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!


  • Hi, I'm working on an account where we are optimizing SEO, SEA and Conversion. The business is a very local car rental company that competes with Hertz, Europcar, ... I already posted a question about it here http://www.seomoz.org/q/very-fluctuating-rankings The lack of time made it almost impossible for this business to start bloggin', but we're about to change that in 2012 and I already came up with some ideas for some articles, but still looking for that big fish that will get those good links. Maybe an infograph, but what data should we cover?
    Any other suggestions on articles that are linkworthy are welcome 🙂

    Link Building | | nvs.nim
    0

  • Hey guys, Some of you may be aware of our story.  We have a website about or son who was born with Down syndrome.  Two days a go a post I wrote went sort of viral, and I woke up this morning to an email from my host saying they had to take my site down as an emergency because of the amount of resources it is using. So now my site is down (noahsdad.com.) ...any ideas how to proceeded? I really need to get my site back online asap. Thank you.

    Technical SEO | | NoahsDad
    0

  • Hi One of our client websites has had a sudden drop in rankings, and also in page rank. We have obviously been off for 2 weeks, so havent been blogging daily etc as we normally would have. Would this cause such a drop? Some keywords have lost from position 2/3 to page 7 over night, and we havent change the strategy! Thanks,

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOwins
    0

  • I recently purchased a domain and the corresponding website.  For as far as I could tell, in the 12 months prior to my purchase, the site was well optimized within Google and had over 40 search terms on page 1 of Google in a really competitive space (lending-related). When I made the purchase, the domain was transferred from seller's GoDaddy account and into my GoDaddy account and I placed privacy protection on the domain.  We did not move the hosting of the site--I took over his hosting account.  And I did not make any significant changes to the website. About 1 week later, the site was totally removed from Google's index and I received notice in Google Webmaster Tools that the site may violate Google's quality guidelines. I filed reconsideration request telling Google that I was the new owner and that if there were any violations, they were caused by old owner.  One week later, I got note back from Google saying they had received my reconsideration request and if they think issues are cured, then they will reindex the site.  That was over a week ago and so seemingly they are not putting it back. My question is this:  Does Google somehow automatically know when domains change hands and does this cause them to manually review sites?   The site in question was aggressively optimized but I don't understand what would have caused Google to take action on the site when they did.  In other words, if they were going to take action, why wouldn't they have done it in the prior 12 months or does the domain transfer put the site into some queue that makes them review it? BTW, the site in question has a SEOMoz domain authority grade of 85 and still is showing up as PR 5 Thanks very much for your time and consideration

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | whodatyat
    0

  • We have a local client who services are very broad and there is no one service, i.e. keyword or keyword phrase, that covers all that they do.  This is making it very challenging to select keywords to optimize the homepage for.  Basically they do everything from engineering, surveying, planning, environmental, etc.  We were thinking we would focus mainly on their most important service which is engineering and then use the other services as supporting phrases.  However, this feels very diluted and there will be pages on the site for each of these services where the keywords will be targeted.  Any thoughts or recommendations for this type of situation?

    On-Page Optimization | | DragonSearch
    0

  • Greetings Mozfriends and Champions! My company is searching for a performance based SEO that can handle multiple websites and platforms at the same time. Was wondering if any of you fine people would be interested in such a quest. Please reply to the message or you can E-mail me at Jsmith@frontlinemobility.com. Good Luck Champions! Justin Smith

    Industry News | | FrontlineMobility
    0

  • Hi everyone, hope you've all had a good new years celebration. Just a quick one on page load speed? how important do you think it is to organic rankings, especially on competitive terms? Any tips on improving it? do i need to improve just the landing page im trying to rank or every page as its looked at as a qualtiy score as a whole? Kind Regards,

    Technical SEO | | pauledwards
    0

  • Hey, I'm trying to create some old reports for a client and wanted to see how I can adjust the reports to a specific timeframe so I can view the statistics & changes between that time frame. Is this possible? 
    Thanks!

