Skip to content

Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

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!


  • I have a competitor who has swooped in on most of the key search terms in my niche, solely through artificial backlinking.  There is a direct and obvious correlation between this link building and rise in the serps. I know the mantra around here is creating good content and gaining real links, which I am doing.  But I am waiting to unleash this content during a site relaunch which is months away.  I don't want to sit around and do nothing while this site makes money and builds their list. I have money to spend and want to go head to head with this site.  Would it make sense for me to go and copy all of the links this competitor has built?  At least 90% of them are profiles, article subs and blog comments.  Also, what do you think would be the best way to tackle this? Any guidance as always is appreciated.

    Link Building | | PedroAndJobu
    0

  • Hi guys, It's my first day here ate seomoz and I got intrigued about the results from the keyword difficulty tool. Even though I do understand the results, I noticed the ranking analysis table has some highlighted cells and some of them have a dark checkmark sign inside. What exactly do they mean? I couldn't find it anywhere. Cheers from Brazil. i0tzl.png

    Keyword Research | | lenineto
    0

  • We have multiple team members and would like to setup unique profiles for each instead of one generic profile.  Is that possible?

    Moz Pro | | Tune_Up
    0

  • I'm doing some work on http://flyawaysimulation.com/ and would like some tips to avoid keyword stuffing for the term "flight simulator" on this page. Currently, there are about 42 occurrences of the term "flight simulator" on this page - which is above the SEOmoz 15 term recommended limit. However, looking at the page - they have used the term fairly and it doesn't appear that "inappropriate". Could you guys have a look and let me know your thoughts?  What can be done?  Where can the repetitions be removed from without hurting internal SEO? Also, from an SEO standpoint how could we improve the site menu?  For example, if  the word "downloads" were removed from the Downloads-->FSX Downloads, FS2004 Downloads, X-Plane Downloads menu (for example just FSX, FS2004, X-Plane) to remove repetition of the phrase - would engines understand that those are "Downloads" because of it being under the "Downloads" drop down list? Your thoughts, suggestions and ideas are greatly appreciated.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter264
    0

  • i just wanted to know if the ranking number allows for google products aswell?

    Moz Pro | | DaveDawson
    0

  • Our website has a WordPress blog, hosted at website.com/blog. I've discovered that with some hard work and a bit of luck, I can create a blog posts that will go viral - they will get about 50k readers in 1-3 days (which is a LOT for our website), and 300-1000 tweets, 100-250 Facebook shares, and anywhere from 10 to 130~ G+1s. (Unfortunately, these are for the posts, not for our website.) The posts will also get some comments. And most importantly, a few links - sometimes from very reputable domains. However, I feel that I could be doing much more here. The links go directly to the blog post, and I'm not sure how much is that helping our website overall in regards to SEO. What actions can I encourage the readers to do, and how should I prioritize them? Some of the actions are: Sharing/liking, writing a comment, checking out our products, subscribing to our Facebook/Twitter/G+ profile, subscribing to our RSS. One another possible action/opportunity that I see and which could potentially pay off is to offer some kind of PDF report to be emailed, which would initiate an autoresponder sequence. Do you think that having a clear call to action in a blog post could reduce the sharing of it ? Is it possible to encourage whoever is writing about our blog posts to use a direct link to our website, instead of linking directly to the post? If yes, how? E.g. if I included a direct link to our website in the post itself, e.g. in the most important part of the post that gets quoted, it could work - unfortunately that's usually virtually impossible. Am I sitting on a gold mine here, and should do this as much as possible? Should I consider putting this content not just onto the blog, but on our website.com/something ? I'm actually not sure how that would help though, it would simply have a shorter URL. I've discovered that it doesn't matter where I post this content, if the presentation looks decent. So it doesn't have to be posted on website.com/blog. I can even post it on other domains - should I? And the most important question: How do I get the most out of this opportunity in SEO regards? Thanks for any ideas or insights!

    Social Media | | Jiri.Novotny
    0

  • I run a law firm with multiple practice areas (bankruptcy, probate, estate planning, personal injury).  I have a google places page with those categories listed.  I recently spoke with an seo company (that cold called me...) that told me that it was "black hat" to try to optimize a local campaign for more than one of those practice areas.  That doesn't seem right to me.  Any thoughts?

