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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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  • rec123


    Hi, We run an online beauty ecommerce store and recently acquired one of our competitors.  Their site runs on magento also, and they sell 70% the same product as us.  We plan to merge the new site into our existing magento install but keep both sites looking exactly as they do now with different themes, different product names, product descriptions, product prices, category structures etc.  In theory the customer would have no idea both sites from the same magento, they will look just as they do now. My question is, will google possibly slap the SERP's of either sites because we have combined them onto the same server and same magento install, even though nothing on either site actually changed on the front end. Both sites already have the same ownership information on the domain WHOIS, and a quick company search would reveal that we legally own both businesses under the same company.  So it's not something we are trying to hide, we are open about it, and plan to continue running both sites long term, with each site being targeted to a slightly difference audience, with 30% different products at different price points. Has anyone done this before?  Was there any SEO risks or SERP drops? Would love some advice on this matter before we make the move, the possible blow back is way too massive to do it without firm advice saying the risk is very low. Brad.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rec123
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  • IcanAgency


    Hi all, I was hoping that someone might have a link to a good example of an XML Sitemap for a large property (real estate) website? Thanks in advance to anyone who does! 🙂 Gavin

    On-Page Optimization | | IcanAgency
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  • blitzna10


    Im just curious.. Im sure a lot of you, like me, Google your own search terms on a fairly frequent basis. Does doing this skew the result you are actually seeing? As in, does Google tailor the results more to my liking, and therefore perhaps show my own site (which I would click through to often enough) higher on the page that it actually is? Sometimes I swear that happens. Steve.

    Search Behavior | | blitzna10
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  • Serkan-Guclu14


    credit card payments (99 dollars), please cancel. I want to return the $ 99. (SEOMOZ 855-894-7355 WAUS)

    Product Support | | Serkan-Guclu14
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  • Uinterview


    Hi, we are a celebrity site but also own a separate sports site with its own URL. We have a link to that site in our Nav bar. Are we being penalized by having that link? thanks

    On-Page Optimization | | Uinterview
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  • Gavo


    Just wanted to clarify my understanding of this... I'm of the understanding that if an external site has more than one link going to your site, then it is only the one link that passes value. If this is the case.... Which is the link that passes value (i.e the first link established or the link that, all factors being considered, is the most valuable for passing authority?) If a second link established on an external website comes from and goes to a different webpage than the first (and is done for the purposes of targeting and boosting a different keyword category/theme), is this then a beneficial practice? If multiple links on an external website all serve to generate solid referral traffic, will this boost rankings, and thereby be a sound practice? Thanks in advance for your help in clarifying this for me!

    Link Building | | Gavo
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  • Kingalan1


    We are looking to rebrand our domain name. Our existing domain is www.nyc-officespace-leader.com. We own www.metro-manhattan.com and were hoping to use this domain. The company name is Metro Manhattan Office Space, Inc. Is the fact that the new domain contains "Manhattan" a negative? I know that the fact that it has a hyphen is weak. Manhattan is part of such keywords as "Manhattan office space". Regarding the company name, is the fact that it contains the target phrase "Manhattan office space" bad? Our company name may sound like exact match anchor text and I am not sure what to do about this if anything. I would really prefer to keep our name but it is necessary to change it to improve SEO we will do so. Would it be better to change to a new name like "Integrity Real Estate" which does not contain target phrases or keywords ("real estate" is not a major target phrase as it is to generic) ? Or how something like www.mmos.com for the domain and leave the company name alone? How would I go about finding a  company that would assist is in creating an SEO friendly domain name and perhaps a new corporate name if necessary? Thanks, Alan

    Branding | | Kingalan1
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  • bsharath


    Is Disqus comments useful as per SEO? We have some comments on each of our pages and its time taking to moderate them, so wanted to know if its beneficial in any ways for SEO?

    On-Page Optimization | | bsharath
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  • edward-may


    Hi Guys I'm stuck here! I have update the hreftags, updated the sitemaps. I have 3 top level domains and my zenory.com site is showing for the home page the wrong meta tag description, as you can see in the attachement the meta tag is showing the new zealand site meta tag description which is for zenory.co.nz Anyone know what might be going on here? I have also fetched the home page through WMT as well and its still returning the same results any advice would be much appreciated! Thanks

    International SEO | | edward-may
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  • Firestarter-SEO


    One website I manage wants to redirect users to state specific pages based on their location. What is the best way to accomplish this? For example a user enters the through site.com but they are in Colorado so we want to direct them to site.com/colorado.

