Welcome to the Q&A Forum

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

  1. Home
  2. Latest Questions
Log in to post

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!

  • Room214


    Hello - My company acquired another company in our industry and our IT team immediately set up the acquired companies domain name as a an alias to our site. This created a duplicate version of our website under another domain name and Google started ranking interior pages from the aliased acquired site for several top keywords that were previously held by our real site. Should we 301 redirect just the top level domain name of the acquired site to the real site or 301 redirect the top level domain name and the interior pages on the acquired site to help ensure that our real domain will take back the rankings it once had? Thanks!

    Technical SEO | | Room214
    0
  • Christoffa


    Hi. I am bran-new to the site so if I am asking a daft question I apoloise 😉 When I go to the Competitive Link Builder, enter some URLS and press GO I am taking to a blank screen with no info.  I've tried on different browsers & same issues. Any advice? Thanks.Christoffa.

    Competitive Research | | Christoffa
    0
  • AdeLewis


    Hello fellow Mozzers. I am just having a brief look at a potential clients website before speaking to them tomorrow and whilst looking at the source I noticed that they don't appear to have a clear definition for their Doctype. All the have at the top of each page is I have to admit that Doctypes aren't my strong point but I know that they are normally slightly more descriptive than this. Can this have any effect on rankings? or is this just an issue for W3C validation? Thanks 🙂

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdeLewis
    0
  • C-Style


    I'm in the midst of converting a fairly large website (500+ pages) into WordPress as a content management system. I know that there are two schools of thought regarding site architecture: Those who believe that everything should be categorized, I.E.- website.com/shoes/reebok/running People who believe that the less clicks it takes from the homepage the better. As it stands, our current site has a completely flat architecture, with landing pages being added randomly to the root, I.E.- website.com/affordable-shoes-in-louisville-ky I'm beginning to think that there is a gray area with this. I spoke to someone who says that you should never have a page more than 2 categories/subfolders deep. But if we plan on adding a lot of content doesn't it make sense to set the site up into many categories so we can set a good foundation for adding massive amounts of content. Also, will 301 redirecting to the new structure cause us to lose rankings for certain terms? Any help here is appreciated.

    Web Design | | C-Style
    0
  • Kezber


    French Keyword : "Chauffage électrique" Currently Ranking 4th on Google.ca (French) It is not even top 50 on Google.ca (English) Why so much gap between them? Both are on Google.ca, just different language. Also, when searching the keyword on Google.ca (English), all the results shown are in french anyway ! Why is mine way off ? How can I help the ranking on the EN version? Why does Google.ca FR and EN have different rankings?

    Algorithm Updates | | Kezber
    0
  • blake-76624


    I am in a smaller town and sell real estate.  I have seen a lot of the competitors links and some of them are just blog commenting spam and things like that (although they are ranking well for certain terms and their links are coming from sites that have nothing to do with real estate.) I guess what I am trying to say is should I start going after links from other towns/cities in my state or should I go outside of my state and start looking for other links in other cities and states? I have bought my townstate.com from someone recently and it ranks highly for town,state.  I am trying to find different ways to get to number one for my "town, state real estate". What would you do?  Would you continue to add content once a week or so as well as build links? Thanks!

    Link Building | | blake-76624
    0
  • PLEsearch


    Hi Team,
    We are looking for link submission in paid directories, so could you please you please let us know what will be the procedure of paid link submission ASAP Regards

    Link Building | | PLEsearch
    0
  • stefanok


    Hi there mozzers, Got a quick question regarding link building. I built a fsir bit of links, and was just wondering when these links will be indexed as links pointing to my sites? Silly novice question but been over a month and links still arent being picked up, so was just wondering. Stef

    Link Building | | stefanok
    0
  • matthewbyers


    Good morning! I'm working on building out a new website for a regional insurance agency specializing in auto insurance for high risk drivers (ex. Tickets, Accidents, Dui's, etc.). Due to the competitive nature of our industry, I believe it is best to focus on very localized long tail keywords, instead of broad terms I don't have any chance of ranking for. Our keyword research indicates that there is an opportunity to optimize and potentially rank for keywords that include geographic modifiers for towns and cities within a roughly 50 mile radius. The problem is, there is only so much you can say about auto insurance. On the one hand, I would like to have individual landing pages for each keyword phrase. On the other hand, I don't want to look manipulative to Google or hurt user experience by creating a bunch of pages with relatively similar content. Can anyone offer some advice on how I can structure the site/content to optimize for each geographic modifier without having lots of pages that are very similar? Thank you!