    Moz Pro | | SavvyPanda
    0

  • Hi, Just a few small things I have noticed which has made a difference in ranking, thought I would share, small things but every little helps. Looks like more content on a page the better the ranking, in a test I have done this is what I found: page with 0 content - Google page 11 page with 250 content - Google page 5 page with 500 content - Google page 2 page with 1000 content - Google page 1, position 3 Looks like Google might count the words on a page (like you can do in Microsoft word) and then apply a score against it. Tweets and likes (78) showed a jump from page 1, position 8, to page 1, position 1 (this was the only form of link building and no changes made apart from adding the share plugin). Kind of makes me think if your starting a new site or page then add 750 - 1000 words of good content (tutorial or whatever) with a social sharing tool and let this run will give you a better chance of ranking when you start to introduce products and services.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper
    0

  • I'm confused by the number of links that we should put on a page. Our site has a high domain authority but SEOmoz tool and others, plus Google WMT suggests much much less than other sites have - look at Dailymail.co.uk or the Huff post site for example. our site is www.worldtravelguide.net and I'm thinking specifically about the /destinations and each continent like /europe Our site has thousands of pages, trying to create an effective internal linking structure with the limitation of 150 or so links is nearly impossible and ends up with too many navigational pages. We were hit hard by Panda (even though all our content is original, professionally written frequently updated) in favour of bigger brands and considering Google suggests that sites should be designed for users and not SEO these two ideals conflict. Does anyone have any data on what the link limit is? Any other tips or observations would be gratefully received. Thanks, John

    Web Design | | JohnFinlayson
    0

  • Hi All, I'm new in SEOMoz and have some questions after I have already spend 2-3 days trying to resolve the problems identified from Crawling one of my clients websites. I get quite a lot of Duplicate Page Conntent and Page Titles warnings and trying to find a workaround through the forums and posts. I continuously get this error on most of my pages: URL: http://domain.com/benefits with the same Page but with a WWW in front URL: http://www.domain.com/benefits Any advice will be highly appreciated. Thanks, Athos

    On-Page Optimization | | athosk
    0

  • Ok,  old fat client developer new at SEO so I apologize if this is obvious. I have 4 errors in one of my campaigns.  two are duplicate content and two are duplicate title. Here is the duplicate title error Rare Currency And Old Paper Money Values and Information.
     http://www.antiquebanknotes.com/ Rare Currency And Old Paper Money Values and Information.
     http://www.antiquebanknotes.com/Default.aspx So, my question is... What do I need to do to make this right?   They are the same page.  in my page load for default.aspx I have this: this.Title = "Rare Currency And Old Paper Money Values and Information."; And it occurs only once...

    Technical SEO | | Banknotes
    0

  • We have in out company lots off different domains pointing to the same web site (On for most major countries actually...) . Unfortunately this was done by having all the DNS names to point to the same IP address to the target web site, and not by using a redirect as should have been done. As most of the pages on the web site are linked internally (All the pages of the site links at least to the front page), this resulted to have all the different domains linking one to each other causing artificial external backlinks to our main .com web site. I just wonder if google is giving us a penallity for this backlinks ? Also this causes the same content to be shared among different domains, resulting probably to self competition for keywords. Should we now remove all other domains resulting to a loss of these "artificial backlinks" ?

    Link Building | | opic
    0

  • Hi guys, I've just started using Seomoz and so far it is awesome! However, there is one thing that I can't figure out. When using Open Site Explorer to analyze inbounds links my competitors got, I've found that one of them has links coming from strange domains like fema.gov. It is unlikely that they have a link coming from such a site, but all these sites have a download as the top linking pages. Probably the top 20 linking root domains are like this. So my question is; is this a bug in OSE, how do I find out if they really have a link coming from this site?

    Link Building | | HDPHNS
    0

  • I am working on a couple of SEO projects and have noticed over the past couple of months that the keywords rankings have improved immensely with most of them amongst top 10 on google, but still the traffic on the website doesn't improve much. Can somebody explain me the possible reasons behind this, and what can I do to attract more traffic?

    Technical SEO | | KS__
    0

  • Hi, We have an online gift store and we write new blogs every year. Question is, if we already had a blog that's called 'Top Valentine Gifts' from last year,should we update the blog content with the most updated data, or should we add a new blog called 'Top Valentine Gifts 2012' and rename the old one to 'Top Valentine Gifts 2011' (and 301 redirect the old URL)? Which one is more beneficial in terms of SEO?

