Top 5 SEO Questions from Customers - Whiteboard Friday

Key Takeaways

i am hi everybody welcome to another edition of whiteboard friday my name is cyrus this is aaron we both work on the health team here at seomoz today's special topic is top five questions from customers aaron and i answer hundreds of customer questions every week from seos all over the world so we thought it was important to talk about some of these issues so just so you know a lot of these questions that we're going to be covering today may be considered beginner to intermediate but even if you're an advanced seo you might find some gems in here so we're going to get started aaron will be back in just a little bit to talk about some of these other topics and the first question we get a lot of is www or non-ww how do you choose what to include in your domain and this is kind of a fun one right because everybody starts their new website and they buy the domain they're getting it set up and which one do you choose or if you have a client and the website is a little more established and they they have some canonicalization issues some duplicate content issues which one do you choose well some things you might want to consider is is it a brand new site or is it more established site if it's a brand new site it's really up to you right and you play around with it in your head should i go with red shoes or www.redshoes.com but if it's a more established site and you have a lot of incoming links you have some some things to consider so some ways to decide if you should use a www prefix in your subdomain or not um first what subdomain has more links coming into it now a good way to determine this is using open site explorer you can type in each version into into the search query and see which one has more incoming links which one has more domain authority and pick the one that is more powerful and redirect the other one to reflect that another way to see is what are you what is the website already ranking for a good way to do this is to just type in your your brand name into a google search box uh example dot com or let's say you're adobe so you type adobe into the search box what comes up in google search is it www adobe or just adobe.com that's that's a that's a good way to see what you're already ranking for you might want to choose that all things being equal and finally this doesn't really determine which one you want to choose but you might want to look in google webmaster tools and choose your preference there's a preference in there set my preferred domain as www or non www and if you're taking on a new client you might want to check in their webmaster tools to see what that's already set for number two i has all the 404s what now now first off that's not how our customers talk except for maybe a couple of them and we love those customers but the question is what do we do about 404s we get this question all the time every single week well the most important thing you want to do when dealing with 404s are make sure you know where they're coming from and there's many ways to find find the source of 404 so the idea is you have these incoming links they're they're coming in your website or their internal links and the links the pages just aren't there so one thing you can do if you have important 404s that the most important you want four or fours you want to fix is look at open site explorer top pages um it's it's a tab in open site explorer you look these are the pages with the most domain authority coming into them from from different sources and if any of those are 404 those are probably a priority that you want to address other ways of finding 404s at least within seomoz is using the web app if you're running a campaign and it will list 404s in your list of issues you can actually export your csv and find the referral link to those it's a new it's a new feature we just added uh just last week other ways of finding 404s you can look in google webmaster tools again they will sometimes list the source of 404s and a great tool that a lot of webmasters know about xenu link sleuth it runs on your desktop it's a free program you run it and it just gives you lots of fun data about all the broken links on your site and you can make site maps it's it's really exciting but then after you know where the 404s are coming from what do you do to fix the problem well the most obvious thing you can do is fix the source link if you have a link coming in pointing to a page that doesn't exist maybe you can reach out to that webmaster and get them to link to the right page or if it's on your website you know just simply fix it but what if you can't control those external links coming in or you have hundreds of links on your page on your website and they're all broken and it's just too much to fix well in that case why not just fix the page uh you can create a page where the 404 is supposed to be and redirect it or create a page and with all new content these are really common solutions and will help you you know take advantage of all that uh page use and authority coming into your page third question my links are indexed this is a question we get all the time especially when people are looking at open site explorer they're looking at linkscape data or google i have these links why aren't they in the index and it's just not a problem with uh seomoz it's it's yahoo it's google a perfect example that we hear all the time is i built a link i'm in the better business bureau but you're not showing my link google isn't indexing the link well there's three real primary reasons that this will happen that we we address all the time the first problem is the link is buried in deep layers of navigation the better business bureau is a perfect example huge site lots of domain authority right dr pete wrote a wrote a post about this recently about finding links under lots of deep navigation if it's buried if you have to go like 15 layers down to find the link a search engine may not go that far down no matter how much domain authority there is so and if this is your own site that links aren't getting indexed you may want to put those links a little higher have a flat flat architecture with maybe more links more categories so that you can get get to that link a little faster a general rule of thumb is if it's an important link you want to have it two steps away from the home page skip skip and search engines are going to be more likely to find that link the second common problem we see is very few or lower low authority links linking into that page again going back to the better business bureau take a look at some of those links and sometimes we find there's only one link coming into that page and that's from the better business bureau so if you want search engines to discover your links you need to build high authority links coming into those and by high authority i mean links with high domain authority or mods rank coming in and third you want to think about your link quality so imagine two different pages one page all things being equal has three links on it and you know your link is the middle link and it's it's really clickable people are going to want to click that