Hi David,

This does happen occasionally. The simple solution is to put a meta before the closing head () tag in to the template's code, as below:

This will block robots from showing the DMOZ directory description.

Hope that helps.

Matt

Hi Mozzers,

We're currently in the process of a website redesign with new CMS and have the opportunity to change URL and structure. I would love some opinions as to what the best practise will be.

A quick prerequisite, the website is entirely about France. French property, living, holidays, forum - everything. Therefore, we're unsure of the usage of the word France/French.

Presently, we're running Classic ASP which allows for one subfolder then dynamic article ID. In my examples, I will take our activity holidays URL. At present this is /france-activity-holidays/DisplayArticle.asp?ID=12345. We know that DisplayArticle.asp?ID=12345 will simply become [article-title], however, its the preceding subfolders I would like some help with.

Here are our thoughts on the options available. Can you please vote as to which you think is the best?

1. /france-activity-holidays/ (one subfolder per category, as at present)
2. /france/holidays/activity/  (always have a first subfolder with the word france)
3. /holidays-to-france/activity-holidays/ (france in the primary subfolder)
4. /holidays/activity-holidays-france/ (france in the secondary subfolder)
5. /holidays/activity/ (because the whole website is about France, it is redundant to have /france/)
6. /French-holidays/activity/

My gut feeling is either number 2 or 5. Concise, good for UX, OK for SEO. However, there is very little information around that is relevant to our sector.

Thanks in advance!

Matt

Thanks for the responses all.

I've always had the suspicions that subfolders are the way to go, and will incorporate this into our development.

Thanks

Matt

Hi Mozzers,

We're in the process of re-developing and redesigning several of our websites, and moving them all onto the same content management system. At the moment, although the websites are all under the same brand and roughly the same designs, because of various reasons they all either live on a separate domain to the main website, or are on a subdomain. Here's a list of what we have (and what we're consolidating):

• Main site - http://www.frenchentree.com/
• Property database - http://france-property.frenchentree.com/ (subdomain)
• Forum - http://www.france-forum-frenchentree.com/ (separate domain)
• Classified ads - http://www.france-classified-ads-frenchentree.com/ (separate domain)

My question to you lovely people is: should we take this opportunity through the redevelopment of the CMS to put everything into subfolders of the main domain? Keep things as they are? Put each section onto a subdomain? What's best from an SEO perspective?

For information - the property database was put onto a subdomain as this is what we were advised to do by the developers of the system. We're starting to question this decision though, as we very rarely see subdomains appear in SERPs for any remotely competitive search terms. Our SEO for the property database is fairly non-existent, and only ever really appears in SERPs for brand related keywords.

For further info - the forum and classifieds were under a separate brand name previously, so keeping them on separate domains felt correct at that time. However, with the redevelopment of our sites, it seems to make more sense to either put them on subdomains or subfolders of the main site. Our SEO for the forum is pretty strong, though has dwindled in the last year or so.

Any help/advice would be very much appreciated.

Thanks

Matt

Perhaps it made its way into the perks section? Is this what you're looking for? http://moz.com/perks

Best

Matt

Hi Mozzers,

Is anyone aware of a tool that will tell me how many outbound external links there are on my website? Basically, I have a theory that our website is littered with links to other websites, but need to know the approximate figure. As far as I can tell, none of the Moz tools tell me this?

Any help appreciated!

Cheers

Matt

Hi Daniel,

It's a tough choice, really. I have 80 categories in my classified ads site under 12 headings. I have taken a Gumtree-style move though, and have spread them across the page (http://www.gumtree.com) rather than just having on long list down a page.

From an SEO point of view, yes, it would be good to cover off all of the potential search phrases, but not at the cost of duplicating categories. You need to think of it from a user's point of view - if you have (for example) "Cars for sale" and "secondhand cars" as two separate categories, users may not know which section to look in (not to mention any keyword dilution). Moreso, and coming from someone who manages a classified ads site, it is really annoying (for admins and users) when users put items for sale in the wrong category. If you're adding multiple similar categories, this will quickly become an issue, in my opinion.

What we tried to do was to create dynamic search engine friendly titles and headers... Therefore we eliminated the need to create multiple categories for different regions, or even for similar products. Whatever language or software you're using, it should be fairly easy to set this up. We also added "similar" searches on search results pages and product pages in order to get links to the more niche search terms. We're in the top 3 for all of our high value key phrases with this approach.

Best,

Matt

No worries... I was intrigued as well!

Actually... Just found the answer here - http://www.seomoz.org/help/ose-terms-metrics

"Tweets:   Total tweets and retweets of this URL since March 2010, including tweets of the URL with unique parameters added. Data provided by Topsy."

