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!
-
EXPERT CHALLENGE: What link building strategies do YOU think will work after the latest 3/29/2012 Google algorithm change?
FOR ALL SEO THOUGHT LEADERS...What link building strategies do YOU think will work after the latest 3/29/2012 Google algorithm change? NOTE: My hope is that the responses left on this thread will ultimately benefit all members of the community and give recognition to the true thought leaders within the SEO space. That being said, my challenge is a 2 part question: With the 80/20 rule in mind, and in light of recent algorithm changes, what would YOU focus most of your SEO budget on if you had to choose? Let's assume you're in a competitive market (ie #1-5 on page 1 has competitors with 20,000+ backlinks - all ranging from AC Rank 7 to 1). How would you split your total monthly SEO budget as a general rule? Ex) 60% link building / 10% onsite SEO / 10% Social Media / 20% content creation? I realize there are many "it depends" factors but please humor us anyways. Link building appears to have become harder and harder as google releases more and more algorithm changes. For link building, the only true white hat way of proactively generating links (that I know of) is creating high quality content that adds value to customers (ie infographics, videos, etc.), guest blogging, and Press Releases. The con to these tactics is that you are waiting for others to find and pick up your content which can take a VERY long time, so ROI is difficult to measure and justify to clients or C-level management. That being said, how are YOU allocating your link building budget? Are all of these proactive link building tactics a waste of time now? I've heard it couldn't hurt to still do some of these, but what are your thoughts and what is / isn't working for you? Here they are: A. Using spun articles edited by US based writers for guest blog content B. 301 Redirects C. Social bookmarking D. Signature links from Blog commenting E. Directory submissions F. Video Submissions G. Article Directory submissions H. Press release directory submissions I. Forum Profile Submissions J. Forum signature links K. RSS Feed submissions L. Link wheels M. Building links (using scrapebox, senukex, etc.) to pages linked to your money site N. Links from privately owned networks (I spoke to an SEO company that claims to have over 4000 unique domains which he uses to boost rankings for his clients) O. Buying Contextual Text Links All Expert opinions are welcomed and appreciated 🙂
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | seoeric2 -
Archived campaign and automatic reports
Hi I set up the standard reports under Reports new and am still getting them emailed with no data. Just want to stop receiving as I have archived the campaign Thanks
Moz Pro | | Alexanders0 -
Which Link Strategy is Better: .edus or Blogs?
Suppose you only have enough resources to execute a strategy that will earn links from 100 .edu sites or a strategy will earn 100 blogs on your industry. Which would you choose?
Link Building | | ProjectLabs0 -
Best practices to track blog.mydomain.com in Google Analytics?
What is the best practice in Google Analytics? Tracking blog.mydomain.com + mydomain.com under the same profile? Or creating separate profiles for each blog.mydomain.com and mydomain.com? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | gerardoH0 -
Paid Directories and On-page Keyword SEO
I have a new website and I am getting ready to submit to a few paid directories to get my links started. I wanted to optimize my domain name/keywords for those directories and also for my on page SEO. My domain contains my keywords. For example "www.horsebuggy.net Questions: #1 Should I target the horsebuggy.net in my on-page SEO or just target horse buggy? #2 When I submit to a paid directory which should I choose for my company name. (I currently have a DBA for each term....for ex.. horse buggy and horsebuggy.net . Thank you, Boo
Link Building | | Boodreaux0 -
Text Link vs image link?
Which passes most link juice a text link or an image with the correct 'alt' attribute? Do the pass the same amount or is one more valuable than the other?
