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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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Latest Questions

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  • RCDesign74


    We have a client that has syndicated content across a variety of domains. They have no access to the domain/hosting for the site that the content is being syndicated on, but would like to run PPC campaigns to these pages. The page is a header, footer and then the main page content is inside of an iframe, and I was wondering if Google will even allow that to be used as a landing page for a PPC campaign? Thanks!

    Paid Search Marketing | | RCDesign74
    0
  • potterharry


    Earlier I had a forum as sub-domain and was mentioned in my main domain. However i have now discontinued the forum and have removed all the links and mention of the forum from my main domain. But the crawler still shows error for the sub-domain. How to make the crawler issues clean or delete the irrelevant crawl issues. I dont have the forum now and no links at the main site, bu still shows crawl errors for the forum which doesnt exist.

    Product Support | | potterharry
    0
  • KS__


    How do I go about it if my physical address (office) is in Country A but I want to rank my website in Country B, C and D (without having an office or physical address in the countries B, C and D)? I am aware of people setting up virtual offices in other countries/cities and adding them to Google Places/Maps with toll free phone numbers, but I don't wish to do any of that. I know Google will catch up with this one day or the other and punish me hard for trying to play games with it. Is there a way rank a website in another country without actually having a physical location there? If yes, please guide me how to go about it.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KS__
    0
  • LMcLaughlin


    Hi there, I am witnessing a giant spike in my Google Analytics data (website: www.exchangecapital.com ) and I am completely stumped. My website usually gains roughly 15-20 visitors a day at most--and as of 11:10 am today my sessions for the day are up to 150. The traffic spike started on Friday at 132 sessions, Saturday at 261, Sunday at 247, etc. It's common that our sessions don't even hit the double digits over the weekends, so you can imagine my confusion. After trying to pin down some irregularities in geography, browser, and behavior, I'm still at a loss. I'm seeing a big spike in organic traffic (all not provided), as well as direct page visits, and I'm gaining traffic from US, Brazil, United Kingdom, Mexico, Spain, Malaysia, etc. etc--so not just one specific area. Is anyone else witnessing this in their data? Does anyone have any insight or ideas as to how I can look further into this? I am at a loss and any information would be appreciated. Thanks in advance! Lauren McLaughlin

    Search Behavior | | LMcLaughlin
    0
  • GPainter


    Hello guys and gals, This is a very odd one, I've a client's website and most of the crawlers I'm using are giving me weird/ wrong results. For now lets focus on screaming frog, when I crawl the site it will list e.g. meta titles as missing (not all of them though), however going into the site the title is not missing, and Google seems to be indexing the site fine. The robots.txt are not affecting the site (I've also tried changing the user agent). The other odd thing is SF gives a 200 code but as a status tells me "connection refused" even though it's giving me data. I'm unable to share the clients site, has any one else seen this very odd issue? And solutions for it? Many thanks in advanced for any help,

    Moz Pro | | GPainter
    0
  • RachelBev


    Someone told me it is a legal requirement for a website to have alt tags on all of their images. Is this right? Or is this bad for SEO?

    Image & Video Optimization | | RachelBev
    0
  • kevinliao


    We have just acquired a competing website and are wondering whether to leave it running as is for now, or set the domain to redirect to our own site. If we set up this redirect, what would happen to the old site in Google SERPs? Would the site drop off from results? If so, would we capture this new search traffic or is it a free for all and all sites compete for the search traffic as normal? Thanks in advance. Paul

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kevinliao
    0
  • kremsoft


    Hello Everyone, I am new to this I need some help. Thanks ahead

    Getting Started | | kremsoft
    0
  • jagdecat


    I have a lot of spammy links pointing at my website according to MOZ. Thankfully all of them were for some URLs that we've long since removed so they're hitting my 404. Should i change the 404 with a 301 and Re-Direct that Juice to my home page or some other page or will that hurt my ranking?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jagdecat
    0
  • newspore


