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Category: White Hat / Black Hat SEO

Dig into white hat and black hat SEO trends.

  • edward-may


    Hey guys, I have seen a few pages in the SERPS that are appearing from my site, some of these pages urls are actually ajax to refresh the buttons on our site... If these are important to our site but don't need to show up in the serps results can anyone recommend anything?  Should I remove the urls? Or exclude them from the sitemap? or noindex? Any advice would be much appreciated thanks

    | edward-may
    0
  • edward-may


    Hey Mozers! I have just began my link building process, firstly creating unique and quality content and looking at my competitors.  I have found that much of my competitors are in listed in many directories.  Some are paid and some are not.  I noticed the paid ones had higher DA which seems appealing, however I'm stuck to think wether or not it is relevant to my site and if my audience will go there to search my services.  But then I'm thinking well if my competitors are there then why is it so? etc Does anyone know if this is something I should look at?  My site has been live since november last year and we only have 1 backlink at the moment according to moz...We are on the writing wagon to filter our content and make sure were writing good engaging content however I'm seeing this obviously not the only way.  I have also read the beginners guide to backlinks via moz and researched and read other interesting ways, including blogger outreach within my niche. Any advice around this approach?

    | edward-may
    0
  • skjorte1974


    Hi Mozzers! Need some help/advice I’m running a sports betting site – superbetting.com and around 16-19<sup>th</sup> may our organic traffic suddenly dropped with 60-70% or so and ever since we’ve been struggling trying to find the cause and not least, been trying to do something about. A few observations / thoughts; It seems we’ve suddenly have quite a few inbound links from Russia without promoting our content / site towards Russian users. Neither do we have any Russian content. Should we disavow those links and/or try to contact the sites to get our link removed? Looking in ahrefs, I can see that anchors also suddenly are dominated by Russian. Maybe obvious given the above but still strange … We have struggled with spammers trying to deploy link in our forum and have just recently removed them ( or at least we think we have) but could those bad links been hurting us over time? Google ran an algo update in may regarding “quality signals” and I full aware that our site may not be top-notch but I can’t belief that should have hit us that hard since I (and I may be biased :)) would say that there are far lousier sites ranking better than us now than before. Any feedback would be appreciated Thanks! Mike

    | skjorte1974
    0
  • TicketCity


    I noticed that we are receiving thousands of links from many different sites that are obviously disguised as something else. The strange part is that some of them are legitimate sites when you go to the root. I would say 99% of the page titles read something like : 1 Hour Loan Approval No Credit Check Vermont, go cash advance - africanamericanadaa.com. Can someone please help me? Here are some of the URL's we are looking at: http://africanamericanadaa.com/genialt/100-dollar-loans-for-people-with-no-credit-colorado.html http://muratmakara.com/sickn/index.php?recipe-for-cone-06-crackle-glaze http://semtechblog.com/tacoa/index.php?chilis-blue-raspberry-margarita http://wesleygcook.com/rearc/guaranteed-personal-loans-oregon.html

    | TicketCity
    0
  • edward-may


    Hey guys, This question may sound a bit drunk, but someone copied our article and re-posted it on their site the exact article, however the article was credited to our site and the original author of the article had approved the other site could do this.  We created the article first though, Will this still be regarded as duplicate content? The owner of the other site has told us it wasn't because they credited it. Any advice would be awesome Thanks

    | edward-may
    0
  • John_Moz


    Poor website ranking or almost no rank at all.

    | John_Moz
    0
  • shopwood


    Thank you for your response

    | shopwood
    0
  • gamesecure


    Hi there! Suppose a domain 'abc.com' has a subdomain 'news.abc.com'. If we redirect (301) only subdomain 'news.abc.com' to 'xyz.com'. so is there any SEO harm on main domain 'abc.com'? Even both abc.com and xyz.com are running separately. Rajiv

    | gamesecure
    0
  • edward-may


    Hi Guys I run daily and weekend horoscopes on my site, the daily horoscopes are changing every day for obvious reasons, and the weekend horoscopes change every weekend. However, I'm stuck in how the pages need to be structured.  I also don't know how I should go about creating title tags and meta tags for content that changes daily.  Each daily and weekend entry creates a new page. As you can see here http://bit.ly/1FV6x0y you can see todays horoscope.  Since our weekend horoscopes cover Friday Sat and Sunday, there is no daily for Friday, so it shows duplicate pages across Friday, Sat and sunday.  If you click on today, tomorrow and weekend all pages showing are duplicate and this will happen for each star sign from Fri, Sat Sun.  My question is, will I be penalized doing this? Even if the content changes? How can I optimize the Title Tags and Meta Tags for pages that are constantly changing? I'm really stuck on this one and would appreciate some feedback into this tricky beast. Thanks in advance

