On-Page SEO of the SEOmoz Blog Section
-
Hey Everyone
My brain isn't working (only had 1 cup of coffee so far - #2 on it's way) this morning and I could use some help.
We're creating a blog on a site for a client of ours and I've been looking at the SEOmoz blog for best practices when it comes to the implementation of pagination, canonical tags and noindex.
My questions:
- There is no use of the canonical tag on the main blog page or any of the paginated pages but it is being used on blog post pages. Why not use it on the main blog pages as well? I'm assuming because the blog pages are always changing with different content there is not much point?
- Paginated pages in the category sections i.e. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/1?page=2 are noindexed but paginated pages in the main blog section i.e. http://www.seomoz.org/blog?page=2 are not. Is this because of a duplicate content concern since the posts in the category sections are in the main blog section as well? If that's the case, why wouldn't the main category page i.e.http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/1 be noindexed as well?
- What's the reason for noindexing the "Show # Posts" pages i.e.http://www.seomoz.org/blog?show=5 ? I'm assuming another concern of duplicate content?
Any insights into these questions would be greatly appreciated and would help with the implementation of our clients blog.
Thanks,
Ken
-
Hey Ruth!
Thanks so much for the response and answers to my questions. You helped solidify what I was already thinking. I was wondering why the rel=next and rel=prev tags weren't being used. I thought for sure SEOmoz would be on the forefront of new on-page SEO techniques. Totally get the whole "do as we say, not as we do" mantra though.
One question though: You said you noindex category pages' pagination because of duplicate content; that the items also exist in the main blog's pagination as well. But, don't the items on the main category landing pages exist in the main blog as well? So wouldn't that be duplicate content as well?
BTW - Congrats on the new role as the Lead SEO, must be exciting!
Thanks,
Ken
-
Hi Ken,
Thanks for looking to our blog as an example - I wish we could be the perfect example of on-page SEO that we want to be, but like a lot of big, oldish websites we've got a lot of room for improvement. Some of the things you've called out are on my wish list to fix. In general when it comes to SEOmoz.org, a "do as we say, not as we do" attitude can be useful. I'll try to answer your questions with "what we should be doing" instead of "what we are doing."
- The only page within the blog that we might wish to self-canonical (as we do on individual post pages) would be www.seomoz.org/blog, which we probably should be doing. I don't think there's as much point in self-canonicaling subsequent pagination, since as you say the blog pages are always changing. In general we do like to put a canonical tag on each page canonicaling it back to itself, so query parameters and other referring data don't cause problems with duplicate URLs/content.
- Rather than noindexing paginated pages in the main blog, I would like to see us start using rel=prev and rel=next. You can learn more about that here.http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html. The reason that we noindex category pages' pagination is that it becomes duplicate content, since all of those items are also appearing in the main blog's pagination as well. We do want the main category pages to be indexed because we want people searching on those specific categories to be able to find them; we've had a lot of discussion in the MozPlex lately about how to give those pages some relevant unique content and make them more of a useful destination for people searching on specific topics. You may see some changes to these, although right now it's a bit low on my list of things to update.
- We noindex the "show # of pages" pages because of duplicate content concerns, and I suggest you do the same.
Thanks for your question, and please let me know if you have any more.
-
I don't work for SEOmoz, so I can't say exactly why they do what they do, but as far as I know the canonical tag would be used on the index page of their site. As this is where it would be need to let google know if it's www.seomoz.com or seomoz.com.
As far as the pagination it's sounds like you answered that already, trying to stop duplicate content from being indexed. The same with noindexing the show post pages.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Panda Cleanup - Removing Old Blog Posts, Let Them 404 or 301 to Main Blog Page?
tl;dr... Removing old blog posts that may be affected by Panda, should we let them 404 or 301 to the Blog? We have been managing a corporate blog since 2011. The content is OK but we've recently hired a new blogger who is doing an outstanding job, creating content that is very useful to site visitors and is just on a higher level than what we've had previously. The old posts mostly have no comments and don't get much user engagement. I know Google recommends creating great new content rather than removing old content due to Panda concerns but I'm confident we're doing the former and I still want to purge the old stuff that's not doing anyone any good. So let's just pretend we're being dinged by Panda for having a large amount of content that doesn't get much user engagement (not sure if that's actually the case, rankings remain good though we have been passed on a couple key rankings recently). I've gone through Analytics and noted any blog posts that have generated at least 1 lead or had at least 20 unique visits all time. I think that's a pretty low barrier and everything else really can be safely removed. So for the remaining posts (I'm guessing there are hundreds of them but haven't compiled the specific list yet), should we just let them 404 or do we 301 redirect them to the main blog page? The underlying question is, if our primary purpose is cleaning things up for Panda specifically, does placing a 301 make sense or would Google see those "low quality" pages being redirected to a new place and pass on some of that "low quality" signal to the new page? Is it better for that content just to go away completely (404)?
Technical SEO | | eBoost-Consulting0 -
Advice on whether we 301 redirect a page or update existing page?
