Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Wow...I didn't know this!  Thanks Dirk for putting me in the 5000 Moz points club!

Hi, Far from being an htacess expert, but you could also try this rule: RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /+[^.]+$ RewriteRule ^(.+[^/])$ %{REQUEST_URI}/ [R=301,L] (off course I didn't invent it myself - it's coming from here: https://github.com/phanan/htaccess#force-trailing-slash ) I tried it here http://htaccess.madewithlove.be/ - and it seems to work if url is in the form mydomain.com/article => mydomain.com/article/ If you check with mydomain.com/article.htm - it's not redirected Could be an alternative if the rule proposed by Andy wouldn't work. Rgds, Dirk

Thanks for your input Andy - some good commonsense there Luke

Hello Dirk & Mike Many thanks for you advice and feedback. Alot of my categories and landing pages are all within 2 clicks from home so that's a relief that google isn't counting the number of / in the url. Most of my users don't come through home page as my brand is not well known etc  , I rank for my category landing pages so these are pages I really need to push hence my thoughts on reducing the number of categories on home page to only popular categories as a few of them we have never made any sales from so to push more link juice to the ones we do should help those rankings there otherwise I'm wasting potential link juice to products etc we never sell.. Many thanks for taking the time to explain. Pete

There are two things to do to fix this: When you upload a photo to a post, don't link it to the "attachment page' - this is a unique page just for the image, and is not needed. Here are your four options ---> http://screencast.com/t/KlUXTbes 'None' - makes the image not clickable Media file - links to the image file itself, which is good if you want users to see the image bigger Custom URL - you can link the image to anything you want, like an external link Attachment Page - is the one you want to avoid If you use the Yoast SEO plugin Go to Advanced -> Permalinks Check off "redirect attachment URLs to parent page' - this will redirect any images on their own URLs back to the page or post.

On another side note, the authors often upload PDF's from other sources like government bodies etc. I've told them to set them to nofollow for the PDF's which they're now doing. Is there a quick way to do nofollow on all the PDF's uploaded to the site or will I need to do it manually? They also sometimes repost (copy and paste) articles from their partners. Is there an easy (and free) way to scan the whole site and see which pages are duplicates from another site need canonical URL's? What is the best way to fix the canonical domain issue? Were you refering to the blog (news.nur...) or main site?

Hi Patrick I thought that but just wanted to triple check before writing a nice list for my developers tomorrow. Thanks Andy

There have been a few changes over the last few weeks that could affect rankings.  Google released a "Quality Algorithm" that seems to be like Panda but isn't Panda.  More info here: http://searchengineland.com/the-quality-update-google-confirms-changing-how-quality-is-assessed-resulting-in-rankings-shake-up-221118 The mobile friendly algo started to roll out April 22, but I see that you are mobile friendly so that's probably not it. Google also released a new doorway pages algo but we don't know exactly when. If you've got cookie cutter pages (i.e. targeting different cities, etc.) this could possibly be a factor. It's tough to say for certain what the issue is though. I'd also be looking at whether or not you made any changes to the site recently as technical issues could be a factor as well.

Thanks, going to watch it for the second time About the cannibalization of the main keyword, yes we are going to lower the amount of our main keyword. BUT if Moz their primary keyword would be "SEO", then all other pages on their website - and I bet that atleast 95% of their pages contain the keyword "SEO" - would rank lower or the homepage would rank lower. But this isn't the case, it makes it stronger because your whole site talks about this topic / keyword.

