All Questions
3,258
questions
145
votes
9
answers
34k
views
How to find web hosting that meets my requirements?
This is a "catch-all" question designed to serve as an answer for all questions about choosing web hosting. Pro Webmasters no longer accepts new questions about how to choose hosting. All future ...
292
votes
25
answers
61k
views
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?
38
votes
2
answers
8k
views
What is duplicate content and how can I avoid being penalized for it on my site?
This is a general, community wiki question regarding duplicate content.
If your question was closed as a duplicate of this question and you feel that the information provided here does not provide a ...
33
votes
3
answers
7k
views
Why aren't search engines indexing my content?
This is a general, community wiki catch-all question and answer pair intended to address any questions
concerning the reasons a site or specific site contents do not appear
in search engine ...
270
votes
20
answers
45k
views
The Sitemap Paradox
We use a sitemap on Stack Overflow, but I have mixed feelings about it.
Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow ...
- 13.9k
34
votes
2
answers
10k
views
Which Content Management System (CMS)/Wiki should I use?
This is a general, community wiki catch-all question to address non-specific "I need a CMS or Wiki that does x, y, and z..." questions.
If your question was closed as a duplicate of this ...
130
votes
8
answers
39k
views
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 ...
- 8,608
68
votes
5
answers
7k
views
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 ...
- 883
27
votes
4
answers
7k
views
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
...
- 373
37
votes
4
answers
10k
views
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.
- 533
23
votes
5
answers
2k
views
How to diagnose a search engine ranking drop?
There has been a significant drop (90%) in traffic from Google to one of my well-established sites (6+ years) in the last week. Searches show that the top 3 wide keywords all dropped 4 spots. Searches ...
- 5,997
47
votes
7
answers
12k
views
How to fight off Google Analytics referrer spammers?
Last months I have lots of referrer spammers in my GA statistics. Their count is ~10x higher than count of legit visitors (my site is not very popular yet). I've turned on an option to hide known ...
- 679
18
votes
4
answers
3k
views
Title tag different from title appearing in Google?
I'm just wondering how it is possible that IGN.com has this in its title tag:
Video Games, Cheats, Walkthroughs, Game Trailers, Reviews, News, Previews & Videos at IGN
while on Google its ...
- 295
37
votes
5
answers
3k
views
Why isn't my website in Google search results? [duplicate]
It's been sometime and Google has yet to index my site. How can I get Google to index my website?
- 1,887
17
votes
4
answers
8k
views
What forum software should I use?
This is a general, community wiki catch-all question to address "I need a forum script that does x, y, and z..." questions.
If your question was closed as a duplicate of this question and you feel ...
61
votes
7
answers
30k
views
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 ...
- 947
9
votes
1
answer
962
views
Which Ecommerce Script Should I Use?
This is a general, community wiki catch-all question to address "I need a eCommerce script that does x, y, and z..." questions.
If your question was closed as a duplicate of this question and you ...
5
votes
1
answer
4k
views
What are the most commonly used and basic Apache htaccess redirects?
This question is here so we can offer users who are looking for information on how to make one or more common or basic redirects in Apache using the htaccess file. All future questions pertaining to ...
42
votes
9
answers
70k
views
How can I prevent my mail from being classified as spam?
When sending or forwarding emails using a personal or company domain using a website or email client, how do I prevent the email from being incorrectly marked as spam?
- 533
26
votes
4
answers
20k
views
Are keywords in URLs good SEO or needlessly redundant?
A coworker and I are locked in a debate over the value of SEO keywords in the URL of a page. She wants to change all the filenames of the HTML pages of a fencing company so they look like residential-...
- 472
15
votes
3
answers
5k
views
Number of indexed pages with "site:" search less than reported in Google Webmaster Tools
In Google webmaster tools it shows that I have 309 pages indexed, but when I search using "site:site.com" appear about 180 only (On the first page appears "about 608 results," something near the total ...
- 165
40
votes
6
answers
2k
views
Subdomain versus subdirectory [duplicate]
I recently moved from having a main site like www.example.com with a subdomain associated site yyy.example.com, to moving everything off the subdomain to a subdirectory like www.example.com/yyy/, with ...
delete
27
votes
4
answers
15k
views
How can I prevent spam on sites which I control?
This is a general, community wiki question to address all non-specific spam prevention questions.
If your question was closed as a duplicate of this question and you feel that the information ...
80
votes
8
answers
33k
views
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 ...
- 1,481
24
votes
3
answers
5k
views
Does Google penalize sites on "commercial" country code domains such as .me or .tv?
If I am thinking about using one of the 'fancy' top level domains such as .me or .tv should I be worried about how Google treats such domains?
Or to put it another way, if all other things are equal (...
- 1,270
11
votes
1
answer
1k
views
Why would a website with keyword stuffing rank higher than one without in google search results?
Like some other websites, I try to maintain a balance in keywords in comparison to other words. I ran tests of my (optimized) website as well as a (keyword stuffed) competitor website via this SEO ...
