undefined
Skip to content
Moz logo Menu open Menu close
  • Products
    • Moz Pro
    • Moz Pro Home
    • Moz Local
    • Moz Local Home
    • STAT
    • Moz API
    • Moz API Home
    • Compare SEO Products
    • Moz Data
  • Free SEO Tools
    • Domain Analysis
    • Keyword Explorer
    • Link Explorer
    • Competitive Research
    • MozBar
    • More Free SEO Tools
  • Learn SEO
    • Beginner's Guide to SEO
    • SEO Learning Center
    • Moz Academy
    • SEO Q&A
    • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
  • Blog
  • Why Moz
    • Digital Marketers
    • Agency Solutions
    • Enterprise Solutions
    • Small Business Solutions
    • The Moz Story
    • New Releases
  • Log in
  • Log out
  • Products
    • Moz Pro

      Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

    • Moz Local

      Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

    • STAT

      SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

    • Moz API

      Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

    • Compare SEO Products

      See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

    • Moz Data

      Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
    Moz Pro

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

    Learn more
  • Free SEO Tools
    • Domain Analysis

      Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

    • Keyword Explorer

      Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

    • Link Explorer

      Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

    • Competitive Research

      Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

    • MozBar

      See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

    • More Free SEO Tools

      Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
    Moz Pro

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

    Learn more
  • Learn SEO
    • Beginner's Guide to SEO

      The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

    • SEO Learning Center

      Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

    • On-Demand Webinars

      Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

    • How-To Guides

      Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

    • Moz Academy

      Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

    • MozCon

      Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

    Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
    Moz API

    Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

    Find your plan
  • Blog
  • Why Moz
    • Digital Marketers

      Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

    • Small Business Solutions

      Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

    • Agency Solutions

      Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

    • Enterprise Solutions

      Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

    • The Moz Story

      Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

    • New Releases

      Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

    Surface actionable competitive intel
    New Feature

    Surface actionable competitive intel

    Learn More
  • Log in
    • Moz Pro
    • Moz Local
    • Moz Local Dashboard
    • Moz API
    • Moz API Dashboard
    • Moz Academy
  • Avatar
    • Moz Home
    • Notifications
    • Account & Billing
    • Manage Users
    • Community Profile
    • My Q&A
    • My Videos
    • Log Out

The Moz Q&A Forum

  • Forum
  • Questions
  • Users
  • Ask the Community

Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

  1. Home
  2. SEO Tactics
  3. Technical SEO
  4. /~username

Moz Q&A is closed.

After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

/~username

Technical SEO
2
5
707
Loading More Posts
  • Oldest to Newest
  • Newest to Oldest
  • Most Votes
Reply
  • Reply as question
Log in to reply
This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
  • jwdl
    jwdl last edited by Nov 19, 2012, 7:40 AM

    Hello,

    The utility on this site that crawls your site and highlights what it sees as potential problems reported an issue with /~username access seeing it as duplicate content i.e. mydomain.com/file.htm is the same as mydomain.com~/username/file.htm so I went to my server hosts and they disabled it using mod_userdir but GWT now gives loads of 404 errors.

    Have I gone about this the wrong way or was it not really a problem in the first place or have I fixed something that wasn't broken and made things worse?

    Thanks,

    Ian

    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
    • jwdl
      jwdl @jwdl last edited by Nov 19, 2012, 1:19 PM Nov 19, 2012, 1:19 PM

      OK thanks for that.

      Ian

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • RyanKent
        RyanKent @jwdl last edited by Nov 19, 2012, 12:59 PM Nov 19, 2012, 12:59 PM

        I can't find any listing on google for the /~user name pages

        In that case, you can safely ignore the issue if you are confident there are no links to those pages on your site.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • jwdl
          jwdl @RyanKent last edited by Nov 19, 2012, 8:41 AM Nov 19, 2012, 8:41 AM

          Thank you for your response.

          There are no links from anywhere that I control to it. The first I was aware that you could even access the site in this way was when the utility on this site reported it.

          It causes no problems to the sites operation. The only links to the /~username pages are from other /~username pages except an obscure search engine links to a few pages.