    Keyword Research | | matthewbyers
    0
  • TRICORSystems


    I recently found a very interesting link to two of my competitors sites. The companies are number 2 and 3 in Google for my targeted keywords (for some reason Wikipedia is number 1) and are both linked from the home page of this site. I don't want to leave a link for linkers site because I don't want them to be able to see that I'm snooping on them but, here is the scenerio: The site that they are linked from is a .org site. It is basically our targeted keywords in a .org. Something like bluewidgets.org. At the very bottom of the home page are some tabs, you click the first tab and it opens about 20 new tabs, when you click any of those 20 tabs it displays some text at the bottom of the page. This text is of no value to visitors, it  is obvious to me what is happening here. Both companies are linked with targeted keywords in the anchor and title text. I'm wondering if I should also pursue a link from this page. I know there is value in a .org link but this site seems to be built to link to those two sites. Anybody else ever run into anything like I'm describing. Should I post a link to this site?

    Link Building | | TRICORSystems
    0
  • Kofoed


    Here is a short question re. 301. I read Dovers article on how to move an old domain to a new one. Say you have been a little inexperienced regarding linkbuilding and used some cheap service in the past and you have steadily seen that certain keywords have been depreciating in the SERP - however the PR is still 3 for the domain - now the qustion is should you rediect with a 301 in .htaccess to a new domain when you know that google does not like certain keywords with respect to the old site. Will the doom and gloom carry over to the new site?

    Technical SEO | | Kofoed
    0
  • jeff.interactive


    Will the the transfer to a new registrar hurt my domains in the SERPs if all contact information for the domain stays the same and DNS stays the same and site hosting remains the same?

    On-Page Optimization | | jeff.interactive
    0
  • Gestisoft-Qc


    Hello, I'm a new SEOmoz member. On Dec. 2nd, after completely redesigning our website, we migrated to a new hosting company by switching our DNS to the new server. The vast majority of the URLs have changed and we configured redirects of the old URLs to the new ones. Although, this task is not completed yet. After the migration, I created an account on SEOmoz to be able to track our progress and find the issues to fix to optimize our SEO. For some reason, in the SEOmoz reports it is the old URLs that show up. Unless the crawler does not actually crawl the pages and only uses the indexed pages to generate its report, I don't understand how could this possible. Anyone has a clue? When will the new URLs be indexed by SEOmoz and the major search engines? Thanks for your help!

    Moz Pro | | Gestisoft-Qc
    0
  • rickt007


    Any insight into what's driving these results would be appreciated. Another site ranks #6 and we rank #22 on a keyword that scores 67% for "Keyword Difficulty", but we score significantly higher than them on almost every ranking factor including having nearly 10 times more backlinks along with higher PA and DA scores,etc. Here is a comparison from the Keyword Difficulty Tool report. Question: What could be going on? Factor and ranking comparison (us v. them) with our higher rankings are listed first. PA: 61 v. 39, mozRank 5,85 v. 4,54, mozTrust 6.00 v. 5.49, mT/mR = 1.0 v. 1.2, total links = 4,198 v. 90, internal links = 4198 v 90, external links = 275 v. 57, followed links = 4171 v 85, no follow links = 27 v 5, linking root domains = 46 v 30 on-page grade = A v B broad keyword usage in title: yes v yes broad keyword usage in document: yes v yes keyword used in url = no v no keyword used in domain = partial v no KW exact match - no v no exact anchor text links = 2373 v 13 %links w/ exact anchor text = 56% v 14% linking root domains w/ exact anchor text = 7 v 8 % linking root domains w/ exact anchor text = 15% v 26% partial anchor text links = 0 v 0 Domain Authority = 54 v 27 Domain mozRank = 5.4 v 3.2 Domain mozTrust = 5.8 v 3.7 DmT/DmR = 1.1 v 1.2 External links to domain 9261 v 63 Linking root domains to this domain = 355 v 33 linking c- blocks domains to domain = 267 v 30 tweets = 4 v 3 FB shares = 13 v 11 Google Plus one shares = 1 v 0