    | edward-may
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  • TheDude


    I am questioning whether one of our competitors is using a click bot to do negative SEO on our CTR for our industry's main term. Is there any way to detect this activity? Background: We've previously been hit by DoS attacks from this competitor, so I'm sure their ethics/morals wouldn't prevent them from doing negative SEO. We sell an insurance product that is only offered through broker networks (insurance agents) not directly by the insurance carriers themselves.  However, our suspect competitor (another agency) and insurance carriers are the only ones who rank on the 1st page for our biggest term.  I don't think the carrier sites would do very well since they don't even sell the product directly (they have pages w/ info only) Our site and one other agency site pops onto the bottom of page one periodically, only to be bumped back to page 2.  I fear they are using a click bot that continuously bounces us out of page 1...then we do well relatively to the other pages on page 2 and naturally earn our way back to page 1, only to be pushed back to page 2 by the negative click seo...is my theory. Is there anything I can do to research whether my theory is right or if I'm just being paranoid?

    | TheDude
    0
  • Shawn124


    So I just submitted my 2nd disavow file to Google, but what about Bing?  I know i would have to submit one url at a time, but is it worth it?  Is it safe yet to submit the same file from Google? I know Bing measures quantity of links and submitting the same file might hurt my rankings, but anything new in 2015?

    | Shawn124
    0
  • Francisco_Meza


    Here the setup: Server is hosted inhouse. It got attacked using a DDOS from 20+ IP addresses spoofing in different counries. Our server overloaded and didn't work anymore. URL is registered at GoDaddy. Signed up at Dreamhost.  We pointed DNS to Dreamhost successfully. Attacks kept coming and messed up other sites on the Dreamhost shared server.  We didn't know we were being followed at first. We originally thought they were attacking the IP address on our inhouse server. Dreamhost noticed the attack and put us on a seperate IP and disabled our URL until the attacks 'stopped'. MY QUESTION IS: What do I do if they don't stop? Close shop? 99% of the business is internet driven. This has to be the blackest Blackhat SEO ever.

    | Francisco_Meza
    0
  • edward-may


    Hey Guys, So I deleted a couple of pages from my blog, and when I search the keyword it is still showing do you guys have any idea how I can completed delete this from the search? Here is the page http://bit.ly/1cRR4qJ

    | edward-may
    0
  • kirmeliux


    Hi, We have a business registered on Thumbtack so we receive their newsletters. I'm aware that review sites offering a "badge" or verification logo which links back to your profile is nothing new. But the email I received from Thumbtack is a fairly blatant attempt to game Google for popular keywords. I was just curious on your thoughts about this. I believe it was Overstock who did something like this and got slapped by Google pretty hard for a while. Could Thumbtack be heading down the same path? Image: http://i.imgur.com/FWPnmEP.jpg

    | kirmeliux
    0
  • Chris661


    Recently I noticed a couple of comments on our blog that seemed nice and relevant so I approved them. The site is wordpress and comments are configured nofollow. We don't get many comments so I thought "why not?". Today I got one and noticed they are all coming from the same IP. They all include urls to sites in the same industry as us, relevant sites and all different. Looks like an SEO is doing it for various clients. My question is what is the value of these nofollow links for the poster? Are these seen as "mentions" and add value to Google? And am I better off trashing them so my site is not associated? Thanks

    | Chris661
    0
  • jeremyskillings


    I have been doing SEO for years, but luckily have never had a client penalized or had to go through that.  I see everyone talking about it at conferences and know the absolute basics of recovery, but just had someone come to me that was algorithmically penalized about two years ago.  They have no actual data to show me a date and they couldn't tell me a specific date.  According to them, their SEO disappeared and wouldn't give them access to the analytics.  They are definitely showing just about every red flag with anchor tags and low trust links and tons of duplicate content.  Just about everything.  I realize you don't have the deep data to go by, but are there cases when it is just better to start over from scratch. They have literally thousands of bad links and strange site pages that they say they weren't even aware of. Whether they were or not I guess isn't the point now, but I have heard rumors that if you start over, Google will still figure it out and follow you with the penalty.  Is this true or documented?  Don't want to potentially recommend that if that is something that generally happens to bad offenders.  Happy to do the work and try to resolve their issues, but it is a lot of work and is going to be expensive and want to present other options.  Thanks and any thoughts suggestions are appreciated.

