Skip to content

Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

Category: On-Page Optimization

Explore on-page optimization and its role in a larger SEO strategy.


  • I'm doing competitive research and noticed that one of our competitors (who outranks us) uses canonical tags on every page on their site. The canonical tags reference the page they are on. For example. www.competitor.com/product has a canonical tag of www.competitor.com/product. Does anyone use this practice? It seems strange to me. Thank you, Kristen

    | Ksink
    0

  • Got a question regarding hreflang tag and specifically about the language part:
    If I have 2 parallel pages, one in German and one in English for UK users. for example: How does google see the “language” part: 1.Based on user language – Google will display this page in the SERP according to what google believe is the user’s language based on the user’s browsers language setting, search query language ect..? in this case the German speaking user in UK will get the DE version Or 2.The language setting in the hreflang tag just means the specified URL language
    So Google will display the EN-GB version in UK both to the English & German user? If you jave any other ideas - i will be glad to hear:) Hope I’m clear enough. Thanks!

    | Kung_fu_Panda
    0

  • Someone told me it does but I thought that was old school way of thinking.  Any thoughts?

    | tryfantasy
    1

  • Hi, Since we have a lot of similar products with duplicate descriptions, I decided to NOINDEX, FOLLOW most of these different variants which have duplicate content. However, I guess it would be useful in marketing terms if Google image search still listed the images of the products in image search. How does the image search of Google actually work - does it read the NOINDEX on the product page and therefore skip the image also or is the image search completely dependent on the ALT tag of any image found on our site? Thanks!

    | speedbird1229
    0

  • Hi Moz is reporting no meta description on a wordpress category page like this one: http://www.dwliverpoolphotography.co.uk/category/uncategorized/ Can I add a meta description to a category? Best wishes. David.

    | WallerD
    0

  • Our website's Community Forum links to the membership profile pages, which by default are blocked for non-members. https://www.foodbloggerpro.com/community/ https://www.foodbloggerpro.com/community/member/1301/ We're getting warnings in Moz for duplicate content (and errors) on these member profile pages. Any ideas for how we can creatively solve this problem? Should we redirect those pages or just beef them up with more content? Just ignore it and assume that search spiders will be smart enough to figure it out? See attached video for further explanation. Community_Area.mp4

    | Bjork
    0

  • We're overwhelmed with client work and looking to hire an SEO professional to handle our local rankings and give us a fresh perspective. Feel free to message me privately or reply here. Thanks!

    | ScottImageWorks
    0

  • Hello, I used a plugin to no-index a lot of pages on my website, and its been couple months and they never disappeared from serps, so i used the google webmaster tool "remove urls" to ask google to  remove them. Is that a good idea? Or does it look bad in googles eyes? any thoughts would help a lot. Thanks

    | Rank-and-Grow
    0

  • I have a site that has used both www and non-www urls since inception years ago.  Moz is saying that I have 183 pages of duplicate content, and it is all because each internal link has both versions.  Both versions have high PR and links going back to them...should I still 301 redirect to one of them or should I leave them be? Thanks Brad

    | bradleymiller148
    0

  • Hi Mozzers, We've been A-B testing landing pages, and have had some success. The changes we've been making have been quite radical in some instances - for example we tested this page: https://www.turnkeymortgages.co.uk/todays-mortgage-deals/ against this one: https://www.turnkeymortgages.co.uk/mortgage-quote/ (Today's best deals won, but we've decided to keep the quote page as it does work for some channels). The decision was made to try and optimise Today's best deals for 'best mortgage deals today' rather than 'mortgage quote' because it offers so much more than simply a quote. The quote page is optimised for 'mortgage quote', though it doesn't rank particularly well (I'm not overly concerned by this as even though you'd think that when people are looking for a quote that they would fill in the form, they don't - people are strange!) As a result of the change above we changed all links that originally went to the quote page to go to Today's best deals instead. As we go through the process of optimising for best conversion will it be damaging if we don't change the url as well. As I can see lots of iterations and lots of work whenever we make changes to the pages (going through the entire site to change the links). I am worried though that we'll end up with hundreds of landing pages and changing links all over the site - do you think we should keep the URLs the same from now on, unless the content changes as radically as it did in the instance I've highlighted above? Thanks, Amelia

