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!

  • casper434


    Anyone know of an effective program to create video sitemaps. I just used pro xmlsitemaps.com and only two of my many videos showed up in the sitemap

    Content Development | | casper434
    0
  • AndySolo


    I have a questions about creating a website network for affiliate marketing purposes and how to achieve the best SEO rankings for each site. An example would be MLB(dot)com. MLB(dot)com  is the hub site, with what appears to be official site sub-domains for each Major League Baseball team. If I were to create a website for every baseball team, would it be best to create each site individually and link them together? or should each site be a sub-domain of a hub site?

    Affiliate Marketing | | AndySolo
    0
  • casper434


    Is there a way of having videos show up in google instant preview? Right now all I am getting is a blank space

    On-Page Optimization | | casper434
    0
  • ThemeParkTourist


    Hi everyone, Due to some really poor decisions I made back when I started my site several years ago, I'm lumbered with several hundred pages that have overly-nested URLs. For example: /theme-parks/uk-theme-parks/alton-towers/attractions/enterprise I'd prefer these to feature at most three layers of nesting, for example: /reviews/alton-towers/enterprise Is there a good approach for achieving this, or is it best just to accept the legacy URLs as an unfixable problem, and make sure that future content follows the new structure? I can easily knock together a script to update the aliases for the existing content, but I'm concerned about having hundreds of 301 redirects (could this be achieved with a single regular express in .htaccess, for example?). Any guidance appreciated. Thanks, Nick

    Technical SEO | | ThemeParkTourist
    0
  • nyphenom


    Content Development | | nyphenom
    0
  • ClaireH-184886


    Hi i wonder if anyone can help me with google adsense. I am having trouble making money with google adsense. I have been altering my pages to try and get better results with google adsense but nothing works. my traffic at the moment is about 3000 visitors a day but this should be doubled to around 6000 a day within the next two months. here is the layout of a typical page and i would be grateful for any advice on how to alter it to make money with google adsense http://www.in2town.co.uk/showbiz-gossip/rihanna-news/rihanna-shocks-fans-over-her-sexy-body-claims

    Technical SEO | | ClaireH-184886
    0
  • frankthetank2


    Just got a crawl report back from SEOmoz and it gives me lots of errors for "duplicate page content".  Upon investigating, I notice this is because my WP blog is setup into categories so the home page is almost identical to one of the category pages.  None of my actually posts are the same but the category pages have some overlap since the same post could show up in two or more categories. Is this a problem or can I just ignore this error?  Any thing I should be doing differently? Thanks!

    Content Development | | frankthetank2
    0
  • Grumpy_Carl


    Could i get a little domain advice please. Launching a new website project and want to put it on a domain we already own (both domains are in the same niche as the larger project).  The new project will be aimed at the UK market. The choice is: .co.uk we own with a good name, however it's Domain Authority rank is 7 and it's only about 8 months old. .com domain which is 6 years old, has a Domain Authority rank of 33 but is not as good a domain name. The Competitive Link Analysis tells me that the rivals for the keywords we would be targeting are between 24 and 42. Which domain would people go with? All things equal it would be a fair guess that the older, higher Domain Authority ranked .com will require less work to rank in the engines, however it's not as good brand wise. Thanks Carl

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Grumpy_Carl
    0
  • Tman3


    Hi guys, A friend's website is hosted in Germany (showing German IP in Flagfox) but it is a UK-based local business that only serves customers within a small radius covering 3 medium sized UK towns (they sell heavy construction materials for collection only). Should I advise him to change hosting location to the UK? Will this help him rank better for regional keyword searches & Google Places? He has some 'followed' links from UK sites (over 6 months old) that are not being picked up by Majestic, OSE or Webmaster Tools - is this likely to be connected to the server location? Thanks in advance for any help!

    Technical SEO | | Tman3
    0
  • NevilRohinton34


    Hi Team, For our client, Forum thread was created some where in Feb 2011 on a US based Forum site, but on to that forum; client has been abused through comments and now in 2012 same link is on top for some important keyword. So we approached to the forum owner to delete the thread or the comments but we got negative response from owner. So do we have anyway to remove that link completely from Google search result apart from creating new links and bringing them on top so that targeted link is moved to later pages. We need some solution/ trick through which we can completely remove the thread link. Awaiting your reply.