    On-Page Optimization | | Essentia
    0

  • This post is for all PRO members, On January 2, 2012, we found a serious bug in our custom reporting system that made it possible for some of our customers to see other customers’ custom reports. This affected less than 1% of our customers in total (.6 % to be exact). Fewer than 100 reports could potentially be viewed by another customer. We are taking this matter very seriously. 98 accounts were affected and we will be contacting those people individually via their account email addresses. If you do not receive an email from us, don’t worry - you were not affected. Soon after we discovered the problem, we completely turned off access to these reports; even though people may have been provided access previously, the access was limited to a short time period. They no longer have access to the reports whatsoever. The issue has now been resolved and all reports moving forward are functioning properly. For more information on what caused the issue, how it's been resolved and any other updates on the issue, follow the thread here: http://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/20836338-custom-reports-issues-resolved. We'll add any updates there. Also, we'd like to have all comments/questions from members in one place, so please use the Zendesk link for comments. We really appreciate your patience while we work through this. If you have any questions or concerns please feel free to contact us at help@seomoz.org - we're always happy to help. Sincerely, Jen Lopez
    Community Manager, SEOmoz

    Moz Pro | | jennita
    0

  • I have a band that performs all over my state and was wondering if i could add my business to google local listings in all the cities that my band performs in.  How would i go about that being as there would be only one phone number and no local address?  I'd love to get the traffic from the local listings that come up for certain search phrases.  I wasn't sure if Google would look at that as spamming though.  I do have contract musicians that play with us in each of those cities and could list their home address as the  address just in case i have to have an address on the listing that is local.  How do businesses that provide services in multiple cities by traveling to those cities usually  list their businesses? any help would be much appreciated! Thanks in advance!

    Industry News | | Ron10
    0

  • I have couple blogs willing to publish an article with a backlink to my site. I want to compare them. What SEO metric is the best to use for comparison: Domain Authority or Domain Domain Mozrank or DomainTrust? I want to choose a blog that will give me the most linkjuice

    Reporting & Analytics | | Alexey_mindvalley
    0

  • Let's say you have a landing page that aims to get people to click on an affiliate offer. Now to measure the effectiveness of that landing page in Google Analytics, We would bring up the page stats, like the image attached. Would I be right in assuming the people clicking on my affiliate link (and leaving my site) would be included in the "% Exit" stat. Of course this figure also includes those that either close their browsers, or typed something in the address bar. ... And the "Bounce Rate" are those that clicked on the Back button on their browser. Is that right? 55Qxx.png

    Affiliate Marketing | | twenytwo
    0

  • When I do a rankings search for one of my sites on Google and it appears high in Google places, SEO Moz tracks this as its ranking - but is this its organic ranking?  My clients are wondering if things have changed and so am I?  Does ranking in the Google places/map appearing on front page of google count as your ranking for that keyword? Client keeps ignoring the Google places ranking and goes looking for a placement farther down... Please explain this probably simple question to me... and if you have official Google references for this, please include them. I appreciate it a lot... be blessed ben

    Moz Pro | | creativeguy
    0

  • If we allow users to embed our videos on their site, would that count as duplicate content? I imagine note, given that Google can't usually 'see' the content of videos, but just want to double check.

    On-Page Optimization | | nicole.healthline
    0

  • This should be an easy one.   I signed up for this service in November.  The first report showed many title pages too long etc.   I fixed all known errors.   On December 28 there was another crawl but the errors still show up on the report.   Why?  Is there anything I can do to update so I can get down to the few I missed

    Moz Pro | | Wales
    1

  • We have a large volume of products that rotate seasonally. From an SEO perspective we are looking for the best method on how to handle these issues. Currently when crawler or user encounters a URL to a product that is no longer in inventory we are looking at two things. One, the request comes in and send a 200 to a page that says ITEM NOT FOUND. Option 2, is simply send them to a 404. The product may or may not be put back into production. What is the best method to handle this?

    Technical SEO | | CC_Dallas
    0

  • Now I have a bunch of links that are dead. (45 to be exact) What should I do? Rebuild the links, 301 redirect them to the homepage, 410 them? I didn't get a lot of external traffic from the links (maybe ~500 uniques/mo). Of that traffic, most of the users would bounce, my SEO wasn't very good so the content they received wasn't as relevant as it could have been. I'm not really worried about losing the traffic, but rather minimizing any penalty from google.

    Technical SEO | | winefolly
    1

  • When doing a search in Google (US Proxy) - Google is stripping and replacing my functional TITLE with the brand name only (say 'Nike'), but if you do a specific search term like ('buy nike shoes') and see a top 10 listing for my site's homepage, now the title works and shows correctly. I saw this a few years ago with another one of my company domains, but didn't ask the question as it worked out. Thanks for any insight.. NOTE: It's not damaging any results, or rankings for the site.. but: when searching for BRAND name of the company, like I explained, it's replacing a optimized title for the BRAND name, and then re-placing it naturally when deep search brings up the homepage and the TITLE looks fine.. Very weird at best! Thanks, Rob

