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After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

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  • Hi, We run a series of weather websites that cater for the units (feet, metres, Celsius, Fahrenheight etc.) for the users by means of detecting their geo-location. So users in the US see the site in feet, Fahrenheight and pretty much the rest of the world gets metric units. My concern is that if we view the cached version of our pages as seen by the Googlebot out of Mountain View, California, it shows that our geoIP switch to imperial units has been activated for every location in the World. The question is, does the fact that we appear to cater for countries who use metric units by showing (in Google's eyes) Imperial units by default count against us from an SEO point of view? Thanks in advance for any comments, Nick

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nickruss
    0

  • Hey Guys, I am fairly new to 'technical' SEO as I was lucky enough in my old role to have technical expertise in the team for things like this, now I am learning myself and it is a slow and painful process, so your expertise is soooo much appreciated! My I.T. dept say that I have 3 instances on my website where the Hybris platform is creating a 302 redirect automatically - the first: URL doesn't exist - Hybris creates a temp 302 - the system does not create case sensitive url's | http://www.example.fr/Example/Marques/0180/brand/CHANEL | URL doesn't exist | TRUE | 302 | | http://www.example.fr/Example/Marques/0015/brand/Giorgio-Armani | URL doesn't exist | TRUE | 302 |
    | http://www.example.fr/fr/Example/marken/0507/brand/lancome | URL doesn't exist | TRUE | 302 | I believe these are being redirected due to the fact that capital letters are being created in the url. Multi-lingual redirects I have a German and French version of my site and whenever any switches from one URL to the other using our language selector a 302 is created. Dynamic URL elements Dynamic url elements and special characters are being created in the URL, I am not sure where this is happening, but my I.T. department would like me to go and see whether this is something that can be created by a browser. If anyone has any similar problems or have any advice or insights even, I would love to hear from you! Thanks 🙂

    Web Design | | eLab_London
    0

  • We have created two category pages, in which we are showing products which could be delivered in separate cities. Both pages are related to cake delivery in that city. But out of these two category pages only 1 got indexed in google and other has not. Its been around 1 month but still only Bangalore category page got indexed. We have submitted sitemap and google is not giving any crawl error. We have also submitted for indexing from "Fetch as google" option in webmasters. www.winni.in/c/4/cakes (Indexed - Bangalore page - http://www.winni.in/sitemap/sitemap_blr_cakes.xml) 2. http://www.winni.in/hyderabad/cakes/c/4 (Not indexed - Hyderabad page - http://www.winni.in/sitemap/sitemap_hyd_cakes.xml) I tried searching for "hyderabad site:www.winni.in" in google but there also http://www.winni.in/hyderabad/cakes/c/4 this link is not coming, instead of this only www.winni.in/c/4/cakes is coming. Can anyone please let me know what could be the possible issue with this?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | abhihan
    0

  • Is there any way to disallow URLs ending in a certain value? For example, if I have the following product page URL: http://website.com/category/product1, and I want to disallow /category/product1/review, /category/product2/review, etc. without disallowing the product pages themselves, is there any shortcut to do this, or must I disallow each gallery page individually?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jmorehouse
    0

  • My domain authority dropped by 9 points and I haven't done anything differently since the last scan. What is going on?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | infotrust2
    0

  • I had a question and I am hoping that some one on this community will be able to help clarify. We went through a link removal and disavow process last year. If we see more unnatural links showing up in our link profile and we want to disavow those links, what should be included in the new list of links that need to be disavowed: Only new links or domains Old list that was disavowed + new list that needs to be disavowed Thank you in advance for your help.

