Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

  1. Home
  2. Latest Questions
Log in to post

Latest Questions

Have an SEO question? Search our Q&A forum for an answer; if not found, use your Moz Pro subscription to ask our incredible community of SEOs for help!

  • pakevin


    I was wondering if there was a way to use SEOmoz's tool to quickly and easily find all the URLs on you site and not just the ones with errors. The site that I am working on does not have a site map. What I am trying to do is find all the URLs along with their titles and description tags. Thank you very much for your help

    Technical SEO | | pakevin
    0
  • SamCUK


    I recently set up a site (3 months ago). After a couple of months I was on page 1/2/3 for all my main keywords. However on friday all the keywords except for 3 dropped out of the SERPS. Today only 1 keyword remains in the SERPS! I'm an amatuer SEO and remember with my 1st site I worked on (this new one is only my second) that it occassionally dissapeared from the SERPS for a few days and came back. It's now been 4 days though and I'm beginning to think I may have been penaslised. This second site is more of an affiliate site but I do try to include lots of relevant unique content even so. Could it be because it's an affiliate site? All the affiliate links are no follow.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK
    0
  • sansonj


    I changed up my on page stuff via SEOMOZ tips, and I dropped like a rock in water 12 positions from 29 to 41 over night for homes for sale in casa Grande AZ. What did I majorly do wrong?

    On-Page Optimization | | sansonj
    0
  • Force7


    Hi, I just signed up with SEOMOZ and found some major duplicate content issues with Wordpress. I have installed Yoast SEO plug in but honestly am a little lost on how Wordpress handles it all and need guidance. I would love to hire someone to do some desktop share / Skype sessions to teach me the proper way to set this up but did not see if there was any place on SEOMOZ where employers and providers can connect. I am interested in more than just this one issue, looking for a freelancer ongoing to work on our site for SEO. Any suggestions? Thanks in advance Force7

    Technical SEO | | Force7
    0
  • Ben-HPB


    I have a competitor that ranks in Google Search for a Top Dollar Keyword in the organic rankings with the normal result, however just below that it shows another result that contains the Local City Name followed by their business name. In the URL they have domain.com > Local and below the description data it shows a map for a totally different location as this competitor only has one location... Once clicking on the link I found that it has everything in the title, description and h1 and body content in footer that talks about the local area but not their product. and when you click the breadcrumbs you can go back to a directory of all the other cities and states they are targeting with doorway pages with the same layout however the anchor text is cityname+keyword How are they getting away with this?

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Ben-HPB
    0
  • pakevin


    I have a client that was working with another SEO consultant and they pretty much dropped the ball big time! The SEO company took his site off of wordpress and put it on another CMS (http://www.wsinetsuccess.com/WSI-E-Fusion). My client would like to take hes site off of the WSI E Fusion platform and back onto wordpress. My question is how is the best way to going about doing this with out loosing all of the PR to the site? Should I find all of the URLs that are on the site and just 301 them to the right page? Thank you very much for your help.

    Technical SEO | | pakevin
    0
  • ChaseH


    Does anyone know where I can find a tutorial for moving a blogger.com (blogspot) blog that's currently hosted on a subdomain (i.e. blog.mysite.com) to a subdirectory (i.e. mysite.com/blog) with the current version of blogger? I'm working on transferring my blogger blogs over to wordpress, and to do so without losing link juice or traffic, this is one of the steps I have to take. There's plenty of tutorials that address moving from blogspot.mysite.com to wordpress and I've even found a few that address moving from blog.mysite.com (hosted on blogger) to a root domain mysite.com. However, I need to move from blog.mysite.com (blogger) to mysite.com/blog/ - subdirectory (wordpress). Anyone who knows how to do this or can point me in the right direction?? Thanks.

    Technical SEO | | ChaseH
    0
  • Chris.Menke


    Just got around to looking for a client's link on merchantcircle and didn't see it, so I looked for some other client's links from there and they don't show up either.  Am I the last one to notice this?