    | jeremyskillings
    0
  • YNWA


    Hi. I am looking into a potential clients SEO issues and reasons why their rankings for specific keywords that they ranked for have dropped but others stayed the same or sometimes have improved. They received a manual spam action that was revoked after some disavow and so on. In May of this year they noticed a huge drop in more generic terms. The main keyword that was ranked 6th, dropped to 35th yet other keywords rose slightly. I have noticed this issue for another potential client as well. They ranked 1st for their brand name, then received a spam action that was revoked. Now they do not rank for their brand name but do for other long tail keywords? Any ideas the best way to investigate this or root out the issue and build to improve rank for more generic keywords? Thanks

    | YNWA
    0
  • VBlue


    Hey Everyone, So I am the SEO at a mid-sized nationwide retailer and have been working there for almost a year and half. This retailer is an SEO nightmare. Imagine the worst possible SEO nightmare, and that is my unfortunate yet challenging everyday reality. In light of the new algorithm update that seems to be on the horizon from Google to further crack down on the usage of doorway pages, I am coming to the Moz community for some desperately needed help. Before I was employed here, the eCommerce director and SEM Manager connected with a vendor that told them basically that they can do a PPC version of SEO for long-tail keywords. This vendor sold them on the idea that they will never compete with our own organic content and can bring in incremental traffic and revenue due to all of this wonderful technology they have that is essentially just a scraper. So for the past three years, this vendor has been creating thousands of doorway pages that are hosted on their own server but our masked as our own pages. They do have a massive index / directory in HTML attached to our website and even upload their own XML site maps to our Google Web Master Tools. So even though they “own” the pages, they masquerade as our own organic pages. So what we have today is thousands upon thousands of product and category pages that are essentially built dynamically and regurgitated through their scraper / platform, whatever. ALL of these pages are incredibly thin in content and it’s beyond me how Panda has not exterminated them. ALL of these pages are built entirely for search engines, to the point that you would feel like the year was 1998. All of these pages are incredibly over- optimized with spam that really is equivalent to just stuffing in a ton of meta keywords. (like I said – 1998) Almost ALL of these scraped doorway pages cause an incredible amount of duplicate content issues even though the “account rep” swears up and down to the SEM Manager (who oversees all paid programs) that they do not. Many of the pages use other shady tactics such as meta refresh style bait and switching. For example: The page title in the SERP shows as: Personalized Watch Boxes When you click the SERP and land on the doorway page the title changes to: Personalized Wrist Watches. Not one actual watch box is listed. They are ALL simply the most god awful pages in terms of UX that you will ever come across BUT because of the sheer volume of this pages spammed deep within the site, they create revenue just playing the odds game. Executives LOVE revenue. Also, one of this vendor’s tactics when our budget spend is reduced for this program is to randomly pull a certain amount of their pages and return numerous 404 server errors until spend bumps back up. This causes a massive nightmare for me. I can go on and on but I think you get where I am going. I have spent a year and half campaigning to get rid of this black-hat vendor and I am finally right on the brink of making it happen. The only problem is, it will be almost impossible to not drop in revenue for quite some time when these pages are pulled. Even though I have helped create several organic pages and product categories that will pick-up the slack when these are pulled, it will still be awhile before the dust settles and stabilizes. I am going to stop here because I can write a novel and the millions of issues I have with this vendor and what they have done. I know this was a very long and open-ended essay of this problem I have presented to you guys in the Moz community and I apologize and would love to clarify anything I can. My actual questions would be: Has anyone gone through a similar situation as this or have experience dealing with a vendor that employs this type of black-hat tactic? Is there any advice at all that you can offer me or experiences that you can share that can help be as armed as I can when I eventually convince the higher-ups they need to pull the plug? How can I limit the bleeding and can I even remotely rely on Google LSI to serve my organic pages for the related terms of the pages that are now gone? Thank you guys so much in advance, -Ben