    Link Building | | revenuexl
    0

  • Hi, I've created a bunch of landing pages for local areas, reading, windsor, slough etc for the title tag I have  for Windsor Emergency Electrician Windsor - BrandName should I be using a pipe in the tag to further help search engines learn/identify the location? Emergency Electrician | Windsor - BrandName Thank you Kev

    Local Website Optimization | | otex
    1

  • Hi
    I have looked but cannot find any reference to this, so I hope someone can help me.
    Is it possible to upload a list of domain URLs and retrieve their MOZ Domain Authority?
    Many thanks
    Steve

    API | | SteveWarren
    0

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

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TheDude
    0

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

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | edward-may
    0

  • We are considering to remove our sitemap because it doesn't display the right structure. Will it affect current rankings if we remove the sitemap en continuing without a sitemap? Thanks

    Technical SEO | | rijwielcashencarry040
    0

  • On 6 June, Google search traffic to my Wordpress travel blog http://www.travelnasia.com tanked completely. There are no warnings or indicators in Webmaster Tools that suggest why this happened. Traffic from search has remained at zero since 6 June and shows no sign of recovering. Two things happened on or around 6 June. (1) I dropped my premium theme which was proving to be not mobile friendly and replaced it with the ColorMag theme which is responsive. (2) I relocated off my previous hosting service which was showing long server lag times to a faster host. Both of these should have improved my search performance, not tanked it. There were some problems with the relocation to the new web host which resulted in a lot of "out of memory" errors on the website for 3-4 days. The allowed memory was simply not enough for the complexity of the site and the volume of traffic. After a few days of trying to resolve these problems, I moved the site to another web host which allows more PHP memory and the site now appears reliably accessible for both desktop and mobile. But my search traffic has not recovered. I am wondering if in all of this I've done something that Google considers to be a cardinal sin and I can't see it. The clues I'm seeing include: Moz Pro was unable to crawl my site last Friday. It seems like every URL it tried to crawl was of the form http://www.travelnasia.com/wp-login.php?action=jetpack-sso&redirect_to=http://www.travelnasia.com/blog/bangkok-skytrain-bts-mrt-lines which resulted in a 500 status error. I don't know why this happened but I have disabled the Jetpack login function completely, just in case it's the problem. GWT tells me that some of my resource files are not accessible by GoogleBot due to my robots.txt file denying access to /wp-content/plugins/. I have removed this restriction after reading the latest advice from Yoast but I still can't get GWT to fetch and render my posts without some resource errors. On 6 June I see in Structured Data of GWT that "items" went from 319 to 1478 and "items with errors" went from 5 to 214. There seems to be a problem with both hatom and hcard microformats but when I look at the source code they seem to be OK. What I can see in GWT is that each hcard has a node called "n [n]" which is empty and Google is generating a warning about this. I see that this is because the author vcard URL class now says "url fn n" but I don't see why it says this or how to fix it. I also don't see that this would cause my search traffic to tank completely. I wonder if anyone can see something I'm missing on the site. Why would Google completely deny search traffic to my site all of a sudden without notifying any kind of penalty? Note that I have NOT changed the content of the site in any significant way. And even if I did, it's unlikely to result in a complete denial of traffic without some kind of warning.

    Technical SEO | | Gavin.Atkinson
    1
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  • Due to URL changes and parameters on our ecommerce sites, we have a massive amount of duplicate pages indexed by google, sometimes up to 5 duplicate pages with different URLs. 1. We've instituted canonical tags site wide. 2. We are using the parameters function in Webmaster Tools. 3. We are using 301 redirects on all of the obsolete URLs 4. I have had many of the pages fetched so that Google can see and index the 301s and canonicals. 5. I created HTML sitemaps with the duplicate URLs, and had Google fetch and index the sitemap so that the dupes would get crawled and deindexed. None of these seems to be terribly effective. Google is indexing pages with parameters in spite of the parameter (clicksource) being called out in GWT. Pages with obsolete URLs are indexed in spite of them having 301 redirects. Google also appears to be ignoring many of our canonical tags as well, despite the pages being identical. Any ideas on how to clean up the mess?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC
    0