    We are finally taking our classifieds site forward and moving into a much improved URL structure, however, there is some disagreement over whether to go with a Flat URL structure or a structured sub-directory. I've browsed all of the posts and Q&A's for this going back to 2011, and still don't feel like I have a real answer. Has anyone tested this yet, or is there any consensus over ranking? I am in a disagreement with another SEO manager about this for our proposed URL structure redesign who is for it because it is what our competitors are doing. Our classifieds are geographically based, and we group by state, county, and city. Most of our traffic comes from state and county based searches. We also would like to integrate categories into the URL for some of the major search terms we see. The disagreement arises around how to structure the site. I prefer the logical sub-directory style: [sitename]/[category]/[state]/[county]/
    mysite.com/for-sale/california/kern-county/
    or
    [sitename]/[category]/[county]-county-[stateabb]/
    mysite.com/for-sale/kern-county-ca/ I don't mind the second, except for when you look at it in the context of the whole site: Geo Landing Pages:
    mysite.com/california/
    mysite.com/los-angeles-ca-90210/ Actual Search Pages:
    mysite.com/for-sale/orange-ca/[filters] Detail Pages:
    mysite.com/widget-type/cool-product-name/productid I want to make sure this flat structure performs better before sacrificing my analytics sanity (and ordered logic). Any case studies, tests or real data around this would be most helpful, someone at Moz must've tackled this by now!

    Algorithm Updates | | newspore
    0
  • Cocoonfxmedia


    Hi I am wondering if the <sup>tag in html is picked up by google as a reference point?</sup> I.e when you put a superscript in word it puts a small number next to your sentence. Then you have a list of reference at the end of the blog/article does google recognise this?

    Technical SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia
    0
  • sobanadevi


    Can anyone list me the best video editing tools. I am currently using camtasia studio but the quality is poor. Any tutorials and list of equipments to create a good quality video,Any help is appreciated.

    Image & Video Optimization | | sobanadevi
    2
  • PeteC12


    Hello Mozzers, I was looking at my homepage and subsequent category landing pages on my on my eCommerce site and wondered whether I have to many internal links which could in effect be diluting link juice to much of the pages I need it to flow. My homepage has 266 links of which 114 (43%) are duplicate links which seems a bit to much to me. One of my major competitors who is a national company has just launched a new site design and they are only showing popular categories on their home page although all categories are accessible from the menu navigation. They only have 123 links on their home page. I am wondering whether If I was to not show every category on my homepage as some of them we don't really have any sales from and only concerntrate on popular ones there like my competitors , then the link juice flowing downwards in the site would be concerntated as I would have less links for them to flow ?... Is that basically how it works ? Is there any negatives with regards to duplicate links on either home or category landing page. We are showing both the categories as visual boxes to select and they are also as selectable links on the left of a page ? Just wondered how duplicate links would be treated? Any thoughts greatly appreciated thanks Pete

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC12
    0
  • Whittie


    Hi there, Does anyone know if placing canonical tags in the body instead of the header of a page will still "take"? The system we are on means that making an editable header is no easy business and I was just wondering how big of a difference it makes to have it in a different area. Thank you in advance.

    On-Page Optimization | | Whittie
    0
  • Silviu


    Hi all, I got a big problem with my website. I have a lot of page, duplicate page made from various combinations of selects, and for all this duplicate content we've be hit by a panda update 2 years ago. I don't want to bring new content an all of these pages, about 3.000.000, because most of them are unnecessary. Google indexed all of them (3.000.000), and I want to redirect the pages that I don't need anymore to the most important ones. My question, is there any problem in how google will see this change, because after this it will remain only 5000-6000 relevant pages?

    Technical SEO | | Silviu
    0
  • EvolveCreative


    I'm looking to find more information on location/local schema. Are you able to implement schema for one location on multiple different sites? (i.e. - Multiple brands/websites (same parent company) - the brands share the same location and address). Also, is schema still important for local SEO? Thank you in advance for your help!

