Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Very interesting Vadim! Thank you.

Thanks all! Yes, I was familiar with the "Text-only" version and the Fetch as Googlebot, so I wasn't overly concerned. It just seemed odd that this particular spider couldn't get to the content. I think it is a very unsophisticated spider!

Thanks so much to you all. This has gotten us closer to an answer. We are consulting with the folks who developed the Web store to make sure that these solutions won't break other things if implemented, particularly something mentioned to me by our IT Director called "Sim links" - I'll keep you posted!

Yes, very helpful guys. I appreciate it!

Hi Mike, Many thanks ro both you and Dr. Pete. I apologize for leaving both of your answers hanging here for so long. Both explanations made perfect sense and I totally get it now. Now it's just a matter of fixing some of those issues. I've know since coming on board here as an in-house SEO that we had some pretty significant site architecture problems. This is just another one to add to my "to-fix" list Many thanks to you both I really appreciate your responses! Dana

Now that we're talking easter eggs... is that the only known easter egg implanted / found in moz.com? :)) I love easter eggs. All year through.

PS it appears your website is 301 redirecting a lot of calls you can see them lit in almost a florescent blue during the speed test I ran here. http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/ds3ceI/CCISOLUTIONS.COM 1 good idea is to use the free pingdom RUM or real user measurement testing. It will show you what your end users actually see. https://www.pingdom.com/free/ Another great tool is neustars RUM tool they actually provide you with simulated real users if you want to see the maximum amount of users per minute your site can handle. It is free for 30 days and well worth the effort. Pingdom RUM is free for life. 5WLPWit.png

I wouldn't worry about it too much from an SEO perspective. You could set up filters in Google Analytics to get rid of the noise so you can see your metrics without these referrals in the mix.

Hey Dana, I'd answer this question... with a question, which is "where are your audience?". Syndication across platforms is only going to be valuable in so much as it reaches more of your target audience and so I'd suggest starting with working out who they are and where they hangout. My perception is that you're going to hit the point of diminishing returns pretty quickly after you cover off YouTube, Vimeo and potentially Daily Motion (if you're accepted), but for your niche, there may well be other sites which have a concentrated pocket of your target audience. I'd ignore the list of sites you linked to altogether, as I think it's completely wrong. They seem to have confused "highest traffic" with PageRank and then lump hosting platforms (which don't display user submitted content on their sites) into the mix. Cheers, Phil

Yes Doug, you totally get my confusion. Your scenarios describe more clearly exactly what I am wondering. In the case of your third example, Matt even stated pretty clearly in the video (perhaps even both videos) that chains of redirects can be a problem. I totally agree with you that avoiding redirects altogether and updating the links is the way to go. Even Google's own Pagespeed Insight's tool often makes this recommendation when evaluating pagespeed of a site. If 301's are exactly the same as links, why would the tool recommend avoiding them? Yes, I think perhaps Matt said what he did because he was looking at 301s and links in complete isolation. If so, then what he says is believable in theory, but I can't think of how it would actually happen in practice.

Hi Keri, I did actually end up using Followerwonk to sort through my followers and decide on some that weren't quite relevant to my (or my other Followers') interests. Some of them ended up being people who had obviously only followed me in order to get me to follow them back...and then once I did they dumped following me like a hot potato, lol! I ended up maxing out the number of people I could "unfollow" in one day on Twitter...I seem to be hitting barricades no matter what I do, lol. Anyway, I was able to make plenty of room now so I can now follow people I really AM interested in without fear of hitting the 2,000 limit any time soon. Thanks Followerwonk!

Dana, /blog would be ok in some circumstances, and ../blog in others. It depends on where you are linking from and to. The ".." means the page being linked to is one level up in the hierarchy defined by the path. So if you're linking to www.mysite.com/notblog/filename from www.mysite.com/blog/postname you would use .. while if you are linking to www.mysite.com/blog/filename you would not. Your developer is probably insisting this because the security certificate doesn't validate on the development or Q&A site, or possibly because you use subdomains. I don't see why an absolute path on the same domain would cause an error.

Yep. If you had links to that page from other authority pages, the pagerank/authority would transfer over, even with the indexing issue.

Hi Paul, We discovered that the problem was being caused by a trailing "comma" at the end of the keyword string that we once used  to populate the Meta keywords tag. Unfortunately, the keyword information in those fields is still being parsed. The parser did not know what to do when it encountered a comma followed by nothing. We did run a query and found that this problem was affecting 128 of our product pages and had been for a long time. We haven't been populating the keywords for almost a year now, so the problem is at least that old. The commas are now gone. Thanks again to you and Andrew!

Thanks so much for responding. I posted a response but it didn't get posted here which is weird so I wonder if Q & A is somewhat broken at the moment. Are you able to share the URL of your GoECart store? Also, can you share what platform you were on prior to switching platforms? If you can't share it here that's fine just send me a private message. I swear on my reputation here at SEOMoz that I will not divulge any business-sensitive information. Thanks for answering! Dana

Thank you to you both. Agreed that testing is really the only way to know. I doubt that the pagespeed is going to be significantly impacted by the logo alone...but we won't know until we try it. Then we can decide which way to go.

Agreed on all counts Jason, not to mention the improved customer experience because we won't have people landing on those God-awful ugly and useless pages! From a server perspective, could deleting 8,000 files (pages, images, PDFs) results in our site speed improving too? Or would it likely have no impact?