Questions
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How important is admin-ajax.php?
On a side note, if you don't want hackers to find the wp-admin folder, you may not want to put the folder in the robots.txt file, as this is publicly accessible and it will make it easy to find (although it may not be an issue for automatic attacks).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | J-S0 -
Odd 404 pages
Hello John, I wouldn't assume that modernizr actually created a page. More likely, the relative path to the minified javascript file was found by Google in your source code, and Google tried to access it. Perhaps the path was wrong (e.g. /js/ exists off the root, not within that "/accidents..." folder) so when Google tried to access that resource it could not be found. I would leave it as-is if the URL produces a 404 status code. However, I would also find the code on that page and see whether it uses the correct path or not. You don't want to block those files, but you don't want Google wasting crawl budget on pages that don't exist either. If you can't figure out what's causing it I would contact the folks at modernizr. You can see their Twitter profiles at the bottom of this page: http://modernizr.com/ .
Technical SEO Issues | | Everett0 -
Weird Blog tags and re-directs
You could always set a no-index rule for the tag pages in robots.txt and then submit all the URL's you want to appear through Webmaster tools using the "Fetch as Google" option. Another thing I would do is to only have the URL's you want to be indexed and focused on included in the sitemap, and the rest excluded. This should cut back on the strange or redundant URL's getting indexed and showing up. Something like: Disallow: /tag/ or Disallow: /http://www.bestpracticegroup.com/tag/ Hope this helps!
Technical SEO Issues | | David-Kley0 -
What would you do with this odd Blog configuration?
In reality it's up to you. If you think the site makes more sense using the /blog/BLOGPOST format, then go for it. It can help search engines and users to understand that this is the blog section of the site. If all of your posts fall under a certain category or topic, you could also change the separator to use something that is more SEO-friendly, such as yoursite.com/marketing/your-blog-post. The whole site and all the linked pages share your "homepage authority". Because you are not using a blog URL in between makes little difference. Your sitemap is the area that you can set the importance of these pages, which we generally set as a 5 or 6 out of 10 if you are concerned about the way that they show up in accordance with your main site in search results. Also, it may take a bit of time to process all the redirects, so see if that is truly a matter of importance. Hope this helps!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | David-Kley0 -
What should I consider before setting up a sub domain?
Subdomains are seperate from your root domain SEO. I guess that you do not want search engines to discover the new site? Deploy a noindex tag on the site to make sure that it is not indexed in the search engines. However, if you place it in a subfolder on your site (e.g. domain.com/site/) I will affect the overall impression of the site from a search engines perspective. You could take a look at the Moz guide about domains (it could help you understand the difference in subdomains and root domains in respect to SEO): http://moz.com/learn/seo/domain
Technical SEO Issues | | renehansen0 -
Should I duplicate keywords in a URL?
Good Morning! I have been in a similar situation and I found two different videos which helped me out in my decision making process. This is Matt Cutts on keywords in domain names https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAWFv43qubI This is Matt Cutts on keywords in URL paths https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=971qGsTPs8M What I ended up doing was making a short list of "static" pages of content that wasn't going to change much. Think of these as my services. So for example www.domainname.co.uk/asbestosis-diagnosis www.domainname.co.uk/asbestosis-treatment or www.domainname.co.uk/asbestosis/diagnosis www.domainname.co.uk/asbestosis/treatment Then from there in our blog section, I started making the more specific, long tail keyword URLS. www.domainname.co.uk/how-to-diagnose-asbestosis www.domainname.co.uk/how-to-treat-asbestosis In the long run, I don't believe it will negatively impact you repeating keywords. Although I may be wrong. My personal thoughts are that Google is getting closer and closer to searching things like a human would. So I try and view my URL path like a filing system. If I can understand it, and it makes sense to Google, then it's going to end up safe. The last thing you want to do is make a system that is overly redundant and/or spammy, although again i'm not entirely sure if this would qualify as a spam URL path. Hope this helps!
On-Page / Site Optimization | | HashtagHustler0 -
Hyphenating a Domain Name - What would you do?
Agree with Ryan Purkey's recommendation. Domain names are treated differently than most text probably because of space constraints. You don't need to worry about separating words. You want to keep your domain name short and memorable. As Ryan says, having to say "Gray DASH or Hyphen Digital) is not memorable. Go with graydigital if it's available.
Technical SEO Issues | | DonnaDuncan0 -
New site: More pages for usability, or fewer more detailed pages for greater domain authority flow?