Link Building | | SamCUK0 -
Should we add our site to Google Webmaster Tools
Hello, Should we add our site nlpca(dot)com to google webmaster tools? Everything's very white hat but we do have a section on each of our 4 sites for "Our other Sites" that link to the others. It's been there for many years. We're looking for clues as to why we've dropped in rank Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Magento: URLs for Products in Multiple Categories
I am working in Magento to build out a large e-commerce site with several thousand products. It's a great platform, but I have run into the issue of what it does to URLs when you put a product into multiple categories. Basically, "a book" in two categories would make two URLs for one product: 1) /books/a-book 2) author-name/a-book So, I need to come up with a solution for this. It seems I have two options: Found this from a Magento SEO article: 'Magento gives you the ability to add the name of categories to path for product URL's. Because Magento doesn't support this functionality very well - it creates duplicate content issues - it is a very good idea to disable this. To do this, go to System => Configuration => Catalog => Search Engine Optimization and set "Use categories path for product URL's to "no".' This would solve the issues and be a quick fix, but I think it's a double edged sword, because then we lose the SEO value of our well named categories being in the URL. Use Canonical tags. To be fair, I'm not even sure this is possible. Even though it is creating different URLs and, thus, poses a risk of "duplicate content" being crawled, there really is only one page on the admin side. So, I can't go to all of the "duplicate" pages and put a canonical tag, because those duplicate pages don't really exist on the back-end. Does that make sense? After typing this out, it seems like the best thing to do probably will be to just turn off categories in the URL from the admin side. However, I'd still love any input from the community on this. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Marketing.SCG0 -
Is this a white hat SEO tactic?
Hi, I just noticed this website http://www.knobsandhardware.com hosts pages like http://www.knobsandhardware.com/local/hardware/California-Cabinet-Hardware.html that are filled with permutations of products + cities. These pages rank for these long tail phrases. Is this considered white hat?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | anthematic0 -
Redirection Plugin and Regular Expressions
I am using Wordpress and the Redirection plugin. I have recently launched a new site and while it was in development, a lot of broken pages were created and indexed. These are terminating in 404s. I am looking to redirect all traffic from: /replay/postname/ to the homepage. When I use this regular expression: Source: /replay/* Target: / it removes the /replay/ but leaves the postname. Any idea how I could redirect all traffic inside of /replay/ to the homepage? Thanks a bunch, Josh
Technical SEO | | dreadmichael0 -
SEO for standard website pages
How do you folks approach adding some SEO value to the standard "every site has them" pages like "About Us", "Contact Us" and such? I struggle trying to find some relevant non-branded content. We normally cover all the customers relevant services and product offerings in pages specfiically tailored to that content, but don't want to waste pages if they could have some value in drawing traffic. Any great ideas, Mozworld? Thanks, Mark
On-Page Optimization | | DenverKelly0 -
Noindex, follow duplicate pages
I have a series of websites that all feature a library of the same content. These pages don't make up the majority of the sites content, maybe 10-15% of the total pages. Most of our clients won't take the time to rewrite the content, but it's valuable to their site. So I decided to noindex, follow all of the pages. Outside of convincing them all to write their own versions of the content, is this the best method? I could also block the pages with robots.txt, but then I couldn't pass any link juice through the pages. Any thoughts?
Technical SEO | | vforvinnie0 -
Identifying long tail phrases
I’m trying to find some long tail phrases for some competitive products, with reasonable number of local searches per month. I’ve tried using Google Adword/ keyword tool but I’m not having much luck. Ideally I would like to keep the product name as the first part of the long tail phrase. Which other tools would you recommend I try? K
Keyword Research | | soltec1 -
Ajax pagination and filters for ecommerce site
Hi There, Is it ok to use ajax for product filters and pagination? In this case url doesn't change when you navigate to 2nd or 3rd page also when you filter by colours, etc. If not what's your advise?
Web Design | | Jvalops0 -
How to filter pages in Analytics by multiple criteria
Hello, we have several pages with the same page title. Now out of all those pages I want to pick two. Let's call them "/page1" and "/page2". For those pages I want the following information (combined for both): Avg. time on page, Bounce rate, Navigation Summary Normally I get all the information under "Content" "Pages" and by choosing the "page title" as primary dimension and clicking on the respective page title. Let's call it "page | title". Choosing the filter for 1 page works fine (I just enter "/page1" in simple filter). But how can I filter for two pages ( entering " include page ends with /page1 and include page ends with /page2" in the advance filter will show 0 results). Thanks in advance
Reporting & Analytics | | guitarslinger0 -
How To SEO Mobile Pages?
