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Category: Algorithm Updates

Discuss algorithm updates and impacts.

  • vtmoz


    Hi all, We have enabled a plugin which translated our site to subdirectories. We are going to geo target certain language sites to their countires. Like Portuguese site website.com/it/ will be targetted to rank in Portugal. I wonder what to do with language sites where the same langauge is spoken in multiple countries. For example, if we target english site website.com to US; will it effects the ranking in other english countires like UK, Australia, Canada, etc....? Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0
  • SubhaVaastu


    Hi, I observed why Google is not visiting www.SubhaVastu.com from past 10 days, later I checked thoroughly, not only for my site, google stopped visiting all websites from past 10/12 days. Is Google releasing any new updates to the crawler? Any new system is releasing soon. I am expecting Google updated their crawler by this Sunday night and it may visit as usual to all sites from 12-midnight pacific time. Has anyone observed it, any information regarding on this Google step. Thanks.

    | SubhaVaastu
    0
  • EPPD


    Hello, Is adding meta keywords still worth doing nowadays? I have been reading and hearing some different opinions about it.  For a ' beginner ' in this field it is hard to find a definite answer to this questions.. Thank you for reading(and answering) my question!

    | EPPD
    0
  • rburnett


    I am tasked with optimizing an existing sites SEO. I have added meta's to all the menu pages, however they have blog section with over 700 posts. How important are meta descriptions when it comes to a websites blog? Do I need to take the time to go through 700+ blog posts and create unique meta descriptions for each one?

    | rburnett
    0
  • NikCall


    I am trying to determine if my website was impacted by the March 2019 Core Update.  Based on the various articles I have been reading, I do not believe my niche (software) was impacted.  I see a very small tick up on search console and google analytics, but it is well within the normal range. Where else should I be looking to see if we were impacted? Thank you!

    | NikCall
    1
  • RyanUK


    This may be a basic question for some. I would like to get opinion of SEO experts on EMD and .co domains. I understand from what I have read that exact match domains have less value nowadays but they still have some value, that's what I seem to be sensing from experts. So I wanted to know how .co domains are viewed in term of SEO. And can an exact match .co domain have a better opportunity against another domain which is not an EMD if all other things are equal?

    | RyanUK
    0
  • vtmoz


    Hi, We are going to install a translation plugin on our wordpress hosted website. It's going to generate sub directories like website.com/it/ or website.com/fr/. The plugin will create hreflang tags automatically in the pages and canonicals will be pointing to same pages. Is there anything to check before deploying this plugin? We are going to generate more than 30+ languages pages which will increase our website pages to 30 times in Google index. Will this dilute the page ranking or have any duplicate content issues? Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0
  • vtmoz


    Hi community, Ours is a WP hosted website. We have given our site title which reflects across all the website page title suffix. Like "Moz SEO" will be default at the title for pages like "Local SEO - Moz SEO". We have given different page title suffix to our sub-folders' pages like blog and help guides. For blog we have given "Moz blog" as title tag suffix which was working fine. But Google suddenly started showing main website's title as suffix in pages of sub folders. Ex blog: "How to rank better  - Moz blog - Moz SEO". Here we can see "Moz SEO" has been added which is not required. How to handle this? Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0
  • bellezze


    What's best for SEO: a folder or no folder? For example: https://domain.com/arizona-dentist/somecontent or just https://domain.com/somecontent. The website has 100+ pages with "dentist" within the content of the somecontent pages, as well as specific pages for /arizona-dentist/. Also, the breadcrumb for the somecontent page would appear something like follows: Arizona Dentist > Some Content ... you can find the somecontent page from the Arizona Dentist page. I didn't include folders in the path because I did not want the url to be too long. In terms of where it is showing up on google search results...it is within the top 3-4 on the first page when searching Arizona dentist come content. The website is pretty organized even without subfolders because it was made using Umbraco. I am wondering if using folders will increase the SEO ranking, or if it really doesn't and could hurt it if paths become too long; especially since it's not doing too bad in the search ranking right now. -Thanks in advance for any help.

