Category: Intermediate & Advanced SEO
Looking to level up your SEO techniques? Chat through more advanced approaches.
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SEO Blow-Up After Site Redesign
That's not too difficult to handle. Here is how I would go about it. I would first fix the existing website 404s, yes you have some as I checked your website. next, I will set up the 301s from old website urls to new urls and also install a 404 monitor plugin. also I woulld suggest that without deleting the copy that we have in old subdmain, if you can 301 everything there to www instead of old.domain.com, that will help.
| QuarterPie0 -
Best E-commerce CMS from a SEO perspective
Thank you for the reply on the thread. I will definitely check you guys out sometime in the near future It's really good that you added the schema.org markup on the product pages. Your users will really benefit from that.
| WesleySmits1 -
How can a small business compete with a larger business?
How much of webdesigners business is from people seeing them linked on a website they made I don’t know. If you know then you might be able to decide if my following advice is useful. Find a website with poor design that has been around since the internet was born, has good backlinks, a load of traffic, and offer to make them a website free of charge and get yourself on their footer. Maybe a silly idea, if I missed something I wouldn’t know. One site like this I am looking at with really amateur design has 96,724 per month SE traffic for google US according to SEM rush. Often sites like this use ads to make a bit of money, so that might make them more likely to say “yes” if it increases direct and referral traffic, and ad revenue.
| Zoolander0 -
Is the Tool Forcing Sites to Link Out?
Hi, This is Matt Cutt's view on the subject: "The other thing that happens is that people don’t always realize what they are linking to when they reprint these infographics. Often the link goes to a completely unrelated site, and one that they don’t mean to endorse. Conceptually, what happens is they really buy into publishing the infographic, and agree to include the link, but they don’t actually care about what it links to. From our perspective this is not what a link is meant to be." ... "This is similar to what people do with widgets as you and I have talked about in the past. I would not be surprised if at some point in the future we did not start to discount these infographic-type links to a degree. The link is often embedded in the infographic in a way that people don’t realize, vs. a true endorsement of your site." http://www.stonetemple.com/matt-cutts-and-eric-talk-about-what-makes-a-quality-site/ Google doesn't want to count links when people are posting them because it comes with the code - they want links to be an endorsement of the site. My recommendation is always to allow people to turn the links off in some fashion, whether we're talking about "powered by" links, widgets, or infographics. In your case, you could have two different code snippets: one that includes a link back to your site, and another that is either missing a link or nofollowed. I'd think it's totally fair to get links by creating something people want, especially if they have the option to turn it off. You can encourage people to share your site or "ink to the source, but "forcing" them to do so might someday result in links being devalued.
| Carson-Ward0 -
Pluggin to minify CSS
You can try a caching plugin like W3 total Cache - http://wordpress.org/plugins/w3-total-cache/ It minifies CSS, and does a lot more to speed up your site - just read all of the instructions first - it can be pretty powerful Good luck, Mark
| Mark_Ginsberg0 -
Should I noindex the site search page? It is generating 4% of my organic traffic.
One other thing to think about - do you have another method for your the bots to find/crawl your content? We robot.txt all of our /search result pages - I agree with Everett's post they are thin content and ripe for duplication issues. We list all content pages in sitemap.xml and have a single section to "browse content" that is paginated. We use re="next" and "prev" to help the bots walk through each page. References http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1663744 Personally, I think Maile's video is really great and you get to see some of the cool artwork in her house. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/03/video-about-pagination-with-relnext-and.html Important to note that if you do setup pagination, if you add any other filters or sort options in that pagination, no follow those links and noindex those result pages as you want to have only one route through your pagination for Goog to travel through. Also, make sure each page has a unique title and description, I just add Page N to the standard blurb for each page and that usually takes care of it. If you close one door on your search pages, you can open another one using pagination! Cheers!
| CleverPhD0 -
Need to know alternate ways to promote a Weekly Campaign
Your Suggestions really started the ball rolling Looking for some more options people
| dineshsearch0 -
Owning all of the top 10 positions for one keyword
I agree with Tom and Lynn. It would be technically possible if you make sure there is no connection with the site, (who is, theme, content, different host/ ip range, etc), there would be no way for google to know one person is behind it. But the amount of work to do that with white hat methods would be incredibly hard ( even with black hat it would be very hard), for a decent keyword worth ranking for..... I don't think its possible these days.
| PaddyDisplays0 -
How to Explain Admin Access To Client Who Denies It to Anyone Inside or Outside?
