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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What are the best ways to improve a site's position in Google?
What are the best ways to improve a site's position in the Google search results?
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Does the order of keywords matter in a page title?
Stack Overflow has made a change to their page titles such that the most popular tag for a question appears at the start of the title. The change is being deployed across the network, so check out ...
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How should I structure my URLs for both SEO and localization?
When I set up a site in multiple languages, how should I set up my URLs for search engines and usability?
Let's say my site is www.example.com, and I'm translating into French and Spanish. What is ...
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Moving from HTTP to HTTPS in Google Search Console
I'm moving from HTTP to HTTPS for my entire site. The site is currently added to Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools) as www.example.com and all the pages are indexed without using ...
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URLs: Should I use hyphens, underscores or plus symbols?
Which is better for search engines?
example.com/my_cool_page.html
example.com/my-cool-page.html
example.com/my+cool+page.html
delete
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How do I transition to SSL without affecting PageRank?
Here at Stack Exchange we're working on moving all traffic to SSL. The reason we're not doing logged-in-users only is that one side of the login divide would suffer a redirect from Google every time. ...
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How bad is it to use display: none in CSS?
I've heard many times that it's bad to use display: none for SEO reasons, as it could be an attempt to push in irrelevant popular keywords. A few questions:
Is that still received wisdom?
Does it ...
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Anchor tag inside <h1> or <h1> inside anchor tag: which is better?
I am trying to use <h1> tags on my blog for the post title and came across one problem. Title is hyperlinked.
Case 1:
<h1> <a href=""> xyz </a> </h1>
case 2:
<a ...
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SEO: Where do I start? [duplicate]
Possible Duplicate:
What are the best ways to increase your site's position in Google?
I am primarily a software developer however I tend to delve in some web development from time to time. I ...
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What are the most important things I need to do to encourage Google Sitelinks?
My website used to have sitelinks and now it doesn't. It's very possible that it's due to changing the website to a sidebar design instead of having an "interstitial" type landing page which limited ...
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Will having multiple domains improve my seo?
Lets say I have a domain already, for example www.automobile4u.com (not mine), with a website fully running and all.
The title of my "Website" says:
<title>Used cars - buy and sell your used ...
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How do I rename a domain and preserve SEO?
As part of graduating from Area51 and becoming a full fledged site we sometimes change domain names from http://topic.stackexchange.com to http://example.com. Aside from the obvious 301 redirect rules ...
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Say a customer is an observant Jew and wants his site to be offline on Shabat - SEO problem?
Someone here might have experience with this problem (it's not my personal problem and never has been):
Say you have a customer who is an observant Jew and he wants his site to be offline somehow (or ...
user58733
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Another website is mirroring and ranks above my site in search results
There is a site of ill-repute known as thedirty which has completely mirrored my site and now has links appearing on Google at the #1 spot using my content. I checked my log files and noticed that ...
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What is the benefit of forcing a site to load over SSL (HTTPS)?
Let's say I have a large content-only site; no login or logout, no usernames, no email addresses, no secure area, nothing secret on the site, nada. People just come to the site and go from page to ...
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Does it make a difference if your URL path ends in a trailing slash or not?
Does it make any difference to SEO ratings what-so-ever if your url has a trailing slash:
http://www.example.com/some/slug/paths/
as opposed to one that does not:
http://www.example.com/some/slug/...
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Do meta keywords have any impact on ranking algorithms?
From what I have read, Google no longer uses meta keywords in it's ranking algorithm. Is it worth the effort to maintain meta keywords?
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Are page ranks for subdomains independent?
If I have a domain name say stackexchange.com and I want to host 2 sites X and Y as subdomains of that site.
Will x.stackexchange.com help out y.stackexchange.com in page rank? Or will google treat ...
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How can I prevent Google mistakenly offering to translate a page to English when it already is in English?
Several of my site's pages are appearing in search results with [Translate this page] next to it. When I click that it takes me to Google Translate and translates my page "from Catalan to English".
...
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Why should we use tags like p, span, hx tags when we can use CSS instead?
Why should we use tags like p, span, hx tags when we can use CSS instead? Is it important from an SEO point of view?
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Do subdomains help/hurt SEO?
If I have example.com, and blog.example.com, do search engines see those as one site or two? Will using subdomains hurt SEO? I have some technical reasons why I can't use example.com/blog.
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Is it better to put hyphens in a domain name?
Both in terms of SEO and user friendliness, is it better to put hyphens in a multi-words domain name or not ?
For example, is www.stackoverflow.com better than www.stack-overflow.com ?
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How long should my HTML page title really be?
How long should my text within my <title></title> tags really be? I know Google cuts it off at some point but when?
When I used IIS7's SEO Toolkit 1.0 I get error stating my title ...
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Why, on StackExchange sites, is the post title on the question page a link to itself?
It may look like a question for meta.stackoverflow.com, but I'd like to know if this decision has something to do with SEO or if this improve the user experience somehow.