- 13.6k
41
votes
9
answers
33k
views
Preventing robots from crawling specific part of a page
As a webmaster in charge of a tiny site that has a forum, I regularly receive complains from users that both the internal search engine and that external searches (like when using Google) are totally ...
- 511
24
votes
2
answers
7k
views
Why do Google search results include pages disallowed in robots.txt?
I have some pages on my site that I want to keep search engines away from, so I disallowed them in my robots.txt file like this:
User-Agent: *
Disallow: /email
Yet I recently noticed that Google ...
- 8,962
10
votes
3
answers
6k
views
Are drops in Google ranking common after switching to https?
About a week ago I made the switch to https on one of my sites. I'm positive I did everything right. Properly setup 301 redirects from http to https versions. Added and verified https version in ...
- 103
15
votes
3
answers
3k
views
What is the best file extension for an SEO friendly URL?
I'm working for a website to convert the website URL to an SEO friendly URL. I plan to use this:
example.com/category-name/pageid-123-page-name
I looked at some similarly categorized, highly ranked ...
- 265
11
votes
2
answers
2k
views
Does Google use the Meta Description Tag for Description of Page?
When you do a Google search, there is typically a snippet of sample content from the page. I seem to recall that the Meta Tags can influence this choice of descriptive sentences. Is that correct(?) ...
- 443
9
votes
1
answer
16k
views
.htaccess rewrite URL leads to missing CSS
I am trying to make my url from this:
example.com/view.php?id=15
To this:
example.com/watch/15
My code in .htaccess is as follows:
Options -Indexes
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On
...
99
votes
8
answers
7k
views
Does a site's bounce rate influence Google rankings?
Does Google consider bounce rate or something similar in ranking sites?
Background: here at Stack Exchange we noticed that the latest Google algorithm changes resulted in about a 20% dip in traffic ...
- 1,300
55
votes
9
answers
3k
views
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?
10
votes
6
answers
2k
views
How to Remove URLs from Google Search Engine
I have used so many things like url removal request and deleted the pages etc., but still the errors are shown in my webmaster tools.
How can I remove the urls completely from Google?
Web Trainings
128
votes
5
answers
245k
views
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 ...
- 1,471
61
votes
3
answers
5k
views
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 ...
- 602
35
votes
5
answers
3k
views
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 ?
- 1,597
32
votes
2
answers
42k
views
What is the use of @id in json-ld syntax?
I am really confused what is @id used for in json-ld syntax. Sample from apple.com. What does @id actually represent. Any help would be great?
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@...
- 321
26
votes
5
answers
6k
views
Does the Google spider render JavaScript?
Does the Google spider knows how to render JavaScript, or only HTML?
significance
25
votes
2
answers
3k
views
Ideas to improve website loading speed?
Are there any ways in which I can improve the loading speed of a website?
I know that Google is really pushing loading speeds and with the popularity of mobile websites it's now imperative that sites ...
- 1,542
3
votes
1
answer
8k
views
Title in Google does not match <title> of document [duplicate]
One of my project's title tag doesn't appear to be getting crawled by Google properly. The title tag of the home page reads:
<title>Grande Prairie Jobs | Job Board for Grande Prairie, Alberta ...
- 131
18
votes
2
answers
13k
views
SEO preference: does a site with WWW rank better than without WWW?
After having read various articles on this site about WWW or Non-WWW website setup, here, here and here, and after having setup a correct redirection rule in .Htaccess to at least eliminate duplicate ...
- 847
17
votes
1
answer
3k
views
Why do Alexa rankings for a site fluctuate by millions day to day?
Yesterday before I went to bed, I checked the Alexa ranking for my website and it was somewhere in the ~4 million but today when I woke up, it was back at what it used to be months ago which was 18 ...
- 173
13
votes
3
answers
6k
views
Can you use googleon and googleoff comments to prevent Googlebot from indexing part of a page?
I've seen code like for preventing Google from indexing part of a page:
<p>This is a paragraph that will be indexed by Google.</p>
<!--googleoff: index-->
<p>This is a ...
- 97.8k
16
votes
1
answer
7k
views
Should I submit https:// and http:// in Google Search Console both with and without the www?
In my site I'm redirecting everything (http://, http://www., https://) to https://www.example.com.
Google webmaster tools says: Make sure you add both "www" and "non-www" versions for your site. Also,...
- 429
10
votes
1
answer
867
views
How do I leave mail at the registrar while serving the web from host?
Client's domain is registered with GoDaddy where they have a mail-only plan at the moment. Now web hosting has been set up elsewhere and we need to point web service to the new host while retaining ...
- 19.3k
8
votes
3
answers
959
views
My title tag doesn't appear to be getting crawled by Google properly [duplicate]
My title is:
<title>School Management Software, College & University Management Software, Cloud ERP Software</title>
However it's showing up like this in Google:
Is there something ...
54
votes
4
answers
32k
views
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/...
- 1,358
15
votes
4
answers
3k
views
Prevent malicious bots from posting spam
I remember a site closed due to misuse and I wonder if bots have a part of it. If the bot is POSTing something to my site what are ways I can combat it? I was thinking of setting some cookies and ...
user1585