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  • tgraham


    Hi all, Our business has aquired a new domain name because there are several organisations closely related to ours that use similar domain names to target a niche group of users.  We would like to use this new domain name to link to an existing website with content targeted at this user group as we feel that they will be more comfortable getting to the content via this new URL. After a useful search in these forums the majority of SEOMOZ gurus suggest that the new URL should be redirected to our current site using a 301 and we are happy to do this.  However do we have to link the URL to our homepage or is it acceptable to link to a subfolder within the domain and then targeting content on this page to the user niche? Thanks for any input. Kind regards. Edit 11:38 The old url is oldcommunity.charity.com (we know having a subdomain is bad) this is where we manage all community engagement. The new url is www.newparticularcommunity.com and we would redirect this to oldcommunity.charity.com.  The reason we have bought www.oldparticularcommunity.com is because the url is used by other charities for community engagement and is recognised by the community we are targeting.  We are redirecting to our old site because we do not want to engage with them on this new url as our old site oldcommunity.charity.com already does this and can cater for the new community and perhaps they haven't realised that we can.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tgraham
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  • petrakraft


    The website of the travel platform is well designed and looks serious - without any adsense or suspicious links on it. So does the email newsletter of them. But I checked the domain in OSE and saw not less links which came from more or less linkfarms with very often the same anchor text. Would you suggest your customer to submit on the platform?

    Link Building | | petrakraft
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  • debi_zyx


    Many websites - especially those done in foreign countries by non-native English speakers - have many grammatical and idiomatic errors in the English copy. How important is that to conversions (actually convincing the customer to buy, etc.)  Is the poor English a turn-off, a cause for distrust or discomfort - or do people not care? I'd be interested to hear people's personal opinions (the more the merrier) and if anyone has a more global perspective backed by research, testing, etc - that would be great, Thanks in advance!

    Conversion Rate Optimization | | debi_zyx
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  • Jurnii


    I have just recently spoken to an SEO consultant who is pushing the opinion that more internal links would be better for me. They are particularly focused oin aligning a large number of content articles that I have developed over the years, and getting more keyword focus, and more links (inpage within site) onto these pages.  I have to agree on a certain level that maybe this large base of unique content is unedr utilised. What is the general opinon, more internal links are better?

    On-Page Optimization | | Jurnii
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  • turnon


    A few pages get a lot of external links and rank well (when site:domain.com) but i do not want that those pages rank well (these are blog pages and we are in E-commerce) Can i redirect these pages to other pages which are more important to me and customers because google see only the link or is google so smart that they see a realtion between the page from which i get the links and to the page in my webste In that case i rename the old pages.

    Link Building | | turnon
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  • RishadShaikh59


    Our newspaper website has an extensive readership in the US, UK, Australia and UAE. Should we go for a mobile web app? Is that worth the investment considering the fact that you have to design different apps for different devices. Or does a mobile version of the website work fine? Also, are there any specific guidelines that you shoudl follow when designing web apps with regards to SEO? Also, if you could point out some good resources for getting web apps designed, that would be great! Thanks, Rishad.

    Branding | | RishadShaikh59
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  • RishadShaikh59


    Now, there are a number of do's and dont's when it comes to internal linking, but do those rules apply to news websites that have to interlink relevant news stories, primarily based on their relevancy to the user and the value that they have to provide rather than keeping the idea of page rank sculpting in mind? What's your take on this?

    Link Building | | RishadShaikh59
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  • JimSkychief


    Our site fell from grace last July and landed on page five of the Google search results for our primary keyword. For 6 months I tried a number of strategies with no results, including reconfiguring our site based on the SOEmoz on-page grading tool. More recently, after receiving your advice in a Q&A, I took down all of my paid links and submitted a reconsideration request to Google. Interestingly, 3 days later we popped up 20 spots. This left us on the top of page three. Better than page 5, but still not prime time! A few days ago (two weeks after our reconsideration request was submitted) I got a message back in my Webmaster Tools, that they had completed a review of our site - but oddly enough they provided no info on the outcome, positive or negative. And there has been no additional movement in the rankings since I received the message. Was the original 20 point jump the result of the reconsideration request, or just a coincidence? Or, is it possible that they did a review and the results will only occur later during some organic re-indexing process? What do you think?

