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!

  • Paul78


    I had just made a 301 re-direct on one of our product pages which had a PR of 4, now that Google has indexed the new page, it's now got a PR of 0, i'm struggling to understand why this could be, i know that you may see a drop of 1, which has happened in the past, but this drop just does not make sense. Any ideas of why this could be? Kind Regards

    On-Page Optimization | | Paul78
    0
  • MyNet


    I need to redirect a page/URL that is purely .html to a new location.  I don't know how to do this.  All the redirects I can find are for server side code pages .php/.aspx etc.  From my understanding I can't put a server side redirect in a .html file.  I am hosting on a microsoft server, however the new page I am redirecting to is .php.  I am running some WordPress (.php) files on the server.  I need to make it redirect before the old page loads so visitors don't start reading something that is about to get redirected Can someone please help me?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MyNet
    0
  • HCGDiet


    I know that making a user register will drop the the conversion rate. However, there are a lot of sites that still stand by making users register before you can purchase. I was wondering if they know something that I don't that would outweigh the loss of those conversions. What exactly are the Pro's & Con's of making your customers register before being able to purchase an item?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HCGDiet
    0
  • jim_shook


    Any recommendations would be very welcome. Thanks!

    Conversion Rate Optimization | | jim_shook
    0
  • prima-253509


    Hey everyone, I have a fairly specific question on cloaking and whether our integration with disqus might be viewed as cloaking. Here is the setup. We have a site that runs off of drupal and would like to convert the comment handling to disqus for ease of our users. However, when javasrcript is disabled the nice comment system and all of the comments from disqus disappear. This obviously isn't good for SEO, however the user experience using disqus is way better than the native comment system. So here is how we are addressing the problem. With drupal we can sync comments between the native comment system and disqus. When a user has javascript enabled the containing div for the native comment system is set to display:none. hiding the submission form and all of the content and instead displaying it through the disqus interface. However when javascrip is not enabled the native comment form and the comments will be available to the user. Could this be considered cloaking by google? I know they do not like hidden div's, but it should be almost exactly the same content being displayed to the user (depending on when the last sync was run). Thanks for your thoughts, and if anyone has familiarity with a better way to integrate drupal and disqus I am all ears. Josh

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | prima-253509
    0
  • processia


    Hi, I finally got a better result on my ranking on specific keyword. Now, here is what I need to do. Just to place you in context, we have acquired 2 companies in Europe since last year ( One in the UK and one in France ) and our head office is in North America. Since our servers are located in NA, I realize the ranking will be better here on specific keywords than it is in the UK and France.  I actually managed to get on the first page on google North America, but I am till very var in ranking in France and the UK. Where should I start to get a worldwide ranking ? I could start on the 2 geography mentionned but is there a strategy to get ranked worldwide ? Any help would be appreciated. Best regards,

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | processia
    0
  • kchandler


    Hey Mozzers - i was hoping to have a discussion with you guys on conversion rates and would love any feedback on comparative metrics. I plan on keeping my client anonymous and feel free to do the same if you would like. Lets start with some background. This client is an online retailer selling golf training ads, the products range from $20-40, he is based out of the US and this site is targeting consumers (B2C). So far i have assisted him with some site analysis and setting up some pay-per-click campaigns. I feel like his site is doing pretty well conversion-wise but i have little experience with conversion metrics with ecommerce (mostly just lead generation, etc). Here is a quick break down on channel conversion rates: PPC: 0.8% - 1.7%
    Organic: 6.8% - 15% 
    Direct: 6.2% - 13% His overall site conversion rate is between 2-3% So my question is to you guys. Is this average, above, or below in your past experiences? Based on my research a site conversion rate of 2-3 is pretty good for ecommerce, however i felt like my PPC conversion rate is kind of low. Thanks for the insight - Kyle

    Paid Search Marketing | | kchandler
    1
  • Socialdude


    Hi Guys, I'm looking to for a good press room that would suits this website http://www.eap-csf.eu the information provided in the press releases will be mainly associated with Eastern Europe and getting important democratic information about civil society topics in the EU and it's member stats. I am thinking of using http://www.prlog.org/ does anyone have any other suggestions that may suit? Thanks in advance.

