Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Tim

I have never had to move back a site that was moved away, but assuming you or your customer has access to the domain account for Site B, then there shouldn't be a problem doing a fresh set of redirections if it's been a year since the last.

Set up the Site A again on your hosting and make sure the 301 URL redirections from B to A are active on Site A before you set the nameservers to point to your hosting.

In terms of how long it will be before the pages rank correctly, my experience is that there may be some bumps in the road, but providing you don't change the page content dramatically on the new site, it should be OK. If the pages on the new site do need improving and optimising then do that after the move and the site has had time to settle.

I'm not sure it fully answers your concerns but I hope that helps.

Peter

Hi Tom

Along similar lines to Shane's answer but the critical questions is do you own the current domain?

If you do, then you can change the nameservers for that domain to your where your new website will be hosted once that website is ready to go live.

If you are keeping the same domain for your new site, that will be even easier, because your new developers will be able to capture a sitemap of your current site with your current developer and create a list of 301 redirections needed to point the current URL to the new URL for each page. Then, prior to the new site going live when the nameservers are switched to your new host, as long as the 301 redirections are active on the server where your new site is hosted, everything should work smoothly.

I hope that helps based on the info you have given, but do post back if you have more info or need more explanation.

Peter

PS. And as far as I know there is no legal requirement for a developer to provide 301 redirects.

Hi Adnan

My experience with this is that more people tend to search with a town or city qualifier than at a county level. That is because they are really searching for a service or maybe a shop close to where they live and so with that as their intent they won't tend to use a county.

Regarding your question about how high a website will rank when optimised for a county for searches against the cities and districts, it would depend on how competitive that search was. If there are not many offering the service in the specific city then it's likely that Google will spread their net wider to bring in search results for other locations in the same area but by distance not by county.

I suggest you do some keyword research for searches with city/town qualifiers and compare them to the county results before going any further and make your decision on what to target after that.

I hope that helps,

Peter

Just to follow on a little more from Chris' reply.

> 1. Is there a way to see whether im ranking for any keyword if I don't know the keyword, in other words, how do I know if I rank for any keyword?

By looking at your Google Analytics search referrals you cannot tell where you are ranking but by the fact that you have had a referral from a search engine means you must have been ranking reasonably well for a search phrase in order to get a click through.

Please note though that if pulling this information from your Google Analytics, for the last year or so Google has gradually been returning more and more "(not provided)" results. These of course don't tell you what people were searching for. Recently, Google has pulled search referral data altogether. Now you can only see if you have had a referral from Google and not what the search phrase was. So only by looking at historic data for Google search referrals will you get the info you want. But you can still get that data from Bing and Yahoo referrals.

> 2. I added a list of keywords to Moz but it says I don't rank on first 50 results. So how do I know if I'm ranking for anything at all?

Yes, Chris it right, but if below 50 then it maybe worth re-examining the phrases you are targeting to see how competitive they are (as your 3 point below) before spending lots of time trying to push them up the rankings. Your time may be better spent looking for longer tail searches that you can pick up some traffic from.

> 3. Ive heard of keyword competition, could you please guide me on how to actually do a competition analysis?

Have a look at this help page on the Moz Keyword Difficulty tool. That should give you a good kickstart to understanding more about it.

Peter

Hi Ravijot,

The only examples I have seen are those where the whole page is a duplicate caused by two URLs pointing to the same page.

You could though have two separate duplicate pages. The Moz report says that Duplicate Page Content is "Code and content similar or identical to code and content on other pages on your site". In the the case that the code and content is 'similar' I don't think it will tell you what is similar only the fact that the Moz crawler has found a large portion of a page that is identical and some different, thereby making the page 'similar'.

Maybe though a Moz support member could clarify my assumption on that.

Peter

Hi Ben

I have just been looking at this again and cab see that the report you were looking at was the duplicate page report from Moz Analytics rather than from Moz Pro.

The report in Moz Analytics is different and does not provide a link to view the duplicate pages on screen. However, having just downloaded the Crawl diagnostics export file in Moz Analytics it does now show the URL that was checked in column U of the spreadsheet and in column AF the duplicate page URL if one was found for the URL being checked. When there is more than one duplicate page found, the downloaded report has extra lines for each duplicate found for the checked URL.

Alternatively, you could switch to the Moz Pro interface and view the Duplicate Page Content report in that, which does give you a hyperlinked number (showing how many duplicate pages have been found for a URL) which if you click it you are shown the list of URLS of duplicated pages for that URL.

A screenshot of that is attached.

I hope that helps,

Peter

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Hi Mark

In my opinion, yes, to repeat the same product name up to 30 times on a page which doesn't have very much text-based copy which your product pages don't seem to have would appear spammy. Also visually, for the site visitor, to have a product name repeated down a long column wouldn't look great either.

If you want to better optimise your product pages then I would look to increase the word count on the products themselves. With the list of Vouchers on the right-hand side and the About Us at the bottom the amount of repeating content on each page is about equal to the amount of unique content.

By adding more unique content to your product pages (e.g. more info on the games themselves) you will make the page more useful to the buyer and give search engines more to bite into. I also suggest you test out a few pages in Moz's On-Page Grader to help you better evaluate where you can make worthwhile changes.

I hope that helps,

Peter

I hear and respect what others are saying on here, especially as you are better qualified than I am.

But looking at the site Jack is referring to, it shows both a UK and a US contact phone number. I realise that provides no guarantee of the level of service someone is likely to receive, but it is in the site's favour.

Whilst from what has been said US customers have trust issues for non .com TLDs, I would say in the UK that is not as common. With regard to the use of .my, I have seen an increase in the use of domains which are written to create a brand name and be used in marketing the product or service on offer as is the case with unlock,my.

