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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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  • Hi, Late last year the company I work for launched two new websites that, at the time, we believed were completely separate from our main website. The two new websites were set up externally and were not well-planned from an SEO perspective (LOTS of duplicate content) - hence, they have struggled to rank on Google. Since the launch of the new websites we have also noticed that our main website (that previously ranked very well) has suffered a decline in visitation and search engine rank. We initially attributed this to a number of factors, including the state of the market, and ramped up our SEO efforts (seeing minor improvement). We have since realised that these two new websites have been set up as subdomains of our main website, with MOZ displaying the same domain authority and root domain backlink profile. My question is, do poor quality subdomains affect the ranking performance of a root domain? I have not yet managed to find a definitive answer. Please let me know if more information is required - I am quite new to the whole SEO concept. Thanks! Amy

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | paulissai
    0

  • I have looked everywhere how reduce http requests on magento. couldn't find it, everyone talks about best practices but not actual answers how to implement this.

    On-Page Optimization | | Mikaai
    1

  • I am currently reviewing my strategy when it comes to categories and tags on my site.  Having been no-indexed for some time, and having many tags with just one entry I am thinking that this is not optimal for SEO purposes. This is what I am planning: Categories - Change these to Index, but only after adding a hundred words or so by way of introduction (see this example - https://www.besthostnews.com/news/hosting/a-small-orange-news/).  With the categories I am thinking of highlighting key articles as well to improve link juice distribution to older articles that are important. Tags - About half my tags have only 1 entry, with a few more just having 2 entries.  I am thinking of deleting all tags with just one entry, and trying to merge those with just two or 3 entries where it makes sense to do so.  I will keep these as no-index, but I think this will mean more optimal distribution of link juice within the site. I would appreciate your thoughts \ suggestions on the best practices here.

    On-Page Optimization | | TheWebMastercom
    0

  • Hi I have noticed using screaming frog that 302 redirect is in place but when checking the HTTACESS there no such thing in place. If I run a scan with: http://www.redirect-checker.org/index.php doing a test with: https://www. everything seems ok but then when I do: http://www. There is a 302 in place and seem to understand why. I have analysed the Httacess file and cant seem to locate anything that refers to the 302 any advise or previous experience would be great. Thanks
    E

    SERP Trends | | Direct_Ram
    0

  • I have been looking at the website of local web design companies and every single one in my area has a footer with links to a separate page for that local city. This seems like a bad idea to me, but everyone in the local pack has it. Does it work?

    Local Website Optimization | | EcommerceSite
    0

  • Lately my organic traffic has dropped significantly as well as my adsense revenue.  The moz report says, for example, my traffic is down 40%, but I a still #1 for that keyword. Also, in the last week, suddenly my number of indexed pages doubled.  We had done some page rewriting and maybe messed that up.  We've fixed that though.  Webmaster tools is still picking up all of our old pages and the new ones. Background: We recently launched our new responsive website in March. March income was about the same as February. April dropped off suddenly (maybe late march - no sure) When we changed site, we did do 301's for all the old pages to the new ones Any ideas or advice as to why my traffic and revenue has dropped off so sharply? Never submitted questions before - not sure if I am supposed to put urls here so if you just google Home Spelling Words - that's my website.  Thanks everyone!!!

    Technical SEO | | kimtastic
    0

  • Hi Guys, I'm new to Moz and really liking it so far!
    I run a eCommerce site on Wordpress + WooCommerce and ofcourse use Yoast for SEO optimalisation I've got a question about my first Crawl report which showed over 600 issues! 😐 I've read that this is something that happens more often (http://moz.com/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success). Most of them are categorized under:
    1. Duplicate Page Titles or;
    2. Duplicate Page Content. Duplicate Page Titles:
    These are almost only: product category pages and product tags. Is this problem beeing solved by giving them the right SEO SERP? I see that a lot of categories don't have a proper SEO SERP set up in yoast! Do I need to add this to clear this issue, or do I need to change the actual Title? And how about the Product tags? Another point (bit more off-topic) I've read here:  http://moz.com/community/q/yoast-seo-plugin-to-index-or-not-to-index-categories  that it's advised to noindex/follow Categories and Tags but isn't that a wierd idea to do for a eCommerce site?! Duplicate Page Content:
    Same goes here almost only Product Categories and product tags that are displayed as duplicate Page content! When I check the results I can click on a blue button for example "+ 17 duplicates" and that shows me (in this case 17 URLS) but they are not related to the fist in any way so not sure where to start here? Thanks for taking the time to help out!
    Joost

    On-Page Optimization | | jeeyer
    0

  • I just signed up for Moz recently, and have noticed that in my crawl errors, I have hundreds of issues with my title tag being too long. My business is selling prints for landscape/travel/nature photography, and I've built these pages dynamically to where the title tag for pages selling individual photos has the title of the photo for sale followed by a hyphen and then the brand name. The same goes for gallery pages "Gallery Name | Brand Name". Would it be worth it to shorten the title tags by removing the brand name from these pages? Or will that actually harm more than help? Thanks in advance!