    Image & Video Optimization | | richardslaw
    0

  • I have a site that has been affected by Panda, and I think I have finally found the problem. When I created this site in the year 2006, I bought content without checking it. Recently, when I went through the site I found out that this content had many duplicates around the web. Not 100% exact, but close to. The first thing I did is ask my best writer to rewrite these topics, as they are a must on my site. This is a very experienced writer, and she will make the categories and subpages outstanding. Second thing I did was putting a NOINDEX, FOLLOW robots meta in place for the pages I determined being bad. They haven't been de-indexed yet. Another thing I recently did is separate other languages and move these over to other domains (with 301's redirecting the old locations to the new.) This means that the site now has a /en/ directory in the URL which is no longer used. With this in mind I was thinking to relocate the NEW content, and 301 the old (to preserve the juice for a while.) For example: http://www.mysite.com/en/this-is-a-pandalized-page/ 301 to http://www.mysite.com/this-is-the-rewritten-page/ The benefits of doing this are: decreasing the amounts of directories in the URL getting rid of pages that are possibly causing trouble getting fresh pages added to the site Now, the advice I am looking for is basically this: Do you agree with the above? Or don't you agree? If you don't, please be so kind to include a reason with your answer. If you do, and have any additional information, or would like to discuss, please go ahead 🙂 Thanks, Giorgio PS: Is it proven that Panda is now a running update? Or is it still periodically executed?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VisualSense
    1

  • Hi i have signed up to s3 amazon and have uploaded my images to my bucket but the trouble i am having is, how do i have the images on my site. i have tried to use the url that it is showing but all that is doing is  https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/in2town/audreyrobertslarge.jpg  not bringing up the image on my site and when i have done it through the internet search box it does not bring up an image. I have been told this is a great cdn service and a cost effective one but i really need to learn how to use it. has anyone used this service and if so can you please let me know what i need to do I have now managed to get a bit futher with the help of stuart Bell but the images are still not showing on my site. any help would be great. many regards

    Web Design | | ClaireH-184886
    0

  • Hi, We took on a client a few months ago, who came to us after seeing a drop in rankings. After cleaning up the site, we concluded that their drop is more than likely down to over-optimised anchor text. The keywords that have mainly been affected are the ones that have a majority of links with the exact anchor text. The links have built using blog networks, articles and there are some comments thrown in for good measure. We have no way of getting them removed. Hmm, links can't hurt you!? So what is the best solution? Has anyone had any success over coming this issue? What sort of time scales are we looking at? Gareth

    Link Building | | garethbrown
    0

  • I hate to ask such a simple question but I have a good look around and cannot find the solution. I have the right kind of seomoz account....could someone point me in the right direction? Thnank you.

    Moz Pro | | dv8media
    0

  • A few weeks ago my error count went up for Duplicate Page Content and Titles.  4 errors in all.  A week later the errors were gone... But now they are back.  I made changes to the Webconfig over a month ago but nothing since. SEOmoz is telling me the duplicate content is this http://www.antiquebanknotes.com/   and http://www.antiquebanknotes.com Thanks for any advise! This is the relevant web.config. <rewrite><rules><rule name="CanonicalHostNameRule1"><match url="(.*)"><conditions><add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="^www.antiquebanknotes.com$" negate="true"></add></conditions>
              <action type="Redirect" url="<a href=" http:="" www.antiquebanknotes.com="" {r:1"="">http://www.antiquebanknotes.com/{R:1}" />
           </action></match></rule>
            <rule name="Default Page" enabled="true" stopprocessing="true"><match url="^default.aspx$"><conditions logicalgrouping="MatchAll"><add input="{REQUEST_METHOD}" pattern="GET"></add></conditions>
              <action type="Redirect" url="/"></action></match></rule></rules></rewrite>

    Technical SEO | | Banknotes
    0

  • I use a primary (personal) twitter account and a business twitter account to keep it separate. Both accounts will have content that is related to my site, is it possible to use both for the same campaign?

    Moz Pro | | stuartlcrawford
    0

  • Hi I am trying to run a google adwords campaign for our price comparison site, and have developed a landing page with content and a table of the best prices on where to buy the product.  The ad is PS3
    Compare the lowest prices
    Buy Today However I keep getting the message disapproved "Landing page and site policy guidelines" Any ideas on how to get it to be approved as google are running ads for price comparison sites such as this one for the phrase 'dvd price comparison' http://www.kelkoo.co.uk/slp/ss-dvd-compare-price.html And I'm not sure what I am doing wrong?