    Competitive Research | | rickt007
    0
  • CeCeBar


    OK assuming a client's website has the right tracking script (hopefully analytics isn't effected by this issue), ... what happens if the htaccess file has a 301 redirect to the www-address, but within Google Webmaster Tools, the address chosen to crawl by Google is the non-www address? How will Google handle and which address takes precedence in this situation? _Cindy

    Technical SEO | | CeCeBar
    0
  • Ticket_King


    We have a competitor whose home page rocketed up to number one, page one, on our key search term after they did a website redesign.  They even beat out the original retailer for that position, as they are resellers of the product (not affiliate sales, resale in the secondary market.) They are the first to knock the original seller out of the #1 position. In the past couple of years that I have been doing in-house SEO, they have never ranked on page one for the term.  I ran their site through the SEOmoz page grader for the specific search term, loading their page that is ranking, and found that they grade a “B,” but have some alerts for keyword stuffing, (the search term is on the home page 30+ times,) and they have eleven tags on said page. Aside from the two things listed above, they have pretty good site architecture on this new site, and are pretty well branded, etc.  Should I expect Google to catch the keyword stuffing and eleven tags, and possibly adjust their rank?  Will their keyword stuffing come back to bite them?

    Web Design | | Ticket_King
    0
  • filarinskis


    Just wanted some advice. SEOmoz crawl found out about 18,000 errors. The error URLs are all mainly URLs like the one below, which seem to be the registration URL with a re-direct on, going back the product after registration: http://www.DOMAIN.com/index.php?_g=co&_a=reg&redir=/index.php?_a=viewProd%26productId=3465 We have the following line in the robots file to stop the login page from being crawled: Disallow: /index.php?act=login If I add the following, will it stop the error? Disallow: /index.php?act=reg Thanks in advance**.**

    Technical SEO | | filarinskis
    0
  • vibelingo


    Hi, does there exist any good data on the correlation between the meta description and having the same text in the body text (as pre-ample in bold, for instance) and conversion rates?

    Content Development | | vibelingo
    0
  • PeterM22


    Hi everyone, I know its not really an SEO question, but I'd thought i'd ask here to see if anyone can help. Does anyone know any awesome wordpress template designers? I've been looking for a while, but i've not been able to find anyone awesome. I know it's going to cost, to get someone good.

    Web Design | | PeterM22
    0
  • rasmusbang


    Hi all, (Total newbie with fourth post of the last 7 days askin' for help!...sorry!) I've discovered that we have a lot of URLs indexed with for example: http://test.betxpert.com/some-odd-url This gives me duplicate content in the search engines. I have searched the web and i can not find a solution fore redirecting http://test.betxpert.com/some-odd-url to http://www.betxpert.com/some-odd-url. Can anyone help me what to write in the .htaccess file? Best regards, Rasmus

    On-Page Optimization | | rasmusbang
    0
  • columbus


    Am I doing something wrong? So far only 3 pages of my site have been crawled - but my account has been live for 7 days. Would it tell me if it was having trouble crawling the rest of the site?

    Moz Pro | | columbus
    0
  • dmunchen


    I have a ON-PAGE optimized website, but seomoz research tool says that 24 pages are F graded, and i was checking the keywords and i noticed that the keywords seomoz research tool was analising wasnt the ones that i used. Let me explain its like this: My Keyword is : Santa and seomoz is running the keyword : Santa Claus Where did the tool got that Keyword from? Thank you

    On-Page Optimization | | dmunchen
    0
  • digitalarts


    For a specific term, we have the potential opportunity to purchase the domain (complete with site) that sits just above us in the Google search results... The domain has reasonable page authority of 49, domain authority of 38 with 168 linking root domains - 311 total links... Would the most beneficial use of the domain be to retain the site content as is and incorporate a few relevant links back to our site or... 301 the entire domain?

