Latest Questions
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Anyone know how to outrank a stock ticker symbol?
Hi Matt, In circumstances like this, it is generally down to the fact that your clients company doesn't carry the trust and authority to outrank the ticker. If someone searches for the acronym, I am assuming that most want to find the stock info, rather than your client. Of course, this is something you need to change. This can only come from building that trust. Google made a change a while back that gave more bias to brands - this is where you want to be. There is a wonderful article here on Search Engine Land that I suggest you spend some time going through as it will take you through many steps that you would need to take. The same with the article here on MOZ. -Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Andy.Drinkwater0 -
Weird Blog tags and re-directs
You could always set a no-index rule for the tag pages in robots.txt and then submit all the URL's you want to appear through Webmaster tools using the "Fetch as Google" option. Another thing I would do is to only have the URL's you want to be indexed and focused on included in the sitemap, and the rest excluded. This should cut back on the strange or redundant URL's getting indexed and showing up. Something like: Disallow: /tag/ or Disallow: /http://www.bestpracticegroup.com/tag/ Hope this helps!
Technical SEO Issues | | David-Kley0 -
Google Indexing of Site Map
No problem, its actually really easy: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/googlebot-fetch Once you have selected your account, add the URL and then submit to index. I would do the homepage first and for that page, use the "Crawl this URL and its direct links" option. Then for the subpages do the "Crawl only this URL" option. It can also help to do the "Crawl this URL and its direct links" for any of your top level menu items to help speed things up. "For example, i just checked a page and saw that some images weren't being indexed." Does your robots file allow specific access to those pages? If not, here is how you can set it to do so. This will also allow Google's partners to access your images. Add this to the bottom of your robots file: User-agent: Googlebot-Image Allow: /images/ User-agent: Adsbot-Google Allow: / User-agent: Googlebot-Mobile Allow: / User-agent: Mediapartners-Google* Allow: / Sitemap: http://www.YOURSITEHERE.com/sitemap.xml
Technical SEO Issues | | David-Kley0 -
SSL Certificate valid for SEO https
As long as you properly redirect all pages to the https version, you should be fine. Google released an update a while back stating that secure sites could perform better in search results as it offered users additional security and trust. If you are going through the trouble of updating your site to an SSL, I would set the entire site to fall under the https, not just the payment pages. Google will like it, users will like it. The only drawback I can see is if your account is set up to use shared IP's, in which case you may have to make some modifications if required by your development team. Here is the quote from Google on this subject: "Security is a top priority for Google. We invest a lot in making sure that our services use industry-leading security, like strong HTTPS encryption by default. That means that people using Search, Gmail and Google Drive, for example, automatically have a secure connection to Google. Beyond our own stuff, we’re also working to make the Internet safer more broadly. A big part of that is making sure that websites people access from Google are secure. For instance, we have created resources to help webmasters prevent and fix security breaches on their sites. We want to go even further. At Google I/O a few months ago, we called for “HTTPS everywhere” on the web. We’ve also seen more and more webmasters adopting HTTPS (also known as HTTP over TLS, or Transport Layer Security), on their website, which is encouraging. For these reasons, over the past few months we’ve been running tests taking into account whether sites use secure, encrypted connections as a signal in our search ranking algorithms. We've seen positive results, so we're starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal. For now it's only a very lightweight signal — affecting fewer than 1% of global queries, and carrying less weight than other signals such as high-quality content — while we give webmasters time to switch to HTTPS. But over time, we may decide to strengthen it, because we’d like to encourage all website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS to keep everyone safe on the web." It's worth mentioning that if the SEO on the site stinks, an SSL will not rescue it from the bowels of page 10 ranking status. Hope this helps!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | David-Kley0 -
What would you do with this odd Blog configuration?
In reality it's up to you. If you think the site makes more sense using the /blog/BLOGPOST format, then go for it. It can help search engines and users to understand that this is the blog section of the site. If all of your posts fall under a certain category or topic, you could also change the separator to use something that is more SEO-friendly, such as yoursite.com/marketing/your-blog-post. The whole site and all the linked pages share your "homepage authority". Because you are not using a blog URL in between makes little difference. Your sitemap is the area that you can set the importance of these pages, which we generally set as a 5 or 6 out of 10 if you are concerned about the way that they show up in accordance with your main site in search results. Also, it may take a bit of time to process all the redirects, so see if that is truly a matter of importance. Hope this helps!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | David-Kley0 -
Sitemap Indexation
if you have a /sitemap.xml file you shouldn't need an html one unless you find users are using it and finding it helpful.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GPainter0 -
I have 5 sites each targeting a different service my company offers, should I consolidate to one site or merge to one?
Hi Andrew, I agree with what Tim and David are saying here ... part of this does depend on how successfully these 5 sites are currently performing for you. The fact that you're pondering this a bit makes me wonder if the sites aren't doing as well as you think they should. I'm having a little trouble envisioning the reason behind 5 sites for a photo booth company, but it's not an industry with which I've ever consulted.. Are the 5 services so distinct that they really warrant 5 sites, or are they all essentially related?