It's a link to the same page ...
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H1 vs H2 vs Other for website title/logo and SEO
It is a common practice for front-end developers to put the website title or logo in H1 tag and the title in H2. But most of the time the title of the page/article is more important because it carries ...
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How to avoid "click here" links
I know that I should try to avoid links that have the text "click here". But how do I avoid that? What are good alternatives to
You can find more information about certain topic over here.
For ...
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Is the title attribute (not tag) important to SEO?
The title attribute is an HTML standard element available across most tags. e.g.
<li><a title="Widgets listed by household function" href="/widgets/by-function.html">by Function</a&...
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SEO: How to Separate Fact from Fiction?
I am interested in learning about SEO, as many of you may already know. I am by far not a pro, but would love to learn. I currently own a number of domains etc that I am playing around with content ...
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Does registering a domain for 10+ years help search rank?
I've heard that registering a domain name for a very long time, say 5 to 10+ years, can help with your search rank.
This seems at least plausible to me, since a fly-by-night, massive domain name farm ...
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Can a website built entirely in SVG have good SEO?
Can a website built entirely in SVG have SEO as good as a website built in HTML? If not, what are the drawbacks to using 100% SVG for a website?
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How do I disallow an entire directory with robots.txt?
I have two sites I am currently working on which is a shopping cart and another shopper. Both are under the same domain name so for example
http://example.com/first_url
http://example.com/...
Tamer
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How do StackOverflow questions appear in Google search results so quickly?
How is it that questions posted to the Stack Overflow show up as #1 in Google search results just minutes after being submitted? What SEO practices are being used to generate this sort of up-to-the-...
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How do you get your Google+ profile displayed in the right hand sidebar of the Google search results page?
Does anyone know how to get your Google+ profile displayed in the right hand sidebar of the Google search results page? As in the screenshot below:
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How to use rel='canonical' properly
I have 3 URLS that serve the same data:
www.example.com/product/foo
www.example.com/product/foo?id=1
www.example.com?product=foo
For Google's sake I want the URL www.example.com/product/foo to be ...
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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?
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Can I use <link> tags in the body of an HTML document?
Can I use <link> tags in the body of an HTML page? I tried to find the answer to this question, but found contradictory information.
When adding Schema.org microdata markup to an HTML page, I ...
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How important is responsive web design?
I've heard a variety of opinions regarding the pros and cons of using responsive web design recently and was wondering whether it was necessary for small businesses that target small geographical ...
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How can I increase the traffic to my site?
I don't want to do link exchanges or anything shady. I just want some legitimate ways that I can direct a little bit more traffic to my site. How do I do that?
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What are the SEO rules for HTML 5?
What are the rules of engagement with respect to SEO in HTML 5?
Examples of things we have been mulling over with no conclusion:
Are you penalised for not using <head> and <body> tags?
...
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What can cause "Discovered - currently not indexed" in the new GWT
The new GWT shows sitemaps links divided into new categories. Two that confuse me:
1. Discovered- currently not indexed
2. Crawled - currently not indexed
What are the possible reasons for this, and ...
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Is a URL with a query string better or worse for SEO then one without one?
I want to know, is there a huge difference in terms of SEO between these URLs:
example.com/ontario/toronto/listings
or
example.com/listings.php?p=ontario&c=toronto
Will one URL rank higher ...
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Is using only HTTPS bad in a SEO perspective?
I would like to set up a new business site. I plan to direct www.example.com to example.com and only use that domain. My plan is also to only use HTTPS and not HTTP.
Does this affect the SEO for the ...
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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 ...
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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....
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Lazy loading images and effects on SEO
We are using the following technique to lazy load images in our site:
For all images we put in the src attribute a url for a default img (i.e. a loader) and put the actual image url in the data-src ...
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Why would Wikipedia show set external links as rel="nofollow"?
I understand that rel="nofollow" is a safe way to link to external sites but why would Wikipedia refuse to link to other sites without the nofollow?
Is this a matter of trust with the community?
...
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Should I use a file extension or not?
I've always wondered about this and never found a good solution.
But this question reminded me of it.
When I have a URL on my website it can be displayed and accessed any of the following ways:
...
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Well structured URLs vs. URLs optimized for SEO
Let’s take an example of a movie site. So a well structured set of URLs for this site can be:
Movie page - example.com/movies/the-matrix
Review for movie - example.com/movies/the-matrix/reviews
...
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SEO regarding using separate <h1> tags for the logo and website name
Is is true <h1> tag should not have more than 1 on every page for SEO?
Every pages on the header, it includes and <h1> tag. Website Name which show an image from logo class, like this:
&...
user622378
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How to correctly mark up different versions of the same document which are non-canonical
The use case is a document which has multiple versions which are all simultaneously available. For example, documentation on a product for each version of that software:
/v1/install-guide
/v2/install-...
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