Use a tool like Screaming Frog to crawl the site. You'll be able to see the response codes from each page and the redirected URL's. A temporary redirect will have a 302 status code.
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Best posts made by LauraSultan
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RE: How to find temporary redirects of existing site you don't control?
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RE: Do You Work At Home As An SEO Or Have An Office?
I've been running my agency from a home office for the last 14 years. Those on my team all work remotely, and it works out well. With a digital agency, there isn't much that you can do in an office that you can't do remotely. I'm very spoiled, so it would take a lot to get me to commute to an office every day. On the other hand, I like to attend networking events and conferences to keep from becoming a total recluse.
Of course, there's a downside to working from home. I don't recommend it if you're an extrovert, which I'm not. I don't recommend it if you can't manage your time and resist distractions. You also have to be able to resist the urge to work all the time.
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RE: What is the radius for local search results
There is no one specific radius for local results. It depends on the type of business and the query itself. For example, someone searching for a gas station probably needs the nearest one, but that's not necessarily true for someone searching for an attorney. The result radius can also be affected by modifiers like "near me" or "in my area." The intent is slightly different than if you search for a query + city, state or even if you search for the query without a geo-modifier. The device makes a difference as well. If you are on the go using your mobile phone, Google may assume you want the nearest location that's open now.
The best thing to do is search the specific queries in question with different modifiers and devices and see what kind of results you get.
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RE: Location Pages and Duplicate Content and Doorway Pages, Oh My!
These do appear to be contradictory guidelines until you understand what Google is trying to avoid here. Historically, SEOs have tried to rank businesses for geo-specific searches in areas other than where a business is located.
Let's say you run a gardening shop in Atlanta and you have an ecommerce side of the business online. Yes, you want to get walk-in traffic from the metro Atlanta area, but you also want to sell products online to customers all over the country. Ten years ago, you might set up 50 or so pages on your site with the exact same content with the city, state switched out. That way you could target keywords like the following:
- gardening supplies in Nashville, TN
- gardening supplies in Houston, TX
- gardening supplies in Seattle, WA
- gardening supplies in San Francisco, CA
- and so on...
That worked well 10 years ago, but the Panda update put a stop to that kind of nonsense. Google understands that someone searching for "gardening supplies in Nashville, TN" is looking for a brick and mortar location in Nashville and not an ecommerce store.
If you have locations in each of those cities, you have a legitimate reason to target the above search queries. On the other hand, you don't want to incur the wrath of Google with duplicate content on your landing pages. That's why the best solution is to create unique content that will appeal to users in that location. Yes, this requires time and possibly money to implement, but it's worth it when customers are streaming through the door at each location.
Check out Bright Local's recent InsideLocal Webinar: Powerful Content Creation Ideas for Local Businesses. They discussed several companies that are doing a great job with local landing page content.
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RE: Do you need contact details (NAP) on every page of your website for local search ranking ?
Ugh. I can't really speak to your precise issue without the URL, but it's possible they are sacrificing increased sales and UX to aesthetics. If they won't budge, you'll have to work harder to improve local search performance in other areas like off-site business citations and reviews.
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RE: Hiding content until user scrolls - Will Google penalize me?
John Mueller addressed a similar question in a recent Google Webmaster Central office-hours hangout, and he was pretty definitive. The question was about text that's hidden behind tabs. He states that they see the hidden content but won't give it as much weight.
Here's the link - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZAY-BwL6rU. The question starts at 6:45.
Google does read JavaScript and CSS, and that's why they send warnings to webmasters if such files are blocked from googlebot.
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RE: How to find temporary redirects of existing site you don't control?
You can find the 35 temporary redirects that Moz reports using the Screaming Frog tool. You'll see the redirects for individual links under the "Response Codes" tab. Look for the "Redirect URI" column.
The fastest way to find all of the redirects is to go to "Reports" > "Redirect Chains." This will show all the redirects on the site. I think you have to purchase a license for this feature.
If you are trying to find redirects that have been set up for incoming links from external sites, you'll have to access the .htaccess file. I also do a site:domain.com search in Google just to see if there are old links still in the index. Then keep an eye on 404 errors in Google Webmaster Tools after the site launches.
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RE: Redirecting to a new domain... a second time
You were right to redirect 1 directly to 3. It's not a huge problem to have short redirect chains, but the best practice is to redirect to the current live site.
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RE: Create Page Titles from H1 using Yoast?
By default, I think Yoast uses the post title as the Page Title with the sitename appended to the end. If you just want it to be the page title, you'll need to update the Yoast settings.
In the WP dashboard, go to SEO (Yoast settings) > Titles & Metas > Post Types tab. Add %%title%% next to the Title template. Your page level settings will override these on any pages where you have added a custom page title.
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RE: Google indexed wrong pages of my website.
Add the following noindex meta tag to let Google know that you don't want these pages indexed. See more info here.
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RE: Solution to Duplicate Pages within Shopify
This duplicate content does need to be addressed, but it's not as complicated as you might think.
Use pagination to solve the "page=1" issues, or use a canonical with a "View all" option. See the following for reference:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html
http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions
Set up the canonical links for the others, and that's all you'll need. You may want to noindex all of the tag pages for the blog unless you have unique content on those.