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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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  • quiltedkoala


    I'm working with a new client with a site built on Shopify. Most of their products appear in four collections. This is creating a duplicate content challenge for us. Can anyone suggest specific code to add to resolve this problem. I'm also interested in other ideas solutions, such as "don't use collections" if that's the best approach. I appreciate your insights. Thank you!

    On-Page Optimization | | quiltedkoala
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  • bondhoward


    When I google site:www.ayurjeewan.com, after 8 pages, google shows Slider and shop pages. Which I don't want to be indexed. How can I get rid of these pages?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bondhoward
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  • Digital-DMG


    Hi, I have a webshop with products with different sizes and colours. For each item I have a different URL, with almost the same content (title tag, product descriptions, etc). In order to prevent duplicated content I'am wondering what is the best way to solve this problem, keeping in mind: -Impossible to create one page/URL for each product with filters on colour and size -Impossible to rewrite the product descriptions in order to be unique I'm considering the option to canonicolize the rest of de colours/size variations, but the disadvantage is that in case the product is not in stock it disappears from the website. Looking forward to your opinions and solutions. Jeroen

    Technical SEO | | Digital-DMG
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  • Emory_Peterson


    Lets say you've got a website and it had quite a few pages that for lack of a better term were like an infomercial, 6-8 pages of slightly different topics all essentially saying the same thing.  You could all but call it spam. www.site.com/page-1 www.site.com/page-2 www.site.com/page-3 www.site.com/page-4 www.site.com/page-5 www.site.com/page-6 Now you decided to consolidate all of that information into one well written page, and while the previous pages may have been a bit spammy they did indeed have SOME juice to pass through. Your new page is: www.site.com/not-spammy-page You then 301 redirect the previous 'spammy' pages to the new page.  Now the question, do I immediately re-submit an updated xml sitemap to Google, which would NOT contain all of the old URL's, thus making me assume Google would miss the 301 redirect/seo juice.  Or do I wait a week or two, allow Google to re-crawl the site and see the existing 301's and once they've taken notice of the changes submit an updated sitemap? Probably a stupid question I understand, but I want to ensure I'm following the best practices given the situation, thanks guys and girls!

    Technical SEO | | Emory_Peterson
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  • Angelos_Savvaidis


    Hey there, I have a site with many languages. So here are my questions concerning the sitemaps. The correct way of creating a sitemap for a multilingual site is as followed ( by the official blog of Google ) <urlset xmlns="</span>http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> http://www.example.com/loc> <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="</span>http://www.example.com/"/> <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="</span>http://www.example.com/de"/> <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="</span>http://www.example.com/fr"/><a href=" http:="" www.example.com="" fr"="" target="_blank"></xhtml:link><a href=" http:="" www.example.com="" de"="" target="_blank"></xhtml:link><a href=" http:="" www.example.com="" "="" target="_blank"></xhtml:link><a href=" http:="" www.sitemaps.org="" schemas="" sitemap="" 0.9"="" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></urlset> **So here is my first question. My site has over 200.000 pages that all of them support around 5-6 languages. Am I suppose to do this example 200.000 times?****My second question is. My root domain is www.example.com but this one redirects with 301 to www.example.com/en should the sitemap be at ****www.example.com/sitemap.xmlorwww.example.com/en/sitemap.xml ???****My third question is as followed. On WMT do I submit my sitemap in all versions of my site? I have all my languages there.**Thanks in advance for taking the time to respond to this thread and by creating it I hope many people will solve their own questions.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Angelos_Savvaidis
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  • ColeLusby


    Hi Mozzers, I have a new client who has some bad links in their profile that are spammy and should be disavowed. They rank on the first page for some longer tail keywords. However, we're aiming at shorter, well-known keywords where they aren't ranking. Will the disavow tool, alone, have the ability to increase rankings (assuming on-site / off-site signals are better than competition)? Thanks, Cole

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ColeLusby
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  • eyeflow


    Google has this page on location pages. It's very useful but it doesn't say anything about handling the duplicate content a location page might have. Seeing as the loctions may have very similar services. Lets say they have example.com/location/boston, example.com/location/chicago, or maybe boston.example.com or chicago.example.com etc. They are landing pages for each location, housing that locations contact information as well as serving as a landing page for that location. Showing the same services/products as every other location. This information may also live on the main domains homepage or services page as well. My initial reaction agrees with this article: http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide - but I'm really asking what does Google expect? Does this location pages guide from Google tell us we don't really have to make sure each of those location pages are unique? Sometimes creating "unique" location pages feels like you're creating **doorway pages - **"Multiple pages on your site with similar content designed to rank for specific queries like city or state names". In a nutshell, Google's Guidelines seem to have a conflict on this topic: Location Pages: "Have each location's or branch's information accessible on separate webpages"
    Doorway Pages: "Multiple pages on your site with similar content designed to rank for specific queries like city or state names"
    Duplicate Content: "If you have many pages that are similar, consider expanding each page or consolidating the pages into one." Now you could avoid making it a doorway page or a duplicate content page if you just put the location information on a page. Each page would then have a unique address, phone number, email, contact name, etc. But then the page would technically be in violation of this page: Thin Pages: "One of the most important steps in improving your site's ranking in Google search results is to ensure that it contains plenty of rich information that includes relevant keywords, used appropriately, that indicate the subject matter of your content." ...starting to feel like I'm in a Google Guidelines Paradox! Do you think this guide from Google means that duplicate content on these pages is acceptable as long as you use that markup? Or do you have another opinion?

