Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi strasshgoa,

Good advice from Calin - my guess would be that you don't have a redirect in place for that, or that you may have some other canonical issue, perhaps caused by having written the same URL differently in a link. An example of this would be using both www.mysite.com and www.mysite.com/index.html in your code. While both call the same page, they are different URLs and therefore seen by the crawler as duplicate pages.

The easiest way to identify the problem is to click the blue links in the column to the right of the URL that has been identified as having a duplication issue in your Report. The number of URLs that have been identified as duplicates of the page will appear as a link and when you click the number you will see the list of URLs.

There is also a help page for each of the tools in the Pro App which you can access by clicking the tiny blue "? Help" link to the right of the page towards the top (directly opposite the summary link on the left of the page). The help page for Crawl Diagnostics is here.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi searchpl,

If you are worried about "freshness" for ecommerce sites, there is one very important thing to do - eliminate wasted effort.

The fact is that what I call the "freshness effect" does not apply to every keyword term. Google appears to be determining whether fresh information is, or is not more relevant according to the individual term. If you manually check SERPs you will see this easily.

So, eliminating wasted effort while working toward providing new and relevant content all comes back to good old fashioned research. The smart approach is to spend some time manually checking SERPs for your "money" keywords. If you see evidence of the "freshness effect" for particular terms, those are the ones you could consider focusing new content development efforts on.

The keyword terms that might be affected will entirely depend upon the types of products in your stores - for example, I know that "weight loss" is a term where the "freshness effect" seems evident in SERPs.

Of course, if you decide to develop new content you should follow the advice already given by EGOL and James on quality and method. Incidentally, I would say the smart thing to do in this situation would be to come up with the type of content that is easy to add on a continuous basis - things like ongoing series, videos, podcasts, and cleverly managed user generated content.

Incidentally, if you listen carefully to information coming out of Bing via Duane Forrester, you may notice that Google is not the only Search engine that takes notice of freshness

Hope that helps,

Sha

Also: Don't stress too much if you are using automated feeds to update your product offerings on a daily basis ... you may already be providing fresh content if products are frequently added. The challenge then is to ensure that quality is up to scratch

Hi,

The reason that the Crawl Diagnostics report is divided into three different sections is because the impact of the things highlighted within is completely different.

Warnings are there because it is a known fact that "Pages with crawl warnings are often penalized by search engines." It is up to you whether you take notice of them, and obviously if you have specific conditions on those pages, such as the presence of a noindex meta tag, then obviously you may choose not to bother adding them.

That doesn't actually make the function spammy. It just means that the warning isn't relevant for your particular situation. Requiring the App to check pages with the noindex meta against pages that have missing meta descriptions and remove them from the reporting would add a whole other layer of complexity to the tool.

In short, the tool is meant to identify pages with missing meta descriptions. It does that very well. If you don't need to use the information then you are free to ignore it.

Sha

Hi again,

We set up an example page for you with working tests and links to example code and zipped version.

Hope that is what you need,

Sha

Hi Ruslan,

If you have a Google Webmaster Tools account, you can use the "fetch as googlebot" feature to notify Google of up to 50 URLs per month. The way it works is that you run "fetch as googlebot" and if the page is fetched successfully, you are given the option to add it to the Google index.

Obviously if it is not fetched successfully then you know that there is a problem with the URL that needs fixing.

Bing also has a similar feature which allows you to manually add up to 10 URLs per day with a maximum of 50 per month.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Anthony,

If the issue you have is related to the fact that you have both www and non www versions of the pages, then you can implement a 301 redirect within the Yahoo Stores system to take care of this.

If you go to this Yahoo Stores 301 Help Page you will find a detailed explanation of the various ways that you can implement redirects.

The part that applies to this situation is in the following paragraph:

You can also choose to redirect all hostnames and domain to your selected domain so your non-www address (acme.com) points for example to your www domain (www.acme.com). This setting also redirects your index page (for example www.acme.com/index.html) to your selected redirect setting (for example www.acme.com). This allows you to have one url (also known as a canonical url) rather than multiple so search engine relevancy factors will accrue to one url rather than being spread out across multiple urls.

The instructions are directly below that paragraph and the diagram shows you where to choose the redirect you want to use A.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Chukwuemeka,

First a quick note - it is not possible to write a script that does this using html, but by converting your normal html files to PHP, you can achieve your aim for a standard site without having to use a CMS like Wordpress.