Nice work! It's always great to hear success stories and gives us a little more inspiration to keep up the communication until we get what we want;-)
| RepLoc_Tim0 -
Search traffic decline after redesign and new URL
Thanks so much for all of your insight! It's been frustrating as an in house SEO to find the root cause to this. We've found additional issues since I posted the question, and we are currently addressing them. Really couldn't be more impressed with the moz community. I'm shocked to get such excellent answers from all of you. It helps calm the team here, knowing that we can reach out to amazing people! Mark
| Canada_wide_media1 -
112 exact match anchor text internal links in the sidebar
Hi, If I understand right these are internal links on your own site? If that is the case then it is not a huge deal (although you should be careful to not go overboard on keyword stuffing your internal links). Sitewide footer and sidebar links on EXTERNAL sites are often done with an eye on boosting search engine rankings and as such have been de-valued by google and sites using this tactic a lot have in some cases been penalized. This is not so relevant for your own site where it is perfectly normal to expect to see footer and sidebar links highlighting main pages/categories of the site. Just be careful to not keyword stuff too much and try to link in a way that helps user experience and feels natural and you should be ok. Hope that helps!
| LynnPatchett0 -
Paging Question: Rel Next or Canonical?
Hi there, As Eric mentioned before, the solution will depend on how much unique content is there in the paginated pages (from the main category page): If there is very very little unique content, crawling and indexing them won't really help on earning more search visibility with them (usually in these cases would be additional long-tail type of keywords for that product category) but just to consume the crawlers time and effort. Being this the case then the best way would be to canonicalize the paginated pages towards each one of their appropriate main product category page. On the other hand, if the possibility exist to differentiate them: By featuring additional pages descriptions for each one of the paginated category pages or users reviews or ratings, or product descriptions of enough length, that can serve to give additional relevance value, then the best way to go would be to implement the rel next & prev annotations.
| Aleyda0 -
SEO Problem with PowerPoint to PDF?
This shouldn't hurt your SEO in any way. I do like Andie's suggestion about SlideShare. You can even embed the slideshare on your own site so i don't see any reason why this wouldn't work.
| WesleySmits0 -
Website, webshop and blog. Subfolders or subdomains?
Hey Wesley, Sub-directory will be a good option. You can find more info http://moz.com/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites I also like the common sense approach. Is your blog part of your site? Yes? Then have it as part of your site. Are you going to write around the topic of your products and services? Yep, Great. Then have it as part of your site so you can link them when natural to do so.
| Perfect0070 -
How to 301 redirect old wordpress category?
Beytznet, You may want to try this wordpress plugin to do you redirects. If you haven't already read it, here's Moz's best practices for redirection. And on this page is a link to a tool that can generate redirects for you.
| Chris.Menke0 -
Ecommerce Duplicate Product Descriptions across 3 websites
Thank you for all your help. We do think it is down to Ebay and Amazon having more authority over our domain which has in turn bought our rankings down. As we move forward we'll cut Ebay and Amazon's description down and see how this goes. I guess a long-term strategy would be to write unique content for all. But this is very time consuming for over 5000 unique products. Thanks,
| Roy19730 -
Hit hard on Google last October.
Hi Mario, Thanks for your reply! Hmm... the thing is we honestly haven't paid for any links at all ever. The listing on linksjuice.com was premium because we put a reciprocal link in an old blog post. Are these types of big directory listings things that Penguin targeted? Because a number of our competitors (who weren't affected last year), are also listed in similar directories. A number of the directories we are in now are only recent additions (a month or so ago, in response to our big drop in traffic 8 months ago). Did you find our most common anchor text from open site explorer's 'anchor text' listing? The anchor text you mentioned is only used 5 times according to OSE. There's 'trampoline australia vuly trampolines' as img text, did you mean that one? That's just one website who has a badge on each page of their website. We started a campaign in April for our authorised resellers to have a badge linking back to our website, not for our primary keyword, but to our trading name and company name. We aren't paying or forcing them to put it on or anything, we have some very loyal resellers who love our products, and there are also some that are fake (which is also one of the reasons we started this) and pretend to sell our products but ship other low quality models. We have a SEO company that also does work for us on link building sometimes as well. Thing is, I never know what they do or what links they build for us. We have left it totally up to them and never done any of our own link building until a few months ago to try and get back up. So do you think it could still be a bad back-link thing? If someone were to link to our website's homepage, and we want to rank for 'trampoline', should the anchor text always be trampoline? That's something Google has been trying to fix up with Penguin isn't it? Noticing when its all the same anchor text and ignoring some of the links because of it? If you look at linking root domains, you'll see stuff like stackoverflow, css-tricks etc (these are all from when I've posted and used my website's URL in the website field). Could this have diluted our ranking at all? Google should be smart enough to recognise that?
| Vuly0 -
Can Forum Signature Links be a positive thing?
I wouldn't worry unless you already have 5,000 existing forum posts and a brand-spankin-new link profile.
| BrightHealth1 -
Image optimization in 2013
Makes sense, thats what I thought as well, nice idea about about the logo and branding, I appreciate your response very much. Vijay
| vijayvasu0