever visit the old URLs again to find that we've re-redirected them? Or have they written them off as moved to the home page for good, meaning that there's no way to direct the authority of the previous URLs to their rightful targets? Thanks!

    | SEOTeamSF
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  • SoundinTheory


    We are looking into amending a website we are working on to try and combine 2 or 3 current pages onto one page. This site is similar to an estate agents site and currently has images, map, floor plan sub pages etc. Can anyone tell me, if we were to combine these pages and include the above details on one page, how that would affect the current search engine rankings?

    | SoundinTheory
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  • QualityHosting


    A family friend asked me to take a look at her website. www.designsbymaida.com First thing i noticed is what seemed a 301 redirect or a forward to http://funktionaldesignstudios.com/dbm-old/ So her site is hosted with what it looks like, in his site(funktonaldesigns).  What does this means in terms of how google sees her site and in terms of SEO. My thought is that he is boosting his domain name.  He is getting the link juice. Thanks for the insight and help.

    | QualityHosting
    1
  • Loganshark


    Hello, About two years ago, the company I work for hired an SEO firm to improve organic rankings on our site.  The SEO company's primary method for doing this was producing "articles" that are not really articles but keyword stuffed pages with lots of hidden, internal links to other legitimate pages on our site. Examples: http://www.creamright.com/Isi-Chargers-articles.html http://www.creamright.com/How-To-Make-Whipped-Cream-article.html http://www.creamright.com/Cream-Whipper-articles.html Obviously, this strategy wasn't greatly successful and we cancelled our work with the firm.  However, we still have all of the "articles" on the site (about 50-60 pages total) and each page is navigable from the html and XML sitemaps.  Additionally, the SEO firm we used built a lot of useless links to these pages from BS directory sites which are all still active. The question I have is whether we should remove these "article" pages or should leave them alone?  Although I'm sure they aren't helping any of our SEO efforts, could deleting the pages after two years negatively impact our search rankings? Thanks in advance for any help on this, Doug M.

    | Loganshark
    1
  • iAnalyst.com


    We're building out a store in Bigcommerce, who for all intensive purposes is perfect for SEO besides the fact that you can not change the URL's to be custom. My question is, does this kill the SEO value of bigcommerce, despite everything else being great? So for example the URL's for a category page would be something like this www.mysite.com/categories/keyword and the product URL's are pulled in by product name, so product URL's could be something like www.mysite.com/products/Product-Description-Long-223.html (notice the words will be capitalized and their is no way to remove the trailing .html) I could go with Interspire (the liscenced version of Bigcommerce) or Magento so I can custom edit this stuff. But then its a lot more work for my employee's on the buildout.

    | iAnalyst.com
    0
  • dbuckles


    .

    | dbuckles
    0
  • BlinkWeb


    Comparing X-Cart and Magento, which do you think is better for SEO and why? I am leaning towards Magento and wanted to get some opinions?

    | BlinkWeb
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  • GardenBeet


    HelloMy website http://www.gardenbeet.com has been rebuilt using prestacart and there are 158 duplicate title and meta descriptions being reported by google.My developer advised the following Almost all the duplicates are due to the same page being accessible at the root and following the category heading. e.g; /75-vegetable-patio-planter-turquoise.html
    /patio-planters/75-vegetable-patio-planter-turquoise.html This is hard-wired into PrestaShop. Was the Canonical module (now disabled) responsible for the confusion by not including the category name? The Googlebot shouldn't be scanning the root versions now. I don't believe this to be a serious issue but I'd recommend a second opinion from someone more SEO savvy just to be sure.Opinions??

    | GardenBeet
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  • TahoeMountain40


    HTML5 is supposed to revolutionize the way browsers, web clients and services are supposed to "understand" information on the web. I have been planning on converting my site to HTML5 ever since it went into a working draft last spring, however I wanted to know if upgrading to HTML5 would offer any SEO benefits or if it would actually have a negative effect on how my site is perceived on the web. I guess my real question here is "Do search engines recognize HTML5 sectioning?" Is content found in semantic sections like <header>, <footer>, <nav>, <aside>, treated any different than content inside generic HTML4 containers like, or ? </aside> </nav> </footer> </header>

    | TahoeMountain40
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  • jarrett.mackay