    Social Media | | Chris.Menke
    0
  • NiallTom


    Hi There, Our company provides training courses and I am looking to provide the Spanish version of a course that we already provide in English.  As it is an e-commerce site, our landing page for the English version gives the full description of the course and all related details. Once the course is purchased, a flash based course launches within a player window and the student begins the course. For the Spanish version of the course, my target customers are English speaking supervisors purchasing the course for their Spanish speaking workers.  So the landing page will still be in English (just like the English version of the course) with the same basic description, with the only content differences on that page being the inclusion of the fact that this course is in Spanish and a few details around that. The majority of the content on these two separate landing pages will be exactly the same, as the description for the overall course is the same, just that it's presented in a different language, so it needs to be 2 separate products. My fear is that Google will read this as duplicate content and I will be penalized for it.  Is this a possibility or will Google know why I set it up this way and not penalize me?  If that is a possibility, how should I go about doing this correctly? Thanks!

    On-Page Optimization | | NiallTom
    0
  • finalfrontier


    Is there a risk that Google will de-index your site or lower your ranking if you have too many backlinks from free classifed sites?  I would just use 1 free ad per classified website.  Thanks.

    Link Building | | finalfrontier
    0
  • GeorgeLaRochelle


    We have a lot of detail pages on our site that reference specific scholarships.  Each page has a different Title and Description.  They also have unique information all regarding the same data points.  The pages are displayed in a similar structure to the user so the data is easy to read. My problem is a lot of these pages are being reported as duplicate content when they certainly are not. Most of them are reported as duplicates when they have the same sponsor.  They may have the same contact information listed.  These two are being reported as duplicate of each other.  They share some data but they are definitely different scholarships. http://www.collegexpress.com/scholarships/adelaide-mcclelland-garden-club-scholarship/9254/ http://www.collegexpress.com/scholarships/mary-wannamaker-witt-and-lee-hampton-witt-memorial-scholarship/10785/ Would it help to add a Canonical for each page to themselves?  Any other suggestions would be great. Thanks

    Technical SEO | | GeorgeLaRochelle
    0
  • MassivePrime


    I wanted to know how others classify an individual in the industry. i.e. What makes an SEO beginner, intermediate or advanced? What skill set separates a pro from a newbie?

    Industry News | | MassivePrime
    0
  • KS__


    Are they really important? Many preach they are, and there are tonnes of services out there who give you thousands of forum profile links in no time. I strictly believe in genuine links built the hard way, and definitely don't want to get into anything which is black hat. Please suggest if building several Forum Profile Links is an appropriate way of building links?

    Technical SEO | | KS__
    2
  • emerald


    Hi, I've just added a sitewide header image link (60 pages) from our general company site pointing to homepage of another brand site of a product that we also own (which focuses in depth on that one brand). I haven't put a nofollow on it as it's just info for those who'd like to reach our other site. Should I expect anything negative out of this for either site? Could it seem like it picked up 60 image links suddenly and raise a flag?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | emerald
    0
  • meteorr


    How to automate the process of checking the operators of search teams.
    such as:
    inurl:? lang = ru site: tochka.net
    inurl: print site: tochka.net
    inurl: print site: tochka.net / *
    inurl: nomobile = 1 site: tochka.net / *
    inurl: comments site: tochka.net
    inurl: comments site: tochka.net / *
    inurl:? a_aid site: tochka.net ... with the conclusion of the number of pages in the search. There is a program to identify?

    Technical SEO | | meteorr
    0
  • emerald


    I have a 60  page site that had some nofollow links sprinkled throughout, 50% of which are probably on its mailto: email links. Should I remove all nofollows all in one go, or just the mailto links first, and later the others? Or has anyone had any negative effects in 2012 from this?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | emerald
    0
  • CommercePundit


    I have set schedules upload of Test Data Feed in Google Merchant Center. Today, I have found duplicate item error in test feed status summary! There are 2697 error for duplicate item. But, my http://www.vistastores.com/feed/test_data_feed.txt does not contain any duplicate item. I have checked test feed twice before raise this question. How can I fix this issue?

