Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Cyrus Shepard covers removal of a site from Google in a blog post

http://moz.com/blog/we-deindexed-followerwonk

Hopefully this answers your question.

Don

Hi BT2009,

While ATP's advice is generally the accepted advice there is reason to actually use more then one H1 tag. Most specifically in HTML5 pages which actually uses the H1 tag to break up sections of content within an article tag. This is an important distinction to the old rule. You can read a lot about this new methodology here on Tutsplus.

There are other cases in which one may use more then one H1 tag, like when changing view points for multiple devices. The basic rule of thumb in such case is the purpose of the additional tag for the users benefit? In both of these cases I still would lean more towards minimal use of multiple H1 tags.

Okay so now that we know that lets move on to the question about Bing. First, we all know that Google has way more invested in the search engine software & hardware than any other company including Bing. Bing may still be using the 1 tag rule. This may not actually be a direct penalty but as ATP points out a simple confusion point that the search engine hasn't yet adapted too. Google has flat out said it does not penalize for multiple H1 tags, but I have not seen the same comments from Bing.

Whats more is each search engine will act in its own way to a website redesign, most focus on Google since it drives most people's traffic, but in fact Bing, Ask, Yahoo, Baidu all treat new content, urls, design differently. I have seen cases were a site redesign takes a couple months before traffic gets back to normal and another few weeks before I know for sure if the redesign actually helped.

There may also be some other issues we didn't discuss here, however since you mentioned the multiple H1 tags is was obviously a concern of yours so I hope we addressed that adequately for you.

Don

HI Stacy,

Dayton Ohio here!

I know the amount of information about SEO can be overwhelming; some of it which still ranks well is outdated...FRUSTRATING!

Any advice I can give will be tailored by my past experience, as I would assume most of everybody else’s will be as well.

To start with there are basically 4 things I will touch on.

1.) Your website.
Are you building it by hand?
Or are you using a CMS (Content Management System); WordPress, Blogroll, Joomla...?

This is an important decision to make. Each pre-built CMS system has some perks and disadvantages. Most are simple to get published but maybe more popular targets for hackers simply due to the platform's popularity. Even with decent web designer skills they can present a challenge to get past the learning curve to do any personal customization.

If you are building your own site, you may have a lot of work ahead of you in non SEO related categories. Depending on your design and coding skills this may not be a huge hurdle.

Either option is valid. But you'll want to fully familiarize yourself with the platform you choose and its SEO's effectiveness.

2.) Know the basics (Moz Guide To The Basics)
When building a site, or choosing a platform you'll want a firm understanding of these concepts. If choosing a platform these will allow you to adequately evaluate each one. If building your own site you can easily write the content with the basics in mind.

3.) Mobile Friendly is a must for new sites
The amount of people using tablets, and mobile devices is only going to go up each year. If you are starting a new site ensure your content is mobile friendly. Established websites may get a little leeway due to the amount of authority they have built up in the years before you, but starting out better than them is important. This year Google starting differentiating mobile search results based on their mobile friendliness.
Read:
9 This You need To Know About Google's Mobile Friendly Update
Basic Mobile Optimization
Responsive Web Design

4.) Content is Key
Having the best content for your industry is key to top search results. You may be able to take a good content approach at first to target long-tail, niche market keywords, but your end goal should be the best content. This is one of the most important aspects not oft talked about in SEO. You can have a great page with all the right SEO practices and never see page one search results. This is because you when you're on the internet you are competing with everybody in your industry. First page results = money for just about every industry!

If you don't bother with any links I posted here, please at least watch Rand Fishkin's Whiteboard Friday on Good Unique Content Needs To Die

To answer your question about picking keywords, while this is an important process and though long tail keywords may not bring a lot of traffic they will bring in the right traffic if all is done correctly you can start ranking for broader keywords, even without trying!

In summary, know the basics, and understand why mobile optimization is important, this will help you choose your design platform and finally remember writing the best content is one of the most important things you can do.

