URLs and Domains

Out of the box, Google Analytics handles being deployed across multiple domains or subdomains extremely poorly. This is easily the most common critical problem in Google Analytics, despite its being easy to fix.

Every time this website owner 301-redirects their site to a new location, traffic disappears almost completely. This Q&A post troubleshoots the cause of these traffic drops and looks at a few potential solutions.

It’s rare when Google reveals any of its actual ranking factors, so it came as a big surprise when representatives announced they would reward sites using HTTPS encryption with a boost in search results. HTTPS isn’t like other ranking factors. Implementing it requires complexity, risks, and costs. Webmasters balance this out with benefits that include increased security, better referral data, and a possible boost in rankings.

Using pagination in conjunction with other URL parameters can be confusing. Check out this Q&A post for a discussion of how to best implement both.

Have you ever redirected a page hoping to see a boost in rankings, but nothing happened? Or worse, traffic actually went down? When done right, 301 redirects have awesome power to clean up messy architecture, solve outdated content problems, and improve user experience — all while preserving link equity and your ranking power. When done wrong, the results are often disastrous.

Why might Google not be caching pages that they've previously indexed? Explore a few potential reasons in this post from the Moz Community Q&A.

This Q&A post explores techniques for preventing "print" pages from being indexed by search engines.

Domain migrations are one of those activities that even if in the long-term can represent a benefit for an SEO process -- especially if the new domain is more relevant, has already a high authority or give better geolocalization signals with a ccTLD -- can represent a risk for SEO because of the multiple tasks that should be performed correctly in order to avoid potential non-trivial crawling and indexing problems and consequential lost of rankings and organic traffic.

A visual guide to the HTTP status codes that really matter to SEO (200, 301, 302, 404, 501, 503). Half infographic, half cheat-sheet, half man, half bear, half pig.

How does using the canonical tag impact indexation and search visibility? This Q&A post explores how search engines interpret the use of this tag on a webpage.