link the second page has 250 links on it and your link is the bottom in the footer somewhere if you were a human which which link would you want to click on well obviously you click on the first page and that's the way search engines sort of think so when you're when you're building links or you're looking at links coming in use use the would a human click on it question if a human would click on it it's more likely that a search engine will find the link but if a human probably wouldn't click on it that link may not be indexed so that's all i have for now we're going to have erin talk about a couple more questions in just a minute hi i'm aaron and i'm with the seomoz help team as well you saw me earlier cyrus introduced me i would love to talk to you about a few more questions that we get asked a lot over on the seomoz help team first off why is only one page getting crawled i see this a lot with the web app i also see it with google and other search engines i'm going to go through all the different reasons that that might be happening if you see something else though feel free to shoot us an email remember that all of these questions are regarding issues or other things that might crop up with the web app or the site or tools they're definitely seo related but we don't answer seo questions as a general rule over in the help team so if you see this in the web app definitely send us a message but if you think it's an seo related question definitely visit the pro q a so first off one thing that we see a lot is robots.txt is overblocking a lot of crawlers including roger probably not explicitly roger but we do see robots.txt blocking so we might just crawl the home page and and that's it another thing that might be happening is the home page is dub dub dub or not dub dub dub as cyrus talked about earlier the home page would be dub dub dub but all of the links going off of the home page would actually be to non-dub dub dub sites or pages rather so you'd end up with one page crawled because there's only one page in that sub domain in the dub dub dub or whatever subdomain that you're using in the web app another thing involves links there's a lot of issues that we see with links sometimes there are no links on the home page just none so we have nothing to crawl and obviously that would be the that would be the reason why we're not seeing other pages in the subdomain if we can't see it google can't see it other search engines won't be able to see it another thing is having links that are only in javascript or ajax that can be a problem for our crawler because we can't always access those and sometimes search engines have problems with those too but generally for our web app we like to see links in the standard html format another problem is that the home page might redirect you might have a 302 or a 301 redirect going to another maybe a different subdomain or any other url that can be a problem for our crawler because we'll get one page and we'll let you know that it's actually a redirect there's nothing else for us to crawl there so if you get that issue you'll probably see a bar that says 301 redirect just for one page that would indicate that that's the problem another problem is we see sites that are in all flash this doesn't happen as often anymore but sometimes people will make their sites all flash especially small businesses they can look really good but they're really really hard to crawl and search engines are getting better at this but our crawler at the moment can't crawl them unfortunately and usability wise you might want to reconsider having your site in something more accessible finally we do see sites that uh give a 404 code but it actually has content this can happen on your home page so we'll actually go to the home page we see content it's telling us all about the business or service but then we look at the http access code and it's 404. so what you need to do here is go to another tool we really like using the moz bar to find this out look at what the code is if you see a 404 you're going to need to change that http status code to a 200 or if you need to redirect change it to a redirect but lots of times we'll see it as a 404 and that's no good because then everyone thinks that you don't exist and that's no good not for seo not for anyone really another big problem that we have another big question that we get lots of questions about is how does on-page reporting work so that's a feature of the web app it's a really cool feature to help you identify low hanging fruit see where your urls are for certain keywords but it can be kind of confusing at first and it might give you results that you weren't expecting for instance if you add a bunch of keywords such as cats cat beds cat coats all sort of cat accessories that's all your keywords we will take each one of those keywords find the highest rank url in whatever search engine you're using in the web app and we'll let you know where you're ranking for that keyword it might turn out that oh cat codes i don't think i'm ranking anywhere for that but i'm actually ranking at the kittyhut.com cats so if you find out that you're ranking there even if you didn't intend for that ranking it's kind of low hanging fruit that's great you're ranking for something you didn't even know you were however we'll also grade that url for that keyword and let you know how you're doing in terms of on-page seo in this case cat coats isn't well optimized for slash cats so we give you some suggestions about how to better optimize that url for that keyword you might want to add more information about cat coats for instance that might bring your grade up if you follow our instructions to a b or an a and consequently instead of having this low hanging fruit that's ranked 37 you might end up being able to push it up to the first page or something higher than 37 since you'll actually start targeting for that keyword unexpected results but very very favorable finally number six the last question that we get a lot of that i thought we might want to touch on is how do i change my profile picture i know i know we all have beautiful pictures of ourselves i've changed mine several times not that i'm beautiful i just can never find one that is so the main thing you got to do is go to seomoz.org users profile you can do that from clicking up here and then going to the drop down and saying edit profile or view profile then you click the silver edit button button that shows up on that page then you click the silver edit photo button at the left then you click the silver upload button so it's all there on that on that page that settings page for your user profile the public profile lets you know oh you actually need to complete all these things in order to get extra mods points well adding a photograph is is a great way to do that it's really easy and you'll start having an identity on our site people will love to see your face i know i sure will thank you for checking this out hope this helps some of our customers and helps you rethink some of your seo if you're using our web app our tools or just generally out there on the net see you next time on whiteboard friday take care you