So putting aside the site trust issue on the basis of it not being a .com, isn't there a place for marketing through the name and building trust through creating an online brand promoted through social media etc, which in turn builds trust with search engines?

Just asking the question.

Peter

Thanks to all of you for your answers and with the clarity of your responses which make total sense. Blogging on the blog it is.

Much appreciated.

Peter

Hi Jazz

What would you do if you get a Vehicle Importer who wants to see his site on Google for keywords like "Import vehicle from Japan" or "Melbourne car imports"?

As Chris suggests below, the critical factor with keyword research is to understand what people are typing into Google which may not be the phrases that your vehicle importer client is suggesting.

It may be that the competition for the phrases he is suggesting are low and so it may be quite easy to rank for them, but a number 1 position for a search that no-one is searching on is pointless. Whilst he may be impressed, any impression will be short-lived when there is no traffic.

Maybe the phrases being suggested do get decent traffic, but if they don't and you have the facility to be able to show him what is being used, then show him based on the intent of the search. If that is, for example, something like "car importer melbourne" or "japanese car importer" then better to use that than something that isn't.

Peter

I am in the process of writing a series of blog posts covering one subject in more detail.

Normally, I would just post my blog posts on my blog, but I have heard and read recently that posting content on Google+ is having very good results.

So should I post this series exclusively on my Google+ pages instead with a link back to my blog and site or just focus on posting on my blog as I have done before?

Thanks in advance,

Peter

Hi, first up, if you haven't read it already, I recommend reading Moz's guide here: http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo

The other thing I would say if you are not clear on it already is first understand the strategy of SEO (i.e. that it is do with provide good relevant content that answers a site visitor's questions) than focussing too much on SEO tactics.

That said, to ensure your content is good and relevant to answer a site visitor's questions that means you need to know what questions they are asking. To do that I recommend doing keyword research to find the the keywords and phrases people are searching for so that your pages can be targeted correctly. When you have done that, make sure the content is well written and optimised correctly for those searches along the guidelines Moz recommend.

As your site is the focus of the attention you want to create then only when you have done those stages above should you be concerned with promoting the site elsewhere through social media etc.

I hope that helps,

Peter

Hi Jack

In my opinion it is better to have a URL that reflects your brand than one that doesn't or loses some of the impact of your brand. If your brand is UnlockMy then it makes total sense for you to use unlock.my as your domain.

If you are concerned with people looking for unlockmy.com then you should get that as well and redirect it, but by the look of it someone has already purchased and holds this as a premium domain.

So to answer your question: "Do you think the memorability of the domain outweighs not having a less memorable .COM domain and would this affect people's perception of site trust?"...

I think the memorability of your domain is more important and on people's perception of site trust, I think that is more to do with the presentation of your site then having a .com, and making sure people know where you are trading from etc.

I hope that helps,

Peter

Hi Stuart

Is product-x just one component in each of these services along with other components?

If so, could you not solve this by having content on each of the service pages about those services and then a small amount of info about product-x on each of those pages with a read more type link to product-x on the actual product-x page.

So you would have:

domain.com/service1
domain.com/service2

both of which point to a page showing product-x at domain.com/product-x

If that is not possible then there isn't a way around having duplicate pages as I can see it.

Peter

Hi Ravijot

I assume you mean the diagnostic report in Moz and not anything you have seen in Google webmaster tools?

If the Moz report, you will see the column of pages it reports as duplicated. Alongside, you will see a number in the column which is titled "Other URLs". If you click the number, it will then show you the other URLs which are returning the duplicate page.

It's likely that these URLs are all pointing to the same page rather than you actually having duplicate pages.

Hopefully that will help you to find out what is wrong and fix it, but post back if you are still stuck.

Peter

As Dan has suggested, you may be best to contact Moz support about this, but it's not really a case of Moz not understanding the characters but the characters being different.

For example, the letter ā is not the same as a

I am not an expert at this but:

ā would encode to this in a URL: %26%23257%3B whereas a would encode to this: a

For your keywords, bīstamo-kravu-pārvadājumi would encode to this: b%26%23299%3Bstamo-kravu-p%26%23257%3Brvad%26%23257%3Bjumi and not this: bistamo-kravu-parvadajumi

It might be worth trying b%26%23299%3Bstamo-kravu-p%26%23257%3Brvad%26%23257%3Bjumi as the URL rather than bistamo-kravu-parvadajumi and then re-testing in Moz.

This page may also help you further: http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_urlencode.asp

Peter

Hi Stephane,

If it's not something as you have said that you have solicited, then yes I would disavow it.

Peter

Hi Līva

Yes, the reason the page grader shows no keyword in the URL is because of the differences in the characters used in the URL and the actual keyword you are grading it for.

Peter

I agree with Vadim. The other thing to consider before you remove the robots.txt file is if you want to also update links to any of the old pages to the new pages that are indexed in search engines.

You may be considering discontinuing the site at the old domain or just forwarding all requests to that domain to your new domain. If you do that just as a web forwarder on the domain, any existing links will be directed to page not found. If you don't want that to happen then you will need some form of 301 URL redirection. If your old site is running on a Linux server using apache then you can use a .htaccess file. More info is here: http://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection

Peter

Hi esiow

You have a choice of placing a robots.txt file in the root folder of your website or if blocking individual pages you could use the meta robots tag. See these page for more information: http://moz.com/learn/seo/robotstxt and https://developers.google.com/webmasters/control-crawl-index/docs/robots_meta_tag?csw=1

I hope that helps,

Peter