hello, I have finally put my first foot on the path of trying to learn and understand mobile SEO. I have a few questions regarding mobile SEO and how it works, so please help me out. I use wordpress for my site, and there is a nifty plugin called WP touch http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wptouch/ What it basically does is, it converts your desktop version into a mobile friendly version. I wanted to know that if it does that, does this mean whatever SEO i do for my regular web site gets accomplished for my moible version as well? Another simple question is, if i search for the same term on my mobile phone then on my desktop how different will the SERs be? thanks moz peeps
Technical SEO | | david3050 -
Guest Blogging Tips
I'm just getting started in guest blogging, and had an idea I wanted to run past the SEOmoz community. I've been told that when guest blogging, it's only worthwhile to post one guest post per domain (if your intention is purely backlinks, which mine is). But I was wondering if it might be more effective to try and place a series of 4 or 5 related posts, and try to get the blog owner to link from one to the other (Click here for Part II of this series). Wouldn't all that internal linking give the pages with my bio links on them that much more authority?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | menachemp0 -
Using tables in html
I have a question about tables in html.I heard that you shouldnt use tables in html,you should should use css instead.Ive used free html templates that use tables but those tables are styled through css:td,th,table and other table elements are ale styled through css.I'm curious is this ok for SEO or should tables should be dropped altogether? Thanks for your response
Web Design | | PCTechGuy20120 -
SEOMOZ is giving me back warning on my site that I cant seem to find.
It says I have too many hyperlinks on almost all my blog posts, but some of them don't even have a single hyperlink? What should I do?
Technical SEO | | Caseman0 -
API callback parameter
I'm using the free API, and would like to use jQuery to fetch the JSON data outputted by the API. I need to make a JSON-P request, and for this I need to be able to pass some form of callback parameter in the url. I'd like to know if this feature is available, and if so what parameter I need to specify in my request. Of course I could just CURL to the API, but that's really a fallback for if I can't get the data using JS. Thanks
Moz Pro | | jgt19850 -
Sub domains or micro sites
Hi All I am setting up a series of affiliate sites; each site will focus on 1 category of product and there will be no cross over (i.e. no 2 sites will promote the same type of product). I'm setting up approximately 40 and they will all share the same domain: product followed by brand name.co.uk. Because of the numbers I intend to get a dedicated server and create a 'parent' website which I was going to use as a blog to promote the individual sites. My question is: should I set them up as micro sites, or should I set them up as sub domains? Wanted to know which is the best method from an SEO point of view as all sites will be hosted and owned collectively so I appreciate that the link building between each site will be limited. Thanks!
Affiliate Marketing | | danielparry0 -
What site do you admire/like for its SEO - technical, content, whatever - and why?
I am gathering examples of great SEO'd sites and would appreciate your examples. The rationale can be anything - great SEO structure, great linking, solid content - you think stands out. Thank you!
Web Design | | josh-riley0 -
What is the best link building management tool ?
What is the best link building management tool that can automatically fill in content for submission for me, check whether my sites are submitted on other sites, propose new lists of submission sites, organize my link building (by date, anchor text, url, page rank, both back links, reciprocal, paid, etc), organize my social media profiles and connect them to each other ?
Moz Pro | | CretanDevelopments0 -
Site Wide Link
I have just run up the link explorer on my site and discovered that every page home page link points back with the text home - I assume this is bad in terms of SEO , my site name is ccie and I assumed that it put the site wide link of ccie to the entire site, however it seems to be the breadcrumb default of home which is doing it/. www.rogerperkin.co.uk/ccie Should I be looking to change this so my top keyword points back from each page to the home page. I am running wordpress and assumed the site name was the home link on all pages. Can anyone advise the best practice? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | rogerp0070 -
301 redirects
At the moment it's possible to access the home page of my website via two different urls, with and without www. and you've told me that this can be resolved with Canonicalization and a 301 redirect. Do I do this with my web hosting package or in my html pages? If I can't do it with my web host (1&1) then is there an idiot's guide of how to do it yourself? I've also got both the domain vamospaella.co.uk and vamospaella.com. Is it better to have one of these redirecting to the other for UK traffic (at the moment .co.uk redirects to .com) Thanks
Technical SEO | | melissa10 -
New Magento store with lots of duplicate contect
Hi, I am fairly new to SEOmoz and would really appreciate some pointers. I have just received the results of my first crawl and I have over 1800 pages of duplicate content. this is an example Cream poplin slim fit mens business shirt from Jermyn Street Shirt Co. http://jsshirts.com.au/aylesbury-cream-poplin-slim-fit-shirt.html Heading other URL's indicates 10 My questions are what does this figure 10 represent? what do I need to do to remove this duplicate content. Thanks | | | | |
Content Development | | mullsey
| | | | |
| | | | |0 -
Google Sitelinks
We have an e-commerce site that has about 50k pageviews of our main shop page every week. However in our Google sitelinks we have one for 'Shop'. However, for the Shop sitelink Google is linking to a random URL that we have never & would never use as a URL and not to our Shop page. I can't work out why Google would pick up this random url as we have so many links etc to the main shop page. Why are they not linking to the right page? I have blocked that url in webmaster tools and done a redirect but I want to understand why it happened in the first place. It included 'swedish+fish' so it seems weirdly spammy?! Any thoughts would be really helpful (and I am only mildly techy). Many thanks
Technical SEO | | ahamill0 -
What are the strategies in Link Building? How to increase referral traffic?