    Local Website Optimization | | EvolveCreative
    0
  • nathanfranklin


    Hi there, I have a website that is targeting 3 countries AU/US & NZ. I have set up hreflang tags for each page on each of the site however I am having difficulties getting it work right. I read this article which was a great insight into the hreflang tags. https://moz.com/blog/hreflang-behaviour-insights and as a result I have implemented hreflang tags in the following manner: When users access the root domain http://[website] it will redirect the user to their locale with a 302 redirect. I have a few questions:
    1. When building my external link profiles, I'm not sure if I should be building link profiles for http://[website]/ or for the geo graphical pages (http://[website]/aus/ etc..). Note that the http://[website]/ is never used, it just issues a 302 to the actual geographical location. 2. It seems that the hreflang tags are not working correctly. Perhaps its the result of the 302 on the root page, but in google.com.au (using the link http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&gl=au&pws=0&q=[branded search]) I would expect that I should see the search results for /aus/ given the fact that the hreflang tags are setup as en-au. Instead I am seeing the root domain page. Is that correct or should it be showing all the pages with /aus/. ALSO If I do a search in google thailand (http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&gl=th&pws=0&q=[branded search]) it returns the /aus/ version where it should be showing the /us/ using the x-default hreflang tag. In google webmaster tools I have setup 4 site profiles:
    http://[website]/
    http://[website]/us/
    http://[website]/aus/ (Targeted to Australia)
    http://[website]/nz/ (Targeted to New Zealand) Any help would be appreciated. Thanks Nathan

    International SEO | | nathanfranklin
    1
  • Houdoe


    Hi, If I understand correctly, Google provides search results based on the location of the user. That's fine, because most of my clients are local. But if I look at my own search results, Google thinks I'm in a totally different town. Most likely based on my IP address. Of course I can solve that for myself, but the same goes for my potential clients. Is there a way to deal with this, from an seo perspective? For instance find out where most of the the IP providers are located and target that location?

    Local Listings | | Houdoe
    1
  • IsaCleanse


    Hi all I am looking at copy/pasting an article from another website which is very relevant to my business, is there a standard practise/best practise for SEO to do this and ensure Google doesn't think i am plagerizing content etc.. Link to source down the bottom? Using Quotations... making a page noindex or no follow etc?

    Branding | | IsaCleanse
    0
  • Vspeed


    Just Curious if this is an SEO No-No! I have set up the box to do some cool SEO transitions but am curious if I am loosing on a signifigant amount of internal linking considering anchor text or if Google recognizes the h2 as anchor text. Thanks. [ Article Title Article Synopsis Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.](internal-page.html)

    On-Page Optimization | | Vspeed
    0
  • Jason_C


    We do not have any manual penalty warnings but I am still concerned that Google will see this as unnatural and be penalizing us to a lesser degree.

    Link Building | | Jason_C
    0
  • Happy-SEO


    I get strange :443 errors in my 404 monitor on Wordpress https://www.compleetverkleed.nl:443/hoed-al-capone-panter-8713647758068-2/
    https://www.compleetverkleed.nl:443/cart/www.compleetverkleed.nl/feestkleding
    https://www.compleetverkleed.nl:443/maskers/ I have no idea where these come from :S

    Technical SEO | | Happy-SEO
    2
  • Cocoonfxmedia


    Hi I am baffled our competitor is position 1 on google and another spam site is position 2 for this position 4. Both site hit every no no for Google. For example our site no duplicate content and no duplicate pages.  However our competitor 21% of all content is duplicated and 51% of the title tags are duplicated. I am seeing this more and more and I am wondering has google screwed up as it seems to be that if you bend the rules you get to the top of google.

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia
    0
  • HB17


    Hello all, This could be something to do with our site or the Moz bar on Chrome, I just need to know which it is so if it is our website we can look into it further. On certain sections of our website the Moz bar doesn't display any Domain Authority, not even zero, the bar just isn't present. These types of pages are php which pull in data through a feed daily. Speaking to an SEO expert they said it could be where the page is being updated so frequently, or it could be something more sinister and technically not quite right. Does anyone have any ideas? Is the Moz bar just not working for these types os pages or is it more likely something to do with my site? Ironically it's these pages which I'm having trouble with that are not showing in SERPs! Thanks! 3Foorka

    Moz Bar | | HB17
    6
  • Happy-SEO


    I was running a rapport with Sreaming Frog SEO Spider and i saw: (Tab) Directives > NOindex : https://compleetverkleed.nl/sitemap_index.xml/  is set on X-Robots-Tag 1 > noindex,follow Does this mean my sitemap isn't indexed? If anyone has some more tips for our website, feel free to give some suggestions 🙂 (Website is far from complete)

    Technical SEO | | Happy-SEO
    2

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