Category: White Hat / Black Hat SEO
Dig into white hat and black hat SEO trends.
-
Is it worth getting links from .blogspot.com and .wordpress.com?
Our niche ecommerce site has only one thing going for it: We have numerous opportunities on a weekly basis to get reviews from "mom bloggers". We need links - our domain authority is depressing. My concern is that these "mom bloggers" tend to have blogs that end with .blogspot.com or .wordpress.com. How do I screen for "reviewers" that are worth getting links from and how can I make the most of the community we have available to us?
| Wilkerson1 -
What is the best factors to increase DA PA?
I want to increase DA Pa for Our Company website Tandem NZ. How Can i Increase it?
| Tandem-Digital0 -
Significant "Average Position" dips in Search Console each time I post on Google My Business
Hi everyone, Several weeks ago I noticed that each Wednesday my site's Average Position in Search Console dipped significantly. Immediately I identified that this was the day my colleague published and back-linked a blog post, and so we spent the next few weeks testing and monitoring everything we did. We discovered that it was ONLY when we created a Google My Business post that the Average Position dipped, and on the 1st July we tested it one more time. The results were the same (please see attached image). I am 100% confident that Google My Business is the cause of the issue, but can't identify why. The image I upload belongs to me, the text isn't spammy or stuffed with keywords, the Learn More links to my own website, and I never receive any warnings from Google about the content. I would love to hear the community's thoughts on this and how I can stop the issue from continuing. I should note, that my Google My Business insights are generally positive i.e. no dips in search results etc. My URL is https://www.photographybymatthewjames.com/ Thanks in advance Matthew C0000OTrpfmNWx8g
| PhotoMattJames0 -
Domain SEO
Hi, May I know for the keyword "engagement rings" which domain is the best in term of SEO perspective? www.engagement-rings.com www.engagementrings.com 3)www.engagement_rings.com Thank you
| KINSHUN1 -
What does Google's Spammy Structured Markup Penalty consist of?
Hey everybody,
| klaver
I'm confused about the Spammy Structured Markup Penalty: "This site may not perform as well in Google results because it appears to be in violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines." Does this mean the rich elements are simply removed from the snippets? Or will there be an actual drop in rankings? Can someone here tell from experience? Thanks for your help!1 -
Competitor Inverse Relationship
Please take a look at the attached images which show the apparently inverse relationship between one of our top competitors (purple trace) and us (blue trace). There seems to be a fairly clear correlation, we're just left wondering what could have happened to cause this. It seems clear that the 'purple' team was termporarily able to beat us out on the keywords we were working on, but a few questions arise: Did the purple team beat us out, or did we screw something up? If they beat us out, what on earth did they do because it clearly wasn't content creation (they have a skimpy site with no blog and their Alexa score is almost identical to ours We took some steps to fix our situation including: Page optimization website speed improvement Blog review and update You can see from the second graph (rankings) that our keyword rankings slid starting may/2018 along with our traffic, but we regained our footing a year later (now). I guess the big questions are: were there black hat tactics at play here? If so, what were they likely to be? did the problem go away because the purple team stopped paying someone for these results? Was it our fault but we fixed it? what is the most likely reason for this problem? Could it have been a Google algorithm update? Which one? Anyway, any insight that you can give would be appreciated. -- PeteR FHM1Sn0
| rastellop1 -
Moz spam score 16 for some pages - Never a manual penalty: Disavow needed?
Hi community, We have some top hierarchy pages with spam score 16 as per Moz due to the backlinks with very high spam score. I read that we could ignore as long as we are not employing paid links or never got a manual penalty. Still we wanna give a try by disavowing certain domains to check if this helps. Anyway we are not going to loose any backlink score by rejecting this low-quality backlinks. Can we proceed? Thanks
| vtmoz0 -
Do content copycats (plagiarism) hurt original website rankings?
Hi all, Found some websites stolen our content and using the same sentences in their website pages. Does this content hurt our website rankings? Their DA is low, still we are worried about the damage about this plagiarism. Thanks
| vtmoz0 -
Free tool, and it ranks well for adult sites and checking if they are down, will that hurt us with ranking for normal sites with google?
