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Category: Technical SEO Issues

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


  • I fully agree with Egol - the moment you start "manipulating" traffic just to please Google, you're taking the wrong direction. I can maybe work for a few months, even years, but in the end it's always a bad strategy. The only valid strategy is trying to figure out how to please your visitors, and traffic & Google will follow. It's not always easy to cope with the pressure for to change things, because your competitors are doing it that way, or because you have certain targets, but you'll win in the long run.

    | DirkC
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  • Thank you, that was what I thought.

    | absoauto
    0

  • That's about as comprehensive an answer as I could have hoped for. Thanks Ryan, really appreciated.

    | Whittie
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  • Hey Ryan and Jim thanks for your answer. I'm going to check those ressources.

    | Sindicic_Alexis
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  • Thanks Richard! If the other websites dont make any effort to change the copy at all and its literally word for word, will that harm our page? I mean will Google be able to tell we posted it first even if it is only an hour or so before they post it?

    | Brabian
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  • I would contact the developer of the plugin for those types of questions. He seems very responsive to people's input on the discussion section of his plugin.  They do serve practical uses though, like preventing comment spam and such, plus your client has been specifically targeted in the past so it seems it is a value add moving forward.

    | RyanPurkey
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  • What Don said is correct. Once the page has more content, it should stop flagging as duplicate content.  I always shoot for around 350-500 unique words per page.

    | masonrj
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  • Hi, I pointed out that Google is a web registrar to elude to the fact they can search registered domain names and return those as results. Google can WILL also use anchor text and links from any site they find a link to your site. Even if you disallow crawling via robots.txt.  If somebody is linking to you and Google finds it, and there are no more appropriate results they will return it when somebody searches those keywords. I would say first your main issue is the redirect. Second you must not have a strong enough keyword profile or you just launched and have not given Google enough time to get an updated SERP out. Either way fixing the redirect should be your primary focus. To answer your question sorry for being blunt here, the reason the parked domain is out ranking your live domain is because as far as Google is concerned it is the most relevant result. There is social media, it is registered and there is a cache of anchor text that is out ranking your live domain right now. You need to fix the redirect, build a link profile on new domain and give it time. It may not make much sense if you look at it from only your side. But Google isn't a magic genie that can update billions of SERPs every minute. The best thing you can do is help them help you. By fixing the redirect you tackle the issue 2 ways. 1. Even if Google returns your parked domain the user is sent to the correct domain. Second Google will see the redirect and index it appropriately thus removing the ranking from the parked domain. I hope this helps and I didn't mean to sound rude if it came off that way, Don

    | donford
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  • Glad to see you got things worked out. Best practice is to always have a "Disallow: /" rule in place in the root location when building a site, or to build it on an IP address via cpanel. A long long time ago we had an issue like this when we hired a rookie web designer, and had to go through everything making sure it was set correctly. Htaccess, robots, sitemap, sitemap crawl frequency, ODP (open directory project) settings, EVERYTHING. Hope everything works out for your new site! Also, since you are having large load times due to a heavy template style, you may want to check this out:  http://designshack.net/articles/css/18-css-compression-tools-and-techniques/. Compression is your friend

    | David-Kley
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  • I agree. I'm advising you to leave them in the index.

    | RyanPurkey
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  • I personally have done with with floridagunclassifieds.com i immediately saw the benefits from it. My key words were all in the domain. The expired domain was around since 2001 so I got the benefit of having an already indexed domain from google. It took about 4-6 months off my SEO time table by using the expired domain and building it up. I am now #3 in florida for my keyword and quickly climbing the rankings.. Go ahead and use the new domain!

    | mattadika
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  • Hi Angelos. Yup, you can do that. Here's a full guide here: http://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection and you'll want to pay attention to the parts regarding page to page redirection, such as: RedirectMatch 301 /poker-face http://www.example.com/poker-faces You can typically find further redirection support from your server host and related to whichever CMS or web software you're using.  Cheers!

    | RyanPurkey
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  • I don't think canonicalization would be inappropriate here. Each page is different, but each page of a forum topic is supporting the OPs' main post on the first page. You can canonical the subsequent pages and pass the authority to the main page so it ranks highest. If someone uses a specific search term that another person used on page 4 of the topic, that page will still show in Google's SERPs and direct the user to the deeper page, rather than the main page. So, we're not applying a canonical tag because of duplicate content issues, but to support the forum topic's parent theme. I suggest adding rel/next logic to your site's theme and let Google rank the subsequent pages accordingly. Once proper canonical and rel/next tags are implemented, I wouldn't worry about duplicate meta information.

    | Ray-pp
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  • You shouldn't have an issue with the TLD. Ensure that their Webmaster Tools is set to the UK, not Worldwide (Search Traffic > International Targeting > Country tab), NAP (name, address, phone number) are on every page (pref in the header) and get directories or links that are in the UK built to the site. You can use Majestic's topical trust flow to find sites that have Regional relevance to the UK if you're outreaching to sites, or scrape a competitors backlink profile. Feel free to Tweet me at @StelinSEO if you have any further issues Stel

    | StelinSEO
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  • Definitely. Trackbacks wont really be a problem unless it's just flat out spam.

    | DennisSeymour
    1

  • Have u tried any of these? https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ https://xmlsitemapgenerator.org/sitemap-generator.aspx http://www.web-site-map.com/ Or take a look at Chapter 8 of the Moz guide. It has insight on xml sitemaps as well.

    | Bryan_Loconto
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  • Thanks so much for your response. Glad to hear that there was a fairly good ending to this, and thanks for following up!

    | KeriMorgret
    1

  • Hi Dan, Actually it looks like ctrl L will do it (you are creating an excel table). You usually need to erase the first few rows from the export so you have the column header in row 1 and then select all and create the table checking the 'my table has headers' so that you can then filter using the headers

    | LynnPatchett
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