    Local Website Optimization | | eyeflow
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  • richdan


    If you do a search for my name on Google, the first result is the author archive page of my Wordpress blog. I would like to redirect the author page to my  "about me" page but cannot add a 301 as the author page is created dynamically in Wordpress. Anyone know how I can do this?

    Technical SEO | | richdan
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  • PeaSoupDigital


    Hola, So today we added 3 or 4 admins to our company FB page. Our company FB consists of a 'profile' and that 'profile' has create a FB 'page' for the business. All of a sudden, the profile (not the company 'page') started to get a new friends. We thought this was weird as we weren't using this for promotion, we were using the company FB page. Anyway, when we dug a little deeper, we found the profile had automatically sent friend requests to all of the admins' contacts (around 2,000 people!). When we checked the friend request page, we realised we can't cancel all the requests, they have to be done individually! Why would FB do this? It might not be so bad if it was actually inviting the admins' contacts to 'like' the business page, but it's just adding them to the main profile's friend list. The only solution we can find is to deactivate/delete the profile and keep the company page with all the admin attached. Any ideas on this one? It's very weird and now it just looks like our fleldgling business is spamming people! Cheers, Lewis

    Social Media | | PeaSoupDigital
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  • measurableROI


    Hey, all!  I have a client who needs for people to see her website before they call her, or else she spends 15 min explaining what's already on the site.  Her Google My Business rankings are excellent for a lot of keywords (yay!), so people are seeing the number big and bold and just picking up the phone.  I called GMB support to ask if removing the phone number would affect rankings, and they said "I don't think so".  If this weren't a HUGE deal to the client, I wouldn't take the chance, but she feels that she's losing business by being on these calls when legitimate prospects try to call and get voice mail.  So...  any experience with removing phone numbers from GMB, or any other creative solutions to the quandary?  Thanks so much for reading!  ~ Scott UPDATE: Well, we went ahead and tried it anyway, and our GMB listins on the 7-pack nosedived!  STRONGLY recommend against this, at least with the current algorithm!!  The phone number is back now.  🙂

    Local Listings | | measurableROI
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  • Ted_Cullen


    We are an ecommerce site... In days gone by, having a bunch of footer links with your top products / categories was a good idea - as it created a ton of internal links to these products. Now, I am hearing that those links "dilute" the value of our other links on a page - and essentially, there is more harm than good from these. Does anyone know what I am talking about (the olds days) and should we still be doing this? Thanks

    On-Page Optimization | | Ted_Cullen
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  • Editor-FabiusMaximus_Website


    This has stumped the Wordpress staff and people in the Google Webmasters forum. We are in Google News (have been for years), and so new posts are crawled immediately. On Feb 17-18 Crawl Stats dropped 85%, and new posts were no longer indexed (not appearing on News or search). Data highlighter attempts return "This URL could not be found in Google's index." No manual actions by Google. No changes to the website; no custom CSS. No Site Errors or new URL errors. No sitemap problems (resubmitting didn't help). We're on wordpress.com, so no odd code. We can see the robot.txt file. Other search engines can see us, as can social media websites. Older posts still index, but loss of News is a big hit. Also, I think overall Google referrals are dropping. We can Fetch the URL for a new post, and many hours later it appears on Google and News, and we can then use Data Highlighter. It's now 6 days and no recovery. Everybody is stumped. Any ideas? I just joined, so this might be the wrong venue. If so, apologies.

    Technical SEO | | Editor-FabiusMaximus_Website
    0
  • ScorePromotions


    Hi MOZers, We are looking for some advice on whether to have a single TLD(.com) or 2 separate domains (.ca) & (.com) Our website will have different products & pricing for each of US users(.com) and Canada users(.ca). Since, we are targeting different countries & user groups with each domain - we are not concerned about "duplicate content". So, does it make more sense to have a single domain for compounding our content marketing efforts? Or, Will it be more beneficial to have seperate domains for the geo-targeting benefits on Google.CA & Google.COM? Looking forward to some great suggestions.

    Local Website Optimization | | ScorePromotions
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  • IsaCleanse


    Hi there I know ideally i need a .my or .sg domain, however i dont have time to do this in the interim so what would be the best way to host Malaysian content on a www.domainname.com.au website? www.domainname.com.au/en-MY
    www.domainname.com.au/MY
    domainname.com.au/malaysia
    malaysia.domainname.com.au
    my.domainname.com.au Im assuming this cant make the .com.au site look spammy but thought I'd ask just to be safe? Thanks in advance! 🙂

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | IsaCleanse
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  • zant


    Are "Redirect 303 & Iframe" types of backlinks? google count them?

