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!

  • ASOS


    Hi, I was just wondering if anyone had used Google Site Search before and what they thought of it? http://www.google.com/sitesearch/ It seems quite expensive for just returning your own pages but would be interested to find out more. Thanks

    Content Development | | ASOS
    0
  • esarge


    Hi, Based on the answers to my question about how to put the spatial location in the URL I'm now thinking about whether and how to flatten my information architecture. My main content is trails and courses. For both categories I have most content for Vancouver, BC (over 100 trails). I have some trails from California and more trails from other areas in BC (5-20 trails for 3 separate counties). My current site architecture is: trails -> country -> state/province -> county/regional district -> list of trails. So a trail page is 5 clicks away from the root. My course structure is: courses -> course list (I have far fewer courses but need to start structuring them) I did a search for site:example.com and found that my course pages rank most highly (probably because I have more inbound links for them) then I get workout pages then I get trail pages last of all. I want to be set up to scale for the rest of the world but I think I have to start winning in my local area first. What ideas might be good for a better site architecture? I'm thinking of doing this: trails -> location page -> list of trails for county. The location page would be a single page with a tree hierarchy from country to county - nicely styled to help the user. Something like: Canada -> British Columbia -> -> Greater Vancouver -> -> Okanagan-Similikameen -> -> Squamish-Lilloet United States -> California -> -> Marin I would make the urls be /trail/ca-bc-greater-vancouver/baden-powell-trail. I'm considering whether /trails/ca-bc/ (i.e. to get the state) should return a list of the counties. I'm worried about duplicate content for doing this. Curiously, my competitors don't have this structure at all. Access to their trails is by searching. Thoughts? Many thanks in advance

    On-Page Optimization | | esarge
    0
  • theLotter


    Most pages on my website contain many numbers above the actual text on the page.  This is useful for users and looks good on an actual view of the page.  However, when a bot reads the page it appears as rows of numbers with a few sentences at the bottom of the page. Does having these number have a negative SEO effect? If so, should I change them to something such as an image so they aren't readable by search engines?

    On-Page Optimization | | theLotter
    0
  • theLotter


    My company's blog is currently a sub directory - www.site/blog.com but for technical ease we are considering changing it to a sub domain - www.blog.site.com. What are the SEO ramifications of each? Thank you! Best, Sara

    Content Development | | theLotter
    0
  • SearchOfficeSpace23


    Guys I have asked for the leaked SEO guidlines just to fine tune my SEO campaigns and it seems no one wanted to send it to me. Anyone can do it here, please?

    Industry News | | SearchOfficeSpace23
    0
  • Entrusteddev


    Hi Mozzers, Here is a dilemma I thought I'd put forward and see how you guys would handle the situations. I'm working on a comparison website on which many of of the product names are very similar. There are circa 2000 products, of which many have similar names. Here are a few of the product names for example; Airsprung Enigma 5ft Mattress Airsprung Double Echo 6ft Mattress Silentnight Double Nova 6ft Mattress The Product name has been used in the page title of the product pages as show below; Compare Prices on the Airsprung Double Echo 6ft Mattress SEOmoz is highlighting these pages as having Duplicate Page Titles (and meta descriptions as a similar approach has been used). How would you handle this situation? Cheers Aran

    Technical SEO | | Entrusteddev
    0
  • Seaward-Group


    Hello, In the UK I have my domains hosted with a company and my hosting with another company. I can change the DNS so the domain works with the webhosting. Can this be setup in the USA in the same way or does the hosting and domain need to be with the same company? Thanks.

    Web Design | | Seaward-Group
    1
  • shebinhassan


    In our campaign I see that it reported that some of our pages have too many on-page links. But I think most of the links that was seen by MozBot is related to our images. There are a lot of images in our site and at the same time we support 11 languages which adds additional links One of the pages that have a lot of links is www.florahospitality.com/dining.aspx What can you <a></a>suggest to fix this? Thanks. <a></a><a></a><a></a><a></a><a></a><a></a><a></a><a></a><a></a><a></a><a></a><a></a><a></a><a></a><a></a><a></a><a></a>

    Moz Pro | | shebinhassan
    0
  • Profero


    Our site is recieving traffic for both .com/page and .com/page/ with the trailing slash. Should we rewrite to just the trailing slash or without because of duplicates. The other question is, if we do a rewrite, google has indexed some pages with the slash and some without - i am assuming we will lose rank for one of them once we do the rewrite, correct?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Profero
    0
  • casper434


    I created an RSS feed to information on my blog using the notes capability of google reader and feedburner. when I update my blog does this feed recognize the change or do I need to do a manual update of google reader?

