Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks for your help guys - and also reassuring to confirm my initial recommendations were correct.

Hi Mozzers

I have a client that had a lot of soft 404s that we wanted to tidy up. Basically everything was going to the homepage.

I recommended they implement proper 404s with a custom 404 page, and 301 any that really should be redirected to another page.

What they have actually done is implemented a 404 (without the custom 404 page) and then after a short delay 301 redirected to the homepage. I understand why they want to do this as they don't want to lose the traffic, but is this a problem with SEO and the index? Or will Google treat as a hard 404 anyway?

Many thanks

Hi there - thanks for your responses.

Robert - sorry, got my terminology wrong, I meant Moz's KWD tool (not KDS). Too may TLAs around! And I guess that's why I am unclear, as they are all Moz metrics but seem at odds with each other. So wondered whether I was missing something or whether the KWD metric needs to be taken with a pinch of salt.

The content is not good for the hoses, My client is taking some persuasion, and I was going to show him the KWD metric but it kinda says the opposite of what I am trying to tell him as makes it seem a good term to target. I'll just stick with showing him the returns. And get him to focus elsewhere as he won't want to do what is necessary!

EGOL - yes, I agree! I'll just need to work harder to convince him that being on page 1 for the term garden hose is not the be all and end all for him. We have other better directions we can go. I initially got quite excited at KWD 28 (this is the UK) but alas, not to be! I guess that is the danger of looking at any metric in isolation.

Keri - hmmm, I got the opposite once. I was asked when my baby was due to which I hissed 'I am not pregnant' - I felt quite sorry for the sales assistant as they were horrified !

Hi there

A KDS report question...

My client has a keyword with a low KDS (garden hose - 28). Intuitively this seemed too low, and when I checked what ranks, it is all high quality brand sites with high DAs. Admittedly the specific pages ranking have low PAs, but I can't see my client ever being able to compete with these big boys right now.

How come the KDS is so low? This seems just wrong as the metric implies it is a good keyword to target - I know there are always lots of other things to check, but this does make me less confident with KDS reporting

Anyone got any thoughts on this?

Many thanks

Many thanks guys

Hi Mozzers

I'm just doing an audit for a client and see that all non-trailing-slash URLs are 301'd to trailing-slash URLS. So far so good.

But then all the trailing-slash URLs are canonicalled back to the non-trailing-slash URLs.

This feels wrong to me, but is it? Never come across this before. Should the canonicals just be removed?

Any help much appreciated

Hi there

So you would provide lots of great and unique deals info on your site for your visitors before linking across to Expedia just to make the booking? If so that is fine and should not hurt your SEO at all.

If you are replicating Expedia content on your site then that is not so good. Just make sure all the descriptive content is unique and you'll be fine.

All the best, Wendy

Thanks Christy and Don

My clients blog is currently integrated into a subfolder. The current situation is:

www.mainsite.com - with 301 from non www version

mainsite.com/blog/ - with 301 going from www version

Are you saying this is not OK? Should they both be www or non www? Or should I not worry?

Will links going into the blog be helping the mainsite or are they working independently? As there is no duplication I think we are OK, but just wanted to check!

Many thanks

Hi Diana

I went through this same discussion with a client of mine. Only the other way round - ie should he go to local domains rather than the .com that he has. I did a lot of research and came up with the conclusion that local domains are great IF you have lots of local resource to support the site - for local content, local links, etc. If the resource is there then the main benefit is that people in each country often favour visiting sites with a country domain.

Otherwise, If the resource is not there then you are better off with a .com domain where the focus can go towards building overall authority for just 1 site rather than many - as you say, it helps with the link juice. Languages can be placed in subfolders (/de/ etc) and that way Google will know to return the correct version in the country Google version.

Hope that helps - good luck

Hi Mozzers

My client has their main site with www as the preferred version and utilises 301s for the non www version which is good.

For their integrated WP blog, they prefer the non www version, again utilising 301s.

So we have no duplicates, but is this different use of sub domains going to hurt SEO with regards to the links pointing in? ie do the links pointing into the blog benefit the main site or are we missing a trick and should change the blog to www?

Many thanks

Wendy

Thanks very much for the advice Rob, it does really help - and its good to hear I am not alone!