    Image & Video Optimization | | CommercePundit
    0
  • chirsirwin


    Hi, I have a new website that deals with 3 very similar businesses  The main purpose of the website is to assist the consumer to search, compare and book chaffered transportation online. The 3 businesses are taxi cab hire, limo hire, party bus hire.  My main domain is www.mytaxicab.co.za.  I also own the domains mylimo.co.za and mypartybus.co.za.  My question is, from a best practice SEO perspective, how should I set this up. Should I have one main site www.mytaxicab.co.za and have the 2 other niche domain names point in eg user types www.mypartybus.co.za and lands on www.mytaxicab.co.za/party-bus-hire or is there a better way? Any help or insite would be appreciated

    Technical SEO | | chirsirwin
    0
  • Grumpy_Carl


    Have a feeling that the answer will be obvious here but more opinions are always good... I own a number of domains, mainly com, which are targeted at the UK but hosted in the netherlands. I have noticed a very high number of dutch hits to my sites. Lower than UK but takings population into account it works out to be higher. I fear my decision to renew my dutch server instead of going for a UK one is helping me rank in the wrong part of the world. I have paid a couple of months ahead for the dutch server but am wondering if the cost of writing off a couple of hundred pounds will be less than I'm losing due to my location. Should I take the financial hit on the server in the hope that buying a UK one will increase my relevant traffic?

    Technical SEO | | Grumpy_Carl
    0
  • PedroAndJobu


    On my site, I have a subdirectory. It posts articles from a bunch of websites that my readers are interested in & links back to all of those sites.  There is no original content in it. There are over 1700 indexed pages in this subdirectory.  The rest of my site has about 500 (all original content). The search engine traffic for this subdirectory only accounts for 3.9% of my sites overall visits. Should I consider removing this subdirectory?  Could all the duplicate content be hurting the rankings of my legit pages? What do you all think?

    On-Page Optimization | | PedroAndJobu
    0
  • iJeep


    We have a bundle product page with a unique title, description and image.  Other companies have similar items, but not a duplicate of what we offer.  There are a few key phrases that we are trying to target with this product because they describe the product perfectly by nature. There are other similar ranking conundrums on our site, but I chose to ask about this one because it is a fairly simple and straight forward case. Attached is the ranking difficulty tool results.  From this test, I don't see any reason why the number 1 ranking is better than our page in the SE's eyes.  We don't have any problems or warnings in WMT either. I'm open to ideas/suggestions on why our pages are ranked so much lower for a simple search term. I have tried tweaking the title, text and added internal/external links as well as built social indicators.  Nothing is making the difference I'm expecting.  Because this is a fairly non-competitive, low-income phrase, I figured it would be easy to move up the rankings. I'm almost thinking it has more to do with our site template/design than anything, but that's hard for me to say. [Our site is 19&20 in the report] 8MXHJ.png

    Competitive Research | | iJeep
    0
  • totaldriveways


    My webmaster tools info is completely differernt to the opensite explorer info, I understand that site explorer only updates every so often but i reckon it been around four months since my stats were updated. Is there anywhere else i could  view this info like PR and domain authority and actually get up to date info. Many thanks

    Moz Pro | | totaldriveways
    0
  • jfeitlinger


    Goal: Leverage videos to get links and traffic back to website not video hosting platform site (e.g. YouTube) to generate website leads **Issue: ** If we place a video on a website using video YouTube embed code and video sitemap for the crawlers to index our video DOES show up in search results BUT that link goes back to YouTube. Great for increasing views on YouTube but not increasing link popularity for client website. Question:  What are recommendations / best practice for SEO (such as using another player like Viddler, etc.) that will get video results from search engines back to the website? We want to leverage videos to build links and generate leads to client site.

    Image & Video Optimization | | jfeitlinger
    0
  • diogenes


    I have 2 business sites. www.affordable-uncontested-divorce.com is a homestead template site which is old and clunky but has given me steady traffic despite little maintenance. It was unafected by the various Panda updates. It does load very fast. www.uncontesteddivorce-nyc I put up about 18 months ago it is a Thesis Theme Wordpress site with the usual bells and whistles. I put a lot of work into it and around May its traffic finally surpassed my old site. In June traffic to the new site started tanking, ultimately about 30% off. A friendly SEO thought that there was some duplication between the 2 sites and Google might have seen the older site as the authority site and the newere as the scraper. I tried the usual fixes and the decline finally bottomed out but no recovery. I read someone who said that Wordpress sites are problamatical with Panda because of inherent duplicate content issues unless you don't use them as blogs, just as CMS. So I got rid of all the blog posts save one. Around about 3 months ago my traffic started to go up again and now it once again has surpassed the older site. The strange thing about it is that since the recovery my Analytic numbers like bounce rate number of page views and time on site have gone down and are much worse on the new site than they are on the old site. Does anyone have any idea of what' s up? Thx Paul

