Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks, Takeshi.

As it turned out, most of the 404s would not have been passing very much juice anyway. We did decide to go ahead and hedge our bets by simply redirecting the majority of them to the root anyway and marked them as fixed in GWMT.

Hi All,

I've just checked my GWMT profile for one of my client's sites and found that there are currently over 600 404 Error notifications! This is not that surprising given that we very recently redesigned and launched their new corporate site, which previously had a ton of "junk" legacy pages.

I was wondering if it would work in terms of efficient SEO to simply apply a 301 redirect from the 404 page to our root to solve this issue?

If not what would be a good solution?

Thanks in advance for all your great advice!

It's pretty simple to configure a corner logo and watermark action in Acrobat if you wanted to just modify the exported PDFs. You could set up an action for each different brand; it only takes like two seconds to open a PDF, apply the action and save it.

You do need to have Adobe Acrobat and not just Reader though...

Hi All,

Although my Moz error scans have been pretty clean for a while, a law firm site I manage recently cropped up with 80+ 404 errors since the last scan.

I'm a little baffled as the url it shows being returned looks like this:

http://www.yoursite.com/ http://www.yoursite.com/resource.html

For some reason it seems to be initiating a query to call the root domain twice before the actual resource.

I installed ModX Revolution 2.2.6-PL on the site in question, and am hoping a canonical plugin I just started using will take care of these.

Has this happened to anyone else? What did you do to solve the issue?

Thanks for your time and any tips!

Happy Friday Everyone,

I have a quick question:

I am in the process of crunching some numbers to try and figure out an organic traffic forecast for a client.

One of the crucial metrics I can't seem to figure out is traffic rate of growth over the next year or so.

The reason this is complicated for me is that I have only ever done this sort of thing for an established business before, and had plenty of past organic traffic data to work with.

What I am looking for is a source that could give me a reasonable idea of what kind of growth rates I might expect for a startup with practically no data; I would be perfectly happy with a national average for online retail startups.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Hey Lynn,

Option 1 worked like a charm!

Thanks for your help, it's a new CMS for me and I'm still getting used to it.

Cheers!

Hey All,

I'm experiencing a bit of a problem with creating a custom, separate Meta Title for CMS pages in Magento 1.6.1.0.

I know this can be added through _CMS => Page => Page Information => Page Title, _but this method presents issues, as a length of 70 characters is a little too long for breadcrumbs.

I would like a way to add a second specific meta title field that overrides this first Page Title field_. _

I did find something that does this in Magento Connect for around $50.00USD, but this seems like something that should be easy and free to do.

Any suggestions as to a workaround or alternative free plugin would be most welcome!

Thanks!

Gregster,

I assume that you have found an answer to your question by now. However, I wanted to offer up what looks to be an extremely in depth and comprehensive walkthrough on Magento SEO from yoast.com. They have several sections on duplicate content, as well as a canonical plugin you may find useful.

http://yoast.com/articles/magento-seo/

Best of Luck!

Hey Miriam,

I did know that they were adding enhanced capabilities to the new Places, although I did not know it was going to now be that easy to verify.

Traditionally, I've found it a real pain to verify, especially when a PO Box is involved. I did recently realize that I could simply call the Google Local team, though, and things have proceeded much more smoothly from there.

I'm keen to get switched over to the new Places dashboard myself, although when I asked if I could be switched early, they said I'd have to wait until my account was randomly updated (not surprised, I wasn't really expecting them to.)

Thanks, Miriam.

I had kind of figured Mike was probably right, since he's a very reliable Local SEO guy. It's pretty bothersome that Google would release a product for public use with so many bugs, but I guess it's not really that surprising.

At this point, I am beginning to wish that I had never combined these pages, and am glad I only did it on my own personal account and not for a client.

I think in the future I may just let Places be Places and Plus be Plus until the kinks are all ironed out.

Hi All,

I'm having an issue: I recently merged my Google+ business page and +Local page, and I'm happy it's verified for local search purposes.