    | VBlue
    1
  • Aus007


    1 For a particular targeted keyword  Google Analytic shows Avg position as 20 for 10 Impresions . On the other hand other Tools like Rank Tracker/Authority Labs shows no Ranking at all . When I Manually check Google results, that particular page is not listed at all in Google Search for that particular keyword in Top 400 search Results. Its almost 30-40 days back done Optimization for that keyword, no Keyword stuffing (2%) or nothing blackhat. Keyword has just 300+ search per month . MOZ and other Tools like MyWebsite Auditor shows no major issues with On Page SEO , overall good score for onpage SEO . Any one has any ideas as why this happens or happened to someone before . Thanks

    | Aus007
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  • carlystemmer


    I was looking in GWT yesterday and found we have several thousand "spam" backlinks...I am curious why this happens and how this happens? There are some links from websites/domains that are not mine that appear to be spam. However, we own a large group of domains and have noticed some of the links are coming from 2 of those sites/domains we own to my main site. The sites/domains are not active, we just own them. I am wondering how someone could access these domains that are not active and create spammy backlinks to my main website? (They created about 20,000 links). Thanks.

    | carlystemmer
    0
  • edward-may


    Hi Guys, A writer for my site has offered to let me post her article on my blog, however the article has already been published on another blog, but the blog has now been taken down.  If I publish this on my blog will there be any harm to my blog?  I want to stay clean and not be in trouble with penguin in any way shape or form! Cheers everyone appreciate some advice here!

    | edward-may
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  • edward-may


    Hey Guys, Seems I'm having more sitemap issues -I just checked my WMT and find that for my com.au and com site - the com.au site is showing i only have 2 pages indexed and 72 Web Pages submitted. The .com I look under sitemaps and it doesn't show any results as to how many pages have been indexed instead it is giving me this error warning - "Your Sitemap appears to be an HTML page. Please use a supported sitemap format instead." All 3 sites are listed here: http://bit.ly/1KTbWg0 http://bit.ly/1AU0f5k http://bit.ly/1yhz96v Any advice would be much appreciate here! Thanks guys

    | edward-may
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  • edward-may


    Hey Guys I have a custom built website - and a wp blog attached to this - problem is there are 3 top level domains: zenory.co.nz,  zenory.com and zenory.com.au **The issue is when I enter the domain to 301 redirect I only have to enter one domain usually i enter redirect from zenory.com/blog/oldpage to zenory.com.newpage ** For eg: I have just move Phone Psychic Readings from the blog - over to the main site.  However there seems to be an issue that I'm still having and trying to clean up.  I'm finding backlinks there are linking to each other of my 3 domains that end up backlinking across domains, which I was told this can look as spammy to google.  For eg: co.nz links many pages to com.au. I'm currently trying to clean this up at the moment - however while im in the process of this - I find myself question when I'm creating the 301 redirects from the blog - but lets say I'm on the blog for zenoy.co.nz/blog/oldblogpost and when I click on a blog post - it redirects me to zenory.com/newarticlepost - because I have redirected it to .com - how can I redirect and make sure is going back to the right domain name to save myself from having to show this cross backlinks? Would gratefully appreciate any assistance on this tricky situation. Cheers Just

    | edward-may
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  • seequs


    So, by now I'm sure everyone that pays attention to their Analytics/GWT's (or Search Console, now) has seen spam referral traffic and ghost traffic showing up (Ilovevitaly.com, simple-share-buttons.com, semalt.com, etc).  Here is my question(s)...  Does this factor into rankings in anyway?   We all know that click through rate and bounce rate (might) send signals to the algorithm and signal a low quality site, which could affect rankings. I guess what I'm asking is are they getting any of that data from Analytics?  Since ghost referral traffic never actually visits my site, how could it affect the CTR our Bounce Rate that the algorithm is seeing?  I'm hoping that it only affects my Bounce/CTR in Analytics and I can just filter that stuff out with filters in Analytics and it won't ever affect my rankings. But.... since we don't know where exactly the algorithm is pulling data on CTR and bounce rate, I guess I'm just worried that having a large amount of this spam/ghost traffic that I see in analytics could be causing harm to my rankings....  Sorry, long winded way of saying... Should I pay attention to this traffic?  Should I care about it?  Will it harm my site or my rankings at all?  And finally... when is google going to shut these open back doors in Analytics so that Vitaly and his ilk are shut down forever?

    | seequs
    2
  • zkouska


    Hi there! I would to ask you if it's advisable to include the creation date of new products (the product description ) in a e-commerce shop, I mean, if it makes a difference (in SEO terms, of course). Thanks for the info and my best regards! Z.