    Branding | | Socialdude
    0
  • AmericanOutlets


    I'm getting a ton of duplicate content errors because almost all of my pages feature a "print this page" link that adds the parameter "printable=Y" to the URL and displays a plain text version of the same page. Is there any way to exclude these pages from the crawl results?

    Moz Pro | | AmericanOutlets
    0
  • idv


    Hi I have followed the examples set by David Mihm and fully completed a Google Places listing - with the geographical area covering the area that it serves along with lots of local citations but when searching on google for 'accountants swansea' it is way down on page 4 of the places results. Does it take time for Google to recognise these changes to Places listings or is my listing incorrect to attract a high listing for the search phrase.  Looking at the competition many of them have not optimised or done anything with their listings pages so I am at a loss to explain why the listing is doing so badly. The places listing is at http://maps.google.co.uk/maps/place?hl=en&prmd=imvns&biw=1280&bih=829&um=1&ie=UTF-8&q=accountants+swansea&fb=1&gl=uk&hq=accountants&hnear=0x486e45555a4e97b1:0x3d77128e2fe7cb74,Swansea,+Neath+Port+Talbot&cid=9815784575213492240&ei=UN6WTt7UJ8rasga-ocTrAw&sa=X&oi=local_result&ct=placepage-link&resnum=7&ved=0CFcQ4gkwBjge

    Image & Video Optimization | | idv
    0
  • CommercePundit


    I have uploaded 6718 products to The Find merchant center. There is no error in data feed as per dashboard. I got only 13 visits from The Find in October 2011. [1st October to 13th October] Is there any specific method to improve performance over The Find Merchant Center? OR any success story or experiment which help me more to understand about this issue.

    Image & Video Optimization | | CommercePundit
    0
  • Braumueller


    Hi, i am asking me since a while, if the relation of the amount of  frontpage backlinks divided through the amount of deeplinks pointing to a domain is an important ranking factor? In this area, i am not so much looking in the total numbers of backlinks, but more at the number of  linking root domains. Do you have explore the ratio of frontpage/deeplinking as ranking factor reqarding the 100% of external backlinks? So for example, what do you consider better, asuming all root linking domains in theory are equal, for the SERP of the main keyword for which the frontpage is running on Google. Case A Frontpage = 80 Linking Domains
    Subpages = 20 Linking Domains 80 / 20 = 4 / 1 (4 times more frontpage linking domains than deep linking domains to subpages) Case B Frontpage = 90 Linking Domains
    Subpages = 10 Linking Domains 90 / 10 =  9 / 1 (9 times more frontpage linking domains than deep linking domains to subpages) Case C Frontpage = 95 Linking Domains
    Subpages = 5 Linking Domains 95 / 5 = 19 / 1 (19 times more frontpage linking domains than deep linking domains to subpages) Greetings from Hamburg,
    http://www.suchmaschinen-experte.de

    Link Building | | Braumueller
    0
  • seoug_2005


    Does the first anchor text link rule ( the first link is given weight ) applies to links in the body of the content only. If there are links in the drop down menu, and in the body of the content, does the above rule applies to links in the drop down menu.

    Technical SEO | | seoug_2005
    0
  • VipinLouka78


    I have multiple websites with same content such as http://www.example.com http://www.example.org and so on.  My primary url is http://www.infoniagara.com and I also placed a 301 on .org. Is that enough to keep away my exampl.org site from indexing on google and other search engines? the eaxmple.org also has lots of link to my old html pages (now removed). Should i change that links too? or will 301 redirection solve all such issues (page not found/crawl error) of my old webpages? i would welcome good seo practices regarding maintaining multiple domains thanks and regards

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | VipinLouka78
    0
  • 1prashakth


    Please provide me with the complete details of How to use Blogscape for Social Media Monitoring?Can you also provide the Video Tutorial if any for the same? Awaiting your Reply at the earliest. Regards, Prashakth Kamath

    Moz Pro | | 1prashakth
    0
  • qubesys


    Hi.. All of our targeted pages have gone through serious Blog Posting and Social Bookmarking. All the sites were more than PR1 or 2 and all of them had a dofollow link with the perfect anchor texts. But when I trying to check our pages on OSE, it doesnt any of them. Why is that ? Im getting worried now. We have spent our last 7 months on this .

