Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Peter - you make some good points.

Perhaps something like you have in public relations - perhaps you join an institute (or a new branch of Moz) by paying a fee and signing up to a code of conduct - if a client is unhappy with your conduct, they can lodge a complaint and challenge your position as a member of the said organisation. That would be a great way forward and restore some level of trust in the industry. A kind of self-regulation if you like.

Hello Mozzers,

I am undertaking a site audit and have just noticed that the developer has left the development site up and it has indexed. They 301d from pages on old site to equivalent pages on new site but seem to have allowed the development site to index, and they haven't switched off the development site. So would the best option be to redirect the development site pages to the homepage of the new site (there is no PR on dev site and there are no links incoming to dev site, so nothing much to lose...)? Or should I request equivalent to equivalent page redirection?

Alternatively I can simply ask for the dev site to be switched off and the URLs removed via WMT, I guess...

Thanks in advance for your help!  

Yes a great answer there from Dan - and thanks for your useful input - good point re: not relying on robots.txt alone!

Many thanks Dan - much appreciated - that process there makes perfect sense even though in my case too :)))) I will report back on progress in a month or so...

Thanks Amelia - yes you're definitely on the right lines - Dan's response below is v helpful too, that's for sure. I do struggle with developers from time to time, so teaching myself coding and so on via codeacademy, etc. - learnt at uni many years ago but v out of date! Will come in useful for SEO too.

Hiya Mozzers - I have a blog separate from main website which is duplicating the blog on the main website. This separate blog is duplicating the main website blog, so it needs to be closed down and redirected. There are some 200 pages of separate blog (identified via Screaming Frog).

So I am suggesting the blog pages should be 301 redirected from the separate blog to the equivalent blog pages on the main website.

Q1) Should the root domain of the separate blog be 301 redirected to the main www.mainwebsite.com/blog page, or to the root domain of the main website?

Q2) Should the blog pages, which lack equivalent content on the main website, be 301 redirected to the main www.mainwebsite.com/blog page, or to the root domain of the main website?

Thanks for your help on this one, Luke

You might find this useful. http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide - especially the ** I serve a huge number of cities. Do I really have to create a page for each one?** bit!!!

Hi - I'm assuming image URL best practice follows same principles as non image URLs (not too many files and so on) - I notice alot of web devs putting photos in subdomains, so wonder if I'm missing something (I usually avoid subdomains like the plague)!

Thanks Angular Marketing, and Everett... very helpful feedback and much appreciated. Luke

What is the best keyword ranking tool you have used? I have used various tools by which I am expected to identify and input the keyword I want to track...

However, recently I was introduced to Searchmetrics, which I think automatically pulls in the keywords a website ranks for, without the need for manual input from the SEO (I haven't used this tool yet, so apologies if I am incorrect!). Do any other rank trackers work like this?

Thanks, Luke

What's your experience of using robots meta tag v robots.txt when it comes to a stand alone solution to prevent Google indexing?

I am pretty sure robots meta tag is more reliable - going on own experiences, I have never experience any probs with robots meta tags but plenty with robots.txt as a stand alone solution.

Thanks in advance, Luke

I've been having endless conversations about this over the last few days and in conclusion I agree with everything you say - thanks for your excellent advice. On this particular site next/prev was not set up correctly, so I'm working on that right now.

Hello all,

I am planning to change the title tags throughout a site and am vaguely aware (perhaps wrongly!) that changing title tags across a site is a risk factor - can be a spam flag if changes (to a specific title tag) are implemented too regularly, for example.

Would you change title tags across a site in one go, or implement changes gradually - to avoid any risk of upsetting Google. Do you have any insights/tips on the implementation of title tag changes?

Hi - I am seeking an onsite search engine that is SEO friendly - which do you recommend?

And has anyone tried doofinder.com - that specific search engine - if you have, is it well aligned/attuned to the SEO aspects of your site?

Thanks as ever, Luke