    On-Page Optimization | | JimSkychief
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  • Yozzer


    This is just a quickie: On one of my campaigns in SEOmoz I have 151 duplicate page content issues! Ouch! On analysis the site in question has duplicated every URL with "en" e.g http://www.domainname.com/en/Fashion/Mulberry/SpringSummer-2010/ http://www.domainname.com/Fashion/Mulberry/SpringSummer-2010/ Personally my thoughts are that are rel = canonical will sort this issue, but before I ask our dev team to add this, and get various excuses why they can't I wanted to double check i am correct in my thinking? Thanks in advance for your time

    Technical SEO | | Yozzer
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  • JoeQuery


    In PHP, I'm wanting to store a session variable based upon a link that's clicked. I'm wanting to avoid query strings on pages that have content. My current workaround is to have a link with query strings to a php file that does nothing but snags the variables via $_GET, stores them into $_SESSION, and then redirects. For example, consider this script, that I have set up to force to a mobile version. Accessed via something like a href="forcemobile.php?url=(the current filename)" session_start(); //Location of vertstudios file on your localhost. Include trailing slash $loc = "http://localhost/web/vertstudios/"; //If GET variable not defined, this page is being accessed directly. //In that case, force to 404 page. Same case for if mobile session variable //not defined. if(!(isset($_GET["url"]) && isset($_SESSION["mobile"]))){ header("Location: http://www.vertstudios.com/404.php"); exit(); } //Snag the URL $url = $_GET["url"]; //Set the mobile session to true, and redirect to specified URL $_SESSION["mobile"] = true;header("Location: " . $loc . $url); ?> Will this circumvent the issue caused by using query strings?

    Technical SEO | | JoeQuery
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  • andresgmontero


    Hi, I have an issue that can be solve with a canonical tag, but I am not sure yet, we are developing a page full of statistics, like this: www.url.com/stats/ But filled with hundreds of stats, so users can come and select only the stats they want to see and share with their friends, so it becomes like a new page with their slected stats: www.url.com/stats/?id=mystats The problems I see on this is: All pages will be have a part of the content from the main page 1) and many of them will be exactly the same, so: duplicate content. My idea was to add the canonical tag of "www.url.com/stats/" to all pages, similar as how Rand does it here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps But I am not sure of this solution because the content is not exactly the same, page 2) will only have a part of the content that page 1) has, and in some cases just a very small part. Is the canonical tag useful in this case? Thank you!

    Technical SEO | | andresgmontero
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  • Amjath


    Hi Everyone, This question is about URL best practice for multilingual websites. We have www.example.com in English and we are building the exact replica of English site in German www.example.de. On the Geman site, we are considering to translate some portions of the URLs for example last folder and file name as seen below: example.de/folder1-in-english/folder2-in-english/folder3-in-german/filename-in-german.html Is this a good idea? Will this help SEO and user experience both? or the mixed languagues in URL will confuse the users? Google guidelines say that this should be ok. Would love to get feedback from SEOMOZ community! Thanks, Supriya.

    International SEO | | Amjath
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  • ThomasHgenhaven


    Hi mozzers, I am currently working on a phd, and one of the professors asked me for help. He would like to know how many Danish school websites (n=1500) links to a certain section of a government website (the relevant section has around 1600 pages). The problem is, that the government website is coded very poorly from an seo perspective with lots of strange URL variables, entailing OSE can't give valid data. So, what would be the best way to check how many of the school websites link? Throw all 1500 website through Xenu, or is there a smarter solution? Maybe the link out feature on Bing? Any suggestions will be greatly appreciate. Thanks!

    Algorithm Updates | | ThomasHgenhaven
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  • RodneyRiley


    I'm trying to get to the bottom of something. If you are trying to optimise for a phrase e.g. "Keyword 1 Keyword 2" And your anchor text is something like "Keyword 1 keyword 2 Another word" Does this still provide as much weight for "keyword 1 keyword 2" or does the additional word come into play and dilute the effect? If it does come into play does it have much of an effect?