    | CommT
    0

  • This brought up another question. should the review page (which now has a canonical to the item page) be Index,follow? My item review pages are showing up with Duplicate Content errors in MOZ. Here are two examples http://www.americanmusical.com/ItemReview--i-HAM-SK1-LIST http://www.americanmusical.com/ItemReview--i-MAC-203680902-LIST is the problem that the pages contain the same code and questions with very little customer created info?

    | dianeb152
    0

  • Hi guys, We have a client who is getting their website redesigned through us. They are discontinuing couple of their services which will not get featured in the new site. They are fairly well ranked for these services and my client wishes to 301 redirect these pages to an external site owned by his friend so that they benefit out of the ranking. The question is: Will my client's website's general ranking get affected due to 301 redirecting to an external site? The external site is not spammy or red-flagged by Google (at the moment, at least). Thanks in advance!
    Ramesh Nair

    | RameshNair
    0

  • What's the best practice for displaying author information at the beginning of an article? We're presently displaying it as: By <Author> • Jan 16, 2015 • <City>. We're considering making it even more concise by removing the term 'By'. Would be shooting ourselves in the foot if we did this? Any other ways we should optimize?

    | TheaterMania
    0

  • I'm looking for advice for what you would start with if you were working on a website that was extremely over-optimized for 1 keyword. So, for example, I'm going to pretend this client is a dog trainer in Toronto (I can't publicly post the URL). I've read places that having exact-match anchor text links to inner pages in the footer of the site can cause problems and removing it has resulted in big ranking jumps. I'm looking to see if there are other big items that you would tackle first if this was your client. Some examples of things the site has: There is a page for dog training under their Services menu. However, internal links on their site link "dog training" to both the homepage and to this service page. Is that going to cause issues? The anchor text for internal linking is almost always the exact same word - "Dog Training". There is a banner that goes across the top of the site that appears on every page that says "Dog Training Toronto". I'm guessing I should remove that. Would the same keyword being overly used on every page cause confusion? Almost every image on his site is saved in the format "Dog Training Toronto". I'm looking to see if anyone has general tips on where to start with a site that has been over-optimized for 1 keyword. He actually has a ton of good content on his blog that gets a ton of traffic (because it's actually useful) so it's not that his content sucks - it's just been overly structured and SEO'd to death. I found a few articles on this but other than the footer advice I didn't find too many case studies of others that have run into this issue and done a few steps that actually worked.

    | ImprezzioMarketing
    0

  • I am curently setting up a travel agency website. This site is going to be targeting both american and mexican costumers. I will be working with an /es subdirectory. Would hreflang, besides showing the matching language version in the SERP´s,  restrain my site translated content (wich is pretty much the same) from being penalized fro duplicated content? Do I have to implement relcannonical? Thank ypu in advanced for any help you can provide.

    | kpi360
    0

  • I was wondering why some of my keywords are ranking in my homepage but are not mentioned even once. Is it maybe because they are semantically related with the keywords targeted on the homepage? What are the reason(s) for this? Thanks for enlightening me with this one.

    | TWSOM
    0

  • Hi, 1. Is there any way to get the moz crawl to analyse any site like the website auditor tool in seo powersuite on command. It would be good to see what keyword my competitors  are using. would also like to analyse my site when i have corrected errors on command. 2. Is google adwords keyword tool still the best keyword research tool? I Don't see anything in the newbie guides to the moz pro tool regarding keyword research. Thanks! David.