Guys please help me to increase reference traffic for a dry topic website such as automotives, insurance, real estate. I tried social bookmarking and networking but I did not find any difference I even did Blog commenting forum posting but it did not make much difference to me It increased my search rate but it not helped in my referral traffic. So please suggest me better strategies in Link Building for dry topic websites
Social Media | | PrasanthMohanachandran0 -
Conversion Rate Optimisation - advice before seeking out a specialist
Hello! I have a site I've been working on for a lovely client, a small business start up since Christmas. The site has a very simple layout, is ranking well and maintaining its positions, has solid social media, is receiving enough traffic and ranking for a number of terms. The problem is - conversions! The site just isn't converting. I have spoken with a few peers who have said advanced CRO will be too much for me to learn in terms of Psychology of Buying, learning about colors, fonts etc. I understand meta descriptions for example are something that I can do, I was wondering if anyone could give me advice on any other basic CRO techniques I could apply to the site before going to a specialist. Any advice would be MUCH appreciated - the moz community is always so helpful! Charlotte 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CharlotteWaller1 -
What are tier 1, tier 2, tier 3 keywords (pages)?
I am seeing these terms, but for the life of mine I can't understand what they are. Could anybody explain that in layman's terms? Thanks.
Content Development | | VinceWicks0 -
Redirecting doesn't rank on google
We are redirecting our artist's official website to copenhagenbeta.dk. We have two artists (Nik & Jay and Burhan G) that top ranks on Google (first on page 1), but one of them (Lukas Graham) doesn't rank at all. We use the same procedure with all artists. http://copenhagenbeta.dk/index.php?option=com_artistdetail&task=biography&type=overview&id=49 Doesn't rank but the old artist page still does. Is it the old page that tricks Google to think that this is the active page for the artist?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Morten_Hjort0 -
TestFreaks.com Opinions Needed
I'm looking into testfreaks for a client - frankly i'm having trouble answering a few of my own questions about them, namely: Can Google spider the test freaks javascript link? Can Google then crawl the reviews in the frame generated? Will Google count that as dupe content? (the content in the frame seems to reside on the testfreaks.com domain..) Do you think this is a safe method of increasing conversions? Seems all good to me, I'm mainly concerned about dupe content (and whether reviews written within the testfreaks interface can then be spidered ... and i'm not sure it can be).
Conversion Rate Optimization | | CheapGames990 -
Crawl Budget on Noindex Follow
We have a list of crawled product search pages where pagination on Page 1 is indexed and crawled and page 2 and onward is noindex, noarchive follow as we want the links followed to the Product Pages themselves. (All product Pages have canonicals and unique URLs) Orr search results will be increasing the sets, and thus Google will have more links to follow on our wesbite although they all will be noindex pages. will this impact our carwl budget and additionally have impact to our rankings? Page 1 - Crawled Indexed and Followed Page 2 onward - Crawled No-index No-Archive Followed Thoughts? Thanks, Phil G
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AU-SEO0 -
Does title text of homepage effect ranking of sub pages?
Question is pretty much summed up in the title. I realize that title text on a specific page can effect the ranking of that page. But what I'm getting a feeling of lately is that google uses the title text of your homepage to effect the ranking of the site on a whole. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | adriandg1 -
SEO, backlink help needed.
Does any one know best SEO and backlink service that uses white hat method. I dont have anytime for optimization. Im looking for one way backlinking and on-page and off page optimization. Will appreciate help.