Hi guys, any advice would be really appreciated. We have an existing page that ranks well for 'red widgets'. The page isn't monetised right now, but we're bringing in a new product onto our site that we optimised for 'blue widgets'. Unfortunately, not enough research was done for this page and we've now realised that consumers actually search for 'red widgets' when looking for the product we're creating as 'blue widgets'. The problem with this is that the 'red widgets' page is in a completely different category of our site than what it needs to be (it needs to be with 'blue widgets'). So, my question is; Should we do a 301 redirect from our 'red-widgets' page to our 'blue-widgets' page which we want to update and optimise the content on there for 'red-widgets'. Or, should we update the existing red-widgets page to have the right products and content on there, even thought it is in the wrong place of our site and users could get confused as to why they are there. If we do a 301 redirect to our new page, will we lose our rankings and have to start again, or is there a better way around this? Thanks! Dave
Technical SEO | | davo230 -
Can you noindex a page, but still index an image on that page?
If a blog is centered around visual images, and we have specific pages with high quality content that we plan to index and drive our traffic, but we have many pages with our images...what is the best way to go about getting these images indexed? We want to noindex all the pages with just images because they are thin content... Can you noindex,follow a page, but still index the images on that page? Please explain how to go about this concept.....
Technical SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
Pager + SEO - Is it possible?
Hi, I am having this issue. I know that pager are not friends with SEO, but I want to know which is the best to do in this situations. for example, I work in a news company, and I have a lot of news pages that are very extensive so I use a pager. Well here I have the problem. suppose that the url is www.mysite.com/news/id/here-comes-the-title When you enter that URL you are viewing the first page that has this meta: title keywords description Now, the problem comes when the user goes to the page 2 of this news article. What I shall do? 1- Change the url to www.mysite.com/news/id/here-comes-the-title-PAGE2 www.mysite.com/news/PAGE2-id/here-comes-the-title www.mysite.com/news/id/PAGE2/here-comes-the-title 2- in the page 2,3,4,5 ... add a meta robot noindex? In the option 2 I think that I am loosing the opportunity to index the body of my article. Is this correct? Thanks
Technical SEO | | informatica8100 -
Subdomain for a blog
My client has a site hosted with a company that allows very little customization including I am unable to add a blog to the site. As he has a fair amount of time & money invested in the site, he is reluctant to start over. So my question is this. His blog is currently hosted off site, would it benefit him if I had them add a cname or a record to show his blog at blog.mydomain.com? Or does Google recognize that it is still a separate site and treat it as such? Finally does it matter how they set it up cname, a record or redirect? This is definitely not my area of expertise (if that is not already obvious from the question!). Thanks for your help! Matthew
Technical SEO | | farlandlee0 -
New Domain Page 7 Google but Page 1 Bing & Yahoo
Hi just wondered what other people's experience is with a new domain. Basically have a client with a domain registered end of May this year, so less than 3 months old! The site ranks for his keyword choice (not very competitive), which is in the domain name. For me I'm not at all surprised with Google's low ranking after such a short period but quite surprsied to see it ranking page 1 on Bing and Yahoo. No seo work has been done yet and there are no inbound links. Anyone else have experience of this? Should I be surprised or is that normal in the other two search engines? Thanks in advance Trevor
Technical SEO | | TrevorJones0 -
Could Having Blog Posts as Home Page Cause Keyword Dilution?
Something I've never been a fan of is having a blog as the home page of a site. I've always thought that it's a bit like walking into someone's house through the kitchen out back.
Technical SEO | | WilliamBay
If it's a vistors first time, it can be a little disconcerting or ackward even if they are not familiar with the writers style. But something just dawned on me, and I'd love a second opinion on this. For websites that focus on multiple keywords (in my most of my client's case it's usually a mix of Wedding Photography, Engagement Photography, Portrait Photography, Family Photography, etc). A lot of these clients will include the photos in a blog post along with a snippet of text that may talk about the people they're photographing and maybe a bit about where they photographed. But they're usually optimizing for the overarching keyword (Wedding... Portrait..., etc as per above). Now I'm wondering if having three or 5 posts on the home page, where most of them are focusing on a specific keyword like New York Wedding Photographer, is actually diluting the keyword they are trying to rank for. My theory is that if I have them move their blog to a domain.com/blog, and solely focus on the desired keyword on the home page, that they would do substantially better in the SERPs. Can anyone subtantiate this? Thanks!0 -
What's the difference between a category page and a content page
Hello, Little confused on this matter. From a website architectural and content stand point, what is the difference between a category page and a content page? So lets say I was going to build a website around tea. My home page would be about tea. My category pages would be: White Tea, Black Tea, Oolong Team and British Tea correct? ( I Would write content for each of these topics on their respective category pages correct?) Then suppose I wrote articles on organic white tea, white tea recipes, how to brew white team etc...( Are these content pages?) Do I think link FROM my category page ( White Tea) to my ( Content pages ie; Organic White Tea, white tea receipes etc) or do I link from my content page to my category page? I hope this makes sense. Thanks, Bill
Technical SEO | | wparlaman0