    Algorithm Updates | | NevilRohinton34
    0
  • ArtiKalra


    My website is having around 170 K webpages and every web page is meant for individual keyword. e.g. keyword for every page is height of a movie star. What should be my link building strategy Should I link other sites to index page of my website (if yes then what should be the anchor text) ? Should I link other websites to individual web pages of my website.

    Link Building | | ArtiKalra
    0
  • BobLongman


    I noticed that many of SEOmoz' own pages, those that aren't XML, start off with a simple , without all the other stuff that's on top of nearly all other sites. Is there a reason behind this? Does it have to do with HTML5 instead of 4.1? Should this be done as a general rule, or is it situational?

    On-Page Optimization | | BobLongman
    0
  • dianeb152


    my main URL is www.americanmusical.com, SEOMOZ shows I have a duplicate page title on www.americanmusical.com/. I have the think the backslash is causing other issues. I noticed when I first go to my site it is without the /, but if I navigate to the home page, the URL has the / in it. Any ideas on if this is a problem or how to handle it?

    Technical SEO | | dianeb152
    0
  • cchhita


    Hi All, SEOMOZ is telling me I have a lot of duplicate content on my site.  The pages are not duplicate, but very similar, because the site is a directory website with a page for cities in multiple states in the US. I do not want these pages being indexed and was wanting to know the best way to go about this. I was thinking I could do a rel ="nofollow" on all the links to those pages, but not sure if that is the correct way to do this. Since the folders are deep within the site and not under one main folder, it would mean I would have to do a disallow for many folders if I did this through Robots.txt. The other thing I am thinking of is doing a meta noindex, follow, but I would have to get my programmer to add a meta tag just for this section of the site. Any thoughts on the best way to achieve this so I can eliminate these dup pages from my SEO report and from the search engine index? Thanks!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cchhita
    0
  • eVacStore


    I am currently updating some H1 tags for my site but the tags are generated automatically by the text that is entered into a field on our content manager software. However because we need an image in this area as well, the entire field including the code for the image is surrounded by an H1 tag. Is this bad for SEO?

    Technical SEO | | eVacStore
    0
  • GCSMasone


    I recently was asked by a potential client to work with them on Joomla based website. I very rarely come across people with Joomla based websites and am struggling to find good resources outside of Joomla's own community site. At this point, I am not very comfortable working with them on Joomla. Any tips or advice?

    Web Design | | GCSMasone
    0
  • MarieHaynes


    A few months ago I found out that someone had hacked my site and placed malicious code and modified my .htaccess.  I am pretty certain that I have cleared up all of the bad code (within 12 hours of it being infected).  Yet, I am getting people telling me that their virus checker is warning them of a trojan on my site. Is there anything that can be done? I have no malware warnings in my Webmaster Tools. The site currently has 2 articles that are going viral and I'd hate for that to be screwed up by a stupid virus!

    Content Development | | MarieHaynes
    0
  • ahw


    With improvements in our rankings, we are seeing adverse changes in our measures of engagement. My gut reaction is to believe we are attracting more unqualified traffic, thus higher bounce rates, declines in pages/visit and time on site (approx 15%, 15%, 25%, respectively). While recent improvements in navigation might have contributed  to these engagement declines, do you have any suggestions how best to determine whether these declines are due to nav changes vs. due to copy/content issues?  There's been no change in copy content during this period. Thanks.

    Search Behavior | | ahw
    0
  • BedeFahey


    On March 27th I noticed a huge rankings drop across the board on a client site in Bing and Yahoo! After some research, I found this article on SEOroundtable (it also links back to a Webmaster World discussion). For this particular site we're talking a few dozen of keywords dropping off the first page, or even from the first page dropping out of the top 50. The only thing not affected were brand keywords. The site was recently relaunched, and has a fairly weak backlink profile right now. It doesn't use keywords in the domain (which was one of the things identified in the SEOroundtable article). Has anyone else noticed changes? If so, what do you attribute them to and how are you combating them?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BedeFahey
    0
  • Caseman


    I wrote some blog posts on my wordpress blog a few years ago that I no longer want on my site. I have them "no index" and "no follow" but everytime I run a report on my site they still seem to pop up. If I just delete the posts will it result in a broken link for my site? Or is there another way I can go about it? Thanks guys