I really hope this helps,

Don

Glad to see this coming online. Just watched day one, and look forward to my daily fix with coffee.

Switching host you are then switching DNS which would force the spiders / crawlers to re-find and re-index the new location.

This should be of little concern unless you notice a traffic decreases as well. Your page rank and domain authority will drop but that is just temporary and indicative of the fact that re-indexing based on new DNS is not instant.

Other things that could effect rank in cases like this are:

New Urls -> were old urls kept? if not were they at least canonicalized?
New IP, did your domain have a static IP before? If so, then you must have got new IP which if the previous site using it had bad mojo ie somebody used it for malware or other nefarious activities you may inherit that bad juju.

Hope this helps

Don

To follow up on what Keszi has said, it is not uncommon for this value to fluctuate from update to update. The reason is because there are so many things that factor into this score. This is further complicated by the fact that the crawl will not crawl every domain every time. This means you may see less / more "linking domains", and "linking c-blocks" which are factors in DA and PA.

I know when you see a 10% fluctuation you may get a little worried. However, when DA is in the 20's the fluctuation will be more prominent than if you were up in the 40's. Reason being is it is exponentially harder to reach higher domain authorities, which means that there will be a larger swab of linking domains and less likely to change much if a few are missed on each crawl.

Hope this helps,

Don

Rel Canonical may not be what you need here.

First question you need to ask yourself is the login page something that needs indexed by Search Engines? If the answer is no, block it with your robots.txt then use  -> rel="nofollow" on your login links.

If you have a reason for your login page to be indexed then you'll need to use the meta rel-canonical tag to point to the absolute root of the page.. based on your URL I would assume it is "http://irishdancingdress.com/wp-login.php"

Hope that helps

Hi Fraser,

The solution is to use a single website with local options. Yes! I know it is exactly what you said the client doesn't want, but then again, the client came to you for your expertise....

Build a national website with localization focus for each product offered. A company with 25+ locations "SHOULD" be ranking nationally for every product!!!!!!!

As for the localization part, if its a franchise or whatever then let the "main" website feed the locals, who should be on their own ranking.

I'd be happy to expand on my thoughts with more details,

Don

Hello,

There is this post here on Moz which has some great guidance. But to adequately answer your question I wonder if you're using a CMS? If so there maybe a few nice add-ons / modules  to help with this task.

My basic advice would be to:

• Identify the pages top keyword and use it in the url.
• Short URLS are better
• Limit parameters
• Try not to go more than 2 folders deep (ie /computers/accessories/)
• Use Hyphens instead of Underscores
• Avoid Stop Words

I hope this helps,

Don

Hi Dirk,

The point about PPM made me smile, the great thing and the worst thing about data is that it can be viewed so many ways. I really see your point here.

Another thing that didn't quite make sense to be is on the Thumbs % tab. I'm not really sure how somebody could have less MozPoints than thumbs up as you should receive 1 point per thumb. I guess some people could have had some thumbs down which I didn't take into account and actually increased their ranking in this category.

Don

A dash is considered a word separator. Similar topics can be found here in regards to dashes vs apostrophes, though this mostly references is in regards to a URL.

The problem you're up against is one that I've personally dealt with on my site o-ring vs o ring vs oring vs o'ring.

Do you use them all? Do you target just one? How does Google treat each one?

Well there is NO good answer I have seen. If you target more then one variant and they are treated as the same keyword then you maybe hit for spamming, but if you don't you may lose potential traffic / sales.

The only thing I can offer is more of a suggestion then anything. Go to Google and plug in the phrases in the keyword analysis tool found in the adwords account tools. In my case I found that three of the 4 of my keywords had the exact same monthly searches. This told me that those 3 words at least are being treated the same. So we picked the correct US English spelling and targeted that word.

In your case, I would assume AK-47 and AK 47 are the same so really are left with targeting just the 2 you have been AK-47 and AK47.

I agree with Massimillano here.

Three things you should do for all common CMS systems (WP, Joomla, ect..)

First change the admin directory to something else. When doing this you likely have to edit configuration files to point to the new location which is pretty simple.

