Questions
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How long to reverse the benefits/problems of a rel=canonical
Yeah, if the .com is blocked now, there's really no point in putting 301s or canonicals over there, because they won't do anything (theoretically, at least). You could put self-referencing canonicals on the .co.uk site. It would at least be a nudge to Google to ignore the old canonicals (to the .com). Other than that, you may have to wait and see. As Alan said, you could 301-redirect the .com and then stop blocking it. Properly redirected, no visitors should be able to view the old pages. In some ways, that's even more reliable than blocking. Update: Sorry, realized that was a bit confusing, as I sort of told you that a 301 was pointless but then to 301 What I'm saying is that you could stop blocking the .com and THEN 301-redirect it. If it really is fully blocked, 301-ing it probably won't have any impact (although it won't hurt anything).
Technical SEO Issues | | Dr-Pete0 -
Domain advice needed, please
Thanks for the replies. A little more info, previously both domains have been used for various projects in the fashion niche. One used to be a blog and the other a fashion article site, however neither of these projects were bring in a decent ROI so am working on launching a store on them. It will be a mixture between unique products and affiliate based product imports. In terms of back links, to be honest, while both domains have fashion related backlinks they are most either on blog or article keywords or just using the domain name as anchor text so there is little benefit to be gained from them in ranking for terms such as 'dresses' 'trousers' etc thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
No index parts of a page?
I wonder if you're thinking of doing the option that Google Custom Search has for doing your internal site search? They do have an option to comment out some of the content for searching, but it doesn't affect their main index, just your own custom search.
On-Page / Site Optimization | | KeriMorgret0 -
Problem with the keyword difficulty tool
Thanks for jumping in here Doug. It is a known problem, and we've made a post about it in ZenDesk at https://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/21120163-google-adwords-not-displaying-in-keyword-difficulty where you can look for updates. We do have people working on this over the weekend, I know that much. Keri
Moz Tools | | KeriMorgret0 -
Using SEOMOZ on kindle
I own a Kindle with 3G and I use it for viewing Gmail and Twitter quite successfully. I haven't tried SEOMoz.org specifically, but I have successfully been able to read other forums pretty easily.
Educational Resources | | danbocain0 -
How to find bloggers and columnists
I need to establish a strong brand so being invited to write becomes an honour and people would jump at the chance. Fantastic attitude. You will kickass!
Branding / Brand Awareness | | EGOL0 -
How to rank lower, fast....
You're perfectly correct, but I thought I'd point it out. Sites can rank with no on-site SEO, but what I was trying to say is that it's much, much more difficult. Thanks for correcting my mistake
Technical SEO Issues | | pointblankseo1 -
Website traffic data miles behind
My Mister G, I'm sorry for the confusion and issues with your traffic data. One thing to keep in mind is that traffic data is updated on a weekly basis and the week starts on Monday. Your traffic data will updated on Monday the 23rd and that's why it is currently a week off. Do keep in mind that even though it will update on Monday, it is not guaranteed what time it will actually update on Monday. Another thing is that all this data is imported directly from Google Analytics and sometimes there can be a problem with the connection. The best thing to do in that scenario is to go into your campaign settings and disconnect, then reconnect. All of you data will be updated. Hope that helps! Kenny
Moz Tools | | kenneth_martin0 -
I think I have a penalty on my domain...
Alertra is sharing the text / html load time. It is not loading images, videos, javascript, etc. which can take substantially longer to load. Alertra is an excellent, free tool which can help you understand if page speed issues are related to your server or your web design. Also understand Alertra is a snapshot of how your site is performing at any individual moment. Site speeds vary greatly throughout the day. If you press the button once/minute, you will likely notice different results. If your GA shows 4 seconds whereas Alertra shows 1 second, either there are optimization opportunities on your site, or your site offers a lot of images, or the discrepancy is due to random sampling. I have used the tool quite a lot and find it to be useful.
Technical SEO Issues | | RyanKent0 -
Advice on too many onpage links
Hi Carl, This is always tough for a ecommerce site. I have heard some people say dont worry about it, others say you should always be around 100. But if we use amazon.com as an example they have about 300+ links on any given page, yes they are Amazon and a content giant but it tells you too many links on a page isnt the end of the world. If I was you I would concentrate more on great product descriptions/content than keeping the links down. I am counting 175 links on your homepage. If you really want to get that number down a bit, here are some observations I noticed at first glance: You have 17 links in your footer - all of which seem to be useless, start by getting rid of those. It looks like there are multiple items in the dropdown menu also what could be duplicates (you have maternity under dresses, but you also have dresses under maternity). See if you cant combine some links and shorten up your dropdown menus also. I think you can easily trim your links down you just have to be creative, but those should give you a starting point.