    Reporting & Analytics | | qubesys
    0
  • Vetshopgroup


    A rather simple question, If i have a  paragraph and have the words cat, dog and bird would it be a good idea to have them all linking to the same url? or is better to have them all going to different urls?

    Link Building | | Vetshopgroup
    0
  • ikomorin


    Our e-commerce site is running on the Magento platform while the blog for the site is integrated and is on the Wordpress platform. The blog is not on a separate subdomain, so it is on www.website.con/blog. What I wonder is how Google treats information on a Wordpress blog compared to pages created in the Magento CMS pages. Would a high quality content article posted as a blog post on the Wordpress have a lower SEO value than a page on the Magento? Thanks.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ikomorin
    0
  • csmithal


    The Good: We redesigned our nature travel website (www.ietravel.com) in Drupal. Overall, it's a great improvement in look and usability. Also, we are ranking for more relevant search terms (the SEO was managed by an agency before, and there were a lot of junk terms in their campaigns that weren't converting). The Bad: Organic search referrals have consistently been down 10-20% year-over-year each and every month. The Ugly: I am trying to dig in and figure out why this is happening, and I'm at a loss. We are aggressively publishing to our blog 5 days a week, and I've built many keyword-focused landing pages. Here's what I do know in terms of things that could be problems which I've seen in Webmaster Tools and SEOmoz tools. I have a lot of files restricted by robots.txt - 1,337 of them. Many have to be that way by design because they are nodes generated by web forms (w/ private user data). The rest are "Dates & Rates" pages - I restricted them because for each destination they are very similar in content. Wondering now if that was a mistake. For example, http://www.ietravel.com/central-south-america/galapagos-islands/dates-rates We have duplicate title tags on 462 pages. The Lightbox Module that was installed for our photo galleries was a disaster. I am researching a more SEO-friendly solution, but that solution is a month or more away. We have 31 duplicate meta descriptions. My question is, could these errors be THAT significantly impacting our rankings? I should note that according to Google Analytics, Referral traffic & Direct traffic is also year-over-year every month since the redesign. I don't understand the Referral part especially, since we took great pains to put in many 301 redirects. There are no 404s or non-indexable pages showing up in Webmaster Tools either. If anyone has any suggestions for problem areas or red flags I should investigate, please let me know. Really, any thoughts are appreciated. Best, Carlton

    Technical SEO | | csmithal
    1
  • mynewco


    Hi, We've done mod-rewrite to our .php files to show .htm files several years ago for SEO purposes. My question is, doing this has become a hassle for adding new pages, etc. and I'd like to make a clean break with the .htm and move to their real file names and or directories (e.g. company.htm --> /company/ ). What kind of ranking penalty am I looking at if we switch? We're a small company with billion dollar competitors so a rank loss would be fairly devastating. I assume I'd need to do 301 redirects for all of the old file names (obviously yes for the change from page to directories) but for each individual page? Thanks, Matt

    Technical SEO | | mynewco
    0
  • sftravel


    For the SEOMoz campaign tool, how do you manage / delete / export keywords in bulk?  We have several hundred keywords and need to delete some efficiently from a campaign. I see how you can delete words from one page of the list, but is there a way to combine the keywords with ranking or traffic data to stack-rank, and than delete the "least valuable"?  Tough to manage in bulk

    Moz Pro | | sftravel
    0
  • MackenzieFogelson


    Frequently we get red-flagged for duplicate content in the MozPro Crawl Diagnostics for URLs with and without a backslash at the end. For example: www.example.com/ gets flagged as being a duplicate of www.example.com I assume that we could rel=canonical this, if needed, but our assumption has been that Google is clever enough to discount this as a genuine crawl error. Can anyone confirm or deny that? Thanks.

    Moz Pro | | MackenzieFogelson
    0
  • nicole.healthline


    We have multiple freelance writers that work for us. Should we require all of them to create a google + profile with authorship?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline
    0
  • Istoresinc


    paintball-online.com This is consistent on every page, despite these pages having text. I assume the SEOMoz tool is working just fine and we have a coding issue that may be hindering our SEO efforts. Any ideas/suggestions? Thanks

    On-Page Optimization | | Istoresinc
    0
  • impressem


    Seomoz says NOT to use your anchor terms on other external pages as you will cannabilize your main page - this is news to me. Appreciate any input on this.