A lot of the links to the old site were due to newsworthy stuff - my client runs an industry tracking monitor - from the BBC and other authoritative sites, and some are still there. So as you say, definitely worth still 301ing - and maybe some juice will flow!! At the moment the links are simply going nowhere and error-ing!

Thanks!

Hi there

Would really appreciate your help in dealing with the following scenario:

My client is an authority brand in their sector. They were bought end 2011, and a new website was launched under the new owner's brand. For whatever reason no 301 redirects were put in place from the old site to the new site.

I am now auditing the new site and the traffic is pitifully low, way lower than they used to enjoy on the old site. The old site is defunct and Google is no longer indexing it. However OSE shows that the link profile of the old site was very good with thousands of good quality links, whilst it is non-existent for the new site.

I am thinking that even though Google does not index the old site, we should try and get access and put 301s in place on the old pages to help transfer across all the link juice to boost the new site.

Do you agree or am I missing something here? Will page rank be transferred across even though the old site is dead? What else could we do? Would change of domain in WMT help? Although how would that work for a defunct site?

We should probably 301 anyway as it would be good to ensure that folk following all those links can find my client's new site, but it would be great if page rank flowed too!

All ideas appreciated! Many thanks
Wendy

Hi there - I had found the tool eventually, but it was deeply buried! Why has it been demoted?

I just want to add that I too find this tool indispensable. I do a lot of one off site audits where there is no point setting up campaigns. So this tool is critical for me and I echo Karen, Tamara and Jeff's comments! Please don't take it away!!

Hi there

I'd like your opinions please!

My client currently has their website at

not-very-good-url.it which has a really good link profile

they also have duplicate sites at:

much-better-brand-name-url.it and

much-better-brand-name-url.com

but both these other sites have only a handful of links in.

How important do you think a better brand url is?

And therefore do you think it would be better to 301 to a better brand URL and take the risk that the link profile will get hit? Or leave the main site where it is and 301 the other two to it?

Many thanks

Thanks Andy

1. hmmm some of pages are pretty much ONLY made up of many different snippets of content all of which are appearing on other pages. It's a horrid theme, but the cost to change it may not be worth the ROI. Your suggestion to beef up content that we can is good though, so thanks

2. Reason given not to noindex was that top level category pages can be good for category keywords, but I have always thought the downsides of the dupe content would outway any benefits that category KW could bring - cos only really in URL, title and headings anyway

I have a couple of WordPress clients with the same issue but caused in different ways:

1. The Slash WP theme which is a portfolio theme, involves setting up multiple excerpts of content that can then be added to multiple pages. So although the pages themselves are not identical, there are the same snippets of content appearing on multiple pages

2. A WP blog which has multiple categories and/or tags for each post, effectively ends up with many pages showing duplicate excerpts of content. My view has always been to noindex these pages (via Yoast), but was advised recently not to.

In both these cases, even though the pages are not identical, do you think this duplicate content across multiple pages could cause an issue?

All thoughts appreciated

Hi jazavid

Another way you can check is to run a crawl test under the SEO Web Crawler Tool.

Open the results in Excel. You will see the Yes/No to duplicate content question in column L. Column M is headed up as 'URLs with Duplicate Page Content (up to 5)' For every URL that says Yes to duplicate content, you will see listed up to 5 other URLs that are considered as duplicate

Hope this helps

Canabalising is a tricky thing.

My thoughts - and these may not be 100% correct! - are as follows;

1. dog-collar

2. All depends on how the navigation works for your site, Do you have lots of categories under Dogs? Just list the sub categories and call this one 'dog collars'. You should be doing stuff to make sense to your site visitors as well as worrying about Google, and this makes sense

3. Your titles can hold up to 70 characters - you have plenty of space to make sure the titles are not duplicates even if they both start with Dog. Just make sure you use all your space and have it read well and not 'stuffed'

4. I would use anchor text that makes sense for the readers of wherever the link is being served. There has been all sorts of discussion on too much exact text anchor linking being penalised, but if you keep the readers in mind you should be OK. ie use the website URL when it makes sense. Or 'dogs', or even 'spiked dog collar' if you are actually describing it or talking about it on the website.

I hope this helps - good luck

Wendy