Best,

Matt

Hi Rich,

I would hazard a guess as to say that data comes from Followerwonk, since this was a recent aquisition of SEOmoz. Just a guess though...

best,

Matt

Thanks Shane. My syntax wasn't perfect, but after messing about with a few different ones, and closing with [RP], I managed to get it to work.

Many thanks!

Hi folks,

Due to working on a site older than myself, I find myself in a position whereby I need to set up some redirects in the httpd.ini document. I had wrongly assumed this would be in the same way as I would in htaccess, but alas, no dice.

There's nothing special about what I'm trying to do, but I think the expressions are what are confusing me.

I'm trying to redirect this example page - http://www.example.com/subfolder/DisplayArticle.asp?ID=12345 to it's subfolder http://www.example.com/subfolder/.

Here's what I have:

[ISAPI_Rewrite]

Redirecting old article to new locations

RewriteRule ^/subfolder/DisplayArticle.asp?ID=12345 /subfolder/ [R=301,L]

Can someone please point me in the right direction?

Thanks

Matt

I read that as 350 backlinks to the page... If it is 350 out-going links from that page, then completely agree! 350 is mental.

Hi Sean,

Sure it is. Just run the page through SEOmoz's OpenSiteExplorer - http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/. Put in the exact URL, and change the params to "only external" and you can see all of the backlinks to that page, plus the linking domain's authority, etc. It's a very good tool.

Cheers

Matt

Hi Gary,

Yeah, overkill for me. The crawlers won't actually be getting as far as to see the canonical. The 301 will take the crawlers right passed those pages straight to the homepage you want to display.

Cheers

Matt

Hi Gary,

Here are my thoughts on the questions you have asked:

Is my best coarse of action to implement 301 re-directs or go with canonical tags to fix this issue? - I would definitely do one or the other. I don't think there would be a huge difference between the two, but I personally would 301. Having multiple versions of the same page is duplication but also dilution of any link juice they're receiving from inbound links. 301 those to whichever version you're most comfortable with. I would suggest just / (as the root domain makes the most of link juice, in theory). Once this is implemented, you should see their overall domain stats increase. Included in this, it seems that they are not resolving non-www URLs, so you should implement something along the lines of this in their htaccess to resolve this:

Ensure www on all URLs.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^bobbyvans.com [NC]RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.bobbyvans.com/$1 [L,R=301]

This will make sure www.bobbyvans.com and bobyvans.com are not two different pages.

Cleaning up URLs - there's no reason why you shouldn't do this. In fact, it will more than likely help rather than hinder, as long as you 301.

Pretty simple really!

Best,

Matt

Hi Olivia,

Maybe Rand has set about you (translation here for all non UK folk) for ripping off the SEOmoz site?

In all seriousness, 1.7mb is rather excessive for images. I would consider scaling these down.

I've never heard of any association between scriptsdown and increased page speed, so I doubt this is effecting it (PS - have you heard of Google Tag Manager?)

Is your new server equivalent in spec to your previous server? Smaller capacities and bandwidth can play a small part in load speed but probably not by that much... Just a thought though.

Cheers

Matt

Hi Patrick,

On the 27th of September, there were two major updates by Google - an EMD update and a subsequent Panda update. Seeing as you don't EMD, it's possible that it was the Panda update that seems to have hit you.

Can I assume that the pages that dropped from rankings were shopping results pages, or pages with pagination? Whereas pages that remain are static pages? The Panda updates address duplicate pages and pages with pagination, so I can imagine that a site like yours probably has a fair amount of what search engines would consider duplicate content. Do you get duplicate content errors in your SEOmoz crawl diagnostics? If that is what you're seeing, then I would recommend canonicalising your pagination pages. http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/canonicalization

The above is just an idea, and given that I don't think it's a penguin penality (penalises backlinks) overwise your above mentioned fixes should have made some noticeable difference, it will be worth looking into Panda.

Best,

Matt

Sandip,

I'm giving you a thumbs up just because of your glorious moustache. Well done, sir.

(Your answer was pretty good too!)

Matt

Hi Dan,

I agree with Jarno - you're not really offering any valuable content to the user. The only unique content is a couple of images and a few changed words. If the server can pull through a couple of different images and change a few words, surely the server can request some unique text that will a) add value to the user and b) reduce the overall amount of templated content?

PS - As a pro member, you can have up to 5 campaigns... Why not set up a campaign for your competitor? I can almost guarantee that they've got a load of duplication errors too, judging by what they're doing.

PPS - Looking at your on-page optimisation, you don't seem to be targeting "DID Numbers"... Your competitors are though, hence why they are displaying in results for that search.

Best,

Matt