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.
SEO audit on a beta site
-
HI there, Is there much point conducting an SEO site audit on a site that has not yet launched and is protected behind a login? Presumably none of the usual SEO tools (Moz, Screaming Frog etc) can crawl this site becuase it is all locked behind a login. Would it be better to launch it and then do a site audit?
Thanks
-
Not sure if not yet lunched meaning it is a brand new site and domain or if this is going to be a new edsign/cms etc..
so, If the site never went live you should have no concerns google spider coming to crawl your site.
But if it is an updated version of an existing website, its better to create a subdomain.
This is the most common practice, you create something like test.domain.com and use robots.txt on this test domain to block all access.it is the safest way that i know
good luck
-
It isn't possible to do this when behind a login but I would definitely still spend the time doing what you can manually before pushing it live.
The other option you have is to push it "live" but block the whole site from crawlers with Robots.txt. Screaming Frog does give you the option to ignore the instructions in Robots so you could still crawl it. If this site is replacing an existing one that makes it a little more tricky. If that's the case, you could still do this but make sure that you get to work on your audit the second you push it live and get it done as quickly as possible.
If the site is up and blocked via Robots for 20 minutes it's unlikely to cause an issue. If you leave it that way for a week however... not such a good idea
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.
Related Questions
-
Seeking SEO contractor
I would like to hire an SEO contractor to assist with some technical/SEO issues on our site (Schema, etc). Can anyone make a recommendation? I am looking to work with a small company. Thank you in advance for any referrals!
On-Page Optimization | | JulieALS1 -
Is Disqus comments useful as per SEO?
Is Disqus comments useful as per SEO? We have some comments on each of our pages and its time taking to moderate them, so wanted to know if its beneficial in any ways for SEO?
On-Page Optimization | | bsharath0 -
Less Tags better for SEO?
I am currently reviewing my strategy when it comes to categories and tags on my site. Â Having been no-indexed for some time, and having many tags with just one entry I am thinking that this is not optimal for SEO purposes. This is what I am planning: Categories - Change these to Index, but only after adding a hundred words or so by way of introduction (see this example - https://www.besthostnews.com/news/hosting/a-small-orange-news/). Â With the categories I am thinking of highlighting key articles as well to improve link juice distribution to older articles that are important. Tags - About half my tags have only 1 entry, with a few more just having 2 entries. Â I am thinking of deleting all tags with just one entry, and trying to merge those with just two or 3 entries where it makes sense to do so. Â I will keep these as no-index, but I think this will mean more optimal distribution of link juice within the site. I would appreciate your thoughts \ suggestions on the best practices here.
On-Page Optimization | | TheWebMastercom0 -
Using Escaped Fragments with SEO
Our e-commerce platform is in the process of changing to what we call app based stores (essentially running in a browser as single page web-app)Â With these new stores they are being built in HTML 5 and using escaped fragments.
On-Page Optimization | | marketing_zoovy.com
Currently merchants are usually running 2 stores until we launch to app site at 100%. My questions are really concerning the app stores which right now show on a subdomain but will essentially take over the primary domain.  Here is an example:
app.tikimater.com and app.sportsworld.com Since I am not a developer, I'm really having a hard time understanding the escaped fragments. I'm using this but https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/getting-started I'm not sure what my actual urls should look like and what the canonical should be set to. Right now they have been removed but previously they had http:app.tikimaster.com#!v=1 Also, and how I should be setting up my meta information for Google so 1) pages are indexed timely 2) pages are indexed with the correct information. I am still setting the meta titles and descriptions but in some instances Google uses other info. With the new platform we are moving away from on page content (written paragraphs) but category pages would have related products embedded. Should I still be pushing to have some type of intro text, since it would solely be for SEO and not the shoppers experience. All product pages have content (product description etc) Thank you for any advice0 -
Duplicate content on partner site
I have a trade partner who will be using some of our content on their site. What's the best way to prevent any duplicate content issues? Their plan is to attribute the content to us using rel=author tagging. Would this be sufficient or should I request that they do something else too? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | ShearingsGroup0 -
SEO for Online Auto Parts Store
I'm currently doing an audit for an online auto parts store and am having a hard time wrapping my head around their duplicate content issue. The current set up is this: The catalogue starts with the user selecting their year of vehicle They then choose their brand (so each of the year pages have listed every single brand of car, creating duplicate content) They then choose their model of car and then the engine And then this takes them to a page listing every type/category of product they sell (so each and every model type/engine size has the exact same content!) This is amounting to literally thousands of pages being seen as duplicates It's a giant mess. Is using rel=canonical the best thing to do? I'm having a hard time seeing a logical way of structuring the site to avoid this issue. Anyone have any ideas?
On-Page Optimization | | ATMOSMarketing560 -
Ecommerce On-Site SEO: Keywords in Category Descriptions
Hello, I'm doing on-site SEO for a client's ecommerce site. Are 160 words enough for a category description? I'm using the keywords once at the top of the description, and once at the bottom of the description, with the ones at the bottom reworded so that they are the keywords with a different word order. I used to put the keywords in 3 times but it just feels like stuffing. Is twice, worded differently the second time, enough for a category description? Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | BobGW0 -
Best SEO structure for blog
What is the best SEO page/link structure for a blog with, say 100 posts that grows at a rate of 4 per month? Each post is 500+ words with charts/graphics; they're not simple one paragraph postings. Rather than use a CMS I have a hand crafted HTML/CSS blog (for tighter integration with the parent site, some dynamic data effects, and in general to have total control). I have a sidebar with headlines from all prior posts, and my blog home page is a 1 line summary of each article. I feel that after 100 articles the sidebar and home page have too many links on them. What is the optimal way to split them up? They are all covering the same niche topic that my site is about. I thought of making the side bar and home page only have the most recent 25 postings, and then create an archive directory for older posts. But categorizing by time doesn't really help someone looking for a specific topic. I could tag each entry with 2-3 keywords and then make the sidebar a sorted list of tags. Clicking on a tag would then show an intermediate index of all articles that have that tag, and then you could click on an article title to read the whole article. Or is there some other strategy that is optimal for SEO and the indexing robots? Is it bad to have a blog that is too heirarchical (where articles are 3 levels down from the root domain) or too flat (if there are 100s of entries)? Thanks for any thoughts or pointers.
On-Page Optimization | | scanlin0