          I can't find any listing on google for the /~user name pages and in WMT it says "Generally, 404s don't harm your site's performance in search"

          So in this case do I ignore it and the 404's will stop once it realises the other pages aren't there? (except links from external sites) or do I need to do something because its an SEO problem

          RyanKent jwdl 2 Replies Last reply Nov 19, 2012, 1:19 PM Reply Quote 0
          • RyanKent
            RyanKent last edited by Nov 19, 2012, 7:57 AM Nov 19, 2012, 7:57 AM

            If you see the issue in Google WMT, then somewhere a link to the /~username URL was found and crawled.

            As a best practice, a link to the /~username URL should not be used on your site. Adding a canonical tag to your pages would have helped better manage this issue as well.

            At this point, if those results were appearing in SERPs you can add a 301 redirect from the /~username URL to the correct one.

            jwdl 1 Reply Last reply Nov 19, 2012, 8:41 AM Reply Quote 0
            • 1 / 1
            1 out of 5
            • First post
              1/5
              Last post

            Got a burning SEO question?

            Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


            Start my free trial


            Browse Questions

            Explore more categories

            • Moz Tools

              Chat with the community about the Moz tools.

            • SEO Tactics

              Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers

            • Community

              Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!

            • Digital Marketing

              Chat about tactics outside of SEO

            • Research & Trends

              Dive into research and trends in the search industry.

            • Support

              Connect on product support and feature requests.

            • See all categories

            Related Questions

            • acsilver

              What do you do with product pages that are no longer used ? Delete/redirect to category/404 etc

              We have a store with thousands of active items and thousands of sold items. Each product is unique so only one of each. All products are pinned and pushed online ... and then they sell and we have a product page for a sold item. All products are keyword researched and often can rank well for longtail keywords Would you :- 1. delete the page and let it 404 (we will get thousands) 2. See if the page has a decent PA, incoming links and traffic and if so redirect to a RELEVANT category page ? ~(again there will be thousands) 3. Re use the page for another product - for example a sold ruby ring gets replaces with ta new ruby ring and we use that same page /url for the new item. Gemma

              Technical SEO | Feb 26, 2019, 3:42 PM | acsilver
              0
            • arun.negi

              We switched the domain from www.blog.domain.com to domain.com/blog.

              We switched the domain from www.blog.domain.com to domain.com/blog. This was done with the purpose of gaining backlinks to our main website as well along with to our blog. This set us very low in organic traffic and not to mention, lost the backlinks. For anything, they are being redirected to 301 code. Kindly suggest changes to bring back all the traffic.

              Technical SEO | Nov 12, 2017, 10:15 AM | arun.negi
              0
            • SS.Digital

              Google Indexed a version of my site w/ MX record subdomain

              We're doing a site audit and found "internal" links to a page in search console that appear to be from a subdomain of our site based on our MX record.  We use Google Mail internally.  The links ultimately redirect to our correct preferred subdomain "www", but I am concerned as to why this is happening and if it can have any negative SEO implications. Example of one of the links: Links aspmx3.googlemail.com.sullivansolarpower.com/about/solar-power-blog/daniel-sullivan/renewable-energy-and-electric-cars-are-not-political-footballs I did a site operator search, site:aspmx3.googlemail.com.sullivansolarpower.com on google and it returns several results.

              Technical SEO | Aug 1, 2017, 5:10 AM | SS.Digital
              0
            • moon-boots

              Rel Canonical, Follow/No Follow in htaccess?

              Very quick question, are rel canonical, follow/no follow tags, etc. written in the htaccess file?

              Technical SEO | Sep 27, 2016, 10:36 AM | moon-boots
              0
            • Dan-Lawrence

              Image Height/Width attributes, how important are they and should a best practice site include this as std

              Hi How important are the image height/width attributes and would you expect a best practice site to have them included ? I hear not having them can slow down a page load time is that correct ? Any other issues from not having them ? I know some re social sharing (i know bufferapp prefers images with h/w attributes to draw into their selection of image options when you post) Most importantly though would you expect them to be intrinsic to sites that have been designed according to best practice guidelines ? Thanks

              Technical SEO | Oct 7, 2013, 9:26 AM | Dan-Lawrence
              0
            • askotzko

              Do we need to manually submit a sitemap every time, or can we host it on our site as /sitemap and Google will see & crawl it?