    | bellezze
    0
  • meysamzare711236541


    Hi I read some articles about Wikipedia links but most of them were talking about how to get links from Wikipedia and no one says about its benefits! We all know that Wikipedia backlinks are nofollow and in most of the articles in Wikipedia, users don't click on the link! So it doesn't pass visitors so nofollow links don't pass the authority. But because this website has trustworthy links, might effect on serp. In your experience does Wikipedia links effect on serp? What grade you will give to this kind of links between one and 100? Between edu, gov, wiki and such this important links which one is more important? I will be glad if you share your experience.

    | meysamzare711236541
    0
  • Bragg


    Analytics is showing a substantial decrease in referring traffic from Google specific regional domains like .ca, .co.uk, .de, etc vs an uptick from .com starting as of March 2018. Did anyone note when this change happened when Google stopped directing traffic to their regional domains? Was there any press about it (couldn't find any). Using a VPN for different countries, I compared regional specific domain SERPs vs .com and they're pretty much identical. Thanks!

    | Bragg
    1
  • vtmoz


    Hi friends, Our website pages without slash are not redirecting to with slash and vice-versa. Both the versions are returning 200 response code. Both the versions are pointed to with slash URLs with rel-canonical tags. Is this right setup? Or we need to redirect  one another to slash or without slash versions? Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0
  • vtmoz


    Hi community, Due to some WP plugin issue, many homepages indexed in Google with anonymous URLs. We blocked them later. Still they are in SERP. I wonder whether these are causing some trouble to our website, especially as our exact homepages indexed. How to remove these pages from Google cache? Is that the right approach? Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0
  • vtmoz


    Hi all, We 2 sub domains with hundreds of pages where we need only 50 pages to get indexed which are important. Unfortunately the CMS of these sub domains is very old and not supporting "noindex" tag to be deployed on page level. So we are planning to block the entire sites from robots.txt and allow the 50 pages needed. But we are not sure if this is the right approach as Google been suggesting to depend mostly on "noindex" than robots.txt. Please suggest whether we can proceed with robots.txt file. Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0
  • FunktionEvents


    Hi Moz Community, I've newly started using Google's search console on a regular basis, and I have a query about the results coming from the platform. For example, I added this article URL to the console with field "URL containing" and "URL exact", and the results showed 71 clicks and 436 impressions over 12 months. However, when looking at the queries that show in the results to see where the clicks are coming from, all of them state there's no clicks from the dozen or so queries that show. Am I doing something wrong here? Is there a field I need to fill in to show more results/top results? I've tested a few article URL's and the same has happened. Thanks in advance for any help.

    | FunktionEvents
    1
  • vtmoz


    Hi community, Our company name got attested with our industry keyword over the years; which also primary keyword of our homepage and all of our industry competitors. Best example is... Moz turns to Moz SEO for fraction of the audience or users. Again this is an example. Now if Google thinks "Moz" is only the company name, does it ignores the word "seo" completely? Or Google gives negative score for employing "seo" after "Moz" across all pages? Does the "seo" word will be considered or ignored in this case? How Google recognises the company name? Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0
  • vtmoz


    Hi all, I wonder that duplicate content is the strong reason beside our ranking drop. We have multiple pages of same "topic" (not exactly same content; not even 30% similar) spread across different pages like website pages (product info), blog-posts and helpguides. This happens with many websites and I wonder is there any specific way we need to differentiate the content? Does Google find the difference across  website pages and blog-pots of same topic? Any good reference about this? Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0
  • vtmoz


    Hi all, Let's say few pages on the website dropped in the rankings due to poor optimisation of the pages or hit by algo updates. Does Google limits the ranking drop only to these pages or the entire website will have any impact? I mean will this cause ranking drop to the homepage for primary keyword? Will Google pose the penalty to other pages in the website if few pages drop in the rankings. Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0
  • Rishardg