    Content Development | | Caseman
    0
  • jmueller


    Does anybody know if there is a way to mark certain elements (especially navigation menus) so that instapaper and co don't pull them? I'm looking for a quick solution (best would be if it was CSS based) nothing fancy like parsing the user-agent. That would be plan B. I've added role="navigation" id="navigation" and class="navigation" to the nav elements in hope that it would work. Seems like it does not; sometimes the elements are present in the page generated by instapaper, sometimes not. Thank you for any replies and have a great day! Jan

    Web Design | | jmueller
    0
  • DigitalJungle


    Do Press Releases sites still worth to engage in terms of link building and domain authority building? I heard they don't deliver link authority anymore? If they they still do,  Which top 10 free and paid site would you recommend? What is the up-to-date link building method would you recommend? Thank you very much!

    Link Building | | DigitalJungle
    1
  • naturalsociety


    My news site has a number of excerpts in the form of archives based on categories that is causing duplicate content problems. Here's an example with the nutrition archive. The articles here are already posts, so it creates the duplicate content. Should I nofollow/noindex this category page along with the rest and 2011,2012 archives etc (see archives here)? Thanks so much for any input!

    Technical SEO | | naturalsociety
    0
  • ProjectLabs


    Suppose a blog has pretty good authority and quality articles but allows guest posters to use really random anchor text in their bios like Miami mexican restaurants when the blog is about blogging. Is there a risk that all the outbound links on the site will be devalued?

    Link Building | | ProjectLabs
    0
  • Max_powers


    I'm quite new to SEO and initially I was learning from the wrong sources who suggested to submit content to as many article directories as possible and the same with website submission to other web directories. Most of the directories they had suggested were low quality, with the only quality ones being made for a niche, which was not my websites niche. They also recommended other bad on-page techniques such as spinning/scraping other websites content - not that I followed this method anyway. Anyway, after educating myself more on how SEO and the search engines themselves work, I know that this is not the best practice. My website initially benefited from having all of these links but now has dropped off ranking for the keyword entirely. It still ranks on the front page for other long tail keywords and the actual domain name, but not the primary keywords. I'm worried that Google has in some way blacklisted my website for the main keywords, which were also used in all of these articles, but not the others if that's possible. At the moment I'm restructuring my website by increasing the amount of content and especially the quality of content so that I can submit it to better directories such as DMOZ and other niche specific directories and websites. Will Google look past the links from the low quality directories if my website is included in DMOZ and other high quality, niche specific directories? Is it better to just abandon my current website and start fresh? Thanks for any answers and/or advice in advance.

    Link Building | | Max_powers
    0
  • adriandg


    What does SEO Moz think of all this SEO abuse that is happening on tumblr lately?  I mean, it doesn't take much time to look around tumbler and realize pretty much every page looks like this: http://staff.tumblr.com/post/454906416/blackberry-app Below the post check out the "reblogged".  With the correct settings in your tumblr profile, all you gotta do is click reblog on a couple tumblr pages and you get instant backlinks to your website from tumblr pages. Some examples from this page: aticards reblogged this from staff mymuffincorner reblogged this from staff contextual-links reblogged this from staff It's actually a followed link if you reblog. if you just 'like' you end up with a nofollowed link. Questions: Why is tumblr so blind to allow this to happen Surely google must be aware of this and devaluing links that come from tumblr posts? Thoughts? edit: 50 views and no responses. maybe my question isnt clear enough?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | adriandg
    0
  • seanmccauley


    I have been working on an eCommerce site; www.pretavoir.co.uk over the past year. Improvements in SERPs have been good with many top three positions. However, there are other important keywords of similar difficulty which refuse to behave in a similar way.... The site is PR4 and has a homepage PA 52. The homepage includes links to internal brand pages eg Prada, Gucci etc. Q Would it be worthwhile creating footer anchor text with eaxct text eg Prada sunglasses, Gucci Sunglasses?? Thanks

    Technical SEO | | seanmccauley
    0
  • StrategicEdgePartners


    In Webmaster Tools I discovered that a client of mine with signed up for or hired another company to get links.  The links are poor quality and from other countries, so it looks like a link farm was done.  I want to know when they links were linked to the site, and not sure how to find that information out.  Does anyone know how to find this out?

