Questions tagged [seo]

Note: General SEO questions are off-topic. Only programming-related SEO questions are acceptable on Stack Overflow. Non-programming SEO questions should be asked on Webmasters.SE at https://webmasters.stackexchange.com. If someone has directed you here to read this warning, go back and delete your question.

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a methodology for helping websites to improve search engine rankings.

Most search engines return results based on relevance to a set of input keywords, or a query, provided by a client (typically a user visiting a search engine's website). Ranking well in any given search for a popular keyword can mean more traffic for a website, which translates into pageviews, comments and most importantly, sales.

Most SEO questions are off-topic

Questions must relate to programming to be on-topic. This means you must have a specific programming problem you are trying to resolve.

On-topic examples include:

Off-topic examples include:

  • Will using a specific programming technique harm my rankings in search engines?

Most SEO questions fall into the category of how to get better rankings or what tactics can be employed to improve robots crawling a site. These and other general SEO questions that are not specifically about programming should be asked on the Pro Webmasters Stack Exchange site. The questions should include the SEO tag. See this discussion on Meta Stack Overflow for details.

WordPress-related SEO questions should be tagged as or . However, generic SEO questions with regards to WordPress belong on WordPress.

Related Tags

Books

7850 questions
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6 answers

Noscript Tag, JavaScript Disabled Warning and Google Penalty

I have been using a noscript tag to show a warning when users have JavaScript disabled or are using script blocking plugins like Noscript. The website will not function properly if JavaScript is disabled and users may not figure out why it is not…
undoIT
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External links: when use rel="external" or rel="nofollow"?

In most of my web site I have a lot of external links to my other sites and other external sites. I need to know when is better to use rel="nofollow" or rel="external" in a website?
Overnet
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Java code/library for generating slugs (for use in pretty URLs)

Web frameworks such as Rails and Django has built-in support for "slugs" which are used to generate readable and SEO-friendly URLs: Slugs in Rails Slugs in Django A slug string typically contains only of the characters a-z, 0-9 and - and can hence…
knorv
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What is the correct use of schema.org SiteNavigationElement?

In SEO terms... Is it best to put the scheme on the parent containing all the links?
Giel Berkers
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5 answers

What microdata should I use for a blog?

The blog is basically a page that lists the summary of like 10 articles, each item title linking to the full article page. I've seen: http://schema.org/Blog http://schema.org/Article (or maybe http://schema.org/BlogPosting ?) Where do I use…
Alex
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12 answers

Can an "SEO Friendly" url contain a unique ID?

I'd like to start using "SEO Friendly Urls" but the notion of generating and looking up large, unique text "ids" seems to be a significant performance challenge relative to simply looking up by an integer. Now, I know this isn't as "human friendly",…
James White
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9 answers

Is there a way to make search bots ignore certain text?

I have my blog (you can see it if you want, from my profile), and it's fresh, as well as google robots parsing results are. The results were alarming to me. Apparently the most common 2 words on my site are "rss" and "feed", because I use text for…
Alex
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5 answers

Is there a standardized (meta?) tag for the date of a website?

One thing that search engines really suck with is the date when a website was created. You know the problem: You search for some CSS or JavaScript problem and Google returns a ton of results from 2002 explaining how to fix the problem in IE 5.5 and…
Michael Stum
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2 answers

Can I Use Multiple ItemProps in a Span Tag for schema.org Rich Snippets?

Let's say I have the following sentence I want to add rich snippets to: I live and work in New York Since New York is both my residency and the city where I work in, I would theoretically want to tag the line like this using schema.org…
Lloyd Banks
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10 answers

Is h1 tag that's hidden using display:none given prominence by search engines?

When content is hidden by CSS (display:none), is that read by Search engines or are sites penalised for that ? In my case, due to some CMS and other reasons, I need to serve alternative content to users and hide the H1 tag on the page using…
Iris
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4 answers

What is the difference between and in HTML, and do they affect website rankings?

What is the difference between and ? I have read here that there are semantic differences between and , does this apply to and ? Additionally, how are such semantic differences, if any, interpreted by search engines and…
octref
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Are 301 redirects possible using javascript or jQuery?

I'm running Apache 2.0 and I'm just wondering if it is possible to make a 301 redirect using JavaScript or jQuery. I have an tag with href to a specified location and I'm asked to make a 301 redirect when I click that link. This is for SEO…
Caleb Doucet
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In Websphere Commerce 7, how do I remove the language and store name from an SEO url the correct way?

Currently the client I'm working for is making use of the SEO Friendly urls outlined here: https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/SSZLC2_8.0.0/com.ibm.commerce.seositemap.doc/concepts/csdSEOURLconstruction.htm However, they would like to…
jros
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How do I redirect without www using Rails 3 / Rack?

I understand there are a lot of questions that answer this. I'm familiar with .htaccess and nginx.conf methods, but I do not have access to such traditional configuration methods on Heroku. Simone Carletti gave this answer that leverages Rails 2.x…
maček
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3 answers

SEO for multilingual sites: language-specific results without changing URL?

I have a site that has 2 languages: English and Swedish. What I want is, if someone Googles the site in Sweden, it should show the Swedish results. That is, I want Google in Sweden (google.se) to crawl the Swedish version of the site. For any…
Nauman Bashir
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