I would certainly redirect those pages! If you're on Wordpress, I suggest the Redirection plugin. It's easy to set up those redirects, and also has a feature where you can monitor your 404s and set up redirects from your 404 logs.
Best posts made by KeriMorgret
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RE: Redirecting broken incoming links
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RE: Proving Bad Intent
One thought is that it would add legitimacy to the comment, and get it approved. On some systems, the first comment needs to be manually approved, and after that the person can freely comment.
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RE: Elements of a Quality Article
Just in case some people aren't familiar with Google's recent post about high quality sites, I'll throw that into the mix. I've edited the list, and selected things that focus more on an individual article than the site itself.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html
- Would you trust the information presented in this article?
- Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature?
- Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?
- Are the topics driven by genuine interests of readers of the site, or does the site generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?
- Does the article provide original content or information, original reporting, original research, or original analysis?
- Does the page provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?
- How much quality control is done on content?
- Does the article describe both sides of a story?
- Was the article edited well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?
- Does this article provide a complete or comprehensive description of the topic?
- Does this article contain insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious?
- Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?
- Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?
- Would you expect to see this article in a printed magazine, encyclopedia or book?
- Are the articles short, unsubstantial, or otherwise lacking in helpful specifics?
- Are the pages produced with great care and attention to detail vs. less attention to detail?
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RE: Low quality websites with spammy EMDs still ranking higher than genuine websites?
Backed by quite a bit of real-life experience on EGOL's part.
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RE: Duplicate Page Titles
I also would have fixed this with a 301 redirect in your .htaccess file. In addition, you have calusacrossinganimalhospital.com and www.calusacrossinganimalhospital.com that resolve independently, so you likely have at least six URLs for your home page.
Let us know if you'd like a hand finding the right rewrite code, or if your website developer is OK with just taking this instruction and fixing things for you.
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RE: Traffic has dropped off a cliff
If you're able to give us a little more information that would help.
Has the organic traffic dropped from all of the search engines, or just one?
Has it dropped for all of your pages or just some of your pages?
Has it dropped for all of your keywords or just some of your keywords?
Have you verified the site in Google and Bing Webmaster tools and looked for any messages and warnings?
When you redesigned, did you put in redirects from the old pages to the new pages (if your URL structure changed)?
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RE: Over Optimisation Penalty
A correction to that Ryan. After two weeks, non-members can see the answers, but cannot reply. Only pro members and those with a certain threshold of mozpoints can answer after the two weeks. (I believe it is still two weeks, that's what it was initially at least).
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RE: Strange client request
If it worked, we'd all see text with lots of odd quotes and parenthesis, correct?
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RE: Google: site gone from SERPs, back in 1 day, then gone again?
It might actually have been Google's fault this time. They misclassified some sites as parked domains and they dropped out of the index. See the Search Engine Land post at http://searchengineland.com/dropped-in-rankings-google-mistake-over-parked-domains-118979.
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RE: Traffic has dropped off a cliff
The redirects are necessary for pages that are indexed in the search engines (so people coming from a search result can get to the right page) and for pages that are linked, bookmarked, etc. You generally want to make sure that most pages you change get a redirect.
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RE: Some of my pages are ranking for terms which I want other pages to rank for. What can I do to effectively switch the ranking?
Rand also made a post about what to do if the "wrong" page is ranking last year at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/wrong-page-ranking-in-the-results-6-common-causes-5-solutions
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RE: Was I hit by Panda/Payday Loan/Penguin?
If it helps when speaking to your boss, know that I'm a Moz employee and do no consulting, and we do not have any type of lead compensation for when we recommend people on the recommended companies, and EGOL does not accept consulting gigs either. Neither of us are saying what we are saying to try to make any money off of you or your company, but rather to try to honestly help your company get the information it needs.
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RE: SEO Checklist
Searching the SEOmoz blog itself can turn up some interesting resources. This is a site audit checklist for looking at an existing site: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-do-a-site-audit.
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RE: 1 hr of SEO vs Paid Link
It depends on what that one hour of work will get you. Is that one hour of work total, or are they prepping with an audit then spending an hour to explain it to you?
What have they said you'll get out of that hour?
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RE: I run a Q&A site, should I limit post questions to 64 characters?
Do the users have a chance for an expanded question beyond the 64 characters, or is that the proposed entire question limit? If that's the entire question limit, I would certainly say to not limit it so much.
The question at http://recessionitis.com/what-is-the-lowest-fare-roundtrip-to-atlanta-from-oakland-california/ is "What is the lowest round trip fare to Atlanta from Oakland, CA?", which is 63 characters. There's a response asking what dates, yet the OP never responded.
My gut says that by limiting the question so much you're going to limit the amount of information the person is able to give, and thus limit the amount of answer a person can give without knowing more detail, and you may never be able to get that detail out of the OP in time. Or, you'll have someone answer, only to have the OP come back and say "oh, but I don't want any layovers" or "I refuse to travel on airline xyz". You're still likely to get people who don't make complete questions, but I would say don't hamstring those who did want to give more information just because you don't want to trigger the "..." in the SERP.