    Link Building | | RodneyRiley
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  • iSenseWebSolutions


    I'm attempting to build links for a seafood market / restaurant and I'm finding my creativity and knowledge of SEO being stretched, which is a good thing of course. Can you help me grow here? I have the client interested in writing articles but he has little time for this. I want to make sure it is worth it. Is article writing and submission worth the time and effort for a business like this? How would I go about link building though articles for a small business like this?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iSenseWebSolutions
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  • NeilInFrance


    (can we ask questions in a language other than English?) Pour le SEO est ce qu'il faut mieux un domain avec les tirets ou sans ? Les américains aurait tendance a faire les domaines sans tirets 
    Par exemple goodseoconsultants.com Et bcp disent qu'utiliser les tirets fait "spammy" ; En France il y a plus tendance à mettre les tirets mais est ce qu'il y a une risque négatif pour le sites qui le font ? Par contre il y a plus de chances que les moteurs et les humaines comprennes les mots avec ; good-seo-consultants.com Qui a raison ? Neil

    International SEO | | NeilInFrance
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  • iSenseWebSolutions


    For those who are conducting SEO here in Australia: A lot of the info I read, and there is a lot, is generally from the States or UK it seems. Are there any things in particular I should look out for when doing SEO in Australia? Are there any SEO tips that are particular to Australia only? What directories are a must in Australia?

    International SEO | | iSenseWebSolutions
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  • Jvalops


    Hi There, Where would you install the blog? mydomain.com/blog/ blog.mydomain.com mydomainblog.com regards

    Content Development | | Jvalops
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  • iSenseWebSolutions


    Say I have a 5 page website with 300 words and 4 images on each page. No or little dynamic content. No blog. Is it still possible to get good SEO results in a site like this? what would be the best strategy? what challenges would I need to over come? or is it just too much of an up hill battle?

    On-Page Optimization | | iSenseWebSolutions
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  • Jvalops


    What is the best procedure for link building? Does blogposts help?

    Link Building | | Jvalops
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  • iSenseWebSolutions


    I know It is not a good idea to have duplicate titles across a website on pages as Google does not like this. Is it ok to have duplicate titles on pages that aren't being optimised with SERP's in mind? or could this have a negative effect on the pages that are being optimised?

    Technical SEO | | iSenseWebSolutions
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  • RishadShaikh59


    A large News Media Group has a Tv Channel, print newspaper, radio channel (for music primarly) and an online website that includes the newspaper content and other original content in different media. My question is, is it better to have independant websites for these different mediums or have all the content on one big website. Currently the newspaper and blog are online as one whereas the radio channel has its own website and the television has its own. So should we maintain sister sites and cross link to each other or have one big happy family under one house? Best, Rishad.

    On-Page Optimization | | RishadShaikh59
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  • iSenseWebSolutions


    From a business perspective It seems a better idea to have one site and multiple domains pointing to that one site. Is there any benefit as far as ranking well in Google to having a site set up on each domain with links to the main site? Does you have any success from a business point of view in using this strategy? P.S. This is my 4th question in Beta testing, just want to make sure I'm not taking advantage of your generosity and if it is fine to keep asking questions here.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iSenseWebSolutions
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  • petrakraft


    Do you see their usage in usability and / or regarding SEO? What about the position? Normally they are embeded in the top area ... what if I have a really long page and I embed them at the bottom of the page. Isn't that positive for the user - he doesn't have to scroll up again. But what about the SEO purpose if they are at the botton in the nirvana? Are breadcrumbs navigational links and have less value because of that?

    On-Page Optimization | | petrakraft
    1
  • k9byron


    Hello, I recently launched my new site (Nov.  25, 2011) but still have the old site live because I still need old customer data from the old admin for customer service issues and I cannot delete the old front-end without deleting the old back-end!. I am seeing a lot of referrals coming from the old site IP address with many backlinks to the new site but dont know if this is actually hurting the new site due to duplicate content, ect .. Any input would be greatly aaaaaapreciated 😉 Thanks in advance, Byron-

    Technical SEO | | k9byron
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  • ninjamarketer


    There has been several debates on the topic of the geo location of hosting provider and the impact on SEO and rankings. As a best practice, it is recommended to host in the same country you are targeting but are there any studies available that confirms the web hosting providers location influences rankings?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ninjamarketer
    1
  • bvalentine


    Most of my work now involves converting older websites to CMS-based sites (in Wordpress) and I'm wondering about best practices here. If I create a "dev" or "sandbox" directory for my development work how do I keep the pages from being indexed while I am working on the new site? Can I "noindex" a directory? What do I do with the old html files when the new site goes live? I'm assuming I will do a 301 redirect from domain.com/index.html to the new domain.com/, and also on all of the inner pages that have equivalent pages in the new site. But there will be a lot of old files left that have no equal in the new site. Do I just delete these, or noindex nofollw them?

