Questions tagged [seo]

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of web content in search engines using an understanding of search engines' processes and algorithms. Also known as "natural" or "organic" search, it is distinct from paid web advertising.

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31 votes
5 answers
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Why is it preferable to use paths with slashes instead of query-string variables in a web page URL?

Why is it preferable to use paths with slashes instead of query-string variables in a web page URL?
Chris W. Rea's user avatar
  • 3,763
28 votes
3 answers
6k views

Should I have both example.com and www.example.com?

I used to have a website which could be addressed by both example.com and www.example.com leading to the same page. Now, I moved to another server and only the example.com works. I got an email from ...
Erel Segal-Halevi's user avatar
28 votes
11 answers
3k views

SEO International Websites usage of sub domains and ccTLD domains

Is it better to have separate country specific domains (which costs more money) or sub domains which define the country, for better SEO? e.g. example.com example.com.au example.co.uk vs example....
Pure.Krome's user avatar
26 votes
11 answers
18k views

Are HTML tables bad for SEO?

A lot of designers discourage the use of tables but I have a layout where I'll use more div structure to achieve something made simple with a table.. Are tables bad for search engines? edit: I will ...
user avatar
25 votes
3 answers
13k views

SEO - Responsive Website and Duplicated Menus

Whenever I create a Responsive Website I usually create 2 menus: 1 hidden and used for mobile and the other displayed as the main menu, then hidden to show the mobile menu. Whenever it comes to SEO ...
Howdy_McGee's user avatar
21 votes
13 answers
3k views

How do I get images containing text to be indexed by search engines?

I am building a small portfolio website for a friend, and being in advertising and all, she hates the standard fonts and wants everything written in a custom font. As CSS font-embedding is not really ...
Wookai's user avatar
  • 1,607
20 votes
3 answers
22k views

What is the difference between "nofollow" and "noreferrer" link from SEO perspective?

I want to know the main difference between "nofollow" and "noreferrer" link from SEO perspective.
Tabish Usman's user avatar
19 votes
5 answers
2k views

Do shorter URLs benefit the pagerank and overall SEO value of pages vs. a longer categorised url showing the site structure

We are coming to the end of a long project in which we are upgrading our client's site from a custom built CMS to the latest version of Umbraco CMS whilst also making their website responsive. As part ...
jezzipin's user avatar
  • 291
19 votes
3 answers
5k views

Is it possible to slow the Baiduspider crawl frequency?

Much has been made of the Baidu spider crawl frequency. It's true: "Baiduspider crawls like crazy." I've experienced this phenomenon at sites I work with. In at least one instance, I've found that ...
samthebrand's user avatar
18 votes
1 answer
7k views

How Google reacts on display:none for CSS media query?

According to Google Webmaster guideline "Hidden text" is not acceptable. Which means I do have a dov containing some good amount of title or paragraph with link or images if I make it display:none in ...
user avatar
18 votes
3 answers
7k views

Will putting a clock display on a website boost SEO?

I've read that putting a dynamic clock or meteo widget on the page could boost SEO because each time Googlebot visits the page, it thinks the page has been updated with new content. It seems to me ...
Tristan's user avatar
  • 375
17 votes
3 answers
1k views

Google's 200 ranking factors

When doing research on SEO you most probably stumbled upon Google's statement there are approximately 200 ranking factors. I think it would be nice to have a list of all these 200 factors. Does ...
Goboozo's user avatar
  • 1,098
17 votes
4 answers
432 views

What is a "back link" and how does it affect search ranking?

I have heard about back links but am not sure what they are or how they affect search rankings and search engine optimization.
KoolKabin's user avatar
  • 1,658
16 votes
2 answers
3k views

How should I handle search engines auto-correcting the spelling of a site's name?

A client's site and company is called 'Tranin Communications' (Tranin is her last name). It ranks well in searches for her name but rather poorly in searches for the name of her site/company. I ...
Nathan G.'s user avatar
  • 261
16 votes
2 answers
3k views

Proper status code for language redirection (301, 302, … 307)?

I have build a websites with multiple languages. The URLs look like: http://www.example.com/en/ http://www.example.com/de/ If the user access the main domain http://www.example.com/ the web server ...
ar099968's user avatar
  • 473
16 votes
2 answers
22k views

New required mainEntityOfPage for article structured data

I had a look at the article structured data as proposed by Google and saw that there are a new required and recommended fields, they weren't there last week. Here is the link: https://developers....
Brendan Vogt's user avatar
  • 1,115
16 votes
5 answers
527 views

Does Google rate the webpage by amount of visits?