Hi all, We rank for searches around "is youporn down" and similar because we provide a free tool to check if a website is up or down: https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/youporn I am worried that ranking for these adult searches is hurting us with ranking for things like "is reddit down", thoughts? I'd appreciate some input!
| bwb0 -
404 Errors For Pages That Never Existed
I'm seeing a lot of 404 errors with slugs related to cryptocurrency (not my website's industry at all). We've never created pages remotely similar, but I see a lot of 404 errors with keywords like "bitcoin" and "litecoin". Any recommendations on what to do about this? Another keyword is "yelz". It usually presents like .../yelz/-ripper-vs-steller/ or .../bitcoin-vs-litecoin/. I don't really even have the time to fix all the legitimate 404 errors, let alone these mysterious requests. Any advice is appreciated.
| bcaples1 -
How good/bad the exit intent pop-ups? What is Google's perspective?
Hi all, We have launched the exit intent pop-ups on our website where a pop-up will appear when the visitor is about to leave the website. This will trigger when the mouse is moved to the top window section; as an attempt by the visitor to close the window. We see a slight ranking drop post this pop-up launch. As the pop-up is appearing just before someone leaves the website; does this making Google to see as if the user left because of the pop-up and penalizing us? What is your thoughts and suggestions on this? Thanks
| vtmoz1 -
Does Google checks the author name of the articles with backlinks to a website?
Hi, This may sound a little too suspicious; but just want to take your suggestions and experience in this. We are trying to create articles on third party websites to increase backlinks, our brand popularity and awareness about our features. If the same author is mentioned in multiple or tens of articles with backlinks to same website; will Google monitor the author name? Is there anything wrong in creating too many external articles with same author name? Thanks
| vtmoz0 -
Is this campaign of spammy links to non-existent pages damaging my site?
My site is built in Wordpress. Somebody has built spammy pharma links to hundreds of non-existent pages. I don't know whether this was inspired by malice or an attempt to inject spammy content. Many of the non-existent pages have the suffix .pptx. These now all return 403s. Example: https://www.101holidays.co.uk/tazalis-10mg.pptx A smaller number of spammy links point to regular non-existent URLs (not ending in .pptx). These are given 302s by Wordpress to my homepage. I've disavowed all domains linking to these URLs. I have not had a manual action or seen a dramatic fall in Google rankings or traffic. The campaign of spammy links appears to be historical and not ongoing. Questions: 1. Do you think these links could be damaging search performance? If so, what can be done? Disavowing each linking domain would be a huge task. 2. Is 403 the best response? Would 404 be better? 3. Any other thoughts or suggestions? Thank you for taking the time to read and consider this question. Mark
| MarkHodson0 -
WordPress Tags and SEO
Good Morning everyone, I am trying to decide how I am going to handle an issue on two WordPress websites. I recently acquired 2 new clients that used to do business with the same SEO company. Neither of the clients know of the other but both had the same story about said SEO company. The usual complaints, I wont get into details. My issue is the old SEO company basically was spamming keywords and utilized tags to do this. For each of these clients they had very thin spammy blog posts written and then had a multitude of spammy tags used as keywords here is an example https://captainjacksboatingschool.com/middlesex-county-boating-safety-class/ Each one of these tags is creating duplicate content. How do i properly handle these tags? Do i delete? Do i need to redirect into one main page after deletion. I much rather use plain English and authoritative based Categories. In fact I never use tags, only categories. They do not seem to have much seo value. Both clients who were with this company have the same Tag setup... Any advice would be greatly appreciated as I do not want to loose the customers current rank because i want to do things my way Thanks, Don Silvernail
| donsilvernail0 -
Ranking Fluctuation on "Canvas Prints" keyword in google.co.uk
Hello Moz We are struggling for "canvas prints" ranking in google.co.uk since last 2 years. every time in SERP my webpage has been changed. i want to rank this URL on this particular keyword - "canvas prints" Can you tell me why my page has been fluctuate every time in SERP's. mtwpvf
| CommercePundit1 -
Search ranking for a term dropped from 1st/2nd to 106th in 3 months
Hello all, Just a couple notes first. I have been advised to be vague on the search term we've dropped on (in case this page ranks higher than our homepage for it). If you search for my name in Google though you should be able to figure out where I work (I'm not the soccer player). While I am looking for an answer, I've also posted this question on a couple other forums (see https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4934323.htm and https://productforums.google.com/forum/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer#!msg/webmasters/AQLD7lywuvo/2zfFRD6oGAAJ) which have thrown up more questions than answers. So I have posted this as a discussion. We've also been told we may have been under a negative SEO attack. We saw in SEMRush a large number of backlinks in October/November/December - at about the same time we disavowed around 1m backlinks (more on this below) but we can't