    Technical SEO | | RobMay
    0

  • Hi, I have a classifieds website and would like to optimize it. The issues/questions I have: A Classifieds site has, say, 500 cities. Is it better to create separate subdomains for each city (http://city_name.site.com) or subdirectory (http://site.com/city_name)? Now in each city, there will be say 50 categories. Now these 50 categories are common across all the cities. Hence, the layout and content will be the same with difference of latest ads from each city and name of the city and the urls pointing to each category in the relevant city. The site architecture of a classifieds site is highly prone to have major content which is not really a duplicate content. What is the best way to deal with this situation? I have been hit by Panda in April 2011 with traffic going down 50%. However, the traffic since then has been around same level. How to best handle the duplicate content penalty in case with site like a classifieds site. Cheers!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ketan9
    0

  • What are people's opinions of Quora for SEM? Early last year many were excited about its potential but I must admit I haven't explored quora as much as I should have. I do find it a good resource for getting answers to my questions but how do people turn this into an SEO tool? This is probably sacrilege for most SEMs but I don't think Quora has taken off over here in the UK as it has in the US. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts as an SEO community and how you've used Quora successfully. Cheers.

    Social Media | | A_Q
    0

  • Hi guys, Can anyone help with a software (online or offline / paid or free) that can help us get the keywords and the rankings our websites are ranking for? *** NOTE: We already use some software to get our rankings for a list of keywords we submit. We are interested in a software that can pull our keywords and rankings WITHOUT having to submit a keyword list. We want to know  where and what for do we rank (especially long tails).
    Also, we know we can use a turn around (by exporting the keywords we get traffic from from Analytics and using Market Samurai to get the rankings, but we prefer an independent software that does all this automatically for all the links on our entire domain. I remember I accidentally got into such software a couple of months ago, but lost the track of it :). Please let me know if you know about such software. I hope I am not chasing after shadows 🙂

    Industry News | | tolik1
    0

  • Here is my robots.txt from google webmaster tools. These are the pages that are being blocked and I am not sure which of these to get rid of in order to unblock blog posts from being searched. http://ensoplastics.com/theblog/?cat=743 http://ensoplastics.com/theblog/?p=240 These category pages and blog posts are blocked so do I delete the /? ...I am new to SEO and web development so I am not sure why the developer of this robots.txt file would block pages and posts in wordpress. It seems to me like that is the reason why someone has a blog so it can be searched and get more exposure for SEO purposes. IS there a reason I should block any pages contained in wodrpress? Sitemap: http://www.ensobottles.com/blog/sitemap.xml User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: /*/trackback Disallow: /*/feed Disallow: /*/comments Disallow: /? Disallow: /*? Disallow: /page/
    User-agent: * Disallow: /cgi-bin/ Disallow: /wp-admin/ Disallow: /wp-includes/ Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/ Disallow: /wp-content/themes/ Disallow: /trackback Disallow: /commentsDisallow: /feed

    Technical SEO | | ENSO
    0

  • I need help with my link building efforts so I have started to search around for companies and/or freelance contractors to hire.  I always ask for examples of sites they are working on.  In many cases the number of inbound links are high (9306) compared to the number of root domains that are linked to (143).  Or as in this sample (120792) inbound links compared to (157) linking domains http://www.shortsalesafe.com.  How can this be?  To me the only logical answer is "link farms" or some other form of black hat magic. Am I right in my assumption, or is there another logical answer for so many links with so few linking domains.? Thanks Gary

    Link Building | | fun52dig
    0

  • When I type in Google a keyword like : boot camp I get results that show Bootcamp (one word) traffic in the tens of thousands. I see many words combined. Does this mean that tens of thousands of people every month are misspelling that keyword? How should I interpret this in terms of anchor texting? I would hate to deliberately misspell it on my website just to get traffic. For those interested, my website is: http://ultimatebasictraining.com/admin/ (currently revaming my http://ultimatebasictraining.com website)

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | StreetwiseReports
    0

  • This may be a simple answer, but when I search for a term and see a website on the SERP, the SEOMoz tool bar shows link data beneath the link. For this site in particular, it shows 300+ links for the root domain and for the page, it shows 8 links. When I put that website in opensite explorer, it shows the same data for the "Page" stats (8 links from 3 root domains), but nowhere can I find where the 315 links from 4 domains comes from. So my questions is why do those links show in the SERP overlay, but not in OSE? il5y9.png