There is quite extensive discussion about this topic on another website and I am really losing my confidence. The thing is that I claim that the amount (count) of visits is not a criteria for ...
petiar's user avatar
  • 263
15 votes
1 answer
11k views

Should query strings be included or removed from the canonical tag?

Should I remove the entire query string from URLs in the canonical meta tag? For example this URL: https://example.com/Turkey/Istanbul/Vehicles/Car/Peugeot?b=11&d=2 This b=11 returns a list of ...
Pedram's user avatar
  • 307
15 votes
5 answers
615 views

How do I build backlinks?

I've recently made a site and I want to know how to go about making backlinks?
KoolKabin's user avatar
  • 1,658
15 votes
4 answers
995 views

Is DMOZ still 'active'?

I understand that having a listing in DMOZ isn't necessarily a 'good' backlink to have due to the 'weight' of links from fully categorized listings, but I was wondering if anyone could give any solid ...
Anonymous's user avatar
  • 2,814
15 votes
3 answers
2k views

Is it a bad idea to use a domain hack for my personal website name?

I want to create a personal webpage for info about myself (potentially for employment or other contact purposes), but the .com extension for my intended name is already taken. The name I want ends in ...
Ari's user avatar
  • 275
14 votes
7 answers
48k views

Use p tag inside a div tag for text?

What is better in terms of SEO ? <div class="box1" > <p> A bunch of text right here</p> </div> or <div class"box1" > A bunch of text right here </div> ...
ClawDuda's user avatar
  • 1,187
14 votes
1 answer
10k views

How does Google treat hash fragment inside a canonical URL

I have seen many websites using slugs in their URL to boost SEO such as this: http://example.com/article/1543/how-to-boost-seo/ I was thinking if I could do something like this instead: http://...
Question Overflow's user avatar
13 votes
2 answers
19k views

SEO of <span> in <h1> header

Does the <span> element have any SEO side-effects? Are there any semantic preferences between the following two or parsing differences between search engines? Clean <h1>: <h1>...
Petrus Theron's user avatar
12 votes
1 answer
19k views

Why does baidu crawl my site like crazy

When i'm checking my apache log I can see that baidu has been crawling my website 10 times a day for the last 2 weeks. It's not that i care much about it but I'm really curious about why he's doing ...
yokoloko's user avatar
  • 405
12 votes
1 answer
1k views

Will "performing maintenance" page holder affect your seo and page rankings? If so, is there a better way to handle it?

Let's say that theoretically you run a ecommerce shop. There may be times, once a year, that you need to take the site down to update product information or to do some maintenance. What would happen ...
milesmeow's user avatar
  • 689
11 votes
7 answers
535 views

How do I get Images for my site to Return in Google Searches

I know when I search Google for specific things I get back images underneath some sites. How do I get that to work for my site? I have even seen some sites that will return 4 or 5 images for the the ...
Ben Hoffman's user avatar
  • 12.8k
11 votes
4 answers
1k views

SEO Implications of blog on site versus offsite?

I recently added a blog to one of our company's websites, and was confident that this increase in content on the site would have only positive SEO results. My boss, however, feels that we should have ...
Kelli Davis's user avatar
11 votes
1 answer
2k views

Duplicate content on the same page - SEO ramifications?

In certain situations, I've seen Responsive Design websites with duplicate content on the same page. The pages had duplicate HTML structure and content in some parts of it due to Responsive Design. ...
Jake Wilson's user avatar
11 votes
1 answer
739 views

Multi Language URLs

I'm building an online store that will be supported in 3 languages: English, Traditional Chinese, and Simplified Chinese. My question is whether or not it is a good idea to make language specific ...
justinl's user avatar
  • 273
11 votes
3 answers
746 views

Do search engines treat index pages with excerpts as duplicate content of the pages they link to?

I am using WordPress and in my post sidebar I have related posts which may be of interest to the user, however, I also have an excerpt of each article which is normally the first paragraph of the post ...
Perry Roper's user avatar
10 votes
4 answers
507 views

Should home page be just domain name or can it be in a folder?

I am working on a website project and the client has requested (for reasons of hosting convenience) that the new website be located in a specific folder. This means that all pages will be in www....
johna's user avatar
  • 319
10 votes
2 answers
3k views

<h1> - Semantic impact vs. SEO impact

There's a lot of debate over the architecture of heading structure in html5. After reading various articles, I've come to three possible architectures that make logical sense to me, but I'm unsure ...
darcher's user avatar
  • 203
10 votes
5 answers
6k views

Should <a> tags with href="#" (or other internal links) use rel="noindex, nofollow"?