    Technical SEO | | digitalarts
    1
  • JurgenEstanislao


    Hi Guys, This question has been asked several times before but after doing some research, I haven't really found the right solution and/or explanation. I'm currently seeing a 30-50% discrepancy in Adwords Clicks and Analytics Visits, where there are more clicks than visits in most situations. E.g. 74,127 clicks v.s. 46,845 visits (34 add-to-carts, 67 initiated orders, and a revenue of $12,000). Can anybody in the forum help explain this? Thank you, Jurgen P.S. I've also looked at all the tracking codes and everything seems to be alright, I've checked if any internal redirects are stripping off parameters but to no avail. Lastly, I'm not sure if this is a behavioral issue here in SEA--will first click (Adwords) and last click attribution (Analytics) be the only explanation? P.S.S. I'm seeing the same discrepancies with Facebook ads and Analytics.

    Paid Search Marketing | | JurgenEstanislao
    0
  • MirandaP


    What is everyone's opinion on this? < 100 at all times? 100 -200 Okay? 200-300+ A little much?

    On-Page Optimization | | MirandaP
    0
  • mlc


    Hi, Look for idea for a website owner selling training courses on painting , he wants to be ranked locally first but also national on google Serp (only one physical address available). His domain name is rather a branded one (no kw in it), and the website is recent (1 year) . An audit will be focused on competitor rankings to find niche KW. I 'd advise  : - For local : optimized Google  address listing  + local business directories + optumized page with local emphasis (shema.org ..) For national : to make unique relevant content pages with keywords geographically targeted (according audit), for instance for a specific town, to include terms related to this particular local market etc.. 1/ What 's else could i suggest to start a national ranking ? 2/ Have you heard of a tool to make distant queries on Google ? I mean , i leave in Madrid (spain) and want to see google serp as if i was in Barcelona ? (seems difficult as google uses Ip). Tks in advance for your advices...

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mlc
    0
  • fivelinesmedia


    A client of mine wants to include drop caps at the start of the first paragraph on the page because they think it looks nice. I found some css techniques for implementing this using a span on the first character to enlarge the size of just that character. First word of the first paragraph. Are there any seo concerns I should have for adding drop caps?

    Web Design | | fivelinesmedia
    0
  • LeeAnn30


    Hi, I know that every linkbuilder needs to rotate proxies every now and then but then this question seems to bother me and I can't seem to shake it off. Just how many links should one create from a single IP proxy? Is it 1 IP proxy is to 100 links? Is it 1 IP proxy is to 200 links? Please help.  Thanks!

    Link Building | | LeeAnn30
    0
  • sprynewmedia


    Can anyone point me to a page showing how to mark up reference data according to schema.org ?  Ie glossary or dictionary page.

    Technical SEO | | sprynewmedia
    0
  • REMOVE56


    REMOVE

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | REMOVE56
    0
  • pano


    Hi Forum, Our site has an errant product review module that is resulting in about 9-10 404 errors per day on Google Webmaster Tools. We've found that by changing our product page URLs to only include 2 dashes, the module stops causing 404 errors for that page. Does changing our URL from "oursite.com/girls-pink-yoga-capri.html" to "oursite.com/girlspink-yoga-capri.html" hurt our SEO for a search for "girls pink yoga capri"? If so, by how much (assuming everthing else on the page is optimized properly) Thanks for your input.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pano
    0
  • timscullin


    Hi there, I've redesigned a website for a client, but we are also changing domains and I'm trying to figure out the best way to set up the redirects from their old domain to the new one. 95% of their search engine traffic originally came through brand related keywords that landed on their homepage, and most of the remaining 15% landed on 3 other pages. The new site has pages to replace these 3 main SEO pages, and I'm about to set 301 redirects from their old domain, but I can't figure out the quickest/best way to do it. Is it possible to set up a specific redirect for the 4 main pages (Home + plus the 3 others) then a "catch all" type of thing for the rest of the pages, that redirect either to the homepage, or some sort of "Check out our new Site" landing page. How do you do this, or is there a better way to set it up? Thanks!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | timscullin
    0
  • ClaireH-184886


    Hi i have been submitting a lot of fresh articles on free article sites and they have been picked up which is good but my problem is, i am finding loads of these sites who have picked up my article using some sort of article rewrite programme and my articles look like they have now been written by a two year old. I want to know if this is going to spoil my reputation and i would like to know why people use these programmes when they do not even make sense.

