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Category: Technical SEO Issues

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


  • Wanted to add one more thing.  If it's possible, you may want to use the url removal tool to remove these new nasty pages from the Google index.

    | MarieHaynes
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  • Thanks Aggie! Glad to see Matt Cutts addressed it directly.

    | JacobFunnell
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  • "AgentRank is coming by end of 2014/beginning of 2015.  Google is testing this and was forced to reduce the amount of authorship they show in the SERPs.  High Quality, Shared Content will be the only posts that have authorship show up going forward." That's my conspiracy theory... carry on.  

    | DarinPirkey
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  • Hi Rich, you've received a couple of good responses. Did they help answer your question? Please give us an update, thanks! Christy

    | Christy-Correll
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  • Thanks Keri, I figured that Btw, you guys are great here at Moz!

    | co.mc
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  • I turned off private data and now it works fine! Thanks!

    | bettingexchange
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  • No problem. The JCE Editor doesn't set the Meta Title Tag, just the content that is contained in an article. It sounds though that you have now found the relevant place. So is it working for you now? Peter

    | crackingmedia
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  • Hi, I had another thought - the old posts are ranking fine on the new site after the 301 redirect. Some are slightly down but in the main, they are approx the same SERP position. It's new posts which are having the difficulty. Are new posts on a new domain difficult to rank anywhere even with a 301 redirect passing authority through? The 301 is passing everything through to the new domain. Getting really frustrated! As I say, I don't have an expectation of search position but this is good content which is being indexed but not being given any SERP position.

    | hooneyrobert
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  • The term "canonical" comes from maths. It means "the standard form to present something in". So, if you have two or more things that are very similar or identical then you might want to say "this is the canonical version - the standard thing we will refer to". For example, if your CMS is a bit old-school and creates two versions of a page - one human-friendly like example.com/blog-post and another horrible one like example.com?id=12397863294862395 - then you want to point search engines to the nice one and say "this is the standard, canonical version - refer to that one". So in this case you should definitely use on example.com?id=1239786329486239 to give search engines that instruction. If you also add this to example.com/blog-post then that's fine - all you are saying is "this is the standard version of this page" which is perfectly valid. But from your question, this doesn't sound like your plan. Correct me if I'm wrong, but your plan sounds like you will tell the search engines something along the lines of "you see that blog post there, and that one there, and that one there, and that one over there? They're actually all the same thing, and the standard, canonical page you should refer to is this category page". That wouldn't be a good idea, because all of those articles are different things. So, I wouldn't add a hard-coded canonical URL into your template. Instead - as long as your CMS allows it - add the canonical tag to the of each article and link to the search engine friendly version of each blog post.

    | BenjaminMorel
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  • http://www.froggysfog.com/robots.txt Does not control a separate domain name. You actually have to modify robots.txt file inside the other host name You should be able to request the URL is no index & no follow That's should take care of all these issues. dont block https or your sight will not be found. Tom

    | BlueprintMarketing
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  • Hi Guy, You've received a couple of great responses here from experienced SEOs. Did they answer your question? Please give us an update, thanks! Christy

    | Christy-Correll
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  • Thank you SO much for your helpful tips and advice!

    | myfitstation
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  • Hi there Well, your page is still there in the SERPs (#11 searching from London), so that's the main thing! It could be an issue with the Moz crawler missing the page, or it could have been some short downtime on your site (best to double check that in webmaster tools if you have them set up - look for any crawl errors around Friday, where the rankings update).  Rank checkers can be a bit temprimental, Moz's included.  I know that they're working hard on the tool to improve it - it's pretty difficult considering that Google don't want sites/apps/programs scraping their results or data.  Some good reading on that topic can be found here, when Raven Tools stopped offering ranking positions. So given all that, every now and then you'll get errors and anomalies.  Try to supplement your data where you can with a couple of free alternatives - both Rank Checker Ace (cloud based) and Rankerizer (download) give you a free keyword ranking tool.  Run all three to get a stronger idea of rankings from different sources. Frustrating I know, but just as much for the Moz team and Google's awkward stance.  At the least most important thing is intact, and that's your site's actual position in the rankings!

    | TomRayner
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  • Hi there! This Authorship troubleshooting guide by Janet Driscoll Miller may help.

    | Christy-Correll
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  • Hello Joni, One of the solutions from the thread Matt linked to earlier is very interesting. I've never tried it but will definitely give it a shot soon. Read about it here. In short, you would add a line to the htaccess file that would instruct user agents trying to access a secure page on the site that they are disallowed from visiting any page. Since I've never tried that solutions, and so far haven't talked to anyone who has, my recommendation is going to be the simplest one I know of: Make sure your rel canonical tag is using the http version of the URL. This should not change when viewing the https version - it should have an http rel canonical tag. That should solve the problem without having to redirect users to a non-secure page, and without having to edit your htaccess file.

    | Everett
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  • Jayson DeMers wrote a great article regarding how to use schema markup for local SEO.  This isn't a complete list, but should definitely help you get started. http://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-to-use-schema-markup-for-local-seo/60245/ I hope that helps!

    | Mike_Davis
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  • Hi Jeff, Thanks for taking time to help us out as well. We are checking out your recommendations, especially interesting is learning from Moz's experience. Kindest Regards Luciano

    | seoec
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  • Thanks Cyrus. I hear what you're saying, I'm just confused as to why Google would allow us on the first page for so many keywords every other week if we had so many bad links? My understanding was more that you have rankings, and you hold those rankings unless a competitor comes and overtakes you, or if you get penalized by Google. I guess this is technically the latter, but if I was getting penalized I wasn't expecting to be anywhere close to the first page for my targeted keywords. I suppose I will look into cleaning up the link profile. I am also planning on switching hosts to WP Engine from our HostGator VPS as it's just too slow. Perhaps changing hosts and speeding up the load time will help a bit as well. I'll continue to tell the client to write more content. I personally don't do any black-hat stuff, especially link-building, so I'll have to go in and see what his old SEO people did.

    | Millermore
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  • +1 what Keri and Andriy have said. I would only add that you can still buy additional domains and redirect them to your core site. e.g. your single site sits on site.com. If you wanted to "glocalise" your appeal then you could promote site.co.uk in the UK in advertising campaigns and have it 301 redirect to site.com. This would protect your brand, and also gives you the opportunity to localise the experience on site.com if they were referred via site.co.uk, and configure things like setting correct local currency. It really depends on how important having a local appeal is to your client. George @methodicalweb

    | webmethod
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