Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Happy to help anytime.

Look forward to catching up with you around SEOmoz as you settle in to the community

Sha

Hi Andarilho,

The 250 page crawl is just a quick version of the crawl to allow you to get started on your campaigns because a full site crawl generally takes up to 7 days to complete. So, you can start working on the first 250 pages in the meantime

Hope that helps,

Sha

No worries Alan.

I figured the one in your Webmaster Tools ought to be the right one

The problem with that one is that it returns blank pages for every URL indexed in Google (if you use site:www.whitby.uk.net you can see a long list of indexed pages, but not a single one is working). Obviously there is a problem with the site which you need to fix as quickly as possible. The Database may be the best place to start looking for issues.

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 Again Alan,

You have now given us 3 different domains:

www.**whitby-uk.**net

www.**whitby-.uk.**net/

www.**whitby.uk.**net/

A little hard to give you a definitive answer if we don't know which domain you are referring to

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Alan,

The URL from your Google Webmaster Tools is a different domain.

The domain that is for sale has a hyphen in it that is not included in the link from your WMT message... or do you own them both?

The WMT  message is a courtesy message that is being sent to all Wordpress users with out of date software versions. The risk of your site being hacked is significantly increased by having out of date cms versions. This is something that Google is concerned about because hacked sites may put users at risk of exposure to malicious code.

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

Hi sansonj

If you are asking about how long it will take for search engines to recognize the changes you have made, then you can speed up the process for Google by using the "Fetch as Googlebot" feature in your Google Webmaster Tools account. This allows you to fetch individual URLs (and pages linked from them if you choose). Once a page has been successfully fetched you have the option of adding it to the index.

There are limits on the number of pages per month that you can fetch, but this is a good option for new or changed pages on your site.

Bing Webmaster Tools has a feature which allows you to add pages to the Bing index in the same way.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Jamie,

Search engines are not the only place you may find links to your pages. Actually, if you have done a good job of promoting your pages across a variety of channels, there should be links out there in a range of different places.

You will find a more detailed answer I wrote on this question about removing 301 redirects.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Josh,

If you have a list of actual URLs which always return a 500 Error, the problem is a bug in the code.

You should send the list of URLs to your developer and ask him/her to fix them. Often, once a bug is identified and fixed, it will correct all or most of the errors.

If you check the URLs and find that the 500 Errors are intermittent (sometimes OK, sometimes returning an error), you should  take a look at this question I answered about random 500 Errors.

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

Oops!

I forgot to mention Mozcon!

I think Cyrus Shepard pretty much summed up the value of the event in his recent blog post I'll be at Mozcon 2012. Will you?.

If you can make it to Seattle in July I'll see you there too

Sha

Hi Andarilho,

Welcome to Q&A!

Good advice from both Andrews above. There are so many ways to learn how to improve your site here at SEOmoz.

A while ago I created a post with a list of resources for a bunch of new people who were starting out here, so I thought it might be helpful to share with you. You can read it here

Look forward to hearing more from you around the community

Hope it helps,

Sha

Hi Daniel,

I have to say I really don't agree with the idea of deleting 301's after a period of time. The only place where there is a time frame involved in the 301 scenario is at the Search engines.

Links can come from any number of other sources including links from other sites, browser bookmarks, links passed in emails, pdf documents, embedded in Youtube videos ...to name just a few.

If the 301's were originally placed to fix the problem of broken links, why would I want to "unfix" them?

Even for large sites with a lot of 301's there are ways to manage processing load etc and if you have found a solution that is acceptable for a period of time, the same solution should be acceptable over the longer term.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Marie,

Good advice from James here.

One other question I would ask - have you checked the site in all browsers? There are viruses written for specific browsers such as IE. I have seen a situation where a site was infected, but nobody in the company knew because they were all using Chrome or Firefox. As soon as a customer hit the site with IE all the flashing lights and sirens went off!

Also, have you asked those reporting a problem for details of the virus scanning software they are using? If you can nail down the virus scanner involved and run an online scan from that company's website you should be able to replicate the report and see what exactly is happening.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hey Robert!

Yes, everything is good here, thanks. Just been hectic around here lately and yes, I've been feeling bad about missing my time in Q&A

Hi Vinod,

I believe SEOmoz uses the Google API to power tools that utilize Google data.

If you would like more specific information about how the SEOmoz Ranking tool works, you can email the Help Team direct (help at seomoz.org) and I'm sure they will be able to help you out.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi dseo241,

Given that your question specifically relates to Roger's ability to access your sites (both dev & production), I think you would be best to email the SEOmoz Help Team direct - help at seomoz.org.

I use the stand alone Crawl Test tool to run a base crawl of our dev sites, which are noindexed, but not behind an htpassword, so you would still need to ask the Help Team about accessibility. Incidentally, the SEOmoz User-agent is rogerbot.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Guido,

It seems none of the domains you mentioned are now working. You should return everything to the way it was before so that your client's sites are operable and then we can start over to resolve your problem.

Incidentally, what just happened sounds slightly familiar to me. Are you using an Apache server?

Sha

Hi Ryan,

A lot of people have gotten much more worried about dates since they heard about the "Freshness Update" late last year. Unfortunately a lot of people assume that it is a factor for all keyword terms & niches, but that is not the case. It is quite easy to find out whether it is a factor for your keywords. I gave a detailed explanation of this in this Q&A thread in November.

As is mentioned in the Quora thread you quoted, there are much more reliable ways for search engines to determine freshness (timestamps & previous crawl data).

I would agree with Brent and EGOL that the significance of year to your user base makes it reasonable (more likely expected) to include the year. However, I would take it a step further and suggest that you consider leveraging the intelligence of the bots a little.

We know that  bots are now smart enough to help assess relevance. In fact it has become the centerpiece of their day to day work.  For me, that should mean that using words like "wine" or "vintage" would signal to the search engine that this URL and its content might reasonably include date references in the form of 4 digit and/or 2 digit year information

That decided, I would build my site infrastructure accordingly, placing individual pages within directories using a reasonable and natural naming structure that includes the appropriate words. Depending how you prefer to approach it, a couple of possible examples might be  grapesinyourtoesexample.com/07-vintage/2007-cellar-pod-viognier-adelaide-hills/ or grapesinyourtoesexample.com/red-wines/2007-cellar-pod-viognier-adelaide-hills/.

Hope that helps,

Sha