    Content Development | | ClaireH-184886
    0
  • rasmusbang


    Hi All, We have some partners which link to our site, and they put "?ref=SITENAME" so we Can identify the source of the link....but does this matter to the search engines? Does this count as a different page than the one without the query string? -Rasmus

    Link Building | | rasmusbang
    0
  • JSOC


    All, I'm working on a duplicate Google places listing issue. One of the listings is accurate, verified and has been reviewed by quite a few customers. However, we have a problem with an old address that still shows up in Google maps and seems to be the cause of poor performance for the accurate listing.  The old address listing was deleted but may not have been removed using best practices based on what I've been able to read here at SEO Moz. The old address listing has been flagged by Google with a notation: “this place is permanently closed.” My question is what happens next? Do listings that have been flagged as permanently closed eventually drop out of the search results Or do I need to take additional action? It appears that once a listing has been flagged as permanently close you can no longer report a problem so that route seems to be unavailable.

    Image & Video Optimization | | JSOC
    0
  • footballfriends


    Hi there This blog insert was flag suggesting there was too many page links? I cant identify the same problem? Can anyone explain?

    Algorithm Updates | | footballfriends
    0
  • footballfriends


    Hi there The majority of website errors are trackback, similar to this? http://www.footballfriendsonline.com/transfer-gossip/trackback/11592555 I use the platform squarespace.com and not quiet sure how to resolve this error? Any help would be much appreciated for this seo ameuter! thanks

    Competitive Research | | footballfriends
    0
  • brian.james


    Hi guys, We are in the process of optimizing the pages of our new site. We have used the 'on page' report card feature in the Seomoz Pro Campaign analyser. On several pages we got the following result No More Than One Canonical URL Tag Number of Canonical tags <dl> <dd>2</dd> <dt>Explanation</dt> <dd>The canonical URL tag is meant to be employed only a single time on an individual URL (much like the title element or meta description). To ensure the search engines properly parse the canonical source, employ only a single version of this tag.</dd> <dt>Recommendation</dt> <dd>Remove all but a single canonical URL tag</dd> </dl> I have looked into the source code of one of the pages http://www.sabaileela.co.uk/acupuncture-london and can see that there are two "canonical" tags. Does anyone have any advise on which one I should ask the developer to remove?  I am not sure how to determine the relative importance of either link.

    On-Page Optimization | | brian.james
    0
  • michalseo


    I need to compile a list of all the siters linking to my site, but my open site explorer analysis shows very few links. I know for certain that there are many many more sites linking to it (it's an academic site and there are links to it from a lot of academic directories). What am I doing wrong?

    Link Building | | michalseo
    0
  • theLotter


    It there a problem disallowing all https URLs to be indexed in order to avoid duplication? This is the article recommending this practice - http://blog.leonardchallis.com/seo/serve-a-different-robots-txt-for-https/ Thanks!

    Technical SEO | | theLotter
    0
  • KS__


    While SEOing .com.au, websites I am submitting PRs in sites like prweb.com, pr.com, prlog.com etc. Is that the right way or should I submit these PRs in Australian PR sites only (.com.au)?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KS__
    0
  • danlae


    Hi I am ranking 1st for my main keyword (barneklær-childrens clothing) on google.no. I got  a bit surprised to see we are close to bottom of page 2 for same keyword on google.com. This keyword is as you probably understandreally country specific because the norwegian letter -æ . So if I take a look at the list at google.com its really the same sites I am outranking on .no. For this keyword local stats pr month is 22k and global is 29k (from google adwords). Even though our site is norwegian only - all of the global traffic is relevant due to the fact that this is a norwegian only word. Main reason we are ranking first on google.no i think is that we ve had articles on the strongest and most relevant blogs in Norway. I am guessing we somehow need to improve our international linking profile - right ? Do i then need US sites ? Is it enough with sites outside Norway? Any suggestions, its not easy to get international links to a norwegian site only dealing with childrens clothing. Thanks in advance... Dan Lærum

    Link Building | | danlae
    0
  • BVREID


    I have a number of clients, but don't have the time, energy or desire to spend my time building links.  I'm looking to partner with someone looking to make some ca$h by helping me accumulate quality links for my clients (at an affordable price). Any referrals would be appreciated.  If this type of post is inappropriate or violates any policy, then I would like to change my submission to: "What's the best way to find a partner to assist my link-building efforts?" ....not looking for an SEO firm's sales pitch. Thanks! BR

    Link Building | | BVREID
    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


Browse Questions

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