    | zkouska
    0
  • JarnoNijzing


    Hello Mozzers, I got a questions about some rankings. Some of my sites always had no. 1 rankings for most of the competitive terms per niche. I recently made the change to a full responsive design for more mobile friendliness. No all of the sudden I see different competitors that are not mobile friendly outranking me for some of my most important keywords but also I see some link farm sites (like: camping.startpagina.nl) outranking me for some terms. I was under the impression that Google doesn't like link farm sites? Also I provide a lot of good unique content on my pages and my competitor does no such thing. Still for some terms he outranks me. I understand that it can't be just 1 thing and that there are a lot of factors playing a rol in the big picture but still, you must understand that this is pretty frustrating. I obey the rules of the search engines and see competitors do no such thing and still being outranked by them. Further details of this matter can be send to you in PM if you need it. Looking forward for your thoughts on this. regards Jarno

    | JarnoNijzing
    0
  • edward-may


    Hi ALL Okay I'm a bit confused here, but it says I have submitted 72 (pages) im assuming and its returning only (2 pages) have been indexed? I submitted a  new site map for each of my 3 top level domains and checked it today and its showing this result attached. We are still having issues with meta tags showing up in the incorrect country. If anyone knows how I can attend to this knightmare would be much appreciated lol 🙂 new

    | edward-may
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  • adorninvitations


    This question relates to setting up an expired domain, that already has quality links, including deep links to internal pages. Since the new site structure will be different, what's the best practice to preserve the link juice to these internal pages? Export all the internal pages linked to using majestic Seo/ ahrefs etc, and set these pages previously linked to? Or 301 redirect these pages to home page? I heard there's a Wordpress plugin that 301 redirects all the 404 errors successfully preserving all the potential link juice.

    | adorninvitations
    0
  • vndflkvnlkzdfnv


    Hello everyone, I have started developing a website about 45 days ago. I have noticed that I'm receiving traffic from adult websites. I've been tracking the traffic via GA. I have not started my link build process yet, but I'm still receiving about 15 to 30 visits per day from these websites. I've had this domain name without use for about 5 years. The domain name was originally registered in 1998. I don't have a background on the previous owners so I wouldn't know their SEO practice. What's the best practice to block this traffic? Google has yet to index the domain by the brand keyword. I feel the referring traffic could be affecting my SERPs. Bing has already index the site and started referring traffic by the brand keyword. Yes, the brand keyword is on the domain name (brandkeyword.com). Thanks in advanced.

    | vndflkvnlkzdfnv
    0
  • Tz_Seo


    Hi, We want create 2 company websites and each to be targeted specific to different countries. The 2 countries are Australia and New Zealand. We have acquired 2 domains, company.com.au and company.co.nz . We want to do it like this and not use different hreflang on the same version for maximum ranking results in each country (correct?). Since both websites will be in English, inevitably some page are going to be the same. Are we facing any danger of duplicate content between the two sites, and if we do is there any solution for that? Thank you for your help!

    | Tz_Seo
    0
  • mlwilmore


    2 years ago we took over a client who had a hacked site and also had signed up with a black hat SEO team that set up 50 spammy directory links back to the site. Since then we have cleaned up the hacks, had the site reviewed by Google and readded to the Search Index, and disavowed all the directory links through GWT. Over the last 2 years, we've encouraged the client to create new content and have developed a small but engaged social following. The website is www.fishtalesoutfitting.com/. The site's domain authority is 30, but it struggles to rank higher than 20 for even uncompetitive long tail keywords. Other sites with much lower domain authorities outrank the site for our primary keywords. We are now overhauling the site design and content. We are considering creating an entirely new URL for the primary domain. We would then use 301 redirects from the old url to the new.   We'd welcome insight into why the current site may still be getting penalized, as well as thoughts on our strategy or other recommendations to recover from the events of 2 years ago. Thank you.

    | mlwilmore
    0
  • Cocoonfxmedia


    Hi I am baffled our competitor is position 1 on google and another spam site is position 2 for this position 4. Both site hit every no no for Google. For example our site no duplicate content and no duplicate pages.  However our competitor 21% of all content is duplicated and 51% of the title tags are duplicated. I am seeing this more and more and I am wondering has google screwed up as it seems to be that if you bend the rules you get to the top of google.

    | Cocoonfxmedia
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  • Armen-SEO