    Technical SEO | | Firestarter-SEO
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  • Kyle_M


    I am trying to deal with the duplicate content issues presented by Magento's layered navigation feature (aka faceted navigation). I installed Amasty's Improved Navigation extension (https://amasty.com/improved-layered-navigation.html) and it offers the option to hide the layered navigation from specific user agents (ie googlebot, bingbot, etc). This seems like cloaking to me and I hesitate to try it, unless hiding faceted navigation from specific user agents is known to be acceptable to Google (white hat practice). Does anyone know if this the case?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kyle_M
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  • PeteC12


    Hi All, We are a UK Company with Uk customers only and use CloudFlare CND. Our Site is hosted by a UK company with servers here but from looking online and checking where my site is hosted etc etc , some sites are telling me the name of our UK Hosted company and other sites are telling me my site is hosted in San Fran (USA) , where I presume the Cloudflare is based. I know Cloudflare has a couple of servers in the UK it uses but given all my customers are UK based ,I don't want this is affect rankings etc , as I thought it was a ranking benefit to be hosted in the country you are based. Is there any issue with this and should I change or is google clever enough to know so i shouldn't worry. thanks Pet

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC12
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  • IsaCleanse


    Hi all Hoping this might be something that can be answered given the number of variables 🙂 
    My main site is www.isacleanse.com.au (Obviously targeted to Australian Market) and also www.isacleanse.co.nz targeted to NZ. The main Keywords im targeting are 'Isagenix' for both and also Isagenix Australia, Isagenix Perth, Sydney (Australian cities) and Isagenix NZ, Isagenix New Zealand, Isagenix Auckland etc.. for NZ The Australian site gets a lot more traffic and Australian market gets a lot more searches - I also have a section www.isacleanse.com.au/isagenix-new-zealand/ on the Australian site. The question is am I best off redirrecting the .co.nz domain completley to the Australian Domain to give it extra SEO Juice?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IsaCleanse
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  • McTaggart


    Just working with a company that has chosen a home URL with /home latched on - very strange indeed - has anybody else comes across this kind of homepage URL "decision" in the past? I can't see why on earth anybody would do this! Perhaps simply a logic-defying decision?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart
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  • RuchiPardal


    Hello Everyone, We have a website http://www.webstarttoday.com. Recently, we have received manual action from Google says "Pages on this site appear to use aggressive spam techniques such as automatically generated gibberish, cloaking, scraping content from other websites, and/or repeated or egregious violations of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines." . Google has given an example http://smoothblog.webstarttoday.com/. The nature of the business of http://www.webstarttoday.com is to creating sub-domains (website builder). Anyone can register and create sub-domains. My questions are: What are the best practices in case if someone is creating sub-domain for webstarttoday.com? How can I revoke my website from this penalty? What should i do with other hundreds of sub-domains those are already created by third party like http://smoothblog.webstarttoday.com? . Why these type of issues don't come with WordPress or weebly. ? Regards, Ruchi

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RuchiPardal
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  • Bob_van_Biezen


    Hi all, I normally work for clients in my home county (The Netherlands) and with local citation building I focus on Dutch websites or well know .com websites in the Netherlands. My rule of thumb kinda was, if it’s not known in the Netherlands it isn’t worth getting mentioned there. Since The Netherlands are pretty small and I think Google ain’t perfect I was wondering if it makes sense to list a Dutch business on any .com business listings that are internationally big, but aren’t well known in the Netherlands. Two reasons that got me thinking this direction: A big well known Dutch company offers a service such as Moz local and did integrate their service with several international business listing websites that I never heard off, since these business directories focus themselves on other parts of the world. Google ain’t perfect and I think they got more budget to identify trustworthy business directories with an international focus or a focus on America then with a focus on The Netherlands. So I’m wondering if it makes any sense to list a Dutch business on let’s say the top 20 international business directories (although these directories don’t have any brand recognition in The Netherlands).

    Local Listings | | Bob_van_Biezen
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  • HB17


    We've been doing some SEO work over the last few weeks and earlier this week we saw a large spike in traffic. Yay we all thought, but then yesterday the traffic levels returned to pre-celebratory levels. I've been doing some digging to try and find out what was different Monday and Tuesday this week. Mondays are usually big traffic days for us anyway, but this week was by far the biggest, and Tuesday was even higher still, our best day ever. After some poking, I found that the direct traffic followed the same pattern as our overall traffic levels (image attached). The first spike coincides with an email we sent out that day, but the later spike we just don't know where it came from? I understand loosely that direct isn't easily traceable, but can anyone help us understand more about this second spike? Thanks! ayqL2wi

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HB17
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  • ahyde


    Moz is flagging a lot of pages on our site which have duplicate page titles. 99% of these are international pages which hreflang tags in the sitemap. Do I need to worry about this? I assumed that it wasn't an issue given the use of hreflang. And if that's the case, why is Moz flagging them as an issue? Thanks.