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | StrategicEdgePartners
    0
  • tjsherrill


    So I have a client who uses PPC and Organic SEO to drive traffic.  Once a user gets to the site, the most common action is to fill out a form. I have Auto Tagging enabled in Adwords so all PPC clicks have "gclid" in the url. I am also grabbing the Google Cookie and parsing it out to determine if the visitor is PPC or Organic. So I have an if statement in my form code to pass PPC vs organic through the form for tracking purposes: $url = 'http://' . $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']; if (false !== strpos($url,'gclid'))  { ?> Essentially this is saying: If gclid is in the url, or if the cookie contains PPC 
    set the Web field as PPC Else
    Set it as Organic. this is working about 80% of the time. I am trying to raise the accuracy.  any ideas where I might be missing some data? thanks

    Conversion Rate Optimization | | tjsherrill
    0
  • BobGW


    Hello, A client of mine has a site that gives advice to people. It's moderately competitive. It's a content site. Using Open Site explorer, I looked up competitor's top pages and backlinks, and there were things such as sites that were heavy on directories, sites heavily on editorial mension, sites on juicy topics that I don't want to cover, and the rest was pretty much junk. Just so that you know, I only link build with quality websites that look strong, long term, have a nice design, are high quality, and are not a directory (with a few exceptions) What's the standard way to link build with a site like this? We've got 7 articles of good content that is from me spending hours learning about the subject and using my skills as a life coach. Right now I'm just adding quality content and social media. I am not a top expert in the field, but I'm learning as much as possible. How do we link build?

    Moz Pro | | BobGW
    0
  • NoahsDad


    The last crawl found a good number of 404's and I can't figure out what's going on.  I don't even recognize these links.  What's really strange is a few of them high a fairly decent page authority. For instance this one has a PA of 55: http://noahsdad.com/?path=http%3A%2F%2Feurosystems.it%2Fconf_commerciale%2Fimages%2Fdd.gif%3F%3F There are several more like this one also, it seems most of these new ones have "Feurosystems" in the link...I have no idea what that is. Just curious what you guys think is going on, why these are 404'ing, and how to fix it. Thanks. Edit: I took out the "%" from the links and I get this: http://noahsdad.com/?path=http3A2F2Feurosystems.it2Fconf_commerciale2Fimages2Fdd.gif3F3F which takes me to a page on my site. I have no idea what's going on, or what that link is. Hoping someone can chime in because this is strange. Another edit: I just checked out the Google Webmaster's and it looks like these errors are 403's and all started around March 21st. I have no idea what happend on March 21st to start causing all of these errors, but I'd sure like to get it fixed. 🙂

    Web Design | | NoahsDad
    0
  • vectormedia


    Currently doing a technical audit for a website and when I search "Site:website.com -www" the only result is website.com/robots.txt I was wondering if anyone else has come across this before -- or what this may mean from a technical audit standpoint. Thank you!

    Technical SEO | | vectormedia
    0
  • Ideas-Money-Art


    Hi I added one google analytics account with a third party business as an admin, and I accidentally shared all the accounts of my clients. So this business have access to all my google analytics account. How do I remove them as an admin of all the GA accounts except the one they need? A step by step process is welcomed 🙂 Thank you,

    Reporting & Analytics | | Ideas-Money-Art
    0
  • BobGW


    Hello, We have a Google Webmaster Tools account under nlpca(dot)com but our preferred URL is www.nlpca(dot)com Do I need to delete the account and start over with the correct domain version, or is there a setting I can set somewhere? The code is in Joomla so I can't set a rel="canonical" in just the home page. Currently we have all home page version redirected to www.nlpca(dot)com Thanks!