Second protect admin directory with .htaccess & .htpasswd.  There is a nice generator I have used on some of my sites in the past here.

Third create a honeypot / auto IP ban for malicious crawlers or script kiddies. There are several plugins for this if you search the keywords honeypot + cms.

Hello,

Moz does not report this kind of information. You need some code on each page that tracks the users sessions. Google Anaylatics does this, but there are other sites out there that can do it as well.

Hope this helps,

Don

Hi Kibin,

Based on your situation the 2 things of URL BEST PRACTICES at odds with each other are:

Length vs Content

I would say depending on the average overall depth you should be perfectly fine and likely see benefits from a strategy like "www.site.com/services/students/essay-editing" as this is only 3 layers deep. At some point however, there is no benefit other then folder organization to having long urls.

If you forsee your site getting over 5 levels of deepness you may want to consider a different structure. Long urls especially those containing URL parameters can cause crawl issues. There are 2 basic thoughts on urls; 1 can a user understand the url, and 2 will the crawlers be able to navigate the url and index it correctly? You want to design for the users first while keeping in mind the way Search Engines will view it.

Finally about the difference between

www.site.com/services/students/essay-editing
and
www.site.com/essay-editing

What you miss out on the latter is long tail keyword opportunities ie..(student essay editing, student services essay editing). Those still can be incorporated into the content of the page and likely will with the breadcrumbs, but they will have a tad more power by having the keyword in the url.

Think of the user of the site first, then the search engines, then the backend administration.

As a user I like the short url but from an administration and SEO perspective I like the longer urls.

Hope that helps,

Hi Trevor,

I started by creating my first campaign. Moz crawls these once a week so the sooner you get this setup the sooner you'll start seeing results.

Next, I started asking questions, my first question, ekks almost 4 years ago! Moz is one of the best places on the internet to get solid educated answers about SEO. Though we may have seen the question before, somebody will usually point you in the right direction or give an updated response.

Sean pointed out some great links. Starting out I liked going to the tool section and just playing around with tools. This gave me a feeling for what each one did and how I could best use them in my role at my company.

Hope it helps and welcome to Moz!

Don

Hello Heather,

If the article is completely irrelevant then the best thing to do would remove the content from the site which would prompt a 404 error. In time the article will stop ranking as it no longer exist.

However, it may make more sense to capitalize on its success if at all possible. One possible way is to 301 redirect the page to a different page explaining the change of direction from what was previously stated in the article. This way you still get the initial traffic, and maybe convert those viewers to the new business model.

My thoughts, hope it helps,

Don

Hi,

Google uses your Meta description pretty much as a recommendation. It will use its own description to suit the keywords searched by the user.

Dr. Pete has some good info about Meta Descriptions Here On Moz, most notably to your question is his last suggestion at the bottom leave it alone.

I hope this helps,

Don

Google custom search is really easy to implement. We purchased the first package I think $199 a year to prevent other competitors ads from showing up. I think it took me like 20 minutes to read and 2 minutes to instal.

Lets be honest there are not many people who can return as relevant results like Google.

Hi Leanne,

On the "Tracked Keywords" tab of Add Manager Keywords, you will see all the keywords you're tracking by scrolling down. There are filters branded / un-branded as well as the ability to add custom labels which help you sort them. If you haven't selected a filter all the keywords should be visible on that page.

Hope it helps,

Don

Hi Simon,

Okay so crawlers can crawl PDF's unless they are encrypted / encoded. However since they link to the PDF that shouldn't be the issue.Ref: googleblog

How much content are on these pages? I ask because when there is thin content you may find that the template itself is causing the duplication problem, unless of course you are using different templates for each language as well.

Take for example a page that reads.

en: The woman eats frozen fruit daily.
de: Die Frau isst gefrorenes Gemüse jegen tag.
es: La mujer come las verduras congeladas diaria

Now surround each of those pages with a header content, footer content, right / left column content same images same alt tags and the deviation of content is so small it is not noticed.