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | diogenes
    0
  • Chris_Gregory


    I currently have several 404 errors in the latest crawls from SEOMoz.  Here is an example of the error. http://dealerplatform.com/blog/2011/10/23/videos-for-auto-dealers/www.dealerplatform.com/ In all cases the error is a result of www.dealerplatform.com being added to the real url. Anyone seen this before?  The site is a wordpress mutlisite.  I don't see where this incorrect link is showing up anywhere on the website. Any advice would be helpful. Thanks

    Moz Pro | | Chris_Gregory
    0
  • riyas_heych


    I have a doubt regarding the facebook LIKES for URLs Case 1: By using a Facebook Like Button (for URL) on my page(s). Here people are coming to my page and giving like directly on my page. Case 2: Here i'm not using any Facebook Like plugins on page, But my page got shared on facebook pages and profiles. And people are giving likes on facebook.com for my shared links. Is this two count as different methods? Explain me please.

    Social Media | | riyas_heych
    0
  • JohnW-UK


    Silly question time..... Can Open Site Explorer work on twitter profile pages? Or is the fact twitter is on https still an issue for crawling open site explorer? Cheers in advance

    Moz Pro | | JohnW-UK
    0
  • JohnW-UK


    Hi, I start a post on a popular internet marketing forum about how bad blogs - (i.e. the ones with one posts of over optimise spun garbage) - and the one page affiliate sites - trying to sell you something... (you know the ones) - were REALLY starting to annoy me and if/when something would be done by ISP's or Anyone really. Obviously google is aware of the issue with trying to push Google Plus to crowd source better search results. But with more and more sites popping up telling people how they can make money from having a niche website/page with adwords on it aren't we fast moving to a two tier internet.... How websites/pages exist purely to game search engines.... and will they ever disappear.... Sorry mini rant..... might even get some ideas for a blog post 😛 (not on a bad blog before anyone says anything)

    Affiliate Marketing | | JohnW-UK
    0
  • Charlessipe


    Is there any risk with placing the same customer quote (3-4 sentences) on multiple pages on your site?

    Technical SEO | | Charlessipe
    0
  • SirMax


    In the opensite explorer most of the links that I see have a higher domain authority and lower page authority which makes sense to me because I thought that domain authority is an aggregate of  its pages authority. But apperently I was wrong because sometimes I see that the page authority is greater then its domain? How could that be?

    Moz Pro | | SirMax
    0
  • Charlessipe


    What if the most trusted sites in your niche have relatively low authority? Should you still spend a lot of resources to get those links or go after easier links with higher link authority (as determined by MozRank)?

    Link Building | | Charlessipe
    0
  • Boodreaux


    Which is the best way to set up the 301 redirect on my main home page? http://horsebuggy.com  to http://www.horsebuggy.com Or does it make a difference? Boodreaux

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Boodreaux
    0
  • Charlessipe


    How do you approach balancing load time with making a page linkworthy? For example, if you create a page with a lot of rich media like infographics, images, videos, and audio, this will probably increase page load time but it will be more likely to earn links.

    Technical SEO | | Charlessipe
    0
  • Charlessipe


    When linking out to external sources what criteria do you use? Also, do you ever add the URL in plain text instead to conserve link juice?

    Technical SEO | | Charlessipe
    0
  • nosuchagency


    Hrello fellow Mozzers. There's been alot of writing about excessive anchor text usage, and as an SEO I get it. Don't get to crazy about it, but - WHEN is it excessive anchor text usage? Is it excessive if I have 50 links distributed in 10 blogposts?
    Is it excessive if I have a 250 links distributed across the entire site? It's fair enough that excessive anchort text usage get's you penalized, but it's freakishly annoying that nobody tells you WHEN you've reach the line that defines "excessive"... Anyone??