  • Hello Moz! I just subscribed for your Moz Pro program. Amazing stuff! On open site explorer, I found a number of links to my site from a page called with a very high page authority and high domain authority, but also a high spam score (8 or 9, one with a 10). I say multiple spam scores, because it's strange, there are what appears variations of the same url, and each one is considered a link.  For instance, there's an abc.linkstomysite.com and xyz.linktomysite.com, and 123.linktomysite.com... there are about 15 of these (all with the spam scores mentioned above)! This must have been some old SEO work done I payed for back in the prehistoric SEO days. However, my fear is the following: Removing these links, and then losing some potentially strong link juice.  I don't have many high DA or PA links to my site, and these are some major ones. The domain in question "linktomysite.com", when entered into OSE, only has a spam score of 4, and it has a domain authority of 45 and page authority of 37.  My site has a spam score of 2 and no messages from google regarding a penalty, but an overall reduction in google traffic over the years (just keeps slowly dropping... as if a weight is pulling me down?) What do you think, should I leave, or remove?  The linkstomysite page is just a LONG page full of links, with short descriptions, nothing of value, but with a an old domain age (relatively). Most important for me is keeping at least some ranking/visibility, while I personally work on building quality links and helpful content. thanks!

    Moz Pro | | DavidC.
    0

  • Hey guys, My site is Netspiren.dk and when I use a tool like Screaming Frog or Integrity, it only crawls my homepage and menu's - not product-pages. Examples
    A menu: http://www.netspiren.dk/pl/Helse-Kosttilskud-Blandingsolie_57699.aspx
    A product: http://www.netspiren.dk/pi/All-Omega-3-6-9-180-kapsler_1412956_57699.aspx Is it because the products are being loaded in Javascript? 
    What's your recommendation? All best,
    Fred.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FrederikTrovatten22
    0

  • Read something about user engagement might be a signal that Google uses, along with links and on-site optimisation, to decide if a search result goes up or down. What should I believe and what are the developments in this field?

    Algorithm Updates | | MozzieJr
    0

  • Just that really - we're getting on average around 80% online enquiries, and 15% calls. Calls convert better so would prefer calls. What steps would you put in place to increase calls? Ours is a lead generation site - we're a mortgage broker. So far we have a click to call button on the quote page which loads on mobile devices and doesn't display when the call centre is shut. We get traffic from organic and PPC. I'm trying to come up with a bit of a plan to address this. Thanks, Amelia

    Conversion Rate Optimization | | CommT
    1

  • My company made a branding decision to use lowercase for all of our title tags. This, of course, means that our titles on SERPs are all lower case. Overwhelmingly, it seems that websites use title case. This makes me wonder if we're shooting ourselves in the foot. Does using lower case titles negatively impact our rankings and/or click through rates? Is there any data out there suggesting that title case has a better click through rate than lower case? Thanks for reading!

    Reporting & Analytics | | Solid_Gold
    0

  • When building very large ecommerce sites, the catalog data can have millions of product SKUs and a massive quantity of hierarchical navigation layers (say 7-10) to get to those SKUs.  On such sites, it can be difficult to get them to index substantially.  The issue doesn’t appear to be product page content issues.  The concern is around the ‘intermediate’ pages -- the many navigation layers between the home page and the product pages that are necessary for a user to funnel down and find the desired product.  There are a lot of these intermediate pages and they commonly contain just a few menu links and thin/no content.  (It's tough to put fresh-unique-quality content on all the intermediate pages that serve the purpose of helping the user navigate a big catalog.)  We've played with NO INDEX, FOLLOW on these pages.  But structurally it seems like a site with a lot of intermediate pages containing thin content can result in issues such as shallow site indexing, weak page rank, crawl budget issues, etc.  Any creative suggestions on how to tackle this?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AltosDigital-1
    0

  • Hello there, Our domain authority dropped yesterday from 37 to 33 yesterday Our domain name is: http://www.wallpapered.com We have been building a few quality/relevant links in the last month so am very surprised by this big drop? Would appreciate everyone's feedback? Thanks

    Link Explorer | | roberthseo
    6

  • Hi Mozers! So I watched a video about Matt Cutts he talks about creating multiple web pages just for one keywords is an absolutely no go.  So I was wondering we serve a clients in NZ Australia and USA, If we target phrase like Psychic Readings California, Psychic Readings San Diego etc (USA) Psychic Readings Melbourne, Psychic Readings Sydney (AU) Psychic Readings Auckland, Psychic Readings Wellington (NZ) What is the best practice or right way to go about structuring my pages to do this without going against googles guidelines. Many thanks

