Frequent Questions
3,343 questions
145
votes
9
answers
35k
views
How to find web hosting that meets my requirements?
This is a "catch-all" question designed to serve as an answer for all questions about choosing web hosting. Pro Webmasters no longer accepts new questions about how to choose hosting. All future ...
292
votes
26
answers
62k
views
What are the best ways to improve a site's position in Google?
What are the best ways to improve a site's position in the Google search results?
33
votes
3
answers
8k
views
Why aren't search engines indexing my content?
This is a general, community wiki catch-all question and answer pair intended to address any questions
concerning the reasons a site or specific site contents do not appear
in search engine ...
39
votes
2
answers
9k
views
What is duplicate content and how can I avoid being penalized for it on my site?
This is a general, community wiki question regarding duplicate content.
If your question was closed as a duplicate of this question and you feel that the information provided here does not provide a ...
271
votes
20
answers
48k
views
The Sitemap Paradox
We use a sitemap on Stack Overflow, but I have mixed feelings about it.
Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow ...
- 14k
34
votes
2
answers
11k
views
Which Content Management System (CMS)/Wiki should I use?
This is a general, community wiki catch-all question to address non-specific "I need a CMS or Wiki that does x, y, and z..." questions.
If your question was closed as a duplicate of this ...
132
votes
8
answers
41k
views
How should I structure my URLs for both SEO and localization?
When I set up a site in multiple languages, how should I set up my URLs for search engines and usability?
Let's say my site is www.example.com, and I'm translating into French and Spanish. What is ...
- 8,688
69
votes
6
answers
8k
views
What are the most important things I need to do to encourage Google Sitelinks?
My website used to have sitelinks and now it doesn't. It's very possible that it's due to changing the website to a sidebar design instead of having an "interstitial" type landing page which limited ...
- 893
27
votes
4
answers
7k
views
Well structured URLs vs. URLs optimized for SEO
Let’s take an example of a movie site. So a well structured set of URLs for this site can be:
Movie page - example.com/movies/the-matrix
Review for movie - example.com/movies/the-matrix/reviews
...
- 373
38
votes
4
answers
11k
views
Do subdomains help/hurt SEO?
If I have example.com, and blog.example.com, do search engines see those as one site or two? Will using subdomains hurt SEO? I have some technical reasons why I can't use example.com/blog.
- 543
24
votes
5
answers
2k
views
How to diagnose a search engine ranking drop?
There has been a significant drop (90%) in traffic from Google to one of my well-established sites (6+ years) in the last week. Searches show that the top 3 wide keywords all dropped 4 spots. Searches ...
- 6,037
47
votes
7
answers
13k
views
How to fight off Google Analytics referrer spammers?
Last months I have lots of referrer spammers in my GA statistics. Their count is ~10x higher than count of legit visitors (my site is not very popular yet). I've turned on an option to hide known ...
- 679
37
votes
5
answers
3k
views
Why isn't my website in Google search results? [duplicate]
It's been sometime and Google has yet to index my site. How can I get Google to index my website?
- 1,907
18
votes
4
answers
3k
views
Title tag different from title appearing in Google?
I'm just wondering how it is possible that IGN.com has this in its title tag:
Video Games, Cheats, Walkthroughs, Game Trailers, Reviews, News, Previews & Videos at IGN
while on Google its title ...
- 295
17
votes
4
answers
8k
views
What forum software should I use?
This is a general, community wiki catch-all question to address "I need a forum script that does x, y, and z..." questions.
If your question was closed as a duplicate of this question and you feel ...