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Category: Technical SEO Issues

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


  • Thanks Jesse. Yup, each page is unique, so probably will be no-indexing and putting some no-follows on those links. Might be worth blocking the /view directory as well, though probably will just start with the noindex. Thanks for the help.

    | jim_shook
    0

  • Hi, The fact that you do not have mobile versions for all pages of the site makes your case a bit of an odd one when it comes to best practices.  I would recommend if at all possible to address this and make all pages available in mobile format also. If for whatever reason this is not possible then I think you are better off using a meta robots tag NOINDEX to get your mobile results out of the serps completely and a rel canonical to the relevant desktop page to make extra sure there are no issues with duplicate content. If you can get all pages into a mobile version then you will want to implement proper redirects based on user string as you are doing, and also implement rel alternate/canonical tags between the desktop and mobile pages of the site (which should make sure the right version of the site shows up in the relevant serps). For more details on the whole setup check: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-optimize-a-mobile-site and http://moz.com/blog/mobile-seo-process

    | LynnPatchett
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  • Thank you for your response! I will try this out!

    | ZAG
    0

  • For #1 The problem may be related to the link/news feed CEBU DAILY NEWS http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/category/cdn that's in the top right navigation. So you may want to investigate that. Using the News sitemap? Check the <name>tags there as well. Failing that try reporting it here: http://support.google.com/news/publisher/bin/request.py?hl=en&contact_type=report_issue_content&rd=2</name> For #2 Google News runs on a different algorithm and also has different ranking factors.

    | AUDigitalMarketing
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  • Hi Brian, I'm happy I could of been of help to you. Using all-in-one SEO plug-in is not at all a bad thing.  However I think you might want to take a look at the Yoast WordPress SEO plug-in http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/  I think it is a better plug in overall however some people like Coke and some like Pepsi you know. Is there anything else I can help you with answer question? Sincerely, Thomas

    | BlueprintMarketing
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  • Thank you all. At a high level based on your input, it makes sense to do nothing at all as traffic rankings for our site have been on the rise and this site has linked to us for at least 3 years with no associated affect. The only bummer is that it does appear to be scraped and some human intervention as many links are broken, but thankfully hit our 404 error page. We have contacted them 3 times over the past month, to no avail - most likely due to either language/translation barriers, or simply due to the fact that they have so many broken links that it's not worth their time to fix them. To answer some of Doug's questions, traffic from their site is minimal but appear as quality visits: 94 visits per month, 8.53 pages per visit, 8:40 minutes on site, 10.64% bounce rate. Their link neighborhood doesn't look exceptional, however the website relationships all appear to be about the same topic - plastics. The links are not in the footer, but instead a link from a specific plastic like Lexan 101 to our Lexan 101 page - pretty relevant, their site is a PR5 and is a legitimate business. They simply appear to be referencing our site for more technical information on the plastics they sell. Just threw a red flag at me because of the excessive number of links from one domain and we work very hard to protect our reputation. Any other comments are most welcome - again thank you all!

    | Prospector-Plastics
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  • Thanks a lot Lynn for pointing to the thread about similar issue.

    | madhurk
    0

  • So is it because of a problem with the setup of the homepage? Would a 301 redirect mean that /home-2 is still ranking.. ideally I need to get it out of the results all together.

    | xcyte
    0

  • Howdy, The big question is whether or not these links are actually "unnatural." If they are there because of overly-aggressive social booking marking, they may be considered unnatural and you may consider removing them. Unfortunately, search engines never tell us exactly what links are bad or which are good. Social bookmarking links aren't necessarily good or bad by themselves, but often it depends on the anchor text - lots of exact match anchor text is usually a sign of unnatural linking. Paddy Moogan wrote a good post on finding low-quality links that I highly recommend: http://www.stateofsearch.com/step-by-step-guide-finding-low-quality-links/ Wish I could tell you one way or another to remove and/or disavow those links, but there's never an easy answer. -cyrus

    | Cyrus-Shepard
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  • Fantastic.  I appreciate all the help.  If it's showing up in the search for the content directly than I'm not too concerned.  I'm curious though as why every tool I tried gave poor responses.  A second tool someone in the office had tried gave a similar response. http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/search-engine-simulator.shtml?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.rocksolidroof.com Is it just something with the template that reads off for spider simulators?

