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Related Questions
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General questions about implementing hreflang using XML sitemap
I created another thread regarding hreflang sitemaps. However, this one is more general and doesn't cover multiple sitemaps for different localizations so I think it's reasonable creating a new thread. We are trying to implement hreflang using XML sitemap. We have localized content for a few countries, but only 1/3 of the content is 'duplicate' localized content. How should this be presented in the sitemap? Can we have some urls with hreflang-tags and some without? Also, where should this be located? In the usual sitemap file at site.com/sitemap.xml or should we create a different sitemap site.com/hreflang.xml where we just paste all hreflang-info? And if it should be in /hreflang.xml - can we have the same URL twice (in both current sitemap and hreflang sitemap)?
Technical SEO | | Telsenome0 -
Which Version Url to Use for Canonical Tags and in General for Homepage.
I want to put canonical tags on the homepage of a site. cant figure out the version of URL of the homepage should be with a / at the end or without the / ( www.example.com of www.example.com/ ) if I put into the google the URL with / I get the URL without the / in my browser, and it isn't showing as a redirect in my moz extension or other tools. But when I copy the URL from browser and paste elsewhere it pastes with a / I have two questions 1 - in general how does it work with URLs of homepages - I see this happening with lots of sites? 2 - which URL should I set as the canonical version of my homepage? Thanks so much
Technical SEO | | Ruchy0 -
Community Discussion - What's been your experience with accessibility?
When Laura Lippay came to me with the idea to write a series of posts on the Moz blog about SEO and accessibility, it really got my gears turning. As the blog manager, I realized I'd been thinking about all sorts of ways to make the blog the best it can be, but accessibility was one place I had yet to explore in-depth. While I have my own goals and projects around this topic churning along in the background, I'd love to hear what the community's done to be inclusive to all users of the Internet. What've you struggled with in terms of making sites you've worked on accessible -- both technically and as an initiative in general? What's often missing that you've become passionate about including? Do you have any big wins you're especially proud of and want to share? Looking forward to reading your thoughts and stories, folks! 🙂
Technical SEO | | FeliciaCrawford1 -
Is Panda as aggressive as Penguin in terms of being able to escape its clutches ?
Hi, Is being hit by Panda as hard to get out of as being hit by Penguin ? Or if you clean up all your content should you get out of it relatively quickly ? I have a very old (11 years) and established site (but also very neglected site that i'm looking to relaunch) but its on an ancient shopping cart platform which never allowed for Google analytics & GWT integration etc so i cant see any messages in GWT or look at traffic figures to correlate a drop with any Panda updates. The reason i ask is i want to relaunch the site after bringing up to date with a modern e-commerce platform. I originally launched the site in early 2002 and was perceived well by Google achieving first field of view SERPS for all targeted keywords however competitive, including 'ipod accessories', 'data storage' etc etc. These top positions (& resulting sales) lasted until about 2007 when it was overtaken by bigger brand competitors with more advanced & Google friendlier ecommerce platforms (& big SEO budgets) I originally used the manufacturers descriptions editing slightly but probably not enough to avoid being considered duplicate content although still managed to obtain good rankings for these pages for a very long time even ranking ahead of Amazon in most cases. The site is still ranking well for some of the keywords relating to products for which there is still manufacturer copied descriptions so i actually don't think i have been hit by Panda. So my questions Is, is there any way of finding out for sure if the site has indeed even been hit by Panda at all without looking at analytics & gwt ? And once i find out if it has or not: Is it best if i relaunch on same domain to take advantage of the 11 year old domain history/authority etc ? So long as i make sure all product descriptions etc are unique, if i have been hit by Panda the site should escape its clutches quite quickly ? **OR ** Is Panda as aggressive as Penguin in which case is it best to start again on a new domain ? Many Thanks Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Beating big brands for rankings on Google page 1 post Panda & Penguin