    Affiliate Marketing | | ocelot
    0

  • Hi, I have noticed when using OSE and enter a domain you very often see a higher Page Authority than Domain Authority. If someone could explain why this would happen then I would be very grateful - its my current understanding that page authority would ALWAYS be LESS THAN Domain Authority but that is not always the case (I have seen cases where PA is more than 10 higher then DA) Here's an example where PA > DA http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links.html?site=www.primelocation.com Thanks

    Moz Pro | | James77
    0

  • Our website has almost 50/50 ratio of dofollow and nofollow links, and our competitors have "better" ratios (more dofollow links). I suspect it is mainly due to Twitter - several of my blog posts went viral, and had thousands of tweets in total - and twitter links are all nofollow. But I'm not sure about that - do these link count? Also, do you think that this could cause problems? Should I worry about writing too much viral content without building traditional links first?

    Social Media | | Jiri.Novotny
    1

  • I'm getting duplicate content warnings for my site because the same pages are getting crawled twice? Once with http://www.website.com and once with http://website.com. I'm assuming this is a .htaccess problem so I'll post what mine looks like. I think installing WordPress in the root domain changed some of the settings I had before. My main site is primarily in HTML with a blog at http://www.website.com/blog/post-name BEGIN WordPress <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
    RewriteBase /
    RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
    RewriteRule . /index.php [L]</ifmodule> END WordPress

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | thirdseo
    0

  • In some of my campaign settings I use specific country for search engine (e.g. "Google Slovakia"). Some times I check the rankings manually too. My process for this: 1. Open a new Chrome incognito window (be sure that that's the only open incognito window) 2. go to google.sk, type in the keyword 3. at the bottom of the page select advanced search, select language: slovak, resubmit the query That's it. With my process, the monitored keywords are not there were seomoz reports them. So the question: with what settings (domain, language anything else) seomoz is tracking the rankings in country specific search engines?

    Moz Pro | | Brainsum
    0

  • I was so happy when my Moz Points reached 100 today, but I've done a whole lot more today and it still says 100. Have I broken the system, or is it resting today (it is Sunday where I am)

    Moz Pro | | loopyal
    0

  • Google tells us to make our sites better for our readers, which we are doing, but do you think google has horrible site usabilty? For example, in webmaster tools, I'm always being confused by their changes and the way they just drop things. In the HTML suggestions area, they don't tell you when the data was last updated, so the only way to tell is to download the files and check. In the URL removals, they used to show you the URLs they had removed. Now that is gone and the only way you can check is to try adding one. We don't have any URL parameters, so any parameters are as a result of some other site tacking on stuff at the end of our URL and there is no way to tell them that we don't have any parameters, so ignore them all. Also, they add new parameters they find on the end of the list, so the only way to check is to click through to the end of the list.

    Algorithm Updates | | loopyal
    0

  • Anyone notice a drop in Bing traffic on January 26th? Slashed by 50% and holding for the past three weeks. 100% white hat site

    Algorithm Updates | | loopyal
    0

  • I am redirecting whole site to https. Is there a difference between 302 or 301 redirect for seo? Site never been indexed. Planning to do that with .htaccess command RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
    RewriteRule ^(.*) https://%{SERVER_NAME}/$1 [R,L] There are plenty of ways http://www.askapache.com/htaccess/ssl-example-usage-in-htaccess.html Which way would be the best? Thanks is advance

    Technical SEO | | Kotkov
    0

  • Say i have a website for a small business...but that business is expanding into neighboring areas.  I still want to have it SEO optimized for keywords in the neighboring towns but I do not want to have to redo the whole website.  Is there a way to do this without having google penalyze me for having duplicate content? I mean i know i can create a landing page www.mysite/newtown but whos to say the reader wont click the logo and go to the home page and gets navigated to www.mysite.com and get confused because its not the same info or its talking about the original town the business started.  I hope this makes sense...thanks for the help! I see that craigslist uses the city.craigslist.com so im wondering if this is the answer??

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dcstover1
    0

  • CBS has a service that they offer to their advertisers called CBS Local Pages. Has anyone used this? It's about $1500 a month and basically they send "business data" to local listing platforms, this is similar to UBL and LocalEZE it seems. One of my associates subscribed to this and they're unsure of the value, they are paying $1500/mo for something that can be achieved with $125/year with localeze. Has anyone used this?