    | WallerD
    0

  • Hi Team, I have been doing off page seo for my prestige kew gardens for quite some time. It has already been 5 months. till recently is was ranking in range of 200. Now I am able to get to first page from last month. But still I feel I am missing something to get it on top. ON Page Grade for this domain is A. I have used all the moz tool to check any on page issue. Everthing seems to be proper. Can anyone help me on this? http://www.prestigekewgardens.org.in/

    | mithungowda
    0

  • We are redesigning our website after a long stint with an SEO firm who also handled our design/dev. We want to clean up the links on our homepage but don't want to screw up our IA or SEO. We want to delete some navbar menu items and a whole bunch on random links to our evergreen content below the fold. Would we need to reposition those navbar items/content links to our footer or somewhere else on the homepage to maintain our internal linking structure? It would be great if you could take a look at our site and give us any suggestions or advice on the best way to go about this. Thanks!

    | Lorne_Marr
    1

  • Hi, I'm experiencing some heavy duplicate content Crawl errors on Moz with www.redrockdecals.com and therefore I really need some help. It brings up different connections between products and I'm having a hard time figuring out what it means. It is listing the same products as duplicate content but they have different URL endings. For example:http://www.redrockdecals.com/car-graphics/chevrolet-silverado?___store=nl&___from_store=us
    &
    http://www.redrockdecals.com/car-graphics/chevrolet-silverado?___store=d&___from_store=us It seems like Moz considers the copy-pasted parts in the Full Description (scrolled a bit down on product pages) as Duplicate Content. For example the general text found on this page: http://www.redrockdecals.com/caution-tow-limited-turning-radius-decal Or this page: http://www.redrockdecals.com/if-you-don-t-succeed-first-time-then-skydiving-isn-t-for-you-bumper-sticker I am planning to write new and unique descriptions for all products but what do you suggest - should I either remove the long same descriptions or just shorten them perhaps so they don't outweigh the short but unique descriptions above? I've heard search engines understand that some parts of the page can be same on other pages but I wonder if in my case this has gone too deep... Thanks so much!

    | speedbird1229
    0

  • Hi I have the following errors on my site and was wondering would it help improve my ranking to fix : Missing Meta Description Tag 137Duplicate Page Title 17Title Element is Too Long 6Temporary Redirect 3

    | WallerD
    0

  • Hi Wondering if anyone could help out here please. I tried to crawl my website using screaming frog and got a 500 error warning (odd considering it worked yesterday). I tried google speed test and got the following message - PageSpeed Insights received a 500 response from the server. To analyze pages behind firewalls or that require authentication. However, it also crawled the site and gave me a score of 70/100. It showed the site thumbnail, as normal. This was updated this morning and it showed the latest one so must have crawled. I can access the site, as can my 'people', the site is getting hits from real users in Google Analytics so must be working. Am very puzzled how the site can be working and not be working at the same time! If possible i would rather not share the url. The site is a test of concept and is very messy looking. it is more a test to see what happens if i do x... Many thanks Carl

    | daedriccarl
    0

  • I had a site that was http://www.site.com and now the entire site is https://www.site.com. I notice in WMT its showing  https://wwwsite.com listed as not verified.  I never added it, but did Google recognize it and added it to my list of sites? Do I need to verify it? Is it ok to have verified http:www.site.com and additionally https://www.site.com Also, i submitted a new sitemap and indexed pages are low. Will that go up as Google crawls the site? The https://www.site.com was launched about a week ago. Thanks.

    | Kdruckenbrod
    0

  • I have two SEO optimised pages in my website targeting different keywords www.example.com                 <-- main selling page (Pocket Guitar | Guitar Instruments)
    www.example.com/index/       <-- 2nd selling page (Guitar Australia | Guitar Perth) Q: At first my website "www.example.com" is ranking on google first page. Suddenly it disappears and the link "www.example.com/index/" appears instead. No matter what i search, "Pocket Guitar | Guitar Instruments | Guitar Australia | Guitar Perth", the link www.example.com/index/ appears on the front page instead of www.example.com. What is happening to my main domain? Should i be worried?