    | GregWalt
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  • And don't forget to look into the Change of Address feature in Google Webmasrter Tools: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=83106

    | Everett
    0

  • I disagree and would advise against this. First of all, these are not the same pages and so it is an improper use of the rel canonical tag, which means - at best - Google could just choose to ignore this at any time and the problem would still be there. Second, if he has a link-based penalty (looking at his link profile for that page this is very possible) placing a rel canonical tag on the two ranking pages that points to the penalized/filtered page could cause those two to stop ranking as well, leaving him with no traffic at all for that brand - a bit worse than sending users to the wrong page. Jonathan, I had a look a the external links to that page and out of 7 links, according to OSE,  6 of them have that exact anchor text "Bit O Honey" with the other one being "Bit O Honey for Visit here". One of them is on a list of "great links" for an android app website that is HEAVILY spammed with really bad links, such as "female escort services" in various countries. Another is on a list of links at the bottom of a totally irrelevant post that is also irrelevant to the blog it's on. The blog is about hotels and travel. The post is about cooking chicken with wine. The link is about "Bit O Honey" candy, and it is found also near links for window blinds and ice cream. The other links, with the exception of one that is debatable, are all along these same lines in terms of quality. If you were to rel canonical (essentially a redirect as far as search engines are concerned) the other two pages to this one you would be putting those pages at risk too. My advice is to get rid of these links. If you can't get rid of them, disavow them. Wait a few weeks and if you don't come back into the rankings for that page file a reinclusion request. And of course build more high-quality links to that page if you can. Last but not least, fire your link builder.

    | Everett
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  • Try going to the soft 404 errors that webmaster tools is reporting, and see the HTTP status code you're getting. If the status code being returned is a 200, you'll know you're getting a soft 404. You can check the status code with the moz bar, in the page analysis section, under the page attributes tab, if you scroll down to the bottom, you'll see the status code of the page. You may also want to emend the file reference in your htaccess file to be relative and just do /404.htm, and not the full path - maybe that will help. Mark

    | Mark_Ginsberg
    0

  • cheers for this, i have contacted the company to see what they say about this issue and hopefully it will be resolved.

    | ClaireH-184886
    0

  • Hi mcardenal, you should not use OSE for checking if your site has crawling issue, but the crawl report. And remember, the Moz crawl report can be ok if your site own a limited number of pages. If it is composed by undreds of thousands pages, then the Moz crawl must be considered more a parsing than a complete crawl. For that reason, even if the Moz crawler is an amazing tool, which present very well the biggest issues a site may have (especially exact and substantial duplicated content issues), for having a complete crawl of your site as if it was crawled by Googlebot, I suggest you to use the Screaming From Spider SEO. With that tool you will be able to understand if bots can access correctly to all the pages of your site. OSE is a tool for analyzing the link profile of a site, not its state of indexation.

    | gfiorelli1
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  • Hey Stephen You have every right to be concerned here and duplicate content is a big problem but don't take my word for it: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66359 http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1235687 Lets try and forget any SEO mumbo jumbo and just think about this in common sense terms: 50 pages with 6500 duplicates means there are 130 versions of each page - which one should Google return in search? If Google is crawling your page and has 6500 pages to crawl how are they supposed to know which page is the right one? I am guessing there are not actually 6500 versions of your pages so in all likelihood, this is some kind of URL based duplication with the page being returned on several URLs (or 130 URLs). What is more worrying is that if the Moz crawler found these pages they are all obviously crawlable so the internal link structure and information architecture is all out of whack. Without examples it is tough to give advice but you have various options Tidy up the URLs - remove any unnecessary URL parameters (this can be done in webmaster tools if your development company are unhelpful (as they certainly seem unknowledgeable and happy to hand out duff advice). Implement a canonical URL Improve the internal link structure so you only link to one version of each page (ideally combined with a canonical) Ultimately we want just the 50 pages, a canonical URL, consistent internal linking and any confusing parameters dealt with in webmaster tools. This kind of problem should be easily resolved and happy to give specific feedback if you wanted to post a link showing some examples. Another good read: http://moz.com/blog/fat-pandas-and-thin-content Hope that helps! Marcus

    | Marcus_Miller
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  • Check your .htaccess file to see if something is going wrong there. Another possibility could be that you did something wrong in the robots.txt file. It could also be a server issue but since we users can see the page just fine i'm thinking it's either the .htaccess or robots.txt file. Let me know if you fix it and if not i'll try to help some more.

    | WesleySmits
    0

  • You don't need to use the word "sandbox" but there may be a delay in indexing the redirected content based on how often your original site gets crawled. (The redirects that went into effect when seomoz changed to moz, for example seemed to happen right away, for example. others might take a month or more. In your case, it sounds like you're moving from one domain to another?  If that's the case, then the redirect should be reflected in Google's search results as soon as the original domain is recrawled.

    | Chris.Menke
    0

  • Sorry... I just had to jump in on this since the other members of the Roberts Tribe of Moz have chimed in. I agree completely with their assessment.

    | MikeRoberts
    0