see this reflected in Moz. We just got off a call with someone at Moz to try and work this out and he suggested we post here - so here goes... On 4th October for the search term 'example-term' we dropped from number 2 to number 9 on Google searches (this was confirmed in Google Search Console). We also paid an external SEO consultant to review our site and see why we are dropping on the term 'example-term'. We've implemented everything and we're still dropping, the consultant thinks we may have been penalised in error (as we are a legitimate business and we're not trying to do anything untoward). In search console you could see from the graphs on the term we used to rank 1st and 2nd (you could go back 2 or 3 years and still see this). The thing we do find confusing is that we still rank very highly (if not 1st) for 'example-term + uk' and our brand name - which is very similar to 'example-term'. Timeline of events of changes: 2nd October 2018 midday: Added a CTA using something called Wisepops over the homepage - this was a full screen CTA for people to pledge on a project on our site helping with the tsunami in Indonesia (which may have had render blocking elements on). 4th October: we added a Google MyBusiness page showing our corporate headquarters as being in the UK (we did flag this on the Google MyBusiness forums and both people who responded said adding a MyBusiness page would not affect our drop in rankings). 4th October: dropped from number 2 to number 9 on Google searches (this was confirmed in Google Search Console) 4th October: Removed the Wisepops popup 5th November: Server redirect so anything coming in on / was redirected to a page without a / 12th November: Removed around 200 junk pages (so old pages, test cms pages etc that were live and still indexed). Redirects from any 404s resolved 19th November: Updated site maps and video site maps to reflect new content and remove old content. Reviewed the whole site for duplicate meta tags and titles and updated accordingly with unique ones. Fixed issues in Google Search Console for Google search console for 404 and Mobile usability. Removed embedded YouTube video from homepage. 11th December: Removed old content and content seen as not useful from indexing; 'honey pot' pages, old blog, map pages, user profile pages, project page ‘junk pages which have little SEO value’ (comments, contact project owner, backers, report project) from indexing, added ‘no-follow’ to widgets linking back to us 3rd January 2019: Changed the meta title from to remove 'example-term' (we were concerned it may have been seen as keyword stuffing) 7th January: Disavow file updated to refuse a set of external sites powered by API linking to us (these were sites like example-term.externalsite.co.uk which used to link to us showing projects in local areas - our SEO expert felt may be seen as a ‘link farm’) 11th January: Updated our ‘About us’ page with more relevant content 15th January: Changed homepage title to include 'example-term' again, footer links updated to point to internal pages rather than linking off to Intercom, homepage ordering of link elements on homepage changed (so moving external rating site link further down the page, removing underlines on one item that was not a link, fixed and instance where two h1 tags were used), removed another set of external Subdomains (i.e. https://externalsite.sitename.co.uk) from our system (these were old sites we used to run for different clients which has projects in geographical areas displayed) 18th January: Added the word 'example-term' to key content pages We're at a loss as to why we are still dropping. Please note that the above changes were implemented after we'd been ranking fine for a couple years on the 'example-term' - the changes were to try and address the drop in ranking. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
| Nobody15554510997900 -
Back links issue and how to resolve it
Hi there! We have a client who has been generating back links from external sites over a period of two years with all the same anchor text which all link back to the home page. This anchor text is also their main search phrase they wish to score highly on. In total, they have roughly 300 domain names linking to their site. Over 50 of these domain names all have the same anchor text. These links have been generated through articles and blogs. So roughly 20% of the total number of links all have the same anchor text. Over the past 6 months the client has noticed a steady drop in their rankings for this term. From the back link analysis we have done, we believe it is this which is causing the problem. Does any one else agree? For the remedy, do we go in and see if we can change the anchor text or disavow them through Google webmaster tools? Suggestions? Thanks for your help! P 🙂
| Globalgraphics0 -
Competitor has same site with multiple languages
Hey Moz, I am working with a dating review website and we have noticed one of our competitors is basically making duplicated of their site with .com, .de, .co.uk, etc. My first thought is this is basically a way to game the system but I could be wrong. They are tapping into googles geo results by including major cities in each state, i.e. "dating in texas" "dating in atlanta" however the content itself doesn't really change. I can't figure out exactly why they are ranking so much higher. For example using some other SEO tools they have a traffic estimate of $500,000 monthly, where as we are sitting around $2000. So, either the traffic estimates are grossly misrepresenting traffic volume, OR they really are crushing it. TLDR: Is geo locating/translating sites a valid way to create backlinks? It's seems a lot like a PBN.