    | kevinbp
    0

  • URL is: www.radianceofpalmbeach.comGreetings All:I have been working on our company's website for months, and I am finally at wit's end. The site was very out-of-date and had unfortunately been built upon some bad links before my arrival. My partner and I have redone the site with SEO best practices in mind: we created new content for the pages, and have been working diligently on correctly organizing the site. Despite everything we have done, our site has plummeted since September in terms of organic search. Here are some of my suspects: Panda/Penguin: a lot of the content of the old site had been copied. We did our best to make our content helpful and original, but I'm not sure we did enough. Also, many backlinks were suspect. I disavowed all that I didn't like Dec. 8. I have seen minor improvement, but not much. Name Change: Around late October, coinciding with one of the algorithm changes, the doctor insisted we change our name from New Radiance Med Spa to New Radiance Cosmetic Center. We noticed overnight tumbling, but it literally happened at the same time many were complaining about Penguin. Pages too far removed from root directory?: We tried to silo the site by category to make it specific, but I'm not sure if we went too far from the root directory. For example, our botox page is: http://www.radianceofpalmbeach.com/services/injectables/neuromodulators/botox-cosmetic/ -- Should it just be ./botox ? Everything is only one link away, so we didn't foresee a problem. No alternate forms of navigation: Our navigation is solely drop-down. Content Issues: Since the site launch, my boss has changed the organization of the site around. I don't think this should be a problem, but I honestly don't know. Technical Issues: We use a Wordpress site, and the designer has been pretty good about making the site clean and without errors, but perhaps there is something I am overlooking? ??: Despite these issues, I feel like our site should be considered better than many of our competitors who nonetheless perform much better than we do on important keyword searches. Type in "liposuction palm beach" or "botox palm beach" and we don't even come on page 1, whereas we used to dominate. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated, as, like I said, we are stumped. I feel like I have looked up every possible problem, and with the above list, we feel frozen as to which direction to turn.Thanks in advance,Michael

    | mikedelseo
    0

  • I remember finding a tutorial on MOZ about how to remove low quality links. But i cant find it now. can someone help?

    | kevinbp
    0

  • Hi guys, my H1 code is like but Yoast SEO and Google Page Speed keeps saying that i do not have a H1 tag in my website, Is my code wrong? Keyword | Keyword2

    | kevinbp
    0

  • Hi, I have a company website that I have access to and it's bcannon.remax-mississippi.com. It allows you to choose a domain and have it 301 redirected so I changed it to Oxfordmissrealestate.com. I noticed that the page and domain authority for bcannon.remax-mississippi.com was pretty high so I took off the Oxfordmissrealestate.com domain and just left it as this subdomain. My question is, would you leave it how it is as the subdomain or change it?  Thanks!

    | Veebs
    0

  • Hi Anyone know latest thinking re 'hidden content' such as body copy behind a 'read more' type button/link in light of John Muellers comments toward end of last year (that they discount hidden copy etc) & follow up posts on Search Engine Round Table & Moz etc etc ? Lots of people were testing it and finding such content was still being crawled & indexed so presumed not a big deal after all but if Google said they discount it surely we now want to reveal/unhide such body copy if it contains text important to the pages seo efforts. Do you think it could be the case that G is still crawling & indexing such content BUT any contribution that copy may have had to the pages seo efforts is now lost if hidden. So to get its contribution to SEO back one needs to reveal it, have fully displayed ? OR no need to worry and can keep such copy behind a 'read more' button/link ? All Best Dan

    | Dan-Lawrence
    0

  • My company offers several generalized categories with more specific services underneath each category. Currently the way it's structured is if you click "Voice" you get a full description of each voice service we offer. I have a feeling this is shooting us in the foot. Would it be better to have a general overview of the services we offer on the "Voice" page that then links to the specified service? The blurb about the service on the overview page would be unique, not taken from the actual specific service's page.

    | AMATechTel
    0

  • Hi, please answer my questions: 1. Is it okay to use the same keyword on both file name and alt tags when inserting an image? Example: File Name: buy-lego-online.jpg ALT tag: buy-lego-online Will it trigger Google Panda? Will I be penalized for that? Or the file name and alt tags should be different from each other? Because when inserting an image on Wordpress, the alt tags are always the same as the file name by default. 2. For example, I have 2 images in a page (same topic/niche) and I will put "cheap-lego-for-kids" and "best-lego-for-sale" as alt tags. Considering that I repeat the word "lego", is it considered keyword stuffing? Will I be penalized for that? Thanks in advance!