    Does the coverage issues on google search console ( Google Webmaster) has an impact on SEO ( CTR or impressions). How much of a difference or impact will fixing these have on Search results and average

    | Rishardg
    0
  • Evosite1


    Obviously, the duplicated pages would be canonical, but would there be a way of anchoring a page land by search term entry? For example: If you have a site that sells cars you could use this method but have a page that has (brand) cars for sale, finance options, best car for a family, how far will the (brand) car go for on a full tank and so on? Then making all the information blocks h2's but using the same H2s for the duplicated page titles. Then it gets complicated, If someone searches "best car for a family" and the page title for the duplicated page is clicked how would you anchor this user to the section of the page with this information? Could there be a benefit to doing this or would it just not work?

    | Evosite1
    0
  • vtmoz


    Hi community, We have couple of pages where we we have given non-https (http) hyperlinks by mistake. They will redirect to http links anyway. Does using these http links on page hurt any rankings? Thansk

    | vtmoz
    0
  • vtmoz


    Hi community, Generally there will be a primary keyword which everybody concentrates and expect their homepage or website to rank for....like "seo" for seo consulting or seo tools. There might be some companies with this keyword in their brand name like "ABC SEO". So this primary keyword will be all over the website being part of the brand name; especially in page titles and header tags. How Google distinguish and ignores this keyword in brand name to avoid giving more ranking boost to such websites? Will this keyword will be completely ignored being the part of the company name or their domain name? How Google distinguish between a generic keyword and keyword in company name? Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0
  • vtmoz


    Hi community, Let's say there is a duplicate page (A) pointing to original page (B) using rel canonical tag. Pagerank will be passed from Page A to B as the content is very similar and Google honours it hopefully. I wonder how Google treats the direct traffic on the duplicate Page A. We know that direct traffic is also an important ranking factor (correct me if I'm wrong). If the direct traffic is high on the duplicate page A, then how Google considers it? Will there be any score given to original page B? Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0
  • vtmoz


    Hi, Ours is a WP hosted website. We have submitted the XML sitemap with a WP plugin. It's been successfully processed by Google but it's not been indexed in and can't be found in SERP. How to get this indexed? Will there be any low crawling of sitemap as it's not indexed? Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0
  • vtmoz


    Hi, We have experienced a shift in SERP from internal pages ranking over website homepage for more than a year. Previously website homepages used to rank for the primary keyword like moz.com for "SEO". Now we can see that internal pages like moz.com/learn/seo/what-is-seo been ranking for the primary keyword "SEO". Google is picking up these "what is ABC" pages than the homepage. All our competitor sites are ranking with these internal pages which are about "what is (primary keyword)". We do have the same internal pages "what is....", but this pages is not ranking; only our homepage is ranking. Moreover we dropped more than 15 positions after this shift in SERP. How to diagnose this? Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0
  • ButtaC


    So there seems to be a huge philosophical difference behind how Moz and Ahrefs calculates page rank (PA). On Moz, PA is very dependent on a site's DA. For instance, any new page or page with no backlinks for a 90DA site on Moz will have around 40PA. However, if a site has around 40 DA, any new page or page with no backlinks will have around 15PA PA. Now if one were to decide to get tons of backlinks to this 40 DA/15PA page, that will raise the PA of the page slightly, but it will likely never go beyond 40PA....which hints that one would rather acquire a backlink from a page on a high DA site even if that page has 0 links back to it as opposed to a backlink from a page on a low DA site with many, many backlinks to it. This is very different from how Ahrefs calculates PA. For Ahrefs, the PA of any new page or page with no backlinks to it will have a PA of around 8-10ish....no matter what the DA of the site is. When a page from a 40DA site begins acquiring a few links to it, it will quickly acquire a higher PA than a page from a 90DA site with no links to it. The big difference here is that for Ahrefs, PA for a given page is far more dependent on how many inbound links that page has. On the other hand, for Moz, PA for a given page is far more dependent on the DA of the site that page is on. If we were to trust Moz's PA calculations, SEOrs should emphasize getting links from high DA sites....whereas if we were to trust Ahref's PA calculations, SEOrs should focus less on that and more on building links to whatever page they want to rank up (even if that page is on a low DA site). So what do you guys think? Do you agree more with Moz or Ahref's valuation of PA. Is PA of a page more dependent on the DA or more dependent on it's total inbound links?

    | ButtaC
    1
  • maestrosonrisas


    Hello I am updating some posts of my Blog, adding new and fresh content and rewriting some of the existing. After doing that I am thinking to update de post publishing so that I appears on front page of the blog and user can read ir again. But I don't know if it is good for google to change the publishing date of the post that he had indexed 5 years ago. Also I don't know if google will read it again if it is old and see the new changes in order to improve it in search results

    | maestrosonrisas
    0
  • ButtaC


    I've been trying to find out the underlying reason why so many websites are ranked higher than mine despite seemingly having far worse links. I've spent a lot of time researching and have read through all the general advice about what could possibly be hurting my site's SEO, from page speed to h1 tags to broken links, and all the various on-page SEO optimization stuff....so the issue here isn't very obvious. From viewing all of my competitors, they seem to have a much higher number of web pages on their sites than mine does. My site currently has 20 pages or so and most of my competitors are well in the hundreds, so I'm wondering if this could potentially be part of the issue here. I know Google has never officially said that page number matters, but does anyone suspect that perhaps page count matters towards SEO and that competing sites with more total pages than you might have an advantage SEOwise?

    | ButtaC
    1
  • DmitriiK


    Howdy, fellow mozzers, Couple of our clients keep losing rankings, slowly but surely, which seem to correlate to August Google updates. No major changes to the websites have been done - neither code, backlink profile nor content. It seem to affect higher search volume keyphrases, while other longer tail keyphrases are climbing up. The screenshots of the visibility rankings are attached below. Any ideas/news/thought about the Google update itself or what might be happening? I know that the Medic update was overall quality, yet it seems to be that these websites in particular are going down after Birthday update, not Medic itself. Google and da mighty Internets being quite.. Help! Links to screenshots (includes higher volume keyphrases only): https://dmitrii-regexseo.tinytake.com/sf/MzAyNjg0MV85MDczNDkz https://dmitrii-regexseo.tinytake.com/sf/MzAyNjgzN185MDczNDY1

    | DmitriiK
    0
  • Boodreaux


    Can anyone take a look at the site and offer suggestions as to what I can do. My visibility went from 13% to 2% over the past two months. I had 800 organic terms prior to this now I am falling off a cliff. Have no idea what happened.  I just switched over to HTTPS 3 weeks ago and it has helped a little.

    | Boodreaux
    1
  • aplnzoctober18


    When writing a meta description is it ok to use keywords that are not on the page or site itself?

    | aplnzoctober18
    1
  • Jason-Reid


    Hi everyone, I've run into a worrying phenomenon in GSC and im wondering if anyone has come across something similar. Since August, I have seen a steady decline in the number of pages that are indexed from my site, from 1.3 million down to about 800,000 in two months. Interestingly, my clicks/impressions continue to increase gradually (on the same pace they have been for months) and I see no other negative side affects resulting from this drop in coverage. In total I have 1.2 million urls that fall into one of three categories, "Crawled - currently not indexed", "Crawl anomaly", and "Discovered - currently not indexed" Some other notes - all of my valid, error, and excluded pages are https://www. , so I don't believe there is an issue with different versions of the same site being submitted. Also, my rankings have not changed so I tentatively believe that this is unrelated to the Medic Update. If anyone else has experienced this or has any insight to the problem I would love to know. Thanks!

    | Jason-Reid
    0
  • david-johns-sheetlabels


    Anybody see anything specific around which sites are seeing upswing from birthday update?  We saw a lot of rankings drop, most drastic in terms that are more loosely associated with our offerings but also seeing more sites with higher DA taking a spot or two above and some more images in top spots for ecommerce terms that you might not usually think to click images to view.  For a lot of these terms we're sure our conversion is better, and we offer to more of the search query intent, than some of the competitor sites that have taken top spots - even Amazon and staples who I'm guessing will move back down after google sees people leaving their site to find what they are looking for (hopefully).

    | david-johns-sheetlabels
    1
  • DmitriiK


    Howdy fellow mozzers, This morning, during our weekly client meeting, I have noticed that pretty much all of our clients' rankings went down a little after a weekend. Nothing major, but noticeable enough on the rankings graph. The MOZcast shows that there was some kinda activity over the weekend with higher than normal temperatures. Anyone has any idea?

    | DmitriiK
    0
  • lmoraes


    Hello, meta keywords is relevant to use in SEO yet? If yes, how many words is recommended to use? Regards, Leandro

    | lmoraes
    0
  • johan8


    It started after the update about 4 websites form the 1st page dropped to the 2nd and 4 of the other sites just popped back to the 1st page and the bad part is that the Da and inbound links of these sites are really bad, so my question is must we just wait this out till Google realises how bad these site are and some of them haven't been updated in years links broken i can go on and on. what these sites have is just the age of the domains, but can this really be the main focus of these results?

    | johan8
    0
  • allanhenryjohn


    Hey Guys. I work for a 15 yr old SAAS company which originally started with a country-specific [.com.au] domain and later got a [.com] domain as the business grew. The AU website has a DA:56 while the [.com] has as DA: 25. Now we are looking to have everything migrated to the [.com] domain. But, my concern is that we might lose the SEO value of the AU domain. I was wondering if anyone has any experience in this or recommend a case study on this topic. Thanks! Allan

    | allanhenryjohn
    0
  • ThorUK


    So, when I gain a link I always check to see if the page that is linking is in the Google cache. I've noticed recently that more and more pages are actually not showing up in Google's cache, yet still appear in search results. I did read an article from someone whoo works at Google a few weeks back that there is sometimes an error with the cache and occasionally the cache will not display. This week, my own website isn't showing up in the cache yet I'm still ranking in SERP's. I'm not worried about it, mostly whitehat, but has there been any indication that Google are phasing out the ability to check cache's of websites?

    | ThorUK
    0
  • MarnusW


    Hi, I'm an SEO newbie. A couple of months ago I launched a new E-Commerce website for my client : http://www.corporategiftsshop.co.za The site has over 1000 pages indexed in Google. I've done some link building and on-page SEO for the keyword terms : corporate gifts
    promotional items
    promotional gifts Currently the website ranks number 31 for "Corporate Gifts" in Google.co.za What I cannot comprehend, is that the site which ranks number 1 is simply shocking! http://www.corporategifts.co.za/ It is a single, static webpage with all links pointing to another website : http://www.promogifts.co.za It has 1 back link and a page rank of zero, yet it still ranks number 1? Can anyone give me a reason or some insight into this as it has me stumped.. Some of the other sites in the top 5 are also poor, yet they still rank high. Our site has a Page rank of 5 and 67 unique domains which links to it (  according to our webmaster tools ) yet it still only manages a 31 ranking?? Any advise would be greatly appreciated as I need to make sense of this, otherwise hang up my SEO gloves.. Regards, Marnus.

    | MarnusW
    1
  • Maggiathor


    Hey guys, I've been working with some hotels and I feel like there are some specific issues which need special solutions. 
    Maybe some of you also work for hotels and face similar problems. Question 1: Google "forces" 3-packs impressions to OTAs like booking.com via Hotel Ads. You basically have a big blue "book now" button and a small little website button. This ends up basically leading to CTRs below 1% despite a 1-3 Position. Is there any way to improve the organic CTR? Of course we use hotel ads, but they offer bad analytics AND we basically pay for our SEO-Performance. Question 2: Search console doesn't specify wether or not a impression comes from 3-Pack or the rest of the organic results, which basically leads to a  average position which says nothing. It's hard to evaluate the performance of meta-titles and texts, because the ctr is also mixed. What would be a better way to get this data or do you think google will change this in some time (new search console doesn't offer this). Question 3: Hotel Rankings are dominated by OTAs, Meta-Searchers and BIg Chains. Has anyone experience in SEO for smaller, family owned Hotels? Any tricks how to get a steady traffic source outside of brand results? Hope there are some travel experts in here 🙂

    | Maggiathor
    0
  • vtmoz


    Hi, We have intentionally blocked some of the website files which were indexed for years. Now we receive a message "Indexed, though blocked by robots.txt" in GSC. We can ignore as per my knowledge? Are any actions required about this? We thought of blocking them with meta tags but these are PDF files. Thanks

    | vtmoz
    1
  • vtmoz


    Hi, We know that it's common to see some ranking difference in browser and GSC for a keyword. But I can see there is a huge difference from last 3 months. We position at 15 to 20th position when we search in browser (different IPs without signing in to any Google account; where as the rank in GSC varies between 35 around. I wonder if anything changed in the way Google reports and does anybody face the same issue? Is there anything we can do about this? Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0
  • Trazo


    My Client has a Real Estate directory with many landing pages for specific properties and locations, example: https://www.laguiainmobiliaria.com.mx/casas-en-venta-queretaro/ This landing page is a list of New Houses in Queretaro. The properties appear dynamically, because this landing pages works trough a WP  Query. So the list changes every week. We are preparing each listing to have a Product Markup as trulia. But what would be the appropiate markup for the list of properties? An itemlist markup seems imposible because the list is dynamical, so maybe Markup as an article? in the description: List of houses in Queretaro?

    | Trazo
    1
  • bigtimeseo


    Hi Guys I'm not sure which section this one belongs in as I didn't see a section for domains/tlds. I wanted an opinion on the future of .co domains. We own a gift company (www.xperiencedays.com), as well as a gift recommendation site (www.uniquegifts.net), and invested in a few gift occasion .co domains (www.birthdaygifts.co, christmasgifts.co etc). This was partly because they were cheap and easy to come by, but also with a hope that they soon gain some public recognition. My question therefore is whether anyone within SEOMOZ has an opinion on whether .co will be widely accepted, whether they will (as google claims) be treated as a non-country specific url, and early success stories you know of, and finally whether the recent news from Overstock to rebrand as O.co (http://www.overstock.com/guides/faqs-about-o-co) is the kick start that .co need. I realize that is more than one question

    | bigtimeseo
    2
  • Kuldeep-Sharma


    Hello everyone, When I have manually search site:www.blinds4uk.co.uk in google.co.uk to know about webpages status, home page of the website is not showing in google search engine result pages. Please let me know, what is the reason behind this? because website crawling and indexing is good. Many Thanks.

    | Kuldeep-Sharma
    0
  • vtmoz


    Hi community, Let's say there is a page with 50 back-links where 40 are non-relevant back-links and only 10 are relevant in-terms of content around the link, etc....Will these non-relevant back-links impact the ranking of the page by diluting the back-link profile? Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0
  • vtmoz


    Hi Moz community, As the different usability issues like pagespeed or mobile responsiveness are playing a key role in website rankings; I wonder how much the same factors are important for sub directories or sub domain pages? Do each and every page of sub directory or sub domain must be optimised like website pages? Does Google gives same importance? Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0
  • Will-McDermott


    If you have an ecommerce site that is using editorial content on topics related to the site's business model to build organic traffic and draw visitors who might be interested in using the site's services eventually, what is the SEO (page ranking) impact -- as well as the impact on the visitors' perceptions about the reliability of the information on the site -- of using phrases like "Here is where [our site] can help you." in nearly every article. Note: the "our site" text would be linked in each case as a conversion point to one of the site's services pages to get visitors to move from content pages on a site to the sales pages on the site. Will this have an impact on page rankings? Does it dilute the page's relevance to search engines? Will the content look less authoritative because of the prevalence of these types of links? What about the same conversion links without the "we can help" text - i.e., more natural-sounding links that stem from the flow of the article but can lead interested visitors deeper into the ecommerce section of the site?

    | Will-McDermott
    0
  • vtmoz


    Hi all, We know that generally logo with the website homepage link is the first link crawled by Google and other search engines. Can we change the anchor text from "logo" to "keyword"? Have any one tried or seen others doing? How Google considers it? Thanks

    | vtmoz
    1
  • conversal


    Hi guys, One of our website (https://www.residentiebosrand.be/) has been online for about two months. It's indexed and Google shows search results. But the website is not ranking on the keywords it's supposed to be ranking: 'residentie bosrand'. How come we still don't find the website on the first pages in the search results, while these are the main keywords on the website's URL, page, ... ? Best regards,

    | conversal
    0

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