    Hi, On April 11th, a month after the farmer update was released for U.S. users of Google, the primary keywords for ALL our sites significantly dropped in Google.  I have some ideas why, but I wanted to get some second opinions also. First off, I did some research if Google did anything on the 11th of April... they did.  They implemented the farmer update internationally, but that does not explain why our ranks did not drop in March for U.S. Google users... unless they rolled out their update based on what site the domain is registered in... in our case, Canada. The primary news release site is www.hotelnewsresource.com, but we have many running on the same server.  EG. www.restaurantnewsresource.com, www.travelindustrywire.com and many more. We were number 1 or had top ranks for terms like ¨Hotel News¨, ¨Hotel Industry¨, ¨Hotel Financing¨, ¨Hotel Jobs¨, ¨Hotels for Sale¨, etc... and now, for most of these we have dropped in a big way. It seems that Google has issued a penalty for every internal page we link to. Couple obvious issues with the current template we use... too many links, and we intend to change that asap, but it has never been a problem before.  The domain hotelnewsresource.com is 10 years old and still holds a page rank of 6. Secondly, the way our news system works, it´s possible to access an article from any domain in the network.  E.G. I can read an article that was assigned to www.hotelnewsresource.com on www.restaurantnewsresource.com... we don´t post links to the irrelevant domain, but it does sometimes get indexed.  So, we are going to implement the Google source meta tag option. The bottom line is that I think we put too much faith in the maturity of the domain... thinking that may protect us... not the case and it´s now a big mess. Any insight you can offer would be greatly appreciated.  Do you think it was farmer or possibly something else? Thanks, Jarrett

    | jarrett.mackay
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  • vijayvasu


    Hello, I am kinda looking for experts who have dealt with the issues of Bounce Rates. Site : www.gunshotdigital.com Problem : High Bounce Rate SOLUTION : PL HELP FELLOW SEOMOZZERS 🙂 thank you all in Advance. I love our community! Let me know if there is anything I can do for you - esp in design /branding/ PSD conversions etc 🙂 best regards, Vijay

    | vijayvasu
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  • deuce1s


    Do iFrames embedded in a page get crawled? I have an iFrame which prints a page hosted by another company embedded in my page. Their links don't include rel=nofollow attributes, so I don't want Google to see them. Do spiders crawl the content in iFrames, or do I have to ensure that the links on this page include the nofollow attribute?

    | deuce1s
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  • eseyo


    I see that you have already answered this question before back in 2007 (http://www.seomoz.org/qa/view/2163), but wanted to ask your current opinion on the same question: Should I add a site-wide footer link to my client websites pointing to my website, or should I create a "website credits" page on my clients site, add this to the footer and then link from within this page out to my website?

    | eseyo
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  • SheriGolla


    Good morning! I'm new to the SEOmoz community. This morning, I spot checked a couple pages using the Term Extractor. When looking at the results, I noticed that we're ranking for many of the terms contained in our privacy policy. Our privacy policy is set up in the footer of our page templates and appears as a light box that pops up over the page you're viewing, so it looks like every page (from a search engines perspective) contains every word of our 900-word privacy policy. Since several of our legal terms are showing up as "targeted terms" within the tool, would it benefit me to change the privacy policy link from a light box to something else? Perhaps a link to a static page that contains our privacy policy instead? Are the search engines smart enough to see the repeating text and ignore it from page to page, or am I just diluting all of my SEO efforts here? I'm after big wins here, and don't want to be too nitpicky, but concerned this could be a big SEO no-no that I might want to correct. Thanks in advance for your expertise! Ben Culbert

    | SheriGolla
    0
  • christinarule


    I need to signon with a hosting/design company that is both cheap and has a nice partner package. Any ideas?