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RE: Bad keywords sending traffic my site, but can't find the source. Advice?
So the traffic seems to be coming from search. I'd do a query in Bing and Google like:
site:mysite.com badkeyword
and see if you can find what pages are indexed with that bad keyword.
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RE: What has happened to my page rank
If your traffic, conversions, and rankings haven't changed, I wouldn't sweat losing a few green pixels on a toolbar.
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RE: How to handle web server downtime?
We had an excellent post about that from a YouMoz author in January. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-handle-downtime-during-site-maintenance should tell you everything you need to know!
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RE: Search engine friendly URLs
Hi Limens,
It is certainly fine to use a subdirectory, and can really make sense to help organize your content. It's also helpful in your analytics if you want to see who went to the blog area of your site versus the product area of your site.
It would help to know a little more about your site, but I would choose neither of the above. I'd actually go with something like domain.com/cooking/lasagna/. Note that I'm not including the .php. If you later switch to a different language, you won't have to redirect from php to asp or html, etc.
I wouldn't stuff your subfolder in your URL with keywords like the tasty-food in your example below. It just makes your URL longer and look a little more spammy to the human eye.
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RE: Are 2 sites in same niche from same company white hat?
I'd still want to ask why? Why put the work into two sites, and divide your effort between them? If the time from the new site was instead allocated to the existing site, could that make it the leader in its field?
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RE: I am getting an error message from Google Webmaster Tools and I don't know what to do to correct the problem
I'd take a step back and stop building links, and start cleaning up the links that have already been built that are a bit fishy.
There's an article directory on a site with a domain about best pet insurance that links to the shoe store (http://bestpetinsurance.org/myarticledirectory/). A UK SEO directory has a link to the same shoe site, under the category of flowers (http://www.seoukdirectory.com/index.php?search=Internet).
If these links were built with your knowledge and you have access to the list of links that were built, go and remove the ones that were bought to just be links and serve no purpose to a reader. Also go through Google Webmaster Tools, Bing Webmaster Center, and Open Site Explorer to look at incoming links and remove those bad links.
Look at the content in those websites. Clean out the junk and make the content good enough that someone would link there without prompting.
In short, think about if you were sitting down with someone from Google and explaining why these sites should be included in the index and have a high ranking. Make sure that everything under your control can be explained and is not embarrassing or going against their guidelines. Clean things up, then ask for a reinclusion request.
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RE: Easy way to get some do-follow links for a new site
If you can find these lists, and if you can find a tool doing this -- Google can easily do the same. Do you want your first links to your brand new site in a competitive field to be ones that the search engines recognize as easy to get and where there are literally 500 other people writing comments on the same site with links back to their blog?
I'd suggest looking through the SEOmoz blog in the link building category for ideas about building valuable links instead. Takes more time, but is much better for your site.
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RE: Website tables
[moderator hat on]
Let's keep this thread related to the original question posted. We make it real easy to create a new question and mark it as a discussion, and that's the more appropriate place for a level-headed discussion about some of these details that don't concern the OP as much as it does the people answering the questions.
Thanks!
[moderator hat off]
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RE: Weird Links Should I Disavow?
For Reddit, was it really reddit, or was it a site pretending to be reddit but using a foreign character for one of the Rs? https://www.billhartzer.com/pages/how-to-stop-lifehacker-com-and-reddit-com-fake-google-analytics-referral-traffic/
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RE: Black Hat or Bulletproof?
Just a quick note -- I've seen Google index PDFs that were scanned images of a cut-and-paste newsletter from the 1980s with a variety of different fonts. This is not a guaranteed way to keep Google out, and images will also make your files much bigger than just text.
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RE: Changing Hosting Companies - Site Downtime - Google Indexing Concern
There's an excellent blog post about this at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-handle-downtime-during-site-maintenance too.
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RE: Anyone have time to tell me his opinion?
I would be concerned about hiring any SEO that has a link exchange page. This site really has very little concrete in the way of content or anything to convince a potential customer to give you their information. There's just hardly anything here in the current version of the site.
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RE: Have my SERP listings been hacked?
I've heard of this before with Wordpress being hacked. I'm having one of our associates who is an expert at WP come over and comment and help walk you through a fix.
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RE: List of Best SEO forums
Warrior Forum has some interesting discussions, and you'll certainly get a different point of view than you will at SEOmoz. Many of the tactics and offers you see there are frowned on in these forums. As with all advice, use your own common sense and do a little research on your own.
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RE: Should I add canonical tag on these pages?
I just have to say I'm real thankful this is about car body kits. I saw the URL and was afraid I was going to need to add a NSFW disclaimer, until I saw the comments.
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RE: Wrong listing in SERP
Have you seen this post by Rand about things you can do when the "wrong" page is ranking?
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/wrong-page-ranking-in-the-results-6-common-causes-5-solutions
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RE: I dont know what happened?!? Help!
