Understanding Canocalization, domain structure, redirects
-
Hey guys,
My background is more in marketing aspect of SEO and I'm afraid my technical knowledge is not where it should be. I'm confused about how to find out whether a site is splitting link juice by having to many domains(?) that are not redirected properly. Am I asking that right? How do you figure that out? And, once you know, do you just go to the ones that are not redirecting and add a 301? Where is the best place to add a 301?
I know there's a difference in the eyes of the search engines between, say, example.com and www.example.com and probably other forms, correct?
I'm not a programmer or IT specialist, I'm a marketing consultant, but I feel like I'm really missing it when it comes to understanding all this stuff (looking at HTTP headers, using GWT, reading source code, etc) and am not sure the best way to learn it effectively so I can be sure I'm not missing something when consulting with clients.
Help? Please?
Thanks,
David
-
I have found Danny Dovers SEO Secrets very useful as a beginners as its not just secrets. I believe the Art of SEO is another worthy reference.
-
John,
You rock, thank you! I will take your advice and do just that. I'm also going to spend a lot more time in the Q & A forum and learn all I can regarding the technical aspects of SEO.
Really appreciate you taking the time, thanks again,
David
-
To find out if your site is splitting domains, try going to different pages and seeing if they're served. For example, go to http://example.com, http://www.example.com, http://example.com/, http://www.example.com/. These should all end up with the same URL at the top when the page loads. If it doesn't, that means your server needs to be configured to do these canonical redirects. Depending on what software you use, this can vary, but the Q&A forum has had a lot of answers related to configuring redirects, so look there, or try Googling it.
I'm not sure it'll make a huge different if you decide to use example.com or www.example.com, but whichever you do choose, be consistent throughout your site.
If you really want to learn to get into the nitty-gritty of web pages, the main tool I use to view web requests, http headers, source, etc is Firebug, a Firefox Add-on. Chrome has something similar, which I think came pre-installed (if you can right click something, and choose "Inspect element", you have it). To learn it, play around with it a bit. The HTML tab in Firebug (Elements tab in Chrome) will show you the source of where you're selecting in the page. The other tab it sounds like you'll be interested in is the Net tab (Network tab in Chrome). Here you can see all the different files the page is loading, and you can view their statuses, headers, and responses.
Another tool I use frequently in Firefox & Chrome is the Web Developer Toolbar. It lets you enable/disable a lot of different things (caching, images, CSS, JavaScript), and clear your cache with a few clicks.
-
I'd have a little explore round the SEOmoz "learn seo" section - really invaluable information.
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
-
301 redirect recovery
Hello Please understand that English is poor. I used to run a site called A This time, I am running a site called B. I need to set up a temporary 302 redirect from A to B
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jinseok
I accidentally set a 301 redirect Site A has many spam links
For now I have removed the 301 redirect source to B. Will A's spam links affect site B?
For your reference, Site B is putting a lot of effort into SEO. Help me.0 -
Recovering from an open redirect
From a previous company we have inherited a domain which once contained an open redirect redirect.magnet.me. Even though this domain has been returning a 410 for every single request directed at it for the last few months, we continue to see new links popping up in Google which refer to this domain https://www.google.com/search?safe=off&q=%22redirect.magnet.me%22 Currently we just keep disavowing these links, but at the same time they keep appearing in our Moz.com tooling, being unable to disavow those links here. Does anybody have any successful tips how to deal with this scenario, compared to only disavow new links after the fact?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rogier_slag0 -
Redirecting from _ to - ?
hi everyone, I need your help! 🙂 What's the best way to redirect a lot of urls from sign _ to sign - ? We changed our e-shop CMS and we don't use that _ anymore. We have more than 100.000 URLs and you can imagine that we don't to do by hand. Any chance of doing it with .htaccess easily? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FCRMediaLietuva0 -
Domain dominance
I've just started to work for a company who've purchased masses of domains with every conceivable permutation based on all their products with every extension possible e.g .biz . eu. .net (including .co.uk and .com of course). I have two questions: 1. Is it worth keeping all these (they want to add more) domains or let them expire? 2. All the purchased domains are online - is there any point (they redirect with a 301)?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LJHopkins0 -
Url structure of a blog
We are trying to work out what the best structure for our blog is as we want each page to rank as highly as possible, we were looking at a flat structure similar to http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/ where every posts is after the blog/ but not in category's although the viewers can look in different category's from the top buttons on the page- photoshop - icons etc or we where going to go for the structured way- blog/photoshop/blog-post.html the only problem is that we will end up 4 deep at least with this and at least 80 characters in the url. any help would be appreciated. Thanks Shaun
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Why does a site have no domain authority?
A website was built and launched eight months ago, and their domain authority is 1. When a site has been live for a while and has such a low DA, what's causing it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | optimalwebinc0 -
URL or Domain length
Hi All, I am wondering if google still does give importance to the length of the domain or url. If yes then how much is the acceptable length of a domain and URL. Many Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HiteshBharucha0 -
Multi domain redirect to single domain
Hello, all SEOers. Today, I would like to get some ideas about handling multiple domains. I have a client who bought numerous domains under purpose of prevent abuse of their brand name and at the same time for future uses. This client bought more than 100 domains. Some domains are paused, parked, lived and redirected to other site. I don't worry too much of parked domains and paused domains. However, what I am worrying is that there are about 40 different domains are now redirected to single domain and meta refresh was used for redirections. As far as I know, this can raise red flag for Google. I asked clients to clean up unnecessary domains, yet they want to keep them all. So now I have to figure out how to handle all domains which are redirect to single domain. So far, I came up with following ideas. 1. Build gateway page which shows lists of my client sites and redirect all domains to gateway page. 2. Implement robots.txt file to all different domains 3. Delete the redirects and leave it as parked domains. Could anyone can share other ideas in order to handling current status? Please people, share your ideas for me.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Artience0