    | bubblymaiko
    0

  • Hello! I'm working with Magento 1.9 for an eCommerce site with several hundred products. Currently I understand it is best practices to use the Canonical tag, however I also have my default robots set to "Index, Follow". Will this cause an issue having product pages set to index, follow but also having a canonical tag included? What are some best practices regarding Magento default robots & canonical tags? Any help is appreciated.

    | BretDarby
    0

  • Hi sorry for the newbie question, I have a few 404 pages on my moz crawl report. so for example this one : http://www.dwliverpoolphotography.co.uk/blog/www.coraclecomm.wordpress.com. How can I find the page that is linking to it so I can fix the link or delete it? Best wishes. David.

    | WallerD
    0

  • Google News is always rejecting my application. I feel as if my site strongly fits the requirements yet they reject it all the time. My url is hiddentriforce.com Any thoughts?

    | Atomicx
    0

  • We can rank a e-commerce product page,
    http://moz.com/blog/building-deep-links-into-ecommerce-pages Q: But how do we rank a forum topic?
    For example i want to rank this page, http://moz.com/community/q/does-a-link-in-facebook-count-as-a-backlinkHow do i go about doing it? Is it similar to ranking a website?

    | kevinbp
    1

  • Hi Gang, We are a multi-state law firm (Indiana, Michigan, New Mexico) that is looking to increase ranking for Michigan and New Mexico for 2015. (Michigan and New Mexico used to exist as subdomains under 2keller.com but have now been incorporated as pages under the main domain.) The question is whether or not we link directly to what we call the "main state pages" from various accounts like G+, FB, Yellow Pages, Yelp, etc.? For example, should we link from our New Mexcio G+ page to our New Mexico main page, or should it be linked to the main domain at 2keller.com where our general branding is on display? I seem to remember somewhere seeing a Whiteboard Friday or some other forum in which Rand had spoke to something similar. I believe he advised AGAINST trying to control the "user experience" for instances like these, but I can't locate same. I understand that clients/customers are looking for our main brand, but it would seem to be the better experience to get users in state specific locales to their state specific page. Am I thinking wrong about this? Thanks in advance! Wayne

    | Wayne76
    0

  • We run an ecommerce company which sells machines.  After the machine is used for X amount of time, we suggest changing the blades in the machines.  We have a resource center for customer convenience. We are creating videos and content on how to change the blades in each machine. (each machine is a different process). Do we create videos and content in the resource center and link to the product page or do we beef up our content on the product page by adding that information there? 1 part of us thinks - "The new blade-changing content" is valuable to that product so buyers know the process before buying and hopefully gain some rank juice on the item pages. The other part of us thinks - Keep all resources in the resource center and link to learning resources from the product pages.  This version doesn't beef up our product pages but seems to be the logical place to hose the content on the website. Thoughts? Suggestions?

    | dkeipper
    0

  • Im using wordpress and I realise that my sitemaps doesnt update itself when i add an additional page on my website, like a blog post. I have to go to (1) setting > xml sitemap setting > click on build sitemap > save changes in wordpress, and then (2) Export the sitemal.xml file  it to webmaster tools in google every single time i blog. Am i doing it wrong? i feel that all these should be automatic.

    | kevinbp
    0

  • What are the conditions under which we should noindex blog categories? I'm asking because I want to decided whether or not to noindex our categories. here.

    | Heydarian
    1

  • I am sort of new to this, and working with an overseas development team on an eCommerce site. I am curious if the Canonical tag will supersede the tag, or if it is best to remove this tag entirely for duplicate product pages?