    | christinarule
    0
  • EricVallee34


    I'm trying to help a client understand the importance of having a well-organized HTML site map as a method of helping usability.  As part of this process, I spent some time searching for good examples of well-organized HTML site maps, and found that many sites don't offer one (including SEOmoz).  I'm wondering if webmasters and/or SEOers think they aren't valuable any longer?

    | EricVallee34
    0
  • tickettoss


    When linking internally in my site is it more beneficial to have links written like, Fast Blenders OR Fast Blenders

    | tickettoss
    0
  • EricVallee34


    I'm in the process of building a website and am experimenting with some new pages.  I don't want search engines to  begin crawling the site yet.  I would like to add the Robot.txt on my pages that I don't want them to crawl.  If I do this, can I remove it later and get them to crawl those pages?

    | EricVallee34
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  • compasslocal


    Why on earth did you say you could get a quality template designed and coded for a few hundred bucks?  Im a professional designer, I expect to make 75 an hour which is actually low. And you think I should be able to design and code a high quality wordpress site in a few hours. You are killing my business and encouraging people to hire low quality developers or take work out of America.  Im very offended by your comments.  Why dont you try living on 5 bucks an hour !! You just spit in the face of all good designers.

    | compasslocal
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  • MikeATL


    Hi - I run a hobby related niche new / article / resource site (http://tinyurl.com/4eavaj4). One of the most critical components of the site is our product database. We don't actually sell anything directly - instead we monetize them by displaying relevant affiliate product feeds and price comparisons. However since the Panda update was implemented in February my traffic (particularly my long tail, product related traffic) has dropped off considerably. I had about a 20% drop in overall traffic, but have made up some of the ground in the past week.  However I want to know once and for all how I should structure my product related information as I have a ton of great content that is ready to be published in this section but want to be sure I structure it the best possible way from a SEO standpoint. Here are a few different options I've come up with for displaying information about products on my site. For the purpose of these examples I am going to refer to all of the information that makes up my product pages collectively as "product profiles". Please let me know which is the best SEO wise (or if you have a better way of doing it let me know): - Option 1 - Current Method - Divide Content Sections into different pages / urls Example: http://tinyurl.com/4tpdlbl This is how the majority of my product profiles are currently structured. I did this to improve load times and to keep the total number of links per page down. In addition to the core product profile subpages: "Product Details","Compare Prices", **"**Product Review", "Hot Auctions", and "Checklists", I have the Checklists area further segmented by subset, each of which is on its own page that is only accessible through the main Checklists tab of the profile. - Option 2 - Everything on one url / page the old fashioned way, with everything available by scrolling vertically. This would make the page go on forever though. - Option 3 - Everything on one url / page, but visually segmented using css / javascript tabs. Example: http://tinyurl.com/4kqhauh I looked at the source code and all the page text is there, so it looks like it would be spider-able but you tell me. Or would another method of tabbing be better? My site is wordpress based so the functionality comes from a plugin. - Option 4 - Use post tabs that are technically all on the same page, but make each individual tab be accessible through its own suburl, all of which share the same core canonical url. Example: http://tinyurl.com/4bs9pjs Clicking on any of the individual tabs will result in something like ?postTabs=2 being appended to the core url.  Example: http://tinyurl.com/4gvgufc Any input would be greatly appreciated asap! Thanks Mike