Hi Celine, Google is very smart at finding content these days, so I would avoid any possible ways of trying to hide it, but looking at what is there, I wouldn't worry too much. When looking at the model choice at the bottom of the page, it is the same for a reason, and there is no way around it. However, I wouldn't think that Google would see that as duplicate content. Lists in this manner don't normally cause issues and as mentioned above, it is more often larger 'chunks' of content that causes issues. There are other considerations that you might want to think about before releasing a lot more pages in this manner, and one if them is making sure Google won't see the pages appearing for no other reason that to draw in search traffic for particular phrases. Keep the pages well stocked with unique relevant content and you should be good to go. -Andy

If it's that you have both www & non-www versions of your site, you need to do this through the .htaccess file. Have a look at this page for some info on how to create a bit of code to add in there. This link is assuming you want the www version of the site to be the one you use. http://dense13.com/blog/2008/02/27/redirecting-non-www-to-www-with-htaccess/ -Andy

There are companies that can get rankings that quickly in competitive verticals.  But to do so they'll need to use techniques that are not within Google's guidelines such as using private blog networks or injecting links via hacking other people's sites. If this is a site that you can walk away from should it get penalized, then hiring them might make sense.  I'd want to ask how they are getting links and to make sure that they are not doing anything illegal or anything that involves hacking other websites.  Getting links from a private blog network (if that's what they are doing) is not illegal or immoral, but if Google catches on and the site gets penalized then you may never be able to recover it. If this is a site that you plan to keep for the long run, then it makes more sense to hire an agency that will improve your search presence gradually.  Good SEO usually takes a lot of time. I have been building back-links manually over the last 3-4 months. Be careful. I'm seeing links that Google will likely see as unnatural such as: http://www.linkaddurl.com/Arts___Humanities/Performing_Arts/Business/Real_Estate/?p=6 http://cqycxzfwzx.com/sell-my-house-fast-for-cash-your-request-fulfilled/ You're in a competitive space.  I am betting that those sites above you with spammy links will drop out of site the next time Penguin hits.  If they don't then it's because they're using private blog networks that Google hasn't been able to detect algorithmically and they're prime targets for a manual penalty. My advice for hiring an SEO company would be to ask them exactly what they will do for your site.  Are they going to improve your on page SEO?  If so, how? Are they able to get you links? If so, how? If they tell you that the process is proprietary then it's probably not above board.  If they give you marketing speak like, "We'll leverage your blah blah blah and produce stellar content marketing blah blah blah" without actually giving you a concrete idea of what they'll do then that's not good.  I'd also ask for references.  If they hide behind an NDA that's not good.  Good SEO companies will have people lined up to give them a reference.

Hi John The best I can offer you from here is to experiment. Try some news that match perfectly (I wouldn't include the brand in your H1, however - regardless of what Google says) and try some that vary. Measure your performance and CTR for each and see how they compare. Which set out performed the other? I would also look into creating a news sitemap (https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/74288?hl=en) and look into NewsArticle schema (https://schema.org/NewsArticle). Both help you define your title better for crawlers. Let me know if you have any more questions!

Great suggestion we'll try that thanks Vic.

Hi David, According to moz 'Use Keywords in Your URL' is moderate importance so it could affect a bit but on-page grade won't go beyond B. I don't think you should worry about it because in a URL we can use one keyword only and most of the cases we target several keywords on a single webpage and they do rank well, not possible to use all targeted keywords in a URL. Thanks

That's awesome Patrick I'll read all your ideas. Thanks a lot NIco

Hi Brad ATP has the right idea indeed. I don't foresee there being any issues with this at all. You're biggest two risks with any migration (back or front end) are broken links and downtime. If you're not changing any URLs, then you don't need to do redirects. Just obviously minimize any downtime as much as possible and you should be fine!

Patrick, Sorry. I am a newbie and can't find you on the PM username list. I sent an email to the address in your profile. Thanks again. Melissa

Patrick: thanks so much for your help on this. I just wanted to circle back to tell you that the problem is now resolved.  The site is "https://www.", and GWT was first setup as "http://" and then just "http://www." and both of those do a 301-redirect to "https://www."  So in any case, adding a third Google Webmaster Tools account for the secure version of the URL seems to have cleared up the problem and unlocked the keyword query data.

Don't know. It probably depends on which images you fetched and rendered. I did some image searches and wasn't able to find many images on your site, only the ones whose actual file names were visible in the HTML.