Technical SEO Issues | | CaseyKluver0 -
Domain targeting advice needed please
Hi Carl, First, hosting location isn't a massive factor in terms of SEO - this wasn't always the case - however as sites are hosted in locations that they don't target (e.g. UK sites hosted in the USA) I think this is largely ignored. As such I'd suggest your hosting location shouldn't cause you major heartache. In terms of the US vs UK question - it really depends on how much time / resource you have. If you have the time to devote to content creation, linkbuilding etc for both the .co.uk and the .com then great - if not focusing your efforts on one site and going down the subfolder route - /uk and /us is probably the best option for you. Do be careful not to replicate the sites in the UK and US folders though - you'll need to create separate, unique content for each. Finally, re the IP redirect - this really isn't a tactic I favour. The issue with implementing a redirect based on IP is that as Google bot crawls from a US IP you can effectively render the UK version of the site invisible to bots. As such I favour the approach taken by CheapFlights. If you hit the .com version of the site from a UK IP you get sent to this 'choose your country' page - http://www.cheapflights.com/workers/profile-select.aspx?sref=CFUK&redirect=GeoIP&geoip=GB&cfref=CFUS&spt=Home&rp=/. This allows users to select the appropriate site for them and allows the bots to crawl both versions. I hope this helps, Hannah
Technical SEO Issues | | Hannah_Smith0 -
How often does Organic Traffic Data update?
Oh, by the way. There are several different reports in the Web App that all update at different times. 1. Your Crawl - Each crawl takes about one week to complete and process the results. Generally, you'll see the results 5-7 days after the beginning of your crawl. If it's been significantly longer than that, contact the help team (help@seomoz.org) The date of your crawl is dependent on the day you first set up your campaign. This cannot be changed. 2. Rankings - Once per week. Because rankings are checked independent of your crawl, the actual date they update in your campaign may be different than your crawl. 3. Traffic - Once per week. Always Monday though Sunday. 4. Link Analysis - About once per month, following updates in the Linkscape Index
Moz Tools | | Cyrus-Shepard0 -
Social report
Hi guys! Robert is correct, the info does exist now in campaigns and yes we do have it in the plan to add it to reports as well. It would be great if you could add and/or upvote the request on this page as well: http://seomoz.zendesk.com/forums/293194-seomoz-pro-feature-requests. Thanks so much!
Moz Tools | | jennita0 -
Can subdomains boost the main domain?
In my experience I have been pleasently surprised by the performance of sub domains. I have a blog sub domain that has the same page rank 4 as the main site. So performed really well.
Technical SEO Issues | | onlinemediadirect0 -
Domain Authority Growth
I believe that SEOMoz made a change to linkscape recently that may show larger movements in the last update. The are trying to include more sites rather then going depper into each site, this may have a big affect as i have seen a few stes drop as otehrs have metioned. It may be better to judge on future updates rather then the last one.
Behavior & Demographics | | AlanMosley0 -
Changing of title page and description
Please, do so. And post back here to let us know if it helps. Always great to see if suggestions and answers pay off
On-Page / Site Optimization | | rasmusbang0 -
Is this dangerous (a content question)
Hi Carl, Several large publications do this sort of thing already, but they do have a lot of content of their own to back the duplicate / blocked content up. The most large-scale example of this is newspapers that syndicate content from other papers, often internationally. I was the SEO on a project like this for a large UK paper, and we blocked the duplicated content's subfolder via robots.txt so that the newspaper was not re-publishing indexable content from its international sister. Your other option is to use the canonical tag to point back to the original version of the content. Syndication shouldn't be harmful, and if you were doing this with a lot of content on the site to begin with, it would be normal and fine. What worries me is Google seeing a new site where there is literally no content (to begin with) and a large, blocked section. After the Panda update, it's pretty important to show a resource-heavy website, even if the site's purpose is filled without content. For instance, a property search engine I worked on saw a huge Panda penalty because all of their articles were on an artlce subdomain, not on the same subdomain as the "money" part of their site. We had to move the articles over to the main site. It's not possible for me to say exactly what will happen if you go ahead with this, but I must advise that you should be building out your unique content both before launch, and quickly post-launch. It's vital that unique, indexable content be live on the site for it to perform well, even for commercial queries that don't rely on a site having articles. Cheers, Jane
Technical SEO Issues | | JaneCopland0 -
Best way to geo redirect
You can as far as Google is concerned, but your uk site may not get crawled, as you will be redireting googlebot as well. you must not detect google bot and make a exception just for them or then you will be cloaking, google bot must go with the rest of the US ips. A better idea my to try this http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlanMosley0