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Category: Algorithm Updates

Discuss algorithm updates and impacts.

  • vtmoz


    Hi all, We use robots file and meta robots tags for blocking website or website pages to block bots from crawling. Mostly robots.txt will be used for website and expect all the pages to not getting indexed. But there is a condition here that any page from website can be indexed by Google even the site is blocked from robots.txt; because crawler may find the page link somewhere on internet as stated here at last paragraph. I wonder if this really the case where some webpages have got indexed. And even we use meta tags at page level; do we need to block from robots.txt file? Can we use both techniques at a time? Thanks

    | vtmoz
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  • vtmoz


    Hi Moz community, We have our backlinks mostly pointed to our homepage. We are trying to rank better and not having minimum number of backlinks to our internal pages is one of the things I worry about. Backlinks to homepage alone help in ranking internal pages or backlinks to internal pages help in ranking homepage? Or both required? Thanks

    | vtmoz
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  • vtmoz


    Hi all, This is the scenario: Our website is newwebsite.com. Our old website is oldwebsite.com which has been redirected to newwebsite.com (years back). But one of the old website's sub domain has a lot of back links to our current website like: seo.oldwebsite.com to newwebsite.com. Will this scenario hurts with any wrong linking? Thanks

    | vtmoz
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  • vtmoz


    Hi all, If we redirect an old page to some new page, we know that content relevancy between source page and this new page matters at Google. I just wonder if Google is looking at the content relevancy of old page (from cache) and new page too. Thanks

    | vtmoz
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  • vtmoz


    Hi Moz community, Backlinks being a major ranking factor, do they must be very recent or fresh to make a ranking difference compared to the backlinks which are years old? We know usually fresh content ranks well, but I wonder how much the fresh/recent backlinks impact in rankings. Do the years old backlinks from related and reputed website have same impact on rankings? Thanks

    | vtmoz
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  • vtmoz


    Hi all, We have our forum and is filled with spammy content and external nofollow links. I am just wondering if we can make all these links as plain text from hyperlinks (if we can); it's technically deleting all the external links. Will this impact negatively or positively anyhow as per Google? Please share your ideas. Thanks

    | vtmoz
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  • vtmoz


    Hi all, I would like to know how sub domains will be collaborated with domain or main website in terms of authority, backlinks, link juice, etc...Link juice will be passed to sub domains from domain or vice versa? If there are large number of pages in sub domain, will that going to impact the ranking of main domain? Backlinks of sub domain are going to be a deciding factor for website ranking too? Thanks

    | vtmoz
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  • Myles92


    Hey guys, So my boss was surfin the web today on Google and came across the what looks like destination cards with an interest drop down.  I've attached a screen shot of what it looks like.  I couldn't find anything about this on the internet and was wondering if this was a new feature?  Either way I guess I just want to know 1. what this SERP feature is called and 2. if there is any information on how google chooses what places to show here. It looks like, for this query anyway, that it's a combination of popular places in New England and my search history. Thanks! PrBMk

    | Myles92
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  • vtmoz


    Hi Moz community, We can see many websites with a reputation will have more number of visitors landing with these two types of traffic mostly (>90%): organic traffic of brand queries and direct traffic. Will these visits help and impact the ranking of these websites for the keywords/topics they been employing? Ex: Moz will have many such visitors. Will this really impact the ranking of Moz for non-brand queries they try to rank for, like "SEO Software". If so, will this have a huge impact or it's just a minor ranking factor. Because we have this with our website and we don't see such boost in rankings compared to our competitors with less direct traffic; where as I been looking at some SEO articles that direct traffic is one of the most important ranking factors. Thanks

    | vtmoz
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  • vtmoz


    Hi all, Our log-in page is ranking in SERP instead of homepage and some times both pages rank for the primary keyword we targeted. We have even dropped. I am looking for a solution for this. Three points here to consider is: Our log-in page is the most visited page and landing page on the website. Even there is the primary keyword in this page or not; same scenario continues Log-in page is the first link bots touch when they crawling any page of our website as log-in page is linked on top navigation menu If we move login page to sub-domain, will it works? I am worrying that we loose so much traffic to our website which will be taken away from log-in page sub domain Please guide with your valuable suggestions. Thanks

    | vtmoz
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  • vtmoz


    Hi all, As most of the users are visiting our website for log-in, we are planning to deindex login page. As they cannpt find it on SERP, they gonna visit our website and login; I just wonder what happens when most of the visitors just end up at homepage by browsing into an "noindex" page. Obviously it increases bounce rate and exit rate as they just gonna disappear. Is this going to push down us in rankings? What are the other concerns to check about? Thanks

    | vtmoz
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  • vtmoz


    Hi all, Does the number/percentage of new visitors (from different IPs and countries) impact the Google rankings? If there are more number of new visitors, will Google favours the website in rankings considering the fact that new visitors are better than returning/same visitors? Thanks

    | vtmoz
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  • nhhernandez


    Hi everyone, We have a fully optimised client site with Moz optimisation scores of 95% and above. Each month we also create 1-2 backlinks. However, for the keywords we track, our client's site is stuck and no longer moving up at the bottom of page 1 and further down to page 2 and 3. The keywords ranking on first page are also getting very low click through rates - between 1% and 3%. The sites that outrank us are a mix of: Top X Places to visit... X Best Places to see... Trip advisor Things to do in... A guide to the best... Is there a chance for us to outrank the type of sites above? Will persevering in link building do the trick? I understand this may take a while because we have a fixed time and budget for each of our clients. If we can't outrank these lifestyle and list sites, will beating just direct competitors be enough? However, this won't change the low CTR issue... Another solution we're looking at is to change our keywords, which may be a bit tough because the current ones we track, even though they are a little broad, are exactly what the client offer and already have low search volumes. Going more specific will surely have lesser search volumes. Thanks in advance.

    | nhhernandez
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  • vtmoz


    Hi all, I would like to know the different scenarios Google going to respond when we use canonical and redirect for duplicate pages. Let's say A to B are duplicate pages with 95% same content and C Doesn't have same content but context wise similar and priority page we expect to rank for. What happens if we canonical from A to B and set redirect from B to C? What if both A and B are pointed to C with canonical? What if A or B deleted and other one is canonical to C? Note: We can noindex or 301 redirect as they have their own visitors. This is more about showing most relevant content to the audience and avoid duplicate content in search results. Thanks

    | vtmoz
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  • vtmoz


    Hi all, We have 3 pages for same topics. We decided to use rel canonical and remove old pages from search to avoid duplicate content. Out of these 3 pages....1 and 2 type of pages have more similar content where 3 type don't have. Generally we must use rel canonical between 1 and 2. But I am wondering what happens if I canonical between 1 and 3 while 2 has more similar content? Will Google respects it or penalise as we left the most similar page and used other page for canonical. Thanks

    | vtmoz
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  • Koki.Mourao


    Hello, I would love some confirmation on this matter. After all, is it OK to have canonicals across domains when syndicating content? I have found this old google blog article (from 2009) and was wondering if anything has changed since...
    https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html Sincerely,

    | Koki.Mourao
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  • Trent.Warner


    I work in insurance, specifically CoOp Insurance. I researched on Google trend the 3 different spellings (Co Op, Co-Op and CoOp) and there is search volume for all 3 but no big trends. Moz shows optimization for all 3. Is there a right one to go after? Is the correct spelling the correct one to target, even if it doesn't have the highest search volume? Does going after the misspellings dilute branding, or enhance search visibility?

    | Trent.Warner
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  • xdunningx


    Hello I have always wanted to know: How to get gold star reviews on Google in search results! Please look at the screenshot to see what I am talking about. Please can someone share with me the knowledge required to make this happen - it would be perfect for my e-commerce website! GLkOK

    | xdunningx
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  • vtmoz


    Hi all, I need clarification on this. We are adding new pages where H2 is followed by few bold bullet point headings with plain text description under each bullet point. I am just wondering whether we can given these bold bullet points as H3 tags as just leave as text. In the below example, can "**Good for website" **and "**Good for visitors" **be H3 tags or not? Benefits of SEO (H2) Good for website: Followed for best practices to show in search results Good for visitors: Will give better user experience. Number of H3 tags followed by a H2 is fine? In fact header tags followed by any header tag if Okay without plain text in-between? Thanks

    | vtmoz
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  • vtmoz


    Hi all, We have our product guide pages on sub domain which are years old, so have some backlinks and high ranking for the beand related queries. Now we created new guide pages on our main website and we want these new pages to rank top beating the old pages from sub domain. Again we can't deindex or rel canonical to solve the issue as there are some part of users still using the old pages. We are planning to give a link from every old page of sub domain to same new page on main domain. Will this linking increases the authority of new pages technically and helps in ranking better? Like we give a link to "Moz guide 1" page to "Moz guide 2" page to rank latter better. Thanks

    | vtmoz
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  • vtmoz


    Hi all, One of our sub-domains is forums. Our users will be discussing about our product and many related things. But some of the users in forum are adding a lot of spammy content everyday. I just wonder whether this scenario is ruining our ranking efforts of main website? A sub domain with spammy content really kills the ranking of main website? Thanks

    | vtmoz
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  • vtmoz


    Hi all, I just wonder if the back links for different sub domains will be counted and considered to rank the main domain better or they are just limit to sub domain pages? There are many websites which has got multiple sub domains which receive backlinks? So the backlinks to main domain and sub domain weigh same at Google? Thanks

    | vtmoz
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  • vtmoz


    Hi all, I have noticed one page from our competitors' website which has been hardly linked from one internal page. I just would like to know if the page not linked anywhere get indexed by Google or not? Will it be found by Google? What if a page not linked internally but go some backlinks from other websites? Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0
  • JohnnyECCO


    We have a site setup with  English, German, French, Spanish and Italian. We offer these languages for every European country (over 30). Thus, there are 150 + different URL combinations, as we use the /country/language/ subdirectory path. Should I list out every combination in hreflang?Or should I simply choose the most applicable combinations (/de/de and fr/fr, etc.)? If we go the latter path, should I block google bot from crawling the atypical combinations? Best, Sam

    | JohnnyECCO
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  • TaylorRHawkins


    Mozzers, what are your thoughts on documenting SEO results from an incognito window? Does anyone have any articles they can recommend that talk about this subject? Is it better to document results from the normal window or from an incognito window?

    | TaylorRHawkins
    1
  • vtmoz


    Hi all, We have a sub domain which has less engagement for last few years. Eventually many spammy back links pointed to this sub domain. There are relevant back links too. We have deleted most of the pages which are employing spammy content or which have spammy back links. Still I'm confused whether to take this sub domain down or keep it. The confusion between "relevant backlinks might be helping our website" and "spammy backlinks are affecting to drop in rankings"? Thanks

    | vtmoz
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  • yacpro13


    Hello mozzers, We are currently running a Magento 1 store and in the planning phase of migrating to Magento 2. As an eCommerce website, it goes without saying that we use secure pages for all pages where exchange of sensitive information is required, however, we do not use https on all pages. I recently read this Moz article stating that the adoption of sitewide https is at around 50% for top websites. I see Moz is also using it. I know that at this time right now, Google states not giving an SEO bump for https pages, but part of me thinks the time might be right (while re-platforming to M2) to make the move if this is what the future is going to be. Do you agree? Is this something that everyone will eventually have to do?
    I am ambiguous about whether 301 redirects would be needed for http -> https ?
    Also, is there a how-to or checklist to making the switch to sitewide https in order not to inadvertently cause an SEO drop? Thanks!

    | yacpro13
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  • vtmoz


    Hi all, We have total 4 pages about same topic and similar keywords. These pages are from our main domain and sub domains too. As the pages from sub domains are years old and been receiving visits from SERP, they stick to 1st position. But we have recently created new pages on our main domain which we are expecting to rank on 1st position. I am planning to hide the sub domain pages from SERP using "Remove URLs" for some days to increase visibility to new pages from main domain. Is this the right and best practice to proceed with? Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0
  • vtmoz


    Hi all, Our website homepage doesn't contain much content associated with our primary keyword or product, it's mostly explaining our features. So we tried adding a section at bottom of the homepage which explains the about our services like "what is seo" and "how seo helps business". We are trying to rank for this primary keyword like "seo" with generic content and we dropped immediately after this deployment. Any suggestions on this why and how to proceed? Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0
  • vtmoz


    Hi all, Many of our partners across the globe are using the same content from our website and hosting on their websites including header tags, text, etc. So I wonder will these websites are hurting our website due to this duplicate content. Do we need to ask our partners to stop using our content? Any suggestions? What if some unofficial partners deny to remove the content? best way to handle? Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0
  • BobAnderson


    do you believe that the advantage of targeting a search term on the home page is now worse off than before? as I understand it ctr is a big factor now And as far as i can see if two pages are equal on page etc the better ctr will win out, the issue with the home page is the serp stars cannot be used hence the ctr on a product page will be higher? I feel if you where able to get a home page up quicker (1 year instead of two) you still lost out in the end due to the product page winning on ctr? do you think this is correct?

    | BobAnderson
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  • vtmoz


    Hi all, We have taken down some infringing websites and acquired them, so far we made around 40 websites. We are using DNS to land on our website from the acquired. But I've see that recently that DNS is not a redirect and we must 301 redirect from the old site to the new site. Also there is a potential harm in employing DNS method due to the duplicate content that will harm SERP performance severely. Which is the best way? DNS or 301 redirect? Thanks

    | vtmoz
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  • vtmoz


    Hi all, Recently we have over taken one of the websites (with Trademark Infringement )who been using our domain name in their domain. That website got no traffic or backlinks. Is there any risk involved in redirecting that website to our website? Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0
  • vtmoz


    Hi all, I want to put this question straight with an example rather than confusing with a scenario. If there is company called "vertigo", a tiles manufacturer. There are many search queries with thousands of searches like "vertigo tiles life", "vertigo tiles for garden", "vertigo tiles dealers", "vertigo tiles for kitchen", etc....These kind of pages will eventually have tendency to rank for non-branded keywords like "tiles for garden", "tiles for kitchen", etc. So where to employ these kind of help/info pages? Main website or sub-domain? Is it Okay to have these pages on sub-domain and traffic getting diverted to sub domain? What if the same pages are on main website? Will main website have ranking improvement for non branded keywords because of employing the landing pages with related topics? Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0
  • vtmoz


    Hi all, We been facing this ranking fluctuation issue for over an year. Every time we made some changes for better optimisation. We improve rank but eventually drop after few days. Most of the changes we employed are On-page like page loading, fixing broken links & redirects, page titles optimisation, etc. When can see the ranking improvement for our main keywords and related keywords for a while and we drop with in a week eventually. I wonder if someone face the same issue and any thoughts on this scenario? Thanks

    | vtmoz
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  • vtmoz


    Hi all, We are going to create new landing pages and optimise existing pages. We have a confusion on how to employ content on these pages....whether these will be filled with content to rank for "topics" and "keywords" or direclty jump into the features are are providing. If we go with first, users may feel boring about teaching them about that topic, if we go with latter...it's hard to rank being no related content to rank for that topic. I have seen some of the websites are employing multiple landing pages where they fill with topic related content and then link to features pages. I need suggestions here. Thank you

    | vtmoz
    1
  • vtmoz


    Hi all, I need clarification on this. Not every time website main pages rank, some times even pages from sub directories or sub domains like blogs or guides; especially for branded keywords. I just wonder what happens when so much traffic is generating in sub directories and sub domains just because of limited landing pages in main website. Will this traffic be counted as traffic in main website as per Google? Traffic increase in main website really an ranking factor? Will the "brand + topic" related keywords' traffic is more for a website; will it ranking improves even for "topic keywords"? Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0
  • vtmoz


    Hi all, We have some of the landing pages on our sub domains which are getting ranked for our brand related queries and taking away the traffic as we don't have pages to rank for those search queries. I would like to know if this scenario hurts or helps our main website ranking as the traffic to the main website is getting diverted to sub domain. Thanks

    | vtmoz
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  • BeckyKey


    Hi Does anyone know of any online training resources/webinars/training UK based that will cover the following for SEO: Why monitoring how search engines crawl and index content is important and how this can improve your SEO performance Using Google advanced operators to evaluate website indexation How to use log file data to gain insight into how search engines crawl and index content Techniques to control how search engines crawl and index content How search engines deal with JavaScript, common frameworks and SEO considerations I'm trying to develop my technical knowledge - I have always been more focused on content/KWD research/optimisation. Thank you

    | BeckyKey
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  • FullMedia90


    Hey All, I have a healthcare client that is particularly interested in benchmarking their organic traffic and other organic KPIs against the industry as a whole. Does anyone know of any great resources that show SEO benchmarks broken out by vertical? Thank you! Rachael

    | FullMedia90
    1
  • jgodwin


    My client's website does fairly well on mobile in a Google Search. So one day, my client is in a staff meeting and everyone does on search on their phones. The client’s website is nowhere on the 1st three pages. I get a call asking why.  I tell the client that Google has maybe as high as 90% market share on mobile. Of course, their phones have the factory installed Safari and IE.  Client says lots of people don’t change the factory settings on mobile . Question: How do we rate higher on lesser search engines?