    If i have a website that provides law services in varying towns and we have pages for each town with unique content on each page, can the page URLS look like the following: mysite.com/miami-family-law-attorney mysite.com/tampa-family-law-attorney mysite.com/orlando-family-law-attorney Does this get penalized when being indexed?

    | Armen-SEO
    0
  • jmorehouse


    Hello, Last week I noticed one of my pages decreased in rank for a particular query from #8 to #13. Although I had recently made a few minor edits to the page (added an introductory paragraph and left-column promo to increase word count), I thought the reason for the decrease was due to a few newly ranked pages that I hadn't seen before. In an attempt to regain my original position, I tried to optimize the meta title for the singular form of the word. After making this change, I fetched and rendered the page as Google (status = partial) and submitted the page for indexing (URL only, not including on-page links). Almost immediately after submitting, the page dropped from #13 out of the top 50. I've since changed the meta title back to what it was originally and let Google crawl and index the page on its own, but the page is still not in the top 50. Could the addition of the page description and left column promos tipped the scales of keyword stuffing? If I change everything back to the way it was originally, is it reasonable to think I should regain my original position below the new pages? Any insights would be greatly appreciated!

    | jmorehouse
    0
  • AMHC


    Several of our websites have experienced a major direct load traffic spike in the last 30 days - roughly 40K new visitors for each site. The bots are emulating IE9 and appear to be hitting our home page and bouncing 100% of the time. The traffic is double our usual volume, or more. Our bounce rates, conversion rate, page views, etc have suffered accordingly. The volume hasn't affected site performance, yet. Since the traffic is direct load, I can't see this being a negative SEO attack. Plus, our search visibility for everything but our brands is abysmal - there aren't any real rankings to tank. Our engineers are saying that the IP addresses are diverse, and they aren't seeing any pattern. I also checked GA for traffic locations, and we aren't seeing anything unusual from overseas.It appears that the attack is US based. Has anyone seen this before?

    | AMHC
    0
  • osaka73


    My website has roughly 1000-2000 pages.  However, our homepage is lacking relevancy as to what it is about. One way that I'd like to tackle this problem, is by updating many of our pages with internal linking. I often hear, use exact keyword links with caution, but have assumed this mainly referred to external backlinks. Would it be a disaster to set up our single most relevant keyword on about 300 pages and point it to our homepage? There are breadcrumbs on our site, but the home link uses an image (It's a picture of a house, if you're curious.)  Am I better off just to change that to our most relevant keyword? I could use any advice on internal links for establishing better homepage relevancy. Thank you!

    | osaka73
    0
  • Aman_123


    I have a website that has been experiencing keyword cannibalization issue since last 2-3 months. We have one main key search term to bring our website TOP ranking, but we have been seeing our website’s 2 different pages ranking strangely sometime for 1st page& sometime for 2nd page that one main key search term. As e.g.:
    our main key search term            1st page rank sometime instead 2nd page
    our main key search term            2nd page rank sometime instead page I am looking for best solution here to get this fixed..

    | Aman_123
    0
  • David-Kley


    Hello fellow mozzers! Let me see if I can explain this properly. First, our server admin is out of contact at the moment,
    so we are having to take this project on somewhat blind. (forgive the ignorance of terms). We have a client that needs a cname record setup, as they need a sales.DOMAIN.com to go to a different
    provider of data. They have a "store" platform that is hosted elsewhere and they require a cname to be 
    sent to a custom subdomain they set up on their end. My question is, how do we prevent the cname from being indexed along with the main domain? If we 
    process a redirect for the subdomain, then the site will not be able to go out and grab the other providers
    info and display it. Currently, if you type in the sales.DOMAIN.com it shows the main site's homepage.
    That cannot be allow to take place as we all know, having more than one domain with
    exact same content = very bad for seo. I'd rather not rely on Google to figure it out. Should we just have the cname host (where its pointing at) add a robots rule and have it set to not index
    the cname? The store does not need to be indexed, as the items are changed almost daily. Lastly, is an A record required for this type of situation in any way? Forgive my ignorance of subdomains, cname records and related terms. Our server admin being
    unavailable is not helping this project move along any. Any advice on the best way to handle
    this would be very helpful!