    Technical SEO | | casper434
    0
  • casper434


    I have been told that google frowns on paid links yet I see many site charging for advertizing and the advertizing consists of an anchor text link. What is the difference between a paid link and this type of advertizing?

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | casper434
    0
  • casper434


    I recently traded links with a site that I will call www.example.com   When I used open site explorer to check the link it came back with a different page authority as www.example.com/index.htm yet the link does appear on the www.example.com page. Why would this be?

    Technical SEO | | casper434
    0
  • casper434


    I have heard the term link juice being used in many different contexts. Where can I find a good definition for it?

    Technical SEO | | casper434
    0
  • casper434


    Is there any evidence that google acknowledges the time that a site has been online with all other things being equal for search ranking?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | casper434
    0
  • casper434


    How important are links from social bookmarking sites from an SEO perspective?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | casper434
    0
  • casper434


    I have heard a variety of thoughts on the importance of directories such as DMOZ. Any thoughts on this subject from the perspective of google search rankings?

    Algorithm Updates | | casper434
    0
  • casper434


    After having employed many different methods for finding good link partners I am now finding it more difficult to reach out and identify good quality links for a niche area such as real estate. Does page rank factor into the search much or is it better to focus on page / domain authority as a major factor?

    Link Building | | casper434
    0
  • WineCellarInnovations


    Hey there, We got cold called by "Vertical Search Works" - VerticalSearchWorks.com and while it sounds great (low CPC compared to our current PPC stuff) on great networks (DIY, HGTV), no contracts, pause anytime... But RipOffReport has two bad reviews on them and I have not been able to search out anything else on them online. If anyone has insight before we start working with them, let me know! Thanks!

    Paid Search Marketing | | WineCellarInnovations
    0
  • esarge


    The SEOMoz On-Page report for my site brings up one warning (among others) that I find interesting: Minimal Subfolders in the URL My site deals with trails and courses for both races and general running. The structure for a trail is, for example: /trails/Canada/British-Columbia/Greater-Vancouver-Regional-District/Baden--Powell-Trail/trail/2 The structure for courses is: /course/28 In both cases, the id at the end is used for a database lookup. I'm considering an URL structure that would be: /trail/Baden-Powell-Trail/ca-bc-vancouver This would use the country code (CA) and sub-country code (BC) along with the short name for the region. This could be good because: it puts the main keyword first the URL is much shorter there are only 3 levels in the URL structure However, there is evidence, from Google's Matt Cutts, that the keyword order and URL structure don't matter in that way: See this post: http://www.seomoz.org/q/all-page-files-in-root-or-to-use-directories If Matt Cutts says they aren't so important then why are they listed in the SEOMoz On-Page Report? I'd prefer to use /trail/ca-bc-vancouver/Baden-Powell-Trail. I'll probably do a similar thing for courses. Is this a good idea? Thoughts? Many thanks, in advance, for your help. Cheers, Edward watch?v=l_A1iRY6XTM watch?v=gRzMhlFZz9I

    Technical SEO | | esarge
    0
  • gmk1567


    Number of indexed pages jumped from 39000 to 52000 and traffic increased around 50% in my site.Note: used "site" command to check the indexed pages. I understand this is approximate.In addition, number of crawled pages/day also increased dramatically.No change in the robots.txt, sitemap, crawl errors and duplicate issues. But server migrated to different IT infrastructure. Before any celebration, want to identify the helper. Thanks.

    Technical SEO | | gmk1567
    0
  • jboddiford


    This customer has purchased about 50 domains over the years and has them all redirecting to their main website.  What could I suggest they do with all of these domain names to increase SEO? Any ideas are greatly appreciated... Thanks!

    SERP Trends | | jboddiford
    1
  • sesertin


    When launching a site to google.com where can you submit it to get a few quick lnks to be enough for indexing and startup? As I saw directory pages are kinda slow you can wait months for your submission. How can you gain quick links? Can you name some sites?