Image & Video Optimization | | tanveers0 -
Duplicate titles / canonical / Drupal
I have a site where there are several duplicate titles, looks like mainly based on a parameterized vs. non-parameterized version of the page. I have what appears to be a proper canonical tag, but webmaster still complains of both duplicate titles & meta descriptions. A good example (taken out of webmaster report for http://igottadrive.com) is: /driving-tips/mirror-setup-and-use /driving-tips/mirror-setup-and-use?inline=true If I look at the page (in either case) there appears to be a correct canonical tag pointing to the base case. However, for some reason google is either ignoring the canonical or its not properly done. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | uwaim20120 -
Huge Increase in Search Traffic - Expected Drop in Conversions?
We've recently implemented a successful strategy whereby we've increased non-branded organic search traffic by over 50%. We started with our niche products and secured those rankings and then expanded the program to include local results. Rev is up, trans# is up, but conversion rate dropped. Here is the question...is there an acceptable ratio between the percentage growth in visits and the percentage decrease in conversions?
Conversion Rate Optimization | | NaHoku1 -
You folks see the Google Analytics Real Time View (Beta)
I was pretty impressed by the amount of data they can present to you and how quickly the site gets it to you. Hit your GA account click the Home tab then click the Real Time (Beta) link in the navigation. It is pretty impressive. GoogleAnalytics.jpg
Algorithm Updates | | donford0 -
Technical SEO issue
Hi Everyone, I have encountered a major issue in one of my clients website(kitchen appliance website). This client has 2 main websites (A & B) linked with each other representing 2 different categories of appliances. We are trying to create some brand pages that this store carries. One brand page has been created and when searching for it on SERP, the results found should be under URL A but it is under URL B. I don't know what is going on? Can someone explain me what happened? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Avoiding duplicate content with national e-commerce products and localized vendors
Hello 'mozzers! For our example purposes, let's say we have a national cog reseller, www.cogexample.com, focusing on B2C cog sales. The website's SEO efforts revolve around keywords with high search volumes -- no long tail keywords here! CogExample.com sells over 35,000 different varieties of cogs online, broken into search engine friendly categories and using both HTML and Meta pagination techniques to ensure adequate deep-linking and indexing of their individual product pages. With their recent fiscal success, CogExample.com has signed 2,500 retailers across the United States to re-sell their cogs. CogExample.com's primary objective is B2C online sales for their highly-sought search terms, ie "green cogs". However, CogExample.com also wants their retailers to show up for local/geo search; ie "seattle green cogs". The geo/location-based retailer's web-content will be delivered from the same database as the primary online store, and thus is very likely to cause duplicate content issues. Questions 1. If the canonical meta tag is used to point the geo-based product to the online primary product, the geo-based product will likely be placed in the supplementary indexed. Is this correct? 2. Given the massive product database (35,000) and retailers (2,500) it is not feasible to re-write 87,500,000 pages of content to sate unique content needs. Is there any way to prevent the duplicate content penalty? 3. Google product feeds will be used to localize content and feed Google's product search. Is this "enough" to garnish sizable amounts of traffic and/or retain SERP ranks?
Technical SEO | | CatalystSEM0 -
Does anybody know of solid statistical examples of websites improving CTR via rich snippets?
There has been a fair deal of broad speculation that "rich snippets improve CTR". The recent rich snippet infographic that SEO Moz came out with mentioned this. However the only solid examples I could find was from an example on Search Engine Land. http://searchengineland.com/how-to-get-a-30-increase-in-ctr-with-structured-markup-105830 Does anybody know of any other success examples with solid data of improved search share CTR rates when rich snippets were implemented?
Algorithm Updates | | southernresearch0 -
Is there a good way to get the list of keywords that bring the most traffic to a competing website?
Listing your most "popular" keywords is easy when you have an "old" website, but when you start out, it's not always easy. We obviously have a list of keywords, as well as various versions for each of them, but we have a hard time assessing which ones are the most popular. Also, we may be missing some. It would be handy to know which keywords are bringing the most traffic to our competitors. Is that even possible?
Keyword Research | | jgenesto0 -
Keyword Search Historical data?
Is there a way to track the history of keyword search over time. I.E. the frequency of the Google search of the phrase 'unpasteurized milk' from 2006-2012 to see trending patterns.
Search Behavior | | preventionaid0 -
Why did SEOMoz only crawl 1 page?
I have multiple campaigns and on a few of them SEOMoz has only crawled one page. I think this may have to do with how I set up the campaign. How do I get SEOMoz to crawl more than one page on these campaigns.
Moz Pro | | HermanAdvertising0
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.