Hi David

I am getting the same issue when I use the Moz On-Page Grader, it is telling me I am using too many title tags, but surely this shouldn't flag an issue as these title tags are external from the head, or does this genuinely impact the ranking of the page?

Here is an example of an SVG our designer has put into a page (one of many) that is being flagged:

<title>Find Your Dealership Icon</title>

In addition do search engines read the title tag or is it ignored?

Thanks in advance to anyone that can help.

Thanks for the clarification EGOL, very useful!

For other users, here's the link to hidden text EGOL is talking about.

Hi Janice,

I have also been wondering the same thing. Although the above replies may have been relevant in 2012, now things seem to have changed. Being from a design background accordions and tabs have always been useful for both visuals and UX, but after reading Barry Schwartz’s article my outlook has changed and a work-around is required.

To conclude the above article, Google are stating hidden content is deemed as unimportant to the user so is 'discounted' and this is something that has been done for a while. If you want your content to have a positive impact on your page ranking it's better left visible unless it's something like FAQ and/or you're not interested in optimising the content on that page. Other members of Moz may have more information on this than me.

Thanks

Hi Dirk,

perfect, thanks a lot for clarifying.

All the best.

Sam

That was a helpful post - thanks for helping out.

Sam

Thanks a lot for your response here, Dirk.

Just to clarify - when you state to use the **correct **spelling on the page, am i correct in assuming you are meaning the spelling with the accent?

and with the foreign characters in HTML, by this are you meaning to use the proper HTML elements in every case rather than copy and pasting symbols in?

Apologies for asking these simple questions, but just wanted to make sure.

Kind Regards

Sam

Hi there,

thanks a lot for your response!

The franchise is a brand name, one that we look after but it is not anywhere in our own brand name. So if you think of a PC shop that sells Apple products, the brand name is Apple but the shop itself has nothing to do with apple and just sells their products - this is the case for us. Would this change your opinion on how to deal with it?

Thanks

Sam

Hi Guys,

My company has a franchise of a foreign company that uses an accent/foreign letter in its brand name. We have to refer to this franchise with this symbol on our website to meet their standards.

I've done some research on this but its not conclusive, so i was wondering whether anyone here can confirm this for me;

Will using the letter with this symbol impair our rankings for this franchise name? Obviously as a UK business people search for this franchise with a regular letter and not the accented one. I would have thought that Google is clever enough to recognise the meaning of the accented letter by now and therefore it wouldn't affect rankings (much). Furthermore, do you think that it would make any difference to use the HTML element to represent the accent rather than copy and pasting the symbol onto our website? I would've thought this would help Google pick it up, but it might not make a difference anyway!

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks

Sam

Thanks for your clarification on that Linda, that does make sense I just had to be sure!

in relation to my earlier point about not all redirects showing as backlinks, I found out earlier that our developer has been migrating our old domains over to a new server (which subsequently removed the 301 redirect) and therefore the reason some of my 301 redirects weren't showing as backlinks was because they had been removed! (I've put them back in place now). So thanks for your response as It encouraged me look further into this, resulting in the above findings!

Sam

Hi Linda,

It seems only some 301 redirects show up on my websites backlink profile. Perhaps this is an issue with these 301 redirects thats causing it, rather than the backlink software!

I've done some more digging in terms of the specific URL's and I now have more of an idea why there are so many there. My question now is; Is having so many URL's redirected like this a negative thing in Google's eyes?

Thanks

Sam

Hi Everyone,

I'm currently doing quite a large back link audit on my company's website and there's one thing that's bugging me.

Our website used to be split into two domains for separate areas of the business but since we have merged them together into one domain and have 301 redirected the old domain the the main one.

But now, both GWT and Majestic are telling me that I've got 12,000 backlinks from that domain?  This domain didn't even have 12,000 pages when it was live and I only did specific 301 redirects (ie. for specific URL's and not an overall domain level 301 redirect) for about 50 of the URL's with all the rest being redirected to the homepage. Therefore I'm quite confused about why its showing up as so many backlinks - Old redirects I've done don't usually show as a backlink at all.

UPDATE: I've got some more info on the specific back links. But now my question is - is having this many backlinks/redirects from a single domain going to be viewed negatively in Google's eyes? I'm currently doing a reconsideration request and would look to try and fix this issue if having so many backlinks from a single domain would be against Google's guidelines.

Does anybody have any ideas? Probably somthing very obvious.

Thanks!

Sam