    Link Building | | sesertin
    0
  • AlanMosley


    First I would not recommend doing this to anyone else, but my circumstances were extreme.
    Let me explain to those that did not read previous posts on the subject. I had a domain thatsit.net.au, I had never really promoted it as I used a keyword domain to rank in search engines but kept this domain mainly for email, but having said that it did rank ok considering, it ranked first for my business name at least.
    A few moths back I decided to promote it and check the rankings, I was surprised to see that it ranked last for almost every thing,. Even my business name. Let me impress when I say last I mean in most cases absolute last and if not last very, very close to last.
    I decided to get some links happening to move it of bottom, in my experiences a site that ranks that bad even a few links with show a big jump in rankings, it is easier to get from page 1000 to page 900 than it is to get from page 2 to page 1. The site had about 200 links and I pushed that up to about 1,000 but I was still at the bottom even for long tails searches where I was the only exact match on the internet.
    asking for advice I got responses like you need better links and the such, this did not account for the sudden drop in rankings, as I knew the history I knew that thee was something deeper going on, I asked Google for reconsideration they said there was no manual action taken.
    I should also mention I ranked very well in Bing all this time and still do.
    By now I was getting paranoid that someone was stuffing me up somehow as a last resort I changed the domain name from thatsit.net.au to thatsit.com.au I did this about 10 days ago.
    Today I searched for my company name and I came up #4 not bad from not being in the top 1,000 a few days ago.
    Rankings are not where they used to be but I can handle that, I have 301’ed across all my links and have stated to change over the links I control, but as I still don’t know why the other domain would not move from the bottom as search results I am nervous that I may 301 over the problem.
    I have never really done anything in the way of Black Hat SEO that would get me banned, maybe a bit of light grey over the years but nothing to worry about.
    Anyhow I am non the wiser as to why things happened like they did. But I did want to report back to others that read the posts and thought that maybe I was imaging things.
    I was never really depended on the domain ranking, what really bothers me is not knowing why the .net.au domain fell from rankiings and I still don’t know why.

    Industry News | | AlanMosley
    1
  • MarieHaynes


    I have an idea for a cartoon that, once created, is likely to be shared a lot in my niche.  I'm currently hiring someone to draw the cartoon.  My question, though, is the best way to get SEO benefit out of this. If you had a cartoon that was likely to go viral would you publish it as a blog post on your site?  People tend to like sharing things that are on imgur or flickr, but these won't help my seo.  (Other than perhaps if I end up getting good PR on a flickr image and then link back to my site.) I'm likely going to just publish this as a blog post on my site, but I thought I'd float this out there for other people to give their input. Have you ever used a cartoon or image for linkbait?

    Link Building | | MarieHaynes
    0
  • AlexThomas


    Hi, I'm testing out the SEOmoz API - however I'm stuggling to understand the use of the Cols parameter within the "anchor-text" method. I've looped through increasing numbers of "Cols" for a standard query and there just seems to be no logical pattern.
    ** - Could someone please enlighten me as to how this works?** E.g. of results for query: http://lsapi.seomoz.com/linkscape/anchor-text/www.seomoz.org/?Scope=term_to_page&Sort=domains_linking_page&Cols=1 1Array ( [0] => Array ( [aturid] => 86128451138 ) [1] => Array ( [aturid] => 86128451144 ) [2] => Array ( [aturid] => 86128451131 ) ) 2Array ( [0] => Array ( [atut] => seomoz ) [1] => Array ( [atut] => seomoz.org ) [2] => Array ( [atut] => seo ) ) 3Array ( [0] => Array ( [aturid] => 86128451138 [atut] => seomoz ) [1] => Array ( [aturid] => 86128451144 [atut] => seomoz.org ) [2] => Array ( [aturid] => 86128451131 [atut] => seo ) ) 4Array ( [0] => Array ( [atui] => 38845159274 ) [1] => Array ( [atui] => 38845159274 ) [2] => Array ( [atui] => 38845159274 ) ) 5Array ( [0] => Array ( [atui] => 38845159274 [aturid] => 86128451138 ) [1] => Array ( [atui] => 38845159274 [aturid] => 86128451144 ) [2] => Array ( [atui] => 38845159274 [aturid] => 86128451131 ) ) 6Array ( [0] => Array ( [atui] => 38845159274 [atut] => seomoz ) [1] => Array ( [atui] => 38845159274 [atut] => seomoz.org ) [2] => Array ( [atui] => 38845159274 [atut] => seo ) ) 7Array ( [0] => Array ( [atui] => 38845159274 [aturid] => 86128451138 [atut] => seomoz ) [1] => Array ( [atui] => 38845159274 [aturid] => 86128451144 [atut] => seomoz.org ) [2] => Array ( [atui] => 38845159274 [aturid] => 86128451131 [atut] => seo ) ) 8Array ( [0] => Array ( [atuiu] => 1 ) [1] => Array ( [atuiu] => 1 ) [2] => Array ( [atuiu] => 0 ) ) 9Array ( [0] => Array ( [atuiu] => 1 [aturid] => 86128451138 ) [1] => Array ( [atuiu] => 1 [aturid] => 86128451144 ) [2] => Array ( [atuiu] => 0 [aturid] => 86128451131 ) ) 10Array ( [0] => Array ( [atuiu] => 1 [atut] => seomoz ) [1] => Array ( [atuiu] => 1 [atut] => seomoz.org ) [2] => Array ( [atuiu] => 0 [atut] => seo ) ) Links API: Similar confusion here for:
    "TargetCols"
    "SourceCols"
    "LinkCols" The description here http://apiwiki.seomoz.org/w/page/13991141/Links API - is a bit vague It appears that the links API spits out everything anyway - that one's less of an issue. So... could anyone explain how the Anchor-text API parameter Cols works?? Cheers!