This post in the Youmoz Blog Adding "Related Post" Links without a Database should provide everything you need to make it work.

I hope this will help solve your problem ... if there is anything that you don't understand just let me know in the comments or come back to this thread.

I owe my boss a BIG beer gift this Christmas for writing the code that makes this work

Sha

Hi Nikos,

A simple 301 redirect should not cause your rankings to evaporate. The 301 Redirect is just signalling to search engines that they should de-index the old domain and replace the link in their index with the new one. It generally doesn't happen in less than a day either

It seems perhaps there is a problem with the way that the redirect has been implemented, or some other completely unrelated issue that has caused a coincidental loss of rankings.

Can you post a link to your site so that we can take a look at what is happening? If you would rather not post the link publicly, you can go to your profile and send me a private message. There are really too many possibilities to guess without taking a look at the site.

Sha

Hi Dennis,

SEOmoz will track rankings for all of the pages crawled within the root domain or subdomain that you have entered for your campaign, so the answer is NO.

If you are seeing different results when you check rankings manually in Google, you need to keep in mind that the SEOmoz Ranking report provides non-personalized results. Also, the way in which embedded local results appear in the SERPs will affect the result. When they are normal results with enhanced local listing they are counted.  If they appear in a 6,8, or 12 pack they are not counted. While Google continues to experiment with local listings, the SEOmoz team continues to respond with updates.

Hope that helps,

Sha

PS - If you want to optimize different pages for your keywords using the On-page Analysis tool, you can click "Report Card" in the On-page tool. You will see a selector at the top where you can type in any URL and choose any keyword from your list.

Hi kundrotas, The problem you have is that the code used for .htaccess functions is not terribly "intelligent". It does not allow for the use of "IF" statements etc. This being the case, the better option is to move the action to within the actual code. This is the rule at question RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/$ /index.php?lang=$1&idr=$2&par1=$3&%{QUERY_STRING} [L] The easiest thing to do is in index.php add a check for par1 // If par1 is 1 and everything else is blank send it to the root. if( $par1 == '1' && $par2 == '' && $par3 == '' && $par4 == '' && $par5 == '' && $par6 == '' ) { $location = "/$lang/$idr/"; header ('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently'); header ('Location: '.$location); } Hope that helps, Sha

Hi Talha,

Perfect answer from MyHolidayMarketing and a big thumbs up!

The benefit of this method of presentation is that it also reflects for your developer the practical implementation of a menu structure that will make it easier to expose search engine crawlers to all page levels on the site.

Basically, the sub-levels of your dot pointed list represent the sub-levels of your menu. That way, when any page is crawled, the basic menu structure will guide the crawler through all levels of the site.

Keeping the site structure within 3 levels is also a good idea.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Shebin,

The best thing to do is email the Help team direct - help [at] seomoz.org

I had a campaign with a similar issue a while back and the Help team sorted it out for me very quickly.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Sorry that my answer appears to have lost all line breaks...seems to be some css issues at the moment.

Hoping you can copy it out and separate the lines ....I will try to reformat it as soon as I can, but right now it just keeps loading funky.

Sha

Hi Robert,

There is a "Getting Started" video intro to the software which will give you a place to start on this page where you will also find information about the weekly Welcome Webinar with Moz staff.

I would recommend that you also sign up for the next Welcome Webinar  so you can ask any questions you may have about the different tools in the SEOmoz toolkit and how you can use them.

There is a Welcome Webinar every Friday morning and you will find a button on that page to Reserve your Spot at the next one.

When using the Pro App, if you need a little clarification of how a particular tool works (for example if you are in the On-page Tool area) you will find a tiny blue "Help" link at the top right of the page that will take you to the help page for that tool.

If there is anything that hasn't been explained by the video or help pages, you can email direct to the Help team - help at seomoz.org. They are actually pretty awesome and always happy to help you out.

There are also a lot of great SEOmoz resources that will help you get your head around it all... The Beginner's Guide to SEO is one of the best. It is included in the list of resources in this thread from a while ago.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Miranda,

Yes, the initial "fast" crawl is limited to 250 pages. It gives you a quick start opportunity for working on your campaign while waiting for a full crawl to complete.