| HashtagHustler0 -
Would this be duplicate content or bad SEO?
Hi Guys, We have a blog for our e-commerce store. We have a full-time in-house writer producing content. As part of our process, we do content briefs, and as part of the brief we analyze competing pieces of content existing on the web. Most of the time, the sources are large publications (i.e HGTV, elledecor, apartmenttherapy, Housebeautiful, NY Times, etc.). The analysis is basically a summary/breakdown of the article, and is sometimes 2-3 paragraphs long for longer pieces of content. The competing content analysis is used to create an outline of our article, and incorporates most important details/facts from competing pieces, but not all. Most of our articles run 1500-3000 words. Here are the questions: Would it be considered duplicate content, or bad SEO practice, if we list sources/links we used at the bottom of our blog post, with the summary from our content brief? Could this be beneficial as far as SEO? If we do this, should be nofollow the links, or use regular dofollow links? For example: For your convenience, here are some articles we found helpful, along with brief summaries: <summary>I want to use as much of the content that we have spent time on. TIA</summary>
| kekepeche1 -
Consolidating small sites into one big site
Hi I have several small review sites in multiple categories and want to consolidate them into a single review site(aged domain I just bought) I'd redirect the old sites to the new one. If I just copied all the old articles onto the new website with solid DA, would this work or would Google think Im trying to start a PBN? Thanks! Eddie
| calentador20190 -
Does Google crawler understand & flag a blog post has text asserting sponsorship with dofollow outbound link?
I kind of know the answer, but just wanted to get some feedback from others. For the sake of argument, assume there are no other issues with the linking blog, such as: too many ads, thin content, etc. Question: If you make a payment for a blog post with a dofollow link, and in the blog post there is something to the effect of: "this post has been sponsored by..." Will Google crawlers detect that and flag that as an unnatural link?
| kekepeche0 -
Links on Brand Banners
Hi, For one of our ecommerce clients, we have brand banners on each brand page that links to their most popular product lines. Some of the banners just have a column of links, and some are paragraphs with copy and anchor text. Example below: Brand Line 1 Brand Line 2 Example 2: For the utmost in quality, performance and comfort, purchase Brand Line 1 . Brand Line 2 offers the perfect ease of use for beginners while not compromising on quality. Obviously these are just examples, and there are several links (more than 2) per brand, but I was wondering if this harms SEO in any way because of keyword stuffing? It makes sense to have the brand name in the link, otherwise the name of the lines might not make much sense (an example of this is one of the lines is called 849.. so without the brand name that doesn't mean much and looks weird) Do you think it would be better to have the links in just columns in the first example, or in paragraph format?