Local Website Optimization | | MiriamEllis0 -
Link rel="prev" AND canonical
WOW, this is an interesting thread. In theory, rel next prev is what Google wants you to go with. In practice, however, I haven't not seen this work as advertised by Google, and end up going to rel canonical in most cases. Here's one way to think about it: Allow non-filtered pagination for top-level categories to be followed, but NOT indexed. Give them their own rel canonicals (self referencing) and ensure the intro content (or any other static content on the page) only shows on the first page (which should rel canonical to / instead of /?page=1). This will ensure your product pages all have a path going to them. Use rel next prev here, which "may" help the main/first page rank better by consolidating ranking signals from the paginated set. For sub-categories and/or filters/facets use rel canonical pointing to the canonical version of that category page. None of this, however, takes care of the crawl budget issue on enterprise eCommerce sites with crawlable filtered URLs. Therefore, I also use the robot.txt file, or nofollow attributes in links to handle this. I don't often use the nofollow robots meta tag for a variety of reasons. Again, in the real world rel next/prev doesn't seem to be working very well. I haven't tried it in awhile, but it just doesn't seem to do what Google says it's supposed to do. This is why you see a lot of sites using rel canonical instead. I think we should think about this in terms of where you are in the architecture instead of trying to fit all pages into a single scheme. For example, some sites may even want to allow the first facet/filter to be indexable - such as "Filter by Brand" - because people are searching for it. If that's the case, I'll often advise they turn that into a real category instead of a filter. Another example, if you sell kitchenware and Pots & Pans is a category but Material is a filter you're missing out on a lot of searches for things like "Copper Pots & Pans" or "Stainless Steel Pans". It all depends on the situation, and has to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
Technical SEO Issues | | Everett1 -
How long should the Image Alt Text be for SEO?
The images on your page should be relevant to your pages content, so describe them with an alt tag naturally will add relevance. The length is not important, but I would not stuff they will a long list of keywords.
Vertical SEO: Video, Image, Local | | AlanMosley0 -
Using on two pages a keyword in alternative language in the title
Hi there Ideally, if you're trying to capture regional or international traffic, you would have different directories or ccTLDs dedicated to targeted content for specific audiences in different countries. You can learn about how to do so here: International SEO (Moz) The International SEO Checklist (Moz) By following the resources above, you can target your site and content more specifically which would see you having much better chances of success in international visibility. To me, it just creates a confusing user experience (most important) and can also confuse crawlers, decreasing your chances of visibility, especially if it's not targeted. It could potentially be viewed as spammy as well, since the site is in English, and you're trying to capitalize on foreign traffic. Review the resources above and those will help guide you. Hope this helps! Good luck!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PatrickDelehanty0 -
Where do we focus from an SEO perspective?
Hi there I answered a similar question recently in another Q+A thread - you can read that here. But, if that's not possible for knowledge or resource reasons, some of the above will require a professional and technical expertise. I highly suggest you take advantage of the Recommended Companies from Moz - there are a TON of experts there that can help you take care of these issues if you're not equipped to do so yourself. If you are interested in learning some tactics yourself, Moz has a great learning section to read through - it will help you immensely going forward. Hope this helps! Good luck!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PatrickDelehanty0 -
Is there some reputed company/person which can fix the SEO issues for me?
Ha! HA! Thanks for your response! I did not get into Qubool Hai because it would make everybody's head spin - therefore, I just used it as an example of a keyword. I have plenty of backlinks but most of them are not of good quality as most of the fans start their own blogs on Tumblr, Blogspot etc and have their own FB and Twitter fan pages too! With our shows getting dubbed in Russian and Bulgarian and being telecast in the Middle East, there are a lot of linking domains from these regions too - and I seem to be fighting a losing battle trying to figure out where are they coming from. As far as duplicate content is concerned - a lot of it was images, though the names of the files were different. Now there are only a few ways I can describe a photo of an actor from XYZ set. So I stopped them from being indexed in the Yoast plugin - which I don't know is good or bad! Which brings me back to my primary question - I don' t know what I am doing and that is scary. Anyway, I am going to write to a few of the companies listed here and see how it goes. Thanks once again.
On-Page / Site Optimization | | gmaxstudios0 -
Internal Links Catalog (too many links)
Hi there As long as your internal link structure is natural and your information architecture is natural, I wouldn't be too concerned. From the sound of things, all of these links fall into relevant categories for their respective brands and models. One thing I would be on the look out though, depending on how your URL structure is set up, are potential duplicate content issues. I would run through that resource with your web development team and try to tackle any of those you see, if they exist. Google can pass equity through PDFs, but I would be careful, because at the end of the day, just make sure your user experience is the best it could possibly be for your audience. If you want to learn more about optimizing PDFs, check out this resource from Search Engine Journal. Lastly, I would run a comb through your on-site SEO - your title tags could use some work and you could also optimize your eCommerce experience as well. InFlow has a lot of great resources for this sort of thing if you want some reading and ideas. Hope this helps! Good luck!
On-Page / Site Optimization | | PatrickDelehanty0 -
What is 'domain authority'?
I always see it as your online 'popularity score', based on various items such as off page (blogger outreach, online partners and PR) and on page SEO (engagement, behavioural, tech etc.)
Getting Started | | eLab_London0 -
Blogging on multiple domains
Hello aquaspressovending, A good person for you to follow would be Aleyda Solis. To answer your question, it is relatively safe to repurpose content across different pages, subdomains or even domains if done properly for different countries. You can choose a canonical version (e.g. the US version or UK version...) and connect the rest using a rel alternate href lang tag, which is explained in the checklist Patrick linked to above.
Technical SEO Issues | | Everett0 -
Direct from one website toanother but different domain name
Hi there I wanted to put a couple of resources here that can help to add to Everett's already great answer. Check out these: Should I Rebrand and Redirect My Site? Should I Consolidate Multiple Sites/Brands? (Moz) Web Site Migration Guide - Tips For SEOs (Moz) Hope these help answer your questions! Good luck!
Link Building | | PatrickDelehanty0