    Link Building | | impressem
    0
  • nicole.healthline


    What is the best site / tool to use to view referral traffic on a third party site?

    Competitive Research | | nicole.healthline
    0
  • EugeneF


    I thought that the important factor in the value of a link was how many outing links a page has total.  Some tools seems to tell me that the important data point is how many EXTERNAL links a page has.   Which number should I be paying attention to when looking at pages I want to get linked from? (Yes, I know there are many other factors that are important)

    Link Building | | EugeneF
    0
  • gritacco


    I'm thinking of creating a new url off an existing url and was wondering if there would be any impact.  For example I have the URL www.baseball.com and rather than secure a new url for a new product launch such as www.newbaseballproduct.com I want to do newproduct.baseball.com  Will this hurt my SEO rankings for this new site?  Basically wanting to figure out if this will hurt me or not?  Should I get a new url or re-utilize an existing URL... really for a landing page/micro site, etc.,

    Web Design | | gritacco
    0
  • dirigodev


    Hi Everyone, I have a question of how the on-page links are being counted. Say you have a page with a warning of having too many on page links (100+). How are all of these links counted? Let's say there are only 5 links on that page. Do the links on each of those pages count too and so on and so forth? I just want to make sure I have wrapped my head around this correctly. Thanks!

    Link Building | | dirigodev
    0
  • MarkWill


    Really quite disappointed with the response to this thread: http://www.seomoz.org/q/possible-to-force-the-seomoz-ranking-report-to-update Three of us expressed an interest in this but the response was for (only) the original poster to create a ticket and the question was closed to any further discussion. Might I request that SEOMoz folks read the thread? There is a general question and three of us have requested some feedback. It is very clear that more than one person is interested in the answer Just asking one of those individuals to open a ticket and get a response for himself doesn't seem very customer-centric (well, beyond that first customer). I'd really appreciate an open and public discussion as to whether SEOMoz can support updates more than once a week and, if not now, whether it intends to in the future. Thanks. Mark

    Moz Pro | | MarkWill
    0
  • EdwardUpton61


    Just a quick question - I am tracking the keyword 'chemistry teaching resources' as part of a campaign and our site comes up at number 4 on a google.co.uk search for this however in the rankings report section of our account, we are ranked at number 50 for this keyword in the 'google UK' column. Does anybody know why this would be different? It is also different for a number of other keywords in the campaign. Any help you could give would be much appreciated. Thanks

    Moz Pro | | EdwardUpton61
    0
  • idv


    Hi I have just created a new campaign and it states that I have duplicate page content which would affect search rankings. Basically it is counting my site www.mydomain.com and www.mydomain.com/index.php as two seperate pages. How can I make it so that only www.mydomain.com is visible reducing the duplicate content issue? Many Thanks

    On-Page Optimization | | idv
    0
  • MichaelWeisbaum


    Do these typically have a negative impact on SEO?  I know this is kind of a vague question, does it make it harder to spider?  Are there SEO friendly ways of coding these?  There are so many sites out there that have these, so I've got to assume it's different on a case by case basis.

    Web Design | | MichaelWeisbaum
    0
  • watkinsheating


    Rand was talking about the importance of address format being exactly the same across all citations in last week's WBF http://www.seomoz.org/blog/local-seo-checklist-for-new-sites-whiteboard-friday. But what about business name? I have two unrelated businesses at the same address and am in the process of updating/adding citations for each. Will duplicate citations (identical addy, different business name) harm my Places ranking? Any suggestions? David

    Whiteboard Friday | | watkinsheating
    0
  • bbelgard


    I know Google Insights gives this data, but the fact that it's relative to overall search requests make it very difficult to see anything other then obvious trends (Toys sell better in November, go figure?). Each query I've looked up[ is showing degradation over time, but I'm postulating that this has more to do with search volume increasing then with the volume of my queries decreasing.