    Local Website Optimization | | edward-may
    1

  • We oversee a variety of regional, county, and town level tourism websites, each with hundreds (or even thousands) of places/businesses represented with individual pages. Each page contains a link back to the place's main web presence if available. My fear is that a large portion of these linked to sites are low quality, and may even be spammy. With our budgets there is no way to sort through them and assign nofollows as needed. There are also a number of broken links that we try to stay on top of but at times some slip through due to the sheer number of pages. I am thinking about adding a nofollow to these outbound links across the board. This would not be all outbound links on the website, just the website links on the listing pages. I would love to know peoples thoughts on this.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Your_Workshop
    0

  • Schema markup helps Google and Bing identify what your (and your competitors') website pages are all about and as a result, helps search engines better index them. Better indexing can lead to better rankings for relevant keywords and phrases and herein lies the opportunity. In today's Daily SEO FiX, Jordan shows you how to use MozBar to analyze the schema markup of the competition and optimize your own site and pages for rich snippets. If you don't have MozBar, no worries! You may download it for free here. This video is part of The Moz Daily SEO Fix tutorial series--Moz tool tips and tricks in under 2 minutes. To watch all of our videos so far, and to subscribe to future ones, make sure to visit the Daily SEO Fix channel on YouTube.

    Moz Bar | | kellyjcoop
    1

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

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | carlystemmer
    0

  • Hi. I work for a regional news source, and our (separate) Spanish-language news publication recently changed its domain name. The publication lost its Google News inclusion. Most of their traffic came from Google News, so traffic tanked. They're trying to get back in. They reapplied but didn't get approved. They're now in the 30-day waiting period to reapply again. The website is run by a third-party company, which handled the domain name change in April (2015). That company has been running their site for a couple of years. Our in-house devs' hands are tied on helping, because we (at the mother company) don't manage their site. This third party has not been responsive. The Spanish pub folks have reached out to me to help them prepare for Round 2 of reapplication. I'm the mothership in-house SEO, but I've never experienced this situation before. Because everything seems to be in order besides the ham-handed changes, my best advice to them so far is: You'll have to wait until Google gets to know you again, unfortunately. Does that sound right? Any pointers out there for bringing their best possible A-game to the next round?

    Technical SEO | | christyrobinson
    1

  • My current site is on wordpress. We are currently designing a new wordpress site, with the same URLs. Our current approach is to go into the server, delete the current website files and ad the new website files. My current site has old urls which are 301 redirected to current urls. Here is my question.  In the current redesign process, do i need to create pages for old the 301 redirected urls so that we do not lose them in the launch of the new site? or is the 301 command currently existing outside of our server so this does not matter? Thank you in advance.

    Web Design | | CamiloSC
    0

  • We have a blog currently powered by the free blogger.com website. We have set it up as blog.example.com we wish to seti it up as example.com/blog how can we do this using .htaccess file? we understand how to update htacess, but we don't know what code we should enter to achieve what we want our website is hosted on Apache servers with plesk control panel

    Technical SEO | | Direct_Ram
    0

  • Hello, I am rather new to online marketing and because of this employ an SEO company to help with improving my ranking. They have now been working with me for around 6 months and I have not seen an increase in the traffic to my site - in fact it is at it all time low. Yesterday I only had 4 visitors for example. They keep ensuring me it will take time, and show me reports on how my keywords are ranking, and some appear to be doing okay, but I would have thought traffic would have improved by now. Why I am a little suspicious of this company is they only seem to be doing back linking. They have done very little, if anything, with on-page optimisation, so much so that I tried to do this all myself following Moz guidelines etc. But even this has seen very little improvement. I would have thought that as a paid SEO company, they may see that something is clearly not working. Perhaps the wrong keywords? Suggest a different tactic? I write blogs posts, am social media active but feeling very discourage with it all as seeing very little results. I continuously hear about scams and get new emails every day saying "we have analysed your site and all these things are wrong... pay us $XXX and we will get you traffic" but who can you trust and how can you find an affordable way to gain traffic as a very small business. Would be great to get feedback from anyone who may know what is going on. Thanks Astrid

    Keyword Research | | Lilala_Kids
    0

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