    | BretDarby
    1

  • My website structure www.example.com (wordpress installation number 1)
    www.example.com/forum/ (vbulletin installtion)
    www.example.com/shop/ (wordpress installation number 2) Each of these individual pages contains a fresh wordpress/vbulletin installation with their individual admin control panel. Am i doing this website entirely wrong? Is my website considered as a single website or does Google classify it as 3 different websites? My Ranking page is, www.example.com, and by blog post is www.example.com/forum/blog. When i do a link within my blog entry to my main ranking page, does it count as external or internal link?

    | kevinbp
    0

  • Recently i got into a discussion with someone regarding the use of headings on an e-commerce website. i had used headings whenever a heading was used in the design, they all marked the subject of the given section. For example: The sidebar contains items for filtering products. Each filter had a containing the name of the filter, like colors or brands. The discussion i had was about whether the use of headings was appropiate because the words contained within the heading had nothing to do with the main subject of the page (Soccer in this case). The advice from the SEO agency was to replace the headings with a different html element like a div or span and style this so it looks like tge heading in the design. What do you guys think?

    | WesleySmits
    0

  • I have been reading alot on SEO and there is something confusing about having "Outbound links. External Links." on your main ranking page. Some say that We shouldn't have any out bound links. (from Random website) According to Yoast, we should have outbound links. (yoast.com) we should have outbound links but we should add the "no-follow" tag. (from Random website) Q: What should i do and follow?
    If the answer is yes, how many outbound links is an appropriate amount per page?

    | kevinbp
    0

  • I'm looking at 2 keywords and i have optimized my main page towards it. My website consist of other pages like, "About Us, Contact Us, Testimonials". My SEO title and Meta Description for these pages are just the basic. Q: My question is, do i have to optimize the pages that i do not want to rank? Is there any way to utilise these pages to help my main page to rank?(besides using them for internal links)

    | kevinbp
    0

  • Hi Folks, I have event pages for specific training courses running on certain dates, the problem I have is that MOZ indicates that I have 1040 duplicate content issues because I'm serving pages like this https://purplegriffon.com/event/2521/mop-practitioner I'm not sure how best to go about resolving this as, of course, although each event is unique in terms of it's start date, the courses and locations could be identical. Will Google penalise us for these types of pages, or will they even index them? Should I add a canonical link to the head of the document pointing to the related course page such as https://purplegriffon.com/courses/project-management/mop-management-of-portfolios/mop-practitioner. Will this solve the issue? I'm a little stuck on what to do for the best. Any advice would be much appreciated. Thanks. Kind Regards Gareth Daine

    | PurpleGriffon
    0

  • Wondering what would be best in terms of SEO. Should I install some blog software actually on the website or can I just embed say a blogger.com blog? if I did that would they consider it duplicate content?

    | Superflys
    0

  • Hello Friends, A few days ago, I set up my wordpress site and everything is great so far, there's just one small problem. Wenn I search for site:mysite.com I see a lot of pages in the index I don't want to have on my site. It looks like demo pages from the theme I bought. Examples: http://mysite.com/themefusion_es_groups/group1/ http://mysite.com/slide/youtube/ http://mysite.com/lorem-ipsum-2/ http://mysite.com/slide/demo-5 What would be the best way to handle it? Simply delete the pages, then a soft 404 shows. Delete the pages and 301 them to the start page. Are they disapearing from the infex then? I am very grateful for tips regarding this! Thanks in Advance:)

    | grobro
    0

  • We are running a blog and would like to hide date, as users find the article less interesting if they are dated more than 2 years ago. Will hiding the article´s date in a blog affecto SEO? Thanks in advance u2cJxsr

    | goperformancelabs
    0

  • In Magento, when entering product information, does the short description have to be different than the meta description? If they are both the same is this considered duplicate content? Thanks for the help!!!

    | LeapOfBelief
    0

  • Hi There, I am hoping someone can advise me on getting the 'Results From' sitelink to display for my site on the Google SERP? I have searched far and wide for the answer with no luck. I'd really appreciate your advice. Thanks! Internal_Search_Google_SERP_zps75a5383e.jpg

    | tmg.seo
    0

Got a burning SEO question?

Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


Start my free trial


Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.