| AliMac260 -
Hiding ad code from bots
Hi. I have a client who is about to deploy ads on their site. To avoid bots clicking on those ads and skewing data, the company would like to prevent any bots from seeing any ads and, of course, that includes Googlebot. This seems like it could be cloaking and I'd rather not have a different version of the sites for bots. However, knowing that this will likely happen, I'm wondering how big of a problem it could be if they do this. This change isn't done to manipulate Googlebot's understanding of the page (ads don't affect rankings, etc.) and it will only be a very minimal impact on the page overall. So, if they go down this road and hide ads from bots, I'm trying to determine how big of a risk this could be. I found some old articles discussing this with some suggesting it was a problem and others saying it might be okay in some cases (links below). But I couldn't find any recent articles about this. Wondering if anybody has seen anything new or has a new perspective to share on this issue? Is it a problem if all bots (including Googlebot) are unable to see ads? https://moz.com/blog/white-hat-cloaking-it-exists-its-permitted-its-useful
| Matthew_Edgar
https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4535445.htm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBO-1ETf_dY0 -
My site in 2 page
my site in 2 page how can i rank with this keywords in dubai legal translation in Dubai
| saharali150 -
I want to rank with this page http://www.servicesarab.com/%D9%86%D9%82%D9%84-%D8%B9%D9%81%D8%B4-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%83%D9%88%D9%8A%D8%AA/
i want to rank with this page http://www.servicesarab.com/%D9%86%D9%82%D9%84-%D8%B9%D9%81%D8%B4-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%83%D9%88%D9%8A%D8%AA/
| saharali150 -
Dealing with Dodgy Looking Traffic
Hi there I am really hoping someone can help. The site I run has started receiving traffic from the US (we are a UK run firm who don't ship overseas). Ordinarily, this wouldn't be a massive problem but the traffic is coming directly to lots of pages and instantly bouncing. I am worried this is going to negatively impact my rankings as drop off rate and conversions are getting hammered by this 'fake traffic'. The attached image shows the traffic for the homepage but its happening on every page with hundreds of hits bouncing and hurting my stats. Is there any way of dealing with this or reporting it to an authority or even Google itself? Any help would be greatly appreciated. George 7vprsJo
| BrinvaleBird0 -
SSL Importance For Backlinks
I am trying to build some good quality backlinks, how important is SSL for the site that we post guest blogs on? I realize that if a site does not have SSL currently, their DA will likely not go up very fast because of Google's new algorithms, but currently, I am looking at a couple sites with a DA of 40 and 41. By the way, my site has SSL (is https). Thanks!
| CSBarns0 -
SEMrush vs GA rankings drop since February and December 2018?
I am wondering if someone can help me understand what's going on with our site. We had a 50% drop in the number of keywords ranking from February 2018 to October in SEMrush. Looking at SEMrush, I am actually seeing a drop after 2/208 with many competitor's sites as well. We saw moderate improvement in November, but around December 6th, we started seeing a decline the number of keywords ranking again. In Google Analytics, there was a 10-15% drop in traffic after February 2018, which recovered September to December, but since early December, there is a drop again. In GWT, I am seeing something similar to analytics with impressions and clicks. We have done some SEO the past couple of years, but we have taken care to do things white-hat so as not to incur a penalty. We have also invested in writing content for our blog on a regular basis. Any thoughts?
| kekepeche0 -
Massive Drop in Users
A client of mine is seeing crazy drops in users. Feb. 2018 was an all-time high in organic users, over 38,000. However, there has been a steep drop off since then. In November 2018, the number of organic users was at a little over 1,000. The client said there have been no major changes to the site. I have no idea what is happening. Below are things I have done already: - Submitted a disavow file- Fixed URL parameters- Performed an entire site audit. Fixed all site errors and re-wrote new metadata. - Made sure no main pages have been deleted. 301 redirects are in place where necessary. - Started to consolidate low-quality pages. If I had to guess, I would assume this is an E.A.T. related drop. I have no way of knowing though. This is a YMYL site, so we are working to increase E.A.T. However, any insight would be helpful. Rankings are dropping off so quick I'm not sure what else I can do. Please comment if you need more context. PLEASE HELP!!
| BryanPhelps-BigLeapWeb0 -
What to do with internal spam url's google indexed?