For SEO purposes, should <a> tags with href="#" make use of rel="nofollow", rel="noindex", rel="noindex, nofollow", or does it not matter? I'm asking because I have some elements on my site ...
rsbarro's user avatar
  • 203
10 votes
3 answers
2k views

Is minifying id and class names a bad SEO practice?

I am a big fan of minifying everything whenever possible. It is a sin for me to don't do this. However, I recently read that one of the thousands tips to boost your website rank on search engines was ...
ajax333221's user avatar
10 votes
1 answer
307 views

Migrating from a wordpress.com to wordpress.org blog without harming SEO

I've had a Wordpress.com weblog for 3 years. And its pages have a good pagerank and are shown in first search results pages. Because of the limitations, I should migrate to my own WordPress. How to ...
kikio's user avatar
  • 203
10 votes
2 answers
8k views

Why won't Webmaster Tools let me set a preferred domain? (says to verify, but it should already be)

I've got a domain that I apparently forgot to set a preferred domain for, so I just tried to do it. Webmaster Tools instead popped up a little box: Part of the process of setting a preferred domain ...
Su''s user avatar
  • 19.3k
10 votes
3 answers
2k views

Is it safe to use multiple h2 tags for a list of products?

I am using html5. I have a list of products in my store (132 products), and they are currently being displayed using pagination, with 10 results on each page. All my product names are very keyword ...
user21100's user avatar
  • 391
9 votes
3 answers
2k views

How rel="next" and rel="prev" helps in SEO if used for pagination?

How rel="next" and rel="prev" helps in SEO, if used for pagination? Is it really required ? i.e. imagine you're on page 2: <link rel="prev" href="http://www.example.com/article-part1.html"> &...
Niko Jojo's user avatar
  • 323
9 votes
5 answers
843 views

Combine websites without hurting SEO

I have a friend that I'm helping out with some web design. Basically, the guy owns a few businesses that are all complementary of each other and he wants to combine them all into a single site. There'...
Nathan Loding's user avatar
9 votes
5 answers
9k views

Does a longer registration length/period for a domain name improve its SEO and search ranking?

While I was renewing a domain of mine with a well-known domain registrar, the support person who was on call with me said that I'd improve the SEO ranking of my domain if I increased the registration ...
40XUserNotFound's user avatar
9 votes
1 answer
6k views

Should I block Wordpress archive pages from search engines?

I use WordPress and /sample-post/ URLs for my posts and /yyyy/mm/ for the archives. Google has indexed the site fully. Since the archives currently display full posts I've thought that I shouldn't ...
cherouvim's user avatar
  • 245
9 votes
6 answers
5k views

Does favicon have any impact on SEO?

I'm looking for advice about favicons and their impacts on search engines. Recently I noticed a site which changes its favicon every time you load another page without losing overall recognition of ...
meiryo's user avatar
  • 205
8 votes
2 answers
987 views

Should every page on my site have our company name in the title?

How different should the <title> tags be for each page on my domain? Which of the following are better examples are "better practice": Home - Example Dog Grooming Company About Us - Example ...
ggle's user avatar
  • 183
8 votes
3 answers
2k views

Is your IP address neighborhood important for SEO?

Can other websites on your shared host affect the rank of your website in the Google index? (same IP address as yours, potentially malicious/low-trust content) Can other websites on your IP class ...
Evgeny Zislis's user avatar
8 votes
2 answers
8k views

Google Pagespeed tells me to leverage browser caching when caching is already enabled

Google Pagespeed Insights still tells me that I have to enable browser caching, but I don't understand what I'm missing. I'm using cloudflare with optimizations enabled. I see this HTTP header in ...
euge9522's user avatar
  • 113
8 votes
2 answers
485 views

Which keyword should I use: colors or colours or a combination of both?

Well this might sound weird but yeah that's exactly what I want to know! Now as per US-English colors is the right word and as per British-English colours is the right word. Here in India we follow ...
Vikas Gulati's user avatar
8 votes
3 answers
800 views

Will redirecting expired domains to my website help or attract penalties?

I am developing a entertainment website and have found more than 4 entertainment domains (expired domains). Domain authority of these domains are 25 or more. If I will redirect these domain to my ...
user avatar
8 votes
3 answers
6k views

Robots.txt for multiple domains with same website

I have the following three domains: example1.com (Disallow) example2.com (Disallow) example3.com (allow) All domain points to same folder which is public_html. How to disallow search engines ...
Saurabh Bajpai's user avatar
8 votes
2 answers
3k views

SEO - Changing file extension

I am going to change the file extension from ".htm" to ".php", is there any disadvantage with this action?
Charles Yeung's user avatar

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