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Category: Technical SEO Issues

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


  • Well, I myself can't tell you why those pages would have errors - I don't know your site to know what is right/wrong or what your folder structure needs to be to ensure the path is correct. Or, as things that have happened to me, for example, in Google Webmaster tools, I'll get notification for 404's to my site pages...even though those pages don't exist. What do I mean? I mean someone linked to my site, but messed up the URL so they (unintentionally) created a bad URL that Google associated with my site. So when you say you have a high amount of errors/warnings, I'd just suggest looking at what  tool is providing that information to determine how credible that is. As for those URLs you shared, are all those legit pages but aren't rendering correctly? Or, are they not real pages at all but somehow the URL was created in the move? (Someone else may be better at chiming in there other than myself.) I suggest going back and redirecting all the bad pages to a good page, or serve up your 404 page for any bad links you want to fall out. Even with errors, sites can do better with traffic if the migration means that the site is more crawlable and that along with the migration, if it's easier for search engines to figure out what your site is about and match it to search queries.

    | josh-riley
    0

  • Thanks a bunch Mark

    | SnowFX
    0

  • Thanks so much for the responses thus far, they've been very helpful!

    | warcom
    0

  • You are not banned when I search. I find your site on the first two pages for a variety of queries.   You are at position #15 for "used parts washers for sale" I also see lots of duplicate content page-to-page on your own site.  Lots of your content also appears verbatim on plus.google.com, on blogspot. and on other sites. I would have a pro review the site to determine if you have a penguin problem or a panda problem.  Or, you can study up on these two problems and diagnose yourself (but I would hire a pro). Canning your domain and moving content to a new site will not get rid of a panda problem.  It just cuts off your links. Get a competent damage assessment before you do anything costly.  When you talk with the person who does this assessment tell them as much as possible as accurately as possible about your linkbuilding history.

    | EGOL
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  • Ben, the easiest way to give visitors the "experience" of the Twylah page without endangering your SEO as much would be to link to the page as it's hosted on Twylah's own domain instead of your own. The pages look exactly the same, just the URL of the link and the in address bar would be different. i.e.. www.twylah.com/yourusrname instead of tweets.yourdomain.com Paul

    | ThompsonPaul
    0

  • I'm fairly certain we lost rankings/traffic a little while after the unnatural link warning come through. The warning came through 7/April and I believe we lost rankings later on in the month when Penguin hit. It's hard to tell because the drop in traffic was only a small amount - since it was only one keyword we got hit for. Sounds like we'll need to try further cleaning up our back-link profile and see if there is anything else we can clean up and go for another reconsideration request?

    | crucialx
    0

  • I would not remove the H1 tag. Its only one of many factors in rankings but it's still important. Don't do anything shady with it just show it. It doesn't have to be huge default size you can style it you know.

    | irvingw
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  • Hey there...got your pm.  I can understand you not wanting to share your url in public. Take a look at your site in open site explorer and click on "anchor text".  You'll see that your most common anchor text is your keyword, and it's definitely not a brand.  You've got 191 links using that keyword as anchor text.  Your next most common is your url and for that you've got 16 links. That's definitely Penguin material unfortunately. It may seem unfair, but the Google guidelines tell us not to make links for the purpose of increasing our position on the SERPS.  It is very unlikely that 191 links with anchor text appeared naturally. Unfortunately you're going to need to get the majority of those links removed in order to recover and that's likely a tough process. If you had had an unnatural links warning in your WMT you could try to remove as many as possible and then show Google your attempts to remove the others.  But, because Penguin is algorithmic, the only way to recover is to do some drastic work at getting the keyword anchors removed or possibly changed to your url. I have found that about 10-15% of webmasters actually respond to my requests to remove links.  That's just not going to work for a site hit by Penguin.  If you can't get the majority of these links removed then you may need to start over with a new domain.

    | MarieHaynes
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  • Thankfully the company has realised that the website in question would require a lot more time than they first realised. I've now been tasked with adverts.ie to look at. It seems to be in a better position in terms of On-Site SEO

    | JayBoy
    0

  • One of the most common SEO issues with Magento is dynamic filter pages being indexed by search engines. These filter pages are ultimately duplicate versions of category pages (with different products) with a dynamic query string attached to the end of the URL. We've created a Magento SEO plugin which can help eliminate this issue, but I'll talk about this in more detail later on in the post. Best article about Magento SEO: http://www.gpmd.co.uk/blog/a-guide-to-doing-seo-on-magento-websites/

    | Visiblics
    0

  • (1) Some reports don't take into account the Rel=canonical tag even though its there but it seems good to me. (2) I would recommend a 301 for an /index page to your domain (www.davidclick.com) instead of a canonical tag.

