Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks for your response Linda.

I've refreshed many times on this and other pages of this stile but it still doesn't appear.

It's a bit worrying if the Moz bar can't see our Domain juice on these sorts of pages...

Any ideas as to what it could be?

Hello all,

I've been talking with an SEO expert who convinced me to add more keywords to my titles of a section of our site which is updated with products daily. I can see the logic and I do prefer having these additional keywords.

The problem now is in Moz it says we have over 2,000 pages with title elements that are too long, which is true they are all over the 70 character limit.

Is this a problem SEO wise? Speaking to our SEO expert they said it's not ideal from a user point of view as you can't see the full title, but are we going to be upsetting Google by having 150+ character titles?

Thanks!

Hello all,

This could be something to do with our site or the Moz bar on Chrome, I just need to know which it is so if it is our website we can look into it further.

On certain sections of our website the Moz bar doesn't display any Domain Authority, not even zero, the bar just isn't present. These types of pages are php which pull in data through a feed daily.

Speaking to an SEO expert they said it could be where the page is being updated so frequently, or it could be something more sinister and technically not quite right.

Does anyone have any ideas? Is the Moz bar just not working for these types os pages or is it more likely something to do with my site? Ironically it's these pages which I'm having trouble with that are not showing in SERPs!

Thanks!

3Foorka

Hi Kyle,

Thanks for responding.

We found it was from Miami after some digging around in Analytics and sorting by location.

No drop in traffic organically, just our usual organic combined with direct gives us a huge spike, but direct from Miami isn't much use for us!

Ok, so I've been doing some digging and I've found the cause, just not the answer.

The additional traffic came in at 9am from Miami... Our website has nothing to do with Miami and 9am would be 3am local time.

It still doesn't look like anything spammy but still, where can I go from here to find the cause of Miami traffic coming to our site?

Thanks!

Thank you for your reply.

Apologies, here's some more info:

Our increase in traffic overall was much higher than normal, but in Analytics when we view just direct, this seems to be the cause of the additional traffic. Organic did not spike.

It is a website for a car dealership containing many brands. The website is fairly large, around 1,000 pages with another 1,000 used cars which are fed in every morning with updates (cars sold, new cars added etc).

Mondays are normally busy days as customers like to book test drives/services etc ready for the following weekend.

Thank you.

Thanks for your reply Jimmy.

We didn't send any emails out on our second spike, which is why we're confused.

The landing pages don't look any different from what we'd expect day-to-day - Nothing that really stands out.

Thanks

We've been doing some SEO work over the last few weeks and earlier this week we saw a large spike in traffic. Yay we all thought, but then yesterday the traffic levels returned to pre-celebratory levels.

I've been doing some digging to try and find out what was different Monday and Tuesday this week. Mondays are usually big traffic days for us anyway, but this week was by far the biggest, and Tuesday was even higher still, our best day ever.

After some poking, I found that the direct traffic followed the same pattern as our overall traffic levels (image attached). The first spike coincides with an email we sent out that day, but the later spike we just don't know where it came from?

I understand loosely that direct isn't easily traceable, but can anyone help us understand more about this second spike?

Thanks!

ayqL2wi

Hi Calin,

Thank you very much for your response. Just to confirm I am understanding you correctly, you are suggesting
the following approach:

1. Do a 301 Redirect on both old and currently indexed URLs

• www.example.com/tennis-shoes [currently canonicalised to www.example.com/tennis-shoes-2]
• www.example.com/tennis-shoes-2

To

www.example.com/products/tennis-shoes-2 [The URL we want google to index]

2. www.example.com/products/tennis-shoes [canonicalise to www.example.com/products/tennis-shoes-2]

The second step will prevent any duplicate content issues given the content will still be accessible
from this URL as well [www.example.com/products/tennis-shoes]

Finally it shouldn't be a problem to have a canonical tag on the www.example.com/products/tennis-shoes-2
to itself as we might need just in case the URL is accessed say using a query string (www.example.com/products/tennis-shoes-2?type=sports)?

Once again, thank you for taking your time to reply.

Hello all! A nice interesting one for you on this fine Friday...

I have some pages which are accessible by 2 different urls - This is for user experience allowing the user to get to these pages in two different ways. To keep Google happy we have a rel canonical so that Google only sees one of these urls to avoid duplicates.

After some SEO work I need to change both of these urls (on around 1,000 pages). Is the best way to do this...

To 301 every old url to every new url

Or... To not worry as I will just point the indexed pages to the new rel canonical?

Any ideas or suggestions would be brilliant.

Thanks!

Hello folks,

We are restructuring some URLS which forms a fair chunk of the content of the domain.
These content are auto generated rather than manually created unlike other parts of the website.

The same content is currently accessible from two URLs:

/used-books/autobiography-a-long-walk-to-freedom-isbn
/autobiography/used-books/a-long-walk-to-freedom-isbn

The URL 1 uses the URL 2 as the canonical url and it has worked allright since Moz does
not show the two as duplicate of each other. Google has also indexed the canonical URL although
there is still a few 'URL 1s' which were indexed before the canonical was implemented.

The updated URL structure will look like something like this:

/used-books/autobiography-a-long-walk-to-freedom-author-name-isbn
/autobiography/used-books/a-long-walk-to-freedom-authore-name-isbn

It would be great to have just a single URL but a few business requirement prevents
us from having just the canonical URL only even with the new structure.