I would say you should do whichever is better for the user. Whatever will make their experience on your site a good one. I am a fan of getting as much information on one page as I can, however, there are some users who might want the highlights with the freedom to dig deeper if they need or want. Content heavy pages are always a good thing, but the UX is ultimately the most important thing.
Technical SEO Issues | | MonicaOConnor1 -
Can you recommend a Content Delivery Network for hosting 20 videos across the website?
No but we will certainly pencil it in for a trial. Thanks
Branding / Brand Awareness | | Muhammad-Isap0 -
Do allow or disavow, that is the question!
Hey John If you decide to take action action, then being aggressive with the links is a good approach. Both in Cyrus Shephard's great Moz blog post on the disavow tool and also advice from Google itself says if you suspect an entire domain to be spammy, go ahead and disavow all of it. However, from my own perspective, I would only go through and create a disavow file if I knew for sure that I was suffering from a manual or algorithmic penalty. I have seen very little benefit in being proactive with that tool (eg rankings are good, you spot bad links in your link profile and disavow them to be safe) and, in fact, I have seen a number of cases when a disavow was submitted "prematurely" - ie, a site was ranking fine and then disavowed some links and saw rankings fall. If we want to look at it from a slightly skeptical point of view - if you're not suffering from a Google penalty, do you really want to inform Google that you have suspicious links in your profile? However, that is a matter of preference based on my own experience. I would certainly take note of the links you think are bad (and perhaps put together a file ready to go, just in case). Worth noting that prweb.com has made all of its links nofollow anyway, and so as they're not passing on link equity it doesn't seem logical to then disavow them (as they have no SEO benefit) Also, keep in mind though that if you visit the page and the link is not there - and especially if you do a google search for cache:http://www.example.com and see that the cached version contains no link - there's a very good chance that the link has already been discounted anyway and so would not be flagged in a manual or algorithmic check. Seeing as you have so many links from the domains, that may be occurring. Hope this helps
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TomRayner0 -
Keywords, when are you overdoing it in the URL?
I would not recommend changing URL structure unless you have a very good reason to do so. Worrying about kw density on a decently readable, nice URL should not be reason to recommend a total URL rewrite.
Technical SEO Issues | | anthonydnelson0 -
To create extra pages, or not to create extra pages?
Thanks Alan, I was told that phone numbers and other details should be marked up with Schema, If you have multiple instances of the phone number on the page - i.e footer, content etc - should all instances be marked up? or just one? If just one, should it be an occurrence in the navigation or footer? Thank you.
On-Page / Site Optimization | | Muhammad-Isap0 -
Do redirected links still provide the same value as a regular link?
I don't think that is correct, I have watched the video also, and I think matt has been deliberately vague. If you have a link that points to pageA that is 301 redirected to pageB, then you lose PR with the link to pageA then lose again when it is 301 redirected to pageB. You have made 2 requests both lose PR True the lose is the same, but it is twice. If you link directly to pageB, them you only leak PR once.
Link Building | | AlanMosley0 -
Rel-Canonical Changes
"I'd like the page to rank for 'Care Home Claims', but as you can see, that isn't the phrase currently being used in the URL: www.asons.co.uk/Claims/Accidents-in-care-homes/21569" True, but the keywords are in the url... order does matter but having them in the url is much better then not at all. www.asons.co.uk/Claims/Accidents-in-care-homes/21569 "I would like to amend the URL to reflect the keyword focus. Currently the page is a 'B' - so hopefully this change will push it over the edge to an A. " The page grader is a very useful tool but you also have to know when it is okay to deviate and ignore some of the results. If you get an A grade for a page that is getting canonicaled to another page then grade doesn't really mean much. Your original question was about using the canonical tag on a page which already has a canonical tag. For somebody (atleast for me) to answer the question, I would want to know what the url is you want to canonical, where you want to canonical it to and why. Something like.. url... rubbererducks.com/decoys/red/p-19191 url... rubbererducks.com/decoys/red/p-19198 canonical to... rubberducks.com/decoys/red/ Because product pages are similar just different artist That would help us help you
On-Page / Site Optimization | | donford0 -
Rankings/Traffic Nosedive - Any ideas?
You can take a quiz at http://www.mytrafficdropped.com/ to determine if Panda or Penguin might have caused your traffic drop. To do a good job on the quiz you will need analytics data that clearly shows the date of the traffic drop.
Link Building | | EGOL0