    | KyleChamp
    0

  • no, both sites are still active... no redirect from one to the other...

    | Prime85
    0

  • Hi Chelsey, I don't have much knowledge with Google Shopping sorry but I thought I'd just suggest when you come to the time of creating unique product descriptions, headings and title tags this can be automated. When I have websites like this I create rules and formulas and pass to the developers to implement. Example: Title tag: [product name - or pull from header] [product code] - [category] - [branding] Meta description: use the first 165 characters from the product description Body copy: Swap out the [product code], [product color etc], [category name] but use a similar description as the base. It would be great if we could write individual descriptions for product pages but if you have a site with thousands and thousands of pages this isn't a reality. header: Will need to be added by hand via a CMS but you can make these unique by adding the product code (or colour or size etc) at the end. Also another thought, why don't you only add noindex to the product pages only on go live so at least your homepage and other content pages have some time to get indexed before the product pages are ready? Alternatively you could use a robots.txt file to block the folder directories of product pages while still allowing search engines to index those important high level pages (instead of noindex). I think it's great you are taking the time to provide unique product descriptions! Good luck, Davinia

    | Unity
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  • Hi Tourman, Your first question: This really depends on the setup of your hosting and development at this moment, but I would say in almost 90% of the cases these sites will be uploaded to the same server. This could affect your rankings but in a really really small difference, because Google is taking the server location into its algorithms. Personally I worked on a couple of sites which didn't had it's servers in the same country as the top level domain and I couldn't found any difference between the top level domains which had the server in the same country. So I wouldn't worry to much about the effect on rankings of your servers location. Hope this helps!

    | Martijn_Scheijbeler
    0

  • Hi Craig, Search this in Google "keyword"+“Guest bloggers wanted” OR “guest blogger wanted” Then analyse the authority of each site, and choose the best 10 to submit your articles to. You could also join the guest posting community at myblogguest.com Good luck! Greg

    | AndreVanKets
    0

  • Hi Neil, I'm not at the office to verify with the team right now, but it's a fairly safe bet to guess that we don't crawl all of the pages of Yahoo's directory, so if this is down several directory layers deep and not popular, we may not crawl it.

    | KeriMorgret
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  • Hi Davninia, Thank you for touching one of my main concerns - I didn't really mention this, but I was very worried about the risk of diluting my other well-ranking keywords. I am happy to report that w have invested countless hours in tailoring each of our product pages to be unique. While they do contain common keywords and phrases the majority of their descriptions are quite unique. 3. I'm glad to hear this - it was actually one of the first strategies we employed (and basically at the root of my question about pages competing against each other.) 4. Great idea. 6. We've been doing that for a few months now. It can get quite expensive when there's no nearby organic link, but a sale for us is one that the competition doesn't get. Your last suggestion is really interested -  I didn't realize that was something that could be done. I'll be using that regularly from here on in I'm sure. Thanks!

    | ninjaprecision
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  • This topic is deleted!

    | SBauer
    0

  • Thanks for all the great advice everyone! I have already started to make a few adjustments to his pages. I ran the seomoz on page optimization report again and it went from a grade D to an A. In terms of Local SEO, I've been working on getting him more citation sources, but he's basically starting from scratch. Most of his competitors that do show up have a ton of Google Reviews and other citation sources such as Insiderpages.com, kudzu, citysearch.com, etc... I'm currently using whitespark to find all the citation sources that his competitors are getting and getting his business profile created. I also registered his business to InfoUSA, Localeze, Yelp, and a few other Legal directories. One problem I noticed with his Google Places page only shows one category (Attorney). The rest of his categories: Criminal Attorney, DUI Attorney, Criminal Defense Attorney, and Immigration Attorney do not show up anymore. (I do know that once you click on the category, it should expand and show the other categories). I did fill out the change request form provided by Google a few days ago and hope that this will fix the issue. I'm not sure if anyone else has experience with this, but would welcome any feedback. I will definitely get started on the Hcard for him though! Thanks Miriam!

    | micasalucasa
    0

  • Hey Jeff, Were you able to fix this and get the "Status: Redirection limit reached." Bing message to go away? Any idea what that message means, is Bing seeing daisy chained 301s on that URL or is it just too many sitewide 301's being hit by the crawler and Bing thinks you are wasting their time?

    | irvingw
    0