    | David-Kley
    0
  • Maximilian21


    A customer wants to have a better position with a keyword (he has already a great position, but he wants more...). So he need a bit of extra link building to have better position in serp(this niche is very competitive so on page is not sufficient).
    He asked me to do a Link Building Analysis to find good link opportunities.
    How can i structure a good report? I need something like a Seo Audit for link building. That's my idea:
    Identify what are the business objectives
    Identify the brand strenghts and weakness
    Find the strongest competitors and understand their tactics
    See what are the top links that they have
    Copy their best strategies
    Find new strategies not used by the competitors
    What else i can do for my link building audit?

    | Maximilian21
    0
  • edward-may


    Hi Guys I have been told a few times to add the rel canonical tag to my category pages - however every category page actually is different from the other - besides the listings that I have for my staff on each pages.  Some of them specialise in areas that cross over in other areas - but over really if I'm re directing for eg: Psychic Readings over to Love and Relationships because 5 of my staff members are in both categories - the actual delivering of content and in depth of the actual category which skills are provided at different levels don't justify me creating a rel tag from Psychic Readings over to Love and Relationships just because i have 5 staff members listed under both categories. Tell me have I got this right or completely wrong? Here is an eg: Psychic Readings category https://www.zenory.com/psychic-readings And love and relationships category - https://www.zenory.com/love-relationships Hope this makes sense - I really look forward to your guys feedback! Cheers

    | edward-may
    0
  • Mohtaref1


    We all know that Google uses click-through-rate (CTR) as one of it is ranking factor. I came up with an idea in my mind. I would like to see if someone saw this idea before or tried it. If you search in Google for the term "SEO" for example. You will see the moz.com website in rank 3. And if you checked the source code you will see that result 3 is linking to this url: https://www.google.com.sa/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CDMQFjAC&url=https%3A%2F%2Fmoz.com%2Fbeginners-guide-to-seo&ei=F-pPVaDZBoSp7Abo_IDYAg&usg=AFQjCNEwiTCgNNNWInUJNibqiJCnlqcYtw That url will redirect you to seomoz.com Ok, what if we use linkbucks.com or any other cheap targeted traffic network and have a campaign that sends traffic to the url that I show you. Will that count as traffic from Google so it will increase the CTR from Google?

    | Mohtaref1
    1
  • rodica7


    Hi, I want to know how can I rank some of my keywords which are in the second and third page on google on page one 100% save, so it will pass all penguin, pandas etc as quick as possible? Kind Regards

    | rodica7
    0
  • mattdinbrooklyn


    Hi, I'm moving a website from a blogspot address to a wordpress blog with a custom domain. Since I don't have access to the servers at Blogspot (Blogger), I can't do a 301 redirect and  have to do a meta refresher redirect. The bad thing about this is because it's a meta refresher some people going to the blog (especially at work) are getting a spam alert warning. I want to keep as much page equity as possible. Also I don't know how I can do a change of address in GWT since I can't do a 301 redirect. Any help would be appreciated! Thanks, Matt

    | mattdinbrooklyn
    0
  • edward-may


    Hi there How would I go about fixing duplicate categories? My products sell in multiple category areas and some overlap the other - how can I go about making sure that I don't get penalised for this?  Each category and content is unique but my advisors offer different tools and insights.

    | edward-may
    0
  • edward-may


    Hi Guys I have just completely a site re-design, I have 3 top level domains. I have no idea whats causing the drop in ranking.  I have changed the title tags and meta tags to improve them and make them better, as the last ones weren't really doing us justice.  But I see now it has actually dropped our main keyword.  I read somewhere that i had to completed **site search **to check and I don't see our home page showing.  I was ranking for the keyword: "online psychics" for over 4months at #6 and now is not showing anywhere in the top 50 keywords.  I'm also affraid I can not find our other keyword "online psychic readings" which we were ranked #11 seems to have dropped to #44 I have no idea why this would be the case.  Our new home page shows a better user experience and also added more content, unqiue content at that - our last design was content thin so I have no idea why we have dropped so much in rankings.  The site is also new about 6months new.  I have checked WMT and have not received any warnings of any penalties as such, unless it is still coming? Does anyone have any suggestions here? Cheers