    Technical SEO | | bvalentine
    0
  • Yozzer


    I have recently optimised a set of images for a client of ours: I'm looking through all the PA of these newly optimised images, and have varying PA {from SEOmoz toolbar} I understand that internal linking will pass link juice, and obviously external links will add to the overall PA. I have several pages with a PA of 36: { Fairly deep pages} Yet they have no external or internal links going to them. My question is "How can a page gain any authority when it has no visible links pointing at it?" Obviously there must be a link pointing at it {internally} as Google wouldn't have crawled the page right? Also lets say all the keywords are of equal competitiveness would the keywords with highest PA rank higher than those on O PA pages. Many Thanks

    On-Page Optimization | | Yozzer
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  • Yozzer


    Having been a member of SEOmoz Pro tools for only a couple of months, I'm now at a point where there are certain issues with our recently overhauled site: On my latest "Open Site Explorer Report" I am seeing a number of external links going to the HTTP://Domainname.com  and a number pointing at HTTP://wwwDomainname.com. This only appears when I pull the report from the Root Domain. If I pull a report from the Sub-domain all URL's are the same. Does this matter too much? Would best practice be to put a rel=canonical on the Non www ? Thanks for any help in advance Sean

    Technical SEO | | Yozzer
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  • petrakraft


    If I have a facebook widget with live stream embeded on a website. Does the spiders crawl  the text of the live stream as a "content text", in the case of a) the page of the website where the widget is embeded is crawled regularly and the facebook stream is changing rarely b) the page of the website where the widget is embeded is crawled regularly and the facebook stream is changing regularly ?

    Content Development | | petrakraft
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  • petrakraft


    Do I have to redirect "/" in the domain by default? My root domain is e.g. petra.at
    --> I redirect via 301 to www.petra.at Do I have to do that with petra.at/ and www.petra.at/, too?

    Technical SEO | | petrakraft
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  • bigtimeseo


    Hey guys, We have been link building and optimizing our website since the beginning of June 2010. Around August-September 2010, our site appeared on second page for the keywords we were targeting for around a week. They then dropped off the radar - although we could still see our website as #1 when searching for our company name, domain name, etc. So we figured we had been put into the 'google sandbox' sort of thing. That was fine, we dealt with that. Then in December 2010, we appeared on the first page for our keywords and maintained first page rankings, even moving up the top 10 for just over a month. On January 13th 2011, we disappeared from Google for all of the keywords we were targeting, we don't even come up in the top pages for company name search. Although we do come up when searching for our domain name in Google and we are being cached regularly. Before we dropped off the rankings in January, we did make some semi-major changes to our site, changing meta description, changing content around, adding a disclaimer to our pages with click tracking parameters (this is when SEOmoz prompted us that our disclaimer pages were duplicate content) so we added the disclaimer URL to our robots.txt so Google couldn't access it, we made the disclaimer an onclick link instead of href, we added nofollow to the link and also told Google to ignore these parameters in Google Webmaster Central. We have fixed the duplicate content side of things now, we have continued to link build and we have been adding content regularly. Do you think the duplicate content (for over 13,000 pages) could have triggered a loss in rankings? Or do you think it's something else? We index pages meta description and some subpages page titles and descriptions. We also fixed up HTML errors signaled in Google Webmaster Central and SEOmoz. The only other reason I think we could have been penalized, is due to having a link exchange script on our site, where people could add our link to their site and add theirs to ours, but we applied the nofollow attribute to those outbound links. Any information that will help me get our rankings back would be greatly appreciated!

    Technical SEO | | bigtimeseo
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