However, I am having a supremely difficult time getting the formatting and anchor text links I inserted in the "Edit Business Section to apply; It's just one large chunk of unformatted text.  Of note is the fact that the text content did actually change when approved.

I made a post on Mike Blumenthal's blog about this, and he said that he generally does not recommend merging at all.

Any ideas how to get my formatting and text links approved by the Google+ team?

Any thoughts on the pros and cons of merging Local+ in general?

Hi Jo,

Sounds like you are on the right track. I'd agree with Francisco in creating one umbrella page for the main brand, and then a separate +Local page for each individual location.

You can request that the Places page be merged with it's +Local version over the phone as long as all the information matches.

My firm recently authored a blog post about doing just this in fact. Perhaps you'll find it useful: http://www.got2web.com/google-plus-seo-local-plus-claiming.html

As an added interesting fact, you can also request that a brand page be combined with a +Local page. This gives the +Local page priority, but moves all of your images, posts, etc. to it.

Hi there,

One of my clients is a local law firm. I have created, populated and verified a Places page for them, but now I have discovered that they had previously created one for each of their attorneys at that location.

According to Google's quality guidelines, this is totally fine. However, I am wondering if I should try to verify each of these accounts within Places to enhance their listing coverage?

One thing I've already tried is modifying some of the listing details via Map Maker, but it would be nice to just make edits en masse, I think.

Any suggestions?

Hate to say it, but it's not uncommon for pages to not be indexed because they contain thin content.

Take a look at the pages that have been indexed; I'm willing to be that they are a little more fleshed out and rich than those that have not been.

If a given page has only a sentence or two of weak or repetitive content, then it's likely that Google saw it in your sitemap and simply did not think it worthy of indexation.

Also, make sure to test your sitemap and check up on any errors that might have cropped up, that's happened to me quite a few times.

In the past, I too have had this issue.

I've found repeatedly that the quickest way to get verified is to get the Google Places/Local dept. to actually call you and speak to a real live person. This way, you can verify instantly over the phone and not worry about postcard PINs.

Furthermore, I expect you'd be able to actually verify all your business locations during the same call, though it might take a while.

Directions as follow to reach Google:

What you want to do is to verify ownership of your business over the phone. In order to do this, you actually need to call Google. Visit this address to get the process started: http://support.google.com/places/bin/static.py?hl=en&ts=1399021&page=ts.cs

Under "Which verification method did you try" select " I tried PIN verification for a single listing" .  At the next prompt, check "The status is NOT needs action". At the verification method prompt, check "Postcard"  and then last check "Yes" when asked "Have you waited 15 days".

You will be given a "call us" link and a contact form. Never mind the form and click the call link. You'll enter your name and number and a real live Google rep will call you within a minute. Simply explain to them that your are trying to verify your Local+ or Places page, and ask if you can do it by phone.

You should be all set within two weeks, tops.

You mention building your author profile and it certainly makes me wonder how important it is to have a fully fleshed out profile backing up pages on Facebook, Google +, etc?

I ask because typically what I have been doing is creating a proxy account that is not even visible to the public just to put up my business pages.

Am I going about this the wrong way?

Takeshi,

Sorry it took me a bit to get back to this post.

I would appear that this issue has been taken care of, presumably either through the canonical tag OR a sitemap resubmission that I had cleaned up.

However- When I do a search for domain.com/index.php in Google, it does still appear- is this something to worry about in your opinion?

Takeshi,

I forgot to include that we had already tried placing a canonical link in the home template header. Unfortunately, it did not take care of the issue for us.

Thanks for the idea, though.

Any others?

Basically, SEOMoz bots are flagging our index.php and root files as duplicate content of one another, therefore cutting the page authority of each.

What we want to do is make the root the canonical preference over index.php.

Ordinarily, we should be able to do this in the htaccess file. For some reason, as the site has been built into a cms using ModX Revolution, this does not seem to work.

We've tried A TON of htaccess rewrite mods to resolve this issue to no avail. We have also tried revising our sitemap to include only the root address.

Any ideas? We'll try most anything at this point.

Thanks in advance.