Traditionally, the phrase Technical SEO refers to optimizing your site for crawling and indexing, but can also include any technical process meant to improve search visibility.
Technical SEO is a broad and exciting field, covering everything from sitemaps, meta tags, JavaScript indexing, linking, keyword research, and more.
If you’re new to SEO, we recommend starting with the chapter on Technical SEO in our Beginner’s Guide. Below are the latest posts on technical SEO, and we’ve included a few top articles here.
On-Site SEO : What are the technical on-page factors that influence your rankings? Our free learning center will get you started in the right direction.
The Web Developer's SEO Cheat Sheet : This handy—and printable—cheat sheet is invaluable for anyone building websites. Contains several useful references that cover a ton of technical SEO best practices.
MozBar : This free Chrome extension is an advanced SEO toolbar that helps you to examine and diagnose several technical SEO issues.
The Technical SEO Renaissance : Is it true that technical SEO isn't necessary, because Google is smart enough to figure your website out? Mike King puts this rumor to rest, and shows you what to focus on.
Technical SEO: The One Hour Guide to SEO : Want a quick introduction to the basics of technical SEO? Our guru Rand has you covered—all in about 10 minutes.
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 When done right, 301 redirects have awesome power to clean up messy architecture, solve outdated content problems, and improve user experience — all while preserving link equity and your ranking power.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.
To many webmasters, Google’s Disavow Tool seems a lifesaver. If you’ve suffered a Google penalty or been plagued by shady link building, simply upload a file of backlinks you want to disavow, and BOOM - you’re back in good graces. Or, more than likely, nothing at all. To better understand, I used the tool myself to disavow 1000s of links, and talked with dozens of SEOs who used it in attempts to recover from Google penalties.
Is Disavowing spam links and reverse engineering spam networks really where Google wants us to spend our time? By the looks of the Disavow process, that answer is a resounding yes.
Five years ago, I purchased a domain name from a competitor who was taking their site down. We simply created a 301 redirect from their site to our home page. Unbeknownst to me, the previous webmaster had built some very questionable links. I never added their domain to Google's Webmaster Tools because there was no reason to. The consequence was that I never received any warning messages.
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In light of Google's recent post on common rel=canonical mistakes, I explore the most commonly asked questions we get in Q&A regarding canonicalization.
As SEOs, we use all sorts of tools to glean insight into technical issues that may be hurting us: web analytics, crawl diagnostics, and Google and Bing Webmaster tools. All of these tools are useful, but there are undoubtedly holes in the data. There is only one true record of how search engines, such as Googlebot, process your website: your web server logs.
There are many areas of online marketing that computers are designed to interpret. In today's post, Will Critchlow shares a training module on robots.txt to help you understand the value of robots.txt files in large sites, and gives tips on using the protocol on your own site!
The speed of your site is critical in furthering your business’ profitability or your website’s popularity.
[htaccess SEO] In the Moz Q&A, there are often questions that are directly asked about, or answered with, a reference to the all-powerful .htaccess file. I've put together a few useful .htaccess snippets which are often helpful, but are generally underused by SEOs.
Recently, we've heard Google use the term "X% of queries affected" when announcing algorithm updates. This post explores what that deceptively simple phrase actually means.
Pagination has long been a topic of discussion within the SEO community. Be it an e-commerce product category, an aggregation of blog posts that meet a given criteria, or a lengthy news article, there are countless examples of pagination across the web. Why paginate? Well, from a usability standpoint, it makes perfect sense. No endless scrolling for users. Faster page load time. Fewer links...
Properly using microformats is the best thing since sliced bread for an enhanced search display. There are SEO murmurs that sites without microformats will soon be left in the dust in the SERP display. Both Google and Bing have both introduced new tools in the Webmaster repertoire that help monitor and troubleshoot issues the microformats. I am not going to delve into the all the individual...
Use of rel=canonical in an HTTP header is underutilized, and I believe that, now more than ever, SEOs should start leveraging and considering the power of this method for non-text/html content-types.
Running into the same site problems over and over again can be exasperating. In the years I've been doing SEO, I'm still surprised to see so many websites suffering from the same list of issues. In today's post, I share the most common problems (and solutions!) I've encountered through site audits, along with a few uncommon issues at the end.