    Moz Pro | | GetFoundFirst
    0

  • I'm working on a site with a parent page and two minor pages all dealing with the primary/root keyword "log siding"  -  How do I optimize all three pages without bastardization of the primary keyword? Parent page - keyword: half-log-siding and log-siding Child Pages (linking from the parent)  cedar-log-siding  and Pine-log-siding. They all feature "log-siding" and grade well for that keyword (as well as their own long-tail keywords), yet I think based on my rank tracking that Google is unhappy with the multiple pages all (seemingly focused) on log-siding. Any ideas how I can effectively target all the long-tail keywords within their respective landing pages and not draw a penalty from Google towards my parent page and the root keyword? Thanks, Bill

    Technical SEO | | Marvo
    0

  • Google WebMaster shows that 55 external sites have links to my website (webmakercms.com).  But SEOmoz shows only 5 links and when I click on "download to CSV" I get a message saying that there is no data for this url in Open Site Explorer. Why is this?

    Link Building | | mfrgolfgti
    0

  • Hi there, Here is our situation:we need to force an IP Redirection for our US users to www.domain.com and at the same time we have different country-specific subfolders with thei own language such as www.domain.com/fr. Our fear is that by forcing an IP redirection for US IP, we will prevent googlebot (which has an US IP) from crawling our country-specific subfolders. I didn't find any clear directives from Google representatives on that matter. In this video  Matt Cutts says it's always better to show Googlebot the same content as your users http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFf1gwr6HJw&noredirect=1, but on the other hand in that other video he says "Google basically crawls from one IP address range worldwide because (they) have one index worldwide. (They) don't build different indices, one for each country". This seems a contradiction to me... Thank you for your help !! Matteo

    International SEO | | H-FARM
    0

  • First timer and new to SEO We  are designing a website for a customer in south america that has 3 distinct divisions.  We want to develop the site in the most SEO effective way possible. Each division will have its own keyword focus, its own associations and its own links. They will all link to each other from the main page company.com. we were thinking of creating 4 different seperate domains such as... www.company.com - basic high level company information with links to the other external sites below. www.company-contructionsoftware.com www.company-itservices.com www.company-graphicdesign.com so my questions are: 1- is it better in the long run to have domains that have the search terms in the url like specified above? We can optimize for the main site as well as the individual sites separately 2- would the result be the same using subdomains? for example, itservices.company.com 3- possibly hosting the 3 different sites in different locations? We want to make sure that we are building using the the best possible architecture for future optimization and internet marketing. What are the pros and cons? Thanks!!!!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brantwadz
    0

  • We are working on a website that has some high-quality industry articles available on their website. For each article, there is an abstract with a link to the PDF which is hosted on the domain. We have found in Analytics that a lot of sites link directly to the PDF and not the webpage that has the abstract of the article. Can we get any benefit from a direct PDF link? Or do we need to modify our strategy?

    Technical SEO | | MattAaron
    0

  • What is the difference between External Followed Links and Total External Links, why are the numbers different? Should the numbers not be the same? I have a difference of 24 links can anyone explain why?

    Link Building | | vendorshop
    0

  • So I am trying to set the URL preference in google webmaster tools for my site. However when I try to save it it tells me to verify that I own the site. I have already done this so where can I go to verify I own the site exactly? Maybe I am wrong and I have not done this already but even on the homepage of webmaster tools I don't see an option to "verify".

    Technical SEO | | ENSO
    0

  • I have been searching around to figure out if submitting articles to ezine, article base, etc. would produce quality incoming links for my website.  Would ezine and article base provide quality incoming links? Thanks in advance!

    Link Building | | giantpro
    0

  • Hi all! Happy New Year! Just wanted to pop in here and start a discussion to see what are some of the most effective link building techniques you'll be using for 2012? -Andy

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alhallinan
    1

  • Wanting to use search operators such as "KEYWORD inurl:blog" to identify potential link targets, then download target url, domain and keyword into an excel file. Then use SEOTools to evaluate the urls from the list. I see the link aquisition assistant in the Moz lab, but the listed operators are limited. Appreciate any suggestions on doing this at scale, thanks!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Qualbe-Marketing-Group
    0

  • On my homepage http://www.shipoverseas.com, I have 142 FB Likes, 9 Tweets, 3 +1s. In OSE it shows, FB Likes 86, Tweets 4, and 3 +1s. Does anyone know why there is a discrepancy? I am using AddThis.

    Social Media | | Francisco_Meza
    0

  • Hi, I would like to do some research and put together a post on the most powerful websites in my industry, and was wondering if you have any advice on how to calculate this - or if there is a tool available? Rather than making assumptions, I would like to try and be as accurate as possible. Thanks in advance for suggestions.

    Competitive Research | | juiceD
    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.