I am in SEO for years but never met this problem. I have client who's web page was hacked and there was posted many, hundreds of links, These links has been indexed by google. Actually these links are not in comments but normal external urls's. See picture. What is the best way to remove them? use google disavow tool or just redirect them to some page? The web page is new, but ranks good on google and has domain authority 24. I think that these spam url's improved rankings too 🙂 What would be the best strategy to solve this. Thanks. k9Bviox
| AndrisZigurs0 -
Increase my DA
So, i am a webmaster / specialist in the adult business for over almost 9 years. Very succesfully and with a broad selection of over 70 clients / businesses all over holland, belgium, germany, UK and even the USA. Lately i've created one page purely based on what my website is about. Google took it like sweet butter and immidiatly ranked that up to the top 3 of premium keywords. Imagine others have to build a wide variety of links to even get close to that and i am there with just one link from another domain. I believe that DA and relevancy is a very important role in this factor, otherwise google woud'nt do it that easy. So i recreated this thing again, and extened that one page to now 40+ pages. Everything is going great, all those pages are ranking within the top 10 by now. All unique content and vice versa. Very good! But; when i created some more pages, with all again, unique content, i started to see a small drop here and there, on which i believe is that Google gives me a X percentage of the pie, and once used, the rest slowly starts to suffer such as the pages i created. The pages are very wide and purely focussed on that keyword i am targetting that for alone. Pages which tend to rank 'bad' or are after position 10 i sometimes give an update with another block of text well written and this seems to work. But now i think i am running against some limit on which google allows me to rank, and i believe it has todo something with DA. It's becoming too low for the goal i am trying to archieve. Now i have build 2600 websites or so and since the last 3+ years i've made all the links back to my domain as nofollow. I figured out to create a better DA was the following: purely make the INDEX link from one of those websites i build for client(s), a FOLLOW and the rest of the page(s) as a nofollow. This would be the strongest form of backlinking since the index is the most important one. Would this work? I am not trying to bypass pagerank or anything, just taking credit for the work i've done for alot of clients and only with the intention to improve my DA. I've checked my website nummerous times and adjusted everything according to MOZ insights; all pages are unique and there's no such thing as duplicate content or whatever. Just having all pages which i've created with no backlinks being crammed up to the top 10 is a sign google trusts my domain enough.
| Jvanderlinde0 -
Nuisance visitors to non active page. What's going on?
Hi Guys, for the past several months, I get high volume of searches on a non-existing page /h/9249823.html. These searches come from all over the world from different domains and have a zero session duration. They are automatically forwarded to my home page. The source re Google Analytics is 12-reasons-for-seo.com. The full referrer is 12.reasons-for-seo.com/seo2php. Any idea what is provoking this activity? Any chance it's screwing with my legitimate search results or rankings?
| Lysarden0 -
Is there proof that disavowing backlinks in GSC help to boost rankings in Google?
Hi Guys Let's say you have a website and you got some questionable back links or lower quality ones. Does anyone have proof that after disavowing back links helped in the rankings or had some positive effects? I am concerned that Google will place our website on their radar and instead possibly demote it or smth. Lastly, if disavowing is the way to go what criteria do you use to disavow backlinks? So if you get questionable back links over time, should you disavow ongoing as well? If so how often? Cheers John
| whiteboardwiz0 -
Help finding website content scraping
Hi, I need a tool to help me review sites that are plagiarising / directly copying content from my site. But tools that I'm aware, such as Copyscape, appear to work with individual URLs and not a root domain. That's great if you have a particular post or page you want to check. But in this case, some sites are scraping 1000s of product pages. So I need to submit the root domain rather than an individual URL. In some cases, other sites are being listed in SERPs above or even instead of our site for product search terms. But so far I have stumbled across this, rather than proactively researched offending sites. So I want to insert my root domain & then for the tool to review all my internal site pages before providing information on other domains where an individual page has a certain amount of duplicated copy. Working in the same way as Moz crawls the site for internal duplicate pages - I need a list of duplicate content by domain & URL, externally that I can then contact the offending sites to request they remove the content and send to Google as evidence, if they don't. Any help would be gratefully appreciated. Terry
| MFCommunications0 -
Script must not be placed outside HTML tag? If not, how Google treats the page?
Hi, We have recently received the "deceptive content" warning from Google about some of our website pages. We couldn't able to find the exact reason behind this. However, we placed some script outside the HTML tag in some pages (Not in the same pages with the above warning). We wonder whether this caused an issue to Google to flag our pages. Please help. Thanks
| vtmoz0 -
Third part http links on the page source: Social engineering content warning from Google
Hi, We have received "Social engineering content" warning from Google and one of our important page and it's internal pages have been flagged as "Deceptive site ahead". We wonder what's the reason behind this as Google didn't point exactly to the specific part of the page which made us look so to the Google. We don't employ any such content on the page and the content is same for many months. As our site is WP hosted, we used a WordPress plugin for this page's layout which injected 2 http (non-https) links in our page code. We suspect if this is the reason behind this? Any ideas? Thanks
| vtmoz1 -
Does building backlinks help improve Google rankings? If so which links work nowadays?
