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.

There is a lot here about metrics.

Firstly you need to know what your goals are and when you want to reach them by.  This will help your SEO consultant plan how they will reach those goals. They should be able to provide you with a plan of action, then reports on how things are going and if they are on target.  This can help you identify who would work best for your business.

SEO companies who contact you are usually very good salesman, but that's about it.

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

If your customers are searching for Online Psychic Readings than the title you have chosen should work well for you.

• Christina

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'.

Hi Justin

I have only found more content to help SEO when that content was of high quality and was what the user needed.

In cases where lots of content has been used without thought of the user, but just going after keywords or locations, then in the long run it has had a negative SEO affect.

If your website isn't that powerful then changing title tags can drop the sites rankings for that set of keywords if you are looking for an exact match.

The titles you are proposing seem relevant, and there isn't that big a change so your rankings should be ok.

Before changing title tags I usually test keywords in PPC to see which have better CTRs.  I also pay a lot of attention to the terms my clients use and not what people within my industry use.

Cheers for all the information.

I don't work with Wordpress or Joomla.

Usually bespoke systems only.

We will certainly look into a staging server.

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

Unfortunately we weren't part of the process to hire the SEO company.

Thank you everyone for giving us feed back.

We don't want to be difficult but ultimately we are there to protect our client and to give them the best advise.  We have already had one client suffer at the hands of a bad SEO, which cost them their on-line business.

After investigating this particular company, I've found plenty of complaints about them.  I've also found they use linking farms.  In this instant I'm glad I protect my client from them.