    Link Building | | nosuchagency
    0
  • VERBInteractive


    I am working on a project that is promoting dining in a particular region of the southwest for a destination marketing company. The parent Web site is an authority in the region and ranks well for almost all terms related to the leisure experience in the region. A completely separate Web site was built to promote this culinary program as it involves a committee of different stakeholders, but it’s solely focused on the region. My question is this. The site is on a different CMS, etc., but the overall experience on the site is similar to the parent DMO site in terms of creative. The client has a brand new domain that they purchased for this initiative, but we are also considering mapping the parent site URL to the new culinary site. Parent: www.regionalsite.com New Themed Site: www.regionalsite.com/theme/ Or www.themeurl.com My fear is that if I take the approach of the new URL that it will take forever for the site to build any link clout at all, as the client doesn’t really get the fact that working a link strategy is so critical. However, I know that having links from the regional site over to the theme URL will have an impact. Also, if I do take the approach of mapping the URL to a new folder off of the parent domain, do I risk that 2<sup>nd</sup> tier links on the micro-site will have a challenge indexing as they will essentially be on tier 3? Any advice would be appreciated.

    Technical SEO | | VERBInteractive
    0
  • DiamondLINE


    I started building links about a month ago for a new, 48% difficulty (according to Keyword analysis) keyword. The on-site optimisation is OK I think, the URL is an A grade (with maximum points, only 1-2 low importance factors missing). I trust my team I work with as they already ranked my site for several keywords in the top 5 positions (only manual linkbuilding). I do not expect top 10 results, but my page did not show up even in the top 50. Furthermore, there are a lot of tiny and weak pages in the top 50. I started campaigns for some other keywords at the same time with this and those are already around 15-20. So is there anything I should check? I am worried I am doing something wrong.

    Link Building | | DiamondLINE
    0
  • pulseseo


    Can Pinterest help me obtain quality backlinks? How does it help in the process of search engine optimization?

    Social Media | | pulseseo
    0
  • jombay


    What is your take on custom domain vs free sub domain for SEO? (example.com vs example.blogspot.com) Say if I have 10 links from 10 different domains but all hosted on blogger.com, will it still have the same link benefit as ones hosted on different hosting account? I am assuming it might be less due to the same C class IP appearing for blogger hosting. What do you think?

    Link Building | | jombay
    0
  • ragivan


    My website keeps moving up and down in ranking but stays within page 2 to 3. Everyday its at a new position.

    Technical SEO | | ragivan
    0
  • ScottBaxterWW


    Ok guys where do I start... Lets go back 12months, so were in April 2011 and ranking 6th for our main keyword 'car warranty' things were going well, we didn't really move up or down the SERP and for our other keywords we were ranking well. We decided to use an SEO agency to try and boost our rankings as we were getting ready to launch a national TV advert. It started off really well, we were moving up the rankings nicely and within 9 months we were 3rd for 'car warranty' we were happy!! On the 7th of Jan 2012 we dropped to 10th in the SERP for our main keyword and we were gutted we contacted the agency straight away trying to find out what had happened - we got news back that a site that they were using for links (around 20) had crashed for the Christmas break and the links had been deindexed by Google, we were told give it 2 weeks and we should see them again... 2 months later we were still at 10th and they had changed there mind and decided it was a 60day filter. We waited again until the filter had been removed and we still didn't move anywhere, with this in mind we have now left the agency and moved back to in-house. So back to today - we are now shifting between 10th and 11th on the SERPS which Is causing us some pain. I'm trying to work out what the hell has happened to our site, have we been penalized? Have we over optimized or is it just purely down to our link profile... Here are some stats: Domain Authority: 49
    Homepage Authority: 59
    MozTrust: 4.43
    MozRank:  4.51 So looking at our campaign within SEOMoz our site does seem to be OK - we have a few little issues but nothing that is causing a problem to our SEO. Our hompage and landing pages all of a report card of A so I can't see it being an over optimization penalty. Looking at our external links our anchor text is spread quite nicely between some of our keywords and our brand name. I don't personally think we have been penalized and we don't have any messages within Google Webmaster tools, i wish we did that way I would know where to star!! haha I personally think its just our link profile - looking at our links through OSE they don't look too bad, yes there are some low quality link directories but there are only a few. I think if we improve this and get some strong links back we should see an improvement but Its driving me mad at the moment and I just can't seem to put my finger on it, if anyone has got any ideas or could shed any light on our issue it would be great. Sorry for the long message but I just had to explain our past and where we are up to... Thanks!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ScottBaxterWW
    0
  • underthesun808


