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.
Related Questions
-
400+ deleted pictures, 404 on URLs, can they be deleted without penalty?
A client had a website redesign and over 400 pictures (she's a photographer) were lost. The URL's (ending in .png) are hanging out there and according to the site scan, they have a matching current URL. Since the pictures are gone can the URL be deleted?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fcromwell0 -
Remove Google penalty or make a new website, Which is better??
My local website was hit by google and I have done all steps to remove the penalty, But it's still not ranked. So it is better to make a new website with new content and start working on it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dan_Brown10 -
Duplicate keyphrases in page titles = penalty?
Hello Mozzers - just looking at a website which has duplicate keyphrases in its page titles... So you have [keyphrase 1] | [exact match Keyphrase 1] Now I happen to know this particular site has suffered a dramatic fall in traffic - the SEO agency working on the site had advised the client to duplicate keyphrases. Hard to believe, huh! What I'm wondering is whether this extensive exact match keyphrase duplication might've been enough to attract a penalty? Your thoughts would be welcome.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Can't seem to get traffic back post Panda / Penguin. WHY?
I have done and am doing everything I can think of to bring back lost traffic after the late 2012 updates from google hit us. I just is not working. We had some issues with our out of house web developers which screwed up our site in 2012 and after taking it in house we have Eden doing damage control form months now. We think we have fixed pretty much everything. URL structure filling up with good unique content(under way. Lots still to do) making better category descriptions redesigned homepage. Updated product pages (CMS is holding things back on that part otherwise they would be better. New CMS under construction) started more link building(its a real weak spot on our SEO as far as I can see) audited bad links from dodgy irelavent sites. hired writers to create content and link bait articles. Begun making high quality video's for both YouTube (brand awareness and viral) and on site hosting (link building and conversions) (in the pipeline not online yet). Flattened out site architecture. optimise internal link flow (got this wrong by using nofollows. In the process of thinking of a better way by reducing nun wanted Nav links on page.) i realise its not all done but I have been working ever since the drop in traffic and I'm just seeing no increase at all. I have been asking a few questions on here for the past few days but still can't put my finger on the issue. Am I just impatient and need to wait on the traffic as I am doing all the correct things? Or have I missed something and need to fix it. you anyone would like to have a quick look at my site and see if there is an obvious issue I have missed It would be great as I have been tearing my hair out trying to find the issues with my site. It's www.centralsaddlery.co.uk Criticism would me much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mark_baird0 -
Our quilting site was hit by Panda/Penguin...should we start a second "traffic" site?
I built a website for my wife who is a quilter called LearnHowToMakeQuilts.com. However, it has been hit by Panda or Penguin (I’m not quite sure) and am scared to tell her to go ahead and keep building the site up. She really wants to post on her blog on Learnhowtomakequilts.com, but I’m afraid it will be in vain for Google’s search engine. Yahoo and Bing still rank well. I don’t want her to produce good content that will never rank well if the whole site is penalized in some way. I’ve overly optimized in linking strongly to the keywords “how to make a quilt” for our main keyword, mainly to the home page and I think that is one of the main reasons we are incurring some kind of penalty. First main question: From looking at the attached Google Analytics image, does anyone know if it was Panda or Penguin that we were “hit” by? And, what can be done about it? (We originally wanted to build a nice content website, but were lured in by a get rich quick personality to rather make a “squeeze page” for the Home page and force all your people through that page to get to the really good content. Thus, our avenge time on site per person is terrible and Pages per Visit is low at: 1.2. We really want to try to improve it some day. She has a local business website, Customcarequilts.com that did not get hit. Second question: Should we start a second site rather than invest the time in trying to repair the damage from my bad link building and article marketing? We do need to keep the site up and running because it has her online quilting course for beginner quilters to learn how to quilt their first quilt. We host the videos through Amazon S3 and were selling at least one course every other day. But now that the Google drop has hit, we are lucky to sell one quilting course per month. So, if we start a second site we can use that to build as a big content site that we can use to introduce people to learnhowtomakequilts.com that has Martha’s quilting course. So, should we go ahead and start a new fresh site rather than to repair the damage done by my bad over optimizing? (We’ve already picked out a great website name that would work really well with her personal facebook page.) Or, here’s a second option, which is to use her local business website: customcarequilts.com. She created it in 2003 and has had it ever since. It is only PR 1. Would this be an option? Anyway I’m looking for guidance on whether we should pursue repairing the damage and whether we should start a second fresh site or use an existing site to create new content (for getting new quilters to eventually purchase her course). Brad & Martha Novacek rnUXcWd
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BradNovi0 -
Multi-language, multi-country localized website with duplicate content penalty
My company website is multi-language and multi-country. Content created for the Global (English-language only, root directory) site is automatically used when no localization exists for the language and country choice (i.e. Brazil). I'm concerned this may be harming our SEO through dupe content penalties. Can anyone confirm this is possible? Any recommendations on how to solve the issue? Maybe the canonical tag? Thanks very much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IanTreviranus0 -
How long does a Google penalty last if you have fixed the problem??
Hi I stupidly thought that it would be a good idea to set up a reciprocal links page on my website named 'links'. I did this because my competitors were linking to these pages so I though it would be a good idea and I genuinely didn't know that you could be punished for this. Within about 3 weeks my rank dropped about 3 pages. I have since removed the links and the page was cached last Friday but the site still appears to have a penalty. I assumed when Google cached the page and saw the links were not there anymore that the penalty would be lifted. Anyone got any ideas? ps. The competitor websites had broken their links pages into various categories relating to the website i.e. related directories etc. so this might be why they weren't penalized.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BelfastSEO0 -
Panda Update - Challenge!
I met with a new client last week. They were very negatively impacted by the Panda update. Initially I thought the reason was pretty straight-forward and had to do with duplicate content. After my meeting with the developer, I'm stumped and I'd appreciate any ideas. Here are a few details to give you some background. The site is a very nice looking (2.0) website with good content. Basically they sell fonts. That's why I thought there could be some duplicate content issues. The developer assured me that the product detail pages are unique and he has the rel=canonical tag properly in place. I don't see any issues with the code, the content is good (not shallow), there's no advertising on the site, XML sitemap is up to date, Google webmaster indicates that the site is getting crawled with no issues. The only thing I can come up with is that it is either: Something off-page related to links or Related to the font descriptions - maybe they are getting copied and pasted from other sites...and they don't look like unique content to Google. If anyone has ideas or would like more info to help please send me a message. I greatly appreciate any feedback. Thank you, friends! LHC
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lhc670