    Link Building | | zant
    0
  • bondhoward


    I can use addmfast.com to increase fb likes, shares, google +, twitter etc.

    Social Media | | bondhoward
    0
  • Angelos_Savvaidis


    Hey there Mozzers, I am a question about internal links. If I am writing a article about something and want to link to another one of my articles inside my blog, do i have to make that link nofollow or dofollow? If possible tell me why also. Thanks in advance

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Angelos_Savvaidis
    0
  • Blink-SEO


    Hi everybody! Here's my question. After a site migration, a client has seen a big drop in rankings. We're trying to narrow down the issue. It seems that they have lost around 15,000 links following the switch, but these came from pages that were blocked in the robots.txt file. I was wondering if there was any research that has been done on the impact of internal links from no-indexed pages. Would be great to hear your thoughts! Sam

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blink-SEO
    0
  • TheEspresseo


    The full URL of a particular site's homepage is something like http://www.example.com/directory/.
    The canonical and og URLs match.
    The root domain 301 redirects to it using the absolute path. And yet the SERP (and the cached version of the page) lists it simply as http://www.example.com/. What gives? Could the problem be found at some deeper technical level (.htaccess or DirectoryIndex or something?) We fiddled with things a bit this week, and while our most recent changes appear to have been crawled (and cached), I am wondering whether I should give it some more time before I proceed as if the SERP won't ever reflect the correct URL. If so, how long? [EDIT: From the comments, see here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8QKIweOzH4#t=2838]

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheEspresseo
    0
  • marketingmediamanagement


    We have a client who has been searching high and low to gain access to the GA account that is tied to their website, but previous agencies keep stating they don't have access. Is there a way to find out who the admins are on a GA account with the tracking number so we can reach out to that person and ask them to admin the client?

    Reporting & Analytics | | marketingmediamanagement
    0
  • ese


    Has anyone got any experience with advertising products for hire rather than for sale on Google Shopping? Is it allowed? How does it perform?

    Paid Search Marketing | | ese
    0
  • Whittie


    Hi guys! I keep reading conflicting information on this and it's left me a little unsure. Am I right in thinking that a website with a subdomain of shop.sitetitle.com will share the same robots.txt file as the root domain?

    Technical SEO | | Whittie
    0
  • kitoks


    I have a Q&A project having content of many different topics.
    My question: writing several articles on the same topic will up my rank? For example I work on keyword "Rhassoul clay". So if I write 5 topics about rhassoul clay (400 words) will it be a plus for my webpage or not? Or it is better to write one article with 400 x 5 = 2000 words instead of splitting it into 5 articles?

    Keyword Research | | kitoks
    0
  • AndrewAkesson


    If you search "venn digital" then the correct meta description is pulled through, but if you search "venndigital" then it pulls through our twitter feed from the bottom of the page. My only suggestion is that it is doing it because there is no mention of " Venn Digital" in the body of the copy, so it is going to the twitter feed at the bottom of the page where Venn Digital is mentioned to pull this info through.

    Local SEO | | AndrewAkesson
    0
  • Turkey


    Wayyy back when (in the days of yore) Mr Cutts spelled out in a video that page rank is distributed equally between the external links on the page. If there are two links on a page, each gets passed 50% of the available page rank etc. (Perhaps an oversimplification but bear with me). As a result of this, the company I worked for at the time (this was the dark ages when sidebar homepage links were in vogue) decreed that we would only ever approach a site about a link for a client once, as additional links had little extra SEO Value. Now you could argue that if there are 5 external links, each acquiring 20% of the power, and your site has 2 of those, you are getting 40% of the power, but lets forget the basic math for a minute. I have scoured the web and Mr Cutts' videos and I cannot find the answer to my question: If my site (Site A) has a backlink from SiteB Page 1, and a backlink from SiteB page 2 - does this count as two separate links in the eyes of Google? If the SAME site links out to my site, linking to different pages in different posts, does this give me more SEO benefit? Thanks for your time!

    Link Building | | Turkey
    0
  • StelinSEO


    Hi Guys, I've checked out MozLocal, but noticed the sources that are referenced are more US based. Is there a version that would target Australian sources coming or has anyone in Australia used Mozlocal and had good results they can share? Thanks in advance! Stel

    Moz Local | | StelinSEO
    0
  • trumpfinc


    Good afternoon everyone. I wanted to pose a question to the group about keywords and the "on-page optimization -  grade a page tool." I have a list of keywords that I am trying to rank for. Some of them are not ranked in the top 50, so on the keyword ranking tool it gives you the 51+ message in the rank column. For the items that are ranked I can try to improve them by looking at grade a page and typing in the URL and keyword. It will then give me a score and suggestions on how to improve it. With that being said, is there an easy way to find out which pages I should be optimizing those keywords which rank at 51+ for,  besides typing the keywords in Google and seeing what URL it associates with the specific keyword? I hope the question above is clear.

    Moz Pro | | trumpfinc
    0

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