    | edward-may
    1
  • ColeLusby


    Hi all, I've been asking quite a bit of questions lately and sincerely appreciate your feedback. My co-workers & I have been discussing content as an avenue outside of SEO. There is a lot of syndicated content programs/plugins out there (in a lot of cases duplicate) - would this be considered fresh content on an individual domain? An example may clearly show what I'm after: domain1.com is a lawyer in Seattle.
    domain2.com is a lawyer in New York. Both need content on their website relating to being a lawyer for Google to understand what the domain is about. Fresh content is also a factor within Google's algorithm (source: http://moz.com/blog/google-fresh-factor). Therefore, fresh content is needed on their domain. But what if that content is duplicate, does it still hold the same value? Question: Is fresh content (adding new / updating existing content) still considered "fresh" even if it's duplicate (across multiple domains). Purpose: domain1.com may benefit from a resource for his/her local clientale as the same would domain2.com. And both customers would be reading the "duplicate content" for the first time. Therefore, both lawyers will be seen as an authority & improve their website to rank well. We weren't interested in ranking the individual article and are aware of canonical URLs. We aren't implementing this as a strategy - just as a means to really understand content marketing outside of SEO. Conclusion: IF duplicate content is still considered fresh content on an individual domain, then couldn't duplicate content (that obviously won't rank) still help SEO across a domain? This may sound controversial & I desire an open-ended discussion with linked sources / case studies. This conversation may tie into another Q&A I posted: http://moz.com/community/q/does-duplicate-content-actually-penalize-a-domain. TLDR version: Is duplicate content (same article across multiple domains) considered fresh content on an individual domain? Thanks so much, Cole

    | ColeLusby
    0
  • Travis_Bailey


    Yeah... the traffic is annoying. But seeing this (attached image) in my GA was pretty funny. Obviously it was only a couple hits. I thought it was pretty cute in comparison to the other actions. 1WnZK0p

    | Travis_Bailey
    2
  • MarcelMoz


    Hi there, Since last Saturday I noticed a big traffic drop on at least the following two pages:
    http://www.smartphonehoesjes.nl/apple/ and http://www.smartphonehoesjes.nl/apple/iphone-6/. I did some research and I noticed something realy strange. Unknown sites seems to hijacked my organic results by using the exact same page title and META description but leading traffic to another their domain. Look at those pictures: http://imgur.com/v6kglLU and http://imgur.com/Whx4l8K. Edit: a competitor seems to have a same problem: http://imgur.com/Zzhter4. I just fetched both URL's in GWT as Google. In Bing there is a little sign of this problem too, so this is not a Google only thing. Can anybody please help me here? This has cost me some real money since Saturday. Tnx in advance. Marcel

    | MarcelMoz
    0
  • edward-may


    Hi Guys I seem to be having a lot of sitemap issues. 1. I have 3 top level domains, all with the co.nz sitemap that was submitted 2. I'm in the midst of a site re-design so I'm unsure if I should be updating these now or when the new site goes live (in two weeks) 3. I have 19 warnings from GWT for the co.nz site and they gave me 3 examples looks like 404 errors however I'm not too sure and a bit green on my behalf to find out where the issues are and how to fix them.  (it is also showing that 95 pages submitted and only 53 were indexed) 4. I generated recently 2 sitemaps for .com and com.au submitted these both to google and when i create i still see the co.nz sitemap Would love some guidance around this. Thanks

    | edward-may
    0
  • ColeLusby


    Hi all, Some co-workers and myself were in a conversation this afternoon regarding if duplicate content actually causes a penalty on your domain. Reference: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66359?hl=en http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-duplicate-content-wont-hurt-you-unless-it-is-spammy-167459 Both sources from Google do not say "duplicate content causes a penalty." However, they do allude to spammy content negatively affecting a website. Why it came up: We originally were talking about syndicated content (same content across multiple domains; ex: "5 explanations of bad breath") for the purpose of social media sharing. Imagine if dentists across the nation had access to this piece of content (5 explanations of bad breath) simply for engagement with their audience. They would use this to post on social media & to talk about in the office. But they would not want to rank for that piece of duplicated content. This type of duplicated content would be valuable to dentists in different cities that need engagement with their audience or simply need the content. This is all hypothetical but serious at the same time. I would love some feedback & sourced information / case studies. Is duplicated content actually penalized or will that piece of content just not rank? (feel free to reference that example article as a real world example). **When I say penalized, I mean "the domain is given a negative penalty for showing up in SERPS" - therefore, the website would not rank for "dentists in san francisco, ca". That is my definition of penalty (feel free to correct if you disagree). Thanks all & look forward to a fun, resourceful conversation on duplicate content for the other purposes outside of SEO. Cole

    | ColeLusby
    0

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