Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Slap to the forehead!

Of course that makes complete sense.

It's been a very long Monday.

Thanks for your help.

-Christina

I'm dealing with an eCommerce website which has a category, subcategory, products.

Moz is showing all of these and the individual products as missing a canonical.

The site is very thin on content at the moment, but all the pages are clearly different, and I don't see why they need a canonical unless this is some rule that eCommerce sites have to follow.

Should I ignore Moz's missing canonical report?

My understanding is if the product appears in multiple categories, then a canonical should be put in place to the product.

Any advice would be appreciated.

• Christina

Hi Nigel

Neither, they use server side filtering.Regards- David

Nigel,Thanks for the reply, the cgi-bin folder is never used by any of my sites but I put this in just as a matter of course, the folder would normally contain old cgi scripts so would not usually affect the crawling of a robot in any case.The reason for the problem turns out that our host had blocked rogerbot along with several other malicious bots, they have now lifted this block and the site is able to be crawled.- David

Our hosting provider has banned Rogerbot as they see it as problematic!!!!

They are a great hosting provider so this is going to be a difficult one.

Moz are reporting the robots.txt file is blocking them from crawling one of our websites.

But as far as we can see this file is exactly the same as the robots.txt files on other websites that Moz is crawling without problems.

We have never come up against this before, even with this site.

Our stats show Rogerbot attempting to crawl our site, but it receives a 404 error.

Can anyone enlighten us to the problem please?

http://www.wychwoodflooring.com

-Christina

Hi Miriam

Thanks for the response, I completely understand what you are staying and agree with you.  I always play by Google's rules, but occasionally the real world has to be considered.

In this instance it is more important and more financially beneficially to the company to have the virtual office near to where all their clients are currently based.

But we don't want anything to happen to the website as it is a source of reference for their customers, so we have already put in place hiding the home address and showing Google the area serviced by the client.

We won't be targeting the virtual address as the business is strong enough to appear within the location they service.

-Christina

Thanks for that link (we had just found it when I received your response), we are ok - YAY

Many micro businesses work from bedrooms, garages or garden sheds and they don't want their clients to know where they live or want to look more professional by having a virtual office.  Which is the case with this client.

In the real world having a virtual office is perfectly acceptable, because the office is manned at all times, by real people and meetings can be held at those premisses.  The virtual office also allows the micro business owner to meet his clients at that address and to use it as their registered business address. He can also have phone answering services as well as call and post forwarding.

What I have discovered is to set the business up within Google places as servicing customers at their locations.  It is perfectly ok to use a virtual office if it is manned and the customers can get hold of the business owner and that permission is given to represent that address.

As far as I'm concerned this is a legal way of running a business and isn't spammy in the real world.  Google should understand how businesses work in real life - my concern was simply would Google attack when it is legitimate and not an attempt at spamming multiple locations.

My client and I are not looking at spamming Google, but needed to know if a legitimate way of running a business in the real world translates to being on Google.

Thanks for your response Umar

The cleaning mess you talk of.  Is this simply having to find all listing with the business address and having to change them?

• Christina

United Kingdom

We have a client who works from home and wants a virtual office so his clients do not know where he lives.

Can a virtual office address be used on his business website pages & contact pages, in title tags and descriptions as well as Google places.

The virtual office is manned at all times and phone calls will be directed to the client, the virtual office company say effectively it is a registered business address.

Look forward to any helpful responses.

We have had to do this to a couple of websites, but we put canonicals in place which saw no negative affects.

Have you checked out Google's Analytic's training, they have video about how to do this.  You should be able to access it from your analytic's account.

Also here is a link to Google Goals: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1032415?hl=en

Not sure if this is what you are after, we tend to set up goals in Google Analytics, we can then match that goal to our lead forms, all thanks to our great web developer.

I know you've asked someone else for this answer, but as it's something I think I can help with, I hope you both don't mind my answering it. If I'm trending on toes please let me know so I don't make the same mistake in future - Cheers Christina

Yes you need keywords, and the closer to the beginning of the title the better.

But unless the sentence of the title makes sense to the user then you are likely to have a lower CTR.

Think about your keyword and what the page is about.

As an example my title tag would simple say 'Web Design Company - DR Adept'.

A client (we designed their website) recently employed an SEO who required FTP access or access to the CMS.

We told the client they would need to take full responsibility for any updates the SEO carried out, otherwise, the SEO could send over the changes and we would put them in at no extra cost to the client.

The client didn't want to take responsibility and denied the SEO access to the CMS, and told the SEO to send over the completed work for us to put into the site.

The SEO was not happy with this arrangement, and didn't seem to understand that we needed to trust him before access was would be given at a future date.

Other SEO's have never had a problem with this arrangement, but this SEO claimed what they do is secret and for no one else to see.

SEO want's to proceed, client doesn't want to proceed, we are happy to update the website with the client's approval.  This particular client has a reputation for backing out of things.  Also from the initial client, SEO contact the SEO was ready to update the website within 24 hours.

Are we being unreasonable?

Hi David

Doesn't seem to like it with or without the http part.

Moz tweeted and asked me to contact help, which I have done.

Thanks for taking the time to reply.

Are the numerous Free SEO reports that are available around the internet, where I simply put a website address in and wait for the results actually any good?

I tend to stick with Moz & Semrush which takes a little time pulling all the information I need together, but many of our clients are being approached by SEO's waving these free reports at them.

Should I see these reports as valid, or ignore them and only concentrate on Moz.

Any views will be greatly appreciated.

-Christina

I've noticed this, but after the last algorithm update, the sites I kept my eye on dropped out of the search engines altogether.  And the others moved down off of page one.

We will certainly look into a staging server.

Although the web developer does some magic and I'm not usually updating the live site.

If you were doing well before this happened you could try news jacking and write an article which has a bit of news about Simon Covell's divorce but then goes on to give the reader advice.

Thanks Joel

Changed Nick name, added website and my world is a happy place once again.

As I was filling out the custom URL, I didn't even understand there was anything wrong with the Nickname, I presumed the message was trying to be helpful by highlighting the Nickname and suggesting I format the Title in the same way (name space name).  I only thought this as at the time I set the profile up the nick name was ok.

Not sure how you can change the message to get passed someone having a "stupid half hour".

Cheers

Christina