Hi Guys, Please only reply of you have real experience.... So as the title implies does building backlinks work in improving the rankings in Google? I know they are not on the same level as some are spammy, in blog networks etc but how about other backlinks that are of higher quality? If yes, what sorts of backlinks work nowadays in boosting rankings but not risking getting penalized? So should you build backlinks ongoing? If so how many per month? I have a real struggle trying to get backlinks on really high quality sites. Any advice? Cheers John
| whiteboardwiz1 -
"Fake" market research reports killing SEO
Our robotics company is in a fast growing, competitive market. There are an assortment of "market research" companies who are distributing press releases about their research reports (which are of less than dubious quality). These announcements end up being distributed through channels with high domain authority. The announcements mention many companies in the space that the purported report covers - including ours. As a result, our company name and product brand is suffering since the volume of press announcements is swamping our ratings. What would you do? Start writing blog postings on topics and post through inexpensive news feeds? Somehow contact the firms posting the contact and let them know they are in violation of our trademarks by mentioning our name? Other ideas?
| amelanson1 -
Old subdomains - what to do SEO-wise?
Hello, I wanted the community's advice on how to handle old subdomains. We have https://www.yoursite.org. We also have two subdomains directly related to the main website: https://www.archive.yoursite.org and https://www.blog.yoursite.org. As these pages are not actively updated, they are triggering lots and lots of errors in the site crawl (missing meta descriptions, and much much more). We do not have particular intentions of keeping them up-to-date in terms of SEO. What do you guys think is the best option of handling these? I considered de-indexing, but content of these page is still relevant and may be useful - yet it is not up to date and it will never be anymore. Many thanks in advance.
| e.wel0 -
Keyword rankings sudden drop
Hello, I own an online headshop, and as of last week my keyword rankings dropped significantly on some competitive keywords I was ranking for. I noticed the same thing happened to me last month, and then a few weeks later these keywords were ranking again. In fact, they were ranking even higher than before. I also noticed that 2 of my biggest competitors who receive 500k+ clicks a month had a significant drop in their keyword rankings as well. Does anybody know why this happens and how to correct the issue? Thanks
| Kobeghods930 -
Crawl anamoly issue on Search Console
Has anyone checked the crwal anamoly issue under the index section on Search console? We recently move to a new site and I'm seeing a huge list of excluded urls which are classified as crawl anamoly (they all lead to 404 page). Does anyone know that if we need to 301 redirect all the links? Is there any other smarter/ more efficiently way to deal with them like set up canonical link (I thought that's what they're used for isn't it?) Thanks!
| greenshinenewenergy0 -
Negative SEO yes/no?
We receive links from fake websites, these website are copy's from real websites that link to us, but sometimes the links are changes, as for example one link is called 'tank weapon with hitler', we are a insurance comparison website (a bit of topic). The real websites that link to us are copied and placed on .ga .tk etc domains: For example: wahlrsinnsa.ga, loungihngsa.ga, pajapritosa.cf, rgeitsportsa.cf, sospesvoasa.tk I received spam links on other domains with comments spam etc, this doesnt really work, but in this case we really suffer in our rankings (from position 1 to 5 etc). Not sure if this is negative SEO and if this is really the reason we lost some rankings, but it's a bit of a coincidence the domains come in google webmaster in the same period we suffer a downgrade in our rankings. My question: Is this negative SEO, or is it something automatic. And do I need to disavow the links/domains? The real versions of the websites (on other domains with .nl) give the website autority.
| remkoallertz0 -
High ranking nationally but not locally via google
A website I am working on is ranked very well in all tracked keywords at a national level, but not from a local standpoint via google. I find it weird that the site is on the first page if you search from many other states/towns/locations but not locally. Looked on Google Search Console and couldn't see any link to why this is happening. Figured we would clear out the htaccess for any redirect issues and hope it fixes it. Suggestions please? Never seen google do this. It is strange.
| SeobyKP1 -
How long before our website bounce back after Google Penalty?