This is an improvement that was added a few months ago. Before that time you had to wait a week for the full crawl if your site was large.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi again Daniel,

Notices are nothing to worry about - if you take a look at the message from Roger and the Mozzers above the blue tabs in the Notices section, you will see a little explanation:

"Notices are interesting facts about your pages we found while crawling."

They are just there to make you aware of things in the background that might not be obvious

You will find a short explanation on each of the other sections too.

Incidentally, lots of 302's is not such a good thing - which is why they are in the "Warnings" section instead of the "Notices.

Another little thing to be aware of is the tiny blue "Help" link toward the top right of each page in the Pro Tool. Whichever page you are on, this link will take you to the help documentation for that particular feature. Some good stuff in there and a great way to get to know the tools when you are starting out.

If you have questions about your campaigns, you can also email the Help Team direct - help at seomoz.org. It's worth it just to see the awesome thankyou video when you answer the feedback survey!...or register for the weekly Welcome Webinar with Moz staff.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Guido,

I would agree with comments from eyepaq and Saijo with regard to redirects. Since there is a slight loss of link value with a 301 redirect, it is best to always send links to the target URL.

As to why the page is not ranking, I just wanted to add a reminder that there is more to that than just pointing links to the page. From that point of view there are a few things to consider with this page:

• There is very little content on the page, but when I view source I see a significant number of exact match instances of your keyword term.
• Most notably, there are several alt tags which offer no descriptive value for the user and are simply repetitive use of the exact match term for each photo. This is likely to be seen as manipulative. There is nothing wrong with including your term in alt tags, but they should always serve as short explanation of the image content.

We need to be even more careful of search engine sensitivity to signs of over optimization when there is very little text on a page.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Brian,

The key here is that it is a "warning" intended to alert you to the fact that the situation exists so that you have the ability to do something about it if you can.

While there are many sites (especially ecommerce sites) which are highlighted by the tool because they have extensive menus, it is also quite possible that some users have pages where the body text is full of plain text links which could be fixed.

As to whether they should be fixed, I would say definitely "yes" if they are the latter.  Pages that have way too many links in the text are detrimental to user experience. They are harder to read, look spammy and the message tends to get lost if people are constantly clicking a link and going to another page.

If, on the other hand, you have a site where the large number of links is the result of the menus it is a fairly simple thing to ignore the warning.

I should mention that there is a feature request in the works which would enable users to "switch off" items in the Pro App that can be ignored. When this is implemented you would be able to remove them from the report so you don't have to keep looking at them.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi David,

Having the 301's in place is a good thing rather than a problem. They have been created by Wordpress so that you do not have broken links on your site (because you have created links and then deleted them by changing the permalink).

There are 3 major reasons for using 301 (Permanent) Redirects:

1. To move pages (or whole sites) to a new location and maintain accessibility to them
2. To eliminate broken link issues when URL's that may already have been crawled and/or seen by search engines or site users. (Links can be created by ordinary users who may have bookmarked or shared the URL)
3. To ensure that multiple URL's which render the same content are not seen by search engines as duplicate content. For example, a canonicalization issue can exist when http://mydomain.com (root domain) and http://www.mydomain.com (the subdomain) generally produce the same page of content, but can be seen as duplicates of each other because they are distinctly different URLs. Dr Pete's Duplicate Content in a Post Panda World is the definitive post on the different reasons for duplicate content and the best options for fixing them.

The 301's have no influence on users as they cannot see them - they are written to the .htaccess file. The idea of having them there is to catch any incoming traffic that comes via existing links to those pages that no longer exist.

There is a good explanation of 301 Best Practice in the Learn SEO section here at SEOmoz.

When working through the things identified in the crawl test, the Errors (red) and Warnings (yellow) are the things to pay attention to first. If you check the single line explanation above the blue tabs you will see this message "Notices are interesting facts about your pages we found while crawling." So they are not really problems that need fixing.

A couple of other great resources if you are just starting out are The Beginners Guide to SEO and the rest of the Learn SEO section.

Hope that helps,

Sha

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world

...or use simple rewrites (without a redirect statement) until you are ready to move the site and then apply 301 redirects as normal. Such rewrites simply serve the alternative page content when a request is made for the target URL.

Sha