    Moz Pro | | AlexThomas
    0
  • Urbanfox


    Hello, Looking to create an export site for a gobal brand and considering the benefits of distinct domains/TLDs vs. directories by territory. I.e. brand.fr vs. brand.com/fr for our French content
    brand.ca/fr vs brand.com/ca/fr for our French Canadian content Apple segregate their content by directory but we're not quite Apple to be fair... Directory route would be technically cleaner but I don't wish to discount the SEO benefit of unique TLDs. Any thoughts / considerations / similar experiences? Thanks, Jan

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Urbanfox
    0
  • SteveOllington


    There is more covered (in terms of checking on-page factors) when using the external report tool than when using the actual campaign one... will the external features be added into the campaign one?

    Moz Pro | | SteveOllington
    0
  • softclick


    Is there a funktion / tool, that displays domain data like: Domain Authority
    Domain MozRank
    Domain MozTrust
    No. of Links
    No. of linking Domains historical?

    Moz Pro | | softclick
    1
  • TheEspresseo


    Anybody know of one?

    Moz Pro | | TheEspresseo
    0
  • MarkWill


    I have had my site registered for a long time (since January 1995) and in that time we have built a good number of incoming links. We have a vendor database that we expose as a service to our visitors, which numbers around 5,500. These sites vary dramatically from low-end, Mom-and-Pop type web sites (some ugly in the extreme :)) to nationwide, established vendors. Back in the day, we had the basic tactic to request a link to our site if the vendor wanted to be listed in our vendor database. We stopped that practice years ago but still have many sites linking to us. The quality of some of these sites is very poor. I want to come up with a strategy for dealing with these. To that end, some questions: How "costly", from an SEO perspective, is a poor quality site that links to our site? What metric(s) should be used to assess the quality of sites linking to us? If possible, for the aforementioned metric is there a "bar" we might try to hit? For example, would it be useful to request removal of links where <metric>is less than x? What is x?</metric> Given that we have thousands to assess, is there any report I can create to identify these sites? Is it generally preferred to have vendors link simply to our home page or is it more effectice to have them link to particular pages on our site (each vendor can generally be associated with a "topic" on our site). In short, I am willing to go through this process if there is real value in it. Thanks. Mark

    Link Building | | MarkWill
    0
  • MarkWill


    Once again the weekly crawl on my site is very slow. I have around 441 pages in the crawl and this has been running for over 12 hours. This last happened two weeks ago (ran for over 48 hours). Last week's crawl was much quicker (not sure exactly how long but guessing an hour or so). Is this a known issue and is there anything that can be done to unblock it? Weekends are the best time for me to assess and respond to changes I have made to my site so having this (small) crawl take most of the weekend is really quite problematic. Thanks. Mark

    Moz Pro | | MarkWill
    0
  • sesertin


    I put up my last site on the web since a month. So far I have been optimizing mainly to Hungary and I got used to that my content was indexed in a day and if content was good it sometimes appeared in the first two pages in a couple of days. Now with my new site I am targeting google.com. I put it up since a week, sent the sitemap to google, it was intresting for mee te see that even the pages to get into the web index needed two days. Seomoz says my site is all right besides some duplicate content issue i will solve soon. So it is past a week and even if I copy a complete sentence from the beginning of my home page and paste it into google my site does not appear. I also purchased couple of backlins but they have not appeared so far as well. Is that really this slow? Am I to impatient? Or should there be something else problem I should be looking for? Thanks for any feedback

    Reporting & Analytics | | sesertin
    0
  • usaccess608


    i am needing help deciding a domain name for a yelp like review site. the domains are listed below: mouthism.com guidies.com yellerz.com yellables.com yellism.com rateism.com yellers.net cryable.com talkbuds.com eritics.com (like epinions.com) gocraze.com iyeller.com venuers.com yeller.com.au (i wanted to start in australia first but find out yeller.com belongs to someone else so what can i do? If i start with yeller.com.au it will be hard to expand to worldwide as need to change the name to iyeller.com or yellerz.com instead of yeller.com.) thanks ray

    Keyword Research | | usaccess608
    0
  • ShoutOut


    I am starting website focused on consumer complaints/reviews with purely User Generated content. Is there really "keyword strategy" for such sites? I can only think of analyzing competition's keywords and understanding long tail http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-big-is-your-long-tail-whiteboard-friday. Any experiences? Or ideas?