    Keyword Research | | bbelgard
    0
  • ChristopherGlaeser


    We have created a website to distribute a niche product.  About a year ago, another vendor decided to drop the product and did not renew their domain name.  We tried to acquire the domain name, but a cyber squatter picked it up. The old domain name had a few decent back links, and there was probably some value to us with a 301, but the cyber squatter was asking $8,000 and we didn't even bother countering such an absurd figure. The old domain continued to rank reasonably well for one or our search terms, even though it was just one page of spammy links.  Well, this week it appears that Google Panda may have finally killed it off.  Which brings me to a couple of questions. 1. In addition to a simple Google search, is there a way to determine if Google has killed a domain? 2. Assuming that Google has indeed killed the domain, is there any value in trying to 301 the domain should it ever be released? Best,
    Christopher

    Link Building | | ChristopherGlaeser
    0
  • SBRMarketing


    Hi, we have recently been working on our site's keywords and we have seen an increase in traffic. As I monitor my keywords, I see that the Not Set keyword has increased a great deal and now become my top keyword. I researched some but all I got is that users are bookmarking my page or using other avenues to reach my website. Can anyone give me a more concrete answer? Is this bad? Or is this a direct result of an increase in traffic. Any words of wisdom will be much appreciated, As you were...

    Keyword Research | | SBRMarketing
    0
  • fleetway


    I just read http://www.thoughtmechanics.com/does-nofollow-attribute-work-google-says-yes-studies-say-otherwise/ . Is it really better to avoid using nofollow for local links (from one site to itself)?

    On-Page Optimization | | fleetway
    0
  • PhilH


    Hi, Sorry if this question appears a bit confused, but here goes ... My understanding is that the Google ranking algolrithm has three aspects: Content Links Social Activity (Tweets, FB shares etc) I recognise that I can increase my PR by posting comments on highly ranked pages that allow 'follow' links. I get that! After investigating Google+ I see I can tie together: The content I contribute to (e.g. my website, my blog) My social networking activity (My Twitter activity, my FB fanpage, Google+ activity) Suddenly Google has a view not just of my content, but also my social influence, almost like a Klout score. It also means they have the potential to build a matrix of other content producers & social media commentators. Therefore, can I gain what I'm calling 'Social Juice' (which would influence the ranking of my content) by: Getting highly ranked social media commenters to interact/comment on any of my content/social engagement By commenting on highly ranked content producers regardless of whether that comment contains a link back to my content. So for point 2, perhaps a prominent expert in my field has a blog that allows me to leave a comment via a Twitter login, but I can't leave a link back to my website (no link juice), however because Google+ knows the comment is attributed to me (as my accounts are linked in Google+) I get 'social juice'. The idea being if I'm permitted to interact with an expert in my field, then I too must have some credibility. (Perhaps that not quite accurate, because I could engaged in an argument with said expert, so perhaps it is more like Klout's idea of influencing people) If there is logic in point 2, then what might be the best way to 'login' to leave comments on something like a Disqus comment based system so that Google might gain access to this 'social jiuce'. I guess the best way would be to leave a comment via a Google+ account, but that doesn't seem to be option in lot of cases. Big post, I hope its relevant and makes sense.

    Social Media | | PhilH
    0
  • emilyburns


    We are having some difficulty generating a sitemap that includes our SEO-friendly URLs (the ones we want to set as canonical), and I was wondering if we might be able to simply use the non-SEO-friendly, non-canonical URLs that the sitemap generator has been producing and then use 301 redirects to send them to the canonical. Is there a reason why we should not be doing this? We don't want search engines to think that the sitemap URLs are more important than the pages to which they redirect. How important is it that the sitemap URLs match the canonical URLs? We would like to find a solution outside of the generation of the sitemap itself as we are locked into using a vendor’s product in order to generate the sitemap. Thanks!

    Technical SEO | | emilyburns
    0
  • kevinmorley


    How many emails do you send in the average outreach campaign? How many links would you expect from that? Also - when doing email blogger outreach do you need to offer the blogger something other than (great) content, in order to get a link? (maybe cash, or a link back?) I'm doing email blogger outreach for a number of clients and types of content, but am finding it hard to get links from bloggers. Any help is appreaciated! Thanks

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kevinmorley
    0
  • MichaelWeisbaum


    What are the best ways to help influence your products rankings in Google Shopping SERPS?  Aside from the obvious factors (ie Product Title, Description, brand, etc), what are the key factors in optimizing your products?

    Image & Video Optimization | | MichaelWeisbaum
    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.