              I realized we don't have a sitemap in place, so we're going to get one built. Once we do, I'll submit it manually to Google via Webmaster tools. However, we have a very dynamic site with content constantly being added. Will I need to keep manually re-submitting the sitemap to Google? Or could we have the continually updating sitemap live on our site at /sitemap and the crawlers will just pick it up from there? I noticed this is what SEOmoz does at http://www.seomoz.org/sitemap.

              Technical SEO | Mar 13, 2012, 3:16 PM | askotzko
              0
            • Freebetsuk

              DISQUS COMMENTS backlinks-good for seo? YES/NO?

              DISQUS COMMENTS backlinks-good for seo? YES/NO? I have just started commenting on "powered by disquus" websites in the Disqus comments box and left a link to my website in the name field! Having googled whether Disqus comments backlinks are any good for seo purposes i have discovered that there is a 50/50 view on the subject with some people saying they are a "goldmine" for getting high PR backlinks and others saying they are a waste of time because googlebot cannot read Java. My own experience of commenting on Disqus powered websites is that wordpress blogs powered by disqus comments ARE INDEXED by GOOGLE and the "BACKLINK IS IN THE SOURCE OF THE PAGE" When i comment on normal websites using the Disqus comment system i have found that my Disqus comments ARE NOT indexed by Google and there IS NO BACKLINK in the page source! Has anybody got any views on whether Disqus comments backlinks are any good?

              Technical SEO | Jul 1, 2024, 5:25 AM | Freebetsuk
              2
            • RobertFisher

              On a dedicated server with multiple IP addresses, how can one address group be slow/time out and all other IP addresses OK?

              We utilize a dedicated server to host roughly 60 sites on. The server is with a company that utilizes a lady who drives race cars.... About 4 months ago we realized we had a group of sites down thanks to monitoring alerts and checked it out. All were on the same IP address and the sites on the other IP address were still up and functioning well. When we contacted the support at first we were stonewalled, but eventually they said there was a problem and it was resolved within about 2 hours. Up until recently we had no problems. As a part of our ongoing SEO we check page load speed for our clients. A few days ago a client who has their site hosted by the same company was running very slow (about 8 seconds to load without cache). We ran every check we could and could not find a reason on our end. The client called the host and were told they needed to be on some other type of server (with the host) at a fee increase of roughly $10 per month. Yesterday, we noticed one group of sites on our server was down and, again, it was one IP address with about 8 sites on it. On chat with support, they kept saying it was our ISP. (We speed tested on multiple computers and were 22MB down and 9MB up +/-2MB). We ran a trace on the IP address and it went through without a problem on three occassions over about ten minutes. After about 30 minutes the sites were back up. Here's the twist: we had a couple of people in the building who were on other ISP's try and the sites came up and loaded on their machines. Does anyone have any idea as to what the issue is?

              Technical SEO | Sep 4, 2011, 7:13 AM | RobertFisher
              0

            Get started with Moz Pro!

            Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

            Start my free trial
            Products
            • Moz Pro
            • Moz Local
            • Moz API
            • Moz Data
            • STAT
            • Product Updates
            Moz Solutions
            • SMB Solutions
            • Agency Solutions
            • Enterprise Solutions
            Free SEO Tools
            • Domain Authority Checker
            • Link Explorer
            • Keyword Explorer
            • Competitive Research
            • Brand Authority Checker
            • Local Citation Checker
            • MozBar Extension
            • MozCast
            Resources
            • Blog
            • SEO Learning Center
            • Help Hub
            • Beginner's Guide to SEO
            • How-to Guides
            • Moz Academy
            • API Docs
            About Moz
            • About
            • Team
            • Careers
            • Contact
            Why Moz
            • Case Studies
            • Testimonials
            Get Involved
            • Become an Affiliate
            • MozCon
            • Webinars
            • Practical Marketer Series
            • MozPod
            Connect with us

            Contact the Help team

            Join our newsletter
            Moz logo
            © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
            • Accessibility
            • Terms of Use
            • Privacy

            Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.