Hi all, so having followed lots of SeoMoz guidelines that we have read here and standard SEO ideas we seem to no longer be able to rank for our core keywords.. and certainly not rank in front of the big brands. We're a small eCommerce company and have historically ranked Google positions 1-4 for many of our keywords (a year or two ago)... but now no where near this any more. We always write unique content for our products of usually around 300-400 words per product we include our keywords in Title, meta description and H1 tags. We include buyers guides and set up articles on the site and generally have a reasonable amount of good quality and always uniquely written content Recently we have concentrated to ensure that page load speed is above average and Google Web Master Tools page speed gives us around 80-90 out of 100 We carry out linking and have always done... in the most recent past this has been weighted towards 'content for links' to gain purely incoming links (although in the early days from 2005 we did swap links with other web masters as well as write and publish on article sites etc). product category pages have an intro piece of text that includes the key phrases for that page and is placed as close to the body tag as possible. From what I understand if you are hit by Panda or Penguin the drop off is invariably over night, but we have not seen this... more of a gradual decline over the last year or two (although there was a bit of a downward blip on Panda update 20). Now we're lucky to be on page 2 for what were our main keywords / phrases such as "portable DVD players" or "portable DVD player"... in front of us in every position is a big national brand.. and certainly on page 1 it is purely only a big brand in every postion. They don't have great info from what we can see for these keywords and certainly don't give as much info as we do. For the phrase "portable DVD player" our portable DVD accessories page ranks better than our actual portable DVD player category page... which we also can't understand? This is our portable DVD category page: http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/portable-dvd-players-car Currently we're starting to produce 2 minute product demo videos for as many of our product detail pages as we can and we plan to host these on something such as Vimeo so that content will be unique to our site (rather than YouTube) in order to give us a different format of unique content on many of our product detail pages to improve rankings (and conversion rates as the same time ideally). So ... I am hoping that some one out there can point us in the right direction and shed some light on our declining positions. Are we doing or have done something wrong... or is it in these post Panda / Penguin days extremely difficult for a small business to beat the big brands as Google believes these are what every one wants to see when shopping? Thanks for any comments and / or help.
Technical SEO | | jasef0 -
Penguin update: Penalty caused from onsite issues or link profile?
Back in April before the Penguin update, our website home page ranked in the #1 position for several of our keywords and on page 1 for dozens of other keywords. But immediately after the Penguin update in April our rankings dropped immediately to below #100 for nearly all keywords. The sharp drop was obviously a penalty of some kind. We worked on removing some bad back links that were questionable. Over the past 7 months many of the bad links have dropped off and our link profile is improving. Our rankings, however, have not improved at all. In Yahoo and Bing we remain strong and rank on page 1 for many of our keywords. I joined SEOmoz because I’ve heard about their great tools and resources for SEO. The first thing I learned is that I had a lot of errors and warnings that need to be addressed and I’m optimistic that these items once addressed will get me out of that dreadful penalty box we’ve been in for 7 months now. So with that quick summary of our SEO problems I have a few questions that I hope to get some direction on. 1. Crawl Diagnostics for my site in SEOmoz reports 7 errors and 19 warnings including missing meta description tags, temporary redirects, duplicate page content, duplicate page title, 4xx client error, and title element too long. Could these errors and warnings be what has landed my website in some kind of penalty or filter? 2. A couple of the errors were duplicate page title and duplicate page content. So there appears to be a duplicate home page. Here are the two pages: howtomaketutus.com/ howtomaketutus.com/?p=home They are the same page but it looks like Google is seeing it as duplicate content. Do I need to do a 301 redirect in the .htaccess file? I’m not sure how that would work since they are the same page. If that is possible how would I go about doing that? 3. Finally based on what I’ve described above is it more likely that the penalty we are experiencing is because of onsite issues or because of our link profile? We would really appreciate any help or direction anyone can offer on these issues. Thanks
Technical SEO | | 123craft0 -
What is Google's Penguin effect on SEO?
I want to know about Google's Penguin. Specially, how it works to protect spam links <seo>or other jobs. </seo> How I can protect this problem. Kind Regards John
Technical SEO | | JohnDooley0 -
My organic search results are down 16% since the Penguin update 4/24
Penguin has affected my search results down 16% When I look at my SEOmoz scan the only problem I see is "too many on page links" The problem is that my blog for each month is considered one page-eg august 2007 I wrote many blogs-the total on page links was 106-but that included all the blogs that were written in a month. The other problem area is duplicate content. I thought Penguin was after "link farming" which I do not do. Any advice how I can correct this? Brooke
Technical SEO | | wianno1680