    | jgodwin
    0
  • vtmoz


    Hi all, We are in the process of creating new landing pages and noticed something what our competitors been following with landing pages. They have created multiple landing pages targeting the related keywords of a main topic / main keyword. Like "seo defined", "seo history", "seo benefits", "seo strategies", "types of seo", etc being "SEO" as main keyword or main topic. Will this works? Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0
  • vtmoz


    Hi all, We had our help articles on sub-domain help.website.com. Then we moved it to sub directory website.com/help/. We expected ranking improvement of website.com as there is a wide saying of benefiting from sub domain to sub directory migration. We have noticed that ranking improvement of new sub directory pages (website.com/help/) but not for any main website pages (website.com). I presume that link juice from main website has benefited new sub directory pages but main website lost ranking due to the page rank dilution. Do you agree? Any ideas? Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0
  • vtmoz


    Hi, One of the most disgusting experiences while browsing web pages is the auto playing anonymous and highly non relevant ad videos at some corner of the page which buffer mostly and automatically plays. There are familiar websites which been following this activity. I don't think Google has ever rolled out an update to penalise these. Any idea why? Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0
  • jessential


    Moz, I am noticing that I need to go back and update my outbound links to your site. There are a lot of them because your content is so great and we love you guys. Could you explain your logic for making the change? Example on my Valid JSON-LD image sizes page: [https://moz.com/blog/state-of-searcher-behavior-revealed/](https://moz.com/blog/state-of-searcher-behavior-revealed/) redirected to: [https://moz.com/blog/state-of-searcher-behavior-revealed](https://moz.com/blog/state-of-searcher-behavior-revealed)

    | jessential
    0
  • vtmoz


    Hi all, Generally we care a lot about keywords at headings, title tags, URL, etc. always. But I wonder how much impact they have being in paragraphs. How much do they matter at paragraphs? Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0
  • vtmoz


    Hi all, Just checked my website in Google pagespeed insights and most of our website pages were required to reduce the images file size for better page loading. So I have compressed the images using https://compressor.io/ and https://tinypng.com/ and replaced the images. Then surprisingly ranking dropped even score improved for all pages with image optimisation. What would be the reason? Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0
  • vtmoz


    Hi all, Links disavowing is such a advanced tasks in SEO with decent amount of risk involved. I thought many wouldn't follow use this method as Google been saying that they try to ignore bad links and there will be no penalty for such bad links and negative SEO is really a rare case. But I wondered to see only 38% SEOs never used this method and other 62% are disavowing links monthly, quarterly or yearly. I just wonder do we need to disavow links now? It's very easy to say to disavow a link which is not good but difficult to conclude them whether they are hurting already or we will get hurt once they been disavowed. Thanks Screenshot_3.jpg

    | vtmoz
    1
  • BeckyKey


    Hi I want to find out, what people feel the top 3 focuses should be for an SEO (I know there are hundreds)...Content/Backlinks/Social/Technical I'm trying to better prioritise my work - I work on a large ecommerce site - with just me as the SEO & a development team in France So most of the technical stuff is controlled there. I focus on audits, KWD research & briefing content how to better optimise products. A lot of time is taken up by that as the site is so big & I'm concerned I am not putting enough effort into other areas. What should these areas be?! Backlinks/Content/Blogs - I can't do everything but would like to prioritise tasks which will have the 
    biggest impact Can anyone help 

    | BeckyKey
    0
  • bjs2010


    Hi! We have an existing website that has a .com TLD with our brand name, which is completely unrelated to any of the terms we want to rank for except for the brand search of our company of course. We have an online shop and the .com site has been online for a good few years. The business activity is related to art, in fact some of our customers would search for   "name of artists + art" and we appear in results. From what I have read, Google is not going to give better rankings for a .art domain name, but will the extension be counted as a potential keyword and relevancy to users searches based on example above? Does anyone have any experience with regards to this consideration? Thanks!

    | bjs2010
    0

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