    Image & Video Optimization | | qlkasdjfw
    0

  • Hey guys, is there a way to do these things? Paste a list of URLs into a Google Docs spreadsheet and get the main metrics for each domain (like domain authority and page authority) pulled into the spreadsheet using OSE's API? I know it can be done, but has someone done it already? And if you have, would you please share the link? Do a Google search and see the DA and PA for all the domains below each result. SEOQuake does a good job with this but they don't show SEOmoz's metrics. Is there a better way to check for keyword difficulty than pasting 5 keywords at a time in the SEOmoz tool? Is there an API for this? What about a Google spreadsheet? Thank you so much! Zeke

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | elcrazyhorse
    0

  • This is a follow up to the Question I ask: http://www.seomoz.org/q/archive-of-content I have decided that I am going to move the articles from example.com (non-commercial) to website.com (commercial) however I was having a think, some of the articles on example.com and ranking well for some keywords, maybe getting around 20,000 visits from natural search, would it be possible when moving this article just to do a 301 redirect from the page with the article example.com to the new website? Hope that makes some sense. Kind Regards,

    Technical SEO | | Paul78
    0

  • Hey There, We're planning to target multiple keywords in a single page.. they keywords are definitely related and to an extent could be considered as synonyms.. We have a few questions as to how to optimize the page for on page and off page. On Page Do we mention all the targeted keywords on the page? At a maximum we could mention the keywords once..of course want to give out relevant and quality content and do not want to focus on keyword density How do we optimize the URL structure? For ex... We have keywords aa, ab and ac, where a is the base keyword Is it a good option to to have a URL structure like http://www.example.com/a-b-c.html? How do we go about mentioning the targeted keywords in meta description.. We've read the articles at SEOMoz.. but would want opinions What about HI, H2 and H3 Tags? how do we go about optimizing these Off Page While using off page we will of course vary our anchor text with the multiple keywords... this will make it look natural. Will we manage to rank for the multiple keywords (if we vary anchor text) that we're targeting if our backlinking method are strong? Thank you all for your inputs and responses...

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | elagaan
    0

  • As some of you may have seen in an earlier post, i have had problems with the speed of my site. After good advice i got an expert on board who done tests and found that my server (hosting company) was taking a long time to answer, on some occasions it was taking seven seconds. I have tried to get the hosting company to listen and sort the problem out but they are not interested and keep trying to sell me other things to get the site faster, i am already on a dedicated server. So now I am looking for a UK hosting company who offer good service and would be grateful if anyone could recommend some on here so i can speak to them, as i want to get my sites moves a.s.a.p many thanks

    Web Design | | ClaireH-184886
    0

  • Still new to this SEO world, so please bear with me.  I have an eCommerce site so one of the issues is duplicate content and page titles. So what I was thinking was this...for each product that I sell I have 4 or 5 keywords that I have targeted.  For example for personalized iPhone cases I have decided on: iphone 4 case personalized, monogrammed iphone 4 case, personalized and monogrammed iphone case, preppy phone case, personalized iPhone case, monogrammed iPhone case For each of my products I was going to a product description (ie: trendy color block diagonal stripes) and a targeted keyword.  But I was going to rotate the keywords through so as to try to avoid the duplicate page title issue. Will that help? Thanks much, Shara

    On-Page Optimization | | Confections
    0

  • Is there an issue using within the URL for a page words with accents or graves, for example including "Estándares"? Thanks Stuart

    International SEO | | mcvicar
    0

  • Hi Guys, Wondering if there has been an algorithm update or new Panda released today? Not seen any news in Google yet however noticed fair shuffle of all results in my niche, particularly in the top 3. The main take I've had from the brief research is that the brands in the niche have popped up a few spots and blogs / affiliate sites etc have dropped. Results noticed using Google.co.uk

    Industry News | | shloy23-294584
    0

  • I run a community site that has over 1 million pages of user-generated content specific to a very defined vertical. I recently switch to the Drupal CMS and have paid the price in the search rankings. I need to find someone to help with my site's SEO efforts. What should I be looking for when selecting an SEO professional?

    Industry News | | proforums
    0

  • Hi SeoZ 🙂 Quick question, is it a problem if the H2 Element comes after the H1 Element? Also does Google recoginise it if i make the h2 font bigger than the h1? For example: HTML: Awesome Headline bla bla bla Keyword1 Keyword 2 Css:
    h2 {font-size: 32px;}
    h1 {font-size: 28px;} Thank you, Alex

    On-Page Optimization | | krseo
    0

  • I've had what has ended up being a nightmare SEO campaign. We have sunk a ton of time into link building for the site and saw little to no traction. Just as a test, I have the site on our portfolio as a site we designed years ago. The link to the site is old. Somehow, this link does not show up on OSE, and it seems to get no credit. http://www.happydogwebproductions.com/item/spine-and-sports.html The backlink, and troubled campaign is www.spineandsportschiro.com There should be a few more links too that aren't getting picked up, especially the ones I have noticed using Whitespark local citation tool. Has Google got picky with all of this? How come this site seems to be getting no credit?