    Reporting & Analytics | | BobGW
    0
  • OddDog


    Just started with a new SEO client. The site is built on Sharepoint Server 2007 running Windows Server 2003 R2 on IIS 6.5 (I know, fun times for me). Being a standard crappy Windows setup, URLs and canonicalization is a huge issue: first and foremost, we get a 302 redirect from the root www.example.com to www.example.com/Pages/default.aspx Now standard SEO best practices dictate that we rewrite and redirect these pages so they're clean URLs. However that may or may not be possible in the current environment - so is the next best thing to change those to 301s so at least link authority is passed better between pages? Here's the tricky thing - the 302s seem to be preventing Google from indexing the /Pages/default.aspx part of the URL, but the primary URL is being indexed, with the page content accurately cached, etc. So, www.example.com 302 redirects to www.example.com/Pages/default.aspx but the indexed page in Google is www.example.com www.example.com/sample-page/ 302 redirects www.example.com/sample-page/Pages/default.aspx but the indexed page in Google is www.example.com/sample-page/ I know Matt Cutts has said that in this case Google will most likely index the shorter version of the URL, so I could leave it, but I just want to make sure that link authority is being appropriately consolidated. Perhaps a rel=canonical on each page of the source URL? i.e. the www.example.com/sample-page/ - however is rel=canonical to a 302 really acceptable? Same goes for sitemaps? I know they always say end-state URLs only, but as the source URLs are being indexed, I don't really want Google getting all the /Pages/default.aspx crap. Looking for thoughts/ideas/experiences in similar situations?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OddDog
    0
  • beehappy


    this is to host about 80 different websites all in the same niche, all doing very well in ranking for their specific keywords, currently at hostgator seohosting plan, but hostgator has issues I do not want to continue dealing with

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | beehappy
    0
  • webfeatseo


    I have a client who has 2 primary services in 4 regions He does mold removal and water damage repair. He then serves cincinnati, dayton, columbus, and indianapolis. Before hiring my company he had like 30 domains (keyword based) and had tons and tons of fake google places listings. He actually got a lot of traffic that way. However I will not tolerate that kind of stuff and want to do things the right way. First of all what is the best site approach for this. He wants a site for each service and for each city. indy mold cincy mold dayton mold dayton water etc etc etc In the end he will have 8 sites and wants to expand into other services and regions. I feel like this is not the right way to handle this as he also has another site that is more generic To me the best way to do this is a generic domain with a locations page and a page for each city. The for the Places he would get one account - an address that is hidden since he goes to customer locations, and just multiple city defined regions. He does have an office like address at each city. So should I make him a Places listing for each city or just the one? And of course how should the actual sites be organized? Thanks

    Technical SEO | | webfeatseo
    0
  • TheReference


    Hello SEOmoz, First question here on the forum, but a silent follower for years 🙂 I'm looking for a good book - you define what is "good" - about content marketing and or persona creation that you read and proved to be usable in real-life situations I've read "Accelerate" but found it too light-weight. Therefore your recommendations would come very in handy. Looking forward to your replies! Best regards, Nikolaas

    Search Behavior | | TheReference
    1
  • sembseo


    Hi all, My clients are about to have th elatest version of the free Magento store set up. It will sell in at least to different languages, so this need to be taken into account. Could any of you give some advice on what is the best way to avoid DC (if possible)? The shop is by now clean (from dc) but from experience I konw this will no continue... Thanks, Best regards, Christian

    Technical SEO | | sembseo
    0
  • BobLongman


    I have a site, spirithome.com (despite the name, a non-com site), that for reasons I don't know took a hit with Panda, and has been drifting down ever since.  What can someone do to stop an overall slow drift down?  (PS: it just came off a predictable seasonal high; I'm talking of an overall picture.)

    On-Page Optimization | | BobLongman
    0
  • duncan274


    I found an old domain that has very high domain authority and one of its top linking root domains is baidu I clicked the link in ose and it took me to a baidu serp????? please explain...im happy to clarify if need be or give you the site in question just let me know what you think.   I checked ose for the page authority of the serp page it was 50. would that page be helping the site in question to rank?  or  am I just dumb for asking this question One more thing I couldnt actually find a link to the page I was looking at in ose on the baidu result page.. thanks

    Moz Pro | | duncan274
    0
  • dseo241


    All sites need to be developed from the small to the grand - and this takes time. Development usually takes place on a subdomain different from our live domain. It is locked down behind an htpasswd during development so its not picked up by searching engines - that may create duplicate content issues if when the site goes live it has already scanned our site on the development server. Its also a security implementation to keep the site away from prying eyes before its ready for launch There could be security holes that have not been tweaked. Whats the best strategy to get SEOmoz involved in this scenario. Its tools are invaluable to the SEO part of the build - but the seomoz crawler bot has a different IP address  (being cloud based) - so we cannot just let a single IP address through our htpasswd. Also is there a way to link the dev and live site in seomoz - so when it goes live to maintain all teh same logs without having to create two seperate site campaigns? Thanks!

    Moz Pro | | dseo241
    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.