    On-Page Optimization | | shannmg1
    0

  • Hey guys, I've got kind of a strange situation going on and I can't seem to find it addressed anywhere.  I have a site that at one point had several development sites set up at subdomains.  Those sites have since launched on their own domains, but the subdomain sites are still showing up in the Google index.  However, if you look at the cached version of pages on these non-existent subdomains, it lists the NEW url, not the dev one in the little blurb that says "This is Google's cached version of www.correcturl.com."  Clearly Google recognizes that the content resides at the new location, so how come the old pages are still in the index?  Attempting to visit one of them gives a "Server Not Found" error, so they are definitely gone. This is happening to a couple of sites, one that was launched over a year ago so it doesn't appear to be a "wait and see" solution. Any suggestions would be a huge help.  Thanks!!

    Technical SEO | | SarahLK
    0

  • I’m building a WordPress site with Visual Composer and I’ve hit a point where I need to show a totally different section on a mobile compared to a desktop/tablet. My issue/question comes from the fact that both mobile and desktop rows will have the same content as well as H1/H2/H3 tags. From inspecting the elements I see the mobile only rows are hidden until the page size shrinks through being set to 'display: none' in the CSS (standard visual composer way of handling width & responsiveness) How will Google see this in terms of SEO? I don’t want to come across as if I’m cloaking text and H1 tags on the page (I have emailed the visual composer support but wanted to get an external opinion)

    Technical SEO | | shloy23-294584
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  • I've discovered few backlinks in images came from websites points to my home page. What is the value of these links?

    Link Building | | Eslam-yosef
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  • I know the standard answer of email all the sites but, I dont like my chances of even getting any delisted..
    Have around 260 links with about 60% of them junk.
    Some links are from sig links on forums that I actually legitimately post to and from real comments I have made on the web over the years. Should all of these go? Was thinking of hiring a freelancer to do this or maybe going through an online tool if anyone has any suggestions? An example is this http://ezinearticles.com/?The-Era-of-Digital-Signage&id=6236852 Edit:  Well I got a reply from ezine and from goarticles! They are removing the articles, maybe its becoming a headache for them all as, Sorry, GoArticles.com is no longer accepting new article submissions or account signups. We wish this wasn't the end, but unfortunately, it is and we aren't able to continue. You can download a backup copy of all of your submissions by logging into your existing account so that you can re-use your content on your own website or other competitor sites. Thank you for being a member and we're sorry that this site will be coming to an end shortly.

    Link Building | | Adamzzz
    1

  • Hi, Our site https://soundbetter.com has been live for 2 years now, and as of yet we haven't yet been able to get our PageRank above 3/10. We have thousands of unique pages and plenty of original contextual content, we avoid duplicate content best we can, follow google's best practices for site structure, deal with any issues that come up in webmaster tools, have schema.org markup, avoid link spamming, have inbound links from authority sites (though OSE doesn't show most of them for some reason), lots of social shares to our pages and the domain has been owned by us for 12 years. Any thoughts on why we would still have a PR of 3? Thanks for helping

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ShaqD
    0

  • So we use http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:x.com/#!/hashbangpage to check what googlebot has cached but when we try to use this method for hashbang pages, we get the x.com's cache... not x.com/#!/hashbangpage That actually makes sense because the hashbang is part of the homepage in that case so I get why the cache returns back the homepage. My question is - how can you actually look up the cache for hashbang page?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | navidash
    0

  • Imagine someone who has 2 separate businesses with the same (home) address. Both are verified Google My Business G+ pages, each with its own separate website. Essentially the old business that is being de-emphasized is a guitar lesson teacher's studio. This G+ page is set as a storefront where people come to. The new business is similar, it is music lessons (private in-home instruction). This G+ page is set to have a service area - this goes along with their new business model. We all know that consistent NAP is essential BUT do you think these are competing against each other because they share an address even though the businesses are separate?

    Local Listings | | Rich_Coffman
    0

  • Hi there, We have a company website based on Wordpress. I just noticed that under Settings > Permalinks I can configure the look of the URLs and even remove the trailing slash. We have about 2-300 pages online. If I remove the trailing slash now, will that negatively impact our SEO in anyway for existing pages? Thanks!

    Technical SEO | | Amr-Haffar
    0

  • We don't have a responsive design site yet, and our mobile site is built through Dudamobile. I know it's not the best, but I'm trying to do whatever we can until we get around to redesigning it. Is there anything I can do about the following Page Speed Insight errors or are they just a function of using Dudamobile? Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content Your page has 3 blocking script resources and 5 blocking CSS resources. This causes a delay in rendering your page.None of the above-the-fold content on your page could be rendered without waiting for the following resources to load. Try to defer or asynchronously load blocking resources, or inline the critical portions of those resources directly in the HTML.Remove render-blocking JavaScript: http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.1/jquery.min.js http://mobile.dudamobile.com/…ckage.min.js?version=2015-04-02T13:36:04 http://mobile.dudamobile.com/…pts/blogs.js?version=2015-04-02T13:36:04 Optimize CSS Delivery of the following: http://fonts.googleapis.com/…:400|Great+Vibes|Signika:400,300,600,700 http://mobile.dudamobile.com/…ont-pack.css?version=2015-04-02T13:36:04 http://mobile.dudamobile.com/…kage.min.css?version=2015-04-02T13:36:04 http://irp-cdn.multiscreensite.com/kempruge/files/kempruge_0.min.css?v=6 http://irp-cdn.multiscreensite.com/…mpruge/files/kempruge_home_0.min.css?v=6 Thanks for any tips, Ruben