Since we will still have two URLs to access the same content and we were wondering
whether we will need to do a 1:1 301 redirect on the current URLs or since there  will be canonical URL
(/autobiography/used-books/a-long-walk-to-freedom-authore-name-isbn),
we won't need to worry about doing the 1:1 redirect on the the indexed content?

Please note that the content will still be accessible from the OLD URL (unless 301ed of course).

If it is advisable to do a 1:1 301 redirect this is what we intend to do:

/used-books/autobiography-a-long-walk-to-freedom-isbn 301 to
/used-books/autobiography-a-long-walk-to-freedom-author-name-isbn

/autobiography/used-books/a-long-walk-to-freedom-isbn 301 to
/autobiography/used-books/a-long-walk-to-freedom-authore-name-isbn

Any advice/suggestions would be greated appreciated. Thank you.

Thanks Patrick!

They are all separate companies and our customer deals with all the different brands, so we have to keep them all separate.

We currently are using:** /cake-company/cupcakes/type-of-cupcake **as suggested, but we're worried it's too far down by the time you get to the product?

We've seen the PA be significantly reduced by being this deep and wonder if it has any other effect SEO wise?

Thank you!

Thanks for your response Patrick!

The problem we have is that because we represent 8 brands, these aren't in our domain, so in order to include the domain we currently have those as level one, e.g.:

/cake-company-1
/cake-company-2
/cake-company-3

etc...

Our current url structure allows us to have the site neatly organised under each manufacturer of our products, but this then makes the urls quite long and deep.

Would you suggest combining the brand with the product it's self so that they are both in the url and this therefore reduces the url by one level?

E.g. - /cake-company-1-cup-cakes/strawberry

That way we can have:

/cake-company-2-cup-cakes/strawberry
 /cake-company-3-cup-cakes/strawberry
 /cake-company-4-cup-cakes/strawberry

Etc?

Thanks!

Hello,

We're giving our website a bit of a spring clean in terms of SEO. The site is doing ok, but after the time invested in SEO, content and last year's migration of multiple sites into one, we're not seeing the increase in traffic we had hoped.

Our current urls look something like this:

/a-cake-company/cup-cakes/strawberry

We have the company name as the first level as we with the migration we migrated many companies into one site. What we're considering is testing some pages with a structure like this:

/cup-cakes/cup-cake-company-strawberry

So we'll lose a level and we'll focus more on the category of the product rather than the brand.

What's your thoughts on this? We weren't going to do a mass change yet, just a test, but is this something we should be focusing on? In terms of organisation our current url structure is perfect, but what about from an SEO point of view? In terms of keywords customers are looking for both options.

Thanks!

Hello,

Simple question - Should we be redirecting our HTTP pages to HTTPS? If yes, why, if not, why?

Thanks!

Is there a way I can mark this question back to unanswered as I still feel we haven't reached a definite conclusion?

Thanks!

Thank you all for your answers.

I'll try and respond to some of your questions:

• Yes Domain Authority - This was high on the old sites and now has dropped since moving what was a home page to now a level 1 sub home page (e.g. website.com/this-was-a-home-page). The old DA was lower than the PA but not by much. Overall though it seems we have lost a lot of DA. The domain name its self has changed, but it's almost like not much DA has been brought across.

• Backlinks - Since we had 8 different businesses with 8 different websites, they linked to each other which created most of our backlinks. We have asked for other backlinks we had that came from the brand website themselves to be changed, but unfortunately a lot of the brands we represent will not link to us directly. We have also updated any sites like DMOZ with our new address.

• Home page links - Every page links back to it's corresponding brand home page, as well as the overall home page.

• We have many internal links and strong navigation allowing you to go to almost anywhere with just 1 or 2 clicks. Our urls don't go deeper than 3 levels.

Just an overview of our site structure which may help:

Overall company home page
Brand A home | Brand B home | Brand C home etc... For 8 brands
Brand A content | Brand B content | Brand C content etc...
Brand A subcontent | Brand B subcontent | Brand C subcontent etc...

To put it in context of real estate:

Our company overview home page
Apartments | Houses | Mansions | Holiday Homes
Info about our apartments | info about our houses | info about our mansions | info about our holiday homes
Info about individual apartments | info about individual houses | info about individual mansions | info about individual holiday homes

All with the ability to jump between these categories easily.

Thank you for all your help so far, I hope the above helps you to help us further!

Many thanks

Hi Dirk,

Thank you for your reply.

Our problem is that all our our second levels used to be individual websites with DA and PA of around 25-30. Now however after the migration, what used to be the home pages of individual sites are now 1 level down from the domain and have lost a huge amount of authority.

Is there something we've done wrong or is this simply what happens when merging lots of sites into one? What was the home page with high DA and PA is now much lower due to being a subfolder.

Thanks!

After migrating 8 sites into one last year, which went quite successfully, we're now looking into SEO much deeper and how we can improve overall.

Something I have noticed is the deeper the pages, the longer the url, the lower the page authority. It almost halves for each level the page gets deeper.

Is this true? And if so how can we combat this?

I know content is key, but is there anything else we can do?

Many thanks

Thank you for your answer!

Unfortunately I wouldn't be able to give out the url at this stage.

Could you elaborate about the 301-redirects? Our developer set these up and asked us simply where the old urls would go on the new site.

Duplicate content - There are 2 or 3 ways to get to these pages which aren't showing in SERPs, our developer has set up a rel conical to avoid duplicate content but could there be an issue there?

I've asked our developer to look into old files from the static site, is there anything in particular I should be asking him to search for?

Thank you!