    We recently received a lot of traffic to one page from
    google.com referral. When I look in analytics it reports that the traffic is
    coming from /url that’s not real helpful. Is there a way to get more specific
    information as to what the referring url was?

    Reporting & Analytics | | underthesun808
    0
  • JamieHibbert


    Hi Does our little friend at SEOmoz follow the same rules as the search engine bots when he crawls my site? He has sent thousands of errors back to me with duplicate content issues, but I thought I had removed these with nofollow etc. Can you advise please.

    On-Page Optimization | | JamieHibbert
    0
  • lzhao


    Our site has a large Business Directory with millions of pages.  For examples' sake, let's say it's a directory of Restaurants. Each Restaurant has 4 pages on the site, each tied together through a row of tabs across the top of the page: Tab 1 -  Basic super 7 info - name, location, contact info Tab 2 -  Restaurant menu Tab 3 - Restaurant reviews Tab 4 - Photos of food The Tab 1 page generates 95% of our traffic, and 90% of conversions. The conversion rate on Tab 2 - Tab 4 pages is 6 - 10x greater than Tab 1 conversions. Total Conversions from search queries on menus, reviews and food are 20% higher than are conversions resulting from searches on restaurant name & info alone. We're working with a consultant on a redesign, who wants to consolidate the 4 pages into one. Their advice is to focus on making a better page, featuring all of the content, sacrifice a little organic traffic but make up any losses by improving conversion. My counterpoint is that we shouldn't scrap the Tab 2-4 pages just because they have lower traffic - we should make the pages BETTER.    The content we display is thin, and we have plenty of data we could expose to make the pages more robust.    By consolidating it will also be hard to optimize a page for people searching for name/location AND menu AND reviews AND photos.  We're asking that one page to do too much, and it's likely we will see diminished search volume for queries on menu, reviews and food.  I think the decline will be much more significant than the consultant estimates. The consultant says there will be little change to organic traffic. since Tab 1 already generates 95% of traffic.   Through basic math, they're saying the risk is a 5% decline in organic traffic.   Further, they see little chance of queries for menu, reviews, and food declining because most of those queries tend to send people too the home page or Tab 1 page anyway. Finally, the designer of the new wireframes admitted that potential organic traffic risks were not taken into consideration when they recommended consolidating the pages. I sincerely appreciate your thoughts and consideration! Trisha

    On-Page Optimization | | lzhao
    0
  • alsvik


    Hi We have a lot of pages about areas like ie. "Mallorca" (domain.com/Spain/Mallorca), with tabbed pages like "excursion" (domain.com/spain/Mallorca/excursions) and "car rental" (domain.com/Spain/Mallorca/car-rental) etc. The text on ie the "car rental"-page is very similar on Mallorca and Rhodos, and seomoz marks these as duplicate content. This happens on "car rental", "map", "weather" etc. which not have a lot of text but images and google maps inserted. Could i use rel=nex/prev/canonical to gather the information from the tabbed pages? That could show google that the Rhodos-map page is related to Rhodos and not Mallorca. Is that all wrong or/and is there a better way to do this? Thanks, Alsvik

    Technical SEO | | alsvik
    0
  • ErikDster


    At what point is there diminishing returns from getting multiple links from one website? Edit: To clarify, when doing competitor research I come across lots of sites that have say 500 linking domains with 5000 total links. When setting goals and calculating the types of links I should go after, I'm not certain which number is the one actually helping the site to rank.

    Link Building | | ErikDster
    0

Got a burning SEO question?

Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


Start my free trial


Browse Questions

Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.