    Technical SEO | | Boogily
    0

  • Is this a bug or something that needs to be addressed? If so, just use a redirect?

    Technical SEO | | Boogily
    0

  • Title tag best practices according to seomoz is the following keyowrd - keyword | brand.com but I have seen some interesting results from using a comma as to a hyphen to seperate keywords as reccomended and wanted to know which method is more crawler friendly.

    Search Behavior | | JHSpecialty
    0

  • Hi all SEOmozzers, site: http://f8phototravel.pl I have (in my GMT profile) 43 domains linking. Among them one of the biggest Polish like: onet.pl (5/187), gazeta.pl (8/393), grono.net.pl, canon-board.info, eturystyka.org and other. They are not present in OpenSiteExplorer. Any ideas why? Thanks, Marek */ Alexa rank (Poland/Global)

    Moz Pro | | mad2k
    0

  • It looks like google has done a pretty deep crawl of my site and is now showing around 40 duplicate content issues for posts that I have tagged in two seperate categories for example: http://www.musicliveuk.com/latest-news/live-music-boosts-australian-economy http://www.musicliveuk.com/live-music/live-music-boosts-australian-economy I use the all in one SEO pack and have checked the no index for categories, archive, and tag archive boxes so google shouldn't even crawl this content should it? . I guess the obvious answer is to only put each post in one category but I shouldn't have to should I? Some posts are relevant in more than once category.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK
    0

  • So I'm in a bit of an interesting situation. I want to do great SEO for all my clients, but I currently manage 18, each demanding 10 - 20 hours per month. Is anyone out there able to manage a ton of clients and keep them all happy? What are the most effective strategies you use? I'm currently focusing almost exclusively on copywriting for all of them, simply because I don't feel like I have time to effectively test different strategies. Anyone have any advice?

    Link Building | | nxmassa
    0

  • I started my Whitby cottage website for years ago www.endeavourcottages.co.uk not knowing anything about SEO, but I now have very good rankings for the keywords on Google. I'm ranking quite well for Whitby holiday cottages on Google and I now list to other cottages in the area for my friends. The point is that I'm now starting a small letting agency and hoping to expand it now so I bought the domain http://www.whitby-holiday-cottages.co.uk/ and set up a WordPress site but it's not ranking are getting anywhere near the same amount of traffic. This domain name and website structure would be much more applicable now that there are more than one cottage to let. Whenever I get some free time I spend it doing SEO on my first website to improve its rankings and so which is the best strategy from here on. One try and develop the new cottages letting website at the expense of my main website, or forget about the new website are together and continue with my first website which was designed initially for just one cottage. It's hard to have enough resources to get both websites ranking high. Thank you very useful tips Alan Davidson

    Algorithm Updates | | thepersuader
    0

  • I know that branded searches are a large component of whether sites were hit by Panda or not, and I wonder if moving forward, I should always include the name of my site (domain) in the name of the product. For example, if I have a product with a unique name such as 'history maps' should I change the name to include my brand name, i.e '[domain] history maps'? Or, if users search for the  unique product name, is that sufficient?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline
    1

  • I track around 1000 keywords for this site, and my rankings in Bing dropped for about half of them on Wednesday. No major changes have been made to the site, rankings are maintaining or improving in Google for a majority of these same terms. The average drop seems to be around 9-12 places, which to me signals more than just standard fluctuation. Anyone else seeing anything strange with Bing this week? Or does anyone have any ideas? I looked for posts about an algorithm change but haven't found anything. Thanks.

    Algorithm Updates | | BrianCC
    0

  • When I click on the text-only cache of nlpca(dot)com on the home page http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:UIJER7OJFzYJ:www.nlpca.com/&hl=en&gl=us&strip=1 our H1 and body content are at the very bottom. How do we get the h1 and content at the top of what the robots see? Thanks!

    Technical SEO | | BobGW
    0

  • I'm working with a local kitchen remodeler. In reviewing the organic keyword searches for the last month I notice the word "kitchens" appearing in the top 10 keyword searches. Since I know we aren't ranking for the term "kitchens" I dug deeper. A handful of the searches are from the local area but most are one occurence of searches from cities across the US and the world. My surmise is that because there are 2.2 million searches for kitchens every month we just happen to be scraping enough of these searches, irrelevant as they are to our client, to make it look like an important keyword. Most of the visitors using this keyword are gone in seconds. Just wanted some folks to confirm what I'm thinking - that "kitchens" showing up in our top 10 keywords list is a bit of a red herring - and we should focus on more localized keyword searches.

    Keyword Research | | DenverKelly
    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


Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.