    Web Design | | KempRugeLawGroup
    0

  • Hi Everyone, I'm currently doing quite a large back link audit on my company's website and there's one thing that's bugging me. Our website used to be split into two domains for separate areas of the business but since we have merged them together into one domain and have 301 redirected the old domain the the main one. But now, both GWT and Majestic are telling me that I've got 12,000 backlinks from that domain?  This domain didn't even have 12,000 pages when it was live and I only did specific 301 redirects (ie. for specific URL's and not an overall domain level 301 redirect) for about 50 of the URL's with all the rest being redirected to the homepage. Therefore I'm quite confused about why its showing up as so many backlinks - Old redirects I've done don't usually show as a backlink at all. UPDATE: I've got some more info on the specific back links. But now my question is - is having this many backlinks/redirects from a single domain going to be viewed negatively in Google's eyes? I'm currently doing a reconsideration request and would look to try and fix this issue if having so many backlinks from a single domain would be against Google's guidelines. Does anybody have any ideas? Probably somthing very obvious. Thanks! Sam

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sandicliffe
    0

  • We have a client in need of a ticketing solution for their domain (let's call it www.domain.com) which is on Wordpress - as is our custom ticket solution.  However, we want to have full control of the ticketing, since we manage it for them - so we do not want to build it inside their original Wordpress install. Our proposed solution is to build it on tickets.domain.com.  This will exist only for selling and issuing the tickets. The question is, is there a way to do this without damaging their bounce rate and SEO scores?
    Since customers will come to www.domain.com, then click the ticketing tab and land on tickets.domain.com, Google will see this as a bounce.  In reality, customers will not notice the difference as we will clone the look and feel of domain.com Should we perhaps have the canonical URL of tickets.domain.com point to www.domain.com? And also, can we install Webmaster Tools for tickets.domain.com and set the preferred domain as www.domain.com? Are these possible solutions to the problem, or not - and if not, does anyone else have a viable solution? Thank you so much for the help.

    Local Website Optimization | | Adam_RushHour_Marketing
    0

  • Does really page size affect the results in search engines? And, what is the maximum in this case?

    On-Page Optimization | | Eslam-yosef
    0

  • Hi all: Do backlinks need to be clicked to pass linkjuice? Is so, can someone explain how much traffic is needed from a backlink to count as linkjuice? Thanks for the help. Audrey.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Addythenurse
    1

  • Hi, I have too many question that I need answer to understand Google ranking system. I have been analyzing different website in different niche, but puzzling to understand how Google rank actually. Some websites have good number of backlinks with good SEO metrics, but some low SEO profiled websiites outrank good sites. I am here with my first question. I am working for one client website who sell sex toys online. So we are optimizing keywords like sex toys, buy sex toys, sex shop, sex toy store and too many keywords to rank on google.ca. My client website is cupidboutique.com. We have some competitors that I want to mention below: 1. PinkCherry: This is one of our big competitor. They have 2 domain one is for US and one is for Canada. Both websites ranking well for different keywords. Basically .ca domain is more successful than .com domain. But I am surprise why Google consider the websites for rank. If you see, both websites are identical, that means both website have same product, same category structure, and the most important all products description are duplicate on each domain. On google webmaster guideline, google mention that if 2 domain have identical content, then Google ignore the duplicate one in ranking. But still both websites ranking for different search term. I compare the SEO metrics of our domain and their .ca domain, there is not big difference. Our websites also have good number of links, good PA/DA, even more good number of social sharing than them. But our rankings are not even comparable with them. They are ranking within 20-30th on Google for different product category keywords, but not our. 2. Hushcanada: This is another website ranking well, but I a surprise how? This website is ranking on very high competitive keyword with very fewer number of backlinks. Their PA/DA, number of backlinks, social sharing all metrics are very few. Their business also established recently that is 2013, which I found through archive.org, whereas our client business has been running since 2003-2004. As a Ecommerce business website their homepage is not showing any product , their catalog can be found under "shop online" page only. There are even some more websites ranking well with very low SEO metrics in this niche. If Google is not looking for these SEO staff, then what other staff Google looks to rank website? Hope I will get some favorable answer of my question.

    Social Media | | moonheart
    0

  • If you don't have any problems with Text/HTML ratio. Which one do you prefer for better results? With reasons of possible, thanks.

    On-Page Optimization | | Eslam-yosef
    0

  • Our web development team have changed our domain prefix from www to non www due to a server change. Our SSL certificate would not be recognised under www and would produce a substantial error message when visiting the secure parts of our website. To prevent issues with old links they have added a permanent 301 redirect from www. to non www. urls until our sitemap catches up. Would this impact our SEO efforts or would it have no impact as a redirect has been placed? Thanks

    Technical SEO | | Jseddon92
    0

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