    | MikeATL
    0
  • kavaliauskas


    I recently have taken a new position responsible for three large national retail sites which are all owned by one parent organization.  Through a series of acquisitions, these three major brands have been brought under one umbrella and a brand consolidation is likely not to happen within the next 2-4 years.  I have a number of questions I’m hoping to get some feedback on, but first a little more background is necessary. A year ago (before my time) the three sites were over-hauled, but were designed to use one common custom CMS and all of the navigation and nearly all the content is the same (with some exceptions, such as tags, url, etc.).  All of the brands have identical products and services; however, each one services a different demographic in the US.  The design was intended for ease of management, but is terrible for seo.  Additionally, without the geographic reference, they all compete for the same keywords.  They have now begun a very large ecommerce project utilizing an ATG platform.  The initial direction is to use one platform for all three brands, but keep them on separate domains and with the use of basic switching, replace nominal content such as logos and references of the brands for each of the domains.    I’m concerned with this approach and would like to hear your feedback.. When optimizing a page for one keyword set, are they likely to be filtered due to dup content?  The argument that management has is that all three current sites rank very well for one keyword on all three sites.  They feel it won’t be an issue due to this. One option, that is currently still available, is to tri-band one ecommerce site, but it would have to be on an entirely new domain.  The other three domains are very well established and are PR6s.  Management, and even I, is afraid to abandon these other domains, but having a single domain would allow us to have unique content and really leverage all efforts to one domain. Thoughts? Any knowledge or thoughts what kind of impact having three domains on one ATG platform will be? Thanks much! John If you feel it will help, please message me and I can share the urls... Also, how would you handle a company blog in this case?

    | kavaliauskas
    0
  • RobertFisher


    A friend who is a software developer asked this question regarding the directory portion of the url: Is it better to use dashes or underscores? I know in the domain name Matt Cutts recommends dashes, but what about the directory extension?

    | RobertFisher
    0
  • Highland


    Got a debate raging here and I figured I'd ask for opinions. We have our websites structured as site/category/product This is fine for URL keywords, etc. We also use this for breadcrumbs. The problem is that we have multiple categories into which a category fits. So "product" could also be at site/cat1/product
    site/cat2/product
    site/cat3/product Obviously this produces duplicate content. There's no reason why it couldn't live under 1 URL  but it would take some time and effort to do so (time we don't necessarily have). As such, we're applying the canonical band-aid and calling it good. My problem is that I think this will still kill our crawl budget (this is not an insignificant number of pages we're talking about). In some cases the duplicate pages are bloating a site by 500%. So what say you all? Do we just simply do canonical and call it good or do we need to take into account the crawl budget and actually remove the duplicate pages. Or am I totally off base and canonical solves the crawl budget issue as well?

    | Highland
    0
  • wazza1985


    Can you optimise websites using flash? is it exactly the same aspects to optimise or does it cause problems??

    | wazza1985
    0
  • DiamondJewelryEmpire


    What would be the fastest way to boost domain authority.

    | DiamondJewelryEmpire
    0
  • wazza1985


    Hi Guys, I am in the process of developing some new areas of work and a good CMS is going to be required to make my SEO and everything included work to its best. What CMS systems are the best ones to use from an SEO prospective and generally all round? Thanks

    | wazza1985
    0
  • TahoeMountain40


    We are developing our mobile site right now and we are using a user agent sniffer to figure out what kind of device the visitor is using. Once the server knows whether it is a desktop or mobile browser it will deliver the appropriate template. We decided to use the same URL for both versions of the page rather than using m.websiteurl.com or www.websiteurl.mobi so that traffic to either version of these pages would register as a visit to the page. Will search engines consider this cloaking or is mobile "versioning" an acceptable practice? The pages in essence are the same, the mobile version will just leave out extraneous scripts and unnecessary resources to better display on a mobile device.

    | TahoeMountain40
    0
  • tgraham


    Hi all, I'm considering creating a dynamic table on my site that highlights rows / columns and cells depending on buttons that users can click.  Each cell in the table links to a separate page that is created dynamically pulling information from a database. Now I'm aware of the google guidelines: "If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few." So we wondered whether we could put the dynamic pages in our sitemap so that google could index them - the pages can be seen with javascript off which is how the pages are manipulated to make them dynamic. Could anyone give us a overview of the dangers here? I also wondered if you still need to separate content from code on a page? My developer still seems very keen to use inline CSS and javascript! Thanks a bundle.

    | tgraham
    0

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