    On-Page Optimization | | ahyde
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  • adamdankhazi


    Hello Mozzers! Couple of days ago I received a request to start optimizing a wordpress website, the domain itself has been around for around 10-12 years so it's it can be considered as one that has real history behind it.  The page has been moved from HTML/FLASH to wordpress about 3 - 4 years ago and hasn't been any SEO maintenance on it. The site used to rank for first position with several keywords, but now understandably, it has greatly decreased. My main question would be, that when I've checked the root domain's and the subdomain's metrics with MOZ Open Site Explorer, the sub domain (with "www.") showed a PA 40 and 90 external links while the root domain (without "www.") only has 27 PA and 6 External links. I know that the 301 or server redirects only transfers about 90% of the link juice to the targeted URL but the difference between the 2 results seem way too big for me. What do you think? Is this normal?
    During future link building is it more beneficial to target the root domain so the page won't lose that "10%" by redirecting the new link from sub-domain to root domain?
    Is it possible to get more juice transferred? Thank you very much,
    Adam

    Link Building | | adamdankhazi
    0
  • evoNick


    Hi guys, We're working through a redesign of our product page and are considering the following: http://screencast.com/t/NBSsDGA9vgS3 Currently the product name (including the brand name - Arc'teryx) in this case is included in the H1 and none of the title is linked.  You can see this here:  http://www.evo.com/synthetic-jackets/arcteryx-atom-lt-hoodie-womens.aspx The firm we're working with is proposing keeping the entire title in the H1 but linking the brand name to the entire brand assortment.  My concern is that the brand name is a critical part of the product title and should be text (not a link).  Any suggestions? Thanks!
    Will

    On-Page Optimization | | evoNick
    0
  • Ask4443523


    Hey, all. I have client that uses tags in the navigation for its blog.  For example, tags might appear around "Library," "Recent Posts," etc.  This is handled through their WordPress theme. This seems fairly standard, but I wonder whether tags are semantically appropriate.  Since each blog post is fairly lengthy (about 500-1000 words) with multiple tags, would it be more appropriate to use tags for this menu navigation?  Are we cutting into the effectiveness of our tags by using them for menu navigation? The navigation is certainly an important page element, and it structures content, so it seems that it should use some header tag.  Anyways, your thoughts are greatly appreciated.  I'm a content creator, not an SEO, so this is a bit out of my skillset.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ask4443523
    0
  • Discountvc


    We have 30,000 pictures on our site. Moz will return 404's on some occasionally, but Google seems to ignore those. Should I 301 redirect all those images when we move to a new site lay-out? Appreciate your views!

    Web Design | | Discountvc
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  • GaryVictory


    Hi In my quest to develop a strategy to enhance "brand exposure" I'm considering guest blogging on sites with very good authority. However my question is; 1. Can I post my article and place my "author bio" (which includes my company linked name and social platforms)  at the bottom of an article? 2. Should author bios links be no follow? 3. Or, does Google allow page rank to pass for this. We have some fantastic articles that are based on projects we've carried out, and would like to share these with readers on Dezeen, Contemporist and the rest of the interior design world. Your help is always very much appreciated! Regards Gary

    Link Building | | GaryVictory
    0
  • Yosef


    Has somebody any experience (pros or cons) to using utf-8 symbols in the Title or in the Meta Description tags?
    Expedia uses it:
    http://prntscr.com/74ofrv 74ofrv

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Yosef
    0
  • LesleyPaone


    This one is stumping me and I need some help. I have a client who's site is www.site.com and we have set them up a CDN through Max CDN at cdn.site.com which is basically a cname to the www.site.com site. The images in the GWT for www.site.com are de-indexing rapidly and the images on cdn.site.com are not indexing.  In the Max CDN account I have the images from cdn.site.com sending a canonical header from www.site.com but that does not seem to help, they are all still de-indexing.

    Reporting & Analytics | | LesleyPaone
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  • Kingalan1


    When should "Noodp" and "Noydir" meta robot tag be used? I have hundreds or URLs for real estate listings on my site that simply use "Index", Follow" without using Noodp and Noydir. Should the listing pages use these Noodp and Noydr also? All major landing pages use Index, Follow, Noodp, Noydir. Is this the best setting in terms of ranking and SEO. Thanks, Alan

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
    0

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