One of our client websites got recently hacked. In a span of 4 days, it received random backlinks from random websites with random anchor texts. We are already in good standing for some of the keywords we are tracking and the attack got us a penalty from Google and we lost our rankings, moving out of the top 500. We already disavowed these dirty backlinks though we never really diagnosed where these came from. How long do you think our client's website will bounce back from the penalty?
| SirAdri110 -
Massive Spam attack against my domain - automate disvow of tld?
We've been getting hundreds of new links from unique domains every day - all the domains follow a pattern like this: www.someword-1f4163e1.space/wiki/Someterm Hundreds... every day. What techniques exist to deal with a prolonged negative seo attack of this type. By the time we can detect and disvow, the damage is done.
| sonar0 -
Dodgy links across top ranking sites in a certain industry - Could this be negative link building?
Hi, I've noticed repeated low value / high spam backlinks directing to a site that I manage, and despite disavowing, new links showing similar anchor text keep appearing. See sample in the table below: <colgroup><col width="514"> <col width="407"> <col width="364"></colgroup>
| Alexanders
| biz.mfso.info/files/images/vertical-blinds-for-bifold-doors.html | | Get free high quality HD wallpapers vertical blinds for bifold doors |
| nmr.mfso.info/files/images/mould-on-vertical-blinds.html | | Get free high quality HD wallpapers mould on vertical blinds |
| nmr.mfso.info/files/images/install-vertical-blinds.html | | Get free high quality HD wallpapers install vertical blinds |
| nmr.mfso.info/files/images/cutting-vertical-blinds.html | | Get free high quality HD wallpapers cutting vertical blinds |
| rre.uere.info/files/images/high-quality-vertical-blinds.html | HD wallpapers high quality vertical blinds rre.uere.info | Get free high quality HD wallpapers high quality vertical blinds |
| dig.uere.info/files/images/mould-on-vertical-blinds.html | HD wallpapers mould on vertical blinds dig.uere.info | Get free high quality HD wallpapers mould on vertical blinds |
| dig.uere.info/files/images/mould-on-vertical-blinds.html | HD wallpapers mould on vertical blinds dig.uere.info | Get free high quality HD wallpapers mould on vertical blinds |
| hja.uere.info/files/images/cost-vertical-blinds.html | HD wallpapers cost vertical blinds hja.uere.info | Get free high quality HD wallpapers cost vertical blinds | I also looked across 5 high ranking sites in the same industry and noticed they too have these 'dodgy' links in their backlink profiles. Could this be negative link building? If so, does anyone know a way to trace it or get it stop?0 -
Incorrect Schema
Hi I have recently noticed that by mistake our eCommerce site was incorrectly using the schema mark up featured product sliders, upsells and category pages. Example: Im aware that google is not a fan of misusing the mark ups. Would the above have a negative effect on rankings?
| MikeZur1 -
New Flurry of thousands of bad links from 3 Spammy websites. Disavow?
I also discovered that a website www.prlog.ru put 32 links to my website. It is a russian site. It has a 32% spam score. Is that high? I think I need to disavow. Another spammy website link has spam score of 16% with with several thousand links. I added one link to the site medexplorer.com 6 years ago and it was fine. Now it has thousands of links. Should I disavow all three?
| Boodreaux0 -
The most efficient anchor text distribution technique
I have many client websites and of course my goal is to do my best in the results I show. Share how you distribute anchor text which work the best. Such a scheme works the best for me naked/ branded/ generic Would you add any other strategy?
| Lynn120 -
Do we lose Backlinks and Domain Authority of URL when we change domain Name?
Have 1 performing domain (Monthly - 4M visitor ) now we want to change domain name ( Brand name like SEOMOZ to Moz ). I have general knowledge about domain changing prevention tips like 301 redirection and other thing. My concern is about backlinks and DA. How can I prevent any lose from SEO Point of view. (backlink lose) Do I need to change all backlink form source or redirection is enough to get all reference traffic from that backlinks?
| HuptechWebseo0
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.