    Keyword Research | | ShoutOut
    0
  • sesertin


    Hello I am new to wordpress I just have started using it. Can anyone suggest me some useful tools / plugins / setting for SEO? I am further intrested in sepeeding up Wp. Any good advive on wp an seo would be appriciated.

    Technical SEO | | sesertin
    0
  • shebinhassan


    I use the ranking tools to check each page of our site. I use the keyword flora grand and exact url http://www.florahospitality.com/dubai-flora-grand-hotel.aspx . It return page rank 1 in US, UAE, and UK region but when I try to search it in google it doesn't appear.

    Moz Pro | | shebinhassan
    0
  • shebinhassan


    Hi, IWe have this mobile page that keeps on appearing in the google search. I even try to put it in the robots.txt to disallow the crawler but still it keeps on popping on the search results. How can I prevent it from displaying?

    Technical SEO | | shebinhassan
    0
  • TheEspresseo


    ...besides the MS AdLab tool (which seems to always be down)?

    Competitive Research | | TheEspresseo
    0
  • holdtheonion


    Hi All: Over the past couple of months, I have heard a few people mention Spring Metrics as something I might want to try to help with conversions. Sure, SEO can lead a horse to water, but getting the horse to drink the water is a whole different issue. Do any of you have experience with Spring Metrics, and is it something that you would recommend to help with conversions? Has it actually made a difference for anyone that would make it worth the time and money investment?

    Conversion Rate Optimization | | holdtheonion
    0
  • sesertin


    Hello There, There is a section about Mozpoints I can not understand. It says if you get 500+ points: Free members who reach +500 mozPoints are eligible for access to the PRO Q&A section where you can respond to and view questions immediately after being posted. I can now access to this section with my 30 or so points. I am surely getting something wrong. What is the actual benefit?

    Moz Pro | | sesertin
    0
  • joeprice


    Hi I run a website which has 2 domains running from it. One domain has a .co.uk extension and shows products aimed at the UK market.  The other domain is a .com which shows products aimed at the US market. As both domains run from the same website, the content is mostly identical APART from the product listings as they change depending upon whether you're in the UK or US. My reason for doing is this mainly for paid search purposes as I can have a more accurate domain depending upon which country I target. Both sites are set to encourage the bots to index it, and in google WMT each domain is targeted to its specific country. So, my questions are, Is this set-up possibly damaging my SEO efforts for either or both websites? If so, would setting one domain to no-index, improve SEO efforts for the other? Thanks in advance for any replies! Cheers Joe

    Technical SEO | | joeprice
    0
  • imusmanbutt


    I want to know iwll SEOmoz improve my google ranking. will they improve my keywords.

    Moz Pro | | imusmanbutt
    0
  • tom14cat14


    Last night my keywords were crawled and it shows me that a key word is ranked 14. For 3 days now it has been rank 4 or 5. Is there a reason this is not accurate? I have not checked the rest of my keywords so i am not sure about those. Thanks

    Moz Pro | | tom14cat14
    0
  • waynekolenchuk


    I thought I saw a post at some point about how to improve Wordpress search results, but I can't seem to locate it. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

    SERP Trends | | waynekolenchuk
    0
  • wparlaman


    Hello Everyone, I'm stumped. My primary website has a horrendous bounce rate of around 75% My domain is www.radicalmarketingsolutions.com My home page has a bounce rate of around 68%. The funny thing is, I have a page on Google Analytics basics for small business owners that is my 3rd top page for content, I have an average time on page of over 3 minutes yet my bounce rate is 90%. I have another page on how to depersonalize your google searches in Chrome and Firefox that is a top page with a time on page over 5 minutes and this page has a bounce rate of 96%! I felt that my old design was really hurting me so I changed the design in the beginning of this month and it does not look like it's helped much. I really simplified the site, created a lot more white space and added some links to my other important pages in hopes to get more click throughs. I would really love some honest "constructive" feed back on my site as to why the bounce rate could be so high. I have a ton of content on my blog and I get a lot of positive feedback. One thing I did not do was exclude my IP from Analytics so I could be influencing the numbers. I've added this filter and hoping this will help. Another issue is I do email my list with each new blog post. This could mean those folks visit the post and then leave without reading anything else on my blog. So this could be hurting me as well. Would love your suggestions. Thanks, Bill Parlaman

    Conversion Rate Optimization | | wparlaman
    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.