Hi Kristy,
I'd look at a couple of things. First, have you verified your site in Google Webmaster Tools? If not, do so now. If you have, log into your account and see if you have any messages saying an action was taken with regards to your site.
Second, you haven't made major changes, but even a minor change in the right part of the code could have caused your analytics to stop working.
Before we get into full-fledged panic mode, let's do a little diagnosis. Take a deep breath, and go back to your analytics and get a little more information.
- Is it just that one page that suddenly has no entrances?
- Is your site traffic as a whole down?
- For that one page, what was the source of those entrances? Was it a link on another site, and that link has been removed?
- If the source was organic search, has you traffic declined over all search engines, or just one search engine?
If we figure out more exactly what the problem is, we can help you get things fixed back up.
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RE: 404 and Duplicate Content.
Also, if you use the CSV of your errors, SEOmoz will tell you where those 404s came from too.
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RE: Duplicate Page Title problems with Product Catalogues (Categories, Subcategories etc.)
Google looks at URLs, and not pages. It's the same content, but on different URLs.
If Google delivered mail, it would think the following were all different houses:
123 Main Street, Los Angeles, California 90210
123 Main St., Los Angeles, California 90210
123 Main Street, Los Angeles, CA 90210
123 Main Street, Los Angeles, CA 90210-1234If you're able to use a canonical tag in your custom CMS, you can effectively tell Google that one specific URL is the "right" one, and that all of the others should be treated as if they were the "right" one.
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RE: Is there any decent web browser that still displays the full page title at the top of the page?
In the new version of Firefox, I believe you can go to View, Toolbars, and select title. I did that for the whole two hours or so I kept 29, before downloading 28 and reinstalling.
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RE: Any recommendations for small businesses
If they have a little bit more to spend, I'd recommend EGOL's suggestion above, and then to look at something like page.ly for hosting. The basic WP hosting there is about $25 a month, and they take care of all of the upgrades for you. I worked with it once a couple of years ago, and it was the easiest WP install I've ever done.
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RE: Twitter DA
We noticed this too, and we're investigating what happened and will keep people updated with the status. Edit: We rolled back a change we made, and this is now fixed.
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RE: Site not showing up in Google search since move
The home page has a robots noindex on it, which won't help things. Couple of other pages do too, when I do a spot check. I'd check your settings in Wordpress.
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RE: Too Many On-Page Links on a Blog
Dr. Pete wrote a good post about this at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many that should help answer some of your questions.
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RE: Why my good links disappeared from gWMT?
Lots of people are reporting this in the forums. Barry Schwartz writes a post about it on Search Engine Roundtable at http://www.seroundtable.com/google-webmaster-tools-link-count-16315.html.
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RE: Moving Site from HTTP to HTTPS
Thomas, when you have a moment, could you go back and edit your response and remove some of the extra spaces and make the formatting flow a bit better? Thanks!
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RE: Odd Ranking Page - Contact Us
Hi! The logged in part would be my guess as well. Can you ask your client to use her browser in an incognito mode and preform the same search? That will help remove some of the personalization.
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RE: Best way to link 150 websites together
Quick correction: EGOL's title is Content Director, but he does not work for Moz as either staff or associate (though we're thankful he dedicates so much of his own time to Q&A).
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RE: Stolen Content reposted on other sites. How does this affect ranking?
It's Labor Day weekend. Shouldn't you be chasing down a BBQ grill and a beer instead of Q&A questions EGOL?
Appreciate your thoughtful answers on a holiday weekend!
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RE: What steps can you take to help a site that does not change
The page actually feels like it has too much information about what the actual surgery involves, and too little information about the hypnosis. How long does it take, both in how long is an individual session and how many sessions does it take? What is the cost? Does the hypnosis ever wear off? For what percentage of people is it effective? Do people have to travel to your office, or do you come to them?
How is the page for conversions? Ranking isn't everything, as in the end you are still trying to make money and have people inquire about your services. You might consider an a/b test and test a page that is more focused on the user and less on the search engines, and see if you get more people calling to inquire about your services. This page has a lot of extra content that is off-topic and appears to be written for the search engines (especially that huge footer) and isn't written for the person considering the service.
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RE: Impact seomoz.org to moz.com?
As well as the Mozinar Ruth did at http://moz.com/webinars/domain-migrations-lessons-from-the-moz-transition
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RE: Stolen Content reposted on other sites. How does this affect ranking?
As long as it wasn't that boss of yours forcing you to work!
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RE: Meta Title Tags
From a user's point of view, if that's all one title tag, it looks fairly stuffed and spammy. Google has been known to show a title tag of its choosing in the SERPs if it thinks the one coded is too spammy.
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RE: Optimizing Product Catalogs for Multiple Brick & Mortar Locations
To everyone who contributed to this thread, thank you! I'm humbled to see that there have been 12 responses in 12 hours to this question, on a Saturday, and on a (US) holiday weekend.
Thank you all for your answers, your time, your encouragement towards each other and towards all of the people in our community. I'm awed by all of you tonight.